Leaving Anhedonia

I Am a Recovering Baby Boomer

I Am a Recovering Baby Boomer

I am a recovering Baby Boomer, a man whose adult life is spent convalescing over my generation's excesses, betrayals, misconceptions, and failures. We are a gullible generation that got duped by the self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller, who could alter the shape of spoons and coins to a rapt audience on The Merv Griffin Show, and the author Peter Tompkins who in the best-selling The Secret Life of Plants claimed flowers and other plants had “feelings” so we had better nourish their self-esteem by showering them not only with water but with love ballades. We read comics promoting worthless Charles Atlas bodybuilding programs, X-Ray-Vision glasses, and Sea Monkeys. We were titillated by TV ads showing Farrah Fawcett and other eager-to-please blondes rubbing shaving cream on football star Joe Namath’s dimpled cheeks. We were inculcated with consumer morality lessons by witnessing exhausted housewives shamed for failing to remove “ring around the collar” from their husbands’ work shirts and watching with horror and disgust as members of the educated class compromised their perfectly-curated lives by coming home from a long day of work to greet their spouses with nasty cases of halitosis. We witnessed the chaos at Woodstock and ogled at Hugh Hefner’s Pleasure Cave, sardine-packed with drunken satyrs and nymphs. I can personally attest to the fact that the popularity of the musical Hair and its soundtrack had a transforming effect on my squeaky-clean suburban neighborhood in San Jose, California. One day our backyards were full of wholesome gatherings of neighbors getting together to make peach and apricot preserves while drinking Florence Henderson-approved Tang. Then in the blink of an eye, those backyards were furnished with hot tubs and mini-bars, and they became attractions for nudists and swingers. “The Age of Aquarius” was an era when divorces in my neighborhood multiplied like toadstools. 

The net sum of these experiences is that Boomers like myself became afflicted with juvenile notions of freedom as a consumer lifestyle offering unlimited pleasure-seeking resulting in a multitude of disturbing behaviors, which included relentless tanning without sunscreen, the need to fortify all of our meals with organic wheat germ, the unbridled veneration of Peter Max, and an inexplicable longing to go on tour with The Partridge Family. 

To this day, not only are Boomers saddled with a Hydra Head of addictions and bizarre behaviors, but we are a selfish lot. Taking advantage of an affordable college education, a generous job market, and housing, we are overcome by a sense of entitlement to an easy life of materialistic success, yet we are too narcissistic and self-absorbed to give a damn about the fact that we didn’t pave the way for subsequent generations to enjoy the same affordable education and housing. 

Speaking of narcissism, we are navel-gazers repelled by any kind of life purpose that would cause us to transcend the limitations of our self-centeredness. When we retire, rather than do volunteer work to make a difference in our community, we will indulge our nostalgia and delusions of grandeur by enrolling in summer baseball camps where Hall of Fame baseball players will coach us on the finer points of bunting and throwing a curveball; we will venture on African safaris and then bore to death anyone within ear-range by regaling friends and family of our adventures by channeling the voice of our childhood cartoon hero Commander McBragg; and we will attend Rolling Stones concerts so that the frenzied hip gyrations of an octogenarian will encourage us to believe that we will never die. 

Much has been written about how loathsome, repugnant, and irredeemable my generation is. Gen-X author Bruce Cannon Gibney castigates us as morally bankrupt and empathy-deprived in his book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The Atlantic writer Lyman Stone has equal loathing of my generation as he observes we enjoy a stranglehold on public policies that benefit our interests but no other generation’s in his essay “The Boomers Ruined Everything.” Washington Post writer Jim Tankersley excoriates us as miscreants and pariahs in his article “Baby Boomers are what’s wrong with America’s economy.” He writes that “They chewed up resources, ran up the debt, and escaped responsibility.” In Joe Queenan’s Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, the irascible author accuses us of being so vainglorious that we have to hype up the most ordinary events to affirm our significance in this world: “By turning spectacularly humdrum occurrences into formal rites, Baby Boomers have transmuted even the most banal activities into ‘events’ requiring reflection, planning, research, underwriting and staggering masses of data.” Clearly, these writers would have us believe that Boomers are, in their worst form, the world’s pestilence and on good days a reliable irritant, having infected the culture with such annoyances as The Seqway, the Chia Pet, and the Starland Vocal Band. 

But I would like to offer a rebuttal to these scathing judgments. While it is true that the “Me Generation” has much to account for, it is also true that our self-indulgence and moral lapses have forced many of us into a state of lifelong recovery, and with that recovery, we have gleaned life lessons that can bear fruit to others. 

So please let me present a Baby Boomer’s autobiography that chronicles some of those life lessons, not just to redeem myself but to blunt the sharp edge of judgment against my generation. Please let me offer these tidbits of wisdom, not just so that you might not repeat my mistakes but to afford me relief from a guilty conscience. 

I am in recovery, after all, and it has been said that confession is good for the soul. 

The Claustrophobia Ride at Universal Studios

I’ll briefly recount a humiliating event that happened to me in 2018 at Universal Studios in Studio City. I should have avoided going there in the first place owing to a natural phobia of amusement parks, but for the sake of my twin daughters and wife, I decided to bite the bullet. It was a decision I will forever regret. The 2018 incarnation of the park reeked of Las Vegas money-grabbing, subpar overpriced restaurants, wannabe boat cruise entertainers donned in epaulets and moth-ball-smelling wool gaucherie who constantly massaged their handlebar mustaches and spoke in fake French accents. Worst of all, I stood in line for over an hour to go on the Harry Potter Forbidden Journey, a ride in which adults sit in undersized airplane seats and are pinned in by a metal harness before entering a narrow tunnel that leads to hell.

As I sat in the cramped seat, a metal bar lowered and clamped down on my 52-inch chest, resulting in shortness of breath and a full-blown claustrophobia attack. While I was struggling to breathe, the conveyor belt ushered me and the other passengers toward the tunnel of darkness as I feebly cried for the engineer to stop the ride. Unhinged, I screamed louder and louder for someone to stop me from entering the tunnel so I could be saved from cardiac arrest. Complete madness, heart attack, or both surely awaited me, as no one in charge seemed to hear my cries for help. But fellow passengers nearby, observing my hysterical state, screamed in unison on my behalf so that the engineer was at last alerted that a maniac needed to get off the ride.

