Demon: My Ex-Wife

I just found this comic I made, maybe five years ago, for a project at my job. Our students were writing comics based on Lynda Barry's incredible book One Hundred Demons.  The teachers made demon comics, too. I made mine on paper towels (Barry drew hers on yellow legal pads). I never shared it anywhere beyond my school, because I didn't want to hurt the feelings of the person that it's about. Now that person seems to have disappeared from Facebook, the internet and my neighborhood, as far as I can tell. And I really love this comic, so I wanted to share it before the real, ephemeral version falls apart. If you know this person, you don't need to go telling her all about this, though of course I can't stop you. And if you are this person, know that I love you and wish you all the best. I don't really think you're a demon--just someone who haunts me from the past. 

(Click on images to enlarge) 

This is a story about my ex-wife. 

I met her in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We worked together in the grocery store. 

We became best friends right away. We spent all our time together. 

All my friends called her my wife. They called me her wife, too. 

We weren't dating but everyone thought we were. 

My wife was lots of fun when she was in a good mood. She liked to hang out and cook or go out dancing. 

But my wife had an evil side. 

She always told me what to do and got mad at me for no good reason. 

My wife sometimes had another best friend besides me. I enjoyed the break. 

But all the other friends always stopped talking to her. So then she was back to being my wife again. 

One day I snapped, just like all the others. 

After that, we stopped talking. 

I still see my ex-wife sometimes in the coffee shop. We do not speak to each other. 

She is married for real now and has a very cute little daughter. 

I have a recurring dream where she approaches me and wants to be friends again. 

I'm always relieved when I wake up. 

The End. 

Slaughterhouse Five

I have very few regrets about never becoming a literary scholar.

Occasionally I get frustrated that critics don’t seem to notice the Brechtian influence in Tony Kushner’s plays (It’s really obvious. He talks about it all the time. Someone should notice it already). And I still get annoyed thinking about the complete misapplication of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood. I mean, you’ve got an opaque, experimental novel about abortion doctors and people turning into plants and mating with dogs in your right hand and in your left, an opaque, poststructuralist piece of critical theory about the horror people feel when their physical and psychological boundaries dissolve—how could this puzzle be any easier to assemble?

Please don’t stop reading. I promise this is going to get more interesting. Well, to me, anyway.

My real failure, my greatest regret, the reason I should have doggedly pursued a career in academia into whatever town-nobody-wants-to-live-in it called me to, was to declare this:

Slaughterhouse Five is the most brilliant novel ever written.

I am pretty sure I am the only person who knows this. The more I explain this to people individually, the more they stare at me blankly and say, I always meant to read that, the more convinced I become that it was my duty to spread the word on a larger scale, that this was my true calling in getting an English Ph.D., and that I missed my chance.

People who haven’t read Slaughterhouse Five, and also many who have, think of it as a science fiction novel. They should, because it is. But it’s also something much weirder, which is a rare and precious eyewitness war account.

When Britain and the United States firebombed the heavily populated city center of Dresden, Germany during the final weeks of World War II, Kurt Vonnegut was there, a prisoner of war hidden away in an underground meat locker. After the bombing, he and his fellow POWs were released into the rubble that had formerly been a great center of German art, architecture and culture.

So here is Kurt Vonnegut, a writer, one of a handful of American witnesses to an atrocity great enough to be called a war crime by some historians, since there seemed to be no strategic justification for it. It was a show of force, the destruction of life, beauty, and culture, for no reason except to stick it to the Germans for all the suffering they had caused. At least that’s Vonnegut’s perception of it—a heartless act of war committed by his own country, “a massacre” as he calls it. (Though when an acquaintance, hearing this description, reminds him of the concentration camps, he says, “I know. I know. I know.”)

For a writer, this nightmare experience was a gift. He was a witness, a survivor, specially authorized to speak. As such, he could write a memoir, a history book, a historical/cultural critique. Or he could write a war novel, the kind of gritty, naturalistic epic that you can only write if you’ve really been there, if you’ve earned the right.

Vonnegut explains all this in the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, a metafictional introduction that explains how he came to write the novel.

“When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen.”

It was all laid out for him. All he had to do was write it down. Simple. What makes the novel brilliant is that he did exactly the opposite.

