Speak no Evil

Troubles

 I haven't posted here in over a month, and in reply to the surprising number of messages I have received over the last couple of weeks, I think I owe you an explanation.

I was involved in a particularly nasty car accident in the middle of January. I was broadsided by another car which has spun out of control on an icy road near where I live in the Northeast. No one was killed, but the driver of the other car was badly injured and I was knocked unconscious for three days. Needless to say, I haven't been all that motivated, let alone able to post here. Things are looking good though and, aside from worries about the potential long-term effects of head trauma, my doctors are fgrankly amazed at the speed of my recovery.

All of this is to say that I hope to get back to this blog soon. Thanks for your patience.

posted by: brassmonkey at 15:13 | link | comments (4) |

Connections

The holidays are over. Life is back to normal and all is good. There's a dusting of snow on the ground (which is an improvement over the rain), I have some money in my pocket and, best of all, and my girlfriend was in town for a visit. I can sit back and bask in contentment with the thought that all is well with the world. 

Only, all is not well with the world. 

Like almost everyone else in the world, from the Dalai Lama to my maiden aunt in Winnipeg, I have been shocked, concerned and transfixed by the tragedy in South Asia. The scale of the disaster is almost mind-numbing: more than 150,000 people in a dozen countries were killed in one sweep of a wave. Hundreds of thousands more – perhaps ultimately millions – are directly affected in the aftermath. They are homeless, jobless, starving and likely candidates for any number of opportunistic diseases that wait quietly for civilization to be utterly dashed so they can ravage humanity.

I have found myself in the strange position of wanting to blame someone for the catastrophe. Hell, it was easy to lay blame after 911 and after Oklahoma City. Those, after all, were the acts of men. I can even imagine finding people to blame for the 1989 San Francisco earthquake – or at least the morons who built the two-deck Embarcadero Freeway in an earthquake zone – and AIDS – or at least the public health officials who twiddled their thumbs while it was only GRID (Gay-related immunodeficiency disorder).

But this? Who do you blame? There was no warning because there was no warning system, and there was no warning system because tsunamis of this scale almost never happen in the Indian Ocean. Blaming someone or some government for no building a warning system would be like blaming someone for not building a Sirocco warning system in West Texas. Sure, it possible, but it's pretty damned unlikely.

And that, at the end of the day, is the problem. There no one to blame. We can only look on in the realization that sometimes, without warning, this planet will kick the shit out of us at random. As powerful and as successful as we have been as a species, it doesn't really take much to wipe a whole lot of us out. This time it was a tsunami; next time it might be a volcano, a really big earthquake or even an asteroid. And there's dick little we can do about it.

That thought won't comfort the families of people who died in the disaster – and who are very likely shaking their fists at God at this very moment – and it won't help the thousands who will die of hunger and disease in the next weeks and months. However, something special has happened. In our infinitesimal smallness, humans have been banding together as humans to do something:

There's that Buddhist congregation in Vancouver, Canada, that's selling its temple to raise, it hopes, $500,000 for the relief effort. There are all the physicians and aid organization workers who toil endlessly to help ease the suffering. And people, ordinary people, are doing little things, and giving what they can.

I must admit that I'm always a bit cynical about individual motivations at times like this. I know that I should be more charitable about people, but I can't help but wonder if most people are giving to the relief effort out of a real sense of charitable altrusim, or whether it's just the latest fashion accessory, like a "free Tibet" button.

My own motivations are pretty complex. I know that, one of the reasons why I have organized a collection for the Red Cross at my work place is that I want to be seen to be doing something good. Don't get me wrong, I want to do good, but I also want to be the guy who does good. And that can only happen if I am seen. It's not that I expect any capital out of this, but I do think there are are number of things going through my mind.

My girlfriend, for example, is the kind of woman who does good as naturally as breathe. Charity and volunteerism are normal to her as self doubt and cynicism are to me. She has done all kinds of things, in the past, that I have thought of us both ridiculously naïve and extraordinarily noble – at the same time, mind you. And here I am, I admit, doing something selfless and charitable largely so she can be proud of me.