The conveyor belt stopped, and a tall burly usher in a gray FBI sport coat approached me. I sheepishly smiled at him and said, “Do you need to speak to me in the debriefing room?” The wizened security officer chuckled, offered me his hand, and with an ashen spirit I exited the park knowing I had thrown a wrench in Universal Studios’ well-oiled ride machine all the while knowing that regardless of all my kettlebell circuit training, wheat-grass smoothies, and high-protein diet, I would never be able to overcome my fear of closed spaces. 

Carbohydrate Comas Were a Normal Part of My Childhood

As a kid in the 60s and 70s, addictive activities were a normal part of my childhood. We were oblivious to nutritional concerns like grams of sugar and carbohydrates. On weekend mornings, for example, my parents would sometimes take me to a local pancake house and I'd always order the apple pancakes. The stack of ten flapjacks served before me was so big that sitting next to it, I looked like a helpless Lilliputian, and the question had to be asked: Was I going to eat the pancakes, or were they going to eat me? Of course, I ate the pancakes, every last one of them. They were delicious--drowning in apple pie filling, smothered in creamy-soft butter, and then finally doused with a half-gallon of maple syrup. I would wash the pancakes down with several tall glasses of orange juice. The amount of insulin-spiking sugars I consumed during these breakfasts were so high that my morning indulgence would have given a modern-day endocrinologist a cerebral hemorrhage. Not surprisingly, I would go home, and rather than spend time with my friends who could be heard outside playing, I would be catatonic and nauseous in my bed for several hours in what could be called a Carbohydrate Coma.

 

Eating Cap 'N Crunch in the 70s Changed Me Forever

When I was a child, my mother indulged my appetite for my favorite sugary cereal, Cap ‘N Crunch, in all its variations: Cap 'N Crunch plain, Cap ‘N Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap 'N Crunch, and then the renamed versions of the same-tasting cereal: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. 

I felt compelled to taste-test all these cereal varieties the way a sommelier would taste dozens of Zinfandel wines from the same region or a fromagier would sample different types of Camembert or a musicologist would listen to hundreds of different versions of Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony.

Eating six versions of Cap 'N Crunch afforded me the illusion of variety while eating the same cereal over and over. I was a preadolescent boy who wanted to believe I had choices but at the same time didn't want any choices. 

You will sometimes hear about the man who is in his sixth marriage, and his wives in terms of appearance, temperament, and personality are all more or less the same. The man keeps going back to the same woman but wants to believe he has "found someone new" to give him hope for a new life. 

That was essentially my relationship with Cap 'N Crunch. Not only was I stagnant in my food tastes, but I was also regressing into sugar-coated pablum. My love of cereal, which endures to this day, was the equivalent of disappearing into my chosen comfort zone. There I found pleasure and oblivion. 

In middle school, I knew a guy whose mother worked for one of the big cereal companies. She’d take home dozens and dozens of test brands of cereal and her son would show them to me. These cereals were of the sugary variety and reminded me of Count Chocula, Franken Berry and such but their names and characters were different. Sick of all the cereals his mother took home every day, the boy would give me as many boxes home as I’d like, and the cereals tasted like the ones you could buy at the store; however, they had different names, mascots, and cereal shapes. 

Having these cereals in my home was like living in a bizarro parallel universe where everything seemed the same but was a little off. That period of my life still feels like a dream in which I felt I possessed potent powers that allowed me to enter a strange universe that was denied by everyone else. 

Objectively speaking, there was nothing about this cereal that had the power to transport me to some enchanted universe. But cereal was more than a grain; it was an idea about happiness. It was a story about how we lived our lives. I was thinking about this while teaching Yuval Noah Harari’s best-seller Sapiens to my college students. The class is called Critical Thinking.  Sapiens helped me understand my fascination with cereal. According to the book, I would not be obsessed with cereal if not for the Cognitive Revolution, which according to Harari developed from 70,000 to 30,000 years ago. This Revolution created “supple” language to form advanced communications: storytelling to create myths and legends which created self-identity, morality systems, alliances, enemies, legal systems, religions, art, gossip, collective beliefs, and social cooperation. 

As children, we weren’t just eating cereal. We were connecting with characters who lived in a mythical world of boundless delights. We were playing board games that were written on the back of the box. We were looking for free prizes, which we search for like buried treasure, inside the cereal box. We were sending box tops to get submarines, shirts, hats, and other merchandise. 

Cereal was part of the broad tapestry of stories 1970s America told us about living the good life and achieving success. We ate enormous amounts of granola, wheat germ, Wheaties, and Special K to promote health and fitness. We read comics promoting Charles Atlas bodybuilding programs. Our fathers shaved with rigor after watching TV ads showing Farrah Fawcett and other eager-to-please blondes rubbing shaving cream on football star Joe Namath's dimpled cheeks. 

To sell cereal, you had to sell a story about finding good health. One of the most famous storytellers about cereal was the outdoor enthusiast Euell Gibbons, who was featured in Grape-Nuts ads in the 1970s.  Walking in a forest, Gibbons asked us: “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.” He was telling us a powerful story about Grape-Nuts: This cereal would connect us to the Earth, make us whole, and deliver a strong, healthy life. Eating Grape-Nuts would give us superpowers and endow us with the kind of survival skills that would allow us to go off the grid, get dumped into a rainforest, and live the rest of our days with nothing but a buck knife and a loincloth. In truth, eating the gravel-like cereal was responsible for thousands of trips to the dentist for chipped teeth and for making a crunch that was so loud we couldn't even hear the radio when we ate our breakfast. 

Of all the cereals that I ate as a youngster, I still eat Grape-Nuts today. I may be addicted to the crunch and I like the malty flavor. I’ve also read that Grape-Nuts is the only store-bought cereal that hasn’t gone through extrusion, a heating process that kills nutrients. Grape-Nuts, on the other hand, is baked like a loaf of bread. 

While I still eat Grape-Nuts in my early sixties, I now pour them in a coffee mug to limit the portion. Otherwise, this calorie-dense food will expand my waistline. Such draconian measures have to be taken if I'm to indulge in one of my childhood memories. 

