#268. Slow dancing with temptation. (The dump, throwing up and your dad.)

That is a ridiculous sentence but I didn’t write it. It’s the headline of an advertisement for Canadian Club whiskey.

Here is what the body copy for the ad says:

“He went out. He got two numbers in the same night. He drank cocktails. But they were whisky cocktails. Made with Canadian Club. Served in a rocks glass. They tasted good. They were effortless. Damn right your dad drank it.”

I saw that ad in Rolling Stone and when you look at the ad itself maybe it isn’t that silly. Maybe it’s kind of hip and cool and you would find yourself wanting a glass of whiskey. But when you strip away all the marketing, when you remove the hype, when you cut away the words and the images and just focus on the core message, you see how stupid it is.

Honestly, is the idea of my dad sleeping around supposed to make me want whiskey? Am I supposed to think, “yay my dad is a slut, let’s get drunk!” More than anything the idea of my dad having sex makes me want to slam my head in a car door. There are four kids in our family, which means four times, end of story.

So why do advertisers think they can do this to you? Why do they think you won’t see the message behind the message? Because all too often, we don’t flee from temptation we slow dance with it.

When I first started dealing with the idea that lust had a choke hold on me, I didn’t cancel my magazine subscriptions. I still got GQ and Esquire and about a dozen other “men’s magazines” that essentially continued to be tinder for an already blazing issue in my heart. I didn’t run from temptation, I hung out with it. But now that I think about it, I wish I had reacted to temptation like my friend Carsten reacts to gross things.

In college, if he thought of something gross, he’d throw up.

Now clearly, if he smelled something gross he’d have the same reaction, but it was the puking that resulted from thinking that proved to be the most entertaining.

The funny thing is that Carsten is one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life. His brain is brilliant, but it was his weak stomach that made him famous on campus. If you were ever at a party that was boring, all you had to do was tell Carsten a story about rotten food, and within minutes the party was exciting again. It happened dozens of times but my favorite was the night we drove by the paper mill.

Usually, if you didn’t want Carsten to throw up, you could talk him down. If you berated him enough, “Oh stop, that’s not even that gross. It smells fine. Give me a break,” he would calm down. But that wasn’t going to work that night in Pensacola, Florida.

It was really my fault. My friend Stu and I used to say, “Oh that’s a puker” if we would smell something bad when Carsten wasn’t with us. It was our way of saying, “Carsten would puke if he ever smelled that.” And months before the paper mill incident, Stu and I had driven by that exact spot and said to each other out loud, “That’s a puker.” So much like Richard Marx, we should have known better. But we were young and wild and free and weren’t thinking. (That was a Bryan Adams reference, must be 80s day.)

By the time I tried to talk him down it was too late, he was already dry heaving. I yelled at him, I pleaded with him, but momentum was clearly not on my side. He grabbed an open bag of candy corn from the floorboard and put it over his mouth in hopes that it would block out the smell. (Since candy corn is so fragrant and what not.) Seconds later he screamed, “it’s getting through the corn, it’s getting through the corn!”

Within minutes we had to pull over on the side of the road so that he could empty his stomach.
I think about Carsten sometimes when I face temptation. He had a visceral, full body, completely committed response to things he thought were gross. It wasn’t soft, it wasn’t casual. It was big and loud and final. His entire life stopped momentarily while he addressed an issue with every fiber of his being. And that reaction doesn’t feel like how I respond when I’m tempted by something.

I’ll usually hold the fire for a few minutes. I’ll usually explore just a little, or taste just a tiny. I’ll take my time. Sometimes I’ll seek it out. I’ll be the one setting up a tent in the parking lot of the paper mill all the while pretending that I’m trying to avoid temptation. More often than I’d like to admit, I react to temptation a lot like I did in the eighth grade.

There are certain chapters in my life that my friend in PR would advise I be careful about sharing. He’s smart and most times he’s right, but sometimes people blog their ideal self and not their real self. And I can’t complain about when people say they have “unspoken prayer requests” and then brush over my own junk. The truth is that I used to spend Saturdays in the eighth grade at the dump digging around in trash and looking inside tractors in hopes of finding porn.

There were even a few snowy days when I brought my sled, thinking that my parents would find it perfectly natural that I was sledding down mountains of trash. Although my approach to temptation is perhaps less obvious now that I am 32, it’s often just as stupid. I keep secrets. I create shadows. I try my best not to have a Carsten reaction to something that I know should make me sick.

I hope God will show me how to throw up more. I hope that he’ll give me a weaker stomach and a stronger heart. I hope that the next time you face temptation you’ll act like Carsten instead of going sledding at the dump.