James Hazlett Foreman

Tag: grief

  • Do Not Listen to Dan

    in memory of Daniel Wolf Roemele (1977-2026)

    “And the mountains they tried to fall on old Peachy, but he was quite safe because Daniel walked before him. And Daniel never let go of Peachy’s hand and Peachy never let go of Daniel’s head.” – The Man Who Would Be King1

    Dan Roemele was my friend. As I discovered in the days since his death, he had lots of friends, more than I knew.

    Dan was loud, large, opinionated, and kind, generous, selfless, hard to deal with and easy to talk to. His laugh was large and loud, too, and it came naturally. He laughed a lot and people around him laughed, too.

    Dan was extremely private, so private that nobody really knows what his last days were like. From what we have learned, he died peacefully in his sleep. One of us in closer contact with him recalls a series of ailments and small calamities that preceded the terrible quiet that too many of us can recognize, a 21st century silence of unanswered calls and unread texts. Is he busy? In a bad mood? Mad at me? The worst case scenario is unthinkable except in hindsight. Now it feels inevitable.

    I Remember the Day I Met Dan

    I had just started dating Becky. She was the first girl I ever dated. I moved in with her and she pulled me into her life and I went along happily. She said that her friend was starting a role playing campaign and there was space for us in it.

    I have been a TTRPG gamer for most of my life. I specifically loved a system called GURPS and played it a lot with my friends in college. I had tons of sourcebooks and many many hours of game mastering and creating scenarios and worlds for my friends to play characters in. I was almost always the GM of those games and I was excited to find out how other people game mastered.

    Dan was living with roommates in a house on Mount Washington. The back of the house was wide open with huge windows overlooking the city below. That house always felt precarious, like it was about to fall into the valley. It creaked and shuddered in the stiff, constant wind.

    Dan was tall. He could loom better than anybody I know. He had long hair for the entire time I knew him, but the giant beard came later. He spoke gently and delicately, with a surprising softness. But when it was time for the game, he was on mission and in the lead, confidently at the head of the table with a head full of ideas.

    I told him I had a lot of experience playing GURPS and he said “Ugh, I hate GURPS.” I never found out why. He actually played it with me a few times over the years, because he would overlook grudges with a game system if it meant a good time around the table. With Dan, it almost always was that: a good time.

    Those first few games were difficult for me! Dan had an adversarial approach to leading a game. While my games tend to be set ups for the players to show off and spend time in the spotlight, Dan was a big believer in consequences. There were no easy answers and no simple solutions.

    Dan’s campaigns were like life — if you and your reprobate friends robbed a gangster, then you’d better be ready to spend the rest of the campaign running from him. Our characters never really succeeded at much, but we could take a breather once in a while between calamities that we caused.

    The first game I played with Dan was the Wheel of Time RPG — similar to Dungeons and Dragons but set in Robert Jordan’s enormous book series. I hadn’t read the books so the setting was alien to me, but fantasy is fantasy — you can always make a big guy with a big club (or “crub” as Dan would say).

    It didn’t matter what character you made, not really — Dan would find a way to stymie their plans, throw mud in their eyes, and make their lives miserable. Most of the time, we made everything worse despite our best attempts. Dan loved giving his players impossible choices and slowly unveiling the next disaster to come out of them.

    Star Wars Without Stormtroopers

    We played many games with Dan — board games, role playing games, video games — but the games I will most fondly remember are his Star Wars games. The heading of this section will always be my shorthand description of Dan’s Star Wars campaigns.

    He set his campaigns in a familiar universe but dropped the characters we made into blisteringly original scenarios that nobody had ever considered for Star Wars, like a space station run by competing groups of criminals, haunted by a medical droid obsessed with experimenting on humans.

    Over many years of playing Star Wars campaigns with Dan, I don’t remember our characters ever encountering a stormtrooper. The Empire was an implacable, fascist meatgrinder, not a bunch of bumbling, mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplashes. Our characters never encountered stormtroopers because Dan’s stormtroopers were elite soldiers reserved for important and difficult threats. Our characters were never a threat. They were the smallest of the small timers, barely making a dent and barely surviving.

    Dan’s Star Wars games were not about larger-than-life heroes blowing up death stars and fighting with lightsabers. If you ever found a lightsaber, your character wouldn’t know what to do with it and would probably lose a limb. I remember a near total party wipe on a slippery ladder. It was maddening! But it was also so idiosyncratically Dan-specific that it’s impossible not to love it.

    When faced with a dilemma or fork in the road during a game, Dan would offer what seemed like sound options. From a different GM, you would think “oh this is what he wants me to do.” Sometimes that was true and it is exactly what Dan wants you do to, but under no circumstances should you do it. We started holding up this sign for the other players when Dan’s suggestions seemed reasonable and one of us seemed about to make a terrible decision.

    Dan had a little tic that I will always think about when I think about him. Whenever he was game mastering, and he was about to narrate the next scene of the game, he would pause for a moment to consider what to say, and then make a little throat-clearing noise before unleashing the booming, authoritative declaratives of a dungeon master. I will miss that.

    A man of contradictions, he was quiet and reserved in social functions. He hovered at the edges, swaying back and forth on his feet, as far away as possible from the hubbub of a party. He left early if he decided to come at all. At the little celebration of his life last night, we all agreed that he would never have come to it.

    He was in his element when he game mastered, like we were seeing the true him. I have only recently learned that I probably wasn’t seeing the true him even then.

    The Parable of the Elephant

    I’m sure you’ve heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the lesson being: you can’t understand something properly if you only ever consider it from a single perspective.

    At the celebration of his life, we assembled a picture of our friend Dan from a dozen different perspectives like the blind men in the parable. He revealed one part of himself to some, and another part of himself to others. Maybe everybody is like this, but as we talked and caught up with each other last night, I don’t think any of us really knew Dan. What was the “real Dan?” Only he will ever know, I suppose.

    I don’t know if I knew the real Dan, but I know I knew my Dan, and I loved him. He was hard to love sometimes, and stubborn and certain about everything. He was a singular being. He was a bright, blazing light, full of love and overflowing with kindness. Abrasive, yes, but soft. He was always the first to help you move and the last helper to leave.

    Sometime in the last few years I had to leave a game early because of some emergency or other, and Dan said “We game tonight in the missing man formation.” It sounds ridiculous and cringe but Dan didn’t care and probably didn’t even notice. It was just the way he talked.

    I miss that voice. The world is a colder place without Dan’s warmth in it.

    I am sorry that you never got to meet him.

    I’m not the only one who shared his memories of Dan Roemele. I’m going to link to them here as I learn about them. I don’t think Dan had an official obituary so these tributes from his found family shall suffice.

    Pierce: Something like a memorial.

    Abby: This isn’t enough , but it’s what I have right now.

    Shaun Scott: We All Surrender to Tock

    1

    Dan had a poster of the cover of this movie on his wall when I first met him. I was astonished that anybody even knew about that movie, one that I had loved since I was a kid. It was the first sign to me that Dan was somebody I was going to like.

  • The Impossible Grief of Hamnet

    Now cracks a noble heart

    When my psychiatrist asks me if I’m having “death thoughts” my answer is always the same: “not in the way you are asking, but yes.”

    I’m not suicidal, but death is a constant preoccupation. The intensity increases and decreases as I cycle through the usual peaks and valleys of depression and anxiety. In other words, I’m pretty much always thinking about death (my death, the deaths of my loved ones, the deaths of strangers, the concept of death, life after death, etc.).

    Naturally, I’m drawn to art about death and dying.

    My sister recommended Hamnet to me, so I read it, and I want to write about it because it affected me greatly in all the best ways that great art does.

    Hamnet, a Love Story About Grief

    Grief is a kind of universal element that lives in all of us, like the carbon atoms in our bodies. Every human on earth has (or will have) a personal experience with death. New people join our own universes all the time and they all leave eventually, too. They always seem to leave before we’re ready. Nobody in Hamnet’s life was ready for him to go.

    We know from the very beginning of this novel that Hamnet will die, so it’s not a spoiler. When it happens, we’re still shocked. The magic trick of this book, and maybe all great historical fiction, is how O’Farrell hides the historicals behind the fictionals.

    Hamnet is a Boy and Agnes is his Mother

    I can approach Hamnet thematically and say it’s about grief, but that’s not quite accurate. It’s really a book about a person, Agnes, who is a witchy sort of woman living in the middle ages in Stratford, England. Her husband happens to be a playwright we all know but he’s never named and we mostly learn about him as he comes in and out of Agnes’s story.

    Agnes is a kind of village shaman, using herbs and other natural things to heal people. The writing borders right on the edge of magical realism, because sometimes it seems like Agnes really can learn about people just by touching their hands in a specific place, and sometimes it seems like her folk remedies actually can rid someone of the plague or fix whatever else is wrong with them.

    In the world of the book, she can and she does.

    She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange.

    A Note About Craft

    I am a big fan of O’Farrell’s writing. Here’s one of my favorite passages:

    WHEN THE TWINS WERE VERY SMALL, PERHAPS AROUND THEIR first birthday, he had turned to his wife and said, Watch, Agnes had lifted her head from her workbench.

    He pushed two slivers of apple across the table to them. At exactly the same moment, Hamnet reached out with his right hand and gripped the apple and Judith reached out with her left.

    In unison, they raised the apple slices to their lips, Hamnet with his right, Judith with her left.

    They put them down, as if with some silent signal between them, at the same moment, then looked at each other, then picked them up again, Judith with her left hand, Hamnet with his right. lis like a mirror, he had said. Or that they are one person split down the middle.

