Survivor: Death Edition

There was an interesting story about aging and dying in The New Yorker this week. Michael Kinsley talks about boomer fascination with living the longest, and living the best, and about his own changed perceptions of aging and dying since he was diagnosed with Parkinson's.

Actually my favorite part of the story was the anecdote at the very beginning, which I felt captured something very common that hardly ever gets properly described. Kinsley is at the pool, and there's an older guy swimming, and the older guy is boasting about being 90, and then the older guy says, "I used to be a judge."

Kinsley describes how it slowly dawns on both of them that saying this has exactly the opposite effect of the effect it's intended to have. It's intended to say, "I'm a player." But having to explain it, obviously, you're not. It's intended to say, "I'm with it." But given the first blunder, obviously, well, you're not.

Kinsley describes it much better than I can. I found myself wondering what Kinsley said to the guy next. Because sometimes in that sort of situation you feel all sorry for the person and you try to change the tone of the interaction back into one in which they can make their statement mean what they meant it to mean. Other times in that sort of situation you feel the person's being a pain anyway, and you sort of quietly let the sorry effects sink in.

Although the article is thoughtful and interesting, it didn't really resonate with me much. I felt like I was reading about the mortality of some other kind of person, not much like me.

He talks about how, no matter what forms you're competitive in, the only competition that matters is how long you live. This, he says, can be inferred from the fact that most people wouldn't a few good years for any material good or wealth.

Hm, maybe. But people trade good years for all sort of other pleasures, like smoking and drinking too much and having unprotected sex and riding motorcycles and climbing mountains.

I'm a freak about death, but to be honest, once we know it's going to be finite and relatively short, I don't find myself obsessing about exactly how many years. I mean, what's the difference? When are you going to die? "Soon," is the right answer, no matter what your age or health status.

Kinsley didn't really seem to share this feeling of "Soon" until he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. There's a vivid and moving account of having the disease, and of the treatments, and of the outlook it gives you on life and death.

He says for the ill person, the future seems finite, something people who aren't sick only feel later. Every new thing feels like the last roll of the dice.

I believe it. But I feel like I've had that feeling forever. Really, since I can remember. I remember being 17 and thinking, well, you'll be young for a few more years anyway so there's a bit of time. I guess if you're not comparing yourself to others, just being human is like having a chronic disease, since we're all on a steady march toward death.

Maybe competition is the thing here. I'm not really very competitive. I just can't get really engaged by competition. What with life being so short and all, I always figure, what's the point? In the long run, as they say, we're all dead.

It's The Hollywood Santa Parade!

Yesterday I went to the Hollywood Santa Parade, which I guess is technically different than the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which died last year from hemorrhaging money.

I live about two blocks away from the parade route, and last year I came back from the grocery store and watched high school bands practicing on the little side streets of Fountain and found the whole thing pretty goddamn touching, but didn't go. Then they said that was the last year and I found myself stricken by a sense of loss and failure, which is funny. As though it wasn't worth going to in itself, but if it was my last chance to experience the parade all of a sudden it became critically important.

I went to the parade once before, when I was maybe seven or eight, with my family and my best friend's family. I don't really remember what I thought about it; I remember people shoving and a struggle to see and some confusion.

Anyway, I saw the signs this year and I meant to go and then I forgot, and then I remembered. The parade started at five; I worried about whether to show up early to get a seat and all that. I went to get a late lunch at RoRo's Chicken and I saw people already staking out seats.

So I drifted over there around 4:30; the parade was due to start at 5. There was a lot of space left, and I sat down on the street, and watched the 15 year olds next to me flirt and giggle. But then at 4:45 one of their parents showed up with a whole host of other adult/teenager/family friend types, and the thermos of hot chocolate came out and a six year old was sitting at the very end of their row of chairs, looking, mostly, extremely anxious about the whole thing.

Bob Avakian's Revolutionary party came along, handing out newspapers and selling t-shirts about how the Bush Administration was a terrorist organization and then there were the Jews For Jesus and then people selling candy canes and light up toys.

The Eckankar center was advertising clean bathrooms, and lending out chairs.


People kept running across the street, aka the parade route, and I found myself vaguely anxious about that. The six year old's mother brought him a piece of pizza; she was blowing on it to cool it down for him.

Things started happening. A whole troupe of fire department guys on motorcycles tricked out with lights and tinsel and with lovely ladies on the back came wheeling down the street. Then there was a procession of emergency vehicles, lights and sirens on. The Robocop car was one of them!

The families on either side of me were waving; I felt weird waving. In fact, I felt a little weird being there on my own, plunked down on the asphalt without so much as a blanket or a thermos. I guess maybe I should have bought a light up toy.

One of the six year old's relatives who was maybe 13 himself (although I am now too old to accurately measure age in young people) came over and told the six year old to stand up, that he wanted to see how tall he was. The six year old was reluctantly hauled up. Then the 13 year old took his seat. The six year old looked upset and said, "Give me back my seat." The 13 year old said, "What do you say?" The six year old added please, and was given back his seat.

