Priceless (how advertising makes our lives better)

March 29, 5:43 am

Wow it has been a while since I wrote here. I’ve been surfing the ‘net too much and I wanted to include more writing in my life (even though I am teaching and I have the four preps, three of which are new). We were cruising along and I handed back the first batch of papers too my 101/103 when into my class walks L___. Odd, thought I, why is my wife in my class? I had no idea what was going on, or what sort of looking glass I was falling through.

M___n, she announced, was in an ambulance and on his way th NY Hospital. His teacher from PS150Q called en route saying that he had “fallen and hurt his ankle.” [This is getting too elaborate and wordy so I'm going to cut detail ruthlessly!] We ponied up and cleared out our offices for the day, taking home grading, electronics and other necessities of the post-modern life.

The drive into Manhattan was painless enough but it took a while to find parking. I got out as Linda continued to search for parking Like Diogenes for an honest man on the Upper East Side. I went and found Mason and Mrs F. and he was watching an episode of Star Wars (III?) with a strangely twisted ankle:

Lots of other things happened, not the lest of which was being treated like a nitwit by the hospital staff because I do not speak their version of “medical insurance bureaucratese.” Mercifully L. was there to translate, and they finally took the xrays (negative), gave mason some crutches, and released us (on our own recognizance). It was 4:30 when we were released and the parking rules had changed where we had parked. Our car had been stolen by the city for our lack of attention to detail and the need to make York Ave more passable for rush hour. We took a minivan cab back to Queens picked up C and LX at Grandmother’s house (“over the river and through the woods” [god I love minivans]) contacting the city about our car on our crackberries on the way home. No sign of our car.

We ordered out, zonked by the experience, too hungry to be nice to one another for the our it would take to cook the pasta or rice or whatever. Linda was on the phone and internet for a few hours trying to track down “big sticky” (our car). Finally she found it hiding under an alias (the Z had been written as a 2).

At 8 I left the house with my mp3player and a book to read for school (Jihad vs. McWorld).

At 8:15 I was on a 7 train heading out of 61st street towards Manhattoes.

At 8:45 I was at the Hudson river and 42nd street having enjoyed my walk through times sq immensely (I rarely get into Manhattan during the semester).

At 8:55 I was in line at the pound with the other towees, trying to maintain my cool in light of the histrionics of a particular middle aged BMW owner. I read for a while but the show was too good so I wrote a poem about my fellow (non-)travelers on my crackberry.

 

The pound is like the post office on hormones.
It combines the impatient lines and hopeless tasks
With the bullet proof decor and public service hygene.
The despair of an all-night McDonalds clings to the vending machines
And usurious cash machine beckon the broke to try
The cash cards of vasectimized bank accounts.

Many are here in the course of regular car driving lives
Here with dates and husbands, work kits and tools
There’s a nice kid with a yarmulke a marketing t-shirt
A shot glass and booze breath wearing $200 shoes
All of our cars have been taken to this pound
Only to be released after excruciating bureaucracy.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

 

Just before 11 (not bad really) I was called to a window and made to jump through another six flaming hoops of bureaucracy by a woman with Queens accent and a Costco wardrobe and body. The Z formerly known as 2 on our license plate made it so that we had to negotiate for another 15 minutes over some Oswaldo Guzman who lived back in California and was supposed to be retrieving the car (I’ll bet that’s the closest he’ll ever come to visiting NYC [if he comes I hope he leaves his car in Cali, we have enough]). There was something wrong with the printer at her station and it took 10 more minutes for me to be given the Charlie Bucket golden ticket.

