drfishsqool

KILL YOUR SELF; A Helpful Essay

2008-09-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

Intro
There’s a problem. These self-help books - they’re everywhere. People are reading them. Believing them.
The fact that they’re published in the first place is a problem – that the people we’ve entrusted books to think it’s a good idea to print and sell these. But what is truly scary is that people take the advice they receive from self-help books and apply it to their lives and their worlds – the same world me and you live in and share with these large legged children.
I admittedly am not well read within this genre, but thanks to my mom recently mailing me Randy Pausch’s, The Last Lecture, I have some ideas, mainly that I just won’t take it anymore. The deal with Randy’s book is he was dying from cancer and wanted to leave something for his children and colleagues to remember him by. Now, I realize ripping a guy who was dying and simply loved his family is not the friendliest thing to do, but it must be done.

Positioning
Chapter Five of Randy’s book is, It’s About How To Live Your Life. This is the basically what all self-help books are about. The original assumption is that the author or authors know more than you do about life (Which is simply not true. Maybe the opposite.), and are now going to share this information with you in the name of helping though they are the ones profiting from the process of selling you the book. This is blatant dishonestly and self-righteousness and should be enough to make readers want to stop. But apparently it doesn’t as every time I get on the train someone is nose deep in, How to Become a Fucker by Age Thirty. So here’s some more…
The first self-help reading experience I had was with the book The Secret, viewing experience actually. I watched a DVD copy my sister gave me. Her boss had given it to her. After watching The Secret I considered writing the boss a letter without telling my sister, but in the name of preserving her job to continue borrowing money from her I decided against it. My initial disgust was based simply on the assumption I’ve already mentioned - that the author knew something I did not, when really what they did know was what used to be called “common sense”.

Masters of the Obvious
The message of The Secret is this - if you focus all of your thoughts and energies on getting something, you will get it. Yeah, and if you wipe your ass with your hand it’s gonna smell. The actual content of any self-help book is the overtly obvious. And they have the nerve to name the book what? – The Secret!

Faking It
As I’ve implied, the things in Randy’s book or the Secret are true – things like focusing on your goals and feeling gratitude are good. The problem though is that a person can not learn how to truly do and feel these things from a book, not books like these at least. People understand life as it unfolds based on the sum of all their time and experience up to the moment at hand. So where reading a self-help book may be one experience, it can not compare to the power of all human interaction, emotion, and thoughts they’ve had over the course of their entire lives. What they can learn from the books though is how to fake it. What you’re left with is a person without a vision for their lives pretending they have one as opposed to being honest with themselves, or an ungrateful person acting grateful because they think they should. In sort, you got a bunch of phonies. What could be worse?

Artistic Value
This may shock some readers to find out, but writing is an art form. Or at least it can be when the writer artfully or stylishly puts together subtle, or beautiful, or funny, or sad pieces of life. Self-help books do none of these things. They simplify the human experience which, when we are honest about it, can be quite complex, to the point of presenting an unrealistic world and in turn confusing readers without them knowing it.
If you really want to give someone a piece of writing that can help them, write something good. Or is that too difficult?

Conclusion
I e-mailed my mom…
“Seriously mom, I don't know if you're kidding or not. Motivational literature is the new Old Navy. This stuff is dangerous.”

A JOB TO DO

2008-04-21T10:59:00.000-07:00

I was hired six weeks ago to work the front desk at a new health club on the south side of Williamsburg. I was looking forward to having a desk job for the first time so I could read and write when there was nothing else to do and lord knows I needed the work. When I started I weighed 200 pounds; kind of heavy for me, so I was also excited to start working out again. I like the job so far, but it’s not quite what I expected. The reason I’m even writing about what was supposed to be an easy and boring job is a recent incident, actually two incidents, that have me spending my shifts standing behind my desk, staring to the street outside, composing dramatic letters of resignation in my mind. Here’s the first…

To management and ownership:
This letter is regarding the request made at the meeting Monday February 18th for all employees to remove locks from lockers and to clear lockers after each shift. I feel this is an infringement on our rights as employees and as people. I personally will not be removing the lock from my locker as I am not in the habit of doing things that don’t make sense just because an authority tells me to. I am a trustworthy and potentially valuable part of this business and expect to be treated accordingly. I do not see the logic behind not allowing us each a locker or something equally as spacious and safe for our things. There are sixty lockers in both the men’s and women’s locker rooms. Of these hundred and twenty lockers, less than thirty are being used at any one time. I have not said anything about the fact that we can’t sit, eat, read, use our phones, or the internet behind the desk, and that there are no scheduled breaks during our shifts, but I feel this one issue needed to be addressed. I like our chemistry here and hope to stay for some time, but this is the kind of treatment that builds distaste between employer and employee and I am prepared to leave strictly on principal – we need lockers. Thank you for your consideration.
I did not consult any of my co-workers on this matter; these are my words only.
-nate fish

Before we even get into the list of things I am not allowed to do while at work, lets talk about the fact that I am being paid 10 dollars an hour – a good after school job - in this case after school means “post-graduation”. It’s beyond me why I’m even taking the extra time to write these letters, I suspect it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of Orwell lately, and like I said before – I actually like the job.
I worked with a Serbian named Enes before he left to manage the new Bronx location. Now I work with Gosia, a polish girl who will only listen to The Hot List on the satellite radio that plays at all times in the gym (The Hot List plays top forty rap and R & B). I also work with Gladys [Night], Gloria [Estephan], and Bryan. Rick and I gave Gladys and Gloria famous last names - we haven’t given one to Bryan because he doesn’t speak and has meth acne and listens to his i-pod even though the radio is playing. Gladys and Gloria don’t speak either, but they’re Spanish - we’re not sure where Bryan is from and are simply relieved when he leaves every day without having killed us. Rick is the General Manager - Pete is the head trainer. Pete would be a short, thin, white man, but instead he decided to be a muscle balloon covered in pimples and has devoted his entire life to bulking up. Sometimes I stand behind the desk and wonder what made him want to do this. Emran is the other trainer. He is half Italian, half Pakistani – a bear of a man - and he is forced to shave his entire body. He says he’s getting electrolysis soon, that he knows a guy, and can get it done for 770 instead of 2300. Emran is also a magician. He was quiet at first, but ever since the day he snuck up behind me and did a coin trick while smiling and talking too fast, we’ve been cool. And these are the “co-workes” whose rights I’m defending in my letters.
I guess technically what you are reading is the second letter and refers to the second incident.
Last week, I had my right to discount items revoked when I made the heavy decision to discount a member’s day pass from twenty-five dollars to twenty. Membership at the gym is 999 for one year paid in full or there are two monthly billing options for slightly more if that’s how you choose to pay. There is also the option of buying a twenty five dollar day pass if you are not a member – you just have to fill out one of these wavers sir or ma’am. This particular member had to buy a guest pass because his membership was not due to start until April, still two weeks away. He has a broken ankle and wanted to use the steam room for the day and lift some light weights. I remembered selling him and his wife their memberships a week earlier. I sell a lot of the memberships and this is what I mean in the first letter when I say “potentially valuable part of this business.” It’s funny I don’t get any extra money for it, and by funny I mean not funny. Well, this particular member’s wife had misspoke and told him day passes were only twelve dollars, and so he only brought twenty. I told him not to worry about it; that I’d discount the pass and he could use the gym for the day. It came to 20.83 after tax. I put the money in the register and dug through my pockets for the extra .83 cents. Rick was on the gym floor working out at the time. Later that day he said, “Nate, talk to me about [said member]’s day pass you sold earlier,” in his mostest self-important voice with the phone turned away from is ear. I knew it was Elina on the other end. I told him how the poor fuckin’ kid had limped over and only had twenty bucks and how he’s a member and that I thought it a better idea to let him in for twenty then to piss off yet another customer. Elina is the owner’s wife; she monitors us and essentially controls the whole business from her home computer. What neither Rick or Elina know as well as I do is how upset our six hundred or so members are with the gym.
We opened Feb 1st. Of the 600 members, 400 signed up pre-registration meaning just that they got discounted prices on memberships in exchange for a promise we’d open on time. And we did, more or less, but the gym is still only about 75 percent complete. Only two of the tree floors are finished. The gym is 17,000 square feet. The top floor is the largest and sits at the same height as the bike and foot path of the Williamsburg Bridge. The walls of the gym are glass. The first thing you see when you walk in is the big rectangular desk, or more accurately, the wooden frame for what will be the big, granite and slate covered rectangular desk - me standing behind it. There are two computer stations on the desk – one at each of the front facing corners. Each station has a monitor, keyboard, cash register, credit card machine, and printer. Pens, tape, paper, staplers, post-its, envelopes, and Rick’s notebook are in between the two stations – very institutional. Rick’s a bit freaky with the organization and the first thing he does when he walks in is clean up. The gound level, the level with the big desk, is mostly done, but the saunas in the locker rooms are not finished.
One of the common questions when someone new walks in is, “When are you guys opening?” - another common question is, “What’s that smell?” The lower level, the basement, is not even close to being done. Worse, all construction down there ceased when Mike, one of the other owners, fired all the builders. Since construction stopped, a huge pile of garbage has accumulated in the basement and a puddle an inch deep or so of standing sewage leaking from somewhere grows. As you can imagine, people are not too happy about paying a thousand dollars for a half done, shit-smelling gym – so I cut the kid a deal and deducted four dollars and seven-teen cents from his day pass – figured it was good customer relations.
When Rick hung up with Elina he was mad. He said, “Nate, you can’t do that man - you can’t just discount items without asking.” I explained again the circumstance and why I didn’t think I needed to ask anyone before discounting the day pass because I knew I was doing the right thing. Before we go any further, let’s review briefly the duties I am expected to perform at my job. Out of work I am currently writing a book, a collection of poetry, completing a series of paintings, I play and coach baseball probably four days a week, I DJ, I’m starting a writer’s workshop, and starting a magazine and website – while at work I am literally by rule made to do nothing. I stand in my black collared t-shirt they gave me, name tag and all, arms crossed for six hours at a time. I honestly understand the no sitting thing; if I owned the gym (which I never would), I wouldn’t want the people behind the front desk sitting and eating and reading and checking e-mails either, so I stand and don’t say anything. The phone rings roughly six times a day. A lot of these calls are prerecorded messages about, “The vehicle you’re driving…” and that’s as far as it gets before I hang up. Some of the calls are for Maria De La Cruz – we don’t know who that is. And some are straight hang-ups. I was told things would pick up, but it’s actually getting slower. It’s exciting when the phone rings, but it’s really exciting when a real person actually walks in. Part of the reason I’m good at selling contracts is my that I’m genuinely excited to talk to someone when I get the chance, so I take my time and give them a full tour of the gym and make them feel comfortable. I know all the members by name, what they do for work, and their marital status as I do not let them leave until they have stopped and spoken to me for at least one minute. Besides Rick and the rest of our crew, I see the same twenty or so members every day. It is a privilege to exercise during the day while most people are working. There’s Toshi who usually spends about three hours a day in the gym in his khaki pants sitting in, or on, different exercise machines reading his newspaper and making sure to not break a sweat. Jack Nicholson exchanges briefcases with Toshii “the Chinaman” towards the end of The Departed just before everyone is killed. Toshii throws crazy parties at his condo in the city I’m just waiting him to invite me to. Steve Burns was the original kid on Blues Clues. Steve mostly just uses the treadmill. Justin Gallo is a pro surfer. Schuyler owns a yoga studio in Tribeca, has two sons, and is the only person we allow to not wear shoes. There’s John Paul Armenio and his wife. John Paul was recently fired from his job at Morgan Stanley and though his wife spent 4,800 dollars on personal training for him, he never works out with a trainer. There is nothing particularly interesting about John Paul or any of the members I see during my shifts besides that they are who I see every day. When they walk in they scan a keychain card across a little ball with a red laser shining from it called an orbit. When the orbit registers the bar code on the back of their card the photograph I took of the member when they signed up appears on the screen along with their personal and billing information. Barring any billing issues, which Elina tells us we must address immediately, I then ask the member if they need a towel and wish them a good workout. I will likely not see the member again until they are leaving and unless I can spark quick conversation, I say just “goodbye.” Needless to point out, I feel qualified to handle any of these high stress situations that could potentially arise at my job standing behind the front desk of a gym, so when the time finally came to discount a day pass, or not discount a day pass, I chose to take a stand, not ask Rick, and make the decision to go ahead and do it.
The next day, when I went to discount my large Smart Water from the coolers next to the desk, a little box popped up on the screen saying, “this employee cannot discount items.” Oh, this employee can’t discount items? I tried one more time. The same thing happened. I figured out pretty quickly that Elina, from her perch, had tweaked the system to not allow me discounts. So I paid full price for my Smart Water, didn’t say anything, and starting composing my mental two week notice. When I went to change the channel on the satellite radio later that morning, Rick stopped me and said I had to leave it on The Pulse; that I wasn’t allowed to choose the station anymore. I am willing to stand, not have breaks, and even not read during my shifts, but to make me pay three dollars for a water and not allow me to choose the music is too much. So me and Rick got into it a little. I showed him how I can’t discount anymore - he said he knew that I couldn’t discount because he had talked to Elina about it. I said it was poor judgment by them and that with the stench coming from the basement and all the unhappy members they had bigger problems then me discounting four dollars off a day pass especially considering I don’t stand to benefit whether someone pays twenty or twenty-five dollars to work out, and that “I always act n the best interest of the club.” What I should have said is god bless the working man – for he is stupid! – and god damn the god damned bureaucrat for he is nothing but a scared child liable to do anything to save his own ass, or liable to do nothing at all if it better serves that same function.
It’s been six weeks – I collect my 250 a week, listen to whatever satellite station Rick wants, and after exercising for one hour after each of my shifts I no longer weigh 200 pounds… I now weigh 201.
THE END

WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING IN GERMANY

2008-04-16T14:31:00.000-07:00

to see full WTFAIDIG daily blog entries, visit www.whatthefuckamidoingingermany.blogspot.com)
4/5

It’s all changing. I arrived last night after missing my connecting flight in Madrid by seconds. I was running through the airport with my carry ons asking people where the hell J47 was. When I got to the gate, the guy just said; “too late,” and walked away. I took my sweatshirt off and kicked it on the floor.
Chris Haas, our assistant coach picked me up at the airport. I am thirsty and don’t have any water in my little room here and don’t know if it’s okay to drink the tap water. They haven’t paid me any euros yet to go to the store down the street. Ten minutes from the airport, on the autobahn, we got a flat tire – really flat – like shake car for thirty seconds until you slow down enough to pull off the road. Chris said, “Shit”. He speaks good English. He took out a little orange triangular reflective flag that was next to the jack securely screwed in the trunk and propped it up on the road about 100 feet behind the van. I thought this a very good idea and wondered if everything in Germany was so well thought out and couldn’t help but think about hoe good Eichmann was at organizing those trains schedules to as the cars wizzed past rocking our van. It was cold and raining. I had woke up right as we had landed and I looked out the little plane window to my left and saw leafless trees and a brown open field and a grey sky. It scared me. We sat and waited for Michael, our head coach – I think that’s his name – to pick me up – the rest of the team was waiting to meet me at an Italian restaurant near the field. Paulino had arrived from the Dominican earlier that day. I was supposed to have land half and hour after him, but I missed my connecting flight like I said. Michael finally arrived and we talked about German Pro Baseball and drove through the rain. I had no idea where we were or where we were going that’s how it always feels when your driving through rain at night. He has bad breathe but I liked it. Only five or six guys were still at the restaurant by the time I finally arrived. I was wearing my “D” hat for Disciples – The Haar Disciples, Chris had given me at the airport. I ate a plate of Tortellini with Bolognese and drank water with bubbles – “ con gas” I remember people in Argentina call it. The five guys that were there were very nice and I tried also to be very nice though I was honestly tired.
Mo took me and Paulino to our rooms after dinner. Each team in the Bundisliga (top league) in Germany is allowed two foreign players – we are them. I actually know Paulino because we also played in the same league last summer – in Israel. He was with the Giants organization for four years – a good player. I understand why he is here – it’s hard to make money in the Dominican – I’ve played there too – so if he can come here to play and mail home some euros – he’s doin’ good for his family. Why exactly I am here I still have not figured out. I have my life in New York and I am certainly too old for this shit I thought as I walked into my room that looks like a dorm room – colorful striped, scratchy, shets on the little bed. Well, I have to go now, we have our first practice in 45 minutes.

4/5 (after practice)
I struck out in my first at bat on the European continent. Doubled off the left field wall my second. I made two plays at third base. The field is pretty nice. My schedule – so I am told – will be something like this. We play one day week – that’s not a typo or a misread by you – we actually only play one day a week, and as I realize my surroundings, I am trying to think of this less as professional baseball and more as a paid six month writing retreat in Europe. The other six days of the week I can go to the field if I choose to practice or help run practice for one of the younger age groups.
After the game today, me and Paulino went to the supermarket down the street – from what I‘ve gathered, the only place to go in our immediate area. And that brings me to the immediate area. I am being housed, I’ve found out, in the sane building of a mental institution – the building the staff lives in. It is right down the street from the field which is why I imagine they’ve put us up here – I hope its not because they know I’m a lil crazy. I have a single room. It is small. I share a bathroom with everyone else on the floor including Wolfgang who I met earlier. I also share the kitchen with everyone else. The showers are down stairs. I am on the second floor – room 39, and Paulino is down the hall in 44. Me and Paulion spent 110 euros at the grocery – about 200 dollars. The manager at the supermarket helped us find stuff. We are a funny couple, me and Paulino. I only speak English and he doesn’t even speak that – only Spanish – neither of us speak a word of German. I should hate it here. I mean, compared to my life in NY, this is shit. In New York I have an apartment, a job, friends, an agent, a cool cell phone, a web site – here, I have a dorm room, a shitty little cell phone the team issued me – I just paused to think of other things I have here, but I’ coming up blank – that’s it. But, the funny thing is, I like it. Things seem to be unfolding at a more appropriate pace then in the city. In New York, I sit and do any number of things – possibly even nothing – order food, and eat the food all within the hour. Paulino cooked chicken and rice and beans for dinner and between the shopping and the cooking, it took all afternoon. The place is a real shit-hole and I’m fuckin’ exhausted, but I think I like it. . Hozomeen, Hozomeen – it looks like six months of desolation for me like Kerouac on the mountain – at least I’ll get some writing done. We leave tomorrow morning at 530 am for a double header somewhere near the border of France – a four hour ride each direction. I’m going to go masturbate or something.

4/6
I’m exhausted. As planned, we left this morning I in the dark – 5:30 – and drove through Germany four hours to Neunburg, 5 kilometers from the French border. It was raining and snowing the whole time and I was sure the games would be cancelled, but like Coach Mike said, the weather seems to always be good in Neumberg or whatever it’s called and it was a pretty nice day – a little cold. The team is a pretty laid back bunch – pretty much just like all other ball teams I’ve ever been on – stupid and close. For some reason I expected our team to be different because the players are European , but I am seeing that stupidity is not uniquely American – it’s just a common trait of athletes. Gregor, our center fielder, an Austrian national team player, gave me a bat with my our team name, Haar Disciples, engraved into the barrel with my name underneath. It was very nice of him.
I was taken by surprise when we started warming up before the game. I am used to my own routine, and usually in pro ball everyone is sort of doing there own thing before game time, but in an instant this group of friends turned into an army brigade and started doing drills I had never seen before as if they’d been doing them since birth - maybe cause they have. Two players at a time would run to the coach about fifteen feet away, quickly change directions, back peddle back to the starting line, then sprint 90 feet – the distance of the bas. Once the set of two passed coach for the second time the next two started. I tried to keep up but was sufficiently winded as I’ve been here for two days, have barely eaten or slept and am just trying to get my bearings.
I can’t help use the reference “brigade” in this case - the world war two thing is just screaming at me. After the games we “went to the showers” I was just hoping water came out and felt a hint of what my recent relatives must have when undressing and being identified as a jew with a circumcised penis. It was okay – just water – though a little cold. On the way back from the game we drove passed Dauchau – just another town on the road sign. We won the firs game – lost the second. I was roughly 1 for 9 at the plate. Paulino hit a home run. Everyone was really upset about the loss. Coach gently told us it was a “shitty thing to have to ride four and a half hours home with the taste of a loss” in his unforgiving German accent; at least it was English. He looked at me most of the time and it freaked me out a bit. First, I am honestly scared of German accents, something I’m working on, second, it made me wonder what they are expecting from me – I am sure its not a 1 for 9 performance but I really hope ts not a carry the team on your back scenario. Speaking of expectations – I got paid today. Life is good when you are paid to play baseball though I must say – this is it for me – my last season, and if we played any more than one day a week, I simply could not do it. My arm is currently falling off - something I knew when I signed to come play here, but I convinced myself I could push through 28 games over six months and abuse my body one last summer for the chance to live in Europe on someone else’s dime. I haven’t said anything about my arm except in the preliminary e-mails with coach where we negotiated my sweet deal. I am so tired that I currently have no feeling about being here – it feels the same but different – somewhat out of body so far though that is a cliché and might not evoke any image or feeling for you in particular (sorry). I must finish my glass of wine, roll my cigarette, smoke my cigarette, and sleep – it’s become a quick ritual – oh yeah, I can’t forget – masturbate. My first day off is tomorrow so I should have some time to elaborate on this whole insane situation I’ve gotten into that I’m not sure I like or not yet. Until then…

4/7
Just ate dinner with Paulino. It never occurred to me how much time we’d inevitably spend together. And did I mention he speaks virtually no English. On our walk to the supermarket this morning – after our breakfast – we had one of our longest conversations; it went like this.

Paulino: Window
Me: Widow?
Paulino: E Window
Me: What window?
Paulino: E windy
Me: Oh, yes, it’s windy.

The manager of the supermarket now just starts laughing when she sees us walk in. On today’s visit she explained to me most of the meat in Germany is at least mixed with pork and she programmed Paulinos cell phone for him – she is something like our mother for now.
I had an absolute nightmare, meltdown, deal breaker, I’m out of here experience this morning. My computer has been working fine thus far as you know because you’re reading words I typed on it. The computer was the only thing plugged into the outlet next to the tiny desk in my tiny dorm room I will describe better later, and it was somehow handling the 220 volts of electricity European outlets pump out though it is built to take 110 volts – American style (must have something to do with the little box on the power cord). I went to plug in the champ. The champ is a small guitar amplifier I use as a speaker on my travels. The word champ is a combination of chest and amp because as I said it is an amp, and I the past I‘ve worn it around my neck attached to a rope or necklace or whatever though I have not achieved a comfort level here yet that would allow me to do such a thing. So I plugged the champ in, it made a loud pop and began smoking from its back. Toast!!! I immediately unplugged the champ and my computer went black screen. I tried plugging it into other outlets in the room – more accurately, the one other outlet. Nothing, or as the Germans would say, nussing. Thought I was totally fucked. I suspected the champ might not make it through the initial plug in as its power source, a small back box began to hum and vibrate a bit when I first plugged it in. It was pure haste that made me go forward with the attempt, and after it exploded and the computer zapped out, I paced the room mad at myself. I found a half pack of light purple post-its when unpacking and have been keeping notes of things I need to get to make my life here livable. After two minutes of pacing, I took a post it out and wrote “computer” on it. As far as I was concerned if I didn’t have a computer I could not make here six months which raises al kinds of questions about how fucked up it is that I couldn’t live without a computer, but I rationalize the whole thing with the fact that I’m a writer and at least my need of computers is not solely based on porn and I decided I could live with a typewriter if I had to. Mind you, this is all before me and Paulino’s breakfast which I was expected to prepare according to our agreement of alternating cooking the meals, or at least I think that’s the agreement. So I went into the kitchen where he waited and hooked up some eggs and turkey and swiss on whole wheat bread, one of my classics, and tried not to think of the fact that my life was completely fucked.
After breakfast, on the walk back from the grocery, I called mo, the kid who works for the team and takes care of foreign players, among other things, to explain my predicament. He said he was planning on coming over anyways to drop us off some plates and laundry detergent and stuff. Even through this fucked up morning, I felt surprisingly okay and I’m convinced it’s got to be the fact that I’m sober for the first time in five years and my mind and body just take to that better. Mo showed us the laundry room in the basement we hadn’t seen. I stole a little bookshelf for my room and then we went into Munich for the first time. The way the train works out here is you buy a card and voluntarily get it stamped each time you ride for 2 euros - roughly 4 dollars. But Mo said the guys only check stamps every once and a while and he always just rides for free and deals with the fine if he gets caught. Sounded perfect. Munich is awesome – a really cool looking city – though unfortunately, I live in a shit box roughly ten kilometers south of Munich. I might end up renting a place in the city – Fuck It.