First, he stalled for twenty years. Whenever anyone asked him what he was working on, he told them it was his Dresden book. But he wasn’t really writing it. “Not many words about Dresden came from my mind then—not enough of them to make a book, anyway.”

And then, when he finally did write the book, it wasn’t the true-life story of a true-life veteran who had been through hell and lived to tell the tale. Instead, it was a novel about time travel and aliens and mediocre Midwestern optometrists suffering from acute depression and possible traumatic brain injury.

The main character, Billy Pilgrim, experiences roughly everything Vonnegut did during the war: he is drafted in the late stages of combat, hastily trained and improperly outfitted, and abandoned behind enemy lines. As a prisoner of war, he survives the bombing of Dresden in an underground meat locker and is then freed by the Allied troups. He could be a literary stand-in for Vonnegut, a boy-soldier who had no business on the battlefield trying to be an adult.

But Billy has two science-fictiony quirks that make it clear that this novel will not be a straightforward, serious tale of war. The first is that during his brief military career, he becomes unstuck in time. From there on out, he flops spastically in and out of different episodes in his life, creating the twisty structure of the narrative, which begins with Billy being drafted and ends with him being rescued from Dresden, with the rest of his entire life story occurring in a spiraling succession of vignettes in between.

And then, in case that first quirk just seems like some kind of metaphor, there’s a second, much goofier one. In 1967, around the time when Vonnegut would have been completing the novel, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who hold him as a captive in a zoo and mate him with a human pornographic actress named Montana Wildhack.

Having aliens in the novel seems to clearly mark it as science fiction. But it’s not serious science fiction, the kind where all the fantastical events are physically plausible and scientifically justified and allegorically significant. No, these aliens are really, really silly. The Tralfamadorians are green, shaped like plungers, topped with a single hand that has an eye in the middle of it. They admit without guilt to destroying the universe during a failed experiment (they travel freely in time so they know how the universe ends). Even their name is silly. And their project of breeding two humans (both of whom just happen to have silly names and outsized secondary sexual characteristics) as a form of entertainment could not be any more self-consciously ridiculous.

It’s as though Vonnegut wanted to take the lofty story of his war experience, the couldn’t-get-more-serious historical account that he was specially authorized to tell, and scribble crazy zigzags all over it with mismatched crayons. He even talks about outlining an early version of the plot with crayons, making a tidy timeline for each character. But that’s not what he did. He scrambled his timeline into a giant, messy tangle, illogically topped with not one but two of the most hackneyed science-fictional tropes imaginable.

Of course, this chaos is orchestrated carefully, beautifully even. Every narrative thread is neatly tied up, every scene thematically significant. But the feeling of messiness, silliness, arbitrariness is what Vonnegut wanted. “It is so short and jumbled and jangled,” he tells his publisher, “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.”

Disgusted by his own authority to tell the serious, meaningful war story, Vonnegut takes that story and shreds it to a messy pulp, just to make the point: I will not tell a serious, meaningful war story.

I love about six hundred things about this novel, but this one first and most. To be given the special, authorized privilege to tell a survivor’s tale, and to sacrifice that privilege in the name of art, meaning, and human decency, is an act of beauty that breaks my heart.

Perhaps Vonnegut’s purposeful evasion of seriousness is the reason that his works do not receive the kind of critical attention afforded to great American postmodern authors. Almost all Vonnegut criticism seems to fall into the realm of explication—plot summaries, readings based on Vonnegut’s biography—rather than serious analysis that would explain the author’s significant contribution to modern literature and thought.

If I write that book of serious analysis someday, I will say this about the message (one of the messages) of Slaughterhouse Five: that it asks us to think about our own war stories. What did we learn from them? Are we better off for having gone through that suffering? And when we tell our survivor’s tales, complete with their morals and lessons, are we full of wisdom and insight? Or have we just convinced ourselves that we are, because it feels better to have something intelligent to say about a massacre?

Ann Arbor

I went to an Alice-in-Wonderland-themed burlesque show in Hamtramck, Michigan with my friends from Ann Arbor. It was in a towering, abandoned factory, remade into a performance space. We took a freight elevator to the fifth floor. The hallways up there were as wide as my living room, lined with dust-clouded windows.

“Listen,” my friend said, pointing down the hall. “The train is coming.”

