Austerity measures
It felt as if a cold wind carefully blew across my naked body. I shivered with fear.
I gotta go out tonight.
Me and my girl, we got invited to see some friends for dinner. My buddy’s wife has been diagnosed with a serious illness, so it’s important we make every effort to go see them.
The whole day today has been like the Johnny Cash song “25 Minutes,” a catchy little diddy about a man counting down his time until execution by hanging.
As the day drove on, I could barely compel myself to move at all. I just wanted to go home and stay there. After a day at the races with all of the rubes, how could I ever be expected to socialize further? I would have to put on a performance worthy of at least a Golden Globe.
It’s not that I don’t care. I do. I care very much and wish everyone well and for world peace and a Merry Christmas to all.
Or do I?
I stood staring at myself in the mirror, searching for the path to make it through this misery when the text came in from my girl:
“Tonight’s canceled. She’s not feeling well.”
I was elated. Ecstatic. I had never felt so much joy.
But then, I felt shame. Which I suppose means I am still human.
Why do I feel this way?
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I don’t want to hang out.
I don’t want to hang out if you text me spontaneously to meet for drinks in 15 minutes. I also don’t want to come to you or your child’s birthday party, even with two weeks’ notice.
I want to stay home with a clean slate on the docket and full cooler of beer, right here in front of this typewriter with a little dog nearby and weird ambient suicide introspective Japanese music playing and the slender smoke of incense dancing over my right shoulder. This is my comfort zone. This is the environment I strive to barricade myself in at all times. I do not want to be outside in the world, where things move fast and angry.
I realize this is not a healthy attitude or perspective and I’ve come here to investigate its origin.
Typically, I would resign myself to my habits and predilections; I am the way I am. But I do believe that man is a social creature, and I should be making more of an attempt to indulge in the pleasures of my species if only for my own eventual benefit. They say having meaningful relationships can lead to a longer life. I don’t know who they are, and I’m not sure how much I want to extend my stay anyways, but I suppose it’s at least worth a try.
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I’ve always been this way. My father is even more of an extreme anti-social than I am. I can only think of a handful of friends he has had during my lifetime, and they have diminished over the years. My father has a Middle Eastern disposition mixed with a military mentality, which is not quite the recipe that makes a raconteur. My father was the first person in his family to be born in the state of Israel. Everyone else before him had been born in Poland, but the Holocaust killed most of them off and the ones that survived completed Moses’ wandering trek through the desert to the Holy Land. I believe my father was led to believe both directly and indirectly by the treatment of his family towards him that he was “lucky,” or “spared” by being born in Israel. He was a sweet summer child, ignorant to the travesties that came before him.
At 18 years of age, my father was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). By the age of 21, he had completed his mandatory period of service and decided to stay. He wanted to be a General, much to the dismay of his parents. When my father shared this news with them, they gave him an ultimatum: travel to America, all expenses paid by them, for the period of one year. If at the end of that one year, he wanted to come home and fight for his little country which is always in conflict, they would accept his decision. My father agreed. During his early tenure in American, he met my mother, said fuck the military, and never went home again save for a few visits and funerals.
Because my father always felt “lucky” to be in America, it instilled in him an unflinchingly hard-working ethic. It was his duty to provide for his family and work the highest-paying job he could find (and was also qualified for) regardless of how much he hated it. His shifts at the local dealership flipping used cars were typically 12 hours for 6 days a week. It made him very bitter and angry. He would come home unable to speak he was so tired, his soul crushed from the weight of the work. Spending so much time doing something you despise does something awful to a man. His spirit was crushed. His personality flatlined. He became a hardened factory worker.
When my father first came to the U.S., he was taken in by a third cousin named Sheila. Sheila knew his mother well and was happy to host him. My father did not yet speak English, and Sheila’s Hebrew was rusty. They found a common ground in a language called Yiddish, an old biblical Ashkenazi Jew dialect that they both spoke at an intermediate level and used to communicate. Eventually, Sheila taught my father English, helped him enroll in college, helped him find a job, and introduced him to a young Israeli expat community living in Los Angeles.
Without the solid American footing Sheila helped my father find, who knows where he would be today. Perhaps back in Israel fighting the fighting the good fight in the IDF as a General; perhaps in an above-ground grave somewhere in Israel, dead from the violent ambitions of wanting to wage war for a living.
