When I first got to college in 1994, my Bible was so thoroughly marked with underlined and cross-referenced verses I liked, I would just flip through it and re-read those parts. When I realized I was doing this, I decided to read the bible with a different approach: underlining the parts I didn’t like and cross-referencing inconsistencies.
My original objectives for this exercise were to solve any problems with the Bible that I might encounter and discover nuances in the Bible that I had previously overlooked. So, for example, I used the pages of who begat who to calculate with a high degree of accuracy when events in the Bible took place. The attention to detail in these chronologies are pretty amazing. Somehow, the very first humans were quickly able to discern the number of days in a year, use that information to keep track of how old they were when their children were born and preserve this data by passing it down through generations.
Another thing that happened with me around this age was that I started to develop what is commonly called “critical thinking skills” (and what neurologists would call my prefrontal cortex). One application of this is gaining an ability to intuit when something doesn’t quite seem right; even when you can’t put your finger on exactly what it is right away. As I began asking questions about the contents of the Bible, I expected to find answers, but instead found more questions.
The immediate result of Adam and Eve disobeying God is that they gain the ability to differentiate between good and evil- in other words, a conscience. The first thing they recognize as evil is nudity and, as a result, experience shame. Now, it doesn’t take an anthropologist to point out that embarrassment about ones own body is not an intrinsic but instead a cultural trait. Pondering this threw me for a loop. Could the Bible contain cultural and not necessarily universal values and truths? Could the Bible be suggesting the conscience was a genetic difference between Jews and cultures of the day that did not wear clothes? Could this story be laying the groundwork for an agenda that is primarily concerned with the feeling of shame?
In Genesis 6:6, it is written that God regrets creating humans. Perhaps this is another attempt at instilling shame in humans, but the bigger question is: how can an all-knowing being experience regret? It is literally not possible, unless it falls under the category of knowing you were going to regret something and doing it anyway, which would place the blame solely on God himself, making him both imperfect and unjust. God concludes the best solution to humans not living up to his expectations is to drown all but eight of them and also most of the animals. The Pentateuch is written very matter-of-factly, and the god in it remains terrifyingly unpredictable, which makes sense when coming from a time full of unexplainable and uncontrollable natural phenomena. This god’s idea of a righteous man is a guy who urges for his two daughters to be gang raped and then shortly thereafter, while mourning the death of his wife, gets drunk and impregnates both of them on consecutive nights. Soren Kirkegaard obsesses over this Old Testament god, and argues we should fear and respect him precisely because he is so scary.
The god of the New Testament, especially in the works attributed to John, is depicted as a more loving being. This conception of god poses a couple major problems: tragic and cruel things happen seemingly at random; he demands to be loved in return; hell exists… but this is the god most people today want to believe in. Christians are eager and enthusiastic about defending this god. Books are written on why this god behaves the way he does. And then this god of love is used to explain that the blood-thirsty Old Testament god also acted out of love, because they are the same god. This only makes sense if you strip the word “love” of all meaning, like an abuser who pleads his love for his wife after beating her. It is only the extremists of a religion that focus on the violent actions of their god and disregard the rest, and yet the majority, who focus on how patient, loving and forgiving their god is, do the exact opposite.
Perhaps the genius of the Bible lies in the ability it bestows to find and focus on verses that mirror whatever you happen to agree with, enabling your beliefs to be retained without further justification.
At the same time I was exploring this question of the nature of God, I discovered philosophy, and discovered the god from my childhood described by Plato (circa 428 – 347 BC) and Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 – 430). These two important figures theorize about and describe a very familiar supreme being, in terminology verbatim to what I heard in Sunday School growing up. I found this fascinating, because Christianity usually teaches that it relies only on the writings included in the Holy Bible. I began to research how the Bible had been compiled, edited, translated and used over the centuries, and discovered a fascinating and complex history. There are literally hundreds of different versions of the Vulgate (the first “official” Bible, written in Latin), for example, as it has undergone nearly constant revising from its inception in AD 382; one would be hard-pressed to find any two versions that are alike, even after the invention of the printing press. One motive for highlighting the importance of the Bible has been to get rid of religious and secular works and writings disliked by the religious leaders of the day- entire libraries full of one-of-a-kind books have been burned to the ground in the name of Christianity. The Bible canon idea has also been useful for discrediting and destroying Christian sects such as the Gnostics. The Protestant Christian Bible I grew up with, consisting of 66 works divided into Old and New Testaments, is not 2000 as I’d always assumed but less than 200 years old, dating back to the 1820s. (This modern compilation contains dozens of references to books no longer considered canon.)
Christianity insists the most important thing is to believe that there’s one God, and further, to believe he showed up in human form as his own son. Ultimately, this visit had to happen because God decided he wouldn’t forgive us unless blood was shed. This is another example of him being overly dramatic and inefficient- thankfully humans are not advised to emulate this policy. Who besides a death metal frontman would respond to a sincere apology with, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness!” But in pondering this whole ideology, my main question became- why does God even care whether or not we believe in him? It seems really petty. Imagine Kris Kringle from the movie Miracle on 34th Street cursing people for not believing he’s the real Santa Claus. It would be antithetical.
Christians are quick to point out that it is impossible to comprehend anything about God, especially his motivations. Only God can judge, and we must assume God is always right. Any words humans use to describe God necessarily fall short, and so even the descriptions of God in the Bible fail to adequately capture or express his true nature. So regardless of what the Bible says about God, entertaining the possibility that their god could be flawed or non-existent is out of the question. Because God cannot be explained, he conveniently becomes the explanation for everything. The logical result is that the explanation for everything is that nothing can be explained. The irony of this is frequently lost on Christians, which can make trying to have a rational conversation with a Christian excruciatingly frustrating. Because there can be no answers, there needn’t be any questions. From a Christian perspective, the acquisition of knowledge is considered a futile distraction from “Truth,” which is yet another synonym for God. Far too often, religion provides little more than an excuse to remain ignorant.
I spent many late nights during my third year of college wrestling with this specific obstacle of how to contemplate a being beyond understanding with my friend Eric. At the same time, I was deeply engrossed in the works of Immanuel Kant. Kant was a genius at being able to work around unsolvable problems by exploring our limitations and what we can determine after accepting those limitations. One thing Kant writes extensively about is the concept of a priori knowledge, or knowledge that is not dependent upon experience but reason. For humans, he says, the purest form of what we can know a priori is limited to deductions regarding the conditions of possible experience. In other words, we can imagine a logically consistent universe without needing to experience that universe; this imagined yet consistent world needn’t have any connection to reality whatsoever, but the same rules that are necessary to make an imagined world consistent must also apply to ours, because otherwise our world would allow impossibilities. So, for example, once I use reason to conclude that, by definition, two plus two must equal four, I can also conclude that if I pick up two sticks with one hand and two sticks with the other, then I must be holding four sticks.
The exciting thing about this, for me, is it demonstrates that humans can both recognize logical consistencies and discover things to be true that we neither believe nor experience to be true. For example, Albert Einstein composed his theory of general relativity by first imagining a universe consisting of an observer in free fall. When he applied the necessary conditions derived from that imagined universe to ours, he discovered, among other things (like the existence of black holes), its calculations could only be accurate if our universe was expanding, which he didn’t think was true, so he applied an alteration to the formula (known as the cosmological constant)… but just over a decade later Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble separately discovered a method of measuring the distances between stars and found that our universe is expanding. So while it may be true that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are our ways his ways, (Isaiah 55:8) the knowledge we can acquire and possess is not absolutely limited by our activities and thoughts.
But now our conversation must turn from knowledge to faith, because that is the way these conversations go. Faith acts both as a bridge between the known and unknown and like a placebo to alter outcomes. Faith turns our dreams into realities and presents evidence for our theories (to reword the famous verse Hebrews 11:1). The first hurdle regarding faith as it pertains to Christianity is that Christians almost universally assume they have a monopoly on it. They don’t. Taking a mathematical formula created in an imaginary world and applying it to ours requires a leap of faith. But, for Christians, holding onto faith in God is of utmost importance because the alternative is disbelief, and those who don’t believe burn in hell.
Christians will resort to reiterating their faith as way of expressing their contempt for anything that might challenge their assumptions about or limitations imposed by reality. It is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card to insist that our understanding is not only paltry but irrelevant. They will, for example, declare that, by faith, the impossible IS possible. Although, whether or not something is possible is obviously not determined by whether it is declared to be so, certain things can be logically determined to be impossible- a square cannot be round, to cite a famous example. In this regard, the impossible cannot be possible in the same way that A cannot equal B. To deny this is, quite simply, a refusal to allow that a word can have a concrete definition. If we cannot define terms, everything is meaningless, logic does not exist and anybody who says they can read this random string of shapes is a liar (because we cannot, for example, determine that “p” is anything more than a line and a circle). The improbable is possible; the impossible is, by definition, not impossible. It would be absurd to expect or assume that even an all-powerful being could do the impossible.
When it comes to something like predicting the future, it is true that our knowledge is feeble, but there’s not much that we understand less than time. Knowledge and faith are never mutually exclusive, and as we learn, our dependence on faith decreases. With knowledge, we can evolve from faith healers to doctors. (Medical science is fully aware of the miracle of faith healing- they call it the Placebo Effect.) Jesus, in Matthew 14:31, suggests that anyone with faith in him can walk on water (and this is demonstrated literally, not figuratively), which at least implies that everyone who cannot walk on water is a hypocrite and going to hell. Most, like the disciples other than Peter in the story, get around this by simply not trying to walk on water, but “faith without works is dead.” (James 2:17) Walking on water is a truly useful skill, and would give Christians a huge advantage in both commerce and evangelism. It should be extremely rare for a Christian to drown relative to the general population. If it were true that anyone who believes in Jesus could walk on water, there is no way they wouldn’t be doing it. There will always be a few people who do truly believe they can walk on water, like those parents who let their kids die while praying for them instead of taking them to the hospital, but the majority realize, even if they won’t admit it, that while faith is a powerful and necessary force, knowledge more often than not trumps faith.
God wants not only to be believed in but obeyed. As the number of pages in my Bible marked with bizarre tales and inconsistencies rivaled those I had marked in high school because I agreed with them, I began to question whether God was qualified to handle a leadership role. This was a being who ordered the mass genocide of the people who had raised Moses, sparing only the female virgins for the soldiers to keep as slaves (Numbers 31). The Bible is pro-slavery throughout (although because it is so diplomatically written, the New Testament book of Philemon, a letter given to accompany a slave Paul had ordered to return to his master, asking the master to forgive him for having escaped, is often misinterpreted as being anti-slavery). Christians will explain that God had to make compromises because he had to make laws that fit within the constraints of the culture of the day, but this is utterly ridiculous. Why would someone with ultimate authority have to compromise? God refrained from standing up for basic human rights because that was too radical an idea for the day and the timing wasn’t right? Who was he afraid of offending- the status quo? This same god created a world in which the women in it exist to keep men company- without consulting Adam first.
Contrary to what the Bible teaches, I steadfastly believe (have faith) that mass genocide is never and never has been an acceptable course of action by anyone, for any reason. If God himself dropped down from heaven and ordered me to prove my loyalty by killing anyone, let alone my own child, I would like to think I’d refuse… even if promised blessings or threatened torture. As I write this, I am reminded of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt. It should be required reading for every person on the planet. I first read it in 1997, three years into my critical analysis of the Bible. It is an examination of a Nazi at a war crimes trial that determines the key personality traits of a man guilty of committing horrific atrocities were that he couldn’t think for himself and was ambitious.
People will point to Biblical prophecies as proof that it’s divinely inspired. Unfortunately, when you eliminate prophecies that were written about after they were fulfilled (which could simply be cases of revisionist history) and prophecies that haven’t happened yet, there is not much to point at. Using prophecies whose foretelling and fulfillment are both written about in the Bible to prove the Bible is true and accurate involves a fallacy of circular logic whereby one must first assume the Bible is true and accurate. In fact, many of the prophecies in the Bible were not fulfilled, such as that the land of Egypt would be abandoned for forty years (Ezekiel 29) or that Jesus would remain dead for three days and three nights (Matthew 12:40). The latter is a great example of how the Bible works: almost every Christian will tell you that Jesus was buried for three days and three nights while they simultaneously celebrate Jesus’ death on the evening before the Sabbath after nightfall (Mark 15:42) and resurrection before dawn on the day after the Sabbath (John 20:1), which is a span of one day and two nights. (Without hesitation or research, Christians will explain how, for that time or culture, three days and three nights was the same as one day and two nights, with is as absurd and desperate as it gets.) It’s not even close to three days and three nights, and yet, somehow, a blind-spot is created which causes almost everybody to ignore the facts and focus on the story. Not the story in the Gospels- which disagree with each other on many details such as who discovered the empty tomb- but a story that is not written anywhere but which lives solely in the public consciousness.
Christians will claim God has never broken a promise. In reality, he promised Abraham he’d give Abraham’s descendents the territory between the Nile and Euphrates (Genesis 15:18). Most people today simply assume this “promised land” is modern-day Israel, but it is actually a huge expanse of land stretching from Egypt to Iraq that the Arabian Peninsula sits between. Christians will immediately explain that the descendents of Abraham never actually owned all that land because of their wickedness, but Deuteronomy 9:5 specifically guarantees that the original promise will be kept regardless of the wickedness of the descendents. Today, another world war would be required to fulfill this promise. Frighteningly, a large number of Christians would support this war, even though Israel has nuclear weapons. Humans generally would prefer to discover justifications for their assumptions rather than truth or peace.
