Leaving Anhedonia

Whenever I pray to God, I find myself talking about Marvin Gaye

I pray to God a lot. People can mock me. I don’t care. I was born with a heavy heart and my heavy heart compels me to pray a lot. For the most part, whenever I pray, I inevitably get around to talking to God about Marvin Gaye. I ask God to please tell Marvin I want to thank him for all his music, especially “What’s Going On.” I often say to God, “Please tell Marvin his song brings me closer to you than any church hymn. In fact, tell him listening to his song is for me the equivalent of going to church. Tell him I always knew music brought beauty to the world, but not until I heard ‘What’s Going On’ did I know music could deliver that much beauty. One more thing, God. Underneath the infinite beautiful layers of ‘What’s Going On’ is essentially a prayer. It is a prayer so deep and so beautiful that I feel ashamed whenever  I come up with my own prayers. Tell Marvin he has written the Prayer of Prayers and that everything that comes out of my mouth feels trite and trivial. Tell him that, would you? And tell him I miss him. Tell him I want to meet him someday and thank him personally. I hope that day comes soon, God. Things are terrible down here. Evil is spiking. Evil people are flaunting their evil. We feel abandoned down here. Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ feels more urgent and relevant than ever. You tell that to Marvin, also, please. Tell him we all want to know what is going on. We need Light, a Guide, a Benevolent Power to get us out of this darkness. We miss Marvin greatly. Thank you, Lord.”

Meaning Quest That Doesn't End Well

A young man in his early twenties goes to the beach, looks up at the sky and says, “God, help me find meaning.” 

God says, “Look at the rocks about you and pick them up, study the bottom of them, and eventually you will find that one of them has the meaning of life inscribed on it.” 

The young man looks at the hundreds of thousands of rocks surrounding him and says, “But God, there are so many rocks. This could take a long time.”

“I have spoken,” God says.

So the young man embarks upon his meaning quest, picking up thousands upon thousands of rocks. Decades pass, and the persevering man, now in his nineties, emaciated, lonely, and decrepit, is still standing on the beach. Every rock has been upturned, but he has found nothing. The old man looks up at the heavens and says, “God, I am really pissed off at you.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I did what you told me to do. I have upturned all the rocks, but I have found nothing. What’s worse, God, is that I’m near the end of my days and I have nothing to show for it.”

Then God says, “That’s right, you dumb shit. Now die.”

Need to Steer My Way Back to the Ark

I told myself I needed the constant updates on Twitter to stay current in The Moment We’re In, but then I realized I had turned Twitter into a Faustian Bargain: If I got off Twitter I could focus on writing 1,000 words a day, and in doing so I could become a better person.

So here we are. I approach this project humbly because I spent the late 1980s, 90s, and 2000s writing novels and short stories. A handful of the short stories were to my mind very good and even had “necessary” essay-like quality about them. However, to be honest the novels were horrible and showed someone who is in the wrong game. It is one thing to have a strong writing skill, but that skill doesn’t necessarily translate into writing novels, screenplays, and other types of fiction. Looking back, autobiographical essays shaped into short stories have been my strong suit. This doesn’t mean that anyone reads my stories in significant numbers. I self-published some stories and fictionalized memoirs into electronic books and sold a hundred or so. 

When I think of writing these pieces, I am sobered to say that I should have been more consistent in my writing. About a decade ago, I rationalized that I should stop because I was busy, the news cycle is crazy and requires that I stay on top of it through Twitter and online news sites. But honestly, I’ve gotten more addicted to the dopamine of quick bursts of news and social media feedback more than anything. The result is my brain and soul have become tattered more than they were to begin with. 

As I begin this project, trying to stay away from Twitter and other addictive behavior, I think of a Jim Harrison line from his novella The Beast God Forgot to Invent: “The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense.”  As MIT professor and author Sherry Turkle warns us, the little tweets don’t really add up to anything. All these little tweets are just another way to piss away our lives on nonsense. 

We’re not just pissing away our lives. We’re fragmenting ourselves. My daughter’s math tutor, a brilliant computer coder, told me she suffers from smartphone addiction, looking for dopamine as she moves rapidly from one app to another,  that has made her like a tiger pacing in a cage. Like me, she suffers from chronic depression, and she knows that online existence is throwing gasoline on the fire of this mental debilitation. 

So I rationalized that I should quit writing because I had proven to be a failed novelist, my self-published writings didn’t sell enough or generate enough attention to justify the energy I put into my writing. I wasn’t getting enough juice for the squeeze. But merely writing these first 400 words or so is already more juice than all the time I spent online yesterday. I feel a certain shape in my interior landscape. I don’t have that jittery, fragmented feeling I get when I’m on Twitter all the time.

Twitter and online porn both have some things in common: The quest for dopamine and the resulting brain fog. Men who quit online porn and join the Nofap community encourage others to go on the 90-Day Challenge: see how you do by quitting porn, masturbation, and orgasm (PMO) for ninety days. They claim you will feel better. You will escape the brain fog.

I will say being online, even engaging with the political mess we’re in on Twitter, has a brain fog effect. Get into that fog long enough, and your soul begins to drown. You fall off Noah’s Ark and drown in the cesspool. 

We have to use whatever tools and resources we have at our disposal to stay out of that cesspool. 

So I used to have a more focused life when I wrote my failed novels. I liked who I was when I lived in that parallel universe of a fictional world more than the person who is grazing on Twitter all day and night. 

The parallel universe I’ve lived in the last decade is what I call my Rupert Pupkin Universe. This is the narcissistic fantasy of being a star, a super human whose super qualities compensate for the true underlying sense of inadequacy. 

The Rupert Pupkin Universe exists in two areas: One, my YouTube Channel where I mostly talk about wristwatches. It’s a place where I can show off my “wrist presence” in front of a video camera while I wear watches that I don’t have the opportunity to wear anyone else because for the most part I am a shut-in, a depressive recluse.

The other Fantasy World is my piano playing. I am an amateur pianist, and when I play I imagine I am performing for others who are absorbed by the beauty of my somber piano ballads. 

These imaginary worlds, like social media, give me dopamine and a fleeting sense of connection, but this connection is for the most part counterfeit. 

This Rupert Pupkin Universe is a sort of cesspool where I go to drown because like most of the human race I have fallen off the Ark. 

We need to say this to each other with loving kindness, “Dude, you have fallen off the Ark.” This metaphorical language needs to be part of our common currency to explain that we’ve lost contact with reality and our moral sense. 

So in using biblical language, notably from Genesis in the Old Testament, am I religious? 

That is an excellent question. I am obsessed with religion. But am I religious? Do you mean do I believe that holy texts are inspired by God and that we must believe in their literal truth? And that some texts are holy and others are not? 

