The holidays came too early this year. I'm not ready for there to be holiday music on the radio and in TV commercials BEFORE Halloween. However, inspired by the sight of an overnight dusting of snow on our back yard lawn, the "spirit" hit me this morning in the shower when I heard the words of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" issuing from my own pipes.
I'm not a religious or spiritual person. Okay, I'll say it at risk of losing my new blogger friends: I am atheist. I'm not militant about it. Christians, Jews, Muslims... you can all worship freely around me. It's just not my bag. Part of me thinks I should write it "X-mas," but the holiday was not named for a fictional/real person named "X." But that's not what this post is about.
I'm not religious. The "Christmas Spirit" within me harks back to my childhood when the brainwashing had its hold of me and I believed, and my parents were young and my siblings were all living at home and we'd wake up in our pajamas and sprint to the Christmas tree to see what Santa had left under it, and surely there was a Santa because our parents couldn't afford to buy us so many toys! I still have warm thoughts about that holiday because that's when the family gets together for a huge meal. Everyone's together, laughing, smiling, digesting. That's Christmas for me. Togetherness.
It's interesting that probably the most famous modern song to commemorate the Christian holiday was written by a Jew! He captured the heart of the holiday in his lyrics, the spirit of the holiday without being spiritual. The Santa side of it instead of the Christ side of it. But what this post is about is literally the title of the post. Have you ever heard the sleighbells during a gentle snowfall? I have.
I was in fifth grade. It had to be December, likely less than a week before Christmas. The sixth grade bully, Tim Pfeiffer (pronounced "PY-fer"), had threatened me with a pummeling after school when he and I tangled going after a ball at recess. I had made every effort to get out the doors as quickly as possible to be out of sight by the time Tim remembered he was scheduled to flatten me. He had quite a busy fight schedule, did Tim. But something happened to delay me, and I was trembling from the fear of facing him. I had a friend with me who was there for moral support more than anything. Someone to wipe up the blood and call an ambulance when the fists stopped flying. I can't remember today who that friend was. It must not have been my best friend because at the time he was fearless. He would have taken on a moving car if he thought he had heard it threaten him or one of his friends. No, this friend was there to watch, take notes for the school newspaper, and make splints.
The only non-violent, defensive move I could think of at the moment was to leave through a different door than I usually did, this one being the school's main entrance. It had started snowing earlier in the day, and by the time school let out, there was about an inch or two of accumulation, on the sidewalks as well as on the grass, so this was a real snowfall. My friend and I walked outside and there was no Tim Pfeiffer. Instead, out there was a calm I had seldom experienced in that small suburb of Chicago. The snowflakes drifted silently to the others that had preceded them to create the white blanket beneath our feet. And either traffic and wind had ceased moving everywhere within a half-mile radius of the school, or the snowfall was so quieting that I could hear myself breathing a sigh of relief that I wasn't being battered by a pair of sixth-grader fists.
And then I heard them. Call it the magic a 10-year-old feels in a white landscape as the white still falls around him, but I heard them. I stopped breathing in order to make sure I heard them. Sleigh bells. Somewhere off in the distance, in no particular direction, a jing-jing-jingling that almost wasn't there, somewhere. Convinced I was hearing things, I stepped forward to go home, my feet crunching on the fresh snow, when my friend said, "Stop! SHH!" I froze. He stood with his arms out at 45-degree angles, appearing to try to still the air with his hands as he listened. "Do you hear that?"
"The bells?" I said.
"Yeah!"
It was ghostly. They faded away, and then back in again, just to the outer edges of our hearing, and finally they were gone. The streets had been plowed, nobody in the area that I was aware of owned horses, let alone a sleigh. And who would ring sleighbells from their front yard while the snow fell?
I don't know if Mr. Berlin meant the same thing when he wrote that line in that perhaps most famous of his songs, or if he simply meant that there really were sleighbells ringing for the children to hear. But when that moment from my childhood came back to me this morning in the shower as my lips formed the words, when I realized that once, just once, I was one of those children who listened to hear sleighbells in the snow, and I heard them, the Christmas Spirit and all of its childhood magic was upon me.
Happy holidays to you, whichever of them you choose to celebrate, however you choose to celebrate them.
dassall
(...and I never got that beating. Tim Pfeiffer had forgotten about me. He must have had more important kids to thrash in his busy beating schedule.)
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Monday, November 21, 2005
The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America Project
In one of his more recent posts, The Sort of Stuff You Think About, Mr. Schprock made reference to one of his earlier posts, to which he provided a link, about his Saturday morning breakfast spot, thus making me read TWO of his posts for a full understanding.
But, at risk of appearing as though I can’t formulate an original thought, his earlier post about his favorite breakfast spot got me to thinking about my favorite breakfast spot.
During my brief tenure at a previous job, coworkers of mine acquainted me with a small diner about a half-block from our office building. Mac’s restaurant is a narrow, rectangular space in a small, one-story, commercial tenant building of narrow, rectangular spaces. My colleagues of the time had brought me there for lunch that one day, but they normally chose local fast-food restaurants for lunch-time jaunts, so we went to Mac’s together only once. As a mass-transit commuter, I sometimes had the good fortune to catch a bus within seconds of arriving at the stop, and then arriving at the train platform as a train pulled into the stop, which allowed me as much as 20 minutes of extra time when I got off the train at my destination. Being a big breakfast fan (and I mean “big breakfast fan” in all three possible meanings), and relegated to foot travel, I decided to drop in on the people at Mac’s to see what kind of breakfast they could do me.
Mac’s is your typical “greasy spoon” type of diner. You enter the building on the southwest corner and find yourself facing the south end – “the smoking section” – of the straight counter, and between the long row and the short row of booths juxtaposed at a right angle to each other, with a break at the corner entrance. The counter seats twelve patrons, six at each half of the counter on either side of a break in the middle to accommodate the waitresses as they work. That first morning at Mac’s was a cold, Chicago winter day, and as I entered I saw a sign that read something to the effect of, “As a courtesy to all of our customers, lone patrons please sit at the counter during peak business hours.” There were several booths open. “The smoking section” was full, which suited me just fine. There was an available stool at the north end of the north counter, way at the back of the dining room, with the adjacent stool also empty, so I wouldn’t have to sit immediately next to another patron. As I sat I was warmed by the heat collecting over and around the large griddle directly in front of me across the counter and against the east wall, where the lead cook, a stocky, 30s-ish Mexican man worked at a feverish pace. The waitress for my section approached from the business side of the counter brandishing a full, glass Bunn coffee pot and said, “Morning. Coffee?”
“Certainly,” I said as I turned my coffee cup upright in its saucer. The waitress handed me the menu and my eyes stopped on “Corned Beef Hash and Eggs.” I don’t know when I started liking corned beef hash, but I do. I seem to recall that the first time I ever ordered it was because it sounded good. And it was. So I decided to try Mac’s version of corned beef hash and eggs.
And so it went for the next year or so, stopping in once every week or two and, having approved heartily of Mac’s rendition on that first cold morning, breaking fast on corned beef hash and eggs, over medium, with a side of home-fried potatoes, and toast.
As time went on I learned that the owner of the place is not named Mac, nor does anyone named Mac even work there. It seems that Mac sold his old diner to Perry, a young son of a Greek immigrant. I’m sure it’s Perinakos or some really thick-sounding Greek name, but he introduced himself as Perry. I learned that Perry employs his father, whom I know by no name other than “Pop,” in the kitchen. I learned that the highly-efficient lead cook is named Joe. He speaks with a fairly strong Spanish accent, but instead of José, he introduces himself as Joe. He emigrated here from the Michoacan region of Mexico. He learned my name within a few visits, and within a few visits more he understood that, with only rare variation, my breakfast is corned beef hash and eggs, over medium, a side of potatoes, and toast. I learned that Joe has Mondays off, and on Mondays Perry cooks. I learned that breakfast is always, always, ALWAYS served to you within two minutes of ordering, but it goes all the way up to three minutes when they’re really busy. I learned that the best place to sit at Mac’s Diner is at the far north end of the counter, at the back of the dining room, because Joe knows me and my “usual,” starts cooking my breakfast before the waitress takes my order, and serves it directly to me when it’s ready. On top of that, it’s nice and toasty warm back there, away from the entrance, on a cold and windy winter morning. And I learned that “the smoking section” is a figurative term because the place is so small that, if “the smoking section” is full, and everyone in it is smoking, no matter where I sit at Mac's, I might as well be sitting in “the smoking section.”
Not much later I quit my job at the place half a block from Mac’s Diner, but, to my good fortune, my current place of employment has me driving right past my old place of employment and, subsequently, Mac’s Diner, so, though not as frequently as when it was a three-minute walk away, I still stop in occasionally for a morning bite.
With the new job came a lot of travel, a lot of stays in hotels in a wide assortment of cities. In many of these places I tried the locals' corned beef hash and eggs, only to be disappointed. I also made my first attempt at losing the extra weight I had put on from all that traveling and eating restaurant food. So my corned beef hash and eggs order at Mac’s changed slightly to include only a half order of potatoes (and it’s still a lot of potatoes!), and rye toast, which, I discovered the first time I ordered it, I like better than wheat or white.
My epicurean exploits across the country have inspired me to initiate an experiment, which I call The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America Project. See, it’s not just about the best corned beef hash. It’s about the whole plate. I hate when a restaurant serves the eggs on top of the corned beef hash. Yes, I know that there are little chunks of potato in the corned beef hash, but there has to be a pile of home fries or hash browns with it, whether as part of the dish or ordered on the side. And it’s nothing without toast. I like my eggs “dunky.” Call it the last hold-out of my childhood habits, but I have to be able to “dunk” the toast in the semi-cooked egg yolk or I might as well just have a bowl of Cheerios. Once the yolks have been “dunked” out, I then use the fork, tines flat against the plate, to finely chop the egg white, just like my mother used to do. Yeah. That’s it. It’s a paean to my dear departed mother, so don’t make any smart-ass comments about my dunky-choppy eggs! And then I mix the chopped eggs, potatoes and corned beef hash all into one big pile of hash to scoop up by the forkful and eat with a bite of toast. YUM!
Some places have served me homemade corned beef hash, with succulent chunks of meat cut from a side of corned beef and mixed with potatoes and some kind of spices. It was quite impressive and really quite flavorful. But the strong flavor of the corned beef has to be tempered by the other ingredients in the hash. They didn’t do that. And they screwed up by having some new-age presentation of the eggs, poor preparation of the potatoes, and the corned beef got stuck in my teeth. ‘A’ for effort, ‘D’ for execution. Other places seem to think that any old corned beef hash from a can will suffice. It doesn’t. Grade = ‘F’.
The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America Project is far from scientific. Sometimes on the road my interest in just having a decent breakfast steers me away from the chance that the corned beef hash will suck, thus disappointing me and making me wish I had ordered the country fried steak and eggs. So sometimes I opt for that. Or the stack o’ pancakes. Or the Cheerios. Thus far in my experience, there is yet to be found in the USA a corned beef hash and eggs breakfast to rival that at Mac’s Diner.
So, my dear readers …all three of you… if you’re ever traveling on I-90 to or through the near northwest suburbs of Chicago, near O’Hare airport, and you happen to find yourself at the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Higgins Road, look to the northeast corner of the intersection, at the first building on Higgins, just east of the gas station. It won’t take you long to find the current home of The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America, Mac’s Diner. And if you decide to stop in, look over to the customer seated in the last counter stool at the back of the dining room. If it’s the right time of day and he’s 40ish, balding and, fatting(?), and he’s polishing off a corned beef hash and eggs breakfast, he just might be me!
Note: A law passed recently in Illinois now bans smoking in public establishments, so there is no longer a smoking section in Mac's. Or anywhere, for that matter!
-2 January 2011
dassall
But, at risk of appearing as though I can’t formulate an original thought, his earlier post about his favorite breakfast spot got me to thinking about my favorite breakfast spot.
During my brief tenure at a previous job, coworkers of mine acquainted me with a small diner about a half-block from our office building. Mac’s restaurant is a narrow, rectangular space in a small, one-story, commercial tenant building of narrow, rectangular spaces. My colleagues of the time had brought me there for lunch that one day, but they normally chose local fast-food restaurants for lunch-time jaunts, so we went to Mac’s together only once. As a mass-transit commuter, I sometimes had the good fortune to catch a bus within seconds of arriving at the stop, and then arriving at the train platform as a train pulled into the stop, which allowed me as much as 20 minutes of extra time when I got off the train at my destination. Being a big breakfast fan (and I mean “big breakfast fan” in all three possible meanings), and relegated to foot travel, I decided to drop in on the people at Mac’s to see what kind of breakfast they could do me.
Mac’s is your typical “greasy spoon” type of diner. You enter the building on the southwest corner and find yourself facing the south end – “the smoking section” – of the straight counter, and between the long row and the short row of booths juxtaposed at a right angle to each other, with a break at the corner entrance. The counter seats twelve patrons, six at each half of the counter on either side of a break in the middle to accommodate the waitresses as they work. That first morning at Mac’s was a cold, Chicago winter day, and as I entered I saw a sign that read something to the effect of, “As a courtesy to all of our customers, lone patrons please sit at the counter during peak business hours.” There were several booths open. “The smoking section” was full, which suited me just fine. There was an available stool at the north end of the north counter, way at the back of the dining room, with the adjacent stool also empty, so I wouldn’t have to sit immediately next to another patron. As I sat I was warmed by the heat collecting over and around the large griddle directly in front of me across the counter and against the east wall, where the lead cook, a stocky, 30s-ish Mexican man worked at a feverish pace. The waitress for my section approached from the business side of the counter brandishing a full, glass Bunn coffee pot and said, “Morning. Coffee?”
“Certainly,” I said as I turned my coffee cup upright in its saucer. The waitress handed me the menu and my eyes stopped on “Corned Beef Hash and Eggs.” I don’t know when I started liking corned beef hash, but I do. I seem to recall that the first time I ever ordered it was because it sounded good. And it was. So I decided to try Mac’s version of corned beef hash and eggs.
And so it went for the next year or so, stopping in once every week or two and, having approved heartily of Mac’s rendition on that first cold morning, breaking fast on corned beef hash and eggs, over medium, with a side of home-fried potatoes, and toast.
As time went on I learned that the owner of the place is not named Mac, nor does anyone named Mac even work there. It seems that Mac sold his old diner to Perry, a young son of a Greek immigrant. I’m sure it’s Perinakos or some really thick-sounding Greek name, but he introduced himself as Perry. I learned that Perry employs his father, whom I know by no name other than “Pop,” in the kitchen. I learned that the highly-efficient lead cook is named Joe. He speaks with a fairly strong Spanish accent, but instead of José, he introduces himself as Joe. He emigrated here from the Michoacan region of Mexico. He learned my name within a few visits, and within a few visits more he understood that, with only rare variation, my breakfast is corned beef hash and eggs, over medium, a side of potatoes, and toast. I learned that Joe has Mondays off, and on Mondays Perry cooks. I learned that breakfast is always, always, ALWAYS served to you within two minutes of ordering, but it goes all the way up to three minutes when they’re really busy. I learned that the best place to sit at Mac’s Diner is at the far north end of the counter, at the back of the dining room, because Joe knows me and my “usual,” starts cooking my breakfast before the waitress takes my order, and serves it directly to me when it’s ready. On top of that, it’s nice and toasty warm back there, away from the entrance, on a cold and windy winter morning. And I learned that “the smoking section” is a figurative term because the place is so small that, if “the smoking section” is full, and everyone in it is smoking, no matter where I sit at Mac's, I might as well be sitting in “the smoking section.”
Not much later I quit my job at the place half a block from Mac’s Diner, but, to my good fortune, my current place of employment has me driving right past my old place of employment and, subsequently, Mac’s Diner, so, though not as frequently as when it was a three-minute walk away, I still stop in occasionally for a morning bite.
With the new job came a lot of travel, a lot of stays in hotels in a wide assortment of cities. In many of these places I tried the locals' corned beef hash and eggs, only to be disappointed. I also made my first attempt at losing the extra weight I had put on from all that traveling and eating restaurant food. So my corned beef hash and eggs order at Mac’s changed slightly to include only a half order of potatoes (and it’s still a lot of potatoes!), and rye toast, which, I discovered the first time I ordered it, I like better than wheat or white.
My epicurean exploits across the country have inspired me to initiate an experiment, which I call The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America Project. See, it’s not just about the best corned beef hash. It’s about the whole plate. I hate when a restaurant serves the eggs on top of the corned beef hash. Yes, I know that there are little chunks of potato in the corned beef hash, but there has to be a pile of home fries or hash browns with it, whether as part of the dish or ordered on the side. And it’s nothing without toast. I like my eggs “dunky.” Call it the last hold-out of my childhood habits, but I have to be able to “dunk” the toast in the semi-cooked egg yolk or I might as well just have a bowl of Cheerios. Once the yolks have been “dunked” out, I then use the fork, tines flat against the plate, to finely chop the egg white, just like my mother used to do. Yeah. That’s it. It’s a paean to my dear departed mother, so don’t make any smart-ass comments about my dunky-choppy eggs! And then I mix the chopped eggs, potatoes and corned beef hash all into one big pile of hash to scoop up by the forkful and eat with a bite of toast. YUM!
Some places have served me homemade corned beef hash, with succulent chunks of meat cut from a side of corned beef and mixed with potatoes and some kind of spices. It was quite impressive and really quite flavorful. But the strong flavor of the corned beef has to be tempered by the other ingredients in the hash. They didn’t do that. And they screwed up by having some new-age presentation of the eggs, poor preparation of the potatoes, and the corned beef got stuck in my teeth. ‘A’ for effort, ‘D’ for execution. Other places seem to think that any old corned beef hash from a can will suffice. It doesn’t. Grade = ‘F’.
The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America Project is far from scientific. Sometimes on the road my interest in just having a decent breakfast steers me away from the chance that the corned beef hash will suck, thus disappointing me and making me wish I had ordered the country fried steak and eggs. So sometimes I opt for that. Or the stack o’ pancakes. Or the Cheerios. Thus far in my experience, there is yet to be found in the USA a corned beef hash and eggs breakfast to rival that at Mac’s Diner.
