203. pluvial

In a way, Valentine’s Day didn’t feel that much different from last year, when I was dating Jason. He wasn’t feeling well, as usual, so I felt pretty much alone. The same as this year.

I know it’s a corporate holiday, its origins are entirely apocryphal, and that it’s mostly about guys buying romantic shit for their significant others so that the latter will be more receptive to sex later in the evening. Just like Christmas is about making people feel coerced into buying shit for friends and relations because that’s what we’re somehow supposed to do. And so on. Holidays are mostly nonsense, with a dash of social bonding thrown in to add a feeling of legitimacy to the crass proceedings.

This year, I was in a less cynical mood, partly because I didn’t go out much over that weekend, and consequently wasn’t buffeted by the aggressive advertising campaigns. I did get emails from Starbucks, Caribou, and Dunn Bros, inviting my to bring my “sweetheart” for a buy-one, get-one. Thanks, big chain coffee companies, for reminding me of how freaking lonely I am.

Of course, there are a lot of people who are alone on Valentine’s Day, who have no one to buy into the bullshit with and for. Many of these people feel anger and resentment at those who callowly revel and who don’t seem to understand how anyone could possibly feel anything but the artificial joy and rush of oxytocin that marketing materials are designed to make them feel.

But many are also content in their own company, content in themselves and who they are as individuals, just happy to be alive, and feel no need to be “completed” by another person. These are people who seem comfortable in their own skin, and comfortable in just about any setting, anywhere, with anyone. These people also baffle me.

Most years, especially since Valentine’s Day of 2010, when the Seth fiasco began and the flame was lit to the edges of what I thought was my comfortable existence and would eventually become a violent conflagration that would burn away the very foundations of that existence into dying embers, I watch Moulin Rouge, because nothing takes away the lingering sting of heartbreak like schadenfreude.

This year, however, I decided to watch a couple of documentaries. One was the incredible Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the discovery of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France and the collection of incredible paleolithic images that were sealed off there over 30,000 years ago. Far from crude, the paintings and etchings are sophisticated, evidence that individuals responsible for them were probably not that different from us today. We drive cars, live in advanced dwellings, have access to medical care and to technologies that would have made us gods to our ancient ancestors, and weren’t threatened by cave bears.

The other was a four-part (two-part on Netflix) BBC documentary called Walking with Cavemen. It was probably more speculation than science, although the writers did attempt to put a “human” face to the fossil bone evidence, which is all the traces we have of our early ancestors.

Each half-hour episode is presented in the form of a drama that attempts to explore the way that each species of human possibly lived, from Australopithecus afarensis to Homo neanderthalensis, particularly in response to climate change.

As the documentary notes, at one point there were numerous species of “ape men” on the African plains, each adapted according to a different successful method of survival. Some, like Paranthropus boisei, adapted larger and more powerful jaws to chew tough vegetation. Others, like Homo habilis, developed larger brains that allowed them to create tools and scheme more effectively.

Last year, I watched another BBC documentary called Christina: a Mediaeval Life, about a 14th-century peasant woman named Christina Cox whose life has been reconstructed through financial and legal records from the time. In mediaeval England, everything was recorded, in meticulous detail. The show notes that it was one of the most well-documented periods in history (aside from our own, which future historians might consider overly documented—one can imagine them musing over our obsession with cats).

I thought about her while doing my taxes a few weeks ago, wondering if anyone in the future would be going over my tax returns six hundred years from now, and parse together from those records (and possibly from this blog and other writings) what sort of person I was.

Yesterday morning in the former fundamentalists group I attend (that is, when I feel like getting up early on a Sunday morning and being with other human beings), we were discussing how we approach death and legacy as Christians-turned-atheists. There was some discussion in Walking With Cavemen over whether Homo heidelbergensis buried their dead and whether they had any concept of an afterlife.

In a way, I’m thankful for the knowledge that I’ll die someday. That day still seems a long way off, but it will happen, eventually. Just as it happened to Lucy; to every Homo habilis who was eaten by lions or died of starvation; and to the man with the crooked finger who did the palm prints in the Chauvet cave 30,000-some years ago.

We are impermanent beings. That is the nature of life on this planet. Flowers bloom, flourish, wither, and die. Animals are born, grow up, grow old, and die. Even mountains crumble. The universe itself will even slow down and freeze to death, so to speak.

