I need your help in processing some very powerful feelings that I don't necessarily understand. A fellow I know is some kind of big shot musician. Last week I went to see him perform at a local club. He was playing the song "Have You Met Miss Jones" and when he got to the bridge he got completely messed up and came out in the wrong key and everything. Needless to say he was terribly embarrassed — absolutely everybody in the club knew he had screwed up and some people, including myself, actually laughed out loud.

Here's the thing — on the one hand, I was so happy to see this guy step on his dick that I actually woke up smiling the next morning, just thinking about it. On the other hand, this person is supposed to be a friend and all, if you think about it in a certain way. So what's the deal? What's up with me and this guy, do you think? And what the hell is "Gnostic Jazz", anyway?

My good man — seemingly you are on the horns of a most perplexing dilemma. But in actuality — not at all!

Man is born with utter integrity of spirit and singularity of purpose — namely, self actualization through his own good works of his lifetime. Through improper child rearing and mixed messages from our so-called culture, our once unitary purpose is splintered into competing and mutually exclusive neurotic strivings, causing us to become self-defeating and ultimately frustrated in our lifework.

According to Dr. Leo Dreckling's masterpiece Spitewerken Fur Dumkopfs, we can resume our proper life course only when we reconcile the seemingly disparate strands of our fractured drives and ambitions into some properly designed Spitewerke which reconciles the noblest and the basest of our motivations in an expressive act of paradoxical behavior. This Spitewerke, when intelligently conceived and deftly executed, is our best hope of recapturing our original wholeness and singularity of purpose, and thus enabling us to fulfill our potential for individuation and sane productive living.

The conceptualization of one's proper Spitewerke can be a daunting business, as the works themselves must necessarily embody seemingly divergent desires with apparently incompatible goals. Once the principle is understood, however, is is amazing to see how elegantly our daunting neurotic dichotomies can be reconciled through proper behavioural modalities.

In this case, your path is clear: you must do what you can to make your comrade feel better about his awkward public moment without letting him forget it. Maybe you take him and his wife out to dinner in a nice restaurant sometime soon. Then, when the perfect moment comes, you tell the little woman the whole sorry story — then she is in on the fun, too, yah? And you pick up the check, of course, of course! Or maybe, every now and then you spend a pleasant afternoon with your friend. You whistle a few bars of "Have You Met Miss Jones". When you get to the troublesome bridge, you break outright into song — All at once I lost my breath/ All at once was scared to death/ All at once I owned the earth and sky... He hears this exalted life-affirming sentiment expressed so eloquently, so tunefully, and he absolutely cannot believe that he made such a cock-up of this beautiful, nay, unforgettable passage. He is crestfallen, yes; but then maybe he does not make the same mistake next time. You feel like a living god.

These are just examples — use your imagination! Soon you will be feeling better and more at peace with yourself all the time.