Jury Duty

They got me again. Jury duty. Third time. Second time was a few years ago, sitting around a jury waiting room in Jamaica, Queens that had the exact feel of a decrepit bus station in East St. Louis. That time, I was gone in a day, not even selected. First time was in the early 90s, in the Bronx, a six-week murder trial, and I’ll get into that later.

This time, in Kew Gardens, Queens, it really got to me. I know, I should be used to metal detectors by now. But I never will be. For jury duty? Really? They were calling me there to perform a civic duty. With a court-decreed summons. Am I really going to bring in a sawed-off shotgun under my coat to randomly kill people in a jury duty waiting room?

The worst part was the guards: incredibly rude and brusque, past the point of antagonism. Barking at people. Demanding they empty their pockets, everything, not even tissues or cough drops, empty them. Really? If I leave one Halls mentholyptus in my pocket by accident, it’s going to set off … the Halls mentholyptus alarm? Assholes. Incredibly rude assholes who eyed everyone waiting in line as if they were child rapists being brought before a judge. I get summoned by the Court, to take time out my life, to perform a civic duty … and all I do is get treated like dogshit by these community college dropouts with badges who have no need to be so openly antagonistic to people who clearly aren’t criminals, who can’t be, otherwise they wouldn’t be summoned?

It really put me off, this time, really hit home how deeply abnormal this process is, how courthouses, and schools, and so many other public institutions, are now. Just as bad as anything you’ll read in 1984 … this is where we are now as a society. I doubt the rest of the country is this bad, just a perfect storm of the New York City Prick Mentality and this awful lock-down mentality we now have with places like this.

I thought about it more. Especially with schools. Most urban schools have this metal detector/guards set-up. It struck me this time in jury duty how much this felt like I was entering a prison facility: the same level of scrutiny and disdain. I put myself in the shoes of a 12-year-old kid going to a cruddy inner-city public school, his first day outside of elementary school … where every morning means walking this gauntlet of shit. Probably for good reason, too, in their case, as there are predators-in-training stalking the hallways of many of these schools.

But let’s say I’m 12 years old, a relatively good kid, not a criminal … but every day when I go to school, I’m being treated like a criminal entering a prison. What kind of mentality does that give me towards the education system? Would I even know enough that there are places in the world where being metal-detected and wanded by guys with badges is a deeply abnormal and unthinkable process to put a 12-year-old boy through, going to a school, no less? I would be raised inside this culture where the expectation was that I was already under suspicion for having done nothing. And living in a world where the expectation would be that, sooner or later, I would do something requiring all these guards with their handguns and clubs to take action against me. Why else would they be there? Presumably to protect me … but if they’re there to protect me, why are they also treating me like someone they need to be protected from? I’m not carrying a gun, or a club. Should I be if I want to be on equal footing? A grown man carrying a gun and club projects one thing to me: fear. You need to be afraid of something to arm yourself that heavily.

That would play on my mind. It played on my mind this past jury duty assignment. How fucked this next generation of kids must be if they consider this kind of daily abuse in any way “normal” … when it’s about as far from normal as you could possibly get. I had this conversation with people at work and was alarmed how many of them think this is perfectly normal behavior. It just isn’t. It’s sick, and it warps people’s minds.

They’ll keep telling us it’s all to “protect us” … but at some point, you have to ask yourself, where does it end? Many of us can remember life before these drastic measures, when you could amble up to a courthouse anywhere in America and just walk in, as opposed to feeling like you’re bringing a carton of cigarettes to an unlucky friend incarcerated in Rahway. We’re so ramped up with this bullshit that I can’t possibly see how we could ramp down again to a relatively normal life where people walked freely into schools and courthouses. The only logical progression would be for things to get worse from this point, not better.

In a sick way, this whole process, especially with schools, seems geared towards making lower and working-class kids feel more comfortable and familiar with being institutionalized, to embrace it in some sense at an early age … so they won’t mind so much when it happens for real a decade down the road. To get used to guards making them feel less human, to be taunted by people with guns, to be made to feel they have to answer to people no one should ever have to answer to.

I can only grasp how awful prison must be, if this sort of treatment is a small fraction of the discomfort and disrespect inmates are exposed to daily for years on end. (I'm assuming it goes both ways, and inmates surely treat guards the same way.) Believe me, getting treated like dogshit in a courthouse is incentive enough for me to do everything possible to not fall under the care and control of any institution. I’m sure I’d figure out how to live and survive in that environment … but I can see, through these minute glimpses, how awful and soul destroying it must be. As with any institution, be it a prison or a hospital, everyone is there to treat you as a dollar sign, whether it’s you in a hospital bed running up a six-figure bill, or you in an orange jumpsuit feeding tax dollars into prison construction and employment. I don’t want any part of either and will do whatever necessary to avoid being part of either situation.

About that earlier jury duty in the Bronx … I’ve forgotten so much about the experience. Must have been mid-90s. I found an article about the actual case. And here’s an even better article about the mass murder leading up to that revenge murder our defendant committed. Read The New York Times article as part of the entry: it gives the entire history of how this story came to be, basically a neighborhood beef amongst teenage drug dealers that exploded into this awful story of multiple corpses. I don't believe the first link mentions that the defendant from our case was in a rival drug gang struggling for dominance of that neighborhood.

I think it was because of that murder on the courthouse steps that this whole era of courthouse lockdowns began – at least that was made explicitly clear to us at the trial, that this was why getting into the Bronx County Courthouse was such an ordeal. Being part of that jury was a terrible experience, as you could imagine, but at least there was a story to tell afterwards. How many of us are exposed to that world, where teenage kids push their bounds by falling into drugs and easy money, and then not have maturity or sense enough to quietly ease out of that life after making a small fortune? In this case, petty neighborhood beefs were tossed into the mix (in this case, a teenage girl slapped in the face in public) and resulted in seven deaths over, essentially, nothing but hurt feelings. When’s the last time you shot someone for hurting your feelings?

I don’t recall being as outraged at the time over my treatment as someone being scrutinized upon entering a courthouse. Why? Because that was one case where they should have sequestered the jury completely from the public. As noted, this was a jury for a high-profile murder case. Every day, I’d look out in the crowded audience and notice the actor Sam Waterston sitting there, dapper and small in a white shirt. Little did I know he was researching his role for his stint as a District Attorney on the TV show, Law and Order. He surely got an education with that case. But every day, there’d be a parade of teenage drug gang members, some in prison uniforms, others not, giving testimony as to what they knew about this revenge killing, and how circumstances came to be that these people found themselves walking around in bullet-proof vests and killing each other execution-style in cramped apartments.

And every day … I’d see these same punks and assholes, not a dozen feet away from me, eating lunch on the courthouse steps with family and friends! Riding elevators with me. Making eye contact. As a juror, I had zero protection from these people. They knew who I was … could have followed me home, if they wanted. The Bronx is notorious for having an ass-backwards attitude on providing guilty verdicts to violent felony crimes. I think part of that is that people who live there simply know or are related to people who have done time so that they tend to let things slide when it comes to making a hard call like that. But more importantly, they’re afraid of vengeance as most of the crimes are related to drug gangs and such. There are a lot of reasons why I left the Bronx, but this realization was one of them, that I was living around people who had lowered their expectations of life to match their physical surroundings, i.e., when you know a few guys who’ve done time for felony offenses, have a relative or two in jail for stupid drug-related shit, you tend to see the world through that sort of lens, where these situations most people find soul destroying simply become part of every-day life.

And, thus, we’re back to where I started, imagining myself as a relatively innocent 12-year-old standing in front of a metal detector at the local P.S. for the first time, and treating it like it’s no big deal. It is a big deal. What it represents. What it says about the place you live. The building in which you are to learn about life, and how to live in this world. What it says about you. Who you are. Who you aren’t. Why you should be made to feel like you’ve done something wrong, when you’ve done nothing wrong. Why you’re made to feel like you’re already institutionalized, when you’re just a kid, and life is spread out in front of you, waiting for you to live it, to sense that freedom … and have that freedom empty its pockets every morning, take off its belt, pass through a metal detector, and maybe have a rent-a-cop curse it and pass a wand over then wave it through after a pat-down.

How did we get here? More importantly, how do we get out of here? Is it even possible?

So Long, Joe II

When I heard that Joe Paterno had been diagnosed with “a treatable form of” lung cancer, on top of a broken hip, I said to a few people, “He’ll be gone inside a year.”

