Danny Bonaduce, You So Crazy...
Here is the 6th installment of my story. I want to tell you ahead of time that this section contains a quite extended, very silly tangent...You have been appropriately cautioned.
I put the phone down and turned the music up as loud as it could possibly go, trying to forget what had just happened. Even with my headphones blaring at an obscene volume in my ears, I couldn’t put my friends out of my mind. My previously meditative calm had been replaced by an overwhelming self-righteousness. What right did they have to interfere in my life? I knew perfectly well that I was in the right, that what I was doing wasn’t insane. Maybe normal people didn’t just pick up their things in the dead of night without telling a soul, but maybe normal people didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. I’d never wanted to be normal in the first place and I sure as hell wasn’t about to start then. My abnormal ass was going to go to Chicago and get published.
It was then, when I had started to think about my writing again, that I started looking for my portfolio. I had put it down on the backseat of the car before I left my house, but when I looked back it wasn’t there. I was positive that I had placed the writing on top of my pillow in the backseat, but each time I looked back there it failed to materialize. “Well, maybe it fell down underneath the seats.” I looked; no portfolio. It was around this time that I began hyperventilating and looking for a brown paper bag to breathe into. This couldn’t be happening. I checked every part of the car that I could see or reach while still maintaining control on the highway. It wasn’t on the passenger seat or in the glove-box or underneath the driver’s seat or underneath the passenger’s seat or in my book bag next to the loaf of raisin bread or anywhere; it wasn’t in the goddamn car. I’d left the worthless piece of crap on my desk at home. My one marginally-valid pretense for going on this stupid trip was sitting next to my printer about 300 miles away from me in Cincinnati. I was screwed in every sense of the word.
Now that my writing was gone and everyone back home knew about my supposedly clandestine plans, there was no way I could keep on driving to Chicago. Yet, for some reason I kept on driving anyway. Right then I was being fueled by the wonderfully nefarious mechanistic workings of my ego. The idea that I could be so horribly wrong about this trip would’ve crushed my ego like a sumo-wrestler belly-flopping onto a bag of Doritos. I had crossed the Rubicon long ago and going back home wasn’t an option. The use of the Rubicon metaphor, while often trite and contrived, is actually rather suited to this situation, because like Caesar himself, I had physically traveled more than half the distance to my destination and returning would take more energy than going forwards. It was like that really bad joke about the three women on an island within sight of the mainland. The first, a brunette, swims a quarter of the way out, but gets too tired and swims back. The second, a redhead, swims two-fifths of the way, but can’t make it any farther and turns back. The third, a blonde (I’m sorry to have to subject you all to an inane “blonde joke”, but it does serve a purpose), swims three-fifths out to sea and begins to get tired, so she heads back to the island. For those of you out there who aren’t math majors, the punch-line of the joke is that when the blonde got tired and swam back to the island, it was two times shorter to swim to the mainland, which is where the dumb broad wanted to go in the first place. As I stared into the taillights of the car in front of me, I began to think that if I turned around right then and drove back home, I would’ve been that dumb blonde. To go on to Chicago with no point and purpose would be bad, but to head back home empty-handed would be worse. Now that my secret had leaked, I knew that I was going to face all manner of reprimand and treatment when I returned, and it seemed a damn shame to give up now. I had adopted a Cool Hand Luke mentality and if I was going to go down, I was going to go down swinging.
During this period of introspection my cell phone had been ringing in nice, neat 38 second intervals; Four and a half rings and then a pause until they called again. At first it was quite easy to ignore, but like Chinese water torture its grating beeps eventually bore a hole in my forehead and wore me down. After about five or six missed calls I finally picked up the phone to find a surprisingly meek and timid voice greeting me. My mother was on the line and it was at this point that I realized that the jig was up. My mom is not a stern or domineering woman, nor is she in possession of a forceful or assertive demeanor. However, this kind, loving woman holds in her hand the trump card of all familial relationships and that most draconian of punishments: the maternal guilt trip. It was readily apparent from the beginning of the conversation that she was going to lay it on at full force. The first words out of her mouth were, “Honey, we’re really worried about you.”
She didn’t even bother with the formality of greeting me. The woman just launched into her barrage of carefully worded empathy and compassion. No matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to avoid succumbing to the force of a mother’s guilt, especially if you actually like your mother. Most people, with the exception of victims of parental abuse and abandonment, love their mothers. You can dread every thanksgiving dinner, avoid your hometown like the plague, and find the simple prospect of talking on the phone with your mom to be a hernia-inducing ordeal, but deep down you know that you love your mother even if you can’t stand being around her. If my feelings towards my mom were of this variety, then I probably would have been able to stave off the guilt of a five minute phone conversation. My problem is that I actually like my mother and even enjoy spending time with her, albeit in limited doses. And while I’m not one of those people who actively try to please their mothers, it really pains me to do anything that makes her upset. So, when I heard her trying to restrain her sobs over the phone, I was completely removed from my “journey”. There were no more delusions about being some misunderstood visionary off to gain glory in the big city. The movie had been replaced by the stark reality that I was hurting the people that were closest to me. I tried to block everything out of my mind with an avalanche of denial, but it was only postponing the inevitable. I kept on telling them that I was going to Chicago no matter what they said, but the statement was hardly brimming with conviction. I was trying to convince myself that I was still going to Chicago just as much as I was trying to convince my folks.
