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.
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Life Without
I don’t have particularly strong feelings regarding grocery shopping- I look at it as a necessary task, like washing dishes or taking out the trash. These things approach miserable only when postponed for too long. What I don’t like doing is price-checking, keeping track of coupons or haggling. I tend to go through a process of taste-testing every brand of a particular product and then insisting on purchasing the one I like best. If it’s out of stock, I tend to not purchase anything rather than substitute a brand I’ve already tried and don’t like.
My girlfriend and I are both vegetarians, and I usually do the shopping for both of us. We exclusively make home-cooked meals. I am competent at cooking a few things and she is quite good at a wide range of dishes. Our bill for food, beverages and toiletries, which also includes food for a large dog and food and litter for two cats, averages $128/week or $18.25/day. She thinks that’s a lot, but it doesn’t seem overly luxurious to me.
For some reason, I always seem to come home from the store with one incorrect item; something similar to what I intended to purchase but with overlooked fine (but usually large and prominent) print. Actual examples include: Pomegranate red wine vinegar instead of red wine vinegar, instant oatmeal instead of oatmeal, sweet onions instead of yellow onions, diet juice and juice drink instead of juice, stewed tomatoes instead of roasted tomatoes, diced green chiles instead of whole green chiles… the list goes on but you get the idea. “In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, –for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, –do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.” –Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I dislike wasting food, and nearly always eat leftovers up until I can see mold growing. Actually, if it’s bread or cheese, I’ve been known to keep eating it after cutting the moldy parts off. “Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary.” –Ibid.
I lived from ages 4-12 on an acreage where we raised our own crops, chickens and pigs and fostered horses. We got free hot school lunches and sometimes waited in line for big bricks of American cheese. I recently saw one of the boxes that cheese came in at a thrift store and found it very nostalgic. We shopped for toiletries and other things we didn’t produce ourselves at a strange warehouse full of damaged boxes. If there was an unopened box of something you wanted you simply found a box-cutter and got it out. I had a nice childhood. I mostly pretended to be a super hero while running around the farm or driving on the lawn mower. We went to the library once a week. I got a lot of Star Wars and G.I. Joe figures each birthday and Christmas and saved my $1-2/week allowance to buy G.I. Joe vehicles and a Swiss Army knife. We went on a one-week vacation once a year and frequently camped on weekends. I guess that’s why I’ve never been bothered by being poor. “In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we live simply and wisely.” –Ibid.
The other thing is; I feel the only ways to gain financial success are by working too much, getting lucky or being unethical. “The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward.” –Thoreau, Life Without Principle
My parents taught me, by example, to value industriousness, dedication and self-sufficiency. I was also taught that conformity is a bad thing, which I’ve since discovered is rather unique. America reveres the rebel, the defining characteristic of which is a willingness to intentionally make mistakes, and Americans go to great lengths to attempt to emulate the non-conformist aesthetic. We even appreciate independent thinkers as long as they are venture capitalists. But having the integrity to not go along or agree with others is heavily frowned upon in our society. There’s this episode of South Park where Stan decides to rebel, and joins up with a group of Goth kids after they advise, “If you want to be one of the non-conformists, all you have to do is dress just like us and listen to the same music we do.” In Hollywood, the outcast invariably aspires to become popular. Why is their rebel always insecure? I suggest it’s because they are considered nothing more than consumers.
Last night I watched Into The Wild (2007) and absolutely loved it. I remember not wanting to watch it when it came out, whining, “Oh boy, another drama about a Trustafarian kid looking like James Dean who runs off into the woods to “discover” himself- how original.” Considering my favorite book around third grade was My Side of the Mountain, I didn’t feel like I needed to see it.
Even as a child, I understood that not jumping on bandwagons, thinking with clarity, knowing how to survive alone and, perhaps most importantly, not caring whether other people liked you or not, were all part of being a true individual. Anybody motivated to impress, whether by obstinacy, audacity or originality, is a bullshitter. The non-conformist’s beliefs and actions are completely independent of others, which sometimes means doing or enjoying something despite its popularity. Demonstrating empathy can, and should, also be part of that equation; indeed that discovery in itself requires individualism, considering how heavily lobbied we are to be selfish. “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.” –Thoreau, Walden
An interesting choice is made in the movie that, because my favorite book is, in fact, Walden, stuck out to me like a sore thumb. The lead actor “paraphrases” (to quote the term he uses in the movie) Thoreau, and alludes to his line, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” but, in between love and money, he adds “faith.” WHAT? Are you fucking telling me you are going to misquote a tribute to truth? Oh, the irony. That occurrence profoundly illustrates the difficulty inherent to discovering truth- we are constantly compelled to twist it to conform to our desires. “Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.” –Thoreau, Life Without Principle
Perhaps the author or screenwriter intended to reflect that the main character did not realize truth without faith is unattainable, but surely that’s giving him or her too much credit and it was really just added to portray the character as an atheist and confusing atheism for nihilism. Either way, it instead portrays Thoreau as a bloviating fool. His works are already taken out of context enough as it is; afterall, his essay about economic living and enjoying simplicity within walking distance of a thriving metropolitan area is somehow taken as encouragement to run off into the wilderness and eat poison berries.
I recently spent a couple weeks unemployed. The only income I managed to gather came through selling some practically worthless items on ebay. As I had gotten rid of nearly every superfluous thing I own just over two years ago, I didn’t have much to sell. This made me contemplate the concept of needs versus wants, and how there is such a huge subjective gray area between them. It really irks me how loosely the phrase, “I have to have this!” is thrown around. I have, throughout the years, managed to scrape together the funds for indulgences such as three meals per day, hot running water, contact lenses, a used vehicle and gently used thrift store jeans. It’s been a long time since I’ve purchased a new outerwear item, but if underwear is any indication, it’s way over-priced. I think Levis are a bit of a rip-off at $5.38 and I only buy a pair or two per year.
Some things others might consider needs that I have seldom, if ever, been able to afford include doctor and dental check-ups, haircuts and television. I am fortunate to have been gifted the two computers I have owned. I can stretch a one-year contact prescription to three. I am very grateful that free public libraries exist. I long ago gave up purchasing superfluous items like hair conditioner and after-shave. I’ve never owned a vehicle with working air conditioning, and only seldom one that retained windshield washer fluid. I feel like these trivial sacrifices are pretty familiar ones to a lot of people, and yet, I feel like a lot of people are embarrassed by having to make them. That, to me, is the sad part. Shouldn’t those wastefully indulging in every little thing while lacking the capacity to imagine how they could survive without them be the ones who are ashamed? “No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.” –Thoreau, Walden
Admittedly, a lot of these concessions have been made in order to save money for tattoos, which is ridiculous and shows how un-destitute I actually am. “If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil’s angels.” –Thoreau, Life Without Principle
One fortuitous happenstance is that my unemployment coincided with my tax return, which I used to pay off the remainder of my debt. This had been incurred in December of 2009 due to plane ticket purchases coinciding with unanticipated vehicle repairs. I am very thankful I don’t have school loans, car loans or a mortgage to repay. I loathe indebtedness; it is a euphemism for indentured servitude. “Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.” –Ibid.
Several years ago, struggling to make ends meet while living in Oakland, I walked to the mainstream grocery store across the street after work to get what I could to survive on until payday with the $20 I had left to my name. I usually got my food from the dented, damaged and expired store, but it was a bit out of the way. Among the few items I had decided to get was peanut butter, but the only brand this store sold that didn’t contain added sugar was a large jar that was over $6. I really do not care for sugar, but mulled over the options for several minutes pondering whether it was worth spending the extra money to avoid it. I decided to stand by my culinary laurels and splurge, and after receiving mere cents back from the clerk, I walked out of the store and down the sidewalk toward my car parked a few blocks away. Suddenly, I heard a crack, and looked down to see that jar of peanut butter spilling onto the sidewalk. My bag had ripped and the glass jar had shattered. I contemplated turning the jar upside-down and salvaging what I could, but quickly realized it was full of shards. The realization that I no longer had enough money to buy even the cheap, sugar-laden option hit me like bricks and I began to sob. I felt as if my entire existence was worth less than that broken jar. I thought about returning to the store and asking for a replacement, but it didn’t seem right to try and hold them responsible for my carelessness. I scooped what I could into a nearby trash can and went home.
Some months later, I moved to Portland, Oregon. I anticipated this would lead to new musical opportunities and had compiled a list of musicians to meet when I arrived, several of which were scheduled to perform at an event space a week after fitting all the belongings I could into my station wagon and driving ten hours to live with some guy I’d met on Craigslist who immediately scolded me for showing up while he was eating dinner. Traveling expenses, rent and deposit meant I would have no money at all while desperately looking for a job. Admission to this event space gig was $6, which I hoped would pay off in musician contacts possibly leading to gig bookings, etc. I still had an ash-tray full of coins in my Saturn reserved for paying parking meters in the Bay Area, and I fished $6 out of it, which ended up being mostly nickels and dimes, as any quarters that had been there had already served their purpose. I then apologetically dumped this pile of change onto the card-table at the entrance. The girl working the cash-box, I’d soon learn, was named Whitney. We would become friends and hang out often for the next several months until she moved to New York City, and is among the most genuine, generous, kind-hearted, non-judgmental and, as an aside, talented persons I have ever met.
I guess all this is to say I feel very grateful that I now have two jobs. I am lucky to be able to drive to a store and purchase food. We have a small garden that produces things like basil to make pesto with all summer. My girlfriend taught me how to make pretty phenomenal pesto. Perhaps most of all, I am glad that I don’t have to look very far to realize there are many things more important than recognition, money and the like. “The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are merely make-shifts, and a shirking of the real business of life- chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.” –Ibid.
