The Crier's Manifesto

Who's Sad in America?

2009-11-28T10:10:00.016-05:00

3172 ESTES is.

According to The Commercial Appeal, Jan. 20, 2008, it looks like my childhood home has passed hands again. This is, I believe, the fourth owner? since it was built in 1968 in what was then called a subdivision of Memphis, TN. In the wake of Memphis' ongoing struggles with race, class and with a resounding assassination coming in a spring storm, my dad bought it to move his wife and two girls out of Midtown, away from the trouble. Midtown, to this day, still struggles with crime, yet artists and college students continue to populate with a shrug of the shoulders, keeping it possibly the most stable and safest of Memphis' historical streets.

Since dad sold our single family home in East Memphis after a good solid 30 years of livin' and dustin' and fightin' and growin' and leavin', there've been three names attached to it. I wonder if anyone can settle in there besides us Dowdas ...? Were we the only family able to eat off the dinner table balancing atop the foundation laid by some developer's turning a xenophobic buck off of my GI bill father? Were we the only ones that could make it last?

It remains to be seen, what family will survive 3172 Estes.

The following was written in 2004. I have nothing to lose any longer by holding on to it, so here it is:

In Search of Lisa Marie, Summer 2004

Two days after my dad's funeral in May of this year, I decided to go to 3172 Estes and ask kindly of the stranger now living there to oblige me a walk around the house one last time. It was Memorial Day in Memphis, TN. My sister and I had a huge falling out on the day before the funeral, involving a security guard and an official escort to my car from dad's efficiency apartment. When I say 'one last time,' I meant this to be the last time this family ever raked me over the coals. I wanted peace. I wanted to smile at the ugly paneling. I wanted to be willfully jarred by the different style of furniture of the second family giving it a shot in this brick home.

I wanted to see the pecan tree in the backyard that I scaled countless times, a refugee from the silent tension of my dad and mom ignoring the huge elephant of Sex and Cancer that was genetically seeded in the sediment of our family. I wanted to see Velvet's grave and doghouse. I wanted to smell the mustiness and mold that was always in my closet – that ruined my clothes and sent me to school consistently smelling like a forgotten dishrag. I wanted to remind myself that I wasn't living nor trying to survive in that house or that family any longer.

If obliged, I would walk into that house, and see another family loving and living, and the nightmares would stop, or at least relocate themselves in a different setting. Either way, there must be peace upon closing the door.

On the front door, a brass doorknocker read "DAVIS" in cursive type. The house holds no loyalty. So soon does it open its doors and subsume any sign of life. So soon. I googled my house previously and found that it had been sold to a "Carlos Davis." A Latino "Davis"? Italian? Spanish? These names didn't match. I had no idea what face of which angles and shadows would be on the other side.

I knock on the door, step back a little bit. Wait. Step back a little more. The white iron decorative piece hanging on the red brick wall beside me is a decorative effort leftover from my mother. The two oak trees in the front yard are blowing in an unusually cooling May breeze. They shade the entire house now. They are the work of my father. When I was 6 or 7, they were no taller than me but lovingly planted, nursed and watered vigilantly by my father. He worried over their growth, one different than the other – slower, shorter and thinner than the other. Yet, here they both stand tall and keeping the house's utility bill down. My father must've hated to leave that.

I continue to wait. A little embarrassed. I remind myself, "This is not your house anymore. This is not your house anymore…" But it's a lie because I remember Mama's smile every time someone complimented her on that ugly iron hanging. I know that house like I know the landscape of my own body. I know the reason behind every brick. I know the slant of the driveway. I know the dents in the front yard. I know why I'm knocking on a just 10 year old iron frame door that was hinged to "keep the blacks out" when a neighbor down the street was broken in on.

I stand there listening for my dad's moccasins slapping against the tile and wresting the door open to greet me. From the carport I hear the familiar, so familiar sound of the storm door opening. The sound of the unlocking and loosening of the aluminum door. I recognize it. That sound was my dad coming home, either to ignore me or to give me tasks to do.

I walk over and peek around. Sure enough. A black man in his early 30's stands there on the threshold holding on to the handle, trying to smile.

"Hi, Um, Hi." I don't venture too close, as he seems suspicious of my intent. It is clear I am expected to earn his trust. "My dad just sold this house. I was born and raised in it."

