A Sport for Americans Who Don’t Like Sports

I blew off working out on Saturday to watch the US/Ghana semifinals World Cup match, which as we know now, was a mistake. Besides, it was 90 degrees here with the humidity hanging like a shit blanket over the city, so sitting tight wasn’t such a bad idea. Ironically, I’ve been right in the middle of sifting through tons of African music to create a new collection for the iPod, so I was doing that with the sound turned down. I didn’t really miss those droning plastic horns. (We had those when we were kids in the 70s: a deeply disturbing instrument that made much too loud a noise.)

It’s been easy to miss the World Cup in America. The viewing times are so awful (7:30 am, 10:30 am and 2:30 pm, daily) that most people are going about their days and not willing to break free. When I mentioned watching the match to brother J in rural PA later that evening, he said he didn’t even know it was going on. And didn’t care. The only World Cup that stuck in my head was in 2002, when I was unemployed that summer and had all kinds of times to watch these oddly-scheduled matches. I can safely say that was the only time I got into soccer on any real basis.

And I can safely say most Americans are in the same boat. You would not know that living in New York City, where it’s somehow been decided that soccer is the sport of the millennium, bars packed with fans, more ballyhoo than a Nascar rally in South Carolina.

But it’s for that reason alone – New York City – that I smell bullshit. Actually, there are a number of reasons. I think the most honest one is Lance Armstrong, who has nothing to do with soccer. But there’s something about Armstrong as an athlete that grates on me. He seems like the archetypal cyclist: slight, youngish, doesn’t appear to have a hair on his body once you get below his head, let’s not forget the “Livestrong” plastic wrist bands he sports and millions emulate, wearing his metrosexual biking pants, team shirt and bad sports shades. If you’ve spent time around bicyclists, you know the style and attitude: sheer arrogance. I know Armstrong is a great athlete, with or without blood doping, and overcame enormous odds to dominate the sport. So … why do I picture him as being such a dick?

I don’t know, but can’t you just feel it? And that negative vibe I get from the whole professional cycling world, emanates like rays of the sun from American soccer players. The most visible US player this time around? Landon Donovan. Would be sporting a duckhead haircut, maybe even a Justin Bieber, if he had more hair. You get the impression this guy gets angered easily, or at least he looks that way. He looks like the guy at work who eats salads, gets his body waxed, wears make-up at social events … and nobody likes.

For all I know, he’s a wonderful, down-to-earth guy who would make me do a 100% about-face if I spent time around him. But he puts out the dick vibe. Most of these soccer guys do, to greater and lesser extents. In America, unlike the rest of the world, soccer has the tinge of suburbia/upper-middle-class existence about it. If you were on a “good” soccer team in high school, I’m willing to bet you come from an affluent white suburb. Which is no crime – you probably also had a pretty good lacrosse team and one hell of a debate team – but there it is. It’s like wine, which is so common in Europe that towns people near vineyards will casually drive over to one and fill gallon jugs the same way we fill slushies and Big Gulp Cokes at convenience stores. In America, wine has been co-opted by overbearing shitheads to make the act of drinking it a class distinction. And I’ll give bicyclists and soccer players credit: they’re way down on my shit list compared to wine snobs. How something as basic and normal as drinking wine became this industry geared towards smug elitists, I don’t have a clue.

And as with wine, soccer as a sport has been geared towards a certain “higher” class of fan, who sees himself that way, too. I’m not questioning his fanhood – christ, if you’re an American soccer fan when this World Cup stuff isn’t around, more power to you, you really care about the sport. I don’t doubt there is a sports purity in a genuine American soccer fan, someone who gets the game, has been following it for decades, played it in high school, maybe even in college, probably as an adult in informal leagues.

But I’d also wager, most of these people spilling out of bars in New York the past week or two, damn few of them are these people. You’ll get your usual expatriates from other countries who are into the sport because it’s the national sport of their home country. No beef with these folks at all. Your disproportionately small contingent of American soccer fans. And a lot of guys who look like Lance Armstrong and Landon Donovan, acting like they grew up on a rainy pitch in Manchester and have loved the sport for years, here let me buy you another Lite Beer, but stop me at two because my girlfriend will yell at me if I gain three pounds a week before our trip to Belize.

It’s bullshit, based on class. The whole “why isn’t America more into soccer” issue is bullshit. We just aren’t; we and the world are no worse for wear. Our best athletes gravitate towards sports that are more visible/higher paying that what passes for professional soccer here. A lucky few go to Europe and make a name for themselves in premier leagues. I’ve noted this before. If we took the time and money to make soccer a national priority, and then went into each World Cup and cleaned house for 20 years straight, the world would hate us for it. They’d much rather look down on us for not giving a shit about soccer, “the only true world sport” as I heard some dweeb at the gym describe it the other day.

Utter bullshit. We have the summer and winter olympics to kick world ass at every even-numbered year. How many times have I heard the “America’s lack of interest in soccer is indicative of its insularity” routine? Too many times. If you don’t like America, just say it, it’s OK, no one’s going to kill you over this. The only people I hear saying shit like that are people who don’t like sports in general. And I gather they’ll latch onto something like soccer, or bicycling when the Tour de France rolls around, and pretend they really care about these sports. And they just don’t. It’s just another excuse to bash not America, per se, but the type of American they despise, i.e., white people the size of houses who really love football, baseball and Nascar. (Probably drive SUVs, vote Republican, listen to Rush (Limbaugh), etc. … we all know the drill by heart.)

It’s important to mention Nascar because fan-wise, it’s the polar opposite of soccer. You won’t find metrosexuals in #3 t-shirts piling into NYC bars to watch the Indy 500 on wide-screen TVs. If anything, they’d derisively laugh at the concept. Me? I hate Nascar. Also not big on hunting or fishing. From a small town. Know plenty of people who are seriously into all three. They’re fine. Nothing wrong with them. I will find myself goofing on people when they veer too far into Nascar country – sporting the truly awful and ugly t-shirts and head gear – but I respect the fact that this is their sport, and they genuinely love it. Millions of Americans do.

Why would these instant soccer fans in New York not grant the same sort of clemency to Nascar and treat the major races in the circuit as major events on par with World Cup soccer? I’d say it’s perception. These people perceive themselves as worldly people, in touch with other people from other nations, why, they vacation overseas regularly, have been to (insert major city in Europe/Africa/South America here), have “friends” all over the globe … soccer, like wine, is just something they indulge in to show their worldliness. Right?

I don’t understand why being a Nascar fan would make one any more less worldly … save to say it’s perceived in America as sport for rednecks, and to follow it, chances are good that you, too, are a redneck by extension. It’s just bullshit to me. Bullshit of the worst kind, to attach these extraneous social values to sports. But you better believe, doing so is just as much a national pastime as following the sports themselves. Most countries in the world, soccer is the sport of the people. All you need is a ball, an open field, four cones to set up for the goals, basic gist of where the sidelines are. I’m sure there are countless kids playing this game right now in Africa, or the slums of major South American cities, or in any European country.

They’re in America, too. Soccer will be a big deal in any suburban school district. Even the rural area I’m from in Pennsylvania, you drive around, and you spot soccer fields here and there. I believe there are soccer programs in most school districts back there, although football overshadows them as their seasons are concurrent.

But you know what? You get into cities and more working-class black rural areas, and I don’t think you see anywhere near as many soccer fields. If you do, kids aren’t using them, adults in leagues are. And until you see this with all kids – until the sport is that accepted and sought after at that elemental level – the US will never be a soccer power. Until you reach that part of America that fuels so many topline professional sports, soccer will be what it is here and has been for a long time: a sport for a certain class of people in America not known for producing champion-caliber athletes. (Or at least that’s how I feel every time I see lacrosse on ESPN. Can’t help but think if you put these burly “see themselves as badass” white college guys up against a team of linebackers and safeties from professional football with a month or two of training, you’d see how thin the veneer of that sport is.)

Every Sunday, in the schoolyard behind my place here, there’s an informal Mexican soccer league that’s taken over the asphalt field in the afternoon. More like morning. These guys show up around 10:00 am to make sure they get the field, and they stay until about 4:00 pm or so, playing each other. They go all out: uniforms, their own nets, even their own referees. The sidelines are filled with wives, kids, other players – there are probably 100 people in that lot back there at any given time in those hours. They set up a refreshments tents selling roasted corn, beans and rice, bottles of water and soda in coolers, etc.

I think the locals were a bit freaked out at first but later realized these people meant no harm. The cops made a show of force after this happened once or twice, had a talk with the guys running the league, made sure they cleaned up after themselves, and I can say these people are no more or less of a problem than the local teenage dickheads who hang out there playing basketball or baseball. Yeah, there is sometimes garbage left over, but per capita, a few empty Gatorade bottles for 100+ people, as compared to a few more empty Gatorade bottles for eight local teenage dickheads … do the math. A suburban youth hockey league commandeered the field a few years ago on Sunday, and the parents with those kids were always carrying on like maniacs, you could hear them yelling all afternoon. I’d take these immigrant Mexican soccer players over those boorish Long Island hockey parents any day of the week.

My point being, that field plays host to a bunch of immigrants who love the sport with a passion, who grew up playing it back home, love the game enough to form their own informal league, buy their own jerseys and equipment, and hang out for hours on a Sunday to make sure they have a place to play the game. This is it for them, the highlight of their week.

I’ll know soccer is a big deal when neighborhood kids go to the same lengths to play the game. I just don’t see it happening, especially with the advent of home video games. I gather the only neighborhood kids I see playing basketball and baseball around here are too poor to buy an X-Box. Until you get poor people of all colors on board with this thing, soccer will never be a major sport in America. And I think the disdain we’re trained to have in this country for the poor is greater than the urge we have to create another avenue for them to make a lot of money through sports. It’s odd how so much of sports comes down to money, but it surely does.

The Men's Room Mirror

For an office, the men’s room at my work place is fairly rank. It’s far too small for 50+ male workers with only two urinals (uncomfortably close to each other) and three toilets. I try not to spend too much time there, but with all-day fluid intake, I’ll usually be in there roughly four times a day. At which time, I will do my thing and get out.

