Let's look at the horror

and wonder at our survival

One of the most puzzling things about being alive is how committed we must be to ignoring the horrors around us. Bordering on delusion, we must deny what’s right in front of us just to keep going. There’s no other way. My problem is that I don’t deny it enough. Horror is like the sun: stare at it for too long and you lose sight of everything else. But, like the sun, it’s also a burning, searing, mass that is impossible to ignore.

Typical Life Coach wisdom often leans in the direction of greater denial: accentuate the positive, focus on what’s good, go where it’s warm. I love that advice, honestly, and I need it. But we’re not doing that today. Because to live that way, helpful as it may be, is also to ignore the insistent itch in my soul that says, “What about…”

So today, my friends, let’s talk about the horror of being alive.

Constant contact with horror is something I love and hate about living in New York City. I was walking home recently and saw this at my feet.

A call to action!

That’s the Lower East Side in an image. A hopeful call to action from a profoundly broken figure. It’s Christlike. And, like the bloody image of Christ on a cross, it speaks directly to the horror of living in this world. This, I believe, was what the new Barbie movie was trying to get at with the line, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” I hated the movie, but I loved that scene. I’ll take street Barbie over movie Barbie any day of the week. Fun fact: When I was in the Army National Guard, I was told that the plastic handgrip of my weapon was made by Mattel.

Getting back to the horror of everyday life: Yesterday, on my walk to see Barbie, I passed through Hell’s Kitchen. A man was passed out while still standing. His face was pressed into a wall and his body was weirdly rigid and unconscious. In front of him, a woman, clearly tweaking on meth, waved her arms and moved her mouth meaninglessly.

If you’ve lived around meth tweakers, you know that they begin by shouting in the street, but after hours or days of this, they lose their voice completely. Their raving madness becomes an endless, silent scream passing over broken teeth and out a contorted mouth. The poor woman, driven by meth-fueled demons, was a marionnette of madness. She was the exact counterpoint to the fentanyl sleeper behind her. Together they were the yin and yang of self-obliteration.

That double shot of utter misery was too much to ignore. There was nothing I could do to ease their suffering. To block it out felt heartless, to indulge the aching empathy felt gratuitous and self-congratulatory. I squirmed inside like a worm under the concentrated sun of a magnifying glass.

“Unfuck the world,” the doll exhorts. This world. This fallen world. Unfuck it how? When? Where? I felt complicit in the suffering of those two human beings somehow as I scurried by. I felt guilty. I felt callous. I felt grateful it wasn’t me. It easily could be. I gazed into the greedy mouth of bottomless horror that could devour me or you or all of us at any moment.

I gazed into the greedy mouth of bottomless horror that could devour me, or you, or all of us at any moment. What do you do with that? Where do you put it in your mind?

Werner Herzog has this magnificent ability to live with the horror of the "overwhelming and connective murder” of nature. He’s made a living staring the horror in the face, documenting it, and sharing it with us for our delight.

In Apocolypse Now, Colonel Kurtz succumbed to the horror, used it to drive himself to unspeakable acts, and repented in the form of suicide-by-commando to Martin Sheen. His last words, “The horror, the horror.”

Before I got to the theater to see the content marketing feature, I stopped at a bakery for a chocolate chip cookie — the best balm for feelings that I currently apply.

A cookie from Culture at 247 West 36th Street. VERY GOOD.

The cookie soothed me. It was crunchy on the outside and mushy inside. A perfect combination of chocolate, a touch of salt, and texture. Eating it while still shuddering from the sight of the two unfortunates nearby felt perverse and absurd.

Then I met my wife at the Director’s Guild Theater for the Barbie screening. The film grappled with a similar theme. How do we enjoy this gift of life in the face of cruelty, pain, and suffering? It didn’t answer the question any better than a cookie can. But at least it didn’t carry any calories.

That’s my Free Life Coach prescription, friends. Face the horror today. Follow it with a cookie. Summon a tolerable quietude.

Shuddering beside you on the ride we can’t escape,

I remain,

Your Free Life Coach,

Sean Sakamoto