BECAUSE, THAT'S WHY (FIVE THOUGHTS ON MEMORIALS AND GRIEVING).

Stick it high. 

Raise your hand if you love going to memorials.

No one? 

No one does. 

But we go. This family goes. Because we will be present. 

Raise your hand if you've ever said "...but I don't know what to say!"

Nobody does. 

But we say something, even if our mouths are silent.

If nothing else, we can give our time and we can bring our presence. 

Just playin'. 

So many people die on Game of Thrones. So many. 

Not gonna turn this into some 'desensitizing effect of violence depiction in pop culture.' Let me say this: 

It's ridiculous to pretend that the way we absorb death in film and television doesn't affect us. 

I am as strong a First Amendment advocate as some are for the Second (let's also be intellectually honest and consistent: you don't get to cherrypick which amendments you support and which ones you don't. Common sense, people. Common sense.). 

Point is, I support free expression and speech-related issues in many incarnations, including often unpleasant ones, and including the right of film and television to portray violence and death in exceptionally prolific and graphic ways. First Amendment ain't a little thing you apply when convenient and yank away when it applies to content you don't like. 

But let's be serious: of course those things desensitize us. Anything you experience over and over desensitizes you. I'm not saying violent content should be banned or censored. I'm saying it's irresponsible and asinine to pretend it doesn't affect us and take some sort of toll on our psyche. 

So what I meant when I said "not gonna turn this into some 'desensitizing effect of violence in pop culture' issue is that I'm going to do exactly that. 

We see death over and over and over, en masse, on screens. And it's often justified and makes us feel good because it's the righteous response to some atrocity we have the right to feel indignant about. So we cheer when violence begats violence and the bad dudes get what's coming. 

But it's all in long shot. It's a comedy cause it's in long shot, like Charlie Chaplin says. It doesn't get tragic until it's up close and you see who's actually getting hurt. 

And that's the thing about memorials: it's an opportunity to hurt together. En masse. To forgo the long shot of death at a distance, whether on a screen or a newspaper, and to experience it close up with those who are truly hurt and to feel the tragedy alongside, if only for a brief period. 

Maybe it's a statement that means only a tiny fraction of something. But I think it's better to do something that may mean something good, even if it's a fraction's fraction, than to take the easy route and do nothing. To make excuses, mostly under the valid banner of "...I don't think ____ cares whether I'm there or not."

We show up. Because our presence matters.

Walter

There are two episodes of television that I will probably return to for comfort at some point when my dad dies. I hope that time is a long, long time off. 

One of them takes place in a later season of the medical comedy Scrubs.

One of them is in a later season of the wonderful and underwatched science fiction show Fringe. 

The latter, especially, is a reminder of the beauty and the pain of having deep, deep relationships that hurt so much to lose. But you wouldn't give up having had them even though it hurts so much. Because they were special, they were beautiful, and they meant something meaningful that you will carry with you always. 

Who woulda thought?

For some reason, I usually feel like listening to Tame Impala after a funeral, memorial, or celebration of life service. 

Someday

Someday, I plan to research (for a short while, probably on Wikipedia) the social trend of moving from "funeral" to "memorial" to "celebration of life." 

I get it. Our choices of words are important. And there are distinctions amongst the three. But sometimes it seems like everything is about a 'a celebration of life' rather than the cold, formal 'funeral,' or slightly-more casual 'memorial service.' In the end, they're all about the same thing: acknowledging the passing of someone from one state to another; from life to death. 

Those little sugary nuts, please

If anyone ever asked my opinion about whether I would prefer to a) have food or b) not have food at a memorial service, I would generally say, 'a' most of the time. 

By 'generally,' I mean 'one hundred percent of the time.'

Don't skimp

Make sure people can hear. It's great to be able to see what people are saying about the deceased, but even more important, it's important to be able to hear what they're saying. 

So do what must be done to get appropriate amplification.

The clock

We all have better things to do.

Of course we do.

Death is not convenient. It often doesn't come at times that fit into our schedule.

But we drop those other things and show our respect by gifting our time.

Time is one of the few things we all have to give. And it's meaningful because there's no shortcuts or way of getting around it.

Until you're dead, you have no choice of whether or not to use your time. You're always using it in some way. It's a little like voting: a non-vote is still a vote, if nothing else for the status quo.

But unlike a vote, your time will be and can be used by only you.* 

If you were looking for the most efficient and effective way of using your time, then you should definitely not go to memorials. There are a thousand more productive ways to spend your time.

If we were robots or even androids, we should definitely just do away with funerals and memorials.

But we are people, and if the relationships we hold are a defining part of what makes us human, then the memorials we choose to attend should be defining reminders of the most beautiful and illogical traits that make us human to begin with.

The fragile and beautiful strength of relationships that are not about productivity or efficiency or logic.

They're about the ways in which we are bound to one another, by blood or friendship or many other ways; all ways that forge meaningful and lasting relationships that inevitably, at some point, will always, always come to an end.

And we can choose to give our time. One more time.

___

*the very fun 2011 Justin Timberlake science-fiction thriller notwithstanding, in which time is very much a tradable commodity. 

Suffer the ?

Children belong at these things. They may not understand exactly what's going on, but it is an opportunity for us to show them, to model for them, what it means to show respect and empathy and how to grieve as a community. 

Although he was referring to entirely different situations (innovation at MIT), I like how Hal Gregersen refers to "constant, generative questioning." Few things are harder to think about, and even more difficult to talk about, than death.

Of course we want to shelter and protect our kids from dealing with pain or tragedy or "adult things," yet I also think it's valuable to begin conversations about grief and empathy early. And death is usually the ultimate catalyst for bringing grief. It sucks. 

Children are good at asking questions, and maybe that's a good thing to have around more when we're dealing with grief and death. Death doesn't make sense. There's no good answers. 

But there's a million questions. Death is a catalyst for talking and trying to understand what it means to really live, the kind of lives we want to live, and the ways in which our lives are connected and impact with others. 

Death is a catalyst for a billion questions. And we should encourage those questions and be okay with not having great answers. Or good answers. Or any answers. Because that's one of the great lies embedded into a lot of formal education: the importance of learning super good answers.

No. The important part is the question; encouraging the questions. It is okay to talk about these things. We don't need to be afraid of having difficult conversations about tough things. And it absolutely, totally, and completely is...

...okay to keep asking questions for which there are not good answers. 

Talk about a great life lesson to get from death. 

Kids are great at figuring out when adults shoo them away from certain topics. There's the Big Two. Politics and religion. But death is the third, I think, possibly followed by sex. Or preceded by. But why?

I don't advocate for dumping 'adult stresses' on kids. But I do advocate for encouraging the asking of questions and a response to those questions that is authentic, open-ended if need be, and respectful of the fact that they simply asked those questions.

Do we want kids to stop asking questions, to stop exploring and discovering and wondering?

Most would say no. 

Our kids don't enjoy memorial services any more than any other kids. They don't get excited about going. But they know it's something we do when we need to, as a family. They know it's a ritual, a part of something bigger than ourselves and outside ourselves that we can contribute to, if only with our presence. 

