Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 Read online

  Even if there were, the event was too close and too personal to share in that way. Celebration should be public, by definition, but grief is a fragile thing. Grief is a small, difficult and necessary visitor that dwells in your home for some little time, and then has to be gently encouraged to depart. Crowds make it nervous and inclined to stay put. We didn’t want that. We figured anyone who learned of it later would understand. We held our grief close and then after enough time, bid it farewell and set it on its way.

  And it is gone; its time in our house was brief. Our friends, our family, and most of all our daughter helped see to that. One cannot stand in the face of such fortunate circumstances as we have and wish to cling to grief. There is too much that is good in our lives together to stay sad for long. So we didn’t.

  Were you to express your condolences to us today, we would of course thank you for them—we know they’re sincere and we know they’re meant from the heart. But we would hope you would also understand when we said “thank you” and then chatted with you about something else entirely, it’s not because we are pained about revisiting the grief. It’s that the grief is like a shirt that is six sizes too small. It fit once, but it doesn’t fit now, and trying to get it back over our heads would be an exercise in futility.

  I mention the miscarriage now primarily because this is around the time that Krissy would have been due, and various correspondents have been asking about it. When I write back that Krissy has miscarried, they’re all deeply apologetic for bringing up what they (not unreasonably) assume is a painful topic. And of course, it’s not their fault at all, since I mentioned the pregnancy but not the miscarriage. I really don’t want anyone else to feel horrifyingly embarrassed because of my decision not to discuss certain information.

  I also want to avoid scenes like that one I had in October, in which I was standing around with a circle of casual acquaintances. One of them was discoursing about the danger of asking other casual acquaintances about their personal lives, since there’s always something horrible that’s happened—and no sooner did this acquaintance finish saying this than she asked me how Krissy’s pregnancy was coming along. Rarely has someone posited a statement and proved it with such brutal efficiency. I felt bad that my omission put her in such a situation. So now it’s out there.

  I should mention that the fact that we’ve left behind the grief of the miscarry does not mean the event is forgotten; or perhaps it’s better to say that the child we lost is not now nor ever will be forgotten by us. It is, as I’ve said, a death in the family, and while the small absence it created is small indeed, it is yet still an absence. It doesn’t go away, and even though we see it without grief, we recognize it exists. It would be wrong to pretend it does not.

  If I could describe to you what a miscarry feels like from an emotional point of view, I would ask you to imagine a dream in which you are standing on a train station platform. While you are waiting, you look through the dirty windows of the train car in front of you and see a small child looking back at you. The child’s face is indistinct because of condition of the windows, but what you can see looks achingly familiar. For a moment, the child is separated from you by only that single, dirty pane of glass. Then the train starts to move, and the child starts to move with it.

  And you realize that the reason you’re on the platform at all is because you’re waiting for your own child to arrive, a child you have yet to meet. And you realize that you could have claimed that child as your own. And you know that whatever child eventually comes to you, you will love that child like the sun loves the sky, like the water loves the river, and the branch loves the tree. The child will be the greater whole in which you dwell.

  But it will never be that child, the one you could only glimpse, the one who went away from you. All you can do is remember, and hope with everything in your heart that the child who went away from you finds another who will love it as the sun loves the sky, the water loves the river, and the branch loves the tree. You pray and you hope and you never forget. That’s what you do. That’s what I do.

  UNFAIR

  One of the nice things about writing something mildly controversial, such as the Big Bang and Creationism or Confederate idiocy, is that it brings in a number of new readers, many of whom are not familiar with my rhetorical style and are therefore shocked about how mean and unfair I am to whatever position it is that they have that I don’t. So let’s talk about being “fair” for a moment.

  Basically, for the purposes of the Whatever, I’m wholly uninterested in it. Complainants about my unfairness have suggested that as a journalist (or having been one in the past), I should know something about being fair and objective. Well, I admit to having been a journalist now and again, although when I worked at the newspaper I was primarily a film critic and a columnist, jobs which were all about being subjective. So I wouldn’t go entirely out of my way to trumpet my own rich personal history of journalistic endeavors. I can do traditional journalism, and when I do it, I do a very good job of it. But it’s never been my main thing; opinion is what what I got paid for in my time as a journalist.

  This space is not about journalism; never has been, never will be. It’s about whatever’s on my brain at the moment (hence the name), and it makes no pretense of being anything else. This gets written in the interstitial time between paid writing assignments; it’s meant to be a venting mechanism and a practical way to keep writing in a certain style—the writer’s equivalent of doing scales—so that when I do this sort of thing on a paid basis (it does happen), I’m ready to go.

  But ultimately it’s all about me: I pick the topics, I comment on the topics, and the basis for the comments is whatever I’m thinking about the subject. I. Me. Mine. It’s all me, baby. What’s going on in my head is inherently unfair because it comes from my own, singular point of view; I don’t try to consider every point of view on a subject when I write about something here: I don’t have the time, for one thing, and for another thing I don’t have an inclination.