There are few things in life I hate more than taking a dump at work, or any place I can’t do so in absolute privacy. Invariably, the toilet stalls are occupied. Even worse, there’s been rank stuff going on lately with guys tracking shit on the floor, somehow. I won’t point fingers, but I’ve seen some guys go in there with cups of water, which I’m assuming they’re using with the toilet paper, and someone’s getting drops of the stuff on the floor and then tracking it a few steps. On top of the usual: guys with big bellies inadvertently urinating on the floor when they can’t belly up to the urinal. I sometimes take a piss posed like Pete Townshend during a guitar solo to avoid the puddles.

So I surely don’t lurk there … and will never understand guys who do. The guys who take forever in front of the mirror. Grooming themselves, or just taking inappropriately long times to wash their hands, stare at themselves, or make small talk in a place where no sane man wants to small talk. And why is it that it’s always the most average looking guys who take the longest to groom themselves in the mirror? They think if they stand there long enough working the comb, they’ll suddenly become handsome? It aint happening.

But another more mundane thing has encouraged me to spend even less time there. The one thing they did do “right” with the bathrooms was put in industrial-strength lighting. It’s really bright in there, make-up mirror bright. As a result, and in my mid-40s, I keep noticing more gray hairs coming in on my temples. Used to be one or two, now it’s a hair here, and there, and there … hardly a gray fox yet, but this must be how it starts. I don’t see these in other mirrors as most places I catch a glimpse, the lighting isn’t that powerful. But that men’s room mirror is relentless, strips you naked in some sense, like having a light shone in your face during a police interrogation.

I guess I should be glad to have hair! Some guys aren’t as lucky, and that becomes a minor cross to bear, probably something they learn to live with once the reality of it sets in. The prospect of my hair eventually going gray doesn’t sit well with me at all, but it will happen. I’ve always prided myself on looking young in some sense for my age, and gray hair throws a monkey wrench in that ruse. Dad looked young well into his 50s – hair didn’t go gray until his late 50s or so, it seemed like. I look at picture of him in his 40s (which was my childhood in the 70s), and he wasn’t gray at all. I seemed to have inherited his hair, that high hairline, with weird tight/kinky hair. Not quite afro or curly, but even today when I got a haircut, the barber doing so couldn’t run a comb through it.

The first time I saw a gray hair two years ago, I freaked out. Hell, I know some guys who go completely gray by their early 40s, which I’m assuming is stress-related in most cases as opposed to genetics (which they’ll tell you it is). But most guys I’ve known like that are wound up in some sense. While my life is far from stress free, it’s a major tenet of mine to downplay stress and reduce it in my life (as I believe stress and how one handles it are as crucial a health choice as smoking or not smoking). It’s no accident that President Obama is starting to look like Old Man Moses after a few years in the highest-pressure job in the world – I’m willing to bet he’s knocking back a pack a day of Marlboros while he’s at it.

I still have the pack of “Just for Men” hair-coloring product I rushed out and bought that day. Opened, but not used. When you read the instructions on this stuff, man, you don’t want to use it. You don’t just rub it into your hair, and wallah. But that was my initial reaction: panic. I recall two women I worked with, in their 30s, with black hair, having someone point out that each had one gray hair, which was plainly visible when you looked as they both had long straight hair. Fellow female employees gathered around, fawning, oh, honey, nurture it, you’re a woman of wisdom and age now, what a wonderful thing. Yeah, well, I think both of them had the fucker plucked from their heads within the five minutes it took each to rush to the ladies room.

Now that I probably have a dozen or so of these stray hairs? Why bother. Most people don’t even notice. Of course, it makes me wonder about all these cultural icons, particularly musicians, who have full heads of jet black hair and such well into their 60s. Springsteen. Jackson Browne. Bowie. Browne and Bowie still position themselves as looking like teenagers in some photos – then again, both looked like teenagers well into their 30s. Very few rock stars have let themselves go gray – Jimmy Page being a notable exception (but I guess that somehow fits in with his witchrafty image). These guys have obviously been dying their hair for decades: it’s beyond unnatural. I work with guys in their 50s and 60s: nearly all of them have gray hair, either completely or well on the way. They look their age, not like teenagers with wrinkles.

So, I wonder how my vanity compares to theirs, and their inability to recognize nature’s way, whereas I’m seeing, even if you have slow-graying genetics and a penchant for youthful looks, your hair will start showing flecks of grays as you move through your 40s. I could surely dye it if I wanted to, although I’d probably go to the barber and pay him $20 to do it once or twice a year. But that’s not something I’ve seriously considered at this point – simply know it’s an option by reading the barber’s price chart as I got my hair cut earlier in the day.

Gray hair does wonders for some guys – I think George Clooney owes his career to prematurely graying hair. If you don’t believe me, check out the teenage George:













Which makes me want to get into a time machine to kick his ass just for fun. And a young-adult George:













Who sported a shaggy mullet long, long after it was considered in any way hip to do so. He looked like a huge Mr. Mister fan and probably still has the purple velour knee-length coat to prove it.

But give the guy a head of gray hair, have him talk in that condescending “everyone, listen to me, I’m in charge and my tone of voice is better than yours” manner that grates on me in so many of his characters, and you have a guy who’s probably coloring his gray hair even grayer to capitalize on that effect.

Last time I was home, I talked to an old high-school friend about aging and looks, in a bar, no less, at that “changing of the guard” hour, about 9:00 on a Friday night, when the local bars back there turn the lights down and switch over from the classic rock station to the crappy Top 40 one, at top volume so you need to shout to be heard. This woman was a knockout in younger days: I mean model material, just drop-dead beautiful. Now? She’s a pretty good looking woman, but just not on that “everyone stop and look” level of beauty she once had. Just passing time, no great crime. She’s still in great shape, just sort of lost that hard-edged beauty many of us had into our early 30s.

She leaned over and said, “You know how when you look in a mirror, you tell yourself your not that bad-looking, and you can still see how young you are, but when you’re walking through a department store, and see your image on a camera trained on a doorway, you always look like a bag of shit? I’ve come to realize, everyone else sees that bag of shit far more often than you see how good you think you still look in the mirror.”

Of course, as she’s saying this, we’re looking at us in the mirror across the bar. I thought, “I don’t look so bad.” But then I realized the effect she was talking about, how boxy and dumpy I look on a really bad video-cam, how fat I think I always look in pictures (which is why I take so few anymore), the lack of definition I in my face that I once had as a kid (which would be nigh on impossible to maintain, barring a sub-1,000 calorie per day diet). She was right – I’m thinking most people look at me and don’t have that sense of history to see me at 18 or 25, when I was in peak form – they’re just seeing some big-assed, middle-aged guy with zero back story.

Right then, one of the early twentysomething bartenders walked over and asked if I needed another beer. She was pretty, black hair, nice smile, kind eyes – and I noticed, she kept glancing over to make eye contact every few minutes from her seat, so I’m thinking what the hell, maybe I’m not so bad after all? (Or maybe she’s really banking on big tips tonight.)

Those are the kind of head games you play with yourself in your 40s. You’re balanced on the edge of no longer bullshitting yourself about being young, but can still maintain vestiges of youth to the extent that you can turn a young girl’s head if she takes a good look at you and catches the kindness in your eyes. Of course, you should then ask yourself, “What on earth am I going to talk about with a 26-year-old woman?” And realize you could play that game if you want, but there better be one hell of a connection between you and that person to bridge a whole lot of generation gap and life experience. And you also realize younger people have limited senses of aging – that girl could be looking at me and thinking, “He must be around 35 or so” … whereas a middle-aged woman could probably pin me down to within a year or two of my real age.

In any event, I’ve stopped gauging my self worth by how attractive I believe women do or don’t find me. If they do, great; if they don’t, great. It’s nice to feel like eye candy, I’ve known the feeling, but it ultimately doesn’t mean all that much. Our society seems to be based on such an overwhelming lack of self worth that I learned to turn my back on that shit long ago. I remember the days of competing for a beautiful woman’s attention in a bar, but can’t recall why it was such a big deal at the time. If we’re talking some Darwinian rule of attraction and strength, I’m just not grasping it in every-day life. We’re no longer cavemen struggling for survival, and the last guy who bought into that was Hitler with his Aryan fixation (despite not being Aryan at all himself).

It just doesn’t make sense to go around gauging every situation as if it was a globe spinning around your axis, because the world doesn’t work that way. Another life lesson that gets driven home repeatedly as you age. That’s an important distinction to make because it’s a major difference between youth and old age, that you’re just part of the story, not the story, and it helps to see your small place in the world, as opposed to believing you’re going to kick the world’s ass. I should have asked my friend, which do you prefer, a scene like ours in a bar when we were both 23, and she would have had every guy in that bar staring her down, tongues hanging out like overheated bulldogs, or now, just two obviously slightly older people, quietly having a beer and not really drawing all that much attention from anyone?

I guess it depends on how you want other people to see you, what you want from them. How you handle being invisible in some sense, when we’re all not-so-subtly conditioned to think there’s a spotlight on each and every one of us. I’d say passing time and aging are not the ass kickers everyone makes them out to be; they’re simply understanding the truth of how we deal with each other in the world, and what really matters, as opposed to chasing illusions of what we thought really mattered. So much of this comes down to insecurity and vanity, which we all have to some extent. The older I get, the less I care.

In the Belly of the Box

The other day, I attended a work-related seminar in a swank midtown conference room. These things are always the same: stiffness, awkward, forced laughter, stifled yawns, sage nodding of the head, left finger posed thoughtfully under the chin with crossed arms. That look of corporate serenity you hope to have in your coffin: yes, I understand that I’m dead, and this is the last major roman numeral in the outline of my life.

One of the speakers actually was very good, guy in his 50s, really spoke with a down-to-earth, “seems like I’m just winging it but think about all the details I’ve imparted” sort of vibe. One of the things he did stuck with me. He stopped and asked: “All right, so you’re at a barbecue, kicking back, beer in one hand, burger in the other, and someone asks you, ‘What do you do?’.”

When he asked the rhetorical question, he stopped and looked one person in the eye, as if he were play acting and actually at a barbecue. Slight, uncomfortable silence, nervous laughter, maybe people don’t get it. So he said, “I’m a Vice President at a Public Relations firm … what do you do?”

