What's Wrong With Me?

I recently got an email from my friend, Susan, which contained one of those personality survey things that gets passed around the Net. Most of the questions were typical trite stuff (“What’s your favorite color?”, “Do you make the bed?”, “What’s the last book you read?” etc…) But one of the questions intrigued me. It was: “What’s your worst personality flaw?” I was thinking about this and sorting through my nearly infinite list of remarkable personality flaws when it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how to answer. I could probably give an answer that feels honest to me but there’s a really good chance that I would be wrong. I’ve noticed that most people can’t correctly identify their own worst personality flaws.

There are countless people who piss me off to no end but it’s abundantly clear that they have no idea their actions are offensive and/or irritating. This self ignorance seems to be a trait common to nearly everyone on the planet. And, if that’s the case, then, most likely, I am also unaware of my own worst flaws. So I started wondering exactly what I do, without realizing it, to make the world a far worse place?

It’s not that I want to know my greatest flaw so I can correct it; I want to know so I can more thoroughly generate tension and enjoy the unease of others. I guess that means that my biggest flaw is that I’m an unapologetic misanthrope.

Or maybe I’m just a real asshole.

Most likely though, I’m fine and it’s the rest of the world that has a problem.

This last possibility seems logical. Misanthropy implies that I have an innate dislike for all mankind but I don’t. I like some people. There are even a few that I actually love. In fact, in addition to my wife, I can think of about ten to twenty other people that I’m proud to call my friends and don’t mind spending time with every now and then. But outside that group… Fuck ‘em.

Christie and my old friend, Jenny, have both said that no one who likes pets as much as I do can be as big of a badass as I want people to think I am. It’s true that I am a lover of nearly all non-delicious creatures; however, that doesn’t mean I have to like people. Dogs and cats and creepy crawly things don’t piss me off the way people do. A dog has never, through its own negligence and laziness, made my work day harder and more stressful. A cat has never cut me off in traffic. A spider has never broken my heart. And a deer has never talked about me behind my back (at least not that I know of). An orangutan once grabbed a fistful of my hair and wouldn’t let go (true story!) but I think he assumed, based on looks, that we were closely related.

In general, the casts of Madagascar and Babe have never given me any trouble and I don’t expect them to do so in the future. Though I do have a recurring nightmare where a bunch of cows and pigs and sheep drag me out of my favorite restaurant and eat me. But, hey, that’s only fair. I’m probably delicious when served medium rare with a mushroom glaze and caramelized onions over a rice pilaf.

People, on the other hand, scare the blue bejesus out of me with their stupidity while, day in and day out, pissing me right the fuck off. It’s really quite surprising that I haven’t already snapped and killed someone.

At least if I went to jail, I’d have time to write (in between being beaten and raped).

But I still probably wouldn’t get anything published.

You see, another of my flaws is that, when it comes to my writing, I’m too much of a perfectionist. For example, I don’t like to post anything to this blog if I can’t tie it all up at the end with some nice, neat, witty and philosophical conclusion. I want these blogs to be more than just updates about my life (mostly because, although I’m ridiculously happy, nothing much of interest is going on in my life). I want these entries to be autobiographically inspired essays but, if I don’t have time to find a good subject, explore it, deconstruct it and fashion it into a good story, I don’t usually bother.

Occasionally, I will break from the traditional essay format to throw in some little bits of personal information that don’t directly contribute to the overall flow of the piece. Like how I originally planned to use my MySpace account for more of a general Life of Lee blog and this one for deeper musings. But that hasn’t really worked out. As Christie and Jenifer have frequently pointed out, I’m not writing much on either. In fact, I’m so out of ideas that, for a Halloween post on MySpace, I just posted an old short story.

See how that broke the flow of the piece? I started with a thing about my own flaws and now I’m off on a tangent about why I don’t write more on my blog. Which leads to a story about a writer I like.

A couple of weeks ago, Christie and I (along with Ben & Wanda) went to a David Sedaris reading in Atlanta. A few thousand people paid to watch this guy read for an hour then talk about random stuff and answer questions for about half an hour. And it was fucking great! He was funny, intelligent and unlike anything I’ve seen before.

His stories (for those of you who haven’t seen him, heard him or read any of his books) are nearly all autobiographical and all but a few have a real resolution--a point that makes the journey of the story totally worthwhile. This is amazing because it often seems to me that life has no point.

But there is a point. At least there is in the lives and stories of some people. The trick, I think, is to figure out the point of your own life and your own story then do something--anything--with it. And what Sedaris does with it is amazing.

He has a nearly unparallel talent for starting at Point A and venturing off on hilarious tangents that, until the last page or so, seem completely unrelated to the first part of the story. In the end, however, he always brings the story full circle so that every paragraph fits together like a literary jigsaw puzzle. The tangents are amazing (and, on their own, worth the read or the price of admission) but the endings are always tight and the payoff is never lame.

This is the standard to which I aspire. It’s also the standard that I seem to have no chance whatsoever of matching.

Sometimes, when we go to plays or when I finish reading a book, I think: “I could do that! I should do that!” Then I see people like David Sedaris and plays like Thief River and I think, “I can’t do that! I shouldn’t even try!”

I keep telling myself that I’m going to start writing every night and finish one of the two novels and/or the play that I’m currently have on the back burner But I never do anything with any of them. I write and I write but very little ever gets finished. I let depression rob me of drive. Maybe that’s my worst flaw.

No. My worst flaw is that I’m allowing myself to end this post with no resolution whatsoever. Maybe I should just go write.