How Schopenhauer Got Me Through My Mid-Life Crisis

[ 1 ]

Why Schopenhauer

My name is Charles Alonso. I am 44 years old. I live in Hercules, California, about a thirty minute drive from San Francisco. I am married to Nora Lathrop, we have two children, William, 16, and Tomas, 12. We are minority owners of a single family home in which the bank has the largest stake, we co-own two bars and a restaurant, I am a quarter-successful screenwriter, we have a dog, Buddy, a cat Tinkerbell, and there literally is a white picket fence toward the rear of the house which keeps Buddy from following through on any thoughts he might have of a better future elsewhere.

We are in the middle of the middle class. I know this with certainty because the college advisor I hired in a panic for William has just informed me that we are nowhere near poor enough to get aid, and nowhere near wealthy enough to afford a decent college for him.

We are, in short, living The American Dream.

* * *

On the floor next to my side of the bed are the following things:

…seven issues of The New Yorker magazine, each of them partially read, except for the cartoons – those I’ve read in full.

…a copy of a screenplay called Meth Cats, about cats that go crazy after ingesting meth, which a producer submitted to me for consideration to rewrite – on spec.

…a copy of The National Enquirer. Lead article: 50 Best and Worst Beach Bodies, purchased by Nora, but snatched away from her and read immediately by me.

…a Sound Oasis white noise machine to help me sleep – I have tinnitus in my left ear – a constant hissing, similar to a fluorescent light – from one too many punk shows.

…an e-reader, ostensibly to keep things like seven issues of The New Yorker from turning the floor into a refuge for dust bunnies.

…a bottle of Astroglide lubrication, for those days when Nora isn’t in the mood but is kind enough to oblige me with a handie.

…a digital alarm clock which I turn to face the wall – no one needs to know just how bad their insomnia is (has the guy who invented klonopin received the Nobel prize yet? Can someone make that happen, please?)

…a box of tissues – for hay fever and masturbation.

…paperback copies of Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction, by J.D. Salinger, and Night, Elie Wiesel’s account of surviving Auschwitz, just to remind myself that no matter what, things could always be worse. Way worse. Auschwitz worse.

…and a copy of The Complete Essays of Schopenhauer, green cloth cover, translated in 1942 by T. Bailey Saunders, given to me – although he alleges I stole it – by drag queen and queercore icon Vaginal Davis, my one very non-Mount Carmel friend who I met freshman year of high school when I was at Thrifty’s drugstore buying ice cream and complimented him on his mod eyeglasses. He was dressed in what I believe he would now call heteronormative drag, i.e., a white oxford shirt and tan corduroy pants. The book is inscribed, To Kayle from Kyle. I still question the coincidence of these two friends being separated by only one letter: you see, between Kayle and Vaginal, he has gone through many incarnations, among them Buster Beauté, Graciela Grejalba, Ravyn Cymone McFarland, Ada Bricktop Smith, and the Rt. Reverend St. Salicia Tate. So it’s not entirely impossible that he inscribed the book from one of his selves to another.

When I recently e-mailed him to verify that it was indeed he who gave me the book, and that I didn’t buy a copy which was coincidentally inscribed to another Kayle, he promptly wrote back:

It had to be from me or you stole it from me as Kayle is a made up name that i got from the 1956 musical film remake The Opposite Sex of the 1939 George Cukor film The Woman where the lead character played by June Allyson of The Depends commercials is name Kay Hilliard and i just added an le at the end. Years later i found out that there is a green leafy vegetable called Kale. No one calls me by that construct of Kayle anymore other then my friend Marlou DeLuna and Red aka Rachel Diaz and the people i worked with at UCLA as that is the name i used.

Just was thinking about you looking at a pic taken in Nov 1983 with you modeling your little mod look for the LA Reader. This autumn this picture which is on the walls of my studio will turn 30 years old—-yikes. i never thought i would live to be so old. Hope you and your family are in good health. Just got back from the doctor and i have high blood pressure and i have to get a prostrate exam. That won´t be fun unless the doctor is attractive and in Germany good luck with that.

love and kissy kissyz

A separate book would be required to capture Kayle – and you may be thinking that’s the one you want to read, but we’ll leave that to the man himself. In another recent e-mail, he confessed to me that he still has a thing for unavailable dorky white guys, and, after he saw a picture of me with our cat lying on my chest, asked if I had turned into a lesbian.