My girlfriend and I are both vegetarians, and I usually do the shopping for both of us. We exclusively make home-cooked meals. I am competent at cooking a few things and she is quite good at a wide range of dishes. Our bill for food, beverages and toiletries, which also includes food for a large dog and food and litter for two cats, averages $128/week or $18.25/day. She thinks that’s a lot, but it doesn’t seem overly luxurious to me.
For some reason, I always seem to come home from the store with one incorrect item; something similar to what I intended to purchase but with overlooked fine (but usually large and prominent) print. Actual examples include: Pomegranate red wine vinegar instead of red wine vinegar, instant oatmeal instead of oatmeal, sweet onions instead of yellow onions, diet juice and juice drink instead of juice, stewed tomatoes instead of roasted tomatoes, diced green chiles instead of whole green chiles… the list goes on but you get the idea. “In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, –for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, –do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.” –Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I dislike wasting food, and nearly always eat leftovers up until I can see mold growing. Actually, if it’s bread or cheese, I’ve been known to keep eating it after cutting the moldy parts off. “Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary.” –Ibid.
I lived from ages 4-12 on an acreage where we raised our own crops, chickens and pigs and fostered horses. We got free hot school lunches and sometimes waited in line for big bricks of American cheese. I recently saw one of the boxes that cheese came in at a thrift store and found it very nostalgic. We shopped for toiletries and other things we didn’t produce ourselves at a strange warehouse full of damaged boxes. If there was an unopened box of something you wanted you simply found a box-cutter and got it out. I had a nice childhood. I mostly pretended to be a super hero while running around the farm or driving on the lawn mower. We went to the library once a week. I got a lot of Star Wars and G.I. Joe figures each birthday and Christmas and saved my $1-2/week allowance to buy G.I. Joe vehicles and a Swiss Army knife. We went on a one-week vacation once a year and frequently camped on weekends. I guess that’s why I’ve never been bothered by being poor. “In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we live simply and wisely.” –Ibid.
The other thing is; I feel the only ways to gain financial success are by working too much, getting lucky or being unethical. “The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward.” –Thoreau, Life Without Principle
My parents taught me, by example, to value industriousness, dedication and self-sufficiency. I was also taught that conformity is a bad thing, which I’ve since discovered is rather unique. America reveres the rebel, the defining characteristic of which is a willingness to intentionally make mistakes, and Americans go to great lengths to attempt to emulate the non-conformist aesthetic. We even appreciate independent thinkers as long as they are venture capitalists. But having the integrity to not go along or agree with others is heavily frowned upon in our society. There’s this episode of South Park where Stan decides to rebel, and joins up with a group of Goth kids after they advise, “If you want to be one of the non-conformists, all you have to do is dress just like us and listen to the same music we do.” In Hollywood, the outcast invariably aspires to become popular. Why is their rebel always insecure? I suggest it’s because they are considered nothing more than consumers.
Last night I watched Into The Wild (2007) and absolutely loved it. I remember not wanting to watch it when it came out, whining, “Oh boy, another drama about a Trustafarian kid looking like James Dean who runs off into the woods to “discover” himself- how original.” Considering my favorite book around third grade was My Side of the Mountain, I didn’t feel like I needed to see it.
Even as a child, I understood that not jumping on bandwagons, thinking with clarity, knowing how to survive alone and, perhaps most importantly, not caring whether other people liked you or not, were all part of being a true individual. Anybody motivated to impress, whether by obstinacy, audacity or originality, is a bullshitter. The non-conformist’s beliefs and actions are completely independent of others, which sometimes means doing or enjoying something despite its popularity. Demonstrating empathy can, and should, also be part of that equation; indeed that discovery in itself requires individualism, considering how heavily lobbied we are to be selfish. “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.” –Thoreau, Walden
An interesting choice is made in the movie that, because my favorite book is, in fact, Walden, stuck out to me like a sore thumb. The lead actor “paraphrases” (to quote the term he uses in the movie) Thoreau, and alludes to his line, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth,” but, in between love and money, he adds “faith.” WHAT? Are you fucking telling me you are going to misquote a tribute to truth? Oh, the irony. That occurrence profoundly illustrates the difficulty inherent to discovering truth- we are constantly compelled to twist it to conform to our desires. “Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things.” –Thoreau, Life Without Principle
Perhaps the author or screenwriter intended to reflect that the main character did not realize truth without faith is unattainable, but surely that’s giving him or her too much credit and it was really just added to portray the character as an atheist and confusing atheism for nihilism. Either way, it instead portrays Thoreau as a bloviating fool. His works are already taken out of context enough as it is; afterall, his essay about economic living and enjoying simplicity within walking distance of a thriving metropolitan area is somehow taken as encouragement to run off into the wilderness and eat poison berries.
I recently spent a couple weeks unemployed. The only income I managed to gather came through selling some practically worthless items on ebay. As I had gotten rid of nearly every superfluous thing I own just over two years ago, I didn’t have much to sell. This made me contemplate the concept of needs versus wants, and how there is such a huge subjective gray area between them. It really irks me how loosely the phrase, “I have to have this!” is thrown around. I have, throughout the years, managed to scrape together the funds for indulgences such as three meals per day, hot running water, contact lenses, a used vehicle and gently used thrift store jeans. It’s been a long time since I’ve purchased a new outerwear item, but if underwear is any indication, it’s way over-priced. I think Levis are a bit of a rip-off at $5.38 and I only buy a pair or two per year.
Some things others might consider needs that I have seldom, if ever, been able to afford include doctor and dental check-ups, haircuts and television. I am fortunate to have been gifted the two computers I have owned. I can stretch a one-year contact prescription to three. I am very grateful that free public libraries exist. I long ago gave up purchasing superfluous items like hair conditioner and after-shave. I’ve never owned a vehicle with working air conditioning, and only seldom one that retained windshield washer fluid. I feel like these trivial sacrifices are pretty familiar ones to a lot of people, and yet, I feel like a lot of people are embarrassed by having to make them. That, to me, is the sad part. Shouldn’t those wastefully indulging in every little thing while lacking the capacity to imagine how they could survive without them be the ones who are ashamed? “No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.” –Thoreau, Walden
Admittedly, a lot of these concessions have been made in order to save money for tattoos, which is ridiculous and shows how un-destitute I actually am. “If within the sophisticated man there is not an unsophisticated one, then he is but one of the devil’s angels.” –Thoreau, Life Without Principle
One fortuitous happenstance is that my unemployment coincided with my tax return, which I used to pay off the remainder of my debt. This had been incurred in December of 2009 due to plane ticket purchases coinciding with unanticipated vehicle repairs. I am very thankful I don’t have school loans, car loans or a mortgage to repay. I loathe indebtedness; it is a euphemism for indentured servitude. “Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.” –Ibid.
Several years ago, struggling to make ends meet while living in Oakland, I walked to the mainstream grocery store across the street after work to get what I could to survive on until payday with the $20 I had left to my name. I usually got my food from the dented, damaged and expired store, but it was a bit out of the way. Among the few items I had decided to get was peanut butter, but the only brand this store sold that didn’t contain added sugar was a large jar that was over $6. I really do not care for sugar, but mulled over the options for several minutes pondering whether it was worth spending the extra money to avoid it. I decided to stand by my culinary laurels and splurge, and after receiving mere cents back from the clerk, I walked out of the store and down the sidewalk toward my car parked a few blocks away. Suddenly, I heard a crack, and looked down to see that jar of peanut butter spilling onto the sidewalk. My bag had ripped and the glass jar had shattered. I contemplated turning the jar upside-down and salvaging what I could, but quickly realized it was full of shards. The realization that I no longer had enough money to buy even the cheap, sugar-laden option hit me like bricks and I began to sob. I felt as if my entire existence was worth less than that broken jar. I thought about returning to the store and asking for a replacement, but it didn’t seem right to try and hold them responsible for my carelessness. I scooped what I could into a nearby trash can and went home.
Some months later, I moved to Portland, Oregon. I anticipated this would lead to new musical opportunities and had compiled a list of musicians to meet when I arrived, several of which were scheduled to perform at an event space a week after fitting all the belongings I could into my station wagon and driving ten hours to live with some guy I’d met on Craigslist who immediately scolded me for showing up while he was eating dinner. Traveling expenses, rent and deposit meant I would have no money at all while desperately looking for a job. Admission to this event space gig was $6, which I hoped would pay off in musician contacts possibly leading to gig bookings, etc. I still had an ash-tray full of coins in my Saturn reserved for paying parking meters in the Bay Area, and I fished $6 out of it, which ended up being mostly nickels and dimes, as any quarters that had been there had already served their purpose. I then apologetically dumped this pile of change onto the card-table at the entrance. The girl working the cash-box, I’d soon learn, was named Whitney. We would become friends and hang out often for the next several months until she moved to New York City, and is among the most genuine, generous, kind-hearted, non-judgmental and, as an aside, talented persons I have ever met.
I guess all this is to say I feel very grateful that I now have two jobs. I am lucky to be able to drive to a store and purchase food. We have a small garden that produces things like basil to make pesto with all summer. My girlfriend taught me how to make pretty phenomenal pesto. Perhaps most of all, I am glad that I don’t have to look very far to realize there are many things more important than recognition, money and the like. “The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are merely make-shifts, and a shirking of the real business of life- chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.” –Ibid.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Ethnicity (Please Check)
I will forever be confused by forms asking for ethnicity. There’s never enough room to put ½ German, ¼ Castilian and ¼ Scotch/Irish/English (roughly). Further, they want to know whether I’m Hispanic/Latino, which, as you can see, is yes- my maternal grandfather’s family immigrated from the Basque region on the Iberian Peninsula, which is the textbook definition of Hispanic.
