Knowing I’m an alumni and a fan, people at work have been ragging me on the topic of Penn State football since this Sandusky scandal broke last fall. Not nearly as much lately, but one of the guys got into the topic of that perfect season from the early part of Joe Paterno’s career for which they didn’t receive the national championship. I had thought that President Nixon somehow decided who would be national champ that year.
A little research showed that the season was 1969, Nixon had only suggested in a newspaper article that the winners of another bowl showdown should determine the champion, and he was probably right as Penn State didn’t play a single ranked team leading up to their bowl-game win.
In doing that research, I stumbled onto a yearly listing of their records, and one date really stood out for me: August 29, 1983. The night Penn State played in the annual “kickoff classic” at Giants Stadium, as reigning national champions after defeating Georgia 27-23 in the Sugar Bowl on New Years Day. That game was probably the apex of my Penn State fandom and best memory, as they played a great game and shut down Hershel Walker who had been tearing up every team Georgia played up to that point.
But I remember August 29th of that year like it was yesterday. I had just wrapped up my first summer in the factory, had one year of college under my belt and was days away from starting my next. I remember feeling fantastic, had a lot of money for myself at the time, was tanned, in great shape from running all the time, really getting a sense of moving forward in life.
The day doesn’t stand out because of Penn State, but because of a quandary I had to face. Obviously, I was pumped to watch that game on TV, but in the mean time, my group of friends had learned that David Bowie’s Serious Moonlight tour was coming to Hershey, PA that same night, and it seemed like a real opportunity to see him perform, still in his prime. His Let’s Dance album was ruling the charts that summer, thanks to MTV. I wasn’t that crazy about the title track (my opinion has changed over the years), but the lead-off single, “Modern Love,” was one of those typical Bowie hits, a sonic punch that was just a brilliant little pop gem.
I was a huge Bowie fan, starting with the ChangesOneBowie greatest hits eight track brother M bought and wore out in a matter of months. I started buying his other albums, beginning with Ziggy Stardust (this was probably 1976 or so, a few years after the fact), and that was one of those albums I played all the way through a few times in one sitting, for weeks on end. It’s hard to communicate the seismic shift that took place in a kid’s head in the 1970’s when he discovered a recording artist like David Bowie, but there was a before and after, no doubt.
Bowie is one of the most misinterpreted artists of the rock era, often mistaken as a trailblazer and innovator. He innovated nothing. His brilliance was in taking nascent trends (like glitter and synths) that a relatively small audience of hip people knew about, grasping that style of music in an extremely short amount of time, then putting out his own take on the trend … long before the average rock fan had any idea the trend existed. Thus mistaking Bowie as the first glam rock star, or the guy who made synthesizers cool with his Low album. (Marc Bolan was way out in front of Bowie on the glam front, and it’s painfully obvious that Bowie loved German bands like Neu, Can and Kraftwerk, thus his Low album. Which bombed at the time. And which, frankly, is more about recording effects applied to guitars, drums and keyboards than anything else. Listen to “Sound and Vision” from that album; it’s a guitar-based song with one of the nuttiest drum sounds I’ve ever heard.)
For me, it was the actual songs themselves, the guy has always had great pop sense, and his lyrics. Which tend to be nonsensical, but in ways that suggest a certain mood that suits the music. I catch the paper boy, but things don’t really change, I’m standing in the rain, but I never wave bye-bye, but I try. Huh? Sit on your hands on a bus of survivors, blushing at all the afro-sheeners?
There’s always been a surface slickness to his work, but with more than enough talent underneath to suggest this was an artist you should pay attention to, always. That’s the perfect definition of rock star. Most of them don’t go too deep in terms of real emotion or communication, but they get across these larger, sweeping concepts in highly entertaining ways that many of us recognize as someone tapped into a deep reserve of talent. (Of course, that’s all faded now … that kind of rock star … and the massive, unified fan base to suggest some type of large gathering of like-minds. We’re left with fragmented flashes of brilliance and a lot of shit rising to the top.)
And that time in the summer of 1983, Bowie was as popular as he would ever get. MTV had a lot to do with that, taking an artists who always understood the concept of image, and allowing him to create this slick, cultured, suit-wearing guy, with an unloosened tie, tan and dyed-blonde hair, like a male model trying to appear more business-like, or a business man with a highly-evolved sense of style. It suited the music he was making at the time, a much more polished take on the riskier 70s image, more user friendly, meant to register with 80s kids, which it surely did.
We had to go see him. Penn State be damned. Major artists like that would occasionally play the stadium next to Hershey Park, but not always. More often than not, when we went to see concerts, it was in the much smaller Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, where I saw my first concert, J. Geils Band, a few years earlier. Seeing Bowie in Hershey would be my first stadium concert, and we were all excited as hell to see this guy we knew only through eight tracks, album covers and the radio.
