Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations

I was struck by the ancient, pagan feel of the place. New Orleans doesn't feel like any other American city I've been to. It has an atmosphere like Rome or Istanbul, a sense of the veil being very thin between this world and the world of the fictional and the dead. It is an eerie, haunted, and beautiful place - as any port should be.

My own belief is that two adults are allowed to love who they want, and if you don't agree with that, you are a narrow-minded shitfuck and we can't be friends.

One of the interesting quirks of the aging process is that events that seem to have little or no impact at the time resonate with a thunderous importance later on, like an expertly constructed detective novel.

I don’t know why I was so afraid of failure; the most interesting people I know have failed more than they have succeeded. This may be because life is not as simple as it appears to a desperately ambitious young man, or it could be that all my friends are losers.

I don’t want my sons to be traumatized by what happened to their father or grandfathers or great-grandfathers, but everyone should know about the lives of those who came before them so that they can figure out why their fingers are bent or why sometimes they feel bone-crushingly sad for no reason that anyone else can see.

As my dear wife occasionally reminds me: "Never miss an opportunity to shut the fuck up.

It must be depressing to have your sole purpose in the universe be pointing out other people's mistakes. Am I right, Internet trolls, gossip columnists, and clergymen?

When Japanese people visit the West for the first time, they must think we are backward heathen medieval savages based on our toilets alone. And they might be right. Without getting too graphic about the art of poopery, I have to say that our Western approach to the follow-up operations after number twos are not perhaps up to speed with other lessons learned in personal hygiene in the centuries since the Black Death. If, for example—and I wouldn’t wish this on you unless it was something you wanted and participated in with another consenting adult—you inadvertently got some poop, some human feces, some man dung on your hand or arm or face, would it be sufficient for you to wipe off said ass fruit with a piece of soft, dry paper, wash your hands, and chalk the whole thing up to experience? No, of course it wouldn’t! You’d want hot water and soap and towels and more soap and some sanitizer and maybe the kind understanding counsel of an old friend. Why then is it okay for us to drop, wipe, and walk? It is not enough, I say. Not nearly enough. The Japanese are sublimely and impressively aware of this. Any of you who have had the luxury of executing a humpty in the Land of the Rising Sun will know what I mean. My first time in a Japanese bathroom was a life changer. You enter the cubicle and the lights change. They become moody and dim, like something big is about to happen. Like something intense is going down. Which with any luck it is. The toilet lid opens automatically as if welcoming you to a ride, a ride to another dimension. Nervously you drop your pants and sit on the cushioned seat, which is warmed! Warmed! And by electricity, not by the fat guy who used the stall before you at the airport. You conduct the business which cannot be named, and you think to yourself, “Well, that was nice,” or you cry or sing or whatever it is you normally do and you think that it’s over. But it’s not over, it’s just about to begin. First come the water jets pushing and throbbing, scooting from some hidden hose beneath your nether regions; these temperate jets, aimed by discreet robots, hose your portal of doom and sandblast away any residual entourage left over from the main event. It is transcendental. It’s euphoric. It is as if the fountain display outside the Bellagio in Las Vegas has been transferred to your anus. You think, “Wow that was nice, it can’t get better than that!” but you are wrong. It can get better than that. Then the dryers start. Dryers! A balmy mistral, a soothing trade wind to dry the now scrupulously clean landscape. When they finally, sadly, stop, you think, “That was unbelievable, there is no way it can get better than that!” But you are wrong again! When the wind stops—POOF!—a shot of scented talcum powder right in the tiger’s eye. It is not often I say this, but I left that bathroom a better man than when I walked in. When it was all over I thought the same thought I had on the airplane as it left Japan.

Fear would have you believe that it starts with a capital letter, but it doesn't, not unless you put it at the start of the sentence or name your cat after it. Fear is not a proper noun. Fear is just fear, just another workday noun or sometimes verb trying to find its place in the lexicon. Like all bullies, it wants you to believe it's tougher than it really is.

I’d actually say that trashy simulated concern in the media helps perpetuate the myth that therapy is somehow self-indulgent. I suppose by nature it is a little, but so are all attempts toward better health, like brushing your teeth twice a day or getting a little exercise now and again.

Well, I’d say a bad therapist is someone who thinks they know how you should live, someone who thinks that their moral compass is more accurate than yours and who believes they are smarter than you because you are in some sort of distress or discomfort. This kind of douchery is fairly common among therapists I have met, and although some people may enjoy being bossed around by a sanctimonious cunt, that’s never really been my thing. I believe that a good therapist is someone who, for want of a more accurate expression, “re-parents” you as an adult. Someone who listens to you describe what you believe is your problem and then offers a different perspective. Perhaps, with a little luck and a lot of skill and patience, that new perspective will help you reach an insight which in turn offers you relief.

Fear doesn’t deal in fact. It lives in untruth and rumor, like a modern politician. It’s a voracious weed that needs just a whiff of uncertainty to thrive, because fear needs to conceal itself from plain sight in order to be really effective. A capricious god whose mind you cannot know, a monstrous foreigner in a far-off land who wants to harm your children. What is hiding in the shadows? Usually nothing.

My first true Real Love was my first child, which meant the nasty, inconvenient, unpleasant business of genuinely loving another human being without judging them or caring or even wondering if they loved you back. Just Love in all its grisly glory.

I say suffer, because I believe that if you are a prejudiced; you are committing an act of self robbery, which will severely diminish your chance of joy or happiness. Tribalism is not just a curse for those who are victims of its cruel nonsense, but also for the stubborn evolutionary throwbacks who believe that it has validity as a value judgment .

I always suspected the perpetrators of both good and evil probably would have behaved the same way, God or no God.

I say suffer, because I believe if you are prejudiced you are committing an act of self robbery, which will severely damage your chance of joy or happiness.

but as anyone who has ever been divorced will tell you, it’s not cheap (often they will add, “. . . but it’s worth it,” which is also true). There’s a myth that when people go through the legal untangling of a marriage, they lose half their stuff, but this is a myth that has clearly been propagated by individuals who have never had the pleasure of getting hitched in the great state of California. Half your stuff may indeed go to your former spouse, but the other half will be split up between your lawyer and the legal fees of your partner-turned-litigation-adversary. Your former partner will also receive 40 percent of your annual future earnings for half the time you were married. For example, if you were married for six years, they get 40 percent (gross) of what you earn for the next three after the divorce. The whole process is a terrifying runaway train. At one point, to my immense frustration, I had to pay to have myself investigated by expensive forensic accountants in order to prove to my ex-wife’s lawyers that I wasn’t hiding money anywhere. In other words I had to prove I wasn’t a liar by giving money to people who had called me a liar.

I forgot about my nerves while I talked to her; she made me forget myself for a while. I can't say anything much nicer about a person.

Fear is not necessarily your enemy. Fear can lead you to the truth about yourself.

How you feel is not necessarily how it is. In fact, going by feel without having an idea of where you are in the scheme of things will often get you in very big trouble in life as well as in aviation.

But if the credits don’t roll the monster isn’t dead yet.

At the time, I was too much of a pussy to defend myself against the desires of others and too shut down to recognize my own desires.

Why on earth would you do it twice? I have asked myself that many times since and all I can come up with is that I felt like I should.

In order to appease the high priests and avoid being murdered, Akhenaten’s son and heir, Tutankhaten (“In the image of Aten”), changed his name to Tutankhamun (“In the image of Amun-Ra”—the old god). The

She smiles and then runs as fast as she can toward them.

I want to learn and continue to learn. It's the only way to stay alive.