These things happen every now and then. Hopefully, you’re making them happen sometimes. I had a nice one on Saturday that’s worth noting. Saturday was possibly the hottest day of the year here: temperatures in the mid-90s with high humidity. Just the sort of brutally hot New York day that encourages sane people to stay inside and not move. Because you move, you sweat, a lot. It’s been a pretty miserable summer in this respect, with forecasters noting “a cooling period” when the day-time highs drop to the high 80s.
We had a tornado warning Friday night around 8:30 that luckily only turned out to be a nasty thunderstorm for half an hour. Blew right through. I didn’t hear any branches coming down on the street, so I felt all right. Got up this morning, surveyed the landlord’s patio, some minor stuff down from high winds, but nothing horrible. Turned the corner, and saw that one of the dead trees on her property had snapped off near the trunk and was suspended against the telephone wires up above.
Man. This was a mixed blessing. Any time part or all of those dead trees come down, it saves her a truckload of money in terms of not having to get them cut down eventually, which would be a four-figure proposition around here. So it was a good thing that this entire tree had come down in one fell swoop.
It was a bad thing in that someone would have to bring the thing down and clean it up … that someone being me. On the hottest day of the year. I took my clothes to the laundromat and set about doing this in between loads. You can guess that I sweated buckets – looked like I had jumped in a pool with my clothes on, sweat just pouring off my body as I worked on this thing. First move was to push the hanging tree over to the sidewalk so I could then grab the broken-off trunk and pull it down the sidewalk, thus bringing the whole severed tree down. Which I did, with a great bang and crash as 30 feet of dead wood hit the sidewalk and cracked. I jammed my thumb in the process, a similar injury I used to get all the time playing basketball in my childhood. Thought I’d broken it, too, hurt like hell, but kept moving and it wasn’t as bad as I thought.
It was easy pulling off the broken branches and stacking them on the patio. The hard part came in sawing down the trunk, with a small branch saw I have for tree limbs, so I could carry large chunks of it to the patio. This was where the sweat really started pouring. Sun was beating directly down on the sidewalk, just relentless. Got to the point where I had the 10-foot long stump of the trunk to go, still too heavy to drag or carry, with about a 20-inch diameter to cut through. You can’t do this easily with a branch saw. You have to feverishly cut here and there, rotate the trunk as much as possible, keep cutting, and when you think you’re getting close, repeatedly pick up the trunk and slam it on the sidewalk, or position it so you can jump up and down on it and hopefully break it in half.
This sucked. Really sucked. I must have sounded like Mel Gibson phoning his girlfriend. It was taking me forever, close to an hour of fruitless sawing and dropping, and I was losing my mind. I went into my apartment and got Dad’s old hammer, using the claw to chip out the wood I had been sawing at, which was working, until I bent the head of the hammer in half. It was that kind of job.
Had I kept going like this, I’d have eventually won out over the stump, but it would have taken a long, long time. Just then, this older Mexican guy who was clearly walking around the neighborhood collecting plastic bottles from the trash saw me, came over, called out, “Amigo need help?” He immediately took the branch saw and started going at it, which went a lot better with one guy, me, holding the stump down. I’d had the job about 80% done on my own but was losing steam and sanity. This guy came along at the perfect time, when I felt like quitting, and apropos of nothing save being a nice guy, he helped a stranger on a day when fucking nobody was going to help me.
Five minutes later, we picked up the stump and dropped it on the sidewalk. Nothing. Again. This time we heard a slight crack, both of us smiling. But it was still connected. At this point, I started jumping on the stump as it was at a slight incline, and sure enough, I snapped it with my body weight, breaking that piece of shit down into halves that could be carried onto the patio. I was elated. This guy was a saint … and if I’m not mistaken, he hadn’t even broken a sweat. He even helped carry the second huge piece on the patio, heaving it on his back.
I gave him a $10 spot for his troubles, which he gladly accepted, and we shook hands. He asked me if I wanted to take down the other dead tree on Sunday. I said no, wasn’t my call to make, and the landlord didn’t have any more space to put the limbs. So he picked up his plastic bags of empties, bid me a good day and went on his way.
That random act of kindness had me thinking all day. It’s hard to find friends when there’s hard work to be done – I’ve found this to be very much true. You can generally count those people in your life on one hand. I try to be one of those people because I know how hard it is to do stuff like an apartment/house move, or shovel snow, or clear a yard of debris, or anything that would be hard as hell on your own. Even if I don’t know you that well, I’ll clear time to do something like that. On one hand, I simply like doing that kind of work in small doses. On the other, this is what you do for people you know … help them when you can.
Of course, it’s not all that rosy and self congratulatory. I have people in my life I’ve let slide. People with bad problems. In most cases of their own doing, but sometimes a combination of things: sliding off the map AND having something catastrophic occurring to deepen the bad luck streak. And I find myself strangely distant in these situations. More accurately, I make myself strangely distant and don’t make much of an effort to bridge the gap.
It’s a guilt thing with me – I feel bad about this handful of bad situations in my life. Won’t get into specifics or name names. But it does bother me that I’ll bend over backwards to give you any sort of physical help you need but will hedge on the emotional variety at times. In each case, I have to note, situations where the person spent years burning down the house in some sense: drinking, drugs, carousing, etc. These aren’t bad people, but they’ve had issues that have gone on for decades. And I guess it offends me in some spiritual sense that the message (stop doing this shit) didn’t sink in after the first warning shot. Or the second. Or the first radical failure. Or the second. Or the third. And so on.
I know the cause of their decline shouldn’t matter, but it does. So much of how I see the world now can be traced back to the winter of 2004, watching Dad pass away. When you see someone in your life like that get pile-drived by a disease and slammed into physical failure and then death, it has a profound effect. In other words, I saw someone I care about a great deal have his health destroyed by circumstances beyond his control, watched him fight these circumstances to the best of his abilities, and lose.
That experience turned me ice cold towards people who throw their lives away. Some who are friends and acquaintances, too. I wouldn’t say I’ve given up on these people. Haven’t even read a single one of them the riot act. People are going to live however they want to live, and I’m not going to stop them. But after watching my father have the shit kicked out of him in a hospital bed, I get fucking angry when I see people willfully put themselves in harm’s way in any sense. As you get older, you see, some people push themselves into a downward slide, repeatedly, over and over, year after year, willfully making the wrong choices, in the mistaken belief that their youth, wits and guile will get them through, like they have in the past. Not realizing how much they’ve eroded their reserves of youth and luck. Much less the good will of those around them who’ve spent as long a time putting up with this stuff. Bad shit catches up to all of us, and much faster if you entertain it.
