Imagine how many times in a week you hear some variant of the phrase, “I think [insert noun] sucks”.

I don’t have any hard data on this little thought/speech blurb, but I sure do find myself in conversations where people are uttering it. And often.

One thing I’ve noticed about how much such-and-such-things-in-the-world suck, is that people often want to tell me about them completely unprompted and unsolicited. This is not necessarily bad. After all, a great deal of what we collectively know about the world, we know in a mostly negative sense. (Think of the common definition of health as simply the absence of sickness). We stand to learn something from what others don’t like. Free speech! But.

Can we please stop taking unsolicited opinions so seriously? I can’t even begin to count the number of arguments that have been started amongst friends when someone ventures an opinion (say, “I think Forrest Gump sucks”), and someone retaliates with a personal attack (“Yeah? Well, I think you suck. Maybe you think you could do better” etc). This is the most immature and unkind form of argumentation and I continue to be amazed at how people well into their twenties can keep this kind of thing going.

Use of the Ad hominem attack not only runs the risk of being logically fallacious, but almost always results in the attacker sounding overtly uncharitable and abusive.

In this sense, I think “free speech” is still an optimistic ideal for the vast majority of conversations that I find myself having.

Normally summer is considered the month of preservation – not a time of growth or decay, but of holding steady, of staying the course. For me though, this summer has been anything but preserving. Instead, I’ve found myself grieving. Two very good people have died, and I struggle to accept and understand.

When I was fifteen, I stood in front of my english composition class and read the following lines from John Donne’s “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” written way back in 1623,

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The meaning of those lines has not changed for me in the years that have passed since I first read them aloud, but it has deepened in much the same way that a river does as you walk towards the center current – gradually the texture of the ground slips away from you, until the water runs fast and cold and smooth underneath your feet.

After the service today, I thought about (among many other things) the beautiful music we play when people die to celebrate their life and to commemorate their death. This afternoon there was the twisting chromaticism of the organist’s interludes: dense, rich, beautiful, and sad. Then the people singing together, the men and women around me harmonizing unconsciously and without effort in fifths and octaves. Next was Schubert’s immortal and ethereal Ellens dritter Gesang. And finally, the flattened blue notes of a repentant slave trader.

In less than an hour, over 700 years of music in a building whose basic form was designed in Rome over 1500 years ago. Now, I sit in front of a screen typing words written four centuries before I was born. All that time and effort and human creativity and none of it makes it any easier for me to understand what happens when we die.

This has been a summer of departure. And in so many ways both large and small, the world feels more lonesome than I ever imagined it could be.

This week my folks are off to mix business and pleasure for close to two weeks of vacation (and a few work related activities.) Before I left the house for the work week here in the capital city, I got the run-down on things to do when I check back in on the family next weekend for the fourth of July holiday. Remember Jon: walk the dogs, check on your grandmother(s), start the cars, water the plants, and so on.

All of these reminders are exactly like the ones I’ve heard my entire life. Except for one.

Today was the day my dad and I had The Talk.

The Talk is the conversation you have about The End Times. About what happens when our tribe of four shrinks to a tribe of two. It contains phrases like, “should anything happen to your mother and I” and “if we don’t come back, you’ll know what to do”.

It’s not an easy conversation to have. Though I’ve made my way through the world for a few years now, that’s all pretty small peanuts compared to the incredible lifetime effort my parents have put into sustaining and safekeeping our family. To see it all laid out in front of me, in black and white, file after file, was humbling. It got me thinking.

We all depend on a huge extended family to make our way through life. When you meet me, you see just one person. But this one person is the result of the combined effort of so many others. Not just parents, but doctors, and accountants, and insurance agents, and lawyers, and state officials. A huge network of people who all hold pieces of the puzzle – people who you’ll need if you get hurt, or need money, or want to invest in your future, or manage your possessions, or prove you are who you say you are. And I’m thinking this is all a good thing. My identity spread across a web of decent people, one phone call away.

I don’t talk about it often, but these days I’ve been thinking a lot about family – how I’m luck to have a good one and how I’d like to have one myself.

In my early twenties I used to have these adventure fantasies about going, going, going. To big cities, and small countries, and remote villages. I wanted to go for the sake of going.

