"Some Cynical Guy" No. 62: February 3, 2002

The Holes In Our Armor

Achilles had it relatively easy: hand-dipped in the River Styx like a premium Belgian chocolate, he was rendered invincible except for the heel his mother dangled him by when she dipped him. Achilles didn't know about his unprotected heel. And of course, it was that one tender spot that caught the poisoned Trojan arrow. 

The rest of us are even more vulnerable than the luckless Homeric warrior. We think we've girded ourselves with the armor of education or money or a gated community -- or a useful, highly esteemed professional skill like writing cynical columns or operating a tattoo parlor. We think we're safe inside our self-made shells. But it turns out we're just quivering blobs of protoplasm in constant danger of annihilation. 

We can be taken completely unaware: look at the three thousand souls who strolled into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, and never strolled out. We can be taken despite our best efforts to cover our tracks: witness the smug insiders at Enron who thought they could bamboozle the rest of the world. When we're gliding down the freeway on a rainy night, a six-inch misjudgment could turn us from chattering yuppies into mangled fodder for future Driver's Education horror films. A minor misstep while cleaning out the roof gutters could transform us into sorry sacks of crackled bones. But it's not only our soft, pudgy, armorless primate bodies that put us in continual peril. It's our minds. We humans have become the all-time masters at leading lethally complicated lives.

For at least a decade after I graduated from college, I used to have recurring nightmares about final exams. Always I'd find myself back in school on the dreaded evening before the big test; I'd suddenly remember that I had enrolled in Organic Chemistry or Sanskrit 101 but inexplicably forgot to attend class all semester. I had discovered a gaping hole in my armor. Now here I was, desperately thumbing through some indecipherable textbook, trying to cram my hapless head with four months' worth of knowledge in four hours. Impossible! I was going to flunk! My beautiful academic career was melting! 

I'd wake up in a mindflash of terror followed by a wave of immeasurable relief. Then I'd drift back to sleep, comfortable in the solid knowledge that I had graduated years ago -- with honors yet. But a college degree, even with honors, affords flimsy protection against the arrows, pestilences and land-mines of real life. Most of us are living in minefields of our own making; a single misstep could blow us to Munchkinland and beyond. It seems unfair that we drive ourselves so hard and so long to create lives that finally work for us -- and yet all that effort can come ingloriously undone with a single blunder, one careless oversight, a stray Trojan arrow that hits us in our unprotected heel, or a land-mine that detonates just as we cross the far end of the field. Think of Waterloo, Watergate, or poor Ed Muskie shedding a politically fatal public tear on behalf of his unjustly maligned wife.

Here's my own sad story, an instructive example of misplaced confidence and dreams undone. I had labored as a low-level editor, then as a somewhat more exalted advertising copy chief, for a quarter of a century. Advertising paid a grown-up salary, and it gave me a chance to flex my writing muscles on a daily basis. I even enjoyed whipping other writers' writing into shape (Teddy Roosevelt hunted lions and wildebeests in Africa; I chased the elusive dangling participle). Yet it irked me that I was forever writing what other folks wanted me to write, whenever they wanted me to write it. Naturally I had to write it their way, not mine. I didn't exactly loathe my work, but let's say it continually chafed me like a pair of ill-fitting shoes. A quarter of a century is a long time to be wearing uncomfortable shoes.

I waited to make my getaway, and finally the stock market boom of the late '90s answered my cynic's prayers. Before I turned fifty, I had amassed enough loot, surely, to live safely off my surging stocks and mutual funds for the rest of my natural life. I wouldn't be rich, but I'd be independently middle class and that was fine with me. (I could be happy subsisting on Cheerios and canned sardines as long as I was free.) I'd finally be able to quit my job, travel when I felt like it, write essays both silly and profound, and not have to care a fig about making money from them. For the first time in my life, I pounced on an opportunity and tossed caution into the garbage disposal where I thought it belonged. I left my job behind, and I began to taste the robust pleasures of real life. I loafed and loosened my collar. I was as merry as a dog let off its leash in a sun-dappled park; I romped and rejoiced in my freedom, and it was good. I felt I could live like this forever. You might say I felt invincible.

Then came the crash -- or more precisely, the meltdown: two long years of financial unraveling unseen in these generally prosperous states since Hoover was president. (As Monty Python might have said, 'Nobody expects a Great Depression!') Who would have anticipated anything more than the temporary blip of a correction?  

I rashly took on a house and a marriage as my stock portfolio crumbled; the expenses began to pile up like unread National Geographics. Mortgage payments, homeowner's insurance, property tax, repairs to crumbling walls and toppling fences. The mere act of moving from Allentown to Philadelphia caused my annual auto insurance premium to zoom from $350 to an appalling $1600. (Did they assume I was a bumpkin unable to cope with the mayhem of the Schuylkill Expressway?) My health insurance shot up from $2500 a year to nearly $4000. (As a Philadelphian, am I more likely to require prompt medical attention? If so, the health insurance bills alone are probably a contributing factor.) 

The stock market continues to twitch like a large ungainly rodent broadsided by a Buick. This could be serious; I'll soon have to figure out how to make actual money again. Meanwhile, I'm having these annoying dreams. 

A few nights ago I dreamed that I was at a formal party when I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I thought I had been suitably dressed, but in fact I was wearing a twenty-five-year-old plaid sports jacket. One sleeve was separating from the shoulder, and huge frayed threads protruded  from one side. I was mortified; I cursed my own stupidity for not taking a better look at the jacket before I wore it. I had found holes in my armor, and I was undone.

Last night I dreamed I was an archaeologist in Afghanistan. I was sitting in my cozy bungalow, reading at the table where I had just finished a simple dinner. I saw two sinister strangers approach my door, and I locked it just in time to shut them out. Then I heard voices off to my right. The thugs had entered through a SECOND door that I hadn't even known was there. As they approached me with their gleaming knives, I protested, 'But I'm a SCHOLAR!' My enemies weren't impressed. 'A SKO-LAR!,' they laughed. 'HA-HA-HA!' They had found a gaping hole in my armor, and it didn't matter how much ancient history I had at my command. I was history myself.

Cynic's Pick of the Week
President Bush unveiled a whopping $2.12 TRILLION budget to go along with his sweeping tax cuts. Does something not compute here? Where do we get all those extra shekels for defense spending when we're supposed to be paying lower taxes? Something's got to give, and you can bet that the environment and the arts are at the top of the administration's hit list.

© 2002 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher. If you'd like this column to appear regularly in  your own site or publication, write to UPBEATmag@aol.com.

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," lives with his wife in a 100-year-old former livery stable in Philadelphia. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online.