I Could Be Wrong, But... |
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Who's In Charge? Where I live in Encinitas, California, the beaches were closed last weekend because a man from Solana Beach, two towns over, while swimming in the ocean on Friday, was attacked and killed by a great white shark. That same night I received an email from a dear friend who wrote with heartfelt despair, citing this once-in-50-year fatal shark attack where we live as being hard proof and startling reminder that death is all around us. And we can do nothing about it. My friend is right. Death is all around us. And we can do nothing about it. I could be wrong, but while we can do nothing about dying, we can do a hell of a lot about living. In fact, the mind-expanding Life-altering wisdom I am about to impart to you, dear reader, has been around for millennia, in one expression or another, and was even a hippie slogan from the 1970s that I was, back then, probably too stoned to have paid attention to. Here it is: There are only two things you have no choice about. First thing is, you have to die. Second thing is, you have to live until you die. We all have to die, and we all have to live until we die. All the rest is up to us. Don’t get me wrong. I pay attention to death. In fact, I think about death every day, several times a day. But the way I think of death is kind of like an old commercial that used to be on television when I was a kid. A guy stands in a somnambulant trance before his bathroom mirror, having just shaved himself despite being half-asleep. (This is truly Reality Television.) Yawning, he liberally splashes the after-shave lotion being advertised into his hands and then slaps each cheek of his face—hard. Shaking his head to clear the stars from his eyes, he smiles—wide-awake now —and says, “Thanks! I needed that!” That’s the way I often think of death. Thich Nhat Hahn, an influential Zen Buddhist monk who has a retreat, Deer Park, right up the road a piece from where I live, has a subtler way of saying, “Thanks! I needed that!” He thinks we’d all live deeper and with more wide open hearts, minds, and eyes, if we not only acknowledged death, but embraced it, going so far as to now and then invite the grim reaper in for a cup of tea and a neighborly chat, just to keep in touch. Thich Nhat Hahn even encourages us to quietly meditate on being dead, to imagine the slow decomposing of our own body, right down to the worms eating the carcass we once inhabited. In a way, Thich Nhat Hahn is saying, when we occasionally pause to meditate on death, the next time we're driving our red convertible BMWs down I-5 with the top down and the wind blowing our hair and the sun tanning our skin and the stereo playing loud and we're shouting at the sky, “When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day!” that joie de' vivre we're feeling will be even deeper. The day after the shark killed the man from Solana Beach, I spent the morning in a café, as I often do, pretending to be absorbed by the words and images flickering on my laptop screen, while secretly eavesdropping on everyone around me. Like my friend who had written the email to me the night before, the people I listened to in the café the morning after expressed shock, worry, and fear. Interspersed with jokes about selling shark repellent to surfers and inviting their in-laws to come to town for a swim. Over the next several days, the people who fill the empty space of newspapers and televisions all over the world—for once, I am NOT exaggerating things —were obsessed with reporting the shark attack. Everyone, from Larry King, to the localist local journalist, struggled to find meaning, to cipher a message, in the event. There were precious little facts to report, so they reported, just like the folks I eavesdropped on in the café, their emotions. Those emotions were shock, worry, and fear. Their goal seemed to be to make a farmer having a beer in his armchair in landlocked Nebraska shiver with fear of imminent shark attack. And then they left town to cover the next shocking story that would spread worry and fear. I see in the event of this man’s unusual death a meaning and message at odds with the above reactions. I gleaned from the conversations I eavesdropped on that before the man from Solana Beach died from the shark attack, he had lived 66 years in this world. He was a retired veterinarian; a profession I believe shows the deeply magnanimous nature of humans—that they would heal species other than their own—because they want to, and because they can. He lived in one of the wealthiest and most beautiful towns anyone could live in anywhere on the planet. He had health and wealth, family and friends, was admired and respected. In the moment of his death, he was swimming vigorously in the ocean, training for a future triathlon. I carry a notepad with me at all times, in case Life sends me a bumper sticker slogan that I mistake for an original thought. On April 11, 2008 when driving home from a vigorous workout at the gym, I pulled over 3 different times to write down three separate thoughts before they would escape back to whence they came. One