A Trench at the Ocean's Bottom, and the Sky's Not Even in Sight... (Part One)

Welcome Back, Mr. Kotter.

It seems I've been away for some time now. In the interim since ye've seen me last, I've more or less had two kids and as many career changes. It hasn't left me much time to think coherently, much less write it down. Uh, sorry. But I'm back now.

One of the frustrating things about this blog the first time around was I had envisioned it as a dialogue but never got any real discussion of anything I wrote here. That was probably a failing of mine, not being able to inspire and intrigue the dozens, much less the masses, and I know I shouldn't go around blaming that crap on you. After all, I'm a big boy these days, and a lot of times, fact is, as much as you want a community of friends to banter with, if you want to get out of the house you have to be willing to make the first steps, at least, on your own.

So I'd like to revisit an earlier topic I had started with this sort of dialogue in mind before it fell flat:

"I was curious to figure out which pop culture genres were sustainable--that is, which pop culture genres and forms can legitimately offer you something insightful and nourishing throughout all of the stages of your life. And which don't. And why. (And why not.)"

Being a dad and now well into middle age, but nowheres near death nor impotence (heh heh), this is of great interest to me, because I have reached the point, if I still intend on reclaiming myself as a creative person after taking a few years off from all that as more or less a domestic and "an earner," where I need to be surrounded by and spend time on things that keep the fires of wonder, curiosity, and inspiration stoked and burning at a hot steady level. Not to drop some blues on you like "because in just a few short years I'll be dead" (let's face it, I'll outlive all of you and remember you fondly), but instead because my life is quite full with respect to family, marriage, and work, and I have neither the time nor inclination to waste my free moments on people and things that don't bring it.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved...the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

     --Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)--

Granted, I'm long past the days where I want to live it up in the style that Kerouac and his cohorts did. It was good in its time, but that type of hedonism holds no charms for me anymore. What I do like about that statement is its imperative to bring passion and conviction to everything you do, everyday. I'm like you in that I don't just want to go through the motions.

The Criteria.

The things that I look at these days, they must have something to say to me about one or more of these fundamental idea/l s:

Authenticity and Truth: I'm as fascinated by strategy and artifice as much as the next guy but ultimately it's a dead end. You can't fool all the people all of the time and you can't in the long run be happy pretending to be something you're not, or aspiring to values, principles, and goals you do not believe in, but if you try and live that way what you can do is outsmart yourself and be perpetually unhappy. May as well be honest and be your real self, which is NOT some classical hero and in a lot of cases is flawed and unappealing.

One of the most generous gifts my father ever gave me, and this is a man who's always shown his unlimited love and support, came at a time when I was really down. After being in the Army, I had busted my hump and graduated college in three years, with honors, and had expected to be onto really big things; yet a year out, I had bombed at my first job so badly I had to resign in anticipation of being fired. It's a long story, but the honest bottom line was I had given it my best shot but had come up light. Worse, I was operating on some ill-conceived self-concocted "ten year plan" and felt I was at age when I should be getting ready for marriage and children, but wasn't even dating--no one was really interested. I took a couple of weeks moping around, and had some friends and family expressing open disappointment and scorn at my failure and rudderlessness, which didn't much help. Truth be told, I kind of thought they had a point and really didn't see a way out of the hole I was in.

Then my dad came to visit for a weekend. Instead of judging me and "calling the shot" of my failure like everyone else seemed to be doing, he took the time to share with me the several instances over the years when things didn't go as he had planned, and how he was down about it but in each case he picked himself back up and kept moving forward. Even now this brings me to tears...he could have told some self-serving narrative where he was a great hero and I should just be more like him, some trite advice like "buck up and pull yourself up by the bootstraps," but he didn't go there. Instead, he gave me something honest and true, and probably a little embarrassing, and let me know it was ok to fail, that I was still "me" and had great value and was worthwhile whether things were going great, or whether things had gone a bit off of the rails. If he hadn't been "real," I don't know if I would have pulled out of it. There are just some things, as much as you want, you can never repay.

Anyhow, aside from keeping you in touch with yourself and what you really want, and being able to have relationships with people based on reality as opposed to deception or wishful thinking, authenticity, as exercised in the example above, is a truly brave and revolutionary act that can bring out the best in people and is worth the risk. As with everything real, there's a price for this but even so I am deeply interested in learning about things that help me live up to this ideal.

So far as truth goes, the appeal should be self-explanatory, but perhaps it's not. With the barrage of bullshit we may experience, day-in, day-out, we may prefer narratives and takes that justify what we already think, how we already feel, and make us feel good/smart/whatever. But we may be doing, or co-signing, something that hurts others without even knowing it. There might be something small that if we know about and get off our tails and deal with , that we can prevent from becoming a big problem. Truth is, we will never be even a slice of what we want to be if we don't value a view of how things are instead of what feels good. If you don't have that thirst for truth even when it hurts you or shows you ugly things about yourself, or perhaps requires you to do something you'd rather not, you are taking yourself out of the game as a potential force for good in the world and as someone upon whom others can depend. When you give up on demanding "the real" and the Truth, your entire being is compromised. An old friend told me long ago that lots of people will flatter and placate you with what you want to hear, but your friends tell you the truth, all else be damned; it's one of the deepest acts of respect that can be shown to you.

Emotional Range: Perhaps you can tell, I am settling into the stage of my life where I really do enjoy being a human, warts and all.  I don't know that I've ever been a human before, and don't know when I'll get the chance to do it again.

Think about it, folks: getting to be a human is a pretty good gig that we take for granted all the time.
Even if we may not be some word-shattering influencer of history, you get a chance to make an impact every day. Some examples:

• Did you kill or spare anything today?
• Did you fix/break anything today?
• Did you avert catastrophe (be it on a small or large scale) for someone/thing?
• Did you provide physical or emotional shelter for someone/thing?
• Did you come up with some idea about something you're anticipating doing in the future?
• Were you able to express what you feel without any dire consequences?
• Did you experience any beauty or empathy?
• Did you try something and not get it right, leaving the chance to nail it at a later date?

These are all great honors that we could choose to do or not do every day. Folks will tell you they know what happens or doesn't happen after you die, but (as handled exhaustively in other JM columns), they're full of it, because there's no way they know for sure. For all you know, this is your one shot at being human and whether you think much of your life or no, you have a tremendous amount of agency to affect reality on various scales of action.

