The Surrender

Lately I've been taking a lot of comfort in the experiences of people who have been declared medically dead. The universal report: a white light, a whooshing tunnel, a feeling of immense peace and relief. The knowledge that all that you love remains intact and you will be reunited. A hallucination, one that some of us have come close to having while fully alive, usually after taking a ton of drugs.

Whether or not this ultimate fulfillment of our deepest wishes is just the effect of our neurotransmitters putting on one last show before they shut down, the fact that it's our mind's best possible show, and it comes on right when we need it most, makes me feel, frankly, a lot more optimistic about dying. I spend a lot of time thinking about how I would survive or not survive various deadly situations -- violence, natural disaster, plane crash -- I spend a lot of time bargaining with rapists in my head, picturing myself pinned beneath rubble or plummeting to my death. What do I want my loved ones to know? That I died happy, not terrified or in pain, that I loved them very much, that I knew at the end that it was all going to be all right. I had an endoscopy about two years ago, and when they put the anesthesia in the IV and I felt the heat of it hit my veins, I panicked, and said, "Tell my husband I love him." I lost consciousness to the sound of the nurse laughing.

When I was twenty, I was suddenly seized by the idea that everybody alive at that moment would be dead soon, all of us, everybody, none of us would survive, and I almost couldn't walk down the street without screaming, without exhorting my fellow humans to fight this thing. Now I feel like, you know what, in a zombie apocalypse, I'm not joining the scrappy band of survivors; I'm getting bit and getting it over with. 

The Conversion

I was in the bathroom of an airplane, crying. The Valium had not kicked in, would not kick in, because I'd been stubborn and taken it too late, and once I've started to panic, no pill in the world can fix me. I knew my doom, and I knew it was me, my palpitations and aneurisms, the excruciating awareness of being alive, fragile, terrified, a statistical improbability on an indifferent rock in an unknowable universe. My heart fighting through my chest. Dying of fright. Dying of mortification, of regret, such regret! Such a short, stupid life, and wasted! Wasted on things like watching TV and holding grudges when the only thing in life, the single only thing in life that matters is being good and giving love, and why have I not devoted myself to this? Why do I not apply myself, every second of every day, to that which is most profound to me? And how can I not die, how can I stand to live with myself, knowing as I do that as soon as I get off this airplane I will stride through the airport and get in a taxi and forget this? 

On god in Have You Found Her

This summer, the copyeditor sent back the finished manuscript for the book. On every other page, she'd written three short insistent blue lines below the first g in every instance of the word god, which I use incessantly ("Oh god," I said to Bill). God is supposed to be capitalized, because it's, you know, That Guy. But that's not the god I meant. I meant the abstract one, the absent one; your own personal god, whatever ideal you fear and hold dear. I mean all of the notions of all of the gods anyone's ever had. I meant the thing people were trying to describe when they came up with God. I meant Zeus; I meant the statue with the head and legs cut off. "Oh, my cat's ass," is what I meant. I hadn't even realized that I'd left it uncapitalized; I thought that's how you spelled it. Turns out my god is a common noun. I put stet next to the blue lines and they let it stet. Turns out my god is an idea.

Money, meet mouth.

Would you like to read some bad news about Darfur?

Well, tough shit, because there isn't any goddamn good news coming out of there.

Hey, the African Union's going home in a few weeks, and about a million more people are going to be brutally, spectacularly murdered!

Which means I am going to have to get off my ass and go wave a sign in Central Park on Sunday, September 17, from 2-5 pm at the East Meadow (enter at 90th Street and Fifth Avenue).

My sign's going to say, "SAVE GWYNETH PALTROW." Because, you know, she's African too!

Not Likin' It

Nope. Not liking this Karr guy in the Jon-Benet murder. Come on, guys; you're saying it yourself -- just because someone confesses, doesn't mean he's guilty. This guy's a nutburger, for sure, a pedophile who seems to want to be punished somehow (okay! or should we leave that to his victims?), but we all know who fucking killed Jon-Benet Ramsey:

JOHN AND PATSY RAMSEY.

Now, if law enforcement is trying to smoke out old Johnny Ramsey somehow, let him think he's safe so he can start bragging about the murder, or slipping somehow, then by all means -- lock up the pedophile! Great! That serves, like, eight of my agendas at once! But I'm not going to be happy until John Ramsey breaks down in tears on national televison and admits what they did. I'm only sorry Patsy died before she could do it; I've half a mind to dig up her maggoty corpse and kick it around the block until it confesses.*

Nope, they're not pinning it on some vagrant, like they did for Chandra Levy (tell me that wasn't, like, a textbook move from TV and movies -- get some crazy guy to take the fall; what the hell, he's got a record). I may not be a cop, but I play one from my sofa while watching TV, and I'ma tell you now, my professional cop-show-watching instincts tell me this confession's not gonna stand.

(* Ooh, I'm tough! When it comes to fighting dead people.)

Where I stand on it, these days.