Some will admit that the Bible is necessarily fallible because it was written by humans. (Notice the ever-present theme of human fallibility.) I would counter that if God wanted a perfect work with no way of parlaying excuses, he could have given Moses a whole bunch of tablets containing his laws, instead of just one copy to be kept in a box and destined to be lost- especially after Moses immediately destroyed the original tablet. Even Jesus could have written his own Bible and handed out 5000 copies along with the fish and bread. Any number of writing methods could have been utilized which would have been better adept at avoiding egregious errors like Aaron dying twice and being buried in two places.
Jesus said, “If you don’t believe me, believe the things I do.” My mom correctly points out that the best thing about Christianity is that it encourages some people to do great things like provide humanitarian aid, and I wholeheartedly appreciate this benefit… that many religions and non-religious charity organizations also provide. I’m personally suspicious of anyone unwilling to do charitable work unless inspired by a supreme being, but Christianity teaches everybody is inherently wicked, and so Christians are skeptical that anyone can do good without a supreme being’s influence. Regardless, my exploration into Christianity was more interested in its truth than its utility, and these are two separate questions.
In all my years growing up in the church, I never witnessed a miracle, with the possible exception of one time when I was about eight our car wouldn’t start in the church parking lot and some guy appeared to help push start it and when that worked my dad stopped to thank him but he had disappeared. I heard about miracles all the time, however. Others will frequently state they’ve witnessed “all kinds” of miracles, but when pressed, fail to come up with anything specific that’s uniquely attributable to the god of Christianity.
In the old days (9th century BC), Elijah puts on a highly publicized miracle-working contest where he mocks 450 prophets of Baal who futilely attempt to have their god light an altar. Elijah then dumps buckets of water on an altar and prays to God, who promptly sends not only fire from heaven to light it but, after another prayer, rain to put it out and end a famine. A chilling part of the story that conveniently gets overlooked is that Elijah has the 450 prophets put to death, but it is a key point in part because it leads to our introduction of Jezebel, who remains an interesting sub-plot right up until she is thrown out a window, trampled on and eaten by dogs.
Even though Matthew 18:19 says God will grant any request asked by two or more people, these days it is considered blasphemous to assume a prayer will be answered, because while it’s okay to ask, who are we to tell God what to do? Preachers will explain that our prayers are answered either yes, no or wait. This answer is not literal of course- it just means that something we ask for will either happen now, happen later or not happen. I cannot help but notice everything that is not prayed for also happens now, later or not at all. In other words, that claim is a tautology (true by definition).
Miracles are claimed in every religion. Christians will usually not deny these but instead remind that Satan can perform miracles, too. These are always called “false miracles,” but are virtually indistinguishable from God’s miracles. This is why we have to be really careful not to be fooled by Satan- because he is virtually indistinguishable from God. (One of the few depictions of Satan in the Bible is in the book of Job, which begins with Satan visiting God in Heaven and, after a discussion beginning with, “What have you been up to?” God and Satan place a friendly wager….) Just as God provides a useful one word blanket explanation for how everything other than God exists, Satan is an easy way to categorize evidence to the contrary as being a deception.
In the book of Judges, Gideon asks God to perform three tests in order to prove his authenticity. The second and third tests are for God to have morning dew on a wool fleece but not on the ground and vice versa. Out of desperation, I decided to replicate this experiment. I took a wool blanket outside on a summer evening, sat on it and prayed. I ended up falling asleep on the blanket and it was wet when I awoke at dawn. Excitedly, I reached out to feel the grass around me and much to my surprise… it was also wet. I immediately began sobbing. Then I thought, well maybe this is some sort of test, so I repeated the experiment for two more nights- although on those occasions I just left the blanket out and slept inside. Those ensuing days were an intense emotional roller coaster of frustration, betrayal, denial and anger. By the third morning of nature following the laws of nature, I felt stupid for having actually thought God existed and simultaneously a sense of peace from being liberated from having to worry about it anymore.
When Jacob wrestled with God, he was punished with a physical injury but rewarded with a new identity. I received no punishment but the same reward. Admitting to myself that everything I’d been taught, believed and preached made more sense if it wasn’t true was probably the most difficult and courageous thing I’ve ever done. Whenever Christians who knew me growing up find out I am no longer a Christian, they automatically assume this is due to ignorance or a lack of faith or self-control, and usually bizarrely note that I seem angry. Christians can really be extraordinarily arrogant, but to be fair, a lot of effort has gone into convincing them non-Christians are ignorant, unhappy (or suffering “false happiness”), reckless and angry. In reality, I decided for myself beyond a reasonable doubt, after intensive research and examination over the course of three years, that that vast majority of the Bible was a work of fiction, and the god described by it was not only extremely inconsistent but something less than admirable. I have come to believe shame is instilled and continuously reinforced by Christianity because the only people who need something external to believe in are those you do not believe in themselves.
Mark 4:22 says, “For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open.” There are a ton of things in the Bible that most Christians would rather ignore than ponder or discuss. Simply insisting that humans aren’t qualified to question the Bible is unreasonable- we were deemed qualified to write it, after all. When it comes to religion, legitimacy should be too important a concern for any of its scriptures to be treated flippantly. Having faith that something is true does not make it so, nor is seeking knowledge demonstrative of a lack of faith. Having faith is admirable- remaining stubbornly ignorant is not; neither is forcing or expecting religious fervor to be revered above factual knowledge or universal human rights. I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that perhaps crediting all actions and opinions to a silent, invisible, superior being is little more than a way of avoiding personal responsibility. Christians should be able to ask themselves, “Would my actions and opinions be defensible and justified if I didn’t have someone else to pin them on?” I think a lot of Christians could benefit from having more humility in admitting their beliefs are held despite unanswered questions instead of insisting they have all the answers and wanting to impose them on everybody else.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Monday, January 5, 2015
The Importance of Candi
San Francisco is blessed with a large homeless population. When I moved to the Bay Area from Iowa in 2000, interacting with homeless people was a new experience for me. Willie Brown, the mayor of San Francisco at the time, was engaged in an active battle against the homeless. Millions of dollars were spent on things like confiscating shopping carts and removing park benches. There were no public restrooms and busking (street performing) required purchasing a permit. Meanwhile, housing costs soared, largely due to an influx of money from Silicon Valley, and the climate remained balmy year round, so the net effect of these policies were solely to increase the suffering of the homeless.
I couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco, so I lived in Richmond on the Easy Bay. When Amy and I moved there, I quickly got a part-time job as a barista at the coffee shop in Borders books in Emeryville, landed an internship at a recording studio complex in The City and joined a weekly jazz improvisation workshop. (For the unaware, “The City” is San Francisco’s rather smug and, if you live there, only acceptable nickname.) Amy got a full-time job in Berkeley. We shared a 1986 Toyota Tercel- she usually used it during the day and I used it whenever I had to haul my drumset somewhere. Most of the time, I got around using BART, the area’s monorail system, whose furthest north station was very close to our quadplex apartment, where rent was $800 per month plus utilities.
In San Francisco, I worked in the Tenderloin district, which is sort of in the middle of town but well removed from tourists, in a well-tagged (graffitied) area full of amazing Thai restaurants and taquerias. The recording studio was about four blocks north of the Civic Center Plaza BART station. The train ride took 45 minutes and costed something like $3.25 each way. The last train left the first station at midnight, and whenever I missed it I slept on a couch in a hallway of the studio.
One day, not long after I’d starting working at the recording studio, an engineer was chatting with me about the homeless in the area. He had a BMW motorcycle, and felt bad that he worried about parking it at the motorcycle parking area next to the BART station, because there were always so many people milling about it. What he would do, when he parked his bike, was give money to a nearby homeless person and say, “Could you watch my bike while you’re, please?” His worry was when he returned and if the same person was there, things could get socially awkward, because, well, dealing with homeless people is awkward.
During this conversation, I buzzed Paul Stubblebine in through the heavy blue door. Paul was a highly-regarded mastering engineer who had presumably worked at the studio for awhile, and was one of those guys who you immediately realized was highly competent. In truth, as I would find out later, he was an extraordinary human being. I’m going to segue a bit here so I can tell my Paul Stubblebine story:
On two occasions while I was there, Paul was hired as a recording/mixing engineer and I was assigned to be his assistant. During one of these sessions, Paul went to the restroom while the band was listening to a mix he had done. While he was away, one of the band members asked if I could turn the guitar up and vocals down a little. Strictly speaking, this was a major no-no; I had no business touching the famed Neve 8038 console. But, being a brash kid, I marked the location of the faders in question with a grease pencil and moved them both half a decibel. Now, answering the question, “How loud is a decibel?” is a complicated one; it doesn’t even make sense to describe decibels in terms of how far you move the fader. Roughly speaking, an increase of 10 decibels is twice as loud. (To truly understand how decibels are calculated, you have to understand the neper, and I don’t.) Half a decibel is about how far you need to adjust the volume to create a minimally perceptible difference. The minimum you can adjust most modern consumer volume knobs is a full decibel.
Paul returned to the mixing room, and while sitting down- so before he was even situated between the speakers- he nonchalantly reached out and adjusted the two faders back to where I had marked their original locations. Everyone who witnessed this realized the appropriate volumes of the guitar and vocals within the mix were definitive. I was too speechless to ever admit I had even moved the faders. It was, and is, the most superhuman thing I have ever witnessed a person do. The only other thing I can think of that comes close is watching Barry Bonds effortlessly crush a baseball.
Anyway, the engineer with the motorcycle asked Paul how he dealt with the homeless. Paul said he followed advice he had been given when he had first come to the area- find one homeless person that resonates with you and give them whatever change you have in your pocket every time you see them. When he said this, I immediately thought of a person who I had ignored asking if I wanted to buy a poem a few days prior.
The person in question was a gaunt, sickly woman draped in layers of rags who looked to be in her 50’s, with long, thinning reddish-brown hair. It was evident she had a drug problem.
People often say that they don’t like to give money to homeless because they will just spend it on booze and drugs. This rationalization hides behind the arrogant premise that we are qualified to judge what others spend their money on. These same people will then proudly explain that their concern is for the other’s health and safety. To follow this logic, the reason they don’t give is out of compassion and charity. They would rather give food, shelter or jobs to the homeless. They don’t do any of those things, of course, but that’s what they “would rather” do. It is telling of our society that those who have a place to sleep at night become so haughty toward those who don’t. I didn’t have food, shelter or jobs to offer, so I began giving this lady my spare change whenever I had it. When I did not have change, I would at least smile and say, “hi!”
In return, she would sometimes give me incoherent scribbling on scraps of paper. Some days, she would chat with me in slurred, garbled speech that I could barely decipher, and I would find myself struggling to stand, smile and listen instead of hurrying on my way. Other days she would be listless and sad and I would feel compelled to talk to her. I found out her name was Candi. I would not have pegged her as a Candi- those kinds of names were more common further up by Van Ness and Post- but I never did find out much about who she was or where she had come from.
One day Candi said she had written a poem especially for me. She fished through her pockets, found it and gave it to me. It was basically, “Andrew I love you.” I felt honored that she actually knew my name. For me, Candi was a face among the faceless. Until then, it had not really occurred to me that I was the same for her.
I would often see Candi twice a day for the next couple of years, and it was the thing I most looked forward to on my trips to and from work. Of course, sometimes she wouldn’t be there. If I didn’t see Candi for a week, I would begin to worry. She wasn’t the type of person about whom you’d think, maybe she found a place to live. In the end I was the one who disappeared for good- and I suppose this was something she was used to.
I have been privileged to meet many amazing people throughout the years, including Paul Stubblebine, but no one has been more important or influential on me and how I perceive the world than Candi. I wish I had thanked her.
I couldn’t afford to live in San Francisco, so I lived in Richmond on the Easy Bay. When Amy and I moved there, I quickly got a part-time job as a barista at the coffee shop in Borders books in Emeryville, landed an internship at a recording studio complex in The City and joined a weekly jazz improvisation workshop. (For the unaware, “The City” is San Francisco’s rather smug and, if you live there, only acceptable nickname.) Amy got a full-time job in Berkeley. We shared a 1986 Toyota Tercel- she usually used it during the day and I used it whenever I had to haul my drumset somewhere. Most of the time, I got around using BART, the area’s monorail system, whose furthest north station was very close to our quadplex apartment, where rent was $800 per month plus utilities.
In San Francisco, I worked in the Tenderloin district, which is sort of in the middle of town but well removed from tourists, in a well-tagged (graffitied) area full of amazing Thai restaurants and taquerias. The recording studio was about four blocks north of the Civic Center Plaza BART station. The train ride took 45 minutes and costed something like $3.25 each way. The last train left the first station at midnight, and whenever I missed it I slept on a couch in a hallway of the studio.
One day, not long after I’d starting working at the recording studio, an engineer was chatting with me about the homeless in the area. He had a BMW motorcycle, and felt bad that he worried about parking it at the motorcycle parking area next to the BART station, because there were always so many people milling about it. What he would do, when he parked his bike, was give money to a nearby homeless person and say, “Could you watch my bike while you’re, please?” His worry was when he returned and if the same person was there, things could get socially awkward, because, well, dealing with homeless people is awkward.
During this conversation, I buzzed Paul Stubblebine in through the heavy blue door. Paul was a highly-regarded mastering engineer who had presumably worked at the studio for awhile, and was one of those guys who you immediately realized was highly competent. In truth, as I would find out later, he was an extraordinary human being. I’m going to segue a bit here so I can tell my Paul Stubblebine story:
On two occasions while I was there, Paul was hired as a recording/mixing engineer and I was assigned to be his assistant. During one of these sessions, Paul went to the restroom while the band was listening to a mix he had done. While he was away, one of the band members asked if I could turn the guitar up and vocals down a little. Strictly speaking, this was a major no-no; I had no business touching the famed Neve 8038 console. But, being a brash kid, I marked the location of the faders in question with a grease pencil and moved them both half a decibel. Now, answering the question, “How loud is a decibel?” is a complicated one; it doesn’t even make sense to describe decibels in terms of how far you move the fader. Roughly speaking, an increase of 10 decibels is twice as loud. (To truly understand how decibels are calculated, you have to understand the neper, and I don’t.) Half a decibel is about how far you need to adjust the volume to create a minimally perceptible difference. The minimum you can adjust most modern consumer volume knobs is a full decibel.
