Successophobia: the

fear that if one is successful, then one's personal needs will be forgotten and one will no longer have one's childish needs catered to.

seemed unable to achieve the animal happiness of people on TV, so I had to stop watching it; mirrors freaked me out; I read every Agatha Christie book; I once thought I'd lost my shadow. I was on automatic pilot.

"I became nonsexual and my body felt inside-out—covered with ice and carbon and plywood like the abandoned mini-malls, flour mills, and oil refineries of Tonawanda and Niagara Falls. Sexual signals became omnipresent and remained repulsive. Accidental eye contact with 7-Eleven grocery clerks became charged with vile meaning. All looks with strangers became the unspoken question, 'Are you the stranger who will rescue me?' Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being's eyes.

"I started to find humanity repulsive, reducing it to hormones, flanks, mounds, secretions, and compelling methanous stinks. At least in this state I felt that there was no possibility of being the ideal target market any more. If, back in Toronto, I had tried to have life both ways by considering myself unfettered and creative, while also playing the patsy corporate drone, I was certainly paying a price.

"But what really got me was the way young people can look into your eyes, curious but without a trace of bodily hunger. Early teens and younger, who I'd see looking envy-makingly happy during my brief agoraphobia-filled forays into the local Buffalo malls that were still open. That guileless look had been erased forever in me, so I felt, and I was convinced that I would walk around the next forty years hollowly acting out life's motions, while listening to the rustling, taunting maracas of youthful mummy dust bounce about inside me.

"Okay, okay. We all go through a certain crisis point, or, I suppose, or we're not complete. I can't tell you how many people I know who claim to have had their midlife crisis early in life. But there invariably comes a certain point where our youth fails us; where college fails us; where Mom and Dad fail us. Me, I'd never be able to find refuge again in Saturday mornings spent in rumpus rooms, itchy with fiberglass in­sulation, listening to Mel Blanc's voice on the TV, unwittingly breathing xenon vapors from cinder blocks, snacking on chewable vitamin C tab­lets, and tormenting my sister's Barbies.

"But my crisis wasn't just the failure of youth but also a failure of class and of sex and the future and I still don't know what. I began to

pee this world as one where citizens stare, say, at the armless Venus de Milo and fantasize about amputee sex or self-righteously apply a fig leaf to the statue of David, but not before breaking off his dick as a souvenir. All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

"So the point of all of this was that I needed a clean slate with no one to read it. I needed to drop out even further. My life had become a series of scary incidents that simply weren't stringing together to make an interesting book, and God, you get old so quickly! Time was (and is) running out. So I split to where the weather is hot and dry and where the cigarettes are cheap. Like you and Claire. And now I'm here."

So now you know a bit more about Dag (skewed as his narrative pre­
sentation of his life may be). But meanwhile, back at our picnic on this
throbbing desert day, Claire is just finishing her mesquite chicken,
wiping off her sunglasses, and replacing them with authority on the
bridge of her nose indicating that she's getting ready to tell us a
story. HA bit about Claire here: she has scrawl handwriting like a taxi
driver. She knows how to fold Japanese paper cranes and she actually
likes the taste of soya burgers. She arrived

in Palm Springs on the hot, windy Mother's Day

weekend that Nostrada- mus (according to some

interpretations) had pre- dieted would be the end

a far more lofty a resort complete

of the world. HI was tending the poolside bar

at La Spa de Luxembourg then,

place than lowly Larry's and

with nine bubbling health pools and patterned imitation silver knives and forks for outdoor use. Weighty stuff, and it always impressed the guests. Anyhow, I remember watching Claire's incalculably numerous and noisy siblings, half-siblings, step-siblings chatter incessantly out in the sun by the pools, like parakeets in an aviary while a sullen, hungry tomcat prowls outside the cage's mesh. For lunch they would only eat fish, and only tiny fish at that. As one of them said, "The big fish have been in the water a bit too long, and God only knows what they've had

I TRY TO IMAGINE MYSELF IN THIS SAME JOB ONE YEAR FROM NOW...

JUST NOT SEEING ANY PICTURES

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23