So, the day came, late August, we all piled into the old man’s used station wagon and made the hour or so journey south to Hershey, blasting Bowie tapes (at this point, surely cassette tapes) the whole way, getting in the mood. There must have been five of us, recalling brother J and neighbor B, but I seem to recall two or three other people along for the ride. As always, we felt like rubes when we got down there. Even presented with kids who were raised in the slightly more urbanized southern part of the state, we assumed they were in on something we weren’t. I’ve since realized people from around Harrisburg or Bethlehem/Allentown and surrounding cities can still be rubes in the grand scheme of things, despite seeing themselves otherwise. We were always raised thinking Reading was a big, rough-and-tumble/to-be-avoided city, but it’s just a faded small city with a shitload of big city problems.
We got our seats, around the far end of the 20 yard line, with the stage in the other end zone. It was a long ways off! To make matters worse, a lighting crane whirred into action just as we sat down and thus blocked our view of the stage. Luckily for us, they repositioned by a few feet, but that only cause another section of seats to start hooting and hollering.
It felt … impersonal. I’ve always felt that way sitting in a stadium, be it for a sports or music event. I don’t like going to stadiums, period. You can give me the best seat in the house, and I won’t care. Just too many people! Way too much hassle getting in and out. The amount of shit you have to put up with just to see a show is unbelievable. And, especially with rock and roll, you’re constantly made to feel like dogshit on the shoes of the staff and everyone else working in an official capacity. This is pretty much why I don’t go out much anymore to see bands, even in clubs, which can be just as problematic and uncomfortable.
We were crowded in with a fairly typical bunch of 70s rock fans who didn’t give a damn about the 80s or time moving forward. That’s another thing about rock and roll, you get to see where people, the fans of a given artist, stamp their foot down and say, this is where it ends for me. “It” being the desire to hear new music and open yourself to other things … the way we all once did with the given artist in question. They found a home … in most cases, it looked like Diamond Dogs circa 1975, that weird, patchy haircut, the crystal meth and pot, jeans and t-shirt, none of this faggoty disco/punk shit, no sir! And I can’t blame them. Diamond Dogs was a pretty good place to stop. But all I could think was, Diamond Dogs seemed like a pretty good place to start …
So, we’re sitting there, getting high on the pot cloud that hovered over any large-scale rock show in the 70s or 80s, and the opening act comes on: Tenpole Tudor. Had never heard of him at that point. He looked like a tall, skinny guy trying to be one of The Stray Cats, who were enormously popular at the time. I thought he wasn’t bad, a vaguely rockabilly thing going on, very stripped down, rocking out, small drum kit, bassist and guitarist doing their thing in front of a huge, closed curtain on a massive stage.
Of course, they were out of place. And as with nearly every opening act I’ve seen in a large venue, completely ignored by the crowd, who would get in the habit of baying out “Bowie” after about 20 minutes of the act. The worst case of this ever for me was seeing The Replacements open up for Elvis Costello at Madison Square Garden. For me, that was a dream show, my favorite band from the 80s matched with a guy who could do no wrong in my book as a recording artist. And the Costello fans treated The Replacements like non-entities. I couldn’t believe it. Even that small gap between Costello breaking big (late 70s) and The Replacements making a name for themselves (mid-80s) was just enough to create a void with the Costello fans, that thousands upon thousands of them didn’t know or care who The Replacements were. Paul and the gang knocked out a perfunctory set and left … Costello came out, bearded and the size of a house at that point in his career, and played just fine, but I left that night feeling a bit cheated, and extremely let down by a bunch of people who should have been more savvy.
Tenpole Tudor went on around 7:00 at night, so he was clearly going to play about 45 minutes, let the sun go down around 8:00, so Bowie could play in the dark. In that down time before darkness, I snuck away to buy a t-shirt, my mythical Bowie Let’s Dance gray muscle t that cost more than the ticket for the show! As an adult, and for years now, I’ve not been in the habit of wearing t-shirts that advertise anything: bands, magazines, products, free mustache rides. I only wear blank shirts: black, blue or white. But for a long time, I was king of the message t-shirt, and it seemed crucial to buy a shirt at a concert. Of course, it’s always a rip-off, but I also know now, this is where a huge portion of the concert revenue for an artist is generated, fans buying these hideously over-priced shirts as mementos of any given night. I recall the stand beneath the bleachers, the half dozen or so choices, the rays of the sun cutting through the bleachers, me, thinking, shit, man, I’m buying a Bowie concert t-shirt, this is great!
Well, that thing got lost over the course of decades. I suspect Mom, in one of her cleaning fits after I moved out in the late 80s, probably put it in a black trash bag and gave it to the local Goodwill store. About a decade ago, I saw that same shirt being sold on E Bay for $75.00! I think we all had a few concert shirts like that, the kind people would one day pay top dollar for and wear for “retro” cool effect. Frankly, I looked like a dick in that shirt, which is probably why I didn’t wear it that much.
