Joseph Heller, Catch-22:
He began walking slowly, pushing uphill. Soon he came to a quiet, cozy, inviting restaurant with red velvet drapes in the windows and a blue neon sign near the door that said: TONY’S RESTAURANT. FINE FOOD AND DRINK. KEEP OUT. The words on the blue neon sign surprised him mildly for only an instant. Nothing warped seem bizarre any more in his strange, distorted surroundings. The tops of the sheer buildings slanted in weird, surrealistic perspective, and the street seemed tilted.
He raised the collar of his warm, woolen coat and hugged it around him. The night was raw. A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed shoes and socks. He made Yossarian think of cripples and of cold and hungry men and women, and of all the dumb, passive, devout mothers with catatonic eyes nursing infants outdoors that same night with chilled animal udders bared insensibly to that same raw rain. Cows.
Almost on cue, a nursing mother padded past holding an infant in black rags, and Yossarian wanted to smash her too, because she reminded him of the barefoot boy in the thin shirt and thin, tattered trousers and of all the shivering, stupefying misery in a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned.
How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people?
When you add them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere. Yossarian walked in lonely torture, feeling estranged, and could not wipe from his mind the excruciating image of the barefoot boy with sickly cheeks until he turned the corner into an avenue finally and came upon an Allied soldier having convulsions on the ground, a young lieutenant with a small, pale, boyish face.
I’ve never read anything like Catch-22; it is littered with my favorite literary device, that being irony, and Joseph Heller implements it to an almost impossible frequency. My dad said it was his favorite book but for most of my childhood and upbringing it sat on or around the coffee table in our living room and I never actually saw him read it.
In a way it is kind of the perfect book to be my dad’s favorite, because he is somewhat of an ironic guy himself. He is (allegedly) anti-war even though he represented the Air Force voluntarily during the most unnecessary war in the history of the United States — the Vietnam War — and has never seen a war he didn’t like because nowadays they all happen in the Middle East and he finds them all to be necessary. He never made more than like $50,000 in a given year and yet he identifies as conservative, which is really to say that he supports the interests of capitalists and owners and multimillionaires and billionaires.
And I love my old man. I would do anything for him. He is one of the smartest and most knowledgeable human beings I have ever met, and he saved his smarts for all the important stuff: Music, movies, and television shows. You know, the most liberal and progressive and move-the-ball-forward mediums in existence. He is my dad, and I am his son.
We live, as Joseph Heller illuminates so vividly, in this kind of opposite land that demands almost everything play out ironically. It’s a cliché that my dad is a God-fearing Republican and that each of his three sons are both socialists and atheists. It is pitch-perfect that his immense catalogue of music and movies and television shows that myself and two brothers grew up with probably played a significant role in making the three of us as openminded and empathetic towards others and accepting of (almost) everyone as we are.
But these are the kinds of tradeoffs parents make. And they are never going to see them. The mom and dad that refuse to let their teenaged high schooler go out to experiment at parties are the same ones whose kids become the biggest party animals with alcohol and drug addictions when they are on their own. The uber-religious mom and dad who homeschool their kids and shelter them from the outside world and implore them to remain abstinent from sex until they are married are the first ones to become grandparents as suddenly as their kid finds their first boyfriend or girlfriend. And so on.
Everything is backwards. I have found in most cases attractive women who have the reputation of being a slut, or a bitch, are in fact the complete opposite in both departments. They have the slutty reputation due specifically to how little they put out — which most men naturally do not appreciate — and they have a bitchy reputation due specifically to the jealousy they receive from other women.
It is all a projection, in other words. Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 general election and immediately pivoted, rather than conceding gracefully, to blaming the Russians for colluding with Trump and the Republican Party, when in reality it was Clinton herself who made a quid pro quo deal with the Russians in 2010 for millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation. The one who constantly accuses their partner of cheating is usually the one cheating themselves. Whoever smelt it, dealt it. Etc.
We cannot divorce ourselves from these ironies. They exist irrespective of us looking or knowing. Our politicians were elected by the people but really only represent their multimillionaire and billionaire donors. The American government chooses to go to war with whomever they feel like at whichever time they choose because of ‘terrorism,’ and yet the rest of the world is in concert with their belief that the United States are the biggest threat to world peace and, in fact, the real terrorists.
And on and on and on we go. Elon Musk during COVID argued that the government should cease giving out extra money in unemployment benefits — money which kept many families, including my own, afloat — and yet Musk’s companies have received something like $38 billion in government subsidies over the years. The wealthiest Americans pay the least amount in taxes, and oftentimes pay none, or even get tax rebates, while the workingclass pay a significantly higher percentage. It doesn’t make sense until you realize that it’s not supposed to.
In 2008 when the banking empire gambled with everyone’s money and bankrupted the economy and lit afire $20 trillion in household wealth (401K’s, IRA’s, etc.), it was everyday workers such as you and I — whose retirement accounts dissolved seemingly overnight — that paid (via our tax dollars) to bail out those same banks. When the stocks crashed, wealthy individuals bought them all back on the cheap and became three and four and ten times wealthier than they were before. War is always good business, but tanking the economy is much greater for those who already have it all.
People oftentimes wonder why the youth are so much less patriotic than their parents and grandparents. They wonder why we aren’t getting hard and saluting every time an American flag is presented before us.
Speaking as a millennial, all I know of my country is getting attacked by Saudi Arabia on 9/11 and going to war with a country — Iraq — who had nothing to do with it. All I know of is the bankers crashing the economy not only without consequence, but with massive severance packages for doing a good job to the people they answer to. All I know of is people being afraid of socialism because it leads to inflation, and prices going up, when actually that is exactly what Capitalism has been doing to everyone for my whole life.
