We Don't Need Would-Be-Deep Theologians Telling Us What We Need!

I only use the word "we" in the headline to make fun of all the articles with "we" in the headline which purport to tell entire civilizations how they feel. It may be that there are such essays written these days by people other than clergypeople and theologians, I don't know. I just know that more often than now and then a reverend or priest or rabbi or Professor of Theology, or sometimes more than one of the above united in one person, gets depressed, and projects his mood upon millions. "Why do we feel so empty inside?" one of them may ask. What you mean, "we," Kimosabe? I don't feel empty inside at the moment. I'm not completely unfamiliar with the feeling, but at the moment, I feel alright. "People don't seem to trust religion anymore." Well, good! Sounds like maybe they're recovering from religion, or potentially about to, or never suffered from it to begin with. Religion hasn't been at the cutting edge of human thought for thousands of years. (Yes, I know that in Medieval Christendom, all scientists were Christians, or pretended to be in order to be allowed to be scientists. That was a forced unity of science and religion -- worse, actually: a forced unity of science and one religion -- which is very convenient for the nincompoops today who insist that there is no conflict between science and religion, and was very bad for science at the time.) Perhaps what really feels particularly empty inside at the moment is the house of worship where the depressed clergyperson-author is attempting to make a living. I feel for someone who entered a profession which not long ago seemed like a completely reliable way of making a living, and now, all of a sudden, does not. I feel for the farmers who used to make a reliable living growing tobacco, and now, all of a sudden, cannot. I feel for them, but I still think they should switch to other crops.

In the 19th century in the US, religion -- well, Christianity -- well, evangelical Protestantism -- boomed. Pastors proclaimed that what "we" needed was "old time religion." I'm not sure how accurate at the time the adjective "old" was to describe what they were offering, but old-time religion was what it was called, and it was what the pastors were offering, and it was a booming industry. These days, "old time religion" is offered mostly on the political right wing. In the politically-progressive publications where these depressed men and women of God are going on and on about what "we" need, very little could be less popular than old-time religion. And so these depressed theologians insist that we need "new ways" into the same old religious stuff. (Sometimes by going along with the nuclear option of denying that what they offer is religious at all, but the dreaded SBNR.) These are the clearest-imaginable cases of projection: it is they who need new ways to attract people to their congregations. I'm really not so upset with them. They're trying to save their jobs. Trying to sell their tobacco, as it were. Yeah, well, I quit smoking and I think others should too. The depressed theologians need to adapt and change -- and not by trying to re-invent their millennia-old wheels.

Take the Awful Existential Weight of the World From My Shoulders, Please!

Today someone asked me about the phrase "The Wrong Monkey," and I explained that I came up with it at a moment when my feelings were hurt because I felt that a clique was snubbing me a little bit. I meant it in the sense of, "I'll show them! I'm the wrong monkey to be snubbing! They'll be sorry!" It was completely empty bluster. I don't believe I ended up showing them anything in particular, but the name "The Wrong Monkey" stuck as an Internet handle, and later also became the name of my blog.

I explained all this, and the lady who'd asked me said that I had told the story in an amusing way, but also apologized for laughing at what she imagined to be a painful episode in my life. I didn't feel it was like that: the pain was slight, brief and long since forgotten, and I got that cool name out of it. This story was almost all upside. But what she said reminded me of some stand-up comics I've known.

I'm not a good stand-up comic. I found this out in the early 1990's when I tried to make a career out of it. Now, I can sometimes be very funny one-on-one: sometimes someone I'm talking to will be amused by what I'm saying, and I'll be able to really feel their amusement, to grab it, and spontaneously keep it going, and growing, and often get that one person laughing so hard they can't stand up any more and they're wheezing and begging me to stop.

What I didn't realize until I finally tried stand-up comedy is that a comic has to do that with an entire group of people at once. Which, for me at least, is a totally different thing. In retrospect, it seems that it shouldn't have surprised me that I can't work a room, because I can't make just anybody laugh -- it's only a few individuals, here and there, now and then. It's not something I can do whenever I want.