Because of what Sheila did for him, my father decided he had a life debt to her. She never had any children, and my father became her de facto son. As she aged, my father made sure she always had the best healthcare and eventual hospice care accessible to her. Sheila was very wealthy, having made her bones as an attorney. Over the years, she accumulated a massive fortune and was the most frugal person I had ever encountered. I remember one time going to meet her for brunch with my parents at Cheesecake Factory. I had the French toast but did not eat all the whipped cream they had plopped onto my entree. Sheila scooped the leftover whipped cream into a to go container, and also took the sugar packets left on the table as well as all of the salt ‘n’ pepper packets. I was appalled and made jokes all the way home about her, but it was this sort of “you never know when the next Holocaust is coming” mentality that parlayed her into being a millionaire.
After Sheila passed, as her appointed estate executor my father had the difficult task of fulfilling the major tenet of her will: distribute her wealth amongst all her living relatives, with certain pre-determined percentages to be doled out based on a few factors such as how well Sheila knew the individual and how distantly related they were to her.
My father took this request very seriously and literally. He spent nearly a decade, employing a team of attorneys, genealogists and estate experts to find and assist in the outreach to all of her living relatives. Even if the person was owed $5 based on the calculations, my father’s team tracked these people down and gave them their $5. His level of devotion to the woman who took him in and gave him a new life in a new country never ceases to move me.
English as a second language seems to have always had a negative effect on my father’s ability to socialize. His English is fine, but his accent is strong and I think this subconsciously makes him self-conscious about speaking. He is not someone who seems to ever have been capable of deep thought or processing emotions, let alone expressing them. His emotional intuition and intelligence is lacking to a shockingly high degree.
None of this means he is a dull person or unintelligent by any means. He is highly educated and can speak for hours on the following topics: Automotive (particularly anything Tesla), Economics, Finance, Investing, Real Estate (state of California specific), Politics (right-wing America, or anything Israel or Middle East), Jewish-American Culture, and World War II History. The problem is, none of these topics are of interest to anyone around him. I dabble in World War II History and I do happen to be a political junkie, but I find conversations on these topics with him to be a complete drag when they exceed five minutes.
We have never spoken at more than a cursory level on deeper topics. He never gave me “the talk,” or advice on how to win over women or prevent from losing them. He never helped me with my math homework or read me to sleep at night. He rarely asked me how my day was, and when he did and I told him it quickly became evident that he was ill equipped for whatever follow-up would have been a panacea.
Socializing in general with my father is very rigid and difficult. When you go out to a meal with him, especially in group settings, he does not engage in conversation at all. He will pull his phone out and scroll around until the waiter comes to take his order. Then he goes back to his black mirror. If a topic of interest for him comes up, he will throw in a couple of barbs and then slowly fade back to his phone.
I find myself behaving like this a lot. Drifting from conversations, strategizing on conversational exits, finding ways to slowly disengage and get out of 95% of the conversations I’m in.
Despite these things, my father is a great and honorable man. A role model for civics and work ethic and providing for a family. I suppose I like the idea of my father: An idealistic figure when you put his positive attributes down on paper, the tenets that he represents ultimately better than the man himself.
I also look at him and then I look at me, and some things start to make sense.
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My maternal grandfather fought in the Battle of Normandy in World War II. Somewhere along the course of the battle, a nearby explosion caused a piece of shrapnel to blow through his helmet and strike his temple. He was pronounced dead by a medic and thrown into a pile of dead bodies. Later that day, he woke up, crawled from out the pile, found his gun and went back to business killin’ Nazis. His battalion couldn’t believe it. From then on, he was the toughest son of a bitch in his division.
When he returned home to Litchfield Park, AZ, he gave it to my maternal grandmother good. My mother was born as one of seven legitimately recognized children. The only reason my maternal grandmother stopped having babies was because she told my maternal grandfather that she thought she might die if she had to carry an eighth child. He did eventually have an eighth child, a bastard with the nanny. They named him Denmark after my maternal grandfather’s ancestral homeland. He was never accepted into the family and lived a life in exile with his “homewrecking” mother.
My mother was very active as a child, both socially and physically. One night at a sleepover when she was around seven years old, she jumped down a flight of stairs to impress some boys. She miscalculated the height of the jump and she face-planted into another piece of the winding staircase. She lost her upper deck of teeth and has had to wear implants ever since. It was a humbling experience, one that crippled her social standings as a “cool girl.”
Growing up, most of my mother’s seven (eight counting Denmark) siblings were fuckups, degenerates, dope dealers and smokers, motorcycle ridin’, party ‘till the sun comes up and then some kind of crowd. Except for my mother and her older sister Toni. They were academic and athletic and mild-mannered, at least in comparison to the rest of the family. This sort of “straight and narrow” path they walked earned them status as both family leaders and pariahs depending on the situation.