But we love it here. We really do. We love being called spoiled and entitled by dinosaurs who got to pay their way through college while bussing tables at the local diner, and we love being called lazy by those who bought their houses for like $40,000 and sold them forty years later for half a million. If only we had their smarts and work ethic. If only, if only.
It is all a trap. The quickest way out of poverty is through education, but higher education can be (and usually is) incredibly expensive and thus puts the young people doing the so-called right thing into crippling student loan debt, putting them further into poverty without enough jobs in the economy that pay enough to offset those loans in any reasonable amount of time. If you are poor, doing the right thing gets you punished. If you are rich, doing the wrong thing gets you rewarded.
I don’t make the rules. I only make observations.
I got a fucking blender. I bought it because I realized that smoothies, or various juice concoctions, are one of god’s great gifts and I have been sleeping on them for most of my life. I don’t know why I only recently came to terms with this, since fruit is something I generally enjoy. Most vegetables are somewhat agreeable to me. But within the comforts of my own private domicile I rarely carry — let alone eat — either of them.
Like many human beings I end up at the grocery store every so often. I usually feel like kind of a huge piece of shit when I’m in line ahead of a couple who has only a carton of eggs and a baggie of tomatoes while I, the incredible bachelor that I am, flood the conveyer belt with a 12-pack of Hot Pockets, a gigantic box of Dino Nuggets, a six-pack of spicy ramen, the biggest sized bag of pizza rolls, and all manner of Cheese Itz and other gluttonous snacks and deserts. It doesn’t say a lot about who I am, but it certainly does say something.
When I first moved out to the desert a couple years ago I did have really strong intentions to do right by the whole cooking thing. I bought myself a cast iron skillet and at least twice a week I cooked various steaks and burgers on it. This lasted a solid three months before I understood just how sensitive my smoke alarm was/is, and it became really discouraging to make these delicious foods while having to deal with listening to the goddam smoke alarm go off for two minutes at a time with that annoying high-pitched sound it makes. The anxiety the smoke alarm gave me defeated the whole purpose and joy I got out of cooking. So I bought an air fryer and quit using the stove entirely (except for heating up water to make noodles).
The point is, now that I have a blender I don’t have to feel like such a huge piece of shit when I am in line at the local grocery store. The other day I bought bananas, strawberries, blueberries, and assorted vegetables. I probably won’t be using every item and I’ll end up throwing some of it out, but at least it looks better. At least the people behind me in line will see a man with at least a kernel of respect for himself.
When I last wrote that I quit drinking again, all I was saying was that I was going to put in the effort. Some effort, anyway. I think when I make these seismic leaps with my lifestyle choices I go too far, too soon, and then eventually I give up easily because altering everything all at once isn’t the right way, either. Even with something as simple as running — which I really love to do regardless of sobriety — I took like a month-and-a-half off and jumped back in by doing all these lunges and shit and then after a day it hurt to sit down on a benign object such a bench. So I had to stop for the rest of the week because my legs were sore as a mutherfucker.
I guess that’s where I’m at: I went from drinking alcohol and soda to blending tomatoes with carrots and broccoli and now I am chugging it because it tastes like trash. I know it’s good for me, but it doesn’t taste good. I went from purchasing at the grocery store a boatload of frozen garbage that would be considered a child’s dream dinner rotation to going all the way to the other side with fruits and veggies. There is no middle ground. Not in my life.
The blender gives me something to do. That’s the whole point of it, I think. It’s a toy I get to throw things into and make it go whir-wee-whir-wee until all of these items that I generally like individually get destroyed and turned into something I can drink. I rather enjoy doing that. It beats the hell out of buying a bonsai tree kit and pretending to know what the hell I am doing there — like I did the last time I got sober.
Drinking or no drinking, running or no running, eating mildly healthier or not, neither my weight nor the way I look ever seems to fluctuate all that dramatically. When I left for Virginia Tech at age-18 I was 5’7″ tall and weighed 150 pounds or so and couldn’t consistently grow facial hair. I am now 36 years old and still I am 5’7″ tall and still I weigh 150 pounds or so and still I cannot consistently grow facial hair to my heart’s desire.
Sure, you can throw a little bout of depression in here or there that’ll last a handful of months and I will absolutely disintegrate downward into the 130 range (in lb’s). I will sometimes grow comfortable in a relationship or whatever and balloon up to a buck eighty (in lb’s). But always I settle back in to this homeostasis of mine that most people who either have a hard time losing weight or putting it on would be quite envious of.
And I’ve generally found it sort of perplexing, what with all the ostensible stress and/or damage I have put my body through over the years — whether with drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or just a plain old-fashioned diet fueled by soda and frozen foods — that I have maintained such a decent figure. I still look young, and I still feel young, but I always assumed at one point or another that I would wake up one day and aged in a way comparable to how many other 30-somethings appear. I should probably count that as a blessing.
Further, it feels almost as if it ought to be incumbent upon me not to waste what I have. That I have gotten away with it for all these years, but now that it’s in the bank (in a manner of speaking) I should eat some healthier shit, like fruits and vegetables, and I shouldn’t take extended breaks from running, and I shouldn’t be poisoning my body with alcohol.
Which is all to say: I really do love being alive. I still enjoy going to work every day, and doing the laundry, and sweeping and Swiffer-ing the tiles at my condo, and going grocery shopping, and talking shit with my friends, and waking up each afternoon with a wonder to the mysteries with which that specific day may or may not have in store. It has always been so worth it to me, trying to figure all of this — including myself — out.
Future Bets 
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