Horrible & Important Music Snobs

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“You listen to some horrible music,” Nelly said. 

“What do you listen to?”

No answer.

Some of us listen to music others consider weird, strange, and just plain different music, but we’ve listened to it for so long that it no longer bothers us when they say it’s horrible. Who cares what anyone thinks of the music we play for our entertainment? We do, when we’re in high school and college, but we wanted everyone to like us back then. Some of us were so insecure that we thought if they didn’t like our my music, or the music we loved so much it was a part of us, it was equivalent to character assassination. As age provided clarity, we realized we didn’t have anything to do with the creation of this music, so it was silly to think it was an insult by extension.  

Nothing Nelly said was personal. She just said silly, inoffensive jokes about my music at parties and family get-togethers. If Nelly wanted to get personal, she could’ve said something about my wife, my children, my financial stability, or my personal appearance. No, Nelly chose a relatively harmless subject on which she thought I had a humorous vulnerability. She was ribbing me. It was all part of this fun, little game we play with one another. 

Repetitive jokes like these only leap the fence from meaningless and harmless to competitive with repetition. When she first said, “You listen to some horrible music,” we laughed as hard as everyone else. We felt no need to respond. She could’ve been a little more creative, but it was a decent shot, and it was funny. 

We’ve found some jewels in the rough over the years, but we know that an overwhelming majority will never enjoy the music we do. It’s a thing, or a thang, we’ve known for so long that it doesn’t really matter to us anymore. It used to matter a great deal to us. We used to try to discover bands before any of our friends did, and the excitement we felt when we found such brilliantly creative artists was almost physical. If the recipients of our recommendations grew to love the music, and they attributed it to us in some manner, it was thick and delicious gravy. That pursuit probably started us down these weird, strange, and just plain different musical paths, but whatever the anthropology of it was, when we returned to the chart-topping, traditional music that the majority enjoy, we were left with, “Is that all there is?”  

By constantly dropping various incarnations of this joke, Nelly was trying to fit in with us. We all enjoyed taking shots at me, and she would score with these little shots more often than not. We would laugh, big belly laughs, because we knew how difficult, strange, and just plain different my music was. We laughed for years, perhaps too many years, until I turned the tables on her. 

“Wait a second,” we said. “What music do you listen to?”

“Oh, I was just joking with you,” Nelly said.

“I know you were, and I took no offense,” we said, “but if you’re going to get in the ring, whaddya got?”

Nothing.

No one cared what kind of music Nelly enjoyed, because she doesn’t love music, and that wasn’t the point. Music was background noise to her. It’s what she turns on when it’s a little too quiet. She doesn’t ache for brilliance the way we do, great songs don’t alter her mood, and she’s never used the word masterpiece with emotional exclamation points. She lets a DJ select her music for her. Okay, but to what station does she tune? She prefers trite and simplistic tunes that are as far from difficult and challenging soundscapes as songs get. Her favorite music involves corporate production, computer enhanced vocals and a professional songwriter composing and editing lyrics. We have no problem with any of that on the surface, because we know 90% of the population prefers that music. They don’t seek unique chord changes and complicated structures that no one else considered before. She’s not a musician or a music aficionado, and either are we. Nelly just wants a hummable beat in life, so she can strum it out on her steering wheel. She doesn’t demand artistry from her favorite artists, and we suspect that most of the music we love involves more minds than we’ll ever know. Yet, her repetition suggests that there is some sort of psychological game going on that she’s won, because we considered this game so silly that we never fired back before.

When we asked “What do you listen to?” a snark was born. We used to defend our music, because it meant so much to us that it felt like it was a part of us. It was our music in a way that breeds kinship, love, loyalty, and some form of mental monogamy. Age brings clarity, and we realized that we can love something that is not ours. We didn’t create the music, so we no longer view their insults as personal. We stopped defending our music, because we matured into the realization that it didn’t need defense, or at least we didn’t need to be the ones who defended it. Plus, most of her insults were right on the mark. The music we listened to was weird, strange, and just plain different.   

