George Was Always My Favorite
My first year of Beatles fandom was filled with milestones. Like many people my age, 1 was my gateway. I’d become aware of it the previous fall.
I was with my dad and his new wife during a period when he decided to invoke his custody rights. He was a stranger to me, as he had been when my parents were still together. He was a cardiologist who kept the hours that doctors keep. I wouldn’t call him the most involved father.
Maybe that was due to his job or his personality, which was formed or malformed by the movement of his career. It was more ebb than flow. We moved around a lot as he tried to advance in his career. I don’t know the exact reasons, but we moved three times by my sixth year. All I know is that things didn’t work out for him at those practices.
I think the fact that he hadn’t yet passed his boards factored in. With that handicap, maybe that was the best play for him.
To be fair to him, he did take me on trips, showed me interesting things, and read to me at bedtime.
I’d had some awareness of The Beatles before then. I remember asking my mother about them in the spring of 1995. I was in kindergarten then and couldn’t read. Maybe I’d heard them mentioned on the radio, several months before Anthology premiered, but I saw a copy of Journey’s Greatest Hits and assumed that the scarab beetle on the cover meant that this was The Beatles.
January 2001, I got my own copy of 1, just about a week before I turned 12. It changed my life; I had never heard music like this before; it was all I wanted to listen to and talk about. I started growing my hair out because of them. A modified flattop had been my coiffure of choice before then; now I wanted to have a mop top.
I didn’t know enough then or couldn’t tell the difference between their voices, but I remember listening to the oldies station on the way to summer camp and hearing about George Harrison’s illness. I felt bad for not really knowing much about him, though in fairness to me, “Something” was the only George song on 1.
My Beatles collection expanded that fall with the CD version of 1967-1970. My mom had a copy on vinyl. She also had 1962-1966, but it had melted in the sun during a garage sale after my dad left, when were in the process of leaving Kokomo. I don’t recall if that was before or after the bank took the house back due to lack of payment on the mortgage.
Part of my father’s acts of spite were letting certain things go unpaid. He tried to make things as difficult as possible for my mother. Didn’t matter that my brother and I suffered collateral damage as a result. There were many casualties in that divorce.
I can forgive uprooting me frequently and causing an unstable housing situation, but depriving me of those early Beatles songs is a middle eight too far.
But maybe that’s fitting, early on in my Beatles fandom, I tended to like the psychedelic stuff best. I remember pulling out the 1967-1970 to request that the oldies station play “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.” I’d rented Yellow Submarine a few times and really loved that song. I might have even known about the rumors about the song’s title being about LSD.
I entered middle school that fall and spent most mornings listening to the Blue Album. The bus would hold students for a time before they were dismissed to enter the school, so I always turned off my CD player by the time we arrived at school. I don’t remember how long that bus ride was, but I think it was long enough to get around eight tracks in. I guess I usually heard up to “All You Need Is Love” or “I Am The Walrus.”
I think the former track was the last song I heard before the reports about planes striking the Twin Towers were read on the radio.
Indiana didn’t participate in Daylight Saving Time then, so we were on Central time when the attacks happened.
I wasn’t affected by them beyond the typical shock and horror, but on some level, I found it exhilarating, because it made it feel like history was alive and not some dead, inert thing that had been rendered that way before I was born.
I made a point to watch Come Together: A Night for John Lennon's Words and Music, because I wanted any Beatles content I could get.
A few months later, George died. I remember very clearly how I found out. I was in a state of consciousness on the threshold of sleep and wakefulness. Someone had called into the oldies morning show and informed the host, Bruce Elscott, of George Harrison’s death. After the caller hung up, they played “Here Comes The Sun,” which I thought was strange because I didn’t hear The Beatles that much in the morning.
When I was more awake, I realized what I’d heard, and to confirm the new reality, I turned to television. CNN was still mired in endless 9/11 coverage and had nothing to say about George’s death. So I logged into AOL and had my world shattered.
George died on a Thursday at the end of November. The first Saturday in December, we got a live Christmas tree, the earliest we ever did. Normally, we waited until mid-December to get one. Holidays in our house had distinct periods; there was no need to rush straight from one to another. Maybe that’s why I hate how the lines are blurred in stores. There is never a chance to enjoy one season or celebration without anticipating the next.
