Instinct

For being an otherwise physically uncoordinated, athletically disinclined, mental klutz, I seem to have a sharp instinct for survival – or at least for avoidance of disastrous incidents while driving.

One such notable incident occurred early in my relationship with Mrs. Farrago. We were in my old Jeep Cherokee, a reliable relic with an underpowered 4-cylinder engine that didn’t know when to quit. We were headed home on the Kennedy Expressway when we encountered a Saturday afternoon traffic jam. As I have become my father, I decided to seek an alternate route around the traffic.

We were approaching – very slowly – the Cumberland Avenue exit, and I decided to use that to get to the surface streets. I swung out in to the long exit lane leading to southbound Cumberland Avenue. I was up to about 35 or 40 mph when suddenly, not more than two car lengths ahead, another SUV swung out from the exit lane to northbound Cumberland into my lane. RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!

Mrs. Farrago braced for impact. I didn’t even have time to honk my horn, which is a sworn duty of every driver in Chicago.

But, without even thinking, I cranked the steering wheel to the right (there’s a wide emergency lane in that area), and I jammed the accelerator to the floor! At that age, the Jeep did little more than let out a disgruntled moan, but it got us out of the collision. And then I cranked the wheel to the left and straightened us out.

Why did I do that? Why hit the accelerator rather than the brake? Afterward, I knew it was intentional – reaction aside – and not an instance of pressing the wrong pedal. I had turned the wheel far enough to avoid a crash, but not so far that I could roll the Cherokee. As we drove away, it all just felt to me like I had done exactly the right thing.

Then, just Monday night the snow had been falling heavily for about an hour and a half. On my way home from work I had “played” in the snow with my Xterra in 4-wheel-drive, cutting the wheel harder on turns than I normally would, giving it more gas, hitting the brakes harder to activate the anti-lock braking system, just to feel how the vehicle reacts in those conditions. That was in an empty parking lot, and on side streets where there were no other cars nearby.

I was done playing. I was practically in the home-stretch to my apartment. I was on a residential street divided by a median, the speed limit on which is 30 mph. About an inch of unplowed snow had accumulated on this street and light traffic had turned it into a hard-packed sheet of slickeriness. Ahead of me, around a blind, gentle curve, someone had poorly negotiated a left turn in the slick conditions and slid past the break in the median and off to the right side of the lane. The driver of the car behind him braked to avoid hitting this person who was then trying to back up and complete the missed left turn!

Admittedly, I was going too fast…about 25 mph. I saw the situation in front of me and I hit the brakes a little too late. The anti-lock braking system engaged, vibrating noisily under my foot and, though I was slowing, it wasn’t enough to stop me in time before I would hit the car in front of me.

This next moment came with the clarity of thought and consideration and weighing of potential consequences that normally comes after an afternoon of contemplation. I simply turned the wheel slightly left and aimed for the median, between a tree there and the rear end of the car I had only milliseconds before been bearing down upon. As I neared the curb, my only fear was that, rather than jump it, my Xterra would have merely been deflected by the curb and back into the roadway and an inevitable crash. All these thoughts in a matter of two seconds!

But my tires ate up the curb and I went onto the median. Deep snow there, deposited by snowplows in earlier snowstorms, stopped me quickly, softly, and I ended up just about directly beside the car I otherwise would have hit! My engine died, as the Xterra has a manual transmission and I had my foot on the brake until well after I had come to a stop. I don’t know if the driver of the car I had managed to avoid crashing into even realized what had happened, but if he or she did, there must have been a loud sigh of relief in that car when I was seen lodged in several feet of snow beside him/her!


The Scene: This is where the Xterra came to rest after missing everything dangerous. Note the small tree to the left.


A closer look at how deep the snow was. And in the background, the Xterra peers sheepishly from behind a sign.

Regardless, the sigh of relief in my car was enough to satisfy us both! Certain I was now stuck, I restarted the engine, put the transmission into reverse, and I felt the 4-wheel-drive move me effortlessly back into the roadway.

I wish I could think as clearly and rationally and decisively in calm moments as I seem to have done in moments of true danger. But then again, seeing as how I’m alive and my car is undamaged (except for the leftovers of this), maybe that’s thinking enough.

