Entries from November 2002 ↓

Regret

As far as I’m concerned, the only thing worse than dreading the future or lamenting the present is mourning the past, looking over your shoulder and seeing all the ghosts of your old mistakes, all those stillborn zombie babies of your hopes and dreams lurching around, glaring at you menacingly through empty eyesockets. Look what you could have done, they say. Look what you could have been.

I was talking to a good friend about this yesterday, and she said something that I liked a lot: that these kinds of regrets are largely silly and misguided, because every experience in your life makes you who you are today. Even the poor decisions or the missed opportunities — or their consequences — are part of the fabric of you. Assuming you’re reasonably happy with who you are, then there’s no point in rueing what could have been, because you are as much the sum of what you didn’t do as what you did.

I like the sound of that. It’s a hopeful doctrine, and a good one, I think. It only fails when you’re horribly unhappy with your life, completely bitter and discontented in a Notes From Underground kind of way.

Another thing to consider: we’re all set up to lose, individually at least. Life from its inception is a slow slide towards death, with vital systems failing in ways serious and trivial until the final collapse. I saw an old folk saying the other day: “Every hour in life is painful, and the last one kills.” Morbid but true. Against that backdrop, any kind of happiness you can secure from life is a major victory. I believe we have a head-start in this; I believe we’re wired not to acknowledge or understand our mortality in any serious way until we get very old. Whatever invisible hand programmed our minds added code that allows most of us, most of the time, to gloss over the essentially depressing nature of the long view of life on earth. And here’s the saving grace: although our body decays as we age, our mind doesn’t. Not as quickly, anyway. The ethereal matrix of thought (personality, ambition, intelligence, desire) can be far less perishable than the meat that sustains it. We can continue to grow intellectually up the very end (if we’re lucky) and that’s a major victory over the physical entropy that destroys us bit by bit, every day of our lives. It’s a gift, it really is.

So is there a point to all this ramble? Not really. I’m just starting to believe that reviling and ignoring your past is a seriously misguided thing to do. We should cherish the imprints that our actions leave in our minds. Regret is a kind of intellectual blight that feeds on all memories, good and bad, and just leaves us feeling hollow. There are gems to discover in the archaeology of your own life, fossils that may help you understand your present and wisdom you can use to navigate your future.

I just saw a snippet of a news conference today, in which someone asked Trent Lott how he felt about his party’s recent ascension to absolute control of the Capitol. He said: “Let’s roll,” with a big shit-eating grin on his face. And that, in a nutshell, is how Bush and the Republicans have done so well for themselves in these elections, and for the past 14 months: by exploiting the tragedy of September 11th, and the fear it engendered in us all, for their own political ends. The administration should have been nailed to the wall for their handling of the economy (two words: tax cut; no, make that four: tax cut Harvey Pitt), but they weren’t. They should have been pilloried for their refusal to divulge the members of this shadowy “task force” that helped Cheney come up with his mockery of an environmental plan, but they weren’t. The ties of the first “CEO president” to the disgraced business community should have been scrutinized as soon as the Enron debacle hit the papers. They weren’t. I watch helplessly as our president’s insane poll numbers refuse to go down. I don’t understand it. Has everyone gone mad? Can’t they see what’s happening? Or have I lost it? Am I that wrong?

And it’s only going to get worse. Now the Bushites are free to ram through their compensation package for the wealthy tax cut, free to curtail our civil liberties in the name of homeland security, free to despoil the environment for the sake of our freedom. It’s going to be a rough two years, and unless the Democrats get their shit together, it’s going to be a rough decade, too.

Right now, I’m so full of bitterness and bile that I can barely see straight, much less say or think anything coherent about what happened last night. I want to be rational, contemplative, calm. But I can’t. Maybe I’ll get it together tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next. I have plenty of time.

Oh no. Oh good lord no. I woke up this morning from a horrible dream in which a hundred giant half-slug/half-cockroach creatures were slowly disemboweling me and consuming my viscera, while I, unable to die, watched screaming, wracked with pain so severe that it was almost incomprehensible.

Then I woke up and saw the election results, and immediately found myself wishing I could return to my slugroaches.

There are no nightmares like waking nightmares.

Several months ago, we made the mistake of bringing home an adorable little beagle from the pound. For those of you who don’t know anything about beagles (like me, before the cataclysm of his arrival in my life), they are extremely intelligent, curious, mischievous, misbehaved, stubborn and, above all, loud dogs. Incredibly, incomprehensibly loud, especially considering their size. You know how an ant can lift twenty times its weight? Beagles can howl twenty times their size. Imagine hearing a tyrannosaurus rex lumbering after your jeep, and flooring it, and looking back to find a 20 pound beagle nipping at your bumper.

We called him Beauregard, which (after the initial mistake of bringing him home in the first place — see above) was a mistake. We should have called him Bane, as in “of my existence”. But it’s too late to change anything now, he’s used to his real name. His real name (as far as he’s concerned) is not Beauregard, but Will-You-Shut-The-Fuck-Up-God-Damn-It, because that is by far my primary mean of addressing him.

