DAVID RAKOFF: It’s very easy to spin out of control and be the person on the subway who soils themselves, screams, “We’re all gonna die, we’re all gonna die” and then passes out. And then you wake up ten minutes later on the floor of the subway with soiled trousers and the subway is, of course, moving. It wasn’t going to burst into flames when it stopped in the tunnel the way you thought it was. But you never want to be that guy, and the way not to be that guy is at best - - at its most basic level - - it’s about regulating your breathing.
Try to breathe in on a count of three and not on a count of .003 which will just make you hyperventilate and pass out. There’s some comfort to be taken from this, or perhaps not. The person who drowns from anxiety and the person who claims agency from their anxiety and the person who feels no anxiety at all; they’re the same person. We’re not these warring constituencies of people who have no problems and people who are simply awash in problems; that’s just life. Life is this incredibly rich and dense and completely mutating perpetually moving mixture of things. I guess that’s sort of comforting to know. No?
JESSE THORN: It is. It’s sort of comforting.
DAVID RAKOFF: Yeah, it’s only sort of comforting.
- from a new Sound of Young America interview with author and essayist David Rakoff
I listened to this during part of my run today. A worthwhile 25-ish minutes. You might know Rakoff from “Christmas Freud” and his many other pieces on This American Life or from 1997’s enduringly clever “El Niño Has a Headache,” which I kept tacked to my cubicle at my first newspaper job. I didn’t even know it was a Gay Talese takeoff; I just knew it made me laugh:
El Niño finally arrives, trailing behind him three or four sycophants and a 35-foot wall of seawater that washes away the couple at the next table. Our server is not pleased. “Duke her,” El Niño says to one of the hangers-on, who peels off a crisp hundred-dollar bill and hands it to the waitress, busy pulling minnows from her hair.
This interview is something different. Jesse Thorn, whose eccentric charms as an interviewer I tried to explain here almost a year ago, introduced Rakoff’s latest book like this:
… a collection of essays that are meditations on the darker side of the human psyche. It comes with the warning, “No inspirational life lessons will be found in these pages.” But frankly it sort of betrays that. There are none of the traditional inspirational life lessons, but it is in part at least an argument that one can be inspired and draw life lessons from a little bit of pessimism and melancholy.”
Oh just go listen.