Lou Kruk Forever Changed My Life

In 1974 at Earl Warren Junior High in Castro Valley, California, Lou Kruk was my PE instructor and Olympic Weightlifting Coach. He stood well over six feet, had an ice cream-cone torso, and showed off his tanned muscular legs with gym shorts. His full head of brown hair was longer than the other instructors. He often wore aviator sunglasses with a dark blue windbreaker or just a T-shirt. He appeared to have a formidable income because he drove a Porsche, owned a sailboat, and had a beautiful blonde girlfriend who looked like a fashion model. Kruk had a loud voice that reminded me of the famous disc jockey Wolfman Jack. He clearly loved music because often in our Olympic Weightlifting class, he’d play his favorite albums by Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass.  

Kruk was loved by us all because he was not a superficial muscle jock by any means. He had a strong moral code. He despised bullying, cruelty, stupidity, laziness, and mediocrity. One day in PE class, in which we had to climb a fifty-foot rope inside the cafeteria, some kids were picking on one of the school nerds, and Kruk stopped the class and admonished the bullies. “What’s with you people? Always kick the guy that’s down in the gutter. Is that it? It’s not bad enough that he’s already lying in the gutter? Does that feel good to you?” The bullies and their complicit friends appeared sincerely ashamed.

It’s safe to say Kruk was a father figure to many of us. We wanted to please him both athletically and morally. During the middle of the school year, Kruk’s brother died while hang-gliding and crashing into a rocky cliff in San Pedro. Hang-gliding was banned after the accident. Kruk took two weeks off and we mourned his loss. When he came back to school, he didn’t quite look the same and his vocal delivery had lost some of its oomph. The aura of vitality that surrounded him had diminished. We hated seeing the faded version of him, but ever so slowly, his spirit came back and once again he barked at us to be better people with the same intensity as before. 

Nearly fifty years have passed since I last saw Kruk, and I’ve been thinking of him because last week I had a severe abdominal injury while working out in the garage and I had to go to Urgent Care where, thankfully, the ultrasound showed I did not get a hernia. So I’m taking a couple of weeks off, taking more Motrin than I’ve ever taken, and hope to get back to working out. It appears I can’t exist in a postworkout world. Some kind of weightlifting, whether it be kettlebells or barbells, is now part of my DNA, part of my daily structure and routine, and a necessary ingredient to achieving some kind of mental equilibrium. Kruk instilled that in me. As a tribute to my coach, I’m going to make a playlist of Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, but I’ll skip wearing aviator sunglasses because my wife and daughters will laugh me out of the house. 

Does Belief in God Compromise Our Morality?

I had a writing student in my Critical Thinking class who had recently come to California from Hungary. She told me her father, like her, was an atheist but had very strong morals. It was easy to believe her. She was a committed, assiduous student who appeared to have absorbed the strong values her father had given her. 

I also had a Vietnamese student, a professed atheist, who had five brothers and sisters, all Christians, and all, in my student’s opinion, loathsome hypocrites. When their mother was dying of cancer in Vietnam, only my atheist student flew from California to tend to her mother till her mother’s death. That her Christian brothers and sisters didn’t lay a finger to help their mother intensified my student’s hatred of religion as a sham.

Perhaps my two atheist students could be used as evidence in the University of Michigan Philosophy Professor Elizabeth Anderson’s argument that we don’t need theism to develop a strong moral foundation. In her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” she presents the case that religion is not only unnecessary for developing a strong moral code in the individual and society but that religion is rife with so much malignancy that we are better off without it. 

Anderson begins her essay at the Institute for Creation Research Museum in Santee, California, where the creationists argue that we can follow two paths: Creationism and “Evolutionism.” Creationism will bring us moral fruit. “Evolutionism,” on the other hand, is the “evil tree,” which will bring forth all kinds of moral filth: fornication, nihilism, addiction, humanism, Communism--every foul thing under the sun. 

Anderson then writes: “The evil tree vividly displays two important ideas. First, the fundamental religious objection to the theory of evolution is not scientific but moral. Evolutionary theory must be opposed because it leads to rampant immorality, on both the personal and political scales. Second, the basic cause of this immorality is atheism. Evolutionary theory bears corrupt fruit because it is rooted in the denial of the existence of God.”

Belief in God--theism--therefore is rooted in the belief that we must believe in God to repel immorality. To embrace atheism is to embrace the reckless disregard for morality and live in a fever swamp of sin and moral debauchery. 

This belief in the intrinsic immorality of atheism is so ingrained and reflexive that most theists have not, according to Anderson, considered a rational defense of atheism “because they think that without God, morality is impossible.” Or as Dostoyevsky famously did not say, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” In other words, belief in God is the cork that keeps the sinful champagne fizz from exploding in our faces. 

Anderson then asks: Could we know the difference between right and wrong without a belief in God? Do we need the Ten Commandments to steer us in the direction of morality? She answers, “But that can’t be right” because every society, regardless of its religious or nonreligious status, creates a moral code: “Every stable society punishes murder, theft, and bearing false witness; teaches children to honor their parents; and condemns envy of one’s neighbor’s possessions, at least when such envy leads one to treat one’s neighbors badly.”

Moral codes are a natural byproduct of any thriving society. In the words of Anderson: “People figured out these rules long before they were exposed to any of the major monotheistic religions. This fact suggests that moral knowledge springs not from revelation but from people’s experiences in living together, in which they have learned that they must adjust their own conduct in light of others’ claims.”

To assert that we need a belief in God to have morality, then, is both arrogant and willfully ignorant. It requires a lot of hubris and impiety to dismiss the morality of other cultures that may demonstrate strong moral codes but not be built on theism.

So Anderson first counters the theist belief that a belief in God is necessary to build a moral code. Her second rebuttal addresses the religious belief that we need a belief in God and the enticements of heaven and the fear of hell to motivate us to care about the difference between right and wrong and doing the right thing. Anderson writes: “On this view, people must be goaded into behaving morally through divine sanction.” She refutes this notion. People are not motivated by God but by love, honor, and respect to care about the difference between right and wrong. In Anderson’s worldview, love, honor, and respect are attributes that flourish separately from a belief in God. An atheist world can be rich in morality and wholesome values. 