A Matter of Suspense

I signed up for Netflix last week. It’s a two-week trial, but I know I’ll keep it. When I was married (still am, technically) we lost the desire to go to see movies. What’s the point of spending twenty bucks on tickets and getting raped for what amounts to a scoop of popcorn and two cups of bubble-y sugar water, only to sit in a room full of rude, noisy people who can’t shut up when the actors are talking?

And then, while we had the time and energy to sit and stare at the TV set, we didn’t want to set our favorite shows aside to watch movies. At least not that often.

But now I’m in a determined effort to catch up on seven years of missed movies!

And that brings up what I’ve been thinking about for the past few days, probably the most important element to making a successful book or film or television show: the suspension of disbelief.

People have been writing fiction and other people have been lapping it up since the first ink was set to papyrus in the Old Testament, and beyond. What magic it is that a skilled wordsmith can use the same letters as you and I, the same words in our collective vocabulary, and spin a tale to make our hearts race or our hair stand on end, or bring us to the heights of laughter or the depths of sorrow!

We’ve all been there; anyone who can read has read, and has experienced a world of sensations beyond anything we’ve done, yet entirely contained within our brains!

I’ve never watched the action-adventure serial 24 on television. I’ve only experienced the program at my whim via DVD player. I know the people I see on the screen are merely highly paid actors following a script. I know that the setting is a mocked up room within a much larger room, and that none of the computers or phones are hooked up to anything beyond the walls and in the real world. I know that the scenarios presented to me are the products of a group of very active and clever imaginations and, further, stretch the boundaries of plausibility. And yet, the story that script tells the actors to tell, the scenarios in which the characters find themselves, grab me by the throat and pull me in! The program can be addictive, and I will sometimes sit and watch four episodes back to back! On a school night!!

At what point in the expository scenes do we accept the terms of the tale? What determines the breaking point where an implausibility is ignored or is dwelled upon, where the story is moved along or it is ruined for us?

As an aspiring writer I find fascinating the challenge to imagine a scenario that is interesting enough, and to string together the right combination of words in the right order to bring a reader into my story and ignore its flaws and stretches and fantasies, and to BELIEVE. And to stay to the end.

May I someday meet that challenge.

Celebrities, Infarctions, S.W.A.T. Update & How To Lose Respect In 10 Seconds

Well, I haven’t written much lately. No excuse, really. Just haven’t had much to say…or at least haven’t felt like saying anything.

I spent five of the last seven days in San Francisco, as my company produced our largest convention of the year. I almost sorta got to meet Jay Leno, who was the day one “keynote speaker,” listed in the convention program as “Inspirational Speaker.” He simply did about 35 minutes of standup (and pretty damn funny, too!), and then about 5 minutes of “inspirational” speak, telling the audience that he loves them and what they do for America. Then he was off the stage, down the stairs and, WOOSH! out to his limo and gone! HiJaybyeJay! (passing breeze and loose papers blown erratically in the air). I took photos of him, as part of my job. I was within 10 feet of him for about 5 minutes. I might have even gotten some of his spit on me from his fevered banter. On Sunday Bob Woodruff, the ABC News anchor who got blown up in Iraq, spoke, along with his wife. Monday’s keynote was Tom Brokaw. I didn’t get to meet any of them, though I did speak to Woodruff, asking him if he was okay with me taking flash photos of him backstage. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to trigger an epileptic seizure or a brain short-circuit or something. He said “Sure.” That was it. Othernat, I got bupkis.

One of my co-workers had a mild heart attack on the last day of show, about 30 minutes before the final meeting started. He’s only 55, and has had a heart attack before. He knew the symptoms, knew it was most likely a heart attack, and the goofball wouldn’t let anybody call 911. Instead he had another co-worker take him to the hospital in our rented minivan. Yay Hertz! He’s “okay,” now. The doctors put a stent (SP?) in his heart (I’m guessing here), and I heard he was allowed to go home, back to the Midwest, today. Lots of rest, and perhaps bypass surgery in his future.

