Boredom

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  At her death in 1665, the head of Jeanne des Anges, as she was now known, was decapitated, mummified, and placed in a silver-gilt box with crystal windows. It was displayed next to the anointed chemise for those who wanted to see it, at the Ursuline house in Loudun, until its disappearance during the French Revolution. • • • Interpretation: In her earliest years, Jeanne de Belciel displayed an insatiable appetite for attention. She wearied her parents, who finally got rid of her by sending her to a convent in Poitiers. There she proceeded to drive the nuns insane with her sarcasm and incredible air of superiority. Sent off to Loudun, it seemed she decided to try a different approach to gaining the recognition she so desperately needed. Given books on spirituality, she determined she would excel all others in her knowledge and pious behavior. She made a complete show of both and gained the good favor of the prioress. But as head of the house, she felt bored, and the attention she now received inadequate. Her dreams of Grandier were a mix of fabrication and autosuggestion. Soon after the exorcists arrived, she was given a book on demonology, which she devoured, and knowing the various ins and outs of devil inhabitation, she proceeded to give herself all of the most dramatic traits, which would be picked up by the exorcists as sure signs of possession. She became the star of the public spectacle. While possessed, she went further than all others in her degradation and lewd behavior. After Grandier’s gruesome execution, which profoundly affected the other nuns, who certainly felt guilt at the part they had played in the death of an innocent man, Jeanne alone felt the sudden lack of attention as unbearable and so she upped the ante by refusing to let go of the demons. She had become a master at sensing the weaknesses and hidden desires of those around her—first the prioress, and then the exorcists, and now Father Surin. He wanted so badly to be the one to redeem her that he would fall for the simplest of miracles. As for the stigmata, some later speculated that she had etched these names with acid, or traced them through colored starch. It seemed odd that they appeared only on her left hand, where it would be easy for her to write them out. It is known that in extreme hysteria the skin becomes particularly sensitive, and a fingernail can do the trick. As someone who had long experimented in concocting herbal remedies, it was easy for her to apply fragrant drops. Once people believed in the stigmata, it would be hard for them to doubt the anointment. Even Surin found the need for a tour dubious. At this point, she could no longer disguise her true appetite for attention. Years later, Jeanne wrote an autobiography in which she admitted to a completely theatrical side to her personality. She was continually

• From Best Erotic Romance

  This was all my idea, this trip. A real step outside of my comfort zone. Our comfort zone. Every year Greg invited Tim and me to come to his place for New Year’s Eve, and every year we found some reason not to go. Or I should say, Tim found a reason. He was never really clear on why he didn’t want to. I suspected some sort of sibling rivalry, since Greg lived in a $2 million architect-designed creation overlooking the ocean, and we just had a dull, suburban condo. Oh, and this little lake cabin, which had been in Tim’s family for decades. It wasn’t anything fancy; it didn’t even really have any character. Very utilitarian. The downstairs consisted of one large room with a small kitchen in one corner and a woodstove in the other. A sofa bed, coffee table along one wall, and a small round table for eating at along the other. Under the stairs to the loft was a bathroom with a stall shower. The loft was open to below and was basically just a floor. We used an inflatable mattress when we stayed up there. So most New Year’s we’d stay home, or maybe go out with some of his office buddies and their wives, a boring crowd if there ever was one. I was tired of it. I’d hit my forties, our daughter was at college, my job was dull, and I was ready for something. But what kind of something? This year I accepted Greg’s invitation before Tim had a chance to come up with an excuse. He’d been a little perturbed, and then doubly perturbed when I told him I was inviting Teresa. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to set Greg up with her. You’re not, are you?” It actually hadn’t occurred to me. Yeah, Greg was unmarried, by choice he’d said, and seemed to have a steady stream of attractive women to spend time with. He didn’t seem like he needed any help. And Teresa was newly divorced and “not on the market,” as she so aptly put it. I’d met her at a weekend writer’s retreat, and we’d discovered we lived practically next door to each other, in neighboring towns. She’d just moved there after her divorce, which was why our paths had never crossed before. It turned out she was several years old than me, but she seemed much more vivacious, and her attitude rubbed off on me when we spent time together. I guess Tim likes her well enough. He’s fairly set in his ways and always seems amused at my tendency to want to try new things. I love him to pieces, but I guess I’m feeling sort of blah about our relationship.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  began to lose consciousness, he could focus on the sunset in the reflected mirror, holding on to this image as long as he could. The sun always returned; maybe he would as well, proving the doctors wrong. Within hours he fell into a coma. Erickson regained consciousness three days later. Somehow he had cheated death, but now the paralysis had spread to his entire body. Even his lips were paralyzed. He could not move or gesture, nor communicate to others in any way. The only body parts he could move were his eyeballs, allowing him to scan the narrow space of his room. Quarantined in the house on the farm in rural Wisconsin where he grew up, his only company was his seven sisters, his one brother, his parents, and a private nurse. For someone with such an active mind, the boredom was excruciating. But one day as he listened to his sisters talking among themselves, he became aware of something he had never noticed before. As they talked, their faces made all kinds of movements, and the tone of their voices seemed to have a life of its own. One sister said to another, “Yes, that’s a good idea,” but she said this in a monotone and with a noticeable smirk, all of which seemed to say, “I actually don’t think it’s a good idea at all.” Somehow a yes could really mean no. Now he paid attention to this. It was a stimulating game. In the course of the next day he counted sixteen different forms