The Worm

He does remind one of a worm, now that I think of it, his consistently fair coloration, his soft, somewhat featureless appearance, and the smooth round shape of his head all reminiscent of an earthworm.

And then there's his habit of pausing with his mouth open, searching for something sufficiently sycophantic to say, I suppose, and the high-pitched way he strains to sing his words of stilted smarm in the only the most pleasing manner. He's a regular Eddie Haskell, he is, except I don't know anyone he ever levels with. Maybe his wife?

He's good, I'll give him that, for I could never quite put my finger on what it was about him that got my skin crawling, what with his flattering words, his hearty approbations, his judicious pauses, his smooth-as-silk smile.

It took a woman of considerable discernment to see him for what he is, noting in his comings and goings over a short period of time a distinct pattern of avoidance, namely, that he was prone to appear whenever she left me, to slither away whenever she returned.

"Why?" she asked me, and in asking it she answered it for me, for at that moment I finally figured it out. She was a threat, both to his friendship with me and, more importantly, to his secret plans for my future, plans which, now that I saw him more clearly, looked glaringly obvious, though tinged with a very weird sort of twisted logic: a religious conversion, a cross-country move and, in all likelihood, a business partnership. How could I have been so blind? How could he have been so creepy?

"He's a worm," she explained, and I had to laugh. It was so true.

Later whenever he'd come up in one of our conversations, one of us would imitate him, saying "Hello, I'm just a worm," in a slow high falsetto voice, stretching out the "r" in "worm."

One morning I said it while the kids were playing on our bed. I was wiggling one of my feet and my eldest assumed I meant that my foot was a worm. A new game! My other foot quickly became a slug with a voice like a '30s gangster and then I hid the first foot and it reappeared as a particularly evil-tempered mole, ostensibly trying to push her off the bed but in reality just tickling her. Soon a whole host of fauna appeared under our covers, each with its own distinct voice and odd behavioral issues, and the worm reappeared and the evil mole tried to eat it but instead just tickled my youngest and -- what can I say? -- the senseless fun just went on and on and today my kids often ask me for the "worm game" by saying "I'm just a worm" in their highest-pitched pleading voices, unwittingly imitating the original worm.

It's odd how life happens, isn't it?

Wish List

"So, what do you want for Christmas?"

"Nothing."

That's been my stock answer for years now. And I mean it. I really don't want any gifts. When people ask me what I want, I honestly can't think of anything.

I frustrate determined gift-givers, and I'm sorry for that, for they're nice people who just want to do something nice for me and I'm just making their lives more difficult. I used to invent a wish list to placate them but after a few years of watching them blow their hard-earned money buying things I didn't really want, I could no longer sit back and permit the senseless waste to continue. I had to put an end to the charade.

Some of them assume I'm a Scrooge, seeking to deny the holiday spirit by denying myself gift-wrapped boxes filled with goodies, but that's not my intent. I happily give, I just don't get.

And that imbalance surely troubles some, this sense that I'm scoring points by fulfilling their wishes while keeping mine to myself. Trust me, I don't keep a ledger. I just listen to you, and figure you'll listen to me. If you told me you wanted nothing, that's what I'd get you.

I'm sure I come across to some as a holier-than-thou saint who seeks to lord it over others with his oh-so-superior enhanced post-consumer enlightenment, one of those Linus types who refuses to admit that he shares the universal desire for packaged goods. There may be something to that, but I really do draw a blank when asked to list the things I want. It's not a pose.

Perhaps my refusal to give you a wish list is just another way of saying that I wouldn't want anything you could give me. Many of my relations are poorer than me, and I'm sure a few interpret my stance as a form of present snobbery. But if they knew that I drew a blank with all potential gift-givers, including those higher on the socioeconomic ladder than me, would they still feel slighted?

