Melatonin

My brain’s autumnal spike in melatonin levels has started to induce that warm, giddy holiday happiness kind of feeling – and it’s only November 12th! This evening when I was driving around it was insanely dark (and cold), and the streets were a clusterfuck of bottleneck after bottleneck. All I could see were lights set against blackness – the blinding white lights of car and truck headlights, and the red flickering and glowing trails of tail lights. I was reminded of my swimming days in high school when seventy-five bodies would crowd into a 25 yard, 8 lane pool. With up to ten people in a lane, without goggles everything was a blurred frenzy. Like a shark or other nearly blind fish, one had to rely on other instincts to navigate the ferocious packed waters. Driving around tonight was a very similar experience. I was like a somnambulist, feeling my way with a special sonar, automatically sensing turns before I could see them, and rarely relying on the familiar landmarks which, in the colder winter months, lose all their pedestrian qualities and become disproportionately majestic.

In the blackness all the lights, neon, glowing corporate logos and shining steeples took me away to another place. Facades of buildings were lit like stages, the people coming and going like actors in a performance. It was as if I wasn’t in my own city but some foreign city, some strange and new city. I felt the way I normally do when I’m on vacation. Everything was dazzling and unfamiliar, it was a lot to take in. I peered into car windows and saw the soft blue glow of consoles, the reddish-amber luminosity of Sirius satellite radios, and the lava lamp mush of flip down tv’s. Billboards which are drab and unnoticeable during the day resplendently screamed their products tonight, and backlit poster advertisements came to life as ephemeral works of art.

I love this time of year! The need for warmth combined with the holiday cheer opens people up and brings them closer together. I’m reminded of another swimming analogy: when we were bobbing in a pool that felt like arctic water at 6 am on a 55 degree morning, we would all rub our bodies together for warmth. We were just kids and we didn’t think there was anything strange about this (rubbing our almost naked bodies together); we were like a group of sea lions cuddling to generate body heat. In fact, that was our team’s mascot – we were the Sea Lions.

Our human need for warmth, like our need for light, should not be underestimated. We operate by light and sleep when there is an absence of it. Similarly, without warmth we become disinhibited, we shake and shiver and our limbs turn numb and rubbery. Our hands stiffen and it become difficult to button a coat or punch the numbers into a cell phone. It is essential, therefore, that we seek communal places of warmth even if we suffer from antisocial tendencies or social phobias. Mostly we do this without being aware of what we are doing, so it doesn’t usually take a conscious effort on our part to overcome our fears or the limitations imposed by our egotism. It was refreshing to see so many people camped out at Barnes & Noble last Sunday evening, staring into lap tops and making hourly trips to the coffee bar. People kicked off their shoes and splayed their jackets on the sofa chairs and delved into books or socialized with the people around them. Gazing at this indoor utopian atmosphere, I briefly wondered if it could exist in, say, May or June when the need for light and warmth is not as great. An ominous blackness outside made the windows resemble mirrors, and the peaceful tranquility of the bookstore was reflected back at us, multiplying it. I had come to buy a few things but I ended up staying for two hours. It was a Sunday night, everybody had work and school the next day, but the world buzzed inside and outside as if the weekend was just beginning.

This is another thing I love about this time of year – the electricity in the air. All the commotion and anticipation and change rearranges everything and puts life on a whole new course. We are approaching the time of year when everything changes over, and we will emerge on the other end with a new outlook and an entirely new set of resolutions. I mentioned melatonin at the beginning of this post and this is noteworthy because, as we age, our bodies produce less melatonin. The darkness of winter is beneficial because it helps to restore our melatonin levels allowing us to get more recuperative sleep. Despite the harsh brutality of winter (waiting at the bus stop in 8 degree weather), we should not forget the physical restoration we reap from the season.

And this brings me back to the importance of light. Light has a similar restorative effect as sleep, and we live by it in the opposite way. We search for light in the same way that we search for a bed, and like a sailor who keeps his eyes peeled for land, we scan our world for light. We measure Civilization by the quality and quantity of light, we attribute it to heaven, God and angels, and it is practically

synonymous with ephinany and wisdom. I guess this is why I was dazzled by all the lights tonight as I was driving around. In the light-swallowing darkness of a November evening, any kind of light – whether it be a neon license plate trim or a candle – becomes more magnificent and brilliant…

I guess there is something more to write about this, but the melatonin is kicking in and I am tired. It is 10:12 pm and the light above my desk is too dim to inspire virtuosic realizations. It has been dark for more than five hours, and the light in my apartment keeps fading. Outside of my peripheral vision is darkness, and the lone light above my desk and the backlight in my computer screen insufficiently mimic the natural light we require to live. And as the artificial light in my room fights to beat back the darkness, the light in me gutters like a candle placed on a sill next to a drafty window.

Goodnight…zzzzz-zzzzzz-zzzzzzzzzzzz-zzzzzzzzzz

DON’T LOOK BACK IN ANGER

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO LIVE HERE WHEN YOU CAN LIVE IN THE GOOD OL’ AMERICAN RUST BELT!!!

With Age Comes Wisdom: I am God!