What all this has to do with Valentine’s Day is that it doesn’t really matter. This moment doesn’t really matter. And yet it matters immensely.

A few nights ago I had a dream about preparations for a wedding in which several good friends appeared in various representational aspects. My friend Jenny, who is studying counseling psychology, was the bride. She arrived late, but wasn’t worried. “It’ll be okay,” she said.

I hope against hope that she’s right.

And all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

201. confutation

Yesterday was Darwin’s birthday, so I watched an HBO documentary called Questioning Darwin, a look at the Creationist movement in the United States and its fierce opposition to the theory of evolution by natural selection. It’s basically a dissection of everything I was taught as a child about myself, the origin of life, and my purpose on Earth.

First, some quotes from Creationists in the film:

• “We believe in Creation, because of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and God’s word, the holy Bible.”
• “If the theory of evolution is a fact, the Bible must be false, so we’re all stupid ignoramuses.”
• “I do not believe that we’re some sort of highly evolved primate.”
• “The Bible says we are created a little lower than angels, which is much more noble and majestic than the explanation that evolution gives for who we are.”
• “I don’t know how someone could observe humans and miss the dignity that’s put there by God alone.”
• “To put man down as just an animal, that we’re no different than a dog, is preposterous. God made us in His image, and so to say that man is an animal, and God created man in his own image… does one come back and say God is nothing more than an animal?”
• “If we are just a product of this random mutation process, where does morality come from? Where does hope come from? Where does love come from?”
• “If that’s the way the world works, then you believe in a God that doesn’t intervene. That takes away any possibility of miracles, any possibility of answered prayer, any possibility of the resurrection.”
• “To think I have no communication with God would be so devastating. I can’t even imagine adopting such a view just to make peace with Darwin.”
• “I can’t imagine life without knowing that God has a plan, and that that plan is not just for the here-and-now, but that plan includes a hope and a future, and a future way beyond whatever we’ll face here on Earth but a future with Him in heaven.”

What I hear in these voices is fear, thinly masked by certainty in a belief that promises to deliver both answers and purpose. These are people terrified by an existence that’s marked by uncertainty and danger. In a way, they’re right to be afraid, irrational as that fear is.

The beginning of my journey to atheism was indeed in finally accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection. I’m not sure when that happened, exactly—somewhere in the years after graduating from Northwestern College. The more I considered the fossil and genetic evidence that all life on Earth is related, and for the age of the universe and the Earth itself, the less likely it seemed that it was designed. For a while I flirted with the idea of theistic evolution, that God put everything in motion. Then something Julia Sweeney says in Letting Go of God stuck with me:

Intelligent design gets everything backwards. It’s like saying that our hands are miraculous because they fit so perfectly into our gloves: “Look at that! Four fingers and a thumb! That can’t have been an accident!’

Fact is, far from “fearfully and wonderfully made,” we more seem to be haphazardly assembled.

This view of a naturalistic universe had real implications for the beliefs my parents had handed me as a child, beliefs that mirrored the sentiments offered by the quotations above. How could a loving God allow such a world to exist? If I, a being made in the image of God, wanted to prevent suffering, how could an all-powerful being then not banish it completely?

At one point, several individuals talk about surviving substance abuse and how their addiction turned to Christianity. This is a popular talking point: without God we’re just animals, slaves to our darker impulses and passions—that we’ll tear ourselves apart. I don’t know how many presentations I sat through growing up: of “recovering sinners” warning us how bad it was on the outside, and that our only hope for overcoming sin and temptation was Jesus.

A fellow from Answers in Genesis sums it up at one point: “When asked what is the primary reason I believe evolution is incompatible with Biblical Christianity, I can sum it up in one word: death. Whether we’re young or old, death is inevitable.”

In the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham last week, this issue also came up. Ham said something to the effect of: “Bill Nye can’t tell us what happens after we die.” And that’s true. We don’t know. I don’t know. Yet somehow this becomes a talking point for Creationists to insert a Gospel pitch of salvation through Jesus Christ. You cannot talk to a Creationist who won’t do this at some point.