I just got a text message. I get weird German text advertisements about once an hour on my phone the little pay as you go phone the team gave me, and even though I have no idea what they say, I still like getting them because I have virtually no human contact right now and it makes me feel normal. This one said; die angegebenen informatioinnen sche nicht aus. Bitte geben sie buchstaben oder 6 ziffern an.

Son in Munich me and Paulino bought adapters for the rooms though I was convinced it was two late and my comp was fucked. I told myself the only way any good could come of this situation is if I learn not to act so hastily anymore. It felt good to be around people, on the train, walking fast through the streets, cutting someone off, looking at women. Did I mention I’m rakishly horny. The guys on the team told me an American girl is coming to play on the softball team, not that I am exclusively looking for American women – it just seems like an easy angle and I’m just hoping she’s fine, or cool, or, don’t want to push it, both. Unlikely. Anyways, we cruised Munich for a few hours. Today is a Monday and Monday is our off day and since this post is already long and I promised in my last post to explain what the fuck I’m doing in Germany I’ll just tell you the converter works and my computer and life are not fucked forever. I almost cried I was so happy. Then me and Paulino cooked pasta and brcooli.
You know what, I’ll explain wha I’m doing here in my next post – I’m tires. Here’s a poem I wrote instead.

This is my life
And I am alone
And it makes me sad
And it makes me glad
I have a pair of Nikes
stuck to my face.

4/8
Okay, here’s the deal. 10 days ago, wow – can’t believe it was only ten days ago my life was so different, I got a phone call from a guy I played with last summer. He said there’s a team in Germany that needs a corner infielder and the pay is good and there’s lots o free time and the fields are nice and it’s a good set up all around. I had no intentions of playing ball this summer or ever again really considering I’m 28, I have tons of shit going on in my life away from baseball, and mostly because when I went to see an orthopedic surgeon in New York he told me I have a tear in my shoulder – my labrum specifically. I told him thanks for calling but I couldn’t do it. I called my dad to see what he thought and he confirmed it was a stupid idea and shouldn’t do it “Just move on with your life,” he said. The next day I was out to brunch in Brooklyn with friends and I casually mentioned the offer – they quickly stopped eating and asked me if I’m crazy and that I should definitely do it. “What else are you gonna do? – stay in NY all summer and do nothing with a bunch of assholes who do coke all night?” We’ll skip my defensive reaction to the implication that I do “nothing” and proceed, proceed to me walking outside the restaurant to call Gregg, the guy who made the initial offer. I asked him or the phone number of the team in Germany and told him I’d possibly changed my mind and I just wanted to talk to them to get some details. I tried calling Germany , but my phone wouldn’t make the call, so I go the e-mail address, sent the team an e-mail and started dong research online about the league there/here. I got an immediate, enthusiastic response from the assistant coach, Chris, saying they definitely wanted me as soon as possible – the season started that weekend and if at all possible, could I fly out later that week. I called my parents again. My mom said if I wanted to do it I should – that it sounded like a cool opportunity to live in Europe for a while and write and since I “wasn’t doing anything in NY anways – why not”. Why does everyone think I do nothing? I sent an e-mail back saying I could leave Thursday – it was Sunday. I called my job – quit – put and add for a six month sublet of my apartment on Craigs List and started making lists of things I had to do before I left. What my friends who recommended I go don’t understand is how unglamorous playing professional baseball overseas is. They think it sounds amazing. Go to Europe – get paid to play – tell the girls I’m a pro athlete – and live the life. What I now already too well is that the conditions would likely suck and no one here would care about baseball. I did it anyways – took a chance. The deal I negotiated with the team via e-mail is this. 700 Euros a month, round trip air fare, a cell phone, and a furnished apartment for the duration of my stay. I told them about my shoulder. They didn’t seem t care and even reassured me it would likely be fine because we only play once a week. They explained we have one game day a week – doubleheaders on Sundays. We are off Mondays, I would be expected to coach a younger Haar Disciples team on Tuesday afternoons. We practice Wednesdays, off Thursday, practice Friday, I still don’t know about Saturdays, and games Sunday. And there is a three week break halfway through the season with n practice and no games. I had already old teams in Los Angeles and Israel “no” to playing this summer, but such a light schedule and pretty good deal sounded cool. My team , as I’ve mentioned, is called the Haar Disciples. We play in the Bundisliga (famous for soccer) which just means “top league” in German. It is the highest level of baseball in Germany and the only level where the players are paid. The Disciples are a baseball/softball club and also have a second level team, two softball teams, and a whole youth program. Two foreign players are allowed on each team and there are all kinds of rules about how any foreign players can be on the field at one time and what positions they can be playing at that time. For example, a foreign player cannot pitch the first game of the double header and there cannot be a foreign short stop and a foreign catcher playing at the same time because those two positions are so important. The second ule mention might just be the saving grace of my summer as Paulino plays short stop , and though they want me to catch, it would mean either moving him to another position, or removing him from the game. Catching is brutal, and though I can do it, I’d always prefer not to.
My flight left Thursday at 9 pm. I pretty much took care of everything I needed to do by Wednesday night and we had a big table for twenty at a cheap Italian place in the East Village the night before I left. I said goodbye to everyone, went for a last shop Thursay afternoon with my sister, and went to the airport Thursday afternoon with her and my folks who drove down to say goodbye and one of my goodest friends. I felt thankful for all the love I have in my life and realized that doing shit like this forces you to take some kind of life inventory where you pack all the things you really need, tell all the people you really love that you really love them, and stash the rest in the closet til you get back. There was a two our delay in New York which is why I missed my connection in Madrid (the Madrid airport is rad and Spain looked nice from the big windows facing the hills). Chris, the coach who I was e-maling with was waiting for me at the airport and I alredy explained our little adventure out n the autobon in an earlier post. It’s been five days here so far, ten days since I got the offer. Last year I had nine months to prepare for leaving to play, this year I had five days. I think I like it here, or at least I keep telling myself I do. Like I said, “the apartment” I was promised is actaully a dorm room on the sprawling campus of and psychiatric institute. I did find a little café on the campus here where families of the crazy people housed here sit and eat and drink beer when they come visit. It is a depressed scene but I was glad to find the place – they serve pretty good coffee – and I plan on being there a while each day. Well, this sure is the simple life. I have one plate, one dish, one fork, cook every meal, and there’s no where to go but in my head or cruise with Paulino. Funny thing is, the week before I got the call from Gregg in California, I was thinking I needed a big change, seclusion, a chance to sober up and finish my book, grow. Now – here I am in Haar, Germany.

4/9
I will begin this entry by stating again that I am tired. Though we only play on Sundays, we practice every day, and practice is long, and since me and Paulino, or at least Paulino, have nothing else to do here besides walk to the field and practice, we go over each day around 4 and work out ti 8. My routine seems to be shaping up like this. I fall asleep around midnight after me and Paulino eat a huge supper in my room as an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm plays on my computer. My sister bought me season five when she found out I was leaving because she is smart and knows there would be nothing here for me to do. I am sure Paulino understands very little of the show, but he usually laughs at vaguely appropriate times and refers to Larry David as “Idio” (translation = idiot). Also, Pauliono refers to the crazy people we can see shuffling around the hospital campus from our room windows as “the people with memory problems,” which is now how I refer to them as well in our conversations. Our diet is limited. Tonight we had spaghetti for the second time in three nights. We usually cook too much and end up eating the leftovers along with whatever we fix for breakfast which brings me to mornings. I set an alarm on my little phone for 9 am. I am supposed to read for one hour, prepare breakfast, take a poo, clean my room, and head down to the café for coffee at twelve – when it opens. But I sleep an extra hour knowing that list of things will not take long. I bring a book and a notepad to the café with me. Today I started Beirut to Jerusalem, the once authoritative and entertaining, now outdated text on the Middle East conflict. After coffee, we either walk to the grocery store for whatever we need and to say hello to our German mom, the manager there. She still laughs hard every time she sees us walk in and usually begins speaking German to one of the cashiers who begins laughing also. I am not sure what they’re talking about but I’m growing suspicious because I put thirty euros on my little phone two days ago – talked on it for maybe a total of half an hour – and the minutes are already used up. I was surprised today when Paulino and I were there buying laundry detergent and they noticed, by name, the Charles Bukowski book of poems I was carrying. And they were surprised I was carrying it, and we stood surprised at one another for a moment – me, manager/mom, cashier, and Paulino who was not surprised by anything. Between going to the store or doing laundry or whatever single task must be accomplished during the day, we have roughly two hours before leaving for practice. In this time I roll a cigarette, smoke half of it and begin writing for my book, or at least I did today and since we’ve only been here six days and am settling in, I imagine I will continue to do so. At 4 we leave for practice – practice till 8, walk home, shower, cook, eat, watch Curb Enthusiasm, clean up, Paulino leaves for his room, I type my blog entry, go to sleep. The absolute saving grace of this experience is having my own room. I have hung many things on the wall already, and betwen the book case I stole the other day, and the grandfather clock I found, my room is shaping up. But the clock ticks back and forth and I didn’t sleep well last night and I’m convinced it was from the noise I’ll give it one more night and if it annoys me again, I’ll smash it into pieces. I already ripped off the gold gizzard thing that swings back and forth. Did I mention my arm hurts – correction, everything hurts. It seems they plan to squeeze out of me their 700 euros worth every month as I am made to throw batting practice and catch bullpens at practice each day. I say nothing, just wince a bit when no one’s looking. One of the perks of playing shit ass pro ball is no trainers. I down Advil and would ice if I had access to some. Sometimes I find my mind drifting into a fantasy where I get officially inured and they send me home. We’ll see, we play two on Sunday, maybe I’ll fracture and eye socket or two or bleed almost to death on the field and be outahere. We shall see. But I can’t lie, after all these fuckin’ years, playing baseball’s still fun, and getting paid to do it is even better.

4/10/08
It’s been a week of solitude and I’m ready for some action. I realize I’m used to an unaverage amount of it in my life and in its absence I find myself dancing in my room wanting my friends to be around. Every night I get dressed – right now I’m wearing jeans, a green collared t-shirt, nice socks, and new shoes – but for no reason, nothing ever happens. If there was anything around, I’d make something happen, but it’s just not an option out here. The guys from the team said they’re going to go out tomorrow night. I shall drink 3,000 beers.
Me and Paulino ate rice, beans, corn, carrots and broccoli for dinner. Maybe I should call this blog, The Germany Diet, and publish it and make some money. Today was more o the same – wake up, read, café, the store (today is was for q-tips and batteries and to minutes on my phone), write, practice at 4, shower, dinner, Curb Your Enthusiam (I don’t even like the show that much), this. We’re already on episode 6 of ten and I don’t know what we’re going to do when we finish disc two. I made my first painting in Germany tonight (see photo) and I’m glad I brought some art supplies along. Not much else to report on so I will discuss a bit about what I’ve fond out about Germany, more accurately, Germans thus far. In the three days I had to prepare before I left, I was able to gather some information about Germany from people in New York who had been here and felt obligated to tell me there thoughts on this place as people often do when you tell them you’re going someplace they’ve been. First, I heard Munich is a nice city. And it is. Too bad I live in Haar. Then I heard Berlin is nicer; I hope I get to find out if that’s true. James, a guy at my job, told me Germans are “scared of confrontation” and are very nice if only from this urge to not offend. I must admit, a large part of me wanting to come here was to see what it’s like fifty years after the war. I asked Mo what religion most people in Germany are. He said, “Da, I do know,” and acted as though he either honestly did not know or had no interest in discussing it. The guys on the team know I’m Jewish, the head coach even called the day before I left to ask if I wanted a kosher meal on the flight. I half think they’re expecting me to break into some world war two fit - I’d just like to have a conversation about what it means to their generation, but it seems like no one wants to talk about it. Another thing I found out before leaving was that because baseball is not a central sport like soccer is in Germany, that it attracts some funny characters – different than our idea in America of the athletic ballplayer. And so far, the guys who hang out at the ballpark are anything but athletic. Nice, yes. Goofy, yes. Athletic, no. Most of the better players from the younger divisions are Japanese. I don’t fully understand what they doing here, but there are a lot of them. I think they’re here for two year visits and it has something to do with the car companies; BMW, Mercedes, Volts Wagen, but I’m not totally sure. So, there are the Japanese players, there are three or four Spanish speaking kids (Paulino was happy to find out) and the rest are German with American parents or some half interesting story about why they play baseball in a country where no one else does. For example, my head coach, Mike, with the bad breathe, played a game they call handball here. It’s not the same handball from New York. This handball involves teams, and goals, and a lot of throwing – something like soccer with your hands, and since its played indoors and only during winter, they had to find another way to practice throwing, so they started a one of the first baseball clubs in Germany. That was thirty years ago. Mike and the rest don’t really look like ballplayers, but all are accepted from the goofiest guy in the dugout to the new Jewish American, no one but no one is made fun of - the new German identity – better late than never, but how this shit happened here so recently I still cannot understand even after comparative religion courses, a class called “evil in the 20th century”, reading Kant, Neitchze, Hanna Arhent, and more, but I am going to find out.

4/12/08
I’m drunk, finally. I just arrived home from the city. I must admit, it is scary as fuck arriving home to a mental institution – walking through alone in the dark half expecting an escaped patient to jump from behind a bush and bite my ankles. Germany, mental hospital – the perfect setting for a horror. Well, I made it into my room, ate some peanut butter with a spoon and now I’m typing. I had a fun day. Manu, one of the guys on the team thankfully called me to invite me and Paulno to a scavenger hunt around Munich one of his friends organizes every year. The guy who organized it is Peter, Peter lives in a store front/loft that is very cool and seems to live a fun life here in Munich. I wanted to ask him if I could move in, but instead just thanked him for the day and wished him a happy birthday. We had bikes. Manu borrowed one of his friend’s for me and we cruised the whole city for like five hours looking for answers to the questions on the paper test Peter had written. It was fun. Almost immediately after we mounted our bikes – just as I was admitting to not being too slick on a bike, I fell after ramming into a high curb and we all had a laugh. Paulino would not come along because yesterday we were caught on the train without tickets as Mo advised. I was keeping a look out, but the checkers came up from behind and asked us for our tickets. I acted as though I had no idea what was going on and was not prepared to give them the forty euros fine they demanded we pay. Paulino quickly counted out forty and handed it over. He is very religious and very scared to “go to jail” as he’s said many times. I’ve concluded both that as a black man he has a well deserved fear of being wrongly imprisoned, and as a religious man, he is quite obedient as religion breads obedience. He said, “Me no go to city anymo,” when I invited him along. The officials only made us pay a total of forty instead of forty each partly because it was obvious we were foreigners and because of my refusal to pay anything. So, a fun day, it felt familiar – people, noise, music, laughter, buzzing conversation, girls. I hung out with Katherine most of the time but was looking at the blonde who was looking at me. I bet we see each other again – me and the blonde that is. I know Katherine will see each other again because she is coming to our game tomorrow. Which brings me to our game tomorrow. We have two of them – a double header, the s-bon series. The s-bon is the name of the train system here and since the other team is also form Munich, a few stops away, its called the s-bon series like when the Mets play the Yankees it’s the Subway Series. Theres even little flyers made up that say” s-bon series” that will be passed out to fans at the game tomorrow. And I must sleep as I cannot go 1 for 9 again like last week. There’s no excuse this time. Must sleep. Must hit home runs. See you tomorrow night.

4/13/08
We split today (won one, lost one) just like last weekend. I was 4 for 8. I felt surprisingly good considering how drunk I was last night. We had to be on the field at 9 am – three hours before game time – to “set up”. I keep finding things out about this German league as they happen – no warning. Setting up consisted of putting up a home run fence in the outfield, building the “burger shack” (concession stand) out of aluminum poles and tarps, wheeling, unfolding, and placing tables for the score keepers, announcer, ticket booth and benches for the fans, and setting up for bating practice - essentially transforming the entire ballpark for opening day in one morning. During warm-ups, after construction was done, my arm hurt so bad I convinced myself “this is it – I’m done – playing one last game and going home.” I felt all emotional because I honestly thought I would ask to leave after the second game and promised myself I wouldn’t say anything about the arm until then – “go out like a warior.” But then I ate 1,000 milligrams of Advil and felt a little better. It was a nice, cool day – a couple hundred people out at the game. I sliced my arm open diving for a ball and it wont stop burning. Overall, a fun day. I got a bike from Mo and not just a bike – a white old school beach cruiser with white wall tires. It’s called “the valor” or at least I says the valor on it. Paulino got a bike too and was very happy about it. He’s been asking the team for a bike ever since we arrived. His bike is much better, but mine is cooler even though the back tire is flat and its hard to peddle. I like it here I thought as I rode the valor home from the field in the dark after having a beer and some pasta at the recently discovered only restaurant in Haar. A lot of times I even laugh out loud at myself – and I’ve figured out why I like it – possibly the key to all happiness – I have absolutely zero responsibility in my life. I don’t have a real job, bills, anything – I have nothing, and that’s perfect. Well, not nothing – we were paid today – 5oo euro – the remainder of our salary for April – so I have money – which might be a factor in the happiness thing though I’d prefer not to think so. Todd paid us – he is the owner of the team. It was the fist time I’d met him. Ad by us I mean me and Paulino. I just learned we are the only players who get paid to play. I broke my Nate Fish, Haar Disciples bat unfortunately on one of my hits. I’ll trade a bat for a hit every time – it only sucks when you break a bat and get out which is usually the case when bats break. We’re off tomorrow. I’m gonna sleep good tonight.

4/14/08
Today was the first day I didn’t go to the field. I took a long bike ride around Haar, found a gas station to fill the tires of the valor up and discovered Haar might actually contain hints of human activity – a pub, a restaurant, a tanning salon even (not that I’ll go – to the tanning salon that is). I’m sore from the games yesterday and am feeling old in the body area. I don’t know how big leaguers do it, but I’ll bet you if it weren’t for the money… they wouldn’t. Not after the age of thirty at most.
Passover is this weekend, and though I’m not religious, I think I’m gonna go to a seder in Munich. It’s just something about being in Germany and going to a seder that seems intriguing. It’s Saturday night. We play a double header Saturday, Seder’s at nine. Not a lot to write about todaysince I’ve hardly left my room. The café downstairs was not serving hot drinks today – no coffee – only beer and soda, so that threw me off a little. I am tearing through the five books I brought; Beirut to Jeusalem, the Bukowski poems, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Nick Flynn), though I haven’t started “the ways of religion” for a second time through, and I’m saving “Motherless Broolyn” to read later this summer though I can’t stand the title. I am no longer trying to decide if I like here or not, I simply am here, and as is the case with being anywhere sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t – a fluctuation that is easier described simply as mood swings rather than connection to a place. Oh, I cleaned my room today. There’s a little lip in the door though I’m convinced was strategically placed there to prevent one from simply sweeping the dirt from the room into the hallway which is honestl what I would have doe, so instead I tossed it out the window. Holler.

4/16/08
I guess I skipped a day though not intentionally.
The café downstairs is becoming increasingly interesting to me and I’m spending at least an hour there every day. I order a large cappuccino for 1.65 euro. I always leave a good tip but the service continues to be brutal. What’s it take to get a little special treatment around here? - I thought as I was leaving just a few minutes ago. From what I can tell, everyone in the café is crazy as hell which in itself makes for an interesting scene, but there are other things I like about it too. There’s a juke box in the corner called Double Thunder that plays mostly wildly depressing songs at random times. I have never seen anyone put quarters in Double Thunder but it kicks on every once and a while anyhow. Yesterday it played When A Man Loves A Woman, while the crazies with their messy hair sipped beer and stared at each other. The servers must think I’m crazy - why wouldn’t they? – my hair’s as messy as anyone in there. Today Thunder played an equally slow tune though I don’t know the name. At the same time I watched two men dig wholes for “direktor parking space” signs in the lot outside. They had a great deal of trouble setting them before filling the wholes back in. I couldn’t help but think the signs were for them and how funny it was to watch them struggle over erecting their own reserved parking space signs.
I’m reading a lot and working on my book again. I figure the only way this time will be worthwhile in the long run is if I write something great while I’m here.
The weather continues to suck – cold and rainy though everyone says it will improve soon. I’ve been here not even two weeks - six months seems a far way off – by then I’ll be like Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption – institutionalized and not wanting to leave. I’ll prop myself up on a chair in the middle of my bare room and scrawl “Nate was here” on the ceiling in sloppy, variously sized letters. Then I’ll go meet Paulino in Mexico where he escaped to after tunneling out of here months earlier to live on our boat.
It’s Passover this weekend and I reserved tickets at a seder in Munich.

THE RESISTANCE GENE and THE TIME EXPERIMENT

2007-05-06T17:41:00.000-07:00

What is the resistance gene? And do I have it?
It is obviously not a gene in the scientific sense, but a characteristic of the personality that often seems so imbedded it might as well be. It is the healthy mistrust of authority and the ability to confront evil on a personal level no matter the outcome of the confrontation. Pretty much, if everyone had “the resistance gene”, the ills of colonialism and the Holocaust would have been prevented, and all the evil in the world would have been confined to the rare hateful, or truly greedy individual; King Leopold and Hitler in these cases.
In the recorded history of “heros”, or people who act justly, there is no pattern of race, religion, or class that would suggest one has it and the other doesn’t. I find that fascinating, so I decided to look deeper into the subject.

In Chicago, two weeks ago, I was standing on the street when Joe told me, “It just turned five o’clock.” I started telling everyone that walked past, “It’s five o’clock. It just turned five o’clock.” I told teN people and got drastically different responses from all of them. Some looked at me like I was crazy, some thanked me for the service, some simply ignored me, and some were clearly scared. At this point I devised a loosely scientific experiment to deduce exactly how many people have this “resistance gene” according to their spontaneous response to me telling them something as arbitrary as the time. I decided to return to New York and repeat “The Time Experiment” on one hundred people, monitoring and recording their responses.

Stanley Milgrim conducted a more controlled and legitimate experiment trying to expose the some of these same things. In his experiment he had an authoritative doctor giving instructions to the subject, an individual administering eclectic shocks to a hired actor pretending to be in pain every time the subject pushed a button and voltage was given. The results of the Milgrim experiment show overwhelmingly that the person giving the shock was more willing to listen to the doctor, and keep increasing and doling out volts, as opposed to stopping, even though they knew the person was in pain. In short, they obeyed the authority and continued hurting the individual receiving the shock as long as the doctor took responsibility and told them to. My experiment is less about response to authority, but it similarly measures an individual’s spontaneous will.

