This is the first in a series of descriptive essays I mean to undertake, not for the purpose of storytelling per se, or even necessarily being of interest to anyone other than myself and the siblings and close friends with whom I shared my upbringing. Rather, I am doing this as a way to remind myself of some formative aspects of my childhood, against the day when I become doddering and need an occasional reminder of things past. This first piece is about the house in which I grew up in Brunswick, Maine.

The house on Old Bath Road was quite ordinary by the standards of Maine in the 1960’s, at least in terms of layout. It was, though, in far less than ideal condition, seeing as how no significant maintenance was undertaken during the fifteen or so years I lived there. As was typical at that time in rural New England, the house had no numerical address (or if it did, it was known only to the post office). One simply addressed mail to the recipient and their road name, and counted on the mailman to know who lived where. Also, in one additional nod to a simpler, quainter time, the house, so far as I recall, had no locks of any kind on the doors.

Oh, Lord, allow me to begin this potentially awkward conversation by directly and succinctly addressing the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. No, I do not believe in you. I do not believe you exist in any real corporeal sense (though I am prepared to concede acceptance of the concept of you). What I believe is that you are the fabrication (many different ones actually) of people desperately searching for answers that will enable them to make sense of a world they do not fully understand. Which is not to say I feel that I fully understand the world either, only that I choose not to resort to believing in supernatural entities in order to get my head around it. That said, if belief in you was simply a means of trying to get a grasp on a complex world, if that were the extent of it, I would actually be okay with others believing in you as an essentially harmless pastime. If only.

Officially it appeared on the curriculum as Industrial Arts, but it was known colloquially as simply Shop.  Whichever moniker you prefer, it was, during my adolescence, a rite of passage for teenage boys attending pretty much any public school system in the U.S. It was book-ended, at least in the sixties and seventies, by Home Economics, the analogous gender-role-reinforcing “academic” requirement for junior high girls. Never having myself stepped up to the challenge of putting children through school, I’m not entirely certain how this tradition has evolved in recent years, but at that time and in that place it was understood, and accepted without too much whining or debate over gender stereotypes or political correctness, that this particular male/female divide simply was not to be crossed. No girls were suing their school administrators to get into Shop. No boys were queuing up for Home Ec. And I don’t recall hearing of a single case during my youth in which parents or students expressed any interest in questioning, much less, God forbid, challenging this state of affairs, though it’s easy to imagine these strictures having by now been relaxed in this new and enlightened age.

In my dream I run aimless and panting up and down the neutrally painted, cinderblock-lined corridors of Brunswick High School, trying desperately to recall which of the countless thousands of lockers stretching before me is, in fact, my locker, and, having eventually located it after much fretting and fuming, struggling with even greater desperation to recall the specific left/right/left combination that will open it. It doesn’t help that all of the lockers look exactly the same—battleship gray, arrayed in a grid two high and effectively infinite in length, extending down both sides of the corridor to a distant vanishing point. That each is uniquely numbered with a small riveted brass plate is of no use either, since, given my ineluctable state of torpor before ten a.m., the ability to remember my own locker number is no easier than is successful execution of the combination, this despite the former being a good deal shorter. But what really makes this dream different from the traditional ‘lost and late’ scenario is the encumbrance I bear throughout the ordeal, an enormous and battered musical instrument case that drags behind me as I struggle up and down the endless corridors.

Humans eat food to survive. Most, if they’re fortunate, do it multiple times each day. And if we go very long without doing it, our bodies have limitless creative ways of making their displeasure known. But we also eat for pleasure—pleasure derived from taste and texture, from culture and tradition, and, for some, from the very process of creating food in the first place. That creation involves three distinctly different types of individuals. Best known are those who combine raw ingredients in creative ways—sometimes exciting, sometimes banal. These are the chefs who craft memorable dishes, the artisans who bake fine bread and pastry, the vintners who magically turn the humble grape into wine, and the factories that turn out the infinitude of products that occupy our grocery store shelves.

I know what you’re thinking, sitting there, furtively skimming this introduction, hoping no one sees you holding the manuscript. Why on earth would I read this? Who, for that matter, would even publish such a thing? Pessimism? Dear God, things are so bleak and heinous these days; what the world needs is optimism, damn it. Well that, my friend, is where you’re mistaken, and I mean to spend the next few pages explaining precisely why.

