There's an old joke -
um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of
'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible."
The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."
Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness,
and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much
too quickly. The... the other important joke, for me, is one that's
usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears
originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,"
and it goes like this - I'm paraphrasing - um, "I would never
want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a
member." That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my
relationships with women.
I hope to become the
balding virile type, you know, as opposed to, say, the distinguished
gray, unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys
with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria
with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.
I feel that life is
divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two
categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you
know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through
life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you
should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky,
to be miserable.
... this guy goes to a
psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks
he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't
you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the
eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about
relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and
absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh,
most of us... need the eggs.
I remember the staff at
our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh, that those who
can't do teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym. And, uh, those
who couldn't do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.
You know, I don't think
I could take a mellow evening because I - I don't respond well to
mellow. You know what I mean? I have a tendency to - if I get too
mellow, I - I ripen and then rot, you know.
I think, I think
there's too much burden placed on the orgasm, you know, to make up
for empty areas in life.
I was thrown out of
N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you
know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I
was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman,
locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg
tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was
suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was
in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they
make you pay for the sessions you miss.
Don’t knock
masturbation, it’s sex with someone I love.
