Illogical
Hello. My name is Tom, and I am addicted to ethics.
I have been cursed with the ability to see each and every side of an issue, and it has become so ingrained in my being that I have found it increasingly difficult to even function in everyday life.
Let me give you an example: I volunteer at a non-profit organization dedicated to finding homes for abandoned children. We spend thousands of dollars on supplies each month to house and take care of these children until we can find a place for them to stay. Now, I know that I can purchase the supplies at discount rates at Wal-Mart, but if I do so I hurt the American economy, further entrap the people working there, and help to exploit the children working in overseas sweat shops to produce the goods. So it’s either help our kids at the expense of, well, pretty much everyone else; or spend more money on fewer supplies for abandoned orphans. Who do I choose? Who gets to be a victim of this cold cost-benefit analysis?
This kind of crap keeps me up at night.
This “gift” is not something that I was born with, though. It was something forced upon me during my more formative years. I can actually pinpoint the day that I started embracing all this ethical bullshit. How’s that for fucked up?
Now, I’d be lying if I said it’s because I knew then that the events of October 27th 1989 would shape me into the pathetic, self-hating narcissist you see before you. Na, it’s nothin’ quite like that. I remember because it was the day that Dad kicked Janice out of the house. It was also the last day that I called Janice “Mom.”
I was seven then. I’d been fighting the flu for a couple days, but my father was one of those types that said if you weren’t passed out, coughing up a lung, or vomiting ‘til you were dehydrated, you didn’t get out of school. It took all of two hours for the latter to happen, and all over my teacher’s paisley dress, too.
She sent me to the nurse’s office where I was only running a 101 degree fever. Yes kids, believe it or not, there was a time when America funded public schools well enough to afford nurses and text books printed in the same decade they were being used! Anyway, she tried calling both my parents, but neither answered their phones at work. I might’ve found that odd had I not been both sweating and freezing at the same time.
Fortunately, I only lived a few blocks from the school, and after forcing a double dose of Thera-Flu down my throat, the nurse sent me home.
I remember the walk home well. I keep this memory protected because I always want to be able to recall what it was like to be normal, to be human. It was so…serene. The world would function as normal one last time for me, and this was it. The crisp fall air smelled fresh and clean and the cool temperature felt good on my hot skin, though I knew it would only be a few minutes before I would be freezing again. There were a few children not quite old enough to be in school playing on the sidewalk. Some girls were drawing hopscotch courses in chalk and challenging each other to do it faster than the last one. A couple of boys were playing “Cops and Robbers” in the front lawn of one of their houses. My neighbor, an elderly man, was mowing the fallen leaves in his yard with his big red riding lawnmower.
When I think about this, I want to think that I smiled at these people as I passed them, but I don’t think I did. I was sick after all. But every time I remember this day, I’m not seven years old anymore. I’m as old as I am when I remember it: fourteen, seventeen, twenty-one, or, like today, twenty-four. I pass them and I see their smiling faces, and I smile back. But it’s not a happy smile. It’s a sad smile, an envious smile. The kids love their games and are able to enjoy them and excused from the destructive machinations of the real world. My neighbor has everything in his life planned out. Nothing will ever surprise him.
I hate them all for it, even now.
By the time I get to my front door, though, I’m seven again. Nothing can quite make me feel younger or smaller than what is about to unfold. It’s tragic, really.
I put my key to the latch, only to realize that the door isn’t locked. It wasn’t even closed all the way, just pushed up to the frame. When I try to push my key in, the door swings open, and that’s when I hear the yelling.
“How the fuck could you do this to us, Janice?”
I knew something was wrong. Dad never cursed. Today would be the last time I would hear him do so until I turned nineteen and told him I had dropped out of engineering and was majoring in English instead.
“Because of you, Michael! Because of all this! Do you think I wanted to be married, living in the suburbs, raising a kid of all things before I was thirty? I had my whole damn life ahead of me and you took that all away when you knocked me up!”