    Their two heads uncovered, shining like spun gold.

    I have read other reviews that mention how affected the prose is and that makes me wonder if I’m missing something or if they’re seeing something I’m not. However you want to describe Maggie O’Farrell’s writing, I think it’s great and I want to read more of it.1

    A Mother’s Grief

    You never get over grief. It’s not like a virus or infection that runs its course and goes away. We have to live with it always. It comes and goes.

    Hamnet shows us the architecture of the grief in Agnes’s heart after her son dies. One measure of a great story is that it reflects back at you what you can recognize but in ways you never thought of before, or illustrates them in ways you would never have considered. I see myself in Agnes and her anguish.

    This passage puts to words an experience we can all relate to: when we think of someone and, for a moment, forget that they’re gone.

    She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see.

    It’s not just a book about how Agnes and her family roil and boil in their grief over Hamnet’s death. A good story also has a trajectory, a movement from the state of things in the beginning through some transformational event. That transformation is the heart of drama.

    It’s part of the human story, too. We begin a life, even a single day, as one person and events happen that change us forever. Agnes suffers the death of her son and grieves and, in the last chapter, is permanently transformed. I’ll get to that in a minute.

    Station Eleven (the series)

    I haven’t read the book Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel. I was so powerfully affected by the series that I don’t want to alter it in my mind by reading the book. I don’t know if that makes any sense. I don’t even like recommending Station Eleven to people because I’m afraid they won’t like it as much as I did, or, perhaps worse, won’t be as affected by it as I was.

    The tv show was a profoundly moving experience. I watched it as the last few episodes aired. It was a show that was being made before and during the pandemic and it aired those last episodes just as the lockdowns were ending.

    The series is about Kirsten, in both the present day and 20 years after the pandemic that killed most of the world’s population. She is an actor in the Traveling Symphony, which performs music and plays to the communities that have sprung up in the bones of the old world.

    It’s post apocalyptic but not in the way you might be used to. One of the things I loved about Station Eleven is how it depicts the end of the world as the beginning of a new one. Most post-apocalypse stories are about how society breaks down and sets people against each other. This does not ring true for me and what I know about people.

    What do you see on the news when disasters happen? What do you see when tragedy happens in your own life or in your own community? People don’t scatter and huddle in their basements with guns aimed at the door — they spring into action to help. Look at the aftermath of any disaster, anywhere in the world. The pile of rubble that used to be a hospital is crowded with people digging others out, tending to the injured, comforting their neighbors. If the end of the world happened, I don’t think everybody would immediately leap at the throats of their neighbors.

    There are violent people in the post-pan(demic) world of Station Eleven, but they’re fringe crazies, aberrant exceptions. They barely appear in the story at all.

    By the end, Station Eleven brings all of the characters we’ve met over the course of 10 episodes and puts them in a post-pandemic, post-apocalyptic production of Hamlet. In acting out the play, our characters reach a kind of mutual understanding of each other and allows them to set aside the traumatic happenstances that led them to fighting and scheming against each other.

    Hamnet is Also Hamlet

    Factually, William Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died of the plague at the age of 11, and a few years later he wrote a play called Hamlet. We also know that Shakespeare made a lot of money and sent most of it back to his family in Stratford. He retired there, too.

    In the book, we see a Shakespeare who can’t sit still. He needs to be in the city, performing, creating. Even after the death of his son, he can’t stay with the family. He can’t explain it to Agnes, who is perplexed by his callousness and selfishness. She watches him leave after their son’s death and she understands him even less than she did before.

    In the book, Agnes hears that her husband has written a play with the same name as their dead son, and she’s enraged by it. How dare he! She and her brother travel to London expecting to be disgusted.

    But that’s not what happens.

    She watches the character of Hamlet, who looks and acts just like her son, who has been coached and trained by her husband exactly how the boy stood, or smirked, or walked, or spoke. Her husband plays Hamlet’s father, a ghost.

    “Hamlet, here, on this stage, is two people, the young man, alive, and the father, dead. He is both alive and dead. Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. ‘O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!’ murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death.

    He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.”

    Agnes experiences her husband’s production as a catharsis, a revelation. Through this performance, she can process the death of their son and see, finally, and in stark relief, the context and shape of her husband’s grief, too. Agnes can move on to the rest of her life with a new understanding of her husband where before she had always struggled to comprehend him. Art transforms.

    Shakespeare, Agnes, Kirsten and Jeevan all use performance, as witnesses and as participators, to talk and listen to each other.

    The stage allows us to be vulnerable and exposed while also hiding our true selves behind masks and costumes. Words written for us, spoken by characters who bear no relation to ourselves except in our mutual humanity, resonate through time and distance and unite us together and help us, too, to understand each other. This is not just performance but all art. Great art shows us ourselves while it shows us things we’ve never seen.

    I gave you a piece of Hamnet to read, so naturally I want to give you a piece of Station Eleven to watch.

    This has small spoilers, but it’s from the second episode so you’re not missing much context. Jeevan, the man taping up the vent, is introduced to us as a guy watching a production of King Lear who sees a famous actor on stage have a medical event and instinctively runs on stage to help him. Kirsten is a child actor in the same production who gets lost in the chaos after this event and the simultaneous outbreak of a world-ending flu pandemic. They take refuge in Jeevan’s brother’s apartment.

    Kirsten is also the adult woman in a production of Hamlet that does not fully unfold fully until the end of the show (but you can see it hopscotches through time).

    Great Art Transforms Us

    As we watch a play or performance, we experience the text of the songs being played or the lines of dialogue being spoken and they allow us to reflect on our own lives and feelings.

    We see a wrathful Iago scheme and plot against his commander and remember the times where we, too, were passed over for a promotion. That other guy didn’t deserve it, but we do! When we see Othello, twisted and contorted into seeing an unfaithful wife, we can think of the times we lost our faith in our own friends or lovers. When Othello snaps and strangles his dearest love, we can all remember the times we treated someone badly because of our own anger or resentment.

    Hamnet and Lincoln in the Bardo

    The obvious accompaniment to this book, or maybe another book in a reading list, would be Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. It’s a different kind of book in lots of ways — it takes place in the Bardo, or the space between life and the afterlife, and our characters are all unquiet ghosts in a cemetery. Stylistically they couldn’t be more different, as it’s all told in a shifting, choral sort of epistolatory first person. These ghosts witness Abraham Lincoln come to visit the temporary tomb of his son who has, like Hamnet, died young from a disease.

    Lincoln’s grief is legendary and known to us. He is said to have held his boy’s body in this temporary resting place.

    All three of these pieces — Hamnet, Station Eleven, and Lincoln in the Bardo, are in conversation with each other, at least in my mind. They are certainly in conversation with each other to me. Interestingly, Hamnet and Station Eleven kind of came out around the same time, so they weren’t in clear communication with each other.

    You don’t have to squint to see it is also in conversation with The Pitt, which also hops back in time to the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It, too, is kind of about grief and moving on when everybody seems to be dying around you.

    We’re so powerless against death. We are always fighting it, writing about it, making shows and art about it, trying to understand it.

    1

    thankfully she has written lots of books

  • The Thrill of Competence: Watching The Pitt

    Grief and joy in endless repetition

    Every generation gets their own prestige medical drama. I end up watching a lot of them despite my squeamishness. I’m not ashamed to admit that I close my eyes when Dr. Bangs on The Pitt takes a scalpel to a teenager’s eye socket.

    I had a couple of brain surgeries a few years ago. The first surgery was just to put a shunt in my head. The second surgery was the Big One. They popped open the back of my skull, plucked out a little tumor, and stitched me back up.

    After the surgery was complete, the surgeon told my family about a moment that happened during the operation. As I sat, insensate, in a supine position with the back of my head pealed open, he touched the surface of my brain with his scalpel. My heart stopped. When he removed the scalpel, my heart resumed beating. He did it again, for some reason, and my heart stopped again.

    This was, apparently, hilarious.

    The Pitt is a Pit But it’s Also a Pitt

    The Pitt is a great name for this show. The title refers to the cute nickname the people of Pittsburgh Regional Hospital have for the emergency department. This is because it’s kind of pit-like but also because it takes place in Pittsburgh (which is why they spell it with two Ts).

    There are references to Pittsburgh peppered throughout the show and there were only a few little moments that hit my ear wrong (as a 20+ year Pittsburgh resident). For instance, they eat Primanti Bros, but without the requisite “I hate Primate Bros” comment from an aggrieved foodie. My brother Rob observed in the family Discord that they call Pittsburgh’s light rail “the subway” which is a sweeping and grandiose word for what we actually have (we call it “the T” and most people who live here have never ridden it). They drink Iron City and there’s a derisive reference to Philadelphia, so that’s pretty good.

    While they don’t always get all the little facts right, they do get one thing right: what it feels like.

    The show takes place in the late summer, around the time of a fictional music festival. I read this interview with the producer, John Wells, who went to CMU.

    “We shot in early September and there’s that wonderful, muggy, warm, late-summer, early-fall feeling that we wanted to get in,” Wells said. “The way the air feels and the way in which we shot it, we worked hard to get that into those scenes when we were outside, to get that feeling that there’s a heaviness of the air.”

    Wells said the crew spent time discussing how to capture the feeling with a camera “and how we were going to move at a certain pace in a way to try and get across that feeling. It’s hard to describe in any kind of specifics. It’s just the way the city feels.” – PPG

    He’s so right! The city does feel like that and they captured it so well that I can forgive the tiny little bits that didn’t hit right. Notes for next season: gimme at least 1 yinzer. It’s not Pittsburgh without one! I wonder if Jon Daly is available.

