"Why Does This Keep Happening To Us?"

Red Rain - Michael Stipe, Natalie Merchant & Peter Gabriel (live) (mp3)
Armed Forces Medley - Bands of the Armed Forces (mp3)

That was the question posed to me over the phone yesterday by a junior in college, a boy I advised while he was a student at my school. A third member of his high school graduating class died tragically over the weekend. The news just reached him and his friends that night as they were out partying, and he called and left a message in a bewildered and awkward and inebriated voice.

Three years out of high school, three classmates dead. The latest, a baffling, random (and non-alcohol-related) tragedy overseas.

I just finished Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, the story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner, bombardier and Japanese POW during WWII. It only seemed right to wrap up the remainder of the book over the holiday weekend.

On Sunday, I sat in the beautiful outdoor Brevard Music Center for their annual Independence Day concert and was moved to tears as literally hundreds of men and women stood during their playing of the Armed Forces Medley.

Each branch offered an impressive showing, as Brevard is a beloved retirement location, and the folks who attend BMC events naturally skew older anyway. But when the Army song played, it felt as if half the crowd stood, as if we were suddenly overrun with members and family members of the US Army, and anyone who is in the midst of Hillenbrand’s book can’t help but feel it.

Hundreds of unknown, untold, sometimes un-uttered stories in the minds of those men, thousands more stories of the women and children left behind at home.

“Why does this keep happening to us?”

This is not a newly-discovered cry. It is a cry as old as humankind, and the asking of it is almost a rite of passage into the world of growing up.

At 11:15 p.m. on Monday, our rednecky neighbors were headed into their third hour of fireworks. They must have spent $1,000 or more on stuff, because these were big, booming barrages of sound and spectacle, an impressive if low-rent version of what you see in bigger shows. And they were firing them, quite literally, in a field not 50 yards from our back deck. So we needed only look straight up to see them.

One daughter came to our room in tears because she was exhausted and couldn’t sleep for the booms and crackles. The protective parent in me was livid, and between curse words muttered under my breath, I swore that they were getting a call from me if one more *#@^& boom hit over our house after 11:30. And then I stared at my watch, counting the seconds and breathing through my nostrils like an agitated bull.

Then I thought of Unbroken. And my anger subsided.

Children all the world over go to sleep every night to the sound of gunshots, artillery fire, explosions. Not fireworks, but real honest-to-God threats to their lives and their safety. Yet they must somehow find a way to close their eyes, drown out the sounds, and attempt to sleep.

One weekend a year, we must endure this symbolic ritual that, when done right, serves as a reminder of how relatively easy and comfy we have it, even when things go badly, even when life keeps taking dumps on our heads. It serves as a reminder that real men and women, time and again, century after century, choose to risk their lives, their bodies, and their minds, so that our highly flawed yet amazing country might renew its own reality show for another season. It is a heroism snot-nosed punks like me simply cannot grasp in full.

I do not mean to trivialize the pain of my young college friends as they struggle with tragedy after tragedy. I do not mean to mock or minimize the frustration of an exhausted 9-year-old as she is shaken and scared by the window-rattling booms of an overly enthusiastic, borderline pyromaniac family of neighbors.

But one cannot read of the experiences and trevails of Louis Zamperini, and one cannot read of the statistics and historical facts Hillenbrand offers about World War II, without gaining, within the hearing of these contemporary tragedies and contemporary child anxieties, a bit of gratitude and perspective.

Bad things keep happening to us because we’re alive. It won’t stop until we’re through.

As Zamperini found, with the help of a certain little-known evangelist who shares my first name, we either let the bad things destroy us, or we scratch and claw and fight and do whatever it takes to see that we grow stronger by enduring them.

It’s easier to remember this when the storms are way out on the horizon or drenching friends or neighbors, far easier to forget when the clouds pour down all around you.

The Afternoon of Mourning

Every Devil - Tanya Donelly (mp3)
Wish You Well - Katie Herzig (mp3)

It’s 6:10 a.m. I’m in the kitchen with my mother. I’m 6 years old. I’m eating one of the Monster Cereals for breakfast. Probably Count Chocula. Mom is pouring another cup of coffee before we head to the car for another day of school. Then, in the midst of the mildly frantic hubbub, she stops. The world stops with her. She’s staring into the blackness of the window, swept into a different dimension far away from me, from the kitchen, from that present moment.

She’s thinking about my biological father. Her brain has called up some memory -- a passionate kiss, or an intense fight, or some random moment where their fingers grazed one another as they reached for the salt shaker at the same time, whatever -- and she has fallen into that well of grief where her mind still struggles to accept that he’s dead.

This is fiction. I made it up.

I don’t have a specific memory of a specific morning from a specific childhood age. What I do have is a jumble of memories of seeing my mother stare off into the distance, yanked out of body and out of that moment, spaced out and incapable of communicating. And I have the wisdom and experience of age now, enough to realize she was mourning her dead husband, enough to realize she almost never let me in on this secret for fear of it having some undesirable consequence on my own childhood.

As I continue my all-too-rapid approach to midlife, I’ve learned it’s not just my mom who has these lost spells. We all do at some point. Once we’ve encountered a tragedy or event too powerful for us to simply swallow and process, our minds will occasionally pull us away from reality and force us to continue digesting the meaning and consequence of a lost loved one, or a divorce, or a tornado ripping our house to shreds, or a serious car accident.

If I learned one seriously painful and life-altering lesson from the death of my adopted father, it’s that we place far too much cultural emphasis on “being there” for someone immediately following a tragedy, and far too little on being there later. When we’re in shock and reeling from a life-altering event, we find our head buzzing, our bodies in a sort of vertigo, and we’re surrounded by concerned people and covered dishes. But later, when the shock has worn off, and the mundane repetitive nature of our lives has been fully restored, and that grief yanks us away from our daily existence for a minute or a day or a week, we feel alone and forgotten. No covered dish. No concerned visitors. No sympathy cards.

Because we’re supposed to be better. We’re supposed to have healed. We had our time to mourn, and now it’s way past time to have moved on.

There might be no lonelier and more heartbreaking thing to say, to oneself or someone else, than “It’s time to move on.” If you don’t believe me, go rewatch Ghost.

The tornado that tore through our Southeast and the outpouring of concern and care that has overflowed in its wake has been truly amazing, but it’s also important to remember that rebuilding for most victims of such an event doesn’t happen overnight. It takes weeks, months, even years. It’s true of tornadoes, and it’s true of tragedy in general.

My point is this. Think of someone you know -- anyone, really -- who has lost a loved one. Be it the death of a parent from old age or cancer, or a sibling, or a child. It can even be someone who went through a rough divorce. Think of that person in your head.

Now, right now, no matter how long ago that tragic moment occurred, think about writing them a letter, by hand, telling them that they’re on your mind. (You can add in a little religious seasoning to taste if you lean that way, but it’s not necessary.)

