Some selections from Don't Let Me Be Lonely:
“There is a button on the remote control called FAV...”
There is a button on the remote control called FAV. You can program your favorite channels. Don’t like the world you live in, choose one closer to the world you live in. I choose the independent film channel and HBO. Neither have news programs as far as I can tell. This is what is great about America—anyone can make these kinds of choices. Instead of the news, HBO has The Sopranos. This week the indie channel is playing and replaying Spaghetti Westerns. Always someone gets shot or pierced through the heart with an arrow, and just before he dies he says, I am not going to make it. Where? Not going to make it where? On some level, maybe, the phrase simply means not going to make it into the next day, hour, minute, or perhaps the next second. Occasionally, you can imagine, it means he is not going to make it to Carson City or Texas or somewhere else out west or to Mexico if he is on the run. On another level always implicit is the sense that it means he is not going to make it to his own death. Perhaps in the back of all our minds is the life expectancy for our generation. Perhaps this expectation lingers there alongside the hours of sleep one should get or the number of times one is meant to chew food—eight hours, twenty chews, and seventy-six years. We are all heading there and not to have that birthday is not to have made it.
"A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life...”
A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it.
Worry 1. A dog’s action of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure or kill it, spec., a hound’s worrying of its quarry; an instance of this. 2. A state or feeling of mental unease or anxiety regarding or arising from one’s cares or responsibilities, uncertainty about the future, fear of failure, etc.; anxious concern, anxiety. Also, an instance or cause of this.
It achieved nothing, all his worrying. Things worked out or they didn’t work out and now here he was, an old man, an old man who each year of his life bit or shook doubt as if to injure if not to kill, an old man with a good-looking son who resembles his deceased mother. It is uncanny how she rests there, as plain as day, in their boy's face.
Worry 8. Cause mental distress or agitation to (a person, oneself); make anxious and ill at ease. 9. Give way to anxiety, unease, or disquietude: allow one’s mind to dwell on difficulties or troubles.
He waits for his father’s death. His father has been taken off the ventilator and clearly will not be able to breathe for himself much longer. Earlier in the day the nurse mentioned something about an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures brain waves in the cerebral hemispheres, the parts of the brain that deal with speech and memory. But his brain stem is damaged; it seems now the test will not be necessary. The son expects an almost silent, hollow gasp to come from the old man’s open mouth. Those final sounds, however, are nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind. The release is jerky and convulsive. There is never the rasp or the choke the son expects, though one meaning of worry is to be choked on, to choke on.
“I don't usually talk to strangers...”
I don't usually talk to strangers, but it is four o'clock and I can't get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it's four o'clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It's hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with its light off. She says, as if to anyone, It's hard to live now. I don't respond. Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer. The war is on and the Department of Homeland Security has decided we have an elevated national-threat level, a code-orange alert. I could say something, but my packages are getting heavier by the minute and besides, what is there to say since rhetorically it's not about our oil under their sand but about freeing Iraqis from Iraqis and Osama is Saddam and Saddam is “that man who tried to kill my father” and the weapons of mass destruction are, well, invisible and Afghanistan is Iraq and Iraq is Syria and we see ourselves only through our own eyes and the British, but not the French, and Germany won't and Turkey won't join us but the coalition is inside Baghdad where the future is the threat the Americans feel they can escape though there is no escaping the Americans because war, this war, is about peace: “The war in Iraq is really about peace. Trying to make the world more peaceful. This victory in Iraq, when it happens, will make the world more peaceful.”
“Cornel West makes the point...”
Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas.
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You don't remember because you don't care. Sometimes my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don't know because you don't care.
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Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don't know because you don't bloody care. Do you?
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I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don't know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.