“When I knocked you up?” Dad shouted. “As I recall, it was you who told me you were on the pill. You think I wanted to be a dad at twenty-two? But I did the right thing. I married you instead of leaving you to raise him by yourself. I got a good job and gave you a home and a life. I even got you a job after Tom was born. I basically handed you the American Dream and you’d throw it all away for some zit-faced high school dropout mail clerk at your office? You’d fuck this seventeen year-old and ruin everything we’ve built together just so you can feel young for a few minutes?”
“Fuck you Michael!” Janice screamed.
“No, fuck you Janice,” Dad said resolutely. “Get your stuff and get the fuck out of my house.”
I remember my Mom dashing from the kitchen and running upstairs. She didn’t even notice me standing in the doorway. Dad did, though. He was taking a long, slow drink from newly opened bottle of beer as he left the kitchen. He nearly choked on it when he saw me standing there, spilling some on the floor.
“Tom? What are you doing home? How long have you been there?”
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, stunned. I remember hearing the kids playing across the street. One of the boys was shouting at the other. “I shot you! I shot you! You’re dead!” One of the girls was crying, too. She had fallen and skinned her knee on the sidewalk. Her mother had rushed out and was trying to get her daughter’s bawling under control. “Let me kiss it and make it all better,” the mother said. I hated them both just then.
“Tom? Did you hear your mom and I arguing just now?”
“What happened?” I’d asked.
“Your mother…your mother lied to us. She told a lie and now she’s going to be leaving and never coming back.”
“Fuck you, Dan,” Janice had said as she came back down the stairs with a suitcase in each hand. She shoved me out of the way and slammed the door behind her. Dad had taken the beer bottle in his hand and thrown it at the door. The bottle had shattered against the wood less than a foot from me.
That was seventeen years ago now. At the time, of course, I hadn’t understood that my mother had been fucking some mail clerk at the insurance agency where she worked. I didn’t even know what fucking was. But what I did understand is that a lie had ruined my parents’ marriage.
From that day forward, I endeavored to never lie again. For a time, it worked. I mean I was a kid what was there to be deceptive about? Whether or not I ate a cookie before dinner? But as I got older I learned that not only does everybody lie all the time, but that it is a necessity for survival.
God damn human nature.
For a while I was able to rationalize “white lies” and “partial truths,” as necessary to function, but I can’t even do that anymore without pangs of guilt and regret. I remember with a fondness the days where I could tell a teacher, “Oh yeah, I did that assignment,” or say to a girl, “The last thing I’m interested in is sex.”
I can’t lie anymore because I’ve seen how people rationalize their own unethical behavior, and it just disgusts me. It’s a goddamn mindfuck to see Bible-thumping fundamentalists go out of their way to tell people that they’re going to hell, yet ignore the not judging lest they be judged thing or doing nothing about the motes in their own eyes. I laugh out loud when I see Michael Moore, who must weigh close to three hundred pounds, preach about the excesses of American society. It is absolute madness.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I am often torn between being tactful and being truthful. This is especially prevalent in my job. I work in the writing center for the English department as part of my work-study financial aid for grad school. I wouldn’t mind this job usually. I mean I like working with people. Unfortunately, it isn’t the people who come to college to get an education that come and get my help. Mainly, it’s the people getting paid to sleep through class and lift weights that need assistance. These supposed college students come in to my office with some of the most absolutely god-awful writing that I have ever seen. How they even make it into college without some modicum of competency in wielding the English language is beyond me.
So, what is the ethical choice here?
I can be honest, tell them that they suck and that there’s nothing I can do to turn their tripe into something a professor won’t vomit on when he/she reads it, because these guys always wait ‘til the day before the assignment is due to bring it in and get help. Or I can lie to them, do my best to help ‘em out, and pray the professor is hopped up on a healthy dose of Paxil. Because if the kid comes by, gets help from me, and still fails the assignment, guess whose fault it is. Not that they would fail anyway; the athletic department always manages to find a way to keep their worst students on the field. It’s like fucking high school all over again.