So, my dear readers …all three of you… if you’re ever traveling on I-90 to or through the near northwest suburbs of Chicago, near O’Hare airport, and you happen to find yourself at the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Higgins Road, look to the northeast corner of the intersection, at the first building on Higgins, just east of the gas station. It won’t take you long to find the current home of The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America, Mac’s Diner. And if you decide to stop in, look over to the customer seated in the last counter stool at the back of the dining room. If it’s the right time of day and he’s 40ish, balding and, fatting(?), and he’s polishing off a corned beef hash and eggs breakfast, he just might be me!
Note: A law passed recently in Illinois now bans smoking in public establishments, so there is no longer a smoking section in Mac's. Or anywhere, for that matter!
-2 January 2011
dassall
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Secrets
About 15 years ago my wife bought our house, which was built around 1900. About two weeks ago work was started on the installation of central air conditioning. The first step was done by a lone man, Greg. In the basement, while cutting holes for what were to be the first floor registers, Greg had to contend with sections of wallboard that a previous owner of our home had nailed to the floor joists in order to make a civilized ceiling for the basement. As he pulled down one of these sections of wallboard, 
he discovered this old toy tractor, covered in who knows how many years of dust and dirt, squirreled away there. We went online and referenced the only available evidence the toy provided for us, "Arcade Toys" and "McCormick Deering," and the best we could determine is that the tractor is missing a nickel plated farmer holding a steering wheel that fits onto the long shaft protruding up at an angle from the tractor, and that the cast iron toy was manufactured and sold between the 1920s and the 1940s.
But I couldn't help but wonder who hid it up there and why. Was it a father punishing a misbehaving child, convincing him with a bluff that toys not put away are thrown away; was it a mean child hiding the toy from a sibling; was it perhaps a selfish child beset by the turmoil of relatives moving into the house protecting his assets from curious cousins' hands; in any case, forgotten for eternity? Or, just maybe, was it a previous owner who had spent the best years of his life in this house, perhaps coming of age here, who, upon setting out into the world on his own, couldn't bear to separate the two old friends and hid the toy in his old home's guts in hopes that they'd never be separated?
Did whoever put it where it was found ever as an adult think back to this toy and wonder whatever happened to it? Or worse, did that person ever think back to it and realize that, when the family moved, he forgot it up in the floor joists above the basement where he hid it?
Is this person even alive today?
Whoever you are, we found your toy, and we think it's just the neatest thing. If you show up on our doorstep and ask for it back, we would gladly give it to you.
dassall
he discovered this old toy tractor, covered in who knows how many years of dust and dirt, squirreled away there. We went online and referenced the only available evidence the toy provided for us, "Arcade Toys" and "McCormick Deering," and the best we could determine is that the tractor is missing a nickel plated farmer holding a steering wheel that fits onto the long shaft protruding up at an angle from the tractor, and that the cast iron toy was manufactured and sold between the 1920s and the 1940s.But I couldn't help but wonder who hid it up there and why. Was it a father punishing a misbehaving child, convincing him with a bluff that toys not put away are thrown away; was it a mean child hiding the toy from a sibling; was it perhaps a selfish child beset by the turmoil of relatives moving into the house protecting his assets from curious cousins' hands; in any case, forgotten for eternity? Or, just maybe, was it a previous owner who had spent the best years of his life in this house, perhaps coming of age here, who, upon setting out into the world on his own, couldn't bear to separate the two old friends and hid the toy in his old home's guts in hopes that they'd never be separated?
Did whoever put it where it was found ever as an adult think back to this toy and wonder whatever happened to it? Or worse, did that person ever think back to it and realize that, when the family moved, he forgot it up in the floor joists above the basement where he hid it?
Is this person even alive today?
Whoever you are, we found your toy, and we think it's just the neatest thing. If you show up on our doorstep and ask for it back, we would gladly give it to you.
dassall
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
A Brief Taste of Power
A new blogger friend I read, Chloe, recently added a post to her blog that triggered a memory from my high school days. I have many memories, most of them happy, but this particular incident gave me a brief look at another side of existence that I had not to that point ever visited, nor did I think I could handle should I have ever visited again.
I was a lanky, uncoordinated kid in high school, with no athletic ability to speak of, unless you consider bowling a sport. And falling. I could fall down like nobody's business. I wasn't the fastest runner, but I wasn't the slowest, either. Because I have an older brother who thought, when I was 10, that he could turn me into the talented baseball player that he had been by screaming at me and dragging me to the park to practice when I just wanted to play in my front yard with my Matchbox cars, I actually had some ability above others in gym class at catching and throwing a ball, but it did me no good to lord that over the girls in the class. Well, MOST of the girls. And, for ability with a bat, I was close to the bottom of the gym class.
Juniors and seniors at our school had the luxury to pick elective gym classes for the last two years of their compulsory schooling, and because I had somehow missed the first day of sign-up for the electives, I wound up with second-semester leftovers fencing, badminton and floor hockey.
Ms. Beeman was the woman who taught us and then oversaw fencing...or should I say who taught us the two most basic moves in fencing and then took a three week working vacation -- some say sleeping off the breakfast booze -- while we hacked away at each other with thin steel rods!
I was embarrassed when badminton started, because the school actually fielded a badminton team...and it was all girls. I thought for sure I would be the only boy in badminton, but there was Gary Block, one year ahead of me as a senior. If I was the Prince of Geeks, Gary was the King. Sorry Gary, if you happen to be reading this (HAH! I kill me! I don't think any of the two of you is Gary Block!). Sadly enough, he fit the stereotype: uncoordinated both physically and socially, excelling in science and Mathletes. I think he was in the Chess Club, too. Fuzzy, almost afro-like hair. And large-framed glasses.
I couldn't understand why the badminton courts had the lines like a tennis court (only smaller). I always thought of baminton as that silly little poof game you played at the beach and at picnics, batting the little cone-shaped "birdie" back and forth over the volleyball net. And that's another thing. Why was the badminton net the same as the tennis net? Everybody in the class seemed to think of badminton the same way as I did. Everybody, that is, except for Gary Block. I learned this when I so gaily batted the birdie across the net toward him and suddenly had to duck as the thing nearly took my eye out on his return! Then I began to understand. Badminton is tennis for people who don't like to chase after the ball when it goes out of bounds! Before long Gary Block and I were the only people in the class who took the game seriously. Leave it to the only two boys in class to make it a competition! The only prblem was, no matter how good I was at it, I could never beat that pipsqueak, that badminton powerhouse, Gary Block! And then, just as I felt the tables turning, as I began a surge that would inevitably result in Gary Block's badminton demise, we switched electives. To floor hockey.
Kids were scattered in all directions, so it wasn't all of us from badminton going to floor hockey. But some others besides me did. Tony Zomparelli was in the floor hockey class. Tony was one of those kids who was very well physically coordinated, but didn't feel the need to show that to people on a playing field in organized, competitive play. His true forte was soccer, but he was not at all shabby at maneuvering a ball at the end of a hockey stick from one end of the hockey floor to the other. And when I say he was not too shabby, I mean he was fantastic. The down side? I was considered the second best. A far distant second best. I always wound up as the center (forward? The guy who got to run anywhere on the floor (help me, Chloe!)), opposite Tony Zomparelli in the same position on the other team. The guy could run circles around me. I mean that literally. I mean, he literally did that to me one day. And my team always lost. No matter who was on it, if Tony Zomparelli wasn't on my team, my team lost.
Then one day the teacher decreed that Tony Zomparelli would be the goalie for his team. I was the (center? forward?) for my team, as usual (ugghh!). So his team had to re-organize, and as their forward/center, they chose none other than Gary Block! I swelled with pride and bravado. I had this guy beat. I was a faster runner, I was better with stickwork, and I was more agile. And I had a score to settle!
Near the end of the game the score was close, thanks to a goal or two scored by Tony Zomparelli, from his position as goalie!! It was down to the last few plays before the class bell would sound. The teacher/referee dropped the ball for our faceoff at center court. Gary and I slapped sticks and managed to knock the ball toward the left side of the court (according to my intended direction of travel). He and I sprinted after it, and I watched as he fell behind in the race. I had the height. I had the legs. I had the speed. Gary, however, had this little aversion to losing, so he aimed his stick right at my knees and thrust it right between them. With the sudden stop of my legs, I quite literally launched into the air and somersaulted, landing on my back, with Gary's stick and my stick launching into the air again as if for an encore. Gasps echoed throughout the gym. My momentum carried me through the roll and I wound up rolling up onto my feet in a crouch.
(When I wrote earlier that I was good at falling, I mean that I excelled at pratfalls. I knew how to throw myself to the floor and make it look like I didn't mean it, and yet I never (okay, seldom) got hurt. I wasn't the most graceful, but I knew how to tumble. And this skill lent itself to times when I really fell. It had become instinct, and when I did lose my balance or my feet, I was able to turn it quickly into a tumble and roll out of it, to witnesses who knew me thinking I had done it on purpose.)
So I sprang back up onto my feet in a crouch, and I was more than a little perturbed at Gary Block for the dirty trick he had just pulled. I didn't think to clobber him or kick him or wring his neck, but I was angry, and my eyes found him. He literally turned sheet white, jumped backwards and put his hands up to his mouth, and he shouted, "Oh, my god! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I didn't mean it!"
The guy honestly thought I was about to pummel him and, according to the bylaws of The Guy Code, I had every right to pummel him. And I think he knew that, too. It was the first time, the only time, I ever instilled abject, menacing fear in someone, and it felt good. It tasted good. But, somehow, it sufficed. He apologized, quite profusely I might add, and his demeanor let me know that he knew he had done wrong, and he was truly sorry. Had it been one of the many class tough-guys who I had rolled up and shot that look at, there would have been a fight, and I probably would have been the one who was pummeled, cause I ain't no tough-guy.
Inside, I knew Gary's fear at that moment. I had been in his shoes, and for much lesser infractions, cowering before bullies and toughs. I had been there, so with the tables turned, after that first sweet taste of power, I didn't want to be one who made others feel impotent.
He did something stupid, I got angry, he apologized. He almost wet his pants, but he apologized. What was there left to do? So I ran and got my stick, slapped the ball toward the goal, and Tony Zomparelli stopped it. And he probably shot from there and scored on us, and we probably lost.
I should have ripped the guy's tongue out of his head.
Thanks, Chloe, for helping to bring this fond memory to the surface!
dassall
I was a lanky, uncoordinated kid in high school, with no athletic ability to speak of, unless you consider bowling a sport. And falling. I could fall down like nobody's business. I wasn't the fastest runner, but I wasn't the slowest, either. Because I have an older brother who thought, when I was 10, that he could turn me into the talented baseball player that he had been by screaming at me and dragging me to the park to practice when I just wanted to play in my front yard with my Matchbox cars, I actually had some ability above others in gym class at catching and throwing a ball, but it did me no good to lord that over the girls in the class. Well, MOST of the girls. And, for ability with a bat, I was close to the bottom of the gym class.
Juniors and seniors at our school had the luxury to pick elective gym classes for the last two years of their compulsory schooling, and because I had somehow missed the first day of sign-up for the electives, I wound up with second-semester leftovers fencing, badminton and floor hockey.
Ms. Beeman was the woman who taught us and then oversaw fencing...or should I say who taught us the two most basic moves in fencing and then took a three week working vacation -- some say sleeping off the breakfast booze -- while we hacked away at each other with thin steel rods!
I was embarrassed when badminton started, because the school actually fielded a badminton team...and it was all girls. I thought for sure I would be the only boy in badminton, but there was Gary Block, one year ahead of me as a senior. If I was the Prince of Geeks, Gary was the King. Sorry Gary, if you happen to be reading this (HAH! I kill me! I don't think any of the two of you is Gary Block!). Sadly enough, he fit the stereotype: uncoordinated both physically and socially, excelling in science and Mathletes. I think he was in the Chess Club, too. Fuzzy, almost afro-like hair. And large-framed glasses.
I couldn't understand why the badminton courts had the lines like a tennis court (only smaller). I always thought of baminton as that silly little poof game you played at the beach and at picnics, batting the little cone-shaped "birdie" back and forth over the volleyball net. And that's another thing. Why was the badminton net the same as the tennis net? Everybody in the class seemed to think of badminton the same way as I did. Everybody, that is, except for Gary Block. I learned this when I so gaily batted the birdie across the net toward him and suddenly had to duck as the thing nearly took my eye out on his return! Then I began to understand. Badminton is tennis for people who don't like to chase after the ball when it goes out of bounds! Before long Gary Block and I were the only people in the class who took the game seriously. Leave it to the only two boys in class to make it a competition! The only prblem was, no matter how good I was at it, I could never beat that pipsqueak, that badminton powerhouse, Gary Block! And then, just as I felt the tables turning, as I began a surge that would inevitably result in Gary Block's badminton demise, we switched electives. To floor hockey.
Kids were scattered in all directions, so it wasn't all of us from badminton going to floor hockey. But some others besides me did. Tony Zomparelli was in the floor hockey class. Tony was one of those kids who was very well physically coordinated, but didn't feel the need to show that to people on a playing field in organized, competitive play. His true forte was soccer, but he was not at all shabby at maneuvering a ball at the end of a hockey stick from one end of the hockey floor to the other. And when I say he was not too shabby, I mean he was fantastic. The down side? I was considered the second best. A far distant second best. I always wound up as the center (forward? The guy who got to run anywhere on the floor (help me, Chloe!)), opposite Tony Zomparelli in the same position on the other team. The guy could run circles around me. I mean that literally. I mean, he literally did that to me one day. And my team always lost. No matter who was on it, if Tony Zomparelli wasn't on my team, my team lost.
Then one day the teacher decreed that Tony Zomparelli would be the goalie for his team. I was the (center? forward?) for my team, as usual (ugghh!). So his team had to re-organize, and as their forward/center, they chose none other than Gary Block! I swelled with pride and bravado. I had this guy beat. I was a faster runner, I was better with stickwork, and I was more agile. And I had a score to settle!
Near the end of the game the score was close, thanks to a goal or two scored by Tony Zomparelli, from his position as goalie!! It was down to the last few plays before the class bell would sound. The teacher/referee dropped the ball for our faceoff at center court. Gary and I slapped sticks and managed to knock the ball toward the left side of the court (according to my intended direction of travel). He and I sprinted after it, and I watched as he fell behind in the race. I had the height. I had the legs. I had the speed. Gary, however, had this little aversion to losing, so he aimed his stick right at my knees and thrust it right between them. With the sudden stop of my legs, I quite literally launched into the air and somersaulted, landing on my back, with Gary's stick and my stick launching into the air again as if for an encore. Gasps echoed throughout the gym. My momentum carried me through the roll and I wound up rolling up onto my feet in a crouch.
(When I wrote earlier that I was good at falling, I mean that I excelled at pratfalls. I knew how to throw myself to the floor and make it look like I didn't mean it, and yet I never (okay, seldom) got hurt. I wasn't the most graceful, but I knew how to tumble. And this skill lent itself to times when I really fell. It had become instinct, and when I did lose my balance or my feet, I was able to turn it quickly into a tumble and roll out of it, to witnesses who knew me thinking I had done it on purpose.)
So I sprang back up onto my feet in a crouch, and I was more than a little perturbed at Gary Block for the dirty trick he had just pulled. I didn't think to clobber him or kick him or wring his neck, but I was angry, and my eyes found him. He literally turned sheet white, jumped backwards and put his hands up to his mouth, and he shouted, "Oh, my god! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I didn't mean it!"
The guy honestly thought I was about to pummel him and, according to the bylaws of The Guy Code, I had every right to pummel him. And I think he knew that, too. It was the first time, the only time, I ever instilled abject, menacing fear in someone, and it felt good. It tasted good. But, somehow, it sufficed. He apologized, quite profusely I might add, and his demeanor let me know that he knew he had done wrong, and he was truly sorry. Had it been one of the many class tough-guys who I had rolled up and shot that look at, there would have been a fight, and I probably would have been the one who was pummeled, cause I ain't no tough-guy.
Inside, I knew Gary's fear at that moment. I had been in his shoes, and for much lesser infractions, cowering before bullies and toughs. I had been there, so with the tables turned, after that first sweet taste of power, I didn't want to be one who made others feel impotent.
He did something stupid, I got angry, he apologized. He almost wet his pants, but he apologized. What was there left to do? So I ran and got my stick, slapped the ball toward the goal, and Tony Zomparelli stopped it. And he probably shot from there and scored on us, and we probably lost.
I should have ripped the guy's tongue out of his head.
Thanks, Chloe, for helping to bring this fond memory to the surface!
dassall
Monday, November 07, 2005
A Brief (VERY!) Respite...
Not much writing lately. Been busy...and lazy...last week or so. Saw my favorite blogger put one of these up and so I decided to participate likewise.
I'd go step in front of a bus, but I just missed it.
dassall
| This Is My Life, Rated | |
| Life: |  6.6 |
| Mind: |  6.2 |
| Body: |  5.5 |
| Spirit: |  4.3 |
| Friends/Family: | 5.6 |
| Love: | 7.3 |
| Finance: | 7 |
| Take the Rate My Life Quiz | |
I'd go step in front of a bus, but I just missed it.
dassall
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Reunion Part Deux
This has been a good year for finding myself headed to cities where old friends live who I have not seen in many years. This trip is to Greenville, South Carolina, where I had the opportunity to see Vince, another with whom I was stationed at Wüschheim Air Station in (what was at the time West) Germany.
Vince was one who had his head screwed on straight, even way back at age 20. Very devout Christian, very straight-laced, and what I characterized as "uptight." In that regard, little has changed, except the "uptight" part. He fell victim to the schoolboy mentality those of us employed who thought we were better than anybody we felt didn't fit. We thought he was uptight. We thought he was geeky. We poked endless fun at him, both in and out of his presence. But of all of us, he was probably more secure in his being than any of us was in our own. He refused to suffer our childish behavior and so seized every opportunity to avoid it, and was thus branded a loner.
