Hyperbole and a Half Read online

  She didn’t understand, but she knew she was supposed to do something, so she just started frantically doing things because maybe—just maybe—one of those things would be the right thing and the magical wizard cup would let her know where the treat went.

  After five minutes of watching my dog aimlessly tear around the house, I finally accepted that she was not going to pass any part of the test and yes, she was most likely mentally challenged. But damn it, I was not going to let my poor, retarded dog feel like she had failed.

  One of the most terrifying things that has ever happened to me was watching myself decide over and over again—thirty-five days in a row—to not return a movie I had rented. Every day, I saw it sitting there on the arm of my couch. And every day, I thought, I should really do something about that . . . and then I just didn’t.

  After a week, I started to worry that it wasn’t going to happen, but I thought, Surely I have more control over my life than this. Surely I wouldn’t allow myself to NEVER return the movie.

  But that’s exactly what happened. After thirty-five days, I decided to just never go back to Blockbuster again.

  Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don’t want to do. If I lose, I’m one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I’m going to win or lose until the last second.

  I’m always surprised when I lose.

  But I keep allowing it to happen because, to me, the future doesn’t seem real. It’s just this magical place where I can put my responsibilities so that I don’t have to be scared while hurtling toward failure at eight hundred miles per hour.

  Or at least that’s how it used to be. I’ve experienced enough failure at this point to become suspicious of where I’m going and what’s going to happen when I get there. And for the last helpless moments of the journey, I’m fully aware and terrified.

  Fortunately, it turns out that being scared of yourself is a somewhat effective motivational technique.

  It’s so somewhat effective that I now rely on it almost exclusively when I need to get myself to do something important.

  Of course, it isn’t without its flaws—the biggest flaw being that I still have to get very close to failure before I recognize some of the landmarks and panic.

  But as long as I figure out what’s going to happen before it actually happens—or hell, even while it’s happening—all the struggling and flailing might propel me away from it in time.

  Procrastination has become its own solution—a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success.

  A more troubling matter is the day-to-day activities that don’t have massive consequences when I neglect to do them. I haven’t figured out how to solve the problem in a normal way, but I did learn how to make myself feel so ashamed that I’m willing to take action.

  It usually doesn’t work right away.

  Sometimes it doesn’t work for days.

  But it always gets to me eventually.

  I’ve gotten pretty good at making myself feel ashamed. I can even use shame in a theoretical sense to make myself do the right thing BEFORE I do the wrong thing. This skill could be described as “morality,” but I prefer to call it “How Horrible Can I Be Before I Experience a Prohibitive Amount of Shame?”

  Fear and shame are the backbone of my self-control. They are my source of inspiration, my insurance against becoming entirely unacceptable. They help me do the right thing. And I am terrified of what I would be without them. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life.

  I’m still hoping that perhaps someday I’ll learn how to use willpower like a real person, but until that very unlikely day, I will confidently battle toward adequacy, wielding my crude skill set of fear and shame.

  My mom baked the most fantastic cake for my grandfather’s seventy-third birthday party. The cake was slathered in impossibly thick frosting and topped with an assortment of delightful creatures that my mom crafted out of mini-marshmallows and toothpicks. To a four-year-old child, it was a thing of wonder—half toy, half cake, and all glorious possibility.

  But my mom knew that it was extremely important to keep the cake away from me because she knew that if I was allowed even a tiny amount of sugar, not only would I become intensely hyperactive, but the entire scope of my existence would funnel down to the singular goal of obtaining and ingesting more sugar. My need for sugar would become so massive that it would collapse in upon itself and create a vacuum into which even more sugar would be drawn until all the world had been stripped of sweetness.

  So when I managed to climb onto the counter and grab a handful of cake while my mom’s back was turned, an irreversible chain reaction was set into motion.

  I had tasted cake and there was no going back. My tiny body had morphed into a writhing mass of pure tenacity encased in a layer of desperation. I would eat all of the cake or I would evaporate from the sheer power of my desire to eat it.

  My mom had prepared the cake early in the day to get the task out of the way. She thought she was being efficient, but really she had only ensured that she would be forced to spend the whole day protecting the cake from my all-encompassing need to eat it. I followed her around doggedly, hoping that she would set the cake down—just for a moment.

  My mom quickly tired of having to hold the cake out of my reach. She tried to hide the cake, but I found it almost immediately. She tried putting the cake on top of the refrigerator, but my freakish climbing abilities soon proved it to be an unsatisfactory solution.

  Her next attempt at cake security involved putting the cake in the refrigerator and then placing a very heavy box in front of the refrigerator’s door.

