No Country for Old Men

Dear Kate,

What kind of trouble did you get into with your parents, in particular your dad, when you were a teenager?  And how did it evolve over the years - not that the essence of it has changed (it never does, if it is an essence at all), but how you come to read it, first in the hormonal thick of it, and now hopefully after all these years and becoming a parent yourself less superficially, less categorically, less impulsively?

The kind of trouble I got into with my dad is quite different from the kind I am having with my son.  I know I am speaking, against my own suggestion, categorically, but to reduce the matter not any further I must say I was a deeply serious man, deadly as seemed to my father then and I am sure still now, since when I couldn't remember and he probably doesn't want to.

"You are like an old man," my dad would say to me, 老態龍鍾 his precise words, which I would prove his point by finishing the rest in my heart 「老態龍鍾疾未平, 更堪俗事敗幽情」, not that I actually knew then as I do now what it means for an old man to feel the sickness, the dis-ease of being human, within and without.

The time I took home from the video store Scorsese's "Raging Bull" for "family viewing" my dad dreaded more than usual.  I couldn't speak much English then but I read it's one of the greatest movies ever made and was dumb enough to tell my dad that's why I picked it.  He knew what that meant: dis-ease.  I pushed Play: black-and-white disease it was.  By the end of it my dad's two-hour murmurs gathered themselves into a rumble: 垃圾!  Garbage.  Garbage of a movie about garbage of a man.

I didn't know half of what they were saying in the movie but I understood it, the eponymous animal.  But why, why understand it at all?  My dad sent me to the video store to come home with something fun, something we can all enjoy at once and as one, to build the family together, to cultivate joy and meaning in our togetherness.  Instead, I took home a beast.

My dad likes Elvis.  He might not know I love him and what makes the difference between like and love in this case.  It is the beast that fascinates me, not retroactively as he appeared at the end, but active in its savaging all along, a deeply serious man trapped in a frivolous life, no small amount of trapping that's of his own.

In our land of peace and plenty, we can afford to get serious only when we can't afford not to anymore.  Eat with someone and drink the same, and there, we are "in this together."  It's so easy to fall in love with each other, make love with any and everyone - when the haters are singled out and exiled.  So we talk about violence, talk more of it when only casually becomes disrespectful, such as when after another mass shooting.  We say, still today, less than a week after what happened in Texas, that we need to speak seriously about it, the beast out there, the dis-ease without.  For how many more days do you think we can keep frivolousness at bay, if ever at all?

"Going a little farther, [Jesus] fell with his face to the ground and prayed, 'My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.'  Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. 'Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?'"

Yours, Alex