It’s fine if you crack on our music. We don’t defend our music, because we didn’t think it needed defense. The only reason we said anything at all was because she spent the whole game on offense, and if we were going to find out if she had any game at all, we thought we should test her defense.

***

Someone stepped into her silence and stuck up for Nelly. He was a gentleman who saw a woman flopping on the shore. She wasn’t embarrassed, and we didn’t really make her look bad, but he apparently felt the need to fill a void Nelly couldn’t. 

He preferred important artists who created important music. He preferred cultural scribes who wrote meaningful music. He preferred musicians Rolling Stone told us that we’re supposed to like. As he spoke, we thought of all the articles that centered around the theme, “Why it’s okay to like this artist now.” This guy preferred to listen to the martyrs, the prophets, and philosophers of music who told us what to think. We told him that we sought our philosophical mainframe in other venues. He asked where, we told him, and we both viewed the other’s path to philosophical truths as simplistic.

“[My artist] has witnessed carnage and mayhem firsthand,” he said, “and he writes about it. He writes about tragedies, foreign and domestic, and he does so with heart-wrenching and illustrative prose and poetry.”

“It’s poetry without a punchline. He writes subjectivity as if it’s objectivity.”

“But he’s been there,” he said in a tone that suggested we don’t get it. The you-don’t-get-it crowd gets a lot of mileage out of that line without saying it. The power lies in the inference.

“He’s been on the yellow brick roads provided by the undersecretary of tourism development.” 

“But he writes from the soul,” he said. “His lyrics are deep and meaningful.”

“[The artist] regards it as the truth, but it is his truth. He regards it as challenging. It’s his important music. It’s the college thesis paper he never wrote, because he never attended college. It’s his “I’m smart. Not like everybody says … like dumb … I’m smart and I want respect!” moment.”  

“This is where you and I differ,” he said, “because I find his lyrics so intellectually stimulating that I consider him important.”

“But did he write it to be important?”

“Why does that matter?” he asked.

“My favorite artists don’t strive for importance in this vein, and when an artist does, it always sounds contrived to me. Did your favorite artist write your favorite important song for the purpose of artistic interpretation, or did he do it to be a star?” 

“I doubt that anyone writes a song with the hope that someone, somewhere will consider it important,” he said. “I’ve never written a song, and neither have you, but I have to imagine that it’s so hard to write a song that if you strive for a hit, or the level of importance that we’re talking about, you probably end up chasing your own tail.”

“You can hear it in the song,” we said. “You can hear it in the emotional triggers he uses to evoke and provoke. There’s nothing wrong with it of course, but it doesn’t move the needle for me. Listen, every musician wants to be successful at what they do, but what do they do to get it? I respect anyone who knows their limitations and battles them from within. Do some artists reach a peak of creative brilliance, and they witness the other guy constantly outdoing them? Does this idea that they can’t outdo their rivals compel them to go down intelligent and important roads? I don’t know. Does the idea that they’ll never reach their creative peak again compel them to do it? I don’t know, but I can tell you that no musician has ever changed my mind on anything, and I find the never-ending attempts to do so a little tedious at times.”  

“So, who’s the music snob here?” he asked in a genuinely reflective tone I found disarming.

Our initial thought, after this conclusion of this conversation, was that this man was attempting to turn the tables on us. I did a deep dive on the reflective chuckle he gave after saying it however, and my best guess is he was laughing as much at himself as he was us. 

Are you Dead Yet? 

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“Are you dead yet?” 

“No.” 

“Isn’t this great?” 

“No.” 

How many of us know a “No” character? How many of us know someone who scrunches up a face and says, “You like life? What the heck is wrong with you?”  

No one says that, of course, but they’re dark. They’re so dark, it’s almost as if they’re obsessed with death, and I’m not just talking about goth customers of Fantas Magoria either. I’m talking about relatively normal people living normal lives who focus so much on what they consider the big circumstantial matter that they fail to put enough focus on the little, tiny stuff that could make their little lives more circumstantial.

Those of us who enjoy life, often find ourselves at odds with “No” types.