This kiss of death occurred when my mom handed the phone over to my father, a man with a Ned Flanders mustache and a wardrobe consisting almost entirely of plaid L.L. Bean dress shirts and light blue jeans. I have the same problem with my father as I do with my mother: I like the man. My father, also like my mother, is rather adept at pouring on the guilt. The first words out of his mouth were, “Your mother’s very upset.” This is the tactical maneuvering of a seasoned veteran. Instead of starting a whole train of guilt and obscuring the old one, he just reinforced the foundation of my mother’s now Tower of Babel sized guilt trip. This statement also implies that my Dad is upset by association, thus killing two birds with one stone. After this well placed left jab, he came at me with a haymaker to the body, leaving me down for the count (Wait a minute. Is this really the proper time for a clichéd boxing metaphor? ...Of course it’s the right time for a boxing metaphor. When is it not the right time for a boxing metaphor? ... I don’t know, always! You’ve been watching way too much ESPN Classic. What you need to do is get off your fat ass and finish this story…Hey! I will have you know that I am not being lazy, I am pacing myself. And you know that I only watched that only watched the Rumble in The Jungle once on ESPN Classic…The what? ...The Rumble in the Jungle. The Ali-Foreman fight where Ali pulled the rope-a-dope on him in 1974…You know what year the fight happened in? That’s sick, you know that? ...No, what’s sick is the fact that you subscribe to Ladies’ Home Journal and have seen “Serendipity” fifty times…It’s a piece of cinematic genius that you couldn’t possibly understand! …***I’m sorry that this digression has gone on for so long. Please take this time to go back to the last sentence before the digression and better familiarize yourself with Drew’s train of thought prior to this impromptu tangent. All set now? Good.***)
It was then that my Dad first suggested that I pull off at the next exit…
You so crazy! Not you Martin...you're not even mildly amusing. I was still talking to Danny.
I put the phone down and turned the music up as loud as it could possibly go, trying to forget what had just happened. Even with my headphones blaring at an obscene volume in my ears, I couldn’t put my friends out of my mind. My previously meditative calm had been replaced by an overwhelming self-righteousness. What right did they have to interfere in my life? I knew perfectly well that I was in the right, that what I was doing wasn’t insane. Maybe normal people didn’t just pick up their things in the dead of night without telling a soul, but maybe normal people didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. I’d never wanted to be normal in the first place and I sure as hell wasn’t about to start then. My abnormal ass was going to go to Chicago and get published.
It was then, when I had started to think about my writing again, that I started looking for my portfolio. I had put it down on the backseat of the car before I left my house, but when I looked back it wasn’t there. I was positive that I had placed the writing on top of my pillow in the backseat, but each time I looked back there it failed to materialize. “Well, maybe it fell down underneath the seats.” I looked; no portfolio. It was around this time that I began hyperventilating and looking for a brown paper bag to breathe into. This couldn’t be happening. I checked every part of the car that I could see or reach while still maintaining control on the highway. It wasn’t on the passenger seat or in the glove-box or underneath the driver’s seat or underneath the passenger’s seat or in my book bag next to the loaf of raisin bread or anywhere; it wasn’t in the goddamn car. I’d left the worthless piece of crap on my desk at home. My one marginally-valid pretense for going on this stupid trip was sitting next to my printer about 300 miles away from me in Cincinnati. I was screwed in every sense of the word.
