In Brooklyn, you protect what’s yours, no matter who’s trying to take it. It can be a a girl, a car, a laptop, your hat in a January breeze coming off the Narrows, your dignity.
And in Brooklyn, if you want to keep your bike, the pizza delivery guys and bike shop owners advise to use this type of chain.
But here, someone’s chained up their sadness.
Pedro left the house one day and got collided with by someone else’s cursory car.
And what do you do when you’ve lost your Pedro at the stop sign at 54th and 7th?
I know I have walked past this corner many times and this was not here. Someone perhaps was not moving past the gravity of their missing of Pedro and had to do something. Something was just not right until Pedro’s girlfriend, handball partner or father found the right way to memorialize him without a gravestone.
And now, we all - with our bags of butter, milk or beer - we have to stop. Here. And sit with Pedro’s Ghost Bike. We give pause to the “hit by a car.” We think about the date. We see the white paint crusting and cracking under the spring sunshine and we write the screenplay. Somehow, we assume this was his last bike ride. Or this bike was a routine thing he enjoyed doing or had to do for work. But really, all of it doesn’t matter.
What matters is what we’re left with of Pedro. And we think. And we feel. And we know. And we respect the tragedy of July 10, 2008 of some stranger that I probably stood in line with buying my tomatoes and half-and-half.
There’s an irrepressible movement to sadness that just won’t pass on without its proper due. Loss deserves its place in the sun. Loss needs attention. It deserves eating the whole pizza by yourself. It deserves screwing up on your taxes and your lover and overcompensating at work to keep from going home to the empty nest.
And the sadness that moves us, moves on us, inside us. As our eyes move up and down this memorial of a bike that no longer pedals a life around - whose wheels are painted shut – it is someone’s grief that runs its warm, sweaty hands against us at this impromptu wake locked up at a corner in Sunset Park.
… so dignified … and so sexy. Yes, sexy in its minimalism and stark black and white. And so scary. And so classy, this memorial. So well done. So much pride. Someone thought about it for a while. In this borough of churches, someone chose not just another gravesite that they couldn’t afford anyway. They chose against a graffiti tag or a wall mural clouded by looming condo development. Someone chose vision and permanency. Someone chose grace.
Someone sealed a nobility in defiant anonymity that stole all my breath away, punishing me with taking for granted my own breath by just rolling on.
In the moment that my dog and I stopped and stared, I felt Pedro was just sorta hanging around, crouched on a curb, smoking a cigarette, smiling secretly … softly. Me, who just sort of got stopped by his life in the middle of the sunniest, warmest day yet this spring.
Stopped by the Ghost of Sadness Unrequited. It stopped me, and it moved me to go all the way home, grab my camera and further memorialize it for you.
Pedro got jacked by Life’s Arbitrary DeSelection. Pedro moves among us no longer.
Keep your empathy electric ... and blood off your prayer shawl.
~~~
A note about the photo: Volunteers from the ultra-Orthodox Zaka rescue organization hold up a victim's bloody prayer shawl in the library of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva March 6, 2008 in Jerusalem. Eight Jewish students were killed and nine more wounded when a Palestinian gunman infiltrated the seminary and opened fire before he was shot dead by armed students. (Photo by Avi Ohayon/GPO via Getty Images)
So quickly the blog has shifted. Our sadness is tidal. So quickly, the levees can’t withstand our dwindling faith in the system, any system - and now we’re standing on the roofs of our houses looking to the government like “what’s next?!”
Or maybe I am a sucker for a hyperbolic metaphor?
In any event, the Fateful Hand of Being Crapped On is not very choosey these days.
When silver-spooned descendent of French royalty and fund manager René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet takes a boxcutter to his wrists in his comfy New York office and positions himself strategically so that he bleeds out directly into a trash can, what have we missed? After dismissing the janitors early that night, to keep from making even more of a mess of innocent people’s lives, he's worried about the carpet cleaners and placing undue stress on even more people?
If I’m a rich guy with homes, businesses, estates, families and friends in both France and New York, and I still feel hopeless when I realize I’ve been duped, what’s really missing? What’s really making me want to kill myself?