In my experiment, I represent some thing out of the ordinary.
The person receiving the information, what time it is, represents any individual presented with the opportunity to spontaneously react to an advance. They are being addressed directly, and made to feel somewhat uncomfortable. This discomfort simulates the discomfort one may experience when confronted with an opportunity to act out against something they recognize as wrong; i.e., an attack they could prevent. Since I could not commit harsh acts of injustice against, or around, these hundred people, the best I could do was simply something that warranted a response, something clearly unusual. The various reactions dictate their willingness to engage or withdraw, and ultimately, whether they have the resistance gene or not.

Before I began the experiment I created four possible categories of responses;
1)Ignore; the person who does not acknowledge me verbally or with eye contact.
2)Eye contact; the person who looks at me, but otherwise ignores the exchange.
3)Engage; the person who thanks me, says something in response, or stops to look and/or speak with me.
5)Fuck You; the person who responds violently, physically or verbally, to me telling them the time.

According to this scale the person who ignores me and withdraws from the exchange will be the least likely to resist evil, and the person who says, “Fuck you man”, is most likely to resist and possesses the ever important resistance gene.
I chose two locations to conduct The Time Experiment. First, the corner of N. 7th Street and Bedford Avenue between 11:10 am and 11:32 am. Second, Time Square, 7th Avenue, between 39th and 40th Street from 3:36 pm to 3:47 pm, both on the same day.
Bedford Avenue is the center of a neighborhood with a combination of Puerto Ricans and Hasidic Jews on the south-side, and almost exclusively young professionals and hipsters on the north-side. I live there.
Time Square is obviously different from Williamsburg, more tourists, and people are moving generally faster and are surrounded by more audio and visual stimulation. I asked 50 people at each location. Here are the results…

1) 34 people completely ignored me.
2) 29 people made eye contact with me, but said nothing, and in almost every case rolled, or quickly refocused, their eyes.
3) 37 people engaged with me, smiling, nodding, slowing down, extensive looking, giving thumbs up... 6 of those people spoke to me for varying lengths of time. Some saying, “Yes. It is.”, and some stopping for full conversation.
4) 0 people reacted violently (remember, according to this experiment, this would have been “the best” reaction).

The largest and most ranging group was “engage”. But the number of people who ignored me, plus the number of people who made eye contact with me, and then looked away, is 63, far surpassing the number of people who engaged, and not inappropriately grouped together.
Ignoring, or making eye-contact then ignoring, are virtually the same thing. One is an instantaneous, arguably unconscious withdrawal. The other is more a conscious decision not to engage. Many of the people gave me looks suggesting I may be crazy, and some were just confused. Even people who didn’t look at me often changed their look and posture.
Within the group of people who engaged, most responses were positive. This group overall obviously exuded more life, energy, charisma, then the other. Usually, eye contact initiated the exchange after my announcing the time, and then I could see a thoughtful moment when the person would hesitate and think about what was going on, and then finally, a reaction; a smile, a nod of acknowledgment, an “okay”. This group represents a portion of the population at least willing to engage on some level with a confrontational force.
No one had the “Fuck you” response I had hoped would appear. According to logic, this instantly rebellious attitude would make the most sense taking into account everything that’s ever happened.

People were more responsive in Williamsburg then in Time Square as one might
suspect. And there are a myriad of other fallacies that make this experiment scientifically unsound. More examples, “attractive females” were less likely to engage because they are approached in a similar fashion several times a day by characters probably who do not look unlike me. Headphones played a huge part in peoples reactions; I had trouble deciding whether to count them. Ultimately, I did. And me; the fact that I was wearing red, white, and blue cut-off sweat pants and a black hooded sweatshirt with a black leather hat over the pulled up hood largely impacted each reaction. But that does not make the data any less valuable. This is important information that is hard to calculate and decipher. Testing how or how not a person may spontaneously react to something they recognize as out of place, or wrong, is relevant to everything about our humanity, and speaks volumes about how each of us live our lives. Calling attention to the topic seems to me more valuable then the certainty of the science behind the experiment.
The results do not differ that much from Milgrim’s. The large majority of people chose to either ignore me, or acknkowledge me and quickly look away. The decision to ignore is a decision to be taken advantage of, to not react, and is more heavily present in actual movements of evil around the world than in this study. The fact that most people ignored me proves how few of us have taken the time and made the effort to think deeply about evil, and in turn develop the ability to spontaneously resist it. Ultimately this hints towards a quote from Professor Dilnot and a suspicion of my own, “You must be more afraid of the quiet, law abiding man than the man who breaks the law out loud.”

HEART FAILURE

2007-04-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

For once, living way down in Brooklyn put me closer to where I needed to be, and I was able to walk to the pick up. I was expecting a full fleet of buses lined in front of the stylish entrance of the museum with teems of young people bustling around holding steaming thermoses trying to find each other. But when I arrived, I saw a single bus in the back parking lot looking cold and lonely. I boarded.
I had signed up for Climate Control Action Day just the day before. I wanted a free ride to DC to get a first hand look at the current state of the revolution.
Our bus leader had not arrived, so a middle-aged, pony-tailed, deaf man in the front of the bus suggested we pass a sheet around and write our names and cell phone numbers down just in case anyone got lost. He was overtly proud of his own life long activism and subsequent ability to spontaneously plan and make lists.
The bus was about half empty. It was still dark and I couldn’t see if there were any pretty girls. More people arrived, we pulled out, and everyone but me went to sleep.
By nine we had make our way almost to Baltimore passing some amazing stretches off nothing green. When everyone woke up we were handed neatly assembled packets of information about Climate Control Action Day. Our bus leaders were beginning to seem like my old Hebrew School teachers as they talked over the bus’s distorted sound system.
We were to arrive at RFK Stadium at11 a.m. In the parking lot we would get Climate Day t-shirts and metro cards, take the Metro to Capitol Hill, and there, finally, join thousands of ferocious environmentalists and change the world forever. But not before we stopped for donuts and coffee.
When we re-boarded I was able to take a survey of my fellow rebels; a small Spanish man, a high school teacher from The Harbor School with ten or so of his students, three black girls with dreadlocks, and a bunch of old white people who could afford, like me, to waste their time going to Washington DC on a Tuesday.

Honestly, I had prepared for an all out party. I even brought The Champ. Champ is short for “chest-amp”; I invented it two summers ago in Israel. The champ is a little guitar amplifier that clips to a round CD carrying case and hangs around my neck. I have all the controls in from of me while my hands are free to shake and snap as I blast music from my solar plexus.
I also brought spray paint to make protest signs with. On the bus I was thinking of possible phrases; “I heard it’s nice on Mars this time of year!”, “What about the weather machine?”, “It’s the poor peoples’ fault”, and, “Nice Day; Get It”, where the best I came up with. But, the day turned out to be not even worth the effort.
The rally was on the back lawn of The Capitol. A small group, equally as pasty as the one I was arriving with, stood facing the stage heads high and attentive in there matching t-shirts. A line-up of politicians and Alaskans spoke in five minute intervals as they were introduced by the very enthusiastic, Weasel, daytime personality of Washington’s only “green” radio station. They talked about stabilizing our climate and disallowing drilling in the arctic for two hours as the crowd got smaller and smaller. By the end, Weasel was noticeably fatigued.
After the rally we were supposed to hand deliver to our senators’ and representatives’ offices type form letters we had been given to sign on the bus. I would tell you what the letter said, but I didn’t read it. I could only imagine a gauntlet scene from Indiana Jones, or Mad Max, where I dive and roll past swinging blades, defeat the fanged-horse-beast, and solve the stone rubrics puzzle, just before I drop my little piece of paper in the “in” box and thank the clerk. It all just seemed so lame to me. Where was the passion?
I did go along with some people to Chuck Schumer’s and Hillary Clinton’s offices though. No gauntlet, just big hallways and good etiquette. It was time to get back on the bus. As we walked one of my trip mates said, “My heart is starting to act up. I need some more of my medication when we get back to the bus.” I thought, heart failure. I slept most of the way back, but the chicken fajitas I had eaten for lunch at the Native American Museum were hurting my stomach. We got back around 10 o’clock; I got off the bus and walked home in the dark.

BASEBALL HAS BEEN BERY BERY GOOD TO ME: PUERTO RICO

2007-03-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

I left for Puerto Rico on a Thursday. The cab was late picking me up and the driver dropped me at the wrong terminal before I ran him down with all my bags and got back in. Carlos was waiting for me at ticketing with a nervous smile, “I don’t like getting here early man. I like showing up and getting straight on the plane”. I wondered why he was so early.
We went through security smoothly. I felt experienced. We sat at the gate across from ours in the row of seats facing the walkway to view scrambling families, overdressed couples, and of course to judge the female travelers. Some of my past teammates had devised a number scale to accurately appraise the sexual value of each woman at the airport, not nearly as scientific as I’m making it sound, simply how much money you would pay to sleep with her, 100 being the most. In the end this game reflects more the mind state of the judge, and less the attractiveness of the woman. Now, whenever I’m at the airport, I can’t seem to avoid playing the game in my head. I’m awful.
Carlos said he needed a drink so we went to the bar. It didn’t open until four, and by then our plane would be boarding. The bartender just stood behind the bar and told us, “No drinks, just beer”, as he pointed to a cooler with a, fuck you. I’m at work, look in his eyes. Carlos said, “This dude is pissing me off. Hey, they have Pac-Man. I’ll just play Pac-Man”.
A younger girl was roaming around our gate waiting to board. Carlos started talking to her in Spanish. We had to take a bus to the plain out on the tarmac. It was very full on the bus and the girl and I stood close together, me holding the overhead bar and her clutching the pole I was standing against. We were lying comfortably, but standing. When we got to the plain Carlos asked her to sit between us, and told her we’d get the person whose seat it was to switch. A big Spanish man came up and said, “Naw, Naw. I want my window seat”, in English. Carolina went back, and I was left between Carlos on my right and the muscle man with poor sense of personal spacing on my left. Discomfort was to become a theme of the trip.
When we landed in San Juan we met up with well-mannered Mikey, and went outside into the warm moist air we had talked about back in New York to wait for Reggie, our coach, and his blue van. I had met Reggie once before, but besides he and Carlos, I would be meeting everyone on the team for the first time. We waited almost an hour while other flights landed and more guys arrived. Reggie told me I owed him $265 for league fees, hotel rooms, and uniforms. I gave him 150 and told him I would get the rest to him by the end of the weekend and thought, shit man, that’s all my money in the world. Can’t someone with a job and lesser baseball ability just pay for it?
We pulled into Howard Johnson’s around 10pm, dropped our stuff in the room, and walked down the strip the hotel was on looking for food. Los Pinos Restaurant was a few doors down between Seven-Eleven and Burger King. San Juan was nothing like Santa Domingo where I had played last summer. It looked more like Florida, All-American. On the walk we noticed a small bum in shorts and a t-shirt. He was leather tan with straight brown hair coming out of his baseball cap. He and his little dog were sleeping outside the entrance of Seven-Eleven, a little authenticity. I ate chicken, rice, and beans, and had my first Medalla, the delicious Puerto Rican Beer. It came to twelve dollars. With my outstanding balance to Reggie, I knew it would be the best meal I ate all weekend. It was budget ball for me again.
When we got back to our room I met my other roommates, Hawk and J-Rod. They had been in Puerto Rico for a long time already having played in a tournament the week before for other teams. J-Rod was on the phone, eating ice, and dipping, hotel hobbies of the ballplayer. There is nothing better then a ball hotel room, and nothing at a more perfect ease than a ballplayer on the road. J gave me a slight, “Hey” that sounded more like “A”. Los had told me about J-Rod on the plain. He played several years for the Marlins and Angels, but he had never made it up to the big leagues. “He hits a ton and can pitch with either hand”, Los said. I had never actually met anyone that could throw equally well with both hands and I was suspicious as to whether he could actually do it.
Hawk was much more personable. He wore corn row braids and spoke in a heavy New York accent. All three of my roommates were born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York at various times in their lives. J-Rod did not speak good English even though he had been living in the states since he arrived to play ball 10 or more years ago when he was 17.
Four dudes. Two beds. I turned the little desk sideways and carried the chair out to the hallway, called for extra blankets and pillows, started making a nice bed for myself in the corner. The other three looked at me like I was crazy. Hawk and J-Rod were going to share the bed and they were surprised I planned to stay on the ground as opposed to sleep with Carlos. But I had been doing it for years; two on the beds, two on the ground. We were supposed to have a team meeting in the morning at nine so we all went to sleep.
Guys slowly arrived half uniformed anywhere between 9:30 and 10am , and the meeting didn’t actually happen till almost 10:30. I was meeting everyone as they arrived; John and his girlfriend, Willie, Snoop, Geo, Angel, Jose. This was my second experience playing on an all Spanish team in a Spanish speaking country and I have learned that time is more an abstract concept to them, not a hard reality to which one must adhere.
Our team had won this tournament the year before so Reggie just thanked everyone for getting there, went through some quick introductions, and talked briefly about how playing time would work. “Everyone paid so everyone’s gonna play”, Shit, I still owed Reggie 150. We left for our game in the Puerto Rican sun.
Reggie told me when he picked us up at the airport, “Fish, you’re gonna sit game one, and John’s gonna catch. I’ll Be straight up with you, you’re the better catcher, but we’re playing a stronger team in the second game so I want you to catch that one, and I want you to play short one game. I’ll probably have you pinch hit in the first game after we get through the order once, so be ready”.
I was relaxed on the ride to the park, I expected to just take ground balls and some swings. I sat in the back of the van next to Willie. He was the only black man on the team. He looked around 50 years old. His hair was an old shape, he had two wild bugged eyes, a little mustache, and wore the 1985 Barry Bonds Pittsburg Pirates gold stud earring with a chain hanging down to a cross. He wouldn’t stop talking to me on the ride over. His breathe smelled bad. He was annoying.
The park was beautiful when we got there. The stadium looked like 1960s or 70s architecture. The Roof angled back over the seats. It was cement, red, and yellow. We entered from behind home plate and saw the field for the first time (the best way to enter a ballpark). We walked behind the first base dugout and went down through the club house and out onto the field. Sunlight. Bright Geen Sunlight coming from the ground. Hot. So hot you could see the heat rising from from the field when you stood eyes at ground level in the dugout. So hot your feet actually burned inside your spikes. 100 degrees.
It didn’t take much to get loose, and we started taking ground balls. I felt good at short stop. The surface was the new artificial grass. The “soil” is rubber pellets that settle between the blades, leaving perfect inch and a half matted plastic grass. Everything was fast and bouncy and honest. My legs felt good and my arm felt like it was two hundred feet long.
Reggie read off the lineup and our team took the field; we were the home team. K.C. was pitching.
We had been taking swings before the game when K.C. was warming up in the bullpen. Almost every ball was getting past John, the catcher, and skipping down to us in front of the dugout. K.C. was throwing hard, but not that hard, around 80 mph I guess, but John clearly could not handle it. He did not look good going out to catch the first inning and he was already complaining about the heat.
We struggled badly in the first. K.C. gave up three runs, we made two errors, and John was only catching half the pitches. When they finally got back in the dugout John said a foul ball had hit him in his bear hand, that it hurt, and he had to come out of the game. That was fine with me. I was already putting on the catchers gear and telling Carlos I was going to throw out the first guy that tried to steal by the time Reggie told me I was going in. We had a quick 1,2,3 in our half of the inning and the next thing I knew I was trotting out to home plate to catch my first game in four years. I jogged out to the mound to talk to K.C. for a moment, took a good look at the eleven people in the stands, and jogged back to the plate where I gave the ump a smile and an hola.
The first hitter of the inning reached on another error and tried to steal second two pitches later. The ball travels from my hand on a downward plane to second base one hundred and twenty three feet away. Out.
It was hot though, and the more errors we made the longer we stood out there. I was wearing; two knee high socks, a long pair of tight pants over jock and sliding shorts, a belt, a red t-shirt under a vest jersey, covered by a chest protector and two knee-to-toe leg guards. My head was in a backwards baseball cap and face mask. My feet were in two tightly tied black metal spikes. I felt as good as a properly functioning robot, happy to be playing, and happy I had put myself through all those workouts.
I was hitting twelfth. One of Reggie’s, “everyone plays policies”, was that fourteen hit in the early games instead of nine, “to see who’s hot”, and get everyone at-bats. My first time up was against an old lefty throwing what we call puss, not very hard. He started me of with a fastball down the middle a bit on the inner half. I had made my mind up not to swing at the first pitch in my first at bat, to give myself at least one look before I started hacking, and of course he grooved me one. The next pitch was a brutally slow change up down the middle. Crack, a knuckling one hop line drive right at the short stop. He did a good job of staying in front of it, pinning the ball to his stomach with his glove and bare hand and getting the lead runner at third base. It felt good, a hard hit ball. I eventually scored after a walk and a single
We continued to make errors in the field and the other team continued to score runs. By the seventh inning the mercy ruled was in sight. Our team was old, slow, and sloppy. Our third baseman, Temple, made four errors in the first game alone. Easy ground balls were missed completely or thrown away to first base. K.C. only made it into the fifth inning, and maybe worst of all, I realized John had no intention of going back out there in that heat and catching anymore then he already had. I went into the clubhouse after the sixth inning to cool off in the AC, and there he was actually drumming a beat on a chair with his hands. I thought, The hand doesn’t look so bad to me. But I didn’t care, I was really having fun out there.
In my second at bat I faced a big righty throwing a bit harder. I got to three and 0 and looked down to Reggie for the green light to swing away. A fast ball down the middle. I skied it into shallow center field. My swing felt long. “Just missed it”, everyone in the dugout said. Our dugout had already taken on its own identity. Snoop brought a ghettoblaster and was playing Hip-Hop, Reggae Ton, or Spanish House music for the hitters’ walk to home plate. Some guys sat and talked and some guys went in and out of the clubhouse to sit in the AC. Snoop brought his kids down into the dugout, everyone watched there mouths at first, but by the fifth inning it was all “Fucks”, “Bitches”, and screaming at the other team. I would say we were a certifiable Bush League team.
We did get mercy ruled, thank g-d for my knees and Snoops little twins. We went to Applebee’s for lunch between games. The other guys ordered all kinds of deep fried food. I ate a turkey wrap with a side of broccoli, took a multi vitamin and some glucosomine, and drank a ton of water. When everyone else went to walk around the mall, I laid in the van. For those who have never experienced the pleasures of catching a full nine inning game, stand with your feet shoulder width apart, squat down until your but almost touches the ground in back, keep your shoulders tall so you can see the ceiling, and then explode back up to a standing position and repeat two hundred times. You should also have some one there occasionally throwing a rock off your face or hitting you in the back of the head with a bat. Don’t forget to throw a ball as hard as you can each time you stand. And that is pretty much what catching a single nine inning baseball game is like. I needed the rest.
It cooled off beautifully for our 4:30 game. We were in the third base dugout now, the shade dugout. Warming up on that perfect field in the cool air was enough to get me moving again and I jogged out to the center field fence with the clouds turning pink above me. We were playing the White Sox, a team made up of mostly Spanish guys recently released from there minor league contracts. The best team there.
Hawk was pitching. When I went out to talk to him in the bullpen about what pitched he throws and how we are going to work the game he just said, “It’s like some Gregg Maddox shit. Just put the glove up and I’ll hit it. Everything is side arm. The slider is straight nasty.” I liked his attitude but the lack of science worried me. Hawk knew everyone on the field from both teams, and he was completely intent on winning the game.
We hit first. I was hitting fifth now, behind J-Rod. We went down 1,2,3 in the first and had only scored one run in the first game. We weren’t playing real well. Hawk got us through the first despite more errors. I flew out to left field in my first at bat and was off to an o for three start to the weekend. In the second inning they scored three runs. We made two errors in the field and hawk threw a fit on the mound after Snoop dropped a ball in left field. By now we had made more errors then clean plays. I threw someone out trying to steal. When we got into the dugout hawk was screaming, “Come on now. We’re grown men out here. Play the game the right way. Shit, we ain’t kids no’ more, if this is the game you love, play it the right way. I don’t even want to pitch no’ more.” I had to take him to the end of the dugout and calm him down and tell him that getting mad about errors wasn’t going to help anyone make plays and it wasn’t going to help him on the mound. In baseball. You can only concentrate on those things you can control. There is a lot going on in the game, so the worst thing to do is think about it all at once.
They scored more runs in the third and hawk developed a blister on his left foot that was bothering him. He started the fourth but motioned to Reggie and said he had to come out of the game, that the blister hurt too much.
Carlos finally got something started for us on offense when he led the seventh inning off with a double off the left field fence. He was excited out there on second base. He is about 5 foot six inches tall and weights over two hundred pounds. He played pro ball straight out of high school, but had since married, had two kids and put on about fifty pounds. We waddled around first base, hesitated, not sure if he could get a double, then ran the rest of the way to second coming in standing up. He looked into the dugout and clapped his hands as if he had proved to himself and the rest of us that he could still play. He scored on a single. Now we had one to their seven. We kept rolling back through he top of the order and by the time I was on deck, J-Rod was up with two outs and runners on second and third base.
Everyone knew J-Rod is a beast, and no one knew who the hell I was so I wasn’t surprised when they intentionally walked him loading the bases to pitch to me. I quickly went to 0 and 2 after fouling a pitch off and trying too late to check my swing on a curve ball. I stepped out of the batters box and told myself, you can still do this. This dude has nothing to beat you with. See it and touch it with your hands. We got to two and two. He threw a fast ball down and in, barely missed. It was too close to take and could have been called a strike, but that’s what I get for being a catcher. Three and two, bases loaded. Two outs. Another fast ball, crack, I didn’t even feel it leave the bat. I looked up and saw a line drive sail about twenty feet over the short stops head and I got moving. A base clearing triple. I slid head first into third base even though the base coach was motioning”up”, not to slide. I couldn’t help myself. The score was now seven to five. The next hitter flew out to right field, and that was as close as we got.
After the game Carlos was smoking a cigar in the dugout and just looked as happy as he could be. He had already racked up three or four hits and could care less that we lost. I grabbed the cigar and took a big puff and choked a little, I was happy too.
By the time we left the field it was almost nine o’clock. On the ride back I was in the back of the van again with Willie, and he wouldn’t stop talking again. I just caught two games, can I get a little love on the seating arrangement? But, the more Willie talked, a funny thing happened, the more I liked him. I was tired but Willie had me cracking up. He said, “Hey Reg, the nigga’ in the back of the van wants to know why he ain’t playing mo’”, in a high soft voice. Willie knew he wasn’t there to play; he was really a base coach and was there to film. He had spent most of the day running around with his camera and tripod. He told me, “Man, I was so fuckin’ proud o’ you when you hit that triple. I knew you was gonna do it man. Did you hear me down at first base cheerin’ for you? Did ya?”
Willie wasn’t staying at Howard Johnsons with the rest of us. He had come with a friend and they were staying across San Juan in another hotel. He was on the phone with his friend saying, “We don’t deserve this shit man… Well I care. We paying money for that disgusting fuckin’ place man. We don’t deserve that shit”, but he wasn’t angry, more gentle and sincere. We got completely lost on the ride home and when Willie realized we had wound up by his hotel he proclaimed, “You see, g-d is always great. Y’all wait right here, I’m gonna go get my things, we’ll buy an air mattress and I’ll stay with y’all tonight”. We went to Walgreen’s for an air mattress and some snacks while Willie got his things from his room. I was really tired walking through the warm winding streets of Old San Juan. It had been twelve hours since our team meeting and spending that much time in a jock strap gets uncomfortable. I was shocked when everyone wanted to go Denny’s instead of back to the hotel, but I was just along for the ride in back with Willie, so we went to Denny’s in uniform.
I sat next to Hawk at Denny’s. By the time Hawk came out of the game earlier he and I were just looking at each other and laughing every time one of our guys made an error, what else could we do. Hawk is thirty six years old. He plays on eight different baseball tams, has had five knee surgeries, he teaches high school physics, works at several homeless shelters around Manhattan, coaches college baseball, and is one of the most curious and honest human beings I have ever met. He is largely the motivation for me to wanting to write this story. He told me he was half Puerto Rican, half Jamaican, and half Jewish, and if it’s possible, he actually looked it. He had brown skin and corn-rows and a big Jewish nose. He was smart, especially for a ballplayer. He started getting into his sexual exploits as we talked, all about these underground clubs he goes to in New York. “Yeah man, they just like old abandoned Warehouses. My niggas rent them out. Flat screen TVs, pool tables. Real nice. Bitches just walking around with nothing on. They text message me the password every Friday, a different word every Friday”. But he wasn’t a pervert; he seemed to know about everything. We had conversations about the crack era in the Bronx, Plate Tectonics, and how sad really the whole world is. By the time we left it was 1 a.m. We got back to the hotel; I iced my knees and arm for half an hour, took a shower, and passed out in my little corner bed.

