…where joy, by giving to other people, you can’t think of yourself, and therefore there’s no pain.

–George Lucas

It is the year 2011, and I recently saw Helen Hunt on an interview show. I haven’t seen her in years, the last time probably when she starred in the movie As Good As It Gets. Since then, she has gone through many changes in her life, including having a daughter, including time.

She doesn’t look as good as she used to, I say to myself. She doesn’t look like the Helen Hunt I remember. She looks old. She doesn’t look like she’s had any plastic surgery. Do I think she needs plastic surgery in order for me to approve of the way she looks? I ask myself. I am troubled by how I feel.

I then try to look at it this way: if she were my mother, my sister, my daughter, I would have probably seen her on a regular basis, just as I do my own mother, my female cousins, my nieces. I see them so much that after I while, I don’t notice time taking its toll on their faces and bodies. To me, my mother is my mother, and that’s that. It is what she gives to me, how she treats me, how she nurtures me, that takes up 99.9999% of my image of her. Almost the same for my cousins and nieces, probably around 99.999%. If I had a sister or a daughter, it would probably be the same thing.

If I apply this same formula to Helen Hunt, if I tried to imagine myself being her son, or brother, or father, I would probably not notice any changes with her over the years. I would probably be surprised if I heard someone talking about her looks. I would probably immediately, in my mind, think about what she has done, both good and bad, over the years, that I have been witness to because I am her son, her brother, her father. I would think about those things much much more than how she simply looks in front of a camera.

I think about what her young daughter will see as she grows up, looking at her mommy. If she’s lucky, it will be good things that have nothing to do with wrinkles.

Some say that Los Angeles—unlike Japan and its citizens of collective-minded, non-looting, orderly, courteous folks—that L.A. couldn’t survive the same series of disasters that the Japanese just went through. Some say that Angelenos are too selfish, too independent to want to work together or sacrifice certain things in order to benefit the larger group. It would take forever for first responders to get anything done because they’d be too busy signing legal waivers that indemnify themselves from lawsuits, in case they infringe upon someone else’s “space” while trying to pull that same someone away from their burning Escalade parked in their overleveraged McMansion.

This is why I think Los Angeles is the SAFEST place to live when the almighty shit hits the fan. Just as God only places the greatest burden on those who are best equipped to handle it, that same God wouldn’t dare touch L.A. for that same reason. Even with the best weather in the world, the most resources available, and every single thing (sand, snow, ocean, mountains, amusement parks, In-N-Out drivethroughs) within arm’s reach, Los Angeles is still just a slight breeze (or an unpopular verdict) away from utter collapse. Hell, if we can’t even handle two straight days of rain, how are we supposed to cope with a tsunami?

And do I think we’ll get radiation poisoning from Japan? No, because any radiation cloud that forms over the Pacific Ocean would take one good look at our sewage-stained coastlines, our crane-infested docks, our half-plastic people, our pretentious love of sushi and our hot, sweaty, farty yoga, and that radiation cloud would take pity on us and leave us alone to mire in our own, uh, mire.

If you want to experience a natural disaster, go live somewhere else, where people don’t mind helping one another shovel snow from their driveways. Go where a high school kid is thankful to have a part-time job, and where a car, any car, is a cherished item that doesn’t get replaced every five years just because that color isn’t in fashion anymore. Go where a person’s last name is more important than his first name.

But if you want nothing to happen to you, stay right here. Nothing’s happening here. And even if it did, we probably wouldn’t notice it. And if, for some reason, it did bother us, there would probably be a pill, a procedure, or an iPhone app that would get rid of it.

I’ll remember that Tiger Woods’ conscience kept him from winning anything since last Thanksgiving, when he drove his SUV into a tree. I’ll remember that gas prices kept going up and down and up again, and we weren’t really sure who to blame for it anymore. It snowed and rained a lot everywhere, and so the TV weather people got to wear a lot more different outfits for their Stormwatch segments.

