Put On Your Big Boy Pants

The Rodney Dangerfield Factor

Manderlin's Search for Meaning Chapter 2

 

The Rodney Dangerfield Factor

 

 

Here’s how I summarize Man’s Search for Meaning to my students on the first day of class: Subject to endless tortures and exhaustion in the concentration camps, Viktor Frankl observed that some people, including himself, became stronger in spirit, held on to life, and maintained their moral values while others became dehumanized, apathetic, and spiritually dead. While identifying these two camps of people, Frankl came up with his book’s main argument about the nature of suffering, which is really a moral imperative for all of us: No matter how torturous our circumstances, no matter how deeply we are thrown into the vortex of evil, no matter how utterly meaningless our freak show of a life seems to us, we must find meaning by choosing the appropriate attitude that uplifts our humanity in a way that radically changes who we are, discarding our false necessities, and stripping ourselves bare of all our illusions. The constant and often overwhelming suffering that the world dishes out to us every day is not reason to despair or to become a vicious animal or to embrace the philosophy of nihilism; rather, all the world’s pain and suffering is an inevitable part of life that affords us the opportunity to find meaning, to connect to others, and to become a stronger person so that our new self doesn’t even resemble its previous incarnation. We can and must make this radical change, Frankl argues, by finding a higher purpose, an ideal larger than ourselves. Quoting Nietzsche, he says, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” Finding meaning and purpose in the midst of life’s cruelty and evil is what Frankl calls “Tragic Optimism.”

 

I have yet to make this radical change. Look at my childhood photos and look at me now, and it’s the same expression: a brooding, pissy-faced creature forced to endure This Mistake We Call Life. My parents tried to cheer me up when I was a kid. They took me to circuses, carnivals, puppet shows, but these entertainments only made me worse. Frustrated by my gloominess, my father would say, “Jesus, son, it looks like a birdy went poo-poo on your lip.”

 

My father was taken back perhaps by my undying sadness, which he didn’t want to see in me. So angered by my moping about, he’d often shout at me “to grow some balls” and “to stop moving like an old lady.” These admonishments in turn made me feel even more inadequate, a condition that I tried to hide by being intimidating and when I couldn’t hide my feelings of self-loathing and rejection I was desperate and this desperation, I’m convinced, gives off a repelling hormone, the Desperation Hormone, which I now surmise made that college girl so repulsed by my existence.

 

My hero Viktor Frankl would scoff at my self-analysis. He would argue that I am not a victim of cynicism and despair, that I have the power to free myself of my mental afflictions, that I possess free will. As Frankl observes, “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

 

I want to believe Viktor Frankl. I really do. But I keep returning to an interview I read with one of my heroes, the comedian Rodney Dangerfield, who said you can’t really change who you are. “You never really change. You’re born a certain way and that’s it.” When I first read this interview in my early twenties, I remember immediately agreeing with Dangerfield. We are creatures molded at birth and we cannot escape who we are fundamentally. So what’s it matter if we embrace Tragic Optimism or not? Why do we give a damn about our choices when the end result of who we are is going to be the same?

 

Another hero of mine, George Carlin, had a similarly pessimistic view. He famously said, “When you’re born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.” Carlin is telling us that we’re a doomed species and the best we can do is laugh at our inevitable destruction. When I look at the human race, I often find myself agreeing with Carlin’s cynical pronouncements and the conclusions he draws from them.

 

So what is it then? Are we free to change ourselves, as Frankl argues, or are we stuck in our predicament? Who am I to believe? Saint Frankl? Or my comedic heroes Dangerfield and Carlin? Do I have to take a side? I love Frankl whose courageous life gives me inspiration for the possibility of a better, nobler existence. But I love my cynical comedic heroes whose nihilistic diatribes have also brought me a sort of cathartic joy. Yes, it’s true. Nihilism when packaged by a master like Dangerfield or Carlin has a pleasure all of its own. Sometimes I’m in a solemn Frankl mood but other times I’m in a more scabrous, comedian mood. I’ve got the Frankl Factor inside me, but I also have the Dangerfield Factor. Do I have to pick one over the other?

 

I’m in my middle age, and I haven’t yet been able to answer that question, so who am I teach Man’s Search for Meaning?

