Letters to the Editor
yehudi
Published Letters: 26 Editor's Choice: 6
-
Get a Dog and a Prostitute
[Read the article: Lonely single guy tired of being lonely and single seeks person ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Get a dog. He'll welcome you home, give you the comfort of a warm body to put your arms around. You'll exude less desperation, and attract a better class of person. Also, people are more likely to come up and talk to you if you have a dog. And if you're thinking about taking Cary's advice to ask some random person to be your friend, which strikes me as unlikely to work out very well, having a dog with you will be a definite advantage, not to mention the fact that he won't think any less of you when the person withers you with a look.
Also, maybe you should hire a high class prostitute, just once, just to see what it's like. I know people around here are likely to get sanctimonious about this suggestion, but really, it's a moot question who's exploiting who in that situation. I'm not suggesting it as a long term solution to anything. I just think you should try it once, some Sunday, instead of going to church. God probably won't hold it against you, in my opinion, and it'll be a secret you can hold against the world that thinks it knows you from a single glance. Maybe it'll spur you to try something else weird another time.
Even if these things don't bring you friends, they'll make the loneliness more interesting for awhile. You feel like an exception, it sounds like, but there are lots of us out there. We just don't talk to each other. If we did we wouldn't be us, which might be a good thing, and then again it might not. Life is an odd business and who knows what's really going on? Not me.
-
PTSD
[Read the article: My wife thinks I'm cheating on her -- but I'm not!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I dated someone with PTSD. She behaved very like your wife. For example, we were in a doctor's waiting room once and she read my horoscope in a magazine from two months previously when we'd been temporarily living in different countries. It said something about a new romantic attachment, which she took as proof that I'd been cheating on her. When she got upset she was liable to take a knife to her wrists, and I thought it was my job to stop her. It was a game we played for two years and at the end of it I believe I was suffering from something like PTSD. People with this disorder, and with things like Borderline Personality Disorder, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which, I've read, sometimes follow from it, can't have healthy relationships, and are a nightmare to be around. You say you love your wife, and I wonder if that statement would bear examination. My experience of people with these problems is that they're impossible to love, and incapable of loving, though they're good actors, and manipulators, and guilt-trippers. It's no fun being them, but in the end I had to look after myself because I was helping no-one by staying in the relationship, and at least by getting out of it I helped myself
-
A love that dare not speak its name
[Read the article: Remembering Norman Mailer through his books]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was very sad to hear about Mailer's death. I picked up A Fire on the Moon as a young man who knew nothing about what one was supposed to read, in which he said "if the universe is a lock, then the key is a metaphor and not a measure", words he lived by, and that I still think about fairly often. Harlot's Ghost, which I've read three times, is his masterpiece, in my opinion. I work in the academy now where white masculinity is the new original sin and my love for Mailer is one that dare not speak its name. I kind of hope he gets reincarnated immediately as a black girl in an intellectual family so that I can read her books before I die. I met him once and he was rather rude to me, but perhaps his ego was wounded by the fact that one of my friends had mistaken him for Arthur Miller and asked him what it had been like being married to Marilyn Monroe. I wish him all the best on his journey.
-
Sexiest Salon columnist
[Read the article: Sexiest Man Living 2007]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'd like to nominate Cary Tennis as the sexiest Salon columnist alive.
-
The problem with the rat-race
[Read the article: Fantasies in black and white]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think poor black people have to take responsibility for their own condition as a psychological and spiritual prerequisite for getting out of it, and because they're human, most of them won't do so. On the other hand everyone else is responsible for the fact that if you're born black in America you're much more likely to be poor, and we'll continue to shirk this responsibility in little ways every day. Yet even the poorest person here can find someone less fortunate than herself by looking through a Radioshack window at TV pictures of, say, child-soldiers in Africa. If we find political solutions to these things we'll just create more problems in the process. We won't even make a dent in the problem of envy that has us always comparing ourselves with those more rather than less fortunate than us, and the pride that makes those who become empowered look for somebody else to victimize. Stupidity is our transcendent quality, and blaming is stupid. What interests me more as I get older is whether there's something that transcends stupidity, a question bigger than history or economics, having to do with what Lily Tomlin was getting at when she said the problem with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. I wish I believed in Jesus, since I believe in many of the things he said about this.