All my life I’ve been afflicted with the morbid thought that my first name, Jeff, rhymes with death.
I first made this unpleasant association when I was six, a sign that I am hard-wired to be of a gloomy disposition. My father, still bristling with gusto and testosterone from his days as an infantryman in the Army, noticed I was gloomy about all sorts of subjects, including his taking me to circuses and giving my birthday parties, not occasions for celebrations on my part, but opportunities for me to whine and complain, prompting my father to often say,“What’s wrong, son, did a birdy go poo-poo on your lip?”
My Grandmother Mildred, on my mother’s side, noticed an unbecoming pessimism in me also. When I was six years old, I was expressing worry about a news report of my favorite candy bar, Pay-Day, being taken off the shelves because of excessive rat hair, and my grandmother, no doubt chafed by my anxieties, told me I worry too much, upon which I thought to myself, “Great, another thing to worry about.”
Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am inclined toward an acute form of weariness which seeks relief through a variety of self-soothing behaviors, some of which do not serve my best interests.
For example, by middle age, I have been reduced to a YouTuber stereotype, a self-obsessed depressive caught up in the familiar trap of buying flashy stuff as a substitute for basic human needs: belonging, creativity, purpose, connection with others. You know the drill. We buy things and show them off on YouTube so people will admire us, and if they esteem us enough evident in a spike in subscribers and effulgent comments, we may begin to admire ourselves, however falsely, and over time this fake self-admiration might just bloom into a form of megalomania sufficient enough to inspire us to kick into gear our YouTube channel to a higher level so we then produce slick, highly-edited videos featuring our superior consumer tastes curated with self-confident alacrity. At this point, we join the ranks of the most odious professions. We become Cultural Influencers, a parasitic tribe using social media platforms to contribute to the consumer addiction of humanity.
But like I said, this eager exhibitionism is a trap. Most social media Influencers flame out. They crash. Behind all the tinsel and glitter is the lonely soul’s cry for help, and when help doesn’t come, the lonely soul curls up into the fetal position and cries himself into a long depression coma. There’s no rush to wake up. Who’s eager to confront a soul that has been reduced to ammonia-soaked shredded rags?
Better to deceive myself by convincing myself that my life is full of joy and excitement. One way I achieve this deception is through the celebrated ritual of unboxing. My unboxing specialty was watches: I was unboxing, wearing, reviewing, delighting, philosophizing, debating, and consuming myself with “watch talk” with other watch obsessives, known in the community as Watch Idiot Savants, mostly a group of highly educated, high-income men with a passion for technology, engineering, and “precise tool instruments.”
I had other unboxing rituals as well. I would unbox and rhapsodize about “ultra-sleek” portable communication devices, vintage coffee percolators with majestic swan-neck spouts, vintage Gillette razors, and the joys of old-fashioned “wet shaving the way Dad used to do it.” I would contemplate my retirement from being a full-time college “critical thinking” composition instructor after 35 years, how I’d reinvent myself by taking adult-learning classes in pottery and then sell my hand-made, lead-free artisan Jabba the Hutt cookie jars on eBay for $500 a piece.
But mostly, my subscribers wanted to see me unbox watches: diver watches, pilot watches, chronographs, solar, quartz, mechanical. The more expensive the watch the better. Spending exorbitant amounts of money on a watch was the equivalent of a dare. “How far will this guy go up the luxury ladder? Will his costly Holy Grail cure him of the pathological need to accumulate a bunch of mediocre watches he doesn’t need? Has he found the one watch Grail to cure him and other watch obsessives of their madness? Does such a watch even exist? Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen, because the watch drama is unfolding before our eyes!”
Whatever the benefits of my channel, I eventually discovered I was doing what every other joker on this planet was doing. While I accumulated crap I didn’t need in the name of featuring products on my channel, I was on a misguided quest for something much deeper: the love that exists inside the depth of the human heart because deep down I knew the truth, even as I paraded my products on my channel, that a life without a loving heart is a life that is not worth a roll of toilet paper.
Some of you are now saying, “Bravo, McMahon, you’ve found the truth, you’ve had your Come to Jesus Moment, so get off your materialism kick, stop buying watches you don’t need, and seek spiritual heights. Come on, bro, you can do it.”
But it’s not that simple. The head and the heart operate separately. My head knows the truth of what I just wrote, but my heart is still shackled to accumulating crap I don’t need, and managing all the crap I don’t need has turned into a full-time job. I’m not celebrating my love for watches anymore. I’m living out the drama of a man enslaved to an addiction and an obsession that is making me miserable. My self-soothing tendencies have backfired and become Balrog’s flame whip from the great battle in Lord of the Rings. The monster’s fiery tail has lashed me and left an indelible mark that leaves me crippled.
I now hobble about my house making unboxing watch videos, trying to put up a happy facade, but deep down I am a broken man bearing the scars of my encounter with Balrog.
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