A subtler take on my no gift posture is to posit that by denying others the ability to satisfy my desires, I'm keeping them at arms'-length, preserving the protective moat I maintain between myself and others. Adherents of this position might even suggest that my isolationist tendencies are so deep-seated that I am actually deceiving myself into drawing a blank when it comes to gift ideas. And if this is were so, you'd think I'd be buying more stuff for myself during the year.

But I'm not. Contrary to what some may think, I do not onanistically engage in an orgy of consumption during the year that leaves nothing for others to give. I just don't buy much of anything anytime. Maybe a book or a CD here and there, but really nothing much.

I wasn't always this way. I remember when I was a kid, paging through the toy section of the Sears catalog, carefully wiping my drool from the pages. I remember when I wanted a bike so much, I evaluated all amounts in bike units ("He won $500? That's three bikes!"). I used to hoard car brochures, lovingly paging through them as I imagined what it would be like to own my own set of wheels. And even into my 30s I had a insatiable lust for electronic gadgets and golf clubs.

But those days are long gone. I wonder why.

I'm sure it's due, in part, to my good fortune at being able to meet my own needs. I don't need gifts like I used to.

And years ago I had the good fortune to attain, and even surpass, my consumption dreams. I discovered that a high-end watch is just a watch, a high-end car is just a car, a high-end computer is just a computer, except when they break, and then you feel even worse because they cost so much.

But then these days I rarely set foot in stores and I'm exposed to very few advertisements, so maybe I simply don't know what I'm missing. It's hard to lust after something you don't know exists.

And I'm sure I'm still influenced by the experience of moving out of my last house. We discovered this mountain of stuff we'd accumulated over the years, much of it by gift. I felt guilt, never having used much of it. I felt trapped, my life weighed down by tons of useless stuff. I felt disgust, surrounded by so much material waste. We gave it all away. The charity part felt good, but the freedom of shedding tons of stuff from our lives felt even better. When you own it, it owns you.

Most of all, though, I think my wishes have grown more intangible as I've grown older. Much more difficult to wrap in a bow and put under a tree.

For instance, I wish I had more time. Can you give some to me? I never seem to have enough.

You know those moments of uncontrollable laughter, complete giddiness, utter rapture, when your analytical brain steps aside and allows your more primitive parts to take over? I wish for more of those. They're so fleeting. And increasingly scarce.

I try so hard to live up to my potential, but I never measure up. Story of my life. And occasionally I get a glimpse of myself, a hamster on a wheel, and I wish I could just drop kick my potential down the hill, never to be seen again.

I wish for solitude. And I wish for the company of soulmates. All at the same time. I'm difficult that way.

Health. Physical and mental. Both for me, because I'm selfish, and for those I know who are dying, because they actually need it. Life is so vital and strong, and it's fragile and soon gone. It's difficult that way.

I wish I had a talent for music. I'm never as happy as I could be while listening, always wondering what it would be like to play it that well. And as much as I like to write, I've always thought that words pale next to notes.

And there's that feeling I get in the morning after I've woken before the dawn, showered and eaten, and I'm sipping my coffee at my desk while surveying the world slowly waking up outside my window as I savor those precious moments I've stolen from the day and kept all to myself when this glow of satisfaction, of total well-being, builds and infuses my body and mind and I suddenly know what it feels like to stop time, even if just for a moment. I wish for a lifetime of those moments.

The Allergen

Mercury is killing her, or so she thinks. Even after she stopped eating fish, even after a dentist removed her amalgam fillings, even after she stopped bathing in tap water, even after she started eating with metal utensils and china plates, even after she stopped wearing jewelry, she feels her life slipping slowly but surely away.

Though skeptical, I am sympathetic. A few years ago, after taking an antibiotic, I experienced a violently painful reaction. Doubled up, I managed to call the doctor, only to have him ask me whether I'd ingested milk or other dairy products. When I responded "yes," he read to me the part of the warning label that said: "Avoid milk and other dairy products." Duh.

