Healings FAQ No. 11, Albert Burneko
"There's no better word than "prayer" for what I'm doing all of the time, inside of myself, asking for help and mercy."
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I freelanced a bit for a website called Deadspin. Many things were different back then. For example, instead of the upstanding, seven-years-sober, 401K-having grown up who’s composing this today, I was a bottoming-out alcoholic and freelance writer (or, ahem, “editorial consultant,” depending on who was asking), who wrote and filed many an assignment from the same dingy dive bar on the corner of Valencia and 26th Street, in San Francisco. Happy Hour started at 2pm.
The media landscape was completely different as well. Sites like Deadspin, Gawker, and Jezebel were at the height of their popularity and influence, and both the advertising and VC dollars were flowing. This meant there was that specific combination of free cash and bad judgment that leads editors to pay degenerates like me to try to pull off great/terrible ideas, such as taking my local septuagenarian bartender to see Paul McCartney, writing about Larry Ellison’s cock at the America’s Cup (despite having zero knowledge of sailing (or for that matter Larry Ellison’s cock)); or—and this feels like some kind of high/low—spending 3,500 words ranking different brands of plain white t-shirts.
It was during this time that I first encountered the work of today’s Healings FAQ contestant, Albert Burneko. I specifically remember Albert, because one of my grand ambitions back then was to transform my passion for home cookery into some kind of income stream, and I figured Deadspin was the place to do it (see above re: bad judgment). They’d already let me write this handy guide to learning how to cook. Could I become the site’s resident Paul Prudhomme? The answer turned out to be No, because Albert beat me to it, via his delightful column, Foodspin.
Anyway, that was, as I said, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Today, Albert is one of twenty or so co-owners of arguably the best website on the planet (sorry, Amnesty International), Defector. Hopefully I don’t need to tell you, but just in case: Defector Media is the flower that bloomed from the dung heap when Albert and his colleagues quit Deadspin en masse in 2019, going on to build their cooperatively owned venture that serves as a beacon of hope in an otherwise depressing mediascape (and I mean beacon literally—sites like 404 and Aftermath, among others, have followed their lead). On top of being an official Inspiration To Us All via Defector, Albert is just a plain old good-ass writer. I’d hazard to guess he’s written thousands of blog posts since those Foodspin days, and I know I could pick any one at random and it’d provoke some combination of laughter, righteous anger, and whatever it is people who love sports feel about sports. Also, like me, Albert’s trying to turn his passion for gardening into a thing. Dude remains the Mozart of home-ec blogs, and I a mere Salieri.
As his longtime admirer, I knew Albert would deliver when it came to the Healings FAQ, and holy crap he did not disappoint. Some of the foregoing is so good I’m thinking of getting it tattooed somewhere. Albert rules. You’re gonna enjoy this. Now go enjoy it.
What happens when we die?
Oh hell, I don't know, man. I can't get my head around the idea of a permanent end, so I'm resolved, as much as I can be, to death profoundly exceeding the limits of any person's imaginative or descriptive powers, even if it really is a permanent end. I hope for something beautiful, and for the mercy of not having to say goodbye to my family for all eternity.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being terrified and 1 being it’s never crossed your mind, how afraid are you of dying? Explain.
I never used to think about death. It's funny, even when I was a cataclysmically unhappy and depressed 19-year-old, consoling myself to sleep with the idea that hey, eventually I could just kill myself, I never thought about death. But for years after my mental health improved enough that I no longer wanted to die or saw it as the most viable available career path, I still wasn't afraid of death itself. It didn't seem like a bad thing, except for the bereaved.
I was afraid of intractable suffering: That I would (will) get a certain diagnosis that would mean suffering and unendurable pain and my body failing all around me, with no hope brighter than that morphine would kill me gently before anything else could. In my life I've had a close-up view as a couple of loved ones slid down that chute, and for many years it seemed like the most fearsome thing imaginable. Or that I would (will) experience some horrible progressive dementia, and die of forgetting how to eat, profoundly alone, in a room full of people I don't recognize. Both of those seem like such lonely ways for a life to run out.