Tell them they are on your mind and your heart. Tell them you know, from your own experiences, that we might not ever fully heal from the tragedies we survive, but maybe that’s not always a bad thing. Tell them that you admire them for how very well they’ve seemed to manage, and even though there’s probably nothing you can do, you’re thinking of them and there if they need anything.

Yes, it’s possible your note will make that person cry. It’s possible you’ll be picking an emotional scab that was better left all crusty, and if that’s the case, I apologize to the both of you. But I can tell you by name the two people who have reached out to me at completely unexpected and random times, and I can tell you I remember their act of concern and kindness a bajillion times more intensely than I remember those covered dishes and those hugs of sympathy at the visitation.

It never hurts to know someone is thinking of you.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Trouble I Seen

The following was originally posted on February 19, 2009.


Fall on Tears - Love Spit Love
King of Pain (live) - Alanis Morrissette

Random things I've recently witnessed and can't shake:

A spider was spinning its web between two of my office chairs the other morning during a meeting. A co-worker bent down, pulled the spider up by its thread, and dangled it for everyone to see. Then he took that spider, placed it in a corner, and let it crawl away. I would have just stepped on it. My choice would likely have gone unchallenged, and no one would have been too upset with me. Just a damn spider, after all. But my co-worker's actions inspired us all to pause and consider what he'd just done. Mercy is a quiet but powerful force.

A bulldozer spent the weekend leveling an area across the street from us. It would scoop up dirt, drive up the hill, and dump it onto a mud pile. Several times it scooped up some plastic tarp that had been laid out. At one point, the dozer dumped out the dirt, but the tarp wouldn't come off. It had just barely wrapped itself around one of the teeth, and most of it was dangling on the earth pile. The dozer's driver was shaking that blade up and down, back and forth, but the tarp wouldn't come off. At some point, I expected him to step down and pull it off with his hands, but he never did. He just kept jostling that blade for several minutes. Finally, he backed up and then drove the blade right into the dirt mount with speed that suggested tremendous frustration. When he backed up a second time, the tarp was gone, buried underneath the pile. Even with our biggest and strongest technologies, we still get caught up on tiny distractions.

A squirrel failed to properly latch on during what looked to be a routine tree-to-tree jump outside our house. It fell some 30 feet, thudding onto our back yard. It stopped for only a second, perhaps to catch its breath or make sure all its body parts were in tact, before running like hell back up the same tree out of which it had just fallen. Even squirrels must believe the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

At the casino last week, I entered the restroom to attend to personal matters only to open a stall door and see a large pile of pudding-esque shit on the tiles two feet before the toilet. As my eyes scrolled up to the toilet, I saw that the guilty party had removed his underwear and simply dropped that soiled item into the water. Some elderly man must have held on a few seconds too long, perhaps for one extra spin on the slots, and failed to make it in time. He chose to go commando rather than try and find some other way out of that bathroom with any of his dignity in tact. Acceptable loss. Collateral damage unavoidable.

On our drive home, on the side of Alabama Highway 27, a mangy dog gave one last try at standing up. It had been hit, and fairly recently. Although there was no blood, the back half of its body had clearly been crushed by the impact. None of us had a way of putting it down, and it would never have made it to a vet, so we kept driving. I looked back to see the tan, short-haired dog -- must've been part Boxer, maybe part Lab -- merely lay down on its side and put its face down onto the cold gravel. I kept staring back at him until we went over a hill, but he never moved again. Watching a creature suffer prior to an inevitable death is always more agonizing than seeing it already dead, even if we have no control over either situation and exist only to serve as a witness. Yet, if given the choice, we would always want to be with our loved ones in their final moments.

Driving the four blocks from home to work and going slowly over a speed hump, I passed a Barbie doll, completely undressed, sprawled out on the curbside, inches from the road. Her hair was tangled and wild. One of her shoes had fallen into the road. Otherwise no clothes were around. The life of a homicide detective must be like placing your heart in battery acid.

"Fall on Tears," one of my favorite songs from the '90s, is from Trysome Eatone. Alanis' version of "King of Pain," which is certainly not as good as the original but not at all bad, is from her MTV Unplugged album. Both can be found on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.

Burn Out or Fade Away

Summer - Buffalo Tom (mp3)
So Fast So Numb - R.E.M. (mp3)

Why do successful bands refuse to die?

In the annals of humanity, few stories are as repetitive and inevitable as this: that we rage, rage against the dying of the light. We’ve romanticized the notion so heavily that, even when we don’t have any energy left in us, and even when we don’t have any rage left in us, we still refuse to embrace the Grim Reaper.

One of my coworkers’ mothers is 78 years old and just underwent septuple bypass open-heart surgery. The doctors and family pondered over it for a day or two. Sure, the surgery might fail, or it might kill her, but she had a 75-80 percent chance of making it.

A decade earlier, she had just wanted to see her dear grandson get married. If she could just see him get married and happy on his wedding day, she would die a happy grandma. But he went and got married while she was still plenty healthy, three years ago. So the deal changed. Now she wanted to see that first great-grandchild. If she could just see that, she could die happy.

I’m a spry 40. It’s easy for me to look at people who have lived almost two of my lifetimes and proclaim that they should accept death as an inevitable part of life and get right with their divine creator rather than finding massively expensive medical measures just to delay what cannot be stopped.

My mother turns 70 this year. My cavalier and callous attitude towards death upsets her greatly. “I guess I used to think that way. I know I did,” she’d say, shaking her head. “But now that I’m getting closer and closer to death’s door, I guess I’m just not all that excited about opening it yet. There’s more to be done. I want to see my granddaughters graduate high school. And college. And maybe if I’m lucky I can see my great-grandchildren born. And I still have a lot to contribute to our church, and to our family. I’m just not ready yet. Not nearly as ready as I thought I’d be 30 years ago.”

In other words, when death is a distant relative in a foreign land, we’re cool with him. When death is a next-door neighbor, we rally the association and do our best to get his ass removed from the premises at all costs. Even if we know damn well he has a right to live there, and even as his dog continues taking regular shits in our rhododendrons.

Perhaps it’s unfair of me to expect bands to approach death differently.

Beady Eye is Oasis Minus Noel Gallagher. It’s a band trying to sound like a band whose entire raison d'être was to riff off and amplify THE band of all bands. Or, put another way, it’s a band that just doesn’t want to accept that maybe they were already better off dead several albums ago.

R.E.M. has a new album out. The critics are all praising it and claiming it’s the best thing they’ve done in 15 years, since their vastly under-appreciated New Adventures in Hi-Fi. But if you look closer at these critics’ statements, it says the following: this album is a compilation of some of their biggest highlights over the last two-thirds of their career! In other words, what they do great with this album is to sound a lot like they already have previously. In other words, why not just compile a Greatest Hits 1997-2011? (Same exact things were said by critics when U2 came out with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, by the way.)

If the best you can do, as a band, is skillfully simulate a sound and a feeling you already created, aren’t you a zombie or a Xerox machine already and just don't know it?

