A TO DO OR NOT TO-DO

By Lynn Phillips

Here in America, you can be anything you want. All you need is a positive attitude and a dash of moxie. But I want to be so many things; I’m having trouble getting started.
On the one hand I yearn to be elegant, really elegant, one of those social paragons with flawless, surgically stretched skin and an orthodontically impeccable smile. I’d wear a Lacroix gown accessorized with jewels as big as meteorites. My shoes would cost a typist six weeks’ wages. My hair would be tipped by a man you’d swear was Botticelli in a former life. At my elbow would stand a tuxed-out older gent, one who’s earned his money the hard way—sucking up to the right people. My amusing escort would steer me bullishly into a drove of Page Sixers at an eat-your-heart-out charity feed thrown on Trump’s lovely yacht, or in the cultural penumbra of an otherwise public museum. There, I’d be envied for my villas and Van Goghs, admired for my unfailing generosity, my discreet charm, and my brilliant lawyers. Outsiders, reading about me in W. would feel comforted to know that any civilization that produced me couldn’t be all bad.

On the other hand, those smug, snitty socialite bores make me want to throw up. How dare the privileged Few flaunt their fortunes before the destitute? Oh to see those doges and their dowagers blown to bits in a great, booming explosion. Wouldn’t that be gratifying?

lmagine: ruby shrapnel and shards of diamond ricocheting off the shantung walls, whizzing through Porcini-shaped clouds of Opium-scented smoke while poached eyeballs spin giddy, bubble• chamber trajectories through a galaxy of waxed legs and imploding centerpieces. Picture severed heads of once vain and mighty men zooming through the air, a hail of comets, flumes of consommé trailing each in its parabolic wake, while roasted wags, untrussed, soaring, rocket through the after-dinner gyre of salad—shredded brocade, pureed pace-makers, blood-red radicchio—clear to the shattered chandeliers and on!

Such a festive conflagration would surely revivify fashion and the Arts, yet I balk at what it might do to the ozone. Besides, I detest violence. It won’t pay the dentist. It won’t melt the heart of a bureaucrat, pull a daddy off crack, or wean the Iower-middle classes from their dependency on Spanish Colonial décor. No, violence breeds nothing but, more violence. So l don’t know what to do.

Even in the middle, muddle rules. Should I renovate a basement in a travesty of Anglophilic taste, hire bodyguards, and cultivate a self-satisfied throng of vapid celebrities? Or, is the life of a demimondaine club-owner too frivolous? Maybe I’d better become an insurance adjuster, making sure that nobody collects unless her injuries are documented! Is this what I want? Or that?

One way or another, questions nag: Should I earn more than I need? Spend more than I earn? Seek fame on talk shows as an achiever, or as a victim? Should I weekend in the Hamptons or gentrify Harlem? Truly mother, or merely reproduce? I can’t even decide if I should draw my sense of community from Ted Koppel or from Snoopy. I’ve too darn many options, and just thinking about them all makes me hungry.

But what to eat? If simple fare, then macro, or Roy Rogers? If complex, Chez Panisse or Tex-Thai? Should I cook, order in, or eat out? Maybe I should run down to the soup kitchen and ladle out some slop for those beggars and moochers who skulk around my neighborhood rubbing our noses in our own heartless hypocrisy. Should I? Are crumbs of mercy filling? Or merely degrading. Both, obviously, but which? Perhaps I should go on a fast.

Most likely I’d have been happier in simpler times when a person had only to ride the great American West, cheating bellicose Indians of their land, shooting gold-crazed Chinamen for their mining claims, or killing cattlemen who’d pay anything to get the railroad routed through their small-minded frontier towns. It was easier once, no doubt, to choose between being a Wobbly organizer and a Pinkerton goon, to husband vain dreams among the polyglot factions of the oppressed, or to bash in their anti-American skulls with one’s truncheon. Easier, but tricky.

Our cultural past is just as hard to figure. Would l have said yes to Walt Whitman’s Transcendental muse, or to Walt Disney’s transcendent mouse? Better yet, starting as a prohibition-era talent agent, maybe l’d have risen hook by crook to head a major studio, beguiling the minds of my generation with dreams of G-men, warriors, and the women who love them. But that’s all moot. One must stay in one’s own time and skin; live in the Present!