For those of you who are new to Prodigy, this segment is a list of quotations selected by me and written by me, and also edited and published by me. Such blatant hubris would probably be unacceptable if ”With Age Comes Wisdom” were, say, a point of purchase book , but this is a blog so I am allowed to ignore formalities and professional conflicts of interest and get away with considering myself the smartest thinker who has ever lived (with this kind of freedom, why would anyone seek to ponder the various implications of blogging as if it were the bane of all future creativity or something?). The quotations included in this series, when removed from their original contexts, often read like truisms. I think it’s safe to say that these posts are lazy posts, and for lack of anything substantive and interesting to write I decided once on a whim to just pick the best parts from some half-assed things I was writing. Those bits and pieces of writing were slapped together in the form of quotations into a post, I gave it a title and – Viola! – the “With Age Comes Wisdom” series was born. I think of it as a way to salvage good writing from what can basically be considered bad writing. When you write two paragraphs of crap, and only one or two sentences from those paragraphs stand out, you want to find a way to preserve those one or two good sentences, because the sentences that stand out exemplify something in your writing that you hope will last forever.

So without further ado, here is the latest installment of “With Age Comes Wisdom”:

~Judge, Jury and Finger Pointer~

“Judgment comes from viewing others (especially strangers) objectively, whereas we see ourselves as intricately nuanced and complicated. Each one of us is our own glass onion, whereas most of the everyday acquaintances we come into contact with look like the outsides of onions with a layer or two peeled back.”

Tim Freeman

~Loneliness~

“The only person each of us will ever completely know and get to be best friends with in life is the one person who we can’t ever wish to be – ourselves.”

Tim Freeman

~Mind under matter~

“The biggest flaw with chasing after lofty ideals is that they are perfect conceptions of our brains, and these conceptions remain uncorrupted by the real world as long as they stay in our heads. Life, as all of us know, is far from perfect, and when pure notions are put to the test in the messiness of reality, they don’t always hold firm.”

Tim Freeman

Heineken: Dutch for Poetry (and recalling shutting down governments)

Last night I drank the 1 pint 8 oz. keg of Heineken pictured above. The coconut monkey, a gift my dad bought for me when he was in Hawaii during the late 1980’s, is a sentimental keepsake and friend, and he’s also one of my best drinking buddies in the whole wide world. He is my Wilson on the stormy seas of life, and I will take him with me wherever I shall go (although he doesn’t have a name, how ironic is that?).

So anyway, I drank this mini keg and I became rather discursive, and in order to let the mental diarrhea seep out I made some refrigerator magnet poetry in the style of Shakespeare. No, I didn’t construct my refrigerator poem in iambic pentameter, but I stayed true to the immortal bard’s bawdiness, and if this poem doesn’t seem too abstract and you think you have some clue about what I’m trying to convey in it, then it may just increase blood flow and cause a tingling sensation in that special area of your anatomy.

Check it out:

Refrigerator magnet poetry and prose is a lifesaver at parties when you feel weird and uninteresting standing around and people keep walking around you and the beer confidence is doing very little to help your reticence. What is one to do in a situation like this? What you do is you walk over to the refrigerator and start moving little magnets with words and suffixes on them around and you begin placing them in a certain syntactical order. You begin conceptualizing a story or a poem which proves to party attendees that you are not in fact stupid but, provided the right medium, you can be smart, interesting, talented, funny, lustful and a whole lot of other things. This word ordering will be the perfect ice breaker to catapult you out of your 5th wheel status to temporary life of the party status. People will gather around you and marvel at what you are doing, and they will no doubt share any relevant related stories – e.g., how much they loved or hated reading Shakespeare in college, or how their friend has refrigerator magnets in German and Spanish. But probably the sweetest part is that you will leave graffiti on somebody’s refrigerator that will last long after the party has ended, thus leaving a lasting reminder of what a hit you were that night. And who knows - somebody may bump into you later on and remember you as the “refrigerator poem guy.”

I bought these Shakespearean refrigerator magnets when I visited the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. five years ago with a group from my college. My Shakespeare professor organized the trip and he was very excited about being in the nation’s capital and seeing as much as he could see in the 1 1/2 days we spent there. He would point out things like the Smithsonian museum and announce what a shame it was that we didn’t have enough time to take a tour of it. He reverently led us through the Vietnam memorial, America’s wailing wall, past all the crying veterans who make the pilgrimage to DC just so they can touch the engraved names of lost friends or loved ones in order to commune with a part of their ghosts. It was my first trip to DC, and I admit that it was a lot to take in. What I will never forget is walking in front of the White House and marvelling at how it physically differed from my lifelong mental conception of it which was based on stock footage I had seen countless times on the news. Cameras give an added dimension to things making them look bigger, and I guess I was taken aback by how much “smaller” the White House actually was than I had previously thought.