The same white guy with the club foot and the whiny voice who I've seen for years, sleeping in the doorway of the Botox clinic down the block, comes up to me and Bill. "Spare some change for a homeless vet," he whines, like, Come on, already, fucking yuppies, and give me some change.

"Sorry, man."

He sucks his teeth and turns in disgust. "Would you please spare some change for a homeless vet," he whines at another passerby.

The woman on the corner of Fourteenth and Fifth, the one wrapped in a khaki tarp, the one who lays on the sidewalk covered in grime, shaking, like Tawana Brawley in her garbage bag. She's a tough case. She's only there when the United Homeless Organization woman isn't there on the same corner, the superduper chipper woman who calls me Pretty Hair whenever I donate. "Hi, Pretty Hair, god bless, have a good day!" The woman in the tarp looks awful -- you know how I'm always saying, "It's not Darfur?" This woman looks like she got dropped in the street directly from fucking Darfur. It's that bad.

Of course, then I see her from my window one morning, with a guy, a can collector, they're ducking under the scaffolding across the street, looking around for cops. They do...whatever their drug is. This is how it works -- the women panhandle, the men score. It's depressing.

Oh, these are the people in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood, in your neigh-bor-hood...

I talk to the UHO woman every now and again, she gives me the state of the union. She tells me about a fight she had with one of her "regulars." Guy used to give her a quarter every morning, then she commented on his dandruff, now he's angry at her. Her "regulars" -- like she's a vendor, providing him a service. Which she is. She is our neighborhood homeless person, the ombudsman for the rest of the crowd, the faceless lumps on the sidewalk underneath cardboard tents. You give her money, it goes to homeless people. What happens to it from there, you don't know.

The UHO does good, in my mind. It looks to me, through observation of the six or seven tables in my immediate area, that chronically homeless people turn to them, where they won't turn to other social services. At the same time, the UHO tables are fucking ubiquitous, and every single one of the collectors hassles you every single time you do not put a coin in the bucket.

Just one penny! Just one!

And everybody goes, la la la la la la la. Some people pat their pockets as they pass, like, checking for change, got none handy, too late now, oh well. I don't blame them. You don't want to pay people to be poor, and on drugs, like that's their job. Somebody's got to be poor and on drugs, and it's not going to be me.

I hardly sound like the bleeding heart liberal I profess to be, do I? It's not like people choose mental illness and chronic addiction. God, the whiny guy's voice is just so tired, he's like, I just want to go home and get high, man, come on. You're gonna have a bottle of wine later, I just want mine.

I'm not even volunteering right now. It's not official, but I'll make it official; I can't have it both ways. I can't show up when I want and not when I don't, that's not how it works. Volunteering is not supposed to be a photo op, or material for a column, and I don't want it to be.

I hope that, when I miss it enough, I'll go back.

In the meantime, I try to see the girls in the women on the street, to remember that this was where they started. The UHO woman, she could have lived with me back in 1984; so could the woman in the tarp. They are my age, though they look twenty years older; they just didn't have parents with money to run home to. I did. Therefore, these days, I get to do my drugs indoors, and they don't.

Save Christine. Please. (If you can.)

I am well overdue in reposting this information, which has been forwarded to me by the very goodly Florence Love Yoo, in her ongoing campaign to help save the life of Christine Pechara. Christine is a Filipina-American filmmaker who's suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and she needs a blood marrow transplant, or she will die. If you are of Filipino descent, and a US citizen, you can send for a free, painless swab test to test your compatibility with others and add yourself to the national marrow donor program registry.

As a pasty Jew, I'm unable to do much more than post this, and fret. But if you can do more, you might be able to save a nice lady's life.

Thanks, swabbies.

Mommy, tell me about the war.

Saw two people the other day, a grey-haired woman and man, standing in front of the arch at Washington Square, holding a banner: NO MORE WAR IN IRAQ. They weren't shouting anything, they were just standing there in the cold, heads high, with looks of contemplative resignation, holding the banner between them. And I felt nostalgic, almost, or sentimental; it was like being reminded of an old song from a few years ago, like hearing OutKast again or something -- oh right, yeah, I was really into that, before it got played into the ground. NO WAR IN IRAQ.

I remember that banner. We were carrying that banner, back in 2003. We schlepped our homemade signs all over town, walking down streets flooded with our friends and neighbors, including the eighty-three year old woman who lives next door, who stopped us in the hallway for ten minutes to tell us how disgusted she was with our government. "I tell you," she said, "I have seen many, many presidents. Nixon was not this bad. These people are the worst of the worst."

And everybody agreed -- all of us here in New York did, anyway. This was not the time to go into another Arab country and start killing people. Jesus! How stupid did you have to be? But all our yelling and marching and emailing and petition signing was for naught. The war started, the bombs dropped, and since it seemed that there was nothing we could do to stop it, we accepted it.

We accepted it. And every day, there were roadside bombs, and firefights, and helicopters down, and people dead. And people said, Well, we had to get rid of Saddam anyway, you didn't want Saddam there, did you? And then other people said, There were no WMDs, they wanted to invade Iraq back in 02, look at the Downing Street memo. But if you weren't watching all the Sunday morning news analysis and reading several of the world's international papers on a daily basis, you were stupid and your opinion didn't matter, so you shut up about it eventually. At least I did.