of no that he heard, indicating various degrees of hardness, all accompanied by different facial expressions. At one point he noticed one sister saying yes to something while actually shaking her head no. It was very subtle, but he saw it. If people said yes but really felt no, it appeared to show up in their grimaces and body language. On another occasion he watched closely from the corner of his eye as one sister offered another an apple, but the tension in her face and tightness in her arms indicated she was just being polite and clearly wanted to keep it for herself. This signal was not picked up, and yet it seemed so clear to him. Unable to participate in conversations, he found his mind completely absorbed in observing people’s hand gestures, their raised eyebrows, the pitch of their voices, and the sudden folding of their arms. He noticed, for instance, how often the veins in his sisters’ necks would begin to pulsate when they stood over him, indicating the nervousness they felt in his presence. Their breathing patterns as they spoke fascinated him, and he discovered that certain rhythms indicated boredom and were generally followed by a yawn. Hair seemed to play an important role with his sisters. A very deliberate brushing back of strands of hair would indicate impatience —“I’ve heard enough; now please shut up.” But a quicker, more unconscious stroke could indicate rapt attention.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  listening to authority figures is old-fashioned. Better to explore, have fun, and be open. A time will come when we will figure out what exactly to do with our lives. In the meantime, maintaining the freedom to do as we wish and go where we please becomes our main motivation. Some of us, however, react the opposite way: Frightened of the chaos, we quickly opt for a career that is practical and lucrative, hopefully related to some of our interests, but not necessarily. We settle on an intimate relationship. We may even continue to cling to our parents. What motivates us is to somehow establish the stability that is so hard to find in this world. Both paths, however, tend to lead to some problems further down the road. In the first case, trying so many things out, we never really develop solid skills in one particular area. We find it hard to focus on a specific activity for too long because we are so used to flitting around and distracting ourselves, which makes it doubly hard to learn new skills if we want to. Because of this our career possibilities begin to narrow. We become trapped into moving from one job to another. We might now want a relationship that lasts, but we haven’t developed the tolerance for compromise, and we cannot help but bristle at the restrictions to our freedom that a lasting relationship will represent. Although we might not like to admit it to ourselves, our freedom can begin to wear on us. In the second case, the career we committed to in our twenties might begin to feel a bit lifeless in our thirties. We chose it for practical purposes, and it has little connection to what actually interests us in life. It begins to feel like just a job. Our minds disengage from the work. And now that smorgasbord of opportunities in the modern world begins to tempt us as we reach midlife. Perhaps we need some new, exciting career or relationship or adventure. In either case, we do what we can to manage our frustrations. But as the years go by, we start to experience bouts of pain that we cannot deny or repress. We are generally unaware of the source of our discomfort—the lack of purpose and true direction in our lives. This pain comes in several forms. We feel increasingly bored . Not really engaged in our work, we turn to various distractions to occupy our restless minds. But by the law of diminishing returns, we need to continually find new and stronger forms of diversion—the latest trend in entertainment, travel to an exotic location, a new guru or cause to follow, hobbies that are taken up and abandoned quickly, addictions of all kinds. Only when we are alone or in down moments do we actually experience the chronic boredom that motivates many of our actions and eats away at us.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We must see within ourselves the grass-is-always-greener syndrome at work and how it continually impels us to certain actions. We need to be able to distinguish between what is positive and productive in our covetous tendencies and what is negative and counterproductive. On the positive side, feeling restless and discontented can motivate us to search for something better and to not settle for what we have. It enlarges our imagination as we consider other possibilities instead of the circumstances we face. As we get older, we tend to become more complacent, and renewing the restlessness of our earlier years can keep us youthful and our minds active. This restlessness, however, must be under conscious control. Often our discontent is merely chronic; our desire for change is vague and a reflection of our boredom. This leads to a waste of precious time. We are unhappy with the way our career is going and so we make a big change, which requires learning new skills and acquiring new contacts. We enjoy the newness of it all. But several years later we again feel the stirring of discontent. This new path isn’t right either. We would have been better off thinking about this more deeply, homing in on those aspects of our previous career that did not click and trying for a more gentle change, choosing a line of work related to the previous one but requiring an adaptation of our skills. With relationships, we can spend our life searching for the perfect man or woman and end up largely alone. There is nobody perfect. Instead, it is better to come to terms with the flaws of the other person and accept them or even find some charm in their weaknesses. Calming down our covetous desires, we can then learn the arts of compromise and how to make a relationship work, which never come easily or naturally. Instead of constantly chasing after the latest trends and modeling our desires on what others find exciting, we should spend our time getting to know our own tastes and desires better, so that we can distinguish what is something we truly need or want from that which has been manufactured by advertisers or viral effects. Life is short and we have only so much energy. Led by our covetous desires, we can waste so much time in futile searches and changes. In general, do not constantly wait and hope for something better, but rather make the most of what you have. Consider it this way: You are embedded in an environment that consists of the people you know and the places you frequent. This is your reality. Your mind is being continually drawn far away from this reality, because of human nature. You dream of traveling to exotic places, but if you go there, you merely drag with you your own discontented frame of mind. You search for entertainment that will bring you new fantasies to feed upon. You read books filled with