Around twenty, my mother married a young salesman named Rod. One should always be skeptical of a guy named Rod, especially if they’re a young salesman. Doesn’t matter what they’re selling, Rod’s will always somehow fuck you.
Rod was abusive towards my mother in a variety of capacities. Her eldest brother Jimmy had joined a motorcycle gang, her younger brother Freddy was not one for muscling up to a confrontation, and her father Vernon was in prison for taking the fall in a tax evasion scheme to protect Jimmy. Lacking a strong male role model in life, one that was consistent and there for her, one that showed her how a real man should be, made a massive impact on my mother.
My mother eventually looked to her older sister Vicki for support. Vicki had made a life for herself in California with her new husband Gary and her two wild childs Warren and Brandy from a previous relationship.
The deal my Aunt Vicki made with my mother was simple: be our live-in babysitter and housekeeper, and we’ll put you up in our guest room and not charge rent. My mom took the deal, seeing it as her only option to ditch Rod despite his very firm and malicious protestations. She ran off to Tustin, the district in Los Angeles where Vicki and Gary lived. They had recently bought their forever home there, or as they liked to call it, they were ‘rustin’ in Tustin.’
My mother took to Los Angeles dearly. She quickly got a job at the local Macy’s as one of the pretty young blondes who could sell pencil skirts and blouses to other pretty young blondes with ease. She also became a maternal figure to high school-aged Warren and Brandy, who were severely lacking the double cheek slap that all children need from time to time. Whether she knew it or not, my mother developed her maternal aspirations and instincts during this time.
Eventually, she moved to Hollywood and transferred to a local Macy’s. Not long after that, she met a Middle Eastern man with a Borat mustache wearing a cowboy hat who worked at a local Toyota dealership. He said his name was Yehuda, or Yuda for short. My mother thought he had said “Yoda.” Yoda who worked for Toyota. She quickly curved his advances, but his respectful persistence earned him a date.
Eventually, they were married and moved into their first house in Encino. My mother wanted to be a mother by this point badly, but she had trouble conceiving. She was told her reproductive organs were no good, and the likelihood of carrying a baby to term was highly unlikely.
This did not deter my mother. She persisted and tried every treatment or method available to her, both the traditional and holistic varieties.
Eventually, they had me and all this business started.
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Growing up, I was the mother fucking man. I lead every group I was a part of with an iron fist.
I was extremely bold and confident. I think this overinflation of my ego came from being an only child whose parents invested their attention on heavily.
My mother was not a helicopter mom, but her entire life revolved around me and my activities. She was constantly enrolling me in things like Boy Scouts, soccer, basketball, swim lessons, surf lessons, break dancing lessons, “play dates” and sleepovers with kids in the neighborhood and in my classes at school.
Everyone I knew had a sibling except me, which I did feel bad about but also subconsciously made me feel as though I was special or chosen. I always had this innate sense to take charge and start bossing people around, and I observed that everyone around me had an inferiority complex because their parents’ attention was split amongst all of their offspring while I was in the spotlight in my parents’ eyes.
And for the most part, all the little mother fuckers around me fell in line. I was the boss. When the crew got together, I decided what destination we would ride our bikes to and what the riding formation would be. Whomever was in my good graces would ride closest to me, and those who had pissed me off got booted to the tail.
I always had the latest video game consoles and games. When something on PlayStation 2 or Nintendo 64 dropped, all the little mother fuckers would come through on the weekend and we would play. I used to love it. I was at the center of the social system. Nothing else really mattered.
Something snapped in my brain eventually, and I started having these mild but afflicting cases of OCD.
The first one I remember very vividly was sleeping bags during sleepovers.
My friends would sleep over and we would sleep in sleeping bags. I provided the sleeping bags; for whatever reason I had a shitload of them.
As soon as everyone woke up, I would look around and see how messy the room was and have this immediate urge to start cleaning everything up. I would roll up the sleeping bags, put them back in the closet they came from, and tidy up the room like I was housekeeping. This was all while my friends had just woken up after a long night of playing video games and being loud little miscreants. They looked at me like I was nuts. It made them uncomfortable. People started having their moms pick them up in the morning as early as possible to avoid getting tossed out of their sleeping bag by me.