So – whether he didn’t care for Arthur Schopenhauer and was re-gifting, or whether he loved Schopenhauer and just wanted to share, or whether I flat out stole it – he was the first person to introduce me to the great man. And while I have no authority to pronounce the man great, I will do so just the same, as I am acquainted with the usual philosophical smatterings one picks up on the way to a B.A. , and of those acquaintances, no one has spoken to me as personally and directly as Arthur. Lots of things land in my lap, but not all of them stay. Schopenhauer stayed.

He speaks plainly, something very difficult for most philosophers.

Just a brief sampling of his aphorisms:

"Hope is the result of confusing the desire that something should take place with the probability that it will."

"The man who is cheerful and merry has always a good reason for being so – the fact, namely, that he is so. There is nothing which, like this quality, can so completely replace the loss of every other blessing."

"If we were not all of us exaggeratedly interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that no one could endure it."

"Vague longing and boredom are close akin."

"The bright and good moments of our life ought to teach us how to act aright when we are melancholy and dull and stupid…and the melancholy, dull and stupid moments should teach us to be modest when we are bright."

"Your friends will tell you that they are sincere; your enemies are really so."

Oscar Wilde + Droopy Dog = Schopenhauer.

* * *

I better stop here a moment. Look, yes, I know there are orphaned kids who grow up as child soldiers in third world countries, I know people are stricken with catastrophic disease in the prime of their lives, I know many people struggle daily just to keep a roof over their head. And I am none of them. So if you’re uninterested in middle class ennui, in coping with a sense of potential unfulfilled, in endlessly looping back over regrets or fretting over the future, this is not the book for you.

But I know I’m not alone. After attending the reunion, I realized my issues are not only not unusual, they are laughably common: Schopenhauer’s vague longing, the boredom, the loss of youthful optimism and buoyancy. And so – for those of us whose lives outwardly look great on paper, but inwardly feel something fundamental is amiss and are trying to accept or even improve our internal lot – this is for you.

Some 169 years ago, the German grouch and master of common sense wrote,

"To live happily only means to lives less unhappily – to live a tolerable life….there is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one’s efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire."

I’m looking, as you may have surmised, for that little room, and the maddening thing is, I’m pretty sure I once knew exactly where it was. That was in the before time: before the endless second guessing, before I filtered every experience through a bit of dirty gray gauze, before the voices in my head tormented me.

Actually, it’s just one voice:

For the purpose of this story, let’s call him Charlie Alonso. He never leaves my side. While I sit around enjoying a basketball game on TV with one of our two sons, or while my wife and I lie in bed for a few minutes after morning sex, he whispers questions like, Shouldn’t you be doing something more productive with your time? Weren’t you supposed to be a wildly successful screenwriter by this point? Have you noticed that most people you see on the street appear to be younger than you? Funny how you exercise regularly, but your arms and chest seem to lose muscle mass anyway. Or, Tell me again, why didn’t you have sex with that unbelievably hot goth girl you knew in college, y’know, the one who begged you to ‘fuck my brains out?’ Are you sure you’re doing all you can do to be a good parent? Don’t you kind of think you’ve wasted your talents on frivolous pursuits? "Dude, buddy, haven’t we gone over all this 10,000 times already? Do we really need to rehash again?"

Yes. Yes, we do. Because – and I’ll get to this – not dealing with him led me one glorious October afternoon a few years ago to the Golden Gate Bridge, where I peered over the railing and gave some serious consideration as to the best place to jump, and how to make sure I could be identified even if my body was never found.

[ 2 ]

Drinks With Erik

A few months before the reunion, my best friend Erik and I met for drinks at Slim’s, a dive bar I co-own on the outskirts of downtown Oakland. At Slim’s the lighting is low, the bathrooms unspeakably filthy, the music ear-splittingly loud. Erik is a lawyer and voracious reader who I’ve known since seventh grade – he devoured 1000 page James Michener tomes when we were 13 – for fun. His nickname in high school was Kirk – impulsive, passionate, charming. I was Spock – logical, reserved, uptight. We were a matched pair, sci-fi salt and pepper shakers.