  If you have your own opinion, don’t expect me to air it for you, unless you understand that typically when I present other people’s points of view here it’s to point out why they are so very wrong wrong wrong. Expecting me or anyone to validate your point of view out of the goodness of our hearts seems a dangerously passive thing to do. You have a functioning brain and an Internet connection; get your own damn Web page. Don’t worry, I won’t expect you to be “fair,” either.

  But I doubt that many of the people who want me to be “fair” are actually asking for actual fairness, anyway. What they want is some sort of murmured polite dissent to whatever beef-witted thing they want to promulgate, something that implicitly suggests that their ideas have legitimacy and should be discussed reasonably among reasonable people.

  To which my response is: Well, no. Your opinion that whatever it is you want to foist on the world is reasonable does not mean that I have to agree, or treat it with the “fairness” you think it deserves. Rest assured that I am “fair” to the extent that I give every idea I encounter the respect I think it rates.

  To take the two most recent examples of this, by and large Creationism (from a scientific point of view) is complete crap; therefore I am rightfully critical of attempts to teach it (or its weak sister “intelligent design”) in science classes. Likewise, denying that the Confederate flags represent evil is pure twaddle and I’m not required to treat the idea that they don’t with anything approaching seriousness. You may not like this position, but ask me if I care. If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas.

  (Somewhat related to this, I’ve noticed that most of the people bitching about “fairness” to me tend to be conservative in one way or another. This makes sense as the topics I’ve been writing about recently fall into the conservative camp. However, inasmuch as conservatives have written the manual on how to demonize those who hold unconforming views—please refer to Newt Gingrich on this—this position st
rikes me as awfully rich. Not every single conservative person can be held responsible for the rhetorical attack-dog manner of many public conservatives, of course. But on the other hand, I’m not particularly moved by complaints of my mild version here. It’s like someone from a family of public gluttons castigating someone else for going back to the buffet for a second helping.)

  I’m likewise not responsible for your reading comprehension of what I’ve written. I do of course try to be coherent—it’s a good thing for a writer to attempt—but what I write and what you think I wrote can be two entirely separate things. More than one person saw what I wrote about Creationists the other day as a general broadside on Christians and Christianity. However, had I wanted to do broadside swack at Christians in general, I would have written “Christians” rather than “Creationists”—the two words not being synonymous, after all.

  Another good example of this is when I mention a particular stance is likely caused by ignorance. Well, no one likes to be called “ignorant,” since the common opinion is that people who are ignorant are also typically dumber than rocks. However, ignorance does not imply stupidity; it merely implies lack of knowledge. Ignorance is correctable; stupidity, unfortunately, is typically irreversible. The good news is that rather more people are ignorant than stupid, which means there’s hope. So if you’re ignorant, congratulations! You can work on that.

  I’m happy to clear up any misunderstandings or offer any clarifications if you have questions; send along an e-mail, I’ll respond if I can. But generally, in terms of my writing here, I tend to be a strict constitutionalist—what I mean to say is usually in the text itself.

  I recognize that a lot of people will consider my utter lack of concern regarding “fairness” here as proof that I’m unreasonable or disinterested in hearing other points of view, but again, that’s another assumption over which I have no control. Likewise people may assume that I’m exactly like I write here, which is also not entirely accurate; what’s here is just one aspect of my total personality, not the complete picture. It does no good to assume that people are only what they write, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it if you think that about me. I can accept a certain amount of unfairness. Life, after all, is famous for not being fair.

  THE INEVITABLE

  BLACKNESS THAT

  WILL ENGULF

  US ALL

  Adam Ziegler, who I think really needs a hug, asks:

  The world is a sad place. One can argue that some things have improved in recent centuries and decades, yet with every turn of the sun, parents lose their beloved children, innocents are maimed or forced in slavery, wars rage, and most people on this planet endure grinding poverty. We live atop a mountain of sorrows, made higher still by our ongoing misery.

  But you are fortunate. By luck of birth and the skill of your hands, you have escaped the fate of most. You earn a generous wage as an entertainer. You have a beautiful family, your health, a comfortable home. But all of it could end tomorrow.

  Even if you are one of those rare individuals who can live every moment in the present; even if you know in your bones that life is what you make of it, you are still an intelligent person who knows the state of the world and how fortunate you are to have your fragile place within it. You know that, in the end, most of what you say or do will matter very little. You know that you, your family, everyone you know and everything you have worked for must someday come to ruin and dust.

  My question: Does it make you sad? How do you deal?

  Well, I deal with it, first, by not thinking about it all a tremendous amount. I do that largely by keeping busy. It’s funny how just the simple act of answering a day’s worth of e-mail will keep the crushing inevitability of the entropic heat death of the universe at bay for a good half hour to an hour. There, I’ve tidied up my inbox. Take that, proton decay! Having an eight-year-old in the house—while certainly increasing entropy—does also help to keep me sufficiently distracted. I’m surely aware this sounds like a dodge—fiddling while Rome pops out of existence one sub-atomic particle at a time—but it really does work, and if you are the sort to obsess about everything eventually turning into dust, then keeping busy is a good make-work solution for being overwhelmed by the ennui that comes from recognizing that nothing you do will matter 500 years from now, anyway. And this way at least all your e-mail gets answered.

