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Rick’s April Tirade Indecision Hamlet suffered from it. Werewolves and politicians rarely do. Indecision appears to be an affliction of the cerebrally inclined. Still, the knowledge that our disorder is intellectually upscale fails to provide much comfort when we’re in the throes of it. We sweat and struggle to push ourselves over that hefty hump of inner conflict, but somehow we fall back. We can almost hear the werewolves and politicians mocking us for our tribulations, and I’d hate to imagine what they sound like in chorus. People who wrestle with depression have a notoriously hard time with decisions; cynics and pessimists probably aren’t much more effective, since we share the depressives’ melancholy assumption that most of our enterprises will come to ruin. We weigh too much evidence, weigh it too long and generally accentuate the negative. How can we decide whether to vacation in Maine or Mexico when either trip could leave us dead or at least diseased? For many of us, making a decision sets the cosmic Rube Goldberg machinery in motion; eventually the duck will press a lever and a bowling ball will drop roundly on our head. I envy people who decide easily; no doubt they enjoy superior health and long life as an added bonus. They see no subtle and perplexing shades of gray; their high-contrast mental pictures make it a simple matter to decide what’s right or wrong, productive or counterproductive, good or evil -- even when they’re comparing bunches of bananas at the supermarket. (Evil bananas get left behind for folks like me.) People equipped by nature with this skill are apparently so uncommon that we revere them as leaders -- in the office, on the street, or in the carpeted sanctuaries of power. Statesmen like FDR, Churchill and Hitler had this in common: they won the allegiance of their respective flocks by ALWAYS speaking with the conviction of certainty. You can detect that same unassailable sense of certainty even in writers and media figures who have developed cult followings over the years: Dr. Johnson, H. L. Mencken, Ayn Rand and Rush Limbaugh come to mind. On a less exalted plane, you can hear the certainty in the bleatings of any late-night televangelist or mayoral candidate. These self-assured citizens have no trouble making up their minds. They have the requisite high-contrast mentalities that enable them to be decisive and unequivocal in their pronouncements. Either you’re saved or you’re damned; there’s no room for limbo in their universe, and somehow their sheepish followers find that clarity comforting. They want to believe in a leader who says yes or no with a flourish; they can’t abide the soulful reflections of a Jimmy Carter with his sighing intimations of a "national malaise." No, the world is run by people who decide easily and loudly. Sheep, being essentially decision-impaired creatures, will follow anyone who appears to know where he’s going, even if he’s headed across the Santa Monica Freeway at rush hour. We respond to leaders who see the world crisply defined in black and white. Decisions, of course, aren’t always a matter of black and white, yes or no, do or don’t. Sometimes the number of possible options could overwhelm a small computer. Think of choosing a college... a career... a gift for that morose cousin from Wisconsin you don’t really know but who will be showing up for the holidays. Think about us poor writers, eyes fixed upon a blank screen, faced with an infinite number of possible ways to say what we want to say -- assuming that we actually KNOW what we want to say. It’s just us and the English language, all 514,886 glorious words of it (and that’s only my best guess; I’m sure the roster is continually expanding). Do we start our first sentence with "The," "When," "How," "Purple" or "Pulchritudinous"? And after that, then what? It’s back to sifting through those same 514,886 words for an encore. The more words you know, the harder it is to decide which ones to use. Let’s face it: writing is one damned decision after another. If we’re dedicated to our craft, we make a few thousand of those decisions in a day. If we’re any good, at least 98 percent of them must be correct and true. You can see why I try not to write every day. Right now my fiancée Anne D. and I are in the process of buying a house -- another harrowing experience for the indecisive. After whittling down the choice of potential neighborhoods to a few suitably antiquated and only marginally dangerous ones in Northwest Philadelphia, we started looking at the available houses in those neighborhoods. Our agent showed us singles and twins, stucco and stone, Tudor and Victorian. We peered at porches, entry halls, stairways and balustrades, bathrooms, bedrooms and basements. We examined the quality of the floors and ceilings. We flushed upstairs toilets to check the water pressure. We poked at peeling paint and pointed at suspicious water stains. One house, situated on a charming and desirable street, seemed hopelessly cramped inside. Another impressed us as stately and cavernous but probably too much house to handle. I liked a plucky little 1830 farmhouse now flanked by twentieth-century neighbors; for Anne it brought back unwelcome memories of a similar house in a previous life. Anne loved a hefty stone edifice that needed a new roof and would have propelled us beyond our budget. We both turned away from a handsome carriage house renovated inside to resemble a 1960s dream of the perfect bachelor pad. Finally, happily, we both fell in love with the same house: a century-old converted stable, complete with its original blacksmith’s forge and tack room. The horse-house was more diminutive than most of the ones we had seen, but it called to us with its shady brick piazza and walled garden, its rustic pillars and shapely cupola. It looked like a Munchkin version of Mount Vernon, with a bit of California mission thrown in for good measure. We wanted it, we bid on it, we signed on the dotted lines. Then we panicked. The house had no basement; what if we wouldn’t have room for all our decades of collected stuff? (The stuff was mostly mine.) It wasn’t enough house for us, Anne lamented. But if we withdrew from the deal and bid on a larger house, we’d have to factor in my general incompetence at home repair and improvement. That incompetence, of course, would expand in direct proportion to the size of the house in which I would exercise it. Both options now looked equally dismal: it was a choice between "too little house" and "too much house," with no comfortable territory in between; we wondered if I could even manage the upkeep on the cozy horse-house with the cupola. In other