Who's Sad in America?

SHE is.












She heard the verdict. 50 shots that killed fiance Sean Bell on the morning before his wedding. 3 cops. No charges.

50 shots. 50 shots. 50 shots.

Getty Images' photographer didn't bother to get her name, but she heard that three New York cops were found not guilty on all charges of the shooting death of Sean Bell - and this is the day she's having.

50.

Who Else is Sad ...?

HE is.












I'm betting this cop's sad he didn't ask for this day off like maybe he thought about doing.

50 shots. 50? Really? 50?!

Who Else ...?

THESE GUYS were.












They were sad at some point in the day when some photographer wasn't around to witness it. Maybe privately. Maybe at work when they received an email blast. Maybe in passing at the foot of the steps of City Hall. Maybe years before at a completely different verdict, a different Sean Bell, another time.

But Sadness, when it's just bored with being sad, co-opts into Anger. And Action. And Unity.

And when the day passes, that Sadness ends up looking like this - the face of a group of people who KNOW that this verdict is not about race. Race is too easy. Race is not vogue anymore.

THIS VERDICT IS ABOUT POWER.

Power ... power is harder, more elusive, more, actually, to the point. It's about having too little and too much and WHAT WOULD YOU DO when you have too much

power?
sadness?
anger?

Look at these people -



- it's not about race.

It's about 50 shots.

50 shots of power.

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID OF HIS DARK is.

Met a German guy at a karaoke bar. Dimples. Not the German guy. The bar was named Dimples.

He sat next to me at this celeb-fave bar in Burbank. Burbank, California.

He leaned over my arm and pointed to #135 in the song list book.

"Neil Diamond, yah? 'Forever in Blue Jeans'? Yah?"

I looked up into the brightly squinted blue eyes of who I would come to know later as Dennis.










Dennis Dennis Full of Shame


That’s what I call him now.

In a German accent and stilted laugh, we took turns picking out songs for each other that we’d never sing. We threatened each other with Phoebe Snow songs, pitched our own bravado with Lynard Skynard trivia, and high-fived when we both saw Neil Young’s’ “Old Man” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” at the same time.

Dennis Dennis Full of Shame.
I knew you in 4 songs or less.

"So your accent?"

He said he’s here because he likes the weather and is enjoying American culture. I told him he was cute. He countered with a shy smile and started picking at the label on his beer.

"I’m strange though."

How strange?

"Trust me. Strange. I think these dark thoughts."

"Well, you are German."

And he laughed the bright and innocent laugh of a shy boy who just got poked in the ribs by the loud, laughing girl in the class that he’s been wondering about.

It was so soon, so inappropriate – this conversation. The place, this barstool, the friend I came with and was ignoring because the cute and warm German guy with the dark thoughts is talking to me. I trust him. He’s coughed up something he’s ashamed of already. He’s warning me, testing me. Can she handle me/it/that/them? Can anyone?

So he’s taking himself too seriously too soon.

"What kind of music do you like?" I cut the moment a different way.

He said "dark, mostly electronica."

And I saw him in the paned shadows of moonlight invading his white, starkly decorated Ikea apartment. I saw him standing staring into his opened closet full of darkness and things that only he could see, things he showed no one because no one’s capable of keeping their retinas from detaching in the light of such easy and simple truths that only exist in the otherwise palatable human heart.

I loved him harder and longer and more passionately than any woman, even his mother, could in that one moment. All because he hung his head telling me about the music he loved.

"I’m strange that way."

"How strange? What’s strange?"

"Ask my friends. They’ll tell ya."

I did. And they didn’t. They were drunk. They laughed at me, and they laughed at him. They laughed at him for talking to the girl that would ask why he was strange.

The more I pressed, the more nervous he got. With an empty beer bottle in front of both of us, he crossed his arms and held himself at the bar.



"I think darkly."








"So do I," I coughed up.

He shook his head. "No, I believe in dead people."

And I felt my first wave of hot hazard. Was it because I was stuck in an unscripted M. Night Shymalan script? Was it because he wasn’t at all joking? Was it because he was German, and he would never have thrown that kind of joke around? For any number of reasons?

Hell, I talk to dead people. Every day, at work, at the gas station. Dead people, they're everywhere these days ...

"Do you talk to these people?"

He looked up at me and nodded softly. The lousy drunk karaokers squealed in the background. This freckle-faced, red-headed wide square face looked so odd shielding this shame. He was so bright and sunny on the outside.

"That’s cool."

…

He continued to hold himself tighter. His eyes began to dart ruthlessly around the bar. He feigned a distracted interested in the Lohan-alikes singing “Bloody Sunday” at the mic.

"So are those people – are they evil?" This was a test question.

"No." Simply, no.

"You’ve lost people in your life? That you’ve loved."

That soft nod again. His eyes wide open with feeling and 'is it okay?' A black hole of a pain so seductive, elusive and gorgeous in its simplicity and rarity.

I touched him on the arm. Any words would scare him away. But I wanted him to feel me, in some way, and maybe some spark of my infinite sadness scraping against his conversation with dead people would relieve him, and he’d order another beer, and we’d share more laughs and sorrows at this karaoke bar in Burbank. Burbank, California.