The cavernous pier was a site to behold filled with late model cars of every stripe with layers of grime that made them look cadaverous, though they were the latest, hippest and coolest cars to a one.
My last message, before I was able to leave the waiting-room-purgatory was:

Mason hurt skating: ambulance ride to New York Hospital: $500
Car towed while in Emergency Room: $300
3 hours at the New York City Impound Yard: Priceless
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

August: Osage County (why I’ll try theatre again)

2/26/2008 4:07 AM

I got an email from Sunil Vyas while I was at work yesterday and he just responded again. It seems I’ll see him on Monday the 3rd for dinner. How exciting. I am up on time and ready to go, but I want to write a little here first.
I keep thinking of the play that I went to see with Chandler. “August: Osage County” was a great play and in spite of the fact that I usually do not enjoy big c culture events I loved this one. I think I’d like to write a brief post about it for the Blog. I should start with the fact that I often, peremptorily, prejudicially and without cause, don’t like going to plays and being around the theatre crowd. This goes double for opera, classical music and experimental theatre. The last play I went to was the one about Buckminster Fuller with my dad (which has its own special load of fraught freight). I remember that it was in a warehouse-type theatre with lots of really engaged people, not a few of whom were old hippies like my dad. As I went into the big space with bleachers built to face the stage I enjoyed the “archive of Buckminster Fuller” and the “world games” that filled the space like some experimental museum. But I was not comfortable.
In spite of the fact that is was like a trip to my childhood, with buckyball globes (tetrahedrons cut out of postcards) made of cardboard and other oddities of the subject of the play, I felt disease. It is the same feeling I get when I go to the opera in SF, or Philly or (strangely to a lesser extent) in New York. I got crabby and judgmental, spending as much time assessing the clothes, styles, class and culture of my fellow theatre goers as I did watching the play, theatre, opera or anything else.
When I go to big-C-cultural events I inevitably start to compare instead of identifying. I begin to reach a point where I note every difference between myself and the other people attending the same production. I’ve noted before that I don’t get this way when I’m in an art museum, so this alienation and judgment is particular to the theatre-arts big-C-cultural events. I just don’t know why. I suppose I could go to a few years of therapy and figure it out, but I like sitting in my grouch-can complaining too much.
“August: Osage County” was a great play and a big-C-cultural event that I truly enjoyed. This leads me to believe that the real issue is the quality or my engagement with the productions I’ve seen. I know that I did actually enjoy the St. Petersburg production of Pushkin’s “The Fiery Angel,” but it had massive full frontal nudity and catholic bashing (fifty nuns stripped down and climbed all over the set nude: it was spectacular). But, I also enjoyed “August: Osage County” and it had no nudity. It was a human drama full of real people and actual emotions covered in very funny humor, which is how I try to avoid my feelings.
From the moment the play began I stopped taking inventory of my fellow theatre-goers and did not notice a thing besides Chandler’s tired head on my shoulders until it was over. I wasn’t even bothered by the people pushing passed my seat to get oiled at intermission. The guy behind me who was so drunk that his breath was making me tipsy barely bothered me as I watched the drama unfold.
It was like watching the most dysfunctional family reunion or chistmas dinner ever, in the tawdriest trailer park in the south. Yet I had no judgment of the people on stage at all (in spite of the bashing that the description I just gave suggests). I was immediately struck by the humanity of the characters, the reality of the actors’ performances and the use of humor to deflect the horror of a domestic tragedy.
I loved the experience of this play and look forward to going to more drama, if it is this good. This one play rescued three genres of big-C-culture for me in one felled swoop.

Stockhom Syndrome and the ACT Prep Intensive

My class takes the ACT today and I feel like the Stockholm Syndrome is reaching critical; I’ll miss them, but I’m glad the cops are coming to free us all from each other. I have one student who has been handing in incomplete practice exams all through the class. If she would a) stop writing the perfect seven sentence intro and b) start with and stick to an outline she’d be through much more quickly and efficiently. There are another couple of students who have such amazing words and language problems that correcting them all puts more of my writing on the page than theirs. I want to use the fact that they originally spoke languages other than English as an excuse, but they are actually caught at a more profound level since they both speak English better than they write it. I’m not sure what it is about writing that makes them “write” (scrawl, scribble, or “tag”) convoluted words that they would never utter. There are, of course, the students whom I can’t imagine why they didn’t pass the damn test. I feel a special twinge of sadness for them because had they learned the tricks of the ACT they’d have passed easily, but they probably thought about the question outside of the (training wheel) ACT paradigm and were punished for writing a thoughtful and balanced essay. There we are, all locked in the vault together. But just for today. Just for one more day.

