Just put food in there

IS there a meaning to life?

I mean, really? Does this all mean something? Parts of it don't make sense, does the whole thing have to, either? I don't ask trying to be a downer, I'm actually asking in search of an answer.

Take the concept of utilitarianism, for example. The idea of utilitarianism is essentially that the best thing to do is that which produces the maximum good. So, the best thing to do with life, under this concept, would be to do as many good deeds, as often, for as many people or places or things as possible. But what is good? What is the most good you can do? Is it charity, helping individuals in need? Is it creating new and exciting technologies that help change and revolutionize the world and make more good things possible? Is it teaching and inspiring others to do good things on your behalf, like a benevolent pyramid scheme? Is it entertainment, scoring the most points in NBA history, getting the most likes on Instagram? Which one is good?

Or perhaps you could live by hedonism. Hedonism is basically saying that pleasure and enjoyment are the things we should strive for in life. Which is kind of a loaded bag, because some people enjoy doing charity and good works for humanity. Others... Well, I'm reminded of a quote by Joe Piscapo in the movie, "Johnny Dangerously". Joe's character said, "Well I enjoy collecting protection money, putting whores to work. I like putting bombs in peoples cars. These are a few of my favorite things." And regardless of how you feel about comical gangster roles in spoof movies, you have to admit that there are some people out there getting enjoyment from things that the rest of us do not care for. There are people who actually enjoy doing hardcore drugs and tearing up hotel rooms (that aren't rock stars from the 70's and 80's). There are people that like to streak in public and see the reaction of others as they look in disgust. There are people who enjoy anime porn, I'm just saying it's out there and it's being made for somebody because they keep making it. And yet, if hedonism is the way to go, then even people murdering because they like murder would be fulfillment of the meaning of life.

And then there is existentialism. Existentialism portrays life as inherently meaningless, and that the only reason life ends up having meaning is because of the meaning that we ourselves make it have. It states that Bill Gates, Bill Nye, Bill Clinton, Billy Baldwin, and Bill Buckner all have the same inherent meaning to their life, but that through their lives they can create meaning for themselves. And I guess that makes sense, or at least more sense that other theories have to this point. We all start at basically zero, and as we go, we can create a meaning different from other meanings of life, since we are all living different life's anyway. If we all lived the same life, perhaps it would be easier to define what the meaning of that life is, but it's very difficult to really sit down and say, "You're life's meaning was the book that you wrote, and his life's meaning was the family he raised, and her life's meaning was the facebook page she managed, and his was that strain of Herpes he spread through his college dorm room, because for each of you, that was the most impactful thing you managed in your life." Even if we could actually identify what each of us did that made the biggest difference on the planet, it still doesn't really tell all that much about the life itself, so you would have to be able to explain and explore and clarify and quantify, and here we are back to the first problem of how the hell to tell what it means in the first damn place.

There are thousands of ways to look at life and try to define and categorize and quantify it, and they all basically have their faults and drawbacks. You may be familiar with nihilism, which is more to the point that life is actually meaningless, and that killing yourself as soon as possible is preferred. Which is just an awesome way to go about your week. There are philosophies that you should live life by virtue, that you should seek to raise a family and contribute to society, that you should live simply and humbly (as in Lynyrd Skynyrd's classic, Simple Man), and there are even philosophies that you should just do whatever the hell you want because it's really not going to make any difference anyway, because human life is just a blip on the radar screen that is existence in the universe.

I like one particular approach to life that has been discussed, and it doesn't come from a philosopher. Well, not what we traditionally think about philosophers, anyway. It comes from an actor and comedian named Louis Szekely, better known as Louis C.K. And Louie is known for his sardonic commentary on everything, and most of the stuff he says is pretty bleak as far as its outlook, but I really like his take on life. It goes basically like this:

<points to mouth> "Just put food in here. That's it. Just walk around, find food and put it in here. Just do stuff so you can put food in there. Later on, when you feel it down here <points to stomach> just shit. That's all you have to do. If someone tries to stop you from putting food in there, murder them."

And I think my man Louie might be on to something. Not so much the end where he advocates murder, I think that kinda got away from him, but the concept that maybe life is less complicated than we've made it over the years here. The idea that maybe...

