LIVING IN ANXIOUS TIMES

I get anxious sometimes.

Manic even.

It’s a very secret world, that I share with few.   

In this rather icy, inner Cold War conflict of mine,  I am the equivalent of James Bond who has the license to kill whatever good feelings that I may be experiencing at the time.

I am also the shoe-banging Khrushchev especially when a liberating emotion suddenly sends me soaring, on a jet flight of spontaneous joy.  My ICBM system will be quickly alerted and it will get shot down in May simply because it is has wandered too deep into my most vulnerable air space.

And what is left for us to do? 

Binge. At this time of life, we go from Binge to Bingo to death.

When we binge our way through our daily menu of TV shows, movies and novels, we graze like starving cattle in the gardens of  good and  evil.  It’s no wonder that networks and studios call the outlines of their shows, “bibles” because every deep, personal experience that we encounter comes in both large and extra large biblical.

On any average day we quietly pray to God but dance with the first devil who asks, at our perpetual, innermost high school prom, where we forever remain awkward, rejected, and way too often stuck in the corner with Baby.

When we do the Satan tango, for a brief  Stephen King-like “Shining” moment we feel heady and loved.  All is right with the world. Shit, we don’t even have to lead.

But there is quite literally hell to pay.   

The Devil after all, wears Prada and has huge bills to cover.

This can all become quite confusing because, in the parlance of Motown, temptations, in the end, do not produce the miracles that we hoped for.  And that is because you are not acting like a supreme being.

When good and evil, when temptation and the overwhelming, desperate need to find life-sized immediate gratification shortcuts suddenly converge, that is when all hell breaks loose and the end result is the spectacular light show that we call anxiety.

Anxiety itself is actually a good thing.  It was our first, prehistoric alarm system that told us it was time to run from that raging dinosaur.   Men in those days were apparently as dumb as the teenagers in horror films who run toward the house where the psychotic killer awaits them with a chainsaw and a smile.

When we feel a sense of danger it’s because we feel a sense of danger.

The problem is we are manufacturing the danger at the rate of a Metro North ticket dispensing machine that take us, ultimately, to some very dark, underground places.

When you live alone, the biggest bummer is not having someone who stands at the door of your inner Studio 54 (because there are at least 54 Heinz-like varieties of self-destructive fears) who waits, with large polo mallet in hand, to whack-a-mole and drag you back out into real world.

When we are most anxious, we are in effect, fearful children all, who suddenly don’t have the sense to come in out of the rain.  Worse we become DEMONstrative, recalcitrant children,

Even though I’m a glass half full kind of guy, I still, somehow, manage to overflow and create all kinds of emotional messes for myself. 

I am not aware, in the moment, for example, what I am up to because I am way to busy acting out and there is no mommy on the premises, to pick me up out of the shopping cart and remove me from the store so I can wail in my car seat until I pass out like a Jean Arthur in an old movie that features a poor waif who has not eaten in six years.  But in real life, there is no Joel McCrea to drag me to the local diner where I will eat fifty courses of pie.  “Feel better kid? Gee, how long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

Remember: we identify with every character.

I am making light of all this even though this subject it not all that funny.

Life for me is often one endless game of Janga where I suddenly lose the ability to control those sons of a bitches Crayola colored bricks that just start falling way too fast and within seconds I am dead and buried. 

This is why God invented beds: so we can retreat to those aptly named comforters.

Yesterday, in between my feverish writing,  I found myself in bed, because, to paraphrase the immortal words of Petula Clark, when you are alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go down-town. 

I do find as I get older, two things are going on simultaneously.  One: I live on a need to nap basis and  two:  life is coming at me FAST, accelerating like the gas pedal of my innermost Jules Verne almost out of time machine is stuck to the floor.

I’m hurtling through space most of these days, my to-do list keeps getting to the floor long and the reality that I will accomplish even a tenth of it is becoming incredibly unrealistic.

It’s like how many shows on Netflix alone can you possibly watch?  At last count I believe there were 1.7 million scripted  programs to watch with 1.7 million to come.  HBO: How Bout’ Overkill?

I feel like I’m in a perpetual side show, where carnival barkers in sweaty Fellini CLOSE UPS, taunt and tempt me to march with their freaks and maybe even join their not so P.C.. Barnum casts.

The fatal mistakes that I make is when I try to keep up with the pace.  Real, actual concerns, try as they do to stay alive, MAGNIFY IN SIZE as they get lost in the downpour of all the other OUTSIZED FEARS and before I know it,  I’m drowning in the deep.