“I want a happy death.” I would advise you to make the most out of life you can before you die. That might lead to a happier death. “I just put a bundle down on a sound-proof, fully insulated casket on a plot that is as far removed from traffic as I could find. I had to put up with the sounds of traffic in life. I don’t want that in death.” They talk about death as if it’s sleep, as if the sounds of traffic might prove so annoying that it will intermittently wake them from a peaceful death. Nobody knows anything about death, except that it is a final punctuation mark. Once you’re gone, you’re gone.  

We shouldn’t care how this “No” character chose to live his life. Even though we needed him, we shouldn’t care that he wanted it over. He didn’t care that we needed him so much, and he didn’t really want to be remembered. He just wanted it over, for about thirty years he wanted his life over. He chose to live those thirty years in a manner that he thought should be rewarded, but he didn’t really pursue the idea that he should make the most of the gift of life. He just didn’t think that way, but he was a good man. Should we really care how or why he became a good man?  

What if this man wanted to hurry up and get his life over with, so he could join his beloved wife on the other side of pearly gates? What if he never found his life particularly rewarding, and he wanted hurry up and get his reward for living a good and virtuous life? What if there is no afterlife? What if his whole reason for living the life he lived turned out to be untrue? Is it untrue? We don’t know, but it seems like such a waste of life.

They told us there was an afterlife, but who were they? They were writers inspired by God. What does that mean? All writers are inspired by another author, especially at the beginning of their career, but how much does an author inspire what another writer writes? At what point does the writer take over and leave their inspirations behind? The only facts we know with 100% certitude, at this point in history, is that life exists on Earth, and it will end at some point. This might prove disappointing to many, but this could be it for us. 

We’re not supposed to question Them. Why? Why were we created with such intellect if we weren’t supposed to question them, Him, or the teachings inspired by Him? If our creator was so narcissistic that He didn’t want us questioning him, why didn’t he give us the intellect of the chimpanzee? Did He make it a sin to question Him, or did His inspired writers write that questioning them was a sin?   

“I’m not taking any chances. I’m living my life right, just in case.” Again, nothing wrong with that, but even if your quality of life was diminished by her death, you still have something she doesn’t, life. You are here now, and we need you. Why not live the life you have left here on Earth and let matters take care of themselves? Death will come soon enough, and once it does, whatever happens, you’ll likely be banished from Earth.    

If there is an afterlife, will we look down, up, around, or back on our life on Earth with regret? Will we wish we would’ve lived better or different? Even if Heaven, Summerland, Nirvana Celtic Otherworld, or Valhalla are the paradise we’ve been promised, will we be as happy as we’ve ever been, or will they provide us a moment to look back on our life on Earth? If they do, will we finally see how substantial and special life was?  

Life is not a minor inconvenience on the path to something greater, as far as we know. Or, if it is, we should not focus on that idea so much that it begins to impede on our life on Earth. What if the guardians at the gate inform us that life was the reward or gift? 

If we don’t enjoy life for what it is, because of the poor choices we’ve made, we should consider changing it. Some might require a complete overhaul, but most only need a few subtle tweaks. If we’re so unhappy in life that we begin looking forward to death it might be time for a change, before it’s too late, because once you’re gone, you’re gone.  

The fundamental, overriding philosophy of his life was that life is but a comma. I couldn’t articulate a proper response to this at the time, but if were granted enough time to ask him another soul-searching question, I would’ve loved to ask him, “If we’re looking for punctuation marks to define the life we lived, wouldn’t we love it if our loved ones applied an exclamation point at the end of our sentence? You suggest that you don’t want to take any chances that there isn’t an afterlife, and I appreciate that, but what if you applied the same rationale to the beforedeath? My guess is, if there is an afterlife, you’re going to find that the only punctuation marks are question marks, and the final answer to those questions will be that you focused too much of your life on death.”  

What happens at the moment of death? Some say it’s the unceremonious end of a life. There’s nothing more. There’s no soul and no afterlife, and if there’s anything to the idea of rebirth, it can only be found in the manner weeds and worms use our carcass for nourishment. We will die one day, as the ground squirrel, the clover, and the elephant will? Life doesn’t last forever, and it’s our job to do the best we can with the 73.77 years we’ve been granted. 