God, I sound like such a narcissist. I don’t really think I’m better than anyone else. In fact, I envy most everyone else. They don’t have to go through this crap like I do. My friend Brandt still gives me hell over the situation with Erin.
Erin was a friend of mine for years. We’d gotten close as the years passed, and she’d apparently developed some secret attraction to me. God knows why; I mean listen to me for Christ’s sakes. Would you want to fuck this?
Anyway, she finally comes out with all this crap about how she loves me and wants to be with me and all this other junk and I sit there, absolutely serious, and say, “Well, that’s great and all, but you’re just a friend. I’m not really interested in a relationship with you. Nothing against you or anything; it’s just how I feel.”
Brandt kicked my ass for that one. “You said what?!” he shouted when I went to his apartment later that night.
“I told her I didn’t love her,” I said.
“Dude!” he yelled. “That doesn’t matter! She basically threw herself at you! Erin is fucking fine! You don’t have to love her! You hit that, you idiot!” He sighed. “What happened next?”
“We talked for the next twenty minutes or so and she basically came up to saying she didn’t care if I loved her or not, she just wanted to come over.”
“I’m going to say this as nicely as possible, given the situation: you are a goddamn motherfucking idiot. What are you doing here instead of being over there knocking that against the headboard?”
I didn’t really have an answer, at least not one that wouldn’t have seen me suffer more ridicule, from him or myself. Hell, I didn’t say no because I didn’t want to fuck her. Like Brandt said, Erin is fucking fine. Besides, she said she didn’t care, so what was the problem?
The problem, so to speak, lies in the fact that, despite how hot Erin might be and how much I would love to take that home for a few hours, I still didn’t think of her as anything more than a friend and I’m not stupid enough to believe that she really doesn’t care if I don’t love her back. I knew that she was lying the instant that she said it, even though she seemed to believe it herself. If I’d gone through with it, the immensity of her feelings or whatever crap she’s drudged up for me from God knows where would eventually crush her ability to keep our adventures at the sexscapade level. It would destroy the friendship between us, which I really did cherish. As you can probably imagine, it’s hard for a person like me to make many friends.
Not like it mattered, the friendship was destroyed anyway. Apparently people don’t respect frankness and honesty anymore.
Damn it, why can’t I just be normal? I could be sleeping soundly in my bed with an incredibly beautiful woman lying next to me. Instead, I’m sitting here at three in the morning with a keyboard and a half-empty bottle of Jack agonizing over how many Pilipino children had been enslaved by my volunteer group’s check to Wal-Mart.
I just can’t help but wonder if, in this quest to be this great person, I’ve lost sight of everything that makes a person good to begin with.
Commentary: I’m really proud of this piece. I think I’ve been able to capture a very real, very visceral look inside the mind of a person definitely marching to the beat of a different drummer.
What I’m particularly proud of is how much one wants to both shake this character’s hand and punch him in the face at the same time. He has so many admirable qualities and always does what is the right thing. He does what everyone wishes they could do. But now that someone sees what doing the right thing all the time does to a person, it makes him pretty despicable.
I think the strongest point is how I was able to make this person’s extremely complex and very linear black and white logic not only evident, but easily comprehensible. The background story sets up his complexity, and the subsequent scenes and commentary play out why he is the way he is and how his mind functions rather than merely trying to explain it to the reader. He doesn’t tell people that he has a flawed perception of what doing the right thing is, but he shows it through his opinions and his actions and they are rather easily understood in the end.
I’m also pretty proud of the language. It’s gritty and dark and shows a severe distaste for how he feels and who he is. It really helps to capture the anger and frustration that he finds himself perpetually immersed in.
I’m not sure about the ending. I added this line to make the point more manifest, but I’m beginning to wonder if I destroyed the reality.
In general, though, I’m very happy with this story.
