Frank's Eulogy

All the glory when He took our place,
But He took my shoulders, and He shook my face
and He takes and He takes and He takes

Sufjan Stevens
from "Casimir Pulaski Day"

Last fall I began thinking about death. Pretty often, actually. To the point where I truly believed that I would--not could--die at any moment. When I came to this realization around mid-December, I noticed that I had been surrounding myself with death: Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, Arcade Fire's Funeral, and Death Cab for Cutie's Plans--all overtly interested in death--had been in my cd player constantly. I'd been preparing for my Master's exam by reading the seventy-five or so works of literature that my professors had decided were "great," and coincidentally, most of them were about death, too. When I walked around my neighborhood, I often felt that some freak disaster was about to befall me: a seemingly innocent passerby would turn out to be mentally ill and push me off the Tenth Street Bridge; the driver of a tractor trailer passing me on Carson Street would suddenly lose consciousness, drive onto the sidewalk, and crush me beneath the trailer's bulk. At night, having survived another seemingly perilous day, I would lie in bed and tell God that I wasn't ready, that he would have to pick someone else this time, even while I knew that a person can't really tell God anything.

Well, he didn't pick me. But I wasn't off the hook. At 10:30 on an evening in late January, I had almost fallen alseep on the couch when my mom called and told me, in a terrible voice, that my father had died. He had massive heart attack, fell over, and turned blue, leaving her behind to figure out what to do next. And me, to try to quietly reinterpret my life.

A few days later, at the funeral, I read a eulogy for my father. I was told later that it had been perfect, recounting truths about his life, inciting laughter and tears, heartache and hope. But ever since I delivered it, I've been completely speechless about my father's death. Language, as Derrida liked to claim, has proved inadequate as a vehicle of self-expression. And so, my reinterpretation of life is largely inarticulate. I've been listening instead of speaking for what feels like the first time, and in my silence, I've come up with a better eulogy for my father. It's a collection of writings about death, fatherhood, and the blank terror that has gripped my consciousness during the last eight months. And it comes closest to telling the truth about the world as I see it now.

Sufjan Stevens, "Casimir Pulaski Day" (from Illinoise)
Li-Young Lee, "Mnemonic" (from Rose)
T.S. Eliot, "The Burial of the Dead" (from The Waste Land)
Anne Lamott, "O Noraht, Noraht" (from Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith)
Death Cab for Cutie, "What Sarah Said" (from Plans)
Arcade Fire, "Neighborhood #4 (Seven Kettles)" (from Funeral)
U2, "Wake Up Dead Man" (from Pop)
Bright Eyes, "Poison Oak" (from I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning)

Gnarls Barkley says it best...

Here's my first blog. It's about being crazy, and in it I quote the Gnarls Barkley song by the same name. Hopefully this is of interest to you.

The more I find out about the fundamental chaos that underlies the universe, the more I need to convince myself that it has nothing to do with me, that I am not, in fact, crazy. This is a difficult thing to do when everywhere I go, I am confronted by other individuals who seem pretty crazy to me. Or are they?

Take, for instance, the man I saw jogging at Charlotte Beach last week. It was my mom's birthday, and since I'm generally a thoughtless and ungrateful daughter, I decided to drive up to Rochester to celebrate with her. (You may wonder why my mom would want to celebrate her birthday with a daughter like that. I'm wondering the same thing, actually.) On the morning of her birthday, the temperature fell below ninety for the first time in a week, and we decided to take a walk along the pier. As the wind picked up, tossing polluted waves onto our feet and blowing our hair into our lipstick, a man jogged past us. He was middle-aged, of average height and weight, and was wearing a typical middle-aged man workout outfit: shorts a little too short, t-shirt a little too tight, and socks pulled up a little too high. I would have forgotten him immedietly and would by no means be describing him right now if, in the next moment, he hadn't transformed himself into a public spectacle. Ten feet in front of us, he stopped jogging, arranged himself into a fighting stance, and began doing what I can only presume to be his best Bruce Lee impersonation: lunging forward, he karate-chopped frantically for several seconds, then began kicking and punching the air in front of him as if it had offended him gravely. Then, satisfied with the ass-kicking he had given nothingness, he jogged on serenely. A few moments later, perhaps to prepare for the air's return attack, he dropped to the ground, propped his feet atop a short concrete wall, and began doing rapid push-ups.

As we cut a wide swath around him, I did the only thing that can be expected of a bystander at that moment: I laughed loudly, and now that I think back on it, almost delightedly. Because, if I'm going to be honest, I must admit that public displays of eccentricity do delight me, even if they're seemingly inconsequential to others. For instance, I saw a woman wearing teal gaucho pants trip and fall on her face on a streetcorner in Beaver Falls, PA, and I had a similar reaction. (Mostly because she was wearing those hideous gaucho pants. The combination of the pants and the falling was too much for me.)

After a lengthy set of push-ups, the man's face had turned an unnatural shade of red. My mom stopped laughing and expressed her worry that he might have a heart attack if he didn't give up his silly grudge against air resistance. She wished that he would stop running/doing pushups/karate-chopping. Because I'm not nearly as nice as her, and because I had already abstracted the man from any sort of reality I associated myself with (with includes mortality, apparently), I wanted him to keep going, mostly so I could keep laughing. I got my wish: he ran the length of the boardwalk, tore off his t-shirt in a frenzy, and began the routine all over again. By this time, most of the people at the park at that moment had noticed him and were staring in wide-eyed confusion. One older man, sitting quietly at a picnic table, his rotund figure refreshingly fitness-free, stared with an intensity that comes only from seeing someone a little too much like you--your age, your socio-economic group--losing their damn mind.

Mom and I left the park before the second round of aerobic kung-fu had been completed, and as we drove away, she forgot the man and thought about more pleasant things, like the delicious food she would consume that night at her birthday dinner. I continued thinking about the man who was so willing to exhibit his fitness mania to all who wished--or didn't wish--to see. I replayed the scene over and over in my mind, as if it were one of those irresistable disaster clips on ifilm, and chuckled contentedly to myself. Then, because it had been such a delightful scene to me, I decided it would be wrong of me not to share it with my husband. So I called him, and described the scene in great detail. That week, I related the story to every friend I hung out with. They all laughed, asked "Who does that?" just as I wanted them to, and agreed that the man was clearly crazy.

The hilarity died when I began analyzing my compulsion to tell everyone I knew about the fitness freak. I mean, it was a funny story, definitely, but funny enough to announce to a group of near-strangers at a friend's family picninc? I don't think so. In fact, those near-strangers may have found my obsession with craziness a little bit crazy. I realized, then, that my interest in the fitness freak was merely a sad, passive-aggressive attempt to assert my own sanity in a chaotic, crazy world. And in doing so, I threw myself headlong into the choas.

Or maybe it's just me. But does it matter whether the chaos approaches from within or without? When I look either way, it's there, in plain sight. Maybe I found that man in the park so funny because his mania was familiar to me: he was wearing my id on his shirtsleeve. I think Gnarls Barkley says it best:

Maybe I'm crazy
Maybe you're crazy
Maybe we're crazy
Probably