When I woke up in the morning I felt stiff like wood. I slowly got up and walked past Hawk and J-Rod sleeping one at the top, one at the foot of the bed. We had a 12:30 game that we had to win to advance to the playoff round after loosing our first two. It was already 10 am and the other three were still sleeping. I woke them up, quickly put my uniform back on, and went to Seven-Eleven were most of the team was already in the parking lot. The little dog was sleeping by the door and the old bum was buying beer. Carlos arrived and translated his mumblings for me, “There’s nothing like a cheeseburger from the garbage. What, you’ve never had a cheeseburger from the garbage? It’s very good”.
I was surprised they let him live in the parking lot. He had a cardboard bed under the Seven-Eleven sign with his dog’s bowls near by. I reluctantly got the rest of the money I owed Reggie from the ATM leaving a well-rounded balance of zero, and I bought a pastry and coffee. Before I knew it, I was in the back seat next to Willie, and it was hot as hell. He asked me how I felt as Reggie drove back and forth from Seven-Eleven to Burger King making sure we had everyone and screaming because we were so late. We got to the field at noon. It looked just as pretty as the day before. We were playing another team from NY, J-Rod was pitching, and I was catching, again.
J-Rod started the game throwing lefty. He threw pretty hard and could locate, a real pro. Our defense continued to botch nearly every play. We were making the game look hard. Our short-stop was spending more time on the ground then on his feet and he took himself out of the game after an easy ground ball hit him in the bare hand and ripped off a nail. Guys were dropping balls, and everything hit to the outfield was bouncing over or past our outfielders and getting to the wall. In the fifth inning the score was 6-3, them, so J-Rod decided to switch hands. He threw exactly as hard and accurately with his right as he had with the left. The umpire asked me if they were twins. I smiled and said, “That’s the same dude”.
J was not happy about how the rest of the team was playing and he was pacing up and down the dugout in our offensive half of the inning ranting in Spanish. I had noticed a certain fierce distance in him, but now he was letting it shine. Hawk had said to me, “Yo, that nigga is crazy. He don’t know how to talk to people, he talks at people”. He added, “But he is my nigga though, so I help him out. I mean, the nigga only has an eigth grade education”, later after giving him five dollars to get some food. They knew each other well. J had even been living with one of Hawk’s friends in New York free of charge for a couple of years.
J had sufficiently pissed all of us off by the seventh inning, even me. I was behind the plate sweating my ass off, and calling a good game. I mishandled one pitch slightly, not even dropping it, but just catching it with too loose a wrist allowing the ball to move my glove when they connected, and J-Rod glared in at me and gestured with his glove how I should catch. I threw the ball back to him hard, as hard as I could. He was about half way between home plate and the pitchers mound; he easily snagged it out of the air and looked at me as if to say, okay poppy. I get the message.
In the bottom of the ninth inning J came up as the winning run. We had scored one more run making it 6-4. Everyone was in the dugout saying things like, “This mothafucka done lost his mind. No shit man, he’s acting crazy”. No sooner, he hit a ball of the scoreboard in left center field 400 feet away. He circled the bases like he had many times before, got back in the dugout, and started saying, “Fucka you, fucka you, and fucka you”, to everyone on the team. Then he went out and struck out three in a row in the bottom of the ninth. We won.
The next game was at 4, right after the first. The team we would be playing had watched us win from the stands behind the third base dugout. We cooled off in the AC and ate granola bars I had bought the night before at Walgreens. I started to feel really sick. I wasn’t fatigued, I was tired. I felt like sleeping and I had a sore throat. Reggie read off the line-up for the second game. I was behind the plate, and J-Rod was on the mound.
I’ve never in my life seen a man throw two complete games in a single day, but J-was acting like it was no big deal. In his first at bat of the game he hit another home run, this one from the left side of the plate. It cleared the outfield fence, the net behind the fence where home runs are supposed to hit, and the outer cement wall of the stadium. I have never seen a ball hit that far. Besides that, the game went just as the others had. Us making errors and rotting in the field, and them running around the bases scoring runs. I was two for three in the game. We managed to keep it close and actually had a chance to win. I sat in the dugout and secretly hoped we wouldn’t. I couldn’t catch anymore. I went out to the mound in the eighth inning to talk to J who had already switched hands twice and mentioned that my arm was killing me. He just said, “Whatthefuckpoppy. I can throw three games a day without my arm hurting. You got to push the arm when it’s tired”. I looked at him and said, “You should say nothing to me but ‘thank you’ for throwing those guys out”. He smiled.
In the dugout the guys were laughing about J’s performance. “That’s some 1925 shit right there”, and they were right, it was. The man had thrown two complete games using both his hands, and had hit a home run from each side of the plate. We agreed it could have only been his attitude that kept him out of the big leagues.
The game finally ended. We lost, and I didn’t have to catch anymore.
Everyone was making plans to go out that night on the ride back to the hotel. Hawk had already told me he had plans for us, “We going to Frenchy’s nigga”, he said. Reggie dropped us off and told us to be back downstairs in an hour. I showered and was ready to go. The only thing I had eaten all day was a pastry and granola bar. Reggie had said, “Nate, wherever we eat tonight, I got you”, because I had caught so many innings and played well for him. Hawk couldn’t stick within the time limit; he was just lying around the hotel room talking and laughing instead of showering, so we left him behind and went to the restaurant. I got rice, steak, and beans this time, and ate so fast that Reggie just looked at me and said, “Damn nigga, you was hungry”. I still can’t figure why Spanish people think it’s okay to use the word “nigga” as freely as black people do. Everyone, even well-mannered Mikey, said it constantly.
We rode up and down the strip with the sliding doors of the van open looking at the girls and waiting for everyone still in the hotel. I was tired and getting sick. I almost jumped out and went up to the room, but Hawk got in the van and excitedly said, “Let’s go nigga. What the fuck y’all waitin’ fo’”.
Frechy’s Le Club, was in a dark alley somewhere about twenty minutes from the hotel. Hawk negotiated a deal with the doorman for all eight of us, and we entered. A round bar was in the middle of the room. Booths lined the walls and the stage was at the far end of the room. We immediately saw players from other teams filling the booths. I went and said hello. A tall, brown, stripper with long curly hair was staring right at me. I looked away after a few seconds, took a drink, and when I looked back her eyes where still fixed on me except now she was smiling and gesturing, one hand making a circle, and the other pointing and moving in and out, the international sign for fucky fucky. I thought, holy shit, this is a freaky scene, and then actually said those very words out loud to Reggie. She wouldn’t stop. She was motioning for me to come to her, so I did. When I got near she grabbed me and just said, “I like to fuck”. I smiled and said, “So do I”. I had my hand firmly around her left ass and she was digging down my pants and grapping like crazy. All of a sudden a little old bald black man who looked like the kitchen cook from the shining jumped out of nowhere with a huge wad of money in his hand and started wildly licking the back of his own hand and humping the air while saying numbers in Spanish. “You want to fuck me?” the girl said, “One Hundred and sixty dollars?”, in a nice accent. I said, “No. Maybe later”, and I walked back to the booth sort of smiling, but she followed me and sat with us for an hour drinking with her legs across my lap and my hand on her ass. Eventually one of the guys did take her up on the offer and disappeared for ten minutes into the back room. I pretty much didn’t move from that spot until we left at 4am. The time turned into a dream like memory with me sitting half asleep slowly sipping Heinekens with an occasional lap dance bursting out on me or next to me. By the time we went to sleep it was 5 and hawk and I vowed to not wake up until afternoon.
When I did wake up I was full blown ill. My head was pounding, I was sweaty and cold, and I could barely swallow. Carlos said, “Hey man, you want some of the flu medicine I’ve been taking”, and I realized it was that fuckin’ cigar that got me sick. That, and catching all those innings. I spent the next day and a half laid up in the hotel under blankets. It was probably for the better. I didn’t have any money anyways. I only left to make trips to Seven-Eleven for medicine and snacks and to see the old bum. When Los and I pulled out of HoJos at 4 am in a cab five days after we had arrived, the bum and his little dog where the only living things on the street. He was walking slowly, drinking a beer, the dog scampering behind him. I said, “Los, look who it is.”
END

EVEREST

2007-01-17T11:32:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching a television program about a group of men attempting to climb 29,000 foot Mount Everest. I am staying a week at my cousin Jeffery’s on the upper west side to take care of his bulldog, Louis. Louis is a freak of a dog. He lacks either the cuteness of a French bulldog or the droopy charm of an English. He makes enough noise for eight dogs, and speaks in a tongue that sounds human. He snores through the night. I pick him up and put him down off the bed when he sees it fit for me to do so. He is unhealthy and old and can no longer jump up to the bed, or at least has learned a paid helper will do it for him. I can only imagine how much money Jeffery has spent on surgeries for Louis who suffers from ear problems, stomach problems and a number of mental ones. Jeffery is gay and single and has somehow rerouted toward Louis any heterosexual parental instinct he may have to pass down his own neurosis.
Jeffery’s apartment is much nicer than my own. He has two flat screen televisions for viewing programs like the one I just watched. I do not even have one television, flat or any other shape. His apartment building was once a hotel for artists and still bears the name, “Hotel Des Artiste”, outside the restaurant on the first floor. The apartment is two floors and there are huge windows to let in the natural light a painter needs. The ABC studio is across the street. There is a staff of doormen and elevator men working all hours. I have never liked the feeling of being served and cannot get used to them. Jeffery is quite promiscuous so they are used to shuffling men about my age up and down the elevator and I can only imagine who they think I am. When I ordered food last night a doorman came to get my money, came back with the food, and took a third trip to give me my change. It only makes things harder. But, I always look forward to my time at Jeffery’s and have promised myself to take it easy for a few days, watch some TV, and get some writing done.
“Take care of”, is actually misleading. A dog walker, Diane, comes three times a day to feed and walk Louis. My only instructions are to sleep here and keep Louis company. Sometimes I struggle to follow these simple orders and don’t make it home for the night.
Diane is very good at her job. She leaves a note after each walk telling me if Louis peed or pooped, she feeds him and gives him water and his medication. She even leaves the TV on for him, Animal Planet. Diane and I have an interesting relationship. She has an intimate knowledge of me because she sees me sprawled across the bed three-quarters naked in some of my most revealing sleeping positions every morning when she arrives to take Louis out for his 7 am walk. She comes strait into the bedroom and begins prodding Louis, calmly begging him to wake up as she helps him down off the bed. I am always impressed with her lack of self-consciousness during these morning intrusions. I pretend to sleep. Diane knows me well, or at least knows how I look when I sleep, pretend to sleep, but I do not know even what she looks like or how old she is. I only know her from notes left on stationary bearing the name, Jeffery Wolf, in the upper corner, and by her voice. If she was suspected for murder and I was called in to ID her, they would have to do a voice ID like in The Usual Suspects. But I’m not sure if I could pick her even then, that seems to me an impossible system for identifying a person. Our uniquely one-sided relationship led to an uncomfortable occurrence a month ago when I was staying here over the holidays.
Outside Jeffery’s building one evening I held the door for a woman like I would hold a door for any woman, or any man for that. As she entered she looked longingly at me like she knew me, because she did. I looked at her blankly as if I didn’t know who she was, because I didn’t. I started down the street wondering to myself why that woman was looking at me so strangely. I herd my name. I turned and saw the woman there. I walked towards her with my face feeling paralyzed by confusion. I slowly started forming words with my mouth to break the awkward silence and bide a moment. “Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii…Diane”, it came to me at the last moment. This was Diane. She was not nearly as attractive as I had fantasized her to be, and I was glad I never snuck a peak any morning. She thanked me again for holding the door. I said, “You’re welcome.” She smiled, and we parted ways. Come to think of it, even if I had known her before, it still would have been kind of creepy. Why the hell was she thanking me profusely for holding the door for her? Maybe she loves me.

As I watched the program about men climbing Everest I could only think that they must live amazingly boring lives. They must be married, employed, and financially comfortable, so they seek adventure to escape there painfully boring everyday lives. Contrarily, I live a very exciting life and have no desire to climb anything, or jump out of anything, or drive anything exceedingly fast. I know I am not the first to come up with this theory of the bored explorer, and I do not give myself any credit for it, but it is at least part true. These men put themselves in harms way occasionally to feel alive, I simply just exist always on the brink of disaster. Every break I receive, good or bad, feels divinely delivered because the consequences always carry dire importance to my life. As I arrived last night at Jeffery’s, I had zero dollars to my name. I hoped he was going to leave me some money, but we had no confirmed arrangement. He left me money last time, but it was the holidays, and my birthday. I also had to pee really badly. The two factors left me running down the street, praying for money. There was an envelope with two hundred dollars with my name on it. I get to eat today. My own life is not as television worthy as dramatic assents up Everest, or more accurately, my own highlights would be inadmissible until released straight to DVD and labeled banned from television.
Two nights ago I attended a party in Brooklyn. I was dressed sort of conservatively because I was stoned when I left the house, but as the weed wore off and the alcohol kicked in I wanted to wear something more wild. I grabbed a t-shirt from my friend Gregg’s closet and took out a set of stencils of the alphabet I carry with me, and wrote, “I AM NOT HERE TO PARTY”, across the front of the shirt.
We got to the club around ten, took a reserved booth in the back, hid the “reserved” sign, and began drinking. It was an open bar from ten to eleven so we were going to the bar in turns and getting four drinks at a time. There were probably eight of us. Representatives from Coke Zero were walking around getting photos because they had sponsored the open bar. They wanted to photograph us. We permitted them to, but made sure at least one of us had our middle finger up in the picture so they couldn’t use it for an ad. We were good and sauced by the time the band went on.
We were side stage. We sort of knew one of the girls performing. She wasn’t actually in the band, but she is wild and beautiful so they had her up there pretending to sing and dance. The other people on stage were the drummer, the synth player, and the more talented, less attractive, lead singer. I got Angel’s (The pretty girl) attention during the set and she made her way over to touch me. Then the lead singer started motioning to me to come around the front of the stage. I wasn’t sure if she wanted me to come onto the stage or just go into the crowd. They played two more songs. I stood and told my friends, “I’m gonna go out there.” I finally got the nerve up, moved the chain curtain we were behind, and entered the stage. The first thing I did was take my pants off. A week earlier I was at a club and decided to take off my pants on the dance floor. Dancing is already fun, it can only be made more fun by doing something outrageous. This got a fantastic response from the girls I was dancing with at the club until my friend ran up to me pulled my underpants down and took a picture of my naked lower half on the crowded dance floor. I made him erase the photos.
I went to Angel and started dancing with her. She looked happy to see me. I think she had been nervous for the performance and was looking for a familiar face to take some of the heat off. She said to me, “Dance with Sylvia”, the lead singer. I made my way over to Sylvia. She was a much bigger woman then Angel and the hugeness that gave her talent as a performer was apparent up close. She was also happy to see me, but was just using me for the show, pulling me close and then pushing me away. I played along. I stayed on stage for two songs, dancing back and forth between the two women and getting the crowd going. At one point I looked out and saw a group of four blond girls screaming and motioning for me to come down to them. Then some dude ran across stage and tried to pull my underpants down. I had learned my lesson the week before and somehow the practice paid off, I grabbed a hold of my blue boxer briefs before I was revealed to the crowd of a thousand.
After the set was done we exited the stage, I put my clothes back on, and walked around a bit. I could feel the extra attention on me. I bumped into a few periphery characters in my life, they just sort of stared at me, but I didn’t feel bad, I had climbed Everest, what the hell had they done.
I saw Angel in the crowd and went up to her to celebrate our rocking performance. She looked lost and had obviously taken a drug that was preventing her from sharing in the excitement of the party. This is what they call the thousand yard stare in old soldiers who are distant from all the gun fire and chaos. Angel had a slight variation of this, the thousand drink stare, so I moved on. The original group was congregated on the dance floor laughing hysterically because of a stench creating an actual gap where no one would dance. “What could it be?”, we shouted to one another. “It smells like dirty giants with huge asses and pussies and dicks that have been fucking for hours”. The general haze of happiness continued till about three when we decided to leave.
I ended up passing out on the couch after eggs and strawberry crepes. I awoke at 10:45 a.m. in my typical wake up panic. I felt like I screamed as I took my waking breathe though I am not sure if I actually made a noise. I immediately phoned my sister to jokingly tell her to call our parents, that my face was stuck to a pleather couch and I needed money. I told her about my heroics from the night before and prepared myself to stand. My friend Verne, whose couch it was I was sleeping on, kicked the door open and said something like, “I love New York”. We were both clearly still drunk so we decided to go to Gegg’s where everyone else was likely sleeping. Gregg was in bed with a girl he had spent the night with. I jumped in with them.
I do not want to mislead you, I usually do not drink during the day, and before this had literally never woke up and began drinking immediately, but we sat around and polished three forty ounces of beer bought in haste the night before. From there we set out looking for brunch but got side tracked and wound up in a booth at a bar. As we frantically went over highlights of the night before we talked about the smell. While at Gregg’s we had identified something looking like dog shit on my shoe. In the small confines of a bar booth we realized we smelled the same smell from the night before, and everyone made me take my shoe off so they could smell it. I pride myself on not smelling bad so I was getting defensive as everyone tried to blame me for the bad smell in the club. “Do not pin this shit on me”, I said over and over. “Pin shit on me”, they mocked. I drunkenly headed to the bathroom to clean my shoe, I could take no more abuse from the table. The logistical issues of cleaning a dog shitted shoe in a bathroom of a bar dawned on me as I began wiping the shoe with a wet towel. That was too slow and the smell was making me gag so I turned the faucet, hot and cold, on full blast and simply held the shoe under the raging stream. This caused a literal shit storm in the tiny bathroom. It was as if it were raining shit water. As perfect temperature water and pieces of shit flew around the bathroom I pulled paper towels from the dispenser to wipe my eyes with. It was glorious. I came out of the bathroom soaked and everyone laughed at me some more.
It was getting ugly at the bar. By the time the real alcoholics were arriving for there first low-key drink of the day, we were eating cheeseburgers, screaming, and had recruited a street performer to join us, he could sing almost any song we requested and was drinking straight vodka from a coffee cup. He said he had just moved to the neighborhood and was still developing his cult following. We left, went back to Gregg’s. The girl, who was still with us, had accused me of not knowing her name about halfway through our time at the bar. I knew her name was Melissa, but pretended not to know just to piss her off. She was beginning to shift her affection to me because Gregg was too drunk. Back at Gregg’s I could hear her cell phone going off in her bag while she stood across the room playing records. I didn’t tell her that her phone was ringing, I figured anyone spending a Monday drinking with a group of strangers was looking to “get away” a little and wouldn’t want to be bothered with whatever average character was calling.
I left Gregg’s at 7:30, took the train up to Jeffery’s, got the key from a doorman, was taken up in the elevator by another doorman, and opened the door. There was Louis waiting for me, grunting and trying to speak. His snoring didn’t even keep me awake that night as we lay on the bed together. I think I might just be doing all this shit so I can write about it. Either way, it’s fun.

PEOPLE FROM CLEVELAND AND OTHER PLACES; PART 2; JERRY

2007-01-10T18:16:00.000-08:00

I
It took a special person to accept the living conditions of 128 Beadel St. It was located in what real estate brokers refer to as, “East Williamsburg”, but was more accurately a deserted industrial wasteland. Beadel Street ran through a dense stretch of metal factories and dead ended into a barren field. The field contained yet another factory, a huge tower protruded up from its middle and massive flame burned atop it at all times. We would come to refer to the flame as, “The Eternal Flame of The Jersey Special Olympics”, or simply, “The Sun”. It looked as if the apocalypse came and went with damage leading up to, but ending on, either side of 128 Beadel.
The Street was only four blocks in total length with our half block at its end being the only residential and most remote part. From the front steps of 128, Vandervoort Road was to the left, and a fence that blocked off the field was to the right creating the dead end. Vandervoort Road was so warped from all the truck traffic pounding it down that it was literally hard to cross. The noise level and scale of the ten or so surrounding blocks some might call a neighborhood left the impression we were living amongst mechanized dinosaurs that stomped and screamed all day, but lay totally silent all night. The nearest train was a twenty-minute walk.
Wally owned 128 Beadel and lived on the first floor with his wife Grace who once claimed she was being held captive there by Wally. Grace had taken it upon herself to decorate the entire house including the portion that was available for rent by the general public. I was responsible for discovering 128 and when I first arrived to see it, I must admit, I was shocked. As I entered, an overwhelming stench of cat urine hit my nostrils. Just to my right was a shrine to Maddona. When I tell people this story they always ask, “Like the singer, Madonna, or like, ‘The Madonna’?” The singer Madonna. A floor to ceiling display of photographs, dolls, albums, and books, of, by, and about Madonna all lit by candlelight loomed in the entranceway. The door to the upstairs, what would become our home, was directly in front of my face, another door was one step to my left where Wally and Grace lived.
As we started upstairs I noticed each stair was painted, designed with shapes you might see as a stencil pattern in a home decorating store, but clearly had been hand painted on one at a time. The pattern spread from the stairs to cover the walls and woodwork of the doorframes. The generally open space looked more like an oversized hand crafted wooden jewelry box from Mexico than a stable home for human beings. There were three bedrooms to the left also painted with the repetitive dipsy doodles that were on the stairs. I was somewhat distracted in thinking about the care put into the creation all around me as Wally and I discussed finances.
II
I inevitably took some criticism about the location and general appearance of the house when Max and his girlfriend, Joyce, arrived from Massachusetts to move in. But, the initial shock wore off, and we began to enjoy our little home. There was a huge back porch that overlooked the back yards of the other homes on the block, it also was painted. A sun design covered the entire back wall of the house, our upstairs portion revealed the top half of the sun, the beams reached all the way to the edge of the house. It was summer and with colorful paint on the walls, the windows open, and the screen door to the porch swinging in the wind it felt more like a beach house then a converted duplex in industrial Brooklyn. Wally once told us in his thick Puerto Rican accent not to have too many people on the porch, that it might fall.
We joked that Beadel St. was a little piece of Ohio, where we are from, that we brought with us. The neighbors all had above ground pools. They were mostly second-generation Polish families living some kind of displaced appellation lives. We could sit on the back deck and watch children swim, women hang clothes, and we practically had our own zoo.
The entire block was at odds with Wally, we suspected, because he looked something like a Puerto Rican Shaman, and housed sick and abandoned animals in small 128. In the basement Wally kept four to six dogs, all abused at one point in their lives. One of the dogs once latched on to my forearm with its teeth when I tried to pet it. In the back yard below our porch was a coup for roosters Wally rescued after they fell from a delivery truck on Vandervoort, some of them had lost beaks or feet in the accident. Next to the roosters was an enormous florescent green parrot. It would burst into flapping, shrieking episodes Wally called anxiety attacks that lasted fifteen minutes once a week or so. There were a number of cats and other animals that lived in the back yard as well. Wally had a kindness exceeding that of your average man. He saved animals, and he encouraged us to play our music loud. When we would ask if the noise disturbed he and Grace at night he would reply, “Turn it up man. I can’t even hear it”.
As nice as he was to us, Wally had a particularly vicious feud going with the neighbors directly next door. A few weeks after we moved in Wally came by to show us a video from the eighties of Diane Sawyer interviewing him about a court case he won where he was either awarded 128, or the money to purchase 128, I can’t quite remember how it went. In the video, we saw a much younger Wally defending himself in court against a New York Slum lord. Wally, and a group of tenants, won in a class action suit largely because of his documentation of their beleaguered living conditions. Inspired by his past victory, Wally had been videotaping the borderline violent exchanges he and the neighbor to the left were having in regard to the placement of the very fence keeping them off of one another. He had strategically positioned cameras in the basement facing the fence in anticipation of another court appearance. In his visits he would show us tapes from past fights, and encouraged us to witness the quarreling from our vantage point above.
The neighbor was a drunk, abusive polish man who not only fought with Wally but incessantly with his wife and children. When Wally was gone the neighbors would invite us into their house to share their side of the story, saying it was their land the fence was on. But when they said things like, “and he’s just plain dirty”, about Wally, we could tell they disagreed more with Wally’s ethnicity, and how he maintained his home, then the plastic fence.
We kept a valuable outsiders neutrality perched above the backside of Beadel St. looking out on swimming children, screaming neighbors, and ever burning torches in the six months we were to live there. People have a tendency to not look up when they are searching around for others, hence the sniper’s roost. I guess we just expect each other to be on the ground.
III

