EPISODE 431: ZOMBIE FINGER
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Got back from my eight-day silent retreat yesterday. Eight days of silence is always a little scary, frankly. I’m by no means hard core in my practice; I basically try to slow myself down, eat slow, walk slow, sit looking out on the world from various places, read/watch/listen/walk in moderation, stay away from the news or anything interpersonal communication-y and above all just try to listen.
But you never know what you might hear, you know? God likes to keep things interesting.
Having said that, maybe my biggest takeaway this year was just how glad I was to have a whole week completely disconnected from the outside world. Some years I think to myself, I’ll just check my email or my phone once in a while, no big deal. But the thing is, you don’t actually know what is waiting for you there. Maybe it is just junk mail and Google calendar reminders; then again, maybe someone from your life has decided this is the moment to really set you straight about a couple things, in a group text. Or you check your email and congratulations, you have just been rejected from that thing you had until now forgotten you had applied for. Or your editor needs you to look at something right now or one of a hundred other things that you did not anticipate, probably could not anticipate, and now instead of being in that place of peace and equanimity and openness you’re back in the mess.
You know what’s crazy? I’ve been back two days and I still have not checked my email. And I’m tempted to stay away a bit longer still. It was just such a relief to unplug so completely. And I find myself in kind of an unexpected moment where circumstance/commitments/the moon are not driving me too hard in any one direction, and the year ahead looks to be very different than I had anticipated and largely up to me to map out. Moments like that are exciting, but usually within a couple weeksdays all that possibility has collapsed harder than an underbaked bundt cake and I’ve got a million balls in the air and a hundred clowns in the car I’m driving – which is really hard to do when you’ve got a million balls in the air, and consequently life feels more of a trap than an opportunity.
It’s a crazy thing how the very things you love and want in your life can become a child-crying-while-tugging-at-my-pants-scale nightmare burden if you don’t take time to properly care for yourself (and them).
I have no idea what I’ll find if I just don’t look to my email for another week. It sounds like a thoroughly irresponsible idea. But there’s got to be something to sticking your head in the sand, right? Ostriches freaking love it.
(*checks Google, has his understanding of how the world works changed, wonders how he could have ever believed that clearly impossible idea, also wonders why there is no second 't' in ostrich, that is one weird word*)
Tell you what, here’s what I’m going to do: no checking my email until next Sunday. And maybe no social media either. (We’ll see. Twitter is madness, and yet…and yet…) I’ll let you know next week how it goes, and possibly where you can send money if I have lost all hope of future work. ++ I don’t know if any of the deets of a priest’s 8-day silent retreat are at all of interest, but if the tidbits intrigue you, here was my playlist. A lot of the time I didn’t go farther than “Quiet Man”, or I’d skip from there to “Visions of Gideon”. But they’re all songs that one way or another helped me get in touch with feelings swimming down in the depths of me.
Otherside, Perfume Genius
When the Night is Over, Lord Huron
Mystery of Love, Sufjan Stevens
Quiet Man, Roo Panes
Sigh No More, Joss Whedon
Wait by the River, Lord Huron
Visions of Gideon, Sufjan Stevens
Yoda, Weird Al Yankovic
San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair), Last Black Man in San Francisco soundtrack
Answer Me, The Band’s Visit soundtrack
Otherside, Perfume Genius (love that song)
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Random question that has consumed an inordinate amount of my energy the last few months: Should we just give up on the conjunction “it’s”? Because more and more it seems like even very competent writers who I respect cannot tell when to use it.
If we just used “its” for everything, would it be that much harder to understand sentences? Its not that big a deal is it?
I can’t even begin to express how uncomfortable I am with sending this out with that last sentence. But if I could it would look something like this:
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So I get home from my retreat and this weird thing happens. The tip of my ring finger starts to swell up and give off these crazy electric hot flashes. It’s totally out of the blue and once it starts it gets worse pretty fast.
