The Stranger: An Existential Answer to Life's Absurdity

 

Partial transcript

In his novel, The Stranger, Albert Camus address himself to the modern man hopelessly caught in his own prosaic life. He also gives us an existentialist's answer to this problem. His solution is a freedom that is contrary to the Lockean, Kantian, and Christian concepts. It is the freedom to let go and live the kind of life one wants, secure in the knowledge that there is no afterlife.

Camus leads us to this conclusion through the eyes of M. Meursault, an atheist whose ordinary life becomes one horrible entanglement. He commits a senseless murder, goes through an absurd trial, and finally finds himself facing decapitation "in a public place." After a violent confrontation with a traditional Catholic chaplain, Meursault is washed clean of all hope of escape from the execution or the non-existence that he believes will follow it. With imminent death in his future, he reasons that it really wouldn't have mattered what he had done in this world for eventually he would have died anyway. And when you have ceased to exist it doesn't matter whether you have lived the life of a saint or a murderer.

In this book, Camus seems to say that Christianity has given man false hope because it too often leaves man disillusioned when he meets with the reality of life and the absurdity of death. He tells us that the only way a man can be free is to give up all hope and accept life, unfair as it is.

Published unsigned by Rich Seeley in The Quaker Campus student newspaper, Whittier College, Whittier California, May 13, 1966

 

Returning student not one to be deterred by NCAA rules 

By Rich Seeley

Like other students starting classes at college this fall semester, Bonnie Frankel exudes the youthful optimism and enthusiasm that you associate with eager college students. 

 

She looks you in the eye and says, “I love music, I love books, I love everything." 

Here's a student who is not afflicted with the cynicism that often catches up with college alums in middle age. 

Yet, Bonnie Frankel is middle-aged. At 46, she will be more than twice the age of many of her fellow students in classes at Loyola Marymount University this fall. 

On top of that, she has lived through the kind of hard knocks that usually kill youthful enthusiasm. But after every hard knock, she bounced back. 

At 32, she was hit with cancer and refused to give in to it. In her early 40s, she was divorced and made a commitment to start a new life by going back to school. 

She went back to Santa Monica College where she had started her college career in 1962. Back then, by her own admission, she was not a good student. She ended up on academic probation and then dropped out. 

It virtually took a judicial order to get her to resume her college studies almost three decades later. At the conclusion of her divorce proceedings in 1988, the judge told her: “Go back to school and find out what you want to do.”

A lot of people in their 40s might have resented a judicial opinion suggesting that they go back to college. But Bonnie Frankel took the judge's advice and ran with it. Literally.

With a freshman’s enthusiasm, she started over and did well academically. Then, always looking for a new challenge, she tried something most middle-aged college students wouldn’t have even considered. She went out for SMC’s women’s track team.

The next oldest member on the team was 20 years younger than Bonnie. Although she had only been a casual beach jogger, she found she could run 3,000 meters competitively at the community college level.

“I had no idea I would take to track,” she says. “But I took to it.”

She also discovered that in the classic sense, college athletics enhanced her academic performance. Running got the blood flowing to her brain. The discipline on the track paid dividends in the classroom. 

When the woman who had originally been in SMC's class of '64, graduated in June with the class of '91, she felt ready to move on to a four-year college. 

She selected Loyola Marymount to pursue her quest for a B.A. and immediately contacted the track coach's office to see if she could also continue her college athletic career. 

The initial response was positive but then she hit a wall. Although she had no way of knowing it at the time, under NCAA rules, her eligibility to compete in a four-year college's athletic program had run out in 1966. Once she took her first full semester of classes in 1962, the clock started ticking. 

The NCAA allows students four years for their college athletic career. Like all rules, the intention is good. It is designed to reserve college athletics for undergraduates. It prevents universities from building professional-type teams with 10-year veterans playing college football or basketball through their 20s.

 

But in Bonnie Frankel's case, she sees it as unfair. She believes it discriminates against her and other older returning students who resume their undergraduate studies in middle age only to find themselves locked out of college athletics. 

So far, the people she has talked to at the NCAA have been sympathetic but as they say in sports, the rules are the rules. 

But Bonnie, with her 1960's college student idealism still intact, is determined to change the rules. 

She is planning to wage a publicity campaign and appeal to the public's sense of 

fairness. 

And like many students, she feels her college experience has helped her discover something important about herself that will guide her through the rest of her life. 

"I like to change things,” she says, “and make them right.” 

After she completes her four-year degree, she's considering going to law school so she can learn more about how to change the rules. 