But the story of rock, the story of successful performers, is similar to old people in general. Mick Jagger and my mother say the same things with different words. The closer these bands get to death, the more they want just one more milestone, just one more little reminder that they’ve lived the good life and fought the good fight.

I bought that Beady Eye album. I’ll probably buy the R.E.M. album. I’ve purchased recent albums by the Hooters, the BoDeans and Buffalo Tom, too. The more like family they’ve been in my music collection, the more my babbles about accepting mortality fail to match my actions of helping to keep them alive.

When the fit hits the shan, nobody likes saying goodbye to a loved one.

Rumors, Details, and Sex on a Picnic Table

Clumsy - Our Lady Peace (mp3)
Deny All - Bettie Serveert (mp3)

I'm in a dentist's office. The faux-leather chair is reclined, and the blood is slowly pooling in my skull, and that light, brighter than a thousand suns, burns into my mouth.

My dentist is a highly-intelligent and beautiful wife and mother who has somehow managed to hold onto every ounce of her attractiveness as she approaches 40. Her skin seems a little less soft, her face a bit more wizened, but she got that young fire in her eyes, with a mighty impressive figure and modest but sharp taste in clothing. And oh yeah, she's a kick-ass dentist.

Yet, try as I might, here's the image that inevitably flashes into my mind: her, 17 years of age and a junior in high school, lying back on a wooden picnic table at a popular local Chattanooga park, her knees dangling off the edge, her feet hovering in open space above the dirt and grass, her skirt up around her waist and spread across the planks like a disheveled too-small tablecloth. And a senior at my school, a year older than us, a popular and athletic king of the hill, pushing himself into her.

In most of my recreations of this moment, the senior boy is looking around in some twisted hope that someone can be a witness to this moment, so that when he brags about this moment over and over for friends and classmates, he can talk about the person or people who saw it with their own eyes. I imagine him, on the verge of orgasm, holding up a Joe Namath finger of victory, stoking the imagined enthralled fans surrounding the table in his moment of sexual triumph.

Of all the rumors and tales of sexual escapades from my high school years, this one is easily the most salient. We didn't have tales of group sex or fantasy blowjob drafts back in the late '80s, when getting a mere one blow job in a night was plenty impresive, so having sex on a picnic table in lingering daylight with one of our sister school's most stunning students was an otherworldly tale of studliness.

I once overheard the senior in question regaling his friends with the details. I then heard it a dozen or so more times as the story became hallway legend, gaining additional details, reaching new heights of the fantastical.

From day one, I doubted this story. One of my closest friends in high school helped out in our athletic training room in the afternoons, and she was constantly the subject of sex tales. She gave blow jobs in the closet. She would jerk you off while she wrapped your ankle. Tales that I knew to be untrue, but they got shared and passed around as factual as if they'd been etched into a chapter of the Bible.

That's what boys do. We talk. We sit round proverbial campfires and tell each other tales of the epic conquering sexual hero. It's as old as Beowulf.

Even when she was 17 and a rumored slut, my dentist wanted to be a dentist. Hell, I wrote it down in my journal. We had a conversation one time -- and all conversations with females of her caliber were recorded and immortalized in my journals for posterity -- where she talked about how much she valued clean, straight teeth. She'd known early in her life that she was going to be a dentist, she said. I remember keeping my mouth closed and smiling, hoping to hide the five dozen fillings in my mouth, suffering painful regret from so insufficiently and inconsistently brushing my teeth in my youth, knowing those cavities were a guaranteed barrier to her falling in love with me. (As if that was the singular preventing factor...)

So of course, when I found out she had moved back to Chattanooga and opened an office with her dentist husband (natch), I signed up as her patient. She'd always been brilliant; she'd always known what she wanted to do as a profession; she was hot. That, my friends, is a perfect combination of motivations for picking your dentist. It's a nice reward of convenience that her husband is a swell guy and a great dentist as well, since he attends to patients 80% of the time, now that she mostly stays home with their daughter.

I remember finding out she was pregnant. During my cleaning, the hygienist said, "It's really brave of her, having this baby." I shrugged and made what limited sounds I could with her fist in my mouth.

"You know, with her having Cystic Fibrosis and all." My brow furrowed and I made more gutteral sounds.

"She said she never even expected to see 20, much less get married and have a career. They didn't even think she could get pregnant in the first place." (More gutteral acknowledgments.) "So, you know, when they did, it just seemed like life was giving her a chance she couldn't pass up."

I don't know whether my dentist got laid on a picnic table when she was 17. But I do know this. If I was 17 years old, and I'd already accepted that I might never see 20, and I knew what kind of potential I might see if only I wasn't saddled with a debilitating and often-fatal hereditary disease, I think I might well be inclined to fuck just about anything I could get my hands on. I might be inclined to drink, smoke, bungee jump, skydive, ski jump... anything and everything risky and life-affirming I could find. Because my dentist was cool and attractive, she just so happened to date cool and attractive studs.

And if -- IF -- they found themselves in flagrante delicto, horizontal or vertical or diagonal on a picnic table, the event takes a different meaning. Suddenly that moment becomes about her, not him, about savoring a precious (if scandalous) opportunity, not about a boy getting a story to tell the school.

I love my dentist because she provides me just one more reminder that the details we don't know about the people we encounter every day create such a complex and wondrous story, and even just a glimpse of those secret details can alter our perceptions and opinions, can engender sympathy and understanding, bring us closer together.

It's a shame we need those details. It's a shame we can't just know those details are out there, none of our business, but ready to explain so much about so many people.

Let's Play SCRUPLES!

Always Love - Addison Road (mp3)
Suffering - Satchel (mp3)

Tom Hanley and Lauren McGee got married in an Indianapolis ER. Their wedding party was in a serious car accident mere hours before their scheduled wedding. One of the groomsmen was pronounced dead on the scene. Other members of the wedding party suffered minor injuries. For reasons we might never truly understand, the couple, both in their early 20s, chose to go through with their wedding that evening in the hospital. Instead of a reception, they held a prayer service for their fallen friend.

If you can read that AOL report on these events without getting at least a little bit misty, then bully for you. Damn thing rips me apart. I've read the story at least six or seven times now, and although I don't drench my keyboard with tears, I find myself doing the whole jerky-breathing and sniffly thing.

Before we play Scruples, you need to go read it. Otherwise you won't be emotionally invested enough to play properly. So grab a few Kleenex and read, and then come back after you've collected yourself. Go ahead. The rest of us will wait for you.

(Insert Jeopardy music here)

Scruples. Remember that game? We played it a lot in our church youth group when I was a teenager, and lots of kids in the group would lie their asses off about what they would or wouldn't do. I mean, the "right" answers were usually pretty obvious.

Something about being presented with a highly imperfect, emotionally-charged scenario and having to come down on one side or another of that situation makes for fascinating internal drama and great discussions. So it should be no surprise that a story at The Frisky last week received 42 comments covering the gamut of reactions.

