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Aug. 9, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:09:12

The Horrors of Modernity: "Long Day's Journey into Night"

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	Oh, we are going deep tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
	We are going to the dark heart of modern American theater.
	I'm talking here with Michelle. Now, we talked about a play before, which was very exciting, and I won't say theater nerds, the pair of us, but probably something along those lines, but we're going to be talking about what is considered by some the best American play, the greatest American play, certainly of the 20th century.
	Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night.
	Now, if you think that the title is sad...
	And you can get there's a version with Jack Lemmon and Peter Gallagher and interestingly enough, oh, what's his disgraced name now?
	Kevin Spacey. Kevin Spacey, warning the world about how dangerous Kevin Spacey is in kind of an interesting manner.
	There's also an older version with a young Dean Stockwell.
	And Jason Robarts, who, by the way, is fantastic in that.
	And so you can get it once through iTunes.
	I think Catherine Hepburn's in the Jason Robarts one.
	And it's an incredible play.
	You can buy it to read. I'll put links to all this below.
	But it's an incredible play on just about every level.
	Now, Michelle, I know that you did a bunch of research into sort of the backstory.
	Do you want to just give a little synopsis of the play and then talk about some of the stuff that you learned about the backstory?
	Oh my gosh, I think you're so much better at doing the synopsis.
	Oh, okay. So, yeah, it's, I don't know, the German phrase is, or something like that.
	But it takes place in one day.
	Now, I have not read the play since probably theater school or something like that.
	And it's earlier than I thought.
	It's 1912 that the play is set in.
	And the writer, Eugene O'Neill, had a tortured...
	Family life.
	And when they say semi-autobiographical, I'm not sure that it's really semi-autobiographical.
	So there's this family. It's an Irish-American family.
	The father is a famous stage actor who had an enormous amount of talent, and at least according to him, everybody is an unreliable narrator because they're all addicts to substances, alcohol and morphine, to abuse, to repetition, to various interpersonal horrors, which we'll get into. But the father was this famous stage actor.
	The mother is a drug addict.
	And the two sons...
	Is the term wastrel, do you think, appropriate in this context, Michelle?
	They don't have jobs, right?
	Yeah, they are bums.
	Yeah, like dangerous, blunted bums with, I don't know, kind of artistic sensibilities.
	And so there's a third character or a third presence in the play, which is the son who was born in between the youngest and the eldest.
	Who died at the age of two when the eldest who had measles went into the baby's room specifically against the mother's orders and the mother has this kind of Freudian theory that the eldest son did not like the newborn and therefore went in with measles And the baby contracted measles, did I get that right? And then the baby died.
	And so this is one of the sort of tortured reminiscences that occurs in the family.
	And basically it's a story of one day and one night in the life of this family as they wrestle with regret and recrimination and addiction and abuse.
	And there's no...
	Spoiler! It's not a long day's journey into night followed by dazzling beautiful dawn.
	It's a long day's journey into night...
	And it's a night that doesn't end.
	Now, it's not, I would say, fundamentally about the family.
	It's about modernity.
	It's about the modern world.
	And we'll sort of get into that case about it.
	The mother continually takes drugs.
	She was at a sort of rehab facility at the time, a sanatorium or someplace where she was off the drugs.
	She gets back on the drugs over the course of the day.
	She keeps sort of disappearing upstairs.
	And this is like...
	Morphine shoot needle in arm.
	So this is some heavy duty addiction that's going on here and there's a continual sort of spacing out and this occasional childlike wonder and forgetfulness followed by bursts of incoherent rage and recrimination and so on.
	And the father's tortured by the fact that he was considered to be, as he says, one of the top sort of three or four talented actors.
	He came from a very, very poor background.
	And he said, you know, he worked like a devil to get rid of an Irish brogue you could cut with a knife, right?
	So he had to Americanize his accent sort of Hugh Laurie style.
	And he's tortured because he felt that he had this incredible career ahead of him as a Shakespearean actor of the very top shelf First Order.
	But partly because he grew up so poor that he was terrified of being poor, and partly just out of greed for money, he ended up buying, well, I can't remember what it's called in the play, in the real life, it was Alexander Dumas, the Count of Monte Cristo, the sort of swashbuckling hero.
	And he ended up just doing that year after year after year because it made him a fortune.
	It was a great commercial success and he was obviously very good in the role.
	But he got lazy, he got bored and he was no longer able to get new characters.
	If he tried anything new, people were like, no, no, we just want to see you in that original role.
	So he got trapped in that, and he's continuing to grind out performances.
	He's 65, but according to stage directions, looks 10 years younger.
	So he's got these regrets.
	The mother has the regrets of the death of the baby.
	And also, when the youngest child was born, she went through some sort of unspecified pain.
	I don't know if it was a physical pain or if something was torn in the birth of the youngest child or whether she just had postpartum depression.
	But the father, who's continually referred to as excessively cheap in the play, got a cheap doctor who just basically prescribed her morphine.
	And she then got addicted to that morphine, and that is the mess that they're wrestling with over the course of the day.
	The eldest son is a complete degenerate.
	Like, you know, well, Kevin...
	Kevin Spacey played him.
	It's kind of all you need to know, right?
	So, Complete Degenerate visits whorehouses, is a rampant alcoholic who's continually seeking oblivion, right?
	Like, he wants to drink relentlessly until he passes out.
	And in real life, the real-life version of this guy did actually drink himself to death by 1923.
	So, this is not made-up stuff.
	And then the youngest son, just to add even more frothy delight to the dysfunctional mix, is just the day of the play.
	He's got a hacking cough and a weak chest, and he's been diagnosed with what used to be called consumption.
	It's kind of a staple of these kinds of stories, tuberculosis.
	And his cure is to go to a good sanatorium.
	Six months to a year, he should be cured.
	This did actually happen to...
	Eugene O'Neill. But the father wants to put him in a sort of state sanatorium, which is very cheap, and this cheapness is one of the things that drives the family nuts.
	So we'll get into the content of it, because, I mean, it's a lot of snippy, snipey stuff, but there's really important, powerful stuff that's in there, which I think gives the play such a long-lasting value.
	It's not about one dysfunctional family to me, and I'll make the case as we talk.
	It's about modernity. Did I miss anything important?
	Is that the general arc?
	I think that's the general arc.
	And if you're willing, like, I really want to dig into this because there's so much because like, to me, that's the narrative, but that's not the story.
	Right, right. So yes. Okay, let's bring the digging in.
	So where would you, of the immense plots in this burial ground that we could look for treasure, where do you want to start?
	Okay, okay. So there's many to go with.
	Okay, so I'd say I'd like to start actually with the morphine addiction, if that's okay.
	I know that's kind of...
	Do you want to go in order or is it like all right to do it this way?
	Whatever you like. Okay, great.
	So, okay.
	Really quick with the two plays, the versions of the play, I'm sorry, because I did read it and then I watched both of these versions, the 1987 version with Kevin Spacey, the 1962 version with Katharine Hepburn.
	Now, between these two, there's only a 20-minute difference in the length of the movies.
	And I love the performances with Katharine Hepburn in that one more, but they cut out some of the dialogue, and the dialogue is there in the 1987 version, and I don't understand what happened there.
	I thought that was very strange.
	And we'll get back to this, too.
	The parts that they cut out, I found particularly like, why that part?
	But, okay.
	And that has to do with some stuff that the mother says later, but...
	And you touched on it, and we'll get back to that.
	Okay, so the morphine addiction.
	When I was watching this play the first time...
	I got to the part with the morphine addiction where they're blaming the father and saying, well, it's because you hired this quack.
	You always look for these quacks the cheapest you can get.
	And I was like, I don't know if that really sits quite right because I love history and I love watching documentaries about different time periods.
	And I do know that in the Victorian era, morphine was a wonder drug.
	It was not...
	It's not how we see it today.
	So I did a bunch of research, and I have a little timeline here, if you'll indulge me.
	Okay, so the play was written through 1941, at the end of 1941, the beginning of 1942.
	It was published in 1956.
	Eugene O'Neill was born in 1888.
	That's the same year his mother became addicted to the morphine.
	Okay, so morphine was marketed commercially in 1827.
	Widely used 1853 through 1855 and all throughout the Civil War.
	It was known as God's own medicine.
	It was one of two medicines used for treating pain at that time.
	It was morphine or ether.
	Now, morphine was widely used in like the miracle tonics of the day, you know, the snake oils and all that.
	You could get it through mail order and Now, morphine was widely used in this manner until 1906 with the Pure Food and Drug Act.
	This required the listing of ingredients on labels, and morphine was one of those.
	So when that happened, morphine dropped.
	The usage of morphine dropped in the general public and in these snake oils.
	Then in 1914, morphine became a controlled substance.
	Okay, so my point of all these timelines is that she's addicted in 1888, during this time when it was considered a miracle drug.
	Yet in the play, the older brother says, oh, I thought only prostitutes were dope fiends.
	And none of this really seemed to sit right with me.
	I was trying to find the research at what point did people start considering this to be like a dope thing or a druggy thing, a prostitute thing, a lower class thing to do.
	I couldn't really find a whole lot of information on that.
	Now it says that doctors used morphine to treat alcohol.
	They thought it was less dangerous.
	They used it to treat pain.
	Some thought pain itself was a disease.
	Doctors believe that eating morphine was more addictive than using a hypodermic needle.
	The needle was thought to be safer and was widely used through the 1860s and 70s, developed in the 1860s.
	So, from what I can understand of what they're saying in the play is that the mother was treated in 1888 for pain with morphine, I don't know if it was at that time, no, 1888, 1860, yeah, so at that time they did have hypodermic needles, so it was most likely a hypodermic needle that was used, and the doctors thought it was safer at the time to do this.
	So when she's sitting there saying, well, you hired a quack, you hired the cheapest you could find, I'm wondering if that's Eugene O'Neill writing this in 1941 projecting that.
	Into 1912 and 1888.
	Like, do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah.
	No, and it's important to remember, just for people who don't know the history, and there's no reason why people would, but the relationship we have with drugs now compared to 140, 130, 120 years ago is very, very different.
	So, for instance, cocaine was synthesized, and one of the people most responsible for bringing cocaine to public attention and public consumption and public addiction was Sigmund Freud.
	Who viewed cocaine as a wonderful cure for morphine addiction, if I remember rightly.
	And what he did was he got his friends hooked not on one drug, but on two.
	And he himself was a cocaine addict and a fiendish cocaine user, and he would just prescribe it.
	It was considered to be a wonderful, miraculous, no-cost, happy-joy-juice kind of drug.
	So, I mean, there's two possibilities.
	One is, of course, that...
	His mother never said anything like this.
	Like, you got me... Because you were so cheap in who you hired to be my doctor, you turned me into a dope fiend, right?
	Maybe his mother never said that, but that was sort of the excuse that he gave to his mother as to why she became addicted to morphine.
	Of course, the other possibility is that the mother did say that, but it wasn't true.
	Because this is the thing.
	Everybody in this play is an unreliable narrator, right?
	And that's important to remember because I've talked about this in my show before.
	If I were to sit down with my mom and try and get the truth, I have no idea whether I'm going to get the truth out of her or not.
	If I'm asking her about things I don't have direct experience of, people who are addicts, people who are dysfunctional are notoriously unreliable.
	And drug addicts in particular are unreliable and they tend not to take ownership for their own addiction.
	They blame external circumstances or causes.
	So, yeah, either the mother never said this, but he's projecting it backwards in order to excuse his mother's addiction, or his mother did say that, but it probably wasn't true, given the medical standards at the time.
	The medical standards at the time were, oh, if you're in horrible pain, then here, have some morphine.
	And... Most people, see this is what people forget, most people who are prescribed opiates do not become addicted to them.
	Even if you look at the Vietnam War, where heroin and other sort of hard drugs were used a lot by the troops, only 10% of the troops who used a lot of hard drugs overseas continued to use those drugs when they came home.
	So even if you're in a war and you're drugged to the gills when you come back home, I wouldn't say it's necessarily easy to kick, but the vast majority of people don't.
	So when people become addicted to a substance, and I've done work on this before, people can read Gabor Mate's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, when people become addicted to a substance, it's invariably because of early childhood trauma, not because they didn't have a doctor who was...
	So well paid that he wouldn't just prescribe morphine for pain, which doctors did.
	So the question is, why did she keep taking this morphine?
	Why did she become addicted?
	And the question as to what happened and why she became addicted is bandied back and forth Because people didn't really understand.