It's not a bad thing for kids to understand there's pain, there's bad things that happen, and we can run away from those things or we can try to be part of something to make the world better. They might not understand a lot of it, depending on their age and development, but we can help them understand the importance of sharing these rituals together and bringing something important to them...

...ourselves.

So we show up. Because our presence matters. 

59 HOURS, BUT NOBODY'S COUNTING.

She came along a road. On a dark night. My buddy, Becca's bud, our pal.

Home again.

Briefly.


It is always the beginning of something.
She pulled in on the dark late night, and brought a big hug - I kindly let Becca squeeze her first before shoving my wife aside - and a bigger box of her baked delicacies full of sugar and butter and cinnamon and spices and secret stuff and such to savor over the next 59 hours. And we did. The molasses ginger cookies were sublime and exquisitely textured.


As you like it.
She slumbered for a number of hours that dug deep into the following morning, and I measured carefully the contents of our coffee supply and determined there was enough for a single serving each, and impatiently waited with patience for her to awake, and waited, and waited, and waited, and debated making myself two cups, but the potential of being able to share a cup on a Friday morning with an adult, and historically one of my favourite drinking companions, was strong enough to back me down, so I waited, and waited, and waited - but I stayed busy educating minds with the joys of a Shakespeare comedy, Latin, a breakdown of the U.S. Constitution and genius of James Madison, a refresher on the beauty of the Fibonacci sequence, and the difference between metals and metalloids on the periodic table. And such. And I waited, but not with inaction.


One more cup, or one cup only.
Up. I made the coffee, and it was mediocre, possibly a few notches beneath. This is not a subjective analysis; she observed this accurately, in the deadpan voice I like to think she saves primarily when mocking me, and I do not mind, because she sneaks the lightest trace of affection into the corners of the deadpan and I can tell.


In which a general satisfaction is found. 
She expressed appreciation, once more, for the single cup of, to quote precisely "...mediocre coffee." This was the second conveyance within a nine-minute span whereupon she found occasion to observe the quality of the handmade beverage I made with my hands. A particular glee at the left corner of her mouth accompanied an otherwise straight countenance in delivering this observation for the second time; a glee that was perhaps an enthusiastic rebuttal to a statement I had made before gently setting down her container of black gold:

I,
I said,
am intimidated to be drinking coffee with you, let alone making and serving it to you. 

Why?
she asked, the left corner of her mouth fighting hard to stay down and being utterly defeated.
You shouldn't be.

I can see by your expression,
I replied.
That you know exactly why. You have spent the last ten months being trained in the exotic art of making exceptional coffee and paying attention to subtle variances in external temperature and relative humidity and the exquisite care one must take in preparing a proper cup of coffee, and knowing all that, and knowing that I know that, and knowing that I have dug to the bottom remainder of our stash to prepare...this...it is difficult. 

Oh, I'm sure it will be fine,
she said, her eyes betraying the lie of her words and alighting on the truth of what I had just spoken; a truth which was confirmed by her coupleted statement not ten minutes later.

Thank you for the coffee,
she murmured in the sun, looking up post-sip.
It really is mediocre.

I know.
I said.
You're welcome.

The left corner turned upward ever so higher in either mirth or disgust. It was a difficult tell.


The vanity of time. 
After that she did not initiate a conversation about time and how the reality of time is unchanging, but the social construct we have built around time is so different than what it used to be. We did not have this conversation - I am usually the one who brings up such conversations with her, and then she eagerly jumps in and we repartee and argue, and she may make me feel like an idiot sometimes, but it is generally because she made a relevant point that I did not see coming and should have; importantly, it is rarely, if ever because of the fact that I have brought up a silly conversation to begin with, such as a questioning of the social construct of time and its evolution - devolution - over time.

Our hyperconsciousness over time and constant awareness of the calendar, of obligations and responsibilities and alarms and timers and reasons to never forget to do anything are an horrific example of the wreck that techno-efficiency brings to our lives in the guise of progress. Incandescent bulbs and microwaves and silicon chips are all great inventions on so many levels...but now we get to work later, make food faster, and be connected at all times to a reflective screen that we live so much of our lives on...in the name of efficiency, productivity, and...connectedness.

The persistent melting away of connection in an age of hyper connective potential. Sad. A reminder of the beauty of scarcity, and how having more than you need of something - e.g. the ability to constantly connect - does not mean you will connect better. Or even well.


Of electric sheep.
She also did also not casually integrate Salvador Dali into any of our conversations, although such casual slip-ins have occurred enough times to not be uncommon in our dialogues going back twenty years. Dali was another individual fascinated by time; a fascination symbolized best by his 1931 Surrealist masterpiece The Persistence of Memory, in which pocket watches are melting across a desert  landscape in a nod to the relative nature of time and space.

We did not speak of that, except perhaps in telepathic dreams?


Call me anytime, but not then.
In addition, she did not begin talking of how Dali was often inspired by the landscapes of Catalonia, the autonomous area in the northeast of Spain. I've never been there, but she has been to Spain, and Becca has been to Spain, and my understanding is that Spain, like many hot regions, takes a siesta at midday as a respite from the sun. Later, shops begin reopening and stay open late. As a lifelong American with an interest in other geographies and living, this is fascinating: being on a completely different sort of clock than I'm used to; a clock that is out of sync with the standard we've been on since the Industrial Revolution helped invent the standard work day in which efficiency and production matter most. Anyway,

we did not speak of that, but it would not be strange if we had.


There is a soundtrack to your life and it is not mine. 
Shortly thereafter, she did not shirk or shrink as I pulled out my phone in the midday sun to take a selfie of us; a practice I have been engaging in heavily since 2015. It is difficult to know whether the greater joy is what I feel much later on in looking at the snapshot of a moment frozen, or whether it is the evolution of her reaction in the moment I pull out camera to selfie. A reaction that went from groaning and eyerolling years ago externally to pose-striking deadpan Kim Deal cool with Mediterranean warmth now. Combo killer. It has never been a wasted moment.


Waste a moment. 
She did not scream at the boy, at my son, as he kissed her. As he kissed her six hundred and twenty-two times with snot-bathed cheeks and blue smile targeted at her, she did not waver in returning the aggression in the hot sun. It was love, and she wore a rugged flannel built for wiping toddler-phlegm off cheeks, and she never screamed.


The modern age. 
At a certain point, she tried to steal my mug, my Wonder Woman mug; her fingers grasped the ceramic but not enough to tug from my grasp. I kept it from her and gave her my third favorite mug to drink coffee from. There are immutable laws in the universe: gravity exists, objects in motion stay in motion until a force acts upon them, etc. Also: nobody drinks from my Wonder Woman mug but me. No one. Not even Becca, except once on her birthday because I was being nice. So I could not, did not let her, one of my best buds, drink from it.

But I let her touch it. Interesting thing about immutable laws: they're not always immutable. For example, I was talking with the children earlier this evening about the circumstances in which natural and immutable laws do not work the immutable way they're supposed to. Like around black holes. The gravity that defines a black hole's existence is so powerful that it sucks everything in. Everything. Including light. The area around a black hole is very strange: the immutable laws governing force and motion that seem to apply everywhere in the universe don't apply here. Same with subatomic particles like quarks; the beginning of the insanely cool and insanely in-understandable world of particle physics. How can the same object exist in multiple spaces simultaneously? Physicists, astronomers, geniuses are still trying to figure out how and why sometimes the immutable laws of the natural world don't apply.