As it turned, out he was gone much sooner, as in today. As I know from harsh personal experience, anyone that age being treated for cancer is rolling the dice, chances are the treatment itself will create conditions (pneumonia, most likely) that will kill the person rather than the cancer itself. And the doctors will shrug and ignore the fact that one of their patients just died. (At least that’s how they treated my father and us.)

Of course, this isn’t just a factory worker with four grown kids who passed on but a college football legend, saddled with a recently-tarnished image we’ve all been bludgeoned with for the past few months. I’ve pretty much said my peace on that subject in two previous posts. His passing changes nothing in that regard.

Hearing the news, I felt terrible. Sensed it was coming, but not that fast. Get ready for the armchair moralists and dogshit sports columnists to gear up their hype machines again, for more sermons on the mount from people you should trust about as far as you could throw. Writing can be a fairly enlightening and heroic profession, at times. But at other times, it presents people who aren’t good at communicating anything real, but are more than glad to infuse the culture with a type of easy, greeting-card mediocrity that so many people mistake as moral turpitude. For all the writers I’ve known, I don’t think there are any I would trust as great moralists, myself included. At least I’ll tell you as much, rather than pretend I’m wielding some magic wand that illuminates all I touch. I’m no more or less human than you are, and just as prone to getting things wrong.

People are going to remember the man however they want to. This man had a profoundly positive influence on me for decades. That sense of stressing intellectual pursuits, whatever else you do in life. In his case, he was giving free college educations to kids who were tremendous athletes. In return, those kids were given the opportunity to be part of a great college football program that brought in millions of dollars to the university. Some of those kids were so talented that they then took their skills, sharpened by him and his staff, and made their fortunes as professional football players. Some fell by the wayside, or never quite clicked with the program. Most did as noted above, got free college educations, which is nothing to scoff at, especially for impoverished kids from small towns and inner cities. And in Penn State’s case, they were openly encouraged to stay the course and graduate with a degree.

May not seem like much, but it is at that level, where those kids are treated like icons, and no doubt were to some degree at Penn State, too. But beneath the bluster, beneath the occasional flame-out and passing controversy, there was that steady line of graduates. This is Joe Paterno’s legacy, after all is said and done.

If you feel the need to tie in this awful Sandusky situation in with it, feel free. I do, too, but I keep it in perspective. Unless otherwise proven over the next few months or years, I’m going to assume that Joe did what he supposed to, report the situation to his immediate authorities, who then did nothing. I’m going to take his word for it that he didn’t really know what Sandusky was doing and had no knowledge of the 1998 investigation. If this is not the case, then now that he’s gone, it should be much easier for someone to come forward, an investigator or participant from either the 1998 case or this 2002 case, and state otherwise. My mind is surely open to that, or any, type of new knowledge and insight being shed on this case.

Even with that take on things, the Board of Regents still held him accountable and claimed the reason he was fired was because he didn’t do more in the situation. And I can surely see their point of view, given that he over-road their authority in the past and was guessing he could do it again, save no one was prepared for the media explosion when this story broke. What most people aren’t realizing is the Board of Regents is a voluntary organization; I’m not even sure if those people get paid. These are people, probably all of them alumni who want to still be part of the university, who have done pretty well for themselves in life, have successful careers in other areas, and joining the Board of Regents for their college alma mater looks good on the resume and the monument they’ve built to themselves.

People seem to think it’s some shadow organization of campus insiders pulling strings. No. It’s highly-visible alumni, and I gather many of them are going to clear out after this whole scenario, as they’re no doubt receiving a ton of grief over what they did from other alumni. I suspect that there will be some type of pardon for Joe issued by the Board over the next year or two over how we was let go. If you’re not part of the Penn State universe and having a hard time seeing that, then maybe you should grasp that there are two worlds here: the outside world, which has been a shitstorm of accusation and shame, and the Penn State world, where Paterno’s legacy over the past five or so decades looms large over so many things on that town, campus and state.

Like so many alumni, I’m part of both worlds. Far away from that Penn State world. I graduated, and aside from spending my summer after graduation there, then revisiting the place once for Arts Festival in the early 90s, I’ve had virtually nothing to do with the campus. They got enough money from me the first time around, so I’m not a donator, especially when I see what they’re charging kids now. I feel no burning need to attach myself to the university, but I do take some sort of pride in associating myself with the college, and am grateful for the time I spent there, as those few years opened me up in innumerable ways that I’m still learning from today.

Paterno and his legacy are tied into that feeling. Not his myth. His legacy … what he did … not what we think he did (or didn’t) do. I’m with a lot of people on this – he should have done more when that incident was reported to him. Everyone should have done more. They didn’t, and this thing turned into a shitstorm of epic proportions that brought down his career and damaged the program he spent a lifetime building. The sting for Joe was being fired after being a coach there since the early 1950s. Since the early 1950s. Imagine working for a place that long, rising so high, achieving so much … and one day, you’re fired over the phone … for doing what you were supposed to do according to school policy? It seems to me that had he contacted, say, the state police on his own back in 2002, doing so could have just as easily led to him being fired for ignoring school policy on handling such situations.

Either way, he wasn’t going to win this one. And if there’s one thing I learned watching Penn State football, you absorb the losses. Some of them stay with you the rest of your days, but you absorb them. You live with them. I still don’t know what happened in this situation, and I suspect Joe’s passing will have little to do with how this scenario plays out. In his last interview, a few days before he passed, he seemed to give a pretty straightforward account about what he did and why he did it. Either you believe him, or you don’t. There will now be plenty of time for anyone who wants to come forward and either prove or disprove what he claimed.

I feel awful today, as does any Penn State football fan. Most people don’t get to choose when they die, and I’m sure Joe would have chosen to live longer and try to clear his name in all this. But I don’t think there’s anything more he could have done, save to reiterate what he said in his last interview and stand by his words. He deserved a better way out, but as I could see with my father, chances are we will all deserve better ways out. My point being, there’s no easy way out of here, and if you think there is, you’ve been reading too many glowing obituaries where it seems the person was lifted to heaven by a gathering of angels, after the deceased muttered famous last words for his loved ones to live by, and they, bearing candles and warm, understanding smiles, watched him float free of all worldly cares to a better place.

No. Shit happened. Did not go according to plan. But it’s done. It’s for the rest of us to pick ourselves up and prepare for whatever life throws at us next. I’ll miss the man immensely, for those things he taught me in my life.

And What of Heaven

That last post regarding a heavily-sedated four-year-old’s vision of heaven got me thinking. All right, so you can poke fun at this … but have you ever really thought about heaven? Does it exist. If so, what would it be like. And hell. Is there an afterlife. Is there one true religion.

Yes, the stuff of many a college dorm-room party debate, that time in your life when you will spend three hours getting into it with someone you radically disagree with just to see how far both of you are willing to go in terms of semantics. (And realizing that Born Agains will go all night on this shit, and you’re better off not going there at all with them.)

I can’t recall having a single debate like this in my post-college life. For that matter, aside from trying to reason with the girl who went Born Again on me and just got too impossible to be around, I didn’t really bother with this much in college either. I did have one friend who was deeply Christian – still is. But more of a hard-edged, not so typical Christian, who when not engaging in that stuff, has always been a very fun guy to be around. It’s because of people like him that I’m not as down on Christianity as many people suspect I would be. There are plenty of good ones out there, going about their lives, having faith, not being too obnoxious or arrogant. Whether or not I agree with them is another point. The ultimate point is they’re big enough as humans to want good people in their lives regardless of their belief systems.

That’s what irks me most about the Christian ideal of heaven. The concept that only Christians will go there. Honestly, that seems like a shit proposition and not some place I’d ever want to go. Forget about eternity. I’d have a hard time spending five minutes in a stalled elevator with a lot of Christians. Living in New York the past two decades, I’m constantly exposed to different cultures, people from different countries, languages of all sorts flying around, all day, every day, just this extreme mix of every type of person you could imagine. Live long enough in that environment, you sense that there are many things going on in this world to which you are not privy, or geared to understand because of your culture and how you were raised. I mean that in a good way -- it's a humbling thought, because those people from those different cultures should be looking at you and thinking the same thing. We can all learn a lot from each other.