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  fish pier (the two types of college) (1979) An endless haze, waiting for yet another boat to appear on the horizon, the work in and of itself nothing to look forward to, the boredom nearly unbearable. The boats can dock as late as ten at night, which means we’ll work until two, three. We’ve been at it since morning—lolling around, getting high, hiding out—until finally the captain radios in that he’s passing the last buoy. The pier boss finds us, shakes us out of our hiding places, assigns jobs—two lumpers with pitchforks in the hold, knee-deep in slime and ice, shoveling fish into a basket; another on deck above, a gloved hand on the line, feeding the basket through the hatch; another on the pier manning the winch, tipping the overflowing basket onto the culling table; another two at the table, sorting round from flat; then a couple on the two-wheelers, slamming an empty box onto the scale, waiting until the cullers slide the fish in, then icing the box, nailing down the lid. The captain writes the weight on the lid with a wax pencil, marks it in his book, we swing another box on top, stacking them four high, eight hundred pounds of fish total, then haul it all off to the walk-in freezer. I started that August, working the two-wheeler, a year to the day after I drove my motorcycle off the road, and after three months I’m bored silly, mostly from the endless waiting. It had taken the better part of the year to recover from the motorcycle accident. In the weeks after my spleen was removed I spent my days before the television or outside in the sun, in either a chemical or a marijuana haze, depending on what my friends brought me. I lost a lot of weight, hovering below one-twenty for a while. Near the end of August my brother was readying to return to college for the fall and I’d forgotten to apply. He was getting the house ready for the winter, working in the crawl space, fiddling with the furnace. As he passed me on his way out to the garage, he muttered, Why don’t you get out of that fuckin’ chair, help out? I’m recovering, I reminded him, why don’t you fuck off. What’d you say? he demanded. Deaf fuck, I said. As I turned my head away he coldcocked me, scraping a handful of keys from my jawbone midway down my neck. He walked out as I pressed my hand to the wound. It was true I needed a job, needed to do something, get some direction. Most of my friends were starting college, town was emptying. A few weeks later I began working for a cleaning company, a franchise with bright yellow vans. I was given a set of light blue polyester shirts with my first name embroidered over the pocket, sent into strangers’ houses with buckets, solvents and rags. I was unable to leave my hometown.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Once you have an adequate feel for what is really going on, you must be bold in how you respond, giving voice to what other people are feeling but not understanding. Be careful to not get too far out ahead and be misunderstood. Ever alert, always letting go of your prior interpretations, you can seize the opportunities in the moment that others cannot even begin to detect. Think of yourself as an enemy of the status quo, whose proponents must view you in turn as dangerous. See this task as absolutely necessary for the revitalization of the human spirit and the culture at large, and master it. Our era is a birth-time, and a period of transition. The spirit of man has broken with the old order of things . . . and with the old ways of thinking, and is of the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about its own transformation. . . . The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. —G. W. F. Hegel Keys to Human Nature In human culture, we can see a phenomenon—changes in fashions and styles—that at first glance might appear trivial, but that in fact is quite profound, revealing a deep and fascinating part of human nature. Look at clothing styles, for instance. In the stores or in fashion shows we can perhaps detect some trends and changes from a few months before, but they are usually subtle. Go back to styles ten years ago and, compared with the present, the differences are quite apparent. Go back twenty years and it is even clearer. With such a distance in time, we can even notice a particular style of twenty years ago that now probably looks a bit amusing and passé. These changes in fashion styles that are so detectable in increments of decades can be characterized as creating something looser and more romantic than the previous style, or more overtly sexual and body conscious, or more classic and elegant, or gaudier and with more frills. We could name several other categories of changes in style, but in the end they are limited in number, and they seem to come in waves or patterns that are detectable over the course of several decades or centuries. For example, the interest in sparser and more classic clothing will recur at various intervals of time, not at precisely the same intervals, but with a degree of regularity. This phenomenon raises some interesting questions: Do these shifts relate to something more than just the desire for what is new and different?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  began to lose consciousness, he could focus on the sunset in the reflected mirror, holding on to this image as long as he could. The sun always returned; maybe he would as well, proving the doctors wrong. Within hours he fell into a coma. Erickson regained consciousness three days later. Somehow he had cheated death, but now the paralysis had spread to his entire body. Even his lips were paralyzed. He could not move or gesture, nor communicate to others in any way. The only body parts he could move were his eyeballs, allowing him to scan the narrow space of his room. Quarantined in the house on the farm in rural Wisconsin where he grew up, his only company was his seven sisters, his one brother, his parents, and a private nurse. For someone with such an active mind, the boredom was excruciating. But one day as he listened to his sisters talking among themselves, he became aware of something he had never noticed before. As they talked, their faces made all kinds of movements, and the tone of their voices seemed to have a life of its own. One sister said to another, “Yes, that’s a good idea,” but she said this in a monotone and with a noticeable smirk, all of which seemed to say, “I actually don’t think it’s a good idea at all.” Somehow a yes could really