What Must Babies Think?

THE COMMANDER AND CHEAT PART THREE

RAGE ON THE PAGE: A HOLLYWOOD WRITER RANTS

Written by

David S. Simon

Followers of this blog know that my  theory is that Trump did not win the election as much as he married America and since the inauguration, when he said his vows,  he has been treating both us, individually and as a country, precisely the way he has treated every one  of his eventually shoved out of the spotlight  wives.

With the release of yesterday’s memo, which promised to reveal the reason why the commander and cheat has no option but to fire Rob Rosenstein en route to firing Bob Mueller, all Trump wound up doing was show what a terrible, transparent liar he is.    

In the parlance of a cheating husband, he can’t even come up with a credible beard or an alibi.

Ironically the true and only purpose of that MEmo was to make all his Fox and Friends react like a hysterical, cheated on wives.  In order for him to stop their now out of control, finger pointing tantrums, he has no choice but to be “the good guy,” step in and punish the bad men who hurt them, while not one single wife stops to think: wait a minute: he’s the lying, cheating, subhuman son of a bitch who hurt me.

That is called misdirection.   In marriage that is called the bullshit you create to deny your affair by creating havoc so all the facts get lost in the tantrums and the only thing that matters for the wounded wife is being vindicated even though they are blaming the wrong people.

To me Melania is now the face of us.

Just envision her death stare at the state of their union address.  The state of her union address is Fifth Avenue and his for-now-address is his swinging bachelor pad at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue which is the actual number of women that he has abused in his lifetime.

Melania’s palpable rage and impossible to disguise disgust makes her the official poster child of  the #metoo movement of  Washington D.C.

Full Disclosure:

I am sorry to say that my past has involved indiscretions, starting all the way back to when I was young.  Thanks to an emotionally punishing childhood,  I grew up craving and fearing  love and as a result I never trusted it (I could not experience love without hate)  and wound up sabotaging every great relationships that I was in.  

Being funny and easy on the eyes just gave me more opportunities to either blow up more relationships than the average guy or date women who would, over an extended period of time,  eventually unravel and like Hercules Poirot, suddenly unmask themselves in the final chapter of our Mousetrap Marriage, showing me why they had no choice but to murder our love.

 The minute that I smelled trouble or felt claustrophobically trapped, is when I became the wingman, happy to help screw it all up.  

To make sure that intimacy was not going to threaten me, I courted complex, razor sharp challenging women who all had a dark side, some darker than others.

 Trust me, if you want a partner who will jump in and help you totally fuck up a relationship, go with the girl with the non-existent relationship with her ice cold, indifferent father.  She will be more than happy to not commit to you (because she is just as scared of true love as you are) as she sits atop the metaphorical stove of life with all her deepest little girl hurt feelings simmering inside her kettle of life shit, which sometimes hits the boiling point on those cold winter mornings when she just  can’t take it anymore.

When you are young that can be very endearing and even quirky.  But when you get to be of a certain age, it can quickly begin to smell like inappropriate teen spirit.

And justifying your need to be on your own or to keep on trucking, bouncing from place to place, from partner to partner, by declaring that you don’t want to be in a relationship is like saying I secretly choose to feel what I felt as a child: empty, abandoned and ignored.  Why? 

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Because that is what is normal to you.  That is when your true emotional temperature was set on the water heater of you.

Now luckily, here I am, in middle age, and after all these years, I  have finally gotten hip to my own game and have taken out a kind of inner FISA warrant on myself in order to be able to surveil my each and every man vs. woman move.

It’s like when you download the latest OS software from Apple and they ask you if you want all your mistakes and problems to go directly to Cupertino.  It all begins when you acknowledge that there are bugs in your operating system.

When you finally grow up, like I have over the last few years, incredible and hitherto impossible unreachable levels of emotional depth begin to become available  and you find yourself like a travel agent, booking passage to the next profound experience.

For years I have been a professional bread and butter sitcom writer (our new show is “There’s Johnny” on Hulu) and when I look back at my Hollywood years I really can’t tell the difference between that and my own tormented childhood.

The way I dealt with my poor, tormented bi-polar mother was to either distract her with song and dance or hide in my room and evaporate into the ether of my imagination deep within the safety walls of my childhood bedroom.

Sadly, that is exactly what I did in Hollywood.  Same room, just with a bunch of other angry, bitter, twisted comedy writers who wrestled for attention like two rats fighting over a pizza crust at the bottom of a dumpster.

It wasn’t until I left and was finally able to see Hollywood in my rear view mirror, which sadly to this day seems closer than it appears, that I was finally able to stop, look and listen and when I did, that is when I became a new kind of writer, which mirrors a Hawaiian cliff diver who is thrilled by the height...and where he gets to plunge into.

I did not reach that diver’s edge place by myself.  Friends had to rescue me and help scrape me off the sidewalk, like the stretched web of Bazooka that I was.   I suffered a nervous breakdown and lost three years of my life to mental illness.

It started with tinnitus which wound up being the gift which taught me that I listened to no one, mostly myself.

That cacophony one day inexplicably ended, but not before I was left shattered Humpty Dumpty in shell shock.

Loving friends and therapists helped put me back together again and that was the beginning of the new dawn of me.

The difference between me and a guy like Trump, is that by becoming painfully self-aware of my weaknesses and inherent and often spectacular faults, I was finally able to be reborn.

No, not in the religious sense.

In  the spiritual sense.   My late, great therapist Mike Gold, said to me one day, before he died, “Depression is a crisis of faith.”   You even rebel against the big brother voice who lives in your head and you temporarily turn your soul into a rock with the business end of  Excalibur wedged deep into it.   Your task, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it, becomes the seemingly impossible mission of pulling it out.

But when...IF...you finally do (as opposed to cliff diving off the GW Bridge which I contemplated daily for years) the gift is, you get to be reborn.  

Which we all do naturally. Over and over and over again.  Every five years or so.  Cities change massively every ten, because they are made of real, actual concrete.

In the moment when we can’t take it anymore and finally implode that is when we metaphorically “die.”  

And that is when we unconsciously summon our better angels, who, if we trust them enough, will begin the resurrection part of the program as they help lift us towards the next 2.0 version of who we are about to become next.

Most of us, sadly choose to fight our better angels, and elect to remain in that Gulag neighborhood of life, in a shuttered house on the corner of Angst and Depression.   Worse: we spend our entire life justifying to others why we could not possibly relocate.

When darkness is all we know, sunlight is just too harsh and painful to take on.   So instead, we live with cool designer shades and only wear outfits designed by indifference.

We might even become self-righteous and smug, that legendary vaudevillian team who specialized in prat falls and scene hogging.

The eminently wise therapist, Dr. Tony Stern said to me weeks back, that I should consider not calling what I went through “a breakdown” and consider it more of a spiritual gift.  An enlightenment.  A reawakening.

Okay. I like that.  Now you do have to have a formal mourning period as you go through all the  Kubler-Ross stage of grief.  That is hugely important.  You just don’t bury the dead.  You memorialize them.  You honor them.

And sooner or later you move on.

Now, don’t you feel close to me now?   Why?  Because I’m transparent and truthful.  As truthful as I consciously can be.

Now compare me to Trump.

Get it?  See it?  Feel it?

It’s time for a divorce, America.  Call your lawyers.  Pack your things and head for the Abused Wives Shelter.

If you’re lucky you will share a room with Melania.

And Marla.  And Ivanka.