Whatever state or guise the next stage of being finds you in, it could be your experience is different in that you cannot relate to reality emotively. I get that emotions can be a blessing or a curse, and are often the source of great struggle. Many turn to shrinks and self-help books, even medication as a means to control them, and I am not one to offer an educated opinion about any of that. What I can tell you that if this very day, someone came to you and made it so you could never feel joy, pain, sorrow, jealously, pride, hysterical laughter, emotional numbness, wonder/amazement, closeness, or any of the emotive states that are endemic to the human experience, you would certainly be a lot more stable and predictable but you would have lost something profound.

The expectations of others may discourage us from feeling or expressing the full range of human emotions.  You see, Sally should smile more, and Billy shouldn't cry. What does that guy have to be angry about anyway? Ooof, she really shouldn't laugh in front of people.

But fuck it.

I want to experience it all, every day. I want things in my life that make me cry. Something that will show me how it feels so I can stop being a dick and judging that person I was just ragging on and maybe instead step up and be of some use to them. I want to be filled with triumph and elation at things small and great. And I'm not interested in who objects to that, or why. I know stoicism, but I do not always exercise its tenets. I know the right thing to do, but I reserve the right to not always do it.

Although I will never stop being aspirational in every cell of my being, I patently reject the call to be perfect, the compulsion to do the right thing at the right time, yes, unfortunately in many cases, the imperative to carry myself with the dignity others may think I ought. I'm going to be sweet and maudlin. I'm going to be petty and fly off the handle sometimes. I'm going to be a real jerk, and a pushover, and give the cold shoulder when it's a damned cruel thing to do.

And so are you.

Some of that, I'd rather not do. But I believe (though do not know) this is my last shot at being human, and I want to embrace, and not deny that, because I think it's a fine and beautiful thing. And I want to surround myself with and explore things that help me be the best human I can be (which is not the same as being perfect or good) and have little interest in anything that bars my way.


Ways of thinking and acting that encourage resilience, adaptability, and point toward "The Good Life":

Confucius: Do you think I have come to know many things by studying them?

Pupil: Yes. Isn’t it so?

Confucius: No. I penetrate them by their underlying unity.

As a child one of my favorite aunts was quite amused the amount of things I collected and/or had an interest in. Indeed, I have many times heard the point of view that a man with many hobbies is a dilettante,  a sophist, an unserious person with too much spare time, a "jack of all trades/master of none," but I take great issue with it. (And of course I would, eh?) Much like the Sage in the quote above, when I learn one thing I try to extrapolate it to many other areas in my life. True knowledge is universal and applies across topics and disciplines.

 So much as I always have, I need to cast my net wide, learn from accomplished people (with a broad definition of "accomplished") who have withstood adversity, and also to interact with what I learn to discover the extent to which the knowledge is true and wise, and where I may apply it. To not get discouraged when learning becomes tough and the gains are small and hard-fought, and to not give up on becoming better even when obligations and time constraints seems to crowd out my ability to move forward with what I need to do on the long road.

The "end" of all this, of course, is that quest so many others have pursued with mixed success over millennia, that of "The Good Life," the life, to the extent it can be, on your own terms--one you can enjoy as it passes, look back upon with solace and contentment that you were you, and leave as a path for those of similar principles and aspirations who would dare follow it and append to it across the fullness of eternity.

But enough about me.

Now: I'd sincerely like to know what would be the criterion, or the values you would seek, in the various and sundry items that you will find your inspiration in for the next 25 years?

 Please do share and talk with me about these things, as friends do, below.

Or you will disappoint me.

Peace on XMas: What Christmas Means to the Post-Christian

There was this club meeting in grad school I recall pretty vividly. I was secretary and we were plotting out activities for the year. "Hey," I said, as I do, "Why don't we participate in the Christmas parade and do up a float as all the characters from 'A Christmas Carol?'" (We were an English student honor society, so that seemed appropriate.) To which the president looked at me condescendingly sideways and said, "Sean: not everybody's a Christian." And me: "Yeah, I know. I'm not one myself."

This started a long ridiculous conversation where I had to explain that just because you don't believe in the literal existence of the Judeo-Christian god, that doesn't mean you reject the cultural importance of the holiday…or that you are resentful toward people who do believe…or that you want to yield your ability to participate in it. But that float just wasn't going to happen, fun as it would have been, b/c this multicultural lit specialist got in her head that acknowledging and celebrating Christmas would be offensive to anyone who wasn't a Bible thumper, and that was that.

A few years later when the trope "War on Christmas" became all the rage amongst reactionaries, it was clear to me that this well-meaning but naive lady with the toe-deep understanding was the straw man who had alley-oop'd the slam dunk that right-wing pundits and their parrot-constituents were shoving down all our throats. They took her to be the spokesperson for people like me, and painted us all in the same brush. 

But newsflash: I don't have stats, but there are a good many people who are not believers, but still enjoy Christmas.

I really like it b/c I have such good memories of childhood. It was a holiday--things broke for a little while from standard operating procedure and different-type stuff happened--lots of different-typed stuff!

Christmas plays were a lot of fun. Sometime it was school, but in most cases it was church, using some loosely-woven narrative scenario to set kids up in a nativity scene. I was always "The Narrator," reading some mashup of the Matthew and Luke versions. (Remember: in the southeast in the 1980s, kids that could both read well and went to church were at a premium, so my spot was perennially safe.) You'd practice it for a few weeks and nail it, and it was a good rush going into Christmas, and really, there's no way to jack up the crowd-pleasing appeal of kids reading scripture and dressed up like angels, shepherds, and wise men. 

Through church, we'd also head out and go caroling once a year. We'd show up at folks' houses and sing to them. It was a fun and happy thing. I wonder what it felt like for the audience…admittedly, if people showed up randomly at my house and started to sing to me, it would initially freak me out, but after the shock subsided, I'd probably rather like it.

I love decorating a tree, be it with elegant-posh ornaments or gaudy toy-like pieces. Some of my favorite ornaments are the wooden 1960s Japanese knock-off Snoopy ornaments that remain from my childhood…battered by years and two kids playing with them carelessly, they hold a link to us as we were all those years ago, Mama, Renita, Sean, joined together, sometimes listening to Christmas music, sometimes not, always with some candy, working with enthusiasm and joy in our hearts until the job was done. Then there was a lull where we got older and that enthusiasm waned and Mama had to hassle us to do it and ultimately just nearly do it all herself. Now as a husband and a dad, it is a more workman-like job…have to go get the tree...is it straight? too many here, too few there; are the lights straight enough? how does it look in the dark? I still enjoy the quiet calm of being in a dimly-lit room, gazing at blinking Christmas lights on a tree and letting the mind wander a bit. You forget your cares. You imagine what your kid is going to feel like when she sees those presents, and anticipates opening them for weeks. It's a flavor you vaguely recall and savor the ghost of, and one you wouldn't begrudge her, or any child, and it sort of comes back when you see it again, through them.