Yeah, I still don't know. But it doesn't mean we can't teach ourselves to look at overarching things like life differently.

Like how maybe life itself has no meaning until we attach meaning. Because that would really be better for me if every single life out there didn't really matter. Not so much for humans. But animals and insects. Really just certain types of insects. Like flies. I understand why they have to exist, but I really hate flies. If I could, I would kill flies all day, and I'd be pretty damn good at it, and I'm not even sure people would have to pay me very much to do it. I've killed flies pretty much every chance I get because I can't relax if I know that they are around. I'm not even kidding, I can't focus on anything unless I can kill or get rid of flies around me. And there is a reason for this.

The summer that I graduated from college, I was pretty much stuck at my house in Madison. It was a 4 bedroom place just south of the football stadium and it was kind of a dump but then again it was also okay for us. Well, a few things about the house. Ummm, it had no central heating, no A/C, it had 2 rooms in the basement that we're pretty sure were filled with mold, there was a 2nd floor with 3 bedrooms and a bathroom that actually trapped heat pretty well for the winter months, a 3rd floor with another bedroom and bathroom, and this yard out back that was wide open. The yard was disgusting, and connected to 4 other houses that rented from the same property company that we did, and then there was also a garage space that you could get to from this yard. So when trash accumulated in this back yard, that was still technically our backyard, it was hard to pinpoint where it came from unless you saw who put the trash there.

Well, over time, trash in that yard attracted stuff that likes trash. First there were a whole lot of ants, that took over the backyard and then moved into our kitchen.And we didn't have a dishwasher, so the dirty dishes that we had previously let pile up for a day or so were now the breeding grounds for the new Insect Hunger Games. So there was a month or so of that year that we had to make better resolve to clean dishes up. Next came the birds, who didn't so much want to get into the house but just always seemed to be fluttering around the backyard to check out whatever was on the menu.

And then came the flies.

This was into the summer months by now, when I was the only one still staying in the house full time. Everyone else had either moved out completely or was staying somewhere for the majority of the summer before coming back to move the rest of their stuff. And like I said, the second floor trapped any and all heat from the house, which made it unbearable to sleep up there. I gradually started moving all of my stuff to the living room, which one of my friends elegantly named 'Vicsville' due to the amount that it started to resemble a Hooverville from the Great Depression era. I honestly didn't mind for the time being, because I knew I just had to get through a few summer months and then I would move into my new place, a few blocks away, that at least had central heating and definitely had an A/C unit for my bedroom.

Well, I don't know how they got in to start. Probably from a window left open by someone in the house who would then have left and not had to deal with the consequences. But the important thing is, I was forced awake one night, as I tried to sleep in the living room, by the feeling of something crawling on my forehead. Which shouldn't have been happening under any circumstances, because no one else should be in the house, and even then, it would be a weird prank to put something on the forehead of a roommate forced to sleep in the living room because his bedroom was too hot.

Well, I try to swipe away at whatever it is, since it's dark and I can't see anything. And I shake it off, and try to go back to sleep, and I feel it again, this time I also hear a buzzing next to my ear, so I recognize that it's a fly. And I try to shoo it away again. But it keeps coming back, over and over again. And this goes on for like an hour. And finally I get to sleep, and wake up in the morning, and can't find the fly. So whatever, I go about my day, hang out at a friend's house, and come home to sleep again, and the same process starts over. Well, this time, I decide to try to find the fly and get rid of it, so I flick the lights on. And the living room has like 6 or 7 flies just buzzing and circling around everywhere, it made my skin crawl for a moment.

Well, I was energized at that moment, and decided to handle this situation all at once. I spent the next 2 hours going room to room, swatting and swiping at every fly I could find. I actually swung so hard, I busted part of a window in the dining room, which I had to subsequently tape back up to prevent the same problem from occurring more. Anyway, I got all the flies that night, but each night there would be more that found a way inside the house, and I wouldn't be able to go to sleep until I hunted them down. For the next 2 months, until I moved, that was my basic routine at night. It got to the point where, while I was living in that house, I didn't sleep the same unless I had hunted flies. And ever since, I've had the same reaction to any flies or spiders or bugs found where I live. They. Must. Be. Dealt. With.