And then to imagine this monochrome world of people of only one religious faith, who are there only because they put their money on the right horse, and very often in life positioned themselves as arrogant power mongers, be it politics, money or exploiting the religion itself to obtain both? As opposed to countless millions of others who had different faiths, but lived good lives, gave freely of themselves, put the needs of others in front of theirs, basically lived as good and pure a life as they possibly could? No. This concept gave me trouble in those heady college days, and it’s a dealbreaker for me now. If faith in Christ is the only door, forget it, that’s a door I won’t even bother to touch, based solely on the miscreants I’ve seen in my life who have exploited their faith for financial and political power, or just made a mockery of their faith with their arrogance and stupidity. Satan can read this back to me at the gates of hell whenever I go – I’ll nod my head and say, yep, that about nails it, oh dark master, please hand me my pitchfork.

Honestly, I’m not even sure if I believe in an afterlife these days. The older I get, the more it seems to me that when you die, that’s it, the end. I mentioned this to a friend once on the phone and he said, “Doesn’t that prospect frighten you? Doesn’t it make you feel like there’s a lot more you need to accomplish?” I thought about it and said, no, doesn’t frighten me because look around, every animal dies, it’s our shared fate, it’s what we’re supposed to do. As for accomplishments, shit, man, I’m not going to be around after I’m gone, so why waste a minute worrying about legacies and however many people carry around your memory? It won’t be doing me any good, whether I’m dead in the ground or on some mystical journey.

I believed in the sense of afterlife as reward or punishment for what we do on earth. In other words, I’ve seen plenty of people thrive on earth in one way or another, who I know are essentially bad people, and plenty of people struggle on earth who I know are essentially good people. So I pictured the afterlife as a settling of the score, one way or the other.

You have to be young and fairly untested by life to see the world that way. You live long enough, you see bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to bad people, good things happen to good people … on endless repeat, in our lives, with no logic to it. If someone you dislike suffers some hideous accident or illness, it surely doesn’t pay to see that as some sort of divine retribution. As if that horrible thing happened just because you don’t like the person. God help you if pray/wish for shit like that to happen. It’s bad luck. The same thing might happen to you next year.

And all those people you picture having questionable morality who are wealthy, or famous, or beautiful … don’t kid yourself. They’re just people. From what I’ve seen, that sort of material success does a number on people, often turns their worlds upside down, and leaves them duty-bound to present this façade of pure happiness, power and fulfillment. It’s high profile insecurity. You should always doubt someone putting forth that image. Because it’s not human to be that way all the time. It’s an illusion, shown to you for a reason, more than likely intimidation, and most people will bite and never question it. Their real power is not that illusion, but presenting it makes them feel better about themselves, it’s part of the game they play.

The most financially successful, driven people I’ve seen in New York, it seems like the one thing they have in common, once you scratch the surface, is being troubled. For one thing, above all else, they love that sense of power money brings them more than anything, or anyone, in their lives. Rest assured, the people in their lives sense this, and there’s anywhere from an uncomfortable gap to outright psychosis flowing from the wake of that divide.

And driven people never have enough. They’re never happy. They’re never satisfied. If they got $10 billion, they’ll convince themselves they need $20 billion. It’s how they see the world, with the insecurity we all feel regarding how other people see us, how we see ourselves, too. It explains billionaires and the 1% concept we hear so much about. That TV show Hoarders? It’s pathetic, focusing on people who have small homes filled with junk. Your average millionaire has an entire life filled with excess and material nothingness that make those hoarding houses look like a sample of feng shui design. Those are the real hoarders in our world, yet we’re trained to quietly ignore this, or even worse, respect it.

But I don’t see any need to hate these people, or feel sorry for them, as if that would matter to them! That’s their thing in life, to be that obsessed with this one narrow, exclusionary sense of power, the same way a Born Again may view his religion as the ultimate show of power, the afterlife.

So I realized that sense of reward or punishment in the afterlife that I placed so much value on when I was younger was counterfeit. We all receive plenty of rewards and punishment in our lives. If you don’t think you’re being rewarded, try life with no legs, or blind, or suffering from a debilitating mental disorder, or living in a tin shack in a third-world slum. There are any number of variables going on in even the most humble life that are rewarding and life-affirming. I’ve learned to value those things, like personal health and sanity, solitude, the ability to sit and think, to have a warm place to go when it rains, people I can talk to when the world gets to be too much, food when I’m hungry, water when I’m thirsty. Little things that you never think about that are huge, paramount, when you don’t have them. And as noted, everyone passes through darkness in some sense, even if it’s something as basic as family members dying, or loneliness, or no sense of purpose, or a sense of purpose you can acknowledge will destroy others. These things are not lost on folks we perceive as “having it all” even if it never shows.

You have it all when you have your health and sanity. Or at least that’s what I believe as I get older, and see people a few decades in front of me lose grips on one or the other, sometimes both due to the ageing process or circumstances beyond their control.

I just have a hard time picturing that sense of making it through this world, experiencing all the good and bad, the successes and failures, and then at the end, bang, tunnel of light, here’s your harp, here’s a set of wings … welcome to heaven. At least I can’t picture that scenario (or the opposite) as a human now, knowing what I know of the world, knowing what I know of myself, that if I immediately became an angel, but was otherwise as human as I am now, all I could think would be, “Man, that angel with the nice ass is giving me such a hard-on … my wings are getting tired … this is heaven, and I can’t even get off a good shit … does anyone ever feel bad around here … would it be all right to tell another angel to go fuck himself?”

There would need to be a transformation of some sort. What I could get my mind around? That concept I mentioned in the last post of our spirits leaving our bodies, and entering a place where only the strength and beauty of our souls mattered. That appeals to me. Not this crazy bullshit with harps, wings, pitchforks, sea of flames, etc. I don’t care if The Bible tells me so … much of the Old Testament and hefty chunks of the New can be traced to previous creation and savior myths that existed long before they were written, so I have a hard time going with all of it as literal truth (although when I do read The Bible, I appreciate its wisdom and poetic vision, particularly the Psalms). Again, if I got this wrong, and all those writings preceding The Bible by millenniums that the book directly emulates is just pure coincidence, Satan, please clip this portion of the post and read it back to me in that hissing baritone of yours while anally impaling me on a red-hot spike. I’ll understand, I’m giving you tacit approval right now. Laugh as I howl in eternal agony, as you have for millions of other smartasses who thought you were a myth.

The soul leaving the body is the only thing I could possibly believe in at this point in my life: it makes sense. And I’m not even sure if it makes enough sense, that when we die, we don’t just drop over dead, and that’s the end for each of us. I’m just as willing to believe that, too. (I’ve never had ghostly visitors from my past fade back over my bed one quiet night and whisper, “You’re wrong about that, Bill, change, now.” Will surely keep you posted if such a scenario transpires.) Our bodies betray us over time, and any pleasures we pursue in the physical world, sooner or later, lose their value. Spiritual enlightenment is the one thing that never seems to grow old, or become something it wasn’t meant to be, or encourage us to be greedy and needful at the expense of others. I can see pursuing that, in any form, religious or otherwise, but again, cannot see the point in limitations and rules that would degrade that freedom. Breaking free from the body, it seems to me, would be the ultimate freedom.

I remember in grade school how the teachers would ask us what we wanted to be when we “grew up.” And it was always the same: football player, fireman, nurse, movie star, etc. Either these jobs tied into the concept of service or celebrity. Because that was what we were taught to respect – still are, I’m sure, if you were to talk to kids. The reality is most of us get these weird jobs that no kid could possibly imagine, that we do only for the money and some small sense of purpose. Senior Vice President of Global Relations? Chief Information Officer? I can rattle off dozens of screwy, self-important titles I’ve seen over the years, some of them longer than this sentence. Things a kid could never imagine and would laugh at (until he saw the six-figure annual salary … at which point he’d stop being a kid). The point being, adulthood is nothing like we thought it would be, even when we were in college. Especially in college … when we all had these perfect visions of ourselves doing exactly what we wanted and being rewarded accordingly.

Well, I’m imaging a teacher asking that same question, and some kid responding, “Let’s cut to the chase. Adulthood is over-rated – I can tell by the look on your face. The right question to ask is, what do you want to be when you die. And I’m thinking, a wave on the ocean, the wind on a summer day, the sun on your face, a drop of rain when the fields are dry, the look in a dying dog’s eyes as his master pets his head for the last time, the sound of our laughing when we’re playing in the schoolyard, a blue star, water flowing, the first cherry blossom in spring, the last leaf to fall in autumn.”

