On staying put

Live in any city long enough and you’ll experience a never-ending series of departures—people, whom you know to varying degrees, deciding to move on: roommates, coworkers, the family across the hall, the woman who cut your hair, the guy you went on four dates with, friends near and dear or peripheral. They go to smaller cities, other towns, far-flung countries, and, of course, the coasts. News of loved ones leaving stings the most, even if you understand their decision, but so many goodbyes take a toll. I’ve been a Chicagoan for 12 years now and have finally figured out how to, if not love the leaving, find ways to learn from it. It might be self-centered to think of other people’s departures primarily as opportunities for introspection, but whereas I used to go into existential-crisis mode with every farewell announcement (Wait—should I go too? Would I be happier elsewhere?), now I see all the going as a chance to reevaluate why I stay.

I recommend such soul-searching for anyone staying put. There’s no shortage of reasons why it’s hard to live in Chicago—high taxes, a lack of job opportunities, harsh winters—and, for many residents of this segregated city, it’s harder still. Local demographers have studied the exodus of African-Americans from Chicago, and oft-cited reasons for relocation include crime and violence as well as inadequate community investment in south- and west-side neighborhoods. In recent years, we’ve led the nation in population loss. “Of the country’s ten largest cities, the Chicago metropolitan statistical area was the only one to drop in population between 2015 and 2016,” a Tribune article from March reports. “By most estimates, the Chicago area’s population will continue to decline in the coming years.”

Amid so many legitimate reasons for moving—and the realization that not everyone who wants to leave even can—it’s a privilege, and honestly therapeutic, to consider the pros of sticking around.

To make the most of being left behind means asking questions: not only interrogating friends’ and acquaintances’ specific reasons for decamping, but also understanding what they now miss. I recently conducted my own little exit poll on Facebook, and of 80 ex- Chicagoans who responded, key motivations for moving included job opportunities, weather, partner/loved one wanted to live elsewhere, cost of living, and other (where “other” encompasses Chicago traffic, pursuing a degree elsewhere, the desire to be closer to nature, lack of family in the area, and the rapacious Department of Revenue).

Particularly illuminating, though, were answers to my follow-up question: “What, if anything, about Chicago do you miss?” Here, respondents were emphatic, effusive: “Everything.” “The peeps.” “EVERYTHING!” “The personalities.” “Diversity.” “Progressive politics.” “Big city culture.” “The El.” “Even complaining about how slow the Brown Line is.” “Walking on a busy street and ducking into a calm quiet spot, then popping back out into the busy.” “Seeing squirrels go up trees with full bagels in their mouths.” “The brownstones and bungalows and wide sidewalks with big mature trees.” “The People / The things those people believe in / Creativity to the Chicago Degree—for the sake of creativity—(rarely in pursuit of riches).”

I often ask myself what I would miss about Chicago if I were to move, but reading former residents’ nostalgia-tinged tributes makes me grateful for my city now: radiant summers, wide green boulevards, the way the skyline looks while driving up South Lake Shore Drive, the diversity of neighborhoods, knowing I could never uncover all its wonders, and, yes, the people.

If there’s an art to leaving, there’s also an art to staying. Self-actualized stayers don’t try to convince others with their reasoning; they know that where someone chooses to reside is personal—and also that no one place can satisfy all our needs and desires. Chicago isn’t everyone’s kind of town. But with every goodbye, I remember why it’s mine.

Originally published in the Chicago Reader

The art of unsticking ourselves

On Monday after hearing that Harold Ramis died, I made an overdue trip to Woodstock, Illinois, the far northwest Chicago suburb where the beloved actor, director and writer filmed Groundhog Day. The 1993 movie about a weatherman, Phil Connors (Bill Murray), forced to live the same day over and over again has special significance for me, as it does for many people. I’m not a weather fanatic or groundhog enthusiast, but I have felt—like Phil and like everyone—profoundly stuck at certain junctures in life. More than once the Ramis-directed philosophical comedy has helped me unstick myself.