Looking for roommate crazy enough to join us. Late nights and loud music. Smokers are okay. If you are the bastard, please contact Nate or Max.
128 Beadel St. Brooklyn, NY 11211
We needed a roommate to take the third bedroom and after several duds stopped by in response to a more proper advertisement; we posted something like the ad above. There was a single response, Jerry Foust. I was not home when Jerry stopped by the first time, but Max quickly informed me he was in fact the one.
Jerry had already been living in New York for twelve years when he moved in with us. He arrived with nothing more then could fit in his small room. A futon, a couple of guitars, an end table, and a lamp with matching zebra print lampshade. He was originally from Texas but claimed to be, “…completely a New Yorker”, after such an extended stay. He was about six foot three. He weighted probably 230 pounds.
We would either drink at home and play music, or go to a favorite place of Jerry’s if his outstanding tab there wasn’t too high. He had spent several years as a bike messenger, and still road his yellow ten-speed everywhere, sometimes getting home late covered in blood after taking a drunken spill along the way.
Jerry was managing a plant shop, The King and I, on Sixth Avenue between twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth streets at the time. He worked for Karen, the owner. She was a surrogate parent type to him, she fronted him money when he needed it, and she yelled at him when he deserved it. Karen was a big woman. Jerry would come home complaining Karen had attacked him and that she was a crazy bitch, but he would always go back to work the next day.
The reason Jerry needed a place to live was an ongoing separation from his long time girlfriend, Emily. When Jerry was extra drunk I could here him in the living room late at night leaving extended messages on Emily’s phone saying things like, “I know we will be together again. I know you still love me”, while giggling to himself. Ultimately, Jerry was just talking to the walls around him, there is no way Emily’s phone had enough memory to record these fifteen minute confessionals. Max and I would try to intercept Jerry’s late night calls telling him it was a bad idea, but he would slip away and call anyways. In the mornings I could hear Jerry going through his ritualistic moaning, coughing, and spitting up of whatever he had collected in his lungs the night before and we would have conversation through the wall separating our bedrooms.
By now Max’s younger brother, Drew, had arrived to live with us, and was sleeping on the couch. I have heard that your first six months in New York are the hardest. Besides Jerry, we were all dealing with the transition in our own way, Drew’s particular method of coping was sleep. He would lay on the couch and drift off in a room full of us screaming drunks, people often sitting on and around him not even noticing he was there. The obvious joke was that he had developed narcolepsy, but more accurate was that he had an actual physical attraction to the couch. He appeared magnetically drawn from any upright standing position as he crashed down on the cushions, not to rise for what seemed like weeks.
As the weather changed and the walks to the train felt longer and longer we openly fantasized about moving somewhere “normal people” lived. It came to my attention that a loft space in a prime location was going to be available starting March 1st, and if we could ride out the rest of winter on Beadel Street, it could be ours. Again, I was put in charge of orchestrating the deal.
IV
When I went to see the loft for the first time there was only a single couch, a kitchen table, and a rug in the middle of the room where a pit bull frantically running around had just taken a shit. The ceiling creaked and cracked twenty two feet over head. A previous tenant had built out and upper deck where a rail less staircase led up to a rail less hallway overlooking the space and leading to three of the four bedrooms. The fourth bedroom was downstairs across from the only tiny bathroom, and a single window in the corner covered almost completely by steel bars served to lock the tenants in as much as to lock unwanted strangers out. No one had the key to the window. If 128 Beadel was a hand crafted jewelry box, the loft was simply the largest cardboard box in the world.
The building was a converted warehouse containing forty units of varying size, # 107, what had become our obsession back at Beadel Street, was the largest. It was located right on the east river across from downtown Manhattan. From the football field sized roof you had an unobstructed panoramic view of Manhattan from Houston Street up to the 59th St Bridge. It was a completely illegal operation and was not zoned for residential living. A group of Hasidic Jews owned and managed the property and most of the rest of the neighborhood. For fifty years this had been a thickly Polish and Jewish neighborhood, but now both groups were relinquishing their homes and collecting checks from young artists and professionals.
The Hasids had a makeshift office a mile south of the building where they conducted their shady dealings. When I went there to sign the lease a buzzer hanging from its wires, and a spray painted address above the door where the only things making it identifiable as inhabited. I walked into what was nothing more than an empty apartment. A single desk in each bedroom and a Xerox machine and coffee pot in the kitchen were the only things inside. The place looked like it could be abandoned and burned in minutes if need be. I nervously sat down and extended my hand to, Dina, the woman handling our “account”. She looked at my hand, and then at me as if I were crazy. Being vaguely familiar with Jewish law, I said in Hebrew, “Shomer Nagilia?”, referring to the Jewish law that forbids unmarried Jewish women from making physical contact with men. The look on her face did not change. I proceeded to agree to what amounted to a series of threats, handed over the outrageous amount of money I had managed to collect from the gang awaiting my return back at Beadel Street and signed the lease before scurrying out hoping to never hear from them again.
When March finally came around we ecstatically packed our things, said a tearful goodbye to Grace and Wally, and headed for our new home.
V
We had big plans for the loft. Max and Andrew come from a family of art dealers and had lots of obscure antiques, paintings, chesterfield couches, and a six hundred pound cement table. They were supposed to decorate the place. I was going to build out a small room off a pillar that came down through the loft as a recording studio. And Jerry was going to build a floor to ceiling water fall and bring in full size palm trees from his shop. He claimed to have a museum quality toy collection he was going to mount on one of the bare walls. He told us he also had several other collections of records, instruments, and snow boards at Emily’s mother house in Rockland county, all of which we “needed” for the loft. Jerry had succeeded in some way with his late calls to Emily, they were talking again and had restored their own kind of civility to the relationship.
One night, Jerry borrowed the van from Karen at The King and I, and me, Jerry, and Emily headed up to Rockland. Jerry was driving, Emily was in the front seat, and I was rattling around in the open back without seats. On the way Emily and Jerry were discussing whose stuff is who’s and who is owed what. They had been together for four years and had allowed their lives to sufficiently meld together making this process difficult but necessary. Somehow Jerry came to the conclusion that Emily’s mom owed him six hundred dollars.
We got to Emily’s mother’s house around ten pm. It felt strange to be out of the city. I hadn’t seen the bouncing headlights reflect off a house for long enough that I noticed ours as we turned into the driveway. No one was home when we opened the side door of the house. Three cats scrambled as we entered. We went upstairs where Jerry started unplugging televisions and video game systems while sorting through CDs. We brought the first load out to the van. We re-entered the same side door and turned immediately into the garage to the left were Jerry’s record collection and toys were. Jerry was saying most of his good records were missing and he and Emily screamed back and forth about it as we carried crates of records out, Jerry accusing Emily’s mother of hand selecting his finest vinyl, and selling them.
We went into the living room when we re entered the house the third time. Jerry was very pleased when he saw the couch he had described to me on the ride up. “It’s this huge orange wrap around couch from the seventies. Vintage”, he had said. He was right, it was huge, it was orange, and it was vintage. He smiled at Emily as he told her we would be taking the couch in exchange for money owed and missing records. We carefully carried the couch out the front door one section at a time until the van was full and the house was empty. Emily must have had some issues with her mother because she not only let us take the couch, but she helped, and laughed the whole time. I had somewhere to sit now in the back of the van as we headed for the city in hysterics.
VI
The couch fit perfectly in the corner of the loft that had the window, and it took all four of us to slide the cement table over, a good fit. We had started storing the things we were not sure what to do with in the corner opposite the couch and table as there were no closets in the loft. Joyce would come over and say, “That fucking pile is going to stay like that for six months.” Offended, we reassured her not only would the pile be sorted through, but the waterfalls would be up and running within two weeks.
Six months later the pile was a twelve foot stack of furniture, bags of clothes, garbage, sports equipment, amps, jackets, and boxes of junk none of us dared identify as our own. Our lifestyle had taken priority. There were beer cans everywhere, overflowing ashtrays, shoes, magazines, and records spread out over the shrinking space.
The loft was tough to keep clean because of a few unique characteristics. First, the flooring was just plywood meant to be covered by had wood floors that never got installed. Because there was only one window, it was always dark even during the day and no air circulated through, and we had only a few antique lamps to light the place. A constant sprinkle fell from the rafters above and would settle as a layer of dust over everything. The place was earning a distinct smell. The dingy nature of the loft attracted certain types as a place were they could come smoke their cigarettes and maybe get a free beer and some weed, sit around cracking jokes and play video games.
Two very different, very important characters stepped on the scene at the six month mark that would drastically change the course of history in the loft. Lyon Porter, one of our friends from Cleveland arrived in June to begin an internship at a big real-estate firm and live with us for the summer. Lyon was a college hockey player. When he arrived, needless to say, he was in a different mind frame then the rest of us. He had no intention of living in such filth and insisted we shape up and, “get rid of that fucking pile of shit.” At first we took offense to this outsider taking charge, but soon realized he was right. We dragged our asses up from the couch and started cleaning. At almost the same time, we noticed a complete stranger had started sleeping on one of the couches.
People slept over a lot. Sometimes there would be four or five bodies around when I would come out of my room in the morning. Once after a party, I stood at the top of the stairs and counted 24 people sleeping around, beside, and on top of one another. We had eight couches and an open door policy, but this stranger had been around for almost a week, it was clear he was living with us. We thought we might try to speak to him.
His name was Jared. Jerry claimed to have known him from some time he spent in Colorado, but we all thought they just met out at a bar and Jerry invited him to live with us out of pure goodness and stupidity. Jared was about the same age as Jerry, 33, and told us he had an ex-wife and child back in Colorado. His charm was contrived but apparent. He slept every night on the vintage couch we had so smoothly heisted, and didn’t usually rise until about 2 p.m. He and Jerry were on a rampage of sorts, going out every night and bringing back strange women in the early morning. This was not uncommon for Jerry. We had a few experiences back at Beadel with Jerry’s loose taste in women, or, taste in loose women more accurately. Once, on Beadel, one of Jerry’s girls was dancing around the living room entertaining us all, kneeling on a chair facing her and rocking back and forth he ripped the leather cover of the chair straight off out of excitement. As I said, Jerry was a big man, but he had lost a lot of weight now in a short time while hanging out with Jared. He called Karen with excuses as to why he couldn’t make it to work several times a week. He looked like shit, a bit of a skeleton of himself. We speculated it was coke, but we never saw them actually doing any in the house.
Jared and Jerry started several new bands and would have various members dropping by to jam. One of my favorites was John. John was so drunk when he came over that he would reintroduce himself every time he arrived at the door. But he had a great disposition and could absolutely shred on a guitar. He acted like Jimmy Hendrix from old interviews I have seen with him. He never actually said anything, just mumbled.
One day Jerry told us Karen fired him. It sounded official this time as he said he would not go back to ask forgiveness yet again. As he spoke there was a hint of shame in his voice but also disregard and distance. Jerry and Jared continued on there various missions around the city. Jared didn’t have a bike so he took it upon himself to borrow Lyons expensive mountain bike that hung suspended from the ceiling by the entrance to the loft when it wasn’t in use. When Lyon found out about this he about pounded Jared into that couch he slept on. Being held back, Lyon told Jared he was a freeloading addict piece of shit, and warned the rest of us to, “look out for this asshole”.
Around the same time I was receiving phone calls from our not so friendly landlords letting me know that each month one of the four roommates was not paying rent. Mine was the only name on the lease, and though they knew I had others living in there, they couldn’t have imagined what exactly we had going on. To them the roommates were just names on checks and in their records only initials were written down.
When I got the call back from Dina, the missing rent was from J. F. I wasn’t really sure how Jerry was supporting himself since he had lost his job. He certainly wasn’t looking for a new one. He was just always drinking, always smoking, losing weight steadily, and working on several different projects around the loft. One of the things we had acquired in our trip up to Rockland was a life sized manikin Jerry started some years before made completely of computer parts. With his new found free time, he decided to finish. The manikin stood six feet tall. It was a woman according to Jerry. Most of the body up to the torso was already covered with microchips and wires. Jerry would apply the oozing glue and then simply stick pieces of the insides of a computer on, fitting them together like a mosaic. For supplies Jerry would scower the streets of our neighborhood looking for computer monitors. His supplies were taking up much of the available space of the loft as he neared completion.
The arms and legs were done when Jerry found a pair of knee high leather woman’s boots for her feet. All he needed was a head. Jerry told us he had brokered a deal with some bar downtown that was going to show this woman thing along with several other of Jerry’s pieces when he finished. He thought appropriate finishing touch would be a huge horn coming out of the neck that was to hold a small flashlight meant to then shine down into a martini glass she was holding that would refract the light around the room. Ambitious. As jerry started constructing the horn out of duct tape the weight became so great that every time he let go of his creation she would fall forward and crash to the ground. Construction halted.
VII
It was Joyce’s birthday. Joyce had pretty much stopped coming to the loft all together, but came by the day Jerry and Jared decided to give her for her birthday, a brand new Gucci hand bag. Sound a bit odd to you? Well, it did to us. When I got home later Max said, “Did you see what Jerry got Joyce for her birthday?” with a confused look on his face. It was a possibility in our minds that this was just a nice gesture by Jerry, but then Joyce found a license in an inner pocket of the bag.
Joyce called the woman whose license it was and told her how it had come about that she now had her license and Gucci hand bag. The woman on the other line didn’t know how to react at first, but soon went into a story about how she was robbed two days earlier. The two made plans to meet for dinner so Joyce could return the purse and the woman could thank her and explain the story in full. She told Joyce a man on a bike had rode past her and yanked he purse right of her shoulder while another man rode just behind him.
That was it for Jerry. He was pretty much out of control; out of work, robbing old women, dismantling computer monitors, and he hadn’t paid rent in two months. I was the only one not totally disgusted with Jerry. In my mind he could do no wrong. He was just a little fucked up. He had earned my unconditional friendship and I knew it was Jared who had actually done the purse snatching anyways. I don’t know if Max was actually pissed at Jerry or if he just had to act like he was for Joyce. Drew agreed that Jerry should go. Jerry knew it was coming, and I could tell it made him sad to leave. In some ways we were the best thing for him, and leaving us was just another step in the wrong direction. Jared and Jerry both moved out, but not before Jared could steal my hair clippers…asshole.
VIII
Darren moved in.
We had started throwing parties and actually were making money doing it. By the simple fact that we hadn’t returned to Cleveland with our tales between our legs as some might have expected, we had earned a reputation there. I don’t know if it was our perceived success in New York or if our friends had a genuine desire to live here, but they started arriving in droves. After Darren, our friend Bradford arrived after traveling Europe and was temporarily living with us. Gregg moved down from Massachusetts as soon as he finished school and got and apartment right down the street. Verne tried living in Hawaii, but his girlfriend was driving him crazy so he broke it off and was now staying with us too.
Casper arrived. A unit in our building opened up on the third floor, four of the Clevelanders moved up there. Another unit on the top floor became available, and four more took it. We now had three lofts in the building and had essentially reconstructed our childhood and high-school gang, but now in Brooklyn, some kind of post graduate psychedelic dormitory living. Also now in New York; Nora (who stayed with us for two months), Sarah (actually was here before us), Ray, Andrew, and Kelly lived together in Astoria, Aaron and a different Sarah lived in Park Slope, and there are more I am forgetting. All together there were about thirty of us. Having all of your childhood friends reunited in adulthood is both amazing and completely hindering. It is comfortable and satisfying, but I pretty much don’t talk to anyone else and have no desire to spark new friendships.
Most of the migrants waited tables here or there, but were really living to come home to the crew and have fun. Our loft was home base. Every time I walked through the door I could expect at least five people hanging out on the couches drinking, smoking, and laughing usually while both the radio and TV played. The walls of the loft were paper thin. I was convinced the noise from downstairs was actually magnified as it carried through my closed bedroom door. The mess and the fun persisted.
IX
I would periodically run into Jerry around the East Village. We were genuinely happy to see one another. He told me he was living in an art commune on St. Marks and that he didn’t talk to Jared anymore. I continued to have coincidental run-ins with Jerry every few weeks. I even saw crazy John a few times, though he didn’t remember me. But then a period of about four months passed when I didn’t see Jerry. One day Max came bursting into the loft with a copy of the New York Post, he handed it to me and told me to read.
A huge one page photograph of Jerry was on the fifth page. He was grinning wide wearing a straw hat and a dress with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand. The Headline covering part of the photo read, “Art Guru says, ‘We’re taking SoHo back’”. The caption credited Jerry with starting an art collective on Greene Street and quotes him as saying they were taking the neighborhood back from the capitalists. Art guru, Jerry? The same Jerry that sat around with us playing his bass sloppily. The same Jerry I had never seen pick up a paint brush.
The next day I went to Greene Street to check it out for myself. Jerry was ecstatic about the article. He had gained some weight back, and besides the fact that he now wore women’s clothes, he seemed well. The space was pretty unbelievable. It was even larger then our loft and completely covered in art. Huge paintings went floor to ceiling. There was a small stage and sound system, and a huge machine gun sat in the middle of the room.
Jerry told me he has befriended the elderly woman who owned the building and she let him move in under the condition that he would fix it up. The old woman lived on the sixth floor and hadn’t come down in years. He had told the reporter from the post she was his mom.
The place did need fixing, but Jerry seemed less concerned with that as he climbed a ladder to finish his towering canvas. As he climbed someone leaned over to me and said, “Isn’t he an amazing artist.” I couldn’t help but laugh, Jerry had reinvented himself as some genius artist, little did these fools know, it was probably the first painting he had ever done. But, I gave Jerry credit. It was an exciting atmosphere and I liked the prospect of being “in” there.
Jerry was living in his gallery/studio/dump, and was permitting several of his cronies to crash there too, paint, and get high all day. One of them was this African man whose name I can’t remember. Come to think of it, I never knew his name. He was building a shrine to the aliens that were coming, some already lived amongst us according to him, and as I showed he and Jerry photographs of paintings I completed he added them to the shrine and told me they would help our cause. I pride myself on my ability to consider all things possible and was actually engaging in conversation with this man as Jerry told me from the background that he was a prophet.
I visited Jerry’s colony as often as I could, they had a lot of good shows there, and it was always interesting. One day when I arrived a wild bunch were sitting around the makeshift living room drawing and reshaping rabbit ears for a clearer signal to outer space. Jerry insisted that I paint something and shuffled me over to the other end of the gallery and set me up with a brush and paint. As I worked, I saw fumbling and unfolding from the corner were everyone was, and concluded they were getting high, really high. I certainly didn’t care and was more offended I wasn’t invited to join than anything. I finished my painting and left.
X
Back at the loft, things were pretty much out of control. Being the responsible one was taking its toll especially considering it was the first time in my life I was assigned the role. I would pay bills and spend the remainder of the month asking for the money in my passive aggressive way. I was getting phone calls from the management company about unpaid rent with threats of fines and worse. I had pretty much put myself in a spot where I accepted all risks, and it was getting old. I said I was out come March just before we got an eviction notice. It is hard to get evicted from an illegally rented warehouse but we had managed to do it. The fact shocked us considering we constantly heard neighbors and people who used to live in the building say they went months without paying and often never settled old debts when they moved out without as much as a phone call from the managers. But we had clearly earned the eviction. Between the parties attracting Brooklyn’s finest vandals and the rotating list of names on rent checks they knew we were up to no good. We moved out March first. I should say, I moved out March 1st, everyone else stayed, Drew moved upstairs and Max and Darren held strong, staying in the loft and hoping no one would arrive with a truck full of things ready to move in. They survived a month like that then left. When I did return to offer the new residents my key to the front door, they looked at me like I was a total ass. We had left the place a bit of a mess, and as I spoke with the girl at the door I could see her friends standing behind her, eyeing me with mops and paint brushes in there hands. It appeared they too had big plans for the loft. I wished them luck and left not feeling too bad, it certainly was a nice gesture by me.
I was still going to Jerry’s every couple weeks to check on their progress there. The exhibits (if that’s what you want to call them) changed constantly. Where the machine gun had been now stood an enormous pink vagina you could walk into. I was wanting to do a show of my own work and had been sort of harassing Jerry about the possibility. I stopped by a lot over the course of one month, but Jerry was increasingly difficult to locate. He didn’t have a cell phone and I was constantly leaving messages with people I knew were not going to relay them. I would say, ”Tell Jerry, FISH, stopped by”, trying to emphasize my name in an effort to show that he would care.
One evening I stopped in and announced myself as usual to a bunch of blank but friendly stares. Jerry’s girlfriend came out from the little bedroom they had constructed. I had met her before. Jerry always had a knack for landing beautiful women despite his shortcomings; she was possibly his most beautiful. She was wasted on dope (the type that starts with an “h”). She shook my hand and told me, “Jerry isn’t feeling well”. My insides told me to just burst into the bedroom and jump on the bed with Jerry. I didn’t care if he wasn’t feeling well and I didn’t care if he was wasted. Our friendship was deeper then that. But I didn’t. He had obviously told her he didn’t want to see me. I had become a nuisance, an unwanted presence in his life. He chose drugs. Me and the girl came to an agreement we would meet back there the next day at seven to talk, but in my heart I knew I would not return…ever.
THE END

ODE TO SUROYAN

2007-01-09T11:36:00.000-08:00

AARDVARKS

2007-01-08T13:42:00.000-08:00

I have always been disgusted by rats
This is not an uncommon condition for a person

I thought of rats as the disease
Not susceptible to it

But then I saw a rat with an inflamed asshole and thought
There must be something wrong with that rat
It must have a disease

I am not disgusted with aardvarks
Why rats?
Rats are just little aardvarks

Then two very playful rats chased one another through a puddle
Bounding and leaping like Aardvarks

Then I wrote this poem
probably cutting short my enjoyment
of the whole thing

DAVE THE TURTLE

2007-01-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

Max gave Dave the Turtle to Allison for her birthday

When Allison and I broke up
She handed him to me in his little plastic cage with a green top
The one she had made him move back into
After I built him a big beautiful cage
That the cats wouldn’t leave alone

She said
“Here. Take him. I never want to see him again.”