So yeah, if I could, I would be a professional fly hunter. I would do that as a job if it were viable, just because of how much I believe in it. But as far as I know, that's not a thing. So I'm gonna keep trying to figure it out, or something close to it. And while I do, I'm gonna keep putting food in there. And shitting. And murdering people that try to stop me from putting food in the hole in my face. That's still cool, right?

Insult + Injury

You can always make a bad situation worse.

I'm not positive that you can always make the situation that you're in better, but I do think you can always make something worse than what it is. I sometimes find myself wondering how I could make a situation go terribly wrong, right while I'm sitting there, supposed to be listening to someone else. I'll be at a gas station or something, waiting in line, and wondering what the clerk would do if I just slapped him in the face when he told me the total for my chips. Or what the elderly woman in the Honda Civic next to me would do if I just rammed her for no reason as we both merged onto the highway. What would my boss do if I threw a battery through his office window while he was watching? I mean, he probably should fire someone for that, but he might be so confused that he just talks to me about it for an hour and then lets it go. I don't know, I usually don't do the things I'm imagining like this, but I imagine these things quite often.

I wrote a post a while ago about giving into the random impulses that come about for no reason, and this is kind of like that. But not quite. This is more about taking a bad scenario and going for broke on making it worse, since you're already 'in it' and you don;t lose anything by being that much more of a jackass.

Back in middle school, I was involved in both sports and marching band. I mean, marching band is kind of a stretch, we really didn't have that much marching that we did. High school had a marching band, but middle school band did a single parade around Christmas and played a few pep rallies, and that was basically it. But the combination of the two was rarely convenient to accomplish side by side, because most kids were not doing sports and music at our school. In fact, with one or two possible exceptions in the choir program, I may have actually been the only one. Not even trying to brag, I don't think anyone else went through the sheer headache that was trying to coordinate between the two sets of schedules, practices, and expectations. And it was fun, I guess, but mostly it just kind of sucked while you were doing it, because you couldn't enjoy anything right then and there, you had one thing to leave and another thing to join, it was a lot of keep track of. Just ask my parents.

My mom, to her eternal credit, was always so positive about these experiences. However she made stuff at her job work around my stuff, my little sister's convoluted schedule and whatever the hell my brother was doing, she just had a smile and a few jokes for any situation we faced. My dad... well, that's the thing about my dad. He'll be right there with us and support and cheer for us and all, but he will also point out a ridiculous situation. Usually in hilarious fashion. For example:

I once had a track meet take place at one school at the exact same time that a band concert was taking place about a half a mile away at the local high school. Now, conventional wisdom would say, okay, which one are you going to. But no, that's not how the Dupuy's do it. I ran at the track meet, did 3 of my 5 events, and then started warming up on saxophone in the parking lot just before the 4x100 relay. I then proceeded to run the relay, run to the car in track spikes, and then run across an open field to get to the performance hall where my band was just about to go onto the stage for the recorded performance (audio recording, not video. But still...)

One of my friends, who we'll call Clay for this post, gave me a funny look when I sat next to him in my track uniform and skimpy running shorts. I just whispered to him, out of breath but quietly, "Not a word. Not one word from you." He did his best not to laugh. But I composed myself, despite the fact that the performance hall was absolutely freezing, and played a decent part for the circumstances. I then packed my saxophone back up and ran back to finish my last race, which didn't go that well, but I got through it. And I was happy with the overall experience. Because I took a not great situation and made the best of it. Because that's what you're supposed to do in those situations.

Or you can do the kind of thing I did a few weeks before that.

It was the end of the basketball season, and I was pissed off at how I had played in the last game, which at the time I thought might be my last game in organized basketball, period. Not just because it was the end of the season, but I didn't know if I was going to be good enough to play in high school, and like I said, I was pissed at how I played. I sucked that night. And I had a concert that I was going to be just in time for at best, but probably late for, which also has always pissed me off. I hate being late, even if it's my fault. So I'm pissed off, and I'm in the car with my mom, God bless her as always, and she's trying to tell me how well I played, and trying to get me to eat some Sonic while changing into my band uniform but not spill, and get over the game because at least we won and I played good in certain parts, blah blah bladdy blah. So I'm eating and changing and stewing, and we're absolutely flying down the road to try to get to this concert on time.