Since the mid-’90s, Woodstock has reveled in its own special connection to Groundhog Day—over and over again. In the film, the quaint city is disguised as Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, home of the largest Groundhog Day celebration and Punxsutawney Phil, weather-predicting rodent numero uno. In real life, Woodstock won’t be overshadowed. It hosts its own Groundhog Days starring its own prognosticating marmot, Woodstock Willie. The festivities here are considerably more meta, stirring ongoing enthusiasm in a movie that stirs ongoing enthusiasm for a strange holiday. Every February 2, and the week leading up to it, hundreds of people flock here for pancake breakfasts, screenings of the film, tours of filming sites and the traditional animal augury.

This Feb. 2, Willie predicted six more weeks of winter. (No surprise there.) When I took my impulsive pilgrimage to Woodstock this week—about an hour’s drive from Chicago—I found a quiet city blanketed in snow. Parking along the town square, where much of the Groundhog Day action takes place, I planned to walk to some of the movie locations. A bone-chilling gust of wind whipped up, making me wish I’d worn a warmer jacket.

The cast and crew experienced a similar kind of cold when they began filming here in 1992, despite the residents’ warm reception. Co-producer Trevor Albert recalls (in the DVD extras),

We were shooting in the square, maybe the third day… I’m watching through the monitor and noticing something odd about Andie [MacDowell], her face. And I’m also noticing something odd about myself—I can’t feel my fingers.

Adds Stephen Tobolowsky, who played pesky insurance salesman Ned Ryerson, “It was a cold that came up through the ground, and you couldn’t stop it…up through the ground, up through your feet and into your knees.”

On Monday, the historic square was virtually empty, the Groundhog Day hoopla having subsided a few weeks ago and the long winter, as prophesied, not going anywhere. I walked past the familiar gazebo, the Tip Top Café (now a taqueria) and the spot, marked with a commemorative plaque, where Phil Connors repeatedly steps in the same puddle. On Main Street, north of the square, I half expected to see the Woodstock Theater (the Alpine Theater in the film) showing Heidi 2, the “family classic” that Phil tells his date he has sat through more than 100 times. Instead it was the family-friendly Lego Movie. Around the corner are the train tracks, scene of the car chase and the bowling alley where Phil gets canned with two yokels before embarking on said car chase, the first of many suicide attempts.

“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” Phil asks the two townies at the bar. “That sums it up for me,” one replies.

The most iconic landmark in Woodstock is the Victorian-era Opera House, the limestone, fieldstone and terra cotta building looming over the square. In Groundhog Day, it’s called the Pennsylvanian Hotel, and it’s where Phil Connors, at the end of his endless rope, jumps from the bell tower. In the nearby Read Between the Lynes bookstore, I flipped through a Groundhog Day calendar—one of the many souvenir items for sale—and saw photos of the stunt double who made that dramatic leap. “Let me know if there’s anything I can help you find,” the friendly bookseller said.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Many of the local businesses are closed on Monday, so the red brick square felt especially dead. The groundhog statues and signs and décor in store windows and on street corners felt a little like Christmas lights left up too long. Maybe everyone has this experience when visiting a movie location—not the magic of the film itself more vividly rendered, but a reminder that the filmmaking that happened there was a fleeting moment in time. Where you’re standing is real and now—much larger and realer than its movie moment(s). This is an especially weird feeling to have in Woodstock, because in many ways, the city tries not to move on, living and reliving its ’90s claim to fame.

Indulge me in some self-reflection. After all, I think it’s what Harold Ramis and his co-writer Danny Rubin hoped viewers would do after seeing the funny and macabre events of Groundhog Day give way to surprising depth. Maybe my trip to Woodstock wasn’t about touring movie locations—finally seeing the spot where Phil muddies his shoe or being better able to picture where the cast and crew shivered away on set. Recently I lost my job, rather unexpectedly, and have felt adrift. My options at this juncture seem to be: 1) Move on determinedly, or 2) hopelessly spin my wheels. On Monday, just before I heard Harold Ramis had passed away at age 69, I was doing the latter—sitting at a Starbucks with my laptop, in a staring match with the cursor. Accusingly it flashed in a blank text box. Writers are familiar with this game, the scary blankness of no ideas rolling in, often amplified for freelancers by bouts of self-pity and the shame of few paychecks rolling in either. It was this very stuckness that reminded me of Phil Connors and his futile attempts to move forward. How everyone, at some point, feels this way and how the phrase Groundhog Day has become a useful way to describe it. Sick of the shame cycle, I knew I had nothing to lose by trying something new. Why not a road trip to upstate Illinois?

