The Sum Of Some Parts

When life hands me brain pudding, I make dehydrated coconut oil, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, gray matter, cocoa powder and tri-calcium phosphate out of it. It offers me a sense of control; if I can take something apart I can understand it and reconstruct it in a way that is more conducive to my interpretation of reality.
When I was a child I would pull apart my toys. I had boxes full of bike and skateboard parts never to roll again. The Dalai Lama takes watches apart to help him meditate on the vastness of the universe. American football fans systematically separate their favorite teams and gel them into “fantasy” leagues. Deconstruction is a good first step to reconstruction. High school anatomy classes use dissection because it is the most accurate way to explain muscular and skeletal structure.
There are of course many things that would be better left misunderstood and intact. The first few years of most presidencies, for example, are mostly devoted to picking apart the hard work of the previous administration. When Clinton left office with a $230 million surplus in 2000, the Bush administrations first response was to pick apart this progress to better understand what their financial strategy should be. Unfortunately had they “stayed the course” the national debt could have been paid off by 2012.
Many of the relationships I have had would probably have stood a better chance with out me picking at them. Most of my wounds would probably heal nicely had I not been so enamored with what happens when I unravel my sutures.
Questioning leaves nasty scars. I have been picking at a fresh scab for the last few weeks.
One of my oldest and dearest friends, a girl with whom I spent a substantial portion of my youth romantically involved with, was murdered while traveling the country conducting research for a project she called “collective autonomy” (living free and independently together) and I can’t help but ponder the what ifs.

If someone in New Orleans had been paid to counsel parents on the importance of physical interactions and reading out loud to their infants, if those parents took that advice to heart, if those parents made enough money to give their child every ounce of education, every sports uniform and every toy for every birthday if that kid never felt alone, awkward or deprived, if that kid didn’t turn into a desperate teenager who felt alienated and forgotten by a country hell-bent on neglecting its desperately impoverished, if that teenager was taught how to deal with anger and depression in a constructive way by someone sincere and reliable.
If there were better streetlights in the 9th ward.
If in 1965 when the Mississippi gulf outlet was completed, someone would have noticed that it intensified the power of hurricanes by more than 20%. If the levees didn’t break; if FEMA and the president hadn’t avoided and mismanaged every element of recovery.
If they had seen my friend’s smile when she used to hold my little sister, or when she talked about social equality.
If someone, anyone, along the way had seen this person and shown them a fraction of the love I felt for the woman they murdered, maybe there would have been a different outcome, and she would still be alive.
Deconstruction like this only works to reconstruct whatever trauma inspired it. Taking apart reality in this way leaves me with an unfortunate result; the world is laid out in front of me in nice pieces, each one detached and disassembled, and I can’t for the life of me remember how to put them back together in a way that works.
Controlling things has little to do with understanding them and even less to do with taking them apart. Football teams still lose regardless of a fantasy league. The Dalai Lama is still left with piles of springs and no answers, and I am left with one less friend and a thousand more questions.

Freedom Of Speech...what?