words, even "too little house" might be too much house for the likes of me. We balked; we agonized; we ignored our real estate agent’s call the next morning while we pondered our choice and mourned our indecisiveness. My aversion to making decisions is legendary among those who know me. My father used to enjoy telling friends and relatives about the time he bought two freshly minted Rutgers University sweatshirts of different designs, one for himself and one for me. He generously offered me the first pick. I looked at one, with its cartoonish Scarlet Knight mascot waving his lance on horseback beneath the letters. Then I looked at the other, loudly emblazoned with a rotund college seal and the superfluous word UNIVERSITY rolling across the belly, as if we had to assure the world that our alma mater was a lofty and ambitious institution that granted actual doctoral degrees. I would have preferred a simple collegiate RUTGERS with no additional ornamentation, but these were my choices. Again I looked at one sweatshirt, then the other. The one with the charging knight was pure corn, despite a certain lively pictorial value; the one with the university seal looked ponderous and overburdened with blood-red lettering. I compared and contrasted; I raised and lowered my eyebrows; I stalled for time. Finally, after at least a full minute of wretched deliberation, as my father looked on with a combination of amusement and genuine concern, I shunned the Scarlet Knight and went with the great seal: the utilitarian won out over the ridiculous. In retrospect, I believe I made the wrong decision. (When you’re given a choice between the utilitarian and the ridiculous, any fool knows you should honor the ridiculous.) To be presented with two comparable and vaguely unpalatable options; to weigh the evidence; to ponder; to squirm; to make the wrong choice anyway: this is the pessimist’s nightmare scenario. My father might have chuckled because the object of my indecision was a mere sweatshirt, but I knew I was rehearsing for all of life’s weighty decisions in which neither option satisfies but a choice still has to be made. I also knew that my decision would carry serious long-term consequences: I’d have to live with my chosen sweatshirt and wear its visible stamp upon my person each time I pulled it down over my head. John F. Kennedy faced a similar dilemma, of course, during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: he could choose to confront the Soviets and risk nuclear war, or he could back down and assure national humiliation. Two options, both of them dismal -- yet the first choice posed only a degree of risk while the second would have guaranteed disgrace. JFK consulted his team of heavyweight advisors (we should all be able to summon Robert McNamara or Dean Rusk when we choose sweatshirts and make other life-altering decisions). Kennedy decided to take the risk and challenge the Soviets. It turned out to be the right decision, even though most of us young Baby Boomers expected to be vaporized by mushroom clouds until Chairman Khrushchev finally backed off. Given two bleak options, Kennedy managed to score a national triumph. Meanwhile, I still have to live with that sweatshirt. I should tell you that I’m also planning to live with Anne D. in that converted stable that we loved and lamented. Anne stopped at my place the morning after the wretched Night of Indecision, pulled out a pad and drew diagrams of each room; we carefully measured my bulkier objects and plotted their potential location. My three enormous bookcases would fit in the living room after all, without blocking any windows or doorways; her sofa could squeeze into the family room upstairs; my parents’ old chrome kitchen table would be consigned to the blacksmith’s shop for now. We were at it all morning, and we concluded that we could fit -- with a little paring of superfluous possessions -- into our enticing new abode. Reason and a sketch pad had triumphed over indecision. Now there remained the minor matter of my presumed ineptitude at home repair and improvement. But that, good reader, will have to be the subject of a future tirade. Monthly tirades ©1996-2001 by Rick Bayan.  Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure: December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going November 2002 — A Raving Moderate August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving? July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy May 2002 — Speechophobia April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard January 2002 — Art for Slackers December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers August 2001 — Why Do We Bother? June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names April 2001 — Indecision March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address December 2000 — The 50th Tirade November 2000 — Travel Advisory October 2000 — Beyond Work September 2000 — More Work August 2000 — Work July 2000 — The Doves' Nest June 2000 — Great Affectations May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course March 2000 — A Living Heck February 2000 — On the Treachery of Time January 2000 — A Letter to the Future December 99 — Rare Bird November 99 — Not Just Another Obscure Ethnic Group October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered September 99 — Good Life, Bad Life, Better Life August 99 — Household Relics: An Elegy July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity June 99 — In Praise of Sloth May 99 — A Bug's Death April 99 — Obligations! March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary February 99 — A Grave Story January 99 — What's Left for Men? December 98 — On the Uses of Friends November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving October 98 — Grand Illusions September 98 — Filth August 98 — Will the Real God Please Stand Up? July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing June 98 — Lady Longevity May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely Clueless April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess March 98 — Humbuggery February 98 — Love and the Single Cynic January 98 — By the Sweat of Your Brow December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable? November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation Blues September 97 — Down with Natural Selection! August 97 — Noise July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable Man April 97 — The Cynic's Dream March 97 — Inequalities February 97 — Flesh and Mortality January 97 — How to Be a Success December 96 — Why I Can't Hate Christmas November 96 — How I Became a Cynic

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