Groundhog Day represents many things to many people. In a 2009 talk at New York City’s Hudson Union Society, Ramis shared how when the movie opened in Santa Monica, Albert called to tell him there was picketing outside the theater. “I asked what they were protesting,” Ramis said. “‘[Albert] said, ‘They’re not protesting. They’re Hasidic Jews walking around with signs that say ARE YOU LIVING THE SAME DAY OVER AND OVER AGAIN?’”

Buddhists have embraced the film as depicting samsara, or cyclic existence; Catholics have likened Punxsutawney to purgatory; and Baptists have viewed the groundhog as a metaphor for Christ. “Then the psychiatric community chimed in and said obviously the movie is a metaphor for psychoanalysis because we revisit the same stories over and over,” Ramis recalled. Every day someone talked to him about the film, the director said. “There’s something in it that allows people to, every time they see it, reconsider where they are in life and kind of question their own habitual behaviors.”

The first time Groundhog Day helped me out of a rut was about 10 years ago. Just out of undergrad, I packed all my possessions into my Nissan Sentra and moved from Michigan to Washington State for a guy. I’d accepted a job I wasn’t really enthused about but that would allow my boyfriend and I to live in closer proximity. When he abruptly dumped me six months later, I fell into a deep depression. This was made worse by my lack of friends, the fact that my first love (whom I’d prematurely pegged as my only love) had quickly found someone new and the unendingly dreary Pacific Northwest winter. To distract myself from myself, I rewatched Groundhog Day. This time Punxsutawney represented Bellingham, Washington, and I was Phil, emotionally careening off a cliff. It was clear I needed to get behind the wheel, not to crash, but to get the hell outta there. On February 2—yes, Groundhog Day, a symbolism I relished—I quit my job, repacked my Sentra and made the long drive back to the Midwest. I landed in Chicago, a city that quickly and unexpectedly became home, and haven’t left since.

Now Groundhog Day, as opposed to January 1, is the day I celebrate fresh starts. The lore means little to me—shadows seen or unseen, winter usually stays too long in the Midwest, and this year, even longer than usual. The snow lingers along the sidewalks in dirty clumps, the cold creeps into our knees and the great radio alarm clock in the sky plays “I Got You Babe” ad infinitum. As everyone knows, the way Phil Connors finally escapes his fate is to do something positive with the terrible cards he has been dealt. At a juncture where his options are 1) Do something meaningful, or 2) Forever be time’s prisoner, he eventually opts for the former. Rather than self-destruct or bemoan or deny, he fills his days with rewarding errands such as changing a flat tire for some stuck elderly ladies, performing the Heimlich maneuver on a choking man and catching a kid who falls from a tree. (“You little brat,” Murray ad libs, clutching his sore back. “You have never thanked me!”)

While he wasn’t specifically referencing Phil Connors, the late writer David Foster Wallace talked about this kind of liberating transformation in a 2005 commencement speech:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

Ramis understood this mindfulness. A smart and sly comedian, he always packed more into his movies and performances than just comedy. In fact, the existentialist philosophy at the heart of Groundhog Day is the same one he tried to live by. “I believe the essential task to leading a good life is to discover meaning at all times,” he told Terri Gross in a 2005 “Fresh Air” interview. “Meaning is not given to us. There is no universal meaning to life that applies now and for always to each and every person. But our job, and it’s a tough job, is to figure out what it means.” The potency of this message, and how inevitably and entertainingly it unfolds, prompted Roger Ebert to give Groundhog Day another chance in 2005, years after publishing his original underwhelmed review. “There are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points,” he wrote the second time around.

As I wandered through Woodstock, it occurred to me that Ramis’ film isn’t alive for me in any physical location—not on these cobblestone streets or among these familiar storefronts—but its message continues to resonate wherever and whenever I feel really stuck. Maybe for you too. Whether in cities or jobs or circumstances that feel entrapping, caught in mindsets or memories we want to move beyond, Groundhog Day is a reminder that change is possible. That’s what makes the ’90s movie so timeless. It’s the realization we can catch the thankless kid, learn to slay on piano, overcome writer’s block and experience fulfillment we weren’t even looking for but was always there to find. Anyway, back here at Starbucks, no longer fazed by the blinking cursor, this is what I’ve been inspired to write.