  The box was far too heavy for me to move. When I discovered that I couldn’t move the box, I decided that the next-best strategy would be to dramatically throw my body against it until my mom was forced to move it or allow me to destroy myself.

  Surprisingly, this tactic did not garner much sympathy.

  I went and played with my toys, but I did not enjoy it.

  I had to stay focused.

  I played vengefully for the rest of the afternoon. All of my toys died horrible deaths at least once. But I never lost sight of my goal.

  My mom finally came to get me. She handed me a dress and told me to put it on because we were leaving for the party soon. I put the dress on backward just to make her life slightly more difficult.

  I was herded into the car and strapped securely into my car seat. As if to taunt me, my mom placed the cake in the passenger seat, just out of my reach.

  We arrived at my grandparents’ house and I was immediately accosted by my doting grandmother while my mom walked away holding the cake.

  I could see my mom and the cake disappearing into the hallway as I watched helplessly. I struggled against my grandmother’s loving embrace, but my efforts were futile. I heard the sound of a door shutting and then a lock sliding into place. My mom had locked the cake in the back bedroom. How was I going to get to it now? I hadn’t yet learned the art of lock-picking and I wasn’t nearly strong enough to kick the door in. It felt as though all my life’s aspirations were slipping away from me in a landslide of tragedy. How could they do this to me? How could they just sit there placidly as my reason for living slowly faded from my grasp? I couldn’t take it. My little mind began to crumble.

  And then, right there in my grandmother’s arms, I lapsed into a full-scale psychological meltdown. My collective frustrations burst forth from my tiny body like bees from a nest that had just been pelted with a rock.

  It was unanimously decided that I would need to go play outside until I was able to regain my composure and stop yelling and punching. I was banished to the patio, where I stood peering doleful
ly through the sliding glass door, trying to look as pitiful as possible.

  I knew the cake was locked securely in the bedroom, but if I could just get them to let me inside . . . maybe. Maybe I could find a way to get to it. After all, desperation breeds ingenuity. I could possibly build an explosive device or some sort of pulley system. I had to try. But at that point, my only real option was to manipulate their emotions so they’d pity me and willfully allow me to get closer to the cake.

  When my theatrics failed to produce the desired results, I resorted to crying very loudly, right up against the glass.

  I carried on in that fashion until my mom poked her head outside and, instead of taking pity on me and warmly inviting me back inside as I had hoped, told me to go play in the side yard because I was fogging up the glass and my inconsolable sobbing was upsetting my grandmother.

  I trudged around to the side of the house, glaring reproachfully over my shoulder and thinking about how sorry my mom would be if I were to die out there. She’d wish she would have listened. She’d wish she had given me a piece of cake. But it would be too late.

  But as I rounded the corner, the personal tragedy I was constructing in my imagination was interrupted by a sliver of hope.

  Just above my head, there was a window. On the other side of that particular window was the room in which my mom had locked the cake. The window was open.

  The window was covered by a screen, but my dad had shown me how to remove a screen as a preemptive safety measure in case I was trapped in a fire and he couldn’t get to me and I turned out to be too stupid to figure out how to kick in a screen to escape death by burning.

  I clambered up the side of the house and pushed the screen with all my strength.

  It gave way, and suddenly there I was—mere feet from the cake, unimpeded by even a single obstacle.

  I couldn’t fully believe what had just occurred. I crept toward the cake, my body quivering with anticipation. It was mine. All mine.

  I ate the entire cake. At one point, I remember becoming aware of the oppressive fullness building inside of me, but I kept eating out of a combination of spite and stubbornness. No one could tell me not to eat an entire cake—not my mom, not Santa, not God—no one. It was my cake and everyone else could go fuck themselves.

  Meanwhile, in the kitchen, my mother suddenly noticed that she hadn’t heard my tortured sobbing in a while.

  She became concerned because it was unusual for my tantrums to stop on their own like that, so she went looking for me.

  When she couldn’t find me anywhere, she finally thought to unlock the bedroom door and peek inside.

  And there I was.

  I spent the rest of the evening in a hyperglycemic fit, alternately running around like a maniac and regurgitating the multicolored remains of my conquest all over my grandparents’ carpet. I was so miserable, but my suffering was small compared to the satisfaction I felt every time my horrible, conniving mother had to watch me retch up another rainbow of sweet, semidigested success: This is for you, Mom. This is what happens when you try to get between me and cake. I silently challenged her to try again to prevent me from obtaining something I wanted. Just once. Just to see what would happen. It didn’t matter how violently ill I felt; in that moment, I was a god—the god of cake—and I was unstoppable.