While I wish that I could sing it all out, like Adele does every four years,  the best that I can do is rock and howl or give myself some kind of tic that I can focus on as if that is my one and only problem.

Or I can stop.  Breathe.  And write.  

Often, a lot of my friends often ask me, why do you have to be so transparent?  You write stuff that is SO personal.

Well this is why.

Because for me, writing is my meds prescription which thank God  is ultimately more decipherable than the real thing, mainly because it’s what is going on between the lines.

This why the Gods of your choice created the sabbath and weekends.

 First of all: God: a huge sports fan (which is why so many players look up and thank him) and during the week, who needs a game when there is Trump to stop?

  The heavengelicals actually have it right.   Trump is all part of God’s plan, as opposed to the Mike Pence plan, which I believe to my core involves wearing make-up, pearl earrings and evening dresses behind not so closed doors.  I mean those Secret Service guys are hot.  

Trump’s behavior is what is slowly making us better men and even better women.

We are not being seduced and blinded by his good deeds.  The only deeds he has are for his own properties. We are, every day, getting Bogey slapped HARD in the face by Trump’s Lauren Bacall.  This is our national daily wake up Bacall which is teaching us every single day, that there is a clear and present reason that God wrote the Ten Commandments (the tablet not the Alan Parker movie) and our founding fathers wrote the Constitution. 

Hitler may be preaching to the fascist lemming congregation,  but none of us  are buying in.

The more he mangles and pisses on our most sacred laws, the closer we are getting to becoming a national David lynch mob—-where deep levels of blue velvet rage are slowly surfacing to the top.

We all have our limits. He doesn’t.  But we do.

Remember the Janga metaphor of a few paragraphs ago? Well the reason that we keep losing control of our destiny bumper cars  is because our sanity is being tested every single day by the outer dealings of that ineffectual, racist, greedy, spectacularly dumb,  talent-free, misogynist pig.

You see what I just did there?  For two seconds I was back in control of the Janga app.

The not fake news is, we all have our own messy messes to deal with and the whole Trump thing, no matter what Michael Big Bad Wolff blatantly exposes, is not going to go away without a dirty fight.  

For the most part we are in a cage match called La Cage aux Fools and we are locked up in there, day after day, Huckabee after Huckabee, lie after lie.

Certainly my level of anxiety is at an all time high.  I can (and do) just like you, SCREAM at the TV every time that Cheetoh colored chimp’s face comes or the second that Press Secretary Deputy Dawg starts spreading her bullshit du second.

I can at the very least create the illusion that I am getting a clean shot at the enemy.  

Then I can blow smoke out of my ass and my remote, twirl it like a six shooter and holster it, as I High Noon my way to the sublimating candy drawer.

But as for the rest of my personal real life and mostly made up agenda,  no matter how I try (and I do, constantly) I cannot point and click my anxieties away.

I can do other things in the name of temporary sanity.  I can hit the Amazon buy now click button which is the human being version of the Pavlov experiment.  But have you ever come across as a dog that after a few treats, is totally satisfied and simply can’t eat  another thing?

Other weapons that I turn to: Shrinks.  Meds. Coffee. The next toy that I MUST have from Apple or the next 40% off at the Gap coupon where I can buy T-shirts even though I have enough T-shirt’s to clothe most of Europe.

And to make matters even worse, there is ❤️.

Being as vulnerable as I am,  I find myself craving love almost as much as I crave the new HomePod.

But again, God does that make that vending machine easy to get.  In fact most of us, stand in front of that machine, feeding it money (via match.com for example) hitting the buttons with no results.

It so happens that love just slipped through my fingers because the object of my affection is not at all like me.  She lives on Walled In Pond (while I wallow in it) which I’m guessing i safe and secure place for her.  Ah those illusions.  Just because you declare that it is real, does not mean that it is real at all.  Only to you.

When it came to matters of the heart, like her, I’m guessing that it tends to be all about civil disobedience.

When you risk and fail, like I just did, the defeat feels that much more staggering.  

You tend to dream about what was as opposed to what could be.

You seek out the sage advice of your daily horoscope.  Talk in low whispers to yourself which in truth is the portal in to the confession booth of your soul, where your long lost parents live in perpetual death, waiting to listen to what you need to say.

Or you can hold on to that once upon a time comforting toy.  Or that lamp from your dad’s apartment.  Or spend a bit too much time skimming through the family album looking for clues to who you used to be.

Or you can write.

So, you see, I have no choice but to continue to lean in towards full transparency.

Expose as much as I can.

While I hope that I touch you in some way.

That, in the right world, just might make me...and by proxy, all of us a lot less lonely.

And anxious.