of the thoughts I wrote in my notepad was this: I am in charge of my Life. God is in charge of my death. When I learned about the Life of the man killed by the shark, I immediately understood that he was a man in full charge of his Life. While, unlike my friends and neighbors and globe-trotting reporters, learning of his death caused no worry or fear in me, I did feel a heartache in knowing that, unlike a death from cancer or HIV, but just like a death in a car crash or from a heart attack, the man from Solana Beach killed by the shark did not get to say goodbye to those he loved. Nor they to him. Yet, they must know far better than I, that he lived well until he died. The death and Life of the man from Solana Beach killed by the shark have once again awakened me to the Life and death all around me. Especially my own. Thanks. I needed that. Time, in partnership with CNN: Fox News: USA Today: Los Angeles Times: 10 News San Diego: San Diego Union Tribune: CNN:
Black Teeth and Bubonic Plaque People way smarter than me say that when Life presents us with a gift, whatever it is, we must accept it. They say whether the gift Life presents us with is finding a spray of coins on the sidewalk, just waiting for us to pick them up, or a doctor calmly giving us a diagnosis of testicular cancer, or a cop handing us a traffic ticket and not bothering to hide his smirk as he salts our wound with the command to “have a nice day,” or someone telling us that they love us and will always be there for us, we must accept the gift. Sometimes, Life presents us with a two-part gift that we are meant to accept, and then to do something with. Like that 20-inch cast iron skillet your wife thought you’d be thrilled to receive on Christmas morning and that the Goodwill people truly were thrilled to receive a week later. I think of these two-part gifts as Door Prizes—because the second part of the gift presents us with a choice of many doorways, any one of which will open to us when we choose it. Life recently presented me with the multiple Door Prize of a root canal, my first ever, a crown for a broken tooth, and a bill from my dentist for $2,000. When driving back to my office, the left side of my face numb and drool dropping on my shirt collar, Life was so moved with affection for me that it then presented me with the bonus Door Prize of the transmission in my car suddenly failing. When a traffic light turned green and I stepped on the accelerator, the car’s engine roared but the car barely moved forward. I would have lost a race to a glacier. Yet, when the car managed to build to a speed of 5 miles per hour, it began running properly and I even caught up to some of the many drivers who had blasted past me while blaring their horns. Until the next red light stopped me. I had a choice. I could feel bad and put my energy into imagining a future that would include another $2,000 bill, this one from my Volvo mechanic. And I could have gone on to imagine a future beyond that in which I would be invited to the wedding of my Volvo mechanic’s daughter who was marrying my dentist’s son now that both had graduated, debt-free, from Harvard. Or I could laugh. I could choose to laugh at the absurd timing and succession of these experiences. So I chuckled, and drooled, and turned up the stereo, and felt pretty good. And a funny thing happened when I left my office a few hours later and got in my car to drive home. The numbness in my jaw was gone, I had sold thousands of dollars of stuff, and the transmission of my car worked perfectly. It hasn’t pulled a prank since. But I shall now digress and tell you about my most recent near-death experience. This past Thursday, when washing my hands in the restroom in my office, smiling for no apparent reason, (which I seem to be doing a lot more of the older I get; perhaps this is the happy approach of senility?) I noticed that all of my lower front teeth appeared gray, almost black. I dismissed it as a trick of the dim, flourescent light of the restroom. But later, when I got into my car to drive home, I checked my teeth in the rear view mirror: definitely black. Then the mirror on my sun visor: black. At home, I stared long and hard into the mirror in my bright, sun-drenched bathroom: black. No getting around it. My lower front teeth had suddenly, mysteriously, turned black. And I thought, Aren’t black teeth a symptom of bubonic plaque? Which made me imagine the headline, Vigorously Healthy Man in Encinitas Suddenly Dead from Bubonic Plague! Everyone Should Now Go Crazy with Irrational Fear! Which made me laugh. Which made me decide to go for a long walk on the beach. Which allowed me to see a brilliant green flash at sunset, while listening on my iPod to Jack Johnson singing how my shadow walks faster than me, and staring skyward in awe as three great V-formation flocks of pelicans flew low overhead, gliding on the thermals alongside the high bluffs. I had no thoughts, no intentions, of leaving this wonder-filled world any time soon. When I got home, I brushed my teeth. And the black disappeared. Which made me remember that for lunch I had eaten a half-pint of delicious fresh tart blackberries.
