The first time I met Joel, I was moving out of my apartment into a house that his sister (my first wife) and I were going to rent together. I didn’t know this guy from Adam, but the first thing he did was offer his help to me - his body, his time, his truck, his gas. Well, not the first thing. The first thing he did was light up a joint and say “What’s goin’ on mate? Care for a puff?” Really, the guy was ready to give me the shirt off his back with no guarantee that I was in even the mildest regard willing or capable of repaying him for his kindness. From that moment forward that man was my brother.
Joel became Uncle Joel and I Uncle Chad. We raised our kids together; camped, took drugs, played music, told stories of what rascals we were when we were younger, and like old men, before they were old complained about things that were largely outside of our control…
The government is corrupt. People are going mad. The youth don’t care about anything. Corporations want your money, politicians want your conformity, and clerics want your soul (and your money).
Things that natter around our edges but we don’t talk about because we have been sold on the idea that we are at the zenith of human accomplishment, and to suggest another way would be a direct attack on where we are - confusing the means for the ends as it were. Or as plant botanist and indigenous lifeways practitioner Arthur Haines articulately posited:
The truth of the matter is much different, and many people will not want to hear an accurate recounting of indigenous life because they want so much to believe we are living during the best conditions humans have ever experienced. Belief in this helps us to consciously overlook all of the things we know to be wrong with modern living (such as the shockingly high rates of cancer, the increasing frequency of depression and suicide, and the blatant ecocide occurring in every corner of the world) (Haines, 2017, p. 28).
My conversations with Joel were some of the first where critical discussion and consideration was taken into how things like money, greed, and power have been used to deny the unique expressions in each of us. How because of the way a person dresses or the parts of society they choose to exclude themselves from becomes a wall wherein the dominant culture labels them as deviant, damaged goods, not of value, quitters, worthless. Because our society places so much value on fiat currency and its finite possessions and not on uniqueness, spontaneity, or finite time, we assume there is something morally wrong with that person’s character. What came later from these conversations was the bitter realization that the oppressors for which we were pointing the finger to were oppressed by the very system they were fighting so hard to protect and defend.
People who dismissed Joel as a deadbeat with no ambitions clearly had not spent five minutes in the company of the man. All he had to do was play the guitar. You could watch and hear him unburden his soul as he lost himself in the notes; and anyone who really did know Joel more accurately described the man as enchanting for you would get lost in his notes too. Joel’s gift was in the way he spoke through music.
Was that gift imparted to him because of the physical body he was born with or the clothes he covered himself with? I have heard it said no better than in the 1970s show in an episode where a military surgeon addresses a young soldier with debilitating hand injuries. The surgeon saves the man’s hands from amputation but finds him rather ungrateful until it is revealed that the GI is also a professional concert pianist. The wounded soldier lays despondent as he will never play again, his life’s ambition broken like his body in a Korean surgical hospital.
The gift does not lie in your hands. I have hands, David. Hands that can make a scalpel sing. But more than anything in my life, I wanted to play… but I do not have the gift. I can play the notes… but I cannot make the music. You’ve performed lists: Rocmononov, Chopin. Even if you never do so again, you already know the joy that I will never know as long as I live. Because the true gift is in your head…and your heart… and in your soul.
So many people had dismissed Joel as troubleth; that he didn’t care about anyone but himself. But he taught me so much about taking care of people that you love, not by blood or by dictum but because it’s a much kinder arrangement to do things FOR people instead of doing things TO people.
And then there was Joel’s girlfriend, Jen. She loved flowers. She had a journal of all the flowers and wild edibles she had identified at their property. Whenever I would come over she’d show me her book and we’d talk about her plans for the place. We’d talk about gardens and canning, about the ecology that had revealed itself to her that year. Jen had an inquisitiveness about her that made you think that anything was possible. That’s probably why she was so good with kids... She longed to be a mother and would care for the helpless things that came under her wing. She valued innocence in that way, I think.
Her’s was taken at a very young age when her father committed suicide in the basement of their home. I used to ride the bus to school with her younger brother. I remember Jen’s family falling apart through those bus windows. The old farmhouse they held in good order for generations dilapidated before our eyes until, and like all other semblance of control, it too was gone.
Ours is a competence-driven culture that doesn’t believe in endings or failure and therefore does very little in the way of preparing young people for the inevitabilities that remind us of our own finitude. The alternative is a highly deluded individual whose naivete is shattered under the incontrovertible truth of what is. Either pick is sour grapes but it remains undeniable that in the West there are no ingrained customs at the societal level that prepare us for all of the trauma and suffering that will find our way. We are broken people bringing up broken people.
Jen was just so finely wrought for this world. She had thrust upon her some painful realities that our culture just simply does not prepare its people for. How much is death even discussed in our culture? How much is death talked about in the schools? How many of us have seen a dead body? Have you? Have you seen a dead body that wasn’t in a hospital or funeral home? How about one that’s been dead for a couple of days, or has died from extensive traumatic injuries?
The point is that she was no different than any one of us, and it was that unresolved trauma that broke an already fragile and gentile person. But see, here’s the crazy thing. In this culture, her response to the death of her father was looked upon with distrust and condemnation, despite the clear reality that her “behavior” was an outward representation of what we are all feeling inside when something cuts us so deeply that it would threaten our very existence… And to ignore that pain because it makes us uncomfortable, and then to disarm and invalidate someone who is willing to be heartbroken is to create the conditions for the very monster you point to as the problem. The outliers.
And that’s what happened. Jen could drink and drink and drink and when what guards she had left were down, what would escape from her subconscious was an unbridled fury that I believe was rooted in her disbelief at how unbearably nasty we can be to one another, despite her knowing better than we did just how impermanent the time we had together was.