When the Apocalypse Comes. . .

I spent the weekend largely immersed in my own little world, coming up for air just long enough to run some errands, take a walk around the block, and follow the sad events in Japan.

I think of how hard the last few months have been for me, and I know that it's nothing, less than nothing, compared to what's facing those poor people in the years ahead. This morning comes the news that thousands of bodies are washing up on the beaches of Japan's coastal towns, literally a tide of death. Also the news of another explosion in one of their nuclear power plants -- this Big Event is still unfolding, with Who Knows What waiting in the wings.

I lost my mother and my home -- but I landed in a new home in better circumstances, and am steadily getting it together.

In Japan, whole populations were wiped off the face of the earth. Whole towns erased from the map.

And I am fascinated to look at the faces of the survivors. I see very few tears. There is grief, but it seems to be underwritten by strength. Some even manage to smile. It took me months to reach that stage, and mine was a common, garden-variety grief.

No doubt some are still in shock, still in survival mode; no doubt that the tears will come, once they have the time to look around. The devastation is so widespread, and in some areas so complete, that it must be numbing to the sensibilities.

On the Global scale, I have to wonder what's going on here? Haiti, China, Thailand, New Orleans. . . the planet knocked off it's axis, shortening the days. Landslides, tidal waves, hurricanes, eruptions. I'm not even close to being one of those loony "End of Days" theorists, the 2012 crowd and the "Left Behind" bible thumpers who actually want to bring on the apocalypse so that they can get to Heaven in their lifetime, but to me the planet does seem to be tearing itself apart, and doing it at an alarming rate.

If, as Jorge Luis Borges once imagined, the planets were sentient beings, communicating with each other as they circled about in the sea of stars, then I could well understand why the Earth would wish to be rid of the human parasite that has been infesting it for, in the grand scheme of time, the last few days. I'd scratch, too. I could even understand why it might begin to succumb to the illness.

And if I believed in God, it would be easy to imagine the old guy thinking that it was time to do another Sodom & Gomorrah number, on a much grander scale.

But none of that gets me any closer to understanding what's really going on here. That something is going on, I have no doubt.

While making my errands run on Saturday, I passed one of those non-traditional churches that has a display sign out front, and thinks that it needs to regale the public at large with "Wise Sayings." Usually these sayings are more along the lines of the trivial, the trite, and the idiotic. This one, that day, read: "Don't think about the strength of the storm. Think about the strength of your God."

On one level this reminded me of the purpose of religion, and the value of faith, and why even J.R.R. Tolkien depicted loss of faith as a mortal sin. But if you believe in God then, by definition, you have to believe that God created the storm as well, and that he had a reason. The most common reason offered is that God does these things to test us.

What a pernicious, evil-minded son of a bitch! What a foul, sad, pathetic creature that God must be!

That God killed a lot of people last week just to learn that the Japanese are made of Strong Stuff.

When I knew that I would have to move on, I looked at the job of work ahead of me and allowed myself to  despair, not knowing if I could ever get through it all by myself. Now I look at the pictures coming out of Japan, all the rubble, all the wreckage, and am in awe of the ability these folk are demonstrating to keep on putting one foot in front of the other.

It's not just an example to follow. It's the meaning of life.

All Those Years Ago

John Lennon was assassinated on my twenty-second birthday. The first words that I heard that morning came from my mother, hollering up the stairs, "John Lennon's been killed."

Happy Birthday.

I had already lost two grandparents by then. My fraternal Grandma Agnes had suffered a stroke years earlier, and died a vegetable in a nursing home with a feeding tube forcing mush down her throat. My fraternal grandfather Adolf had been killed several years later coming out of a Stamp Collector's show. He was hit by a young moron driving down the road with a girl on his lap.

Both of these deaths came to me with a sense of detachment. First there was the physical detachment, in that my family had moved to Maine when I was six years old and since that time I saw my grandparents only when they came to visit, once or twice a year. I was not a part of their deaths, I lived half a continent away from them, and my parents did not even see fit for me to join them at the funerals.

Beyond that, I was just so young. I hadn't begun to ask the big questions; hell fire, I did not even know the words to express the concepts in those big questions. I'm still not sure that I know them. Religion? Up to a point, my family went to church every Sunday. Then, suddenly, we stopped. I know that religion was never anything more than an abstract to me, and my sense is that my parents were starting to feel the same way about it.

When I was very, very young, and we were living in Minnesota, my mother taught Sunday School at (I think) the Lutheran Church. I remember only one particular lesson. She told of how they nailed Jesus to the cross, and I asked, out loud, "Didn't it hurt?"

I was so little that the concept of somebody doing something like that to anyone was unbelievable to me.

Now, all I have to do is turn on the television and hear about what's happening in Mexico and other places, things so horrible that crucifixion seems mildly invasive by comparison.

