YOU KNOW OPP

The great tragedy and alienation of the service-based economy is that one is forced to devote the waking hours of one’s best, most productive and healthiest years to other peoples’ problems, to pretend to care deeply about them, to get all bent outta shape in respect of them, and to respond to the whims of the problemmed people with a speed not suited to one’s savannah-developed brain. A fair piece of this could be chalked up to an overemphasis on the value of “altruism,” not as a philanthropic concept, but as a foundational philosophy of economics. Is that so bad? I suppose not, but look at some of its effects.

My name is Oppenheimer and I live in Baltimore. As you now know, I am something of a do-it-yourself philosopher. Last year I attended a talk by a former NASA astronaut about how my brain – well, yours too – has not yet fully adjusted to today’s (or even last century’s) technological advances and, for instance, chaining oneself to a desk to monitor and respond to hundreds of emails a day is something we weren’t intended for. Well … let’s put it another way : “something we haven’t yet evolved for ….” Ah, but maybe the old astronaut was showing some of the signs of becoming an old, grumpy coot.

“Oppenheimer,” said my ex-wife Martha, “you spend too much time thinking about shit that doesn’t matter.” And maybe she was right. All that thinking made it near impossible for me to be attentive to the needs of Martha or the children, so here I am, divorced.
But in my more conspiratorial moods I blame the inattentiveness on having been hypnotized by the computer all day, having carried the water for all those “other people” during my waking hours, and just having been tired when I got home.

So you know me. Upon my divorce, I ran out and purchased that BMW I always wanted. Some men, during their mid-life crises, will buy a sports car. I don’t consider the BMW a sports car. But I purchased the car because it was the model I had seen some of my superiors driving. I also felt that it could display a material tidiness and advancement that didn’t otherwise bowl one over upon meeting yours truly. And I suppose that worked for a while.

But then I got used to it. Now I don’t perceive that the BMW makes much of an impression on anyone. Certainly not me. I am accustomed to it now, it doesn’t have that new car smell, and somehow the gas cap fell off. So now every time I approach the car’s left side I feel ashamed that the pock-marked car is mine. I am too lazy to get the thing fixed or, if you prefer, I spend too much time on other peoples’ problems to have the time to solve this one.

When we got divorced, Martha took custody of the children. Just as well. Now I can log on and view my pornography whenever I please. The good thing about pornography is that you can shut it off when you are finished and, if you are unencumbered by the more pernicious aspects of guilt, you can forget about it fast after disposing of your mess.

Now, reader, I’ve been working on other peoples’ problems long enough to sense that something that I’ve said may have left you with the impression that I am not a very nice guy. So, this is to indicate that I feel a little guilt as I imagine the pain or confusion I may have caused you. So, as I have learned to do, I now apologize. But, because my heart is not wholly in it, and now that I’ve dispensed with the social imperative, I can tell you to go stick a fork in an electrical outlet. See what that does.

Let’s see … by a sort of accident of history, because my last name is Oppenheimer, I was able to enjoy the trust of many clients who saw my name as a sign that I’d be a very strong financial advisor. And I suppose that I strove to avoid their disappointment, by working hard, putting in lots of hours, reading up on the research and analysis, and keeping in close communication with my clients. Further, I lived up to the image of a sober financial adviser by spending a good deal of money on dark, overpriced suits, uncomfortable shoes and conservative ties. I decorated my office with a dark mahogany desk and hung shiny plaques on the walls, attesting to my education and merit. I included a bookcase displaying how-to books of various stripes, which I rarely thumbed through, but which promised to make you, me or whomever else that cracked them open, a very rich man (or woman). On the eighteenth floor of my office building, I click-click-clicked with my murderous shoes back and forth to the bathroom and the break-room all day, just as an excuse to stop by my colleagues’ offices and be gregarious, to chat about the weather and sports, to hear about the newest porn sites, and to keep upon office gossip. Ostensibly, I guess the purpose of all the wandering was to keep apprised on what people had heard about the “markets.” But because the markets are whatever people are doing at a given time, and they are not plottable in any rational sense, all chatter about the markets can only be old news, a historical “see what I know” type exercise.