I can only imagine the stunned silence, followed by howls of laughter from the other kids. But the one constant in my life is the next step ends up being nothing like what I thought it would be, for better and worse. Can’t see why the afterlife would be any different, assuming it’s there.

Heaven Is Real(ly Strange)

I may not talk about this much, but I had an out-of-body experience.  In fact, I’ve never referred to the incident as such, but have since realized that’s exactly what it was.

I had my tonsils out some time in the early 1970’s.  I can’t recall the exact year – most likely 1970-72, as I had them out “early” and had the operation the same time as my slightly older sister.  As with most things in my childhood, I’m sure the explanation of why we both went in together was economics: my depression-era parents did everything possible to save a buck, which also made sense with my factory-working father supporting seven people.

The out-of-body experience occurred just after the operation.  I was high as a kite.  I didn’t know this at the time – I would later learn this when I sampled magic mushrooms in college and found the effects to be quite similar (and wonderful).  When I first came out of my slumber, I had the sensation of lying on grass on a sunny day.  The thing was, I was on a gurney in an operating room.  The weirder thing was, I was convinced I was lying vertically, against the wall, relaxed, but somehow suspended vertically on a patch of soft grass … I swear I could even smell the grass.  I leaned my head forward, but didn’t fall off the gurney.

It didn’t end there.  A few second later, I became aware of my body rising, slowly, over the hospital room, so I could see my sister on the gurney next to me, a doctor making notations on a chart, nurses putting away instruments and such on a tray.  It was at this point that I remember feeling very scared – this wasn’t right.  I was afraid I was going to fall.

Coinciding with that “falling” feeling was the realization that the anesthetic was wearing off, and my throat was on fire.  I felt immediately slammed down onto the gurney, no longer vertical, no longer on grass, and my throat felt as though someone had stabbed it with a dagger.  I started crying, hard.  A nurse said, “Look, William, your sister is doing fine.  It doesn’t hurt that much.”  And I looked over, and she was surely at peace, probably as high as I had been, but as noted, whatever good shit they had pumped into my system, man, it was no longer working.

And that’s where it ended.  I’m sure I wailed for a good 15 minutes longer, wore myself out with the weeping, as kids do, then dozed off, awakening a few hours later in our shared hospital room to parents and ice cream.

Do I attribute this to some mystical experience?  No.  I attribute it to drugs.  Really good drugs.  The kind of drugs that alter reality and fill you with a sense of peace.  I wouldn’t have had that experience without the drugs.  Brother M has assured me, as a wayward teenager, he had many out-of-body experiences in less clinical circumstances.  I remember the fall-out of one, him standing in the living room at two in the morning covered in clods of dirt, vines and weeds after running his car into the side of a hill, claiming he had just missed hitting a dog.  We later learned he thought he was driving an airplane through a corn field, and the corn cobs were balls of light.  He had been driving on a non-descript portion of Route 61 and simply drove over the rail into the side of a hill.  Luckily, there was a hill, otherwise he would have been flying for real.

I use all this as preface to a review of a book a friend recommended that I just read over the New Year’s weekend: Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent.  Burpo is a pastor from the midwest, and Vincent a professional writer who co-wrote a book with Sara Palin, among other conservative-leaning books.  The book is written from the point of view of Burpo, so I’m guessing he told much of the story to Vincent, and she edited this into an acceptable book format.  At least the book has that feel of colloquial first-person account with an agenda.  Burpo is set up as a working-class everyman with a heart of gold and “hey bud” writing voice, thus we get the impression as readers after about 15 pages that if we disagree with him, there must be something really wrong and bad with us.  (Vincent knows her trade well, emotional manipulation that the unsubtle and converted will not sense.)

The gist is Burpo’s four-year-old son, Colton, visits heaven during a near-death experience he had after his appendix burst, was mis-diagnosed, and he wasn’t operated on until the situation had grown into a life-or-death proposition.  He never flat-lined at any time in the experience, but claimed to have visited heaven nonetheless, where he met God, Jesus, a grandfather he never knew, a fetus his mother miscarried (that he miraculously also knew nothing about) and various other angels.  He even met Satan, apparently, but was too spooked to try to physically describe him.  (I’m wondering if anyone’s shown him a picture of Simon Cowell since?)

It was a bad read, to say the least, cost me $5.00 on Amazon Kindle, but that’s a fiver I won’t be getting back.  Still, mission accomplished.  Colton and Vincent sold another copy, have no doubt sold millions of copies as this is the exact sort of hokum that’s bound to be a hit with a Christian reading audience who, even if they have their doubts, will feel some type of warmth in the story of this humble father, who had already lived through a year of tribulations (nearly going broke due to various health issues of his own, while his garage-door installation business fell by the wayside, during his and his son’s physical problems), and then slowly realized his son had a mystical experience.

How mystical was it?  Put it this way.  If I did my weight in magic mushrooms, with The Wizard of Oz in Blu-Ray on repeat, Dark Side of the Moon blasting from the speakers of my stereo, I couldn’t have come anywhere near this.  Little Colton said he was in heaven for only three minutes, but he packed a lot of shit into those three minutes.  Meeting the man in charge, his Son who died for our sins, family members he never knew, and got to experience the technicolor glory of heaven, where everyone has wings, either stays a child or reverts back to how they looked at 25. 

Let’s start with Colton meeting “Pop” – his paternal great-grandfather who died in a car crash in his early 60s, decades before Colton was born.  The “great-grandfather” – like everyone else in heaven – appeared to be about 25 year old as he was given that body again after his car crash.  Old people … suck, in heaven.  Heaven would be crawling with the elderly if people entered heaven at the age they died.  It would be like a senior citizens home.  Heaven would smell vaguely of piss and clorox.  We can’t have that.  It has to be me more like MTV.  Everybody’s young.  Everybody’s beautiful.  Isn’t that heavenly?

This man Colton met in heaven had many identities to many people.  Why would this man/angel not identify himself by his real name, then simply state that he was the kid’s great grandfather?  In the context of this man’s after life, he’s more than likely in heaven with his own parents, grandparents, great grandparents and possibly some of his children … why would he identify himself to this kid as “Pop” in this context?  He wasn’t “Pop” to Colton.  He would probably only say, “Your father is my grandson.”  Which would probably blow the kid’s mind, as he’s being told this guy who looks younger than his Dad is his Dad’s grandfather … who died decades before he was born. 

Lest we forget “Pop” was now a  25-year-old man in perfect health, with wings … think about that when you try to identify your parents in heaven, assuming you’re all lucky enough to get there.  Your mother and father are going to be 25 years old and in perfect health, just as you shall be.  My Mom was pretty good looking in her time.  What if I don’t know it’s her and hit on her?  According to Colton, I’ll still have a physical body and will apparently have the same urges, and need to shit and eat, too, I guess?  The mother thing alone would freak me out.

And why would we have any physical attributes in heaven when it seems like the most logical explanation of heaven would be our spirits leaving our bodies, which are in the ground rotting (or incinerated) as countless exhumations have proven, which only served to drag down and cloud our judgment in life?  It seems like leaving our bodies, in and of itself, would be a pretty apt description of heaven … why all this dumb, childish shit thrown on top of it to make it seem like a Disney cartoon on acid?  Oh, almost forgot … it’s because we’re talking about a four-year-old boy stoned out of his mind piecing together bits of his sub-conscious the way we all do when we dream or get high.

The book reeks of this sort of “stacking the deck” bullshit.  As if Colton “went to heaven” so he could later prove it only to his father, who was the only one who called his grandfather “Pop.”  I’m not sure if Burpo and Vincent are smart enough to recognize this.  A lot of what went on in heaven seemed to happen only so that little Colton could then relay this information to his father, who would immediately sense the connection to his own life, as if the kid’s recollection in and of itself, even if he had nothing to tell his father that would make any sense to him, wasn’t good enough.  It was only valid when his father deemed it so.  I take it that if Colton had told his father of things he saw that his father could in no way personally verify, Colton would probably still be seeing a therapist year later.

