Let me query you a question: What is the fucking point of being alive? And be honest! Those of you who are married or have kids are gonna say “my kids!” or “my partner!” and that’s all fine. But supposing you didn’t have those things?
Supposing you’d made different choices or God forbid life did what life does and blew your entire shit to smithereens and you didn’t have those raisons d’être anymore: What is the fucking point of all this?
What is the point of enduring the sturm and drang of existence—yes, the big terribles like say cancer and abuse and you know the collapse of the world’s oldest democracy into a fascist oligarchical dictatorship or whatever, but also the things you must endure in order to endure those, like driving behind people going the speed limit in the left lane (move OVER it is for CRIMES) and the radical incompetence of self-checkout machines or having to listen to Taylor Swift fans straight-facedly and unironically claim she’s the first person to become a billionaire on the basis of her music and touring alone despite having had at least 13 ad campaigns, a perfume line, a Chinese clothing collection and a deal with Capital One on the very tour on which she is currently traversing the Earth?
WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF ALL OF THAT. You make it through the tyranny of whatever the fuck it is JoJo Siwa is doing right now and your reward for surviving is to DIE.
“Oh my GOD John Jesus fucking CHRIST obviously there are MEANINGFUL things along the way that make it worthwhile like the PEOPLE we LOVE and the EXPERIENCES we HAVE.” Ah ha! That last part! Say that part again, you insufferable pedant! What was that about experiences????
EXACTLY. So then explain to me, like I’m 5, like I’m the dumbest person to ever be born, like I’m Brendan Fraser in Encino Man, why half of you are ACTIVELY PERTURBED that people give a fuck about today’s solar eclipse. EXPLAIN IT! EXPLAIN LIKE I AM LINK THE UNFROZEN CAVEMAN IMMORTALIZED BY BRENDAN FRASER IN THE 1992 FILM ENCINO MAN FROM DIRECTOR LES MAYFIELD AND HOLLYWOOD PICTURES!!!
Everywhere you turn on the internet the past week is some bloviating fucktard like “wHaTs ThE bIg DeAl?” and “tHiS hApPeNs EvErY tWo YeArS” and “dOn’T tHeSe PeOpLe HaVe LiVes?” Yes, we do! And they’re fucking miserable! And demonstrably, so is yours, because only a miserable, broken person would respond to people taking interest in rare, extraordinary events with a sneer of disdain. Fuck you!
And I say this as a hater! I’m 45 years old. I am a hater all the way back to 1978. Since the Carter Administration I’m a hater.
But it is NORMAL to care about rare, extraordinary things! It is deeply, unsettlingly, worryingly abnormal to think that’s dumb. People fly all over the world for concerts, and theater shows, and fucking FOOTBALL GAMES, but it’s weird for people to fly to Little Rock, Arkansas to see a celestial phenomenon so rare and bizarre it made ancient peoples think the world was ending? What in the actual fuck is wrong with all your brains?
“We just had an eclipse in 2017” yeah, that alone is extraordinary and there isn’t gonna be another one visible in the US for 20 years, did you have a point? There’s a fucking Super Bowl every 12 months! Beyoncé goes on tour every 7-10 business days! (Can someone PLEASE tell her how broke we all are?! PLEASE!!! Anyway stream “Cowboy Carter.”) A new Marvel movie comes out fortnightly and is routinely worse than the one before it and some of y’all STILL won’t shut the fuck up about Harry Potter and Kim Kardashian releases new SKIMS every 15 fucking minutes AND called you all poor and lazy and y’all STILL can’t barf up your money fast enough! WHAT’S YOUR FUCKING POINT?!
If you so much as smirk in the direction of a Disney Adult they will slash your throat in the middle of a public thoroughfare and 4,376 Oberlin liberal arts majors will compose 37-tweet-long threads about how you should “let people like what they like” but it’s weird to care about a fucking eclipse?! If you people don’t come the entire comprehensive fuck on I swear to God and all the saints.
Oh and then there’s my personal favorite—“boy I bet the people in Gaza wish everyone cared as much about them as they do about the eclipse,” as if people are incapable of doing both, as if a plane ticket to Little Rock or wherever you’re going for the eclipse is so prohibitively expensive you can’t possibly afford to send eSims to Gaza anymore, as if Joe Biden would stop funding the IDF if only you’d stop giving a shit about everything else, as if you taking 15 minutes to go out on your lawn and look up at the sun and see a thing you might not live long enough to ever see again makes one single solitary bit of difference to what the people of Gaza are enduring, or the climate, or reproductive rights, or race relations, or our slide into fascism, or whatever other cause you want to name.