I stayed up late decorating the tree and hanging ornaments. When Weekend Update came on, I figured they’d joke about George. Instead, they played a clip of him appearing on the show in 1976 with Paul Simon. It was poignant and sad. Even the show that mocked everything wasn’t left unaffected by his death.
Of course, now I would expect that, knowing what a stranglehold boomers have on the culture.
I’m surprised I was watching it then. I was more of a Mad TV fan. That was the preferred late-night comedy show in my house growing up. But I was aware of the importance of SNL. My interest in comedy gave me a rough understanding of that. And I’d watched reruns of the 90s episodes on Comedy Central.
My history teacher and spell bowl coach very kindly gave me her copy of Time with George on the cover.
I already had a reputation for being a Beatles fan. I’d made a friend in my Spanish class who also loved The Beatles; it was one of the first times I found a kindred spirit in music. I hadn’t taken music seriously until then. My taste was out of step with my classmates. My mom listened to country music, so that’s what I knew. Attempts at listening to more contemporary music were stymied by my cluelessness. I watched MTV and Vh1 to get a better grasp of the thing.
I’ve always been a man out of time. My interests skewed older or off the beaten path. That makes me feel a kinship with Gen-Xers who absorbed cultural knowledge because of the limited options for entertainment.
I watched a lot of Looney Tunes and old Hanna-Barbera cartoons growing up, courtesy of a TV that nearly always stayed tuned to Cartoon Network.
Most of the George songs I knew then were from 1967-1970: ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Old Brown Shoe,” “Here Comes The Sun,
and “Something.” My mother, a far more causal Beatles fan than I, knew the hits, but she also knew “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Not a single in the U.S. but a popular staple on radio. She once shocked and surprised me by knowing the release date for Revolver.
That Christmas, I received a copy of The Silmarillion and Live At The BBC. I remember being disappointed by both. I found the former less engaging and more challenging to read than The Lord of the Rings and the latter because I was hoping for Sgt. Pepper. Shortsighted reactions of youth, my appreciation for both has only grown in the time between.
Years later, I’d learn about discussing adapting LOTR with the four Beatles starring and Stanley Kubrick directing: John as Gollum, Paul as Frodo, George as Gandalf, and Ringo as Sam. Every choice seemed apt.
Of course, Gollum would appeal to John. He had a fascination with the grotesque; there’s footage of him on stage mimicking disabled people. That was a nervous tick of his and was also done to entertain. There were many people like that after the war, and they seemed to make John uncomfortable. Perhaps it was his insecurities about his eyesight, his looks, and maybe his fear of becoming disabled. “Crippled Inside” reflects this insecurity.
And of course, the duality of character: Gollum, the nasty, avarice-filled side lusting for The Ring. And the other side, Sméagol, a remnant of what he once was before The Ring ensnared him and devoured him over the years, and turned him against his upbringing and the people he knew. John had a temper and sometimes behaved in an unbecoming fashion. He was open about his flaws and spent much of his later years trying to overcome the traumas of his early losses. And to become a better man.
Without excusing the hurt he caused by his actions, it’s amusing to see regular occurrences on social media of someone trying to cancel him or otherwise punish him for his misdeeds. That already happened when he was gunned down at 40 in front of his wife. Is being murdered not adequate punishment?
Many of the negative things we know about him are because he himself disclosed them. Had he lived longer, he might have had an opportunity to right those wrongs.
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.”
While Tolkien stated that he detested allegories, parts of his own life seeped into his work. His experiences in The Great War shaped several characters and the narrative itself. Gollum recalls many of the shellshocked veterans, forever changed by the war.
John made a film about conflict, How I Won The War and much of his later political activism was related to the war.
Maybe Gollum resonated with him because he saw the behavior and mannerisms of an addict and a traumatized person. Or maybe he just liked the idea of biting off Paul’s finger.
Paul as Frodo makes sense to me: the one who takes it on himself to do what needs to be done. Paul is often viewed as a lightweight compared to John, which is unfair to both of them on multiple levels. In Gollum, Frodo sees what could have become of him, what could have become of Bilbo.
