"What About Friday Night?"

Fasting can teach you things.  Good things?  Who knows.  Good is subjective.  It is up to you.  And, like sex, I suppose it depends on how often you do it--and when.  Yesterday's experience was terrible, really.  I cam to realize how many addictions I have developed in the past years.  Distractions, I suppose.  What I kept thinking over and over was that existence is like an empty room you sit in alone.  Try it.  Sit in an empty room for twenty-four hours with only a gallon of water and see what comes from it.  Most people will never do such a thing unless forced or coerced. They'd rather do just about anything else.  But it occurred to me in the agonizing throes (these began as soon as I got up and knew I was going to fast that day) of a psychologically driven hunger that our lives in that room needed distraction from existence.  If that room were your life, I asked myself, what would you put in it?  That is what I kept asking myself as I sipped cup after cup of chamomile tea.  How would you decorate your life?  And I would look around the rooms of my life and say, "This isn't it.  This is not how I want to decorate my room."

It is the old "desert island" question, I know.  What books would you take?  If you could take only five songs or three paintings, etc.  But it was more than that about which I was thinking.

Having eaten now, sitting with a cup of coffee, no skinnier than I was when I got up yesterday morning, no problems solved, I feel no real resolve, no steel will, nothing.  I'm just overwhelmed by the mess I've collected in that imaginary room.

But Q emailed me an article from Slate last night.  This morning I roamed around the site which will surely replace The Huffington Post in my morning ritual.  In roaming, I found a guide to Woody Allen.  This will not interest the majority of you and may be an actual anathema.  For me, however, it was what I needed--a bromide to yesterday's bleakness.

I have a friend who had formed a living, if joking, philosophy of life according to "The Andy Griffith Show."  Just about any question you could come up with, any dilemma, he could answer with a quote from the show.  Believe me, it was a brilliant piece of work and most often as profound as anything I've ever heard come from the pulpit.

My choice would be darker, of course.  I would work out a World According to Woody.  I'm not saying I'm proud of that.  I'm just saying. . . .

It is officially one year now since I've had "a date."  Don't say anything.  I'm saving myself.  I could have dated, but I've not been smitten.  Whatever.  A discussion for another time.  But when I have dated, it has been like something out of a Woody Allen movie.  On a budget.  In the south.  We live through imagination and memory, or so I think.  So when I read this, I forgot about yesterday and began thinking of the future:

When an Allen character is in a particularly morose state of mind, he may feel moved to announce that life is meaningless. I call these "void moments," because the declarations often contain the word void. Despite the bleak moniker, the void moment doesn't always have the same function. Play It Again, Sam (1972), for instance, has a particularly lighthearted one. 

In this little-seen comedy, the recently divorced Allan Felix (Woody Allen) tries to get the hang of dating. Trouble is, he's romantically self-destructive: Felix (I'll use his surname to avoid confusion) says he's attracted to "emotionally disturbed women," and that's not an exaggeration. The depth of his perverse inclination becomes clear when he approaches a woman looking at a Jackson Pollock drip-painting, and asks what it means to her. She answers: "It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous, lonely, emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos." She's just the kind of woman Felix has been looking for, and he asks her what's she's doing Saturday night. "Committing suicide," she responds. Unfazed, he counters: "What about Friday night?" (source)

Oy.  However,we all need role models.

I'll be thinking about what I would put in my room today, or rather, what I want to take out which is just about everything.  I see a large room with white walls and wooden floors and plenty of sunlight.  I don't want to put much in there.  I want it to remain open and airy.  I must empty my rooms first though.  And that could take some time.

Meanwhile. . . I'll keep an eye out for my own true love.