Yes, dammit, I want her to be proud of me. It's not about the suffering in Indonesia and Sri Lanka so much as it's about being a good man in her eyes. How demented is that?

And I'm sure that many other people, maybe most of the people who are doing their bit for the survivors and for the relief effort, have similar, less-than-noble motivations. They, too, want to be seen to be doing good. They want someone to be proud of them.

But then I wonder if this is such a bad thing after all. I mean, people, including me, are doing good, despite the absence of real altruism. I am doing things that my girlfriend can be proud of. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Who cares why people do things as long as they do the right thing, right?

I suppose there should be some kind of profound revelation in that, and perhaps there is. The best I can do is that we are all connected, in some way. Some of us are connected through people closer to us than strangers on the other side of the world. But at the end of the day, I guess, we are all connected.

posted by: brassmonkey at 20:48 | link | comments (1) |

Like a Bad Hollywood Movie

I never thought I'd be one of those guys who are afraid of commitment. It's such a cliché, after all, along with the woman with the loudly audible biological clock and the love-'em-and-leave-'em Lothario. That isn't to say that I haven't known people who fit these clichés and give them life; God only knows how many of the guys I grew up with went running the first time their first really serious girlfriends started talking about their futures. 

To be honest, I always thought I was better than a tired, old saw. After all, I came of age at a time when "the sensitive man of the eighties" was an ideal to live by, and not a standing joke. Liberated men were able to have frank and open discussions with their partners – yes, we called our girlfriends and wives partners – about their mutual goals with respect and consideration. Liberated fathers carried their children in snugglies, changed diapers and did the grocery shopping down at the bulk store, returning home with bundles of extra-firm tofu and kamut flour.

I'm not trying to trivialize that experience. It was real and meaningful in ways that The Utne Reader could never quite grasp. There was an earnestness to our relationships, to be sure, but it was motivated by a deep love and respect and a desire to be good and do right.

And I always thought that that experience had imparted to me the ability to look beyond myself, step out of my skin and really open up to an honest, committed relationship with the woman I love. I always thought that, but I was wrong. I am watching my relationship with my girlfriend spin clockwise down the drain because I am unable to make the commitment that she wants from me.

The ironic thing is that she's not asking for anything unreasonable. It's not as if she has demanded that we get married – to be honest, that's about the farthest thing from her mind right now and, in any event, she is quite aware that I am not exactly what you might call receptive to the idea of marriage for a whole lot of philosophical reasons. What she wants – and what I do believe she has every right to expect – is for me to integrate me more fully into my life.

In the broadest terms, that means that she wants to meet my friends and my parents and my siblings and their children. It sounds simple and straightforward enough, but every time I contemplate it, I am seized by a visceral panic; It's something that I want to do, not least because I know that I'll lose her if I don't, but I find myself fundamentally unable to do it. And because we live in different cities, it is possible for me to continue to avoid doing it.

The truth is that I have had a very bad couple of years. Sure, there were some good things that happened – meeting and falling in love with my girl certainly ranks as one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me – but mostly, I have endured two long years of trial and decline. (For the record, I am not blaming anyone for any of this; much of my pain was self-inflicted.)

 In this time, I lost a job that I loved and did very well; my income was halved; I have had to take menial and soul-destroying work to make ends meet; I have had an unbroken series of professional disappointments. If I had it to do all over again, I can honestly say that I wouldn't. 

Through all of this, my girlfriend has been the one bright light in an otherwise dark and grim world. In the last couple of months, with her help, I've finally found my feet and, while things haven't quite gelled professionally, I have begun to recover a bit. I am still battered and bruised and bloody, by the bleeding has stopped and new skin is growing over my wounds. 

Yet, I don't feel that I've healed enough to make even the tiny, symbolic commitment that she asks of me.

