I took the train in today. One of our cars needs a new clutch and so I was dropped by the commuter rail to make the 8:23.
My buddy Kenny and I once kidded each other and said we'd never take "the 8:23" meaning we'd never be one of those guys who has to make a train to get to work. We lived on Long Island growing up and there was a train line, the Long Island Rail Road, which had as its slogan: "The flight of the dashing commuter." These words were painted on the side of train cars with a picture of a man in a suit dashing to make "the 8:23". We laughed at such proletarian folly. "Not for us." we said. He has stayed true to the promise and drives two easy miles to toil. Typically, I drive into traffic, today I was a dashing commuter.
Not so bad. Walked down the steps to the Auburndale stop. Waited with other dashing commuters who were reading papers or staring at their hand helds. And once on board, sat silently next to another dashing commuter and interacted with a conductor who could have been right out of 1956. He took my dough, detached half of a ticket, and stuck it in a notch at my seat.
I got off at Back Bay 22 minutes later-- on time-- and began the walk to school. The route I selected took me through the Copley Place mall and Prudential Center mall. I am not a mall guy. Don't like going to them to shop and, even as a kid, never enjoyed hanging out there. But the Copley Place and "Pru" mall are different; elegant in a non pretentious way. So sauntering through there is not a bad path to take in the a.m.
As I got to the junction of where the Copley mall ends and the bridge to the Pru mall begins, I saw a very long line. It was so long that initially I could not see what the commuters were lining up for. Then I saw what I should have predicted: Starbucks. Had to be thirty people in that line, easy. I pass those queuing for their morning fix, proceed through the pedestrian bridge and am in the Pru mall. I walk the width, am nearly to the Sheraton that anchors the west side, and again see an enormous line. Again, I can't readily see why. I get closer and it is a Dunkin Doughnuts.
Once in the early 80s I was in a fender bender in New Jersey. I called my insurance company and answered a bunch of questions. One was whether I had been taking any drugs before the accident. I said, "just coffee." She laughed.
When I was in college there was a big to-do about the perils of drugs. Then in the 80s, Nancy Reagan did her "Just Say No" bit.
Folks, coffee is a drug. The folks lining up for Starbucks need a fix. It's not for the overpriced muffins that they wait twenty minutes on a queue. When I return tonight, Starbucks will not be as well populated. However, there is, near Starbucks, a bar which will be buzzing.
Similarly, this evening folks will be lining up at pharmacies to get their legal drugs to reduce anxiety, depression, and other maladies brought about by living.
I never did much in the way of drugs in college. Never "dropped acid' or "did a line of coke." Thought it was too risky. But I contend for many of those who did, they are no worse off than those who wait for twenty minutes for a cup of pick-me-up, or pay 6 bucks for a beer draft, or drop a xanax at night to deal with the aggravations that accrue. I am not unaware of horror stories of those who did become addicted to illegal drugs and I am not minimizing the risk with this or condoning it. Rather, I think there are legal drugs that get a pass and when we talk about the perils of drugs we might want to look at our own legal consumptions as well.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
chaos
You have probably been there. Thoughts surface to your consciousness which may not have been suppressed but had been just lurking. Then they surface. As if some storm has entered your head, some confluence of this and that has disrupted the terrain and now, cerebral junk impedes your daily activity. Our physical and psychological maneuverings are infected. And the result is that in your head, at least, there is chaos such that it is tough to do what you do effortlessly during a normal period.
It occurs when someone you love tells you, explicitly or otherwise, that you are no longer in the picture. It happens at work, when you are told you have failed or sense it yourself and you wonder why in the world anyone would hire you. It happens when someone dies or becomes incapacitated, someone who was a part of your foundation, and you realize how important was that floorboard of your life. There is chaos.
Extrapolating from chaos theory one can assume that such periods are predictable in that they are inevitable, and that the result of chaos can actually be something positive or at least something that provides a new opportunity. Yet when you are swamped by chaos the wisdom of chaos theory cannot gain entrance to the miserable conditions within your head.