As a kid, shopping inspired in me a deep sense of empathy. I had to think about another person and imagine what I could buy them that would make them happy. I wasn't always successful, but heck, I tried. Now I think of the care my mother spent trying to decipher what we wanted in a "is that your final answer" kind of way, then concocting some story as to why Santa wouldn't be able to score it, only to find on Christmas Day: hey, you got it! She got us more than she ever should have, and no doubt ran around all over trying to get things just so. Today, it's easier. I got my Christmas presents on Amazon, all of them, within an hour. Wishlists make it a safer bet you'll buy something your loved one wants, but it also sort of ruins the surprise a bit. (The kid in me still can't resist peeking, if the option is available.)

One ritual was the frenzy of Christmas Eve, when my mother would cart us around, dropping presents off to friends and relatives at the 11th hour. I tried as I could to continue this into my early adulthood, bringing presents to my childless Aunt and Uncle on Christmas Eve until one time I fell asleep on the couch and woke up at 11 pm, and still decided, dammit, this is Christmas! I can't let this stop me from giving them the benefit of my love and good cheer, and so I headed up there in a flash. For some reason, they did not share the enthusiasm I had when I showed up at midnight with two bags full of presents, and though I still did it for years after, they were always wary that one year I'd show up at midnight again and roust them from bed to open presents (sort of like a Santa-home invasion, I suppose). They are both gone now, and I must admit though I loved them dearly, I wasn't of much use to them most of the time…like with a lot of my family, there's just a gap I couldn't bridge, no matter how much I tried. But being able to do that for them for just a few years, it makes me feel like maybe somewhere deep down, they knew how much I loved them. There's really no way to know, I reckon.

My dad would be sure to come up and see us the day of, or the day after Christmas, and it was always great to seem him and some of that side of the family. With divorces in his generation, men often just cut ties with the kids from their "first marriage." I suppose it was emotionally easier to do that, and it might have been for him, but it wasn't really ever an option, b/c for my dad it was not about what was easy, but what would make his kids know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that though the living situation may be complicated and times may be fat or lean, we were the most important thing in his life. Seeing him at Christmas every year, no matter what, just drove that point home, and he was always so fun and cheerful and warm to be around. Saying goodbye was not fun, but it never is when you're parting from those you love. Even though those goodbyes often caused tears, shared or unshared, and the whole scenario was not optimal, he never shirked the effort it took to be there and make merry. Too much was at stake!

So yeah, a lot of stuff, whether it seems deep or superficial, comes up when I think about Christmas. You might not be with me all the way down the line, but hear me out; I promise I'm going somewhere with this:

Once you figure out that your attachment to religion is more out of nostalgia and wishful thinking than anything else, you have a choice: you can ignore what you know is the truth, and go back where it's comfortable. Hell, I did it one big time. That one time is all it takes, b/c you're likely going to figure out you can't fake it, and even if you could, you're lying to everyone about a fundamental part of your personality. And that's not right…may as well, to paraphrase my man Huck, stick by the truth and be damned. At least people can trust you then.

So you go the other way. You go into a land unknown. Likely, none of your relatives would have ever owned up to not believing, even if it was so, b/c there was just too much stigma attached to it, and it's lonely, and often harsh. B/c the people who die: you have to accept they're gone and you'll never see them again. And if you're sick, or old, you have to accept your best days might be behind you, lest you have the courage to seize the day no matter what your condition may be. Injustice doesn't get remediated in the hereafter, which makes it all the more cruel and less bearable. This is all quite a hard sell, with no solace other than it is how things really are, and not how you wish they were. But in the end, everything counts more and means more as a result.

So you're on your own, walking a path that is not yet completely paved. Not everything is figured out. There are no pastors to tell you what to think or do, and sure, there are a lot of books, but you have to parse them, piece them together and struggle with them to make sense. (But on the good tip, you're not beholden to any of them if they represent a line o' b.s.). Even though you'll try hard, mistakes will be made, but being authentic and true to yourself has more value than being a conformist and a liar, and patronizing people you love who still believe. And you're not a church; you don't want everyone to think and be just like you.

Time goes by. You start to figure it out. Whereas you may have initially been a reactionary against all things religious, you get to a point where you keep your distance and remain skeptical, but realize that you may be where you are, but religion did play a key role in your life. Who would you have turned out to be without that upbringing? Could there be any atheists in mainstream Western Culture without the Donatists, the Gregorian Revolution, the Protestants, the Reformers, those idealists who valued the dignity and clarity of their consciences, so much that they would stand against those who would compel them to obey, resisting them b/c they represented authority without reason and humaneness, which is in essence authority without legitimacy? You reject the literal truth of it but you cannot deny that it is your culture, and that you are partaking in some serious revisionist history if you can't acknowledge the intellectual and moral debts you owe it. (And you remember: Mao and Stalin were atheists, too, and they liked to revise history a bit themselves. You have an interest in being nothing like them, and having the humility to remember: atheism is no assurance of virtue.) Can you be maintain the very genius of which James Joyce spoke, to simultaneously ponder competing ideas in your head? Of course you can. You've already proven you can think about stuff without having to believe in it. You are called an "atheist," but to be more accurate, you are the culmination of the tradition of dissenters and truth-tellers within the Christian faith--in essence, a "Post-Christian."  To turn your back on that completely is to turn your back on all the people who faced the rack, burnt at the stake, who suffered because they were excommunicated and/or branded a heretic. Nay, you owe them, and they deserve better.

And then you have kids and you wonder: what do I do now? If you were religious, there'd be a lot more resources to point you the way, but you're going down the path you chose. Will the kids suffer? Will they lack the benefits of social contexts and support others take for granted? Will religious kids pick on them for being different, as you know kids do, especially kids in the dominant culture wrt minority kids? Will they be strong enough to endure the slings and arrows life throws at them without that framework of solace? What initial disadvantages will their reticence (borne of patience), skepticism, and ability to temporarily accept uncertainty while they work to find the truth, traits that will server them so well and give them such a rich life later on, represent when put up against the "perpetually 100% certain" confidence and blind acceptance of convention and authority of some of their Christian peers? Because of your choices, there are some early advantages she'll have to yield, and some experiences she'll miss out on that you had, you know. But you know what?

Christmas ain't one of them.

