Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION , page 6

THE CHARMED ONE: THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF SHANNEN DOHERTY

Have you ever felt like a phone call that's been disconnected?

I never met Shannen Doherty. I never worked, to my knowledge or remembrance, on any project in which she was even tangentially involved. A great deal of what I remember about her is from gossip magazines and entertinment news shows of the 90s, who frequently crafted hit pieces based on secondhand information and spiteful rumor. In recent years -- the last ten, it seems -- she was on my personal radar because of her fight with cancer, and her ongoing and seemingly never-dying feud with Alyssa Milano. And now she is gone, a victim of the cancer she battled relentlessly up until the day it killed her. That is not a great deal to go on by itself, but there is, of course, more. There is always more.

I arrived at college in 1990, which coincidentally was the same year BEVERLY HILLS, 90210 debuted on Fox. I had "encountered" Shannen before, as a child actress on various programs I'd seen, but I doubt I had even a faint remembrance of her. Playing Brenda Walsh, the tempestuous other half of the Walsh twins, Doherty made immediate waves with the show's fast-growing audience, but she was a polarizing figure on the show. Was she hot or just weird-looking? Was she a likeable fish out of water or a mere social climber? Was she sympathetic or something of an antagonist? This was the sort of thing fans, and people like myself, who pretended not to be a fan but watched it anyway, would argue about, sometimes almost seriously. In regards to Shannen the human being, however, Shannen the actress, there was little debate: she was the quintessential Hollywood Bad Girl, the spoiled child actress semi-grown up to be a full-blown set siva, bitch, and monster. When she finally left 90210 after four seasons, it seemed to be one of those situations which walked the line between "I quit!" and "you're fired!" Shannen was the girl everyone loved to hate -- in part, I think, because of the complicated, paraodoxical relationship Americans in particular have with celebrity. We seem to both want and need celebrities, and were are often as entertained by their off-screen doings as whatever they bring to the television or theater or stage, but at the same time we love to hate them, and to pass judgment on their lifestyles. There is a good deal of envy at the core of this, but that is not important, anymore than it is important whether everything that was said about Shannen was true or none of it. What I myself know after almost thirteen years grinding in Tinseltown is that nobody, and I mean nobody, who isn't actually there on set will ever truly the know the story. TV shows, like films, are hermetically sealed communities in which very little escapes which is not intended to escape: the code of silence practiced by the ordinary crew member is far more rigidly observed than the Mafia's omerta: he will talk shop with fellow crew, or with relations with no connections whatever to the industry, but never to celebrity gossip rags whatever they choose to call themselves. Hell, when I was working there (2007 - 2020), it was taken as an article of faith that if you'd worked for TMZ, even as a 23 year-old production assistant, you were unhirable in any other field: nobody wanted a rat on set.

But at the time I believed all of it, every bad word. I believed it because I wanted to believe it, because I'm no different than anyone else -- rather, I wasn't then, before my own time in the industry -- and had fun mocking the bad behavior of the young starlet.

The next time Doherty came on my personal radar was when she was cast as Prue Halliwell on CHARMED, another Aaron Spelling show, and one which turned out to be one of the unexpected hits of 1998. Doherty had "reconciled" with Spelling sufficiently to head up this new series about three sisters who discover they have inherited magical powers, but this time her run was even shorter than on 90210 -- a mere three of CHARMED's eight seasons. Having directed the cliffhanger season finale herself, Doherty and her beau were on vacation -- in Canada I believe -- when they got the news she'd been unceremoniously fired for "bad behavior." Although I didn't watch CHARMED at the time it was on the air, I had to laugh at history repeating itself. I believed every word of the gossip rolling out of the online magazines, and simply accepted that it was her jealousy of the popularity of her co-star, Alyssa Milano, which had short-circuited this precious second career chance. Divas gonna diva, after all.

It was quite a few years later that friends of mine from the industry let me in on the fact that Doherty's departure from CHARMED was in many ways a raw deal, a sort of cold-blooded assassination carried out by the producers to appease Milano, "who wanted to move up one place on the call sheet" and thus disposed of the series' titular star rather than face a lawsuit. As I said above, nobody who wasn't there will ever know the whole story, but I've heard enough from "knowledgeable sources" to believe that as guilty as Doherty had been on 90210, which was largely but not entirely, was how innocent she'd been here. The fact the entirety of the cast ultimately and publicly sided with her over Milano is sufficient proof for me to believe this is substantially true, and that she was a wronged woman.

Why does any of this matter? As the cliche goes, it's complicated. Doherty was a staple of the 90s. Between 90210, MALLRATS, HEATHERS and CHARMED it seemed you couldn't escape her for good or ill, and then -- bang. It was over. A lot of actors get fired off shows and return after a period of career purgatory, or what my friend Mark calls "film jail," but almost nobody gets a third bite at the apple. Doherty's career never recovered. She became more famous for her feuds than she was for her work. And this is why it matters.

90210 is something of a sentimental favorite for my generation, a teen soap opera which was somewhat ridiculous even when it was on the air, but possessed an undeniable charisma and the kind of strutting self-confidence you sometimes see if free spirits who don't give a damn, or a fuck for that matter, what you think of them because they know they're cool. (Hell, I freely admit I had Brandon Walsh hair and sideburns for several years.) But CHARMED, whatever you think of the series (and maybe you've only seen half of one episode because it was on the television in front of the only available treadmill at the gym), was something a hell of a lot more important to millions of girls and young women. Like BUFFY, it was not only an inspiration, providing not one but three role models, each of which appealed to a different sort of viewer, it also tackled a lot of the real-world issues that young women encountered in everyday life. CHARMED was about sometimes painful family dynamics; it was about work-life balance; it was about loneliness, lust, love and sex; it was about fashion; it was about music; it was about job hunts and aggravating co-workers and workplace dating and hangovers and rivalry and stealing your sister's clothing and makeup and how the hell do we pay the gas bill and are we going to die alone? It was, in short, about everything the twentysomething female was dealing with in the late 90s, the difference between that time and now being that the women of CHARMED were depicted as being liberated but also suffering the price of liberation, and trying to decide whether the strong-and-independent-girlboss or the traditional marriage w/kids life was the way to go, which is something you would never see on television now. In short, despite its fantastical premise, tongue-in-cheek delivery and often quite deliberate silliness, CHARMED actually had something to say about real life: it was relatable -- moreso on this in a moment. And if I had a penny for every woman I'd met who gushed over the memory of the series, I'd have as much money as Musk. But never mind Gen X and Millennials: there are young women I know who were barely alive if even born when the show debuted who binge-watch it regularly. And Shannen Doherty was at the center of that. She played the big sister Prue with a combination of bossiness, bitchiness, tenderness, and humor: she, the matriarch by default, had to be as much a mom as a sis and sometimes resented it, just as her sisters, played by Holly Marie Combs and Milano, sometimes resented her. The frictive nature of the relationship lent it a lot of credence.

But I mentioned relatability, and this is another thing CHARMED had in common with BUFFY and so many other superhero stories going back to Spider Man and before: the superpowers of the ladies in question did not make their personal and professional lives easier. It made them harder. It stress-tested and often destroyed their romantic relationships and cost them jobs and time and money and worry -- plenty of worry. It burdened them with the weight of a double life, and sometimes it threatened to end that life. And to circle back to Doherty directly, this paradox, this powerlessness by virtue of power, applied to Shannen herself. She was a child actor: you can find her on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRARIE and T.J. HOOKER. She did not have what we call "a normal life." When she became a star she did not know how to cope with the superpower of celebrity and it played out in fights in makeup trailers, in nightclub brawls, in impulse marriages, in accusations and arguments and rumors and gossip, much of which was founded. She didn't even want to do CHARMED when the opportunity arose -- a TV show about witches? Come on. But it worked. Improbably perhaps, but that is the nature of magic.

Doherty struggled mightily in her post-CHARMED career. Her rhetorical remark, "Do you ever feel like a phone call that's been disconnected?" is probably the saddest and yet at the same time the most illuminating comment anyone has ever made about what it's like to be cut off in mid-career as if by an executioner's axe. Nor would she accept Milano's alleged attempts to gaslight what had occurred, replying to the charge that was merely set drama with the cry "what you call drama I call trauma." And I use the word "cry" specifically and not for dramatic effect: Doherty was obviously devastated by what had happened, by the consequences to her career and life, and being Doherty, wasn't inclined to be terribly quiet or polite about it. The extent to which she ultimately accepted her share of responsibility for her troubles, whatever that share might have been, is to some extent documented on her podcast, LET'S BE CLEAR, but the rest of it was known only to herself and her intimates. As I said above, at the core of all Hollywood feuds is a secret, and that secret is both open and remarkably well kept.

When I heard the news of Doherty's death, I was as they say "shocked but not surprised." I subscribed to her podcast, and she had released new material as recently as a week before her demise. Of course I knew she had supposedly incurable cancer, but nothing is incurable until it actually kills you, and she had lived with the disease so long that I regarded almost in the way I regard Magic Johnson's HIV+ status: a mere factor in a complicated life, and not one that required much commentary, or even thought. But now she's gone, and I find myself grieving almost as if I had worked with her or known her socially. Of course I know why, and so do you: pure selfishness. She was one of the pop-culture stars of the 1990s: in a way she encapsulated the decade. From her debut as Brenda in 1990 to her exit as Prue in 2001, her hair, her clothing, the way she carried herself on screen, the slang she dropped, all of it was the description of an arc: the twentysomethings. And like Doherty herself, the twentysomethings are now fiftysomethings, if only barely, and feeling dismay that they -- like the surviving cast of CHARMED -- no longer resemble their twentysomething selves. Hairlines have receded. Skin has wrinkled. Muscles have softened. The scars of living show plainly on faces and bodies. The styles, the fashions, the technology and the music of that time, as much as we all might still love it and cherish its collective memory, now feels definitely and unmistakably dated, part of another time, another era, the pre-9/11 world which everyone who was privileged to experience misses like all hell whether they admit it or no. To lose Shannen is to lose an icon, a piece of ourselves, our past, our collective history. It is to stare mortality in the face. It's a body blow, a gut shot, a kick to the balls. It hurts in a raw sort of way. A cruel way.