When did the definition of diplomacy change from being tactful to being vague and meaningless in order to dance around the truth? Why is it that elections have more to do with being polite than being poignant?
Politics would be so much better with a real vocabulary. Can you imagine how interested the populous would be if every time a member of the GOP said “maverick” they used the term “fucking bad ass” instead? Essentially “bad ass” is what they are implying and if they were truly “mavericks” they would have the balls to use the appropriate vernacular.
I respect Barack Obama’s positive attitude. His willingness to use terms like “change” and “hope” (when what he is implying that we need “change” from the past eight years of horrifyingly unprecedented “hope”-lessness) is a testament to his sincerity. Using uplifting language and double positives (“more good”) in place of heavy double negatives (“less bad”) is a thoughtful tactic employed by many high school guidance counselors and authors of books about quitting smoking. Unfortunately the results of this kind hearted illusory tend to be a lot of passive-aggressive pundits and a confused populous.
I would prefer my politics a bit more honest (wow, that is a ridiculous sentence). I sincerely feel that the way our country is run would be dramatically different if we allowed our politicians the freedom of speech.
I can remember vividly the day my world changed from one trapped behind a thick veil of miscommunication to one liberated by an open vocabulary. I am speaking of the day I was given the gift of swear words.
I was at my father’s house in Northridge; he had picked me up from daycare and had driven me back to the Valley. I was in the fourth grade. I had no friends. I was abnormal, and no one could determine if I had ADHD, or if I was so gifted that my classes bored me. I would be placed in a gifted program one week then a remedial program the next. My parents tried therapy and special education programs based in different learning styles. They tried private tutors and personally explaining every homework assignment. None of it worked. In all honesty, I was just really good at abhorring school.
My teacher, Mr. Johnson, did not feel that my troubles were anything but sheer stupidity. My parents had many a proper sit-down with Mr. Johnson, the principal, and my elementary school guidance counselor. Meetings where, I am told, tears were shed, threats of physical violence were exchanged and my divorced, young, embittered parents were absolutely civil with each for the first and last time in years.
Mr. Johnson smelled of English Leather and coffee; a stench that lingered through 20 years of bourbon and depression. He also did not have the patience and compassion that my parents and other teachers had.
Mr. Johnson’s solution, derived from more than two decades as a fourth grade teacher, was to place me and my desk in a big cardboard refrigerator box in the back of the room. He would hand me assignments at the beginning of the day and I would pick my nose and weight for the bells to signal recess, lunch and finally my release to afterschool care. The other kids called me “Box Boy”. I was not at all happy or more educated at the end of the year.
So when my father saw my frustration that night in Northridge he could empathize. He knew what was bothering me and he had been working hard to make it better. He asked me what was wrong; I told him that in order to truly express myself I would need to use words that were inappropriate for a child to be using with his father. He said there were no such words,
“Mr. Johnson is a fucking asshole,” I said. My father welled up, smiled and hugged me.
“Yes he is son, yes he is,” He replied.
In that moment I was freed. I still barely passed the fourth grade, Mr. Johnson was still an evil man, but no longer was I afraid to express myself appropriately or diplomatically. I could express myself accurately. Since that day I have been working hard to use every word I know to express exactly what I feel.
Can you imagine where politics would be if we suddenly liberated them from the mindless bureaucratic doublespeak and allowed them to tell us just how fucked up everything is and what specifically they’re going to do in order to get this country’s shit straight?

untitled

My girlfriend asked me this week if I considered myself to be a nostalgic person and the only thing I have been able to think of since is The Beatles. Wedged deeply into America’s soundtrack, they are like a bad political bumper sticker on the back of a VW bus that is so dated that it is ironic and suddenly hipper than ever.
America wants to like The Beatles like a high school freshmen wants to like the taste of beer; it would just make it so much easier to be cool. Unfortunately numbers speak louder than empty cans of Natty Ice and Americans don’t actually buy many Beatles albums. In fact just over 19 million copies of The White Album (The Beatles’ best selling record to date) have been purchased in America, thus making it the ninth most popular album of all time. Behind The Eagles, Michael Jackson and yes, Shania Twain, sales of The White Album look a bit gray.
For years I have wanted desperately to like The Beatles. I wanted to identify with the different emotional elements their songwriting captured. I want to be able to say things like “God, I feel like Paul’s blues phase this week,” or “I need some Ravi Shankar John today.”
I tried to like the Beatles like a chubby kid trying to like karate, pretending I didn’t mind being slapped in the face with their overplayed anthems filled with cliché and pretense. I had to con myself into it. Initially I created activities that incorporated their music into my routine. It was a practice in systemic desensitization that involved a lot of dishonesty with my friends, lovers and most shamefully myself. My attempts consumed my Sunday mornings, my late night drives and destroyed a lot of good writing. In the end I have learned to love The Beatles the way old people have learned to love war.
I recently lost an estranged friend to breast cancer. We were contemporaries in a spoken word poetry scene. We were romantic and we were wildly competitive in our writing. Our relationship was often fodder for feeding our performances into intense emotional outbursts. Oh yeah, it was uncomfortable, often unkind, childish and unbelievably fun.
She was a true Beatles fan. Not to be measured by an accumulation of obscure first edition pressings of side projects of side projects. Not the kind of fan whose walls are a paper mache of “Let It Be” posters and framed album covers. Not even the kind of fan who prides themselves on knowing who sang, wrote or recorded what song. She was what I like to call second generation Beatles; her need/love was something delivered by lineage. An indelibly sincere dependency bestowed upon her at birth by a crazy hippy mother and a youth full of balding love children that honestly believed “all they needed was love.” Unfortunately rent is not paid in lyrics.
Some children are the best of their parent’s bad habits. Bronwynn was platinum 19 times over in her mother’s “Hey Jude” (she made it a point to play this song for me every opportunity she could in hopes that I would eventually get it; I didn’t). When Bronwynn met adversity, she faced it with a confidence and calmness that I have rarely seen, often not appearing to understand the true severity of situations and often times emasculating them with her cool.
Some children are raised on bible verses; they use their faith in rote memorization of psalms and allegory to bend the world into paradigms of good and bad, of right and wrong. When reality diverges from their terms of reason we get things like sin, guilt and doubt. She saw the world in terms of love, revolution, LSD and octopus’s gardens. When reality unfairly bent away from this matrix she bent it back (often with alcohol and self destruction unfortunately) and my, what a ride she had. This also was paramount in creating one of the most sincerely agreeable dispositions of any human being I have ever met. Forgiveness, compassion, humor and, as trite as it sounds, unquestioning, unconditional relentless love. America wishes we could like The Beatles like that but we can’t, that’s what made Bronwynn. I am trying so hard to like them, but it is just so much harder to convince myself without her.

