Keep Your Chin Up, The Sequel

There have been many points within the past few weeks during which all that I can think about is quitting. The kind of day in which I am greeted in the morning by a child who tells me he wants to punch me in the face. And then another child who is angry because of something that happened during a basketball game during lunch (something I am only to piece together much later) and so he begins swearing at me, telling another student that he will slap her, and slamming his desk against the ground. And another student who is unable to stop talking for more than 1 minute, rendering me incapable of completing a full sentence during most points of the day (I’m not exaggerating). And another student who  becomes frustrated when I don’t allow him to do whatever he wants, so he grabs a computer monitor in order to try to break it. And another student who goes into violent hysterics when I gently and quietly suggest that she choose a book where she can read most of the words. And two students who begin punching each other because of something that happened between two other students. And so on and so forth. This is just a snippet of one day I’m talking about here.

I got pretty low there for a while, compounded by sickness. But eventually, I turned the corner. That’s just the way it goes. You get the bear up on your back, digging in his claws, and you’re getting dragged down, but then you turn the corner, and you find some sap and succor to carry you back into positivity. You find those moments of breakthrough, when students have a light in their eyes at the connection they are making to what you are saying.

I’ve also been learning coping strategies, to manage my own anger and upset. I sometimes have to step back and take a moment to allow students to have a completely off topic discussion, or to insult each other, until I can regain my composure and enter back into the fray. Because when I lose control of myself, that’s when my students begin to explode. They are like dry tinder in a forest, just waiting to be sparked. A little bit of anger from anyone, whether myself or another student, will spread like wildfire, and then the day will be spent in putting out flames. So I have to be able to take whatever they throw at me. I have to be the zen master, transforming their reactive stratagems of despair into teachable moments of development.

My students have learning disabilities (in addition to growing up in areas of high poverty), and I’m only just beginning to get a glimpse of what that really means. It means that nobody knows exactly how to teach them in just the way that they need. You can give them fragments of a standard education, but you have to find a way to pitch everything you do in a completely different way. And figuring out how to do that isn’t always clear. For example, a student may only be able to decode words at a kindergarten to early 1st grade level, but their comprehension is high. Meaning that they grow weary of low-level books about dogs and cats very easily. Or a student may be able to read words fluently at a 4th grade level, but their comprehension (or at least, their demonstration of their comprehension) of what they read is minimal. Traditional assessments don’t really convey exactly where they stand, in other words. It just tells you that they are behind, way behind.

So solutions may be, for example, that the student who can’t decode many words needs a graphic novel that requires complex understanding but has few words. And the student who reads fluently with little understanding may need books with clear and well-organized narratives, like well-written children’s books or short stories. But these aren’t solutions that you come to through training. You have to know the student that is in front of you and be able to see through their behaviors and symptoms and into the source of the obstruction to their learning. And you know, with all that free time and money that teachers have, you can develop all your own curriculum, get tons of great books, and tailor it just right for every student! (That last sentence was sarcasm, in case you didn’t catch it.)

I just keep on reminding myself — on those days in which I feel like breaking into tears in the middle of the classroom because my students are insulting each other in a way I would never even consider talking to any human being — that this is the challenge that I was looking for. I sought for it, and I got it.

And I remember last winter at this very time, I was going through the same struggle, in a different sense. I was sitting on the E train at 3 in the morning with the drunk and the homeless, then walking through the icy pre-dawn streets of Queens to shoulder the mythological struggle that is the American Dream. I was getting 4-5 hours of sleep and eating one and a half meals a day. So now, yes, this challenge right now, right here, is exactly what I came here for.

I’m here to work my ass off in order to make my world a better place. And what better place to do that in than New York City, the gateway portal to manifest destiny?

Phases of a First Year Teacher

See where the line dips up there, swinging all the way down through DISILLUSIONMENT in the months of Nov – Jan? Yeah, I would say this graph of the phases of a first year teacher’s attitude (thanks to DOE web page) is pretty damn accurate. Is feeling like crap about oneself during this horrific experience really so formulaic and utterly predictable? Well, I guess it can be, when you consider that this is a profession with an overwhelming amount of responsibilities and duties and that, furthermore, in your first year teaching you’re essentially just heaved into it and left to sink or swim. So that’s where I’m at, in case you were wondering.

Fortitude

This was a rough week. I have one student who takes meds, but I think there are days where the effects wear off or when he doesn’t take them. It’s kind of disturbing to see the two sides of him: one where he attempts to model an idealistic vision of a ‘good boy’ (it is endearing but also kind of upsetting to see him try so hard to please me), and the other where he erupts into sadistic shrill curses and screams. This darker side of his two faces erupted after something had happened during lunch (a common occurrence with my students), and he began spewing angry verbal filth at me in the middle of a lesson. The guidance counselor couldn’t coax him out of class, and eventually he sat there drawing without saying anything, then finally gathered his things and walked out of class. I had to spend time that day and the next day discussing how to deal with anger and being upset.

What is interesting about this circumstance–and an innumerable number of similar occurrences–is that I constantly discover that I am learning the same things that my students are. It isn’t about multiplying decimals or writing complete sentences or Algonquian Native American wigwams; it’s about learning how to handle our frustration, deal with anger, mediate conflicts, and communicate what we feel in appropriate ways. These are the very areas that my students force me to struggle in. When they cuss me out to my face, when they turn around and have a discussion in the middle of my every sentence, when they are busier squirting glue onto their fingers instead of doing their math, when they fail to perform an activity I had planned, when they cry or yell or insult each other endlessly, when they hit one another . . . these are the times when I find myself struggling to force myself past the anger and hurt and upset and frustration and try to understand the root source of their problems. And most of the time, no, I am not the model of calm fortitude that I wish I could be. I end up yelling, bullying, forcing order and rigor upon their disorganized lives in every manner that I can. And part of this is necessary. Sometimes I have to yell in order to demonstrate that I care. Sometimes I have to be strict to give them the structure that they need. But sometimes, I know that I have failed them as a teacher, and I am yelling to obviate my wounded pride. I am yelling because I don’t fully understand their disabilities. I am yelling because I don’t fully understand their lives and their needs.

And this is what makes it hard. Not the hours of lesson planning every night and all weekend. Not the hours of meetings and paperwork and phone calls. Not the hours organizing bulletin boards and leveling books and creating SMART board presentations. It is the constant holes that are pricked in my self-esteem, the consistent reminders that I am frail human being with emotions and prejudices and self-induced blindness. The feeling and taste and texture of failure. Every single day. And this is the very experience that my students have endured since the beginning of their young lives.

The greatest struggle right now I have is trying to keep my energy levels up. I haven’t been able to run for a long time now, and my health is declining as a result. I’ve lost weight. I have strange growths in my neck. I’m developing asthma. So my focus, beyond simple survival–which is the mode I have been in–is to find a way to establish an exercise routine. And if I can keep myself healthy and keep myself positive, then I can keep myself calm and patient with my students.

The Battle of the Bereft

Last weekend a friend was visiting, and of course I began discussing my students, because what else do I have to talk about now? I talked about their problems, their behaviors, their tough home lives. So he challenged me to say what they were good at. And in that moment I realized just how bereft my understanding of them is. I couldn’t think of anything. Not one thing. I wanted to weep.

When the entire world tells you you are worthless, in what place do you claw to find succor?

I watch them clutch empty-hearted at the manufactured dreams of the complacent, and shit on the very fabric of their own existence.

Dreams of graduation into comfort seem to be the defining tunnel vision of my own survival. All I can envision are green trees, rolling hills, an empty swatch of air and bird ringed silence across my bedroom window. A river, somewhere, without the brown slogs of industry.

Already, I have abandoned them. To leave them to their trash strewn streets, the steps of apartment buildings that serve as the template for passing the time. To their endlessly working, endlessly shopping mothers, who give them whatever they want whenever they can.

In this ghetto of the soul, it’s all about power. You take it any way you can, you drag down those who might love you and beat them into submission.

This is the game we play, whether in the streets or in the classroom. Who is the powerful? Who is the one who will lead by the blood on his hands?

I am too battered right now to step away from the battle. I see only red before me. I am angry. I am filled with despair. And this is when I know that this is the only fight worth

losing.

With Struggle

I know that the wind has been knocked out of the sails of my blog posting. I’m finding it hard to justify setting aside time for self-exploration; much of my energy and thought and emotion, even when I’m sleeping, goes towards my students. I have dreams about them, and I lay awake thinking about them. It’s not like I want to.

I have a new student (I jinxed my luck in my last post), who I haven’t gotten a chance to get to know at all because he showed up yesterday, but there seems to be something going on in his home life that may make him a difficulty in class.

I made my first report cards this week, and I had my first parent-teacher conferences tonight, and two moms showed up. Which is one more than I expected.

I also broke up my first fight today. Fists and feet were flying. One part of me was angry for my student who began throwing the punches, but another part of me also recognized her need to stand up for herself. She has been getting picked on everyday, and she just couldn’t take it anymore.

So I am going to have to find a way to resolve the situation as a class. We will have to have a conversation about bullying and about the fight that happened.

I’ve realized that I can no longer ignore the way students in this class are treating each other in the cafeteria or in the schoolyard. Because they will bring it into class with them and then I spend the whole day trying to keep a lid on it.

So I have to teach them how to interact with each other. How to be friends. How to show kindness. Right now they think that picking on easy targets is “playing.”

So teaching is not only about meeting the standards. It’s about reaching your students where they need you in their lives. With material that will guide them and shape them. And that’s why I don’t have time to write much on my blog anymore. Every free second I have, even when I’m wasting it on Facebook or whatever, I always have it in the back of my mind that I should be writing lessons, planning units, writing goals, brainstorming activities. Many of my lessons at school just plain suck. I’m doing a lot of lecturing. I’m in survival mode as a teacher. But the faintest taste of success–knowing with certainty that I am making a difference in their lives, even when all that means is that I am keeping them in their seats–keeps me motivated to see it through. I’m not perfect, but lord knows neither are they. We give each other second and third and fourth and fifth chances.

Until one day, with hope, with struggle, we get it right.

A (perhaps) Premature Giving of Thanks

Well, now that I’m no longer terrified, at complete wit’s end, nor totally overwhelmed at all times, sometimes I even have these moments where I actually realize just how easy I’ve got it. Such that I almost even feel bad. For a moment. At just how lucky I am to be in my current situation as a new teacher.

Let me list the ways in which I am fortunate:

1) I’ve got 7 students. I expected to have 13 (I teach in a 12:1:1 special education classroom. For the uninitiated, that means twelve students to one teacher and one paraprofessional). If I had just 1 or 2 more students, the whole dynamic of my classroom could shift substantially — in the wrong direction. Even at the beginning of the school year, I had one student who didn’t show up ’til the second week. That one student alone completely changed my classroom from well-managed to always chaotic.

2) My para is great. She has managed to get all kinds of supplies for my classroom that I would have no idea where to find in my school. She leaves me apples on my desk. She’s been with my students for a few years now, so she knows the kind of trouble they have been in the past, and she continually boosts my frazzled ego to remind me of how much they have been turned around this year.

3) I’ve got a Smartboard in my classroom. Sure, it’s an old one and the projector is askew and it continually gets off-kilter whenever a student knocks into it. I have to lug my old 15″ laptop to and from school each day to use it. But it’s a great asset to have in a classroom. As a technology geek, it makes my life a hell of a lot easier for lesson planning. And even more importantly, it brightens the day of my students. Just the fact that they have a screen to stare at and a technological gadget to play around with is enough to make them slightly more engaged.

4) I’ve got windows in my classroom. This is a luxury not to be discounted.

5) I’ve got most of the supplies I need in the school.

6) My students may constantly harangue, harass, punch, and belittle each other — but they do not stab each other. They do not draw blood.

7) My students are all smaller than me.

8) It takes me less than 50 minutes to get to work.

Compared to some other teachers I know, I’ve got it cake. And compared to others, I’ve got it tough. It’s all relative of course, but the important thing is that I feel like I’ve got a handle on the situation at this point. I’m still strung out and overwhelmed by many a thing each and every day, but I’m beginning to get into a rhythm. I’m in a situation where I am learning just what I need to at just the right balance of overwhelming but not debilitating. And there’s a lot of helpful and positive teachers in my building who go out of their way to share when they have a spare second.

So I’m just gonna leave it at that and keep it focused on the positive. Because that’s what keeps me going each and every day.

Learning

Now that some kind of routine has been established each day, my new work incarnation as an urban public school special ed teacher has settled into a rhythmed pace, and the stress has somewhat eased up. Or at least become a more manageable kind of stress. Before, it was like fight or flight response high strung anxiety, with moments of frustration so intense that I almost cried. Now, I know that I can handle whatever is ahead in my day, even if I’m not fully prepared.

It’s that last half of the last sentence that still gets me, though. The not being fully prepared thing.

The fact is that at some point, I just shut down. I wake up at 5 in the morning and get to work at 7, where I spend my morning preparing my classroom until school starts at 8:30. Then after school I stay until 5 or 6 preparing my lessons. Then when I get home I tie up the loose ends, like printing out my lesson plans and worksheets or filling out IEP paperwork. By 8 o clock, I just can’t focus anymore on it. I need a glass of Chartreuse, a parsing of Facebook, a reality show on TV. That is, if it’s not one of the nights where I go to class for my graduate coursework.

Same thing on the weekends. On Friday after school, I desperately want to just sit there and take care of all of my planning for the next week. But I need to get out of there. And then I get home and I don’t want to think about it anymore. And on Saturday, I don’t want to think about it anymore. So on Sunday, I force myself to spend the day preparing.

But the things that I need to get done, I should be working nonstop. I should be working til 10 or 11 every night, I should be working every day of the weekend.

That’s what I mean by not fully prepared. It’s like I’m getting stressed out because I’m not working hard enough, but if I worked any harder, I would be burnt out.

The good news is, so far all I get is positive feedback from the administration and other teachers. That’s great, and it keeps me going. But at the end of the day, none of that matters. What matters is whether or not I am truly teaching my students and meeting their needs. They are the ultimate gauge of my effectiveness. And every single day I feel like I have failed them. Because I lose my temper, or I mishandle a situation, or I have not been able to differentiate my instruction effectively. They want to learn. They want to succeed. They want me to be the best teacher they have ever had. And I don’t think that I can be that teacher just yet. I just can’t. That’s the reality.

I wish that I was more OCD and more dedicated and just stayed in my classroom til 8 every night organizing, preparing, envisioning. But I can only learn and develop at the level that I am at. I’m the biggest student in my own classroom.

The 1st Month

Well, it’s been a hell of a month. But I’ve come out at the other end with some victories that are helping me to keep my chin up. I think what I am most proud of is that two of the most dominant (as in most loud and aggressive) personalities in my class, who are constantly disrupting, talking, getting up out of their seats, bullying others, and fighting with each other all day long, have been made into friends. Or at least have made a temporary truce. One day during a read aloud, suddenly some fight that had taken place during recess erupted into the classroom, shouting escalated back and forth between groups of students, based on the power struggle between those two aggressive personalities. So I stopped and decided to take it in stride. I listened to both sides and talked about how to resolve conflicts. I drew a feedback loop between two points in a circle, demonstrating how blame and aggression escalate and build endlessly. How there’s only two methods of resolving the situation: you either step forward to reconcile and forgive, or you step away and ignore. But it didn’t resolve anything and they didn’t really get it, because the two kids were still angry with each other.

Two days ago I kept the two kids behind the class when school ended and talked to them on the level. I let them know what I saw in class going on and how they were disrupting other students from learning. And then the real feelings started to come out, the hurts and the misunderstandings. I talked about how they could keep on fighting with each other, or they could act like sportsmen and forgive each other and shake hands. And finally, they did. Even exchanged numbers and agreed to meet online to play some game or something. So that was a success, because their vying for power and attention in class has been a constant problem. Which isn’t to say everything is great now, but it turned a corner in my relationship with them and with the class. I turned from being a hapless disciplinarian into a kind of tribal elder, and that was when I began to gain the vision of how to operate my classroom. Sometimes you have to allow for a bit of surface chaos in order to truly establish control.

According to commentary by others at the school based on these students’ past behavior, I have been successful in creating order in their school lives. They aren’t running the hallways all day long, breaking windows, stealing, or cussing out adults. Which isn’t to say that they are angels by any means, but they do stay in their seats overall, and they definitely don’t leave my classroom unless I allow them to.