	I mean, there was Freudianism and so on, but people didn't really understand the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and subsequent...
	There's susceptibility to addiction.
	And so there's this ghost that everyone's chasing around the whole house all day and all night.
	And I imagine this went on year after year, decade after decade in this family.
	Why did mom become a dope fiend?
	Now, the answer is because she had a terrible childhood and, you know, the X factor, whatever that is in terms of free will.
	But the terrible childhood was sort of important.
	But she and they can't talk about that.
	And you'll notice they don't really talk about their childhoods with the exception of the father who talks about from the age of 10 onwards and it's all these external circumstances.
	His own father, he says, it's a little confusing in the play to me at least, but his own father went back to Ireland to die and there's pretty strong suggestions that he killed himself by eating rat poison or something like that.
	Oh, well, they said it was a mistake.
	And the youngest son says, I don't think it was a mistake.
	So, you know, you've got this typical Angela's ashes, suicidality, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, dashed broken hopes, artistic sensibilities smashed on consumerism.
	It's kind of almost like a cliche.
	It wasn't necessarily back in the 40s, but it is kind of now.
	But this question, why did the mother become addicted?
	Well, she says, it's because my husband is cheap.
	That's why I became addicted.
	And again, your research, and I think just the general knowledge that we have now, says that's not the answer.
	No, I don't think so, of course.
	Okay, so with her childhood, we only get a few little snippets.
	Okay, so... There is one part where she's blaming her husband for, you know, the quack.
	And he or the son, I think, is maybe confronting him with that.
	And the father does say like one line of like, oh, no, no, no.
	This was in her long before the doctor visited her that day.
	And there's another line, I think it's in the third act, where they're going on about...
	She's got a little memory.
	She's talking about the wedding dress.
	Remember the wedding dress?
	It was so beautiful.
	It had this Queen's Anne lace and this and this and this.
	And she's...
	Talking about how her father said, money is no object, dear.
	You can get anything you want. Price is no object, my princess, my darling, the angel of my heart.
	Yes. And what did her mother say?
	Oh, your husband is never, ever going to be able to satisfy you if this is the way your father treats you.
	Right. That's my plan, by the way.
	Right. Just so my daughter...
	Ruin your daughter so she's stuck with you.
	No, no, no. Enhance her.
	Enhance her to stay close.
	Oh, yes, yes, yes. There you go.
	Ruin her. Good heavens.
	I'm joking. I'm joking.
	I know. No, she sounds like a sweetie when you guys are playing together.
	So, no. Yeah, okay.
	So... Sorry.
	This actually really reminded me of...
	I imagine I'm going to be crying a lot talking about this.
	It reminds me a lot of my childhood, just as yours.
	My grandmother, she was 70-something.
	When she died, she died a couple years ago.
	So, 1940s, she was...
	Okay, so I don't want to give too many.
	Okay, so she said that her father bought her a prom dress and And he had sold, like a company watcher, he had sold something that meant something to him to buy her this dress.
	And her mother was really upset by it.
	And I would get these little snippets of stories of the contention that my grandmother's parents had.
	So it sounded like my great-grandmother was this really freaking awful harpy that would make up stories and lie and do things and just awful to the children.
	And it sounded like my great-grandfather was kind of this cuck that just let her run roughshod and would...
	Well, this relationship of money It's really, really powerful in the play.
	Half the damn play is this bourgeois obsession with money.
	And I want to sort of get into the deeper theological side of it, but just so people sort of get the arc, right?
	And this is a typical kind of arc, right?
	So the parents, the grandparents on the father's side are desperately poor.
	Like to the point where the guy has to go work at a machine shop when he's 10 years old and all this kind of stuff.
	And Then what happens is he gets this play that in real life, the real-life father of Eugene O'Neill played this character 6,000 times.
	I sort of looked that up. 6,000 times.
	Now, anything you're doing 6,000 times or 1,000 times plus, it gets kind of rote.
	It gets kind of...
	You're going through the motions.
	Like when you're that accomplished in a role or that it's that habitual, you can kind of tune out.
	Like you know how you have this sometimes you're driving and you're thinking about something, but you've driven the route a thousand times before and you get home and you can't really remember the drive because it's just become so automatic.
	In theater, it's called the performance is being phoned in.
	Like, oh, I just leave the phone on the stage.
	I'll just call it in from the hotel room, right?
	But you can still be very good.
	The audience doesn't really notice because you become so practiced that all of the emotional affect comes pretty easily and you know exactly what to do.
	You kind of space out. So the dad was making, as he talks about, what is it, $30,000 to $40,000 profit, not gross, that's net, per season.
	And this would be over 100 years ago.
	So, you know, that's basically, you know, per season, you could roughly say half, three quarters of a million dollars that this guy made from playing this role.
	And that's a significant amount of cash, you know, for sometimes, you know, a six pack and a hand job is enough to make an actor happy.
	So he went from rags to riches.
	In the story of the play, and this of course was the real-life Eugene O'Neill situation, and what a disaster that was for the family.
	You know, the arts are a freaking plague and a curse upon most people's psychology.
	Like, if you have an addictive personality, if you have a dysfunctional personality, you kind of, like, the best place to be is working with your hands, digging a ditch from nine to five.
	You know, that's where you need to be because it keeps you grounded.
	It keeps you in reality and you don't get to manipulate.
	And your craziness is kept in check by having to get up, having to go to work, having to work with your hands.
	And that's really, really important.
	This situation where you go from rags to riches because of the art world, where he didn't have to study new plays.
	He didn't have to study.
	He didn't have to learn new lines.
	He didn't have to, you know, learn new accents.
	He just did the same thing over and over again.
	So he got lazy.
	He got bored.
	And his children grew up and didn't have to work because, you know, if he's so cheap, why is there a summer house?
	If he's so cheap, why is his wife consistently going into the sanatorium, which he has to pay for, which is expensive?
	If he's so cheap, why don't his children have jobs?
	You know, he's the one who's supporting them.
	So this, to me, is just kind of crazy.
	Like, oh, you're so cheap, you're so cheap.
	As they sit around swilling expensive liquor in a house by the sea, you know, paid for by the dad.
	So, I think that the wealth...
	Hollered out and destroyed the family, and if Eugene O'Neill had not had his particular talent for writing, then Eugene O'Neill would probably have either died from tuberculosis or just followed in his brother's footsteps, which we can see the brother encouraging in him, and just drank himself into either an early grave or into just sort of useless inconsequentiality.
	So the money was a disaster.
	For the family, just as the money so often is to people in the arts.
	I mean, you look at someone, I was just watching a documentary on Joe Cocker.
	Boy, talk about flipping around your genres here.
	But Joe Cocker, you know, I mean, was a very, very talented singer and front man.
	But that talent was a complete disaster for him because he got to just be a drunk and a druggie.
	And people just kind of propped him up and he did his thing on stage.
	And most times it would work and sometimes it wouldn't.
	But if you have talent and money rolling in and you don't have to work or if you do work, you know, this guy could just roll up five minutes before the theater, slap on his makeup, do the show for two hours, then go home and do that, you know, four or five times a week.
	And he makes his three quarters of a million dollars a year.
	What a disaster.
	You know, he didn't sit there and say, well, I'm going to open up a new theater.
	I'm going to get my own Steppenwolf going.
	I'm going to, you know, I'm going to start funding new playwrights.
	And he just showed up to work, made his fortune, went home.
	And that lack of struggle, you know, we all want this life free of struggle, but man, if we get it, is it terrible for us.
	Yeah, okay, so that kind of reminds me of like lottery winners, right?
	You know, there's all these disastrous stories.
	However, he's not exactly a lottery winner, right?
	Because he's been working since he was 10 years old.
	He worked hard jobs before he got into the theater.
	And then, you know, he did work in the theater, he had a passion for it, and then he hit the lottery.
	Right. So like, it's a little bit of a different arc.
	I feel like the baggage, because he brings up the poorhouse a lot, right?
	The fear of dying in a poorhouse and like the effect of his father and his mother had on him.
	So I feel like he's kind of He knows the value of the dollar, but he didn't know how to tell his wife to stop poisoning everything he earned and his children.
	This is a complicated thought, but I was talking to my husband about this idea, and I was thinking, okay, they accuse him of being cheap.
	Cheap, cheap, cheap. I was like, you know, if that were our son, right, and something like this happened, and we had property and a car and so on, we would sell these things to get him the best treatment, right, wouldn't we? And my husband said, well, of course, but they're almost in their 30s.
	Why can't they afford this themselves?
	And I was like, hmm, that's a great point.
	Why are they sitting there saying that their father is cheap when they're grown men and they should be earning this themselves?
	Well, because one of them is a whoremongering drunkard living off his father's money, and the other one had the wonderful money-making idea of just going to be a merchant sailor for a couple of years and just sail around the world, make a minimum wage.
	But that's actually, being a sailor even back then was good money.
	I mean, all throughout history, being a sailor, I mean, except for when you were conscripted or forced to, but if you got paid to do the job, it was good money.
	It still is. So I kind of wonder about that as well.
	I didn't look up how much sailors got paid back then.
	But if it holds, then I would imagine he probably wasted it on whores and boos, like you said.
	Yeah, so I kind of want to get into the religious side of things, but this arc of money is really, really important.
	I remember being incredibly struck, Michelle, when I first read the play and then saw it.
	I remember being really struck with...
	Because, you know, I was in theater school and I was like, holy crap.
	So you could make three quarters of a million dollars being a matinee idol in an exciting play...
	And you could wind up incredibly miserable.
	Because, you know, when you're an actor, you're like, man, this is the greatest thing ever, right?
	I mean, woohoo! Like, I mean, I'm the lead.
	I'm sword fighting.
	I'm a handsome guy on a stage and I'm making tons of money.
	And then this idea that, okay, you know, he married the most beautiful girl.
	He had, you know, two sons who are obviously intelligent and artistic and have great language skills and so on.
	And he has had a very successful career as an actor.
	And God, is he miserable.
	And that to me is really, really important because that's one of the lies.
	It's sold to you by society.
	You know, success, success, success will make you happy.
	And yet he got the girl of his dreams.
	He got the family of his dreams.
	He had the career that just about every actor would give his eye teeth to get a hold of.
	And his life is miserable.
	And I just remember being really struck by that.
	It's not an insight that is in the play explicitly, but to me, it's kind of all over the place in there.
	Yeah, so, okay, so this reminds me of...
	I loved whenever you have Dr.
	Duke on. I love his perspective.
	I love hearing what he has to say, even if I don't agree with it.
	And when you guys were talking about...
	It's actually, sorry, it's Dr. Pesta.
	People get a little bit confused by the Dr.
	Duke phrase. I do know that.
	I'm so sorry. No, that's fine.
	It's just, you know, people were like, Stephen Molyneux had Dr.
	Duke on. I'm so sorry.
	No, I don't want to do that. No, but I mean Dr.
	Pester, right. Thank you for correcting me.
	He's a first name kind of guy.
	I mean, there's no question. The Duke, right?
	Okay, so one of the things that struck me when you guys were talking about A Streetcar Named Desire, I was thinking about this.
	A lot of times what I observe is that it seems like people don't take away the what not to do message from stories, right?
	So... Like The Great Gatsby.
	The first time I read that play in high school, I really, or book, I hated it.
	It was like, oh, what a cuck.
	And then as I got to be an adult, I was like, oh, it's a lesson in what not to do.
	Oh, The Great Gatsby is so wasted on the young, but it's still better than being forced to read The Stone Angel by Margaret Atwood, which was our punishment as students in junior high, which is completely insane.
	But anyway, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say just like background on that regard.
	Okay, so in America here we have a thing called the GATE program.
	It's like advanced classes throughout like your elementary school and stuff and junior high and high school you're supposed to be taking like the more advanced harder classes.
	It didn't seem very challenging to me.
	I took AP courses in my junior year, and that was such a disappointment.
	I was irritated because it was just more work.
	And my teacher could not explain to me that the importance of writing essays was to help you think.
	So I was like, fuck this busy work.
	I'm graduating early, and I took the test, and I left early.
	And I have...
	Always scored in the top 1% for reading comprehension.
	That's America and people are illiterate here.
	I'm just trying to say this is where I am in what I learned and where I was in high school and these skills.
	I've often noticed that people don't seem to take away the message of what not to do.
	And yes, The Great Gatsby was probably too big a read at the age of a teenager when you're still figuring out relationships in the first place.
	But it's an important lesson of not pining over the wrong girl.