And yet the magic around her remains and perhaps strengthens in death. It casts a glow every time she shoots that look over a bare shoulder, or flashes that impossibly perfect smile, or deliberately evokes that smoky, flirty tone she was capable of summoning and dismissing at will. I honestly don't know how I'd rate Shannen as an actress, but as a presence, a charismatic force, a self-conscious icon of a time and a place and mood and a theme, she gets supernatural marks indeed. And is that not the nature of charm?

BOOK REVIEW: MARTIN CAIDEN'S "BLACK THURSDAY"

And there is the sound, the one that grates deepest against the nerves, that is hellish and hated, that knifes into the brain and makes a man wince through and through. A scream, metallic, thin, and high, a slender file blade cutting through the nerves. Above all else there is this cry of the fighter racing in close, sounding a scream that can be none other.

BLACK THURSDAY achieves something rare in any field: it is at once an amazing piece of research and also an eminently readable book. Martin Caiden takes us through the disastrous raid on Schweinfurt by the U.S. 8th Air Force in late 1943, the so-called "Black Thursday" battle which saw 60 American bombers shot down over Germany -- around 20% of the attacking force. No dry history this, but an almost novel-esque work which layers history, tactics, strategy and a blow-by-blow account of the raid, while simultaneously taking the deepest possible dive into what it meant to fly a B-17 in combat -- the mechanical wonders, the physical effort, the psychological strain. I really cannot emphasize how swiftly this book moves or how frightfully well it conveys the horror and confusion of a bombing raid carried out under continous attack by flak guns, rockets, aerial mines, and hundreds upon hundreds of enemy fighters. There are many touching and some tragic, and even a few funny, stories about how pilots, bombardiers, navigators, and gunners coped, or failed to cope, with the horror.

I should note here that I have read a number of memoirs about fighter and bomber pilots in the Second World War, but little or nothing about the air war as a whole. I know the basic history, the objectives, some of the top personalities, and some of the more glorious or notorious incidents: but I do not claim even an enthusiastic amateur's knowledge of the war as a whole. So I was grateful for the layout of the book. Caiden takes a brief broad overview of the history of the air war over Europe, and America's participation in same. The British had tried to carry out daylight bombing raids over Germany, but the losses they sustained were so prohibitive they eventually gave up resorted to heavy night attacks. America, establishing bases in Britain, took over the burden of daylight operations, flying gigantic formations of what were initially largely unescorted heavy bombers over Germany and Occupied Europe, in the face of tremendous opposition. The purpose of the raids was primarily the destruction of German's sprawling war industry, and the now-infamous Schweinfurt raids were meant to strike a fatal blow to the Third Reich's crucial ball-bearing industry and thus cripple the Nazi war machine. To achieve this goal, a force of about 300+ B-17s was mustered for the strike. This is their story.

The structure of the book is interesting. Caiden was a veteran pilot and understood fliers and flying and machinery, and he wants the reader to understand what it means to move through the air in 30 tons of aircraft -- the work involved, the physics, the technical expertise and the cold courage. So he breaks down the chapters into the overall strategy, the tactics, the logistics, the everything involved in carrying out a 300-bomber raid over a hostile nation. This is an immense task but he handles it as deftly as a bullfighter, making his mark on each subject but never lingering.
Then we get the real action. Caiden makes extensive use of firsthand accounts and official records to record the event from the POV of those involved. He makes us feel it, the successes and failures both, and tries to cover all aspects of the battle -- for example, one entire chapter is devoted to the improbable escape to Spain, through Germany and France, of one airman shot down during the attack; another takes the experiences of a single minute of heavy combat as experienced by a series of bomber crews. At the same time, he explains the tactics and strategy of the Luftwaffe, praising their courage, ingenuity and determination at every point. While Caiden is obviously partisan, using "we" and "our" when describing Americans and the Air Forces, he does not make the error of presenting the Germans as mere foils for American greatness. The Germans won this battle, and while they paid a steep price to do so, Caiden does not let us forget that Schweinfurt was a bloody mess that failed to achieve its objective despite shockingly accurate bombing. The scenes where American ground crews wait in vain for bombers that will never return, the times when accidents kill as many Americans as a lost battle, the pathetic image of the lone survivor of an entire squadron staring through tear-blurred eyes at row after row after row of empty bunks never again to be filled by their former occupants, will stick with you forever. Like many people, I always assumed the Air Forces had it easier than the infantry, that they fought a "clean war," but this assumption does not survive contact with BLACK THURSDAY. Aside from being in the first wave of an amphibious invasion against a hardened beach, I can't imagine anything as terrifying, and nothing more terrifying, than being stuck in the ball turret of a B-17 when 200 German fighters are attacking you from every direction, flak is pounding away all around you, one engine is on fire, and you know you've still got 3, 4, 5 more hours of this hell to go through before you can get home.

If you get home.

If the book has a weakness, it is that Caiden uses German records only for the purposes of recording losses and measuring bomb damage. There are no interviews with Luftwaffe fighter pilots who flew against the raid, or the Luftwaffe commanders who directed the battle. He does not tap into official histories from "the other side of the hill" except to give us some statistics. By doing so he would have greatly improved an already amazing piece of history and research, and given us a broader and deeper, and also a more balanced, account of the battle. However, I realize this was probably not his objective to begin with. As I said, Caiden is a partisan writer: he wrote this book to impress upon us the courage of the American airman and the tremendous struggles and sacrifices he had to make to win the daylight air war over Europe, not to tell both sides of the story. Still, I consider this a pity. I have read enough German accounts of what it was like to fly against the dreaded "boxes" of B-17s, each bristling with hundreds of .50 machine guns, to want to read more. And I confess I wondered if Caiden was uncomfortable with the idea of opening up, in the reader's mind, what happens when hundreds of tons of high explosives rain down on factory workers and civilians of all ages alike. When the air war is disussed by historians, I have found it often omits describing this fundamental horror as a way of keeping the "Greatest Generation" clean in their own minds. The national myths of any nation require a certain amount of this sweeping-dust-beneath-the-rug approach: however, a moment's worth of inquiry satisified me that he was doing absolutely nothing of the kind: he tackled that subject in excruciatingly horrifying detail in A TORCH TO THE ENEMY, about the firebombing of Tokyo. So I believe his motive here was to tell a complex tale in the most efficient and arresting manner possible, and keep it lean and mean.

In short, I loved this book. It reads almost like a novel and it has none of the overly technical, burdensome discussions of metallurgy, aerdodynamics, and what-not that made what many consider his seminal work, THE FORK-TAILED DEVIL, impossible for me to read cover to cover. That book has terrific anecdotes and exhaustive research, but -- in my opinion -- it gets in its own way with all the nuts and bolts: BLACK THURSDAY does not make that mistake. It's one of the best WW2 histories I've ever read, and I strongly encourage anyone even slightly interested in history or aviation to read it.

BOOK REVIEW: ERROL FLYNN'S "MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS"

I have been in rebellion against God and government ever since I can remember.

In his own autobiography, IN AND OUT OF CHARACTER, Basil Rathbone wrote of Errol Flynn:

"He was one of the most beautiful male animals I've ever seen...but I think his greatest handicap was that he was incapable of taking anything or anyone else seriously. I don't think he had any ambition beyond 'living up' every moment of his life to the maximum of his physical capacity, and making money. He had talent, but how much we shall never know; there were flashes of talent in the three pictures we made together. He was monstrously lazy and self-indulgent, relying on a magnificent body to keep him going, and he had an insidious flair for making trouble, mostly for himself. I believe him to have been quite fearless, and subconsciously possessed of his own self-destruction. I would say that he was fond of me, for what reasons I will never know. It was always 'Dear old Bazzz,' and he would flash that smile that was both defiant and cruel, but for me always had a tinge of affection in it. We only crossed swords, never words."

The extent to which Rathbone, who worked closely with Flynn on CAPTAIN BLOOD, ROBIN HOOD and DAWN PATROL, understood and did not understand the paradoxical, enigmatic, what-you-saw-is-not-necessarily-what-you-got Errol Flynn will be revealed to anyone who spends the money and takes the time to read his surprisingly thick, surprisingly deep, often amusing and occasionally appalling autobiography, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS.

Now I freely confess I am one of those fiends who folds back the edges of book pages I consider to contain important quotations. I also confess I bought this book expecting that Flynn would have little to say aside from endless recounts of alcoholic and sexual debacheries and perhaps some amusing gossip from the Golden Age of Hollywood; in other words, I expected to be entertained, but I did not anticipate folding many pages. As to the former, my expectations were met. As to the latter, I confess I was dead wrong. Errol Flynn was indeed a degenerate, libertine, almost completely amoral man, one who lived his entire life either teetering on the edge of, or completely beyond, both the rules of civilized behavior and occasionally, of civilization itself. The smile that Rathbone described as "defiant and cruel" was just that, for Flynn was defiant by nature -- defiant of everything -- and his pleasures often took an exploitative form that bore no regard for the feelings or dignity of others. He lived for those pleasures, and adventure, and laughed (literally) at the idea of consequences. He seems to have scarcely understood the idea of guilt, conscience or remorse, and he did not take himself any more seriously than he took the women (sometimes girls) he seduced, the husbands he humiliated, or the many people of all races he ruthlessly conned out of their money and their dignity. On the other hand, he was far more than the sum of his sins: Flynn was highly intelligent, extremely resourceful, deeply curious about life and human existence, and in his later years, a surprisingly self-critical and philosophical man who came to regret many of his choices. If he was ruthless, he was also without self-pity.