Innocence Costs

Oh, the cyclical nature of demystification; it’s as though growing up is as much about realizing your own capacity for stupidity as it is about overcoming said stupidity. Losing innocence is as much about realizing that you have something to lose as it is about rubbing mutual pink parts. The smartest people I know are not those who know the greatest number of things about stuff, rather those who know how much they don’t know. More than puberty, your first beer or your first “real” job, it seems that growing up is about figuring out what growing up is.
In 2008 there were 350,000 children under the age of 18 serving time in jail in the United States, there were more than 720,000 teen pregnancies (80% of which were unwanted or unintended) and over 5,000 drivers under the age of 20 were killed in car accidents. These are definitley severe examples, but American youth is about making stupid booboos that scar over into the calluses of adulthood.
However, it is a common misconception that one traumatic event is a eureka moment of everlasting maturity. Humans are habitual dunces, and bad ideas have a tendency to work like Jenga blocks. Cutting corners and taking risks becomes a test of creativity, until inevitably all the little wood blocks collapse(at which point we vow never to take such “immature” risks again whilst simultaneously setting the pieces up for another round). In this way, growing up is about learning how to eat crow, humble pie and shit, while still showing up to play again tomorrow.
I live in Los Angeles where there are roughly 3.2 million parking tickets issued a year. The city collects $113 million annually due to parking citations alone. In any given year I am responsible for at least a few thousand of those dollars.
This is not because I am a terrible parker or because I accumulate, say, fifty $40 meter violations in 12 months. No, no, this is the handy work of letting a handful of tickets double, then triple then go to collections where they accumulate a collector’s fee for a few months. Every time this happens and I inevitably cowboy up and head to the downtown courthouse checkbook in hand. I stand in line behind an army of angry, slighted, suffering Angelinos (just like me). I then cut a check for a few months rent or a down payment on a car or a few semesters at community college; enough to level my savings to a pancaked flat line. Every time I vow, I honestly commit to myself, “No way dude, never again. You’re a grown up now, man. Grown ups don’t do this.”
As the tickets pile up again the same unexplainable ridicules behavior piles up right along side. This is not growing up; this is just stupid.
If I changed my behavior I wouldn’t be any more “grown up”…just less broke. Growing up, it seems, is learning that no amount of assumed responsibility can suddenly propel you into the realm of adulthood. Its about coming to terms with your bone headed tendencies and moving past the ones that you can while enjoying the ever quickening momentum of mortality. Growing up is about taking what you get and going with it, as simple as that may seem. It’s about facing the day clueless with a handful of fellow hopefuls and being brave enough to pretend you are not all terrified.
It’s about yelling at the gods from the top of the mountain, “Yeah, I may have to push this rock up this hill for eternity, but I’d rather have balls than be an angel!”
There are plenty of people who move past their pitfalls and remain imbecilic teenage-minded thirtysomethings. There are plenty adult minded folk who are still crippled by repeated stupid investments (sub-prime mortgages, bad college loans, car notes). Do these tremendously overbearing mistakes automatically grant them the title of adult?
More than 5,000 small businesses declared bankruptcy last month. On average 56% of American entrepreneurs don’t make it past the first three years of commerce. Bad decisions are what the American dream is all about. Finding happiness regardless is what growing up is all about.