As a kid, I was told to checkmark “Caucasian.” The Caucasus is the region between the Black and Caspian Seas in which several ethnicities reside, but none of them are called Caucasian. A cursory glance at the origin of this term is horrifying. It seems some 18th Century German “philosopher” proposed the human race could be divided into two categories, based on the inherent beauty of their skin. Shortly thereafter, a colleague added the criteria of skull structure, and I assume that either inspired or was inspired by the sham science of phrenology. The “beautiful” races were labeled Caucasian and the “ugly” ones Mongolian. Yikes! This made-up racist term should never be used by anyone, let alone an official document.
I suspect these forms are most interested in my skin tone, but it seems obvious to me that “White” is not an ethnicity. Where would Whites come from- Whitelandia? That’s what makes American racism so dumb- what the hell does skin tone have to do with ANYTHING? Maybe they should have a color chart; although probably it’d be more accurate if the choices were just on a spectrum between Privileged and SOL.
Many years ago my grandpa stated, “The great thing about America is that you can choose your ethnicity.” Thinking this an odd statement but willing to explore what he meant, I replied by asking, “Have you read Anti-Semite and Jew, by Simone DeBeviour?” He apparently hadn’t because he sort of stared at me befuddled before continuing: “In America, all you have to do to be American is act American. If you embrace the ideas of capitalism, you can have everything you want in this country.” Ever the contrarian, I observed, “But that creates a conundrum if you don’t want to be a capitalist,” which led my grandpa into a rant about that being exactly the problem with so many foreigners- that they refused to accept the American dream.
The irony of this conversation is my grandpa was the same person who’d boasted to me that in all his years as a banker he’d never given a home loan to a minority.
In retrospect, I think perhaps he meant “your” in “choosing your ethnicity” to be singular instead of plural. He might not have been saying everyone can choose their ethnicity, but that I could. As his family had moved to California from Mexico when he was a boy, he knew this firsthand. I guess because his ethnic roots were Castilian and not Mexican, he looked “white.” He went by Joseph, not José, and was an eloquent English speaker. He was well-read in classic Western literature; interestingly his favorite writer seemed to be the Transcendental essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declares in his most famous work, entitled Self-Reliance: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
A few years ago, in circumstances I do not recall, I casually mentioned to a friend from Great Britain that I was part Castilian. “That explains so much about you!” she exclaimed, “Castilians are fiery!” As this was coming from a redhead, I knew it was a compliment. I had no idea that Castilians possessed any stereotypical traits, but the revelation especially excited me because, after discovering Ronaldinho around 2005, I had begun following Spanish soccer. Also, possibly because of the awareness that I’m a Taurus, I’ve long been fond of illustrations depicting bull fighting.
Since that moment, I’ve been taking my grandpa’s advice, and choosing to identify as Castilian. Poor Grandpa Vasquez must be rolling in his grave. Honestly, I know nothing about Basque culture and I’ve never been to Spain, but I have done some cursory reading on Spanish history and try to keep up on Spanish politics. Because of my bias toward Futbol Club Barcelona, I’d admittedly rather be Catalan, but at least it's in the vicinity (I looked on a map).
Lest my point be lost, it is not that I have forgotten the absurdity of racism, but that I have chosen to embrace that absurdity to an extent. It allows me to think to myself, I’m German, Scotch/Irish/English and Basque: of course I love soccer! I’m fully aware the assertion is ridiculous, as I could make the same claim if I were Brazilian, Argentine and Dutch. But it seems to me that’s precisely the fun, curse and irony of ethnicity: we pick and choose which of our traits are genetic and do the same in others. This deceptive cloud of racial identity gives us power to place blame, embrace interests and eschew responsibility at our discretion. We can use race as a tool to infuse or incite pride or shame. Maybe it’s not the concept that’s defective so much as how we choose to use it.
In any other country, I’d be considered an American, but when I think of Americans, nothing much resembling me comes to mind. Perhaps that’s why I tend to be critical of American nationalism. Honestly, I’ve never trusted Americans or its government, precisely because I’ve always been fascinated by American history, and when I was a kid, I wanted to be a Native American when I grew up….
As a kid, I was told to checkmark “Caucasian.” The Caucasus is the region between the Black and Caspian Seas in which several ethnicities reside, but none of them are called Caucasian. A cursory glance at the origin of this term is horrifying. It seems some 18th Century German “philosopher” proposed the human race could be divided into two categories, based on the inherent beauty of their skin. Shortly thereafter, a colleague added the criteria of skull structure, and I assume that either inspired or was inspired by the sham science of phrenology. The “beautiful” races were labeled Caucasian and the “ugly” ones Mongolian. Yikes! This made-up racist term should never be used by anyone, let alone an official document.
I suspect these forms are most interested in my skin tone, but it seems obvious to me that “White” is not an ethnicity. Where would Whites come from- Whitelandia? That’s what makes American racism so dumb- what the hell does skin tone have to do with ANYTHING? Maybe they should have a color chart; although probably it’d be more accurate if the choices were just on a spectrum between Privileged and SOL.
Many years ago my grandpa stated, “The great thing about America is that you can choose your ethnicity.” Thinking this an odd statement but willing to explore what he meant, I replied by asking, “Have you read Anti-Semite and Jew, by Simone DeBeviour?” He apparently hadn’t because he sort of stared at me befuddled before continuing: “In America, all you have to do to be American is act American. If you embrace the ideas of capitalism, you can have everything you want in this country.” Ever the contrarian, I observed, “But that creates a conundrum if you don’t want to be a capitalist,” which led my grandpa into a rant about that being exactly the problem with so many foreigners- that they refused to accept the American dream.
The irony of this conversation is my grandpa was the same person who’d boasted to me that in all his years as a banker he’d never given a home loan to a minority.
In retrospect, I think perhaps he meant “your” in “choosing your ethnicity” to be singular instead of plural. He might not have been saying everyone can choose their ethnicity, but that I could. As his family had moved to California from Mexico when he was a boy, he knew this firsthand. I guess because his ethnic roots were Castilian and not Mexican, he looked “white.” He went by Joseph, not José, and was an eloquent English speaker. He was well-read in classic Western literature; interestingly his favorite writer seemed to be the Transcendental essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declares in his most famous work, entitled Self-Reliance: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
A few years ago, in circumstances I do not recall, I casually mentioned to a friend from Great Britain that I was part Castilian. “That explains so much about you!” she exclaimed, “Castilians are fiery!” As this was coming from a redhead, I knew it was a compliment. I had no idea that Castilians possessed any stereotypical traits, but the revelation especially excited me because, after discovering Ronaldinho around 2005, I had begun following Spanish soccer. Also, possibly because of the awareness that I’m a Taurus, I’ve long been fond of illustrations depicting bull fighting.
Since that moment, I’ve been taking my grandpa’s advice, and choosing to identify as Castilian. Poor Grandpa Vasquez must be rolling in his grave. Honestly, I know nothing about Basque culture and I’ve never been to Spain, but I have done some cursory reading on Spanish history and try to keep up on Spanish politics. Because of my bias toward Futbol Club Barcelona, I’d admittedly rather be Catalan, but at least it's in the vicinity (I looked on a map).
Lest my point be lost, it is not that I have forgotten the absurdity of racism, but that I have chosen to embrace that absurdity to an extent. It allows me to think to myself, I’m German, Scotch/Irish/English and Basque: of course I love soccer! I’m fully aware the assertion is ridiculous, as I could make the same claim if I were Brazilian, Argentine and Dutch. But it seems to me that’s precisely the fun, curse and irony of ethnicity: we pick and choose which of our traits are genetic and do the same in others. This deceptive cloud of racial identity gives us power to place blame, embrace interests and eschew responsibility at our discretion. We can use race as a tool to infuse or incite pride or shame. Maybe it’s not the concept that’s defective so much as how we choose to use it.
In any other country, I’d be considered an American, but when I think of Americans, nothing much resembling me comes to mind. Perhaps that’s why I tend to be critical of American nationalism. Honestly, I’ve never trusted Americans or its government, precisely because I’ve always been fascinated by American history, and when I was a kid, I wanted to be a Native American when I grew up….
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Common Sense And Other Tales
During my first overnight camping trip, at the age of four, my dad taught me how to make an archery bow out of a green sapling and nylon string. At five, I could tie several knots and differentiate between tinder, kindling and fuel. Peter appeared when I was eight or so, and by then I could pitch a tent, wield an axe, lash a fence, rig a fishing pole, fire a black powder rifle and properly sharpen a knife.
“Peter just has no common sense,” my dad would say, shaking his head. Dad led our church’s all-male scouting group, which met every Wednesday evening. We drove 40 miles each way to these meetings for several years, as we did to two services every Sunday, during the time when Pastor Steve led the church in Webster City. For a period we picked up Peter along the way. This guy had a knack for breaking everything. To this day, you can’t go on a camping trip with my family and ask, “Who broke this?” without the inevitable reply- “Peter.”
As an example, while setting up tents at the beginning of one camping trip, Peter asked if he could help. “Sure,” my dad said, “Grab one of those tomahawks and hammer in those tent pegs.” Yes, we did have several tomahawks lying around. Oh, does that seem weird to you? Also, our tent pegs were railroad spikes. Anyway, Peter took a hack at driving in a railroad spike using the sharp end of the throwing hatchet instead of the butt-end, leaving a remarkable chip in the blade.