The bottom line is that I don't like my life. After these two years, I have withdrawn from almost everyone. Though I still have contact with my friends, it is very sporadic and superficial. I feel like I've been cowering in a Muhammad Ali-style rope-a-dope for so long that I'm still not quite ready to open up to outsiders. And, to be perfectly honest, my friendships were rarely of the deep and intimate type. Maybe this is typical of the men-of-the-21^st century, but I have social friends more than close friends, and they mostly remind me, I'm afraid to say, of the past two years.

It's hard for me to conceive of integrating my girl into that part of my life since I am not myself integrated into that part of my life.

My family is another matter. I plan a post about family some time in the next couple of weeks, but suffice it to say that my relationship with my parents and siblings is particularly estranged. In particular, my father and I have been at war for months, He helped me out financially when I really needed help a few months ago, and I really appreciated it. But my father has taken that as evidence (not totally without foundation, I admit) that I am utterly incapable of looking after myself. I have never followed a particularly stable career path and, in the past two years, that lack of stability turned around and bit me. In my father's eyes, I am a failure.

Admittedly, things are not quite as strained with my mother or siblings, but even there, I find the going difficult. My dilemma is how can I integrate my girlfriend with my family life when, for the moment at least, I am so estranged from my family? 

The problem is that I'm running out of time. She has already waited a long time for me to get my life back together and, even though I feel that I am slowly doing just that, I don't think she can wait any longer. And I don't feel that I can ask her to wait. 

So my life becomes ever more like a cliché. It's like a bad Hollywood movie starring Scarlet Johansson and Matthew Broderick as us (the names were taken more-or-less at random, although I am about Broderick's height and she is indeed beautiful). It's a place where I never thought I'd be, but I really don't know where else to go.

posted by: brassmonkey at 15:15 | link | comments (2) |

Humbug

My girlfriend asked: "do you really hate the holidays?"

 It's a legitimate question. The first thing I do when I hear canned Christmas music or see homes, businesses and trees decked in lights and tinsel every year in anticipation of winter wonderlands and familial warmth by the hearth is fall into a very foul, un-festive temper. I don't really even think about it; it just happens as a conditioned response. I am Pavlov's Scrooge.

 It wasn't always that way, of course. I can remember a time when I eagerly champed at the bit on the last days of school, impatient to get out into the freedom of crisp December air to celebrate the Great Winter Festival, whether it was Christmas, Chanukah or Saturnalia. It's not so much that I looked forward to the presents – though, as a young lad, I was hardly one to argue with free stuff – or even the perfectly-prepared turkey dinner, with stuffing and mashed potatoes, plum pudding with hard sauce and mince pie. (My mother, by the way, makes a mince pie that can knock you on your ass from five paces.)

 I was really into all the Norman Rockwell stuff. I always looked forward to spending an evening in the freezing cold of late December with Michelle, Donald, Mike, Steve, Sheila, Eddie, Alexa and Monicasinging "Good King Wenceslas" and "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" outside unsuspecting homes and collecting alms for local charities. We were actually a pretty good impromptu choir, with Alex, Mark and me grounding the bass, while Edie and the Monicae soared in the purest soprano voices through "Gloria in exclesis Deo."

 Afterward, we'd wind up at the home of one of our number for fruitcake, shortbread cookies shaped like Christmas trees, eggnog and hot toddy. Inevitably, It’s a Wonderful Life would be on the television, and we would warm ourselves in the glow of spiced rum and fellowship.

 My mother would always insist that we leave tree trimming for Christmas Eve (despite the fact that the Norrises had had their tree up since Halloween) to stand the twelve days until Epiphany, or "Old Christmas Day," as tradition demanded. It was a highly ritualized activity, lubricated by liberal libations of eggnog and well as sweets, oranges and nuts. The exercise was complete when my father placed a small angel figure – one of my mother's family heirlooms – at the top of the tree, and we realized that the family dog had fresh and minty breath because he had had his way with the candy canes hung from the lowest branches of the tree.