Their response to the news that we’re essentially alone in an amoral and indifferent universe is to try to shut their eyes tight and stop their ears. For them, if evolution is true, that means that life is pointless, aimless, meaningless. I love how Julia Sweeney puts it in Letting Go of God: “What’s going to stop me from rushing out and murdering people?”

For me, accepting evolution was liberating. For years, I agonized over the struggle between my “earthly” desires and my supposed divine purpose on Earth. The news that I’m an animal, with the same origins and subject to the same needs and forces as other creature on this planet, was a relief. It meant there’s nothing wrong with me, the opposite of what Christianity taught.

It’s futile to argue with Creationists. Their arguments are based on emotion, and apparently fear of death and spontaneously becoming murderers or kleptomaniacs. Or gay. Thus, they can easily dismiss threatening, rational evidence in favor of the Bible.

Darwin wrote: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals.”

122. exoteric

exoteric, adjective: 1. Suitable for or communicated to the general public; 2. Not belonging, limited, or pertaining to the inner or select circle, as of disciples or intimates; 3. Popular; simple; commonplace; 4. Pertaining to the outside; exterior; external.

---

This morning I posted the following on Twitter: “If children aren’t allowed in an R-rated movie, children shouldn’t be allowed into churches where they read from an X-rated book.”

Having read the bible cover-to-cover many times (and in different translations!), I feel I can speak with authority on this subject. My parents were shocked when they found out that I’d read Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles as an eight-year-old. That actually began my long love affair with banned books, although I hadn’t known that it had been banned at the time. In places it’s pretty sexually explicit, so why my parents—as Evangelical Christians—had that book I’ll never know.

However, if you bother to look closely at the bible you’ll find x-rated material throughout, yet this was a book my parents encouraged my sisters and me to spend as much time reading as possible (which is partly why they objected to me reading Martian Chronicles, because it wasn’t the bible)! Here are a few sexually explicit examples (parents—you’ll want to send your children out of the room now):

• Lot’s daughters get him drunk and rape him multiple times after they flee Sodom. (Genesis 19:30-36)
• David commits adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of his soldiers, and then has Uriah killed when he finds out that Bathsheba is pregnant with his [David’s] child. (2 Samuel 11:3-5)
• Amnon, one of David’s sons, becomes infatuated with his half-sister Tamar (different Tamar) and rapes her after pretending to be sick and asking to have her bring him food. Tamar’s brother Absolom finds out about this two years later and kills Amnon. (2 Samuel 13)

That’s not to mention all of the other instances of rape, incest, mass slaughter, genocide, infant and child sacrifice, and horrific mutilations that are scattered throughout the “holy scriptures.” Eli Roth, James Wan and Wes Crave shouldn’t bother making torture porn—they could just adapt the bible.

Today I got into a discussion with a friend of a friend on Facebook who posted the above picture along with this caption:

Then Jesus prayed this prayer: “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thank you for hiding the truth from those who think themselves so wise and clever, and for revealing it to the childlike. Yes, Father, it pleased you to do it this way!”
— Matthew 11:25-26

As a rule, I try not to go after people I don’t know unless they try to start something with me. However, as much as I dislike children, that picture really disturbed me, and I shared that sentiment with him: “This makes me extremely nervous, seeing children who are not yet able to cognitively grasp what or who it is that they’re worshiping, or what they’re doing, and are basically parroting their elders.”

He responded: “I can see where your concern is coming from. On the flip side, I look forward to fathering my children in such a way some day, that they “parrot” my worship. If their parents are godly men and women whose lives produce fruit to go along with those postures of worship, these kids are on a very healthy pathway towards understanding worship in a way most adults do not.”

I look at that picture and see myself as a child, eager to please my parents and adults and to fit in. As children we’re genetically conditioned to imitate our elders. It’s how we learn.

But how, exactly, is this not brainwashing? When you raise a child in a vacuum, tell it that there’s a benevolent god up there who loves us, listens to our prayers and takes care of all our needs (even though its parents work hard to put food on the table and clothes on everyone’s backs); but will nevertheless throw us into a fiery pit for all eternity if we fail to properly worship the son he slaughtered because of his failed experiment on humanity—how can you expect that child to ask questions? To grow as a human being?

And when you tell that child that the earth is 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs and humans co-existed (even though most of the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, and modern humans appeared on the scene c.60,000 years ago), how can you expect that child to think freely when you’ve taught it from birth that the bible is the authoritative, infallible word of god, and that every word is absolutely, unquestionably true?