Flynn takes us from his improbable childhood -- he was the son of a famous Australian scientist who rather doted on him, and an unloving mother with whom he remained at war his entire life -- to an even more improbable adolescence. Born in Tasmania, which is quite literally the end of the earth, he took on the characteristics of that island's most famous animal: the devil. He was a curious, wild, nearly fearless child, always up to mischief, and even at a very young age obsessed with the female of the species. Gifted with extreme good looks, he collected sexual experiences (and veneral diseases) early, and his teens and twenties were spent on a series of adventures. At different points before he was accidentally discovered by Hollywood, Flynn sailed the South Seas, tried his hand at running various kinds of plantations, dabbled in the slave trade, panned for gold in New Guinea -- the most dangerous place on earth at that time -- and eventually learned to live as a vagabond con man. While guiding a documentary crew up the deadly Sepik River in New Guinea, he was noted for his looks and charisma and cast in a movie called THE WAKE OF THE BOUNTY, which opened him up to the film world but did not deliver him from poverty or give him purpose. Indeed, Flynn is 179 pages into his memoirs before he ceases his life of wandering, hanging out with street thugs in Australia, running cons from Hong Kong to the Phillippines, and sailing around the Pacific with a fellow con artist named Koets, and joins the Northampton Repertory Company in England. This act set the course for the rest of his life, for it was here he learned how to act, and more than that, became interested in acting as a craft. Indeed, in his later years he remarked that the happiest times of his life were the two years he spent "trodding the boards" with this theater company. And therein lies one of the book's many moments of tragedy. Flynn's talents as an actor, which were considerable, eventually became overlooked because of his physical appearance; his handsomeness and devil-may-care smile are what got him to New York and eventually, Los Angeles, and the genuine passion and deep-soul satisfaction that a life of theater acting might have engendered in him were traded, before he even really understood what happened, for a life as a movie star: a life that fed into all of his surface passions and animal lusts, but did not ultimately leave him fulfilled, satisified, or even in possession of his self-respect.

Flynn's Hollywood career started with a bang with CAPTAIN BLOOD in 1935. He rapidly became one of "the" leading men in the motion picture industry and pictures like THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, ROBIN HOOD, THE SEA HAWK, and SANTA FE TRAIL cemented his status as a "swashbuckler" -- the 30s-40s equivalent of an action star. His fame and money allowed him to indulge in all of his favorite pastimes, and gave him a reputation as a womanzer nonpariel, but his marital choices cost him dearly in divorce court and plagued him for the rest of his life. Indeed, it could be said that Flynn spent much of that life working in films he cared nothing about simply to feed the insatiable alimony demands of his first wife. He could not enter military service during WW2 because of malaria, tuberculosis and veneral disease picked up in his "adventures," and he unfairly suffered reputation damage by being associated with a taste for Fascism (an absurdity when you consider Flynn's centralmost desire in life was for personal freedom). His taste for hijinks and low farce hamstrung his efforts to land meatier acting parts, as did his penchant for making enemies, which fed a growing disillusion with acting generally. However, it was his trial for rape in 1943 which he regarded as the most significant moment of his life. Indeed, he qualifies the incident by stating his life can be divided into "before" and "after" the trial. What happened, in extreme brief and according to Flynn, was this: Flynn's reputation as a ladykiller with a taste for young flesh made him the subject of a number of extortion attempts, one of which led to a highly dubious rape prosecution in Los Angeles which deeply humiliated him and seems to have left him permanently traumatized. Indeed, he devotes an entire act of the book to the trial (which he believed was a frame-up) and its aftermath, which badly damaged his career and both public and self-image. Acting no longer meant anything to him, and neither did money or even sex. He speaks freely about contemplating suicide on many occasions, and writes with palpable anguish about the decline in his fortunes: "All my life the one thing I feared was mediocrity -- and my whole living effort was pitched to oppose ever becoming a mediocrity. I did not wish to live in a mediocre way, nor to be regarded artistically as a mediocrity. This to me was the cardinal sin: to be middling was to be nothing."

I must pause here to say that MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS, despite its salacious fascinations, dry wit, and often appalling amoralism, comes dangerously close to becoming tedious at a certain point about 3/4 of the way through. This is not due to any deficiency in Flynn's writing style: he is actually quite a cracking good writer, and it's easy to see why Hemingway disliked him so much, and for other reasons than that Flynn shared more than one woman with him: Flynn led a life that in many ways eclipsed Hemingway's, and had he doggedly pursued mastering the craft-and-art of writing in the same way he did young women, he might have produced some fiction to put the literary world on notice. No, it is simply that Flynn's penchant for sleeping with other men's wives, his taste for sophomoric pranks and crude humor, his love of the con, the tinge of cruelty and complete lack of remorse he had for all the damage he caused...it all becomes tiresome after a time. Tiresome, and a little disgusting. Yet just at the moment I was beginning to get sick of all these tales of seductions, pranks, parties, debaucheries, fights, disastrous vacations, sailing expeditions, financial problems and irresponsible shennanigans, Flynn abruptly changes course. No longer content with listing his victories and defeats, he spends the last 100-odd pages in a deeply philosophical quest to discover where his life went wrong, what he has learned from his mistakes, why he made the choices he did and how he came to be so disgusted with surface attractions that he refused to look in the mirror. He contemplates life and makes powerful observations about himself, some of which may have startled his friend "Dear Old Bazzz":

"I know I am a contradiction inside a contradiction...you can love every instant of living and still want to be dead."

"I have a zest for living yet twice an urge to die."

"If I have a genius it is a genius for living. And yet I turn many things into shit."

"I hate the legend of myself as a phallic representation, yet I work to keep it alive. I portray myself as wicked, yet I hope not to be truly regarded as wicked."

"Praise Mama. Damn her too."

At the time he wrote the book, he was acutely aware that his looks were going, his health was slipping, his bank account was void and his career was in chaos; he had become somewhat acclaimed as an actor again, but only for smoothly recherche portrayals of characters who were very much like him in that moment of his life: aged-out Romeos engaged in losing struggles with the bottle, such as he portrayed in THE SUN ALSO RISES, a performance so good even Hemingway respected it. Yet his incapacity for self-pity makes his self-explorations truly interesting and slightly tragic and even sympathetic. In the end, Flynn, who seemed to be missing the capacity to grasp the collateral and sometimes deliberate damage he had inflicted on others, is unsparing in looking at the wreck he made of his own life. To his credit, he does not blame a rapacious ex-wife, controlling studio mogul Jack Warner, his mean-minded mother, or any other person or set of circumstances for his dark night of the soul. He knows he has led an extraordinary life, and he knows it was not the life he should have led, that he might have been much more than an actor known for standing with a sword in one hand and a garter in the other. As he put it: "I had no greatness, only a deadly fear of mediocrity."

In the end, MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS is a much subtler and deeper book than I was expecting, about one of the most notorious movie stars of all time, for whose sexual rapacity birthed the vulgar phrase "in like Flynn," which is still in use 75 years after his death. Many readers will be put off by his amoralism, sexual rapacity and taste for all things facetious, sophomoric and irresponsible. Some will be outraged by his cruel con artistry and his dabbles in the modern-day slave trade still rampant in the South Seas. Others will regard his life as Rathbone did, as a rather self-indulgent waste of talent. Neither would be wrong. But I think even his bitterest critics would agree that in the end, there was much more to Flynn than his wicked, wicked ways.

YOU LOOK LONELY

It was a few weeks ago, late at night, and I was at the keys, working hard on my latest book, lost in the imaginary world I was in the process of creating. My apartment was dark save for the red lamps and a single, flickering candle. I had put on music as accompaniment, nothing with lyrics that would distract, just beautiful, solemn music that was playing under the collective heading of "You Look Lonely."

I had been at the bottle. It's an old writer's curse and not one I am going to complain about here, but yeah, I was probably in the bag. Sometimes it helps me access my thoughts. Sometimes it liberates me from my inhibitions. Sometimes it ignites feelings that, for me, are all too damned difficult to get at or perhaps gone altogether. But at some point I sat back, and, needing a break scrolled down in the comments section beneath the video. I don't normally do this. Comments on YouTube, while no where near as horrible as they were 10 - 15 years ago, are still usually vulgar and stupid enough to make me regret even glancing at them. But this night was different. Very different. Perhaps it was the sort of music the video played; perhaps it was merely the title, but the comments here were cut from different stone, true stone. And for what seemed like hours I read the private, pain-filled confessionals of complete strangers, people whose faces I couldn't see, whose voices I couldn't hear, who I will never meet in real life. And it shook me deeply. As I recently noted somewhere else, I see a lot of tragedy in my line of work. Robbery, rape, overdose, suicide, murder, all of it. It's gotten to the point where it's hard for me to experience a genuine emotional reaction to anything, hence the whiskey. But not that night.

Loneliness is a constant in my life. In bars, in cars, on the streets, in stores, everywhere. There is no way out. I am a single man.

I been alone for 35 years, nothing can fix that.

Is it weird to feel lonely even if you have a good social life? I just sometimes feel so lost, lonely, not aiming or seeking for new challenges in life. One day having a good laugh with friends and the day after or even the same evening it just hits you... "That" feeling. Thinking about doing great stuff in the future... but then never really starting to work towards it. I sometimes really question myself in every single way. Am I going to be succesfull one day? Am I going to make my parents proud of me one day? Am I going to stop stressing about everything one day? Am I going to be loved unconditionally one day...?

6'1" 185lbs Exercise regularly, stable job. Living on my own. No diseases. No kids. No criminal record. Still not good enough I guess and still single forever. Loneliness is the only thing that ever embraced me...

In the old days of the internet, I can remember "logging on" and having the most meaningful conversations with strangers about almost any topic imaginable. Now I feel like you can't post a picture of a sunset without somone hijacking or vandalizing the conversation to service their own anger or loathing or smugness or narcissism. All the roads lead to ugliness. But not this time. There was this weird democracy that comes with anonymity. Everyone became equal in their loneliness, and the confessions unfolded, page after page of bare-laid souls:

Yeah, I want to have someone to love. But every time I do I ask myself: "Am I good enough?" I give up. Sure I can love someone but for someone to love me is just a fake reality. For me, everything in life is just a straight line. When I get good and bad grades, when someone in my family dies, when someone insults me, I don't feel anything, just emptiness. I think I'm like this because I've been through a lot of bullying, I ignored them, closed myself from others and always put up a straight face. Every smile is fake, only lasts for a few seconds. So anyway that was my story. Thank you for reading.

i don't fear being alone I fear being lonely

I wish there were nice people. But hey, the world is not nice

I died years ago I am simply existing until im not, days and days go by, repeating over and over and i feel nothing im empty i can laugh and i can smile and joke and play but in the end im left with this emptiness that never goes away, sometimes i wish the night i died was really my death i wont take myself but this thing im living isnt a life its miserable and im secretly waiting for the end

Without you, there's nothing here for me.

