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Death & Parenting’s life was too short. There’s so much more I’d like to write. About death: Paul Harding’s Tinkers is the best book I’ve read all year. About parenting: the kid has discovered the joy of calling his friends on the phone. “Hello,” he says, “I am talking to you on the phone because…” It’s very funny. More about death: Letting Go, Atul Gawande’s article about end-of-life care in the new New Yorker is crushingly powerful and very wise and should be the start of lots of important conversations. It’s making me think today about my grandfather’s death, the terrible month after he’d been resuscitated, against explicit instructions, during a third heart attack at his home. Of going to visit him in the hospice center where he was gaunt and wide-eyed, conscious but unable to talk, only to cry out like an animal—or, more accurately, like Chewbacca from Star Wars. A terrible, primal emoting that I was pretty sure meant something along the lines of “Please kill me.” Needless to say, it was very difficult to see him like this. And I’ve spent a long time wishing he’d been let to die at home, with what I imagined would have been more dignity. But then, while unable to speak, lying there in his hospice bed, he was able to pucker his lips and give kisses. And I’ll never forget the feeling of his unshaven stubble on my cheek the last time I saw him. That counts as a goodbye, I guess. One that we were only able to share because of the resuscitation. So maybe he would have actually chosen to die in the manner that he did. I don’t know for sure. This stuff is complicated. But for sure, the country’s medical system could be improved in this area. And Gawande gives the topic the careful thought it deserves.

But I’m out of time. So what I’ll do now is just say a huge thank you to you for reading this. And to Coates and Michael and Lewis and the rest of the team that made True/Slant such a great place to write—and read the writing of others—over the past six months. Thank you!

Have you been following the story about Jessi Slaughter and her dad against the internet? It’s as complicated as it is disturbing, and it ends with the 11-year-old Jessi, who lives in Florida and whose real last name is not Slaughter, being placed under police protection. But here goes: Jessi had an active online presence, posting messages, pictures, and videos on Tumblr and Myspace page, Youtube and a crowd-sourced “tween” site called Sticky Drama, which promotes itself as “The #1 Tabloid About Internet Celebrities and Social Network Gossip!” (I’m already way out of my depth here.) She was a fan of the techno group Blood On the Dancefloor.

On July 10, someone going by the name “tdomf_e8e13” wrote an article on Sticky Drama claiming that Jessi was romantically involved with Blood On the Dancefloor singer Dahvie Vanity, who is 25 years old. Jessi wrote a response denying the claim. Comments to both posts were as ridiculous and cruel as the internet can get. Jessi then recorded a shockingly vulgar and vitriolic webcam video addressed to her “haters” and put it up on Youtube. The video found its way onto image-sharing site 4chan’s gleefully amoral, aggressively puerile “random” board, /b/. (I am now even deeper out of my depth; I learned a lot about the internet today, much of it thanks to a site called Know Your Meme and Ryan Broderick’s reporting on The Awl.) The web-savvy users of 4chan are notorious for wrecking havoc on the internet—they are reportedly the genesis of the once ubiquitous “rickroll” prank. Apparently amused by Jessi’s rant, and hoping to prompt more, some of them organized an effort to harass her. Her real name and address and phone number were posted. A wave of crank calls ensued, and people—pizza delivery guys, prostitutes—showing up at the house. And, reportedly, death threats. (Police are investigating, and guarding the house. Meanwhile, 4chan users have since launched side campaigns against Dahvie Vanity and Gawker’s Adrien Chen, who wrote about the story on Friday. A coordinated denial-of-service attack successfully shut down operations at Gawker for a short time Tuesday. Cyber warfare is nasty, powerful business.)