It’s ironic that Christians believe that every fetus has a right to life, yet when that child is born they immediately want to take away its right to think to “save its soul.”

Religious freedom is a hallmark of American society. However, in preserving parents’ freedom to express their religious beliefs, I fear that we place children in intellectual (as well as physical) peril. Many religious groups refuse life-saving medical treatment on the grounds that it interferes with god’s prerogative over life—notably, Christian Scientists. Last year a couple in Oregon was jailed for six years after their premature newborn son died of staph pneumonia when they refused medical intervention. In 2010, a 15-year-old Jehovah’s Witness in the U.K. refused a blood transfusion and died as a result.

Religious parents claim the right to raise their children as they see fit. To be fair, most children raised in religious homes grow up healthy and well-adjusted. And I acknowledge that these parents are concerned for the spiritual well-being of their offspring. But how many of those children will:

• … grow up thinking the earth is 6,000 years old?
• … vote against same-sex marriage and believe that homosexuals are evil?
• … go to school board meetings and demand that Creationism or Intelligent Design be taught?

You cannot be raised in a religious home and be a freethinker. I’m sorry, it’s not possible.

119. crib

crib, verb: To pilfer or steal, especially to plagiarize; slang: One’s home; pad.

Regrets collect like old friends,
Here to relive your darkest moments—
I can see no way, I can see no way.
And all of the ghouls come out to play.
— Florence + the Machine, Shake It Out

Change is inevitable. That’s the way of evolution. It’s the driving force of the universe. If things stayed the way they were, nothing would exist.

I’ve called Minneapolis/Saint Paul home since August of 1993 when my family moved here from central Kansas, where we’d lived since 1986. Ever since we came up over a hill and the skyscrapers of Minneapolis came into view, I’ve never wanted to call anyplace else home—even after visiting England and Ireland in 2003. This is where my family is from, where my friends are, and where a million memories are connected to.

But over the past couple of months, like a person gradually losing their mother tongue and having it replaced by an alien language, it’s felt less like the home that it always has been.

A similar thing happened in 2007 when I left the church that had been home for 14 years and went off by myself to another church, where I’d be for the next three and a half years until finally becoming an atheist.

When we moved here in 1993, we quickly decided on a non-denominational church in Saint Paul. Everything about it felt just right—the people, the teaching, the Christian education programs for both adults and children. And we got involved right away. We got connected with the active homeschool community at the church, and soon we were there 3-4 days a week, including Sundays. There were music practices, AWANAS, clubs, and regular events.

Later I would join the adult choir at age 15, which became my special church family, and I honestly cherish every memory I have from that group. And we were good. We were not your typical warbly church choir. We were an auditioned ensemble—and voiced. Our music director was incredible, and we were seated according to how our voices blended.

Needless to say, there were a thousand things about that church that I loved. But then our pastor left after a coup of sorts by the executive pastor who was hired to basically turn us into a mega church. That eventually led to the installation of the pastor who is currently there, a much younger guy who had his own “hip” ideas about church. The sermons were watered down in content and quality. Services started resembling rock shows, with one of the pastors shifted over to overseeing production.

And then one day I was standing in church, looking around, and it suddenly hit me. “I don’t belong here anymore.” I couldn’t put my finger on it, but so much had gradually changed that it no longer resembled the church I had grown up in. It was someone else’s church. At the time I was working at the church as a custodian, and I continued to work there while going to Saturday services at the church I would eventually move to.

In the same way, Minneapolis and Saint Paul have ceased to feel like home. Only nothing about the city itself has changed. The people have. And I have.

For many reasons, this past Christmas I cut off all contact with my immediate family—my mom and dad, two younger sisters, a brother-on-law and a nephew.

Many of my friends have also either moved away, or gotten married and/or started families of their own. A very close-knit group of friends of mine scattered last year after about half of them moved away. I lived with two guys for about a year and a half until one of them moved out to move in with his girlfriend, and then the other guy was getting married so I moved in with my parents for a bit until I found a new place to live. They became my “church” after I left the other one.