And he comes to pity him and tries to nurture and save what good remains within him. Frodo suffers his share of hurts in the quest: stabbed by the Morgul blade, stricken with venom, and wounded by tooth. To say nothing of the toll of bearing The Ring so long and fighting its influence and temptation.
Paul was no stranger to loss. He lost his mother at an early age. Something that no doubt helped him and John bond. But they responded to it in different ways. Not to knock John, his relationship with Julia was more complicated than the one Paul had with Mary.
Paul didn’t lose her twice like John did with Julia. He had his loving and supportive father, while John only had Mimi, who, while caring very deeply for him, was also very strict and rigid in her view of the world. John had been abandoned by his father, Alfred, and his beloved Uncle George died when he was 14. Uncle George practiced a more gentle form of parenting than his wife, and he nurtured John’s love of wordplay as well as his musical interests.
John and Paul are forever bound together by their songwriting credits and shared experience at the center of a hurricane. They couldn’t relate to how it was for George or Ringo, but only to each other.
Frodo and Hobbits in general are viewed as weaker than they are. They possess true resilience to the temptation of The Ring, more than other members of the Free People of Middle Earth. They have no ambition to be conquerors. When Sam is temporarily Ringbearer, it tempts him with visions of what it could allow him to do: to become a hero, throwing down the Dark Tower, making a garden of what was once wasteland.
“[H]e knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden, even if such visions were not a mere cheat to betray him. The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.” Those best suited to power do not desire to use it.
Paul’s love of nature, such as his home in Scotland, where he and Linda lived in the early years of their relationship, and songs like “Mother Nature’s Son,” makes it easy to see why the pastoral life of The Shire would appeal to him.
It’s not a perfect corollary, Paul has known tremendous loss and suffered many of those publicly, yet there seems to be no sign that the world has lost joy for him like it did for Frodo. It’s hard to imagine that changing for him any time soon.
George as Gandalf makes sense: a bearded mystic who enjoyed smoking. Gandalf has a fondness for pipe weed, and George was a prolific cigarette smoker. The Peter Jackson films make winking allusions to pipe weed being more akin to cannabis, but in the appendices, it’s described as coming from a plant in the same family as tobacco. “They imbibed or inhaled, through pipes of clay or wood, the smoke of the burning leaves of a herb, which they called pipe-weed or leaf, a variety probably of Nicotiana.”
Gandalf is a member of the Maiar, beings of supernatural origin, sent by the Valar to guide and aid the Free People of Middle Earth. The Valar are more powerful supernatural beings who serve the world's creator: Eru Illúvatar. The world was created by the performance of music, which brought everything into the world: mountains, rivers, forests, streams, love, elves, you name it.
In Hindu cosmology, Om is the first sound, everything that makes up reality. As in Tolkien’s Legendarium, creation begins with sound.
Spiritual sound is deeply important to Hinduism's practice, whether through music playing, mantra use during meditation, or prayer. George was a devotee of the Hari Krishna branch of Hinduism.
Māyā is a word that means illusion and refers to misconceptions about the world: that individuals are separate from the world and that we are not part of one deeply connected web of life, that desire can ever be satisfied, and that everything is permanent. All things must pass away.
“Do not risk getting entangled in the woods of Laurelindórenan! That is what the Elves used to call it, but now they make the name shorter: Lothlórien they call it. Perhaps they are right: maybe it is fading, not growing. Land of the Valley of Singing Gold, that was it, once upon a time. Now it is the Dreamflower,” says Treebeard in The Two Towers.
Maia is the singular form of Maiar and comes from the Quenya word maya, meaning excellent or admirable. Quenya is one of the languages spoken by the elves that Tolkien created. There are some linguistic similarities between Quenya and Sanskrit, and Tolkien used several languages as a source of inspiration for it. So maybe it's not a direct connection, but it's an interesting coincidence, at least.
There are many reasons why Gandalf might appeal to George. Gandalf’s appearance does not indicate his true nature, and what he is goes far beyond a physical body.