Feeling Whistful @ 48 (Whittier Poem)

Read ’til the end, where you get the payoff: For of all sad words of tongue or pen,/The saddest are these: “It might have been!

Maud Muller
John Greenleaf Whittier
Maud Muller, on a summer’s day,
Raked the meadows sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.
So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,
And Maud was left in the field alone.
But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,
When he hummed in court an old love-tune
He wedded a wife of richest dower,
Who lived for fashion, as he for power.
Yet oft, in his marble hearth’s bright glow,
He watched a picture come and go:
And sweet Maud Muller’s hazel eyes
Looked out in their innocent surprise.
A manly form at her side she saw,
And joy was duty and love was law.
Then she took up her burden of life again,
Saying only, “It might have been.”
Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!“

Prophet Housing

12/18/07 04:56:38 AM

So our new lives in our new apartment have started. I took Chandler to meet Aneka at 46^th Street on the seven train. We were there so early Chandler has renegotiated for an extra 10 minutes of sleep today. I was a work by 7:30 and If I continue to do this I’ll have time to go to the gym in morning. Apparently Lennox and Mason’s drop off also went well. Linda and I went to Costco to buy a TV, which I think we’ve put off in the hopes that we can buy the kids more of what they want this “holiday” season. Funny thing about that ironic use of quotation marked holiday.

I found a copy of Khalil Ghibran’s The Prophet (that I had bought on telegraph avenue used) and in it was a bookmark. The page it marked was the Prophet’s response to the Mason. “’Ironic,’ thought I, it is addressed to my son.” But the opening line is “Then a [M]ason came forth and said speak to us of Houses” (34). So, since I spent the evening unpacking my seemingly endless supply of things and assembling them I was intrigued by the synchronicity of the bookmarking.¹ This is the electronics (and modern) version of feathering my nest. We’ve got to get all of the twigs and grass just right so that the chicks and their parents will all fit comfortably. I imagine a bird’s nest of wires, surge protectors, USB cables and transformer power lines in which we comfortably cuddle together. (God, how I digress.)

The first few “stanzas” were pure anti-city, and I’ll include a bit here as an illustration: “Would the valleys your streets and the green paths your alleys… [and] In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together” (35). These nods to the bucolic piss me off. Besides the fact that the human condition is social, and there would be no wilderness if we spread people out like that, even in 1922, I just want to dissent a bit further on this romanticization of the bucolic.

(Digression Alert) I remember one week when Scott and I lived on Maui. This was before we got food stamps, in deed it might be why I got food stamps. We had “no visible means of support” and we had alienated those off of whom we could beg. But there was a mango tree and an avocado tree that were in season near where we were camping. We could fill ourselves nicely on these huge trees for the cost of a climb. Guavas, I think were also ripe in a pasture a couple of miles away. Before seven days had passed I was crazy and hungry though my stomach never went empty. There is a reason that we are a social and agrarian species. The hunter gatherer thing is too much work. (I think it is also why we are omnivores, but that is another rant.)

Then the prophet gets to why I am writing this now:

Tell me have you [peace, remembrances and beauty] in your houses?

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?

Ay, it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.

Though its hands are silken, its hear is of iron.

It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeers at the dignity of the flesh.