Now, the concert is going on at a different high school than the first one I mentioned, and it's farther away from where we were coming from. What I had planned is that my band director would brig my instrument from our school to the performance, since there were a lot of other equipment that needed to be transported over. So when I got to the high school, all I had to do was locate where they had placed my instrument, and put it together to start warming up. Well, I went through all the trouble of hightailing it from half an hour away, tired and pissed off, and they could not locate my god damn instrument when I got there. So I went from being pissed off to what I considered was enraged, even though it probably was just smidge more annoyed than before. I mean, I was a middle schooler at a band concert performance, how much damage could I really have done?

Well, just hang on there.

So I hd been looking for my instrument for a good 20 minutes, and my band is warming up and getting ready to go out onto the stage, and I just can't handle it anymore, so I storm into the hall where the band is warming up right as they stop playing and are listening to the guy conducting. It would turn out later that the guy conducting was not our band director, but the director at that high school. He had literally just told them about one of the marimbas near the back, where the percussionists were standing (Marimba is a big ass xylophone that's wooden and sounds slightly different, for those of you about to open another tab to google it) And this particular marimba was from Africa, and was very special, very expensive, and was made of special wood that was sensitive to the oils in our hands, and the guy specifically told everyone not to touch this particular equipment. Like, you can touch any other instruments, but please not this one.

Enter Victor in a pissy mood.

I storm in, determined to prove a point as I walk around the side of the room where the percussion section is. And I swear, I didn't actually mean to touch anything. I just meant to walk in, make some gesture in the air, and then tall the guy that I could not find my instrument and that he needed to help me fix it. I had this image in my head of flinging my hand through the air, almost like I was throwing something away. That's all I meant to do, no real harm done. Well...I aimed a little low, and ran my hand down the exotic African marimba, and made loud de-chromatic sound in front of everyone. And I played it off okay, like I'd meant to do that, but inside my head I was already like, "Oops, ok, I know I screwed up already, please just don't look back here. Nobody look over here.."

And the band director stops in mid sentence, storms over to me, almost knocking kids over in the way, and asks me what the matter is. And I felt even more ridiculous trying to keep a straight face and complain that my tenor saxophone could not be located. And he very quickly offers me another saxophone for the performance, and I of course had no real reason to refuse, and after that there was nothing I could complain about, so I had to just sit there and look like a moron while this guy wipes off the sections of the marimba and literally 15 different kids approach me to explain how funny it was to watch that entire thing unfold. That was the extra insult to the injury that I had apparently inflicted on this special instrument. So yeah, I got crap about that one for a long time.

My band director never spoke to me about it, but I heard him apologizing over and over to that high school director after we finished playing. After the concert, they found my saxophone under a marimba on stage. I don't think it was under the same marimba, and frankly it was bad enough without any more symmetry or irony. But it serves as a reminder: you can always make it worse.

It's Chess, It Ain't Checkers

There’s a saying that gets more and more true over time: Those that don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.

And this exists in basically all walks of life. Business, music, sports, politics, whatever you’re doing. Whatever you’re studying, or trying to figure out, or just trying to enjoy. There are good ways of doing things and there are not so good ways of doing those same things, and when you start trying something out for the first couple of times, rarely if ever have you already figured out the good ways to go about it. Which means we learn. We learn from ourselves and our own experiences, we learn from those around us, we learn from the world and animals and plants and Chinese proverbs and newspaper horoscopes and Snapple can tops and South Park. Stuff happens, we watch it or we listen to it or hear about it, but we gain perspective and we internalize it and hopefully, we can take note of what does and does not work out so well.

The way I see it, we know what we know from one of two ways: intelligence and wisdom.

There's only a few different ways to learn stuff in the world. From the time that we're born, we have to constantly adapt and change and develop our understanding the scope of what we remember, what we can do, and how we learn things going forward. It isn't as simple as, "Okay, I know everything I need to know, stop teaching me stuff now." Like, you never reach that point in life, and yet there will be several times in a person's early life, and probably the middle life, and probably near the end somewhere, that they just sit down and say that they know everything that they need to, and they don't want to hear another damn thing from anyone about what they don't know.