Originally published on Huffington Post

Seeing blooms

California Natives

Betty Edwards is an 80-something-year-old Californian whose ideas about creativity and the brain have inspired millions of people to draw with confidence: faces, apples, hands. These days, the grandmother of two lives near San Diego and spends her retirement cooking, reading, gardening, drawing (of course) and, according to Wikipedia, appreciating “art in general.”

While teaching at California State University, Long Beach, Dr. Edwards explored the implications of brain function lateralization, or the specialization of cerebral hemispheres—left brain versus right. She wrote a book based on her research. Published in 1979, it appeared on the New York Times bestseller list within just two weeks, and in 1998 got my younger sister into a local art fair.

Actually, my sister got herself into an art fair (talent, drive) but in ways that elevated both her artistic confidence and drawing skills, Betty helped. 

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has been translated into 13 languages and is the most widely used how-to-draw book in the world.

—

I’m thinking of another book, a biography of installation artist Robert Irwin. Also native to California, born in Long Beach; also in his eighties and now living in San Diego. Actually, I’m thinking of the title: Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. I’ve yet to read the book.

Still, the title alone, in addition to being beautiful, says a lot. Among other things, it reminds me of Betty Edwards’ emphasis on facilitating visual/spatial discovery in a predominantly verbal/analytical education system. 

“We deprive our children of their sense of wonder and discovery by labeling and categorizing things in the physical world,” she writes in a postscript to an updated version of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. “After discovering that every object is fascinating and complex, a child will begin to understand that the label is only a small part of the whole. Thus taught, a child’s sense of wonder will survive, even under our modern avalanche of words.”

Our modern avalanche of words is kind of beautiful, too (ironic, since it’s a critique of language), but maybe you’re wondering where this is going.…

I’m not about to make an argument that a popular art teacher/best-selling author at Cal State Long Beach and a pioneering light-and-space artist roaming in the desert are, or ever were, kindred spirits or visionary on a similar plane. The former has taught students to draw what’s right in front their noses, to be keenly perceptive of edges, space, light, relationships between objects, and the gestalt (whole) in order to capture the view exactly. The latter questioned everything about his studio practice to eventually embrace situational art and perceptual phenomena. Instead of capturing the environment in front of his nose, he has responded to it with subtle, exacting alterations. And yet both Californians espouse looking more closely as a catalyst for creativity: seeing until all words dissolve. 

Another light-and-space artist, James Turrell (born in Pasadena) described this type of seeing as “akin to wordless thought.”

“This thought is not at all unthinking or without intelligence,” he said. “It’s just that it has a different return than words.”

Native to the Margins

“Do you wish you could draw?” asks writer/cartoonist Lynda Barry in her 2008 book What It Is, a book that her publisher describes as having pioneered a genre: the graphic-memoir how-to. On the next pages, amid collaged words, swirls of color, and paintings of birds, rabbits, and cephalopods, she inquires, “Do you wish you could sing? Do you wish you could write?” 

Based on her popular writing workshops “Writing the Unthinkable,” What It Is is a vibrant manual demonstrating how to abandon rote methods of creation and instead focus on the image. Just as Edwards instructs us to draw precisely what we see, trying not to let the verbal/analytical side of the brain interfere, Barry teaches us to describe, in writing, a very specific image—e.g., an old car, a friend’s dog, something that went missing—and to stay inside that image rather than edit ourselves.

One day in a college fiction writing class, my instructor, who’d recently returned from a Lynda Barry workshop and who also had a flair for the dramatic, burst into the classroom and urged us, Dead Poets Society–style, to rip out all the pages of our writing textbooks.

“Forget everything I’ve taught you up ’til now!” she declared, with Robin Williams-y gusto. “I’m teaching you a new way to write!” I’m not sure if she actually intended for us to rip up our textbooks (and I think we just quietly stowed them away), but from that day on we followed a Barry-inspired course, delving deep into the heart of the image.