Anderson’s third refutation is the argument that we need a belief in God to give authority to the moral values we wish to establish. We need God’s authority, for example, to tell us that murder is wrong. Her rebuttal states that we should not use claims of theism or atheism to object to “the basic moral rules”: it’s wrong to commit murder, rape, torture, slavery, and genocide, to name several examples. We know these things are wrong “with greater confidence,” Anderson states, than we can draw “from elaborate factual or logical reasoning.” In other words, we should not need tortuous legal reasoning to arrive at the conclusion that the aforementioned deeds are bad. Anderson writes, “If you find a train of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that everything, or even just these things, is permitted, this is a good reason for you to reject it. Call this ‘the moralistic argument.’ So, if it is true that atheism entails that everything is permitted, this is a strong reason to reject atheism.” She calls such reasoning “the moralistic argument.” 

The moralistic argument, Anderson contends, “applies more forcefully to theism than to atheism.” If God’s laws are based on authority and not goodness, then “in principle anything is permitted.” For example, the Calvinistic notion of predestination in which God preselects a remnant of human souls to be saved at his discreet pleasure while damning billions in eternal fire is perfectly fine for Calvinists because such an arrangement is God’s will. Moral reasoning has nothing to do with it. 

At this point in Anderson’s essay, she gets very serious in her dismantling of perhaps not all religions but what could be called fundamentalist religion. She writes, “I shall argue that if we take the evidence for theism with utmost seriousness, we will find ourselves committed to the proposition that the most heinous acts are permitted. Since we know that these acts are not morally permitted, we must therefore doubt the evidence for theism.”

Anderson is very specific about what she means by theism: “I mean belief in the God of Scripture.” She includes the Old and New Testaments and the Koran in her critique. We must judge the morality of God based on Scripture as taken as inerrant. In interpreting Scripture as the inerrant word of God, we will, Anderson argues, be forced to conclude that Scripture is rife with evil and depravity, much of which comes from the personality of Scripture’s God. At this juncture, Anderson gives a litany of God’s cruel actions and moral abominations. He “routinely punishes people for the sins of others.” He hardens hearts and therefore “thwarts their free will.” He kills firstborn sons. He orders genocide. 

Additionally, Anderson observes that God permits slavery, allows for female captives in war to be “raped or seized as wives.” God allows for men to amass a stable of concubines. “Children may be sacrificed to God in return for His aid in battle (2 Kings 3:26-27, Judg. n), or to persuade Him to end a famine (2 Sam. 21).”

Anderson anticipates that Christian apologists will point out that “these transgressions occur in the Old Testament” and that we must find God’s true glory and moral superiority in the New Testament. Anderson is equally if not more harsh in her judgment of the New Testament. She is opposed to Jesus’ love for humans, based on choosing Jesus over their parents. Loyalty to Jesus will require that family members hate each other. She cites Matthew and Mark to show that disobedient children must suffer more than the rod; they must be killed. She mocks all of these things as Jesus’ “family values.” 

Worse than the Old Testament, the New Testament brings eternal damnation to most people. The basis, Anderson charges, is not only inhumane but inconsistent. Paul sometimes preaches predestination as an “arbitrary gift from God” and sometimes salvation is promised to people who abandon their families for Christ or for helping the poor. 

Anderson is equally offended by the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the idea that Jesus is a scapegoat who must endure God’s wrath otherwise reserved for the human race of sinners. 

In sum, Anderson writes: “I find it hard to resist the conclusion that the God of the Bible is cruel and unjust and commands and permits us to be cruel and unjust to others.” 

At this point in her essay, Anderson would like to address “thoughtful Christians and Jews,” those who struggle with the above cruelties and moral atrocities. She gives these thoughtful theists a list of untenable options. The first is “to bite the bullet” and accept the atrocities as they are. After all, some preachers will tell us Scripture is a sweet watermelon and we must as true believers swallow the hunks of delicious fruit and bitter seeds. We cannot pick and choose what we eat. The Bible has plenty of bitter seeds resulting in racism, tribalism, ethno-nationalism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, cultural genocide, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. 

The second way to deal with the above calamities is to rely on “a stopgap measure.” Say these extreme behaviors no longer are sanctioned now that Scripture has been written. God may have spoken that way to people in biblical times, but he will not command us to perform such barbarism today. This doesn’t work because Anderson points out the whole purpose of being a believer is to have a communication with God.

A third strategy is to excuse God’s depravity. We can come up with rationalizations for God’s testing of Abraham and Job and slaughtering seventy thousand of David’s men. She writes that such rationalizations are dangerous and “invite applications of similar reasoning to future actions.”

Anderson concludes that there is no way to “soft-pedal the reprehensible moral implications” of God's ordered atrocities. “They must be categorically rejected as false and depraved moral teachings. Morally decent theists have always done so in practice. Nevertheless, they insist that there is much worthy moral teaching that can be salvaged from the Bible.”

Anderson concedes that the Bible is rich in beautiful moral lessons, but that these lessons are mixed in a mire of depravity and therefore it is “morally inconsistent.” 

Better than being a liberal theist who “soft-pedals” all the hideous things in Scripture, Anderson argues that we should abandon theological claims for building a moral code. Citing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Anderson argues that God should not be worshiped out of fear of his raw power, his arbitrary love of some and not others, and his moral inconsistencies. Fear of raw power is not love or a sound basis for morality.  

Secondly, ascribing good and bad events to God in the absence of scientific explanation is unworthy of making any kind of moral claims. Anderson writes: “So the tendency, in the absence of scientific knowledge, to ascribe events having good and bad consequences for human beings to corresponding benevolent and malevolent intentions of unseen spirits” reflects the biases of those who interpret these events.  

Third, Anderson rejects so-called divine revelation as a basis for making claims about morality. Anderson presents the summer art fair in her town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where all kinds of religious sects show up, the conventional ones all the way to the fringe ones, including Wiccans and New Agers. She writes: “The believers in each booth offer evidence of exactly the same kind to advance their religion. Every faith points to its own holy texts and oral traditions, its spiritual experiences, miracles and prophets, its testimonies of wayward lives turned around by conversion, rebirth of faith, or return to the church.”

Anderson concludes that we cannot base moral authority on any god or gods. What, then, should morality be built on if one has rejected the belief in God and is an atheist? Her answer is that morality is built on each of us: “We each have moral authority with respect to one another. This authority is, of course, not absolute. No one has the authority to order anyone else to blind obedience. Rather, each of us has the authority to make claims on others, to call upon people to heed our interests and concerns.” 

For Anderson, morality is “a system of reciprocal claim making, in which everyone is accountable to everyone else, [and] does not need its authority underwritten by some higher, external authority.” 

