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From My Name is Jerry
(movie not about the mid-life crisis as described herein) |
Here is my theory about the classic mid-life crisis some men go through.
The crisis has been portrayed as a last gasp for glory before heading into the autumn years and I think that might be due to the shallow interpretation by these men of their own feelings, but I think it’s driven by the evolutionary need for more babies.
I think during the distant yesterdays that probably prosperous and powerful men in the tribe continued to father children throughout their lives. Eventually, their original mates could no longer bare them many good sons and daughters.
Unlike me, most middle class men who live into their forties have built up some security and their children have left the nest and so they feel that old school pressure to have more puppies and kittens. But, at least half of them aren’t going to bail out on their true love back at home, so they go a little psycho and express their manhood by going to the gym and buying that Harley and smiling at the blonde chick on the corner nearly half his age (but a respectable few years older than his daughter).
And then the other half pick up the blonde chick and divorce their wives via a fax (because they’re too polite to do it through email, or a Facebook update).
And then the other half were already being kicked to the curb by their newly super hot forty something woman who has determined that she knows what she wants and it’s not the schlub sitting on the cough who hasn’t yet gone through his midlife crisis.
She’s sick of fantasy football.
Yeh, super hot. I’ve had the good fortune of spending a lot of time with a woman in her mid-forties who easily had more men after her than that blonde chick on the corner. It’s funny watching all those young guys check her while she walked to our table in a restaurant… actually looking away from their young, blonde date while she was talking.
Bad move, young dude.
Women HATE that. I learned that in high school at the mall. You better not look away to check out the backside of that girl walking past the table. Death move. I’m good at not directly looking… I’m not saying I don’t see. I have excellent peripheral vision.
The good news: I think the baby thing passed over this last year. It cropped up, strangely, while I was homeless. And then when I had a job and things were looking alright again, it surged forward through my brain cogs… and I actually started spending time with a 28-year old woman.
When it looked like things were going to be bad again, I thought it was a sort of bad deal for such a young woman… and I was specifically thinking about children. What if she wanted children? I can’t support children (obviously). Then, if I stuck around it would be in bad faith, selfish.
I told myself that, anyway.
A good, healthy fear of intimacy feeds excuses for doing the right thing.
I recently used the internal excuse that I was more likely to add to a woman’s problems than help, and all the while I would be taking up space that could be filled by a more well adjusted potential mate for her.
Well, enough about me and now a picture of a chicken.
Here’s some art I did. It relates to the chicken. My excuse this time is that it’s foolish and irresponsible to print up a bunch of art for a show when I don’t have the money to make a good presentation. It’s very true that most ventures fail because they’re not well ventured — money spent on a weak attempt is money wasted.
No, I didn’t draw this. Originally it was a photograph of a butterfly that I rearranged and colored.
You just can’t imagine the relief I’ve felt in the past when some strong woman just absolutely forced me to loosen up. It’s the kind of peaceful feeling that can become addictive.
I’m very careful about becoming addicted to the wrong person or in the wrong situation — one where I might know that things are wrong for her (and/or me) but I stick with it anyway because I don’t want to give up the peace.
That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.
My relationship with #2 ended up being that way. We had spent years together. For the first 18 months, we literally spent nearly every second of every day in each other’s presence and we both loved a good percentage of those seconds. But, we are different kinds of people for various reasons and some of the things she wanted to spend our lives on differed from the kinds of things that I knew I could spend my life on, so we should have split up, but we were addicted, and so splitting was a loud, violent process… mostly because I couldn’t bring myself to just leave and so expressed my frustration through violence — sort of a cry for a breakup.
It was also a good way to just wallow in anger and make myself feel better for a little while. (Strong, angry actions release all sorts of chemicals that dull your pain… which is why it’s so hard for some people to stop being shitheads even when they know they’re shitheads and they always regret what was said or done… They’re addicted to the chemicals released by their anger…)
Eventually we got married.
