Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!

NOVEMBER 9, 1909—EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD IS ENOUGH

“I WANTED A MISSION, and for my sins they gave me one.”

The first time I went on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN, it was right before I started shooting The Celebrity Apprentice. Piers had also done TCA, and for his considerable sins he had won it. Everyone gets everything he wants. Before we went live on the air, we sat and chatted. Piers was pleasant, but not polite. While we made small talk, he answered texts on his Porsche BlackBerry. You didn’t even know they had a designer Porsche BlackBerry. I’ve given you that information and, in the same breath, told you who would fucking buy and use a Porsche BlackBerry while someone was talking to him. Piers told me that I’d have a blast on The Celebrity Apprentice and how much he liked my magic show. He was slamming down Red Bulls like they were going out of style, and indeed they had gone out of style a decade earlier.

The floor manager counted us down from five seconds for the broadcast to go live, and Piers started his interview with a big smile, a quick intro and then got right to a quick and sloppy reading from my book God, No! I believe what he read on the air was all he had read of the book. Then he said something to the effect of “I don’t like you, and I don’t like your book.” He hadn’t read it, and he didn’t know me, but he thought he had a sense of good TV and good TV is sometimes just about being rude and ignorant. He had that in spades. We must always remember that we can never know what’s in someone else’s heart, but in order to function, we must guess. It sure seemed that as Piers argued with me about religion, he didn’t believe a word he was saying. We must go with what he says, and he says he’s a religious man and we must believe him, but from a couple yards away, my bullshit detector was pinning the needles. You must trust him and not me, but goddamn, from the guest chair his faith sounded like jive.

It took me until I was fifty-six years old, but for the first time in my life, on Piers’s show, I took my parents’ advice on how to treat people. I was polite. Completely polite. I sat, as Piers attacked me, and found that simple politeness brought a calm over me that no yogi could match. Under his rudeness, I found nirvana. I didn’t once raise my voice and I didn’t once say anything like, “Would you please let me finish?” It was his show, and if he wanted me to finish my sentence, I would. If he didn’t, it was his show.

Before I went on the show, my buddy Jonathan Ross told me a joke ad-libbed on a British TV show called I’m Sorry I Haven’t Got a Clue by another buddy of mine, Stephen Fry. On that show, Stephen defined the word “countryside” as “The killing of Piers Morgan.” When Jonathan sent it to me in an e-mail, it took me a few moments to get it. In case you have trouble, try spelling “countryside” phonetically. “Cunt-re-cide.” Stephen Fry is wicked funny and in my experience is right about everything.

The first Piers Morgan show that I did (yes, it’s called show business, and now I’m a regular on Piers Morgan, because that’s my job and I enjoy doing his show) is perhaps still my favorite interview, because it was the first one I did that I believe my parents would have been proud of. That’s a lie. My mom and dad were proud of everything I ever did, that was their default setting, but it might have been the first interview where I was myself. There was no jive from me. I was polite and honest. I can be ashamed that it took me fifty-six years to be polite and honest in the face of an attack, but at least I got there. If you heard me a few times on Howard Stern, you may have bet that I’d never ever be able to hit politesse and honesty at the same time.

That first Piers Morgan interview changed the way I acted on TV and in my overall public life. I’ve always respected honesty in showbiz, but somehow I never considered being polite to be honest. Piers taught me that I could be myself on TV and it would be okay. I could be my mother’s son and still be a motherfucker. It’s a great feeling.

At one point in the discussion, Piers asked me about fearing death. He hit below the belt and talked about the deaths in my family. He moved it from theoretical and theological to personal and cruel. During that moment, it wasn’t my mom and dad going through my head (that would have been self-cruelty), it was the Stones, “All your sickness, I can suck it up, throw it all at me, I can shrug it off.” For that moment on live TV, I was rich enough, strong enough, hard enough and, most important, in love enough. It seemed Piers was making the argument that he believed in a life after death because not believing in it scared him. This argument is empty on so many levels. Should I argue that I believe I’m Bob Dylan because being Penn Jillette depresses me? I can argue that I’d like to be Bob Dylan: I’d like to have written the line “It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be,” but I didn’t. That is the answer. The frightening sweetness of life is not an argument for life after death. Wanting to believe something is not any reason at all to believe it. If anything, it’s a reason to question it.

