Before I fell...to pieces...?

First of all, Happy New Year (slightly in advance) to the SHAMblog community. Gotta be honest, a month or so ago I didn't think I'd see 2012 ring in. (I still haven't quite gotten there yet, but we're within hours, so I'm hopeful.)

I'm posting this older vid for a few reasons. First of all, my sense is that very few of you saw it when it happened live, back at this time in 2006, at the height of the scandal over Oprah's endorsement of James Frey's blockbuster work of faction, A Million Little Pieces. Second, someone who'd been Googling me uncovered it and asked me if I knew it was "out there." (No, I did not. Or maybe I'd forgotten.) Third, the core tenet of the James Frey defense—it's OK to tell outrageous lies for fun and profit as long as you can claim that your motives are "pure"—has always been the dominant ethic of SHAMland. Fourth, it's been a while since I've posted anything, yet I remain at a loss to know what to write from scratch....so in jazz circles, this post might be called a vamp.

Fifth and final, though I remember hating the way I looked that night in the studio lighting, it's funny how some added years and further (mis)adventures can change one's point of view. I was never any Brad Pitt, but it's nice in these disquieting days to see myself at a time when i didn't (quite) look 114 years old and/or altogether hairless. A worthy lesson for all of us, maybe?

The mortality rate of Cheez-its.

I'm beginning to realize that when something like this happens, and people who purport to care about you say, "It's essential for you to eliminate some of the stress from your life," what they too often mean is, "You have to develop coping mechanisms and better ways of putting up with the fact that we're not going to lift a finger to avoid stressing you out."

I do not find that especially helpful. In fact, I find the realization to be a source of stress anew.

What I'm talking about here can be (and frequently is) a simple, trivial thing. Like, let's say it has always irked or disgusted me when people eat things, especially crumbly things (e.g. chips or crackers), in the car. So, their prescription for my continued emotional well-being is for me to learn to live with (literally) the fact that there may be Doritos or Cheez-Its on the floor mats or dispersed across that impossible-to-clean carpeted area under the console. Because they're not going to stop eating the damned things. See, it's my problem to modify the stress; it's not their problem to modify the stress-inducing behavior.

I grant you, crackers on the floor is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, certainly not worth dying over. But if that's the case, then, similarly, why is the need to have crackers in the mouth such a big deal, either? (Understand, we're not talking about diabetics or hypoglycemics who are sudddenly overcome by nerves or nausea. We're talking about people who just didn't feel it was necessary to get in the house before breaking open the box on the way home from the grocery. Or who thought waiting the 11 minutes till lunch-time was an unbearable sacrifice.) Is it so important for my tormentors to assert their right to munch crackers while in transit that they'd risk contributing to the already-too-high stress level of someone they love?

That is obviously a very minor example of a phenomenon that I have encountered in more significant settings (e.g financial matters) as well since My Event.

Tell me: Is it me? I want to know.

No atheists in foxholes or ICUs.

I was motivated to post again today. Maybe it has to do with my own crisis of faith, recently, when I had my event. Oh, I wanted to ask for Divine help, and I finally did. (Though I consider myself a realist and a person of basically secular inclinations, I've also made clear on this blog that, for whatever reason probably having to do with the conditioning of my youth as well as my sheer wonder at the magnificence of the "natural" world, I've always harbored an instinctive belief in...Something. And yet, because my rational side has also, always, prevented me from worshiping in the joyous, hosanna-in-the-highest tradition, part of me feels that if there is indeed a God, He's pretty disgusted by now with the idea of hearing from people like me mostly when we're frightened that we're about to meet Him or whatever. Religion is not something you should do halfway if you really expect to be taken seriously Upstairs, is how I see it. Designer religion, the kind of user-friendly, no-sacrifices, all-about-me spirituality popularized by Joel Osteen and his Church of Ralph Lauren—where you "follow" a gospel that consists of little more than what you were going to do to please yourself anyway, with or without God in your life—is no religion at all. Same for our New Age friends like James Ray and his Universal genie, who appear to argue that God and the Ever-Abundant Universe exist simply to feed your innate narcissistic tendencies.

On second thought, I guess what brings all this to mind is the news of the death of 76-year- old Judy Lewis, the secret love child of Clark Gable and Loretta Young. I was reading the obit linked above when this passage stopped me in my tracks:

"Gable, then 34, and Young, then 22, fell into an affair while filming 'Call of the Wild' in Washington state during the winter of 1935. When a pregnancy followed, Young had no choice but to go into hiding—being a staunch Catholic, an abortion wasn't an option. "Wouldn't you [unhappy] if you were a movie star and the father of your child was a movie star and you couldn't have an abortion because it was a mortal sin?" the actress was quoted as saying by Lewis in her 1994 memoir 'Uncommon Knowledge.' "

So there you have it. She couldn't have an abortion because she's a "staunch Catholic" and abortion is a mortal sin. Now I could be wrong, but I think there may be a little entry in Catholic doctrine about extramarital sex, too. It think it might even be a mortal sin in its own right. Understand, I'm not judging Ms. Young for having the baby, or even for having sex with Mr. Gable. I'm simply judging the cafeteria Catholicism that makes it so difficult for me to abide people who present themselves as members of the faith in good standing while picking and choosing which religious laws they consider personally relevant. They appear to give themselves a nice pious pat on the back for avoiding certain extreme behaviors (e.g. abortion) while totally ignoring the piety implications for other behaviors that may be more enticing and thus less comfortable for them to forgo (e.g. adulterous sex with fellow movie star Clark Gable).

Trust me, there have been times over the past several weeks, typically at night, when all gets quiet and it's just me and my thoughts in the dark, when I only wished I could give myself to God with full passion and belief. But I just couldn't. I'd be insulting Him, wouldn't I? How can you ask someone for help that you've disrespected so many times in life? I can't even say His prayer with conviction. What kind of worship is that?