	So maybe, I don't know, like maybe it was the lack of having a good teacher to explain these lessons.
	I'm not sure. Well, I mean, the great Gatsby is the suicidality of one-itis as well, right?
	Like, this is the only one person who could ever make me happy.
	It's like, way to toss your happiness into a literal crack for some men.
	So let's talk a little bit about...
	The religious side.
	Because to me, the play, and there's good evidence for this.
	I'm going to stick by this case and feel free to fight me to the death on this.
	But secularism versus religion.
	Because the contrast or the combat is very clear.
	So the mother keeps talking about the time she was going to become a nun.
	She was in a convent and she was going to be a nun and that was going to be her life.
	And instead, she was totally blown away by this actor's larger-than-life stage persona.
	And God help people who confuse the character for the actor.
	I mean, it's one of the great disappointments in life.
	And so she, this guy, she's like, oh, this guy was from another world.
	I was stammering. I was, like, blown away.
	And so she chose...
	Her husband, this, I guess, naive girl with the hyperindulgent daddy and the convent temptations and becoming a nun temptations, she chose her husband based on fantasy, grandiosity, and hormones.
	Not because he was a virtuous guy, not because he was a sensible guy, not because he was a loving guy.
	But because he looked really good in a pair of Shakespearean tights.
	I mean, that's about as shallow as it gets.
	And also, he says, the husband says very clearly about the wife.
	Ah, she was the most beautiful girl around, and she knew it.
	And so she, you know, I guess she was working at nun style.
	Oh, that's going to send me to hell.
	But... So these are two people who are alphas, I guess, in their environment, and they're drawn to each other for the most shallow of reasons, and lo and behold, it turns out they can't sustain love based upon mere physical attraction.
	And that, of course, is an old biblical statement that you look for the inner person, you look for the soul, right?
	You look for the virtues and so on.
	So that... Aspect of things to me that she's coming right out of religion.
	And there is mention of socialism and anarchism versus, you know, she's almost this living embodiment that religion is the opiate of the masses.
	I mean, she literally was addicted to religion.
	Now she's addicted to opiates when she's given up religion, right?
	So to me, this is – and I don't know what I pretty much could guess.
	You know, everyone who's successful in America is a bloody socialist in the art world, at least until the modern era.
	But in the play, I didn't even notice this until I redid the play.
	But yeah, his dad says to – I think it's to the youngest son – never mind the socialist gabble.
	I don't care to listen, right?
	It's a socialism, socialism.
	And then later, the son says, I told Shaughnessy he should have reminded Harker that a Stanford oil millionaire ought to welcome the flavor of hog in his ice water as an appropriate touch.
	I have no idea what the hell that means.
	But the father says, the devil you did.
	Keep your damned socialist anarchist sentiments out of my affairs.
	And so there is this reference to socialism.
	There is this reference to secularism.
	And there is continual reminders in the play that the characters have fallen away from religion.
	The mother doesn't pray anymore.
	The wonderful and I think very well written character of Kathleen, the maid, says to the dad, the son says, I haven't seen you wearing out your knees in prayer and you haven't darkened the doors of a church lately.
	He's like, well, I might be a bad Catholic, but...
	Mm-hmm. And the idea of Catholicism as a status symbol, you know, Waterloo was a Catholic, and Shakespeare was a Catholic, you know, all of this silly stuff.
	So there is very much, these are no longer religious people, and the sun's I mean, the youngest son says, blah, blah, blah, wonderful, we'll get into this later, wonderful, phantasmagorical, cosmic experience of oneness and all this kind of...
	You can call it, I don't know, God if you want, you know?
	Like, that's as far as he's gotten into theology, which is some weird little bubble-up of endorphins in his brain.
	It's the closest he can come to religion.
	So you've got a whole family structure here that the father was raised as a good Catholic.
	The mother was literally in a convent going to become a nun.
	They have fallen away significantly from religion.
	The son obviously has become quite taken by socialism.
	And I would argue, of course, as I had before, that socialism replaced the religiosity in the West and became sort of the new cult of endless improvability, right?
	And the innate free will of Christianity gave way to the environmental determinism that could be manipulated by the government of socialism.
	So that's right in there, to me, quite powerfully, that religion ain't happening and socialism is the younger generation thing, which is viewed in a somewhat hostile manner or very hostile manner by the dead.
	Are you with me? Does this sort of make some sense so far?
	I think so. Like, it's reminding me.
	Have you seen or read the...
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, it's okay.
	Is it okay if I, like, puff on my vape?
	I don't want to... No, that's fine.
	Listen, we're doing a play about addiction.
	Yes, well, I am. I'll pretend to smoke something and you pretend to smoke.
	Yeah, well, okay.
	So, well, I'm not pretending, but okay.
	This makes me think of The Iceman Cometh.
	Have you seen that one or read it?
	No, I haven't. Oh my lord.
	Okay, I tell you, next year we gotta talk about that one.
	I will try to measure my dosage of Eugene O'Neill, but yeah.
	It's so good.
	Oh yes, please watch it.
	It's got Jason Rovards in it again.
	This one's less depressing.
	Okay, so Eugene O'Neill, for a time, he spent some time in this dive bar.
	I can't remember where it was, but, like, he nearly died there.
	And there were, like, socialists, and it was that time of, like, what, the 1920s, 1930s, the anarchist, socialist anarchists, you know, were running around, so...
	We get some more of that in The Iceman Cometh, and I was actually quite curious about that in this play, and I was actually hoping you would be able to answer this for me, because in watching the biographies of Eugene O'Neill, they didn't really talk a whole lot about his political predilections.
	However, he is in theater, so I kind of assume with some of this socialist-y stuff that the Suns are saying, I wonder if that's what's happening.
	Well, so, I mean, with regards to capitalism, and this is very similar to the Arthur Miller situation in Death of a Salesman, where capitalism is just crapped on from a great height, right?
	So what is the view of capitalism?
	Well, the view of capitalism you see here is that the love of money and profit destroyed capitalism.
	The man's talent and fantasy.
	And for those who, you know, you don't have to necessarily watch the whole play, but I will beg, demand, insist that people go onto YouTube and look at Christopher Plummer's rendition of the speech about how this guy's talent was destroyed.
	Because, of course, I think that almost happened to Christopher Plummer off The Sound of Music.
	But anyway, it's an incredible piece of acting.
	But... So what is the free market or how is it portrayed or how is it shown?
	Well, you have the free market destroying this man's life.
	You have people profiting off addiction with the mom.
	And there's this character who never appears on stage, who's down at the club, who's just continually bilking this idiot dad with bad real estate investments, right?
	And there was one that worked and it's continually brought up.
	So all of the sort of buying and selling and trade...
	It has this malarian kind of tortiness and ripoff and gypness and hollowing out and nastiness and all of that.
	And that, again, makes me just think, you know, okay, that's just the socialist view of the free market is everyone's a grifter and a chiseler and a cheat and a con and it's all terrible and it destroys, it dehumanizes, it alienates.
	Like, even this guy is a pure example of Marxist alienation of labor, right?
	Because, you know, the alienation of labor is like, hey, one guy used to build a whole carriage and he painted it and he made the wheels and the seat cushions and all of that and he was a craftsman and now what does he do?
	He just bolts on... You know, 200 wheels a day.
	That's all he does. His labor has been alienated.
	He no longer has to have any skill.
	He's been turned into a robot.
	Well, this is the same thing that happened to the father.
	He got turned into an acting robot.
	He lost his juice, his mojo, his talent was destroyed.
	The market, you see, just destroys people.
	It makes them addicted to drugs.
	It destroys their acting talent.
	It rips off people with bad real estate investments.
	There's this constant torturiness.
	Even the house he bought, nobody likes.
	You know, of course, they think they don't like the house.
	They just don't like each other and themselves.
	But that aspect of things where the market is just portrayed as a tawdry, negative, a horrible thing that hollers people out and destroys them, that to me is one of the reasons why the play is still considered to be, it's still touted.
	And it's a great play, but...
	Every play that is considered wonderful has something horrible to say in general about the marketplace.
	I mean, you can see this in The Glass Menagerie, you know, like the guy who's into the market is like this shallow idiot who breaks the schizophrenic girl's heart and he's just, you know, the Tom Wingfield is stuck in a factory scribbling his poems on a shoebox and it's all just, you know, terrible and tawdry and bad.
	And, of course, Death of a Salesman is completely insane with regards to its view of the market.
	And, of course, a lot of these guys are in the theater world.
	And the theater world, like the rock and roll world, is full of a lot of cheats and scam artists.
	And, you know, you try and run a tour and people just rip you off left, right, and center.
	And you can just look at the number of rock stars who've had to sue to try and get any kind of money back from predatory management and so on.
	The list kind of goes on and on.
	Sting ended up having to take his accountant to court because his accountant was ripping him off for a huge amount of money.
	And I think Billy Joel had to take people to court and Elton John and Johnny Depp now is in some entanglements and I don't know who's right or who's wrong.
	But you don't get the best view of capitalism necessarily when you're in that fetid, talent, drug-addled, destructive world of the arts.
	Yeah, you know, okay, so this reminds me of Joe Rogan had Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith on recently.
	And I was listening to it.
	And this guy's talking about the, you know, the predatory managers, and they'd give us drugs and have a sign, whatever, and blah, blah, blah.
	And I was thinking, you know what?
	First off, you chose to take the drugs.
	You know damn well it's going to alter your state when you're doing these deals and whatever.
	That's your own fucking fault. Number two, I feel that I think that if they would get off this old school fucking business model they have, this wouldn't be a fucking issue.
	There's no need. Let me know if you get passionate about this topic.
	I can't tell. I do.
	I do. There's reasons.
	But yeah, I hate this shit because it's like, bitches, change your fucking model.
	We live in the 21st century.
	You're always like, it's 2017.
	So change your model.
	Change to string your shit.
	Put it on subscription. Charge me 25 cents.
	Charge me a monthly. I'll gladly freaking pay you.
	But I am not willing to shell out $12.99 for something that I can buy from you through a stream.
	And then one day you decide, I'm a bad person.
	I don't get to have that movie anymore.
	And you delete it. Like, Naga, fuck yourself.
	Well, yeah, so the Joe Rogan and Steve Tyler interview, you know, Joe Rogan kind of sucker punched me with a three hour try to take me down of all these sorts of things.
	And, you know, okay, I guess you could say that's fair-ish.
	I mean, I'd like to know ahead of time if it's going to be some hostile interview so I can choose whether to come down.
	But, you know, he's like, how dare you basically say that people don't have to be in abusive relationships, right?
	Then he gets Steve Tyler on.
	Now, Steve Tyler actually adopted an underage girl for sexual purposes.
	And I don't remember Joe Rogan bringing any of that stuff up because he's a really tough guy.
	Yeah, the tough guy. Anyway.
	Yeah, I know.
	Let's not do Joe Rogan.
	It's a tempting alleyway.
	But let's take the high road and pass by.
	I would gladly gossip with you off air.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I understand.
	So the religious side, to me, this is a very religious story for the following reasons.
	Temptation is all over the place, right?
	So the father was tempted by riches.
	The father and the mother were both tempted by status and beauty and the grandiosity of his stage persona and so on.
	And There's a chilling line, which I remember the first time I read it and then saw it.
	But the first time I read it, where he basically said, yeah, I was making all this money from this play, but it destroyed my talent.
	And then he says, I can't remember what it is that I wanted to buy.
	And that's a very powerful line because that is the Faustian bargain, right?
	That is the Faustian bargain.
	You can have all of this cool shit.
	You can have lots of money and fame and groupies and whatever, right?
	It's just going to cost you your soul.
	And that is the arc of the dad.
	The dad bought this play.
	Obviously, this was entrepreneurial.
	He became the matinee idol in this play, ran it for thousands of times.
	It destroyed his talent.
	Now, I don't actually think that the play destroyed his talent at all.
	I don't think a play can do that.
	I think it was the alcoholism and his miserable marriage that destroyed his talent, but...
	So, but that to me is a very religious arc, that the devil is going to tempt you with material gain, with adulation, with things that are going to appeal to your vanity, but not stain your morality.
	In fact, quite the opposite. And to me, the play is equivalent to if they'd all died in a car crash and they were in hell.
	I'm not sure how the play would be any different.
	You know, if it was like, no exit, Sartre style, you know, hell is other people.
	I'm not saying that this is the actual story of the play, but you could make a vague case for it, that they're actually in hell.
	Because the Elder Brother, terrifying, one of the most terrifying characters in modern plays.
