Grammar Is the Antidote to Chaos
When I was sixteen, my parents divorced. My father moved into an apartment about a half-hour away from our home, and once a month he'd pick me up, take me to his apartment, and make me a barbecued steak dinner. One evening, we were eating on his patio, and he asked me what I wanted to do with my life when I got out of high school. At the time, I was an aspiring bodybuilder, and I had no college plans. What I wanted was a job that paid well and had good hours so I'd have time to go to the gym. I had made friends at the gym with a lot of men who worked in sanitation, and some of them said they could get me full-time work after I graduated high school. I told my father my plan to become a sanitation engineer, and he laughed at me.
"You can't be a garbage man," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because you're too vain."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Imagine this. You're at a cocktail party and everyone is introducing themselves. Doctor, engineer, lawyer, computer programmer, business executive. Then they get to you. You're going to tell them you're a garbage man? I should think not."
"Oh my God, Dad, you're right. I'm driven by vanity and social status."
"Of course, you are, son. Now finish your steak and start making plans for college."
My father's cocksure certainty for my future didn't help me once I got into college. I didn't have a clue about what to do. For my first two years at the university, I could not find a major, and my indecision made me miserable. I took a criminal justice class, but the books were mired in lawyer-speak. As a result, the sentences were larded with provisos, caveats, and contingencies reflected in elongated sentences in which I had to wade through several dependent clauses before I reached the independent clause. These sentences were so tedious and convoluted that I felt I had to go through the obstacle course on American Gladiators before I got to the sentence's main idea. This drove me into a state of madness.
Then I tried sociology and psychology, but the books were immersed in self-satisfied academic jargon in which self-evident observations were made to look sophisticated and authoritative by virtue of the indecipherable, pretentious, and self-indulgent verbiage. Being forced to read these textbooks, I had to take my machete and slash through a jungle thick with words like positivity, codependency, external validation, inner child, interconnectivity, facilitate, mindset, marginalization, multi-faceted, dichotomy, and contemporaneously. Hacking my way through this forest of phony language made me tighten my body with so much hostility that I feared I would suffer a self-induced inguinal hernia.
Then I gave history a crack. The sheer volume of facts, dates, and places seemed to have compelled the authors to write in a mundane, almost remedial prose style with no distinctive point of view. The result was that I was bored out of my mind.
One night while my mother and I were eating Hamburger Helper, I told her I had no career prospects to think of and felt completely lost.
She said, "Keep plugging away. Something will turn up."
"But I don't have time to keep plugging away," I argued back. "I need results."
"The harder you try the worse it's going to get. Just relax, buster."
I hated it when my mom called me buster.
But I took her advice. I relaxed the only way I knew how: I went to the gym for a late-night workout so I could saturate my brain with endorphins.
At the gym, I did five sets of bench presses, five sets of incline presses, and five sets of incline flyes. When my pectoral muscles were sufficiently pumped and my brain was endorphin-soaked, it occurred to me that I had rejected criminal justice, sociology, psychology, and history because the books I had to read in those classes were so poorly written that they offended me. It occurred to me that I hungered for a certain quality of writing and that this hunger pointed me to the English major.
It would have never occurred to me to be an English major. During my first semester in college, I was kicked out of freshman composition the first week after the professor gave us a diagnostic writing assessment. At the bottom of my paper was a terse note: "Based on your writing sample, it is unlikely you will pass this class. You are in dire need of remediation. Fortunately, the university offers such classes, and I would urge you to drop this class and take remediation as soon as possible."
In 1979, these remedial classes were commonly known as "Bonehead English." So I dropped freshman composition, took the remedial class one notch below it, and found I could not keep up with the lexicon of grammatical terms, so I dropped the remedial class and took a credit/no-credit course that could be termed "Pre-Bonehead English."
The presentation of remedial grammar and sentence structure in this class was ladled out at a much slower pace, and I didn't feel as intimidated by the course content. But even at the slower pace, I found myself anxious that I would fail the grammar quizzes, so I sought tutoring in the university's Learning Center.
My favorite tutor was Michelle, a twenty-five-year-old grad student whom I wanted to impress with my expert grasp of the present and past participles, but one afternoon she appeared offended that I didn't know the difference between a phrase and a clause. My ignorance was so egregious that she looked offended. She excused herself, walked into the teacher's lounge, and then another tutor, some pencil-neck geek with an oversized Adam's apple, replaced her. I told the replacement I didn't need help, exited the Learning Center, and headed straight toward the bookstore where I purchased a grammar handbook. From that day on, I resolved to teach myself grammar.
It occurred to me that I was not dumb. The problem was my anxieties. Sitting inside a classroom with thirty-five other students, I was too anxious and self-conscious to comprehend the professors' lectures, and I knew that I would have to be self-taught or what is called an autodidactic if I were to get any kind of meaningful education.
Once I learned the basics of grammar, it seemed as essential to life as breathing. I considered that three-year-old children without any formal learning were already fluent in the most elaborate sentences. Grammar was proof that life had a clear structure, order, and harmony. To learn all the names of the grammatical parts was to understand the harmony of the universe. When I thought of grammar, I saw rivulets flowing into the streams, streams flowing into the great rivers, and the great rivers flowing into the ocean.
That life could be grasped as an orderly whole through the prism of grammar seemed to be a refutation of the chaos I had witnessed growing up during the 60s and 70s. I had mourned the assassinations of Robert J. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. I had marched with my activist grandfather in anti-Vietnam protests. I had seen the televised mayhem at Woodstock, I had seen the televised hearings of Watergate corruption, and I had seen so many episodes of H.R. Pufnstuf, Lidsville, and The Bugaloos that my brain had been transported into a time warp from Alice in Wonderland. I had compromised myself with such abhorrent disco accessories as gold medallions and pukka shells.
Once in college, I existed in a moratorium where I was insulated from the chaos of my past. Immersing myself in grammar, I understood what Nietzsche meant in his book Twilight of the Gods where he writes that "I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still have faith in grammar." What he meant is that by studying grammar, I could find order and convalescence from two decades of mainlining the glorification of selfish pleasure-seeking and chaos. To be a Baby Boomer was to be an addict and to need recovery. Part of being a recovering Baby Boomer was enlisting in a Ten-Step Program, and one of the steps was grammar.
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