How to Be Merely Disappointed

Dear Friends:

I’m trying to make these newsletters shorter.

Will try again next time.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements

1. Yes on Proposition 33
California law says cities can limit rent increases only for units in apartment buildings older than 15 years. A Yes vote on Prop 33 in November will let whatever locality you live in decide for itself which units can be rent-controlled. The 2-bed townhouse we rent is classed as a single-family home, and thus not under rent control, meaning our landlord can raise the rent to whatever they want whenever they want. I’ve had to be promoted to full professor to finally get to where rent is under 30% of our income (a measure of housing affordability that’s probably long outdated), so yeah I’ve got skin in this game. An unexpected rent boost would threaten our ability just to keep living where we work. If you look at the No folks, you’ll find more than 1,000 people and lobbying groups spending hundreds and thousands of dollars each—all to keep rents going up up up. They’ve even got signs:

The window of a landlord probably.

They will tell a lot of lies this fall about how Prop 33 will ‘disincentivize’ builders from building new housing, thus worsening our housing crisis.¹ Well, we’ve had these limitations on rent control since 1995, and if you think a freer market has kept home costs affordable over the last 30 years, I don’t know what to tell you. (Maybe don’t vote in November?) Whether you rent or own in California, tell your friends: Yes on 33 for more affordable homes.

2. Finders Seekers
Nearly everyone I know hates the idea of an escape room, and I hate the idea of being in an escape room with people I don’t know, therefore I don’t get to do escape rooms. But I can’t think of a better way to spend an hour. If you’re like me, or just a shut-in, Finders Seekers is here for you. Each month, you get a thick envelope in the mail with a travel-themed mystery to solve by working your way through lots of little puzzles. It’s not a room to escape, exactly, but there’s a story where you get to be a kind of hero and often some little toy you get to keep. Last one I did was set in Provence; I got to save 10 people who’d fallen into a weird trance and also got a sachet of lavender and a collapsable cup. The price is on the steep side (~$30/game), but there are discounts for multi-month subscriptions. (A perfect gift idea.) I imagine it’s doubly fun with friends, if you have those kinds of friends.²

How to Be Merely Disappointed

Some years back, my pal Adam and I wrote a TV pilot together. It was likely his idea. I liked the idea of a show about a local network affiliate in a small market, and in a weekend Adam threw a draft together about a station in North Platte, Neb., which remains the nation’s 2nd smallest market.

Anyway, the pilot clearly made us rich and famous. The point of this anecdote is something I remember Adam saying in the collaboration process. We were in his apartment in Portland, going through the thing scene by scene. Lord knows what I was pitching, but he said, ‘It’s just so boring to have an opinion.’

Or maybe he said opinions weren’t interesting. This would amount to fighting words to someone as enamored with opinions as I am, if I were a fighting person, but instead I took a moment to think about it, this new opinion I’d just been handed.

Adam’s point: it’s hard for opinions to do anything to anyone, once they’re released. They just sit there, stuck in a bog. They’re not the best tools in the work of making new things. In time, I wrote a little index card to hang over my desk: Don’t have an opinion, have an imagination.

Here’s a scene from S5E10 of The Sopranos. Tony is in Dr. Melfi’s office:

M: Okay, let’s stick to the subject.

T: Which is what?

M: Your own intolerance for frustration.

T: ‘Thank you for calling. Your call is important to us.’ If it’s so important to you, answer the fucking phone!

M: Stay with that.

T: It’s just a level of bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! Every fucking new idea they come up with that’s supposed to make things better makes things worse.

M: Okay right, I agree. ‘The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.’

T: What the fuck are you talking about?

M: We live in a time of technological and spiritual crisis. But you feel you’re above all of it. Certainly above any inconvenience or annoyance. And if things don’t go your way, instead of being merely disappointed or inconvenienced, you blow.

T: My sister’s…. She’s taking anger management classes. Y’know maybe she’s on the right track.

M: Is this something you’d consider?

T: No.

M’s face falls in disappointment.

Melfi’s talking in 2004. George W. Bush was president. Friends was still on the air. She’s referencing Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, a poem from 1919. The other week, I taught undergrads Didion’s ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’,³ which also references the Yeats poem; Didion was writing in 1967. Chinua Achebe’s wrote his novel, Things Fall Apart, another reference, in 1958 about the 1890s.

So when was it that the center held, exactly? And for whom?

As wise as Melfi is here re Tony, she’s unwise re 2004 specifically being ‘a time of technological and spiritual crisis’. That is, I think she’s seeing the world as cycles, pendulums swinging: 2004 for Melfi was like 1967, like 1919. Melfi looks at the zeit and sees a geist. It haunts us every few decades, perhaps?

