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. |