It’s not the economy. Only. It’s not the angry clients that he’s indebted to. Only. It’s something more systemic. It’s something so seemingly unanswerable that a 60-something year old, white-collared French man sees the rough-edged end of a boxcutter as his best way out.
What could be so horrible that 60 years does not provide enough perspective?
. . .
There’s more self-deaded in America.
NPR and CNN got the press release over the wires this week that our soldiers are popping themselves off at a quicker clip. And that’s the reported ones. That’s not accounting for the countless men, boys, women, daughters that perhaps devise a more honorable Killed In Action scenario for ending their lives. Instead of inflicting their spouses and parents with a relentless horror stuck in their brains, they leave them with an Arlington burial and medal.
In 2008, 128 soldiers are reported to have taken their lives. This amount is higher than that of the whole of civilian America. Army’s score: 20.2 suicided per 100,000. Civilian America: 19.5 suicided per 100,000. I’m no mathematician – but I’m thinking the Army’s looking at some faster-moving percentages than us regular folks looking down the barrel of a gun off-the-clock.
So The Army, a.k.a. The Government is introducing some suicide prevention tactics. Because we Americans don’t conduct suicide missions. We Americans are not terrorists. No no, that’s the other guys. No no, we keep our suicides personal, not ideological. No no, seriously. That's the other guys.
Battlemind. It’s called Battlemind - the program that’s the prescription to save its soldiers from themselves in response to low recruitment numbers.
How about this? GetOuttaThere. That’s another program I’ve heard of that might stop the hemorrhaging of good men being pushed too far.
. . .
Then there’s always someone being born to fill the hole of another loss. At the same time, someone’s putting a gun to their head or swallowing Drano, someone else in America is quietly financing the cloning their previous dog.
Go ahead, judge them. We’re all judging them. The only one not judging them is Leona Helmsley because she’s hoping the millionaire dog that survived her will sign off on having her cloned so that she can come back and continue being a bitch.
When Al Roker asks why she sold her jewelry to clone a dog at the price tag of $150K, Nina Otto so articulately states with glassy-eyed conviction, “Ummm, you know, I can always have jewelry. I actually can always have jewelry if I wanted it. I wanted him, if it was going to be … to be part of something … that I gave to make him happen.”
Ah. I see now. … no, no, no, I don’t.
While she's stroking her furry petri-dish fantasy of love and devotion, this guy and his wife get laid off from his tech job with Kaiser Permenente in Southern California –
- so all the family has to die.
His two sets of twins, a daughter and a wife. And himself.
“Is there no hope for a widow’s son?” said the fatherless son in his suicide note. All those children were not enough to pad the gap between father and son. He fell in and took everyone with him.
Kaiser Permenente should not be implicated. Poor Kaiser Permenente – they’re just trying to break records delivering ethically implicated births to full term. They’re just trying to be a health care organization in America. “Don’t blame the economy [for familicide],” says forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Poor Kaiser Permenente - just providing healthcare to good hard-working families. (just not jobs)
Meanwhile, Kaiser Permenante holds a press conference about the single mother who gave birth to a much-maligned EIGHT MORE BABIES after a prior litter of 6.
How deep is the hole in her heart that she has to feed it with infertility drugs and death-defying pregnancies? And with no mention of a father or husband or lover, no less. How desperate is Kaiser Permenente’s board of trustees to steal ahead in the race to control nature to take on this single mother’s request for more more more more more more? How did any doctor look this woman in the face and let her lay down on the table and pump her full of too many children that, I DON'T KNOW, she may be too emotionally needy to raise? Did any doctor consult with his own set of ethics and personal empathy? ANY?
While this woman breeds like spiders with anti-divine intervention, Kaiser Permenente’s doctors and nurses pose for the perfunctory self-congratulatory press photos. (The hospital presumably took this themselves to hand out to the press – there’s no photographer listed.)
So while a dog is cloned and a herd of children circles up, a soldier, a father and a financier find themselves at the end of their rope.