"What should they have done: get married or postpone?"

It probably says more about me than about those who commented that the level and extremity in some of their judgments really bothered me. It probably speaks to my namby-pamby relativist nature that, because I can't possibly know all the details and explanations for their decision to get married in that emergency room, I don't feel comfortable saying whether it was right or wrong.

Maybe that dead groomsman's parents told them to get married because that's what he would have wanted. Or maybe they knew that, no matter how long they postponed their wedding, the day would always carry that very heavy cloud of tragedy and sadness, that the only way out was through. Maybe they were in shock. Maybe... Lots of maybes. Few facts.

I've got plenty of theories. They involve the circle of life, and symmetry, and sex, and friendship. And all of those theories say that what they did, getting married in the ER like that, had to be damn near impossible to pull off, but it was the best of the pathetic and awful options.

How horrifying, if they postponed that wedding, and then one of them went through some serious level of guilt or panic or whatever, and next thing you know, they break off their engagement? Next thing you know, they wake up and realize their good friend died in a car crash for two people who never even ended up getting married. Perhaps it's selfish, but such a chain of events would destroy me. It would f*** my psychological shizznat all up in ways I'd be afraid I might never recover.

So here's to emergency room weddings. And here's to hoping none of y'all and no one you know or love ever has to contemplate that option.

Joe

Come Sail Away (Live, 1996) - Styx (mp3)

Joe turned 20 in December. He will never turn 21. His four-year fight with cancer included momentary victories and at one point or another impacted half of his body. Scars on his chest, on his back, on his knee. Poison also known as chemotherapy surged through every vein and artery in his body. Below are the words I spoke at his funeral service, held at our school on Thursday, January 14, 2010.

At one point in his journey, Joe dreamt of getting into a boat and sailing into the wide blue yonder. Mostly he dreamt of going alone. Once in a while, he might find a port and allow his beloved younger brothers to hop aboard for a few days. Maybe the occasional visit from his parents. And, less frequently, he would even consider allowing one of his great friends to experience the open water with him, but it wouldn't be a regular thing.

He went so far as to spend time searching for the right boat, reading books and arranging for lessons to learn how to sail properly, hoping to make this dream come true. Eventually Joe acknowledged that this dream was beyond his grasp, and instead he "settled" for an amazing trip through Europe. He was so very grateful to his parents for giving him that trip. He even liked France except for all the French people. Although it wasn't sailing on the ocean, it was time away from everything and everyone familiar. Time alone to explore and contemplate and just be.

We are all, as humans, entangled in difficult-to-explain contradictions. Alongside this intense desire for separation and solitude existed Joe's intense love for his family and friends. He saw the kind of loyalty and love his trevails had inspired. But I think being at the center of that, and seeing it from his perspective, put a lot of strain on Joe, pressure to be or do or symbolize something big when his dreams and hopes were so very different before this all started.

O Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.

Joe didn't want this role. He despised it, in fact. I can't even recall how many times he spoke to me, often in the midnight hours in my kitchen, openly angry about his lot in life, an anger he earned but held in check more often than not. In our last conversation before he started UPenn, the single thing that excited him most was getting away from his cancer, making new friends who could like him for him. Not for osteosarcoma, not for the tragedy of his situation. Just because he was clever or cute or a sharp dresser any of those little things that draws one typical freshman to another typical freshman.

Part of what I think Joe hated about his illness was that it felt like he was cheating. I think he worried that his illness gave him an unfair advantage on the loyalty and love and support of friends and strangers, and Joe was most decidedly someone who felt like things had to be earned and deserved. Of course, Joe wasn't cheating at all. Joe drew people to him in ways that none of us, in a similar circumstance, quite could have. Seeing the rows of blue blazers, more than two dozen of his loyal and loving classmates and friends, sitting in that Charlotte church on Tuesday both broke my heart and lifted me in ways I can't express. I think it did the same for almost every grieving person in that sanctuary.

O Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.

I don't mean to give anyone here the impression that Joe was a Christ figure -- Joe would certainly haunt me with expletive-ridden screams if I did -- but anyone trapped into knowing their days are numbered must have a similar experience.

Jesus found himself incredibly impatient with his friends. He felt lonely a lot, because all these people who loved him simply couldn't appreciate what was going on. All they could do was try to sympathize, and even that sympathy stilted the way a more natural relationship should have worked. In this way, Joe's frustrations and challenges with relationships were quite similar. Conversations sometimes felt more stilted, because people just didn't know quite what to say to him. Not all the time, but enough that everyone knew that the cancer thing was in the room with them.

Joe had no choice but to carry the burden of his illness, to bear the weight of altered friendship dynamics, to be Joe Cancer. As much as he hoped UPenn would be a place where he could begin life on his own merits, fair and square, eventually even his friends there discovered the truth he hoped to hide.

The Road wasn't Joe's favorite Cormac McCarthy novel. He preferred All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian. But in The Road, a boy and his father -- another man who must wrestle with his own imminent demise -- walk a desolate and dying world where few if any can be trusted. Theirs is a horrific odyssey.

We're going to be okay, arent we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

The father, struggling with his health, convinces the boy that they are keep the fire -- the best parts of humanity -- alight, and they cannot die, because they cannot allow the fire to die.

Whether Joe wanted this burden, whether he enjoyed it, is actually irrelevant. What all of us sitting in this Chapel know is that Joe carried that fire. He carried it in his quiet, understated, sarcastic, critical, pensive, brilliant way. He carried the fire in a way that somehow managed to inspire all of us to want to or need to carry it with him.

And carry it you have. And will. Dozens of guys and parents returning for last year's Bone Cancer Awareness Walk. Those who returned to this Chapel for Joe's talk just a few months ago. Going in carefully-measured droves to Charlotte and invading his family's household to show your love and support for him. And a family, wrapped around Joe almost like a blanket these last few months, offering every ounce of themselves day and night to him.

We carry Joe's fire. This is his final gift to us, a gift that's both a blessing and a vital responsibility. He gave us a kind of fire we never had before we became witnesses to his journey. It continues to burn brightly in our hearts.

Joe, meanwhile, finally gets his dream. He captains his sailboat into a vast ocean of beauty and wonder and mystery, free of his illness and pain, free from the restraints of time or responsibility. On occasion, he will stop at a port in our hearts and minds, and he will let us visit him for a while. And then he will insist on continuing his journey but will promise to keep in touch, as he always did. As he always will.

Modern Lepers & Transcendent Tunes

Every year I'm lucky to find one or two songs that move me well beyond that of the usual ear candy. Songs that feel like they've pulled me into a different place emotionally, or located me in the distant and removed corner of my emotional being. Sometimes it feels like I found the song, but sometimes it feels like the song found me.