I have read a lot of New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, and he makes the case that not all biblical texts are legitimate. For example, some of Paul’s letters were not actually written by Paul. Writers using Paul’s name wanted Paul’s authority to write screeds that put women back into their subordinate position after some of Paul’s authentic letters wrote that men and women were equal in Christ.

He gives other examples of New Testament writers trying to shoe-horn Gospel narratives into Old Testament prophecies, and how these writers did a horrible job of hiding their tracks, sometimes even mistranslating the Old Testament in their clumsy contrivances of fulfilling prophecy.  

So am I a basher of religion? No. We are incurably religious. We all crave meaning and we all become our Higher Self through adherence to moral principles of compassion, sacrifice, integrity, and so on. I don’t tithe or give enough of my income to charity and maybe I should, so I’m not living financial sacrifice very well. I’ll confess I feel guilty about that, and I struggle with that.

I could talk about how morality doesn’t seem to exist in some exclusive realm of religion, how some atheists are just as moral as some Christians. I could point to one of my students, from Hungary, who said her father was an atheist who instilled a strong sense of morality to his children. This conversation came about when my students wrote an argumentative essay addressing Elizabeth Anderson’s “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” in which Anderson argues that societies develop morality through evolution and social reciprocity. Many behaviors attributed to God in the Old and New Testament, she claims, are morally abhorrent and therefore unless we cherry pick only the benevolent passages, we cannot look to codified religion for our best morality. 

Religious or not, we must have a moral foundation. We must have a Moral Ark. I’m afraid that spending time on Twitter and other social media platforms pushes us off the Ark and we drown in the cesspool of outrage, information overload, dopamine, addiction, and scattered thoughts. 

So I wonder what would happen if I wrote 1,000 words a day and composed at the piano rather than spend time indulging my Internet addictions.  Therefore, I have started the 1,000 Word Project to see if I can steer my way back to the Ark. 

What Does Living to 130 Have to Do With My Quality of Life?

Like most people I don’t want to die. I want to live as long as possible. I’d like to live to 130. I exercise, I eat healthy, and I undergo preventative medical protocols to maximize the probability of having a long life. I engage in the Wim Hof Breathing Bubble. I also live just 30 miles from Loma Linda, a bona fide Blue Zone, which is a place where people live for a really long time.

I need to live a long life, man. I’ve got a lot of stuff to figure out.

One of my concerns, though, is that a long life isn’t necessarily a high quality life.

I worry that if I get too caught up into living to 130 I’m treating myself more like a consumer appliance than a human being.

For example, if I buy a refrigerator and it lasts me 20 years, I enjoy bragging rights. “My loser neighbors bought a new fridge and it broke down after 3 years. Mine is still going strong. I’m Number One.”

It’s the same situation for me living to 130. I may have bragging rights that I had a long life, but maybe I missed the point of life.

Imagine me on my deathbed: “Look at me, guys, I’m a 130. I’m so proud of myself. My amazing lifestyle prolonged my life. No one else lived this long. I’m Number One. I won. Hahaha!”

I won? What did I win?

What does living to 130 have to do with the kind of life I lived?

Do you see my concern? I am concerned that by seeing my life as a refrigerator or some other consumer appliance I am focusing on my life in terms of quantity rather than what I should be focusing on: quality. 

The mentality that living a long life is equivalent to winning is rooted in a deep sickness because this “make me live as long as possible” mentality  has no foundation on a moral core. 

How do I score on the Moral Core Grade Sheet? 

Mediocre at best.

As far as morals go, I have a fair amount of decency. But my default setting is to be selfish and lazy.

For example, the other night I tried to educate myself on world suffering so I watched a documentary on hunger, and I got so bored watching this documentary, I had to stay awake by eating a peanut butter sandwich larded with honey. I mean, I’m watching a documentary on hunger and I’m feeding my face. Disgusting. 

I don’t know how moral I am. And if my Moral Grade is low, then living to 130 doesn’t mean diddly squat. 

So what I need to do is redirect my focus. What I need is a clear moral framework. Now as far as I can tell, there are three approaches to morality:

One is religious. Reconcile my selfish ways by connecting to my Maker and be my Higher Angel. Be the Light of the World. 

This approach reminds me of the 1978 Christover Reeves version of Superman when his father Jor-El told him to be the Light of the World.

“They can be a great people, Kel-Al, they only need the Light to show them the way.” I got chills.

But then there are secular humanists and atheists who argue that religion is an impediment to morality.  Religion is the source of tribalism, violence, and untenable dogmas that discourage one’s natural spirituality. These humanists argue that social evolution and the laws of reciprocity make us moral and rather than fight for some religious faith or other, we should fight to champion liberal democracy throughout the world. 

The third approach is to say the hell with morals altogether. I call this the Deacon Blues approach. The narrator of the Steely Dan Deacon Blues discards all conventional morality, plays the saxophone, drinks whiskey all night long, and pursues a life of selfish hedonism. 

When I was sixteen, I was drawn to the song’s self-centered nihilism and despair. But I was also drawn to Jor-El’s moral imperative to his son: Be the Light of the World.

Here’s where it gets messy: I see a piece of myself in all 3 moral approaches.

Wait a minute. You mean I’m not simple. You mean I have conflicting impulses inside me? This is terrible. I was looking for a simple storybook narrative with a happy ending wrapped up in a pretty package with a shiny bow. 

I guess I’m not getting that.

Well, it’s time to workout and have a wheat-grass smoothie. I need to live for as long as I can so I can figure out this complicated morality stuff.

Tell me what you think, ladies and gentlemen. I’m out.   

 

The Toaster-Oven Approach to Life Is a Losing Model

Like most people I don’t want to die. I want to live as long as possible. I exercise, eat healthy, and undergo preventative medical protocols to maximize the probability of having a long life. One of my concerns, though, is that my approach to living a long life is similar to the desire to make my life a “good value” in a materialistic, consumer sense. For example, if I buy a toaster-oven, I want it to last a long time, a decade perhaps, as a sign that I got a “good value” and was a “smart shopper.” By living to, say, 110, I fear I will on my deathbed say something really stupid like this: “I should be proud because I managed to live to 110. I got my money’s worth over this thing we call life. I won.”

Won what? 

What does living to 110 have to do with the kind of life I lived?

So as you can see, I am concerned that by seeing my life as a toaster-oven I am focusing on my lifespan in terms of quantity rather than what I should be focusing on: quality. 

The mentality that living a long life is equivalent to winning is rooted in foolishness. This mentality is in truth based on a losing framework that has no foundation on a moral core. 

How do I score on the Moral Core Grade Sheet? 

Low, I’m afraid. 

As far as morals go, I have a modicum of decency. But my default setting is to be selfish, lazy, insular, and to succumb to my unruly passions as much as I think I can get away with so that my acts of moral courage and charity are rather limited. 

