50's Mentality Pt.1

Why is it that things that you don’t like are somehow considered to be good for you?

It’s like that old 50’s mentality, you know the one: “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stringer.” That one.

Thinking on this I realize that in all practical matters it’s true. For instance the sucker-fish. Those things give me the creeps. They look so horrible and scary, some freakish holdover from the prehistoric ages. Without it though your aquarium is twice as hard to keep up. So, no matter how squeamish they make you, keep them around because in the long run it really is good for you.

Exercise is another thing. I’m at the gym last week and I’m on this machine called the “true Strider” and I tell you it was hell. In thirty minutes I burned away seven hundred calories. The morning after my legs felt a though they had been immersed in flames. The first few steps out of the bed threatened to give from beneath me. In retrospect though, it really does do wonders for the calves. And once again, what seems like the time from hell ends up being great for you after the fact.

Now it’s true, this good old 50’s mentality holds true in a lot of situations. This is why people are so willing to take it as gospel. Ask anyone and they will nine times out of ten say that it is true, no qualifiers. Only every now and then will you get the qualifiers of “usually” or “most of the time“. And if you ask those people why they add that qualifier, they will undoubtedly have had some personal trauma that disproved it. If you were to further interrogate these people, nine out of ten will quote some overbearing parent, teacher, coach, or employer. I’m not really interested in them though.

I want to know about that one tenth of one tenth that sites love as the qualifying experience. And as pretentiously romantic it is to feel that to be wounded by love is to be in a minority, it’s how I feel, if you don’t like it, you can stop reading right now.

So 1% of the 50’s mentality population, is what I want to discuss. And in my very own romantically pretentious way I am going to use myself as the standard for our lot.

We are told that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. The theory being that bouncing back from heartbreak is somehow fortifying in character and better off to have the war scar than to stay in hiding. I hope no one ever tried that argument on Anne Frank. Supposing that you survive the heartbreak though it is supposed to be a fortifying experience. Those who do not survive it, well that is another camp all together.

I want to talk about those of us who are broken. I mean that pseudo-rare class of people who are genuinely broken from a great, yet non-lethal, heartbreak.

In short I wish to talk of my own heartbreak, and how though I have survived it, at least physically, I am weakened, even broken, because of it.