But this is not what is most memorable about my DC trip, it is what happened next that will be a conversational font for years to come. As I was walking around, I took my shoulder bag off and placed it on a bench just yards from the entrance to the White House where George “Dubya” Bush was probably inside having a meeting with important leaders. It was very hot even though it was April, and I took off my long sleeve shirt and tied it around my waist. In order to do this I had to set my bag and headphones on the bench, and when I was done I picked up my headphones but carelessly forgot my shoulder bag. I started walking back to the hotel where my group was staying – we were supposed to be leaving in less than an hour – when it occurred to me that my bag was not secured to my shoulder. All of a sudden I had that frightening feeling that occurs only when you realize that, sometime and somewhere within the last couple of hours, you have lost either your wallet or your child. It is a terrifying feeling to say the least, and even though my bag was not as important as either of these things, I ascribed a lot of value to it because it contained all of the mementos I had purchased on my very first DC trip (like a “Anybody But Bush” button and tee-shirt from the Folger Library with a quote from II Henry IV which read, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”). I stopped in mid gait and stiffened as an icy chill shot through my body. I looked down at my side – no bag. I looked at my other side – no bag. I tried to retrace my steps. I remember just having it, where could I have left it? I ran back to a vendor who I bought a pretzel from just a minute ago. He didn’t see my bag. Oh crap! I kept running back in the direction I came from. Suddenly, up ahead, I could see sirens flashing, a lane of traffic was shut down, and sleek black official-looking cars were parked in the middle of the closed part of the street. Men with suits climbed out of the cars. One held a dog on a leash and another flourished a device that looked like an electronic wand. A helicopter circled overhead.

It took less than ten seconds to realize that my worst fears had come true - my unattended bag had posed a clear and present danger for the United States government and the citizens of Washington, D.C. Oh shit! I thought, I have just put the government on high alert! The previous day while visiting the Lincoln Memorial, we were all evacuated by police and security guards because a suspicious looking package was left in a corner behind the monolithic statue of our 16th president. The hundreds of people who had been enjoying the view from the steps of Lincoln’s perch all grunted and groaned as they lazily floated away like a congregation of vagrants forced to find somewhere else to camp. The suspicious package, we would soon learn, turned out to be a box abandoned by a homeless person. But if the War on Terror has taught me anything, it is that there are “soft” targets and there are more premium targets. The Lincoln Memorial is what would be considered a soft target because it is simply a famous landmark, it serves no governing or other vital function that might render its destruction a crippling blow to the nation’s important systems. But I had left my bag only a few yards from the rear entrance to the White House, the home of president George W. Bush and the ruling seat of one of world’s leading super powers! This is the most premium target a terrorist could ever hope to strike if he had the temerity to get close enough, and seeing what a stir the abandoned box had caused the day before at the Lincoln Memorial, I knew I was standing in a deep pile of shit when I saw the helicopters and dogs and important guys in suits.  

As I approached the intersection where all the commotion was unfolding, I found a bike cop and quickly confessed my culpability. Surprisingly, he didn’t tackle me or pull out his gun and tell me to put my hands up. He took my name, license and social security number and radioed that information to someone who was probably sitting before a bank of the highest tech computer and video monitors in the world. That guy read the information back to the cop saying, “echo, T-I-M -F-R-E…” Meanwhile the helicopter circled overhead, its roaring blades disturbing the mid-day touristic peace just like a Lawn Boy disturbing the quiet calm of a suburban Saturday morning. I was shaking and nervous, envisioning Guantanamo Bay bedlam in my near future, and I was afraid to touch any of the buttons on the Walkman secured to my belt lest the sniper with the long range rifle who I couldn’t see blew my head off. It was a tense couple of minutes made all the more nerve-racking by the rudely impatient throngs of tourists who were overly eager to go on their White House tour. Not only had I gone and possibly shut down one of the most powerful governments on the planet with my forgetful carelessness, but I had also ruined the vacations of countless suburban moms and dads and their kids who I would most likely never see again (since I would die in a Cuban jail cell). So now, added to my fearful nervousness of being imminently and secretly tortured as an enemy combatant, was an embarrassment like no other. “Look at that idiot who shut down the government and spoiled our vacation,” people’s eyes appeared to say as they shook their heads and angrily stared at me, the fool who couldn’t even remember to keep his bag attached to his shoulder.

But luckily the cop had a lot of experience with these sorts of things. He was fairly understanding and I think he appreciated my honesty and cooperation. You see, the protectors of Washington, D.C. go on heightened alert every day – no, every half hour – or at least they did 5 years ago in the post 9/11 terrorist paranoia frenzy. Whenever a homeless person would leave a bag full of stuff at a landmark, or a government worker forgot his expensive briefcase in a subway terminal, or a stupid tourist like myself would accidentally leave their shoulder or shopping bags next to big important buildings, the capital’s police and secret service went into red alert and herded people away, cordoned off the area and sent in the dogs and guys with bomb detecting magic wands. And just like all of these routine bomb scares, my ordeal was over in a matter of minutes. Just as quickly as life in the nation’s capital had gone from calmly normal to imminently dire, everything reverted back to normal again. Traffic resumed, the tours commenced and the noisy helicopter flew away. I was a free man, completely forgiven and even felt sorry for by some people. As I walked away, a person in the crowd told me not to sweat it as these things are a daily occurence in D.C. It was a relief for me to learn that I would not be put on trial in a secret military court and labeled as a terrorist. Furthermore, I was glad that I didn’t cause anybody to miss out on their once-in-a-lifetime tour of the White House. I was even happier, however, that my little mishap didn’t interrupt the pundits on cable channels like MSNBC and CNN in the form of one of those live and late breaking aerial footage stories. I couldn’t stand the thought of my newly retired mom, an avid political junky who always keeps her TV tuned to the 24-hour news channels, watching my embarrassing horror unfold at her house hundreds of miles away in real time.

