This could be heaven or this could be hell.
Nineteen days into 2016 and it seems like every few minutes there is yet another knock at the door and outside stands a somber, sober soldier waiting to inform us that yet another one of our treasured sons has been lost in the rock-and-roll wars.
This I know from experience as recent as of right now. Age is like a perverse magic trick. We slowly disappear until we become translucent and ultimately invisible. And then just like that, we are jolted by the sudden, slam into the brick wall news that a hero has been slain by cancer, or colitis or drugs.
And suddenly instead of marching in the parade we find ourselves chasing it. Trying to catch up to regain our equilibrium.
In remarkable time we do just that. We offer our condolences. Cry a little. Binge listen to records.
And then we return to our own magic trick believing that we are the exception. That only tragic heroes like John Lennon never see 40.
But here's the thing: despite appearances, there is no miles long gap between us and the privileged. We elevate celebrities like the Catholic Church picks a pope. Every few weeks or so, we send out a puff of smoke and anoint someone to become our next savior.
It can be a comic. An actor. A rock and roller. An athlete. Or once every millennium, or so, a politician.
But none of it is real. Despite the fact that we treat them like indulged royalty. Despite the fact that we lavish them with praise and money and glittery awards, what we are ultimately rewarding is how they made us feel about ourselves.
Because here is the fact: they are human and they are strangers that have no idea who you are, despite the fact that their lyrics seem all about you.
So when one of our elevated angels falls, it seems almost sublimely-in-the-moment tragic and unbearably painful, but not because of their suffering--or their family's.
It's all about you. And me. And everyone else who has fallen in their literal wake.
One thing that I have long learned and that has been reinforced by the film Inside/Out is that joy cannot live without sorrow.
The Beatles (I pray at the Church of Pope JohnPaulGeorgeRingo) from the very beginning intuitively got that.
After the war Europe was plunged into a gray covered cloud of despair that, to this day, has never lifted. The Beatles grew up during the War World 2 bombing. They grew up in rubble. In lower-class houses where they were saved by alcohol and family gathering sing a longs that would act as a temporary salve to the wounds of loss.
John and Paul both lost their moms when they were teenagers and were bonded by that emptiness.
We in America prospered and baby boomed after the war, and it wasn't until November 1963 that we got caught in the downpour of the acid rain of sorrow.
By then The Beatles were already lighting up the world with the delivery of near giddy joy and the cheeky dismissal of all things conventional and past.
It wasn't hard to join the handclapping party and hold their hands.
But here is the point of this departure into Beatleland: Deep within much of their music was, yes, joy, but it was also laced with sorrow. "Yesterday". "Elenor Rigby". "Help".
Which brings me flash forward back to today and the loss of yet another troubadour.
I would say that The Eagles carried a very similar flag into battle that represented equal amounts of happiness and regret. Just because you want to make infectious melody and harmony does not mean that you are not secretly transmitting profound feelings of profound sadness. The toe-tapping helps the seventies medicine go down.
But I think we all subliminally get the message that we are bonded sometimes by tragedy, loss and sorrow, especially through music. A great song can immediately inform you that it is not unmanly to grieve and feel the tortured sting of heartache.
Death is the great fuck-you equalizer and while the dead perhaps head heavenwards, we are driven into the ground and pulverized into bewildered mist--especially when death comes at regular battle like regularity.
But for us, any crisis is a crisis of faith which renders us, albeit temporarily, stunned and staggered. Words fail. Feelings taunt. Hope abandons us. Hearts throb instead of pump.
But here is where evolution steps in because we have been Darwinized with the belief system that everything is going to be okay.
When in doubt, just call your old girlfriend or boyfriend Optimism and in a few days or so you will be back on track ready to take on your faith, your fairy tales and your ongoing concern that mortality is ready to jump out at you--a fear that is stoked by the second by CNN and Fox News. We want to be scared, I guess, which is why we all head like film-head lemmings towards the next horror film.
Every major celebrity loss is just another dream ended. Nothing changes in your everyday life, except the bookmarked reminder that you could be next.
So... my prescription is rather simple: listen to the music, read the books and the poetry, head for your local theaters and see some plays and movies and take delight in all the gifts that have been bestowed by all the immortal mortal beings. Listen for their melodies. Decipher their codes.
And try to live life a little less scared every single day.
Because whether you get it or not, death has no irony in store for you.
You make the instructions. You create the rules. You decide who to love.
Look how powerful you are.
Take it Easy.
D