In PhD school I read novel after novel across the decades that talked in one way or another about how fractured life was now, how splintered and disjointed compared to some fuzzy past when this wasn’t the case. This was lamented in the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1950s—you get my drift.

What I learned: life’s fractures are less a fact than a lens. Like floaters, they sometimes catch your eye and stain everything you see.

Most days, I bet I could out-anger Tony Soprano about the level of bullshit in the world. The latest culprit: Twitter’s owned by an anti-labor racist whose imagination begins and ends at online angermonging about Holocaust denialism and offers to rape celebrities,⁴ and yet people not only still use Twitter, but still post screenshotted tweets to Instagram. I’ll never understand it. Is the idea that these still-on-Twitter folks see a tweet, feel the truth of its content, and think This tweet is saying things that are only being said here, on Twitter, so it’s my duty to share this with people who have decided—for all the sane, humane, and obvious reasons—to get the fuck off Twitter?

(Talk about a technological and spiritual crisis!)

When you post tweets to Instagram you are the bachelorette at the gay bar. I’m sure you’re having tons of fun, but you’re ruining a place that wasn’t built for you.

Okay let’s do one more. Tonight, N & I are going to the Balboa Theater to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That this is falling on the night of the U.S. Presidential Debate is a happy coincidence. This morning, the L.A. Times ran a column: ‘How to get real answers from Trump and Harris? Ask these debate questions’. After a series of admittedly good and pointed questions, the column concluded this way:

Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

Many years ago, before the unsuccessful pilot, I tried to write a book about standup comedy. That failed, and I tried again, and that one clearly made me rich and famous. As part of my ‘research’, I saw a lot of standup. In August 2012, I saw John Mulaney at the DC Improv one night and Jerry Seinfeld at the Kennedy Center the next. They both did bits about caller ID. Here’s Seinfeld’s first:

Caller ID! It’s very tense!

Tense! Competitive!

Why should they be calling me knowing I’m me without me knowing that it’s them?

I should be calling them without them knowing it’s me.

That would give me the advantage.

Why do we think like that?

Years ago the phone would ring and somebody in your house would go ‘I’ll get it!’

You haven’t heard that in a long time.

Now the phone rings, people go: ‘Nobody move! Who the hell is 513?’

Here’s Mulaney’s:

Some days my phone’ll ring and I’ll be like, Huh … 615?

What the fuck is that area code?

[mimes answering the phone]

‘Hello?’

‘Pensacola Highway Patrol?!’

[makes a shocked and delighted face]

‘Yes I would like to appear in court for those traffic tickets!'

I’m gonna have an adventure!

Both comics are working a technological crisis into a spiritual one for laffs, which is one way to be merely disappointed by the disappointments of life—make fun of them. But in their fun, Seinfeld’s having an opinion about caller ID, and Mulaney’s having an imagination.

That’s another way to be merely disappointed: make fun from it. It doesn’t even have to be funny just new, something else. There’s nothing fresh about bullshit;⁵ it sinks you in a bog. This is why Tony says the word three times: it’s again and again and again with this shit. He can’t imagine alternatives, can’t see the world as material.

In the end, Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a big disappointment, the original 16mm print washed-out to hell, the soundtrack near unintelligible, shriller than Tobe Hooper could ever have intended. Also, the advertised $2 refills applied only to sodas, which we discovered only after tossing our bag of popcorn that we’d made too salty.

The disappointment was real, but mere, because the second popcorn was delicious. And despite the lousy print, I’m glad we went. It got us out of the house on a Tuesday, gave the MFA program assistant a good joke to make about the similarities between her and my viewing plans that night, and gave me this ending to a Shenny, however disappointing.

This week’s thing I did not buy at the antique store are these postcards of children drinking goatmilk from the teat:

1. This is a lie similar to the ‘job killer!’ one the restaurant industry told about Calif.’s raising the fast food minimum wage to $20/hour, which has actually increased the number of fast food jobs in the state.

2. To be fair, I was finally invited by friends to do an escape room this summer, and I replied to the group text with so many exclamation points, but then I got a stupid invitation to do a stupid residency so I missed the whole thing.

3. An uninspired choice, but it does take place 3 blocks from campus.

4. It’s also owned by shithead billionaire Bill Ackman and recently-arrested-on-sex-trafficking-charges Sean Combs, among other disasters.

5. Fresh bullshit is either a joke or a scam, depending on what it wants from you.