EPISODE 401: LUKEWARM FILLING

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Well hello. And a belated Happy New Year! We’re two weeks in; how are you managing? We’ve got still a Christmas star hanging in our yard here, and if I had my druthers it would stick around a lot longer. Christmas vacation, I just can’t quit you.

(Although once it gets to be February and the plastic manger is now wet and muddy and the lights are sagging I guess yeah, maybe then I can. It’s weird, isn’t it, that a season of such beauty can curdle so hard once you add mud, sleet or maybe just time.

I’d still take it over Lent, but that’s just me.)

Thanks for coming back. I hope you each had a great holiday, and that the new year hasn’t been too insane as of yet. (Don’t worry, there’s still time! If government shutdowns where people are asked to work for nothing so that we can have walls that no one wants are not your fancy, maybe look across the pond to a world where some of our cousins may very soon have to work for next to nothing so that the Hard Brexiters can reinstate a wall that no one wants.)

I spent the last two weeks in a self-imposed withdrawal from that there internet I hear all the youngins always talking about. A few writers that I admire had been saying they like to use the end of the year to take a breath and envision the year to come. It seemed like a great idea. So I stepped away from it all, bought a bunch of new Moleskine journals and let the mind wander.

And you know, it was kind of amazing. I stopped eating meat in September, and fish too, more or less. “Anything with faces or brains” is my current explanation, a definition which allows for eggs and dairy until I read another story about all the horrific things that happen to cows and chickens on factory farms. And people have asked me if I feel better somehow, clearer. And I don’t think that I do yet. I go to bed earlier, but I actually count that more a negative than a positive, because the middle of the night is my jam.

But you know what has made me feel better? Not receiving email. Not just not opening it, but not seeing it, not being made aware that there are new potential time bombs sitting in my inbox. Demands, requests, please responds, hi how have you beens? -- they’re exhausting and overwhelming and sometimes a little frightening and that’s life, it’s fine, it’s Fine. But you know, so is saying no thank you for a little while.

Vacation messages, they seem like they’re just a professional way of explaining your absence to others, but in fact they are a way to create space in your life. It took me a couple days to get past the typical FOMO feelings – which in the case of email are more like Fear Of Disappointing Someone. But then it’s like you suddenly start to breathe again. Like you were dead and didn’t know it and Meredith Grey got the crash cart just in time and dialed the paddles to 300 and CLEAR and here you are, alive again except now you can actually see the world in front of you. (It has a lot of scents and colors!)

A lot of days my high point was just taking a walk along the ocean and watching the people gather near sunset in ones or twos, separate and yet all together staring out on the end of another day. And you do that two, three days in a row and without even noticing it suddenly your soul seems to have so much more room in it.

And you may still be aware that there is a lot of garbage going on all around, but it’s also somehow a little clearer that for the most part it’s the same garbage, just with different names or speaking in slightly different accents to try and fool you. And we don’t have to be fooled. We can turn back to the sunset.

Sometimes I wonder if our existence would be better if every day at some random moment someone wandered through the background of your life – a court jester, say, or one of those guys dressed like Spider-Man in Hollywood – shouted “Hey you, yes you, you’re going to die”, and walked on.

So much of our life is spent on nonsense that I think we would let go of if we were more aware that our time is really limited.

This is starting to sound like one of those annoying testimonials your friend makes after they get back from their life-changing vacation that they will promptly forget three days after they’ve finished rubbing it in, isn’t it.

(Starting to?)

Sorry. Point is, it was good to get a little time away.

And now, back at it!

Spider-Man, care of artist Riley Rossimo
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Do you do New Year’s Resolutions? I’m a little skeptical of the concept, mostly because I think if we were able to trace back its origins it would have come from some business looking to make a buck, Hallmark or Whole Foods or some such thing.

But I do like the idea of thinking about lessons from the year that’s gone by and being open to invitations or lessons in the year to come. And sometimes they come on velvet pillows; other times they look like that until you put on your glasses and realize oh no, that’s not a velvet pillow, that’s a huge purple fist hurtling toward my face.

I got one of those over the break. I was walking through our parking lot after Sunday Mass here, and an older Jesuit visiting our community was just a little bit ahead of me, going really slow because he has some trouble walking. And I stopped to talk to him for what I thought was going to be a moment, except he had a lot he wanted to say. And he kept stopping – probably to restore his energy (I wonder if we would all be kinder if floating we could see floating above our heads each other’s “life” or “hit points” bar, like a video game).