It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.²

Verily the lust for comfort murders the the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

But you, children o space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. (36)

Moving Impotence

12/14/0710:46:52 AM

So the movers are packing away and Linda is away at the other apartment cleaning and accepting deliveries of new furniture. “The game is afoot,” as Holmes often said. Things are happening fast and I’m not sure how much I can write here. I am useless now that I’ve washed the dishes and tightened the cheap Ikea chairs that are always falling loose. There is a feeling of impotence that accepting (or paying for) help causes. I want to have meaning in this whole process which I don’t seem to feel just paying for it. I am too 19^th century. I feel like if I don’t put my shoulder to the wheel in this move I am not actually helping. Of course that is ridiculous because Linda and I are the “first movers” of this whole show. These three strong Latinas would not be here if we were not paying for them to be here.

It is strange having people in your house touching all of our stuff. Now I don’t know these women in our house singing away to the popular music they have thumping from our boom box as they yell questions and comments back and forth. I guess this adds to the strange feeling of helplessness that I feel not helping. Here are three total strangers doing what in the past only our dearest (and most willing) friends had done. But they are not Richard Heller, Joel Stanger, Trevor Turner, John Mercer, or any of my Berkeley friends who helped with the last three moves. Interestingly the last move here we were helped by Miss Misti H and the one two moves ago involved Dennis Wolf. Both of those people are out of reach to me now and I am sad that they have been replaced by paid professionals.

Neither am I participating physically (no heave-ho), nor am I intimate with the workers. I am slipping out of my life during this move. In this journal, a sign of my increasing alienation from my life, I am recording my increasing feelings of alienation from my life. The skrittch of packing tape sounds like fingernails on the blackboard of my life as I sit in a house with people working incredibly hard as I sit here and diddle on the computer. I guess the root of it is that I am uncomfortable with and unused to my new status as bourgeois middle class sub-gentry (I can’t even own up to the fact that I am indeed a well paid middle class professional with a post graduate degree and a good union job [I'm prayin' for tenure]). I want to live in my imaginary hey-day of a working class youthful messenger. Sigh. If it was that good I’d have never gone to college.

If I insist on continually romanticizing my youth I will always be unhappy, looking over my shoulder at some thin hungry horny bachelor. The truth of the matter is that he was miserable and empty. I was lonely and bored except when I was misbehaving and in grave peril. The life I fantasize about was the life of a young man with few coping skills and a lot of misused down time. I guess I should be proud of one thing. When I was bored, lonely and venal I at least painted and wrote and some of those drawings and writings still exist. Two moves ago, from one place in the village to another I went through my “archive” and looked at lots of my letters and paintings (that wasted time alone justifies the cost of this packing). Up in the attic are two huge tubes of my work from the early 1980s that are testaments to the fact that there might be something to this nostalgia thing. But if you count out how much time I’ve lived and subtracted the time I “created” you’d still have each and every waking hour of a misspent youth.

So I think, against my better judgment I’ll post this now because I’m tired of writing.

 

When I was trying to stay out of the packers way I thought of a poetic way to characterize our move, but I think I’ve lost it: “from the intimate proximity of the gardens to the phallic modernity of the Big Six. ”

 

Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet (Poem)

 

We’re moving tomorrow and I found two poems I had written that I thought I had keyed in.  I’ll key ‘em in now.  The first was about the shy young woman I saw heading to Aviation HS one morning.  Refined and restrained, though she was obviously one of the kids, she seemed apart.

Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet

High school phalanx / A boisterous wedge
Tumbling Down / Off the concrete EL

Unapproachable / In stylized youth
A garden of  / Performed individualism

Petals and thorns / Of hidden beauty
Instant adolescent / Fauna wilderness

In the rigid  / Individualism
Is a patch of / Conformity

We’re all sad and scared about moving. I’m nervous as hell. I’ve been snapping at the kids and crabby with Ms. L.  We love it here and I want to spill my guts about it, but I found these poems instead, so I’ll post them and see where it leads.

Chandler’s Letter to Amir

I found this dry-erase letter in Chandler’s Room when I was up there.  I think that its medium, its very impermanence, says as much as Cha-Cha’s eloquent  words.