Peter was several years older than me; closer to my brother’s age. My brother knew algebra. Peter did not know left from right. I began to wonder what common sense was and why Peter didn’t have it. Dad began taking some extra time to thoroughly explain things to Peter. I asked why Peter’s own dad didn’t teach him these things, and my dad explained that some kids don’t have responsible or attentive dads and others didn’t have dads at all. It occurred to me that common sense was something akin to things your parents are supposed to teach you.
My first pocket knife had raccoons etched on the blade. When I showed it to Peter, he couldn’t figure out how to work the locking mechanism that keeps the blade from slipping shut. After demonstrating how it worked, he promptly closed it on himself and cut a finger. I quickly fetched a band-aid, hoping I wasn’t going to get in trouble for being in part responsible for the mishap, and watched wide-eyed as Peter futilely tried to figure out how to apply the bandage. I eventually had to adhere it myself. Peter had no common sense.
Dad had given me this knife during a strange fishing trip a few years prior. We attended a much closer church in Fort Dodge then, and it was evenly divided into the older teenage kids- Sean, Jay, Troy and my brother, and the younger grade school kids- Stevie, Trent, Jeremy and myself. Honestly, the other kids were a bunch of hoodlums. Fort Dodge was a poor and rough-and-tumble town. My dad was in charge of the older kids and Jeremy’s dad was in charge of the younger kids. Jeremy’s dad taught us the scouting group's Code and the definitions of some of the strange words it contained, including “loyal,” “courteous” and “obedient.” I specifically recall him defining loyal as, “You know, being loyal to someone or something,” which I realized was no explanation whatsoever. I wondered if he knew what it meant.
On the day I received the knife, we went fishing near a spillway in Fort Dodge, and were given strict instructions to be very careful around the dam- no getting near the water, no running and no climbing or crossing the protective barriers. Before long, us younger kids had gotten bored with fishing and were running, climbing and shoving each other on top of the spillway.
Suddenly, we noticed a commotion below where the big kids still were, and Jeremy’s dad seemed to be attending to my dad, who was holding his back. Without knowing what was going on, I decided I’d better start following instructions and stopped horsing around with the other kids. Shortly thereafter, one of them slid down the spillway and probably would have drowned if my dad hadn’t gone in after him and fetched him out of the water. (I honestly don’t remember which kid it was, but for easier readability later on, I’m going to suppose it was Trent.) After that, it was time to leave, and as we packed things up dad gave me the raccoon-laden pocket knife with strict instructions as to its proper usage, and I considered this my reward for being relatively obedient.
The scouting group meetings generally consisted of a morality lesson and a fun activity. One activity was ring-toss, which consisted of attempting to throw wooden shower curtain rings around the neck of one of a cluster of soda bottles. The reward for accomplishing this feat was the bottle itself, but since I didn’t particularly care for soda, I found the game a bit tedious. One day while this activity was taking place, Peter revealed a box, and inside was a set of handcuffs replete with key. These things were pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen.
Peter said they belonged to his dad, who was a cop. By this time I had determined that Peter didn’t have a father, because of the common sense thing, so this bombshell surprised me. However, Stevie’s dad at that other church was a cop, too, and Stevie was the worst behaving kid of the bunch. So it seemed even police officers could be bad fathers. After that, I’d continually ask Peter to bring the handcuffs again, but he never did. Also, his stories pertaining to his father’s occupation and whereabouts was in constant flux, so I began to suspect he was inventing him like Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.
On one camping trip, while a few of us were milling around in our tent, separate from the adults, the taboo topic of girls came up. “What would you do if a girl drove into the campgrounds right now?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, uninterested. It seemed a stupid premise. Girls weren’t allowed on these camping trips. Anyway, I had a sister who wasn’t particularly mysterious, so I was simply glad for the respite from one being around.
Peter, however, went into a monologue: “First, I’d bring her back into this tent and close the flap. And zip up all the windows. Then, I’d slowly unbutton her blouse, starting at the top and working my way down…”
“Why would you want to do that?” I interrupted. Peter gave me an indecipherable look. I didn’t know whether it meant my question was stupid or that he didn’t actually know the answer, either. I never got the chance to find out, as Little Steve, the pastor’s kid, quickly put an abrupt end to the conversation.
After pondering this awkward moment, I concluded that this was another example of Peter’s lack of parental guidance. Otherwise he would have known better than to have inappropriate fantasies about girls.
On another occasion, my dad returned home late, and mentioned it was because he had been visiting a kid in prison. It was a kid from the Fort Dodge church’s scouting group way back when who I didn’t immediately remember, but eventually recognized as the infrequent member who had once shown me how to construct an effective paper airplane. How could someone smart enough to know that be in jail? “I think his dad had a drinking problem and might have been abusive,” my dad explained. “Do you remember- we visited his house once to try and help and I even reported his situation to social services, but they didn’t do anything.” I vaguely remembered. “He was the one who threw the knife at me.”
“What?!” This was certainly news to me.
“It was on that same fishing trip when Trent fell in the spillway. At the previous meeting we had done an activity and as a prize I had given him a pocket knife with raccoons on the blade- I think you have it now. Anyway, I think his dad must have found him with it and he’d gotten in trouble for it, because the next week during that fishing trip he drove up, got out of the car and threw the knife at me while I was sitting at a picnic table and it hit me square in the back. Luckily, it had rotated so the point of the handle hit me even though the blade was out but he still threw it hard enough that it really hurt. At first, I thought I’d been shot.”
“That’s not why he’s in jail, is it?”
“Oh no, I figured he had enough problems. I guess I was right.”
Why would my dad now be going out of his way to visit an incarcerated person who had once tried to kill him? It defied common sense, unless I was to stick with my original interpretation of the term.
I find an exploration of the term “common sense” yields more questions than answers. I assume the idea is a derivative of the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, which I, as a subjective individual, can only see as a load of hooey. I don’t believe I can remember things that didn’t happen to me. Will a bird raised in isolation still fly south for the winter without being introduced to a migrating flock? Hell if I know; nor do I consider the question germane. Instincts are distinctly separate to memory, as the former are things done without a previous sensory influence.
I have no idea how accurate or precise my memories are, nor am I able to perceive to what degree they have been altered, influenced or changed over time. Are my remembrances more or less influential than the actual experiences I’ve had, many of which are totally irretrievable to my consciousness? I don’t know the answer to that question, either.
My friend Eric is fond of postulating, “Can you think it if you can’t say it?” It is a clever question in part because the quest for the answer requires both intense examination and detailed articulation. In the end, I’m of the opinion that the impression that it often takes years to properly explain things that have been known all along point toward the reality that we can’t say much of what we think. An example is the person who can provide the answer to a math problem but is incapable of “showing his work,” or demonstrating the method used to come to that solution. However, even if it is in fact correct, one cannot trust the conclusion without demonstrating a fully coherent process of obtaining it. It would be unjustifiable to place any validity in unexplainable beliefs.
Does an unsolved mathematical equation have a solution? The best answer we can give is simply to try and solve it. Yet, I firmly believe that questions without answers exist in abundance. One seemingly useless thing to do is simply assume an answer and then assume that answer is the correct answer.
At least one impossible question is immediately posited here: If the blade of that knife had found its mark, who would have saved Trent from drowning?” There are no answers to purely hypothetical questions with no applicable predetermined rules. There is no point it wondering, “What if….” Life is what it is, which is to some degree separate from how we remember it to be, unless we are to argue life doesn’t exist at all, but is a figment of our own imaginations. That assumption must be rejected on the grounds that it forces us into an egocentric existence where nobody else matters. Because it cannot be demonstrated otherwise, we must assume the consciousness of the other is as relevant as our own. (I am making an argument that can align itself with Pascal’s wager here: it would be a lesser transgression to assume equality and be wrong than it would to assume inequality and be wrong.)
I often find my mind returning to moments in life that found me bewildered. Many of these seem to pertain to juxtapositions between the world those who raised us intended us to see, and the world as it reveals itself despite them. I am reminded of another scene from To Kill A Mockingbird, when Atticus says, “There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible.” As illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave, refusing to question the validity of how we immediately see things is detrimental to our growth.
In the years since Peter, I’ve come to the conclusion that when people say, “It’s common sense,” what they mean is they are incapable of effectively explaining their reasoning, likely because the logic is dubious, so they will instead refuse to answer on the unfounded grounds that the question is stupid. I see no evidence that common sense exists at all, but that some of us are better inclined towards finding reasonable and effective solutions than others.
“Peter just has no common sense,” my dad would say, shaking his head. Dad led our church’s all-male scouting group, which met every Wednesday evening. We drove 40 miles each way to these meetings for several years, as we did to two services every Sunday, during the time when Pastor Steve led the church in Webster City. For a period we picked up Peter along the way. This guy had a knack for breaking everything. To this day, you can’t go on a camping trip with my family and ask, “Who broke this?” without the inevitable reply- “Peter.”
As an example, while setting up tents at the beginning of one camping trip, Peter asked if he could help. “Sure,” my dad said, “Grab one of those tomahawks and hammer in those tent pegs.” Yes, we did have several tomahawks lying around. Oh, does that seem weird to you? Also, our tent pegs were railroad spikes. Anyway, Peter took a hack at driving in a railroad spike using the sharp end of the throwing hatchet instead of the butt-end, leaving a remarkable chip in the blade.
Peter was several years older than me; closer to my brother’s age. My brother knew algebra. Peter did not know left from right. I began to wonder what common sense was and why Peter didn’t have it. Dad began taking some extra time to thoroughly explain things to Peter. I asked why Peter’s own dad didn’t teach him these things, and my dad explained that some kids don’t have responsible or attentive dads and others didn’t have dads at all. It occurred to me that common sense was something akin to things your parents are supposed to teach you.