Feeling stupid quickly gave way to feeling better, much better than I could ever remember feeling, and keep in mind that I was taking antibiotics because I was sick, and I was still sick, for they hadn't started working yet, but the other parts of me felt incredibly good. It was like I'd been tuned up. Detoxed. A new man. Even while I was wheezing and coughing waiting for the antibiotics to work.

Long story short: I'd been allergic to milk and other dairy products, but never knew it. I guess I figured the pain and discomfort was just a normal part of being alive. Removing said products from my system dramatically reduced my ordinary everday pain and discomfort, producing a sustained feeling of well-being that I've managed to maintain with the assistance of soy milk and other soy-derived pseudo-dairy products.

Back to Mrs. Mercury. She has one child who's gotten so big. A rich husband with businesses to run. A massive new house that needs nothing but inhabitation. A mind that's not the most dynamic and engaged mind in the city, if you know what I mean. And a hobby -- interior decorating -- that perhaps isn't sufficiently absorbing to occupy those long daylight hours while the family is away.

So when she feels listless, when the sadness overwhelms, when she can't seem to make it off the divan, is it any wonder she blames the mercury? As I learned with milk and other dairy products, when you eliminate the allergen, you eliminate the pain. Immediately and permanently. It's so incredibly transforming, it's seductive.

The problem is, it's one thing to eliminate a substance from your life, quite another to eliminate an entire life from your life.

Technical Difficulties

So late last week I notice that my most recent post has vanished. I log in to locate it, but the log in won't work. I read a notice, learn that Typepad, the service that hosts this site, is down.

Not for the first time.

My first thought is to save my vanished post. Thankfully Google cached it. But what to do with it? I know, mirror sites! That's what I need. So I copy the post and paste it in to a new Blogspot blog and a new Blogsome blog and now I have a triple redundant backup mirror system that shouldn't be too hard to keep going because all it requires is cutting and pasting the same post thrice.

So if you bookmark the mirror sites, you'll never miss another episode of Outer Life. I hope.

Now that I've shored up the technical side, all that remains is a little tinkering with the creative side. I'd like to blame Typepad for the lack of action here, but the truth is it's all me.

I used to write short, now I write long. I used to post daily, now I post weekly. I used to struggle with too few ideas, now I struggle with too many. I used to have too much time to write, now I have too little.

And last week I had a chance to review some of my old posts and some of my more recent posts, and the difference startled me. What happened to my sense of humor? What happened to the nonsense? What happened to the outward-looking observer? When did I start taking myself so seriously?

The other day I joked to a correspondent that I should rename this site "The Before Picture." Now I think that wasn't a joke.

So your continued patience is appreciated while we sort through these difficulties.

g Force

In grade school we took an IQ test. I don’t remember which grade I was in, and I certainly don’t remember anything about the test, but I do remember my score. My mother showed it to me, telling me in hushed tones that it was a secret I must never divulge to anyone.

I never did. And I never will, though with the general populace’s interest in my IQ expected to remain at immeasurably low levels well into the foreseeable future, my continued silence won’t be too difficult to maintain.

My mother never explained why an IQ score must be kept secret. It was just one of those things, like one’s income or gambling debts, that polite people didn’t discuss. I suppose if your IQ was higher than those around you, you risked hurting their feelings. And if your IQ was lower, you risked hurting your stature, not to mention your own feelings. So you could never bring up the subject without treading on someone, maybe even yourself. So you didn’t.

I’d like to say that was why I never discussed my IQ, and leave it at that, because I’d like you to think I live my life according to the teachings of polite society, but to be honest there was another reason, one that was probably more important: I didn’t believe in IQs. Surely intelligence was more varied, more multi-faceted, vastly more complicated than anything represented by a triple-digit (or double-digit) (or, I suppose, single-digit) number. I had similarly scoffing views when it came to the PSAT and the SAT and each of the other bubble-filling exercises in quasi-intellectual standardized achievement that punctuated my academic career. Squeezing the vast universe that orbits around broad concepts like “intelligence” and “scholastic achievement” into multiple-guess and true-false questions was the ultimate reductio ad absurdum. Bringing up IQ in a conversation would be like earnestly discussing astrology or Uri Geller or UFO abductions or blogs, a total faux pas in any triple-digit IQ crowd, so I never did.