  The second way I deal with it is to have a sense of perspective about the matter. Look, at the end of the day, trillions of years from now, everything in this universe is going to disappear. It’s right there on the label marked “quantum physics.” Long before this happens, just five billion years from now, the sun will turn into a red giant, likely swallowing the Earth and reducing it to a cinder. Long before that—billions of years before that—changes in the sun’s internal workings will render our planet uninhabitable. And long before that— in the relatively short period of time of a few million years—it’s very likely we’ll be extinct because unless you’re a shark or an alligator, the chance that your species will simply peter out after a few million years is really rather excellent. We’re likely with the majority there, even if we weren’t busily altering our environment so rapidly it’s like we’re daring future generations of humans to survive.

  With the exception of the very last of these, there’s not that much to be done about it; the universe is not notably sympathetic to our cries that we should be special and eternal. It’s nice you feel that way, the universe is telling us, but one day I’m going to end and I’m going to take you with me. Once you wrap your brain around this simple and unalterable fact—the fact that not even the universe is getting out of here alive—the rest of it comes pretty easy. And you realize that to some extent worrying about enduring when your genome will dissolve, your planet will dry up, your sun will engulf your home and every single thing that ever was in the universe will randomly pop out of existence, a particle at a time, is a little silly. This frees you to stop freaking out about what will happen in the future and focus on what the hell’s going on now.

  Yes, tomorrow I die in any number of ways; tomorrow anyone I know and love could do the same. 50 years from now I have a very good chance of being dead; 60 years from now it’ll be a near-certainty; 100 years from now it’s unlikely that anyone alive will be reading my work. Honestly, have you read a book from 1907? That year, the best selling book was The Lady of the Decoration, by Frances Little; prior to just now looking up this info, I’d not heard of either the book or the author. Nor, prior to just now, had I heard of The Port of Missing Men, Satan Sanderson, The Younger Set or Half a Rogue, best sellers all, or of Meredith Nicolson, Hallie Erminie Rives, Robert W. Chambers or Harold McGrath, their authors. These were the best sellers of the year. My books sell just fine today, thanks, but if I can’t be bothered with Half a Rogue, it seems doubtful the citizenry of 2107 will have much use for The Last Colony.

  Does this make me sad? Not really. Sure, it’d be nice to be remembered eternally, or, at least as long as people read, but that’s not really up to me, and I just think it’s dumb to spend much time worrying about it—and indeed, for as much as I like like my writing, I think I’d be a little worried for the future if 200 years from now I was hailed as one of the great literary lights of our age. It would make me wonder what really interesting selective apocalypse occurred that only my work and work inferior to it survived.

  My work is meant to be read now. If it survives and is enjoyable 20 or 40 years in the future, excellent; I’ll be happy to enjoy the royalties and the low-to-moderate notability it provides. But I don’t worry about writing for the ages; the ages will decide what they want to read by themselves, and I won’t be around to care either way. I think intentionally writing for the ages is a fine way to psyche yourself out and assure whatever it is you’re writing is stiff and pretentious, and frankly there are very few writers who are so preternaturally good at this gig that they should flatter themselves that the contemporaries of their great-great-g
reat grandchildren will give a crap. Ask Frances Little or Harold McGrath about this one. I want to give people a good read that doesn’t insult their intelligence and also pays my mortgage. If eternal art comes out of these desires, groovy. If not, then I still get to eat.

  Moving away from my work to more ineffable aspects of my personal life, yes, I’m aware of the fragility of life and the suddenness with which circumstances can change. Today my life is good; there are any number of ways it could go crushingly wrong. Aside from basic and laudable prophylaxis, however (i.e., pay bills on time, live within means, buckle seatbelts, teach child basic moral standards, etc) I’m not sure that there’s much benefit in thinking too much about all the ways things could get horrible, fast. So I don’t. Being capable of understanding the downside—to anything—does not suggest that one is obliged to model it in one’s head more than is absolutely necessary. Short of actually experiencing horrible wrenching change, I believe I am as prepared as a person can be for its possibility. Worrying about it beyond that point is useless overthinking; I’ve got enough stuff to do already.

  Finally, in the larger sense—the one in which I am a citizen of the world, that I like no man am an island, blah blah blah blah blah, it becomes a matter of asking one’s self first whether one wants to be engaged in the world, and then if so, how best to be of utility. I do enough things that I feel engaged in my world and I feel like I’m trying to do beneficial things (or at least I’m doing as little harm as possible). I think it’s my responsibility to try to make the world a better place than it was before I got here; I don’t feel obliged to be heart-rent at every thing that’s wrong with the planet. One person can make a difference in the world, so long as that one person realizes that one person can not do everything or be actively concerned with every damn thing. I pick and choose; everyone does. I focus on what I think I do well and where I think I can do good.