I love that. I would rather exist as an exception than a rule; an outlier rather than an indicator. I am happy to surround myself with others who embrace the exceptions to immutable laws. If there's one thing you take away from this paragraph, it's this: yes, you read correctly; I am strongly inferring, if not guaranteeing, that time travel is not only a possibility, it is a certainty and will definitely happen within this century. Though probably after I'm dead.

So I guess if there's two things you take away, it's this: don't touch my Wonder Woman mug. Also, I need to look into the affordability of cryogenics.


Seventeen.
She accepted my invitation to drive into the big city to a big store, where I bought a large bag of coffee, thirteen bananas, and picked up my contacts from the optometrist - which is vastly different from an ophthalmologist - inside this big store. I looked longingly at a diverse assortment of items, such as a kayak, a standup paddleboard, and a small boat. Perhaps in violent reaction to my reactionary longing, she took decisive action and ordered me to deposit a single item in her cart: a flotation device for two, requiring paddles and starting with the letter 'k.'

She bought a kayak, which I thought was the appropriate method to get a kayak if you want one, as opposed to shoplifting. Had she chosen that route, the remainder of the weekend could have had a different flavor. I acceded to her demand; demanding in exchange a second selfie of the day as we stood dour-countenanced in front of three thousand shopping carts.

I bought my bananas and coffee and checked to ensure an appropriate number of children were flailing their infinite elbows within a hundred foot radius as we headed into the parking lot.

A boy in front wiggled and waggled along as he held onto an adult across the concrete walkway, tugging and kissing her leg and losing balance, but kept sure-footed by the firm grasp of a bigger hand over a small. The sun beat down, one was wearing a baseball hat as we climbed in and left the parking lot...

...to drive into another parking lot on a Friday afternoon artery to the highway. Yuck. An hour to go two miles or so. Should I have bought iced coffee previous to this? Life is full of should haves. But we work to eliminate them going forward. So next time. Fortunately I had some emergency music stashed away I was able to put to use, and got a few words of conversation in as the two-year old in the back bantered and played with who had once been my friend, but who had now been transferred over to his dominion. C'est la vie, que sera sera.


Black water.
She then stopped by the grocery with us, which brought a big bill, more yellow berries, and and a rendezvous with our other friend, also known as my wife. The Countess - my wife - and I parted ways with her temporarily and shared a banana in the sunshine.

At this point, there is a break in this narrative's chronology, as she conveyed herself ostensibly for a visit with grandparents; a divergent path which led down physically a separate road from us, but also a divergent path from honesty, as later events led to a somber moment where it was revealed she spurned a grandparental generational chit-chat in favor of a gourmet mid-afternoon lunch with her mother. This was a circumstance outside of my prior knowledge. I do not know what she ordered, though it is unlike me to have not asked.

The hour is late. 
She posed for a shot with her sister before they departed for a show. A concert beginning at a witching hour, a concert which I urged my wife to attend for the joint reasons of:

A) it'll be a fun bit of culture and melody.
B) you'll see your brother up on stage slappin' da bass.
C) you'll make a great memory with your sister that can never be stripped away, save through severe and sudden traumatic retrograde memory loss or genetic-markers leading to extreme dementia and the erratic cleansing of your memory bank; either way it's out of your control, so if all goes well you can use tonight to construct a delightful memory that won't disappear, ideally. But take pictures too.

So they hopped off the porch, rolled away on wheels, giggling and done up, gorgeous and fifty-percent pregnant.  I returned to children, scrounged up enough morsels for their stomachs to survive them through the night, and yelled them into bed before settling with a blanket, my laptop, two notebooks, seven books, and my fave G2 gel pen to make little notes and work on my little book I'm working on in little bits.

Moby remixes swirled in the background, probably too loud, but what can you do? I wasn't going to turn it down in the name of sleeping children. I wrote. Some good things and some mediocre things and I tried some new tricks with a semi-colon, and I reheated a cup of mostly uncaffeinated coffee that was mediocre and befitted the weekend in terms of beverage quality.

The sisters returned post-Cinderella clock, but radiances and attire intact. I had been preparing myself all evening long to back off upon their return. By 'back off,' I mean "not initiate a conversation that would keep one of my favorite conversational partners up into the wee wee hours of the morning. I held firm to that commitment, because I am strong, and watched her crawl into bed, also known as our living room couch, without brushing her teeth. I commented on this because my wife is a hygienist and our relationship is such that I can ask those questions of her at 1am and I helpfully suggested she could borrow our two-year old son's teethbrush.

She declined, and I left with nothing more than a small judgmental look tossed her way. But she was already dreaming.


The hour is early. 
She asked me a question, and I allowed a significant number of time to elapse before responding. Around fifteen hours. Rather than responding, I waited for her eyes to run to slumber twelve feet away. Skipping backwards through time, this is what happened:

I awoke at a premature hour, an hour which could have been used for sleep, but instead was used for the entrance of two sleepy boys joining our bed. Sleepy boys with the bed-sharing habits of a Cirque du Soleil trapeze artist, which is to say they are acrobatic, and the vocal subtleties of Tom Waits, which is to say that the growling, throat clearing, and whistly breathing of bed partners is not the companion of restful early morning slumber.

So I quietly ducked out to a couch and discovered enough light to read through my ragged paperback Sophie's World, a literary trek I have been on for a couple years now and immensely enjoy. It is a Scandinavian novel whose narrative involves following a young girl's mysterious journey into studying the history of philosophy. Thus it is a plot-driven approach to learning about the eras and titans of philosophy throughout history. I typically read it Friday evenings or nights; sometimes a page or two, sometimes 20 or thirty.

I carefully turned the pages in as rustle-less a fashion as possible, knowing from long experience the impact that "quiet" noises can have in distracting one from sleep, such the hypothetical situation of an 11-year old girl choosing your 20-minute power nap time to suddenly take an interest in thumbing through your book collection at the foot of the bed. One rustled page at a time. This is also why I avoided anything more than a millisecond eye contact when she threw off the comforter and trotted across the room and down the adjacent hallway, perhaps to use the toilet, perhaps to do tai chi, perhaps to go crawl in bed with her sister, who was accompanied by the two young men I had sought to escape.

My suspicion of the former was confirmed a short time later when she returned and asked in her passage across the room: "What are you reading?"

followed by a glance at my small journal and pen precariously perched on the arm : "How is the writing?"

There are moments in a person's life where they can clearly see everything in an instant. I have not yet embarked on a near-death experience, although I have broken one ankle and two legs, though both were the same leg at different times, but my understanding is that at the moment of death minus one-second, everything flashes before your eyes. Perhaps this is a novelist's construct that has waded into modern archetypes, or perhaps there is something to it. There is certainly a romantic allure of having the split second before death be filled with a hyper-sped version of your life. I think Walt Whitman would agree.