No, no more procrastinating! I will triumph over indecision. But how? Should I channel mummies through a house-wife’s larynx? Get in touch with my body or opt for out-of-body bliss? Should I invest my savings in therapy, summon the Furies of childhood, then learn to croon them to sleep with self-absorbed lullabies? Hmmmmm. Jogging might do as well. Or sitting zazen, or lifting weights. Any disciplined routine to get me into the rhythm of decisive action without the distractions of content or consequence.

Perhaps I ought to join an Anonymous Society and entrust my life to a Higher Power? The Higher Power can be anything I wish: Moscow, Mary, Elvis, you name it. At any hour of the day or night, if Elvis wills it, my fellow sufferers—the stymied, the scattered and shirkoholic—may ring me up. And I them. A tight support system—is that the solution?

Deep in my heart I know that prodding and poking at my problem won’t solve it. The only way to defeat lethargy is to do something, anything. Sign a personal check to help science test a new cancer drug, albeit on innocent monkeys and bunnies? Support groups opposed to such cruel practices, thus slowing the metastasis of hope? Maybe I ought to write a note admonishing my congressman to ignore all those munitions lobbies and xenophobic voters who put him in office? No, I’d be more useful sending blankets to the baked plains of Ethiopia, or shipping medical supplies to the armies of Nicaragua to abet that noblest of causes—a small nation’s struggle to choose which superpower to owe. Oh dear.

Perhaps it would be more effective to teach just one teenage mother to read. After a few years of patient work and sacrifice, for which her children (once they’re successful word-processors) will no doubt thank her, she’ll be able to read this. Or something more upbeat, a fashion mag, or supermarket romance. She’ll be able to make her own choices then.

She’ll be as free as I.

I know that sloth is a sin. Still, reviewing all the viable alternatives to it wears me out. l’m sleepy. Time for a nap.

I curl up, and my cat, Purina, jumps up on the futon for a cuddle. What a creature! She is not at all confused. She has no job. She has no social ambitions. No social conscience. She has much to teach me.

Watching her, I can see what I must do. I must find a Higher Power to take care of me, a Higher Power who’ll scratch my back and leave me alone with a full dish on weekends. I will learn to clean myself with my tongue and go to the bathroom in a box of gravel. I’ll hunt mice and catch them; I’ll regale them with tales of tigers, leopards, and the rodents who love them. I’ll bat my little Mickies and Minnies around like hockey pucks, or Pinkerton Men, or Latin refugees. Then I‘ll experiment on them scientifically with my teeth for awhile before presenting my empirical results to The Great One. If I get bored or lonely I’ll crawl into a paper bag and rattle up a childhood trauma or two, then scamper forth reborn. And should the Almighty seek to soothe her conscience by writing a check, I’ll bite the hand that grips the pen, or nibble a leaf of grass to make myself spit up on Her signature. No teenage mothers are going to learn to read while I’m around! I’ll stand on their books and stick my sphincter smack in their faces! In such behavior lies truth, simplicity, and honesty.

But alas, I am no cat. I am only a confused good-for-nothing, fated to flatter and praise the go-getters and never-say-diers, the movers and shakers, the can-do-and-did-ers, those whose lot it is to build, build, build, for better or worse, in sickness and in health upon this earthly paradise a temple of marvels, a monument to the dovetail fit of demand and supply, factory and shopping mall, of tyrant and jester, killer and nurse, and to bequeath their creation with love everlasting to their cherished offspring that they may build and bequeath In turn, hand over fist, mind over matter, Life über alles and a pox on Laggards!

Published in the print version of Heresies Magazine 1989
Issue #24: 12 Years (Anniversary Issue) (Volume 6, Number 4)

Why Read it?

This piece has been omitted from the online archival version. But I like how fresh this piece feels 27 years later.  When it was written, many contemporary forms of human folly and wasted energy—“social media marketing” for example—had not yet been created, but the basic template of folly and waste—an economy of cruelty—was well in place.

I could have used an editor on this one. The endings are too numerous and bludgeon the reader with too much whimsy besides. What keeps me in love with it are its concluding blasts of ferocious ambivalence.