The Raging Elitist

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Elliott’s The Wasteland

Dear Elite,

Signs of spring are everywhere. The longer, warmer days; the birds singing; the flowers blooming; like sirens along the rocky shore they call to us, drawing us near with their sweet song, only to wreck our elite nasal passages and drown us in a sea of pollen dust. T.S. Elliott said that April is the cruelest month. Maybe he was allergic to lilacs. You never know. Could be that the impetus for his epic poem The Wasteland was a frustrating case of the sniffles. Or maybe he, like we modern elites, sensed something duplicitous about early spring. Maybe amid springtime’s boisterous show of rejuvenation – Azaleas! Songbirds! Opening Day! – old T.S. looked up from his study and sighed with bitter exasperation, “Didn’t we just do this?” There’s something about all of spring’s pomp and circumstance that screams Here we go! Get ready! This is going to be great! The Christians know in their own subelite way what I’m talking about. Early spring signals the culmination of lent, that period of self-discipline and soul searching that is supposed to prepare them for the commemoration of Christ’s death on the cross and subsequent resurrection. All the alleged Christians are supposedly spending their days reading scripture and fasting and praying away their sins so that when Easter arrives and their lord and savior is risen again, their souls will be cleansed and they’ll go merrily along their way praising Jesus and smelling the roses. Must be nice. We elites have more in common with T.S. in this regard. To us, all this ostentatiousness seems like a trick. We’ve seen it before, we find it presumptuous, and while we like all the pretty scenery, we’d really prefer if spring would take its hurry up let’s go vibes and leave us alone. You see, we got the message last year with the whole spiritual cleansing and rebirth business, and the thing is, we’re still working on it. Hey, springtime, how about you let us finish the last assignment before giving us a new one! You act like you’re giving us a present, but it feels more like a deadline! Maybe that’s how T.S. felt, like being strapped to this rock that seems to go around the sun more and more quickly was the equivalent of watching time run away from him while he was stuck standing still in the wasteland. Maybe he just needed a minute.

If T.S. really was complaining about being strapped for time (and who the fuck knows, really? His poem is basically incomprehensible), then he definitely had something in common with current elites. We love bitching about not having enough time. The fact that we’re so busy is a sign of how important we are. In my elite household the things sucking my time away these days include ongoing swim team registration and the hours of preparation it entails. Swim team registration means that it’s almost pool season, which means teenage lifeguards are about to start, which means the manager is freaking out and contacting me excessively. It means other teams in the league are having a hard time getting their shit together, and the all-knowing team moms are descending from their lofty perches to bug me about how the fuck to do things. It means dealing with 100 8 and unders and their parents for the next three months. Here we go! Get ready! It means that all the ordinary household duties like keeping track of bills and emails become more annoying than normal as the amount of time that you have to devote to elite scholarly pursuits of self-betterment dwindles. There’s this feeling that if the world would just fucking stop for a bit, then you could get done all the shit you need to get done and actually enjoy the time the kids have off from school this summer. Just hold on a minute, Spring! But the world continues on its ceaseless march with no regard for your pathetic self importance, and all that’s left to do is scramble to try to set things up in time so that maybe you can navigate the coming spring and summer without going completely insane. One can get frustrated.

