Philip Seymour Hoffman was discovered on the floor of his bathroom with a needle in his arm and a lot of heroin nearby.
His body was found when he failed to pick up his three kids from their mother.
Five days later the media continue to pick at the story like flies on a carcass while hailing Hoffman as one of the greatest actors of his time, a wonderful man and father. Our cultural loss is apparently immeasurable.
Avoidable death is always tragic. Beyond that, I don’t know what to think.
I understand that addiction is an insidious disease that claims many innocent victims. On the other hand, this guy left three young children to grow up without their father.
I had a treasured friend I’ll call Harvey who killed himself a few years ago. He put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His son found him a couple of days later.
I still love Harvey and but I also hate his guts for what he did.
As the media fawns over Philip Seymour Hoffman I find myself curiously unmoved. And, I’ve just decided that’s okay. There are some things I just can’t figure out.
I write less than I used to. As time goes by I am becoming convinced that I don’t have anything original or interesting to say.
When I was young I was much smarter. Wisdom came to me so fast I couldn’t explain it all.
But, over the years I’ve come to realize the older I get and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know.
That was an original thought when I thunk it. Nobody enlightened me. I had never heard or read anything like it. It was a brilliant and original epiphany. But now we have the Internet and ego crushing reality is just a search away.
A minute ago I typed “The more I learn…” into Google and here’s what popped up:
The more you learn, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. So why bother to learn? — George Bernard Shaw
And:
The more you know, the less you understand. — Lao-Tse
And the real stunner:
The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know. — Socrates
Socrates had my original thought some 2,400 years before I did and said it more succinctly!
AND, in ancient Greek!
Socrates was a wise guy.
Worse yet, I’ll bet he wasn’t the first guy to figure this out, either. He just had a tremendous publicist.
I suppose having an idea expressed by one of the great thinkers in history come to me all by itself is cool but there’s no point in my passing it along. It obviously occurs to everybody eventually.
Plus, if we all regurgitated every brilliantly mundane original thought we have what would become of the poor philosophy majors who have nothing else to do with their educations?
The other reason I don’t write much anymore is because Americans don’t read much anymore.
We don’t consume information, we spew it.
We Tweet. We text. We spend our days expressing every banal thought that crosses our mind in such a way that we don’t have to bother hearing or reading a response.
Maybe we don’t want response. We’re just spewin’.
Maybe we’re just trying to shut off the noise and hear ourselves think.
I could be wrong about this.
Maybe, but how can I know?
I’ve learned so much, so fast, I’m rushing toward total ignorance.
I’m one of those word nerds who drives his family crazy by correcting their speech and writing. I do it to be helpful, I really do. I’ve learned to lay off my friends in public because people are embarrassed if you point out an error in spelling, punctuation, pronunciation or word choice. They protest, “You know what I mean,” but they’re really just embarrassed by their ignorance.
Why, then, are dictionaries enabling rather than informing them?
English is said to be the most difficult language in the world to master. But, for its complexity it is also the most glorious.
There are no true synonyms. Every word that essentially means the same as another has its own unique feeling and implication. These implied emotions and judgments allow really good writers to write between the lines, to manipulate perspective and emotions by inference rather than directive.
The best writers never tell you what to think or how to feel, they merely lead the way and allow you to discover yourself in their path. That’s the power of the language.
Words are my business. I talk on the radio for a living and write a bit on the side, so this stuff is a big deal for me. I don’t expect most people to understand or care about the subtleties and nuances of the language. I don’t point out slightly off target utterances, not even to my wife, just the ugly errors that may lead people to misunderstand or misjudge her. But I do ask English speakers everywhere to join with me in protest of officially redefining perfectly good, very specific words simply because so many people are too lazy to learn to use them correctly.
The Oxford English Dictionary has thrown in the towel and declared that the constant misuse of the word, ‘literally’ is now acceptable. It can mean literally or it can be used for emphasis as in, “It was literally raining cats and dogs.”