~Peace
I have been cursed with the ability to see each and every side of an issue, and it has become so ingrained in my being that I have found it increasingly difficult to even function in everyday life.
Let me give you an example: I volunteer at a non-profit organization dedicated to finding homes for abandoned children. We spend thousands of dollars on supplies each month to house and take care of these children until we can find a place for them to stay. Now, I know that I can purchase the supplies at discount rates at Wal-Mart, but if I do so I hurt the American economy, further entrap the people working there, and help to exploit the children working in overseas sweat shops to produce the goods. So it’s either help our kids at the expense of, well, pretty much everyone else; or spend more money on fewer supplies for abandoned orphans. Who do I choose? Who gets to be a victim of this cold cost-benefit analysis?
This kind of crap keeps me up at night.
This “gift” is not something that I was born with, though. It was something forced upon me during my more formative years. I can actually pinpoint the day that I started embracing all this ethical bullshit. How’s that for fucked up?
Now, I’d be lying if I said it’s because I knew then that the events of October 27th 1989 would shape me into the pathetic, self-hating narcissist you see before you. Na, it’s nothin’ quite like that. I remember because it was the day that Dad kicked Janice out of the house. It was also the last day that I called Janice “Mom.”
I was seven then. I’d been fighting the flu for a couple days, but my father was one of those types that said if you weren’t passed out, coughing up a lung, or vomiting ‘til you were dehydrated, you didn’t get out of school. It took all of two hours for the latter to happen, and all over my teacher’s paisley dress, too.
She sent me to the nurse’s office where I was only running a 101 degree fever. Yes kids, believe it or not, there was a time when America funded public schools well enough to afford nurses and text books printed in the same decade they were being used! Anyway, she tried calling both my parents, but neither answered their phones at work. I might’ve found that odd had I not been both sweating and freezing at the same time.
Fortunately, I only lived a few blocks from the school, and after forcing a double dose of Thera-Flu down my throat, the nurse sent me home.
I remember the walk home well. I keep this memory protected because I always want to be able to recall what it was like to be normal, to be human. It was so…serene. The world would function as normal one last time for me, and this was it. The crisp fall air smelled fresh and clean and the cool temperature felt good on my hot skin, though I knew it would only be a few minutes before I would be freezing again. There were a few children not quite old enough to be in school playing on the sidewalk. Some girls were drawing hopscotch courses in chalk and challenging each other to do it faster than the last one. A couple of boys were playing “Cops and Robbers” in the front lawn of one of their houses. My neighbor, an elderly man, was mowing the fallen leaves in his yard with his big red riding lawnmower.
When I think about this, I want to think that I smiled at these people as I passed them, but I don’t think I did. I was sick after all. But every time I remember this day, I’m not seven years old anymore. I’m as old as I am when I remember it: fourteen, seventeen, twenty-one, or, like today, twenty-four. I pass them and I see their smiling faces, and I smile back. But it’s not a happy smile. It’s a sad smile, an envious smile. The kids love their games and are able to enjoy them and excused from the destructive machinations of the real world. My neighbor has everything in his life planned out. Nothing will ever surprise him.
I hate them all for it, even now.
By the time I get to my front door, though, I’m seven again. Nothing can quite make me feel younger or smaller than what is about to unfold. It’s tragic, really.
I put my key to the latch, only to realize that the door isn’t locked. It wasn’t even closed all the way, just pushed up to the frame. When I try to push my key in, the door swings open, and that’s when I hear the yelling.
“How the fuck could you do this to us, Janice?”
I knew something was wrong. Dad never cursed. Today would be the last time I would hear him do so until I turned nineteen and told him I had dropped out of engineering and was majoring in English instead.
“Because of you, Michael! Because of all this! Do you think I wanted to be married, living in the suburbs, raising a kid of all things before I was thirty? I had my whole damn life ahead of me and you took that all away when you knocked me up!”