I finally got an update today on what the hell happened at my apartment complex last week, as detailed in my prior post. The police department wouldn’t let me look at a police report, but an officer familiar with the case did come out and tell me “what he could” about the case. Apparently an adult couple, in an apartment in the building next to mine, were suspected of growing marijuana in their place. The cops stormed their apartment, found several potted (no pun intended) plants and a pistol. The pot was… well… there, and the pistol was off to one side, with no one near it when the cops went in. The S.W.A.T. team – or whatever they were – was there just in case there was resistance…and just to put the scare in innocent bystanders who happened to blunder into their little cat and mouse game....

= = = = = = = = = =

What do you do when, all of a sudden, in one quick moment, you lose respect for someone? On our last night in San Francisco two of my coworkers and I went out with a former coworker who now lives and works in San Francisco. He’s young, tall, athletic and damnably good looking. He’s also a player. One of the coworkers out with us that night is a young, very attractive woman who is engaged to be married. I had warned her about this guy when she was about to go to one of our past conventions for which this young man had been hired by us as a contractor, but she pooh-poohed it. As a necessary part of the job, they had exchanged mobile phone numbers, and after the job was over he would – and still does – call her occasionally. On this night in San Francisco we went to dinner and then he led us around to a few places he knows, and we all had plenty to drink.

We were all buzzing pretty well when we went to a bar where there was some pretty severe club music playing, and a very crowded dance floor. After a few minutes both the young ones had disappeared. My other coworker and I, a decade or two too old for the crowd in which we found ourselves, decided it was time to go. I told him I would let the others know we were throwing in the towel.

I walked onto the dance floor and found them. She had her arms in the air, arching her back while he had his arms around her waist and, crotch to crotch, was literally dry-humping her to the beat of the music. I told them we were leaving, turned and left. I couldn’t believe what I had seen. I couldn’t believe that she would do that, that she would let him do that. I’m actually heartbroken.

I tried to blame it on alcohol, but that didn’t work. We were all buzzing pretty good. I’m a lightweight when it comes to drinking, so I’m sure I was feeling it as much as – if not more than – the others, and I wasn’t dry-humping her – or anyone, or anything, for that matter. Am I jealous? Sure, I’ll admit to that…or to envy. My former coworker has been genetically blessed with everything women find appealing before they ever meet him, and he gets way more than his share of attention in that arena. She’s off-limits, yet he focused his attention on her. And she ate it up.

He later told my other, aged coworker, “nothing happened.” Well, maybe there was nothing beyond the dance floor, but THAT happened! Maybe I’ve got it all wrong, but if I’m standing there in a crowded room grinding my stuff against a beautiful woman’s stuff (not like it’s ever happened, mind you, but IF!), number one I’m thinking I’ve made a tremendous breakthrough, and number two I’m thinking this has serious potential to continue on another horizontal surface somewhere more intimate and private. And I have to believe that a woman feels the same way in that situation.

I had lost respect for him long ago for other things as well as his player’s game. But, for me, she fell from grace in that moment. I work with her almost every day, and I can’t even look her in the eye.

So… what do you do?

S.W.A.T!

So last night, while I was online watching the Super Bowl ads I missed because I didn’t watch perhaps the most exciting Super Bowl game in 15 years, I heard a loud – and I mean LOUD – bang. It gently shook my apartment building, and then I heard its echo off to the south from me.

My first thought was “gunshot,” but a gunshot wouldn’t have shaken the building. “Explosion?” Perhaps too small for anything destructive or catastrophic.

I looked out my window down to the parking lot. There were a couple of people walking from the parking lot who kept looking back to the east. I looked in that direction and saw a strange grey truck – think huge motor home – with the letters NIPAD emblazoned on its side, inching its way further into the parking lot, with a local police SUV inching a little more quickly past it. The local gas company is Nicor, so I made a connection there and thought, “Could it have been a gas explosion?”

Too curious to ignore it, I threw on some shoes and went out to investigate. Winter is in full swing here, and a storm was announcing its arrival with winds, freezing rain and general misery for anyone out in it…especially with no coat or hat…like me. But I did get to the eastern end of my building, and I was able to stare into the wind long enough to see two more people, now looking to the north, and the same police SUV, having made its way past my building. Unable to take the wind and the cold biting me everywhere AND the flying bits of ice perforating my eyeballs, I went back inside to get my coat and hat. The curiosity was getting to me and no one in my building seemed to have noticed the rafter-rattling noise that had started it all.