Now please don’t get me wrong. This is, after all, a self-help piece. And self-help books and essays are about achieving happiness, success, self-actualization, and other hard-to-define but generally positive states of being. My working hypothesis (which turns out to be true, otherwise there wouldn’t be much point to the essay) is that happiness and success can and do spring directly from a well-grounded understanding and exploitation of negative energy. Pessimism—like gravity, friction, and attraction to fast food—is nothing less than a force of nature.

Growing up in Maine, it is reasonably assumed that my halcyon youth was filled with an unending orgy of skiing, camping, fishing, hunting, and all the other rustic backwood sorts of recreation that out-of-staters generally associate with the place. The bitter truth of the matter is that I never—not even once—participated in any of these activities until I was fully grown and had moved away to other places.[1] Non-Mainers harbor, as well, one additional myth about native downeasters, viz that we daily gorge ourselves on great heaping platters of lobster. Indeed, it was the popularity of this myth that prompted an associate to suggest that I might be uniquely qualified to expound in an entertaining (perhaps even informative) manner on the topic. As it happens, lobster was not, by any means, a staple food during my childhood. I was, however, sufficiently well versed in its many nuances to allow me to offer at least an opinion or two on the matter.

I never doubted for a moment that this day would come. At some point in nearly every introductory conversation I have, the topic of children comes up. Do I have any? None, huh? Why is that, exactly? Then, sensing discomfort, awkwardness, we tacitly agree to move on to some different, safer topic of conversation. It’s at these moments that I frequently feel compelled to retort with something like, so, why did you decide to have kids? How would you rate the pros and cons? Would you do it again if you had it to do over?[1] We live, though, in a society that regards child bearing as so self-evidently worthwhile, indeed necessary to the advancement of civilization, that daring to scrutinize the process with anything approaching objectivity is on a social par with offering to show a friend your collection of pipe bombs.

Or Why Skiing is an Especially Apt Metaphor for Life Itself What do you get when you combine the annoyance factor of golf, the vast expense of scuba, and the bodily risk of skydiving? That’s right—skiing, a pastime whose origins are lost to antiquity, but which, in all likelihood, involved some Swiss or Austrian misanthrope—let’s agree to call him Gunther—living high on a mountain, who awakens one day to discover he is snowed in by a couple of feet of fresh powder from the previous night’s storm, and on the very day he had meant to go into the village at the base of the mountain for his semi-annual consignment of groceries.

Americans are positively infatuated with scoring in sports. I don’t mean scoring in the sense of keeping score, though goodness knows there exist more than a few hard-core fans who, not content to simply sit and watch a game, will, instead, labor over every pitch, hit, throw, and error that occurs, writing each down in arcane hieroglyphics on score-sheets, for what possible use afterward one is hard-pressed to imagine. I’m talking here, though, about our national obsession with seeing the score of each sporting contest rise to as high a level as possible.

I have wanted to write about my views on the game of golf for quite a long time, but always resisted for one reason or another, not least because so many others more talented than me have made such a splendid job of it, leading me to conclude there was little I could add to the dialog. Only then, after a bit of reflection, I finally hit upon a potentially unique angle. Most of the extant golf literature is either about the subtle grandeur of the perfect drive, or the mist floating gossamer-like across the first green at sunup, perhaps even the ephemeral serendipity of a hole-in-one. But no one, so far as I could tell, had ever reflected (at least not publicly) on just what it meant to suffer through an entire lifetime of truly wretched, mind-numbingly bad golf. I could be that writer.

Introduction The following observations are presented in no particular order, save for that in which they occurred to me. Which is to say that no one item is any more or less important than another, unless of course there is a specific safety issue being discussed, in which case I will make that plain, and expound as necessary. The only preemptive statements I will make by way of establishing credibility in the home repair field are to observe that I own a formidable collection of tools, both manual and powered, and yet I still possess all of my appendages, digits, and assorted extremities, which is more than I can say for my seventh-grade shop teacher.

Following is the complete unedited transcript of an extended interview conducted by Rolling Stone Feature Editor Marvin Foxtrap with Detroit Lions punter/place kicker Ryan Mitchell, following his team’s 45-6 loss to the Dallas Cowboys, during which game Mitchell missed 3 field goals, made 2, and punted an NFC single-game record 18 times, of which 3 were blocked, averaging 26 yards per punt. MF: Ryan, I want to spend a bit of time talking about tonight’s game, but before we get into that I’d like to hear your overall take on the job.

