Hitting The Links: 1/26/25
THE GODDAMNEDEST THING HAPPENED LAST NIGHT (+ a bunch of links, a flex, & a meditation on meditations)
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THE GODDAMNEDEST THING
The thing is, I don’t even like Starbucks coffee. I would’ve stopped at the Shell station in Englewood (Dunkin, mildly less bad coffee), but I was going a little fast on Rt. 4 and would’ve had to jump over a lane. I regretted not just making a pourover at home and travel-mugging it. But I was running a half-hour early, and this was my last chance before getting to NYC.
I was closing in on the George Washington Bridge, on my way to a friend’s party in the far east 50s last night, and since there’s no coffee shop near him and I was going to have to stay up past my ~9:30 p.m. bedtime, I pulled into the Starbucks for a caffeine boost.
There was a drive-through, and I could’ve just idled away there, but thought I could use a pastry too, so I parked, donned my suit jacket, and went inside. There was a customer at the far end of the store, sitting at a rounder. I noted him quickly — big guy, dark hair, olive-skin in the inconsistent mood-light of the shop, big white beard — and made my order for a black coffee and a pumpkin-pepita bread. I’d have plenty of time to get into the city and park at a garage by my friend’s place.
While waiting, I picked up a few napkins, and I noticed the customer was looking at me. I didn’t pay any direct attention, and figured I was close enough to the exit if he got up & made trouble. After all, I did look pretty goofy, with my hair down, and wearing a rust-corduroy suit and a weird midnight blue print sport-shirt.
My order came up, and I glanced over at the table again. He was looking intently (scowling?) at me now, and I looked back and realized he was J——, my oldest friend in the world.
Coincidentally, I’d emailed him that morning, replying to a note of his from 3 weeks earlier. While walking Birdy around the block in the afternoon, I thought of how we haven’t spoken in 20+ years, how we started infrequent emailing after I got my CLL diagnosis in 2021, and how I told a mutual friend last summer, “I doubt we’ll ever be in the same room unless one of us is in a casket.”
Or, as it turns out, a Starbucks off the highway in Fort Lee, NJ.
It wasn’t quite as improbable when I hid out in L.A. for my birthday last year, but wound up bumping into a Hebrew school friend I’d known since I was 7. And I’m pretty flexible about what/who the universe puts in my path. This is what happens when you put yourself out in the world, I guess.
I walked over and sat down at his table, said something like, “Old boy, how are you?”, and we talked for the next ~3 hours.
The conversation started around politics and the state of America, and over time that gave way to more personal issues, about family, change, selves & self-discovery & mutation, never the reason we stopped talking 2003.
The staff knew him and accommodated our gab session, even turning the music down so we could hear each other better. They were too young to really get “We’ve known each other 50 years.” Customers came in for take-out or to pick up mobile orders.
We told each other stories, performed our shtick for a new audience, bared ourselves through our shtick and unrehearsed moments, shared our addictions and the workarounds we’ve developed, lamented this benighted age. We talked about marriage and parents and his parenting, about friends’ and family members’ deaths and suicides, about becoming and unfolding, about our jobs, about low-information voters and the evils of incuriousness, about his parents’ house down the street from me, about making art and finding an art-teacher for his kid, about how we’ve each tried to be/get better, about how trying the past 5 years have been.
I cried a little when talking about my recent transformation, as tends to happen anytime I go into it, and I held his hand when he told a story about his father’s terminal cancer diagnosis ~40 years ago. There’s something to be said for talking with someone who knows you from way back. [See all those newsletters about last summer’s Catskills Fire Tower hikes with another long-time friend (& mutual friend of mine & J——’s).]
We never looked at our phones, although I did notice my watch occasionally. I wondered what time this Starbucks closed on a Saturday, and whether I’d go on to my friend’s party, but it wasn’t important; whoever was there would have a great time without me, and everyone who went out would have their own story to tell about this night.
J——’s wife called around 8, so I took a bathroom break while they talked. Before I walked away, I asked, “You’re still gonna be here when I get back?” In the toilet, I laughed and muttered, “Goddamnedest thing.”
We kept talking as they prepped to close, and in the parking lot, we talked about getting together again, and whether there’s any hope for the future. I gave a blithe “we’re doomed,” but that means something different to me than to someone with a child, and we said we would talk more about that and the possibility of flowers in the ruins.
It was too late to go on to the party, so I called my wife to let her know I’d be home soon and that the goddamnedest thing happened on the way to the city.
