The surreal thing that happened Monday.

Scene: Tal has had no good sleep Sunday night, having gotten an extremely confusing, terse, and cold couple of text messages from the guy. She dragged herself to work on Monday, but went home a couple of hours early to get some sleep. She sleeps a little too long, waking up just in time to put her hair in a ponytail, throw clothes on, and get to her meeting.

I'm sitting and waiting for the meeting to start, still a little groggy. Someone pulls my ponytail - it's V, with whom interactions have been a little strained lately, but I'm too bleary to go there now. I stand up to hug her, she says hi, and then sort of stops. "Paul Y. is dead."

I blink. "Paul? Paulie?" Which is what I call him, thank you, Sopranos. "How? When? What happened?" She isn't sure - over the weekend, some kind of sudden aneurysm, very fast, boom, gone. She's going to the funeral home after the chairperson, who is celebrating her second anniversary, shares.

I nod and she goes to say hi to other people. I feel my eyes start to well up - Paul and I weren't that close, but I'd known him since I got clean and we were baseball antagonists (he a Yankees fan). A couple of people asked if I was okay and I said I'd just heard about Paul. One guy asked for more details and said he'd come with us. While this was going on my cell rang - it was the guy. I told him what was up and tried to have a conversation with him while talking to someone else...confusion, frustration, wondering if it was too soon to joke about one less Yankee fan. I go in, sit down, and start that thing where you think you see someone you know can't be there out of the corner of your eye.

So once the celebrant is finished sharing, the four of us stand up (along with a few others going to smoke or get more coffee), go out to the parking lot, and caravan to the funeral home. V. thinks she knows where she's going. We get there, find parking on the streets of the neighborhood, and go inside.

I look towards the front of the room, and I see Paul. Talking to someone. No, it's not just someone who looks like him - it's the person I expected to never see again. I look at V. and try to speak. "Bu- Paul's righ- what?"

V. looks at me strangely. "Paul's father died."

I just stood there. "I thought you said Paul died."

"What are you - high?" And in that moment I felt like I was. I wasn't quite making contact with anything; neurons were firing but not aimed anywhere in particular. I stood there, dazed, as Paul worked his way back to us. I hugged him in turn and tried to fade into the wallpaper. Oh, god. How many people did I tell that Paul was dead? Oh, god.

V. made the rounds and came back. She looked at me and put her arm around me. "Poor Tal. I can't imagine what that must've felt like. You know I'd've been way more upset if it had been Paulie." Well, no, V., you aren't the most demonstrative person when it comes to your emotions, but I certainly wasn't feeling like I had any firm ground to stand on. I was embarrassed, I was relieved, I was confused.

So I stayed for an acceptable length of time - the guy who'd followed us had left as soon as he found out that Paul was, in fact, alive - and then walked out to my car, alone. There was a text message on my phone. The guy, saying how truly sorry he was for my loss. "Funny story..." I texted him back, knowing it would be funny eventually.

Celebrities - just like us

I find that I'm responding to the death of David Foster Wallace (who hung himself last September) much as I did to that of Kurt Cobain. I wasn't more than superficially familiar with either man or the work thereof before his death - my reaction has been much more of my mind than my gut. Cobain showed me that a person could be living his (my) dream - making a living doing the thing he loved to do, receiving critical and popular acclaim for doing so, maintaining a home in a beautiful city, and creating a family with a woman he loved - and it still might not be enough to quiet the hateful voices in his head. Limitless alcohol and heroin might not be enough. For him, the only way to silence the voices was to extinguish himself.

Kurt Cobain taught me that living the dream did not mean you'd have peace of mind; that having it all was not the same thing as having enough. When Cobain died, I was well into active addiction and I didn't really put it all together until after I got clean. I just knew his death commanded my attention.

In David Foster Wallace I see the me that has fought the good fight - gone through year after year of treatment for the depression that required multiple trials with various pharmaceutical cocktails before achieving some relief. My illness has been called "medically resistant" and ever since reading Undercurrents I have wondered if I should ask about the ECT Wallace submitted himself to. He lived my back-up dream - writer, college professor, spouse - and survived well into middle-age before whatever it is inside us became too much to beat back.

I'm not sure what I'll ultimately take away from Wallace's life and death. My audience is certainly not as demanding as his; my life is the result of not making promises I was afraid I wouldn't be able to keep. I'm not a high-energy person to begin with and I deliberately conserve strength to fight my disease(s) - is that the best I'll ever be able to do?

