“Once upon a time there lived a vain Emperor whose only worry in life was to dress in elegant clothes. He changed clothes almost every hour and loved to show them off to his people.”
- Hans Christian Anderson, The Emperor’s New Clothes
“The tradition of Festivus begins with the Airing of Grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now, you’re gonna hear about it. You, Kruger. My son tells me your company STINKS!”
- Frank Costanza, Seinfeld: The Strike
Okay, before you ask, you should all know I made up this holiday. “The Feast of All Sorrows” does not exist in any religion or culture and it certainly does not exist as I’ve been defining it throughout today. That being said let me tell you about today.
I woke up late this morning after a really depressing sleep. A depressing sleep, as I’ve come to call it, is when you wake up in the middle of the night, around two or three AM, in a panic because you’ve realized that you’ve made too many wrong turns in life and are now paying the price for your foolishness. Most of the time I wake up in a sweat and my mind is stuck in a restless vicious circle of frustration which gains more and more momentum until I either feel suicidal or find a complete apathy to life in general. Sleep does not come back easily and I wake up physically, psychically, spiritually, and emotionally exhausted.
My first thought of the day is usually one of disappointment and that I must live and be conscious for another 15 hours or so. It’s not the best way to plan your day.
At 8:AM I showered and tried to coax myself into enjoying the day. This is the conversation in my head between me as a life coach and me as a death coach:
“Okay, Let’s do this today.”
“What? Do what?!!! Do the same thing we’ve been doing everyday for the last 11 months?!! Spend the day at home?!! Wallow in our misery?!! Do meaningless tasks around the house?!! Try to teach ourselves a new technology in order to be more marketable on the job market?!! Fight depression and ADHD?!! Lose ourselves on Facebook?!! Resist the temptation of watching even more useless programs on the television?!!”
“Well, I’d recommend anything productive. The boxes in the conservatory are still there. You could take them up to the attic. You could drain the koi pond. You could start writing again.”
“Part of my problem is that I’m terrified that I’ll lose this house. If I put the boxes upstairs and I lose this house, I’ll only have to take them down again. The koi pond is only good until it fills up again. I know eventually I’ll need the gumption and money to fill it with gravel and sand to make a Zen garden. For now the best I can do is rig the pump to empty it – which is a pointless waste of energy. And you know as well as I do that if I start writing in this mood it will be pure venom.”
“So what if it is pure venom!! Some of your best rants have been pure venom. You just have to be able to make a point or make it enjoyable to someone somewhere in the writing for it to be worth while. Plus you’ve been aching to flex your writing muscles for months. You know that this is where your passion is. Why haven’t you been following it?”
“I don’t know. It’s strange. It’s like I have this invisible barrier that if I pour my heart and my soul into this and it fails then I’ll really have failed. I’m afraid to face that. It’s my way of saying to the world that this is the best I can offer it. I’m afraid that the world will come back and say, ‘Yeah, well, that’s nice. But, you suck.’”
“How are you going to know unless you try? You do know that this could be the problem behind everything, don’t you? You want to write so you don’t focus on anything else. You don’t focus on anything else because you want to write. Everything else, every distraction you’ve had is a diversion on not looking at this problem.”
“Fine, I’ll do it. (Pain in the ass.)”
“WHAT!!!”
“Nothing.”
My life coach self won out before I got out of the shower. I thought, at worst, writing was something to do on a Saturday. It was raining on and off which meant that I could not rake the leaves or go up on the roof to remove the pine needles OR clean the gutters. This was a good thing because as much as death is something of an attraction to me, I didn’t want to be “the-guy-who-slips-off-of-the-roof-to-be-impaled-by-a-fence” urban legend. I figured on going to the diner with my wife for a quick breakfast, coming back to the house to start the pump on the koi pond, and start doing some writing before I had to get ready for the Halloween Party tonight. And, if God smiled on me, perhaps I could get the gym and make myself less of a fat bastard. It seemed like a good plan and a healthy itinerary for the day.
In actuality, it is good therapy to plan your day. When you give yourself short term achievable goals you can create the illusion that you are getting things done instead of just participating in this planet’s oxygen/carbon dioxide conversion ritual. In common parlance, this is called living – as opposed to existing. I’ve been instructed to start keeping a journal of what I do during the day to keep me going in a positive direction. I’ve also been trying to keep a journal of what I’ve been eating during the day so I can be more aware of what I’ve been dumping in my body. The goal is to keep my body as a temple and not a toxic waste dump.
