Don’t Reach for the Poison Bottle
With over forty years of playing the piano, it would be nice if my wife and two teenage daughters bathed in my ecstatic glissandos and plaintive melodious sonatas. In my vainglorious imagination, I see myself as the talented father who bears his musical gifts to his wife and children. They sit around me in the living room while I play the ebony Yamaha upright. As the curtains rustle in the soft evening warm breeze of Southern California, they listen to my most recent nocturne while they read Thackeray novels, sip peppermint tea, and make requests from my rich musical catalog.
It would be really nice if this peaceful domestic scene could be actualized. But I’m sad to report my piano playing does not create this blissful scenario. This is not because I’m a lousy pianist or because my family lacks musical appreciation. The problem is our tiny house--more suited for Barbie dolls than human beings--and my piano music is overwhelmingly loud. My piano encroaches on my family’s private space and drills into their brains, the equivalent of a root canal.
It would be nice if we lived in a big house so that when I play, my family members could find sanctuary in their rooms, and then my piano would be like a distant pitter-patter like rain on a window. But as things are, my piano is loud, the kind of loud when you’re at a rock concert and you have to stuff wads of toilet paper in your ears to spare your eardrums from rupturing.
This is because we share a cramped 1,200-square-foot house in Southern California. This lab-rat cage of a house is worth over $1.3 million dollars. It’s pathetic that a house of that value doesn’t provide us with the kind of personal space that we all crave. Sharing cramped spaces makes us suffer the elevated stress hormone cortisol. This is worsened by the fact that I am living the same deluded fantasy as the narrator in Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” and I see myself as the uncompromising artist who must find personal expression in my music.
In truth, I’m not uncompromising. I’m a half-ass amateur musician who never took my piano playing to the next level. I’m self-indulgent and most of my songs sound the same. In spite of my shortcomings as a dilettante pianist, it would be nice if my family enjoyed the same musical catharsis I experience when I play. But for them, my piano playing is as pleasant as shoving their heads down the sink’s garbage disposal.
It would be really nice if my family could enjoy the same heartwrenching melodies that I hear in my piano compositions, but as The Rolling Stones will tell you: You don’t always get what you want.
Speaking of not always getting what you want, it would be really nice if I were less lazy and more hardwired like my wife to exact precision and detail in everything I do. For example, I am the person in my family who goes to Trader Joe’s every Tuesday morning at 8 sharp, buys $300 in groceries, and makes dinners five nights a week. I’m not a good cook, I’m lazy, and I tend to make things that are easy. I make salmon, avocado toast, and broccoli on Tuesday. Wednesday is spaghetti with ground turkey meat and broccoli. Thursday is ground Impossible Burger with grilled mushrooms and a jar of Thai curry or Indian marsala sauce with white rice and broccoli. Friday is usually takeout. Saturday is frozen potstickers and frozen coconut shrimp and broccoli. Sunday is frozen Kung-Pao chicken, white rice, and broccoli. Monday is frozen chicken chow-mein, Impossible Chicken Nuggets, and broccoli. That’s a lot of broccoli. No one complains because it’s the only vegetable my twelve-year-old daughters will consistently eat. My daughters do want my wife to cook more because she’s a detail freak and my meals are more “rustic,” a polite way of saying they are painfully close to being prison food.
In contrast, my wife is an excellent cook. However, she works more hours as a middle school English teacher than I do as a college writing instructor. As bad as I am at cooking, my family doesn’t complain too harshly as long as I don’t burn the food or overcook the broccoli into a pile of mush.
I usually get a pass for my half-ass cooking. However, I don’t get as much lenience in my subpar kitchen organization, which has four major categories: the refrigerator, the freezer, the spice cabinet, and the pantry. When I get home from Trader Joe’s every Tuesday morning around 9, I put the groceries away in a crude fashion. I just stuff and muscle the items inside the fridge, freezer, spice cabinet, and pantry, doing my best to keep jars from falling. My “method” is such that a lot of items get lost in the back. You’ve heard the saying “Out of sight out of mind.” That’s the problem with my “system.” I don’t know my inventory. As a result, I too often make unnecessary repeat purchases so that there is an accumulation of things we don’t need. For example, at certain points my wife has pointed out that the spice cabinet has four bottles of garlic powder, five bottles of Everything But the Elote Seasoning, and seven jars of Umami Seasoning Blend. The pantry will be stuffed with bags of rice, quinoa, Indian lentils, and hemp seeds that are so beyond the expiration dates that they have to be thrown out. Every few months or so, the pantry goes through a Great Purge, a process that my wife does with me every few months or so.