Paul returned to the mixing room, and while sitting down- so before he was even situated between the speakers- he nonchalantly reached out and adjusted the two faders back to where I had marked their original locations. Everyone who witnessed this realized the appropriate volumes of the guitar and vocals within the mix were definitive. I was too speechless to ever admit I had even moved the faders. It was, and is, the most superhuman thing I have ever witnessed a person do. The only other thing I can think of that comes close is watching Barry Bonds effortlessly crush a baseball.
Anyway, the engineer with the motorcycle asked Paul how he dealt with the homeless. Paul said he followed advice he had been given when he had first come to the area- find one homeless person that resonates with you and give them whatever change you have in your pocket every time you see them. When he said this, I immediately thought of a person who I had ignored asking if I wanted to buy a poem a few days prior.
The person in question was a gaunt, sickly woman draped in layers of rags who looked to be in her 50’s, with long, thinning reddish-brown hair. It was evident she had a drug problem.
People often say that they don’t like to give money to homeless because they will just spend it on booze and drugs. This rationalization hides behind the arrogant premise that we are qualified to judge what others spend their money on. These same people will then proudly explain that their concern is for the other’s health and safety. To follow this logic, the reason they don’t give is out of compassion and charity. They would rather give food, shelter or jobs to the homeless. They don’t do any of those things, of course, but that’s what they “would rather” do. It is telling of our society that those who have a place to sleep at night become so haughty toward those who don’t. I didn’t have food, shelter or jobs to offer, so I began giving this lady my spare change whenever I had it. When I did not have change, I would at least smile and say, “hi!”
In return, she would sometimes give me incoherent scribbling on scraps of paper. Some days, she would chat with me in slurred, garbled speech that I could barely decipher, and I would find myself struggling to stand, smile and listen instead of hurrying on my way. Other days she would be listless and sad and I would feel compelled to talk to her. I found out her name was Candi. I would not have pegged her as a Candi- those kinds of names were more common further up by Van Ness and Post- but I never did find out much about who she was or where she had come from.
One day Candi said she had written a poem especially for me. She fished through her pockets, found it and gave it to me. It was basically, “Andrew I love you.” I felt honored that she actually knew my name. For me, Candi was a face among the faceless. Until then, it had not really occurred to me that I was the same for her.
I would often see Candi twice a day for the next couple of years, and it was the thing I most looked forward to on my trips to and from work. Of course, sometimes she wouldn’t be there. If I didn’t see Candi for a week, I would begin to worry. She wasn’t the type of person about whom you’d think, maybe she found a place to live. In the end I was the one who disappeared for good- and I suppose this was something she was used to.
I have been privileged to meet many amazing people throughout the years, including Paul Stubblebine, but no one has been more important or influential on me and how I perceive the world than Candi. I wish I had thanked her.
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
The Importance of G.I. Joe
I grew up in a farmhouse in the 1980s. It was on a gravel road, surrounded for miles on every side by corn or soybean fields. We lived two miles from the school, where I had 17 classmates, and 10 miles from the town of Fort Dodge, Iowa. Water was supplied to the house from a shallow well, and if it didn’t rain for a few months, we would run out. My parents, brother, sister and I raised various animals and tended a large garden. I loathed all chores other than burning the trash in a rusty old oil drum, but chores were not optional. Fortunately, during the school year, I only did chores before school and on weekends.
After school, I ran from the school bus down the driveway and through the house to my parents’ bedroom, where I could watch G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero on a 13” black and white television. Maybe because it was a UHF and not a VHF channel, this was the only of our two televisions that picked up FOX, even though it only had a stick antennae protruding out of the back while the other one was attached to a huge antennae on the roof. The only thing in the world better than the G.I. Joe cartoon was the Hasbro G.I. Joe toyline.
The first G.I Joe figure I got was the COBRA ninja known as Stormshadow. I was a shy kid, but I was so excited about this toy that I decided to participate in “show-and-tell” at school for the first time, to explain things such as: All of the G.I. Joe characters had code-names sort of like super heroes, and they all came with a file card description of their rank, abilities, personalities and real name… unless it was “Classified” or “Unknown.” The cool thing about the G.I. Joe action figures themselves was that the elbows and knees bent, the torso swiveled and you could attach a backpack onto them, making them far superior to Star Wars toys. The unimpressed reaction of my classmates to this incredible toy made me acutely aware that I had just voluntarily embarrassed myself; thus ending my public speaking career. It was 1984 and I was in second grade.
I received an allowance for chores (one to two dollars per week) and saved my money and also the “flag points” on the back of every box in order to buy more G.I. Joe action figures and vehicles. After getting Stormshadow, I spent what felt like forever saving up enough money to buy the “Dragonfly” helicopter that came with a Texas rancher code-named Wild Bill. It was $15.99.
Before I discovered G.I. Joe, I played “cowboys & Indians,” and had always understood that it was about Native Americans protecting their land from invaders unabashedly destroying it, so I didn’t trust Wild Bill. I pretended that he was a double agent. As my toy collection increased, I would continue to rearrange which figures were considered good guys; after all, this was my universe to manipulate as I pleased. For the most part, the actual good guys were drab and suspiciously homogenous, whereas the bad guys were a random hodge-podge of interesting characters that didn’t get along. One notable exception to this was Spirit, although now I realize it is sort of weird they gave the Native American a red loin cloth instead of military issue garb. (The G.I. Joe comic story arc would reveal that Stormshadow was in fact a good guy acting as a spy within the COBRA organization, and Hasbro re-released him with an outfit and gear that I liked even more than the original one.)
I had a bunch of Star Wars toys, but I never played Star Wars. They were mostly used as cannon fodder and substitutes for Joes I didn’t have. I used Luke Skywalker in Duke’s role and put Princess Leia on the bad side to be The Baroness. It was already 1985 before I purchased my next Joes: Tomax and Xamot. They were bankers, so they were obviously evil. The leader of COBRA was supposedly the egomaniac Emperor Serpentor, but I just couldn’t take an adult who dressed up in a snake suit and drove a hovercraft chariot very seriously. As a clone long before Jurassic Park, Serpentor was ahead of his time. (Remember, these were the days before there were clones in Star Wars- there was only a throw-away, non-descript mention of “the Clone Wars.”) It did not escape me that this made Serpentor expendable, because if he was killed, he could just be re-cloned. I also owned Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, but to me, Tomax and Xamot were the ones running COBRA from behind the scenes, funding and pulling the strings of the terrorists.
Speaking of ahead of its time, according to the cartoon’s theme song, “G.I. Joe is the codename for America's daring, highly-trained special mission force. Its purpose: to defend human freedom against COBRA- a ruthless, terrorist organization determined to rule the world.” Outside of G.I. Joe, there was literally no mention of terrorists in America in the ‘80s; the bad guys were generally considered to be the U.S.S.R.
I did not like playing indoor recess or P.E. with the other kids, so I frequently spent that time hiding alone under the bleachers in the gymnasium playing with the Star Wars and G.I. Joe toys I had smuggled in my pockets. I got caught once, in Kindergarten, by the P.E. teacher who spanked me in front of the class after I refused to answer his absurd question, “What are you doing under the bleachers?” After that, I mostly stuck to only hiding behind the bleachers when they were folded closed. Nobody looked for me there, because no adult could fathom that I could actually fit behind them. Eventually I did outgrow that spot, but then I figured out if I volunteered to fetch the rubber balls and then didn’t shut the door to the supply closet all the way, I could sneak back in there after delivering the balls. I did this for years until one day a P.E. instructor (not the same one who spanked me) walked in on me in there during recess. When the teacher that was supposed to be in charge of supervising the kids at recess couldn’t explain how I had gotten out of her sight, I knew I wasn’t getting in trouble.
This is why, when Zandar was introduced in 1986, he immediately became my second favorite character. He lived in the swamp and his specialty was hiding. He had a twin sister who was basically a method actress assassin and a creepy older brother, a “master of disguise,” who was also the leader of a biker gang and looked like a member of K.I.S.S. when he wasn’t wearing his mask. (The siblings’ skin turned blue when left in the sun.) In my recreation, the older brother remained a bad guy while the twins were good guys.
I drew topographic maps transforming my bedroom into G.I. Joe terrain, conceived original plots and wrote scripts for the figures. I sent in for the Steel Brigade character that came with a personalized bio card. I completed the two “Live the Adventure” code-breaking assignments and sent them in to get certificates and patches. I read several of the G.I. Joe comics, but they conflicted with my G.I. Joe universe, so I preferred reading Marvel comics. Two movies from 1985 that informed my G.I. Joe playing were Rambo: First Blood Part II and Witness, but mostly I just used my imagination.
My favorite figures- Stormshadow, Zandar, Zarana, Snake Eyes, Beach Head and Mainframe- became a splinter group headquartered at the Dagobah tree fort. G.I. Joe would contact them with special missions and they would consult with Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi and decide whether the mission was aligned with their code of striving for equality and justice. So they would carry out assignments like retrieving hostages and using money from Tomax and Xamot’s bank to feed starving children in Africa while the main regiment of G.I. Joes would have to do stuff like assassinate Serpentor or bomb the COBRA Hoth base themselves. This splinter group did not work alongside the other G.I. Joes, but they would often be assisted by the Ewoks. The official military’s stance on the Ewoks was that they didn’t exist. They also denied that there was a group of mutant bounty hunters led by Jabba the Hut living on an island used for nuclear testing.
Adults tentatively tolerated but frowned upon G.I. Joe. It was too violent. Sure, yeah, okay, whatever. The fact is, these toys were allowing me to manipulate, explore and ponder the world of adults with the pace, creativity and naïveté of the child I was. G.I. Joe taught me the importance of well-coordinated and communicated teamwork, but also that sometimes you have to go it alone. It allowed me to play through all kinds of ethical dilemmas and ponder the balance of justice through violence and justice through peace. As I got older, I began to understand the probability of surviving one dangerous, top-secret mission, let alone several per week. When you enact battle scenarios on a daily basis for years on end, you begin to ponder: If the bad guys were the ones who wanted to take over the world and the good guys were the ones in charge, how could the good guys have come to power without having first been the bad guys? Didn’t the bad guys simply want what the good guys had? As a kid, the terrorists I controlled never attacked without reason; that would have been a waste of time and resources. If G.I. Joe wanted to defeat COBRA, they had to learn to think like COBRA without underestimating them. Alternatively, instead of defeating them, they could learn to work together by finding common goals.
Because of G.I. Joe, I had things figured out by sixth grade that few adults seem to understand even to this day… and knowing is half the battle.
After school, I ran from the school bus down the driveway and through the house to my parents’ bedroom, where I could watch G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero on a 13” black and white television. Maybe because it was a UHF and not a VHF channel, this was the only of our two televisions that picked up FOX, even though it only had a stick antennae protruding out of the back while the other one was attached to a huge antennae on the roof. The only thing in the world better than the G.I. Joe cartoon was the Hasbro G.I. Joe toyline.
The first G.I Joe figure I got was the COBRA ninja known as Stormshadow. I was a shy kid, but I was so excited about this toy that I decided to participate in “show-and-tell” at school for the first time, to explain things such as: All of the G.I. Joe characters had code-names sort of like super heroes, and they all came with a file card description of their rank, abilities, personalities and real name… unless it was “Classified” or “Unknown.” The cool thing about the G.I. Joe action figures themselves was that the elbows and knees bent, the torso swiveled and you could attach a backpack onto them, making them far superior to Star Wars toys. The unimpressed reaction of my classmates to this incredible toy made me acutely aware that I had just voluntarily embarrassed myself; thus ending my public speaking career. It was 1984 and I was in second grade.
I received an allowance for chores (one to two dollars per week) and saved my money and also the “flag points” on the back of every box in order to buy more G.I. Joe action figures and vehicles. After getting Stormshadow, I spent what felt like forever saving up enough money to buy the “Dragonfly” helicopter that came with a Texas rancher code-named Wild Bill. It was $15.99.
Before I discovered G.I. Joe, I played “cowboys & Indians,” and had always understood that it was about Native Americans protecting their land from invaders unabashedly destroying it, so I didn’t trust Wild Bill. I pretended that he was a double agent. As my toy collection increased, I would continue to rearrange which figures were considered good guys; after all, this was my universe to manipulate as I pleased. For the most part, the actual good guys were drab and suspiciously homogenous, whereas the bad guys were a random hodge-podge of interesting characters that didn’t get along. One notable exception to this was Spirit, although now I realize it is sort of weird they gave the Native American a red loin cloth instead of military issue garb. (The G.I. Joe comic story arc would reveal that Stormshadow was in fact a good guy acting as a spy within the COBRA organization, and Hasbro re-released him with an outfit and gear that I liked even more than the original one.)
I had a bunch of Star Wars toys, but I never played Star Wars. They were mostly used as cannon fodder and substitutes for Joes I didn’t have. I used Luke Skywalker in Duke’s role and put Princess Leia on the bad side to be The Baroness. It was already 1985 before I purchased my next Joes: Tomax and Xamot. They were bankers, so they were obviously evil. The leader of COBRA was supposedly the egomaniac Emperor Serpentor, but I just couldn’t take an adult who dressed up in a snake suit and drove a hovercraft chariot very seriously. As a clone long before Jurassic Park, Serpentor was ahead of his time. (Remember, these were the days before there were clones in Star Wars- there was only a throw-away, non-descript mention of “the Clone Wars.”) It did not escape me that this made Serpentor expendable, because if he was killed, he could just be re-cloned. I also owned Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, but to me, Tomax and Xamot were the ones running COBRA from behind the scenes, funding and pulling the strings of the terrorists.