That would be the equivalent of her catching a glimpse of me drunk and stoned at a party constructing refrigerator magnet poetry and laughing with my friends and my coconut monkey which my dad bought for me when I was 11. I could just see her shaking her head and ruefully asking, “What did you do now?”

33

IN A FEW DAYS I will turn thirty-three. Thirty-three is a significant year, not only because Christ the Lord is eternally thirty-three, but because many other celebrities have kicked the bucket at that age as well. Christ Farley croaked when he was thirty-three years young, and I am especially troubled by this not least because of the fact that I tend to have sleight issues with weight and hyperactivity just as he did (there is also a scary image of a freshly dead Chris Farley I saw once, and it seared its way into my brain to such an extent that I cannot watch his movies to this day without feeling a sickening rising/falling feeling in my stomach). Layne Staley also died at thirty-three – too late by many of his fans’ expectations (and probably the artist’s own as well), but frighteningly young nonetheless. And who can forget John Belushi, the first modern day celebrity with a penchant for excess who set the precedent for dying at thirty-three. Then there is Eva Peron, William S. Burroughs, Jr., Sam Cooke and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy just to name a few.

I have no intention of dying in my thirty-third year, which is why the demise of so many talented careers at this half-grown age is troubling to me.

It is as if there is a preternatural curse on the number thirty-three as it pertains to the lifespan, and it is similar in many ways to the curse that plagues the twenty-seventh year of life. Several entertainment luminaries like Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain have all died at the age of twenty-seven, and I even knew a few people who took their lives at this age as well. The curse regarding dying at twenty-seven is cosmic in nature, and gets its significance from an astrological phenomenon known as Saturn Return. Basically, Saturn Return is a deep life assessment that occurs approximately every 27-30 years, which is the same time it takes the planet Saturn to complete its orbit (i.e., wherever Saturn was at in its orbit when you were born, approximately 27 years later it will be in the same place in the heavens). The first Saturn Return is viewed as a crossing of the threshold from youth to adulthood, and some believe people like Kurt Cobain who kill themselves in their twenty-seventh year are unwilling to relinquish their childhoods and mature into adults. This theory holds a lot of water when one considers the types of entertainers who have offed themselves either directly or indirectly at this age. But it is tragic that nobody told these people that growing up (or “old”) is not obligatory, as there are many fifty year old men and women who like to watch the Disney channel or curl up and read Harry Potter. Sure, Nirvana may have broken up and never recorded another album after In Utero, and Kurt could have gone solo and ended up trying too hard resulting in something that sounds like Days of the New - but he is no longer with us, and Frances Bean doesn’t have a daddy.

Luckily for me, the thirty-third year of life bears no potentially ominous significance in the realm of astrology. The number 33, however, does have revelevance in the similar field of numerology – and it’s optimistic relevance too! 33 is special because it is one of the Master numbers (double digit numbers which cannot be reduced) along with 11 and 22. According to the website www.decoz.com, these numbers, “are called Master numbers because they possess more potential than other numbers. They are highly charged, difficult to handle, and require time, maturity, and great effort to integrate into one’s personality.” 33 is viewed as the most powerful of the Master numbers not only because it is the highest, but because the other two Master numbers – 11 and 22 – can be combined to form it. According to www.decoz.com, 33 is marked by a, “determination to seek understanding and wisdom before preaching to others.” It is also referred to as the “Master Teacher.” It is not surprising, therefore, to see this number ascribed to Jesus Christ when he was at the height and climax of his earthly and eternal mission.

But if 33 is so rich with abstruse compassion, wisdom and enlightenment as the numerologists say (I abstained from quoting more from the website; but, trust me, this is what they say), it did not teach people like Chris Farley and John Belushi a whole heck of a lot. If it taught these men anything, it is not to gamble with your life and think that you can cheat death for another day by snorting all the coke you want. It taught them the cost of their own mistakes. In the case of Layne Staley, he learned the ultimate enlightenment of what he was putting in his veins. But since these has-beens are all dead as a result of their brief and scary satoris, their lessons can be passed on to the rest of us. Their final acts exist as visceral reminders (WARNING GRAPHIC PIC) of the death that hovers not too far above all of us. We can either cling to death and its inevitability, or we can embrace life as long as we’re alive.

I pray that 33 won’t teach me a harsh and permanent lesson like it did to the aforementioned celebrity party animals. I like to think that I am not playing with fire like these people were. Sure, I have my vices; but you won’t see me on any three day coke binge any time soon. I think I would have to gain 100-150 pounds before I resembled Chris Farley, and the only coke you will ever see me using is Diet Coke. But if 33 is the “Master Teacher,” who knows what it will teach me. Jesus often spoke in cryptic parables, and if 33 imparts its wisdom in a similar way, I may find myself sifting through life parables to find the gems of enlightenment contained therein.

