Historia Calamitatum

Ah, memories. I have some of those: a few good ones, a few medium ones, and a lot of bad ones. The bad ones are what I prefer to dwell on, particularly when I’m around strangers who haven’t yet heard my sob stories.

One thing I’ve learned over the years1 is that it is better to tell fictional sob stories than real ones. What I like to do, given how I’ve inherited the “luck of the Irish” from my deceased and decidedly non-Irish father, is to either exagerrate or to downplay how bad things have been for me, depending on what I believe the expectations of my audience are. So if I’m before a crowd of real fucked-up “Marla from Fight Club” types2, I’ll shoot high: multiple molestations, total impoverishment, suicide attempts stacked one atop the other, years in rehab, and the rest of the Whole Nine Yards starring Matthew Perry and the l8, gr8 Michael Clarke Duncan as the Nine Yards. But if I’m in front of a bunch of good country people of the sort who used to look down on me and my fucking family of fucking idiots, I’ll just mouth some platitudes about how “I’ve struggled to get my act together” and how “my late twenties were rough but I’m in a better place now.”3 I might even append something about centering myself or renewing my faith if that’s what I think people want to hear.

As a historian, or at least as a man who plays a historian at work, I have reached a point of no return: I have lost my faith in the past. Not in the people who lived in the past–they were, much like the people of today, arrant imbeciles and sex-crazed buffoons–but in the fact that there was a past at all. Human memory is more than just faulty, pace Montaigne, it’s nonexistent. How many conversations begin with vague recollections? “Yes, Bill, how’s he doing? Does he still eat shit out of the commode? I distinctly kinda sorta may have heard about him doing that and I’d like to follow up with you regarding this anecdote.” How fleeting and insubstantial is our engagement even with material that has been recorded for posterity? “Oh yeah, that movie I probably saw but that I know exists in the world, it was kinda okay, I guess. Nothing special, but yeah, definitely a movie.”4

At a certain point, you–and you meaning me, while also meaning you–need to recognize that you’re not remembered and that you don’t matter. You need to understand that your job is pointless, and that all of the time you’ve taken to speak to other humans, who are every bit as rotten and ungrateful as you, was actually less productive than pissing in the wind, because at least in that case a “product” of some sort is involved. Other humans can sit across from you and utter words, but their presence, like your own, amounts to little more than a way of killing time while waiting for something better and truer, something more momentous, to occur. You aren’t that thing for them and they aren’t that thing for you.5

“I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live.”

Leo Tolstoy was a sweetheart and a runny-nosed god of a writer, but he knew more about beard-growing than human nature. Men6 live to eat, first of all, and once they’ve discovered a consistent source of food, they live to pop their cherries, after which they raise or abandon offspring. But once the offspring are raised or fail to materialize due to protection or impotence or “shooting blanks” or what have ye–and here I’m not privileging one outcome over the other–what else is left? Children, insofar as they serve any purpose at all, seem to exist to anchor us to the world until such time as they can be released into the wild, whereupon they’ll relaunch the whole wretched cycle of trying and failing. But I suppose I can understand why they provide “joy” and “hope” for so many. Kids/“kiddos”7, like the prospect that a cherry-popping might be more than just that, represent limitless possibility. Maybe this next run, your child’s doe-eyed look suggests, won’t be so goddamned stupid and pointless &c. Maybe he or she will do the right things for the right reasons, instead of the wrong things for no reasons. Maybe people will listen to him or her, since there’s always a chance. Isn’t there always a chance?8

Screaming! Screaming! I heard screaming!

My own ostensible reason for living was to come back from my hard times, and it’s now clear that I’ve come back and went. Each one of these sweet little stories constitutes a fragment of the last will and testament of Oscar Berkman, a literary character too tough to die and too weak to watch thirty minutes of DailyMotion footage of late-life circumcisions (much less to actually get one in the hopes of scoring a moderately fast-trending and half-viral Slate.com piece out of the ordeal). So I say to you, Oscar Berkman’s Harshest Critics, exactly what I said to my high school classmates when my stellar GPA qualified me to deliver the “baccalaureate oration”: It’s been real, it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun. Catch ya on the flip side, humanoids.