Again, I have not experienced the nearness of death, aside from some near-near-ish experiences I will tell you about someday, such as the time I saved a prostitute along the Ala Wai Canal from her knife-wielding pimp, but what else I have done is to practice the art of exercising an ability to immediately size up a particular situation in an instant, and in that instant know the right thing to do.

I knew the right thing to do was to ignore her.

Because I knew, based on my instant assessment of posture, gait, head turn, voice modulation, tone, angle of head, amount of eye contact, and inflection at the end of the two questions, that she was simply asking out of misguided responsibility and obligation.

Do I believe she was interested? Yes. But I also knew in this instant that these questions were driven by a motivation other than a deep desire to be up at this hour engaged in conversation. Even if it was me, who is often her able and capable conversational partner and verbal duelist. And I knew if I used the next five seconds to answer, her synapses would move from dormant to alive, against their will, and all other body and brain functions would slowly grind their gears into action, and it would be against her will. And face it: some people are cranky when they don't get enough sleep. I make no inferences. Simply that some people are.

So I ignored her, although I would have swapped ten pages of reading Sophie for five minutes of conversation with her. But I knew it wasn't right, and I was able to smugly peer over my book at the sleepy figure of my friend as she ignored my ignoring and trotted into bed, pulling the comforter up and burying her body underneath, and I knew that I had performed a beautiful and self-sacrificing action. Truly the action of a saint.

The sun broke through the slits around the thirteen-year old blinds hanging over our thirty-year old windows as I polished off several more pages, and she finished her night's nap. When she awoke later, we spoke some words. She had little memory of the encounter.

Yeah, I said, I don't really remember it either.


A time to turn.
At 9.56 am I took three selfies of us holding a small stuffed animal. I wore a white tank top for the occasion.


Impossible request.
For a period of four minutes between 10.02 and 10.06am, she backed out of our driveway, executing one of the greatest 27-point turns seen in my lifetime, in which a turn was never executed, but did, in the end, allow for a successful exit.

The time required to execute this move might have dropped from four minutes to ten seconds had I moved a vehicle or two in order to allow for a clear exit path, but I was heavily involved in the important task of laughing as she made micro-turn adjustments and attempted to extricate her vehicle. In the end she did so.

If I had intervened, she surely would have lost the opportunity to show her capability at executing a 27-point backup maneuver.


Over.
She sat in the pew behind at the memorial service we attended, and I stepped out with our two-year old son who had a soggy diaper and tired eyes, and he finally lolled to sleep on my shoulder, whereupon I returned to the sanctuary and dumped his plumb body across her chest, where he lay splayed upon her bosoms, chest rising and falling and falling and falling deeper into nap and the dreams of a good dream brought to life when he opened his sweaty eyes at long long last and saw in whose arms he lay; a circumstance which led him immediately to begin kissing her with his sweaty face, again and again; an activity which continued for the entirety of her fifty-nine hour stay, if anyone was counting, which they probably weren't, which I was.

Because sometimes to savor the moments, you gotta own up to their scarcity and make em count.

Also, I tried to eat soup while driving.


Homecoming. 
We drove home in silence, save for bottomless sounds of talking, laughing, and music. A child kept her attention for most of the duration, and she gave it with something less than a sullen presence.

There are many people who treat time as a fixed entity, and there are others who invoke Albert Einstein and Salvador Dali in creating elaborate reasons for why time is more of a fluid concept. I could be described as falling into the latter category; however as I watched the minutes tick away, in maddeningly un-fluid fashion, and I swiftly used calculus to determine the timing of making it to my brother's album release show at the scheduled time, I came to the conclusion that there was a discrepancy between the two numbers.

The long version is, if we drove all the way home - 35 minutes past the concert venue - and then drove back, we would most certainly be late to his show.

So my wife, the Countess Becca, spoke the words that John Huss and John Wycliff and Joan of Arc spoke so many times (or perhaps only once, as they were being burned at the stake):

"I'll take care of this."

This is not technically what she said, and probably not what they said either, but it does capture the spirit of what they all meant, which is why I included it in quotation marks, and also to give it more gravitas. I did not take care of it. Becca did, and what she did was this: she dropped us off at the show so we could be there on time and she took the children home, and promised to drive back in, long after bedtime, to pick us up.

A saintly thing, although I can say with delicious knowledge that she may be a heavenly-bodied angel, but she is not a saint, in the best way possible she is not, and is much more interesting and rebellious than one. But what she did was a kind and saintly gesture. She lifted the responsibility and the anxiety and the stress of us potentially missing the show away with her saintly decision and sent us off with a wave as the sun began to set in northwest Portland.

We walked the thirty seconds to the venue. I used eight of those seconds to selfie-video us walking, and looking back at the video, I am deeply irked at myself for not using at least twenty. She wore a jean jacket and was applying lipstick and looked very cool,

and then we crossed the street and entered.

Hearing is weak, listening is strong, so which do we do with music? 
The venue was small and the people were many. Chairs were found and we found ourselves located in a center-front vantage point where we watched two performers - first the lovely duo of Adam Black and Ariel Roxanne Cook (the latter on my fave guitar solo of the year), then the stompin sounds of Jacob Westfall, and finally...

my little brother. Jeremy M. Long, or as he goes by professionally: J.M. Long. A beautiful set with him splitting time between keys and guitar, ink rippling his lithe dense arms as he danced sang and played his way through a falsetto-soaring set of rockers, ballads, and experimental pop gems. My toes tapped and I felt her head bobbing time and my heart leaped when he said "...this one's for my brother Joseph" before launching into People Worry, a track that has both brought and taken away tears in the last month. So good.

We ducked out and found fresh oxygen immediately thereafter; we looped around 300 blocks or so while waiting for Becca to arrive. She spent 275 of them grumbling about not having brought knee socks on a cold night. She was grinning while grumbling so I found it unnecessary to break Anthropologie's window at 11 on a Saturday night in order to get her a pair, which I totally would have done if needed. But again, grinning-while-grumbling. She somehow survived until Becca arrived.


Because it's what I do.
After sliding almost-sleeping Becca over to the passenger seat and giving a brief synopsis of the show, I launched into an appropriate discussion question for the ride home.

So,
I said.
Tell us about this fellow you're with.

She did.

Because I asked.

INTERLUDE:

You can ask me two questions,
I informed her.
Go.

She thought briefly, and then asked two questions. I will only list one of them.

My fave Shakes right now,
I answered her,
is Twelfth Night.

We approached the bottom of our mountain and I knew it was time to play a special song that would bring us home as we pulled in the driveway, which is what happened as the closing strains of Kings of Leon's True Love Ways died out and I cut the engine and I don't know if she thought it was special but I know her and I know that someday she'll realize it was and is.


The morning after. 
There was coffee on the porch, and late birthday gifts given, and sunshine which bothered me because sunshine when I'm sad does not make me happy and I was sad because the clock would not stop ticking and time would not stop moving the wrong way and there was nothing to do to prevent her from leaving.

Again.

And I wanted to grab hold of the stupid little seconds winding their revolutions and slow each one down but they wouldn't stop moving. I gave her a CD, and I gave her sister a CD and I said:

It is the same playlist on each CD. Maybe sometimes you can each listen to it when you're driving and feel connected, or something. They're songs that are special to me.


