Slaughterhouse E-mail 2

START: 9:37 PM
FINISH: 10:34 PM
Words: 922

“The Power of Pessimism”

So I’m talking to Julie on the phone this week, and we’re sorting out some of the various things we’re working on at the moment, and she talks about how being optimistic is a new path for her at the moment. I pointed out that, “One of the reasons I’m pessimistic is I’m that much more prepared when everything takes a turn for the worse.” She laughed loudly and said, “Now in case I wasn’t SURE you were my brother…” At that point she insisted she was sending that in as the topic and wanted 500 words about how “the power of positive thinking” was nonsense. Keeping with the slaughterhouse rules, hers was the third email in the Suggestion Box this week and is my topic for the evening. Enjoy.

I will be the first to admit that my worldview has moments where it’s a little bit dark and a little bit cynical, and that surprises a lot of people who meet me very quickly. There are some things that I can be very driven about, but I don’t believe that some things can happen just because you wish they would. But I don’t have the kind of pessimism that believes that “bad things can happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.” That’s pessimism AND fatalism. No, I am well aware that the glass is half empty, and that’s why I have two extra gallons in the trunk. I even brought this extra glass, and thank God I learned how to make a paper cup out of a square of 8.5 x 11 paper in Ms. Birmingham’s seventh grade science class because there have been at least three occasions where there were no cups to drink from, and I’m not going to drink straight from the fountain because that would have been a sure-fire way to get water on my tie.

My brain’s filled with this sort of useless knowledge. Did you know that there’s a space at the Oak Brook Mall in the western suburbs of Chicago on the second level, right next to the stairwell in the MIDDLE of the stairwell, that you could duck into and your car would be right there, steps ahead of your pursuers and your taillights are fading while they’re still running down the stairs to their vehicle in the open lot, or even better, they saw you go down the stairs and lost you, thinking you went all the way to the lot? Yep. There is. And I would insist on getting that parking space at any given opportunity, hoping it was available, even though it would involve backing into it and taking an extra 15 minutes of driving around the lot, despite the fact I have never been chased by ANYONE through a mall. But when the moment came, I would be ready for it.

My pessimism kind of commingles with paranoia and is cooked in an obsessive-compulsive sauce. When I first started doing triathlons, I would bring two of everything, unless I could bring three. My overpacking for things is the stuff of legend. I am a heterosexual male who has gone away for a race weekend, where I was staying for only one night, with five pairs of shoes. When I was five and was playing a game of tag, my friend Dawn, just before we were to leave Ally-Ally-Oxen Free, quickly reached down and untied my right shoelace. I , new at the shoe-tying game but aware it was dangerous to go undone, was powerless to head anywhere until it was fixed. I think I lost the next 732 games of tag on that alone.

It’s not that I think everything is going to go wrong; I KNOW things will fail, the plans will change, the plane will be late, the driver will get lost, the bus is not coming and sometimes your only way out of a mess like this is Plan Zed. Like I was doing one night when I had tickets to the last night of a show (Out of Order at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse, 1992) and my only recourse as a deep snow began to blanket the area was to hear that my date was prohibited from driving, and I was prohibited from driving, so it was time to hit Speed Dial 4, Hinsdale Limousine, and leave this to the professionals. (I had never used Speed Dial 4 because the phone book had worked just fine, but you’re starting to get the picture, right?) I was a well mannered child who shouted loudly, “FUCK IT! I’m hiring a limousine.” My father, who would not normally abide such outbursts comfortably (either the profanity or the profligacy), sat me down and calmly purchased both tickets from me. My date, the very patient woman who had several more years ahead of watching me veer out of control, took about thirty minutes to calm me down and reassure me that this really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

The good news is, the world is adapting to people like me. A cell phone that’s web-enabled with GPS? Can recharge in 20 minutes and I can have two power adapters and keep a spare battery in my desk? A solar cranked weather radio and flashlight? I can’t even look at a SkyMall catalog, specifically Hammacher Schlemmer, without thinking, that makes sense. I don’t want to pay that much for it and I would never use it and people would mock me unmercifully, but that makes sense.

So when my mind drifts to how many separate exits there are from my workspace and how many proxy cards you need to get to my desk and what kind of notice I would have that someone is coming (four including the roof, three, and about 45 seconds) you shouldn’t think of it as pessimism, a certain knowledge that something is going to go wrong. Think of it as chronic overpreparedness, but for the most unlikely, bizarre scenarios.

And therein lies its power. A positive thinker will stay calm and think, you know, everything’s going to be fine. Meanwhile, I know where the failure points are. I know better.

And those five pairs of shoes? One of them’s going to have speed laces. You never have to tie them. Take that, Dawn Swanson!