EPISODE 403: IS THIS THE REAL LIFE?

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Hey you. I don’t know where this newsletter finds you perched, hopefully in comfort and safety, but I feel safe in saying regardless, Weather! Amirite?

Maybe you think I’m being West Coast smug. I will have you know we had a thunderstorm today. That’s right, a THUNDERSTORM. It lasted almost a whole hour. Someone said to me tonight, “It’s getting to be like the Midwest around here.” I said, I KNOW!

(In nine years here I think I’ve heard thunder twice. And the first time might have been an LMU student cutting across our backyard in the middle of the night and dropping a large set of library books.

A couple summers ago I found myself in the middle of a massive sudden crash of thunderbolts and lightning (very very frightening me)

(Galileo)

(galileo)

(Galileo)

(galileo)

(just saw the movie, the critics are whacked, it was awesome)

ANYWHO, it turned out I was so dazzled and/or starved for a genuine thunderstorm that when that happened in Melbourne I stopped what I was doing, got a cup of coffee and just sat out in it (under an umbrella) taking it all in like God on the day he stopped to enjoy his whole creation.

So: Australian heat wave? American polar vortex? Here in California, we’re right there with you.

(Now if someone could just explain to us why they’re called “thunderbolts”? Because that does not seem to make a lot of sense.)

++

Man this week went fast. I wish I could tell you what I’d done with it, too, but most of it escapes me. Actually if you want to savor just how deep the crazy that is I goes, check this out: off an on for the last nine months –mostly off, I do have day jobs! – I’ve been writing essays about issues of a comic book I love called The Wicked + The Divine. Writer Kieron Gillen, who I’ve mentioned here before for his great newsletter, has this amazing practice of writing thousands of words about every issue a couple weeks after it comes out, and his commentary is just a wealth of insight into writing and being a Creator of Things. And don’t ask me why, but at some point I got so into his writing about his writing that I thought I wanted to write my own writing about his writing about his writing. And boy have I.

I don’t get paid for it (obviously). I’m juggling a hundred other things (largely badly). It’s writing about a creation rather than creating (which is also on the surface maybe not the best choice). But I have to say, I find in writing about good writing I am learning so many things.

For instance, Gillen has this practice where, when he knows that people can tell that there’s some big twist coming, like maybe they don’t necessarily know what it is but they can tell there’s a piece missing and they’re on some level waiting for “the reveal”, he uses that expectation against them, by adding another whole surprise or reveal (or sometimes even two) immediately following the reveal they’re already waiting for. Like in one issue someone gets something they really want, which we’ve been hoping might happen, and then immediately after that just the worst thing happens, something we could not have seen coming but which in retrospect is totally fitting and changes the story entirely.

It’s like he’s perfected the idea of the writing donut. You think it’s just a twist or a glaze and then you bite it and it is filled with jelly. Sad, devastating, human tears-flavored jelly.

So yeah. I guess this is my Ode to a Grecian Urn. Except on Tumblr.

++

Speaking of the taste of human tears, this article about a young chef who has passed away will make you cry, but for all the good reasons.

++

Still no idea who sent the Nic Cage pillow cover. (Man that image is disturbing, isn't it?) Received a compliment from my mother about it that definitely keeps her on the suspects list, but for now the truth remains unclear.

Originally the title of the newsletter last week was going to be A LIZARD, A SHARK, A HEAT-SEEKING PANTHER. Other things came up and I went another way, but I sort of missed it. It comes from this amazing Nic Cage quote. “I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion.”

Yeah. Amazing.

(Did you hear Nic Cage in the Spider-Man animated film? He played the deeply broken black and white Spider-Man and he was AMAZING. I asked a friend if this officially begins the ReCage-aissance. I was told Absolutely Not.

But I’m feeling it anyway.)

++

So I think I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have stopped eating meat and fish. It’s been about four months now in fact. I got food poisoning from some very badly dressed steak two days before a transpacific flight in September and just decided you know, let’s do this. And honestly I haven’t really missed it.

Some people have asked me what’s behind the choice. Certainly part of it has been to try and eat healthier. Which based on my scale definitely does not seem to have been a thing that has happened thus far. Apparently substituting cheese and sometimes bourbon for protein is not actually a great idea. But then again I also have grown a beard for the first time, and you know what they say about how beards put on twenty pounds. Or cameras. Whatever.