The 59th. 
I hugged her, a good hug, and other people hugged her, and Becca squeezed her, and then I skulked over at the last minute to sneak the last hug in, and then she left,

and drove along the road.

The wrong way.

Away, way away.

There were some good hours in those fifty-nine, and I think the mountain misses her.

I took my stupid watery eyes inside and angrily ate a ginger molasses cookie. Allergies.


HOME / SISTERS
True Love Way / Kings of Leon
Pretty Voice / Cloud Cult
Ran / Future Islands
Jade / Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
The Vanity of Trying / Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
River of Brakelights / Julian Casablancas
Keep You On My Side / Chvrches
No Widows / The Antlers
Waste a Moment / Kings of Leon
The Modern Age / The Strokes
Seventeen / Sharon Van Etten
Black Water / Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes
Don't Miss It / James Blake
Blood Bank / Bon Iver
Seasons (Waiting On You) / Future Islands
Impossible Request (alt version) / Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Over / Kings of Leon

I guess it's good to feel even when it doesn't feel good. 

all times are not exact times and all quotes are not exact quotes; for both there is no apology. the truth is still contained within these hybrids of fact and interpretation. 

I LIKE RICK GRIMES MORE THAN YOU.

Sometimes, you love something so much, and it is a very popular thing, and you know it's illogical that you should love it and other people should not be able to, but sometimes, you just know that you love it in a special way that is better than anyone else. Sometimes you just know.

The Walking Dead is a massively popular television show, and I resent that, because I like it more and better than anyone. There is graphic violence and gore galore, and I just know that's why so many people like it, but not me. It is one of the most hopeful and humanistic stories on television and it has reminded me so many times to withhold judgment on people without knowing their stories, and to believe in people's capacity to change and become better. Sometimes worse too. But to see the travails of this band of post-apocalypse as they struggle with walkers (a.k.a. zombies), but to a greater degree, with their fellow humans...that is the brutality and the beauty of this terrible and terrific show.

And I like it more than anyone does.

Kings of Leon are a massively popular band, and I resent that, because I like them more and better than anyone. Their countrified gritty rock and roll almost never loses its heart as it meanders around the big city and tries out the big lights and sexy glam of various genres; jamming soulful and emotionally brutal and beautiful lyrics into stadium-sized intimate pieces of four-minute magic. Other people just wait for the big choruses that probably got played nine billion times a week on every radio station. Not me. The Face. Back Down South. True Love Ways. Cold Desert. Wait for Me. I know them, and two dozen other timeless tracks to score the peaks and valleys of life, and they have soundtracked a hundred walks I've made on my mountain on dark lonely nights when I needed to be alone with someone, and they were there for me.

I definitely like them better than anyone else does.

There's people too; people who are loved and liked by many, and that's the hardest, because I pay attention to the nuances and the beats; the little moments and the collected eclecticisms that shadow by everyone else, and they are filed in my head in a growing living sculpture of love at the beauty that is a unique person, and it doesn't matter if everyone likes them...

I like them, better than anyone else does.

Oh, the competitive life.

IT'S THE _____ TIME OF THE YEAR.

I've been thinking a lot about the experience of Christmas.

I've always loved it. December, the holiday season, lights, swirling people, the feeling of joy and humanity mingling amidst once-a-year melodies and buttered-up treats everywhere.

I still love it. Or I will again. But this has been a tough year. A very challenging one in multiple ways. 

I have not had the same experience this season. I've tried. And had many good moments and made some good memories. 

I've loved the people I've been with. Drank some good coffee. A lot. Eaten some sugar. Listened to Pentatonix. Tchaikovsky, and Sufjan Stevens incessantly. Every time I try to play something else - say, Cat Power, then I hear "...but Daddy, it's Christmas season, can we PLEASE just listen to Christmas music!" I acquiesce the majority of the time on that one. It's a battle where I'm the perpetual villain.

It's also been a tough season. This post isn't about the reasons that it's been tough. It's about the feeling I've had this season that's different. Right now, it's the present. But someday it will be a memory. 

Someday it will be a memory. 

I love the fragility of memory and how it lets us move on with life and leave things behind; often times things that should be left behind out of survival or necessity or in order to prioritize new focuses and opportunities. 

But some things need to be remembered, and remembered not just as concrete experiences (what, when, who, where, etc.), but as emotional passages. My heart has gone through some deep tunnels and twisty turns this year and I'm having a difficult time finding the familiar joy I've always felt this time of year. 

I don't think it's a bad thing to try and hang on to the feeling. Not to drag it out or make it more acute, but to make sure I remember. Because some things don't make sense until you experience them. And I feel like I'm having an experience; a passage of something that will pass, but that I should remember. 

I'm sad. At the happiest time of the year. 

The logical part of my brain - and I am very logical in certain ways when it comes to finding clarity - knows that there are many joyful experiences and wonderful times ahead and some of the feelings I have now will dissipate; compost away into the heap of forgotten months that shape you without consciously realizing. I have so many people I care about, so many good things going on, so much to practice gratitude for. I am grateful for these things. Most of all the people; the many people I am surrounded with who bring support and joy in so many ways. 

This is a hard month this time around. Maybe there will be other Decembers like this in my future; I'm guessing the classic ones I'm used to will likely outweigh these. 

But I don't want to forget how tough this has been. I think I need to remember. 

Because I want to understand better, going forward, the people who experience this every year. Every December, every holiday season. The sadness.

The sadness and even loneliness amidst being surrounded by joy and love. Even when you're in the middle of that and it's directed at you. You can still have those feelings; if I deal with some of these things with the support system I have, then I don't know how so many people deal when they're truly alone and have everything crumbling around.

I don't know, and I want to keep a little piece of that feeling with me; a slice of this month's experience to keep handy and accessible for the coming years when I'm feeling jollygood and it's almost impossible to understand how anyone could not be feeling the holiday spirit. 

So yeah, I wanna remember. Ideally the right amount. It's hard hanging on to hope sometimes, or trying to find it or resurrect it, but it's still important to keep alive, and maybe, maybe 

I will be there in a future December to be there for someone who understands. Even if it's just a little bit. Who understands how hard joy and jolly can be sometimes. 

In a left turn here, I subscribe to the dual and perhaps dueling ideas that 1) you can and should own up to your feelings and emotions honestly and 2) you can also push yourself to own up to them, and then to continue moving on and sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, even (platitude coming up)...

...fake it til you make it. There is something to that. 

The idea of trying to bring your best, of trying to model for others, especially children, of how you can respond in the face of adversity or things not going your way, and creating joy and joyful experiences, EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T FEEL LIKE IT, and realizing at some point, sometimes, you get sucked into it and it turns real. 

Lot of good moments this season. Lot to remember.

Joyeux Noel, all. Love you. Especially my wife, the delectable and patient Countess Becca who brings joy to so many surrounding her. 

Including me. 

A COMMA, NOT A PERIOD.

The first thing you'll probably notice is how well-composed this group selfie is.