I never let ignorance get in the way of my opinions, or at least that’s how it seems to me today, for though I still do not “believe” in IQ scores – I have not welcomed my IQ score into my life as my personal lord and savior – a few years ago for some obscure reason I actually went to the trouble of researching the science behind IQ tests and came away thinking that maybe there was a little more thinking behind them than I ever supposed. Are IQs perfect? No. Are IQs strongly correlated with numerous intelligence-related factors, factors that appear to form the basis for practically every measure of success in modern society other than scoring with hot chicks? Yes.

And this was when my old IQ score started to interest me again. What does that score really mean? What does it say about me? Is my old IQ score still my IQ score today? I mean, I’d like to think my mind has bulked up quite a bit since grade school, what with all the educational stuff I’ve jammed into it and all the work-outs I’ve put it through to extricate me from complicated scrapes, but in theory a well-designed and properly scaled IQ test should yield the same score throughout one’s life, putting aside the Flynn Effect. Even after you’ve filled your head with useful knowledge. Even after you’ve exercised your brain with the most difficult problems. Even, I suppose, after you’ve constructed millions of new neural networks just to process and preserve for immediate retrieval precious memories of the female form in various stages of undress, a resource-sapping project I hadn’t even started when I took that grade school IQ test.

The obvious answer was to take another IQ test and compare the scores, but that was easier said than done. Let me make that unclearer – it was easy to take a new test, potentially much harder to actually live with the new score. If my new score was lower, would my last remaining shred of self-esteem evaporate, leaving me to live down to my potential, all the while feeling like an overachieving dunderheaded fraud? Or if my new score was higher, would I kick myself for not shooting higher in life, not taking on bigger challenges, having instead settled for a fault-resistant good enough approach to an average life after unwittingly bullying my inner-Poindexter into submission?

I couldn’t take the easy way out, which was to do nothing. I had to know, but I didn’t really want to know. So to preserve sufficient waffle room for flexible post-test interpretations I didn’t take a timed two-day professionally-administered test, much like the one we took in grade school. Instead, I took a timed two-hour test over the internet. And, when it tallied my score, I learned that my two IQ scores, though separated by 30 years and millions of new neural networks, were identical. Surely a coincidence, but a convenient coincidence – the best kind – so I quit while I was ahead, meaning neither ahead nor behind scorewise.

It’s been a few years since the convenient coincidence ended my foray into IQ land. I haven’t returned, and probably never will. The whole IQ thing still bothers me. If anything, I’m even more uneasy about it than before, now that I can no longer dismiss it so easily, but I’ve had the hardest time explaining to myself why.

And then the other day I was sitting in a meeting across the table from some people trying to convince us of something and I noticed myself paying particularly close attention to their lead guy as he spun out his presentation, weaving theories and ideas and concepts around his positions to make them more palatable, and I wondered to myself, as I often do at times like these, whether this guy really made sense, or just seemed to be making sense. Did his presentation hint at his inner brilliance, or was it just an elaborate snow job designed to blind us, hiding his hollow core? And what did his presentation say about his perception of our abilities? Were its bells and whistles borne out of deep respect, fear, even, for our deep cognitive skills, or were they eye candy designed to distract our feeble minds? In short, did he know what he was talking about, and did we know what he was talking about? We didn’t know, and he didn’t know, respectively, and that made it all the more interesting, this timeless game of trying, but never quite succeeding, in turning the inscrutable into the merely scrutable.

Tattoo our IQs on our foreheads and the game wouldn’t be nearly as fun, would it?

Biography

I had this dream the other day. A really strange dream. I was reading my biography. It was really thick, a doorstop of a book, the kind with small type in the front and even smaller type in the endnotes, and as you might expect from such a massive book it was crammed full of facts. Facts about me.