Quantum Question I could be wrong, but I was thinking that if quantum physics is true, and our world is what we imagine and believe it to be, when people overwhelmingly imagined and believed the earth to be flat— was it? Robinson Crusoe I could be wrong, but it seems to me that every single one of us has been shipwrecked on this planet. Remember just before you got here? You were sailing along, if not on Moonlight Bay, at least on a pacific ocean of amniotic fluid, under the sheltering night sky of your mother’s womb. Then wham! Up came a perfect storm. You were knocked about, tumbled around, and forcefully expelled, carried on a mighty wave from that dark ocean to dry land. Even while blinded by the nuclear bright sunlight of this new world, in a single heartbeat you had to sprint across a bridge that had taken your collective ancestors millennia to build—as you went from breathing underwater to breathing in air. We are all Robinson Crusoes. And, while we never completely let go of our dream of returning whence we came, like Crusoe, we all dig in and cope with the urgent need to learn everything—absolutely everything—about this strange new world we find ourselves castaway in. The stakes are high. If we fail to learn and adapt, we die. Which maybe sends us back to whence we came, but that’s another story. So we become smarter. American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition - Cite This Source - Share This Easter Eggs I’m a happy and well-adjusted individual. Yet, once in a while, I would like to stop being me. I imagine the possibilities if I were to be someone else. Don't get me wrong, being me is a blast. It's just that after spending all my time with me, I sometimes need a break, a vacation. But every time I travel, I insist on coming along. Everywhere I go, there I am. As long as I can remember, I have been working two full-time 24/7 jobs—being totally self-absorbed and being totally self-involved. Neither job pays the rent or provides health care benefits. And as fun as it usually is to be me, after so many years without a rest, I’m exhausted. I could be wrong, but I suspect I'm not alone in this self-weariness. We do our jobs, take care of business, pay the bills, floss regularly. We play by the rules and we play nice. We keep up with the group and we color within the lines. We don't touch the Picasso and we don't talk back. And then one rush-hour morning on I-5, one of us decides to give the steering wheel of her Ford Explorer a huge spin, like a roulette wheel, gambling that the cars surrounding her are no more real, no more dangerous, than bumper cars at the fairground. And when the reporters later interview her neighbors, the quotes read, "She was pretty quiet, kept to herself. Always smiled; said good morning. I never would have imagined." All the time we are being well adjusted, Life is passing. All the time we are doing what’s expected of us, Life is passing. And somewhere deep inside, we are quietly, desperately, yearning. Until we suddenly see that steering wheel as a roulette wheel, and say, "What the hell!” And give it a big spin. Perhaps because I sometimes tire of being me, I have become hyper-attuned to the many mysterious mini-doors to Other Worlds that an increasing number of bored humans are embedding in our increasingly removed-from-Nature world. Just slow down and look around. You’ll start to see these doors. Like Easter Eggs. Easter Egg is the name given to secret mini-programs software engineers plant in the mind-numbingly dull code they write. For example, in the page layout program many graphic artists use, called Quark, if you select something on your page to delete and then simultaneously press the command, shift, option and delete keys, a miniature animated space alien appears on your computer monitor, tromps across the screen, raises a ray gun, and zaps the selected item into who knows where. Another example is the email program I use, Outlook Express, which has a menu option, "Switch Identity". Don’t tempt me. Or how about this: Who in their well-behaved mind decided to program all credit card machines and automatic teller machines to prompt us with, "Swipe card?” Delightfully subversive message that. And what about the phenomena of people becoming disappeared? I read recently that 40,000 people every year opt-in on opting-out. They disappear themselves. We call them “missing persons,” as if they are no more than misplaced car keys or cell phones. I wonder...where do they all go? Is there any chance that the cashier with the degree in graphic arts who rang up my purchases in Trader Joes yesterday combined the option "Swipe Card," by taking my credit card, then went home to his computer, opened Outlook, and selected the option "Switch Identity?" Then he hit the command-shift-option-delete keys on his Quark program and zapped his old self into who knows where. And a new him popped up somewhere in the Time Space Continuum, naked, but for my fully-loaded credit card. Plot Points I could be wrong, but to me, obituaries always read like well-constructed plots to novels. Why is that? I'm glad I asked. Let me begin small and work my way up: When walking my dog yesterday morning, two things happened
that made me think about the infinite variables affecting
the content and direction of each of our lives on this
lonely planet. Then she started walking in the same direction the
man had gone, but not fast enough to catch up with him. Kelly wrote that she realized how "untraditional"
her values must seem, in comparison to her friend who
was "living the American dream". Sure, there might be some differences. Her rented farmhouse
