I had a friend at one point who was a very bitter person, and he had a bunch of problems and
some of them were self-inflicted and some of them were fate, I suppose and
he had become very very destructive, murderously destructive, genocidally destructive, I would say.
You could see it in his dreams, and he lived with me for a while.
And I knew him very well. He was a friend of mine from the time
I was 12 until the time he committed suicide when he was about 40.
When he lived with me, I was trying to help him get on his feet
which was why he had come to live with me, because he thought maybe I could help him get on his feet.
He could only take
relatively low-level jobs. You know, like he had some mechanical ability, he didn't get educated although
he was a very very smart person. He probably had an IQ about 135 or something like that.
He was very smart and so, he was bitter too because he hadn't educated himself to the level that
his intellect would have demanded.
So he had to take jobs that were beneath him intellectually and he had that real,
intellectual arrogance, you know, because he was smart and really smart people often come to believe that
only smart matters, and if they're smart and all that and all that matters is smart,
and then the world isn't sort of laying itself at their feet then they've been terribly betrayed and then they cling to their
intelligence which is more like a talent or a gift like it's an idol. You know, a false idol
which is exactly what it is, and a very dangerous one and
get cynical about the stupidity of the world and the fact that their talents weren't properly recognized, and that's just not that helpful,
you know, because smart is a good thing, but I'll tell you if you don't use it properly it will devour you,
just like all arbitrarily assigned talents.
Right, so you might have a talent, but it's your friend if you
use it properly and if you misuse it, it will be your enemy, and maybe that's how God keeps the cosmic scales adjusted.
But anyhow, my friend was a very smart person, although not as smart as he thought he was unfortunately,
but he hadn't done what would have been necessary with that intelligence
to make it manifest itself properly in the world and that also embittered him because he also knew that
there was more that he could have done if he would have done it,
and perhaps more that he could still do. What I was suggesting to him
while he was living with us--because he was, you know,
two levels from homeless by that point--was that he should find a job that he could find
working in a garage, working in a shop, something like that because he had some mechanical ability and that he should--
He should separate himself from the arrogance that made him presume that such a job would be beneath him.
Because, at that point no job was beneath him--but more importantly, it's not so obvious that jobs are beneath people,
you know, because, imagine you have a job as a
checkout person in a grocery store, you know it's a fairly unskilled job.
You can be some miserable, resentful, horrid bastard doing that job, boy.
You know, you can come in there just exuding resentment and bitterness and making mistakes and
making sure that every customer that passes by you has a slightly worse day than they need to, right, and you know,
pilfering time and perhaps pilfering goods and being resentful about the people
who gave you the position because they're above you in the dominance hierarchy and talking, you know bad things,
gossiping behind the back of your co-workers. It's like you can take your menial position--
self-described--and turn that into a very nice little slice of hell.
That's for sure, and you know you go into places like that
I always think of the archetypal diner in that way, you know you guys have been in this diner
There's a really good opposite diner, and there's a great video on YouTube
it's Tom Waits reading reading a poem by
Bukowski, and I think it's called Nirvana
and it's about a good diner that he happened to visit Bukowski happened to visit when he was on a bus when he was a
when he was a kid, a diner where everything was going well, and you could listen to that. It's great. I think it's great
Tom Waits: Not much chance completely cut loose from purpose
he was a young man riding a bus to North Carolina on the way to somewhere
and it began to snow
and the bus stopped at a little café in the hills and the passengers entered
and he sat at the counter with the others and he ordered, food arrived
and the meal was particularly good
and the coffee
the waitress was unlike the women he'd known
she was unaffected and there was a natural humour which came from her
and the fry cook said crazy things
and the dishwasher in the back laughed a good clean pleasant laugh
and the young man watched the snow through the window
and he wanted to stay in that café forever
the curious feeling swam through him that everything was beautiful there
and it would always stay beautiful there
and then the bus driver told the passengers that it was time to board
and the young man thought I’ll just stay here
I’ll just stay here
and then he rose and he followed the others onto the bus
he found his seat and looked at the café through the window
and then the bus moved off down a curve downward out of the hills
the young man looked straight forward
and he heard the other passengers speaking of other things
or they were reading or attempting to sleep
and they hadn't noticed the magic
and the young man put his head to one side
closed his eyes and pretended to sleep
there was nothing else to do
just to listen to the sound of the engine
the sound of the tires
in the snow
Jordan Peterson: This is the opposite diner. I'm thinking my so you'll go into a diner, right?
It's seven o'clock in the morning,
and you order some bacon and eggs and some toast and then you look around in the diner and you think
It was like 1975 when the windows were last washed and there's this kind of thick coating of who-gives-a-damn
grease on the walls you know and and the floor too has got that sort of stickiness that you really have to work
at to develop over years, you know and the waitress is
she's not happy to be there and the guy behind the counter isn't happy that that happens to be the waitress that he's working with
And then you know you walk down the stairs,
maybe to the washroom, and that's its own little trip and so you come back, and you order your damn eggs
And you order your toast and you order your bacon
And then it comes and like the eggs are too cooked on the bottom
So they're kind of brown, and then they're kind of raw on top and and they're cold in the middle,
which is, you really have to work to cook an egg like that, man.
But you can master that with like ten years of bitterness, teach you how to cook an egg like that
and then the toast--here's what you do with the toast, right--you put
You take the white bread, you know the pre-sliced stuff that no one should ever eat
Then you put that in the toaster and you overcook it and then you wait
And then you'd pop it out of the toaster and then because it's overcooked you scrape it off
And you knock off the crumbs, so it doesn't look too burnt
And then you wait til it's cold
And then you put cold margarine on it because if you put cold--first of all not butter--
but if you put cold margarine or you can also kind of tear holes in it so that then it has lumps of
margarine in it and it's really dry except where it's too greasy, so that's like its own little work of art, man.
And then you put that on the side,
with the eggs, and then you have the potatoes, and this is how you cook the potatoes properly
you know so they're leftover potatoes and
You keep dumping new leftover potatoes into the old leftover potatoes over weeks
And so some of the potatoes have--they're no longer potatoes right, they've half-returned to mother Earth
then you flop them on the grill and you sort of
I dunno. Oh, you burn them a bit. I guess and then you've slapped them on the plate and jesus you don't eat those man
That's for sure, and that's the point and then
You have the bacon and you want to make sure you buy the lowest possible quality bacon,
That's how you start, and then you throw it on the grill
And your grill has to be overheated to do this--you have to
cook the bacon so that it's raw in places and burnt in other places
And it has that
delightful pig-like odor that only really cheap badly cooked bacon can provide or maybe you use those little breakfast sausages that
no one in their bloody right mind would let within 15 feet of anything living you know and
Then you serve that right, and you serve it with the kind of orange juice that is only orange in color
and then with coffee, that's ah
What would you say? It was started too early in the morning. That's the first thing
Bad quality coffee started too early in the morning
got cold once or twice and has been reheated and then you serve that with
whitener.
Like here's your breakfast. It's like no, man. That's not breakfast. That's hell
And you created it
And then what you do, if you have a diner like that--because you have a miserable life if you have a diner like that
And you've really worked on achieving that--is every night you go home and you curse your wife
And you curse your kids
And you fucking well curse God too for producing a universe where a diner like yours is allowed to exist
And that's your bloody life.