I was excited to hear how things had been going for him at work. Erik is a lawyer for a state utility commission, and has been put in charge of leading the investigation into a disastrous gas pipe explosion which leveled an entire neighborhood, leaving eight dead and fifty two injured. His boss told him to clear his desk for two years for this massive undertaking. It’s the biggest case of his life, the biggest in the commission’s history, and he, my best friend since seventh grade, the Michener Man, was asked to tackle it. I’m so proud of him. He is at the pinnacle of his career.

After fetching us a pair of Jack and gingers, I leaned in and asked, tell me everything, Erik – how goes it in the trenches?

He stirred the ice in his drink a moment before answering.

I’m bored.

My eyes lit up. Now – now – we had something to talk about.

I went to my go-to authority on most matters concerning the problem, as the philosophers put it, of existing.

Arthur, what say you on the subject of boredom?

"The most general survey shows us that the two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom. Life presents, in fact, a more or less violent oscillation between the two."

That’s right. You can worry yourself silly over war, famine, plague or wayward asteroids – or, or – instead, just do what you can to avoid pain (think about how a toothache can absolutely ruin your day), and boredom (recently researchers in Germany identified a fifth type of boredom. They were aware of the first four: indifferent, calibrating, searching, and reactant boredom, but were surprised to discover a fifth: apathetic boredom. They did this by asking college students – who one would think would be the least susceptible to weariness of life, restless dissatisfaction, and a sense of emptiness – to fill out a five point scale ranging from calm to fidgety.) Turns out even college students know from existential ennui. Something most orphaned child soldiers probably don’t have the time to brood over adequately.

The conclusion? On the whole, researchers found that boredom was – forgive the scientific jargon – bad.

Arthur was well aware of this. What happens when you slow down enough to realize how bored with jugglers, one night stands, and bungee jumping you really are? You come down with a case of what he called vacuity of soul.

So talk to me – boredom – what? I asked Erik.

The feeling is more like, I’ve succeeded at work, the kids are doing well, I’m remarried, I have a house – and….what about it? What’s the next challenge? I feel stagnant. Since we spoke, Erik has joined an amateur tennis league and initiated a weekly poker night with work colleagues. Tomorrow he will also begin seeing a therapist.

A few weeks after meeting Erik, while in Los Angeles, I met for dinner with Toshi, who, like me, has dabbled in several careers: flipping houses, TV production, screenwriting; he has degrees from film school and law school, and has passed the bar. In his living room is a large white board with nine possible TV projects he’s developing, all of which probably won’t go anywhere. At lunch, exasperated, he said,

I want a nine to five job. I want stability. He spoke wistfully of moving to Ohio. He wants to trade in what he called the instability of his thirties and early forties – his wild years – for a desk job. I’m seriously thinking about adopting a kid, Charlie. He is the only Log Cabin Republican I know. He spoke to me of hush hush fundraisers he’s attended, fund raisers that are held in the closet. Not because of his sexuality – this is Hollywood, California in the early part of the 21st century – but because of his conservatism. No one must know he voted for Romney, lest he be black balled.

In reply, I rambled on about trying to find something more meaningful than being a liquor merchant and less frustrating than being a screenwriter. We like to commiserate. We’re good at it. But it wasn’t until I said, I feel like I’m wasting a fine mind that he jerked up straight and said,

God! I know! This is the theme of our generation.

And so here I sit typing, hoping he’s right, and hoping all this navel gazing will resonate with a few of you out there. By the way, how much navel gazing is too much? No such thing, according to my five therapists (seen sequentially, by the way, not simultaneously. That – that – would be excessive).

Another classmate at the reunion bitterly recalled the slogan of the Mount Carmel Man.

"’A man for others.’ Right. It’s like, you have to be a man for others because you are better than other men. Total bullshit."

I hold it as a general principal that if I’ve thought or done something – anything – others have, too. It’s a numbers game. As of this writing, there are 7.093 billion of us on this planet. I also hold it as a general principal that it feels good to know you’re not alone.

I lay some – but just some – of the blame for our theme at the feet of Mount Carmel High School. There was something implicit in the air there: we were being groomed to be the captains of commerce, industry, science – well, in any case, captains of something. Anything less meant that you weren’t living up to the two dreaded P’s: your potential, your promise.

How should I have answered Bishop Moore’s query as to whether I was still smart as shit?

Well, father, I took my brains and work ethic and am running two dive bars in Oakland, and working intermittently (is there any other way if you’re not in Hollywood’s Top Twenty?) as a screenwriter. Not sure which is more vulgar – selling liquor at a mark-up, or trying to write