The concept was to get the person to say something more basic than “I work in a museum.” To look at a question like that as a networking/business opportunity. “I work as a loan officer in a community bank.” “Oh, you know, my brother is looking to take out a loan for his small business.” “Well, here’s my card ..” Etc.

I only had one small problem with this: if you’re the kind of person who goes to a non-work event and immediately starts in with work-related junk, I walk the hell away from you. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want you asking me “what I do.” I don’t care what you do – profoundly so. No one does. We’re there to hang loose and enjoy each other’s company. I’m not there to shake you down for a job. You’re not an object for my financial gain. I won’t make you feel small if “what you do” doesn’t subscribe to some bullshit standard I hold. The only standard I’ll hold in a situation like that is whether or not you’re interesting and likable enough to hang around and talk with for awhile, maybe even become friends if we really get along.

And chances are if you’re networking, I’ll smell it like a hard-boiled egg fart and evacuate the premises in exactly the same manner. Of course, I picture the guy who was speaking, his world is that kind of suburban barbecue where a bunch of uptight guys walk around in polo shirts and $90 shorts talking nothing but work and the amounts of money they make. If not directly, then indirectly by listing thing like international vacations, cars, second homes, wives’ shopping habits, kids’ Ivy League affiliations, etc. If it’s not money, it’s what money can buy. Not who you are. Who you are is generally buried underneath tons of carefully-piled debris, like a doll in a garbage dump.

(Sidenote to “what do you do” way of life: This always makes me think of old friend John S. in high school, when the topic of “what we were going to do with our lives” came up. I can’t recall the class, but a teacher asked us just such a question. Most kids gave the same stock answers: doctor, lawyer, carpenter, nurse, etc. The teacher knew when he got to John, things were going to get strange, so he saved him for last. Finally, he says, O.K., John, what do you want to be when you grow up? John says, “I have it narrowed down to two choices: a gynecologist in Hollywood, or hot-dog vendor on the beach in Maui.” Of course, he was lying. “Cindy Crawford’s bicycle seat” was the stock answer we gave back then to this sort of question.)

I always feel like a spy at these sort of corporate seminars, because this isn’t me at all. Of course, I realize, you go around the room, and the thought balloons over most people’s heads will be saying, “What the fuck am I doing here? Not just this conference room, but this place in my life? How did I get here? Why do I stay? Do they stage these things so I can have these desperate moments of quiet crisis and make me feel like I pussied out on my life and have turned into some kind of corporate cyborg?”

The answer, of course, is money. And free donuts. Free alcohol if you’re really lucky. But I’m assuming most people in that room are doing what I’m doing: putting on the work face for work. Although you’ll get that glint in more than few people’s eyes, the true believers. And I don’t fault them for that. These displays of public disaffection are meant solely for people like them, who buy into whatever’s being sold and believe in it with a religious fervor. They’re the ones who are perfectly at home in an environment like this, and people like me are intruders in a sense, who may never openly balk at this sort of nonsense, but surely roll along with it as it’s part of the deal of making money.

Something about these things always brings out my inner 19-year-old. That’s roughly the age, for me at least, where everything seemed like bullshit. Strung out between childhood and adulthood. In college? If not, working one’s first job, probably living at home, thinking, “Is this how life works now that school is out?” Teenage kids seem like assholes. Adults seem like assholes. Your friends seem like assholes. You seem like an asshole. Everything’s a joke. Who are you doing this for? What are you doing this for?

I have a few friends with kids right at that age, and, man, do their kids seem lost. Not in a horrifying way – actually in a pretty typical way most people go through. But I can see, you have any romantic notions about being a teenager or young adult, you should eavesdrop on a family that has a 19-21 year-old kid who doesn’t quite know what to do with his life, and that awkward lack of direction will kill that nostalgia. It doesn’t look like any fun – more like a teenage purgatory, stuck between that carefree, private lifestyle they’ve had the past few years and the approaching adult world they’ve been drilled to view with fear and disdain, but now it has to be breached somehow in the next few years.

And I wouldn’t know what to tell them, as if some magic answer will appear through the mist. It won’t. There will be things that suggest themselves, and more than likely, situations that just present themselves as a way to make ends meet, and they’ll often grow into some type of vocation. Some people will aim themselves like missiles to get through life, every step carefully planned and conceived. And I always get the feeling that everything else in their lives is secondary to that game plan. Marriages and children are part of the deal, but not the deal. You’ll find executives with three kids who don’t know a damn thing about child-rearing … because you can’t learn a damn thing about child-rearing when you’re working from 8:00 until 8:00 every day and lining up high-end social engagements every weekend that don’t involve kids. I got no problem with people espousing the way of life, but I wish they’d drop the illusion that they “have it all” in some sense when anyone can see through this charade that goes on with that lifestyle. People who work that hard love work. Whatever else they attach to it is not even a close second. I’d guess that realization becomes fairly obvious to the un-close seconds after awhile, and they either see the truth of their lives and accept it, or decide to kick up a fuss.

That’s what I’d tell these kids: you can’t have it all. You can give yourself the illusion that you can have it all, but you can’t have it all. Something will always be out of place. Something will always be out of balance. One thing will be greater than another. Come back a year later, and those things will have changed places in your life. Where they’re at now, everything looks like it’s out of reach. Not quite knowing they have youth, looks, time, a casual laissez faire attitude towards the future that people will spend years trying in vain to recapture as they age. They have a lot, but are not experienced enough to recognize its value. What they don’t have is that standing and sense of belonging in the adult world they’re un-easing into, which will come in time, but unrecognizably, like a disease that unfolds over the course of years. And as it spreads, that hang-loose vibe of taking life as it comes will disappear.

That’s all I could think of in that corporate boardroom. How does this uptight, nowhere feeling I have in the pit of my stomach have anything to do with that kid I was once, that loose sense of freedom I once had? Should it? On some level, no. When I was that age, I wanted to do nothing but be a writer, not quite realizing that it’s pretty rare that anyone gets to do nothing but write, and even more rare to write only what they want to. Usually there’s a lot of shit attached to that. Teaching. Senior editing. Day-jobbing it. You’ll get paid a $30,000 advance for a book and often not see much more than that. Try living on that for a year. It won’t happen, unless you’re depending on someone else for money. Try freelancing. Even the few people I know doing that successfully spend weeks or sometimes months sweating it financially as their assignments and late-arriving payments ebb and flow.

So I’ve had friends with the same aspirations go do the teaching thing. Only to find that they’re so burned at the end of each work day, and have papers to grade, that there is no time to write anything. Or the senior editors, who spend endless hours at work, I mean 12-hour days as a given, with longer for deadline days and weeks, that the concept of writing whatever they want to write disappears like a ghost in the fog. They surely do write, but nothing they want to. Throw in families on top of that, and the aspirations of a 19-year-old look only like a faded question mark in the backs of their minds. Not something to ever be taken seriously again. There's no time.

This is why I find the “thinking inside the box” paradigm sprung on me by someone who has always lived his or her whole like this bad cliché so offensive. Many of us have tried to live our lives “outside the box.” But live in a society where it really helps to have that box to get by. We need to resort to convention to make a living, while we chip away at things we really want to do. Very few people get to do exactly what they want to do, and I suspect their worlds are fraught with countless threats to their ability to go on doing so, which gives them a different kind of box that is a box nonetheless.

Sure enough, while that guy was speaking, he had another trick question where the object was to get us to “think outside the box.” I can’t tell you how rank I feel when I hear that phrase uttered in an office. The person uttering it invariably owes his existence to the box. I’ve known people who’ve lived outside the box, and most of them are dead or beat-down the way you’d get running into a brick wall repeatedly. I’ve trained my mind to think “outside the box that you live inside of” when it comes to people like this. Since I was bored out of my skull, I started entertaining my inner 19-year-old, thinking of how I should really answer this question if I wasn’t worried about losing my job in a shit economy, and walking away from this questionable way of life. And this is what I came up with:

I AM THE BOX. There is no thinking inside or outside of me. If I was, as you say, “thinking outside the box” – I mean really exercising true thought – I wouldn’t be in this room, nor would you, spouting a bad corporate cliché that tells me you’re really not all that smart beyond the blind ambition. If we were thinking outside the box, we’d probably be driving through the Badlands in a 57 Cadillac with a Yes album blaring from the cassette deck, high on magic mushrooms, on a death trip, one of our friends who had died a few days earlier from a brain tumor, wrapped up in plastic in the trunk, and we’re on our way to California to give him a viking burial at sea as his unofficial will stipulated, the one we verbally agreed upon when we were seventeen, drunk and gazing at the stars on the hood of an abandoned school bus at a bush party, but we wanted to get high and drive through the Dakotas first because he always wanted to see the Badlands, and we only have enough money to get us to Utah and will have to improvise thereafter. Motherfucker, THAT is thinking outside the box … not trying to make me feel like an asshole because I’m playing your game and need to reduce my mind to an uncomfortable place where I can figure out solutions to your wayward marketing campaign that’s going to be a piece of shit no matter how far anyone goes “outside the box” on this one.

Maybe the box is a casket and to think inside it is death? Maybe the box is this fucking job, this way of life, the irrational urge to pile hundreds of thousands of dollars into your life because you feel naked and weak without it? I need to think outside the box? Buddy, you don’t want to know what’s outside the box. You can’t handle it. You don’t want to. Last time you went outside the box was decades ago, and it scared the shit out of you, so much that you took that native intelligence, that spark of life you had, and twisted it around to some pre-defined career path because genuine freedom was something that blew your fucking mind and didn’t fit in with what your parents wanted for you, which sucked you in like a vacuum, and turned you into them, like you knew it always would in your little caste system world. So you’ll forgive me if I’m not all that crazy about spending time anywhere near your box because I need money to survive, but at least still have enough sense of personal freedom to wander around “outside the box” in ways you find counter-productive and childish, but I can assure you, no worse than the rampant insecurities and crippling fear that’s hidden beneath your fortress of solitude, you annoying, sell-out prick with enough arrogance to make Hitler blush, you putz.

And I know that tie is a clip-on!