Anyway, Will-You-Shut-The-Fuck-Up-God-Damn-It has had his beady little eye on one of my stuffed animals since he got here. It’s that little Taco Bell chihuahua from the commercials, the one that used to say “Drop the chalupa” all the time. The stuffed version says “Drop the chalupa” too, when you squeeze its flanks. Will-You-Shut-The-Fuck-Up-God-Damn-It (we’ll call him Beau, for short) could often be found sitting at the base of the bookshelf in my room, staring intently up at the little chihuahua, with murder in his eyes.

The other day I was working at my computer when I heard Beau going nuts outside my room, stampeding back and forth in the hall and growling and snorting and panting and generally making a lot of noise. He usually does this when he’s acquired one of the many contraband items in the house (a pair of glasses, a really nice sweater that I really really like a lot, an ancient Ming vase) and is in the process of destroying it. I was too engrossed in what I was doing to care at the time, so I just let it go.

Until I heard a hissy little recorded voice saying: “Drop the chalupa.”

I stopped typing, and listened. Beau also seemed to pause in his rampage, perhaps surprised that his victim was actually saying something. This didn’t last for long. He resumed his attack soon after, and with renewed vigor.

I heard the voice again — “Drop the chalupa” — followed this time by the tell-tale bump bump bump bump BUMP of a tumble down the stairs. I got up and went into the hall and looked over the banister.

“Drop the chalupa.” The voice seemed a little more high-pitched now, a little panicked. Beau was standing on the landing, clenching the Taco Bell chihuahua in this jaws, whipping it back and forth, perhaps in an instinctive effort to break its neck.

“Hey!” I yelled, and started down the stairs. But Beau was too fast, too devious. He raced down the other flight and into the living room, out of sight.

“DROP THE FUCKING CHALUPA!” bellowed the chihuahua. I can only imagine its terror. I ran downstairs and rounded the corner just in time to see it arcing through the air, across the room, over the banister, and down to the first level. Beau was racing down after it. I followed.

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WILL SOMEBODY HELP ME!” screamed the chihuahua. When I reached the bottom level Beau had pinned the poor creature to the carpet with his paws and was ripping chunks out of it. Stuffing floated through the still air like dustmotes in the afternoon light.

HappiIy, I was able to save the poor creature, tearing it away from Beau before he could administer the killing blow. But my little stuffed friend did not come through the experience unscathed. Not by a long shot. Besides the obvious physical damage (it is conspicuously deflated, now, and is missing an eye; two of its legs dangle precariously from its body, attached only by a couple of strings and sheer power of will), it has suffered some sort of mental trauma from which I fear it will never recover. Whenever I squeeze it now, it just says “The horror, the horror” over and over again.

Beau is sitting beside me as I write this, eyeing my furby. I can only imagine what evil designs he has for that poor creature. Goodbye, dear Furby. I hardly knew ye.

Apparently, our famously well-spoken president did some speechwriting for his father’s campaign, back in 1988. The senior Bush won anyway (I checked), so I have to assume that W’s contribution was minimal — which is to say, nonexistent.

But, in the unlikely event that he did participate in any of the speechwriters’ meetings during that campaign, the session would have probably gone something like this:

Speechwriter 1: I’m not sure about this line about the success of the whole “trickle-down” economics thing. It hasn’t really worked out.

Speechwriter 2: No one cares. Or knows, for that matter. We have to say something about the economy.

Speechwriter 3: But what? We have the biggest deficits in history. Bush himself called the whole idea “voodoo economics” back in 1980. What can he possibly say that won’t seem disingenuous? George, do you have any ideas?

George W Bush: Make the pie higher.

(long pause)

Speechwriter 3: What?

George W Bush: Make the pie higher. Because the nucular.

(longer pause)

Speechwriter 2: What does that have to do with the economy?

George W Bush: (grinning) Well, you know, me and Laura have the uttermost respect for Reagandomics and all that fedeluciary aspect. So when you take all of that and push it into one big … um … pottery then you can enfranchise. Better.

(utter silence)

George W Bush: Nucular.

(utter silence, punctuated by an occasional cough)

George W Bush: Ok, well I’m just going to let you boys finish up. I’ve got a board room meeting to attend. Business stuff. I’m a CEO you know. Don’t want to misunderestimate the importulance of my role in the business arena.

Speechwriter 1: Yeah.

George W Bush: Bye now.

(leaves; long silence)

Speechwriter 1: Wow.

Speechwriter 2: Yeah.

Speechwriter 1: So he volunteered?

Speechwriter 2: Apparently.

Speechwriter 1: Wow.

Speechwriter 3: Hope he never volunteers to run for president.

(raucous laugher, lasting for a good four or five minutes)

Speechwriter 1: Ok (wiping tears from his eyes). Let’s get back to this trickle-down stuff.