So I can rationalize my inaction on that part, but still recognize there’s a person there I’ve known for a long time, decades or much of my life in some cases, and I’m letting the person down. I’m not writing this as some sort of emotional pep rally to get back into these situations – I’ll probably go on doing very little to nothing in each situation – but I am aware of it and can acknowledge it. Which counts for very little here. But I’d rather see this larger picture of myself than focus in on my desire to randomly help people when they need it. Life gets tricky like that. Or maybe it just gets more clear. When you’re younger, you tend to focus on your positive qualities because that’s how you want the world to see you. But you get older, you see it all within yourself, the good and the bad, hopefully can acknowledge both, and understand your shit truly does stink just like everyone else’s. If you’re like me, you’ll spend the rest of your days doing good and bad things, and wondering how it all pans it out in the end.
Still, what that guy did for me today was great, and it registered, will surely influence me to do the same in situations where there is no personal gain for me, save to help someone having a rough time. Be a saint when you can, because it’s not as hard as you think it is. No one bats a thousand, so there’s no harm in hitting one out of the park every now and then to counter-balance those times when you strike out using a corked bat and blame it on the ump.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Steinbrenner’s Inferno
George Steinbrenner passes on at the age of 80 on July 13, 2010.
Moments after his life ends, he feels himself gliding through a long, dark tunnel. There’s a light at the end of it, and he feels irreversibly drawn to it. Only it’s not a golden light: it’s a red light. A burning red light. As he grows closer, he can see it’s a raging inferno, like a neighborhood in the Bronx burning down in a riot.
He slides out of the tunnel and finds himself dumped in a room that looks like a major league baseball clubhouse. It’s empty, save for a card table in the middle of it. “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" by Hank Williams is echoing from the PA system. An old-fashioned Coke machine with bottles hums and sweats in the corner.
At the card table sits a being who is obviously Satan, just as depicted for centuries: a large, red man with yellow eyes, black hair, goatee and horns sprouting from his forehead. He has a tail, cloven hooves and is swathed in a long red cape. The only strange touch: he wears a New York Mets cap jauntily arranged to keep his horns showing.
Satan is playing poker with a rail-thin, dark-haired, middle-aged man in a mustard-stained tank top, a pair of white boxer shorts with hearts, stirrup socks and baseball cleats. The man has a cigarette in his card-holding hand, and a can of Billy beer in the other. It’s Steinbrenner’s old friend/nemesis, Billy Martin.
Billy: (blows a smoke ring and glances over at Steinbrenner on the floor) Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.
Satan snickers and wags his tail.
Steinbrenner: Billy, what the. I was just napping in my hospital bed a few minutes ago. What in the hell is going on here?
Billy Martin: You got it. Hell is going on here. You’ve gone to hell, George. I’ve been waiting for you.
Satan: So have I.
Steinbrenner: What do you mean “hell”? This can’t be hell. I like the clubhouse. I can even live with the Mets hat.
Satan: This is hell. You own this place. The clubhouse. The team. The stadium. If you walk around outside, it will look a lot like Pittsburgh. You now own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Any good players you have came up through your farm system and leave once their contracts expire. You can no longer afford to buy the best. Your family owns a string of kielbasa restaurants in western Pennsylvania. Your team lost tonight to the Houston Astros, 7-2. Attendance was 8,531. Billy is your manager, and you can’t fire him.
Steinbrenner: Christ. This really is hell.
Satan: Come. Sit at our table. We can deal you in on the next hand.
Billy crushes his beer can and throws it over his shoulder.
Billy: Christ, I can’t stand this shit. It’s warm as piss, too. Can’t you ever get Budweiser down here?
Satan: You know warm Billy beer is part of your hell. We save the Budweiser for sinners who love good imported beer. Besides, you have the same name.
Billy: Don’t remind me. I got drunk with that asshole once in Texarkana in 1979. There was something weird about that boy. He smelled like turpentine and had his own Secret Service agent. Kept chasing my dog around the yard. Shit, Satan, give me the Belgian beer for once, you know the only beer I like is Bud.
Satan smiled at Billy, knowing who ruled here. Just then, Richard Nixon came through the clubhouse door.
Nixon: George! Old buddy, how are you?
Steinbrenner: Oh my God. Dick. Dick Nixon! You’re here, too?
Nixon: Where else would I be? All politicians go to hell. Well, in reality, all lawyers go directly to hell, and most politicians are lawyers by default.
Steinbrenner: But we were good men in our lives. We did so much good for the world.
Nixon: Don’t I know it, George, don’t I know it, but not everyone can see things the way we do. I never got to thank you for the campaign contributions in ’72. I know you caught hell over those, but I’ve never forgotten.
Steinbrenner: You showed them, though, didn’t you, Mr. Nixon. Crushed McGovern and all those hippies. The day you won that election, I put right up there with any of my World Series wins. What do you do down here?
Nixon: Well, I, uh, don’t like to talk about it.
Satan: He’s Bella Abzug’s campaign manager and sex slave. She’s down here, too.
Steinbrenner: (grimacing) Oh, dear lord. Oh, that’s so harsh. Mr. Nixon, I don’t know what to say.
Nixon: Don’t say anything, George. I don’t want to talk about it.
Steinbrenner: What do we do here?
Satan: This is it.
Steinbrenner: What do you mean “this is it”?
Satan: Some sinners get chased around lakes of fire by one-eyed demons. Some roll boulders up huge hills only to have them roll back down and crush them for eternity. But for our special sinners, like you, we give you a special kind of hell. When you’re here long enough, we allow you to walk around and be part of other people’s hells. So you know you’re not alone.
Billy: George, I lose to the fuckin’ Astros 7-2 every night then get puking drunk on Billy beer.
Nixon: And Bella beats her Republican opponent in New York state every night, then makes passionate love to me in the coat room at the campaign after party. Believe you me, it’s no picnic for her either.
Satan: Mr. Nixon, you know full well you earned your place in hell.
Nixon: So I took a few short cuts.
Steinbrenner: Don’t you do stuff like sit in a theater and watch the movie of your life play out?
Satan: Even I have a heart. That would be hell for everyone. You don’t realize how much time you spend on the toilet and sleeping. You really want to sit in a movie theater and watch that? My ass gets sore if I have to sit and watch a three-hour movie, much less an 80-year long one. Yours does, too.
Steinbrenner: I see your point. But why not a highlights reel?
