Shitting the Bed
It’s a good exercise to look back at your life and find anecdotes that define something fundamental about your personality. If you’re a bullshitter, like I am, an anecdote can explain the causes of your bullshitting.
One such anecdote comes to mind: I was in my late twenties and working as a full-time college composition instructor at a university in the California desert. As a lifetime bodybuilder whose teenage role model was the Mr. Olympia version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, I was buying clothes that I believed complemented my muscular physique from International Male, a now defunct men’s clothing catalog that was the male version of Victoria’s Secret. I had purchased a fluorescent lime green gossamer swashbuckler shirt with puffy long sleeves and a low neckline. One couldn’t appreciate how magnificently hideous the shirt was in the catalog photos. The shirt had to be seen in person to truly behold its splendid grotesqueness. The fabric was so threadbare that it seemed to be made of dragonfly wings. The shirt was fashion abomination ugly shirt, and my eagerness to wear it was clear proof of my disintegrating personality.
At the time, my sartorial choices were partly inspired by one of my spiffy Nigerian colleagues who commonly wore Italian loafers with no socks. I wanted to emulate him, so I did the same thing, but unlike him, rather than wear my tasseled loafers with tailored slacks and classy sport coats, I went overboard with my misguided interpretation of the dashing masculine look by donning a puffy pirate shirt.
One afternoon, I wore the green fluorescent shirt to teach my composition class. My boss, the English Chair, was also Nigerian, but he was much older and had grown large in his role as a middle-age husband and father of two children. My boss met me in the mailroom before my lecture. He looked me up and down, and seeming somewhat bemused by my pirate shirt, he asked me to come sit down with him in his office. He closed the door. He started by asking me about my workout routine and complained that his stomach was getting too big. He then asked me if I would be cooking curried lentils for this year’s department picnic. I had brought such a dish to the previous year’s picnic, and my lentils were by far the worst dish served at the event. My boss was the only person who, out of politeness to me, scooped a muddy mound of lentils on his plate. Overcooked, the lentils looked like brown sludge, or as one colleague whispered, a pile of fresh horse shit. My boss found my repugnant lentils a source of constant laughter, and he never let me forget about the incident, always mocking me by asking me to give him the "special recipe.”
After joking about my lentils, he then turned his attention to my shirt.
“I’ve never seen a shirt quite like that,” he said. “It’s very distinctive.”
I was familiar with my boss’ tone of sarcasm, which had been ladled upon me since my lentils fiasco. I detected the same sarcasm now being directed to my shirt.
“Where did you buy it?” he continued.
“A men’s clothing catalog, International Male.”
“Never heard of it.”
He then squinted his eyes at my chest and said, “I believe I can see through it.” I looked down and sure enough I could see more than I wanted. In that moment, it became clear to me that wearing this shirt to my lecture would be nothing short of a scandal. This shirt would make me a laughingstock and stigmatize me in ways that I might never recover.
The Dean then said, “When is your first lecture?”
“About an hour.”
“Why don’t you go home and change?”
I took his advice, and I am forever grateful to him for showing me the error of my ways.
I always think back to this moment because it evidences that I may be a bit crazy. By crazy, I mean lacking self-possession and sound judgment. By crazy, I also mean being someone who is predisposed to shitting the bed.
To shit the bed is shorthand for making a grand mess of things, but the expression also implies a certain infantile regression. A lack of maturity and judgment coupled with an infantile impulsiveness causes us to shit the bed.
We will all shit the bed a few times in our lifetime. But my anecdote with the pirate shirt doesn’t merely suggest the occasional shitting of the bed. Some might say the pirate shirt incident suggests a life defined as one long protracted bed-shitting.
Such people could be classified as bed-shitters. We mess things up. We damage everything in our path. We have few or no friends. What relationships we do have are dysfunctional. We often hide our bed-shitting ways, from others and ourselves, by constructing a façade of strength and high intelligence, and eventually this façade crumbles and reveals a bed buried under a dung heap.
If we are honest with ourselves and reach the conclusion that we are bed-shitters, where do we go from here? Is there a self-help book that can remedy our bed-shitting? Is there a religion that can make us reborn as non-bed-shitters? Or more likely do our religious conversions constitute just another manifestation of our bed-shitting?
The appeal of Hollywood movies is that most of them feature a hero who undergoes a grand character arc in which he transforms from a bed-shitter to a non-bed-shitter. He changes from making messes to cleaning them up. By the movie’s end, he gets cleaned up, so to speak, and is in a position to clean the world’s messes.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl said there are two races of men, the decent and the indecent. Would it be more accurate to say the two races of men are the bed-shitters and the bed cleaners?
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