Habit of Being, an Introduction

As you might guess from the title and URL of my blog, I love Flannery O'Connor. I named my first car after one of her peacocks (Colonel Eggbert). I fantasize about meeting her in heaven. Also, God.

If you, like most people who are acquainted with Flan Flan, only know her through her most famous story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," you may wonder what's so great about this woman who wrote Southern Grotesque fiction and died of Lupus in the sixties. Let me help you.

Beginning tonight, I will intermittently make blog entries which present my favorite moments from Habit of Being, a 600 pg collection of Flannery's letters. I'll arrange them by subject so you can know up front whether or not you'll be interested. Consider this entry a sampler plate of O'Connor quotes. Maybe, like me, you'll find yourself steadily falling in love with this woman from Georgia who raised peacocks and wrote stories about men who steal wooden legs from girls. Who knows?

I am doing fairly well these days, though I am practically bald-headed on top and have a watermelon face. I think that this is going to be permanent… I stay strictly out of the sun and strictly do not take any exercise. No great hardship.

1-25-53

I have just got back from 2 days in NYC. There is one advantage in it because although you see several people you wish you didn’t know, you see thousands you’re glad you don’t know.

11-5-49

I have got my last draft off to the publisher and now am raising ducks like a respectable citizen. I have twenty-one. However, if the Lord is willing, I am shortly going to eat all twenty-one of them and start another novel.

10-18-51

I had to go have my picture taken for the purposes of Harcourt, Brace. They were all bad. (The pictures.) The one I sent looked as if I had just bitten my grandmother and that this was one of my few pleasures, but all the rest were worse. We liked your Christmas card very much and recognized yer assorted children.

Early 1952

Miss B. is still violently interested in finding herself a husband and still asks personal questions without any preparation and at the most inconvenient times. I do wish somebody would marry the child and shut her up. I am touched by her but you know what a long way a little goes.

5-23-52

I am taking painting again but none of my paintings go over very big in this house although mamma puts them up and is loth to take them down again. Sister used to teach painting classes in her youth and she says she doesn’t like this modern art because it’s not “smoothed down.” My mamma says it’s not modern art (insulted), it’s very true to nature and there’s no use spending five hours on a painting you can do in two. This refers to the fact that I have been painting with a palette knife because I don’t like to wash brushes.

Summer 1953

Mr. P. is taking a correspondence course in Catholicism. He is not going to be a Catholic or anything—he just likes to get things free in the mail.

August 1953

I would like to create the impression over the television that I’m a hillbilly Thomist, but I will probably not be able to think of anything to say to Mr. Harvey Breit but “Huh?” and “Ah dunno.” When I come back I’ll probably have to spend three months day and night in the chicken pen to counteract these evil influences… I wish somebody really intelligent would write me sometime but I seem to attract the lunatic fringe mainly. I will be real glad when this television thing is over with. I keep having a mental picture of my glacial glare being sent out over the nation onto millions of children who are waiting impatiently for The Batman to come on.

5-18-55

I don’t deserve much credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

6-10-55

The latest came from a Mr. Semple of Cincinnati who has not read anything of mine but doesn’t really see how I can say a good man is hard to find. He is an industrial engineer, likes to play bridge, is the active type, 31 years old, single etc. etc. I wrote Mr. Semple that I didn’t think I’d like him a bit but he would be crazy about me as I had seven gold teeth and weighed 250 pounds.

6-16-55

Arizona Road Trip!

I have not posted in a long time. A long time indeed. So I thought I'd share a little about my road trip to Arizona last week. Probably won't write about the whole trip, but at least it'll break the dry spell.

Day One
Victor, John Mark, and I set out for Prescott, AZ at 6:30 AM. I bought a pair of Converse shoes last month, years after the trend was at its peak, having taken that long for me to work up the self-confidence to tap into the "cool skater" look. Now, I realize that Converse shoes make my toes amazingly cold. Even so, I'm not getting cold feet: this trip is going to be awesome.

After John Mark, a veritable encyclopedia, names an interesting fact about almost every town we pass, we cross the border into New Mexico. All the buildings are tan adobe on a tan, dirty landscape, hiding in plain sight like soldiers in camo gear. It's kind of ridiculous, actually. New Mexico says "we love tan" like Chic Fil A workers say "my pleasure."

For lunch, we stop in Albuquerque, the Weird Al song soundtracking in my mind until we leave ("Where the sun is always shining and the air smells like warm root beer"). We pull into a parking lot for Subway, but then see an adjacent Mexican grocery store and decide to check it out. As we're walking in, a Texan woman, as evidenced by her big hair and big accent, pulls up in her car and addresses us: "Is this a Mexycan resturaun?"