mean no. Now he paid attention to this. It was a stimulating game. In the course of the next day he counted sixteen different forms of no that he heard, indicating various degrees of hardness, all accompanied by different facial expressions. At one point he noticed one sister saying yes to something while actually shaking her head no. It was very subtle, but he saw it. If people said yes but really felt no, it appeared to show up in their grimaces and body language. On another occasion he watched closely from the corner of his eye as one sister offered another an apple, but the tension in her face and tightness in her arms indicated she was just being polite and clearly wanted to keep it for herself. This signal was not picked up, and yet it seemed so clear to him. Unable to participate in conversations, he found his mind completely absorbed in observing people’s hand gestures, their raised eyebrows, the pitch of their voices, and the sudden folding of their arms. He noticed, for instance, how often the veins in his sisters’ necks would begin to pulsate when they stood over him, indicating the nervousness they felt in his presence. Their breathing patterns as they spoke fascinated him, and he discovered that certain rhythms indicated boredom and were generally followed by a yawn. Hair seemed to play an important role with his sisters. A very deliberate brushing back of strands of hair would indicate impatience —“I’ve heard enough; now please shut up.” But a quicker, more unconscious stroke could indicate rapt attention.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  first days on the ice, Shackleton made a point of asking Hurley for his opinion on all significant matters, such as food stores, and complimenting him on his ideas. Furthermore he assigned Hurley to his own tent, which both made Hurley feel more important than the others and made it easier for Shackleton to keep an eye on him. The navigator, Huberht Hudson, revealed himself to be very self-centered and a terrible listener. He needed constant attention. Shackleton talked with him more than with any of the others and also brought him into his tent. If there were other men he suspected of being latent malcontents, he spread them around in different tents, diluting their possible influence. As the winter wore on, he doubled his attentiveness. At certain moments, he could feel the boredom of the men in how they carried themselves, in how they talked less and less to one another. To combat this, he organized sporting events on the ice during the sunless days and entertainments at night—music, practical jokes, storytelling. Every holiday was carefully observed, with a large feast set out for the men. The endless days of drifting somehow were filled with highlights, and soon he began to notice something remarkable: the men were decidedly cheery and even seemed to be enjoying the challenges of life on a drifting ice floe. At one point the floe they were on had become dangerously small, and so he ordered the men into the three small lifeboats they had salvaged from the Endurance . They needed to head for land. He kept the boats together and, braving the rough waters, they managed to land on the nearby Elephant Island, on a narrow patch of beach. As he surveyed the island that day, it was clear the conditions on it were in some ways worse than the ice floe. Time was against them. That same day, Shackleton ordered one boat to be prepared for an extremely risky attempt to reach the most accessible and inhabited patch of land in the area—South Georgia Island, some eight hundred miles to the northeast. The chances of making it were slim, but the men could not survive long on Elephant Island, with its exposure to the sea and the paucity of animals to kill. Shackleton had to choose carefully the five other men, besides himself, for this voyage. One man he selected, Harry McNeish, was a very odd choice. He was the ship’s carpenter and the oldest member of the crew at fifty-seven. He could be grumpy and did not take well to hard labor. Even though it would be an extremely rough journey in their small boat, Shackleton was too afraid to leave him behind. He put him in charge of fitting out the boat for the trip. With this task, he would feel personally responsible for the boat’s safety, and on the journey his mind would be continually occupied with keeping track of the boat’s seaworthiness.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  "Oh, my God, you know how life goes, father!" she said, looking thoughtfully at the ceiling... "Of course I've known life... but that's why it's a somewhat bleak prospect for me, always having to sit at home here like a silly thing. I hope you don't think that I don't like being with you, papa ... I should have had a beating, it would be the greatest ingratitude! But as it is in life, you know..." Above all, however, she resented the ever more religious spirit that filled her sprawling father's house, for the consul's pious inclinations became more and more evident as he grew old and sickly, and as the consul grew older, she too began to pursue them to find a taste for the spirit. Graces had always been customary in the Buddenbrooks' house; but now the law had existed for a long time that mornings and evenings the family and the servants would gather in the breakfast room to hear a passage from the Bible from the master of the house. Besides, the visits of pastors and missionaries increased from year to year, for the dignified patrician house in Meng Street, where, by the way, one dined so excellently, was in the Lutheran world and Reformed clergy, long known as a hospitable haven to the internal and external missions, and from all parts of the fatherland black-clad and long-haired gentlemen occasionally came to linger a few days... of godly conversation, some nourishing meals, and sounding support for holy purposes certainly. Even the preachers of the city went out and in as family friends... Tom was far too discreet and understanding to even smile, but Tony was simply mocking himself, yes, unfortunately she made a point of ridiculing the clergy whenever she got the chance. Sometimes, when the consul suffered from migraines, it was up to Madame Grünlich to take care of the housekeeping and set the menu. One day, when a strange preacher, whose appetite aroused the general joy, was visiting the house, she insidiously ordered bacon soup, the city special dish, a bouillon prepared with sour herbs, in which the whole luncheon meal: ham, potatoes, sour plums, baking pears, cauliflower, peas, beans, turnips and other things, along with the fruit sauce, which no one in the world could enjoy who wasn't used to it from childhood. »Does it taste good? Is it tasty, Mr. Pastor?” Tony kept asking... “No? Oh God, who would have thought it!'

