The wrong way in...

Today I read an article in The Guardian by a woman who decided to do the High Fidelity thing and contact all her old boyfriends. Did I mention she was a fifth-of-vodka-a-day alcoholic? No? It's a key point since it explains why the men she contacted were creepy guys, and sheds a dim ray of light on why she might write this up for public consumption. Plainly, she is a young lady ruined by the deadly combination of art and booze.

Generally, I navigate the tricky seas of life through a series of truisms I've hammered out for myself. Two of these are: Never look up people from your long-dead past, and Don't do anything advocated by novels, movies, plays, or popular songs. That second rule is my most hard-won. For years, I did only what novels, short stories etc. built their plot-lines around, and discovered this is decidedly a wrong way to go about things. Nearly every action done or suggested in a novel (movie or whatever) is wack, otherwise, it wouldn't be the least bit interesting or engaging. Art is not made from serene, happy lives, but from boredom, misery and fatal decisions. If Emma in Madame Bovary had decided to get a grip, and knuckle down to life in her dead little town, there would have been no novel, but Emma might have lived a long and fairly bearable life. Had Ishmael not gone to sea, there would have been no Moby Dick, but he would have avoided a lot of turmoil and nuttiness. Anyway, who goes whaling as a cure for free-floating anxiety? (Ishmael, that's who.)

My first truism is one I learned very early: Don't look back. As Hericlites knew, even 2200 years ago, you don't dip your toes in the same river twice. A single high school reunion should be enough to realize that your memory is flawed and that people generally lose touch for good reasons. At such events, or during unfortunate meetings on the street, you always come face to face with graying strangers and your own poor taste. The few times I've violated this rule, I've discovered that friends from the dim past have mysteriously turned into my parents. At such meetings, I was relentlessly and cluelessly quizzed. Why did you decide to do that? I never heard of such a thing. Why did you divorce him? He was a good steady guy.

But the real iron-clad rule is: Never look up old loves. The only conversations you will ever have are bad ones. This young lady in The Guardian rushed heedlessly into old boyfriend meetings a la John Cusak in High Fidelity, and came a cropper. Evidently she didn't stop to ask herself: Do I work in a record store? Am I an immature hipster-type guy, afraid of commitment? Does John Cusak look happy? Instead she barreled ahead, phoning up a series of no-hopers who said unkind things as they pawed her legs. Besides believing in a movie plot and its cardboard characters, she also believed a deeply-flawed art-idea: that of redemption. This notion postulates that all suffering is worthwhile if it is transformed into something finer.

Now sober, she wanted to show these past loves/one-night stands that she was all cleaned up, had a job and so, had redeemed herself. But entropy being what it is, she mostly got a realistic eyeful of how bad these guys were and it shattered her tenuous self-esteem. Then, in a last-ditch effort to exchange her wretchedness at the border for a big glob of Art, she wrote about her humiliations in great detail, then published them in a newspaper that enjoys a world-wide circulation. Whereupon her bewildered musings were seized on by snarky bloggers like me. The End.

I'm not sure what the moral is here. Don't believe crap you see in the movies comes to mind. As does, Let sleeping dogs and rotten boyfriends lie. Except that morals-to-the-story don't do much good. Most of us can't take good advice. We have to make good advice, and good advice generally comes from bad living. It's the human condition.

So mind how you go.