overheard last week:

2 guys talking.
“Do you remember Hitler?”
“Who?”
“You know, World War II?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember him. Cool guy.”

not that i want to know, but i wonder where that conversation went next.

i watched “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” the other night, a nazi-era
film of fantasy, though i was sold throughout on it at least being based
on a true story, a sliver of a story from WWII. i was a bit bummed to find
that it had no basis in fact, and at that i commenced to question
everything about the leaps of logic within the narrative.

i have also been watching some episodes of M*A*S*H, a fixture in my
television throughout youth, episodes which look a little different but
comfortably the same as i remember them. i do not see anything
fundamentally different in those shows now versus when i saw thim in
school — this unlike the surprisingly sophisticated humour in childhood
shows like Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies, humour which rose anew when
re-encountered as an adult.

i also have been rambling through my still born collection of “The
Complete Peanuts,” a monstrous set of books which has a publishing
schedule that caused me to see the plateau, that horizon of mortality
whence one can assume they will not live long enough to see the fruits of
the labor.

i had no fear of my own imminent death, but when these volumes were
published more-or-less annually i began scheduling them as Christmas or
birthday gifts for my mother, this annual gift-giving routine clouded by
her mortality, and the presumption that there was no way she could live
long enough to see this series published to its completion.

she did not, and possibly as a corrolary to this i ceased my own
collection, but i decided last week to resume the accumulation, this after
opening a couple of volumes from the late 1950s and finding them (mostly)
as funny as ever, to me at least.

i think of Charles Schulz once in a while, in tandem with a friend of mine
who was a composer and pianist. when i mentioned Charles Schulz to a
friend in the months after Schulz’s death the friend grimaced, a
demonstrative frown of the :[ shape, complaining that Schulz wandered off
into irrelevance during the 1970s. not so much complaining as relegating,
dismissing, throwing away. Charles Schulz? Pppht, a waste of greatness.

An annoying and senselessly cynical dismissal, by my account, but common
among failures.

In another instance, though, I mentioned the name of a deceased friend who
had been a composer and pianist of note. He was also an alcoholic and
recreation drug user whose productivity was absorbed into vodka and
heroin, but whose name survives in history books and on LP records.

i mentioned his name to a friend and the reaction was the same: squint.
grimace. frown. disappointment. “yeah, it’s too bad, isn’t it?” that was
not the reaction i might have expected, had i established expectations for
the conversation. i expected a stroke of positive memory, a hearty, if
hoary, reminiscence. something positive at the mention of a mutual
colleague’s death.

instead the reflex was to remember the failure, remember the worst,
remember the addiction and the waste and to forget the accomplishment and
the success.

thus trail human sentiments, i guess. i do not understand why we boo the
dead. i have said this before and i will say it again until it trickles
into the general discussion: why do we applaud when presented with
someone who is 102 years old? “MEET MABLE, SHE’S 102!” (applause from the
audience). why? why applause? reaching those triple-digit ages (craaaazy
by today’s standards but common to the future) is a matter of luck and
laziness, but it does not merit applause. to my ears the act of applauding
the unbelievably elderly is no different from going out to the cemetery
and booing the dead. “LOSERS! YOU 42-YEAR-OLDS COULDN’T CUT IT, COULD
YOU? YOU 90 YEAR OLDS GOT NOTHING ON MABLE! F0CK Y00000000000!!!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”