Words Most Cannot Speak

 Dialogue from the movie Blackthorn:

Eduardo: "You'd be rich now, instead of being here with me."

Butch Cassidy: "Rich? I've been my own man. There's nothing richer than that."

If.............

 If the intricate neural pathways of your brain were interwoven with delicate, pure gold strands of insanity, would you even know it?

Or would you assume that everyone you meet thinks like you?

John Cazale

Played Fredo Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather Part Two.

He also acted in Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation, and The Deerhunter.

Five blockbuster films in seven years. All five were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture - Godfather, Godfather Two, and The Deerhunter won the award.

That impressive run began for Cazale in 1972 with The Godfather and ended in 1978 with The Deerhunter.

That is amazing stuff. The sad part comes in a diagnosis of lung cancer in 1977 while Cazale was working on The Deer Hunter. The diagnosis was terminal - Cazale chose to keep working on the film. He died on March 13, 1978 at the age of 42. The Deer Hunter was released on February 23, 1979.

I am not 100% sure what fascinates me about John Cazale's life but it blows me away on an emotional level. He was revered in the acting community - close friend to Al Pacino, romantic partner of Meryl Streep, lauded on Broadway where he got his start.

I could go where I always go - "Look at this man's extraordinary life; amazingly successful and tragically short. Compare it to mine and yours - tragically long, marginally successful, as long as you consider survival a success."

Can't do that though. John Cazale's life was extraordinary. One in a million. He was talented and loved. And his life was disappointingly short, which puts an exclamation point on "you never know."

Comparison's are disingenuous.

The rest of us should get comfortable with Jim Valvano's guidelines for a good life:

 "To me, there are three things we all should do every day.......................Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think, you should spend some time in thought. And number three is you should have your emotions moved to tears. Could be happiness or joy, but think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special."

When you're young, shoot for the moon.

If the moon proves to be beyond your reach, and, especially as you get older, you are wise to take comfort in laughing, thinking, and crying.

Choices

 "Morality is doing what's right regardless of what you're told. Obedience is doing what your told regardless of what's right."

H. L. Mencken

200 Years After

Doing a little light reading this morning.

A sentence read: "We are still talking about him 200 years after he died."

That hit me strangely for some reason.

When I die I will be in the memories of lots of people. For a while.

Some will think "I loved Joe. My heart is broken."

Some will think: "Joe was a good friend. We had some laughs. I miss him already."

Some will think: "I am so glad that son of a bitch is dead. It's about time. He contributed nothing to this world, and was a complete waste of space and any time I was forced to spend with him."

But in 200 years? There will be absolutely no footprint. It will be as if I never existed. How strange is that? No one will know anything about me, no one will be looking me up, I will not be in anyone's thoughts or memories.

Unless Jackson comes through. I'm giving him a minimum of 100 years. So theoretically I could exist until 2124. Probably longer. In Jackson's world he will probably live for 150 years. So maybe I make it to 2174. And if he has kids............................, but I'm not sure about the impact of that. I would be their great-grandfather. I have no clue who my great-grandfather was.

I hope Jackson keeps things rolling for 500 years. But even if he does, at some point I will disappear. I will just fucking disappear like a puff of smoke.

When you die you are gone. That in itself is so strange. We have all lost loved ones. One day they are here, the next day they are gone and you will never see them again. Just like that.

Memories persist. For a while. But they become smoky, then a footnote, and ultimately not even that.

It's tough enough to think about me being dead. But recognizing that all traces of my life will eventually disappear, leaving absolutely nothing where I once was, kind of bothers me.

Maybe that's why serial killers do their thing.

Marc Maron - Quotable Quotes

"No matter how open my mind is, or what I let into it, I still land in a familiar place..................I mean, I can learn new things and integrate new ideas and enjoy new things but that doesn't mean I return to them. They have some effect, they inform my ongoing intellectual narrative, but it's sort of amazing what's dug in, wired.........................I know there's a whole world out there and I do take it in. Despite that I somehow land back in myself."

Marc Maron is my twin.