While I was hanging out with friends, each of us trying to outdo each other in "cool," Vince was out in his car, traversing the countryside, touring Europe, visiting friends, both German and American, with every free moment he had available to him.
When Vince was in our midst, suffering our barbs and jokes, he was there not because he wanted to be, but because he had to be. He wanted not to be there not because he didn't like us, but because we didn't give him anything to like. One on one he and I got along together, but when the gang was around, I disappeared into the group mentality and was one of the voices from which he shrank. And yet he and I maintained, if not a friendship, at least a healthy acquaintanceship.
Thanks to Classmates.com (this is not a plug, just a statement of fact) these 20-odd years later, Vince and I were able to contact each other again. And, as luck would have it, my travels brought me to within a few miles of his home.
At a local restaurant we shared dinner and memories, and I amazed him with my recall of names, though I'm sure most of them were incorrect. And again I was awed to learn that I had so misjudged someone back in my youth that I now regret I didn't spend more time getting to know him. Of course, his devotion to his faith, and my lack of same would eventually have caused friction then. But I've grown much more tolerant of that sort of thing. Vince is in the middle of studies to become a minister, so he knows now that he will have his day to proselytize, and to those eager to hear him. This evening, despite the fact that I brought up the topic of the progress of his studies, and my curiosity about why he follows this path, never once did he utter the icon after which his faith is named. Was that out of respect for me?
After dinner we retired to his home where I met his lovely wife and kids, and where we shared more laughs, more names and more memories.
Where I felt remorse for "Rudy" and the life he led as a young airman, and for how much he realized he missed while under the influence of alcohol, I left Vince feeling remorse for myself, for being a stupid kid who thought I was more than I was, for thinking I was more than anybody was, and for missing an opportunity to embrace a friendship that could have shown me more about life than I already knew.
To my friend, Vince, very devout Christian, very straight-laced, but definitely not uptight.
dassall
Vince was one who had his head screwed on straight, even way back at age 20. Very devout Christian, very straight-laced, and what I characterized as "uptight." In that regard, little has changed, except the "uptight" part. He fell victim to the schoolboy mentality those of us employed who thought we were better than anybody we felt didn't fit. We thought he was uptight. We thought he was geeky. We poked endless fun at him, both in and out of his presence. But of all of us, he was probably more secure in his being than any of us was in our own. He refused to suffer our childish behavior and so seized every opportunity to avoid it, and was thus branded a loner.
While I was hanging out with friends, each of us trying to outdo each other in "cool," Vince was out in his car, traversing the countryside, touring Europe, visiting friends, both German and American, with every free moment he had available to him.
When Vince was in our midst, suffering our barbs and jokes, he was there not because he wanted to be, but because he had to be. He wanted not to be there not because he didn't like us, but because we didn't give him anything to like. One on one he and I got along together, but when the gang was around, I disappeared into the group mentality and was one of the voices from which he shrank. And yet he and I maintained, if not a friendship, at least a healthy acquaintanceship.
Thanks to Classmates.com (this is not a plug, just a statement of fact) these 20-odd years later, Vince and I were able to contact each other again. And, as luck would have it, my travels brought me to within a few miles of his home.
At a local restaurant we shared dinner and memories, and I amazed him with my recall of names, though I'm sure most of them were incorrect. And again I was awed to learn that I had so misjudged someone back in my youth that I now regret I didn't spend more time getting to know him. Of course, his devotion to his faith, and my lack of same would eventually have caused friction then. But I've grown much more tolerant of that sort of thing. Vince is in the middle of studies to become a minister, so he knows now that he will have his day to proselytize, and to those eager to hear him. This evening, despite the fact that I brought up the topic of the progress of his studies, and my curiosity about why he follows this path, never once did he utter the icon after which his faith is named. Was that out of respect for me?
After dinner we retired to his home where I met his lovely wife and kids, and where we shared more laughs, more names and more memories.
Where I felt remorse for "Rudy" and the life he led as a young airman, and for how much he realized he missed while under the influence of alcohol, I left Vince feeling remorse for myself, for being a stupid kid who thought I was more than I was, for thinking I was more than anybody was, and for missing an opportunity to embrace a friendship that could have shown me more about life than I already knew.
To my friend, Vince, very devout Christian, very straight-laced, but definitely not uptight.
dassall
Monday, October 24, 2005
Rainbows
As we ooze into adulthood, too many of us lose that sense of wonder we had as children. For, as children, the everyday humdrum is not so everyday, nor so humdrum, as we have experienced very little beyond our front doors. But we grow up. We get out of the house. We go to school. We learn about the science and technology that make up the world around us.
We learn how everything works that ever made us stop and scratch our heads, or made us say, “Aw, COOL!” And as the knowledge enters our brains, the wonder leaves.
Today started off as the typical Monday. It wasn’t a usual Monday as we had workers coming over to start a project at the house, and they were late. I had to wait for them to arrive to go over the areas where they were to work, pose and answer questions and whatnot. But they were late, making me late for work, to deal with rain-crazy traffic, which made me later for work, and that is the typical Monday.
But as traffic cleared and I headed northwest, the sun peeked out, giving promise to the day. I noticed something in the sky ahead of me to my left: a band of colors canted at an angle, floating in the sky. “Prism effect of the sun through the rain,” my brain automatically reminded me. But then, when I looked forward I had the illusion of driving toward a vast archway. I looked up and there it was, arching from the ground way off to the left of the highway, over the road, and down to the ground way off to the right, a complete rainbow! I hadn’t seen one of those in at least thirty years. I looked around at the drivers on either side of me, but no one seemed to have noticed my rainbow. It lasted a good three or four minutes, and I continuously marveled at it as I hurtled along the highway at 75 miles per hour (but that’s okay, as I am the world’s best driver).
I returned momentarily to an amalgam of all of my grade school classrooms, imagining the voice of a teacher explaining the science of a rainbow. “Blah blah blah sunlight blah blah blah refraction blah blah blah prism blah blah.” But once you’ve seen one in all its glory, the scientific explanation doesn’t seem sufficient. It became very easy to understand the origins of the folklore of rainbows, as they are so magnificent, people of centuries ago must have desired to touch them, to see them up close. The area where it “touched” the ground seemed to be illuminated in a sort of spotlight, but I’m sure it was more trick of the mind than trick of the eye. Nonetheless, it lent to the sense of magic that I experienced.
All too soon it was gone and I was once again aware that I was headed to work. On a Monday. And a rainy Monday at that. Any magic that rainbows may possess, now or during my childhood, disappears with the rainbows, as my Monday turned out to be worse than the average Monday. Unless the magic of the rainbow is the smile worn on your soul, no matter how lousy is your day, when the image of the rainbow arches across your memory.
dassall
We learn how everything works that ever made us stop and scratch our heads, or made us say, “Aw, COOL!” And as the knowledge enters our brains, the wonder leaves.
Today started off as the typical Monday. It wasn’t a usual Monday as we had workers coming over to start a project at the house, and they were late. I had to wait for them to arrive to go over the areas where they were to work, pose and answer questions and whatnot. But they were late, making me late for work, to deal with rain-crazy traffic, which made me later for work, and that is the typical Monday.
But as traffic cleared and I headed northwest, the sun peeked out, giving promise to the day. I noticed something in the sky ahead of me to my left: a band of colors canted at an angle, floating in the sky. “Prism effect of the sun through the rain,” my brain automatically reminded me. But then, when I looked forward I had the illusion of driving toward a vast archway. I looked up and there it was, arching from the ground way off to the left of the highway, over the road, and down to the ground way off to the right, a complete rainbow! I hadn’t seen one of those in at least thirty years. I looked around at the drivers on either side of me, but no one seemed to have noticed my rainbow. It lasted a good three or four minutes, and I continuously marveled at it as I hurtled along the highway at 75 miles per hour (but that’s okay, as I am the world’s best driver).
I returned momentarily to an amalgam of all of my grade school classrooms, imagining the voice of a teacher explaining the science of a rainbow. “Blah blah blah sunlight blah blah blah refraction blah blah blah prism blah blah.” But once you’ve seen one in all its glory, the scientific explanation doesn’t seem sufficient. It became very easy to understand the origins of the folklore of rainbows, as they are so magnificent, people of centuries ago must have desired to touch them, to see them up close. The area where it “touched” the ground seemed to be illuminated in a sort of spotlight, but I’m sure it was more trick of the mind than trick of the eye. Nonetheless, it lent to the sense of magic that I experienced.
All too soon it was gone and I was once again aware that I was headed to work. On a Monday. And a rainy Monday at that. Any magic that rainbows may possess, now or during my childhood, disappears with the rainbows, as my Monday turned out to be worse than the average Monday. Unless the magic of the rainbow is the smile worn on your soul, no matter how lousy is your day, when the image of the rainbow arches across your memory.
dassall
Thursday, October 20, 2005
The Gift of Music
Taken out of context, the title I've chosen for this post can be interpreted in several ways: a gift certificate from Amazon.com? A CD wrapped in pretty paper and given at a birthday? An innate talent for creating sounds pleasing to the ear? Yeah. That's it. That last one's close.
I would love to say that I'm talking about me, but I'm not. Musical ability is an untapped undercurrent in our family. My paternal grandfather was a professional musician back in the Italian immigrant heyday of the early 1900s. To say he was a professional does not mean he made his living at it, rather, he toiled in a steel mill by day in order to support his passion. I don't really know much about the man; he died at age 42 when my father was a tender age 4...in 1928. What I do know is that he was a talented musician, and he played the accordion. I have photos. This talent was evident in my oldest brother who took accordion lessons and was able to play quite well on an instrument which was dying with the immigrant culture it rode in on.
I, too, have a talent for creating music, but it was a talent I discovered late. When I was a kid we had this cheap chord organ, basically a toy, but it was my first access to a musical keyboard. My older brother introduced me to "Chopsticks," and a love was born. In the 36 years hence I have dabbled with keyboards - the chord organ; pianos at schools, churches, community theatre auditoriums; and, yes, my oldest brother's old accordion - never creating anything terribly sophisticated, yet still creating. I never learned to write, so the things I created were committed to, and played back from, memory. Most have also been lost. Music has never been my number one passion, and with no training and no sophisticated outlet, the talent I possess has remained nascent. My love has remained the keyboard, and I purchased an expensive cheap one about ten years ago. It's a Casio I purchased as a demo model from some electronics and appliance store. It came with no instruction manual, no box, not even a power supply. It features an array of buttons that can create a bazillion sounds and rhythms. With it I have created my most sophisticated tunes, but, don't be mistaken, they are far from sophisticated.
As possessor of a new iMac G5, I discovered a little program that comes installed on it called "Garage Band." I haven't yet delved deeply into the program, but basically it enables anyone from an accomplished musician to someone like, say, ME to compose music. Shortly after I discovered "Garage Band," I discovered a Mac compatible, Plug-N-Play USB MIDI Controller musical keyboard. I won't go into the laundry list of its features, but I will simply say that its purchase rendered my old Casio obsolete.
My older brother, the one who taught me how to play "Chopsticks," now has two boys of his own, ages 12 and 9. Among their endless sponsored sports and activities they are each studying music, the older trumpet, the younger clarinet. With my recently obsoleted keyboard I thought maybe the boys' musical training would benefit if they had another instument at their disposal. My brother was receptive to the idea, and since I was giving it away there was no obstacle to block the idea.
The boys were typical kids at a keyboard: they simply banged on the keys with open hands just to hear it make noise. As I showed them the features I understand, their interest became more focused. I played a few of the tunes I made up, and I played "Heart and Soul," recording the left-hand, chord progression part, then played it back as accompaniment so I could play the right-hand part. Now the boys were hooked! The older boy was interested in how the keyboard worked, how to access each different sound and rhythm. I spent a long time showing him these things while he repeatedly slapped away the hand of his younger brother who really wanted to get at the keys himself. Their mother retrieved one of their musical instrument lesson books and we tried to show the older boy where the notes on the scale were located on the keyboard...the blind leading the blind!
After a while my brother told his older son that it was his brother's turn on the keyboard. They traded places and, after a few minutes of exploring the more annoying sounds the instrument can make, the boy started poking at individual keys. Suddenly I heard the melody of "Heart and Soul" being plunked out slowly! While the older boy had focused on the mechanics of getting the instrument to make sounds, the younger had focused on how to use it to make music. He had studied his inept uncle's pathetic rendition of "Heart and Soul," and he was able to play it back almost perfectly (as his uncles example!) the first time! He is the more expressive boy, as enthusiastic about doing plays and singing in choir as he is about playing baseball and basketball and soccer and volleyball, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But I am fascinated by how quickly he seized upon a melody, how he studied what he had seen and heard, and then duplicated it. I didn't bestow upon him the talent to play music, I just simply gave an old electronic keyboard. But I gave him a new outlet. I gave him a true gift of music.
His parents have the money and the circumstance to provide the boys with the music and instrument lessons that our parents could not afford. I wish now that I could have had lessons then, even if they had to force me to do them. I hope my brother and his wife will keep their boys on the path to music. I'd like to know that I had something to do with that.
dassall
I would love to say that I'm talking about me, but I'm not. Musical ability is an untapped undercurrent in our family. My paternal grandfather was a professional musician back in the Italian immigrant heyday of the early 1900s. To say he was a professional does not mean he made his living at it, rather, he toiled in a steel mill by day in order to support his passion. I don't really know much about the man; he died at age 42 when my father was a tender age 4...in 1928. What I do know is that he was a talented musician, and he played the accordion. I have photos. This talent was evident in my oldest brother who took accordion lessons and was able to play quite well on an instrument which was dying with the immigrant culture it rode in on.
I, too, have a talent for creating music, but it was a talent I discovered late. When I was a kid we had this cheap chord organ, basically a toy, but it was my first access to a musical keyboard. My older brother introduced me to "Chopsticks," and a love was born. In the 36 years hence I have dabbled with keyboards - the chord organ; pianos at schools, churches, community theatre auditoriums; and, yes, my oldest brother's old accordion - never creating anything terribly sophisticated, yet still creating. I never learned to write, so the things I created were committed to, and played back from, memory. Most have also been lost. Music has never been my number one passion, and with no training and no sophisticated outlet, the talent I possess has remained nascent. My love has remained the keyboard, and I purchased an expensive cheap one about ten years ago. It's a Casio I purchased as a demo model from some electronics and appliance store. It came with no instruction manual, no box, not even a power supply. It features an array of buttons that can create a bazillion sounds and rhythms. With it I have created my most sophisticated tunes, but, don't be mistaken, they are far from sophisticated.
As possessor of a new iMac G5, I discovered a little program that comes installed on it called "Garage Band." I haven't yet delved deeply into the program, but basically it enables anyone from an accomplished musician to someone like, say, ME to compose music. Shortly after I discovered "Garage Band," I discovered a Mac compatible, Plug-N-Play USB MIDI Controller musical keyboard. I won't go into the laundry list of its features, but I will simply say that its purchase rendered my old Casio obsolete.
My older brother, the one who taught me how to play "Chopsticks," now has two boys of his own, ages 12 and 9. Among their endless sponsored sports and activities they are each studying music, the older trumpet, the younger clarinet. With my recently obsoleted keyboard I thought maybe the boys' musical training would benefit if they had another instument at their disposal. My brother was receptive to the idea, and since I was giving it away there was no obstacle to block the idea.
The boys were typical kids at a keyboard: they simply banged on the keys with open hands just to hear it make noise. As I showed them the features I understand, their interest became more focused. I played a few of the tunes I made up, and I played "Heart and Soul," recording the left-hand, chord progression part, then played it back as accompaniment so I could play the right-hand part. Now the boys were hooked! The older boy was interested in how the keyboard worked, how to access each different sound and rhythm. I spent a long time showing him these things while he repeatedly slapped away the hand of his younger brother who really wanted to get at the keys himself. Their mother retrieved one of their musical instrument lesson books and we tried to show the older boy where the notes on the scale were located on the keyboard...the blind leading the blind!
After a while my brother told his older son that it was his brother's turn on the keyboard. They traded places and, after a few minutes of exploring the more annoying sounds the instrument can make, the boy started poking at individual keys. Suddenly I heard the melody of "Heart and Soul" being plunked out slowly! While the older boy had focused on the mechanics of getting the instrument to make sounds, the younger had focused on how to use it to make music. He had studied his inept uncle's pathetic rendition of "Heart and Soul," and he was able to play it back almost perfectly (as his uncles example!) the first time! He is the more expressive boy, as enthusiastic about doing plays and singing in choir as he is about playing baseball and basketball and soccer and volleyball, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. But I am fascinated by how quickly he seized upon a melody, how he studied what he had seen and heard, and then duplicated it. I didn't bestow upon him the talent to play music, I just simply gave an old electronic keyboard. But I gave him a new outlet. I gave him a true gift of music.
His parents have the money and the circumstance to provide the boys with the music and instrument lessons that our parents could not afford. I wish now that I could have had lessons then, even if they had to force me to do them. I hope my brother and his wife will keep their boys on the path to music. I'd like to know that I had something to do with that.
dassall
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Is It Treason?
I’m not the world’s greatest baseball fan. But, since I live in Chicago, and I am SOMEWHAT a baseball fan, I have to choose sides.
No. You don’t understand. I have to choose sides.
As a White Sox fan, I would have to say that the White Sox are the best team ever. As a White Sox fan, I would have to say that I’ve died 40 deaths waiting for them to get to the World Series. As a White Sox fan, I would have to say that this has been the season of a lifetime and I was pulling for them all the way.
…
But I won’t say it. I can’t.
I am a Cubs fan.
I am not ashamed to say it. The 40 deaths I’ve died have been for the Cubs. When you’ve grown up in Chicago you learn that there really is no “fan of both teams.” Those who say they are haven’t spent their entire lives in this metropolitan area, or they’re just trying to get along in mixed company. Anyone who says he or she is a fan of both teams, when he is surrounded by true fans of either team, will be deafened by the shouts of, “The HELL you are!”
