mogg (with jones)
A piece of advice I’ve often been offered is the lyrical ‘fake it till you make it’. The advice is incredibly versatile; it can be applied to dates, art, job interviews, exams, and even conversation. The implication is that no one knows what the hell they’re doing, and the suggestion is that false confidence births true confidence, and just in the nick of time. We do it in school. We do it at work. We did it during our first kiss; the first time we had sex; and the first time we entered a committed relationship. For models we rely on the people around us, the books we read, and the media.
Thanks, in part, to Christopher Pike's teen fiction, I grew up thinking that 16 was the ‘normal’ time to have sex and so I found a way to lose my virginity the summer of my champagne year. I was nowhere near ready: my gut reaction to seeing a penis was to squeeze my eyes shut. But I pretended. I faked it until I eventually understood it, which wasn’t until years later.
Similarly, the first time I moved in with a man, I had a strong sensation that I was playing house. I touched on this briefly during my
Woman Mogg entry, and to elaborate some: I’d fallen into a relationship with a man who was a stauch advocate of traditional gender roles, and so I played housewife. I read the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. I dusted. On Valentine’s Day I was rewarded with a trip to The Keg. Somewhere along the line, I reaized that not only was I no longer faking the "man: work and fart/woman: cook and do not fart" mentality, I was full-on subscribing to it. I began to get stomach aches. Horrified, I bolted. I began to wonder if one can acclimatize oneself to anything.
The following summer, I started playing a different (MORE DANGEROUS) game. Confused about what I wanted after having abandoned my 6 year relationship with Mr. Man before it was too late (read: a brood of children grabbing at my apron strings), I began to act out. To play the hood rat. I stopped working, and started
slumming. I began sleeping with an older, often abusive, alcoholic. It started out as almost a joke (
“You’ll never believe who I…”). The joke, however, took too long to tell, and we all quickly realized that not only was there no punchline, but I was also laughing a
bit too hard while telling it. Laughing until I cried.
And still, I couldn’t stop telling the joke. I told it through drinking binges, where I forgot to eat for days, that didn’t end until I fainted. I told it several times at the ER after an assortment of alcohol related accidents. It was hilarious, or so I thought at the beginning. Look how well I play the train wreck! I thought I could stop once it got too bad, and when it never seemed to reach too bad, I began to hope the joke would fizzle out on its own. Either way, long after the end should have come, I was still flapping my mouth like a possessed marionette, crying and laughing at having completely lost control. Suddenly I was no longer faking it, and the fate I was headed toward was much worse than housewife.
(potential mogg, minus fame and cobain)
It was around the same time that one of my besties started to deal drugs. He, too, in his anxiety, and ennui, started playing the role of the bad boy. Specifically, his role became the mysterious and ridiculous drug dealer who dips into his own supply. HA HA, he’d say: DIDN’T MAKE ANY MONEY WITH THIS BATCH. He'd offer his friends drugs and insist we could pay him back ‘whenever’. He took them when he woke up. He took them to sleep. It was so out of control it could only be considered comical; if we took it seriously we’d have to own up to the fact that he was in trouble. In the end,
he had to figure it out on his own.
We’re all middle to upper class kids from Mississauga. While I know some people who grew up with alcoholic parents, for the most part our experience with serious substance abuse came from degrassi high. Everyone knew they should be helping him, and everyone wanted to help me, but no one knew how. And no one wanted to risk faking it.
* * *
Everyone has that eureka! moment after a few weeks at a new job, when you realize that you’re no longer guessing; you know your responsibilities and the responsibilities of those around you, and you are confident enough to handle any stuation that may arise. That moment is the same as when you get to the point in a relationship where silence is easy and comfortable. I once heard a similar story about prayer; my favourite priest once told me he used to think prayer was bullshit until one day, suddenly, it wasn’t.
I think the desire to slum it, the way my friend and I did, is understandable. If we have to step outside of ourselves to inhabit roles anyway, why not choose the sexier, more dangerous roles? The movies tell us that the bad boy gets the prettiest girl; literature has suggested that the love of a worthy woman can cure an addict. Furthermore, slumming it is easier. You don't have to work, be dependable or grow. Most of all, though, there is something about faking it as a Reg that just seems distasteful: you have to start caring about your stupid job, or your appearance, or whether you have a bedbug infestation or not. In short, it turns you into a bit of an asshole.
I don’t see anything wrong with dabbling as a slum dog. The unfortunate thing is is that the consequences are often total shit. While faking it at Regular activities ultimately creates a positive feedback loop, slumming it spawns a negative one which is often incredibly difficult to escape. Part of becoming Reg, I think, is letting go of the juvenile belief that nothing matters and accepting the fact that, yeah, I'm going to have to start being a bit of an asshole now with my job and my outfits and my hygiene even though everything seems absurd. And I think that if you jump in head first, start faking, things will start to quickly seem less absurd. And even if they don't, at least I won't be a crack whore.