might be in New Hampshire, instead of Indiana. Falling Apart Almost everyone I meet asks me, "So what do you do?" I usually say, "I'm a writer, and I pay for that self-indulgence by managing an ecommerce business." This is the truth, but not the whole truth. Were I to answer with complete honesty I would say, "What do I do? I spend most of my time falling apart and putting myself back together." For as long as I can remember, I have been unable to travel more than five hours down the road of Life without having to pull over and set off red flares and dive under my hood to perform emergency repairs on my psyche. How do I return to getting my kicks on Route 66? I sing songs. But not Gregorian chants or endless rounds of Michael Row the Boat Ashore. I sing silly, ridiculous, nonsensical songs. I sing Wagnerian opera in the persona of Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd. Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit! Recently I wondered: Would I have made it this far in Life without silly songs? In the 1980s, miserable in my yuppie job of selling printing to Manhattan corporations, I spent many hours riding up and down in crowded elevators mumbling the words to George of the Jungle. I would walk through the hot and humid city, from rejection to rejection, wistfully singing If I Only Had A Brain. I think I spent most of the 1990s walking my dog in the rain in Portland, Oregon. As the rain pelted my face and I slogged through four-inch deep puddles I would drone an obscure song that went: Of course, you have to find or create your own silly songs. And you have to sing them over and over and over. Like a private mantra. Like a secret self-affirmation. We are what we sing. Back then, I was Particle Man. Advertising jingles can work, too, especially the mysterious messages impressed on our soft brains during childhood. Recently, I happily made it through an entire day singing:
Yet, some mornings, when the shock and awe of waking up and getting out of bed is overwhelming, I am forced to break out the top-secret laser-guided smart bomb I discovered at age 7: the theme song of The Patty Duke Show. Inwardly singing the theme song of The Patty Duke Show has gotten me through job interviews, first dates, and public speaking engagements. What is more, I've discovered a way to make the theme song of The Patty Duke Show take on an astonishing, synergistic, galactic, harmonic-convergence kind of power. Honest. If you don't believe me, this is one experiment you can try at home. First, warm up by singing the theme song of The Patty Duke Show. (*Lyrics below) Then, sing it again, but this time sing really loud. Without stopping, sing it a third time, but now as you belt it out, throw a wild fit of head-shaking and arm-flailing and spastic kicking, just like an out of control teenaged girl when denied television, cell phone, and internet privileges. Feels good, yes? Finally, if you seriously want to lower your blood pressure and clear your arteries and obliterate all the dark matter in your universe—go out and do it at the movie theatre, the football game, your company cafeteria, and while stuck in rush-hour traffic at 8 in the morning. The Patty Duke Show theme song Video of the theme song to The Patty Duke Show Meet Cathy, who's lived most everywhere, But they're cousins, Where Cathy adores a minuet, Still, they're cousins, You can lose your mind, © David Boyne Recently, finding myself alone in the chilled early morning sun-drenched backyard of a suburban San Diego home, I rediscovered a long forgotten small pleasure of being a guy, and being alive: peeing outdoors. Don’t get me wrong: indoor plumbing is one of my all time favorite inventions. If not for indoor plumbing, humans could not live in cities of millions, with all the cultural, intellectual, and social pleasures to be experienced there, while not expiring en masse from the noxious effects of their collective effluvia. But in the sanitary time and place in which I live, peeing outdoors is unusual, out of the ordinary. Not to mention illegal. While I was in fact peeing outdoors, it was different from peeing in public; not like standing outside a Blarney Stone bar in the 5pm Manhattan rush hour, peeing on the Locksmith shop next door. I was alone, had plenty of privacy, stood partly screened by the leafy tree I was watering, and when done, I’m sure I left nothing but my footprints on the grass and a coded message only the neighborhood’s dogs could parse. Peeing outdoors every now and then gives one perspective. We live almost all of the hours of our modern lives indoors, which is to live in boxes of one form or another. What is a house or office, but a series of connected boxes? What is a car, but a box on wheels. What is an airplane, train, duck blind or television, but a box we choose to put ourselves into as we move through time and space. How many minutes of our lives do we simply stand outside somewhere, looking around, feeling the sun, temperature, quality of the air, just being alive? The reason I found myself alone in the chilled early morning sun-drenched backyard of a suburban San Diego home, peeing on a small tree near a wood rail fence, was because the artist friend who I was visiting had no indoor plumbing in her rented studio space. She had also made me drink cup after cup of some strange herbal tea I suspect was a powerful diuretic developed by the CIA for use in torturing, I mean interrogating, prisoners. I peed a long time. And as I peed, a montage of memories played across the movie screen of my mind. I saw myself 6-years old, wearing only underpants, being chased around the yard of our home by a visiting uncle, then suddenly pulling up beside a dogwood tree and showering it. I saw myself, 17-years old and in the scraggly woods of Connecticut, peeing on the rocks and fire-colored autumn leaves covering the hilly ground. I saw myself 36-years-old, at 3am of the first night I had gotten the dog I had always, always wanted, standing in a chilly suburban backyard in Portland beneath a starry, starry