The Defense Mechanism

I was talking to a guy in boxing class today about his other class: krav maga, the Israeli-based form of martial arts. He has a full-contact class that tends to get nuts. I jokingly call him “The Italian Stallion” and he says, ‘No, I’m more like ‘The Italian Scallion.’” He’s had a woman kick him square in the balls in that class and in general gets roughed up a good bit by over-zealous sparring partners, but wearing head gear, cup and mouth piece. Our boxing class is just hitting things, which I prefer. My advice is unless you’re good enough to be a professional or highly-ranked amateur, you should not allow people who really know how to hit routinely hit you.

It’s always a pleasure to talk with this guy, or most people in these classes, because no one is there to kick somebody else’s ass. Every now and then you’ll get a hothead, but he (always he) will rarely last. Like me, most people realize it’s just a good physical release to hit something, and the workout in general is designed to break you down physically, and will, unless you’re in astounding physical condition. (I’ve also found the better you get, the harder you workout. The harder you hit, the more energy you burn. It builds on itself.)

This often makes me think about what it means to hurt or dominate other people, not just physically, and what the point is. Want to hurt me? Got news for you. There are things I understand about myself that are darker, more ugly and more hurtful than anything my worst enemy could come up with. As life goes on, if you’re honest with yourself, you see your own darkness, and embrace it in some strange sense, forgive it whenever possible, try not to encourage it. By the same token, I see great things, too, that sometimes come through clearly, especially when I write.

Gonna’ hurt me? Physically, that’s surely possible, but otherwise, I doubt it. Or at least nowhere near as hard as I could hurt myself. It comes in handy to understand this when you put yourself out there for public consumption. And I’ve learned plenty of people who abhor physical violence and see themselves as miles above it, don’t think twice about trying to inflict the same emotionally and mentally. That’s one major thing I don’t get about adulthood. Kids grasp this instinctively. Adults feel some need to bullshit themselves about this.

That’s one of the interesting things I grasp about New York. The way you see yourself fluctuates constantly because you’re placed in so many situations that tempt you to be the worst you can be one moment, and the best a few minutes later. I’ll be seconds away from popping some nimrod on the subway carrying on about how much he hates white people, fully knowing white people are listening to him carry on with this sort of senseless, baiting crap. An hour later, I’ll take five minutes to help an old lady with a walking cane make it up the subway stairs. Come back in half an hour, and I’ll be contemplating kicking some jackass thumbing an iPhone down the same set of stairs. Aspiring saints should not live here: they'll be tested far too much to make the ecumenical cut.

Boxing to me serves as a defense mechanism against the world. For every man or woman boxing in our class, there tend to be a dozen guys out on the floor pumping iron, building their own defense mechanism. The bigger you are, the less people mess with you. It’s a pretty simple equation. It occurs to me, too, that this is fear in some sense. And I think to understand manhood, you have to understand fear. Because it’s a huge part of the deal. Traditionally, a man had to deal with fear in his world on a daily basis, instilling it in others or controlling it within himself. Life was about regular physical confrontation leading up to the last century or two.

Of course, it applies now, too. It will always apply, as it’s part of man’s nature to feel dominant in some sense. When I’m back home, Mom and I will often sit watching some war documentary on the History Channel. She’ll shake her head and say, “I will never understand why people have to always be fighting.” And I’ll shake my head and reply, “Mom, it’s the nature of men to fight each other. I’ll never understand how peace breaks out so often.”

But the older I get, the less I feel the need to dominate other people. I can understand it in a very base form, living in the most powerful nation in the world, with a standard of living that allows me to think such thoughts. But, really, you see a show on TV about a tribe living in the Amazon, what do they know or care about this kind of dominance? They care about food, and shelter, plants growing so they can eat, water running so they can drink, animals in the forest they can kill and eat. There’s something seductive about that way of seeing the world from my apartment in New York, just walking around with something covering your private parts and only worrying about food and shelter, as opposed to the endless mind games of society. The sense of male dominance in those closed little groups seems incidental to the larger sense of tribal community. Somewhere along the road, long in the past, we lost touch with that. Or more likely wiped it out on purpose.

This country was built on the concept of people dominating each other, and the tradition continues financially, so that we have a place filled with millions of people who don’t feel any sense of worth or happiness unless they feel dominant over just about everyone else they come across. It gets disgusting after awhile, especially in New York. Tiresome. Not something I want to base my life on in any sense. I was never like this as a kid. Or a teenager. Or a young adult. I’m sure as hell not going to start embracing it now. Thought we were going to catch a break on all this shit with the economy nearly collapsing and still ailing. But I can see now, that’s impossible. This system would have to crash for everyone to abandon it. To do so would be to openly admit how empty it is, and we are by extension, and you better believe the people benefiting the most from it will do everything possible to ensure that never happens.

Still, I can see my take on boxing is self defense, not dominance. I don’t walk around beating the shit out of people. I surely walk around thinking about beating the shit out of people – many of us do – but recognize doing so would be much more trouble than it’s worth. It would slowly corrupt my soul to do so (just dwelling on it is surely a minor form of corruption). And the ultimate truth: sooner or later, probably much sooner than I’d expect, I’d come across someone who could beat my ass to a pulp in a few seconds. As I’ve stated before, boxing is about recognizing your limitations. You hang around a gym and see a few guys who are high-end amateurs, it occurs to you, fast, that some people were made to kick other people’s asses, and chances are you or I aint one of them. Catch a few of Mike Tyson’s early fights on ESPN Classic: it’s like watching the perfect ass-kicking machine.

This next generation coming into adulthood, I don’t know what to think. On one hand, you have guys who, no offense, seem like women with penises. They’re all over my neighborhood. Guys who have never been in a physical confrontation and never will be, if they can help it. I’d applaud their pacifism if I didn’t also recognize there’s some key missing elements of manhood in so many of these guys. That flinty quality you’d get with war vets and mechanics. There’s nothing “guy” about these guys. It’s as though any vestige of manhood has been sucked out of or willfully abandoned by them, in favor of being these wimpy, sort of always smirking beings who, as noted, have emotional warfare down to a science, but have somehow erased traditional manhood from their DNA. (This New York Times commercial nails that vibe, that deeply annoying type of guy for me, in a terrible way. I want to kill everyone in this commercial, slowly, but particularly the men, and particularly the balding guy with glasses.)

If you don’t believe me, watch a few current movies, especially comedies, which seem to delight in presenting men as lovable losers who are always sensitive, funny souls life has passed by, but they learn some important life lesson through a strong woman or other like-minded guys, all to the tune of some dumpy indie music that espouses the same airy “let’s just chill, dude” form of quasi-masculinity.

And let’s not forget the “bromance,” i.e., buddy movies, which have been around for decades. The concept of platonic love between men has been discussed since the days of Greek philosophers. But let’s sum it all up now by attaching a vaguely gay slur to the concept of two men being friends … which seems like a neat summation of what I’m getting at. These guys are being raised to be so disdainful of any sign of masculinity that they turn it all into a smirking inside joke, nod-wink, we really know what’s going on here. Right. Abbott and Costello movies were bromances? Eat me.

On the other hand, you have these hyper-macho, heavily-tattooed, nose- and ear-ringed, Ultimate Fighting sort of guys who walk around like open sores waiting for someone to bump into them so they can blast off. It’s like a cartoon caricature of manhood, taking all the obvious physical elements – muscular signs of strength, marking up one’s body with foreboding drawings and designs, inserting metal into one’s face, ears, nose, eye brows, nipples and whatever else, head shaving, facial hair sporting in various awful configurations, glaring at everyone when not wearing wraparound shades …

All I’m seeing are guys who are very afraid of the world, and this is their defense. Constant defense: defense as a lifestyle. I saw a recent story about a champion ultimate fighter beating the shit out of his porn-star wife. So, the guy’s a champion ultimate fighter … who beats up women, too. You have the bravery of this guy climbing into a steel cage to beat another guy’s ass, mixed with the cowardice of beating a woman, particularly one he married and made vows to. So what does the ability to kick somebody’s ass mean in the context of manhood, when you can readily do both these things? What did this woman do to him to make him flick that switch and treat her like a male opponent in a steel cage? What weakness did she exploit so well that his only recourse was to kick her ass?

What’s even stranger are guys who mimic all these affectations, but clearly don’t lift a finger to acquire any of the physical necessities required to be a genuine badass. They’re either rail thin or beer-bellied fat, slobby in general, but ramped up with that “badass” look and attitude … that I can assure you, is going to radically fail somewhere down the road, hopefully not to the extent that the guy gets permanently damaged.

Which is worse, the nancy boy or the alpha male? I’m describing physical extremes here, but admit it, when I describe either, you know the type of men I’m writing about. Surely, most of us guys see ourselves as somewhere in between, with elements of both. I’m not convinced that abandoning any type of physical/strength training would be an answer to anything. It helps to have these skills. Even the weightlifters, it helps to be able to physically intimidate people, even if you have no intention of doing so. In and of itself, it’s not a bad thing: it’s a defense mechanism that is as healthy or harmful as you want it to be. And history is sprinkled with people (Jesus, Gandhi, etc.) who had no defense mechanism, were peace-loving and gentle, advanced souls, who had something greater to teach mankind, and held a different kind of power that’s far deeper than any physical show of strength.

We tend to kill those guys because we can’t handle what they’re saying. Look at us. Look at the world. Look at this country. I don’t mean this as any sort of harsh “we’re fucked” rhetoric. The world has always been this way and most likely always will be. These are just some of the odd things I think about as I’m putting on my hand wraps and slipping on those heavy-bag gloves. Of course, were I Mike Tyson, I would probably be thinking, “Kill! Kill! Kill! In way! Bad! Bad! Kill!” Instead of, “I should really say something complimentary to the pretty girl wearing the retro Led Zeppelin concert shirt on the other side of the gym.”

Mr. Welker

On a recent trip back to Pennsylvania, I opened the county newspaper and was shocked to find that Mr. Welker, my old high-school chemistry teacher, had passed on in his 80s. I’m usually not big on obituary-reading, but this one was right in front of me. I now know there’s no such thing as “natural causes” when elderly people die – that something gets you in the end, as opposed to this romantic notion so many people have of quietly going to sleep one night and not waking up … while doves and angels in gowns lift you up to heaven. Most of us are guaranteed a gravel-filled wiffleball bat ass-beating on the way out.