It came barreling around the corner, a motorized engine trailing three passenger cars, something children would ride at an amusement park. It zigzagged across the broad hallway like a startled cockroach, passing us by fifteen feet, breaking, driving backwards until it landed right in front of us.

“Get on! Quick! Everyone get on!” yelled the conductor, as throngs of giddy hipsters threw themselves aboard for the ride down the long hallway, around the corner, and to the doors of the giant production floor that would serve as the theater.

Inside there was a full band, sounding ready to play back-up for Tom Waits, while a tall, stately chanteuse purred songs about Alice, tea parties, things growing curiouser and curiouser. A Bettie Page look-alike pranced around the stage, dropping successive articles of baby blue clothing in her wake as she encountered the juggling Cheshire cat, the break-dancing playing cards, the Mad Hatter and March Hair suspended from the ceiling by hooks stuck under their skin.

In Oakland, where I live, or in San Francisco, this all never would have happened. Okay, maybe it would have happened, but it wouldn’t have happened in a hulking factory. And if it did, you would have missed it amidst the throng of culturally enriching activities happening every single night. And if you did go, your friend wouldn’t be dating the bass player and your other friend wouldn’t have slept with the singer. The performers would be part of a specialized scene, and they would have spent years cultivating the appearance, style, clothing, mannerisms, and jargon of that scene. You might be able to get into the scene, but it wouldn’t be easy.

The thing the local weekly newspapers always said about Detroit is: cultural isolation breeds creativity. It sounds condescending until you go to Detroit, which is like going to another planet where everything is backwards. Downtown neighborhoods look like abandoned farms, there are more boarded-over storefronts than populated ones, twenty-three year olds own giant houses, ethnic enclaves are the fanciest and safest places to live. It’s an incredibly beautiful, surreal place, a place that feels outside America, a place where anything is possible.

And so in Detroit, and in the cities that surround it, people create their own scenes and ways of making art. There’s not much to be daunted by: you just start, and people show up, because they probably know you from work or high school or the bar, and anyway there aren’t all that many things to do on a given night.

When I first moved to Ann Arbor, it reminded me of my hometown, Palo Alto. Not modern, Facebook-era Palo Alto, but the pre-dot-com Palo Alto of my youth. It was a quirky college town, affluent but not wealthy, smug about its own artsiness. The main difference was, when young people in Palo Alto wanted to go somewhere, we got on the train to San Francisco or Berkeley where we could sit in grungy coffee shops, have picnics in the park, buy ourselves used books and CDs and absurd clothing, wander past the street vendors and the real beggers and the other beggars who were kids just like us, only dirtier.

Ann Arbor is an hour from Detroit, but there’s no train. This is a car town, people told me. Why would the rich people in the suburbs vote for a train? They don’t want to take a train, they don’t want to go to Detroit, and they sure as hell don’t want poor people from Detroit taking a train into their town.

You can drive an hour to Detroit, but then there’s the question of what to do when you get there. There are lots of amazing things to do: there are great bars and music venues, museums, historical sites. But Detroit isn’t the kind of place you can just wander around. You’ve got to have a plan, a course of action, a series of places to go. Every trip I ever took to Detroit was like this: exit freeway, drive straight to destination, park in front (there will be plenty of parking) go in. If there is a second destination in mind, get back in car, get back on freeway, drive to second destination, go in. Repeat as needed. Try to sober up for the long drive home down dark country highways.

But like the Detroit Metro Times was always saying: the lack of ready-to-wear, easily consumable culture spurred people to create this culture for themselves. I never met so many people doing creative things as in Ann Arbor. Even a simple act like getting dressed was an artistic project. In California, when you wanted bizarre, interesting clothes, there were a million stores ready to sell them to you. In Ann Arbor, the clothing stores catered to practical Midwestern adults and preppy Midwestern teenagers, and if you did find something good, four of your friends would have the same one. I learned the art of customization from people in Ann Arbor: making legwarmers out of socks, decorating shirts and hats with colored sharpies, ripping the sleeves and necks and ankles off of things to make them cooler and better.