B/c no matter what it is called, Christians don't own Christmas. The winter holidays existed long before that religion became dominant; do the research and you'll see the followers of Jesus just co-opted the celebrations that were already taking place so that the religion could more effectively spread and supplant those already in place. In short, Jesus isn' "the reason for the season"; he's just renting it for a while. Christmas belongs to you because you have lived it and felt is so intensely your whole life through. You get to share it, all the things that it means to you and everyone else, and even though it has Christ in the name, that's just a passing thing; it could have "Cheese Biscuit" in the name and it wouldn't matter a great deal. You get a winter holiday to take some time and celebrate love, and family, and the passage of time and mortality, and just being a human, alive and in love with life at the end of the year. We'll do it up every year and because it's a living thing, we'll make our own traditions that may or may not be passed down. 

So I'll leave the rest unwritten, and we'll write it in the coming years. It'll be wild, b/c we have no script, but that's just how we roll, always has been. For now? wish me a Merry Christmas. I'll wish you one, too.

War on Christmas, my ass; I own Christmas. And so do you.

Antimatter is eating my youth.

...just wanting to talk to you for a second. It's been a while since we seen each other, or at least it really seems like a long time.

Remembering back to a church-sponsored skiiing trip in January of '85.  Mom let me stack up on comics at the grocery store and I picked up "Crisis on Infinite Earths #1." The issue was framed on each cover by a piece talking about how the DC Universe was too confusing and they were going to consolidate it and "nothing would ever be the same" again.

The story had what I felt at the time were a bunch of DC second-stringers, most of whom I didn't know and had to look up in "Who's Who: The Definitive Guide to the DC Universe" (an encyclopedia in monthly installments of all the DC characters and major concepts, but only Vol 1 had come out yet). A gothy looking dude named Pariah was flashing in and out of different universes in the multiverse, and everywhere he showed up, he'd be forced to watch white antimatter ate up the place and people until he would flash out and flash in to another. It was really creepy and ominous and I wondered how even Batman and Superman would stack up against this existential threat. Pariah would pop up and have to watch as this freaky white stuff ate up everything and there was nothing left and he'd head out and have to watch it all happen to some other group of people and their universe, again and again.

Cut to last week. I was working late (big surprise) and hit the NPR website and learned Adam Yauch had died. Lately, Whitney Houston ate it and it doesn't seem too long since Michael Jackson kicked off. This stuff happens and, no offense to them, but they were pretty easy to shrug off either b/c they were on borrowed time anyhow or they had squandered their talent and mismanaged their lives and creatively speaking...well, nevermind b/c it's really mean so I won't even say it. You know where I'm going and let's just leave it at that.

But losing MCA almost moved me to tears.  I didn't know the guy and never really obsessed about him at all in any sort of youthful hero-worship sort of way, but I just felt that something was lost that will never be here again.  I mean, all of these dead celebrities are people and they leave folks behind that actually do know them and will mourn them, but this guy was different.

I was never the world's biggest Beastie Boys fan as some of my pals were, but they really did mean something to me. I wore out "License to Ill" in seventh grade in my Walkman and at summer camp. We could rap every song.  When Paul's Boutique came out, the new aesthetic blew my mind and I initially rejected it, but after a while I came to see it as the superior work that it was, and a step toward creative freedom and more importantly, a jail-break out of a very narrow and self-limiting sort of young white male persona into an infinite one, one that could grow and shift as you got older. And of course, by the time Check Your Head came out, I was a believer and admirer forever more.

They consciously made the jump from snarky meatheads to young men actively trying to create a culture, and to me that's the real boon of hip hop (not the macho swagger that gets mistaken for it). On PB, they recovered a lot of the pop culture artifacts from their childhood. It wasn't coherent, but they were creating the context of their own existence, referring to this, referring to that.

I learned that Adam was studying Tibetan Buddhism around the same time that I was studying Zen and Daoism rather intensely (though it's hard to be a Daoist in the Army) and there was some validation there. Certainly it was a jump from the beer guzzling lady-harassing dude he presented himself to be initially.  They started putting instrumentals on their albums. I'm sure there were other instances, but these guys showed you could be who you wanted to be. You could be a Jewish kid from Brooklyn but also be into hiphop; you could be a loudmouth jerk and morph into a Buddhist; you could take all the "crap" that you wasted your time on as a kid (comic books, sports, tv shows, etc.) and that really meant something to you, though you were told and sort of knew it was junk culture, and hold it close, work with it, extract the good stuff from it, and use it to make something new that expressed how you felt.  Even though it was '89, I think the 90s began the day Paul's Boutique was released. I'm not the only one who had to let it sit for a while before I could get into it, but it gave middle class white kids a new paradigm from which to live, and those of us who haven't lost our souls to work and life and all that's happened over the intervening years, it's because on some level we still live that way. I'm reading too much into it? 

Sure.

That's the whole point.

So when I read the NPR post, selfish as it was, I knew I'd never get a new Beastie Boys album again and I was sad. It was,with apologies to Hemingway, the end of something.

I hadn't bought the last two BB albums, much less even bothered to listen to them. Yep, I'm one of those people that make me cringe...not appreciating anything until it's gone and only then I celebrate it to the stars. It all rubs rawer the wound of recently losing a beloved stepfather who I know I didn't appreciate as much as I should have before he was gone, and now I'll never go over to his house and watch TV or drink a glass of sweet tea with him again. I think that's what it's really about, but it's all the same thing.

It's got me thinking about all those other 90s staples who moved me in a permanent way who I "outgrew"...the Chili Peppers, Pavement, Beck, all staples of that new paradigm of looking at the world, about as far from the Stones and the Beatles and the hippies as you can get, yet incorporating a lot of the stuff they discovered and moving beyond it into the new.  With me, it's all about the new and interesting concept, but you can't think about all this without thinking about how you need to honor the old stuff that made you, too.

And it got me thinking about you. I haven't talked to you in a while. Sometimes sheer inertia keeps me away; I'm ashamed, because it's been so long and I know it will probably be awkward and a bit painful at first. I keep waiting for the right time, for when things settle down and we're less busy, when I have something good to say to you. But I don't want to wait anymore. Let's make some time for each other.  If I don't call you, please call me and tackle me and tell me how it's all going. I miss you and all the stuff we use to laugh about, and I want to know you're ok b/c as much you might think I'm aloof and dodging you like I owe you money, I really do think about you all the time. I hope you're doing OK.

By the time January of '86 came around, they figured out how to deal with the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and the series wrapped.  Some stuff was just plain lost forever. But a lot of stuff from the various universes/old multiverse was recovered and they slammed it into one big chaotic universe and it was in this weird state of reboot/"same old, same old." A completely new place, but with the past as prologue

I don't know if it can really work that way, but I'll talk to you soon.  Please look after yourself until then.