 

 

 

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I Am Unworthy of Teaching Viktor Frankl's Masterpiece

Manderlin's Search for Meaning Chapter One

 

I Am Unworthy of Teaching Viktor Frankl’s Masterpiece

 

When you teach Viktor Frankl’s beloved masterpiece Man’s Search for Meaning, as I do, at the college level and you have been doing so for over a decade, you have certain responsibilities. I presume you don’t have to be an all-out saint like Viktor Frankl, risking your life to help others the way he did in the concentration camps, but you should be moving in the right direction on the scale of positive attitude and meaning, flourishing in your work, your maturity, and your service to others.

 

And there lies the problem. Having taught Man’s Search for Meaning for over ten years, I should have absorbed some of the book’s powerful wisdom and its essential goodness, but I feel like the same desperate soul that I was before I taught it, which is disturbing for many reasons not the least of which I feel like a fraud and a hypocrite.

 

I have fallen short of being “worthy of suffering,” of being a free agent, someone who is more than a “plaything of circumstance.” And knowing this brings me shame.

 

Often I imagine Frankl perched in heaven tsktsking me as he watches me bloviate his book’s principles to my students, for he would see me as a confident, capable speaker but someone whose life violates his moral imperative: We make an “inner decision” to choose under any circumstances our attitude toward life and we must choose to grasp our highest moral behavior and as a result make ourselves worthy of our suffering. But my attitude is horrendous, toxic, cynical, fearful, desperate, and at times even nihilistic.

 

If I may illustrate, I was at this college party back when I was in my early twenties and an attractive girl who knew me from Introduction to Art class walked up to me, not because she liked me, but because she needed to get something off her chest. She said, “I need to tell you something. You’re not the kind of person people gravitate to. You have this face that makes people feel stupid and you look like you’re always inhaling foul odors.”

 

Then keeping her head turned toward me, she walked backwards across the room and put her arm around this evenly tanned guy who was conspicuously free of my sour expression and she curled her lips  as if to say, “See you later, loser.” And to add to the insult, she made this scrunched-up face at me as if being in my presence had afflicted her with a dark cloud of stench and now she was leaving my stench-infested world and entering a more fragrant universe where everyone smiled at each other because everyone smelled like fresh lilac.

 

I was stunned by the raw disdain she expressed toward me and I was equally stunned by the truth that I didn’t want to hear: I do have a way of looking at people like I’m judging them severely and that I’m smelling foul odors from them as if I disapprove of their entire existence. And sometimes I really do feel that way, but the expression more often than not has little to do with judging others but more with a sense of general desperation that consumes me. I am desperate for answers about the problems of death and existence that always seem in short supply. I am desperate for courage and confidence and identity, but these things also remain scarce. My face therefore isn’t of a man disapproving of others but of a man who disapproves of life itself.

 

And this disapproving, grumpy face of mine evidences a man who does not embrace the robust attitude toward life that Frankl says we must assert as we brave our way through life’s challenges.

 

I teach Viktor Frankl’s masterpiece, but I am the embodiment of the book’s antithesis. The irony of it all is not funny. It is killing me.

 

Would You Share Your Protein Bar While Waiting to be Rescued?

 

 

 

I survived an earthquake at Dr. Jacobson’s psychotherapy office in Lomita, California, in which I was trapped with another patient in the waiting room for nearly four hours. The tremor was only a 5.5, but it was bad enough to start a fire at the nearby Korean barbecue take-out place and the smoke was so thick that Beverly Marston, the other patient, and I had to wait until fire fighters could penetrate the door. By that time Beverly Marston was dead from cardiac arrest. I was fine, physically, except for some minor smoke ventilation.

 

Mentally I was a mess, wracked with guilt and shame for the unfriendly and at times disdainful attitude I showed Beverly Marston, a woman, who under enormous distress during our entrapment, was in obvious need of my comfort. She was a heavy woman, perhaps three hundred pounds or so, and she was eating constantly inside the waiting room before we got hit by the quake. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her shoveling celery sticks into a large tub of hummus and crunching greedily and I remember being annoyed at her constant smacking and then boasting: “I don’t eat lunch. I just snack on hummus.”