Anyone could found an institution in Ann Arbor. Every wildly popular thing was created by someone we knew, often someone in their twenties. We all knew the guy who started the karaoke night at the local club, and the three kids who ran the mixed-tape dance party, the women who organized the Totally Kickball tournament and the Burly Girly mud wrestling. And if you grew up in Ann Arbor, you would also know every family who had owned the barn where the wrestling was held and every kid who had lived in that barn when his or her parents kicked him or her out of the house. The odds were that if something interesting was going on, you would know the person doing it.

The last time I visited Ann Arbor, my friends had started a burlesque troupe. The house where they prepare and rehearse seemed familiar, and then I remembered I had been to a few parties there. Houses in Ann Arbor are like people; you seem to keep running into the same ones over and over. At one of the parties, people had spun flame-tipped chains in circles in the back yard. But most of the parties had been normal, just lots of drunk people getting drunker and dancing at 3 a.m., after the bars closed. Now the house is filled with drawers of glitter and lace and construction paper and the basement is a rehearsal hall filled with wrestling mats and trapezes. The performers make all their costumes and props out of cardboard and paint and things they find at the Salvation Army Store.

Their performances are pure Ann Arbor aesthetics: everything is rough and homespun and nerdy and badass. Unicorns prance to disco music, girls in pasties wash themselves in bathtubs filled with sparkling shards of broken glass, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock strip off their uniforms accompanied by the spoken words of William Shatner. I watched them rehearse—I would be back in California by the date of the performance—and thought about how I loved my adopted hometown, the place where I spent my mid-twenties writing a dissertation and trying to pretend I wasn’t a graduate student.

I can’t believe I am wasting my youth in the Midwest, I used to think sometimes, as I made the reverse-commute back home to California every winter vacation, just as all the other young people were leaving San Francisco to visit their families in the boring middle states. But now I think that there was no better place to be young, where the world was a canvas begging to be painted and anything you could imagine was possible.

This illustration depicts the lovely and talented Annie Thing of Ann Arbor's Tickled Fancy Burlesque Company. Check out their videos, especially the ones about Star Trek and unicorns.

Palo Alto

In a city of the future, it is difficult to concentrate.

—Radiohead, “Palo Alto”

During my first year in California, when I was nine, a group of local parents wrote and produced a theater piece called Perfect Palo Alto. It was a series of skits that lovingly mocked the eccentricities of my new home: Every single adult here works in computers! Our city is populated with well-to-do ex-sort-of-hippies! We’re all really liberal, overeducated, and self-righteous!

This is a weird place, I thought. No one would have ever written a play like that about Framingham, Massachusetts, or Nashua New Hampshire, the most recent cities I had lived in. What would you even say about those places? We’re a suburb of Boston! We have a big mall! And what practical New England parent would ever decide to write that play, much less be seen by their children and peers performing in it?

Palo Alto, I came to understand, was a weird town that prided itself on its weirdness. It was like that kid who makes sure to do everything on purpose to be as bizarre as possible; and, not surprisingly, it was filled with kids like that. Everyplace I went seemed haunted by a strange hippy heritage that traced back to the Sixties. Grace Slick and Joan Baez both went to my high school. My favorite coffee shop, Saint Michael’s Alley, used to be a hangout for the Grateful Dead when they were still the Warlocks. Only back then, the coffee shop had been housed in a different building, one that had long since been converted into the Varsity Theater, where you could watch Rocky Horror or Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation and imagine Jerry Garcia having a smoke there back when he looked like a Chasidic Jew.

The town reveled in its iconoclasm, the college-town in the midst of the Silicon Valley, the town only twenty minutes from San Jose that considered itself a steadfast satellite of San Francisco (an hour’s drive).

When my economics and government teachers explained the difference between liberals and conservatives, they would always say, “Conservative voters tend to be more prevalent in wealthier areas. Where we live is an exception, though.”

And was it ever an exception. Growing up in Palo Alto, Republicans were like polar bears; I’d only ever seen one on TV. Before an election, every front yard sign, every bumper sticker, every snide comment from an adult seemed to be preaching to a city-wide choir: Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton. A few of my fellow students claimed doggedly to be Republicans, in what always struck me as an Alex P. Keaton style act of contrarian rebellion. I never met a real Republican until I went to college—at U.C. Berkeley, a school I chose over a small liberal arts school primarily because I had heard there were Republicans there and I wanted to confirm that they really existed.

