My mom’s dad just died. I should say my grandpa but I can’t. That wouldn’t be true.
My dad’s dad, my grandpa for sure, died when I was 10, and he lived in Georgia, so I only met him a few times. Great guy. Wish I knew him more.
Growing up, the main person I called “grandpa” was some black guy named Bill.1 I don’t mean that to be dismissive, he was great. We had some good times. Nevertheless, he really was just some guy, as we all are.
I’m feeling that heavy these days. My dad is just some guy. My mom is just some lady. My mom’s dad is just some guy I met one time when I was 20.
We were at a relative's wedding2 at Shutters On the Beach in Santa Monica. (I just looked it up, a room is going for $1000 a night.) My mom’s dad pulls up in a tuxedo with short pants and open-toed sandals. This is the first time I’ve ever seen this dude. It’s my “grandfather.” I’m related to this fuckin guy.
He’s not a great dude. He was in and out of my mom’s life, a cheater, dishonest, asshole, all the classics. My mom hasn’t talked to him for 20 years (at the time of the wedding) so she’s pretty nervous about seeing him. She’s holding onto my arm as we approach this guy in the lobby (his name is Tim). I look him up and down and say, “What up, man? I’m your grandson.”
He can’t even make eye contact with me. He just kinda smirks and looks down and to his right/my left.
That’s it. Saw the guy one time. Said one sentence to him. He didn’t say shit to me. He talked a whole bunch to my sister’s then-boyfriend. That’s fuckin weird.3
Anyway, the guy’s not alive anymore. But he was. For 85 years. He didn’t take care of himself very well. Hard living. But he still got 85 years. I think that makes him a good case study. It’s got me thinking: what is life? What is a life? If we take Tim’s as an example problem, you get 85 years to do… whatever.
Tim lived in a cult (maybe two). Became a super devout Christian for a while. Got my grandma pregnant when she was 19, then had a bunch of kids with a number of different women. I don’t think I’ll ever actually know how many kids he had. I think he was living in Mexico for a while, maybe that was a cult? At one point he moved to Gettysburg and got really into Civil War reenactment stuff. He lived the last piece of his life in a trailer park in Wisconsin.
It’s interesting: most people, including me, would look at that and say, “Well, that sounds terrible.” And maybe it is/was. But it’s also a move. Living in a trailer park is a move. Being an asshole with a bunch of families is a move. Becoming a born-again Christian is a hell of a move.
We gotta fill the 85 years with something. That is for sure.
Sure, we can become monks, give up everything, move into the forest or mountains, and just sort of vibe it out. People rarely do though, and it’s technically still a move. No one is born a monk.
When I first started to really ask these questions of myself, the, “What are we doing here? What is life? What is a person?” I turned to psychedelics.4 That was amazing. Especially during covid. I was so ill,5 down about 30 lbs, and in so much pain physically, mentally, and spiritually. These drugs opened me up so much and alleviated so much pain, it felt like a “God-send.” I had those experiences of a higher consciousness holding me. I felt what it could feel like to not be in so much pain. I saw firsthand what being love, being in love would look like.
Going to these places had a super profound effect on me. I changed my ways for real. I changed my worldview. I started meditating. I found a relationship with God for the first time since I was eight. I started to make a concerted effort not to be an asshole. I became a “woo-woo” guy to a certain extent. Which is hilarious, because I’d always hated those people.
I have a visceral memory: February 2020, before everything shut down. I’m at one of those crazy expensive smoothie places that LA is famous for. I’m so fucking sick and I can’t hold any real food down and I’m losing weight fast, just so miserable. This is why I’m at the smoothie place. And standing in front of me is one of those couples. The woo-woo couple. The guy is dressed like a shepherd or whatever, even though he’s got a fuckin Tesla parked outside. The Birkenstocks, the long Jesus hair with the headband thing. His girlfriend is all cuddled up with him, she’s got on I don’t even fucking remember what, I was so fuckin mad. But I do remember her hat. The Big Dumb Hat. The $5000 giant brown hat. You know what I’m talking about. It’s probably passé to make fun of it at this point.
Anyway, I remember standing behind them as they take fuckin forever to order their shit and having this intense desire to cut them both in half with a Samurai sword. I barely had the energy for anything in those days. Could barely eat, couldn’t exercise, had no real strong urges to make anything happen. But I was 100% sure I wanted to murder this guy, and then at least just fully terrify the girl and dump some $20-brownish-purple smoothie sludge in her hat.
A few weeks later, before I entered one of these drug-induced ceremonies, I wrote down a few things. Some intentions, some things I wanted to focus on, questions I wanted answers to. The main thing I remember writing down: “DO NOT become the smoothie guy with the Big Dumb Hat girlfriend.”
Yeah, I was really shooting for the moon in those days.
Two other notes sandwiched the warning to my future self: “There is nothing to be afraid of,” and “Even the apocalypse isn’t that bad.”
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” except having a girlfriend who hugs me in a smoothie shop. And the “Apocalypse isn’t that bad,” but wearing Birkenstocks and taking a long time to order Bee pollen sludge? North Korea, hit the button.
And guess what? It fuckin happened anyway. I mean, I still haven’t dated Big Dumb Hat girl, thank God, but I basically still became the guy I wanted to gut and filet in line at a smoothie shop. I try my best to wear natural fabrics, I pray daily, I identify as an optimist, and I got certified in Transformational Coaching.
I guess I just ran out of road. It got to the point where relief trumped belief. Being a smug, combative, irony-poisoned dick is finite. Believing in nothing is still believing in something.
And all of it is just cope.
85 years is a long fuckin time, and we all need relief at some point. Some people take drugs, some people go to mass, some people have a bunch of kids with many different people and neglect them, and some people make fun of the ways other people are looking for relief.
I’m not advising anyone to stop making fun of people– any people, for any reason– I’m just saying you’re also desperately looking for relief. (Maybe your way is socially sanctioned. For now.)
You will, if you’re lucky, become the Smoothie Guy. And for the part of you fighting like hell against it, that day is the apocalypse.
Which isn’t that big of a deal anyway… I mean, it is, just not in the way you thought it was.
We get to practice dying. “If you die before you die, you don’t die when you die.”6
The sun will rise again.
It’s all just a series of moves.
RIP Tim.
Not dead, I just don’t talk to him anymore because before my grandma was even cremated he was buying white women dry martinis with my mom’s credit card.
Some of you remember her from “Normalization” as the therapist who wants to normalize crying in public… so…
Apparently, he was encouraging the bf to stay locked in with my family. He told him that we were “gold.” Whatever that fuckin means. How would he know? Who says we are?
All kinds. Mostly in a ceremony setting. Not that it really matters. I wasn’t by myself in my room or in the woods is all I’m trynna say.
These were the prostatitis days mentioned in “Leap Day Miracle”
I’m gonna bank on this quote being in the Public Domain.