My first pocket knife had raccoons etched on the blade. When I showed it to Peter, he couldn’t figure out how to work the locking mechanism that keeps the blade from slipping shut. After demonstrating how it worked, he promptly closed it on himself and cut a finger. I quickly fetched a band-aid, hoping I wasn’t going to get in trouble for being in part responsible for the mishap, and watched wide-eyed as Peter futilely tried to figure out how to apply the bandage. I eventually had to adhere it myself. Peter had no common sense.
Dad had given me this knife during a strange fishing trip a few years prior. We attended a much closer church in Fort Dodge then, and it was evenly divided into the older teenage kids- Sean, Jay, Troy and my brother, and the younger grade school kids- Stevie, Trent, Jeremy and myself. Honestly, the other kids were a bunch of hoodlums. Fort Dodge was a poor and rough-and-tumble town. My dad was in charge of the older kids and Jeremy’s dad was in charge of the younger kids. Jeremy’s dad taught us the scouting group's Code and the definitions of some of the strange words it contained, including “loyal,” “courteous” and “obedient.” I specifically recall him defining loyal as, “You know, being loyal to someone or something,” which I realized was no explanation whatsoever. I wondered if he knew what it meant.
On the day I received the knife, we went fishing near a spillway in Fort Dodge, and were given strict instructions to be very careful around the dam- no getting near the water, no running and no climbing or crossing the protective barriers. Before long, us younger kids had gotten bored with fishing and were running, climbing and shoving each other on top of the spillway.
Suddenly, we noticed a commotion below where the big kids still were, and Jeremy’s dad seemed to be attending to my dad, who was holding his back. Without knowing what was going on, I decided I’d better start following instructions and stopped horsing around with the other kids. Shortly thereafter, one of them slid down the spillway and probably would have drowned if my dad hadn’t gone in after him and fetched him out of the water. (I honestly don’t remember which kid it was, but for easier readability later on, I’m going to suppose it was Trent.) After that, it was time to leave, and as we packed things up dad gave me the raccoon-laden pocket knife with strict instructions as to its proper usage, and I considered this my reward for being relatively obedient.
The scouting group meetings generally consisted of a morality lesson and a fun activity. One activity was ring-toss, which consisted of attempting to throw wooden shower curtain rings around the neck of one of a cluster of soda bottles. The reward for accomplishing this feat was the bottle itself, but since I didn’t particularly care for soda, I found the game a bit tedious. One day while this activity was taking place, Peter revealed a box, and inside was a set of handcuffs replete with key. These things were pretty much the coolest thing I had ever seen.
Peter said they belonged to his dad, who was a cop. By this time I had determined that Peter didn’t have a father, because of the common sense thing, so this bombshell surprised me. However, Stevie’s dad at that other church was a cop, too, and Stevie was the worst behaving kid of the bunch. So it seemed even police officers could be bad fathers. After that, I’d continually ask Peter to bring the handcuffs again, but he never did. Also, his stories pertaining to his father’s occupation and whereabouts was in constant flux, so I began to suspect he was inventing him like Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.
On one camping trip, while a few of us were milling around in our tent, separate from the adults, the taboo topic of girls came up. “What would you do if a girl drove into the campgrounds right now?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, uninterested. It seemed a stupid premise. Girls weren’t allowed on these camping trips. Anyway, I had a sister who wasn’t particularly mysterious, so I was simply glad for the respite from one being around.
Peter, however, went into a monologue: “First, I’d bring her back into this tent and close the flap. And zip up all the windows. Then, I’d slowly unbutton her blouse, starting at the top and working my way down…”
“Why would you want to do that?” I interrupted. Peter gave me an indecipherable look. I didn’t know whether it meant my question was stupid or that he didn’t actually know the answer, either. I never got the chance to find out, as Little Steve, the pastor’s kid, quickly put an abrupt end to the conversation.
After pondering this awkward moment, I concluded that this was another example of Peter’s lack of parental guidance. Otherwise he would have known better than to have inappropriate fantasies about girls.
On another occasion, my dad returned home late, and mentioned it was because he had been visiting a kid in prison. It was a kid from the Fort Dodge church’s scouting group way back when who I didn’t immediately remember, but eventually recognized as the infrequent member who had once shown me how to construct an effective paper airplane. How could someone smart enough to know that be in jail? “I think his dad had a drinking problem and might have been abusive,” my dad explained. “Do you remember- we visited his house once to try and help and I even reported his situation to social services, but they didn’t do anything.” I vaguely remembered. “He was the one who threw the knife at me.”
“What?!” This was certainly news to me.
“It was on that same fishing trip when Trent fell in the spillway. At the previous meeting we had done an activity and as a prize I had given him a pocket knife with raccoons on the blade- I think you have it now. Anyway, I think his dad must have found him with it and he’d gotten in trouble for it, because the next week during that fishing trip he drove up, got out of the car and threw the knife at me while I was sitting at a picnic table and it hit me square in the back. Luckily, it had rotated so the point of the handle hit me even though the blade was out but he still threw it hard enough that it really hurt. At first, I thought I’d been shot.”
“That’s not why he’s in jail, is it?”
“Oh no, I figured he had enough problems. I guess I was right.”
Why would my dad now be going out of his way to visit an incarcerated person who had once tried to kill him? It defied common sense, unless I was to stick with my original interpretation of the term.
I find an exploration of the term “common sense” yields more questions than answers. I assume the idea is a derivative of the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious, which I, as a subjective individual, can only see as a load of hooey. I don’t believe I can remember things that didn’t happen to me. Will a bird raised in isolation still fly south for the winter without being introduced to a migrating flock? Hell if I know; nor do I consider the question germane. Instincts are distinctly separate to memory, as the former are things done without a previous sensory influence.
I have no idea how accurate or precise my memories are, nor am I able to perceive to what degree they have been altered, influenced or changed over time. Are my remembrances more or less influential than the actual experiences I’ve had, many of which are totally irretrievable to my consciousness? I don’t know the answer to that question, either.
My friend Eric is fond of postulating, “Can you think it if you can’t say it?” It is a clever question in part because the quest for the answer requires both intense examination and detailed articulation. In the end, I’m of the opinion that the impression that it often takes years to properly explain things that have been known all along point toward the reality that we can’t say much of what we think. An example is the person who can provide the answer to a math problem but is incapable of “showing his work,” or demonstrating the method used to come to that solution. However, even if it is in fact correct, one cannot trust the conclusion without demonstrating a fully coherent process of obtaining it. It would be unjustifiable to place any validity in unexplainable beliefs.
Does an unsolved mathematical equation have a solution? The best answer we can give is simply to try and solve it. Yet, I firmly believe that questions without answers exist in abundance. One seemingly useless thing to do is simply assume an answer and then assume that answer is the correct answer.
At least one impossible question is immediately posited here: If the blade of that knife had found its mark, who would have saved Trent from drowning?” There are no answers to purely hypothetical questions with no applicable predetermined rules. There is no point it wondering, “What if….” Life is what it is, which is to some degree separate from how we remember it to be, unless we are to argue life doesn’t exist at all, but is a figment of our own imaginations. That assumption must be rejected on the grounds that it forces us into an egocentric existence where nobody else matters. Because it cannot be demonstrated otherwise, we must assume the consciousness of the other is as relevant as our own. (I am making an argument that can align itself with Pascal’s wager here: it would be a lesser transgression to assume equality and be wrong than it would to assume inequality and be wrong.)
I often find my mind returning to moments in life that found me bewildered. Many of these seem to pertain to juxtapositions between the world those who raised us intended us to see, and the world as it reveals itself despite them. I am reminded of another scene from To Kill A Mockingbird, when Atticus says, “There's a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep 'em all away from you. That's never possible.” As illustrated in Plato’s allegory of the cave, refusing to question the validity of how we immediately see things is detrimental to our growth.
In the years since Peter, I’ve come to the conclusion that when people say, “It’s common sense,” what they mean is they are incapable of effectively explaining their reasoning, likely because the logic is dubious, so they will instead refuse to answer on the unfounded grounds that the question is stupid. I see no evidence that common sense exists at all, but that some of us are better inclined towards finding reasonable and effective solutions than others.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Mike Tyson's America
“Iron” Mike Tyson grew up in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. After his mother died when he was sixteen, he was adopted by Cus D’Amato, a reclusive boxing trainer and manager who had been responsible for making Floyd Patterson the youngest heavyweight boxing champion in 1956. I, on the other hand, grew up in a farmhouse with a stable family in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. I wanted to take Tae Kwan Do lessons but we couldn’t afford them, so I studied books explaining Asian martial arts instead.
The premise of boxing is ludicrous, which became a hugely popular word in my elementary school after we first heard it said in a nasally voice by none other than Mike Tyson. (That segue is cute enough I fear it will seem contrived….) Basically, boxing involves wrapping up your fists with leather-covered pillows and then attempting to punch an opponent in the front or sides of either the body above the belly button or head while he attempts to do the same atop a 256-484 square foot surface for 30-45 minutes.
Boxing aficionados will tell you the most important element of boxing is footwork. They will also tell you the most beautiful thing in boxing is the left jab. A left jab is a quick, straight punch thrown with the weak hand. It generally serves to measure the distance between you and the opponent and get the opponent off balance. Tyson was not a beautiful boxer- he had no left jab whatsoever. In fact, that is exactly the reason he was so successful.