Palo Alto’s demographic and social weirdness, when I was growing up, seemed to stem from the fact that people mostly moved there for the school district. At a time when California’s schools were in a fast decline, Palo Alto’s schools were consistently rated amongst the highest in the nation. These schools kept the property values sky-high for the small, single-story, space-efficient tract houses that pervaded most of the city.

In nearby Atherton, every resident lived in a mansion, but they shared a lackluster school district with neighboring Menlo Park. This incongruity used to strike me as odd, until I realized that many affluent areas don’t care about the quality of their public education system, since the residents would all be sending their children to private schools.

But in Palo Alto, all of my friends’ parents were like mine: they had sunk all of their money into a small, expensive house so that they could send their children to a top-ranked public school. So while I grew up in a town with a high average income and high property values, no one I knew ever seemed to have much money. We all had parents who carefully budgeted, who fretted over the money we spent on clothes and food, who considered every purchase seriously: Do you really need that?

Thinking back, I realize that our parents could have been living in bigger houses, driving fancier cars, not worrying about every dollar, if they had chosen to live in cheaper cities with lesser school districts. Palo Alto self-selected for people who valued education—public education—over every other luxury in life, and that was what made it truly a town of weirdos.

The values of our parents seemed to have rubbed off on most of the students I knew. Certainly the interest in education did. Grades were so high that my school could not publicize class rankings for fear of keeping us from being admitted to universities. My 3.6 GPA put me in the 68th percentile of my graduating class.

But our view of money seemed to come from our parents as well. In a city with one of the highest real estate prices per square foot in the country, no one wanted to be seen as rich; instead, students tended to brag about how poor they were. Having a lot of money, or spending it frivolously, was something to be ashamed of. In my high school, it was considered horribly uncouth to have anything expensive or new. I knew one very rich kid whose parents bought him a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday, and everyone mocked him behind his back. He was one of the handful of people I knew who had a new car at all; most of my friends, like me, did not have a car, and none had a car manufactured after the Seventies. At the high school across town from mine, the newspaper ran a “Wreck of the Week” column featuring students boasting about the decrepit state of their vehicles. There seemed to be an acute understanding that we had not earned the money we spent on clothes or cars, and that wasting your parents’ money didn’t make you cool; it made you a spoiled brat.

This rule probably did not hold amongst the small crowd of “popular” kids, but no one cared about them. While they held some sway in middle school, by high school, they could no longer manage to lord despotically over the masses, hopelessly outnumbered as they were. All the horrors I hear reported from other high schools—the football players and cheerleaders and game days and school spirit—were all reversed at my school. Sporting events were under-attended, with teachers begging us to show up. School spirit was for losers. I never once heard a girl admit to being a cheerleader without an embarrassed disclaimer: “Actually I’m a cheerleader. But it’s just because I’m really into dance.”

I moved away from Palo Alto at what ended up being the dawn of the dot-com era. When I applied to college, I had visited the internet one time. By the time I graduated, my father was asking me whether I might want to put off the Ph.D. program I had just been accepted to and make a bunch of quick money as a tech writer, just like every other jackass with an English degree.

Whenever I came back to visit Palo Alto, every other car was a BMW or Jaguar, and there was a new yuppie restaurant in the place of each quirky old diner or bookstore I used to love. Saint Michael’s Alley had been converted from a grungy coffeehouse to a stylish gourmet brunch spot. The Varsity Theater became a Borders bookstore. All the eccentric little corners were swept clean, as if the weird haunted hippy town of my youth had never existed.

During those boom years, when I would visit my mom, I used to go for a run around my old neighborhood—a run that took me past Steve Jobs’s house, an unassuming neighborhood landmark—and each time, I would pass at least four houses knocked all the way down to their foundations. They were about to be built up again from scratch, now taller and with basements and bloated out to the far edges of their lots.

Like every affluent place, Palo Alto seems culturally improved by economic downturn. The bloated houses still stand, but I don’t see so many knocked down when I visit now. The roving crowds of dot-com twenty-somethings in cocktail attire no longer swarm University Avenue in search of mates. Palo Alto still makes me a little sad, seeing it from the outside, its sanitized plazas and former-dives where my teenaged friends used to write on the walls with Sharpies. Still, that is only from the outside. I have a lot of hope that the high school kids are still traipsing around like lost hoboes somewhere I never go, that young Grace Slick is there writing scandalous songs, hidden away somewhere my respectable grown-up eyes can no longer see.