Reed Richards is Not a ---k: Hickman's Fantastic Voyage Part One

"It's okay to be afraid.  It's ok to fail.  But to say that you're not even willing to try...that's unacceptable..."

-Nathaniel Richards to his young son, Reed-

Jonathan Hickman has only been in the industry for a few years now, but his stories are the big, big type that are why I still bother to read comics--tales of secret histories, utopias, about characters taking initiative and boldly building a future, any future, rather than meekly sitting on their hands and protecting the status quo. Not all of his stories finish as satisfyingly as they begin, but all that I have read are incredibly interesting and thought provoking.  Knowing Hickman was a "big idea" guy (having read The Nightly News and Pax Romana) and also a high detail writer (his legendary "notebook" treatments are dwarfed only by apocryphal tales of those of Moore and Morrison), I was quite looking forward to his take on that quintessential Lee/Kirby collaboration, Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four is a historically important though periodically stagnant title.  Its importance stems from the fact that it is Marvel's initial superhero title of the modern era, and so the successful run of Lee and Kirby--the longest continuous run on any title until just recently (102 consecutive monthly issues of the same writer/artist team--somewhere in the neighborhood of ten years, if you count annuals), and certainly the most creatively prolific--ensured that Marvel would become an ongoing concern.

That seminal run established the M.O. for Marvel--the idea that heroes could have distinct personalities and conflicting interests and points of view turned the dramatic dial up a few notches for what had been a sleepy children's lit subgenre, and Kirby's all-out 200 miles-per-hour visuals set the bar for the next twenty years. Since that run ended, there have been a few brilliant and fun stretches (Byrne's, Simonson's, and the Waid/Werringo run spring immediately to mind), but rarely have the creative teams recaptured the spirit of optimism and adventure of a science-loving, cosmos-exploring family in the atomic age, each one so larger than life that none can occupy the same space without high drama ensuing. 

Other than John Byrne's run in the 80s when the man had the midas touch (coming off of his Uncanny X-Men collaboration with Claremont), I never read the book much.  It always seemed based on an incredibly outdated and corny worldview. Optimism wasn't "in" in the grim 'n gritty 80s, when The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and all things Wolverine were king. Having since gone back and read much of the Kirby run, I'm astounded by how much of what's important, enduring, and distinctive about the Marvel Universe was laid down in those initial 100 or so issues.

I could never find a way "in" for the patriarch of the team, Reed Richards. He was old. (He had graying temples even in his first appearance, and smoked a pipe.) He was sort of jerky and condescending to everyone else in the book. He had stupid low-rent Plastic Man-style powers. Not only that, but he seemed more or less a living, breathing deus ex machina, as his brilliance was the solution to every problem.  And all apologies, but a guy who neglects his friends and family because his idea of fun is to slave away in a lab will likely never be cool to the young.  Like the narrative engineer he is, Hickman sets about solving this problem with a very "Reed-centric" story.

Things begin at the point of the Marvel Universe's "Dark Reign" baseline (i.e., immediately following the "Secret Invasion" event).  The bad guys are in charge of things and looking to use their advantage to smear the reputations of all the good guys and take them out of the equation.  Tony Stark is discredited, Nick Fury has disappeared, Captain America is dead, and evil nutjob Norman Osborne is running law enforcement.  Reed is at an all-time low.  He feels responsible, as he had a great deal of input leading up to this point, and based on outcomes, decisions he made in good faith made things worse rather than better.  That's not how supergeniuses are supposed to work.

[SPOILERS GALORE AHEAD--PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK]

Try as he might, he cannot see how he could have come to any better conclusions than he did.  The solution: to build a machine that gathers data from alternate realities, and pipe it into a device that extrapolates desirable and adverse outcomes, and their causes.   The data leads him to a conclusion that is disturbing. Reed has discovered that in the timestreams where he collaborated with others, disaster ensued; in the ones where/when he acted unilaterally, positive outcomes were created, without exception.  This puts a character already known for hubris in a bad spot.  Whereas he'd be inclined to compromise with others to build consensus, he now has a moral imperative not to, as false humility on his part can cause loss of life on a massive scale.

He finds out that Reeds from 140 other realities have arrived at the same conclusion. In what seems like a sure nod to Alan Moore's run on Supreme, he discovers the Council--a place where these 141 Reeds meet and solve problems on a multiversal level.

At this part, I'll just take a moment to step back and acknowledge the scale of all of this.  If Reed Richards is, as he describes himself, "the most brilliant mind in the universe," imagine the sheer brain power teaming with 140 other instances of himself would yield!  The ambition of the story  is well beyond any previous run that I have read on the book and approaches utopian fare like Miracleman and The Authority (not slight praise, I know!) Richards is going well beyond superheroics into universe building.  Together, the Council can take care of Galactus (i.e., the Marvel Universe's analog for God) problems before lunch.  Poverty and energy problems are things of the past, and with effort, they can save entire solar systems from extinction.

But as you'd expect there are flaws, and some pretty big ones at that.  For example, all members of the Council handle their Dr. Dooms in essentially the same way. Not wanting to toy with such a potentially destructive force, the solution is to lobotomize them and put them in captivity.  If that weren't enough to make Reed re-think his affiliation with them, he discovers something else they all have in common.  True enough, each version of Reed has set about the goal of "solving everything," but with that each has also made the judgement that the only way to do so is abdicating their role in their family.  As one member of the Council explains, "The work will consume you. How can we think about little things like our personal lives when the fate of all we know lies in the balance? Susan will stop understanding.  Her patience will run out as she's forced to raise the family all alone...Doesn't she deserve better? Ben and Johnny will get angry and eventually move on...Your children will resent you because you work too much and love too little..All you will have left is this."  It is then clear that "[t]he cost of solving everything is everything."  And in a character-defining moment, Reed decides this is not his way, and he leaves the Council to go back home to his wife.  The story ends with a very moving image: he returns and Sue, wearily, is still waiting for him.

Hickman has done his work and now I can really identify with Reed at this stage of my life. Certainly his is a talent not to be wasted.  However, the events in this story have calibrated the character's priorities.  There is work to be done, yes.  He will be tugged this way and that, and even though he wants to hunker down and just do what he does best and see the results, there are others he must answer to as well. Unlike his peers on the Council and unlike his own father (who makes appearances in several interludes throughout the story), Reed won't accept the compromises and expediencies that become the excuses we diminish ourselves with.  He won't take shortcuts (like lobotomizing Doom, or sacrificing time with his family for the sake of a greater sense of personal achievement).  Most importantly, he won't accept the false dichotomy of either being Great (in the sense of achievement) or being good (in the moral sense).  We can be very forgiving of this Reed. He carries a great weight, and even if he screws up by being aloof, or a workaholic, or short tempered, we know he's trying. He's trying to  do the "have it all" thing, which we know is impossible but the trying of it is worth it nonetheless.