As I paged through the book, my eyes swimming in the sea of facts, I remember thinking that this biographer really did his homework. It was all there, every detail of my life, presented in chronological order. He must have interviewed everyone I’ve known. He must’ve walked through every house, dorm and apartment I’ve ever lived in. He must’ve reviewed all my school work. My employers must’ve provided him access to all the paper I’ve churned out over the years. He must've analyzed all my tax returns, reviewed all my Quicken reports, inventoried all my possessions. It looked like he'd read every book I’d ever read. And he’d surely looked at all my photos, for how else could he have chronicled every minute change in my appearance so completely?

It was overwhelming, seeing it all there, page after page of my life reduced to words.

I learned a lot. Not only stuff I never knew, such as what others really thought of me, but a lot of stuff I once knew but had long since forgotten, such as who I sat next to on the first day of kindergarten. And it was disorienting, to say the least, to learn so much about myself from a book. To think that this guy, my biographer, knew me better than I knew myself. Very unsettling.

But the more I read, the more frustrated I felt. Something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure what it was. He got all the facts right. No argument there. My Boswell was nothing if not thorough. But as fact after fact piled up I found it harder and harder to find the me buried beneath. I mean, it’s interesting to note the shoes I wore in sixth grade, or my brand of toothpaste, or the scores I achieved on my SAT, or the friends I was closest to in college, or the books I enjoyed most when I was 32, but after a while it got really distracting, then it got annoying, this fire hose of facts drowning me on every page. I found myself reacting against this, at first trying to forget the facts but after a while simply repeating a mantra to myself, over and over: I am not those shoes, I am not that toothpaste, I am not those scores, I am not those friends, I am not those books.

And it wasn’t just the facts. Like any modern biographer, he delved beneath, ascribing motives, describing moods, reconstructing reasons to explain why I did what what I did, and didn’t do what I didn’t. He was very astute, no doubt about it, for his theories started with the facts, they were internally consistent, they drew upon the latest psychological research, they made sense. They were quite convincing. Masterful, even. I was definitely nodding my head, reading them, even thinking sometimes “so that’s why I did that.”

Or was it? As I read deeper into the book, I found myself questioning him more and more. I thought of alternate explanations or, sometimes, I thought there was no explanation. I recalled contradictions, delusions and distortions in my mind that never found their way onto these pages. This was all working out a little too neatly, if you know what I mean, all these facts and theories dovetailing beautifully into a unified whole that, in the end, didn’t add up. It made too much sense. The more I pressed, the more it unraveled, especially as the book reached more recent years, years when I had a better recollection of what I was, and wasn’t, thinking.

For all its factualizing and theorizing, it wasn’t me.

This massive compendium of accurate facts joined together with insightful explanations amounted to a big fat nothing. All that leg work, all those words, so many endnotes, but to what end? The best in biography technology, but it never even dipped a toe into my head. Never even hinted at the swirling uncertainties, the illogical progressions, the faulty connections, the delusional fears, the contextless recollections, the aimless wanderings that fill my mind every second of every day.

I mean, if I could record an accurate account of my mental processes during just one hour of my life -- any hour -- it would tell you more about me than a million well-researched, well-reasoned and well-cited words ever would. Just one hour is all it would take. It would be a true self-portrait, painted in words, an internal portrayal of a mind over a moment in time, the most accurate possible picture of who I was, who I am and who I will be. The rest is noise.

At this point I slammed the book shut, vowing to never read it again. I’d had enough of its energetic and encyclopedic futility. And, being the subject of all this work, I felt that it was somehow my duty to inform my biographer that he’d missed the mark, maybe thank him for all his efforts and acknowledge his good intentions but leave it clear in no uncertain terms that the person portrayed in his biography, in the end, bore only the most superficial resemblance to me.

So I looked for the biographer’s name on the front cover and saw that his name was mine.