What’s that phrase – when God closes a door, he opens a window?
Yeh, a window to jump out of.
Keep your ears open and your empathy electric. If you’re worried about things this year, there’s someone around you that’s already bought the farm and has convinced him or herself that no one’s going to miss them when they’re gone.
Keep your empathy electric. We need you awake. This is not a M. Night Shyamalan script we're in.
This is a trend. Killing yourself has become the new black.
And there’s nothing standing in its way besides our yet-to-be-found ability to cling to each other – all 750,000 of us standing in line at the Unemployment Office.
"Hi, I'm from Starbucks." "Citibank, here." "Lehman Bros., yo." "Over here, AIG and Starbucks - yeh, I lost them both at the same time." "Ford." "Hey, yo, I'm here from a Long Island City dealership, c'mere, man, shake my hand!" "Yo, I was laid off from a small business you never heard of." "Red Lobster - my boss just got all nervous for no reason and got rid of 6 of us today. We were freaking slammed yesterday and now today, he lost it. I'm a cook."
How much worse does it have to get until we realize that each of us are alone, yes, and so therefore, we are not?
How much worse does it have to get, President Obama? You keep warning us that the darkest is coming before we get our dawn.
What’s it going to take before someone starts telling us to come out of our houses of terror and take the hand of someone else?
What’s it going to take?
What’s it going to take to spread the wealth? Are we really going to call it socialism if it saves our lives? If it brings us together for a little stop gap on the livelihood hemorrhaging? This is not Che, this isn't Red Square, this isn't Stalin, Kant, Nietzche or even Nader. This is your neighborhood crumbling.
Mark my words: Change will come in the spring. That’s when all the guns come out. People get a little Vitamin D under their belts and hopelessness gets a little energy and the shootings will start. Remember that, right now, we’re only in the Winter of Our Discontent.
12:18 pm, 2.26.93: The Truck Bombing at the World Trade Center 12:07 pm, 4.19.93: The ATF Siege on the Branch Dividian Compound in Waco, Texas 9:02 am, 4.19.95: The Truck Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City 11:19 am, 4.20.99: The Columbine Shootings in Littleton, Colorado 7:15 am, 4.16.07: Virginia Tech massacre
These were people who are operating at a Loss, Barely Getting By in the Emotional Red, Sucking Whatever Love They Could Off the Familial Lack, Down with the Not-In-My-BackYard Lack of Resource. These are people like the cloning couple and the breeding mother and the killing father.
It’s not about the economy, that’s right. But it is about our own internal resource of well-being that is just not there for us to lean on right now.
And it ain’t over till the Fat Cats stop feeding. And we all get off the roofs of our houses and start swimming.
Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, This is the News of the First Monday of 2009:
Bush Sr. is on Fox News promoting his other son for president.
Did someone lose the pruning shears at the White House?
I know some rabid Democrats that are already up this morning at 530am with their various intoxicants. I know some Democrats that are already losing faith and hope and whatever else happens when your vote wins. I know some Republicans that aren't necessarily relieved to see something like this.
And I know some recently laid-off journalists and comedy writers that are breathing a sigh of relief and billing right now for Monday's assignments and jokes.
What the Republicans know about the Democrats and Independents and various otherly titled offenders is that this emailed link will spin the wheels off of some of the best internet providers. What the Right knows about the Left is that there is a traditionally hysterical, terrified, scared and flagging demographic to feed on. Just like the Left and the Media (they're not the same) fed on that woman standing up in a McCain rally and saying Obama was a Muslim, so too will the Left feed on this.
And the Right can relax for a couple of weeks as the carbon footprint of the Bush Family quietly widens.
~~~
The video, naturally, was found at www.huffingtonpost.com.
The photos, found at Getty Images, are of the triumvirate godhead boating in August 2007, and the Bush family gathered on December 25, 2008, at the White House.
There are scientists holding their breaths, crossing their fingers, assuring their families that in 50 days, they’ll still be here, feet firmly planted on the ground.