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  “Well, actually he is a little weird in that category,” she admits. This livens up the conversation for a few minutes. Before leaving the phone booth I plug the music back into my head. More hollering from Van. I notice as I set out on my walk that the New York landscape has taken on the blurred and sepia tones of a distant memory. I’m already back in Iowa, waiting for my body to join me. Once home, I discover that I’m bored. Outside, long blank fields of corn and the blue midwestern sky. Inside, the same dustballs in the same corners. The cat carries tiny corpses up to the back step and arranges them in rows. The kid next door plays basketball with earphones on in his driveway, mouthing lyrics that would turn your hair white if you could hear them. Squint your eyes and he looks a little bit like Dave Anderson. Close your eyes altogether and the blond poet appears. I perfect the art of brooding, gazing for hours at the paint on my living room ceiling, smoking and smoking. Elizabeth comes to visit me one weekend and we try on each other’s clothes and paint our toenails maroon. “I’ll say one thing,” she remarks. “I do happen to have decent feet.” And she turns them this way and that, admiring. My own feet look like they belong to a stranger with too much time on her hands. I stretch out on the couch and feed myself a potato chip. There is a long hair-sized crack running down the center of the ceiling. “Don’t brood in front of me,” she says. Mister Spider has built a web right above my giant, dying, phallic-looking cactus. It’s a little trampoline and he’s bouncing around in the center of it right now. Even the spiders are bored. “It could be worse,” she mentions. “We could be having to entertain those two mopes.” She means our ex-husbands, the Jim and Eric show. If they were here, this is what they’d be doing: nothing, that’s what. They’d be placidly sitting around, waiting for us to make something happen. “So we’d still be bored,” she concludes, “and we wouldn’t even be able to paint our toenails, for fear of ridicule.” It’s true. Not only would it be boring but I’d have that old feeling back of constantly imagining myself as a widow wearing a great outfit. The phone rings. “Who could be calling me here?” Elizabeth says. We let it ring and ring until the answering machine kicks in and then we tiptoe over to listen. “This is what I do when you call,” I tell her. My answering machine voice lies about my whereabouts and then the beep comes on. Suddenly I’m standing on my circus footstool like a mouse has been let loose in the room. It’s the guy. “Hi, Jo Ann, this is X,” he says and then leaves a long, rambling, totally coherent message and hangs up. Oh man.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  “He’s got to advertise it to the neighbors.” Popular thinking places Yimmer at the crime scene, a white dog against a brown brick establishment, fodder for local dinner table discussion tonight. “If there’s a garter snake in this neighborhood, then I’m moving,” Helen tells her. They’re making sheers for Helen’s dining room, so she can open her drapes without the whole world looking in. They keep taking the pins out of their mouths in order to smoke, and then putting them back in. As soon as they get the hard part done they plan to switch from iced tea to beer. All three kids have been dispatched to find the dog on our own block, but I have come back early, due to the bogus nature of the mission. We all know where she is. I’m trying to get my parakeet to look at me. No matter where I stand, next to his cage, he turns around in a single hopping motion and looks the other way. “I think this bird is mad at me,” I say. He wants me to put my finger in there so he can peck it. The back door slams and the refrigerator opens. “Get out of there,” my mother says through her pins. Linda flops down on the sofa and opens her book, taking small bites off a radish. “She’s putting her fingers in the birdcage,” she tells my mother. “I forgot,” I say quickly. “Well, he’ll be happy to remind you,” my mother says. “Linda’s eating a radish without washing it,” I report. “I wish I had about eight more just like them,” my mother tells Helen. She goes to the back door and calls for Brad, very, very loudly, in a voice designed to scare all neighborhood children, then stops at the refrigerator and gets two cans of beer. It takes Brad a full ten minutes to report in, and when he does, it turns out he forgot his mission altogether and was making a campfire in the middle of the alley. “We’re rubbing the sticks together and then we’re going to cook things over it,” he tells my mother. His mouth is still vivid from lunch and he has his T-shirt on inside out. Helen is charmed by him and exclaims over the idea of a campfire in the alley. He glances at her. “Don’t worry,” he explains, “it’s all pretend.” What about the dog? “Huh?” he says. The tavern is several long blocks away. The girls are to get their shoes on and go over there with the leash and see if the dog is waiting outside. If she is, they are to put the leash on her and bring her home. If it turns out they can do that without fighting, then they won’t get beat to a pulp when they get back. Helen thinks this is funny and so does my mother. Two things we are never, under any circumstances, to do.