Or not. I am not an acolyte of numerology, nor did I even know much about it until I went to www.decoz.com the other day on a whim and looked up the significance of the number 33. But my ability to think analytically makes me somewhat superstitious, or at least I want to believe that my various interpretations of life and the world carry spiritual and supernatural weight. I like to think there is more to life than just coincidence after coincidence. The mysteries are too great, and I don’t find the statistical assurance of coincidence convenient enough. But I think grasping for answers in the stars or picking apart number patterns is misguided. It is simply a way of drawing parallels, and this is where it derives its most intellectual fascination for me.

But it does make you think if there is not something more to everything we see around us. And it goes a long way in proving a point which Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons makes over and over, that the laws of physics (and mathematics and hence science) are God’s laws. There is order and balance all around us, in our bodies, in our ecosystems, in everything. The natural order is very clean and orderly. Whether one is an atheist or not, it has to be admitted that this is a miracle. It can’t always be taken for granted the way the seasons change, the way nature is very resilient, the way language and numbers – the building blocks of human understanding and communication – are so mathematically ordered.

And, of course, the way a celebrity mired in addiction often dies at the age of thirty-three calls to mind this order. It is a coincidence big enough to make even a statistician scratch his or her head, and it should be an actuarial warning to Hollywood people never to hire a coke sniffing, heroin shooting artist/actor for role in a big production if he is an the eve of his thirty-third birthday.

But I still want the pair of boobs featured at the top of this post!

Where is My Mind?

I have been avoiding the blog for a while, not because I want to, but because my mind has been a huge blank this summer. Seriously, I think I might have brain damage. Backtracking, I’m not exactly sure when everything started to go wrong for me. But it’s safe to say that when I was laid-off from my job in June, the evaporation of any kind of formal structure system mixed with the very non-intellectual pursuit of trying to find work, has caused a huge swath of nothingness to open up in my life. Let me clarify that I am normally not one for exhibiting vast amounts of spontaneity, at least not consistently. Consequently, the ridiculous amount of fee time on my hands these past two months has been the bane of my intellect. Late nights have been spent watching B (and sometimes C) science-fiction flicks on cable and endless hours have disappeared into the black hole Internet realm of discussion forums, Facebook and other multimedia sites. Meanwhile, the job search always keeps chugging along unsuccessfully. The only thing tempering this ennui is a stack of books beside my bed, which I have been reluctantly trudging my way through like a fat Indiana Jones trying to pull himself out of quicksand. Thank God for my weekly unemployment benefits or I would be dining at the local dumpster behind my apartment instead of throwing boxes of pizza crust into it.

But more than just being lazy, or unfocused, or mired in a slump (as I like to describe my situation to my psychiatrist), I think I’ve also been hit with an invariable bout of Writer’s Block. I say invariable because these things are bound to happen sooner or later to  most aspiring writers. If the daunting challenge looming over our heads us doesn’t get us down, the realization that maybe we just don’t have what it takes to be a professional writer is sure to hinder our creative motivation. Like a lot of people who have been in my shoes, I am having a problem with the F word. I am finally experiencing what it feels like to cower before that dreaded and towering conception of Failure, a notion that prevents many a person from progressing in life and threatens countless dreamers not to dream big dreams. But – fuck! - more than this, I have been plagued by a syntactical problem which has messed with my ability to construct meaningful thoughts using sophisticated words and sentences. This latter condition is no doubt the result of subjecting my brain to excessive amounts of lowbrow entertainment and drivel during my down time (which I have a lot of). If I’m not ogling free online porn, I’m chatting with White Supremacists in the virtual equivalent of a prison cafeteria. It’s safe to say that I’ve developed some bad habits of late, and rather than try my hand at the writing to steer me back onto the right path, I’ve let the fear of producing something embarrassingly awful keep me away from the keyboard.

David Foster Wallace said that, “Anything that is a failure is always a victory.” Coming from a guy who’s battle with depression ended when he took his own life, these words mean a lot. Speaking at a panel in Italy in 2006 two years before his death, the author of Infinite Jest said, “In some ways what I try to do with myself is just avoid the success and failure thing, because there is so much about writing that is out of the writer’s control – not the action of doing it, but whether is comes alive or not – that if I begin to think in terms of failure, what happens is I get really depressed and the game is over, because I’ve already decided.”

In some ways what I’ve been waiting for is the automatic motivation, that ticket to ride the train of words that flows through the eternal ether. I have lost my Muse so to speak, and the ability to channel my thoughts and feelings into coherent sentences and paragraphs. To be linguistically deprived feels castrating in a way, because I consider my writing talent to be one of my biggest assets. If my ability to express myself and communicate effectively becomes limited, I feel doomed. After all, I don’t have washboard abs and a chisled face to fall back on, or better yet a bloated trust fund. What seems like even more of an affront is that I have all the time in the world to hone my language skills by reading, listening to NPR, or associating with other people who I consider to be smarter than myself. Instead, I watch videos of cats humping on You Tube, I chat with other unemployed people across the globe about meaningless minutiae (like the size and consistency of our bowel movements), and I find the desire to watch straight-to-DVD movies like Hell Raptor III at 1 am too tempting to pass up.