Satan: Because, Mr. Steinbrenner, hell is not This Week in Baseball, and I’m not here to please you. You work for me here. And I don’t take requests, unless they’re to make some other sinner’s time here more harsh.
Steinbrenner: I’m not the kind who takes orders from anyone!
Satan: (laughing) Oh, I’ll never give you any orders. I’ll just give you this illusion and make you repeat it for eternity. Yell and scream if you want. Make threats. Try not to do it. But you will do this every day and night here. Your office only has a beat-up window fan, and it’s always 87 degrees with 75% humidity. You thought Billy gave you a hard time in New York with a great team? Try it in Pittsburgh with a team batting average of .241 in a stadium where you can hear drunks in the upper level shouting obscenities in Polish at the players.
Steinbrenner: Right off the bat, I have to ask. How do I get to heaven?
Satan, Billy Martin and Richard Nixon erupt in a blaze of laughter, doubling over and slapping each other on the back.
Steinbrenner: What’s so funny?
Billy: George, man, don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what we thought of ourselves when we were alive. Even Hitler thought he was a great guy. You’re here for a reason. Probably a lot of reasons. I know I am. And you have all the time in the world to think about them. After awhile, it all sinks in.
Steinbrenner: No. This can’t be. There must be some mistake.
Nixon: Take it easy, George, we’re not going to pull a congressional committee on you. We’re not here to judge. We’re all just doing our time. I have no idea what heaven must be like.
Satan: I do. It’s over-rated. Why do you think I left?
Steinbrenner: Well, if it’s so over-rated, why not let me go there instead?
Satan: Mr. Steinbrenner, understand I rule down here. But I’m not running the whole show. Much as I hate Him, I answer to God. We all do. He sent you here. All I did was open the door and let you in.
Steinbrenner: Can I talk to God? You know, I talked to Him all the time when I was alive. In prayer. Or just when I needed help. I know He was listening.
Billy: Well, you must have called Him an asshole or something, because here you are.
The PA system starts to play “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. George gets a glimmer in his eye and sits down at the card table with Billy Martin, Richard Nixon and Satan.
Steinbrenner: Satan, I have a proposition for you.
Satan: Wouldn’t be the first one I’ve heard or the last. Go on.
Steinbrenner: What if we had a poker tournament, right here, right now, and if I win, you let me talk to God.
Satan: And if one of us wins?
Steinbrenner: You decide. Make me go to Woodstock for eternity. Give me the Cleveland Indians to run, and make Abbie Hoffman the coach. I don’t care. Just give me the chance.
Billy: Satan, don’t listen to him. The man’s a born liar. I know you’re good, but you might lose.
Satan: Billy, you know I never lose.
Billy: That’s the truth. Only thing I think about when we play is how close I can get to winning without it ever happening.
Satan: I’ll take you up on this wager, Mr. Steinbrenner, but understand you will lose. I’m not even worried about introducing you to God. It won’t happen. And even if I did, more than likely, He would tell you why you’re here and be done with you.
Steinbrenner: Just keep your word, Satan. If I’m lucky enough to beat you, you let me worry about God and what to say. If I can sit in a conference room with Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin screaming their heads off and come out on top, nothing scares me after that.
Billy: (burps, opens another Billy beer) Fuckin’ A.
… the scene fades out as Nixon and Steinbrenner pull up their fold-out metal chairs to the card table and Satan shuffles the deck of cards.
… fade back in through a white cloud. A celestial choir. Through the mist, Billy Martin appears, dressed as he was in hell, save he now wears a Yankee’s cap. He’s sitting at a small rectangular white desk on a cloud, in front of large set of silver gates. He’s drinking a can of Budweiser. An elderly woman appears through the cloud and approaches Billy.
The Woman: Who are you? Am I in heaven?
Billy: Who the fuck are you? That is the question, mama. Who the fuck are you?
Disembodied voice: Billy! Language! You know not to speak like that to angels.
Billy: (mumbling) California fuckin’ Angels, should have kicked Jim Fregosi's ass when I had the chance.
The sound of footsteps. It’s George Steinbrenner, in a white suit, and he appears through the gates behind Billy Martin, opening the gates.
Steinbrenner: You’ll have to forgive, Billy, ma’am, he’s still a little rough around the edges. I just traded Mother Teresa and St. Peter to Satan for Billy, $500,000 in cash and a soul to be named later. He’s still learning the ropes here.
The Woman: Is this heaven?
Steinbrenner: Yes, this is heaven. When you pass through these gates, you’ll transform to the best you ever looked in your life, remember only happy times and be reunited with everyone else here that you knew in life. This is heaven!
The Woman: (weeping) Oh, thank God!
Steinbrenner: And me, too, George Steinbrenner!
The Woman: I wasn’t expecting anyone famous to meet me here.
Steinbrenner: Well, I’ve only been here a few days.
The Woman: But you died a few weeks ago, didn’t you? Where were you?
Steinbrenner: Well, long story short, I went to hell. I didn’t like hell. Hell was the worst thing you could imagine for yourself, repeated for eternity. I don’t want to talk about it. But when I was in hell, I challenged Satan to a game of poker with the stipulation that if I won, I could talk to God. Well, we played for two weeks straight, and in the end, I had Satan down to a pair of underpants and an IOU for a ’57 Chevy. So, he got mad, and made a lot of noise, but in the end, he let me talk to God.
The Woman: Have you seen God?
Steinbrenner: No. No one ever does. But you can talk to Him. And up here, He’ll answer you. So I talked to Him. Explained my situation. That I had done a lot of wrong things in my life. Really turned the game of baseball into a mess. Treated many of my underlings with extreme disrespect. But at the end of the day, the good outweighed the bad. And I should have gone to heaven, not hell, there must have been some kind of mistake.
The Woman: And what did God say?
Steinbrenner: He said no.
The Woman: So, why are you here?
Steinbrenner: Well, we kept on talking, and God was pretty straightforward in telling me He was tired of running heaven by Himself. Needed some help in the logistics: concessions, budgeting, the ability to shift around key personnel to suit their skill set. I told Him that if He let me run heaven for a year – not the heavy stuff, just the numbers – and it worked out, I could stay and not go back to hell. I could also trade souls with Satan at my own discretion, as He had heard of my acquisition skills and greatly admired them.
The Woman: You’re not going to trade me to Satan are you?
Steinbrenner: Oh, no, I’d never do anything like that.
Billy (whispering to the woman behind his hand): You better get that in writing.
Steinbrenner: Billy, open the gates. Let this kind woman in. She’s earned her way into heaven. Come on in.
