I’m in favor of ending more things with an abrupt cut to black.
(Spoiler alert) SOUL, the Pixar movie Disney+ released last month, goes dark before we can see what the main character does with his second chance at life. We don’t know if he learns to appreciate the simple miracle of sucking in air or if he returns to slumping in his chair, flipping channels and mourning all he could have been. I thought it was a good ending, to leave it up to the viewer, mostly because — despite Pixar always being pretty unsubtle that their cartoons MEAN SOMETHING — I tend to be wary of lessons imparted by major corporations (especially major corporations that once employed me).
I’d just finished watching The Sopranos for the first time a few weeks before seeing the Pixar movie. As even many who haven’t seen it know, the show’s finale – which has the excellent double-entendre title “Made in America” – abruptly cuts to black. The finale made news for this. If you never watched, the lead-up was this: Tony’s at a restaurant and puts Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” on the mini jukebox. He orders onion rings as Carmela and A.J. join him for dinner (one of his first outings after emerging from hiding). They’re talking about pedestrian upper-middle class family stuff as they wait for Meadow to arrive.
The tension builds as the camera cuts to different people in the restaurant, any of whom maybe will arrest Tony or shoot him down mid-meal, the choicest time to assassinate a mobster. We hope those onion rings will show up first. Outside, his daughter Meadow is trying to parallel park. (As an aside, Jaime-Lynn Sigler’s driving in this scene, as it cut to the restaurant and back to her, trying a spot, failing, pulling out, trying again, gave me a case of sympathy sweats. I just discovered this essay in The Cut that indicates I’m not the only one.)
The FBI might be coming for him; he could get whacked at any time; the Jersey crew of which he’s boss is decimated and most everyone he worked with is now dead or on life support, save a few guys we haven’t gotten to know much and his most annoying soldier, Paulie (your most irritating co-worker surviving while everyone you liked is gone feels very truthful).
I purposely avoided reading any of the write-ups on this finale but I assume many surmise that Tony gets taken out. I think he just goes on living.
Tony’s a guy who’s done bad things and is probably a sociopath with an addiction to cured meats, but maybe his evil deeds have always just been part of the job. And just like I remain unsure on his diagnosis, I think his fate is 50-50, too. Maybe he gets shot or arrested when we hear that restaurant door chime but he’s just as likely to see his daughter walk in and have a nice-enough meal with his family and then go back to being a mob boss who may or may not have learned and grown over the past six seasons of the show.
I wish more things ended this way. Just “we were here, now we’re not.” It’s a truer ending, because stories go on.
It’s a real inconvenience that everything has to have a point. An auspicious start for my first newsletter, yeah? “Step right up, enjoy my pointless stab at communication.”
But finding the point to things is a habit I’m trying to break myself of.
I live near a busy street in walking distance of a lot of stuff — not the scenic hiking trails or oceanfront that Los Angeles is known for, but utilitarian basic places — a Ralph’s, a CVS, a 7-11, a strip mall containing a donut shop, liquor store, and a taco stand (for what it’s worth, the first good taco stand to be in that particular space in my thirteen years living in this house).
No one walks in my neighborhood for the view; many people walk because they don’t own cars and they’re going to the bus stop.
I love walking down that street. I love passing by older couples each clutching a plastic bag of groceries, families walking dogs, twenty-somethings rushing to their jobs at Ralph’s or Yogurtland or whatever. The handyman who’s frequently stationed at one of the apartment buildings said to me once, “you walk a lot.” Even though it was just an observation, I took it as a compliment. (I’m a fragile-egoed writer; I take what I can get.)
At one of the duplexes on the other side of the street, there’s a multifamily dwelling with a small garden out front.
Whenever it’s sunny — which, according to a locally brewed beer, is 329 days a year in Los Angeles — there’s a man outside that building, in threadbare orange running shorts and nothing else. He’s bent at the waist even when he’s standing as straight as he probably can, and his tan is brown and even and makes his white hair that much more regal by comparison. He tends to the garden. He tended to the garden before the pandemic and before our ugly last week and he’ll be tending to the garden, I hope, for the rest of his days.
It’s not the most tamed or lush garden but he putters about with a milk jug of water, crouching to water the plants as close to their bases as he can. He zigzags among them instead of addressing the plants in any disciplined order, as if it’s garden wac-a-mole and — as he’s caring for one plant — another behind him is calling out, “Hey, I need goddamn water.”
I think if I was trying to make this mean something, I’d write about how this guy had found his purpose, and I definitely have an urge to do that. Then you, reader, would hopefully absorb my point and consider your daily routine and how the small things you do form your purpose.
But, who knows, maybe Mr. Orange Shorts hates going out there to water those plants and does it begrudgingly? Maybe there’s a Mrs. Orange Shorts inside and she’s a nag and wants him to do this thing and he could really give a shit if the plants live or die and he just wants her to leave him alone. Maybe he spends most of his day caught in the whorl of Twitter, like me, and he has to tend to the plants to forcibly detach (to which I’ll reluctantly admit I sometimes have trouble putting my phone down long enough to tend to a plant so he’s doing better than me).
I could ask him why he does it. I could take his photo and show you him and his garden, sharing him as a totem that you can look to when you need him. Maybe I could make him go viral.
But that seems reductive to do to this guy I find delightful. Maybe it’s because I think he seems content, and I want some of that for myself, and sharing too much of him will lessen my chances of getting it. I also know that I’ve assigned him fulfillment is sort of nuts when the plants he deals with might be his only reprieve from what’s otherwise a life of quiet desperation. (Or, if he really is on Twitter, loud, twitchy, validation-seeking desperation.)
In writing about him, though, I see that I’m trying to make him have a point. And maybe you want to read something with a point, because then you can carry that point around, and have it to wield when you need it.
Sorry. My quest of late is not to make everything a quest. And sometimes, it’s nice — if disorienting — to walk around empty-handed.
Sometimes the things we do are just the things we do. They are a life but who are we kidding to think there’s a huge sum?
One day that man in the orange shorts won’t be there anymore and maybe no one will tend to those flowers and plants and most people won’t be any wiser that he was there. The flowers and plants won’t know the difference, not really.
It will have been pointless for him to tend to them each day but he did it anyway. Maybe it’s pointless of me to write about him but I feel lucky that I got to. If it’s nihilistic of me to say, it’s the nihilism of gratitude.
It’s all pointless. It’s all for naught. It all means everything. It’s all beautiful.
Cut to black.
Stuff I’ve Loved Reading Lately:
Luster by Raven Leilani (buy it here)
Indestructible Object by Mary McCoy (preorder here)
Arlo and Pips: King of the Birds by Elise Gravel (buy it here)
This piece by Kaitlyn Greenidge in Harper’s Bazaar (read it twice)
This piece by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker
Carrie Mesrobian’s Substack, A Mess You’d Wear With Pride
Safy Hallan Farah’s Substack, Hip to Waste (also thank you to Safy for sharing her tips on and encouragements to starting a newsletter)
“ It’s a real inconvenience that everything has to have a point.” 🙌 Can’t we just enjoy the meaninglessness of it all?!
I agree with everything in this. I wish more writes felt less compelled to tidy up all their lose ends in the stories. Sometimes it’s more realistic and kind of satisfying to wonder a bit.