    Each episode of The Pitt is an hour of a single day shift in the Emergency Department. There is a palpable dedication to realism1. There are no cartoonish villains or perfect heroes or outrageous scenarios. I really enjoy the tightness of the writing and the economy of story.2

    This show also made me miss being in the hospital. I know, I know, but hear me out. When I was in the hospital for those surgeries I didn’t have to worry about anything. The hospital is a building full of people who want to heal you and send you home. They bring you food three times a day. They don’t want anything bad to happen to you. If something really bad happens to your body they will try to fix it.

    Out here in the world, anything could happen and I have to find my own meals. Terrible!

    I wrote about these subject in previous editions:

    The Thrill of Competence

    The Pitt is a medical drama, but there’s another genre it belongs to: the unfortunately-named “competence porn.”3

    I like watching really smart people do smart things. I like to see problems solved and lives saved by skilled professionals.

    As I thought about the thrill of watching competent people I started to realize that this is something a lot of my favorites movies and stories have in common. I also suspect this is one of the reasons why people love sports? Maybe!

    Great Examples of Competency as a Genre

    The movie Sneakers is about a misfit red team who stumbles onto a device that can break any cryptographic code. They use it better than the guy who invented it, because they’re more competent than everybody else.

    The book/movie The Hunt for Red October is about a lowly CIA analyst who figures out how a disgruntled submarine captain is going to arrange his own defection while also delivering a secret prototype into American hands.

    The show Slow Horses is about competent (and occasionally incompetent) spies manage to figure things out before anybody else. More competent spies can be found on The Agency and Counterpart.

    I love it when smart, capable, people solve problems because they’re smart and capable. It’s thrilling! That probably explains why it’s so common in the thriller genre lol

    Entering Into the Chaos of Another

    The competency is nice, but I don’t think I would enjoy a show about auto mechanics. The urgency and enormous stakes of medicine make it fertile ground for drama (which is why we get so many medical dramas).

    I worked for Carlow University for a few years. Carlow was founded by the Sisters of Mercy, Catholic nuns whose devotion to helping people is summed up nicely by this quote by John Keenan:

    “Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.”

    People who work in emergency rooms leap into the chaos of the acutely sick and suffering. They heal and fix and work to save people and join them on the worst days of their lives. The Pitt is fiction but it vibrates with emotional truth. I can’t tell you if it’s factually accurate, but it understands big feelings pretty well. I know a lot about those.

    Grief > Joy > Grief; Repeat

    In the first episode of the show, elder attending physician Dr Robby gives a med student some advice about how to deal with the constant seesaw of joy into grief and then joy again in emergency medicine.

    During a chaotic crisis, Dr Robby, who has shouldered the burdens of these feelings both in himself and in his staff and patients, and the weight of the billion little decisions they make that can unravel into terrible consequences or bloom into ecstatic relief, breaks down, finally, huddled in the pediatric care room. For him, and for us, the suffering is just too great, as his past and his present collide and collapse, a staggering overload that drops him to the floor. We can’t take anymore and neither can he.

    The med student he advised finds him and, not knowing what else to do, joins him. Robby tells him to get up and get moving. But he’s saying this as he, himself, can’t.

    There’s no monologue at the right moment that breaks the spell. They just get up and keep going. They’re not cured or refreshed, they just continue. All they can do is continue. They open the door and go back into the chaos of the dead and dying.4

    They continue on, and the crisis winds down as the day ends. We follow the doctors out of the building, through the waiting room that’s already full again.

    But before that, the student and Dr Robby reconnect for a minute. The med student repeats back the advice Robby gave him earlier, and tells him he knows the prayer that Robby had been repeating, in biblical english rather than Robby’s talmudic Hebrew.

    She-ma yisrael, adonai eloheinu, adonai echad
    Baruch shem kavod malchuto l’olam va-ed — the Shema prayer

    The tension from the crisis has abated but not with a narratively easy or convenient explosive release. We do get our release, but this is it: a quiet moment between mentor and student. The story closes its long loop from beginning to end, the wise elder has imparted his wisdom and the young student has metabolized the advice into something greater for both of them.

    Robby’s advice is the thesis of the show: you can’t help people on the worst days of their lives and not feel the joy and the grief as if it’s your own — the best you can do is find a balance. The only way out is through, unfortunately.

    These Are Spoilers

    The last few episodes of the show take place during a mass casualty event. There’s a shooting at the music festival and the Pitt is the closest hospital to the disaster, so they get the worst of it.

    When the news hits, the whole hospital mobilizes to deal with the crisis, citing their own “mass shooting training.” They wheel in giant bins of emergency medical supplies. One of the doctors has military experience (we learn along the way), so he has tricks he learned by treating victims of warfare.

    The ease with which the hospital moves into mass casualty mass gunshot mode is depressing and scary and sad and infuriating. I hope this is not the world we will live in forever but it’s the world we live in now. Like a lot happening lately, I wish it weren’t.

    1

    no tv show can be completely realistic, of course. Drama requires the laws of reality to bend to fit the demands of the story. There are good discussions on the subreddit for the Pitt if you’re curious.

    2

    it’s a nice counterbalance to the over-written tragedy of shows like The Boys or The Last of Us, which never have relationships or subtexts that they don’t love announcing in direct dialogue between characters who already know about them

    3

    People on the internet like to apply the blank porn appellation to lots of things and I dislike every one of them. Porn is famously hard to define but anything called porn is very specifically intended to serve a function beyond simply entertaining or telling a story. The Pitt is good drama about competent people doing their jobs well.

    4

    you can watch this scene yourself for as long as the video stays up (I expect it to be taken down because these clips always are). I recommend watching everything that leads up to it first, though. I will say I also forgot the little detail of Robby pushing Whitaker away after he helps him up. The little touches like that are a different kind of competence — the thrill of watching great storytellers, filmmakers, actors, writers, etc.

  • When the Big Feelings Get Too Big

    Who let them in here anyway?

    I have all these feelings. They are big. If I were an illustrator I would draw myself with a giant sack of wet laundry on my back with the word “feelings” on it. My head is bent low in effort, but if you could see my face, the expression would be anguish.

    They’ve been bad lately, and bigger than I’m used to. They’re so big and mean and nasty that all I can do is keep going and hope they’ll pass eventually. They always do.

    But where do they come from? Well, that’s a little harder to pin down. Some of it is self-inflicted. In sports terms, it’s an unforced error. In the parlance of the internet, it’s called a self-own. Nobody said anything or did anything with the intention of hurting my feelings — I did it all to myself.

    I feel like a cat with a long tail in a room full of rocking chairs. The cat could just leave the room. The door is open, cat! Just walk through it! Why are you doing this to yourself?

    But the pain of that rocking chair coming down on its tail is weirdly comforting. Or, if it’s not comforting, it’s familiar.

    Sure, the cat could leave the room, but what’s in the hall? What’s in the next room? What if that’s even worse?

    And then there’s the little part of that cat that needs the attention it gets when it yowls. That’s the hardest part of this to reckon with. Is that why I let these things get to me?

    Or am I just being hard on myself about that, too?

    I’ll return to this in a moment, but for now, let’s look at why I think this is useful to write about.

    Don’t Be Sad I Know You Will

    I was going to stop writing about my feelings so much. I write about my interior life more than anything else and I never wanted that. I was ashamed. I kept thinking — this is what I’m doing now instead of writing my novels or my stories? Every time I would start writing one of these I would jump in front of myself and tell me I was wasting my time. Who cares about any of this?

    But then I looked at the stuff I enjoyed reading the most and it was all stuff like this. This, the newsletter you’re reading, but also this:

    “I rarely look in the mirror anymore, not for an extended period, lest I set myself up for a full day of isolation on my phone, pondering the steps I can take to not despair over my appearance: Nose job? Jaw enhancements? Hair plugs? Teeth whitening? Intermittent fasting? That barbaric surgery where they stretch out your leg bones to gain three more inches of height?

    And then I start calculating if any of those alterations are worth it. How many “good years” do I have left to not feel like an ogre anyway?”

    I still wonder most days what it’s like to have a body that’s not awful. Body image was a topic in IOP (that’s “Intensive Outpatient Program” for you fuzzy ducks who haven’t gone to rehab), and I took the floor. I described how much I hated the sight of myself, how I defaulted to believing myself utterly loathsome, physically, and how I relied on attention to feel less so, if only for a moment. How I’d spent 24 years in long-term relationships in part to keep that ongoing drip of knowing someone out there wasn’t revolted by me. There was a long silence. I’d gone deep. One woman said, “It’s okay to cry.”

    These are middle-aged men writing about their experiences and they resonate so much with me that I feel like I did when I was reading science fiction books and watching action adventure movies when I was a kid. I love how they make me feel and I want to make something that makes people feel that way, too.

    I want to make somebody else feel the comaraderie and fellowship I feel when I read about other people like me. How do I feel when I read about A.J. and Ben and their own big feelings?

    I feel like I’m not alone. I feel like there are other people out there who know what it’s like to feel this stuff. Sometimes they figure out ways to deal with it, but sometimes they don’t.

    Do You Want Sympathy or Solutions?

    This is a good question to ask somebody when they tell you a bunch of bad stuff that’s happening to them, or when they’re complaining about their jobs, or when they’re telling you about their problems. It’s especially useful to people like me, who struggle sometimes with human interactions.