My biggest problem is that I’m having problems figuring out my goals. My working goal is to “be happy”. My next goal is to “be employed”. The challenge of both of these goals is that so far I’ve had no great epiphany on “what makes me happy” and “what job I should be doing”. Ideally, when you have one you might figure out the other. The obstacle to this is that unless it’s done while young and under your parents’ roof or in school, you really need income to support your lifestyle and buy the time you need for answers. There are limited resources that buy the necessary time needed before the “tough luck” alarm goes off. When that rings people find they do menial work and sometimes don’t get out of it.
And thus the vicious circle and depressing sleep cycles infect people’s consciousness.
While at the diner, my wife let me know that she was unable to find the “dress” part of her costume in the house and needed to buy another. She also needed other small props for her costume. Her plan was to go as “The Lady of the Lake”. For those of you who are not familiar with the character, I recommend any of the following for reference: The movie Excalibur, or the books, “Le Morte d’Arthur” by Sir Thomas Mallory or “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. She’s the character who gives King Arthur the sword, Excalibur or, as Monty Python would put it “the moistened bint lobbing scimitars” at people. Her twist on this is the one made by Peter David in “Knight Life” where the Lady of the Lake rises again in New York City through the lake in Central Park. Unfortunately, she gets all of the garbage in that lake as well.
Here’s what you need to know about my wife and costumes. She gets obsessed. For her, it has to be perfect. The sword has to be the right period and the right country. The dress has to have the right look. The props have to look convincing. This is insanity on a level that I will never understand.
What you should know is that I have this conversation with my wife every year.
“Who cares? This is really too much energy for too little reward,” I tell her.
“This is important to me,” she’ll reply.
“Why? You’ll be lucky if anyone gets it,” I point out.
“Well, what are you going as?” Something she will always inevitably ask.
“I’m going as George W. Bush in a prison outfit.” I thought this was the last year I could get away with that. “I think people will get that immediately. PLUS, it will piss off every hardcore Republican in the room.” Which falls relatively consistently annually.
“I’m missing stuff for my costume. We are going to have to find them.” This usually ends the discussion anyway.
I didn’t like where this conversation was going.
We wound up going FIRST to Party City. My wife, whom I’m now convinced is starting menopause, complained about the heat in the store, the children in the aisles, and the fact that the only costumes there were made for sluts and kids. “Nothing for normal people.”
On the way to the Freehold Raceway Mall, I decided to get playful. Remember, while your wife is in a foul mood and you feel slightly suicidal, you have nothing to lose when you poke a bear with a stick.
“You do realize that you are doing this on ’The Feast of All Sorrows’”
“You’re making that up.”
“Am I?”
“What’s the ‘Feast of All Sorrows’ then?”
“It’s the feast day one week prior to Halloween,” I lied. “Saint Ignatius Loyola observed that since Jesus was all knowing, knew of his impending suffering which would happen in the next Passover, he felt sorrow in knowing he’d forever be denied the joys of a long life. In this day, we observe his sorrows with our own shortcomings.”
“Bullshit.”
“Hey, it’s as much bullshit that most religions make up as they go along.”
We went to the mall and picked up a suitable dress while I wandered around “Everything Halloween”. As I was in a “poking a bear with a stick” mood, I decided that if she was going to be completely anal about her costume, I’d add to her psychosis.
“What do you think of this dress?” She held up a green lace thing.
“Wrong period,” I said.
“Wrong period?”
“You said you wanted Arthurian. That one is Elizabethan.”
“Grrrrrrr.”
“Well, you said you wanted to take this seriously. Oh, and the plastic sword you have is a short sword instead of a broadsword. It’s not authentic.”
Someday, I’m certain, you will read about my mysterious and gruesome death. It will involve a fake short sword, several different, yet effective, bits of barely traceable poisons, and a brick. My wife will shed a brief lone tear for the cameras and say, “Why did he have to go so suddenly? He didn’t have an enemy in the world. If only he didn’t hit himself in the head repeatedly with that brick.”