My moral failings hardly make me an exception. To the contrary, I suspect I’m like most people in the Morals Department, but there are some extreme traits I see in myself that should be examined unflinchingly to get to the bottom of this toaster-oven approach to life.  

Unboxing Watches Is My Full-Time Job of Self-Deception

All my life I’ve been afflicted with the morbid thought that my first name, Jeff, rhymes with death. 

I first made this unpleasant association when I was six, a sign that I am hard-wired to be of a gloomy disposition. My father, still bristling with gusto and testosterone from his days as an infantryman in the Army, noticed I was gloomy about all sorts of subjects, including his taking me to circuses and giving my birthday parties, not occasions for celebrations on my part, but opportunities for me to whine and complain, prompting my father to often say,“What’s wrong, son, did a birdy go poo-poo on your lip?”

My Grandmother Mildred, on my mother’s side, noticed an unbecoming pessimism in me also. When I was six years old, I was expressing worry about a news report of my favorite candy bar, Pay-Day, being taken off the shelves because of excessive rat hair, and my grandmother, no doubt chafed by my anxieties, told me I worry too much, upon which I thought to myself, “Great, another thing to worry about.”

Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am inclined toward an acute form of weariness which seeks relief through a variety of self-soothing behaviors, some of which do not serve my best interests.

For example, by middle age, I have been reduced to a YouTuber stereotype, a self-obsessed depressive caught up in the familiar trap of buying flashy stuff as a substitute for basic human needs: belonging, creativity, purpose, connection with others. You know the drill. We buy things and show them off on YouTube so people will admire us, and if they esteem us enough evident in a spike in subscribers and effulgent comments, we may begin to admire ourselves, however falsely, and over time this fake self-admiration might just bloom into a form of megalomania sufficient enough to inspire us to kick into gear our YouTube channel to a higher level so we then produce slick, highly-edited videos featuring our superior consumer tastes curated with self-confident alacrity. At this point, we join the ranks of the most odious professions. We become Cultural Influencers, a parasitic tribe using social media platforms to contribute to the consumer addiction of humanity. 

But like I said, this eager exhibitionism is a trap. Most social media Influencers flame out. They crash. Behind all the tinsel and glitter is the lonely soul’s cry for help, and when help doesn’t come, the lonely soul curls up into the fetal position and cries himself into a long depression coma. There’s no rush to wake up. Who’s eager to confront a soul that has been reduced to ammonia-soaked shredded rags? 

Better to deceive myself by convincing myself that my life is full of joy and excitement. One way I achieve this deception is through the celebrated ritual of unboxing. My unboxing specialty was watches: I was unboxing, wearing, reviewing, delighting, philosophizing, debating, and consuming myself with “watch talk” with other watch obsessives, known in the community as Watch Idiot Savants, mostly a group of highly educated, high-income men with a passion for technology, engineering, and “precise tool instruments.” 

I had other unboxing rituals as well. I would unbox and  rhapsodize about “ultra-sleek” portable communication devices, vintage coffee percolators with majestic swan-neck spouts, vintage Gillette razors, and the joys of old-fashioned “wet shaving the way Dad used to do it.” I would contemplate my retirement from being a full-time college “critical thinking” composition instructor after 35 years, how I’d reinvent myself by taking adult-learning classes in pottery and then sell my hand-made, lead-free artisan Jabba the Hutt cookie jars on eBay for $500 a piece. 

But mostly, my subscribers wanted to see me unbox watches: diver watches, pilot watches, chronographs, solar, quartz, mechanical. The more expensive the watch the better. Spending exorbitant amounts of money on a watch was the equivalent of a dare. “How far will this guy go up the luxury ladder? Will his costly Holy Grail cure him of the pathological need to accumulate a bunch of mediocre watches he doesn’t need? Has he found the one watch Grail to cure him and other watch obsessives of their madness? Does such a watch even exist? Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen, because the watch drama is unfolding before our eyes!” 

Whatever the benefits of my channel, I eventually discovered I was doing what every other joker on this planet was doing. While I accumulated crap I didn’t need in the name of featuring products on my channel, I was on a misguided quest for something much deeper: the love that exists inside the depth of the human heart because deep down I knew the truth, even as I paraded my products on my channel, that a life without a loving heart is a life that is not worth a roll of toilet paper. 

Some of you are now saying, “Bravo, McMahon, you’ve found the truth, you’ve had your Come to Jesus Moment, so get off your materialism kick, stop buying watches you don’t need, and seek spiritual heights. Come on, bro, you can do it.”

But it’s not that simple. The head and the heart operate separately. My head knows the truth of what I just wrote, but my heart is still shackled to accumulating crap I don’t need, and managing all the crap I don’t need has turned into a full-time job. I’m not celebrating my love for watches anymore. I’m living out the drama of a man enslaved to an addiction and an obsession that is making me miserable. My self-soothing tendencies have backfired and become Balrog’s flame whip from the great battle in Lord of the Rings. The monster’s fiery tail has lashed me and left an indelible mark that leaves me crippled. 

I now hobble about my house making unboxing watch videos, trying to put up a happy facade, but deep down I am a broken man bearing the scars of my encounter with Balrog.

 

 

Hyperbole on the Brain

Our psychological underpinnings determine our course of action we take to leave our indelible mark on this world. Our innate psychological profile, perhaps more than free will or human agency, governs our path to what we believe is a meaningful existence that will have a lasting impact on others.

I don’t know if my personal profile is conducive to meaning in any kind of elevated sense. My defining personality trait is my compulsion toward hyperbole. What this means is that I over exaggerate everything to the nth degree. I don’t just get sick with a common cold. I nearly die. I don’t just enjoy German Chocolate Cake. I nearly pass out from the endorphin rush. When I drive past the cattle slaughter houses on Highway 5 in Kettleman City, I nearly go into anaphylactic shock. When I enter a port-a-potty at some musical festival or other, I emerge from the squalid latrine with chronic depression that forces me into six months of bed rest while I listen to motivational podcasts and read selected passages from The Book of Psalms. When my twin daughters see the candy rack at a supermarket and they ask me to buy them sweets, I tell them I refuse to buy them diabetes supplements, which will lead to nephropathy of their kidneys.

Hyperbole is not some affliction or other that hit me in adulthood. I was born with it as a congenital disease, what you might call hyperbole on the brain. Case in point, when I was four years old, I wanted to give a girl some Sun-Maid raisins that my parents usually kept for me, but when they said they didn’t have any more raisins, I had a tantrum at the top of our apartment and I accidentally bumped into the girl, causing her to fall down a flight of stairs. I felt so guilty for what I had done that the next day I flung myself down the same stairs in the hope that this self-punishment would rectify my criminal wrongdoing.