Martha and I were involved in the Camden Foundation, which is a receptacle for rich peoples’ money. We didn’t have a name-your-own-building-sized stake in the Foundation, but we nevertheless announced to all who asked – and many who didn’t – that we admired the Foundation’s mission because it disbursed its money – well, the interest but not the principal – to a variety of local charities in support of the Baltimore community. This was an easier way for us to feel like we’d made an impact on our community: easier than, say, working as a community organizer, but it was all we could do given the little time we had. In the competition between other peoples’ problems and still other peoples’ problems, the other people with the money to pay you mostly win out.

Today I am not a stock broker and I’m no longer a patron-level Camden Foundation supporter. I suppose I’m on inactive status with both. My licenses to sell stocks and other paper won’t run out so long as I attend one or two seminars per year. I attend mostly to watch the people and come up with fodder for my stories. But it is comforting to know that I can always go back to that business. Today I am a copy-editor for a financial magazine. So I still work on other peoples’ problems, in a round-about way, and I spend my days wordsmithing, which has greatly improved my writing. It is still tough to find time to write for pleasure, though.

Whilst bleeding my red ink on various self-promoters’ “see-what-I-know” articles, I slowly develop my stay-at-home philosopher’s frustration: the necessary anger and overwhelming irritation that drove me last year to read Marx – despite my rock-ribbed Republican roots – and to explain away my divorce and my shitty behavior towards my wife and my children, among other things, as symptoms of my alienation in a socially-constructed prison of a world. Boo hoo.

I am dating again. The woman is in her late twenties. “Good for you,” all my buddies say, and I say this to myself at night as I flex my muscles in front of the mirror. I have little regret over this because man has evolved to seek out youthful women who are fruitful and can easily multiply. But I certainly don’t want to have more children. Mine are great, fund, beautiful, I love them, but you’ve got to be rich to support more than two in this service-based economy. My great-grandfather sired fourteen children by two different women to help him run his farm. Somehow I think he was better than me.

Birth control might as well have been invited by the Catholic Church to give them a problem to work on. More likely, though, it was developed by employees of the Secretary of Commerce. Who said we don’t have a command economy?

The woman I am dating is named Jill. Not only is she fifteen years younger than me, but she has a name right out of a nursery rhyme. She is only slightly less good than my wife was in bed, but I feel better about myself for associating with her youthfulness. By the way, the feminists will accost me for only focusing on Jill’s (i) youth, and her (ii) sex. Let me step back a minute, power up my left brain, and tell you all the reasons I admire her as a woman and a person and not just as a sex object.

A. Jill is a nurse. This is an example of tending to other peoples’ problems in the extreme. She seems to me a very caring person and, instinctively, I just know she’d be a wonderful mother. Shoot! There goes that instinctual shit again. I apologize, Ms. Feminist reader.

B. Jill is genuinely interested in my philosophical writings, the same type of stuff my old wife hated because they took time away from the domestic imperative. Okay, okay. I guess this one was a little bit selfish too.

C. As a nurse, Jill appreciates science and so, when her patients are near death, she doesn’t spend precious time and energy pleading with a speck of lint on the ceiling fan to spare them from eternal damnation and barbecue. Instead she treats the dying with a kindness and gentleness that believes nine out of ten of us never do anything so bad during our lifetimes to deserve all this guilt.

I have been seeing a doctor for the depression wrought by the breakup of my marriage. Even though I am happy with (i) my new career, (ii) the new sex, (iii) my new outlook, and (iv) my compassionate girlfriend, I still miss the stability of Martha and the kids. The doctor says I take too much of the world’s problems on my shoulders. One time I replied, “If I don’t who will?” He just asked, “Barack Obama?” It didn’t strike me as all that funny, but I get it. And just look at the resistance he got, and I’m sitting here without the good looks and the millions in campaign donations.

I don’t want to go into politics because it’s easier to complain in peace. My neighbor Jack ran for city council a couple years ago and you should hear the stories of the major dunces you have to bow down to, just to get a party’s nomination. He lost the election and now his great pleasure is to mow the lawn and place the clippings on top of his compost pile. Who needs other peoples’ problems when you have a yard to maintain?