The gates swing open, and the old woman enters heaven, magically transforming to a beautiful, raven-haired woman of 23 in a white robe. The heavenly choir breaks into “New York, New York.” In the distance a silhouette appears behind a cloud: the outline of Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon: Checkers! Here, Checkers! Come here, boy. Pat, help me find Checkers!
The gates swing shut, and Billy Martin is left alone with his can of Bud. He lights another cigarette and stares off into the distance.
Billy: Fuckin’ Satan was right.
Moments after his life ends, he feels himself gliding through a long, dark tunnel. There’s a light at the end of it, and he feels irreversibly drawn to it. Only it’s not a golden light: it’s a red light. A burning red light. As he grows closer, he can see it’s a raging inferno, like a neighborhood in the Bronx burning down in a riot.
He slides out of the tunnel and finds himself dumped in a room that looks like a major league baseball clubhouse. It’s empty, save for a card table in the middle of it. “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" by Hank Williams is echoing from the PA system. An old-fashioned Coke machine with bottles hums and sweats in the corner.
At the card table sits a being who is obviously Satan, just as depicted for centuries: a large, red man with yellow eyes, black hair, goatee and horns sprouting from his forehead. He has a tail, cloven hooves and is swathed in a long red cape. The only strange touch: he wears a New York Mets cap jauntily arranged to keep his horns showing.
Satan is playing poker with a rail-thin, dark-haired, middle-aged man in a mustard-stained tank top, a pair of white boxer shorts with hearts, stirrup socks and baseball cleats. The man has a cigarette in his card-holding hand, and a can of Billy beer in the other. It’s Steinbrenner’s old friend/nemesis, Billy Martin.
Billy: (blows a smoke ring and glances over at Steinbrenner on the floor) Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.
Satan snickers and wags his tail.
Steinbrenner: Billy, what the. I was just napping in my hospital bed a few minutes ago. What in the hell is going on here?
Billy Martin: You got it. Hell is going on here. You’ve gone to hell, George. I’ve been waiting for you.
Satan: So have I.
Steinbrenner: What do you mean “hell”? This can’t be hell. I like the clubhouse. I can even live with the Mets hat.
Satan: This is hell. You own this place. The clubhouse. The team. The stadium. If you walk around outside, it will look a lot like Pittsburgh. You now own the Pittsburgh Pirates. Any good players you have came up through your farm system and leave once their contracts expire. You can no longer afford to buy the best. Your family owns a string of kielbasa restaurants in western Pennsylvania. Your team lost tonight to the Houston Astros, 7-2. Attendance was 8,531. Billy is your manager, and you can’t fire him.
Steinbrenner: Christ. This really is hell.
Satan: Come. Sit at our table. We can deal you in on the next hand.
Billy crushes his beer can and throws it over his shoulder.
Billy: Christ, I can’t stand this shit. It’s warm as piss, too. Can’t you ever get Budweiser down here?
Satan: You know warm Billy beer is part of your hell. We save the Budweiser for sinners who love good imported beer. Besides, you have the same name.
Billy: Don’t remind me. I got drunk with that asshole once in Texarkana in 1979. There was something weird about that boy. He smelled like turpentine and had his own Secret Service agent. Kept chasing my dog around the yard. Shit, Satan, give me the Belgian beer for once, you know the only beer I like is Bud.
Satan smiled at Billy, knowing who ruled here. Just then, Richard Nixon came through the clubhouse door.
Nixon: George! Old buddy, how are you?
Steinbrenner: Oh my God. Dick. Dick Nixon! You’re here, too?
Nixon: Where else would I be? All politicians go to hell. Well, in reality, all lawyers go directly to hell, and most politicians are lawyers by default.
Steinbrenner: But we were good men in our lives. We did so much good for the world.
Nixon: Don’t I know it, George, don’t I know it, but not everyone can see things the way we do. I never got to thank you for the campaign contributions in ’72. I know you caught hell over those, but I’ve never forgotten.
Steinbrenner: You showed them, though, didn’t you, Mr. Nixon. Crushed McGovern and all those hippies. The day you won that election, I put right up there with any of my World Series wins. What do you do down here?
Nixon: Well, I, uh, don’t like to talk about it.
Satan: He’s Bella Abzug’s campaign manager and sex slave. She’s down here, too.
Steinbrenner: (grimacing) Oh, dear lord. Oh, that’s so harsh. Mr. Nixon, I don’t know what to say.
Nixon: Don’t say anything, George. I don’t want to talk about it.
Steinbrenner: What do we do here?
Satan: This is it.
Steinbrenner: What do you mean “this is it”?
Satan: Some sinners get chased around lakes of fire by one-eyed demons. Some roll boulders up huge hills only to have them roll back down and crush them for eternity. But for our special sinners, like you, we give you a special kind of hell. When you’re here long enough, we allow you to walk around and be part of other people’s hells. So you know you’re not alone.
Billy: George, I lose to the fuckin’ Astros 7-2 every night then get puking drunk on Billy beer.
Nixon: And Bella beats her Republican opponent in New York state every night, then makes passionate love to me in the coat room at the campaign after party. Believe you me, it’s no picnic for her either.
Satan: Mr. Nixon, you know full well you earned your place in hell.
Nixon: So I took a few short cuts.
Steinbrenner: Don’t you do stuff like sit in a theater and watch the movie of your life play out?
Satan: Even I have a heart. That would be hell for everyone. You don’t realize how much time you spend on the toilet and sleeping. You really want to sit in a movie theater and watch that? My ass gets sore if I have to sit and watch a three-hour movie, much less an 80-year long one. Yours does, too.
Steinbrenner: I see your point. But why not a highlights reel?
Satan: Because, Mr. Steinbrenner, hell is not This Week in Baseball, and I’m not here to please you. You work for me here. And I don’t take requests, unless they’re to make some other sinner’s time here more harsh.
Steinbrenner: I’m not the kind who takes orders from anyone!
Satan: (laughing) Oh, I’ll never give you any orders. I’ll just give you this illusion and make you repeat it for eternity. Yell and scream if you want. Make threats. Try not to do it. But you will do this every day and night here. Your office only has a beat-up window fan, and it’s always 87 degrees with 75% humidity. You thought Billy gave you a hard time in New York with a great team? Try it in Pittsburgh with a team batting average of .241 in a stadium where you can hear drunks in the upper level shouting obscenities in Polish at the players.
Steinbrenner: Right off the bat, I have to ask. How do I get to heaven?
Satan, Billy Martin and Richard Nixon erupt in a blaze of laughter, doubling over and slapping each other on the back.