Speaking of ahead of its time, according to the cartoon’s theme song, “G.I. Joe is the codename for America's daring, highly-trained special mission force. Its purpose: to defend human freedom against COBRA- a ruthless, terrorist organization determined to rule the world.” Outside of G.I. Joe, there was literally no mention of terrorists in America in the ‘80s; the bad guys were generally considered to be the U.S.S.R.
I did not like playing indoor recess or P.E. with the other kids, so I frequently spent that time hiding alone under the bleachers in the gymnasium playing with the Star Wars and G.I. Joe toys I had smuggled in my pockets. I got caught once, in Kindergarten, by the P.E. teacher who spanked me in front of the class after I refused to answer his absurd question, “What are you doing under the bleachers?” After that, I mostly stuck to only hiding behind the bleachers when they were folded closed. Nobody looked for me there, because no adult could fathom that I could actually fit behind them. Eventually I did outgrow that spot, but then I figured out if I volunteered to fetch the rubber balls and then didn’t shut the door to the supply closet all the way, I could sneak back in there after delivering the balls. I did this for years until one day a P.E. instructor (not the same one who spanked me) walked in on me in there during recess. When the teacher that was supposed to be in charge of supervising the kids at recess couldn’t explain how I had gotten out of her sight, I knew I wasn’t getting in trouble.
This is why, when Zandar was introduced in 1986, he immediately became my second favorite character. He lived in the swamp and his specialty was hiding. He had a twin sister who was basically a method actress assassin and a creepy older brother, a “master of disguise,” who was also the leader of a biker gang and looked like a member of K.I.S.S. when he wasn’t wearing his mask. (The siblings’ skin turned blue when left in the sun.) In my recreation, the older brother remained a bad guy while the twins were good guys.
I drew topographic maps transforming my bedroom into G.I. Joe terrain, conceived original plots and wrote scripts for the figures. I sent in for the Steel Brigade character that came with a personalized bio card. I completed the two “Live the Adventure” code-breaking assignments and sent them in to get certificates and patches. I read several of the G.I. Joe comics, but they conflicted with my G.I. Joe universe, so I preferred reading Marvel comics. Two movies from 1985 that informed my G.I. Joe playing were Rambo: First Blood Part II and Witness, but mostly I just used my imagination.
My favorite figures- Stormshadow, Zandar, Zarana, Snake Eyes, Beach Head and Mainframe- became a splinter group headquartered at the Dagobah tree fort. G.I. Joe would contact them with special missions and they would consult with Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi and decide whether the mission was aligned with their code of striving for equality and justice. So they would carry out assignments like retrieving hostages and using money from Tomax and Xamot’s bank to feed starving children in Africa while the main regiment of G.I. Joes would have to do stuff like assassinate Serpentor or bomb the COBRA Hoth base themselves. This splinter group did not work alongside the other G.I. Joes, but they would often be assisted by the Ewoks. The official military’s stance on the Ewoks was that they didn’t exist. They also denied that there was a group of mutant bounty hunters led by Jabba the Hut living on an island used for nuclear testing.
Adults tentatively tolerated but frowned upon G.I. Joe. It was too violent. Sure, yeah, okay, whatever. The fact is, these toys were allowing me to manipulate, explore and ponder the world of adults with the pace, creativity and naïveté of the child I was. G.I. Joe taught me the importance of well-coordinated and communicated teamwork, but also that sometimes you have to go it alone. It allowed me to play through all kinds of ethical dilemmas and ponder the balance of justice through violence and justice through peace. As I got older, I began to understand the probability of surviving one dangerous, top-secret mission, let alone several per week. When you enact battle scenarios on a daily basis for years on end, you begin to ponder: If the bad guys were the ones who wanted to take over the world and the good guys were the ones in charge, how could the good guys have come to power without having first been the bad guys? Didn’t the bad guys simply want what the good guys had? As a kid, the terrorists I controlled never attacked without reason; that would have been a waste of time and resources. If G.I. Joe wanted to defeat COBRA, they had to learn to think like COBRA without underestimating them. Alternatively, instead of defeating them, they could learn to work together by finding common goals.
Because of G.I. Joe, I had things figured out by sixth grade that few adults seem to understand even to this day… and knowing is half the battle.
Saturday, November 1, 2014
The Importance of Elliott Smith
When I was an audio engineer, I had a subscription to Tape Op magazine. Around 2000, I read an interview with Elliott Smith which intrigued me enough to listen to his latest album. I didn’t like it. Another whiny white male, I thought.
I blaming my reaction on Coldplay, who had just come out with a terrible song called “Yellow,” that was wildly popular for some reason. The lyrics are stupid, trite and unironically nonsensical. Here’s a sample:
I take issue with people and things that are disingenuous. Males have established a long tradition of trying to get in girls’ pants by telling girls what they think they want to hear that really annoys me. The annoying part is that girls actually fall for that crap. So did he jump or did he swim? Obviously he’s flat out lying. When a guy is trying to woo you and instead accidentally calls you a coward and then gives an ultimatum, which he admits is cowardly on his part, my advice is to run away from him. But what do I know. I suppose being a songwriter with no grasp of language doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person.
Another thing I don’t understand is chronic depression. What are so many people so sad about? Obviously there are a lot of bad things in life, but they are either within our ability to change or they aren’t, so your options in life are to be confident you can change and hopeful others will. See? There you go- I was just able to solve everybody’s problems with one sentence. With that attitude, it is understandable why white males sobbing over their presumably posh lives tend to annoy me. I am usually a very rational and objective thinker, so I tend to be incredulous that people can’t just get over their petty selves and strive on.
A few years after first dismissing Elliott Smith I heard him again, after moving in with a roommate whose two favorite musicians were Smith and Syd Barrett. I didn’t get the appeal of Barrett when I first heard him either, but just last year I was challenged to listen to the debut Pink Floyd album. I’ve never liked Pink Floyd- pretentious drivel is what I’d call it. “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” was actually pretty good, though, which caused me to revisit Syd Barrett and find him much more interesting than I’d remembered. It was through this circuitous route that I decided to give Elliott Smith another try.
Smith’s style fits snugly between late Beatles and John Lennon solo. He probably spent a lot of time listening to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975). He doesn’t seem to be someone with an extensive musical library, but rather someone who has spent a lot of time shut up alone writing, rewriting and practicing. And that’s the thing about Elliott Smith- after listening to his music, you automatically assume you know everything about the guy. It’s funny to realize that, perhaps, he’s never broken up with a girl he loves; it’s just a topic he enjoys writing songs about. Smith’s songs are so utterly heartfelt, personal and convincing the proposal that they could be just stories seems preposterous.
I’ve had my heart broken by my fair share of girls, but would like to think I’ve never whined about it as much as this guy. In fact, I hope nobody’s taken a break up as hard as Elliott Smith. Holy Christ, dude, get it together. He alternatively blames self for his own inadequacies and spews anger towards his ex. Running together the lyrics from “I Didn’t Understand” and “A Question Mark,” both from XO (1998), makes it pretty obvious that Smith has some maladaptive coping strategies:
…
Even though the subject matter and instrumentation are the same, these two songs have completely different vibes- one is a cappella and the other features a full band, including a peppy baritone sax. It’s almost as if he’s cursed to keep writing on the same topics despite his uncanny ability to write songs that don’t sound derivative. Smith is not oblivious to how extreme his inability to let go and move on comes across. He not only perceives this, but responds to this criticism in a couple songs, including “Southern Belle,” from Elliott Smith (1995):
Smith tends to drown his vocals in either a sea of close harmonic overdubs or a Leslie organ speaker, giving the impression he must be uncomfortable with the sound of his own voice. One wonders whether he is insecure with his talents or in revealing the subject matter. Wrapping the words into this almost surreal cloud forces the listener not only to want to understand the lyrics but pay close attention in order to do so. In the end, the vocal effect provides an honest, distressed and soul-bearing atmosphere that effectively creates contrast on the rare occasion he reveals his actual naked, lonely voice.
The production sensibility is one way in which Smith informs the audience that the words must be personally meaningful. Another is by the unembellished frankness of the lyrics themselves.
This song in particular reads to me very much like a Charles Bukowski poem. Bukowski is the type of poet who can convince you the only solace in life is at a horse race, even though you’ve never been to a racetrack. One thing Bukowski is masterful at is putting details into poems that wouldn’t really make sense to be there unless they were true, and this is a concept that Smith also exploits. But while Bukowski is resolute and defiant, Elliott Smith is obsessed with missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential. He is a staunch pessimist.
I, on the other hand, am an optimist. Some might think I’m not because I tend to be overly critical, but that is precisely because I seek out the best of the best. I am wired to value productivity, and neither negativity nor dwelling on the past are useful. I dislike time-wasting and have never understood procrastinators. I’m easily amused and can entertain myself effortlessly. I'm a pretty normal guy. I don’t have much in common with Elliott Smith.
Figure 8 would be Smith’s final studio album. The first track from it makes us acutely aware that his mental issues may be far worse than we imagine:
This song, which is played in a haunting minor key and includes disorienting bridges, is downright frightening, and I don’t quite know what to make of it. I like to read about serial killers because their mindset is fascinatingly unfamiliar. This distinguishes "Son of Sam" from perhaps my favorite Elliott Smith song, "Between The Bars," from either/or (1997). In this song, he makes the first person character a sort of tragic, desperate wanna-be hero trying to save the wrong person and making unkeepable and ill-advised promises.
I like this song because, unlike most of Smith’s work, I can actually relate to it. I bring this up specifically because I think one of the most wonderful things about art is also something we need to be wary of- we tend to embrace art we can relate to and reject art we can’t. And that’s why Elliott Smith is important- he is a veritable window into mental illness. He acts as a voice for millions of people battling depression especially and mental diseases in general. Despite the fact that I have a BA in psychology and have dated a couple crazies, I don’t know much about mental illness. As un-hip as it is to admit it, I’m relatively sane. While those of us that don’t struggle with these issues tend to imagine them not dissimilar to how we feel upon finding expired milk in the fridge, Elliott Smith tells us how it really feels- and we should all be taking notes and learning from him for the betterment of human kind.
People who feel like Elliott Smith have lost access to perspective. Programs utilizing psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers trained to help these people regain an undistorted viewpoint are severely under-funded in America. In fact, our mental health care system ranks last among first world countries. In many ways, we have simply written off mental illness as an inevitable and unavoidable part of our culture. As a result, millions suffering from mental illness end up becoming homeless, abused or violent.
Elliott Smith died from two stab wounds to the chest on October 21st, 2003. They were probably self-inflicted.
I blaming my reaction on Coldplay, who had just come out with a terrible song called “Yellow,” that was wildly popular for some reason. The lyrics are stupid, trite and unironically nonsensical. Here’s a sample:
I swam across
I jumped across for you
Oh what a thing to do
'Cause you were all yellow
I drew a line
I drew a line for you
Oh what a thing to do
And it was all yellow
I take issue with people and things that are disingenuous. Males have established a long tradition of trying to get in girls’ pants by telling girls what they think they want to hear that really annoys me. The annoying part is that girls actually fall for that crap. So did he jump or did he swim? Obviously he’s flat out lying. When a guy is trying to woo you and instead accidentally calls you a coward and then gives an ultimatum, which he admits is cowardly on his part, my advice is to run away from him. But what do I know. I suppose being a songwriter with no grasp of language doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person.
Another thing I don’t understand is chronic depression. What are so many people so sad about? Obviously there are a lot of bad things in life, but they are either within our ability to change or they aren’t, so your options in life are to be confident you can change and hopeful others will. See? There you go- I was just able to solve everybody’s problems with one sentence. With that attitude, it is understandable why white males sobbing over their presumably posh lives tend to annoy me. I am usually a very rational and objective thinker, so I tend to be incredulous that people can’t just get over their petty selves and strive on.
A few years after first dismissing Elliott Smith I heard him again, after moving in with a roommate whose two favorite musicians were Smith and Syd Barrett. I didn’t get the appeal of Barrett when I first heard him either, but just last year I was challenged to listen to the debut Pink Floyd album. I’ve never liked Pink Floyd- pretentious drivel is what I’d call it. “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” was actually pretty good, though, which caused me to revisit Syd Barrett and find him much more interesting than I’d remembered. It was through this circuitous route that I decided to give Elliott Smith another try.
Smith’s style fits snugly between late Beatles and John Lennon solo. He probably spent a lot of time listening to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975). He doesn’t seem to be someone with an extensive musical library, but rather someone who has spent a lot of time shut up alone writing, rewriting and practicing. And that’s the thing about Elliott Smith- after listening to his music, you automatically assume you know everything about the guy. It’s funny to realize that, perhaps, he’s never broken up with a girl he loves; it’s just a topic he enjoys writing songs about. Smith’s songs are so utterly heartfelt, personal and convincing the proposal that they could be just stories seems preposterous.