I swear, it feels like some stranger has usurped my brain and body and is using it for his own sick pleasure. Whatever the reason for my recent childish behavior, I don’t think I can go on living this life for very long before something changes. I hope that by taking David Foster Wallace’s words to heart I can overcome the initial urge to play it safe and avoid failure when it comes to writing. And hopefully the fact that I’ve just written about my Writer’s Block means that I’ve already taken the first step in confronting this obstacle.

Fantasy and Voyeurism: Men and the Violence Culture

Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, worries that pornography is carving out a false image of femininity in our national consciousness. She is troubled at how the natural is being supplanted by the artificial, and by the glorification of performance sex over love making.

The negative gender stereotypes associated with pornography are no doubt worrisome, and more so for females because of the demeaning way in which they are often depicted in this genre (name one other form of lowbrow entertainment where perverted fat men get to crack jokes and rate the sexiness of females who they are simultaneously fondling, probing or getting fellated by?). But if women have good reason to be offended by their underling roles in this testosterone-driven industry, we men should at least be leery of the equally testosterone-driven entertainments that appeal to the generic aspects of our gender.

Spike TV is perhaps one of the most notorious purveyors of the notion that all men get hard-ons for cage fighting, muscle cars and bikini clad women. Shows like UFC: Ultimate Fighter Championship and Deadliest Worrier attempt to awaken our animalistic bloodlust with raw, savage depictions of guys beating the hell out of each other and scenes of ancient weapons of warfare slicing through slabs of meat as a way of demonstrating their deadly effectiveness. Entertainment such as this is troubling if one considers the sobering statistic that, in 2006, 1 in every 72 American men was incarcerated in a county, state or federal prison. By comparison, in that same year only 1 out of every 746 women was behind bars. Given our innately virile propensity to fight, murder and self-destruct, shouldn’t the modern man boycott all things which glorify senseless violence and brutality? Is the world so lacking in actual violence to necessitate the creation and consumption of fantasy violence? And just how are we contributing to human growth and progress if we give in to these natural urges which – when carried out in real life – only wreak havoc on our lives and the lives of countless others?

To get a taste of the very real and very permanent consequences of senseless acts of violence committed by men in the throes of passion, one need look no further than A&E’s First 48. This is a series which follows actual detectives around in the first forty-eight hours after a murder has been committed. The blood soaked crime scenes which the burned out and exasperated detective workers must canvass, and the trail of clues which invariably lead to a stoic, cold-blooded murderer – these things evoke a stark reminder of just how ugly a pandemic violence is in our culture. There are no heroic desperados of Hollywood proportion in real-life shootouts and slayings, just lowlife gang members and common street thugs. In light of this, pop cultural glamorization of death and killing seems, at the very least, irresponsible and jaded.

And yet shows like First 48 do more than just feed our curiosity about the procedurals of detective work. There is a voyeurism to it all, starting at the point when the detectives lift the tarpaulin to reveal the slain victim, all the way up till the end when they slap a pair of cuffs on the prime suspect and read him his rights. These police shows are a way for us to peer into the lives of people who we don’t really know or care too much about, allowing us to observe how they kill each other off. This is the real curiosity which gives programs like First 48 their momentum. Everything from the senseless motives for the killings, to the killers’ nonchalant attitudes about taking a life – given their unflinching indifference in the interrogation room you would think they were being accused of stealing a bike – causes every episode to convey an inexplicable foreignness. We know what we’re seeing, and yet we don’t understand it. We know who these people are, we have a vague idea of what they’re all about, and yet after seeing how they kill and react to killing, we understand them even less.

Other real-life shows feed our voyeurism in similar ways. Every weekend MSNBC runs back to back to back documentaries about prison life, visiting places from Alaska (like institutions which house that state’s worst murderers) to Folsom’s historic penitentiary in California to modern day chain gangs in the South. After watching just a couple of these programs, it quickly becomes evident that NBC is indirectly pillorying the weak-willed and downtrodden inmates on their cross country big house tours. The cameras take us though the prisons as if on a tour of a zoo, pausing before a cell to observe how an inmate makes contraband moonshine from fruit and shampoo as if he were a gorilla doing something strange. It is veritable Schadenfreude with a glossy shine. The result is that we feel a comforting contentedness knowing that these manimals are locked up where they are, and not walking the streets with us and our children. The shows also remind us that prison is no place we’d ever want to be, further driving home the old adage not to do the crime if we can’t do the time.

(Let’s also remember one thing: NBC may not have invented subtlety, but they have certainly perfected it in their coverage over the years. They have become psychologists; every word spoken by their anchors or pundits, and every news show, sitcom, biopic, miniseries or movie they broadcast is so saturated with multiple meanings and nuance that it is impossible to take them at face value anymore.)

***

When we give up thinking for the day and cast our burdens upon the TV, there are multiple choices from which to get our violence fix. If we want to vicariously experience fantasy violence there are car chases, endless murder mysteries, or sci-fi movies where we can insert ourselves into the role of a hero who saves the world from an outer space bug invasion just so he can win the girl he loves. If we want entertainment that blurs the line between fantasy violence and actual violence, there are shows like UFC: Ultimate Fighting Championship where the kicks and punches might be truncated so as not to deliver the full force of the blow, but they still draw blood sometimes. Finally, if we want the real, raw stuff without all the dressing up and glamour, there are shows like First 48 and MSNBC’s prison marathon weekends.