And here i am in my bed crying because no one can fix me.

I can smile. I can laugh. I can be happy. But no one knows that truly it's an act. It's a manipulation or an easy way to deceive everyone. Let's be honest. You can buy anyone with a fake smile. And yes, im lonely...

I sat back in my chair in the red-lit darkness with the music brooding and the sound of the summer rain on the windows. I was drunk. Keenly aware that I was living a cliche as old as the typewriter -- probably as old as the quill. There was something so Film Noir about the crimson light, the sad soul-tugging music, the endless outpouring of anonymous pain. About the way the ice clinked and rattled in my glass when I sipped the cold liquid fire that makes me more human. About the way my own thoughts turned inward.

Thought i was getting better but today all the memories just hit me like a ton of bricks, i miss her voice and laugh and cute smile so much....she was my whole world and ill never forget you

I don't feel anything anymore and Idc...

i hate myself, i hate the decisions i made. i hate my life, im so depressed.

I've been in self isolation for five years. Hardly living , clinging on to every day, every ounce of hope just so I won't commit the Act . Worst is, I'm living with my fam who don't understand me at all. No matter how much I've cried Infront of them. I have no control in life, I can't even finish myself. When will this end!

I simply give up. I've been alone all my life, loneliness is now part of me. Three years of psychotherapy got me nowhere and now I'm back on antidepressants. I will accept the fact that I am not made for this world

The only thing missing was a cigarette so its smoke could curl in the neon light. It was all so perfectly atmospheric, so poetically sad. I was even in a cotton undershirt.

Probably ending it all soon, thank you for the final few fleeting moments of clarity this music gave me.

I pass by her house…it’s like we never met before. It feels like I’m the only one who carries the memories. Sometimes I see her car pass by and wonder if she feels the same.

Every night, before I close my eyes I wish, I beg even don't wake up again, I want quit this, I'm not enough

I feel nothing anymore. There's absolutely nothing I want to do, only things I have to do. Nothing brings me joy....

dark hours, cacophony of multicolor lights, alcohol and tobacco smell, wrong feelings, contradictory, glimmer of hope, suffocated in filth...but it s kind of...ok this way....the cold...the only constant in your life....get used to it

I was moved. Profoundly moved. One could argue all pity is self-pity, a projection of one's fears, or a recognition of one's own hurts, but I don't buy it. Not all the way. Statements like that are never more than half-truths, and those who utter them always have their own hidden motives for leaving out the other half. In any event what I felt was a need to engage, to join the confession. Writing is a solitary pursuit, after all, and the dividing line between solitude and loneliness is often indistinguishable.

"Show me your relationship to pain," I wrote, quoting one of my favorite authors. "And I will show you who you are." And then I added my own spin, which when you are already spinning is not difficult to do: "Show me your relationship to loneliness and I will show you who you do not wish to be."

Eventually a reply came. Someone quite rightly asking for a clarification. "I feel like this is a quote that I kind of understand on the surface, but there’s a deeper meaning I don’t get. Could you go into more detail?"

I was embarrassed at having been so deliberately vague and mystical, so after a lot of thinking I answered, with apologies:

"Our ability to withstand pain is accepted as a measure of our strength. But the degree to which we can endure loneliness is in some ways a measure of our weakness...we habituate ourselves to a state we despise and would do almost anything to escape from. We begin to pride ourselves outwardly, in a perverse way, that we are 'strong enough' to walk alone, meanwhile secretly longing to walk hand in hand with someone else. In other words, the more we can stand up to loneliness the more we hate it, and the greater our desire to escape it becomes."

Re-reading this now, on another night where the lamps are casting their glow, I see that I had spoken truly, which is hardly always the case when talking with strangers under the influence of the True. Anyone who reads my blogs - or my fiction, for that matter -- knows I have an abiding romance with pain, and this too, is a cliche. The half-starving writer, whose melting glass of ice cubes and whiskey sits atop a heap of unpaid bills and parking tickets and rejection slips, whose trophy cup for Best Novel of 20XX is full of cigarette butts, who gets more respect from strangers who have read his work than friends who never will, is almost a caricature, and when you throw in the fact that all writers are liars who speak more truly with their lies, as Hemingway sort-of said, than other people speak with their truths, I could perhaps be accused of telling a creative fib here: but I am not. These strangers bared their souls and in my own way, more pompously perhaps, but nevertheless truly, I bared mine. I was caught up in a peculiar sort of moment, when a person who has difficulty feeling things, or at any rate often has difficulty feeling what others would deem the right things, forgot the double ring of calluses over his emotions.

The next day I did a lot of thinking about loneliness, and whether the age we live in has led to an epidemic or merely exposed its existence. A lot gets blamed on the internet, in many cases justly, but if we are honest with ourselves, we often heap upon it the same guilt which fell on television in the 70s - 80s and video games since the late 90s, only a smallish part of which was rooted in verifiable fact. Technology has become a kind of whipping boy for our societal ills, and loneliness, unlike, say, mass shootings, is not a newish phenomenon. But I confess that I do believe that this condition, initially soothed for so many by the creation of chatrooms, instant messaging and the like 25-plus years ago, has now become horribly exacerbated. Instead of facilitating human contact, it has allowed humans to live without for years at a time. An entire generation has grown up considering text messaging to be a more normal form of communication than talking over the phone, and "ghosting" as the preferred means of dismissing someone from your life rather than a painful but cathartic confrontation in person. People sitting opposite one another at restaurants, even people outside in the sunshine, like as not have their faces buried in their mobile devices, isolating themselves even when surrounded by others. Humans are gregarious animals and suffer according psychological damage when isolated from other humans. Alerts on a phone are a poor substitute for intimacy, and it is starting to show.

I know I have a reactionary, even a hypocritical attitude toward a lot of technology. I use it and I don't really want to live without it and yet I despise it all the same. Even now, sitting here alone in the dark listening to a sad playlist ("They Moved On Too Fast"), I am rejecting human society in favor of connecting with a scattering of people I'll never meet. And perhaps that why it hit me so hard, that outpouring of loneliness, of grief: because I see so much of it in myself. There is something curiously and horribly seductive about it, something romantic, and that brings me back to the beginning of this note, to the atmosphere that loneliness brings with it. Loneliness is a feeling, and under certain circumstances we've all experienced can even become a condition; but it is not meant to be a lifestyle. It should never be normalized or accepted, as so many people in the comments section accepted it, as something all-encompassing and inescapable. My own, pre-internet generation saw it as a shameful condition never to be admitted, but this in retrospect was hardly the high ground, moral or otherwise, and my words to the stranger on the subject are the ones I truly hold with: to measure ourselves by our ability to endure loneliness, or to find some virtue in it where none exists, is a fool's errand. And with that in mind, I am pushing away from the keyboard and leaving my apartment to mingle with my fellow humans. I sincerely hope you do the same. For the solitude there is always time.

BOOK REVIEW: JAKE LA MOTTA'S "RAGING BULL"

Just give me a stage where this bull can rage.

When most people hear the words "raging bull," their minds immediately move to the Martin Scorsese movie of the same name. That infamous movie had a point of origin, however, and this is it: the life story of the Raging Bull himself, middleweight boxing champion Jake La Motta.

Years after his death and three quartes of a century after his last war in the ring, La Motta's name is still synonymous with a toughness that crosses the border into masochism, as well as misogyny, paranoia and selfishness. It is recorded that when the real-life La Motta left the premiere of Scorsese's film, he asked his ex-wife Vicki in a whining tone, "I really wasn't that bad, was I?" Her reply? "No, you were worse."

It was partially in an attempt to find out what La Motta thought of himself that I located and bought this surprisingly difficult-to-find book. Which was also surprisingly expensive. So be it, and here we go.

The autobiography reads like a well-written pulp fiction crime novel, and no wonder: La Motta, was as much a crook as a boxer. Indeed, this terse little memoir has more robbery, larceny, rape, bribery, depravity and assault in it than any three hardboiled detective flicks set in the era in which the La Motta fought (1941 - 1954). Not since Errol Flynn's tell-all MY WICKED, WICKED WAYS have I read such an warts-and-all, honest-in-spirit confessional from a public figure. He lays his dark and tortured soul absolutely bare. Most people, writing autobiographies, make at least some attempt to rationalize or justify the evil they have done in life, and to apportion some share of the blame to others, or to "the system" or something even more generalized, like poverty or racism: the Bronx Bull does not. This profoundly irresponsible man takes the lion's share of responsibility for his mistakes, caprices and cruelties, attacking himself with the same vigor he once swarmed his middleweight opponents.

La Motta depicts himself as a brutalized boy growing up in a filthy Bronx slum in the 1920s and 30s (he vividly describes the stench of his tenement housing, abetted by the foul practice of boiling dirty diapers on the stove, as well as the dog-sized rats) in which the brutality of the local Mob was balanced by the near-equal savagery of the NYPD. His early years were spent fighting bullies (he used an ice pick), committing a series of petty crimes, and auditioning for the Mafia via a series of robberies. Learning how to box in reform school, he found he had a real talent for structured violence as well, and blazed a bloody trail on the boxing circuit, where he rapidly became known as the Bronx Bull or the Raging Bull for his furious aggression and near-indestructability. He even handed the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson his first-ever defeat, but was denied a title shot until he agreed to throw a fight so Mafia fatcats could get rich on crooked bets. This led to a lengthy suspension and serious damage to his reputation, but La Motta was not to be denied, defeating Marcel Cerdan to claim the middleweight title.

Of course, when he finally won the belt and its attendant glory, he quickly cratered his marriage, career, finances and everything else so thoroughly that he ended up on a chain gang in Florida on a morals charge just a few years after his retirement. This fall, not from grace, which is a state he never visited, but from financial success and public adoration, seems earned and then some, but it also carries the tragedy implicit in the rags-to-riches story, which so often ends "and back to rags again." We, as a society, are literally born into the idea of of the "happily ever after." We very seldom wonder what happens after ever-after. Much of this book is devoted to it.