	The Elder Brother is like...
	I'm dead. I'm dead and I want to kill you.
	And I get to that speech in a bit.
	He says to the younger brother, I'm dead.
	I'm a walking corpse.
	I want you to die with me.
	And maybe I'm even happy that mom's back on morphine again because I don't want to be the only fucking corpse rolling around this house.
	The death wants company.
	And then the son says, I'm half in love with death, right?
	And it's half in love with easeful deathism.
	So, if they had died of their sins and this was their purgatory or this was their hell, I'm not sure how the play would be sort of fundamentally any different, right?
	And so this arc of temptation, the mother is tempted by drugs and the mother is tempted by the death of blame.
	I don't mean the death of blame like she killed blame, but the spiritual death that comes when you just blame and blame and blame and blame and blame and blame and blame.
	Oh, I remember reading that.
	Tell me what you think of this. I remember that.
	This bit where she complains about, oh, you know, just dragged me all over the country in second-rate motels and second-rate hotels and I was lonely and blah, blah, blah, right?
	Why the hell didn't you say something?
	You know, why didn't you change it?
	Why didn't you make something happen?
	Why didn't you go and meet people?
	Why didn't you get friends to come along with you?
	Your husband is...
	I mean, this would be the equivalent of a top-tier movie star, right?
	So the amount of money that he was making back in the day, late 19th century and so on, would be staggering.
	And because there really weren't movies back then, this is the closest...
	He's at the top of his profession.
	He is a movie star.
	And she could say, what a wonderful opportunity to travel, to meet new people, to, you know, I could make new friends, I could, whatever, right?
	Get involved in the business side of what he's doing.
	I could, you know, I could say to him, hey, you know, maybe you should try some new roles and so on.
	But she doesn't. She just sits there.
	It's lonely. And then just spends the next 30 years complaining about it.
	And I remember thinking, like, God Almighty, let me never let that ever happen to me.
	Like, let me never, ever swallow something down, not work to change it, and then just spend the last freaking third of my life complaining about it.
	Because that blame aspect is another part of this sort of undead hellscape of the abandonment of responsibility.
	Oh, God. Okay, so...
	Within that, I often wonder if she was lying, see?
	I wonder that because she says that...
	I had one or two dreams, you know, to be a nun or a concert pianist.
	And so I always wondered if she was lying about that part because she says...
	Right, which one? To be a...
	Okay, I'm sorry. To be a concert pianist is to be in the art world, right?
	To travel, to do like her husband was doing.
	You travel to the theaters and you play, right?
	If you're a concert pianist, that would have been her life anyway if she wanted to do that.
	So when she says, like, oh, I never wanted to be dragged around in these filthy hotel rooms, that's what I was wondering if she was lying about that.
	Maybe she was thrilled with it at first.
	See, I think, okay, she had the second baby who died of measles, right?
	She left the...
	She left James and that middle child, whose real name was Edmund, with her mother.
	But he's referred to as Eugene in the play.
	In other words, Eugene O'Neill, the writer, put himself in his autobiographical play as the child who died.
	That's always struck me as kind of important, but go on.
	You said that line the other day about a woman just squatting over a grave and giving birth.
	Yeah, that's exactly what happened to Eugene O'Neill.
	Okay, so the death of the brother Edmund.
	So she had the baby.
	She says, you know, I thought he was a little too young for me to travel, but you wanted me to be with you.
	She blames it on the husband. You wanted me to be with you so badly.
	I just... Who could resist?
	But it's like, come on.
	You wanted to be with him.
	You're putting it on him like, oh, you wanted me to come and be with you, and I knew better because you made me do it.
	And I think that's a lie. You wanted to go.
	You left the child there.
	And then the whole measles blame seems so god-awful, too, because...
	When I was watching the biography for it, so she says, she accuses James, you went into the baby's room and you knew better.
	You weren't a stupid child.
	You had been told. Now, one of the people in the biography was saying that the contagion, you know, you're...
	You have measles, it's contagious before the symptoms start showing.
	So the baby was probably already infected by the time all this happened anyway.
	Because it's very contagious on top of it.
	But I don't know if she would have known how contagious it was or not.
	I don't know if Like, I wonder if she just, she blamed herself, but she couldn't, so she had to blame her son.
	And like, God, that's sick.
	No, but this is... To put that on a child.
	Sorry, I'll hold my thought.
	You're right in the middle. I'll hold my thought.
	Go ahead. Oh. No, it's okay.
	It's already derailed.
	Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry. Okay, so get your thought back, but I just wanted to mention this as well.
	This is, to me, where the...
	The problem of the lack of religiosity shows up because they would have had an explanation 50 years before, and it wouldn't have been that the elder brother wanted to murder the baby by coughing measles onto its face.
	The explanation would have been, God works in mysterious ways.
	God called that child home.
	They would have been able to put the horror of their situation into some incomprehensible divine plan.
	But because they're not religious anymore, terrible things happen in life.
	And we used to have a place to put the blame, or to dissolve the blame, or to neuter the blame, which was, God works in mysterious ways, and God has a plan, right? This is part of God's plan.
	And also, there wouldn't be this horror of putting your baby in a box in the ground to be eaten by worms because you would believe that your baby's soul had ascended to heaven and was with the angels.
	So, one of the reasons when I talk about this tipping point, right, Michelle, from religious to secular, this blame shit is really powerful when you let go of religion.
	Because you've got, like, we just, why do we have a civilization?
	Because we look for the cause of stuff.
	Why is there fire?
	Oh, there's heat, there's wood.
	Okay, now we can reproduce it.
	How do we make the air cooler?
	Freon! We're always looking to find out the cause of things.
	And that's great when it comes to technology.
	But when your baby gets measles and dies, it's pretty destructive sometimes if you don't have a God.
	It's pretty destructive.
	I mean, what they did was absolutely appalling.
	Was they blamed the eldest son for the murder of his brother.
	Huh! Eldest son ends up completely self-loathing, drowning himself in alcohol, and drinks himself into a very early grave.
	Come on! I mean, that secular problem of blame and causality, of causality, why did the baby die?
	You had an answer under religion.
	I'm not saying it was a great answer philosophically, blah, blah, blah, but you had an answer that at least wasn't, my son killed my baby.
	You know, like that wasn't the, that was never the answer that I can tell.
	And this, you can see this, of course, going on.
	Like, why are people poor?
	You know, oh, exploitation.
	It's capitalism.
	It's white people.
	It's whatever, right?
	This causality of why did so-and-so die?
	Why did so-and-so poor?
	Why?
	We used to have an explanation.
	That was better than I currently.
	The religious explanation is way better than our current explanation because to have put the blame on God's plan, so to speak, dissolves the blame because you're saying, hey, we can't figure it out.
	There is no why as to why my child got measles and died.
	There's no why there.
	Now we can say, well, the why is God's mysterious plan that we can never understand, but that's exactly the same as saying there's no why.
	And because we're so desperate to find causality in things, particularly tragedies, because we want to avoid them, It's horrible because there is no why as to why a baby would die of measles in 1880.
	Like, there's no why. Measles sucks, you know?
	Like, it's an illness that kills people and kills babies.
	And, you know, as you say, the eldest child had measles, probably didn't have any symptoms.
	Nobody knew he's around the baby.
	It could have been he could have touched something that a maid touched and then brought it into the baby's room.
	There's no why! The baby died.
	That's a horrible thing, but there's no why.
	And we used to dissolve our why in the divine, but now we don't.
	And now we blame individuals.
	And that's very, very dangerous.
	Okay, so I do have a lot to say on this regard.
	I will not interrupt. And I am going to push back.
	Yeah, please. Okay.
	Got to be okay? All right.
	So, just to give some background.
	Because I hate it when I talk about Christianity and Christians are like, you don't understand.
	What do you know? You're an atheist.
	So background-wise, I was raised a Christian.
	I've been to many churches, many different denominations all over the country.
	I've lived in many states.
	I studied to be a pastor even for a short time when I was 19, 20, somewhere around there.
	I was... I really believed in God and Jesus, and I was a Christian.
	I wholeheartedly believed, and it was a long, hard road to an atheist.
	So, I haven't really studied the Bible in like 10-15 years, so sometimes I get my quotes mixed up and sometimes I don't remember everything correctly and all that, but the study that I did put in was scholarly study.
	My pastor was not running a little day camp and you get your sticker and you're a pastor.
	He was grilling.
	You had to go through the questions he had.
	You had to look up what other pastors had to say.
	You had to look up old texts and see what they said.
	It was rigorous work.
	So I feel like I've done a lot of homework on this in a regard a long time ago.
	Having said all that, when I was a Christian, I do understand it's a comfort to have someone to talk to.
	You're talking to God.
	You're meditating. You're thinking about what He's saying to you.
	You're thinking on these scriptures.
	It's very comforting.
	And then having this I can't say because I'm just a human, but I can put it on something bigger than myself and put it there and be comfortable with it.
	I understand some people can do that, but I can't.
	I don't find that comforting.
	To me, it's much more comforting to say, I understand back then, maybe, I don't know, I think they had germ theory at this moment yet, I don't remember.
	To me, it's more comforting to have the actual whys.
	To me, the idea of, well, greed is the root of all evil because the Bible says so.
	I disagree. I don't find these satisfactory, so I have a lot of pushback when it comes to, well, we lost some...
	It's like we did lose something in religion, but I feel like we should shed the magical thinking aspects.
	We can keep the good...
	Hard-won lessons.
	Like, the Bible is an evolved book that has been around for thousands of years, and before that, before it was written, it was spoken.
	Like, people living thousands of years over generation after generation wrote down their hard-won lessons of just being fucking human, seeing civilizations rise and fall.
	And they wrote down the lessons in the book, and granted, you've got to put some plaster on it or whatever, and I understand that this can cause things to get lost, too, which is part of the frustration.
	But like, I got myself lost when I do that.
	You and I talked about magic and madness a while back, right?
	Yep. You said to me, we can't go back.
	And as much respect as I have for the lessons that are in the Bible and the things that Christians have hard won, I don't have...
	I can't go back.
	Oh no, listen. I can't.
	Look, I'm with you.
	I'm not saying that we...
	I'm simply pointing out this particular progression.
	Okay. That if we are continually looking for the why of accidents, we go crazy.
	And we end up blaming other people.
	And in this play, the child is blamed.
	And it gets even worse, because not only is a seven-year-old blamed for the death of a baby because of the measles, in one of the most terrifying monologues in literary history, the elder brother blames the younger brother For the mother's addiction.
	Because he says, after you were born, mom got addicted.
	And he says, I know that's crazy, but I can't help hating your guts for it.
	Because it was the pain...
	You've got to move a little bit to the left.
	The pain of...
	The pain of whatever...
	I think it's unspecified.
	Maybe you remember better. But the pain that the mother was going through after the birth of her third child, that the second had survived...
	They don't specify. So it could be physical, it could be emotional, it could be psychological, who knows, right?
	But the pain, so the causality is, well, you had this baby, you were in pain, the doctor gave you morphine.
	So why did you become an addict?
	Well, because the husband wouldn't pay for a better doctor.
	Well, because I had the baby, and so you're blaming the husband, and you're actually blaming the baby for the addiction of the mother.
	Now, because If you have more insight on this, I'm certainly happy to hear it, because this is a psychological phenomenon that occurs.
	I do not understand it.
	I know it's very, very common. So the parents blame the eldest son for the death of the baby, which makes the eldest son hate himself and feel like a murderer.
	So then, rather than say, well, that's a crazy thing, I better not do that, because I know how bad it makes me feel, the eldest son blames the youngest son for the addiction of the mother.
	So the eldest son is blamed for something that happened when he was seven, and But the eldest son, knowing how terrible that is and how painful and awful that is, instead then blames the youngest son as a baby for the addiction of the mother.
	Now, at least the eldest son was probably told, don't go into the baby's room because you have measles, right?
	But a baby. I mean, there's no rational universe in which you can blame a baby.
	And I've never understood this particular phenomenon.
	I'd love to understand it.
	Why the hell would you treat someone like hell when you know how bad it is to be treated like hell?
	Like, why would you have this shit-rolls-downhill kind of thing?
	Well, they're blaming me for the death of your brother.
	Well, I'm blaming you for the addiction of mom.
	And if you have any insight to that...
	But clearly, this is a family that doesn't know how to...
	How to figure out the cause of things.
	And a lot of the abuse that they are throwing at each other is this desperate, manic, insane desire to find the cause of the dysfunction.
