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| A Wonderful Mentor -- Lex Mitchell (left) back in his acting days. |
Apart from the fact that it is Sunday in my part of the world, the title is rather random.
Which is what this blog will be. (But not without substance.)
I'm a little blocked up creatively. I have several blog entries in the works and usually do. But the right juices aren't flowing. So forgive me the indulgence of this stream-of-consciousness entry. It might unclog the works. Some salts for the creative brain.
So, it's Sunday. People are in church, hospital, the grave, the funhouse, casinos, Chinese factories, Latin American sweatshops, NFL comas, beds, shitty prisons, jet airliners, movie houses, recording studios, stupors, cooking classes, dirty kitchens, fantasy worlds, savage realities... should I go on?
I'm always amazed at what's happening in the world at any given moment. This moment. The scope and variety and pure living theater of it. Somewhere a child is being bargained for while someone else gets married or gnashes their way towards divorce while someone else puts a gun to their head while someone else digs for a fossil that might answer a question about our race while someone else slips a pack of teeth whiteners in their coat at the local supermarket while someone else looks at an old photo and remembers something. Billions of events, tiny and large, in every corner of the globe.
The human race is a fascinating mass-multitude of stories being written simultaneously. How incredible is that?
It's the highest of high art that can never be simulated by the greatest writer or painter or, God help us, computer genius.
Which makes it kind of a sin to sit in your living room on a Sunday. Or too much on any day, for that matter. Much better to wander the streets and look for the interesting secrets we generally whiz by in our cars. There's poetry out there.
I once had a mate who used to say "I'm gonna suck the juice out of life." He was a wild one who shared Billy the Kid's surname.
He went to the farewell get-together for our college business class dressed in a bloodied butcher's apron. Why not? It was a lark. Our business school -- inaugural as it was -- existed in part of a monastery set in the countryside just southwest of Sydney.
You can't ask for a better beginning in higher education than that. It was 1983-4. I loved every moment. Good friends. Interesting classes. (I'd been a high school time-waster so the only way I got into college was through the "mature entry" program. Fate played the straight man, as it often does.)
We played touch footy in every break and flirted with the girls constantly. I was a few years older so I flirted with the receptionist as well. ("Hold some of my calls!") We were surrounded by trees and pastures and the wafting meditations of the monks. Times were good.
Every Friday, when classes were over, I'd get on the F5 (have I got my freeways right? It's so long ago), and I'd usually put on Foreigner's second album "Double Vision" (cassette tapes in those days) and roar up the highway to my home in the western suburbs before hitting the disco in Parramatta with my best mate, Bazza. AKA The Dead Man. I recall that the surging, evocative instrumental "Tramontine" would always be playing when I passed this strange-looking structure perched out in the middle of nowhere. Some kind of mystery facility with mad professors undoubtedly feverishly at work.
Every time that happened it was an exultant, transcendent moment -- I felt invincible. The kind of moment that makes you realize your own life is a fascinating story. The kind of moment that you live for.
Yes, these were wonderful days. Sucking the juice out of life.
I had a professor at that college whom I'll never forget and will take the liberty of naming here.
His name was Lex Mitchell. He'd been a movie and TV actor of some standing in the 70s but was now, strange as it seemed, an accounting lecturer. (Actually this fitted Lex's philosophy on life perfectly. He'd tell us: "Don't get too caught up in one thing. Life is a smorgasbord. Taste everything. See what you like." Never a truer word spoken.)
Lex taught accounting the way Jack Kerouac might have taught writing or Charlie Parker might have taught jazz: throw out all the rules. I don't think we learned what the hell a balance sheet was until about Week 7. We were frantic and dismayed. We needed this important, factual, concrete shit so we could earn dollars later on in jobs that would kill our brains and give us cookie-cutter homes and picture book families.
We thought Lex was lazy. A nut. A show pony. Lacking in knowledge. Avoiding his duties. What was all this nonsense on the first day of the class?: "This will be an anthropological study of what it is accountants do." (Of course the message down the line was that they can bend financial "reality" in any fashion they like, which has huge implications for anything financial, including how the world is run.)
No, Lex wasn't a nut or a slacker. He had better plans for us. He valued our potential. And he wasn't about to lead us all the way to the water and show us how to drink. He was going to unsettle us, confuse us, even panic us. He would give us deeper lessons before the dumb nuts and bolts of "debits on the left and credits on the right." Lex was going to make us... think.