In fact, La Motta was so tormented by a youthful robbery gone horribly wrong, in which he savagely beat a bookie with a lead pipe, that he sought contrition and repentance in the suffering implicit in the ring, and basically shit on everyone in his life -- his wives, his brother, his best friend -- every chance he got, because he didn't believe he deserved to be the focus of anyone's love. As Vicki said, the loathsome creature portrayed by De Niro in RAGING BULL is perhaps even uglier in his own words than he seems through Scorsese's lens: a jealous, self-hating, pathologically violent beast who didn't quite understand the difference between rape and sex and whose main virtue was a mule-like refusal to bend his knee to the Mafia, even though at times he was quite the armed robber and thief himself. La Motta, as a psychological study, is at least as fascinating as he is disgusting, though sometimes it's a bit of a horserace. There is no doubt that he was a victim of poverty, but he was also a creature of free will like all men, and much of that freedom he used poorly to say the very, very least.

RAGING BULL is extremely well-written; as I said above, it actually turns pages just like a novel, and has the benefit of real emotional honesty: but it is not always easy to read. La Motta is at times so vile that you almost wish someone had shot him dead just to put him out of society's misery. In two chapter he details needlessly violent robberies he committed, and in another the rape of a friend's girlfriend, who later disintegrates mentally as a result of her trauma. What redeems RAGING BULL, at least to a degree, is that some men -- Salvador Dali for example, Sugar Ray Leonard, Sammy Hagar, Arnold Schwarzenegger, even Athony Keidis -- write confessionals that often sound more like boasting than contrition. RAGING BULL is not in that category. In fact, the salvation of this book lies in the fact that you cannot possibly despise La Motta more than he does; you cannot hold him up to greater scrutiny, ridicule and attack than he has done in these pages. Errol Flynn came to believe that he had wasted his life and talents in a mindless pursuit of pleasure, but exhibited very little if any remorse for the damage he'd done to others; La Motta makes it clear that he at least had the decency to truly hate himself for the wreckage he left behind in his wake. If you want a beautifully ugly depiction of poverty, the mob, and the tormented life of a pro fighter who could lick any opponent save himself, you cannot beat this book, whose only real weakness is an unrealistically happy ending. And as a final note I want to touch upon that.

RAGING BULL concludes on a note of positivity which rings false. Not that redemption or change is by any means impossible, but because this particular note strikes me as a contrived, editorially-mandated sort of ending, a sort of simple, feel-good, bright-light Hollywood moment grafted onto an otherwise complex and shadowy tale of human failings in action. This ending speaks to commercial appeal, of course, but also to the need we seem to have to walk into sunsets just for the aesthetics of it even when everything behind us is broken or on fire. As it happened, LaMotta lived until the age of 95, finally passing away in 2017, and by all accounts managed his affairs reasonably well; but the sort of demons that drove him don't simply evaporate with age or moderate living, and I think it's important to keep in mind that reform takes work. Like training for a prize fight, it requires serious daily commitment, but unlike prize fighting, the commitment must be lifelong. It has been said the nature of a man doesn't change, and while this is superficially true, it is false in the sense that one's actual nature hardly matters except to oneself: it is how we treat others that matters to them. La Motta spent a lot of his life paying for his sins, but his greatest sin was making others pay for them as well.

HORIZONS LOST AND FOUND

Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not.

I spent the weekend past at my alma mater, Seton Hill University, teaching and attending fiction-writing classes, appearing at a surprisingly successful book signing, reuniting with old friends and making new ones, and drinking entirely too much Yuengling Lager. It should have been a grand occasion. In a sense it was. But a pall hung over the lovely old campus (think: Hogwarts on a large green hill), and I could not escape its shadow -- the shadow of death.

There is never a good time to lose a good friend. Still, some losses can come at moments which seem not only to stick the knife between your ribs but slowly turn the blade, as if the Reaper is trying to exact as much pain as possible from the loss.

To be honest, I had not seen Chris in years, and it had been a long time since we had spoken even over the internet. We hardly fit the status of "good friends" as any reasonable person would define the term. But I am not a reasonable person, never have been, and don't really give a fuck if some would think I am appropriating the grief which rightfully belongs to others. There are times in life that you meet someone with whom you form a certain bond, feel a little simpatico, share a certain connection. You may not become friends in the classical sense, due to distance or other factors, but whenever you're together or even engage in a discussion by some cold electronic means, there's a strong unspoken sense of tribe. In my half-century of life I have had many friendships which seemed solid, complete and rang true when tested, yet also evaporated almost immediately upon the imposition of distance, leaving almost no trace behind. I have also enjoyed others -- not as many, but a number -- which shut down as if by a switch when one of us moved away, only to be reignited years or even decades later, the almost literal example of "picking up where we left off." And between these two and indeed, beyond them, there are a range of other types, the most precious I suppose being the sort that goes at full steam regardless of whether the two of you live next door or on other sides of the planet. My point is simply that friendship is harder to define than we would assume. It fits Michael Ruppert's quirky definition of a paradigm as "what we think about something before we think about it." I feel the same way about friends, and I feel the same way about Chris.

We met in graduate school, in the Masters of Fine Arts program, more years ago now than I care to tell you and certainly more than I believe possible. Actually we met without meeting, and this peculiar first impression lingers to this day. As an aspirant to the Writing Popular Fiction program, I was required to submit a sample of my fiction for the approval or disapproval of those responsible for my admittance to the school. It must have impressed somebody, because I was accepted, and thereafter as one of the tasks to be completed in preparation for my first residency at the school, I had to resubmit this piece to my peers for critique, as they had to submit their own pieces to me. I had a total of ten of these submissions to peruse, and it so happened that Chris P's was the first I plucked off the pile.

Now, I must confess here to a failing which I no longer believe applies to me generally as a person: arrogance. I retain a high belief in self, but only in certain specific areas, and I have come to understand that the more humble one tries to be even in those areas where one considers oneself greatly or supremely talented, the better one can become. And this process by necessity opens the door to further humility by virtue of understanding that if there is room for improvement, well, one is not as good as one thought. There is more to it than that, but for the moment we'll leave it there, and I'll just say that at the time, I always entered any situation assuming that I was the best in the room. So when I took Chris' work off the heap, I was prepared to look down my nose at it.

Five minutes later I distinctly recall feeling sweat on my upper lip. Not figurative sweat. Real sweat. I remember either saying aloud or thinking very loudly, "If this is representative of what they've got, how the hell am I even going to stand out?"

When I arrived at school -- this was the summer of 2006 -- I was eager to meet the guy that had clubbed my well-hidden insecurities with his typewriter. I don't actually remember if I wanted to hate him or not, but I do remember telling him what an amazing writer I thought he was, and meaning it, as Salieri meant his initial compliments to Mozart in Amadeus. Thankfully, Chris was not the sort to compete, or to gloat, or to let compliments go to his head. Indeed, as I was to discover, he was actually far too humble for his own good. Beneath that dryly witty-looking face (the more serious a look he tried to put on it, the more he looked as if he were about to burst out laughing) there lay a great creative genius, it is true, but that genius was untouched by egotism, by pride, or even self-belief as I understand the word. And it was here that I found him utterly infuriating, but I'm getting a touch ahead of myself.

Chris and I hit it off, and last weekend, as I was walking and driving around the campus and the town in which it resides, I kept encountering the places where he and I and others had gone while jammed into my wine-red Buick LaSaber sedan. I remember how he told me that Primani Bros boasted "The Salad As Big As Your Head" -- and it turned out to be bigger, since the last time I checked my dome was 61 cm around (must be all that brain). I remember when we needed beer on a Sunday, and the only place we could get it, thanks to Pennsylvania's blue laws, was a dirty hole-in-the-wall dive bar nestled in the basement of a run-down brick building in the shadow of an overpass. We walked in, the room -- full of barflies and meth-heads -- stopped, and then a smoky-faced old junkie drunk, with shards of yellow teeth, allegedly female, screamed, "Lookeee here at them handsome boys! Hows a bout youse buy an old girl a drink!" And Chris, who was kind to seemingly everyone, replied suavely, "Another time, ma'a'm, for sure," as she wolf-whistled us out the door. And I remembered the nerdy arguments we'd have in the dining hall or somebody's hotel room, where a dozen of us would sit around, drinking and eating take-out and fighting about this or that novelist, whether he sucked or was over-rated or truly the genius everyone said he was, and Chris was generally the sole voice of diplomacy, if not necessarily reason. He seemed to be a natural diplomat, incapable of giving or taking offense, genuinely concerned with keeping the peace, willing to take a stand but not willing to hurt someone as a result. And this was why he drove me nuts.

As a writer, as in every other creative pursuit and many which are not creative, it is necessary to have a certain core of arrogance. Not just self-belief; arrogance. I use the word specifically because to be great means to believe one is great even if the evidence periodically indicates otherwise. One must believe that one has a claim which one may in fact not have, or not have yet; and one must cling to this belief in the face of discouragement, false counsel, and counsel which is well-intentioned and possibly correct in the moment but not in the main. In short, one must possess a certainty of greatness independent of logic or likelihood. And this Chris did not possess. Not creatively, I mean. He was far too malleable and pliable, far too open to accepting criticism at face value, far too willing to accept suggestions and submit to attacks from people grossly unqualified to give them. He seemed to lack any ability to discriminate between remarks made by fools and those made by people of genuine talent. His natural goodness meant he had to take everyone seriously, even those operating out of stupidity or jealousy, and his natural diplomacy meant he had to accept every critique with perfect democracy. This seriously effected his writing and it was the subject of a number of arguments between us, conducted primarily over e-mail, but occasionally in person.

"Chris," I'd say in exasperation. "Not everyone with a voice box is worth listening to."

And of course Chris, ever the conciliator, would agree and fail to mention my own reputation, justly deserved at the time, as an arrogant asshole with little regard for othe people's feelings and little respect for their abilities. He would just agree with whatever I said, make one of his heavily ironic jokes, and then change the subject and go right on listening to clowns unfit to carry his pencil. His writing suffered accordingly, yet when we graduated, and I was chosen to give the valedictory (admittedly after an utterly shameless campaign of self-promotion), he was the only person in my graduation class of twenty-eight that I called out by name. There were of course other large talents in the bunch, but Chris was something special, someone with the potential to go all the way -- agent, traditional publishing contract, Hollywood options, all of it. And I was sufficiently respectful of his talent and his human qualities, few of which I shared at the time but all of which I admired, that I wanted him to succeed to the fullest even if it meant he would be running rings around my sorry ass for the rest of our respective writing careers.