This compulsion to be hyperbolic speaks to a childishness, a self-indulgence, and a self-centeredness, personality traits that are not very desirable or pleasant, but this hyperbolic quality also speaks to a sense of irony, comedic self-deprecation, and dramatic story-telling, attributes that people appear to like or to find entertaining, at least in moderate doses.

My entire existence has been one of hyperbole. My mother broke water with me at a Gainesville Gators football game during half time. This was late October, 1961. She was in the stands at the University of Florida about twenty yards from Lyndon B. Johnson, who was America’s Vice President at the time. My father rushed my mother to the hospital, where the doctor, an avid Gators fan, said he didn’t want to miss the second half of the game. “Either the boy comes out now, or he doesn’t come out,” the doctor said.  

I came out an enormous baby, described by many as a giant Buddha, with cheeks that pushed against my eyes and a love of mashed potatoes that I wanted shoveled into my mouth without interruption or else I would emit blood-curdling screams.

As a toddler, I had an enormous appetite while living in poverty in the housing projects, called Flavet Village, student housing made of World War II barracks. Flavet was infested with cockroaches, which I would crush with my hands before trying to eat them because of my hunger and my belief that the oversized roaches were chocolate bars. When my parents weren’t yanking cockroaches out of my greedy hands, they were selling their blood to feed me.

We had a watercolor painting on the living room wall. It was a portrait of an Alaskan Eskimo wearing a traditional fur parka. The head covering had fur that looked like arches of light or a halo, and I grew up believing this Eskmo was some kind of deity. Though my parents did not raise me in any religion, everyday I beheld the heavenly Eskimo and believed I was beholding the visage of God.

The Eskimo painting was not some piece of random artwork that my parents had put on the wall of our Gainesville apartment. It was a relic from where they had met each other in Alaska. Even that story of their romance and my conception is rooted in hyperbole.

My father and John Shalikashvili, who would someday be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were both stationed in Anchorage and both had met my mother in a tavern. My eighteen-year-old mother and her parents had recently “relocated” to Anchorage from Los Angeles when Senator Joe McCarthy went on the red-scare-inspired witch’s hunt, which included going after my grandfather whose politics were so left as to make Joan Baez look like a member of a William F. Buckley think tank. Deemed a threat to national security, my grandfather was fired from his high-ranking government-position with the USO, and, with the help of friends, got radio work in Anchorage. Laying low in Alaska until McCarthy was discredited as the ruthless political hack that he was, my mother, just out of high school, didn’t have a lot to do but flirt the with the local army personnel. That’s when she met Shalikashvili and my father who both wanted her as their very own. Their battle for her sole romantic affections took a Christmas hiatus when Shalikashvili returned to his home in Peoria, Illinois, and my father returned to see his family in Gainesville, Florida. Wanting to beat Shalikashvili to my mother, my father decided to secretly head back for Anchorage a couple of days early. The problem was that the Lukas fuel filter in the Morris Minor wasn’t working and the auto parts store still didn’t have a replacement. In a moment of ingenuity, my father, who would later become an engineer, used his only prophylactic and a paperclip as a temporary fuel filter replacement. While not a perfect repair job, the condom did serve as a spring to help keep the fuel pump from staying stuck in the “open” or “closed” position. Somehow he made it to Seattle, where he ferried to Alaska and reunited with my mother, beating Shalikashvili by forty-eight hours.

The problem was that my father used his one and only prophylactic and I was, as a result, born nine months later in Gainesville during a Gators game.  The condom that would have blocked my conception was instead adapted to make a car drivable.

No doubt this lust-soaked effluvium that accompanied the origins of my birth made an indelible stamp of car lust that has afflicted me all of my life.

 

How Will You be Remembered?

We all want to be remembered for something.

Preferably, we want to be remembered for something deemed uplifting, useful, helpful, meaningful. We want our brief existence to make a contribution to humanity, yet we don’t want to be grandiose about our claimed contributions. Nor do we want to engage in excessive self-regard or self-promotion, attributes that betray an insidious inadequacy and pestilence to the human race. Nor do we want to be pathological in our supposed altruism, caring without compromise for the world of strangers while behaving like churlish cretins toward our close family and friends.

We can look to a few people who have left a permanent mark on the culture, evidenced by the fact that their names have been turned into adjectives and are now an enduring part of our lexicon.

Orwellian points to totalitarian government agencies and their total corruption of language to exercise their oppression.

Kafkaesque points to bureaucratic absurdity, meaningless rules, and feelings of helplessness in the face of that meaninglessness.  

Nabokovian points to pyrotechnic word play that razzle dazzles the readers.

Some people’s names have not been turned into adjectives, but their personalities embody a lasting cultural influence.

David Letterman embodies acerbic wit and deadpan irony, qualities that were especially shocking since he emerged out of the Disco Era when people wore Angel Flights bell-bottom slacks, platform shoes, and puka shell necklaces without a trace of irony.

Hugh Hefner embodies, in spite of Bill Maher’s historical revisionism, swanky self-indulgent prurience and arrested development, qualities that at one time seemed shockingly hip in contrast to the phony cultural conformity glorified by such iconic, homily-larded television shows as Leave It To Beaver and My Three Sons.

Martin Luther King represents powerful persuasion for self-sacrifice for liberal democracy and the war against racial tribalism.

Vladimir Putin represents a conniving operative who champions kleptocracies and totalitarian governments while sabotaging democratic ones.

Viktor Frankl represents the quest for meaning by not imposing our will on life but by listening to life’s demands and responding with urgency to those demands.

Hitler represents pure evil. Some would argue that Hitler’s evil was a form of madness. Others would argue that his evil was his cynical manipulation of others. I would argue that Hitler’s evil was a bit of both. It’s possible that evil begins as a cynical strategum. Then eventually the evil person becomes insane, like his cultish followers, from drinking his own Kool-Aid.

Some people suffer a type of egotism that hungers for notoriety, a particular way of being remembered severed from a moral framework. In the sociopath’s world, infamy becomes a reward unto itself.

Most of us, however, are not like that. Most of us want to be remembered for something morally good, or at the very least be remembered for having been distinctive.

Many of us are not content with being mere consumers of cultural trophy markers, amassing funds to satisfy our materialistic and social status cravings before passing out from consumeristic and social-climbing exhaustion and being buried six feet under.  

Many of us acknowledge that we hunger for nice cars and luxury watches and spacious houses with all the technological upgrades and a life of first-class travel, fitness, health, “clean eating,” and a type of disciplined creative work and sustained focus that frees us from physical and psychological clutter. Such individuals may even have a tech-free “holy day,” a designated day of the week in which they turn off their Wi-Fi and gadgets while strolling with their loved ones and rescue animals along their private beachfront.

