Who's Sad in America?

SOME OF PAKISTAN is.






What will they do in the hole of this loss? What will our foreign policy of the new administration see as opportunity in her absence?

What - ? How - ? Why - ?

Some of America is sad, too. What if – Hillary? What if – Barack? For that matter, what if – Bush? What if – Condoleeza? We have extremists, too – let’s not forget. If they take away the players of our voice, what will happen to us?

In memoriam of a woman who stood up for the voiceless. In memoriam for a woman who was shot in the neck, just to make sure she was silenced.

~~~

Photo courtesy of Warrick Page, Getty Images

Who's Sad in America?

JOSEPHINE is.

It’s 11:34 pm and Josephine is walking with me from the home goods store that we both do time at. She’s bigger than me, older than me, blacker than me, and she’s made this walk many times. She doesn’t need a ride the 3/4 of a mile to the subway in a crumbling and neglected Coney Island, Brooklyn – she is woman enough to walk there in the blank slate of night.

“I put God in front of me wherever I go … so I don’t worry.”

Josephine is from Jamaica and asked me if I’ve heard of it. “Jamaica?? Yes, of course.”













And yet her face is still maternal, gentle in her searching me for what I know about her home. This is at once so humble of a question, asked as if she expected me to either not care or not know of people and places beyond myself. It’s the kind of cautious question, testing to see if I could handle one of her most essential truths. I was both pissed and charmed by this question.

And we pulled our coats tighter around us in wind blowing up over the coast of Coney Island.

“I come from a dangerous country,” she says in my silence. “When it’s your time, there’s no fighting it.

I look at her face, stunned by her conviction, her stillness, her – what I read as a sort of - peace.

“I really believe that,” she says emphatically.

There’s something about what Josephine carries with her that has seen more than just twin towers falling and Brooklyn fighting and teenage mall massacres. There’s a different kind of killing she’s seen.

I get on the D train headed home and can only guess about the kind of violences that she’s witnessed, was drawn into, left.

What I know about Josephine’s home is what any white kid from a flyover state knows. Jamaica is peddled to college students as the bluest part of the Atlantic Ocean and the place to get the best ganja. It’s sold to the 25-45ers as a place to order fruity cocktails and set a Weight Watchers calendar for. It is shocking, this information from Josephine, this serious side to the real Destination Jamaica. I’m so used to American violence of neglect, ideologies and commerce. Here, in America, violence isn’t personal – it’s business. If it’s not historically or federally predicated, it’s generated mostly from our viral need to secure a home for ourselves. And that's big business.

But here, tonight, with Josephine, violence is personal. And an electric stillness passed over us in this cold, windy night.

She’s lived in the United States for some years now, enough to learn to survive on our streets and under our laws and without her most familiar landmarks of childhood. She’s worked at this home goods store for the past few years as a Manager On Duty, and she knows her place, her clientele and her inventory. She is who I ask when I need questions answered because she’s approachable and possesses a certain pride in her retail work.













And no irony is lost when an immigrant gains full-time administrative employment at a corporate home goods chain built on consumers’ need to find more ways to comfort themselves in their own private home tucked away from all the rampages of the world.

She, like many who emigrate away from a tumultuous home, carry with them a certain otherness, a secret of having seen and decided not to live that way. A certain sort of spirit from another life. With that otherness comes also a deep, sinewy want for a place that provides her comfort, belonging, a fashion she understood, a dirt in between her toes that felt right. Why Brooklyn is not really working for her, only she knows.

Later the next week, Josephine, Jermaine (another Manager On Duty) and I were making the walk to the train station. Colder than previous nights, this walk, they start talking about the coming winter, which inevitably leads Brooklynites to muse about where else they’d like to live. Josephine reveals her plan to relocate to Atlanta, Georgia, in a year, which leads Jermaine to offer up, “Aw yeh, for me, it’s Houston.”













I gasped so loud that I quite possibly swallowed a small wayward pigeon. “HOUSTON?? Like, Houston, TEXAS?!” What black man wants to live in Texas?

And I’m fraught with all my Southern mythologies taught to me in fundamentalist Christian havens called college prep secondary schools, and I have to realize that they, like me, have not felt safe in the home they were born into. Me in Memphis, Jermaine in Brooklyn, Josephine in Jamaica. And for some reason, I feel safe in the Brooklyn that Jermaine and Josephine long to leave behind. And Josephine and Jermaine feel safe in the South that I left far behind because it was dangerous for me, in its insidious and emotionally lazy hatefulness that’s tableclothed in AquaNet and crocheted doilies.

And it doesn’t make sense. And it makes me sad that deep in my soul, Brooklyn is the only place that’s really felt like home and for them, it’s not so much. And it’s sad that the Mother’s Face of Home is always changing, distorting and disfiguring our memories of what was at once a soft place to fall.

So in the meantime, we all live in Brooklyn. Josephine’s daughter came home last week complaining about the gunfire she saw in Crown Heights. And last night on Christmas Eve, I was approached by a wild-eyed stranger asking me to sit on his lap on the train. And in the meantime, we close our coats around us, holding ourselves tighter against the wind.

Crime and home. There will always be a certain sadness for the home that reared us and the home that wronged us in the very beginning. For this, we keep packing up our stuff and moving to the next place that will have us.