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  I spend my time building elaborate mazes from the stacks of boxes, with hidden paths leading to a central room I disappear into to get high, read, sleep. Most of the job consists of learning how to hide, of how to appear busy, of killing time. In this way it’s a continuation of my twelve years of public school. Hiding seems the point of everything. I’m going nowhere, and not very fast. The monotony of being perpetually high and trying to look busy is worse than cleaning houses, so I decide to quit, but before I can I’m taken aside by Keith, the electrician. Known as the “Professor,” Keith knows my mother, always asks after her. He takes me out to lunch and offers me a job as his apprentice. Officially Keith’s the electrician for the boats, for the fish house, and he looks the part—wears a tool belt, messes with boxes sprouting medusas of particolored wire—but it’s a front. High up in the Organization, he maintains the radios that keep in touch with boats that aren’t going out for fish, the type of boat that Liam goes out on. He calls the radio the “Mothership.” Working for Keith means that I’m moving up the ladder. On the surface I’m learning a trade, which I need, and at the same time I’m being ushered into the big time, the big money. This is good, this is the plan—electricity can be my front. One of my first jobs is to spend a week in Tony’s trucking yard, burning documents behind the building in a steel drum. Keith checks up on me once a day, to make sure I’m pulverizing even the ash, scattering it. I know I’m being filmed as I do this, Keith points out the telephone worker strapped to the pole directly across from the yard, waves to him. But no one ever approaches me, and in three days all the records are dust. It’s some kind of test, to see if I can handle the conceptually illegal before being offered a shot at the real. I’m then moved back to the fish pier, to rewire the boats in ways that had nothing to do with fish, simply making them comfortable for longer trips. Boats still come in, fish are unloaded and in the fillet house fish are cut and packed and shipped out. But no one believes this is the real money. After that weekend, with the kidnapping and the tough-guy stance, Tony never uses the pier again, not for drugs. The drug boats now unload in Portland, Maine, a washed-up port at this point in its history, off the map. Red and the Goon haul the marijuana down from Maine in eighteen-wheelers. Sometimes, if it’s the season, they stash it in a load of Christmas trees. This all comes out later. At the time I just know, along with the FBI and the DEA, that something’s happening.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  The blacktop dips into view, and as the coyote moves toward it he prepares himself for the highway’s big medicine. The sandy dirt beneath his paws gives way just a bit as each foot lands and springs off, the small stones and irregularities in his path add juice to his travels but rarely pain. Under his paws it is sand… sand… rock… sand… stick… sand… stick and then the highway’s medicine: hard … scalding… scalding… scalding and then gravel… sand… rock… sand… sand… rock… sand again. As he passes once more safely through the hard pond of highway fire the coyote is startled by something in the air, something dangerous bearing down on him. Alert and agile, he jumps to the side, cringing and whining, but it is too late. An empty bread wrapper hits him smack in the side of the head. The landscape has changed from the invisible Comobabi Mountains of love to the barren flats of boredom and annoyance. The sun is a yellow baseball hanging over right field, the driver’s side is in the shade and the passenger’s side is sizzling. I decide it’s my turn to drive. Eric glances over. “Uh, doubt it,” he says. I’ve just noticed how his hairline has taken a daring swoop down his forehead and back up again, just like his father’s. I mention this to him while inspecting my fingernails. He smiles and addresses me by my mother’s name. “I mean, honey,” he corrects himself, “the kid’s got the wheel and the kid’s keeping it.” He’s leaning back in his seat, steering with one finger, brow arched. We are very bored. The kid is a shithook, I remark. A shithook with the wheel , though, he clarifies. He points out that I’m sweating a lot, more than he’s ever seen me do. “Pretty hot over there, eh?” I begin calling him Lovey, and suggest that we change drivers without stopping. He gives in reluctantly, only because he knows eventually he’ll lose. If I don’t get to drive pretty soon I will open my car door while we’re moving and he can’t stand that. He’s afraid I’ll get sucked out by accident and it’ll be his fault for being a control freak. You have to be going really fast for this trick, over seventy miles an hour. Both of us recline our seats all the way down, I do the gas pedal with my left foot and hold the steering wheel steady with my left hand while Eric climbs into the back seat. I move over the gear shift and slide into his seat while he climbs over my reclined seat back into the passenger side. It’s not exactly that smooth, of course, there is a lot of swerving and hollering that goes along with it. We settle in and bring our seat backs into position and open a can of malt liquor. “Yee-haw,” I say, now that I’m in the driver’s seat.

