This is what I always grab at the gym
The Atlantic
The Economist
The New York Times Magazine or a left over Week In Review or the NYRB
and O Magazine
The Atlantic tells you how terrible everything is. In fact, they all do in one way or another. This is why I get them. I am cravenly anxious about everything but I torment myself by finding out more and more things to be distressed about. If you enjoy believing we are in the end times or facing catastrophe, you too might want to read these things.
So how does O Magazine fit in? You may think there's a disrepancy here, but it's only on the surface. Because O Magazine and only O Magazine, i.e., The Magazine of all things Oprah tells you how you can live in a world of bad, bad things, like the Middle East and the melting polar icecaps and Famine in East Africa and your overly critical mother.
For do you not know that O Magazine is designed specifically to help you live in a world such as ours, a world of strife and violence and suffering and environmental collapse and poverty and injustice and turmoil and geopolitical instability, obesity and war even if things like the Middle East are only mentioned in passing and then usually in a culinary context?
O Magazine is the cure for all that mankind is faced with in this grim, dark age.
One of the main methods O utilizes is to get you to forget about the strife, etc., etc. Another technique is to think about something nice, something soothing, like a waterfall or if that doesn't work to smell something pleasant, like peppermint or lemons. Phffft, it all sounds so simple as I explain it here. It's not in the least--it's very complex and difficult and requires many experts. I'm just not good at explaining how its done. For that, you must read O Magazine again and again. At least a one year subscription is necessary (unless you go to a gym where O is always there, as I do) but it may be several years before you more than mere glimmers of the light.
It sounds very avant garde, 'O'. And yet it is not. It is just 'O'.
Now, if you are curious about this magazine and want to find it, it's quite easy because every month, on the cover is an extra large picture of Oprah herself, Oprah always.
You cannot fail to find it. The magazine is very large and full of things. Full of things like hope, and bliss and joy and comfort and peace and forgiveness.
They may interview Charlize Theron (about the bad childhood, yes, always about the bad childhood. People tell Oprah EVERYTHING) but, my friend, you better fucking bet that it's Oprah who's going to be on the cover.
God, I love those covers. I examine them so closely. Oprah always wears something thematic--like for a spring issue she will wear green. I can't help but notice Oprah and the sameness of Oprah all the time makes you so much more attentive to every detail that changes. It's like those Zen artists who painted the same tree branch every day over and over again through each season and for years on end--for seeing is difficult, true comprehension of what is, is not easy and I believe this is the lesson the Oprah herself wants to give us.
Oh, who am I kidding. I love Oprah, the woman herself.
I have these strange unconscious beliefs, I realized one day. Among these: The belief that I am going to go to Japan at some point for a long visit; that I'm going to be fabulously wealthy; that I'm going to be in a high speed car chase. But the surprising subconscious assumption I have, one that never makes it close enough to the surface for me to examine and question it-- is that I'm going to be really, really good friends with Oprah.
Someday, Oprah is going to need me.
For Oprah is the sort of person who would be a friend, a true friend, not just a friend that buys you diamond pendants and extreme amazingly fabulous face cream and lends you her personal chef and always remembers what number your cholesterol count is but a friend who will want to know everything EVERYTHING about you. And who will not just say 'oh, everyone is beaten/neglected/ugly as a child but someone who will care. ALOT.
Not like those other friends, those friends who just buy you a beer once in a while but make you feel so guilty about it you end up buying them a six pack the next time you come over to visit.
Actually, I don't have any friends. But if I did, I know that is what would happen. Still, thanks to O Magazine I will not be bothered by this, I will take out my affirmation cards (conveniently perforated and put within O Magazine like a present they made just for you) and read them and be filled with the light of forgiveness and inner tranquility.
O Magazine has a kind of strange feature, however. An almost mystical feature. There are experts on virtually every thing you can imagine and their wisdom is dispensed by the bucketload in each thick, glossy issue of O.
And yet, it is almost impossible to remember anything that you've ever read in O shortly thereafter. You can pick up your copy of O from last month and it is as if you never read it. The advice, it seems vaguely familiar. Be goal oriented or stop being so goal oriented or laugh more. Vaguely, as if it were a dream, you remember getting that advice...and yet, and yet...did you? Why can you not remember it? The waters of lethe close over the O reader quickly.
One cure is to supplement your reading of O with regular (and by this I mean daily, not including weekends) viewing of Oprah. They really need to go together.
I'm being snide here but this is all prompted by a realization--at all the dark points of my life, it seems, I gravitate to Oprah. Oprah draws me in. I remember--during one particularly troubled long distance relationship when stuck in my lover's house and alone all day*--the hours would drag by, the ticking clock, I'm trying to write my dissertation but the more I sit there the more agitated I become...by 2 p.m. I'd be positively...well, napping sometimes, but nervously napping--and then, and then--I'd realize there was a goal in my shapeless, meaningless day and that was to wait for Oprah to come on at 4.
The loneliness would lessen, the feeling that annihilation was better than this continued hollow existence would dissipate and Oprah--or her guests, specialists in the most insane and random areas of human life--would tell me to drink more water, drink lots and lots of water or something (the water drinking is the only thing that ever took) and...I don't know. I realized there was hope. Kind of. Not really, but I realized some people thought there was hope. Some people don't let things like genocide and the fact that the stain of humanity's crimes will never be washed from the earth get them down. It's not that they never talk about genocide on "Oprah". I'd bet my life savings that Oprah's already done a show about genocide. But you know what, no matter what horrors they confront, Oprah goes on and "Oprah" goes on and so you can get up in the morning too, or at least in the mid-morning. More to the point, you should.
Basically, the theme is 'if you have the right information, there is no reason whatsoever to kill yourself.' And 'you can always be better.'
And sometimes we all need to hear that.
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