When I set out on a hot September day in 2023 to tape up JP Improv flyers along the Southwest Corridor, I wasn’t expecting to get bitten by a dog.
The situation was awkward for both of us. He looked surprised to find the crook of a stranger’s elbow in his mouth. Like he didn’t know he’d had it in him.
Later, in the Beth Israel ER, I would worry about rabies—did you know that bats, not dogs, are the main culprits nowadays? Also hospital bills, contacting the dog’s owner, and so on. But in that moment, in the park, with forty pounds of mutt hanging off my left wrist flexors—above all else, I felt frustration and disappointment.
It had been a good day for putting up flyers, you see, and now I wouldn’t get to finish.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote that “[He w]ho knows the ‘why’ for his existence […] will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’”
Frankl discovered what he knew about the importance of meaning under much darker circumstances than most of us will ever face. But what he learned in the concentration camps—that meaning makes suffering bearable—may be helpful for us right now.
I finished Man’s Search for Meaning this past weekend, on a flight from Boston to San Francisco, somewhere over the Midwest.
The night before, I had printed out an ACLU guide to what I should expect going through airport security in 2025. (Hint: clean your phone.) En route, I was distracted from Frankl by the CNN broadcast playing on a neighbor’s monitor. The anchors were discussing Senator Chris Van Hollen’s visit with Kilmar Albrego Garcia, a husband and father who was taken off a street in the United States, deported, and thrown into a dictator’s prison due to “administrative error.”
For his kindness, the administration which made the error has called Senator Van Hollen “a fool.”
When we are bombarded every. Single. Day. with such ugliness—when we wake up and go to bed every day ashamed to be Americans—it can feel impossible to keep moving forward.
Impossible, that is, until we find our why. A meaning which makes the horror and absurdity survivable.
For me, that’s making art with all of you. Making each other laugh—making our neighborhood laugh—keeps me whole through stock market crashes, Social Security cuts, and “frequent victories in golf events.” So many other sources of our collective meaning have been assaulted, degraded and stripped away. But this one remains.
What’s a little love bite compared to that?