I’ve had my heart broken by my fair share of girls, but would like to think I’ve never whined about it as much as this guy. In fact, I hope nobody’s taken a break up as hard as Elliott Smith. Holy Christ, dude, get it together. He alternatively blames self for his own inadequacies and spews anger towards his ex. Running together the lyrics from “I Didn’t Understand” and “A Question Mark,” both from XO (1998), makes it pretty obvious that Smith has some maladaptive coping strategies:
Thought you'd be looking for the next in line to love
Then ignore, put out, and put away
And so you'd soon be leaving me alone like I'm supposed to be
Tonight, tomorrow, and every day
There's nothing here that you'll miss
I can guarantee you this is a cloud of smoke
Trying to occupy space
What a fucking joke
What a fucking joke
I waited for a bus to separate the both of us
And take me off, far away from you
'Cause my feelings never change a bit
I always feel like shit
I don't know why, I guess that I just do
You once talked to me about love
And you painted pictures of a Never-Never land
And I could have gone to that place
But I didn't understand
I didn't understand
I didn't understand
…
I got a question mark
You got a need to always take some shot in the dark
I don't have to make pretend the picture I'm in is totally clear
You think that all things have a way they ought to appear
'Cause you know you know you know you know
You know you know you know you know
You know I don't
I dream
Don't know what you mean
Panic called you out and took you in
Giving you an easy game and letting you win
Giving back a little hatred now to the world
'Cause it treated you bad
'Cause you couldn't keep the great unknown from making you mad
'Cause you know you know you know you know
You know you know you know you know
You know I don't
I dream
Don't know what you mean
Said your final word, but honesty and love could have kept us together
One day you'll see it's worth it after all
If you ever want to say you're sorry you can give me a call
Even though the subject matter and instrumentation are the same, these two songs have completely different vibes- one is a cappella and the other features a full band, including a peppy baritone sax. It’s almost as if he’s cursed to keep writing on the same topics despite his uncanny ability to write songs that don’t sound derivative. Smith is not oblivious to how extreme his inability to let go and move on comes across. He not only perceives this, but responds to this criticism in a couple songs, including “Southern Belle,” from Elliott Smith (1995):
Killing a southern belle
Is all you know how to do
That, and give other people hell
It's what they expect from you too
But I wouldn't have you how you want
I don't want to walk around
I don't even want to breathe
I live in a southern town
Where all you can do is grit your teeth
But I wouldn't have you how you want
How come you're not ashamed of what you are?
And sorry that you're the one she got?
Ain't nobody looking now
Nobody nothing's said
No one's about to shout
Nobody's seeing red
But I wouldn't have you how you want
You're killing a southern belle
Killing a southern belle
Killing a southern belle
Smith tends to drown his vocals in either a sea of close harmonic overdubs or a Leslie organ speaker, giving the impression he must be uncomfortable with the sound of his own voice. One wonders whether he is insecure with his talents or in revealing the subject matter. Wrapping the words into this almost surreal cloud forces the listener not only to want to understand the lyrics but pay close attention in order to do so. In the end, the vocal effect provides an honest, distressed and soul-bearing atmosphere that effectively creates contrast on the rare occasion he reveals his actual naked, lonely voice.
The production sensibility is one way in which Smith informs the audience that the words must be personally meaningful. Another is by the unembellished frankness of the lyrics themselves.
"Clementine" from Elliott Smith
They're waking you up to close the bar
The street's wet, you can tell by the sound of the cars
The bartender's singing "Clementine"
While he's turning around the Open sign
"Dreadful sorry, Clementine"
Though you're still her man
It seems a long time gone
Maybe the whole thing's wrong
What if she thinks so but just didn't say so?
You drank yourself into slow-mo
Made an angel in the snow
You did anything to pass the time
And keep that song out of your mind
"Oh my darling
Oh my darling
Oh my darling Clementine
Dreadful sorry, Clementine"
This song in particular reads to me very much like a Charles Bukowski poem. Bukowski is the type of poet who can convince you the only solace in life is at a horse race, even though you’ve never been to a racetrack. One thing Bukowski is masterful at is putting details into poems that wouldn’t really make sense to be there unless they were true, and this is a concept that Smith also exploits. But while Bukowski is resolute and defiant, Elliott Smith is obsessed with missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential. He is a staunch pessimist.
“No Name No. 5” from Figure 8 (2000)
Got bitten fingernails and a head full of the past
And everybody's gone at last
Sweet, sweet smile that's fading fast
'Cause everybody's gone at last
Don't get upset about it
No not anymore
There's nothing wrong that wasn't wrong before
Had a second alone with a chance let pass
And everybody's gone at last
Well I hope you're not waiting
Waiting 'round for me
'Cause I'm not going anywhere, obviously
Got a broken heart and your name on my cast
And everybody's gone at last
Everybody's gone at last
I, on the other hand, am an optimist. Some might think I’m not because I tend to be overly critical, but that is precisely because I seek out the best of the best. I am wired to value productivity, and neither negativity nor dwelling on the past are useful. I dislike time-wasting and have never understood procrastinators. I’m easily amused and can entertain myself effortlessly. I'm a pretty normal guy. I don’t have much in common with Elliott Smith.
Figure 8 would be Smith’s final studio album. The first track from it makes us acutely aware that his mental issues may be far worse than we imagine:
"Son of Sam"
Something's happening, don't speak too soon
I told the boss off and made my move
Got nowhere to go
Son of Sam, son of the shining path, the clouded mind
The couple killer each and every time
I'm not uncomfortable, feeling weird
Lonely leered, options disappeared
But I know what to do
Son of Sam, son of a doctor's touch, a nurse's love
Acting under orders from above
King for a day!
Son of Sam, son of the shining path, the clouded mind
The couple killer running out of time
Shiva opens her arms now to make sure I don't get too far
I may talk in my sleep tonight 'cause I don't know what I am
I'm a little like you, more like Son of Sam
This song, which is played in a haunting minor key and includes disorienting bridges, is downright frightening, and I don’t quite know what to make of it. I like to read about serial killers because their mindset is fascinatingly unfamiliar. This distinguishes "Son of Sam" from perhaps my favorite Elliott Smith song, "Between The Bars," from either/or (1997). In this song, he makes the first person character a sort of tragic, desperate wanna-be hero trying to save the wrong person and making unkeepable and ill-advised promises.
Drink up baby, stay up all night
With the things you could do
You won't but you might
The potential you'll be
That you'll never see
The promises you'll only make
Drink up with me now
And forget all about
The pressure of days
Do what I say
And I'll make you okay
And drive them away
The images stuck in your head
People you've been before
That you don't want around anymore
That push and shove and won't bend to your will
I'll keep them still
Drink up baby, look at the stars
I'll kiss you again between the bars
Where I'm seeing you there
With your hands in the air
Waiting to finally be caught
Drink up one more time
And I'll make you mine
Keep you apart
Deep in my heart
Separate from the rest
Where I like you the best
And keep the things you forgot
The people you've been before
That you don't want around anymore
That push and shove and won't bend to your will
I'll keep them still
I like this song because, unlike most of Smith’s work, I can actually relate to it. I bring this up specifically because I think one of the most wonderful things about art is also something we need to be wary of- we tend to embrace art we can relate to and reject art we can’t. And that’s why Elliott Smith is important- he is a veritable window into mental illness. He acts as a voice for millions of people battling depression especially and mental diseases in general. Despite the fact that I have a BA in psychology and have dated a couple crazies, I don’t know much about mental illness. As un-hip as it is to admit it, I’m relatively sane. While those of us that don’t struggle with these issues tend to imagine them not dissimilar to how we feel upon finding expired milk in the fridge, Elliott Smith tells us how it really feels- and we should all be taking notes and learning from him for the betterment of human kind.
People who feel like Elliott Smith have lost access to perspective. Programs utilizing psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers trained to help these people regain an undistorted viewpoint are severely under-funded in America. In fact, our mental health care system ranks last among first world countries. In many ways, we have simply written off mental illness as an inevitable and unavoidable part of our culture. As a result, millions suffering from mental illness end up becoming homeless, abused or violent.
Elliott Smith died from two stab wounds to the chest on October 21st, 2003. They were probably self-inflicted.
“Oh Well, Okay" from XO
Here's the silhouette, the face always turned away
The bleeding color gone to black, dying like a day
Couldn't figure out what made you so unhappy
Shook your head to say no, no, no
And stopped for a spell
And stayed that way
Oh well, okay
I got pictures, I just don't see it anymore
Climbing hour upon hour through a total bore
With the one I keep, where it never fades
In the safety of a pitch-black mind
An airless cell that blocks the day
Oh well, okay
If you get a feeling next time you see me
Do me a favor and let me know
'Cause it's hard to tell
It's hard to say
Oh well, okay
Oh well, okay
Oh well, okay
Monday, October 27, 2014
The Importance of Tattoos
Some consider tattoos a waste of money, and in many ways they are. I consider things like big houses, fancy vehicles and jewelry a waste of money, but I don’t have those things. I have tattoos. I believe tattoos offer something beyond the feelings of identity and pride that we Americans seek in the things we buy. I don’t know whether tattoos offer anything that justifies the expense, but I think there’s an unfair juxtaposition between the perceptions of having a sports car and getting tattooed- whereas one is lauded for indicating success, the other is derided for demonstrating a lack of judgment.
At the root of this issue is a significant misunderstanding among the uninitiated as to why people get tattooed. This in turn means there are vastly different reasons why people get their first tattoo and why they get their second one. I’m not going to pretend I know the myriad of reasons why people get tattooed; my intention is to use my subjective experiences with tattoos to attempt to give non-tattooed people a fuller perspective on tattoos than what American culture generally provides.
Part I: The First Tat
Most people want their first tattoo to be some object that is personally significant and meaningful. They usually want it to be small and hide-able. On the other hand, first timers who get large tats or tats in visible areas are likely either tattoo artists themselves or want to impress others; the latter might fit the stereotype of being socially defiant or in a gang. Personally, I’ve always thought tattoos were cool. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant recommended not trying to decipher human motivations because they are far too abstract.
First-timers figure it’ll probably hurt a bit. How getting tattooed actually feels depends on size, density, placement and, most importantly, mental state, and can run the gamut from ticklish to excruciating, but generally feels like a combination of being burned and scratched. Tats are generally created in three passes: hard lines, greyscale shading and then color- with color sometimes including several passes. There can be another pass of line detailing over the top of all that. Multiple passes over the same area of skin during a one-session tat can be a bitch. The process is accompanied by an endorphin rush that peaks after about an hour and a half to two hours and crashes around three and a half to four hours. Therefore, tats that take less than an hour can act as teasers where you end up wishing the experience had taken longer. (If you think a tattoo lasting less than an hour is extremely painful, I’d kindly suggest you are a wuss.) Tats lasting longer than four hours require either a high pain threshold or a strong mental attitude toward overcoming the pain.
One’s own reaction to their first tattoo is either extreme pride or extreme shame; the basic thought in both cases being, “I can’t believe I did that!” Those experiencing pride will be the ones wearing a cut of clothing specifically chosen to show-off their tattoo, even if it is a bad one, which a normal outfit would have covered up. Wondering why another is not ashamed of their tattoo that you would NEVER get reveals your character to be wanting, not theirs. Our species could benefit from being a lot less judgmental and feeling a lot less shame.
These days, it seems like there’s a tattoo parlor on every street corner, but even now, on most days an artist that you don’t have to make an appointment with is either a novice or had a cancellation (which is very common). In the old days, you’d choose your tattoo from a set of “flash” or drawings the tattoo artist had displayed. Sometimes these were designs from the artist themselves, and sometimes they were cribbed or purchased from another tattoo artist. Today, everybody wants a “custom” tattoo. This causes two problems- you may be asking for something that that tattoo artist doesn’t know how to render in tattoo form and your idea might be stupid. I recommend considering any tattoo idea from the perspective of how you’d react to it if you saw it as flash advertised by a tattoo artist. Great t-shirt ideas do not always make good tattoos.
Artists tend to have photograph examples of pieces they’ve done and enjoyed doing. The best thing to do is find a portfolio with images you appreciate, and ask for something that you want done in that artist’s style. Tattoo placement is another important factor that the artist will likely understand the repercussions of better than the canvas. People may not realize that tattoo artists will generally ask questions like, “What do you do for a living?” and desire for a third-party reaction of, “Oh my god, who did that?” to be akin to that of a museum patron and not a homicide investigator. Tattoos should be thought of as collaborations, with the person holding the gun being the technical and artistic expert.
If you have some friend coercing or shaming you into getting a tattoo, that person is a douchebag that you should stop associating with. If you want “Believe” written on your ankle, you don’t need an artist with a six month waiting list. You do, however, want to see examples of lettering from the artist and need to make sure it gets spelled correctly. Another thing to be mindful of is to make sure an artist hasn’t accidentally mirrored an image when making the stencil- which can be especially confusing when you’re looking at the image in a mirror.
For the first few days, a new tattoo will feel like a sunburn; then it’ll start to peel and itch. Closely follow the artist’s recommended two week aftercare program- unless you want a splotchy, faded or infected tat. (On a back piece, assistance in applying cream/lotion during this time is essential.) Applying sunscreen is NOT the same as keeping it out of direct sunlight. One thing that is often not articulated is that if you apply pressure to a fresh tat, it will stick to and transfer itself to fabric. If this happens, you have to soak the fabric with water before gently removing it from your skin.
Part II: The Repeat Customer
The experience of getting a tattoo offers an acute, heightened awareness of one’s own body unlike anything else. The nervous system is a fascinating thing, with different parts of the body sending different interpretations of the same sensation to the brain. If you’re not watching, it is often impossible to guess exactly which part of a tattoo is being worked on. Adapting to the sensation of being jabbed with rapidly-vibrating needles is a skill that can be improved upon over time. Not only are coping strategies acquired, but your body builds up a tolerance to the pain. As you become accustomed to getting tattooed, future sittings hurt less. It still hurts, though.
The best way to deal with the pain is to accept it. Compared to the pain of having your limbs ripped off by horses or getting punched by Brock Lesner, it’s really not that big of a deal. When an artist is really digging in with a fifteen needle bar, I remind myself that’s the feeling of progress. You can also focus on appreciating the warmth of the tattoo gun, thinking of it as a localized heating device. Your body tends to want to go into fight-or-flight mode, but if you fight or struggle against it, not wanting it to hurt, you won’t be able to stay relaxed and your body will start to twitch, tighten and flinch. Distracting your mind (choosing the “flight” response) by thinking of anything and everything you can also works to make the experience less painful, but only in spurts. How you deal with pain reveals character. Tattoos not only demonstrate but also teach discipline, commitment and humility. This is why people go back for more. It is no wonder they are popular within organizations that value loyalty.