But about quarter after 8:00, lights went down, everyone started carrying on, lo and behold, Bowie and band exploded on the stage in a blaze of light, and I can’t even recall what song he opened with. He had his canary yellow suit on, and the band looked like a bunch of jackasses, the horn section wearing pith helmets and explorer khaki outfits, guitarist Carlos Alomar wearing a fezz and some kind of black, Indian-looking dress, lead guitarist Earl Slick in an 80s headband and the sort of Chess King-looking pants and peasant shirt, the two male background singers decked out in seersucker suits and fedoras that made them looked like southern attorneys at a garden party in Savannah.
It was a mind-fuck of a show. Naturally, we were all impressed with the lighting, the first time we had seen such effects, the laser shows, the multi-colored spots, the fog banks, etc. He put on a rock show, no doubt about it. And we could barely see it. It was like watching a touchdown from the other 20 yard line! This was before video screens, so all we saw was this little flame-hared guy in a yellow suit, about 100 yard away, and his weirdly-attired band. The sound was pretty bad: it was a stadium. Music wasn’t meant to be played like this outdoors. In a natural amphitheater, sure, but not a flattened out field surrounded by a metal casing. The echo was terrible. Nothing wrong with the sound system, but there’s just so much you can do in a place like this.
About the only stand-out for me was his different take on “Heroes.” He started the song slow, mumbling these incoherent lyrics, that, knowing Bowie, really meant something, he was imparting something profound, and those mumblings ended with, “I will be king/And … you … will … be … queen.” And the band exploded into that huge guitar riff on the last word, a great moment. I later found out that Bowie was singing, “Lavender blue, duh-luh-di-doo, Lavender green, duh-luh-di-doo, I will be king, etc.” He was probably giving instructions to the lighting crew on what shade spot light to use! I was let down to learn that he wasn’t adding some profound message to the already-profound message of “Heroes.” The dude wanted to swim like dolphins, man!
I was able to track down that version of the song years later, as part of a bootleg of pre-tour rehearsals that he played in a small Dallas club with originally-planned lead guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn. Enjoy! I recall that it was a money issue with Stevie Ray, as I’m sure he wanted more than sideman pay, and everything worked out fine, as he then went on to push his solo career over the top at that time. Earl Slick could probably play Bowie’s songs blind-folded as he seemed to ride shotgun on so many of his tours and albums.
Aside from that? Honestly, the show got boring, fast. And I have to be honest, that feeling has overcome me at some point in nearly every live show I’ve ever attended. Sometimes the whole show will be like that. Other times, just a few minutes. But at some point, I look around and think, this is bullshit. It’s too much. I’m uncomfortable as hell. We’re packed in like sardines here. There are a lot of people acting like small children, taking this thing as an opportunity to “cut loose” and essentially be pricks. Same vibe as sporting events. People getting too drunk and high. Taking piss breaks constantly. Baying like idiots in ways that don’t suggest irony but brain damage. I sort of look at myself in an imaginary mirror when I see shit like this going on and think, “Am I part of this?” And the answer is no, but I have to accept the fact that this special thing to me, the profound relationship I feel towards this artist’s music, is shared by people who appear to be complete jackasses!
I ask myself, what’s going on here? What is this thing? We pay a truckload of money to attend this thing, get treated like shit every step of way, are forced into bleachers or crappy plastic seats, then spend the rest of our time dealing with people in the immediate vicinity getting into mild forms of weirdness, be it piss breaks or fist fights or talking/yelling constantly through a set, all the while, trying to take in a show that sounds choppy because it’s been booked into a venue that was never meant to host musical events. At some point, I don’t understand the process. In younger days, I’d just bite my tongue and keep buying the tickets. Now, I just say fuck it! I can see going to small club shows where there is some type of musicianship going on – think celtic music being played live by accomplished musicians, or blues, or jazz, or even some quieter kind of folk or country. But this blowzy, balls-out, rock-and-roll, party-time event … what an over-rated ritual I’ve found these things to be over the years. Music makes sense to me personally in my every-day life, but loses its meaning for me in these staged events.
But, this realization was years down the road that night! We all told ourselves this was fucking wild, man, this was incredible … but it was just a well-staged rock show put on by a consummate professional who looked like a dot on the faraway stage and sounded muddy by the time the music reached us in our bleacher seats.
I’ve since realized that I could very easily bump into Bowie on the streets of New York, as he lives here, walks around with no fanfare, keeps a low profile. It just seems odd to try to make that connection between this ordinary guy on the street, and this shiny star at the center of these traveling events, that went on for years, that influenced millions of kids, that made perfect, beautiful sense to me the first time I slapped Ziggy Stardust on that cheap bedroom stereo. I think that’s where they myth begins. Falling in love with that sound, the word play, the sense of style, knowing this is someone who has something to tell me, even if it makes no sense, it sounds like it makes perfect sense. But then to realize I’m not the only one getting it, that millions of other people do, too. But one day, I could turn a corner on Broadway, and there Bowie will be, looking through the window of a bookstore, in an overcoat, just an average guy I could walk up to, say hello, thank him for making those albums, and he’d probably nod and be gracious, so long as I was cool and brief about it.