Oh, but things weren’t over yet. In order to accessorize with a woman who has walked out of a polluted lake, we needed a plastic fish and other miscellaneous amounts of garbage. And while I was in a holiday mood, I may as well go along with my fake holiday and suffer. I came up with the possibility of getting fishing lure stuff. I sort of remembered from my fishing days that some of the lures were lifelike rubber fish – rubber fish with hooks, but rubber fish nonetheless.
No good deed ever goes unpunished.
While the fishing stuff was a good idea, my wife, the animal rights activist, did not feel comfortable contributing money to a manufacturer of fish death. My immediate, and to some extent correct, reaction was, “Fine, put it down and let’s get out of here.” No, no, that would have been waaaay too easy. She wanted me to pay for it. There’s one thing about going along with nonsense, it’s another thing having to finance it. Now I have fishing accessories that I’m never going to use because I DON’T FISH ANYMORE!!!! WHY? BECAUSE I PROMISED HER I WOULD’NT!!!! I can’t be yet another murderer of cute little fishies that swim, and crap, and make more little fishies. I can’t even give the lures away because that would make me an accessory to fish murder.
Anyone else have these problems? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller??
Christopher Titus once said, “if any man goes to the mall with his wife, HE LOVES HER!!! He keeps thinking, ‘I could be doing something productive.’” And, really, I love my wife. She’s going to make me into a mass murderer… but I love her. All of this is not unexpected because today is “The Feast of All Sorrows” and in keeping with this long sacred tradition, I must suffer… long… and painfully.
We got home at 3:PM. The productive part of the day was almost over as we need to get ready for the party in Toms River. I did manage to get the pump out and empty the koi pond of excess water. This was just in time for the storm which filled it right back up.
In the back of my mind, I’m planning both this rant and what I’m going to say about this manufactured feast day to the party goers. “I’m sorry, I can’t drink that today, it’s part of my ‘Feast of All Sorrows’ observance. What’s that? Well, let me tell you…” I figure it will be good for a laugh and keep my wife in a state of perpetual terror.
It’s funny when people celebrate religious holidays and observances. I remember when I was a kid, in my parents household, it was tradition to observe a 2 hour period of silence between the hours of 1:PM and 3:PM on Holy Saturday before Easter. There was always the “no meat on Friday” rule during Lent, but this went the extra mile. We were supposed to be quiet and “meditate”. The was enforced contemplation which did not come easy to a 10 year old. I was never able to do it successfully. I always wound up screaming, “Mom!!!! She’s talking out loud.” I have a feeling that tattling on your sister was never part of the Lenten spirit.
It’s like the wearing of green during Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s stupid. We celebrate the fact that some ancestor of ours decided to copulate on an island an ocean away. What’s more, we had no choice about our ancestry, and I don’t think our forefathers would get the fact we’re honoring them by wearing a different color and drinking intoxicants. “YAY!!! WE’RE HAPPY TO BE IRISH!!! LET’S CELEBRATE BY GETTING DRUNK AND SINGING A WHOLE BUNCH OF SONGS WE’D NEVER ORDINARILY LISTEN TO AND DON’T KNOW!!!!”
Oh, my parents just love me.
Here’s the thing – and I think this should resonate with anyone who has an ounce of spirituality or decency in their soul – if you need to observe something special, observe it in your own private way. It’s important to you. It does not need to be done with fanfare and attention. I know one person I went to school with just loves advertising what kind of a caring martyr she is. Personally, I could care less. However, the motivation is not entirely that she cares, it’s made up on the very manufactured perception that she cares. She wants people to know that she’s a caring person not because she is but she wants the respect that comes with caring and showing people that she’s acting compassionate.
And that is not compassion. That is ego. That’s a costume and a disguise of a compassionate person. The birth of compassion is actually the opposite of ego. People who are compassionate are caught being compassionate. It is something that is observed without the participant making an ostentatious show over. It’s like finding a chameleon in a green leafy tree or a moth on the bark of a willow. Compassion is found by a people who subconsciously notice it and think, “That’s kind of nice. Maybe I should do that.”
And when people care, they do it because they want to do it and it’s the right thing to do. Not because it was part of a ritual where they wear shiny clothes and are expected to behave a certain way.
Don’t wear a disguise. Be compassionate because that’s who you are.
