Guarding Against Bliss
Some of us are so finely tuned, so exquisitely alive to the sensations come zinging at us from a busy world, that we look around for some form of relief. Some sort of backup. Some sort of, to put it briefly, insurance policy.
We can consider in this regard the fact that highly mediocre golfers take out ‘hole in one policies’ on a regular basis.
The supposed point is once you have hit this hole in one, you will be required to buy a round or several for the entire clubhouse, you will be tempted to now take you act to some of the most legendary and expensive golf resorts in the world, will be expected to upgrade your clubs, gear, outfit, membership level, tipping activity and the like…all of which cost money.
This insurance policy I speak of kicks in soon enough, after a little paperwork, and supplies the funds to support all these activities that simply weren’t in the budget before.
Or so it is said.
In fact, it is hard not to get the feeling that the real point of taking out the policy is to insure against nearly anything at all happening to the policyholder, good or bad.
For these supersensitive types that I speak of, highly emotional good news is as upsetting as bad.
In both cases the gastric juices are released at an accelerating rate, the baseline pulse quickens, various hormones of either extreme pleasure or frank terror are introduced into the system and the impact upon the subject is the same: disruption of the body and spirit.
These subjects look upon the eruption of the local volcano with the same resigned response that they direct towards a beautiful sunset that just seems to call out for a sonnet or a landscape painting.
“Hoo, boy,” their autonomous nervous system silently conveys to them, “that’s gonna be a lot of work. There goes THE EVENING.”
There is almost nothing worse you can do to a late middle-aged man than bring about a situation that requires him to say, ‘there goes THE EVENING.’
There is a mournful, keening sense to the words, a bit like the howl of a lone coyote on a dark prairie, a bit like the last groan of stressed timbers as a mighty sailing vessel goes down.
‘THE EVENING,’ uninterrupted, sedate, predictable, indeed, entirely interchangeable with a hundred such evenings behind and – hopefully – a million such ahead, is viewed with a kind of religious awe.
“Don’t mess with THE EVENING! Don’t touch it!” the Id, Ego, and Superego all scream at the same time, “it is really all you’ve got left!”
THE EVENING is that time of drowsy inaction, when the chores and the woes of the day have wandered off to bother somebody else, and a steady state, if temporary, equilibrium descends upon the man with absolutely nothing on his mind. “It isn’t much of a mind to begin with,” he might argue, “and now and again it needs to have absolutely nothing on it in order to restore its plumpness and vitality,” and he might have something there.
These fine people, upon viewing one of those science fiction movies where our species has evolved to the point that we are all just naked brains floating in a vat of nutrients and simply existing, say, “looks good to me! Where do I sign up?”
It is the steadiness that counts, the flat line on the graph that measures disruption, emotional response, the excitation of the instincts.
‘Spare me,’ is more or less the prevailing attitude.
There are more of these fellows than you would think, particularly past a certain age, which I seem to keep coming back to, but the insurance industry hasn’t yet stepped up with a family of products to protect them from emotional eruptions and just leaves them to their own solutions.
What you would like to see for this now unprotected class is a policy that you can take out guarding against any kind of emotional upset at all.
The agent, or I suppose, adjuster, will come out when a claim is filed, and first simply try to understand the nature of the claim.
These fine people, trained to the hilt, are especially alert to disruptions that fall into the romantic or artistic categories. They are the worst.
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: (carefully eyeing the guy for symptoms of emotional overstimulation.) Bill, I got over here as soon as I got your call. What seems to be the problem?
Stricken Homeowner: No problem, I see now, no problem at all. I don’t know what I could have been thinking of. It just so turns out that I’m suddenly in love. With that redhead over there trimming her bushes. Here I was thinking that it was all a bunch of nonsense to keep the greeting card industry in business and all along they had the real goods. My eyes have been opened.
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: An attractive girl, certainly. Here, let me just check your pulse. Hmmm.
Stricken Homeowner: I’m surprised that you can look directly at her without damage to your nervous system. Say, would you say June is an adequate rhyme for moon if I were to write a musical comedy on what you might call the redheaded theme, or has it been overused?