Does this mean I am a good teacher? Not even remotely. I can’t even pretend that I am competent. I won’t be any good for at least another few years. I’m embarrassed by the kind of lessons I’ve been throwing together. But I’m doing the best I can under the circumstances, which means that I am flying by the seat of my pants. And it’s an extremely overwhelming experience, which does not even begin to describe how it feels. In teaching learning disabled children, you can’t teach a whole classroom lesson. You can’t tell the class to open their books to page 9 and complete the exercises after reading the passage. You can’t lecture. You can’t operate anything by any traditional means, because it just won’t work. Not that it works with students of any stripe, but it won’t even have a semblance of working with these students. Because they will erupt into chaos at the slightest sense of frustration or boredom. And I have 1 or 2 children who can read fairly fluently or do math relatively well, and then I have students who can’t decode words and can’t subtract. So I need to teach each student according to their level, which means anywhere from kindergarten to 5th grade — and in fact both and all at the same time, because I still have to pull them up their grade level standards for state tests — and that’s not easy to do when most students don’t work well independently and also don’t work well in groups.

The challenges are enormous. Unless you’ve been a teacher or are close to someone who is a teacher, you may not know how hard it is. You may think that teaching is easy, what with summer vacations and holidays. And maybe for some teachers in some schools it is. But for any teacher worth their salt, it’s akin to the kind of pressure and stress that a CEO of a company faces. You have to be extremely organized. You have to be a leader. You have to have intuition. You have to be a drill sergeant. You have to be a coach. You have to be a parent. You have to set policy and constantly tweak systems and structures. You have to plan for a year and plan for each minute. You have to attend meetings, conferences and join teams. You have to negotiate legal documents, compile and assess data, create forms and lessons and newsletters. You have to contact parents and create behavioral intervention plans. You have to organize your classroom artfully and advertise the learning taking place therein. You have be capable of immediate improvisation. You have to be in control every second of every day. You have to perform.

And this is minus the bonuses and societal recognition that a CEO would obtain. But the rewards — the love that you feel from a student who is finally recognized and challenged and feeling successful — almost make all of it worth it. I say almost because most days all I can think of is WTF am I doing? And all I can imagine is a nice quiet life somewhere in a forest where I am not being constantly challenged and harassed and disrespected. But the important thing right now is that my students are beginning to recognize that I am in it for real. They know that I care. And in a world of dislocation and upset and being let down by adults and society, that stands for something.

In the Trenches

There really is nothing that could prepare me for this. The sense of despair, of anger, of being so overwhelmed that the only thing I can do is focus on one piece at a time, knowing that it will not be enough. These children need help. They need help so bad that it is nearly impossible to do anything but scramble desperately in their wake, trying to band aid wounds that were inflicted long before they were born. The way they test me, tearing me apart, deliberately assessing just how committed I am to them. And it’s never enough. Because I’m not ready. And there is no way that I could be ready.

We all know that the first year is hard. But you don’t really understand what that means until you are down in it, in those moments of pure frustration, where you get so angry that you begin yelling in a way that you never thought you were capable of. And that’s when they’ve won, when they’ve wrested the control into their hands and empowered themselves in the only way they’ve learned to.

Oh yes. I have yelled, many times now. I have sent a child outside of my classroom already. And the sense of defeat I feel is untenable.

But every day is a new day. It really is. There are moments where I am soaring off of the eagerness with which they do things that they know they are capable of. They get so easily frustrated. Some of them can barely decode a word. Some of them can barely multiply. And I am trying to understand how to teach them at a level so concrete that I can barely even grasp yet myself.  Because numbers or words on a board can be too abstract. And they are perfectly aware of just how disadvantaged they are, and they feel ashamed.

Most of the time, I’m fighting just to make myself heard.

But I will not back down. Because this isn’t about me. This is about them.

Beginning a New Chapter

So my life now begins in its new incarnation. I finally obtained a job, after long last and many interviews, as a teacher of special education in the Bronx. I was hired on Friday morning. It takes less than an hour for me to get there, which is better than the up to 2 hour commute I had with my last gig, and the staff seems nice enough. But once I was hired, I was shown my classroom, given a set of directions about how to set up my bulletin boards, and suddenly, with a rush of adrenaline fear and stress, I realized that I was completely overwhelmed. See, it’s not like getting hired at any normal job, where they train you and induct you into your new duties and responsibilities.  At least, not this late in the game. Schools starts on Wednesday. That gave me Friday, and this upcoming Tuesday, to try to organize a classroom packed with junk that I don’t even know how to organize or use. As well as to plan my lessons and activities, establish a classroom management plan, and well, just about figure out every single component of how I will run my classroom. Which is kind of hard, since I haven’t ever run one before. And since I don’t even know what my curriculum will be, what my school’s policies are, what my schedule is, who my students are, etc, etc.

So I stood there, alone, in this massive classroom with no A/C, steaming in the sunlight, closets filled with dusty book after book, feeling adrenaline coursing through my system. I just had to start somewhere. So I started pulling stuff out of closets, dusting shelves, trying to figure out what I knew I could use and what I couldn’t. By the end of the day, after not having eaten anything and feeling completely lost out at sea, I finally took off for home, wishing I could have had 2 weeks to set it up instead of 2 days.

During the interview, the administration did its utmost to stress that the students I will have are the biggest behavior problems in the school. They wanted to make sure that I knew what I was getting into. Apparently, there’s a group of them that have established a reputation for creating havoc, cussing out adults, and running out of class. Apparently, simply getting them to come up from the cafeteria and into the classroom on time each morning is a victory.

But the reason I have elected to become a teacher is to be challenged. These are children who have been failed by the system. So they need me to be there for them, to see beyond their behaviors and diagnosed disabilities and into their hearts, to believe in them, and to push them to achieve. And at the end of the day, the only thing that I can possibly lose from the effort is my ego.

In any case, I’m going to be busy for the next few months just trying to keep my head above the water. So it’s a good thing I posted so frequently last month, because I won’t have much time anymore to do so. I will need to use this space for reflection and venting once I get into the swing of things, so keep checking back in, and I will do my best to continue to update. Wish me luck.

This One Makes It a Month’s Worth of Daily Posting

Well, so today marks the last post in completion of a full month’s worth of daily posting, thus meeting the requirement for  fulfillment of a National Blog Posting Month! I had tried last month but was unable to complete it. I came pretty close to not posting some days this month, but with the pestering and encouragement of my girlfriend, I was able to punch through it. I think it was a useful exercise to get me to free up my fingers and mind a little bit and just put something out there, whether I thought it was worthwhile or not. But I admit that I am glad to be done with it. Here’s to a healthy dose of silence ‘tween well-formulated bouts of speech.

Thoughts on Communication Tools

It’s kind of weird, don’t you think, that blogging, texting, Facebooking, Twittering, etc, have become so blasé that no one thinks to even comment on these technological everyday manifestations of our interconnectivity anymore? I mean, these are things that didn’t really exist a mere 10 years ago, at least not in the form of critical mass that makes them truly meaningful in a social context. Now we take it for granted that we can constantly communicate with each other in what is tantamount to another dimension. We can convey ourselves immediately through the written word in a way never before possible, not to mention the addition of video, sound, and photos. It’s all so mundane now, but once upon a time getting onto your modem and then onto a bulletin board to share your hobby or chat with someone about something was a strange new world. Now it seems like there’s a blog for every locale, activity, and interest. And I think that’s a good thing, of course. I’m just amazed at how swiftly and easily we have taken it in stride.

What this portends, I believe, is that–contrary to the fear of a sci-fi future of disconnected blobs hiding behind self-stimulating machines–technology is evolving to enable us to connect with each other more effectively. In every type of way, both deep and shallow, both in sex and in spirit. You’ve got the guy using craigslist to find a prostitute on one hand and the mother sharing photos of her newborn baby on the other. And while there is truth to the statement that internet is the new TV–and I am guilty of wasting away far too much time doing nothing productive–the fact is that what you get out of technology is pretty much what you want to get out of it. The tools that we have at our fingertips are impressive. We can go to zoom in on a city street and find out exactly what the building looks like where we are meeting someone and what side of the street it’s on. We can look up the quote that has been bothering us and not only find out who said it, but furthermore what line on what page it was written in.

A lot of our use of this new power is purely narcissistic or for entertainment or voyeuristic, but then again, that’s what humanity is all about, aren’t we? You take a look at all the wide range of blogs out there, I mean, my god, you could write an anthropology paper on it. And yes, half the time Facebook is just people taking personality quizzes or posting status updates about how drunk they are, but it also gives you a glimpse into the lives of people who you may never have gotten to know otherwise. You may not want to talk to many people on the phone and keep up with them, but there are people that you grew up with or have met that you remember sometimes and get curious about. And it’s nice to be able to see their new baby, or to know that they moved to another city. In other words, a lot of stuff is a waste of time, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s all about how much you invest in it and how much you expect from it. It can be completely shallow, or it can be a tool to communicate things about yourself that you may not be able to otherwise.

Not everyone is effective at socializing in traditional contexts, like at a bar or even just in any face-to-face conversation. Some people just don’t understand body language, or come off as incredibly conceited, or don’t have much to say immediately. But new forms of communication allow such people to interact without confusing signals or ambient noise. Which can create some other forms of confusion, such as misunderstandings over sarcasm (hence the use of emoticons), but overall, there is the opportunity to convey many things that could not be conveyed in a traditional context.

So I’m a big fan of these developments. I feel like all these new tools are an opportunity to explore myself and others more deeply. My fiancee reads my blog and I read hers. We learn things about each other that we would never have said directly in a conversation. We announced our engagement on Facebook. So much more effective and easy than calling a bunch of people, which I never would have done anyway. And I remember farther back, when we were “going steady” or whatever the hell you call it now when you are not just hooking up with someone, how big of a step it was to change our relationship statuses on MySpace. Now look, I maligned MySpace and cellphones and every other social technological development just as much as anyone when they burst forth onto the scene. I resisted having a cellphone for years before I finally gave in. But now I obviously accept social tools for what they are, and I don’t feel weird about “advertising” my life anymore on the web. I think it’s great, that we can share so much about ourselves with each other. Is 85% of it TMI? Most definitely. But in the eyes of a god, it’s all food and fodder for understanding.

Go Beyond

Gotta escape that zone of sameness and bland expectation, where your complacent everyday self knows exactly what it will do (nothing) and who it will see (noone). Break the cycle of doldrum limbo stagnancy and force yourself into a situation wherein you know you will be uncomfortable and scared to go, cuz in that place of strange alien modish pressure you will be taken beyond what you can control, and you will be forced to be exactly what you are in that exact moment of place-time circumstance. In all of your imperfect, half-formed glory. Go, no matter your status, your age, your defined self in-context: go to places that you have never seen, go to people you have never met, stick yourself into sketchiness, fear, gray dim areas of uncertainty, where you don’t speak the language, and you have to gesture to make yourself understood, and people are tattoed and pierced and confused and full of life. Do this, and you will never despair. Do this, and your fear will lessen. So that you are not scared to live. So that you are not scared to die. Because the two are one and the same. So go go go go go. The tether that holds you to yourself cannot be broken by anyone except yourself.  Be yourself and go to places where you do not belong.

Territory (NYC style)

Eventually, it’s time to put down your roots in each step of your foot, to deny the possibility of stepping aside for anyone, to declare, firmly, that you belong here, that you have a purpose and a direction that cannot be ceded. You have a right to exist and to move unimpeded towards your destination. Others may move aside. You will only stop, patiently, until they acknowledge that they must move around you.

That you will bow to no one.

There is only one power to submit to, and it exists beyond the superficial territoriality of the street.

(Contrast this with another Territory post from LA long ago)

Poor Claudia

Vincent and Claudia

I’m a little stressed out right now. I was just sitting down to write my daily (nightly) post and I had put the birds to bed, when I heard my parakeet, Claudia, fluttering frantically about in her cage. This isn’t too unusual for her, as she is a very spastic kind of bird and will frequently fall from her perch randomly and flap around. When I pulled up the cover to check on her, though, I saw that she seemed to be caught on a new toy we had just put into her cage. She had got caught like a fish on a hook somehow on the attachment, and it looked like she had her beak caught. So I had to grab her and then pull her off. The poor thing had got the underside of her beak caught, and I really hope that the damage isn’t serious. She’s bleeding, but she seems to be otherwise OK. All I can do right now is put her back to bed and hope that she can recover while resting and that the wound will heal. I’m canceling a Zipcar outing up the Hudson Valley tomorrow so that I can be around. Which maybe sounds weird considering that she’s a tiny little bird, but in the absence of children, she’s one of my babies. Poor Claudia! She’s a sweet, very active and vocal little bird. When she is out of the cage with Vincent, my Amazon parrot, she grooms him and they feed each other. She also likes to groom me and peck at my lips. When she is in her cage, she jumps around playing with all of her toys, especially the one with the little mirror with the bell on it. She sings practically all day long and mimics sounds very well–much better, ironically, than my parrot.

In other less maudlin news, I’ve been interviewing like crazy all this week, so I should find out soon where I’ll end up teaching. Which is good, considering the school year starts in another week. Today after an interview I went over to a music store and jammed on a hand carved djembe with one of the employees on drum kit and made a friend. It made me excited to start playing again. As he was reminding me, this city is full of people playing hand drums, so I really don’t have any excuse for not getting my chops back up. Time to start looking around for people to jam with. Time to start looking around for people, period. I’ve been in New York over a year now and have barely gone out. But then again, once the school year starts, I’ll be swamped anyway. Here’s to keeping busy. And to getting a paycheck.

And give a prayer for little Claudia, I just checked on her and  she’s not looking so hot.

Chronicles of Crispin 06

As our intrepid hero followed this strange group of misfits down the misted squares of midnight cobblestone streets, he bethought himself of where it was he was venturing to, and whom therewith. He knew, thus far, that he was going to see a boat. But a mysterious boat, apparently, because there was much ado about it over the multiple Mordant Thieves they had consumed at Club Zephyr. Some kind of special boat in which was performed missions. What kind of missions, unknown.

Once taken out of the sexually amplified, intellectually dimmed environment of the club, Crispin found his companions surreal, even slightly demonic in manifestation. They walked together silently, almost grimly, purposely striding towards their mysterious destination in a formation of four, with Crispin straggling behind like a small child. They all seemed locked into their individual worlds of thought. As the silence weighed down upon him, Crispin felt the need to say something, anything. But right as he was about to break the hold of that witching hour before dawn, Taft suddenly stopped and spewed chunks that were backlit by a florescent hair salon sign. He leaned over the curb, heaving and spluttering. The group stopped and waited impatiently.

“Goddamit, Taft” Looger muttered ominously, shuffling awkwardly on his feet.

“A waste of quality drink, that is,” Kruger opined, leaning up against a post and twiddling his fingers.

“So . . .spphrt! . . sorry, folks . . . spppt . . .hhheeww . . . just a minor malfunction of equilibrioception due to the shortness of my legs in relation to . . . .spsptth! . . . the over acuity of my vestibular system,” Taft explained as he cleared his esophagus.

“Or something,” Lydia said, her arms crossed, though not unkindly.

As they waited for Taft to recollect himself and finish blowing his nose, Crispin felt an increasing sense of unease. He was totally out of his element, and all he wanted to do was go back to the club and take body shots off Melana. As he was envisioning that pleasant scenario, a gun shot rang out and suddenly everything changed.

Gaining the Loss

The rule of the cosmos: you can’t ask for anything. You’ve got to just take what you need and give what you have. Seems to be the way things work, more or less. Like, if I get a little bit too screechy, needy, desperate for love and attention, then all I can hear is the veritable waves on the shore in the shell held up to the ear. So I have to regroup, sit down in the empty night space and meditate on my nothingness. How I have nothing, I am nothing, I will gain nothing. I’ve got to keep it all in perspective, somehow. Clam up, button the hole, and just observe, just watch the way the world works. The way that light seems to be generated not by light but by some other order of power. How all of the good things in life are really just a residue of extreme evisceration. The trickling out of beauty from the suffering awareness of despair.

So how to live life in this full declaration of madness? The masses recline before the injection of beauty. So dawn it upon them in full, without shame or fear or denial. There is nothing to lose. There is nothing to gain. There is just what you allow yourself to be, here, in this place of moment.

In Passing

If I could just stop

everything

to put you in a frame,

to capture the light around you,

to glorify and rhapsodize you

in exactly the way that you were meant to be seen,

apart from the grime and glitter of the washed up

everyday surface,

then I would get down on bended knee

right here in the middle of the street

to take the picture.

But who will believe in it?

Am I the only witness?

I will simply watch

without taking

a thing.

