byrdsongs. lxvii

There’s always gonna be topics one wishes to avoid. When my heroes do embarrassing things, I’d rather not talk about it, rather not dwell on it. It’s like with Willie Mays. Nobody wants to think about him being all gimpy in the 1973 World Series, a shell of his former greatness. And I don’t wanna think about Moe Tucker becoming a member of the Tea Party, or Gene Simmons being an all-around douchebag. Roman Polanski raped a 13-yr-old girl. She might've even been 12. That’s horrible, and it’s none of my business, so I’m just gonna watch Knife in the Water, Rosemary’s Baby, and Chinatown, marveling at them all with my blinkers on. I remember how disappointed I was when I learned that Roger McGuinn is Born Again. But does it make me admire him less? Not unless I think about it. Everybody’s got their flaws, even you out there, dear reader, those things you hope won’t be revealed and pray people won’t hold against you when they are. So try being sympathetic and accepting. Does it sound like I’m vamping? I am. Why else would I waste time spouting hollow platitudes about flaws and acceptance and sympathy?  Because, really, who am I kidding?  I’m the least accepting guy I know when it comes to people’s flaws. I hone in on them so I don’t have to think about my own, which are considerable, believe me. It’s small comfort, though comfort nevertheless, to dwell on the negative, particularly if it’s negativity directed at someone else. That’s a little sick, isn’t it?  The way negativity can be comforting. I have a friend from childhood – we’ve become somewhat estranged from one another over the past 20 years or so – but one of the things I loved about him when we were kids was that he was so negative and bitter, a real dark guy, but in a funny way. He wasn’t a sad sack.  Well, maybe a little bit of a sad sack but not too much. I’d call him mirthfully negative in a way that was very New York, very Jewish, and very much of apiece with the social pressure cooker that was my Manhattan judeo-bourgeois environment. But something happened at some point in his early adult life. I’m not completely sure what it was. I know he had a fairly serious health scare when he was in college and was hospitalized for awhile. There was even talk he might not make it, but he did, thankfully. In the course of this crisis, however, I think he had some kind of moment of clarity, though this ‘clarity’ paradoxically muddled his thinking and his personality beyond recognition. He began to embrace some kind of very loosely defined spirituality. In my mind, when this happens with a person it’s usually a negative reaction to the realization that life is essentially meaningless. But I won’t get too deeply into that right now.  …So he embraces this weird occult stuff, an incomprehensible hodge podge of Aliester Crowley, yoga, Dianetics, and Chinese fortune cookies. And as this awakening (or whatever it was) unfolded, he moved to Frisco and all the things I loved about the guy began to evaporate. He traded in the mirthful negativity for arch optimism and benevolence. I say benevolence but the truth is that it’s a sham, a mask he wears, perhaps even when he’s alone and looking at himself the mirror.  The reality is that he’s become a deeply self-centered, self-important, selfish person, a shell of his former greatness, just like Mays in the ’73 series, no less hobbled, just in a different way. He doesn’t wanna criticize anything. He thinks my negativity is narrow-minded. There’s no point any longer in telling him that it’s better to be critical and discerning than to be accepting of every pile of bullshit that gets thrown in your direction. I keep telling myself that this isn’t really who he is, that he’ll come back around to being the guy I held in such high esteem, once upon a time.  But deep down I know that, while he’s smart enough to know who he really is, he’ll never let that guy come out again. He’s too deeply invested now in this new thing he wants to be. He has been for a long time. He’s too far gone, too old, too lazy, too permanently damaged. And why am I telling you all this?  It should be obvious by now.  I’ll do almost anything not to have to talk about Souther Hillman Furay…