Day 311 – Penmanship

          I almost always wanted to be a writer, but I never wanted to work at it. It’s a damn hard thing to do for one thing. It’s much harder than accounting or finance. I say this as an accountant who can discuss in-substance defeasance as it relates to advance refunding bond issues—not that anyone should care, but I think, from the way people’s eyes glass over when I utter that phrase, that it helps put things into perspective.

Just using English properly (or any language for that matter) is a thing that seems beyond most people’s ken. Going beyond mere correct usage, however, and forging language into a meaningful and compelling narrative is a superhuman undertaking that borders on the miraculous. This near miraculous facility with language is why guys like Salmon Rushdie can occasionally marry women like Padma Lakshmi. It’s easier to be good-looking of course, but, if you are not, it’s good to know that you can overcome a weak chin or pasty complexion with a resonant phrase.

Still I would rather be handsome than charming in the same way that I would rather be lucky than smart. I’m not just speculating. I know this—rather by accident, but I know it just the same. I had a neighbor once who was a spectacularly good-looking fellow. He was tall and lean and muscular. He had classic chiseled features, curly blonde hair, and stunning azure eyes. He was studying to become a golf pro. By studying, I mean he played golf every day with a teaching pro, and his aim was to get a PGA license and get onto the pro tour. He was also married to a very attractive young woman, whose function in life had been to support him in his quest to become a golf champion. Somehow she had either failed or grown weary in this role, and when I knew them they were in the process of divorcing.

One day this fellow asked me if I would accompany him to a pool party at an apartment complex across town. I doubt that he needed a wing man, but for whatever reason, he didn’t want to go alone. I agreed and happily. I was in my twenties, single, and almost adventurous…for an accountant. It may have occurred to me that being in tow to someone attractive could not fail but to get me some residual attention. Boy was I wrong. What followed was a revelation to me.

We came into the party on the back side of the complex. We grabbed a couple of beers and made our way around the pool to the club house at the front end. Along the way we passed maybe 100 young women, any one of whom I would have been glad to get to know. Not one of them seemed to know that I existed. Not one of them acknowledged my presence in any way whatsoever. They didn’t even glance at me to make sure their initial assessments had been correct, and that I was indeed beneath their notice or attention. They were all too busy swooning at the sight of my friend, Adonis.

I’m not making this up. I am not even embellishing. I had not realized up until that moment that girls could swoon over regular citizens. I knew they swooned. I had seen it on TV. Every time the Beatles got off a plane or out of a limo somewhere, there were plenty of hysterical chippies on hand to greet them, and they all had a particular look in their eyes like they had just seen their complete bliss and they had to get their fill of it before it was snatched away. I thought it was a little silly and laid it off to the music, the fame, and the glamour.

Now I was witness to the same kind of swooning, although without the screaming and hysteria, that I had seen on TV. This time, however, there was no music or fame or glamour. There was only handsomeness, but it was sufficient to make all these young women go weak in the knees.

It was a palpable thing, and, walking as close as I was to my good-looking friend, I could observe it as if it were happening to me, although clearly it was not. I watched the girls’ eyes get wide as early rising moons. They would blink once or twice, and stare unabashed. Their jaws would slacken and drop. They would forget how to walk. Most of them just stopped in their tracks, probably to avoid tripping over their own feet, which had been rendered useless by flooding hormones and misfiring synapses.

This happened time after time and without exception. I knew in a few minutes that it was possible to slay women with a glance, to induce in them a visceral longing without saying a word, without sweet nothings, without courting, without permission. I have never since coveted a power so much.    

It has never been mine to have, of course. It’s not the kind of thing you can develop. It is only a thing you can be born with, and, having been born with it, I don’t think it is a thing of which you are aware. At least you shouldn’t be. It just wouldn’t be fair. My friend certainly wasn’t—not on a purposeful level anyway. He couldn’t have cared less. In fact it was probably his indifference that allowed these women to swoon in the first place. Had he been aware of their reactions to his passing, had he been looking at them, they wouldn’t have been able to stare at him and swoon. Conversely, had they been less preoccupied with him, and thus able to look at me, I wouldn’t have been able to watch them swoon.

I might have been better off if it had worked otherwise. I mean I think it would be better for me not to know that this power is loose in the universe. It is a troublesome thing for me to have experienced. Having witnessed the power of gut attraction, my place in the cosmic pecking order of sexual magnetism will be ever precarious. Everyone else, however, is probably better off that it worked as it did. The women were happily unaware that I knew their weakness, and they were protected from their own folly in that my friend remained unaware of the power he had over them. This much is all as it should be, I think, but knowing it is a burden of which I am grown weary.