Eventually, it doesn’t matter to the wearer whether his tattoos are visible to others. These tattoos are not necessarily there for others to notice or comment upon. People will ask, “What’s that say?” and I’ll have no idea what their talking about because, in general, I don’t think about or notice my own tattoos any more than, for example, my own ears. When I see another’s tattoo, I might think, Wow, that’s small, but only an idiot would actually share their opinion of another’s tat as if it mattered. (Perhaps the strangest comment I’ve gotten from another upon seeing one of my tattoos has been, “Did you get bored one day or something?” I can’t relate to thinking of a tattoo as being something done on a whim.) The arms are the least painful area to get tattooed and the neck is the most painful, so those are incentives to get those areas done; reasons that have nothing to do with being socially defiant or a gang-banger. (For the curious, the shin, ribs and clavicle are the most painful areas I’ve had tattooed.)
Everyone with a tattoo participated in its creation. The shape and skin tone of your unique body irreplicably contribute to the finished piece. The final product becomes a literal part of its owner that can be felt for the rest of their lives. (Tats itch in cold weather.) Repeat customers understand that tattoos are a medium through which artists can express themselves. We respect and trust the tattoo artist fully. After the first, it is realized the meaning and symbolism of the tattoo runs deeper than whatever object it happens to be. Only a tattoo virgin would see someone with roses on their arm and declare, “You must really like roses!” What a tattoo is of is almost beside the point.
America is a country with a lot of spoiled brats- whites especially- getting through life by avoiding any experience that involves discomfort and pain. This strategy makes us vulnerable and unprepared when the inevitable illness, disease or confrontation occurs. Tattooing offers a safe and beautiful way of experiencing and overcoming pain, and leaves us with a permanent reminder of that achievement. There is nothing more dangerous than a culture that condones conformity, homogeneity, passivity and painlessness while rejecting individualism. Intolerance is the single greatest threat to humankind. When we eschew our ability to have personal experiences and preferences, we increase the risk of being stripped of those privileges. We should not be speaking disparagingly about the barbarism of tattoos but instead lauding them for being an essential part of a progressive civilization. Tattoos are art, and without art, life is meaningless.
At the root of this issue is a significant misunderstanding among the uninitiated as to why people get tattooed. This in turn means there are vastly different reasons why people get their first tattoo and why they get their second one. I’m not going to pretend I know the myriad of reasons why people get tattooed; my intention is to use my subjective experiences with tattoos to attempt to give non-tattooed people a fuller perspective on tattoos than what American culture generally provides.
Part I: The First Tat
Most people want their first tattoo to be some object that is personally significant and meaningful. They usually want it to be small and hide-able. On the other hand, first timers who get large tats or tats in visible areas are likely either tattoo artists themselves or want to impress others; the latter might fit the stereotype of being socially defiant or in a gang. Personally, I’ve always thought tattoos were cool. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant recommended not trying to decipher human motivations because they are far too abstract.
First-timers figure it’ll probably hurt a bit. How getting tattooed actually feels depends on size, density, placement and, most importantly, mental state, and can run the gamut from ticklish to excruciating, but generally feels like a combination of being burned and scratched. Tats are generally created in three passes: hard lines, greyscale shading and then color- with color sometimes including several passes. There can be another pass of line detailing over the top of all that. Multiple passes over the same area of skin during a one-session tat can be a bitch. The process is accompanied by an endorphin rush that peaks after about an hour and a half to two hours and crashes around three and a half to four hours. Therefore, tats that take less than an hour can act as teasers where you end up wishing the experience had taken longer. (If you think a tattoo lasting less than an hour is extremely painful, I’d kindly suggest you are a wuss.) Tats lasting longer than four hours require either a high pain threshold or a strong mental attitude toward overcoming the pain.
One’s own reaction to their first tattoo is either extreme pride or extreme shame; the basic thought in both cases being, “I can’t believe I did that!” Those experiencing pride will be the ones wearing a cut of clothing specifically chosen to show-off their tattoo, even if it is a bad one, which a normal outfit would have covered up. Wondering why another is not ashamed of their tattoo that you would NEVER get reveals your character to be wanting, not theirs. Our species could benefit from being a lot less judgmental and feeling a lot less shame.
These days, it seems like there’s a tattoo parlor on every street corner, but even now, on most days an artist that you don’t have to make an appointment with is either a novice or had a cancellation (which is very common). In the old days, you’d choose your tattoo from a set of “flash” or drawings the tattoo artist had displayed. Sometimes these were designs from the artist themselves, and sometimes they were cribbed or purchased from another tattoo artist. Today, everybody wants a “custom” tattoo. This causes two problems- you may be asking for something that that tattoo artist doesn’t know how to render in tattoo form and your idea might be stupid. I recommend considering any tattoo idea from the perspective of how you’d react to it if you saw it as flash advertised by a tattoo artist. Great t-shirt ideas do not always make good tattoos.
Artists tend to have photograph examples of pieces they’ve done and enjoyed doing. The best thing to do is find a portfolio with images you appreciate, and ask for something that you want done in that artist’s style. Tattoo placement is another important factor that the artist will likely understand the repercussions of better than the canvas. People may not realize that tattoo artists will generally ask questions like, “What do you do for a living?” and desire for a third-party reaction of, “Oh my god, who did that?” to be akin to that of a museum patron and not a homicide investigator. Tattoos should be thought of as collaborations, with the person holding the gun being the technical and artistic expert.
If you have some friend coercing or shaming you into getting a tattoo, that person is a douchebag that you should stop associating with. If you want “Believe” written on your ankle, you don’t need an artist with a six month waiting list. You do, however, want to see examples of lettering from the artist and need to make sure it gets spelled correctly. Another thing to be mindful of is to make sure an artist hasn’t accidentally mirrored an image when making the stencil- which can be especially confusing when you’re looking at the image in a mirror.
For the first few days, a new tattoo will feel like a sunburn; then it’ll start to peel and itch. Closely follow the artist’s recommended two week aftercare program- unless you want a splotchy, faded or infected tat. (On a back piece, assistance in applying cream/lotion during this time is essential.) Applying sunscreen is NOT the same as keeping it out of direct sunlight. One thing that is often not articulated is that if you apply pressure to a fresh tat, it will stick to and transfer itself to fabric. If this happens, you have to soak the fabric with water before gently removing it from your skin.
Part II: The Repeat Customer
The experience of getting a tattoo offers an acute, heightened awareness of one’s own body unlike anything else. The nervous system is a fascinating thing, with different parts of the body sending different interpretations of the same sensation to the brain. If you’re not watching, it is often impossible to guess exactly which part of a tattoo is being worked on. Adapting to the sensation of being jabbed with rapidly-vibrating needles is a skill that can be improved upon over time. Not only are coping strategies acquired, but your body builds up a tolerance to the pain. As you become accustomed to getting tattooed, future sittings hurt less. It still hurts, though.
The best way to deal with the pain is to accept it. Compared to the pain of having your limbs ripped off by horses or getting punched by Brock Lesner, it’s really not that big of a deal. When an artist is really digging in with a fifteen needle bar, I remind myself that’s the feeling of progress. You can also focus on appreciating the warmth of the tattoo gun, thinking of it as a localized heating device. Your body tends to want to go into fight-or-flight mode, but if you fight or struggle against it, not wanting it to hurt, you won’t be able to stay relaxed and your body will start to twitch, tighten and flinch. Distracting your mind (choosing the “flight” response) by thinking of anything and everything you can also works to make the experience less painful, but only in spurts. How you deal with pain reveals character. Tattoos not only demonstrate but also teach discipline, commitment and humility. This is why people go back for more. It is no wonder they are popular within organizations that value loyalty.
Eventually, it doesn’t matter to the wearer whether his tattoos are visible to others. These tattoos are not necessarily there for others to notice or comment upon. People will ask, “What’s that say?” and I’ll have no idea what their talking about because, in general, I don’t think about or notice my own tattoos any more than, for example, my own ears. When I see another’s tattoo, I might think, Wow, that’s small, but only an idiot would actually share their opinion of another’s tat as if it mattered. (Perhaps the strangest comment I’ve gotten from another upon seeing one of my tattoos has been, “Did you get bored one day or something?” I can’t relate to thinking of a tattoo as being something done on a whim.) The arms are the least painful area to get tattooed and the neck is the most painful, so those are incentives to get those areas done; reasons that have nothing to do with being socially defiant or a gang-banger. (For the curious, the shin, ribs and clavicle are the most painful areas I’ve had tattooed.)
Everyone with a tattoo participated in its creation. The shape and skin tone of your unique body irreplicably contribute to the finished piece. The final product becomes a literal part of its owner that can be felt for the rest of their lives. (Tats itch in cold weather.) Repeat customers understand that tattoos are a medium through which artists can express themselves. We respect and trust the tattoo artist fully. After the first, it is realized the meaning and symbolism of the tattoo runs deeper than whatever object it happens to be. Only a tattoo virgin would see someone with roses on their arm and declare, “You must really like roses!” What a tattoo is of is almost beside the point.
America is a country with a lot of spoiled brats- whites especially- getting through life by avoiding any experience that involves discomfort and pain. This strategy makes us vulnerable and unprepared when the inevitable illness, disease or confrontation occurs. Tattooing offers a safe and beautiful way of experiencing and overcoming pain, and leaves us with a permanent reminder of that achievement. There is nothing more dangerous than a culture that condones conformity, homogeneity, passivity and painlessness while rejecting individualism. Intolerance is the single greatest threat to humankind. When we eschew our ability to have personal experiences and preferences, we increase the risk of being stripped of those privileges. We should not be speaking disparagingly about the barbarism of tattoos but instead lauding them for being an essential part of a progressive civilization. Tattoos are art, and without art, life is meaningless.
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
The Importance of Jay Adams
Growing up in rural Iowa in the early 1980s, I was really into superheroes. I ran around the farmstead where I lived imagining super powers for myself and using them to defeat invisible bad guys. Around fourth grade I discovered Marvel comic books through a classmate, and soon couldn’t get enough of them. J.J. had inherited piles of 1970s era comic books from his older brothers that he doled out to three or four of us at school. I would sometimes sleep over at J.J.’s house over the weekends, where he would grab stacks of magazines from his brothers’ bedrooms for me to pick and choose from. Amongst the comic books were other magazines from the same era, including Mad (which I didn’t understand at all), Rolling Stone (which I had been led to believe was Satanic) and Skateboarder. The only thing I knew about skateboarding was that it had been invented by Marty McFly. Flipping through the pages of Skateboarder to see what it was all about, I came across this picture:
I was enthralled and confused. Somehow, this wasn’t a picture of a kid falling down. It was only after imagining the photo as a comic book drawing that I realized I’d seen that pose before- from Spider-Man. The incidental old man seemingly sinking into the pavement in the distance provided the perfect contrast to this death-defying kid. The only photograph I had seen with this combination of grace, skill and determination was a poster of Dr. J our principal had hanging in his office. I had to find out who this person was.
The picture was from a series of articles by Craig Stecyk III about a group of skateboarders in southern California called the Z-Boys. Stecyk was the graphic artist at Zephr surfboard shop, which was located in the rough slums of South Santa Monica known as Dogtown. Instead of rainbows and sun rays, Stecyk put graffiti-influenced designs onto surfboards handmade by Jeff Ho and sold them to the hoodlums from both South Santa Monica and Venice who surfed a cove containing the remains of an abandoned amusement park and frequently broke their boards on the pier pylons they maneuvered through.
When the waves died down, some of the surfers practiced their surf moves on skateboards. The owners of the shop promoted themselves by organizing first a surfing team and, in 1974, a skateboard team, to participate in competitions. Skip Engblom, co-owner of the Zephyr shop, set up a practice schedule for the members to follow. They slalomed down a street near the shop, skated at local school playgrounds with sloping concrete banks and in whatever abandoned and empty swimming pools they could find around town.
The signature style of the Z-Boys, as the skateboarders on Zephr Skate Team were called, was to emulate surfers by staying crouched low to the ground; not shying away from touching it. Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva would eventually move on from this group to become the first famous skateboarders. Although their hand dragging style did not ever wholly catch on, the Z-Boys changed the focus of the sport toward riding bowls, performing vertical jumps (Alva is generally credited with completing the first aerial) and street skating. Beyond these seminal contributions, there was one other essential thing that transformed the hobby of skateboarding into a multi-billion dollar industry, and that contribution came not from Peralta or Alva but rather another one of the original Z-Boys- Jay Adams.
Skateboarding had been a fad in the early ‘60s, but the thrill of standing on a piece of wood with wheels attached had quickly worn off, especially after parents started organizing to ban skateboards for being dangerous. But in 1973, a new type of wheel was invented that greatly increased the skateboard’s maneuverability and durability, and because of that, by 1975, growing interest had convinced organizers to hold the first national skateboarding competition of that decade. The chosen location for the event was in Del Mar, California, conveniently located just two hours from Dogtown.
Freestyle refers to skateboarding on flat ground. The Z-Boys didn’t do freestyle. Today, nobody except Rodney Mullen does freestyle, and even he mostly does street skating now. Back then, freestyle skateboarding was nothing other than a gymnastics routine with a prop, like what gymnasts still do today with ribbons, rubber balls and hula hoops. At Del Mar, freestyle was not only the main event, but the only event other than downhill slalom.