Time Tells The Best Stories

I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago that has made me think a bit as time goes on. I was out drinking at a bar in SF and it was reaching the end of the night after a festive occasion. I wasn’t overly drunk, but I had consumed a fair amount of wine over the length of the evening, so I was not perhaps in the best of conversational and intellectually reflective form. The person I was speaking to was kind of grilling me as to why it is that I am a capable writer, but I do not seem to have any ambition to do anything with it. I blathered on a bit about my blog and about how I’d made a choice long ago to simply write for the love and heck of it, not for profit, and furthermore that I have little attention span nor dedication to writing cohesive pieces, etc, but I have to admit that I do not feel like my answers really addressed what she was attempting to get to the heart of.

Now look, I was flattered, first and foremost, that anyone would even give two shits about whether I can write or not. And I was flattered that someone would have the empathy and zeal to even bother to press me on the issue. But I was also somewhat taken aback, as I am not accustomed to having to defend myself on the choices that I make that determine my life’s path. But before I could talk my way any further into any insight on the matter, the bar was closing and it was time to go.

I think I realized, as the conversation ended, that I wished that it could continue and that I could really explain my thought process and life decisions in a way that would convince ME. But I also realized that the reality is that truly having that level of conversation, reflecting about oneself and one’s passions and life decisions, is just a bit too narcissistic to really occur anywhere other than in a therapist’s office. Or, well, on a blog.  Oh yes, my friends, self-therapy is unfortunately sometimes and all too often the name of the game here on Manderson’s Bubble.

I mean, I don’t have any illusions of grandeur. I generally get around 100 recorded hits a day, with the majority of those hits consisting of people doing searches for guns and ending up on my post about my grandfather’s gun collection.  Which is definitely not the post that I would care to be remembered by, though it’s nice to know that it might be interesting to people doing research like I was doing.

But I do know that I can be a competent writer, when I apply myself to it. I’ve helped people to edit professional writings and academic essays, and I’ve been penning my bullshit onto this blog for some time now, of course. But what of it? Lots of people are competent writers, and they are out there making a living out of it.

I made a declaration long ago that I didn’t want to write to be published. And the more I tried to defend that long ago decision in that somewhat drunken conversation, the more I realized just how much of that decision could be attributed to the low self-esteem and angry alienation that I was going through at that time in my life. I’ve never really questioned that choice I made, but I have always wanted to write in some capacity, and so the only way I’ve found that I could keep positive and excited about writing was to share it with my friends. So in college, I started an e-mail list, and I would write almost daily prose/poetry pieces that I would then e-mail to people (some of which you can view under the category Pre-Blog Missives). And then later, I started a blog, because it seemed to make better sense to give people a choice as to whether they wanted to bother reading my shit or not, instead of stuffing it into their inboxes. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Just writing to share with friends.

But what is this impulse to share my writing with you really about? Isn’t it at heart a desire to be recognized? Why shouldn’t this desire be translated into a project, into a book, into a career?

These are the questions that were raised in my mind. I want to take a moment to stress that I am not expressing regret for any of my life decisions in terms of career, academics,  or otherwise. I am happy to have taken the path that I have chosen, and I am extremely excited, currently, to become a teacher. But neither does my current trajectory negate any future potential for taking my writing to another level. And perhaps at the bottom of it all, no matter how I may declaim about how I like my writing to be imperfect and mundane and blah blah blah, perhaps I really do want to take my writing to another level, and I’ve just been too scared or too lazy to really take it there.

Deep thoughts, folks, that I will end this post upon. Whatever the case, thank you for stopping by occasionally and enduring such indulgent and amateurish writing. Will I ever attempt to write something more cohesive and profound? Time will only tell.

¡Help Me Publish Something!

Help me weed out the fluff and get a solid collection of my writings together so that I can publish them. I’ve got 18 pieces thus far in it, and I’d like to get them down to at least 10 – 13 pieces, if not less. I want them to the be the ones that work together the most cohesively and are the best.

To help me, scan through the pieces by following this link over to Google docs, where you can view or download the PDF file.

Then, vote on the poll below on the pieces that you feel should be included. Vote on only one, or select all 18, it’s up to you. If enough people give me their feedback, this can help me to better consider which ones to eliminate. I’m having trouble whittling it down because I’m finding it hard to edit my own work.

Also, if you happen to feel strongly about any pieces that should be included that are not currently in the collection, then you can write in your own response at the bottom.

Methods of Saving Moolah

There’s always these articles in Yahoo! and other such trite sources of information that advise us on ways to save our money. Such as utilizing coupons, driving less aggressively, paying off credit cards with the highest interest first, and other such trivial methods of scraping some extra cash back into the coffers–or, at the very least, simply stemming the flow of money out just that much less.

While those methods, and others, are all important ways to save, I would like to forward some of my own methods of saving cash which I think are more effective. Excelsior!

1) Stop using Mach 3s and dropping $20 every month on razors. Transition into wetshaving (just one upfront initial investment) and you’ll save a lot of cash over the long term. Razors for safety or straight razors are significantly cheaper, and it’s furthermore a more fulfilling shaving experience.

2) Shave your own head. I used to go to SuperCuts or whatever cheap haircut store was around. I kind of liked how sometimes it was a pretty young lass that was cutting my hair. But I also noted that all they ever did was ask me what length of guard they should use on the clippers (as if I was supposed to know). So I realized, eventually, that I could just do it myself. That’s at least $20 in savings every two to four weeks, depending how often you cut your hair. And a pair of clippers is cheap, and they will last you for years. That’s a lot of money saved over the long term.

3) Forgo the gym and go hiking/running/walking. All you need is a pair of shoes. Or invest in a bike.

4) Brew your own damn coffee. I’ve bought a lot of Dunkin’ in my day, and I can attest that it really adds up over the course of a year. It’s the little steady, daily transactions that drain your income. It tastes better at home anyway. And all you need to make your own coffee is coffee and a French press. Forget drip brew; why pay for filters?

5) Hang out at home. You’ve heard of “staycations.” Well, how about “stay ins”? Instead of going out, you stay in. Invite your buddies over. Hang out at the local park. We all need to get out sometimes. But if you make it into only an occasional expenditure, then you will save big time. It’s quite easy to drop $60 in one outing on a few drinks. Drop that $60 on a fine whiskey instead and you could sip at it slowly over the course of a month.

6) Get over yourself and drink tap water.

7) Use the library. Libraries are fucking awesome. You can get nearly any book you want if you are willing to wait for it.

8) Don’t be an organic freak. Buy organic local produce or join a CSA. It’s important to support organic, local, and sustainable use of land. But forget the damn organic cookies and organic cereal. I mean, really. Just let it go.

9) Recognize the difference between luxury and necessity, and make your choices between the two consciously. A car? Sometimes its a luxury or a necessity, depending on where you live. In NYC, it’s a luxury, and an expensive one at that. Movies at the movie theater? Do you really need to see the movie right when it comes out? Is it really better in a movie theater? I find it obnoxiously loud, with way too many trailers and advertisements. In fact, I would rather just read a book. A lot cheaper, and more fulfilling. Sorry movies.

I think that last bullet point is actually the most important one. If you are making your choices consciously, then you are choosing to invest more in certain activities or things because you find them more fulfilling. And thus, it is worth it to you. But there are many things that we throw our money at that are not more fulfilling, and that even degrade our quality of life.

The moral of the story? Spend your money wisely.

Chronicles of Crispin 05

Looger leaned forward. “We know that in the 3rd – 4th grades, you frequented the nurses’ office due to complaints of headaches. We know that an MRI scan performed on you at the age of 6 revealed a slightly unusual development in the R-complex area of your brain. Which subsequent research did nothing to elucidate.”

Crispin started. He’d almost forgotten about those episodes in his childhood. Nothing of substance had come of them, and his headaches had subsided, and as far as he knew, he was a normal, average human being. He took a large couple of swallows from his beverage.

“We know that you are capable of more. That you could be something much greater, in service to powers much more sweeping than Phineus & Mortcum Waste Management Co.”

“And what powers would those be?” Crispin inquired shrewdly.

“Ahha! Jumps right to the point, doesn’t he?” The merry band of misfits chuckled. “Suffice to say that these are powers that are responsible for the events that determine the course of human history, insofar as it can be guided.”

“But wait a sec. I’m not exactly a very capable worker. I’ve never excelled in anything except track, lacrosse, and drinking.”

“And dancing, neh?” Lydia winked, her thigh seeming to massage his, the parting of her upper and lower femoris displayed succulently with the crossing of her legs.

“Er, I guess,” Crispin said, trying to keep the blood from rushing to currently non-essential parts of his body. “Nothing useful, basically. And what is this R-complex thing you mentioned?”

Looger, obviously accustomed to pontification, sat back and gestured with his hairy hands over his paunch as he spoke, “The brain stem and cerebellum are the R-complex, the reptilian brain. This is the evolutionary basis from which our brains have evolved. You with me? It controls subconscious aspects of your body, like your breath and body temperature. There are certain people, generally of a mystical persuasion, who believe that we can consciously learn to regulate and manipulate this most basic aspect of our brain in order to increase longevity, physical health, and strength. Through meditation and other such disciplines.”

Crispin wasn’t quite sure that he understood how any of this related to him. Or mattered. He concentrated on Lydia’s presence next to his and sipped his drink. Sensing that he was losing his attention, Kruger spoke:

“I have a brain development similar to yours, Crispin. Which is not to say that the capabilities I have gained are comparable necessarily to those that you will develop,” Crispin duly noted the use of the future tense, “But essentially, I have been able to hone the physical structure of my body and increase my strength, endurance, and agility. This makes me a highly useful instrument in my work to those powers that be.”

Lydia suddenly stood up and stretched like a cat, her nose ring flashing in the iridescent strobe lighting, breaking the spell that Crispin had been under. He looked about him wildly, drunk.

“But enough talk,” she said, placing her hands on her hips. “Come on, and we’ll show you our boat.”

Chronicles of Crispin 04

Crispin shifted uncomfortably upon his haunches. This was a strange group, for sure. He glanced back over at his work comrades, noting that they were quickly proceeding into that stage of drunkenness wherein the stuff of legend occurs. Marissa was trying to obtain a shot from out of Thomas’ buttocks, her hands hooked around his thighs and her nose buried deep. Jesse was dry humping Lauren in the corner like a dog in heat, while Mike and Cain, water cooler buddies, looked on approvingly as they removed their shirts. Ah well, he was enjoying his strange cocktail, and he had to admit, there was something compelling about these outcasts who welcomed him so readily into their entourage.

They sat together in collective silence for a moment, sipping their drinks and soaking in the hedonistic ambiance of Club Zephyr. Crispin was, by this point, a bit tipsy, so he may perhaps be forgiven for failing to notice when Lydia slipped her hand into his pocket and withdrew his wallet. She handed it off to Kruger, who summarily withdrew the driver’s license and handed it back to her. Lydia pressed herself against Crispin a little harder, giving him some boob this time, and simultaneously slipped his wallet back into his pocket.The only thing that Crispin was aware of was thigh and boob. Kruger excused himself and tipped his hat to Crispin, who nodded back.

Looger leaned forward, his eyes a-gleam, his breath scented with shellfish. “Tell me, m’boy. Where did you learn them moves on the dance floor?”

Crispin flushed a bit. “Aw, you know. Just feel it in the hips. I used to dance to Michael Jackson in my underwear when I was a boy.” He wasn’t quite sure why he volunteered this information. But Looger nodded, seeming to approve of the dancing to Michael Jackson in skivvies as a perfectly viable method of learning.

“You’ve got the moves of a rattlesnake. You’ve got POTENTIAL, lad.” Kruger returned and handed a print-out to Looger, who consulted it, squinting, in the limited club lighting. Crispin took another couple of pulls from his Mordant Thief and drained the glass, giddy with Lydia’s silent and subtle attentions and Looger’s flattery. Crispin turned to Taft, who was happily drumming the beat of the music on his knees and watching the debauchery on the dance floor with interest, and offered to buy the next round. With a horse whistle, Taft called over the pony tailed waitress in black Converse and ordered them a new tray.

Looger examined Crispin piercingly over his glasses, his beard bedraggled in a somewhat majestic manner, now that Crispin looked more closely. “Don’t you think your talents are being wasted sitting behind a front desk all day?”

“Well, it’s a job,” Crispin began earnestly, “And the people I work with are fun. I mean, do I wish I was doing something more fulfilling? Of course I do. But isn’t that just the way adult life is?” Crispin looked around at the group, all of whom were gazing back at him intently.

“Wait a second. How did you know. . .?” By way of answer, Kruger flipped Crispin’s driver’s license onto the table like a card. As Crispin processed these events, the waitress distributed the drinks about the table and turned her sweet headlights on him. He automatically went for his wallet, then more urgently, realizing that his card may have gone wherever the ID had. But it was there, as was his cash, which he handed off to the waitress, who looked around at the table quizzically as she left.

“Sorry bub, just a routine background check. In this industry we’ve got to watch our backs,” Kruger said.

Lydia purred into his ear, “We just wanted to make sure that we could trust you. We LIKE you. If we are going to continue in this relationship, then we need to learn more about each other.”

Crispin’s head was spinning. He took a few pulls of his freshly delivered drink to ground himself. He took his ID and put it back into his wallet. He looked around at the group, all of whom were watching him. He smiled and raised his glass. “To new friends and new adventures!”

“Bravo, kid! Bravo!” Taft bubbled. Lydia squeezed his knee. Looger nodded approvingly. Kruger tipped his hat. They all raised their cups and drank.

“So what else do you know about me, then?” Crispin inquired.

Stay tuned, don’t touch that dial, folks. Crispin will return tomorrow!

Chronicles of Crispin 03

“Yes, men of the sea we are! And one woman! But before we get into the specifics of our enterprise, I would be happy to forward you a beverage in an attempt to account for the tragically spilt beer (though the fault was all Lydia’s), which did, at the very least, have the unforeseen but perhaps divinely intended outcome of introducing you to us!” Taft enumerated cheerily, his round face uplifted to shout over the techno music.

“I’m not quite sure what you said,” Crispin shouted back honestly, “But I sense your good intent, and I’ll drink whatever’s handed to me. And I will forgive whomever was responsible forthwith.”

With this objective determined, a round of drinks were arranged by Taft through a comely waitress in black Converse and black socks. As they awaited their libations, Crispin was invited to join the odd group  in being seated. He spotted Menala back at the bar, his pink boa draped winningly across her back, but he then noted that she was engaged in exchanging body shots with Morrison. Morrison was driving his oblong face in between Menala’s substantial breasts in the effort to obtain a buried shot. So as Lydia patted the seat next to her invitingly, he plopped himself down. The waitress appeared with a tray of ruddy, strangely aromatic cocktails that made Crispin envision the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

“To your health, Sir Crispin!” Looger called, and they drank.

“What in God’s name is this unholy yet strangely compelling concoction?” spluttered Crispin.

“It is known,” volunteered Kruger, “as the Mordant Thief. It consists of tequila, dry port, and a dash of olive juice brine. I was lucky enough to discover it one hot, humid, and airless night in a nameless hotel off the Gulf of Mexico. I had been attempting to drown my sorrows in drink after a particularly demanding mission that took the life of my favorite Mexican mistress and a substantial amount of money. Not to mention unsettling the nation almost to the point of civil war. ” Heads were shaken all around in quiet remembrance by the group.

“Ay, THAT was a fuckin’ mission, alright,” Looger stated.

By way of attempting to include Crispin, Lydia explained, “Not all of our missions end successfully. We have had some close calls.” She leaned over slightly so that her ample thigh lay against his. Crispin nodded thoughtfully and took another pull of his Mordant Thief.

“So.” Crispin tried to think of a way to steer this conversation into his understanding. “Um. So you guys have a boat?”

The group of misfits looked at each other and smirked. “Yes, it is a BOAT, that’s for sure. A boat such as you have never seen!”

Train your web browser to this here blog tomorrow for a fresh episode in

The Chronicles of Crispin!

Chronicles of Crispin 02

Once out ‘pon yon dance floor, Crispin executed a few deft hip waggling maneuvers that combined salsa sensuality with hip-hop swagger. Or so he liked to think, in any case. Menala clapped her hands in delight and pressed her ass against him in approval. It would most likely take another 2-3 shots of tequila before tongues could get involved.

But right about then, a wrench got thrown thence into the proceedings. From somewhere just out of peripheral vision, a drink was heaved onto our aforementioned dancers. Beer, to be exact. Menala yelped, and Crispin exclaimed, “What-the-fuck!” He swiveled about to locate the source of untimely beer upheaval, his arm hair already getting sticky. Menala dashed off to the ladies’ room, her shapely calves flashing in the gyrating club lights.