Then I started hating to share my new video games. I would always pre-order the newest big game coming out, and as usual all the little mother fuckers would come over on a Friday to play. Eventually, I stopped wanting to share the experience of a new game with anyone. It was this sacred, lone wolf experience I liked to have. I wanted to make all of the choices in the gameplay by myself and not have some little mother fuckers fucking my game progress up or skip a cut scene. This is very clearly a direct result of being an only child. I went for so long not really sharing my experiences with anyone, that I went from craving companionship to revolting against it in certain situations. My mom would tell me the little mother fuckers were coming over on a Friday night and I would start with the excuses. I wanted to pull the packaging off my new game and dig in on my own. This was the beginning of the shift into my anti-social antics.
In high school, I broke the trend for a bit. I had a solid group of friends that was quite extensive, and I found myself going out a lot. Thinking back on it now, I felt like I had a lot of time and bright future ahead of myself. I could let loose, get weird and buckle down later. I was already destined for greatness, so why bust my ass?
College was different though. In college, I started to develop a sense of anxiety that I was falling behind in achieving greatness. I had wanted to be a screenwriter my whole life, and I felt that the success I was pre-ordained to have was not coming as quickly as I had sworn to myself it would. This caused me to stay inside on the weekend and read books and watch movies and television, what I called “studying” the craft instead of going around drinking and chasing girls with my buddies.
At the time, I believed I was disciplining myself like a great athlete before a breakthrough to the league. In retrospect, all I did was deprive myself of young experiences. I had my fun, but I never had my fill.
This is not a sad sob story, though. Just an interrogative investigation into why certain things are the way they are.
And there are other factors to consider: Los Angeles. The city of lesser angels and many angles.
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I live in a city called Agoura Hills, the northern most city in Los Angeles, bordering the county of Ventura.
With no traffic, it would take me about 30 minutes to get to DTLA, the dirty little bleeding heart of Los Angeles. But in this city, there is no such thing as “no traffic.” It’s a construct that does not exist within these walls.
Los Angeles is a commuters’ city. The longer you spend here, the more ingrained this concept becomes in your psyche.
Here’s what that looks like:
When you go somewhere, you gotta account for about an extra hour minimum of driving on the parking lots that are the 101, 405, 5, 134 or 118 freeways. It doesn’t matter the day of the week, the time of the day, the season, the weather, none of it. The freeways are always reliably and miserably packed in Los Angeles, full of angry freaks with somewhere to be who are just as miserable sitting in traffic as you are and are ready and willing at all times to haphazardly jut out in front of you if it cuts 5 seconds off their drive time. Risk to your life and theirs? Fuck it.
Then, you have to contend with these same assholes for parking. There’s never enough of it, and the spots that are technically available are spectacularly inaccessible: $50 valet, garages controlled by apps you have to scramble to download, meters placed treacherously on crumbling sidewalks paired with byzantine street signs overloaded with contradictory information, or street parking so far away from your destination that you need to factor in extra time to walk over.
By the time you do arrive, you then must deal with massive herds of people in all places at all times. There is little room to move, little air to breath, long lines that snake around blocks for unseen lengths, and but a rock to sit on.
“Where do they all come from?” I say to myself as I stare in dismay. “The horror… the horror…”
All of these factors must be considered well in advance of leaving the house, and it can drive a man into a deep and anxious place before he even slides his shorts on.
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I have struggled for a long time to find a meaningful connection to my work and the city that I call home.
It’s a sickness, a curse, a stressor that I feel we all have to one degree or another. But it’s something I have felt very deeply for a long time. I have let it inhibit me in many ways, but I will continue to fight against it. It’s easier to fight an enemy one can see.
The amount of content I consume has expanded my mind and introduced me to cultures and ways of thought that I will never be able to fully comprehend. But it is this very ocean of awareness that I believe has truly caused my discontent.
I savor bad feelings and painful thoughts. I know this is the gamut I must go through and will never get to the end of. The gamut is what makes us human; we never get to the end of it, we just forget it about it sometimes when we’re having an unexpected laugh, or cracking a beer after a long day, or enjoying a meal with a loved one, or laying on the mat after getting our asses kicked in a workout, or looking out at some very beautiful view. It’s those little times in between, little moments of blissful ignorance, that make the fight worth it in the end.
It’s easy to place blame on your parents or your environment or any other factor as the explanation for things not going your way. But none of them are the real reason.
The reason for discontent is not in the past or the present, but within us. We need a shift in perspective, a glimmer of hope. Breadcrumbs to survive off of until we figure some shit out, let the rest of go and accept what it is that is.
And I’m tryin’, Ringo. I’m tryin’ real hard.
In the meantime, no. I don’t want to hang out.