Not with a bang

I have a friend who's dying. I can't save him. He may not see fifty and he's probably going to die alone because he won't reach out. Probably thinks he can't.

I know what this friend needs to do, and what he needs to do will be painful and difficult. It will require a faith on the level of abdicating his sovereign right to make his own decisions, at least for a while. It will require him to tell uncomfortable truths. The odds of that are...well.

I watched another man I love wither into a frail husk in front of me when his wife passed. He got lonely. He rattled around his house with little to do but mow the lawn. He stooped. He met his golfing buddies once a week and talked sports and weather and lawn care, until that ended. He stopped putting sheets on his bed. His mind started to go until he'd moved from forgetting the date to not comprehending how a day could have a number.

Then he met a woman. He dated again. And he has returned to us, to life.

These men are like most men. They've each only got one really close friend: the women they love. They have no one else to burn for. Without those women, or with the wrong one, they start to die. Slowly.

My wife tagged me on this essay that's making the rounds. I've been chewing on it for a while now. And I hesitate to speak up at all, because "what about [white] men" is a disproportional analysis. But then again this is a pretty solid episode of the hit series Patriarchy Hurts Everyone, so here I go.

I'll tell one on me too.

I had a job half my life ago selling jewelry. We had a fairly tightly-knit staff. Someone, not sure who, got in the habit of ending conversations with a little musical "love yoooouuuuu..."

It caught on. Should this ring shank be replaced? Yes, and add an unset/reset charge for the emerald. Okay, love yoooouuuuu. Love yooouuuuuuu.

Months went by and those love-yous got a little less drawn out and musical. One day someone pre-pended the earnest pronoun "I".

Can I have Saturday off? No, sorry, Josh is off. Okay, I love you. I love you too.

This was my twenties. Three other salesmen on that staff with me, and another man I connected with by chance. All stood with me on my wedding day. We're now scattered across four states and two time zones. We still stay in touch. We still proclaim our love. One day I kissed one of them on the cheek when we hugged hello. I surprised myself; I don't kiss anyone who isn't family. But it felt like breathing, so I kept it up.

Didn't always have that, though. I've had years of mere existence, staring every evening at a screen in my living room, reaching out to strangers there in the aether and wishing everyone in my physical proximity would leave me to live in my own idiot head. I was starving myself.

One day I stood before my wife, nearly in tears, saying "I miss my friend." A week later she was pressing a plane ticket into my hand. I did not deserve that or her. I'm trying to make up for that now.

Now I have another, local group of friends. We have a regular dinner thing. We talk. About sports, about lawn care. About our terror and shame and hope and love. I recently told one of them that I love him. The others are on deck.

Let me tell you about my boy.

My boy burns hot. My boy feels every drop of his feelings. You are his friend, even if you haven't yet met.

My boy loves. Profoundly. So much that it's hard to get him to tell me his darker thoughts. I can see the wall of embarrassment: what if Dad loves me less if I tell him? And I will own that sometimes the messiness of his feelings inconveniences me, that I reach to contain it and keep us on schedule, rather than guide him through.

I know that the world is going to do its damndest to beat his love and affection out of him. I know that I have to be vigilant, or I will help it. I have to protect him from me.

What I have seen, time and again, is that men are starving as I have starved. And we have to dress up our love and need in no-homo bullshit to justify it to each other. Iron John forest howling. Promise Keepers. White men doing hakas. Hugging that inexplicably involves hitting. Love yoooouuuuuu.

Yet I tell my son: Enough. Could you just calm down. Breathe, buddy, it's not that big of a deal. Every blow tempers him. I do not tell him enough that we feed each other with handfuls of our insides. That making a feast of our hearts makes them beat more loudly.

We are obsessed with masculinity. Masculinity is cosplay and individualism a cancer. We smother the best parts of us in the name of some facile made-up John McClane bullshit. We chase the myth of the self, as if the self exists. So now it's hard for us to turn the the person next to us and say "I'm really happy right now," much less admitting out loud that we're absolutely fuckin' terrified. And so we die.

I learned emotional labor and emotional nourishment relatively late in life. But there is my boy, and there are these men, this boy and these men for whom I burn. I look into the eyes of men who have found what I found and sometimes I see the wild and exultant desperation that I feel, the fear that this can't go away, not ever, or I'll die. It lashes my heart to the earth.

I was alone when I spilled my blood into the walls of my house. I was alone when I shook the soil of my home out of my shoes and onto an island in the Danube. I was alone when I forded a creek in search of my son, trying not to scream.

These stories, you need to hear them so that you know that we are here, you and I. If I do not tell you them, I will die, and if you do not hear them, then I never will have lived.

Listen:

Dani Bunton changed video games forever →

I fell down a Wiki rabbit hole recently after a Slack conversation about Arkansas software development. I didn't know that at one time, one of the best video game companies in the world was right here in Little Rock.

David Koon did a great cover story about their star developer a few years back. It does the whole historical-gendering, he-then-she thing, but otherwise it's a damn fine tribute to an unsung hero of software.

