I'm not a mellow person, it's true. I think I inherited my worrying nature - my pessimism - my inability to see the glass as even half-empty but rather about to fall to pieces - from my mother, a seriously old-fashioned & superstitious fatalist of the Western European variety. I was able to forego a great deal of the superstition - it simply didn't make any sense to me, & I am not good at taking people at their word for ridiculous shit - but the negative outlook toward the world stayed with me.
Here's an example of the superstition: my mother believes that putting shoes on a table is bad luck. She will seriously lose her shit if you put a shoe on a table (it doesn't have to be a pair). Granted, it's not terribly hygienic - shoes are usually pretty dirty - but I don't think that's what freaks her out. It's just really, really bad luck. Her mother made it clear to her & she's passed it on to her children. Superstition kinda works on that weird-ass Manchurian Candidate brainwashing-type level. It finds its way into you because of repeated exposures while you're in a suggestive state, i.e., young.
& so I ask her: how does it work? Is there a process that begins when the sole of a shoe touches the tabletop? Are demons immediately dispatched? Or does it somehow offend the Deity? Is the process physical or mystical? How can putting shoes on a table generate bad luck? & what is bad luck anyway?
My mother waves away such skepticism with a simple, "I don't know, I just know it's bad luck." That's why superstition - that's why anything supernatural, really - has never appealed to me. I'm a huge fan of absurdity & nonsense precisely because I understand why it's so ridiculous. But believing in it is neither funny nor attractive; it's the dangerous opposite of Groucho letting more people into the tiny stateroom, or trying to get a grant from the Ministry Of Silly Walks.
Something had to rub off, though. & my word, how much time I had to have spent as a child with my mother as she navigated a horrible divorce & the privations & stresses it caused! My mother is a talker, like me, & mostly she talks shit. She talks shit about people, about events, about anything. She is a massively disappointed person, but has a sweet tooth for the lurid. She loves Fox News not because she is politically conservative, but because they peddle fear first & foremost (as the other cable news channels do, but they do it more to her liking). Being German, she has a natural sense of schadenfreude, & I speak to her weekly, & it's a rare phone call that she's not tsk-tsk-ing someone I don't know anything about while simultaneously loving their unhappy state.
I hope I'm not that bad. Mainly I expect the worst. I know it can be exhausting. It's caused me to give up more than persevere when it comes to roadblocks & hurdles. I expect to - well, not fail, but certainly not to meet the goals I hoped to achieve. Unlike my mother, I tend to blame myself when things go wrong - I am not the hero of my life story that she is of hers.
Plus, I don't smoke pot. I understand that makes you hella mellow. Have I talked about this before? I find that I can't enjoy myself when I smoke pot, whereas I get somewhat mellow when I have had a couple of glasses of whiskey. Alcohol, thankfully, doesn't increase my rage or my sadness. It makes me more susceptible to emotion. That doesn't mean I mellow out - weeping during a movie is hardly a mellow thing - but it means there's the possibility I could.
Is the opposite of mellow out mellow in? What would that entail?
Does it feel like I am changing the subject? Because I didn't really want to talk about my mother today.
No comments:
Post a Comment