Steinbrenner: What’s so funny?
Billy: George, man, don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what we thought of ourselves when we were alive. Even Hitler thought he was a great guy. You’re here for a reason. Probably a lot of reasons. I know I am. And you have all the time in the world to think about them. After awhile, it all sinks in.
Steinbrenner: No. This can’t be. There must be some mistake.
Nixon: Take it easy, George, we’re not going to pull a congressional committee on you. We’re not here to judge. We’re all just doing our time. I have no idea what heaven must be like.
Satan: I do. It’s over-rated. Why do you think I left?
Steinbrenner: Well, if it’s so over-rated, why not let me go there instead?
Satan: Mr. Steinbrenner, understand I rule down here. But I’m not running the whole show. Much as I hate Him, I answer to God. We all do. He sent you here. All I did was open the door and let you in.
Steinbrenner: Can I talk to God? You know, I talked to Him all the time when I was alive. In prayer. Or just when I needed help. I know He was listening.
Billy: Well, you must have called Him an asshole or something, because here you are.
The PA system starts to play “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. George gets a glimmer in his eye and sits down at the card table with Billy Martin, Richard Nixon and Satan.
Steinbrenner: Satan, I have a proposition for you.
Satan: Wouldn’t be the first one I’ve heard or the last. Go on.
Steinbrenner: What if we had a poker tournament, right here, right now, and if I win, you let me talk to God.
Satan: And if one of us wins?
Steinbrenner: You decide. Make me go to Woodstock for eternity. Give me the Cleveland Indians to run, and make Abbie Hoffman the coach. I don’t care. Just give me the chance.
Billy: Satan, don’t listen to him. The man’s a born liar. I know you’re good, but you might lose.
Satan: Billy, you know I never lose.
Billy: That’s the truth. Only thing I think about when we play is how close I can get to winning without it ever happening.
Satan: I’ll take you up on this wager, Mr. Steinbrenner, but understand you will lose. I’m not even worried about introducing you to God. It won’t happen. And even if I did, more than likely, He would tell you why you’re here and be done with you.
Steinbrenner: Just keep your word, Satan. If I’m lucky enough to beat you, you let me worry about God and what to say. If I can sit in a conference room with Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin screaming their heads off and come out on top, nothing scares me after that.
Billy: (burps, opens another Billy beer) Fuckin’ A.
… the scene fades out as Nixon and Steinbrenner pull up their fold-out metal chairs to the card table and Satan shuffles the deck of cards.
… fade back in through a white cloud. A celestial choir. Through the mist, Billy Martin appears, dressed as he was in hell, save he now wears a Yankee’s cap. He’s sitting at a small rectangular white desk on a cloud, in front of large set of silver gates. He’s drinking a can of Budweiser. An elderly woman appears through the cloud and approaches Billy.
The Woman: Who are you? Am I in heaven?
Billy: Who the fuck are you? That is the question, mama. Who the fuck are you?
Disembodied voice: Billy! Language! You know not to speak like that to angels.
Billy: (mumbling) California fuckin’ Angels, should have kicked Jim Fregosi's ass when I had the chance.
The sound of footsteps. It’s George Steinbrenner, in a white suit, and he appears through the gates behind Billy Martin, opening the gates.
Steinbrenner: You’ll have to forgive, Billy, ma’am, he’s still a little rough around the edges. I just traded Mother Teresa and St. Peter to Satan for Billy, $500,000 in cash and a soul to be named later. He’s still learning the ropes here.
The Woman: Is this heaven?
Steinbrenner: Yes, this is heaven. When you pass through these gates, you’ll transform to the best you ever looked in your life, remember only happy times and be reunited with everyone else here that you knew in life. This is heaven!
The Woman: (weeping) Oh, thank God!
Steinbrenner: And me, too, George Steinbrenner!
The Woman: I wasn’t expecting anyone famous to meet me here.
Steinbrenner: Well, I’ve only been here a few days.
The Woman: But you died a few weeks ago, didn’t you? Where were you?
Steinbrenner: Well, long story short, I went to hell. I didn’t like hell. Hell was the worst thing you could imagine for yourself, repeated for eternity. I don’t want to talk about it. But when I was in hell, I challenged Satan to a game of poker with the stipulation that if I won, I could talk to God. Well, we played for two weeks straight, and in the end, I had Satan down to a pair of underpants and an IOU for a ’57 Chevy. So, he got mad, and made a lot of noise, but in the end, he let me talk to God.
The Woman: Have you seen God?
Steinbrenner: No. No one ever does. But you can talk to Him. And up here, He’ll answer you. So I talked to Him. Explained my situation. That I had done a lot of wrong things in my life. Really turned the game of baseball into a mess. Treated many of my underlings with extreme disrespect. But at the end of the day, the good outweighed the bad. And I should have gone to heaven, not hell, there must have been some kind of mistake.
The Woman: And what did God say?
Steinbrenner: He said no.
The Woman: So, why are you here?
Steinbrenner: Well, we kept on talking, and God was pretty straightforward in telling me He was tired of running heaven by Himself. Needed some help in the logistics: concessions, budgeting, the ability to shift around key personnel to suit their skill set. I told Him that if He let me run heaven for a year – not the heavy stuff, just the numbers – and it worked out, I could stay and not go back to hell. I could also trade souls with Satan at my own discretion, as He had heard of my acquisition skills and greatly admired them.
The Woman: You’re not going to trade me to Satan are you?
Steinbrenner: Oh, no, I’d never do anything like that.
Billy (whispering to the woman behind his hand): You better get that in writing.
Steinbrenner: Billy, open the gates. Let this kind woman in. She’s earned her way into heaven. Come on in.
The gates swing open, and the old woman enters heaven, magically transforming to a beautiful, raven-haired woman of 23 in a white robe. The heavenly choir breaks into “New York, New York.” In the distance a silhouette appears behind a cloud: the outline of Richard Nixon.
Richard Nixon: Checkers! Here, Checkers! Come here, boy. Pat, help me find Checkers!
The gates swing shut, and Billy Martin is left alone with his can of Bud. He lights another cigarette and stares off into the distance.
Billy: Fuckin’ Satan was right.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Angelo's Gone
I’ve learned that most of our lives are rituals. Probably always knew this, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to appreciate it. 9/11 went a long ways towards opening that door. Those few days after that were devoid of ritual in New York, a dark gray haze of slow passing time, and all I know is that going back to my normal schedule felt heavenly in comparison. Same with Dad passing on – the ritual of going back to work a week later felt all right, after days of darkness. The darkness didn’t magically disappear, but you learn, it never does. Ritual means you’re moving forward in some sense, even if it feels like the exact opposite.