We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction. Denise Levertov Let me begin by stating, for the record, that I was more than a little hacked off when I heard about David Foster Wallace hanging himself a few years back. Just to be clear, this initial reaction wasn’t a sad or mournful thing; I was genuinely pissed: at him, his doctors, his family, anyone who could plausibly be blamed for his abject failure to successfully handle a life replete with talent, fame, and money, all things so many long for and so few actually possess[1].

When a complete stranger voluntarily spends enormous amounts of time and energy working to convince you to spend money on something you neither need nor want, that’s marketing. It is the very essence of capitalism, as vital to the free flow of wealth (from you to them) as the invention of cash[1] itself. And no matter how you feel about marketing—supportive, jaded, or ambivalent—it is absolutely critical that you understand how it works, because whether you acknowledge it or not, it is taking place all around you, every minute of every day. In fact, it is being done to you, whether you want it to be or not. And the people who are doing it to you aren’t only the professionals, though there are certainly plenty of those. It is also being done to you by your friends, your family, your colleagues at the office, everyone you know. There isn’t one damned thing you can do about it except to understand how it works and be as vigilant as possible. And while you’re at it, with a fair degree of self-awareness and a bit of creativity, you can also have yourself a bit of fun.

Being the good industrious New England boy that I was, raised in the Puritan tradition of all-work-and-no-play-makes-one-a-Mainer, I began work—actual compensated work—at the age of eight. That would have made it 1965 or thereabouts, a couple of years after the tragic events of Dallas, and still in the early stages of what President Johnson was rapturously referring to as his New Society, a utopian age in which no one would want for anything nor be asked to do much to get it. There was only one problem with this incipient euphoria, at least as it related to my life. Johnson hadn’t spent much time in Maine, his only visit so far as I am aware, having taken him through the little borough of Topsham, which fact is marked to this very day by an exuberant sign in front of the Topsham Dairy Queen proudly proclaiming that “LBJ Ate Here.” Exactly what he ate is not revealed, nor is there any historical record of what interactions he may have had with the locals. Maine is an awkward place politically, hidebound and traditional on its most ebullient day (which is to say staunchly conservative), yet prone to the occasional bout of wackiness, as evidenced by having been one of the few states to strongly support Ross Perot in the 1992 Presidential election.

1. There is no such thing, nor should there be, as American “exceptionalism,” i.e. we are no better than anyone else on earth in any way, shape or fashion. And while we have a system of government that works reasonably well for us, that does not mean that it is “the right” system or that we should have as our mission imposing that system on others, particularly if they demonstrably do not want it.

2. It is extraordinarily hypocritical to espouse democracy but to then fail to accept the wishes of those who exercise that privilege, simply because we don’t like who they elected.

3. All capital punishment is wrong, without exception. Those who support and implement it are as morally culpable as the people they kill.

4. Anyone who aspires to be a politician is, by definition, unfit to serve as one.

There would seem to be something inherent, perhaps even genetic, about the need to face in the direction in which one is traveling, i.e. forward. Some of us have occasion, once in a great while, to travel while facing in another direction, and having done it a bit myself, I find it not only unsatisfying, but actually borderline unnerving, in that same hard-to-explain-to-someone-else-without-sounding-like-a-lunatic way that walking up or down a broken escalator is unnerving. It’s as if there are certain mobility-related patterns that get more or less permanently implanted in our minds at a young age, which when countermanded later in life, lead to all sorts of discomfort. I don’t know why this is. I don’t even know why or if it is worth writing about. But I’m going to anyway.

I cannot say what put me of a mind to delve into this particular topic, fraught as it is with emotion and history. Suffice it to say that the subject matter has troubled me for ages and I feel the need to get something down on paper, if only to concentrate my thoughts and bring a bit more focus to how I feel about it. I accept as well that precisely the opposite may be the result and that I may come away even more hazy and uncertain than when I began—a risk I am prepared to take. I should state at the outset as well that it is not my objective to change anyone’s mind with this treatise, nor is it in any event a likely outcome, since the topic is one so firmly entrenched in each individual’s psyche, either positively or otherwise. It is however possible that in reading this piece, someone may be moved to offer a counter argument that sharpens my own thinking on the matter, and surely that cannot be a bad thing.