So anyway, I worked some comedy clubs, and bombed, and I hung out with some comedians and got to know them a little. And there's a range of personality types among them, but many of the funniest ones are just brutally downbeat offstage, horribly depressed and pessimistic. Now, I've had my battles with depression. But not like these comics. You know that episode of Seinfeldwhere George has started dating a woman who laughs a lot at the things he says, and he asks Jerry not to be funny around her, and Jerry happens to be sitting alone with her in the diner and has just finished a long spiel about how horrible and pointless life is, and she asks him what he does, and he replies, "I'm a comedian!" ? Well, that's especially funny if you know a lot of comics. Funny, because it's true. Offstage, a lot of them could give Bleak Jerry a real run for his horribly-depressed money.

One of the most memorable moments from the time when I failed to make it as a stand-up comic came when I was watching another guy on stage, a much better comic than I'll ever be, a guy who night after night felt the collective funny bone of an entire roomful of people at once and manipulated it unmercifully, made them laugh so hard that they fell out of their seats and cried, the way I can sometimes do with one person, and offstage -- oh my God! That poor guy, you don't wanna know.

The moment I remember was a few seconds into a big laugh he'd gotten. I've long since forgotten the joke he told that got that laugh going. What I remember was what he improvised to make that laugh bigger: he said, "Thank you. Thank you for laughing at my pain."

Okay, that might not seem like such a brilliant thing to say. You may have heard comics say close to the same thing several different times -- maybe exactly the same thing, word for word. Because it's an honest and succinct summing up of what a lot of comics do: bare their horrible anguish for the amusement of the general public.

Because I knew that guy a little bit, I knew how completely sincere he was being when he said that. I think that was when I realized I wasn't going to make it as a comic. Because I wanted to be that kind of comic, but I wasn't nearly unhappy enough.

More Depression

The doctors spotted it before I did, or perhaps I should say, they correctly guessed that what I was going through was depression before I came to the same conclusion. A couple of months ago I started having physical symptoms: extreme fatigue and sleepiness, very low energy, physical pain, aching all over and extreme sensitivity, for example, to every bump in the road when I was in a car, feeling a jolt in my jaw and in my elbows if the car went over a pebble. The doctors -- more than one, because my primary care physician was on leave, for one thing, and for another because I called after regular clinic hours -- ordered lots of blood tests, which kept coming back negative. Finally, enough tests came back negative that I began to think my condition might be psychosomatic. So I I tried to deal with it with mind over matter: by getting out of bed eight hours after I went to bed, whether I felt rested ot not; by exercising much, much more. And low and behold, the fatigue and and the pain went away. At first I felt silly about the whole thing, like I had put the medical people through a lot of work for no reason. But then I thought how sometimes people's hair will fall out in clumps due to psychological stress, or how they will develop hives. No one says that those people are being silly. So I decided to give myself a break. Not only because I could see the analogy between my condition and conditions like hair loss due to trauma and hives and such, but also because the medical personnel whose time I felt I'd wasted all urged me to give myself a break. I've been very fortunate, some very kind people who are very good at their jobs having been helping me through all of this.

The good news was that I felt better physically when I forced myself to be more active. The bad news was that as I felt better physically, I suddenly felt much worse mentally and emotionally. It seems that the physical symptoms were distracting me from the psychological distress. I've never sensed the mind-body connection so profoundly as I have recently as a result of these strange and, for me, unprecedented experiences.

Depression

A lot of people get it -- or at least you'd think so by the amount of ads on TV for antidepressants. I've been depressed lately. That's why I haven't posted in a few days. Barring major problems such as depression, I hope to post in this blog at least once a day. I'm on an antidepressant right now, which either makes me trendy or a dupe of big pharm, neither of which I want to be, but there it is. I feel a little woozy from the happy pills, but woozy is a lot better than I felt last Tuesday, when I last posted here, and then had to take a little break. I wonder whether I'm mentally impaired from the antidepressants, but I'm not particularly worried about it. I'm not particularly worried right now, which is sort of the point of taking the stuff, I guess. When someone gets a lobotomy, or so I gather, they no longer worry very much about anything. They feel pretty happy. Friends and loved ones of the lobotomized patient may feel horrified, because they notice what is now lacking in him, now that part of his frontal lobes is gone, but the lobotomized one doesn't notice the difference, or miss what's gone. I hope I'm not currently chemically impaired, but if I were -- how could I tell? Maybe you, my readers, can let me know whether the blogger who writes the next few posts here, who's on antidepressants, seems significantly different than the one before.