Among those everyday household duties that start to feel a little more intrusive amid spring’s braggadocios urgency is meal prep. It’s one of the things that you can easily overlook or underestimate as you map out your day and what you plan to accomplish. At the end of the day, as you assess your failure and what caused it, you sit and muse I thought I was going to write an elite blog post about not having time for blogging, but I ran out of time, because I didn’t account for making dinner. Woops. Last week I had one such day. With Danyelle having misbudgeted her own elite time and needing to take the kids to their swim lesson after school, the task of prepping dinner fell to me. It was pork tenderloin night, which meant trimming the loin, slicing it into medallions and then pounding them into thin pieces and seasoning them. It’s a process surrounded by vegetable chopping on one end, and sanitization and cooking on the other, littered with periodic handwashing, punctuated by the ultimate presentation of your completed work to the halflings at the dinner table and then followed by a dishwashing postscript. Long story short it’s a fucking time suck. In this particular instance, I enjoyed my time bent over the counter handling raw meat, finding solace in the thought that my elite sacrifice was for the benefit of my wife’s sanity and my children’s nourishment. Listening to Wayne Shorter’s Night Dreamer play on the Sonos, I carefully seasoned every bit of flesh and arranged the morsels in a fashion that would ensure like pieces ended up together on the skillet, the memory of Scotty once announcing his approval of such a meal assuring me that my effort was not in vain. As the rest of my elite clan crashed through the door, the potatoes in the air fryer were turning golden brown and crisp, and the asparagus in the oven were starting to cook. I turned on the big eye on the stove to heat up a pan of oil for the pork. I was in the zone. My timing was perfect. Everything finished together and was cooked perfectly. The table was set and the food plated and served. Now for my reward – a scowling 4-year-old, seating himself at the table and glaring at me as he muttered about how he “didn’t want this dinner,” and he “doesn’t like this dinner.” Cartter cried actual tears because he didn’t like the seasoning on the potatoes while Scotty persisted in staring at me and playing with his food, taking a bite about every three minutes. At least Cartter tried to restrain himself before bursting into tears. Scotty was openly vindictive. In the face of his evil display, I turned to Danyelle and said, “I wanna say something to him. Can you guess what it is?” She said yes. I said, “Really? How many words is it?” She held up two fingers. Yes, Scotty, if you’re reading this as an elite adolescent or adult, know that I love you more than you can possibly understand and that when you were a 4-year-old cutting your eyes at me after I spent all afternoon making you dinner, I wanted to look you in the face and tell you “Fuck you.”

There goes that rage again. Is it indicative of a part of my shadow appearing as Von Franz suggests? It’s tempting to dismiss the notion, because I can easily excuse my anger in this particular instance as justifiable. As we’ve established, spring is an annoying time. It seems to speed everything up just when you most need to slow down. Even as I sit and type this the pool manager has texted me 26 times about the lifeguards’ schedule. The kids’ schools are sending us Easter related homework and requesting our presence at conferences and events. Danyelle is sending me links to hotels for a trip this summer that we could stand to take from a psychological standpoint but is somewhat uncomfortable from a fiscal responsibility standpoint. Add on top of these seasonal issues the fact that we’re getting taxed heavily by the maddeningly nonchalant fence and landscape contractors who are supposed to complete the project in our backyard in the coming weeks after a full year of delays, not to mention the myriad other little impositions on my elite time these days, and getting angry at my four-year-old son’s lack of appreciation seems like a normal response. The problem is that this episode of rage wasn’t really an isolated event. It was more like a sudden belch of fumes from a volcano that’s steadily oozing lava. Lately, dreams of remembering neglected courses just before graduation have given way to dreams about violent death. This past Friday afternoon, driving home from the hardware store for the second time, I indulged my frustration with a would be five-minute process having taken me two hours by yelling to myself in the front seat of the minivan “Suck my dick!” I was installing seat belts in the golf cart I just purchased (because I love you, kids) and had moronically bought the wrong size socket for tightening the nuts on my first trip. No, perhaps in light of the steady rageful undercurrent that has characterized and seems to always characterize the early part of spring, my urge to tell my four-year-old “fuck you” was not a normal response to his shitty behavior but rather the symptom of a neurosis swirling around a shadow complex in my unconscious. Given the leering, manipulative inspiration for this particular eruption, and my T.S.-like sense of being mired in a wasteland as time slips by, I would have to guess that the complex in question has something to do with control.

That’s the thing about time, isn’t it? We don’t seem to have much control over it, and spring is a very in-your-face reminder of that lack of control. The whole world is moving on whether we like it or not. It’s probably why the Christians put their savior’s ultimate sacrifice where they do on the calendar. It’s when they’re at their most helpless, unable to complete the subelite task of cleansing their souls in time for the blossoming new season, desperately in need of some divine hope. Cue Jesus. We elites don’t believe in fairy tales, though, and we don’t need any divine help with our homework, hence the annoyance we feel at nature seeming to insist that we wrap it up already and get on to the next task. It’s like the random universe and the Holy Science that governs it have no regard for just how important what we’re doing as individuals is. I need to get these fucking seat belts on now, Science dammit! Just fit into this socket I got that’s too small! Why can’t things slow down, or better yet, just stop for a little bit so that we can take a breath and enjoy what we have? Why all this constant evolution? This Heraclitean flux? This death and rebirth? How are we ever supposed to get a handle on anything if everything keeps on moving and changing with time? Seriously, my inner and my outer four-year-olds have had enough.

