The Lush Life Chronicles - - Volume 10: The Mystique

I've made prior mention on this blog that a healthy dose of mystery can improve one's life and standing greatly, but I'm not yet sure that you believe me. There is nothing that draws people to you like moths to a flame more so than intrigue. The Paparazzi isn't exactly knocking down Emilio Estevez's doors to ask for an interview and if they are it's to talk about Charlie Sheen. That's because we assume that with Emilio...what we see is what we get. With Charlie Sheen we have no clue what we're going to get, but we want to know what being a warlock assassin entails. Now I respect Emilio a hell of a lot more than I respect Charlie, but I'd probably have to pick Charlie to interview if given the choice based solely on the fact that I'd get more hits by interviewing somebody with 4.3 million Twitter followers than by interviewing somebody with only 75,000. Plus I feel that questions about porn star menages and snorting 7g rocks will yield more interesting stories than reminiscences on playing Gordon Bombay, working with John Hughes, and your new career as a semi-successful vintner. Much like nature vs. nurture, mind vs. matter, and Brown vs. The Board of Education...quantity vs. quality is a raging debate. Most people will tell you that they'll take quality over quantity...but societally that's not what shines through. We don't care about the quality of character...we want quantity. When somebody is interesting we have to consume that interest. And when they stop giving us interest to consume we can either forget about them, fabricate interest, or delve deeper into the past interest that they have generated.

However, Charlie Sheen's star will burn out temporarily because he's being forced to generate interest himself and he really is leaving nothing to our imaginations. His candor makes for great television, but pretty soon we're not going to be left with any questions. He is almost out of intrigue. He's got being interesting down to a science, but that's not enough. You also have to leave us wondering. Take for example, Lady Gaga. Despite the fact that she is tremendously over-exposed in every sense of the word, how much do we really know about her? Not much. What we know barely scratches the surface of what we assume there is to know. We've heard Lady Gaga's opinions on so many things, but what about Stefani Germanotta's? We don't know who this woman is underneath what we are allowed to see. She gives us a lot but really tells us nothing. This is why she is the poster girl for The Mystique. The Mystique is about being secretive. It's about being dark and intriguing and leaving everybody you meet wondering about you and wanting more.

This is never more apparent than it is when courting a lady...or a dude. Let it be said for the record that almost everybody has a case of what I like to call Disney Princess Syndrome. We have it to varying degrees, but we all have it. I've got the worst case of almost anybody that I know. Disney Princess Syndrome is the unshakable feeling that your current state of affairs is numbingly boring and that you need to go forth towards adventure in strange places which are calling you by name. And much like people who possess The Big Fish, people who possess The Mystique almost always bring with them the promise of a cure for this affliction. We've always known that many women love themselves a bad boy. And it's not because they like his confidence or because they want to reform him like many quack analysts have told you. It's because bad boys, by their very nature, have the ability to shuck predictability. It's almost the exact opposite of what Jack Sparrow would have you believe at the climax of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Good guys can more or less be counted on to do the right thing. That's part of being a good guy...you're predictable and we know where we stand with you. Bad boys are more complicated. They can't always be counted do the wrong thing. It doesn't work like that. But they can often be counted on to do what is in their own self-interest. Sometimes that's good and sometimes that's bad and sometimes it's just intriguing and this is where there unpredictability comes from. And both women and men associate unpredictability in their potential mates with adventure.

This doesn't mean that you have to be a prick to have The Mystique. Quite the contrary, mystery comes in many forms. The Mystique is often seen in people who are described as "cloak and dagger". But all The Mystique really needs is the cloak. There doesn't need to be a dagger. People just need to see the cloak that may be hiding a dagger. Being a nice guy can carry with it The Mystique. The trick to building up The Mystique through acts of decency is making people think that you have some ulterior motive when you really don't. The Mystique actually works best with mysterious benevolence. Unpredictability and approachability are two things that don't often go hand and hand within a person, but when they do a cult of personality is born. Mystery creates for a tidal wave of human interest. And this is what I want for myself. Mystery. Intrigue. People say that they want openness and honesty in their relationships, but do they really? They certainly don't want you to lie to them. But they don't want you to tell them everything about yourself either. You have to parcel it out and leave some surprises for later. Just try to make the later surprises good surprises. Better to have those surprises be that they've known you for eight years but they never knew that you spoke Portuguese than they've known you for eight years but they never knew that you had herpes.

The basic agenda in attaining this pillar is that you should live your life in a way that would make for an extremely enlightening E! True Hollywood Story once your deceased. Do you really need to see an E! True Hollywood Story on Brad Pitt and Anjolina Jolie? Sure there would be intrigue but we've seen most of the tawdriness play out in the tabloids. What you really want to see is dark seedy underbelly of Reese Witherspoon's life...assuming that there is one? Is America's Sweetheart's life really all that it appears? Or is it more than it appears? The most interesting people are the ones that appear to be the most normal on the outside but are secretly hiding The Mystique. Check into the lives of Fred Rogers or Pat Morita and you'll see what I'm talking about. Much like The Big Fish before it, The Mystique doubles as a call to action. It's an invitation to a certain kind of lifestyle. It's not about making women (or men) think that your James (or Jane) Bond. It's about actually being Mr. or Mrs. Bond. Don't just play mysterious...be mysterious. And don't just be unpredictable for other people. Be unpredictable to yourself. Surprise yourself. Wake up one morning and just do something unexpected and in the moment with your day. Don't pre-plan it. Just open up the morning paper for inspiration and live a little. Though I should probably recommend staying away from the obituaries and police blotter for inspiration.

Even if you think that characters like Charlie Sheen or Lindsey Lohan are unpredictable (despite the fact I imagine that I know what each of them are up to right now), they still aren't even close to The Mystique. Unpredictability and spontaneity are cornerstones of The Mystique, but at the top of that pyramid is control. You have to be able to maintain an air of control around you because while all secrets are mysterious, not all secrets are interesting. You want people to wonder about you, and when they wonder you want them to wonder what you know that they don't. How do you have it all figured out? They should be trying to figure out the secret to your success...not the secret to your failure. So while The Mystique is about not living such a vanilla life it's also about not living a rat poison life. You should be hard to put your finger on, but in that respect be more Carmen San Diego than Where's Waldo. By that I mean be elusive, not lost in your own confusion. Suave isn't necessarily a requirement of The Mystique but the two go together pretty damn well. The Mystique is a particularly challenging pillar to attain because it's less stable than others like The Clark or The Hobby. The more you open up to people, the more they're going to think that they have you figured out. So you have to keep changing things up and introducing liquidity into your lifestyle. It's tough, but worth it. It ensures that you don't become stale or obsolete, but it also means that you don't get to relax. But that's why life is for living...relax when you're dead.