Back outside and properly attired, I returned to the farthest point I had reached, and looked north. There was a small U-Haul box truck parked against apartment regulations, and with its rear door open. Around the next building I could see the three red running lights on the top of another truck of some sort. I was within about 20 feet of the U-Haul truck when I saw movement to my left. I turned and saw a man in urban assault gear! Helmet, body armor, dark uniform, boots, and carrying a short, military-style assault rifle!!

The alarm bell in my head told me to turn around! I knew by the way he held the rifle – pistol-grip in one hand, ammo magazine resting on his belt, and the muzzle pointed to the ground – that he was a police officer. I had walked right into the middle of some sort of S.W.A.T. incident! I was two steps toward the warmth and comfort of my apartment when I heard a voice behind me: “How can we help you, sir?”

I spun back around. The voice had come from inside the back of the U-Haul truck, and now there was a man, dressed as the first, standing there. “I just heard a loud noise and I was trying to find out what it was,” said I.

To my left the first officer I had seen, the one whose appearance had triggered the first thrill of mild panic in me, spoke. “You’re gonna have to go back to your apartment, sir.”

“Thank you!” I said. You don’t need to tell me twice to get out of a potential kill-zone!

As I returned to the proximity of my building I peered more intently at the hulking, grey, motor-home-looking NIPAD truck. I couldn’t quite make out the smaller lettering beneath the acronym, as that side of the truck was half in and half out of the pool of light from the parking lot lamps, but it read “Northern Illinois somethingorother Police Emergency Unit.”

Sure. NOW you tell me!

Later, from within the safety and comfort of my apartment, I called the police department and demanded to know if the emergency was over, and if there had been any point in the evening that my building was in danger. The woman on the other end of the line told me that the matter had been taken care of, and there never was anything to be concerned about, safety-wise. Except, of course, I added in my head, walking into the cross-fire zone!

Now, about 12 hours later, I still don’t know what happened. I’m guessing now that the loud, edifice-shaking bang was a concussion grenade used by the police when they stormed an apartment in one of the next buildings over, to stun, frighten and disorient the suspects inside. What they were suspected of, however, is only my best guess. First thought is drug-bust. But there are a lot of Middle Eastern people in this complex.

I’ll let your thoughts run on their own from there.

I’ll post an update if I find anything else out.

Icons*

This morning, as I tried to get out of bed, I listened to the radio. The DJ mentioned this day, February 3rd, as a landmark day in the history of rock ‘n roll, the anniversary of the Iowa plane crash in 1959 that killed J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, Richie Valens and Buddy Holly.

The DJ went on to rhapsodize the legacy left by Holly, saying that, to this day, every day, somewhere on the globe, a radio station is playing a Buddy Holly song.

What is it about human nature that, in the event of a famous life cut short – especially a talented one – we extrapolate that life, had it been lived fully, achieving tremendous things? “Oh, the music that Buddy Holly would have written! The innovations that would have continued to shape the industry!”

(Not to mention the two other famous guys on that plane, marginalized by our mainstream, white-majority sensibilities as one whose choice of a stage name locked his legacy into the era of “’50s music,” and the other as simply a Mexican also-ran.)

But would he have? Was his music really all that great? Did we feel that way about his music before he died? Sure, he was a pioneer in the halcyon days of rock ‘n roll. Sure, his music was popular in the 1950s, but back then there just wasn’t a great deal of rock ‘n roll music to choose from, yet! Do we know for certain that Holly hadn’t hit a wall creatively, and had written his last song, plane crash notwithstanding? Are we certain that he wouldn’t have called it quits upon the impending birth of his child so that he could spend the time his family needed of him?

Did we assign a greater importance to his musical contributions only because of our sense of loss at his tragic death?

How is it that someone whose career was so short, whose body of work – though promising – is so small, is revered by us as an icon as the result of an untimely death?

There are many others who died young, who we elevated to iconic status after their deaths: Jimi Hendrix. Bruce Lee. Janis Joplin. Kurt Cobain.