It’s obvious why a moment like that would mean more to me than any massive concert. Because that’s how I understand music, on this small, one-to-one level. That’s how you’re reading me now, on your computer, in your room, or wherever. You read along, if you really like what I’m writing, you keep on reading. I understand life at this level. When you times it by a million and attach all these other values to that human connection, that’s when things get weird for me, and I enter this vaguely troubling misunderstanding with how this all works. But that’s rock and roll, and I wouldn’t be “getting it” on any level if it hadn’t been marketed on that large a level, so I guess I have to take the good with the bad.
I’m glad we saw Bowie that night. Not so much for the act of seeing Bowie (which was the only time I saw him). But because when we got out in the parking lot and turned on the radio, we came up on the football game in the last minutes of the fourth quarter, with Nebraska beating Penn State 44-6. They got their asses kicked! I’ve sat through more than a few Penn State games like that in my lifetime, but that one, coming on the heels of a national championship, was surely a bad, bad feeling. Had we stayed home to watch that? We would have sat there grumbling and moaning the whole time, getting deeply upset in the way sports make us feel when our team gets shellacked in an important game. Had we skipped seeing Bowie to sit there at home and watch that happen? Even worse.
So we drove home that night, howling up Route 81 around midnight, still buzzing from the big concert, “TVC15” blasting from the tape deck, but coming back to reality where our football team now officially sucked.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Save the iPod!
I’ve been living in the cloud the past few weeks, although not this new-age cloud of streaming music and movie files. The cloud of non-Apple devices and the unbelievable amount of nonsense you need to put up with occasionally to make the devices work properly.
It’s been a few years – I’ve forgotten. And I do have non-Apple devices that work well. The laptop I’m typing this on, for instance. And the Kindle I bought last fall – a fantastic device that works as advertised. But I’m thinking more portable MP3 devices.
For years, I denied the pull of iPods. To me, they seemed like frilly little things people bought purely as accessories to demonstrate how “cool” they were. For most people, they are just that, to this day. Most models don’t hold a lot of music, and the people who carry them don’t have or know a lot of music to put on the device. Therefore, the concept of an iPod with a 32GB capacity seems like a limitless sea of possibilities that they will never fill up.
For me, 32 GB is a bump in the road. Before iPods, I used Creative Nomad Zen players. Had to – at the time, they were the only game in town for larger players, and I first bought a 30 GB player, and then a 60 GB player which, at the time, seemed like a huge field to play on. And so it was, but because it was so big, I figured, time to really dig down in my collection and start putting on music that I know I want to have with me at all times. Hardly entire album and artist collections. But if you’re talking about bands like The Beatles, Kinks or Rolling Stones, there are hundreds of tracks that apply for each bands. I didn’t go wild – I rationally asked myself, now that I have a bigger playing field, what songs do I want immediate access to at all times.
And I kept on with my Emusic account, often taking out monthly booster packs to add extra tracks when I stumbled on an artist who had an intriguing catalog that I wanted to flesh out. And friends, as they do, kept on sending me DVD-Rs and flash drives with enormous amounts of music on them, thousands of songs … which I’d sort through and find what I wanted. And that golden age of blogs and websites that had rare and out-of-print albums on them as RAR files … an age which seems to be passing now with the crackdown on copyright infringement. (I have no problem pulling down music from websites that’s either hard-to-find, absurdly import priced or out of print … not to mention a vast ocean of live and demo material that I used to pay top dollar for at small mom-and-pop record stores that quietly sold this stuff as bootlegs.)
It didn’t take me long to push the limits of 60 GB. I came to a point where I had to start deleting music from the Creative Nomad player because there was no more space, which pissed me off, but what choice did I have? And a few months after that, Apple rolled out it’s 160 GB iPod Classic. Which blew the Creative Nomad (and every other portable device) out of the water with nearly 100 more GB of space. As much as I didn’t want to give my money to Apple and be mistaken for just another hipster with those telltale white earbuds, what choice did I have?
And buying that player was a revelation. It showed me a few things about Apple. The most obvious thing was they charged too much for their product, reason number one why I was never a fan. But they also showed me that while they get away with this, they also put out superior product. Simply stated, the 160 GB iPod Classic was and is the best MP3 player ever made for music lovers. Enough room to roam, the design is such that the player is no larger than half a deck of cards, the battery life is astounding, and iTunes, once you get used to it, is fairly easy to use and convenient. (I know the number of people out there who despise iTunes as a media player is legion, but aside from one glitch a few years ago where an upgrade messed with my files tags, I’ve had zero problems with the software.)