She mercifully brought it all to an end about a month later, when she moved away to another state.
I was just reading this over and started wondering about why I got so girl crazy when I was homeless. For some reason in my recent life, I’ve been less depressed while I was homeless than any other time. Oh, I was stressed, but it was survival stress… For some reason, when you’re worried about your physical well being, and you’re not much liking sleeping in a room with 300 of your closest, farting friends, and you didn’t really enjoy getting stuck with the shower head that always sprays cold water while 20 of your closest friends are in there farting, and ten other guys at the head of the line are yelling to hurry the fuck up, and you don’t think about the fact that you don’t have shower shoes and then you wonder where those other guys found shower shoes and then you’re drying off with what a woman would call a “face towel”… that’s worn through in several places… and then you try to put on your dirty clothes while you’re still wet, but you’re glad you have your socks back on and you’re not standing on the floor… and then you catch the flu during the first couple of weeks (this happened to me BOTH TIMES I stayed in a shelter)…
I’ve been homeless three times. Before the middle time, I was dropped off by a friend at a homeless shelter. I went inside and lined up to get a cot. Then they herded us into the chapel for a service.
The guy giving the service looked familiar, so I stayed after to find out why.
It turned out that he was a telephone services salesman for Worldcom. I’d purchased all the PRI’s for my internet service through him… Thousands of dollars a month worth.
I was so humiliated to run into him there. I didn’t have a good answer to the question, “What happened?”
Then I remembered that flu.
I remembered sitting in a chair at the Day Center for the Homeless in Tulsa, Oklahoma because I was too sick go walk around downtown getting turned down for jobs… I was DAMN LUCKY to have a chair. I sat there… wiping my nose with toilet paper… sometimes falling asleep and waking up to the sound of snot hitting my coat (my snot, THANK GOD).
Nothing like hearing that some old guy just got jacked for his disability money by crack heads in the bathroom of the Day Center.
Yeeeee hawww!!!!
So, I walked out of the homeless shelter and decided to sleep in the wild. Those were my exact thoughts: I am releasing myself to the wild.
I slept under a highway overpass for 10 nights.
Sweet.
Well, this again is enough about me. And now, a picture of a highway overpass.
These little guys look cute, but they’ll take you out if given the chance.
I guess what I’m saying is that when you’re concerned for your immediate survival, you don’t have time to dwell on your shortcomings. Or, perhaps, there’s an excitement generated by the predicament, or a fight-or-flight response… the same sort of chemicals are probably produced in a person’s brain as with that…
Or, perhaps I’m just remembering it that way.
I remember laughing whenever things got a little worse… like when I decided to walk a long distance and then it was hot and sweat was dripping into and burning my eyes and I was getting sun burned and then I got to where I was going and it was closed so I turned around and walked back… a six mile round trip.
Well, what else was I going to do that day? Sit under the bridge?
It’s quite frustrating to me that I am unable alone to experience the kinds of peaceful feelings that I do when I’m in an intimate relationship with a woman. I don’t know. The need to mate is a basic human need, pretty low down on the hierarchy of needs, I’d imagine. I suppose when you’re not in a relationship that may provide what is so basic to our constitutions that everything you build outside it is always sitting on a shaky foundation… just a contrived substitution for what you really need.
And now some more of my art.
Thanks to our own idiocy, #2 and I were really, really poor for a number of those months. We always had a place to sleep, and that was good, but I remember being so sick of eating what we could get from food banks… man, one day we had the money to eat at Whataburger. WOW. Beef. It’s what was for dinner. What a great burger…
Anyway, things were really miserable. I made a daily trip through the parking lots of grocery stores and fast food restaurants and convenience stores looking for change.
Here’s a tip: People drop change when they’re looking for their keys. They pull their keys out of their pocket or purse and sometimes some change gets dropped. Also, they drop change at the drive-through windows of fast food places. Look in these places for change.
