Our psychological underpinnings determine our course of action we take to leave our indelible mark on this world. Our innate psychological profile, perhaps more than free will or human agency, governs our path to what we believe is a meaningful existence that will have a lasting impact on others.
I don’t know if my personal profile is conducive to meaning in any kind of elevated sense. My defining personality trait is my compulsion toward hyperbole. What this means is that I over exaggerate everything to the nth degree. I don’t just get sick with a common cold. I nearly die. I don’t just enjoy German Chocolate Cake. I nearly pass out from the endorphin rush. When I drive past the cattle slaughter houses on Highway 5 in Kettleman City, I nearly go into anaphylactic shock. When I enter a port-a-potty at some musical festival or other, I emerge from the squalid latrine with chronic depression that forces me into six months of bed rest while I listen to motivational podcasts and read selected passages from The Book of Psalms. When my twin daughters see the candy rack at a supermarket and they ask me to buy them sweets, I tell them I refuse to buy them diabetes supplements, which will lead to nephropathy of their kidneys.
Hyperbole is not some affliction or other that hit me in adulthood. I was born with it as a congenital disease, what you might call hyperbole on the brain. Case in point, when I was four years old, I wanted to give a girl some Sun-Maid raisins that my parents usually kept for me, but when they said they didn’t have any more raisins, I had a tantrum at the top of our apartment and I accidentally bumped into the girl, causing her to fall down a flight of stairs. I felt so guilty for what I had done that the next day I flung myself down the same stairs in the hope that this self-punishment would rectify my criminal wrongdoing.
This compulsion to be hyperbolic speaks to a childishness, a self-indulgence, and a self-centeredness, personality traits that are not very desirable or pleasant, but this hyperbolic quality also speaks to a sense of irony, comedic self-deprecation, and dramatic story-telling, attributes that people appear to like or to find entertaining, at least in moderate doses.
My entire existence has been one of hyperbole. My mother broke water with me at a Gainesville Gators football game during half time. This was late October, 1961. She was in the stands at the University of Florida about twenty yards from Lyndon B. Johnson, who was America’s Vice President at the time. My father rushed my mother to the hospital, where the doctor, an avid Gators fan, said he didn’t want to miss the second half of the game. “Either the boy comes out now, or he doesn’t come out,” the doctor said.
I came out an enormous baby, described by many as a giant Buddha, with cheeks that pushed against my eyes and a love of mashed potatoes that I wanted shoveled into my mouth without interruption or else I would emit blood-curdling screams.
As a toddler, I had an enormous appetite while living in poverty in the housing projects, called Flavet Village, student housing made of World War II barracks. Flavet was infested with cockroaches, which I would crush with my hands before trying to eat them because of my hunger and my belief that the oversized roaches were chocolate bars. When my parents weren’t yanking cockroaches out of my greedy hands, they were selling their blood to feed me.
We had a watercolor painting on the living room wall. It was a portrait of an Alaskan Eskimo wearing a traditional fur parka. The head covering had fur that looked like arches of light or a halo, and I grew up believing this Eskmo was some kind of deity. Though my parents did not raise me in any religion, everyday I beheld the heavenly Eskimo and believed I was beholding the visage of God.
The Eskimo painting was not some piece of random artwork that my parents had put on the wall of our Gainesville apartment. It was a relic from where they had met each other in Alaska. Even that story of their romance and my conception is rooted in hyperbole.
My father and John Shalikashvili, who would someday be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were both stationed in Anchorage and both had met my mother in a tavern. My eighteen-year-old mother and her parents had recently “relocated” to Anchorage from Los Angeles when Senator Joe McCarthy went on the red-scare-inspired witch’s hunt, which included going after my grandfather whose politics were so left as to make Joan Baez look like a member of a William F. Buckley think tank. Deemed a threat to national security, my grandfather was fired from his high-ranking government-position with the USO, and, with the help of friends, got radio work in Anchorage. Laying low in Alaska until McCarthy was discredited as the ruthless political hack that he was, my mother, just out of high school, didn’t have a lot to do but flirt the with the local army personnel. That’s when she met Shalikashvili and my father who both wanted her as their very own. Their battle for her sole romantic affections took a Christmas hiatus when Shalikashvili returned to his home in Peoria, Illinois, and my father returned to see his family in Gainesville, Florida. Wanting to beat Shalikashvili to my mother, my father decided to secretly head back for Anchorage a couple of days early. The problem was that the Lukas fuel filter in the Morris Minor wasn’t working and the auto parts store still didn’t have a replacement. In a moment of ingenuity, my father, who would later become an engineer, used his only prophylactic and a paperclip as a temporary fuel filter replacement. While not a perfect repair job, the condom did serve as a spring to help keep the fuel pump from staying stuck in the “open” or “closed” position. Somehow he made it to Seattle, where he ferried to Alaska and reunited with my mother, beating Shalikashvili by forty-eight hours.
The problem was that my father used his one and only prophylactic and I was, as a result, born nine months later in Gainesville during a Gators game. The condom that would have blocked my conception was instead adapted to make a car drivable.
No doubt this lust-soaked effluvium that accompanied the origins of my birth made an indelible stamp of car lust that has afflicted me all of my life.
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