What is Left Unsaid

I am on the last day of my commenting ban, which means I will not be able to weigh in on such important topics such as AOC’s dress (I like her politics, of course, so I’m supportive of the message. I would like to see more of her standing up to Nancy Pelosi and using some creative parliamentary tactics to actually get shit done, but I don’t object to performance art politics, per se, and sometimes it’s effective, see Donald Trump) and Norm MacDonald’s sad death of cancer at the age of 61.
He was a funny guy, made me laugh many times. Loved his spoonerisms, like “prosti….constitution hall” which is my earliest memory of him. Somebody just posted a really funny, and prophetic, joke of his: “When you die, I’m pretty sure the cancer dies along with you. That’s not a loss, it’s a draw.” That’s a great joke.
Anyway, as I often find myself doing when a famous person dies, I read through his Wikipedia page. Even with people you know a lot about, you usually find something new. That they were in way more movies than you thought, or wrote more of your favorite songs that you knew.
Reading Norm MacDonald’s Wikipedia page, I realized that his biggest career moment was being on Saturday night live, and the only movies he was in after that tanked, and he had a few guest spots on TV shows, but nothing earth-shattering. He was 2nd tier, at best. But, that’s enough to say it was a good life. Even a 2nd tier comedian, in the same generation with people like Robin Williams and Steve Martin, is pretty admirable. Norm MacDonald is one who should be remembered, but probably won’t be 50 years from now.
Anyway, while I chafe at the ban, I realize that the world will not notice I was missing from the conversation for 3 days. Even my closest friends might fail to notice. It’s human nature. We don’t notice, or respond to, what isn’t there. That is not hard wired into us by evolution, and the people who have enough vision, and imagination, to notice what doesn’t exist, are called visionary geniuses, and they are rare, very rare.