There’s no discernable reason one becomes a fan of the White Sox or of the Cubs. Neither team has been a dynastic powerhouse in my lifetime. Unlike a team such as the perennial NL East champion Atlanta Braves, the Cubs have had what can be best described as fortunate hiccups in 1969, ’84, ’98, and 2003. The same goes for the White Sox in 1959, ’83, ’93, 2000, and even ’05. If it were down to a decision to pick one team to which to devote your loyalty, there would be no objective standards to follow. It must come down to childhood influences. Maybe something really nice happened to you when you were age two-and-a-half, and the first color scheme you saw in that moment was black-and-white. Maybe when you were four you thought that little baby bear on their shirtsleeves was cute. Or maybe you just like deep emotional pain. And it was all fun until you encountered someone for the other team and the topic of team loyalty came up, and within a minute you were fighting the urge to strangle this guy!
So it’s not a decision to make. It’s in the blood. But it’s not hereditary. My mother was a White Sox fan, as I learned when I was a teenager. But, she said, she loved me all the same. I never fully trusted her again. My oldest brother, age fifty-something, is a White Sox fan, though he says he is a fan of both teams. He also happened to move away from Chicago at age 20, so he just doesn’t get it.
And so I watch with mixed feelings as the White Sox and the Red Sox battle it out in the American League Division Series. Last year I so desperately wanted the Red Sox to beat the Yankees, and then the St. Louis Cardinals, because if the Red Sox could win the World Series after 87 years of tears, then surely it means that my beloved Cubs could win the World Series after 97 years of hard, hard deaths. Oh, wait. Make that 98, now.
This year I find myself staring at my TV, staring at the team I’ve spent a lifetime despising as they play against my favorite American League team for the privilege of advancing to the next round. But I am a loyal fan of Chicago, so I must root for the White Sox. Boston, you finally had that long-awaited moment in the sun. Now go away.
It’s right, but it feels so wrong.
Go White Sox! (RRRRRETCH!)
dassall
No. You don’t understand. I have to choose sides.
As a White Sox fan, I would have to say that the White Sox are the best team ever. As a White Sox fan, I would have to say that I’ve died 40 deaths waiting for them to get to the World Series. As a White Sox fan, I would have to say that this has been the season of a lifetime and I was pulling for them all the way.
…
But I won’t say it. I can’t.
I am a Cubs fan.
I am not ashamed to say it. The 40 deaths I’ve died have been for the Cubs. When you’ve grown up in Chicago you learn that there really is no “fan of both teams.” Those who say they are haven’t spent their entire lives in this metropolitan area, or they’re just trying to get along in mixed company. Anyone who says he or she is a fan of both teams, when he is surrounded by true fans of either team, will be deafened by the shouts of, “The HELL you are!”
There’s no discernable reason one becomes a fan of the White Sox or of the Cubs. Neither team has been a dynastic powerhouse in my lifetime. Unlike a team such as the perennial NL East champion Atlanta Braves, the Cubs have had what can be best described as fortunate hiccups in 1969, ’84, ’98, and 2003. The same goes for the White Sox in 1959, ’83, ’93, 2000, and even ’05. If it were down to a decision to pick one team to which to devote your loyalty, there would be no objective standards to follow. It must come down to childhood influences. Maybe something really nice happened to you when you were age two-and-a-half, and the first color scheme you saw in that moment was black-and-white. Maybe when you were four you thought that little baby bear on their shirtsleeves was cute. Or maybe you just like deep emotional pain. And it was all fun until you encountered someone for the other team and the topic of team loyalty came up, and within a minute you were fighting the urge to strangle this guy!
So it’s not a decision to make. It’s in the blood. But it’s not hereditary. My mother was a White Sox fan, as I learned when I was a teenager. But, she said, she loved me all the same. I never fully trusted her again. My oldest brother, age fifty-something, is a White Sox fan, though he says he is a fan of both teams. He also happened to move away from Chicago at age 20, so he just doesn’t get it.
And so I watch with mixed feelings as the White Sox and the Red Sox battle it out in the American League Division Series. Last year I so desperately wanted the Red Sox to beat the Yankees, and then the St. Louis Cardinals, because if the Red Sox could win the World Series after 87 years of tears, then surely it means that my beloved Cubs could win the World Series after 97 years of hard, hard deaths. Oh, wait. Make that 98, now.
This year I find myself staring at my TV, staring at the team I’ve spent a lifetime despising as they play against my favorite American League team for the privilege of advancing to the next round. But I am a loyal fan of Chicago, so I must root for the White Sox. Boston, you finally had that long-awaited moment in the sun. Now go away.
It’s right, but it feels so wrong.
Go White Sox! (RRRRRETCH!)
dassall
Monday, October 03, 2005
A Distant Planet
I was watching PBS last night, and there was a show on about meteor impacts on Earth. The discussions among the scientists came around to the supposed discovery of proof that there at least WAS life on Mars, brough to the attention of science by the discovery of a rock, proved to be a small chunk of Mars that arrived here as part of a meteor shower some time ago, and which had attached to it what appeared to be a fossilized, microscopic, single-celled organism.
This discovery had touched off a flurry of discussions and arguments among scientists regarding the existence -- past or present -- of life on Mars and how some say it's not possible, never was possible, never will be possible, ad nauseum.
But, non-scientist that I am -- I can't even digest food properly -- I came up with a theory of the existence many centuries ago of life on Mars that I have not yet heard anyone else echo, nor have I heard anyone refute...okay, any renown GEOPHYSICISTS refute...or address....
One of the many bits of miscellany that I needlessly remember from my youth is that the universe is forever expanding, and that Earth and all of the other planets of our solar system are moving away from the sun at the blinding speed of approximately 3 inches a year...or something like that. How they're able to measure to the inch is way beyond me, but there it is.
Okay, so I'm a Big Bang evolutionist...swear to god I am...so I belive this theory. I also believe that the earth, as well as the universe, is hundreds of millions of years old. And I believe that, somewhere out there is a life form of a far superior, more advanced intelligence than the inhabitants of this planet. Okay, so, let's just keep it easy and say Earth finally formed a discernible planet with a solid crust exactly 100-million years ago. Spinning happily through space and testing the sun's gravitational limits at three inches a year for 100-million years to this day... comes out to... 300-million inches...divided by twelve, which equals... 25-million feet...divided by 5,280 (feet in a mile), which equals...4,734.85 miles.
Okay, so let's say it's BILLIONS of years old and, without slowing things down with all that pesky math, let's say that in those billions of years of moving three inches away from the sun each year, Earth arrived about 100-million years ago at an orbital "temperate zone," a distance from this particular sun -- not too hot, not too cold -- that allows carbon-based life forms like us and everything else that consumes or produces oxygen to thrive. Okay, accept that into your head as absolute truth, just for this little moment.
So, if Earth slowly traveled out to the temperate zone, and Mars is the next planet out from ours, on average approximately 48-million miles further out and traveling at approximately the same three inches per year, doesn't it seem logical that Mars was once in this temperate zone that we so thoroughly enjoy today?
Okay, so here's where you'll most likely dismiss me as a wack-job, but, let's assume that in roughly 100-million years Earth will be at the outer reaches of the temperate zone. The human species will have advanced quite far by then, provided we haven't discovered an easier way to atomically snuff ourselves out sooner. And with a perpetual winter of deep-space proportions looming quite literally on the horizon, the most advanced minds of our highly advanced species will be working feverishly on getting as many of us as possible and whatever other beings we need to support us off our beloved planet and back sunward to Venus, which will have just about cooled off enough to sustain life after entering the temperate zone a few million years earlier.
Naturally, not everyone will be able to go to Venus; actually very few. But those few who do will arrive at a planet with virtually no facilities. People will have to live in completely primitive conditions, perhaps for eons as they struggle just to survive. Differences will split the groups. Rifts will cause wars, and wars will scatter the people in all directions to form their own civilizations and adapt their own languages. Over the passage of the subsequent eons, our forms will evolve to adapt to the ever-changing terrain of the living planet, as will the forms of the animals we brought with us from Earth, and in that process, we will have forgotten all about Earth and what she was for us until, hundreds and hundreds of millions of years later someone of advanced, evolved intelligence discovers an odd little rock and determines that it's from that distant, withered third planet from the sun and, lo! There's a little microscopic bit on the rock that he insists is proof that the barren third planet which theories suggest may have held oceans, and may perhaps still have water in its ice caps, once supported life.
And, of course, his narrow-minded peers will tell him he's full of shit.
dassall
This discovery had touched off a flurry of discussions and arguments among scientists regarding the existence -- past or present -- of life on Mars and how some say it's not possible, never was possible, never will be possible, ad nauseum.
But, non-scientist that I am -- I can't even digest food properly -- I came up with a theory of the existence many centuries ago of life on Mars that I have not yet heard anyone else echo, nor have I heard anyone refute...okay, any renown GEOPHYSICISTS refute...or address....
One of the many bits of miscellany that I needlessly remember from my youth is that the universe is forever expanding, and that Earth and all of the other planets of our solar system are moving away from the sun at the blinding speed of approximately 3 inches a year...or something like that. How they're able to measure to the inch is way beyond me, but there it is.
Okay, so I'm a Big Bang evolutionist...swear to god I am...so I belive this theory. I also believe that the earth, as well as the universe, is hundreds of millions of years old. And I believe that, somewhere out there is a life form of a far superior, more advanced intelligence than the inhabitants of this planet. Okay, so, let's just keep it easy and say Earth finally formed a discernible planet with a solid crust exactly 100-million years ago. Spinning happily through space and testing the sun's gravitational limits at three inches a year for 100-million years to this day... comes out to... 300-million inches...divided by twelve, which equals... 25-million feet...divided by 5,280 (feet in a mile), which equals...4,734.85 miles.
Okay, so let's say it's BILLIONS of years old and, without slowing things down with all that pesky math, let's say that in those billions of years of moving three inches away from the sun each year, Earth arrived about 100-million years ago at an orbital "temperate zone," a distance from this particular sun -- not too hot, not too cold -- that allows carbon-based life forms like us and everything else that consumes or produces oxygen to thrive. Okay, accept that into your head as absolute truth, just for this little moment.
So, if Earth slowly traveled out to the temperate zone, and Mars is the next planet out from ours, on average approximately 48-million miles further out and traveling at approximately the same three inches per year, doesn't it seem logical that Mars was once in this temperate zone that we so thoroughly enjoy today?
Okay, so here's where you'll most likely dismiss me as a wack-job, but, let's assume that in roughly 100-million years Earth will be at the outer reaches of the temperate zone. The human species will have advanced quite far by then, provided we haven't discovered an easier way to atomically snuff ourselves out sooner. And with a perpetual winter of deep-space proportions looming quite literally on the horizon, the most advanced minds of our highly advanced species will be working feverishly on getting as many of us as possible and whatever other beings we need to support us off our beloved planet and back sunward to Venus, which will have just about cooled off enough to sustain life after entering the temperate zone a few million years earlier.
Naturally, not everyone will be able to go to Venus; actually very few. But those few who do will arrive at a planet with virtually no facilities. People will have to live in completely primitive conditions, perhaps for eons as they struggle just to survive. Differences will split the groups. Rifts will cause wars, and wars will scatter the people in all directions to form their own civilizations and adapt their own languages. Over the passage of the subsequent eons, our forms will evolve to adapt to the ever-changing terrain of the living planet, as will the forms of the animals we brought with us from Earth, and in that process, we will have forgotten all about Earth and what she was for us until, hundreds and hundreds of millions of years later someone of advanced, evolved intelligence discovers an odd little rock and determines that it's from that distant, withered third planet from the sun and, lo! There's a little microscopic bit on the rock that he insists is proof that the barren third planet which theories suggest may have held oceans, and may perhaps still have water in its ice caps, once supported life.
And, of course, his narrow-minded peers will tell him he's full of shit.
dassall
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Words
I got to thinking today about words. In particular, swear words. Why is it... HOW is it that certain words in our language achieve such power and supposed potential for damage to the young and the frail that they are restricted from use? I mean, they're just words.
I won't pussyfoot around here. "Fuck" is probably the worst word any mother could hear her seven year old child say, followed a close second by "cunt" (which is first, depending on the woman who hears it). But why? It's just a word! Into common usage we accept "screw" as a substitute for "fuck," yet they both mean the same thing. I could say, "Screw you!" on television, which means the same thing as "Fuck you!" "We're screwed." "We're fucked." They mean the same thing, connote the same feeling of defeat or doom, yet if I say the former on TV or radio, I or the station owner could receive a huge fine.
I wanna know why this is! We try to protect our children from hearing such language, we try to discourage our children from using such language, yet we all have ventured into that weed patch ourselves when we thought we were cool or when we just got fed up with something. For some of us it's just a part of our everyday language. Hell! For some of us it's our mother tongue!
Is it possible that words evolve like everything else? I can remember when "sonofabitch" used to be bleeped from movies brought to TV, but now it's pretty much a standby TV swear word. I remember when I heard "bastard" used as a swear word on TV when I was a small child, and feeling shocked when I heard it. "God damn" took a little while longer, but you'll hear it occasionally on your grittier TV dramas. A couple of years ago, on "NYPD Blue," "bullshit" was getting a once-an-episode free pass, and I never heard about any complaints. "Shit" alone never got play, but it was apparently okay if it was identified as the bovine sort. And as for "shit," I think "crap," "caca," doo-doo" and "turds" are words just as offensive, yet they're allowed on TV these days (mind you, it's not to say that I'm offended by any of these words. I just think they're just as strong) (and, mind you, if Sergeant Sipowicz had ever blurted out, "That's a load of bull doo-doo!" I would have shit myself laughing!). In its final season, "Chicago Hope" pushed the envelope in one episode when one of its characters told another, "Shit happens." I didn't witness the episode myself, but I heard the clip played on the radio the next morning. I never heard about anyone lodging a complaint. And what about "fart?" At its worst, "fart" was inappropriate. Kids could say it. If anyone said it, kids -- and most men -- would burst into giggly laughter, yet it appeared to have the same restriction on television as "fuck!" It wasn't until the mid- to late 1990s that Roseanne Barr Arnold took on convention and not only used it on her sitcom, but she devoted a whole episode to the topic. Of course, all the headway and groundbreaking made by Stephen Bochco and Roseanne and the writers of "Chicago Hope" were undone with Janet Jackson's tit flash...oops! I mean her breast-baring on live television. She sure fucked a lot of shit up with that little episode.
Why can't we just drop the pretense? Almost all of us say these words, even if it's only once in a great while. They're part of our language. Look in any dictionary worth its salt and you'll find them all. And regardless of whether we say them or not, we hear them just about everywhere we go. If we, as parents, are with our children when someone on the street starts using such language, we spirit our child(ren) away to a "safe" area, where they can't hear those words. The same should be done in the home. If something objectionable is mentioned on TV or radio, protect the kid by switching channels or by switching the thing off. Don't take it upon yourself to petition the FCC to remove a show from the air. Don't presume that I want or need your protection.
I say television should reflect our society as it is, not as the Puritans who influence the FCC wish it to be. If you are offended by language or nudity on a particular TV show, change the channel, not the network! You say you don't have to listen to such vile language, and you're right. So, CHANGE THE FUCKING CHANNEL! Does this mean I want my kid to hear Big Bird cussing out Oscar? No. But if I don't mind if he hears Detective Sipowicz telling a murder suspect that his story is full of shit, then that's my prerogative. If I DO mind if my kid hears such a thing, then he goes to bed, or neither he nor I watch the show. Don't try regulate MY viewing because you don't like what you see or hear on a particular show.
Comedian George Carlin achieved notoriety when Howard Stern purposely aired his "Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television:" shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. And then there were the discretionary words like "balls" and "prick." "NYPD Blue" alone knocked three of those words off that list, plus both of the discretionary words above. I think it's only a matter of time -- perhaps a decade or three, as cable continues to erode broadcast's viewer base -- before we'll be able to hear common street language on free television, if we so choose. The Darwin Etymology.
Okay, I had a few beers tonight with some guys I work with, and I'm pretty damn tired, so I'm sorry if I rambled. The Point: words shouldn't be powerful as words alone. The power is and should be in ideas. No words should be banned from the airwaves, just as none is banned from our everyday speech. Insert thought-provoking, insightful ending here.
dassall
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
I won't pussyfoot around here. "Fuck" is probably the worst word any mother could hear her seven year old child say, followed a close second by "cunt" (which is first, depending on the woman who hears it). But why? It's just a word! Into common usage we accept "screw" as a substitute for "fuck," yet they both mean the same thing. I could say, "Screw you!" on television, which means the same thing as "Fuck you!" "We're screwed." "We're fucked." They mean the same thing, connote the same feeling of defeat or doom, yet if I say the former on TV or radio, I or the station owner could receive a huge fine.
I wanna know why this is! We try to protect our children from hearing such language, we try to discourage our children from using such language, yet we all have ventured into that weed patch ourselves when we thought we were cool or when we just got fed up with something. For some of us it's just a part of our everyday language. Hell! For some of us it's our mother tongue!
Is it possible that words evolve like everything else? I can remember when "sonofabitch" used to be bleeped from movies brought to TV, but now it's pretty much a standby TV swear word. I remember when I heard "bastard" used as a swear word on TV when I was a small child, and feeling shocked when I heard it. "God damn" took a little while longer, but you'll hear it occasionally on your grittier TV dramas. A couple of years ago, on "NYPD Blue," "bullshit" was getting a once-an-episode free pass, and I never heard about any complaints. "Shit" alone never got play, but it was apparently okay if it was identified as the bovine sort. And as for "shit," I think "crap," "caca," doo-doo" and "turds" are words just as offensive, yet they're allowed on TV these days (mind you, it's not to say that I'm offended by any of these words. I just think they're just as strong) (and, mind you, if Sergeant Sipowicz had ever blurted out, "That's a load of bull doo-doo!" I would have shit myself laughing!). In its final season, "Chicago Hope" pushed the envelope in one episode when one of its characters told another, "Shit happens." I didn't witness the episode myself, but I heard the clip played on the radio the next morning. I never heard about anyone lodging a complaint. And what about "fart?" At its worst, "fart" was inappropriate. Kids could say it. If anyone said it, kids -- and most men -- would burst into giggly laughter, yet it appeared to have the same restriction on television as "fuck!" It wasn't until the mid- to late 1990s that Roseanne Barr Arnold took on convention and not only used it on her sitcom, but she devoted a whole episode to the topic. Of course, all the headway and groundbreaking made by Stephen Bochco and Roseanne and the writers of "Chicago Hope" were undone with Janet Jackson's tit flash...oops! I mean her breast-baring on live television. She sure fucked a lot of shit up with that little episode.