He's smiling curiously, politely. Confused.

"Hi, I'm Lisa," and I extend a hand, and begin moving toward him. He's not budging, but he is watching my feet move. I still. "I just wanted to stop by and see it one last time." He's not moving. His smile is beginning to hit its expiration date.

"Mr. Dowda? Did you know him? He just passed away."

"Naw, naw, I didn't know anybody like that."

His smile has frozen before it's faded altogether. Politeness has quite a grip on all us Memphians. A life raft.

"Ok." I keep putting my hand to my heart. I'm standing there in front of this black man, the only thing standing between me and MY HOME, and I am instinctively acting on my nice-girlness. It's the only negotiating technique my upbringing afforded me. Certainly I can summons the survival skills needed in this land. Any moment now, this man's going to see my need, relent and invite me in. Any moment, this moment will have passed, a new day will rise on the races coming together in ironic justice.

I keep clutching my heart – the Gone-With-the-Wind Melanie negotiation technique ain't working. It's never worked – not on bill collectors, car dealerships, landlords. I keep using it though. He's standing, shifting his weight on his flip-flopped feet, waiting for the white girl to get the hint. I'm blinking in the silence between us, knowing a black man in my own home is the only thing standing between me and it. The last black man that stood on that threshold was the man I was in love back in 1996, trying to get in. The black man that caused my father to disown me from the family. And now Carlos, a black man who could buy his way in, stands there in ownership and authority. Another black man in Memphis. Certainly, this Carlos is someone who'd been living at the hands of a Lazurusian prejudicial discontent and would at least give me a chance.

He exhaled loudly, scuffed a stray string off his foot with the other, adjusted his grip on the door handle, his eyes downcast.

"Um, ok, ok, ok. I'm sorry to bother you." Hand to my heart. He nods and closes the door, locks it. Then closes the wooden door and locks it. I walk down the driveway on which I taught my dog to fetch the morning newspaper. Down the driveway on which I played countless games of solitaire jacks. The driveway on which I crashed my bike, sustained a swollen and bruised blue chin of such a size that my mother forced me to wear gloppy pink makeup to conceal it. One more walk down the driveway, I get into my rental car, take a deep breath, crank up the MAGIC 101 R&B, and hit the road.

Maybe it's the house. Maybe it was never the family dynamic. Maybe it was the intent of the developers – to sell to people who needed to make a new life away from a more dangerous one. Maybe it's the architects, sketching out the human geography of this bluff city that keeps me at bay, keeps me moving on down the river. Maybe this black man is segregating himself from a community where he was not welcomed or where he was not succeeding or where he couldn't safely raise his children. Maybe it's just the house, built on fear.

But I'm still not welcome in it.

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2009-10-01T09:33:00.006-04:00

MAD MEN are.

Sometimes I just don't understand the world unless it comes from some hand shoved up some character's ass.

So just in case you weren't clear on the concept either, I offer you this:

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2009-07-19T18:45:00.009-04:00

MARK MARON is.

Another self-proclaimed, marginally successful SadHead - WOO HOO!

"I'm not sure when exactly [my comedy style] got angry.

I think it was somewhere around the time I was in college - where I started to realize I was too sensitive, and too shy, and too heady, and too arty to really exist in the world without crying all the time ... I was on that trajectory and then somewhere I said, 'You know what - that guy has to die'" ...

From PRI's "The Sound of Young America"

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2009-07-14T10:54:00.012-04:00

THOSE WHO LIKE SOME ARTFUL IRONY TO THEIR FINANCIAL NEWS are.

In an article published by CNN Money on June 25 and called out on today's Yahoo home page, 14 companies are listed off as "gone bankrupt." But really, REALLY, a lot of 'em stay open and just sort of float in this trendy vernacularian state of the universe. They ain't closing nothing. GM? They're not closing. They're just ... let's say ... laying low and doing the Mark Sanford thing: "Yes, I've been bad. You're right - I suck and I've been totally irresponsible. How about this? How about you hate me for the night. I'll go and sleep in a Howard Johnsons until you are a little less angry and then we'll get back on the horse? Eh? K. You have a good night." (Not to mention that that dude didn't want to spend the $700 million allotted to his state, but was ordered to - wah - but that's another blogpost.)