In 2008, that song was "The '59 Sound" by The Gaslight Anthem, a song that continues to tug on my emotions when I hear it. If I had to name a list of the most emotionally powerful songs of my decade, this might well earn the top spot. To be young, to know someone young who dies, to be connected to them when they go and to feel that surge of life's limited and vital electricity surging through you in a kind of overload at the same time your knees buckle from grief. All of those emotions get wrapped in this gift of a song, a gift that manages to feel wrapped up and shiny every time I go to open it.

I'll prolly never write a single song. But if I do, if I could write a song, and it had the kind of power to run through someone's mind like "The '59 Sound" runs through mine, like Prefontaine on speed, then maybe that one song would be enough.

Besides, if it's good enough for Bruce, it's gotta be good enough for all of us, right?



At the end of 2009, I discovered a new song to add to that list. "The Modern Leper" by the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit also came out in 2008, and it explores my own little topic of fascination for the 21st Century: the painfully fallible human who knows he's got more than he deserves and can't quite seem to figure out why or how.

While it can't compete with The Gaslight Anthem's raw verve, Frightened Rabbit's song manages the similar task of straddling two emotional worlds: despair and giddiness. It's almost as if the singer is certain he's getting away with something and learning to accept that fate isn't going to punish him like he deserves. It's a song about having your hand in the cookie jar, waiting and waiting for some evil monster inside that jar to bite it off, and then staring in disbelief as your hand emerges, unscathed, with that precious cookie in tow.

The Modern Leper - Frightened Rabbit (mp3)

A cripple walks amongst you
All you tired human beings
He's got all the things a cripple has not
Working arms and legs
And vital parts fall from his system
And dissolve in Scottish rain
Vitally he doesn't miss them
He's too fucked up to care
Is that you in front of me?
Coming back for even more of exactly the same
You must be a masochist to love a modern leper
On his last leg
On his last leg
Well, I crippled your heart a hundred times
And still can't work out why
You see, I've got this disease I can't shake
And I'm just rattling through life
Well, this is how we do things now
Yeah, this is how the modern stay scared
So I cut out all the good stuff
Yeah, I cut off my foot to spite my leg
Is that you in front of me?
Coming back for even more of exactly the same
You must be a masochist to love a modern leper
On his last leg
I am ill
But I'm not dead
And I don't know which of those I prefer
Because that limb which I have lost
It was the only thing holding me up
Holding me up
Well, I'm lying on the ground now
Walking through the only door
Well, I have lost my eyesight
Like I said I would
But I still know
That that is you in front of me
And you are back for even more of exactly the same
Well, are you a masochist to love a modern leper
On his last leg?
And you are not ill
And I'm not dead
Doesn't that make us the perfect pair?
Just you and me
We'll start again
And you can tell me all about what you did today
What you did today

Some people call this song an "indie rock anthem." I don't really know what that means. Maybe it means the singer couldn't get past the first stage of American Idol. Maybe it means they couldn't crack the Billboard Top 10. All I know is it feels mighty damn anthemic to me. I bought "The Modern Leper" on December 28 and have since listened to it on my home computer 17 times. No telling how many times it's played on my iPod, but I've savored it so much that I bought the whole album on January 1 and keep playing it. "Head Rolls Off" and "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms" and "Keep Yourself Warm" are particularly scrumptious.

In "Keep Yourself Warm," he proclaims It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm. HA! People, when you can write those words and mix it with music that makes people listening want to sing those words to the sky and feel some kind of sweet release from the gravitational pull of the planet, then you've done something. Especially if it's not even the most amazing song on the album.

Funeral

Elton John--"Funeral For A Friend/ Love Lies Bleeding" (mp3)

I stood at a funeral, out in the bright sun of a Saturday afternoon, staring down at the cap of an acorn. We were high on a hill. Occasional leaves fell around us. The pastor spoke of the celebration of life, the connection with Jesus Christ that could never be broken, the deceased's confidence in this fact. With the angle of the sun, half of the cap was shadowed. An ant circled around the acorn cap, somewhat erratically, but still taking the same general path. I watched the ant for a long time. I wondered if it would ever try to climb inside the acorn cap.

Later, by my other foot, many more ants, not from an anthill that I could see, but still a community, out on a Saturday afternoon milling about, doing small labors, crossing over twigs and under leaves, carried out their own small play.

Something had brought them there. Death perhaps? Something that had landed there, dropped, used up, beginning its return to the earth?

I had known the woman. I had loved the woman. But the day, the sky, my own desires, even the slow journey of a leaf downward had overwhelmed me, and all I had to offer to the proceedings was the extended contemplation of those ants. They were not Hemingway's ants from A Farewell To Arms, clustered on a log and then tossed into a burning fire, meant to represent all of humanity tossed into the fire by an indifferent or malevolent god. They were just ants. But they were ants indifferent to the proceedings and unconcerned by the giant foot in their midst.

There are a thousand reasons to avoid a funeral and only one reason to go.

That single reason is duty. Obligation, if you will. To the deceased, to the family, to community, to one's job and the obligations that go with it. To friendship, to appearances, to peer pressure, to tradition, to your own history, to closure. But, oh, the avoidance of that duty is so easy. Who is going to call you on it? Who is going to challenge your priorities? With this latest funeral, one friend stood in my office and I could watch his mind cycle through the many reasons why he had already decided he wasn't going to go. But it was the fourth one that stuck: "I've been to too many funerals lately." Who can argue with that? So, yes, it is a difficult duty to fulfill.

What about love? Love makes you cry for your loss, makes you want to embrace the members of the family, yours or theirs, makes you miserable for the tragedy if the death was tragic, makes you wake at night with the sudden recognition that someone who mattered so much to you is gone. Love does not send you to a funeral.

My father, an 83-year-old man, admitted to me the other day that he had never been to a funeral. That would be something you would have to work at. He is excepting, of course, the funerals of his own parents. I missed my grandfather's funeral, I don't remember why, but I was at his mother's funeral--just him, me, and my Springer Spaniel waiting out in the car for the long drive back. We stood in a small room of the funeral home, just the two of us, and he said to me, "Well, I promised her I would do this, so here goes." He began to whistle the French National Anthem perfectly, all the way through an entire verse. Then we stood there silently for several moments. Then we left.

My wife, by contrast, comes from a very small town, a town, as I like to tease her, where people die more frequently than they do anywhere else. I base this on the fact that every time she calls her mother and I am in hearing distance, the conversation shifts to who has died since the last time they talked. As she reminds me, in a small town, it isn't that people die more often, it's just that you know everyone who dies. And what her father taught her is that the least you can do is to go to someone's funeral.

And so we go and stand and mourn and chat and fear and wish and wander. What else can we do? As Hamlet once said, in a different context, "Why, anything, but to th'purpose."

Perhaps this not-so-cheery post will be enlivened for you by, arguably, the greatest recorded moments of Elton John's career, available at amazon.com.

Deer Abby

Dear Lord - Joseph Arthur (mp3)
Anonanimal - Andrew Bird (mp3)

You can learn a lot about people when someone hits a deer.

