I find that the best way to overcome a destructive temptation is to stare it in the face, which is usually by the barcode if it’s an object. Some people find this approach crazy, even tortuous. They’d rather throw away the carrot*—the Blackberry, the chocolate, the pornography—than throw on the chastity belt and sleep with it. They feel that if the attraction is physically unattainable, they naturally can’t attain it, and their resolution is met.

Maybe. Resolutions—and life changes—aren’t really about the physical.

Circumstantial change is doomed to fail, because circumstances themselves change. Eventually, despite your best efforts to avoid them, God is going to drop a chocolate souffle in your lap, with a Blackberry on top, and some porn on the Blackberry (starring, ironically, the world-renowned Chocolate Souffle, again with a Blackberry on top—her lover, not the device. And some oddly utilized carrots). It’s the God double decker: Blackberry on Chocolate Souffle on Blackberry on chocolate souffle. And you’ll indulge, because you never figured out how to overcome these things; they’ve just been held at bay on a long mental leash. On the bright side, you get to read God’s Blackberry. What’s the deal with famine.

I think that real change is sculpted from something less volatile than circumstance: thought. While you might think you think new thoughts often, you’re probably doing little more than changing outfits. Sure, some days you wear the jeans, other days the shorts, and still others the khakis with the embarrassing stain from that time God hurled chocolate souffle at your crotch all willy-nilly. And some days you worry about your job first and family second. But you only have so much space in that closet. (And yes, I compare your brain to a small closet. Poetic license.)

Only once you extinguish the urge, only once you can spend all day with your Blackberry (the device, not the porn star) and never take it out of your pants (the device), will you be able to watch in twitchless satisfaction as your friend fingers his own Blackberry (ambiguous). God can throw all the souffle He wants, but you’ll never bite. Then maybe He’ll start tossing it at the people who are actually hungry, because seriously God, famine. What’s up.

* Why does “carrot” epitomize an attractive reward, as in “carrot or stick”? Who does things for carrots?

I like to take walks at night through the backroads. I take my iPod and play some song I’ve heard a million times before, there are no surprises in the chords anymore, and that’s okay: it’s just the elevator music. I confess I sing out loud, almost involuntarily and without recourse, because there’s nobody else around.

Daylight mirrors your existence; you can’t help but remember you’re alive everywhere you go: Pedestrians move out of your way, an intimate conversation dwindles while you pass, civilization carves out space for you.

Night, less courteous. You can look around, to be sure, but it seems that at any moment a ficus could take your place should the land-Lord decide that you’re a bad use of real estate at the corner of Forest and Cowper. Nothing bends for you after sundown.

Tonight I cross an intersection against a man in a grizzled gray beard. His pants are pleated in a dozen directions, and his fly is open. His red plaid shirt is pulled out through it like a rose blossoming from the unlikeliest of places, but it is well watered with amber…rain. His body bobs and swivels, his back is grossly arched and his head is down, and he looks like a scythe chopping lazily through a world that is of a much swampier consistency than mine, a jello to my smooth garlic aioli (no wonder he looks so tired). I can’t say he’s moving so much as being moved, frame by frame, a marvel of claymation. His arms shuffle to some beat but it’s not mine. He’s singing something but there’s no music playing. An original.

It seems a pure coincidence that he crosses at the crosswalk, and I think if there happened to be a mountain or a desert here, he would cross those instead.

Side by side in the dark. He doesn’t change a thing, his timbre and gaze and shuffle all metronomic: a true steward of nighttime callousness. I, on the other hand, have stopped singing in hot self-awareness. He cuts me nothing, but I’ve carved out his space, a scythe in deed if not form.

I don’t want him to hear me. I’m not sure he even knows I’m there, but I am embarrassed that the man with the blooming crotch will hear me, and in that moment I am only certain that one of us is crazy.

So many people spend so much of their energy trying to be perfect. It’s a fruitless goal. For one thing, perfect people are hated way more than imperfect people. If people don’t like you, odds are that it’s because you’re striving for perfection rather than lacking it—and in your pursuit, you’re systematically weeding out all of the things that make you interesting: the stupid jokes, the random thoughts, the quirky turns of phrase, the failures.

