The Left Coast Biased

Let's be honest. Break-ups are unpleasant. Relationships by nature don't end well; if things were that amicable between the two of you then things wouldn't have ended in the first place. This, however, is not the travesty that popular teen magazines and soap operas would make it out to be. Too many of us shy away from sensational experiences, even good ones, out of fear or a lack of imagination. To shelve a philosophical conversation for a later date, let me just assert that the experience of real, intense emotion is one of the most rare and valuable experiences granted to those of us on this mortal coil and should be treasured, regardless of the polarity of the experience. So with no further ado, here are some tips to help you maximize the emotional experience of your next break up, both for yourself and everyone around you:

Engage Emotionally in the Relationship

This is the first and scariest necessity for having an absolute screamer of a break-up. It is difficult to give yourself over emotionally to another person, but without you investing the trust and vulnerability into the relationship your partner will not give themselves over to it, which will result in a relationship that neither one of you really cares about. That means neither one of you will really be that upset when it ends. Here is some advice for taking steps to engage yourself emotionally in a relationship:

• Imagine a life filled with all of the things that you like about your partner. Picture yourself living that life and try to mentally equate that image to living with the other person.
• Share experiences with them that you have never had before and enjoy, because then that feeling of joy will forever be psychologically tied to that person (e.g. - your first kiss, first marriage, first monster truck rally...)
• Give them gifts that you really want to keep for yourself, as this will tie you emotionally to this item which will transfer to the person you gave it to ( e.g. - jewelry, poems that you wrote, or the Liverpool scarf that you bought the first time you went overseas)

Get it Right the First Time (in person)

Nothing is more annoying to your loved ones than having to hear all about your break-up with John Soandso for the eighth time this year. The First Time is a seminal experience that evokes sympathy and pity and in some cases retributive anger. Every time after that your cousin, sister, best friend, or rebound guy is going to be bored with the same story and annoyed at your stupidity for falling into the same story when everyone already knew how this one ends.

In a related note, cowboy up and do the deed in person. We live in a time when you can have entire relationships via IM, text, email, etc., in fact several websites make quite a lot of money based precisely upon that proposition, but if you really want to dig into the emotional landmark that is the break up, put yourself in a chair and say it to their face, even if it is the only time in the relationship when you actually meet face to face. If you can get her to scream at you amidst a crowded coffee shop that you were the worst thing that ever happened to her and she wishes that she had never met you, all the better, but more on that to come.

The guideline of getting it right the first time is the one that comes with the biggest caveat, which is this: if you are going to put everyone around you through the sequel of an already tired story then you better step up the quality, the way that Chronicles of Riddick seriously upped the ante on Pitch Black. The best way to do that is to have a relatively tame initial break up and then incorporate one or more of the following tips into the subsequent iterations. to be clear, though, our recommendation is still that you go for gold and get it all in the first time around. The counter argument to this theory is that if you can get the same person to lower all their considerable emotional defenses after crushing them a first time then the fallout is so much greater as to be worth the redundancies. I think we have made our position clear, but the final choice is up to you.

Involve as Many Other People as Possible

This is the Multiplication Theory of Emotional Distress, expounded in several famous maxims. C.S. Lewis put a positive spin on the theory when he claimed that a joy was not complete until you shared or explained it to someone else, as teenage girls around the world have since proved, ad nauseum. The negative corollary is that misery loves company.

The most straightforward means of accomplishing this, and the least rewarding is to simply bitch to all your friends incessantly for the four months immediately following the break up. A much more satisfying modus operandi is to actually force your loved ones into having an emotional stake of their own in the relationship. The most productive means of accomplishing this are as follows:

• Tightly intertwine your social circles so that in the aftermath you get to enjoy the debacle of sorting out which friends go with whom. I would suggest an arbitrary system of division, such as lining them up tallest to shortest and assigning them to alternate teams like when you would divide up teams for the elementerary tether ball tournaments.
  
• Spend a lot of time with each respective family. This will ensure that every time that you show up at a family gathering, after the requisite integration about your current love life you will get the "You never should have let go of that one girl. What was her name? She was so nice" In addition to this, if the significant other's family happens to be a major player in any noteworthy field of work then you can ensure yourself reduced employment opportunities for the rest of your life.
• The hands down best method of maximizing the emotional trauma is to procreate, because then you get a permanent physical reminder of what a terrible decision dating this person in the first place was. The emotion fallout has the potential to reverberate for decades if the guy turns out to be a complete douche bag who would rather waste his life playing World of Warcraft than getting up off his pathetic ass to get a job and support his child, resulting in an abandonment where he doesn't even have the stones to run away from the problem, he just lounges about in impotent laziness waiting for a deity or his parents to take care of the problem (as he sees the child) for him. Needless to say this can also get complete strangers emotionally engaged in your break up as a bonus.