Later in Hickman's FF macrostory, other characters take their turns at center stage (as they should in an ensemble book). Throughout, though, Reed Richards is depicted as a mature man who shoulders the burdens of responsibility but stays young by embracing possibility.  His family grows as he takes into his home those who need his help. He sees that through work and family he is building the future.  We might think, "Man, I wish I had a Dad like that."  But the far better thought is "I want to be a Dad like that."

Here's to you, Reed Richards.  You're the man.

How Not to Be a Stooge

Well, Atheist Week has come and gone (18-24 March), and the first practice of the year of the Atheist softball team I used to manage (another column, another time) is tomorrow. I figured I need to write something on that sort of theme. You can listen up, or in light of that, you can check out now, your choice. I'd say sit back down and listen to what I have to say, but hey, it's your call.

In an earlier column, I pointed out the fact that I derive major bits of my worldview from Confucianism. More accurately, I've always thought in parallel lines with that school of thought, even before I became aware of it, so when I did I was strongly drawn to it. Exactly how these things happen is hard to say. Actually, I can tell you exactly how this influence came to be, but it's not terribly exciting and I want to get to the good stuff now.

Over the years I've ingested so much of this stuff, it's just me now. It's great for the whole "having a moral compass" thing, but it's not terribly useful when trying to share or pass the ideas on. So in preparation for this column, I was looking back over one of my many different translations of The Analects, trying to find a good explanation of what about this way of thinking was so appealing.

D. C. Lau, in his introduction to his 1979 translation captures it better than anybody. He explains that at the very core of Confucian thinking lies the "unspoken, and therefore, unquestioned, assumption that the only purpose a man can have and also the only worthwhile thing a man can do is to become as good a man as possible. This is something that has to be pursued for its own sake and with complete indifference to success or failure" (12).

Now let's unpack this, because it's a huge and important idea. When beginning, there's nothing better than starting off with fundamentals and right principles, and this is ground zero. To hold the objective of being the best person you can possibly be...that is exactly what separates a serious person from the average guy. You either, in your heart, care, intensely, or you're lukewarm. You think that it is worthwhile to do the right thing as much as possible, and to always try to do it more and more, or you do it just when the act is convenient or has visibility. If you are the former, life is a frantic, restless search for how to be better, how to be more. You feverishly want to know the right thing to do, the right way to live. And if you're in the latter category, there's nothing preventing you from joining the former at some point.

The other huge point here--if you want it to count, the good you do and/or try to be has to be for its own sake. Not for show, and not for future reward. I've often found that everything has a price, but especially it's the case when tasked with doing the right thing. which could be unpopular, unappreciated, and misunderstood. If you start with this as your center, you can never go too far wrong.

Christianity in its modern generic form teaches us to obey. Indoctrination begins before you can even talk, and as you age it's very difficult to break out of it without coring a fundamental part of your identity out, sort of like drilling out too much to fix a cavity. Even if it has long since failed to do anything for you, you still go to church, pray, read scripture, just out of habit. It holds out rewards (God's grace, material prosperity [as proof of being among The Elect], and everlasting life) and punishment (estrangement from the asserted source of life [i.e., God], eternal punishment [Hell], etc). Whatever God approves of is good, and whatever he does not approve of is bad, by definition. So you want to do what God says, and you get rewarded. You definitely don't want to do want he doesn't like, or you'll get punished, and harshly. It's all about obeying and pleasing God. The scriptures harp repeatedly on behaving righteously to be pleasing to God and to receive His rewards.

All fine and dandy on paper, but in the real world we know that being good and being obedient to authority are sometimes mutually exclusive. When I'm told to do something but it seems wrong or unethical, I have to challenge that, and if my reservations aren't satisfied, I'm not doing it! I fail to obey, but I've done the right thing. If my core values were seeking approval from authority or securing a reward from myself, I'd be a much different person. I'd be less, and I'd be grossly disappointed in and ashamed of myself. I wouldn't be able to do the right thing a good portion of the time.

So you can aim low or you can aim higher. If you want to drift through life without thinking about it or struggling too much, you can be an obeyer. Abdicate responsibility for your moral choices to an abstract higher power. It seems harder, but actually it's a lot easier than to have to struggle day to day, reasoning if you have done the right thing, without the instant reset buttons of confession or being born again to erase your mistakes whenever you like. It's no fun to have to figure it out, to take the chance on being wrong, and to have to live with mistakes and go forward. Easier to buy into the franchise of thought that's already there, fully formed, ready for you to just add water and stir.

And this is why I love Confucius. You see, the source material for much of Confucian thought, the Lun Yu (aka The Analects) was not written by a supernatural being. It wasn't even written by Confucius, but rather by his students, who collected and revised his ideas after his death. You might say it's the collective document of an ideology at one snapshot in time.

As time went by, his followers could have claimed divine parentage for him. They could have usurped an earlier mystical tradition, like Judaism, and placed him at the center of its canon. They could have written in a scene of literal apotheosis before his death. They didn't. They knew to do so would be to go against everything he stood for. More than anything, Confucius wanted his students and followers to refine themselves by studying and self-examination, to become better people through their own efforts. (Part of this is to be able to read properly, which is more than ingesting ideas--it also means interpreting and critiquing them to see if they hold up.)

It was said that the supernatural is a topic he refused to speak on, and he outrightly refused to comment on life after death. To speak on these bizarre subjects would be an act, more or less, of speculation, and idle speculation is a distraction from the sorts of things you should be learning to straighten yourself out and make yourself a more substantial person. (Think about it: the fire and brimstone of hell and depiction of heaven is generally the most vivid but also the most pander-y thing about any sermon. It's a purely visceral emotional appeal that does nothing to aid your moral instruction. It's also quite circus freakshow-ish...think of how Jonathan Edwards likely had his audience eating out of his hand in sermons like Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God...)

And anyhow, what did it matter? If the goal of being a good person was paramount, you're doing everything you can, anyhow. And if God exists, he'd have to be cool with that. But if not, you'd just have to stand against Him. Because right is right. Again, you're the person that does the right thing, or you're the person that panders to the bully. If the bully throws you in Hell for doing the right thing, you can easily re-imagine the scene between Thoreau and Emerson where Emerson asked him why he was in jail, and Thoreau in turn asked Emerson why he was not.