These intensive writing exercises, which Barry learned from her teacher Marilyn Frasca in the late ’70s, involve describing an image—or specific slice of memory—as concretely as possible. This helps us avoid falling into the usual modes of storytelling, the rhythm of What We’ve Always Done. In my fiction class, the more we practiced, the more vivid our writing became. And yet we learned that preconceived approaches are difficult to shake. We crave syncopation, the ability to write or draw in a new way, and we want to excel at it, but as Barry points out we’re often stuck obsessing over two questions: Is this good? and Does this suck?

—

If I were writing this essay by hand, I’d probably be stopping occasionally to doodle in the margins: mindless blooms, not easily classifiable. For years they’ve crowded the corners of pages in notebooks I’ve owned, also blossoming on the backs of bank statements, Jewel-Osco receipts.

Kindgom: Plantae. Genus, species: Unknown. 

In elementary school I wished I knew how to draw realistic horses, and dogs that looked like dogs and not cats, but flowers came more easily. Since then, my habit of sketching them on every piece of scrap paper within reach has seemed relatively innocuous. That is, until lately, when I’ve been stopping mid-sketch to think about how I’m not drawing actual flowers, just weird amalgamations and approximations of flowers I drew when I was nine. Sure, they’ve advanced a little over the years, showing slight structural variations (iris-ish or cherry blossom-y or daisy-like) and a bit of shading. And sometimes I know I’m only doodling—an activity that frees the mind to go elsewhere. Other times, though, I long for a fresh approach, and the sameness of the flower chain seems indicative of some larger creative malaise. 

My 13-year-old sister’s drawing—the one that appeared in the art fair after her skills bloomed wildly and almost overnight—was a realistic rendering of a male model’s face. The model was from a cologne ad, Acqua di Gio by Giorgio Armani, and she perfectly captured his piercing gaze.

The art fair-goers were impressed. When asked how she captured the cologne guy so well, my sister replied that she’d read a book called Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain.

Coming Into Bloom

Dr. Betty Edwards has made it her life’s work to facilitate “aha” moments for people who think creative abilities cannot be learned. 

“To many people, the process of drawing seems mysterious and somehow beyond human understanding,” she writes in the intro to The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1989). “You will soon discover that drawing is a skill that can be learned by every normal person with average eyesight and average eye-hand coordination with sufficient ability, for example, to thread a needle or catch a baseball.”

The official DOTRSOTB website features a gallery of before-and-after portraits: drawings made by students of various professions and backgrounds at the beginning and end of a five-day intensive drawing class. Predictably, the “before” drawings are simple, crude, and more than a little lopsided in comparison to the meticulously shaded and proportionate “afters.” The latter drawings show shadow, texture, and more nuanced hairstyles and facial expressions. They demonstrate students’ newfound skills at processing visual information. Yet there’s something especially endearing about the lopsided “befores.”

Maybe the difference between Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Lynda Barry’s “Writing the Unthinkable” method is the intended result. Edwards wants students to activate their right brains, looking closely until they forget the name of the thing they’re seeing and then express themselves in the language of forms. But as drawright.com indicates—with its proud portrait gallery and offers for $1500 five-day intensive drawing classes and corporate workshops (taught by Edwards’ son)—the other goal is to sell a ton of books. Tapping into one’s creative potential can’t be the only objective, therefore. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Inc. also relies on the customer producing nice-looking, recognizable portraits.

“Writing the Unthinkable,” meanwhile, is all about process. Lynda Barry doesn’t tell you what to do with your image-based exercises, and in fact she advises “DO NOT READ OVER!” I have notebooks full of exercises from that college fiction-writing class—countless attempts at making alive the memories of old cars and friends’ dogs—and now I see that, free from the pressure of having to edit, analyze, or turn in my work for a grade, these exercises really did get me seeing and writing differently. When I cheated and did read over my work, the voice I discovered was fresh and unfamiliar. I wouldn’t call it miracle growth, but certainly progress: the activation of another brain hemisphere or maybe just new habits. 

Unfortunately, when the semester ended, I didn’t keep at it. The eyes wander, and the image falls out of focus.