Tyson was short for a heavyweight boxer. When I was a kid, I thought he was short like me, but actually he is 5’11’’. His reach is normal for his size, so was also less than that of his opponents. Tyson’s technique, cleverly designed to compensate for this, was to position both his gloves high in front of his face and explode toward his opponent like a bulldozer. He was able to nimbly move his head while keeping his arms rock-solid in front of it. When within jabbing range, Tyson didn’t as much as flinch. He just kept barreling forward, deftly cutting off the ring and both perplexing and intimidating his opponent just long enough to feed him devastating right hooks and uppercuts at point blank range.
In November of 1986, a year that had begun with the explosion of the Challenger, “Iron” Mike Tyson overtook Floyd Patterson’s record by a year and a half to become the new youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history. Cus D’Amato died shortly thereafter. Around the same time, my rabbit, aptly named Snowball, froze to death. As Tyson continued to pummel opponents in the ring on an almost weekly basis, my dad turned the rabbit cage into a pigeon coop. I was spending a significant amount of my time reading Marvel comic books, an alternate universe filled with super humans whose personal lives we got a glimpse of in every third issue, and playing with the 1980’s version of G.I. Joe- poseable plastic fighters and vehicles of all different styles whose product tag-line was “A Real American Hero.”
My dad is not a fighter and does not condone fighting. He is what one might call a hobbyist. In the mid 80’s, he divided his spare time between building a boat in the basement, constructing wire-controlled gas propeller-driven model airplanes, playing in a basketball league and assiduously leading the church’s boy-scout group. And by “spare time,” I’m referring to time not being spent supporting a family of five on a single household income as a construction and maintenance worker and also sustaining a 3.5 acre lot with horses, pigs, chickens, a quarter-acre garden and a four bedroom, one bathroom century home that ran on propane and shallow well-water. All this while teaching me how to pitch a baseball, build bird houses and model rockets, shoot a rifle, ride a bike on gravel, play basketball and who knows what else.
I’m not sure why or how dad decided to add raising pigeons to the list. I also don’t recall what kind of pigeons we had at that time. At some point, he moved the pigeon coop from the converted rabbit cage to the machine shed where I was spending more and more time practicing on an old drumset he had bought me for $50. Having yet to develop the capacity for controlling dynamics, I would struggle to figure out how to continue to hear the pigeons cooing while attempting to accompany them on that drumset.
In 1988, just after ending my elementary school years and becoming old enough to finally join the Christian frontiersman re-enactment club my dad and brother were involved in, we moved a few hours south to a small town just outside Des Moines called Polk City. At the same time, my brother, six years my elder, went off to college in Iowa City. Dad asked if I would like to continue to raise pigeons with him when we moved. I can’t recall moving the pigeons from the farm, but I do remember going with dad to buy some new ones. On that trip I learned there were different kinds of pigeons, and it seemed to me a no-brainer that the best ones were those that periodically interrupted their flight with random freefall backflips. My dad wanted the ones that could find their way home from hundreds of miles away. The person selling the pigeons made sure we wouldn’t be using the birds for training dogs. I learned what was meant by that on the drive home. Dad had built a shed in the backyard which he divided it into two sections, one for his Racing Homers and one for my Rollers.
That summer, the neighborhood kids quickly introduced me to their two favorite things: Poison, a really bad “hair” band, and Mike Tyson’s Punchout, a really awesome Nintendo game. In it, you got to be “Iron” Mike and fight his opponents; learning their names, stats, strengths and weaknesses. We all knew it was an almost exact rip-off of an Atari game called Punchout, but it was way better in our eyes- because it was Mike Tyson’s Punchout. I couldn’t even beat the video game version of the guys Tyson had made short work of in real life.
In the eighties, America and Americans were invincible. Perhaps the “Miracle on Ice” can be credited for setting the tone for the decade. We had not only the greatest athletes on the planet, as the 1984 Olympics would prove, but we also had the most entertaining movies, the most brilliant technology, the loudest music, the funniest comedians, Pepsi and break dancing. Sure, the Brits had Princess Di, but we had the king- Michael Jackson. We were so bad-ass we were winning the Cold War by intimidation alone. Everything was larger than life back then. Even our president was a Hollywood actor. We didn’t know or care to know about the wars his administration was instigating, funding and arming. Unbelievably in retrospect, we were also largely ignorant of the AIDS epidemic. We nearly got through the entire decade with only those six astronauts and the accompanying teacher being our only televised glimpse of reality, and they had become enshrined in our minds as epitomizing American bravery and fortitude. We even saved Jessica McClure from that well. 1989 was defined by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but we failed to appreciate the significance of this event as a poignant warning that we would soon find ourselves cleaning up all kinds of messes that would be the direct results of our decade of peace and prosperity. (When god announced her presence during the World Series and then let the A’s beat the Giants, we should have known we were headed for trouble.)
The early nineties sucked, and not only because of the fact that I was entering high school. The end began on February 11th, 1990. I didn’t watch the “Buster” Douglas fight. Nobody watched that fight, because we all knew nobody could beat Mike Tyson. He was “the baddest man on the planet.” Afterwards, we didn’t know what to believe anymore. Before we knew what was happening, we were fighting in Iraq, “Magic” Johnson had AIDS and Michael Jackson was white. We had been told there was no draft, yet here were getting “Selective Service” registration cards in the mail. Forced to inspect closer, we quickly learned not only was the Marvel universe fiction, but our media-fed one was as well. Obviously many of the greats of the era: Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky, etc. have remained untainted, but that is beside the point. We as a collective had glass chins. We quickly found a new spokesperson for our generation in Kurt Cobain. The turnaround was so drastic that, on January 11th, 1992, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” supplanted Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” atop the Billboard charts.
Raising pigeons consists mostly of giving them straw, food and water, cleaning up their crap and making sure they are inside at dusk so they don’t get eaten by hawks and owls. The last is achieved by throwing rocks at them if they try and roost on the neighbor's garage. I sometimes drove random places with dad to release the Homers at gradually increasing distances. It wasn’t unusual for them to eventually fail to return, and every once in awhile, one that had been lost for several months would suddenly appear, ragged and beaten. Dad and I remained active in the frontiersman group, where we camped in a Baker-style lean-to tent dad had designed and sewn with three built-in cots. He also built oak and glass lanterns that we bartered with at “Rendezvous,” which were all-male gatherings during which we shot black powder rifles, threw knives, tomahawks and horseshoes, swapped tales and started bonfires with flint and steel.
During one such event, another member of our frontiersman group, whom I had known as far back as I could remember for being able to build the fastest pinewood derby cars in the state, spent an afternoon turning a leaky metal washtub into a washtub bass- only to discover he couldn’t play the thing. Others made brief and unsuccessful attempts, but when it was my dad’s turn, he immediately began plucking out familiar melodies. This astonished me likely as much as it had my parents when my brother had sat down at a piano and started sight-reading music back in ’82. Later that night there was a severe storm and we came within a few feet of being struck by lightning.
After returning home, dad bought a guitar and we started a Christian rock band. This was my first band outside of the organized school music program, which I remained heavily involved in, and my first taste of rehearsals, gigs, band mates and music equipment, which dad bought second-hand from a nice old junk collector named Fred. Also during this time, dad grew his hair long, got his ear pierced and bought a motorcycle.
My junior year of high school, I began dating a girl and discovered bebop. I worked as a prep cook and read classic literature. Dad didn’t know about any of this stuff. He followed meaningless drivel like college football and played golf, which was far too frustrating a sport to try and figure out how to do.
In retrospect, it is obvious that one way to defend against Tyson’s strategy is to tie him up before he can unload a punch, obliging the referee to break the pair up. Repeated, this would make for an interesting gambit to determine who would get more frustrated with a fight in which nary a punch would be thrown, the fans or Tyson. Evander Holyfield was determined to find out.
Mike Tyson’s early success combined with the untimely death of the architect of that success left Tyson without a backup plan. Having presumably never been exposed to the philosophy of fighters like Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali, flexibility and adaptation were not in “Iron” Mike’s repertoire. He had instead been trained to be unyielding, and he had learned well. When things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to, Mike Tyson didn’t get frustrated; he absolutely snapped.
Today, Tyson’s influence is very much alive in Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA, a modern sport that combines fighting with grappling. Wresters who converted to MMA figured out that Tyson’s style was perfectly suited for them, as the way to defend it, tying up, is exactly what wrestlers want to do. MMA gloves are much less padded than boxing gloves, so even a boxing novice can knock someone out. (This is not to belittle MMA as a sport- I’ve realized the easiest way to defend oneself in real life is to learn how to do everything that is illegal in MMA.) Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell, who a lot of kids today probably tout as the greatest fighter ever, made a career out of emulating Tyson’s boxing approach in MMA fights.
There is currently a television show about Mike Tyson learning to train Racing Homers, called “Taking on Tyson.” Tyson has raised pigeons most of his life, but they have always been ones that looked pretty or did tricks in the air. The unique thing about Homers is that they can find their way home from hundreds of miles away, but in order for them to be good at it, they have to be trained. To some, a show about a washed-up nut-job fooling around with birds might seem a bore, but I’ve remained glued to every episode, not only because Mike Tyson helped define my generation, but because it reminds how fortunate I am that, while my generation grew up looking for heroes in pop-culture, I was being raised by a superhero.
The premise of boxing is ludicrous, which became a hugely popular word in my elementary school after we first heard it said in a nasally voice by none other than Mike Tyson. (That segue is cute enough I fear it will seem contrived….) Basically, boxing involves wrapping up your fists with leather-covered pillows and then attempting to punch an opponent in the front or sides of either the body above the belly button or head while he attempts to do the same atop a 256-484 square foot surface for 30-45 minutes.
