Ambition is the Stupidest Feeling

On the advice of Tony Horton – which was not given to me personally – I gave up drinking two cups of coffee a day sometime last week, and have moved on as a human being in my life to drinking fourteen cups of decaf an hour instead.

That is growth; these are results.

But I did not do this because I am concerned with having a physique that resembles that of Tony Horton, nor his financial success, nor his considerable renown. I did it because I want to sleep like him – I want the sleep of Tony Horton.

I do not believe there is any sleep like the sleep of Tony Horton. I imagine him floating into fatigue with the grace of a hang glider, a puff-ball hat wrapped around his torso in bandolier fashion as he tightens the drawstring of his ironic hospital pants yet another inch, the captain of his own mausoleum absolutely. At nine-thirty p.m. precisely, the call of slumber washes over him with the warmth of morphine-ignited death, and he says, “I have problems, perhaps, but I know how to solve them.”

Then, without a trace of cumbersome sexual urge, or consideration given to the aforementioned thought, he falls unconscious. The elves in his muscles emerge from their wiry caverns with a tide of regeneration, painting the dull exhaust of his workout-annihilated ligaments with hot pink spray paint in a speed and arc suggestive of having been shot from circus cannons. Halfway around in the awakening world, the people of the East buzz in furious parallel with the volcanic river of The Tony Horton Bloodstream, a light speed constellation that injects every cell with a belief in itself, and exiles every impurity to the least uncomfortable part of his anus.

But not even the sun and Asia working in tandem are enough of a metaphor enough to describe this phoenix ritual, because while Tony Horton rebuilds, he also dreams: He dreams of his own life.

And then, when he awakens, it becomes the dream that came true.

I want to sleep the sleep of Tony Horton, but I toss and turn instead: Thinking about how I don’t, and maybe more.

And I cannot fix myself – incapacity is all I can hope for, like a handyman unable to repair his vacuum cleaner with his meager tools and no warranty, who must throw it down a garbage chute and blame teenagers instead. I simply have to make myself incapable of being the person that I am at the end of a civilized hour rather than think that I can become somebody else.

But everything I think about, when I think back on it, really can be blamed on having been a teenager at one time. I can’t see Tony Horton as a teenager. He was a robot built by God but imbued with a greater humanity than everyone who is not robotic, which is everyone. That’s classic God – doing His thing. Ad infinitum.

So: The caffeine had to go.

Here is a history of caffeine addiction as I’ve now withdrawingly hallucinated it: A long time ago, everyone was mining and farming everything in sight, i.e. potatoes, and there was a social interest amongst the only people who could afford a decent suit in endowing the citizenry with wonderful pep. Thomas Jefferson was on his way to see Abraham Lincoln with Archie and Jughead when he was struck with an enormous thought: Get everyone all jacked up in the morning so they wouldn’t start the day at 9 a.m. with the thought that lunch was only three hours away. Also, ban liquor.

Of course, if regulators and other social engineers could begin anew in our increasingly sedentary yet psychologically weighty days, you can bet that caffeine would be a controlled substance, and that mini-bottles of hotel vodka would be in the Halloween baskets of our children.

This sounds awful, but there is no doubt in my mind that caffeine is an enormously more insidious substance than booze, and this is why: Booze is mandatorily episodic. Booze ends. A severely drunk man may pass judgment on another severely drunk man who gets hit in the face with a frying pan by his wife for failing to remember their anniversary, but both of them end up passed-out anyways.

Even if you want to keep going, every road comes to a close. Don’t tell me that you can’t quit drinking: You quit drinking every single time you drink.

But caffeine, and what it leaves behind, goes on forever.

So this is what I’m thinking: I’m not such a bad guy. I pay my taxes, and I think that people who have lawns should mow them. I’ll pet a dog that somebody has tied up outside a drugstore. I don’t pretend to not have scotch tape just because I think people should get their own goddamn scotch tape, and I certainly don’t deserve to have a bunch of alcoholics that I’ve invented judge me just because I can’t be like Tony Horton, who probably never even touched a cup of coffee in his life, even though I think he would be a Chai Tea guy.

This is what I would pay to hear any lifestyle guru, anywhere, anytime, simply say:

“You can’t have it all.”

But they never will.