Amir Hassan

I realize that this post might have been an enigma for many (or any) who stumbled here (and a lot of good this will do people who’ve already left), but it is about Misti and Amir Hassan. We knew Misti and Amir from student housing in UC Village. I’ve known them these last 9 years or so. I saw them the last time I was in Berkeley. When we moved Misti minded the kids and cleaned the house as we moved our belongings onto the truck to come East. Misti, it seems, killed Amir. This is not, in the least, about me. This is all about Amir’s Death and Misti’s “survival.” I think that she has entered a new. deeper. more profound level of hell with this heinous and pathetic act. For some -the troubled- there is never enough pain, scorn or opprobrium, though I think Misti’s found the mother-lode.

From My Journal:

Amir Hassan is dead. He was found dead with Misti, his mother, who had numerous non-life-threatening self-inflicted wounds. The word is that they will charge Misti in Amir’s death. I cannot begin to process the grand scale of this horror. I am so sad. He was a good person, and I wish that this hadn’t happened to him. I am overwhelmed by the finality of death. I am shocked by the capricious nature of murder. I am terrified by the possibility of filicide (killing your child). If anyone can do it, we all could do it. I won’t do it, but now that I know one who has the idea has gotten out of the genie’s bottle of possibility.

A small consolation is that there are lots of good and kind words floating around the ether (internet) about Amir, our lives in the courtyard, Misti’s pain, and the gaping maw that Amir’s death leaves in the world I knew before 7:43 pm yesterday. But there will never be Amir Hassan at my door, playing light saber Jedi with Mason, swinging a wiffle bat, studying at Chandler’s kindergarten; the world is forever incomplete.

 

Misti always was a self-mutilator. I remember talking to her about it. I reckon that I was probably less kind than I should have been, judgment being my character defect of choice. I tried to share my experience strength and hope, but you need a willing and hopeful person to “catch” this optimism. Misti was not that person. I know when I’m “yessed,” I think. I recall that she told me that the cutting was a way of punishing herself and reminding herself that she was alive. I know that there was a positive veneer that she put on the act of slicing her flesh. I think that I believed her. I was into the vainglorious masochism of riding my bike up Grizzly Peak repetitively at that time, so I loved pain too. It reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me that I have a choice, and that I can make anything happen, as long as I can feel: pain or pleasure.

My understanding of this whole thing is incomplete. While I can relate to the self-mutilation, self-abnegation, and self-denial, it is all based on my, well, myself. I have always had a good strong sense of my perverse sanity. While I have red-lined my life for months and years to the point where I was temporarily crazy, I was never at the point where a good night’s sleep, food, and a touch of sobriety wouldn’t clear things up. I always saw the importance of the self in society, you know, the id and the ego, the me. When I was “Thinking of committing some dreadful crime” I always had the safety net of a basically sound mind to fall back on.

I knew that Misti was trying to find that when she was cutting herself. I am sure that the sobering pain and scarlet blood of the slices on her arm always brought her back to what passed for the quotidian, the daily, the mundane. I could imagine the secret satisfaction that cutting yourself would bring when dealing with the commonplace people and problems of suburban single parenthood. (“Yes, I’m fighting for my child-support, talking with other parents, taking my kid to karate, alone again, but I can, after he’s asleep, open up this flesh that people take so seriously [Misti is a handsome woman, never forget that] and look at the inner workings and liquid mainspring that keeps it all going. I do not respect what can be seen without pain. I am deeper. I look inside.”)

My suspicion is that the pain stopped bringing her back. Simple cuts of her arm stopped bringing her back to the pedestrian world she was forced to inhabit with us. She became, I imagine, inured to the daily cuts and bruises of her little life. I am sure that she needed a bigger pain to bring her back. I know that as the little deaths of arm-wounds stopped working she began to worry that she would lose the little prince. The idea of not having your alpha and omega readily available is the most terrifying concept imaginable. Once in a while I let my dark mind go there and battle and fight the evil forces that I’d imagine could rob me of my family, but always my rational self returns, asserts supremacy and banishes the paper-maché mad fears that I build in the cave of my mind. I cannot imagine what it would be like if the “self” that I relied on stopped coming and I was left with the terrors I had created.

