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Ever since reading Sean Penn's article for Rolling Stone about his meeting with El Chapo, I have been unable to get his writing style out of my head. It was like he was being held at knife point by a band of drunk thesauruses.
Fortunately, Sean Penn had other people he wanted to meet and write about for free, and was generous enough to let me run the following.
"In the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." — Abraham Lincoln, probably
What's the point of this? Two words: G0D. I'm meeting him - anytime now. I'm meeting the Man Upstairs.
It could be a paragraph away. It could be 80. It's the journey, not the destination, as Nietzsche so famously said. I've read Nietzsche. It is important that I tell you this.
All men worship two gods: Sean Penn, and this other one. The Man Upstairs. The Chief Honcho. We are mostly the same, but this is a creature incomprehensible to most minds, absent the human algebra that may provide us with a communal vocabulary. When I was 4, I built a rudimentary man from clay. So did G0D. We're not so different, He and I. When I was 8, I surfed. There, at least, we are not quite the same.
His angel, Raphael, summons us into the conference room. The conference room is warm and dark, like memories of childhood, or the underbelly of capitalism. It is a clandestine meeting, the type of meeting that is clandestine and you have to organize clandestinely.
Hence, this clandestine collusion, striving for a moment of transcendence. Or shall I pass on into the hyperbole of the every day, where moments beat their little fists against each other and the night wind whistles like a poor man's paycheck - and isn't that the truth, if we weren't so damn complacent.
Why am I writing this? Why am I here, even, in the first place? What is so transcendent about this frangibility?
Flash frame: We're doing this. We eat a snack: bangers and mash. I know what a banger really is. The slang of it. The carnage. I tell G0D no.
We're all such frauds. Do you have the courage to see it? Trust. Only honesty. I'm in my flow. Respect that, if nothing else.
We travel in the mountains for 80 paragraphs. The descriptions are detailed, and I think of Hunter S. Thompson as I write them, effulgently, contumaciously, a gringo in G0D's villages. The complicity - there's enough to go around.
We make our way up the crystal staircase to G0D's conference room. G0D is a simple man. Simple like the child in my metaphor from earlier.
Why are you here, G0D wants to know. Why are you, Sean Penn, here to talk to me. G0D whispers in my ear, all light and effusion. It's a conclave. Cut. Rewind. Freeze-frame. Wipe. Dissolve. I don't understand a word. I whisper shyly to Raphael, who translates back. I speak to him in intuitive metaphors that translate to a litmus test of our bona fides. G0D is not here as some kind of a casual fanny pack on a vituperative neophyte. No. Not here. Not this.
G0D, I explain, I have a lot of questions. As true as they are compartmentalized. Why do bad things happen to good people? Vice versa. What is truth? Who is really to blame for killers and paparazzi and whom should we thank for the whales - or is it blame? What's ISIS? Do you have dreams? What do you dream about? Your mother, what was she like?
G0D agrees to take my questions provided I am not in the room. I say OK. We shake hands and G0D offers me a huge bed or a huge floor.
I think you know which one I would prefer, I tell G0D. I have traveled too far and seen too much. G0D sleeps on the huge floor, and I sleep vindicated.
G0D's eyes: Describe them. Two pinwheels on a slow computer. Two moths dancing toward pinprick stars. Charisma? Disputable. There is a doubtlessness to G0D's facial expression. What is it that takes Doubt away? John Patrick Shanley, or is it my cowardice? Could it be all of our cowardice?
What was I trying to see in him? Something, truth. I tried hard, folks. I really did. I reminded myself over and over again that this was no little teapot, short and stout, from the fairy tales they whisper to a little boy drawing pesos in his backyard. This was a simple deity, surrounded by simple truth. He conjures questions of complexity and context, or survivalists and capitalists and collectivists and dentists, of all the ilks, some say pewter, others bronze.
My G0D, this is deep.
I make no money for my journalism. I am Sean Penn. The only currency I seek is truth.
I saw "Scarface."
We're all just dead weight.
Do you have dreams, I asked G0D. What do you dream about.
But G0D only smiled, that mysterious smile that G0D has.
I'm you, G0D said. Don't you see, Sean Penn? I've always been you.
It was the most ineffable thing that has ever happened to me.
Previously:
• 01/05/16: 'Said' is not dead. Save boring words!
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