“Ari shit directly on me yesterday,” my brother said. “And I looked, and there in his eye was the slightest twinkle, and I thought, ‘Yeah, he’s a Simon.’”

There’s a part of my genome, I’m sure, that’s dedicated solely to spite. Depending on how much coffee I’ve had on any given day, I think about it either as The Spite Gene, or The Fuck You Gene. It’s a familial trait, as far as I’m concerned, but it seems like only my Dad inherited it from his Dad. All of my uncles and aunts on the Simon side seem to be very lovely people who aren’t driven solely by spite, but for whatever reason, my pops inherited it and passed it down to my brother and me.

I bring this up because this past Sunday, I watched Whiplash. It was fantastic – and not for the reasons you’ll hear from other people. Yeah, JK Simmons was great, and the music was brilliant, and the pacing was spot on, and the cast was inspired and – okay, it was fantastic for the reasons you’ll hear from other people, but also because the protagonist seems to be, like me and my brother and my father, driven by spite. Funnily enough, the protagonist is also Jewish. I don’t know if that was typecasting, or just a personal quirk written into the character, but it was a nice connection.

Anyway, the reason I bring that up is because the story centers around this kid going through an intense program presided over by a sadist. In many ways, it’s Full Metal Jacket at Juilliard, but in some ways, it’s worse. Think about it, you expect drill sergeants to be awful. That’s what they’re paid for. But music is supposed to be uplifting and human and everything good in the world – and music teachers are supposed to be encouraging the next generation of greats, not throwing chairs at their heads!

As to that second point, I don’t think anyone actually believes that. Musicians are pricks. Beethoven drove his nephew to attempted suicide. Rock is full of drug-addled assholes. The blues is so full of leery, dirty sex that it’s surprising you don’t get syphilis after listening to a Robert Johnson song. (Not to mention anything by Lucille Bogan. Good Lord.) Jazz, apparently, is chock full of abusive psychopaths – which, I guess, isn’t too surprising. Jazz figured heavily in On The Road, and Kerouac wasn’t a shining beacon of ethics. Does that make the music bad, though? Of course not. The music’s music. And just as GWAR doesn’t inspire people to go murdering others, jazz doesn’t inspire people to throw cymbals at neighbors or coworkers. However, it’s not surprising that you have the greats acting like they did: Music’s primal, and in order to be one of the greats, you almost have to tap into and embrace that primality of music.

So, the idea that Fletcher (JK Simmons) is a riotous asshole shouldn’t surprise people, but it sure as hell makes for an interesting hook to a movie.

But really, the thing that hit me about Whiplash was the protagonist’s drive to succeed. The guy could have given up, but he didn’t. And where did that drive come from? Not from some external source – certainly not from his father, who wasn’t exactly all about supporting his son as a musician – but from inside. And what was that source of drive? The Fuck You gene. Neymann isn’t some schlub who has to be picked up by his girlfriend (he didn’t have one long, because he dumped her because he was an asshole) or friends (as near as we can tell, he didn’t have any), but because some voice deep inside him heard Fletcher’s criticisms and said, “You know what? Fuck you.” And from thence, Neymann decided that he would be one of the greats even if it physically destroyed him.

And something about that connected with me. Well, scratch that, I know just what it was: My personal “Fuck you” moment came in grad school, as I was being told that my writing just didn’t work and if I kept it up, I wouldn’t pass the program. This wasn’t Justice Trio-level stuff I was writing, either: This is stuff that has been well-received by people other than my parents! So, I thought the key phrase, and kept churning it out. I wrote like a madman from October to June, far surpassing the required word count (“You want a novella for a Master’s? Fuck you, you’re getting a novel.”) and churning out something that outside readers said was good enough for an Merit degree at Kent. Yeah, it’s not Oxford, but that’s leagues better than getting failed out of a program for going against what I know is my style, and what I know is what I write well. And I hold on to that moment not out of personal spite (partially personal spite), but out of professional spite – because the purpose of an MA or an MFA in writing isn’t to churn out Jonathan Franzen clones, but to make good writers better in their own genre.

That idea, that the best way for me to get inspired is to go against the grain of what I believe is right, is why I don’t have any freakin patience for feel-good woo spread around by sites like Upworthy, or Buzzfeed, or any number of bizarre offshoots that slap a semi-inspirational quote on a semi-inspirational photo and call it insightful. The world does not run on good vibes. The world is fueled by humans, the majority of which are too wrapped up in their day-to-day existence and egos to acknowledge anyone’s idea of the greater picture – most of all, their own. To slather sugar on a piece of shit idea and call it smart is insulting to anyone who got to where they are without an entire cheerleading section on the sidelines. (Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have that, but to be fueled entirely by that is self-delusion and self-denial of the grandest scale.)

In order to be successful in whatever you practice, you have to be willing to smell the sewage as well as the flowers. The Buddha may be a fresh breeze, but the Buddha is also a shit-stick. So, what do you do? Do you focus entirely on negative feedback? Well, no. That way lays self-destruction and annihilation of whatever social structure you might otherwise build around yourselves. But you have to embrace the anger not as a friend, because that’ll then turn it into not anger, but as an enemy you have to surpass. The world is a stage, says the bard, but every play needs a villain for the protagonist to overcome.

So, in my day-to-day, when I’m looking at something in front of me, I know I’m most successful if it’s something I want to do and think I can do, and someone tells me that I shouldn’t. I need that something to look in the eyes and go “Fuck you” at.

And when my brother told me that story of his baby son seemingly purposefully shitting directly on him, I knew: That kid’s gonna be someone.

