Death, like so many great movies, is terribly sad.
...But before we get to that...
It's tent caterpillar season here in New Orleans. One of the great disadvantages to living in a town that is, essentially, a swamp, is that we have approximately seven different seasons of gross bugs. There's the season of Enormous Cockroaches. The season of mosquito-y things that aren't quite mosquitoes. The season of really tiny black bugs that always seem to die mid-coitus, while fucking. ...And then, of course, the season of tent caterpillars, who cover our trees in enormous nets of hammock-like gray filaments, and who then fall to the ground in thousands, and who get squished, and die.
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All those caterpillars getting smushed reminds me of something. ...What was that thing again? ...Ah yes. Death.
The Hooksexup Video Blog is coming to an end.
...But before we get to that, here's a video. And I might point out that the videos that I'll be posting on this particular blog will have almost nothing to do with anything. But since this blog will soon be going to the great blog graveyard in the sky, I'll just be getting my entirely random song/video posting out of my system.
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So, the video blog is coming to an end, in the next couple of weeks. We gave it a shot; we had a good run; we
[insert sports-related cliché here]. Jess and I may soon be writing for a new blog for Hooksexup, but that's the future, and as for the future: we don't know.
I will, in any event, continue writing on the web in one form or another, and I'll give you guys the link to that, before we say bye bye for real.
It's bittersweet. This is the second "this is the end of this blog" column-thingy that I've had to write for Hooksexup. God wot that there will not be a third. And, yet, in a weird way, I really
like writing "goodbye; this is the end" column entries. I don't know why, but at the same time, I also know why.
See that image that I posted at the very top of this blog? That's from the very first comic book that I ever read. Comic books were my literature, growing up, and god knows, if I could manage to keep track of them, I'd probably still be reading them today. I picked up the comic pictured above randomly in a drug store, and I was instantly hooked. And it just so happened that the first comic book that I ever read was the final issue in a series that had gone on for over fifteen years. In the comic, nearly everyone died, and the good guys -- stunningly, to my mind -- had to vaporize themselves, die and turn themselves into columns of dust, in order to defeat the forces of evil.
I can still remember the first page of the issue, burned as it is into my memory. It showed the picture of an outstretched hand, trailing a slender handful of ashes, which were caught up, and which dissipated, into the wind. And it featured the caption:
"...In the end... everything will be ashes. Ashes and dust."
This was a hell of a thing for an eleven year-old kid to read, and I'm not sure that I ever got over it.
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I grew up with a sense of nostalgia. I may have gotten this from my father. My father loves old things: old trains, old diners, old cars. And so I grew up loving the same things that he loved. Except that these things -- trains, cars, old movies -- were from his childhood, not mine. And so I grew with a sense of nostalgia for things that had happened before I was even born.
Here's a quote:
"...Art," said Phlox, later. We were in her bed. There was the green glow of her radio dial and the faint, lost voice of Patti Page singing 'Old Cape Cod.' "What happened? Tell me. It was rude to leave like that. I'm embarrassed."
...I pressed up against her, spoonwise, and spoke over the soft and slightly damp lip of her ear. "I'm sorry," I whispered. "Everyone has some things he doesn't like to discuss, no?"
"You have too many," said Phlox.
"This song always kills me," I said.
She sighed, and then gave up. "Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. Nostalgia. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive."
"That's what I do to you too," she said. "I'll just bet."
It was what everything I loved did to me.
I guess what I'm saying, or trying to say, is that saying goodbye to stuff makes me feel sad, but also happy, in a weird way. As though it confirms a certain view that I have about the world. That, in a way, everything that is worth happening has happened already.
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That this blog is ending is good/bad. I found out this morning that the vid-blog is not long for this world, and my first reaction was: "Shit. What will I write about
now?" ...And then I paced around my apartment for half an hour, and then I sat down, and wrote a couple of scenes for my novel, and a scene for my memoir. (...I'm writing one of each; that way, whenever I say to myself,
"God, this book that I'm working on sucks," I can just switch over, painlessly, to the other one.) ...And then I was like: "Oh, so that's what I'll be writing about now."
...And so it's god/bad. I enjoyed writing this blog, a lot, but I will also enjoy writing other things.
I felt like I had a lot more that I was going to say, but I realize, looking back at those two sentences above, that that really kind of sums it up.
Anyway, since I'm feeling like I'm in an expansive mood, and since I love quoting shit, here's a passage from one of my favorite writers, talking about death, and the future. He's a really good writer, and you should probably go, right now, and buy his book.
...On the way back from the airport, I got off the expressway at the river road and parked the car at the edge of the woods. I walked up a steep path. There was an old picket fence with a sign.
THE OLD BURYING GROUND
Blacksmith Village
The headstones were small, tilted, pockmarked, spotted with fungus or moss, the names and dates barely legible. The ground was hard, with patches of ice. I walked among the stones, taking off my gloves to touch the rough marble. Embedded in the dirt before one of the markers was a narrow vase containing three small American flags, the only sign that someone had preceded me to this place in this century. I was able to make out some of the names, great strong simple names, suggesting a moral rigor. I stood and listened.
I was beyond the traffic noise, the intermittent stir of factories across the river. So at least in this they'd been correct, placing the graveyard here, a silence that had stood its ground. The air had a bite. I breathed deeply, remained in one spot, waiting to feel the peace that is supposed to descend upon the dead, waiting to see the light that hangs above the fields of the landscapist's lament.
I stood there, listening. The wind blew snow from the branches. Snow blew out of the woods in eddies and sweeping gusts. I raised my collar, put my gloves back on. When the air was still again, I walked among the stones, trying to read the names and dates, adjusting the flags to make them swing free. Then I stood and listened.
The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.
May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan.
...And that's it, for the moment. But there'll be some more video blogs to come, in the next couple of weeks. ...And we'll be seeing you soon; on the other side.
--Oliver