After graduation, I had only sporadic contact with Chris. Every couple of years I'd get intensely curious as to what he was doing -- the guy was legitimately a stud, if you can use that word in relation to writers -- so I'd hit him up by e-mail, or on Facebook or by some other means, and we'd get to jawin'. Then, following the birth of his daughter, he disappeared from social media for a long time - years, if memory serves. Can't say as I blame him: by all accounts being a father was the focus of his being. But eventually our ships passed in the night once more, and I distinctly remember him telling me, the last time we communicated directly, that he'd fallen away from writing for a long time, but was now working on a project and would let me know when it was complete. I was excited enough to offer him the services of my editor without actually asking that long-suffering individual if he wanted another client. But I never did hear back from him and once again we fell out of touch completely, with the exception of the occasional "like" on a social media status or a secondhand howdy.

A few days before I left for the In Your Write Mind Workshop at Seton Hill last Thursday, I was at my sink, washing the dishes, when my glance fell upon one of the numerous (we're talking hundreds, folks) of framed photographs I hang from floor to ceiling in my rather overlarge single bedroom apartment. These pictures change from time to time, reflecting new experiences and cataloging old ones, but they are primarily of people that I care about, even if no longer speak to them anymore. This one depicted a much younger and infinitely more handsome version of myself standing between Chris and a third writer. I'd forgotten the photo was even there, and it pained me to see how badly I've decayed in the intervening years, but the mock-serious look on Chris's face made me laugh. It was stern and pompous, incredibly reminiscent of the character of Wesley Wyndham-Price in Buffy and Angel, so ably played by Alexis Denisoff, but from the very compression of Chris's lips in the picture, you knew the son of a bitch was about to start laughing. The guy was simply incapable of taking himself seriously. I thought, "I hope he goes to the conference. I miss that guy."

The next day, or the one after that, I was at my desk at work when a random e-mail from the Alumni Relations Department at the university hit my inbox. It informed me that Chris had passed away. For a few moments I just stared at it with what must have been a very puzzled look upon my face. Then I set out to prove that it was nonsense, a mistake, the wrong guy's obituary. If only. Chris was dead all right, gone.

The news hit me much harder than I would have expected. I am now almost 52 years old, and certainly past the age where one is rawly shocked by the news of a premature passing. My relationship with Chris was intermittent at best: no one was going to mistake us for Butch and Sundance, or even Fonzie and Richie. We were two guys who knew each other from graduate school and had gotten on well together; we respected each other's work, and that respect survived over the years we had little to no contact. So too did the knowledge that if we ran into each other in an airport lounge in Phoenix, a dive bar in Quebec City, or a charity marathon in Chicago, we'd be able to resume our last conversation as if it had ended the previous evening. Yet it is precisely because I was confident in my ability to reconnect with him at will that I never did so. I didn't even reach out to ask him if was going to attend IYWM this year, which would have been easy enough. I just took it for granted. I took him for granted. And now he's gone.

I am unashamed to say that later that night, long after work had ended and I was sitting here, where I write this now, I wept a little. What shames me is that the tears were not really for Chris. I did not know Chris well enough to weep for him. The tears were for myself. They were for the sadness that overcomes me when I see my reflection and realize I'm not looking at a picture of my father, who died at 54, but myself at almost 52. The tears were for the missed opportunities, the unfulfilled dreams, the lost horizons. To quote Lawrence Sanders: "I wept for all of us. The losers."

So yes, my four-day excursion to Seton Hill, successful as it was, left me feeling thoughtful and sad. Very few of the people attending the conference ever met Chris or even knew who he was, which furthered my feelings of isolation. It heartened me slightly to raise a toast to him at dinner with friends, but it heartened me more that I was having dinner with friends, and making new ones in the bargain. It heartened me that at least this tragedy had made me realize how rare and precious such moments truly are in our lives, how little time we actually spend with the people we care about. To quote Orwell, "There is time for everything in life except that which is worth doing."

There is a song which has been playing in my head for a week straight. Unlike most earworms it is not annoying or aggravating: it seems completely appropriate, even if the lyrics apply more to the vast circle of people I have cared about or care about than Chris specifically:

Do I have to die to hear you miss me?
Do I have to die to let you say goodbye?
I don't want to act like there's tomorrow
I don't want to wait to do this one more time

I miss you
Took time but I admit it
It still hurts even after all these years
And I know that next time
Ain't always gonna happen
I gotta say "I love you" while you're here

Somewhere in this apartment I actually have a crystal ball. Unfortunately -- or perhaps very fortunately -- it doesn't tell the future. Like everyone else, I've no idea how much time I'm granted on this rock. I could live to be 103 like Ernst Jünger, publishing all the way, or tap out shy of fifty-five like my old man, with my pen very far from having gleaned my teeming brain. The only thing I do know is that the death of Chris, as much as any of the losses I have sustained in this year of loss, has served to remind me just how fragile a thing life is and just how much of it I have taken for granted. To break the pattern of entitlement, to shatter the belief that "next time is always gonna happen" is going to be a job of work, but by God I am going to give it a crack. I owe that much to Chris.

BOOK REVIEW: COLIN MCDOUGALL'S "EXECUTION"

In fact, of course, he had done the most a man could do, and although this thought would never occur to him, the most a man can do is everything.

EXECUTION is a rare find, a novel about war viewed through the lens of execution. Not war or murder per se, but execution: the formal, legitimized process by which human life is taken in a civilized society.

Colin McDougall, a decorated veteran of the small but ferocious Canadian expeditionary force in WW2, takes us through a novelized version of his own experiences between 1943 - 1945, when the Allies were making their torturous hop-and-crawl from Sicily up the seemingly endless boot of Italy, in the face of resistance that seemed to increase rather than decrease over time. In the history of the Second World War, the contributions of Canada are often marginalized or forgotten altogether, just as the Mediterranean Theater of Operations is marginalized and forgotten; McDougall's novel serves from its opening lines as a valuable reminder that war is war wherever it is fought, and that if debts to those who fight war are owed by those they fight to protect, those debts must be paid equally.

EXECUTION's inciting incident is the summary and brutal execution of two Italian prisoners of war by the Canadians in a Sicilian barnyard. The second is a massive attack on the seemingly impregnable Adolf Hitler Line south of Rome by the Canadian division, a bloody massacre which its own commanding general likens to a formal execution of his own men. The last is the actual execution by firing squad of a Canadian soldier following his somewhat dubious court-martial for murder. All of these incidents are woven together, as are the lives and the deaths of the characters involved, to form a tapestry -- not about war exactly, but rather the effect that ending human lives has on the human beings tasked with ending them. McDougall is not merely writing a war novel, he is quite blatantly comparing the various forms of execution created by society: informal (murder), mass scale (battle), and formal (firing squad).

The novel's principal character is John Adam, a dutiful young lieutenant whose burning enthusiasm for the job of war is blown into a sort of existential vacuum by the two murders he is ordered to commit by his superior officer. Adam is left only with his sense of duty, and by periodic attempts to submerge himself into the pleasures of R & R, but even when coupling with "ladies of the evening" he is unable to be truly cynical or unfeeling, and he seems to come fully alive only when love, friendship, or duty beckon: at all other times the war has left him hollow, almost indifferent to his own fate. He is not a bold character despite his battle courage, nor is he intended to be: he is simply a victim, and the theme of victimhood runs throughout the entire book. The executioners and the executed share a bond: their roles can reverse any moment, and in this novel, they frequently do.

McDougall himself is a startling writer. His prose often rises to the lyrical, and his insights into human nature buckling and occasionally strengthening under the extreme pressures of war is profound. Nobody who reads EXECUTION will forget Ian Kildare, the cigar-waving brigade commander who travels with a personal bagpiper and takes sadistic relish in insulting his superiors; or Philip Doorn, the platoon chaplain known as The Ghoul, who goes so thoroughly insane he has nowhere to go but back to sanity; or Bunny Bazin, the quirky battalion commander who accepts his own inevitable death in battle so completely he takes conscious steps not to try to avoid it. And McDougall's description of the Battle of the Hitler Line rises to the truly epic: I actually got goosebumps at its mixture of mindless butchery and accidental glory. McDougall is the sort who grasps by virtue of bitter experience that war is a catalyst for the most terrible but also the most powerful chemistries within mankind, which is not profound in itself; it becomes profound because he understands this applies also to civilization, that instrument designed to enhance and protect human life, which through the process of war, or law, can extinguish life. There is a madness implicit in this which cannot help but chagrin the reader as it chagrins characters like John Adam, who is fully committed to committing executions in combat but is gutted by execution in its crueler, more personal forms.

The cultural links between Britain and Canada show strongly in McDougall's writing. EXECUTION, despite its dark subject matter, is laced with dry (but stinging) English-style wit which occasionally rises to the level of black comedy or even satire; fans of Evelyn Waugh and Derek Robinson will smile at his tongue-in-cheek depictions of idiot bureaucracy, fools in uniform, ironic outcomes and eccentricities often indistinguishable from madness. And indeed (and not to repeat myself), madness is a recurring theme in the book: it is arguable that nearly all the characters in EXECUTION are insane at one point or another, and some continually. The dissonance that creates this is not merely cognitive, it is psychological and spiritual. It is the end product of the paradox of execution itself.

One extremely memorable scene takes place when the soldiers are gathered to be told about the great benefits which await them when the war is over -- cash payouts, job assurance, free schooling, et cetera and so on. The civilian speaker is in true earnest as he informs them that the mistakes of WW1 will not be repeated, this time the government will take care of its soldiery and not abandon them as they did before. The commanding officer cuts the presentation short and orders his men out of the room in a cold rage, knowing that the speaker means well but that filling the men with thoughts of what they will do after the war will merely distract them and contribute to their deaths. He views his men as condemned, with commutation possible only if they focus entirely on their task -- itself execution.

