Exceptional Minds Tend To Lead Exceptional Lives

Once upon a time, a man sat on a park bench to eat his sandwich. The man was thinking about divorcing his wife—that's the subtext here (except now I suppose it's text). He'd installed a dating app on his phone and set it to stealth mode, so his wife and her friends couldn't see, and for the last few days he’d been favoriting women, trying to see if it was true that his sexual market value had increased substantially since the last time he'd been single.

The man hunched over, angling his body so nobody could see the phone. He swiped and swiped. The last time he'd done this, twelve years ago, it'd been a negative experience—very few matches, very little interest. The man was from a minority race that the majority race in his city considered quite unattractive. Trying to date had beaten him down, and he'd just been happy someone had wanted him.

The man had his reasons for divorcing, but fundamentally, he was bored. He just wanted something different. He kept being told about all these men who used up their wives' youth and then left them. The men lived these swinging, glorious glamorous second lives, just seeing their kids every other weekend, dating younger women, going on adventures, et cetera. That seemed good to the man. Terrible for women, obviously, but…so what? That’s why if you did it, you just had to dress it up with a lot of rhetoric about how you really weren’t happy in your specific marriage, etc. There was a whole routine for this kind of thing, where you pretended you weren't engaging in the bad practice, but actually you were reifying it.

While sitting on the park bench, he had a number of reflections on the nature of masculinity and of his place in the world. He could feel himself slowly inching towards the kind of worldview (monogamy is outdated, marriage is a trap for men, men are emasculated in contemporary society, etc) that would allow him to abandon his family.

You know the really annoying thing was that his wife was a very incisive woman whom he quite enjoyed talking to, when they weren't fighting about housework and shit like that. She'd probably be very interested in his thoughts about what it was like to constantly hear (perhaps accurately!) that you were a much more valuable commodity than your own wife. She was one of the most interesting and thoughtful people he knew—that’s exactly why he’d married her! But obviously now they couldn’t talk openly, because if they did she might wonder, “Is he about to leave me?” and that subtext would lead them to fight.

Shit. Some red sauce had dripped from his sandwich onto his slacks. See, his wife would've told him not to order a meatball sub. He would've ordered it, and she'd have said, "Are you really gonna do that?" And he'd have said, "Let me order what I want! Why’re you always trying to control my order!" And then he'd have been like, "Hmm, I do have that meeting later," and he'd probably have changed his order, and then later been like...wow you were definitely right about the meatball sub, I do not know what I was thinking.

But she wasn't here, and now he had marinara on his slacks.

It wasn't the end of the world though was it? His wife never seemed to understand that he could live with marinara on his slacks—this stain really would not ruin his day in the slightest. He pretended to her, because he loved her, that he was glad she’d saved him from the chance of having a stain on his pants, but….really he didn’t care. She probably understood that though! That’s exactly why she appreciated the gesture of him saying, “Oh you were right about that order.”

Anyway, he just wanted to rebel, he supposed—do something he wasn't supposed to do. As a teenager and twentysomething he'd felt so utterly worthless that rebellion almost didn't seem to matter. Like, why rebel, when basically the world wanted him to not exist anymore? The real rebellion had been actually getting married, getting a job, doing the things he was supposed to do, but which people like him (lonely, overweight, nerdy, etc) often didn't actually manage. (...)

Now his meeting was starting however, so he carried his thoughts into the meeting, and into the rest of his life, where they formed the substrate of...well, everything he did. He constantly had thoughts, all the time, about all kinds of things. They weren't necessarily that special, but they were his. Some he told to other people. Some he didn't. Many would've horrified his wife or his friends, which seemed honestly a bit weird to him (why get offended by a thought?), but maybe when you articulate a thought, it's no longer just a thought—it becomes a position, something you think it's worthwhile to tell other people. In the act of speaking it, the thought becomes an action, in other words. Which seems kind of funny—because then actual thoughts can never really be communicated!

But what wasn't true of course. To communicate thoughts, you'd simply need an audience who understood that thoughts weren't willful—that they arose spontaneously. Which most people did seem to understand! Or claim to! But there were still thoughts you shouldn't say. His thoughts weren't really that bad, in his opinion. But it's not like he wanted to go around teaching people to just say all their thoughts! Because then there'd be a kind of monstrous unleashing of the id. Probably no good for society. Whatever thoughts needed to be expressed likely would be, despite the fear of being poorly received. Because there's a thrill in being honest! That thrill would likely motivate some adventurers or whatever.

The man pondered the idea of being honest with his wife and telling her he was bored and wanted adventure. Seemed like a terrible way to pay her back for loving him! And did he want her to be more honest with him? No way, absolutely not, Jesus Christ, no.

He benefited from repression, even though he hated it, of course.

But the thoughts just continued, in a stream, in a torrent, totally unanswerable. They were the basic building blocks of his life—the stuff he had to work with. It was up to him to decide which, if any, were worth devoting more time to.

by Naomi Kanakia, Woman of Letters | Read more:
Image: Sad Keanu meme Twitter/via