"We don't know, we're just checking it out."

"Well is it a resturaun?"

"We've never been here. We're on a roadtrip."

She pauses half a beat, comes to a decision, and says, "Well, I'll just wait here and see if you come out."

Sure enough, she follows us in three minutes later. I hear her at the counter asking for "More cheese. More CHEESE. MORE CHEEEESE!"

Albuquerque. ("where anyone on the street will gladly shave your back for a nickel.")

All the workers at the Mexican grocery store speak spanish (go figure). Victor foretells, "They're going to speak to me in spanish." They do. Also, Victor arrives at the counter and pays sixty cents for a drink. Turning to me, he whispers, "Sixty cents! Back in America this would be at least..." and then catches himself. This isn't another country, Victor. Just Albuquerque. ("Where the shriners and the lepers play their ukuleles all day long.")

We cross into Arizona, and somehow the chiles rellenos burrito I ate for lunch doesn't give me any problems. In fact, the entire trip is easy. Sunny skies. Good company. No traffic or construction.

We left Colorado as the sun was rising, and we arrive in Prescott as it's setting. There is spaghetti, a game of Catan, and kids running everywhere. And then bed.

Day Two

An interesting disaster happened that night, namely, that Victor found a very comfortable sheet in the middle of the night and wrapped himself in it. Unfortunately, it was not a sheet. It was a window curtain. During the rest of the trip, I catch our hosts checking on other household items, making sure Victor hasn't put them to some ungodly use. "That's not a napkin, it's our cat." Or, "Can you please use a Q-tip for your ears, instead of our homegrown carrots?"

Shiloh kindly makes us a quiche, which is like Heaven in a crock pot, only filled with cheese and meat instead of God and the saints.

That morning we get the tour of Prescott, which as it turns out, is pronounced by locals to rhyme with "Biscuit." Who knew? Prescott is an amalgamation of old hippies, young students, and outdoorsy folk. Everything is a something/bar. Icecream/beer. Hair salon/saloon. It's weird.

We eat lunch at In-N-Out, which (for me) does not measure up to the hype. Good shakes, though.

And then the afternoon. Oh Lord, the afternoon! After removing the canoe from the backyard, where it is covered with scraps of lumber and dusty from disuse, we set out for a lake ten minutes from their house. This lake is the best of all lakes, at least to a Coloradoan who sees the dog's water dish and calls it a pond. The water is calm, and towers of rock jut up from it. This makes it a perfect place for adventure, as you can maneuver between islands or park your boat and go hiking (Park? That can't be right. Moor? Hitch?).

The afternoon is perfect.

On the way back home, we are in such good spirits that we flirt with a pair of girls who pulls up next to us at a stop light. When the light changes, I keep accelerating or decelerating as necessary to keep in line with their car, making the three of us feel awkward and also a little charming. After a few minutes of this, we are dancing wildly, and so are the girls, they in their jeep and us in our.... uh, minivan. Yes, we're in Shiloh's minivan. But we have a boat strapped to the top, so that has to count for something.

That night we eat chicken teriyaki with rice, which is delicious. (You can tell I'm related to my mom, who will forget entire days of a vacation while remembering every single meal. Also, you can tell I'm fasting today.)

During dinner, the youngest daughter becomes obsessed with finding out how many days remain till her birthday. After shutting herself in a room for fifteen minutes to concentrate on her calculations, she emerges triumphantly with an announcement: "Forty-six hundred days!"

The guys try to teach me Halo, which I have somehow avoided my entire life. I do wonderfully. I'm sorry, did I say wonderfully? I meant to say disastrously. I get killed dozens of times and never shoot a single person. It is enormous fun, actually.

Later, we watch a few episodes of Portlandia and eat icecream. (Is icecream a liquid or solid? I'm only fasting solid food today...)

Before we go to bed, Victor says to me, "Today was a good day."

Spies #3

This is the story of how I became a spy.

It all started when I was enlisted to partake in a Quest, a scavenger hunt of sorts heavy with secret agent elements, put together by friends. My roommate, we’ll call him Bombador Ali, and I immediately began preparing clues for Sydney and Bristow, our challengers:

We hollowed out a book and placed a camera inside, researched matrices to encode messages, and printed maps on transparencies, maps which only revealed a path when overlaid with alternate diagrams. I climbed a fire escape ladder and hid a message at the top. Bombador removed ceiling panels and climbed into a dusty attic, finding his way by the light of his cell phone while college professors chatted one floor below. (A creak on the stairs!—we pause, Bombador’s foot dangling from a removed panel in the ceiling… the creak is a false alarm. We resume.)