But even this very enviable lifestyle leaves us with a gaping spiritual hole that gnaws at us, what Viktor Frankl calls the “existential vacuum.”

Many of us want to be remembered. And it’s not just that we’re remembered, but how we are remembered, so at some point in our lives we may begin to develop a framework that will allow us to imagine ourselves being remembered because we are behaving in a way that we believe “makes a difference.”

Some of us don’t have a choice in this matter. Believing that we are put on this earth to be remembered for “making a difference” is how we are hardwired. If we’re not hardwired for this quest, we may have been taught to “make a difference” by the pillars of strong secular humanism or a well defined religious creed,  but we may abandon this moral imperative for the pleasures of narcissistic indifference and self-centered indolence. For some of us, living in the sustained oblivion of self-indulgent hedonism becomes our sole objective.

But for many of us seeking pleasure-seeking oblivion is just a passing fancy. Eventually, we return to the state of wanting to be remembered, and if we take this quest seriously we realize we have to do something with ourselves. But we will likely find that doing something significant and memorable is no picnic at the beach. There are brilliant artists, scientists, writers, and philosophers who slog on in obscurity.

Dante died a pauper. He did eventually leave a mark, however. My Italian Literature professor once told me he was teaching The Inferno when one of his students fainted. I doubt Dante envisioned hundreds of years later a young student at a university in some other country would be studying his poetic descriptions of Hell and lose consciousness. Or perhaps that is precisely what he had in mind.

Dante used his imagination to create a physical universe of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise as an analogy of humanity’s psychological and spiritual condition of alienation from God, longing for God, and unity with God. This epic three-part poem has left a mark so that the term Dantean is a permanent part of the universal lexicon.

Curiously, though, Dantean addresses only the condition of Hell and is not used as a short-hand for Purgatory or Paradise. Descriptions of Hell, apparently, are more compelling than less tormented conditions. We could infer perhaps that life here on earth is so excruciating that poets who can articulate the scope of that suffering will have a better chance of being remembered.

We can be thankful that Dante didn’t live in another place and time when he may have been tempted to avoid poverty by composing saccharine Hallmark greeting cards. I suspect that such an insufferable occupation would have descended Dante through the nine circles of Hell.

I'm Leaving Apple Momma, At Least for Now

Since 2004 when I got my first iMac and iPod, I have been navigating inside the simple Apple ecosystem, convinced that I was in the safest, most efficient technological world possible. I was drinking the Apple Kool-Aid, and then around 2014 I bought my third iMac with i5 processor and 8 gigs of RAM, and it was always on the slow side, freezing up, and in general a buzzkill. Close to five and a half years later, it's slower than ever, especially with Word. 

Meanwhile, my work got me a Dell laptop with i7, 16 gigs of RAM, and 512 SSD, and it smokes. Apple is using similar specs on their higher priced models, but do I spend $2,200 on a new iMac with similar specs or do I spend about $1,200 on a Lenovo Yoga 720 with the same specs and touchscreen? I'm leaning toward the latter. 

I already bought my second smartphone yesterday, a Samsung Galaxy S9, and I forced myself to learn how to listen to podcasts on two apps: the very polished looking Pocket Casts and the less snazzy looking Pod Bean. However, Pocket Casts won't let me upload any more new podcasts without giving me an error message. Pod Bean seems to work better for now. I also have Google Podcasts, but they don't appear to play continuously, which is a feature I need since I sleep with podcasts running all night due to a particular type of neurosis and insomnia I must endure. I find "ocean sounds" and other white noise horrifying in a claustrophobic kind of way. I need to hear human voices to get through the nights. 

The point is I have had to learn the new way of listening to podcasts: on a smartphone, as opposed to the way I've been doing it for several years: Using an iPod to download from iTunes. Getting out of the Apple ecosystem has been a source of anxiety since I fear change.

But sleep is a big deal, and knowing my tech companions are at the ready means a lot to me. I'm leaving Apple Momma, at least for now.

Will I come crying back for Momma? Or will I learn to adapt to technologies outside my comfort zone? I hope I don't come back to Apple. As an engineering friend said to me, "When you pay extra for Apple, you're paying for easy." 

Is Apple really that more easy than the alternatives out there? We shall see. 

Bodybuilder's Inferno

Comedian Bill Burr has a routine in which he talks about how disturbing it would be if he made it to heaven and he waited for his friends and family to join him, but they never made it. After he waited for hundreds of years, he explains he'd have to conclude that they had gone to hell. He imagined that he wouldn't be able to enjoy heaven anymore knowing that all those loved ones were being eternally tortured.

I grew up without religious parents so I didn't spend much time thinking about heaven and hell. But then I learned about the afterlife in high school when some classmates invited my buddy Mario Alzone and me to start attending their church’s Wednesday night youth group meetings after I asked some Christians at school to explain to me the lyrics of the song “Supper’s Ready” by my favorite band Genesis. The song is twenty-four minutes long and ladled with biblical verses about the Apocalypse.

I had several questions for my Christian classmates: What are Gog and Magog? What is the significance of the numbers 666? What is the New Jerusalem? My classmates said the pastor could answer my questions at the youth group, and that there would be complimentary lasagna and Kool-Aid.

My friend Mario had no curiosity about deciphering Genesis’ quasi-religious lyrics. However, he loved free meals, especially since he was “bulking up” in his quest to be an international bodybuilding champion. Bodybuilding was our shared passion since I had met Mario during my freshman year of high school. Three years my senior and having hulking trapezius muscles that gave him the nickname “No Neck,” Mario told me he wanted to be so big and muscular that he no longer looked human. He aspired to be a horned monster with webbed toes and fingers that instilled fear and awe in the hearts of men. “To get really big,” he had said, “you have to eat the steak fat and throw away the meat. You have to drink the fruit cocktail syrup and throw away the fruit. And after your workouts you should have a nurse push you around in a wheelchair to allow your muscles maximum recovery.”

He wanted to prove all his doubters wrong by someday being so muscle-bound that when he took off his shirt people would fall to the ground, weep, and worship him as Lord.

After a few weeks of attending the megachurch’s youth meetings and being told that we “had to make a decision for Christ,” Mario was expressing doubt over the concepts of heaven and hell. “Truth be told,” he said, driving me to the Wednesday-night youth group in his candy apple red Ford Ranchero, “I need to see it all on film. Jacques Cousteau captures his underwater journeys in his documentaries. If I’m going to give up fornication, there had better be movies that show me that hell is a real thing, not just some scare tactic.” Mario would have to hear the heavy French accent of Jacques Cousteau, submerged in the bowels of hell, describe in detail its horrors before he gave up fornication, for Mario was a disciple of the flesh, a regular at the Moonlight Ranch and other such establishments where he could fulfill his ambition to be a Billy Goat.