A blonde girl with pink highlights came up to Crispin and gripped his wrist. “I am SO sorry! I just totally spilled my beer ALL over you! Oh shit!” Crispin eyed her petulantly, beer dripping down his ribs. The girl appraised him. “Wow! I dig your mascara! My name is Lydia. I’ll make it up to you, I promise,” she said mysteriously, still holding him by his wrist. “C’mon and meet my friends.” Though Crispin was quite certain that Lydia was not referring to sexual favors when she said that she would make it up to him, the primitive part of his brain allowed him to be led by the hand by this strange, short but shapely blonde. He could tell that she was completely obnoxious, and he was still pissed about the beer and the lost mating ritual time with Menala, but there was something just off enough about her to make him interested. Maybe it was the nose ring.

Lydia brought him up to a lounging group of misfits, all of them guys. They looked at him dispassionately as Lydia introduced them, shouting over the 4/4 beat of the music. “This is Looger,” Lydia said, waving at the first gentleman, who was sprawled out on a cushion like he was going to get a lap dance. Looger was a large man with a prominent belly and a disheveled beard, but despite these slovenly indications, dressed immaculately. He nodded amiably enough at Crispin. “He’s the brains of the operation,” Lydia shouted affectionately. “And this is Kruger,” referring to a tall thin man standing against the pillar with a rakishly tilted cap. “He’s the hands.” Kruger obligingly shook hands forthwith, demonstrating his long, bony, but strong fingers. “This next gent is the one mainly responsible for you being half-covered in beer, though I plead guilty, in part, as well,” she said, pointing out a small man who was bubbling over in excitement and was the only one who came up to Crispin. “So pleased to meet you, SIR! And so sorry about the spillage, absolutely unncessary, if only Lydia here had just allowed me to . . . ” Lydia stomped on his foot, stopping him short. “I’m not sure why we keep this guy around, to be honest,” she said playfully, “This is Taft.”

“I’m Crispin,” Crispin said to all, in his typically phlegmatic manner. He stood there awkwardly for a moment, uncertain whether he should still be angry about the beer or not. “Um, so, what do you guys DO, anyway?”

“We’re sailors!” Lydia enjoined. “Sailors of the high seas, if you please. We were just discussing our next route and mission, when Taft, as is his wont, got a tad carried away.”

Join us on the morrow for the further adventures of Crispin! . . .

Chronicles of Crispin 01

Crispin donned his feather boa, slid another silver ring on his finger, and appraised his mascara’d face from many different angles one more time before stepping out of his highrise apartment and into the elevator. He was destined this evening for a meetup at Jesse’s place and thence onward to Club Zephyr, which required a certain flamboyance in get-up just to get in. This was the first time he would be going out with some of the ladies from work, and he was eager to show them that he had a wild side that they would not have guessed from the unassuming, placid demeanor he maintained at the front desk. He knew that he had a winning smile, which was enough to pique the immediate interest of a stray lass, but he had always struggled in the conversation department. He required props and activities to cover this weakness when he went out. Thus, he was also a tad nervous, because meeting the girls over at Jesse’s first could be kind of weird, before the alcohol got into everyones system, sans deafening bass and beats. He was arriving at the tail end of fashionably late in an attempt to curtail that awkward face time.

He was pleased when he strutted into Jesse’s, his heart thumping and his wallet loop jangling, and everyone called out and whooped in delight at his appearance. It was simply because they were all bored and thirsty for spectacle, of course, but he thought that he also sensed some burgeoning sexuality in the flashing eyes and appreciative catcalls of a few of the girls. He high-fived Morrison and grabbed a beer nonchalantly from the fridge. All he had to do was sit back and wait for the encroaching darkness of the club, where the alcohol and jubilation of freedom from normalcy would kick in. He could tell that there would be some shots involved, some freaking, some sandwiching going on tonight.

After the beers were summarily polished off, it was time to head out. Marissa was already getting loud and stumbling a little on the 5 block walk. Crispin made sure to stay at the head of the group, knowing that his ass looked pretty good in his red jeans. He could sense a good vibe emanating from Menala, a quiet girl with funky earrings and great calves. So when they got in the club, he made sure to sidle up to her at the bar. But even with the coating of liquor on his tongue, Crispin found it difficult to establish anything substantive via verbal engagement. He needed to ply her with his body language. “C’mon, let’s dance,” he told her, wrapping the boa around her neck. She smiled reluctantly but followed him, her straightened hair tied back around her ears.

Stay tuned for the further adventures of Crispin on the morrow. . .

Vuelo back home

Sitting in the aeropuerto to vamoose back to The City. WTF happened to free wi-fi? Should be like water.

I had fun in the city, and must admit to feeling some pangs of regret that I don’t live in a place where I can walk down the street to a supermarket where they have absolutely everything you could ever hunger for, including 25 types of dark chocolate and the freshest bread basket produce ever. It’s been sunny as hell here, which I s’pose I cain’t really complain about, excepting that it has burnt my skin to a reddened crisp.

The nuptial ceremony was great fun, and I consumed so much red wine that I think I turned French overnight. The reading went well, although I got kind of nervous beforehand since the microphone didn’t work so I had to belt it out sans amplification.

I got to see and catch up with folks I hadn’t seen in years, which was nice. I couldn’t have asked for a better trip. Thanks for the carpet and good times, Willie, thanks for the sweet breakfast and recording, Seth and Shelley, thanks for the conversation and conviviality, Anna, and sorry I didn’t have more time for nargilah, James and Jenny and Ashley. And congrats again to Matt and Sue!

So long for now, San Francisco.

Hallowed Lives

To possess something of depth, there must be a relevant soul-searching ream of pain, as what has built up and calcified is scooped out, cleared out, cut out. Leaving the space for the blueprint of something new. In the erection of new life structures, you think of the manner in which windows will capture light, the space needed to sustain love. Policies are put into place, expectations are clearly set. From out of the hollows of your aching heart are formed crystals, that when dug up form the diamond terrace of your realized dreams.

The people in our lives are designed to mold us into who we want to be. To support, construct, motivate. If we are not here to enact something better, than what would be the point? Together, pressing the clay of our vision into higher planes.

All that exists is a matter of process, timing, development. We must wait, patiently, for the universe to unfold into itself, riding the waves of our suffering as we hollow our lives in preparation for the future.

Journey

There are times when I need space to reflect, a mountain to climb. A venture into the wilderness, where I can become, momentarily, a lone animal following his instinct, reliant solely on his own wiles. Once I am there, at the peak of solitary vision, all I can think about is going home. And so when I return to my safe harbor from the world, it is new, it is warm, it is imbued with the light of re-discovered love.

In Area of Bay

It’s funny how different different cities can be. As soon as you walk off the plane, there is a new vibe in the air that is particular to that particular city. Shit, even before you get off of the plane; the inhabitants on their way home set an intangible, introductory tone. San Francisco, with its REI wear hipsters, its segregated sidestreets of the strung out, its hippie bums who sometimes look relatively content. If I were a bum, I would live in San Francisco.

People in general look healthier, more wholesome in some sun-kissed way. Clothing is varied and colorful. The streets are wide, people wait patiently at stop lights. It is simultaneously liberal and yuppie at the same time in a sometimes contradictory but sometimes harmonious way. People bike through the city with their baskets full of Trader Joe’s tote bags. In the un-yuppified neighborhoods, if you don’t belong there then you stick out like a sore thumb.

A down-and-out man followed me across the street at one intersection, then good naturedly told me that he knew that I was loco. I thought he was telling me that I was a local at first. But then I got that he was saying that I was loco. “The way you walkin’, the clothes you wearin’. I can tell.” I took this as a compliment. If I appear loco, then that means that I won’t be fucked with. And I’m alright with that.

Bit of Tid

Well, I’m extremely glad to get out of dodge and escape the heated humidity of NYC to hang out, temporarily, in the ‘Bay Area.’ I’m going to attend the wedding of a dear friend and frequent reader of this blog, and I’m excited to do a reading (of mine own!) at the wedding. Congrats & best wishes in advance, Matt and Susan!

If only I had more time to spend out there, but duty–in the form of a job search–calls me back to my east coast abode all too soon. But even a few days back in Cali is nice.

Did you notice that my blog has it’s own little icon now? Yeah. Pretty cool, huh? Bet you wish your blog had an icon.

It’s too damn hot in this apartment to write anything more of substance nor detail. I’m going to go cleanse myself in the cool Catskills water that oh so gently trickles out of the faucet in my shower. So that I can go thence and sweat some more into mine pillow and catcheth some Zs, before I’ve got to wake up again at 3 in la madruga to catch the shuttle to the port of air. And onwards, thence. Pigs in space.

Equivocation

There is what is within. And then there is all that is without. However, in essence, the without is but a collection of other withins. So if I stepped out of myself, I would observe that what is within other people is proportionate to that which is within myself. Without–in all of this collection of withins–is an extroverted form of myself. Or an introverted form of the cosmos.

But to directly and immediately equate the two together would be a fallacy, because while at some ultimate level everything within and without harmonizes like a yolk harmonizes within an egg, they are not one and the same at any given moment in time. It is only when seen from a steadfast, timeless, eternal viewpoint that they pan out into one. If you flash framed the Now right now, then you would notice more the contrasts, the differences, the distinctiveness of all people from one another from different peoples in different times. The yolk would seem to be distinguished from the egg just as when you cut in half a hardboiled egg. You could pop it out as if it were a separate piece altogether.

As if the children were distinct from the adults, who are distinct from the old. As if the college students were distinct from the young professionals, as if distinct from high school students. As if the sun were distinct from the moon, and this solar system distinct from the milky way.

As if my thoughts and my feelings were distinct from your fingers. As if your eyes were distinct from the concrete, from the summer air, as if the currents carrying a Florida thunderstorm were distinct from the waves cutting at the Taiwanese shore. As if this breath, this moment, this pinnacle of your rushing heart was distinct from the world.

Fighting Climate Change Through Prevention

In this article in the NY Times, analysts correctly ascertain that climate change could result in threats to national interest. What is sad about this form of analysis–which as, of course, the FOXNews reporting eagerly highlights (Climate Change Could Warrant U.S. Military Action)–is the reactive mentality that this lends to the debate about policy and strategy. Instead of talking about methods of combating climate change in terms of establishing carbon emission reducing policies, funding ‘green’ technologies, and mitigation of climate change in those areas most affected, war hawks eagerly begin anticipating increasing weapons cachets and military budgets. But what good will it do to send in troops to areas devastated by climate change? That’s like trying to staunch a wound with a toothpick. The only effective measures we can take to address the potential threats to U.S. interests and security from climate change will be preventative: through policy, funding, and diplomacy. And that must happen now, not later.

Et Tu, Brute?

Brutus caved in to the unspoken demand in his soul for idleness. His brain told him, take a look at your schedule. You must do this. You must do that. But his soul called out to him for mercy, and he could not find it within him to do much beyond the simple boiling of tea. Perhaps, he thought, this is some form of depression. A lack of motivation, a juvenile internal form of rebellion against the adult demands of the external world. Just let it all go. Let it all slide by. What did it matter?

Brutus required a consistent stream of friends to force him out the door. Otherwise, he would forget who he was, and he couldn’t fathom how he could face the world without any deep set conviction. If someone were to challenge him out there, on the street, how could he muster the passion to reply?

Obviously, he had somehow managed to pull himself together enough to craft the illusion of some kind of put together adult life. He was a fairly successful manager at a bank located so close to his apartment that he could walk there in 20 minutes, and he did, every single morning stopping at the cafe on the corner for his chai. He went out with a loose affiliation of friends from business school and his workplace every weekend. Sometimes they would go out to a club and dance; usually, they took a booth at their favorite bar, Muskee’s, and drank one too many martinis while trying–largely unsuccessfully–to hit on women. He would wake up on Saturday mornings hung over, beset with an inexplicable feeling of guilt and impending doom, which he could only shed after going to the gym and eating breakfast at a diner, where he would sit drinking coffee and reading The Economist until he felt ready for the oncoming week again.

But this weekend had been different. Brutus excused himself from the Friday night outing, on the somewhat legitimate claim that he had extra work he needed to finish over the weekend. But he hadn’t touched the work. He had sat listlessly in his apartment, so idle that he couldn’t even bring himself to put on a CD to break the silence. He sat there in his boxers, drinking his tea and staring at the floor.

So he elected to give in to it. He allowed it to overtake him. He sat there in the darkened gloom of the impending evening without turning on the light. The extra work could plausibly be extended into the week; it didn’t have to be finished this weekend. This felt like a throwback to his undergraduate days, when he would skip class and waste the day playing video games or drinking beer, doing absolutely nothing in some kind of child-like defiance to the demands of the inhumane strictures of the civilized world. It could also have been called laziness, but it was more than that. Something inarticulate and hidden. Something so unlikely to find its way into expression that it fizzled out instead into impotent idleness.

Was this his natural proclivity, perhaps? To drift purposelessly in some limbo of spirit? And the illusion of his daily life was only some type of caving in to the pressure of normalcy? Too many questions. It was better simply to sit, thinking nothing.

Exploring My Self

I have never been much inclined to write down the things that simply happen to me down in a journal. Such as “Today I went to the park and met up with Jane and played snooker,” and etc. My memory also mimics this disinclination. I completely erase from my memory occurrences or conversations which I feel are only of an overly detailed nature. This of course often gets me into trouble, especially with the girlfriend, who feels quite differently about the things that I have let slide from my mind like silicone through a tube. I am someone who thinks in generalities and integrating linkages. I see the connections in things that make two disparate concepts into a greater whole. I have never been interested in learning detailed specifics—at least not conceptually—because I don’t retain this information. I sometimes wish that I could. For example, when I read the autobiography of Malcolm X, I was especially impressed by Malcolm’s keen ability to retain facts and history, and to string these together in one moment in a penetrating response to any questioner. This made him dangerous, because his mind was a weapon, and he used it to blow apart conventional myths and assumptions. But I can’t retain information like that, even if I (*gasp*) applied myself. After I’ve read something like the People’s History of the United States, I wish that I could just spit up dates and events from it in the midst of debate. But instead, the only thing I retain is the perspective of what I’d read, what the overall meaning of those dates and events were. Once I’ve gleaned this overall meaning, I throw away all the details. I think I do it because I’ve learned that this is the manner in which I think most efficiently. I think best in metaphor and quantum leap. I don’t do well with logic, math, chemistry, or any other specific, sequential avenues of thought.

My writing on this blog truly is my journal. I’ve never kept a diary in which I continuously detail what has daily happened to me (although I do of course do it from time to time). But I’ve always written when something deep down in there starts to stir, reacting to these daily occurrences. The daily occurrence itself usually gets left out—unless it was of such enjoyment that I don’t have anything to add to it—but I don’t think that this is particularly important. What is important, to me, is the change that occurs within me, the transformation of myself as I adapt and respond to the cosmos. What happens within me is what happens within everyone else, and this is how I understand other people: through what I have been through, or through what I have imagined. Even when other people have grown up in completely different circumstances from me, I can still relate to them, because the exterior differences are generally shallow. Even when in different cultures, different countries, I feel like I can relate. Because deep within ourselves, we all go through the same innate processes.

I am watching myself, observing my feelings, my emotions, my loneliness, my happiness, my love, my pettiness. I am taking notes, and these webpages are the result. You can understand me. You can relate to me. You can know me, without knowing nor caring what my daily happenstance life may be. So what is it that you are knowing, really? Is it just me? Or perhaps it is also you? Or is it something that between the two of us is cumulatively greater?

The Race of the Waterfall

Us humans, we short-sightedly cling to each other like life rafts as we hurtle towards precipitous falls, as if we would be the ones to save each other. In the frenzy of the lip of the unseen, everything comes apart, and we find our fingers empty, our eyes filled with spray. It would have been better to have been beholden to the void before we fell. It would have been better to have been still, drowned already in the inevitable, serene in the knowing that there is no saving grace beyond the embrace of emptiness.

Who can blame us, in our cataclysmic euphoria of need? In our poverty of vision, we claim what is given to us as desirable. Whatever can make us feel good, temporarily, whatever can numb our feeling, temporarily, day by day until one day we find that we are nostalgic monsters, a distant alien force that must be fought tooth and nail by the oncoming generation. We wake up perhaps at the vertiginous pinnacle of that final descent into nothingness to find that we have become parasites, aging attachés of complacency, selfishly clinging to mythological ideals that w0uld label us heroes, label us entitled, label us good and whole and pure.