And then he was also pulling on my sweater, probably again both to slow me down and because that’s just part of how he communicates, which is fine, it’s FINE, except no, not for me, I just couldn’t get away from him fast enough. In fact looking back now I’ve created this version of events where he was constantly touching me and trying to pull me down into a pit filled with those styrofoam packing squiggles (btw, how are those environmentally acceptable?) and I was suffocating and also freaking out because those things feel so weird on your skin and make that weird sound and then they are in my mouth.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, but I suspect it might be that I need to be a little bit more patient. Or at least aware of my feelings before I’m acting on them. And also stay away from styrofoam, it just gives me the willies.

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TOP FIVE 2019 POP CULTURE THINGS MY LITTLE BEATING NERD HEART CAN’T WAIT FOR

1. Episode IX
It felt weird not to have a Star Wars film at Christmas, didn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re slowing the number of productions down. But after three years in a row having a Star Wars film at Christmas, it feels like one belongs there.

No idea how they “finish” this trilogy. I’d be happy even now if they said you know, we’ve been thinking and it’s pretty much “the end” as is, so we’re just gonna leave it. We shall see.

Prediction: The film ends with some kind of spirit scene like the end of Return of the Jedi, but instead of Obi-Wan, Yoda and Anakin it’s Luke, Han and Leia.

(Yeah that’s right, I just made you cry. But there’s no shame in it. It’s Luke, Han and Leia.)

2. Avengers: Endgame
I’m hoping for an initial time jump to like twenty years later and it’s like Leftovers, Season 1. And Cap is the only one who still believes. And then he finds a way back to the past. And meanwhile Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon have finally figured stuff out.

(She definitely traveled to the other world.)

(No she did not.)

(Argh.)

3. Captain Marvel
Five or six years ago, the character of Captain Marvel was actually known as Ms. Marvel, and the character had this weird ridiculous skimpy outfit that somehow she wore even into the ice cold of outer space and no one really saw her full potential as a character.

Then Kelly Sue DeConnick was hired to write her as “Captain Marvel” and created this whole new mythos of the character that made her noble and strong and 300% winning. And that seems to be the vision behind the new movie. I’m excited to see it myself, but I’m almost more excited for girls to see it. Like Wonder Woman, this new take on Captain Marvel just seems so enormously positive.

4. John Wick 3
I don’t like guns, let alone people getting shot but I don’t know, I just can’t get enough of the John Wick movies. The first trailer dropped today and it was fantastic.

5. Game of Thrones
The trailers have been pretty much a zero, and GRRM still won’t just give me the next book like a real friend would. Also, I’m just intrigued to see what the ridiculously long pause between seasons might do to how we experience the series. Do we really care who sits on the Iron Throne at this point?

Personally, I think I just want Arya to be happy. And in a way that might be easier to believe in if I don’t watch whatever the GOT team is about to put her and the rest through.

There’s also the new Jordan Peele film Us, the new season of The Magicians (which is such a fantastic show – Harry Potter for adults) and It Chapter II.

What about you? What’s getting you excited? ++

Also make good heaters!

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It’s been raining in Los Angeles four days straight.

I can hear your sympathy from here. Thanks ever so much.

The thing is, that doesn’t happen here. Like, ever. Sure, insert climate change comment; everything is indeed awful. (I saw an article today from a columnist I like about how the oceans are dying and it was just so bleak I couldn’t even muster an appropriate feeling. Brother, we don’t even have a functioning government. What can I say?)

But actually the rains put me in my mind of comments I kept hearing while away over Christmas about how California is just one long ongoing apocalypse, isn’t it? Which is of course ridiculous. California is many things all at the same time, just like New York City or Chicago or even Topeka, Kansas. Yes, we have fires and earthquakes and mudslides and a critical amount of homelessness and a lot of other issues. But we’ve also got the fifth biggest economy in the world, and some of the best environmental regulations, and other good things. The state is like people: good or bad is not an either/or.

The rains have not been prompted any widespread disasters (as of yet), though there have been some mudslides and flooding. Mostly we tell ourselves, this is good, we need the precipitation, but meanwhile we’re also constantly asking one another when it is going to end. Not only because we’re not used to the constant cloud cover – there’s a reason we don’t all live in Milwaukee – but I think because we feel a little unsafe in it.

I’m sure I’ve written here before about how funny it is to hear Californians talk with dread about what in the Midwest we would call “a light misting”. But I’m starting to realizing I’m now at the same point. It was an actual downpour at times this week and I was pretty reluctant to get in my car. What did I think would happen? I had no spinout pile up whirling through my mind. Actually when pressed I think my concerns were less about my reaction time than the pavement; I didn’t quite trust its capacity to keep hold of my tires (which is ridiculous and the grip is way more about the tires not the pavement but never mind my way is cooler, the pavement is like a magnet now). It just doesn’t quite feel safe.

And it struck me, maybe that’s how people who don’t live here feel about Los Angeles in general. Like sure, palm trees, ocean, Hollywood. But also, seriously isn’t the whole state one strong shove from falling into the ocean, and/or descending into some kind of mass riot/car chase up the 405? People look at us and see a fragility that most of us living here usually don’t personally experience.