Last weekend, I was on a golf course in Kentucky with family members. We had three groups of three, and I'm probably the second-best golfer in the group even though my handicap hovers around 20. My threesome included a cousin by marriage who struggled to get his drives up in the air. But this cousin is big. And strong.

So we turn the corner and arrive at the 10th tee to see a family of deer eating about 40 yards ahead of the tee box, just outside of a wooded patch. We walked up to the tee box and joked about hitting the deer.

As we looked a little more closely, the family of deer were very emaciated, with their rib cage pushing strongly out of their fur, and I asked how deer surrounded by so much grass and nature could find themselves starving. Apparently most grass is like celery for a deer, which is to say it's not very filling. Apparently only certain strains of grass and nuts and other such stuff helps provide a deer its beefiness... or, um, venison-ness.

The first cousin steps up to the tee, and he's decent off the tee. "Maybe once they hear me hit the ball, they'll scamper off," he said. It seemed like a good plan. So he teed off, and it was a moonball, heading directly up into the stratosphere. The deer didn't even flinch. They just kept munching away on the thin grass. The male even inched out a little more, so that he was now sitting at about 10:30 on the proverbial hour hand.

The next cousin steps up, and Brandon and I look over at each other. He's lined up a little bit left -- he tends to push the ball right -- so I raise my eyebrows at Brandon, and he raises them back to me. "Is he gonna hit a deer?" he mouths to me. I kind of shrug in the How the hell should I know? kind of way, because trying to predict how this dude's golf ball is gonna come off that tee is like trying to predict when the next earthquake will hit Tennessee. But we just sit back and watch, 'cuz I guess we felt like we'd already given these animals a fair warning.

The minute Cousin #2 connected with the ball, Brandon and I kind of yelped and raised a leg and raised our arms up to our faces, acting like maybe we hoped that deer might react, kind of like people who lean the way they wish a bowling ball would roll. But the damn skinny-ass deer just kept chewing away at its tuft of grass as that golf ball hurtled toward it at impressively high speed. According to a super-fast Google search, it's safe to assume the ball hit that deer going well over 100 mph.

Had the ball hit the deer in the head, the result would have doubtless been deadly. Fortunately (I guess), it sailed directly into the animal's hindquarters and struck with a surprisingly strange sound, somewhere between a smack and a thud. Even on a deer this emaciated, the ball hit the most muscled and least bony area of its frail body. It kind of jumped in a shocked reaction, as if to say HOLLLY SHIT!! and then started limping off into the patch of trees. But it didn't run. It reacted like a very sick, very emaciated deer would react. Slowly, and sadly. As if it were saying, "Aw, go ahead and hit me; I'm half-dead anyway."

Now here's the part you don't want to read.

For the first full minute after that deer limped, pathetically, a few feet into the trees, all three of us were on the verge of silence. Maybe one of us said something like "Ohhh shit" or "Ohhh no" or "Ohhhhh my God" or something else with an "Ohhhh" in front of it. And the other two of us kind of held a hand to our mouths in something like disbelief -- seriously, do you really, truly appreciate how impossible it is for a crappy golfer to hit ANYTHING??

And we felt awful. We sat staring at that poor "doe-eyed li'l deeuh," as Marisa Tomei might say, waiting on pins and needles for it to just collapse to the earth and expire, it's murdered soul on our conscience.

But it didn't die. It just walked over to the trees and kept munching on grass. Albeit with a slight limp.

And once we realized he didn't kill it... once we realized he'd only nailed the ever-lovin' crap out of it with a golf ball at 120 mph by pure crappy-golfer accident... well, I don't know who chuckled first. It wasn't me. But I know I was second. I was a quick second. And I laughed pretty loudly. Guffawed, actually.

Now look. (That's an Obama favorite!) I know it's not great to laugh at something like this. But I'm one of those people who laughed when I saw Faces of Death. I'm one of those people who laugh during most of Pulp Fiction, even the twisted scenes with Zed. Laughter, if you didn't know, is a perfectly natural nervous reaction in the face of extreme situations one is incapable of completely grasping. So in the face of almost murdering a deer with a Maxfli... well, I laughed.

We all did.

So, in honor of Serena, Kanye, and Joe Wilson, here is my public apology to the deer:

Dear Deer,

I'm very sorry I laughed that my crappy golfer of a cousin defied all odds and actually hit you in the left haunch with a golf ball at full velocity. There's nothing remotely funny about such a violent act, even if it was unintentional and failed to result in your death. And even if I maybe found it funny at the time, and even if as I write this I'm chuckling a little, laughing at such a painful moment makes me a very bad person, and for that I'm sorry.

Sincerely,
Billy

Death Math

Headed for the Ditch - Bottle Rockets (mp3)
My Spirit Lives in Shadows - Rykarda Parasol (mp3)

The first time I grasped the depressing ramifications of life being worth a fixed dollar amount was watching Fight Club. Edward Norton's character in that film is a "risk assessor" whose job it is to survey accidents involving his company's cars and assess whether the potential lives lost cost more or less than the money required to fix a known problem.

I distinctly remember, three years or so later, reading about the controversy involving the victims of 9/11. Those charged with distributing funds had dared to place higher value on the lives of those whose lives were more lucrative, more revenue-generating. Why should the Wall Street investor's family receive millions when the janitor's family gets something in the small six figures? Death is death, and life is life, right?

In the present-day, some in the conservative corner are using the words "death panel." They're using it to suggest that the government has a maniacal plan to choose who lives and who dies, quite literally. A star chamber of sorts that would determine whether Grammy really needs that hip replacement or Grampy his fifth triple-bypass.

At some point between 1999 and 2009, I stopped being so bothered by human life having a price tag.

Maybe it was after my father demanded a DNR (do not resuscitate) arrangement.

His liver and his stomach and his entire body had lost so much as he fought cancer, and his brain was gradually giving way as well. And you could tell it aggravated the shit out of him, being incapable of expressing what he was thinking, sometimes being incapable of making sense of his own thoughts. At some point toward the end, I swallowed a very difficult belief: My father's life wasn't worth half of what it used to be, before he got so sick. My father's life had become more trouble than it was worth. Living, for him, had lost its economic balance.

The recent "death panel" demagoguery is intended to scare you with the image of some Janet Reno type and two of her pals sitting up in the emperor's box, giving their Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down signal to determine the fate of your loved one. It's a fictional image. Complete horse puckey.

Meanwhile, the Edward Norton job is fiction based on complete reality. People actually have jobs where they determine where traffic lights should go, what defects to recall, lots of scary and morbid and life v. death shit. Insurance companies have employees who act, basically, as "death panels of one." And it's very real. And their priority is certainly less about your sick grandmother than their company's profit margin. You don't believe it, start researching all the dire medical cases insurance companies have kicked to the curb with nary a blink (but you can start with a general link).