Move on as Quickly as Possible

Unlike the rest of these points, this one really works only if one of you follows it. If you both move on then it completely nullifies any possible trauma, kind of indicating that the initial relationship never really meant anything after all. I mean, just like every other aspect of life we can take our cue from Hollywood here. How much less interesting would Brad and Jennifer's break up be if they both would have immediately moved on to a ridiculously happy, popular and procreative (both physiologically and professionally) relationship? instead we get to deal with Jennifer's jealousy, inadequacy, and insecurities for the next 5 years. This is so very much more emotionally ripe than an immediate recovery on both ends.

For maximum emotional damage try to overlap the rebound relationship with the current relationship. This will heighten the feelings of worthlessness on their part and betrayal on yours. These feelings can be further amplified if the subsequent relationship is a mutual acquaintance, or better yet friend, of the both of you. Then the former future Mrs. Soandso can be reminded of her failure every time she sees the two of you at the frequent shared social engagements, and whenever another mutual friend mentions either one of you. If you really want to salt the wound, switch gender preferences altogether. "My girlfriend left me for another guy" - painful. "Because I am such an incompetent representation of the entire gender, my girlfriend has given up on men altogether" - debilitating.

Go for Glory

This is the final, and easily the most critical, of the tips we have for getting the most emotional mileage out of your break up. go for the movie scene quality moment. Look for a story, experience, anecdote, line, or moment that embodies all of the frustrations and excitements of the relationship and its ending. Rehearse this moment over and again so you can share it with ease. be sure that it is a moment that forces the conflict on the listener: make them confront their desire to cheer you on and despise you at the same time. The essence of any break up is the polarizing nature of the two viewpoints. Yours should be an example which allows the listener the opportunity to engage in both sides of the issue. this will enable you to continue telling the story and stretching and spreading the emotional distress of the break up for years and years. Here are some examples of types of moments to look for:

• The public disturbance: the bigger the better. Everyone can share in the monstrosity that is a person screaming obscenities in a Starbucks at the top of their lungs, and the more of your friends that are there for the moment, the more of a group experience the storytelling actually becomes.
• In a related note, the more physical, the better: if you can incite her to attack you, running screaming across the room in a Braveheart charge, threatening the kind of physical violence that can only be responded to by a side volley into the wall, a threat of immenent death and her arrest, then you have succesfully birthed a story of infinite retale value.
  
• The epic one liner. Scene: she stands crying in the rain, clinging to you, going on about how she knows it won't change anything but she just wants to hold on to every last moment she can have with you and you grab her, hold her at arm's length and say, "Shh. Stop it. You're embarassing yourself." And you turn and walk away without looking back. This is the kind of moment that lives on in retelling.

Addendum 1 (the Disclaimer): All the illustrations above are drawn from real life, solely for the purpose of entertaining, not for that of wounding the participants, with the exception of the jibe at the douche bag abandoning his child. You are a Captian of douche bags and deserve to be wounded, emotionally and physically, but if an obscure henchman-looking individual should accost you in an alley and beat you within an inch of your life in the near future, then I would like to state for the record that said individual is not known to me, nor did I procure the entirely illicit services of said individual, and niether do I condone such behavior. The poison oak sent to your hospital room? That was me.

Addendum 2: If, in the event that you are a coward, and you would like to have as painless of a break up as possible simply pursue the inverse of the steps listed above, though whether you could really call it a relationship if you did not engage emotionally, didn't introduce them to your family and friends, and come out without a single story of note is an entirely different story. You would have to take that up with my high school 'Girlfriend'.

Addendum 3: This post was brought to you by Coheed and Cambria, and by GENESIS, an excellent 2004 Merlot by Hogue Cellars out of Washington state.

Labels: personal, relationships

I spent the week leading up to Christmas in a cabin with my family next to a frigid lake in Oklahoma. When I sat down to write this, I was planning on doing this whole bit about the frustrations of Christmas, replete with scriptural allusions and caustic bitterness. You know, almost precisely what you would expect from me. It started pretty easily. Most of the aspects of Christmas annoy me. 2000 years ago a guy who never bought anyone a present in the entirety his much debated and nevertheless world changing life was born in a shack, probably some time in August. On top of the inherent ludicrosity (yeah, I made that word up) of thee when and how we celebrate this day, the consumerism we have built into the day is pushing the holiday season deeper and deeper into the autumn weeks, which are brief enough in Arizona as it is. The evils of Christmas Creep have been much bemoaned elsewhere, but in case you happen to own a major media or consumer company and you haven't been paying attention: QUIT PUSHING CHRISTMAS ON US!!! The 12 days of Christmas have been more than enough for thousands of holidays before this year, we don't suddenly need 12 weeks of it now. Give us time to enjoy Halloween and Thanksgiving before settling into the materialist driven stress of the fat man. There are plenty of things about this holiday, and this whole season (see footnote for example) to go off about, but There was a moment that against all odds lightened my pervasive gloom and got me thinking about all the things that make this a special time of year.