Some believe our state of being doesn’t end, it changes. Some believe that the afterlife involves a literal transformation into something else. They call it reincarnation. They also believe that their souls have been reincarnated hundreds of times already, and they always trace the path of their soul through someone noteworthy and glorious. Most people were Julius Caesar during the height of his rule in a previous life. No one looks back to see themselves as a vulgar peasant who was forced to commit atrocities to survive. What if, as a result of the life we lived as a human, we come back as a grub, or a dung beetle? Will we have any consciousness of the life we lived before? Will we know that this is our reward/punishment for the life we lived, or will our consciousness of life be as minimal as the dung beetle’s?    

Various religions believe life on earth is but as stage, as opposed to the stage. These religions teach us that this is not all there is, and some of us take great comfort in knowing this. That comfort bothers others, because some are always bothered by comfortable people. They suggest that most religious doctrine almost seems centered around a marketing strategy to attract the angry, sad, and uncomfortable people who need hope.   

We all know the Christian version of Heaven and Hell, but the various Pagan religions have Summerland, the Celtic Otherworld, or Valhalla. They also have their own versions of the Christian purgatory, in that the unsettled soul moves from being to being until it learns what it needs to know to enter the promised land. Most religions share the view that this life on Earth can’t be it. 73.77 years on earth, and we’re done? It can’t be. We’re human beings. We’re the top of the food chain. We have emotions and intellect that should be utilized by a greater force. If the controlling force(s) allow us to dissolve to dust, it just seems like such a waste of life.  

Some other philosophers suggest that it’s possible that through our psychic energy that we’ve created a promised land, through the rational if God doesn’t exist, there might be a need to create Him. We created the internet through our collective intellect, and the metaverse, and the omniverse, who’s to say we couldn’t create our own afterverse composed of dead souls congregating for the rest of eternity? We created this reward for ourselves, because we’re too important to the universe. There’s got to be more than this. What if there isn’t? What if this is it?  

My aunt passed away, or she thought she did. She looked up and saw a bright light. It moved her to tears, until her daughter informed her that it was the examination room light. The sweet smile on her face diminished, and she felt dumb when we giggled. The doctor arrived in the room minutes later, diagnosed her, and they treated her for the next week. She was released from the hospital, and she lived the rest of her remaining years disappointed. One might think that such a near-death experience might wake a person up and lead them to live a better life than the one they lived before the experience. She didn’t. She experienced what she thought was glory, and she lived a life of disappointment and routine in the aftermath.  

What if we had such a spiritually moving experience? Researchers suggest we continue to live 2-20 seconds after death. They say that we experience a surge of electricity in our brain in this brief time span. Other research suggests that dreams can last 50 seconds, but that the average dream only lasts about 15. With both of those theories in mind, we can guess that this surge of electricity in our brains can make an after-death dream feel like one of the most powerfully surreal dreams we’ve ever had. We might feel more alive than we ever have after our death. We might even call it an afterlife experience.    

We should hold no grudges or superiority over intellects who focus on the afterlife. Better minds than ours believe in the phenomenon, and dumber ones believe that we become nothing more than worm food … if we don’t purchase the proper casket with the best insulation technology has to offer. Some label the former superstitious, others mystical, but whatever we call it, it’s not an indicator of intellect. 

I don’t know if there is evidence that could end this debate, but what if we received concrete, irrefutable evidence that the afterlife did or did not exist? Would this lead us to live better lives, or would a sense of hopelessness increase? Would we enjoy our lives more in the aftermath? If there is no afterlife, we’ll never regret how we lived. If there is an afterlife, we might regret how we lived. What difference does that make to you now though, I ask these “No” characters.  

