I was driving with my son the other night, listening to Joe Frank on the radio. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Frank has been doing weird late-night audio pastiches for about as long as I’ve been listening to college radio. They used to seem more random to me. Now they make a lot more sense.

Anyway, the topic (if you can call it that) of this program may have been identity, since he had recordings of a lot of callers named Joe Frank leaving messages that summed who they were and where they lived: “I’m Joe Frank and I’m a butcher who lives in the Bronx…” “I”m Joe Frank and I’m a retired military man…” And threaded in between all of these will-the-real-Joe-Frank-please-stand-up moments was a recording of a talk by Jack Kornfield, one of my favorite Buddhist writers and lecturers.

Jack was telling a joke, as is his wont, that he had heard from a “recovering Catholic” friend of his: Jesus is walking around heaven when he sees a bunch of people gambling. He can’t believe it, gambling in heaven! Then he turns the corner and there are a bunch of people drinking! It’s too much. He goes to St. Peter at the gate and rips him: “What’s wrong with you? You’re supposed to vet these people and make sure they come in when they are ready! Until then they go to purgatory (or worse!)” “Sorry,” says Peter, “I do try and vet them, honest, boss.” “One simple task and this is the best you can do!” says Jesus, who won’t let it go (you know how He gets). Finally Peter says, “I keep turning these people away and your mother keeps letting them in the back door!”

Moral being pray to Mary, I guess, if you want forgiveness. I thought of this the next day when I was hiking by myself by the Pacific Ocean. I was by myself because my son, who can annoy me to no end, would not pick up the phone or answer his email — we were supposed to get together before I got on a plane to come home to NY. And rather than stew about him and his Asperger’s related problems I decided to hike somewhere pretty by myself.

And what was in the parking lot, at the Tennessee Valley Road trail head? A van full of autistic adults. And walking down to the ocean I kept passing them, some in worse shape than others, their minders calling after them — “Come on, John! we’re going to be late.” While John studied his water bottle, or some caterpillar crawling across the road.

And I recalled another hike I took many years ago when my son was an infant. I had taken ecstasy and wrote about it here; the big revelation, really, was that this was an ordinary day on empathy. Like Jesus had just ripped my chest open, or Mary had let everyone in the back door, crowding my little Eden, over flowing my heart.

What links the viral reaction to the story of This American Life retracting its Mike Daisey story about Apple factory conditions in China and the news that Kony 2012 cofounder Jason Russell was arrested for public masturbation? The hope the often nasty tweets and messages held that people wouldn’t actually have to worry about buying iPads or helping children being kidnapped in Africa.

TAL host Ira Glass did what any good journalist would do with the Apple story, in which monologuist, author and (perhaps) bullshit artist Daisey is guilty of mashing up facts (and seemingly inventing characters) for a radio report based on his one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs: He made a whole new episode out of it, and it’s a must-listen for fans of journalism.

Glass himself seems beyond reproach, which is one of the reasons his retraction packed such a punch. As Kurt Andersen noted, the first line of tweets responding to his posting of the news was “Whoa!” Glass is like the Edward Murrow of the new new journalism; his popular program has always seemed a model of integrity and has never succumbed to easy irony. He tackles subjects others don’t, using novel approaches and refreshingly first-person reporting.

Which is maybe why he sounds so devastated in this weekend’s show. “The most powerful and memorable moment’s [of Daisey's report] all seem to have been fabricated,” he says, a fact which Daisey doesn’t really dispute. “I wanted to tell a story that captured the totality of my trip” he says, which, along with “I didn’t think I would unpack the complexities of how the story gets told” may live on as howlers of the Appalachian Trail variety when it comes to the art of dissembling.

In the end the monologist (and author of the inside-Amazon book, 27 Dog Years) seeks shelter with the idea that he was telling a theatrical truth in a journalistic setting (which doesn’t explain him lying to Glass and the fact-checkers of the show) while Glass counters that the old-fashioned idea of labeling stories “fiction” or “non” stands the test of time (and theater). Daisey makes it sound like they tried to take Death of a Salesman and put it in the 60 Minutes slot (against his will, I guess) while Glass understands that the question of Apple’s factory conditions is a different one for billions of consumers: “Should I feel bad about this?” they want to know, or, put another way, “Is their blood on my iPhone?”

In the third act of the retraction show, Glass poses the question to Charles Duhigg, who co-authored a report on Foxconn factory conditions in the NY Times, and it gets a complicated answer. But I can’t help but think a lot of people want an uncomplicated answer — No — so they can go back to tapping their screens without wondering if there’s a human cost.

So it is with Jason Russell, whose Kony 2012 video has been seen by more than 82 million people. The video, along with the organization Invisible Children, is meant to bring awareness to the Ugandan guerilla Joseph Kony, whose Lord’s Resistance Army kidnaps young children and forces them into conflict and prostitution. The video and the organization were already being criticized before his arrest — it was misleading, critics said, an over simplification, another example of a white man coming to save Africa. (Nicholas Kristoff did a pretty thorough job of answering those criticisms in his op-ed column last week.)