Why can't we just drop the pretense? Almost all of us say these words, even if it's only once in a great while. They're part of our language. Look in any dictionary worth its salt and you'll find them all. And regardless of whether we say them or not, we hear them just about everywhere we go. If we, as parents, are with our children when someone on the street starts using such language, we spirit our child(ren) away to a "safe" area, where they can't hear those words. The same should be done in the home. If something objectionable is mentioned on TV or radio, protect the kid by switching channels or by switching the thing off. Don't take it upon yourself to petition the FCC to remove a show from the air. Don't presume that I want or need your protection.
I say television should reflect our society as it is, not as the Puritans who influence the FCC wish it to be. If you are offended by language or nudity on a particular TV show, change the channel, not the network! You say you don't have to listen to such vile language, and you're right. So, CHANGE THE FUCKING CHANNEL! Does this mean I want my kid to hear Big Bird cussing out Oscar? No. But if I don't mind if he hears Detective Sipowicz telling a murder suspect that his story is full of shit, then that's my prerogative. If I DO mind if my kid hears such a thing, then he goes to bed, or neither he nor I watch the show. Don't try regulate MY viewing because you don't like what you see or hear on a particular show.
Comedian George Carlin achieved notoriety when Howard Stern purposely aired his "Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television:" shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. And then there were the discretionary words like "balls" and "prick." "NYPD Blue" alone knocked three of those words off that list, plus both of the discretionary words above. I think it's only a matter of time -- perhaps a decade or three, as cable continues to erode broadcast's viewer base -- before we'll be able to hear common street language on free television, if we so choose. The Darwin Etymology.
Okay, I had a few beers tonight with some guys I work with, and I'm pretty damn tired, so I'm sorry if I rambled. The Point: words shouldn't be powerful as words alone. The power is and should be in ideas. No words should be banned from the airwaves, just as none is banned from our everyday speech. Insert thought-provoking, insightful ending here.
dassall
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Salt Lake City
As you already know – if you’ve read my earliest posts – I travel frequently. As I write, I am on a United Airlines Boeing 737-300 headed for Salt Lake City, Utah. I go there with some hesitation in my heart. It’s purely psychological, as nothing happened to me there, and nothing happened there to anyone else to make me wary.
I had just gotten out of the shower in my room at the Little America Hotel. I had used the hotel’s alarm clock to wake up, and I left the radio on while I went about my morning preparations. As I toweled off, I heard one of the on-air personalities interrupt the others by saying something to the effect of, “I know this sounds crazy, but I just read on the news wire that one of the towers of the World Trade Center is on fire.” The day was September 11, 2001. The reactions to the comment were of incredulity. “Yeah. Apparently a plane crashed into one of the buildings.”
I immediately turned on the television, for some reason thinking that a hapless, wayward single-engine Cessna’s pilot had experienced the worst day of his life and had made a fatal mistake in the sky above Manhattan. I vowed to flip through the channels until I came to the first images of the scene. I wound up on the local CBS affiliate, slaved over to the network, and the image I saw was of both towers with thick, black smoke pouring out of them. By about two minutes I had missed the live shot of the second plane coming in. Of course, just as everybody else in the world, save for a sinister few, I had no idea what was going on. I saw a huge, gaping hole roughly the size and shape of a large airplane in the tower nearer the camera, and I thought to myself, “That was no Cessna…". And then they replayed what had happened only moments earlier: the second plane. I said aloud to the otherwise empty room, “That was no accident!” In the back of my head I had this faint hope that some navigational system had gone horribly haywire, but my logic, flawed as it may be at times, said that was impossible.
Within minutes I heard the unconfirmed report of four airliners – two from United Air Lines and two from American Air Lines – that were unaccounted for. And the even shakier rumor that there had been some hijackings. And then there was a report of a “bomb” exploding at the Pentagon.
“We’re under attack,” I muttered aloud. With a sick feeling in my stomach, I sat at the desk, fired up the laptop and sent e-mail to my wife. I couldn’t think clearly enough to know what time it was in Chicago at that moment, nor could I know if she was watching the events unfold on TV. All I know is that I didn’t want her to be in her downtown Chicago office tower where she worked at that time. I remember writing something to the effect of, “I may be overreacting, but I don’t think you should be downtown today. I know the Sears tower is a couple miles away from you, but if it’s a target it’s too close. Please go home where you’ll be safest.” (By noon, Chicago time, the downtown area was all but deserted, on the strong recommendation of Mayor Daley.) It was another full hour or so before I heard the word, “attack,” used by any reporter, interviewee or hired expert at CBS.
My co-worker and frequent travel partner was in the room across the hall from mine. I called him on the phone and asked, “Are you watching TV or listening to the radio right now?”
“No.”
“Turn on the TV and find any news program.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“If I told you,” I said, “you wouldn’t believe me.”
Half an hour later he knocked on my door. When I opened it, the look on his face told me that he had done what I told him to do. We headed down to the hotel restaurant for a breakfast I certainly didn’t feel I could eat. We rode the elevator down to the first floor and walked to the restaurant, a trip of about four minutes. Where the hostess normally guided us past the bar and into the dining room, on this morning she took us straight into the bar where there was a television set in every corner, each tuned to a different network. I walked in to the bar and saw the same expression on every face. I looked at the nearest TV and saw nothing but clouds of smoke.
“Now what happened?” I asked to no one in particular.
Someone said, “One of the towers collapsed.”
I don’t remember what I said, or if I said anything. All I remember is that my knees buckled and I dropped to the floor. I kneeled in the middle of that bar for about a minute with my hands covering my mouth. As no one else in the country could at that moment, neither could I believe my eyes. And it seems in that moment I desensitized. Yes it was all horrible, and I was sad and angry at the same time, but I knew in that moment there was nothing I could do but watch as history unfurled in a dazzling electronic display before my eyes. When the second tower fell I simply said to my co-worker, “There goes the other one.” Inside I was screaming, but no emotion showed from me.
We walked the half-mile from the Little America hotel to the Salt Palace convention Center. Our stage had been up for a couple of days already with one general session already under our belt. When we walked backstage there were heated discussions about canceling the rest of the convention. We set ourselves up as an information center, projecting onto the huge 9x12 screens the convention center’s CNN cable feed. The reactions varied from people crying as they watched, to people making angry, anti-Muslim comments or threats, because by that time the general consensus among the expert analysts was that this was an al-Qaida operation.
Also by that time, the FAA had ordered closed all airports nationwide, so our client decided that, since everybody was essentially stuck in Salt Lake City, they might as well put the convention on, if not as planned, then slightly altered so as not to focus so much on fun, but rather patriotism.
In the vast hallways of the convention center there were TVs set up every fifty yards or so, and every one of them had a crowd of people in front of it. It was mesmerizing: even while looking at the images of the rubble and carnage of the fallen towers, no one could get his head around the reality that they were gone. They were really gone. I stood toward the end of the convention center farthest from our session hall, staring, just like everyone else, at a TV monitor. There was a woman beside me. I don’t know if she was with our client or not. Then, between us from behind stepped up a short Asian or Filipina woman who, judging by her uniform, must have been a convention center employee. And she must have been working alone deep in the bowels of the convention center because she stared at the TV with us for a few moments, and then asked the two of us, “What happened?”
I looked at the other woman beside me as she looked at me. If the look on my face showed only half as much shock as hers did, then I would be surprised. The first thing on my mind to say was, “Where the hell have you been all morning?” But I didn’t say that. I just told her that there had been terrorist attacks in Washington and New York City, where planes had been hijacked and crashed into the buildings.
The poor woman’s eyes nearly fell out of her head and her hands came up to her mouth. “Oh my god!” she gasped. “My husband works there!” And then she turned and ran away through the crowds of people. To this day I have no idea which “there” her husband worked in. The other woman and I looked at each other in horror, for we had just casually tossed out the facts, but we had brought this woman’s world crashing down around her. Of course, we had no way of knowing, but I still have that awful feeling of responsibility for, at the very least, frightening her nearly to death.
A couple of hours later my wife called me on my cell phone. I had not heard of anything bad happening in Chicago, so I was confident that she was okay. Nevertheless, when I heard her voice and knew she was safe, I couldn’t contain my emotions. I ran outside with the phone to my ear, both to get good reception and so that as few people as possible would see me blubbering on the phone! But blubber I did, and I don’t know why. I can only guess that it was being freed to release my emotions to someone close to me, as well as the relief that she was indeed home and safe. It took me a while to compose myself.
The convention continued, but it was a very somber, subdued event. But the number one concern on our minds, after wondering how many people might have died in the attacks, was how we were going to get home. There was no sign that the FAA would be opening the airports soon. Local news reports and people who were trying to get home were saying that all of the rental cars were gone from the city. However, the owner of our company saw an angle. All rental cars were gone, yet all airports were closed. All major airports have car rental offices on or very near their properties, and he knew for a fact that the Salt Lake City airport had them ON the property. He had one of the crew drive him to the airport where he was stopped by security. He told them that he had flown out of Salt Lake City a few days earlier and had just made it back to town, and now he needed to get his car out of the parking garage. The guard let him pass. He promptly went to his favorite rental agency and rented the two biggest vehicles they had available: a Ford Excursion and a Ford Expedition.
The next morning fifteen of us in two large vehicles set out from Salt Lake City for Chicago. For the most part the two days on the road were somber ones, listening to the radio reports from the World Trade Center and by the many “experts” who had a point to make. There were a few laughs, a few jokes to help lighten the mood, but it was one of those times when, though it felt good to laugh, it was a laugh laced with guilt, and with dreadful wonder about what the future must now hold for our nation.
And now, a hair past four full years since that awful day, I’ve returned. She’s a beautiful city, best bedecked in sunshine or a blanket of snow, or both. But there are certain corners of the convention center, certain views down a street or of a unique architectural structure that trigger memories of that sad, sad day. It is my hope that this stay in Salt Lake City will erase the bad memories I have of her that are not even her fault.
dassall
I had just gotten out of the shower in my room at the Little America Hotel. I had used the hotel’s alarm clock to wake up, and I left the radio on while I went about my morning preparations. As I toweled off, I heard one of the on-air personalities interrupt the others by saying something to the effect of, “I know this sounds crazy, but I just read on the news wire that one of the towers of the World Trade Center is on fire.” The day was September 11, 2001. The reactions to the comment were of incredulity. “Yeah. Apparently a plane crashed into one of the buildings.”
I immediately turned on the television, for some reason thinking that a hapless, wayward single-engine Cessna’s pilot had experienced the worst day of his life and had made a fatal mistake in the sky above Manhattan. I vowed to flip through the channels until I came to the first images of the scene. I wound up on the local CBS affiliate, slaved over to the network, and the image I saw was of both towers with thick, black smoke pouring out of them. By about two minutes I had missed the live shot of the second plane coming in. Of course, just as everybody else in the world, save for a sinister few, I had no idea what was going on. I saw a huge, gaping hole roughly the size and shape of a large airplane in the tower nearer the camera, and I thought to myself, “That was no Cessna…". And then they replayed what had happened only moments earlier: the second plane. I said aloud to the otherwise empty room, “That was no accident!” In the back of my head I had this faint hope that some navigational system had gone horribly haywire, but my logic, flawed as it may be at times, said that was impossible.
Within minutes I heard the unconfirmed report of four airliners – two from United Air Lines and two from American Air Lines – that were unaccounted for. And the even shakier rumor that there had been some hijackings. And then there was a report of a “bomb” exploding at the Pentagon.
“We’re under attack,” I muttered aloud. With a sick feeling in my stomach, I sat at the desk, fired up the laptop and sent e-mail to my wife. I couldn’t think clearly enough to know what time it was in Chicago at that moment, nor could I know if she was watching the events unfold on TV. All I know is that I didn’t want her to be in her downtown Chicago office tower where she worked at that time. I remember writing something to the effect of, “I may be overreacting, but I don’t think you should be downtown today. I know the Sears tower is a couple miles away from you, but if it’s a target it’s too close. Please go home where you’ll be safest.” (By noon, Chicago time, the downtown area was all but deserted, on the strong recommendation of Mayor Daley.) It was another full hour or so before I heard the word, “attack,” used by any reporter, interviewee or hired expert at CBS.
My co-worker and frequent travel partner was in the room across the hall from mine. I called him on the phone and asked, “Are you watching TV or listening to the radio right now?”
“No.”
“Turn on the TV and find any news program.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
“If I told you,” I said, “you wouldn’t believe me.”
Half an hour later he knocked on my door. When I opened it, the look on his face told me that he had done what I told him to do. We headed down to the hotel restaurant for a breakfast I certainly didn’t feel I could eat. We rode the elevator down to the first floor and walked to the restaurant, a trip of about four minutes. Where the hostess normally guided us past the bar and into the dining room, on this morning she took us straight into the bar where there was a television set in every corner, each tuned to a different network. I walked in to the bar and saw the same expression on every face. I looked at the nearest TV and saw nothing but clouds of smoke.
“Now what happened?” I asked to no one in particular.
Someone said, “One of the towers collapsed.”
I don’t remember what I said, or if I said anything. All I remember is that my knees buckled and I dropped to the floor. I kneeled in the middle of that bar for about a minute with my hands covering my mouth. As no one else in the country could at that moment, neither could I believe my eyes. And it seems in that moment I desensitized. Yes it was all horrible, and I was sad and angry at the same time, but I knew in that moment there was nothing I could do but watch as history unfurled in a dazzling electronic display before my eyes. When the second tower fell I simply said to my co-worker, “There goes the other one.” Inside I was screaming, but no emotion showed from me.
We walked the half-mile from the Little America hotel to the Salt Palace convention Center. Our stage had been up for a couple of days already with one general session already under our belt. When we walked backstage there were heated discussions about canceling the rest of the convention. We set ourselves up as an information center, projecting onto the huge 9x12 screens the convention center’s CNN cable feed. The reactions varied from people crying as they watched, to people making angry, anti-Muslim comments or threats, because by that time the general consensus among the expert analysts was that this was an al-Qaida operation.
Also by that time, the FAA had ordered closed all airports nationwide, so our client decided that, since everybody was essentially stuck in Salt Lake City, they might as well put the convention on, if not as planned, then slightly altered so as not to focus so much on fun, but rather patriotism.
In the vast hallways of the convention center there were TVs set up every fifty yards or so, and every one of them had a crowd of people in front of it. It was mesmerizing: even while looking at the images of the rubble and carnage of the fallen towers, no one could get his head around the reality that they were gone. They were really gone. I stood toward the end of the convention center farthest from our session hall, staring, just like everyone else, at a TV monitor. There was a woman beside me. I don’t know if she was with our client or not. Then, between us from behind stepped up a short Asian or Filipina woman who, judging by her uniform, must have been a convention center employee. And she must have been working alone deep in the bowels of the convention center because she stared at the TV with us for a few moments, and then asked the two of us, “What happened?”
I looked at the other woman beside me as she looked at me. If the look on my face showed only half as much shock as hers did, then I would be surprised. The first thing on my mind to say was, “Where the hell have you been all morning?” But I didn’t say that. I just told her that there had been terrorist attacks in Washington and New York City, where planes had been hijacked and crashed into the buildings.
The poor woman’s eyes nearly fell out of her head and her hands came up to her mouth. “Oh my god!” she gasped. “My husband works there!” And then she turned and ran away through the crowds of people. To this day I have no idea which “there” her husband worked in. The other woman and I looked at each other in horror, for we had just casually tossed out the facts, but we had brought this woman’s world crashing down around her. Of course, we had no way of knowing, but I still have that awful feeling of responsibility for, at the very least, frightening her nearly to death.
A couple of hours later my wife called me on my cell phone. I had not heard of anything bad happening in Chicago, so I was confident that she was okay. Nevertheless, when I heard her voice and knew she was safe, I couldn’t contain my emotions. I ran outside with the phone to my ear, both to get good reception and so that as few people as possible would see me blubbering on the phone! But blubber I did, and I don’t know why. I can only guess that it was being freed to release my emotions to someone close to me, as well as the relief that she was indeed home and safe. It took me a while to compose myself.
The convention continued, but it was a very somber, subdued event. But the number one concern on our minds, after wondering how many people might have died in the attacks, was how we were going to get home. There was no sign that the FAA would be opening the airports soon. Local news reports and people who were trying to get home were saying that all of the rental cars were gone from the city. However, the owner of our company saw an angle. All rental cars were gone, yet all airports were closed. All major airports have car rental offices on or very near their properties, and he knew for a fact that the Salt Lake City airport had them ON the property. He had one of the crew drive him to the airport where he was stopped by security. He told them that he had flown out of Salt Lake City a few days earlier and had just made it back to town, and now he needed to get his car out of the parking garage. The guard let him pass. He promptly went to his favorite rental agency and rented the two biggest vehicles they had available: a Ford Excursion and a Ford Expedition.
The next morning fifteen of us in two large vehicles set out from Salt Lake City for Chicago. For the most part the two days on the road were somber ones, listening to the radio reports from the World Trade Center and by the many “experts” who had a point to make. There were a few laughs, a few jokes to help lighten the mood, but it was one of those times when, though it felt good to laugh, it was a laugh laced with guilt, and with dreadful wonder about what the future must now hold for our nation.