Or read this dialogue between Greta and Karl on FOXNews:

VAN SUSTEREN: But isn't that being done now? When you -- when you go to get a procedure or something, gets rejected by the insurance company -- I mean, isn't it, you know, unfortunately, sometimes your doctor can't make the decisions, but the insurance company, some non-medical person is?

ROVE: Sure, but you have an -- you have an ability to appeal that, and you have the ultimate ability to say, All right, you know what? I don't like my current carrier. I'd like to get a different insurance, which particularly in small businesses and when a small business owner's unhappy, he can shift his insurance.

Yes, after you have died because your insurance deep-sixed your claim, your former boss can change companies. But if you come down with a serious and deadly illness, I friggin' dare you to try and cavalierly switch insurance companies. Good luck finding one that will take you. Rove's argument is, literally and much like his heart, very cold comfort.

One way or another, people are out there putting a dollar amount to your life, to your arm, to your tongue, to your left cerebral hemisphere, to your pinky toe. This isn't a scare tactic. It's reality. Your life has a price tag whether you like it or not. The only real question here is who you find least trustworthy with a calculator in their hand and your life on the line.

The Godfather of Adolescence is Dead

Cry Like This - Blue Room (mp3)
If You Leave - OMD (mp3)

Michael Jackson created an image; John Hughes created a whole universe. I don't quite know how to explain my sense of loss here, but this isn't an exaggeration: my life would be significantly different -- and worse -- had John Hughes not existed.

Hughes, who died at 59, created so many of the indelible pop culture moments that cover the canvas of my adolescence, that were I to start spewing out all the memorable Hughes lines stored in my brain's C: drive -- without any cheating or help from Google, mind you -- it would take me a long time to get through it. Let's just do the first 25 that pop into my head, with the only requirement that I can't go with the same movie twice in a row.

1. He's a righteous dude.
2. Yeah. 220, 221, whatever it takes.
3. It must be a hen house, because all I see is chickenshit.
4. There's a tremendous white sale on.. at Towel World!
5. This is crazy this is crazy this is crazy.
6. In the family jewels?
7. Any fool can get into college. Only a select few can say the same about Amanda Jones.
8. Let's face it. You're a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie. What would you be if you weren't out making yourself a better person?
9. You called Dr. Stanky?
   
10. Schooner Tuna: the tuna with a heart!
    
11. If I woke up tomorrow morning with my head sewn to the carpet I wouldn't be more surprised.
    
12. Chicks cannot hold de smoke. Dass what it is.
13. How 'bout you bend over and I shove this straight up your ass?
14. I don't want you to take me home!
15. You're like a chatty cathy doll.
16. You've got a big Yard King 410!
17. Gimme the keys!
18. Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?
19. He jeopardizes my ability to effectively govern this student body.
20. Keep the change, you filthy animal.
21. Lisa was everything I wanted in a girl before I knew what I wanted.
22. You ought to spend a little more time dealing with yourself, and a little less time worrying about what your brother does.
23. She's small, but she's strong. Her first baby come out sideways. She didn't scream or nuthin'.
24. It's my porcelain udder buddy.
25. ...and an asshole on my front lawn, emptying his chemical toilet into our sewer.

(for those dying to know, the movies from which these quotes (or my inaccurate recollection of them) come are listed below)

These aren't the best ones. They're not the only ones I could work up. I'm just saying that I thought of the next one as soon as I'd typed the one before it, and I had to concentrate to keep others from coming into my head. I can already think of a dozen more that are better and more memorable than the ones I wrote above.

My point is, John Hughes helped me understand what I was going through as a teenager. He helped me know that being awkward and feeling outcast was miserable yet also worth laughing at. He made me want to kiss a girl. He told me it was admirable to want to be more than others think you can be. He told me money was sad and superficial and was used by shallow people as a singularly divisive attribute. He convinced me that parents loved us, even if they didn't quite understand us.

Hughes, particularly in The Breakfast Club, noted the cultural shift from the '60s and '70s -- when teens distrusted authority -- to the '80s -- when teens fought amongst themselves and paid too little heed to the conniving and selfish adults in charge of them. He simplified some of the complexities of teenage confusion without insulting us. He made an entire movie set inside a school library, a movie of just five kids talking to each other, and it was successful.

When I found out about his death yesterday afternoon, the weight of it didn't hit me right away. Then, last night at about 10 p.m., I found myself putting in one of my least favorite Hughes films, Pretty In Pink, and watching it and loving it even though it's not that great of a film. His movies weren't Kubrickian constructs of painstaking care. They were flawed, and sometimes highly. But they had enough heart to give life to a million tin men. Or, more accurately, to millions of tin teens.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1, 22)
Mr. Mom (2, 10)
Some Kind of Wonderful (3, 7)
Weird Science (4, 6, 13, 17, 21)
Vacation (5)
Breakfast Club (8, 12, 18)
She's Having a Baby (9, 16, 24)
Christmas Vacation (11, 25)
Pretty in Pink (14)
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (15, 23)
Home Alone (20)

A Still, Small Voice is Gone

Silent House - Dixie Chicks (mp3)
Hey Kind Friend - Indigo Girls (mp3)

Charlie Samuel might as well have been 85 when I first met him. I was in second grade when he walked into my Sunday School class and introduced himself as our teacher for the next two years. To a second-grader, anyone over 25 is placed into a singular category of age in our mind: old. Mr. Samuel was Old. Really Old.

I'm fairly certain most of us are born with a Spider Sense, an ability to instinctively feel when someone is a threat to us or if they are a good person, a person we should heed and observe intensely. It might not be 100% accurate -- in all honesty, which of our senses are? -- but it works more often than not, and when my classmates and I first encountered Mr. Samuel, we knew immediately he was a man worthy of our hard-to-focus attention. He wasn't entertaining, necessarily. He didn't put on costumes or sing or flail his arms around when he talked like I'd do if I had to teach young elementary students about the Bible. He just oozed Wisdom. It emanated out of his pores like garlic. His calm and soft-spoken manner simply helped affirm this sense.

Older people tend to think children and teenagers don't appreciate wisdom, don't respect the wisdom of their elders, but I happen to think that's a misguided accusation. Like most people I know, teenagers and kids respect wisdom plenty, we just don't always understand it. And sometimes the wisdom of our elders risks getting in the way of our own experiences. We want to find out for ourselves whether that stove eye is really hot. That's what makes us human. That's what makes us need to go to Sunday School.

I can't exactly claim I remember any of his specific lessons. I can't even say I remember many of the oodles of Bible verses he asked our class to memorize. I was so good at it that he started giving me extra ones to memorize, but I've long forgotten the word-for-word versions and have to rely on my ad-libbed versions and hope I can find a Bible around to verify the general gist of it for me.

While I don't remember the lessons, I remember Mr. Samuel. Even then I knew he was a good man, and maybe even a great man, at least in the limited scope of my interactions with him, which was limited to church.