	Why is mom an addict? Why did the baby die?
	You know what? Now, I agree with you.
	God works in mysterious ways is not a rational answer.
	But what it does do is it has you not blame children and babies for the disasters in your life.
	And I agree.
	Like, I'm just saying... I'd rather that than what goes on in the secular world of a long day's journey into night.
	Mm-hmm. I have to agree with you on that.
	I just, I don't know.
	It's like, I don't know if I can wholly credit Christianity with that, because like, I wonder if it's like just something in our brains, because like, we have people that say, oh, well, maybe we live in a matrix we have people that say, oh, well, maybe we live in a matrix or the universe this or,
	And I don't know if it's just a part of our brain that can't accept that sometimes coincidence and shit just happens.
	We have a very tough time.
	And I wonder like if, yeah.
	and I wonder like if we never had Christianity We would probably still struggle with it and just say it's something else.
	So it's like I'm not so You can dissolve the causality into the acid wash of God works in mysterious ways.
	Now, that's not a rational explanation, but sometimes there is no causal explanation.
	Measles. And measles is not sentient, right?
	So it's just, it's shit happens, right?
	And that's unbearable, especially when the loss is of a child and so on.
	And here's the other thing too.
	I mean, God, I'm sure that kid probably, if he got to read that play later, would be like, I'm pretty glad that measles got me because these people are just monstrous, right?
	I mean... I mean, it's so...
	I've never fundamentally understood this, like, why you would say, I'm now going to torture my children because one child died.
	It's like, isn't that throwing, like, adult bodies into the same grave you buried your child in?
	Like, wouldn't the death of a child have you appreciate and treat your existing children better?
	But they don't do that, right?
	They take this catastrophe, and because they don't have a mysterious ways dissolving agent to get rid of the question...
	Because it doesn't answer the question, but it helps you stop asking the question.
	Like, you know, if you've ever looked for something, you either find it or you give up, right?
	And if you find it, great, right?
	And if you give up, like after you've genuinely searched everywhere, right?
	I mean, I remember once losing money in a place I lived in.
	And, you know, this is, you know, it was not a tiny amount of money.
	It wasn't like a fortune or anything, but I had some cash.
	And eventually, this is when I was very young, I moved out, right?
	Now, when you move out, you take everything out, right?
	The whole place is bare and empty.
	It's like, okay, well... I have closure that it wasn't in the place, you know, because otherwise you're like, oh, is it in the place, right?
	So what happens is if you have the mysterious ways argument or the mysterious ways perspective, you can stop looking.
	Right? It's like, okay, here we're going to stop looking.
	But if you don't have that, you keep looking for causality to the point where you blame a seven-year-old and then the seven-year-old blames a baby and then the husband is blamed by the wife and then the husband blames the play and then, you know, the wife blames the husband and now everyone's blaming each other because they don't have...
	Stop looking! Stop looking.
	Or if you're going to look, look in your own heart and mind.
	But in particular, the blaming...
	Because the one thing that happened that did not have any causality was the death of the baby by measles, right?
	Like the mom, obviously she took the morphine and she at some point made the choice to keep taking it.
	The dad chose the riches over his talent and the kids chose to be wastrels and this, you know.
	But the baby didn't choose the measles, right?
	So this is the one thing...
	Where the family would have been a hell of a lot healthier if they had just said, hey, mysterious ways, right?
	God works in mysterious ways.
	He has a plan. It's painful for us, but we have to trust in the plan.
	At least they're not turning on each other.
	And that's sort of the major issue, I think, that you were about to comment on.
	Yeah, okay. So this makes me think of some weird dynamics in my own family on this regard.
	So, okay. Like you said, like, okay, so they don't have, you know, the God of Works in Mysterious Ways argument to place blame somewhere that's not hurting somebody, right?
	And so they blame the child because, hey, he's the, he's, it must have been him, he's the one that had the measles, right?
	And then, like, it's like they dwell and dwell and dwell on it, okay?
	And this makes me kind of think of my own family.
	Okay, my dad, I'm pretty sure, hated his mother, right?
	But, he had this story of, well, she had a horrible life, she had a tough childhood, so we need to treat Grandma with respect, we need to do things for Grandma, yet he resented her and hated her for everything he went through in his childhood, which is a whole other story.
	So, I always felt that because he can never...
	Place the blame where it belonged or confront her for his bad childhood.
	He perpetuated his childhood onto me and my brother, expecting that when my brother and I reached age, we would do the same for him as he did for grandma.
	Like, does that make sense? I think that's along those lines.
	Right. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, somebody commented the other day on a video where I was talking about what might have happened to my mother during the war.
	And he was talking about, you know, because my mother made mention of Russians invading the village where she was, and having to be kind of cutesy and coquettish with the tank armada so it didn't blow up the entire village.
	And he was saying that, you know, the stories of rape and pedophilia and molestation and so on from the Russians charging into Germany were legion and, you know, not proof, but the suspicion my mother was a very attractive woman.
	I've seen pictures of her as a child, very attractive.
	And so if there were creeps and pedophiles in this army, this was a time of complete social chaos and breakdown that what might have happened to my mother during the war would be horrors beyond imagination in terms of potential child rape or serial rape or whatever it was, right? Which would go a hell of a long way towards explaining some causality behind her dysfunction.
	And that is a sorrowful thing to think about.
	But I'm still not giving causality to that.
	I'm still not saying, well, that's the dominoes, right?
	Because, I mean, obviously I didn't have a childhood that bad if that's what happened to her.
	But I still have to say that my childhood cannot be the domino causality of my adult life.
	Otherwise, I can't change anything.
	And so for me, the mysterious ways is free will.
	The reality, of course, is that It's always the parent's fault.
	You know, like, you can say, well, the seven-year-old was told not to go into the baby's room, right?
	Yeah. The baby got measles, right?
	Now, we don't even know what—maybe they never saw the kid in the room, right?
	So the baby gets measles, and they say, did you go into this room?
	And he says, no, I didn't go into the room.
	No, you must have gone into the room because the baby has measles.
	Nobody else in the house has measles.
	It had to be you. Like, they may never have even seen, you know, seven-year-old boys not overly fascinated by babies, you know, right?
	Yeah. Yeah. No, it seemed to me she decided that's what happened.
	Right. I think that's true.
	She decided that's what happened.
	And that's a hell of a thing to place on a child.
	And so for me, the causality, even if you know, like your parents had a terrible childhood, well...
	So did I, so did you.
	You can still make different choices.
	I don't think that you can ever be traumatized to the point where you can't change or you can't be honest or whatever.
	I just think that's a sort of a reality.
	So I really am glad that we're at least to some degree in alignment with regards to secular versus religious and this hollowing out of belief.
	To me, the end of faith is not the catastrophe.
	The catastrophe... Is the lack of anything to replace it, right?
	I mean, that's been the big challenge and it's one of the things I've been working for for many, many years.
	Meaning and virtue and ethics and all of that.
	We have to have something.
	We have to have something because we grew up on God and we can't just take that out of ourselves and imagine that we can just carry on as if nothing was amputated.
	Yeah, so I have...
	love-hate relationship with this idea.
	Okay, 'cause like for me, I look around and I understand today we go, look at all these crazy blue hair SJWs running around without God and then look at what's happening, right?
	Now, when I was a kid, it was the Christians that were doing this.
	Like to me, the blue hair, busy bodies running around look exactly like the Christians from when I was a child.
	They were dragging in my favorite bands, accusing them of blasphemy, corrupting the youth.
	Why are you doing this?
	Blah, blah, blah. You got to go see Congress and testify.
	To me, it's like I don't see anything different happening between these two groups.
	But what I think happened is a marriage with government, right?
	The Christian base was a nice voting bloc.
	The government wanted to court that voting bloc, so hey, we'll give you incentives to vote for us.
	That's just human nature.
	It's not blaming Christians for it.
	I think during the time of my childhood, they were the people in power.
	And it's not so much like the Christians themselves.
	I think it's more like the marriage of the government.
	The government used that aspect of Christianity.
	Oh, you want to protect your children?
	Oh, let us have some censorship here.
	Give us some power here to do some censorship.
	And I think that's what's going on today.
	It's just that instead of protecting the youth and the Christian values, it's, well, don't you want some liberty?
	Don't you want to be a slut like everybody else?
	But it's like the same tactic.
	That's the way I see it. Right, right, right.
	Yeah, well, we're still wrestling with this whole thing.
	So let's get to the demonic temptation of the brother.
	Yes. Oh, my God.
	I'm going to cry. I got my tissues here.
	I don't know if you've ever had this.
	Yeah, I have a lot to say about this speech.
	I've literally had this conversation with someone who was revealing a kind of what would have been called a demonic side and warning me against themselves.
	I've had a friend who I was trying to...
	I wouldn't say this sounds like a project or something, but I had a friend that was being elevated by discussions with me and had another friend of his who wanted to drag him back down into his stupid drinking and partying and stuff like that.
	And I remember that friend looking at me and saying, yeah, we're battling over his soul.
	You know, it's going to be interesting to see who wins, right?
	Unfortunately, I didn't win. But, so this, like, you can have these moments with people, and I'm just going to give this, I'm not going to, like, big acting thing, but here's the speech, right?
	Yeah, if you do, I'll cry.
	Yeah, this is the elder brother, Jamie, talking to the younger brother.
	This is, at night, they've been out drinking, right?
	Yeah. And the son has been diagnosed, the younger has been diagnosed with tuberculosis, which could be fatal.
	The mom's dad died of tuberculosis and so on, right?
	Maybe. Yeah, again, unreliable narratives or something, right?
	But, you know, it's interesting because when we have an autobiographical play, we have a court, so to speak, which is, did it actually happen in Eugene O'Neill's real family?
	So he says, listen, kid, you'll be going away.
	You may not get another chance to talk or might not be drunk enough to tell you Truth.
	So, I gotta tell you now.
	Something I ought to have told you long ago for your own good.
	And he pauses, struggling with himself.
	Jamie blurts out, Not drunken bull, but in vino veritas stuff.
	You better take it seriously.
	Want to warn you against me.
	Mama and Papa are right.
	I've been a rotten, bad influence, and worst of all, I did it on purpose.
	Now, this is...
	Jason Robbins, to me, is the king of this speech, right?
	Because this is in vino veritas, right?
	In wine there is truth. This is the eruption of the remnants of a soul.
	You know, like when you have a fire, you're camping, right?
	You have a fire, and...
	Just as it's dying, right?
	The logs all pile in.
	You get this big flare-up of sparks and so on, right?
	And you think, oh, that's light.
	And it's like, no, that's the end of light.
	And this is the end of the light of this man's soul.
	This is his soul dying in the scene, and it's passing a note saying, all I can do is warn you against what I've been teaching you.
	Because earlier he's got this whole creepy speech about he went to a whorehouse and it was kind of cool and it was kind of fun and all that kind of stuff.
	So the So he says, I've been a rotten bad influence, and worst of it is, I did it on purpose.
	And the youngest son says, shut up, I don't want to hear.
	And Jamie says, next kid, you listen!
	Did it on purpose to make a bum of you!
	A part of me did, a big part, the part that's been dead so long, that hates life.
	Am I putting you wise so you'd learn from my mistakes?
	Belief that myself at times, but it's a fake thing.
	Made my mistakes look good.
	Made getting drunk romantic.
	Made whores fascinating vampires instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are.
	Made fun of work as a sucker's game.
	Never wanted you to succeed and make me look even worse by comparison.
	Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you.
	Mama's baby, papa's pet.
	And it was your being born that started Mama on dope!
	I know that's not your fault, but all the same, God damn you, I can't help hating your guts!
	And it's a real...
	I mean, it's an eruption of this terrible, terrifying truth, right?
	That there's these scripts at the basis of so many relationships that are always avoided, but always manifested through that avoidance.
	And Edmund, he's scared, says, Jamie, cut it out.
	You're crazy. And Jamie says, but don't get the wrong idea, kid.
	I love you more than I hate you.
	I mean, this is all borderline stuff.
	This is all, like, codependent stuff, right?
	I hate you. Don't leave me, right?
	He says, but don't get the wrong idea, kid.
	I love you more than I hate you.
	My saying what I'm telling you now proves it.
	I run the risk you'll hate me, and you're all I've got left.
	But I didn't mean to tell you that last stuff.
	Go that far back. He's referring to you made mom a dope fiend or whatever.
	I don't know what made me. What I wanted to say is I'd like to see you become the greatest success in the world.