There was Bob Barker! There were high school bands! There was the mayor, who may have been greeted by cheering up on Hollywood Blvd., which was the pulsating heart of the parade route, but not down on Sunset, almost at the end. I mean, there were a couple of cheers, but nothing so much. He was working the crowd; he shouted "Hollywood in the house!" and asked the cops what district they were from and mentioned the tragic recent death of a cop and then later he asked a family where they were from and shouted "Covina in the house!" There was Rocky Delgadillo. There was Fred Willard, which I was very excited about because I had him confused with David Leisure, who was Joe Isuzu. It is only just now that I learned my mistake, and I feel a little cheated.

Endless amounts of time passed between bands and celebrities. I got antsy. The Marine Corps band from Twentynine Palms played a medley of Christmas carols, including that one that goes peace on earth and mercy mild, and I got all choked up, and then I myself ran across the parade route and went home.

A Night At The Roller Rink

Yesterday I found myself back at the local roller rink, a strange kind of place, being so close to the train tracks and the Home Depot and really nothing else, except for one of those all nude strip clubs where, I hear, they don't serve booze, which is pretty dispiriting to contemplate.

I've never been a good skater of any kind. I never played hockey or learned to skate backwards. On the other hand, like every properly socialized little girl I insisted on being taken to the ice skating rink, and although it was in some regards disappointing -- there were so many goddamn people around moving so fast -- it also had its upsides. Including hot chocolate in those paper cups with playing cards printed on them. And that mind blowing moment when you took your skates off and your feet felt so light, as though you were walking on air.

And sometimes I would go to the roller rink, and they would play the hokey-pokey and YMCA and we were all very ironic about it because the heyday of the roller rink was clearly a long way gone, but it was still pretty fun.

I actually went to a birthday party at the particular roller rink I went to last night back sometime in the late 80's/early 90's, and felt a kind of vague heartburning during the couple skate.

So last night we got there too early first, and then we went and got dinner at this restaurant that we were just walking by that turned out to be an enormous tiki-themed steakhouse, and I vaguely wished I was not going roller skating after so that I could get a Mai Tai or a Chi Chi, which were the cocktails featured on the menu. I am not a good enough roller skater to think mixing booze and wheels is a good idea. The restaurant was in Glendale, and people were being kind of boisterous, and one table kept bursting into highly trained song, leading me to believe they were some kind of choir. According to the menus, the restaurant has been there since 1937.

When we went back to the roller rink, the parking lot was entirely full. We walked in and some guy outside smoking (in contravention of the signs all over the place which said no outs and ins) was talking about being locked up for 30 years, from 1978 to 2004. I don't know if it was what it sounded like. Sunday, anyway, is not just the over 21 night at the roller rink, but the Savoy night, which meant that they were mostly playing seventies soul music. The crowd was 95 percent black and 100 percent truly excellent skaters, and they had one segment where only groups of three or four were allowed out on the floor. It's funny, because every night I've gone to this roller rink it's been a different kind of thing. Tuesday is organ night, which is one far back recreation of a midwestern past, but then there's also the Debbie Gibson era recreated with blonde 13 year olds showing off.

Anyway, I skated around a few times, slowing down the traffic and people watching, and it was all pretty awesome. And between that and the restaurant you could say it was some kind of cutsifying, a deliberate chase of alien charm outside my experience, because my normal life does not include things tiki or roller skating all that much. But the thing is, watching the skaters go round and round was genuinely awesome, and, in fact, roller skating is genuinely awesome, and I really need to start going every night so that I no longer feel bad about getting in people's way when I'm skating.

A Short Pause For Vituperation Or Adam Gopnik Is A Force For Evil

We have all been warned about the dangers of anonymous rants on the internet, so I will not spend a lot of time discussing the history of my dislike for Adam Gopnik. If you would like further details, email me at this address, and I will be happy to oblige.

I always believed this dislike to be a personal prejudice, perhaps arising from envy over his years in France, his range of knowledge, his status as man of letters. I have changed my mind.

In the most recent New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has an essay about abridged versions of books and the extras in DVDs, and what these things have to teach us about the nature of art. I didn't get it.

(I would also like to state for the record that having a special issue of the New Yorker about "the arts" strikes me as idiotic, and that I noticed a distinct anti-Trilling slant in their article about Jacques Barzun.)

But the course of saying what he has to say brings him to the movie Hollywoodland, which is one of those movies about Old Hollywood which I didn't want to see because it looked dull.

This is what Adam Gopnik has to say about it: "The tale of how the guy who played Superman on a cheap, forgotten TV series shot himself lacks the grip of tragedy, even pop tragedy, which demands, after all, that the hero once counted. (Joe Orton's life can be made ugly and tragic because the scale of his gift implies both conditions; but George Reeve's death is merely sad and a little sordid.)"

I've been thinking about writing about it for a while, and during that time I wondered if my initial outrage was excessive and then I typed in that quote. I am now perfectly satisfied with my initial outrage.