As we wound up the hill and approached the giant three white crosses that towered over the nondenominational worship complex, Mario continued to say that renouncing the flesh would be especially hard during the summer when, as we were prone to tanning at the lake after working out at the gym, his lust meter tended to rise to unbearable levels.

To add to his doubts about joining the church, his favorite bodybuilder—and mine—1978 Mr. Universe winner Mike Mentzer was an atheistic, self-described existentialist philosopher fond of quoting Nietzsche and other likeminded thinkers in Muscle Builder magazine. “If Mentzer ever finds out we’re listening to these fairy tales with these sheltered little brainwashed children, he’ll laugh at us. He may even have us kicked out of the International Bodybuilding Federation.”

“He can laugh all he wants,” I said. “I for one don’t want to go to hell.”

Unlike Mario, I didn’t need the Jacques Cousteau footage to be haunted by eternity. I was having nightmares about burning in hell. One morning, I screamed out to Jesus to save me so loudly I woke myself up in a lather of sweat. One Sunday when Alzone and I were in the church’s private prayer quarters after a service in which we were invited to accept Christ as our personal savior, I told the pastor about my dream of burning in hell and how I screamed out to Jesus to save me. On the way home, Alzone scolded me for telling the pastor about my dream.

“I should kick your ass for telling him about that dream. Were you trying to make me laugh, or what?”

“What’s so funny about having a dream about burning in hell?”

“No one has dreams like that, asshole. You’re making that shit up. We’re in a prayer room, and you decide to be a comedian all of a sudden. I had to pinch myself to stop laughing.”

Ironically, I had to pinch myself to stop laughing when Mario, during the same meeting, asked the pastor if fornication was a sin. For Mario, accepting the Lord as Savior might be achieved if he could strike a deal with the pastor, persuading the minister to give him a special dispensation for the sins of the flesh, a kind of fornication allowance. But the doughy, double-chinned pastor with a green plaid suit, long bangs, and bushy mustache made it clear that there were no exceptions when it came to sex before marriage: Fornication was a sin. The pastor’s pronouncement made Alzone sink in his chair and pout like a dejected child.

That fornication was a sin and should be avoided at all costs was reinforced at a youth meeting when the pastor showed us a Josh McDowell film in which the evangelist lectures the importance of preserving one’s virginity before marriage. McDowell’s presentation was peppered with jokes that made Mario cackle like a drunkard, but when the message sunk in, that celibacy was a sign of obedience to God, he became sober.

On the drive home from the Sunday morning service in which I described my dream of burning in the flames of hell, Mario said he doubted he would be able to abstain from sex, which he said came as naturally to him as breathing, sweating, and going to the bathroom. It was, in his mind, a natural body function that could not be denied.

He and I had a conversation with his older sister Brenda, an attorney still living in the home, about his struggles with the Christian faith and his attempts at chastity. We were in Mario’s room when she told us abstaining from sex before marriage was not realistic. She was wearing a low-cut red halter-top and skimpy denim cut-offs, made popular by Daisy Duke from The Duke’s of Hazzard. “In modern society,” she said sitting on Mario’s bed, “everything has been so sexualized there’s really no way of avoiding it.” She then looked at the wallpaper in her brother’s bedroom. It featured duplicate images of the same topless woman with features that reminded me of Sophia Loren. Mario was literally living inside a room with wall-to-wall breasts. His sister smiled at the nearby wall featuring hundreds of pendulous breasts and said, “Is this Christian wallpaper?” Then she looked at the cache of Playboys and similar magazines stacked on his desk next to his Incredible Hulk piggy bank and said, “Are those Christian magazines?” She had a triumphant smile as if her observation of Mario’s erotica was proof of religion’s futility.

I told Mario we should tear down the wallpaper and burn the magazines in his backyard. Mario wouldn’t let me touch the wallpaper, but he agreed to burn the magazines. We stacked the magazines on the grass in Mario’s backyard, doused them with gasoline, and threw a lit match on them. Soon, charred pages and ashes whirled in the wind making a huge mess, a sort of porno apocalypse, and Mario’s 260-pound, disheveled, squinty-eyed father emerged from the house presumably having been wakened from a nap. He was wearing nothing but white boxer shorts and black socks. His pale thighs were covered with thick black hair, but his bulging calves and shins were bald from the constant friction provided by his black nylon socks. He scowled at us and said, “Clean up the mess, dumb shits,” before disappearing back into the house.

Mario was in ill spirits after incinerating his private magazine collection. He decided we should wash his car, which was coated with ashes. We were in the front driveway when a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses approached us. Mario barked at them to leave the area, but not before he blasted them with the jet spray of his garden hose. Putting the kibosh on premarital sex and his illicit magazines was proving too much for him. As I recall, after the bonfire he had quickly replenished his private magazine collection and within a few months his collection had grown tenfold.

During one of our drives to the Wednesday-night youth service as we approached the megachurch’s parking area, Mario told me he was still struggling with his vows of chastity. “Take away sex,” he said, “and what’s left for young men in their prime like us?”

“Salvation,” I said.

“What if it’s not true?

“What if it is?”

Neither of us was familiar with Pascal’s Wager, but unknowingly I was operating on that principle. Better to be safe, and avoid hell, than be sorry. But for Mario, hell insurance wasn’t compelling enough to stave off the impulse for fornication. And he didn’t believe the young church members were abstaining from sex either. “Look at those women at church,” he said. “All made up with false eyelashes, mascara, short skirts, with their boobs hanging out. You don’t think they’re there to get laid? Shit. Everyone wants sex, my friend. Christian, Muslim, Jew, and atheist alike. It’s in our blood. It’s what makes the world go round. And guess what? God gave us the desire, so why should He condemn us?”

“No one said it was going to be easy.”

Once we discussed the sin of fornication with his mother in the kitchen. She was seated at the table having her 2 P.M. martini. Behind her was a wooden plaque her husband, the manager of a sausage processing plant, had nailed to the wall. It read, “The man makes the living, and the wife makes the life worth living.” Mario’s mom told her son he didn’t need to worry about sex before marriage. “We’re Catholic,” she said. “In our religion, we can have all the sex and alcohol we want from Monday through Saturday. Then on Sundays we confess our sins to the priest.”

“How do you get to Heaven?” I asked.

“Don't commit murder, don’t steal, and don’t cheat.”

Regarding the latter, I knew that Mario’s father was being investigated for income tax fraud, but I kept my mouth shut.

The giant three crosses cast a shadow over the fire red Ranchero as Mario looked for a parking place next to the youth center building. After telling me how much easier it would be for us to be Catholic, he said, “Screw these youth meetings. Screw chastity. We should go to my parents’ church. There’s more leeway.”

“The Bible tells us that God will not be mocked.”