sky, peeing, with the golden retriever puppy who would share so much of the next 11 and one-half years of my life, beside me, peeing. I smiled with the memory of a 5-year-old boy I lived who, for many months after watching the movie Ghostbusters, would bust into the bathroom when I was peeing and join in, both of us shouting, "Don't cross the steams!" I shivered from a sudden sweeping over me of cold New England winter air, and heard across decades of life, a rowdy pack of beer-drinking guys waiting in a heated, idling car pulled to the side of a black ribbon of road, as I peed on a snow bank. Peeing simultaneously in both worlds, I almost lost my balance, there in the San Diego backyard as I looked up at the sun, just as I had on the side of the road in Connecticut, when peeing and suddenly looking straight up into the thousand-watt bright full moon in the black sky. Then looking down at the blue-white snow and shadows of the landscape, the steam from my arc of urine rising into the white beam of the headlights. I laughed quietly, peeing in the backyard in San Diego, as I remembered the first girl I had loved and lived with who would sometimes come into the bathroom as I peed and plead, “Oh! Let me aim it!” Which made me recall another long-forgotten pleasure of being alive: making love outdoors. But that’s another story. Marital Status
Recently, I had an identity crisis. This is nothing new, as I have one almost daily. But this crisis, rather than being triggered by insistent voices in my head urging me to call in sick to work, spend the day at an Indian gaming casino, and buy a garishly multi-colored and logo-emblazoned nylon NASCAR jacket, was triggered by my failure to place a check mark in a tiny box on a piece of paper. I wanted something, but I could not have it unless I filled a form. Filling forms, or filling out forms, or filling in forms, is a necessity in modern American Life. Filling forms begins at birth, when others do it on our behalf, so that we can start having things. Like a name. Our schooling teaches us to fill our own forms, which we dutifully do until we die, when our forms are once again filled by others, only this time on their own behalf, so they can divvy up the things we could not take with us. I was quickly filling this form so I could get what I wanted, when I came to a nest of tiny boxes, each beside a singe word, one of which would declare and define my marital status. My pen hovered first over the tiny box beside Divorced, then over the tiny box beside Single. Which was I? Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I had been one of the other words on the form with a tiny box beside it, Married. But then I had become Divorced. I know this because I received a fully filled form from the State of California 17 years ago declaring I was legally Divorced. That form is somewhere in one of my filing cabinets, I’m certain. But I have yet to receive a filled from declaring me as Single. So am I still Divorced? Having been declared legally Divorced, can I ever again be legally Single? Is remarrying the only way to become un-Divorced? Or is being Divorced, unlike being Married, truly until death do we part? I could be wrong, but shouldn’t there be a Statute of Limitations on Divorce? As I spiraled down this rabbit hole of questions, I wondered why it is so important each time we fill in the blanks of our lives, to declare our marital status. Does this obsession with marital status reveal a deeply ingrained Puritan bias in our culture? Is it wrong, somehow suspect, and perhaps even unsavory, for an adult to not be married? Is the scarlet letter of modern Life a D? Why, outside of a police station, hospital, or bar, should it matter to anyone whether I am Single or Divorced? Aren’t we either married—or not? I grew up in a Catholic family and retain fond memories of how fixated on blame and punishment that religion is. As a kid, it always struck me as a rigged game, the way we are all inescapably born with something called Original Sin. Then, when we fail to lead a saint-like Life, our souls don’t get to go to Heaven, but are put in a place called Purgatory. While not as bad as going to Hell, Purgatory does not sound like a summer picnic at twilight with fireflies swirling overhead and the love of your Life snuggling up close. At least in purgatory there was an exit strategy; a soul must stay there until enough people still living here on Earth prayed long enough and hard enough for its release and elevation to Heaven. I could be wrong, but as far as I remember, there was no system set up for souls languishing in Purgatory to lobby the living, and solicit prayers for their release. The Catholics living in the Middle Ages had a better system. The Church would sell Indulgences to rich folk. Indulgences were essentially pre-absolution for whatever sins you had made, or planned on making, while alive here on Earth. Once an indulgence had been secured from the Church, a rich person could relax, live Life as brutally as they were inclined to, and know that when they died, their soul would be on the express lane to Heaven. Which was important, because if they landed in Purgatory they would need the same folks they had crushed who were still alive on Earth to pray for their release. Fat chance. But I wander. I solved my identity crisis, as I often do, by ignoring it and running away. I tore up the half-filled form, walked out of the video store that had what I wanted, and drove home. Once home, I got on the internet, went to Amazon.com, and filled their online form which did not ask about my marital status, wanting only my address and credit card number. Two days later, what I wanted was in my mailbox. My own copy of the movie Groundhog Day. Hurry Up and Wait Sometimes, I think about the Time-Space Continuum. * Lydia
the Tattooed Lady | |||