ken hartman, 1968-2019

My oldest friend died this week.
Or less ambiguously, my longest-running friendship...the past thirty-six years or so. Ken was born two days before me, and we probably met in 8th grade. My oldest friend in the other sense, michael, died earlier this year. After a life remarkably shielded from death, it's been a year of loss - though i've still been shielded, in one sense. When ken and michael and irene and my grandparents died, i was far away.
Ken was the only person i've known well, whom i never saw do or say anything unkind. I don't want to make too huge a deal of that, for it's easy to be loving during good times. I'm sure he had less gentle moments. But still, in this self-absorbed, needy world, kindness like his is...remarkable.
Not that he was a peace-eyed flower child...he was an occasional crankypuss. But lash out? Never.
We became friends in the M.P.C. Youth Club, which i resisted joining because it was churchy and the domain of my "perfect" older sister. My parents forced me, though i refused to be in the yearly play. Did i want to drop out, and was told i could quit after one more year? Maybe. That second year changed my life, though...after being stunned by the acting of an older student, i begged my way into the cast, and was a performer ever after.
By then, ken and i were chummy. I suppose he was like me socially...gratefully (for me, at least) occupying that safe ground between the cool kids and the outcasts. There were a group of us...ken and i, robb wilson, cathy o'brien...the only real friends of my adolescence. We were emotionally stunted of course, being uptight, alienated kids from the suburbs. We never knew how to be emotionally deep, not even in the half-pretentious way common to college dorms. But we shared the kind of friendship that keeps people sane. We spent time at each other's homes, and for me, none moreso than ken's. I was their housesitter when he and his parents went away (with a diabetic cat i had to give injections...imagine!). He was a regular at the pool plunges and volleyball games in my backyard, and we formed a school intramural team, the Fish 2. Many were the evenings spent in his basement, listening to music (he loved King Crimson and Rush, which i didn't get, but we bonded over sting's jazzy stuff, and it was perhaps in that basement i first heard "Kind of Blue"). And movies...do you remember where you were the first time you saw "This Is Spinal Tap"?
The yearly play was our social touchstone. Ken's acting climb was slower...when i got my first lead, he and robb were hairy ishmaelites #2 and 3...witnessing my exuberance, he eventually groused that life wasn't so damned glamorous in the hairy world. Our senior year, he snagged a supporting lead in Bye Bye Birdie and acquitted himself well, though he never should have been asked to sing...somewhere out there, there's a dog still twitching. And his forced extemporization when an actor missed an entrance is the stuff of, um, legend.
In high school, i was in a two-actor short. When a festival beckoned and my partner wasn't available, mr. roche told me to pick an actor and direct it myself. I switched roles, giving my old part to ken. He was agreeably competent, and we had a dandy time.
Our collaboration blossomed after our first year at different colleges. He said we should produce a summer play in the M.P.C. Fellowship Hall - he would direct and produce, and i would star. We did three summers of some of the most wonderful theater of my life. The Odd Couple, The Real Inspector Hound, The Star-Spangled Girl...is it rose-colored vision to say those productions were more brilliant than anyone ought have expected? When i later did professional theater and realized that some amateur shows are better, it was those three i recalled most. The energy, the joy...no actor should want anything more. For our supporting casts, ken was a minimalist director - he picked actors who knew what they were doing, and let them do it (a method that resonated when i became a director). Our sets were delightful, and his publicity spot-on - we played to crowds of 50-150.
Most of all, the process was as wonderful as the product. High-spirited rehearsals, with raids on the kitchen for frozen Cool Whip, and fits of rehearsal giggles that count as the best laughter of my life, while ken drummed his fingers and contemplated throwing water at us...
We parted ways theatrically after that. I went on to roles on many stages. He did Rider College theater and a couple local productions, then his life found its center in marriage and employment, as an education retirement specialist. He once ran a seminar at a school where my mom taught.
For the next twenty-five years, i lived 90 miles away, then 1500, then 3000. He never saw the plays i produced. It would have been fun having him there...so many things i learned, that he had learned first. We'd talk maybe once a year, and i'd see him every two or three. When his multiple sclerosis arrived, he said that The West Wing did NOT get it right.
It's easy to second-guess how you could or should have been a better friend to someone going through dire times. Did i call enough? No. A couple years ago, i mailed him a cd of my songs that i'd recorded with another Youth Club friend. Ken would have adored it, but in his depression, he never listened. When i learned that death was near, i tried to call him everyday for his last week and half, to sing another song i'd written.
Charlie chaplin said that life begins at fifty. Perhaps he meant that that's when you're mostly free of the immaturities, obligations, bad education, and hormones of youth. That resonates with me...at fifty, i feel like my best times creatively and personally are ahead.
Yet now i must try to do what can't be done...come to grips with my same-age friend hitting that black wall.
When i got the call, my heart gripped. I'd held on to a hope that he might bounce back.
There is an emptiness now that will ever remain.
But ken hartman made my life more than it would have been. Those joys and resonances will always inform who i am. In my heart until i die...i love you, ken.

death is raining

Poke a living person, what happens? Something.
Poke a dying person, what happens? Something.
Poke a dead person, what happens? Nothing.
Nothing.
There is no nothing more terrifying.
Death is insanity.
In this world of artificial insanities, death reigns over all pretenders. No other beauty or horror, no mutual orgasm or murderous vengeance, no childbirth or maiming, is more essential and primal. We humyns create staggeringly intricate psychological and physical structures whose core purpose is to deny the power, nay the very EXISTENCE, of death. Heaven, reincarnation, cathedrals, art/literature, offspring, cosmetic surgery...
We even attempt to erase the word itself. Pass away, lost, transition...how many deathbeds/deaths/funerals are enacted without a single participant ever uttering the word "die"? If you never say it, maybe it doesn't exist...
Don't trust the conceit that humyns alone know the existential horror of mortality. Other animals grasp, and are unhinged by, death-awareness.
Death is insanity. To be around it for an abnormal amount of time, to dance with that nothingness for days, months, or years and stay sane, requires staggering amounts of mental discipline. Or pervasive, punitive socialization. Or self-medication.
To be a soldier (or civilian) living in a war...
To care for a loved one dying in slow agony...
It's clear how many fail to endure such reality. Those who flee, those who crack, those who survive but are forever scarred...no creature is designed to stay sane in the presence of unrelenting death.
There are other insanities, natural and artificial. Rejection, failure, loneliness, disaster...waterboarding, date rape, religion, reality TV...
But death reigns.
Knowing all that, the most incomprehensible and damning cultural reality is suicide. To willfully enact the most primal humyn terror...to erase this frailest of sparks, that everyone else is obsessively protecting...
How dysfunctional must any society be, in which self-annihilation exists...or thrives?
I'm a fan of statistics, but i think a single generality might be more germane. Is there anyone who knows no one who has taken their own life?
If you're one of those few, stay inside your bubble as long as you can.
Or burst it, to grow wise in the ways of this broken world...
And help us become humyn again.

ultimate sci fi moviethon

Get the popcorn, PB pretzels, and soy jerky! Colostomy bag optional.
morning
-Forbidden Planet
-Close Encounters of the Third Kind
-Planet of the Apes
afternoon
-Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
-Blade Runner
-The Terminator
evening
-Aliens
-The Matrix
-Star Trek: First Contact

Riptide 8

Two new numbers, "Hotel Biglebowski" and "The Poop Song"...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49nvZaH_HL0