This, I Believe

“The difference between us is that I have a basis for condemning evil in its Christian guise. You have no basis for confronting evil in its atheist guise, or in its Christian guise, either. When you say that a certain practice is evil, you have to be prepared to tell us why it is evil. And this brings us to the last point—you make the first glimmer of an attempt to provide a basis for ethics. You say in passing that ethical imperatives are “derived from innate human solidarity.” A host of difficult questions immediately arise, which is perhaps why atheists are generally so coy about trying to answer this question. Derived by whom? Is this derivation authoritative? Do the rest of us ever get to vote on which derivations represent true, innate human solidarity? Do we ever get to vote on the authorized derivers? On what basis is innate human solidarity authoritative? If someone rejects innate human solidarity, are they being evil, or are they just a mutation in the inevitable changes that the evolutionary process requires? What is the precise nature of human solidarity? What is easier to read, the book of Romans or innate human solidarity? Are there different denominations that read the book of innate human solidarity differently? Which one is right? Who says? And last, does innate human solidarity believe in God?”

“There are three insurmountable problems for you here. The first is that innate is not a synonym for authoritative. Why does anyone have to obey any particular prompting from within? And which internal prompting is in charge of sorting out all the other competing promptings? Why? Second, the tangled skein of innate and conflicting moralities found within the billions of humans alive today also has to be sorted out and systematized. Why do you get to do it and then come around and tell us how we must behave? Who died and left you king? And third, according to you, this innate morality of ours is found in a creature (mankind) that is a distant blood cousin of various bacteria, aquatic mammals, and colorful birds in the jungle. Your entire worldview has evolution as a key foundation stone, and evolution means nothing if not change. You believe that virtually every species has morphed out of another one. And when we change, as we must, all our innate morality changes with us, right? We have distant cousins where the mothers ate their young. Was that innate for them? Did they evolve out of it because it was evil for them to be doing that?”

- theologian Douglas Wilson, from a debate with Christopher Hitchens.

I agree with him, and yet don’t end up the same place Douglas Wilson does (unless of course we’re speaking of Doug Wilson from Weeds and went back in time 15 years [at which point there was no Weeds] in which case I’d always be the same place as Doug Wilson; that is, stoned out of my mind).

/tangent

I understand that I have no justifiable basis for my ethics. I do not believe in an independent standard against which my actions are measured. I don’t believe in a place of agreement we would all get to if we just sat still long enough, despite my recent immersion in Buddhist literature.

This is the great abyss of existentialism. This is the “fear unto death”. This is what keeps me awake on those nights when the fact of my own mortality bears down on me like a semi.

There is no magnetic north with which I can align when constructing my moral compass. I choose compassion and kindness (I don’t always live either one) knowing full well that I will be run over by those that don’t. The only reward I hope for for doing so is peace of mind, without which nothing else (in my experience) matters.

I guess the assumption I start with is that your existence is as important to you as mine is to me. I make judgments about who is capable of comprehending their own limited nature and act in ways I hope reduce suffering for all.

Everyone’s motivations and beliefs are based on certain assumptions. The source of all the conflict is that we don’t all start from the same ones.

Random confession

Here is a thing about which I am ashamed although I'm not sure I need to be. At the very least, it is a thing that makes me unhappy.

I have been perpetually deferred from donating blood. Fifteen years ago I was in a sexual relationship with someone who, before I met him, used IV drugs. I imagine that one or two partners I've had since getting clean also have IV drug use in their past. Despite all parties involved testing negative for HIV, disclosure of this fact renders me unsuitable to donate.

I understand the necessity of maintaining a clean blood supply; I understand that actions have consequences. This is one of those things that makes me feel "less than" - somehow unclean; unwelcome to contribute. I am especially saddened since I am O+, which is compatible with any positive blood type.

Monday

Monday night I’m chairing the meeting celebrating my thirteenth year of sobriety. I have no idea what I’m going to say. I feel like I’ve never been as close to the edge of insanity/paralysis/the abyss as I am now. So what do I say? Do I stand up and say “Look, newcomers still trying to detox! Stay clean for 13 years and all this can be yours!”? ‘Cause for real, I’d look at me and think it wasn’t fucking worth it.

I can’t wait to see what’s going to come out of my mouth.

A day late...

…but I think I just had an epiphany. Check me: if my conscious goal is to satisfy/please/make content my Ego (the me-ness of me) but it is the nature of the Ego to never be satisfied/pleased/content, by definition my goal is unattainable.

I need a different goal - or to lose the idea of goal-oriented-ness. But how do I thank my Ego for sharing and send it on its way?