Adam Gopnik thinks that the unhappy extinction of human life can only become ugly and tragic if the life extinguished possessed the gifts to make it so. George Reeve (Superman!) doesn't make the grade; I don't know about the rest of us.

Now, a more charitable interpretation is that Adam Gopnik just doesn't feel like the movie in question made us believe in the importance of George Reeve. This would be wrong.

"The enormous care lavished on material that would never be worthy of the effort is more moving than the film."

I don't think of myself as given to moral outrage. I do believe that all of our lives contain at least some material worthy of enormous care, rising to the level of ugly and tragic. Or at least that there's no dividing line between the more gifted and the less so, making their sorrows are ugly and tragic, and ours are sad and a little sordid.

Human life is not well-designed for human beings. The tragedy of that is free-ranging and always tragedy. Except, of course, when it's comedy, which is an entirely different matter.

I Am Not The Stuff Of Which Buddhists Are Made

Once, a very long time ago, I lived in a very small town on the border of Colorado and New Mexico and I was the reporter for the finest weekly paper in town.

This was my schedule:

Monday I would wake up at 5 a.m. Sometimes 4. I would drive over the mountain pass into New Mexico. Usually the sun wasn't up yet and I would smoke cigarettes out the window of my car and listen to Roxette or Willie Nelson and worry about the day ahead and whether or not I was going to hit a small animal. Sometimes I would brush the snow off my car first.

Then a period of hubbub and fast and frantic typing and people grouching at each other and the paper would be all ready to go and printed out and I would drive home. Smoking, again, out the window of my car. Usually I would stop at Taco Bell.

When I got home I would sit on the floor and watch old episodes of Northern Exposure which would bleed into Magnum P.I.


Tuesdays I would go to the County Commission meetings in the morning and the City Council meetings in the evening. There would always be a break in the City Council meeting where we would go outside on the balcony and smoke and shoot the shit. In between I would read police reports and talk to people and try to find things to take photographs of.

Wednesday and Thursday were all trying to talk to people, trying to find things to write about, fielding complaints and making sure the obituaries had come in.

Thursday night and Friday morning I'd write up my stories. Four or five, usually. Friday afternoon my editor would send me a sketch of how the front page should look and details on the ads for the rest of the paper and Friday night or Saturday morning I'd put the layout together.


Usually I screwed it up, which is why I had to get there so early on Monday morning.

Sunday was my day off. I had developed this fixation on the Sunday New York Times, a hobby that would wax and wane over the years. Unfortunately, the New York Times couldn't be purchased anywhere nearer than an hour and a half away. So my mother bought me a subscription, which still ranks up there with any present I've ever gotten.

But since I was probably the only person in town with such a subscription, delivery was erratic. It would come one week, and you would think that the problem had been solved, and then it wouldn't come for the next two weeks and it would take endless phone calls from both me and my mother to get it to show up on the third week.

On the weeks where the New York Times came, no matter how bad and bleak things were looking, I felt better. The New York Times was something to cling to in a dark and menacing world.

The names change. Sometimes I really want coffee from a particular place, sometimes I want this one kind of potato chip and no other. It makes me feel safe, to be invested in a brand name, a certain product, it makes me feel autonomous and in control, a person of discrimination and taste.

And when that product is not available, there can't be a substitute. If the New York Times is the magical object, what goddamn good is the Denver Post going to be to me? Even if I really like the comics?

Quick Thoughts On An Autumn Morning

Photo by Flickr user withrow, here. (Licensed for shared use under Creative Commons.)

It's unseasonably warm and unseasonably beautiful today here in the Great Lakes region of Canada. We're all in a bit of a dream-like stupor about it. How could these sun-dappled fields become covered in snow and ice? It seems impossible.

They're building a new building about 20 feet from my office. So there are worker guys, there's a truly enormous crane, there's cement being poured. Watching them work in the sunshine, it seems so awesome and enviable. Outside on a beautiful day! Making something! Working together! Physical labor followed by a relaxing lunch!

These are all the things my job as a professor doesn't have. Or doesn't have enough of. As we all know, in the university, there's a lot of arguing, a lot of in-fighting over distribution of resources, a lot of criticism in every direction. Disaffected students.

A lot of teachers will say, "But I love teaching!" The truth is, I don't really love teaching. To do a really good job at it requires effort and caring, work in preparation but even more work in the classroom -- trying not to be boring, trying to see whether people are lost, trying to respond kindly and encouragingly to answers that are off-the-wall without other students getting confused. If that effort and caring happens in front of students who are surfing the web or just completely absorbed in something else, it's depressing.

But the time-warn cliche that I am happy to sign on too is, I really like students, and I love being around them. They're so full of energy. I love it. If it's not always energy for their studies, well, I can't blame them for that; I wasn't "good at" school at that age either.

They are so interested in one another, so obsessive about the things they are obessive about, so looking forward to the next big thing.

It's The Life Force, all around you, 24-7. Hooray for The Life Force! Happy Autumn!