Who watches the watchmen?

I’m starting to write near midnight on Dec. 29th. I’m not sure how far I’ll get. What I need to fight against right now is the urge to stop writing—or, as the case just a moment ago was, to not begin writing—and close this laptop down and try and go to bed. What I need to do here is to keep drinking this drink and keep moving my fingers and postpone crying so that I can put down some of what I’ve heard tonight. And what I’ve seen and done.

Let me take these things in reverse order. Maybe I’ll get to finish that previous point I said I’d make about music and religiosity. Because guess which album I’m listening to. You have exactly one guess.

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WHAT I DID TODAY

Not much. Yesterday I picked up Arrested Development on DVD and today I watched a whole mess of it with Kris. Here’s why this show’s great. It has the fastest-paced writing in television, with the possible exception of Family Guy or The Simpsons. Also, there’s a resonance between the characters of the Bluth family and the Lobko family. A brief recap for those who don’t know the show would go something like this: George Bluth (Jeffrey Tambor) is in prison for carrying out Enron-scale fraud with his Bluth Company holdings. There are four offspring. Gob (pronounced "Jobe"), the oldest, a magician blackballed from the Alliance of Magicians (which he founded) for accidentally revealing certain magicians’ secrets. Lindsay, a gorgeous fair-weather activist. Michael (played by Jason Bateman, who, some of you might remember, started out on The Hogans) (FN #1). Buster is a man-child and perennial graduate student, a hysterically pitiful mama’s boy who’s given to panic attacks and only began sitting in the front seat of cars six episodes into Season One.

Here’s why I’m fascinated with the show: it trumps even Seinfeld in Seinfeld’s ability to set out minor events and develop them into absurd, yet logical full-blown scenarios. It has a lot of fast-paced banter, and that’s always fun, but what sets the show apart (among other things) is the way that passing asides and barely-referenced references recur and develop later within the same episode – and when this happens with a few or a half-dozen references, an episode begins to seem complexly braided indeed. It makes these absurd plausible is another, slightly different way of saying this.

Here’s also why I enjoy it. There’s a way to loosely map these characters onto our own family. Melissa = Lindsay (beautiful, a canny shopper, v. sharp when it comes to understanding others), I = Michael (straight-laced, the fall guy, trying to keep things together), Gob = Jon (seeking patriarchal approval, rebelling when said approval seems hard to come by, fond of tricks, a little black sheepy), and Bailey, our Golden Retriever, = Buster (I mean, you can’t even give this dog an ice cube without the dog acting up with a case of what we call “the hiccups” – a sort of effusive tongue-action that’s part nerves and part adverse physical reaction. It looks downright dipsomaniacal.

Could I talk about anything insignificanter than this? Considering circumstances?

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I’m dealing with that wanting-to-stop-writing feeling again.

What’s better to do? Work through it or give into it?

When I was running up Knowell Rd. yesterday – the 3rd leg of my standard 5ish mile run here in Camillus – my thoughts went something like You’ve gotta do the hard thing. I may’ve even said something out loud to that effect. And I do believe that. Part of me however simultaneously and oppositely is aware that doing the “easy” thing in these trying days is actually obeying the prescriptions of the heart and the body. Are these really the days to be reciting in this self-goading fashion that old chestnut about “The spirit [being] willing but the body [being] weak”? Because I do sometimes use that as a way to tell myself No, you’ve got to make the body as willing as the spirit, or the spirit as willing as the body. I’ve been this way for a long, long time. It’s sort of in my blood by this point. Thus the daily poems, thus the novel quotas, thus this blog, thus my fondness for running—one of the most masochistic of all sports/hobbies. So my default mode is to push through and past whatever would be easier.

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WHAT I SAW TODAY

Dad pulling up to the house in Jon’s black Nissan Frontier. He’d been in Colorado retrieving Jon’s worldly possessions. Which included.

o Scores of DVDs, some of which were “borrowed” from me. These were packaged in a green shoulder bag and a black heavy-duty garbage bag, the kind of bag that’s so sturdy it has quilted-style stitching on it.

o A PlayStation 2 w/ controllers and games, packed in a spiffy Targus carry case.

o A sturdy black plastic bag teeming with boots and shoes.

o A translucent plastic Tupperware-type container about as wide as your armspan and about 8 inches high. This contained Jon’s dress shirts and ties. Some of which were mine, but were originally Dad’s. So many of the ties in possession of members of this family were first Dad’s. It’s funny how clothes circulate. Clothes typically go up the geneological tree towards Dad: shirts, jeans, jackets, hats. But ties have only travelled down, towards the younger of us.

o A safe. A Sentry v330. Portable. Weighs about 50 lbs. There are some of Jon’s documents inside. We have the key, but not the combination. It falls to us to open this safe. Part of me doesn’t want to farm this work out to a professional. Wants to leave the safe unopened until we figure out how to open it ourselves.