“When I knocked you up?” Dad shouted. “As I recall, it was you who told me you were on the pill. You think I wanted to be a dad at twenty-two? But I did the right thing. I married you instead of leaving you to raise him by yourself. I got a good job and gave you a home and a life. I even got you a job after Tom was born. I basically handed you the American Dream and you’d throw it all away for some zit-faced high school dropout mail clerk at your office? You’d fuck this seventeen year-old and ruin everything we’ve built together just so you can feel young for a few minutes?”
“Fuck you Michael!” Janice screamed.
“No, fuck you Janice,” Dad said resolutely. “Get your stuff and get the fuck out of my house.”
I remember my Mom dashing from the kitchen and running upstairs. She didn’t even notice me standing in the doorway. Dad did, though. He was taking a long, slow drink from newly opened bottle of beer as he left the kitchen. He nearly choked on it when he saw me standing there, spilling some on the floor.
“Tom? What are you doing home? How long have you been there?”
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, stunned. I remember hearing the kids playing across the street. One of the boys was shouting at the other. “I shot you! I shot you! You’re dead!” One of the girls was crying, too. She had fallen and skinned her knee on the sidewalk. Her mother had rushed out and was trying to get her daughter’s bawling under control. “Let me kiss it and make it all better,” the mother said. I hated them both just then.
“Tom? Did you hear your mom and I arguing just now?”
“What happened?” I’d asked.
“Your mother…your mother lied to us. She told a lie and now she’s going to be leaving and never coming back.”
“Fuck you, Dan,” Janice had said as she came back down the stairs with a suitcase in each hand. She shoved me out of the way and slammed the door behind her. Dad had taken the beer bottle in his hand and thrown it at the door. The bottle had shattered against the wood less than a foot from me.
That was seventeen years ago now. At the time, of course, I hadn’t understood that my mother had been fucking some mail clerk at the insurance agency where she worked. I didn’t even know what fucking was. But what I did understand is that a lie had ruined my parents’ marriage.
From that day forward, I endeavored to never lie again. For a time, it worked. I mean I was a kid what was there to be deceptive about? Whether or not I ate a cookie before dinner? But as I got older I learned that not only does everybody lie all the time, but that it is a necessity for survival.
God damn human nature.
For a while I was able to rationalize “white lies” and “partial truths,” as necessary to function, but I can’t even do that anymore without pangs of guilt and regret. I remember with a fondness the days where I could tell a teacher, “Oh yeah, I did that assignment,” or say to a girl, “The last thing I’m interested in is sex.”
I can’t lie anymore because I’ve seen how people rationalize their own unethical behavior, and it just disgusts me. It’s a goddamn mindfuck to see Bible-thumping fundamentalists go out of their way to tell people that they’re going to hell, yet ignore the not judging lest they be judged thing or doing nothing about the motes in their own eyes. I laugh out loud when I see Michael Moore, who must weigh close to three hundred pounds, preach about the excesses of American society. It is absolute madness.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I am often torn between being tactful and being truthful. This is especially prevalent in my job. I work in the writing center for the English department as part of my work-study financial aid for grad school. I wouldn’t mind this job usually. I mean I like working with people. Unfortunately, it isn’t the people who come to college to get an education that come and get my help. Mainly, it’s the people getting paid to sleep through class and lift weights that need assistance. These supposed college students come in to my office with some of the most absolutely god-awful writing that I have ever seen. How they even make it into college without some modicum of competency in wielding the English language is beyond me.
So, what is the ethical choice here?
I can be honest, tell them that they suck and that there’s nothing I can do to turn their tripe into something a professor won’t vomit on when he/she reads it, because these guys always wait ‘til the day before the assignment is due to bring it in and get help. Or I can lie to them, do my best to help ‘em out, and pray the professor is hopped up on a healthy dose of Paxil. Because if the kid comes by, gets help from me, and still fails the assignment, guess whose fault it is. Not that they would fail anyway; the athletic department always manages to find a way to keep their worst students on the field. It’s like fucking high school all over again.