Mr. Welker was one of those love him/hate him teachers. Actually, most kids hated him at the time, but later admitted they learned a lot under this tutelage. When I forwarded the obituary to Brother M, the best he could come up with was, “Not one of my favorite instructors, although I think his intentions were good.” The rest was remembering how he’d dropped out of Mr. Welker’s class and had received a stern lecture about his (surely lost) future. Well, M did have logistical issues with adult authority figures in his late teen years, and Mr. Welker had his short-term future pegged. But M surely got his shit together at some point, and proved Mr. Welker wrong. I suspect if he had confronted Mr. Welker publicly years after the fact, Mr. Welker probably would have slapped him on the back and said, “I’m glad I was wrong about you.”

I got along swimmingly with the guy, or about as swimmingly as a goofball teenager could with a strict adult disciplinarian. He was by no means a nasty teacher. Just hard … my way or the highway, learn this, or get the hell out of my class. He was physically imposing, too, a large, burly man, with a pronounced forehead, and most noticeable of all, a strange orange tint to his skin. Like Homer Simpson. He felt like a space alien to many of us, a more intelligent being we couldn’t quite understand, but he was sent here to educate us.

About the only really bad thing I remember about him was his habit of injecting his personal politics into his class, which was Chemistry, i.e., had nothing to do with politics. I know you’ll find plenty of left-leaning instructors doing this (particularly in college), but Mr. Welker leaned right and was convinced every generation that came of age after the Korean War era was doomed. (I’ve since come to agree with him, but not out of any sense of conservatism, just the recognition of how much dumber and LCD society keeps growing.)

This was actually pretty funny when he routinely attacked “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, whom he despised equally for her Vietnam-era antics and her starring role in the then hugely popular movie, The China Syndrome. One of Mr. Welker’s auxiliary jobs when he wasn’t teaching was to help out at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, as he also had a strong background in Nuclear Science. Not sure exactly what he did, but he apparently knew everyone and was well-liked there. As you may recall, there was a core meltdown at Three Mile Island in the spring of 1979 … the exact same predicament detailed in The China Syndrome, which actually came out just days before the real-life accident.

When he’d go off on his Hanoi Jane tangents, man, he’d be on fire. Telling us what a nuclear meltdown was really like and how the movie totally botched it/blew it out of proportion. The problem was, I never knew if I could trust him as a valid source. Sure, he knew infinitely more than I did about the topic – he actually worked there – but how much of his bile (which was usually apropos of nothing, just him going off) was because he: a. worked there and had a professional stake in nuclear power being presented as positively as possible; and b. really hated Jane Fonda.

“All I can say is, by the year 2000, go talk to Jane Fonda when your electric bill is hundreds of dollars of month, and most of that is quietly being provided by nuclear power,” he’d say. From the way Mom carries on about electric bills back in Pennsylvania, he probably wasn’t too far off the mark. I’ll never forget once, though, raising my hand and somberly stating, “I don’t know, Mr. Welker, what you’re saying sounds like baloney in a nutshell.”

I had employed a double-zinger on him – using his two favorite catch phrases, “baloney” and “in a nutshell.” And he knew it, breaking into that weird, hard laugh of his, like a dog choking up grass, and said, “Mr. Repsher, if you don’t start paying closer attention, your grade for this class is going to be baloney in a nutshell.”

I can also recall one more hippyish female student blurting out, “Mr. Welker, are you telling us that Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt are wrong about this?” Those were two of the many pop-music “No Nukes” spokespeople railing against the nuclear industry at the time. Mr. Welker’s reply: “So it goes from Glenn Miller disappearing in a plane while serving his country in World War II to self-serving hippies spouting off about topics they know nothing about.” He threw his hands up and walked away, knowing in his heart we were all doomed, listening to frilly, careless rock stars instead of a guy who actually knew what he was talking about.

On that same note, I’ll never forget his reaction the morning after John Lennon was murdered. That was a pretty shocking incident for all of society, whether you were a Beatles fan or not. Kids my age at the time (16 or so), most of them weren’t really big Beatles fans, but surely knew of them as they were omnipresent in our pop-music culture, much more so than today (and I recognize they’re pretty present today). If you were a teenage kid into music, at some point, you went through your Beatles phase and really “got” the band, despite being a toddler when they broke up. It was just one of those things. Besides which, they were still putting out music. I was a huge McCartney fan and Lennon had just put out Double Fantasy. (Thought most of his songs were solid and Yoko’s sucked, but that’s how they wanted to present the album. He had enough material to put out his own album and should have.)

Well, that morning, we pile into Chemistry class, some kids like me, stone-faced and out of it, still in shock, but honestly, most kids not feeling too affected one way or the other. And Mr. Welker blurts out, “OK, everybody, let’s get over this ‘John Lennon hoopla’ and move on, I don’t recall people getting this upset over Glenn Miller’s plane gone missing, it’s only music, and this is chemistry.”

Most kids just sat there open-mouthed. I’m sure I was one of them. Just made no sense to take a swipe at Lennon hours after his passing, but again, in retrospect and taking in Mr. Welker’s politics, I gathered he was getting a bellyful of John Lennon all morning on the news and from everyone around him, and he’d had enough. I hated him for a few days after that, but it wore off. Frankly, what he had said wasn’t much different from what our parents were saying. But I suspect Mr. Welker’s discomfort wasn’t provided by or aimed at students. Most of the teachers at our high school at the time were relatively young, in their 20s and early 30s, and thus were children of the 60s and surely Beatles fans. So I suspect he was sitting in those smoke-filled teacher lounges and getting an earful of other teachers carrying on about John Lennon, and was thus offended.

His class normally wasn’t that controversial. It was Chemistry. And he drilled it into us, having us memorize the periodic table, key formulas and calculations, the whole shebang. You either learned that stuff by rote, or you got the hell out. To get an A in his class was a monumental achievement and generally indicative of someone who was headed towards a science-based career. I was a pretty solid B student in his class and didn’t even like science. It was that sink-or-swim. If you were a smart kid, like I was, it was a gut check to see how much of this stuff you could inundate yourself with and how well you could process it in a test situation. I passed, nearly got an A too, but didn’t push myself that hard.

A typical Welkerian touch: he loved this particular Texas Instruments calculator that did logarithms, which was a big deal at the time, as he recalled doing this shit on an abacus and such back in the 40s. (I can even recall him having an abacus in the class room and teaching us how to use it!) The Texas Instruments calculator with logarithm function? Shit. For him, it was like the invention of the iPod. He demanded that we all go out and buy that same calculator, nothing else would do. First he would teach us how to do the calculations manually so we grasped the principle, but then we’d use the calculator to save time.

Calculators at that time, turn of the 1980s, were just coming into vogue. You could get a basic one (add/subtract/multiply/divide) very cheaply, under $10, but always battery-operated, as solar panels on small devices like this had yet to go mass market. The Texas Instruments one was special, and as I recall, cost upwards of $20, but probably not much more. I think I still have mine back in “my” drawer that my mother still keeps in the living-room desk. It sits there in its denim-blue carrying case, out-moded by smaller, faster, solar-panel calculators that came in its wake. I also recall the buttons clicked when you pressed them.

The thing with this calculator, though, was that blue, soft leather case came with a loop so you could attach it to your belt. “Now, I’m not going to tell you people how to dress,” Mr. Welker said that first day in class, “but if I were you, I would attach the Texas Instruments calculator to your belt, much like I have these pens and pencils in my pocket protector, and keep it there, because you’ll be using this calculator constantly.”

You could generally tell how much of Mr. Welker’s Kool-Aid a kid drank by whether or not he wore his calculator on his belt … like a gunslinger. Forget about pocket protectors -- a teenage male would get his ass kicked on principle for wearing one. I don’t recall one single female student doing this. I do recall a handful of guys, who were generally not the smartest kids in class, but we really taken in by Mr. Welker’s sales pitch. As with so many nerdy things in high school, you may as well have worn a white t-shirt with the word “DICK” emblazoned on the chest in gigantic ALL CAPS scarlet letters. A kid who did that would take endless shit. The usual gag was to temporarily strap your own Texas Instruments calculator to your belt and pretend to have a gunslinger showdown with the kid, both of you unzipping the case, drawing out your calculator, flicking it on and seeing who could find the square root of 586 first.

I had two legendary incidents in Mr. Welker’s class, along with all the hard work and studying. As noted, we got along pretty well. I had two brothers and a sister pass before me through his classes, so he got the impression he could trust me as a student. Brother M came off as an under-achieving charlatan, while Brother J and Sister K diligently B’d it through his class (the same way I would). I was a “good kid” … and I really was, which wasn’t necessarily a blessing as a teenager. I may have chafed at Mr. Welker’s politics and discipline, but I somehow saw through the BS and took to whatever he had to offer as an instructor.

The first incident was Dress Up Day, which the school would have once every semester, a chance for kids to dress like adults, for guys to put on ties and suit coats and girls to wear nice dresses and such to school. As opposed to our normal uniforms of concert t-shirts, flannel shirts, cruddy jeans and sneakers. (Does it say something about me now that I don’t even own a pair of jeans? I can’t stand denim as a fabric.) It was a big deal to put on the dog in high school, save for that small cache of students who always dressed well.

Well, Dress Up Day, Chemistry class, and Mr. Welker has scheduled some experimentation in the lab next to our desks in his classroom. We loved doing that stuff, because it could be dangerous and risky at times if you didn’t do things right, and shit was always happening, phosphorous burning too much, sulfur smells emanating from mixed liquids, etc. He drilled us on how to use bunsen burners, as you could imagine the danger of 20 or so teenagers lighting these up simultaneously without any training. We all had our hand-held flint devices. And our burners that we’d hook up to our individual gas pipes. Turn on the pipes, hear that telltale hiss, then flick the burner on with the flint.

I must have been groggy that day because I did something unforgiveable: hooked up my bunsen burner accidentally to the water pipe adjacent to the gas. I was dressed up that day. Everyone around me was. I turned on the pipe, didn’t hear the gas, picked up my bunsen to burner to see what was wrong, and when I did, pulled off the small hose leading to the pipe, spraying water over everyone within five feet of the pipe.

