The Lash

Sitting and Feeling Bad

I’m sitting at the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, within spitting distance of Boston College, where my wife and brother are alumni. I am a graduate of a different BC, Brooklyn College, the one where Allen Ginsberg taught poetry for nineteen years in a big office adorned with framed but glassless art that his office-mate, a respected author in his own right, hated. This is the college that Bernie Sanders transferred from to the University of Chicago. Brooklyn College is wedged between Midwood High and an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. I took the Q to Avenue H, ten minutes from Sheepshead Bay. Always hungry, I walked by the sandwich board advertising two slices and a can of soda for five dollars. While I write this, I wonder why I never went in and bought a slice of pizza. Come to think of it, I may have bought a slice and been disappointed.

Sitting here, people-watching, I’m reminded why I didn’t go in for that slice for so long. I was afraid. I felt unworthy. Alienated. This had nothing to do with the guys working the counter but had its roots, obviously, in childhood, and more immediately in how I compared myself to my classmates. I believed they were flat-out better than me. Unfortunately, to defend myself from these diabolical thoughts, I had to cook up judgments against them. By justifying, mostly to myself, why these people were flawed and despicable, I could shield myself against the true fear and self-loathing that doomed my graduate school experience. I was obsessed with the idea that my classmates were better dressed, better looking, and plain smarter than me.

Here I am feeling that again. Goddamn emotional flashbacks. It’s a quiet afternoon. The weather is cool for June, but I am obsessing over the super-fit, accomplished Boston College students and alumni running by in crop tops or shirtless, oozing confidence and superiority. And I’m sitting here like Aesop, the man who the Greeks threw off a damned cliff for being too fucking ugly. I’m wearing a jacket in June, so I don’t offend anybody with my eyesore of a carapace. I said it was cool, but it’s certainly not jacket weather.

But where do these thoughts come from? Why am I so offensive? 

I’m not…

I offend God! 

No, I offend myself for failing to match their “success.” 

My body is a temple of ineptitude.

Thankfully, the temple is crumbling. 

I went for a run/jog before starting this “essay.” I had nothing, my back hurt, and I couldn’t breathe, but I sallied on. I bore it as best I could and went about four miles, sprinting, jogging, and walking. I sure as hell was not gliding like some of these fleet-footed gazelles. I huffed and puffed and made ugly faces in agony. But I completed my goal. Do I deserve credit for that? Well, no. I was disappointed even though I pretended not to be. I was fake. I was upset because I did not run like a high school track star. I ran like a 33-year-old man who took a week off because his legs were tired. 

Now I can give myself credit because although I want to bring out the lash, I know that will make my next run slower. That well-worn lash made it so damn difficult to accept mistakes, as well as any progress made afterward. As I get older, I will try a different approach. I cannot guarantee that the lash won’t come out, but at least I can dress the wounds and maybe, in time, learn that the lash is not necessary.

A beaten man naturally asks at some point, “Why bother?” I don’t want to ask that question anymore. If I have to ask, I want to have a better answer.