Poe's Raven muttering Nevermore was incorrect even if it was perched on a bust of Pallas the goddess of wisdom. Chaos does not persist unless one chooses to perseverate. Chaos evanesces if, when you are able, you open the door and allow the foul air to escape. Consciousness without chaos is something that one can retrieve. "Quaff oh quaff that sweet nepenthe and forget the lost Lenore."
There may be no true nepenthe, but there is time and time can be considered such.
The wonder of sport and its value as metaphor is that there is always another game, another opportunity for a clean slate with which to demonstrate your capabilities and value. The New York Rangers down 2-0 to the Bruins have a shot tonight to win and make the series competitive. The Memphis Grizzlies pummeled by San Antonio on Sunday can come out tonight and play like champions.
And we can, however heavy our hearts, no matter how heartbroken or bereft, have a shot at another day. We the living can escape chaos. Not by artifically revising our world with booze or illusions, but by opening the doors to allow sadness to leave the premises and recognizing that it may take time for it to go.
It occurs when someone you love tells you, explicitly or otherwise, that you are no longer in the picture. It happens at work, when you are told you have failed or sense it yourself and you wonder why in the world anyone would hire you. It happens when someone dies or becomes incapacitated, someone who was a part of your foundation, and you realize how important was that floorboard of your life. There is chaos.
Extrapolating from chaos theory one can assume that such periods are predictable in that they are inevitable, and that the result of chaos can actually be something positive or at least something that provides a new opportunity. Yet when you are swamped by chaos the wisdom of chaos theory cannot gain entrance to the miserable conditions within your head.
Poe's Raven muttering Nevermore was incorrect even if it was perched on a bust of Pallas the goddess of wisdom. Chaos does not persist unless one chooses to perseverate. Chaos evanesces if, when you are able, you open the door and allow the foul air to escape. Consciousness without chaos is something that one can retrieve. "Quaff oh quaff that sweet nepenthe and forget the lost Lenore."
There may be no true nepenthe, but there is time and time can be considered such.
The wonder of sport and its value as metaphor is that there is always another game, another opportunity for a clean slate with which to demonstrate your capabilities and value. The New York Rangers down 2-0 to the Bruins have a shot tonight to win and make the series competitive. The Memphis Grizzlies pummeled by San Antonio on Sunday can come out tonight and play like champions.
And we can, however heavy our hearts, no matter how heartbroken or bereft, have a shot at another day. We the living can escape chaos. Not by artifically revising our world with booze or illusions, but by opening the doors to allow sadness to leave the premises and recognizing that it may take time for it to go.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
truth and history
At my high school reunion last summer several people brought and then pulled out the year book. A buddy of mine was perusing the pages, when he commented and congratulated me on being a regent's scholarship recipient. In the yearbook under the mugs of the valedictorian and salutatorian were two lists. One was headed with the words Regent's Scholarship Recipients. And the other Regent's Scholarship Alternates. There, under the list of scholarship recipients was my name. What would be curious to anyone who studied the page was that the salutatorian and valedictorian whose pictures dominated the page, were not on the recipients list, but on the alternates list.
For those of you who are putting someone through college now or are paying off your own loans, the following information might be painful. My college tuition to attend a newly constructed university, with a new library, gym, theatre complex, dormitories, classroom, fountains, new everything (so new in fact that much of it was not completed when I arrived), the college tuition was a grand total of 400 dollars a year. I have not left off a zero. That is four hundred dollars a year.
To offset this financial burden on the children of the citizens of the great state of New York, the regent of the state university of New York, gave high school students a test each fall. This test was called the Regents Scholarship Exam. There were 300 questions. If you got 100 out of 300 right, ( a score of 33 per cent for those arithmetically challenged) you earned what was called an Incentive award. The Incentive was a one hundred dollar a year or fifty dollar a semester reduction in your tuition bill should you choose to study in New York State. Now, you don't need to be a wizard to get a 33 on a test, so anyone who was even thinking of going to college was going to get an incentive rendering annual tuition 300 dollars a year.
