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Rena called from OK City a few minutes ago. It's official: Our mutual friend is about to be dead.
At a 2,500 mile remove from the deathbed hijinx, I feel that peculiar numbness that tells me my deepest emotions are in danger of being engaged. Hence the numbness. Negative capacity is my bestest friend.
I never met Mister Carp in the flesh, but then I didn't have to. We've been intimate for some 20 plus years. I know more about him than I know about many of the people that I've spent hours and hours and hours with in what we laughingly call "real life." He was self-absorbed to the extreme. He was also brilliant, hilarious, uber-talented. One of the funniest guys I never met. I can't tell you how many times I read something he wrote -- either on the Well or in his blog -- and burst out laughing because the only other alternative was to cry hysterically. He was a monologuist of the magnitude of David Sedaris, truly a genius at the self-deprecating story with that tasty epiphany-packed kernel of goodness inside.
(In the end, it's always good writing that gets to me. If Hitler had been a good writer, no doubt I would have said, Yeah, yeah, too bad about the Jews, but Jeeze – could that guy write or what?)
And Mister Carp was an A-team writer. In heaven, I want to be scribbling sit-com scripts, just me, Nathaniel West and Scott Fitzgerald, with Mister Carp as our celestial scriptrunner.
I'm with Susan Sontag when it comes to illness as metaphor. I can't count the number of times when I read some brilliant, hilarious, depressive masterpiece Mister Carp had just scribbled and thought, You are so full of shit, Mike...
And in the end it killed him.
Stage IV colon cancer when it was first diagnosed approximately two years ago.
There are certain games one doesn't want to play, and the "What if I had cancer?" game is certainly one of them.
Nonetheless, I think if I had been diagnosed with what Mike was diagnosed with, I would have made very different choices.
The colostomy. The chemo. All that pain and humiliation. For two years more on this planet. This was someone, mind you, who'd always paid great lip service to the sentiment that he didn't much care whether he was alive or dead because the only thing that mattered was detachment. The little lies we tell ourselves, right? Because to go through everything he went through, he would have wanted very desperately to remain alive and connected, no? Or at least to remain alive with the potential to be connected.
He did fall in love too at the very end. Requited love. Although Rena told me on the phone that they'd broken it off about a week before he went into the hospital.
Cause and effect?
I will miss you, Mike.
My life is poorer without you.
If anyone has any spare good thoughts this evening, send them OK City-ward to grant Mike safe passage over that wide, dark river.
At a 2,500 mile remove from the deathbed hijinx, I feel that peculiar numbness that tells me my deepest emotions are in danger of being engaged. Hence the numbness. Negative capacity is my bestest friend.
I never met Mister Carp in the flesh, but then I didn't have to. We've been intimate for some 20 plus years. I know more about him than I know about many of the people that I've spent hours and hours and hours with in what we laughingly call "real life." He was self-absorbed to the extreme. He was also brilliant, hilarious, uber-talented. One of the funniest guys I never met. I can't tell you how many times I read something he wrote -- either on the Well or in his blog -- and burst out laughing because the only other alternative was to cry hysterically. He was a monologuist of the magnitude of David Sedaris, truly a genius at the self-deprecating story with that tasty epiphany-packed kernel of goodness inside.
(In the end, it's always good writing that gets to me. If Hitler had been a good writer, no doubt I would have said, Yeah, yeah, too bad about the Jews, but Jeeze – could that guy write or what?)
And Mister Carp was an A-team writer. In heaven, I want to be scribbling sit-com scripts, just me, Nathaniel West and Scott Fitzgerald, with Mister Carp as our celestial scriptrunner.
I'm with Susan Sontag when it comes to illness as metaphor. I can't count the number of times when I read some brilliant, hilarious, depressive masterpiece Mister Carp had just scribbled and thought, You are so full of shit, Mike...
And in the end it killed him.
Stage IV colon cancer when it was first diagnosed approximately two years ago.
There are certain games one doesn't want to play, and the "What if I had cancer?" game is certainly one of them.
Nonetheless, I think if I had been diagnosed with what Mike was diagnosed with, I would have made very different choices.
The colostomy. The chemo. All that pain and humiliation. For two years more on this planet. This was someone, mind you, who'd always paid great lip service to the sentiment that he didn't much care whether he was alive or dead because the only thing that mattered was detachment. The little lies we tell ourselves, right? Because to go through everything he went through, he would have wanted very desperately to remain alive and connected, no? Or at least to remain alive with the potential to be connected.
He did fall in love too at the very end. Requited love. Although Rena told me on the phone that they'd broken it off about a week before he went into the hospital.
Cause and effect?
I will miss you, Mike.
My life is poorer without you.
If anyone has any spare good thoughts this evening, send them OK City-ward to grant Mike safe passage over that wide, dark river.