James Dean made only three films, and was only 24 when he died, yet at the mention of his name his image still ripples through the psyche as the personification of “cool” and “rebel,” and a great sense of what could have been.

Why do we do it? I’m guilty of it myself, especially upon hearing of the death of John Belushi in 1982. “What a shame!” I thought. “What a waste! The laughs he could have given the world…” But would he have? It became obvious after the details of his death were made public that he had a serious drug problem. Had the drugs never killed him, it’s likely he would have spiraled out of the public mind, fizzled into obscurity like so many other “rising stars” who never rose. (Britney Spears, anyone? Though her fall has been so spectacularly documented and photographed, she’ll still be “famous” in twenty years, even if she records or performs not one more note of music in that time.)

A great example here is “The King of Rock ‘n Roll,” Elvis Presley. As a rock ‘n roll star, he reached his zenith by age 25, in 1960, but since he’s the guy who essentially started it all, the spotlight was never really off him. He shifted his focus to a career in films and, by the mid-1960s, had disappeared from the stage. He was never taken seriously as an actor and as the 1960s came to a close, so did his film career. After his 1968 “comeback” as a stage performer, he quickly became a caricature of his former self. He still sold millions of records during this time, but he was a living legend whose legacy easily fed on itself.

Had Presley died tragically 1959, the world would have been spared the ugly proof in 1977 that, indeed, Presley was human; that, indeed, what goes up must come down.

And what if he had instead rehabilitated, gotten off the drugs and gotten clean again? Would we be subjected to scenes today of a 73-year-old man in a bejeweled white jumpsuit onstage, lamely karate-chopping his way through an hour’s worth of Vegas-rock arrangements of his greatest hits?

People older than I still often ponder the further greatness that could have been achieved by John F. Kennedy had he not died so young. Our nation had been seduced by the notion of “Camelot” in the White House, and was in love with the President. Let’s rewrite history for a moment and believe that Lee Harvey Oswald and/or one to three “second gunmen” got the date wrong and never showed up at Dealey Plaza when the presidential motorcade zoomed through.

It’s plausible that – as alleged in Oliver Stone’s film JFK – Kennedy would have ordered a pullout of the handful of our military “advisers” in the tiny country of Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t have had any power to reverse Kennedy’s order – as Stone also alleges in the film – and the lives of 58,000 young American men and women (not to mention untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese) over the next 12 years would have been spared.

However, in November of 1963, Kennedy was heading into an election year in which his opponents – and voters – would be looking back at his first term. There were already rumors of his dalliances with Marilyn Monroe, another star whose death in 1962 came too soon, amid circumstances in which Kennedy might have been implicated in murder as a cover-up of their affair. Who knows? Had he lived to pursue re-election, and this kind of information came to light, Kennedy may have resigned or chosen not to run for re-election, or might have been defeated in a re-election bid, or even arrested and imprisoned. He may have lived his post-White House years in disgrace much like Richard Nixon did. So much for the Boy King of America.

Though he was 30 at the time of his death in 1953, Hank Williams had only been Big Time for four years. Would we still hold him and his music in such high regard had he lived through his addictions and stumbled and staggered in and out of rehab in the public eye?

How would we feel today about Michael Jackson had some medical condition taken him from us shortly after the release of Thriller? How do we feel about Bob Dylan or Keith Richards, two men who, by their own admission and in the opinions of some who have known them, “should be dead?”

We just don’t know what would have come to a life cut short; we only know what won’t. For some reason inexplicable to me, we give a level of respect to a notable young person who dies early in a seemingly promising career higher than what we may have given that person with a long career in the spotlight and a death in comparative obscurity.

A final example: on January 19 of this year the entertainment world lost stage, film and television actress Suzanne Pleshette, age 70; three days later news outlets around the globe shouted in a pathetic frenzy about the death of film actor Heath Ledger, age 28. Of the two, who had the longer, more noteworthy career? But whose death received more news coverage and worldwide shock and sympathy? Who might we more likely see as an “icon” 20 years from now?

So it seems sadly possible that, with the examples of the longer lives lived by some of his contemporaries, and the lives of those who came after, Buddy Holly’s death on this date 49 years ago could have been the best thing for his career.



*In memory, fleeting, of Heath Ledger.