In any case what I was afraid of wasn't that I'll die, but that at some point I'd know that the experience of being alive was only going to get worse and worse and worse and worse, and that sorta by definition the final moments of my life would be, by light years, the worst ones; that my loved ones would have to grasp for the bleak consolation that at least I was dead and not living through hell anymore. (That is still very frightening to me.) When I would think about death, I would hope for an abrupt, no-nonsense one. Maybe it could even be a little funny. I thought that what I'd want was for an anvil to fall out of the blue sky when I am 80 years old and smash me to ragù Bolognese all at once. Maybe just after a crab feast.
Then I fell in love and got married, and then we had kids. Now I'm afraid of dying. Namely I'm afraid of dying soon, or suddenly, and of inevitably being separated from them, in some ways and maybe all ways, forever. I'm afraid of the possibility that dying will just be The End (even as I struggle to imagine what that means or how it could be); that there won't be any meaningful sense in which any part of me can stay with them and make sure they're OK. I'm freaked out by the whole idea of it. And I'm so angry, so often, at the idea that I just have to accept that at some point, no matter what, the period we got to spend being, uh, corporeally alive and a family together on Earth will just end, and will have ended, and will not return. It's all so much realer to me now that I've grown into the continuity of my life. I really fucking hate it.
I probably swing from a two to a seven, on that scale? That's embarrassing to confess. I figure Peter Thiel and that one weirdly smooth and eggshell-white tech guy who is trying to age himself backward by doping with his own son's blood or whatever are definitely a lot more afraid of dying than I am. But I am afraid of dying.
What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
I've never been all that close to my own death, I think. I've had, like, near-misses in traffic or whatever, but that is not closeness to death. I've been close to other people's deaths, and to other people's near-deaths. I dunno that I learned anything good to learn from those experiences. Terminal illness in particular just seemed so astoundingly cruel and unfair. I could easily perceive the death part as a kind of relief. But then again I'm not the one who did the dying. They all kept trying to breathe, right up until they couldn't anymore.
Do you believe in God? Explain.
I do. For a long time I went about my life as though I did not, and then I had to acknowledge, if only to myself at first, that I very plainly did and had all along. I had been praying to something, and angry at something, and grateful to something, and obligated to something, and asking something to help me to be courageous and merciful in the world. It's trite, but: I can't hope that God is good without first believing that there is God.
I tell this story a lot, mostly as a way of recommending a travel destination. I share it now in full awareness that in many ways it embodies some painfully corny clichés. I can't do anything about that! It happened, and you asked me to explain!
When I was 20 I drove across the country; it was the first real thing I'd done, and the first hope or ambition I'd treated as worth acting upon since I was a young kid; it was a way, I think now in retrospect, of deciding that it was OK for me to want to live. (I'm sorry if I've just now made you roll your eyes or pinch the bridge of your nose. I think it's the frankest way of putting it.)
On I-90 in South Dakota, on a gloomy damp afternoon with the clouds just overhead, on an impulse I followed signs to Badlands National Park, which I had only a vague sense of maybe possibly having heard of before. After winding through that wrinkled pink alien landscape in amazement for a while, I came to a spot where a wooden pier extended out over endless prairie grass. There was nobody around, and only a slight hiss of the breeze over the grass, mingled with the faint ambient drone of the interstate somewhere far away to my right. I walked out to the end of the pier; as I was folding myself up to sit down, what I later learned was a pronghorn, maybe reacting to my presence, bounded off from a few yards away on a more-or-less straight line from me toward the horizon. It made so little sound, and disturbed almost nothing in that soft vastness, just leaving a thin trail of disturbed grass in its wake.
In a bad movie or novel I think I would have burst into cathartic tears that wouldn't quite make narrative sense but onto which an audience could project … whatever. But I just sat there and watched, for what felt like an hour but probably wasn't even 20 minutes, as that pronghorn jogged away; until it had gone so far that both it and its meandering trail had dwindled beyond the limits of my eyesight. Nothing else happened during all that time. I didn't want anything or regret anything. I felt such an absolute, overwhelming wonder. I was so happy. I contained nothing else at all, right then.
The more I thought about that experience afterward, which had mystified me at the time, the more I felt—feel—sure that it was an experience of receiving kindness: that I could be there then, and encounter this huge gentle silence just then in my life; that wild joy could bloom big enough to crowd even me all the way out of my rotten mind; that I, and therefore maybe a person, and so maybe even people, could be overcome by exactly the stupid, inarticulate, aching, gargantuan love I felt just then for that silly animal, for the sake of which I'd have ecstatically thrown myself in front of a train; that the world, amid all the other ways it can be, could also be like that, when it did not have to.