Nobody's closing but these guys:

Debt Relief USA. Just like stealing - they've taken your fees and identities and info and closed down. Disappeared. Like Linens 'N Things - they're nothing but a website now with text in their codes saying, "If you bought something from us and didn't get it - sorry. Got Lawyer?"

When Debt Relief USA skips town, General Motors probably has hooked them up with a Certified Used ride.

It's all pretty transparent, if you ask me. Really, sort of unoriginal how Bankruptcy is the new Celebrity Rehab.

Below is One Question from their Frequently Asked Questions page:

Q: How do I find a good credit counseling service?
A: Due to a few bad apples, the credit-counseling industry is under enormous scrutiny from both the government, and private consumer-interest groups. Although this is bad for honest credit counselors (and even worse for the not-so-honest ones), it's great for you, the consumer. Search the Web sites of the Federal Trade Commission (www.ftc.gov) and the Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org) for "credit counseling" and you will find all you need to know, including complaints against individual credit-counseling firms.

Secondarily, you can tell right away if a credit-counseling service is legitimate by evaluating the promises it makes. Does it sound too good to be true? If so, then it is. No one can make your debts and/or bad credit disappear, and no one can save you 90% or more -- even 50% is really stretching it. Good credit counselors can typically save consumers 10-35% on their monthly payments, so if a firm promises to do much more, be skeptical of their claims, and of them as a company."

It's all there - in the coded text. Don't be stupid - everyone's stealing and calling it Bankruptcy.

Where's the art in that? Here's art:

D'oh ...

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2009-07-04T21:09:00.006-04:00

HE is.

Maybe forever he is.

...

Isn't it possible that maybe he just didn't want to comeback?

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2009-07-01T11:03:00.013-04:00

TIM KREIDER is.

I can't stop with this guy.

His "Stabbing Story" ...

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2009-06-30T16:32:00.008-04:00

EVERYONE is.

And here I thought it was just me that ruminated about such things.

Check out Tim Kreider's text "Reprieve." It's posted at the troubled blog of the troubled New York Times:

REPRIEVE: "Fourteen years ago I was stabbed in the throat ..."

Also, check out his comic, "The Pain: When Will It End?"

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2009-04-11T12:44:00.011-04:00

THIS GHOST BIKE is.

In Brooklyn, you protect what’s yours, no matter who’s trying to take it. It can be a a girl, a car, a laptop, your hat in a January breeze coming off the Narrows, your dignity.

And in Brooklyn, if you want to keep your bike, the pizza delivery guys and bike shop owners advise to use this type of chain.

But here, someone’s chained up their sadness.

Pedro left the house one day and got collided with by someone else’s cursory car.

And what do you do when you’ve lost your Pedro at the stop sign at 54th and 7th?

I know I have walked past this corner many times and this was not here. Someone perhaps was not moving past the gravity of their missing of Pedro and had to do something. Something was just not right until Pedro’s girlfriend, handball partner or father found the right way to memorialize him without a gravestone.

And now, we all - with our bags of butter, milk or beer - we have to stop. Here. And sit with Pedro’s Ghost Bike. We give pause to the “hit by a car.” We think about the date. We see the white paint crusting and cracking under the spring sunshine and we write the screenplay. Somehow, we assume this was his last bike ride. Or this bike was a routine thing he enjoyed doing or had to do for work. But really, all of it doesn’t matter.

What matters is what we’re left with of Pedro. And we think. And we feel. And we know. And we respect the tragedy of July 10, 2008 of some stranger that I probably stood in line with buying my tomatoes and half-and-half.

There’s an irrepressible movement to sadness that just won’t pass on without its proper due. Loss deserves its place in the sun. Loss needs attention. It deserves eating the whole pizza by yourself. It deserves screwing up on your taxes and your lover and overcompensating at work to keep from going home to the empty nest.

And the sadness that moves us, moves on us, inside us. As our eyes move up and down this memorial of a bike that no longer pedals a life around - whose wheels are painted shut – it is someone’s grief that runs its warm, sweaty hands against us at this impromptu wake locked up at a corner in Sunset Park.

… so dignified … and so sexy. Yes, sexy in its minimalism and stark black and white. And so scary. And so classy, this memorial. So well done. So much pride. Someone thought about it for a while. In this borough of churches, someone chose not just another gravesite that they couldn’t afford anyway. They chose against a graffiti tag or a wall mural clouded by looming condo development. Someone chose vision and permanency. Someone chose grace.