Of course, the class went nuts. Understand that kids had lighted their burners, and scattered when they got splashed, nearly burning themselves on the lit burners in the process. It was mayhem for a few seconds, but blew over quickly, although I surely pissed off those kids around me. To Mr. Welker’s credit, I don’t recall him punishing me, just giving me a stern warning. I’m surprised this didn’t happen more with the gas and water pipes right next to each other and not labeled accordingly.

The second incident was a test we had in the last semester of our senior year in Mr. Welker’s Nuclear Science class. That class was a mistake on my part as I hadn’t anticipated how lackadaisical I’d feel towards academics in that last few weeks of high school. (I felt the same way my last semester of senior-year college, too.) I was cruising towards the finish line, already accepted at Penn State, really felt I had nothing to lose. Inject into this mindset Mr. Welker, teaching a relatively new and very difficult class that he had a burning passion for, and it was an educational disaster.

Even the kids who were good at Math and Science were tanking the class. It was fucking hard! Unlike his earlier Hanoi Jane rants, this was actual Nuclear Science, the study of it, and most of us just weren’t cut out for this stuff. I recall two girls really taking to it, and sure enough, both did pursue Nuclear Science in college. But most of us were totally lost in this class, from the first week on, and since it was our last semester and all of us were already college bound, no one was sweating it, save those kids who kept desperate tabs on their Grade Point Average.

I wrote about this class earlier in a posting about The Kinks, that great field trip we took to a nearby power plant, and my discovering that two of the more popular jocks in school were closet Kinks fans. I don’t know why that field trip sticks in my head – sure, it was the Kinks connection, but there was something about the whole thing, being 17 or so, May of 1982, and it’s just one of those “young” memories I’ll always have, walking around that plant in a hardhat with all the other upper-echelon smart kids and having a blast away from the school.

The last week of school, we had our final exam, which was an all-essay extravaganza as opposed to the usual sections of Multiple Choice, True/False and such. Normally, I’d be over-joyed with this development, as I ate up essays and could write them in my sleep. Even if I didn’t know too much about a subject, I could generally feel my way into it as a writer and make it work. But I had two problems here: I was totally flummoxed by Nuclear Science, and my study habits were completely shot with freedom from high school so close we could smell it like blossom on the wind.

That was probably the last test I took in high school, and in uncharacteristic fashion got a C Minus on it … which was cause for great joy. Because I knew jackshit about the topics at hand and truly deserved an F. I can’t recall the exact questions, but each one I turned into a free-form exploration of the universe, gearing the first and last paragraphs towards the question at hand, but in between just rambling a cut-up style of writing much like William S. Burroughs used in his novels. I had just read Naked Lunch earlier in the year and was entering my Beat Writers phase with Kerouac, Ginsberg, etc. It didn’t take me long to realize writing like that wasn’t my forte, but you have to do these things first to realize you’re not good at them.

The one question that stood out was the last: Explain in detail the theory of Black Holes. We all know what black holes in space are, but I recalled we had a special class and film about the topic which went into great detail about their discovery, the differing theories about what they were, what it would be like to enter one, etc. Interesting stuff, but I was zoned out at the time and not paying attention at all. Not studying a lick either. Those few weeks, every night found me shooting pool at near-by Holiday Lanes with pal George, who was much better than I was because he had a pool table in his parents’ basement, so I had to practice really hard to beat him. I spent much more time shooting pool that last month of school than studying … a malady many of classmates suffered from their entire high-school career.

I somehow found a racial component to the Black Hole Theory, tying in the Civil Rights movement and the band Earth Wind & Fire into what happens when a burned-out star enters a black hole. I pictured the Black Hole as nightclub in Harlem, and the burned-out star being singer Tom Jones. And so it went … I think I had Tom and the members of Earth Wind and Fire beating up a gang of KKK rednecks from the 1930s who had slipped into a time-space continuum and ended up in their black hole. The essay ended with me clicking together the heels of my black Chuck E. Taylor Converse hightops and chanting “there’s no place like home” tying into my theory that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz had actually been in a black hole, and that movie was what really went on in there as opposed to gaseous explosions and super novas.

It was a tour de force of “no longer give a fuck” babble from a kid woefully unprepared to handle that or any other essay question in a test. By all rights, I should have flunked. But Mr. Welker gave me a C Minus, on the test and in the class. Not just that – I had friends in that class who studied their asses off for that test and got C Minuses, too. I guess they simply had the wrong answers, as opposed to imaginatively wrong answers like mine that at least demonstrated some type of creative thinking.

Whatever the case, I’ll never forget how nice he was to cut me that slack on the way out. I tend to remember the good things more than the bad with Mr. Welker, or with anyone who passes on whom I haven’t seen in years. He once told us the story of how he and a few of his friends, back during the Depression, had swiped a shipment of potassium from the lab for the sole purpose of throwing it into a nearby creek to watch it explode. This had to be done carefully, constructing a slingshot, as just throwing it by hand into the water could result in an explosion they couldn’t escape. He detailed the whole thing, how they set up the slingshot between two trees, set up two large rocks they could hide behind, constructed informal mirror/cardboard periscopes (another thing we did in his class …) so they could watch, and communicated the joy they had in blowing the shit out of that creek, although none of them had anticipated the number of dead fish their depth charge would unveil. Again, that dog-choking laughter and twinkle in his eye as he told the story.

I couldn’t help but get along with somebody like that. A few people I know have told me he was like that out of school and after retiring – a fun-loving guy, always with the “devil in his eye” glint of someone looking to pull a fast one. It would have been nice to know him like that, but I can live with the memory I have.

Dentist Office in Buenos Aires

I can tell you how it feels to discover new music because I never really stopped. Granted, I don’t go far out of my way to find this stuff; it’s more like stumbling across it. I hear a song in a movie or somehow by chance, know it’s a certain style that I don’t know much about. But I like what I hear. So I pursue it. Thanks to relatively cheap services like Emusic and Amie Street, and great places like the New York Public Library, I can educate myself in a hurry on any style of music.

It’s like being near the ocean on a summer day. You can smell the ocean on the breeze. Feel the sun. It’s there, you know it, but you haven’t seen it just yet. Then you start walking, and you can see sand creep into the cracks on the sidewalk. And you can now hear the ocean, a soft roar just out of earshot. You go down a few more streets, and you can see a beach head on a dead-end street with a wooden boardwalk, You walk up the boardwalk, and there it is, the ocean, stretching out as far as the eye can see. It’s an exhilarating feeling, no matter how many times you’ve seen it.

At least that’s how I feel these days when I get into a new kind of music I never would have considered as a pop-rock teenager at the turn of the 1980s. And some of it is just as good or better than what I already love. Such has been my “discovery” of Bossa Nova music. Or Samba. Or “Brazilian.” I’m not quite sure what to call it. But it’s a very light, breezy sounding music, generally from South America, that has a certain descending, shifting chord pattern played on an acoustic guitar, that sounds both relaxing and vaguely sad at times. It’s the lightest music I’ve ever heard – like a breeze. It sounds like summer in a way The Beach Boys don’t quite get. (But I love The Beach Boys for the way they do get summer.) I’ll include a few samples of what I’ve turned up at the end of the post.

Sometimes the net effect of listening is like being in a dentist’s office in Buenos Aires, at least for the older, more orchestrated music from the 50s and 60s. A fellow fan told me he dreads the inevitable flute solo many of these tracks have. And he’s right, that ubiquitous, mellow flute, not quite Zamfir’s pan pipe but too close for comfort, comes wafting in. If you can't handle Easy Listening music, then you won't be able to handle a lot of Bossa Nova. The best stuff for me is stripped down to acoustic guitar with light percussion. The words are usually in Portuguese or Spanish, but I’ve found a fair amount of songs in English, too, and plenty of instrumentals.A lot of stuff that sounds like good pop rock, save it’s in another language. And that doesn’t bother me near as much as I thought it would.

I’m trying to remember how all this started. Not listening to music. The act of going outside your prescribed American teen listening sledgehammer of pop and realizing there’s plenty of other stuff going on, and always has been. As noted in my last post, we had music class in grade school which introduced us to music nearly all of us agreed was fruity. About the only cool thing I recall from that time period was dancing around to songs like “Yummy Yummy Yummy (I Got Love in My Tummy” and “1-2-3 Redlight” in kindergarten during those jump-around sessions the teacher employed to wear us out for nap time on the wrestling mats.

And there was Lawrence Welk every Saturday night on PBS, which our parents made us sit through to get to the World at War documentary series. This was bad Big Band music – schmaltzy, sterilized and hammy. I’ve come to appreciate Big Band music with passing time, but this show put a decades-long dent in the learning curve. About the only cool thing Lawrence Welk did was his version of “Baby Elephant Walk” (which my friend George would play on a lark every time we drove into a new town at night in his ’76 Nova with flaming tailpipes).

I think the simple answer is Oldies stations, which in the 70s meant 50s and early 60s pop rock. Which was the first forbidden ocean I laid eyes on. By forbidden ocean, I mean how rigid and claustrophobic so many teenagers are in terms of their listening habits, and how much of that was determined solely by radio play, Top 40 popularity and sheer lack of listening experience. And in the 70s and 80s that also meant “rock” popularity. Rock music wasn’t necessarily the most popular music of the time, especially for various heavy metal bands, but they’d be hugely popular with subsets of outsider kids, and thus the barometer of real cool. Led Zep and Pink Floyd were by no means Top 40 pop bands … but were massively popular with teenagers in the 70s. This was thanks to AOR (Album Oriented Radio) stations playing their non-single album tracks to death. A lot of us were raised entirely in that rock/album culture, the same way we were raised with religion.

And you’ll find those same kids now, adults in their 40s and 50s, listening to the same shit and nothing more as if it was still 1975! On one hand, I can respect that sort of stubbornness. Hell, I still listen to all those all bands, too … and a ton of other shit that came before and after. That was the spirit of the day, wasn’t it? Everything is NEW, and we’re IN ON IT, and this is OUR MUSIC, and we’re ALWAYS GOING TO FEEL THIS WAY.

