Category Archives: The Evidentialism Files

O Me! O Life! A Verse for the Powerful Play

 

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here, that life exists, and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Am I doing the right thing?”

Not before, nor since, have I asked that question aloud, posed 15 years ago today.

My organs were in. I was flying from New York, on the tick tock clock,  for my double transplant. The doctors prepped me: gown and gurney, hair net and thin blanket. Shivering, cold as hell. Now all that awaited were the new kidney and pancreas down the hall.

I had been waiting more than  year for this moment. A perfect genetic match. A chance. Yet I wasn’t sure that moment. Spencer and Michael had offered their kidneys. My god. Their kidneys. I never told them, but I got two calls that my donor pancreas was in. Tick tock. That we could move forward as soon as a volunteer was ready to be cut.

Twice I told them no. I told them I wanted to wait for the exact genetic match, for both organs, simultaneously. In truth, I was afraid. What if it didn’t work? What if I died on the table? What if Spencer or MIchael died? All because I was unable to deal with my demons?

I was a shitty diabetic. I chose to run from the disease I contracted when I was 14. I barely paid notice to my blood level unless it sank perilously low or soared dangerously high. I chewed sugared gum to fit in with the kids at the basketball court behind Pierce Middle School. They hit up the Good Humor truck every lunch period. I didn’t want to be that one kid who couldn’t chew goddamned bubblegum. I convinced myself that I was like any other kid, that nothing like juvenile diabetes, a disease I’d heard of until I got it, could conquer Ultraman.

Now I’m on the gurney, forced to face the cost of my flight.

“Am I doing the right thing?” I asked my ex-wife, Julie. In all my hubris, I needed reassurance.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But if you want to call this off, we can leave here right now.”

Now, I know. It is the right thing. Better to die on the table than of diabetes’ decay, I said, feigning bravery. The real reason I was ready: Finally, after so much running, I realized  I did not face this alone. Over the years, I’ve discovered, that’s the key to facing what appears so frightening, so insurmountable, so entrenched within. That there’s another option besides facing your demons, or not.

You can hunt them. Corner them. Force them into the light and make those motherfucker pay before you finish them off.

If you are afraid of love, love. If you fear faith, believe. If you are frightened of the dark, get up in the middle of night. Don’t turn on the light. Walk to the center of the room, the center of the dark, and challenge the spirits to show themselves, to take their best goddamn shot.

They won’t. That’s the thing about inner demons. They are crafty, malleable, terrific at making you believe they are actual. Undefeated on the field, they will say, and you are but grass to be mowed.

But that’s a lie. They are cowards.

I was a crime writer the first half of my professional career, and saw real monsters. Michael’s brain tumor. Ronald Gene Simmons, who killed 14 relatives over Christmas because he snooped a note that his wife was tired of the abuse and was going to leave for good. Those are monsters materialized. I cried when one took Michael, sighed relief to see the other executed.

Yet how often do we face such demons? How often do we instead convince ourselves that they’ve become so fierce that we’re not up to repelling them? That we…just…can’t.

We can. It is within us, because we created that darkness. Perhaps let it grow out of control until it appeared in control.

However.

Is this not of our own creation? Is it really that impossible to smite that enemy, god-like and vengeful? The bible loves to preach of demons and gods borne outside our world. Adam and Eve were fine until that nasty serpent pulled up in the fruit cart.

Fuck that. Maybe Adam was just jonesing for some fructose. Maybe if he’d faced his own demons instead of blaming one in a tree, we wouldn’t have ever had to say goodbye to Samuel Flegel. Instead, he rests inside me. I carry him, perhaps because of my own demons.

But, on this day every year, he taps me on the shoulder. He is a gentle but literal reminder. I do not walk among the night spirits alone. That he is here, bow at the ready. That my quiver is full, filled with arrows sharpened by Spencer and Michael and those who were always less fearful than I.

Let’s hunt.

 

 

 

 

More Human Than Human: Why Cats Get Nine Lives And Dogs An Eternal One

Kids aren’t for everybody. But parenting must be.

How else to explain our need to anthropomorphize everything, from hamsters to Hondas? We’re expert at morphing anything into something human-ish, and just as adept at convincing ourselves that anything human-ish loves us back (except, ironically, other humans).

So I get how crazed people get over cats and dogs. And I have to admit: there have been rare occasions when I have mentioned, perhaps even bragged, on my own domestic partners. But I swear, something’s weird about Teddy and Esme.