We thought we were awesome. (And to be honest, we are rather awesome. Hollowed out books? How much cooler can a man get?) We worried that the quest they were creating for us would not measure up to ours.

Then the Quest was launched. Bombador was at a birthday party when I received the email initiating the quest, so I opened it without him. It read: “A friend (or foe?) sent you a self-destructing message. You have one chance to read it.” I clicked on the link provided, which sent me to a new website. Numbers in the upper right corner immediately started counting down from sixty seconds, and I read the message quickly. In short, the text stated that Bombador and I were to meet in the basement of a building on campus at 9:00 PM, wearing “the appropriate attire.” When the ticker hit zero, the message erased.

That was my first hint that their quest was of a high caliber indeed. Self destructing messages! This was a spy’s bread and butter, and I was swallowing it without even chewing.

Bombador returned. Being too poor to own a suit, I borrowed one from another roommate. Bombador wore a black wool cap and leather jacket. I looked like James Bond, and Bombador resembled a feisty henchman. At 9:00 sharp, we arrived at the specified location. I was more giddy than severe, and it showed. I became a chatterbox, spouting off words so fast that later, when Bombador repeated to me some of the things I’d said, I didn’t even remember them.

A dour stranger in a long tan trench coat approached us. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was smiling broadly, unable to hide my eagerness. The man handed me a briefcase, nodded once, and departed, all without a word.

Back at base, we watched the DVD provided inside the briefcase. Words scrolled across a black screen: “We’ve been watching you.”

Suddenly, I appear onscreen. A shaky camera follows me as I walk through the school cafeteria, tray of food in hand. I look in the direction of the camera, and the image freezes, zeroing in on my face. Next, the video transitions to show Bombador, standing in a stairway. A third scene reveals Bombador and I, standing and reading a newspaper.

As we watched this, Bombador and I giggled like children on a Tilt-A-Whirl. While I’m sure it might freak out a person who is less obsessed with spies, the fact that Sidney and Bristow had taped us without our knowledge was invigorating. I was impressed with the skill required to pull off such a feat, but more than that, I was impressed by their audacity.

Sidney and Bristow were not amateurs. Whereas before, Bombador and I had worried that their quest would pale in comparison to ours, we now worried that the quest we’d created wasn’t good enough.

So we made a plan. We would break into their apartment.

Spies #2

While hanging out at my friend Penelope Rubix’s house a few years ago, I discovered in her father’s desk drawer a wad of currency from a range of nations. (I made this discovery while searching for a stapler. I know, I know, this is just the sort of lame excuse you would expect from an amateur spy, but it’s true.) Upon asking Penelope why her father—we’ll call him Mr. X—would possess such a stash, she replied that he goes overseas a lot on business.

On business.

I knew exactly what those words meant. My suspicion only mounted when I asked what her father did for a living.

“He works with computers,” she said.

I wasn’t sure whether she thought I was stupid, or whether she was really that naïve. “Working with computers” is the spy’s equivalent of the adulterer’s “staying late at work.”

Following this incident I began to make other curious observations in relation to Penelope’s family. For instance, every time I called her via her family’s landline, I heard a slight clicking sound before the call connected. Hers is the only phone I have ever noticed do such a thing.

I questioned Penelope about her father’s prior occupations. Turns out Mr. X used to work inside a government base. Mr. X’s office was not open to civilians, including his family. Because of this, Penelope knew very little information about what his job entailed.

(I, by contrast, knew much about what his job entailed. From the little information I’d been given I was easily able to conjure the rest: Mr. X places his eye to a retinal scan, pausing in the next room for a thermal x-ray, before taking an elevator to the subterranean levels of the building. [If an agent in training were to accompany him one day, she would watch in confusion as he swiped a pass card over a scanner while simultaneously depressing the “door close” button. “Where are we going?” she’d ask. “The basement,” he’d reply. “But there is no basement!” “Precisely.” And she attempts to quiet a tremor that begins to overtake he fingers as the elevator descends and a cold stare enters Mr. X’s eyes.])

Mr. X quit working at the base eight years ago for no apparent reason. As if we, the American public, are meant to believe that spies can become non-spies by “quitting.” No, the truth is they move higher up the ranks, so high that they are no longer even allowed to admit they work for the government.

When the body of information verifying his secret agent status had accrued, I confronted Mr. X during a game of cards, asking him point blank if he was a spy. He was slow in answering, and a mercurial haze settled in his eyes.

“You got me,” he said. “I kill people for a living.”

His mischievous grin was chilling. I couldn’t discern whether he was toying with me or plotting to break into my house that night and strangle me.