    Sometimes we just want to get the bad stuff out of us and into the world and we need somebody to validate our feelings. We don’t want somebody to tell us how to improve our lives or feel better about things, we just want somebody to hear us and listen. We want a witness.

    My therapist’s name is Sandy. Everybody who knows me knows about Sandy. When they see me having a bad time, they don’t ask “have you talked to somebody?” they ask me “have you talked to Sandy?”

    Sandy knows me really well because he’s been my therapist for over 20 years. He was my dad’s therapist before he was mine, and since my dad was the origin of so many of my troubles, Sandy’s insight and experience are particularly useful to me.

    My dad started getting better after he started seeing Sandy. Sandy helped him connect with his own interiority and deal with the anxiety and depression that made him such a nasty person to his children and his wife.

    In addition to his body shape, I inherited these from my dad. I have had terrible anxiety all my life. It got tremendously bad in my adolescence. I had daily panic attacks in college. I had trouble making friends because of it. If I suspected a girl liked me, they might as well have lit a stick of dynamite and dropped it into my limbic system.

    All excitement, all arousal, was bad. I didn’t know how to differentiate the good excitement from the bad. I was scared of pretty much everything, but I was especially scared of other people. I didn’t know how to handle their feelings or my feelings about their feelings.

    I still struggle with them sometimes! Maybe more than sometimes.

    The Day That Sandy Saved My Life

    After graduating college, I moved to DC to live with my Aunt Posy and “find a job.” I put it in quotes because I didn’t have a plan and I had no idea how any of it was supposed to go.

    I had an english degree and a vague idea that I could start a career. I didn’t know what that career was going to be or where I would find it. It didn’t matter, because I was too anxious to follow through on anything you do to find a job and I spent most of those days in Posy’s basement, smoking cigarettes and writing fiction that nobody read.

    At the end of those six months, my mom suggested I come back home and start seeing a therapist. My dad had been seeing Sandy for a little while, and it had helped him. I returned to West Virginia at what was the lowest point of my entire life, and moved back in with my parents. My dad made me an appointment with Sandy and drove me to Pittsburgh from Wheeling.

    I had been to therapists before, as a kid. Twice, actually, and neither one lasted very long. Those therapists were supposed to help me get along better with my dad. His work with Sandy, many years later, was proof that he needed the therapy as much as I did.

    So I went into Sandy’s office with trepidation and, of course, anxiety. I told him some version of the above, that I was so nervous all the time and didn’t like myself and I was ashamed of what I looked like and who I was and I was resigned to living like that for the rest of my life. I had trouble talking to people I had known my whole life. I was scared of everybody, everything. I had never even held hands with a girl, let alone kiss one. I was never going to live a normal life.

    “Jim, you have anxiety,” he said. “I’ve helped many people with these things you’re feeling. You’re not alone, and you’re not cursed, you just need a plan. Here’s what we’re going to do…”

    I needed sympathy and solutions, and he gave me both.

    I Need You To Witness Me

    I don’t even need to know you’re out there. These newsletter are like prayers. That’s something else I’m coming to understand: prayer isn’t about somebody answering, it’s about the praying. A prayer names our suffering and lets us get our arms around it. A prayer asks the universe, the powers greater than us, to hear us, to witness us.

    So What About My Big Feelings?

    Oh right, I said I’d get back to this. I’m not expecting you, or the the wild, wide universe, to do anything but witness me. The universe doesn’t have a choice but you do. I’m worried that if I write what people don’t want in their inboxes, they’ll stop reading what I write.

    Every time I write one of these I think nobody wants to read it and everybody will yell at me about it or, worse, nobody will say anything about it at all. But in the end, right before I hit “Send,” I say “fuck it.”

    Because one of my continuing big problems is the approval I look for from other people. I shouldn’t need somebody to tell me I’m handsome or tell me they like my writing. That needs to come from inside me. This is my next challenge. I’ll write about it here, in addition to my writing challenges and all the other challenges that constantly challenge me lol.

    That’s a small version of why I decided it was okay to write about my feelings and post it here. It helps me, and maybe somebody will be helped by it, too.

    We’re only as old as we’ve been told
    And I’m not ready for the shelf
    – Marika Hackman, Ophelia

    there might be a middle aged middle child in your life who would like reading this

    Share

    If you liked reading this, consider a subscription, won’t you? It’s free!

  • Dear Miles,

    Ten years ago this very day, you left us forever.

    I don’t know what you would think of all this. I didn’t know you as well as I should have.

    I’m sorry to make this about me, but you can’t talk anymore. You should be 27.

    Here’s what I remember. You were vibrant. You always seemed restful, even when you weren’t. Your hair was incredible and bright blonde, like a violin bow unfurled. I remember that. I remember your braces, too. I remember your smile. I remember your easy agreeability.

    I remember when you were a fat little baby, and (I tell this story all the time) you were toddling around my apartment in Morgantown and you picked up a letter that my roommate was going to mail and you ripped it open and I lunged at you and said “no!” and you started crying right there while your dad and I laughed.

    I remember that, too.

    I still see you in my dreams. Maybe I’ll dream about you tonight.

    I have a dumb question. When I dream about you, is that you visiting me? I hope so. I also hope you have better things to do, like explore the universe. Forgive me if I don’t say hi in there. In my dreams you’re supposed to be there so it’s not strange to me that you still look like this, 10 years on:

    I don’t just think about you on August 21, but I always think about you on August 21. I tell people. I tell them about the website your dad made for you. Your peers would call me “cringe.”

    Wait, no they wouldn’t. You’re a millennial. You’re not Gen Z. I’m sorry, in my mind you’re still 17.

    You’re lucky. Wait, hear me out. You don’t have to get old and watch everybody else get old and busted and die around you. You don’t have to have cancer scares. You don’t have to have any more fucked up surgeries. You get to be remembered as a twanged bow string, vibrating forever. You get to stay put while the rest of us have to keep moving on and on and on.

    You vibrated so much. You made so much great art —

    I mean it, you made really great art — in such a short time that it’s almost as if —

    No, I won’t say it.

    You didn’t know you were leaving until you were already gone.

    I’m going to wrap this up.

    I don’t know if you can read this. I think it’s probably silly to think you can, but I don’t care. I don’t pray but this is a kind of prayer anyway.

    I remember in Morgantown, shortly after you died, they released paper lanterns into the sky in your memory. That’s kind of like what this letter is. It’s going to go up and out and away.

    I hope wherever you are is nice. I hope you can skate or take photographs or maybe just laugh a lot at all the silly shit we do down here. That’s a nice thought.

    Okay well I’m going now

    Jimmy

  • Love and Death, But Mostly Death

    This could be the title of my whole newsletter

    I have written a lot about death. Here’s some of it:

    Emmitt has a favorite spot in my apartment. It’s a heating pad on top of a big trunk that was made in my home town of Wheeling, West Virginia. There’s a blanket on there too, the blanket that was in the crate with him when we met. It was his only possession.

    Emmitt and I have at least two things in common: a love of treats and intractable anxiety. At least I have cognitive behavioral therapy and cymbalta to help keep mine somewhat tractable. Maybe Emmitt was born that way, and he was going to be an anxious cat no matter what.

    Equally likely is that he had a rough go of it during his first few years of life, when he was a stray. What struggles and danger he faced in those times makes me very sad, because I love the little guy so much. He’s fine, don’t worry. He’s staring at me right now as I write this. His anxiety is my anxiety.

    I think the real origin of his anxiety is probably a mixture of both, just like mine is. We were both going to be anxious, but life had its way with us and gave that anxiety a place to bloom.

    The smallest disturbance can set Emmitt off under the couch. A big disturbance sends him into the closet, as far back as he can squeeze his little body. When somebody visits, it’s always the worst day of Emmitt’s life. He can take hours to reemerge, hesitantly, after they’ve left and he knows the coast is clear.

    Sometimes Emmitt has bad dreams and he wakes up with an exaggerated startle response that sends him flying across the room. Nothing happened, and nothing is wrong, but whatever was threatening him in his dream was so scary he had to get out of there. He’s so small and goes so gently in his normal life that when he has a bad night I can tell because the blanket on his heating pad is askew when I wake up.

    Even though Emmitt’s not there, I know he was. Even a 7 lb cat with the lightest touch you ever saw leaves something behind. I began this section as a metaphor for death and it turned into a wistful reflection on my cat.

    I wanted to write about death because my dad died almost exactly a year ago and it’s been on my mind a lot. Since I don’t have a lot of experience with dads dying (I only had the one), it coughed up a whole bunch of other related feelings that I do have some experience with: a broken heart.

    Oh woe is me! My heart’s broken. Boo fucking hoo. I know, I know. It’s very cringe for me to be talking about this stuff but this is my space and you agreed to read it, so stop bumming me out and go bum somebody else out with your bad attitude.

    It sounds like I’m talking to somebody else but I’m really talking to myself. This is the annoying manifestation of my shame and self loathing that materializes in my own head and I start hearing that person scoff and I see them roll their eyes.

    But get this: the person who planted those seeds in me is dead! He was my dad. It’s a special kind of feeling to grow up and your biggest tormentor and origin of the worst feelings about yourself is your own dad. Peoples dads do way worse things than my dad did, but just because somebody else had a bad dad doesn’t mean my dad can’t be bad, too. And when I say he was bad, he was bad in a very specific emotional way.

    If you’re wondering what I mean, let me give you a single solitary example (I have a ton more).

