Welcome to Reality

The trouble with normal is it only gets worse

Bruce Cockburn

Back in the day, before the internet, before electricity, before jet airplanes and flush toilets, I had hair. One Sunday morning in New York City after who knows what the night before, I had showered and went off to a diner in the lower west end. I don’t recall what greasy concoction I had ordered to try the right the ills of the night before but certainly it must have included sausages or bacon. My hair was still slicked back from the shower. I don’t need a hair dryer. I have reality to fix my hair.
From out of nowhere in this empty diner on an incongruously quiet New York City morning, a young woman cautiously approached my table, smiling and then blurted out, “I just wanted to tell you, I really like your music.”

I was so dumbfounded, the male instinct of collecting phone numbers and names evaded me. I think I said something utterly idiotic like, “You have me mistaken” when I should have said, “Are you busy?”

She apologized and turned and left far more quickly than she arrived. I looked at my breakfast partner and asked, “Who do you think she thought I was?”

“Sting”.

I could not believe it. Me?

That was not the norm. The norm was someone else. For years I got a standard, to-be-expected question every time after a new business presentation, a client presentation or an animated office encounter.

“Has anyone ever said you remind them a lot of Robin Williams?”

There wasn’t anything I did to be anyone other than myself in those meeting, other than just typically animating absurdity; spinning life’s truths on their head and being more self-deprecating than what many shrinks would call healthy. It was not my, nor Robin Williams fault that we were born without lips and larger than normal noses.

I saw him once in FAO Swartz in New York City and a life regret is that I did not go up to him and ask, “Has anyone ever told you, you look a lot like Bill Lower?”

I should have. Because he was later mistaken for me. A woman friend who I was and remain incredibly close to, lives in LA, as I had for a couple of years. But I had moved back to New York. One evening close to Christmas she was at a sushi restaurant on Melrose and her dinner companion said, “Look who’s sitting over there.”

Her first thought was, “How does he know Bill Lower?” but before she asked the question, another female instinct kicked in: she was going to give me shit for not telling her I was in LA.

Nothing moves faster in the known universe than a woman’s desire to give a guy shit and its delivery.

She marched across the restaurant and began to lambast poor, unsuspecting Robin Williams.

Had I asked him that question in FAO Swartz, perhaps he might have been able to defend himself by saying, “You are angry. You must be looking for Bill Lower.”

I think Williams and I shared more than simple demeanour, non-lips and over-sized noses.

I loath the term, “battling with demons”. I far prefer, “trying to tame your friends’.

Depression is like cold sores: it comes back. It’s a sinus infection of the soul and like a sinus infection, it can be treated with medication, although not as quickly.  And, of course, untreated, it can have fatal consequences.

Friends, untamed.

Reality is unpleasant. It is also the nucleus of humour: taking a truth and spinning it on its head, making us see reality as we had not seen it before. However, living life through that prism is no picnic. Absurdities are the norm. It’s how you see everything. And it’s no joke.

Welcome to reality.