I will also commit the same errors for products that go in the refrigerator. Everything Bagels, sliced sourdough bread, jarred pickles, kimchi, ketchup, soy sauce, mustard, and Greek yogurt will clog up the shelves. Items hidden behind stacks in the front of the shelves often don’t get eaten and must be thrown out because they’re past their expiration or, worse, clumps of hairy mold are floating inside jars of brine. Once again, a Great Purge is required.
What I need to learn from all this is that putting the time and effort to organize in the beginning would save me the headache of wasted money and having to do The Great Purge. I’m not completely hopeless. If I can create a system that I believe in, I will stick to it. In a broader sense, I need to replace the kitchen’s chaos with order.
The quest for order seems to be an obsessive theme of mine that I can trace back to childhood when having a messy room with dirty clothes mixed with dust balls under the bed forced me, for my sanity’s sake, to perform an occasional Great Purge. Here is that theme slapping me in the face as I look to organize the kitchen.
It would be very nice if order was a natural occurrence and if chaos were automatically managed like a self-cleaning oven or a computer that does consistent software security updates, but in fact, the opposite is true: When I’m half-assing it in life, as is my default setting, a sense of order is not the natural state of affairs. Chaos and entropy are the inevitable results of my laziness.
How lazy am I? To answer that question, we need to look at my notion of happiness. For me, happiness is not an abundance of some kind of spectacular feeling. Instead, happiness is an absence of bullshit. By bullshit, I’m referring to all the little tedious inconveniences of life that I have no tolerance for: broken mechanical things that need repairs; a jury duty summons in the mail; an invitation to a wedding from a couple I barely know; a reminder from my doctor that I’m due for a colonoscopy; a somber announcement from my dentist that I need three teeth drilled; an email reminder from my work telling me that Human Resources requires that I watch several “time-sensitive” videos keeping me current on all the complicated protocols and that I must pass several online quizzes to prove my mastery of the material. In other words, the normal care and maintenance of life chaps my ass and makes me irascible and surly. If that’s not lazy, I don’t know what is.
It would really be nice if my laziness didn’t get me into trouble, but it often does. I might not notice the problems arising from laziness so much if I were single, but I am married, and one of the key features of marriage is that you are far more accountable for your behavior than when you’re going solo. It would be really nice to avoid the inevitable judgments that spring from laziness, but that is not the case. The reality is that half-assing your way through marriage will be a constant source of frustration for your partner and eventually she will erupt like Vesuvius.
It would be nice if I had a greater awareness of how my half-assing it builds frustration in my wife. Then I could avoid much unnecessary strife and conflict, but alas that is not the case. For example, my wife had been back from her vacation with her best friend to Cabo for one day when there was some undue conflict and tension regarding bagels in the refrigerator. I was playing the piano in our living room when my wife, standing under the archway of the kitchen, held two bags of bagels and yelled at me. “Which one is older?”
I turned from the piano bench and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I need to know which one is older. Don’t you know?”
There was an anger and intensity to her pitch that flummoxed me. This isn’t the question from a wife who’s asking about bagels. This is the question of someone whose frustration has been building because her husband’s laziness has caused chaos and disorder in the refrigerator. This chaos has caused our daughter to not know which bag of bagels to open for breakfast, and our daughter is neurotic like I am. Our daughter was obsessed with knowing which bag of bagels was fresher and neither bag had due dates. In the end, our daughter ended up toasting tandoori nan bread with garlic and putting butter on it.
But while I was on the piano and not knowing the frustrating encounter my wife had had with my daughter, I turned around toward my wife and said, “There’s too much bagel intensity in this house. Too much bagel intensity.”