 

I was hungry watching her eat her creamy hummus and remember experiencing a tinge of resentment when she didn’t offer to share any with me. Every now and then while looking up at her self-absorbed expression, her tight blond curls and her flamingo pink neck scarf, I would register a certain contempt for her and then return to re-reading Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss, which I teach to my college composition students, but in my messenger bag I did have something to eat if I became desperate: a protein bar, a disgusting, noxious mix of processed ingredients, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, various proteins isolated through the use of solvents, most likely cancer-causing. I doubted I would ever eat it, but it comforted me to know it was there in case while I was waiting to see my therapist that if I get stuck in the waiting room for a longer period that I could handle (anything more than 10 minutes), I could comfort my hunger pains with something to avoid passing out, which was how I often felt when I was waiting beyond what I planned for an appointment.

 

The most common scenario for the therapist being late was that the patient before me would, because of his selfishness, exceed the allotted time allowance. But there were other scenarios that were cause for worry. There might be a widespread electric outage from a short-circuited power grid, or a lockdown due to a prison escapee or two on the loose; or a hostage situation. Because I look like a hardened paramilitary operative due to a lifetime of hardcore Russian kettlebell training, the hostage-taker would see me as the greatest threat and would very likely go to great lengths to disable me, the muscle-bound Alpha Male of the bunch, perhaps even injure me. During the lockdown in which I could be cooped-up in the waiting room for an indefinite period, I might find myself famished and wounded and could keep my wits about me only because I had the foresight to bring my duffel bag with my water-filled CamelBak, Eucerin “Soothing Repair Crème” (my skin cracks when I’m overcome with acute anxieties, which is nearly all of the time), a 2-liter plastic beaker (my anxieties also cause frequent urination and a toilet isn’t always handy)  and the aforementioned protein bar.

 

And then the earthquake happened, and the fire, and the ear-crushing alarms, and the billowing smoke, and the screeching Beverly Marston. Within seconds, I was hiding beneath a chair, cowering like a child, fearing my death inside my therapist’s waiting room and afflicted with the terrifying question: What would God think of me during my Judgment? I was going to a therapist after all, not my Maker, for counsel, seeking a narrative of redemption and spiritual transformation through the principles of secular humanism, not religion.

 

Ruminating over the efficacy of my choosing therapy over God for my salvation, I wondered if I was on the “winning team” when I heard Beverly Marston, just a few feet away, screaming that our building was surrounded by fire, her body pressed against the glass window, trying to see signs of any rescuers behind the dark smoke. She was fretting that she had eaten all of her hummus and worried out loud that we might not be rescued for several hours, perhaps days. She then asked me if I had any food, or as she put it, “anything to munch on” while looking at my messenger bag, on the floor beside me, with predatory eyes that suggested X-Ray vision.

 

Of course, I had the protein bar, but I had eaten nothing for several hours and Beverly had just finished gorging on a tub of hummus, none of which she had offered to share with me. Plus she appeared insulated with energy reserves evidenced by her Michelin Man-sized fat rolls.

 

I said I had, regrettably, nothing to eat while curled up beneath the chair, making a mental note that Beverly was too large to take cover in the manner I was doing, taking a lesson from earthquake drills in my elementary school days; then on impulse I surreptitiously stuffed my protein bar down my throat. I must have looked like a primordial beast, hiding in darkness, a primitive cave, while operating under the grotesque instinct of unbridled self-preservation.

 

My concern was that Beverly, outweighing me by a hundred pounds or so, could perhaps muscle the bar from me if things got desperate. Better to have the nutrition and needed calories in my body now before things got out of hand.

 

While digesting my protein bar and contemplating its unsavory ingredients, I listened to Beverly whimper and whine during which time she explained that she was in therapy because of an eating disorder that compelled her to eat incessantly.

 

“I really don’t eat meals,” she said. “I kind of just graze all day long. It’s a nervous condition.”

 

“I can relate to that,” I said.

 

“Then you know what’s it like to have those constant cravings,” she said, flaring her hungry eyes. “I’m surprised you didn’t bring any food with you.”

 

“I usually do,” I responded. “But I was late, I was in a rush. I feel so stupid.”

 

Her silence and skeptical expression suggested that my words didn’t ring true to her, that she knew I was lying, that I was indeed hiding a tasty, nutritious morsel inside my travel bag.