I was WebMDing like crazy, of course, and after tentatively ruling out cancer, fatty lungs and kidney failure I discovered this is what having a hangnail is. Which made me really outraged at the PR wizards who decided to use the hangnail as a way of claiming something is small or trivial. Because let me tell you, when your fingertip is so sensitive that just the barest graze from a cotton towel is enough to make you jump through a window and your hand function is reduced basically to the level of a mitten, we have left trivial in the dust.
(Who’d have thunk that just the tip of one finger could really mess up your hand function? The human body is crazy ingenious…)
So I did all the witchcraft suggested online – dip finger in cup of warm soapy water; try to get the hangnail out with a tweezers; dry the fingertip, then rub in moisturizer. Take lots of Advil.
None of it seemed to really work beyond the Advil. In fact it reached the point where I started thinking maybe I would have to go to urgent care. It was just so swollen, and I was starting to feel it all the way down the finger and into my palm.
But I had this Mass I had to do this morning at a retirement community. And as I’m headed over there I suddenly notice there’s…stuff… on my fingernail. Blood and water and something solid that honestly was maggot-white (but not alive, thanks be to God). It was enormously disgusting. But as soon as I clean the nail off, that stuff comes right back. Apparently part of the blister that had formed over the prior 24 hours had burst, and now its delightful plague contents were seeping out onto my fingernail.
Which was great, actually, because the pain went away pretty much just like that. But it just won’t stop. And I’m at this Mass – which was this intimate sort of a thing for about 15 patients seated around the table – and I have to hold up the bread and then the cup and when I do there is literally nothing I can do to hide the fact that one of my fingers is oozing pus like it’s full on undead and coming for their brains or maybe just earlobes, it’s just one finger after all. It was gross and horrifying and also I need to write it into a script because being a priest really can be this weird and absurd and silly. ++ I know I’ve mentioned The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt already a couple times. I finished it on retreat. No book has made me miss New York more, or made me more curious about woodworking and antiques. It’s a beautiful, sad-wise rollercoaster of a book and God I hope you to read it.
Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention – laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab – made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, ad amp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt. ++ LINKS ++
This profile of Nicole Kidman has got to have one of the laugh-out-loud craziest first couple paragraphs I have read this year.
I wonder how many of you will think this article on the growing success of non-animal meat is nutty. (Less in flavor than in sanity.) I’m kind of fascinated.
While I was away I came across this from Daniel Harvey, who writes about how tech molds our lives: when it comes to social media, “anger is a commodity”. That is to say, those platforms make their money by selling ads based on eyeballs. The more people who look at and/or react to something posted, the more they can charge advertisers who are foolish enough to believe that us posting about Trump means we’re going to also buy more catfood. And nothing generates looks and reactions like something that makes you angry. It’s a self-perpetuating income machine in fact: because my angry response is more likely to create more angry responses, and on and on.
Basically the economics of social media is an anger-based pyramid scheme, except none of us are promised money for the energy we burn and information we give those platforms to sell, and the information they get is probably not worth what they’re selling it for.
Lastly, this secret origin of Candy Land is one of my favorite kind of stories: take something with which I am way too familiar – like the name of my hometown, or a saying about ostriches, or a game I played as a kid -- and show me how much more there is to it and I will be there for you. And there is so much good stuff in this one: A schoolteacher created Candy Land for kids with polio, and the set up of the game is meant specifically for them. She donated most of the proceeds to children’s charities. And there’s this beautiful ending:
When children want a more challenging experience, they leave Candy Land behind. And that, in the end, is what makes Candy Land priceless: It is designed to be outgrown. Abbott’s game originally taught children, immobilized and separated from family, to envision a world beyond the polio ward, where opportunities for growth and adventure could still materialize. Today that lesson persists more broadly. The game teaches children that all arrangements have their alternatives. It’s the start of learning how to imagine a better world than the one they inherited. As it has done for generations, Candy Land continues to send young children on the first steps of that journey.
It was a challenging week in the U.S. That's been true for quite a while now. But we are more than our worst days want us to believe. Who we are cannot be contained in a little box of outrage. We sing out not just in sadness but with blistering, hilarious heartbreaking joy.
See you next week. And by the way, if you really thought one of my songs for prayer this last week was Weird Al Yankovic's "Yoda" you are crazy and I love you forever.