As a modern man, which form of televised violence should we turn to when our peaceful boredom becomes too much to bear? As the physically stronger sex, we need outlets for all that extra energy. Viewing violence, reading about it, dreaming of it or partaking in it in some minimal (or big) way almost feels like a necessity – violence always has been and probably always will be one of our many hungers. Perhaps the goal of the modern man therefore shouldn’t be to eradicate violent tendencies from our DNA, but rather our goal should be to learn how to control these tendencies. When violence is in your grasp, you feel powerful, mighty and invincible. But as we’ve witnessed far too often, this power always becomes too great too quickly and invariably leads to people being physically or emotionally hurt, and the imminent imploding (or exploding) of the violence bearer. Riding high on violent power is like riding a huge serpent, you cling to its scaly back for as long as possible before you are eventually thrown off and tossed about in its wake.

Perhaps violence is sacred, something to use only in rare instances when there is no other alternative. They endlessly try to teach us in anger management classes about the realistic allocation of negative feelings – feeling murderous rage towards the guy who killed your daughter is normal, feeling that same type of rage towards the lady that cut you off in traffic is not – but the lessons take a while to sink in. If we can’t control our hormonal tendencies, perhaps it is best to banish them to a faraway place within us.

Violence serves an inverse evolutionary purpose. The longer we are alive, the more it becomes prevalent that the cool kids – the desperados, the slackers, the gang bangers and all the other guys who lived by the seat of their hormones – didn’t get themselves or us anywhere. The phrase “only the strong survive” – coined by Jerry Butler in his titular song and later immortalized by Elvis – may not be such a truism after all. As evidenced by the aforementioned A&E and MSNBC shows, men who fight to defend their personal territory, virility and respect against frivolous threats often end up in prisons or morgues. They finish each other off in street brawls, wars and drag races gone awry. By living in the moment, these men lack the planning and foresight necessary to effectively pass on their genes.

Peacefulness is becoming the new golden rule. There is no place in the future for combative rogues and hot tempered territorial nitwits. The conquerors of history, the ones who will make most proud the thousands of generations of our ancestors who suffered and fought and foraged so that we could exist today, will be the men who were capable of being the better man by walking away from a fight. These males are the humble and happy men who value book smarts over street smarts. They are the teenagers who sacrifice their youths so that they can have a rich future which doesn’t involve a lot of tattoos, gas-pumping and frequent trips to Wal-Mart. They are the future. We are the future. The immature naysayers and trash talkers are shouting into a wind which blows louder and more fiercely with each passing season.

That wind is the Modern Man.

A Tour of Hamilton College in Clinton, NY

Reflections of L.A.: 2007

L.A.: not exactly your mom’s burbs

All of my preconceptions about Southern California were shattered shortly after arriving at the Long Beach airport. I was anticipating suburbia: square mile after square mile of strip malls and tract homes populated by endless iterations of soccer moms, office park dads and the broods of kids typically associated with these kinds of people. Instead everything screamed Civilization, trendiness, wealth, sophistication, art, nightlife and fun – lots and lots of expensive, unatainable fun. Southern California may as well be New York City with beaches and palm trees.

The Shocking Truth about Celebrities

“It was surprising to learn that famous people in L.A. are in fact more human than one raised on a steady diet of Hollywood fantasy might expect. I always imagined the celebrities sort of as offspring to the gods who never went anywhere without their retinues of helpers and small armies to prevent them from being mobbed, molested or kidnapped by the hoards of unsophisticated ‘normal’ people. It was weird to discover that they travel around with friends or alone, eat at restaurants, shop for shoes or just stop in a park bathroom to expose themselves much like the rest of us.

I saw John Voight at a Jewish deli. He entered alone (where were his body men, I thought) and scanned the room for his party. The other patrons might have leered over their roast beef sandwiches, and there were some hushed whispers – “Look, it’s John Voight,” “John Voight! Where?” – but he was not mobbed and no madmen jumped up and tried to assassinate him. John Voight looked and acted for the most part as if he could care less that he was John Voight. The muted excitement in the restaurant lasted less than a minute and then life resumed as normal.”

On being a self-described ugly person in the Land of Beautiful People

“I enjoyed taking in the sights, sounds and smells of Southern California as one might enjoy attending a beach party while encased in a bubble. I was close to all of the action yet I didn’t feel like a part of it. Ultimately, it was this detached proximity that made me feel invisible and conspicuous at the same time.

The whole experience was not unlike my recurring nightmare in which I find myself at a cocktail party after work on the same day that I just happen to forget to wear clothes. As if the nudity part of the dream isn’t bad enough, when I try to open my mouth to explain myself chirping birds fly out. The other party attendees in the nightmare who smartly remembered to wear their tuxedos and spangled dresses eye me as if I’m a lost cause, while my work superiors give me stern yet understanding looks which say, “Well, just remember to wear clothes tomorrow, okay Tim.”