As you’d expect, Jessi freaked out. She made and posted more video—desperate, sobbing, please for mercy—but the torment continued. And then her father joined her in one of the videos. Enraged, also clearly freaked out, he pointed directly into the camera and addressed the invisible hordes who had so quickly upended his family life. “Ya dun goofed,” he said, threatening legal action:

“This is from her father. You bunch of lying, no-good punks, and I know who it’s coming from because I’ve backtraced it and I know who is emailing and doing it and you’ll be reported to the cyber police and state police, so you better not write one more thing or screw with my computer again! You’ll be arrested. End of conversation. FROM. HER. FATHER. And if you come near my daughter, guess what, consequences will never be the same!”

Of course this only made the situation worse. The video with the father become a meme—viewed by millions, mocked, spoofed and used as fodder in a way similar to what happened with Kanye West’s interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at last year’s MTV Video Awards show. Within days, “Ya dun goofed!” T-shirts were available for sale.

It’s a sad story. And one of those that points to the struggle people have keeping up with the changes technology brings to the world. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal wrote a good piece about it called “The Helplessness of a Father in the Internet Age.” He writes,

“Parents want to protect their children, but a precondition of that is being able to know what or who the threat is. Father and daughter alike are now living inside one of those nightmares where the thing that’s out to get you remains perpetually just out of sight and reach. FROM. HER. FATHER. Those words used to mean something. Mostly it meant, ‘I’m a full-grown man and I’m willing to use physical force to stop you from hurting my kid, you punk kid.’ But who is the man in this video going to scare? Everyone knows his threats are empty, that he’s bluffing and helpless. And he does, too, which must make it all the more enraging.”

Without wanting to come down on a little girl and a family who found themselves in a really awful situation, the first question that struck me was, Why wouldn’t these people turn off the computer? Once internet use is leading to tears and upset, it seems like the first thing to do is make the screen go dark. Thinking about it more, maybe it’s not that easy. I wonder if this points to a future the paranoids among us already suspect is coming: a time when we really can’t turn off the computers, because we rely on them for food and air and safety and stuff. (On a larger scale, of course, that time is already here. Like, we wouldn’t want the computers to go off at the Nuclear power plants.) But maybe that time is already here in lots of ways on the personal level, too. Maybe for this family, with the attacks coming in over phone and at the door, the thought of turning off the computer, the main information source, would have just made it all the more frightening. Like, There are these people out there talking about us, plotting against us—we need to monitor them, and in fact, strike out in defense. Maybe the dark screen would feel like a blindfold in that situation. And your enemies are out there, targeting your family with infrared vision.

Yeesh! Creepy. Here’s hoping to never find out.

Image via Wikipedia

I’m reading Paul Harding’s novel, Tinkers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year. It’s about an old man lying in bed, trying to take stock of his life during the week leading up to his death. But he finds that his memories defy narrative arrangement, coming to him instead like mosaic tiles loose in a frame, “with just enough space so that they can all keep moving around…” It is some of the most beautiful prose I have read in a long time, slow and meditative and, unsurprisingly, largely plotless. Similar in these ways to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which won the Pulitzer in 2004. But I’m actually finding it much more compelling. There is a two-page section that starts on page 64, comprising only five sentences, the central one 39 lines long, wherein the old man, George, wonders at the “shifting mass” of his experience and at how it will only stop when he dies, its solid state something only for others to see. And then how even then it will not reveal itself to be as set and discernable as one would like.

“… I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all of the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else’s frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their own time, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world because they were made from this world, even though the fleeting tenants of those bits of colored glass have vacated them before they have had even the remotest understanding of what it is to inhabit them, and if they—if we are fortunate (yes, I am lucky, lucky), if we are fortunate, have fleeting instants when were are satisfied that the mystery is our to ponder, if never to solve…”

Image by infomatique via Flickr

So I’ve been thinking a lot about Jennifer Senior’s story about parenting in this week’s New York Magazine. “All Joy and No Fun,” it’s called. It’s about how an overwhelming majority of scientific studies on the topic conclude that having children makes people less happy—a “finding duplicated over and over,” Senior writes, “despite the fact that most parents find it to be wrong”—and the resultant question of why we keep doing it. I liked a lot about it. It’s the cover story, and the cover line is “I love my children. I hate my life.” This is a sentiment I can very much relate to, even though I have just one child.