He became a friend. He was 46 and I was in my 20s. Sometimes he drove me nuts. But I loved the bloke.
I remember once in his office we were talking about all kinds of shit. I mentioned Montgomery Clift, the great film actor who'd died in 1966.
"How the hell do you know about Monty?" Lex asked, a little incredulous.
"I read his bio and watched his movies. Genius."
"I met him once back when I was acting," Lex said with a smile. "They pass this way but once."
Indeed.
I remember many things Lex taught me/us. Another time in his office we had another exchange.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"24."
He smiled. "24. It's all ahead of you. I'm 46. If I knew at your age what I know now I'd be running the show."
I never forgot that.
The thing is, you don't get to know at 24 what it takes 46 years to experience. We don't get that luxury. We only get to make our way as best we can, learn as we go, blunder as we must, and that is life. I felt a little sad because I think Lex, as rich as his life had been, had a reservoir of regret: which is the most useless, baseless emotion of them all. (I'll get into that another time.) His personal balance sheet, his profit and loss statement, was that he had a great mind and a fine heart and he had experienced and shared so much.
Lex also taught us some very powerful lessons in logic for dealing with the bullshit of the world. And I have kept them in my toolbox to this day.
He taught us to be wary of assertions. How often in lectures, arguments, testimonies, conversations, bull sessions, famous speeches that take us to war, ideas that lead to crimes, lectures that lead to bad learning, do we hear statements like: "The only way is to do XYZ." Or "Nobody will listen to you!" Or "This is a money maker." Pick any assertion you like.
[Dictionary definition of "assertion": a positive statement or declaration, often without support or reason]
Lex taught us that this is how people are often persuaded and morons get their way, but that assertions are baseless, often emotive, statements. They're bullshit.
His antidote? Always ask two questions: 1/ What do you mean? 2/ What is your evidence? He insisted that if you ask the question "What do you mean?" until your tongue bleeds, most arguments, and their purveyors, fall apart. As for evidence, most assertions are not backed by any. Try it. As Bill Hicks used to say: "It's logic. It'll help ya."
And then the world leaders with the bombs and the teachers teaching your kids and the lawyers trying to grind you into the dust for the love of money and the lover who is getting too emotional and the car salesman who wants to vacuum your bank account or the propagandist who would have us conforming and consuming like robots, will all actually have to come up with little things called facts. Better than 90% of the time, you'll find that that's game over.
I lost touch with Lex a bit before I moved to the States 15 years ago. I've tried tracking him down but can't find him. That keeps happening to me. I also lost touch with the Dead Man, who was almost like a brother to me, around the same time. He was the only person the high school reunion committee couldn't track down. Like D-Day in "Animal House." He could be living on a mountain in New Zealand or buried somewhere in an unmarked grave. Who knows? His disappearance is entirely fitting and very sad.
Lex would be about 73 now if he quit the smokes and made it this far. I hope he has. Men like him are few and far between. They have ideas that mean something and they're happy to share them with those smart enough to shut up and stop talking for a while and actually listen and learn.
It was a long time ago and I'm lucky to have had those experiences. I've had some great teachers. I sit here now in my living room in Las Vegas writing this, reflecting, appreciating the life I've had. But there is much yet to do!
Now I'll get off my own butt and go poke around the nooks and crannies this Vegas Sunday. Practice what I preach.
Well, this flowed pretty well, eh? A bit of a tale or two. Is there an overarching lesson? Perhaps it's simply that life can be supremely interesting. Intriguing. Painful. Depressing. Dangerous. Fun. Mysterious. And much more. We love, we lose love. We fight our battles and we win some, we lose some. That's the best anyone can manage. Rich or poor. Smart or dumb. Life is way too big to master so forget that nonsense.
Well, I thank you for reading.
Now go forth this holy Sunday and suck the juice out of life. Believe me, you have nothing better to do.
Take care and may God bless all the people who've disappeared from our lives,
Adrian Zupp
FOOTNOTE: This blog entry is dedicated to Jazmyn who was also a very special part of my life. And to Lex and the Dead Man, of course. [IF YOU LIKED this post, you might also like LIFE'S SHORT...MAKE IT COUNT.]
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