To further reduce the financial burden, the regent provided a nearly total tuition scholarship for those who scored competitively higher on the test. The score you needed to get to earn a scholarship depended on where you lived. So, if you lived in an area where there were hundreds of bright students you might need to get a higher score than in an area where you had a graduating class of 40 dullards.
The yearbook plainly indicates that I was one of the smartypants at my school because I earned one of these scholarships.
However I didn't earn a scholarship--at least not at first. I was what was called an Alternate. This meant that if enough scholarship recipients decided not to go to school in New York, I might get the money. This is what happened, but I did not initially get the scholarship--I was an alternate..
I can't imagine that historians are going to select regents scholarship winners as a subject for their investigations and monographs. If they did, however, they might create a narrative about who did and who did not get awards based on the fact that whoever was in charge of that page of the yearbook, made a mistake and switched the lists. All the true smartypants in the school were listed as the Alternates, and all the smartypants-lite folks like me were listed as recipients.
Who are the winners in history? Are they the winners, or are they the ones who have been recorded as winners either in error or by design. What we are told is history is the narrative that, we'd like to think, is based on fact but is just as likely based on error or subjectivity.
Who are the heroes in politics, religion, education, diplomacy, and social change? We'd like to think we learn about this in school and in large part we do. But what if the narrative is wrong and perpetuated as such because the examination of artifacts is prejudiced by an historian's agenda, or the integrity of the artifact itself. Nobody will care much that the valedictorian of my class appears not to have qualified for a scholarship. But decisions will be and have been made on the basis of other "facts" which have been perpetuated in our history and cultural narratives.
This concern for truth in history has surfaced this week because of the anniversary of the Kent State killings. The four students who were murdered that day posed no threat whatsoever to the National Guardsmen who shot them. Two of the students were walking to class with their backs to the shooters when they were slain. The other two were similarly unarmed and even with a rock (had they been inclined to hurl them and neither were) could not have hit a Guardsman since they were the length of a football field away. And no apologist for the shooters should ever be allowed to have any bogus retelling of the events gain traction.
For those of you who are putting someone through college now or are paying off your own loans, the following information might be painful. My college tuition to attend a newly constructed university, with a new library, gym, theatre complex, dormitories, classroom, fountains, new everything (so new in fact that much of it was not completed when I arrived), the college tuition was a grand total of 400 dollars a year. I have not left off a zero. That is four hundred dollars a year.
To offset this financial burden on the children of the citizens of the great state of New York, the regent of the state university of New York, gave high school students a test each fall. This test was called the Regents Scholarship Exam. There were 300 questions. If you got 100 out of 300 right, ( a score of 33 per cent for those arithmetically challenged) you earned what was called an Incentive award. The Incentive was a one hundred dollar a year or fifty dollar a semester reduction in your tuition bill should you choose to study in New York State. Now, you don't need to be a wizard to get a 33 on a test, so anyone who was even thinking of going to college was going to get an incentive rendering annual tuition 300 dollars a year.
To further reduce the financial burden, the regent provided a nearly total tuition scholarship for those who scored competitively higher on the test. The score you needed to get to earn a scholarship depended on where you lived. So, if you lived in an area where there were hundreds of bright students you might need to get a higher score than in an area where you had a graduating class of 40 dullards.
The yearbook plainly indicates that I was one of the smartypants at my school because I earned one of these scholarships.
However I didn't earn a scholarship--at least not at first. I was what was called an Alternate. This meant that if enough scholarship recipients decided not to go to school in New York, I might get the money. This is what happened, but I did not initially get the scholarship--I was an alternate..
I can't imagine that historians are going to select regents scholarship winners as a subject for their investigations and monographs. If they did, however, they might create a narrative about who did and who did not get awards based on the fact that whoever was in charge of that page of the yearbook, made a mistake and switched the lists. All the true smartypants in the school were listed as the Alternates, and all the smartypants-lite folks like me were listed as recipients.
Who are the winners in history? Are they the winners, or are they the ones who have been recorded as winners either in error or by design. What we are told is history is the narrative that, we'd like to think, is based on fact but is just as likely based on error or subjectivity.