I'm absolutely positive that everyone reaches this stage at least once in their childhood or adolescence. If you're a kid, you think you know shit, and you almost certainly don't. We've all been there, and none of us wanted to hear it at the time we were there. And if you get old enough, I think your mind just literally shuts off, and you stop caring what you don't know because, you're old, how much could you really be in charge of anymore anyway? And if you get old enough, that’s your right to disregard planet earth past the date that you choose to go by. But for the rest of us, there’s intelligence, and there’s wisdom.

So intelligence. The smart way of doing things. The recommended path. This comes from reading the directions. From listening to others. From watching how something is done and trying to emulate it. This is the type of smarts that comes from, well, basically from being smart about things. Intelligence comes from studying for the test you are about to take. From building upon knowledge that has already been acquired. Largely, this involves observation and using patience, and accepting that you don't know about something and you would instead like to learn from another person. Here's what intelligence sounds like: Don't jump off that ledge! Scientific studies have shown that falling from that height into that creek will almost certainly break both of your legs and possibly knock you unconscious. Don't do it, that's a terrible idea. Take those stairs, or the ladder, or fling a rope down. Just be careful, don’t do anything you’re going to regret later.

Wisdom? Nah, wisdom comes from experience. It comes from eliminating the bad choices in life by trying them first, although not approaching it quite like that. Wisdom comes from doing things and learning firsthand why we don't do things certain ways. From hearing others but not really listening to what they say. From disregarding directions. From seeing how others do something but thinking, what if I switch this up and try this over here instead? And sometimes it works out, and it is innovative because you push past an idea that had limited others. And sometimes you do things that are really dumb, or are not seen as dumb at the time but you discover during the process why no one does it the way that you did. Wisdom sounds like this: Don't jump off that ledge! Johnny Legs jumped off that ledge two and a half years ago. Oh, he hit the water and basically got folded in half. It was brutal, blood everywhere, he was in a coma for a month, and he's been in that wheelchair ever since. You wanna end up like Johnny Legs? Get people to help you get bread from the upper shelves at the supermarket, have to use the ramp to get in and out of the strip club? Then by all means, go for it, jump for it kid. We'll watch, see how it goes.

That’s why any time I see something dumb about to happen, I can rationalize it that, “Well, at least some wisdom is on its way.” And wisdom does not come quickly. It comes with time, and pain, and usually a bunch of shit that will seem pretty obvious in retrospect. But just because you already knew something doesn't mean that you can't gain a valuable lesson from hearing it again under different circumstances. Wisdom, it's a drawn out process, like a chess match. And also like a chess match, there are lots of variations on how things can go, and stuff you could have done, and stuff that could have gone different based on what you could have done. So you start off and you suck at it, and you get your ass kicked a bunch, and then you start to do a little better every time. 

At my apartment in downtown Madison a few years ago, we had mice. Plural. We thought it was just one mouse that was really crafty at avoiding capture, but it turned out to be a few of them. This happened the 2^nd year that we lived there, an entire year of 4 guys that were pretty messy and threw more parties than they should have, didn’t always pick up after ourselves, and an old rickety apartment that may have already have had rodents living in it anyway. And I’m not gonna sit here and blame anyone specifically for why our apartment was quite as messy as it was, but there was much discussion of why the bathroom always had clothes in it and why the kitchen never got completely clean. It was discussed.

Anyway, one night we were just sitting in the living room, watching the Bucks play on TV, and one of the roommates, we’ll call him Chad for these purposes, Chad randomly jumps up and starts yelling and pointing to the ground over by the garbage. And it’s really out of nowhere and startling, so it was hard to tell what he was even saying at first, but finally I could understand “Meece!” which is Chad’s way of saying that he had seen a mouse. Now, it was dark, and we had all had a few beers, and I think we were also willing to ignore this for the time, so we all just told Chad that he was probably just high. Which, he could have been that too. And we didn’t see a mouse again that night. But a few nights later, there was another sighting in the same spot. Then a week later, I saw a blur shoot past in the same spot. So it wasn’t really something to ignore anymore, so we tried to decide what to do about it, rather than decide whether we had to do anything at all.

Now, there are obviously many ways to try to catch things that are hiding in your house. Traps, glue, lures, borrow someone’s cat, bunch of ways. But for god knows why, our first plan was to keep our household bat (like baseball bat) near the kitchen so that upon the next sighting, someone could grab it and bash the rodent to death on sight. Please take a moment to imagine all the ways that this could fail. Take a few moments, I’ll wait.