I'm one degree removed from her, turns out. A friend of mine started chatting with her in a bar in Hillcrest in the early '90s, somehow they got on the subject of games, and he declared to her that the greatest game of all time was M.U.L.E.

"I wrote that," she said, and it took a bit for her to convince him. From then on they were friends until her death.

"I still pull out my old Commodore and play it," he told me. "I've probably played M.U.L.E. 2000 times since the 1980s. And I've literally never seen a game go the same way twice."

Hell of a thing.

This is my child, he said.

Then he wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to the fire.

The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the sand for the boy's hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them.

—The Road

SO MAYBE JOHN MCCAIN FOUND SOME COURAGE IN BETWEEN A COUCH CUSHION →

Very Smart Brothas posted a follow-up after last night's vote, so I feel I should do the same in the name of fairness.

I was happy to wake up to the news that the vote had been defeated. I do not believe that McCain did it for the right reasons, any more than I believe that more than half of Republicans actually want the repeal. They've seen the numbers, those that care about and understand numbers. And especially given the grandstanding McCain pulled on this, it smells more like a theatrically-waved middle finger than anything.

I have never believed in "moderate" "maverick" John McCain. I have never believed in him as anything other than what he needed to be in the moment to get ahead. A piece of me has that in common with him, and I've had to fight it for a long time. I know it when I see it. If you don't, this Rolling Stone profile quantifies it with hard facts.

Even so, I am fond of telling people that I am an Aristotelian at my core. Aristotle didn't give a good goddamn what's inside your head or heart. He didn't care about who or what you "love". He cared about your actions. There was another fella too went on about something to do with fruits.

That's me too, though I will almost surely whine about my intentions when I am caught doing wrong, at least until I catch myself. I don't care about your intentions, and I'm trying like hell not to care about mine.

So, in a nut, McCain probably did vote against the repeal to make himself look good and stick it to people he hates. But millions of people get to keep seeing doctors, at least for now. With that much on the line, I'll take a dirty win over a principled failure.

COWARD WITH TERMINAL BRAIN CANCER JUMPS OUT OF GOVERNMENT-FUNDED DEATH BED TO KILL OTHER SICK PEOPLE →

He sure did express concerns, yes sir, and he said a lot of angry words about how wrong it is that the GOP hasn't been working in good faith with the Democrats before he gave them another opportunity to do that again, and maybe kill poor people in the process.

If they ram it through, the last two major chapters of his legacy will be inflicting Sarah Palin on the world and being implicated in the deaths of more Americans than the people who captured and tortured him were responsible for.

I'm no political expert but it seems to me that a freshly-elected octogenarian with terminal cancer could act like he has (1) empathy and (2) nothing to lose.

I do not aim with my hand;

he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.

I aim with my eye.

I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.

I shoot with my mind.

I do not own little-ass kids with my gun; he who owns little-ass kids with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.

I own little-ass kids with my heart

Their barrows heaped with shoddy.

In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

—The Road

I restrained myself from quoting five paragraphs before I gave in to this one. And I'm not thirty pages in.

Rather an effect

What makes a human a human? Is it a heart? Skin? A functioning spleen? Legs which take you walking through the fields? Fingers which clutch and caress? Eyes which see the heavens, and weep when they lose a dear, dear friend? I have often pondered this question as I walk my dreamy death through life. We are such a strange and wonderful species that I'm sometimes lost for words to describe us. Though not often.

Also then, so long as I have you here, answer me this: if it is true that the human creature has no eternal soul, if she is but a brief blink in existence, if she is nothing more than the sum of her flesh parts, and if those parts can be replaced with mechanical pieces, then what is she? Her memories? Ah, but her memories are fragile fictions. Is she then the choices which will compose her natural life? Possibly. But if she is just this and no more—a fleshy decision-making machine, something born only to die—then what makes her decide to rise from her bed each day? What gives her life purpose? And what compels her to make her choices good? Perhaps, in the absence of any immortal judgment—or perhaps even in the presence of such judgment—she must become her own pure idea of what is right, and what is wrong. Perhaps in this sense she becomes not a "self" at all, but rather an effect. Perhaps rather than being defined by the physical object she seems to represent, this raw lump of meat and metal she is for the brief time of her life, she can be defined simply by what she leaves behind when she departs the stage for ever.

—Theatre of the Gods

Ravished Means You Cannot Stay

"I can't stop," the shark rasped. "If I stop, I shall sink and die. That's the way I am made. I have to keep going always, and even when I get where I'm going, I'll have to keep on. That's living."

"Is it?"

"If you're a shark."

September rubbed at the blood on her knee. "Am I a shark?" she said faintly.

"You don't look like one, but I'm not a scientist."

"Am I dreaming? This feels like a dream."

"I don't think so. I could bite you, to see if it hurts."

"No, thank you." September looked out at the flat gray water, all severe and stark in the sunrise. "I have to keep going," she whispered.

"Yes."

"I have to keep going, so that I can keep going after that, forever and ever."

"Not forever."

"Why haven't you eaten me, shark? I ate the fish; I ought to be eaten."

"It doesn't work like that."

—The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

I am almost home. In a manner of speaking (or two).