When Misti’s blood stopped calling her “self” back, the monsters of her mind, no doubt, became unstoppable. To rescue Amir from those who do not love him as well as she did, in the exact way proscribed by her mania, she had no choice but to send him beyond pain. To think of your child sitting in someone else’s house, at someone else’s table, on someone else’s couch, dancing to someone else’s music, while having poison poured in his ear about you, his mother is a fate to terrible to conceive of.

God I know just how the awful child-welfare-horror comes together. Stephen King writes the civil service test and holds meetings according to Robert’s Rules of Order. I know just how it feels. I can imagine the very linoleum, fluorescent lighting and cubicle where custody would be lost. I can picture the cursor on the outdated software which will perform the coup de grâce. When people say that they cannot imagine how a person, a parent, a mother could do something horrible, I say that they don’t want to know. I can imagine. It is not that Misti did it, it is that all of us could do it.

Kiko to Canal (In and On Traffic)

We went to adventure land yesterday.  It is a small amusement park where we all had a good time.  I took some Dramamine and was able to ride the rides, though after my first spinning one I was dizzy and tired for an hour or so. 

At the end, when I was tired and grumpy, and we were giving the kids money to gamble with (Linda won at Whack-A-Mole), Chlöe melted down and I ascribed the meltdown on staying for too long.  Needless to say I was tired and blaming, which got the other adults riled up.  Otherwise it was a wonderful day.

Here’s the latest installment of Kiko’s Tale, and he’s back. Today in my writing I had Kiko start to make some observations about the bikes of a  delivery guy compared to others . But those are in the pipeline, and you’ll have to wait a week or so. And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.

Realistically he knew that he was going to cut off the limo driver about a block before if he went at the same speed, and that if he sped up he’d have made it through, though the people on the street were a wild card he wasn’t willing to bet on.  Part of why Kiko was so fast was that he could judge the traffic so well.  When he looked up an avenue, without thinking, he knew what types of cars and trucks were there and judging by the make, model and block what hey would probably do.  Trucks deliver to businesses that make sense (newspaper to newsstands).  Cabs without fares stay straight unless they’re hailed.  Cabs with fares turn in the direction that the passengers in the back seat look. Limos and Black cars are more unpredictable not only because you can’t see if they have passengers, but also because they’re more inexperienced in Manhattan and they try and find eccentric ways around the city, not knowing like the Yellow Cab drivers that the best way is often to show the momentary patience and then leap for the hole in traffic before a truck with its lousy acceleration. 

Kiko wasn’t quite aware of what a natural he was in judging the space and time of traffic.  He did a thousand thousand calculations as he looked up a flowing avenue each precise.  These estimates ranged from sociological (make, model and condition of the vehicle) to economic (the need of a particular block or district) to demographic (the likelihood of a driver’s affinity for or connection to a block) to physics (the rate, mass, direction and acceleration of a 1980s model panel truck).  Kiko was an immigrant savant of New York City traffic: knowing how, why and where vehicles were most likely to go before the drivers themselves had decided.

Later that day, a slow day where he had to spend too much time cutting vegetables and frying French Fries under the eyes of Santiago and Mrs. Choi, he had a delivery all the way up to Canal Street.  This gave him about a straight half a mile up and back on Greenwich and Hudson, straight avenues, where he could really let go.  The speed felt good and the escape from the Wall Street area laberintos was like an escape from un cárcel.  He charged north with a sense of purpose, rebelling against the eyes of his boss and co-worker with the power and speed his legs gave him.  Passing cars, a bit recklessly, he made it there in about three minutes, though he was winded and sweating like he was in an Aztec Jungle.