Okay, good. Nothing ridiculous happened from that approach, but I almost wish it had. I almost wish we had a story of one of us desperately swinging at a fleeing mouse and breaking the tv open. But no, nothing like that. It just wasn’t a good set up in general, because usually by the time we saw that the mouse was there, it was already too late to do anything about it that time. So, the first plan was not a good one. Lesson learned.

Next, we tried to set up a mousetrap with a little piece of cheese in the same corner that the mouse would pass through. We set it up, let it sit for a day or so, and we heard a THWAT come from the corner. But the mouse would never be there, no matter how many times we tried this. Nor would the cheese left as the decoy. For whatever reason, the trap was too sensitive or the mouse was too experienced or maybe this invention never actually works, because I’ve never seen or heard of any mousetrap actually catching one of these damn things myself. But whatever, maybe we had a shitty mousetrap, lesson learned.

Next we tried malt-o-meal. This I’ve seen work because we had a mouse in our garage at home when I was a kid. You give the mice something to eat that will make their stomach expand, to the point that the mouse basically overbloats and can’t move anymore, then it just keels over and dies. So we pour this food in the already dirty corners of our kitchen and wait. And wait, and wait. And nothing. Or at least we think nothing. Looking back, it’s possible that there were a tone of other mice that met their end because of this, I can’t be sure. But because we never saw those results, I still assume that it didn’t work. Maybe mice don’t eat malt-o-meal anymore. I know humans basically don’t. It took forever just to find malt-o-meal in the first place, so screw that. Lesson learned.

Finally, another roommate, who will be Anthony for this purpose, comes back with a glue trap, and that’s what finally got results. One morning we awoke to find this poor bastard just careened face down on the trap, not even breathing anymore. Did we assume it was the only one at the time? Of course. Did we end up using glue traps several more times in that corner? You bet. Is that the end of the story? Hell no.

The end finally came one night when I heard a shriek come from across the hall where my bedroom was. It wasn’t that late, but I had mostly chilled out for the night when the noise came. The room belonged to, well, we’ll call him Flea. Partially because his room was the dirtiest and partially because I’m using names of Red Hot Chili Peppers for aliases here. So Flea’s girlfriend at the time, she runs out of the room, freaking out, and after a bit of discussion, she reveals that she had seen yet another mouse and was disgusted. Well, we’re all a bit pissed off because we were certain that we had already gotten the last damn rat or mouse or whatever the hell. But we determine that we’ll take him down, right here and now, just to be done with it. Like it was personal now, like this mouse had invaded Flea’s bedroom, so any of us could be next if we let this go unchecked. Although again, filthy room, if I’m being honest here. So Anthony, Flea, and myself ran in the room and shut the door. Chad stayed in the hallway.

We started moving stuff around, trying to force the mouse out to run around, and then we laid a glue trap near a narrow space we thought we could force him to go. Then we started making noise and rummaging stuff around trying to provoke a reaction. Suddenly, out of a small pile of socks, the mouse darted forward, which shocked me enough to kind of jump up onto Anthony’s shoulders. I wasn’t scared, mind you, but startled enough to lose my composure for a second. But it didn’t quite work, the mouse went around the bed, so we tried it again, and he shot back around to the book case, and back, and forth, for like an hour. But then we finally get things moved around enough, and we got it to go the right way out of the closet and then around the TV and BAM, we got him on the trap!

We were so jacked that we had finally caught this little bastard, I and my roommates started exclaiming quotes from Alonzo from Training Day. I yelled out, “The shit’s chess, it ain’t checkers!” And then Anthony yelled out “You protect the sheep by killing the motha-fuckin’ wolf!” and then I think Chad yelled out from the hallway, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove!” Which really didn’t go along with what had happened, but it started us going around trying to quote pretty much everything Denzel Washington said in that movie. And then we decided to get drunk and watch the full movie. Oh, and we bashed the mouse’s head in and threw him in the trash, because screw that mouse and all of his free-loading friends.

Speaking of Training Day, did you know they’re trying to make that into a TV show? And that Denzel WON’T be involved? How could that possibly work? And unless the whole series is one long day, why even call it Training Day?

Sounds like some fresh wisdom on its way. Bye now.