Once I'd left his class I moved on to other teachers, younger teachers and youth leaders more inclined to entertain, or sing, or flail their arms about when talking. But Mr. Samuel was not done with us. He continued to keep track of us. Like an owl, he would watch me proudly -- and maybe with just a hint of concern -- as I evolved and aged in the halls and sanctuary of our church.

Years later I had finished college, eventually returned to Chattanooga, and found myself back at First Cumberland, where I began to learn more about Mr. Samuel. (When you're a second-grader, you don't realize that people have lives outside your presence. You kinda figure they pop out of thin air to teach your Sunday School class and then, once you leave, they go back in their box until next Sunday. All kids think they live in something akin to The Truman Show.)

I learned he served in World War II. I learned he was a husband and a father. I learned he was respected and endeared as much by the adults at our church as he was by me and all those kids he taught. He was, as best I could tell, that rarest of men whose missteps were few and whose enemies existed only on other dimensions. Not only did everyone in our church admire and respect him, but he also played down his successes and achievements with tremendous humility. It would have been easier to remove molars from his mouth with a spoon than to have him discuss his life's accomplishments.

The first day I dared step into a Sunday School classroom as a teacher myself -- some 17 years after I first encountered him -- Mr. Samuel solidified his place as one of my few true heroes. I knew at that moment I could only hope to be a shadow of the teacher, the man, the imparter of Wisdom he was, a man whose successes were measured in people, not things or awards, whose power was measured in quiet confidence and tenderness, not prominence or news stories.

Four years ago, our church learned Mr. Samuel had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and the news both frightened and saddened me. We live in a time where it seems if death hasn't found you by a certain age, cancer or Alzheimer's will. Time, it would seem, is not really on our side after all. Not in this life, at least. His struggle was difficult to witness, and the challenges such an illness puts on the family of a victim are impossible to grasp. I know Mrs. Samuel struggled with it, with him, and on several occasions I found myself overcome with emotion and racing for solitude after talking with her about it. Even the most courageous souls can be frightened and panicked when confronting an illness that slowly erases the mind, the gradual human impersonation of a chicken with its head cut off.

Still, whenever his body and health could manage it, he was in church. He, too, might have forgotten many of the Bible verses he used to have memorized, but I don't think he could ever forget God and his relationship with Jesus Christ.

In the late fall of 2007, columnist Rosa Brooks lamented how carelessly Americans today sling around the title of "hero." She regretted that giving such a noble title to so many for doing so little sullied the very power of the word, and I agree with her. We've lowered the standards on most things lately, and those whom we call "heroes" is on that list.

Charlie Samuel might very well deserve to be considered a hero by anyone who knew him, but he might not. From my perspective, it really doesn't matter whether he earned that specific title. What Charlie Samuel was -- for his church and beyond -- was a living, breathing example of someone whose actions, words, and deeds proclaimed the glory of Jesus Christ. He was a man who embodied that so-true quote from St. Francis of Assisi: "Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words."

Lifelong role model. Priceless teacher. Honorable and humble man. Thank you thank you thank you God for your servant, Charlie.

Charlie Samuel died Wednesday, July 15. He was 82.

Live Together, Die Alone

New Test Leper - REM (mp3)
Please Please Please, Let Me Get What I Want - The Scattered Pages (mp3)

Live together, die alone.

For the non-LOST geeks out there, this is one of the show's recurring quotes and one that encapsulates at least a part of the governing philosophy on this mystical island. For those of us in Real America who find ourselves on the less than a day away from knowing that Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson are both dead, this quote should mean something as well.

When I look at these two deaths, I don't feel sadness for the loss to our popular culture. I don't feel sadness for myself or their fans. I feel a sadness for celebrity. What's been on my mind when thinking about these two people is this: for every rung we climb on the ladder to success and fame, how much more isolated and lonely must we be?

Michael Jackson sold out concert after concert across the globe. He made teenagers and adults cry from something like fetishistic ecstasy when he walked by or when he moon walked or when he grabbed whatever was left of his crotch. He was surrounded by guards, advisors, lawyers, and anyone else who qualified for his "entorage." Yet I'm sure I'm not alone in believing that no one on this entire planet knew Michael Jackson.

When I look at George W. Bush, I might mock him, and I might loathe many of the things he has done to this country, but I can't deny him this: many people know him, and some very deeply. Laura knows Dubya. I think Barbara and Jenna know Dubya. I bet a few other dozen people know Dubya pretty damn well, too.

How many people knew Michael Jackson?

And when I say "know," I don't mean "know he targets little kids, scurries them to his private quarters, feeds them Jesus juice and takes advantage of them." I don't mean secrets or personal peccadillos. I mean, I don't think anyone knew the guy. I think he died alone. Utterly, completely, and in all ways alone.

He will be mourned by millions. Hundreds of millions. Yet never known.

Farrah Fawcett is also a total mystery and stranger, although a little more understandably so. Here's a woman on whom our culture thrust about a million fantasies and hang-ups solely because of a single poster and a single season on Charlie's Angels. Sure, I also loved her in Saturn 3 and Logan's Run. Hell, I knew Farrah was hot well before I understood why my pee-pee was getting all stiff inside my Underoos.

Maybe because I didn't understand the sex part, I never found Farrah as attractive as Jacklyn Smith or Cheryl Ladd, or Olivia Newton-John for that matter. I don't know if I understood it at the time, but I think she seemed both slutty and clueless, and that's a combination of qualities I've never found appealing. (Slutty and wise? Hell yeah. Clueless yet cuddly adorable? Hell yeah. Slutty and clueless? You've got to have a predatory glee in you to find that appealing, no?)

Unlike the King of Pop, I imagine Farrah had at least a small set of people who knew her. If there was anything there to know. Between her own drug issues and those of the people around her, you wonder how much she actually knew of herself, how much of her there was to know. Even as she's fighting for her life, she's trying to figure out how to use a camera to share her struggle with viewers via two-dimensional TV screens. She's playing the role of Farrah Fawcett Dying, the role of a lifetime.

What I'm begging someone to explain to me is why we as a culture envy this shit. Why do so many of us want what they have (or had) so desperately? Fame and success isolates you. It throws you into a huge ant farm with creatures who idolize you but don't really want to or can't know you. Your identity is so overtaken by handlers and/or the hunger of the masses that most of these people eventually lose themselves. And as they lose themselves, they increasingly isolate from the world around them.

Sure, there's minor exceptions. The oft-cited Bruce Springsteen seems to have held onto most of his humanity. Jon Bon Jovi (God help me for using him as an example) has convinced me in interviews that he's almost a normal person. Paul Newman somehow convinced everyone that he never got swept quite as deeply into the Fame Whirlpool as everyone else (but if you look at his history, a lot of it ain't pretty).

Fame at that level is like playing Russian Roulette with five bullets. And it's somehow a game far too many of us are dying to play.

That's what leaves me sad. I'm sad that our culture devours the very souls of the people we idolize. I'm sad we want to be devoured like that. And I'm said that we'll never really know -- or really, really care about -- either of these two dead stars on the walk of fame.

Live together, die alone