And now, a hair past four full years since that awful day, I’ve returned. She’s a beautiful city, best bedecked in sunshine or a blanket of snow, or both. But there are certain corners of the convention center, certain views down a street or of a unique architectural structure that trigger memories of that sad, sad day. It is my hope that this stay in Salt Lake City will erase the bad memories I have of her that are not even her fault.
dassall
Tubes
This thought occurred to me today: we, all of us living things, are really just tubes. We take food into the tube, the tube does stuff to the food to keep us living, and then we push out what’s left of the food that we don’t want or need, and to make room for more food in our tubes. Seeing as how food is being processed by our tube, both ends of the tube, if not cleaned or cared for properly, can be pretty smelly at times.
Some of us are systems designed simply for the purpose of finding more stuff for our tube and, in some cases, to be put through other tubes(!). In other words, some of us are beings that simply provide for the tube. Others of us are systems for which the tube provides. The tube sustains us as we do other things. We do not exist solely for the tube, as evidenced by the occasion that we get so consumed by other things that we “forget” to feed the tube.
Anyway, that was my weird thought today.
Another thought I had, this one long, long ago but that has stuck with me, is that most things on our planet – man-made or naturally occurring – are, simply put, just containers of other things. If you think in that mode, you’ll see that it covers just about everything.
Almost anything: a garage contains a car contains a person contains organs contain blood (et.al.) contains cells. A house contains all your stuff which contains everything else. A house: container of containers.
It works even in the abstract: a photograph may not contain an image, as it is photo-sensitive chemicals on paper (or, in the digital sense, magnetically excited oxides arranged accordingly, and then stimulated electrons on a screen and/or ink on paper), but the image itself “contains” memories for us or for posterity. A skull contains a brain contains thoughts and memories.
And with that I must cease this post. I’ve just gotten too deep for myself.
dassall
Some of us are systems designed simply for the purpose of finding more stuff for our tube and, in some cases, to be put through other tubes(!). In other words, some of us are beings that simply provide for the tube. Others of us are systems for which the tube provides. The tube sustains us as we do other things. We do not exist solely for the tube, as evidenced by the occasion that we get so consumed by other things that we “forget” to feed the tube.
Anyway, that was my weird thought today.
Another thought I had, this one long, long ago but that has stuck with me, is that most things on our planet – man-made or naturally occurring – are, simply put, just containers of other things. If you think in that mode, you’ll see that it covers just about everything.
Almost anything: a garage contains a car contains a person contains organs contain blood (et.al.) contains cells. A house contains all your stuff which contains everything else. A house: container of containers.
It works even in the abstract: a photograph may not contain an image, as it is photo-sensitive chemicals on paper (or, in the digital sense, magnetically excited oxides arranged accordingly, and then stimulated electrons on a screen and/or ink on paper), but the image itself “contains” memories for us or for posterity. A skull contains a brain contains thoughts and memories.
And with that I must cease this post. I’ve just gotten too deep for myself.
dassall
Thursday, September 22, 2005
I Wonder...
Is it just me, or does "Austin, Texas" sound a lot like "ostentatious?"
os·ten·ta·tious adjective marked by or fond of conspicuous or vainglorious and sometimes pretentious display
Nothing against Austin. Just noticed it and... well, you read the question.
os·ten·ta·tious adjective marked by or fond of conspicuous or vainglorious and sometimes pretentious display
Nothing against Austin. Just noticed it and... well, you read the question.
Monday, September 19, 2005
It's My Sidewalk, Too, Dammit!
I really hate you fuckers who think you're the only people on the planet. I take a walk down any city street, or in a mall, or anywhere more than ten people gather for whatever reason, and I see it. It's a sidewalk or walkway, four to thirty feet wide, and you're there: you fuckers who don't notice any other humans besides yourselves. You walk in groups of two or three or four or more, all in a line abreast (that's shoulder-to-shoulder for those of you about whom I write). No matter how wide the thoroughfare, you expand to occupy the entire width. And then there's me. Alone. Carrying stuff. Lots of stuff. A cake in a box. A jug of milk. Clothes for/from The Salvation Army. Grandpa's favorite bowling ball. I face you and you face me as we walk toward each other. To one side of your horde I have the curb and certain death by traffic. To the other I have the unyielding brick façade of the Fourth/Fifth National American Bank. We draw exponentially nearer. Collision is imminent. And does any of you move?
HELL NO. Why? Because I'm not there! At least you don't see me. Therefore I'm not there. And because I'm the polite one, the one with a minute smidgen of manners, I slow. I stop. I step aside while not a one of you reciprocates to allow me to pass.
And sometimes its worse if I'm behind your group. Why? Because the more of you there are in the group, the slower you must walk.
So from now on, I will no longer give 100% of the sidewalk to you. I will no longer be the one expected to get out of the way. If you're stupid enough not to acknowledge my approach and give at least half your body width to match the half of mine I give, then you're stupid enough to get run over, with a little extra shoulder thrown in for good measure, a little reminder in case you forget how stupid you are.
*SIGH*
dassall
HELL NO. Why? Because I'm not there! At least you don't see me. Therefore I'm not there. And because I'm the polite one, the one with a minute smidgen of manners, I slow. I stop. I step aside while not a one of you reciprocates to allow me to pass.
And sometimes its worse if I'm behind your group. Why? Because the more of you there are in the group, the slower you must walk.
So from now on, I will no longer give 100% of the sidewalk to you. I will no longer be the one expected to get out of the way. If you're stupid enough not to acknowledge my approach and give at least half your body width to match the half of mine I give, then you're stupid enough to get run over, with a little extra shoulder thrown in for good measure, a little reminder in case you forget how stupid you are.
*SIGH*
dassall
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Nostalgic Wax
This afternoon I was folding laundry and listening to the ‘70s channel of the Dish Network’s satellite music service. The Carpenters song, “We’ve Only Just Begun” came on and I looked at the screen and noticed the name of the CD from which the song played was titled something like, “Greatest Hits, 1969-1981.” Now, I don’t know if I’m a child of the ‘70s or the ‘80s. I don’t really know exactly what that term means. I was a child during the ‘60s and ‘70s. I became a teenager in the ‘70s, and finished high school and reached legal adulthood in the ‘80s. So what the heck am I?
But back to the topic at hand. I thought back to 1981. I turned seventeen that year. I started my senior year in high school. I was a lanky, gawky, geeky, nerdy kid who thought he was the funniest in his class. I thought today about thinking back 25 years back then. Back then, 25 years ago was 1956. I remember thinking that the ‘50s seemed like such a remote, primitive time compared to all the technology we possessed in the heady days of 1981. I thought about all the things we had at the time that hadn’t even been imagined in 1956. Man hadn’t been to the moon. Hell, man hadn’t even been to space! No one had even THOUGHT of going to the moon. Okay, I guess a lot of people had thought about it, but few had ever thought it could or would be done, and certainly not within the next fifteen years.
Personal stereos. The Walkman. Twenty-five years earlier, the transistor radio was still a marvel. And now we had a personal stereo, and it was capable of playing music of our own choosing, on a cassette tape! In two separate high-fidelity channels!! Who in 1956 would have ever thought they could do that? Color TV? Perhaps it was available, but who had it? Who could afford it? Cable TV? It existed, perhaps, but strictly for people in areas where TV signals were blocked by big geography, like mountains. The personal computer. We were learning BASIC language on what came to be not-so-affectionately referred to as “Trash-80s.” (the Tandy-Radio Shack TRS-80.) And I could not, for the life of me, figure out why I had to know this stuff. As it turned out, I never really learned it! I could list thousands of innovations that were in use in 1981 that hadn’t even been dreamed of in 1956 – that is, if I knew all of them – but I’m babbling again.
My point…finally. Twenty-five years of history is not as remote when you’ve lived it as when you only read about it or see it in movies or TV. When I saw “1981” on my TV screen this afternoon, I did sort of a nanosecond flashback that covered the time-span of 24 years and change. I tried to think of the ‘80s as remote and primitive as the ‘50s, but my brain couldn’t do it. I lived there. It didn’t seem remote and primitive at the time, and it doesn’t seem that way now. CRAP! Most of the time it seems like just a few days ago! I tried to picture the thoughts of a 17-year-old today thinking back to what it must have been like to be alive way back in the early ‘80s when his mom and dad were teenagers and, well, I still couldn’t do it.
But I do get it when I see a movie contemporary of the time, or a photo what shows some “new” technology, or the rare home movie (super8, thankyouverymuch!), or the even rarer home video, that can serve as time capsules. That’s when the new, streamlined items of “convenience” just appear absurdly large and cumbersome today.
Picture your average kid doing the average thing today while doing nothing: playing with his/her Game Boy. I don’t remember the year, but I do remember the game: Mattel Electronic Football, perhaps the great-granddaddy to the Game Boy. It was a handheld game, slightly larger than today’s less sleek Palm-style PDAs. It had maybe six buttons on it, four of which were used to maneuver a solitary little LED blip between various arrays of other little LED blips. If you tried to get your blip to occupy the same diode that a “defender” blip occupied, or the “defenders” caught up to your blip, you were tackled. The sound at the tackle, which I can only guess is an electronic rendition of a referee’s whistle, is forever preserved for posterity near the end of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song,” from their “Breakfast In America” album, which came out in 1979, thus dating the game actually before the ‘80s. This game was outclassed a year or two after its debut by Coleco’s version of electronic football. This game allowed a player to “throw” a pass! My best friend’s younger brother had this game, and it made me envious. And even I was shocked at how quickly the fervor for these games spiked (these toys were forever sold out, especially during the holiday shopping season) and then waned. I begged for this toy for a whole year, got it at Christmas, probably 1980, and by March of ‘81 I never played with it again.
I babbled again. These toys were just simply controlling little red blips on a diode array. Twenty-five years later, on a toy essentially the same size, we have highly detailed, highly sophisticated animations that we can control with buttons and maneuver our characters through incredibly intricate mazes and imaginary worlds, and entertain ourselves for hours and hours.
But I cannot allow myself to think of Mattel Electronic Football, or the AM/FM stereo/cassette player Walkman, or the 64Kb computer as 25+ year-old relics, for to admit that they are relics, so must I admit am I.
And I just can’t do that.
dassall
But back to the topic at hand. I thought back to 1981. I turned seventeen that year. I started my senior year in high school. I was a lanky, gawky, geeky, nerdy kid who thought he was the funniest in his class. I thought today about thinking back 25 years back then. Back then, 25 years ago was 1956. I remember thinking that the ‘50s seemed like such a remote, primitive time compared to all the technology we possessed in the heady days of 1981. I thought about all the things we had at the time that hadn’t even been imagined in 1956. Man hadn’t been to the moon. Hell, man hadn’t even been to space! No one had even THOUGHT of going to the moon. Okay, I guess a lot of people had thought about it, but few had ever thought it could or would be done, and certainly not within the next fifteen years.
Personal stereos. The Walkman. Twenty-five years earlier, the transistor radio was still a marvel. And now we had a personal stereo, and it was capable of playing music of our own choosing, on a cassette tape! In two separate high-fidelity channels!! Who in 1956 would have ever thought they could do that? Color TV? Perhaps it was available, but who had it? Who could afford it? Cable TV? It existed, perhaps, but strictly for people in areas where TV signals were blocked by big geography, like mountains. The personal computer. We were learning BASIC language on what came to be not-so-affectionately referred to as “Trash-80s.” (the Tandy-Radio Shack TRS-80.) And I could not, for the life of me, figure out why I had to know this stuff. As it turned out, I never really learned it! I could list thousands of innovations that were in use in 1981 that hadn’t even been dreamed of in 1956 – that is, if I knew all of them – but I’m babbling again.
My point…finally. Twenty-five years of history is not as remote when you’ve lived it as when you only read about it or see it in movies or TV. When I saw “1981” on my TV screen this afternoon, I did sort of a nanosecond flashback that covered the time-span of 24 years and change. I tried to think of the ‘80s as remote and primitive as the ‘50s, but my brain couldn’t do it. I lived there. It didn’t seem remote and primitive at the time, and it doesn’t seem that way now. CRAP! Most of the time it seems like just a few days ago! I tried to picture the thoughts of a 17-year-old today thinking back to what it must have been like to be alive way back in the early ‘80s when his mom and dad were teenagers and, well, I still couldn’t do it.
But I do get it when I see a movie contemporary of the time, or a photo what shows some “new” technology, or the rare home movie (super8, thankyouverymuch!), or the even rarer home video, that can serve as time capsules. That’s when the new, streamlined items of “convenience” just appear absurdly large and cumbersome today.
Picture your average kid doing the average thing today while doing nothing: playing with his/her Game Boy. I don’t remember the year, but I do remember the game: Mattel Electronic Football, perhaps the great-granddaddy to the Game Boy. It was a handheld game, slightly larger than today’s less sleek Palm-style PDAs. It had maybe six buttons on it, four of which were used to maneuver a solitary little LED blip between various arrays of other little LED blips. If you tried to get your blip to occupy the same diode that a “defender” blip occupied, or the “defenders” caught up to your blip, you were tackled. The sound at the tackle, which I can only guess is an electronic rendition of a referee’s whistle, is forever preserved for posterity near the end of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song,” from their “Breakfast In America” album, which came out in 1979, thus dating the game actually before the ‘80s. This game was outclassed a year or two after its debut by Coleco’s version of electronic football. This game allowed a player to “throw” a pass! My best friend’s younger brother had this game, and it made me envious. And even I was shocked at how quickly the fervor for these games spiked (these toys were forever sold out, especially during the holiday shopping season) and then waned. I begged for this toy for a whole year, got it at Christmas, probably 1980, and by March of ‘81 I never played with it again.
I babbled again. These toys were just simply controlling little red blips on a diode array. Twenty-five years later, on a toy essentially the same size, we have highly detailed, highly sophisticated animations that we can control with buttons and maneuver our characters through incredibly intricate mazes and imaginary worlds, and entertain ourselves for hours and hours.
But I cannot allow myself to think of Mattel Electronic Football, or the AM/FM stereo/cassette player Walkman, or the 64Kb computer as 25+ year-old relics, for to admit that they are relics, so must I admit am I.
And I just can’t do that.
dassall
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Reunion
"Rudy" was just a dumb kid back then. Fresh out of basic and tech school(s). A child of money. His first duty station was at Wüschheim Air Station in what was at the time West Germany. He was my roommate. We were three to a room in the dorms. My other roommate -- let's call him "Floyd" -- and I had gone through the most recent bout of training enroute to this duty assignment in the same class, which was where we had formed our friendship. We were two of a kind -- a couple of goofballs. We were experienced, veteran airmen for we had each been in the Air Force for a full two years. Yes we were dumb kids back then, too, but what dumb kid KNOWS he's a dumb kid? We were older than "Rudy," and that gave us the occasion to think we were smarter than he.
Almost from the start "Rudy" got on our nerves. He was gifted in many ways. He was endowed with great looks that he didn't have to cultivate or fabricate -- with the restrictive military regulations regarding appearance, there was only so much a young man could do with his hair, yet "Rudy" could walk into a room at a club, and within seconds be in conversation with two or three women.
And he was endowed with a natural charm: what his looks attracted, his charisma won over.
And he was just plain ENDOWED! (He was my roommate. There are certain things you never want to see, but you see them anyway!)
He was talented. He could do with his hands and a pencil or pen or paintbrush things we couldn't even picture in our minds. The "back office" took advantage of those talents and put him to work not out in the elements like the rest of us hardened, experienced airmen, but in the squadron office, painting murals and unit logos.
This kid seemed to have everything I did not. Needless to say, I was envious.
Not long after he had arrived in our room, he had a favor to ask of me since I had a car. I obliged. Without going into detail, I will say it involved going out "on the economy," or into the town just off base. The directions he had been given were erroneous, and finding the store meant asking a local. I had a limited understanding and vocabulary of German, but I managed -- with much difficulty -- to speak to and understand an old villager. "Rudy" seemed in awe of me after that incident.
"Floyd" and I worked the night shift, sleeping through the day. "Rudy" would come in after his painting and artwork shift ended at 5:00pm, turn on the stereo, converse with friends at the door, and generally disrupt our sleep. We asked him to stop it, but he just didn't seem to get it. After several failed efforts to get him to consider our needs, to consider the importance of a full night's (day's!) sleep, "Floyd" and I lobbied the dorm chief to have "Rudy" relocated. The request was honored. "Rudy" was out.
"Floyd" and I, from that day forward, harbored a resentment toward "Rudy." I know that my resentment was more for "Rudy's" gifts than for his inconsiderate attitude. Nonetheless, I participated in daily trash talk about and to "Rudy." Yet, as mean as I felt I was toward the kid, he always seemed to like me. If he saw me in the club on base, he always came over to my table, two drinks in hand because one was for me, and he would join me, if only for a few minutes. To the two or three women who would always stop by to talk to him, he would introduce me as "the coolest guy" he knew. It never rubbed off. When he left the table, the girls left with him. As always, my resentment of him magnified with every reminder of what he had that I did not.
My time in the Air Force came to an end when my tour at Wüschheim was finished. I went home, moved on with my life, losing track of all of my friends but one, a guy I had known since tech school, almost at the very start of my service. About three years after I got out, I received a phone call out of the blue from "Rudy." It goes without saying that I was actually dismayed that he had found me. Why was this guy calling me? Didn't I abuse him enough? We chatted for a while, and he told me of the trouble he had gotten into in the Air Force and out, all of it to do with drinking. The thought in my head was "Stupid 'Rudy.'" We finished our chat, and I hung up the phone and all but forgot about him.
Nearly twenty years after getting out I've found myself thinking about "Rudy" a lot. It started off with an e-mail to "Floyd," who's still in the Air Force and facing retirement soon. We shared a few memories, and "Rudy's" name came up. We trashed him, as always, but afterward I realized that while I trashed him in the present, the person I saw in my memory was the nineteen-year-old kid who had come stumbling into my relatively comfortable world twenty years ago. That bothered me about me. So I tried to imagine what he could possibly be doing today, but the only image I could conjure was the scrawny, wiry kid with the stupid smile on his face and a drink in his hand. I projected that forward twenty years, and the only difference was that he had a few wrinkles on his face.