Going First

Someone I know recently died in an accident. It wasn’t the kind of accident that occurs during normal activities everyone does every day, like driving or showering or walking down the street. It also wasn’t the kind of accident that results from an activity so risky that no one is surprised when it goes wrong, something like white-water kayaking or flying an “experimental aircraft.”

My friend died doing something both dangerous and mundane, the kind of thing that makes parents declare that their children are trying to get themselves killed. He died from a skateboarding accident. He crashed his skateboard, hit his head, was in a coma for a long time, and then finally, just when chances for his eventual recovery had started to look up, he died.

Besides his death being incredibly sad on its own, it bothered me a lot that he had died skateboarding. Something about it seemed like suicide to me, like he had chosen to die on purpose. I couldn’t figure out why I felt this way. After all, he skateboarded everywhere, all the time. There couldn’t have been anything special about the day when he crashed; it was probably just an ordinary day, until things went horribly wrong. But I couldn’t get rid of this creepy feeling that he knew it was coming, that it was planned somehow.

I tried to shake the idea that there was some underlying significance to all this, that it was the end to some kind of parable or puzzle or syllogism.

“I suppose it could have been anything,” I said to a friend of his. “It could have been a car accident.”

“No,” said the friend, shaking his head vehemently. “It’s important that it was a skateboarding accident.”

That’s how I felt, too, but I didn’t like what this interpretation suggested. It meant that it wasn’t random, not a freak accident, that his death had meant something. But what could it mean, other than a referendum against the kind of life that we were all living, lives full of small dangers, unnecessary risks, hobbies and habits we all convince ourselves are safe, or safe enough?

Our friend was a brave guy. That’s one of the qualities that always struck me most about him. Without a hint of apprehension, he would do all kinds of things that to me seemed pretty scary: travel to China to study kung fu, practice crazy jumping back flips, spar on a raised platform with no protective gear, move to Guatemala on a moment’s notice when his ailing mother needed help, and, regularly, get on his skateboard and fly down Monte Vista, a street so steep it’s difficult to walk down without stumbling.

I had often been inspired by his bravery. When he returned from China during a time that I had been feeling ambivalent about sparring, the stories of his trip motivated me to face up to difficult challenges. Watching how easily he could pack up his life and travel, I reminded myself not to get too attached to my routines. If he can do it, I would tell myself, it must not be so bad.

His death reminded me of another one that occurred five years ago, when my coworker’s sixteen-year-old daughter flew off her dirt bike, which she was riding with her father, and suffered a fatal injury to one of her internal organs. I didn’t know her very well, but after she died, I learned she was another brave person, someone who, like my friend, inspired people around her to try to be braver themselves.

Just after she died, her mother told me that her friends were keeping her MySpace page as a memorial, and when I went to look at it, in addition to about a thousand heartbreaking messages from distressed teenagers, I saw her brief self-description, which included this:

I love my dirt bike, even though I seem to fall off it all the time!

The eerie foreshadowing of these words chilled me when I read them. Could she have known, I asked myself? As with my skateboarding friend, I imagined for a moment that she had chosen her death, or that it had been somehow fated. It just seemed so unlikely that she would specifically mention the falling off; why would she say that, if she hadn’t anticipated what it would come to mean?

Then I thought about the potential for creepy omens on my own online presences: so many jokes about getting beat up, getting hit in the face, so many pictures of injuries and bruises. It seems impossibly far-fetched that any of this would lead me to serious physical harm, just as the falls must have seemed reasonably safe to her. And they were; she was just really, really unlucky in how she fell. We can all be unlucky, whether getting thrown by a dirt bike or kneed a little too hard in the face or hit by a runaway bus as we cross the street. So it’s back to the car accident comparison. Are these deaths, which seem so particularly haunted, the result of the same kind of wrong-place-wrong time bad luck that causes people to die on the freeway or in the shower?