This device has been everything I ever wanted in a portable music player. And so I took the time to re-tag all my files to fit into this new format and started down the iPod road. I’ve gone hog wild in the past few years in terms of branching out into other forms of music. Celtic. African. Brazilian. A smattering of Asian and Indian. Jazz. Classical. I’ve always been curious about these kinds of music, so why not delve in, now that we’re in the digital age, I can sample everything before I buy it, and roam around fairly easily, building good-sized sampling of any genre in a fraction of the time it used to take. Owning this iPod made that not just possible, but somehow pushed me outward to find these things, since I had such a large space to use.
I’ve been on it for five years now with this player, but now find myself coming up on only 10 GB of space left on the player. And now that Apple is doing one of its usual “fuck you, we don’t care what you want, we’re going to tell you what you want, and then we’re going to tell everyone this is the future we must all live in” marketing campaigns for “the cloud” … it seems very unlikely that they’re ever going to put out a new model MP3 player with a larger drive than the 160 GB iPod Classic. In their eyes, it won’t be necessary … we have “the cloud” … there’s no need to store anything anymore.
Well, I know enough about computers to know what bullshit this is. The world, or at least America, is not yet ready for portable device streaming, and may not be for a very long time to come. For one thing, there are data caps in place on most cellphones that crap out after 2.5 GB of monthly data usage. I know … the past few months, my internet use at home has been determined solely by a Virgin Mobile flash-drive 3G modem that I spend $50/month on to get “unlimited” data (which slows to a crawl after 2.5 GB … and is already achingly slow as-is when compared to cable or DSL). I’ve learned not to watch video on the computer with this thing – if I do, I easily reach 2.5 GB of data usage inside a week or two. As it is, I push the limit of usage every month just sampling and downloading from my monthly Emusic account. I don’t even stream music – I can’t. The stream breaks up constantly. When I sample a 30-second piece of music on Emusic to see if I want to buy the track, invariably, the stream will stop somewhere in that 30 seconds, usually somewhere around the 15-second mark.
Using this flash-drive modem been an education on “streaming” and “the future” as it replicates what someone would experience using a phone to “stream media in the cloud.” It sucks. Until folks like AT&T and Verizon decide that we all have unlimited data usage for any plan we choose, streaming on a portable device is not an option. Sounds like a no-brainer? I don’t see it happening. I think AT&T now has a truly unlimited data plan for $80/month … but do you want to pay $80/month for only one device on top of your normal monthly home cable/DSL charges? And that one device is your phone. If you really love music … do you want to listen to music only on your smart phone? With a stream that most likely has lesser sound quality than the MP3s you listen to and, I don’t care what anyone else tells you, will crap out routinely, like when you go underground for any reason (a constant with most New Yorkers and the subway) or enter any kind of situation where streaming signals grow hazy (being out in the country, on open highways, in office buildings, etc.)?
No. The “cloud” is cool for people who don’t have a lot at stake musically. Who look at 32 Gigs of space as a vast sea of space for their music. For those of us who blew by 32 Gigs as an after-thought, streaming is not an option. I’d gather most of us in this boat understand implicitly, there is no substitute for having music you’ve acquired, there in actual files, in the palm of your hand, not being streamed to your device as a monthly rental. I’ve tried a service like Spotify, one of the larger new streaming music sites. It’s fantastic … for the home computer. I can sample albums in their entirety, even put on whole albums and just let them play … on the home computer, with cable. But I would sure hate to try using that on a device. Forget about the monthly data caps that would be reached in a week or two – just knowing the stream would stop and garble routinely in the NYC living area, and drop out completely for the half hour I spend each day on the way to and from work in Manhattan is enough to put me off.
So, faced with this “future” of streaming I recognize as a hard sell to people who don’t really like or care about music (as I’ve stated in the past, that constitutes a massive portion of the audience the music industry pays total attention to for their teenage lifespan, while basically ignoring everyone else), it just doesn’t wash with people who love music. In theory, it should. But theory doesn’t recognize the reality of data caps and satellite signals that grow hazy the farther you get from populated areas … which could be just as easy as hitting any interstate near any major city and driving no more than few miles into the countryside. Or taking a subway train. Or being in an office in any metropolitan area where cellphone service is bad to non-existent.
So what do I do? I do the next best thing. There’s one other device out there that trumps the 160 GB iPod Classic in terms of drive space: the Archos 48 Internet tablet, with a whopping 500 GB hard drive. Not sure why they call it a tablet – it’s larger than an iPod, but I can still fit it into my shirt pocket. It feels like a monster next to the iPod, which I attribute, again, to the brilliance of the design team at Apple. I bought one of these a few weeks ago, for $200, considerably less than the iPod Classic. And I was thinking, “I hate to abandon the iPod (and won’t for at least the rest of the year or so), but I’m being left no choice as someone with a large music collection who wants to go on listening and branching out … as anyone who loves music is supposed to do over the course of his life.”
