Tim Kreider - We Learn Nothing: Essays

Also by Tim Kreider

The PainWhen Will It End?

Why Do They Kill Me?

Twilight of the Assholes

Free Press

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Copyright 2012 by Tim Kreider

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Free Press hardcover edition June 2012

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Designed by Akasha Archer

The following essays first appeared, in different form, on www.nytimes.com : Reprieve, You Cant Stay Here (as Time and the Bottle), How They Tried to Fuck Me Over (as Isnt It Outrageous?), The Referendum, and Averted Vision.

The Stabbing Story was originally published in The Urbanite .

All of these cartoons first appeared in the Baltimore City Paper . Whats Your Plan (When the Shit Hits the Fan) also appears in Twilight of the Assholes , and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Fantagraphics Books. All illustrations are original.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kreider, Tim.

We learn nothing: essays and cartoons / Tim Kreider

p. cm.

1. American wit and humor. I. Title.

PN6165.K75 2012

814. 6dc23 2011050095

ISBN 978-1-4391-9870-4

ISBN 978-1-4391-9872-8 (ebook)

For my mother and father

Most of the names of people mentioned in these essays (except for those of my colleagues, Jennifer Boylan, Sarah Glidden, and Matt, aka Slim Dodger), as well as certain other identifying details, have been changed. Nothing else has been made up.

When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, Where are all my friends?

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

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We Learn Nothing

Fourteen years ago, I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and less interesting than it sounds. A lot of people have told me about their own near-death experiences over the years, often in harrowing medical detail, imagining that those detailshow many times they rolled the car, how many vertebrae shattered, how many months spent in tractionwill somehow convey the subjective psychic force of the experience, the way some people will relate the whole narrative of a dream in a futile attempt to evoke its ambient feeling. Except for the ten or fifteen minutes during which it looked like I was about to die, which I would prefer not to relive, getting stabbed wasnt even among the worst experiences of my life. In fact it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

After my unsuccessful murder I wasnt unhappy for an entire year. Winston Churchills aphorism about the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story, The Lost City of Mars, in which a man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likesin locomotive collisions, race car crashes, exploding rocket shipsuntil he emerges flayed of all his Christian guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.

I cant claim to have been continuously euphoric the whole time; its just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The horrible thing that Id always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters awaythe distance between my carotid and the stilettoI had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. As far as I was concerned everything in this life was what Raymond Carver, in writing of his own second chance, called gravy.

My friends immediately mocked me out of my self-consciousness about the nerve damage that had left me with a lopsided smile. I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old one-hit wonders much too stupid to name in print. And I developed a strange new laugh thats stayed with me to this daya raucous, barking thing that comes from deep in the diaphragm, the laugh of a much larger man, that makes people in bars or restaurants look over for a second to make sure Im not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon. I dont laugh this way all the timecertainly not when Im just being polite. The last time it happened was when I told my friend Harold, You dont understand me, in mock-wounded protest at some unjust charge of sleazery, and he retorted: No, sir, I understand you very wellit is you who do not understand yourself. The laugh always seems to be in response to the same elusive joke, some dark, hilarious universal truth.

Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life for Some Purpose. Even if Id been the type who was prone to such silly notions, I wouldve been rudely disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a coma. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate. What I had been was not blessed or chosen but lucky. Not to turn up my nose at luck; its better to be lucky than just about anything else in life. And if youre reading this now youre among the lucky, too.

I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone. Its a truism that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes, ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like horror movies and roller coasters to what are essentially suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping and skydiving. The trick is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that youre going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent, Clouseauesque hit man to assassinate you.