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  Praise for

  WE LEARN NOTHING

  “Tim Kreider’s writing is heartbreaking, brutal, and hilarious—usually at the same time. He can do in a few pages what I need several hours of screen time and tens of millions to accomplish. And he does it better. Come to think of it, I’d rather not do a blurb. I am beginning to feel bad about myself.”

  —JUDD APATOW

  “Tim Kreider may be the most subversive soul in America and his subversions—by turns public and intimate, political and cultural—are just what our weary, mixed-up nation needs. The essays in We Learn Nothing are for anybody who believes it’s high time for some answers, damn it.”

  —RICHARD RUSSO, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

  “Whether he is expressing himself in highly original cartoons that are hilarious visual poems, or in prose that exposes our self-delusions by the way he probes his own experience with candor, Tim Kreider is a writer-artist who brilliantly understands that every humorist at his best is a liberator. Because he is irreverent, makes us laugh, ruffles the feathers of the pretentious and the pompous, and keeps us honest, We Learn Nothing is a pleasure from its first page to the last.”

  —CHARLES JOHNSON, bestselling author of Middle Passage

  In We Learn Nothing, satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn’t change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don’t even like? What do you do when a friend becomes obsessed with a political movement and won’t let you ignore it? How do you react when someone you’ve known for years unexpectedly changes genders?

  Irreverent yet earnest, he shares deeply personal experiences and readily confesses his vices—betraying his addiction to lovesickness, for example, and the gray area that he sees between the bold romantic gesture and the illegal act of stalking.

  In these pages, we witness Kreider’s tight-knit crew struggle to deal with a pathologically lying friend who won’t ask for help. We watch him navigate a fraught relationship with a lonely uncle in jail who—as he degenerates into madness—continues to plead for the support of his conflicted nephew. And we cringe as he gets outed as a “moby” at a Tea Party rally. In moments like these, we can’t help but ask ourselves: How far would we go for our own family members, and when is someone simply too far gone to save? Are there truly “bad people,” and if so, should we change them? With a perfect combination of humor and pathos, these essays, peppered with Kreider’s signature cartoons, leave us with newfound wisdom and a unique prism through which to examine our own chaotic journeys through life.

  Uncompromisingly candid, sometimes mercilessly so, these comically illustrated essays are rigorous exercises in self-awareness and self-reflection. These are the conversations you have only with best friends or total strangers, late at night over drinks, near closing time.

  © TIM KREIDER

  TIM KREIDER is a writer for The New York Times. His popular cartoon “The Pain—When Will It End?” has been collected in three books by Fantagraphics. He divides his time between New York City and the Chesapeake Bay.

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  • THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •

  JACKET DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION BY T IM KREIDER AND TOM HART

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Also by Tim Kreider

  The Pain—When Will It End?

  Why Do They Kill Me?

  Twilight of the Assholes

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  Copyright © 2012 by Tim Kreider

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Free Press hardcover edition June 2012

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  Designed by Akasha Archer

  The following essays first appeared, in different form, on www.nytimes.com: “Reprieve,” “You Can’t Stay Here” (as “Time and the Bottle”), “How They Tried to Fuck Me Over” (as “Isn’t It Outrageous?”), “The Referendum,” and “Averted Vision.”

  “The Stabbing Story” was originally published in The Urbanite.

  All of these cartoons first appeared in the Baltimore City Paper. “What’s Your Plan (When the Shit Hits the Fan)” also appears in Twilight of the Assholes, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Fantagraphics Books. All illustrations are original.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kreider, Tim.

  We learn nothing: essays and cartoons / Tim Kreider

  p. cm.

  1. American wit and humor. I. Title.

  PN6165.K75 2012

  814’. 6—dc23 2011050095

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9870-4

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9872-8 (ebook)

  For my mother and father

  Author’s Note

  Most of the names of people mentioned in these essays (except for those of my colleagues, Jennifer Boylan, Sarah Glidden, and Matt, aka “Slim Dodger”), as well as certain other identifying details, have been changed. Nothing else has been made up.

  When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, “Where are all my friends?”

  —Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

  Contents

  REPRIEVE

  THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US

  YOU CAN’T STAY HERE

  THE CZAR’S DAUGHTER

  HOW THEY TRIED TO FUCK ME OVER (BUT I SHOWED THEM!)

  WHEN THEY’RE NOT ASSHOLES

  THE ANTI-KREIDER CLUB

  ESCAPE FROM PONY ISLAND

  THE REFERENDUM

  BAD PEOPLE

  CHUTES AND CANDYLAND

  AN INSULT TO THE BRAIN

  SISTER WORLD

  AVERTED VISION

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We Learn Nothing

  Reprieve

  Fourteen years ago, I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and less interesting than it sounds. A lot of people have told me about their own near-death experiences over the years, often in harrowing medical detail, imagining that those details—how many times they rolled the car, how many vertebrae shattered, how many months spent in traction—will somehow convey the subjective psychic force of the experience, the way some people will relate the whole narrative of a dream in a futile attempt to evoke its ambient feeling. Except for the ten or fifteen minutes during which it looked like I was about to die, which I would prefer not to relive, getting stabbed wasn’t even among the
worst experiences of my life. In fact it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

  After my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year. Winston Churchill’s aphorism about the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story, “The Lost City of Mars,” in which a man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes—in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, exploding rocket ships—until he emerges flayed of all his Christian guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.

  I can’t claim to have been continuously euphoric the whole time; it’s just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away—the distance between my carotid and the stiletto—I had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. As far as I was concerned everything in this life was what Raymond Carver, in writing of his own second chance, called “gravy.”

