Are you familiar with that flash of a unifying thought that seems to answer several questions at once?  A thought that suddenly, and at once, explains what you could not previously get a grip on no matter how hard you pondered it?

I remember an odd moment years ago when a friend came up with messianic fervor in his eyes speaking a name over and over, a name I’d never heard.  By this incantation he was trying to impart such a moment of insight, the ah-hah moment when it all became clear to him.  It turns out he was speaking the name of a charismatic lead singer, a man who, my friend believed with great and palpable relief, was going to help take my friend’s music to the toppermost of the poppermost.  My friend makes a good living today, lives in a nice house in an excellent neighborhood, but the partnership with the singer never worked out and he does not live off the royalties of his many fine songs.  The singer himself has made his way in another field entirely, never spent a moment on the pop charts anywhere.

Words jump out at us according to our own magnetic qualities, what we see is many times the product of what we are looking for, the lens we look through.  I recall my father reading a piece I wrote about him during the decades I was still trying to connect with him as something other than an adversary.  “Weird?” my father said at the end, repeating one of 1,000 words incredulously.  “Weird?” he said again, his voice pitched in a strange cadence, a peculiar, almost wry, expression on his face.  And he kept saying it, “weird?” in a way I think even he would be forced to admit, was a little weird after a while.

One stray word or thought in an otherwise well-played campaign of words can queer the whole deal, as they used to say.  I wrote a letter in a very difficult situation, maintaining a certain dispassion all the way through, I thought.  My friend read it and nodded, until he put a finger on a single word at the end of the last sentence, a word which whipped my mask off and revealed the snarl I’d been restraining the whole time.  It was an adjective, “cynical”, which, applied to the letter of reprimand I was replying to, made it clear that all my restraint and even-handedness had necessarily been employed answering something only a piece of shit would force me to respond to.  Once he pointed to “cynical” I had no doubt as to its effect on the insane jackass who would be reading my letter, as well as its effect on her superiors, my real audience.  I removed the offending adjective and the letter was as fine as such a letter can be.

I’m reminded of this plucking things out as they strike us by a reaction to a post I put up here the other day, taking a bold and principled stand against suicide (he said, without a trace of self-mockery).  I’d given a couple of examples of a monster that preys on the souls of those we know well, easy for us to see but elusive and untamable for the person struggling with the monster.  I gave the illustration of the freelancer whose phone doesn’t ring for a while and who goes to a dark place next door to his own death by starvation.   There are many factors and variables in a freelancer’s life, and there is a lot of stress inherent in depending on the phone to ring for your work.   It’s better than some jobs, and ideal for some lifestyles (particularly when work is easy to come by) but the uncertainty of it can be as stressful as the most oppressive full-time job, with none of its security.

The point I was trying to illustrate by the example was seemingly lost on this reader, a freelancer who sometimes finds himself between dark, starvation thoughts when he gets no work and the sickeningly overworked state when he takes on too much work.  To him I had merely captured the undeniable dilemma of the freelancer.  Play your banjo without a care when you have no work and the whole freelance gig can slip away entirely for lack of attention.  There is irrational fear and there is rational fear, he reminded me, and a balance to be struck.  There’s no point lumping them into one bouillabaisse for the sake of an illustration.   The point I was trying to illustrate is that some people are not programmed, as many I know are, including myself, to dwell painfully on the worst case scenario when things are looking particularly bad.

Robin Williams’s dead body was not even buried when reports of his possible Parkinson’s diagnosis came out.  The healthy 63 year-old, according to this theory, saw himself as a deteriorating cripple in a wheelchair and decided to take his belt, twist it around his neck and take a flying leap before he wound up a pain-riddled, speech challenged, vegetable. What would Michael J. Fox, for one, have to say about that decision?  Ali?   Whatever the actual terror, Robin jumped to the darkest possible conclusion, and to his death, the demons and monsters that had pursued him for years hanging off his twitching ankles, yanking as the oxygen of his last breath ran out in his bloodstream.

Not everybody, dear reader, goes to this dark place.  It is a shame that anyone does, especially when the person is as brilliant, inspired and, by every indication, as good a man as Robin Williams seems to have been.  That’s all I was trying to say.  And that there are gradations to the darkness and a range from a bad feeling, to worry, to gnawing fear, to the terror that causes a blind leap at the end of a short belt around the neck.  That’s what I was trying to bring out.  

Not whether or not people have reasons for their fears, we usually do.  It is when fear becomes a monster that things become really dramatic, get out of control, we start to get in our own way.  Easier to see other people’s monsters than our own, that’s all I was trying to get at, as I try to get a closer look at this impossibly agile fucker that’s wrapped around my arms and legs most days lately.