groupthink

Wednesday night is group therapy night for me. I'm not sure yet whether it's helping. I feel less anxious than when I started a few months ago, so that's a good sign...unless it's just coincidence. The group features an All Male Cast. It's actually billed as a 'men's group', and it's a strange mix of personalities. The other guys are quite a bit older than me, so there's a definite degree to which I feel I have little in common with them. Then again, I don't feel like I have much in common with anybody, regardless of how old or young they are. This is one of the main reasons I decided to do group therapy, to find some avenue through which I might be able to balance out my tendency towards isolation. But the net effect so far has been to create yet another circular process for me. My life is full of circularity, so much so that I might even be tempted to say that it's all one big circle for me, and not in a Joni Mitchell kind of way, but rather in the sense of a dog chasing its tail... You're supposed talk about all this shit in the group, which I do, but then the ensuing conversation leaves me feeling like it's not so bad for me to be on my own after all. Perhaps this is positive. The group makes me feel like less of a weirdo, though it strikes me as being an inadvertent benefit, one I derive in spite of the group. I tell the group I'm comfortable being alone --> They tell me that too much aloneness is unhealthy --> But I have almost nothing in common with these people trying to talk me out of the lone wolf existence I lead, and so what they say ends up making the lone wolf existence all the more attractive to me. Welcome to my world.

Normally I relate well to older people, or I should say that I prefer older people to younger people. Always have. But whether they're older or younger, there are certain types of freaky personalities I just can't abide. One guy in the group is extremely annoying in a way that only intensely jewy people can be. I feel I'm allowed to say this since I'm a M.O.T.T. myself. I have lots of experience with his type of personality in my own family. But this guy's jewiness by itself is not what gets to me. It's the jewiness combined with the fact that he's a hoarder. He can't throw anything away. The problem has completely wrecked his life. His wife and kids left him long ago because of it, and yet he doesn't seem able to grasp that he has a problem that could reasonably be expected to drive them away. He insists his wife is at fault, and he does it in a pushy, jewy way that makes my whole body tighten up with anger. He reminds me of my grandfather's second wife, who I absolutely couldn't stand. I wanted to dance the Lindy hop on her grave when she died. I threw in an extra shovel full of dirt at her funeral, just to make sure she'd stay the fuck underground.

The hoarder guy annoys me in the same way she did. The County's child protective services agency would not allow his kids to even visit him at the house after his wife left him because the place was such a goddamn pigsty. The biggest issue for him is an accumulation of seltzer bottles. He cannot bring himself to throw the empties away or even recycle them, so the house is apparently a mountain of glass. All he ever talks about are those fucking seltzer bottles. It just doesn't interest me in the slightest. You're supposed to say what you're feeling when you participate in a therapy group, but I can't do it with Mr. Seltzer Bottle without violating the rules of conduct and mutual respect. Picture it, if you will: Lose the bottles, you fucking moron! What the fuck's the matter with you? Are the bottles really that important to you? Is being right, even when you're obviously wrong, so fundamentally critical to your ridiculous self-concept that you can't just be a grown up for once in your pathetic life and get rid of the bottles? And when are we gonna arrive at the point where we don't have to hear about these stupid fucking bottles anymore? It bores me. YOU bore me, and you sicken me. Grow up. ...I actually usually have sympathy for hoarders and pack rats. My parents are pack rats, and I believe it's symptomatic of a larger constipated state of mind. I often feel like they hold back something they want to let go because they don't know how to express it. When I call my dad, just to say hello and see how he's doing, he always tells me he's cleaning up the house and throwing things away. But each time I go back to New York to visit them, their apartment seems ever more cluttered with junk and paper and crystallized memories. It makes me sad in a strange way. Maybe the sadness I feel about hoarding turns to anger when it's refracted through Mr. Seltzer Bottles' personality?

