Guide to Taking Care of Yourself

“Look at you. You’re a goddamned mess.”

Aside from being an always at least somewhat accurate and pleasurably exaggerated self-deprecating way to greet your bathroom mirror-image in the morning, this mantra harbors a basic, depressing truth about human life. You and your daily foibles are on the losing end of a constant struggle against entropy, and the whole universe is against you at all times, and you have a zero percent chance of survival. True or not, this is not the most helpful way to say hello to yourself in the morning, or ever, really.

I suggest something lighter and equally as true, such as:

“Could be worse.”

Or:

“Looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

Or else you could just stop being all cutesy with yourself in the mirror. What are you, a movie? No you are not. Maybe one of the reasons you’re such a mess lately is you’ve been watching yourself like you’re a movie. You should do something. First person camera style.

Last night I put a towel on the floor on my kitchen in front of the refrigerator, opened the freezer, removed its contents, and whacked away at the condensed ice cave in there with a spatula for the better part of an hour until it looked like a freezer again rather than an Eskimo roommate’s secret bagel stash from a parallel dimension. I’m hoping this level of action in opposition to entropy is a sign of things to come in my life. Probably not. Right now, ice is forming on the walls of my freezer. I’m guessing this expansion will occur at a faster rate than I will be able to rejuvenate motivation to remove it, and the ice will continue to grow unchecked until it claims a banana or two in about eight months and I’m once again forced into action.

When I’m in a bad place in my life, and I think I am right now, I tend to think of the world as a cyclical series of tasks one must complete. These tasks offer the benefit of a temporary illusory feeling of completion. You do laundry and all of your clothes are clean, and you are completely done with laundry. But this is not the case. Now your task is to wear those clothes in a succession of your choosing until they are all dirty and you must clean them again. The task of dirtying your clothes will eventually be as complete as the task of cleaning them, with unfortunately less satisfaction. It would be better, maybe to say to yourself, “Well, I’ve done it, I’ve made all of my clothes dirty. Every single article of my clothing is now dirty. Job well done, me. Now my reward is to clean them again. Oh goody.” And you could really feel that way instead of the other way around. But that doesn’t work. People like to wear clothes. People hate to wash clothes. It’s the order of things.

It is nice to switch things around every once in a while, just to show the universe that you’re in on its little joke. “Yogurt cup in the sink, throw away the spoon” is a classic example of your subconscious brain trying to tell you something about how sick it is of doing dishes while the rest of you is busy looking at a dog through the kitchen window. You will eventually get that spoon out of the garbage, but for a while there you consider leaving it as a signal that you’re hip to the natural order of things. Your subconscious brain has a point. So does your conscious brain when it says, “Hey buddy, take a load off: check out that dog.”

In the meantime, while your more pure self is in charge, spoon goes in the garbage. “If a little thing like eating a cup of yogurt is going to make it need a washing, I’d rather not have to deal with it again in my lifetime. Spoons should be less of a nuisance than that. This spoon is worse than my elderly Grandmother’s continual insistence on not being a burden. You are a burden, and I’m sick of pretending you’re not. You’d be easier to deal with if you just said ‘I’m a burden, but hey, so is everyone, so no biggie.’” Spoon. You are talking to the spoon now. And now you are looking at that dog for another little while before getting the spoon out of the garbage and then dealing with the rest of your Sisyphusian life.

I’m convinced a situation like this is what prompted that one genius to invent Gogurt. It was a moment of quiet reflection by the kitchen window inspired by a yogurt-eased distraction from the day’s cares while looking at a dog and a subsequent tumble into an ideological pit of doom once he threw the spoon in the garbage by accident.

Somehow I’m certain that Gogurt was invented by a he.

Actually, scratch that, I’m not certain, but it seems like a reasonable assumption based on the cleaning product advertisements and psychology books I’ve seen about how women are more adept than men at enjoying processes rather than just their results. And I’ve tried countless times to satisfy a woman sexually, and I’m almost completely convinced that it can’t be done. I’m looking for a result: i.e. ejaculating and therefore ending the sex event, and she’s looking to enjoy the process: i.e. bugging me for more sex once I’ve ejaculated and have now fallen asleep as if she cannot understand that the event is over and the result is satisfactory. Even on occasions when I’ve expended Herculean efforts to forgo that well-earned sleep and concentrated on the process so fully and effectively that she has no choice but to tell me to stop having sex with her, the end result of such an event, in the long run, is raised expectations for future such efforts.

But this is how life, even sex, becomes a chore. If you focus on the results at the exclusion of the process, you’re in trouble. And that’s why you have to stop watching your life like a movie and do something in it, even if it’s small and useless. There is something immensely satisfying about whacking a big hunk of ice off of the ceiling of your freezer using a spatula. If you can’t enjoy that, you are crazy and it’s time to get help.

That’s the good news about the never-ending series of tasks that are your miserable life: most of them offer a modest amount of ritualized enjoyment if you break them down into their most basic component parts. And if that doesn’t work, you can also get super duper baked and play some loud music while you’re doing whatever it is that needs to be done. That way instead of mind-numbing manual labor, you’ve got a mind-enhancing thing to do with your hands and body while your mind has already been artificially numbed by cannabis and the Talking Heads. And aside from the result of your girlfriend finally feeling safe in your bathroom, which might further result in her letting you sleep that night after you blast your jazz, you might also enjoy the process, too. Oh goody. Just what you need right now. It’s true. Look at yourself. You’re a goddamned mess.