Folks will tell you that this is all garbage, that morality did not exist before Christianity. The chauvinism and small mindedness in such ideas are readily apparent, as this means all the non-Christian cultures are immoral (not just amoral). It also denies Christianity's debt to stoicism, Platonism, Judaism, and many of the mythic tropes it ripped off. And did Confucius not say, "Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire"? Sounds suspiciously like he ripped off the Golden Rule...except that Confucius died in 479 B.C.

Another prong of rebuttal would say that men are innately bad, and they can't be trusted to become good without some dire punishment, that we need hell because if there were no heaven and hell, people would hedonistically and savagely behave as they wished, without consequence.

It is instructive here to consider two major proponents of the Confucian school--Mencius and Xunzi. They differed on one fundamental point. Mencius thought man's essential nature was good, but in need of refinement (i.e., study and introspection for the sake of moral instruction). Xunzi thought the opposite; man's nature is essentially evil, and is in need of moral education, else he is not to be trusted. The latter led to Legalism, which imposed harsh punishments on the people and destroyed books--so that they could not become a basis for criticizing those in power--en masse.

Apologies to Xunzi. He's a superior philosopher whose work everyone should read. But to assume human nature is bad, no matter what carnage you've seen, is flabby thinking. If you assume that we (people) can't be trusted, that means you can't even trust that very idea (that people can't be trusted), because you're a person, and you thought it. I'm with Mencius. Our nature, if it must be broken down into such dichotomous terms, is good, and we can refine ourselves and make ourselves better.

So as A-Week draws to a close, if you would, take the time and think about what you're doing for your own moral instruction and improvement. Are you an obeyer, or are you trying to be better than you are now? What's your plan for it? Do you spend the time you could be using to strengthen yourself trying to please authority and be seen as good?

No school of thought is perfect, but that's the joy of study. You take the core ideas, work with them, and make them into something that has meaning and can do something for you. Nothing gets swallowed whole without it being interpreted and revised by you into something that makes sense. It's a creative act.

And Atheists, remember that you're not off the hook by any means. No God is ok, but living without a moral code, no matter what the source may be, is nihilism and oblivion. (And looking down at others for being in a different place than you is not cool, either.) Those of us who realize there is likely no life after death, or at least in a way in which will allow us to retain our identities, should be especially sensitive to the need to not waste what time we have left to us as who we are.

No matter what brush you paint yourself with, or wherever you are, we can do a lot better. To be good is the most important decision you'll ever make, and that goodness is more real if it comes from your own will and effort, and isn't derived from mere obedience. Don't stop, and in your darkest moments, don't be discouraged.

As Confucius said, "Good people strengthen themselves ceaselessly."

You are that good person.

Do it.

Kansas is My Enemy

Another guest column from my wife, while my next one bakes in the oven a bit longer. In light of today's Elite Eight games, seems like just the right time to run it...

I’m sitting here watching the beginnings of March Madness on TV with my husband, and so I’m thinking about basketball and the role it has assumed in my life.

I’m from Alabama, and so I am, by law of the state, a football fan, specifically an Alabama (Roll Tide!) fan. Since I grew up with a father who likes other sports (not golf, not hockey, not soccer), I do know something about basketball, but I wouldn’t say I’m as comfortable with or knowledgeable about it as I am with football.

Then I got married, and I married a man from North Carolina, where it is state law to love basketball. When we first started dating I knew that I would have to get more familiar with basketball, and more okay with watching a lot of basketball in March and the early part of April.

One day my spouse and I were discussing rivalries. In Alabama, you have one rival: Auburn. And if you’re an Alabama fan, you hate Auburn. You hate people who like Auburn, you hate the city of Auburn, you hate people who attend Auburn, you hate the colors orange and blue, and you hate tigers. I think that covers it. Oh, and even if Auburn isn’t playing Alabama, you root against Auburn in whatever sport they’re playing. If Auburn is playing Florida in lacrosse, you root for Florida.

This is what my husband didn’t understand. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I root against Duke when they’re playing UNC, but I root for Duke if they’re playing Michigan State.’

‘Nope, not in Alabama. If you hate Auburn, you hate them completely,’ says I.

‘But they’re representing your state. Wouldn’t you rather a team from Alabama win?’

I just shook my head. How could I explain it? Maybe it’s that there are really only two main players in the sports world in Alabama. There’s Auburn and there’s Alabama. I mean, sure, you have UAB, but they don’t really count. But in North Carolina, you have Duke, UNC, NC State, and Wake Forest. All are reasonable contenders for basketball superiority.

Still I can’t understand how you can root against a team one day, cussing them and throwing things at the TV (isn’t that what everyone does?) and then rooting for them the next day. How fickle can you be? If I root against someone, I do it completely. They’re dead to me, in all venues.

And here’s my triumphant basketball story heralding the virtues of hating completely: When we got married, which was in March, we went on our honeymoon in Asheville, NC, and this happened to coincide with the official beginning of the basketball tournament. We watched basketball in our hotel room when we weren’t out and about touring the town. To honor the creation of our new family, my husband created the Memolo March Madness Pool (now in our 8^th season). Family and friends could enter their bracket picks and whoever won got the dough. I think only 5 or 6 people signed up the first year.

Recently, I had submitted an application to Kansas for their Creative Writing PhD program. Even more recently, I had received not one but TWO rejection letters from the school. It was like they were saying, “I know we rejected you in that first letter, but we wanted to be sure you understood that you’re really rejected. Thanks.”

Understandably, this caused me to feel a certain amount of ire towards Kansas. So, when we made our bracket picks, I picked Bucknell (I think they were 14 seed) to beat Kansas. My husband said something like, ‘are you sure you want to pick Bucknell?’ and I said something like ‘screw Kansas’ except more obscene and I kept my pick.

Then the night of the game came and we watched intently. I was more invested since we had the pool going, but I really was rooting against Kansas (see my earlier discussion of completely hating your rival). Kansas had made it to the second round every time since the 1980s, so you can understand why my husband questioned my judgement. It was a tight game, and Kansas was ahead at the half. But in the last seconds of the game Bucknell hit a shot and Kansas wasn’t able to return the favor, and the game ended with Bucknell winning, 64 to 63.

I cheered for Bucknell as if I’d gone to the school and donated money to the alumni fund regularly. The Bison were my heroes. Through them, I had beaten Kansas, and had exacted my revenge for their thoughtless and painful mailing error.

Needless to say, I won the pool that year based solely on that pick. I think I won $15.

Subsequently, I have picked whoever Kansas plays in the tournament (I will hate Kansas forever), but I’ve never been right since.