But now as I get ready to transition out of my mid-twenties, (and after I’ve been around to a few big cities and at least one truly remote village), I know that adventures are what you make of them. That’s not to say I don’t still dream of going. I do, but now it’s different.

It seems to me now that a place is just that. Some landmarks, some history, some rocks and rivers, a point on the map. For some people going and living in famous or remote areas is about LIFESTYLE. Some people can only live the life of their dreams in a certain place: geography is destiny.

I can’t deny that where you live doesn’t effect how you live – that’s a truth and it’s a fundamental cornerstone of the disciplines I studied in school. And I understand the need to find a place where you’ll fit in and feel comfortable. Home, in other words.

So maybe I’m stubborn, or just simple, but I’m starting to believe that I can live the life I want just about anywhere. Some places would be better than others of course, but I’m not worried about where I’ll eventually end up like I used to be. Maybe it will be like I’ve always dreamed. Or maybe not. After all, I come from a long line of dispersed peoples who did just fine. History is on my side, I think.

More important to me now is the people I’ll end up with – after all a place is only so great as the folks you find there. A scenic view means very little if you’ve got no one to share it with.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that today, for the first time in maybe eight years, instead of thinking about all the negatives aspects of where I live, instead of dreading the stretch of highway and the sights I’ve seen so many times going into my hometown, instead of all that rubbish, I thought about how beautiful and wonderful all the people that I know are, and how I’m so happy to be close to them.

As mom and dad go off to see new sights, I wish them the best of travels. Seeing what’s out there with your own eyes is important, but it’s not the only way to see new things. I had a teacher tell me once (and I’ve remembered it all these years), that you can see with your eyes and also with your heart. Today I closed my eyes for a bit and looked with my heart and everything old seemed new, just like that.

Street art by Banksy. True, Sad, Funny, and Stupid all at once. That’s how I feel about a lot of things that have happened so far this year.

I like cable internet.

No ironic commentary necessary.

Margherita Pizza Night from David Comeaux on Vimeo.

Here is a video of pizza I made the other day. Sorry for the excessive length and the tasteless jokes.

Pictured: Surgeon Bruno Dehaye, M.D. and unknown patient, Eastern Cambodia circa 1975.

Photo by Sebastião Salgado, from The Face of Mercy – A Photographic History of Medicine at War

When I look at this photograph, I feel both terrified and awe-struck.

As debates about the practice of modern medicine continue to swirl around my country, this is my kind of memento mori: When I die, it’s possible that I may spend my last moment with a man or woman like this surgeon, lying on a table while they look over me trying to keep my body working. I can’t know how I might feel at that moment, but I know that right now I feel so grateful that as a group, contemporary people choose to meet death together. Rather than look away, we adjust the light so that we may see.

A very old person once said, “Be a light unto yourself.” When my light fails, it’s somehow comforting to know that another person, perhaps even a stranger, will continue to shine the light for me.

“Effective” by Kerry Giangrande

“I could do this forever,” I tell the words.
Won’t you get tired? The answer is yes, very tired.
We will lose meaning on the way, we will become gibberish.

We will not fit in stories or poems, but stand alone on stray lines.
We will be lonely and no one will love us. Few speak this language,
I hear it in my sleep.

****

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

- G.K. Chesterton

***

In the deepest ocean
The bottom of the sea
Your eyes
They turn me

Why should I stay here?
Why should I stay?

I’d be crazy not to follow
Follow where you lead
Your eyes
They turn me

Turn me on to phantoms
I follow to the edge of the earth
And fall off
Everybody leaves
If they get the chance
And this is my chance

I get eaten by the worms
And weird fishes
Picked over by the worms
And weird fishes

- Thom Yorke

***

If he exalts himself, I humble him.
If he humbles himself, I exhalt him.
And I go on contradicting him
Until he understands
That he is a monster that passes all understanding.

- Blaise Pascal

***

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.”

- Annie Dillard

***

“Better hope deferred than none.”

- Sam Beckett

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

- Italo Calvino

***

“There is no escape. You can’t be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don’t try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you!”