	Now that struck me because this play takes place right before Eugene O'Neill's ascent into his literary stardom, which is second almost to none, certainly in America.
	And he says, what I wanted to say is I'd like to see you become the greatest success in the world, but you better be on your guard because I'll do my damnedest to make you fail.
	Can't help it. I hate myself.
	Got to take revenge on everyone else, especially you.
	Oscar Wilde's Reading Jail has the dope twisted.
	The man was dead and so he had to kill the thing he loved.
	That's what it ought to be.
	The dead part of me hopes you won't get well.
	Maybe he's even glad the game has got Mama again, write the drugs.
	He wants company. He doesn't want to be the only corpse around the house.
	And that strikes me as Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, or memoirs from the House of the Dead.
	He says, Jesus, Jamie, you really have gone crazy.
	Jamie says, think it over and you'll see I'm right.
	Think it over when you're away from me in the sanatorium.
	Make up your mind. You've got to tie a can to me.
	Get me out of your life. Think of me as dead.
	Tell people, I had a brother, but he's dead.
	And when you come back, look out for me.
	I'll be waiting to welcome you with that, oh, my old pal stuff, and give you the glad hand, and at the first good chance I get, stab you in the back.
	And he says, shut up. I'll be goddamned if I listen to you anymore.
	Right? So he's Saying, I will destroy you, just as I have destroyed myself.
	And Jamie, and the stage direction is as if he hadn't heard, right?
	The elder brother, as if he hadn't heard.
	He says, only don't forget me.
	Remember, I warned you for your sake.
	Give me credit. Greater love hath no man than this, that he saveth his brother from himself.
	Now that's the evolution of Cain versus Abel, right?
	At least he's giving him fair, fair warning.
	And then, it's funny because after this revelation, this continually happens, right?
	Everything fades, right? So then he says, that's all.
	Feel better now. Gone to confession.
	No, you absolve me.
	Don't you, kid? You understand.
	You're a damn fine kid.
	Ought to be. I made you.
	So go and get well. Don't die on me.
	You're all I've got. God bless you, kid.
	That last drink, the old KO. Down he goes, right?
	Mm-hmm. And the dad comes in and, thank God, he says, thank God he's asleep.
	I thought he'd never stop talking.
	So the dad has heard this speech.
	And it reminds me of this film called The Third Man, where this man gets all these signs about how he's going to get killed and doesn't do a damn thing to change the course of his life.
	The father has just heard his eldest son confess that he's got a murderous impulse towards his youngest son.
	The father comes in and says, well, I'm glad he's passed out because, man, he was yammering on.
	Wow! You've really got to work that hard to be that blind.
	Yeah. That reminds me of my own father, if it's okay to tell a little story on that regard.
	You can. You should. Okay.
	And I want to get back to this speech, because I have a lot to say about it.
	But, yeah. Death itself cannot change people sometimes, so...
	Okay, so I lived near my father for a short time a few years ago, trying to be vague here, because he, like, I had lived in a different part of the country.
	He asked me if I'd move closer to him to help him with some health issues he was having with his heart, so on and so forth.
	So I agreed, like an idiot.
	And during my time there, I knew that he could have a heart attack, and I was mentally prepared, and he did.
	Um... So he called me to his house and he asked if he was laying in his chair and asked if I could take him to the hospital.
	So I said, yeah, I had to go back to my house and get some things, come back.
	And while I was doing that, he showed up at my house driving the car and said, let's go.
	And I was like, scoot over, I'll drive.
	And he was like, no, I can.
	It's probably just chest pain.
	I'll be fine. But I just want to go check it out.
	So, OK, so I get in the car with him.
	We're driving to the hospital.
	We hit a little speed bump.
	And then all of a sudden, I was kind of just looking out the window talking.
	All of a sudden, I noticed that the car's listing and slowing down.
	And so I look over and I see he's slumped against the steering wheel, staring at me.
	And I was like, okay, here it comes.
	Now, when you're in an emergency situation, especially if you have already had some time to think, what will I do in that situation?
	Your brain just...
	They're not joking about like, you know, your life flashes before your eyes type situation, right?
	So I have thought about, okay, this is what I need to do.
	I need to stop the car. I need to call 911.
	I need to flag people down because we were on the street.
	But at the same time that script is running in my mind, I thought, maybe I should let him die.
	He's pretty terrible.
	He makes everybody miserable.
	If I just wait a few seconds before I call 911, I could probably say that I panicked, and I don't think anybody will question me.
	But your brain is just like, no, no, no, you gotta get your shit done.
	Don't think that, right?
	That's not up to you, right?
	It's not up to you, right?
	And it wasn't up to me.
	And I still struggle sometimes.
	I still have that thought of like, God, maybe I should have.
	But like, no, I know I can't, right?
	It's bizarre, but... So, I saved his life.
	I called 911, I flagged down motorists to help me pull him out of the vehicle and begin CPR, guided the ambulance to where we were, and they took him to the hospital.
	My husband, we actually weren't too far from my house, so my husband came and got me and drove me to the hospital, and then I stayed there until a life flight, a helicopter could be called in, because we were in a small town, to take him out to a city to see a proper surgeon.
	So, and then I had to drive to that town, which was several hours away, and then it was weeks of back and forth.
	They thought he might die while he was in the hospital.
	His kidneys shut down for a short time.
	I was having to...
	I make medical decisions for him because anytime they need to do something, they got to call you and get permission for some fucking reason.
	And then I had to get my brother from a different state, get him to there because they were saying he might die.
	You got to get your family gathered.
	Then on top of it, my father was going through a divorce with his second wife.
	They have a child who's 23.
	20 years my junior.
	I was 20 years old when he was born.
	So he was about 10 or 11 around the time this happened.
	So I had to deal with what happens with the mother and the custody and the divorce while my dad was in the hospital.
	So the best thing to do in that situation is to call the lawyer, your father's lawyer, which is what I did, called my father's lawyer and I told him this is what's going on.
	What should I do to make sure everything's square with the court?
	The lawyer said, The court wants, in this case, the child should go to the mother while the father's in the hospital and then we'll deal with it afterward.
	I knew my father would not be happy if I did that.
	But, like, what am I going to do?
	Am I going to defy the court and say, nah, let's just keep this a secret and risk myself and everything else, or tell the lawyer the truth and do what the lawyer, who it's his job to know the law and do what's best for you, follow his advice?
	So that's what I did. Once my father regained consciousness and...
	Sorry, this is a long story.
	My father regained consciousness and we were called to the hospital.
	And he was all doped up on the pain medicines and all that.
	And when he looked at me, he saw me when I walked in the room and he looked at me like...
	You know when your newborn is nursing with your wife and they smile up at you with that just perfect love?
	He smiled at me like that.
	I had never, ever, like, nothing like that ever before.
	Like, I was only hugged twice a year.
	On Christmas and birthday, you get your annual, your biannual hug.
	So I walked into the hospital and he had that look on his face and it broke my heart.
	And I thought, oh, maybe...
	Maybe he'll stop treating me like shit.
	Maybe he will start to be a father.
	I can forgive him if he'll do it.
	I have it in my heart that I could do that.
	I could get over it.
	But as soon as the drugs wore off, he was right back to his belligerent self.
	He We didn't tell him about what had happened with the lawyer and my little brother and stuff because I didn't want him to get stressed out.
	Okay, I'm sorry. I have a little brother that's only two years younger than me, so closer to my age, we're full siblings.
	He visited my father in the hospital without me and told my father what was happening with our younger brother.
	And the custody and the lawyer and all that and that got my father all worked up and then he started being belligerent to the nurses and wouldn't take his medication so that they were forced to kick him out of the hospital so that he could return back home and then cause ruckus there.
	Okay I'm sorry that's kind of a long story but in all that he was extremely angry with me because he knew like he knew I knew what he wanted and And I didn't do what he wanted.
	And so he called me up and he threatened to break my jaw.
	And before he had gotten out of the hospital, I had filled his fridge with like healthy food, like the yogurts and stuff, because they wipe out your, you know, they get the antibiotics while you're on the heart attack.
	So they wipe out all your gut bacteria.
	You need to get some yogurt and stuff and infuse that back in.
	So I bought him all this good food and cleaned his house.
	And he came home early anyway.
	And then like I don't know how he did this, because he was as weak as a kitten.
	He could barely walk.
	He gathered up the food that I had put in his fridge, drove over to my apartment, and threw it on my doorstep.
	Just this bag of food all over my doorstep.
	I'm sorry, just really quick.
	My point was that I saved my dad's life from a goddamn heart attack, handled his affairs, did all this stuff, I'm sorry.
	My point was that I saw the terror in his face when he was dying.
	And I saved his life and yet he still could not treat me like I wasn't shit on his booth.
	I'm sorry. That was my point.
	My point was I was traumatized and it was horrible.
	Well, yeah, because then I was able to defle after that.
	It ate me. I went through that and I said, If this cannot make my father be a goddamn father, or treat me like a goddamn decent human being, he treats strangers better than he treats me.
	If this event cannot change that, there is no hope.
	That was when I finally defood.
	I'm sorry, that was my whole point, was that you can go through something this horrible, you can save the evil son of a bitch's life, and they'll still spit in your goddamn face when they recover.
	Yes. Yes, the personality.
	And that was Back to Death Doesn't Change People.
	Yes, I'm sorry.
	That was the whole point of that.
	I'm sorry. Now, there's something else about the play that I didn't remember from when I was younger.
	So something has changed for me.
	And I think I know what it is, but let me know what you think.
	They don't like each other.
	None of these people like each other.
	And they're stuck together.
	And one of the things that struck me was how bored they must be.
	They don't engage in interesting conversations.
	They can't play.
	They play some card.
	They try to play some card game, the dad and the youngest son.
	And they can't even do that.
	And they have these weird flashes of confessions and illuminations.
	And then everybody just kind of shrugs and moves on.
	They're so fundamentally bored that it sort of reminds me of a scene in Chekhov's The Wood Demon where the guy is saying, you know, I'm stuck in Siberia in a tent.
	We're guarding nothing.
	We're there month after month after month.
	And then one day the guy I'm stationed there with just picks up a sword and starts swinging at me.
	Okay.
	Because he's so bored. I'd rather fight than...
	So I think this emptiness and this boredom, because one of the things that's just teeth-grittingly repetitive about dysfunction, this is something that Paul Johnson said with regards to Tolstoy.
	You know, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, what he starts off, he says, you know, every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family...
	It's different in its own way.
	And Paul Johnson said, actually, that seems quite the opposite of the truth.
	Like, there's wide variety among happiness, but dysfunction is grindingly repetitive, and it's always the same damn thing, and it's always so predictable, and it's always so boring.
	Because you know, the play to me, it needed an edit, but he didn't have an editor because he wrote it and didn't want it published for 25 years after he died, right?
	So he didn't have an editor.
	But if I was his editor, I'd say...
	You know, we get it. They hate each other.
	They blame each other for everything.
	You've made your point. It's hell.
	Nothing's going to change, and nothing does change, right?
	The last line of the play, and then I met your father, and I was happy for a time.
	Yeah, you were happy for a time because you got your vanity satisfied by, you know, he married the prettiest girl, and you married the most high-status male, and, you know, that was happy for a while, but there was no moral foundation to the relationship, which they would have had under religion, for better and for worse.
	But they're so bored with each other, and boredom in relationships as the source of dysfunction, I think, is something that's underappreciated, right?
	Because to my way of thinking, what gets people out, and this is related to your story about your dad, what gets people out of dysfunctional relationships is recognizing that they're not going to change, which makes them not traumatic anymore, but boring.
	Really, really boring.
	Like, you know, when you start to sort of understand how Hollywood movies work and you're like, okay, well, I know, I know, I know what's going to happen with this.
	Like, you just don't want to watch them anymore, right?
	I don't want to watch comic book movies.
	I mean, they're just boring. They're just boring.
	You know, there's going to be some classic rock motif.
	There's going to be some cool guy.
	You just know how this is all going to, the woman's going to be super tough and she don't need no man.
	And, you know, the man's going to be kind of goofy and fumbly but end up saving the day.
	Like, you just know there's all of these cliches, you know, if there's, In an interracial relationship, you always know how it's going to play out and what's going to happen and who's going to be what.
	There's all these tropes, right?
	I mean, if a woman's walking down an alley, she's going to be scared by a cat first.
	You just know all of these things that are going to happen.
	And so you get out of these relationships to some degree.
	Like for you, with your dad, it's like, okay, well, if this doesn't change him, nothing will.