—

The grounds of the Getty Center, located on a hill above Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, afford stunning views of the Santa Monica Mountains, San Bernardino Mountains, and the Pacific Ocean. In the middle of the grounds is a garden, appropriately named The Central Garden: a tree- and shrub-lined walkway spiraling around a pool featuring a floating maze of azaleas. Home to more than 500 varieties of plant materials, the garden is ever-evolving. 

Robert Irwin was commissioned to plan this public garden in 1992. In the plaza beside the pool, visitors can find shade beneath canopies of bougainvillea and read his inscription, carved into stone—the statement of an artist who recognizes that perceptions shift as we do: “Always changing, never twice the same.”  

—

A note I’d written to myself fell out of a book and grew into this essay. It said:

I found the solution to creative malaise!

KEEP LOOKING.

Originally published in Monsters + Dust, issue No. 3: Flowers

A year and a day

My friends in middle school spent a long time feeling sad about Kurt, going over and again over the tragic details.

Found dead in his home in Seattle. Age 27. Shotgun wound to the head.

Despite living relatively easy lives in Southwest Michigan, we were already skilled at what one might call “competitive grieving”—the impulse to try and out-mourn one another. This behavior was likely influenced by teachers’ and parents’ endless warnings about the “roller-coaster moods” that accompany puberty. We interpreted this as, “Step right up! Take a free ride on the Hormone ‘Coaster!” Or maybe sheer boredom. Definitely Lurlene McDaniel’s dying-girl books.

When a member of our group, let’s call her Melissa, announced she and her family were moving 95 miles east to Lansing, there was some unspoken agreement that we’d all be devastated for a month, minimum. In fact, there was so much random crying/attempts at crying about her impending departure—in class and between classes and all throughout lunch—that the school guidance counselor called us down to his office, where he gave us these informational packets about coping with grief. (Forever in debt to your priceless advice, Mr. B.) 

Not sure any of us thought we needed grief packets, but we loved the attention.

More useful would’ve been a packet on coping with the loss of a pop-culture icon/larger-than-life arbiter of cool, because soon Kurt Cobain’s death was all anyone could talk about. I remember hanging out at Kristen’s house after school, CD jewel cases scattered across the floor of her bedroom—her enviable room with the sea foam green walls, a paint color she’d picked out herself—while she sprawled on her bed, like a swoony woman of Russian lit, in mourning dress (black Nirvana concert tee) as “All Apologies” played on repeat.

What else could I write? I don’t have the right.

Some of the crying made sense to me. Gone was our golden boy of grunge, the main reason we wore loose-fitting flannel shirts stolen from our dads’ closets and watched MTV—or, I should say, why my friends watched MTV. My family didn’t have cable, so I taped Nirvana songs off the radio instead, putting a lot of effort into memorizing the lyrics.

It was becoming obvious, though, that the band was nearer and dearer to my friends’ hearts and Discmans than to my own. It was getting tiring.

In Kristen’s sea foam green room, I picked up the CD booklet to Ill Communication and decided I’d memorize Beastie Boys lyrics instead.

I was a fan of the the New York–bred hip-hop trio from then on and, as is often true with heroes/crushes (celebrity or non), I wanted to be them a little. See, in this case: mimetic desire, the gentrification of hip hop and the timeless appeal of the “bad boy.”

When I got to high school, I looked around and noted all the kids who were copying the Beastie Boys’ style — or else copying other kids who were copying their style: knit caps, nylon jackets, baggy chinos and old-school Pumas and Adidas.

I attempted to sartorially follow suit, sourcing more items from Dad’s closet. I screamed/sang along to “Sabotage” at school dances and recited “Get It Together” at the Waterfall. The Waterfall was what the stoners called this off-the-beaten-path, litter-strewn spot near a dam in the Kalamazoo River, a few miles from school. Sometimes we’d go there during our 25-minute lunch break and smoke weed from Steve’s kazoo pipe—or try. I never quite mastered it.

The senior whom I obsessed over as a freshman, a snowboarder and skater with a habit of trying to pass off Jack Kerouac’s poetry as his own, looked particularly Check Your Head-era Beastie Boy–like. Did he know I could spit out all the words to “So What’cha Want” with a precision not usually found in youth group–going freshman? Probably not.

Despite all that, I was surprised when the death of Adam Yauch/MCA in 2012, a year and a day ago, affected me the way it did.