Who are the heroes in politics, religion, education, diplomacy, and social change? We'd like to think we learn about this in school and in large part we do. But what if the narrative is wrong and perpetuated as such because the examination of artifacts is prejudiced by an historian's agenda, or the integrity of the artifact itself. Nobody will care much that the valedictorian of my class appears not to have qualified for a scholarship. But decisions will be and have been made on the basis of other "facts" which have been perpetuated in our history and cultural narratives.
This concern for truth in history has surfaced this week because of the anniversary of the Kent State killings. The four students who were murdered that day posed no threat whatsoever to the National Guardsmen who shot them. Two of the students were walking to class with their backs to the shooters when they were slain. The other two were similarly unarmed and even with a rock (had they been inclined to hurl them and neither were) could not have hit a Guardsman since they were the length of a football field away. And no apologist for the shooters should ever be allowed to have any bogus retelling of the events gain traction.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
all the flowers
It was coincidental, but still eerie, to go to the movies last night and see "The Company You Keep"--a movie about 60s activists now in their late 60s. I had decided to see a movie since it had been a while, saw that this one had gotten good reviews, and went--on the anniversary of the Kent State murders.
The audience was composed of people of my vintage. Many in the theater could identify very clearly with the characters in the film. At one point the silence in the auditorium was so evident that I did not want to eat my popcorn because I knew that the sound would be audible throughout. Not an exaggeration.
Yesterday I posted something on Facebook about the Kent State murders. A number of contemporaries commented that the victims of this incident could easily have been themselves. If you are about to collect social security, you very likely marched or otherwise protested the war in Viet Nam. It could have been you at Kent State or Jackson State.
I saw another posting this morning from a high school classmate about the killings. He wrote simply, "What has changed? Tell me." and then subsequently, "Where have all the flowers gone?"
The power of the film last night was enhanced by seeing aged film stars in the various roles. We don't know Robert Redford and Julie Christie personally, but we do through their acting and we have seen these two as youngsters in The Sting and Shampoo and others. In this movie they have aged (and it seemed to me made up to make sure they looked older). Redford, Christie, Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon, and other familiar faces show up. And it is as if we can see ourselves aged. How they reacted to time is akin to how those we knew from that era also reacted.
I think my classmate with his "what has changed" question was saying, in essence, that nothing has. When he asked "Where have all the flowers gone?" I'm thinking he was asking what happened to the ends we desired and what has happened to all of those/us who once advocated for a world where flowers would not go to young girls, girls to soldiers, soldiers to graveyards, and graveyards to flowers.
The day and movie made me wonder how much off course I have gone since those heady days. It is important, I think, to do this self analysis now and again and get back on track. I never was a militant protestor and I found that some of my contemporaries were less interested in political reform than political power. Some characters in the film reminded me of those whom I could never consider in my camp. But others seemed to have stayed true to principles even after they went mainstream and I hope I can say that of myself when the dust settles.
The film had some gaps in the plot, but if you are from the sixties and in your sixties, I think you will find portions of the script spot-on, you will recognize the characters, and maybe you'll see yourself in the movie. "Where have all the flowers gone?" is a good question. After seeing the film you might feel like I did, that you need to look into the mirror and see if you're on track to contribute to what you claimed you desired for us all in the 60s.
The audience was composed of people of my vintage. Many in the theater could identify very clearly with the characters in the film. At one point the silence in the auditorium was so evident that I did not want to eat my popcorn because I knew that the sound would be audible throughout. Not an exaggeration.
Yesterday I posted something on Facebook about the Kent State murders. A number of contemporaries commented that the victims of this incident could easily have been themselves. If you are about to collect social security, you very likely marched or otherwise protested the war in Viet Nam. It could have been you at Kent State or Jackson State.
I saw another posting this morning from a high school classmate about the killings. He wrote simply, "What has changed? Tell me." and then subsequently, "Where have all the flowers gone?"
