Mastering Yourself

Four bars on being raised by parents, TV, puberty, and masters

The Voyage of Life: Manhood, Thomas Cole

Part One

Does anybody here remember Martin Tupper?

He was a character on the old HBO series Dream On? Here’s the series’ current Wikipedia description:

Dream On is an American sitcom television series created by Marta Kauffman and David Crane. It follows the family life, romantic life, and career of Martin Tupper, a divorced New York City book editor played by Brian Benben. The show distinctively interjected clips from older black-and-white television series to punctuate Tupper's feelings or thoughts. It ran for six seasons on HBO between July 8, 1990, and March 27, 1996.

And just to really emphasize the influence of TV on Martin Tupper and its importance in the series:

The opening indicates Martin's mother parked him in front of the TV and he then grew up engrossed in it. It briefly shows a babysitter making out with a boyfriend behind young Martin, hence the association of sex with his memories. The show was notable for its frequent use of clips from old movies and TV shows to express Martin's inner life and feelings, which lent it much of its quirky appeal, reminding viewers about the impact of TV on their consciousness.

TV Tropes puts it this way:

The series was essentially a sex farce, detailing the life of […] a neurotic New Yorker trying to get laid in the wake of his divorce, his expectations of life addled by a childhood spent watching old TV.

When the series first aired in 1990, I was 10 years old. And like the young Martin Tupper, TV was basically a third parent to me, one that would soon come to punctuate my own thoughts and feelings.

My only real interest in life then (other than TV) was music. MTV used to play a lot of it. So I used to watch a lot of MTV. This means that when I first saw Dream On, I was likely also watching Jon Bon Jovi lip-synching the words to “Blaze of Glory” from atop a sandstone mesa in Utah. It also means that I was probably watching (and re-watching VHS recordings of) things like Axl Rose singing “Free Fallin’” with Tom Petty, or Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora playing acoustic guitars and singing “Wanted Dead or Alive,” or Julie Brown interviewing JBJ from his rented home in California to talk about deep things such as that time he lip-synched from atop a sandstone mesa in Utah.

Importantly, it also means that, I was probably already heavily animated by the animalistic fires of pubescence, and therefore likely having sexual fantasies about Julie Brown and many of the women in this list and elsewhere. And this was perhaps my main reason for watching Dream On. As is also noted on its Wikipedia page, the series was “significant for being one of the first American sitcoms to use uncensored profanity and nudity.”

Ah, 1990s HBO nudity. To a boy undergoing the metamorphosis of puberty, it was nothing less than the Holy Grail.

Part Two

One of my favorite films (and books) is Fight Club. Its themes resonated with me when I was young, and they are still highly relevant today. Two of the most prominent and relevant ones are (1) the unclear role of men and masculinity in modern society, and (2) the damages that overemphases on materialism and consumerism incur on individuals and cultures.

In one scene in the movie, Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, sits in a bathtub cleaning his wounds and talking with Edward Norton’s character, who is unnamed but referred to elsewhere as the Narrator. The two discuss their relationships with their largely absent fathers, as well as their general sense of aimlessness as young men living in a world that they don’t feel designed for.

Tyler: My dad never went to college, so it was real important that I go.

Narrator: That sounds familiar

Tyler: So I graduate, I call him up long distance, I say, “Dad, now what?” He says, “Get a job.”

Narrator: Same here.

Tyler: Now I'm 25, I make my yearly call again, I say, “Dad, now what?” He says, “I don't know. Get married.”

Narrator: I can't get married. I'm a 30-year-old boy.

Tyler: We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.

Entire essays could be written (and probably have been) about this exchange. The closing two sentences alone could inspire volumes, I reckon. But I’m going to avoid going on a tangent about them for now, in the interest of staying focused on the tangents that I’m already on.

I don’t now recall whether or not the Martin Tupper character in Dream On was raised primarily by a single mother. But that’s vaguely how I remember it. Even if his parents were still together, the series’ opening sequence, as Wikipedia touched on, clearly aims to tell us something like: Here we have a boy who was raised by (1) a busy or uninterested (or just 1950s-era) mom, (2) a totally or partially absent (or just 1950s-era) dad, and (3) a TV.

In a later scene in Fight Club, Tyler Durden addresses a crowd of men gathered in a barroom basement to fight:

I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived. I see all this potential. And I see it squandered. Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables. Slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war's a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

By the time I was 15 (so, four years before Fight Club’s film release), I’d joined my first band. I still listened to Bon Jovi when no one was looking, but for the most part, my musical tastes had evolved to match the rage and turmoil that I was feeling inside. I was confused and directionless and mad at the world. And I wanted the world to know it.

My bandmates and I kept at it for nearly a decade, getting heavier and more extreme throughout. I owe a lot—including probably my life—to the music we made (and listened to) during those years. But in 2004, things started to dissolve (in my mind, anyway; the band itself was actually doing okay). I was 24 and miserable. I’d started to dread band practices. The individuals I played music with were among my closest friends, and in some strange ways they still are. I’d just lost the drive I knew I’d need to keep going. Not to mention the desire to keep going in the first place.

I imagined getting what we’d wanted. It wasn’t that much. Our dream was just to earn enough from writing and recording music and playing shows to be able to keep doing all three without needing day jobs. But then it hit me: I’ve already stopped enjoying doing those things. Why would doing more of them change anything? Why would earning more money doing them make things better?

