Wipe Your Feet

Batman selling, not spelling, kitchen cabinets in Hollywood.

Part of loving Los Angeles is differentiating between the bizarre and the Day-of-the-Locust-depressing. For instance, I would rather sell kitchen cabinets as Batman than sell kitchen cabinets as myself. First of all there’s the good story factor: it’s more interesting to say, “When I first moved to Los Angeles, I sold stick-on wood laminate in a Batman suit” than it is to say, “When I first moved to Los Angeles, I sold stick-on wood laminate.” In fact, taking part in a ridiculous construct elevates almost anything to the floor above Sad Basement. Second of all, it takes a strong person to stow your pride in the overhead compartment and allow other people to be amused by your pain (you know, just like Pagliacci did). Being dumped is horrible. Being dumped while you’re stuck on the ferris wheel at the third street promenade with gum caught in your hair is halfway between horrible and — go with me — noble. There is nothing more honorable than submitting to the mind-boggling absurdity and often humiliating randomness of the universe. It’s like being the kind of person who can say something witty on his or her deathbed. It gives you the appearance of having accepted what’s usually considered unacceptable about being a human. Whether it’s performative or genuine is beside the point, because it’s the kind of performance that tricks you into believing it’s true if you stick with it long enough.

The people who most often impress me are the ones who actually seem able to be amused at their own misfortune, as if they’re watching their lives play out on a screen while knowing they’ll get to leave the theater at the end. Of course, they won’t: when the movie’s over so are they, but it means they’re almost never crippled by worry over the terrible things that may befall them or hopelessly depressing scenarios they might find themselves in. Their feelings are as real as anyone else’s. Woody Allen’s fear of mortality is a justified terror of an inevitable outcome, just as real as your hypochondriac friend who weeps over the certainty that this bump is the final act of a body in a decades-long battle with its own decay — only funnier, and with some kind of universal perspective that makes all the difference. Abject suffering in a chicken suit is viewed from without and never from within, a much less painful vantage point that allows you to look elsewhere when you need to. I guess it’s a question of character, of being able to picture a perfectly happy world without you in it. All that remains of what you once were: he sold kitchen cabinets in a Batman suit, a punch line for a future dinner table of someone elses’ guests, the best possible outcome. The fool is usually the only Shakespearean character I don’t pity at some point over the course of the play. Even when he’s in prison or being marched off to his execution, part of you always believes he’ll be back. He knows something you don’t, and you’re still itching to find out what exactly that may be.