In 1975, Jay Adams was fourteen years-old but small enough to pass for younger. Like many of the other Z-Boys, he had flowing blonde hair. He was the first of the Z-Boys to compete, doing freestyle. The Zephyr Skate Team wore matching outfits, so everyone in attendance expected him to set the tone for the entire team. The first thing he did was ride his board across the platform at top speed and then slide by planting his hands behind him to keep from flying off the edge. The Z-Boys called this a “Bert,” which they had named after surfer Larry Bertlemann, who would often run his hands in the water as he surfed and was the biggest stylistic influence on the Z-Boys. Of course, nobody outside of the team would have even considered this a trick.
Then, in what was presumably an attempt to emulate something he had just seen from another competitor, he tried standing up straight while riding backward on one end of the board- and promptly fell on his ass.
At this point, the cameraman filming the event for posterity actually turns away in disappointment… but Jay Adams gets back on the board and skates backwards again- this time his way. Crouched down, he grabs the board on either side and angrily hops up and down.
And with that outburst, skateboarding is changed forever.
It is the perfect embodiment of the old way of skateboarding being replaced. Because it is so completely unintentional, it is beyond what anybody could have scripted. For the rest of the brief routine, he stays so close to the ground it’s difficult to differentiate whether he’s sliding on the board or on the ground- in actuality he’s simultaneously doing a little of both. He ends by jumping off the end of the platform.
Jay Adams had dared to thrust aggression into a sport where simply demonstrating balance and acrobatic prowess had been the only point. Suddenly, skateboarding had attitude, and not just any attitude- it had Jay Adam’s attitude. Whereas Peralta was a mild-mannered and disciplined pretty boy and Alva came across as a self-centered prick, being a skateboarder would come to mean being raw, brazen, authentic, flawed and stubbornly determined regardless of ability or success. Adams was comparable to Janis Joplin or John Coltrane in not overtly seeking to innovate but doing so anyway by being obsessed with finding their voice. But if you’re going to compare him to a musician, it would surely be Iggy Pop, whose band The Stooges had broken up the year before but whose legend and popularity were continuing to grow. Adams embodied, and because of him, skateboarding represented what would become known as punk.
The competitors other than the Z-Boys hated Jay’s performance. Adams wasn’t particularly thrilled by it either. His reaction to anybody else’s opinion about his skating tended to vacillate between anger, indifference and disgust, which was proof that he was not a caricature, persona or act. He probably decided right then that competitive skateboarding was bullshit.
After Del Mar, sponsors came crawling out of the woodwork to capitalize on the allure of the Z-Boys, and the Zephyr Skate Team soon dissolved as the members ran after money and fame. Adams didn’t go anywhere, but instead became part of a team organized by his abusive step-father. The next few decades would not be good ones for Adams.
The Bones Brigade videos would herald a new preferred media for being able to watch skateboarders from afar, but there really was something special about imagining what might be possible from trying to decipher a still photo. There are three photographs from my childhood that even as an adult my mind wanders back to: a National Geographic cover of a Afghan woman with haunted green eyes, a lone man standing in front of a row of tanks at Tiananmen Square and Jay Adams slaloming down a hill.
Well, that’s sort of true. When I was in high school, I went searching for the picture of Jay Adams that had inspired me so many years prior, and found this one instead:
Now, I think of both photographs like one of those holograms where you see different poses when you look at it from different angles.
For those of you still wondering what’s the big deal about some rebellious kid bouncing up and down on a skateboard, let me try and frame it another way. Without Jay Adams, this picture certainly wouldn’t have the same connotations, and probably wouldn’t even exist:
Jay Adams: Born, February 3, 1961; Died, August 15, 2014
I was enthralled and confused. Somehow, this wasn’t a picture of a kid falling down. It was only after imagining the photo as a comic book drawing that I realized I’d seen that pose before- from Spider-Man. The incidental old man seemingly sinking into the pavement in the distance provided the perfect contrast to this death-defying kid. The only photograph I had seen with this combination of grace, skill and determination was a poster of Dr. J our principal had hanging in his office. I had to find out who this person was.
The picture was from a series of articles by Craig Stecyk III about a group of skateboarders in southern California called the Z-Boys. Stecyk was the graphic artist at Zephr surfboard shop, which was located in the rough slums of South Santa Monica known as Dogtown. Instead of rainbows and sun rays, Stecyk put graffiti-influenced designs onto surfboards handmade by Jeff Ho and sold them to the hoodlums from both South Santa Monica and Venice who surfed a cove containing the remains of an abandoned amusement park and frequently broke their boards on the pier pylons they maneuvered through.
When the waves died down, some of the surfers practiced their surf moves on skateboards. The owners of the shop promoted themselves by organizing first a surfing team and, in 1974, a skateboard team, to participate in competitions. Skip Engblom, co-owner of the Zephyr shop, set up a practice schedule for the members to follow. They slalomed down a street near the shop, skated at local school playgrounds with sloping concrete banks and in whatever abandoned and empty swimming pools they could find around town.
The signature style of the Z-Boys, as the skateboarders on Zephr Skate Team were called, was to emulate surfers by staying crouched low to the ground; not shying away from touching it. Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva would eventually move on from this group to become the first famous skateboarders. Although their hand dragging style did not ever wholly catch on, the Z-Boys changed the focus of the sport toward riding bowls, performing vertical jumps (Alva is generally credited with completing the first aerial) and street skating. Beyond these seminal contributions, there was one other essential thing that transformed the hobby of skateboarding into a multi-billion dollar industry, and that contribution came not from Peralta or Alva but rather another one of the original Z-Boys- Jay Adams.
Skateboarding had been a fad in the early ‘60s, but the thrill of standing on a piece of wood with wheels attached had quickly worn off, especially after parents started organizing to ban skateboards for being dangerous. But in 1973, a new type of wheel was invented that greatly increased the skateboard’s maneuverability and durability, and because of that, by 1975, growing interest had convinced organizers to hold the first national skateboarding competition of that decade. The chosen location for the event was in Del Mar, California, conveniently located just two hours from Dogtown.
Freestyle refers to skateboarding on flat ground. The Z-Boys didn’t do freestyle. Today, nobody except Rodney Mullen does freestyle, and even he mostly does street skating now. Back then, freestyle skateboarding was nothing other than a gymnastics routine with a prop, like what gymnasts still do today with ribbons, rubber balls and hula hoops. At Del Mar, freestyle was not only the main event, but the only event other than downhill slalom.
In 1975, Jay Adams was fourteen years-old but small enough to pass for younger. Like many of the other Z-Boys, he had flowing blonde hair. He was the first of the Z-Boys to compete, doing freestyle. The Zephyr Skate Team wore matching outfits, so everyone in attendance expected him to set the tone for the entire team. The first thing he did was ride his board across the platform at top speed and then slide by planting his hands behind him to keep from flying off the edge. The Z-Boys called this a “Bert,” which they had named after surfer Larry Bertlemann, who would often run his hands in the water as he surfed and was the biggest stylistic influence on the Z-Boys. Of course, nobody outside of the team would have even considered this a trick.
Then, in what was presumably an attempt to emulate something he had just seen from another competitor, he tried standing up straight while riding backward on one end of the board- and promptly fell on his ass.
At this point, the cameraman filming the event for posterity actually turns away in disappointment… but Jay Adams gets back on the board and skates backwards again- this time his way. Crouched down, he grabs the board on either side and angrily hops up and down.
And with that outburst, skateboarding is changed forever.
It is the perfect embodiment of the old way of skateboarding being replaced. Because it is so completely unintentional, it is beyond what anybody could have scripted. For the rest of the brief routine, he stays so close to the ground it’s difficult to differentiate whether he’s sliding on the board or on the ground- in actuality he’s simultaneously doing a little of both. He ends by jumping off the end of the platform.
Jay Adams had dared to thrust aggression into a sport where simply demonstrating balance and acrobatic prowess had been the only point. Suddenly, skateboarding had attitude, and not just any attitude- it had Jay Adam’s attitude. Whereas Peralta was a mild-mannered and disciplined pretty boy and Alva came across as a self-centered prick, being a skateboarder would come to mean being raw, brazen, authentic, flawed and stubbornly determined regardless of ability or success. Adams was comparable to Janis Joplin or John Coltrane in not overtly seeking to innovate but doing so anyway by being obsessed with finding their voice. But if you’re going to compare him to a musician, it would surely be Iggy Pop, whose band The Stooges had broken up the year before but whose legend and popularity were continuing to grow. Adams embodied, and because of him, skateboarding represented what would become known as punk.
The competitors other than the Z-Boys hated Jay’s performance. Adams wasn’t particularly thrilled by it either. His reaction to anybody else’s opinion about his skating tended to vacillate between anger, indifference and disgust, which was proof that he was not a caricature, persona or act. He probably decided right then that competitive skateboarding was bullshit.
After Del Mar, sponsors came crawling out of the woodwork to capitalize on the allure of the Z-Boys, and the Zephyr Skate Team soon dissolved as the members ran after money and fame. Adams didn’t go anywhere, but instead became part of a team organized by his abusive step-father. The next few decades would not be good ones for Adams.
The Bones Brigade videos would herald a new preferred media for being able to watch skateboarders from afar, but there really was something special about imagining what might be possible from trying to decipher a still photo. There are three photographs from my childhood that even as an adult my mind wanders back to: a National Geographic cover of a Afghan woman with haunted green eyes, a lone man standing in front of a row of tanks at Tiananmen Square and Jay Adams slaloming down a hill.
Well, that’s sort of true. When I was in high school, I went searching for the picture of Jay Adams that had inspired me so many years prior, and found this one instead:
Now, I think of both photographs like one of those holograms where you see different poses when you look at it from different angles.
For those of you still wondering what’s the big deal about some rebellious kid bouncing up and down on a skateboard, let me try and frame it another way. Without Jay Adams, this picture certainly wouldn’t have the same connotations, and probably wouldn’t even exist:
Jay Adams: Born, February 3, 1961; Died, August 15, 2014
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Why Christians Should Support Gay Marriage in America
There are several places in the Bible that state homosexual sex is wrong. The New Testament characterizes marriage as a union of a man and a woman. For these reasons and others, it is reasonable to concede that Christianity was founded with the premise that marriage between gay people within the Christian Church was not an accepted concept. Therefore, it is understandable for a Christian pastor or priest to refuse to authorize or bless the union of a gay couple in a Christian ceremony. After all, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America prevents the government from interfering with religious practices. What the scriptures do not address, however, is the situation as it pertains to marriage recognized, not by the Christian Church, but by a contemporary, secular government.
In addition to, or, as part of protecting everybody’s right to practice whichever religion they choose, the First Amendment explicitly states that any one specific religion’s beliefs cannot be taken into consideration when making federal laws. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” The First Amendment is not a suggestion, but is itself a federal law. Jesus Christ indicated that both government laws and God’s should be followed, even though he trusted neither tax collectors nor religious leaders. When asked if taxes should be paid, he replied, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21)
Within Christianity, it is understood that a marriage is a union recognized and sanctified by God. Our government, on the contrary, recognizes marriage as a legally binding contract between two people which can be used to gain things like tax benefits, inheritance rights, child custody rights and immigration privileges. These are two distinct roles that we umbrella under the same term. To determine whether a Christian should desire for the legal form of marriage to include homosexuals, we can, and must, ponder Jesus’ teachings.
The longest transcription we have of Jesus’ teachings is known as the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew, chapters 5-7. A second, similar sermon is found in Luke, chapter 6. These are the most concrete and clear directives from Jesus to be found in the Bible. In these speeches, Jesus demonstrates that there is a distinction between earthly and heavenly values. One major theme is to treat non-followers as brethren even while living according to standards beyond those of non-followers. In fact, treating those who oppose you with love is precisely one way of upholding these higher standards. Jesus clarifies that these high standards should not be demanded, or even expected, of others. He gives several examples that if another chooses evil, it should be met with love.
Most are familiar with Jesus’ command to not judge. Luke 6:37 reads, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” The severity of this command becomes evident when it is cross-referenced with Matthew 6:15: “If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Jesus is not concerned with the decisions of those uninterested in following him, not because he doesn’t love them, but because he is uninterested in earthly pursuits, gains and rituals. This is why he says to a man who wanted to bury his father instead of getting on a boat with him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” (Matthew 8:22) Jesus sole focus is on being holy himself.
Jesus recognizes earthly laws cannot reflect heavenly values. God judges that which mankind cannot see; even our thoughts. When asked by a group of religious leaders and teachers if an adulteress should be stoned according to Jewish law, Jesus replies, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” (John 8:7) This compels the group to leave, and then Jesus, left alone with the woman, does something extraordinary. According to his own criteria, Jesus could have stoned the adulteress himself, but he instead measures her against those who had just left- and deems her equal to them. “Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir,’ she said. ‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin.’” (John 8:10-11) The Bible does not indicate whether Jesus' advice was taken.
Critics will argue that Jesus’ statement in Matthew 7:6 to not give that which is sacred to dogs is proof that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry. The first rebuttal to this is that the scriptures make clear that God condemns all sin equally, so if it is interpreted that marriage, as a sacred thing, should not be given to those who are not Christians, it follows that ALL marriage involving non-Christians should not be allowed. James 2:8-13 says, “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘You shall not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.” Again, we see a clear separation between earthly judgment and heavenly judgment, and that our earthly judgments should be tempered with both mercy and neighborly love, leaning in favor of giving freedom. It is precisely this kind of sacred wisdom that Jesus is suggesting only his followers can understand in Matthew 7:6. His followers should not bother attempting to impose the high standards they should hold themselves to on non-followers.