I’d also just come out of a long-term relationship that didn’t end well. So there was a palpable sense of collapse in my life (though also a related one of relief). Somewhere slowly in the midst of it all, I arrived at the realization that I could just walk away. I could just find something else to do. So that’s what I did.

Shortly before I quit the band, I started studying web design and working for a soulless financial corporation in Chicago. It was another point of transition for me, one that placed me on the cusp of two totally different worlds. The job left me feeling pretty miserable, too, though. So at the time, it felt less like moving through a passageway into something better and more like being trapped in a liminal space with all the lights blown out.

During this same time, I distanced myself from most of my friends, and in a way, also my family. It felt good. I needed the solitude. I found solace in being alone and doing things like watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Fight Club on a loop.

As I saw it, I was basically Jim Carrey’s character, Joel Barish, in Eternal Sunshine. Parts of my past were being erased, and I was lost in a mess of inner conflict about that, even though I was the one who’d set the erasure in motion.

But I was also the Narrator in Fight Club, feeling the spiritual decay caused by corporate America, and wanting to become Tyler Durden. I think I vaguely understood that I was looking for my own version of a fight club. Some kind of structured activity that I could engage in to free myself from my empty new world, or at least myself. Some new outlet to replace the band and guide me forward.

It took a while, at least a few years, but I eventually found one. I found a few of them, actually. But the main one, the one that rose above the others and shone its bright light on a doorway leading out of the dark, was writing. When I think about it now, it makes perfect sense that the first writer to draw me in and make me think, I could do that, was former Black Flag vocalist and all-around sensitive madman Henry Rollins.

The first book I read of his, Get in the Van, resonated with me like no book before it had. After that, I read all of his books of journal entries, and then I reread them all. Obsessively. For years. They helped me to understand my desire to be alone, and all the good and bad that comes with it. They showed me the damage that trauma can do to a person and, crucially, how that same person can use discipline to hold themself together and thrive.

Part Three

On a 2018 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I heard Fight Club’s author,

Chuck Palahniuk

, explain how the book was inspired in part by the need he saw for a social model for men, some depiction of them coming together to deal with their shit. He writes about this in the afterword to Fight Club as well:

The bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt. These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be together. To sit together and tell their stories. To share their lives. But there was no novel that presented a new social model for men to share their lives.

Around that same time, Palahniuk writes:

I’d seen a Bill Moyer television program about how street gangs were really young men raised without fathers, just trying to help one another become men. They issued orders and challenges. Imposed rules and discipline. Rewarded action. All the things a coach or drill sergeant would do.

While making a similar point on the Rogan podcast, Palahniuk brings up Joseph Campbell’s ideas on how young people—men in particular—need “secondary fathers” beyond their biological fathers to finish raising them.

You're born, if you're lucky, with a biological father that you do not choose. And that is the nurturing, loving father that you eventually kind of have to reject. But in doing so, you have to choose a new father. And that father-by-choice typically is a minister, or a teacher, or a drill sergeant, or a coach—one of those fathers. And you kind of put yourself in apprenticeship to the secondary father. And you have to sort of consign your life to the secondary father, and agree to learn what they’re going to teach you. Just like in Karate Kid. And that is getting harder and harder and harder to find. So Fight Club was also depicting a new form of the secondary father, with all these kids that were showing up on the doorstep of this ramshackle old house.

The ramshackle old house being home (ostensibly) to one Tyler Durden—all of those kids’ new father. On the apprenticeship point, Palahniuk adds:

Whether you’re apprenticing yourself to a fighting coach, or to a metallurgist, or to a welder, or to a bricklayer, or to a mason—you are apprenticing yourself to somebody that you’re going to do all of this gruntwork for, but in exchange, you’re going to learn a master skill at something. And so, it’s a way of mastering yourself as you master this other thing.

And therein lies the point. The Whole Point. Working to master yourself, or to at least better yourself. It may just be the only thing worth doing. And as we can all see in Fight Club, doing it sometimes requires an element of self-destruction.

Part Four

Looking back now, I can’t identify any Mr. Miyagis in my life, by which I mean the physical reality of my life. In other words, when I conjure all the people whom I can (or could at one time) reach out and touch, my mentors and masters simply don’t appear. But when I widen the field to include individuals whose work I’ve actively studied—and in a sense, trained on—a few do.

Does that even count? I don’t know. Maybe the reason I’ve needed a few is because I didn’t have one and zero isn’t enough. But again, I’m not sure where the master-and-apprentice line is drawn. What’s the rule? Fight Club can’t provide all of them, I’m afraid. Some things we just have to figure out for ourselves.

In any case, my mentors in the art of creation exist. They are real and can be found all over the language and performing arts. Writers, comedians, musicians—I can think of at least a few in each field that have, unbeknownst to them, done their part to finish raising me. And for that they have my undying gratitude, whether they know it or not.

Same goes for my “primary” parents, by the way—my biological mother and father. I know that they’ll read this, so: Mom, Dad, if I may, I’d like to recite a short bit of classic poetry to you. It comes from one of JBJ’s silly cowboy songs that you might remember me listening to as a kid in the 90s, and that I still sometimes listen to now when no one’s looking. It’s called “Blaze of Glory.” I’ll let JBJ start and then I’ll finish the thought: “I don't know where I'm going / Only God knows where I've been,” but you started it. So thanks. And sorry for fucking it up to the extent that I did during all those puberty years and beyond. How did we survive? How does anyone ever do it? It’s a miracle every time.

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