But you know, the main answer why is that I hate the idea of eating animals. My quip is, I don’t want to eat anything that has a brain or a face, because it just seems so wrong.

Like, how is it that we can be not only so advanced as a species that we can fly to the moon and also device all day standardized tests to break our children’s belief in themselves, and yet also refuse to fact the fact that most of the things we eat are themselves actually intelligent?

Ah yes, but how intelligent? Tut tut. (Apparently my main opponent on this question is an omnivorous British grandmother.) I mean, have you ever met a cow or a sheep? They are not exactly brain surgeons.

But they do experience REM sleep. Which is to say they dream. And they communicate with each other. And they make choices. Like, smarter choices that kids, sometimes.

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago about a more ethical killing of fish. (Their answer: Kill them instantly. I.e. Stop suffocating fish and watching them die and thinking it's funny, Jesus what are you.)

But the thing that really struck me was the expert’s passing comment that tuna, which I always thought were these teeny tiny little creatures, are actually massive animals (for fish) that are sort of the hunters of the seas. “And you have to be extremely intelligent to be a hunter,” the expert pointed out.

Now stepping back from the fact that you’ve just said the animal in question is super intelligent but your story is about how it’s better to just shoot them in the head (an ENORMOUS, Grand Canyon-size step back), the insight of that comment just stopped me in my tracks. Because of course that expert is correct, aren’t they? Great hunting, which many animals do (see: my sister’s tiny dog and squirrels), is not just about instinct. It’s about planning and waiting. I’ll go further – it’s about imagination.

Take a second to think about that. We kill beings that have active imaginations. That make plans and show patience. We kill them, and then we eat them and sometimes wear their skins.

Yeesh.

There’s a million arguments against what I’m saying, I realize, but most of them seem to require you to put your brain away (which is ironic, given what they’re claiming). Personally, the idea that we kill things that have dreams, it just rips my heart out.

Also, guys, they have faces.

++

The New York Times had a great article last week about the place of beauty in natural selection. Some scientists argue beauty is an essential part of evolution, insofar for instance as it’s a way that animals draw mating partners. But others say that’s way too limiting, that in fact our whole sense of evolution as just about getting ahead and surviving is wrong.

Sometimes beauty is the glorious but meaningless flowering of arbitrary preference. Animals simply find certain features — a blush of red, a feathered flourish — to be appealing. And that innate sense of beauty itself can become an engine of evolution, pushing animals toward aesthetic extremes. In other cases, certain environmental or physiological constraints steer an animal toward an aesthetic preference that has nothing to do with survival whatsoever.

The article goes into some of the players behind the battles being fought over this, and has so many cool ideas. Like the fact that the specific color that a certain animal or plant might take on over time might in part have something to do with the specific wavelengths of color that pops the most for that/a particular animal – whic his not just about the animal’s specific eye lens sensitivity or the fact that some animals see ultraviolet, but also about the substance through which the light passes to them, i.e. are they deep underwater, always in jungle-like conditions or do they live out in the open?

Like us, insects have color vision. Unlike us, insects can also perceive ultraviolet light. Many plants have evolved flower parts that absorb or reflect ultraviolet light, forming patterns like rings, bull’s-eyes and starbursts. Most creatures are oblivious to these ornaments, but to the eyes of many pollinators, they are unmistakable beacons. There is an entire dimension of floral beauty invisible to us, not because we are not exposed to ultraviolet light, but because we do not have the proper biological hardware to perceive it.

There are similar cool stories about frog calls and the specific sensitivities of the ear canals of female frogs.

++

The Good Place finished its third season last week, with yet another big twist and in some ways hard reset. I have no idea how much longer the series can continue to do that; I sort of suspect the next season might be its last. It’s funny, I spent a lot of this season thinking it all didn’t quite hold up as well as the other two. But then I was writing a couple notes about the season, stuff I wanted to remember and before I knew it I had pages of stuff. It’s a very different season than the others, one with a lot of traveling and much more substantial change in the characters. If the early seasons were sort of about whether they could “be” good people, the third season insisted being good is actually about the things you do, whether you help people.

One big spoiler that I love – Skip this if you don’t want to know it– are you ready, because I’m going to go for it in 3...2....1.5.....1....is that in fact the whole game is rigged, no human being has actually made it into heaven in hundreds of years. And when they dug into that what they discovered was that every decision that we make is loaded with so many other effects that we are not aware of that in fact every decision ends up being one that harms people.