And there are bankers in New York and London contemplating the gravity of their actions, their choices, their workaday assumptions.
This is a black hole that we’re already in. Chayya felt it a little more than the rest of us did/do. Some people just feel drawn to a black hole’s gravity more than the rest of us. Some people find the Possibility of Things teeming with such horror that it’s easier to swallow poison.
There’s a lot of Possibility in the air these days – an election year, an Iran, and Iraq War, Russia’s restless, the oil, the air, the texting, the texting, the texting …
And a few coincidental days after that Collider got bumping, the US financial markets started falling apart. We can’t see that happening, but we hear about it. Most of us have no idea how it’s going to affect us, but nor did we understand how the blips and bleeps of the digital world of information would change us either. Nothing you can see, but you know you’re different.
A symptom of what’s shaking underground in Geneva? The smell of a Tower of Babel Society?
There’s dark matter out there/in here/sitting next to you and yet …
We Americans feel stronger now. So far away from the 9/11 attacks, even now, with our losing our homes and pricey tomatoes and gallons of milk poking holes in our savings, we still feel stronger. We see the Lehman employees hitting the road with their bankers boxes full of cubicle contents and personal effects and we think, “Eh, they have a savings, they’re loaded. They don’t affect my rent … all their monolopolizing Excel spreadsheets – nope, nothing to do with me.”
And the scientists with their particle-smashing machines and a new generation of black hole believers…
Nothing to do with me.
But there’s me … and there’s Chayya Lal. There’s some future we’re sensing here. And it’s terrible … terrible in the old Latin way.
And there’s this guy looking down from his Lehman office.
This office that was bought for $650 million after the World Trade Center office went down in less than an hour. This office that gave its employees a feeling of surety … without the ‘S.E.C.’
And as these people crowd down below looking up at him -
New Yorkers look up when the Terrible starts raining down. They know that his life’s collapse today will be the fallout that they’ll feel for days to come. Remotely, directly, laterally. Not sure how, not sure when, but their eyes are cursed with a certain particle-smashing knowledge that Things ARE NOT Okay.
I leaned over the shoulder of a young guy reading the newspaper on the morning train, and I saw this small article on an Indian girl who took control of her chaos before it spread beyond control. I leaned over the shoulder of a guy I’ll never see again and felt a girl’s fear 28 hours away from me. I couldn’t look away.
And all I felt was chaos.
Maybe she didn’t want to feel it happen – the world colliding, the world smashing. Was too smart or too weak to watch the universe expand in its complex ways and to be a part of it.
Maybe I’m too dumb, too overeducated, too isolated and too weak, too spiritually limited, too terrestrially contained, too voyeuristically driven, too LITTLE to off myself too. Maybe I’m just too stunned standing in the light of all of the dilemmas of world of + and -. Maybe I’m just lazy and scared and full of fear and I’m scared of dying at my own hand. Maybe I want to give that baton to the Laws of Physics and Averages.
But I’m sad she’s gone. Particle-smashing is not so scary if you’re just willing to fall apart a little. But maybe if she fell apart, she’d fall into a black hole of never landing and she’d see you or me clinging to the walls and say, “Oh, shit! Really?”
I don’t know. Maybe her family was neglecting her and her choices as a teenage girl sucked ass. Maybe someone took advantage of her. Maybe her secrets… maybe she’s full of holes herself and that was just enough.
But what happens to her body – where do her particles go, once her soul has left? Is she a more manageable form of matter now? In two crowded countries, suicide’s becoming the population control.
These self-killed people – they’re still here, somewhere, somehow. Not haunting, but pulsing on the wind, living in the water, beatboxing from the morgue. Just changing the form of matter. Never leaving. Never not staying. I refuse to think people just die (with the exception of my own father). I refuse to think that people are garbage and just thrown away, their impact ceasing. That garbage is in a landfill turning into something else. A methane stroking your skin in the fall breeze.
Think twice about Chayya and particle smashing and your shot friends and your hung sisters. The planet is recycling us, not letting us go, sloughing off bits of ourselves into its own shower. We’re never clean. Never new. Forget it.