No novel is perfect, of course, and there are admittedly a few sluggish chapters in this book, and some which fall into war-cliche tropes. The narrative is more fractured than I would have liked, and as a result we do not get to know some characters as well as we should. Because the novel is constructed in four acts, the pace of the narrative sometimes loses its rhythm. In the end however I would not only say this is a terrific novel, I think it's one of the better novels I've ever read and certainly a legitimate classic of war literature. McDougall apparently never wrote another one, which is perhaps just as well, because it is difficult to believe he could have topped EXECUTION.

MURDERED IN LOVE

Today, come voleva la prassi, I was walking in the woods after work, and as if often the case on my hikes and rambles, my thoughts turned in a creative direction. I flatter, and probably delude, myself that some of you may remember the blog I wrote some time past on my experiments in poetry. They are humble experiments indeed, and today, as I climbed sweatily up a leaf-strewn, root-overgrown trail, I began to compose something which was not a poem but prose in what might be called the style of poetry. As soon as I arrived home, I sat down and wrote it out as best I could remember it, which, also come voleva la prassi, was not terribly well. But in the interests of sharing the creative process in its rawest form, here it is:

The Heart Murdered In Love

When a heart is murdered in love, it dies in five ways.

The first is the killing itself, which comes out of the dark, a flash of cold steel into the beating organ, yielding a moment of paralyzing shock, a moment of terrible comprehension when the full magnitude of the horror sinks in, and then the grim business of death itself, business of which we need not speak.

The second is the onset of decomposition. This is not visible to the eye and the heart murdered in love very much resembles the beating version, so much so that most onlookers cannot tell the difference. They may get a faint whiff of corruption, a vague sense that something is wrong, but their interest will be passive in character, and any questions they ask will not require answers – it will be enough for their consciences that the questions were asked. After all, they have their own hearts to tend.

The third is rot. This phase, which sets in when all other phases of surprise, dismay, and humiliation pass and leave only the sickening leprosy of betrayal in their wake, is particularly tragic because the disgusting nature of full decomposition draws a crowd, many of whom wish well; but their intervention will of necessity come too late and at any rate the heart murdered in love is so repulsive to them that they will soon flee, as the dead heart is now monstrous and like all monsters drives away all things good as it gets about the business of destroying itself even more thoroughly.

The fourth phase is mummification. What remains of the heart murdered in love slowly becomes as so many dried leaves and branches and sticks, neither offensive nor frightening and only a little sad to behold, only a reminder that things end. Any odor will be faint and perhaps even pleasing in a nostalgic sort of way, a smell of dust and foxed paper and decaying leather, like an old secondhand bookshop where no one ever goes. A lonely quiet surrounds the heart murdered in love because none wish to disturb its loneliness with their fellowship, and they will call this respect for the dead.

The fifth way is a choice. The heart murdered in love, having passed out of shock, out of horror, out of humiliation and pain, is now a ghost come to a crossroads. On the left is the existence of a ghost, which is not life, but assumes its shape; the heart murdered in love passes over things without leaving a trace, neither in nor of the world, an echo of itself growing ever-fainter until it passes into greater and truer death years hence, its one balm being that it has no more pain because it does not feel. On the right is the soil where the leaves of the heart murdered in love have decayed into nothingness, and this is soil which can be tended even by a ghost, though the tending is slow and laborious and may yield little at first and for years afterwards; but if the ghost keeps to his work and tends his soil well, it may realize one day it is no longer a ghost but has taken human form and their human heart is beating once again, and all the heritage and legacy of human emotions they foreswore in their darkest hours are theirs again if they are strong enough and stupid enough to feel them. And they will realize further that they have no guarantees not to be murdered in love once more, that there are other hearts beating out there in the night but also other murderers, and the choice is simply to beat or not to beat.

I will spare you the prosaic details of what led me to this line of thinking, except that it is at least partially dedicated to a female friend of mine, but I assure you that whatever you think of the product, it was sincerely written. Indeed, I have found that the sort of creative energies that often flow when I am hiking through nature are, like nature itself, rambling and raw yet also real in a way that more cooly and deliberately constructed thoughts are not. They have the vitality of nature itself, and assume their own forms which you are free to take with you and subject to carving if you wish. Exactly what the hell I am to do with raw, free-form compositions like "Murdered in Love" beyond publish them here in their still-dripping form is beyond me, but it seems rather a crime not to hold them up to the light, because it's in the light that they are created.

BOOK REVIEW: ROBERT PAYNE'S "THE LIFE AND DEATH OF STALIN"

Death is the solution to all problems.

For me, Stalin has always been an enigma. Unlike the other tyrants and giants of his era, from Lenin to Hitler, Stalin always struck me as a kind of black hole, a void of personality, a man whose actual beliefs, goals and personality were indistinct, or hidden from view. He had no personal charisma, lacked physical courage, was a dull speech-maker, disliked writing, created no new systems of thought, and did not entirely understand the ones he was supposedly upholding. His contributions to the Russian Revolution were meager, he proved an incompetent soldier, and he showed every evidence of pathological jealousy, paranoia, and vindictiveness. Those who met him noted that he was vulgar, insulting and rude at almost all times, and when drunk could be especially vicious. His bullying drove his wife to suicide, and during WW2 he refused to exchange his son, a soldier in the Soviet army had been captured by the Germans, for a German general, with the offhand remark, "To gain a private for a general would be a poor trade indeed." Just how did this terrible mediocrity, this deformed misanthrope, this lump of unpleasant qualities, rise to such titanic heights of power? How did he outmaneuver cleverer, braver, more appealing men within his own party? How did he find so many willing tools to serve his morbid ambitions, and come to rule an empire greater than that of Ghengis Khan?

To answer these questions, or rather in hopes of having the questions answered, I consulted Robert Payne, a prolific author and world-traveler of yesteryear who, among his many published works, authored biographies of most of the major tyrants of the 20th century. I have always regarded his biography of Hitler as one of the best-written (if not necessarily the best-researched) biographies I've ever read, and his prose style is so far above that of the ordinary historian that any deficiencies he has in that regard can and should be easily forgiven.

In any event, Payne answers a number of these lingering questions in his biopic THE RISE AND FALL OF STALIN. He describes a man who grew up in an atmosphere of abuse and cruelty, and whose black views about humanity were initially formed between beatings and privations during his miserable childhood in Georgia. Later, as a minor revolutionary figure in Siberian exile, they hardened further, as Stalin absorbed the bleak, harsh, pitiless attitudes of the people and the environment. Payne shows Stalin from later childhood as being drawn to the aggrandizing heroic fantasies of Georgian folk tales, which he coupled later to Communist ideology to produce his cult of personality; but even as a young, burgeoning Socialist revolutionary it was clear he intended on nothing less than supreme power. The powerlessness of his youth manifested in adulthood as an insatiable appetite for domination -- what the Romans referred to as libido domanandi. He managed for a time to convince Lenin he was a sincere communist and a valuable asset to the Party, and seems to have harbored some genuine admiration for the man, but he came to view Lenin as an impediment upon his boundless ambitions, and privately marked for death all Lenin's friends and loyalists, long before he was in a position to harm any of them. Stalin was a man with both eyes on the main chance. His devotion to Communism seems to have been limited to the fact it, being amoral and authoritarian, was an effective means to an end: unlike Lenin and Trotsky, he probably would have embraced any extreme ideology if he thought it would allow him to satisfy his lust for dominance.

What distinguished Stalin was his cunning, which must be distinguished from his intelligence. Stalin was not stupid, he had an alert mind and a restless curiosity, but unlike Lenin and Trotsky he lacked mastery of any one particular discipline or system of thought, was unimaginative and inflexible, and his need for control led him to rigidly enforce plans which often failed or performed poorly in execution, which in turn triggered his paranoia and incapacity for taking blame, which in turn led to his penchant for killing anyone who failed him. However, all of these failings were eclipsed by the one outstanding quality he had, which he may have possessed to a greater degree than any tyrant or political leader in history: his ability to outmaneuver his enemies, to slowly undercut their positions, to initiate slander, libel and whispering campaigns against them, to isolate them politically, to marginalize them and prepare them for the killing blow, and to do this years in advance of any quarrel with them and in so subtle and gradual a way that even his worst enemies, men who should have been on guard and perhaps were fully on guard against his machinations, were nonetheless stunned to see the degree to which they'd been compromised in the grisly moments before the blow finally fell. While still a relative nobody in the Party, Stalin managed to get appointed "general secretary," a presumably minor post which gave him the power of filling positions within the sprawling communist organization, including the secret police. In this way he quietly managed to isolate Lenin and neutralize Trotsky and the other Old Bolsheviks who had actually brought about the revolution: and later, to exterminate his opponents via huge purges carried out by hand-picked men who were later themselves murdered, on and on, ad nauseum. Payne describes the USSR of Stalin as transforming from a tyanny that used terror and murder to enforce its lofty political aims, to a terror which had no political aims and whose sole function was to murder on an industrial scale to please Stalin's paranoia and blood lust.

This brings us to his second quality, his absolute rejection of all ethics, morals, and scruples. Stalin was a man capable of friendship, but incapable of loyalty. He once remarked that "gratitude is a disease of dogs" and he endeavored to prove this true by killing most of the men who got him into power, and many who helped keep him there. His distrust and jealousy doomed those he professed to love as certainly as his bottomless fund of hatred doomed his many enemies. He murdered relatives, in-laws, close friends, old comrades. He murdered complete strangers. He arbitrarily ordered mass executions, and relished playing cat-and-mouse with his victims for months or years before he finally had them executed. He framed people for crimes he himself had committed, supervised their interrogation and torture, and then had them shot or hanged, believing in their guilt even when he consciously knew them to be innocent. He then just as often murdered his own executioners. Orwell's "doublethink" seems to have originated not merely within the Stalinite state but in Stalin's own personality. When Stalin rewrote history to make himself appear infallible, he did so knowing everything he wrote was a lie; but he believed the lies and forced the world to repeat them on pain of death. Death, Payne tells us, Stalin was determined to keep so busy it would have no time to come for him.