If you define perfection by the absence of failures that other people notice, as so many people seem to, then the only way you will ever be perfect is to sit in a dark hut in the Rockies and graciously decline to participate in life. After all, you can’t fail at what you don’t attempt. Of course, nobody will know of your perfection in such circumstances, so you’ll have to send out frequent telegrams:

1:00PM: STILL PERFECT.

And then, in celebration of your success:

1:03PM: BLOW US.
-MANKIND

(When I said nobody likes perfection, I especially meant mankind.)

But now we have a quandary: you don’t like your imperfections but nobody else wants your… perfections. Whatever you’re worried about, the problem is rarely the flaw itself, but the way you respond to it. For instance, let’s say you’re not naturally funny, which is in fact the word on you right now. Your instinct will be to force everything into a joke, even though the best humor creeps up slowly and coyly from behind, placing its hand on your funny bone, caressing it, circling it gently as if to tease, until—

Sorry. Carried away.

The point is, the best humor is spontaneous. Say you’re at a restaurant and you order the artichoke heart appetizer. You might think it’d be funny to grab your heart, begin mock-choking, and wink: “Whoa, they weren’t kidding with those artiCHOKE hearts.” But this isn’t funny. It’s tasteless and forced, perpetuating the widely held idea, even by me now, that you’re a humorless hack.

If you had just waited a few more minutes, odds are that your friend Roberto with the comically small trachea would have begun actually choking. THEN you could have chimed in with a “Well, they don’t call ‘em artichoke hearts for nothing,” and all your friends would burst out laughing, and the waiter would pause to slap his knee mid-heimlich, and even Roberto would have to concede through hand gestures that it was a “good one” before surrendering to the icy scythe of death. This is humor. Just make sure Roberto doesn’t get credit for the joke posthumously.

I find that the best way to deal with your anxieties is to play a mental game of T-Ball, but I call it N-Ball, N for Neurosis, or Not patent infringement. Take all the ish that’s bothering you, wrap it up into a neat little ball of anger and frustration and embarrassment and resentment, and put it on an imaginary tee shaped like an “N”. For instance, right now I’m worried that “N-Ball” is a stupid name because it’s called T-Ball because it’s a “tee”, not because it’s shaped like a T, which it’s not, and even then an N-shaped tee is still a tee. So I’d package that thought up and put it onto my… N.

Now pick up the bat and take your hardest swing. You can’t tap the ball into the infield or you’ll just retrieve it again, and again, batting the same thoughts around until you die, and then your family, thinking that you simply must love that ball because you spent your whole life batting it around, will bury you with it, and you’ll spend eternity with your neuroses while the other corpses are all laid back. So, you have to knock it out of the park and into the surrounding streets, far enough that it will never be seen again.

There. Feel better, don’t you? If not, gaze out into the blue horizon and the green expanse. Take a whiff of the freshly mown lawn. Then turn around and beat the bloody shit out of the umpire. That always seals the deal for me. Who does he think he is, judging everything you do? The judge?

I’m thinking of manufacturing N-Ball as the first commercial sporting equipment ever to be prescribed by therapists. It would of course be a gimmick, like the Staples Easy button, except that the purpose of mine would be to absolve the heartache that underpins our mortality, while the purpose of the Easy button is to upsell thumbtacks and corrugated cardboard. I feel mine warrants a higher price point.

If you’re a highly advanced worrier, you don’t just spend your time worrying about your issues; you also spend time worrying about the fact that you worry so much. Just package up those meta-worries into another ball and place it onto the second leg of your N-tee:

o  o < — second leg for meta-worry support
| \ |

If you worry about how much you worry about how much you worry, you do not belong in this class. Please leave and go invent W-Ball to sustain your mutant anxiety.

Whatever your level, the key is to recognize that everyone has their own anxieties to bat around, and they’re far too focused on them to worry about yours. We’re a criss-cross of baseball diamonds and batters swinging in solitude, striking out or hitting big and rounding the bases, but in either case ending where we began. Your friend might be a paragon of composure, but you will never truly know her until you’ve walked a mile with her balls.