“We are not these bodies, just souls having a bodily experience.” - George Harrison
Sam and Ringo are a perfect match. Everyone loves Ringo, and Sam was as steadfast a companion as anyone could hope to have. The quest would have failed had he not followed Frodo to Mordor. Whether it was him shouldering the greater burden of the goods, taking The Ring when it seemed Frodo had died, rescuing him from the orcs, or carrying Frodo when he could no longer carry the burden further. Ringo was critical to The Beatles. He had an innate feel for drum fills, and he was not prone to making mistakes in the studio.
Personality-wise, he was a perfect fit for the other three, and even when they were at odds with one another, they could all agree on loving Ringo. Sam is the most working-class of the four main Hobbits, and Ringo had the most hardscrabble childhood of the Fab Four.
He lived in a poorer neighborhood than the other three and spent much of his childhood in and out of hospitals. He didn’t have the education of some of his bandmates or the skills to write songs easily. Still, he could put together memorable turns of phrase, like his beloved malapropisms that led to song titles like “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” or “Eight Days A Week.” Sam Gamgee was a gardener. Still, there were occasions where he showed a knack for writing, such as his tribute to Gandalf or his song about the stone troll. Underestimate him at your peril, he contains depths and multitude of which you cannot fathom.
The following year was almost as significant in my Beatles fandom. I Am Sam was released, and I wanted to see it because of the Beatles connection. We rented it at some point, and I remember over the years my mother occasionally quoting Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, “George was always my favorite.”
No George songs appeared on the soundtrack, at least not the U.S. version.
We moved in January, and I started at a new school by March. And because of the chaos of the move in February, we celebrated in May that year. One of the gifts I received at my temporally shifted birthday was the Yellow Submarine songtrack, which featured all the songs in the film except for “A Day In The Life.” Four of the songs were new for the film: “All Together Now,” “Hey Bulldog,” “Only A Northern Song,” and “It’s All Too Much.”
I liked all four of the new songs, some of which were driven by the visuals accompanying the song in the film. I loved “It’s All Too Much,” in particular, because it quotes a line from “Sorrow” by The Merseys and The Prince of Denmark’s March by Jeremiah Clarke. It is sometimes known as Trumpet Voluntary.
It’s commonly played at weddings, including that of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
While I’m aware that it refers to a different member of Denmark’s royalty, I like to pretend that it was named for Hamlet
During my freshman year of college, I took a course on Shakespeare, and I made it a challenge to find a connection between every play we read and The Beatles. Some were more direct, like The Beatles performing the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Or Paul quoting Hamlet during a scene in A Hard Day’s Night or a BBC broadcast of King Lear being heard on “I Am The Walrus.”
Others were more abstract, like Peter Sellers impersonating Laurence Olivier’s Richard III and reciting “A Hard Day’s Night” as if it were the words of the Bard.
The songtrack was released in 1999, alongside a restoration of the film on DVD and VHS.
That year also saw the release of Big Daddy. The soundtrack to the film featured a Shawn Mullins cover of “What Is Life.”
Christmas of 2002, I got Sgt. Pepper and I started to see what all the fuss was about that record. I loved the songs I already knew from 1967-1970 and elsewhere, and adored the ones new to me like “Fixing A Hole,” “Getting Better,” “She’s Leaving Home,” and “Good Morning, Good Morning.” I thought a lot about the sax on that.
My freshman year of high school really kicked my Beatles fandom into overdrive, and I became a George guy.
I learned that my birthday was the anniversary of their arrival at JFK in 1964, the 40th anniversary year. My grandmother got me a copy of Brian Epstein's biography A Cellarful of Noise.
I got more Beatles that year, including Rubber Soul, Revolver, The White Album, and Abbey Road.
I had a Rolling Stone supplement on George Harrison, and one of the songs mentioned in one section, “If I Needed Someone,” quickly became a favorite. I was intrigued by the mention of The Byrds in the write-up and that it was inspired by “The Bells of Rhymney” and “She Don’t Care About Time.” I had no idea how they sounded. Streaming on demand wasn’t yet a thing, and I was clueless and too afraid to attempt to use Limewire.
That summer, we got a new computer, and I could burn CDs and add my music collection to it. I also discovered streaming radio on AOL.
