Fool Me Once, Shame on Me

           I’m going to go ahead and assume that most of you haven’t read Alexander Malisk’s recent novel, You Deserve Nothing. If you have, great. if you haven’t, I’m not going to spoil it for you. I am, however, going to spend the first part of this piece unpacking what I understand to be its core problematic, a problematic which gets most potently delivered late in the novel when an old man says to a young one, “If you remember one thing and one thing only, remember this: Anyone you can fool is not worth loving.”

I’ve been discussing this quote with everyone I can these past few weeks (including the author himself, if you’re interested...), and after much noggin-knocking I think I finally figured out what it means, sort’a.

First Off: The quote has almost nothing to do with other people, i.e., it’s not really about them and whether or not they’re worthy of sweet lovin’ (at least not initially...).

Whom/what is it about? Well, first and foremost, it’s about us. It’s about me. It’s about you. It’s about an answer to an uncomfortable question...

Anecdote: I read an earlier version of this piece at an open-mic event a few weeks back. The day after, I was in a coffee shop in downtown P-town and happened to see one of the other open-micers, a gal who’d sung this fantastic song about a woman coming up to her and mistaking her for Liza Minelli.

Being the brazen, fool-hardy, aw-shucks kind’a guy I am, I went up to the Liza Minelli “look-alike” and said, “Hey, I saw you sing last night and I really loved it. I just wanted you to know,” which precipitated her responding, “Awww thanks, hey, I really liked your piece too,” which precipitated my being like, “Thanks, whatever, yeah, blah blah,” and her going, “No, really, your piece really made me think. I always have a cigarette before I go to bed and I was out there smoking and was like, ‘How full of sh*t am I? Am I like 100% full of sh*t?’”

Sure, the gal could’ve been fooling me with her “No, it really made me think” (there’s almost nothing I like to hear more in response to something I’ve written, *wink wink, nudge nudge*), but I’m  going to go ahead and assume she wasn’t for the purpose of what follows.

Uncomfortable Question: How full of sh*t am I/are you? Are you Pinocchio full of sh*t?

Nixon full of sh*t?



Tubgirl full of sh*t?

• Answering the Uncomfortable Question:
• Angle 1: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the insert what you’re looking to see here-est one of all?
• Being tubgirl-full-of-sh*t and/or fooling ourselves is primarily about distorting, misrecognizing, remaining blind to, and/or lying about what we see when we’re confronted with a “mirror” (whether said mirror be literal or figurative or magical or...).
• Fooling ourselves is about twisting the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in the name of...
• Feeling better about ourselves.
• I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh-darnit, people like me!
• Feeling worser about ourselves.
• I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, and people just don’t like me (I know it).
• There’s always a “pay-off” to self-fooling (otherwise we wouldn’t do it).
• We get something when we fool ourselves about ourselves, a certain pleasure, a certain maintenance of the status quo.
• If I’m in the habit of telling myself that people don’t really like me (or that they’re too stupid to like me, e.g.), then I get to relish in the dark-fun of solitude.
• See Jonathan Franzen:

                                                           

• If I’m in the habit of telling myself that people do like me (i.e., that I’m just so d@mn awesome that they just can’t help themselves), then I get to ignore all of the subtle and not so subtle ques that suggest otherwise.
• When we’re in the business of fooling ourselves about ourselves it allows/forces us to tune out information/feedback/stuff we don’t want to hear.
• The opposite of fooling ourselves about ourselves is giving ourselves accurate self-appraisals.
• An accurate self-appraisal is any appraisal that doesn’t require you to ignore/obfuscate/distort That Which Is Present.
• That Which is Present is that which, when ignored/obfuscated/distorted becomes what is commonly referred to as a “pink elephant.”
• WE KNOW when there’s a “pink elephant” in the room.
• YOU KNOW.
• Accurate self-appraisal require that we learn to ask/answer the following, often uncomfortable meta-question: “What’s my motivation?”
• What does a given self-appraisal justify me in doing or not doing, ignoring or paying O.C.D. attention to, saying or remaining silent on, investigating or obfuscating, etc?
• Again, there’s always a “pay-off” for an inaccurate self-appraisal, and, unfortunately, a lot of the time the pay-offs are Big Ones.

• Angle 2: Hey, you there?!?
• Other people are just as likely to show/tell us what we want to see/hear r.e. ourselves as they are the opposite.
• Who am I kidding?!? Other people are way more likely to show/tell us what we want than not.
• Mostly as a function of their desire to be liked/approved-of or disliked/rejected by us.
• “He smiled at her, hoping to be liked...”
• “She scowled at him, hoping to be disliked.”.
• This notion is undoubtedly part projection on my part.
• Someone who doesn’t care whether/not they’re liked is not necessarily more trustworthy in helping us with accurate self-appraisals than someone who is.
• This is true insofar as nothing is really at stake in/for such a person, a “stranger.”
• Just like with the above, the first question we’ve got to learn to ask ourselves when receiving feedback from another person r.e. ourselves and whether or not we’re good/bad, ugly/beautiful, interesting/boring, etc., is: Motivation?
• What does the other stand to gain from helping us affirm/disconfirm a given self-appraisal? From saying/not saying X?
• Sorry people, but we just can’t trust strippers to give us information that will lead to a more accurate appraisal of our sexual desirability.
• Sorry again, but we just can’t trust people telling us certain jeans make our a$$es look downright delectable.
• Many of us can’t trust our own parents, period.

            And the Second Thing Is: It’s only once we’re actively not fooling ourselves that we’re really worth loving. Again, anyone you can fool is not worth loving...

Why do I believe this? Well, whenever I’ve developed a habit of fooling myself in regards to Thing X (e.g., my interests, my values, my principles, my intelligence, my looks, my goodness/badness) it has seriously compromised my ability to be the sort of person that another person could/should depend on or trust or be genuinely interested in.

I’ve come to believe there’s a big eff’n difference between being known/loved as one is and being known/loved as we/others distort us to be. And it isn’t until we stop fooling ourselves/letting ourselves be fooled about ourselves that being loved as we are becomes possible without the assist of wild, wild speculation on the part of some penny-stock kind'a person who, like, sees our souls or some such ideological sloppage (e.g., Drive).

ONE MORE THING: There’s nobody we can’t fool if/when we set our minds to it.

Nobody.