Someone sealed a nobility in defiant anonymity that stole all my breath away, punishing me with taking for granted my own breath by just rolling on.

In the moment that my dog and I stopped and stared, I felt Pedro was just sorta hanging around, crouched on a curb, smoking a cigarette, smiling secretly … softly. Me, who just sort of got stopped by his life in the middle of the sunniest, warmest day yet this spring.

Stopped by the Ghost of Sadness Unrequited. It stopped me, and it moved me to go all the way home, grab my camera and further memorialize it for you.

Pedro got jacked by Life’s Arbitrary DeSelection. Pedro moves among us no longer.

Pedro got stolen.

But somehow, Pedro’s bike moves us still.

###

April 18, 930 AM, The 11th Annual Blessing of the Bikes, New York City

Who's Sad in America?

2009-02-02T17:11:00.005-05:00

THESE FORMER HASIDIC GUYS are.

I can't hardly breathe, listening to their story on NPR.

Abuse Scandal Plagues Hasidic Jews In Brooklyn
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Keep your empathy electric ... and blood off your prayer shawl.

~~~

A note about the photo: Volunteers from the ultra-Orthodox Zaka rescue organization hold up a victim's bloody prayer shawl in the library of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva March 6, 2008 in Jerusalem. Eight Jewish students were killed and nine more wounded when a Palestinian gunman infiltrated the seminary and opened fire before he was shot dead by armed students. (Photo by Avi Ohayon/GPO via Getty Images)

Who's Sad in America?

2009-02-01T14:10:00.015-05:00

Question is: Who's NOT Sad in America?

So quickly the blog has shifted. Our sadness is tidal. So quickly, the levees can’t withstand our dwindling faith in the system, any system - and now we’re standing on the roofs of our houses looking to the government like “what’s next?!”

Or maybe I am a sucker for a hyperbolic metaphor?

In any event, the Fateful Hand of Being Crapped On is not very choosey these days.

When silver-spooned descendent of French royalty and fund manager René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet takes a boxcutter to his wrists in his comfy New York office and positions himself strategically so that he bleeds out directly into a trash can, what have we missed? After dismissing the janitors early that night, to keep from making even more of a mess of innocent people’s lives, he's worried about the carpet cleaners and placing undue stress on even more people?

If I’m a rich guy with homes, businesses, estates, families and friends in both France and New York, and I still feel hopeless when I realize I’ve been duped, what’s really missing? What’s really making me want to kill myself?

It’s not the economy. Only. It’s not the angry clients that he’s indebted to. Only. It’s something more systemic. It’s something so seemingly unanswerable that a 60-something year old, white-collared French man sees the rough-edged end of a boxcutter as his best way out.

What could be so horrible that 60 years does not provide enough perspective?

.
.
.

There’s more self-deaded in America.

NPR and CNN got the press release over the wires this week that our soldiers are popping themselves off at a quicker clip. And that’s the reported ones. That’s not accounting for the countless men, boys, women, daughters that perhaps devise a more honorable Killed In Action scenario for ending their lives. Instead of inflicting their spouses and parents with a relentless horror stuck in their brains, they leave them with an Arlington burial and medal.

In 2008, 128 soldiers are reported to have taken their lives. This amount is higher than that of the whole of civilian America. Army’s score: 20.2 suicided per 100,000. Civilian America: 19.5 suicided per 100,000. I’m no mathematician – but I’m thinking the Army’s looking at some faster-moving percentages than us regular folks looking down the barrel of a gun off-the-clock.

So The Army, a.k.a. The Government is introducing some suicide prevention tactics. Because we Americans don’t conduct suicide missions. We Americans are not terrorists. No no, that’s the other guys. No no, we keep our suicides personal, not ideological. No no, seriously. That's the other guys.

Battlemind. It’s called Battlemind - the program that’s the prescription to save its soldiers from themselves in response to low recruitment numbers.

How about this? GetOuttaThere. That’s another program I’ve heard of that might stop the hemorrhaging of good men being pushed too far.

.
.
.

Then there’s always someone being born to fill the hole of another loss. At the same time, someone’s putting a gun to their head or swallowing Drano, someone else in America is quietly financing the cloning their previous dog.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Go ahead, judge them. We’re all judging them. The only one not judging them is Leona Helmsley because she’s hoping the millionaire dog that survived her will sign off on having her cloned so that she can come back and continue being a bitch.

When Al Roker asks why she sold her jewelry to clone a dog at the price tag of $150K, Nina Otto so articulately states with glassy-eyed conviction, “Ummm, you know, I can always have jewelry. I actually can always have jewelry if I wanted it. I wanted him, if it was going to be … to be part of something … that I gave to make him happen.”

Ah. I see now. … no, no, no, I don’t.

While she's stroking her furry petri-dish fantasy of love and devotion, this guy and his wife get laid off from his tech job with Kaiser Permenente in Southern California –

- so all the family has to die.

His two sets of twins, a daughter and a wife. And himself.

Sure, he was probably a little psychologically exhausted to begin with. Who isn't? Maybe life had always been hard for this man.

“Is there no hope for a widow’s son?” said the fatherless son in his suicide note. All those children were not enough to pad the gap between father and son. He fell in and took everyone with him.