Boxing aficionados will tell you the most important element of boxing is footwork. They will also tell you the most beautiful thing in boxing is the left jab. A left jab is a quick, straight punch thrown with the weak hand. It generally serves to measure the distance between you and the opponent and get the opponent off balance. Tyson was not a beautiful boxer- he had no left jab whatsoever. In fact, that is exactly the reason he was so successful.
Tyson was short for a heavyweight boxer. When I was a kid, I thought he was short like me, but actually he is 5’11’’. His reach is normal for his size, so was also less than that of his opponents. Tyson’s technique, cleverly designed to compensate for this, was to position both his gloves high in front of his face and explode toward his opponent like a bulldozer. He was able to nimbly move his head while keeping his arms rock-solid in front of it. When within jabbing range, Tyson didn’t as much as flinch. He just kept barreling forward, deftly cutting off the ring and both perplexing and intimidating his opponent just long enough to feed him devastating right hooks and uppercuts at point blank range.
In November of 1986, a year that had begun with the explosion of the Challenger, “Iron” Mike Tyson overtook Floyd Patterson’s record by a year and a half to become the new youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history. Cus D’Amato died shortly thereafter. Around the same time, my rabbit, aptly named Snowball, froze to death. As Tyson continued to pummel opponents in the ring on an almost weekly basis, my dad turned the rabbit cage into a pigeon coop. I was spending a significant amount of my time reading Marvel comic books, an alternate universe filled with super humans whose personal lives we got a glimpse of in every third issue, and playing with the 1980’s version of G.I. Joe- poseable plastic fighters and vehicles of all different styles whose product tag-line was “A Real American Hero.”
My dad is not a fighter and does not condone fighting. He is what one might call a hobbyist. In the mid 80’s, he divided his spare time between building a boat in the basement, constructing wire-controlled gas propeller-driven model airplanes, playing in a basketball league and assiduously leading the church’s boy-scout group. And by “spare time,” I’m referring to time not being spent supporting a family of five on a single household income as a construction and maintenance worker and also sustaining a 3.5 acre lot with horses, pigs, chickens, a quarter-acre garden and a four bedroom, one bathroom century home that ran on propane and shallow well-water. All this while teaching me how to pitch a baseball, build bird houses and model rockets, shoot a rifle, ride a bike on gravel, play basketball and who knows what else.
I’m not sure why or how dad decided to add raising pigeons to the list. I also don’t recall what kind of pigeons we had at that time. At some point, he moved the pigeon coop from the converted rabbit cage to the machine shed where I was spending more and more time practicing on an old drumset he had bought me for $50. Having yet to develop the capacity for controlling dynamics, I would struggle to figure out how to continue to hear the pigeons cooing while attempting to accompany them on that drumset.
In 1988, just after ending my elementary school years and becoming old enough to finally join the Christian frontiersman re-enactment club my dad and brother were involved in, we moved a few hours south to a small town just outside Des Moines called Polk City. At the same time, my brother, six years my elder, went off to college in Iowa City. Dad asked if I would like to continue to raise pigeons with him when we moved. I can’t recall moving the pigeons from the farm, but I do remember going with dad to buy some new ones. On that trip I learned there were different kinds of pigeons, and it seemed to me a no-brainer that the best ones were those that periodically interrupted their flight with random freefall backflips. My dad wanted the ones that could find their way home from hundreds of miles away. The person selling the pigeons made sure we wouldn’t be using the birds for training dogs. I learned what was meant by that on the drive home. Dad had built a shed in the backyard which he divided it into two sections, one for his Racing Homers and one for my Rollers.
That summer, the neighborhood kids quickly introduced me to their two favorite things: Poison, a really bad “hair” band, and Mike Tyson’s Punchout, a really awesome Nintendo game. In it, you got to be “Iron” Mike and fight his opponents; learning their names, stats, strengths and weaknesses. We all knew it was an almost exact rip-off of an Atari game called Punchout, but it was way better in our eyes- because it was Mike Tyson’s Punchout. I couldn’t even beat the video game version of the guys Tyson had made short work of in real life.
In the eighties, America and Americans were invincible. Perhaps the “Miracle on Ice” can be credited for setting the tone for the decade. We had not only the greatest athletes on the planet, as the 1984 Olympics would prove, but we also had the most entertaining movies, the most brilliant technology, the loudest music, the funniest comedians, Pepsi and break dancing. Sure, the Brits had Princess Di, but we had the king- Michael Jackson. We were so bad-ass we were winning the Cold War by intimidation alone. Everything was larger than life back then. Even our president was a Hollywood actor. We didn’t know or care to know about the wars his administration was instigating, funding and arming. Unbelievably in retrospect, we were also largely ignorant of the AIDS epidemic. We nearly got through the entire decade with only those six astronauts and the accompanying teacher being our only televised glimpse of reality, and they had become enshrined in our minds as epitomizing American bravery and fortitude. We even saved Jessica McClure from that well. 1989 was defined by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but we failed to appreciate the significance of this event as a poignant warning that we would soon find ourselves cleaning up all kinds of messes that would be the direct results of our decade of peace and prosperity. (When god announced her presence during the World Series and then let the A’s beat the Giants, we should have known we were headed for trouble.)
The early nineties sucked, and not only because of the fact that I was entering high school. The end began on February 11th, 1990. I didn’t watch the “Buster” Douglas fight. Nobody watched that fight, because we all knew nobody could beat Mike Tyson. He was “the baddest man on the planet.” Afterwards, we didn’t know what to believe anymore. Before we knew what was happening, we were fighting in Iraq, “Magic” Johnson had AIDS and Michael Jackson was white. We had been told there was no draft, yet here were getting “Selective Service” registration cards in the mail. Forced to inspect closer, we quickly learned not only was the Marvel universe fiction, but our media-fed one was as well. Obviously many of the greats of the era: Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Wayne Gretzky, etc. have remained untainted, but that is beside the point. We as a collective had glass chins. We quickly found a new spokesperson for our generation in Kurt Cobain. The turnaround was so drastic that, on January 11th, 1992, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” supplanted Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” atop the Billboard charts.
Raising pigeons consists mostly of giving them straw, food and water, cleaning up their crap and making sure they are inside at dusk so they don’t get eaten by hawks and owls. The last is achieved by throwing rocks at them if they try and roost on the neighbor's garage. I sometimes drove random places with dad to release the Homers at gradually increasing distances. It wasn’t unusual for them to eventually fail to return, and every once in awhile, one that had been lost for several months would suddenly appear, ragged and beaten. Dad and I remained active in the frontiersman group, where we camped in a Baker-style lean-to tent dad had designed and sewn with three built-in cots. He also built oak and glass lanterns that we bartered with at “Rendezvous,” which were all-male gatherings during which we shot black powder rifles, threw knives, tomahawks and horseshoes, swapped tales and started bonfires with flint and steel.
During one such event, another member of our frontiersman group, whom I had known as far back as I could remember for being able to build the fastest pinewood derby cars in the state, spent an afternoon turning a leaky metal washtub into a washtub bass- only to discover he couldn’t play the thing. Others made brief and unsuccessful attempts, but when it was my dad’s turn, he immediately began plucking out familiar melodies. This astonished me likely as much as it had my parents when my brother had sat down at a piano and started sight-reading music back in ’82. Later that night there was a severe storm and we came within a few feet of being struck by lightning.
After returning home, dad bought a guitar and we started a Christian rock band. This was my first band outside of the organized school music program, which I remained heavily involved in, and my first taste of rehearsals, gigs, band mates and music equipment, which dad bought second-hand from a nice old junk collector named Fred. Also during this time, dad grew his hair long, got his ear pierced and bought a motorcycle.
My junior year of high school, I began dating a girl and discovered bebop. I worked as a prep cook and read classic literature. Dad didn’t know about any of this stuff. He followed meaningless drivel like college football and played golf, which was far too frustrating a sport to try and figure out how to do.
In retrospect, it is obvious that one way to defend against Tyson’s strategy is to tie him up before he can unload a punch, obliging the referee to break the pair up. Repeated, this would make for an interesting gambit to determine who would get more frustrated with a fight in which nary a punch would be thrown, the fans or Tyson. Evander Holyfield was determined to find out.
Mike Tyson’s early success combined with the untimely death of the architect of that success left Tyson without a backup plan. Having presumably never been exposed to the philosophy of fighters like Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali, flexibility and adaptation were not in “Iron” Mike’s repertoire. He had instead been trained to be unyielding, and he had learned well. When things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to, Mike Tyson didn’t get frustrated; he absolutely snapped.
Today, Tyson’s influence is very much alive in Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA, a modern sport that combines fighting with grappling. Wresters who converted to MMA figured out that Tyson’s style was perfectly suited for them, as the way to defend it, tying up, is exactly what wrestlers want to do. MMA gloves are much less padded than boxing gloves, so even a boxing novice can knock someone out. (This is not to belittle MMA as a sport- I’ve realized the easiest way to defend oneself in real life is to learn how to do everything that is illegal in MMA.) Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell, who a lot of kids today probably tout as the greatest fighter ever, made a career out of emulating Tyson’s boxing approach in MMA fights.