	So I know what's going to happen.
	And when you know what's going to happen...
	It's not... Trauma almost comes out of hope, right?
	So as a kid, you don't have any choice.
	But as an adult, you hope things are going to be different, right?
	Oh, things are going to change. It's going to grow.
	And if death doesn't do it, nothing's going to do it.
	So the trauma comes out of hope.
	But the hope is never materialized.
	When you realize that the hope is false, that change will not come, you are able to rescue yourself from trauma By an anticipation of boredom.
	I know how this is going to go.
	I know if I say this, they're going to say this.
	I know if this topic comes up.
	So every single time something comes up that's difficult, people blame each other.
	They don't take any responsibility.
	They just blame each other.
	And it's really boring and it's really predictable, which is why that scene to me with the brother came kind of out of nowhere.
	That it's like, oh my God, this is actually real.
	Now the fact that nobody listens and nobody cares...
	Is kind of important.
	Now the brother, he doesn't say, hey, I'm going to change.
	He says, no, I'm not going to change.
	I'm going to stab you in the back. And he doesn't change.
	The actual brother drank himself to death.
	Didn't change. And I also thought about how this incredibly dysfunctional behavior is marked as cool.
	That's a trend that's still going on.
	You know, like being a slut is cool.
	You know, drinking is cool.
	You know, like it's, you know, the denizens of the underworld, like Lady Gaga videos with these weird guys in masks and shit like that.
	It's like they're seriously disturbed human beings, right?
	I mean, this is not cool. This is like horrible.
	This is the kind of horror show. It's a freak show.
	And when people get bored of that, when they recognize that there's no salvation possible, I think there's real freedom in recognizing the grinding repetitiveness of defenses.
	There aren't actually people there.
	Like, there's death in life that keeps being talked about in the play.
	They say about the mom, you'll be like a mad ghost by tonight if you keep taking these drugs.
	And the brother saying, I'm...
	Already dead. There's a dead part of me.
	I want to be like mom.
	I don't want to be the only corpse in the room, right?
	And the reason that he feels like he's a corpse is he was accused of murder of the baby, right?
	So when you kill, it's a spear.
	It's a stick sharp at both ends.
	You put it in someone else, it goes into you, right?
	And this boredom is to me really powerful.
	It's not mentioned explicitly, of course, because that'd be fairly evolved, but it's everywhere in there just how repetitive it is and how much they pick at each other because they have nothing to say to each other.
	Yeah, so the first time I watched it, I was on the edge of my seat with this play.
	It was the greatest thriller.
	Like, oh my God, what are they talking about?
	What's going to happen next, right?
	And, okay, so in that speech, the brother says, you know, oh, I convinced you that...
	Drinking was romantic, yeah.
	Yes, and the prostitutes, vampire, glamorous vampires, instead they're poor dopes, and he does say something about working, being a fool's game.
	Just for suckers. Yeah, that's right.
	So, like, when you were talking earlier about, like, kind of these socialistic tendencies, and, um...
	Okay, so, like, the brother...
	The brother spun this narrative.
	He hates himself.
	He hates his parents, but he can't admit it, I think.
	Okay, God. Okay, so there's so much I have to say on this because, like, I have been the older abusive sibling.
	Okay, so I'm the oldest sibling, and I was abusive to my little brother when we were siblings.
	Or, I'm sorry, when we were younger children.
	Part of that is that shit-rolls-down-hill thing, right?
	The parents are...
	At the vomiting at Jamie, and then Jamie vomits at Edmund because who else is there for Jamie to take it out on?
	There is part of that.
	And even though you, like, I loved, I do, I still love my brother, and I think about that, and it makes me feel terrible, but like...
	There were times when I wanted to hurt him because I was hurting or it was just irritating me.
	Sorry to interrupt, but what did hurting him do for you?
	Like, how did that help? Okay.
	You know, if my tooth is hurting, I go punch someone else.
	It doesn't make my tooth hurt less.
	I know. I know.
	It's so stupid. Okay, so Jamie says, Mama's baby, Papa's pet, right?
	Oh, I love James Rovard when he says that.
	That's part of it.
	It's like this resentment.
	There would be times where my father would either show...
	I think he was pitting against each other in a way, where he would show favor to one or the other in a given situation, and that would make the other angry, because there wasn't a fairness in it or something.
	It was on a whim.
	There was no logic to it.
	For Jamie...
	Mother favors poor little Edmund.
	You know, Jamie is blamed for the death of the middle brother.
	So, like, I think it's so hard to explain.
	It's like, they're hurting me.
	And even though, like, because I think siblings don't really realize how much they love each other until they're older.
	Like, that might be part of it.
	It's hard when you don't have your parents giving you an example of how to love and be loved and be loving.
	So how are you supposed to show that to your siblings?
	I just can't quite word this right and it's like a...
	do for you how did it help you when you were hurting to hurt your sibling so when i was annoyed with my brother so you know there's a period of time where girls are a little stronger than boys you know for a So during that period of time, I relished pinning him down on the ground and holding him because he couldn't move.
	But why? Why did you relish that?
	Oh, why?
	I mean, you could have given him a hug and said, listen, we're both in a pretty terrible situation here.
	We've got each other. We've got to cling to each other like Frodo and Samwise in Mordor because there are orcs around and we can be...
	And there were those moments.
	There were those moments.
	It was kind of like a...
	It was like back and forth, back and forth.
	I love you. I hate you. I love you.
	I hate you. I love you. I hate you.
	And I do think...
	I do think that there was...
	Play from the adults in that.
	You're explaining. This is all in your head.
	Give me your heart. What was the benefit to you?
	How did it help you to hurt or torture your brother?
	Don't give me this abstract.
	There was some visceral, deep down...
	What was that?
	that?
	How did it help you?
	What was the motive?
	Or another way of asking that is what would have happened if you didn't do that?
	Okay. It's hard to have an emotional attachment here.
	I don't entirely understand it.
	Like, I do understand the feeling of Being powerful and dominant in the moment.
	There was also an aspect of wanting to impress my father.
	I wanted to impress my father and show that I was tough too.
	I wanted...
	Okay, so why did you want to impress your father?
	Did you feel then he would treat you better?
	Yeah, like... It's not exactly like I expected that he would treat me better, but it was kind of like a competition.
	So say my brother and I were fighting with each other.
	There would be moments where my dad would take one side or the other and tell the other to knock it off or get revenge for them or whatever.
	But then there would be these other moments where he would step back and just say, well, you solve it.
	You guys figure it out.
	I don't know if it was like a...
	He wanted to see what would happen.
	If it was amusing for him.
	No, no, you're back in... This is all theory.
	You've got a gut emotional reason for doing this.
	Okay. Even before we lived with my father, when my brother and I would fight, we would bite each other really hard.
	He would bite me and I would bite him.
	No, but I'm not talking about the mutual, right?
	So it's interesting that I'm asking for your responsibility.
	You immediately shift to the mutual.
	I'm asking about your responsibility as the elder and at times as the stronger.
	What was the benefit in attacking your brother?
	I mean, morally, neutrally, like, forget the ethics of it.
	Yeah, it's okay. There's something that, you know, like, why do people have sex?
	Because it feels good. Why do they eat?
	Because they're hungry. Like, there's this, like, what is that?
	Because, like, I mean, I was bullied as a kid, and we had pets, and there were other younger kids in the neighborhood, and I didn't walk out, and I didn't hurt the pets.
	I didn't go, I never hit another kid.
	I never, right, never pushed another kid.
	I never really said mean things to other kids.
	Yeah. So I'm missing something as far as that motivation goes.
	Okay. Okay.
	It is hard for me to understand this with my own sibling.
	Part of that is because of...
	The weirdness of my childhood.
	I feel like I can better explain this with a stepchild, if you'll give me a second.
	So, when I was a teenager, my dad started dating this other lady who had two children.
	The older one was about the same age as my brother and I. The younger one was several years younger, but like seven or eight or something like that.
	This kid... The youngest one was favored by the mother.
	She would spoil him so he'd get a little bit bigger slice of cake than everybody else.
	If he whined for a candy bar when we were at the gas station, he'd get one while she'd say no to everybody else.
	So in that, he became like a target.
	Now, there would be times where I would go, I'm the older person here.
	I shouldn't do this.
	I know it's not his fault his mom babies him.
	But yet, so whenever I would try to be kind and act that way towards him, the kid would switch teams.
	So it's like, oh, one person out of the group of three is being nice to me, so now I'm going to gang up with the other two and start acting like a shit towards the one that's being nice to me.
	And then that would make me angry.
	So in that dynamic, I can understand it.
	With my brother and I... I would say between the two of us that I was the favored one, as in I got shat on a little bit less.
	My family was more apt to call my brother stupid or to denigrate him or shit on him or say he couldn't do things than they were to me.
	They did that to me, but more to him.
	So being the one that's favored...
	In that regard, I still looked at him like he was the favored one because he was younger and he had less responsibilities than I did.
	So if I had to load the dishwasher, I had to do it right.
	If my brother did it and my dad wasn't satisfied, he would tell me to reload it because my brother just couldn't do it right.
	And then I would get resentful.
	Like, you don't have to put up with this shit that I do.
	I don't think I consciously set out to take it out on him.
	But maybe, and I know I enjoyed feeling powerful over him.
	I know I enjoyed that I could pin him down to the ground.
	That even though I was a girl, I still had the strength to pin this kid down.
	And he couldn't get up until I released him to get up.
	And then in that moment, that was scary.
	Because it's like, well, then he could get up and then we could really start brawling.
	And it was some adrenaline in that.
	I'm not sure. We'll have to keep mulling it over.
	Let me know if anything pops into your mind.
	I wanted to say with Jamie, when he was yelling at Edmund in this moment, I identified so much with that.
	It makes me cry so much.
	I feel like I'm Jamie yelling at my little brother.
	In that moment. And at the same time, I feel like that's my father yelling at me in that moment.
	I feel...
	I feel like, you know, whatever dead part in my father that might have loved me as a child, there's all this other poison around it.
	So, like, this idea of, like, I sabotage you.
	I bring you down.
	I give you the wrong information on purpose.
	I think that's very true.
	I don't think everybody has the ability to see that darkness in themselves, right?
	Or to see it and not change course.
	It was too late for him, I guess, right?
	He'd already done so much harm with the prostitutes.
	Who knows what else this guy had done in his life?
	It's not really hinted at, but it was too late for him at that point.
	And... It's almost like the mother who's drowning passing the baby to the dinghy, you know?
	Like, I mean... And that's a terrible thing, that there can be this flash of insight that's too late.
	And that, to me, is something...
	I've been terrified of that in my life.
	This idea that I'm going to go on some bad course, and I'm only going to realize it when it's too late.
	And that's kind of like the dad, right?
	The dad said, you know, I made all this money, I was on this terrible course, and then I didn't know it was so bad until it was too late.
	And the mom is like, well, I was just taking these drugs for pain.
	I didn't realize I was addicted until it was too late.
	And then this guy is like, well, I've been an alcoholic, dissolute drug...
	Well, maybe drug-using, but certainly prostitute-visiting degenerate.
	And now I'm aware of how terrible I am, and it's too late.
	And that... It's terrifying.
	And hopefully, you know, people get scared straight in a way from this kind of dysfunction.
	So, yeah, that's the major stuff I wanted to say.
	I really, really do appreciate you bringing up the play as a whole.
	I mean, it's fascinating to me, like, you know, 30 years apart from reading it, to go through it again and get, you know, I can understand why it's a famous and powerful play, but...
	There are so many themes in there that people talk about the family.
	Again, I think it's much bigger and deeper, and I really do appreciate the chance to chat about it this way.
	Yeah, thank you, and me too.
	I don't get to talk to many people beyond my husband about art in such an in-depth way, so I really do appreciate this too.
	It's a lot of fun. Along those lines, I wanted to ask you, do you think that the mother...
	I felt like she felt guilty for giving up the convent, but I feel like she felt like she should feel guilty, something like that, right?
	Because she did do it, and then when she talks about, like, oh, I just fell in love with this man from another world, and so on, I was wondering, does she actually feel guilty for not taking the nun path, or is she telling herself she feels guilty for not taking the nun path?
	Mm-hmm.
	just because he was pretty and high status.
	That's not very Christian, right?
	So she should feel guilty for that.
	She should feel guilty for blaming her son and driving him into an alcoholic death for the death of his brother.
	She should feel guilty for putting her family through this addiction.