The other part of that argument or assertion is that death is scary. The loss of life is sad, the wonderful rickety carnival ride being over, but the atheist view of death could not be less scary. The religious view of death, the spook show, is scary. Whether benevolent or not, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent creatures up in all your shit is scary. I certainly wouldn’t tell my children there is a hell they might go to. Even the idea of purgatory is horrific. I won’t go head to head with Mark Twain, so read his Letters from the Earth to imagine how even the Christian heaven is just real human hell. Add eternal to anything, even eating pussy while listening to Dylan, and you get hell.

After Piers tried to crack me with my mom’s death and scare me with my own death, I answered, “1909.” That’s not true. I don’t think I really answered, “1909.” If you check it out on the InnerTube you’ll hear me say another year. I answered whatever year happened to pop into my head. I didn’t have my answer planned. I want to believe I said “1909.” My answer confused Piers. He stopped insulting me for a moment and cocked his eyebrow in mock TV wonder. Why would I answer a question about death with a year? He ad-libbed something like “What?”

I asked if 1909 terrified him. This is the question to ask anyone who is afraid of the atheist view of death. How frightened are you of 1909? How frightened were you in 1909? I’ve now picked November 9, 1909, because that’s the day my mom was born, and I figured, since she would be over 103 years old now, it’s pretty safe that if you’re reading this book, you weren’t alive in 1909. So, 1909 is exactly the same as 2109 for our purposes. You most likely weren’t alive in 1909 and you most likely won’t be alive in 2109. You won’t have any effect on anything then. You won’t know anything and no one will know about you. Game over or game hasn’t started—there isn’t much difference.

I would love to be alive in 2109. I would love to talk to my possible grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. I would love to see what people are wearing. I would love to see if we have flying cars, world peace, and a better song for twelve-year-old boys than “Stairway to Heaven.” Will we finally get to wear silver jumpsuits and have big foreheads?

I’m not sure I want November 9, 2109, more than I’d want November 9, 1909. I would love to meet my grandparents and maybe my great-grandparents. I never knew my grandmother, and I knew my grandfather only as an old man. I’d love to meet him when he was young, dumb, and full of cum. I would love to sit and tell my infant mom what her grandchildren would be like when they were her age. I would love to see the horses and buggies and know we would eventually be going to the moon. I would love to put a few bucks in a compound interest account for myself and leave a note to throw some money at the guys from Microsoft, Apple, Google, PayPal and Facebook, and to get credit for coining the term “CamelCase.” I’d love to be around for the invention of swing, bebop, and rock and roll. There’s so much we miss by being stuck in time. But life is time, and nothing more.

In the twentieth century, we got pretty good at one-way time travel. Since language developed, we have been able to travel to the past, and more and more people since Gutenberg (not Steve, he was off Dancing with the Stars almost as fast as I was) have been able to write messages to the future. In the twentieth century, we learned to send pictures to the future and now video. I have a picture of my mom at two years old and another of her at seven, about the same age as my daughter now, and about one hundred years apart.

We have the imagination to imagine our daughters and our mothers playing together at the same age and we have the technology to feed that imagination. I daydream about my mom, seven years old, in her little wool coat and hat, knocking on the door and coming over for a playdate. I see Valda and Moxie being nice to me for a while, and then running up to Mox’s room to play princesses. I imagine my mom coming down wearing my little girl’s plastic shoes and yellow princess dress. It would take my daughter about two minutes to teach her grandmother to play Plants vs. Zombies, and they would have the unstuck time of their lives. They could be mean to my son, Zolten, together and leave him out of their little girl play and then make him laugh that pure laugh that explodes my world and frees my heart. The daydream of my mom and my daughter at the same age breaks my heart. I want it so badly. I promise you that I want it more than Piers Morgan wants there to be a god and an afterlife. My desire for something impossible does not make it less impossible. My imagination is not bad. My imagined Val/Mox playdate is a real part of me. It informs my love of my daughter and my love of my mom. That loves exists. That love is not imaginary. That love is in me. And as far as memories count, and they do count, my mom lives on, and she lives on as that seven-year-old girl in that wool hat from the time-traveling picture. She lives on in a way that I never experienced her for real and never will experience her. It’s just a picture, and that’s okay.

We do have time travel. Depending on whatever shitty sci-fi story you’re following, the rules of time travel change, but they often allow you to go back in time, allow you to know what’s happening, even though you can have no effect on the events themselves. I look at the picture of my mom from 1916 and I can see her little wool hat and her smile, the smile I recognize from her deathbed eighty-four years later. By any real definition, we’re time traveling. I’m time traveling in any real sense.