 To be absolutely honest, I would enjoy the holidays a whole lot more, and my girlfriend wouldn't have to ask if I really hated them, if I could go back to that. I am reasonably certain that the holiday celebrations of my youth were just as simple, warm and emotionally satisfying as I remember them. But they're gone. My friends are scattered hither and thither across the continent. The dynamics of my family have changed fundamentally as my siblings and I have grown older. My dog is long dead.

That's the thing about nostalgia, though: You're never nostalgic for something you have, only for what you've lost. My old-time Christmases live on in my memory as archetypes of the perfect holiday celebrations because I don't do Christmas like that anymore. Because I can't do Christmas like that anymore.

So, in answer to my girlfriend's question, no, I don't hate the holidays. I mistrust the holidays. I can't really get into the holidays the way I would like to, and that invariably makes me sad and a little grumpy.

Let me make something clear here. I am a staunch atheist, and have been as long as I can remember, so the religious dimension of the winter festivals doesn't really have a lot of appeal to me. On an aesthetic level, I can appreciate the Gnostic symbolism of the Christmas story. It tells of divinity being born – realized, if you will – through humanity. And not just any human, but the infant son of an itinerant carpenter who was too poor to pay for a room at the inn. Think about it: the power of the infinite is personified by the lowest among us, a powerless, essentially homeless infant. It evokes the promise of the Latin hymn: 

Veni, Creator Spiritus,
mentes tuorum visita,
imple superna gratia
quae tu creasti pectora. 

That's powerful stuff, and I can understand why the Puritans refrained from celebrating Christmas, and why Oliver Cromwell's dictatorship outlawed the holiday. If anyone can be the medium of divinity, then all that bumf about religious and temporal authority is a bunch of crap.

Maybe that's a secularized reading, but I don't have too much trouble with a secular holiday. That's not to say that I want to see endless Frosties and Santas pushing department store wares to a looping soundtrack of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," but if you can take the God stuff out of Christmas and replace it with some "Peace on Earth to men of goodwill" stuff, I'm down with it. 

But that's not it. The truth is that, as I get older, I find it increasingly difficult to get behind the communal part of the holidays, the way the whole world, or at least the small corner of it I happen to inhabit, stops to join hands in a public display of piety and enforced cheer. Even when I was a lad, I would gag when I saw those Christmas cards emblazoned with the emphatic imperative "Joy." There is a nasty tyranny of goodwill far beyond the affirmation of "in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis" of the Latin Gloria. Far from being a time to contemplate the emergence of the creative spirit in humanity – whether you take that on a religious, mystical or philosophical level – it is a not-very-subtle demand to be joyous. In the same way as everyone else. Whether you want to or not. Dammit. 

And if you don't, you're a Scrooge… or worse, a Grinch. (How dare he try to steal Christmas from all those nice Whos!) There's the rub: If you're not expressing seasonal elation, you must, the logic holds, be stealing joy from everyone else is.

You see it in company gift exchanges, where there is an implicit imperative to go out and buy something clever and meaningful for some randomly-selected coworker with whom you've exchanged three words in the last year. My usual fallback is to drop by the liquor store on the way to work and pick up a bottle of scotch. Once, however, this brought me in for an unusual level of disapprobation when it turned out that my randomly-assigned coworker was a recovering alcoholic. (As it turned out, he enjoyed the gift, but his life, I'm afraid, unraveled from there.) 

You see it in the insistence on family. As much as I enjoyed the family experience when I was young, I find it very difficult as an adult. No one expects much of a child on Christmas except innocent happiness. Things are different for adults, especially those of us who haven't quite lived up to expectations. The holidays are the one time, my father likes to remind me, when families are all together. Consequently, they are the one time of the year when your kin can quiz you about your achievements, or lack of them, over the last twelve months, grill you on your failed relationships and your inability to do anything remotely important with your life. 