We are visiting with my grandparents here, who are getting on in years, approaching that twilight where gets a bit more beautiful for its imminent paucity. Not quite there, but closer. We were all sitting around paying rapt attention to the clinic that I was holding on the bridge table when my grandmother's youngest son walked in to surprise her. She wasn't expecting to see him this season, and she broke into tears when he came through the door. This is the kind of moment that is truly at the heart of everything that we do this time of year. it is an excuse to allow ourselves to really delve into the depth of the emotion that we feel for our loved ones, with a reckless abandon that would be exhausting if we pursued it year round. A lot of this is accomplished by pushing the ever invasive world at large back to arms length and letting ourselves just dwell with a bit more awareness in the togetherness of family moments, whether it is the comfort with which we fight over taking pictures, the stories that we all laugh at for the hundredth time, or the moment when everyone decides to spontaneously throw mashed potatoes at the youngest sibling. The other, and much less significant way that we show this emotion is in the giving of gifts.

Gift giving is an incredibly powerful and vulnerable experience. I learned this the way kids learn anything: the hard way. I was in my early teens, and there was a cd that I was soooo excited about. For all of you who were not big on the mid 90's music scene, this was just around the time of Napster, before the onset of glorious iTunes, and I lived in the sticks so there was no high speed internet. The short of it is, you had to still go buy the actual disc to get your music. So imagine living in this pre-musical liberation world and there is a cd that you go around talking about for weeks, months even. Ok, enough with dodging the issue. It was the first NSync album. I watched the Disney concert, knew the dance moves, all the words. Yes, I still liked girls. In any case, I was hyped on this album and Christmas morning rolls around and my mother actually went to the tree and grabbed one of the presents and brought it to me, standing there watching as I opened it. Her face was glowing, eyes eager, the anticipation that only comes when you know that you are about to make one of the day of one of the dearest people in the world to you. I unwrapped that shiny blue case with Justin and JC and the boys smiling out at me and my mother caught her breath, waiting for the reaction... I looked up. "Mom, I bought this last week." Derisively I tossed the cd to the side and reached back into the pile. out of the corner of my eye I see my mother's face fall, tears welling up in her eyes, and she starts telling me that I can return it. This moment has never left my mind. Giving a gift, that is, trying to give a good gift, is a very vulnerable experience. And to be clear, a gift card is never a good gift. I am not saying that they are bad gifts, but a good gift is a painstaking, deliberate searching out for that thing, that moment which will not just be appreciated but be the key stone of a glorious arch of joy and utility. it says that I know you, intimately, and value who you are and what is meaningful to you. A gift treasured is an affirmation of that knowledge and a validation of the relationship. A gift spurned is is precisely the opposite. You cannot really give a good gift to someone until they begin to embrace the world around them and engage in things passionately, so to some people who roll through life as mere bystanders you can never give a good gift. This was my mother's first real effort to give me a good gift and my reaction had consequences that rolled down through the years. Since then I have made every effort to give as good of a gift as possible, to risk that moment of vulnerability, to tell all the people that I love how much they mean to me.

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Labels: personal

We might as well have this out sooner rather than later. At some point in time during your perusal of this collection of our idyllic ramblings you will begin to wonder whether I am being serious. Did these stories really happen? Do I really believe these philosophies that I am espousing? Let me anticipate the question with this answer: I am always serious, especially when I am joking. For reasons that I don't delve into, as there are fears of delving to deep and awakening things better left to sleep, I have always had a more fluid relationship with the concept of truth than that with which most people are comfortable. Let us just say that for those of us who are more flexible when reaching that place where subjective perception intersects with objective reality sincerity is always very easy while honesty is somewhat more difficult to achieve. So to guide all our interactions heretofore let this be your rubric: if you think that I am joking then I likely firmly hold to what I am professing, and if I appear more earnest then the chances are good that I am having a laugh. That being said...

I have long been a fan of polygamy, both as a theory and a practice. I like the idea of having a larger relationship, of them being friends, of creating my own little fiefdom. I am a love the community of family and I want to have as much of it as I can. Polygamy (e.g., Warren Jeffs, Big Love, Mitt Romney) tends to get a bad rap, in my humble opinion (a phrase you are not supposed to use, because you are obviously the one writing; of course it is your opinion). We have so long operated under the assumption that polygamy is a dirty word and a dirtier concept that there aren't any rational arguments against it. The objections run the gamut from ad hominem to ad baculum without ever pausing in the realm of validity. Let's run through them:

......