I thought,
Does she mean she never wants to me see again, or Dave?
I left
and when I got to the stares I looked at Dave in his little plastic cage and laughed
then I thought,
I must be an asshole for laughing right now

But I quickly forgave myself
Because I know it’s just a defense mechanism

Dave’s life at my apartment is something like this
He sits in a Tupperware container on a table by the window
It is a lame replica of his big cage from Allison’s
If I open the shades the right way he gets some sunlight
But I often put him on the sill
And open the window for fresh air

When I am not home Dave sits in his Tupperware for days
In darkness
I arrive home, turn on the lights, and pick up his container
making the water slush around

It is an attempt to be kind
and stimulate his environment
But it always comes out wrong, almost violent, because I move too fast compensating for the fact that I haven’t been home in days.

Dave has made several suicide attempts
I put him on Allison’s bed once
And forgot he was there
When I remembered, we ran into the room and he was on the ground under the dresser

Since then, several jumps have occurred

I went to the train to meet Billy forgetting Dave was on my coffee table
We looked everywhere for him
He was under the couch
He usually goes to a dark spot
I said to Billy,
"He's in a dark place"
we laughed

He actually got out of his Tupperware under his own power once

I was typing
I heard something by the window

Half an hour later
I walked over to see Dave, and he wasn’t in his container
He was under the radiator
Below the sill

Dave constantly tries to escape
But that was the only time he made it out under his own power
And I can’t figure how he did it

Sometimes I worry he is trying to drown himself

Every few days I put him in the bathtub
And run the water
Hoping he will like the sound of the running water
But he just sits there
Under his shell
So its hard for me to tell if he likes it

There is a pond in Prospect Park
Just outside my home
I plan to set Dave free there this spring

THE DUNK

2007-01-08T13:21:00.000-08:00

There were basketball courts outside our locker room
We would play before practice and games
I always thought it was crazy and we were wasting our energy

one day, we were playing 3 on 3
About three-quarters speed

We had played a lot over the summer

It was just an average day
Another practice or game

I don’t know what the score was
And I don’t even know who exactly was on what team

Joe McBride passed Dan Reineke the ball
At the free-throw line

Dan was in motion already
He took the pass
And dribbled the ball once
Streaking to the hoop

He took a final step
And leapt

Everyone else one the court seemed still

He held the ball with two hands
Brought it from behind his head
And slammed it
Hard down through the hoop

The air in the gym felt vacuumed out for a moment
I walked off the court
The game was over

I don’t think anyone was more surprised then Dan
We had played hundreds of games
None of us had ever slam dunked the ball

Some guys on the team could dunk
But they would just throw ally-oops
This was a game

Reineke lived the dream that day
The dream every man who has ever played a sport has had
For the muscles of the leg to explode in a way sending you higher
than you have ever been before
above the rim

it happened
without announcement
on an average day before another practice or game
it turns out
we weren’t wasting our energy at all

PROBLEMS OF THE BIPED

2007-01-08T13:16:00.000-08:00

I slept on a couch
And in the morning woke in a panic
And promised to sleep in my own bed that night
And to go into a hermit state
For 10 years
For strength

But by nightfall
I am lonely again, restless
So I come back to the couch
To be with people
Because I am less sick with them than I am with myself

“I’ll just sleep here”, I cry.
With a hint of shame.
“Do you have a blanket?”

I must be an addict
And I believe I am developing a back problem

They say man began walking on his hind legs too soon
Forcing us to shuffle unnatural
Sleepers on couches
Whose place is this?

I need to be crushed on all sides
To satisfy my claustrophobia
Family

MY BIRTHDAY; A RESPONSE TO ALEX HALEY'S MALCOLM X

2007-01-05T14:06:00.000-08:00

It is January 2nd, also known as my birthday. I am 27 years old today.
January 2nd is possibly the worst birthday. I do not say this with even a hint of self pity, it’s just true. It is a forgotten day. At best, it is the official start of the New Year, people go back to work. Growing up it was often the day we returned to school from winter vacation. At worst, it is an utterly depressing day to hopefully be lived quickly and forgotten and added to the list of days in the category. But it is certainly not an eventful day, the opposite. People aren’t really ready to acknowledge any day as special until about half-way through the month.

I returned home yesterday, January 1st, around seven pm in a taxi. It was dark and I wasn’t sure if it was morning, evening, or night. I really wasn’t even sure what day it was. I was shaking and drifting in and out of consciousness in the back seat. I told the driver I would pay him forty dollars if he helped me carry my things into my apartment. My things consisted of two turntables, two speakers, two speaker stands, three bags of records, and a bag for a mixing board and all the cords.
I had DJed a rather large new years eve celebration in a 5,ooo sq. foot loft on Gansevort Road and Washington Street. I had been up until 10 am on the 1st, slept four hours, then returned to the loft to pick up the sound system.
The loft was covered in plastic cups, bottles, and forgotten articles of clothing up to about knee level. I helped others pick up garbage as we took shots of tequila from an unopened bottle we recovered from the stage area. We smoked four or five blunts.
Because it was New Years day I was having a great deal of trouble getting a cab (I guess some people do things besides recover on the holiday). I asked one cab to pull around, I had some things to load up, and then I had to go to Brooklyn. He looked at me like I was crazy and sped off. I called car services for two hours getting busy signals as we drank and smoked and laughed, talking about how crazy the party had been. I finally got a car.
I got home and fell into bed moaning for breathe. I slept until today, January second, my 27th birthday. The reason I was so tired, even unable to carry my own things into my apartment, was that I had exerted an amazing amount of physical energy during the party. What had allowed me to do this was just having read the Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Before the party I sat and thought about Malcolm before a public speech. He was such a strong man, a sure man, and when he did things he did them wholly. Earlier in the day I had told friends I was going single handedly rock the party with my energy, and then retire and never DJ again. I was sure of this because of the book.
I have done embarrassingly little reading in the first 26 years of my life, but lately I have been tearing through entire books in only a few days. I feel almost as though I am racing to their ends. As I read and complete these books I cherish the words often stopping after a particularly touching line to let it wash over me. I can feel the words not only becoming part of my thinking, but part of my personality and spirit. The books make me better, thicker.
Usually when I DJ I am effected by who is there and what they think of me. I simply no longer cared about those things after reading Malcolm’s story. I was going to let my light shine bright right in the face of all the 500 people coming to the party no matter what happened.
The clothing I wore looked something like pajamas from 3030. I wore a pair of leopard print hammer pants and an oversized orange t-shirt with new all white Fila shoes and my longish curly hair (not optional). I was on a stage where the turntables were set up, and there was another platform the same height as the stage just in front of them. I was playing records, wildly dancing, sometimes walking around to the front of the stage to overlook the crowd as I addressed them with the microphone, “Are you mother fuckers ready to have some fun?”, the noise in the room would raise to a fever pitch as I ran back behind the turntables to play another tune. I did this for hours; sweating and dancing, screaming and mixing, drinking and hugging until I had fulfilled my promise to unleash.
When I awoke today, my 27th birthday, from 15 hours of sleep, I picked up Malcolm X and read the final pages, though, which I have led you to believe I had read already, I hadn’t. I had thirty pages left, and to be completely honest, I still haven’t read the epilogue (but that doesn’t effect the powers it gave me).
In these last thirty pages Malcolm returns to the United States from his first trip to the Middle-East and Africa when he reformed his thinking some what. If Malcolm had a flaw, and he admittedly had many as the humble last line of the book illuminates, “Only the mistakes have been mine”, it is that he lacked even an ounce of skepticism. He lived and preached what he believed to be true until he had an experience powerful enough to alter that course, even if it was completely contradictory to his prior notions. People saw him as powerful because he didn’t doubt. From when he grew up hustling to his education in prison, to his rise with Nation of Islam and his eventual split with them, he was exceptional in his commitment.
The next thing I did this morning was send the promoter of the party that had hired me a text message saying, “I’m retired”. If I learned anything from Malcolm X it is this. A great man need only see once what he ought to do before he starts doing it.

THE BALFOUR DECLARATION; WHAT THE FUCK

2006-12-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

George Orwell once wrote a great essay explaining how political language is meant to confuse instead of communicate, that the very point of political jargon is to say nothing at all. This is true, but more important to mention is that this political language does a great deal to destroy actual human beings lives. November 2nd, 1917, one hundred and twenty five such words were written. One hundred and twenty five of the most contradictory, controversial, extraordinarily fucking vague words ever recorded. These one hundred and twenty five words mark the official launching of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict thirty years before the state of Israel even existed, and made promises both might, logic, money, and some would say ‘the hands of g-d’ would eventually prevent. In the end, the one hundred and twenty five words known as The Balfour Declaration served only to spark a bloody raging debate. The declaration reads…

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of his majesty’s government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which had been submitted to, and approved by, the cabinet.
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use there best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities, in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours Sincerely,
Arthur James Balfour

I won’t even begin talking about the paragraph long sentences and antiquated grammar in the document though it should be noted. The glaring fallacy lies in the middle paragraph were it is stated that that The British Government is both in favor of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and that this process must not disrupt the current composition of the area, a mostly Arab speaking area at the time. Did these assholes not realize the conflicting interests involved?
The letter was written from Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild. Balfour was the former Prime Minister of Great Britain and was still an active statesman whatever the hell that means. Walter Rothschild was a scientist, mostly a zoologist and insect taxidermist, who had been helping write various draft proposals for the Jewish homeland in Palestine. He was accepted into the upper circles of British Government pretty much because he was a rich kid, and was a close friend of Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann was also a scientist and had a unique relationship with Balfour after inventing a solvent acetone from a chestnut that helped the British blow shit up during World War I. Weizmann was single handedly conducting negotiations with the British for a Jewish homeland in Palestine under instruction from various Zionist leaders.
The idea of Zionism is simply that the Jewish people deserve a homeland where they can, and should, live freely. The growing popularity of the movement was a timely reaction to treatment of Jews around the world growing increasingly shitty. Several different locations were discussed and nearly agreed upon as a homeland for the Jews including a section of Argentina, and what is now Kenya. But in reforming and solidifying their plans, Zionists began thinking of Palestine as the only suitable option.
David Lloyd George was the prime minister of Great Britain at the time the Balfour Declaration was issued. George sympathized with the Zionist cause, but because he was a shit talking politician, and white, he was not honest in his dealings with them. Neither George nor any other British official involved in the negotiations told Weizmann and the Zionists about an agreement struck only one year earlier in 1916 between the British, French, and Russians.
The Ottoman Empire was crumbling but they still had claim and control over almost the entire Middle-East. In anticipation of the end of World War One and simultaneous dissolve of the Ottoman Empire, British Sir Mark Sykes, and French, Charles George-Picot, made an agreement dividing up the region the Ottomans controlled amongst several European nations and Russia, while giving some measure of rule to the Arabs. Some of the land was to fall under “international rule”. The agreement had been accepted on all sides. Nowhere in the Sykes-Picot agreement did it mention a homeland for the Jewish people, and as Weizmann and others conducted negotiations, they had no idea the previous arrangements existed. The British were acting like real assholes as we haVe come to expect from them.
In 1919, included in the Treaty of Versailles was a system for stable nations to rule over those less stable ones in their transition to independence. This was known as the mandate system. The mandates really just gave power to already prosperous nations to manipulate and exploit any areas given to them. In 1920 at the San Remo conference, Great Britain was given the mandate over Palestine, an area they had already made conflicting plans for. The mandates led to the thoughtless creation of false borders that either intentionally or unintentionally fragmented the region. The image everyone has in their head of seven to ten old fat white dudes standing around a table with a bunch of maps on it drinking and drawing lines that stood for new borders is probably frighteningly accurate. By now the seeds of anti-western sentiment were blossoming as people of the region were forced to live under foreign rule. I guess that’s how it works. Let’s get back to the Balfour disaster. Amazingly, when the Balfour Declaration was issued it was, in principle, smiled on by the Arabs… or at least one Arab. Emir Faisal was arguably the most visible and influential character in the middle east, 1917. He was the son of the Sherif of Mecca and eventual King of Iraq come 1921. Upon finding out about the Balfour Declaration, he wrote Weizmann what would become known as the, Emir Feisal/Chaim Weizmann Agreement, January 3rd, 1919.

“His royal Highness the Emir Feisal, representing and acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz, and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, representing and acting on behalf of the Zionist Organization, mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people…have agreed upon the following articles.”

The agreement goes on to outline how Jews and Arabs will work together to meet their national aspirations. Feisal then wrote to Felix Frankfurter, an American Zionist, on March 3rd, 1919.

“Dear Mr. Frankfurter:
I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I have often been able to say to say to Dr. Weizmann in Arabia and Europe.
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race, having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their nationalist ideals together. We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist Movement…”

Within the actual land of Palestine, 1917, word of the Balfour Declaration had not yet arrived. The British knew it would put there troops there in heightened danger and took measures to assure Arabs living in Palestine did not find out about the document.
As for the Jews, if the Balfour declaration did anything at all, it motivated those living in the fucked up Ghettos of Russia and Eastern Europe to start moving to Palestine in massive numbers. A large part of the Zionist plan was to get poorer Jews to Palestine to begin cultivating the land and developing an economic infrastructure for Jewish society. Jews began arriving by the thousands. These mass migrations obviously did not go unnoticed by Palestinian Arabs, and by the time they found out about the Balfour Declaration in 1920 they rioted against both Jews and British military. Only a few short years after the declaration was issued, Emir Feisal said he had no recollection of ever writing any letters in support of the Zionist movement, and it was becoming abundantly clear the Balfour Declaration was going to be impossible to realize.
Jews continued to flood into Palestine in two more distinct waves until the Jewish population made up nearly one third of Palestine. Tension between Jews and Arabs worsened and strong anti-Jewish propaganda circulated through the Arab community. There were more riots in 1929. The British were forced to choose a side in response to the growing problem in Palestine. They issued a series of revisions and proclamations called, The White Papers, once in 1922 and again in ’39 completely negating any promises made to the Jews in the Balfour Declaration as it had been so left open for interpretation. The 1922 white papers attempt to smooth out the Palestinian problem using the same double speak language that appeared in The Balfour Declaration, though a hint of bias is detectable in favor of the Arabs. The 1922 White Paper reads…

“…The tension which has prevailed from time to time in Palestine is mainly due to apprehensions, which are entertained by both by sections of the Arab and by sections of the Jewish populations. These apprehensions so far as the Arabs are concerned, are partly based upon exaggerated interpretations of the meaning of the declaration favouring the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, made on behalf of His Majesty’s Government on 2nd November, 1917.
…This then is the interpretation which His Majesty’s Government place upon the declaration of 1917, and, so understood, The Secretary of State is of opinion that it does not contain or imply anything which need cause either alarm to the Arab population of Palestine or disappointment to the Jews.”

But the papers did cause both alarm and disappointment as they go on to outline how the numbers of Jews that are to be accepted into the region will be reduced each year, but also that, “…the existence of a Jewish homeland in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed”. Again, the British had contradicted themselves and were acting like asses. The tension in the area worsened until 1939 when they issued the decisive second White Paper.

“…with the royal commission, His Majesty’s Government believe that the framers of the mandate in which the Balfour Declaration was embodied could not have intended that Palestine should be converted into a Jewish State against the will of the Arab population of the country… His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.”

The papers go on to say that all Jewish migration into Palestine must cease immediately. The Jews were fucking pissed as shock and disbelief ran through the Zionist movement and Jewish communities, but it was too late for the British to make such a bold claim. Over 100,000 Jews were living in Palestine. They were responsible for much of the economic activity there, they had pseudo governments in place, and had laid the foundation for a “Jewish nation” that was essentially already functioning. And, they had organized a proficient underground military, The Hagana, that would play a crucial role in the near future.
Eight years after Britain “unequivocally” stated that Palestine should not become a Jewish state, and not long after a devastating World War Two, The Hagana and other Jewish military groups bombed, or terrorized, the last British military presence out of Palestine. The following day in 1947, Israel claimed independence. The day after that, the five Arab armies surrounding Israel declared war on them. In what Jews call a miracle, and Arabs call literally, “the disaster”, Israeli forces fended of the Arab armies and in the process won all of the land that had been allotted for “a Palestine”, and, “an Israel”, under the past British Mandate lines.
The British mandate was over. The Balfour Declaration in all its revisions and interpretations was effectively dead. The Jewish state of Israel existed, and the two remaining parties of the land, Arabs and Jews, were left to fight out problems that had only grown more heated and complex. Still now in 2007 the killing and suffering continues because politicians want to talk shit and they don’t actually care about the people there policies effect. There are countless examples of how this has torn humanity down and turned us against one another. In the case of the Israeli/Palestinian it started from one hundred and twenty five words written from a rich white ex-prime minister to some other rich white dude who was into stuffing insects Nov. 2nd, 1917, and they were probably both drunk.
A couple of years ago a great documentary called, “Fog of War”, was released about Robert McNamara’s life as Secretary of Defense and his honest evaluation that most wars are fought out of, and in, confusion. If you are cool enough to be reading this, you have probably seen it. The Balfour Declaration is yet another example of how confusion induced by simple lack of clarity, or fog, literally claims lives. Two separate groups of people, both addressed in the same document, began acting on what they believed was promised them in that document. But because of the dual language used in the Declaration, it proved a collision course. Somehow it appears that as history unfolds, it is doing so in constant utter mistake, allowing us to see clear only in hind sight that what we have done…is wrong.

The End

WOMEN

2006-12-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

I just read Charles Bukowski’s, Women, and really got into it. Maybe a little too much.
My friend, Mike, brought it over as part of a care package for me after I broke up with my girlfriend of two and a half years. He said it wasn’t as much a remedy or advice as it was a distraction, and just good. He also brought popcorn, ramen noodles, Honey Bunches of Oats, and a gallon of milk, probably what amounted to extras from his place. Bukowski would have said, “Where’s the booze?”
It took me about a week to read the two hundred and ninety pages of, Women. I started it on a Sunday. By Monday night felt a curious thing happening, I was thinking like Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s reoccurring fictionalized demented self. I was only fifty pages into the novel.
I made a cup of coffee at home and thought only, I made coffee. I went to the bathroom and thought to myself, I took a shit. My actions were nothing more than words on a page. I was measuring passages of time in units of consumption and thinking of people in terms of the mediocre projects they spend their time completing.
When I wasn’t reading I was trying my best to get over the break-up. Things weren’t quite as I imagined them to be when I used to fantasize about being single. I wasn’t being followed around by a harem of women. I didn’t feel particularly good, or even okay. In the book, Bukowski says a person can expect this six or eight times in their lifetime. I can’t handle too many more. I felt sick. I missed her, and the only thing I really cared to do is read.
By Tuesday night I was on page one twenty five. Three a.m. Wednesday night, I was sitting at the end of a bar not talking, thinking plain and cruelly honest thoughts and feeling great about it. I sat and wrote the summary of my night.

9/29
The contract ran out.
To be honest with you,
very few people impress me.
And that’s how I want it.
Nothing is cool anymore.

I sat and glared and relaxed and thought, I don’t like talking to people about things, their words become my thoughts too easily. But that’s exactly what had happened. I was Henry Chinaski.
I had a fifteen page, “learning assessment”, due for a prior learning workshop I am taking in which I had to prove the painting education I have provided myself is the equivalent to that of two college courses. It is supposed to resemble a research paper. I wrote it as a short story and am sure mine is the only portfolio containing the word, “shit”, anyone will be handing in for the class. Fuck ‘em. What would Chinaski do?
I read on not caring what kind of damage my morality must suffer; I was being driven forward by a sense of similarity between us. Bukowski had opinions. He hated mediocrity. On page one seven six, Bukowski talks about his bad spelling and contempt for grammar. He says the worst thing a writer could do is to know another writer. I agreed sitting back thinking, Man, Fuck my writing class. They have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m gonna drop out of school. Me and Bukowski, we really got it man. We share the same beautiful mad philosophy. Me and Bukowski, we suffer together.
By Friday I was all the way gone. I had to know what he looked like. I got to page two hundred and looked in the back cover for his picture. He had described himself as a two hundred and twenty five pound aging alcoholic. Mike had described him as looking, “simian”. He didn't look so bad to me.
I got to page two hundred and thirty where Bukowski says the most time you can hope for in a good relationship is two and a half years; my stomach wrenched to its tightest notch. Goodbye Allison.
Page two fifty. Chinaski has his big breakdown; he is naked and crying at Sarah’s house waiting for her to arrive home to tell her he has to break their Thanksgiving plans because his belly dancer from Vancouver was coming down to see him. Chinaski finally realizes himself. What had I done? I threw away the only love I ever had to join the ranks of Henry Chinaski, a miserable drunk old bastard. I knew people like Henry Chinaski, and I didn’t like them. He probably wouldn’t like me either. I am far too happy and good-looking for him to ever accept me into his drunk world. I like people and dancing, and even being sober sometimes. So Chinaski and Fish are not long-lost soul brothers reunited by this three hundred page ramble full of sex and drugs and unrealistically easy relationships.
There was nothing left to do but finish the book which just sort of just ended as opposed to concluded. I read the final chapter and closed the back cover. I ran one hand over the book while holding its weight in the other. I flipped back through, reviewing highlights in my mind. I sat the book down on my coffee table and looked up for the first time in hours. I was alone.

The End

24 very short essays

2006-11-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

1. I think about pouring water into mailboxes.
2. When I’m reading the paper or a magazine and a foreign name comes up, say an Asian or Arab name, I skip over it.
3. In the face of silence a stupid man will repeat his favorite jokes, stories, and movie quotes without considering if he has told you them before. Also, he will enjoy the same level of excitement from them each time they are repeated.
4. Even nice pants don’t look good on fat people.
5. Not wearing a seatbelt is okay. Thinking about wearing a seatbelt, and then not doing it, is not.
6. I can tell when people are just repeating something they heard someone else say.
7. It is a Puerto Rican’s instinct to tie his boom box and several Puerto Rican flags to a bike and ride it around a four block radius over and over again.
8. As a piece of conceptual art I checked an empty bag last week when I flew to Detroit. I figured if they asked me what’s in the bag I could just give a blank stair and say, “nothing”.
9. I only wash my hands after going to the bathroom if another person is in there with me.
10. As a child, my mom chose the left side of my head to be the side on witch she would part my hair. I think my natural part side is my right though.
11. I learned everything I know from rap songs.
12. When Max sees a girl he likes he sings a song in his head. He has sung the song for me. It has the words bang-bang, pooper, daddy, and snoochies in it.
13. By the time I was 5 years old, I was using swear words heavily.
14. I have spent my whole life trying to be liked.
15. Wearing under armor in public is not okay.
16. If you just sit on the couch and do nothing at all, Something will still happen.
17. That was not Alicia Silverstone skating the vertical ramp in the video for Free Falling.
18. White people ruined the world.
19. Today we ordered food from several different ethnic restaurants, and judged the overall value of each culture based upon the order witch they arrived. Japanese won. 20. An average high-schooler is more dangerous then an average criminal.
21. I have discovered a fundamental flaw in all movies,
they end.
22. You cannot comprehend my lifestyle.
23. Home is the place you think all places are like, until you realize…they are not.
24. If you don’t have anything mean to say, don’t say anything at all.