Sunday mornings, I go out boxing. My regular instructor is on vacation, so I always worry about his temporary replacement. Turns out it’s a younger white guy, really leans hard on the calisthenics, but overall, entirely acceptable, so I’ll keep going for the next two weeks. The big ritual when I get off the train in the early afternoon is to grab a newspaper, some bread, some ice tea, all at Angelo’s Food Emporium on Ditmars. Head home, kick back, take it easy for a few hours, usually until I make that big Sunday meal that will feed me for the next few days.
The reason I’ve gone to Angelo’s is because Angelo is a good guy: an older, bespectacled Greek with a kind face who welcomes everyone into his store. Most delis, I walk in, and it’s business as usual, shopkeepers who don’t seem particularly warm or friendly, selling the basics. Angelo sells the basics, too, but he’s always been unfailingly kind and friendly, from the first time I went in there to the last. So why not give him my money?
I actually felt guilty about a year ago when I started buying mixed nuts from a competing deli down the block on the other side of the street. The place opened up with a more “European imports” vibe about it, no doubt aiming at the new moneyed gentry with their selections, and I blew it off for weeks when it opened. But I saw after awhile that they had a pretty substantial nuts and dried fruit section at the front of the store. And I found that it’s a killer selection of stuff, fresh, reasonably priced, much better than Angelo’s ho-hum selection of cashews and such. So, every few weeks I stock up there, but give Angelo the vast majority of my deli visits.
The last few times I was there, Angelo seemed uncommunicative – tired, sitting in his folding chair at the end of the counter and not really talking to anyone, a glum look on his face. He let the young Mexican guy he has working there run the show, and I get along fine with that guy, too. But I had to wonder what was going on with Angelo, as I saw this routine three or four times over the course of weeks, which was unlike him.
Well, last two Sundays I’ve been there, Angelo’s gone. His signage is still on the front of the store, but he’s not. Last week, I was hoping maybe he’d just gone on vacation or something, and he had friends helping him out. The guy there now is another older Greek, with his wife and what appear to be their son, and don’t seem to be bad people. But not Angelo. The young Mexican guy is gone, too.
This week, I don’t know. I started noticing re-designed looks to the store’s layout, a lot of the Greek sundries Angelo had on the counter removed. Different kinds of ice tea in the coolers. The worst part: they fucked up the Sunday paper two weeks running. The paper had the right outer wrap, but last week there was no “news” portion of the paper (just the arts guide), and this week, they stuffed the Saturday edition of the paper into the Sunday outer wrap … which really pissed me off. I could handle the weird vibe of Angelo not being there, but knowingly selling me a shit copy of the newspaper two weeks running without a word of warning is one of those “dealbreaker” things I won’t put up with from a deli.
But, of course, the worst news for me is Angelo appears to be gone. Dead? I doubt it. There would have been candle memorials in front of the store. Gone back to Greece for a month? Possible … but why the sudden minor store re-design? As noted, his signage is still on the store, so I have to wonder what goes on there. I’m afraid to ask! Because I suspect what happened to Angelo is what will happen to most every small business on that main drag: once the 10/20/30-year lease comes up for renewal, the new monthly rent will be astronomically unaffordable, and the original owner will have to leave, usually after decades of catering to a working-class Greek/Italian neighborhood that’s turning more yuppie by the minute.
That’s the most logical explanation. But usually when this happens, there’s a warning, the owner let’s you know he’s leaving, there’ll be signs stating as much, and the store front goes dark, around here, for months usually as no one in his right mind is willing to pay the cut-throat newer rents local real-estate barons are charging for these places. And eventually, a Dunkin Donuts or such will move in.
I have to believe the man is gone. Where, I don’t know. Hopefully, he made enough over the years to be ready for something like this. I’d have no idea how much a deli owner makes in an outer borough of New York. I doubt Angelo was getting rich doing what he was doing. But he had such a feel for his customers. Spoke Greek. Hired an even-keel Mexican kid because he could relate to the Spanish-speaking customers, and Angelo spoke Spanish himself. I remember going into his deli when we had a deep-summer blackout for a few days, only because I wanted to give him some of my money, and his first words were, “My old friend, how are you doing in this hell? How can I help you?” And he wasn’t joking about hell – this post covers those few days. Going without electricity in a major city in 90-degree heat for days on end aint no joke. Angelo's freezers were shut down, his meats were gone, and he was only selling canned goods and bread.
What does it mean? I’m not sure. But Angelo should know, if the store he runs is no longer there in any real sense and he’s gone, that he will be missed. Things like this seem so inconsequential until they happen. It’s just a deli. I only walk in once a week in general, unless I’m desperate for some Bounty or mineral water. I never hung out there for hours, exchanging stories and bantering with other locals. I’d walk in, chat with Angelo, buy my shit, and walk out.
But he made it clear to me, every time I was in there, that this was his store, that was his name on the front, and he wanted you to know, with every fiber of his being, that this is what he stood for, this was his life, and he cared that you were in there putting money in his pocket. So that’s what disappears when someone like Angelo is gone. Someone who gives a shit about something and let’s you know it. I don’t like seeing people like that getting shit-canned for any reason. That’s why I went there in the first place. The Indian deli just up the block, the first time I walked in there, the girl behind the counter glared at me and barked, “In the future, please pay for your newspaper BEFORE you pick it up outside.” I can’t recall exactly what I said, but it was along the lines of “There is no future. Keep your fucking newspaper, asshole.” In fact, that might have been the first time I walked into Angelo’s, that day, when I was so incensed to be treated like a jackass by someone with zero sense of customer service. (And not to knock Indian store merchants – most of them I’ve dealt with here have been just fine, with a few just as friendly as Angelo. That particular one happened to be an asshole, and Angelo would often tell me he suspected they’d steal his bundle of newspapers if he didn’t get there early enough in the morning. Come to think of it, that’s probably what’s happening now with Angelo gone!)
This bothers me, much more than I thought it would. It also doesn’t help that we’re in the midst of a heat wave, temperatures above 90 most days last week, with the daily high set to never fall below 85 for the upcoming week. It’s “mumbling to self like homeless person” type weather that really wears on your average New Yorker, me included. Just too fucking hot for this sort of nonsense.