    We would be having fun on Christmas morning, as kids tend to do. It probably looked like this:

    In the middle of all those joyful kids, my dad would get in his car and sit there with the engine running out on the street. Once we were sure we all saw him, he’d drive away and stay away for hours. He did this on more than one Christmas. Christmas was also his birthday. He wasn’t mad that we weren’t celebrating him, he was mad that we weren’t sad. So he made us sad.

    He couldn’t help it, I guess. His mom was even worse, if you can believe it. So he was dealing with a lot, too.

    And he died the day after MY birthday! The audacity!

    This isn’t a dad roast. That already happened, anyway, because he was cremated.

    He would have loved that joke, by the way.

    Despite how it sounds, I actually did love him a lot and that love grows as I get older and get to know myself a little better. He couldn’t help it, but sometimes he absolutely could help it and he did it anyway. He knew that being a passive aggressive shit to his own children when they were having fun was wrong, but he did it anyway. I don’t think he had the tools or the self awareness to help any of it until later, when he got therapy and prozac. He got a lot better, but I was an adult by then.

    I forgave my dad for what he did to me. Forgiveness is a process, and I am still forgiving him. But I’ll write about forgiveness some other time. This is about death and love.

    “I think the constant articulation of my own grief and hearing other people’s stories was very healing, because those who grieve know. They are the ones to tell the story. They have gone to the darkness and returned with the knowledge. They hold the information that other grieving people need to hear. And most astonishing of all, we all go there, in time.”

    ― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage

    We are blessed and cursed to live, because everything that lives also dies. What’s worse than death is to watch other things die.

    Life prepares us for the inevitability of our own deaths by killing the people we love and forcing us to sit with the feelings.

    Life prepares us for those deaths in other small ways, too.

    For instance, we cannot survive without making something else die first. Oh sure there are some monks in some far off places that only eat fruit that falls from a tree and I suppose those same monks could also choose only to eat animals that died of natural causes, though that seems hard to sustain. It simply wouldn’t scale.

    But before I get bogged down on that train of thought, I’ll make the point I was making: love is death, is life.

    When we love somebody, we put a chunk of our happiness with them. We access that happiness by thinking about them, or looking at them, or making love with them, or simply sometimes just by remembering that they are there. If you’re really lucky, they gave a piece of their own happiness to you, too.

    Something happens to that chunk of ourselves we hand over to them, because we completely lose control of it. They have it, now. As long as they take care of it, it grows and changes, and enriches the piece of them we hold. But sometimes people move on and leave that chunk of us behind.

    They might place it gently on the table between you, or they might take it out and stomp on it, or they might simply leave it behind because something or someone drew them away. Sometimes they don’t tell you they’re leaving.

    After they’ve left you and your chunk of happiness is back in your hands and you’re figuring out what to do with it, they might not have given you a reason for it. Or maybe they did give you a reason and it was even more cruel than stomping on it would have been.

    In my experience, there’s no version of the breakup more preferable than another. They’re all bad. They’re all terrible. And sometimes it’s more terrible for you than it is for them and it makes you mad. Why aren’t they as sad as I am? How can they so callously leave us behind like this? Why did they have to go?

    There’s no reason for it. Sometimes. And sometimes we don’t want to hear the answer that’s true.

    And now you’re left with a giant absence. The beams of love and joy you fired in their direction don’t bounce back anymore. The light you shine isn’t reflected. It all disappears. The void swallows it all and gives nothing back.

    The real sad fact of the whole thing is that we’re all alone, all the time, and maybe they made us feel like we weren’t alone. Or maybe we felt like our whole life was over and they blasted into it like a rocket and picked us up with them and we flew so high and saw such amazing things from a vantage we thought we’d never see again and they dropped us off, not unkindly, and blasted off to their next adventure. And now we’re back on the boring old hard ground and we’re so lonely that not even our cats can fill the space.

    I can get wrapped up in metaphors so I want to bring this back to the point I was making before: we can’t make people stay with us if they don’t want to, and sometimes they give us reasons why they can’t stay with us and you know they’re just saying those things to save our feelings.

    Sometimes you want to shout and call them a liar and maybe when you’re young you do that because young people are closer to their feelings and haven’t made the right tools yet.

    When you lose a tooth, there’s a space in your mouth that wasn’t there before that you can stick your tongue through. It takes a while to get used to that absence, and after a little while a new tooth grows into the space where the old one was.

    While we don’t have an infinite supply of teeth, we do have an infinite supply of love. It springs out of us and spills over and gets everywhere. It makes no sense to keep it all inside yourself. That doesn’t do anybody any good. Sharing that love makes the whole universe better, even if it’s just saying something sweet to your cat.

    If it sounds like I’m not writing about death anymore, I suppose I’m not. I’m writing about love now, and how love is the thing that really matters.

    And she said losing love
    Is like a window in your heart
    Everybody sees you’re blown apart

    – Paul Simon, Graceland

    Anyway, losing love is one of the ways life gets us ready to face death, because falling in and out of love can prepare us for when the people leave.

    One big difference is that the people we love are still alive, and we have that little hope that maybe they’ll come back. When you spend a lot of time out here in this void with your cat sometimes that hope is all you have.

    And while it’s important to hold on to that hope, it’s best not to get too precious about it. And it should absolutely never keep you from lighting a new candle for somebody else. If you’re lucky you can get a whole bunch of candles burning all at the same time. Some will always be shorter flames than others, but it’s okay to keep them. We are, after all, made of fire ourselves.

    Losing love is like when somebody you love dies. That seems paradoxical, but it’s the way it is. You love them and they go away, and you’re left by yourself again.

    We don’t ever get over anyone. We just learn to live with their ghosts.

    this song doesn’t have anything to do with what I just wrote, but it’s nice little bop

  • Everything Ends

    So the new things can begin

    Well, the road is out before me
    And the moon is shining bright
    What I want you to remember as I disappear tonight

    Today is grey skies
    Tomorrow is tears
    You’ll have to wait til yesterday’s here

    – Yesterday is Here, by Tom Waits

    It’s Autumn, baby. This is my favorite time of year. Here’s a photo I took of me and Emmitt, my cat.

    It looks like I’m taking a photo of my humidifier or my pile of (clean!) laundry, but I’m not. Emmitt was hanging out behind me for some reason and I thought it was funny. We have fun, Emmitt and me.

    Anyway, on to the newslettering:

    Some memories are like planets. We don’t think about them very much but they’re always there, orbiting around us. We are under their sway, in the invisible certainty of gravity.

    When I picked the title of this issue, I thought people might think I’m announcing that I’m ending of this newsletter. Fear not! I’m not going to stop writing this.

    No, I’m just thinking about ends. And planets.

    I’ll talk about memory in a second. First, I want to talk about planets.

    Did you know that Jupiter has saved our little planet from disaster after disaster? It’s so far away but its gravity is immense. Rogue rocks come flying in from somewhere out there and Jupiter is so heavy that it bends space around the whole solar system. Those asteroids go spinning off away from our little marble. Our precious rock, our only home, under the watchful eye of big brother Jupiter’s big red spot.

    Is Jupiter there in the perfect orbit to defend us, on our perfect orbit, for a reason? Or is Jupiter’s perfect orbit a happenstance compliment our own earth’s happenstance perfect orbit? I don’t know anymore.

    Memories are Comets

    Okay, memory now: memories want to be remembered. It’s their whole reason for being. Sometimes you need to let them have their way. Sometimes they feel like the kind of comet that collides with our brains and makes us nuts, but not really. I don’t like that particular metaphor because it doesn’t capture the repetition. Comets come in and out of our solar system, though. Halley has a comet that does that.

    It’s okay to let those memories into our orbits sometimes and watch their stories, but this is the crucial part: we have to move them along. We have to make them start their orbit again. They’ll be back eventually. But they stick around too long and they cause problems. They mess with the gravity in our lives and by thinking about them too much we start obsessing. No, it’s vitally important to push them away. Crucially, this is also the hardest part.

    Something New Is Always Starting

    “Stars are not important. There is nothing interesting about stars. Street lamps are very important, because they’re so rare. As far as we know, there’s only a few million of them in the universe. And they were built by monkeys.” – Terry Pratchett

    Every morning when you wake up, and your eyes flutter open, and you have a new day, you’re one of the luckiest beings in the history of the universe.

    Life is so rare that it only exists in one place (as far as we know). We’ve visited a few other planets in the solar system and there’s no life there. Just here.

    When you look at yourself in the mirror for the first time in the morning, you’ve got a front row seat to one of the rarest miracles in the known universe: you.

    You. Yes, you. You’re the miracle.

    You don’t even have to do anything.

    But then you could say that everybody is a miracle.

    Alan Moore gets it. Just because we are surrounded by life doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.

    Carl Sagan got it, too.

    The thing about these miraculous lives we have is that even on the best days, they’re hard. Even lives we know would be easier than our own, if we had everything we wanted or needed, we would still struggle, just in different ways. Your life is immeasurably better than the lives of most people in the long, wild history of human beings. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy!

    As soon as you wake up, you’re in the thick of it. You’ve got a face full of problems before you even life your head off the pillow. My advice for you is simple to say but hard to do, and I know that but I’m still going to say it: it’s going to end, at some point.

    Do not despair! The end is coming. These terrible times will be over soon.

    The white winter peals away to green spring.

    Hold on.

