Eating the Dinosaur

From a sociological standpoint, what I find most interesting about this query is the way it inevitably splits between gender lines: Women usually advise themselves not to do something they now regret (i.e., “Don’t sleep with Corey McDonald, no matter how much he pressures you”), while men almost always instruct themselves to do something they faile

ecstatic.

Here’s a question I like to ask people when I’m 5/8; drunk: Let’s say you had the ability to make a very brief phone call into your own past. You are (somehow) given the opportunity to phone yourself as a teenager; in short, you will be able to communicate with the fifteen-year-old version of you. However, you will only get to talk to your former s

2. It’s my job. Except that it wasn’t. I wasn’t promoting anything. In fact, the interaction could have been detrimental to my career, were I to have inadvertently said something insulting about the king of Norway. Technically, there was more downside than upside.

1. I felt I had something important to say. Except I did not. No element of our interaction felt important to me. If anything, I felt unqualified to talk about the things the reporter was asking me. I don’t have that much of an opinion about why certain Black Metal bands burn down churches.

6. When asked a direct question, it’s human nature to respond. This, I suppose, is the most likely explanation. It’s the crux of Frost/Nixon. But if this is true, why is it true? What is the psychological directive that makes an unanswered question discomfiting?

3. I have an unconscious, unresolved craving for attention. Except that this feels inaccurate. It was probably true twenty years ago, but those desires have waned. Besides, who gives a fuck about being famous in a country I’ll never visit? Why would that feel good to anyone? How would I even know it was happening?

4. I had nothing better to do. This is accurate, but not satisfactory.

Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.