Kaiser Permenente should not be implicated. Poor Kaiser Permenente – they’re just trying to break records delivering ethically implicated births to full term. They’re just trying to be a health care organization in America. “Don’t blame the economy [for familicide],” says forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Poor Kaiser Permenente - just providing healthcare to good hard-working families. (just not jobs)

Meanwhile, Kaiser Permenante holds a press conference about the single mother who gave birth to a much-maligned EIGHT MORE BABIES after a prior litter of 6.

How deep is the hole in her heart that she has to feed it with infertility drugs and death-defying pregnancies? And with no mention of a father or husband or lover, no less. How desperate is Kaiser Permenente’s board of trustees to steal ahead in the race to control nature to take on this single mother’s request for more more more more more more? How did any doctor look this woman in the face and let her lay down on the table and pump her full of too many children that, I DON'T KNOW, she may be too emotionally needy to raise? Did any doctor consult with his own set of ethics and personal empathy? ANY?

While this woman breeds like spiders with anti-divine intervention, Kaiser Permenente’s doctors and nurses pose for the perfunctory self-congratulatory press photos. (The hospital presumably took this themselves to hand out to the press – there’s no photographer listed.)

So while a dog is cloned and a herd of children circles up, a soldier, a father and a financier find themselves at the end of their rope.

What’s that phrase – when God closes a door, he opens a window?

Yeh, a window to jump out of.

Keep your ears open and your empathy electric. If you’re worried about things this year, there’s someone around you that’s already bought the farm and has convinced him or herself that no one’s going to miss them when they’re gone.

Keep your empathy electric. We need you awake. This is not a M. Night Shyamalan script we're in.

This is a trend. Killing yourself has become the new black.

And there’s nothing standing in its way besides our yet-to-be-found ability to cling to each other – all 750,000 of us standing in line at the Unemployment Office.

"Hi, I'm from Starbucks."
"Citibank, here."
"Lehman Bros., yo."
"Over here, AIG and Starbucks - yeh, I lost them both at the same time."
"Ford."
"Hey, yo, I'm here from a Long Island City dealership, c'mere, man, shake my hand!"
"Yo, I was laid off from a small business you never heard of."
"Red Lobster - my boss just got all nervous for no reason and got rid of 6 of us today. We were freaking slammed yesterday and now today, he lost it. I'm a cook."

How much worse does it have to get until we realize that each of us are alone, yes, and so therefore, we are not?

How much worse does it have to get, President Obama? You keep warning us that the darkest is coming before we get our dawn.

What’s it going to take before someone starts telling us to come out of our houses of terror and take the hand of someone else?

What’s it going to take?

What’s it going to take to spread the wealth? Are we really going to call it socialism if it saves our lives? If it brings us together for a little stop gap on the livelihood hemorrhaging? This is not Che, this isn't Red Square, this isn't Stalin, Kant, Nietzche or even Nader. This is your neighborhood crumbling.

Mark my words: Change will come in the spring. That’s when all the guns come out. People get a little Vitamin D under their belts and hopelessness gets a little energy and the shootings will start. Remember that, right now, we’re only in the Winter of Our Discontent.

12:18 pm, 2.26.93: The Truck Bombing at the World Trade Center
12:07 pm, 4.19.93: The ATF Siege on the Branch Dividian Compound in Waco, Texas
9:02 am, 4.19.95: The Truck Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
11:19 am, 4.20.99: The Columbine Shootings in Littleton, Colorado
7:15 am, 4.16.07: Virginia Tech massacre

These were people who are operating at a Loss, Barely Getting By in the Emotional Red, Sucking Whatever Love They Could Off the Familial Lack, Down with the Not-In-My-BackYard Lack of Resource. These are people like the cloning couple and the breeding mother and the killing father.

It’s not about the economy, that’s right. But it is about our own internal resource of well-being that is just not there for us to lean on right now.

And it ain’t over till the Fat Cats stop feeding. And we all get off the roofs of our houses and start swimming.

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2009-01-05T09:12:00.019-05:00

THE LIBERALS are.

Man, what a buzzkill ...

Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, This is the News of the First Monday of 2009:

Bush Sr. is on Fox News promoting his other son for president.

Did someone lose the pruning shears at the White House?

I know some rabid Democrats that are already up this morning at 530am with their various intoxicants. I know some Democrats that are already losing faith and hope and whatever else happens when your vote wins. I know some Republicans that aren't necessarily relieved to see something like this.

And I know some recently laid-off journalists and comedy writers that are breathing a sigh of relief and billing right now for Monday's assignments and jokes.

What the Republicans know about the Democrats and Independents and various otherly titled offenders is that this emailed link will spin the wheels off of some of the best internet providers. What the Right knows about the Left is that there is a traditionally hysterical, terrified, scared and flagging demographic to feed on. Just like the Left and the Media (they're not the same) fed on that woman standing up in a McCain rally and saying Obama was a Muslim, so too will the Left feed on this.

And the Right can relax for a couple of weeks as the carbon footprint of the Bush Family quietly widens.