If I give them a treat, which is so embarrassingly often they must think they get a Snausage for farting, the hounds know the drill. Both know to sit, silently. Teddy gets the big rawhide, Esme the miniature. I usually give it to Teddy first, because he’s got those eyes that make you think he just came from cosmetic experimentation. That’s right, you manipulative ass, anthropomorphize the hell out of me. So he gets first bite.

And I always feel like a sucker, because the moment he has it, Teddy is gone. I am dead to him. He’ll run to the other side of the yard, like he’s afraid I’ll take it back. Or, preferably, he’ll chew it on the couch, where he concocts his own slobber and rawhide leather conditioner.

But if I give the mini rawhide to Esme first, she does something odd: nothing. She will sit there, treat in mouth, waiting for me to give Teddy his. She’ll do the same thing with food (assuming there’s not a treat in it); wait until Teddy’s bowl is on the ground also.

Whether you’re a vet or a dog freak (ahem), there’s something fascinating going on here. She’s either being polite or she’s waiting to see what Teddy receives. The first is unlikely, but the second is almost as odd; if I gave Teddy hamburger, there’s nothing she could do but accept her own treat. She weighs less than a quarter what Teddy does and knows not to be alpha over issues that matter; she won’t even eat from his bowl in the kitchen.

So what is she observing? And why? She’s smarter than most people I know, so I have to be careful not to assign brilliance. But I’d like the Dog Whisperer to come here and give me a straight answer. Cuz she ain’t talking.

And while he’s here, maybe he can explain Teddy’s behavior when I go to the spa. He and Esme normally bound outside for fetch when they hear neighbor-irritating rock from the jacuzzi and see me heading to the door in a towel (my nipples have become their dog whistle).

Esme, though, is a fair-weather fetcher. If it’s cold or rainy outside, she’ll stay indoors, right here by the space heater, which you will surely turn on before you go outside, thankyouverymuch. Allow me to anthropomorphize that as well; I love her to death, but Esme is all about Esme.

Not Teddy. Yesterday brought more rain to the Valley. There’s something about being the in spa in rain, watching water hit the roof as it percolates your insides. Storms are hypnotic.

Yesterday wasn’t one, but the rain came, hard. I grabbed a towel, knit cap and hit the spa. A good half hour. listening and thinking and settling. Finally, I turn the water off, open the gazebo doors, get ready to bolt for the porch.

And there’s Teddy. Just sitting, waiting. Wet as can be from puddling water. But he isn’t moving until I head in.

Hell yes I anthropomorphize my world. I choose to believe there’s love there, even if I can’t give you a reason why. Esme makes Einstein look like a monkey with a Rubik’s Cube. Teddy’s blossoming heart fills any desolate soul.

But that’s just the dad in me.

https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=3WFyajeFaE4&video_referrer=watch

 

At Last

 

 

 

The Theory Of One Thing (Or How God Died In The Big Bang)

 

The brutal irony of science is that, in discovering how to measure matter, it discovered that nothing does.

Where once science argued the Big Bang theory, now we have the Multiple Universe debate, which posits that we are more granular than we ever thought. That our macrocosm, the cosmos we once saw as infinite, is actually just a contact lens in a sea of countless infinities. It’s enough to leave you scrambling for a blankie, pacifier and bottle of Jack to forget our insignificance.

But we can’t help but add humanity to our search for worlds without it. For what is atheism, if not faith? We side with science because it has a better track record; you know what? Turns out the world isn’t flat. The sun doesn’t revolve around our planet. Human sacrifice won’t bring rain. Our bad.

Religion, on the other hand, prefers to retrofit theories to explain an ever-empirical world. Hell yes dinosaurs roamed our neighborhood only a few millennia ago; God just has his own daylight savings plan and time zone; He’ll explain when you get there.

But when we hear Stephen Hawking explain so convincingly  the workings of the cosmos — that time had an official beginning like an Olympic starter pistol, that everything sprang from nothing, that there really are bottomless pits (we just call them black holes)  — we must take it with the same faith as a Pentecostal must accept god. How is the Big Bang on a scale any less miraculous than the loaves and fishes? Science is great at explaining the laws of nature. But whence the lawmaker? Give this to faith: It can be a lot less depressing  than quantum physics.

Perhaps the answer lies not in Hawking’s mind, but his body, which continues to fade like a collapsing star. The macro from the micro, as when a split atom alters so many molecules. Hawking embodies our own conflict with existence. He should have been dead 50 years ago, but still fights the darkness that consumes his life.  He has elevated us without movement, illuminated galaxies from a wheelchair and serenaded our choir with a gospel chanted through a Speak n’ Spell.

Maybe he has inadvertently stumbled on the singularity that unites both sides of the pew.

That life, no matter how you define it, finds a way.