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Narcissists, please watch out for other narcissists
"Everyone's personal theme song is, 'There will never be another me.'" —Thomas D. Murray, advertising executive
An old friend recently told me after reading a magazine article of mine: "I am always surprised at what a good writer you are." He's been reading me for 25 years—most of them apparently spent in the casual assumption that I'm just an okay writer. How could he say a thing like that?
The opposite is just as hard to deal with. A guy once thanked me for coming to his party with a note, "Dave, you're always great." (The implied next sentence being, "At least you have been so far.")
And then there was the boss who, when an employee told him that her uncle had died, said, "Yeah, that seems to be going around."
What I remember about the first professional baseball game I attended was looking out at all those people and trying to grapple with the fact that they each of them was looking out of his or her own head at the rest of us—that every one of these infinite faces was as fully them as I was me.
Of course, I was seven then.
Since then, I have not become any less me. Really, the only way to stop being self-centered is by eating plastic explosives. But I have, for the most part, figured out how to adjust to your insistence on being just as fully you.
Have you?
‘Look at him! He doesn’t even have pants on!’
I've been feeling a little old lately. I don't know why. Could be because I went to the doctor and he told me I looked great but added that my "body-mass index" indicates that I could stand to lose 10-15 pounds. That's a nice way of saying, "You are fat." Still in my paper gown, I texted my wife with this news, hoping she would say, "Pish!" She texted back, "It's hell getting old."
Goddamn.
But it's been coming on for years. Every day I find myself telling my friends about things—eat breakfast, excercise, nap—that I do every day. Without my Walgreens reading glasses, I have the same chance of making out the dose chart on the Children's Tylenol bottle as Hellen Keller. If I had to list my ten greatest pleasures in life, two of them would be, chopping onions and reading the newspaper. Word association: McDonalds—cholesterol!
Jesus.
That's why my delight was so outsized last Sunday morning when I rounded the corner I heard my single-woman neighbor with dog, Jennifer, tell my other S-WNWD, Sharon, "Look at him! He doesn't even have pants on!"
I was in shorts on that cold morning for a very boring reason—I had aborted a morning jog and decided to zip around the corner to Dunkin' Donuts for coffee and a paper—but the tone of Jennifer's gripe indicated that the bareness of my legs was only the finishing touch of a comprehensive litany of irresponsible behavior of which she was keeping track.
Jennifer doesn't actually know me too well. So I reckon it's Sharon, who actually lives in my building, who has been mostly contributing to the inventory. Sharon, who holds an annual "pink party" and dresses her dog in a coat and little rubber booties, has seen me tipsy a couple of times, I suppose. One recent morning, she saw me wrapped in a blanket, barefoot on my snowy balcony, croaking at Scout to hurry up walking the dog. More than once she has probably overheard me call the dog a "cocksucker." And of course she knows I ride a motorcycle, something that responsible parents, in her spotless mind, just don't do. "You must be so scared," she told Cristie shortly after I bought the machine. (Thanks, Bitch.)
To Sharon and Jennifer, I am Hunter S. Thompson, Jim Morrison and Lindsay Lohan all wrapped up in one.
You know what? I love these dames. They make me feel young again.