Until yesterday, I’d been very lucky in that the only death that hit close to home was my grandmother’s while I was in college. Yesterday, I learned that a friend, Connor Gregory, died in a car wreck. Since learning that, I’ve been trying to figure out where I am on the spectrum of feelings, and thought that, you know, it doesn’t really matter. (I mean, it does, but, well, hold on and I’ll get to it.) The people who are hit hardest by this are going to have a hell of a time, something that I cannot imagine. And, to me, there is nothing you can say that wouldn’t cheapen whatever it is they’re going through. That’s the thing about not having gone through anything like this, you don’t have the emotional toolbox to be able to help someone through the process. The good news is, though, that Connor’s girlfriend, Faye, who was with him at the time, is going to be in very good hands. Mark and Nora, two extremely good people and even better friends, are going to be there for her, and that’s, as far as I can tell, the best thing that can happen right now.

When I’ve told people about this, they’ve asked if Connor was a good friend. Well, of course he was. Connor was an extremely warm and affable guy. One of the messed up rubrics I use to judge a friendship is how many arguments about nothing I can have with a person and still walk away thinking, “Yeah, he’s a good guy.” By that measure, Connor was a fantastic human being and a great friend. If you were to look at his Facebook profile today, you’d see it changed into a memorial wall, with people who he’s affected sharing memories. For my generation, I guess that’s the closest a lot of people will have to a memorial service or a wake for the departed. If nothing else, then, if you’re looking for this sort of thing, it’s an easy way to judge the effect someone had on people’s lives.

Earlier, I mentioned that the only death I’d experienced so far was my grandmother’s while I was in college. After she died, I felt like there was a bit of mercy in it. See, she was a very strong-willed person. She had to have been in order to be a raging left-winger in Smyrna, Tennessee, and remain there for decades both while my grandfather, an officer in the Air Force, was alive, and then afterward. But at the end of her life, she had suffered three strokes and was going through heavy dementia. There were days where she didn’t know her daughters, and that is not who Rose Montgomery was. In that sense, the death was leagues easier—for me, but not for my mother, of course, because holy shit there is nothing like the bond between a child and her mother—than seeing her in that state. So, I went almost ten years without experiencing death, and now am facing this.

Suddenness, as anyone knows, is a harder thing to face than a gradual decline, which allows you to come to terms with what’s coming. Suddenness brings with it shock, disbelief, and an almost subdermal feeling of rage. I didn’t know Connor well enough to get into any metaphysical or philosophical or dharma combat things with him, so I can’t say how he would have liked people to handle it. Thus, I’m left with how to handle the memory of a friend.

One of mainline Judaism’s (simplest) answer(s) is the yearning for the establishment of God’s kingdom on Earth, the appearance of Moshiach, and the true justice and paradise that that would bring. [See the Mourner’s Kaddish. This, of course, is extremely simple, and Judaism is a religion that puts a lot of weight on how to handle things like this, whether that’s sitting shiva or anything else.] However, I’m not a member of mainline Judaism, and haven’t been for a long time now. Christianity would—well, I’m not even going there, because I’m not a Christian, and Christianity is a wide potpourri of theological analyses of Biblical texts, just like Judaism, and I’m an outsider.

However, there’s an approach to death that I like, and it’s found in Zen. Zen emphasizes that we cannot actually make sense of reality, because as we try to do so, we are putting our own desires and interpretations and everything else on top of what is actually reality, thus not actually experiencing it. Buddha, Zen says, is a shit stick. Which means that, simultaneously, enlightenment is everything that is gross and filthy about the world, as well as the relief from the grossness and filth. (Apparently, monks used to wipe their tucheses with sticks.) Living enlightenment is fully feeling loss just as it is enjoying a good coffee or tea.

Further, a guy whose worldview I can really get behind, says that there is an element of all of us in the universe, because, he says, we’re all the universe experiencing itself. It’s not a New Age thing—even though it sounds like it is—and you don’t get that unless you’ve read some of the Patriarch’s writings and sat zazen for a while. But the point is that someone who’s dead is never truly dead. They’re not hovering around like a ghost in The Frighteners, either, but they’re never truly gone. You can’t put what that means into words, but after a while of meditating on it—but not thinking about it—you start to gain understanding of it. That, of course, doesn’t mean that it’s any easier to process.

If you pray, think, or send good vibes, do so for Connor’s family and Faye Norris.

I just realized that there’s a very big spider web on this site, so I reckon I’ll jump in, clean it off a bit with a blog post, and then frolic on off to… do whatever it is that I need to do today.

It’s been a stupid busy eight months. Since getting the job I’m currently in, I’ve been commuting at least two hours a day, ramping up for what is, so far, a pretty successful relaunch of the Cards: The Attackening! Kickstarter, and trying to have some semblance of a social life on top of all of that.

In addition to that, I’m finally back on my 1,000 words a day schedule, starting at 6:00 in the morning. A long time ago, I found out that if I don’t get my writing done before 10 in the morning, then I’m useless. Now, what with having to leave my place by 7:00 most days, that means my time is incredibly limited. But! It’s worked out so far.

“But Aaron, what have you been working on?”

Aside from the C:TA! Kickstarter, I’ve been working on the third part of my post-apocalyptic beast of a book–that, I think, is currently living on Mt St Helens because of reasons reasons–a long-form piece about the Portland con scene that is in desperate need of some editing, a longish primer on classical music, and a series of stories called “The Estimable Adventures of Dr. Chiu.” 

“But Aaron, what are you doing with all of that?”

None of your business. Have patience.

Oh, also: I’ve been learning JavaScript and Drupal. Also Selenium

So yeah. I see other people, like, twice a month, now. (Business, work, and going to the store excluded.)

Much busy. Such productivity. Wow.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. How about you?!