He believed in a deity. He believed in the Christian God. “Why do you think he placed you here, on Earth? What’s your purpose? I doubt He put you here, or any of us here, to live for the promised land.” A literal interpretation is that the promised land is a promise He made to those who make the most of life on earth. Obsessing over that promise almost seems to me a violation of the contract. My guess is God loses patience with those who obsess over death and an afterlife. My guess, if God chose to bring this debate to a close, is that he’d say, “Do everything you can with the greatest gift I ever gave you, life. Death comes soon enough for everyone and everything, and when it does, you’ll know what happens.”   

The Trials and Triumphs of Danny MacKinnon

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I heard that Danny MacKinnon used to be a no good kid just like the rest of us, until his dad took his life over. I was sitting next to him in some intro level, required Geography class, when he leaned over and said, “How can you like those losers?” Those were the first words he ever said to me. He said it in reference to the Atlanta Braves jersey I wore, number three, Dale Murphy. “I don’t know how anyone can like them, and “The Murph””, he said with a sarcastic tone, “The Murph can’t even tie Pedro Guererro’s shoes.” Danny was obviously a diehard Los Angeles Dodgers fan who tried to prove their superiority through statistics. The type of statistics he threw at me were those only a true baseball nerd would know. A guy drops competitive hatred lines like those on a fella, and two things will happen. Fellas either throw down or a competitive hatred/friendship is born. For us, it was the latter. We exchanged notes, “The Murph goes three for three with a homer and three RBI’s, and Pedro strikes out twice, 0-4,” was one such note I scooted across the desk. We whisper, talked baseball for the rest of the year, until an unusual friendship, indigenous to young men developed. I wanted to hang out with Danny, outside Geography class, but he was always too busy. I began to think Danny MacKinnon might be something of a snob.

“He’s not a snob,” a mutual friend said. “He is busy, too busy. His dad booked his whole life up. There was an incident in high school. No one knows what happened, but there was an incident.”

Danny’s mom won the wars in the MacKinnon household, prior to the incident. She wanted her boy to have fun in life, nothing more, and “He doesn’t like sports as much as you do Tom.” She fought her husband on many issues she considered crucial, and she won those wars. “Life is short,” she said to him in many ways. “He will only have one childhood. He will only go through high school once. Let’s let him enjoy it,” she said. Danny was special. He was their only boy, and she accused her husband of wanting to live vicariously through him.

No one knew what the incident was, but Tom MacKinnon took charge of son’s life after it. We could only guess that the incident was a small and relatively insignificant incident that Tom used to win the wars in the MacKinnon household. Some of us guessed that the incident was one of those bad road incidents. The type of incident where no one gets hurt, and there’s no damage done, but it suggests that a teenager might be headed down the wrong road. We assume that Tom decided the best way to prevent his child from going further down that road was to book his son’s whole life up. He probably thought the best way to prevent Danny from going down a bad road was to prevent him from having free time or leave him so exhausted that he doesn’t have the energy to go out with his friends.

Whatever the incident was, Danny was implicated, and it prompted his dad to stop volunteering to work overtime to engineer his son’s life. Tom MacKinnon became the coach of his son’s basketball teams, his baseball teams, and his flag football teams. In doing so, the man discovered he had a talent for coaching young boys, and he continued to work as an assistant coach for Danny’s high school teams, when time permitted. When his kid wasn’t playing organized sports, or doing homework with his dad, he was practicing, and when he wasn’t practicing he was lifting weights, jogging, and playing pickup games with neighborhood kids in the local park. After high school, Danny’s immediate future was mapped out. He received a division II, college scholarship for basketball, and he was able to choose a school well-known for turning out bright engineers. His whole life was mapped out until another incident happened, before he could take one step into a classroom or a basketball court for the college. The second incident was a freak accident that involved a forklift and sheet metal on a Summer job.

His doctors warned him that his future was grim. “I didn’t even know what the word grim meant,” Danny said, “but I really didn’t have to know. All I had to do was look at my dad’s face and hear my mom’s tears to understand the gist of this word grim.”

“You should’ve lost complete functionality of your legs,” the MacKinnon’s primary physician said with a specialist in his background nodding, and an x-ray of Danny’s legs further back. “You didn’t, and in the grand scheme of things, you should consider yourself lucky.”