    Everything is Ending

    Everything is happening
    Everyone is clapping
    – Everything is Ending by the Bird and the Bee

    This applies to the bad things, but to the good things, too. Some day even this planetary pattern will end. But not yet! Not today. Not tomorrow. Yes, the end is inevitable, but it’s not here yet.

    Just like everything has to begin, everything has to end, too. We endure our ends to make room for the next beginnings. Even a dead human body left to its own devices will also host new life, from bacteria to bugs.

    Did you know there’s a place not far from here where dead human bodies decompose out in the open? It’s true, and it’s called a body farm, and it’s in Fayette County. They use the bodies there to study how human beings decompose in different scenarios and environments. Sorry, true crime fans, it’s not open to the public. You can sign up to have your body decompose there, if you like, and maybe your ending can educate somebody.

    The Long, Slow Goodbye

    I close my eyes, I just can’t sleep
    Where have you gone again, my sweet?
    – The Long, Slow Goodbye by Queens of the Stone Age

    I feel like I’ve had a lot of endings lately. I don’t know if I’ve had more than my share, but there’s not much I can do about them. I try to remember that it’s important to endure endings, no matter how hard they are, so those new things can begin. Losing a parent is one of the big ones, maybe one of the biggest ones, that people have to deal with. There’s no new beginning behind a dead parent. It’s not like I’m going to get a new dad to replace the old one. Humans aren’t baby teeth.

    But the end of his story is the beginning of a new part of mine, so that’s kind of a new beginning. I don’t plan on joining him at the top of the long, slow, stairway just yet. I’ve got some chapters left.

    It might sound like it, but I’m not complaining about how many endings I’ve had lately. Endings are encoded in everything. The greatest gift we can hope for is a good end. Endings are not fun, but they’re important.

    Did you ever hear somebody say “I hate funerals” ? Of course you hate funerals! Everybody hates funerals! Somebody had to die for one to happen, and that’s terrible. It sucks. We don’t have funerals for the fun of them. Even though dying is inevitable, we still don’t like it when people die. It’s a shattering experience. I imagine it’s even more shattering for the person who died. But at least they don’t have to live without them. That’s the burden of the survivor. We get to watch the ends happen and mourn the people we lose.

    I think my father had a good end, as far as those things go. He was surrounded by every single member of the family he made with my mom, the family that held together despite everything, sometimes despite him! It’s the family that remains even though he’s gone and the family I am so thankful to have.

    This will change, of course. Another inescapable truth about the universe is that it changes. Change is built into everything, too.

    Throw yourself into the unknown
    With pace and a fury defiant
    Clothe yourself in beauty untold
    And see life as a means to a triumph

    – Achilles, Come Down by Gang of Youths

    There is nothing, literally nothing, that goes on forever.

    Forever exists only in our imaginations. That sounds like I’m downplaying it but I’m really not. The human imagination is what keeps us alive. It drives us ever forward. The real spark of humanity is right there in our imaginations, where new things spring out of the underbrush like startled rabbits.

    A Tiny Tincture of Tolkien

    Our imaginations have created a concept wherein nothing changes. Tolkien wrote about it a lot, with his elves. His elves did everything they could to preserve an ever-present past. Elves fought wars over gems that preserved the light of dead trees. While men sought to dominate and dwarves sought to accumulate wealth, elves wanted only to keep what they already had. When the rings lost their power, the elves were forced to “diminish.” Even Tolkien’s forever-obsessed kingdoms eventually went away to the West where they would live in harmony and beauty with the gods.

    But even that infinity is actually finite, because the gods and their elves only persist as long as the world exists. When the world ends, and it most certainly will, the elves all end, too. Forever isn’t so ever after all.

    I’ve Been Thinking About Death, Again (Again)

    You might have noticed that I think about death a lot. I felt guilty and selfish after my father died. It was mixed in with all the sadness, so they took a little bit of time to make themselves known against the backdrop. I felt selfish because I kept thinking about my own death.

    I talked to my therapist about this. He is unafraid to call me out on my bullshit, as all good therapists are, so I expected some castigation or excoriation. He said something I’ve seen echoed by poets and philosophers: every death we experience is our own death, too.

    It feels selfish but it isn’t, because something that’s universal can’t be selfish. That’s like saying you get “selfish” when you’re “hungry.” How dare you selfishly drink water when you’re thirsty or sleep when you’re sleepy. I’ve had my bad memory called selfish. Can you believe it? People have actually accused me of selfishly forgetting things. Thankfully, the relationships with those people ended. New relationships sprang into the spaces they left behind.

    That’s how these things go.

    May your endings be swift. I wish you sparkling beginnings. I wish you bountiful newness and joyful conclusions. Hold on, don’t let go. All you have to do is endure.

    May your endurance be easy.

    Thank you for reading.

    Programming note: You’ll see that the spelling of Foremanea has changed. Foremania was a term first coined (in my memory) by extended family member Leigh, who described a gathering of Foremans thusly. There are a lot of us, after all.

    I also liked how it kind of resembled the word “miscellanea,” at least by the sound of it. I like to capture both ideas with the archaic flourish of an uncommon “ea” ending.

    I want to lean more into the miscellanea part, so I changed the spelling of the name of the newsletter. I like it more. See? Even this newsletter changes!

  • Rise and Grind, Dirge and Dance

    It’s time for a pep talk

    One of these days, I will dance again. I have danced a few times, but I have too much shame and a poor body image and other associated inhibitors to do so as often as I am dancing in my head. I love listening to dance music, especially anything that sounds like this:

     

    The original title of this was “A Dirge for the Dead and Dying” but I thought that was a little too morose for what I wanted to write today, and not reflective of how I feel and also not the kind of energy I want to pop into peoples inboxes on a Sunday evening. Be warned, though, I’m going to talk about death, because it’s on my mind today, especially, of all days. 

    Today is in My Calendar as Miles Day

    Today is the seventh year since my nephew, Miles, died in a car accident. He was alone but listening to music, and it was late at night. I have put myself in that car with him many times since. I sit with him as the end comes, and he’s not alone at all. 

    My brother, his father, memorialized him with a website of our memories of Miles and the gifts he gave us. I encourage you to visit anonymousish.com today and think about that golden-haired boy with us.

    This is a Dirge Day

    In accessing the mourning part of my tapestry of available feelings, I am reminded of my friend Elicia Parkinson, who also died young, and recently, and suddenly, and without telling anyone. Of course she didn’t tell anyone, she didn’t know it was going to happen, though I suspect if she had known she wouldn’t have mentioned it. I wrote about her when it happened and this is a part of what I said: 

    Life keeps going and that person is back from where you just came from. If time is a river, they dropped anchor and waved goodbye as you went around the bend. She’s gone, now. She’s back there. 

    Everything Happens At Once

    We are blessed to experience time linearly, at a rate of sixty seconds per minute. Everything that has ever happened has happened already, and is currently happening. Imagine a long string held vertically, as if to entice a cat to play. Every event occurs along that string, stacked vertically, from the beginning of the universe to its end. Everything ends, you see, even the universe.

    I take great comfort in this. Endings are built into the fabric of everything. Order and chaos are not opposed forces, they are best friends. Order knows that chaos wins in the end, but it still stacks up the blocks that it knows chaos will one day knock over. Even though chaos claims everything eventually, order keeps us safe until we can’t be safe anymore. Endings are inevitable, but the greatest glory is for those who fight for a lost cause.

    I Won an Award 

    Our office had a lovely little superlatives survey that culminated in a lovely little awards ceremony at the company picnic. It was a nice way to show our mutual admiration for each other, and more reasons for me to feel so lucky about where I work. Here’s my award:

    Believe it or don’t, I’m known around the office for my relentless positivity. Having been faced with some challenges of my own helped me get to where I am, but it does not originate in a hospital bed. My secret is that this positivity does not come from that stuff at all but, instead, comes directly from Miles.

    Miles and I both struggled with anxiety and depression. My tattoo is a constant reminder of the light in the darkness. It was pulled straight from a page of writing Miles had done. It stuck out to me because it was on a page by itself, as if he flipped over whatever he was working on and scribbled this down. It’s a mantra. It’s a prayer. It will be with me until my own story ends.

    Well, unless my arm gets bitten off by a shark or bear or something. I suppose I could also lose it to a necronomical infection and chop it off with a chainsaw, and then replace the lost hand with the same chainsaw, but I’m not really a cabin-in-the-woods kind of guy.

    Feeling Sorry For Yourself is OK, But Don’t Let it Last

    Last night I was deep in my feelings (the bad ones), and then I happened to look at what day it was, and I instantly felt like a very large ass. I smacked myself (mentally) and told myself to pull me together.

    It is tempting to dwell on the things we don’t have. It is easy to see another person enjoying what we wish we had and feel envy. It is especially infuriating to see someone squander something we value.

    The cure for this is to make a list. It doesn’t have to be a long list. In fact, it can be just one thing that you have: rent money, a healthy body, a partner or a pet who loves you, etc. There is somebody in the world, probably not very far from you, who would love to have what you have. If you’re alive and reading this, I can name at least one thing for you.

    When you next find yourself in your feelings and feeling down about whatever it is you’re down about, remember that you are alive, right now. Rejoice! Now is all that matters, and right now, you’re right here.

    That’s something to celebrate.

  • Deviations on Death

    Alliteration is Accidental

    I wrote the following a bit ago, and I’ll get to why, but I’m including it here mostly as I left it. At the end, I’ll go back to Now. The first bit, about death, is from the Before (a month ago, or slightly more).

    —

    I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about it so much I tweeted it:

     

    Where Does This Death Come From?