Now they said – still spoiling here, I’ll be done soon --this means The Bad Place is cooking the books and moved on, but I don’t know, isn’t that actually true? Isn’t that the problem we’re all struggling with all the time? I gave up my Amazon Prime account because I think it’s crazy how they treat their workers to make sure I have stuff that if I’m being honest I really don’t need as fast as they offer; most of the animal products we eat comes from animals that are horribly treated; our carbon emissions are not only ruining the planet for future generations but for a lot of people living near water right now. And what are we to do about any of that? Are there any actually good choices? Definitely better choices and worse ones, but good? Everything is at one and the same time so interconnected and so complex that it’s hard to know. It’s like I want everything I buy to have a little tag on it that I can scan to see the supply chain by which it went from the pasture to me.

One more spoilery paragraph: I want to write a piece about this called “But Isn’t The Good Place Right and All our Choices are More Bad than Good and Is it Really All That Terrible in Hell?” Not sure anyone will print it, but I definitely think there’s more to what The Good Place set up than they got to explore.

God it’s a great show.

(BTW, so is yet another season of Grey’s Anatomy. I realize the show is old and has nothing to do with Hell or Kristin Bell but tonight one of the doctors was going to have their spine operated on and everyone was scared and before they did the surgery they placed Diana Ross in the operating room and everyone got up and danced and God I was such a mess.

Usually older shows just get tired, but somehow Grey’s keeps finding ways to organically expand its characters’ stories. I know, it sounds preposterous, I’m just a sappy middle-aged Jesuit who needs something to do on Thursday nights at 8pm PST before he puts on his pajamas and falls asleep and wants to remember what it was like to feel all the things.

But actually don’t we all keep expanding and having different or new or more things in our lives that we have to learn how to grow through? We do. And so why don’t more shows with a lot of years continue to succeed, I wonder? It’s not like there’s not a ton of great young hungry writers out there waiting to be A Part Of It, that’s for sure.

Just hush your doubts and watch your Grey’s, mmkay? You will not regret it.

++ LINKS ++

As I mentioned at the top, I saw Bohemian Rhapsody last week and it made me wonder for the 100th time why I ever listen to critics about anything. It’s a very satisfying film and my 14 year old niece Meggan saw that way more clearly than the people who are supposed to and so enough with them and also here is a Canadian guy singing Bohemian Rhapsody and he is also amazing.

This week in Facebook is Still a Dumpster Fire: Tech and spirituality writer Damien Williams demonstrates just how wrong, so wrong is Facebook’s algorithm for suggesting emojis.

Also, you know you need to turn off your Apple FaceTime, right? And maybe have a conversation with your kids about whether Facebook has been paying them $20/month to get access to everything on their phones, including their email, notes, everything.

This story about Harry Potter goes on a very long time. If you have time for it it’s worth the full read, but even if you don’t, it’s worth checking out just for the crazy insane world gone wrong lifechanging debate going on among Harry Potter fans about of all things plumbing.

Meanwhile, am I the only one who did not know that there were secret messages in every episode of Friends? And also that there are so many secret cameras in pretty much every website you visit, and they are tracking so much more of our lives, that we really now live in An Age of what some are calling Surveillance Capitalism?

Last weekend the Jesuits of Southern California had this day of prayer kind of talking about our presence here and the future. And I found myself thinking about how sometimes (a lot of the time?) you don’t actually have a clear sense of where you’re headed when you have to make the decision to go there. It’s like you’re in a dark gymnasium or amphitheater or indoor Atlanta football stadium (GO YOU RAMS DO NOT @ ME PATRIOTS FANS YOU HAVE ENOUGH ALREADY), and there’s just one little light and it’s right in front of you, so when you step forward as far as you can tell you’re going to be in the dark. But then if you take that step, eventually your eyes get used to the darkness and you can see a little further, and maybe when you take THAT step there’s another light or a guy with a match or a sudden appearance by that step’s special guest star Tinkerbell.

All you can do is take the next step, and see what happens. And if we’re looking for direction, we also can’t do much better than this, from TV writer and good person Javi Grillo-Marxuach.

Every small kindness is an atom in the universe’s arc toward morality. don’t let the overwhelming cruelty of power depress you from that knowledge. ever gesture, however small, moves the totality of existence. there are more of us than there are of them.

A new week. A new step into the dark. I’m right here beside you.