That's because I took it, and I am very good at taking group selfies. My left arm, like that one foot of that one Daniel Day-Lewis character, is very dexterous and surprisingly lengthy.

The other thing you might notice is that the people contained within this frame do not appear happy. Or rather, joyful. There is not a song in these hearts, or if there is, it is likely a Black Heart Processional song, or maybe one of more Adele's more weepy ones, which would be pretty much anything she's ever sung.

My dear brother Jonny and his beloved, Meilani, are moving. At this point, they have moved. Rather, they have left; departed with a trailer full of mostly unnecessary belongings, and their bunny, to the locale of Toronto. Toronto, Canada. A 38-hour drive away, according to maps, which means probably 48 hours with a trailer, and 96 hours if there were children involved. There are not, unless they impregnate themselves along the way, which I have strongly urged them to do.

#stay warm

For many years, I have told my siblings:

I want you to be where you need to be. I always want you geographically close, but more importantly, I want you to be where you need to be, to follow your dreams and the path to achieving your dreams, and sometimes that means sacrifices that take you physically away from your family. But you gotta do it. 

And I will support those decisions even when they're painful. And this was so painful. And when I say was, what I mean is...is. Will be. I'm still in denial and it hasn't really sunk in yet. It will.

I don't know the number of times Jonny and I have talked on average per day for the last decade, and I don't know the average length of those different conversations, but they would be interesting numbers to analyze.

Little tiny talks, many many times, most frequently about mundane topics that have no introduction and no ending and generally conclude with abrupt:

Talk to you in five minutes.

Okay, love you, talk to you in four. 

Click.

Lots of little ones. Little, guilt-free, trivial conversations that have laid a bedrock for the occasional more substantive ones that deep-rooted relationships are built on.

It's so hard saying goodbye. I had to say goodbye to one of my other best friends several months ago, and her absence is still such a big hole. Now the hole's bigger.

#thatswhatshesaid #michaelscott Funny television to make me laugh even when I don't want to.

I've always been pretty good at making goals and finding little things to look forward to. I've lost some of that skill though. Trying to get it back.

It's a cliche that 'change is hard.' But I think the hardest kind of change to face is when everything seems to be changing around you and you want to change, but the brutal heel of reality makes the steps toward active change seem so difficult and almost impossible.

I do believe in that idea that you absorb the mores, attitudes, philosophies, etc. of the six people or so you spend the most time around. That's a powerful concept, and a lot to unwrap. The influence of those you're surrounded by.

Who will step in?

Or, who will I find to step in?

Or, will I wait for someone to step in, or will I charge ahead, facing change, finding the track back to dreams I've had, continuing to assist in others' actively along the way?

I hope that one. I'll try. It's hard, when you love someone so much to let them go and face their dreams. I wanna be a support system, a cheerleading squad; I wanna build the best thing possible from afar, and hope that it'll be near again soon.

There's not some big inspiring wrap-up to this. Change happens. You either flight it, fight it, or accept it. Or ignore it.

I'm proud of those who charge forward and make change happen. Thanks for being an influence on my life and others and carpe dieming the flipping lights out of life.

Anyway. All the love. Thanks ahead of time to the Postal Service, Pony Express, and FaceTime. And cheap airline tickets.

- Josef.

A DAY, A WEDNESDAY.

01
Would you rather have good food and poor service, or poor food and great service?

Trick question. I vote for great food combined with great service. We got one of the two this week.

One of the first things I would do, were I a camp director, would be to ban the use of kitchen and dishwashing staff wearing headphones while interacting with campers.

I married a camp kitchen worker. Her mischievous smile in line was one of the tiny things that added joy and spice to a mundane part of the day. It took nothing extra. Just a willingness to connect with others on the job with personality and spirit.

And there’s a bond that forms in the back kitchens when you’re forced to compromise over radio listening, as opposed to everyone being on separate earbuds in their own little private worlds.

At the least: not when interacting with the public. There’s something that slowly sucks the life out of air when you’re interacting with people who are trying hard not to make eye contact and using headphones as a signaling mechanism that ‘I am not available for friendly communication on any level and in any way, which includes smiling.’

I believe there were hash browns, chicken eggs, tofu, oatmeal, and muffins.

I ate an oatmeal and a hashbrown, plural.

02
This is a really sad incident with a sad ending, but I’m going to tell it because you need to hear it.

I have told our children: play hard, get dirty, scrape yourselves up.

They can start doing their own laundry and we can afford plenty of bandaids.

But don’t,
I say.
Do anything to your head or your spine.

No brain or spinal injuries. I feel strongly about this.

It felt good to have our 19-month old absorb this philosophy already. I had previously forbidden him from doing somersaults on the 4th floor window ledge; a stern command I gave that made sense to me, if not him and everyone else.

Go find something slightly less dangerous,
I said.

- and I should note that I am slightly rearranging facts here again to fit the narrative I want to tell, because I did not actually tell him this, and I was not actually with him when the incident I am about to tell you took place.

He was with his mother, a girl who is frequently good at dangerous things, and sometimes not so skilled at being a triage nurse. So what happened was

- and I should tell you ahead of time in case you’re getting excited about what is about to happen, that he did not get attacked by a moose. That is another story for another time -

The short version is this:  You know the skin underneath your upper leg that everyone, aside from triathletes and people who exercise too much, have?

Some people have more of this fatty skin than others on their thigh. If he was in Alaska and he was a whale, the Inuit might call it ‘blubber.’

It is cute blubber, I have to say.

So what what happened is, he was apparently playing with a friend, a friend who was a bee. I do not know the bee’s name, but they were having fun I would guess, and in the midst of their playing, his friend flew underneath him playfully, and got lost.

Where did he get lost? In the folds. The folds of blubber, of fatty tissue that all non-triathletes have. Mr. Bee was flying around and got caught in a fold of fat that closed around him as he was flying, and as our son was kicking his legs around playfully.

When living creatures encounter danger, they usually go into fight or flight mode. For Mr. Bee’s sake, I wish he had gone into flight mode.

But he didn’t. He fought. With his stinger. He plunged his stinger deep into the fat of our son’s leg, and then with a final gasp...

...died.

Our son valiantly screamed, and then cried, and recovered over a period of days. He is fine.

Mr. Bee is not. He’s dead. Sad. Sometimes you gotta run, not fight.
Don’t fight if you’re going to end up dead, unless it’s for a bigger cause than yourself. And choose your friends carefully, because some of them can be dangerous, especially if you’re a bee and they’re a little boy with a lot of fatty tissue on the backside of their upper legs.


03
I watched my sister-in-law Meilani reading a one-page black-and-white photocopy of a camp schedule to a nephew and niece, ages 19 months and almost three years old.

They sat with her, happy and absorbed, toys all around, ignored. The toys ignored.

Reading a single page of text-heavy paper with their aunty. Laughing, pointing, squealing, absorbed for precious minutes in interacting.

They had her attention.

It’s hard to overestimate the value of giving kids conscious, focused attention.

I have to remind myself every day, as I get distracted like everyone else and try to escape that focused attention by throwing toys and easy entertainment at them. There’s a time for that too. But still: reminders. #reminders

I loved watching those moments.