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I can’t even begin to write about materialism as I see it now in the aftermath of a guy like Jon’s death, Jon who loved stuff, Jon who had recently bought all manner of new consumer goods such as a flatscreen computer monitor, an Olympic weight set, a Sony Vaio laptop computer, some of which were destroyed by his hand, some of which have come home now to be—what? redistributed among us the survivors? Sold? Mothballed in the basement?—and none of which were able to bring him the happiness he was looking for. Capital. Goods. Stuff. Items. Purchases. Belongings. The weight room here in the basement of the Camillus house just teems with his stuff. Clothes. Boots. Shoes. It is one of the most grotesque and heartbreaking and beautiful rooms full of stuff I will probably ever see.

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WHAT I HEARD TODAY

What I heard today was too gruesome to share, I think. And too personal. Things to do with what Jon was like on a daily basis, and on a week-to-week basis, with his rising and falling morale, his rising and falling goodness to E— his girlfriend and companion. To do with the precise timing, place, and dynamics of how Jon killed himself. To do with the composition of his face and the forensics of etc.

Here I run smack into more unforeseen issues of honesty and its ramifications.

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HERE COMES APPROX. 7 HOURS OF SLEEP

And now it’s the next morning. Here is the problem that eventually got the better of me last night. What is more important: to share or to withhold certain, ah, distasteful and / or nightmarish (literally) facts and images? To parse this question out into subquestions:

What would be the good in sharing these facts and images with others? Would such sharing aid in the grieving of others? Would it aid my own grief to sort of offload some of the burden from myself onto others? And moreover, what is the moral obligation involved, if any? To present any and all images and facts I come across in that aforementioned spirit of 100% honesty, 100% of the time. (And naturally 100% of anything is going to be a dicey proposition: I know that.) So one might argue that there’s a moral obligation to oneself to share if it is going to help one process. And one might argue that there’s an M.O. to share if it might help others process, even if at first it comes as a shock to them.

But oppositely, what would be the good in withholding certain informations, facts, and images? Well. Doing so would safeguard several things and people: a) my brother Jon and his reputation, which might be injured with certain revelations, b) his immediate family, which might be similarly injured , c) those in Jon’s immediate day-in-day-out circle, and d) you the reader, who might not want certain images that I now have in my head to transfer into your head.

This question is akin to one that like Life Magazine photography editors and war documentarians probably have been asking themselves since the development of their respective mediums. At which point does the public representation of a horrific fact cease to benefit anyone or anything? And, crucially, what effect does this have on the Honesty Issue? Well, its effect is clear: that honesty and propriety are different forces, but are not enemies. Honesty and propriety must not be at loggerheads (FN #2), is the truism I see the reality of, now, these days. But the cessation of benefit issue is a murkier one to try and answer.

I realize that this question is completely bound up in the nature of this online and intrinsically public forum I’ve selected, and that the question would be rendered moot if only I were to select—if only for a time—another medium for contending with some of the facts I’ve alluded to above.

But. I have come to depend on the public nature of this medium as an outlet and a nexus through which I connect with friends old and new and family members and the whole great cloud of human connections in which I’m floating. In which my family’s floating. And by their own claims, some of these friends have proclaimed that there’s been a cathartic benefit to this forum’s public nature. That these writings aren’t about me or the Event so much anymore because they’ve begun to apply to larger experiences. That, in effect, It’s Too Late To Stop Now.

This post has become way too meta… way too about itself. This isn’t going to hold true for subsequent posts, I promise. Still, this issue needed investigation. I’m not too psychically blocked to realize that I spend this much time on the issue halfway-deliberately in order to avoid dwelling on the very images and facts I myself have been discussing the merits and demerits of possibly sharing.

Realize that as I ask these questions, I’m not really looking for a quorum to vote on the issue and instruct me. Rather I’m trying to nose out a protocol for future situations of this kind, and more generally to share—aha!—some of the mental processes with which I’ve been wrestling.

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FOOTNOTES W/O MUCH IMPORTANT INFORMATION, OR, COLOR COMMENTARY

FN #1. I have the thoroughly useless life skill of recognizing actors and actresses from previous obscure TV pilots and / or Films the Eighties Forgot. If ever you vaguely recognize an actor or actress and can’t place him / her, ask me, and I’ll probably be able to nose out the answer you need.

FN #2. “At loggerheads” = in conflict. A colloquialism much in favor at the New York Times these days; I guess I picked it up by osmosis. Ever notice the repetition of certain phrases in a certain newspaper, even when the articles in question aren’t authored by the same writer? It gives me the image of a vast smoky newsroom in which reporters are kicked back in roller-chairs playing a half-hearted, one-handed game of catch with Koosh ball, saying like “How ‘bout ‘butting heads?’ ” “ ‘Butting heads’ won’t do, won’t do. How ‘bout ‘at loggerheads’?” “Loggerheads, eh? That’s gold, Jimmy, gold!”