How difficult is the process of divorce? I've developed a simple algorithm to help you empathize with my plight. The future is here. Mathematics will determine all of our emotional states from here on out, delivered by your cranially-implanted iPod. You may think there's no way an iPod can alter your mental state, but if you're forced to hear "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" enough times in a row, you'll feel what it fucking tells you to feel. It's the same effect as waterboarding, except instead of water, it uses lukewarm, viscous musical awful and by the time you're done, drowning doesn't seem like the worst option you can think of.
No, here's how you can feel what I've felt if you've never been divorced. Think of the worst thing that ever happened to you. Puppy eaten by an alligator. Grandma's wandering hands. Parents sold you to Albanian slave traffickers for two cartons of Parliaments and the complete works of Asgjë Sikur Dielli. Whatever it is. Now employ Stanislavski's affective memory technique from the Introduction to Stage Drama & Movement class you took in junior college the summer after high school in between frisbee golf and bong rips. Do you have it? Do you feel it? OK, filter out the detritus of emotional complexity until you've got the sticky, Triaminic-like syrup of pure pain. Swallow it. Let it fill you to the ends of your fingertips. Feel that? Now multiply that times 10,000.
There. It comes in waves, doesn't it? The nausea I expected, but the rash in the shape of the Blessed Virgin was totally unexpected, I'll be honest.
OK, now divide the pain you feel by about 10,806. That's about where I'm at with the divorce. I told it you it was mathematically precise. Seriously, it's troubling, but no way divorce is worse than that slave trafficking thing.
If I had to characterize it, I'd put it somewhere between the death of someone who was already really sick or a persistent toothache. But a toothache that is represented by a downmarket lawyer who doesn't see the conflict of interest between time spent on a case and the elevation of his/her compensation.
There really is no simple way to characterize the emotional line graph. It's a complicated zigzag of crags and unexpected valleys, like Steve Buscemi's teeth, except far less disarmingly charismatic. Kids out of the house for the first extended period? Sure, it feels kind of like you've died and are haunting your own empty house. But how long is it before it dawns on you: holy shit, FREE TIME?!
Things can always be worse. I could be maimed. I could be stuck in a burning car. I could be Glenn fucking Beck. I think maybe, instead, I will survive. Or even, if just by accident, live.
PS- the title is a linky click magic trick. Have speakers and about four and a half minutes free.
Friday, March 12, 2010
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5 comments:
I think you scared everyone away.
it was all the math.
It had to happen eventually. I was hoping to get people to hang on long enough to drive them away with increasing levels of pseudo-self-help pablum and social sanctimony, culminating in my coming out as a vegan, the ultimate expression of both positions.
I couldn't comment on this with my usual sycophantic charm. I'm perplexed to mutism from the conflict between empathic revulsion and seething jealousy over the same condition: free time.
That, and I've never played frisbee golf.
See, somebody got it.
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