Umwelt that Ends Welt.

Maybe there's no surprise in this, but right now I'm reading a book that ain't exactly a beach read.

Many years ago, I had wrapped up a shoot in LA. While the rest of the team was staying in the Casa Del Mar, I had asked the Executive Producer, Lee, to book me at Shutters across the street. They cost exactly the same.

I noticed along the way that after a sweaty fourteen-hour day of working with people on a set--especially since we were shooting unscripted with an <ahem> volatile director to whom I was attached at the hip, I was better off in the evening not having dinner with clients and my agency colleagues. I was better off ordering a chicken Caesar salad in my room and watching an old black-and-white movie on Turner Classic Movies, preferably something creepy with Elisha Cook, Jr.

In any event, with a few hours on my own, I went down to the pool at Shutters and decided to read my book and maybe take a plunge. In moments two of the most surpassingly beautiful women I've ever worked with sat on either side of me, dressed pool-side appropriately, which is to say, inappropriately which I enjoyed, inappropriately.

I remember I was reading at the time the autobiography/
confessions of the Kommandant of the Auschwitz death camp. Soon, Lee, my Executive Producer came down to the pool. Lee and I were fully-bonded. Not only did we survive late-night edit sessions and excruciating shoots by doing the sternest of the New York Times' crossword puzzles, but our elder daughters were about the same age and in rival private girls' schools in Manhattan. We could cry in our beers or wines together.

Lee made an entrance, standing over me with about four cigarettes burning at once. 

"You're laying next to two of the most beautiful women in the world and you're reading about Nazis," she said.

"I'll take comfort where I can find it," I answered.

I bring this up because right now I am about one-third of the way through Simon Sebag Montefiore's 1,400-page book, "The World: A Family History of Humanity." You can buy it here.

At dinner with friends the other evening I described it like this: "It's like taking the plots of every soap opera ever aired and condensing them down to TV Guide descriptions but for the world stage. 

"'Instead of Jim was married to Linda but fucking Pam and Barbara, while Desi and Jill were having simultaneous affairs with Jethro and Francis,' Montefiore writes from a global and fractal point of view. Both big and small.

"This one marries his sister, kills his mother, who's also his aunt, and kills nine-step-brothers, and his father and his grandfather, and like Hongwu, a thirteenth-century Chinese emperor, killing his family to the ninth degree, or tenth degree--that is nine or ten levels of relatives. Such bloodshed makes Stalin or Hitler, who killed to the second or third degree, look like they were playing pattycake. And in the grand scheme of world history--where their reigns of terror lasted two decades or four, they were, since the Mings lasted for about half a millennia. 

"These were the people who built 200-foot-high minarets and towers out of the skulls of hundreds of thousands of enemies, and walled cities with their bones. And those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were sold into slavery and sexual depravity, and worked to death mining lead or salt or silver."

Later on--after dinner--I said to my wife, "You get mad at me when I tell one of the six or seven thousand cannibal jokes I've committed to memory (I'm having a ball) yet the truth is, from a human history pov, eating fellow humans has been acceptable for much longer than it's been taboo. Likewise, Europe, that bastion of Christianity, has been Muslim or "pagan" much longer than it's been in the thrall of the Church.

In other words, let's get over ourselves.

The world--despite how the news might make you feel or the galloping hooves of hatred and trumpism, or what I call fascism with a press-agent, ie libertarianism--is a brutal muthafookin place and always will be. People will always kill people. The rich will always eat the poor and as a species we are hardly ever more than a flea infected with yersinia pestis-away from essential eradication--where thirty-percent to ninety-percent of us die, depending on our distance from gallivanting rodents.

If you think today's cacophony of horrors is more horrible than a century ago or a millennia ago or in Christ's time or Xerxes', you're wrong. The world was shaved by a drunken barber--to steal from Robert Riskin--and you're likely to get your head de-bodytated any minute. 

Worry all you want about the seas engulfing us, pandemic infecting us, our brains eaten by AI and nuclear weapons landing in your ShopRite. The fact of the matter life is horror and horror is life. 

But don't forget, Newton's Third Law of Motion--for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction--applies to realms metaphysical, as well. After wars and Black Deaths, etc., rebounds happen--Enlightenments, increased power for the lumpen proletariat and so on. As they say at Karma Bagels over on Lex, "what goes around comes around."

So, the sooner you can find your own--no matter how unnatural it is--restorative niche, your own psychological respite, whether it's laying next to two bikini'd wimmen at Shutters or reading a book by Rudolph Höss, kommandant of Auschwitz, find that thing that gives you something away from the thing that's keeping you on the precipice of despair.

As Wordsworth said, the world is too much with us, late and soon.

Show up late sometime, and leave too soon, or both. And find solace and peace and quiet and maybe a bit of laughter, even amid the horror, wherever you can, whenever you can.

Find a hand you can hold and hold it. Maybe squeeze it and get squozen back. Don't think about it not being enough. It's all any of us can ever get.