“What does lucky mean?” he asked with disdain.

“Well, you’re not going to consider yourself lucky in rehab,” the specialist added. “If you complete the regimen we’re prescribing, you’ll gain more functionality, but that’s a big if. With you being a top-shelf athlete in our state, we give you a better than average chance of completing the rehab, if you show the same grit and determination that you displayed on the court, but that’s still a big if. It’s up to you Danny. We’re not going to sugarcoat this, even if you complete the rehab in a spectacular manner, you’ll experience various levels of pain in your legs for the rest of your life. You’ll also experience moments, with your legs, that will forever alter the life you knew before this accident.”

Even with those warnings, Danny MacKinnon was not what anyone would call a model rehabilitation student, in the beginning. He spent some of that time feeling sorry for himself. Who wouldn’t? Prior to the incident, Danny MacKinnon was considered a top-shelf athlete in the state, and no matter how many second opinions they received, Danny was told his plans for an athletic future were over.

“There’s so much damage here,” a second specialist said, “that if you listen to your physical therapists, and you excel in your rehab, you might eventually regain enough functionality to walk without a limp. I’m not going to kid you though, Danny, it will be a test of your resolve to reach that point. Most people don’t.”

That wasn’t enough to get him going either. He was awful to the physical therapists and their assistants, and he made their lives miserable.

“I was a little bitch,” Danny said to characterize his first few weeks. “If I couldn’t play sports, I really didn’t want to do anything else. I went into a full-fledged depression, because I couldn’t accept the idea that everything I spent my whole life doing prior to that awful day in September was dead and gone. The mental rehabilitation was much more grueling than the physical aspects of it, but I eventually reached a point where I buried the old Danny MacKinnon and decided to give birth to a new one. I can’t remember if I came up with that idea on my own, or if one of my physical therapists thought it up, but I eventually shocked my doctors by achieving a level of functionality just short of what fully capable people take for granted. I’ll never have a normal gate pattern, but I can now hide my disability so well that most people who don’t know me, can’t see my limp, or my struggle to appear normal.”

I wanted more details. Everything I heard about the incident was secondhand, and if I was ever going to write about it, I wanted primary source information. I thought Danny MacKinnon’s story needed to be told. I thought his story might prove to be an inspiration to others in similar situations in life, but when I called him to ask him for more details, Danny MacKinnon didn’t have the in-depth answers I was seeking. I initially thought this had something to do with the idea that the horrible accident happened so many years prior to our phone call that he either forgot some of the details, or he wanted to put it all behind him now that he was a successful podiatrist, living a full happy life. I also considered the idea that he wasn’t a reflective person. Throughout the phone calls that followed, in which I asked him questions that I thought up after our first phone call, both of those characteristics played a part in Danny’s answers, but the central driving force of Danny MacKinnon’s inability to define his miraculous recovery lay in the idea that he was just a doer.

“Was it painful?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“The rehab I mean.”

“Yes it was painful,” he said. “Every day, every exercise was a new test of the pain threshold.”

This man of few words said he did what his therapists told him to do. Back then, some therapists used scream therapies. They got in your face and screamed you into more reps. He didn’t like his therapists, and he grew to loathe them, but they helped him achieve what they said would buckle an overwhelming majority of those suffering similar injuries.

Danny MacKinnon eventually became a model student. He used the athlete’s mentality to overcome overwhelming odds, but he didn’t analyze anything he did. Even while immersed in the physical and mental rehabilitation, he apparently didn’t analyze the steps in the process in the manner I would’ve. It’s the difference between doers and analytical and reflective people. Reflective people build narratives to a point where they imagine how a local news network might report on it. Whereas a doer might sum up everything they do with a line such as, “Life deals you some twists and turns, and you have to deal with them when they hit you.” That was how Danny summed up his inability to give me what I wanted.