04
My mom is a wheeler-dealer; a talent that many people might not peg her as having. But she is. She is sincere and straightforward and nice and empathetic...and also knows how to keep nudging and pushing people into giving a better answer than their original. As in: “Well yes, the ceramics class is full...but I suppose we could set up another table so you and your grandchildren could join too.”

Ceramics and then Giant Swing. The Giant Swing is another very difficult activity to describe. Essentially, it’s a swing that is huge. You might say it’s giant. You get hoisted up into the air 40 or a hundred meters or so, attached by a climbing harness and a piece or two of rope, and people pull you higher and higher, and when you’re ready, you pull a little smaller rope that releases you and you...swing through the air in a side-to-side arc that is...giant.

The idea is that it’s fun. Several years ago, I did it and screamed so loud and for so long that I lost my voice for several days. Seriously and literally.

Becca also made fast friends with one of the instructor guys. They had a little meeting on the ladder and just really hit it off, and they were so cute just standing there talking, for a long time, while the rest of us were waiting to swing. On the giant swing.

05
I like having good salad fixings. Ingredients that make it extra good for me are kidney beans, sunflower seeds, and non-soggy tomatoes that are cut correctly; that is to say: with a sharp and SERRATED knife.

I’ve been having Ejvindr help clear the tables after meals. He wasn’t sure what to make of it the first time, but once he figured out what the process was, he loved it.

He gets to drop the dirty silverware in a giant tub filled with water and other dirty silverware.

He gets to help stack the plates and bowls in the back by the dishwashers and tell them thank you, although they will sadly be too absorbed in their earbuds and in one case, an especially gigantic pair of over-the-ear headphones, to realize that he’s telling them ‘thank you’ in his garbled and semi-intelligible way. With a big smile.

And most importantly, he gets to dump leftover water from the cups into a five-gallon bucket filled with waste liquids, and then stack the dirty cups, upside down, into trays. The trays are arranged in a grid, with little slots for each cup to go upside down. Sometimes he forgets this. Idiot. I remind him, and he figures it out. It’s awesome. He’s very proud of himself.

People offer to help. They helpfully come up and try to take a stack of dishes as I have him in one arm, carefully helping me carry that stack of dirty plates, bowls, silverware, cups to the back, and I say no. No. The point is not that it’s more efficient, or effective, or easier, or faster. It’s none of those things.

It’s more fun.

And possibly he’s learning something valuable about helping out and being part of a collaborative community. I don’t know.

It’s just more fun.

06
When it’s bright outside, I like to wear sunglasses. I typically try to stick to glasses that are constructed out of very poor plastic and are in garish colours. If they cost over a dollar or so, then they are overpriced. If they are freebies from some company’s marketing team, even better, and chances are I can easily rub their logo out in twenty seconds and I’ll be good to go. Becca is good at helping hook me up with these types of sunglasses. It is a skill.

She found six pairs of these sunglass types in children’s sizes, and gave them to all seven of the cousins, including our three. Well...six pairs of sunglasses, seven kids. The 19-month old got stuck with some old adult-size rejects of ours. Sad. We got a photograph of all seven squirming their way around in various contortions as they looked rico suave cool with their cheap shades.

It would be truly terrifying to own expensive sunglasses.


07
Johannes went waterskiing.

There was crashing.

There was improvement.

There was never quite getting up.

And there is next year and next time.

Sometimes it’s valuable to learn that you can crash and still survive. That was a good thing he learned, and I am proud of him for going through the terrifying process of learning that. The actual skill part will come at some point. Probably. Or maybe not.

But he is trying.

He is improving.

And he is giving his best in the face of fear.

That is what I ask.

08
When a person is getting pulled behind a boat, and they crash, then it’s legally required that somebody on the boat hold up an orange flag to let everyone else around know that there’s somebody who wasn’t skilled enough to successfully complete whatever activity they were doing, like waterskiing, and that nobody should probably run over them because they’re treading water while they wait to go again, although they might be crying and not ready to go again because they’re eight-years old and waterskiing is a very terrifying experience.

My dad is very good at holding up an orange flag and holding an infant and simultaneously heckling both the boat driver and whoever the boat driver is pulling.

09
Mud runs are one of the coolest things ever. The mud is only a small part of it. The best part, besides the glitter. We made all our children go, including the 19-month old, because. Because. Because because! Because it’s fun, and he shouldn’t have to miss out. This made sense to us, thought not to all present, especially as this particular Mud Run was a timed competition, and some were planning on winning it.

Our team’s name, coined by our oldest son, was “The Super Slow Sloths.” A team was never named more appropriately. We slogged through mud, over walls and barricades, dogpaddled through a pond, rolled through glitter, slid through sudsy slide, ran down a steep dusty mountain, and finally swam a short sprint in the lake. The latter was terrifying. No joke. I had Ejvindr, who was lifejacketed up, but I was wiped out and barely made it to shore intact. #ironman I doubt my heart rate has come close to what it was during the final leg of the swim. Terrifying.

Loved it. So fun. Also grateful to have a wife that supports the involvement of our children in these activities from early ages and doesn’t take the easy route out of not doing them.

10
I don’t know what we had for supper. It might have been calzones. I don’t think they that terrific. I think I slipped mine to my three-year old niece, who wanted a third.

11
There’s a bunch of safety stuff at camp that’s super important to them, like...let’s see.

Oh yes, adults are required to wear life jackets if they’re playing on the water toys.

And there’s safety stuff that’s not such a big deal to them, like not having railings on 4th floor staircases and decks where small children are staying.

And also doing s’mores on the lakeshore beach at night, with 50 sharp skewers waving around in a small space with hot marshmallows, young children, and fire. Johannes was surprised and disappointed they didn’t have dark chocolate available.

Fortunately, the night passed with no eyeballs on sticks. So, it’s definitely safe. #blackswanevents

That was a day.

IN THE COLD DESERT WHILE THEY NAPPED.

Jesus never loved me 

No one ever carried my load.

I was around eight; we lived in a small Oregon coastal town.
Two younger siblings. How young?
Young enough that they were forced to take daily naps.
We lived on a hill.

It was an afternoon, a summer.
Nap for them.
I stepped outside.
Heat heat hot.

I looked around.
No breeze.
Sun slamming down.
A few houses down the road, trees, distant noise from the town's pumping downtown.

But quiet up here.
Just sun. And me.
At forty-one, I have carried that feeling around with me since;
that feeling of solitude and loneliness, popping up intermittently but with regularity.

No one hurt me.
Nothing bad happened
I wondered around, looked around, listened,
desolate, and the sun kept coming.

The world felt still, and quiet, and far away.
I grew up in a world of books, forests, oceans,
and more than that, family and love.
And yet I felt so alone in those moments.

A house away, my siblings slept.
Hot dirty road, flowers drooping,
I gazed around three hundred sixty degrees.
The ocean a short distance away, but not visible. Thanks, development.

Autumn
Winter
Spring
Summer.

I love them all,
but summer is the outlier for me,
which is similar to me,
because I have always felt like an outlier in most communities.

Summer, a season I love,
but grow weary of, and grow lonely with sometimes.
In certain situations.
It's not the heat, or the bright, or any other number of variables.