That is not how life fucking works, and not just because we are all capable of caring about more than one thing at a time. Closing yourself off to the good in the midst of extraordinary terror on a level your brain is not even equipped to parse, let alone witness 24 hrs a day on the little box of horrors you carry around in the palm of your hand, is not only psychically damaging on a level we are only just beginning to understand, but it is also a capitulation.
It is a betrayal of the victims of the multitudinous tragedies we are witnessing.
Because that is PRECISELY what the diabolical monsters perpetrating all of this want—they want despair, they want hopelessness, they want cynism, they want immobilization, they want depersonalization and demoralization and dehumanization so that they are enabled to ride roughshod over every modicum of decency and order holding the world together. And, demonstrably, it’s working.
How absolutely fucking dare you assert that making space for beauty, wonder and awe—making time for the things that remind us we are human, and small, and only here for a breath’s length of time in the grand scheme of things—is a dereliction of duty to your fellow humans. Grow the fuck up, put your fucking phone down for 5 minutes, and go to therapy.
*deep breath*
Now admittedly, I am biased—I saw the 2017 eclipse on a whim and it broke my brain. But not just mine—everyone I was with, including two squirrelly kids who were annoyed we dragged them away from summer vacation.
Everyone’s entire psyche fucking collapsed because, hi, a 360-degree SUNSET is, uhhhhh kind of a wild thing to see since sunsets ONLY happen in the west on every other day of your existence! It looks like being in space! Except in, like, De Soto, Missouri in our case!
It is wild to watch all the birds go to bed and then be up chirping at the sunrise again 3 minutes later because they are so shit-fucked in the brain by what is happening, wild to hear the crickets come out and then immediately be like “oh lol jk lemme shut up” because it’s now dawn again out of nowhere, wild to suddenly hear roosters crowing at 4:00 in the goddamn afternoon, wild to look down on the pavement and SEE THE SHADOWS OF THE SUN’S ACTUAL RAYS AND PLASMA FLARES DANCING ON THE CONCRETE, and most of all, wild to look up in the sky and see a GLOWING SILVER CIRCLE staring back at you that basically looked exactly like the light thing in the opening of the current Madonna tour I paid to see twice except IN THE FUCKING SKY.
Yeah, you heard me I went to this shit twice and had to endure the slings and arrows of Cleveland fucking Ohio to do it! Why? BECAUSE LIFE IS FUCKING MISERABLE AND THESE ARE THE THINGS THAT MAKE IT WORTH ENDURING. These are the things that make us remember we are human when literally everyone in charge of everything is doing everything they can to make us forget.
Moments that burn into your memory like a soldering iron. If you can share them with people you love? All the better. If you can provide them for your kids in the process, give them a lifelong memory of wonder they shared with the people they love most on this Earth?
Well, I don’t have kids, but I did watch my nieces’ faces explode in awe and wonder from behind their eclipse glasses and their homemade cereal box viewers and I imagine that sight is about as good as it gets in this shitshow of a life.
And given the world we’re leaving these kids to endure once they’re grown? Well, call me apoplectic but I think anything that reminds them of their humanity and their place in the universe is probably a good idea because they essentially have nothing left in the world around them to teach them that lesson.
Here’s what I really want to say: I am a person who has stared death in the face, and the thing that nobody tells you about that experience is that it is a fundamental loss of innocence. What you learn is that the membrane between this life and the next, or this life and nothing, whichever it is, is shockingly thin—so much so that once you get a glimpse of it you can’t believe anyone even actually believes the membrane exists.
Once you have that lived knowledge, it is nearly impossible to get your head around the notion of life actually meaning a single fucking thing other than the people you love and the experience of being a human animal at the mercy of the ball of dirt on which you’ve landed.
Standing in front of a woman who saved your life as a kid and hearing her say, “I don’t know if I’m ever going to be in this arena again, but I’m glad to be here” (six months after seeing that life/death veil herself, no less) and feeling lucky you got to stand 20 feet away from her with two of your closest friends at your side to and hear her say it.
Sitting with your bestie’s science-teacher husband on a summer night and listening to him explain what stars actually are, what matter actually is, what we’re all actually made of, and what it makes him think of every time he looks at his sons.
Stopping to catch your breath while trudging up a hiking trail in 100-degree heat and turning around to see all of this:
That’s it. That’s the whole kit and kaboodle when it comes to the meaning of life. That’s it. And anyone who tells you different is selling you something.
So lighten up, and go look at the eclipse. Go be reminded of where and what you actually are. Your heart and soul will thank you for it.
As always, well said, John. When I was 5 years old my parents got me and my brothers up at 5 am to see a total eclipse (midwest, midsummer). It was awe inspiring. I envy those who are close enough to the path of totality to experience it.