(On the other hand: At some point, as we've discussed, death is going to separate me from my family, at least for a while, and painfully. I struggle with the effort to integrate this. I suppose I have to try to have faith, then, that this eventuality is not as cruel as it seems from here.)
I don't know why I wouldn't call that kindness God, or strive toward it and try to be worthy of it. My reason for not doing that—mine, specifically, with no commentary on anybody else's—would be petty and vain and ridiculous. It would be that I didn't want to think of myself as someone who believes in God.
One more thing! While we are on this subject. Then I promise I'll move on. Sometimes the experience of being a person with lefty politics and lefty friends who also believes in capital-G God can be sorta awkward. Not, like, I Have Been Canceled For My Beliefs By The Intolerant Godless Left or whatever—nearly all the adult lefty types who've learned this about me were either kindly amiable or blandly indifferent to the news, because who the fuck am I—but sometimes both I and another person are brought up a little short by a standing presumption of a cooler or more ambivalent attitude toward the God Question, sorta like how I (more often) encounter the standing presumption that everyone in the room went to college, and it leaves both of us not quite sure what to say next.
It's fine! It's fine. We don't have to make perfect sense to one another. What I can offer about where these things seem in tension is that in my case, my belief—that there is God, and that beauty and goodness exist where they are neither inevitable nor indicated, and thus that they have purposes—is the very root of my ideas about what's just and ethical and moral in the world, and of the fitful outrage the people who've known me longest will attest I've been carrying around since I was a very tiny little John the Baptist in Oshkosh overalls with my arms over my head, yelling at everybody.
Look at the world! We are surrounded and suffused at all times, animated by, a generosity infinitely beyond comprehension; life itself, the spark of it, my literal heartbeat, is that mystery right where I can place my hand on my own chest and feel it giving me each next moment. In which I get to try! Was I given that, were any of us given that, so that interest rates and credit scores and insurance deductibles might exist, so that we might erect vast edifices of arcane bullshit for the sake of taking from each other? So that I could draw a line across the world of fireflies and fireworks and presume to tell you on which side of it you're permitted to seek peace and sustenance? So that there could be vast mechanized death-mills where living beings know only fear and cruelty for their whole lives for the sake of drive-thrus? So that someone can push a button in an air-conditioned room over here and over there a Palestinian mother sees her children blown apart into pieces? These are appalling cosmic obscenities. It wasn't supposed to be like this. This is not what we are for. This is not what you do with an unearned dispensation of the fucking spark of life.
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
I'm disgracefully derelict in the practice of my Catholicism. A big old church—particularly when empty—has a unique capacity to make me feel dwarfed and engulfed by God and time and the mystery of faith, and in how disparate grimy human efforts can accumulate into a soaring call to God, but I struggle with and agonize over and feel so bitterly let down by the capital-C Church, the way just about every Catholic does (including many who haven't let that alienate them away from continuing to show up). But there's no better word than "prayer" for what I'm doing all of the time, inside of myself, asking for help and mercy and asking why things are this way and straining toward some clearer view of what I ought to do. It's like with the title "God": For me to call this something other than prayer would be dishonest. I am praying to God. Generally this begins with an Our Father or a Hail Mary. That is my spiritual practice.
Give me an example of a sacred text, for you personally—a work of some kind (book, album, song, painting) that’s essential to the formation of your spiritual worldview. Explain.
Ah hell. This is kind of embarrassing and vulnerable to reveal. When I was a teen I read The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis and it blew me away. This is so dumb and bad, but I was really taken with the early chapters in which Jesus experiences God, and his own dual substance, as a merciless bird of prey latched onto his head with its talons digging into his skull, gripping all the harder the more he tries to live as a normal person. I didn't believe God was like that, but I was compelled by the idea that belief in (or in Jesus's case, knowledge of) God should sometimes be that way. That at least as much as it comforts me it should make me painfully and inescapably aware of what's implicit in the miracle of having woken up this morning. That it was for something.
And so along the same lines I really like the places in the Gospels where people, most often Peter, think they've got this business all figured out and Jesus hits them with a parable that completely confounds them, and which people are still trying to figure out thousands of years later. I trust my own conscience best when it is doing its own meager version of that to me, and suspect it at all other times.
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