. . . . . .
Where is Chayya Lal now?
Has she become part of the deepening black hole of the rest of us remaining?
What she feared about the end of the world, she took control of. In Science’s poetic way to control its world, there is the possibility that what collapses us, recreates us.
:recreate :recreate :recreate :recreate
. . . . . .
… … … She can’t be just gone.
And her sadness and fears are not over. She just passed them on to me.
"Listen to the depressed people who have a feeling something’s bad in the air because often it is. The idea that we repress our unhappiness rather than listen to it is just as dysfunctional psychically as it is physically. If your leg is broken, the pain is there for a reason. You don’t just take morphine, you reset the leg. …
To be conscious at this point in human history is to be sad. "
She heard the verdict. 50 shots that killed fiance Sean Bell on the morning before his wedding. 3 cops. No charges.
50 shots. 50 shots. 50 shots.
Getty Images' photographer didn't bother to get her name, but she heard that three New York cops were found not guilty on all charges of the shooting death of Sean Bell - and this is the day she's having.
50.
Who Else is Sad ...?
HE is.
I'm betting this cop's sad he didn't ask for this day off like maybe he thought about doing.
50 shots. 50? Really? 50?!
Who Else ...?
THESE GUYSwere.
They were sad at some point in the day when some photographer wasn't around to witness it. Maybe privately. Maybe at work when they received an email blast. Maybe in passing at the foot of the steps of City Hall. Maybe years before at a completely different verdict, a different Sean Bell, another time.
But Sadness, when it's just bored with being sad, co-opts into Anger. And Action. And Unity.
And when the day passes, that Sadness ends up looking like this - the face of a group of people who KNOW that this verdict is not about race. Race is too easy. Race is not vogue anymore.
THIS VERDICT IS ABOUT POWER.
Power ... power is harder, more elusive, more, actually, to the point. It's about having too little and too much and WHAT WOULD YOU DO when you have too much
Met a German guy at a karaoke bar. Dimples. Not the German guy. The bar was named Dimples.
He sat next to me at this celeb-fave bar in Burbank. Burbank, California.
He leaned over my arm and pointed to #135 in the song list book.
"Neil Diamond, yah? 'Forever in Blue Jeans'? Yah?"
I looked up into the brightly squinted blue eyes of who I would come to know later as Dennis.
Dennis Dennis Full of Shame
That’s what I call him now.
In a German accent and stilted laugh, we took turns picking out songs for each other that we’d never sing. We threatened each other with Phoebe Snow songs, pitched our own bravado with Lynard Skynard trivia, and high-fived when we both saw Neil Young’s’ “Old Man” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at the same time.
Dennis Dennis Full of Shame. I knew you in 4 songs or less.
"So your accent?"
He said he’s here because he likes the weather and is enjoying American culture. I told him he was cute. He countered with a shy smile and started picking at the label on his beer.
"I’m strange though."
How strange?
"Trust me. Strange. I think these dark thoughts."
"Well, you are German."
And he laughed the bright and innocent laugh of a shy boy who just got poked in the ribs by the loud, laughing girl in the class that he’s been wondering about.
It was so soon, so inappropriate – this conversation. The place, this barstool, the friend I came with and was ignoring because the cute and warm German guy with the dark thoughts is talking to me. I trust him. He’s coughed up something he’s ashamed of already. He’s warning me, testing me. Can she handle me/it/that/them? Can anyone?
So he’s taking himself too seriously too soon.
"What kind of music do you like?" I cut the moment a different way.
He said "dark, mostly electronica."
And I saw him in the paned shadows of moonlight invading his white, starkly decorated Ikea apartment. I saw him standing staring into his opened closet full of darkness and things that only he could see, things he showed no one because no one’s capable of keeping their retinas from detaching in the light of such easy and simple truths that only exist in the otherwise palatable human heart.
I loved him harder and longer and more passionately than any woman, even his mother, could in that one moment. All because he hung his head telling me about the music he loved.
"I’m strange that way."
"How strange? What’s strange?"