“You take the joy out of life. Why I continue to hang out with you is a mystery, my friend.”

Giving up on the Catholic angle, he turned the discussion to atheism, bringing up atheist philosopher Mr. Universe Mike Mentzer again, and my grandfather, a socialist atheist, who believed sex before marriage was healthy and recommended it for men of our age, words that made Mario venerate my grandfather as his lifetime hero.

“Mentzer and your grandfather would both agree that young men like us should not be repressing our sexual desires. And believe me, it’s going to be harder during the summer. It’s bikini season. Do you know what that will do to our testosterone?”

“I don’t want to go to hell,” I said bluntly.

“But how do you know?”

“How do I not know? And what about the biblical prophecies?” While Mario was driving, I had been reading aloud excerpts of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and scaring both of us about The End of Times. “We’re entering the nineteen-eighties. We may be living in the age of the Anti-Christ, the Mark of the Beast, and the Rapture. Do you want to get caught with your pants down?”

“If she looks good, why not?”

“Shit, Mario, this is not a joke.”

To add to my fear of hell, I was spending a lot of time listening to the scariest Voice of Hell on Planet Earth, Family Radio’s Harold Camping. His cranky, humorless voice dripped with contempt for the “lovers of the flesh” who were doomed to scream for all eternity in the flames of hell. Listening to Camping’s voice on the radio, I felt like the trembling Cowardly Lion in the presence of the Great Oz. Camping specialized in damning the human race as if he relished in his position to be a spokesman for a God who saved only a remnant according to his own discretion. “I don’t know about you,” Camping once said on his radio show, “but the idea of going to bed at night unsaved with the fear of not waking up and your next moment of consciousness being in eternal damnation is enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up. If I were you, I would throw myself at the Mercy Seat of Christ and say, ‘Oh, Lord, if it would please you to be saved from the hell that I deserve, please, Lord, save me.’ And then perhaps, Lord willing, you could find mercy.” Over and over Camping told callers to his radio program that being afraid of hell was the best thing that could ever happen to them because, after all, the fear of the Lord, Scripture tells us, is the beginning of all wisdom. Unbeknownst to himself, Camping seemed to take gleeful delight in talking about hell and how only “a remnant were chosen to be saved according to God’s private pleasure.” Whom God saved and whom He destined for hell were none of our business, Camping was fond of saying. It was all in His divine discretion. When callers protested Camping’s God that predestined a remnant to heaven and the overwhelming majority to hell, he would end the call with a passive-aggressive curse of politeness: “May the Lord richly bless you.”

Whenever my mother heard Camping’s radio show through my bedroom walls, she’d come into my room and tell me to turn that shit off. And I could take my Bible and throw it out the window, and if I didn’t do it, she’d do it for me.

Recently divorced from my father, my mother was a secular Jew who saw Christianity as being too often an anti-Semitic force as it accused Jews of being Christ killers. And the notion that our family members who had died in the Holocaust had to face an even greater hell, provided by the Christian God, after their death in the concentration camps didn’t sit well with her either. I agreed with her that this notion of hell was morally abhorrent, but unlike her I could not disbelieve in this doctrine that offended and tormented me.

One afternoon, I walked into the kitchen and on the counter was this yellow, slimy chicken. The plucked bird looked forlorn, a leper sulking on the cutting board. Mother was standing next to the chicken holding a cleaver.

“You need to learn to clean out this chicken,” she said puffing on a cigarette.

“I don’t want to touch it,” I said. “It’s disgusting.”

What Mother said next ruined my life. She said, “You better learn to clean a chicken. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to make love to a woman. This whole church business is about you being afraid of girls, isn’t it.”

Where in the hell did that come from? Was this just some insane nonsense that exploded from the abyss of her volatile brain? Or was there some Freudian nugget of genius insight in her analogy between one’s capacity for wallowing in blood and guts and one’s skillful navigation through difficult sexual techniques? Perhaps she sincerely believed that getting my fingers deep inside the folds of moist chicken flesh was a prerequisite for my transformation into a first-rate lover.

My mother is a very complex human being, sometimes appearing childishly naïve, other times appearing fiendishly premeditating and manipulative, so I cannot honestly say I have a clear and single answer for any of the possible motives behind the Chicken Incident.

What I can say with certainty is that after she made her remark, I puffed my chest and exuding the same military aggression I learned from my father I said something like “That is complete bullshit, Mother,” before disappearing into my room and doing bench presses and curls while contemplating Bible verses on how the sins of the flesh could land a sinner like myself into the flames of hell.

In her concern for my fear of hell, Mother used her connections to arrange that I speak to a couple of liberal pastors, kind-hearted men whose formula for getting into heaven proved far more generous than Harold Camping’s, but their implied universalism, the belief that everyone eventually gets to heaven, never sunk in. Reading the words attributed to St. Paul and Jesus and listening to Harold Camping and others convinced me that being a Christian was about being saved from eternal hell. “Weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth” in the outer darkness was the result of knowing that you had the chance to get saved, but that you had told God to shove it. You were more interested in asserting your own will, your own selfish desires, and making yourself the Lord of yourself. You were the defiant Frank Sinatra singing “My Way” to God. The price to pay for loving the Darkness more than the Light was not just moral dissolution here on Earth but eternal torment in hell. The torment of the damned was to look afar at the believers ecstatically feasting at God’s table while the unsaved watched, outsiders looking in, forever banished from the things they longed for.

My mother accused the Christian faith of being a disgrace for at least two reasons. For one, in Judaism there was no such "sickness" as the belief in eternal hell. For two, the Christian religion was tinged with anti-Semitism. This became evident at the megachurch I attended when one night, around Easter season, a film was shown about Jesus, probably taken from the Gospel of Luke. In one scene as the dark-skinned hooked-nosed Jews threw rocks at the light-skinned blond Jesus, the white Christian audience gasped in disgust at the dark complexioned Pharisees, and a young woman sitting in front of me said, “Those people make me sick!”

During my high school years, I observed that disdain for the Jews was evident outside the church as well. Kids at school used Jew as a verb whenever they tried to get a price down on something during a negotiation. The story of Judas Iscariot, the greedy Jew who sold out Jesus for twenty pieces of silver, forever branded Jews as money-hungry scoundrels.

My senior year in high school I had a crush on a girl, Sandy Templeton, who worked for a Jewish doctor and one day at school, not knowing I was half Jewish, she told me working for this obnoxious Jewish doctor was too much for her, that she would avoid Jews for the rest of her life. Then there was my very best friend Mario whose father read the weekly newspaper The Spotlight, an ultra right wing anti-Semitic publication that denounced Zionism, accused the international Jewish community of crazy conspiracies, and denied the Holocaust, or at the very least, claimed it was an exaggeration. Mario told me when he was a little kid he had a Jewish babysitter who was so cheap she turned off the heat in his house and he almost froze to death. I imagined his parents re-told him the story over and over during his youth, so that he grew up believing, “This is what the Jews do. They kill their children—and others’ children if they’re given the opportunity—with their cheapness.”