"I've always been aware of most of the similarities but there's poetry to the expressions of a senile mind. It's concise and to the point." 

That is a beautiful and heart-aching sentence. That's Marc talking about his Dad, who is dealing with dementia. The similarities he's talking about are the traits he and his Dad share.

"I also talked to an old friend who I grew up with. We are around the same age and both hyper-aware of where we are in our lives. We were able to reflect on it a bit but also express the surprise of it in a way. We both knew it was coming but now it's here and who are we now. It's kind of mind-blowing. It didn't happen all of a sudden but somehow it feels like it snuck up on us slowly and pounced."

I feel the same way. Strangely, I am not afraid of being 70. Leading up to it, I was in a bit of a panic, but now that it's here there is a strange calm about me. But it definitely pounced. I cannot believe I am 70.

"Time is racing by. It seems to go faster when you get older. I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to get a sense of what's real, what's fantasy and what's delusion in relation to who I think I am. Getting right-sized is what they call it in the recovery racket."

Getting right-sized. I like the sound of that. Negotiating the confusion between real, fantasy, and delusion takes up a lot of my time. I often experience the wrong perspective at the wrong time.

"I'm trying to make decisons about what I want to do and who I want to be as an old man. Definitive choices. What do I want as a life and an environment? What do I even really like to do? It's strange how the brain, at least my brain, doesn't know the difference between practicality and desire and ridiculous fantasy..................................I don't have time for fantasies that ruin my brain into believing they are possibilities. I need a self-induced ego contraction. The humbling is coming for all of us. I should get a jump on it."

I am already 70. Who will I be at 80? I suspect I will be only a shadow of my former self. If I am even alive. The humbling hits me on two levels. On one level I interpret it as the falling away of self-delusion into the humble truth of who I really am. Could be comforting. Could be horrifying. On another level I interpret it as death.

Here's hoping humble truth comes first.

143 Days

Sold a house. Bought a house. Moved from the end of the world to the center of the world. Took 2 and 1/2 months off from work. Got a job. Quit that job 30 days later.

My grandson was born.

This series of events essentially began on October 31, 2023 and culminated in divine deliverance on March 22, 2024.

143 days. 

Holy shit. I would be hard pressed to identify a more intense emotional roller coaster than these 143 days in any other period of my life. And I have been around for a hundred years.

2/12/1978. 5/03/1980. 10/23/1983. Those were emotional explosions, massive shifts in my life that created ripple effects that will last for the rest of my life. Happiness extraordinaire.

But shit, man - I flew close to the sun for 143 straight days. A little bit of bad mixed in there, some fucked up stuff, but mostly good, good stuff. And the beeswax in my wings has not melted.

How does one compare? You don't.  HST said: "No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride............and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well... maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."

In the space that I occupy right now, "get beaten" does not apply. I have been beaten - many, many times in my life. But the beatings were self-orchestrated.

I bought the ticket - despite the fact that I did not believe in marriage, or kids, or fucking jobs - in anything predictable, anything expected or "normal", anything that could impose obligations on me, anything that could distract me from fully realizing the potential that my soul made available to me. Anything that remotely resembled the life my parents lived. 

And I ended up with an amazing wife, who I worship, two sons, who I worship, a grandson who I worship - Jesus fucking Christ - I ended up with human beings in my life who I would die for. That's how much I love them.

So I took the ride. The destination was improbable but glorious.

Now I am experiencing forced consciousness expansion. At the age of 70.

I sold a house I considered a piece of shit. And made out like a fucking bandit. That opened my eyes.

You know the rest of the story. I went on a happiness jag for a while there and you were forced to read about it. Or not, depending on your level of interest.

Other than my grandson being born - which is a high I will ride for the rest of my life - things have evened out, things have settled down a bit. Still, the newness of it all is exquisite.

I am in a new place. I am thinking new thoughts. Even since 10/31/23 I have learned stuff.

I feel different inside but I can't explain it to you.

It doesn't matter. All that matters is the road ahead.

All I need now is a little bit of luck, a few more years of life than maybe I deserve, to smooth things out for me and everyone I love.