"Ask my friends. They’ll tell ya."
I did. And they didn’t. They were drunk. They laughed at me, and they laughed at him. They laughed at him for talking to the girl that would ask why he was strange.
The more I pressed, the more nervous he got. With an empty beer bottle in front of both of us, he crossed his arms and held himself at the bar.
"I think darkly."
"So do I," I coughed up.
He shook his head. "No, I believe in dead people."
And I felt my first wave of hot hazard. Was it because I was stuck in an unscripted M. Night Shymalan script? Was it because he wasn’t at all joking? Was it because he was German, and he would never have thrown that kind of joke around? For any number of reasons?
Hell, I talk to dead people. Every day, at work, at the gas station. Dead people, they're everywhere these days ...
"Do you talk to these people?"
He looked up at me and nodded softly. The lousy drunk karaokers squealed in the background. This freckle-faced, red-headed wide square face looked so odd shielding this shame. He was so bright and sunny on the outside.
"That’s cool."
…
He continued to hold himself tighter. His eyes began to dart ruthlessly around the bar. He feigned a distracted interested in the Lohan-alikes singing “Bloody Sunday” at the mic.
"So are those people – are they evil?" This was a test question.
"No." Simply, no.
"You’ve lost people in your life? That you’ve loved."
That soft nod again. His eyes wide open with feeling and 'is it okay?' A black hole of a pain so seductive, elusive and gorgeous in its simplicity and rarity.
I touched him on the arm. Any words would scare him away. But I wanted him to feel me, in some way, and maybe some spark of my infinite sadness scraping against his conversation with dead people would relieve him, and he’d order another beer, and we’d share more laughs and sorrows at this karaoke bar in Burbank. Burbank, California.
He drew himself away, motioned to his pals he was ready to leave. They gathered all their girls for the evening, packed them up and headed towards the door. I gave him my email because I wanted to stay in touch, send him my little book of pain when I got around to writing it, let him know he’s not alone in the dark. I shook his hand to pass my email to him.
It fell to the ground. Whatever love I had, whatever you want to call it, was laying on the grimy, sticky karaoke bar. He had criminalized my concern, my unrequited concern, by dropping it carelessly. And all of a sudden we both were in this accessory moment.
Dennis Dennis Full of Shame was danger to me now, as I was to him. I loved him until he saw it. I felt him until he felt him. I lost him just when he started to land. Something … something scared him. Was it me?
That night, Dennis Dennis Full of Shame walked out the door, into the night. He left me alone in that stupid bar in Burbank. Burbank, California.
Nancy is, too. Edward, maybe so, in a different way than Nancy, in a different way than Cheryl. But Cheryl … Cheryl is the one whose name appears in all the eulogized newspaper articles. She’s taking the phonecalls, she’s making quotes. She’s bearing the responsibility of the end.
This week, the children of Dr. Chaos lost their father.
We will never know if Cheryl and he had a good relationship or not. Dads and Daughters … opposing ends of the familial spectrum in age, in sex, in viewpoints of the world.
And yet, both define each other’s intake of all things. A daughter’s sense of protection, stillness and strength come from her father. A daughter’s sense of humor comes in her father’s ability to present a stable or instable world for her. A dad’s understanding and sense of beauty, delicacy, place in society and social grace comes from his daughter’s genetic predisposition to care about such petty things. And a dad’s fragility is held tight in the soft palm of his daughter’s happiness.
A scientist’s daughter? A Daughter of Dr. Chaos? Well, one can only speculate what twists and turns their relationship have taken in the storm of familial weather patterns.
But since Tuesday, April 16, I’ve wondered about her. Cheryl. She’s the only one interviewed about the loss of the man at chaos' horizon. I’m assuming she’s the one calling the mortuary, calling the lawyers, receiving perfunctory notes of condolence – some polite, some political, some passionate – from his colleagues, protégés and adversaries. She’s survived him and his patterns, like Nancy and Edward, but she’s the one the scribes are quoting in the face of the end of her own particular chaos.