• From Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality (2007)

  1 There’s an advertising campaign running right now for the city of Las Vegas that says, “Whatever happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas.” How boring does your life have to be that you need to go somewhere far away and do things you don’t want anybody to know about to have a good time?2 1 Corinthians 6:13.3 1 Corinthians 6:19. He’s writing to a church here, a group of people, so the “you” is plural.4 Blaise Pascal said, “Man is neither angel nor beast” (Pensées [London: Dent, 1960], 68).5 I’m using the word spirit here in reference to the distinction made in Genesis between humans and the rest of creation, humans being made in the image of God. In the sense that the word for spirit is also the word for breath in both Hebrew and Greek, then obviously animals do have spirits, as we read in Ecclesiastes 3:21.6 Job 38:7.7 Psalm 8:5.8 Hebrews 1:14.9 Being fully human is our job. Thinking and laughing and arranging and creating and relating and designing and nurturing and responding and reacting and pondering when googling became a verb and wondering and exploring and meditating and acting and making long lists of verbs and calling and talking and feeling and sharing and doubting if this paragraph is ever going to end and teaching and learning and jumping on a trampoline and sighing and celebrating and dancing and turning to the person next to you and saying: “This is living.”You can make your own list because you know what it is that makes you feel alive, what it is that feeds your soul, what it is that reminds you that the goal is to be fully human. What’s on your list? I’ve heard people say, “I’m only human,” as if it’s a bad thing. But being human isn’t a bad thing; it’s a good thing. It’s what God intended. How could we ever be anything else? The issue, then, isn’t trying to escape our humanity in order to morph into something, or somebody, else. The problem is all of the things that get in the way of being fully human. When a person says, “I’m only human,” perhaps what they mean is, “I have this habit of making choices that inhibit my being fully human.” This is a primal struggle in all of us, and it goes all the way back to the garden of Eden. The temptation was, and is, to trade our full humanity for something else.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  In the process we cast aside what is frivolous, immature, irresponsible, reckless, excessive, and unproductive, for such things clash with the task at hand: building a family. “I got rid of my motorcycle when Jimmy was born. I’m not allowed to die in a bike crash anymore.” “I’m a sculptor, but I took this job doing Power Point presentations for a high-end investment firm because the pay and the benefits are great and I’ll be vested after five years so I won’t have to worry about retirement and I can put all my extra money into Becky’s college fund” (all said without the speaker taking a breath). “No partying till five o’clock in the morning for me anymore, not when I have to get up at five-thirty—six-fifteen when the baby’s feeling generous.” “It was all spur-of-the-moment for us before the kids. We’d decide to go camping and we’d throw the tent into the car and go. I could call Dawn at the office at five-fifteen to tell her about a band that was playing at nine, and she’d always meet me there. Now we buy season tickets but wind up giving half of them away.” Family life flourishes in an atmosphere of comfort and consistency. Yet eroticism resides in unpredictability, spontaneity, and risk. Eros is a force that doesn’t like to be constrained. When it settles into repetition, habit, or rules, it touches its death. It then is transformed into boredom and sometimes, more powerfully, into repulsion. Sex, a harbinger of loss of control, is fraught with uncertainty and vulnerability. But when kids come on the scene, our tol erance for these destabilizing emotions takes a dive. Perhaps this is why they are so often relegated to the fringes of family life. What eroticism thrives on, family life defends against. Many of us become so immersed in our role as parents that we become unable to break free, even when we might. “I knew we were in trouble when I couldn’t even think about having sex until all the toys were put away,” my patient Stephanie reluctantly admits. “And then there are the dishes, the laundry, the bills, the dog. The list never ends. The chores always seem to win out, and intimacy between Warren and me gets lost in the shuffle. If someone were to ask me, ‘What would you rather do, mop the kitchen floor or make love to your husband?’ of course I would pick sex. But in real life? I push Warren away and grab that mop.” It’s easy to disparage the mop. Like a lot of mothers (yes, mothers), Stephanie resents cleaning, even while she feels compelled to pursue the tidy household as a symbol of successful motherhood. She finds herself irresistibly drawn to cleanliness, as if order on the outside can bring peace on the inside. And, to some extent, it does.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  I’ve always focused on the tangible stuff—the money, the house, the kids in college—thinking that’s what’s solid. But who says that what Charles is after is so frivolous? Maybe it’s another way of taking care of a marriage.” By refusing to acknowledge anything that falls outside the accepted range of behavior, Charles and Rose had achieved the opposite of what they were seeking. Rather than making their love more secure, they had, in fact, made it more vulnerable. But allowing both of them to reveal heretofore segregated parts of themselves was not without risk. The very foundation of their relationship was at stake. Each of them would have to tolerate the unfolding of the other, even if it took them beyond their range of comfort. Dismantling the Security System We often expect our relationship to act as a buttress against the slings and arrows of life. But love, by its very nature, is unstable. So we shore it up: we tighten the borders, batten down the hatches, and create predictability, all in an effort to make us feel more secure. Yet the mechanisms that we put in place to make love safer often put us more at risk. We ground ourselves in familiarity, and perhaps achieve a peaceful domestic arrangement, but in the process we orchestrate boredom. The verve of the relationship collapses under the weight of all that control. Stultified, couples are left wondering, “Whatever happened to fun? What ever happened to excitement, to transcendence, to awe?” Desire is fueled by the unknown, and for that reason it’s inherently anxiety-producing. In his book Open to Desire, the Buddhist psychoanalyst Mark Epstein explains that our willingness to engage that mystery keeps desire alive. Faced with the irrefutable otherness of our partner, we can respond with fear or with curiosity. We can try to reduce the other to a knowable entity, or we can embrace her persistent mystery. When we resist the urge to control, when we keep ourselves open, we preserve the possibility of discovery. Eroticism resides in the ambiguous space between anxiety and fascination. We remain interested in our partners; they delight us, and we’re drawn to them. But, for many of us, renouncing the illusion of safety, and accepting the reality of our fundamental insecurity, proves to be a difficult step. 2 More Intimacy, Less Sex Love Seeks Closeness, but Desire Needs Distance Love and lust are inseparable parts of a larger whole for some, while for others they are irretrievably disconnected. Most of us, however, express our eroticism somewhere in the gray areas where love and lust both relate and conflict. —Jack Morin, from The Erotic Mind IN ANY FIRST CONVERSATION WITH a couple, I always ask how they met and what attracted them to each other. Since we associate therapy with problems, people usually don’t come to me when they are still in the initial thrall of love. Sometimes they need a gentle reminder of what once was.

