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lucky
The long view doesn’t have to lead you to nihilism. It can also lead you to gratitude, to the understanding that your individual existence is the result of a near-impossible, billions of years, winning streak. Consider: Every woman has seven million eggs. Every ejaculation 100 million sperm. You had to win two lotteries to be born. Your two parents had to win four lotteries and your four grandparents eight lotteries and so on, going back 100,000 years. And then millions of years of hominids, and millions more of apes, and billions of years of whatever life forms we were before that. And that’s just to be conceived. All our ancestors had to make it to birth, and then avoid all the perils of life– predators, …
god is not a partisan
Remember Nick Berg? He was an American captured in Iraq by Islamic militants. They cut off his head and posted a video of it online. What would I say if I were him, with the cameras on me, about to die? Putting aside that I would not be allowed to ad-lib, and that even if I were, I would stammer and cry and beg for my life. Putting aside that my heart would be hurling itself against my chest, pounding in my ears and I would be too afraid to think. I would say: Don’t let what is about to happen make you become them. Thinking about what happened to Nick Berg, I feel something primal. I want to find the executioner, hold him …
tabitha
Tabitha Ruth smoothed her yellow skirt over her knees and looked down at the snake-patterns in the linoleum and tried to be calm. She needed to figure out out. A way out. Soon the men in white would come for her with their sticky eyes and long fingers. They would put her on a chair with wheels and push her to a room made of pillows and lock her in. The pillows would be full of dust-mites which are microscopic crabs that crawl into your pores and clip your capillaries with their pincers until you bleed to death. Your toes and fingertips turn red and swollen and the red rises up you like a thermometer in summertime. How strange, thought Tabitha, to bleed to death …
why we are avatars
For years I had only a vague idea of what World of Warcraft was. To the extent I thought of the people who were caught up in it (or other games like Grand Theft Auto or Halo), I pitied them. I couldn’t fathom why people would choose to waste their time like that, how anyone could prefer staring at a screen and pushing buttons to all life’s other options. But a couple years ago, all that changed … and I’m still a little mystified about what happened to me. I’m a grown man. You might not know it from a distance, but it’s true. How did I get caught up in an online fantasy game? It was winter in Chicago. That was part of it. …
dog-face
I once had a teacher who said the Dick Tracy comic was “insidious” because all the villains were disfigured. You know, Flat Top and Prune Face and all them. She said it was wrong to think people who look different are bad. She talked about movies that played on our fears of things that are different and made them worse. She was careful not to look at me and no one else in the class did either, but I felt like they were all thinking about me. I would have if I were them. I felt like Miss Mahoney was trying to tell me and everybody that I was okay. It just made me embarrassed. I felt my cheeks flush but of course no one …
the beast
All the different Beauty and Beast stories we know can be put into two categories. In one, the beast is eventually transformed, turned handsome – The Frog Prince, Beauty and the Beast… (I count Shrek in this category, although there, beauty is the one transformed. But in the end they match.) In the second kind, there is no transformation. The beast stays a beast. Think Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dam, Cyrano, King Kong. Here’s what’s interesting: In every transformation story, they live happily ever after. In every story where the beast stays a beast, he dies. The beast is never allowed to consummate his love. We don’t allow beauty to be defiled. Even in the true beast stories–My Left Foot, Mask, The Elephant man–the …
beauty
I was watching Jimmy Pardo’s Running Your Trap, a game show where three celebrity guests all claim a story and the contestants try to guess which one is telling the truth. In one round the story was, “I talked my way out of getting arrested for shoplifiting.” Now the guests were 2 men and one woman, Janet Varney. You can Google her if you like or you can just take my word for it: Janet is pretty. The guys were average-looking and I hope if they hear this they’ll forgive me for saying so. So who do you think was the one? If you were there, I think you would have guessed the same as I did, the same as both contestants. We all thought it …
trap
Paul wondered if this was a trap, the kind that killed Jim. He was smart and generally stayed out of trouble. He ate sensibly – only fresh scraps. He once ate some delicious green pellets off a plastic tray that made him so sick he thought he’d die and almost wanted to. He surely would have except he came upon the tray after eating a hard chunk of Colby Jack. (Who throws cheese away??) So he was already full when he came upon the green stuff and only had a taste. Somehow he knew it was the pellets that made him sick. They were good but there was a funny taste to them. From then on, he only ate food that the big ones ate. …
nihilism
Once I dreamt I was taking photographs of a guy playing guitar. It felt like they were coming out great. I was using an old camera and looking forward to seeing the pictures when they developed. I thought maybe one will be the cover of his next album. Then I woke up. I don’t know who he was supposed to be, but that musician is never going to have an album. He was a figment of my imagination. Same goes for the camera and the film. And those pictures. They’ll never be developed. As I woke up and realized this, I felt a sense of loss. I had been looking forward to something that I’ll never get to see. But then I thought, really, in the …