Then I found myself on a plane, for a business trip, touching down in "Rudy's" home town. The wonder stirred up in me again, and I knew I just had to try to look him up, see if he remembered me, and see if he would care to get together for old time's sake. Much to my surprise, he was there. It took a simple search online, and one phone call. Two days later we sat facing each other across a table, chewing the fat enthusiastically, poring over old photos he had brought along. And I saw that he was a lot like me. He still has his hair (I don't), but he's stacked on the pounds in the past few years, just like me, a testament to the good life he lives with his wife and daughter. The former ladies' man has been married for twelve years. He owns his own business(es). What shocked me to learn was that he admittedly had probably not been sober for more than eight hours straight for practically his entire four-year stint in the Air Force. The party boy straightened out and got his degree, and he now does for a living the thing he loves more than anything else to do: art. Seated across the table from me was the "Rudy" I wished he had been back then. I can't help but think that his undiscovered drinking problem while in the Air Force was the sole reason why he was so unbearable back then, as well as why he was so oblivious to the indifference and thinly veiled hostility we sent his way.
He had been a talented, intelligent, "dumb" kid whom I believed had everything, yet didn't know how to behave in the world around him, and it took a couple of really hard knocks to get him to learn. But it took twenty years and an impromptu reunion for me to learn that, for everything he had that I didn't, "Rudy" envied qualities and talents I possessed of which I was never aware, or which I would never acknowledge.
What's the lesson here? I can't seem to put it into words. It's all about self-worth and envy and using what you have to make yourself more than what you already are rather than to make others seem less than what they are. But I can't seem to put it into words.
To "Rudy," my new old friend.
dassall
Almost from the start "Rudy" got on our nerves. He was gifted in many ways. He was endowed with great looks that he didn't have to cultivate or fabricate -- with the restrictive military regulations regarding appearance, there was only so much a young man could do with his hair, yet "Rudy" could walk into a room at a club, and within seconds be in conversation with two or three women.
And he was endowed with a natural charm: what his looks attracted, his charisma won over.
And he was just plain ENDOWED! (He was my roommate. There are certain things you never want to see, but you see them anyway!)
He was talented. He could do with his hands and a pencil or pen or paintbrush things we couldn't even picture in our minds. The "back office" took advantage of those talents and put him to work not out in the elements like the rest of us hardened, experienced airmen, but in the squadron office, painting murals and unit logos.
This kid seemed to have everything I did not. Needless to say, I was envious.
Not long after he had arrived in our room, he had a favor to ask of me since I had a car. I obliged. Without going into detail, I will say it involved going out "on the economy," or into the town just off base. The directions he had been given were erroneous, and finding the store meant asking a local. I had a limited understanding and vocabulary of German, but I managed -- with much difficulty -- to speak to and understand an old villager. "Rudy" seemed in awe of me after that incident.
"Floyd" and I worked the night shift, sleeping through the day. "Rudy" would come in after his painting and artwork shift ended at 5:00pm, turn on the stereo, converse with friends at the door, and generally disrupt our sleep. We asked him to stop it, but he just didn't seem to get it. After several failed efforts to get him to consider our needs, to consider the importance of a full night's (day's!) sleep, "Floyd" and I lobbied the dorm chief to have "Rudy" relocated. The request was honored. "Rudy" was out.
"Floyd" and I, from that day forward, harbored a resentment toward "Rudy." I know that my resentment was more for "Rudy's" gifts than for his inconsiderate attitude. Nonetheless, I participated in daily trash talk about and to "Rudy." Yet, as mean as I felt I was toward the kid, he always seemed to like me. If he saw me in the club on base, he always came over to my table, two drinks in hand because one was for me, and he would join me, if only for a few minutes. To the two or three women who would always stop by to talk to him, he would introduce me as "the coolest guy" he knew. It never rubbed off. When he left the table, the girls left with him. As always, my resentment of him magnified with every reminder of what he had that I did not.
My time in the Air Force came to an end when my tour at Wüschheim was finished. I went home, moved on with my life, losing track of all of my friends but one, a guy I had known since tech school, almost at the very start of my service. About three years after I got out, I received a phone call out of the blue from "Rudy." It goes without saying that I was actually dismayed that he had found me. Why was this guy calling me? Didn't I abuse him enough? We chatted for a while, and he told me of the trouble he had gotten into in the Air Force and out, all of it to do with drinking. The thought in my head was "Stupid 'Rudy.'" We finished our chat, and I hung up the phone and all but forgot about him.
Nearly twenty years after getting out I've found myself thinking about "Rudy" a lot. It started off with an e-mail to "Floyd," who's still in the Air Force and facing retirement soon. We shared a few memories, and "Rudy's" name came up. We trashed him, as always, but afterward I realized that while I trashed him in the present, the person I saw in my memory was the nineteen-year-old kid who had come stumbling into my relatively comfortable world twenty years ago. That bothered me about me. So I tried to imagine what he could possibly be doing today, but the only image I could conjure was the scrawny, wiry kid with the stupid smile on his face and a drink in his hand. I projected that forward twenty years, and the only difference was that he had a few wrinkles on his face.
Then I found myself on a plane, for a business trip, touching down in "Rudy's" home town. The wonder stirred up in me again, and I knew I just had to try to look him up, see if he remembered me, and see if he would care to get together for old time's sake. Much to my surprise, he was there. It took a simple search online, and one phone call. Two days later we sat facing each other across a table, chewing the fat enthusiastically, poring over old photos he had brought along. And I saw that he was a lot like me. He still has his hair (I don't), but he's stacked on the pounds in the past few years, just like me, a testament to the good life he lives with his wife and daughter. The former ladies' man has been married for twelve years. He owns his own business(es). What shocked me to learn was that he admittedly had probably not been sober for more than eight hours straight for practically his entire four-year stint in the Air Force. The party boy straightened out and got his degree, and he now does for a living the thing he loves more than anything else to do: art. Seated across the table from me was the "Rudy" I wished he had been back then. I can't help but think that his undiscovered drinking problem while in the Air Force was the sole reason why he was so unbearable back then, as well as why he was so oblivious to the indifference and thinly veiled hostility we sent his way.
He had been a talented, intelligent, "dumb" kid whom I believed had everything, yet didn't know how to behave in the world around him, and it took a couple of really hard knocks to get him to learn. But it took twenty years and an impromptu reunion for me to learn that, for everything he had that I didn't, "Rudy" envied qualities and talents I possessed of which I was never aware, or which I would never acknowledge.
What's the lesson here? I can't seem to put it into words. It's all about self-worth and envy and using what you have to make yourself more than what you already are rather than to make others seem less than what they are. But I can't seem to put it into words.
To "Rudy," my new old friend.
dassall
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Okay
It's great to feel great. Sometimes it's good to feel bad, even though we may not like it. Emotionally bad. It can give us the oomph to improve ourselves or our surroundings. Physically bad, not so good.
But what about that vast area in between? We don't feel great, but we don't feel like crawling under a rock to die. We don't even feel good. Or melancholy.
Today I feel ...okay. I've done nothing great. I haven't helped anybody, nor been helped by anybody. I didn't give scads of cash to a needy organization, didn't give blood. I didn't offend anyone intentionally, nor am I aware of having done so unintentionally. I made some people laugh. Some made me laugh. But aside from laughter being special in its own right, it was nothing special. I'm not especially happy, but neither am I especially unhappy.
"Hi. How ya doing?"
"I'm okay."
One can read so much into "okay," as though it were a mask for underlying distress. And we do use it that way:
"How ya doin'?"
"(Well, my mother-in-law moved in yesterday and she's a terrible cook, yet she insists that she cook for us, and her favorite ingredient is beets; and my daughter's dating a medical school student, but my daughter's only fifteen; and my wife just discovered a large lump in her breast, but) I'm okay."
But sometimes we're just okay. Not bad. Not great. Not angry. Not joyous. Not hungry. Not stuffed. Not sleepy. Not terribly alert....
So the next time someone says he's "okay," he probably is just that. Just realize that you just failed to make his day great. Face that challenge and perhaps you will have lifted your day up from "okay" to ...something better than "okay."
Okay?
(I had this idea for a GREAT post, but then I ran out of steam, and it turned out merely okay. Sorry.)
dassall
But what about that vast area in between? We don't feel great, but we don't feel like crawling under a rock to die. We don't even feel good. Or melancholy.
Today I feel ...okay. I've done nothing great. I haven't helped anybody, nor been helped by anybody. I didn't give scads of cash to a needy organization, didn't give blood. I didn't offend anyone intentionally, nor am I aware of having done so unintentionally. I made some people laugh. Some made me laugh. But aside from laughter being special in its own right, it was nothing special. I'm not especially happy, but neither am I especially unhappy.
"Hi. How ya doing?"
"I'm okay."
One can read so much into "okay," as though it were a mask for underlying distress. And we do use it that way:
"How ya doin'?"
"(Well, my mother-in-law moved in yesterday and she's a terrible cook, yet she insists that she cook for us, and her favorite ingredient is beets; and my daughter's dating a medical school student, but my daughter's only fifteen; and my wife just discovered a large lump in her breast, but) I'm okay."
But sometimes we're just okay. Not bad. Not great. Not angry. Not joyous. Not hungry. Not stuffed. Not sleepy. Not terribly alert....
So the next time someone says he's "okay," he probably is just that. Just realize that you just failed to make his day great. Face that challenge and perhaps you will have lifted your day up from "okay" to ...something better than "okay."
Okay?
(I had this idea for a GREAT post, but then I ran out of steam, and it turned out merely okay. Sorry.)
dassall
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Good-bye, Gilligan
Yesterday's (Tuesday September 7, 2005) news of Bob Denver's death hit me kind of hard. But what hit me even harder was hearing that he was age 70! Qualified as a "Boomer," born in the last official year of the post-World War II baby boom, I identified on a couple levels with the show for which Bob Denver was forever instantly identified, and the role which conferred upon him the status of Pop Culture Icon.
First - though I learned this long after the show had ceased production - the show and I were the same age. When I learned of its first year of production, I watched with a renewed interest for insight into the lingo, fashions, and social behaviors of the mid-1960s.
Second, I grew up on the show. Very short-lived, off the air before I was even aware that the glowing noise-box in the living room had a purpose (or does it?), it thrived in later years in synidication, as it does in places still today. When I was a small boy I used to get angry that they could be so close to rescue, but it would somehow get screwed up, and whether justified or not, Gilligan was always held to blame. And when it wasn't justified, I got even angrier. Of course, I never understood or cared that their rescue would have meant the end of the show.
When I was a little older I always wanted Gilligan to succumb to Ginger's temptation. Never mind that her intentions were never in anyone's best interest but her own! And when I was a teenager my testosterone-flooded brain was certain that, though the cameras couldn't show it, the girls and the boys were getting it on regularly! That is, except for Thurston and Lovie, whom, even in my worst nightmares, I couldn't picture doing THAT!
And yet older, knowing most, if not all, of the gags and jokes, I appreciated the show for its Hollywood humorcraft: bump, set, PUNCHLINE! Never mind that the laughter came from a can. Nevermind that, no matter how brilliant the professor's next idea, they would never get off that island. Nevermind that, no matter how alluring and willing Ginger might seem to be, Gilligan still had to wander off into the jungle and violate a papaya.
As I reached adulthood I realized I prefer Mary Ann. I actually even met her - Dawn Wells, that is - at a TV station where I worked in 1996. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon! You figure it out.
So, though Bob Denver passed with little notice in the shadows of Katrina, and of Justice Rehnquist, my heart broke a little. He was forever young in his Technicolor red shirt, pale blue jeans and sailor's hat, so it was a shock to hear his age, just as much as it was a shock to hear he was gone. He was part of my psyche. I've long since reckoned with myself that it was indeed Gilligan with whom I identified on the show. I wanted those responsible to receive his blame. When it was his fault, I felt bad for him. I wanted him to get Ginger because I wanted Ginger! Then I wanted Mary Ann! And then I wanted them BOTH! He is part of my sense of humor, that slightly slapstick, slightly dopey deadpan I lay on my friends, family and co-workers. Indeed, he is part of my life.
Willie Gilligan, I'm sad to see you go.
dassall
First - though I learned this long after the show had ceased production - the show and I were the same age. When I learned of its first year of production, I watched with a renewed interest for insight into the lingo, fashions, and social behaviors of the mid-1960s.
Second, I grew up on the show. Very short-lived, off the air before I was even aware that the glowing noise-box in the living room had a purpose (or does it?), it thrived in later years in synidication, as it does in places still today. When I was a small boy I used to get angry that they could be so close to rescue, but it would somehow get screwed up, and whether justified or not, Gilligan was always held to blame. And when it wasn't justified, I got even angrier. Of course, I never understood or cared that their rescue would have meant the end of the show.
When I was a little older I always wanted Gilligan to succumb to Ginger's temptation. Never mind that her intentions were never in anyone's best interest but her own! And when I was a teenager my testosterone-flooded brain was certain that, though the cameras couldn't show it, the girls and the boys were getting it on regularly! That is, except for Thurston and Lovie, whom, even in my worst nightmares, I couldn't picture doing THAT!
And yet older, knowing most, if not all, of the gags and jokes, I appreciated the show for its Hollywood humorcraft: bump, set, PUNCHLINE! Never mind that the laughter came from a can. Nevermind that, no matter how brilliant the professor's next idea, they would never get off that island. Nevermind that, no matter how alluring and willing Ginger might seem to be, Gilligan still had to wander off into the jungle and violate a papaya.
As I reached adulthood I realized I prefer Mary Ann. I actually even met her - Dawn Wells, that is - at a TV station where I worked in 1996. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon! You figure it out.
So, though Bob Denver passed with little notice in the shadows of Katrina, and of Justice Rehnquist, my heart broke a little. He was forever young in his Technicolor red shirt, pale blue jeans and sailor's hat, so it was a shock to hear his age, just as much as it was a shock to hear he was gone. He was part of my psyche. I've long since reckoned with myself that it was indeed Gilligan with whom I identified on the show. I wanted those responsible to receive his blame. When it was his fault, I felt bad for him. I wanted him to get Ginger because I wanted Ginger! Then I wanted Mary Ann! And then I wanted them BOTH! He is part of my sense of humor, that slightly slapstick, slightly dopey deadpan I lay on my friends, family and co-workers. Indeed, he is part of my life.
Willie Gilligan, I'm sad to see you go.
dassall
Katrina's Refugees
I've heard several people -- politicians, city workers, some plain folk on the streets -- complain about the use of the word "refugee" in regard to the citizens of New Orleans displaced by the tragedies in their city. With all the important issues regarding the care of the city's residents, the least important is what to call those people forced to flee -- whether by fear, floodwaters, or the mayor's evacuation order. They're refugees, plain and simple.
From Merriam-Webster Online:
ref·u·gee
Pronunciation: "re-fyu-'jE, 're-fyu-"
Function: noun
Etymology: French réfugié, past participle of (se) réfugier to take refuge, from Latin refugium
: one that flees; especially (emphasis theirs): a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution
The term "especially," as far as I'm concerned, is insignificant here. The average New Orleanian (so I made up a word!) who finds him- or herself transplanted to Pocatello, Idaho, might as well be in a foreign country. The important phrase in the definition, in fact THE definition, is "one who flees." These people have fled. They've left their homes and have washed ashore, as it were, in lands foreign to them (Minneapolis?! That's about as opposite from New Orleans as you can get!)
They're refugees, plain and simple. Everybody else just deal with it.
dassall
From Merriam-Webster Online:
ref·u·gee
Pronunciation: "re-fyu-'jE, 're-fyu-"
Function: noun
Etymology: French réfugié, past participle of (se) réfugier to take refuge, from Latin refugium
: one that flees; especially (emphasis theirs): a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution
The term "especially," as far as I'm concerned, is insignificant here. The average New Orleanian (so I made up a word!) who finds him- or herself transplanted to Pocatello, Idaho, might as well be in a foreign country. The important phrase in the definition, in fact THE definition, is "one who flees." These people have fled. They've left their homes and have washed ashore, as it were, in lands foreign to them (Minneapolis?! That's about as opposite from New Orleans as you can get!)
They're refugees, plain and simple. Everybody else just deal with it.
dassall
Monday, September 05, 2005
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Hurricane Katrina, another thought afterthought
Okay, some four days later, I FINALLY hear via MSNBC that some other countries have offered aid: Great Britain offered half a million aid packets. Afghanistan pledged 100-thousand dollars in assistance, though that seems to me like they're just giving some of OUR assistance money BACK. And would you believe it? Some of them are our "enemies:" Iran; Cuba; China. Hugo Chavez, dictator of Venezuela, offered aid.
So, I feel a lot better about the rest of the world than I did a few days ago. Now it's all about quelling the rising ache in my gut about our nation and what went wrong before Katrina ever spun up over Africa.
And another thought...I've watched CNN for the past six days and seen no mention of foreign aid, yet I happen to catch five minutes of MSNBC, and there's a story. What's up with that? What's CNN's agenda?
dassall
So, I feel a lot better about the rest of the world than I did a few days ago. Now it's all about quelling the rising ache in my gut about our nation and what went wrong before Katrina ever spun up over Africa.
And another thought...I've watched CNN for the past six days and seen no mention of foreign aid, yet I happen to catch five minutes of MSNBC, and there's a story. What's up with that? What's CNN's agenda?
dassall
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Hurricane Katrina, another thought
I'm safely cocooned a thousand miles north of New Orleans, watching with the rest of the nation as the horror and despair there unfold in the phosphor glow of my television set.