As you can tell by the all caps, I’ve come to realize these concepts are questionable, at least in regards to how people age with music. If you do, you abandon that fortress of false cool you construct as a teenager and take off for the hinterlands to see what else you can find. (And you find that your fortress was very small, and there’s just no way you can take in all the music out there. You won’t even have time to find or listen to all the stuff you like.) When I hear a teenager talking like that last sentence of the previous paragraph, I know he’s full of shit and won’t be listening to music in any real sense 10 years down the road. An adult? That’s someone trying to sell something … to someone he assumes is a complete moron, i.e., your average teenage kid. It’s an exclusionary, small-minded sales pitch as cynical as any you’ll find in other markets. And what’s turned the recording industry into a child’s playground since Elvis Presley, maybe even Frank Sinatra if you think about it.

So why do so many people not just buy into this, but then pick it up and hold it to their chest like a worn teddy bear they carry the rest of their days? Well, because it’s music, good or bad, and tied into emotions, particularly emotions regarding youth and some sense of freedom. Freedom compared the responsibilities of adulthood … although I feel more free as an adult than I ever did as a kid. At least in important ways: how I want to live, where I want to live, whom I want as friends, etc. We didn’t have to worry about making money and supporting ourselves as kids, but otherwise, the major downsides I recall about childhood was the curtailment of these personal freedoms. And I know kids think about this all the time, as they imagine how their world is going to change for the better when they grow up. In some ways, it does. Youth was about moments of freedom – sometimes hours, days or even weeks of freedom – but adulthood is more about less obvious personal freedoms. I’d love to have both! But life hasn’t worked out that way, as it doesn’t for most people.

So, in that context, you can see why music is such a big deal. Not so much the music itself. The act of using it as a form of identity. An idealized identity, too, in terms of that freedom and a sense of wildness. And not just personal identity: group identity. That’s the one thing that seems to be decreasing over time with no central music cultures “taking over” as they did in the past. Save the ubiquitous Top 40 crap, that I can usually avoid, even in the gym on Saturdays, so long as I bring my iPod and drown out all the gimmicky, crappy, soulless songs with auto-tuned vocals and dentist drill beats.

I don’t want this to feel like a sermon on the mount from a music lover. Most people I know, as adults, back off from music as time goes on, even though they listen to it all the time. If they have cars, they listen on car radios and CD players, sometimes even going so far as to get satellite radio because it’s so much better than commercial. They’ll buy CDs every now and then. Someone may have bought them an iPod along the way, and they’re familiar with the whole process of purchasing and listening to digital music. (But not in the same way a maniac like me is – because if you’ve grasped what’s gone on with digital music in the past decade, you know this change in music is cataclysmic and paradise for a music lover.)

When they ask me what I’m listening to, I don’t know how to answer. I have an iPod with 20,000 songs on it. I download 100 songs a month from Emusic that span many genres; keep a running account with Amie Street and occasionally buy albums from online stores like Amazon and 7 Digital when they have good sales. I poke around websites and pull down hard-to-find and out-of-print albums routinely. A downside is I listen to so much music now I just can’t absorb and internalize it the way I once did as a kid and young adult. But I was leaning in this direction with CDs through the 90s, buying anywhere from four to 12 a month. That process is a lot quicker now, going into albums online, sampling the tracks and choosing what I want. It’s a whole different way of understanding music that has its ups and downs. I don’t live with it the way I used to … but I surely do live with it. And in volumes and styles I never could have imagined even a decade ago. I sometimes feel like I’m skiing down an avalanche that never stops, and rather than feeling like I’m about to die, feeling like I’m just starting to live.

I guess I tie-in music appreciation with a general curiosity towards life, which should never end. If I can look into other people’s lives and see something, anything, about the person that suggests a similar passion and curiosity, I feel like I can understand and relate to that person better. I don’t care what it is. Football. Macramé. Stamps. Nascar. Fishing. Yoga. Whatever. Something that shows me they’re “really into this shit” and care about something more than obvious things like money or status. The problem I see with a lot of adults is they’re just not into anything but getting through life. Which I am, too, but you need to set-up small areas for yourself to roam around in and have that same sense of wonder you did as a child.

Conversely, I would be bored as hell listening solely to the exact same music I did as a teenager. Thus, the branching out. Started with Oldies, but the next big one was Country. You listen to stuff like “Dead Flowers” by The Rolling Stones, and as a rock fan, you think, that sounds cool, where did they get that sound from. And stumble across Hank. And Johnny. And Merle. And Willie. And before you know it, you have a few hundred songs on the iPod that really give you a good understanding of Country Music in general. And you pick up more stuff as you move along and learn, connecting the dots, stumbling onto similar artists, discovering new ones, reaching back for older ones. Same thing has happened to me with Celtic, Soul/R&B, Blues, Reggae, Big Band, Classical, some Jazz, and now this Latin-based stuff. Will happen with African music, which I have a little of, but have a disc of MP3s from a friend that I’ll use as a starting point when I get more into this later in the year. And I’ll find what I’ve always found: great music that appeals to me. Not age-based. As the phony battles lines have been drawn in our fractured musical culture.

It takes work to do this. A lot of research and listening. Time. But really, nothing like the amount of time it would have taken a decade ago when I’d have to go buy dozens of CDs, or get educated enough to pull the CDs from the library, and slowly feel my way through them to pull what appeals to me. I guess the key change is the sense of ownership of music. I surely own digital music, but that ownership is now invisible and comes in bits and pieces that I pull from whole albums. In the past, I would have to purchase whole albums and keep them. I have a six-dresser drawer filled with CDs, probably about 3,000 of them in slimline sleeves. (The cases were too bulky to keep.) You could visibly see my passion for music.

Now? I got a laptop with iTunes on it, a 500 Gigabyte external drive to back it up, and an iPod. A vast sea of music on this little thing I can hold in the palm of my hand. These are incredible times, folks. Jaw-dropping stuff to a kid raised with eight-track tape decks and tinny, handheld AM radios. A time of wonder. I guess it always has been. All I recommend is having that feeling towards something in your life, because it seem to me losing that sucks. I can understand life beating that out of you, but I don't understand willfully abandoning it, as so many people do with their love of music.

So, here are some of the tracks I’ve been listening to:

“Girl from Ipanema” by Astrud Gilberto (with João Gilberto and Stan Getz). If you only download one track, make it this one, the holy grail of Bossa Nova. A perfect pop song, too, which is hard to pull off for a five-minute plus song. If I had to give an audio example of summer to space aliens, I’d play this song.

“Patience” by Sixth Finger featuring Dew. This is a sample of the many cover versions I found in my travels. Most of the Guns & Roses Bossa album was terrible, but I thought this sounded great. Nouvelle Vague is surely the best of the Bossa cover bands, with their tilt towards 80s pop, but there are whole series of CDs for “Bossa does rock” music. And, on each of those, you’ll find that same breathy, vaguely Scandinavian-sounding female lead singer phonetically botching lyrics and singing with about as much soul as a vacuum cleaner. I say that like it’s a bad thing … but sometimes it works! Mileage varies wildly, even within one CD, but I’ve come across some great covers in this genre.

“He Vinido” by Los Zafiros. Picked up on this from a recent episode of the AMC series Breaking Bad. Cuban doo-wop from the early 60s. Not all the stuff I found was Brazilian, although I purposely avoided a lot of Mexican music as it’s too loud in comparison. Ditto salsa and merengue, two forms of music I am never going to like (and have had endless exposure to via a decade in the Bronx). But, man, “He Vinido” is just a great song. I find that a lot of southern hemisphere stabs at rock and roll, past or present, tend to be pretty legitimate, if you can handle the non-English lyrics.

"Concórdia" by Elza Soares. Not Bossa Nova, but Brazilian. I can't describe this track. Sort of like "Guitar Man" by Bread with a more funky beat and raw female singer. There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this song. The best Brazilian stuff is either bare-boned Bossa Nova or weird mixtures of influences like this.

"Aguas De Marco" by Bossacucanova. The waters of March. A perfect Bossa Nova song, and in English, too! That signature acoustic guitar riff, the way the song keeps flowing. If songs like this don't float your boat, then you're just not into Bossa, man.

Around the Neighborhood

It happened again this year. Was out sweeping Saturday morning and feeling a bit pissed. Couldn’t do my laundry because the laundromat was over-run with strangers, by which I mean people who were randomly doing their laundry. I do mine roughly the same time every week and know the other regulars. The place has been near empty the past two weeks. This week, it’s like they’re giving out $100 bills.

But I’m out there, windy/sunny day, and I notice an unusual amount of cars driving like maniacs through the neighborhood, meaning there’s some kind of traffic blockage nearby. I often look at the faces of the people driving this dangerously, and it’s always the same dumb, blank face gazing out the window. These people aren’t in a hurry because they have brain surgery to perform later in the day. They’re just typical Queens drivers who feel some burning need to get where they’re going in eight minutes instead of 10. I can’t stand the false urgency, the self importance, the gigantic vehicles, the lack of concern for anyone around them. These people get tiresome after awhile, but let’s face it, they’re everywhere. (And I spoke too soon, as later in the day, I saw a woman do a full 360 turn in the middle of an intersection, three times, in an SUV, I guess because she saw an open parking space she would have to back into and couldn’t make up her mind if she wanted to take the time to maneuver into it. It was like watching a dog chase its tail … a three-ton dog with the brains of an ant and the ability to crush me.)

But then I hear it on the breeze. A lone bagpiper playing “America the Beautiful.” The sound keeps falling in and out of earshot with the wind. That can only mean one thing: the annual Little League parade on opening day. The playing fields are about five blocks down on the back avenue. Sure enough, the bagpipes grow stronger, and then the kids appear in the distance, marching determinedly down the back avenue, in rows with their uniforms, parents shuffling along with camcorders and digital cameras.

I love seeing this and feel bad when I miss it. Any sign of normalcy in the city, I’ve learned to appreciate and nurture because I fell off the “let’s be ‘out there’ for the sake of being out there” bandwagon a long time ago. It’s nice to recognize that underneath some layers, this is just like any other town in America.

**

Speaking of out there, saw something weird on the street the other day. Another sunny day, coming home from work. It was one of those days that the gutters were filled with cherry blossoms, mid-April, all this stuff coming off the trees when the wind blows hard, such a nice thing to see blossoms in the gutter as opposed to dogshit or Dunkin’ Donuts styrofoam cups. But as I was cutting up one of the side streets from the main drag, I heard someone playing a piano. It was some barrelhouse-sounding stuff, rolling chords, Mead Luxe Lewis.