And that’s the cloud I’ve been living in the past few weeks … trying to get this god-damned Archos player up to snuff. It’s been an enormous pain in the ass. Just finding the right software/media player to act as a solid transfer point to the device was a problem. (iTunes is a completely closed system that will not transfer to any non-Apple device.) I finally stumbled on Media Monkey, which I actually like more than iTunes as a media player, and respect a great deal as it pulled all the songs from my iTunes library and had a very good percentage of tagging everything properly. (I’d say about 300 tracks didn’t work out right and had to be re-tagged, but that’s not bad considering there were over 24,500 all together.) Unlike iTunes, it can mimic iTunes itself, and then allow the user to transfer the files from Media Monkey onto any non-Apple player.
Which is what I’ve been doing the past two weeks. I’ve learned a serious lesson in data transfers that you had better dot every “i” when doing something this large, as getting anything wrong will require you to scrub/erase the data and start all over again … which I’ve done three times between Media Monkey and the Archos player. The auto-synch also takes forever. When I auto-synch from the iTunes library to the iPod, it takes literally seconds. This things takes 20 minutes just to read the files, and then an indeterminate amount of time to dis-mount the player. I’m doing this process right now, for instance, since my last data transfer was mostly successful, but neglected to copy my dozens of playlists. I’ve been sitting here over 45 minutes waiting for the auto-synch to end and may well just get frustrated and un-plug the device from the USB port. It shouldn’t take this long to synch up a player that already has all the tracks on it.
Just one of more than a few issues I’ve had, and it’s made me realize Archos puts out a pretty choppy product. Unfortunately for now, the only product larger than the 160 GB iPod. I do like the device, but the amount of shit I’ve had to go through is not worth it. And don’t get me started on the anti-Apple tech heads who over-populate the online forums for Media Monkey and Archos. When you have to run scripts, and get into your computer registry, and write code, and make sure every minute aspect of a transfer is perfect, and run de-bugging programs, and download firmware … then you’ve just demonstrated why Apple is so popular beyond the hipster quotient. You just plug the fucking thing in, and it works. That’s hard to beat, and that’s what all these tech heads aren’t getting. Nobody, save tech heads, wants to spend hours trying to figure these things out and jump through burning hoops just to make the device work normally. It just underlines a level of quality a notch or two below what most people come to expect as standard operational procedure for any Apple product.
Can we save the iPod? I hope so, but I just don’t see it happening in the current climate of cloud hype. The Apple folks seem dead-set on driving their point home that we must all acquiesce to the cloud and their version of the future … when they’ve made a device that is just sheer perfection in terms of listening to portable music. And they should be building these things with larger drives, and switching to flash drives and putting them in the devices as flash drives grow larger and cheaper over the next few years. Doesn’t even have to be iPod Classic. I’d assume they could move forward with iPod Touches since they have larger viewing screens and people could watch movies and videos on them. The key for me is room to grow, and if I had a 320 GB device, or even a 240 GB Apple portable device, it would take me a long, long time to fill it up. It took me five years to fill up a 160 GB device that automatically had 60 GB on it, and you can throw down about another 20 GB when I went into my CD collection and went hog-wild in terms of throwing everything I wanted on the player. A device with twice the size hard drive would take me another decade to fill up, at least.
But I know this is all idle chatter. Everyone in my shoes does this – speaks it out loud, or writes it on the web, and thinks wishing publicly like this will make it so. In the mean time, I’ll face reality and wrestle with the frumpy, tank-like, pain-in-the-ass Archos player. It may be royally pissing me off, but it’s my only hope for the future right now.
It’s been a few years – I’ve forgotten. And I do have non-Apple devices that work well. The laptop I’m typing this on, for instance. And the Kindle I bought last fall – a fantastic device that works as advertised. But I’m thinking more portable MP3 devices.
For years, I denied the pull of iPods. To me, they seemed like frilly little things people bought purely as accessories to demonstrate how “cool” they were. For most people, they are just that, to this day. Most models don’t hold a lot of music, and the people who carry them don’t have or know a lot of music to put on the device. Therefore, the concept of an iPod with a 32GB capacity seems like a limitless sea of possibilities that they will never fill up.
For me, 32 GB is a bump in the road. Before iPods, I used Creative Nomad Zen players. Had to – at the time, they were the only game in town for larger players, and I first bought a 30 GB player, and then a 60 GB player which, at the time, seemed like a huge field to play on. And so it was, but because it was so big, I figured, time to really dig down in my collection and start putting on music that I know I want to have with me at all times. Hardly entire album and artist collections. But if you’re talking about bands like The Beatles, Kinks or Rolling Stones, there are hundreds of tracks that apply for each bands. I didn’t go wild – I rationally asked myself, now that I have a bigger playing field, what songs do I want immediate access to at all times.
And I kept on with my Emusic account, often taking out monthly booster packs to add extra tracks when I stumbled on an artist who had an intriguing catalog that I wanted to flesh out. And friends, as they do, kept on sending me DVD-Rs and flash drives with enormous amounts of music on them, thousands of songs … which I’d sort through and find what I wanted. And that golden age of blogs and websites that had rare and out-of-print albums on them as RAR files … an age which seems to be passing now with the crackdown on copyright infringement. (I have no problem pulling down music from websites that’s either hard-to-find, absurdly import priced or out of print … not to mention a vast ocean of live and demo material that I used to pay top dollar for at small mom-and-pop record stores that quietly sold this stuff as bootlegs.)