New generations will be seeing more and more high-quality video from times they weren’t alive. They’ll be experiencing part of a time when they did not exist. This is a fairly new thing. I have home movies my brother-in-law and my nephew ripped to computer video that I can watch of myself learning to juggle at age twelve. The sixties and seventies are pretty well documented, and lots of people alive today weren’t alive then. My high school girlfriend, Anne, who is some sort of genius scientist now, thinks any theory about the modern world changing human nature is bullshit. Anne points out that what humans do is adapt. It’s what we’re best at. We got good at going faster than the speed of sound and being able to talk to people all over the world at once. That doesn’t fuck with our attention spans. None of that changes our humanity.

But I wonder what all this time travel does to our sadness. I know we’ve adapted, but how is sadness affected? Just one hundred years ago, the old lady down the street was always and eternally the old lady down the street. You could hear stories about her as a young person, and you could read things she wrote as a young person, and maybe even see a drawing or photograph of her as a younger person, but these were little glimpses. Soon we’ll have hi-def 3-D images of our grandmothers sexting.

Davy Jones died in February 2012. We have a lot of pictures of him at age twenty. We have video and shows of him at twenty and now he’s dead at sixty-six and it’s all laid out there. Mortality is rammed down our throats through our eyes and ears. Paul Newman is the most attractive human being I have ever seen in person. I saw him live and realized the camera was not kind to him. The camera made him uglier. The camera makes David Letterman look better. Off-camera, in person, Julia Roberts is wonderful, but looks a bit like a tapeworm. That’s a lot of mouth to see up close. We don’t have the technology yet to capture the beauty of Paul Newman. But we do have enough technology to watch him get old. Paul never got ugly and that helps my heart, but he got old. Pretty doesn’t always hang in there, Mr. Gibson. Things you’ve felt can show in your face sometimes. Movies can show us aging at its prettiest, and that’s Paul Newman, but it’s still sad. It’s still a bit melancholy to watch The Left-Handed Gun become Nobody’s Fool. We live so much longer now than we used to. We are more aware of how time flies and what changes have happened and will happen. I can no longer remember the feeling of holding my daughter in one hand and her being barely bigger than my one hand. She’s now a little girl. And she will be a young woman, then a woman, then an old woman. I show her pictures of her daddy as a baby. “Did you poop your pants?”

“I sure did.”

Piers Morgan was trying to scare me with death. Fuck death. He can’t scare me with death. I got death hanging. Death is November 9, 1909—death is nothing. I’m not afraid of nothing. But time passing is something different. I’m terrified of time passing. I tremble at the thought of my little girl growing up. I can’t face my son growing stronger than me and helping me up the stairs. I quake at the prospect of looking at my adult children’s faces with eyesight worse than I have now.

Motherfucker.

Piers, you have no chance of scaring me with death, because all the fear possible is contained in life. The awful truth of how sweet life can be is enough to crack me every second. That black-and-white picture of my mom, alive, and bursting with her future in her little wool hat and matching mittens—that, Piers, is what scares the shit out of me, and your TV religion can’t protect any of us from that. I’m not afraid of a hot lead enema followed by some serious ass-to-mouth with Satan—give it your worst. I’m afraid of a life that is so full of joy and love that every second just bursts by and is gone. It’s a gorgeous, detailed, 3-D, surround sound, no-flutter-in-the-bass mural done by 10 billion artists, and it’s whipping by the car window at the speed of sound, and I’ll never come back to it. I can take pictures of it, but in the time I hold those pictures up, I’ll have missed another billion images and experiences.

You want to scare me, Piers, try that. But no one claims god can change that. God might promise everlasting life, and the possibility of seeing my loved ones again, but he can’t promise that this life that I’m living right now won’t go by. I want every time I touch my son’s hand to never end, and I want to experience the next time I touch his hand after not touching his hand for a while.

I want the impossible. But I’ll settle for what we have. Everything in the world has to be enough. Everything in the world is enough. I’m rejoicing that what scares me and breaks my heart is the beauty of what I have right now.

Are you afraid of death?

November 9, 1909.

I’m making my mom’s birthday a holiday. I’m afraid of a life stuck in time, but so what? I’m not afraid of death.