Age 47. Cancer of the salivary gland.

I didn’t sprawl on my bed in a mourning tee, go to a counselor’s office or cry. But I did fall into a weeks-long Internet K-hole, where I went over and again over the sad details. Lost his battle with cancer. (An expression I hate.) A death premature and tragic. Then the journalist in me kicked in—the part that loves filling in knowledge gaps with info., Q’s with A’s, to get a fuller picture. With strangers, getting this specific for no reason might be classified as stalking. With people in the public eye, it’s conveniently called “research.”

I learned more about Yauch’s many creative projects, the origins of his involvement with Tibetan activism and Buddhism, his wild times heli-boarding in Alaska—documented in Grand Royal—and how he recorded “A Year and a Day” alone in his Koreatown apartment in Los Angeles, wearing a jet pilot’s helmet equipped with a microphone.

“What happened to the three of us together and all that crap?” Ad-Rock remembers thinking at the time. “But then I heard the track… He rapped his ass off.”

I discovered, via watching multiple interviews, that MCA might’ve been the only person on Earth who chewed as much gum as I do. Even while performing. Never without gum.

My research wandered off in weird directions to find the YouTube-based cooking show of Mike D’s wife, Tamra Davis, and remembrances by Yauch’s old girlfriend, circa Licensed to Ill, on Facebook about their “conscious and loving decision not to get married,” having set out down their own spiritual paths.

Unrelated but interesting: Some credit Mike D with coining the term “mullet”!

When it comes to coping with the loss of a pop-culture icon, one of the first things we in the gen pop do is to publicly assert our proximity to the deceased. It’s often in the form of a tweet: “RIP, MCA. Thanks for letting me play basketball with you that one time before Lollapalooza.” (To use a hypothetical example.) There might be sympathy and gratitude in these public statements, but isn’t the real point bragging that you once played pickup b-ball with a B-Boy?

To deride this impulse would be to criticize all of social media, which is fundamentally about validation, affirmation and self-interest. I’m guilty—it’s no different from my middle school friends and I lamenting Kurt’s death or Melissa’s move—and I won’t. But last spring, I did struggle with the fact that I was so consumed by the loss of a famous person, having never experienced this emotion before and not even sure I should let myself experience it. For one thing, there were other, more proximate people and things to worry about. There always are. For another, while I wanted to watch Tammy D prepare a healthy tempeh reuben for her kids, I also had freelance assignments to finish. (Get it together is right.)

Furthermore, there were and are way bigger Beastie Boys fans in the world. I liked a lot of other music in high school, including (yep) this and this. And I didn’t hear Paul’s Boutique, start to finish, until after college. I can still do the rap breakdown in “The Sound of Science” and love jogging to this, but that’s really the extent of my 31-year-old fandom.

So, why so rapt? There’s the obvious answer that losing cherished celebs—especially someone like MCA who managed, even as he grew older and got sick, to stay deeply engaged in the world and interested in other people, and thus to never really age, not in spirit—reminds us of our own mortality. Shouldn’t that youthful energy stave off death?

Oh right, we remember. Nothing can. Not even dropping science like Galileo dropped the orange.

I think the real reason I was so moved by what I learned about Yauch, while reading articles and magazines and combing the far corners of the ‘net like a true creepster, is the realization that beyond being a great artist, he showed a steadfast commitment to transforming himself for the better. Once he stopped chugging beers and wrecking hotel rooms and womanizing (ca. early fame), he started moving in more thoughtful, mindful directions—quietly, when necessary (meditating, living a relatively private life), and loudly, when required (grabbing the mic, revising his worldview). He became someone who owned up to his mistakes.

Thinking back to school: a lot of those cocky skater and stoner kids that hung out by the Waterfall at lunch turned out pretty well. We’re still turning. One of the positives of social media is that I’ve been able to find out that a lot of them, including my senior crush, now have creative outlets and causes and kids. Some especially visionary ones have started small businesses in developing countries or are working for social justice orgs. And of course, some are still down by the river, holding down the fort.

What else could I write? 

I think back, a year later, on MCA’s life, not death, and the fact that he lived fully and humbly.

Want to cop that style.