*
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Fred Kaplan • Mia Wolff • Damion Searls • 2024 Recap • The Guest List • Benjamin Swett • Ken Krimstein • Eddie Campbell
RIP Jules Feiffer (& NYT obit) . . . RIP Véronique Vienne . . . RIP Garth Hudson . . . RIP David Schneiderman . . . RIP Lynne Taylor-Corbett . . . RIP Charles Phan . . . RIP Barry Michael Cooper . . . RIP Charles A. Le Guin . . . RIP Lynn Ban . . . RIP Crawdaddy . . .
Go ogle Robert Caro’s personal library.
Hal Mayforth has some new paintings to check out.
Go read Howard Chaykin on the Progs & the Trogs.
Neat reading by Sarah Churchwell on what “we” get wrong about The Great Gatsby, albeit pedantic in parts.
Some elementary school students ask Nick Cave about all the death themes in his songs.
Here’s a piece about David Lynch’s movie The Straight Story writeup. I rewatched that last year the night my friend died. I was mesmerized by the scene with the protagonist and another WWII vet in a bar:
“That is one thing I can’t shake loose: all my buddies’ faces are still young. And the thing is, the more years I have, the more they’ve lost.”
Current/Recent Reading
Karma Doll - Jonathan Ames
Naples 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory - Martin Mittelmeier (tr. Shelley Frisch)
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
“I am, I suppose, what people would call a decadent, someone whose spirit is externally defined by the sad glimmerings of a kind of bogus eccentricity that gives unexpected expression to an adroit but anxious soul. That, at least, is how I feel about myself, and I find myself absurd.”
The Creative Act: A Way of Being - Rick Rubin
Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity - David Lynch
Plus my daily chapter of The Man Without Qualities (tr. Wilkins/Pike). Here’s a piece:
“Few people in mid-life really know how they got to be what they are, how they came by their pastimes, their outlook, their wife, their character, profession, and successes, but they have the feeling that from this point on nothing much can change. It might even be fair to say that they were tricked, since nowhere is a sufficient reason to be found why everything should have turned out the the way it did.”
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I’m doing okay with exercise. As far as my Wed-Sun weights/yoga cycle goes, I skipped yoga on Thursday, because I had some errands to run that late afternoon, but got back to it yesterday. My weight’s hovering on the margin of not-so-happy-Gil, but that means it’s also on the margin of Gil-is-okay-with-this. I got out for a few walks this week, which is also an improvement over recent weeks.
I’ve been engaging in my unstructured meditation every day, with varying degrees of . . . success? Not sure how to characterize it, as one thing I’ve picked up on is that I shouldn’t have goals in mind: I shouldn’t be meditating so that I can get ideas for the book, or newsletter, or etc. etc. Rather, I’m doing it to go deeper. On Thursday, I came out of the session with a peculiar sense of bliss and directedness/deliberateness. Driving out to Paramus soon after, I felt both flowing and at rest. But I know the hazards of trying to chase that, the self-abnegation that comes from trying too hard for something that only happens when one lets go.
Sometimes, after I finish, I write down some notes, but I also need to be aware of not thinking about that during meditation. That is, thinking of what I will write takes me out of the present moment, and this is all about the present moment. Here’s what I wrote after one of them
Unstructured data like natural language, he said before I went under. What structure, a scaffolding or a gallows? Stop thinking in words, let the mind find some other way of communicating or exploring. "I" focused on my eyelids, then rolled my eyes back in my head, darker darker. The humidifier a few inches past the crown of my head shut off, out of water or courtesy. Was I looking at it askance with my 3rd eye? Momentary flash to Schiller's Books, the entryway after the mall was enclosed. I know where to go but not when.
The day before that
Too in the world during today’s meditation, but I started to slip near the end and saw a moth’s face close up against my eyelids. I thought of the luna moth we found dead in the driveway, the Luna Luna show at the Shed I might go see on Saturday before [xxx’s] party, that Luna Luna Illuminate song by Underworld. It occurred to “me” that sometimes these images are like a thread that I’m following, but sometimes like today it’s more like a jigsaw puzzle, and I’m trying to fit different pieces together to build a picture. Or a binding agent to attach to a protein, kill the infection of overconsciousness luna luna
So, my mind & soul are works in progress, but my body’s looking fine.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode, some throwbax Instax, & maybe some art, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.
I’ll pull the bricks down / One by one / Leave a big hole in the wall / Just where you are looking in,