How this Inverted-U can improve your Thinking and your Life
Like a lot of you, I’ve had to find ways to amuse myself over the last 15 months so I read a lot of books including re-reading everything Elmore Leonard and John Sandford and John Connolly wrote because one of the few positives of a failing memory is forgetting everything you read 10 years ago, so now it all seems fresh and new and the same goes for movies.
Can’t wait to re-watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because I like Paul Newman and Robert Redford and I’m sure it will have an uplifting ending which won’t be even the tiniest bit depressing.
(OK, just kidding about the ending on Butch Cassidy, but I did re-watch a number of movies from the 1970s that I theoretically saw at drive-in theaters while completely ignoring the screen and trying to hit a “triple” in the back seat, if you know what I mean and I’m pretty sure that you do. I mean, who knew there was a shark in Jaws?)
A semi-related story alert
OK, didn’t plan on writing about movie fights, but we’re being swept away in my stream of consciousness, so let’s quit fighting the current and go with the flow until we get close enough to shore to grab a handy rock or tree limb and in this case going with the flow means we have to talk about the Jason Bourne movies.
I just re-watched the first three in order and one of my favorite things in those movies are the fight scenes because that’s what real fights are like, although usually conducted with a lot less skill.
In the Bourne movies there’s none of that Bruce Lee posing and “hi-yahs” and balletic, spinning back kicks which look great on film, but take too long to deliver in real life and all you have to do is grab some dude’s foot and he’s now hopping around on one leg while you look for a handy flight of stairs to push him down.
In the Bourne movies it’s guys grappling and hitting each other with whatever comes to hand and I loved the fight where Jason rolled up a magazine and used it to extend his jab an extra 6 inches because I did the same thing when scuffling with my brothers because the end of a rolled up magazine can be pretty goddamn solid as long as you use a good, thick Playboy and not that flimsy-ass Parade, so when someone catches you looking at Penthouse and asks why you have it, the obvious answer is:
“Self-defense.”
During our family scuffles I also discovered the spine of paperback book is pretty solid and can be used as a weapon, so I totally related when Jason put the edge of book up against a guy’s throat and slammed the other side of it repeatedly to crush the bad guy’s larynx.
Also, if you hold a lit match up in front of a can of hairspray and then depress the button it turns into a flame thrower, which I’m guessing is not a safe or recommended use, but nonetheless works, so I think what we’ve learned so far is maybe you should turn down any invitation to come to one of our family dinners unless you have martial arts training that didn’t include spinning back kicks because my mom’s house has three flights of stairs.
All of which reminds me of a conversation I had with my son Paul in a Mexican restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard two years ago. Paul threw out a theory about creativity that went like this:
Interesting people create interesting art.
If you have to direct a fight scene and you’ve never actually been in a fight, all you can do is copy other fight scenes and create a clichéd version of those because you’ve got nothing new to add from your own experiences, like using Remembrance of Things Past to crush somebody’s throat, which is a much better use for that book than actually trying to read it.
That will crush your will to live.
Anyway…
As author Andrew Vachss once wrote: “You can always tell when a virgin’s writing a sex scene” so if you want to create interesting art, live an interesting life.
That way, when you get arrested for finding out how fast your car will go backwards down I-5 or having unnatural relations with a goat or robbing a gas station and you get asked just what the hell you thought you were doing, you have an answer:
“Research.”
(Man, you need to read this stuff for all the outstanding advice I’m dispensing which makes me think I could make a living as a Life Coach for Fuck-Ups because you know there would never be a shortage of clients, plus that slogan would look great on a T-shirt.)
And now back to our regularly-scheduled program
After reading a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book – The Bomber Mafia – I decided to read all his stuff and came across an interesting and useful idea in David and Goliath.
I’ll sum it up so you don’t have to read the whole book, so you’re welcome and let’s both be thankful I’m not trying to sum up Remembrance of Things Past which you can buy in a seven-volume set and is 3,000 pages long and – according to the internet – will take the average reader 10 hours and seven minutes to read, but will seem like 100 hours and seven minutes because it’s about really fascinating stuff Marcel Proust remembered like eating a piece of cake.
If Jason Bourne had remembered a piece of cake it probably would have been that time he got in a fight and used the cake to choke somebody to death, which now that I write that, I wouldn’t mind seeing in the next Jason Bourne movie. So Matt Damon: get right on that, would you?
But I digress.
The Inverted-U Theory is that a little bit of something might make things better, but too much of that thing and the rate of improvement starts to flatten out and then starts descending.
Which leads us to…
The Law of Diminishing Returns
Here’s a definition of that law which comes from the Britannica.com website:
(An) economic law stating that if one input in the production of a commodity is increased while all other inputs are held fixed, a point will eventually be reached at which additions of the input yield progressively smaller, or diminishing, increases in output.
The Inverted-U Theory goes even further because it argues that not only will too much of something quit being effective, eventually it will become a negative and make things worse and if “The Law of Diminishing Returns” gets around to stating the same thing, my bad, but it turns out I can only read so much economic theory before I realize I’d rather hear about Marcel Proust’s cake.
But let’s refocus (like you’re the one getting off track) and get back to the Inverted-U.
Gladwell used wealth as an example.
He talked to a guy who was broke and then started making money which was a big improvement and he eventually became fantastically rich, but is now worried that his fantastic wealth is fucking up his kids because they’ve never had to work for anything and live a Fantastically Rich and Completely Unrealistic Life which sounds like a problem I wouldn’t mind having.
Nevertheless, I get the point about too much wealth distorting values.
A little bit of fame is kind of cool because you get better tables in restaurants, but too much fame and you can’t even go to restaurants because people won’t leave you alone and let you eat.
A little bit of muscle is OK because it looks better than flab, but too much muscle and you can’t comb your own hair, a problem my current workout regime guarantees I’ll never have.
Now take that Inverted-U Theory and apply it to politics:
A little bit of Right-Wing philosophy might be OK, but too much and you wind up singing the Horst Wessel Song and invading Russia.
A little bit of Left-Wing Philosophy might be OK, but too much and you wind up calling each other Comrade and informing on your parents.
So instead of thinking your side is always right, it’s helpful to understand that your side can go too far and you probably don’t want Nancy Pelosi in charge of the Marine Corps or Mitch McConnell running the Social Security Administration.
Which makes your thinking just a bit more complex and nuanced, which is not a bad thing and better than thinking in Black & White and being an Extremist because we already have enough of those and right now they’re causing an awful lot of problems.
Summing up
So what have we learned today?
You don’t want to be too rich or too famous or too muscular or too Right-Wing or too Left-Wing and you probably don’t want try that “open-flame-can-of-hairspray” trick because I think there’s a chance the can could explode, so I think the only thing we can say for sure is we wouldn’t mind seeing Jason Bourne attack a guy with a piece of cake.
Or is that too much?
Meanwhile…have a nice Memorial Day.