It didn’t take me long to push the limits of 60 GB. I came to a point where I had to start deleting music from the Creative Nomad player because there was no more space, which pissed me off, but what choice did I have? And a few months after that, Apple rolled out it’s 160 GB iPod Classic. Which blew the Creative Nomad (and every other portable device) out of the water with nearly 100 more GB of space. As much as I didn’t want to give my money to Apple and be mistaken for just another hipster with those telltale white earbuds, what choice did I have?
And buying that player was a revelation. It showed me a few things about Apple. The most obvious thing was they charged too much for their product, reason number one why I was never a fan. But they also showed me that while they get away with this, they also put out superior product. Simply stated, the 160 GB iPod Classic was and is the best MP3 player ever made for music lovers. Enough room to roam, the design is such that the player is no larger than half a deck of cards, the battery life is astounding, and iTunes, once you get used to it, is fairly easy to use and convenient. (I know the number of people out there who despise iTunes as a media player is legion, but aside from one glitch a few years ago where an upgrade messed with my files tags, I’ve had zero problems with the software.)
This device has been everything I ever wanted in a portable music player. And so I took the time to re-tag all my files to fit into this new format and started down the iPod road. I’ve gone hog wild in the past few years in terms of branching out into other forms of music. Celtic. African. Brazilian. A smattering of Asian and Indian. Jazz. Classical. I’ve always been curious about these kinds of music, so why not delve in, now that we’re in the digital age, I can sample everything before I buy it, and roam around fairly easily, building good-sized sampling of any genre in a fraction of the time it used to take. Owning this iPod made that not just possible, but somehow pushed me outward to find these things, since I had such a large space to use.
I’ve been on it for five years now with this player, but now find myself coming up on only 10 GB of space left on the player. And now that Apple is doing one of its usual “fuck you, we don’t care what you want, we’re going to tell you what you want, and then we’re going to tell everyone this is the future we must all live in” marketing campaigns for “the cloud” … it seems very unlikely that they’re ever going to put out a new model MP3 player with a larger drive than the 160 GB iPod Classic. In their eyes, it won’t be necessary … we have “the cloud” … there’s no need to store anything anymore.
Well, I know enough about computers to know what bullshit this is. The world, or at least America, is not yet ready for portable device streaming, and may not be for a very long time to come. For one thing, there are data caps in place on most cellphones that crap out after 2.5 GB of monthly data usage. I know … the past few months, my internet use at home has been determined solely by a Virgin Mobile flash-drive 3G modem that I spend $50/month on to get “unlimited” data (which slows to a crawl after 2.5 GB … and is already achingly slow as-is when compared to cable or DSL). I’ve learned not to watch video on the computer with this thing – if I do, I easily reach 2.5 GB of data usage inside a week or two. As it is, I push the limit of usage every month just sampling and downloading from my monthly Emusic account. I don’t even stream music – I can’t. The stream breaks up constantly. When I sample a 30-second piece of music on Emusic to see if I want to buy the track, invariably, the stream will stop somewhere in that 30 seconds, usually somewhere around the 15-second mark.
Using this flash-drive modem been an education on “streaming” and “the future” as it replicates what someone would experience using a phone to “stream media in the cloud.” It sucks. Until folks like AT&T and Verizon decide that we all have unlimited data usage for any plan we choose, streaming on a portable device is not an option. Sounds like a no-brainer? I don’t see it happening. I think AT&T now has a truly unlimited data plan for $80/month … but do you want to pay $80/month for only one device on top of your normal monthly home cable/DSL charges? And that one device is your phone. If you really love music … do you want to listen to music only on your smart phone? With a stream that most likely has lesser sound quality than the MP3s you listen to and, I don’t care what anyone else tells you, will crap out routinely, like when you go underground for any reason (a constant with most New Yorkers and the subway) or enter any kind of situation where streaming signals grow hazy (being out in the country, on open highways, in office buildings, etc.)?
No. The “cloud” is cool for people who don’t have a lot at stake musically. Who look at 32 Gigs of space as a vast sea of space for their music. For those of us who blew by 32 Gigs as an after-thought, streaming is not an option. I’d gather most of us in this boat understand implicitly, there is no substitute for having music you’ve acquired, there in actual files, in the palm of your hand, not being streamed to your device as a monthly rental. I’ve tried a service like Spotify, one of the larger new streaming music sites. It’s fantastic … for the home computer. I can sample albums in their entirety, even put on whole albums and just let them play … on the home computer, with cable. But I would sure hate to try using that on a device. Forget about the monthly data caps that would be reached in a week or two – just knowing the stream would stop and garble routinely in the NYC living area, and drop out completely for the half hour I spend each day on the way to and from work in Manhattan is enough to put me off.