I guess this thing with Angelo is like any situation where someone goes missing. It reminds you of your own mortality, if not in that final life/death sense, then in the sense of your lease coming due one day, too. Most of us who’ve been in Astoria for awhile are either going to get priced out one day or pay way too much money to hang around an ever-increasing population of careless douchebags pining for a Trader Joes to open up here and complete the gross suburbanization of this neighborhood. That desire is like a freight train that doesn’t stop for anything or anybody. I fear it just ran over Angelo, but I’ll be sure to glance in his store window over the next few weeks, against all hope, that maybe he just went on vacation. In a better world, a man with that sort of dignity and dedication would have the chance to call his own number, instead of getting mowed-down in a sleazy numbers racket that benefits very few people in this town. Or world, for that matter.
Sunday mornings, I go out boxing. My regular instructor is on vacation, so I always worry about his temporary replacement. Turns out it’s a younger white guy, really leans hard on the calisthenics, but overall, entirely acceptable, so I’ll keep going for the next two weeks. The big ritual when I get off the train in the early afternoon is to grab a newspaper, some bread, some ice tea, all at Angelo’s Food Emporium on Ditmars. Head home, kick back, take it easy for a few hours, usually until I make that big Sunday meal that will feed me for the next few days.
The reason I’ve gone to Angelo’s is because Angelo is a good guy: an older, bespectacled Greek with a kind face who welcomes everyone into his store. Most delis, I walk in, and it’s business as usual, shopkeepers who don’t seem particularly warm or friendly, selling the basics. Angelo sells the basics, too, but he’s always been unfailingly kind and friendly, from the first time I went in there to the last. So why not give him my money?
I actually felt guilty about a year ago when I started buying mixed nuts from a competing deli down the block on the other side of the street. The place opened up with a more “European imports” vibe about it, no doubt aiming at the new moneyed gentry with their selections, and I blew it off for weeks when it opened. But I saw after awhile that they had a pretty substantial nuts and dried fruit section at the front of the store. And I found that it’s a killer selection of stuff, fresh, reasonably priced, much better than Angelo’s ho-hum selection of cashews and such. So, every few weeks I stock up there, but give Angelo the vast majority of my deli visits.
The last few times I was there, Angelo seemed uncommunicative – tired, sitting in his folding chair at the end of the counter and not really talking to anyone, a glum look on his face. He let the young Mexican guy he has working there run the show, and I get along fine with that guy, too. But I had to wonder what was going on with Angelo, as I saw this routine three or four times over the course of weeks, which was unlike him.
Well, last two Sundays I’ve been there, Angelo’s gone. His signage is still on the front of the store, but he’s not. Last week, I was hoping maybe he’d just gone on vacation or something, and he had friends helping him out. The guy there now is another older Greek, with his wife and what appear to be their son, and don’t seem to be bad people. But not Angelo. The young Mexican guy is gone, too.
This week, I don’t know. I started noticing re-designed looks to the store’s layout, a lot of the Greek sundries Angelo had on the counter removed. Different kinds of ice tea in the coolers. The worst part: they fucked up the Sunday paper two weeks running. The paper had the right outer wrap, but last week there was no “news” portion of the paper (just the arts guide), and this week, they stuffed the Saturday edition of the paper into the Sunday outer wrap … which really pissed me off. I could handle the weird vibe of Angelo not being there, but knowingly selling me a shit copy of the newspaper two weeks running without a word of warning is one of those “dealbreaker” things I won’t put up with from a deli.
But, of course, the worst news for me is Angelo appears to be gone. Dead? I doubt it. There would have been candle memorials in front of the store. Gone back to Greece for a month? Possible … but why the sudden minor store re-design? As noted, his signage is still on the store, so I have to wonder what goes on there. I’m afraid to ask! Because I suspect what happened to Angelo is what will happen to most every small business on that main drag: once the 10/20/30-year lease comes up for renewal, the new monthly rent will be astronomically unaffordable, and the original owner will have to leave, usually after decades of catering to a working-class Greek/Italian neighborhood that’s turning more yuppie by the minute.
That’s the most logical explanation. But usually when this happens, there’s a warning, the owner let’s you know he’s leaving, there’ll be signs stating as much, and the store front goes dark, around here, for months usually as no one in his right mind is willing to pay the cut-throat newer rents local real-estate barons are charging for these places. And eventually, a Dunkin Donuts or such will move in.
I have to believe the man is gone. Where, I don’t know. Hopefully, he made enough over the years to be ready for something like this. I’d have no idea how much a deli owner makes in an outer borough of New York. I doubt Angelo was getting rich doing what he was doing. But he had such a feel for his customers. Spoke Greek. Hired an even-keel Mexican kid because he could relate to the Spanish-speaking customers, and Angelo spoke Spanish himself. I remember going into his deli when we had a deep-summer blackout for a few days, only because I wanted to give him some of my money, and his first words were, “My old friend, how are you doing in this hell? How can I help you?” And he wasn’t joking about hell – this post covers those few days. Going without electricity in a major city in 90-degree heat for days on end aint no joke. Angelo's freezers were shut down, his meats were gone, and he was only selling canned goods and bread.
What does it mean? I’m not sure. But Angelo should know, if the store he runs is no longer there in any real sense and he’s gone, that he will be missed. Things like this seem so inconsequential until they happen. It’s just a deli. I only walk in once a week in general, unless I’m desperate for some Bounty or mineral water. I never hung out there for hours, exchanging stories and bantering with other locals. I’d walk in, chat with Angelo, buy my shit, and walk out.
But he made it clear to me, every time I was in there, that this was his store, that was his name on the front, and he wanted you to know, with every fiber of his being, that this is what he stood for, this was his life, and he cared that you were in there putting money in his pocket. So that’s what disappears when someone like Angelo is gone. Someone who gives a shit about something and let’s you know it. I don’t like seeing people like that getting shit-canned for any reason. That’s why I went there in the first place. The Indian deli just up the block, the first time I walked in there, the girl behind the counter glared at me and barked, “In the future, please pay for your newspaper BEFORE you pick it up outside.” I can’t recall exactly what I said, but it was along the lines of “There is no future. Keep your fucking newspaper, asshole.” In fact, that might have been the first time I walked into Angelo’s, that day, when I was so incensed to be treated like a jackass by someone with zero sense of customer service. (And not to knock Indian store merchants – most of them I’ve dealt with here have been just fine, with a few just as friendly as Angelo. That particular one happened to be an asshole, and Angelo would often tell me he suspected they’d steal his bundle of newspapers if he didn’t get there early enough in the morning. Come to think of it, that’s probably what’s happening now with Angelo gone!)