Then there’s SafeHouse, the church that my friends are starting. For those of you who’ve never been in a church, there’s a closeness that comes with being part of one that makes everyone on the outside feel a bit alienated. It’s not intentional on their part. They’re just becoming a tribe. It’s basic sociology.

… there’s also Seth.

It feels like playground politics to say it, but he’s really become the line in the sand with my old group of friends. Before the night of my birthday in 2011, I had grown incredibly close with that set of people, and Seth (at least for me) quickly became the center of it all. He’s incredibly charismatic and likable. From the first time I heard about the kid who had been kicked out of his Christian parents’ home when he came out to them, to when I read his blog and fell in love with his words, to when I actually met him for coffee and fell in love with his personality and his incredibly piercing, beautiful blue-grey eyes, I was taken.

Then it all fell apart. Now he’s my friends’ pastor, and on one side of the line is me and on the other is all the pain and ugliness that lies between him and myself, as well as anyone who calls him “friend.” And I miss him terribly. There are few days where I don’t think about him or wonder what he’s up to, and wish things happened differently.

So I’m seriously contemplating relocating to Seattle this summer. It’s pointless to run from your problems, but neither is anything getting better; and sometimes a radical change of scenery can help, like women in Jane Austen novels vacationing in Bath.

There’s the need for physical distance between myself and Seth, from SafeHouse, and from the people in my life who I just don’t belong with anymore. And I can’t figure out who I am now as an atheist when I’m dragging this horse around with me.

106. review

What’s a year, really? 12 months? 52 weeks? 525,600 minutes (or, when I asked Google, 525,948.766 minutes)? Does the earth wake up as it’s hurtling around the sun at a dizzying 67,000 miles per hour (that’s 107,000 kilometers per hour for my metric friends) and think, “I say! This looks awfully familiar. Haven’t I been here before?” After all, it doesn’t have much else to think about. It’s cleared its orbital zone, except for the occasional stray asteroid or comet that waltzes into its path that occasionally crashes into it.

This is nothing compared to how fast we’re hurtling around our home galaxy. The sun (and therefore the earth as well and all that’s on it) is moving at an incredible 483,000 miles per hour (792,000 km/hr). We orbit once every 225 million years.

225 million years ago (Mya), the earth was in the beginning stages of the Mesozoic Era, in the middle of the Triassic Period known as the Carnian stage; with the continents having just formed into one massive supercontinent known as Pangea. There were no ice caps as the continental mass was centered around the equator, and earth was hot and dry. Tiny dinosaurs called archosaurs were beginning to evolve, along with the ancestors of the first mammals—tiny shrew-like creatures called adelobasileus that appeared about 225 Mya.

That should give us some perspective on what has happened in the past galactic year.

The primates (our direct ancestors) appeared about 65 Mya. The genus Homo didn’t appear until around 2.5 Mya, and even then, Homo sapiens (modern humans) didn’t evolve until about 200,000 years ago. Putting that in terms of mean solar time, if we were to set a timer for 60 minutes…

• 5 minutes after we hit “start” (when the earth began its galactic “year”), the first mammals begin to appear;
• 15 and a half minutes later, North America separates from Africa;
• 42 minutes later a meteor crashes into Chicxulub, in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, resulting in the mass extinction of 80-90% of marine life and 85% of land species, including the dinosaurs;
• 43 minutes later, primates appear;
• With a minute to go, at 58 seconds, upright walking hominins appear;
• At 59.81 seconds, Human and Neanderthal lineages start to diverge genetically;
• At 59.85 seconds, Heidelberg Man develops speech;
• Modern man appears just milliseconds before the timer goes off.

We’ve barely been on this earth. We can trace our first modern male ancestor back to about 60,000 years ago, but in terms of the galactic “year,” all of recorded history is but a fraction of a millisecond.

If that though doesn’t fill you with awe, wonder and amazement — nothing will.

Then there’s an illustration on Wikipedia of the Earth’s location in the known universe, which is equally awe-inspiring. As Douglas Adams wrote, describing the horrific torture device known as the Total Perspective Vortex,

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

All that is to say that 2011 was a pretty awful year for many of us, and we weren’t sorry to see it go.

I did have hopes going into 2011:

• By now I’d have at least gotten more established in musical theatre;
• That I’d have found a day job that was enjoyable and would be more financially stable;
• That I’d be in a serious relationship by now;
• That come early summer I’d have a home church in SafeHouse, and possibly even a relationship with Seth;
• That I’d have achieved more success with my compositions.