What matters, at that point, our pride? When our whole life flashes before our mind’s eye, it is the things we did when no one else was looking that is replayed. How did we comport ourselves then? Were we free? Were we ashamed? Were we utilitarian, were we idle? What has defined our integrity in our lives? Who are we? What is it that we have done to the world, to ourselves, to each other?

How do we carry ourselves as our world falls about us, and our hands grasp out into emptiness, and we find that there is nothing to support us but the quantifiable pull of gravity?

The Hollow Reed Goes to Court

I have defined myself by loneliness, a barrenness of expectancy. Any light that passes through me is not my own, I am a hollowness that is sounded by the passing breath of what the universe elects to bestow, just as it so readily and inevitably draws away, to leave me again enshrouded in silence, in the magnitude of a void that lies at the root of every being. For this solitude is not my own;  it is the very concavity of the universe, against whose form I am embedded within, a child pregnant with nothingness, like the deadened sacs of jellyfish that wash to shore, glancing in the moonlight like glass blown bubbles, a horrifically beautiful detachment of alien life forms deadened of meaning. The eye that views us wholly is not our own. It is in the distance of aqueous rock, beholden to a history that extends far beyond the parasitic need of life.

As I unravel from out of my comfortable discipline, from out of the mountainous wilderness of my solitude and into a daily existence that necessitates immediacy, haphazard intimacy, and action, I find myself flailing, looking to strike out again for the deep water, where life slows until it is still.

But I have made a choice. I have turned my back to the night and descended into the electrified city of the people, where we choose to listen to the music of our own crafting. My deepest self, rooted in empty blankness, must belatedly put on the masks of human aspiration and join in the ritual dances of the season. To become a proselytizer of the human future, laboring for fecundity. To have hope, to believe in a collective expansion of spirit, that what we take will be less than what we make.

The individual light within me has been lessened, intentionally, to make way for the lights of other people who will come with me. The one light that we shine can only be stronger, the one song that we sing can only be that much more steady, defined through the legislated breath of each other, not simply by the passing happenstance gift of the beyond.

Nostalgia and Adaptation

I have been having these recurring, viscerally painful moments of missing the West Coast lately, especially Tahoe. It’s these intense moments of remembrance of little details, like walking across the street from my apartment to go to Raley’s, or driving my beat up old Subaru (‘Subie’ or ‘Subarita’) down the winding, bumpy one lane mountain road to work, or biking into town on the bike trail to go to the library. And there are other things, like missing my family and missing my nieces and nephews growing up.

What’s even more strange, however, has been that I keep having these visions of New Mexico. I have never lived there and have only passed through, and maybe it’s just that I’m envisioning some idealized fantasy of dry heat as opposed to humid heat (as I sit here immersed in a pool of sweat) but for whatever reason, I am dreaming of terra cotta colors, green chile burritos, mountains, and cacti. And a lifestyle of space, light, and quietude.

I think the meaning of these visions and remembrances is that I am beginning to realize just how out of touch with myself I have become. At least, the parts of myself that I had more clearly defined in other contexts. I have always been a kind of lonely chameleon, adapting in superficial ways to my environment while trying to understand myself outside of that immediate context. But lately, my habits and modes of existence have been so thoroughly alien to the way I’ve lived most of my adult life that I find myself struggling with my identity and where I am. Part of that struggle necessitates nostalgia and fantasizing. I am shedding my past, shedding the parts of me that were defined by other worlds. And so I miss those contexts where I was comfortable, where I had established myself in some way. And I yearn for some immediate context where I can be what I see as myself, wherein I can stretch my wings and be comfortable.

I think that here in this wildly new environment, I have been sitting back and trying to adapt and to survive. I haven’t had time to be myself. I think you can see this reflected in my writing from this period of my life when you compare it to past posts. I am less reflective, a little more superficial, more passive-aggressive, less spiritual. Maybe, I don’t know.

As I come out of that hole of survival mode and begin to feel a little more established, I am taking a look around and then looking down at myself and wondering who the fuck I still am. I have been taking the city in, compromising with it, selling myself to it. And now that I am coming somewhat to terms with it, I am able to take a clearer look at myself and who I am within this new context. But not quite yet. The vision is blurry. I am still tied to my idealizations of my past self.

In any case, here I am, still struggling to adapt to this city. I am slowly branching out, putting down roots, finding my place, but I’ve got a lot of work to do.

My $.02 On Health Care Reform

Health care reform. Does it need to happen?  Is it going to happen? Does it require an inclusive public health insurance option? God yes. Depends on your idea of reform. And yes.

This is a sticky issue that has been largely avoided by politicians who don’t want to tango with sticky issues. Props to Mrs. Clinton for even attempting it years ago, back when it should have been done. President Obama has elected to tackle it head on, and the issue has punctured his seeming political invincibility. But one cannot dock him points for giving it an honest effort. He could just sit back on his ranch and pretend that allowing the status quo to continue is the right thing for all Americans, not just the top 5%.

It’s amazing how much debate there even is revolving around the issue of public health coverage. Apparently the reality has been rendered so opaque to analysis that many a folk appears to have missed the obvious: that national health care coverage needs to be as universal as possible, or else all public health, both nationally and globally, is endangered. That’s the reality. Now the other reality at the moment, politically speaking, is how do we pay for it. But to me, at least, the answer to this is also clear: we need to tax the rich and use that money to cover public health insurance. The poor have never been able to afford health insurance. That’s why they go to the ER and make the public pay for it anyway. And the middle class can no longer afford health insurance either. Why? Because it’s big business. Health care is a luxury in this country. But public health can not be relegated to luxury/big business status. If we do not cover the majority of the population, then all of the population is put in grave danger due to outbreaks of disease. Evolved microbes do not recognize class distinctions.

A sidebar on “middle class”: apparently, the President seems to consider households that make below $250,000 a year to be “middle class”. I’m sorry, but if your household is making that much, then you are not middle class. You are doing just fine. You should be paying higher taxes so that the rest of us can get health care.

Dusting Myself Off

Now that I am done with intensive training, and I have some free time before the start of the school year (whereupon I will lose any semblance of having a personal life–but I’m used to that now), I want to regain some of my health and personal focus. I’m hoping that by sharing some of my goals with you, I might actually make some of them happen. Here is a list of some of the ways I will seek to better myself in the next month:

1) Begin running again. I haven’t run since last September, and I miss it. My ass has lost its once herculean mold and decomposed into jelly. I’ve gotten lazy and I’m tired all the time. Which is either because I’m dying or because I stopped running.

2) Switch back to yerba maté as my caffeine source, instead of coffee. My fiancee broke my last maté gourd, and I refused to order what should be a $3 gourd on-line. So I tried to find a gourd in NYC, which given that this is the freakin’ melting pot o’ the nation, I figured wouldn’t be so hard. But unless I’m senile, I didn’t find no gourds on the Isla de Manhattan. I could find the loose tea, sure, no problem. My local Inwoodian C-Town has big bags of it, which makes me very happy. But no gourds. Now, I am aware that there are more concentrated Uruguayan/Argentinean populations in Queens, and I did in fact stop off the 7 one day after work in an attempt to find a gourd, based on some Yelp info I had read. But for whatever reason, I was unable to locate the store I was looking for, and I ended up giving up that day. So after months and months of straight French pressed Bustelo, I have finally given in and paid the exorbitant fees to order a new gourd on-line. I need a sustained caffeine kick, not that high and low shit that coffee seems to be all about. I like the taste, alright, but I don’t like the fact that it stains my damn teeth, neither. Maté, at long last, I am comin’ back to you.

3) Attempt to include more fruits and vegetables in my diet. I think I often borderline on scurvy. I’m going to start snackin’ on apples and oranges instead of raw slabs of beef. Not that I snacked on raw slabs of beef. But you get the drift.

4) Read fiction books again. For a while there, I’d been on a non-fiction book kick. Which is great. I learned a lot of stuff. Then I began my summer training, which included a fair amount of reading on things like classroom management, differentiation, disabilities, etc. So after that, I’ve needed some time off from reading anything. But then after a conversation on books the other day, I realized that I hadn’t read a fiction book in a really long time. And that I wouldn’t have to learn anything from it if I didn’t want to. So I went to my local library and picked out a bunch of books just from the A – B section, and I’m enjoying getting back into it. It’s like rediscovering my first love. Me and reading, we go way back. Curled up, the patter of the rain on the windowsills, the forward falling impulse of the narrative and a world outside whose demand has lessened, if only for a spell.

5) Get myself organized. Review all the material that I’ve been learning over the last 6 weeks, put together the stuff I will want to use, throw out what I won’t. Pull out all the stuff from the front closet, get rid of stuff, put it back in and organize it. Clean the floors of the apartment. Cut my hair.

6) Kill the cockroaches. They’ve infested our apartment in the last few weeks, and it’s gotten out of hand. Every time we walk in the kitchen at night, there are millions of them, scattering across the floor, swarming over the sink. Well, not quite millions. Just a few. But enough to feel disgusted. I’ve won the war against the mice, and I plan on winning against the roaches, too. I mixed together some borax and brown sugar today and scattered it around behind things, and I’ll see if that old school remedy is enough to do the deed. If not, I’ll move on to the more conventional weaponry.

7) Get a job. The hiring freeze for special education has been lifted, so it’s time to get myself placed. These next weeks will consist of resume sending and cover letter writing. Oh, joy. It reminds me a little too much of last summer. But at least this time around, I’ve got a little more solid direction to run in.

8 ) Explore outside of the city. I signed up for Zipcar a while ago and still haven’t gotten around to actually using one. I want to go up the Hudson Valley, see the non-city greenery, get a sense of my east coast environs. I’ve seen enough of the subways. I need to see more of the aboveground scene. I also need to plan a wedding, ostensibly. Which if it is to actually happen, would require a site in order to perform the ceremony. So a site must be located. Things must be planned.

Balance Acting

My summer fellows training has ended, so I have no excuse now for not frequently tending to this here blog. I will try once again to achieve a consistent performance of post-a-days in order to meet Augustal National Blog Posting Month requirements. We shall see if I can maintain such discipline or not. There are some days when I just simply can’t find it within me to write something, knowing that it will be ridiculously trivial and demeaning once I sit down and take a good hard look at it at some later time and date. But I suppose what I need to bear in mind is that part of the very reason why I have been consistently writing–without any higher goals or objectives of being published or successful–since middle school has been to deny the prevalancy of some idea that good writing must be merely pristine, perfect, and pure. I seek, therefore, to embellish informal writing intended to be shared with my friends–now in this day and age termed “blogging”–with a certain status and depth of artfulnesses, of deliberateness, while still using it for the therapeutic, temporal, connective intention that informal communication is largely about. But let me set something straight here: I am not a “blogger”. I have been writing in this manner since long before the advent of web-blogs became a hot ticket item. I am a writer. I write so I can live. A blog just so happens to be a highly convenient mechanism to share my writings with the world.

It’s like the difference between a jogger and a runner. When you jog, you are running for exercise. When you run, you are running to live. If you don’t understand that distinction, then you are a jogger.

The distinction between informal and formal writing is not so very clear in any case anymore. The immediacy of the language of e-mails, text messaging, and twittering has led to a natural aversion in most people to any form of abstraction or strenuous embellishment. And who can blame them? I share the aversion to staid words that serve no function other than pompous self-preening. Yet I also enjoy the playfulness of well-stated formations of words. The power and impact of syntax and artfully employed synonyms cannot be understated. The formal language of academia can either be sucked dry of all marrow of life, a limp husk of signification, or when deployed consciously, a tactful display of power, ripe with meaning and revelation, a preacher’s sermon more than a professor’s tract.

I think there is a balance that I seek to achieve between the lines of formal and informal language, where I can enact an impactful immediacy that lingers just enough to make you want more. I’m not saying that I gain this regularly. But this is how I want to write. To punch you in the gullet like a wine or whiskey that you taste. Something coming from a deep barrel of thought and feeling, combined in one moment of rubber and road. From which the journey continues. A fragment that is tied together somehow with all the fragments that came before. Not quite complete in and of itself, but suggestive of what will come.

Because that’s how life is. It’s beautifully fraught with meaning, but it’s never quite the dramatic, slow motion, soundtracked scene that can be encapsulated in a frame. It slips and sloshes outside of trite definition. We can’t quite hold onto anything, and this is what is sorrowful and what is full of light. The spaces, the gaps between neurons. From which sparks fly. From which stars shine. From which sentences are strung and minds are momentarily breathless from recognition of the void that exists between hearts.

Modality

Sometimes I have to force myself to settle on back to accept the shadowy recesses of modal shifts ‘twixt sunshine and moodiness. I tell myself to remember Miles. That dark master, a warlock that straddled the transition into an almost openly psychedelic world (momentarily), a paradigm psychological shift that erupted out armpit sized jazz clubs into studio produced cut/spliced internalized packages that traversed boundaries cultural and physical and otherwise, united in an aural depth of explorative bliss that was generated through uniquely disciplined collaboration, managed quietly by the ultimate anti-micro-manager, he who directed simply by presence alone. If only I could be so comfortable in my own inner vision skin, to sit back and preside over numinative formations in moments of over-riding mass mentality, in those times when the crowd dominates knowledge of self and I am lost in the over-arching eyes and critical judgements that come from fear and past submissions to low self-esteem.

Lost Over Here (&, furthermore, Celestial Hip-Hop)

Hello! Mr Manderson foolishly gave me the keys to his kingdom, as a guest blogger, with the suggestion to try writing a bit more inwardly (in his blog’s style), as a release from the narrative distance I maintain over at my public arts blog (www.itwaslost.org). Now, I don’t live in New York City, where the angsty gray-clad individuals, unable to communicate with their fellow citizen, fester inward thoughts worth blogging about. If you look into the soul of a Berkeley resident like myself, it looks like one of those early Disney Cartoons with smiling trees bobbing back & forth to the music.

However, I just came up to my parents’ house on Lake Tahoe (where I first met Mr Manderson), & after a splurge of creativity, had some thoughts about the creative process I thought might be relevant over here.

Wow, WordPress is super slow on this computer I’m using, I wonder why.

First thought. Motion revitalizes the creative spirit & pushes us in new directions. I was not exactly having writers block in Berkeley, but I have been living in the same place for a long time, & artistically was beginning to feel a bit tepid. I had been writing hymns, & just by taking a train ride home, I changed course 270 degrees & mapped out an entire hip-hop EP – a genre I previously had no interest or push to explore. Moral: if you’re stuck, hit the road.

Palinode to that thought. It’s important to have roots, & altho ramblers can constantly rejuice their spirits, there’s a link between nomadism & fraudulence (think Dylan’s famous phrase “no direction home”, he’s affected roots. I’m not saying it isn’t beautiful, but where do you go home?) I relate all this to how I have no business in the genre of hip-hop.

Second thought. There’s something in a Tom Stoppard play (Indian Ink may be) about how when a multicultural couple was living in England, they decorated their house with all of their Indian flavors; but when they lived in India, they found themselves taking high tea & putting up pictures of England, &c. Not just nostalgia, but how we can focus & be inspired by a place we live or we have lived in, better when we’re in the other place. For instance, I was only able to rap about the East Bay when I was traveling by train up to Tahoe.

These may seem like simple thoughts, but there they are. Meanwhile, while I’m here, I’ll advertise the test-runs of my EP, The Celestial Hierarchy, with beats by Gold Diamonds. Warning, if you’re offended by bawdy ironic sexism, sacreligion, or Medieval Christianity, you might want to skip out on this project. The first five tracks are up & there’s a few more coming. Here!

Update from the sweaty pit of Summer

As you may have noticed, alas, I have been unable to keep up with my post-a-day dictum. Only one more week of summer school field training and coursework, and then I’ve got some time off to concentrate on acquiring a job (kinda important), visiting SF for a wedding, and enjoying what’s been a fairly mild summer for NY. Since I’m currently sitting in a pool of sweat, I’m not in the mood for posting much right now, either, but here’s some graphic filler for the meanwhile. . . (once you’ve entered into the picture gallery below, click on the picture again once you are on the next page in order to see it full size)

Lil’ City House in DUMBO

Downtown Manhattan

Central Park Pond

Birds bathing in the hot summer sun

Lotuses in a Central Park pond

Tree formed shade in Central Park

The pull of wool

I’m so tired I can feel my eyeballs sucking back into my skull. I was just about to tottle off to bed, finally, when I remembered that damn post-a-day business I’d somehow thought would be a good idea. So here ’tis. My post for today. Let’s see, what’s my big thought? I was thinking today about how it is mostly counter-productive to be immersed in rebellion and opposition to systems and bureacracies. The most productive thing is to be actively involved in addressing problems by deliberately inventing solutions. Otherwise, you’ll just end up bitching about everything, which just ends up making everything worse. But on the other side of the coin, I recognize that it’s easy to lose one’s perspective about what is really important in life, which is what is right in front of you. And to relate yourself honestly and with integrity to other people based on their immediate need, which you can only really determine most accurately through intuition. If you lose that intuition sense, that empathy, that honest relation to other people, then you’ve just lost your integrity to the pull of an overarching system. That’s it for now. See you tomorrow.

