In 1992, I joined The Philosopher’s Club.
Now, don’t get the wrong impression – it wasn’t some group of scholarly men and women sitting around a table discussing possible solutions for all the ills of modern life, except that’s kind of exactly what it was. So, let me explain.
Meeting The Group
A Friend of mine told me about this coffeehouse, just a few minutes from downtown. It slightly resembled your average neighborhood bar in that you were greeted by a long counter with stools where one could sit. Beyond that, you had several tables of varying sizes, a pool table and dart board in the far corner. The main difference between the two was that this place sold no alcohol.
I was looking for a place where I could go to meet people and be social, and since I wasn’t old enough to (legally) go to the bars, I decided to check it out. I knew a few people who occasionally went there, so a smart person probably would have asked one of them to join me, but I didn’t. I went alone.
I took a seat at the far corner of the bar, ordered myself a Cherry Cola and watched as the bartender, an older gentleman I would later discover owned the place, made my drink. No sooner than it was in my hands than someone slid onto the bar stool next to mine.
“Who is John Galt?” He asked.
I, for obvious reasons, found this to be a very odd thing to do. I had no idea who this strange man was or why he would be asking such a question. I wasn’t even sure he was speaking to me. So, I turned to him and asked, “Who? Me?”
“Ding! Ding! Ding!” He practically shouted. “We’ve got a winner!”
At that point the man stood up and promptly walked away.
I considered finishing my drink as quickly as possible and running out the door and never coming back. Before that could happen, though, a woman who had been seated at the table directly behind me sat down on the stool the strange man had just evacuated. “Never mind Glenn. He can be such as asshole,” She said.
As the bartender walked over to where Glenn was sitting, my new friend introduced herself to me, pointed out her girlfriend and asked if I wanted to join them. “Not everybody here is crazy,” she joked.
Over the next hour or so, my new friend and I talked a bit. She introduced me to all the regulars (except the ones at Glenn’s table, who now appeared to be playing some kind of card game), and I found them all to be surprisingly nice and decent people.
The Blinking Twelve
While my new friend and I talked, the bartender (she informed me that everyone called “Dad”) had kept himself busy when he wasn’t pouring drinks. The main focus of his attention was a small shelf next to a television mounted on the wall that housed a VCR. When he was finished with his handywork, I saw him step back and awkwardly sigh.
“I will give free drinks to anyone,” he announced loudly, “to anyone who can get that VCR to stop blinking 12:00.” He shouted along with a few additional F-Words.
As I glanced about the room, I saw everyone suddenly had their noses pointed at the table, or the cards in their hand, one person sat reading a book, holding it at an awkward angle.
Part of the problem, he explained to me, was that “a long time ago” someone lost the remote. Then, that same person lost the instruction manual. Dad wanted to throw the VCR into the garbage where he assured me it belonged. However, he does use it once a week for Tuesday Movie Nights, and it would be a shame to throw it out just because of a few lost parts.
It was the blinking 12:00 on the VCRs display that was driving him up the wall. He tried to ignore it, but every time he glanced in its direction, the thing grabbed his attention, and he was getting increasingly flustered with each passing hour, every day, month after month … He just wanted it to stop!
I thought for a moment and informed him I had a solution. He stared at me in disbelief when I asked him if he had a bit of electrical tape. I walked behind the counter, cut about an inch of the tape, and gently placed it over the offending 12:00.
As I handed the tape back to him, he said “That was genius.”
“Meh,” I said, trying to act nonchalantly. “It’s not rocket science.”
The room suddenly went deathly silent.
“Not cool,” my new friend said as she learned across the counter.
Here is what I didn’t know.
Before retiring from NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the man we called “Dad” worked as a mechanical engineer. He had an impressive career with the agency and had received the agency’s top honors after taking a leading role in several of the Apollo Missions, including Apollo 11 – the one where we landed on the moon.
A decade or so before I met him, he retired from space work. In lieu of retirement boredom (those were his words) he decided to return to his hometown and open a bar, which was something he had long thought about doing, even though he didn’t know the first thing about running a business.
He and his partner moved to Denver and purchased a house that had previously been registered as both residential and commercial and began the process of renovating it. It wasn’t until the project was nearly completed that the couple learned that, based on its location (a block or two away from a school) it would be ineligible for any kind of liquor license. At that point, the dream of opening a bar became the dream of running a non-alcoholic bar, or coffeehouse. And so far, the dream had become a success – except for one thing – the flashing 12:00 on the F’ing VCR that seemed to be more of a harbinger of death and doom than anything else.
Joining The Club
Before I walked into Dad’s Coffeehouse, I had no interest in (or knowledge of) Philosophy. I had no idea if Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato were old Greek philosophers or the cousins of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I wasn’t dumb, I kind of knew what philosophy was, even if I couldn’t give you a dictionary definition of it off the top of my head. I just thought we all had “our philosophies” – ways we viewed the world on a basic level. “I have this philosophy … so what?” Sang Julie Brown in Earth Girls are Easy.
Maybe I was dumb – at that point in my life, I was trying to figure out who I was as a person, and what kind of life I wanted to live. I was raised in a conservative Evangelical household where the answer to just about any question was either “The Bible” or “Jesus Christ”. After splitting up with The Church, I found that I had to replace those teachings with … well, something … I just didn’t know, with what…?
Having grown up with ’80s sitcoms, which mostly seemed to revolve around “learning life lessons”, I thought that I had a good idea of what being a good person was about. To be fair, considering all the traumatic life lessons learned by the cast of shows like The Facts of Life or Family Ties or Growing Pains, I’m kind of surprised none of these shows ended with half the characters having a PTSD meltdown.