These horribly conflicting definitions are 180 degrees out of sync. The word “figuratively” is effectively dead. “Literally” is now meaningless.
Education is apparently no longer the Dictionary’s purpose. The arbiters of our language seem to have decided it is nobler (and perhaps, more politically correct) to reflect rather than guide communication. In doing this they leave it to the reader or listener to determine if cats and dogs are actually raining down from the sky or if it’s just a figure of speech.
And what difference does it make, you may ask? In this example, probably none but it does empower hyperbole in ways that make purists like me panic for our sudden blindness.
If I can’t trust you to say precisely what you mean or to understand what I’m saying, what is the point in either of us saying anything at all?
These days we’re all giving up. We shrug and say, “Whatever.” Even the Dictionary is doing it.
We all suffer when our ability to communicate with specificity and clarity is eroded.
I understand that language is fluid and always evolving. I embrace that. I ply my trade using colloquial English and I adore slang, it’s the spice that enriches the language but is useless by itself.
Definitions can’t be allowed to contradict themselves just because people are lazy. At this rate, in a couple of generations communication will have devolved to grunting and pointing at things.
(That’s neither literal nor figurative, it’s just sarcasm.)
I got my first kiss from a girl when I was in third grade. That’s what, about eight years old? That seems ridiculous, though I’m sure I was there.
Her name was Lorraine Latorre and I recall her only vaguely before and after the moment she appeared out of nowhere and, for no reason I can recall or imagine, kissed me on the playground.
Let the record show I did not return the kiss.
But I liked it.
I don’t remember if either of us said anything before or after the kiss. I don’t remember if I thought she was cute before then, though I sure as heck thought so afterward.
(Stock photo of kids; sadly, not me and Lorraine.)
And let’s stop for a moment right there and ponder something psychologists have no doubt picked apart into tiny, tasteless, tedious pieces:
How can pre-pre-pre-pubescent kids be instinctively attracted to a person of the opposite sex? Isn’t there a biological component required to engage a chemical reaction that third graders haven’t begun to physically develop?
I didn’t desireLorraine and I’m pretty sure she didn’t have any such feeling for me, either. We were eight, we weren’t capable of desire.
So, why was it a happy thing? Lorraine kissed me on the cheek and I liked it.
But, why?
She was a beauty, I remember that. She had long dark brown curls and a complexion that was just slightly darker than mine.
If I was writing a sizzling novel of elementary school lust I’d probably describe her skin as “florid” and I’d throw in a passage about the flirtatious, dancing fire in her eyes. That’s the way I remember her now, anyway. The experience of an eight-year-old sifted through five-plus decades of life is very sketchy and requires a dash of imagination.
Lorraine had an older brother named Ron, I remember that for sure. He was probably in fifth grade at the time. I steered clear of Ron because he was older and just too cool to approach. He was Eddie Haskell to my Beaver Cleaver. And, because I was afraid he’d find out what happened on the playground that day and beat the ever-loving snot out of me even though it was his sister who had kissed me, not the other way around.
But I didn’t just fear Ron, I envied him, too. He was grown up (ten or eleven!) and cool. He lived in the same house as Lorraine. He watched TV with her, ate dinner with her, went on vacation with her for cripes sake and probably even saw her every night and morning in her pajamas!
Lorraine Latorre changed me forever. She injected an Adam and Eve aspect into my life I couldn’t possibly understand at the time and still don’t. But I do remember that moment.
She kissed my cheek and I liked it, though I have no idea why.
Like you, I worry a bit. Okay, maybe more than a bit. We all do.
We worry about our jobs and money, our personal relationships and whether our kids are healthy and happy.
We worry about big stuff like climate change and politics, we stress over little stuff like our weight or a new gray hair.
Worry, worry, worry!
We even worry about that.
On Friday September 12, 2008, 25 people got out of their beds long before dawn, prepared themselves for work, kissed their families good-bye, left the house and died. They were killed in a freak commuter train crash in Southern California. My KNX radio partner, Vickie Moore, and I told their stories with relative dispassion because that was our job but I never got over the soul-jarring realization that you can walk out of your home one morning and never return.