Yesterday we stopped next door to see if our neighbor, now eighty-five, needed us to get her anything in the blizzard. "Oh no, my dears," she thanked us. "You know, this isn't even the worst blizzard I've ever been through here in New York. The worst one was the winter of 1947, and Hal was just back from overseas, and Miriam was just six months old, and we were living out in Sunnyside, Queens..."

She pulled her bathrobe a little tighter, remembering the cold. "Twenty seven inches of snow. It was so cold! And you couldn't get any heat, the heating oil rations were all gone, and we didn't have a telephone at the time -- you know it was hard to get a telephone after the war, you had to wait for weeks and months. Everything was in short supply back then; you had to make do. We had six blankets on the baby, she was wrapped in layers 'til we could barely see her little face! Oh, we froze for nearly a week before we could get any oil."

This is what she remembers of old wars -- drafts and droughts, rations and deprivation. But this war, this blizzard, she is warm inside her well-heated apartment. None of us over here in the US are going without oil for this one.

So what will I tell my much younger neighbors, when I'm eighty-five years old and it snows like a motherfuck, and they come by to see if I need toilet paper or bananas -- what will I say? "You know, it snowed like this back in 2006, but we'd been at war for almost three years by then, and it didn't seem as important anymore."

Dick Cheney shot a guy!

Because sending hundreds of thousands of people overseas to do it for him wasn't enough.

If I was Bush, I wouldn't go "hunting" with Cheney any time soon. I wouldn't let that crazy fuck get next to a bottle opener. His usual homicidal frenzy has escalated into pure blood lust, he's about twelve days from going zombie and eating somebody's neck. It's definitely time for the tranq dart.

Current Events

Thank you, inspiring commenters, for your political and cultural opinions. You have explicitly proven that there are in fact other people on the planet besides myself, and that these other people are worth paying attention to. Therefore! I am dragging myself out of my apathy/atrophy, and endeavoring to give a shit about world events again. Despite the fact that we're all fucking doomed. Doomed!

(And...not to take anything away from the world events, which I'll get to in a minute, by posting helpful links along with my insightful and profane commentary, but...we're doomed, right? It sort of all adds up to we're fucked, doesn't it? And by "we" I don't mean "the Democrats" [versus the Republicans] or the "the good, smart people" [versus the violent sociopaths], I mean "humans." Versus OURSELVES. Look at war, and environmental degradation -- those two pervasive trends alone forecast the inevitable DEATH OF THE SPECIES -- and that's before you heap on the racism and the sexual violence and the bad fashion and all the other indicators of the DECLINE OF HUMANITY...

[Is this an age-related thing, do you think? Have I reached a point in my life where I am 100 percent undoubtably not a kid anymore, positively and certifiably not getting any younger, and so now I'm freaking out about my own eventual death? Because it's sooooo like me to assume that it's not just me that will inevitably decay, but the whole world along with me. It's like, I'd rather think that history will barely outlive me, that we'll all be gone in two generations anyway, that I won't miss too much when I go, that I'll have managed to squeak in just as the door was shutting, that I got my shot at life on this planet in the final minutes of its possibility. Grandiose, right? Copernican, even. Very Erlbaumian.

WHY AM I TALKING ABOUT MYSELF AGAIN WHEN I AM TRYING TO TALK ABOUT THE NEWS?]

See, this is the problem, this overwhelming sense of futility. People are getting blown up around the world, and I can't even put up a link to Yahoo News about it. Because what the hell is a link going to do? Prove that I read the news? So does everyone I know! And I do not have any particularly novel or helpful analysis of the international situation. I can not tell you what we should do or not do in Iraq, and why. I think we should probably bail the hell out, but I do not know, because it is not my job to know, under the division of labor made necessary by the complex, capitalistic society in which we live; however, I am professionally authorized to make fun of people, cast prurient speculation on the internal monologues of others, and devise elaborate similes and metaphors involving scatalogical or gynecological terms most usually of interest to twelve-year-olds. And I'm going back to the shelter to make some goddamn beads soon, all right? Isn't any of that politically useful?)

Anyway, some stuff I read this morning:

Good news:

New chick chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany -- she says she's going to stay out of Iraq but still try to court the US. Chirac kisses her hand -- he never did that to Schroder! -- but will she wear a headscarf if she goes to the Middle East?

Wacky Iraqi news:

We might have on purpose accidentally bombed the Al Jazeera network! Really? Deliberately? I saw Control Room; I was hoping maybe it could have been a mistake.

"Oh, shit, dude, it was Al Qaeda we were supposed to blow up!"
"Al Qaeda, Al Jazeera...whatever, dude -- if it's an 'Al,' we're against it."

Wacko Jacko news:

"The Jews do it on purpose...they're like leeches..."

The local news:

Fuggin' cold out.

That's all I got.