Danny switched from dreaming about playing college basketball and eventually becoming an engineer, to dreaming about a life as a physical therapist, to dreaming about becoming a podiatrist. He told everyone he knew that he wanted to do for others what the physical therapists did for him, and he thought his story might stoke the fires of any patient who stood precariously over the fault line in the manner he did. When I asked him why he decided to switch to podiatry, he said, “Somewhere along the line, I switched.” He made a couple jokes like, “I think I saw how many hot girls were in podiatry, and I decided that’s for me.” I laughed, but I heard too much about Danny MacKinnon to think he would switch careers over something that silly. It might have been sarcasm too, because I couldn’t think of any female podiatrists, but I’m sure there are some.

Over the course of a couple years, he built a successful practice in a small town, and his friends said he put as much temerity and resolve into building that practice as he put into his athletics. He turned into a substantial, serious man, and that’s when it dawned on me that Danny MacKinnon simply forgot why he switched careers. I don’t know if the Danny I met, after years of separation, was so busy, so happy, or so fun that he didn’t think too much about any of the life-altering decisions he made, but I think he genuinely forgot why he made those decisions. I think he also forgot why he was so driven to rehabilitate himself and the little details of how he drove himself. This may seem improbable to anyone who doesn’t know Danny MacKinnon, but I think he forgot the finer details of his life. He wasn’t particularly humble and nothing he said over the years led me to believe he was an egotistical man. He was just a just-the-facts-ma’am type of guy. These characteristics were such that while I didn’t think he would ever trumpet his accomplishment in an egotistical manner, I didn’t think he would shy away from giving me details either. He just forgot the details of a story that I would’ve told everyone I knew about them so often that they would have tired of hearing them. I might’ve asked that these details be be chiseled into my gravestone if I had to endure them. Danny MacKinnon forgot them.

“You could inspire others, suffering similar incidents,” friends might say if it happened to me. “Your inspirational story of overcoming the odds could appeal to healthy and unhealthy types. People love stories like these.”

If someone suggested that I sell my inspirational story to a Reader’s Digest, I’d have a story like this one typed up, printed, and in the mail the following Monday. I would be so proud of my ability to overcome the odds to walk again that I might even embellish the story to have my “I” character walk onto a court one more time to sink one ceremonious, jump shot in a college basketball game. Danny MacKinnon’s story is not a Rudy tale. His injuries were just too severe. If one were to provide in-depth details of Danny MacKinnon’s incident to a specialist who never heard of him, they might be better able to tell us what a miracle it is that Danny can not only walk without assistance but he helps anyone who suffers similar problems.

The idea that the gist of Danny MacKinnon’s story ended with him becoming one of the most successful podiatrists in his area might be what keeps his story from being After School Special material. How does a screenwriter make a man examining the x-ray of his patients’ feet a dramatic conclusion? It’s not the exclamation point at the end of a story most writers seek. It’s more of a period to those who already know what the word grim means. To those of us who know the details of what this teenager had to overcome, and what this man still deals with and will have to deal with for the rest of his life, it is a story we feel compelled to tell anyone who will listen.

As inspirational as Danny’s tale is to those of us who know some of the details, it pales compared to story we think he could’ve told if he remembered more. If he kept a journal of his daily travails, the progressions of his mindset, and the motivational techniques he used to get through the day, we think he could’ve written a motivational best-seller. Danny simply forgot the necessary details he would’ve needed to make his story feel more complete.

“How could you forget?” we asked him.

“I just did,” he said. “I guess I just didn’t consider the details as important as you do.”

When Danny MacKinnon fell out of line with an incident in high school, his dad took control of his life. He drove Danny, like a drill sergeant in the Marines, to be the type of kid who had tunnel vision. He basically took Danny’s identity and image away from him and gave him a new one. That mindset probably drove Danny to become a top-shelf athlete in his state, and that same level of intensity later drove him to overcome the odds and achieve surprising levels of health to the point that he became the most successful podiatrist in his area. If it’s true that Danny MacKinnon was a no-good kid like the rest of us, before I knew him, and he was as directionless as the rest of us, then perhaps the greatest gift his dad unknowingly gave him was a relatively freakish level of tunnel vision that we could all use in our lives.