    When Rush Limbaugh died, a lot of people were talking about death, how he deserved to die, or that they’re happy that he’s dead. 

    While I intellectually understand why somebody might be happy when certain people die, and I agree that he was a garbage person, I could not participate in the glee. This is not a new insight brought to me by life’s meandering surprises, because I think my relationship with death has always been complicated. 

    This is also not an indictment of their reaction. I was never a target of Limbaugh’s awfulness, even remotely, so I have no horse in the fight. That probably influences my reaction. I was never his target, so I had the privilege of not having an opinion. Being free to not have an opinion on something is a privilege I have only recently come to understand.

    Death Was Cool?

    When I was in junior high, I would intentionally write extremely violent or gross things for vocabulary words (for example), knowing that they would get a reaction. These would invariably involve death or murder. I understand now that it was attention-seeking behavior, and not a sign of something deeper that was happening in my life or in my mind. I wasn’t a threat to anyone, I was just a middle child with crippling social anxiety who sought the most efficacious opportunities for attention. I think my teachers knew that, too, and entertained me as much as they could. 

    I reign with my left hand, I rule with my right

    I’m lord of all darkness, I’m queen of the night

    I had been caught up in thoughts of my own death. I am versed in mental health, so I know what “ideations” are and I was not thinking about killing myself. I’ve never been tempted to end it all early. Suicide has never approached my radar.

    I feel like that’s important to disclaim early in any writer writing about death, and his own death particularly, especially when he has a history of writing about his challenges with depression, cancer, etc. I’m fine. I was just thinking about death.

    Vivid Ideations

    My thoughts on my own death centered around these two scenarios. Skip this part if you might be bothered by graphic depictions.

    Scenario 1: me, in a violent accident. Blood-soaked whiskers. Red snow. It scared me. When I thought about driving somewhere, that image invaded my mind. It passed as the anxiety-induced imagery it was. It was not a portend. I have had so many anxiety-induced “glimpses” into the future, since my very youngest memories, that know none of them can be trusted. Exactly none of them have ever come true.

    Scenario 2: how my family and friends would behave in my now-empty apartment, after my death. If I were to leave here and die, I would leave behind this apartment exactly as it is. Having experienced this from the point of view of a loved one exploring the crypt-like remnants of another person’s life, frozen in time, I can easily spiral into obsessive thoughts about what my heirs would encounter. 

    “I found another power strip that wasn’t plugged into anything!”

    “How many socks did he have?”

    “Why is this here?” X 100

    “How much did he spend on this?”

    They will see the things I bought or kept in case I needed them in the future, in a future I will never see. They will comb through my diaries, and journals, and find things in them that might make them blush, or cry, or remember me fondly. They would divvy up my belongings though I think most of this stuff would go to the auction or the garbage. I could write more about the value of another person’s valuables, but I would not blame anybody for getting rid of anything they inherited that they felt no connection to. I know, from experience, that there are plenty of things remaining after a person dies that not every single thing they touched has the same weight. I value and treasure items from Posy and Miles, and they will always have more value to me than anything with a price tag on it. 

    But Not Yet

    I’m here, and taking up this space, and eating this food, but some day I’m going to leave this place and never come back, and my family will have to go through it all. What will they think? What will they find? 

    I am confident that they will find nothing scandalous. One joke among people my age is “delete my browser history before my mom sees it” but I could show my unfiltered browser history to everybody who ever mattered to me and not be even slightly concerned or embarrassed by what they would see. I am both very predictable and not scandalous.

    Dying To Live

    I read a short story about time travel. The time travel actually didn’t really matter to me as much as other parts of the story that I found far more compelling. Within this story about time travel was a secret society of magic-practitioners who discovered the confirmable existence of an unavoidable afterlife. Heaven and hell were real, and you went to one or the other when you died.

    Because they were a secret society of very nasty people, they weren’t very interested in spending an eternity in hell, so the majority of the story involved them looking for a way to obliterate themselves. 

    I don’t just mean “obliterate” in the physical way, I mean it in a wholesale spiritual way. Faced with an afterlife of suffering, they were looking for a way to make themselves cease existing, as if they had never existed.

    The complete erasure of identity or selfhood that we all fear awaits us in death was something they actively wanted, because oblivion was preferable to eternal suffering. The story is a novella I read called Salvage and Demolition.

    Not Existing 

    The sudden non-existence is frightening to us, as creatures who have existed. The fact that we may some day return to the nonexistence we experienced pre-birth is so unsettling that we have created entire belief systems around it (or, about it, at least). I don’t know if religion exists because of a fear of the obliteration of permanent death, but I wouldn’t be surprised. 

    Death is a funny thing 

    It happens to everybody. Nobody on earth has ever escaped it. It is a fundamental part of life. There are things that live a long time, but they die eventually. Everything has a lifespan, from bacteria to stars, measured in minutes or billions of years. 

    This inevitability has made it creep into every culture, in some way. The more appealing cultures, to me, embrace it and celebrate it, or at least they don’t try to hide from it. 

    The religion of my upbringing, presbyterianism, teaches that we are all destined to die, and then wake up again (?) in the afterlife we deserve determined by 1) how much we believe in Jesus and 2) whether we were good people, though 2 was not as important as 1. This thinking led to Pascal’s Wager and other inadvisable digressions.

    Consciousness is a tenuous experience

    I spent a lot of time watching documentaries about science and the brain. They were looking at human brains in an MRI, trying to find the source of consciousness, of that experience we all have, that sense of “me-ness,” that identification of who we are and how we relate to the world

    We like to think that what we experience as our day-to-day, standard average life is the one we will carry into whatever afterlife we hope lies beyond the veil. It doesn’t take long to find that the consciousness we think is so emblematic of our experience as human beings is tenuous. A shot of vodka under an overpass with friends who stole a bottle from their parents is enough to show us entirely new ways to experience the world around us. 

    When one of the scientists investigating the seat of consciousness was asked about the physical location of consciousness in the human brain, he had no satisfying answer. It wasn’t, say, in the pineal gland.

    Instead, consciousness was a flickering wave of neuroactivity that swept across the brain like a passing breeze or flashing fire. Consciousness, the essential you-ness, the experience of now, the intersection of sensory data and our current thoughts, was not a place but an event, constantly moving. The similarity between this and the revelations of Zen Buddhism are not lost on me. But this is not the place for that.

    “‎Matter flows from place to place, and momentarily comes together to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing; I find the reality thrilling.” – Richard Dawkins

    —

    Back to Now

    As I said, I wrote the preceding at an earlier time. I was unclear about how much thoughts of my own death had interrupted the steady flicker of MY consciousness. I would stumble and trip over invisible ottomans and blame something or other for the difficulty.

    I got the first dose of my vaccine recently, an injection that everybody will hopefully soon be getting, and it immediately made me glad to be alive. The ruminations on death dissipated.

    The systems in place for getting the vaccine, like all systems, are apathetic. Systems are designed to serve the most people, harm the least, for the most net gain. Systems are not overly concerned with how anybody feels. This makes most systems hostile to human happiness, but we have no choice but to endure them.

    The thoughts of death I had before disappeared a few hours after the shot.

    I wish this relief for everyone.

    I’m hitting Publish on this one, just to get it out of my drafts. I’ve been working on it too long. It’s enough. No more ruminating tonight.

    I love this video with my whole heart. It’s an incredible 20 year anniversary of Andrew WK’s first album, I Get Wet, which mixed heavy metal vibes with party anthems and traditionally-metal-adjacent topics like death and killing and victory.

    There were a bunch of weird conspiracy theories about him that are fascinating to read and bonkers and intentionally played up (if not directly started) by Andrew himself. He maintains this mystery in interviews, mixing a weird performance art aesthetic with relentlessly positive messages of self-acceptance and a celebration of life while also somehow being completely genuine. He is a force of goodness and unapologetic cartoonish glee and I am so very happy that he has a new song out.

  • Death

    “‘And what would humans be without love?’”
    ‘RARE,’ said Death.”
    — Terry Pratchett

    Death is a character in Pratchett’s work, and he always speaks in all-caps. He is a tender-hearted being who likes cats, but is very serious about his job, which is to help the dead get to their final destinations. He tends to be blunt. People who die in Pratchett’s work often encounter Death, who is usually sympathetic, but being a personification of a concept, can’t really relate.

    Terry Pratchett himself died recently, of Alzheimer’s. He got it much earlier than most people, and it finally killed him at age 66. That’s 24 years older than me. I have a history of dementia in my family. Alzheimer’s is part of that terrifying constellation of diseases that slowly, inexorably rob you of your ability to think. Many people think this is a worse fate than slowly losing your physical faculties and dying, infirm but aware of your surroundings. Having seen both processes of aging up close, I cannot say that I prefer one to the other. The looming, large, intractable similarity they share is that they only happen if you get old. We cannot overlook this.

    “Hard times? I’m used to them,
    Speeding planet burns? I’m used to that,
    My life’s so common it disappears.”
    — Paul Simon, The Cool, Cool River.

    Everybody knows someone who died young. Everybody knows lots of people who died young. It’s so common and tragic that most of us won’t traverse our childhoods without losing someone. But you can’t build an identity around it. It’s sad and it’s terrible. That’s not what this is about. This is about me.

    At the age of 42, I have succeeded in not dying young.

    I don’t think about dying very much. I don’t fear death. This is not a result of any experience I had. I’ve been ambivalent about death for most of my life. At some point I realized that dying is, at worst, going to sleep and never waking up. As someone who enjoys sleep, I am not bothered by this.