So, faced with this “future” of streaming I recognize as a hard sell to people who don’t really like or care about music (as I’ve stated in the past, that constitutes a massive portion of the audience the music industry pays total attention to for their teenage lifespan, while basically ignoring everyone else), it just doesn’t wash with people who love music. In theory, it should. But theory doesn’t recognize the reality of data caps and satellite signals that grow hazy the farther you get from populated areas … which could be just as easy as hitting any interstate near any major city and driving no more than few miles into the countryside. Or taking a subway train. Or being in an office in any metropolitan area where cellphone service is bad to non-existent.
So what do I do? I do the next best thing. There’s one other device out there that trumps the 160 GB iPod Classic in terms of drive space: the Archos 48 Internet tablet, with a whopping 500 GB hard drive. Not sure why they call it a tablet – it’s larger than an iPod, but I can still fit it into my shirt pocket. It feels like a monster next to the iPod, which I attribute, again, to the brilliance of the design team at Apple. I bought one of these a few weeks ago, for $200, considerably less than the iPod Classic. And I was thinking, “I hate to abandon the iPod (and won’t for at least the rest of the year or so), but I’m being left no choice as someone with a large music collection who wants to go on listening and branching out … as anyone who loves music is supposed to do over the course of his life.”
And that’s the cloud I’ve been living in the past few weeks … trying to get this god-damned Archos player up to snuff. It’s been an enormous pain in the ass. Just finding the right software/media player to act as a solid transfer point to the device was a problem. (iTunes is a completely closed system that will not transfer to any non-Apple device.) I finally stumbled on Media Monkey, which I actually like more than iTunes as a media player, and respect a great deal as it pulled all the songs from my iTunes library and had a very good percentage of tagging everything properly. (I’d say about 300 tracks didn’t work out right and had to be re-tagged, but that’s not bad considering there were over 24,500 all together.) Unlike iTunes, it can mimic iTunes itself, and then allow the user to transfer the files from Media Monkey onto any non-Apple player.
Which is what I’ve been doing the past two weeks. I’ve learned a serious lesson in data transfers that you had better dot every “i” when doing something this large, as getting anything wrong will require you to scrub/erase the data and start all over again … which I’ve done three times between Media Monkey and the Archos player. The auto-synch also takes forever. When I auto-synch from the iTunes library to the iPod, it takes literally seconds. This things takes 20 minutes just to read the files, and then an indeterminate amount of time to dis-mount the player. I’m doing this process right now, for instance, since my last data transfer was mostly successful, but neglected to copy my dozens of playlists. I’ve been sitting here over 45 minutes waiting for the auto-synch to end and may well just get frustrated and un-plug the device from the USB port. It shouldn’t take this long to synch up a player that already has all the tracks on it.
Just one of more than a few issues I’ve had, and it’s made me realize Archos puts out a pretty choppy product. Unfortunately for now, the only product larger than the 160 GB iPod. I do like the device, but the amount of shit I’ve had to go through is not worth it. And don’t get me started on the anti-Apple tech heads who over-populate the online forums for Media Monkey and Archos. When you have to run scripts, and get into your computer registry, and write code, and make sure every minute aspect of a transfer is perfect, and run de-bugging programs, and download firmware … then you’ve just demonstrated why Apple is so popular beyond the hipster quotient. You just plug the fucking thing in, and it works. That’s hard to beat, and that’s what all these tech heads aren’t getting. Nobody, save tech heads, wants to spend hours trying to figure these things out and jump through burning hoops just to make the device work normally. It just underlines a level of quality a notch or two below what most people come to expect as standard operational procedure for any Apple product.
Can we save the iPod? I hope so, but I just don’t see it happening in the current climate of cloud hype. The Apple folks seem dead-set on driving their point home that we must all acquiesce to the cloud and their version of the future … when they’ve made a device that is just sheer perfection in terms of listening to portable music. And they should be building these things with larger drives, and switching to flash drives and putting them in the devices as flash drives grow larger and cheaper over the next few years. Doesn’t even have to be iPod Classic. I’d assume they could move forward with iPod Touches since they have larger viewing screens and people could watch movies and videos on them. The key for me is room to grow, and if I had a 320 GB device, or even a 240 GB Apple portable device, it would take me a long, long time to fill it up. It took me five years to fill up a 160 GB device that automatically had 60 GB on it, and you can throw down about another 20 GB when I went into my CD collection and went hog-wild in terms of throwing everything I wanted on the player. A device with twice the size hard drive would take me another decade to fill up, at least.
But I know this is all idle chatter. Everyone in my shoes does this – speaks it out loud, or writes it on the web, and thinks wishing publicly like this will make it so. In the mean time, I’ll face reality and wrestle with the frumpy, tank-like, pain-in-the-ass Archos player. It may be royally pissing me off, but it’s my only hope for the future right now.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
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?
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?
Sunday, January 22, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
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.
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