Whenever I read Anderson’s essay, I think to those two atheist students who were enrolled in my classes. Their decency, their courage, and their moral core indeed seem to be one of the strongest arguments ever presented to me for how unnecessary it is to believe in God to have morals. 

Muscle Flex

Muscle Flex

There was a lie I told in 1973 that still haunts me. I was eleven at the time. I was on the sixth-grade basketball team at Independent Elementary in Castro Valley, California. The coach Erick Henderson was a young man, not much older than thirty, with a crop of sandy blond hair. He usually wore brown corduroys and blue oxfords with sleeves rolled up. He was close to six-foot-three, handsome, and a former college basketball player. He had an earnest, sturdy morality about him without being annoying. We all liked him. My problem was that I lied. The lie had nothing to do with basketball. It was nothing that was pertinent to my success on the team. The lie had to do with wanting Coach Henderson’s attention and admiration. It was about baseball cards. He appeared to admire my photographic memory of baseball player statistics from my collection of baseball cards and baseball biographies. When I discovered that in addition to being a basketball fan, Coach Henderson was also a baseball fan, I wasn’t satisfied with him being impressed with my encyclopedic knowledge of baseball records. I wanted to impress him more by blowing him away with fabulous tales. My friend and teammate Justin and I collected baseball cards together. We had an amazing collection from the 1950s to the present day. Some of the cards we had stolen from neighbors once we discovered that they had the cards stashed somewhere, often in the garage or in a guest room. I did not tell Coach Henderson about the stolen baseball cards. But one afternoon as we were getting ready for practice on the playground basketball courts, I boasted to the coach that Justin and I had a “very special collection of all-time greats.” I started reciting a list of baseball cards I didn’t have. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner, and Ty Cobb. As I was rattling off the list, Justin made eye contact with me. He looked very uncomfortable, like someone on a boat cruise whose seasickness was getting worse from an oncoming stomach flu. I ignored his disapproving stare and continued to make a false claim of owning even more baseball cards Justin and I did not have: Walter Johnson, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Jackie Robinson. 

My lie was too egregious for Justin to remain silent because I had sucked him into it. When I was not present, he must have told the coach soon after because the next day at practice in front of the whole team, Coach Henderson said, “Hey, Jeff, I heard you were fibbing about those baseball cards.”

Coach Henderson’s tone was softspoken but I could tell by his expression that he was both deeply disappointed in me and that he detected a character defect, some missing ingredient in my hardwiring, that was deserving of pity. 

Surprisingly, my teammates did not castigate me for being so stupid as to present such flagrant falsehoods to anyone, least of all our coach. The whole thing blew over quickly enough considering the boldness of my dishonesty. Perhaps the ensuing practice and running drills distracted everyone from my pathological lying. But I still remember lying to Coach Henderson. It was one of those touchstone events that pointed to something deeply broken inside of me. How could I have lied to him so easily and compulsively? And why did I feel the need to rely on fabrications to get Coach Henderson’s attention?

My baseball card obsession continued and not in a good way. Whenever my family and I would go to someone’s house, the first thing I’d do is ask the parents if they had any old baseball cards lying around. I was an embarrassment to my parents. My mother reached the point where she’d give me a pre-visit reminder: Do not bring up baseball cards.

She had curbed my inappropriate inquiries, but my obsession with baseball made me invent a game called Dice Baseball. The game required two dice, box score sheets, and my Panasonic tape recorder. I played my team, the Oakland Athletics, against their opponents for full 162-game seasons, including playoffs, then would play the entire season over and over for perpetuity. I recorded statistics, a laborious albeit satisfying task, and would play this game from eight in the morning till bedtime. During Dice Baseball, I announced the games, imitating the vocal inflexions of the Oakland Athletics’ real broadcaster Monte Moore. I even conducted post-game interviews, playing both the role of Monte Moore and my favorite players: Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Jim Catfish Hunter, Sal Bando, Vida Blue. The interviews were captured on my Panasonic tape recorder. For visual aids, I had a baseball card for each player. I would play from dawn to dusk. I made a lot of ruckus. The dice made a rattling noise and I could be heard broadcasting the games into my Panasonic taperecorder from morning till night. 

My parents hoped our annual summer vacation would encourage me to take a break from Dice Baseball.  My family and family friends spent two weeks every summer in the foothills thirty miles outside of Yosemite at Berkeley Tuolumne Camp. We lived in tent-like cabins, used public latrines, and ate in a communal setting in the woods. 

My desire to find sufficient time to play Dice Baseball was hampered by the intrusive camp counselors who were always calling us to meals at specific times, arranging talent shows, dances, and athletic contests such as tug-of-war. 

I remember the Berkeley Camp counselors well, including a young woman who bore a strong resemblance to the actress Barbara Hershey and a man who carried around a guitar and would sit, as the spirit moved him, on random boulders and sing folk songs. This hippy guitarist wore white tunics, faded bluejeans with peace and love patches sewn on them, and had long blond hair and a beard that made him look like popular depictions of Jesus. Not only did he look like Jesus, he had created a Divine Point System whereby he was always announcing how many points Jesus would give you or subtract in accordance with the goodness or badness of your deeds. If you littered, you lost ten points from Jesus. If you spent the afternoon picking up litter on the campgrounds, you gained fifteen points from Jesus. If you didn’t finish your toast and oatmeal for breakfast so that the counselors discovered wasted food in your bowl, you lost ten points from Jesus. If you talked during the talent show, you lost thirty points from Jesus. If you didn’t put away the volleyball nets and the croquet paraphernalia in the recreation center, you lost fifty points from Jesus. If you helped someone whose car battery had died, you gained forty points from Jesus. 

“Berkeley Camp Jesus,” as I had privately called him, had caused me to internalize a sort of Divine Abacus so that my conscience was constantly awarding or penalizing myself in accordance with my deeds. For example, after we returned home from camp, I was in my backyard where I picked a plum from our plum tree, ate the plum, and flicked the pit in our neighbor’s backyard. Immediately, a voice in my head said, “You just littered in your neighbor’s yard so that’s ten points taken away by Jesus.” But then I offered a quick rebuttal. “Wait a minute, by throwing a pit in your neighbor’s yard, you have planted a plum tree, which will grow and give your neighbors delicious plums. Not only do you not lose points from Jesus, you gain twenty points.” Thus I learned at the age of eleven to fudge the numbers. This began my life of corruption and moral debauchery. 