    A new wrinkle in my worldview has been the grudging acceptance that I might be wrong. Wrong about what? All of it. For most of my life (let’s say 13 to 35), I was convinced of the impermanence of the physical universe, that human beings are all happenstance conglomerations of matter that get to live for a few decades of interrupted nonexistence, after which we return to a state of not existing. The more time you get, the better. But, fundamentally, we are all animals. We are (mostly) hairless apes who managed to live long enough to receive the genes of our successful ancestors. Consciousness, rather than some kind of end goal of evolution, is a bizarre side effect of the combination of beneficial cognitive variables. Consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, is just a byproduct of the adaptations we developed to survive the conditions of the African savannah. We aren’t even the only ones — Neanderthals and Devonians were pre-human (or protohuman, if you’re feeling deterministic) that emerged around the same time we did, and likely had the same existential questions we do. The actual qualities of being Homo sapiens that made us the dominant hairless ape on this planet are lost to history and are far beyond the scope of the point I’m making which is this:

    I’m not so sure about that stuff anymore

    I don’t mean I question evolution, only that the physical universe is all there is to it and we hairless apes have the vast mystery of the universe all figured out. I don’t know what caused the spark of doubt in my own certainty. It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t the result of any singular moment. I experienced a slow skepticism of orthodoxy, all kinds of orthodoxies, that I could no longer ignore. My thirties were a decade of big changes for me, none of them very visible to someone on the outside, and none of them were spurred by astounding revelations. I just kind of thought about things more and found I was less certain of the old certainties.

    I learned more about Zen Buddhism

    It feels like a cliche but I was a white man in his mid thirties who got really into eastern philosophy. My doorway into this world was Alan Watts. I happened to be looking at videos on the internet somewhere and happened upon a video somebody made using a bit of one of his lectures. He talks about the fundamental Buddhist concept of existence as a function of being, and the nature of choice.

    Watts says this (emphasis mine):

    You do not know where your decisions come from. They pop up like hiccups.

    And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. “Did I think this over long enough? Did I take enough data into consideration?” And if you think it through, you find you never could take enough data into consideration. The data for a decision for any given situation is infinite.

    So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking out what you will do about this. Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobble. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way or doing the right thing, and so on and so forth.

    You have to regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh. Because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that is misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you would treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize you can’t make a mistake, whatever you do, cause even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or other.

    For someone who deals with anxiety and indecision as frequently as he breathes, this is a shattering concept. This is a shaking of the foundations. This is a tectonic shift.

    This is a revelation

    I hate to mix my religions, but I will anyway. The concept of the revelation is integral to Abrahamic theology. Sometimes the revelations are personal, and God speaks directly to the stunned listener (the listener, I imagine, is always stunned; nobody receives a communique from the divine and thinks “yes, this is exactly what should be happening”). More often, they are second-hand: an Angel, a messenger, comes down to earth and speaks to them for God. Even more potent, and I think more effective, is the public revelation, a kind of celestial music festival where the main stage is, for example, a guy handing out commandments.

    Moments of revelation are a reliable narrative device that gives me endless pleasure. I love when a character realizes something that alters the course of his life and, thus, the story. The music swells, the camera zooms slowly in, and the neurotransmitters for pleasure hit me like a brick. God, I love it so much. Here are two of my favorites:

    Luke Skywalker is a kid in over his head. A plucky rebellion short on able pilots gives him a rickety old star fighter because an old friend and one of their own can vouch for him. He is just one among an entire fleet, doing his best. He’s given the fifth position in a squadron of five, tasked with defending far more experienced bomber pilots who have to land the football directly into the arms of a receiver so far away and so small that even otherwise hopeful rebels can’t imagine hitting such a small target. Luke watches in horror as every other experienced pilot is put out of action and he, alone, can save the rebels from certain death. He can’t do it. How could he do it? He just watched veteran pilots try and fail. It’s hopeless. He squints into the unfamiliar bomb viewfinder. The galaxy is doomed to fall as the rebellion’s secret base is blown to pieces by the Death Star.

    Until a voice pops into Luke’s head. It’s the Jedi who just died at the business end of the sword of the guy who’s also blowing up all of Luke’s friends. We watched Obi-Wan Kenobi give Luke some rudimentary lessons on the true nature of the universe. It’s nothing very complicated. Use the Force. Luke knows what that means: reach out with his feelings, and don’t rely on what his machines tell him. Kenobi even tells him not to trust his own eyes, to trust his instincts, his connection to the universe, the energy field surrounding everything. It’s ridiculous, but it suddenly makes sense. It’s a counter factual, unmoored and against everything he was previously led to believe. So he turns off his targeting computer and trusts his feelings. [1]

    Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/zR7CeC-rqiE

    That’s the first one. The second one is much more recent and not nearly as famous. It’s a revelation in a very religious sense, because it’s happening to a pastor who has lost of faith after witnessing the death of his wife. She lived just long enough after being struck by a vehicle to unleash a string of nonsense non sequiturs. The pastor interpreted them as the meaningless words of a woman dying a meaningless death in a meaningless universe and abandoned his faith. But the universe of the movie Signs is anything but meaningless.

    It’s not until the pastor’s remaining family is threatened by an intractable, deadly creature from another planet (!) that his wife’s revelation is revealed to him. They spend a terrible night in the basement, menaced by these beings who try over and over again to get to them. The pastor calms his terrified daughter with the story of her birth, the first of every person’s revelations, as the monsters close in. The morning brings hope that they lived through it, until the shocking reveal where we finally see one of these creatures in full view, in stark daylight, cradling the body of the pastor’s asthmatic son. Here comes the second revelation, as the Pastor flashes back to the meaningless babble of his dying wife, which now suddenly has context. One of her utterances was “swing away, Merrill.” The pastor looks over at Merrill and sees him standing below the mounted trophy he got for hitting a ball extremely hard for the longest recorded home run. We know from earlier conversations that Merrill was an unparalleled talent, but struck out more than he hit. “It felt wrong not to swing,” he explains in an earlier scene, unapologetically. The pastor repeats her words to him, and suddenly that night she seemed to speak nonsense makes perfect sense after all. These are three revelations in one scene. It’s like this movie was made for me. [2]

    Watch it with me, won’t you? https://youtu.be/bjv7CVhZXNs

    My own revelations

    I do most of my best work when I’m thinking, and thinking about Alan Watts‘s words was, I suppose, a kind of personal revelation for me. I had never heard what he was saying before. It made sense. It was an explanation of the universe that, to use a word heard most in creative writing classes, resonated. It’s tempting to use the word “resonate” because it has an attractive physicality. It’s an accurate description of the way a revelation bounces around inside you like an echoing musical tone bounces around inside the body of a violin.

    Alan Watts has a nice, English-accented voice with the bristly edge of a tobacco habit. A quick perusal of his biography shows a man of many dimensions, just like any of us. He died young (58, only 16 years older than me), of complications from alcoholism. Even a man who spoke so eloquently of the freedom from the chains of a mortal existence was bound by them. He addressed this in many of his lectures, so it’s not much of a revelation — we are all creatures of the universe, and that sometimes includes destructive habits. His choice to drink his heart to death (he died of heart disease, technically) was spurred by an addiction, but he made his choices. It is the rare person with a drinking problem who does not suspect that they have a drinking problem.

    Alan Watts, warts and all, gave me an excuse to not worry about things. He gave me a reason to stop the spinning brain cycles I spent worrying about things I could control and things I couldn’t. The solution to indecision is to decide. The cure for anxiety is information. Even more startlingly, the enemy of worry is action.

    Don’t sit and stew, plan and do

    The above is a quote from my therapist, who might have gotten it from somewhere else, but I learned it from him. It’s a nice summation of cognitive behavioral therapy. Rather than baste in our own juices, or masticate the gristle of our worries, devise a solution to your problems and execute it. When I learned this, when I really absorbed this lesson, it was likely the first of many revelations I would have in that office. This is how it works: you’re worried about that mole on your arm, the one that looks funny. You can sit in misery and worry about having cancer, or you can go to a doctor. This won’t prevent you from getting cancer, but it will eliminate the worry. It might lead you to additional worrying that you might die from the cancer you might have, but there’s a long way between a diagnosis and death. The point is nicely summarized by this quote from Alan Watts: “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

    If I dig a bit deeper in my own biases, I can see a tendency toward Zen Buddhism specifically for its similarity to the cognitive therapy that has been responsible for so much of my personal growth. They both speak to the importance of reason and clear thinking. My life got measurably better when I started internalizing those concepts.

    Thank you for reading, dear reader. This is the longest one yet, and I hope I didn’t bore you.

    1. What we don’t see is another revelation — Han Solo changes his mind about the Rebellion and comes back to rescue Luke. He, too, trusted his feelings.

    2. People like to criticize this movie for the apparent plot hole that aliens vulnerable to water decided to invade a planet covered in it. I take issue with those who take issue with this because they’re missing the entire point of the movie: there are no coincidences. They picked a planet with water so they could be defeated by clever humans who noticed they were vulnerable to it. The Pastor’s wife had a dying revelation that her husband had to “see” and that Merrill needed to swing. Their daughter left glasses of water around the house specifically so Merrill had a ready supply of ammunition. Her brother had asthma specifically so his lungs would be closed when the alien unleashed its poisonous gas into his face. The unlikely coincidences of the final act of the movie are entirely the point the movie is making: there are no coincidences, and the universe might actually have some meaning behind it after all.