This is going off on a tangent. Here's where I wanted to go in the first place:

John Lennon was another thing. I believe that Lennon's murder was the first time I started to know at some level that this is real, this is all there is, and it's not permanent, it can be taken away from us at any time, if you leave your house at the wrong time (or even if you don't) you can be snuffed out just like that.

When George Harrison released his memorial song, "All Those Years Ago," I confess that I didn't understand it.  The thoughts and emotions that it expresses are a good deal more complicated than what you encounter in the average pop song, and the deceptively upbeat, bouncy tone of the melody is in one sense misleading. The song is by no means a dirge -- and I suppose that was my problem with it.

I didn't begin to understand the song until I reached the age that George was when he wrote it. The joy of the music and the pain of the words started to come together for me. Harrison's relationship with Lennon was not always the rosiest; that's the way friendships and partnerships are.

Harrison was a much more religious man than I am. As I've written in other posts, I believe it when I can see it, and sometimes not even then. But there's something awfully compelling in the very harsh, angry thought behind the lyrics:

They've forgotten all about God

He's the only reason we exist,

Yet you were the one that they thought was so weird

All those years ago

Now I'm more than a decade older than Lennon was when he was assassinated, and George has been gone an awfully long time, too. Both of them lived significantly shorter lives than anyone in my family.

Shortly after Harrison's death, I believe that I wrote a series of emails to friends, in effect asking: What's going on here? Where has it all gone? Why does it have to be like this?

My very pragmatic friend BC replied to them saying, "George Harrison isn't dead because [I honestly forget this part]. George Harrison is dead because he smoked six packs of cigarettes a day."

And he was right. Actions have consequences. The same thing is true with my mother, who shouted up the stairs to me on my birthday that John Lennon had been killed by a madman.

Her death should not have come as such a shock to me. I was paying attention, but I was running away from what I saw. I was pickling my fear and dread in a sea of alcohol. I couldn't face it. I didn't want to know.

The Importance of Milestones

The walk to work is not bad, when the weather is good. On the other hand, the walk home from the supermarket (which is actually shorter) is not good at all.

It's not just that coming home from the supermarket I generally have a heavy load to carry. It's that C____ Street is a long straight street with no landmarks or milestones, just one anonymous side lane after another. It's possible to get a third of the way along and  feel as if you haven't made any progress at all. Only at the very end do the landmarks pop up: The Water District, the Nursing Home where my mother stayed for four months following her amputation, the church; but all of these are right next to each other. Once the stoplight starts to come within range, you can measure your progress and I know that I'm getting close to home. But that doesn't happen until the walk is nearly over.

By contrast, the walk to the college is filled with landmarks, milestones, stages. W_____ Avenue starts with two gentle curves; S & C's house is at the apex of the first. Beyond the second, a stoplight comes into view at the intersection of W_____ Avenue and First Rangeway, which I cross, and start up to the top of a small hill that marks the halfway point of my journey. The avenue is quite narrow at this point, but just beyond the hilltop it takes a sharp right turn into what I think of as a funnel and then suddenly opens up for two-lane traffic. A short walk down to M______ H_____ Drive, then I turn left and start up the broad curving slope that ultimately takes me to the campus.

Humans need to know that they are making progress when they take on a task. That's what milestones are for. Without them, it's a long slog in darkness.

-- Freder.

Black Pages

Being a "Believe it when I see it" kind of person (I'll believe in God when I can look him in the eye and tell him that I think he's Quite A Bastard), I'm starting to feel reluctant to pack any more until I get word from the bank that the closing is actually going to happen. According to the owner, everything is ready to go -- we're just waiting for the phone to ring.

No matter. It gives me time to work on my scrapbook, which is coming along nicely. The paper inserts between the pages that started out as a design element have now become a necessity just to hold the book together; it was never made for this kind of abuse, and a while ago I had to split the spine open in order to allow for expansion. I'll re-bind it with cloth tape when all the work is done.

Last night I finished blackening all the pages with India ink. I'll continue making the pages fast and laying down a basic design, but for now I've run out of prints! -- And I'm not ordering more until until I have a new mailing address!

Once I get into the All-New, All Different DuckHaus, I have decided that one of the upstairs bedrooms will become a studio. Oh, it'll still have a bed in it. But any overnight guests will have to put up with my drawing table, a small stand for drawing and art supplies, a stack of magazines and other things that I cut up for scraps, and some of my own comic art on the walls. Maybe quite a lot of it.

In fact I have a plan for all of the rooms, subject to change and revision of course. I certainly have enough furniture to fill the place! -- Just not enough shelving.

Here's a question you could maybe help me out with. I have a large sofa and a small one that are a matching set, but the large one has been badly mauled by about fifteen generations of cats and needs to kept covered to look halfway presentable. Do I keep it because it goes with the little one, or take a different sofa from another room that is in much better shape, somewhat larger, but in no way matches the little one?

Ah, decisions, decisions. . .

-- Freder.