The story presents plentiful evidence and anecdotes detailing the misery of parenthood: the endless work, the stress on the marriage, the loss of freedom, the destruction of social life. (I would add something that the story elides—the great, ever-present fear, which I’ve mentioned before.) It investigates the ways in which parenthood has changed over the past 30 years and examines the differences between our notions of happiness and joy and purpose and reward. Senior ends with the thought that retrospective appreciation of the positive aspects of raising children outweighs moment-to-moment happiness or the lack thereof—even if this amounts to a sort of delusion:

“It’s a lovely magic trick of the memory, this gilding of hard time. Perhaps it’s just the necessary alchemy we need to keep the species going. But for parents, this sleight of the mind and spell on the heart is the very definition of enchantment.”

Hmm. I don’t know that this jibes so well with my personal experience. I don’t think I’ve found parenthood enchanting. Debilitating seems like a better word. Even in retrospect; my memories are not so halcyon. Those first three years? Amazingly horrible. (The kid is five; and it must be said, it’s been much less horrible lately.) Indeed, the question of why people continue to do it is a very interesting one to me. And the question of, Is it worth it? Would I recommend it to someone who asked? This is complicated and difficult and probably impossible to confidently answer, really, due to the non-existence of time travel or the ability to know the outcome of paths not chosen. I mean, of course there are lots of wonderful things about parenthood. I’ll start off with this: I love my kid and I am very happy that he exists. So in that way, because his existence would be impossible without my being a parent, it’s hard to say that the endeavor is not worth it. I do not regret his existence. But if I’m to be honest with myself, and with this hypothetical person asking me a question, I do think I am, all things considered, less happy than I was before becoming a parent. I miss the freedom of childless adulthood—being able to do pretty much whatever I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it. That was a great source of happiness to me. Gone. And the abundance of uninterrupted time with my wife. And I miss relaxation—the fullest state of which, I think I have probably said goodbye to forever. These are important things. I go a good ways with hedonism. And I’m not entirely sure I’d like to argue that the happiest life is not the best one to lead. Removing the kid’s existence from the equation, which we should try to do, especially if we’re considering the recommendation to the hypothetical prospective mother or father, I’m hard pressed to say that parenthood is worth its attendant and enormous hardship and sacrifice.

But still, I think, I say it. The reason why might get both over-worded and kind of fruity, but I’ll try to express it anyway. And it does have to do with some of the semantic distinctions Senior raised in the New York article. It relies on the idea that richness of experience, or something vague like meaning, might be more important than happiness. It is: parenthood is worth it because of the knowledge it bestows. I don’t mean the everyday learning about life or whatever that takes place along with, and very often because of, the aforementioned hardship and sacrifice. Much of this, I think, we could learn other ways. (Bootcamp, maybe. Or prison.) Rather, for me, the most profound and enlightening moment of parenthood remains the very first one. The very first time I looked at the kid, thirty seconds after he was born, lying on the tray of the scale in the delivery room. In the crazy sense of connection I felt with him, a more tangible sense of connection than I’d ever felt with anything before—one that came as a result of the understanding, or the feeble attempt thereof, that this tiny breathing human shape, this thing lying in front of me, outside of me, was in fact made half out of me—I had as close to what I’d describe as an out-of-body experience as I’ve ever had, best comparable to a zoom-lens perspective effect in a movie, or, really, psychedelic drugs. Later that night, talking to my friend Dave, who’d had his first kid five years before, and two more since, I struggled for words to describe it. Dave laughed.

“It’s like walking through a door, right?” he said. “And suddenly there’s this whole other world you never even knew existed.”