There’s another guy in the group who’s an out-of-work actor, which is to say he’s a limo driver. I refer to him privately as Nat West. You'll come across a lot of Nat Wests out here in Los Angeles, of course. It’s pathetic and sad when they’re 20-somethings, but when they’re 50-somethings it’s just irritating. Again, I find myself holding back... It ain’t gonna happen, dude. Repeat after me: It. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen. It was never gonna happen. Look at how much of your life you've wasted chasing nothingness. I don’t care that George Clooney was nice to you when you drove him from LAX to the Paramount lot. It doesn’t mean shit. It doesn’t mean that he thinks you’d be a good fit for his next feature. How could you possibly be so damn delusional? When you start sentences with the words, “my agent,” you need to know that people tune out the rest of what you have to say. Your so-called “agent” is a 24-year-old kid who plays X-Box and does bong rips in the middle of the workday. You’re a limo driver. Maybe it's not what you pictured for yourself, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s a skill other people can actually use. I know you think you did a great job in your walk-on on Murder She Wrote back in the fucking 80s, but nobody noticed it, nobody remembers it, nobody cares. I certainly don’t care, and no, I don’t want to see the head shot you have stored on your iPhone. I really don’t...

A third guy in the group owns a telemarketing business. But this isn’t the worst thing about him, although it is admittedly pretty bad. The worst thing about him is that he’s bald and wears his neck hair in a ponytail. Cut that fucking thing off before I yank on it like the bell for Lurch on the Addam’s Family... You rang? Why yes, I did ring. I wanted to be sure to tell you in no uncertain terms that you need to lose that stupid necktail, you dumb fuckwad. Steve Cropper can get away with a necktail because (a) he’s not nearly as bald as you are, Mr. Cue Ball, and (b) he’s Steve Fucking Cropper. You’re you, and you’re not allowed to wear a goddamn necktail. You’re just not. Why can't you understand that when people meet you, learn that you’re a telemarketer, and see your necktail, the effect is the same as if you were wearing a bumper sticker that said ‘I’m a scumbag and, oh by the way, did I mention that I’m a scumbag’? And if none of this is enough to convince you to take a scissors to that thing, I would simply ask you this: Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, on the wrong side of 60, to be walking around with a fucking necktail? I mean, really…

Well, I guess one thing is crystal clear: Being in this group has put me in touch with what an angry, nasty, mean, unfeeling motherfucker I can be, even though I can’t really outwardly express what I’m thinking. I should say that there’s one guy in the group, an animator, whom I like and respect a great deal. He’s very smart and says things, often in passing, that suggest to me that we’re similarly wired. I get the sense he’s got a lot of anger as well, but he’s also got a soft side, which he reserves for the small handful of people he likes. A lot of this is projection on my part, but sometimes he flashes me a passing look that lets me know – or I think it lets me know – that we’re thinking the same thing. I find those passing glances very gratifying. It’s too bad the rules of the group prevent us from becoming friends. I was dismayed a few weeks back when he announced that he might be leaving the group. That would be bad because then I’d be stuck with Seltzer Bottles, Nat West, and a god knows what else in terms of who might join the group to fill the vacancy. I made a joke – one with a huge kernel of truth – about how his leaving would tap into my abandonment issues, which he thought was funny, but everybody else just stared at me blankly. He hasn’t left yet, so maybe he’s reconsidering things. Maybe the joke I cracked worked its passive-aggressive magic. Abra cadabra! Or maybe I’ll just arrive at the group one week and find that he’s quit for good. I almost wish the group was just the two of us. On the other hand, perhaps it’s good for me to deal with people I don’t like or respect. Maybe it’s revealing something for me that will help me as I try to branch out a little. Maybe the anger and exasperation I feel so often in the group is part of a larger set of personal issues and complexes that tend to derail my attempts to branch out. Or maybe it all just means that the world is full of people who are even more fucked up than I am, and that branching out is overrated, one of those things I feel I should do because other people tell me I should do it, and not because I really want to... That's a lot of maybes. But there’s one thing for certain: No amount of therapy, whether in a one-on-one format or in a group, will ever make me more open-minded or forgiving about bald guys with necktails.