We took a family trip to Cedar Point, and we also went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and I got a shirt from there - George was one of the inductees that year.
There was also an exhibit on Bob Dylan. I had a dream about him that night: we were sharing a hotel room, and where I was, he wasn’t, and vice versa. So if I was in the bathroom, he would be in the main room and so on. He also sang about what he was doing, like singing about shaving in a voice stereotypical of most Dylan impressions, the one from 1966.
George was the one of the four who seemed most at ease with Dylan. He knew he wasn’t on the same songwriting level as him, so no pressure like it was for John or Paul. George was used to accommodating that type of ego, so it didn’t phase him. I think Dylan appreciated that. Or maybe they didn’t quite know what to make of the other. George was the only one of the four who could have convinced Bob to play his charity concert and to join a supergroup.
I think George is one of the better interpreters of Dylan. His version of “Mama You’ve Been On My Mind” adds plenty of life to an already incredible song.
His “If Not For You” on All Things Must Pass is a nice companion to “I’d Have You Anytime At All.”
George had so many songs that his first time out on his own — not counting Wonderwall Music and Electronic Sound – he released a triple album. If you were to cut the jams that close it out, the album would no doubt improve. But then you’d lose out on some of the charm. When I listen to it, I go from bow to stern.
I got the remaster at Christmas that year, and it became my soundtrack for my trip to Arizona to march in the Fiesta Bowl parade.
It’s a fitting album for dealing with big feelings, which are bound to arise when you’re a sensitive teen boy. Sonically, the production is big and loud, the trademark Phil Spector Wall of Sound. And he tackles big issues like faith, death, and love. When your passions are only skin deep, your inner world froths and hisses like a ship building up a head of steam.
Gifted as you may be in terms of vocabulary and sentence construction, you lack the language to articulate how you feel inside.
You’re creeping ever closer to when your life is supposed to start, and you feel frustrated because your peers seem to have a head start while you’re waiting for your turn.
Facets of life seem to come easier for people around you, as if they attended some class that you missed out on, or you’ve wandered into a film that’s on the sixth reel.
So you relate to George, because he lived in the shadow of John and Paul and had to work at it because it didn’t come easily for him. He had these gifts and talent, but he had to really toil to make it happen. It wasn’t effortless like it seemed to be for Paul. He looked up to John, but he could never be him; he could only be George.
All Things Must Pass finished the work Rubber Soul and Revolver had started: George was my favorite Beatle.
Some of that was undoubtedly due to his passing away the year I became a fan. I feel a sort of guilt when a musician passes away, either because it’s before I’ve listened to their work or not long after it becomes part of my life.
Some of that is guilt. Guilt that I didn’t appreciate them more while they were alive. And also a compulsion to appreciate them now that they are no longer living. To ensure that at least one person appreciates what they left behind, that their life had meaning.
Another factor in my appreciation for George was definitely his venture into cinema through Handmade Films. Like many generations of obnoxious nerds, I came to love Monty Python. My mother introduced me to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. By Fall of 2001, I’d heard a tape of Monty Python routines, caught reruns of Flying Circus on BBC America and had started reading Monty Python Speaks.
Movies have always been an important part of my life, and their overall importance has only grown in the last five years, where I upped my movie watching and began to more deeply educate myself on the history of cinema, and generally doing what I can to become a more well-rounded person and film fan.
Sometimes it’s those you least expect who support true artists, like Mel Brooks getting The Elephant Man made and helping David Lynch to pursue his creative vision. Speaking of Mel Brooks, George’s favorite film was The Producers; he liked it so much that he slipped a reference to it in his song “Horse To Water.”
On the same birthday weekend that I learned about the Beatles' connection to my birth, I watched The Producers for the first time the night before.
Along with the Python films, Handmade was also behind The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa, Withnail & I, and Time Bandits.
Maybe George became my favorite because we were both born in February, in the dead of winter. “Here Comes The Sun” was written in the middle of a particularly long, cold, and miserable English winter. He’d been busted for marijuana, briefly quit The Beatles, and was generally not having a great time.