Eh, chaos never ends, really - it just begins again. But the man who started explaining that cycle to us - that Brazilian butterfly’s flap provoking a Texas tornado - is gone. His brain, his hope, his spirit, his future discoveries and philosophies, his unending quest to contain and predict the unpredictable – it’s gone. With the finite nature of this human constraint, there’s only irony left in this man’s disappearing act. Will he be buried? Will he be cremated? Will his atoms, protons, dormant viruses, cells be tossed into the winds of today, only to bring about the stolid knowing of one young scientist in 25 years that explains why we need to make sense out of chaos? Will his cells find a way to describe our need to storytell, mythologize and theologize the meaning in the meaningless? In my mind, there’s just no sense / no order / only chaos in losing a man who set into motion a path of conviction that could only serve to bring us to a global resolve of change. Sure, there are his students and followers. But the man is gone.
What’s left is his residue. What Cheryl’s left with … what damage, what growth patterns, what papers books and things left unsaid and world-changing things written. She and her siblings are the ones cleaning up after his tornado blew through their hallways, bedroom, late-night kitchen snacks or studies. And we're all left with a choice of carrying on for him or because of him.
A daughter’s loss of dad is a messy thing. I’m sure her middle-aged tears don’t make sense to her, if she indeed does cry for him. My own sadness for this NPR report that stopped me in my tracks - doesn't make sense to me, either. But then again, a complicated mourning of a lost relationship with a man driven by something inexplicable – that I know. And that’s probably the reason I’ve felt for their family this week, more than perhaps a stranger should.
The loss of Father Chaos. Creationists won’t miss him. Farmers won’t, either - they’ve been predicting weather for centuries – nothing new under their sun that he wrote papers about. His Ivy League buddies might. Meterologists will. Science won’t because he’s not vogue anymore.
But Cheryl will, good relationship or bad. When the man who explained chaos to you as a child dies, all sense in the world goes with him.
And as I write this, at 12:20pm on Sunday, April 20, 2008, the family, the followers and the others prepare to gather for the memorial service in Cambridge, Mass., for a man that prompted us as well to make some sense of the world for a brief time in the 20th century. As the weather changes, a traditional storm’s intensity compounds, and the ice caps melt into our souls’ histories, we are left with Chaos’ daughter, Complexity.
... it just never ends ...
For all daughters who have lost their fathers to science, or to love mis-expressed, or to tragedy, or to nature. This is for them …
~~~
Photo is Argentina's Gerogina Bardach during the women's 200m butterfly qualifiers of the South American Aquatics Championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on March 14, 2008. Courtesy of MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images.
What will they do in the hole of this loss? What will our foreign policy of the new administration see as opportunity in her absence?
What - ? How - ? Why - ?
Some of America is sad, too. What if – Hillary? What if – Barack? For that matter, what if – Bush? What if – Condoleeza? We have extremists, too – let’s not forget. If they take away the players of our voice, what will happen to us?
In memoriam of a woman who stood up for the voiceless. In memoriam for a woman who was shot in the neck, just to make sure she was silenced.
i am sad. i am not ashamed of it, because it is true. i am not held hostage by it, because it is only part of who i am. i will protect, indulge and defend my sadness when it occurs or when it comes under attack. I will also defend the right of others to be sad. terror is any church, school, family, lover or boss that tells you there is only pain in living and you can only be happy when you're dead. screw that. i am happier being sad than dead. i have loved and i have lossed. the love and loss that i have will never die. it will only incorporate. the loss i have sustained, survived and am living will never die. it will only incorporate. i will live and love and lose in my own damn way until the day i inflict the ultimate loss onto those i have loved. then will my love and loss be someone else's to incorporate. but my sadness will never end. nor will my happiness ever cease. these are mine. SADNESS is MINE.
I'm a writer / producer of TV, new media and theatre. I have had and have inflicted loss. I have had good days and better days exploding with joy. I see and hear sadness in everything and everywhere I go, and I don't know why, but I consider it a blessing and a curse, but never is it a shame. I live in and am in love with Brooklyn, New York.
