Part 6: Fighting the Ghost of Rodney Dangerfield
For two months, I attempted to live by Phil Stutz’s rules. I acknowledged that life consists of pain, uncertainty, and hard work. I acknowledged that doing creative work was my purpose in life and to stave off the impulse for immediate gratification and comfort. On balance, I was happier. I had more clarity about my writing, namely, that I am at my best when I write in spurts more like a windsprinter than a long-distance runner. As a result, I am stronger as an essayist and a short story writer than I am as someone who writes book-length nonfiction or novels. I improved some mediocre sections of some of my piano compositions, and I wrote some new songs. I had more clarity about paying attention to my body and realizing that I was eating close to a thousand calories a day more than I should be eating and that managing my food consumption wasn’t as impossible as I made it out to be. I was more conscious of being less selfish and a better husband and father.
But I suspect Part X got pissed off that I was neglecting him. About two months into my Journey into Stutz, I was doing a kettlebell workout in the garage when I heard a voice in my head: “What have you really gained from all this Stutz bullshit? You’ve seen that you’re over sixty and all you have is about a half dozen essays. You’re pathetic. You’re grandiose. You're sniveling. You’re compulsive. You ain’t shit.”
This self-laceration reminded me of an interview I read with the great comedian Rodney Dangerfield in the early 1980s. Dangerfield said that we cannot change who we are. We are born a certain way and that’s it. I took from his comments that self-improvement is futile and a waste of time. Trying to live in accordance with Stutz’s rules was a waste of my time. And if I were honest and looked deep inside of me, Dangerfield was right. Nothing about me had changed. I was still needy, selfish, depressive, consumeristic, addicted to comfort and pleasure, prone to compulsions that negated my powers of reason and my sense of decency, and emotionally volatile.
Why not just throw care to the wind? Throw in the towel? Give up? This was the voice of demoralization Stutz warned about. This was the voice of Part X that needed to be exposed and challenged.
So challenge Part X I did. I countered that Dangerfield did not really surrender to despair and nihilism. His comedy was a powerful expression of someone who had turned his demons into laughter. He had painstakingly crafted his misery into entertainment to become one of the greatest comedians ever. Creating his comedy was evidence that Dangerfield had connected and reconnected with his Life Force. As a comic craftsman, he was hardly someone who gave up and succumbed to mediocrity and self-complacency, so even if his premise that we’re born a certain way and remain fundamentally unchanged, we are still obligated to leave the Maze and find our Life Force. In fact, I could counter Part X with the argument that staying in the Maze and giving up to despair is far more difficult and anguish-producing than moving forward, exiting the Maze, and embracing a purposeful life that acknowledges pain, uncertainty, and constant work. I could further counter that though Rodney Dangerfield struggled with addiction and his own Maze, he nevertheless created comedy that benefited us all. Stutz observes that we are morally obliged to improve ourselves because our self-improvement benefits those in our social and family circles and beyond.
To take this argument further, the Stutz philosophy clearly indicates that we are put into this world with a moral responsibility toward others and that responsibility means finding ways to escape the Maze and connect with the Life Force.
Part X will never die. It will rage and plot against us. We have to see it like a large shark’s fin in the water coming for us over and over. Such is the human condition.
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