By the way, I’ll tell the kid, there was this democratic revolution that happened in the Middle East, a whole bunch of countries that all of a sudden decided they didn’t like dictators anymore, and so they stood in public to say so. Many of them got shot and died, and a bunch more got the crap beat out of them, and others went to prison and were never seen again. And even after all of this, these Middle Eastern people didn’t give up and they kept revolting, using the Internet and their cellphones to spread the word. News crews from around the world got a hold of their stories and spread the word out even more, so much so that even news people got the crap beat out of them when they showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anderson Cooper got punched a dozen times and Katie Couric got shoved around, but I’m not sure if she got hit.

This changed the world much like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union back in the early nineties. I remember back then, all the TV and radio stations were glued to what was happening in Europe and Russia, and nobody wanted to see or hear about anything else, because it was a big deal. Then there was Desert Shield which became Desert Storm. That had Schwarzkopf with his camouflage uniform, Rumsfeld with his podium updates, George Bush Senior getting a standing ovation from everybody in Congress, and Colin Powell looking like he was going to run for president one day, but he never did. I remember the first time they showed a stealth fighter and a stealth bomber, and how friggin’ accurate those things were, and how when they bombed a tank or a bunker where people were hiding, it looked like an old video game.

But yeah, in 2011, people played Angry Birds on their iPads and iPods and iPhones because Sudoku was already getting boring. Robert Rizzo from the city of Bell got caught paying himself and his city council members too much money, and then other officials from other cities got caught for the same thing, even though it’s been happening for decades. This snowballed into other cities and states, and pretty soon every government office was being audited. It’s like a trend, just like when Egypt started with their revolution, then Libya and the other countries followed.

I’ll tell the kid that I still read whatever newspaper I could get my hands on, the Times or Wall Street Journal, whatever was around, even though most newspapers had already gone out of business. I’d get a whiff of the story from someone on TV saying something quick about it, then I’d check it on the Internet, then I’d get the complete story by reading the paper. I usually only get to read the whole story every other day or so, because the newspaper vending machine is always out of the L.A. Times, or I don’t have three quarters on me and it’s too far to walk to the bookstore a block away. I get to read the paper when I’m having my toasted wheat bagel with honey almond shmear, and my French roasted coffee, four sugars and four creams.

I always finish my bagel and coffee, but I don’t always finish reading the paper.

“If you have honor and dignity as a man, come and protect me, and other girls in the protest. If you stay home, you deserve what’s being done to you, and you will be guilty before your nation and your people. Go down to the street, send SMSes, post it on the internet, make people aware.”

I heard about this woman on The Charlie Rose Show. Asmaa Mahfouz posted this video on YouTube, then went to Tahrir Square and protested in person. She told everyone who she was, how she could be contacted, and challenged her people to join her. She is credited for helping spark the Egyptian uprising. She is credited as being a revolutionary.

I very much doubt that I could be this brave. I very much doubt that I would want to be tested like she has. I think I will do everything in my power to run away from any conflict that may result in my having anything like this happen in my life. I think that I will tow the line. I think that I will not rock the boat. I think that I will remain quiet. I will internalize everything. And when my life is over, like that famous quote says, I will have regretted doing nothing.

Out from under your beds
C’mon, ye people
Stand up for your love
–”Stand Up Comedy”, U2

BUCKET LIST

Be healthy enough to hike Machu Picchu.

Spend three nonconsecutive days inside the Louvre with a sketchbook and my old 35mm camera with TMAX film. Every other day, visit the rest of Paris.

Create a sketchbook of my friends and family portraits with notes on my good memories of them.

Drive through Germany’s Romantic Road in a Maserati Quattroporte.

Discuss Buddhism with Jet Li while walking the compound of the Forbidden City.

Give a million dollars to a charity.

Convince a small restaurant owner in Venice to let me pay for my meal by writing a song for his family. Learn the language so the lyrics could be in Italian.