The power of the film last night was enhanced by seeing aged film stars in the various roles. We don't know Robert Redford and Julie Christie personally, but we do through their acting and we have seen these two as youngsters in The Sting and Shampoo and others. In this movie they have aged (and it seemed to me made up to make sure they looked older). Redford, Christie, Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon, and other familiar faces show up. And it is as if we can see ourselves aged. How they reacted to time is akin to how those we knew from that era also reacted.
I think my classmate with his "what has changed" question was saying, in essence, that nothing has. When he asked "Where have all the flowers gone?" I'm thinking he was asking what happened to the ends we desired and what has happened to all of those/us who once advocated for a world where flowers would not go to young girls, girls to soldiers, soldiers to graveyards, and graveyards to flowers.
The day and movie made me wonder how much off course I have gone since those heady days. It is important, I think, to do this self analysis now and again and get back on track. I never was a militant protestor and I found that some of my contemporaries were less interested in political reform than political power. Some characters in the film reminded me of those whom I could never consider in my camp. But others seemed to have stayed true to principles even after they went mainstream and I hope I can say that of myself when the dust settles.
The film had some gaps in the plot, but if you are from the sixties and in your sixties, I think you will find portions of the script spot-on, you will recognize the characters, and maybe you'll see yourself in the movie. "Where have all the flowers gone?" is a good question. After seeing the film you might feel like I did, that you need to look into the mirror and see if you're on track to contribute to what you claimed you desired for us all in the 60s.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
May 4
Tin Soldiers and Nixon coming
We're finally on our own
This summer I heard the drumming
Four dead in Ohio.
We're finally on our own
This summer I heard the drumming
Four dead in Ohio.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
cowards
Annually, my buddy Kenny comes to Boston to visit and watch the Boston Marathon. Patriots Day, the day of the marathon is a festive time, one that is difficult to describe. The Red Sox play a game that starts at 11 in the morning. The marathon begins at 930 a.m and runners stream across the finish line from one o'clock until 5. Kids are there with balloons cheering on their mothers and fathers. Runners have cheering sections. Some wear signs that read Joan, so that spectators can shout "Go Joan Go" for 26 miles. Racers draped in aluminum covers are exhausted but are smiling as they have completed the race and are embraced by their loved ones. Fans who have exited the Red Sox game parade around in their Red Sox caps, jackets, and sweatshirts. It is a big party.
This year we got a late start out of the house and were en route to the finish line when we got the news that there had been an explosion. We continued downtown, parked at my university which is about a mile from the bomb scene. We walked towards the finish line. We saw people sobbing; runners draped in their aluminum shawls were subdued; spectators stunned. We got into the Sheraton where at least 100 maybe 200 runners and their families congregated in the lobby. A fellow from Toronto told us that his wife had just crossed the finish line when the bombs went off.
Not sure coward is a strong enough word to describe the gutless individuals who decided to plant a bomb in a crowd. An 8 year old is dead. Body parts and blood littered Boylston street. For what? Some political statement? Very likely to persuade me that a cause is just by spinelessly killing innocent people and maiming others.
I look forward to next year. I will try to get an early start. I want to be sure to get a spot on Boylston street and cheer for the runners and spit in the face of the gutless chumps who think their cowardly act is justified. And I know I will not be alone.
This year we got a late start out of the house and were en route to the finish line when we got the news that there had been an explosion. We continued downtown, parked at my university which is about a mile from the bomb scene. We walked towards the finish line. We saw people sobbing; runners draped in their aluminum shawls were subdued; spectators stunned. We got into the Sheraton where at least 100 maybe 200 runners and their families congregated in the lobby. A fellow from Toronto told us that his wife had just crossed the finish line when the bombs went off.
Not sure coward is a strong enough word to describe the gutless individuals who decided to plant a bomb in a crowd. An 8 year old is dead. Body parts and blood littered Boylston street. For what? Some political statement? Very likely to persuade me that a cause is just by spinelessly killing innocent people and maiming others.
I look forward to next year. I will try to get an early start. I want to be sure to get a spot on Boylston street and cheer for the runners and spit in the face of the gutless chumps who think their cowardly act is justified. And I know I will not be alone.
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