There is currently a television show about Mike Tyson learning to train Racing Homers, called “Taking on Tyson.” Tyson has raised pigeons most of his life, but they have always been ones that looked pretty or did tricks in the air. The unique thing about Homers is that they can find their way home from hundreds of miles away, but in order for them to be good at it, they have to be trained. To some, a show about a washed-up nut-job fooling around with birds might seem a bore, but I’ve remained glued to every episode, not only because Mike Tyson helped define my generation, but because it reminds how fortunate I am that, while my generation grew up looking for heroes in pop-culture, I was being raised by a superhero.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Begin Again Again
When I first got to Iowa, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Ironically, I was very fortunate in having a place I could take refuge. I came to live with my brother, whom I last lived with 22 years ago. I didn’t actually know quite what to expect. It turns out he’s not dissimilar to me if you removed my cockiness. I am privileged with the opportunity to get back on my feet without desperation. My brother, like myself, is a generous person. He has this Mennonite cookbook full of simple meals that he makes most nights. I am going to have to get myself a copy. First, I have to get myself a truck.
The public transportation system here is hilarious. There are something like 12 buses that make a loop once an hour and meet in the middle of downtown, so the bus route map is comparable to the city with a child-drawn flower on top of it. A ticket is $1.25; however, if you want to transfer (which you’ll always want to do unless your destination is downtown), you have to pay again or get a $3.00 day pass. Inexplicably, they stop running altogether at 7:00pm, and don’t run on Sundays at all!
Moving to a new place is an excellent opportunity to reinvent oneself. For starters, I tell everyone here I’m from the west coast, which I feel is true. One bizarre thing is that everyone here seems to think I’m quiet and reserved!
I have had the chance to sort through every single one of my possessions this year and get rid of a lot of junk. Most Americans have an appalling accumulation of crap. The things I own that I like the most are my tattoos, which is a good thing.
For the most part, it seems the only people that live in Cedar Rapids are those who don’t know enough to leave. But there’s something relaxing about the quaintness of it all. It’s a perfect place to save money, as housing is super cheap and there’s nothing to do.
I got a job working with AT&T. It’s not bad, but the co-workers I’m training with are a bunch of nineteen-year-old mothers who eat ramen noodles for every lunch and fast food for every dinner, all washed down with soda, which they call “pop.” I’ve been inspired by the reality that, no matter how bad it might be for me right now, at least I’m not one of these losers. I’m reminded of one of my favorite lines from the apropos movie Lonesome Jim, “I think about ending it enough as it is; I can’t imagine having YOUR life.” But really these kids are smart, witty and driven. I’ve found myself learning from them.
Nobody ever did anything by saying “I can’t.” I am the type of person who has tended to be motivated by criticism and bored with compliments. Now I’ve realized that negativity is the real bore. There is no greater gift than the opportunity to pay someone a compliment. I still think people that need to be complimented all the time are pathetic.
There have been times when I’ve felt life owed me something. Now I’m realizing I owe life something. While I can at times behave like a bratty little kid, at heart I am a responsible adult… who should not date bratty little kids. Another key realization is that I have always been attracted to strong-willed, independent people. This really explains a lot about my life.
I feel so blessed with all that I’ve accomplished and experienced. I’ve done more this year alone than what most people can ever dream of. Just thinking about the food I’ve eaten and the places I’ve been this year: The best Indian food I ate was in Tuscaloosa, breakfast- Tuscaloosa, Thai- Chattanooga, sushi- Portland, Mexican- Portland, bar food- Portland, Tex Mex- Huston, home-cooked meal- Tucson, coffee- Tucson, cocktails- New Orleans, Spanish- New Orleans, Italian- San Francisco, Peruvian- San Francisco… AND since I can’t get a nopales burrito around here, I’ve learned to make my own.
The public transportation system here is hilarious. There are something like 12 buses that make a loop once an hour and meet in the middle of downtown, so the bus route map is comparable to the city with a child-drawn flower on top of it. A ticket is $1.25; however, if you want to transfer (which you’ll always want to do unless your destination is downtown), you have to pay again or get a $3.00 day pass. Inexplicably, they stop running altogether at 7:00pm, and don’t run on Sundays at all!
Moving to a new place is an excellent opportunity to reinvent oneself. For starters, I tell everyone here I’m from the west coast, which I feel is true. One bizarre thing is that everyone here seems to think I’m quiet and reserved!
I have had the chance to sort through every single one of my possessions this year and get rid of a lot of junk. Most Americans have an appalling accumulation of crap. The things I own that I like the most are my tattoos, which is a good thing.
For the most part, it seems the only people that live in Cedar Rapids are those who don’t know enough to leave. But there’s something relaxing about the quaintness of it all. It’s a perfect place to save money, as housing is super cheap and there’s nothing to do.
I got a job working with AT&T. It’s not bad, but the co-workers I’m training with are a bunch of nineteen-year-old mothers who eat ramen noodles for every lunch and fast food for every dinner, all washed down with soda, which they call “pop.” I’ve been inspired by the reality that, no matter how bad it might be for me right now, at least I’m not one of these losers. I’m reminded of one of my favorite lines from the apropos movie Lonesome Jim, “I think about ending it enough as it is; I can’t imagine having YOUR life.” But really these kids are smart, witty and driven. I’ve found myself learning from them.
Nobody ever did anything by saying “I can’t.” I am the type of person who has tended to be motivated by criticism and bored with compliments. Now I’ve realized that negativity is the real bore. There is no greater gift than the opportunity to pay someone a compliment. I still think people that need to be complimented all the time are pathetic.
There have been times when I’ve felt life owed me something. Now I’m realizing I owe life something. While I can at times behave like a bratty little kid, at heart I am a responsible adult… who should not date bratty little kids. Another key realization is that I have always been attracted to strong-willed, independent people. This really explains a lot about my life.
I feel so blessed with all that I’ve accomplished and experienced. I’ve done more this year alone than what most people can ever dream of. Just thinking about the food I’ve eaten and the places I’ve been this year: The best Indian food I ate was in Tuscaloosa, breakfast- Tuscaloosa, Thai- Chattanooga, sushi- Portland, Mexican- Portland, bar food- Portland, Tex Mex- Huston, home-cooked meal- Tucson, coffee- Tucson, cocktails- New Orleans, Spanish- New Orleans, Italian- San Francisco, Peruvian- San Francisco… AND since I can’t get a nopales burrito around here, I’ve learned to make my own.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
2010 Top 10
in chronological order:
Scotch tastings at Ian’s
Chant and Risa’s Oregon visit
Joseph Cornell exhibit at New Orleans Art Museum
Watching Portland Beavers games with the Lemon Ladies
Reuniting with college classmate Stefanie
Applejack cocktail tasting at my apt.
Surprise going away party in my honor
Meeting Makena and Ryder McLaughlin
Seeing Eric Sheldon and his family
Lance’s 40th birthday
Other awesome things included watching World Cup and playing a ton of disc golf. I also got to spend time in ten different states (traveling through several others) and live in three of them this year! AND THE GIANTS WON THE WORLD SERIES!!! 2010 has truly been a great year and I look forward to the next one.
Scotch tastings at Ian’s
Chant and Risa’s Oregon visit
Joseph Cornell exhibit at New Orleans Art Museum
Watching Portland Beavers games with the Lemon Ladies
Reuniting with college classmate Stefanie
Applejack cocktail tasting at my apt.
Surprise going away party in my honor
Meeting Makena and Ryder McLaughlin
Seeing Eric Sheldon and his family
Lance’s 40th birthday
Other awesome things included watching World Cup and playing a ton of disc golf. I also got to spend time in ten different states (traveling through several others) and live in three of them this year! AND THE GIANTS WON THE WORLD SERIES!!! 2010 has truly been a great year and I look forward to the next one.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Geni
I just found out that according to geni.com my name is Dennis Kelso. I live in Nebraska, my mom is named Norma and my wife is Janet. There's so much useful information on the internet! It doesn't know how old I am, however. Rats; I wanted to find out how long I've gone without being aware of these extremely fundamental facts....
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Trust
In my experience there are four kinds of people: those who lie, those who exaggerate, those who refrain from telling the truth and those who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. People have suggested I have trust issues, to which I coyly reply, “I don’t have trust issues because I don’t trust anyone.” Actually, that’s not true, I trust people sometimes. But I always regret it eventually.
My parents have been married 38 years. One day when I was around ten, my parents got into a big argument and my dad left. The next morning he came back and brought with him a gift for each of us three kids. Presumably he brought something for mom too but I don’t remember. My dad sat down with each of us, discussed the situation, apologized and promised that he would never leave us no matter what. I can’t really remember the conversation or what he gave my brother and sister, but he brought me a hot wheels car that from that day forward was by far my favorite toy car. I do remember realizing that he had spent his night away wandering around buying us presents, which showed that he was still thinking of us even while he was gone. My dad never left again.
That car happens to be sitting on the window ledge next to this computer now, and I sometimes find myself staring at it and thinking how lucky and grateful I am that no matter what happens, no matter how bad things get and no matter how annoying they are (oops, I mean I am), my parents will always be there for me. I can’t even begin to imagine where I would be right now if it weren’t for that fact.
My parents have been married 38 years. One day when I was around ten, my parents got into a big argument and my dad left. The next morning he came back and brought with him a gift for each of us three kids. Presumably he brought something for mom too but I don’t remember. My dad sat down with each of us, discussed the situation, apologized and promised that he would never leave us no matter what. I can’t really remember the conversation or what he gave my brother and sister, but he brought me a hot wheels car that from that day forward was by far my favorite toy car. I do remember realizing that he had spent his night away wandering around buying us presents, which showed that he was still thinking of us even while he was gone. My dad never left again.
That car happens to be sitting on the window ledge next to this computer now, and I sometimes find myself staring at it and thinking how lucky and grateful I am that no matter what happens, no matter how bad things get and no matter how annoying they are (oops, I mean I am), my parents will always be there for me. I can’t even begin to imagine where I would be right now if it weren’t for that fact.
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