The only type of marriage the Bible explicitly condemns is re-marriage after a divorce, unless the divorce was because of unfaithfulness (Matthew 19:11). This is why, in the church where I grew up, my pastor once refused to perform the ceremony of a divorcé who wanted to remarry. That pastor probably shared his belief that God would not consider such a marriage sacred. The cultural reality, however, is that he could not say, “You can’t get married,” because in fact, that couple could have walked straight to the courthouse– or any number of other churches– and received a legal document binding them to laws and privileges pertaining to marriage as recognized, though not by God, by the lesser authority operating as the United States of America. In Matthew 19:8, Jesus explains that divorce itself was only allowed as a concession to placate human weakness. This exemplifies Jesus’ understanding that earthly laws, specifically those pertaining to marriage, are necessarily an imperfect compromise.
The sanctity of marriage is completely independent from the earthly laws governing it. Man has no authority to decide what is sacred. It is God, not man, who decides whether a marriage will be recognized and blessed by Him, and God’s judgment waits in heaven. It is understandable that a church, which should seek to reflect God’s laws as closely as possible, would refuse to perform a gay marriage ceremony. For the same reasons, that church could also justifiably refuse to remarry someone who had been divorced, all non-believers and even a person wearing a wedding dress made of a fiber blend (Leviticus 19:19)
The righteous person described and demonstrated by Jesus is loving, generous and humble; not worrying about the things of this world but instead focusing on and striving toward inner perfection. Jesus compared false teachers to wolves in sheep’s clothing and thorn bushes offering fruit (Matthew 7:15-16), and was criticized for associating with and befriending sinners: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:19) Kindness toward sinners is always the right course of action while insolence is always the wrong one. The life of a Christian should focus not on demonstrating one’s own virtues, but on charitably giving of oneself to others, meeting their needs and even wants. “And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.” (Matthew 5:40)
While marriage as described in the Bible is an opportunity offered by the church, marriage described by governmental law is something else entirely. While it is against the fallible, earthly laws of America to take Jesus’ opinion under consideration when making laws, singling out homosexuals by restricting them of rights given to every other American citizen is inconsistent with Jesus’ teachings. Homosexuals should be treated the same as every sinner, which includes all of us. “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8)
But what do I know; I'm an atheist.
In addition to, or, as part of protecting everybody’s right to practice whichever religion they choose, the First Amendment explicitly states that any one specific religion’s beliefs cannot be taken into consideration when making federal laws. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” The First Amendment is not a suggestion, but is itself a federal law. Jesus Christ indicated that both government laws and God’s should be followed, even though he trusted neither tax collectors nor religious leaders. When asked if taxes should be paid, he replied, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21)
Within Christianity, it is understood that a marriage is a union recognized and sanctified by God. Our government, on the contrary, recognizes marriage as a legally binding contract between two people which can be used to gain things like tax benefits, inheritance rights, child custody rights and immigration privileges. These are two distinct roles that we umbrella under the same term. To determine whether a Christian should desire for the legal form of marriage to include homosexuals, we can, and must, ponder Jesus’ teachings.
The longest transcription we have of Jesus’ teachings is known as the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew, chapters 5-7. A second, similar sermon is found in Luke, chapter 6. These are the most concrete and clear directives from Jesus to be found in the Bible. In these speeches, Jesus demonstrates that there is a distinction between earthly and heavenly values. One major theme is to treat non-followers as brethren even while living according to standards beyond those of non-followers. In fact, treating those who oppose you with love is precisely one way of upholding these higher standards. Jesus clarifies that these high standards should not be demanded, or even expected, of others. He gives several examples that if another chooses evil, it should be met with love.
Most are familiar with Jesus’ command to not judge. Luke 6:37 reads, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” The severity of this command becomes evident when it is cross-referenced with Matthew 6:15: “If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” Jesus is not concerned with the decisions of those uninterested in following him, not because he doesn’t love them, but because he is uninterested in earthly pursuits, gains and rituals. This is why he says to a man who wanted to bury his father instead of getting on a boat with him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” (Matthew 8:22) Jesus sole focus is on being holy himself.
Jesus recognizes earthly laws cannot reflect heavenly values. God judges that which mankind cannot see; even our thoughts. When asked by a group of religious leaders and teachers if an adulteress should be stoned according to Jewish law, Jesus replies, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” (John 8:7) This compels the group to leave, and then Jesus, left alone with the woman, does something extraordinary. According to his own criteria, Jesus could have stoned the adulteress himself, but he instead measures her against those who had just left- and deems her equal to them. “Jesus straightened up and asked her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, sir,’ she said. ‘Then neither do I condemn you,’ Jesus declared. ‘Go now and leave your life of sin.’” (John 8:10-11) The Bible does not indicate whether Jesus' advice was taken.
Critics will argue that Jesus’ statement in Matthew 7:6 to not give that which is sacred to dogs is proof that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry. The first rebuttal to this is that the scriptures make clear that God condemns all sin equally, so if it is interpreted that marriage, as a sacred thing, should not be given to those who are not Christians, it follows that ALL marriage involving non-Christians should not be allowed. James 2:8-13 says, “If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘You shall not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.” Again, we see a clear separation between earthly judgment and heavenly judgment, and that our earthly judgments should be tempered with both mercy and neighborly love, leaning in favor of giving freedom. It is precisely this kind of sacred wisdom that Jesus is suggesting only his followers can understand in Matthew 7:6. His followers should not bother attempting to impose the high standards they should hold themselves to on non-followers.
The only type of marriage the Bible explicitly condemns is re-marriage after a divorce, unless the divorce was because of unfaithfulness (Matthew 19:11). This is why, in the church where I grew up, my pastor once refused to perform the ceremony of a divorcé who wanted to remarry. That pastor probably shared his belief that God would not consider such a marriage sacred. The cultural reality, however, is that he could not say, “You can’t get married,” because in fact, that couple could have walked straight to the courthouse– or any number of other churches– and received a legal document binding them to laws and privileges pertaining to marriage as recognized, though not by God, by the lesser authority operating as the United States of America. In Matthew 19:8, Jesus explains that divorce itself was only allowed as a concession to placate human weakness. This exemplifies Jesus’ understanding that earthly laws, specifically those pertaining to marriage, are necessarily an imperfect compromise.
The sanctity of marriage is completely independent from the earthly laws governing it. Man has no authority to decide what is sacred. It is God, not man, who decides whether a marriage will be recognized and blessed by Him, and God’s judgment waits in heaven. It is understandable that a church, which should seek to reflect God’s laws as closely as possible, would refuse to perform a gay marriage ceremony. For the same reasons, that church could also justifiably refuse to remarry someone who had been divorced, all non-believers and even a person wearing a wedding dress made of a fiber blend (Leviticus 19:19)
The righteous person described and demonstrated by Jesus is loving, generous and humble; not worrying about the things of this world but instead focusing on and striving toward inner perfection. Jesus compared false teachers to wolves in sheep’s clothing and thorn bushes offering fruit (Matthew 7:15-16), and was criticized for associating with and befriending sinners: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:19) Kindness toward sinners is always the right course of action while insolence is always the wrong one. The life of a Christian should focus not on demonstrating one’s own virtues, but on charitably giving of oneself to others, meeting their needs and even wants. “And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.” (Matthew 5:40)
While marriage as described in the Bible is an opportunity offered by the church, marriage described by governmental law is something else entirely. While it is against the fallible, earthly laws of America to take Jesus’ opinion under consideration when making laws, singling out homosexuals by restricting them of rights given to every other American citizen is inconsistent with Jesus’ teachings. Homosexuals should be treated the same as every sinner, which includes all of us. “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8)
But what do I know; I'm an atheist.
Thursday, June 5, 2014
Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled
Kenyon College Commencement, May 20, 1990
Speaker: Bill Watterson
I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to be going. As I walk up the steps to the post office, I realize I don't have my box key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years until I graduate? Wait, didn't I graduate already? How old AM I?" Then I wake up.
Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.
I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won't remember of yours either.
In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book. Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch. The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry. The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.
My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did. Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli-sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.
It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year. If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery- it recharges by running.
You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by” absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.
At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems. For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one ideas leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.
So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it. I don't look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it's too late. Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.
Boy, was I smug.
As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.
Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my firs love, comic strips. For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job. A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it. It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.
It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.
Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli-sci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and the only reason you're there is to pay the bills. Thoreau said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation.
When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.
I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.
I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.
Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions. To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.
As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted apiece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons. Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need. What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts. On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.
You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime. But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them. To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time. I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know. With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.
Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed. I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on your achievement.
Speaker: Bill Watterson
I have a recurring dream about Kenyon. In it, I'm walking to the post office on the way to my first class at the start of the school year. Suddenly it occurs to me that I don't have my schedule memorized, and I'm not sure which classes I'm taking, or where exactly I'm supposed to be going. As I walk up the steps to the post office, I realize I don't have my box key, and in fact, I can't remember what my box number is. I'm certain that everyone I know has written me a letter, but I can't get them. I get more flustered and annoyed by the minute. I head back to Middle Path, racking my brains and asking myself, "How many more years until I graduate? Wait, didn't I graduate already? How old AM I?" Then I wake up.
Experience is food for the brain. And four years at Kenyon is a rich meal. I suppose it should be no surprise that your brains will probably burp up Kenyon for a long time. And I think the reason I keep having the dream is because its central image is a metaphor for a good part of life: that is, not knowing where you're going or what you're doing.
I graduated exactly ten years ago. That doesn't give me a great deal of experience to speak from, but I'm emboldened by the fact that I can't remember a bit of MY commencement, and I trust that in half an hour, you won't remember of yours either.
In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book. Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch. The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry. The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.
My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did. Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli-sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.
It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year. If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.
We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery- it recharges by running.
You may be surprised to find how quickly daily routine and the demands of “just getting by” absorb your waking hours. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your politics and religion become matters of habit rather than thought and inquiry. You may be surprised to find how quickly you start to see your life in terms of other people's expectations rather than issues. You may be surprised to find out how quickly reading a good book sounds like a luxury.
At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own. With any luck at all, you'll never need to take an idea and squeeze a punchline out of it, but as bright, creative people, you'll be called upon to generate ideas and solutions all your lives. Letting your mind play is the best way to solve problems. For me, it's been liberating to put myself in the mind of a fictitious six year-old each day, and rediscover my own curiosity. I've been amazed at how one ideas leads to others if I allow my mind to play and wander. I know a lot about dinosaurs now, and the information has helped me out of quite a few deadlines.
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead.
So, what's it like in the real world? Well, the food is better, but beyond that, I don't recommend it. I don't look back on my first few years out of school with much affection, and if I could have talked to you six months ago, I'd have encouraged you all to flunk some classes and postpone this moment as long as possible. But now it's too late. Unfortunately, that was all the advice I really had. When I was sitting where you are, I was one of the lucky few who had a cushy job waiting for me. I'd drawn political cartoons for the Collegian for four years, and the Cincinnati Post had hired me as an editorial cartoonist. All my friends were either dreading the infamous first year of law school, or despondent about their chances of convincing anyone that a history degree had any real application outside of academia.
Boy, was I smug.
As it turned out, my editor instantly regretted his decision to hire me. By the end of the summer, I'd been given notice; by the beginning of winter, I was in an unemployment line; and by the end of my first year away from Kenyon, I was broke and living with my parents again. You can imagine how upset my dad was when he learned that Kenyon doesn't give refunds.
Watching my career explode on the lauchpad caused some soul searching. I eventually admitted that I didn't have what it takes to be a good political cartoonist, that is, an interest in politics, and I returned to my firs love, comic strips. For years I got nothing but rejection letters, and I was forced to accept a real job. A REAL job is a job you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-1/2 million minutes I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without doing any work for it. It was incredible: after every break, the entire staff would stand around in the garage where the time clock was, and wait for that last click. And after my used car needed the head gasket replaced twice, I waited in the garage too.
It's funny how at Kenyon, you take for granted that the people around you think about more than the last episode of Dynasty. I guess that's what it means to be in an ivory tower.
Anyway, after a few months at this job, I was starved for some life of the mind that, during my lunch break, I used to read those poli-sci books that I'd somehow never quite finished when I was here. Some of those books were actually kind of interesting. It was a rude shock to see just how empty and robotic life can be when you don't care about what you're doing, and the only reason you're there is to pay the bills. Thoreau said, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." That's one of those dumb cocktail quotations that will strike fear in your heart as you get older. Actually, I was leading a life of loud desperation.
When it seemed I would be writing about "Midnite Madness Sale-abrations" for the rest of my life, a friend used to console me that cream always rises to the top. I used to think, so do people who throw themselves into the sea.
I tell you all this because it's worth recognizing that there is no such thing as an overnight success. You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along. It's a good idea to try to enjoy the scenery on the detours, because you'll probably take a few.
I still haven't drawn the strip as long as it took me to get the job. To endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work. I loved the work.
Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came.
Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions. To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works.
As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted apiece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons. Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need. What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts. On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.
You will find your own ethical dilemmas in all parts of your lives, both personal and professional. We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. Sooner or later, we are all asked to compromise ourselves and the things we care about. We define ourselves by our actions. With each decision, we tell ourselves and the world who we are. Think about what you want out of this life, and recognize that there are many kinds of success.
Many of you will be going on to law school, business school, medical school, or other graduate work, and you can expect the kind of starting salary that, with luck, will allow you to pay off your own tuition debts within your own lifetime. But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them. To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time. I think you'll find that Kenyon touched a deep part of you. These have been formative years. Chances are, at least of your roommates has taught you everything ugly about human nature you ever wanted to know. With luck, you've also had a class that transmitted a spark of insight or interest you'd never had before. Cultivate that interest, and you may find a deeper meaning in your life that feeds your soul and spirit. Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you've learned, but in the questions you've learned how to ask yourself.
Graduating from Kenyon, I suspect you'll find yourselves quite well prepared indeed. I wish you all fulfillment and happiness. Congratulations on your achievement.
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