Have breakfast at Cancale in Brittany, then walk the lowered tide to the castle at Mont Saint Michel with some friends, pretending that we are the cast of the movie Mindwalk.

Walk the rest of Descanso Gardens when the flowers are in full bloom.

Have dim sum at a crowded, sweaty restaurant in Beijing.

Watch a Boston Red sox game with Stephen King.

Walk through Chicago with a Carl Sandburg historian.

Read the poem on Raymond Carver’s tombstone with a loved one.

Perhaps I dreamt it, perhaps it actually happened, or perhaps a little of both. When I was very young, my mother took me aside during a party and told me something.

She pointed to one of the partygoers, a middle-aged man, very thin, who wore a brown button-front short sleeve shirt, pomade in his hair, whose skin cracked from nicotine and whose eyes yellowed from alcohol and heavy living. He looked as if he was always poised to borrow some money from somebody, and everyone who approached him knew it.

My mother said, “Look at him. Look at the way he is. You already know his story. Study him, son. Make sure you know everything about him. Do not be anything like him.”

Even though I followed my mother’s advice as an obedient son is supposed to do, I never really thought about it until I got older. Why did I study so hard in school? Why did I do my best to stay out of trouble? Why did I stay away from drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes?

Because I didn’t want them to win.

Throughout a person’s life, throughout the histories of civilizations, sooner or later something or someone will come along that will try to break that civilization, break that person’s spirit. We all know the stories so I won’t go into them. And in the wake of most, if not every, oppression is an addiction. There is alcohol, opium, violence, eating disorder, tobacco, something that marked and reminded the oppressed as being that, oppressed.

Whenever something goes wrong in life, there is always the temptation to addiction, that immediate release and numbing of the senses. There are people and forces that revel in the fact that people are addicted, desperate. There are people and forces that profit from it, that are enriched somehow by it, that would like nothing more than to get others addicted. And the only way that they will win is if I lose myself to them. The only way that they will be happy is if I lose my spirit.

And I don’t want to lose my spirit.

If they are able to convince me that engorging myself in food to the point of exhaustion and fleeting euphoria is a good way to go, they win. If they are able to convince me that enough booze in my system will give me six hours of not feeling anything at all, they win. If they are able to convince me to immerse myself in noise and confusion that drown my sensibilities in exchange for a moment of illusion, they win. If they are able to convince me to give up, they win.

Whether they kill me because they got tired of trying to break me has yet to be decided.

The man asks me what I thought about his neighbor, and the man asks me what words we could use to talk poorly about his neighbor. I tell the man that if I were different today, and if I were inviting people over to entertain and wanted to impress them with my house and my lawn, I would want my neighbor’s house and lawn to look impressive also. But since I am not, I tell the man that I have no words for him.

A woman comes up to me and wants to talk about her neighbor’s group of friends, how they have such complicated lives, with all their drama and backstabbing and deceits and conceits. The woman tells me about what she has seen and heard in detail, and has heard in detail from other people. The woman asks me what thoughts I may have about her neighbor’s group of friends, about their life choices and strengths of character.

I say to the woman that if I were different today, and if my own life was constantly being judged and harassed, and if I felt trapped and angry and resentful to those around me, that I may have plenty of thoughts for her about her neighbor’s group of friends. But since I have, for the most part, an uneventful life, and am having an uneventful day, and my only thoughts are for the daily chores that I must tend to, I tell the woman that I have no words for her.

A child comes up to me and wants to talk about a ladybug that she found crawling on her windowsill. She wants to find an open field where she can release the ladybug, where there aren’t any people or large animals, and where the ladybug can hop-fly from one grass stem to another, taking its time until it finds what it’s looking for.

I tell the child that if I were different today, if I had so many chores that I had no time for anything else, or if I had the lives of other people on my mind, or if I had to rush home to make my house impressive for others, that I would not have time to help her. But since I have none of those things, at least for today, I said yes.