It happens every day all over the world, of course, but we never imagine it happening to us. Among all the trivial stuff we worry about it never occurs to us to be worried about sudden, dumb luck death.
Caught on video: The explosion in the town of West, Texas, April 17, 2013.
It happened last night in the nearby, very small town of West, Texas, which one resident described on the radio this morning as “a Mayberry kind of place.” There was a fertilizer factory in West which employed and supported a good portion of the 2,600 people who live in the town. It caught fire at 7:30 p.m. and 25 minutes later it blew away everything within a five block radius.
Now, almost 18 hours later, they’re still looking for bodies, alive and dead. Texas officials tend to play their cards quietly. Ten hours ago they allowed that there may be as many as five to 15 deaths. Most likely there are dozens of others who died with no warning, people who hadn’t even been aware of the fire but were close enough to have life literally blown out of them as if they were birthday candles while they finished supper, watched TV with their families and fed their dogs.
When things like this happen and my work day is done I wonder about that. What’s it like to die with absolutely no warning? One moment you can be laughing and the next moment you’re nothing.
There is no sense to be made of this sort of thing.
But today I’m not worried about anything. Nothing at all.
It’s early April. The North Texas wind is, as they say, blowing like a bandit. White, fluffy clouds are scooting east fast, and I have that comforting, aching feeling again, the one I’ve had every March and April of my life for as long as I can remember.
Soggy dirt, wet grass and chilly afternoons.
Baseball season is back.
Roughly 47 or 48 years ago, when I was a kid of 13 or 14, I spent my summer days on a baseball field on Thomas Drive, one block over from my home with my buddy, Norm Miller. We always got there early and that’s where we spent our days.
Sometimes we were eventually joined by other kids. Often we were not. Didn’t matter to us. Norm and I would throw baseballs to each other, taking turns swinging for non-existent fences, absorbing imagined cheers from the imagined crowd.
My hero, Willie Mays
We peopled our fantasy with our Northern California heroes of the early 1960s: Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal and the Alou brothers. We gave them a sense of reality by batting left or right handed as they did and even mimicking their unique batting stances. We announced their advancement to the plate at Candlestick Park, predending we were p.a. announcer, Jeff Carter:
“The batter, number 5, Tom Haller!”
That’s how Norm and I spent our spring weekends and summer afternoons, in baseball heaven.
One day a man wandered up behind the backstop and watched for awhile as I threw slow fastballs and flat curves to Norm, who was always a sucker for any pitch high and away.
Balding, portly and puffing on a cigar the man behind the backstop watched. Norm and I thought nothing of him until he finally hollered, “Hey, mind if I take a swing?”
In those days it never occurred to any kid to say no to any adult request. It never occurred to us that his request was weird or that we should run for our lives and report the strange, fat, balding cigar sucker as a potential child molestor. Those things didn’t happen in the 60s.
He just wanted to hit a baseball and we said, “Sure”.
Together, Norm and I had acquired a kid’s treasure trove of baseballs. We had maybe three or four between us. Some of them had their covers taped shut, maybe one had its seams intact. That’s the one I picked up as Norm ran out to center field.
Something told me I needed to show this guy my best stuff. I was only 13 or 14 but on that particular day I had never been older and I had never played baseball with an adult.
I concentrated, made my best imitation of scraping my toe at the pitching rubber, peered in at the non-existent sign from non-existent Tom Haller and fired in my best non-existent fast ball.
“Thwack!”
The fat, bald guy slammed it on a line into centerfield and hadn’t missed a puff from his cigar.
Two or three more times I threw baseballs as hard as I could and the old man peppered them around the deepest outfields, left to right. Poor Norman was run ragged shagging them down.
The old man smiled, dropped the cigar on the grass beside him and got down to business.
“THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!”
He slammed everything I had that came anywhere near the plate. A couple of pitches, the ones twelve or fifteen feet away, he let pass, easily ducking the ones that were boring in straight for his head.