Looking back on it now, none of those hope and dreams came anywhere close to being met:

• I started a temp job in February that I ended up loving; that seemed like it might lead to a career until it abruptly ended at the end of November;
• I had a horrific experience music directing Sound of Music where I had little support from theater staff or production crew (including the director); was constantly undermined by a number of key auxiliary cast members (my principles and orchestra rocked though); and subsequently never wanted to direct another musical again;
• I had my heart broken by Seth in the worst possible way on my birthday, which led to becoming an atheist and losing that community I was looking forward to being a part of in SafeHouse, along with my faith (although in a way, my coming out as an atheist was as inevitable as my coming out a gay man—that is to say, both should’ve happened much sooner);
• I had a string of unsuccessful and very disappointing dates, flings and relationships, all of which left me feeling less desirable, more defective and unlovable, and less hopeful of ever finding a guy who wants to commit to me as much as I do to him;
• My trumpet sonata was premiered in Tacoma in June, but sadly that performance hasn’t led to more opportunities like I thought it might. I’d sort of hoped that trumpet players might hear it and want to pick it up to learn it, and maybe even commission new works for trumpet from me, which would lead to more visibility, more musicians knowing my name and my work, and commissioning more and more work. But no.

Add to that that at the end of this year (on Christmas Day, to be precise), I gave my dad the last $225 dollars that I owed him for my car, whereupon he gave me the title to said car; and I told him and my mom and that I wanted nothing more to do with them again— at least so long as they hold their fundamentalist beliefs about homosexuality.

• So, to close out 2011, I divorced the family that I’ve had for twenty-eight years.

That’s heavy stuff.

I feel even less sure of myself going into 2012 than I did going into 2011. That beginning was similar to this year’s: with not knowing what my job prospects are; waiting to hear from the temp agency about job possibilities while sending out resumes in the chance of striking gold; and generally feeling miserable, lonely and depressed.

Pathetic.

I’ve said this before, but I feel as though I seriously fucked up in college. Majoring in music composition seemed like the perfect idea, and the future seemed so certain. Everyone thought that I showed great potential and talent as a composer. I’d be a working composer by, well, twenty-eight.

What I didn’t factor was that I had no business sense or training. That I’d had my head in the clouds during high school and college, focusing so narrowly on the Arts, on music and writing. That I’d failed to develop any Real World skills. And the economy drying up.

Then I’d graduated with said degree in music composition and…

… now what was I going to do?

Most of the people I know who are successful figured out fairly early what they were good at and wanted to do, and started doing it. They got the education they needed or cultivated the skills and the experience. And I feel as though I realized too late that I started down the wrong career path, and it’s a dead end. I’m not even good enough at what I am trained at. I’ve worked a variety of office jobs. I do okay, but always seem to find myself in situations where opportunities to impress my supervisors arise, and I try, but quickly find myself in way over my head.

And I crash.

So I don’t know what to do. A few hundred years ago I could’ve found gainful employ with the Church directing a choir, or with the nobility as a court musician, or even as a writer. And I’m apparently barely passable as any of those. Today you have to be extremely good and extremely clever (or lucky) to make it like that. I’m detail oriented, yes; but I lack the organizational and strategic-thinking skills that are needed to be truly successful.

This is normally where a manager comes in: someone who recognizes that an individual possesses talent—but not necessarily savviness. Often that means just being in the right place at the right time. And I’ve no clue how to make that sort of thing happen. Ira Glass randomly discovered David Sedaris reading his diary in a Chicago club in the early ’90s—a discovery that led to the publication of the SantaLand Diaries, his account of working as a seasonal elf in Macy’s SantaLand during Christmastime in New York City.

He got lucky.

Artists have a somewhat symbiotic, commensalist relationship with society. We don’t really contribute anything tangible to society, aside from making it more aesthetically pleasing perhaps. Kind of like remora fish and sharks. We provide “valuable services,” but the shark could get by just fine without us.

So while hurtling through the universe at 483,000 miles per hour, circling a nuclear fireball at 67,000 miles per hour, at the bottom of a deep gravity well, I’m looking hard at myself and must conclude:

I feel like a failure.