Now, after being caught (and caught on tape) screaming, naked, hysterical on the streets of San Diego, Russell has damaged the cause and certainly made himself a target for a lot of online humor. Friends and family members are already suggesting that Russell’s problems are a lot deeper than the haters suggest, and may end up proving the adage that just because someone is crazy doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Russell has made a cause of the thousands of children kidnapped in Uganda and neighboring countries, and has been fighting to bring it to public attention for ten years. His organization has enlisted the support of politicians on both sides of the aisle in DC (and what else can you say that about these days?) and helped convince Obama to send military advisors to Uganda to aid in the capture of Kony, who tops the list of the International Criminal Court’s most-wanted-for-crimes-against-humanity. The eagerness to write him off seems to mirror the desire most people have when faced with international injustice to go back to sleep.

I was saddened if not 100% shocked by the news of Whitney Houston’s sudden death in her room at the Beverly Hilton last night. The last I had seen of her was a glimpse of her performing in Central Park on Good Morning America in 2009, where she appeared torn and frayed after yet another comeback album. (“I’m gonna try and do this,” she said, before making a hash of the number.) She had been seen previously, gaunt and unrecognizable, in the reality TV show, Being Bobby Brown, and I remember thinking there was no rung below the celebrity rehab show. But there’s always another rung.

I had interviewed Houston in 1995 for Harper’s Bazaar. She was finishing her soundtrack for the film version of Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale and was gearing up for The Preacher’s Wife, a gospel remake of an old Cary Grant-Loretta Young vehicle, The Bishop’s Wife. I remember reading McMillan’s book (a best-seller with a huge following among African American women) and watching The Bodyguard in preparation for my interview with her. But the more salient stories on my mind had nothing to do with her projects.

For the rumors already abounded: She was smoking crack cocaine; her marriage to Brown was a sham; she was an unstable and unpredictable talent on the best of days. None of these were the kinds of things one could talk about, of course: I can’t remember if her publicist had expressly forbidden such forays but I was supposed to write a soft and supportive story – she would “wear clothes,” as they said in the fashion mags, and grace the cover. No dirty laundry need be aired.

I was newly sober myself, counting days as they say in AA. I had found a number of interesting meetings in LA, filled with movie stars and crack whores, sometimes in the same place, and I was literally taking things one day at a time while preparing to talk to this woman who was supposedly deep in denial about her own addictions. I was more nervous than usual before meeting her (and frankly I always felt sort of sick before interviewing any celebrity, even though that was how I earned my bread and butter then) – an ex publicist of hers had already told me stories, off the record, about what a handful Houston could be.

I was allowed to sit in at a recording studio where she was working with Babyface and Cece Winans, and I tried to act like a fly on the wall (albeit one with a notebook) while the three of them went over something she had already recorded. She was doing a bit of overdubbing while I hung out with Winans and “Face,” as his friends call him. It was only after she had run through a few octaves and returned to chat with her friends that things got weird.

The topic was a country singer who had just sung, and sort of mangled, “The Star Spangled Banner” on Monday Night Football that week. It was not a big diss, as I recall; not many people can sing that song, and quite a few, pros included, have publicly died trying. But Houston had famously knocked it out of the park at the 1991 Super Bowl, and in the wake of the first Gulf War her cover sold millions. Maybe she thought, in light of her success, that she would appear petty making fun of someone else’s effort.

Seeing me in the corner, jotting down notes while the three of them joked, Houston suddenly rushed over and proceeded to push me out the door. Literally. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to leave now,” she said and within minutes I was out on the street thinking I had been thrown out of better places than that, but not while sober. Her new publicist joined me before I could head back to my hotel, assuring me that the diva was just a little tightly wrapped right now and that I shouldn’t read anything into it.

The next day I had lunch with Houston at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She was on time and immediately apologized for her behavior the day before. I didn’t care; I knew it would make for interesting copy, which was always a challenge when writing what too often became puff pieces. I remember her being clear and present for the interview, defending Bobby Brown (who had just been accused, again, of punching out someone in a hotel) and extolling the virtues of Denzel Washington, who was going to play the Cary Grant role in The Preacher’s Wife. She seemed authentically curious about what I thought of McMillan’s book and if she looked a little pockmarked underneath the makeup, what business of it was mine? She had already made my job easier when she threw me out of the studio: She had given me my lede.

I didn’t know how to observe the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center this morning, and the idea of listening to bagpipes and speeches filled me with ennui. Maybe it’s being half-Irish but the whole “Never forget” impulse, no matter what your religion or the wrongs done to you in another’s name, makes me want to run from history screaming. As if from a burning building…

But the good I remember from that time was the sense of communion you got from New Yorkers that had nothing to do with politics or religion, certainly not at first. I remember hearing that there weren’t enough mourners to attend the masses of all the firemen and other first responders who died that day, and Giuliani and the fire chief asked if people could attend services for people they didn’t know. I went to one for a fireman at a small Catholic church at Pacific and Flatbush, a church I had not not been in before or since — I’m not even Catholic — crying with a few other strangers.