Polygamy is pedophilia. True, some polygamists dip into the wine before it is fully aged. But these are the religious nut jobs who are equally as likely no ask everyone in their commune to chase a comet with them. No offense, Brigham. Polygamy isn't any more inherently oppressive to women than a monogamous male-female marriage. Should we abolish booze (again) because Tara Ried goes on nightly benders?
.....

If you legalize polygamy, it's a slippery slope, and next you'll have to legalize men marrying goats. Not really. Two (relatively) rational adult females who are capable of declaring yes or no do not equal one insensate and incoherent goat.

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Polygamy is an affront to God and the Bible. Perhaps. Depends which part of the Bible. In the Old Testament, you know- the part where it was unbelievably strict and judgmental, polygamy is accepted without a cross word. I read about a man after God's own heart who had eight wives, and his son holds the record with 700. All the New Testament says is that you can't be a deacon.

......


It's bad for the kids. The studies are vague. And actually, anthropologist Philip Kilbride says that polygamy would reduce the divorce rate and be better for kids. Given that most kids suffer from a lack of attention and absentee parentism, wouldn't more parents be better?

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There would be a single-man surplus. This is actually the most realistic and severe problem. The math is simple: The rich men will snap up several women. Bill Gates will rack up Solomon-like numbers, leaving the rest of us schmucks crying alone in our rooms. (This will be true even if polygamy is a two-way street, as it should be. Women should be allowed to marry multiple men. But most won't. DNA and testosterone say that men will be the ones who do most of the spouse collecting.) And yet...so what? Isn't that the point of the free market? Why should love be any different from business? It'd be good incentive for us other guys to start our own software mega company. Given the laws of evolutionary progression, aren't the more successful among us the ones we want breeding anyway?



If the government legally required that all men earn the same salary, that system would be described in a book called Das Kapital. And that's the marital system we're living under. Which isn't to say that I think a socialist society wouldn't be better. I'm just asking for a little internal consistency.

Polygamists of the world, throw off your chains.

Labels: personal

Alright, its time I entered the fray. First things effing last (name the movie), I agree with Ryan. About what? About most things, and usually not everything. We get along just fine that way.

Labels: personal

I don’t know what to do with a blog, but quite a few people (some of whom I even respect) seem to think blogs are a good idea so I guess we'll give it a go. I don’t even know what a ‘blog’ is. I mean, I’m familiar with the concept, but how did we get here? So I looked it up. It’s short for weblog, and apparently it is just a journal, albiet with an audience and hyperlinks. Memoirs with the conceit of not being retrospective. Well, I’ve kept a journal for years so this shouldn’t be too difficult of a transition. Having stepped into this now, what exactly are the standards? Do we address you, the ever present reader, or are you the elephant in the room? Do we have to write daily? Do we need a theme? I am a huge fan of standards as they play nicely into my completely unfounded sense of elitism, but I look around the World Wide Web and it appears that there are none whatsoever. Looks like you elephants will have to indulge our flights of fancy as they swing o’er philosophical ranting, sports commentary, local cuisine, and random biographical nostalgia. The central theme will be the reflection of our intellectual meanderings and as such most of what ends up here will be our own opinions, some original, some colored more heavily by other’s thoughts and some ripped off wholesale, but go read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem for a fun little illustration of the vanity of original thought. Or the copyright to Days of War, Nights of Love. Or Ecclesiastes.

I am sure that no one is going to read this without having substantial personal exposure to us already, but on the off chance that someone is bored and stumbles across this by hitting the I Feel Lucky button, I guess I’ll start with a justification of our chosen name. First of all, this should be an imperative: if you are going to start a blog with a clever name, say, back in 2002, and then not post for the next 6 years DELETE THE BLOG. Or don't be foolish enough to post your home address unless you want some future blogger to come drag you into the street to physically vent some of the frustration of spending a half an hour trying to find some domain name that is appropriate and witty. To all of you, I hate you. That being said I don't want the chosen title of our blog to give the impression that this will be a bludgeoning of provincial sporting convictions. We will try to keep that to a mere smattering, at most. The name was chosen from our undivided affection for all things West Coast. The coast itself, and all accompanying beaches and subsequent recreational pursuits are more pleasant. The weather is nicer for longer. The people are prettier. Everything about this edge of the country is better. And that assertion is in no way related to the fact that my entire family moved back east and now I never get to see them.

Labels: personal