And that’s what it is, with that first moment of parenthood, my world got immeasurably bigger. My outer world and my inner world and this weird new emotional bridge between the two. It was the very definition of mind-expanding. And this type of knowledge, which I don’t know of any of any other way to acquire, has great value to me. It is different from joy or happiness, but it is still something that is very good. It’s worth it.

Image by glassblower via Flickr

Surely you’re up on Silly Bandz?

They are the rubber bands of bright and various colors that you might have seen on the wrists of children lately. They differ from regular rubber bands in that they hold a certain shape—and they come in a multitude of shapes: submarines, baseball bats, dinosaurs, butterflies, you name it—when they’re not being stretched, and that they sell for $3.00 for a pack of twelve or $5.00 for a pack of 24 and that they are absolutely the hottest thing on the grade-school streets. “Five years from now people will be asking, ‘What was the big deal with the rubber bands?’” says Chris Byrne, content director for the children’s toys and entertainment review, Time To Play magazine. “But for right now, it really is a defining moment in time.”

One way to know a kids fad is defining a moment in time, of course, is that schools start banning the items from their premises. And like the similarly distracting Pokemon cards and Young Jeezy snowman t-shirts before them, Silly Bandz are now against the rules at schools around the country. (If kids were smart, they would start trading and obsessing over their textbooks or homework assignments.) Another way is that Fox News will do a hysteria-fanning “Are YOUR children at risk??!!!” story. Check. Another way, I guess, is when adults start buying the items from your children at a 400 percent mark-up.

Last week, we were at this Japanese restaurant in our neighborhood where we often take the kid and his friend Leo after picking them up from their after-school program. It’s a great place, owned by this super-friendly woman who loves kids and has a collection of toys she keeps spread out on the bar. This is wonderful, as the two boys eat their dinner up there, while my wife and I and Leo’s parents take a table as far away as we can and dine in relative peace.

Halfway through the meal, a rocker-looking couple walked in. The woman in tattered fishnets under cut-off-jeans, the guy in all black and wayfarers; the tattoos and general mien of both suggesting a close familiarity with needles. They sat at the bar, next to the kids, a decision that elicited the standard sotto voce expressions of “ha ha” and “those poor people” from our table. But they were in the mood for younger company, and soon enough, the woman and our boys were engaged in long and seemingly serious conversation. A couple minutes later, the boys climbed down off their stools and walked over to our table with big smiles on their faces, each of them fanning (literally fanning, like little hustler card-sharks) four dollar bills in their hands. (I don’t know where they learned to do the money fanning thing; needless to say, it was unattractive.)

We all gasped.

“Where did you get that money?” my wife, Emily, asked.

“From that lady,” Leo said.

“We sold her Silly Bandz,” my kid said.

I looked up at the woman and she smiled and waved.

“Oh, no no no!” I said. “Absolutely not. You go back there and give her that money back.” (I said this to only my kid, of course. But I’m pretty sure Leo’s parents were suggesting the same thing.)

My kid frowned and whined, “Whyyyy? She picked out the ones she wanted.”

“Four dollars is way too much,” I said, while gesturing this idea to woman at the bar. “How many Silly Bandz did you give her?”

“Four,” my kid said.

“She gave us a dollar for each,” Leo said.

I stood up and approached the woman. “Please,” I said. “That’s very nice of you, but you don’t have to—”

“No, I totally wanted to,” she said, holding up her wrist, which was draped in Silly Bandz the way girls wore those black rubber Madonna bangles in 1985. “I think they’re great! I’ve been collecting them. I picked out the ones that matched my style. The spider, the skeleton…”

“The axe,” my kid interjected.

“Yeah, the axe. I think they’re the just the coolest.”

I didn’t know what to do. I looked back at Emily and Leo’s parents, who all shrugged. So I said okay and told my kid to go thank the woman again and tell her it was nice doing business with her.

“Nice doing business with you,” the woman said when he did. She was so nice.