Guest John B. talks about his 10-minute death last year and how he's looked at his life since then, and Gil talks about Robert Caro and the publicity-industrial complex. Trust me; it's good!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 5 - Look in Your Heart.mp3
[music] Welcome to the May 2012 episode of The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and I've got a confession to make. I did not see the New Avengers movie. However, I did see the Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman Avengers movie, in the theater no less. Partly, I skipped the new one because I'm not really into giant action-explosion movies. Partly, it was because of Marvel Comics' shitty treatment of all the guys who created those characters over the years. Partly, it's because I really hate being marketed to. I don't know if Ron Rosenbaum coined the term "publicity-industrial complex," but he might as well have. He's written about it often enough over the years, that whole phenomenon of publicity and how it's engineered. And the whole notion of it puts me on edge. I guess I just have some sort of allergy about marketing. So this left me with conflicted feelings about the PR Blitz for Robert Caro's new book, the fourth volume in his biography of Lyndon Johnson. On the one hand, it's some pretty transparent behavior by his publisher to get major profiles about Caro and Esquire and Times Magazine and Smithsonian. The last one written by Ron Rosenbaum. On the other hand, there are three big articles out about Robert Caro and Lyndon Johnson. How awesome is that? Still, one of the big problems with all these profiles is that they overlap in a bunch of places. So each writer chooses his own area to focus on. Each article has some untrodden territory, but for the most part, these articles felt like a report from the press pool, you know? Where one writer uses a nice anecdote in the middle of the article, another one uses it for his closing lines. The story, as it seemed kind of fresh on the first reading, it seemed kind of recited by the third. What I'm saying is, it was wonderful that Mr. Caro got so much exposure for the new book, and I really hope the press coverage gets people reading his work. But it all felt remarkably staged. And if you read only one of the articles, then check out Rosenbaum's piece in Smithsonian. Really, you should read all three, plus lesser coverage in places like the Wall Street Journal. And you should see this neat piece in Business Week about the power brokers who've read the power broker, Caro's biography of Robert Moses. I wonder if this sort of thing might happen more frequently now, since there are fewer and fewer prestigious venues to publish work like this. I mean, we saw a bizarro version of this phenomenon a few months ago, and the New Yorker and the Times Magazine managed to put out profiles of Carrie Brownstein in the same week. It was all leading up to the premiere of the second season of Portlandia, but that one felt totally like her publicist hoodwinked both magazines. With Caro, it's more a notion of this being an important event, and that all those magazines will be failing by not covering it. Like I said, it irks me when I'm being marketed to, but I understand the commercial imperative. I mean, you need to make a big splash with the new book. In the Times profile on Mr. Caro, there's this little exchange about the profitability of publishing Lyndon Johnson's biography over decades. Let me read from it. Are the books profitable? Sunny Meta, Knoff's current head, who took over the Johnson Project enthusiastically after Gottlieb's departure in 1987 said last month? By the way, that's an incredibly awkward sentence, and the editor should be shot. Meta paused for a moment. "They will be," he answered finally, "because there is nothing like them." Gottlieb is more philosophical. "So what if at the end of 45 years it turns out we lost money by one kind of accounting?" he said. "Think of what he has given us, what he has added. How do you weigh that?" I respect and enjoy some contemporary non-fiction writers, but I can't imagine that any of them are going to get commissioned to work on an open-ended project like Caro's LBJ books. Something that's going to take 40 years or so to complete. I mean, what publisher thinks are still going to be around in 40 years? The irony here, and you knew there was going to be one, is that I haven't started reading those LBJ books. I read The Power Broker a few years ago, but I decided to hold off on starting the Johnson ones until I knew that Caro was actually going to finish them. In the Esquire profile, it mentions that his will stipulates that no one gets to finish the last volume if he dies before it's completed. On my blog a few years ago, I wrote about this, and how I'd been asking my New York literary friends if they knew Caro personally, and if they could attest to his health. His wife actually found that post the next day, and left me a comment saying that he's in great health in Robert Jogg's every day, and he'll surely finish the biography. I kind of felt like a heel, writing about her husband's potential death, but it was pretty awesome, and she found it and took the time to reply, right? Anyway, I hope to start the books next year, and I'd recommend The Power Broker to anyone who wants some idea of what Shakespeare would write about if he'd lived in 20th century America. Power and Politics. This episode's interview was kind of brief. I apologize for that, but it was recorded at the end of a trade show. As a magazine editor, I'm kind of in demand to talk to people at these things. Not at a podium or anything, but just walking the trade show floor. Everybody wants to know my opinion about industry moves, what I think about this or that acquisition, who got hired where. I got around to doing this interview on day three, when I was already kind of talked out. The interview was for the guy named John. He works for a company that advertises in my magazine. I'm good pals with a bunch of people from that company, and attended the wedding of one of the guys last summer. In the backstory, the interview was this. John didn't attend the trade show last year. On the