 

Her silence continued until I heard her raspy breathing become more strained. Then she collapsed and fell to the floor, dropping her paisley tote bag. A bunch of breath-freshening candies, tiny pale red hockey pucks, fell out of her bag and scattered on the beige carpet. I sniffed one that had rolled close to my nose and found its tangy watermelon aroma tempting but of course did not eat the contaminated candy.

 

Suddenly there was another impulse. To get up and give aid to Beverly. But I made the decision that it would not be prudent to get out from underneath the chair for fear that large debris might fall as a result of an after-shock. I knew there was nothing I could do anyway. Beverly Marston was dead, apparently so anxious from our dire circumstances that her anxieties had precipitated a massive cardiac arrest. All I could think of at that moment was that the perfume she was wearing, an overpowering mingling of honey and vanilla, had the cloying, nauseating effects of cheap incense.

 

Then without warning, I was overcome with hunger. I got up, not to aid Beverly, but to examine the contents of her tote bag. It was full of loose receipts, chewing gum wrappers, peanut shells, restaurant coupons. I scratched my fingers at the bottom and felt stale cookie crumbs, like gravel, collecting under my fingernails and then I felt a wrapper and heard a crinkling sound. I could discern the shape of a candy bar of sorts. I picked it up and saw that it was a protein bar in fact, similar in calories and nutritional information as the one I had eaten moments before.

 

Was Beverly’s bag such a mess inside that she didn’t even know she was in possession of it? Was she in such a panic that she couldn’t think straight and had completely forgotten about it? Or, more deviously, did she know she had a protein bar but was looking to stock up, as it were, in the event we were holed up in the waiting room for several days?

 

Whatever the case, I did not know when I would be rescued and felt the need for more nourishment. In spite of my standing next to a corpse redolent of cheap perfume, gnawing hunger pains compelled me to unwrap the bar, which turned out to be half melted, and I ate the liquefied bar as quickly as possible before anyone caught me in the act. I had melted chocolate all over my fingers and face.

 

This was my shameful condition when the rescue squad broke down the front door. Strange, my first reaction upon seeing the fire fighters wasn’t the elation of being rescued but the embarrassment of being covered with melted chocolate. That was the last thing I remembered before passing out, apparently from lack of oxygen when smoke entered the open door, and I was carried out on a stretcher. You could actually see me lying prone and being lifted inside an ambulance, a recurring image on many of the local news broadcasts for several days.

 

In the ensuing weeks, well-wishers approached me and asked how I got blood all over my face. I knew it wasn’t blood, but I wasn’t going to tell them I was eating a protein bar pilfered from the tote bag of the deceased.

 

For me the marks on my face are neither blood nor chocolate. They’re stains, streaks of guilt and self-loathing that I’m trying to erase in my therapy sessions.

 

I haven’t eaten a protein bar since.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"You Have This Face That Makes People Feel Stupid"

 

 

I was at this college party back when I was in my early twenties and an attractive girl who knew me from Introduction to Art class walked up to me, not because she liked me, but because she needed to get something off her chest. She said, “I need to tell you something. You’re not the kind of person people gravitate to. You have this face that makes people feel stupid and you look like you’re always inhaling foul odors.”

 

Then keeping her head turned toward me, she walked backwards across the room and put her arm around this evenly tanned guy who was the type of person presumably free of my sour expression and she smiled contemptuously at me as if to say, “See you later, loser.” And to add to the insult, she made this scrunched-up face at me as if being in my presence had afflicted her with a dark cloud of stench and now she was leaving that stench and entering a more fragrant world where everyone smiled at each other because everyone smelled like fresh lilac.

 

I was stunned by the raw disdain she expressed toward me and I was equally stunned by the truth that I didn’t want to hear: I do have a way of looking at people like I’m judging them severely and that I’m smelling foul odors from them as if I disapprove of their entire existence. And sometimes I really do feel that way, but the expression is more often than not has little to do with judging others but more with a sense of general desperation that consumes me. I am desperate for answers about the problems of death and existence that always seem in short supply. I am desperate for courage and confidence and identity, but these things also remain scarce. My face therefore isn’t of a man disapproving of others but of a man who disapproves of life itself.