If you’re not too proud to harvest the tobacco out of someone else’s smokes, then break-time smoke holes outside of grocery stores or office buildings are the perfect place because people who are late from coming back from their break will just put out a cigarette at mid-carcinogenagenationmadeupword and leave it there.
We didn’t even smoke tobacco before that… But for several weeks we took up the mission of finding tobacco and making ourselves sick with it. And then we stopped smoking tobacco.
Anyway, throughout this misery we were together. For some reason being together made everything just okay enough to keep going.
Misery can bind people together, too. One becomes very loyal to the person who lived through it with him.
Ok, that’s enough. I’ve come back like 10 times to add more to this mess, so I’ll close by admitting that I feel things are really screwed up and I’m so sure that I can’t help myself fix it that I’m not even trying hard enough. Any reward from efforts to right myself are so long after the efforts and my situation feels like it is one of being in a hole so deep that I’ll never make it out before dying on the way. At my core I am hopeless and unhappy.
Making a little more money means that I’ll have to spend lots of time in courts and watching people who have a right to take it take it. In addition to the kind corporations who loaned me money, the United States of America, and I imagine, the State of Oklahoma, are looking for me because I owe you money, too.
So, making a little more money means a lot more trouble. And, I hate courts. Nothing good has ever happened for me in a courtroom.
So, the only way out is to make a LOT MORE MONEY.
Wow, the pressure. I can’t admit to myself that I don’t have what it takes to make a lot more money. I have the ideas, and I have the basic skill sets, but I don’t have the type of long term consistency of mission and thought and drive to make anything like that happen.
So, the set of possibilities keeps getting smaller in my head. Suddenly I’m looking for ideas to create simple software tools that accomplish some great task. Or working on projects that have some sort of hobby need within me that will keep me going.
But, the voice in the back of my head wants me to face that none of this will ever happen because I know I won’t make it happen.
There is no backup plan.
Someone who can’t do what he should to accomplish what he thinks he must, and yet refuses to quit “trying” or won’t stop telling himself that he’s trying… is truly doomed, I think.
I used to study stories and quotes from people who were eventually successful in business. None of those people were immediate hits. They all had really hard knocks… Ventures that failed and people lost money and they were down and out, but they didn’t quit, and eventually someone was interested enough in their success to write down their stories.
But, see, those people never stopped really trying and they are all the sorts of people who have a long term vision of what they’re doing and they work day in and day out to make it happen. If they lose, they pick up some other project and keep making things happen.
Thinking of these shortcomings has become an excuse to not accomplish anything — it’s a classic sort of addiction or compulsion cycle. “Oh, I’m just a big fat pig anyway, why not eat another pizza?” “Oh, I’m a complete shithead and there’s no hope, why not smoke more crack?”
I don’t have an eating disorder and I don’t smoke crack, but you can see, surely, that it’s all the same sort of problem: “I’m not getting anything done anyway, my life is never going anywhere good; why work this afternoon?”
So, you see the dilemma: The kind of internal peace that might come from a new relationship could be the one thing that I’m missing that keeps me waving my brain around and not completing anything, but while I have all of these problems to deal with and I think everything just really might go to complete shit — perhaps stress even ruining my health — that it’s not fair to “infect” someone else’s life with it.
I’m damn lucky to have a new family. That’s good. This “luck” was directly related to another strong woman acting in my life. God bless #3.
Ok, I’m done.
Wait!! I’m not done.
The hierarchy of homeless shelter needs: You’re naked and standing on a wet floor. Goodness knows what sorts of fungi are floating around on the floor. Do you put on your underwear first or your socks? Underwear… What’s on your feet is already on your feet. There is no 10-second rule that makes any sense. And, while you’re sure you’re the best damn looking homeless guy out of the 300, you still cover your bare ass before anyone else starts thinking you’re the best damn looking homeless guy out of the 300.
Oh, and that sound you can’t quite identify in the bathroom, coming from one of the stalls, is an old guy masturbating. I bet you wish you didn’t know that. I know I wished I hadn’t figured it out.
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