“I better watch out then,” I said, grinning in kind. This is called repartee. Among the arsenal of spy skills, repartee is just as valuable as a silenced pistol or tight leather pants. I laughed, effectively breaking the tension that had amassed in the room.

“I’m joking,” I said.

“I know,” he responded.

We continued playing cards, matching move for move, navigating through other conversation topics. I avoided Mr. X’s gaze for the rest of the night.

And I’m still alive. The amateur spy must understand the advisability of playing dumb when a situation demands it, rather than ending up dead in a bathtub, as Sidney Bristow’s boyfriend did on the very first episode of Alias. I may have uncovered a bona fide conspiracy, but this knowledge is worthless if I play the idiot and “out” an American agent.

What I would really like to say is, if I have uncovered conspiracies in the lives of friends and loved ones (and there are more examples to come), it is not illogical to extend speculation to others we know. Perhaps it reveals the true nature of our existence, when we begin to question whether our friends’ lives—and our own—aren’t really so mundane as we believe. And if we are not so mundane as we believe, then our lives can hold up to a bit more inspection, a heightened curiosity. We must be skeptical of our neighbor’s ordinary façade and of our friends’ seeming monotony. A bit of digging will reveal the truth.

Spies #1

There is a certain claim that is easily made but should never be believed. It is simply this: I am not a spy.

That being said, I am not a spy.

I am, to be honest, an average human being. I am a white, Protestant, straight male who lives in a suburb with a middle-class family. Like many twenty-somethings, coffee is my drug of choice. My favorite color is blue. I feel like a hipster when I wear a sweater.

If you’ve watched the TV show Chuck, you know that the very characteristics that make me seem ordinary also make me a prime candidate for accidentally falling into a heinous conspiracy—or at the very least, wanting to. Thus, my obsession with spies.

*The entries you are about to read take place over a lifetime of infatuation with spies. They are not made up. Many names have been changed for the safety (and sometimes dignity) of those involved.

Junior High saw the pinnacle of my attempt to achieve secret agent savvy. It was during these formational years that I became obsessed with the TV show, Alias. Jennifer Garner plays Sidney Bristow, a spy who discovers that she is working for the “bad guys” and decides to become a double agent. In between episodes, I was often inspired to practice sparring with a friend, a pastime which we stopped after I roundhouse kicked him in the face, causing blood to spurt from his mouth. I’ll admit: I had never felt so badass in my life. The feeling was unwarranted, however, as my successful kick owed more to junior high gawkiness than any skill.

Some commentary: Spies are not people who accidentally kick others’ faces. Spies are people who, when held from behind, run their feet up a wall, propel themselves backwards over their assailant’s head, and land perfectly after rotating fully and delivering a scissor kick to the neck.

It was during my Alias years that my then girlfriend phoned to reveal her identity as a secret agent. She gave such proofs as her mother’s German accent and referenced a tube of lipstick she allegedly owned that doubled as a gun. My skepticism crumbled in a matter of minutes, with less credit to her storytelling skill than my own desire to be romantically involved with a spy. When she revealed an hour later that day that it was all a farce, I was crestfallen.

(As for her German mother, she was in fact only German, not a spy.)

My life is a connect-the-dots of small-scale conspiracies. A few weeks ago, as I waited to pass through airport security, I questioned whether the African American woman in front of me was traveling under an assumed identity. She handed her passport to the security guard, and I noted pink skin peeking out at the base of her neck and behind her ears, as if she had not quite finished a hasty disguise. The thought that she might only have a skin problem didn’t occur to me until later.

I would be lying if I claimed that I don’t question even close friends’ hobbies and occupations regularly. Maybe you would question too, if you knew the people I know. Consider my next-door neighbor, who recently grew a bushy beard, shaved his head, and put on weight so that he could integrate into Somalian culture and catch pirates off the north-eastern coast.

It is easy to understand why a guy like me might find solace in the world of spies. Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt are nothing if not extraordinary. Even when performing mundane tasks, such as crossing a street or climbing into a car, they do so with an economy of movement and a style that comes naturally. Their every action is streamlined to display an inherent importance, and they exercise control of the most impossible of situations.

I have often wished that I were a spy. Or at the very least, dating one. Then I would be involved in that world of intrigue and secrets; of cars, houses, and warehouses that explode in bursts of flame; of pricy liqueurs and pricier vehicles; of women who speak their minds and betray the presence of a gun through slits in black satin dresses.

It’s a dangerous world, to be certain. In fact, as I was reading this entry aloud to my mom, she looked at me sternly and delivered an exhortation with utter sobriety: “I would be careful what you say in that thing.”

“Why?”

“What if the real ones read it?”

What, indeed?

Tune in next Saturday for part two. If I die of a mysterious heart attack before then, you’ll know why.