I had one friend who dreaded her annual pilgrimage across the continent to the ancestral homestead in Idaho for just that reason. He always called his visit home for the holidays "The Accounting." 

And even with my dear, wonderful girlfriend (about whom you will eventually learn a great deal, because she is the most important person in my life), I find I cringe at the thought of the holidays. I'm sure I broke her heart when, like the emotional oaf that I am, I recoiled when she called to tell me that she had found me the perfect gift. It was an unconscious reaction on my part, I can assure you, but it hurt her just the same. (Incidentally, this is why she asked me if I really hate the holidays.) 

I'm not really opposed to the idea of buying gifts for one's loved ones. In fact, unlike shopping for the intimate strangers of the workplace, I quite enjoy putting the effort into buying something for someone I really care about. There is a lot of satisfaction in seeing someone's face flash with excitement and joy when she tears open the wrapping paper and sees the fruits of weeks of careful planning, searching and shopping. 

My problem is that I don't like receiving gifts. I don't want my girl to waste her time, effort and money on me, particularly under the oppressive tyranny of some seasonal imperative. 

Because I don't deserve it. Because I'm a Scrooge.

Humbug!

posted by: brassmonkey at 00:40 | link | comments |

Standing Naked in a Crowd

 There's something about our confessional culture that I just don't understand. I mean, how did we get here at all?

 

It wasn't really so long ago that we would live quiet, mostly isolated lives, spinning by each other like atoms. There was more empty space than matter then. It was maintained by a carefully-balanced, mutually-repellent valence layer of backyard fences, aluminum storm doors and carefully trimmed hedges. My parents could go for years without exchanging more words than "hello" and "cold enough for you?" with the Smiths and Joneses and Norrises on the other side of the fence.

I knew with the confident certainty of religious faith that, when the door closed behind me at the end of the day, that I was in a discrete family orbit, in a private realm among private realms separated by the comfort of empty space.

Maybe I'm just old enough to remember "the way things used to be" and just self-satisfied and patronizing enough to think that it was "the way things ought to be." Confession doesn't come easy when your peers cross paths for a prescribed few hours a day, and their worlds, apart from brief glimpses of kitchen and den on grilled-cheese lunchtime visits, are as mysterious to you as yours is to them. 

The "way things used to be" was a physical and emotional isolation, with controlled interactions with the world. It was comforting because you could control the frequency and depth of those interactions fairly easily. If you wanted to be alone with your thoughts, you closed a bedroom door with its keep out sign, jammed a chair under the knob and turned up the stereo that you got for Christmas and floated in personal space. 

It was private and safe and, as often as not, pretty damned lonely. 

I always wonder of kids today, nursed on the milk of constant connectivity, ever have trouble bridging the gap to other minds. Do they lie on their beds, with their hands behind their heads, wishing that something might happen so they would have a reason to pierce the barrier of privacy and tell Michelle S. and Ellie R. that they're in love? I guess my question is whether the ability to interconnect is matched with a desire or motivation to interconnect. (Before you ask: no, I don't have an answer.) 

I ask because things aren't the way they used to be. Communication is pervasive, if not always profound. There seem to be more opportunities to chat, message and reach out in big and small ways than there is need. We've become comfortable with the idea of confessing everything to Oprah and Dr. Phil, sharing with millions what half a generation ago would have been a deep dark secret; a skeleton in the closet. 

Most dramatically, we've whipped up the blinds on the picture window of our private lives. It doesn't seem strange anymore to live out our lives, in the most minute and intimate details, in front of a million networked eyes. 

In less than a generation, we went from the comforting isolation of the suburban subdivisions to the always-on, always-available pervasive network. And yet, while we can confess everything in voices so loud and so clear to millions of pairs of networked ears, while we can live lives like performances for mass consumption, it still isn't easier to tell a girl how much you love her. 

And I still don't know how we got here at all, from the loneliness of physical isolation to the equal loneliness of standing naked in a crowd.

posted by: brassmonkey at 16:29 | link | comments (1) |