When I think of the moral debauchery that afflicted me during my Berkeley Camp days, I am reminded of the Herman Raucher novel, Summer of ‘42, which I took to the camp and read inside the tent while everyone else was outside playing or hiking. The novel is about a fifteen-year-old boy, Hermie, who has a brief affair with a married woman named Dorothy. I had seen the movie with Dorothy played by the beautiful actress Jennifer O’Neill, so I had a preconceived image. The narrative’s building tension with Hermie’s desire for Dorothy had me so hooked I was averse to going outside of the tent. I was too addicted to the imaginary world of the novel to appreciate the nature that surrounded me.

The good news is that I had found a new interest, my curiosity for Dorothy, to replace the Dice Baseball. The bad news is that I seemed to be replacing one addiction for another. 

As I approached the age of twelve, I began to develop body dysmorphia, the idea that I could never be too muscular. This became evident when I started drawing baseball cards of myself. The back of the baseball card had all my record-breaking statistics. My lifetime homerun totals would always exceed a thousand and in moments of unusual grandiosity top fifteen hundred. My lifetime batting average always exceeded 400. The front of the card had me posing with a baseball bat. My muscles exploded out of my uniform. 

Not surprisingly, I was drawn to the oversized sluggers: Reggie Jackson, Lee May, Richie Allen, Boog Powell, Frank Howard, and Ted Kluszewski--all of whom became my artistic templates. Never satisfied with my self-portrait or the statistics on the back, I would throw away my baseball cards and start afresh. 

My interest in strength made me pivot from baseball to Olympic Weightlifting. In the seventh grade, our PE teacher Lou Kruk offered Olympic Weightlifting as an elective. This involved competing in tournaments. My peasant-stock thighs made me the strongest squatter in the class. Soon enough, I was given the nickname Squats. This was in part because during PE when I was the goalie for soccer, I’d kill time by doing deep-knee bends when the players were on the opposite side of the field. The same obsessive quality that informed my baseball card collecting fueled my Olympic Weightlifting. 

I won a few tournaments and was briefly ranked number-one in the nation, but I quit the Olympic Weightlifting in 1977 at the age of 15 when my father took me to the premier opening of the bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron. Once I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger, I knew I’d have to become a bodybuilder. 

That’s when I joined Walt's Gym in Hayward, California. Converted from a chicken coop in the 1950s, the gym was a swamp of fungus and bacteria. Members complained of incurable athlete's foot and some claimed there were strains of fungus and mold that had not yet been identified in scientific journals. Making a home in the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog. The pro wrestlers had nicknamed the old-timer frog Charlie. I had never seen the frog myself and often wondered if it were a mythical creature borne of deranged minds that had taken too many blows in the wrestling ring. 

The locker room always had a bankrupt divorcee or other in a velour top and gold chain hogging the payphone while having a two-hour-long talk with his attorney about his bleak life choices and what kind of attorney fees he was looking at in order to sweep his past behaviors under the carpet. 

There was an unused outdoor swimming pool in the back with murky water black with plague and dead rats. Walt, the gym's owner, would, if the mood suited him, walk outside, use the pool net to scoop up some dead creature and hold the net up so that everyone in the gym would give him a mighty round of applause, upon which he would toss the dead creature into a nearby dumpster and give us an exaggerated bow. 

A lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be a model for human anatomy textbooks, worked out for several hours before spending an equal time in the sauna and shower, completing his grooming with a complete-body talcum powder treatment so that when he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud. The radio played the same hits over and over: Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around and Fell in Love," The Eagles' "New Kid in Town," and Norman Connors' "You Are My Starship." What stood out to me was that I was just a kid navigating in an adult world, and the gym, like the barbershop, was a public square that allowed me to hear adult conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the cost of sending kids to college, the burdens of taking care of elderly parents. I realized then that I was at the perfect age: Old enough to grow big and strong but young enough to be saved from the drudgery and tedium of adult life. It became clear to me then that I never wanted to grow up. I wanted to spend my life secluded inside the gym. I was the same boy isolated in his room playing and announcing Dice Baseball, but now I was pumping iron to look like my idol Arnold Schwarzenegger.

During my teen years, I repeatedly saw how others linked size, strength, and power to self-worth and masculinity. In 1975, I was a freshman at Canyon High School in Castro Valley, California. The school was nestled in a sunny suburb thirty miles east of the San Francisco Bay Area. As the name suggests, the school was in a canyon surrounded by ravines thick with brush, eucalyptus trees, creeks, crawdads, and poison oak. There were deer, coyotes, mountain lions, and the occasional bobcat roaming the hills. 

On the first day of school, I stood in the high school courtyard, a cement patio littered with picnic tables, benches, and small trees. I was with the other scared freshmen who had formed a large circle around classmate Rick Galia. Standing on one of the picnic tables, Galia was giving us an informal orientation about surviving our first year of high school without getting our asses kicked. The muscles in Galia's thick neck rippled as he warned us to watch our step with the most feared student, a junior by the name of Bull Labroni. 

Well-tanned, Galia was wearing brown corduroy bell-bottoms, an orange mesh tank top revealing sinewy muscles underneath, and a white pukka shell necklace. He had golden curly hair and a cleft in his broad chin. He kept his hairbrush in his back pocket and the bristles had worn the pocket raw. He jabbed his finger in the air as he gave us a litany of Bull's feats of strength and aggression. 

Bull was kicked out of Catholic school in the fourth grade for stabbing a guy in the ear with a pencil. Bull wasn't admitted to a party so he punched his fist through the door and hit the poor kid standing behind the feeble barrier. Bull crashed a motorcycle into Our Lady of Grace Church and after all the damage was assessed it was discovered that he had left a colossal testicular imprint in the motorcycle's gas tank. 

I was shaking my head while thinking that I'd only been at high school for a few hours and there were already heated discussions about who had the most massive, invincible balls. 

Two skinny kids, Hewitt and Kaufmann, walk toward me, and Kaufmann says, "Christ, the dude sounds like a monster. You're going to protect us, right?"

"I'm not protecting anyone," I said. 

"Hella big," Kauffman said looking me over, "but still a wimp." 

Hewitt looked at my desert boots and said, "God, McMahon, your shoes are pieces of crap."