Like I said, a really strange dream.

Photographic Memories

“Then my father died,” she said, “and I got all the family photos. No one else wanted them. There must be thousands tossed into this banker’s box, no order at all, a complete mess. I’ve tried to organize them but I can’t. The minute I start to sort they draw me in, these old snapshots and slides, and they won’t let go. I stare myself into them, feeling long-dormant memories awaken as they transport me back in time. Then hours later I snap out of my reverie, my lap covered with old photos. I toss them back into the box – which just makes the mess worse – and I vow to organize them next time. Of course, that’ll never happen, I’ll just lose myself in them again.”

“I avoid old photos.”

“Why? They’re so comforting, my link to the past, they’re all I have to remind me of better times, sepia-toned times, as it were, but mine are fading Kodachromes. Times I never want to forget again, that I want to hold on to forever. Why would you avoid that? Are you trying to forget your past?”

“I’m not trying, but I am forgetting. And somehow that seems right. It’s been years like this and by now it’s like I’ve got this organic mind, free of artificial memories. It remembers only what it wants to remember. The rest it forgets. I don’t try to manipulate my memory by jogging it or force-feeding it with old photos, or scolding it for forgetting, or training it to remember. I just let it run on auto-pilot. I figure it has its own reasons – good reasons, I’m sure – to remember what it remembers and to forget what it forgets. It absorbs as memories whatever nutrients it needs from my current experiences, and excretes the rest, just like it does with food and drink.”

“But that’s so, you know, don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but that seems really strange to me. You’re just denying your past.”

“But you’re denying your present while you sit there staring at your old photos, aren’t you? The past is gone. Isn’t it healthier to just live in the present?”

“I do live in the present, I’m not denying it, I just miss my past. It’s a part of me too, but I forget it and I hate that so I want to hold on to it. Especially now.”

“And I’m not really denying my past, I’m just allowing my brain to filter it as it pleases to suit its own purposes. I do remember, it’s just that what I remember might be more selective and distorted and deluded than what you remember after forcing your brain to relive your past by feeding it old photos. Or maybe our memories are the same, maybe all your reminiscing doesn’t keep you from forgetting, and all my neglecting doesn’t keep me from remembering. I don’t know, but I wonder whether a muddled memory is all we’re really capable of, and maybe there’s a good reason for the muddle, you know, it’s a defensive mechanism or something like that.”

“Defensive? Against what?”

“I’m just guessing here, but I’d say it’s a defense against useless clutter clogging up our minds, clutter that makes it hard to live in the moment. And forgetting is a powerful antidote to nostalgia, or at least I hope it will be, because my god isn’t nostalgia pathetic? Patina worship. Get a grip, people. It’s later than you think.”

“You’re cruel.”

“Seriously, though, forgetting, or organically selective distorted remembering, as I think of it, is the ultimate healer. It heals wounds without even the hint of a scar. Where did I cut myself? I can’t tell anymore. Did I cut myself? I can’t remember. Why would I want to? The wound is gone, so it must have healed. Let’s forget it and move on. In this way, I’ve healed myself more often than I can remember by simply forgiving and forgetting. And when I can’t forgive, I just forget.”

“So?”

“So the mental healing process happens naturally, if you let it. Your mind on auto-pilot routinely cleans its wounds by purging pernicious memories. But when you intervene and interfere, when you cling to memories that should be purged, you risk breaking down the mind’s defenses, preventing it from healing. In our family, we had The Historian. She remembered everything, never forgot her slights, regurgitating and replaying them everyday as if they happened yesterday. She wouldn’t forget, or perhaps she couldn’t forget, I don’t know which, but I do know that her wounds never healed. They festered, and her toxic memory build-up just corroded her whole outlook on life. It was so sad. She was so unhappy.”

“Okay, but then why are you always so unhappy, Mr. Organic Brain?”

“You’re cruel.”

“Seriously, why aren't you happier?”

“Why? I can’t remember.”