“‘Here Comes the Sun’ was written at the time when Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: 'Sign this' and 'sign that.' Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever, by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton's house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric's acoustic guitars and wrote ‘Here Comes the Sun,’” wrote George in his autobiography.
He’s a Pisces sun, whereas I’m a Pisces moon. I’m not especially into astrology, but I lived in Los Angeles long enough to pick up on it. George also lived in a rental on Blue Jay Way in LA for a period. He later passed away in a Beverly Hills home owned by Paul. He was cremated at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and a memorial service was held at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades.
I was born in Illinois, and the first place George visited in America was Illinois to see his sister Louise. He stayed with her for two weeks in September 1963. Ringo had originally planned to join him but opted for a trip to Greece instead. It was a time the group had decided to use for a little R&R. They were months away from making it big in the States and were already sending young girls into a frenzy in the UK.
While there, George bought a Rickenbacker 420 and some singles, including James Ray’s “I Got My Mind Set On You,” a gospel song he’d cover in 1987. He even played with a local band at a VFW.
My favorite number is 7, mainly because that’s my birth date. It’s as inspired as the T. Rex being your favorite dinosaur, but I know how I feel, and I have no one to impress.
“My dad’s favorite number was 7, and a lot of things that he did were according to the number 7, whether he meant it or not. That was the highest honor I could have given a track on the album [Brainwashed], to put it track 7.” - Dhani Harrison, Brainwashed electronic press kit
There are more technically skilled guitar players than him, but very few I’d rather listen to over George. He has such a distinct tone and eras, like near the end of The Beatles when he began using The Leslie Speaker.
The Beatles had used it since the mid-60s, first on “It’s Only Love.” A Leslie is a speaker with parts that rotate, giving whatever sound is played through it a unique sound. It was designed for use on electric organs such as the Hammond B3. A pedal allows the sound to be altered by changing the speed at which they rotate: slow or fast. Chorale and tremolo.
George produced an album of Hindu devotional songs recorded by UK members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness for Apple Records. Without knowing his involvement, you know it’s him the second the Leslie’d guitar kicks in on “Hare Krsna Mantra.”
While I’ve not explored Eastern thought beyond satisfying my curiosity and desire to know more about the world, I would call myself a spiritual person. I hate that terminology because it feels like a cop-out answer, and it’s so vague.
Like George, I did not find the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised to have satisfactory answers. There are aspects of it I have a fondness for: the folk mass, the Jesuits and their dedication to knowledge and delivering mercy and kindness to those most in need, the use of Latin, the Beatitudes. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
I think of that when I’m having hard time and feeling a certain way about the loss of my mother. There’s a lot to admire about The Sermon on the Mount. Contained within that are all the things that we should all probably just do but often fail to do because our venal, selfish impulses foil our altruistic sides.
“Do you know what a humanist is? My parents and grandparents were humanists, what used to be called Free Thinkers. So as a humanist I am honoring my ancestors, which the Bible says is a good thing to do. We humanists try to behave as decently, fairly, and as honorably as we can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. My brother and sister didn't think there was one, my parents and grandparents didn't think there was one. It was enough that they were alive. We humanists serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, ‘Isaac is up in heaven now.’ It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, ‘Kurt is up in heaven now.’ That's my favorite joke.
How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, ‘If what he said is good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?’
But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.” - Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
I have no interest in being a practicing Catholic. Feels disingenuous to me to be a cafeteria Catholic and pick and choose what parts of the faith I accept and don’t. I understand Pascal’s wager, but it feels far worse to me to feign piety than to embrace how I truly feel.
Some who are raised Catholic describe feelings of guilt related to certain behaviors. I don’t feel any guilt related to sexual mores or the like, but I do feel guilt because of being raised Catholic.
And for me, it manifests in falling short. Not doing enough to help my fellow man, acting selflessly or cruelly when I could have done something to ease the burden of someone in need, to have offered rebuke when a kind word would have done greater good. Anytime I act as a fallible human being.
I can take the good from it without wringing my hands about it. I see no use in self-flagellation. Contradiction is the driving force of the universe.
I am far too laid back to subscribe to a particular rigid dogma. But I’m also confident enough to say that I’m uncertain about being certain. Some of that stems from personal experience.