Is that the only lesson, I wondered, as I thought about these two deaths? That same old lesson we’ve always known, that you never know when it will be your time to go, that it can happen any time, in any way, for seemingly no reason at all? And if the brave people go and get killed doing things that are supposed to be safe, what lesson does that teach the rest of us? The implied message seems to be that maybe it’s not a good idea to be so brave—but that’s hardly an acceptable lesson to take from the lives of people who inspired those around them to be adventurous and take risks.

I looked back at the girl’s MySpace page this week, which would have been her twenty-first birthday. I saw that her friends are still writing notes to her on it, five years later. They tell her about their problems, and tell her that she is an inspiration to them, how they think of her as they enter scary new phases of their lives, starting college, moving away from home, dating. Some of them say that they imagine her as she would be now, as a young adult, and they look to her for wisdom about decisions in their own lives.

I reread her self-description and saw something I had missed last time. Below the part about falling off her dirt bike, it said that she loved softball and basketball, and, she noted, that she loved to play “full contact—it’s more interesting that way!” If I saw those words five years ago, I didn’t remember them, though if her accident had occurred during one of those sports, these words would have seemed as foreboding as the ones about her dirt bike. It turns out, she wasn’t psychic regarding her own untimely demise. She was just a brave girl who loved to do scary, exhilarating things, just as my skateboarding friend did.

The lesson I will keep with me from my friend is the same lesson I always learned from him, which is to be brave. I though at first that his death negated this message in some way, that it showed that taking risks does not pay off. But now, like the young adults seeking strength and guidance from their friend’s memory on MySpace, I feel inspired by my friend’s memory to be braver, even about the prospect of my own death. My friend did so many things that I found terrifying, and when he did them, they came easily, fearlessly, effortlessly. Death is far less scary to me now that he has gone through it. I think to myself, if he did it, it must not be so bad.

Adam Caldwell's drawing of Joseph in the hospital.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Joseph and Monica, both greatly missed.

Pesty

When I woke up on Saturday morning, my cat was already begging to go outside. “Meow,” she said, shooting a meaningful look towards the front door as I passed her on my way to the bathroom.

“Now?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

I live in an apartment building, so my cat can’t wander the halls unsupervised. I didn’t feel like following her around the building; I wanted to sit around, drink tea, and read things on the internet.

“Meow,” she said again, walking briskly from the door to my feet and then back to the door.

“Wait until I make tea,” I said.

A few minutes later, tea in hand, I grudgingly opened the door. Despite all of her expressed urgency, she hesitated to venture out into the hallway once the opportunity became available.

“Out,” I said, pushing her into the hall with the side of my foot.

She put on a little show of being indecisive about where to go, with so many options available. But I knew exactly where she was headed. Soon enough, she had turned towards the staircase. I followed her down the stairs and into the hallway below. She stopped briefly to sniff the crack under the second door before continuing to her ultimate destination, the one she had been visiting faithfully every day for the last two weeks.

It was a greasy-looking spot on the floor between the second and third doors. She stopped, sniffed it, then abruptly threw herself head first onto it, rolling nimbly onto her back as the side of her face hit the ground. She rolled around on the spot for a moment, then regained her composure. She seated herself at the side of the spot and proceeded to sniff it again, her expression contemplative. Her concentration remained unbroken as a large male neighbor came lumbering past her, something that normally would have sent her flying back up the stairs towards home.

“What’s so interesting?” I asked her, leaning against the wall and blowing on my steaming tea. “Did a dog pee there? Did someone’s garbage leak?”

She was too busy to answer me. She stayed in the spot for five minutes with no sign of growing bored, her nose to the ground, while I sipped my tea.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any more.

“That’s plenty,” I said, scooping her up with my non-tea hand. I carried her back upstairs to the apartment, where she immediately began to meow again.

“No,” I said. “Too boring.”

I took my half cup of tea over to my desk and sat in front of my laptop. I sipped it as I replied to an email. Then I logged into Facebook, where I examined a series of photographs that a friend-of-a-friend took on a trip to Italy with her girlfriend. Her girlfriend is cute, I decided.

My cat sat on the floor next to my chair as I clicked through pictures of the cheerful couple riding in a gondola. I think I heard her sigh audibly as she watched me.

My cat Pesty died just before Thanksgiving this year. I wrote this piece about her in September, before I knew just how sick she was. I was lucky to have her for twelve years; she was a wonderful, lovely kitty.