	But the nun thing, to me, that's a total red herring.
	I mean, this woman would not have worked out as a nun any more than I don't believe that she was going to be some concert pianist.
	You know, there weren't a lot of famous female concert pianists in the late 19th century.
	And, of course, the other thing, too, is who the hell was keeping her from becoming a concert pianist?
	I mean, he said that when they traveled, he says to his son, and I think there's reasons to believe it, he says, look, I paid for a nurse, which I guess would be sort of like a nanny now, right?
	So, like, she's traveling with kids.
	She's got a nanny. She doesn't have a job.
	She's in a hotel, so there's not a whole lot of cooking and housekeeping going on.
	Hotels have pianos.
	You know, there's people who back down from their ambitions and then blame people in their lives, to me, as some of the most pathetic human beings around.
	Like, you could say, you know, the life of a traveling musician wasn't for me, and, you know, I didn't want to be a musician.
	I couldn't be a musician and be the wife of this guy who's also traveling and be a mom, and, you know, I made my compromises.
	I'm happy with them and all that.
	But this idea, oh, I had this great...
	And I could have been a contender.
	There's this Brando on the waterfront scene.
	I could have been someone great, but you sold me out.
	You betrayed me. Those people, they're drowning human beings who will take you to the bottom of the ocean and you won't get the dignity even of dying.
	You'll just be down there, bubbled and rotting and not even dead, like this whole fucking family.
	But the people who say, I had this great potential and you destroyed it.
	are some of the most destructive people on the planet.
	They're not, you know.
	Gosh, a woman who pretends victimhood in order to gain power over others.
	Never seen that before. That's a new one for you.
	It's completely new, right?
	I don't know what you're talking about.
	You probably don't, right?
	Which is good. And this one last thing, actually.
	This flash of happiness shit.
	Oh, my God. This is a real cliche in theatre, right?
	So this is the little bit from Edmund, right?
	Yeah. So he's saying to his dad, you just told me some high spots in your memories.
	You want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea.
	Here's one. When I was on the square head, square rigor bound for Buenos Aires, full moon in the trades, the old hooker driving 14 knots, I lay on the bow spirit, facing a stern with the water foaming into spume under me, the mass with every sail white in the moonlight towering high above me.
	I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it.
	And for a moment, I lost myself.
	I actually lost my life.
	I was set free. I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim starred sky.
	I belonged without past or future within peace and unity and a wild joy within something far greater than my own life or the life of man, to life itself, to God, if you want to put it that way.
	Then another time, on the American line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch, a calm sea that time, only a lazy groundswell and a slow, drowsy roll to the ship, the passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight, no sound of man, black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me,
	dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone and above and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together, Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came, the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond man's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams.
	And several other times in my life when I was swimming far out or lying alone on a beach, I have the same experience.
	It became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock swaying in the tide like a saint's Vision of beatitude, like the veil of things as they seem, drawn back by an unseen hand.
	For a second you see, and seeing the secret are the secret.
	For a second there is meaning.
	Then the hand lets the veil fall, and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere for no good reason.
	And he says, it was a great mistake my being born a man.
	I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish.
	As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want, and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.
	And what drives me nuts about this speech, which is a real cliche in the theater, it's like, you know, in families, nobody ever gets to make a speech.
	Come on. You know, you're always interrupted.
	Somebody needs the salt. Like, nobody ever gets to make these big, long speeches.
	But, you know, this is like the audience gets hushed because the monologue moment has arrived.
	It always kind of drives me nuts.
	It's not very realistic. But anyway, it's fine.
	But this, you know, I played pool with my daughter the other day.
	Now, I'm not too bad a pool player.
	I use the cue and she just rolls the balls, right?
	Because she can't really work the cues yet, right?
	And she rolls kind of randomly and every now and then she pulls off this fantastic shot, right?
	Like, wow, you know, it bounced three times, knocked this thing and went in, right?
	And she's like, yay, right? And I'm like...
	Well, that's great. There's no skill involved.
	It's good luck. And you can't reproduce it, but it's kind of funny that it happened, right?
	And it's the same thing with these stupid people and their happiness.
	It's like, ah, I remember this time three years ago when I was swimming and I was happy.
	And it's like, well, because, you know, you're a terrible human being.
	You know, you're involved in dysfunctional relationships.
	You tear each other limb from limb.
	You drink.
	You don't take care of yourself.
	You don't even exercise. Like, You live off your sponge off your dad.
	You don't have a life.
	You don't have a girlfriend. You don't have a future.
	I mean, you don't have a purpose. And you're watching your brother drink himself to death without intervening.
	And the moment he tries to tell you something that's actually true, you tell him to shut the hell up.
	So, you know, this like, ah, this time that I was happy.
	And the happiness here is non-existence.
	It's non-existence.
	I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it.
	And for a moment, I lost myself.
	I actually lost my life. I was set free.
	This again. Death is freedom.
	They're in hell. He might have fallen off the ship and hit his head and died.
	And this is all the afterlife, right?
	I don't know. But this idea that as soon as I'm not myself, I'm happy, is like, well, that's a pretty god-awful way to live.
	You know, you've got to be yourself, man.
	Everyone else is taken. So that...
	Random happiness stuff is very cliched, and that's what you get when you get the secular stuff, where you just get a weird moment of peace that you can't reproduce, a weird moment of happiness that it comes and it goes and there's no consistency.
	It's like my daughter will occasionally sink a really cool pool shop, but she couldn't do it again if you paid her a million dollars.
	Yeah, you know, this was one of the one of the parts that one of the speeches in the play that people most talk about, you know, because that is so taken by this, you know, feeling of oneness that he manages to capture in the speech.
	And I do understand that.
	But like you said, it's it's the feeling of nothingness, right?
	It's the being nothing. It's the being the ghost that gives this feeling of joy.
	Right. And I hypnotize myself into no self-recrimination for 12 seconds.
	Right, and I think, you know, when I saw that scene, I go, like, of course I understand looking up at the stars and feeling that wonder of God or creation or, like, whatever you would call it, the oneness, right?
	But, like, again, like you said, he's not talking about, like, I am human on this earth connected with everybody, star matter, and the stars are looking down at me and I'm made of them.
	It's not that. It's, I was a ghost in the fog in the nothing, right?
	Right. I was like mother.
	I was like Jamie. But he himself doesn't seem...
	Yeah, self-eratial. The father erased himself in the role.
	The mother erases herself in drugs.
	The brother, the elder brother, erases himself in alcohol.
	He's saying, I can't drink myself into unconsciousness.
	That's the problem. For these people, consciousness is hell.
	To be awake. And this is this repetition, this blaming, all of this mechanistic.
	They're robots. They don't have any free will because they don't have any self-knowledge and they're not willing to act in a virtuous manner.
	But happiness is a skill.
	It's a muscle. You develop it like anything else.
	You could blindfold anyone, have them swing randomly a tennis racket on a tennis court.
	And occasionally they'd make this incredible shot.
	Same thing with golfing.
	You know, you can get a hole in one if you just randomly hit blindfolded.
	Eventually you'll get a hole in one.
	But it's the reproducibility of the damn thing that matters when it comes to happiness.
	And reason equals virtue equals happiness.
	That's how you consistently end up with happiness.
	Not this... You know, three years ago, on top of a ship, I was happy for four seconds because I pretended I didn't exist.
	That's like, oh my god, what a nightmare.
	And what a terrible situation.
	And there's no meaning in that.
	There's meaninglessness in that.
	Oh, for a moment, there was meaning.
	The veil is drawn back.
	It's like, what do you mean there's meaning?
	There's no meaning in self-erasure on a crow's nest.
	That's not meaning. And that's the cost of losing God, is the meaning, the purpose, right?
	People are like, well, you've got to be virtuous because you want to get into heaven and you want to do what Jesus did and fight evil and resist the devil.
	You've got meaning all over the place.
	You're part of a gripping story that is bigger than the universe.
	You're a comic book hero in a series of panels called Virtue and Life and Heaven, and you take all of that away, and the best that people can do is Allow the rocking of the ship to hypnotize them into a kind of living death that gives them momentary joy.
	And that's like, God, that's a heavy price.
	Again, you know, I'm not saying that God is the answer, but it's a better answer than that shit.
	Yeah, so I think, okay, so I have like a split thought on this.
	Like, okay, so on the one hand, I think like, So I watched the biography on Eugene O'Neill after I got done watching the play the first time, and I thought, how could somebody so brilliant be so stupid?
	Okay, so in this play, he's trying to figure out, like, why did my parents do what they did?
	Why did I have this childhood?
	And I think he never really exactly figured it out, because it seems like he's kind of making some excuses for them and romanticizing some of this.
	Now, Eugene O'Neill himself...
	He abandoned two wives and children with each of them And it's like you're sitting here writing about the regrets of your parents, your grandfather abandoning your father when he was 10 years old, and so on and so forth, and you see what that did to him, and then you go and repeat that in your life too.
	I'm sorry, I'm getting all loud.
	That's part of what I wanted to write in about this play in particular, because to me there's so much of What not to do.
	Learn from these mistakes.
	Learn from these regrets. Do not repeat them.
	I see that when I watch a movie like Goodfellas.
	Don't go join in the mafia because you'll wind up some schlubber dead in the end, right?
	Like, I'm always saying these don't do this lessons and I don't Yeah.
	No, because it's universal.
	It's universal, right?
	There's all of this.
	And this is the character of Kathleen.
	It's like, okay, well, you can, I guess, have meaning if you're an idiot scullery maid.
	But, you know, we highfalutin intellectuals, we have risen above mere meaning.
	Nietzsche is also mentioned in the play, right?
	This damned morbid philosophy, this Nietzsche that you're into and so on, right?
	And God is dead and all this kind of stuff and the world is will to power and so on.
	And this sort of flaccid degeneracy is, I mean, is so crippling and it's so dangerous.
	And what is the solution? Well, you get this weird imaginary bucket called, it's the human condition, right?
	It's like, that's not the human condition.
	That's an alcohol's liver.
	That's not the human condition.
	This is just people who won't tell the truth, who won't listen to each other.
	That's the other so frustrating thing, is all they're doing is creating risable blame tsunamis and then dodging it on the other side.
	And then they finally tell the truth, like Edmund tells the truth to his brother and...
	His brother just says, Jamie tells the truth to Edmund and Edmund is like, shut up, I don't want to listen to you.
	And they're trying to tell the truth to your dad.
	Shut up, I won't listen to your morbid nonsense.
	And the mother, I don't know if she's ever telling the truth because she's drugged out of her gourd.
	But yeah, just, you know, you don't listen.
	And, you know, at the end of the play when she says, oh yeah, then I met your father and I was happy for a while.
	It's like, well, yeah, that's all you deserved.
	It's all you earned. It was a little bit of vanity happiness.
	And this is the dark side of making decisions based on vanity, of making decisions based on status, of making decisions based on prestige.
	This is it.
	And this is the world of art, absent of meaning.
	It is merely a...
	It's a tracing of the bodies of...
	hedonism has produced.
	You know, it's like Californication, right?
	This is like you're outlining the dead bodies produced by hedonism and greed and shallowness and trying to combine our godlike intelligence with mere mammalian lusts for sex and money and status and self-erasure and all this kind of stuff.
	It's just chalk outlines of dead bodies.
	The problem is they're saying we're all dead because there's no exceptions.
	It's like, I guess there's even a slightly more functional couple in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but oh, it's the human condition.
	It's the human condition. It's like, nope, nope.
	It's just your crazy messed up corner of the planet.
	Don't drag me into this kind of stuff.
	You had this great quote a long time ago.
	You said something about a tree gets cut down and put through the mill and turned into a table.
	And then it sits and it looks out the window at the tree and goes, ah, look at that weirdo.
	Right? And we go, ah, that's the human condition, the table.
	Like, no, the tree is the condition, right?
	Yeah, we've been pretty walked by all this stuff.
	All right. Well, listen, I really appreciate the call.
	Let's make another date for the Iceman Cometh.
	Is that the next one to take a look at?
	I would like to do the Iceman Cometh.
	And darn it, I had something else that was really quick that I wanted to say, but that's all right.
	All right. We'll save it for the next one.
	I'm sure if it's Eugene O'Neill, it'll come back.
	So, yeah, thanks a million for a great chat, and thanks for the suggestion.
	I'm glad that you pestered me to do it.
	It was really, really great. Thank you.
	I'll pester you again. Please do.
	Take care. All right.
	Bye-bye. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
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