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: (Shining a small flashlight into the guy’s eyes, taking his temperature, and checking him for an ear infection while he’s about it.) Tell you what, let’s just go inside and sit quietly for a while and see if it passes.
Stricken Homeowner: Yes, I think you are right, June and moon have probably had their run. Can you think of a good rhyme for redhead? That would be just the ticket, you see, then I could get this song together and go over on her front lawn and sing it to her before she finishes with the bushes. By the way, have you ever seen more divine grace exercised in a homelier pursuit that the way this veritable angel clips bushes?
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: Here, let’s get you out of direct line of sight of this attractive individual. (Getting him inside to the living room and pulling the curtains.) Now, taking a deep breath. Become one with your surroundings. Feel your pulse slow. Send those hormones and endorphins back where they came from. Think about your EVENING. Your quiet sacred EVENING.
Stricken Homeowner: (Shaking his head.) Where am I?
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: You’re in your own living room, Bill, calm and secure.
Stricken Homeowner: I had the worst nightmare that my EVENING was at risk.
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: It was a close thing, but I got here in time. THE EVENING is safe, the easy chair, the stack of books, the chilled sarsaparilla. This is exactly the type of thing you took out our policy to cover, Bill.
Stricken Homeowner: And thank God, I did! What do I do now?
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: Well, for starters, let’s get a 12 foot fence put up completely encircling your yard. You see, that not only deals with the current threat, but protects you from any further incursions from any direction threatening THE EVENING. I’ve got a guy that I can get right on it if you give me the go-ahead.
Stricken Homeowner: Do it, do it! Whatever it takes to save THE EVENING. (Shaking his head.) Imagine putting everything I hold dear at risk for what? This, this…redheaded menace!. (He muses.) My easy chair. My stack of books. (Groaning.) And my chilled sarsaparilla!
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: (Gravely.) Yes, and your chilled sarsaparilla. But like I say, that’s why you bought the policy. Now, you are back to your desired more or less inert emotional state?
Stricken Homeowner: (Examining himself and testing his reflexes.) You’d barely know me from a dead guy! How can I thank you?
Solicitous Young Insurance Guy: No thanks necessary. This is what we do, this is what you’re paying us for. To protect THE EVENING.
In like circumstances the subject, heretofore just about as absent of artistic sensibilities as a length of Southern pine, gets set off somehow – and who’s to say what triggers these fits: it might be a particularly pretty flower, it might be something he read, it might be an unwise dwelling upon the majesty of the universe and the way that when you sit down and think about it everything in it, this universe that I speak of, just seems to click, all those atoms and and all those sums of the squares of the hypotenuses, and even the weirder elements from The Periodic Table, or it might be some internal revelation he arrives at after long and admittedly painful thinking, ‘well, why do we wear clothes anyway?’ – and the next thing you know the guy is intent as the dickens on writing a multi-volume epic in free verse (free verse, mind you) — he thinks he will call it The Dance of the Universe — and in his spare time will set up a utopian community, or become a Futurist painter, or start a new religion.
Something, anyway.
Well, you talk about messing up THE EVENING!
This type of artistic sensibility is going to mess up your morning, noon, and night as well, and possibly land you in jail if you take the whole ‘why do we wear clothes anyway?’ thing too far.
And what of your stack of books and the easy chair and the chilled sarsaparilla then?
In particularly alarming cases the subject will rush to the typewriter to bang out one of those French existentialist plays where everyone hangs around, wandering on and off the stage, chatting of this and that, and then doesn’t conclude until several days of stage directions later when the dialogue finally gets to the point and comes right and says that we’re all mere scraps of protoplasm drifting through a mindless void and have a nice day, hope to see you back at the ticket window soon, remember there’s matinees on the weekend.
In these cases the insurance guy has a tough one on his hands and can only prescribe a strict diet of paperback mysteries, college football games, cheeseburgers and fries. Homely remedies to be sure, but effective, and anyway, whatever it takes to bring the homeowner back to his senses is worth a try.
There are no guarantees though. When you’ve gone as far as to write free verse you may be too far around the bend to ever get reeled back in again.