Swashbuckling Standards

My head is swimming in NY state standards right now. It’s easy to get caught up in a systemized language that is not my own when that is what I am required to speak in order to survive. But eventually, with enough swimming, hopefully, I will raise my head up out of the current to catch a clear-sighted view of what is beyond and around and above. When I am deep within it all, awash in the murky swarm of formulaic legalese and politically manipulated bureacracies, it can be difficult to retain my inner vision. As I gain clarity on the essential questions that uncoil fitfully, with artful prying, from the standards, I hope to achieve some semblance of holistic order and comprehensiveness that I can use thereafter to apply to creative, project-based thematic units. Here’s to Bloom’s taxonomy.

Moon Drop

The moon, shimmering

beneath the surface of your understanding,

a weighted pull towards the inevitable.

Tell me that I am something more

than what I allow myself to be.

Let me be that glimmer of translucent

mercury in the deep sea bottom,

trawling for subsistence.

A watery unseeing eye,

opaque from your desire.

Uncompromising in lonely despair,

an empty surface

of shapes.

A Tribute to MJ

I made some offhand comments a few posts back which were disparaging about Mr. Jackson, and I want to temper them with positive stuff, because he is, after all, the figurehead of pop culture in a truly global sense. Let’s be honest: the dude was kind of weird. But so has been most every other pop cultural icon, and no other has been as big as Michael Jackson. The man was a live wire dancer, electrically consumed, filled with spectacular light and fizz and energy. His performances were his gift to the world.

He became an almost hermaphroditic figure, sphinx-like in his crumbling plastered facade. As strange as he may have been, though, there was always something remotely accessible about him, something tangibly innocent and pure. The child-like joy that he conveyed through his dancing and high-pitched squeals of singing glee resonates with us all. Whatever we may think about his personal existence, no one can deny the appeal of Michael Jackson the pop artist. Not even himself. He didn’t seem capable of creating an inner persona that could exist outside of his own legend.

But his struggle with identity is the struggle of any artist that has grown up with fame. It ruins and ravages people, and that is the sap and succor of the tabloid gossip hounds. I don’t believe that he ever molested children or that he had any interest in doing so. Number one, because he has never been convicted in a court of law, which in this country is supposed to mean that he is innocent of all charges. Number two, because I think he truly loved children, just as he loved the child within himself. His work with charities for children should speak for itself. He was a sensitive soul, and the tragedy of Michael Jackson was perhaps the tragedy of being surrounded by unscrupulous people who took advantage of him.

In any case, the man is gone, leaving behind a legacy that can no longer be tarnished or sullied by anyone anymore. His music will live on, just as he knew it would. And we will continue to listen to his best songs, over and over again, and they will never get old.

My Pad part iii

It is all about forming your own space of quiet and ease where you can sip upon your vino and partake of your mental detanglification whilst listening to Maxwell’s BLACKsummers’night. Chocolate consisting of at the very least 70% cacao should of course be consumed. What I’m talking about, as you may or may not have surmised, depending on what you know of the different histrionic episodes of my past, is Pumpkins and Monkeys part III. In a whole new part of the continent, with a whole new vibe and width and depth of being. Minus, unfortunately, a semi-constant influx of friends and neighbors. All that I’ve got right now is some birds and an occasional breeze. So what this means is that a) I need to make more friends in this friggin’ city; and b) y’all need to come out here and visit.

I just haven’t been in much of a position since moving out here to really get to know much of anyone, including meself. I did try to get involved in various groups, volunteer stuff, and whatnot when I first landed, but nothing of substance came from it, though I did get some pretty interesting crisis counseling training. Then after I finally got a job, it was, of course, out in the middle of another borough and it was retail, so I simply did not have any semblance of a life. It was simply work and transit. I got to befriend my co-workers somewhat, but there really wasn’t much chance for meaningful chatter there, plus I just lived too damn far away. So now I’ve gots my teaching fellow crew, and hopefully some connections will be developed therein.

I guess I’m also just simply a person who takes time to get to know, and within a certain context. I come off as perty unanimated and quiet right off the bat. It takes a little bit of chillin’ to get to know me better. I like to dance, drink, and be a social butterfly, but most of the time I’m content squirreled away in my little hole, perched up here on the 5th floor corner, listening to the street sounds filtering through the buildinged trees. That’s my best context for understanding: some smooth music, some liquor, and some conversatin’.

Googly Two Shoes

Googly Two Shoes was a shrimp in the deep blue sea of Nordstruttom, a dire strait betwixt the continental shelfs of Jabar and Joongedoon. GTS swam in the slow dancing curl and uncurl motioning of shrimp in the darkness of that cold water, his unblinking beady eyes glistening with a light that was like that of the moon. Two Shoes listened for the sounds of currents carrying the fathoming moan of whales, gauging the season and horoscope through the twinkling chitter of starfish. As a shrimpling, founded from the shore of Kooler, Googly made his way through the depths by the trail of green plankton until his belly grew ready for shellfish and mud shrimp, and he ate his way down deeper into the darkness, away from the reggaeton and tourist encroach of Koolton Bay, until his eyes glued wide open with which to catch a glimmer of a crab leg or fish scale, glimmering in some otherworldly light that reflects off of something not the sun. Down and down he sank, eating daintily in the way of shrimp, growing more vessely and plump with meat as he went. As we all know, in those deep dark waters of Nordstruttom where there is no clear delineation between complete absence of color and a deep shade of blue, life can be competitive and fleeting, but at the very least, quiet and ominous with the weight of meaning.

We will remember Googly Two Shoes for his juiciness of body and cleft of taste. That he was netted so unjustly in mass industrial manner, torn asunder from his netherworld deploy, speaks poorly of the human species’ rampant, primal need for meats that it does not deserve to rend. But we will nevertheless enjoy this sauteed cashew nut surprise in his name.

Tower of Babble

I wanted to just add one more thing about MJ, which I have realized is mostly absent from all the media speak: everyone is talking about the man, the myth, and the legend, but do you remember the arcade game, Moonwalker?? That shit was awesome! I remember some joyful time spent making Michael pull out his special dance moves to vanquish foes at the local Family Fun Center. I’m just saying.

This week has been tough. I had thought that after my last gig, schlepping over to Queens with 2 trains and a long walk through the winter cold at 3 in the morning with 4-6 hours of sleep under my belt to work long physically demanding hours, that doing coursework and working with kids would be pretty damn easy. It’s certainly not as demanding in many ways, and I get to see my fiancee other than when one of us is asleep, but I’m finding that the mental and emotional focus that I’m trying to maintain can be just as draining at the end of the day. I’m someone who is not accustomed to being challenged by classwork. But the thing is, this isn’t just a crackpipe full of academic bullshit: this is theory that we are learning to apply directly to reality. We are thinking critically about our experiences and analyzing every single thing that we go through, whether that is the job search, the school training, the coursework, or the interactions with our professional peers. I guess what I’m really saying is that I’m just not accustomed to really applying myself to thinking about things all day long. I generally think in short, dynamic bursts. Then I do a bunch of physical stuff and daydream. Then I sit back and relax with some vino.

So I’m tired. I’m beat. But I’m enjoying the challenges. I’m also learning about my own methods of learning. I never was an ideal student. I’ve always hated being lectured to and being stuck in a classroom. I used to like to think that it was because I am such a genius, but it’s only due, unfortunately, to the fact that I am mostly a kinesthetic learner. I like to learn things by doing things. Which is how I’ve achieved most of my real learning as an adult: at work and through life experiences and talking to different people.

Anyhoo. This is my daily babble. Here’s wishing a Happy Birthday to my baby momma!

Posting Flotsam

I think the lesson that I’ve taken from this whole hoopla over Michael Jackson’s death is that even if you’re a perverted recluse, as long as you’ve done something cool in the past and been famous for it, then you will still be deified upon your death. Like Elvis or Brando. Can’t do nothing wrong.

This post a day thing has been fine, but tonight it’s freaking killing me. I just extenuated my brain trying to make a lesson plan for PEMDAS, you know, the order of operations for mathematical expressions. So right now I just want to go to bed and lose myself in oblivion. But I’ve got to keep up with the discipline, you know. I can’t give up now.

There have been little victories each day that I am doing my field training at a summer school site. I have some challenging kids in one of my classes, but I’m learning how to approach their behavior problems. I’m learning to pick my battles and deflect negativity. You really do have to focus constantly on positive reinforcement and building rapport with students; nothing else will work. Integrity, empathy, and positivity.

Ok, so this post was totally weak and I would like to say something profound and relevant to all that lives and is and will be, but I can barely iterate a complete sentence right now. But if there’s one thing you learn quickly in the teaching profession, as terrible as today may have been, tomorrow is another day, another opportunity to get things right, to work on the little victories, the little steps forward, the little shafts of light that shine suddenly from out of nowhere. Until then.

Inhibiting Impulse

“At a fundamental level, functioning socially means mastering one’s impulses. The adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as on action, some studies suggest, and mental health relies on abiding strategies to ignore or suppress deeply disturbing thoughts — of one’s own inevitable death, for example. These strategies are general, subconscious or semiconscious psychological programs that usually run on automatic pilot.”

– NY Times.com: Benedict Cary, Why the Imp in Your Brain Gets Out

Must it be, therefore, that the more energy that we apply to inhibition leads us to better interaction with other human creatures? Certainly a possibility, considering that Zen monks are all about seemingly complete inhibition, though most likely they are ridiculously blissful somewhere on the inside. One of those paradoxes, you know, where transcendence is achieved only through the utmost discipline. But we all know, of course, that good things never come easy. Because the good things that do come easy grow sour quickly. The good things that last take us extreme effort to attain. Extended days of training so hard that you think  you’re gonna puke, and maybe you do.

In some emotionally or mentally jettisoned manner, we releast, we vent, we cope, we belabor our colleagues, our friends, our family, the postman: whatever upturned ear that comes our way that we know we can spooge into. It 9 times out of 10 becomes the gossip train, which is not ultimately a beneficial or positive thing in any way, but we gotta do what we gotta do until we finally find that space for self-reflection and breathing, whereupon we can silence the negative self-talk and move our mannerisms into quiet brilliance.

And the thing is, too, that this training and discipline must come regularly, and consistently. Or else we begin to lose it after just a few days. And exponentially onward from there, until we get ourselves back up onto the wagon of what we know we must do if we are to win. “Win,” not because we will have defeated all of our greatest enemies, but because we will have overcome our own depression, fear, and shame. (Which is essentially a statement re-stating itself).

Anyway. I have observed, based on qualitative assessments of my own life experience, that I interact much more positively with my peers when I restrain myself from being anyone other than myself. Therefore, no attempts to placate that desperation to be immediately categorized and labelled into a one-dimensional caricature of myself. I am me. I am quiet, I am slow to process, I am kinesthetic, and I want to be better than you. But I am sunshine, moonshine, dark lunar eclipse of the soul, moodily pleasant to you in your classroom. I am somewhat inhibited, intrapersonally restrained, running free at the end of some tether that only the gods would be crazy enough to contemplate. And I must be careful, because my soul’s musculature grows flabby as I allow myself to reside in a comfortability of current placement. I must be better than myself, everyday, and don’t let myself forget it.

Grace Full

To be grateful, grateful, full of grace and grit and compassion and loving for every event and person that crosses your awareness, even when your caffeine coffee high is on its wending way downward. The people that before might be registered in your awareness as incidental or fixtures of the trash laden pavement become transformed creatures reflectant of a certain hue and shade of light that is dependent on their placement in that certain spot at that certain time on that certain street. There is nothing, yet, that you can say to them, but what must and needs be said is conveyed through the placement of your head upon your neck, the way your shoes plod onward, the way your hips and arm swinging and laden satchel are balanced moving forward beyond and through and with them. Because you have nothing to hide, no empty barren space of shame nor fear nor any diminishing of divinity that might take place in any human heart at any time when we grow distant from ourselves and thus and subsequently, each other.

When the tongue is full and pressed to the roof of the mouth in silent and overwhelming praise at the smell of this summertime air that swoons so softly up into this apartment where I sit, grateful, singing and typing rapidly into this network of praise, that I may reflect, as a deliberate practitioner, this life that I am so lucky to live and to choose to live and to have the opportunity to fulfill with fullness of life and love and complete awareness of everything that I am so fortunate to be capable of losing.

From Inmate to Teacher

It’s interesting that I am becoming a teacher, given that as a child I hated being in school. Now I’m the guard, the tie-wearer, the drawling specter in the front of the class. I’m perfectly aware that the public school environment is not so very far from prison. And for some kids, unfortunately, it is prison prep.

But now that I’m in this position, I’ve got to keep the bigger picture in mind. The purpose for which we’ve federally mandated  children to be forced into cell-like classrooms in publicly [under]funded institutions every day is because we need them to become full functioning adults capable of navigating an ever increasingly complex and interconnected world. It ain’t Disneyland that we’re sending them to. Public school is the harsh reality that has trickled down from federal legislation, civic will, and economic necessity; where children are subject to the whims, small cruelties, and fumbling attempts at socialization of their peers and teachers and administration. It’s an imperfect system; but it’s what we’ve got. Investing in our children–right now–is the most solid foundation we have for a future.

So my job is to somehow reach through all of the BS and bureaucracy and truly spark quiet insight into the minds of children. I say “quiet” because the payoff in reaching through into a child’s life is not immediate. It may take years, it may take a lifetime before the impact that a teacher has made becomes evident. And one teacher can’t reach them all. But everyone has that one teacher who has made a difference to them. That one teacher who saw his or her way around all of the superficialities and walls and straight into your hidden potential, and let you know in no uncertain terms that it was there, just waiting to be polished. That’s my task, and it’s gonna be a tough one. But certainly well worth the effort.

National Blog Posting Month blog posting

Couple of things. I’ve been fairly reticent about posting regularly here ‘pon this blog, and I need a little spot of discipline to get back into that creative groove. So in an effort to make my ass post more frecuentamente, I joined NaBloPoMo, for which it is requisite to post every single damn day. I’ve generally avoided such haste in posting, b/c then my posts end up being trivial, superficial gleanings of my every day existence. But hey, that’s what the hyperactive fleeting browsing of visual data over a world wide network is all about anyway, right? So stay tuned for frequent updates here of mundanity, terse abstraction, and snippets of my teacher-in-training lifestyle.

While you’re here, scroll all the way down to the bottom o’ the page and click on my SocialVibe badge. It’s free, and you could potentially help prevent kids from obtaining malaria, or something. It’s easier and more effective than giving the guy on the subway your change because you feel guilty and ashamed that you wear clean socks most of the time and don’t have the gout, scurvy, or genetically handed down mental disorders. I just want to see a number other than ZERO on the damn badge. Let me know if it don’t work.

Also, go pop over to this summery blog, Summer Conversations, which is essentially a compendium of different folks sharing random stuff about themselves, and on which I will be posting infrequently as well.

Enjoy your 4th. I’m going over the New Jersey to eat some extended family cooked food and hang out near a pool, which I will not enter because chlorinated water turns my hair green. ‘Til tomorrow!

Let Me Count The Ways

Oh, New York, New York, let me count the wonderful ways that you’ve affected (infected) me:

• lice
• asthma
• possibly cancer
• nut butter from hell
• 5 decrepit flights of stairs every time I want to venture out of my apartment
• schizophrenia
• showers in a slight trickle of water that sometimes disapparates altogether suddenly, usually right when I’ve just lathered up the dome
• dulled hearing
• an inability to relate to anyone outside of New York

Oh yes! This is why we love it here, people. We love it cuz it just hurts so good.

Color Awareness

There seems to be a direct link for me between insomnia and self-exploration via blog writing, so I will capitalize upon this opportunity while my sleep cycle is being disrupted. I admit that I have been frequently opening up a blank window in order to begin writing, only to find that I don’t even know where to start. It’s not so much that I have a lack of things to explore, but rather that everything inside there is so densely intertangled that I don’t know what strand is worth picking up to examine. In a sense, these past 2 weeks have been a sort of slow uncoiling of my inner and outer worlds as they seek to realign themselves together from out of their disjoint.