I resented getting yelled at about bagels during my piano practice, but I didn’t see what had led up to it. My wife was frustrated with my daughter’s indecision, and part of the indecision was from the half-ass way I put the groceries away. This spoke to deeper character defects in me: my laziness, my lack of being engaged with running the house efficiently, my tendency to rely on my wife to pick up the slack to compensate for my deficits, and my general selfishness. All of these defects were worsened by the fact that my loud piano spun a cocoon of isolation around me so that I could escape the very domestic disorder my laziness had caused.
It would be really nice had I recognized this earlier. Then I wouldn’t have been so shocked and the “bagel intensity.”
Shortly after the discussion about the bagels, my wife and I agreed that I would get up from my piano practice, and I helped her do a Great Purge in the kitchen. Both of us bonded over this chore and felt better afterward. I’m just sorry my laziness let the crisis get to the point where there was “bagel intensity.”
It would be really nice if I could see the self-destructive effects of my laziness in real-time so that I could put on the brakes and manage my indolence for not only my self-improvement but for the betterment of my family. But my laziness usually gets the best of me long before I see its chaotic effect on others.
Does laziness exist in me as an isolated vice? It would be nice to think so. It would be nice to think that in every other way, I’m a great guy. I just happen to have some laziness thrown in with all the good stuff about me. But sadly, that’s not how it works. Usually, one bad trait is linked to several others. Character defects exist in a sort of chain. What is typically linked to laziness? Impatience. On the Patience Scale, I score a big fat zero.
Lacking patience makes small things a source of torment. I only have to drive five miles to work--a drive that totals about fifteen minutes--and I dread driving to and from the college campus. Those fifteen minutes are defined by anxiety, hostility, and resentment. Watching people who can’t drive or are recklessly discourteous inflames me with misanthropy. I try to kill the time by listening to the radio, but that just makes things worse. I end up being bored out of my mind by NPR stories told by affected urbane voices that all sound the same and this fills me with contempt.
Driving to Trader Joe’s only takes eight minutes, and even that drive becomes a reptilian competition with me seething over the fact that people have cut me off or are driving too slow or that there is construction causing a lane closure or that there is a siren-alert emergency response so that I’m forced to stop on the side of the road. I’m convinced that every time I drive, I have to delay my journey because a firetruck or a police car is making an emergency response. I resent people having kitchen fires, heart attacks, and fainting spells because it inconveniences me when I’m on the road.
It would be nice if I only suffered from laziness and impatience, but my anger and resentment while driving speaks to another character deficit: I’m a malcontent. I’m one of those mentally ill people who can’t be happy unless I’m pissed off and resentful about something.
It would be really nice if I could accept myself the way I am, but I resent being so resentful. One of the things about being a middle-class college-educated man with a stable job, health insurance, robust health, and a house in a desirable location in the suburbs is that venting resentment is self-centered, boring, and perhaps worst of all shows a superficial grasp of the human condition.
To cut through my superficiality and drill into the core of my real attitudinal problems, we may have to turn to the political columnist and culture critic Ana Marie Cox. She has been public on her podcast and elsewhere that she is a recovering alcoholic who has clinical depression and bipolar disorder. On her now-defunct podcast, she once said something that haunts me: As a recovering alcoholic, she learned with the help of her therapist that she no longer reaches for the liquor bottle. However, there is a bottle that is always close by, and as a sort of reflex, she always reaches for it and finds it far more addictive and accessible than alcohol. It’s the bottle of self-hatred. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say the root of my laziness, impatience, and anger is that I share this addiction with Ana Marie Cox and others.
For my sake and my family’s, I need to learn to curb this addiction. It would be really nice if there were some things I could do to avoid reaching for the poison bottle, and actually, I think there are.
For one, I need to learn to forgive myself for my past. Looking back from around my late twenties, I have been depraved, cowardly, self-centered, infantile, compulsive, licentious, dishonest, fraudulent, two-faced, and I could go on, but just making this list is the equivalent of me reaching for the poison bottle and indulging in the spiritual rotgut.
Secondly, I can help around the house more and do so without half-assing it. I can take responsibility for my actions. I can show some discipline in my writing, eating, and chore habits. Living a clean, orderly, structured life, warding off chaos, and resisting the impulse for instant gratification make me less self-loathing. There are a lot of things I can do to avoid reaching for the poison bottle. Mainly, I need to behave in a way so that I don’t feel guilty for making my wife being married to a man-baby. I need to grow up.
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