Blog

I set two goals for myself a long time ago: that I wouldn’t be boring, and that I wouldn’t lead an ordinary life. For some reason, these have mattered to me, and I know they matter to some of you. And I’ve been struggling with how to keep these goals.

There’s an inevitable march toward ordinary in our world. When are you going to grow up? Get a real job? Etc. etc. etc. It’s celebrated, in a way. We know that many men do live lives of quiet desperation, and yet we’re told to follow in their footsteps. And I have before–I’ve made that mistake–just to find that it’s not what they say it is on the other side, and the searching doesn’t go away.

I don’t know what it is about the searching, and how it doesn’t go away. Even when you have everything–and maybe especially then. There’s no logical reason to want anything and that’s fine because you don’t want, per se. You long. You desire. You crave to know what’s over that next hill–just one more hill–what’s under that rock, or what’s in that person’s head.

It’s that thing that’s in us, sitting in the chest, waiting for us to give it attention. More, different, better. It pops up whenever it wants and leaves us feeling unsatisfied–always unsatisfied–because that’s the only way it works. If it made you satisfied, it’d go away.

But it does go away, for a while. Long stretches of contentment, fulfillment, and that whole thing. The feeling that you might be figuring it out, and that maybe the need to look will go away. Because everyone’s basically the same and stories are just stories and a lot of the time they have no real grounding in reality. The world’s pretty simple and not all that mystifying if we just sit there and look at it pragmatically. Maybe we can be ordinary. Maybe ordinary’s not all that bad.

The thought can linger, and if we let it, it can take hold. And if we aren’t careful, we end up on the couch with a beer in hand watching the Big Bang Theory every day after work. (Or whatever your equivalent is. I just really hate that show.) We can convince ourselves that ordinary is okay.

So it’s our job to say: no. Fuck that.

That’s our job, and that’s what we’re here for, because that’s the only way anything meaningful happens. And you know it in your heart, but you might ignore it as we all do, because it’s so much easier to ignore it. But what’s the value in easy, anyway?

So no. Fuck that.

Do you know about the man-eating tigers?

First off, not a movie; it’s nonfiction. Bengals have been smashing people for centuries in India. But due to recent conservation efforts and the marauding spread of humanity, tigers and humans are living in closer proximity than ever, and it seems to be making things worse.

Theres a ton to read about man-eating tigers, but this recent story caught my attention, and my imagination. It’s so outlandish—so Hollywood-formulaic—it could be the script of a movie without a single tweak. And it’s all true.

Honestly it’s got everything. In the first paragraph we learn this tiger STALKED THE HILLS and REPEATEDLY ELUDED CAPTURE for TWO DAMN YEARS.

NEW DELHI — A man-eating tiger that stalked the hills of central India for more than two years and repeatedly eluded capture was shot and killed by hunters after one of the most intensive tiger hunts in recent memory, officials said.

This tiger killed 13 people. That’s more people than most people can kill before being caught.

The locals joined forces to save their village, determined to put an end to the beast’s killing spree.

For months, the noose had been tightening around her. Hundreds of forest rangers fanned out across the jungles of central Maharashtra State, combing the bush for tiger tracks, scat, stray hairs, long scratches on trees — anything that might reveal where she was hiding.

It wasn’t that easy, of course (it never is), and so the operation expanded. The search for the tiger now included hundreds of people and a HEAT-SEEKING DRONE.

The hunt grew into a sprawling, military-style operation, eventually encompassing a heat-seeking drone, hundreds of people, more than a hundred remote cameras and a team of specially trained Indian elephants with sharpshooters mounted on their backs.

Elephants. With sharpshooters. Mounted on their backs.

Of course, this was no normal tiger. No, this tiger was as deft as they come, possessing the cunning intelligence of a super-being.

…this tiger was seen as unusually crafty.

Tiger experts say she had benefited from past attempts to capture her and knew how to slink through the bush undetected, sometimes just a few steps ahead of the teams of rangers and police officers looking for her.

They even had to call in the old retired tiger hunter and plead for his help. The guy who everyone knew was “the best to ever do it” but had “left that life behind him” and tried to settle down to a peaceful life in the hills. This is the exact plot of like three thousand action movies.

“She has learned from all these botched capture operations,’’ said Nawab Shafath Ali Khan, a famous tiger hunter whom the authorities had called in to help. “We’ve made her very smart. Brilliant, actually.”

Not even the might of the militaristic operation and its heat-seeking drones could successfully defeat the tiger, which at this point we can all agree is the embodiment of Satan himself. All is certainly lost!

But wait. Through pure chance, our heroes stumble on a possible solution, straight out of left field. Could this tiger have an achilles heel?

The break may have come from a surprise source: a bottle of Obsession cologne.

Obsession (a popular men’s fragrance in the 1990s) contains civetone, a compound originally derived from the scent glands of a civet. In areas where it’s been sprayed, cats take huge sniffs and roll around in it for several minutes.

Last month, the Indian rangers squirted some Obsession on bushes here and there, hoping to draw the tiger out. On Friday afternoon, the rangers sprayed some Obsession and tiger urine in an area where she was believed to be hiding.

This is where you’d turn the movie off for being too unrealistic.

Finally, the showdown has come. They try to take her humanely but since this is a movie and we’re dealing with a MONSTER, of course it couldn’t be that easy.

The plan had been to tranquilize her. But according to the hunters who tried to capture her, she roared and charged after being hit by a tranquilizer dart at short range.

According to the authorities, after she was darted, the tiger moved back, roared loudly and charged the open jeep. Asghar Khan then fired a bullet from a high-powered rifle. The authorities said it was in “self-defense.’’

The beast is dead! Of course, our hardened tiger hunter ends the scene with a show of conflicted remorse, because only through a deep empathy for the beast can he understand it so well.

“I am sad we couldn’t save the man-eater,” it read. Efforts to “save her faded due to the hostile terrain and her aggressive behavior.”

Finally, we have the final celebration scene, where the locals take to the streets to dance and celebrate the mighty reign of terror coming to an end.

Villagers in the area erupted in joy when they heard about her death, shooting off firecrackers, passing out sweets and pumping their fists in the air.

“Now our lives will be back to normal,” Hidayat Khan said. “We can go to our fields and do our work.”

Sometimes the best stories are right there in the newspaper.

Read the whole thing here.

I stumbled upon this story from 2003 earlier this week. It’s about people who commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate bridge, and it’s incredible. I knew the bridge had a history of that type of thing, but I had no idea the numbers were in the thousands.

The whole thing is illuminating, but a particular passage stood out to me from a survivor of the fall (of whom there aren’t many):

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

I think most of us find suicide—even the thought of it—so hard to understand, and I’ve been wondering lately what kind of state of mind a person is in when they enter that place. This story helped me understand it just a little better. 

It’s longer read, but definitely worth it. It’s odd that I just came across it now, because a barrier on the bridge—such a focal point of the story—began being constructed just a few months ago.