My sudden career shift has me excited, while also nervous. Nervous because I know that there are many aspects of indoctrined cultural training that must still be challenged within me; in dealing with systemic racism and socio-economic inequity, I must be able to explore the notion of myself as a member of a group, rather than as a unique individual. It is a group that I have tried, at times, to pretend that I am not a part of, even as I have partook in the privileges of its membership, however unknowingly. That group is the little box that I generally avoid filling in on questionaires, the one that says Caucasian or simply–and rather yawningly–White. Attach onto that the further group membership of Male, and even further than that: Raised in High Income and Highly Segregated Area, and there you go. That’s my grouping in this society, whether I like it or not.

I have been aware of what it means to be privileged for some time, based mainly on socio-economic status. But the fact is that I grew up in an area where people of color were few and far between, isolated into small, distant enclaves. So it was difficult for me to reconcile my awareness of socio-economic status with racial and ethnic inequity, however much I knew that it existed. It existed somewhere else.

When a white person finally has an experience where they are made jarringly aware of the fact that they are White, and that they are therefore Privileged, it makes them extremely uncomfortable. They want to avoid, at all costs, such experiences. It challenges their belief in their innate value as an individual, as a unique, distinct person whose worth in society is based strictly upon merit. I can remember distinctly one of these first experiences, though I’m sure there were many more before that that I have effectively blocked from my memory. It was while I was traveling alone in Peru, and I was taken to a part of Lima where there was a huge outdoor market of secondhand goods, in the middle of the city downtown. I was told that I needed to have a guide, that I absolutely could not go there alone. I was not to carry any valuables on my person, and to be aware of my belongings at all times. This was heavily stressed to me, to the point that I was extremely nervous before I went, though I am fairly adventurous when it comes to being in sketchy situations. And indeed, when I walked through the streets of that market, I suddenly became shockingly aware of my utter Whiteness. In the midst of a crowd of dark skinned people living in poverty, here was this white foreigner. The very fact of my existence in their midst signaled my privilege; that I could even travel there from so far away. I wasn’t wearing fancy clothes, I wasn’t wearing jewelry. I had worked hard and saved my money to travel there. But I knew that I was privileged just by the fact of my skin, just by the fact of where I happened to be born. I felt like an alien. I became aware of how strange it was that in one context—my normal environment—things like a nice watch and shoes are just things you get to fit in; but here in this place, such things were what made you stand out like a sore thumb.

And so what I was experiencing, essentially, was the idea of what it feels like to be someone defined as a part of a group based on immediate appearance. I was an Other. I didn’t belong there. That feeling of unbelonging stung. It was highly disturbing. We white people don’t typically understand how it is to be viewed as a part of a group. We resent being made to be aware of this grouping, not realizing that it is something that people of color have to deal with every single day.

It makes me uncomfortable even to talk about these kinds of things, just as I’m sure that it makes you uncomfortable to read them. Am I a racist? Certainly not intentionally. But my society is racist, and unfortunately, it has embedded its racism in me such that I have to struggle to remain aware of it in order to call it out on its existence. We like to pretend that everything has been put behind us. Slavery is a thing of the past. Segregation has been outlawed. Etc. And things have certainly gotten better. But when you see the statistics of the achievement gap in education, for example, or the statistics on prisons, or just simply journey to any inner city grotto, it becomes hard to deny the fact that we’ve still got a hell of a long way to go.

So this is, conversely, what I am also excited about in my current career shift. I am excited to be able to be actively involved in working to struggle against this systemic racism, even if that might be only just within myself. Being an educator in a “high needs” urban public school means that you will have to struggle not only with how society views your students, but with how your students and their families view you. Who are you? Are you just another one of them? Or are you a part of a grouping that goes beyond such petty distinctions, inclusive of all of humanity? The thing is, you can’t deny where you have come from, nor what you look like. But you can deny the urge to ignore your identity as a part of a group, and to stop pretending that everything is equal, that all the world is just. Because it isn’t. Not yet. But it could be.

Snip of Life

Well, it’s been some time since I’ve really scribed my inner self into this somewhat limited method of electronic sharing. Honestly, I’ve been so busy/tired over the past few months that I’ve become somewhat disconnected from my self. I’ve left my job as a store manager and have spent this past week re-acquainting myself with the notion of what it means to have some free time and free space. I’ve been settling into a wonderful new apartment and trying to acclimate my affronted parrot, who has not been taking the move gracefully, and unpacking all these things that haven’t seen the light of day for two years since I left Tahoe. As I ready myself for the challenge of teaching in an urban public school, I am simultaneously trying to unravel just who it is that I still am. As a New Yorker, now, some part of my inner self is always subsumed to overarching structures.

Tax, Not Cut

Why is it that whenever a recession occurs (as it inevitably must), a state or municipality suddenly begins proposing to cut the programs that are most needed by those who have the least? These are always programs of health care to the poor or elderly, education to children, and other programs of welfare or of not immediately quantifiable benefit such as arts or music. Why is it that politicians are such cowards that they can’t propose the most logical form of meeting budgetary needs: increased taxes on those who have the most? Why is this so untenable to Americans? Is it simply because they know that the people least likely to complain or raise a fuss are those who don’t have anything to begin with?

Let me repeat: those politicians unable to raise the spectre of taxation are cowards. Funding to programs that are essential to people should not be subject to economic whim. Education should never have its funding cut. Never. Health care programs and preventative care programs and family planning programs should never have funding cut. Never. Welfare programs should never have funding cut. People rely on that welfare and need it for day-to-day existence.

Tax the rich and distribute that money equitably in order to continue funding for essential services and programs. Why is that such an unrealistic objective to achieve?

How could I write this?

How could I possibly sing into this despair, this thin air of the void between distant strangers? What could I create to withstand my own insecurity, that could remain standing apart from listless self-concern in the overwrought perception of the wind from others eyes? I look into myself and see mostly fear, a defensive readiness, a reflection of my environment. This is not an excuse. I need to speak of what is within me, this bottled up genie of anger, petulance, and routinely denied divinity. Is it that I am getting afraid to die? That the more patiently I stock up for the future, the more loss of presence I incur? Enough questioning. This is not an inquisition. This is the attempted cultivation of understanding. Between estranged parties. The tentative negotiated establishment of dialogue.

It’s hard, sometimes, to empathize with strangers when they seem to ask something of you that you can’t imagine. Yet that much harder to ask yourself to begin to articulate your own emotions. Because you are so estranged from yourself that you fear a stranger may yet somehow know you better. May see into you directly for what you are. A human. A somewhat pitiful collection of experiences determined by circumstance and placement. How can you transcend this? How can you transcend this? How can we?

You can’t. You suffer from this realization. You shake, you cry, you wail. You stand silently with hands in pockets, overwhelmed, underheld, simply shelled. You can’t be any more or less than what you are. Until something within you is shed. Until you jettison the weight of your dreams, the afterbirth of your desire. Leaving a hollow form waiting to be filled. Leaving the space of a song that is waiting to be sung, in fullness of pain, to fill the voiceless silence in every person that they may or may not have known that they had.

We must cling to each other, like life rafts in the fearsome storm of the unknown. We must watch each other, drink each other, live each other. I am aching to tell this to myself, so that I remember when I am with you. That I love you, everyone, that I love to live, that I am willing to suffer to know this again everyday. Because this will soon be forgotten. This will be misunderstood. This will need to be reiterated, revoiced, rebirthed tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Spring Flowers

I Wouldn’t Have Had It Any Other Way

Fresh back from a vacay to San Diego with my woman, which included seeing the fam, going to the zoo—which I hadn’t been to since I was a wee lad—and getting a massage for our weary limbs. And eating lots of food. I think I gained 4 pounds, which I will promptly shed now that I am back to the grind. Whilst on aforementioned vacay, however, a glimmer of light suddenly appeared out of the tunnel of my grim existence: I was accepted, nearly a year after applying and being placed on a waiting list, into the NYC Teaching Fellows program. For those not in the know, this is a program that places people without teaching credentials directly into high needs schools and subsidizes their master’s in education while they are teaching. It thus allows highly motivated and idealistic individuals who are looking to transition their careers into doing something for the public good to infiltrate low resource schools. The problem with such a program, of course, would be that many folks quickly shed their idealistic ardor once in such a position, and come quickly to realize the dire reality that is the everyday effort of teaching in the public school system. But I have, by this point in my life maturation process, tempered my idealism with a healthy dose of pragmatism, and I have learned what it is to struggle, to suffer, and to learn from my everyday grind how to overcome, through patience and steady will, those obstacles that are seemingly implacable.

So in other words, I am ready for this. Being as it is that I am an English major, I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a teacher someday. I worked in the special education department in a high school as an instructional assistant after I graduated college, and I loved it. But I wanted to get some life experience first before I considered pretending to be someone that kids could look up to. And then I ended up, in the drift of life, becoming a housekeeping manager, and then now, a retail store manager. And during that time, the idea of becoming a teacher gradually faded, and I set my sights instead on a career at a different level of influence, in public policy. But then here I was in San Diego, sitting in a coffee shop checking my Yahoo mail, and I discovered that I had been accepted to become a teacher. It came out of nowhere. I hadn’t expected to hear anything back from the Fellows since it had been so long, and they have such a highly competitive applicant pool. It took a few days of processing and discussion before I realized that this is exactly the opportunity that I need, right now at this exact point in my life. And while I had been taking solid steps to apply to a graduate program in public policy for next year, taking an extra couple of years to be deeply involved in influencing children’s lives is not a step away from that. It is learning, rather, exactly how our administrator’s policy decisions can affect our everyday existence.

So I am extremely excited to be involved in this program, and I am aware of the challenges that I will face in the coming year. But I am excited by these kind of challenges, because I really do love working with kids and being able to get through to them. I am excited by the potential to change myself, to hone my capability as a leader and teacher and shed more of my ego, shed more of my past, in order to most effectively teach.

During the summer, instead of moving into part-time work as I had planned and studying for the GRE, I will now be entering intensive training for the program. So in one way, my life is only going to get busier. But in another way, it will also get more enriched, because now I will have somewhat regular hours, and weekends off, enabling me to finally spend time with my beloved. And because I will not be doing part-time work but rather earning a decent living wage, we will now be able to finally move out on our own and get our own apartment, and finally—after 2 years—take our stuff out of storage, where it has been boxed up since leaving Tahoe in ‘07.

It’s interesting how things really do happen just when they need to. My fiancee had been praying—in a non-denominational manner—for me to find a job where I had regular hours, and here it came. And when I applied to the Fellows last year, I don’t know that I would have been ready for it then. The experience that I have gained in my current work as a manager has been invaluable in preparing me for what I will do next. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

This Isn’t Just About Me

It isn’t just about conforming, see. It’s about learning that confining yourself temporarily—or even on a leased, indentured status–into a box is a part of what it means to develop concurrently personally and alongside of the world. It ain’t just “pop culture”, see; that’s a residue of the 60’s. It’s about what we are learning about together, in this crazy super hyper-generated nexus of instantaneous communication. Yes, there’s wanna be B-boys with their blackberries and I-phones, the Top-40 lovin’ hummer born and bred without a trace of irony or self-awareness about them, those whom zoom forward, heedlessly, into the things that they want. And that’s OK. That’s what we are all about, as a species, as a collective. Like corporations, we are conglomerations whose growth and predisposition is bound by the market and interplay of self-worth and public policy. We conform to the latest happenings on the news. We shy instinctively away from that for which time has not yet come. That which will be is. Simply is. There is the reflection and there is the surface. This is not a Postmodern thing but rather a post-consumerist thing. People are animals drawn innately by a higher determination, and many of us will fail, and that is precisely the point: we will fail only ourselves. Because we Know. We Know, by our internal habitual addictions, from our balloon mounted intuition gatherings (from whence came this hallucinogenic image, I know not. I seem to be channeling a mix of Thoma Pynchon and Chartreuse), of those forces arrayed against us that we must shun, ignore, and pretend away.

Because every test that comes your way is a challenge of your integrity. What is it that determines what you are? Is it All, or is it You? Is it everything, or is it nothing? Because this isn’t just about chemistry, y’all. It’s about humility. It’s about will. It’s about love. And part of that is accepting—is embracing—that every little itty bitty thing, and every One, for What They are (it’s fun to capitalize unOfficially Designated words), as a part of you, as you are a part of all. Too stumbling, too fragmented are my words, Yoda-like in their sheared grammar, perhaps. Anyway.

We must be vigilant—almost paranoid—in our readiness for complete annihilation. Yet we must also be like fascinated babies with our every waking moment. Everything that is most important to our deep interconnected existence passes all too readily away into ignorance. So lubricate it with alcohol, or tea, or whatever damn substance or thing or habit or belief it is that sustains you beyond yourself and into an empathetic, intuitional understanding of outside edifices, institutions, and other such everpresent structures known as Strangers. These could be Trees, Buildings, or People. You know what I mean. Everything that is beyond yourself. Beyond your surface understanding.

Anyway, this is turning into a rambling treatise whose narrative zenith I’m not sure I’ve attained. Hope you enjoyed the ride. Comments are appreciated, though not necessarily replied to. Copyright breaking readings to sodden audiences in liberal enclaves in cities and townships across the world are encouraged. Over and out, til I’m on the other side of this politically designated range of turf known as the US of A.

Anniversary of My Arrival

So it has now been a full year since this intrepid Californian arrived on this eastern shore of dense urban life. In this past year I have been seriously challenged and have undergone some changes, some growing up, some facing of the hard edged point of now termed ‘Reality’, or—as we used to term it out on a small lake bordering a wilderness area out in Tahoe—the ‘Real World’. A quick schemattering of this past year in a nutshell:

• a 7 day journey in a Budget truck across a storm/flood stricken Mid-West/South with all of my worldly possessions, including my terrified White-Fronted Amazon parrot Vinnie and my girlfriend
• a living in the living room of my girlfriend’s family’s apartment, sleeping on an air mattress that we blew up each and every night and deconstructed again in the morning, so that our ‘room’ could reconvert into a TV watching arena, in which I was subjected to extremely loud marathon watchings of Dancing With The Stars, American Idol, and The View, just to name a select few
• a confrontation on the late night D train with a very large man who was seeking to kick both my and my girlfriend’s ass
• I almost threw up on a train and bus, but just barely held it in to spew it all out at a bus stop 10 blocks away from our street
• a proposal and subsequent engagement to my girlfriend, now henceforth to be known as The Fiancée
• my fiancee’s sister moved out, thus enabling my fiancee and I to move into her room, where we now sleep on two twin beds pushed up together. We’re moving on up in the world
• an attempt to obtain our own apartment failed; I got Lasik surgery performed on my eyes
• I was unemployed for 6 months and sought desperately for a job, undergoing strange interview processes and feeling my self-esteem rise and plummet on a minute-by-minute basis just like the stock market
• I finally gained employment—in a location 1 1/2 – 2 hours away by public transit in Queens, with variable and long hours

Well, that’s pretty much my New York experience in a broad and sweeping overview. In celebration of my survival and continuing eeked existence here in this city, I am going home to Southern California next week, to obtain some much needed R&R, as well as to see my family and especially my nieces and nephews, one of whom I have not even met yet. My fiancee and I are going to get massages, as both our bodies are falling apart from our respective jobs, and simply enjoy ourselves, as we haven’t been able to spend more than a few hours together from week to week.

This is Struggle, These Words

Apparently, I am seeking to unfold a new methodology of articulation in this medium. If I was perfectly honest with myself, I would acknowledge that my writing is in some way a form of laziness, in that I simply write things off the top of my dome that tend to be similar in essence to something I’ve already written before. Which I’ve conveniently forgotten about. I burp up fragments from my inner sanctum of feeling, some containing a momentary burst of inspiration, but mostly just some convoluted form of self idolatry, perhaps.

It might be helpful at this point to give voice to what it is I want my writing to really be about: I want it to be about integrity, about the inner connectivity that binds all disparate individuals and strangers together into love and deeper knowledge. I want it to be about me, but not about the me of the surface daily mundane realm of miscommunicated passings, but rather about the me that is divine, the me that is you, the me that is us, the me that is everything and nothing. Less spectacularly, I want it to be about reality, and about the life that I live as told, pragmatically, from out of dry wit and a sordid heart. I want my writing to sing to you, to speak to you, to inspire you aflame, to nod your head in rhythmic understanding, to know exactly what it is I am talking about and to smile in recognition.