~~~

The video, naturally, was found at www.huffingtonpost.com.

The photos, found at Getty Images, are of the triumvirate godhead boating in August 2007, and the Bush family gathered on December 25, 2008, at the White House.

Who's Sad in America ...

2008-11-21T13:31:00.006-05:00

... When All You Have is YouTube to Witness You?

Click on the above Who's Sad in America to see what I'm talking about.

I'm watching my clock to see how long it takes for parents to sue YouTube for this.

"He posted a suicide note, where he said he had hurt other people and hated himself for being a failure."

Who's going to sue the radius of people that let this man slip so far off the radar?

And why is an Australian website reporting on it? Who heard this story first - Fox News or Australia?

19-year-old Abraham K Biggs commits suicide live on webcam

Shame on us - for throwing yet another 19 year old man away. Shame on us ...

###

Who's Sad in India?

2008-09-17T10:52:00.022-04:00

CHAYYA LAL was.

...

IS.

There’s a strangelet dying to be discovered.

There’s a girl in India dying not to see it.

There are scientists holding their breaths, crossing their fingers, assuring their families that in 50 days, they’ll still be here, feet firmly planted on the ground.

And there are bankers in New York and London contemplating the gravity of their actions, their choices, their workaday assumptions.

This is a black hole that we’re already in. Chayya felt it a little more than the rest of us did/do. Some people just feel drawn to a black hole’s gravity more than the rest of us. Some people find the Possibility of Things teeming with such horror that it’s easier to swallow poison.

There’s a lot of Possibility in the air these days – an election year, an Iran, and Iraq War, Russia’s restless, the oil, the air, the texting, the texting, the texting …

And a few coincidental days after that Collider got bumping, the US financial markets started falling apart. We can’t see that happening, but we hear about it. Most of us have no idea how it’s going to affect us, but nor did we understand how the blips and bleeps of the digital world of information would change us either. Nothing you can see, but you know you’re different.

A symptom of what’s shaking underground in Geneva? The smell of a Tower of Babel Society?

There’s dark matter out there/in here/sitting next to you and yet …

We Americans feel stronger now. So far away from the 9/11 attacks, even now, with our losing our homes and pricey tomatoes and gallons of milk poking holes in our savings, we still feel stronger. We see the Lehman employees hitting the road with their bankers boxes full of cubicle contents and personal effects and we think, “Eh, they have a savings, they’re loaded. They don’t affect my rent … all their monolopolizing Excel spreadsheets – nope, nothing to do with me.”