Day 255 – The Ant and the Grasshopper

            I always liked the Aesop fable about the grasshopper and the ant. The ant spends the summer storing up grain and supplies for the coming winter while the grasshopper sings and plays the fiddle and, in some tellings, ridicules the ant for wasting the idyllic days with industry. When winter comes the ant is warm and well provisioned while the grasshopper is cold and hungry. When the grasshopper comes knocking on the ant’s door for a handout, he is in turn roundly castigated by the ant for wasting the plenteous days of summer with idle pursuits when he should have been working to store up provisions.

The grasshopper is turned away to die in the ancient versions of this story, and invited in to sing and dance in exchange for the ant’s largesse in some more modern iterations. I like the versions where the ant shares his bounty better than the ones where the grasshopper dies. This may be because I am now forced by circumstances to consider that I have in fact become one of life’s grasshoppers.

          There are more modern versions still—sarcastic ones but apocryphal nonetheless—where government intervenes on the grasshopper’s behalf, condemns the ant for greed and acquisitiveness, confiscates the ant’s wealth, and redistributes it to the grasshopper. The left-leaning sensibilities of our modern world, the re-spinners of this yarn would have us believe, have turned Aesop’s wisdom upside down.

          I am not a communist, not a socialist, not a Marxist. I do not believe in the forced redistribution of wealth. I do not think it is a good idea to strip the risk-takers and innovative thinkers of the comforts they have managed to accumulate for themselves by industry and perseverance and to give it to a bunch of lay-abouts in the interest of social fairness. I think doing this is an excellent way to guarantee the end of progress and the diminution of wealth and quality of life for society as a whole.

          I am still, however, as I have already pointed out several times, a vengeful bastard. So if you are talking about stripping the executive helicopter from Joe Gregory (Lehman Bros.) or the $6,000 suits from Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan) or the Manhattan apartment from Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs) or the multimillion dollar bonus from any one of several thousand bank executives and traders who profited hugely from the financial troubles that are still troubling the rest of us, and giving that stuff to me, then I say go for it. It’s only fair. After all, these scalawags precipitated a forced redistribution of wealth in the name of unabashed capitalism, and they remain, not just unrepentant, but proud of their accomplishments.

          These yahoos, just like the muddling managers I used to work for, have broken the system that sustains them, and now, while the victims of their shameful duplicities, frauds, and ignorance languish in unemployment, despair and powerlessness, they are engaged in self-congratulatory celebrations of their return to profitability. They made the hard choices, they say, they took their lumps such as they were, and emerged stronger than ever from the wreckage they caused. Who in their right mind does not believe that these lugubrious flim-flammers should be rounded up and horse whipped?

          Ah, but I digress—easy when you are a grasshopper, and even easier when you consider that, in the current circumstances, the ants have not fared very well either. In fact the ants may have suffered worse than us grasshoppers. They certainly had more to lose at the outset.

Sometimes, when I think of what might have been, I am glad that I didn’t give up the life I had at the time in order to make a better one in the future. Sure, I worked hard for what I got, but I didn’t give up as much life balance as I could have in order to accumulate stores for my future. And what I did get I mostly spent when I got it—better in retrospect than denying myself for a future that was going to be stolen from me in any event. How pissed would I be then? Pissed enough perhaps to have joined the Tea Party so I could go to rallies with crackpots and stare at Sarah Palin’s bosom.

As a grasshopper I depend on the ants. Their surplus is my birthright. Not all of it mind you, just the amount they are willing to give up for my fiddling and dancing. This is not without precedent. There are others who add no value to our economy, but still manage to fare very well on stipends for their entertainment value. Tom Cruise comes to mind, Brad and Angelina, virtually all the various Real Housewives (very few of whom it turns out really are), Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton, the Kardashians, everyone from Twilight.

These are just the most egregious examples I can think of. Arranged into categories, professional athletes, entertainers, artists and writers, celebrities of every stripe are useless in terms of their ability to add to the collective wealth of society. These people are all paid from the stores of the real producers among us, and many of them are paid very well indeed. They are paid so well that a lot of actual productive workers aspire to be just like them.

Now there is a world turned upside down, although it may be as much due to the attendant fame and sex appeal as to the pay scale. Who would not rather be tricked out in the resplendent colors of the grasshopper above than the drab monochromatic uniform of the fire ant I wrote about some days ago? On the other hand, if one were going to try to relieve Jamie Dimon of one of his resplendent suits, who would not rather have the formidable resources of the fire ant at his disposal? The fire ant’s arsenal though is the exclusive preserve of power mongers and rebels. In the world where I live, the world where fables are mostly just entertainment, the ants would mostly rather be grasshoppers.