- Herman Hesse

***

Wittgenstein did not argue; he merely thought himself into subtler and deeper problems The record which three of his students have made of his lectures and conversations at Cambridge discloses a man tragically honest and wonderfully, astoundingly absurd. In every memoir of him we meet a man we are hungry to know more about, for even if his every sentence remains opaque to us, it is clear that the archaic transparency of his thought is like nothing that philosophy has seen for thousands of years. It is also clear that he was trying to be wise and to make others wise. He lived in the world, and for the world. He came to believe that a normal, honest human being could not be a professor. It is the academy that gave him his reputation of impenetrable abstruseness; never has a man deserved a reputation less. Disciples who came to him expecting to find a man of incredibly deep learning found a man who saw mankind held together by suffering alone, and he invariably advised them to be as kind as possible to others. He read, like all inquisitive men, to multiply his experiences. He read Tolstoy (always getting bogged down) and the Gospels and bales of detective stories. He shook his head over Freud. When he died, he was reading Black Beauty. His last words were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

- Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

-Calvin Coolidge

Music and Life – the pot of gold : An animated quote, 2 min. 20 sec.

Do these two ideas sound somewhat contradictory to one another? I’m not sure… One is telling you to push onward and achieve, the other is telling you to slow down and enjoy life. I want to think of them as having two different messages, speaking for different ends, but they both seem to discuss being goal-oriented.

The Coolidge quote I find motivating, especially for huge tasks that need to be broken into several smaller steps. That’s how I succeed when I take on problems. Sometimes I want to say this exact thing to those people in my life who sometimes feel unmotivated to complete a nearby and achievable goal. I want to show them how easy it can be to solve problems when you stop and do the steps one at a time, but I have found that to be a folly on my part. Almost always I am attempting to influence their attitude, their fundamental disposition. An unstoppable force hits the immovable object and things just ricochet everywhere and I want to pick up the broken mess and put it back like it began.

The Watts video is an alarmingly accurate truth about the sadness of Western culture. It is an understated critique of the “pot-of-gold” that people have midlife crises over. Some people manage to hear and sing to the music when they are young enough, but I think most people do not.

Maybe the combination of these problems is causing a huge rift in understanding between two distinct groups of people in America today.

Coolidge people: the people who uphold traditional “American Dream” values. I think people who uphold these values can be truly happy. We all know people whom we think personify these values and their success stories, but I think most people (lets quantify… 90%) can’t find happiness this way. The number of factors that have to align in their favor (intense preparation, opportunity, a personality of perfectionism to achieve lofty goals) is startlingly high, and their definition of success is difficult to accomplish. In fact, even when some of them get there, they might find that Watts has been ringing true all along and they feel cheated in missing out on the journey. Sometimes, we hear the more vocal ones (I’m talking about you, Sean Hannity) feel they need a scapegoat for why their life is shitty, and they have turned bitter. They might blame other people who don’t uphold the same values. They tend to think out loud: “Those worthless human beings who don’t succeed are worthless because they are too lazy to pull themselves together. They are bringing the value of society down.”

Watts people: the people who are disillusioned about Western ideals of “success” and who don’t identify with the expectations (or value system) of society. Interestingly, I find that more often these people tend to show their happiness more freely throughout their life. However, for those Watts people who haven’t figured out that they are Watts people, they seem to be a generally depressed bunch who are holding on to something they don’t really believe in.

I don’t mean to suggest that everyone should be Wattsian. But I think most people would be happier if they were.

I’m sorry to have dragged this on, I really just wanted to post the two ideas about life. Which group do you most identify with? Or rather, what group do your choices and actions identify you with?

My life choices seem to indicate that I’m a Coolidge person. From the outside it looks like i’m aggressively chasing the American Dream. But I feel like I’m really a Watts person who plays a Coolidge person at work, perhaps moreso because of the people whom I work with.

If you really want to know, I find that I am undeniably fortunate to have enough interest AND ability AND education AND determination in an industry / field that allows me to pursue the things I want, or the things I think I want anyways. I may actually be in that 10% who can “make it” and be happy with it. But I think sometime in my adolescence, maybe ten years ago, I found the music of life to dance to, if you’ll pardon the cheesy metaphor.

Post Scriptum note about Hannity: He and his ilk are like a terrible virus infecting and festering in an otherwise perfectly habitable and progressive America. Shameful. What, did I go too far?