Fucked at the Drive Through

For eleven years, I was in a regular nickel-dime-quarter-dollar home poker game in Santa Fe- in the early days, sometimes three nights a week- Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. That tapered off to twice a week, then to once a week, with some weeks not having a game at all, basically as people got older, fell out with each other, had a hard time keeping up with the endless bong hits (which I never did) and beer (which I always did until I got sober, after which I kept playing- there was a definite advantage to being the only sober person at the table, especially as the night wore on). Anyway, the game was laden with catchphrases and inside jokes, most of which were weird references to lines from movies, usually altered slightly in some strange punny way. In a draw game, if one drew a useless card, or in a hold 'em variation with a river card that didn't work with a hand, someone might say "well I got fucked at the drive through," a reference to Joe Pesci's character Leo Getz in Lethal Weapon 2, who gets...fucked at the drive through by getting a tuna sandwich instead of what he ordered. 

This is an example of an absolutely awful five card poker hand with pretty much zero potential

They fuck you at the drive through. I have no clear idea why this phrase has been on my mind lately, but it has. I have been muttering it to myself when I go to find a citation and I can't find it, when I have some kind of formatting issue in Word, when I don't get a desired response or have my expected result occur in any way at all- fucked at the drive through. 

And in recovery from codependency, there are a ton of opportunities to become more aware of expectations versus outcomes, and just how precarious a lot of my existence is, relying on other people, who are of course notoriously unreliable, to meet my expectations. Or relying on my ability to manipulate outcomes to fit what my expectations are. Or to expend tremendous energy trying. And failing. 

If only a Buddhist had been in the car with Leo Getz and could have said to him "your suffering arises in your relationship to experience, not through the experience itself. Your disappointment is entirely a product of your aversion to tuna and your attachment to getting the order you expected. Let go of your aversion and release your expectations and you can be perfectly content at this very moment." Of course, that's not likely in Lethal Weapon 2, but it's the basic idea.

My experience is too Proustian for a lot of Buddhism to be natural for me, though. The landscape of experience is littered with landmines. My consciousness is powerfully associative and suggestible, and the slightest, weirdest thing can catalyze a coruscating cascade of uninvited memories, sometimes so powerful as to seem virtually present rather than remembered. This complicates things when the enterprise is to let go and be in the present moment. Sometimes it takes true effort in redirecting the mind. "No no, mind, we are not going to think about all that right now. Thanks anyway." 

But that is like what happens in anyone's mind when you say to them "do not think of a chicken." I guess you'd have to be a true master to not think of a chicken. 

The idiosyncratic absolute particularity of associations combined with not being able to even casually say to the other person, "hey do you remember when..." enforces a sense of being 100% alone. Green shirt, orange coat, Gray Duck, red nails, a hand on a thigh during Act II, scene 1, L'encre Noir cologne, pie, palms, tha ha, Tomasita's for lunch, terrible couple's selfies at The Turf Club, weird Indian buffet in a strip mall, a trip to a dentist, a funny lunch at a fancy little bakery with the little one scattering food everywhere (and earlier in the timeline, a flying spoon), a tiny diner, "I wanna go round, I wanna go round,"a knock on the door of a hotel room in the morning in August 2017, an expensive dinner like a real date, 10th and Temperance, Olympic figure skating, pictures of hands, counting freckles (it seems I could catalog for a couple of years) - and the experience, for me, sometimes, is that suddenly everything becomes associative at once, like an avalanche that melts from a particular event into just the entire world as trigger, and that, dear reader, is overwhelming. As my first sponsor in AA would ask, though: "What's the problem?" To which I am bound to reply- "well, they aren't here. all of that is over." To which he would probably reply, "well- isn't that *always* true though? What's the real problem?" And I'd be left with simply suffering, but no problem- just the reality of being in pain. 

A peculiar aspect of this associative consciousness that catapults me into the past is that the romance included "fictional" scenes that existed in writing, in our mediated deep connection, probably part of the danger of two writers and excellent readers having a long distance romance. So my immolation by uninvited memory includes very detailed memories of scenes we wrote with each other in them, as if they happened. Hot humid Arkansas green on a blanket. A trip to a museum. Attending a wedding and sneaking off. Tea getting cold. Camping. Lying on a beach under stars. One learns through this experience that what we call"fictional" or "imagined" has the capacity to be more than real- or one is reminded. I've usually been immediately willing to suspend disbelief. I guess this is probably not true for everyone. I think a lot of people might say it's fucking stupid. Not sure. I do have that voice in myself- harshly judging sometimes. "Dude, snap out of it. That shit did not even fucking happen." That is not a helpful voice.  

The view from the beach blanket, reading Frank O'Hara's "Having a Coke with You," not a care in the world, an experience that a pragmatist would say "didn't happen"

I think my control strategies arise at least partly out of this nature of my experience of life. I think my tendency to over-commit early and keep someone close is an attempt to avoid remembering them. (And an attempt at making it so that they do not forget about me- a topic for another post). Remembering in their absence, which is one of the definite dimensions of grief, which naturally arouses aversion. Nostalgia and sentiment. The past arises as far more vital, numinous and powerfully real than the present, and the future stretches out like an empty and dreary absence. So it's no wonder that I sometimes have difficulty letting go. I have gradually become more and more aware that not everyone's experience is like this. 

Maybe there are rememberers and forgetters. There I go, categorizing again. Functioners and feelers. Are the functioners just better at forgetting? Do the rememberers all end up as writers, catalogers, poets, sentimental motherfuckers? Because remembering challenges gratitude, for me, a lot of the time. However, one of the saving redirections is to reframe: instead of remembering with a gut punch of loss and a nostalgic sadness, why not remember with thankfulness for the experience? Why not? I mean, it is definitely possible. At times. 

But the concept of inequality of significance of a shared experience is a painful one for me. That is- for me to have forgotten and not care very much about a shared experience, while the other person carries it powerfully, and for them, it has the deepest meaning- or, especially, vice versa. 

And this is yet another nexus of why words fuck me at the drive through- words are the easiest thing in the world to say, and are also very, very easy to believe, if you are me. I was gaslighted in my childhood to believe words and ignore actions. I have carried that tendency into my adult relationships. "I'll love you for the rest of my life-" wow, hot diggity dog! That's awesome. But either I find it easy to abandon that statement, sometimes in the blink of an eye, or someone else might. "No, it was true- but only when I said it." Then introducing the paradox of the flexible vow, the conditionally true unconditional statement. These are the weird ways of words in the spells they cast, especially in relation to the passage of time and the exigencies of being human and therefore unreliable. Temporally true, absolutely, a lie. Behavior, by comparison, is like a blunt piece of pig iron. Words are hypotheses, Behavior is proof. Behavior is proof even without any words at all. The old maxim that either I made up or someone ironically now forgotten provided for me: "Watch the movie with the sound off." Does the movie look like love? Because if it doesn't what the fuck difference does the soundtrack make? 

Anyway, taking my power back means finding my way through who I actually am and how I actually experience the world, not attempting to therapize myself into "better" ways of being. Self-improvement can go fuck itself. Self-acceptance with re-parenting, re-training how to honor my authentic self yet find more desirable ways to work with myself- that's what I'm doing now. 

To be able to say: This is who I am, this is what I want, this is how I feel, and these are my bottom line non-negotiables. I insist on living my life. I am these ways: (lists the ways). If "you" (whoever you are) think those ways are problematic, there's the door. 

Getting fucked at the drive through is a given, but working with the experience in an authentic way is the goal.