In all the coverage, there is one important thing I have yet to hear reported:
WHERE THE FUCK IS THE HELP? I'm not talking about FEMA or the Red Cross, or the local authorities. They're scrambling to act against a near overwhelming national disaster. Where the fuck is the rest of the world? With as much criticism as the USA received for our slow response and paltry initial dollar-figure offer of aid in the hours after the devastation of the December 26, 2004, tsunami in south Asia was revealed, where are the offers from the rest of the world to help the United States disaster relief organizations help the people of the Gulf coast? The USA upped its tsunami-aid offer from a few million to nearly a half-billion dollars in a matter of days. I have yet to hear of ANY offer from ANY country for ANY type of aid.
You'd think that some nation with a bone to pick would have come up with some offer significant in comparison to its size or economic health, if only to show us up for our "stinginess."
In years past, we've sent money and provisions to our ENEMIES when members of their citizenry were befallen with disaster. Where are our friends?
dassall
In all the coverage, there is one important thing I have yet to hear reported:
WHERE THE FUCK IS THE HELP? I'm not talking about FEMA or the Red Cross, or the local authorities. They're scrambling to act against a near overwhelming national disaster. Where the fuck is the rest of the world? With as much criticism as the USA received for our slow response and paltry initial dollar-figure offer of aid in the hours after the devastation of the December 26, 2004, tsunami in south Asia was revealed, where are the offers from the rest of the world to help the United States disaster relief organizations help the people of the Gulf coast? The USA upped its tsunami-aid offer from a few million to nearly a half-billion dollars in a matter of days. I have yet to hear of ANY offer from ANY country for ANY type of aid.
You'd think that some nation with a bone to pick would have come up with some offer significant in comparison to its size or economic health, if only to show us up for our "stinginess."
In years past, we've sent money and provisions to our ENEMIES when members of their citizenry were befallen with disaster. Where are our friends?
dassall
Hurricane Katrina
I'm not going to try to pontificate on the devastation of the hurricane or the despair it leaves behind. There are too many others with better vocabulary and journalistic skills than I to compete with.
What I wish to address is the news coverage of this storm and others. Whose idea was it to send people INTO these storms for the sole purpose of reporting them? In the specific case of Katrina, as one flipped from channel to channel, broadcast and cable, there were untold numbers of TV news people standing waist deep in churning waters, wrapped in rain gear, backs to the wind and shouting into their microphones, trying to keep their eyes on rain-spattered camera lenses and telling us how bad the weather was! HELLO! It's a freakin' HURRICANE! Do these people have rights? Do their bosses realize that they're sending their people into serious danger? Do they receive hazardous duty pay?
It's not war. War correspondents jump into the fray at risk of their lives for more than just bringing us the adrenaline rush of combat voyeurism. There's a human story to be revealed in showing men and women, sometimes very young men and women, forced into a situation in which they never expected to find themselves. Sometimes they perform valiantly, and some perform cowardly. Some are compassionate or timid. Some are emotionless and aggressive. Almost all of them have someone back home whom they miss and who misses them terribly. But every one of them has a story. And almost every story can break our hearts.
And in the aftermath of a storm as terrible as Katrina, there are thousands of stories which can touch -- and break -- our hearts. For the story is not the in storm. The story is in the people who lived - and died - through the storm. The story is in the efforts of the cities and their people to get through the aftermath and to rebuild their cities and rebuild their lives. That's where the reporters and cameramen can work true magic.
But DURING the storm? It serves no purpose. The reporter appears on camera, shouting into his microphone to be heard over the roar of the wind and rain, and might as well say, "Yes, Bent Hangnail here on scene as Hurricane Katrina, now a category 4 storm, blows ashore with all her force. Upon the order of city officials to evacuate, everyone has wisely left this very dangerous, very treacherous city...except us." How stupid is that? Why do it? You can't see anything: the camera lens is most likely crapped up with water and dirt; and if the camera man has the time to wipe the lens clean, you still can't see anything because, with the wind and water and debris in the air, visibility is about 50 yards at best, and if it's night time, you might see a traffic signal buffetted around in the distance, but that's about it.
The grand effect of sending those poor, young people into the storm - and I would wager that those people are the most junior on the staffs of their respective stations - is the viewer looking at the TV screen, pointing at it, and saying, "Look at that moron! What an idiot! Get out of there, stupid!"
dassall
What I wish to address is the news coverage of this storm and others. Whose idea was it to send people INTO these storms for the sole purpose of reporting them? In the specific case of Katrina, as one flipped from channel to channel, broadcast and cable, there were untold numbers of TV news people standing waist deep in churning waters, wrapped in rain gear, backs to the wind and shouting into their microphones, trying to keep their eyes on rain-spattered camera lenses and telling us how bad the weather was! HELLO! It's a freakin' HURRICANE! Do these people have rights? Do their bosses realize that they're sending their people into serious danger? Do they receive hazardous duty pay?
It's not war. War correspondents jump into the fray at risk of their lives for more than just bringing us the adrenaline rush of combat voyeurism. There's a human story to be revealed in showing men and women, sometimes very young men and women, forced into a situation in which they never expected to find themselves. Sometimes they perform valiantly, and some perform cowardly. Some are compassionate or timid. Some are emotionless and aggressive. Almost all of them have someone back home whom they miss and who misses them terribly. But every one of them has a story. And almost every story can break our hearts.
And in the aftermath of a storm as terrible as Katrina, there are thousands of stories which can touch -- and break -- our hearts. For the story is not the in storm. The story is in the people who lived - and died - through the storm. The story is in the efforts of the cities and their people to get through the aftermath and to rebuild their cities and rebuild their lives. That's where the reporters and cameramen can work true magic.
But DURING the storm? It serves no purpose. The reporter appears on camera, shouting into his microphone to be heard over the roar of the wind and rain, and might as well say, "Yes, Bent Hangnail here on scene as Hurricane Katrina, now a category 4 storm, blows ashore with all her force. Upon the order of city officials to evacuate, everyone has wisely left this very dangerous, very treacherous city...except us." How stupid is that? Why do it? You can't see anything: the camera lens is most likely crapped up with water and dirt; and if the camera man has the time to wipe the lens clean, you still can't see anything because, with the wind and water and debris in the air, visibility is about 50 yards at best, and if it's night time, you might see a traffic signal buffetted around in the distance, but that's about it.
The grand effect of sending those poor, young people into the storm - and I would wager that those people are the most junior on the staffs of their respective stations - is the viewer looking at the TV screen, pointing at it, and saying, "Look at that moron! What an idiot! Get out of there, stupid!"
dassall
Sunday, August 14, 2005
We're Wireless
Cool!
The wife and I just upgraded everything. Two new iMacs G5 and an iBook G4, both with wireless, plus made the old PowerBook G4, the old iMac G4 and her G4 tower wireless. We're still a little glitchy, but I'm sure we're the problem, not the gear! There are 3 of us in the house, and we have 7 functional Macs, though this one, the G3 is soon to get the boot!
Cool!
Cool!
Cool!
dassall
The wife and I just upgraded everything. Two new iMacs G5 and an iBook G4, both with wireless, plus made the old PowerBook G4, the old iMac G4 and her G4 tower wireless. We're still a little glitchy, but I'm sure we're the problem, not the gear! There are 3 of us in the house, and we have 7 functional Macs, though this one, the G3 is soon to get the boot!
Cool!
Cool!
Cool!
dassall
Monday, August 08, 2005
Felt Up On a Plane!
So I'm on a short flight to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It's a small, 70 passenger jet. I'm in the exit row, in the aisle seat across the aisle from my co-worker. Next to me, by the window, is a young, twenty-something man. About 20 minutes into the flight I turn to ask my co-worker a question, and I barely get two words out when, HELLO! There's a hand in my lap that's not mine!! I turn to look at the guy next to me and he's sound asleep. Apparently he had his hand on the arm rest, and then he flinched, sending his arm off the arm rest and onto my leg. When it happened I must have had a classic look on my face because my co-worker, who saw me remove the dude's hand from my lap, then burst into uncontrollable laughter. Once I got rid of the creeps and the absurdity of the moment hit me, I also lost it, and I laughed nonstop for about 5 minutes, tears running down my face.
Why doesn't that ever happen when there's a young, twenty-something woman next to me?!
dassall
Why doesn't that ever happen when there's a young, twenty-something woman next to me?!
dassall
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Murder By Travel
I don't know what I've done to deserve it, and I'm not even certain it's true, but I think my employer is trying to kill me.
See, my job requires that I travel. It's video production work, so I have to carry a lot of gear around with me. Granted, it's not as much stuff as that dude from CBS's "48 Hours" that I saw carrying, but that's a different animal. Mine are still large cases, still generally over the airlines' allowable weight max, and still need to be lugged from home to car to airport to car to location to hotel room to car to airport to home to office blah blah blah.
But lately the travel has been ridiculous. Take June, for instance. June started on May 30 with a flight to Palm Beach, Florida for a convention that lasted until June 4, and I flew home on the 5th. I was back in Chicago for five full days, and then I was back in the air on my way to Dublin, Ireland. IRELAND! For TWO WEEKS!! Okay, one week was for work, and the other was actually my vacation, with a niece and nephew of mine, each there as my graduation gift to them (WOO HOO! Frequent flyer miles!). I was in Chicago for a full five days, making that a grand total of ten days that I was home in the month of June. And then it was JULY!
On the 5th I was on the 6:50am flight back to Florida, this time Daytona, with a drive back to Palm Beach (see earlier post "World's Best Driver") for a total of four days. in Chicago for only ten days, I was then off to Puerto Rico on the 19th for a ten day stretch of three conferences (see "A Week In Puerto Rico (So Far...). I arrived home on the 29th, but I had to turn around for a 6:00am flight to San Diego the next day, Saturday July 30th, for three nights, and suddenly, with only 14 days in Chicago in July, it was AUGUST!
On the 2nd we drove to Los Angeles (see "A Truly Beautiful Person") where we worked in the evening, worked into the afternoon on the Wednesday the 3rd, and then hopped on a plane back home. I was home for two nights, and then had a 6:30am Friday flight to Denver, where we worked for about six hours, and then managed to catch stand-by seats two hours earlier than our scheduled flight to get home by 11:30pm.
I have this weekend...most of it, anyway... to rest up, for tonight at 10:00 I fly to Cedar Rapids, Iowa where we work tomorrow morning, then we drive to Des Moines to work in the afternoon, and THEN we catch a flight through Chicago to Philadelphia, where we'll shoot on Tuesday. On Wednesday we have to fly BACK through Chicago, BACK to Cedar Rapids because some schlub had a procedure, so he can't be taped on Monday, and then we fly home in the early afternoon. Thursday afternoon we fly out again, this time to Atlanta for a Friday shoot in Bumphuck, Georgia, and a Saturday shoot in Asshump, Alabama (cue "Dueling Banjos" theme here). We fly back Sunday morning, but then we have to drive Monday morning two hours to Bloomington, Illinois, and then back in the afternoon. We may or may not have Tuesday at home, depending on whether or not something gets scheduled for that day, and then we have a one-day shoot in Omaha, Nebraska! THEN we get a whole three days back in Chicago before we have to go to Greenbrier, West Virginia, for 6 days for yet another convention. This will make a grand total of thirteen days home in August, IF other stuff isn't scheduled.
I swear to cod they're trying to kill me. And if not, please...
SOMEBODY SHOOT ME!
dassall
See, my job requires that I travel. It's video production work, so I have to carry a lot of gear around with me. Granted, it's not as much stuff as that dude from CBS's "48 Hours" that I saw carrying, but that's a different animal. Mine are still large cases, still generally over the airlines' allowable weight max, and still need to be lugged from home to car to airport to car to location to hotel room to car to airport to home to office blah blah blah.
But lately the travel has been ridiculous. Take June, for instance. June started on May 30 with a flight to Palm Beach, Florida for a convention that lasted until June 4, and I flew home on the 5th. I was back in Chicago for five full days, and then I was back in the air on my way to Dublin, Ireland. IRELAND! For TWO WEEKS!! Okay, one week was for work, and the other was actually my vacation, with a niece and nephew of mine, each there as my graduation gift to them (WOO HOO! Frequent flyer miles!). I was in Chicago for a full five days, making that a grand total of ten days that I was home in the month of June. And then it was JULY!
On the 5th I was on the 6:50am flight back to Florida, this time Daytona, with a drive back to Palm Beach (see earlier post "World's Best Driver") for a total of four days. in Chicago for only ten days, I was then off to Puerto Rico on the 19th for a ten day stretch of three conferences (see "A Week In Puerto Rico (So Far...). I arrived home on the 29th, but I had to turn around for a 6:00am flight to San Diego the next day, Saturday July 30th, for three nights, and suddenly, with only 14 days in Chicago in July, it was AUGUST!
On the 2nd we drove to Los Angeles (see "A Truly Beautiful Person") where we worked in the evening, worked into the afternoon on the Wednesday the 3rd, and then hopped on a plane back home. I was home for two nights, and then had a 6:30am Friday flight to Denver, where we worked for about six hours, and then managed to catch stand-by seats two hours earlier than our scheduled flight to get home by 11:30pm.
I have this weekend...most of it, anyway... to rest up, for tonight at 10:00 I fly to Cedar Rapids, Iowa where we work tomorrow morning, then we drive to Des Moines to work in the afternoon, and THEN we catch a flight through Chicago to Philadelphia, where we'll shoot on Tuesday. On Wednesday we have to fly BACK through Chicago, BACK to Cedar Rapids because some schlub had a procedure, so he can't be taped on Monday, and then we fly home in the early afternoon. Thursday afternoon we fly out again, this time to Atlanta for a Friday shoot in Bumphuck, Georgia, and a Saturday shoot in Asshump, Alabama (cue "Dueling Banjos" theme here). We fly back Sunday morning, but then we have to drive Monday morning two hours to Bloomington, Illinois, and then back in the afternoon. We may or may not have Tuesday at home, depending on whether or not something gets scheduled for that day, and then we have a one-day shoot in Omaha, Nebraska! THEN we get a whole three days back in Chicago before we have to go to Greenbrier, West Virginia, for 6 days for yet another convention. This will make a grand total of thirteen days home in August, IF other stuff isn't scheduled.
I swear to cod they're trying to kill me. And if not, please...
SOMEBODY SHOOT ME!
dassall
Thursday, August 04, 2005
A Truly Beautiful Person
In my job I meet a wide variety of people, usually in the insurance and financial services industry. And, due to the nature of my business, I usually meet the best examples of people in the industry. Occasionally I get to meet a client of one of these top examples, and if they're served by the best, then they're usually quite happy people.
Recently I met one of these happy customers in Los Angeles. Once a year our client does a series of videos about people who have benefitted from their purchase of different types of insurance when their lives took an unexpected turn, and the company I work for produces the videos. The happy customer of which I speak is in his 50s, and if ever there was a man emotionally and mentally prepared to have a disaster befall him, this was the man. Devout in his faith (not something I particularly care about, but it's such a part of his life it cannot go unmentioned), and of unflappable spirit, he has lived his whole life choosing to smile and greet everyone he meets warmly and with joy. He had just returned from a visit to Israel in 2004 when one day he experienced an uncharacteristic weakness in his arms and legs. He lay down to rest, took a brief nap, and when he made to get up, his legs collapsed beneath him. He could not get up or move without help. By nightfall he was paralyzed from the neck down. In the ensuing days his doctors had diagnosed him with Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
I'm not versed in medical lingo. I know only from meeting him that Guillain-Barre Syndrome is temporary -- he can recover -- however it can leave one devastated. I'm not here to extoll the virtues of insurance, but I'm sure it is the main reason he can smile today, for his family has not experienced a financial hardship, despite astronomical medical expenses.
We spent a day with this man, in his home, at aqua-therapy, at physical therapy. He has regained movement and limited function of his arms and hands, and some movement of his legs. He works hard to get better, and there is incremental improvement every day. His mind is sharp, his wit is quick, and his condition is the last thing on his mind, other than that it's the reason he must fill his days with visits to the hospital therapy room and the local pool. He engages everyone intellectually, enjoys laughter -- generating and receiving -- and will talk non-stop if you let him.
I don't really know what I logged on here to say, except that in the presence of this man I was touched. Touched by his undeniable spirit, his unstoppable will, his unswerving determination to get back on his feet, and by his infectious, never-ending smile. The world needs more people like him.
Here's to you, Mr. Shore. May you be back on your feet soon.
Recently I met one of these happy customers in Los Angeles. Once a year our client does a series of videos about people who have benefitted from their purchase of different types of insurance when their lives took an unexpected turn, and the company I work for produces the videos. The happy customer of which I speak is in his 50s, and if ever there was a man emotionally and mentally prepared to have a disaster befall him, this was the man. Devout in his faith (not something I particularly care about, but it's such a part of his life it cannot go unmentioned), and of unflappable spirit, he has lived his whole life choosing to smile and greet everyone he meets warmly and with joy. He had just returned from a visit to Israel in 2004 when one day he experienced an uncharacteristic weakness in his arms and legs. He lay down to rest, took a brief nap, and when he made to get up, his legs collapsed beneath him. He could not get up or move without help. By nightfall he was paralyzed from the neck down. In the ensuing days his doctors had diagnosed him with Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
I'm not versed in medical lingo. I know only from meeting him that Guillain-Barre Syndrome is temporary -- he can recover -- however it can leave one devastated. I'm not here to extoll the virtues of insurance, but I'm sure it is the main reason he can smile today, for his family has not experienced a financial hardship, despite astronomical medical expenses.
We spent a day with this man, in his home, at aqua-therapy, at physical therapy. He has regained movement and limited function of his arms and hands, and some movement of his legs. He works hard to get better, and there is incremental improvement every day. His mind is sharp, his wit is quick, and his condition is the last thing on his mind, other than that it's the reason he must fill his days with visits to the hospital therapy room and the local pool. He engages everyone intellectually, enjoys laughter -- generating and receiving -- and will talk non-stop if you let him.
I don't really know what I logged on here to say, except that in the presence of this man I was touched. Touched by his undeniable spirit, his unstoppable will, his unswerving determination to get back on his feet, and by his infectious, never-ending smile. The world needs more people like him.
Here's to you, Mr. Shore. May you be back on your feet soon.
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