Now that my writing was gone and everyone back home knew about my supposedly clandestine plans, there was no way I could keep on driving to Chicago. Yet, for some reason I kept on driving anyway. Right then I was being fueled by the wonderfully nefarious mechanistic workings of my ego. The idea that I could be so horribly wrong about this trip would’ve crushed my ego like a sumo-wrestler belly-flopping onto a bag of Doritos. I had crossed the Rubicon long ago and going back home wasn’t an option. The use of the Rubicon metaphor, while often trite and contrived, is actually rather suited to this situation, because like Caesar himself, I had physically traveled more than half the distance to my destination and returning would take more energy than going forwards. It was like that really bad joke about the three women on an island within sight of the mainland. The first, a brunette, swims a quarter of the way out, but gets too tired and swims back. The second, a redhead, swims two-fifths of the way, but can’t make it any farther and turns back. The third, a blonde (I’m sorry to have to subject you all to an inane “blonde joke”, but it does serve a purpose), swims three-fifths out to sea and begins to get tired, so she heads back to the island. For those of you out there who aren’t math majors, the punch-line of the joke is that when the blonde got tired and swam back to the island, it was two times shorter to swim to the mainland, which is where the dumb broad wanted to go in the first place. As I stared into the taillights of the car in front of me, I began to think that if I turned around right then and drove back home, I would’ve been that dumb blonde. To go on to Chicago with no point and purpose would be bad, but to head back home empty-handed would be worse. Now that my secret had leaked, I knew that I was going to face all manner of reprimand and treatment when I returned, and it seemed a damn shame to give up now. I had adopted a Cool Hand Luke mentality and if I was going to go down, I was going to go down swinging.
During this period of introspection my cell phone had been ringing in nice, neat 38 second intervals; Four and a half rings and then a pause until they called again. At first it was quite easy to ignore, but like Chinese water torture its grating beeps eventually bore a hole in my forehead and wore me down. After about five or six missed calls I finally picked up the phone to find a surprisingly meek and timid voice greeting me. My mother was on the line and it was at this point that I realized that the jig was up. My mom is not a stern or domineering woman, nor is she in possession of a forceful or assertive demeanor. However, this kind, loving woman holds in her hand the trump card of all familial relationships and that most draconian of punishments: the maternal guilt trip. It was readily apparent from the beginning of the conversation that she was going to lay it on at full force. The first words out of her mouth were, “Honey, we’re really worried about you.”
She didn’t even bother with the formality of greeting me. The woman just launched into her barrage of carefully worded empathy and compassion. No matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to avoid succumbing to the force of a mother’s guilt, especially if you actually like your mother. Most people, with the exception of victims of parental abuse and abandonment, love their mothers. You can dread every thanksgiving dinner, avoid your hometown like the plague, and find the simple prospect of talking on the phone with your mom to be a hernia-inducing ordeal, but deep down you know that you love your mother even if you can’t stand being around her. If my feelings towards my mom were of this variety, then I probably would have been able to stave off the guilt of a five minute phone conversation. My problem is that I actually like my mother and even enjoy spending time with her, albeit in limited doses. And while I’m not one of those people who actively try to please their mothers, it really pains me to do anything that makes her upset. So, when I heard her trying to restrain her sobs over the phone, I was completely removed from my “journey”. There were no more delusions about being some misunderstood visionary off to gain glory in the big city. The movie had been replaced by the stark reality that I was hurting the people that were closest to me. I tried to block everything out of my mind with an avalanche of denial, but it was only postponing the inevitable. I kept on telling them that I was going to Chicago no matter what they said, but the statement was hardly brimming with conviction. I was trying to convince myself that I was still going to Chicago just as much as I was trying to convince my folks.
This kiss of death occurred when my mom handed the phone over to my father, a man with a Ned Flanders mustache and a wardrobe consisting almost entirely of plaid L.L. Bean dress shirts and light blue jeans. I have the same problem with my father as I do with my mother: I like the man. My father, also like my mother, is rather adept at pouring on the guilt. The first words out of his mouth were, “Your mother’s very upset.” This is the tactical maneuvering of a seasoned veteran. Instead of starting a whole train of guilt and obscuring the old one, he just reinforced the foundation of my mother’s now Tower of Babel sized guilt trip. This statement also implies that my Dad is upset by association, thus killing two birds with one stone. After this well placed left jab, he came at me with a haymaker to the body, leaving me down for the count (Wait a minute. Is this really the proper time for a clichéd boxing metaphor? ...Of course it’s the right time for a boxing metaphor. When is it not the right time for a boxing metaphor? ... I don’t know, always! You’ve been watching way too much ESPN Classic. What you need to do is get off your fat ass and finish this story…Hey! I will have you know that I am not being lazy, I am pacing myself. And you know that I only watched that only watched the Rumble in The Jungle once on ESPN Classic…The what? ...The Rumble in the Jungle. The Ali-Foreman fight where Ali pulled the rope-a-dope on him in 1974…You know what year the fight happened in? That’s sick, you know that? ...No, what’s sick is the fact that you subscribe to Ladies’ Home Journal and have seen “Serendipity” fifty times…It’s a piece of cinematic genius that you couldn’t possibly understand! …***I’m sorry that this digression has gone on for so long. Please take this time to go back to the last sentence before the digression and better familiarize yourself with Drew’s train of thought prior to this impromptu tangent. All set now? Good.***)
It was then that my Dad first suggested that I pull off at the next exit…
You so crazy! Not you Martin...you're not even mildly amusing. I was still talking to Danny.