~~~

Other Links:

If Eminem was Jamaican

Who's Sad in America?

CHARLIE BROWN is.












Charles Schulz was a spiritualist, a god amongst men, a Joseph Campbell with a pen sketching out a gaggle of philosophical and depressed round kids. Timeless, contemporary, salient for the post-Industrialites. A guru on a hill.

He knows the childhood demons as they hitchhike aimlessly on each of our brain maps. He created the martyr Charlie Brown, the Athenian Peppermint Patty, the micromanager busybody Lucy, the ratting-out, annoying sister Sally, the misunderstood romantic artist Schroeder, the sarcastic, aloof-woof Snoopy and his Colin Powell advisor Woodstock, and who can forget the helpful, philosophizing, thumb-sucking, blankie-dragging Linus.

All of them – parts of ourselves.

Charlie Brown’s biggest problem – with girls, with Lucy, with his baseball game – in my mind, was he was just sad, perhaps even grieving. Look at those eye circles, would ya?

Maybe it was the loss of his innocence at the hands of a dream-deferred coach. Maybe it was the collapse of certain lobes of his brain from falling on his head so many times from that hateful Lucy’s hijinks.











Maybe it's something deeper, something so horrible, and something with such gravity and elusiveness of the human condition that Charles Schulz had to channel it through the carelessly thoughtful kids that circled the wagon around this bald kid in a yellow striped sweater.

Maybe Charlie Brown was just flipping down – Kurt Cobain blue, Bukowski screwed up. And Lucy crippled his healing, Linus confounded his simple way in this world, and that damn red-haired girl down the street made him feel less of a man. Maybe the neglected Pigpen was the only one really that could reach across the Grief Divide, but he had enough of his own problems at home to deal with.

I’m just sayin’ … Charlie Brown is sad.

