When my kitchen became infested with ants this summer, as it does every year, I put out ant traps, which, in another annual rite, did exactly nothing. So I did what I always end up doing — inefficiently
smushing the ants one by one. Sometimes I’ll massacre dozens at a time in a fit of pique after catching them glutting themselves in my sugar bowl, but then, seeing a single ant moping around on the
counter looking sort of forlorn and hangdog, I’ll hesitate. He looks like maybe he’s not having such a great day already. Getting smushed is the last thing this guy needs.
Watching an ant scramble frantically to escape my annihilating thumb, he certainly looks every bit as conscious of his own mortality as I am.
Dispensing death and clemency capriciously — killing on petulant impulse, granting pardons at whim — gives me an Olympian view of how men must live and die in battle or disasters: one just unlucky,
in the wrong place at the wrong moment, while the guy next to him is miraculously spared for no reason at all. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
Ants, as individuals, do not seem like very complicated animals to me (I’m sure E. O. Wilson would correct me), but every time I smush one I am aware I am extinguishing for all eternity one being’s
single chance to be alive. It’s hard to believe Descartes convinced even himself that animals were automata; watching an ant scramble frantically to escape my annihilating thumb, he certainly looks
every bit as conscious of his own mortality as I am. Read more…
I LIVED with the same cat for 19 years — by far the longest relationship of my adult life. Under common law, this cat was my wife. I fell asleep at night with the warm, pleasant weight of the cat on my
chest. The first thing I saw on most mornings was the foreshortened paw of the cat retreating slowly from my face and her baleful crescent glare informing me that it was Cat Food Time. As I often told her,
in a mellow, resonant, Barry White voice: “There is no luuve … like the luuve that exists … between a man … and his cat.”
‘You’re in love with that cat!’ my then-girlfriend Margot once accused me. To be fair, she was a very attractive cat.
The cat was jealous of my attention; she liked to sit on whatever I was reading, walked back and forth and back and forth in front of my laptop’s screen while I worked, and unsubtly interpolated herself
between me and any woman I may have had over. She and my ex Kati Jo, who was temperamentally not dissimilar to the cat, instantly sized each other up as enemies. When I was physically intimate with a woman,
the cat did not discreetly absent herself but sat on the edge of the bed with her back to me, facing rather pointedly away from the scene of debauch, quietly exuding disapproval, like your grandmother’s
ghost.
Read more…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
I used to be a polemicist. I was an editorial cartoonist, and wrote what I called “artist’s statements” to accompany my cartoons each week, which over the two terms of the George W. Bush
administration lengthened and sharpened from rants into something more like essays. I became practiced at using language as a weapon. My role models were hilarious, elegant and brutal humorists from Mark
Twain and H.L. Mencken through Hunter S. Thompson and Matt Taibbi, who raised American invective to an art form. This is a fine and honorable tradition when practiced with a certain amour-propre and panache, but in the last couple of decades it’s become our dominant mode of public discourse, degraded by hacks and amateurs who ape its cruelty but are rhetorically illiterate and tone-deaf to
humor. They’re just parroting talking points with profanity.
I’m no longer an active combatant in that fight. As the grim, endless decade of the War on Terror dragged on I began to get a bad aesthetic conscience about my screeds, and grew concerned that I might
be doing cirrhotic damage to what let’s call, for old times’ sake, my soul. I found a second career as an essayist, and made a conscientious effort to be more intellectually honest, fair-minded
and empathetic, to get out there and try to help instead of just cheerfully jeering from the bleachers.
But excising aggression from your art turns out to be a tricky business, like separating Hyde from Jekyll; even if you could do it, what remained would be pallid, weak and denatured. My first book of prose was
less angry than my political writing had been, more melancholy and reflective, and almost every one of its essays was about someone I’d loved — but there is aggression at the heart of all attachment,
just as there is a dark unconscious attraction beneath all hatred. And it was only after I’d finished that book that I saw clearly how much old aggression, competitiveness and ambition had been sublimated
into it. Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
Recently I received an e-mail that wasn’t meant for me, but was about me. I’d been cc’d by accident. This is one of the darker hazards of electronic communication, Reason No. 697 Why the
Internet Is Bad — the dreadful consequence of hitting “reply all” instead of “reply” or “forward.” The context is that I had rented a herd of goats for reasons
that aren’t relevant here and had sent out a mass e-mail with photographs of the goats attached to illustrate that a) I had goats, and b) it was good. Most of the responses I received expressed appropriate
admiration and envy of my goats, but the message in question was intended not as a response to me but as an aside to some of the recipient’s co-workers, sighing over the kinds of expenditures on which
I was frittering away my uncomfortable income. The word “oof” was used.