Usually on dates, when I’m trying to “score” or “pop my cherry,” neither of which ever has happened. I really thought that Life™, by which I mean the game of Life™, should revolve around this all-important, all-consuming quest. The game, which is already laid out as a kind of haphazard highway that leads to the enlightenment of the grave, should fix greater attention on the sort of plot device that concerns our finest examples of “teen cinema” and “hot college comedy”; viz., “cherry-popping.” Because, at least as far as I can tell from watching these movies over and over on account of how they stave off the tears, Life™ is all about “popping your cherry” and then just flat-out coming to a bittersweet end. And what I want more than anything else, God how I want it, is an ending. A little closure, is that too much to ask? Because my story, of which you’ll read, skim, or ignore more of in the body of the text, contained plenty of opportunities for a bang finish. But here I am, 30 years old and it’s still just creaking along like an ex-NFL player trying to walk up a flight of stairs. Like srsly wtf omg zomg rofl roflmao
Please don’t take this reference as an endorsement of either the book, which is the most manipulative piece of shit ever committed to paper, or the film, which ought to have come with a barf bag so that I could’ve puked my guts out after becoming overwhelmed by the Fincher-enforced sentimentality.
None of this is true, but what is truth? In my opinion (and that’s all eXiStEnZ is; it’s just, like, your opinion, man), truth is whatever *feels* true to you. Or, as O.W. Holmes Jr. so neatly put it, “truth was the majority vote of that nation that could lick all others.” But isn’t it more than this? Did something real ever happen to me? My lived past, whatever that past might have consisted of, seems about as heavy as a gross of cotton candy skewers.
Said to you after you’ve proceeded to deliver a disquisition on the merits of that film, which undoubtedly had deep meaning for you up until the moment when this brusque and careless dismissal by a third party revealed how barren and infirm your mental landscape was.
Consider, if you will, a date. A meeting with a student or an employer/employee would work equally well here, but I’m going with a date because that’s a universal and universally awful occurrence all of us have had to endure during years on this orb leavened only by the fact that, for reasons entirely out of our control, we weren’t born into one of the hundreds of polities being exploited by the small percentage of elite ones that are currently grinding up the rest of the world to make their bread. To which I say, “tough titty,” as if this were a thing people ever said or still say. Anyway, you’re on this date and saying words and it’s “blah blah blah blah.” “Blah blah blah blah” is exactly how the words are reaching the other person, who within two seconds of meeting you had already decided whether to “pop your cherry” and undoubtedly concluded that safety should be *semper ubique et omnibus* prioritized over feeling sorry. And his or her words are streaming in to you as “blah blah blah blah.” Mixed in there somewhere are a bunch of lies, maybe a generous exagerration of your salary or general lot in life (the two amount to the same thing), and the gradual recognition that Forster’s exhortation to “only connect” is about as bullshit as professional wrestling. Then you go your separate ways, and if you ever see one another again, you pass each other with your heads down and hope that it wasn’t as bad as you thought it was, because damn it seemed bad at the time. But fortunately you and he/she weren’t memorable at all, and are wrong to think that you are (how narcissistic of you both!), so it doesn’t matter.
Here I mean “men and women” but simply don’t want to type that, nor do I want to write “people” because I don’t like how that word sounds. Not that I should give two shits about the literary quality of my work, since a) it’s all dreadful and b) no one reads it, but I have my pride and not much else. You know what really gets my goat, though? Those lazy fucking comedians and social commentators whose entire horseshit careers consist of making observations about how men and women are different, how ethnic groups say and do silly things, and so forth. This is about the lowest form of human creativity, if it can be called such at all, and yet we still continue to embrace it. Think about a comedian like Amy Schumer, whose hackneyed shtick largely consists of insincere jokes about what disappointing assholes 99.9% of men are; what good is this kind of work, aside from shoring up the embodied cultural differences that have made life a vale of tears? We already know that our time on earth is miserable, and that the things that separate us one from the other are what makes it such a ruinous experience. Why not seek in comedy, or in commentary more broadly, for some thread of the universal? Why not aspire to create things that will last beyond your time, if not for all time? You’ll fail at it the way I’ve failed at everything I’ve ever attempted, but at least I’ve failed on my own terms and I’ll go down curled in a fetal ball while other, worse people go down swinging without so much as a clue as to when their fortunes were reversed. They’ll probably still have more money than I do, though, and that’s not nothing.
I know this awful middle-aged sackcloth & ashes of a human being (a “human bean,” as my late father RIP g-d rest his soul etc. used to say) who insists on referring to all people under age 30 as “kiddos,” and it’s a term I hate more than life itself, which is saying something if you’ve read at least a couple sentences of this piece.
I wish I had been by my father’s side when he died. I don’t know what I would’ve said to him, but I would’ve said more to him than I did during our last real conversation, which took place while I was driving up and down the Pacific coast in a gray Toyota van filled to bursting with students. It would’ve been a great scene for the story of my life, you see, and I could’ve jazzed it up with a little James Frey-meets-Mitch Albom hocus-pocus, thereby extracting a threadbare and emotionally bankrupt meaning from a moment that quite honestly would’ve meant jack shit to me, given how broken-down I already was. I’m still not over it, meaning my relationship with him, but neither am I under it. Rather, I’m in exactly the same place with it that I had been for many years, which is to say I’m left with a firm understanding that the point of his life had been to show me that there was no point to mine.

–Ohvuh LeRoi Bimmin