No, that’s putting it too mildly. They look at us and seem to see either an ongoing or just about ready to pop apocalypse. (A popalypse?) And we here may roll our eyes at that, partially in offense but also partially in embarrassment that intelligent people would actually not only think that but feel comfortable telling us that. (Some things belong only in your journal, amirite?)

But you know, we have had a lot of fires in the last two years. And we’re definitely due for a pretty serious earthquake (or seven). This is not an eternal banquet we’re running here, yet we tend to live like it is, moving more and more into areas that we know for a fact are the first to go in a fire, flood or quake. The writer Mike Davis once wrote a whole piece about how we should just let Malibu burn from time to time, because there will always be fires there, and if we’re going to build our mansions in fire zones than whose fault is that?

He also has this great/scary book about Los Angeles, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, where he analyzes the history of the area in terms of millennia instead of centuries and discovers the general sense of security we have right now is a total fiction, we’re living in a lull between centuries of major geologic events.

But that’s not just Los Angeles, or even California. We all live and build and proceed within a timeframe that is at most a lifetime – and almost always only looking backwards. Forwards we can imagine, we can hear the stats and watch the scary dark scifi dystopias. But that’s not really how we think, most of us.

Which is to say it’s all pretty fragile, I think, our existences. And maybe people focus on California because it helps them to avoid thinking of their own situations. Or I don’t know, maybe we’re a helpful story in some semi-biblical sense. In the Ancient Near East, creation stories and apocalypses were never imagined as history or prediction. They were a way of commenting on the present. No one reading Revelationsthought all the crazy stuff that goes on was going to actually literally happen; it was a way of talking about what the people at the time were going through, their sense of instability, their fear for their lives and their futures. There’s this big Tolkienesque war because that’s kind of besiegement people felt at the time; and the point was the ending – yeah, it is all big and it’s terrible, but God wins. In some more permanent and fundamental sense it is going to be okay.

If the country looks at California and says to itself “apocalypse”, maybe rather than denying their own fragility they’re letting us be the way they can deal with it, at arm’s length where things are a little safer. We are the monster movie that helps them process the horrors that are also coming for them. And maybe (hopefully) that also means we’re a source of hope and reassurance. Because burn us down, mudslide us out we stay, and we help each other.

In the midst of this messy week, our public school teachers went on strike and they have had something like twenty thousand people out there. Notably, the story around the strike hasn’t been about teacher salaries; the negotiations have gotten pretty close on that regard. It’s been, teachers want their school to reopen its library, or have nurses for longer hours, or have enough aides or teachers for the number of students, or just adequate facilities. They’re fighting for the needs of their students, not despite them.

And they’re no different than people anywhere else in the country, really. Spend too much time on the internet and you may think Americans are trolly garbage (and also almost all white men). But in fact we continue to be a people who when the chips are down to actually help each other.

Maybe some day California will slide into the ocean. (At this point what seems more certain is that some day soon the ocean will rise and claim a pretty significant part of us.) But the next time I hear that California is one big ongoing apocalypse I’m going to try to wear it with a little pride. Yeah, we are, in part. You’re welcome.

++ LINKS ++

Advance Australia Fair: When this article began by calling Australia “Canada with a thong”, I cringed all over myself. Americans, why are we like this?

But then as it goes on it captures a lot of things I love about by Australians. Like how great Australians are at hanging out. I swear, for Australians no one is a stranger really, i.e. someone we keep our distance from just because that’s what people do. My observation, it seems like no matter where Australians go they see themselves as part of a world of friends and fun while I am sitting in a corner of the coffee shop writing this and loving that I’m writing this but also wondering if I could write this and still say hello to people who I have never met before.

“I Don’t Hate Women Candidates — I Just Hated Hillary and Coincidentally I’m Starting to Hate Elizabeth Warren”: Pure genius, this.

British Politics Today: 60 seconds of the UK Parliament being encouraged to deploy its Zen.

Lastly, One Thing We Can Do This Week To Make the World A Little Better: The Library of Congress, the biggest library in the world, is trying to transcribe all their documents to make them more searchable.

And believe it or not, we can actually be a part of that work. Even if we just have 15, 20 minutes, we can help them do that transcription. Maybe that sounds dull, but I don’t know, somehow doing it for the Library of Congress sounds kind of amazing to me.

The poet Mary Oliver died today. I've used her stuff in this newsletter a bunch of times. For me she was the poet of the everyday grace, constantly calling us to look around and appreciate all that we find there.

Here's one of her shorter poems.

The Uses of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I love once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

No matter what this week may hold, may you find somewhere within it, waiting for you, a gift.

Thanks as always for riding down rabbit holes with me. See you again next week.