"Why?"

"Because they're a cheap knock-off. Mine are the original Wallabees."

"What's the difference?"

"Quality. For one, mine have superior laces." 

Hewitt kneeled and gave a demonstration of the "stretching action" of his shoelaces. Then he tugged my laces and one of them snapped.

"What the hell did you just do?"

"Like I said, McMahon, yours are crap. Go with quality next time."

The bell rang, but Galia was still grandstanding, announcing that Bull knew that Galia's dad was a cop, so he would be safe. 

Kauffman looked at me and said, "You're a target."

"Why me?"

"Because you're a freshman who wears extra-large shirts. Bull will zero in on you like a torpedo."

Hewitt smiled and said, "You're toast. And get some new shoelaces, loser."

For lunch that day, I had a burger, a salad, and milk, which I ate alone in the cafeteria. I swallowed ten desiccated Argentine beef liver tablets, exited the cafeteria, and stood at the edge of the courtyard, keeping cool under the shade of the eaves. Behind me was a wall of gray lockers. I saw a short heavy-browed teen with no neck walking toward me. The young man's head was as thick and wide as a bovine creature feeding in the Alaskan tundra. The sixteen-year-old was wearing a black sweatshirt with the sleeves rolled up. Each forearm looked like a jumbo Thanksgiving turkey.  His hands were puffy and calloused. He looked at me and said, "Hey, shit sack." 

At that moment, I knew it was the fabled legend Bull Labroni. I nodded back at him.

He studied me up and down and said, "You look like a sad excuse for a bodybuilder."

"Sorry."

"You do work out, don't you? At least that's what people tell me."

I nodded.

Bull shook his head and said, "It's a shame you look like a track runner. You're doing something wrong. You may have to quit working out for a while, enter a hospital for six months, and be fed intravenously before you can enter the real world again. And I suggest you use an electric wheelchair to conserve calories."

"I didn't know I was so skinny. I wear extra-large shirts."

"Who gives a shit about your shirt size? For someone who works out, you're beyond pathetic. You're a disgrace to the international bodybuilding community. What kind of diet are you on?"

"Eggs, steak, chicken, brown rice, bananas, peanut butter, whole grain cereals, honey, whey protein powder, lots of fruit and vegetables."

Bull winced. "Here's what you do. When you eat steak, throw away the meat and eat only the fat. When you open up a can of fruit cocktail, throw away the fruit and drink only the syrup."

I was thinking, Is this guy serious?

"And why is your neck so skinny?"

"Not sure."

"Have you ever done trap squeezes?"

I shook my head.

"Here's what you do. Hold your head up, stare straight up at the sky, tighten your neck, and flex your traps."

I followed his instructions. 

"Now hold it like that for at least two hours every day." 

I felt a painful pinch in my neck and I knew I would never do this exercise again, but I said okay. 

"Who's your favorite bodybuilder?"

"Arnold Schwarzenegger."

He nodded with approval. "Anyone else?"

"Frank Zane."

Bull frowned. "He's not a bodybuilder. He's an undernourished sailor who's been lost at sea. That pencil-neck geek should be kicked out of the international bodybuilding federation. Don't waste your time with him."

"He has remarkable proportions."

"Remarkable proportions. Who says that?"

"I do."

"Are you arguing with me, freshman?"

"No. I'm just saying Frank Zane is in my top three. I'd put Serge Nubret in there as well."

"Do you even know who I am?"

"I think so."

"Then don't be throwing these small bodybuilders' names in my face, okay?"

"You seem more like a Sergio Oliva kind of guy."

"Now you're talking. But check this out. I actually want to be bigger than Sergio."

"Bigger than Sergio?"

"Of course. You can never be big enough. Don't you agree?"

I nodded.

Bull said, "I want to be so big I'm no longer human. I want to grow gills and be like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I want to be such a badass that when I take my shirt off people fall to the ground and weep." 

The bell rang. I turned around, faced the wall of lockers, opened my combination lock, and grabbed several books. I was holding them in both arms. 

Bull said, "What's your problem? Are you a real student or something?"

"I'm trying to maintain a decent GPA."

"So you're one of those assholes."

I nodded.

"Cool. I'll meet you here at the same time tomorrow." 

Thus began my friendship with the school's toughest dude, so feared that Rick Galia felt compelled to stand on one of the picnic tables and give us a one-hour orientation on Surviving Canyon High School with Bull Labroni. 

Befriending Bull Labroni compromised my social decorum and gallantry. One example that stands out is that one night we were swimming at the Tanglewood apartments swimming pool when Bull found a giant orange fluorescent bra hanging by its strap on the diving board. It practically glowed in the dark. Bull grabbed the bra and twirled it above his head as if he were going to fling it. Then he stopped and said it was his sister's birthday the next day, and he had forgotten to buy her a present. He didn't even wrap it. He just gave his sister this orange bra, and she wasn't even shocked. For her, it was just another day in the life of having a crazy brother. 

My four-year friendship with Bull faded when I turned eighteen. Against my own desires, I attended college to please my mother who said failure to enroll at the local university would result in me being expelled from the house, so I wouldn’t have free room and board as I lived the life of a bodybuilder. To my surprise, in college I discovered something that replaced my bodybuilding obsession: Franz Kafka. Not just the writer Franz Kafka but the idea of Kafka, the idea that has become known over the years as Kafkaesque--seeing the world as being sinister, absurd, bizarre, and nightmarish. As someone who has suffered from chronic nightmares all my life, I was drawn to not only Franz Kafka and his dark novels and short stories but the comedian Rodney Dangerfield who could make a joke out of his sense of pain and rejection. Dangerfield was Kafka’s Jungian Shadow. In addition to my interest in Franz Kafka and Rodney Dangerfield, I was fascinated with David Letterman and his deadpan delivery. I saw that comedy could be a new form of muscle-flexing. This insight pushed me in the direction of comic novels. I voraciously consumed Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. I also read many books by Vladimir Nabokov, including Strong Opinions, a collection of interviews and articles of the most confident person I had ever encountered and in doing so, I had learned a new way to flex my muscles--by being a pompous ass. 