It's a specific combination of them.
Sun. Flat topography. Dry. Stillness. Quiet.
That feeling brought on by age seven, walking around.
It all comes up.

How can you be lonely when you're lucky enough to have
family,
friends,
community?

How can you feel desolate when you live in the lush and verdant Pacific Northwest,
trees,
rain,
green?

How can you feel alone
when people are close by; physically, emotionally?
There are a lot of answers to that question,
and I don't have good ones, not really.

I know that is a feeling I can conjure up easily,
and I understand how people can feel lonely,
and alone,
when it feels silly that they would or could feel that way.

It's why I ask
"are you okay?"
Instead of waiting for them to tell me
if they're not.

Because it seems ridiculous, petty, arrogant to feel certain emotions;
how can you complain about being hungry when kids are starving across the world and you've got a full fridge?
How can you feel alone when you've got a warm, caring, affectionate, supportive
family, friends, community?

But I get it.
I do.
The feeling of being crushed and trying to take another step,
of feeling you're doing it alone.

You know it's not true.
It's not true.
It's ridiculous.
But it feels that way sometimes.

The aloneness of being surrounded by people.
The loneliness of being engulfed with community.
The desolation of a dusty street on a hot quiet afternoon.
The weariness of dragging your feet forward and wanting to sprint but being too tired anymore.

Kings of Leon, a decade ago,
wrote Cold Desert. Some of it goes:

Jesus never loved me / 

No one ever carried my load.

The Followill brothers, from what I understand, grew up Pentecostal.
That's Christian, I think.
Their religious background comes through in much of their music.
Biblical references, allusions to faith and the contradictory confusing nature of their lives and beliefs.

But to say: Jesus never loved me
Followed by no one ever carried my load...
those are explosive lines for someone whose identity was wrapped up
in God and family.

What does it mean?
I don't know.
I think he may have been super drunk
when he drawled them out.

But I hear them as a question,
a mournful, bottom-of-the-barrel cry
that is pitiful, sad, desperate, lonely, and...
ridiculous?

Does he mean these?
Does he make these statements with lucid sincerity?
Or are they the words of someone whose success is directly influenced by the two things he denies here;
his God's love and his family's support; the systems that propelled he and his two brothers who comprise the Kings to a huge level of success?

I don't know.
I was working until after midnight in my dungeon office, as I frequently do,
and I had Kings of Leon going, with no particular attention paid to this song, until finally it grabbed me,
and then I ran it ten times in a row.

It is so sad.
So mournful.
So full of loneliness.

Yet it also feels cathartic;
like the saving stroke of someone ripping away sadness and draining it for you.
A burden lifted.
Listening over and over, and over, and then again, and once more,
I found a contentment and peace as he mourned in his elegiac howl again and again...

...singing words that he may not have believed,
and may not be true,
but in that moment,
in that time,
in that desert,
they were.

In the hot desert,
the hot, flat, sun soaked, lonely, cold desert.
I feel that feeling and sometimes I wish it would never come back,
but then I wonder,

if I feel it,
if I still feel it sometimes,
can I take that feeling and make something beautiful
and maybe help drain the sadness from someone else?

That is music, the beautiful collision
that strikes us down and lifts us up.
To make something brutal and lovely,
something sad that leaves us better.

That lets us own up to pain, sadness,
depression, loneliness,
however fleeting,
and help release from their spell;

the martyr act of taking upon the sadness of the world in a song
of crying out what is felt, not what is necessarily true,
and finding comfort in a shared solemnity.
Hope in the cold desert,

or as I prefer,

cold mountains.




___





Kings of Leon
Cold Desert
Only By the Night
2008

I'M HERE, YOU'RE THERE, I'M COMING.

One of the principles I believe in, which I believe is somewhat backed up by science, is the finite nature of present time. We can engage in infinite philosophical discussions about the meaning of time, and continuums, and the relationship between it and other variables, but when it comes to cold reality, we have what we have. That’s it. There’s no stretching or squeezing. It brutally exists in the same way that sometimes feels plodding and sometimes feels accelerated, but notwithstanding our feelings, it’s the same. One second is one second. One day is one day. Et cetera.

I really loathe guilt trips. What do they buy you when you’re handing them out? The same thing you get when you’re receiving one: resentment. Friendships and relationships built around guilt and unrealistic expectations are not a good or a healthy thing.

I fight it sometimes. Pretty sure most people do. I tried to eliminate them, but they can be fun and feel so useful...when you’re the one handing them out.

Pivoting: I do think one of the hallmarks of great relationships - not ALL, just great ones - is that they’re proactive.

In other words, it’s the difference between saying,

Are you upset about something? Well, let me know if you want to talk.

And saying:

I’m sensing you’re upset about something. Let’s talk.

The difference between:

Sounds like you’re overwhelmed! Let me know if you need help!

And saying:

I think you have a lot going on and I would love to listen and help. What shall we start with and what can I do?

The difference between:

Let me know if you want to talk.

versus

Let’s talk. Tell me what’s going on! And let’s face this together.

The difference between

Responding to a heartfelt message with an emoji.

versus

Responding to a personal message with a thoughtful response.

___


I’ve tried to help our kids learn how to converse well: 

“Conversation is a ball. You’re playing catch, and you take turns. You keep it going. You throw, you catch. Good dialog is like that. Active. You answer a question and then you throw it back. That’s what makes conversation - and friendship - fun. It’s active and you keep tossing things back and forth. It's not one person's job to keep it going. You gotta both be in it.”

Life is tough sometimes. And most people...they’re on middle and outer edges of our concentric social circles; the people we nod to and say ‘how you doing?’ without breaking stride, the ones we banter casually and playfully with and keep ourselves in check with appropriate decorum and protocol for the nature of that friendship.


But the handful of deeper and more meaningful ones we might be fortunate to have...by definition, they may need a little extra time and effort and concern and concerted exertion building and growing...

...those are the the ones that need proactive energy; the kind that doesn’t wait or expect the other to contact you for help.

And energy, although different than love, has the potential to have a similar characteristic in the right circumstances: it can multiply. Good energy (I know this runs slightly counter to Science 101) multiplies itself. Bring good energy in. Proactive. A rocket boost. Or even a tiny little vial-size boost. Not fake positivity; totally different thing. 

An energy that says "hey, this is tough, and you need some extra energy, so I'm jumping in with you, and let's boost each other up today." 

And that can be two minutes. Two minutes of proactivity here and there. An investment. Those two minutes add up. They're doable. But don't wait. It's a ball. You catch, you throw. 

You go. You don’t wait. You confidently forge ahead and take ownership of that valuable thing that you share and you make it your place to make sure they’re good.

Because sometimes, it is your place.

And it feels good to know there’s someone coming to check on you before you’ve asked.

That’s what we do for each other. What we should do.

And that word “should” is at the root of so many guilt trips.

You should do this.
You should do that.

So be it.

To those people you may be extra close to and have special connections with: you should be proactive. Don’t wait to be there for them. Don't wait for them to ask. 

Just go. Be there. 

Happy sunshine day, all. Go get 'em. Get him. Or her. Go.