--Jenn Memolo--

Diminution

"When you're small, you spend your life crawling..."

--Morrissey--

Among the genetically-derived physical attributes for which folks are discriminated against, if I asked you to list the ones that most profoundly affected a person's life, you'd likely mention race or sex; maybe you'd try to throw sexual "preference" in there. Being short wouldn't even register on the radar.

But I'm a 5'6" male, and I can tell you I've been reminded of that fact all of my adult life, and anything I've achieved has been in spite of it. Whereas a taller person cuts an imposing figure and demands respect with much less effort, we more diminutive folk struggle not to be dismissed in nearly every possible way for a factor we can't control and that is ultimately of no relevance to anything other than being able to slam dunk a basketball with ease.

I'm certainly no self-hater--many who know me have described me as "confident-bordering-on-arrogant" (which, I'm sure, does me no favors--I should probably be more reticent and shamed by my shortness), and I personally see nothing wrong with my height and, in fact, would never want to be taller than I am. (Though I did take offense to the "life-sized" model of Alvin they had at the movie theatre last year to promote Alvin and The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. It was only three inches shorter than me. I have to call bullshit on the notion that I'm only three inches taller than a chipmunk.)

Yet, this has been a hard-fought war. For example, just last week I caught a co-worker muttering under his breath that the employee who works under me shouldn't bother to listen to what a little short guy tells her to do. In the past, people who probably considered themselves my friends have made light of my height, and at key and rather public moments (crowded bars, weddings, high school reunions) at length in unflattering ways, joking that my height was the reason why I relate well to small children, that I would need platform shoes or a stepping stool to do this or a booster seat to do that, or noting that I was a "funny little guy" (as a response to my cutting up with them good-naturedly).

Before I met my wife, who thankfully is a person of substance who treats this as the non-issue that it is, this no doubt affected my dating prospects. One girlfriend who professed to love me told me no matter what I did (exercised, worked out, etc.), I'd never be as much of a man as a taller guy, and that she felt more safe when she dated taller men than she did with me. In another instance when I was once set up on a blind date, my date spent the night being rude and unresponsive. Initially I didn't take it personally, because I figured mine was hardly the first blind date where the chemistry failed. I was deeply hurt and offended when it was later passed on to me that the date had disdainfully told her friend (who had dragged me out to meet her in the first place) that she was tempted to rub chalk on me while we were playing pool, so I'd look like the smurf I was as short as.

(If I hadn't gotten the memo before, in 2001 the message was driven home further. Being the lifelong comics geek that I am, it was impossible not to notice the instant transformation of that stud of the Marvel Universe Logan, aka Wolverine. Historically Logan was depicted as 5'2" and quite stocky, but in the wake of the success of Brian Singer's X-Men, and Hugh Jackman's sex symbol-creating performance of the character, Marvel thereafter portrayed Wolverine as the standard 6'1". It was stark and immediate; one month other characters towered over him, as they always had, and the next, he was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Captain America and the like. His incredible tenacity, indomitable personality, and prodigious abilities, though they are the very things that always defined the character, were simply not enough to make him seem sexy and to allow him to be taken seriously as a hero to the public-at-large. Message sent; message received. A pretty important beat for the character, that he would be underestimated by people who didn't know him, and would always prove to be more than met the eye, was tossed to make him more generic and "photogenic," and all the guys who can't and couldn't make it to 6'0" saw one of the few diminutive models of masculinity in pop culture snatched away for homogeneity's sake.)

It always strikes me as odd that it would be deemed socially unacceptable to make disparaging remarks about race if I were black or about my sex if I were a woman, but that bagging on someone for falling below the height average is perfectly ok. In each instance, I try to handle it with all the grace I can muster, but just what the proper response should be is hard to gage. (The instinctive response is to savagely wail on whomever has disrespected you, but that's nowhere near as constructive as it is cathartic.) Should you laugh along at your own body? ("Hahaha, I know, I'm short, it's funny, right?") Get confrontational and call them out? ("F-you you f-ing -f-er!") Ignore it? ("I'm sorry, did you say something?") Stoop to their level and identify some physical attribute they are likely to be sensitive about? ("Well, you have a stupid nose/tooth/ear.") (Others: "I apologize for my height; I'll get on some human growth hormone right away so I'm more acceptable and pleasing to you.") None of these really ring true. You have been placed in a situation where any reaction to or acknowledgement of the comment diminishes you. But ultimately the fact is, anyone who would dismiss you based on such a superficial attribute is probably not someone who has much to offer you, and so you should limit your contact with them if you can.

In the meanwhile, I have gained a lot from my shortness. Possibly in some effort to compensate and prove wrong the naysayers, I'm always trying to improve myself physically, be it with weights, running, or the speed bag, and even though I go through my ebbs and flows with exercise, the will to be better and the chip on my shoulder generally keeps me healthier and stronger than I would be otherwise. It's also taught me, as much as I can, to patiently tolerate bad behavior because it's not bad people, but rather simply human nature to look for reasons to exclude and dismiss others (as a method toward simplification), and as Confucius teaches, I should observe these tendencies in others (and their effects) so I can try to curb them in my own behavior. And so far as the group I'm in, I'm always looking at things from the outside, even if I'm really on the inside. I've come to identify with the underdog and the outsider in almost every situation, and even though it slows down my reaction time on some issues, it keeps me from doing anything too fucked up to anyone else, without solid reason. I'm not black, or a woman, or gay, or really any of the standard minorities you can instantly drum up, but I can pretty easily empathize with how they have been and are marginalized, dismissed, derided, and excluded.

Yeah, I've read all of the crap about how you're less likely to get raises, or be respected and admired, or be considered sexy, and all of the other stuff that men of average or greater height take for granted and I can honestly say that I don't feel slighted in the least. I have taken, and likely will continue to take a lot of guff for being short. But whether it's true or not, I tend to see myself as a scrapper, as someone who in reality can go toe-to-toe with anyone and who is perpetually challenging himself to grow more (ok, metaphorically, you jackass), and I also tend, because they are generally skewed by projections and divorced from reality, to mistrust other's perceptions of me. The confidence and sense of well being I feel about the whole issue are rock solid because they are hard-won and time-tested. At 5'6", I have a loving and fulfilling marriage to a beautiful and brilliant wife, a daughter whom I adore, a lovely home, and a career that's solid and that both challenges me and affords me a measure of security. I have creative outlets (writing, music). It's a good life. So it seems in truth, height's only an issue if you allow it to be.

Having said all that, if I ever run into Randy Newman on the street, I'll knock his goddamned teeth down his throat.