He drew himself away, motioned to his pals he was ready to leave. They gathered all their girls for the evening, packed them up and headed towards the door. I gave him my email because I wanted to stay in touch, send him my little book of pain when I got around to writing it, let him know he’s not alone in the dark. I shook his hand to pass my email to him.

It fell to the ground. Whatever love I had, whatever you want to call it, was laying on the grimy, sticky karaoke bar. He had criminalized my concern, my unrequited concern, by dropping it carelessly. And all of a sudden we both were in this accessory moment.

Dennis Dennis Full of Shame was danger to me now, as I was to him. I loved him until he saw it. I felt him until he felt him. I lost him just when he started to land. Something … something scared him. Was it me?

That night, Dennis Dennis Full of Shame walked out the door, into the night. He left me alone in that stupid bar in Burbank. Burbank, California.

He’s out there. I don’t know where.

I don’t know where …




I don’t know where …



















I don’t know where …






























































































































But I’m out here too …














~~~

Who's Sad in America?

CHERYL LORENZ is.

Nancy is, too. Edward, maybe so, in a different way than Nancy, in a different way than Cheryl.

But Cheryl … Cheryl is the one whose name appears in all the eulogized newspaper articles. She’s taking the phonecalls, she’s making quotes. She’s bearing the responsibility of the end.

This week, the children of Dr. Chaos lost their father.

We will never know if Cheryl and he had a good relationship or not. Dads and Daughters … opposing ends of the familial spectrum in age, in sex, in viewpoints of the world.

And yet, both define each other’s intake of all things. A daughter’s sense of protection, stillness and strength come from her father. A daughter’s sense of humor comes in her father’s ability to present a stable or instable world for her. A dad’s understanding and sense of beauty, delicacy, place in society and social grace comes from his daughter’s genetic predisposition to care about such petty things. And a dad’s fragility is held tight in the soft palm of his daughter’s happiness.

A scientist’s daughter? A Daughter of Dr. Chaos? Well, one can only speculate what twists and turns their relationship have taken in the storm of familial weather patterns.

But since Tuesday, April 16, I’ve wondered about her. Cheryl. She’s the only one interviewed about the loss of the man at chaos' horizon. I’m assuming she’s the one calling the mortuary, calling the lawyers, receiving perfunctory notes of condolence – some polite, some political, some passionate – from his colleagues, protégés and adversaries. She’s survived him and his patterns, like Nancy and Edward, but she’s the one the scribes are quoting in the face of the end of her own particular chaos.

Eh, chaos never ends, really - it just begins again. But the man who started explaining that cycle to us - that Brazilian butterfly’s flap provoking a Texas tornado - is gone. His brain, his hope, his spirit, his future discoveries and philosophies, his unending quest to contain and predict the unpredictable – it’s gone. With the finite nature of this human constraint, there’s only irony left in this man’s disappearing act. Will he be buried? Will he be cremated? Will his atoms, protons, dormant viruses, cells be tossed into the winds of today, only to bring about the stolid knowing of one young scientist in 25 years that explains why we need to make sense out of chaos? Will his cells find a way to describe our need to storytell, mythologize and theologize the meaning in the meaningless? In my mind, there’s just no sense / no order / only chaos in losing a man who set into motion a path of conviction that could only serve to bring us to a global resolve of change. Sure, there are his students and followers. But the man is gone.

What’s left is his residue. What Cheryl’s left with … what damage, what growth patterns, what papers books and things left unsaid and world-changing things written. She and her siblings are the ones cleaning up after his tornado blew through their hallways, bedroom, late-night kitchen snacks or studies. And we're all left with a choice of carrying on for him or because of him.

A daughter’s loss of dad is a messy thing. I’m sure her middle-aged tears don’t make sense to her, if she indeed does cry for him. My own sadness for this NPR report that stopped me in my tracks - doesn't make sense to me, either. But then again, a complicated mourning of a lost relationship with a man driven by something inexplicable – that I know. And that’s probably the reason I’ve felt for their family this week, more than perhaps a stranger should.

The loss of Father Chaos. Creationists won’t miss him. Farmers won’t, either - they’ve been predicting weather for centuries – nothing new under their sun that he wrote papers about. His Ivy League buddies might. Meterologists will. Science won’t because he’s not vogue anymore.

But Cheryl will, good relationship or bad. When the man who explained chaos to you as a child dies, all sense in the world goes with him.

And as I write this, at 12:20pm on Sunday, April 20, 2008, the family, the followers and the others prepare to gather for the memorial service in Cambridge, Mass., for a man that prompted us as well to make some sense of the world for a brief time in the 20th century. As the weather changes, a traditional storm’s intensity compounds, and the ice caps melt into our souls’ histories, we are left with Chaos’ daughter, Complexity.

... it just never ends ...

For all daughters who have lost their fathers to science, or to love mis-expressed, or to tragedy, or to nature. This is for them …

~~~

Photo is Argentina's Gerogina Bardach during the women's 200m butterfly qualifiers of the South American Aquatics Championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on March 14, 2008. Courtesy of MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images.