It ended when the bat in his hand splintered. You could say it simply gave up, glued, nailed and taped together as it had been to begin with.
And when the old, fat, cigar-chomper came out to the field, grinning from ear to ear and offering to pay for the bat, we asked him — with the ignorance of youth: “Did you ever play baseball?”
He smiled again and took the wallet out of his back pocket. Then he carefully fished out a yellow newspaper clipping nearly twenty years old.
I’m sorry to say it didn’t mean anything to me at the time and I remember nothing about it now. But his wallet also displayed his driver’s license, and having never seen one from New York before.
His name caught my attention:
Carl Anthony Furillo (March 8, 1922 – January 21, 1989), nicknamed “The Reading Rifle” and “Skoonj,” was a right fielder in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. A member of seven National League champions from 1947 to 1959, he batted over .300 five times, winning the 1953 batting title with a .344 average – then the highest by a right-handed Dodger since 1900. Noted for his strong and accurate throwing arm, he recorded 10 or more assists in nine consecutive seasons, leading the league twice, and retired with the fifth most games in right field (1408) in NL history. – Wikipedia
Did you know that people really do have biological rhythms which define us as morning people or night people? Neuroscientists have discovered some fascinating differences in how our brains are wired.
For one thing, night people apparently get stronger and more energetic as evening grows late. We morning people tend to hit our peak well before noon and then our energy and brain functions level off until drowsiness overtakes us just after the evening meal.
On the other hand, morning people are supposedly happier than night people! Who would have guessed that? I always suspected there was a party starting just as I was going to bed. That’s apparently a large part of the problem for you owls. One study calls it “social jet lag,” a disruption of circadian rhythms caused when you stay up late but are forced by responsibilities to get up early the next morning whether you want to or not.
(And by the way, your grumpiness really puts a damper on our bubbly morning effervescence. Try to keep it to yourself, okay?)
Here’s one final scientific finding that supports everything we’ve long believed: the older we get almost all of us become morning people even if we were night people when we were younger.
Does this sound a bit suspicious to you? I believe the science but the more I read I keep coming back to a physical reality that circadian studies just don’t seem to support.
I’m tired because I’m old. I wake up at four or five a.m. because I fell asleep in front of the TV ten hours ago.
We called her Cricket because when she was a puppy she bounced through the grass.
Cricket, is gone.
I miss her jumping with excitement simply because I’m home from work, and at night when she snuggled in my arm alongside me in bed as we fell asleep together in security and comfort.
She’s not here to gently tap my face with a soft, insistent paw to tell me she’s hungry or thirsty or needs to go outside.
She’ll never lick my nose again to comfort me when I’m sad.
Our baby girl died Thursday.
If you ever had a dog that could make your eyes tear up for no reason but your mutual love; a dog who could lift you from the depths of sadness and pain by simply nudging your face with a cold nose and bright eyes, you are a believer.
For me God has the face and the eternal, unqualified love of a Yorkie named Cricket.
She crawled inside my soul and will live there forever.
Clara Cowell stopped smoking last week and chose her birthday to mark the occasion.
Her 102nd birthday.
The British mother of four, grandmother of nine, great grandmother of 12, and great-great grandmother of four decided, after 89 years and tens of thousands of cigarettes, she might be pushing her luck.
Clara’s 72 year-old daughter is more concerned that her mom might be tempting fate. She says the secret to Clara’s longevity has been a lifetime of cigarettes and whiskey. Why stop now? She said it cheeky but may have a point.
Everybody knows that smoking is bad for your health, it’s not arguable, but when I read a story like this I wonder if our culture-driven fears aren’t at least as hazardous as the actual risk factors.
Why are we all so scared? Because we’re told we must be. We live our lives surrounded by warning labels and bombarded with anecdotal horror stories mixed with rumors and urban legends. We’re scared of cancer and heart disease and every sort of illness whether attributable to poor nutrition and lousy lifestyle decisions or just dumb luck and dna.
We live in constant fear of things that will probably never happen.