Opposite Day

2006-10-31T07:56:00.000-08:00

As a child I noticed my body always seemed to do the opposite of what I wanted it to. In a hot room, I wanted cool down, but only got hotter and began sweating. I was away from home not wanting to use a foreign toilet, my stomach immediately started grumbling
I have heard Rabbis, scholars, and philosophers alike claim the ultimate attempt a person can make is no attempt at all. To be content knowing you are simply a particle floating around bumping into other particles. By conceding you are nothing, you find solace in everything. I believe some refer to this approach as living in the moment.
For Halloween this year I was nothing. Well, nothing in particular. I wore a basketball jersey on which I had altered the lettering, I spray painted some pants gold, and I wore gold chains and a baseball cap. When people asked me what I was, I just said. “You don’t have to be anything for Halloween, you can just dress up in a crazy combination of things, and that’s what you are.”
Out of costume, I definitely want to be something, even something famous. I am ambitious, selfish, and productive. I am eager. I exaggerate. I rush through meals thinking about what I can snack on later. In a few heightened moments I have grasped nothingness, but it does not at all describe my current mind state. If nothingness is the ultimate, then what is fame? I paint, I write, I am anxious. I lye awake in bed with ideas running through my head. I pay bills, I show too much excitement in my voice. I drink. I smoke, and again, my body is doing the opposite of what I want it to. The rapper Common Sense said, “A reality I touch, but for me it’s hard to keep.” about his experience losing his nothingness.
When rabbis, scholars, and philosophers are expounding their ideas on nothingness and life and other things they think about they often reference opposites. Poor and rich. Ritcheous and wicked. Truths and false truths. Opposites seal the spectrum on either end and envelop any point lying between, they are natural and necessary, a soothing thought to me because it at least validates my endless frenzied collection of life. I seem to have found a place in the conversation about all knowing peace of mind, as its opposite.
When my girlfriend’s father asked her what I was for Halloween she described my costume, and he said, “Yeah, but what was he?” So I am wrong. You do have to be something for Halloween, something famous. All the days I should fill with nothingness, I am trying far too hard to be something, and the one day set aside to be something, I was nothing, once again, the opposite.

THE TUNNEL OF DESPAIR AND ENTERTAINMENT

2006-10-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

There is a tunnel that connects the 1, 2, 9 train stop at 14^th street to the 6^th avenue L train stop. I used to walk the tunnel in my commute from Brooklyn to the upper west side and back almost daily. The tunnel is one cross-town block in length. White tile cover the floor, walls, and ceiling. Bright florescent lights illuminate the tiles bringing them to a glow. It feels something like the bellows of a spaceship containing the last people that made it off the earth before it blew up or melted.

I walked the tunnel fast and often enough that it almost feels like pacing. At some point, amidst studying advertisements lining the tile wall and cursing my hours at work, I dubbed it, the Tunnel of Despair and entertainment. The rotating cast of performers, painters, sellers, and sleepers provide the flowing foot traffic with constant entertainment whether they want it or not. The tunnel is often over crowded; the strumming guitar lingers behind me while the saxophone ahead competes for airspace in a melding of sorrowful sounds.

Joseph sits and draws pictures of common cityscapes like above ground trains or the skyline, but the buildings and trains in Joseph’s drawings are almost always under alien attack. He also draws, Run Away Corn, the image of a single stock of corn with a knapsack on a stick thrown over its shoulder. I own several of Joseph’s creations, though Michael says his artistic ability was stunted in fourth grade, I think his drawings are quite nice.

A black man sings songs everyone but he knows, like The Beatles, “I want to hold your hand”. He doesn’t know all the lyrics so he makes up new ones. He shaves half of his head and switches sides once his hair starts to grow out. His fake lyrics have been getting increasingly self righteous lately, and now he is selling small books titled “Jesus is the Answer”, next to his CDs.

Then there is Hambone. Hambone tapes pieces of cardboard over his entire body turning himself into some kind of over worked, deteriorating percussion instrument. He proceeds to pound out unrecognizable rhythms, more random thuds and slaps than music. He stairs strait ahead and does not stop this mechanical ritual for, what I imagine, is hours. He has never not been pounding away at himself in all the times I have seen him in the tunnel. Written across the piece of cardboard covering his chest is, Hambone The Human. Either Hambone didn’t have room on the board for a final defining word to add after human, or he just has a very sharp sense of irony.

I walked the tunnel the other day by chance. I entered nearest the 7^th Ave. end, and in the distance I noticed a man rolling in a wheelchair towards me. Besides a few other commuters the tunnel was uncharacteristically empty. I walked slowly examining the new ads and appreciating being back in the tunnel. Had it really changed so much since I last walked through? Had all the despair and entertainment been drained from it like rain water? Where was Joseph and where was Hambone?

As I got nearer the man in the wheelchair, I realized he was rolling backwards, he had one leg and no one to assist him, so he was moving himself by pushing off with his good leg. I looked to my left a little as I passed so I could see him. His eyes were closed and he had a grin on his face. He was singing “Lucky Star” the Madonna song.

“You must be my lucky star,

Cause you shine on me wherever you are.”

I smiled and walked down the stairs to the L train.

COUPLES

2006-10-17T16:35:00.000-07:00

People use the expression, “you can never go home again”, or, “there is no way home”, and though I understand to the expression and appreciate its sentiment, this essay has nothing to do with it.

I literally cannot get home. I was watching an episode of, Couples, an awful British sitcom at my girlfriend’s apartment. She has season 4 on DVD. The basic premise of the show is the physical manifestation of the most typical stereotypes dealing with men and women in their relationships as played out in obvious scenarios like bar scenes, or lamaz classes. Somewhere weaved into the simple fabric of the particular episode I was watching is the fact that, Patrick, wants to go home after he and his girlfriend, Sally, have sex. Over dark beers Patrick and Bob discuss why all men want to go home after sex. This little anecdote matters mostly to show, if you can remember all the way back to the beginning of this paragraph, I am at my girlfriend’s apartment, not at home.

I live in Flatbush Brooklyn, off the Parkside stop of the Q train. If you are like most people, even most New Yorkers, you have never been to my neighborhood. It is six stops into Brooklyn, about twenty five minutes from Union Square, and roughly one hour from any of the places you can usually find me. My girlfriend lives in the East Village; her apartment is most specifically the place where you can usually find me. I have a duffle bag of clothes, my school bag, a bag of baseballs, a suit, and the bottom draw of her dresser there.

Give or take a couple, I am home ten hours a week at this point, that includes sleep time. I pay $900 a month meaning the I am being charged about $30 an hour to live there, or the rate of an expensive hotel. When I walk into my apartment I open the door slowly thinking maybe someone else has moved in. I have a plant that I rush to check on first thing when getting home to see if it is still alive after 5 days without water. Sometimes I leave it out on the window sill and hope it rains, but the weather is changing and I don’t know if the plant will make it through the winter months. I do not have a television. I do not have food in my refrigerator. I have a desk, two turntables, a couch, a coffee table, and paintings everywhere. If I ever had a visitor they would not have a place to sit.

The one redeeming quality of my little place in Flatbush is that I get a lot of work done in those ten precious hours there. I am actually going to take the 20 dollar cab ride home right now to get some work done. As soon as I watch one more episode of Couples.

Jelani Dukes

2006-10-17T16:21:00.000-07:00

Growing up I thought I was going to play in the NBA. Everyday at three o'clock after school I would grab my basketball and go to Hanover High School to shoot baskets until six pm. By the time I was 11 years old I was practicing with the high school varsity basketball team when they needed an extra player. There were two gyms at the high school, and sometimes I would have one of them all to myself. I would run the floor in the empty gym pretending it was a game-winning situation. I would shoot a three pointer; if I missed I could just do it again.

During the yearly Christmas basketball tournament at the High School my sister and I would run the scoreboard and keep the books during the games. We would come home every night with our ears ringing from the sound of the substitution horn. Our pay was as much orange drink as we wanted. The small basketball community in New Hampshire had officially adopted me, and I was the best player in the area.

While this was going on my mom was living in Boston, Massachusetts, attending Brandies University, getting her masters degree and making an attempt to dig our family out of financial misery once and for all. She made it home almost every weekend. All this meant she would be looking for jobs and that we would be moving, my parents decided, anywhere east of St. Louis. She got an offer from the Jewish Federation of Cleveland and moved into a small house in Shaker Heights, a suburb just east of Cleveland, where the rest of us would meet her after working out the details of the move. When we arrived in Ohio two months later the only thing in the house was a lonely looking mattress in the middle of living room floor with a blanket and pillow messily thrown on top where she had been sleeping. After living for twenty-five years in rural New Hampshire with virtually no exposure to popular culture, we now lived in Cleveland, OH, smack in the middle of America.

I reported to my first day of sixth grade to Woodbury Middle School wearing my usual attire, sweatpants and a t-shirt. Mr. Service was my teacher. He was a deaf man who’s curriculum for us would alternate between repeating the story of how he lost his hearing as a child, telling us about his wrestling days at The University of Michigan, and day long recesses. He had two large hearing aids that apparently malfunctioned quite a bit. When he administered spelling tests the entire class would discuss out loud the proper spelling of the words. As Mr. Service began taking attendance that first day I heard names I had never heard before.

“Juanita?”

“present.”

“Aja?”

“Here.”

“Omar?”

“Yeah.”

“Omar? Is Omar here?”

“Yes, right here Mr. Service.”

Sitting petrified in my front row seat, I realized I had never met any black people. I looked around the room and wondered why the black girls hair looked so fancy. Was it because it was the first day of school or did they wear their hair like that all the time? I had only seen hair like theirs on special occasions such as weddings. Tied up in elaborate twists and shapes protruding skyward their hair looked like a Frank Gehry building. Why had no one warned me about this I sat and thought quietly to myself?

The kids all seemed very adult. They spoke about sex as if they new what they were talking about, they sold candy to one another, and they wore perfectly matching shirts and sneakers. Aja quickly informed me it was very important for a boy’s shirt to match his shoes. Our classroom looked more like a marketplace for children with absolute freedom then a sixth grade class.

At the tryout for the sixth grade travel basketball team it took me about five minutes to realize not only was I not going to the NBA, but I wasn’t even good enough to make the team. The other kids on the court where moving faster and more fluidly than anyone I had played against in New Hampshire. They seemed to have a magical control over the ball dribbling it behind there back and between their legs before easily elevating and laying it into the cylinder. I did my best to stand around the perimeter of the three-point line and quickly get rid of the ball when it came my way, but I must have done something right, because the following week, I found out I made the team.

There were twelve of us on the team, Mike Gross, a short, red headed Jewish kid and myself were the only white players. Joe Grimes was our coach. He was a parole officer and training to become an NBA official. His son Onaje was our center. Aaron Strickland and Devon Kent shared the point guard position. I shared the forward position with Anthony Abernathy.

Jelani Dukes was arguably the most talented player on the team. His mom, Phyllis, would pick him up after every practice, and enthusiastically cheer him on during games. She had Frank Gehry hair and wore thick-framed glasses lined with gold. Mike Jones was the other “best’ player on the team. He was short but had freakish control over his body. By the time we were in high school, Mike could throw a football fifty yards with either arm.

My family would often drive Mike home after practice. His house was in a part of town we would otherwise probably not visit. It was tilted slightly left and seemed to sit back off the street in a shadow that swallowed it almost whole. A homemade basketball hoop was hammered in half way up the side of the house where he would enter after bashfully thanking us for the ride.

Our group grew quite close that year. In what would be my final basketball season, we won the league we played in, and I was welcomed into a world of language, movement, and style I never new existed. With my basketball connections I was now fluent in Cleveland, a language that had been foreign to me only six months before. I even had a pair of cool sneakers, the Charles Barkley 180 Nike Airs, and a matching shirt that impressed Aja very much. My father found work and our little house was fully furnished.

When time came for the seventh grade tryouts I simply did not go. Seventh grade marked the year these kids starting dunking, and the year I realized I was cut out for baseball. By the time we were in high school that core group of ten was the nucleus for a team ranked amongst the best in the nation. My family had moved into a larger home by then that, because it was close to the high school, served as a haven for class cutting teens. I would often see Jelani or Aaron walking through my back yard. We would make eye contact and nod somehow acknowledging what we shared as kids.

Several of the players from the team received college scholarships. Onaje went to Northwestern to play football, and is now in the NFL. Mike Gross went to Georgetown to play soccer, and I received a baseball scholarship to The University of Cincinnati. Jelani got a basketball scholarship to Embry-Riddle, a small school in Pennsylvania.

Outside a friend’s house at school, Jelani was shot several times in the stomach and killed. His girlfriend and mother of two rushed him to the hospital where he died within hours. He was twenty-five years old. Mike Jones is currently serving a prison sentence for his involvement in the shooting. Phyllis is leading the search for her son’s killer who has not been found.

My parents attended Jelani’s wake in Cleveland. Most of the players from the team were there. Above Jelani’s open casket was a poster size picture of all of us, the sixth grade travel basketball team.

KANYA'S SOCKS

2006-10-17T16:10:00.000-07:00

I play for a softball team. The orphans. We are a group of bar workers, actors, and students who’s
unconventional schedules allow us to play our midday weekday schedule against other teams with similarly filled
rosters. Technically it is the Lower East Side Bar League. This means simply that you have to attach the name
of a bar that exists below 14^th St. on the east side of Manhattan as the prefix of your team name. We are the
Uncle Ming’s Orphans, No one on the team actually works at Uncle Ming’s.
In any case, these 1 pm gatherings in the East River Park usually draw a motley crew that must look more to onlookers like early arrivers to a punk rock show than an athletic event. Yes, we have onlookers. A short Spanish man sells drinks out of a grocery cart (he has beer under a tarp covering the small portion of the cart). He is joined usually by two or three similarly sized men that appear to follow him around the park, and several other randoms dress the area behind the backstop.
The team consists of Spam at third base. Spam has one huge dreadlock in the back of his head that looks as if it’s nesting in the rest of his hair. The best writer could not justly describe this thing, its like a fifties prom doo with a huge dreadlock spiking straight up through its middle. He has a name for it, Huey. Allison plays second base. A short Asian man is our first baseman, and McKeon is in Left field.
Wiggins is our center fielder, he lights off fireworks periodically throughout the game when he gets bored. Wiggins was our team coach, and he originally recruited me to play. When Wiggins moved to Las Vegas, McKeon, took over the thankless role of manager. He has really turned things around for us. I get several text messages a week about game times and batting cages. Joel plays right field and is phenomenal, like myself, I have no idea what he is doing there. And the infamous softball fourth outfielder is usually more of an observer wandering around behind second base in the form of my girlfriend, Kate. Her name is actually Allison. Her middle name is Kate. There is already an Allison in the story and I don’t want to confuse you. I play shortstop, and Kanya is our catcher, she sometimes plays second base. Kanya consistently wears small, terri cloth shorts with matching knee high socks, a matching tank top, and Kangaroo sneakers to every game. Her level of devotion is remarkable. I imagine her planning her outfits and getting mentally prepared for the game. Her ensemble looks like something Susan Summers would wear on Three is Company. Of the two opposing teams she is the only one who has clearly washed herself before the game. I am sure my teammates are as shocked and impressed as I am about Kanya’s attire, but it always goes unmentioned.
According to league rules you must have at least 3 girls in the line up or it is an automatic out each time you go through the batting order. These rules often lead to us scrambling around the park asking female joggers and dog walkers if they want to play in a softball game. Allison, our second baseman, was actually just walking by one day when fait was to find another female player or face the dreaded “automatic out rule”. She has been there every game since. I actually overheard her saying she leaves her third grade class unattended for two hours just to play in our games.
We even have umpires. Nelson is a man of an unidentifiable ethnicity. He is definitely mildly retarded, but beyond that he switches between several accents that could either make him Korean, Polish, or Viking. When a batter hits a foul ball Nelson raises his hands and bellows, “IT IS A FOUL BALL”, but when nearly anything else happens he is silent and confused. If presented with questions about the calls he is making he will surely respond with a series of unintelligible noises and gestures, but he repeats, “IT IS A FOUL BALL”, with a vigor only a stupid man posseses, even when it’s fair sometimes. His partner is a Puerto Rican man who appears to have been a ballplayer. He comments to me sometimes, “You are really good man”, in a thick Puerto Rican accent. He knows the game, and he manages Nelson beautifully though he does get caught in the confusion at times when Nelson starts his blathering. I’ve even seen him knowingly let Nelson make incorrect calls. I wonder if he is being nice, or lazy. And these are the umpires, the same two every game.
Having played college baseball I qualify as the best player to ever play in The Lower East Side Bar League. Joel is pretty good, but my own play is nothing shy of jaw dropping. From my short stop position I catch fly balls hit anywhere shy of the outfielders. I often catch balls and realize that though my teammate is standing next to me, I was the only one moving towards the ball. The average skills of any individual player on the field are roughly around a third grade level. If athletic ability were measured like literacy rates, we would be a third world nation.
I have spent two seasons with The Orphans though I haven’t played lately. Under Wiggins, our first year, we only had 4 wins in a grueling 36 game schedule and were asked to leave the league and forfeit the rest of our games just before the playoffs began due to too many cancellations and, we suspect, our overall appearance. But after much pleading, we were invited back for a second season. Under Mckeon we had a winning record and made the playoffs for the first time. In the eyes of the league we have risen from despair to be considered a solid middle of the road team who’s players show up.
Two Boots is the team to beat. Mona’s is pretty good too. They look as bad as we do, but they have a key element that all winning softball teams must have, a couple of old guys who take the games really seriously. An older man pitches for Two Boots. He wears knee braces over his sweatpants, he sports rec-spec goggles, and wears only a yellow penny and several wristbands on his upper body. He reacts to each ball hit with a spin and a longing look at his teammate making the play. Through sheer will he raises the play of his teammates, and leads them to victory every time.
Mona’s has an entire line up of these types. Middle age men who particpate in softball games on Monday and Thursday afternoons are typically in an emotionally fragile phase of life. The very fact that they are available suggests they are miserable and probably uncussful. The saying goes that when you play ball you feel like a kid again. In the case of these men, they still feel old, but they behave as children. They constantly complain about the umpires, they bicker amogst themselves, and, in a setting where I feel completely uncompetitive, they have several times started fights with other teams about the rules or the score. But they win. Both teams have tried to illegally recruit me to play for their teams, but I decline each time. I couldn’t imagine playing for anyone butThe Orphans.
I bumped into Kanya just last week, it turns out we go to the same school. She is going to be finishing this spring and is considering law school. We talked for a while in the foyer outside the registrar’s office before saying goodbye. It was nice to see her again and get updates on the Orphans as their season comes to a close. Your not going to believe it, she was wearing little pink shorts and white tube socks with pink stripes just below the knee, a matching tanktop, and Kangaroo sneakers.

2 RELATIVELY SHORT, RELATIVELY MORBID POEMS

2006-09-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

Airplanes In The Sky;

Airplanes in the sky

There we are

against nature

We look like a computer generated image

There is nothing like

a collage of envy and cameras floating above the sidewalk

To strange to be real

But There we are

At least they will know;

At least past half way and I think we have gone far enough

we dig bank account sized graves

And throw ourselves in them

with great enthusiasm

We chew the ground beneath our feet

With huge fake teeth

And sell it to one another

We will pay for this

With ourselves and with our children

And they will hate us for it

But at least they will know

The Way of The Evangelical

2006-05-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

Evangelical: of, relating to, or being; A Christian church believing in the sole authority and inerrancy of the bible, in salvation only through regeneration, and in a spiritually transformed personal life.

In the past I thought of religion as old. Growing up I was taught about biblical times and people, about their wars and their struggles and the miracles that saved or ended their lives. But just as our modern world is actually more dangerous and war ridden than my imagined world from the bible stories, religion is more relevant today then ever. People seem to be starved for religion, starved for guidance and answers in our increasingly complex society. And just as religious movements of the past, say Judaism, have gathered striking numbers of followers, there are modern movements like Scientology, or more recently Falun Gong, doing the same. Due to the way information spreads today, by exploiting various media outlets a religious group can reach enough hearts and minds to eventually be identified on the religious map, and in turn can claim to have answers to our most pressing of life’s questions about faith, rights and wrongs, and the afterlife.

One such recent religious invention is, The Way of The Master, an Evangelical Christian sect operating out of Bellflower, California. It is deserving of particularly close examination because of its calculated approach to conversion using and interactive website and television program to broadcast its fundamentalist beliefs.

The Way of The Master movement is headed by charismatic New Zealander, Ray Comfort, and, Kirk Cameron. That’s right, Kirk Cameron, the same Kirk Cameron who played Mike Seaver on the 80s hit sitcom Growing Pains. Towards the end of the show’s life span Cameron withdrew from the cast and ultimately from Hollywood due to his apparently extreme religious beliefs. Together, Comfort and Cameron travel mostly the southern states and California preaching there updated version of Evangelical Christianity harping on the pivotal claim that any new evangelical movement must make; that all other religions, even other Christian sects, even other Evangelical Christians sects, are wrong. And more, that those sects create a false sense of righteousness and savior in those who follow them. This claim leads to their conclusive statement that if you want true bliss on earth, and forever in heaven, that you must exclusively follow this one way, The Way of The Master (which of course includes buying their videos and books conveniently available on the website www.wayof themaster.com).

As I entered the website for the first time, even before getting to the home page, I was presented with the question, “Are you a Christian?” After answering no, I was directed to a series of questions about my life decisions and relating them to the exact text of the 10 commandments with the only options for answer being, “innocent”, or “guilty”. After I was deemed in need of sevior, I finally entered the home page.

As a first time viewer it was suggested that I take another test called, “The Love Test”, a multiple-choice questionnaire about faith. After completing the love test, step two of my introduction was to listen to 2, hour long, streaming audio sermons given by Kirk, and then Ray Comfort. I must admit that upon embarking on this audit I was a little concerned that the sermons would get to me in a way I did not want them to, but I quickly got over my fear, hoping it was unrealistic, and entered into an extended explanation of the philosophy of The Way of The Master.

Kirk opened with his story about becoming a Christian, a 5 minute account of his life as a celebrity who had all the material possessions he wanted, and leaving it behind when he was saved by Jesus after hearing the scripture read for just the first time. In his description of his life before being saved he used words like, “guilty”, “filthy”, and “dirty”. More generally, he applies these descriptors to all people, speaking with the overtone that we as human beings are naturally bad and that only in repentance through Jesus may we be saved from, “ourselves”, “the tribulation”, and “the wrath of g-d”. He used a series of overly simplified metaphors and anecdotes about judges and one about sinking cars to prove his point to the intently silent crowd.

Kirk’s sermon crosses into the realm of ridiculous and extreme, but his mission partner Ray Comfort takes an even harder line. Comfort attacks other forms of Christianity calling people who follow them “false converts” and “weak”. He calls the mind, “an unfaithful instrument that is not to be trusted”, and calls evolution and other scientific endeavors “irrelevant”. He also continues the theme of self disgust that they both suggest we should all have. Comfort refers several time to morbid images like “…bring them to the foot of a bloody cross”, about false coverts. He talks about the anti-Christ and the tribulation with such confidence in their arrival that the crowd begins to respond out loud with whoops and cheers. The use of fear as a tool of education and control is most easily recalled when Comfort refers back to Evangelical leaders of the past like Moody and Billy Graham.

After I listen to the words of Comfort and Cameron the third step of my introduction forwards me to www.livingwaters.com, the carrier for all TWOTM merchandise, audio CD’s, books, bibles, and even on line courses are offered. This is a truly comprehensive approach to reaching the masses where all media outlets are exploited. They even have a TV show.

The web site says, “The Way of the Master television programs are scheduled to air via satellite to over 100 nations every week. This is a new look at reality TV. Each program is 30 minutes of Ray and Kirk teaching Christians how to share their faith effectively and inoffensively. Learn how to speak with your unsaved family and friends, and then see Kirk and Ray go onto the streets and demonstrate how to do it. This is real- life witnessing in action. Watch as Kirk and Ray share the gospel with teenagers, intellectuals, atheists, Moslems, Jews, Cults, backsliders, and the self-righteous. We will follow Jesus’ example by going to the highways and byways, malls and movie theaters, college campuses and local coffee houses, answering the 100 most common questions and objections of the Christian faith. Kirk and Ray will talk about difficult questions, difficult situations, and put powerful tools in the Christian’s hand that will replace his/her fears with courage.”