When I told Mario my mother was Jewish, he said he knew it all along, that he “could spot a Jew a mile away,” and that the implication was that his accepting me, a Jew, as his friend was an exception, not a rule.

In spite of the anti-Semitism that he had absorbed from his father, Mario had been my best friend since I was fourteen and he ended up embracing my Jewish socialist grandfather as his own, being drawn to my grandfather’s warmth and wisdom more than his father’s disdain for his family that made Mario and his two older sisters walk on eggshells whenever they were in their father’s presence.

In spite of my misgivings about Christianity—my suspicion that it was anti-Semitic, my assessment that eternal damnation was an unjust punishment for the finite sins of the human race, and my sense that St. Paul’s writing style smacked of excessive, self-aggrandizing piety —my fear of hell proved too great to fight and one night at a youth meeting when I stood up to accept Christ as my savior, I was congratulated by Christians, many who attended my high school and who had been eagerly waiting for me to become saved.

Word spread about my conversion, and at the next day at school a classmate approached me, shook my hand, and looked into my sad eyes. “Why don’t you look happy?” he asked. I was in fact the saddest man in the world, joining a religion whose God damned people for all eternity, but I didn’t tell him this. Nor did I tell him that my Jewish grandmother, who had died a year earlier from leukemia, weighed heavily on my soul because some of my new church friends told me she was in hell. I had begged God to save me from hell, but there was nothing I could do about dead Jewish family members who didn’t know Jesus. The idea of them suffering in hell made it feel impossible for me to be happy or to experience the perfect love of God. And I was told if I questioned God’s perfect love I myself would go to hell. I told myself I didn’t need to have all my doubts and questions answered right away. The important thing was to get my hell insurance. Then I’d have some breathing room and could bide my time while I waited for God to answer the questions that continued to eat away at me.

During the summer, a couple months after my conversion, I left the San Francisco Bay Area to spend time with my grandfather in Los Angeles. He was still grieving the loss of his wife who had died from leukemia seventeen months earlier. I didn’t dare tell him what the church people had told me about her eternal fate. But I did tell him I was going to church. I knew he wouldn’t be happy. He was an atheist socialist whose favorite philosopher in college was Nietzsche, a man some of the church people called the “Anti-Christ.” He asked me why I had turned to religion, and I told him I was afraid I was going to hell. He laughed and said that once I started college and talked to history and philosophy professors they would set me straight; they would show me that religion was nothing but a bunch of fairy tales and a bogus creation designed to control the masses. He said that most religious people he had met over the years were weird. I didn’t want my grandfather to think I was a weirdo or a stupid person who believed in fairy tales, but I was hurting. My whole world had collapsed when I discovered the universe was ruled by a god who threw people into eternal hell. And I was commiserating with people who were telling me my grandmother was damned. I tried to explain my fear of hell to my grandfather, and he said, “If you want to be afraid of hell, be my guest.”

It was just like my grandfather to not argue with me about my beliefs. He must have known that arguing wouldn’t change my mind. When he and I spent time at the machine shop with his best friend and fellow socialist Forbes Sherry, he told him about my fear of hell, and Forbes, a small wiry man who worked over sixty hours a week in his machine shop and gave all the money he could to the socialist movement, said to me, “Don’t let them suck you into their cult. That’s all it is—a cult—just like the rest of them.”

Calmly, my grandfather said, “I think it’s too late.”

I felt wounded, perhaps even despair, upon hearing my grandfather’s words because I knew what he said was true. How could the idea of eternal hell, so powerful and so terrifying, once implanted inside someone ever truly vanish? Only a miracle would make it do so, or I would find a way to make a peace with the God of heaven and hell. For me, God was a real being to be feared, but for my grandfather, God was the product of fairy tales, ancient stories made up in the desert during tribal warfare, and were best discarded in favor of secular, practical strategies to help build a better world.

I envied my grandfather for having no fear of hell and for seeing the Bible as nothing but fairy tales. His life seemed so much easier than mine. The only thing he seemed to fear were birds—poultry in particular—because his siblings threw a headless chicken at him, the legend goes, when he was a little boy and he had a lifelong phobia to all forms of poultry, so that on Thanksgiving the hosts had to make him a special dish featuring a non-bird protein. Once when we were at someone’s house with a pet macaw perched outside its cage, my grandfather cowered and his whole body shook until the owner put the bird in another room. So there you had it. My grandfather cowered in the presence of birds. I cowered in the presence of the New Testament God.

If I had to choose between a lifelong fear of chickens and a lifelong fear of hell, I’d take the chickens.

I often long to have my grandfather’s point of view, that the Bible is a bunch of man-made fairy tales, but the fear of hell was so deep inside me I felt I couldn’t afford to be wrong because if I was wrong I’d be totally screwed.

One summer after a Sunday evening church service, Mario and I went to Tanglewood apartments because Mario wanted to have a late-night swim. He said he had a friend who lived at the complex, and this friend was supposed to meet us by the gate, but he never showed up and the gate was locked, so we climbed over the gate and went swimming. Hanging by its strap on the diving board was an orange fluorescent bra. It practically glowed in the dark. The sight of the bra excited me. Obviously a woman of great bounty had disrobed there. We had probably missed the glorious spectacle by just a few moments.

Mario grabbed the bra and twirled it above his head as if he were going to fling it. Then he stopped. "Shit on a stick," he said. "It's my sister's birthday tomorrow. I forgot to buy her a present."

He didn't even wrap it. He just gave his sister this orange bra, and she wasn’t even shocked. Using an abandoned bra as a birthday gift was just another crazy thing in the life of her brother Mario.

When I think back of the two or three years I attended church with Mario, I realize I was patently depressed. People who knew me said that I looked like I had given up on life and that if Jesus was as amazing as I said He was then why was I so miserable? The reason in part is that many of the church members had told me my grandmother had gone to hell. Most of them meant no harm. They were simply espousing their beliefs, the very beliefs that insured they themselves would not go to hell. In order for them to enjoy hell insurance, they had to tow the company line.

In spite of being raised by an anti-Semitic father, not once did Mario ever say that my grandmother was damned. In fact, he was so offended when he heard it at church that one time he told me anyone who says that should be punched in the face, and if I didn’t do it he would. In spite of being raised by a Jew-hating father, Mario embraced by grandfather as his very own. The thing about Mario is that he was a crazy recalcitrant sinner, but he was the only reason I was ever happy during my “church years.” That guy could make me laugh like no other. Life without Mario was life with too little laughter, and life without laughter was hell on earth.