I’ve written before about Scotty’s desire to slow things down, his feeling that he’s “supposed to be a baby,” his perturbance with his older brother’s speedy development. It’s something I can easily identify with. Some of the most melancholy sweet times in my life came just before a big change – my final semester at Clemson, the last weeks before an ill-advised move to Spain, the summer in Boston before Danyelle and I got married. With a massive change looming and the life I was leading unwinding, things really did seem to slow down. There was time for reflection and enjoyment. Every ping pong game with Dan in Thornhill Village, every pick up game with Stratton at Sergeant Jasper, every walk around Jamaica Pond with Danyelle took on new significance during those in between times. I was the one moving on, and the rest of the world was standing still, giving me the chance to soak it all in and memorize it before leaving it behind. Absent these major impending shifts, though, the bulk of life has been more like trying to play a song while simultaneously listening to it for the first time – really hard to get the changes and match tempo. Everything is always in flux. Your coaching buddies get grown up jobs, your friends move, suddenly your babies are going to school and doing homework, and what have you done? Fuck off, springtime! I’m working on it! Faced with such indignity, there are countless coping strategies at your disposal. You could write a whiny epic poem about it; you could pretend to be a good Christian; you could yell, “Suck my dick!” to no one in particular alone in your car and then write a blog about it; but if you’re four, none of those things likely sound too appealing, and you’re much more likely to make a dickish gesture in an infantile attempt to get the rest of the world to stop, which in a way is kind of the same thing as all of the above. If you’re a Christian or a lover of T.S. Elliott or the raging elitist and you just got offended, thanks for proving my point. Yeah, life’s not about you, you insignificant piece of shit. Quit being a dick. Tell ‘em springtime.

Yes, that’s right. I’m giving Scotty a pass, because really his episodic dickishness is no worse than all the other indignant controlling behavior I see among adults in my elite world – the swim moms putting me down, the pool manager bossing me around, the mother in law trying to stir up drama. All these people see springtime getting up in their faces, and they lash out indiscriminately at others’ apparent happiness. There’s not really much to say for their poor behavior except that it’s understandable, as the world’s lack of concern for their subeliteness has got to be frustrating. With Scotty, though, I see something besides pure self-aggrandizement. There’s an impulse to keep those he loves nearby. That’s right. He’s a sweet dick. When he sees his brother’s artwork and not his own stuck on my dad’s fridge, his reflexive insult of “you’re fat” doesn’t come simply from a place of jealousy; it comes from a fear of his brother advancing too far ahead of him and leaving him behind. When he listens silently to a not-so-subtle lecture from Dad about the value of saying thanks after his mother presented him with a cheese and fruit plate, he’s not just implying that he is above saying thank you; he’s enjoying the eyes of his loved ones being fixed on him. When he repeatedly teases his brother who’s working on his “star of the week” poster, he’s not just trying to prompt outbursts of rage; he genuinely wants his brother to stop what he’s doing so they can play together. Ultimately, that’s the thing he most often seems to be guarding from the world’s instability – his brother’s love and attention. This past Sunday, once his nonstop pestering of the star of the week threatened to push Danyelle past her breaking point, I unglued myself from the couch and the basketball game on TV, and told him to come with me for a lap around the neighborhood in the golf cart. Separation goes a long way sometimes. Of course, Cartter sniffed out what was happening and melted down into a screaming puddle of tears at the injustice of it all. How could we not take him with us? As we rode up the street, Scotty buckled in the front seat next to me, his feet sticking straight out in front him over the edge of the seat, a true halfling for a very brief time yet to come, I looked at him and asked him how he was feeling. He said, “not good.” I asked why not. He said, “I feel bad Cartter didn’t get to come on a golf cart ride.” And there it was – for a tiny moment as the two of us hummed up the street in our new electric toy, this little boy sitting next to me stunned into sadness by his brother’s outburst even as we did the most fun and exciting thing imaginable, the world slowed down and let me catch up. His feet keep on getting bigger, and his legs keep on getting longer. I see him stretched out in the bathtub, and suddenly I’m surprised. His brother chose him as the subject for his St. Patrick’s Day writing assignment “What’s More Valuable than a Pot of Gold?” In a few weeks, he won’t be four anymore. We’re making a big deal about it and throwing him one of those kid birthday parties where the whole class gets invited. It’s at the arcade. Scotty, our springtime baby, is turning five. And the world just keeps on turning. April really is the cruelest month.