Trinity Broadcasting Network has aired 2 full seasons of, The Way Of The Master, the show. There are plans for a third 13 episode season. After countless attempts, I couldn’t access the television show and watch it for myself (very Moses not being allowed entrance to the promise land of me), but the few clips I saw really just looked like Comfort and Cameron harassing people about there faith and confronting them about how they live their lives. Wikipedia.com says, “The Way of the Master series employs logical fallacies against the public” and, “that it asserts as fact many suppositions that are at best conjecture and at worst complete falsehoods”, in their criticism section.

More interesting than the content of the show is the simple fact that it exists. The Evangelicals have a long history of using new media technology to reach the masses they feel it is their responsibility to convert. This is just one example of how the lines of religion and media can blur. For Kirk Cameron, achieving notoriety as a television personality has lent him credibility as a religious leader. And really, anyone who can have the appearance of religious legitimacy and stability through television or the Internet can achieve the same thing.

When will people look for clarity on who is providing them their information, and what that information really means? For many people, the media is like g-d, or at least looked to with religious fervor. Media is our new glowing light in the sky with a booming voice that we trust to teach us everything we know. The Evangelicals insist on pushing this misconception ahead for it is the very thing that gives them their power.

Question 4 of the love test read,

“The fact that anyone could suffer in hell forever…”

a) doesn’t worry me.

b) concerns me

c) horrifies me.

d) Isn’t my problem.

I couldn’t help but think,

e) all of the above.

Words To Look Up (To)

2006-04-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

One time my father hit me. One shot across the head with a dictionary. And then, silence. Then tears, not mine though, his, then mine.
His tears looked like they rippled inside him instead of down his face. He had a gaze for a moment like the walls around us weren’t those of our new house, but those of his childhood home in the Bronx. More, a familiar feeling, maybe a memory of his mom yelling at him and shuffling him around the apartment in what order she could think of before going down to her card game.
I had a sense this was more about him than me for I had committed far worse household crimes than this one. I don’t even remember what I did that day to warrant a dictionary across my 13 year old head. Hey, what the hell was my dad doing with a dictionary at 9:30 at night in the upstairs hallway anyways? And why, the one time that he had the impulse to smack me did he have to be holding the biggest book in the house. It was a red dictionary. One with the thumb cuts marking the beginning of each new letter. My sister and I had colored certain letters on the cover black as well as several hundred pages and most of the thumb cuts.
I stood looking at his left hand now dangling by his side. He was still holding the dictionary. His index finger was lodged somewhere between L and Q. Maybe he was looking up “lonely”, or “money”. He was mad at himself, so he whacked me. Makes sense like all things make sense.
So we stood in the hallway facing one another and crying. I could tell as he hugged me that my father wanted so badly to take back what he had just done. I did not wish him to have it back though. We could have looked up “regret”.
Now normally this type of thing would escalate into a family issue with my mom calling from downstairs and my sister peeking out into the hallway. At this age the house still just felt like one big room to me. No sound, nor light, nor carpet could be contained by the walls as we cycled through our room to room activities, but somehow, this moment was kept between me and my dad. It was a moment deserving of our uninterrupted attention, one rich in the passing of generational dysfunction, and even though it was an isolated incident for us, I wonder if I will have such a moment with my own son some day.

Baseball vs. Life

2006-04-25T13:22:00.000-07:00

Life is hard. Baseball is easy. Some say, baseball is hard, and life is easy. Some would say they are equally difficult. I have yet to find a man who knows so little about either as to say they are both simple tasks.

When I play baseball, I want to play well. I want to play the game the right way and help my team win. In life…not so much. It just seems more complicated; no uniforms, signals, or dugouts, how am I expected to know what to do.

If life was like baseball, some one would ceremoniously wake us all each morning. We would put on our cleats, and have a coin flip for the bathroom. We would jog through the day casually commenting on details of success, and about half way through the afternoon we would have a good sense how the day was going to end; an exciting finish, a little nerves, some noise from the fans.

If baseball was lifelike sometimes the pitcher wouldn’t throw the ball, or first base would be missing. I would hustle down the first base line and find no base awaits my effort. I'll take an out call over that. It is not the game of baseball that is easy, it is the feeling it gives you. In baseball, I strike out sometimes, and when I strike out, I know I have struck out because it is the third strike; I am free to play in a game where the rules are always the same.

In baseball we have warning tracks/ in life, horns;

baseball, coaches/ life, bosses

baseball, clubhouse/ life, break room

baseball, batting practice/ life, alarm clocks and coffee.

My college baseball coach used to say to the team, “What is the worst thing you can do on the field, loose the game for the team? Do you think your mom won’t love you anymore, hell, most of these guys will still love you. Don't worry, just play”. And he was right; it’s off the field we would have to do the worrying.

Sorry Flatbush

2006-04-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

In recognizing the process, you effectively end it, or at least do it irreparable damage.

More often than not, it is thinking about forgetting something that causes me to forget it. I moved to Flatbush three weeks ago. About the same time ago I came to a particularly telling dilemma in the route that is my life.
The distain I have spent so much time honing regarding some vague group of people who represent all I oppose is beginning to dull. You see, I am 26 years old; I live in New York City, I am a student, and I work as a disc jockey and a baseball coach. The people I come across in my various activities as any or all of these are, to some degree or another, cool. My friends are into music, my fellow students are politically progressive thinkers, and the kids I coach are just cute as hell.
None of them provide me with the disgust I need to fuel my passion for social revolution so I have planned a cross country trip living and working with “average” Americans hopefully participating in the kind of despicable socializing that fires me up (of course this is all planned in my head and will never take place, more likely it will join a long list of my projects and ideas obscured by reality; my cross country trip with my turntables playing records to landscapes, or my photo journal, “Rise and Shine”, of all my friends in their beds during their first waking moments, hair messy, eyes still half swollen shut with a hung-over smirk and a day ahead that could bring any number of good things).
On my trip I can imagine going to work one day with a businessman in Tennessee, he will joke with a friend on the phone about how they are racist, and he beats his secretary, and he sells bones on the black market from bodies he and his brother spend nights digging up, and the whole time they chew tobacco.
I will sit around the dinner table with a particularly pathetic family of 4 in Idaho. They will have trouble communicating but the few words that are spoken will be about what they can do to be better liked by the neighbors and how great Pepsi is (several times specific products will be mentioned). I will visit the battered elderly and spend as much time as possible with Evangelical Christians.
That’s what I need; good old ignorant, hateful American pastimes. Instead, I am in New York with a bunch of cultured, intelligent, loving people leaving me enough satisfied for complacency to set in.
“Make yourself uncomfortable”, my college baseball coach used to say, “it is the best thing you could do”. I made myself uncomfortable, I moved to Flatbush.
Like most things I encounter, by the time I encounter them, or in this case, it encounters me, “it” sucks. My arrival into an all African-Caribbean neighborhood is a sign of the end to a homogenous scene here. The same paranoia that moves me to forget things by thinking about forgetting them fills my worried mind in Flatbush: I do not want the neighborhood to change, but I am the very change I wish not to see. And so goes the cycles of forgetting and remembering and having to constantly reinvent everything just to meet the day and not have to say goodbye.

Binkies

2006-04-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

What would you do if you had a binkies in your hand?
Pluck it?
Poke it?
Stroke it?

In a moral dilemma simply ask yourself....what would binkies do?

Liz says she doesn't like it when I yell at Allison like that
she is right
the time I yelled at Allison in front of Liz
it was particularly unpleasant
she was going to sit down on my papers, when I yelled it was loud
like a dog barking

Media Desensitivity

2006-04-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

Reporting on Tragedy
So often when we are watching the news a story of tragic proportions will not only be along side of a more mundane one, it will be presented with the same docile tone and care by the reporter giving us the information. This not only is reflected in our attitudes as watchers, readers, and listeners, but it strips the story of its human value.
I am not suggesting on-air emotional breakdowns become standard, but give me something, offer some words of grief, a look, something. Make the 9 year old kid that is watching think about how sad it is that a stray bullet killed a mother of 4 children today in the Bronx; don’t tell him as if you are letting him know the Westminster dog show is rolling into town for the weekend.
We each posses a quality that allows us to forget about the woes of the world and live our everyday lives, and just as we cannot walk through the day crippled by worry, a reporter can’t cry his way through that same report about the Bronx mother of 4, but who looses when a child doesn’t learn life lessons that tragic events can instill because he has a deeply effected sense of tragedy, or because the world has projected to him that they don’t care?
The same fear that prevents media outlets from breaking controversial stories or searching for truth beyond what they are told prevents them from holding some emotional stake in the news they are reporting. This pseudo-professionalism ultimately allows them to be mediocre in there job to properly inform us.
If we can project a sense of compassion and caring in our news reporting we can give the world a sense compassion for one another, a sense of responsibility for one another, and a shared sense of sadness when one of us is touched by tragedy.

The Internet
Violence is not a new creation. Neither is sex or tragedy. What is new is the internet, and the way it introduces us to these things indirectly. We get horrific images without the intensity or emotion they would surely come with if encountered in the first person.
How must a man being beaten look to a child who has seen people get shot on www.killsometime.com, or other sites like it, whose video games are more violent than what he sees, and who has access to nastier things at the touch of a finger on his computer.
This is a serious thing being presented to this kid, but a new standard is taking over where these scenarios are too commonplace to care about, and tragedy is entertainment. The charge is lead by the opportunistic attitude of the media, and is a byproduct of a nature within all of us that needs addressed.
I looked over at my roommates computer screen a couple of days ago and took notice that one third of the screen was devoted to the image of a naked woman bent over putting her finger in her own asshole. The movement was looped and repeating in such an arrhythmic way that it looked inhuman. The middle third of the screen was a freeze frame of a black mans face so badly beaten in a fight that his eye was hanging out of its socket. On the other third he searched for apartments because we are moving March 1. These images where advertisements, pop-ups.
I do not think of my roommate as perverted or bad, he is quite average in these respects which is what makes him a good subject for study. In an instant he was taking in more pornographic and violently shocking visual information than the majority of people ever on the planet did in their entire lives, and so was I.

Inundation
We are simply saturated in media, and really in what media thinks we want, a dumbed down, over sexed, over violent version of our lives. According to, www.mediawise.com, an average American kid watches 4 hours of TV a day, more than any other one waking activity. And if they are an average child watcher, they will witness 200,000 acts of violence, including 40,000 murders on television by the time they are 18.
All of this is leading to a societal movement away from natural human life towards mechanized numbness. Not a thrilling progression, one more likely to resolve like the quiet hum of a computer shutting down then the roar of a man’s voice.

Conclusion
We are desensitized to tragedy, slowly shaping an identity in each of us as an observer, not a participant. We seek tragic and shocking footage to satisfy all while the real tragedy is going on within ourselves, within the dark room where the glowing screen projects anything we could dream up and better, or should I say worse. We are readily turning over what is good and human in us for what is new and shocking. We seem to move at this technological pitch while leaving behind unhandled fundamental issues, only for them to reinvent themselves again and again.
We are special as humans both in our ability to; invent, adapt and build, and in our ability to emote, and share, and use our minds to achieve higher levels of understanding. These two different categories of human capability seem equally impressive and interesting to me, but such a stress has been put on the first group that we, at least in the west, have achieved true imbalance. An imbalance directly represented in the amount of media in front of us, behind us, and in us.
More and more people are becoming aware of these patterns as we continue to question and figure out our own condition. Hopefully this awareness can spark some momentum back towards the middle, towards people learning from other people. After all, that is the true enjoyment of life. A bird does not learn from the trees, it learns from other birds, and that is what makes a bird, a bird. If we continue putting obstacles between ourselves and learning more from electronic screens then from one another, what does that make us?

rocking place

2006-04-12T21:50:00.000-07:00

For the place to be rocking someone’s got to do some rocking and some talking and some rocking, if you want go. show your body super float if you’re careful. Talk to your boy to see the door, get going. Round up some hoes and some drugs, tamper with the lines. Dance in slow motion and get everyone to dance in slow motion right past the ham stoned stragglers and the hustlers. Look over and over, and go to the bathroom now, and talk in a different voice. People look close, you cruise. You can never prove whats in your pocket. give the tender a scoop of his own bus boy. Hang out at your house, things are people different. Shake a leg at whatever or two. Celebrate. when its your birthday bash bring a gun, sneak in some.

where do we all go?

2006-04-12T21:41:00.000-07:00

There is only one art, and it is the moment.
Each moment is a moment and only a moment, but all moments are forever.
Disrespect of this time code is most evident
when it occurs.

All art is a person,
and is only what is in a person and can be nothing else, but all art is not all people.
Each art is one art like each person.
Any person can be art if they choose to, and whether they do, they are to me.
Art is things people, and mostly things in people.

Art matters by virtue of it being the only thing that matters.
There is reverse art, but it too is art as reverse racism is racism.
There is only art and only one moment for all art
One place for all people

Writing Class

2006-04-12T21:27:00.000-07:00

Writing classes are a trip. Different characters divulging what they think are the most interesting moments of their lives. Some of it can be pretty brutal. You have to be especially cautious when evaluating your classmates. You must be tough, but encourage them as well.

Nancy, no one cares about the inconsequential details of your life. They care about the details of their own. If writing is a two way street, you haven’t come your half way. C’mon baby. It hurts when I read this stuff, you are being mean.
Here is what we are going to do; no talking, no reading, and no writing. We will attempt to essentially start your life over. I, along with the help of my team, will slowly introduce you to words, then full sentences, and then whole thoughts and paragraphs. We will to nurse you back to a healthy mind state that will allow you to write coherently and maybe even lead an exciting life. We will give you new activities to fill your day with and we may change your name.
Ask yourself how bad you want to be a writer. Bad enough to say bye to solid foods and let us zap you with one of those little red lights that make you forget everything. It’s either that, or you leave class. Good piece overall though.

Mission Possible

2006-04-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

In March of 2003 George Bush announced that troops would soon be withdrawn from Iraq, and the war there would be over. At roughly the same time, anticipating that this statement was at least partially untrue, many Americans took a step back from politics, a step away from earnest participation in the shared national space towards a more relevant space, a space where they matter and they have control, their own lives.
Instead of direct pressure applied to the political current, an unconcerned philosophy and uninvolved course of action seems to be prevailing now, one where a person can show that they are not committed to the policies of their government not by staging demonstrations, but in the subtleties of their lifestyle. A political concession that has some false personal salvation at a high but in turn is leading to a route in favor of those people twisted enough to attempt domination.
After so many ill efforts of the past to change the fact, it is now clear, rules we don’t make for ourselves run our lives to the point where we no longer own them. This is creating a growing sense of irresponsibility to our political selves, a detached sense that what we do, or do not do, somehow doesn’t count, and that because we did not construct our current reality any disrespect of it is equally impersonal. People are seeking snippets of freedom by deviating from the process of the conventional, feeling, not wrongly so, that their own resistance and expressions are the only things they can control.
I myself, with an affinity to politics have turned to art and other expressive means to deal with my frustrations about our world’s modern identity. I have been driven to these means by a hopeless idea that I can not change the course of things, but instead that I can have some effect on them through more abstract methods of coping even if it only affects the few people I know and provides some personal peace of mind. I, with so many other young Americans, unlike the troops, have withdrawn.
So we have come to a moment tied with all other moments as most pivotal on our path to the end, and we must make another seemingly urgent decision to either dive back in head first for what could be a righteous nation, or to just observe its downfall, sketchbooks in hand saving only ourselves.

Vampires, Warewolves, and Big Foots

2006-04-01T17:04:00.000-08:00

Who cares about a vampire
A ware wolf
or a big foot
If you are one of these, you have plenty of TV shows to watch about your life.

People sleep with there TVs on, on purpose.

If you are a cop show, or at least a show having something to do with government
You are famous
(Don’t worry, if you are not one you might still be able to get famous).

Images from popular media are unrealistic and fantastical, and because we look to media for guidance this creates confusion within people when dealing with real life and the processes of reality.

I thought we were taking a step in the right direction with reality TV,
I was wrong.

If you are an action hero and you have a tight fitting full body leather suit
You are well known and respected.

Do you think of people on TV as watching as much TV as you do?

A wise man once told me that if we were to see our lives replayed, all of the time we spent in front of a screen would appear blank. According to, www.mediafamily.org. the average American kid between the ages of 8 and 18 spends six and a half hours a day looking at an electronic screen.

I have recordable, rewindable TV at my house.

Every time you bring a television or most any modern amenity for that, into your home, you inadvertently invite advertisements and propaganda that bombard your psyche and create obstacles to you in, what would be, your natural life.

If you are a bulletproof cell phone, an impossibly flat TV, or some combination of the two
You are highly coveted.

TV will continue to play an increasingly large roll in our lives as it becomes digital
and interactive.

If you are a small object that upon being found will give your holder super human power,
a cute monster
or the devil
you are not real but you are massively popular.

75% of the television shows in the fifties were about cowboys and Indians.

If you are just a regular person with a regular life
I would understand if you thought no one cared about you.
There are few to no programs about your life,
And even though your successes, ideas, and problems are the only real things I’ve mentioned (in bold), they will always give way to a fake world presented on a screen, in stereo, and on time.
I would also ask you to stop watching TV, because if you are a normal person that is probably what you spend much of your time doing.

Guide To American Life

2006-04-01T16:50:00.000-08:00

At birth you have arrived. You are at your best, you look kind of purple.
By 1 you are slipping, but you have options, you can still choose to be a reptile.
By 2 you should have moved homes once.
By 3 you should love the TV. You will now have a well developed sense of irony and mistrust of authority.
By 4 you should have bought something. If you are rich, you will be doing gymnastics. If you are poor, you will have developed bad eating habits. You might have a little belly.
By 5 you should recognize the round faced girl sitting next to you at school as, Amy. You will do daring tricks with her older brother at 8 and 9 off of the high dive at Storr’s pond. But you do not know that yet. He is chubby. This same year (5), you will count to 100.
At 6 you will notice some kids doing something called, multiplication. You will also learn that snow becomes only a little water when it melts, and despite a good fight, you will lose in a guessing contest on the matter.
At 7 you will be vehemently rejected in attempts to hang out with your sister and her friends. You notice they are nice, especially the way they talk on the phone. They are 11, and you wish to be a girl when you are 11, but only for one year. When you are 8, you will play sports with kids who have been practicing sports more then you. If you are super advanced, you might sprout a pube. No, that’s actually too early, but you are now doing daring jumps off the high dive with Erik.
At 9, you will be interested in something, if you are smart. And if you are smart, you will begin to feel annoyed that you have no control over your own life.
10 is great. You will love your radio, and you will make tapes of your favorite songs, and now, maybe you will have a pube. (A lot of these are sort of non specific to America. Maybe I should just have called the piece, “Your Life”.)
At 11 you will begin to realize your misbehavior in school means more to your classmates than it does to your teacher.
When you are 12, you will move to Cleveland.
By 13 you will have been deemed good looking, or not. You will also have been deemed smart, cool, tall, potentially criminal, lazy, gay or retarded by now.
At 14 you will enter high school.
When you are 15 you will have your first experience running from the police. If you are white, it will be fun, and you will be laughing. If you are black you will be scared.
When you are 16 you will be driving your fathers Subaru fast and listening to music that makes you want to drive it faster around memorized streets and on highway excursions. You are sure you will always drive this fast and listen to loud music. At 17, you will make a pact with yourself to never change, to never get a “real” job, and to never give yourself over to the government agency in charge of getting you. Though you stick to the pact more steadfastly then most who have recited it, you can not quite live up to its virtue.
When you turn 18, you are suposedly ready. No longer in need of this manual, and currently taking Mr. Springstubb’s English class you are no smarter then you were at the beginning. Have fun and don’t worry about it when your 24 and broke in New York without work or any prospects of it. Everything is gonna work out.

so much better

2006-03-30T21:51:00.000-08:00

So Much Better
Feeling fat
I feel kind of fat right now. I know I don't like feeling fat. I also know that if I allow myself to continue getting fatter, I will not mind so much. There will always be some one out there fatter than me.

I Am Special
It seems that a phenomenal person and a mediocre one are much the same, besides the fact that a phenomenal person realizes that by the very nature of being human, they are phenomenal. There are so many ways to prove yourself mediocre; avoiding it is not easy.
Being aware of your own potential is something that happens for some people and doesn’t for others. I would say that your best chance of having this happen to you lies firmly in the hands of others in managing their meanness towards you, or in the hands of g-d.

Meanness
“Mean” might be the only thing we still feel we have control over. That’s why people rule their own meanness so well, easily deciding when to hate, scream, ignore, or kill.
Killing is somehow less mean than ignoring. Killing is quite involved; when killing, or being killed you at least earned the efforts of another person. Ignoring is just thinking some one is not important enough to pay attention to.

Cell Phones
There is an entire section of the population very into cell phones. This is apparent to me both because I know some of these people and because cell phone companies seem to be everywhere. They are doing well, and for them to be doing this well, much of the population must care about them (I guess that’s how it works).
I’ve heard something the opposite of consumption actually happens when a person finds them self at ease.

Responsibility
People don't really think of the world as being theirs, some one else must own it, shit, some one owns everything else. I would say it is a responsible move to not believe everything you are told and to care enough about things to learn them for yourself, that is to love them.
Funny as it sounds, it is irresponsible to go to work each day and do as you are told. If you just to try to live on the conveyer belt of the social press you are more machine product than human, and the fact that you haven’t found enough love or strength within yourself to not be this way, is sad.

Feeling Shitty
If you feel shitty, you are not wrong. You are actually quite right. You have been lied to, beaten up, brainwashed and enslaved. These are all shitty things. In realizing this, and in that feeling like shit is not your fault, you are now free to be great. It gives you a ritchgeous, "fuck them", or, "I just don't give a fuck anymore" feeling. It is important to feel like this at least once in your life, it is the type of thing that could bring good change.

Coolness
Do not underestimate the importance of coolness. Being cool means you can have conversations with people in loud places, and stay relaxed in situations where most people cannot. Being bad is important too. If the established idea of bad is wrong, wouldn’t you have to be considered bad to be right? Being cool can save your life if you are important enough for someone to want to kill you.

Fake Niceness
It is bad that mean people can act nice, and it is bad that many nice people will be considered mean because they look mean. A philosophy that many nice people have is that most all people are assholes (like someone from “responsibility”). And nice people want to like everyone because they are nice, but it does not make sense to think that everyone is an asshole, and to like them. Each nice person must come to a point where they say, “No, fuck this, I do not like you, and I think you are an asshole.” This too could help turn things around.

Not knowing what the hell I’m talking about
If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, its okay, you’re probably not alone. You also probably suffer from much of the unhappiness that comes when unfamiliar with the concepts I am discussing, though you might be numb to it. If you do not even know yourself you surely will not recognize your own deficiencies.
I promise that the people you seek to impress do not love you; moreover, they don’t even care about you. They want to use you, your labor and your consumption. I recommend not giving all of yourself to this thankless calling, and think, and if that is all you do, it is enough, but you will know by then you can do so much more, and that we… could be so much better.

the sky is up to something(s)

2006-03-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

Go blind if your hind legs are powerful enough to alligate. take me on a date. coreograph my tan purple and cough in my general direction, your under my projection insection and you’re a contestant. Advertise my tatas to everyone you know so you can make me your complete package. Ravish my testicles in your face or at your place and at your discretion and injestion. Maybelline tap counter pack only a small bag, I could go on like this forever, never more special then munching pounderloins, a 4 person course out pointed souceback to one another, retrace you mother, open up the cover, discover the cupboard and the cup holder and the visor of green water. When you place yourself you will be factories away. Fish.