This bothers me, much more than I thought it would. It also doesn’t help that we’re in the midst of a heat wave, temperatures above 90 most days last week, with the daily high set to never fall below 85 for the upcoming week. It’s “mumbling to self like homeless person” type weather that really wears on your average New Yorker, me included. Just too fucking hot for this sort of nonsense.
I guess this thing with Angelo is like any situation where someone goes missing. It reminds you of your own mortality, if not in that final life/death sense, then in the sense of your lease coming due one day, too. Most of us who’ve been in Astoria for awhile are either going to get priced out one day or pay way too much money to hang around an ever-increasing population of careless douchebags pining for a Trader Joes to open up here and complete the gross suburbanization of this neighborhood. That desire is like a freight train that doesn’t stop for anything or anybody. I fear it just ran over Angelo, but I’ll be sure to glance in his store window over the next few weeks, against all hope, that maybe he just went on vacation. In a better world, a man with that sort of dignity and dedication would have the chance to call his own number, instead of getting mowed-down in a sleazy numbers racket that benefits very few people in this town. Or world, for that matter.
Sunday, July 04, 2010
Paypal Button: Hands Up
Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen ...
Anyone who's used the New York City subway system for a long period of time knows that line ... it's what every homeless person says upon entering a train car and launching into his spiel to get subway riders to part with their change. Cup in hand. Raspy voice. Making eye contact with everyone possible. Stories of burned-down homes, time spent in prison, children in need of operation, can you help a vet, I'm not stealing, etc.
Money for nothing but the asking is a nice concept that doesn't go over too well with most subway riders, me included. Nor am I too crazy about people who "perform" for their money, the teenage kids with beatboxes doing their incredibly annoying street dance routine on a narrow subway car, blind guys with accordions, the homeless black guy doowop groups, etc. You get on a subway, all you want to do is sit down and be left alone until you reach your destination.
I decided to put a Paypal button on the site as an experiment. To this day, I have no clue how many people read this and don't want to know. Probably not a lot, otherwise I'd be getting deluged with responses from people who do nothing but respond to websites with Twitter-syle gibberish. Then again, to avoid getting my ass spammed off, I make people sign in to leave comments, which surely dissuades a huge bulk of that sort of random response. This is like a newspaper -- you should have balls enough to state who you are, or at least present some sort of identification, to leave a comment. Most people do who respond here, I like it that way, and all responders are surely welcome here, even if you don't like me.
Advertising is out of the question -- it would make no sense with a site like this. Those Adsense ads respond to subject matter and catch words/phrases. I write about whatever I want, so I'm sure any ads placed on here would be utter gibberish based on a one-off catch phrase used in a line of text. Besides which, I hate advertising and never click-through when I see it on websites ... so why would I make people suffer through the same blinking, annoying crap?
I don't "need" the money per se. Yes, we all need money, but I have a steady job, make reasonably good money, live sensibly, save. I write this thing because I love writing, always have, always will, would be great to make money at it, but it's not the driving force. Still, why not put a discrete Paypal button on there, let people drop in some money if they feel like it. If they don't, no big deal either. I guess I'm shooting for that one unhinged reader who's so touched by something here that he/she drops in $10K in one shot ... before tracking me down with the chloroform hankie to take me back to the brick-walled pit in the basement of a dilapidated Victorian home in a rural town in Ohio. I know you're out there! And I got no problem putting the lotion in the basket!
So, go on reading, nothing else will change, don't feel put upon, my only expectation is that you read along. And give me all your money. Because the plate in my head is picking up AM radio again. And my crack-addicted love child needs new shoes. And that carpentry job my brother-in-law promised in Schenectady fell through. And I had a rough time, fighting for this great nation in Grenada so we could all be free. And that new state sales tax now has a carton of cigarettes costing more than crystal meth. Brother, can you spare a dime for a cup of joe?
Anyone who's used the New York City subway system for a long period of time knows that line ... it's what every homeless person says upon entering a train car and launching into his spiel to get subway riders to part with their change. Cup in hand. Raspy voice. Making eye contact with everyone possible. Stories of burned-down homes, time spent in prison, children in need of operation, can you help a vet, I'm not stealing, etc.
Money for nothing but the asking is a nice concept that doesn't go over too well with most subway riders, me included. Nor am I too crazy about people who "perform" for their money, the teenage kids with beatboxes doing their incredibly annoying street dance routine on a narrow subway car, blind guys with accordions, the homeless black guy doowop groups, etc. You get on a subway, all you want to do is sit down and be left alone until you reach your destination.
I decided to put a Paypal button on the site as an experiment. To this day, I have no clue how many people read this and don't want to know. Probably not a lot, otherwise I'd be getting deluged with responses from people who do nothing but respond to websites with Twitter-syle gibberish. Then again, to avoid getting my ass spammed off, I make people sign in to leave comments, which surely dissuades a huge bulk of that sort of random response. This is like a newspaper -- you should have balls enough to state who you are, or at least present some sort of identification, to leave a comment. Most people do who respond here, I like it that way, and all responders are surely welcome here, even if you don't like me.
Advertising is out of the question -- it would make no sense with a site like this. Those Adsense ads respond to subject matter and catch words/phrases. I write about whatever I want, so I'm sure any ads placed on here would be utter gibberish based on a one-off catch phrase used in a line of text. Besides which, I hate advertising and never click-through when I see it on websites ... so why would I make people suffer through the same blinking, annoying crap?
I don't "need" the money per se. Yes, we all need money, but I have a steady job, make reasonably good money, live sensibly, save. I write this thing because I love writing, always have, always will, would be great to make money at it, but it's not the driving force. Still, why not put a discrete Paypal button on there, let people drop in some money if they feel like it. If they don't, no big deal either. I guess I'm shooting for that one unhinged reader who's so touched by something here that he/she drops in $10K in one shot ... before tracking me down with the chloroform hankie to take me back to the brick-walled pit in the basement of a dilapidated Victorian home in a rural town in Ohio. I know you're out there! And I got no problem putting the lotion in the basket!
So, go on reading, nothing else will change, don't feel put upon, my only expectation is that you read along. And give me all your money. Because the plate in my head is picking up AM radio again. And my crack-addicted love child needs new shoes. And that carpentry job my brother-in-law promised in Schenectady fell through. And I had a rough time, fighting for this great nation in Grenada so we could all be free. And that new state sales tax now has a carton of cigarettes costing more than crystal meth. Brother, can you spare a dime for a cup of joe?
Sunday, June 27, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
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 thi
ngs 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.
There are few thi
ngs 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.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
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!
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!
Sunday, May 16, 2010
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.”
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.”
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