second day of the show, one of his co-workers told me that John had died the day before, playing soccer with his league team. Lucky for him, several members of his team were doctors and scientists, and they were able to give him CPR and try to keep his heart going until the EMTs could show up and zap him back to life. They got him to the hospital. They installed a pacemaker and a monitor, and he's been just fine ever since. Still, he was dead for about ten minutes, and I figure that's got to change a guy. We've talked a few times since, including my trip out for his co-workers' wedding, and I thought it'd be good to talk to him about the past year and how he and his family have dealt with this near death and whether, like the guest I had on the previous episode, he's thought about things he wanted to do before he died, and maybe change that after he's had such a near-death experience with no warning. Now, should note that John is a remarkably upbeat guy, and that part of his personality hasn't changed in the slightest, so you might find it a little odd that someone's talking about his own death so lightheartedly, but he's just a really good guy with a really optimistic outlook. So, basically, it's a lot better than me. I would have spent the last year curled up in a ball wondering when the next hard episode was going to happen or something else. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the conversation. ♪ I bought a cheap watch from the crazy man ♪ ♪ floating down the mountain ♪ Last year, when I was at Interfects, I got the news that you, um, you would die, and got better. Tell me about that story first, because the audience is going to want to know exactly how you died. You know, I love the got better part, and as many friends as I have who are very into Bonnie Python, that's the first time I've ever met everybody drop that on me yet. I got better. You know, playing soccer came out, was just talking to some friends of mine, looked up and realized I felt a little dizzy, and had the conscious thought in my head of, "Why do I feel so dizzy?" And then, lost consciousness while looking at the field, and what happened was I was, my heart had stopped for almost 10 minutes. I had friends do CPR on me that entire time. More, more details have come out in the year since. Apparently, I turned so blue during that time that people really assumed that I was actually dead, because it looked like there was no way to bring me back. Paramedics arrived, they administered one shock, and I woke up immediately. The other thing I found out is I was really angry, because they wouldn't let me continue to play, and I don't remember any of that, of course. The next thing I remember is being in the ambulance, and then in intensive care. The standard question, that any time I've told a anecdote to anyone about you, white light, any awareness of what happened in that stretch, any weird fantasies about the afterlife or anything? Green soccer field, and really, that's the only thing I remember. You know, it's one of those things I've struggled to think about is, you know, what was going on in my brain during that time. Honestly, I just can't come up with anything. I mean, it's just a blank between then and waking up in the ambulance. I think it's better than half-assing some sort of, you know, spiritual reckoning, or something like that. The question that I had, the last guest that I had on the podcast, a friend of mine who had a melanoma survived and moved on, and we talked a bit about things while he was struggling with cancer that he, you know, realized he should have done, and, you know, ways of trying to change his life. If I survive this, you know, I'll sit down and read Moby Dick, finally, and all that. And it struck me going, coming to the show this year, and thinking about your case, where it was an on-off switch, basically, you had no warning, no buildup, and yet you survived and got a second chance at life not knowing that, you know, your life was that, in as much as we all know our lives, or that tenuous, to begin with, especially when we have to walk around New York a bit. But, you know, that idea of what did, how did it strike you? I mean, how do you look at re-evaluating your life, or thinking in terms of what you should have done, or what you're going to do in future? Any sort of change like that? Any big, you know, yeah, a lot of my friends have approached me with that about, you know, I'm sure that this is going to change the way you look at everything. I got to be perfectly honest. I think I had a fairly centered approach, and a fairly balanced approach to life before that. So really to make any drastic changes would really unbalance it, and that's not me. What it does is... You did want to go back to work, the weekend or the Monday after this whole thing happened. The scary part about that thing, too, is I've realized since then that whole week I was at work, I have no idea what I was doing. I have no memory of some of the steps I did. I go back and look at things that I've wrote, and I thought I didn't write that, and then realized, oh, it was in, you know, the two weeks after I went back. Was it essentially medication post-trauma, or just the overwhelmingness of the trauma? I mean, I wasn't on any pain meds when I went back. I was in a significant discomfort because my chest was all, you know, cracked from the CPR. But really what it was was, yeah, just the whole, you know, emotional response to everything that went on, and then, you know, probably a little bit of concern over my family and how worried everybody was about me, because from their perspective, I had died. From my perspective, I'd been in the hospital, I'd had a defibrillator installed. It was weird, but at that point, I really didn't know how to think about it. It took me a long time to really, you know, wrap some type of definition around what had happened to me. What sort of conclusions have you reached? You know, I'm a scientist, and scientists are always trying to define things, to put categories and labels on things. And this is actually a realization that came to me almost a year after it had happened, and you find, you know, I guess, Jimmy Buffett, if you're