  My friends immediately mocked me out of my self-consciousness about the nerve damage that had left me with a lopsided smile. I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old one-hit wonders much too stupid to name in print. And I developed a strange new laugh that’s stayed with me to this day—a raucous, barking thing that comes from deep in the diaphragm, the laugh of a much larger man, that makes people in bars or restaurants look over for a second to make sure I’m not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon. I don’t laugh this way all the time—certainly not when I’m just being polite. The last time it happened was when I told my friend Harold, “You don’t understand me,” in mock-wounded protest at some unjust charge of sleazery, and he retorted: “No, sir, I understand you very well—it is you who do not understand yourself.” The laugh always seems to be in response to the same elusive joke, some dark, hilarious universal truth.

  Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life for Some Purpose. Even if I’d been the type who was prone to such silly notions, I would’ve been rudely disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a coma. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate. What I had been was not blessed or chosen but lucky. Not to turn up my nose at luck; it’s better to be lucky than just about anything else in life. And if you’re reading this now you’re among the lucky, too.

  I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone. It’s a truism that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes, ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like horror movies and roller coasters to what are essentially suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping and skydiving. The trick is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent, Clouseauesque hit man to assassinate you.

  It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, the same way some of us appreciate our girlfriends only after they’ve become exes. I saw the same thing happen, in a more profound and lasting way, to my father when he was terminally ill: a lightening, an amused indifference to the nonsense that the rest of us think of as the serious business of the world. A neighbor was suing my father over some property dispute during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such practical matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” in a silly, quavering falsetto until you gave up. He cared less about things that didn’t matter and more about the things that did. It was during his illness that he gave me the talk that all my artist friends have envied, in which he told me that he and my mother believed in my talent and I shouldn’t worry about getting “some dumb job.”

  Maybe people who have lived with the reality of their own mortality for months or years are permanently changed by it, but getting stabbed was more like getting struck by lightning, over almost as soon as it happened, and the illumination didn’t last. You can’t feel crazily grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever—or grieve forever, for that matter. Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living. Before a year had gone by, the same everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I was disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night worrying about what was to become of me. I can’t recapture that feeling of euphoric gratitude any more than I can really remember the mortal terror I felt when I was pretty sure I had about four minutes to live. But I know that it really happened, that that state of grace is accessible to us, even if I only blundered across it once and never find my way back. At my cabin on the Chesapeake Bay I’ll see bald eagles swoop up from the water with wriggling little fish in their talons, and whenever they accidentally drop their catch, I like to imagine that fish trying to tell his friends about his own near-death experience, a perspective so unprecedented there are no words in the fish language to describe it: for a short time he was outside the world, he could see forever, there’s so much more than they knew, but he’s glad to be back.

  Once a year on my stabbiversary, I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a round on the house. But now that I’m back in the slog of everyday life, I have to struggle to keep things in what I still insist is their true perspective. I know intellectually that all the urgently pressing items on our mental lists—our careers, car repairs, the daily headlines, the goddamned taxes—are just so much noise, that what matters is spending time with the people you love. It’s just hard to bear in mind when the hard drive crashes or the shower drain clogs first thing in the day. Apparently I can only ever attain that God’s-eye view in the grip of the talons.

  I was not cheered to read about psychological studies suggesting that most people inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows. How happy we can hope to be may be as inalterable and unfair as our height or metabolism or the age at which we’ll lose our hair. This is reassuring news if you’ve undergone some trauma, but less so if your own emotional thermostat is set so low it makes you want to phone up the landlord and yell at him. You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through. I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound. If anything, the whole episode only confirmed my solipsistic suspicion that in the story of Me only supporting characters would die, while I, its first-person narrator and star, was immortal. It gave me much more of an existential turn when my vision started to blur.

  I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d feel after getting clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of reality, being jolted out of a lifelong stupor. It’s like the revelation I had the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressiv
e, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

  The Creature Walks Among Us

  A few years ago an astronaut who’d been jilted in a romantic space triangle reportedly donned an adult diaper and drove hundreds of miles across the country, armed with pepper spray, a knife, and a BB pistol, to confront her rival.* The news media got a week’s worth of fun out of that story; the national consensus amounted to those middle school sneers, “What ever” and “O-kaaaayyyy. . . .” Everyone was eager to laugh at that unhappy woman to reassure themselves that she was crazy, her behavior incomprehensible. But I knew exactly how she felt.

  I had a perhaps unhealthy empathy for that astronaut because, as it happened, around the same time she undertook her own mission, I’d nearly driven twenty hours for similar reasons. Not to abduct anyone, of course, ha ha, no, certainly not—just to make a desperate last-ditch appeal. The object of my obsession was on vacation somewhere on the Carolina shore, and I vaguely pictured myself kneeling in the surf, shocking the moms and toddlers around us. I actually got in the car and sat in the driveway with my hands on the hot steering wheel, poised to launch. What stayed me was not any awareness that this might be alarming or delusional behavior, but only the concern that it might backfire and drive the person in question further away from me. At such moments it never occurs to you to question your loyalty to the Acme brand, much less ask yourself whether it’s really worth all this trouble and personal injury to try to catch one scrawny roadrunner; your only hesitation is in choosing between the rocket skates or the earthquake pills. I could understand that donning the diaper was not insane but exactly the sort of thoroughness and resourcefulness that NASA inculcates in its astronaut corps. When love is at stake, you do not waste time on rest stops.