“If The Beautiful People and the celebrities are practically indistinguishable in the fairy tale realm of Southern California, one would think haughtiness would flow down Wilshire Boulevard and the Sunset Strip like apocalyptic blood. This, however, is not the case. Just like the celebrities, the many semi-important beautiful people of Southern California do not act as if they are endowed with any corporeal advantage over the rest of humankind. They need a certain level of humility to survive just like the rest of us. Based on this fact, one would be inclined to think that this “humanness” would make them less scary. But it was not the quality of the Beautiful Peoples’ personalities that made them so intimidating to me – it was their quantity. I could not walk down a street without lines of mannequin-like perfect people criss-crossing all around me. While their body language gave no hint of hostility and no snobbishness could be detected in their glances, the simple phenomenon of being outnumbered made me feel unwelcome. Something instinctive told me I should go back home, work on my looks, read a ton of books and earn some money before I ever attempted to walk the streets of Southern California again. And yet at the same time my experience felt so cliche in that gauche out-of-towner culture shock sort of way.”

Be real, be yourself

“The corporate distillation and distribution of Southern California to the rest of America is creating a strange and funny illusion. After my vacation enlightenment, I have to say that the brains in Hollywood (especially the fashion brains) are doing a good job at making average Middle Americans resemble Venice Beach hippies or jet setting socialites. But the distance between the real world of Southern California and its parallel imitation world is proportionate to the distance between the Earth and the Moon. One of life’s biggest faux pas, in my opinion, is for a person to look like a Southern Californian when they have little or no understanding as to the actual essence of what makes a Southern Californian truly a Southern Californian (the same goes for a New Yorker or a Brit or a…fill in the blank).”

“I envied what few other imperfect people there were who appeared to have found stylistic ways to compensate for their physical shortcomings. There was one heavy man I saw at a restaurant who seemed to wear his excess weight as if it were a bulky cashmere sweater. A cashier was able to offset a long, crooked nose with a loud purple haircut. And a man at the beach was able to turn his physical deformity into an attention-getting act. Viewing these individuals made me wonder why I haven’t been able to find the right fashion accessories to call attention away from my pear-shaped torso and large head. I wondered, as I gazed at all of the eclectic people in coffee shops and and restaurants, why I am not able to exude my inner qualities in the same way that a lot of these people did. It was introspective moments like this that instantly made me loathe my stiff, timid gait, my high forehead and bushy, glowering eyebrows. As I was forced to endure myself in this environment, I longed for nothing more than to be back home in my room drowning my low self-esteem in diet soda and reruns of Law & Order. It was too stressful to face myself as I really am, even in the city that is often notoriously considered the mecca of everything that is fake.”

Conclusion

Los Angeles may have made me long for myself, but it has proved to be a productive longing thus far. It is a longing that has made me want to search, explore and try new things that will enable all the parts of me to coalesce again. The city may have initially chased me away, but it is also calling me back (or else I wouldn’t have written this, right?). And I believe in the future it will continue to call me back and challenge me to search for that latent potential which is hidden within (if not also to cause me to obsess about what is visible to the rest of the world from without).

Memory Lane

Before I moved away from my hometown of Carmichael, CA 13 years ago, I took a roll of pictures of the last high school I attended for posterity’s sake. I actually attended 3 different high schools between 1991 and 1995, but I hardly felt any connection to two of them. The high school that will always remain my true high school is Del Campo, the high school I attended for my freshman year, part of my sophomore and during my senior year. It is the high school which issued me and both of my older brothers diplomas. Most of my elementary and junior high school friends attended Del Campo. There was a lot of Del Campo tradition tied into the neighborhood we lived in. I found and lost myself at Del Campo. (But I’m getting away from the original point I wanted to make about the keepsake pictures I took before moving away all those years ago.)

Since I didn’t grow up with the Internet, I couldn’t have possibly imagined that I would easily be able to summon pictures of my old stomping grounds with my fingertips. All it takes now is an Internet connection to travel down memory lane. Photo albums are a thing of the past. And who cares because they were bulky and cumbersome anyway, right? I can now regale new acquaintances with images from my past, images of people and places which – when removed from their personal context – are mostly meaningless to others who don’t know me well.

For instance, here is a picture of one of the lesser high schools I attended (by “lesser” I mean that it is lesser in importance to me, not so much in overall quality). The photo is of a breezeway. Ah, I love those California high schools with their quads and breezeways.

Here is my high school below. Notice from the photo how it looks like a boreal high school – the lack of palm trees and houses in the distance make it look like it’s nestled in a rustic setting. Only one low building with pines behind it is visible and a big part of the picture is dominated by a mound of grass (this is where the Christian fundis used to flock in the early 90’s).

But the camera often lies. Del Campo was in fact situated in the densely populated suburb of Fair Oaks. Fair Oaks was located within Sacramento County, a county with a population of approximately 1.2 million people. And it continues to grow. Del Campo was part of the San Juan Unified School District, the 3rd largest district in the state of California during the nineties (I don’t know if it still is).   

A cougar was our mascot. Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Below is a promotional video for a rival high school I wish I could have attended in a parallel life. The only problem is that it was/is an all boys school, so dating would have been kind of tricky. Oh yeah – plus I’m not Catholic, so I guess that would have also posed a problem. But the Jesuits are really hardcore about discipline, learning, applying yourself and training young people to be some the coolest, most successful and richest bastards on the planet.

There you have it, Memory Lane. Next up: Forgotten Cul de Sac.