Notes on Disappointment
a selection of footnotes from my new book "Disappointment: A Brief History of Disappointment."
If I were ever disappointed, like, for example, by seeing an uninteresting alien on my lawn, I would say “Alien this is not your home!” And then the alien would respect me. Because I was assertive.
All disappointments are like this alien one. Just square them up. Take a breath.
Sometimes disappointment means nothing. It just doesn’t matter. Smile in a sunny cafe. Spin frantically, with a parasol, in the night streets of Hong Kong.
Still, disappointment is tragic. For example in the movie Top Gun: Jets of Destiny one of the pilots points at another airplane (mig) and is like “That airplane is going to shoot us with a gun” and the co-pilot is like “Nuh uh” and then the pilot pulls the ripcord and they launch upward but their flight suits get stuck in the seat so they sort of launch sideways instead and then, like two dogs hitting the end of a leash, they abruptly fling downward, ripping their flight suits off down to the boots, their now totally nude bodies dangling upside down in the sky. And then they get shot in the butts and the bullets go right up their holes. The audience laughs. The music gets louder. Who wrote this movie? A child? A gadfly?
My point is this: disappointment requires carbon. Lifeless galaxies exist in a kind of bright blue fog, permanently unbothered. Indeed, Science tells us, on page 35 of the Annals of Science, as well as on the ceiling of all known observatories, that asteroids know peace.
Once, in the hope-stung days of my youth, I walked into a soda fountain and ordered an ice cream flavor that did not yet exist.
Sometimes there’s no way out. You must choose disappointment for the good of another. It says so in The Bible. Think not. Care not. Cleave unto your wife and not unto your neighbor’s wife, the icy blue-eyed woman named Anna Greco, from Sicily, who wears hoop earrings, and smells like red birthday cake, and sits crossed-legged on her lawn at night, looking up at the sky, then over at your window, then back at the sky, black ponytail bobbing beneath Orion.
Lying for no reason. Interesting. Defensible? Can it be tried? Well somebody is trying it. Yes, at this very moment, in some elegant Corvette moving mindlessly through Miami, somebody you once slept with is telling the biggest whopper ever.
I have a son, and my son is Pinnochio.
You are doing fine. You are not in Miami. You are not lying about your wooden son being a puppet of the ages. Show me those big blue eyes, bandolero. You have a lot to recommend you.
There is no good reason to watch a show called Treasure Copter with your girlfriend. How does she find these shows? You will watch it because you love her. The show is about a bitchy little helicopter that distributes stolen treasure to couples in need. So yes we can agree that the theme is good. And yet various violations of the law are depicted: Eagle capture. Telex fraud. Mistaken identities. Hunger. Make-up. Horses with no saddles. A random leash in a pool. Costumes. Irony. Floofy lingerie. Lambs. Honey in a towel. Snapped underwear bands, leaving deep red lines in the wrong boyfriend’s hips. We are sick, we are tired, we are the viewers, and we are dying.
Viewing. To view things. Sitting there idly, viewing the world’s endless dreck. To be a viewer is the deepest disappointment of all. Have you ever viewed someone in your phone before? Despair. Have you viewed someone compromised, cribbing for light, in the world before? The grief is like a syrup, oozing everywhere, making pools.
What is this grief? It is the shock of perpetual taking, of being animated by ocular theft.
I discovered a new band! They are called The Appalachian Diminishment. They play folk anthems for a forgotten world. Why forgotten? Because it was evil. And oh! The disappointment of that corridor! Measure it with a thimble. So sad. To be swept directly into hell, banjos squealing in the firelights. Their dogs are mean. Their ideas are slumgullion. Disappointment is sometimes good. You can see that right.
New activity idea: caroling with friends, at Christmastime. Is this something?
Yes of course people can change their majors in college. Normal. I changed mine one summer, near Cocoa Beach, after falling in with a bad crowd. The crowd wore Addidas jackets and threw elephant gummies at the court-martialed sailors on shore. “I gotta get the CRUD out of my major,” I thought, watching them injure a sad seaman’s eye. “I need to give direct thought to my career,” I thought, watching them steal mint-colored juggling balls from a down-and-out midshipman. “A major in communications? My god,” I thought, watching everyone get arrested. “A crock is what it is. My major is a litany of theories dreamed up by an idiot. My major is ignoble.” I paused in the sun, adjusted my sunglasses, sipped a can of Esau’s probiotic soda, and looked out at the sea. This, I whispered, is the sound of my life beginning.
The flavor was Blueberry Debt. The unknown ice cream flavor, from the hope-stung days of my youth. A contortion of berry with a sluice of crumble. Did you know that cemetery bodies only last about three months underground? The worms do them in.
Disappointment is omnidirectional. I feel so sad to disappoint others, who themselves have disappointed me. I feel so sad to judge people for their wobbly auras, their long sad clouds of enabling affection, who have, it must be noted, originally judged me. There is no answer here. We are beautiful in the dark, screaming urchins in the light. Write me a tender letter Betty and tell me something true for once.
black ponytail bobbing beneath orion! major!!
I waited and waited and this finally came. Thank you. I needed it to remember.