David Lynch - Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Skull-E-oh-sis-uh-fuss

Here’s a thing about which we can be certain: People I admire are going to keep dying. Because here’s the thing: None of them, not one of them, is getting any younger. It’s like they’re not even trying.

David Lynch died last week. Someday I’m sure I’ll write more about what his oddball dark surrealism and grotesque genre parody meant to me. For me, his work, as it was for a lot of people, was a beacon. A signal that a broader world was out there, and that things don’t have to be just like it seems they are where you happen to be. In fact, things might not even be like that at all.

I’m not totally sure how he did it, but Lynch got crazy, singular projects fully realized and produced and distributed through mainstream television and movie systems. An unthinkable feat. And he did it over and over. Those beacons reached people—people who were isolated and had access to only the dominant monoculture, or the unsatisfyingly stilted and repressive culture of whatever place they happened to be growing up. People like me. And maybe you too.

David Lynch’s work had the same effect on me as Sesame Street. They both, at different points in my life, but in strikingly similar ways said to me, “there’s a bigger world out there.”

Lynch is the reason I ever tried mediating, because I heard him talk about the experience of meditation and how he had benefited from it. I respected him so much that his full-throated endorsement was enough to get me to sit still and close my eyes for minutes at a time—a pretty counterintuitive move for me, then and now.

It’s strange when these people you don’t know, but who shaped you die. And these strange things are predictable.

Here’s my ill-advised cover of “In Heaven (The Lady in the Radiator Song)” from Eraserhead, recorded years ago.

Collage of the day: Breaker Breaker

Subscriber collage: Bird Break