The reason Burpo focused on “Pop” being in heaven was that “Pop” never went to church that much, therefore there was doubt as to whether “Pop” had accepted Jesus as his personal savior.  Little Colton, after his trip to heaven, was adamant that everyone had to accept Christ as his savior, otherwise they wouldn’t get to heaven.  I guess he’s lucky they were in the midwest, because I could only imagine little Colton busting in on a bunch of Jews sitting shiva for a much-loved family matriarch who had just passed on, and slipping into his “must accept Jesus” routine … they’d have drop-kicked the mini-savior straight through to Utah.

Of course, we later find, just days before his crash, by chance, “Pop” had attended a Christian gathering and had asked to be saved.  Christ, does it matter?  The guy’s in heaven, again, no need to stack the deck with this inconsequential tent-revival bullshit story that magically coincides with little Colton’s stipulation on how you get to heaven.  It’s just this sort of bizarre deck-stacking that’s so questionable that anyone with a rational mind can only read something like this, shake his head and think, “How many people reading this book are going to willfully or conveniently not even spend a second thinking of moral questions like this?”  And I mean morality from a writer’s point of view … knowing that you are foisting bullshit of one sort or another on a reading audience.  I’ve done it, and have felt terrible afterwards.  On a scale like this?  I’ve done some pretty screwed-up things in my time, so help me God, but nothing this shameless.

The most horrifying incident of this comes with the miscarried sister Colton never had.  He meets her in heaven.  She’s a little girl now.  I gather meeting a bloody fetus with wings might have been a hard one to pull off, unless Colton had glimpsed a Nirvana album cover when he was three and somehow worked this into his vision.  So let’s make her a little girl.  NOT a 25-year-old girl, like all those millions of elderly people who have died but ka-ching themselves back to their physical prime.  I take it when you die as a child, you stay that same age.  If you die as a fetus, as countless millions have since the advent of legalized abortion, then we’ll spin the magic wheel in heaven and make you an attractive little girl.  Always attractive.  No room in heaven for homely girls.  Every boy and girl who was aborted has to be a vision of loveliness. 

No fat people in heaven either, I’d imagine.  If you were 25 and the size of a house, I suspect the Man Upstairs will place you on that heavenly diet plan that allows you to drop 95 lbs. in a nanosecond.  Fixes your teeth while He’s at it.  Colton also specifically stated no one has glasses in heaven.  Not sure why?  I guess the concept of angels with wings … and glasses … doesn’t work with Jesus.  Or wheelchairs.  Or arm or leg braces.  And I guess if you lived with some physical deformity, poof, magically gone.  We can’t have The Elephant Man greeting people in heaven.  Rita Heyworth and Patrick Swayze, sure.  But not some guy who looked like he had a giant testicle on the side of his head … but probably had a heart a thousand times more pure than most people on earth.

The concept of aborted fetuses – as opposed to miscarried – is not broached.  The assumption being any woman who has an abortion is most likely going to hell, along with guys who kiss each other, and Jews, you know, all those people who have horns on their heads (if you look hard enough … I wont’ get into the sideline of the kid mentioned in the book who saw haloes over some people’s heads, but not others).  Unless she accepts Jesus as her personal savior.  I can only imagine that conversation in heaven, when an aborted fetus, now an 8-year-old girl with wings, approaches the mother, who later found Jesus, and asks her, “Mom, remember me?  You aborted me when I six weeks old in your womb.  How do you like them apples?”  (As the polka song says, in heaven there is no beer, but this woman will surely crave more than few.)

It never gets dark in heaven, according to Colton.  There is no night.  I’m assuming it never rains either.  It’s like a sunny day in southern California, all the time.  So if you love the night, or the smell of a rain shower in the summer, or gently falling snow, forget it, those things never happen in heaven.  It’s always sunny, light breeze, low humidity, 75 degrees.  When the angels aren’t flying around, they’re skateboarding down by the pearly gates.

I’m not even going to get into Jesus.  The picture with this week’s post is a painting by a girl named Akiane called “Prince of Peace” that appeared to her as the face of Jesus in a vision.  (If you go to her website, you’ll find she has a pretty nice enterprise set up for herself, selling prints of her various visions for tidy sums.  And good for her – it is amazing that someone at her age has the artistic talent to do the things she’s done.  May as well get rich off it.)  In the book, a big deal is made of little Colton rejecting every picture of Christ as not being authentic … until he saw Akiane’s painting of Christ on a website.  Funny, how both their visions of Christ subscribe to the cosmic surfer dude portrayal we’ve had fed to us over the course of centuries by Western artists to represent a Jew from the Middle East.  I would expect Christ to look more like Danny DeVito or Groucho Marx, but I guess He really must look like Dennis Wilson, Kenny Loggins, or any number of guys you’d meet at a Yanni concert.  (It can now be told: Jesus is Andrew Gold.)

We also find later in the book that Colton has grown a little too attached to his vision of heaven.  There’s a situation noted in parking lot, with Todd Burpo becoming extremely upset when his son darts out into parking lot near major traffic.  When asked why he keeps doing things like this, even though he could be killed, like the rabbit run over in the middle of the road that Todd points out, the son replies, “Oh, good!  That means I get to go back to heaven!”  Todd says, “You’re missing the point.  This time, I get to heaven first.  I’m the dad; you’re the kid.  Parents go first!”

The chapter ends on that note.  But wouldn’t Colton’s no-nonsense, just-the-truth-as-I-see-it reply have been: “Well, I hope you die real soon, Dad.  I can’t wait to go back to heaven!”

Colton also gets into the apocalypse, which is coming, according to him, in our lifetime, as he sees his thirtysomething father fighting off demons and bad people with a sword, on earth.  I’ll leave this one alone, save to say if you’re at all familiar with Charles Manson’s views on Helter Skelter, his vision of the apocalypse, about the only things little Colton was missing were race wars and hippies in dune buggies, otherwise he and Charlie were on roughly the same page.

I don’t know where to begin or end with this.  I can understand if you’re a Christian, you pick up a book like this, it makes for a great gift, chances are whoever you’re giving it to isn’t going to freak out and throw the book in the trash.  They’ll read it, nod sagely, have their faith reinforced in some small way, and feel all warm inside in that way these small things are supposed to.  That’s a great marketing plan, and as usual, I tip my cap to Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent for grasping the concept somewhere along the way.  Burpo claims the book was not written for financial gain, and I believe him.  I’ve met more than a few pastors in my time, and this is how they are, basically humble people going about their lives, hardly making any money at day jobs, and tending to their congregation in all their spare time.  It doesn’t bother me that he’ll more than likely use the money to help his church and community.

I’m more interested in Colton, who appears to be a normal boy now, growing up in the midwest, not having any more visions, just going about his life.  I can only hope he goes through a phase.  That Midwest kid phase.  Going to Slipknot concerts.  Becoming a goth for a few months one summer.  Getting into some shit.  Multiple facial piercings.  Having issues with parental authority figures.  Resenting how his visions were turned into a book, that caught fire and became a bestseller, thus making it all seem cheaper than just a pure vision of heaven a small boy had.  I don’t doubt the kid had a mystical experience.  But we all do at times, thanks to drugs, whether taken recreationally or clinically in a life-threatening situation.  Strange shit happens when you’re high.  Books like this happen when you come down.

Holding Patterns

It occurred to me earlier today, drinking bubble tea in the little shop by the laundromat, that more than likely, I’m going to be leaving all this in a few weeks. Not like leaving paradise. Leaving a place I’ve been living temporarily while the place in Astoria undergoes restoration after the fire (which is going full gun right now).

As you could guess, drinking bubble tea, reading a book about The Faces and Rod Stewart on the Kindle, between laundry loads, I’ve learned to relax and make-do with the situation. You live in any place long enough, you get used to it. And it’s not hard to get used to a place people aspire to live in, the suburbs basically. I’ll never get used to the insane commute, or the shitheel driving styles around here (just no need for anyone to drive as selfishly and recklessly as people do around here, ever, for any reason). But people around here know me now. Say hello to the guy down the block walking his bulldog. On first-name bases with the people in the tea shop and diner. Joke around with the Chinese children whose parents run the laundromat, fun kids. Banter with the people waiting for the bus in the morning. Even see the same familiar faces on the way home.

I looked at this whole endeavor as a holding pattern in my life, but have since realized it’s just life, going on as it always does, until it stops. The people who live and work around here will go on doing so, while I go back to my neighborhood and take my rightful place in the apartment I’d been living in for nigh on 12 years. It occurs to me that my life back there isn’t much different from what it is here, save I have more furniture back there, and internet/TV access with my cable!