This Sunday, read it closely. There’s something in there about each of our own brands of social mangling and emotional impotence that the world around us will just have to deal with.

~~~

Photos courtesy of:

http://euroross.blogspot.com/charlie%20brown%20tree.JPG

and

http://www.overworm.com/NothingToSeeHere/NTSH%20Images/CharlieBrownLucyFootball.gif

Who's Sad in America?

THE MAN WHO WROTE THE BOOK ON CRYING is.

He is quick with a laugh. He has a pliable face and open eyes. He raked at his cobb salad and told me stories of writing the book on crying. Personal stories … well, rehearsed personal stories after book tours, reviews and interviews. He was kind and approachable, in soft colors and fabrics, and I was relieved.

He told me he was a musician. And here I thought he was a writer, even, a teacher. Said he was a juvenile delinquent. This man? REEEAlly? Maybe this was some, probably, ghetto envy, but he admitted to loitering in blues bars and ivory towers.

But he is sad. Only when asked about it, though. Otherwise, he was a confident open, friendly man raking a cobb salad on a Thursday afternoon in the hip Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Only when asked about sadness was he willing to think out loud about such things, willing to wait in the moment for my next question, willing to see where I took this lunch, open to the journey of my semantics investigating personal pain under the social guise of academia.

Even with all the social constructs holding onto both of us, I saw his sadness. He comes from a family of weepers, possibly indulged and abusive drama that he didn’t speak to, but he admitted to coming from a whole host of folks who ball. And I realized I had weeper envy.

I told him that the first chapter of his book that I cracked was the conclusion – “Conclusion: The End of Tears.”

I’m just not comfortable with the idea, and yet it’s all that I want, for myself, for anyone. No more drama. Walking away from sadness, forgetting how good I am at carrying the lousy around like an ID card, misremembering that loss is something I learned in one split second and spent a professional and personal life unsuccessfully cramming into a capitalistic writing persona of BOOK WRITER … or even worse … MANIFESTO WRITER.

I suppose I do think there is an end to tears, but never to sadness. Sadness and Happiness – conjoined soul sisters. One without the other is a reality of certain death. And I’m worn out with acting like, trying to be, asking others to help me, addicting myself to routines to avoid /help/resolve/deconstruct/delete/deprogram/depower my sadness just to fit into conversation at networking parties and family barbeques. I am sick of it. It’s impossible, really, especially when I see families receiving their fathers home after 5 years in Iraq with half a body, mind and faith left. Not when I see reality show after Dateline Special after NatGeo Special exploring the many taboo stories of injury and emotional abuse, and the fat layers covering our parents, kids and unfulfilled dreams. Not when the developers continue to create more and more communities away from the urban ills and diseases of the poor, the disenfranchised, the unincorporated, the culturally divergent in gated communities, military and prison industrial complexes renovated by Home Depot or junkyards. Not when I sit across from a stranger who has nothing common with me than a need to write about crying.

This is the truth. So genuine. SO real. So NOT HAPPY.

God.

Not everyone is happy all the time. Be depressed. Stop being so defensive about why you’re having a bad day. And let’s all stop blaming our employers, or our spouses or our diseases about why we feel bad. Maybe We. Just. Feel. Bad. Maybe it’s just that simple. Stop being so irrigated by stupid crap, like a turn of a phrase or the time spent waiting on a returned phonecall. Stop that crap.

If you’re pissed or sad, be pissed or sad. Don’t subvert that shit into passive aggressive notes on your boyfriend’s car or
working less on that proposal at work than you should just because you don’t want to appear a threat to your colleague who just lost his wife to an aneurysm. Sure, maybe he needs that job more than you do. If you’re sad for him, tell him. Be it. Write it, sing it, love that sadness, man. You’re ALIVE, pal, and his wife is not. And he still is here. Show him the loveliness of still being here. Stop bearing his burden. It’s his. Leave it to him. Allow him that. Be noble and take him out for a drink. Or hell, talk to him mindlessly about wireless connections in coffeehouses. Whatever, man, just don’t turn in a lousy proposal just because you feel sorry for him. Be your best, and love his sadness. Worship, revere, respect and revel in this major experience that you may have not been allowed . To have loved and lossed.

Life is nothing but chaos. So love it, or get the hell out, because you might be making it even more screwball annoying by trying to make sense out of it.

I’m just sayin’ … the man who wrote the book on crying also wrote the book on doing nothing. Who’s to say he’s not really doing anything but crying? Who’s to say that any of us aren’t doing anything else but feeling it?

~~~

Photo courtesy of StanfordAlumni.org.

Who's Sad in America?

I am.

I am sad. Sad sad sad. Not just depressed, not just a little blue today. Hard core, pulling your heart out through your lungs, then between your skull and your brain, and hurling yourself off Kilimanjaro sad. Dancer in the Dark sad. Scratching the paint off the walls, hanger abortions sad. Motherfucking down, man. I am Sad for Time, a levy looking over the tears of the years and crying competitively.

