The truth will set us free or at least BOGO
Okay, I admit, I don’t know what that title means either.
I was just thinking that, when we can, we still need to connect ourselves to what’s true. When we stack layers of artifice we are building a structure that depends on every one of those layers not cracking for the whole thing to stand.
Today I ran some errands in Glendale. For some reason Waze, instead of routing me to my destination on Brand, routed me directly into the Americana parking garage. So I ended up walking across the Americana to get to my doctor’s appointment on the other side of the block.
(For those of you that don’t live in Los Angeles, the Americana is like a posh outdoor mall with a Vegas-style water fountain in the middle; Frank Sinatra is always playing and there is a Cheesecake Factory and a Kiehl’s. It’s the kind of place that I both enjoy going to and also think about how capitalism crushes us all eventually.1)
As I am wont to do, I like a roam through a bookstore, so I walked into the Barnes & Noble. My fabric mask was feeling kind of sweaty (today was a hot day), and they had surgical masks at the door. I tugged at one, hoping it would come out of the box easily. It didn’t. It had somehow hooked over all the rest of the masks in the box, so I spent an uncomfortable two minutes kind of putting my hand all over the box and into it trying to free the one mask that I wanted, while I was already wearing a mask. I wanted to stop but I was committed at that point and a man on his way out did look at me strangely. I felt that moment where you have to stick to something to show that’s what you meant to do all along. “I intended to manhandle these sanitary masks because this cantankerous little bugger is just stuck in there, and well, someone has to take care of problems in our society or else what’s civilization for” … is the general energy I was trying to give off.2
Also, then, I realized: I don’t know whether I’m supposed to put the blue side of a surgical mask in or out, and am I making it completely pointless if I get it wrong? This thought was happening as I was standing in front of the magazine aisle. I eventually decided to keep my fabric mask on and tuck the surgical away for later, like a breakroom cookie.3
Oh so yes, the truth. After my bookstore visit (I bought Mike Nichols’ autobiography because I heard Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas liked it, I’m a deep thinker) and my doctor’s appointment, I got to my car and, well… dang it, the truth must be said. The fabric mask was hot, and uncomfortable, and it was indeed making it hard for me to breathe. I took it off as I sat, started the engine, and turned on the AC.
The mask is a pain in the ass. It hasn’t always been, maybe this was a one-time thing… I was out longer than I normally have been during the pandemic, and it was almost 80 degrees outside today after a series of pretty chilly weeks. I don’t know why today of all days the mask was bothering me. But it was.
Of course, not enough for me not to wear it, or to advocate not wearing it, or to storm a capitol or anything. But I’m not sure where we profit from trying to act like masks are not an inconvenience. If we’re trying to sell the idea to someone resistant, and we immediately start with something that they feel is untrue, what hope do we have of persuading them? It reminds me of the 1980s, when anti-drug messages were everywhere, and someone told me once, “You can’t get people to stop taking drugs by acting as if drugs aren’t fun… because they are. Drugs make you feel good, or powerful, or less sad. They have bad aftereffects and there are consequences to them, but we can’t pretend there isn’t some appeal.”4
Starting from the truth that wearing a mask is kind of annoying seems to me like the only way that you can ever get someone into a conversation where they might wear it even though they don’t like it (because of the myriad of benefits that result such as not having half a million people die). Wearing a seatbelt or a helmet is also annoying, until you get so used to them that they aren’t. Of course, one counterargument is that a rational approach is irrelevant, as you can’t reason a person out of a position that they didn’t reason themselves into, but the implications that spiral out of that thought are too heavy for me to think about it right now.
I just know that I want to include as much truth in my base assumptions as possible. I’m going to build the rest of my life on top of that.
Now that I’ve brought you to a contemplative and somewhat melancholy place about all of this, here’s something ridiculous. This music video won the SXSW Audience Award a few weeks ago and it’s a delight.
Have a good day!
Case in point: as I descended the escalator from the parking garage, there was a sign advertising the luxury apartments in the Americana with the amenity “Room service provided by Trattoria Amicia”… meaning at your apartment, you can call and have pasta delivered within minutes, and I thought about what it would be like to live there, how on days that I didn’t feel like pasta I could walk to Din Tai Fung, or get a Sparkles cupcake, and how every single day I could descend in the elevator, psychologically heal myself by buying something, and then ascend back to my home for just $3300 a month.
If I was actually being a samaritan, I probably should have taken the box and thrown it in the trash. “These simply won’t do!” I would say as I tossed them, preferably in a Victorian accent.
I would like to note that at the time of this writing, there is a cat behind me sleeping, whose breathing is as loud as a fullgrown human adult.
Or as Chris Rock would say, “Crack sells itself.”