I don’t know if that’s a troubling or comforting thought – probably a little of both. The reality of living in a city for most people is that they get set in routines, between work and whatever else they have going on, that, believe me, is easy to replicate just by picking it up and moving it five miles in any direction. You feel weird and alien at first. Then you adjust. Then your mind attaches feelings of “home” – however faint or temporary they may be – to the place, and you create a bond to it. There weren’t 10,000 family members and friends I was leaving behind in Astoria. Hell, most people I know in the NYC area, we’re so spread out and busy with our own shit that even if we lived two blocks apart, it would be an ordeal trying to pull something together. I used to think that was some sort of travesty or failing on my part, but have experienced it enough times to know, it’s just how things are here. I try to make myself available as possible, but even I’ll close ranks sometimes and get too zeroed in on my own shit.

What a crazy year. Some years, it’s like being on an amusement park ride, where all you can do is hold on, convinced that what you’re experiencing is not real, but is somehow, because you’ve chosen to get on the ride, and the belts and buckles probably aren’t going to snap, but you’re still being safely whipped around at high velocity in ways that suggest danger, but are fairly controlled. I resigned from my job back in June due to a luke-warm review (after busting my ass for a few months solid leading up to that point) … and am still working there after management turned up a few dead ends on various candidates. Believe me, after the fire in August, I was grateful to have steady work anywhere. But I go on there, knowing that sooner or later, they’ll land someone for that spot, and I’ll move on. At that time, I had visions of taking the summer off, relaxing for a month or two, and then trying to feel my way into something else. I just didn’t want to haul off and get the same job in a different place. Still don’t. Which is why I’ve never been one of these “planning my escape” people. I’d rather cut something off cold, go through a few weeks of laziness, and then come up with something else. Not a formula for latter climbing! But I’m not worried about that.

I’m not worried about much of anything, to be honest. Lived through a fire, rendered temporarily homeless, set up in a temporary apartment, which has been a blessing, as otherwise I’d probably have bounced from one high-priced sublet to another over the course of the past few months. Picked up my usual routines. About all I haven’t done is cook, opting for a steady diet of Hot Pockets, pasta and canned soup, rather than getting into my usual winter rituals of chili and various soups, which would take up a Sunday afternoon in preparation. And I’d rather let that go for now, gives me something to look forward to when I get back to my place and feel more at home.

Some of the changes I’ve gone through in the past few months have been good. I was watching way too much TV with cable, and who knows, maybe I will again when I get it back. But I’ve been reading more, writing a lot, too, listening to much more music, even listening to local college radio, which has been surprisingly good at times. I always appreciated the routines I had back there and will gladly get back into them. I’m left with the realization that you could lose it all in a minute, and when you've lost it all, all you can do is simply gather your resources and start over again. Feel like an asshole for awhile. Feel wounded. Feel like the world owes you something. But sooner or later, you align yourself with the hardness of the world, and jump back into the freezing cold stream of life where, ultimately, the only person who’s going to keep you treading water is you.

Not to say I haven’t appreciated the support over the past few months. Friends have been good, landlord’s family has been very helpful, crucial in terms of getting me set up with a new place to stay, and I suspect most people have either forgotten what happened to me, or quietly filed it away in the “shit that happened to Bill in the near past” file. I don’t dwell on it much now these few months later, so I sure as hell don’t want to make other people dwell on it. Everyone always asks when I’m getting back there, a few minutes of bitching and moaning about how long it’s taking, but rest assured, wheels are turning now, and I can see I will be back there soon.

I don’t picture any huge emotional revelations. I’ve gone back there a few times to gather things, winter clothes, some DVDs I was thinking about, and the place has been forlorn, dirty as the windows were knocked out for so long, the yard a mess with unraked leaves, all my furniture and belongings packed into one part of the floor so plumbers could tear out a small part of the ceiling to get at the pipes, little off-kilter things like that, as we all waited for work to begin.

My landlord, I suspect, will be weeping when she gets back, tears of joy, probably pain, too, over things she lost in the fire, as she lost a lot more than I or the upstairs tenant did. She’s lived there since the early 60s, started a family and made a life there, so I know the emotional attachment she has to the place is much larger than mine. I can only hope she spends the rest of her days there in peace, never going through anything this harrowing again, as it’s a shit experience at any age, much less in your 70s at a point where you think life is going to even out and let you take it all in before darkness falls.

And I can see, one day I’ll have to move on, a proposition that scared the hell out of me before all this. But I’ve seen – living a few months in another neighborhood – it’s not such a bad deal. You move somewhere else, pick up a few new tricks, learn a little more about the world, and go on doing whatever you do. World doesn’t end. I hope to stay in that apartment a few more years, at least, but I’ve seen with my own eyes, there are other neighborhoods I could handle in Queens (Manhattan and Brooklyn, forget it, too expensive, Bronx I’ve done and not going back, Staten Island, another country). I’d hardly call it a sense of freedom, more like being exposed, against my will, to other neighborhoods, and realizing people live there, too, just as I do in mine!

So, it was a strange, unsettling year that, I guess, should have left me rattled and battle-scarred. But in reality I feel a little more weightless, surely a little harder, which is what happens when bad shit like this gets thrown your way. There’s the famous saying, “That which cannot kill you makes you stronger.” But I’ve learned this year, that’s bullshit. You expose yourself routinely to things that have the capacity to kill you, sooner or later, they will sap your strength and take your life. You get these things in small doses, a house fire, once in a lifetime, you can pound your chest and bellow, “I’m stronger for all I’ve been through!”

But, man, if that shit happened to me routinely, I’d be a wreck right now. We can’t pick and choose some of our crises. They pick and choose us. As noted, one at a time, once in a blue moon, you can ruminate on them, take strength in the fact that you lived through them and have found your way back to normalcy of some sort. But if this shit happened every other day, like bombs dropping, it would destroy my life. Yours, too, no matter how old or young, how weak or strong you really are.

Things to think about for the new year! Things to think about as you get older. I hope I’m sitting in my apartment, this day next year, and thinking, “Shit, nothing happened this year.”

Balling on Campus

A situation occurred a few days ago at my old Penn State branch campus that sounds depressingly familiar to city life, but somewhat new to the locals. Basically, a bunch of students who had played basketball together (one group from New York, the other from Philly) later ended up in an apartment brawl resulting in serious injuries.

It’s really not much of a story, save that if you read the avalanche of comments, the locals are understandably getting fed-up with these kind of incidents, generally revolving around urban students (their home addresses are always NYC or Philly-based) being admitted to that local campus and then committing these type of crimes which always make for front-page news back there, regardless of the perpetrators’ home town. (A follow-up article noted that the campus is second only to University Park as having the highest crime rate of all the university’s campuses.) The locals are also making the mistake of using words like “trash,” “animals” and “you people” when expressing their anger, and that will automatically push buttons with those kids attending the campus who have nothing to do with this sort of violence.

I can understand both sides of this. I agree with locals getting upset over urban nonsense like this spilling into their community – it’s frightening. It’s frightening when it happens in the city, too, save people who live there are conditioned to think horseshit like this is normal, and to be expected and tolerated. That doesn’t hold true for most towns in rural Pennsylvania, which is a good thing. It doesn’t hold true for most small towns anywhere. You get a bunch of kids squaring off and assaulting each other over something as stupid as comments during a basketball game, pulling up just short of murder, and most people in a small town are going to have a profoundly negative reaction.

And the students from out of town commenting on the site are upset because they see themselves being lumped in with these sort of jackasses who indulge in that sort of violence, thus making themselves targets of bigotry to the locals. Or at least I hope that’s the case. I read through the comments, and not once did I see any of those students state anything to that effect (although I read it between the lines in every comment).

I saw them get angry at the locals for making veiled racist comments. I saw them defending themselves against what they perceived as racist smears. But not once did I see any one of them acknowledge that what happened between those two groups of kids was awful and totally unacceptable. Nor did they apologize for this happening. As well they shouldn’t have. But they can’t seem to recognize that their inability to acknowledge that what happened (and apparently is happening routinely) in that situation was a terrible affront to the community, in the minds of the locals, and honestly in my mind, too. And infers that they relate more closely to a bunch of jackasses who would threaten each other’s lives over a basketball game, rather than be upset that felony crimes are being committed in their midst.