It was enough, however, to know that these characters were good people, sometimes they make mistakes, they learn, they grow … time for the next episode.
I was discovering that The Real World was nothing like that. In the real world, you’re a bad person if you voted wrong in the last election. In the real world, most people are not trustworthy. In the real world, you’re a bad person if you put ketchup on a hot dog. (Or was that only in Chicago?)
Anyway – the more I got to know the people at Dad’s Coffeehouse, the more I learned some of them were just as fascinating as the owner. A small group of them had formed an unofficial and informal Philosophy Club – in that they would often sit at the shop and discuss philosophical matters.
That is not to say that they all agreed on anything, although they did “agree to disagree” quite often.
It’s worth noting that one member of the group, an asshole named Glenn, was so enamored by the writings of Ayn Rand that whenever he encountered someone new, he would ask them a question like “Who is John Galt?” This was, he would be the first to tell you, an unfair question as most people had no idea who John was, nor had they ever read (or probably even heard of) Atlas Shrugged. Eventually, he had convinced himself, someone would give him the answer he was looking for, someone he would think of as his intellectual equal. Apparently, when I asked if he was talking to me, the way I phrased it was close enough to the answer that he was looking for that he declared me “the winner”.
Yeah, I know – sometimes life is weird.
What I Learned
Looking back a few decades later, I obviously can’t remember every conversation I had with them. What I do remember is the way they got me to question everything I thought I knew, everything I believed (but usually wasn’t sure why).
At the time, all I was really thinking was that I didn’t feel alone anymore. They would listen to my problems, no matter how big or small, and they understood.
Maybe none of them had ever … say … misunderstood the Group Halloween Costume and instead of showing up as Gene Simmons, arrived as Richard Simmons. Maybe none of them had ever … say … accidentally tried to date legendary Canadian singer-songwriter (and very lesbian) k.d. lang because they thought she was a cute guy.
Maybe none of them had ever said, “Thanks, you too!” when someone wished them a Happy Birthday. (Okay, maybe everyone has said something like that at some point. Whatever.)
What I learned from them was how to look at things from multiple perspectives and determine for myself if things were good or not. This forced me to look at myself and ask some pretty hard questions.
My entire life, I was told that people like me (aka, gay people) were an abomination, that we were evil, we were tools of The Devil. No matter how much serious repenting and praying to God to help me change – nothing was ever going to change and even if it did, I doubted that I would ever have truly been accepted by the Churchgoing community. I was barely pubescent when they first called me a “bad seed” and letting me know that because I once had feelings that I could not control, I was forever damned.
Satan was, in the 1980s, always right around the corner, tempting young and impressionable minds which caused many Churchgoing folk to “panic”. Throw on top of that the spark of the gay rights movement and … yep, the Devil was everywhere.
At the same time that I was labeled a “bad person” on account that I had attractions that I had never even acted on – the Junior Pastor at our church was going through “a troubling time”. He, while away on some sort of church conference, paid money to a “woman of the night” for her services. In return, she gave him a little gift, something called Hepatitis C. He lied to the church about his extracurricular activities during the conference, he lied about the disease he had contracted, and the church helped pay his medical bills since the “incident” occurred while he was supposedly doing Church business. His lies became evident when his wife noticed something, went to the doctor, only to discover that he had passed the little big on to her as well. Junior Pastor then confessed to a multitude of sins, standing before the entire congregation, begging for forgiveness before heading out on a three-month (paid) sabbatical so that he could recover physically from the infection as well as “work on his marriage”.
I saw the situation a bit differently.
Mind you, I was considered “an abomination unto The Lord” and was led to believe that I was among the worst of the bad people – just for having attractions that I had never even acted on. Meanwhile, Junior Pastor was still considered a “good man” in spite of telling multiple lies, being an adulterer, paying for a hooker out of the church’s Petty Cash fund – basically a whole bunch of bad things that are expressly forbidden in The Bible (and a few things that really should be) … how is that right?
Gay people, we were taught at Church, were getting diseases like AIDS as punishment for their immorality. Junior Pastor was got a disease like Hepatitis C because he acted in a moment of weakness and deserves our forgiveness.
That issue was one I struggled with for a very long time.
Since I was often told that I was a bad person over things that I had no control over, and the fact that I once had those feelings meant that I was scarred for life with little hope of any redemption – then why should I even bother trying to be good?
I realized that in my mind, I was trying to become the best person that I possibly could be just to prove them wrong. I wanted to do good things in life so that I could start to think that I was a good person. To all those people who told me that I would never achieve in life, I wanted to make something of myself just to prove to them that they were wrong.
Because of The Philosopher’s Club, I made a conscious decision that I would try to leave this world a slightly better place than it was when I found it. It’s about helping people who need it. It’s about being kind and fair and thoughtful and treating others with basic dignity and respect. Basically – the version of “good people” that all those 80s sitcoms taught me to be.
I Guess That’s My Philosophy
So, if you were to ask me what my philosophy was in life – that’s it. Try to be as good of a person as you can.
Nobody is ever going to be a perfectly good person – I think it’s the intention that counts.
I spent a good part of my life worrying over the stupid things I’ve done. I worried about what people thought about the weirdness that life sometimes brings my way. I worried about not doing enough, or doing too much …
After too many nights staying awake, worried that someone thought I was a freak because I said, “Good morning!” to them at approximately 3:15 PM … I got to the point where I started thinking maybe that didn’t matter. So what if someone thought I was weird – I am weird, and what if that’s okay?
What if I took it as a compliment that someone was thinking about me in the first place?
(Okay, maybe that’s…???)