Published Sunday, September 8, 1991, The [Torrance, Calif.] Daily Breeze Westside edition.

David Kennedy Payne was a cool dude, a warm friend

 By Rich Seeley

David Kennedy Payne, 28, of Santa Monica was a cool dude, a local hero, a football star, a true friend and a gorgeous actor with a big heart.

And now, for no reason, he is dead.

Last Tuesday night [Aug. 11, 1987] at the corner of Main Street and Pacific Avenue in Santa Monica, the driver of an Isuzu Trooper II hit David’s Yamaha V-MAX motorcycle.

The helmet David always wore cracked like an egg and he was killed. Valarie White, a girlfriend who was riding with him, suffered multiple leg injuries.

The driver of the Isuzu was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and drunken driving. 

David’s best friend, Luis “Lumo” Morris, 31, heard about the accident that night just before last call at Mom’s in Brentwood, where he sometimes works as a bartender. 

He left the bar and went to be with David’s younger sister, Sue, at Santa Monica Hospital. 

Lumo remembers going into the antiseptic room where his dead friend lay.

“I went in with Sue and she said goodbye and kissed him,” Lumo recalls. “I stayed there a few minutes longer. Then I kissed him goodbye. He was so cold. It’s hard to accept him being so cold.”

Lumo felt he was in another dimension the rest of the week. He tried to work his regular shift tending bar at the Oarhouse in Ocean Park Friday night.

The Oarhouse was the place where he first met David four years ago. Lumo was serving a stint as the manager and hired the 6-foot-2 semi-pro football player to work for him. 

Eventually, David started his own moving business and no longer worked at the bar, but he remained a regular with a lot of friends there.

The Oarhouse seemed real sad to Lumo Friday night.

“It wasn’t the usual exuberant place,” he says.

Lumo noticed that someone had drawn a heart around a smiling picture of David that was on the bar’s bulletin board. There were lines radiating out from the heart to photos of all his friends.

People kept coming up to Lumo to talk about David. He couldn’t concentrate on mixing drinks.

Finally, he excused himself and went to be with friends.

“Dave was a great guy,” Lumo recalls. “Anytime he could help somebody he would. He might show up hours late -- that’s California -- but he’d always be there for you. Sometimes he’d call me up and say we got to go do this and we’d go. 

Another friend, Shelly Skaug of Venice remembers how David bought the Yamaha V-MAX, he gave his old bike, a Honda Nighthawk, to Lumo.

“He’s always there for his friends,” she says, still speaking of David in the present tense. “His sister lives with him and I know he takes real good care of her.”

It was Shelly who first called The Outlook’s attention to David when she entered him in the paper’s recent search for the Westside’s Cool Dudes. 

She wrote in to tell how David cooly took a pistol away from two punks who broke into his house and threatened his sister and two women friends. With the gun to his head, David still managed to distract the would-be robbers so the women could escape. Then he disarmed and captured one of the punks while the other ran away.

“David could have killed that guy,” Lumo says, “but he told me later that it wasn’t his place to take a human life.”

For his cool-headed action, the Santa Monica Police presented David with a Good Citizen’s plaque.

David was everything a Cool Dude and Good Citizen should be.

And now those who knew him are left with memories and dreams of all the things he might have been.

After a year of struggling on the bench, he was finally looking forward to starting as tailback this fall on the California Wolves, a semi-pro football team in Van Nuys. 

“He earned that starting job by having a great game in the playoffs when we won the championship last year,” says John Bowker, the head coach.

“He’s a great kid,” Bowker says. “He’s always got a smile on his face. He had a lot of talent. We used to call him Marcus because he had that slashing running style of Marcus Allen. I’ll always remember him dashing through the line with panache.”

After a one-line part on “Dynasty” last fall, playing an emergency room intern struggling to save an accident victim, he qualified for membership in the Screen Actors Guild. With a union card, he was hoping for more television work this season.

Things were looking up this summer. David was in good shape for both acting and football having finally recovered from a back injury he suffered last year when the parked truck he was sitting in was totaled by another drunk driver.

And his friend Lumo had finally returned after being out of town for three months following the death of his mother.

When Lumo first got back to L.A., David told him, “I thought I’d lost you forever.”

Lumo had reassured his friend that he was back in L.A. to stay.

“Now,” Lumo says, “I’ve lost him forever.”

David Kennedy Payne is to be buried today in his hometown of Willougby Hills, Ohio.

Published Aug. 17, 1987, in The Outlook, Santa Monica, Calif.