I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical and anarchic mind could design would not be on the military or financial sector but simply to simultaneously make every e-mail
and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe; the fabric of society would instantly evaporate, every marriage, friendship and business
partnership dissolved. Civilization, which is held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions and white lies, would collapse in an apocalypse of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups
and fistfights, divorces and bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds, litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets and lingering ill will. Read more…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
My friend Alicia likes to mock me by mimicking the tone of online comments on my writing, affecting the snarky hauteur that is the Internet’s default: “Kreider makes the audacious claim
that his cat is more attractive than all other living cats,” she’ll say. “According to Kreider, pie is a perfectly acceptable breakfast,” or “Kreider would have it that pants are purely optional.” She’s making mild fun of my sporadic blips of Internet celebrity, but I think she’s more heavily amused to hear commenters citing her feckless
goofball friend as though I were some eminent authority, solemnly parsing my passing opinions as though they were official policy statements. Alicia’s an artist, too, and understands how audiences
tend to ascribe magisterial intention and control to artists, when more often we’re just making it up as we go, doing the best we can by deadline. Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
My sister and I recently toured the retirement community where my mother has announced she’ll be moving. I have been in some bleak clinical facilities for the elderly where not one person was compos mentis
and I had to politely suppress the urge to flee, but this was nothing like that. It was a very cushy modern complex housed in what used to be a seminary, with individual condominiums with big kitchens and
sun rooms, equipped with fancy restaurants, grills and snack bars, a fitness center, a concert hall, a library, an art room, a couple of beauty salons, a bank and an ornate chapel of Italian marble. You
could walk from any building in the complex to another without ever going outside, through underground corridors and glass-enclosed walkways through the woods. Mom described it as “like a college
dorm, except the boys aren’t as good-looking.” Nonetheless I spent much of my day trying not to cry.
You are older at this moment than you’ve ever been before, and it’s the youngest you’re ever going to get.
At all times of major life crisis, friends and family will crowd around and press upon you the false emotions appropriate to the occasion. “That’s so great!” everyone said of my mother’s
decision to move to an assisted-living facility. “It’s really impressive that she decided to do that herself.” They cited their own stories of 90-year-old parents grimly clinging to
drafty dilapidated houses, refusing to move until forced out by strokes or broken hips. “You should be really relieved and grateful.” “She’ll be much happier there.” The
overbearing unanimity of this chorus suggests to me that its real purpose is less to reassure than to suppress, to deny the most obvious and natural emotion that attends this occasion, which is sadness. Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing:
“Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation:
“That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet.
It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged”
their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. Read more…
Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.
Like many people, I like to set aside a few hours every day, generally between 3 and 6 a.m., to lie quietly thinking about everything that could go horribly wrong with my life and all the ways in which I am
negligent and reprehensible. I have spasms of panic over things I shouldn’t have written, or, worse, things I should have; I regret having spent all the money and wonder where more money might ever
conceivably come from; I wish I’d kissed girls I didn’t, as long ago as 1985. I’m suddenly convulsed with remorse over mean things I did in middle school (I am sorry, Matthew Reeve);
I force myself to choose my least favorite death (drowning).
I suspect that if I am killed while biking, the state of mind in which I am likeliest to die is extreme annoyance.
It’s worth noting that the order in which these items preoccupy me is more or less the inverse of the order in which I ought to be worrying about them. I tend to obsess over the least pressing problems,
the ones over which I have the least control. Some people have suggested that I should stop worrying about things I cannot control. These people are no doubt hardheaded, competent C.E.O.’s of the
Fortune 500 of La-La Land. Of course it’s the things I can’t control that I worry about. Worry is not productive; it’s a kind of procrastination. I like to pretend worry is passive,
something your brain does when it’s trapped and helpless, but it’s more often a way to avoid taking some direct action that would be frightening, difficult, inconvenient or boring, like drawing
up a monthly budget or doing sit-ups or finally just summoning up the nerve to ask someone What, exactly, The Deal Is. Worrying can turn into one of those problems that prevents itself from getting solved,
the way that pornography can if you’d rather stay home watching it than go out and meet somebody. Read more…
Recently an editor asked me for an essay about arrested adolescence, joking: “Of course, I thought of you.”
It is worth mentioning that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, been pantsless in several nonsexual contexts, and accidentally hospitalized each other in good fun. He
is now a respectable homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless
manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?
My weird touchiness on this issue — taking offense at someone offering to pay me money for my work — is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “The Referendum.”
To my friends with children, the obscene wealth of free time at my command must seem unimaginably exotic, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far,
and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated
relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available
to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own
are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning. Read more…
In 1996 I rode the circus train to Mexico City where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone’s husband. (Don’t even ask.) I remember my time there as we remember most of our travels —
vivid and thrilling, everything new and strange. My ex-fake-wife Carolyn and I often reminisce nostalgically about our honeymoon there: ordering un balde hielo from room service to cool our Coronas
every afternoon, the black-velvet painting of the devil on the toilet that she made me buy, our shared hilarious terror of kidnapping and murder, the giant pork rind I wrangled through customs. Which is
funny, since, if I think back honestly, while I was actually there I did not feel “happy.” Read more…