Most importantly, however, is that my writing expresses something that I am unable to express otherwise. That I learn of myself from my own act of self-creation. Thus learning of you, in that leap from difference to communal know-edge.

What is it that I am trying to say? I think I want to say that this is supremely important to me, and that I want it to be important to you. That I want this to be much better than what I am. That I want the world to be much better than what it is. That I want to write my way into you, in understanding, in peace, in confrontation, in commiseration, in fire, in quiet pain, in love.

Onward, Ungodly Smolders

Oh blog, how I hath neglected thee. But verily, I do wish to continue to address postal updates aquí, when I am so able. So I shall. I have never exactly written for a pop culturally induced audience, in any case. You either read me and understand me or you don’t get it or you don’t care. That’s fair enough. There’s too much shit out there to waste time with. I can’t write for a captive audience. Move on, silly wind, breeze on through. The narratives contained herein cannot be immediately defined by the confines of market ideologies. I write because it is my choice, because it is my small momentary claim of freedom. Nothing here can define me except myself. And so it shall be writ.

Needs and Needles

Take everything that you think you need, and have it be denied to you. Go ahead, have it dangled in front of your nose and then yanked away everytime you even remotely make a movement towards it. Eventually, you delimit your sphere of desire and you fight for what you know you need and that you can and will obtain. The things that aren’t obtainable are abstractions. If you had them, they would slip just as easily through your fingers anyway. What is a title? What is a car? What is a home? What is money?

All of what you need resides so close to you that it would be ridiculous to even reach for it. Yet it takes the greatest of efforts simply to recognize its proximity, to focus on its closeness. Each moment that passes bears your fading name away from you. You struggle to inscribe yourself, again and again, failing to encompass everything that you want to be. It’s silly, really. You are already everything that has been and will be. Your atoms, your carbons, your matrixed energy.

Who are the homeless? Who the hungry? Who are the powerless, the oppressed, the victimized tatters of a cannabilistic civilization?

We are all on the same boat. The same journey. The Titanic of misplaced dreams that sinks together as if all, the served and the servers, were of the same ill fated density, destined but to sink beneath the weight of a retrospectively immense folly.

But I’m not talking about a mere fatalism. It is indeed complacency that is the greatest of man-made evils. To know yourself, to recognize your divinity, to ask nothing of the world—this is the greatest of life’s many challenges. As we ride this inevitable path that must be trodden on the road to total gain, and total loss, the ledger sheet that will tally our outcome is a mirror that looks into our heart of hearts, the psalm of desire, the desert of pain. How much can you suffer? How much can you delight? To be as soft as a baby and as hard as bamboo, to be everything and nothing, to be yourself and to be yourself. To take only what you need, to give everything that you are.

This is the most difficult of demands. This task of life and death. This existence that we have been chosen to become aware of. All that we need to be we are. All that the world needs us to be we can be. All of what we desire is impossible.

Togetherness

We are rooted into each other, unabashedly interwoven, each one heart the sap that sustains the other. You are my best friend, my worst enemy, the one who knows me most and least, for without you, I would be someone else entirely. We can now only define ourselves together; apart, what would we be? Of what is our history but the discoverance of each other? Our love is something much more mundane than eternity; it is something renewed through struggle daily. This love is something that grows, that flowers, that yearns for ever more sun. This love is not simply something we have stumbled into but that we have earned, that we deserve. This love is something that we create. We discover each other again, every day, growing increasingly confident. We are still here together, in this new place, in this new day. It only gets better. Our love only grows stronger. This work we have put into our future will bear its fruit.

Putting It All In Perspective

Things that were before unthinkable/untenable become routine unremarked events in this city of everything and nothing, of the richest and poorest, of the darkness and the light. Blood spattered on the pavement of a man splayed out in the street after being hit by an SUV—a drunken boy kicking his girlfriend on the train—a woman sleeping on her knees on the concrete with her head resting against a hard wooden bench—the nightly array of homeless in the plastic subway seats, resting in exhausted, bent, flopping angles, their skin bloated and gray.

The petty struggle of my own existence is thus kept honed in a perspective relative to the suffering that is the everyday realm of those society has passed over. A clarity of vision comes from these watchful late night journeys. I listen to soulful music and catch small packets of rest as I cultivate my ambition, stoking a striated core of determination that grows increasingly irrevocable, a hunger and confidence maturated by patience and humility. Before, twas the wind or lack thereof that determined my path; now, tis my work and will that paves the way. My inner capitalist thus fomented, I recognize the value in self-restraint mixed with a strategic and occasional allocation of self-indulgence.

Time is now not merely The Now, which certainly has its critical power and mystique, as evidenced by Zen and Thelonius monks, but furthermore The Day That Will Come, the nurtering long-term barter that results, someday, in the fruition of what was once but a dream in a shell of enshrouded loneliness. There is This, and there is What Will Be, all one in the grand scale of existence, the unseen weighted omega pull of dark energy that exerts its unyielding influence on still birthing oblivion. What will be will be only because of each individual sown effort, this momentous ephemeral daily struggle. This daily bread will be only because of what must become. All one picture that cannot be viewed by any one mind but only ultimately in the intermixture of eternal generations.

New Paradigm

You may have noted that I have been relatively quiet on the political/news front as of late, mostly because I don’t have any free time anymore, but furthermore because I think that most of the events, such as Obama’s inauguration, speak for themselves and we are all somewhat inspired and hopeful for the future, finally. But there are a few things that I want to say about the pressing economic and political events of our time.

First of all, former George W. Bush’s presidency was a complete and abject failure. Please, let’s not forget that. There have been a lot of interviews and articles before the switch-over that offered a somewhat benign retrospective of Bush’s reign, and it looks like reporters have been attempting to remain “objective” by entertaining the notion that Bush may have represented integrity because he never backed down from doing whatever the fuck he wanted, or something like that.

Bush was a terrible mistake, and a giant mar on the already besotted history of US politics. He stood as a representative not of personal integrity, but rather as the exact negative of what a leader should be. He didn’t listen to his opponents nor his own constituency. He didn’t utilize diplomacy in dealing with world bodies and foreign leaders. He took more vacations than any other president in history. His administration was peppered by yes-men, neo-cons, and nepotism. This is completely ignoring the myriad scandals that marred his administration. Basically, he didn’t do anything that he was supposed to do as a LEADER. The real “leadership” in the Bush presidency were the people who actually ran things, such as his vice-president and Karl Rove. Presidents in the past have oft been puppets on strings, such as Reagan, but at least Reagan had charisma and could instill some kind of false confidence, even when his actual policies resulted in terrible outcomes that we are still paying for today.

So yes, thank god we have closed that terrible chapter in our history. But we will be continuing to pay for those 8 years of bullshit for a long time hence, Obama or not. The Republican Party, as evidenced by their cold response to bipartisanship in the passing of the stimulus plan, are awaiting an eventual rebuttal to the centrism of the Obama presidency. They will do all they can do to ensure that his policies fail, so that they can renew their onslaught of the poor and middle class. Bear that in mind in the coming years: W. Bush was not an anomaly. He was the epitome of hard-line right-wing divisiveness. And again, let me be perfectly clear about the policies of such an administration: they failed. Period. They will never be effective. The myth of free market capitalism has been—with finality—debunked.

The history that Obama has made in his ascendance to the American presidency is not simply about a black man becoming a US President, nor reductively about simple “change”: it is about the forceful backing of an American public for a government that will utilize its policies for greater control and responsibility of economic tides. A government that does what it is supposed to do, rather than absolving itself of any and all responsibility beyond that of blatant militarism.

Now I want to discuss these “tough economic times,” as they like to say everyday on the news. This is indeed a time when the failed economic policies of the past are coming home to roost. This is also a time when “the American people” are beginning to pay for their years of living wantonly off of money that they never had and never will have. This is a time when issues of sustainability are no longer simply concerns of hippies, but of academic professors and Washington policy wonks. This is a time when America has to wake up to the fact that we have been sleeping, while the rest of the world has been quietly surpassing us in their investment in business and educational competitiveness.

Even though comparisons to the Great Depression can be fruitful simply for waking up people to the fact that this recession is real and its effects on people devastating, let’s also abstain from going too far. No one is jumping out of windows on Wall St. The lines for unemployment may be exceedingly long, but there’s no extensive lines for soup kitchens, at least, not yet. Retail chains that have stretched themselves too thin on the promise of endless sales have indeed been shutting their doors. Banks are decisively slimming their ranks with a butcher’s knife. And this impact cannot be understated on the economy nor on men and women now without salaries. But for many, it also doesn’t mean much of anything other than that they won’t waste their money like they might have before. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Because the fact is that transitioning into what they call a “green” economy can not be easy, nor even possible without the recognition that it is necessary. These “tough economic times” are not about a housing market bubble collapsing, nor about over-investment in bad securities and over-lending of easy credit: it is about the transition into a new economic and political and social paradigm. A paradigm in which we recognize our interdependence on each other and other nations, acknowledge the interconnectivity of mankind with that of the earth, and begin to take responsibility for the actions not only of ourselves, but of our governments and world bodies.

So as tough as these times are—and yes, these times are tough for me personally, thank you very much—they are also a necessary time for buckling down and gaining a clearer vision of what we need to achieve.

Nu Bidness

Bunch of stuff been going down en mi vida right now, so here’s a general un-abstract post to fill you in. First things first, I got my eyeballs lasered, and I am now in recovery mode, which is a bit harder than I assumed it would be, as I am still working while healing.

Getting your eyes lasered is a bit scary sci-fi-ish, I won’t lie. They lay you down on a chair and douse your eyes in some solution to numb them. They were supposed to have given me valium but they forgot. I wished I’d had it. I was clutching the little stress balls they gave me and kicking my wee legs against the chair in silent protest. Anyway, then they tape up your eyelids and put something (a speculum, I believe it was called) around your eye to keep it open. Then your eye gets like sucked upwards or something, and you’re staring at this red light surrounded by concentric white circles, and it zaps like something out of a B movie, and you can smell your eyeballs burning. Yes, you can smell it, and it’s not pleasant. But that is not the worst of it. They then drop endless amounts of ice cold water into your freshly lasered eye. That was the worst part, for me. I was getting brain freeze from all the water being flooded into my eye socket.

But the whole debacle is over in a few minutes, so it’s not all that bad, really, other than being extremely uncomfortable and unnerving and disturbingly like a bad sci-fi movie. Then the real pain and discomfort begins. The rest of the day I spent popping vicodin and laying in the dark with my eyes closed, as they could not be opened, as they flooded endlessly with tears. The next day was more of the same, though I could keep my eyes open for slightly longer periods of time. I shuffled about with the big shades on that they gave me that made me look like Ray Charles. Then the next day I went back to work.

My eyes have been getting extremely dried out, which isn’t surprising, given that I work 10 hours a day with 3-4 hours on the subway, so I have to keep my eyes moisturized constantly. But the eyeballs are healing, slowly; meanwhile, I can’t see very well and I continue to look like Ray Charles. But it’s all worth it for the luxury of glassless-ness, folks. I can finally walk outside and put on my sunglasses, instead of squinting about and giving my aging skin crows legs.

Other news: my fiancee (I love throwing that word about; it seems to have a weight and heft to it that makes me sound conceited) and I have honed in on an apartment exactly one block away from the location where we are currently squatting. It gets tons of light, it’s relatively huge for a Manhattan apartment, and of course, it’s in a building without an elevator, meaning that we get plenty of exercise going up and down the six flights of stairs.

But we don’t have it yet. We just got all the extensive documentation prepared and put together for the property management nazis. A word on obtaining a space the size of a closet in New York City: it’s absolutely nothing like renting in California like I’m accustomed to. In California, you plop down a deposit and a months worth in rent and sign your name and there you go. They’ll kick you out if they don’t like you. But in New York, they require bank statements, tax forms, W-2’s, employment and salary verification, IDs, personal references, and a 5 page essay on your long-term goals and dreams. Well, minus the essay, they require a shitload of personal information, which is apparently because it’s nearly impossible for New York City landlords to boot you out once you’ve got a lease. Pain in the fucking arse, is all I’ve got to say. But as they like to say here, welcome to New York.

At my store in Queens I seem to be a space alien to people sometimes. They look at my name tag, note that I am from San Diego, and then proceed to exclaim with wonder at the fact that I exist and work in New York City. Seeming to forget that New York City is comprised of mostly foreign elements. Why the hell are you in New York? they all want to know. Implying that California is a land of paradise. Which granted, at times during my half hour walk from the train station to my workplace at 3 in the morning when it’s below freezing and the arctic wind is blasting through my puny three layers, it may appear to be.

Let’s discuss this cold further: it’s been really cold. Like, so cold that my toes in my shoes and socks begin to freeze. So cold, that the air penetrates my pantalones. So cold that it’s like walking out into a freezer. Welcome to New York, indeed. More like Welcome to Minnesota.

Anyway, I need to get off the computer, because it’s straining my still unfocused newly laser minted eyeballs. Another post will be forthcoming at some unknown date in the unforeseen future.

Orange Winter Light

My posts have been a bit abstract of late, I know. That’s what happens when I’m struggling with something internally, unable yet to articulate it fully to someone else. Also, I’m sidestepping around a central point of negativity. I’m perfectly aware that nobody wants to hear bitching and whining. So I’m attempting to navigate through the minefields of my strenuous days to pick out the slivers of light that still shaft through the bricolage, eternally everpresent, a golden sheen added even to shit when you look at it with the right attitude.

And ultimately, that is what it all comes down to: my attitude, my determined perception and predetermined reception of events. How close to the earth must I bend, swaying in the wind like a broken tree? Until everyone who knows of me sees only the light.

But I’m waxing sphinx-ish again. Let me discuss the things that are beautiful in my life right now: when I walk from work and I raise my eyes to the skyline to witness the waning winter afternoon orange colored light slipping across the tips of brick buildings and rooftops; when I make a child I’ve never met before smile, a light that breaks from beyond a wall of shy uncertainty; coming home to the loving exclamations of my parrot, fiancée, and tail wagging dog; when my breath is solid and full on the subway train, and I’m listening to a sitar bended over synthesized drums; when a package arrives from family or friends now far away, or when my cellphone rings; when people at work see a momentary glimpse beyond my professional facade. These are the little things that keep me fighting for tomorrow. It doesn’t take much to fill a receptive heart up with love.

In other news, I’m considering publishing a book compiled from the detritus of my past blog posts. If you have a post in mind that you would consider your favorite or that you would consider essential in such a collection, then please let me know. I’m trying to whittle the compilation down to something solid. Thanks.

New Year’s: Cultivate What We Can’t Have

¡Feliz año nuevo! Hope this turnabout of the calendar system finds you celebratory and hopeful in turn. My new year’s eve has been about as quiet and boring as you could possibly imagine, but that’s alright with me. I’m not really into the whole horde of drunken people out in the street thing. I just don’t relish getting into fights and vomiting, silly me. Plus, it’s fucking freezing out there tonight. Yes, you heard that alliteration correctly: Fucking Freezing, folks. This So Cal lad is aching for some boring seasonless San Diego weather right about now. But at the same time, it’s kind of cool/weird to get to wear a girly scarf everyday.

Let’s see, I just don’t have a whole lot of rhetoric left in me this particular New Year’s. I generally have some kind of speech to make to commemorate the yearly paradigm shift. Let me see if I can dredge up anything from out the depths of exhaustion:

As time passes and we age into our bodies, becoming increasingly aware of both our power and our limitations, we learn that learning never stops. We branch out and develop in complex synergistic dances of exploration, multi-faceted twistings to catch the light. Maturity is about adaptability and empathetic capability, not about knowledge. Development is an everyday occurence. Stasis denotes the foreshadowing of death/rebirth. Because if you are not developing/learning/being challenged, then you know something is stagnant about your situation. We all want to hide, ride out the storm, wake up in some perfect world where everything has been solved and straightened out for us. But there is no mythical god mama to wipe our collective asses. Everything’s gonna be alright; but not because a switch gets hit and some divine wind sweeps on through: everything’s gonna be alright, because we’re going to struggle, and we’re going to work, organize, and develop.

Humanity is disgusting and beautiful. Every sword cuts two ways. It is a matter of how the tool/weapon is wielded. Enough with the cryptic shit: beauty comes quietly out of despair. There is no such thing as easy beauty. There is that which glitters and reflects the light, and there is that which is assigned arbitrary value, and then there is that which is beyond classification, a substance that ebbs from the unseen, invaluable to us all. We must cultivate only what we cannot hold.

Happy new year.