And that’s city people! Having now spent roughly half my life in a rural area and the other half in New York City, I know that mindset. If you talk to these people and point out to them this quiet refusal to place blame on the real problem here (kids willing to kill each other over stupid comments), they would be shocked and tell you, obviously, I detest violence, I hate that this sort of thing happens anywhere.

Yet … if that was your true emotion in all of this, if that’s what really upset you, that would be the first thing out of your mouth. And then you’d lay into the locals for making such typically racist comments. To me, that lack of self realization is crucial and telling as some local starting in with “you people” and going downhill from there.

People should obviously think before they write, but they don’t, especially anonymously on internet message boards. The locals can be just as bad, sometimes even worse, but at least I understand the fear underlying the occasionally stupid comments. Nobody wants to live around bullshit like that. And maybe the university should be doing a better job of screening students if things like this are happening to the extent that a relatively small campus has such an unusually high crime rate. Allowing this to go on hurts everyone. It makes the locals distrustful of any person of color, even if he came from, say, Pottsville, just a few miles away, even if the kid was an honors student at his high school. And it makes the kids who go there from various urban areas extremely uncomfortable when they sense the locals are vaguely hostile towards them, despite the fact that many of them are there to do something honorable, get an education and push themselves forward in life.

All I know is that if I had to choose sides here, I wouldn’t. But I relate more to people who are afraid of felony crime being thrust into their community than people who are willing to kill each other over nothing. And people who don’t recognize that as the core issue. It’s not a racial issue. Or a rural/urban issue. It’s a sanity issue. You would have to be insane to want to live in a place where people try to kill each other over emotions aroused during a fucking basketball game.

Would you have to be insane to live around people who hated you for the color of your skin? No … hell, I did it for a decade in the Bronx! Was perfectly sane the whole time. Foolishly wore it like a badge of honor, as if it made me tough to be the only white guy on the block. Was exposed to verbal abuse routinely, but never physical. Reached my breaking point with the whole “spitting” thing that I started noticing in 1997, people spitting as I passed as a sign of disrespect because I was white. Wasn’t the kind of thing I’d see every now and then. I would see this dozens of times over the course of a week, all week, every week, until I hit that "last straw" milestone and decided to leave that spring. “Hundreds” would not be an exaggeration. Got to the point where I could walk down the street and accurately predict who would spit as I passed! (Generally thugs-in-training teenage males and grown male buffoons who were still dressed and carrying on like teenage males.) Still see this now, too, although not nearly as much. Then again, I don’t live in the Bronx anymore.

For the most part, people were either respectful to me (as I was to them), or they left me alone. Some of them hated me? That wasn’t my problem. My attitude was, unless you make this real, unless you physically confront me, to me you’re just like a baby shitting itself. And that should be a lesson these kids at the campus learn now, because I gather from their commentary that they’ve never really been exposed to actual, real people throwing them bad vibes for the color of their skin. They’ve had this concept drilled into their heads all their lives, but had previously lived all their lives in urban areas where they were not minorities.

It sucks to have your belief in humanity tested as mine was, but it will be tested, over and over again. The trick is to not let anyone control your actions. That’s what’s really going on when someone throws racial shit in front of you: they want your attention, a reaction, why, I don’t know. If you’re wise, you’ll walk on and realize most people don’t give a shit about you one way or the other and are too caught up in their own problems. And that’s a good thing once you get over the concept that the world isn’t spinning around you.

I keep coming back to the issue of recognizing other people’s humanity, but that’s all this is, too. I know for me the race issue got a lot less problematic when I moved here and realized everyone had the same problems. One of the big things for me was seeing how many kids in the Bronx were asthmatic because of their lousy building ventilation and locations near major roadways. Barriers got broken down constantly in my first decade in New York. I could see people caring for their elderly parents. Relying on older brothers and sisters. Struggling through shitty, low-paying jobs. Basically, the same things I’d always seen working-class white people do where I grew up. It occurred me these people had a lot more in common than they knew with white people in small towns, who were equally encouraged to look at black people in the city and feel nothing but fear and disdain.

Incidents like this one that just occurred make that sort of understanding much harder to accomplish. Because you have the incident, in an of itself, which is a lousy thing. And then you have the fallout, people saying stupid shit because they feel threatened, be it locals defending their turf in some sense, or visiting students who want to feel simple respect in a situation (moving to a rural area to get an education) that more than likely has them feeling intimidated and insecure, too.

I can remember feeling deeply upset the first few hundred times with the spitting nonsense, as if I was doing something wrong to incite this kind of reaction. It had to be me, as this kept happening to me with random kids on the street. What was I doing wrong? Was it something I was wearing? Was it the way I looked? The way I walked? After awhile, I realized, I wasn’t dealing with geniuses. The exact opposite was true. Cowards, to boot. Who had picked up on some lousy cultural trend that served as a nice litmus test for their souls. I look back now and laugh at how naïve I was, and quietly mourn that state of innocence, when I assumed that all people were essentially good. I also learned that in any given situation, how I saw things was just that … not how other people were seeing things. It took me out of my perspective and forced me to acknowledge other people are going to see the world, and me in particular, differently, in ways that I might find instructive, but just as likely in ways that are radically wrong and offensive. And there was nothing I could do about that, save walk on if they were going to make fools of themselves.

Don’t you think this kind of knowledge, employed in basketball game where the trash talk must have reached epic levels, might have amounted to the realization that it was just that, trash talk, and no reason to escalate things to a level where someone is willing to take another person’s life?

Penn State Follow-Up

I don’t want to focus too much on the recent Jerry Sandusky/child molestation case as noted in the last post, which finally seems to have quieted down as the “burning issue we all must confront” media blast. But I do want to write about the experience many of us have had as Penn State graduates and football fans over the past few weeks.

Because it has sucked. In so many ways. The obvious way, of course, is feeling yourself associated to any of this because you have a degree from the university, enjoyed yourself while you were there, still feel good about having gone there, spend a few hours every fall Saturday watching the football team on TV, etc. I can’t tell you how many people at work in NYC anointed me the unofficial expert on this news story … just because I went there. As if I had any sort of inside scoop.

As Brother M pointed out to me over Thanksgiving, Penn State is a learning factory. A LOT of people went there. A lot never had anything to do with the football program, directly or indirectly. I’ve been a Penn State football fan all my life and will go on being one. Sorry if anyone finds that offensive, but I’d be lying if I wrote otherwise. As would millions of other fans. Believe me, for a week or two there, even mentioning that you went to Penn State would elicit vague “pitchforks and torches” vibe from some folks, with you as the Frankenstein monster being stalked through the woods by the howling, straw-hatted mob. If you didn’t support a full shut-down of the football program and demand the immediate imprisonment of all involved, you, by extension, were just as guilty as Sandusky in all this.

The sense of “guilt by association” has been overwhelming at times. Especially concerning Joe Paterno, who was fired over his role in all this, even though we have no idea exactly what that was, save to say at a bare minimum, he dropped the ball in terms of living up to his legend. College administrators tend not to be legendary, and in the cold, black-and-white print of the grand jury indictment, that’s all he was in this situation. Which we have to reconcile with his all-encompassing power as someone who controls everything not just within the football program, but on campus, in that town and in that part of the state.

And I really don’t know how much power the guy has or had wielded beyond his football program, now that we’re equipped with this 20/20 hindsight and superior morality. Would he have known that Sandusky was being investigated by the local police in 1998? Sandusky himself apparently didn’t even know. Who from the police department would have quietly told Paterno this off the record? The media didn’t know about this at the time, otherwise we surely would have heard about it. These are the kind of details we need to know. Did Paterno have any inkling that Sandusky was a pedophile? We’re all assuming this was some sort of quiet common knowledge shared not just by all involved, but by everyone involved with Division I-A college football coaching … and I just don’t know if that’s true or not. If it is, I’ll feel like a horse’s ass for cutting Paterno any slack in this situation. But if it isn’t …

In any event, there are multiple investigations going on now, a trial soon to follow, so we will be inundated with the case again, although we got the media full monty, a legendary college coach falling from grace, this time, and the rest will be anti-climactic. The usual suspects will bloviate, we will be sternly prompted to “think first of the children” … when I can assure you, as a fellow writer, those are the last people on the minds of anyone selling papers or ad space. The first thing will be having the name spelled right in the byline, and then on the check.