Stalin's appetite for murder proved to be boundless: he was having men shot long before he was in power, and seemed incapable of, or unwilling to, impose any other penalty. In his mind, a man or woman who failed to complete a task was a traitor: mere incompetence was no shield from a firing squad. This applied even to those given tasks Stalin himself knew to be impossible. He created a vast murder apparatus which he then obligingly fed at first thousands, and later tens of millions, human beings. By the time Hitler had killed his first hundred thousand, Stalin had killed ten million, and he seldom slackened the pace of his atrocities, sometimes committing them out of sheer boredom. (The machine had to be fed, after all.) In a position of unchallengable power, ruling much of the earth's surface, he was gearing up for a fresh series of terrors and purges among his own people when he finally died himself. Payne tells us "Stalin ruled Russia as if he bore it a personal grudge" and he was right. Hitler turned on Germany when he realized his war was lost, but Stalin turned on the Soviet Union he had helped create before it was even fully created. In some senses he seems in retrospect like a homicidal maniac whose main worry was that he someday might run out of victims.

STALIN is a good book, but Payne's depictions of endless frame-ups, show trials, engineered famines, mass shootings, midnight disappearances, and nonexistent plots punished as if they were quite real, become numbing after a time. The stark fact is that Stalin is a very difficult person to read about without becoming hopelessly depressed. Hitler, in comparison, had great charisma and a sense of aesthetic grandeur to go along with his hate and mania; Mussolini was a would-be conquerer in the 19th century style, a sort of tragic farce in uniform; Lenin, Trotsky and Mao shared the single saving grace of sincerity of aim, even if their methods were drenched in blood. But Stalin was a nullity. He stood for nothing. He had no redeeming qualities at all. He lacked even the superifical charms of the other tyrants. His craving for adoration -- constant and shameless adoration -- seems to have come from the knowledge that without it, he would cease to exist, because he himself was a void, a black hole. His entire career is a warning to the rest of us, but at the center of the warning remains a mystery: how did so many smarter, fitter, abler men end up as his victims? And how did such a fundamentally unlikeable and treacherous person find so many who were willing, when he was still essentially a nobody, to carry out his aims?

Payne does not manage, ultimately, to answer the riddle of Stalin. Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps Stalin was simply the historical version of Michael Myers in Halloween: an ill wind, the bad seed, the Book of Job in human guise, the Bad Thing That Happens To Good People. But he brought me much closer to a final understanding by reminding me that evil, in its purest guise, lacks even a dark glamour: it is not a thing of sinister beauty or devilish charm. There is no bad-boy appeal to it, no seductive quality. Evil is dull. It is ugly. It is humorless and unintelligent and small. And at its core is the void. Someone once called Stalin "the man with the iron heart" but we now know precisely what Stalin's heart was made of.

Nothing.

BOOK REVIEW: DAVID GOGGINS "CAN'T HURT ME"

Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance and beautiful silence.

Let's be real with each other. We live in the softest age in human history, and anyone with any sense or honesty understands that it is doing us precious little good as a race. Like everyone else, I benefit measurably from this softness: as I sit here, writing this, the temperature in my apartment is comfortable despite the furnace-like heat outside, thanks to the miracle of air conditioning; my laundry is washing itself; my dishes are drying themselves; an oven roasts my food, and the light within ensures that I don't even need to open the door to check to see if it's done. I am exercised, freshly bathed, and my belly is full. When I finish this blog, I will drink a beer, watch half an episode of Da Vinci's Inquest and then climb into my queen-sized bed with The Inimitable Jeeves and read myself to sleep. I have taken tomorrow off from work, but I will nevertheless be paid. I am not a wealthy man, but in many ways I probably live better than the millionaires of a century ago, and have instantaneous access to almost unlimited amounts of information and entertainment. I do not need to work for any it. It is enough to speak a few words into my phone, and presto, it's there, waiting for me.

You would think that this state of affairs, which is at least roughly attainable for the working class and even to some extent for the poor, would lead to a corresponding rise in our sense of psychological and spiritual well-being and perhaps our physical health as well: precisely the opposite has happened. Americans are fatter, lazier, more anxious, more depressed, more suicidal, more homicidal, more antisocial, more angry, more suspicious, more entitled, more cynical, and somehow more ignorant than they have ever been. All this material prosperity and softness has left us incapable of gratitude or the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes with truly earning things. We have run so far from the pain which is a normal part of life that we have fallen into a completely different form of suffering entirely, a suffering of the soul.

Enter David Goggins.

For those unfamiliar with the name, David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL who is legendary for his determination, will-power and ability to edure pain. Now, before you throw up your hands, adopt an English accent, and exclaim, "Och, not another bloody book by a bloody SEAL!" let me assure you that CAN'T HURT ME is most definitely not like all the other SEAL accounts you may have read. The Chris Kyles and Marcus Lattrells and what-not were telling war stories and to some extent, making extended commercials for their own branch of the military. Goggins is not. In fact, when it comes to his deployed-in-a-war-zone days, he doesn't write enough to fill out a paragraph, much less a page. He talks about his military training extensively, but only with the larger focus of the book in mind. Which is as follows.

Goggins grew up in an abusive family. His dad was a physically and emotionally abusive hustler who treated him like a slave. He ended up living with his mom and taking comfort in food -- lots of food, so that he eventually became grossly and immensely fat. As one of the only blacks in an all-white school, he was also subjected to terrible racism. By the time he was in his late teens, early 20s, his life was a kind of morbid joke, with his job being to empty traps left in restaurants which were full of dead insects and rats. He had no self-respect and no future, and his only pleasure was sucking down immense quantities of food and drink, which gave him temporary pleasure but also increased his girth and therefore his isolation and self-loathing.

Goggins eventually came to the conclusion that he must stop seeking out the easy path in life, must "find comfort in being uncomfortable," and constantly seek to challenge himself in every aspect of life. This led him to the SEALs, whose training he had to go through several times due to injuries and illness -- a remarkable feat in itself given the mental and physical brutality of the training, which not infrequently kills its subjects.

Once a SEAL, however, Goggins continued to find ways to become uncomfortable by seeking out the toughest trainings he could sign up for, including the Rangers and the Delta Force, and by entering marathons and later, the masochistic enterprise known as the ultra-marathon. Eventually he competed in even more punishing activities such as trying to become the Guinness Book of World Records holder in the category of chin-ups (which sounds like my idea of hell). But the thing which distinguishes him from everyone else is the fact that he did most of this with some severe congenital defects he didn't even know he had at the time, including a sizeable hole in his heart. This discovery truly blew his mind and got him asking, "What if -- ?" He began to realize that we are largely prisoners of our own perceptions, and are capable of so much more than we think, but we habitually underestimate our potential and settle for what he calls "the 40%." This is different for different people, but it usually involves living a life in which even our "challenges" (working out, dieting, etc.) fall within our comfort zones. Take my hike today after work. I spent an hour trampling through the mud in the deep woods. It's good exercise, but it didn't push my limits in any way whatsoever. If I doubled the hike it would probably have not done this. And if I had doubled the hike and then thrown in a different sort of workout afterwards, lifting weights, say, or some calisthenics, I still would not have pushed my body to 100% of its limits. So basically my workout was at the 40% level -- enough to give me the sense that I earned my before-bed beer, but not enough to make me suffer.

Goggins goal for himself, and his goal for you, is to reach 100%. Not only in your workouts, but in every aspect of life. His language here is characteristic of the man: "You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential." The fact reaching one's true potential may not be possible is irrelevant to him. It's the striving, the discomfort, the pain that he seeks, not because it will get him to the goal but because it is the goal. Seeing what one can endure expands what one can achieve. As writers from Marcus Aurelius to Ernst Jünger have noted, "the obstacle is the way." One of the best passages in CAN'T HURT ME is as follows:

"Are you an experienced scuba diver? Great, shed your gear, take a deep breath and become a one-hundred-foot free diver. Are you a badass triathlete? Cool, learn how to rock climb. Are you enjoying a wildly successful career? Wonderful, learn a new language or skill. Get a second degree. Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind."

CAN'T HURT ME is important not for its recitation of all the blisters and sweat and torn ligaments Goggins has endured, or for his achievements as a sailor or an athlete, but for the way he approaches the central questions regarding the difficulties we all face in life. Goggins has plenty of reason to play the vicitim, but chose another path, the path of self-ownership. It really is very simple. For example, when he discusses his obesity, he does not blame his father, racism or society: he blames himself. His mantra in every aspect of his life is that we own our own skin and our own decisions and too often, we use our traumas to justify things like laziness, apathy, cowardice, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Overcoming this self-sabotage requires being brutally honest with oneself. "Don't call yourself overweight," he all but shouts at the reader. "Say what you really are -- a fat fuck!" In an age when 700 lb women are called "curvy," this is not a message which is going to please many of the people who hear it, but it is a necessary antidote to the culture of weakness and victimhood in which we live. Goggins, however, is not making a philsophical statement: he is trying to get people to take an honest look at their lives so that they can understand what it is they need to change to fulfill their potential and live their dreams. Carl von Clausewitz called this technique, "The appreciation of the situation." Goggins calls it a self-audit. He audits himself regularly, especially when he fails at something, but also when he is successful, too. He encourages a mind-set of brutal honesty with an emphasis on the brutal. He is very frank that he "gets his strength from a very dark place," and his ethos illustrates that, as does this book. He isn't a shiny, happy person. He isn't interested in fame. He doesn't have many friends. He doesn't seem to own much of anything in the way of material objects. Even when he writes about the SEALs, he offers fairly harsh criticism -- something you won't see much if any of in other books by former members. Some readers may be offput by this very darkness, especially in an era in which whining and entitlement (something he especially despises) are now rampant everywhere. But that is why I consider CAN'T HURT ME to be so important. It comes at a time when many are beginning to suspect that the victim mentality they've been told to sharpen their entire lives is actually an albatross, weighing them down, stranding them in weakness, unhappiness, and failure.

CAN'T HURT ME is a fast and brutal read. It's inspiring, but it's not a feel-good memoir, and one can't help but wonder if Goggins takes any real pleasure out of life as we ordinary folk understand the word. He's sort of the Mace Windu of inspirational writers, a grim-faced warrior monk who is going to poke you in your love-handle and ask if you think that is the best you can do. But should you manage to sweat it off, don't look to him for a pat on the back. Look to him to ask if you couldn't have done it more efficiently...and then to ask you what's next on your list of challenges. And why you aren't working on them yet.