And here’s the kicker, the ultimate damned-if-you-do-or-don’t irony: the same health experts who shake their fingers at us when we eat a Big Mac or don’t get enough sleep insist that stress will kill us deader than anything.
Yes, of course we should be careful when we’re driving and mindful of how much bad stuff we ingest but is a lifetime of worry helpful in any way? Of course it isn’t.
Hand-wringing worrywarts are everywhere. They warn us with no uncertain gravity that sugar and butter are bad for us but artificial sweeteners and butter substitutes may be even worse. They extol the virtues of exercise and then some famous long distance runner drops dead from a heart attack.
Sure, don’t smoke. But, diet drinks? Less red meat? I don’t know.
I think we can be too careful. And when you see a 102 year-old woman giving up cigarettes after 90 years I think there are times when a pound of prevention is a silly concession to cultural bullying.
This morning on my Dallas radio show I shared the story of a woman in Seattle who has gotten some minor national attention for her resolve to eat every single meal of her life this year at Starbucks. Eleven days into the year she’s apparently on track.
The source story doesn’t say why she wants to do this. She says she’s not employed by Starbucks and isn’t making any money for the stunt but I suspect that’s her plan. We all remember the young guy named Jared who became a spokesman for Subway sandwich shops by losing a boatload of weight eating there. If this is what this Starbucks woman has in mind, I kind of feel bad for her. For one thing, it has already been done. And really, Starbucks doesn’t need any help. They’re so successful they’re opening new stores on both sides of every McDonalds in the world.
The other problem is that for every fru-fru croissant and muffin they put in the display case leading to the cash register Starbucks is still basically a purveyor of coffee. Jared didn’t get the best-balanced diet in the world at Subway but at least he got a reasonable portion of veggies and some protein with his caffeine and carbs. Ms. Existence may find her health flagging by the end of February.
Wait, I didn’t tell you her name, did I? It’s Beautiful Existence.
Apparently that is her legal name and if you’re boringly normal like me your first thought is that she’s a nutball. That’s what I thought. But now, a few hours later, it occurs to me that this woman, for whatever reasons related to her life experience, lives on a different plane than most of us. She travels to the beat of a different drummer. A drummer with a banjo.
My good friend Chuck Woodbury spent many years of his young adult life traveling around the western United States in a motorhome gathering and reporting the stories of such people in a wonderful monthly publication called Out West. One story was about a young man Chuck met in some small town in Utah or Wyoming. The details escape me but I think this guy’s name was David. He earned a living as a dishwasher in a local cafe. He spent all of his spare time at home, alone, with one of those adding machines from the 80s that kept running tabulations on a long roll of paper. He started with 1+1=2 and proceeded from there to add 1 over and over and over and over and over again.
David had his house filled with carefully cataloged rolls of used adding machine tapes.
Before I left work this morning I wrote and recorded a radio report about Beautiful Existence for use later in the day. It was a professional, typically sterile radio news story that proudly sucks all the reality and fascination out of life.
But I can’t stop thinking about Beautiful Existence.
She might be a nutball or she might be just a Jared copycat.
David, the adding machine dishwasher, might be a genuine looney from where I sit.
“Crazy” is a slippery word and though I don’t know any of the trials and tribulations of the lives experienced by Beautiful Existence or David the dishwasher, part of me greatly envies them.
They wake up every morning with a plan, they follow through and go to bed each night with a sense of fulfillment.
They serve nobody’s expectations except their own.
If that isn’t life well-lived, what is?
Post script: Beautiful Existence apparently succeeded in having every meal at Starbucks for an entire year. And it seems I misjudged her in my assumption that she was trying to get some big paydays for her stunt. Here’s a follow-up article about her achievement and her future goals. – DW, 2022
If you ever had a dog that could make your eyes tear up for no reason but your mutual love; a dog who could lift you from the depths of sadness and pain by simply nudging your face with a cold nose and bright eyes, you are a believer.
Clara Cowell stopped smoking last week and chose her birthday to mark the occasion.