And the scientists with their particle-smashing machines and a new generation of black hole believers…

Nothing to do with me.

But there’s me … and there’s Chayya Lal. There’s some future we’re sensing here. And it’s terrible … terrible in the old Latin way.

And there’s this guy looking down from his Lehman office.

This office that was bought for $650 million after the World Trade Center office went down in less than an hour. This office that gave its employees a feeling of surety … without the ‘S.E.C.’

And as these people crowd down below looking up at him -

New Yorkers look up when the Terrible starts raining down. They know that his life’s collapse today will be the fallout that they’ll feel for days to come. Remotely, directly, laterally. Not sure how, not sure when, but their eyes are cursed with a certain particle-smashing knowledge that Things ARE NOT Okay.

I leaned over the shoulder of a young guy reading the newspaper on the morning train, and I saw this small article on an Indian girl who took control of her chaos before it spread beyond control. I leaned over the shoulder of a guy I’ll never see again and felt a girl’s fear 28 hours away from me. I couldn’t look away.

And all I felt was chaos.

Maybe she didn’t want to feel it happen – the world colliding, the world smashing. Was too smart or too weak to watch the universe expand in its complex ways and to be a part of it.

Maybe I’m too dumb, too overeducated, too isolated and too weak, too spiritually limited, too terrestrially contained, too voyeuristically driven, too LITTLE to off myself too. Maybe I’m just too stunned standing in the light of all of the dilemmas of world of + and -. Maybe I’m just lazy and scared and full of fear and I’m scared of dying at my own hand. Maybe I want to give that baton to the Laws of Physics and Averages.

But I’m sad she’s gone. Particle-smashing is not so scary if you’re just willing to fall apart a little. But maybe if she fell apart, she’d fall into a black hole of never landing and she’d see you or me clinging to the walls and say, “Oh, shit! Really?”

I don’t know. Maybe her family was neglecting her and her choices as a teenage girl sucked ass. Maybe someone took advantage of her. Maybe her secrets… maybe she’s full of holes herself and that was just enough.

But what happens to her body – where do her particles go, once her soul has left? Is she a more manageable form of matter now? In two crowded countries, suicide’s becoming the population control.

These self-killed people – they’re still here, somewhere, somehow. Not haunting, but pulsing on the wind, living in the water, beatboxing from the morgue. Just changing the form of matter. Never leaving. Never not staying. I refuse to think people just die (with the exception of my own father). I refuse to think that people are garbage and just thrown away, their impact ceasing. That garbage is in a landfill turning into something else. A methane stroking your skin in the fall breeze.

Think twice about Chayya and particle smashing and your shot friends and your hung sisters. The planet is recycling us, not letting us go, sloughing off bits of ourselves into its own shower. We’re never clean. Never new. Forget it.

.
.
.
.
.
.

Where is Chayya Lal now?

Has she become part of the deepening black hole of the rest of us remaining?

Was she alone, in her fear?

Is she still afraid? Is she right here? Now?

What she feared about the end of the world, she took control of. In Science’s poetic way to control its world, there is the possibility that what collapses us, recreates us.

:recreate
:recreate
:recreate
:recreate

.
.
.
.
.
.

… … … She can’t be just gone.

And her sadness and fears are not over. She just passed them on to me.

:re-mecreate
:re-mecreate
:re-chayyacreate
:re-chayyacreate

.
.
.

"Listen to the depressed people who have a feeling something’s bad in the air because often it is. The idea that we repress our unhappiness rather than listen to it is just as dysfunctional psychically as it is physically. If your leg is broken, the pain is there for a reason. You don’t just take morphine, you reset the leg. …

To be conscious at this point in human history is to be sad. "

~ Marianne Williamson

~~~

Who's Sad in America?

2008-04-26T15:26:00.008-04:00

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?

2008-04-20T14:41:00.012-04:00

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?

2008-04-20T13:55:00.006-04:00

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.

Who's Sad in America?

2007-12-28T10:23:00.001-05:00

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?

2007-12-25T16:45:00.001-05:00

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?

2007-11-18T19:37:00.002-05:00

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?

2007-11-14T14:16:00.000-05:00

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?

2007-11-13T14:48:00.001-05:00

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.