I cry at the sight of crushing beauty. I laughed and cried in Bowling for Columbine - it was like a Beaches movie for me. I feel loss at most times in the day and can see sadness in the grocery cashier's perfunctory smile and know that she is sealed in a relationship to some secret loss that keeps her scanning barcodes for a living because at least it's a job. I miss my dead mother, my dead boyfriend, my now three dead dogs, my terminally fetal career, and my dead father who treated me like I was dead before he died. I miss the America we had before terrorism, before the 80s, before 'Nam, before the sexual revolution. And as I grow older, the dead people and the dead eras on my list tally up, making sadness old hat.

I have Blue Blood. This is my schtick. Everybody's got something - some are fashion designers, some are cartoonists, some are massacre-ists, some are corporate defense lawyers. Mine's being down in the dumps.

SAD.

And this ain't so Seasonal Affective bullshit. This life of mine ain't nobody's acronym.

Sadness is ...

The feeling of loss. Careful now, because it's not THE loss - the loss is totally different - something that happens - a moment, a verb almost, a second - loss is an event. Sadness is the you you're left with.

It's the feeling of desperation, sobbing that has taken pounds off and makes you look like a blowfish with rosea. Sadness is the ability to see the black and white of lives lived and lives taken. Sadness is a broken heart. Sadness is a dog hit by a car when you just got him housebroken. (Alanis Morrissette would call this ironic. She is Sad, but masquerading as Angry.) Sadness is two towers coming down on a generation of comfort-seekers. Sadness is an unreturned phone call after the first date. Sadness is a mother's first, second and then final miscarriage.

There is loss and we all have it. Big or small. Tragic or planned. It seems our society has all sorts of discomfort and mythological ways of dealing with it. Loss is so enveloping that we must must must shut up the crying self sometimes just to get on with life. It's in the getting on that we discover the fluidity of sadness in all. The grace of it. The inevitable beauty in having had and lossed. The ability for sadness to fit in to most all circumstances, by virture of its propigation. When we cry in the movies, we know it never leaves. Sadness stays and becomes you - a slow bleed that never heals, but only changes in the course of growth. Dr. Phil and all the other pontificators are full of shit, saying that we can move beyond it. It's a trite simplification, promoting the ideal that we can "fix" sadness.

I say EMBRACE YOUR SADNESS.

This is Who I Am. I am a Sad Person. I am a Crier. And I'm coming out of the closet with my blue ribbon pinned to my skin. Proud to be Down. Flaunting my Abandonment, Protesting Viral Happiness, Capitalizing on the Panic of Loneliness and Loss that are as natural as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Not about to give into prescriptions. This is all natural, this thing of mine. My Time is Now. America's Time is Now. There is no better time than the present to be Sad in America. I'm not about to be shamed into toting my sadness around like it's a habit I'm trying to curb by confessing it at anonymous meetings. Not anymore. Nope. No siree. My sadness deserves to see the light of day, to come out and talk with the others, laugh low and guttural and find a place in this world whose very nature is loss and rebirth. Dude, just to get a little color in my skin, you know? Partake in the Seratonin Elite without all the Laura Ashley and Prada fashion.

So I want to encourage you - come out into the Dark. The Goth kids get it. The punks, but not the disaffected hipsters. Grunge music was its turn-of-the-century love child. Elvis impersonators are the embodiment of a loss that's found a fashionable place to kitsch its camp, just like the gay community has cornered the market on being the alternative, whether for good or bad. We give awards to soldiers, firemen, policeman who see the most fighting because we know they've experienced more than their share of loss, and a medal or a ceremony is all we can do to recognize it. We spend the next several years waffling from Ground Zero plan to Ground Zero plan, never confident enough of incapusulating the spiralling loss that happened there, because all we're really left with is is this amorphous sense of sadness that never really ends. But we still yearn to make it right - to justify, to beautify the missing pieces of ourselves. When all that's left swirling in the hole of loss is sadness, within that, you've got to put your hand out and hold on to what's left of you - whether it's a dance, a scream, a life, a mellowing wisdom, or a secret.

But just be, man. You're - I'm - Still Here. And it sucks. And it's Okay. And it's fucked. But UROK, because we're all sad. We're just afraid that if we say so, we'll be standing at the coffee maker alone and fidgeting.