I think that’s one reason the Unitarian Universalist Church was appealing to me. People from many walks of life and backgrounds are members of UU congregations, and members follow seven guiding principles:
1st Principle: The inherent worth and dignity of every person
2nd Principle: Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
3rd Principle: Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
4th Principle: A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
5th Principle: The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
6th Principle: The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
7th Principle: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
UU draws on many faith traditions, something that’s been lampooned on shows like Futurama. I understand why people may deride it since it seems so amorphous and shapeless on the surface.
I began attending a UU church a year ago because I was experiencing extended unemployment and feeling lost and unmoored by that and much of what has transpired over the last six years and beyond. My experiences have been profoundly isolating and dispiriting. It isn’t easy to imagine myself living a normal life (or what passes for normal) after all that.
There, I found like-minded people and a community. It was a great source of comfort, and I looked forward to attending church for the first time. Losing that was one reason my sudden departure from Los Angeles was so devastating.
I moved a lot as a kid out of necessity for my father’s job. Ultimately, I feel rootless because my dad was from Idaho, and my mother was from Brooklyn. I was born in the Midwest, grew up in Indiana, and consider myself a Hoosier.
“All my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it.
My relationship to Indiana is like that of a convert. I find every way I can to tie myself to a state where I grew up, but my family had no kin or ties beyond work initially.
George was a racing fanatic. When The Beatles played the Indiana State Fair in 1964, they played golf at the course located in the Speedway, and Ringo was given a ride around the track by a cop. At the fair, they played multiple shows, including an indoor show in the coliseum, where three years later, the Indiana Pacers played their games. Fifty years after those shows, the team would have a player on the roster with the names of two Beatles: Paul George.
Even Vonnegut had thoughts on The Beatles. “I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'.”Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
My moves have only increased since The Incident™️. Since 2019, I have moved four times, nearly all of which were sudden and not what I planned. I had to scramble, pack, and try to leave as fast as possible.
When I was younger, I found George’s spirituality and devotion to religion a little corny and embarrassing. Perhaps it’s because I feared sincerity in that, and I found my Catholic upbringing so lacking. At church, I felt a lack of fervor and devotion, and attending mass was going through the motions. Faith did not come to me easily, and I didn’t see the point in pretending otherwise.
Part of what motivated me to explore this aspect of life more is what happened with my mother, not because something unbelievably cruel and tragic was visited upon me. I’m no stranger to bad things occurring and have mostly vacillated between thinking the universe is indifferent and what befalls us has little to do with our actions, and thinking that whatever guiding force or principle undergirds the world had a personal vendetta against me because of my apostate ways.
What gave me pause was a moment I can’t explain. After waking up around three in the morning on New Year’s Day 2019 and hearing a loud crash, I heard my mother laughing. I’d been ready to go upstairs to see if she was alright. That previous calendar year, she’d had a hip and knee replacement, so I thought she might have fallen due to that.
The laughter told me she was okay, which was the truth in a certain light. I know now that the crash was the sound of a body hitting the floor, hers or his. And I know that she was dead by the time she hit the floor, or soon would be. She hadn’t the time to laugh and wasn’t the type to find humor in something like that. That’s more my area of expertise. Such as me comparing stepping over his corpse to Allen Iverson stepping over Tyronn Lue during Game 1 of the 2001 NBA Finals.
It very well could have been the product of my trauma-addled brain trying to make sense out of the senselessness. I know I’ll never get a real explanation, but I’m content to sit with the inexplicable for now. The farther one travels, the less one really knows.
Maybe there’s more to the universe than I thought, or perhaps I’m just seeing patterns that are my way of enforcing order and structure onto something far more shapeless than I believed.
The other night, I was sitting outside listening to Living In The Material World, and as “Be Here Now” faded out, I heard the sound of rain. At first, I thought it was part of the track, but then I noticed the droplets pockmarking the concrete that had spent the day baking in the desert sunlight. If this were a work of fiction, that moment would have been too on the nose about informing the character about their next move. But this is real life, and it’s often stranger than fiction.
I think this is core to having a bearable human experience: “I’m content to sit with the inexplicable for now.”