  A few months after we adopted the simple dog, we decided that we didn’t have enough dog-related challenges in our lives, so we set out to find a friend for the simple dog.

  When we arrived at the shelter, they were like, “Hello, we’ve got all sorts of wonderful animals here!” and we said, “No thanks. Just go back there and bring us the most hopeless, psychologically destroyed dog-monster you can find.”

  One of the shelter workers led us to a kennel in the very back corner. It contained a mangy German shepherd mix that had been there for months because nobody else wanted it.

  The shelter worker said, “This one hates everything and she doesn’t know anything, and I hope you aren’t planning on taking her outside ever because she’s more like a bear than a dog, really, and unfortunately, she can scale a seven-foot-tall fence like the fucking Spider-Man.”

  And we were like, “Sure, why not.”

  We were feeling pretty optimistic because, on some level, we both felt like maybe we were dog whisperers and we could use our magical powers to convince this new dog to not be any of the things the shelter worker had just said.

  As it turns out, we are not dog whisperers. We should have known this because of our struggles with the simple dog, but we thought maybe the simple dog doesn’t understand dog whispering. There are lots of things the simple dog doesn’t understand.

  The clues that things might not go well for us started piling up almost immediately.

  The helper dog—who earned that title on the car ride home while we were gleefully entertaining the notion that this new dog could act as a service animal for the simple dog—did not appear overly interested in interacting with us.

  She was very focused on something, though. We didn’t know what it was yet, but this dog clearly had a plan—a plan that shelter imprisonment had prevented her from working on. And now that she’d been freed, this plan—whatever it was—was the only thing that mattered. We were simply a means to an end.

  It was sort of like being the taxi-driver character in a Bruce Willis movie. You try to make small talk with Bruce Willis on his ride home from prison, where he spent the last nine years becoming hardened and vengeful, but he is finally free to pursue his plan and he doesn’t give a shit about small talk. He doesn’t have time. There are important things to focus on, and the taxi driver is not one of them.

  We uncovered a major clue about the helper dog’s plan when we tried to introduce her to the simple dog.

  The simple dog has a lot of weird qualities that make her seem un-dog-like. She’s more like a sea cucumber with legs. Which is fortunate, because otherwise, the helper dog may have never agreed to tolerate her.

  From what we can tell, the helper dog holds a firm belief that other dogs should not exist. The fact that they do fills her with uncontrollable, psychotic rage. Even the slightest hint of another dog’s existence will throw her into a hysterical fit of scream-barking.

  But she can’t do anything to prevent the world from containing other dogs, so instead, she is determined to make sure that no other dogs can enjoy existing. If she senses that another dog is enjoying itself nearby, she will do everything within her power to ruin that dog’s day.

  And when she does this, other people glare at us like, “What horrible people they must be to have such an angry animal. MY dog would never do that. People like that should be in jail.”

  Still, we thought, Okay, this is horribly stressful and embarrassing. But we can teach her.

  Everyone told us, “Oh, it’s easy to train dogs! You just give them a treat when they do something you like!” We asked, “But what if they never do anything you like?” And everybody said, “Oh, then just wait until the dog stops doing what you don’t like, give it a treat, and presto! It’s really, really, really, really, really, really, really, absurdly, unbelievably easy! It has a 100 percent success rate on every dog ever. There is literally nobody in the entire world who has been unsuccessful with this method.”

  This is what was supposed to happen:

  But the only thing we managed to accomplish was to teach the helper dog that if she starts doing something we hate, and then stops doing that thing very briefly, she can get a treat. And then she can go back to doing the thing we hate.

  We have tried and tried. Oh how we have tried. We are still trying. But all the one-on-one training classes and socialization and positive reinforcement and timely corrections and special leashes and self-esteem boosters and mind tricks have not made even the slightest dent in her hatred of other dogs. Nor have they solved any of the other problems she has. And she has HEAPS of other problems. If you could stack the helper dog’s problems one on top of the other, the
y would reach all the way to the moon. And then they would shove the moon out of the way aggressively and continue in a completely straight line for an infinite distance.

  You might be thinking, How many problems can a dog actually have? There are only, like, eight things dogs can do. And that’s what I thought too. I also thought there would be spaces in between the problems—happy little spaces where I could bask in the love and appreciation that would surely reward my efforts. Or at least times where the helper dog would be asleep.

  But she doesn’t sleep.

  She doesn’t even relax.

  At night, she crouches in the corner of the room, as rigid as a block of wood, and just stares at us.

  The staring was a bit unsettling, but that wasn’t what forced us to move the helper dog’s bed into the hallway. What did that was the neighbor’s dog.