EPISODE 205 – COULD SOMEONE PLEASE FIND SCATMAN CROTHERS?

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

On Monday I spent most of the day driving from Northern California, where I had spent the weekend, back to Los Angeles. And about halfway through the trip, I decided to stop in a little town and get a cup of coffee, you know, just chill out for a little bit, clear my head. Oh, and if the little town happened to be the location of the bakery that makes the world’s best sea salt cookies, which I could then binge eat later in the week while writing my newsletter even though at the time I told myself I was buying them for friends, well, what an amazing coincidence that would be.

So I’m sitting this little coffee shop, definitely doing a little reading and not at all looking out the window at the Brown Butter Bakery down the street, when two women sit down nearby. The woman facing me has glasses and long straight silver-grey hair. Though she wasn’t showy, there was something very fashionable about her; I could see her walking through bazaars in Santa Fe, inspecting the silver and topaz jewelry.

Focused on my bakery, er, book– I noticed them only superficially at first. But do you ever have one of those moments when suddenly someone says something so unexpected and/or embarrassing that it so completely cuts through everything else that everyone hears it and immediately stops what they’re doing? (Or, if you’re like me, have you ever had one of those moments when you say something in a public place in a very normal and not at all loud voice without recognizing that it’s probably a little more in-private conversation until suddenly the room is silent and everyone is looking at you and you wish you were dead?)

Here’s what she said:

“Like, I look out the window and all I can think is that at any moment someone out there could gun us all down.”

There are very few things at that moment that could have drawn my attention away from my baker—BOOK. But this was one. In point of fact the only thing to be seen out the window was the empty street and a hundred little tourist traps.

She went on. “The world – I mean, it’s just really scary.”

Outside a late-middle aged couple wandered by in floppy hats and khaki shorts, clearly on vacation and looking at next door’s antiques.

++

I’ve been thinking a lot about monsters lately. Some of that is a function of the rhetoric in our country right now. Day after day we get descriptions of our country that veer so far from empirical observations as to seem to be from a totally different universe. And many of them turn on some sort of awful menace -- the “bad hombres” trying to cross our borders, the gangs supposedly running riot over our city streets, the (Islamic) perpetrators of our fictional massacres.

Every president is in part a storyteller, and every administrator has its ‘villains of the piece’. But I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a leader quite so invested in recrafting reality as a monster movie.

Some of it’s the stuff that seems to be floating through my newsfeed of late. Like this description of the horror genre by the writer Joe Hill.

’Horror’ is a word that describes what you feel when you or someone you care about is faced with the worst. When a work of fiction stirs a sense of "horror," we're entering a heightened state of empathy. Someone is in terrible trouble - the swamp monster has a girl by the ankle and is pulling her down into the weeds - and we want her to escape, to paw her way back to the surface of the water, to taste the air again.

I love that idea that horror is actually predicated on empathy, that a horror film is more than anything an exercise in identifying with someone else.

Or there was this comment from a writer I love about a terrifying chaos monster-god in a British role-playing game I know nothing about:

“I was petrified of Slaanesh. I didn’t like thinking about Slaanesh. I never stopped thinking of Slaanesh....The point of Slaanesh is that It Is Inside You. Slaanesh doesn’t just exist as a thing to punch. Slaanesh exists as a threat to your own identity.”

Or there’s this quote about the difference between being afraid as a child and as an adult from Stephen King’s 1975 novel, “’Salem’s Lot”:

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting—not for the first time—on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can’t get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

“Lot” was King’s second novel, if you can believe that.

But the main reason I’ve been thinking about monsters a lot lately is that I’ve begun to realize, much to my surprise and dismay, that I seem to have a monster of my own living inside me. And that it’s been there a long time. And that my strategies for dealing with it have misunderstood it pretty much entirely.

(How’s that for a tease?)

Over the next couple months, I’m hoping to write a bunch of pieces about monsters -- the monsters under the bed; the monsters in the movies; and yeah, the monsters hiding out in our hearts. (Or in mine, anyway.)

I’ve spent the better part of today writing and rewriting (and rewriting) different ways to start, only to find myself time and time again suddenly confronted, like Danny Torrance at the end of “The Shining”, by another dead end. And somewhere in the darkness of this maze I car hear Jack Nicholson coming.

So I guess for now it’s going to have to be enough to sit with that woman at the coffee shop, looking out on a placid, idyllic world and yet finding herself so frightened. She may sound a little disconnected from her reality. Then again, when it comes right down to it nobody's getting out of here alive.

(Happy thoughts!)

++ LINKS ++

Speaking of getting out of here alive, Harrison Ford, STOP FLYING. Remember, you are in the middle of a late-life renaissance.

Also, for those who may be finding the first hundred days of the current administration a uniquely scary kind of horror show, this great piece from the New York Times offers interviews with members of prior administrations about the enormous surprises and challenges they faced in their first hundred days.

And lastly, even if it’s true that kids have to deal with fear in a much more primal and unfiltered way than the rest of us, it’s also nice to be reminded how much better they can be at being brave and good, too.

Another nutty week. Hang in there. Sometimes it helps to remember that if he were still alive Mr. Rogers would be FURIOUS.