How to Get What You Want

"Cash rules everything around me/C.R.E.A.M/Get the money/Dolla, dolla bills y’all!"

--Wu Tang

I was riding the El today and went past a hospital with someone opening the door to go in.

It struck me that, from what I can tell, illness is your body’s attempt to deal with a lacking past. Mess around too long and you get a cold, get cancer, have a heart attack. Messing around being stepping out on your soul—smoking, refusing to rest, not speaking up, ignoring your dreams, etc.

I then thought of our whole society as an enormous reaction to the fear that we were starving (or dying, or in danger). I then thought of business’ love of data and numbers—of quantification—and it seemed obvious to me that that was a love of the past. Or at best, a future so afraid of the past that it cannot create anything but what it thought was the best of the past. (With momentary glimpses of the creative future as it runs dry of numbers to crunch).

I then thought what that block may have been like if all that time, energy, money and love that was there to heal people’s pasts had just been allocated to ensuring their futures in the first place. Certainly the hospital represented hundreds of millions of dollars.

What would it look like to free a whole block of people from ever having to face fear? I’m not talking about growing up rich and having so much accumulated fear that you spend your whole life feeling guilty and worthless or trying to give it away—help someone else. I’m talking about a life completely supported forever. What if someone supported your every whim and fancy.

I then thought what people would think if I started talking about doing what you want. Inevitably, beer and porn come up.

If we all could do what we wanted forever, wouldn’t we just act like monkeys at a landfill and get fat, lazy and suffer worse hygiene? Isn’t that what the problem is already?

Most definitely not, my better half argued. Beer, porn and whatever else is cheap substitution for a feeling that we lose somewhere from the first hospital to the last hospital. And it doesn’t even work. We’ve just got horribly low standards.

Whenever someone mentions that I have a lot of discipline (when I’m refusing a piece of cake or something similarly longsighted) I try to mention that I’ve never changed what I was looking for a day in my life. I have gone for a feeling of contentment—for what I wanted—and taken the easiest and most stable road I could find every single time.

It was the road I took drinking beer before class in high school, smoking a pack a day after, and turning coffee into a religion in Burlington, VT (coffee was the one I thought I’d never have to give up).

It was the road I took eating bowls of pasta at the Green Cat in Seattle, doing yoga, reading self-help books, and chasing women I didn’t really care about. It was the road I took doing just about everything.

And then one day—after I was eating according to my blood type, after I had had all the proper massage, after I had taken a nap every day for a few years, after I had taken a course of amino acids, and filled notebooks with exercises from The Feeling Good Handbook (all of which work, by the way)—it dawned on me: all I was doing was mediating the past’s effect on how I felt in the present. Why not give up on it all together? Why not just flip it!? Why not just ignore everything that happened to me and move in on a permanent basis with what I wanted to do every day. What if I simply never panicked?

It was strange at first—but I never forgot anything important. I still know where I was born, what I’ve done my whole life, and how I felt when my parents got divorced. But a funny thing started happening as I began to insist that my fears and so-called issues walk on their own—the inside became inside and the outside became outside. I turned inside out. And that feels like a vastly superior way to walk down the street.

When I was writing my book (and horribly depressed) I realized that if my depression ever lifted I’d have to express and act on all the wild thoughts that ran through my head. That if I had the energy and time to live that I’d have to actually live. And nothing scared me more.

I thought that would be like my ideas on acid. I thought that it would be like Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”—borderline crazy—and I didn’t want to do that.

But that was just my brain talking. You don’t get present with your brain still going, you find, grab and switch to your gut. You learn how to ignore more and more of the clutter and clatter around you until it’s manageable. You feel fear but know how to choose not to pay attention to it. We’re constantly doing this—either paying attention to ourselves or the fear. In a very real way we choose god or a devil every moment.

Which is not to say that as soon as you decide to take chances you know what you’re doing. There is a reason they call it the dark night of the soul. Because you don’t know where the hell you are or what you’re doing. But that’s okay too. You start to see patterns. Feel similarities. Get comfortable doing this new kind of work. You develop a whole group of things you’d be willing to die for.

Back to the point at hand—our wants and living forward instead of backing through life—once you try something like beer as a way of life (I’m thinking here of the album “More Beer” by the band Fear), there’s no way you can sustain it. The only way is to taper off and taper off—or go whole hog and see where that gets you. And we all know that gets you nowhere.

Grace Llewellyn (what a great name). in her genius book “The Teenage Liberation Handbook”, posits the same answer to a parental question about a child wanting to watch television every day once he or she is “liberated” from school. She says let ‘em watch—and not even mention it. They couldn’t possibly watch it for more than six months straight without getting bored, she says.

It was that advice that made me think that all our excess television, beer, cigarettes, double tall grandes, and blackout shopping trips were fearful responses to the fearful conditions that created them in the first place. And that the only way away from them was not to demonize them but just to keep choosing. As we feel less fearful about what we do for work, how our credentials look to a possible employer, how we look, etc. they just fall away. Or we can go straight there right now. Though we may not understand it as well as we’d like—we are in charge of ourselves. That goes for businessmen and soccer moms as well as artists and protesters. You are in charge of your life.

And what we do want may be as varied and diverse as we are as people. (Although my sneaking suspicion is that it’s pretty darn simple.) I’m throwing my vote in with those who think that we were made in god’s image. What I take from that is that we are primarily creative beings and not primarily consumptive beings. I think it’s our repressed desires that lead us to consume and destroy, and although there may be a blip of consumption as we turn around, we will quickly find that the route to love includes much greater priority for relaxation, making love, playing with children and singing than it does for shopping, watching TV, drinking beer and the like. That’s what I want to do.

And ps: if anyone knows the light-skinned woman in the current “Dream On” videos (for Pontiac?), please tell her there’s an envelope from Publisher’s Clearinghouse addressed to her on my front table.

Zoom, zoom.