I saw a full range of emotions from fellow Penn State grads. One totally disowned Paterno and said he was ashamed to have gone there. That was the extreme. I don’t know any “apologists” … whatever that’s supposed to mean. I see what people mean by that, anonymous commenters on websites bending over backwards to preserve Paterno’s god-like status, but I honestly don’t know anyone who was carrying on like that … or those asshole kids on campus who rioted over this nonsense. Everyone I’ve been in contact with had grave doubts, serious questions and was almost as put off and angered by the out-pouring of hatred towards the university and Paterno as I was.

Every alumni I know was profoundly upset. Some had trouble sleeping. Some got physically ill: headaches, upset stomachs, general malaise. It was like learning that a cherished relative had been accused of a grievous crime, and responding accordingly. I spent two weeks googling “Paterno,” “Sandusky” and “McQueary” every morning to see what had transpired overnight, most of it pure editorial junk. I was obsessed with learning everything I possibly could about the matter. After a week, I realized 99% of what I was reading was utter dogshit, tree-stump pontificating from writers and anonymous, self-appointed super-heroes I wouldn’t buy a used car from, and gave up.

Going back to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving helped a lot. I could see the prevailing attitude back there was, “None of the people hyping this thing care about the kids, or Paterno, or Penn State, so let them blow themselves out and move on to their next conquest.” I could see that this will all end, maybe not soon, but it will end. And the people who follow Penn State football will go on following it, without Joe, with whatever stain this leaves on his legacy and the program. We’ll all go on recognizing that Paterno was a legendary coach, whatever horrible revelations this situation may bring. And we’ll all have to absorb that as it comes along, if it comes along, and reconcile it with his much less tarnished past. His legend is now tarnished? That’s how it works with mere mortals, and we’ve all blown a gasket over the numerous women JFK and Martin Luther King had affairs with while married. They’re still cultural icons, with whatever values you personally attach to them. If those values aren’t complicated, you’re not paying attention or just don’t care. Which is no skin off my nose.

As we’ve seen, other people will be caught up in child sex abuse scandals (your turn now, Syracuse), and the hype machine will kick into overdrive on them. Powerless, angry people will vent righteously on the internet. The hype machine will then give them another topic (take your pick: Kardashian divorce, pepper-sprayed Black Friday shoppers, Herman Cain’s love life, etc.), and they’ll spew Twitter-sized bile all over again, over things they feel no personal connection to and don’t really care about. A subtle message I get from all this: one of the reasons people are so angry is because they sense they just don’t care about anything real, and things like this make them feel like they do, or should. The response rate on stories like this is downright Pavlovian. Ring a bell, and substitute raging impotently for salivating. Chances are if you’re machine-gunning off mini-tirades about every current topic you’re a self-appointed expert on, there’s an emptiness in your life that no amount of time spent on the computer will ever fill.

Personally, it all underlines a seismic shift I felt the day Dad passed on a few Christmas seasons ago. Which was realizing I had just one father figure in my life and felt lost without him for a long time afterwards. I wrote a tribute to Joe Paterno about a decade ago for Leisuresuit.net (and the link doesn’t appear to work right now, unfortunately). Re-reading it now, I can strongly sense that my father was still alive, because I had not experienced the above-noted shift and was attaching father-like qualities to someone (Paterno) who was in no way my father … who the one time I had crossed paths with him, acted like a bit of a nut. Some realizations, you get only the hard way, by experiencing unimaginable and unforeseeable pain and loss. The article I wrote back then feels extremely naïve to me now, but I didn’t know any better at the time.

I can’t tell you how many bad stories and posts I came across on the web attacking Penn State fans for being like children the way they looked up to Joe Paterno, this impossibly clean father figure to millions. The day we put my father in the ground, that fantasy stopped. A lot of fantasies stopped. The world turned black and white, and I can assure you, the last thing on my mind was Penn State football. These bad writers used their massively broad brushes to paint all Penn State fans this way, and I’m just one example of someone with his own much larger, quiet, less obvious personal history, who’d get in their faces and put the fear of God into them if they pulled that little bon mot on me in a social situation.

The amount of sanctimonious, preachy, wrong-headed, simplistic writing I’ve read on this topic has been mind-bending. Like crayon scrawl on wallpaper. Forget about the automatic assumptions of guilt and all the personal baggage (most clearly regarding a disdain for sports of any kind and a burning need to position one self as a font of true, brave morality we must all aspire to). As noted in this article, heroes are not the norm in any extreme situation. Yet … the internet was suddenly crawling with caped crusaders, forces of good who had all the right answers to this moral dilemma and knew every hidden detail about the case. Anonymously. On the internet. Right.

Paterno became an all-purpose piñata for anyone who once believed in a hero and later found the hero to be human. That’s everyone, sooner or later. And once we learn they’re human, the only logical thing to do is to make them bleed, just like we do. I’m having a hard time with people who insinuate that if you don’t personally damn Paterno to burning hell, immediately, you, sir, are suspect, too. This is the sort of sickening nonsense one associates with the Salem witch trials, or any other grotesquely puritanical undertaking. Not everyone in my life is pure and unblemished. Hell, no one is, myself included. I know people who’ve been in prison. Who’ve had serious drug and alcohol problems. Who’ve done “bad things” … anything from petty theft to aggravated assault. You shouldn’t picture me hanging out with a bunch of comic-book villains – most people I know are fairly normal, law-abiding citizens – but sometimes shit happens with people you grew up with and know, and life gets weird.

I haven’t dumped any of those troubled people from my life. Why should I? Because they fucked up? We all fuck up on varying levels. If your life doesn’t contain anyone who’s made these kind of radical errors, goody for you, and I can guess that sanctimony hovers around you like a halo of stale flatulence.

Look at our culture. Our TV shows. Our movies. We are constantly fed characters who are morally ambiguous, or flat-out evil, but then guided in a way that suggests we see these characters as human beings, with feelings, and pasts that explain the roots of their evil, and plenty of other things we all have in common. Think Tony Soprano. Any hiphop artist who portrays himself as a badass with a heart of gold. There are countless thousands of characters and images like this in our society that we are instructed to show some type of human respect or sympathy towards.

Yet … when real-life things like this situation with Paterno come along, we are forcefully instructed to burn this man in effigy and forsake any valuable lessons we learned from him, toss away decades of experience and memory? It just doesn’t work that way. At least for me. If it is found that Joe knew all along about Sandusky’s pedophilia, that he protected and shielded him from the authorities, you better believe I’m going to be furious and about as let down as a fan can be with a major sports figure. But at this point, now that everyone is lawyered up (and don’t flatter yourself, you would be, too, if the media hammer that was dropped on Joe came down on your head), I’m really not sure how close we’re going to get to the truth of this situation, unless people quietly come forward and do some genuinely heroic things that shed light on the situation.

I don’t kid myself. Maybe it’s a New York thing? In the past year or two, thanks to youtube and the explosion of street cams, I’ve been made privy to people filming friends beating up innocent bystanders on the subway and in fast-food joints, or laughing hysterically while providing ironic commentary to a drunken man trying to get back into the burning SUV he just crashed, or a homeless man who’s been stabbed and is now dying on the sidewalk while people passing by ignore him, with one person even pausing to take pictures of him with his phone camera.

The wonders of the internet? It’s all part of the stew of our society, things we don’t like to admit, people we don’t like to acknowledge. Forgive me if I recognize this Penn State situation as a subset of personal dislocation that runs like life blood through so much of what I see today, whether on the internet or street, people who are just incapable of recognizing other people’s humanity. In this case, it comes out as extreme moral posturing, putting on that brave face for the world to see. On the surface, that impulse is a positive thing, but when you think about it … the most moral people I’ve known in my life have never once had to tell me they were moral people, or make any kind of impassioned, grandiose testaments to that effect. And what I learned from them is that you’re only as good as your last act of compassion, that you will fail, and make mistakes, mistreat people on occasion, in effect, be human.

And you could argue that the reason Paterno got himself into this situation is because he, too, didn’t recognize other people’s humanity, in this case that poor kid whom Sandusky was “horsing around with.” And so it goes. He’s paid dearly for it. We all have in some sense, if we’ve taken time to ponder all the obvious and less obvious intangibles. But feel free to skip the less obvious ones. Why trouble yourself with complicated moral questions when the easy ones make for better headlines?