gonna figure out any philosophy from listening to Jimmy Buffett, it usually has to be after you've had a few margaritas. You think? Yeah. So this is one of those few times where you're listening to it. He writes a song about the Katrina, the hurricane, no way through. And I was listening to that song, and I realized, hey, there's my definition as a scientist that I can put around this, because if you think about it, somebody dies at the age of 85 from, you know, some type of pneumonia or something like that. You look at that and you call that natural causes, right? Right. So you look at, you know, maybe a 10-year-old who has leukemia, and you look at that, and that's either a tragedy or a disaster of some kind. What happened to me, at 46 years old, where everything just stops, I look at that as a natural disaster. And I've actually tried to find some way to say, you know, because I went through about a year of, what the hell happened? Why did that happen to me? Well, you don't ask why natural disasters happen. You really don't. They just happen, and you accept them. Katrina, natural disaster, people can say, why did that happen to us? It just happened. And that's really what I look at mine as now. It was a natural disaster. It's something that happened to my body, a natural disaster on a very small personal scale. And that's actually kind of helped me a little bit, because you don't question it. You just go on. Interesting. Again, any change in behavior once you have that that moment? Was there a sort of either a sense of peace or a, hey, I'm moving on from actually a little sense of peace? Because it was, it does help you move on a little bit. You quit asking the question, why the hell did that happen to me? I mean, it does still leave a lot of those remnants of, you know what, if I look at a decision I'm going to make today in terms of, ah, do I really want to go to that show, you know, with my daughter, I've been to that one show five times, you know what, if it's the last time I had a chance to do it, it's pretty damn important that I do it. And that's, I guess, the big question. Do you have, again, that Moby Dick, do you have something that you meant to get to that you were reevaluating? I know you talked about traveling to New Zealand and had some thoughts about, ah, taking family there. We do have some of those kind of plans, yes. I mean, we're also going to accelerate plans to go on a whole trip, trip with our whole family back to the Mediterranean, you know, to visit that area. Also because, you know, you look at how temporary everything is, you know, same thing with our parents, my wife's parents, my parents, they're getting on in years. If I can go that quick, I mean, the natural causes are going to start catching up with us just like the natural disaster almost did. So we've looked at those kind of things and said, you know what, we do it now. We do it now while we can. Yeah. Is there a sense ultimately that it was a good thing? I mean, just at least in kind of shocking you back into life the way, you know, no battles did. Okay, you know, back to the natural disaster analogy, you know, I'm much happier if this never happened. It would be just fine if I didn't have to clean up the mess from this one. I mean, I'm packing a battery in my chest. I'm always a little bit worried about that. It did have some, some tough, you know, ramifications on my family. They struggled with some of the trauma of it. My wife in general, you know, has had a pretty to have time with why did this happen to you, you know, and for her, honestly, the emotional backlash of it all was so much more than me. I'm sure she lost me. Right. I lost consciousness. She lost me for that time. Yeah. So that was, you know, it had some real, real ramifications on her. Is there any sort of Moby Dick? Is there any, anything you did mean to sit down and, and, you know, read all this time that you're, you're finally, let's get to it. Let's just say that I'm more aware of, of the importance of looking into those kinds of things and evaluating than I was before. Because always before it's, yeah, I'll get to that sometime. Now it's, do I have time now to do this? Interesting. Okay. And see kids go to college and grow up and move on. And how old are your kids? One daughter just turned 16. The other one's 12. And which one came along on the end? My 16-year-old. It was her 16-year-old birth, or her birthday present. Yeah. Great. Hope they have a great time in New York and then hope the show went well for you. And, and it was less eventful than last year's Interfax. That's, that's all it counts. So always a pleasure. Thanks. Great. Thanks, John. And that was my pal John. The music for this episode is that Jimmy Buffett song he mentioned. Breathe in, breathe out, move on. It's from the album Take the Weather with you. And while I resent anyone who attempts a crowd at House cover him, I'm willing to cut Jimmy some slack on this one. So that's it for this episode of The Virtual Memory Show. I hope you enjoyed it. I've got some good conversations lined up in the months ahead. So I hope you'll check back for more episodes. Till next time, I'm Gil Roth and you are awesome. I bought a cheap watch from the crazy man. Floating down, canal. It doesn't use numbers and moving hands. It always just says now. Now you may be thinking that I was had. But this watch is never wrong. And if I have trouble, the warranty said he didn't read out long. And it ran. It was nothing really new. And it blew. Seen all that before. And it was. The earth began to strain. Brought to trade. Leaking through the door. Tides at war. If a hurricane doesn't leave you dead, it will make you strong. Don't try to explain it. Just nod your head. Breathe in, breathe out, move on. [Music] And it ran. Nothing really new. And it blew. Seen all that before. And it was. The earth began to strain. Brought to trade. Vary the ninth war to the second floor. According to my watch, the time is now. As this dead and gone. Don't try to shake it. Just nod your head. Breathe in, breathe out, move on. Don't try to explain it. Just bow your head. Breathe in, breathe out, move on. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]