A few yards down the block, I could see who it was. A white guy in his 20s, not particularly hipsterish, just a guy, who had dropped his backpack and was playing a beat-to-shit upright piano that someone had put on the sidewalk for trash pick-up the next day. He was having a blast, and the piano was way out of tune. This is the kind of quirkiness I can live with, as opposed to the canned junk of flash-mob pillow fights and such. The guy was walking down the street, knew how to play the piano, was obviously feeling good on a sunny day, saw a golden opportunity, and started hammering out some old boogie woogie number he knew.

Sure enough, a minute later, an old Greek woman comes barreling out of the house with a broom, shuffles down her stairs and starts swatting at this guy, cursing him in Greek. But he was laughing too hard to take it seriously, picked up his bag and started jogged down the block. Again, we could use more guys like this in the neighborhood, as opposed to the ceaseless wave of muttering zombies with iPhones and left hands glued to their ears.

**

It’s been weird in the neighborhood. One depressing thing that keeps happening: film crews showing up all over the place for TV shows and movies. This is a terrible sign; they’re not choosing this place because it’s a slice of life. They’re choosing it for hipster quotient which is just another sign of the gentrification apocalypse that has been going on here since the turn of the century. There have been movies filmed here in the past that were neighborhood specific, or geared to recall a different time in New York (a lot of the neighborhood recalls 1950s/60s New York in terms of the housing), but what’s going on now is just bullshit. People who scouts locations for movies move to this neighborhood because it’s been deemed a hip/pricey place to live. So, obviously, they start looking around where they live and decide certain places in the neighborhood would look great in the show/movie.

I just wish they’d get the fuck out, the whole crew of them. Last night coming off the train was like being in A Hard Day’s Night. I’ve noticed there’s been a film crew by the subway train the past week, and don’t get me started on these douchebags. Don’t know what it is about film crews – the self importance, the arrogance, the total lack of respect for the people who live in a given neighborhood – but without fail, these people always conduct themselves like assholes, as if we should be thanking them for throwing off our routines, taking up space for days on end and bringing absolutely nothing to the neighborhood but more empty hype.

I’ve heard they’re shooting scenes for a new Pacino movie, but no one cares about Pacino anymore, it’s all about young co-star C_____ T_____, who must really play big with teenage girls. (I’m not printing his name lest a search engine picks it up. The only people who would be googling this guy are teenage girls and gay guys in search of this clown displaying his washboard abs on the red carpet. A blog like this would be like reading Chinese for them.) The subway station was mobbed with them, all giggling and carrying on, grabbing each other, squealing, pushing each other, making asses of themselves … the same way they once did for The Beatles and Elvis and whoever. It took five minutes to get out of a station that normally takes 30 seconds. No police presence, near fights, which would have turned into riots in no time with all these kids milling around … just a major annoyance.

But maybe this is just another thing like the Little League scenario mentioned above and I should take heart? These kids were acting like rubes who had never seen an actor or famous person before. I have. Anyone who gets on the train and goes across the river does, routinely. And when you do … you realize that they’re just people. Some of them are incredibly beautiful. (I recall seeing Marisa Tomei at an outdoor café near the Museum of Natural History one afternoon, and it was like she had a spotlight on her, the woman was just stunningly attractive.) Some really strike you with their presence when you randomly encounter them on the street, building lobby or elevator. But, honestly, after the bolt of recognition that lasts about 10 seconds, they’re just people, and you get over it. I surely wouldn’t hang around squealing in a subway station to see one. I wouldn’t hang out anywhere to do so. I’m not sure what looking at a celebrity is supposed to do for you? Touching one? Getting one to sign a piece of paper? Honestly, no one gives a shit, least of all them, for which this stuff becomes a routine annoyance. And I see beautiful women every day, probably with a lot less baggage than any celebrity.

But look at our culture. This shit is as bad or worse than it’s ever been and grows more vapid by the minute.

**

The public school next door has been weird lately, too. Weird in the sense that a few months ago, someone thought it was a great idea to install a loudspeaker somewhere on the outside of the building, so that the entire neighborhood is now privy to all the sounds that come from a loudspeaker in a school. Mainly beeps signaling the beginning and ending of class periods. But, without fail, the morning announcements, too, which go on for about five minutes.

They happen just as I’m getting ready to leave my apartment at quarter after eight. And, man, I would hate to be a kid in that school. I’ve gathered the principal over there is a woman, and from these announcements, she sounds batshit crazy, or treating 12-14 year-old kids like infants as opposed to humans. Her tone of voice is always a little too “and that’s why the sky is blue, little Johnny, now isn’t it beddy-bye nappy time, boo-boo.” The worst came a few weeks ago when she made up new lyrics to Queens “We Will Rock You” to match some recycling campaign the school was apparently running. Imagine a middle-aged woman in a dress suit braying “We Will Rock You” into a microphone in a school office. I was 13 or so when “We Will Rock You” came out … and never would have predicted that something so stupid would one day happen, or be considered in any way normal. She’s trying to reach kids … by warbling out a horribly uncool version of a 30-year-old rock song that was popular when she was kid. (But I’m guessing I missed some newer TV show aimed at kids using “We Will Rock You” in one of their episodes.)

Imagine answering to this woman, and I guess you can gauge why NYC school are such a mess. Other days, what sounds like a drunk janitor is braying out “Happy Birthday” in Bill Murray's insincere lounge singer voice. I’m assuming picking out a hapless kid, or favorite teacher, to serenade. The effect to people outside the school listening to the loudspeaker is to think the place is being run by heavily-medicated inmates in a lunatic asylum. Which is probably your average New York City public school in a nutshell.

**

Last bit of weirdness. I usually don’t bother people on the subway train … how hard is it to sit still and mind your own business … but I’ve noticed an odd thing with some women lately on the train, something I’ve seen at least a dozen times over the past few months. I hate to single out women because guys tend to be complete assholes on the subway train: the grapefruit testes leg spread, the “little big man” act of taking up too much space, the pole leaners, the fingernail clippers … basically describing grown men showing they were raised fatherless (even if they had one). They are legion compared to the women with issues on a subway train.

But I’m starting to notice the neuroses with women a lot more lately. There’s the usual: women who appear to be bag ladies with the number of bags they’re carrying, save they’re dressed for office work. I don’t get it. What are they carrying that’s so important? And when you think it’s maybe a one-off thing, that there’s some special event at work they’re carrying all these bags for, you see them the next day and realize, no, this woman carries four bags on the subway train to work every day. Which normally doesn’t bother me, save they’ll hover over any seated person with an air of expectation that this person must give up his seat because she’s so over-burdened. Yeah, well, as noted, I know the “bag lady” routine, have seen it possibly thousands of times now in my NYC life. If I got up every time someone tried to manipulate me out of a seat, I’d never sit down on a subway train.

But this is a new one on me. I like sitting on the end seats of the newer subway cars because they’re wide enough to comfortably fit two people. The only times I get crowded are when a guy roughly my size will try to sit in one of those seats, in which case both of us are uncomfortably crowded. I’m assuming these guys are new to city life and don’t recognize you should just go on standing in a situation like this, or they’re just douchebags. Probably both. I size up every seat before I sit down, and if it looks too cramped, I stay standing.

But these end seats for two are great. Even large women aren’t a problem in them as they seem to position their bodies differently (smaller shoulders). Some people don’t like those seats because homeless people tend to favor them when they camp out on a train. But from what I’ve seen, routine trainriders can be just as scuzzy as any homeless person. So unless there’s some residual stink on the seat (which does happen sometimes) from a homeless guy camping out there, I grab that seat.

And a woman will sit next to me. A small woman, which suits me fine as it gives both of us more room. I’ll notice in the corner of my eye that she looks slightly nervous. Nothing horrible, just a person who has a lot on her mind. She’ll break out her make-up case and start doing her make-up on the train … which seems like a real bad idea, but hey, people run late and this takes a good 5-10 minutes. (I’ve also noticed, unfortunately, that beautiful women never apply make-up on a subway train; it’s always average to homely-looking women. I sometimes feel like grabbing their whirling hands and saying, “Stop, it’s not working” or “Stop, you’re already beautiful” depending on how the situation breaks.)

A woman putting on make-up on the train is in constant motion. Her arms are jerking back and forth, her hands are constantly moving over her face. It’s annoying to sit next to someone in any situation who moves that much. On a crowded subway train? It’s even worse. Again, it gets tiresome after you’ve seen this repeatedly for years on end. But after a few minutes, the woman gets her make-up on, and I think, good, now this woman can relax and take it easy the rest of her train ride.

But no. She opens her purse, gets out her iPhone or Blackberry and starts tapping out a message. As we all know, it takes a good five minutes to send out a text message of any length. Again, constant thumbing, this woman has been a non-stop flurry of motion since she sat down.

She gets done tapping out the message, puts her iPhone away, and I’m thinking, finally, she’s done monkeying around.

But no. She opens up one of her three bags and pulls out one of those god-awful free newspapers you can get at the entrance of any subway station. (If you’re reading these things, you should stop and buy a real newspaper.) It’s always the free newspaper. Always. And she starts “reading” it, but she’s not really reading it. She’s flipping through it, absorbing god knows what. She gets done the paper, and I’m thinking, finally …

But no. Her leg starts twitching. She’s sitting with her legs crossed, which takes up more space on the train than I do at twice her size, and does that until it’s time for her to get off.

In short, the woman is a nonstop blur of neurotic activity that is one small step from sitting next to someone with Tourette’s Syndrome. The fidgeting is endless, and I wouldn’t be noticing this, save I’ve seen this a lot lately, much more than usual. But I’m thinking, the same way I’m psychologically drawn to these end-cap seats on a subway train, because they’re roomier than the bench seats in the middle of a train, these women are probably drawn to them, too, so they can indulge in their routines on the train, knowing they’ll have more room to move, even with a big guy sitting next to them.

So, I just sit there, motionless save for clicking to the next track on random play on the iPod, or checking my watch, or looking out the window if it’s not too crowded. Knowing, like all things in life, that this, too, shall pass. It gets worse than this. And then the wandering mariachi band comes through the door and starts hammering away on “La Bamba” …