And I remember going to the Barnes and Noble on Court Street in the following weeks and visiting the shelves that had once held the books on the Middle East and Islam and finding them empty, cleaned out by people trying to understand. Before we as a nation went back to sleep. (Or as my favorite Irish writer said, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”)

And I remember the actual day of 9.11, wearing a suit because I was attending a hearing for Adam who had not been diagnosed with Aspergers yet but who could not be mainstreamed in public schools, and the city didn’t have special schools that worked with kids with learning difficulties and emotional problems, so you had to threaten to sue them to get them to pay for private schools. We were thrown out of the tall building next to the Marriott where the NY Dept of Education held its hearings, my lawyer complaining that we should have gone ahead with things anyway (unaware of the body count, the full horror of what had happened) and the silent baleful looks those who knew more gave him in the elevator.

And I remember going past my daughter’s school, where the then new head was literally running around in front of the building uncertain whether to send the kids home. (They didn’t at first, and then they did.) And I remember walking up the hill to Fort Greene, seeing the first people coming back from walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, their hair filled with ash. And I remember seeing one man with ash on his shoulders fall to his knees on DeKalb, across from the park, overcome no doubt by the memories of what he had seen.

Another couple stood not far from him and only watched as I did — all of frozen for a moment in fear and confusion, uncertain how to respond to another in pain. And then the man got up and moved on but the fact I did not even say a word or reach out a hand right then haunted me for a long time afterwards, and does now.

I offer you this wafer of a memory, flavored with the salt of my tears.

Adam turns 27 today. Thinking back to our conversation at Chava’s I remember him saying, “I thought cancer was supposed to be this big life-changing event. And instead everything still feels the same.”

I told him how much I liked what he said after this meditation class we went to the last time I was here. It’s a regular Monday night group that meets at the SF Zen Center, and it’s really for people in recovery. (I knew that going in but didn’t tell him, though I don’t think drugs and alcohol are his problem now, just further impediments.) The fellow who ran the group gave a good introduction to the Buddhist precepts, kind of Zen 101, and then invited the (very crowded) room to introduce themselves, saying what their affliction/affiliation was as they went.

Being SF, almost everyone was more than one thing – “Hi, I’m Joe and I’m alcoholic, addict, Al-Anon member etc.” and by the time it got to Adam, who was literally the last person in the circle, sitting by the door, he said, “Adam, stand-up comic.” I could see people looking at each other – do you need a recovery group for that? Can I get in on that?

Later that evening I told him I thought that was funny and he said, “Yeah, but I thought about it and wish I’d said, ‘Adam, Aspergers, cancer-survivor and stand-up comic.”

That’s the key, I think: Identifying with the people who survive, the ones who are still here, who look at each other with some sort of recognition. If nothing else, being in close quarters with him for the last week has convinced me he is not self destructive, that he is not headed down the dark path my father took.

He is fascinated with Dad’s story, at times; he even said something to the oncologist about how my father killed himself because of his cancer diagnosis. No, I told him later: he killed himself because he was a miserable person who compounded his fear and hatred of other people with alcohol and isolation, crippling, near-total isolation.

One night while I was here I awoke and remembered sharply, as if in a dream, a trip I took to see Dad and Marion in Mackey, Idaho. I wasn’t 30 – Bonnie and I weren’t married (though she was with me on the trip) and Dad and I were friendly enough to have got invited to Idaho, where he and Marion had bought a bar in the god-forsaken little cattle town of Mackey, 30 miles from Nowhere.

Except when we arrived at the airport in Pocatello and called them, Marion answered and was very alarmed to hear we were there. This wasn’t a good time, she said – health concerns, your father had a “little stroke.” But after some whining on my part she told us to come on over.

It was a weird weekend. I remember despite Dad having had a “stroke” (of which there was no physical evidence) he was up at seven am, chopping wood outside our window. I think they were both wishing we would go away, and one afternoon Bon and I went into the moonscape hills outside of town and took mushrooms. I remember driving back and through a herd of cattle, a cowboy on a motorcycle waving us through.

Sitting in the bar that night I saw Dad behind the bar, not a position he was not born to. He didn’t like most people, and his customers were few and sullen. (I remember one old cowboy asking me what I did in San Francisco, and when I told him I worked in a bookstore he looked at me like I’d said I molested small children.)

We left, finally, the next day. Dad took us to the airport and remember a testy time in the airport lounge, waiting for the plane. B said something about how, for being a writer, I never spent much time actually writing, and I remember flipping her the bird. My father was shocked – gentlemen did not do that to ladies, I guess. “Why don’t you have a drink?” he said. “That might cheer you up.”

And look how well that worked for him!

But why was I remembering all this now, in vibrant color and detail? I think because I understood, all these years later, that he had not had a stroke at all but had made an attempt on his life, or was certainly headed that way. “I’m in the slough of despond,” was the most he ever said about it, and Marion was under strict orders to not speak of such matters. But I think, in old-fashioned terms, he was having a nervous breakdown: He had left his job teaching, sold his house, sunk what money had into running a business he was completely unprepared for in a town that didn’t want him in a land that looked like a bombing field. And he didn’t see any way out.