During this time, I wanted to appear highly intelligent and in control and I would overcompensate by doing things that were ridiculous. For example, while getting my prostate examined during my early twenties, I wanted my doctor to be impressed by how calm and undisturbed I was during the procedure, so while he stuck his finger up my rectum, I read a paperback copy of Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery. To give another example of my impoverishment, while playing piano for my first girlfriend, I did so by taking off my shirt and playing the ballade while standing up in a display that must have shown her how needy and broken I was. 

The muscle flex--by lying about what kinds of things I owned, building a carapace of muscle over my body, or flexing my literary and musical muscles--was the equivalent of the middle-aged man buying an ostentatious watch and a sports car to compensate for all that was lacking in his life. In other words, I embodied the word crass. 

Over the ensuing decades, the desire to overcompensate has abated a bit, but I’m still haunted by my impoverishment and by the broken and missing pieces inside of me. Recently, at the age of sixty-one, I dreamed I was at the beach with my nineteen-year-old ripped version of my bodybuilding self. While soaking in some rays with my family, my wife and twin daughters, the Hall-of-Fame wrestling coach who works at the college where I am employed told me to go home, find my brown Speedos, the same ones I wore in the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco, and enter the local Mr. Redondo Beach Contest.  Because I was darkly tanned and surprisingly ripped, I rushed home to look for my Speedos. I found them in the back of my closet, but alas they were tattered, hole-ridden, and covered with a greenish patina of mold, unsuitable for posing in, and I woke up relieved that I had been spared the embarrassment of posing in a pair of 42-year-old Speedos. 

I was relieved on one hand, but on the other hand, those Speedos, in a state of decay, felt like a metaphor for some part of me that has undergone a form of moral disintegration. My thoughts jumped to Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray in which an eternally good-looking man has a painting of himself hidden away that shows the true decomposition of his grotesque soul. 

Whenever I wonder when the monstrosity of my inner painting began, I often think of the lie I told Coach Henderson, the fabrication of an eleven-year-old boy who was desperate to appear more impressive than he really was.

We’re Not as Phony As Pascal Portrayed Us

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal observed that most of us lead a double life, curating the life we wish to show others while burying in darkness the shameful part of us we’d like to hide. This dual existence is both exhausting and unsustainable. If you come from a family rife with addiction, you’ll know that addicts live double lives, and maintaining one life while concealing the other works until it doesn’t: bankruptcy, unemployment, an overdose, hospitalization, an arrest, imprisonment, and all the rest. 

Of course, not all addictions are alike. They exist on a spectrum. Some will destroy us faster than others. Some addictions may not lead to illegal behavior but they will nevertheless slowly kill us so that we slog through life like a zombie and die having squandered the life that was given to us. 

Some addictions are shameful and scandalous and we wouldn’t want to get caught dead being seen in the middle of performing some form of moral debauchery or other. However, some addictions are so common that they become part of a cultural norm. Because most of us are afflicted with the addiction in question, it doesn’t seem so bad. It may even seem normal, acceptable, and expected. 

The addiction in question is our unquenchable thirst for public approval and admiration. Pascal identified this universal craving for public approval and the way this addiction eviscerated our morals. Pascal saw that we crave admiration more than we crave the cultivation of our intelligence, decency, and moral character. We’re not content with being admired for wealth, conspicuous material goods, or positions of power. We want people to believe that we are morally exceptional and we will go to great lengths--often relying on deception, manipulation, subterfuge, and other immoral schemes--to convince others of our moral superiority. As a result, there is a yawning gap between who we are and who we pretend to be. In his book Pensees, Pascal put it this way:

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.

Pascal’s scathing judgment of our “nothingness of being” has a lot of truth to it, but I daresay the genius philosopher has written a caricature of the human condition. There appears to be a streak of misanthropy in Pascal’s analysis that results in exaggeration at the expense of complexity. While it’s true many of us are guilty of squandering our lives curating an image of self at the expense of our moral character, most of us only desire admiration so much as it is an instrument to help us create meaningful connections with others. If I play the piano, I want people to admire my musical ability while at the same time connecting with the music. If I am a comedian, I want people to admire my comic brilliance while at the same time connecting with the hilarious absurdity I point out about the human condition. If I am a college rhetoric instructor, I want my students to admire my intelligence while at the same time connecting with my lesson’s relevance to their lives. If I am a friend conversing with others about our shared past at a social gathering, I want people to admire me for my extraordinary memory while at the same time connecting with my storytelling. 

Pascal was a genius who penetrated to the root causes of our desire to fabricate an image to the rest of society, but most of us are more complicated than Pascal’s characterization. We are hungry for deep connections and only seek to be admired as part of the deep connections we can forge with others. 

 

Recurring Cycles at Maverick's Disco

All my teenage years of toiling in the gym and amassing muscles had finally reached dividends in 1979 when at the age of seventeen I got hired to be a bouncer at Maverick’s Disco in San Ramon, California. Not only did I make ten cents over the minimum wage at three dollars an hour, but I also got free soft drinks and got to bear witness to enough polyester pantsuits and feathered hairdos held with so much hairspray as to present a fire hazard violation. One of the great feats of this job, or so I thought, was that I was killing two birds with one stone. I was making money while walking around the teenage disco and doing the required lat flex, and at the same time, I was socializing with a never-ending parade of beautiful women.

But as I would later learn while studying Abnormal Psychology in college, there is this thing called the anhedonic response in which the brain becomes so numb to repeated stimulation that a state of anhedonia kicks in, the condition of not being able to experience happiness or pleasure. When I think of anhedonia, I think of the time I stopped enjoying my favorite cartoon The Flintstones. I noticed that as Fred and his best friend Barney Rubble were driving their caveman car on a highway, the background, a series of trees, boulders, and buildings, began to repeat over and over. Seeing the wraparound background ruined the show’s illusion of reality because recognizing this time-saving measure was like going behind closed doors to see how they make the sausage. Watching The Flintstones was never the same again.

I had a similar experience at Maverick’s Disco. Every night, I watched the customers come into the club with expressions of high expectations of excitement, glamor, and romantic connection, but at closing, I saw those same faces glazed over, tired, and disappointed with the whole enterprise. And yet the next weekend, I saw those same faces repeat the cycle. My life at the disco had become the wraparound background used for The Flintstones, and this was a sign that I needed to quit. I didn’t only need to quit the disco job.

Grammar Is the Cure to Chaos

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. Part of my recovery was enlisting in a Twelve-Step Program, and one of the steps was grammar.