Fragments from My Mind

Bits n Pieces of journals, random thoughts, provocative ideas

Photo by BW Square on Unsplash

*These are from my cancer journals, mostly, penned over the course of 23 months during my father’s terminal cancer journey. He died June 2. But one or two are just random thoughts I jotted down or Notes I posted earlier.

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On Tribalism and Honesty

It’s taken me a very long time—sensitive writer/artist that I am—to get to the point where people’s reactions to me don’t have a huge effect. Not to say they have zero effect. What I’ve ultimately come to realize is that I am both sensitive and egocentric, as most artists are. Playing it safe has never been my bag. Art has historically always been transgressive, radical, rebellious. Art doesn’t pick political sides. It doesn’t cater to any one view. I’m often amused and saddened when the ad hominem attacks come out, arrowed at me like bullets. But the thing is: If you’re speaking your Truth; if you’re being as honest as you can be; if you’re thinking independently: You’re inevitably going to piss some people off. If you’re not getting some ad hominem attacks you might be doing something wrong. I very rarely (if ever) attack individual people; I attack ideas. I notice that most of the ad hominem responses I get have three telling qualities:

1.   They almost always seem to come from people on the political Left

2.   The responses almost never respond to the intellectual idea being criticized or made; instead, the person in essence calls me an asshole or says I’m “pretentious.”

3.   There is a whole lot of angry tribal knee-jerk responses using received political ideas and pre-packaged language

Substack is a free-speech platform. You do you, I’ll do me. Look: I have a right to my own opinion. As do you. If you don’t like my opinion, explain, like an adult, why you disagree with it. It’s really not all that hard.

Joshua Tree

I recently went on a three-day trip with my girlfriend [now fiancée] to the desert. Joshua Tree, to be precise. I wrote about it extensively on my substack, “Sincere American Writing.” It was a birthday trip. I loved it. We drove on all manner of highways. Saw all manner of flat and mountainous landscapes. Viewed Joshua trees and Yucca trees and thick desert brush. We talked incessantly about life and love and our future together. We read (me Dostoevsky and she Alice Sebold) and listened to Paul Auster’s second-person memoir, “Winter Journal.” We made fire and drank tea and slept in a little cabin and in her car. (A white Prius.) We travel well together, we discovered, and that’s fantastic. A huge chunk of what’s needed to “make it" long term.

(I love this woman like nobody’s business; like no woman ever before. I think about her constantly. I love her with a ferocity unknown by my younger self. I didn’t know you could love someone this much.)

BRITNEY JUST UNDER 5 MONTHS INTO RELATIONSHP (Jan 13 2023)

My girlfriend Britney and I have our struggles as a couple. What couple doesn’t? But we love each other fiercely. We’re determined to preserve this mutual love. I feel like she’s also become one of my best friends. I always want to be with her. It seems I’m learning new things about myself and about relationships right now. Being with her is teaching me, to be more loving, more open, more gentle. To risk more. To give up more control. In some ways it feels like my first ‘serious’ relationship. I see it as my last relationship, as in I plan to marry this woman.

One door seems to be slowly closing. [My father’s impending death] Another is swiftly opening. My heart greets them both.

Is this not the nature of life?

WHAT IS THE POINT OF LIFE?

There’s never been anything easy or obvious to me about being alive, about existing, about being a human being. It’s all a mystery, really. Like feeling your way blindly through a jungle in the pitch black of night. Not in a bad or scary way—though, sometimes, yes, this, too—but more like in a complex, magical, semi-sinister, profound way.

All my life I’ve been groping for answers to Why I’m Here. Who am I? What does any of it mean? What is the point? Why live? Why does anything matter?

This feeling produces a smile on my face. I feel it now, warm and familiar. Life may be a four-letter word, but it’s still brilliant; it’s still the best goddamn thing around.

BABE (Feb, 2023)

I felt like we got closer on this trip. I felt that way about Joshua Tree, too. There’s something about getting out of the pressure-cooker of daily life that bonds two people. I felt my love for her deepen even more, which is really something because my love for her was already deeper than the Grand Canyon. And yet still there was more depth to plumb. There will be for the rest of our lives, I’m sure. We discussed the past and the present and the future. My house in El Cerrito. Hers in Lompoc. Travel. Her son, slowly spreading his wings. Our cats. Franky. Adulthood. Literature. Language. Media. Etc. She is my best friend, not only my lover.

PARENTS/forgiveness

My parents are good people. Complicated, no question. Flawed. Like all of us. I see my mom’s weaknesses in myself, reflected in my own thoughts, feelings, behaviors. I sense my father in me like the primordial muck of time. Dad is a computer engineer but before that, many decades ago, he was a high school and college professor. That is me: Half intense creative writer, half madman professor. Arrogant yet kind. Loving yet at times cruel. Sensitive yet sometimes mean. Desperate and alone yet hopelessly in love and happy. A reader. A writer. A thinker. A pusher. Directed more by my DNA than I’d like to admit.

If there’s anything to say it’s that I forgive my parents. Forgive them for being good and imperfect. For not knowing what to do or how to protect me when I was young. For choosing self over child, out of bald, ripe fear. For distancing themselves emotionally from me when what I craved was intimacy; closeness. I’ve been seeking a mother all my life, chasing a father. They’re both there and not there. I know I wasn’t an easy child. I’m not an easy man. My life brims with past mistakes. I am a wild work in progress.

DAD AWKWARD SILENCE

A few times I repeated questions I’d already asked: About his new MG symptoms; about what his doctor said; about his next MRI or lung scan; about the book he and my mother are listening to together. We briefly discussed my girlfriend; our cats; their dogs; politics. There’s nothing wrong with discussing these things but they’re all superficial; skin-deep. The man is dying. Who frankly gives a fuck about the basics. Let’s get real. For the first time in our shared lives let’s tell the truth; the honest, deep, real, gritty, righteous truth.

But I know this won’t happen. This isn’t how my father operates. He’s a man of classical stoicism. Silence. Averted eyes. Crossed legs, knee over knee. His existence circles around clinical distance and detachment; mine is the precise opposite. I live for realism; depth; vulnerability; I wear my sensitive heart on my sleeve.

And so finally I let go; I allowed the darkness and the silence to gracefully swallow us up.

DEATH OF DAD ALMOST HERE, STRONG EMOTION

On the 50-minute drive home along U.S. Highway 101 and then Highway 1—the road empty, trying to listen to my Michael Shelden George Orwell biography—I suddenly felt several rushes of emotion pulse through my whole body. Through my soul, perhaps, as if a hand were gripping my heart like a vice. It reminded me of seeing my ex-girlfriend eight months after she’d left me, at the Berkeley Marina, in September, 2018, how I sat on a rock by the water after she left and sighed, the wind rushing through, saying to myself, Goodbye. That deep, raw sadness. That impending grief. That sensation of the ultimate letting go. The release of pain into the self, into the void, into the Netherlands of the torturous and inevitable human condition.

I turned the volume off on the audiobook. The road was empty before me, the white lines and rumble-strips on either side, the thick yellow lines with the black center between. I felt tears brewing but I didn’t cry. Not for any reason, I just didn’t want to. Not right then. Later, I told myself.

I thought, Goodbye, Dad. Even though he’s still here. He’s not gone yet. But he will be soon enough. These are the layers, the levels of grief. Letting go. Saying goodbye. Accepting the temporary reality of existence. Looking into the yawning jaws of death and saying “okay.” Releasing the illusion of control. Here it is: The ineradicable, inexhaustible Truth. Life ends.