• From Post Office (1971)

  11 The boys on Dorsey station didn’t know my problems. I’d enter through the back way each night, hide my sweater in a tray and walk in to get my timecard: “Brothers and sisters!” I’d say. “Brother, Hank!” “Hello, Brother Hank!” We had a game going, the black-white game and they liked to play it. Boyer would walk up to me, touch me on the arm and say, “Man, if I had your paint job I’d be a millionaire!” “Sure you would, Boyer. That’s all it takes: a white skin.” Then round little Hadley would walk up to us. “There used to be this black cook on this ship. He was the only black man aboard. He cooked tapioca pudding two or three times a week and then jacked- off into it. Those white boys really liked his tapioca pudding, hehehehe! They asked him how he made it and he said he had his own secret recipe, hehehehehehe!” We all laughed. I don’t know how many times I had to hear the tapioca pudding story ... “Hey, poor white trash! Hey, boy!” “Look, man, if I called you ‘boy’ you might draw steel on me. So don’t call me ‘boy.’ “ “Look, white man, what do you say we go out together this Saturday night? I got me a nice white gal with blonde hair. “ “And I got myself a nice black gal. And you know what color her hair is.” “You guys been fucking our women for centuries. We’re trying to catch up. You don’t mind if I stick my big black dick into your white gal?” “If she wants it she can have it.” “You stole the land from the Indians.” “Sure I did.” “You won’t invite me to your house. If you do, you’ll ask me to come in the back way, so no one will see my skin ...” “But I’ll leave a small light burning.” It got boring but there was no way out.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  When you start to feel antsy, it’s time for something—not someone—new.” I give him the following quotation from Frank Jude Boccio, author of Mindfulness Yoga, to think about as he leaves the session: “We bitch about our difficulties along the rough surface of our path, we curse every sharp stone underneath, until at some point in our maturation, we finally look down to see that they are diamonds.” We live in times where faster is better and control is power, where performance trumps process and risk is mathematically calculated. In our overcommitted lives there’s a temptation to simplify our existential complexities. We just don’t have the time and patience for open-ended reflection. We prefer instead to be proactive and thereby reaffirm our sense of control. In my practice I meet couples who complain about how the routine of their lives has left them feeling numb. But when we continuously invest in the kind of pragmatic solutions for “doing sex” that promise regularity—a decent average —we run the risk of exacerbating the blandness we struggle to remedy. Eroticism challenges us to seek a different kind of resolution, to surrender to the unknown and ungraspable, and to breach the confines of the rational world. 6 Sex Is Dirty; Save It for Someone You Love When Puritanism and Hedonism Collide Sex without sin is like an egg without salt. —Luis Buñuel I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce. —J. Edgar Hoover WHY DO SO MANY COUPLES become erotically alienated? The list of factors that contribute to the waning of excitement is long, and the one most commonly invoked is stress. “As soon as I sit down, I see the laundry that still needs folding, the unopened mail, the strewn toys, and it takes all sexual desire away from me.” “Between our new jobs, our old parents, and our young kids, I’m wiped out. I don’t have a very strong sex drive to begin with, but right now I don’t have any desire for it at all. Don’t take it personally.” But when my patients cite the all-too-real stresses of modern life to explain why romance went south, I suggest that there may be more to it. After all, stress was a reliable feature of their lives long before they met, and it didn’t stop them from leaping into one another’s arms.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The place was smelly and oppressive, but the grown-ups, their tongues loosened by martinis, settled in for a long stay. The two women, seated next to each other, talked Paris fashions and assured each other no one would wear the Parachute. Mr. Cork, more Republican than the republic, was discerning a Communist conspiracy in every national mishap. I could see my father wasn’t convinced, least of all by Mr. Cork’s ardor; Dad took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and nodded rhythmically through the harangue, his polite way of shielding himself from a loudmouth, of immigrating inward. Little Peter had turned a celery stalk from the relish tray into an Indian canoe and Kevin was sniping at it from the chalky promontory of a flour-dusted dinner roll; the massacre was carried out in whispered sound effects. “Kevin O’Malley Cork, how many times must I tell you not to play with your food!” “Aw, Maw.” On and on the meal devolved. The organist’s pale forehead glittering under his black wig, his teeth bared, he moved from a pathetic “Now Is the Hour” with copious vibrato into a “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” with a Latin beat. The waitress tempted everyone with pie—stewed apples and cinnamon enclosed in envelopes of pastry that looked like pressed Leatherette, each wedge, of course, à la mode. Coffee for the grownups, more milk for the kids. The bill. The argument over it. The change. The second cigar. The mints. The toothpicks. The crème de menthe frappés and the B and B’s. More coffee. The tip. “Good night, folks. Hurry back!” Another tip for the organist, who nods grateful acknowledgment while staying right in there with “Kitten on the Keys.”