God, I sound like such a narcissist. I don’t really think I’m better than anyone else. In fact, I envy most everyone else. They don’t have to go through this crap like I do. My friend Brandt still gives me hell over the situation with Erin.
Erin was a friend of mine for years. We’d gotten close as the years passed, and she’d apparently developed some secret attraction to me. God knows why; I mean listen to me for Christ’s sakes. Would you want to fuck this?
Anyway, she finally comes out with all this crap about how she loves me and wants to be with me and all this other junk and I sit there, absolutely serious, and say, “Well, that’s great and all, but you’re just a friend. I’m not really interested in a relationship with you. Nothing against you or anything; it’s just how I feel.”
Brandt kicked my ass for that one. “You said what?!” he shouted when I went to his apartment later that night.
“I told her I didn’t love her,” I said.
“Dude!” he yelled. “That doesn’t matter! She basically threw herself at you! Erin is fucking fine! You don’t have to love her! You hit that, you idiot!” He sighed. “What happened next?”
“We talked for the next twenty minutes or so and she basically came up to saying she didn’t care if I loved her or not, she just wanted to come over.”
“I’m going to say this as nicely as possible, given the situation: you are a goddamn motherfucking idiot. What are you doing here instead of being over there knocking that against the headboard?”
I didn’t really have an answer, at least not one that wouldn’t have seen me suffer more ridicule, from him or myself. Hell, I didn’t say no because I didn’t want to fuck her. Like Brandt said, Erin is fucking fine. Besides, she said she didn’t care, so what was the problem?
The problem, so to speak, lies in the fact that, despite how hot Erin might be and how much I would love to take that home for a few hours, I still didn’t think of her as anything more than a friend and I’m not stupid enough to believe that she really doesn’t care if I don’t love her back. I knew that she was lying the instant that she said it, even though she seemed to believe it herself. If I’d gone through with it, the immensity of her feelings or whatever crap she’s drudged up for me from God knows where would eventually crush her ability to keep our adventures at the sexscapade level. It would destroy the friendship between us, which I really did cherish. As you can probably imagine, it’s hard for a person like me to make many friends.
Not like it mattered, the friendship was destroyed anyway. Apparently people don’t respect frankness and honesty anymore.
Damn it, why can’t I just be normal? I could be sleeping soundly in my bed with an incredibly beautiful woman lying next to me. Instead, I’m sitting here at three in the morning with a keyboard and a half-empty bottle of Jack agonizing over how many Pilipino children had been enslaved by my volunteer group’s check to Wal-Mart.
I just can’t help but wonder if, in this quest to be this great person, I’ve lost sight of everything that makes a person good to begin with.
Commentary: I’m really proud of this piece. I think I’ve been able to capture a very real, very visceral look inside the mind of a person definitely marching to the beat of a different drummer.
What I’m particularly proud of is how much one wants to both shake this character’s hand and punch him in the face at the same time. He has so many admirable qualities and always does what is the right thing. He does what everyone wishes they could do. But now that someone sees what doing the right thing all the time does to a person, it makes him pretty despicable.
I think the strongest point is how I was able to make this person’s extremely complex and very linear black and white logic not only evident, but easily comprehensible. The background story sets up his complexity, and the subsequent scenes and commentary play out why he is the way he is and how his mind functions rather than merely trying to explain it to the reader. He doesn’t tell people that he has a flawed perception of what doing the right thing is, but he shows it through his opinions and his actions and they are rather easily understood in the end.
I’m also pretty proud of the language. It’s gritty and dark and shows a severe distaste for how he feels and who he is. It really helps to capture the anger and frustration that he finds himself perpetually immersed in.
I’m not sure about the ending. I added this line to make the point more manifest, but I’m beginning to wonder if I destroyed the reality.
In general, though, I’m very happy with this story.
~Peace
posted by Jon Fish at
4:18 AM
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