Welcome to the Working Weak

It’s hard to argue about jobs. Are you doing a good job? Do you have a good job? Does your job have an important social impact? If not, is your job worth doing? Who will be affected and in what way if you don’t do or have your job? What would happen if you lost your job? This kind of panic is what makes American capitalism.
Essentially there are two schools of thought: One, a job matters because you make money doing it, therefore allowing you the liberty to do things you want to do when not doing the job. In this school of thought a job’s worth is measured first by the amount of money you make (the larger and more outlandish the better), second by how much time the job takes up (the smaller and less painful the better) and lastly by the relative joy to suffering ratio that the job creates. He whose hearse has the flashiest rims wins. Bill Gates-one, Jesus-zero.
Two, a job matters because society benefits from the job, thus emasculating the almighty dollar, but allowing the worker no freedom from their work. By this edict, the importance of a job has nothing to do with the benefit to the worker. Most of us would like to fall into this category alongside the mothers, martyrs, social activists, and artists. We often fail to recognize, however, that this is also the category of public rest room sanitizers and community organizers. Barack Obama-one, Sarah Palin-zero. He whose hearse is a sea of ready weeping hands wins.
I am willing to say that nether of these ideals are remotely part of the average American’s nine to five. A Gallop poll released in late August showed that 48% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs, but only 28% are satisfied with the amount of money they make and only 45% are satisfied with the amount of recognition they receive for their accomplishments. People want to get paid and hugged, simple as that.
A waiter can depend on neither of these.
A maverick young restaurateur who is as devoted to my future as John McCain is devoted to the environment recently purchased the restaurant that employs me. I am comfortable in my job like a polar bear on an icecap, in the Gulf of Mexico, drifting next to a NRA cruise ship.
Every week a new apparatus gleaned from some productivity conference at a Four Seasons in the Midwest is introduced into my work. I then have to incorporate this piece of corporate handiwork into waiting tables. It’s kind of like an archeologist studying dinosaur shit in order to understand the Ming Dynasty.
Sometimes, it’s a new mantra flashing across every computer screen. Sometimes it’s a new “flow” for the dining room, to best intimidate customers into spending more money than they can appropriately tip on. My favorite was the introduction of handheld palm pilot devices that allowed me to send orders to the kitchen from the table. I felt like I was a waiter on the Starship Enterprise. My job matters, I don’t. However, slopping Chinese food to tourists does not exactly qualify me for martyr status; there is no larger impact of the service I provide other than the temporary experience of having a nice meal. Therefore I cannot count on the social impact of my work to keep my morale in check.
I work for a subjective monetary representation of gratitude, and I work hard. If I am exceptional at my job, the best waiter ever, what I walk home with is still completely unpredictable. I make a lot of money when compared to other service industry jobs especially considering the total hours I work. However when taking into consideration the median annual U.S. household income ($50,740) I don’t actually make much money at all. I cannot depend on the amount of money I make to keep my morale in check.
So what can I depend on to stick me through the shift? The recession! That’s right, in times of recession and high unemployment Americans’ job satisfaction usually experiences a bump. This is the same kind of logic that assures you that having your finger sawed off won’t hurt a bit because at least it’s not your leg. Hugs or tax cuts, social change or financial gain, it’s really all about fear of pain.

American pie; how rich?

You have to eat. Regardless of economic or educational hierarchy, regardless of physical or mental strength, regardless of will, want or wage, everyone has to eat. All are created equal in the eyes of the almighty apatite. What we eat defines us politically. Food on average travels 4,000 to 5,000 miles in America. Taking beef and dairy out of your diet can have the same effect as driving 8,000 less miles a year. The carbon dinner plate is adding a bitter flavor to the all-American comfort.
In America, the poor don’t have the convenience of guilt; pocket book voting is a privilege granted only to those with a pocket book. In Los Angeles, the poor don’t pine over ingredients to make their meal more eco friendly, they just don’t cook. The problem has gotten so bad city council created a moratorium on building fast food establishments in inner city communities. Nationwide, the highest rates of obesity and heart disease related to eating cheap calorically dense and fat rich fast foods lie in households making between $20,000 and $30,000 a year. In my neighborhood mercado they simply don’t sell fat-free anything.
Once on tour in Plattsburgh, New York, I met a kid named Blake working in a coffee shop. Plattsburgh is a tiny hippie college town with less than 19,000 people in upstate New York. In the winter, it’s cold; in the summer, it’s hot. Food there was something families did to ease the grip of the elements. Blake made his body a testament to his family’s comfort and tradition. He had a half stack of his mothers flapjacks tattooed on the inside of his left bicep. He had his family’s kitchen table tattooed on his rib cage. These were images in which he found comfort; they were the tools used to build tradition and solidarity.
The median income in Madera, California is less than $30,000 a year. Bye far Madera’s most successful and profitable export is Methamphetamine. It’s a sad dark place directly in the center of one of the richest, brightest states in America. The Fresno Methamphetamine Task Force regularly finds drug coffers in public housing filled with one-gallon Ziploc bags of crystal meth.
When my band stayed in Madera, we slept on the floor of a public provided apartment with three overweight sisters, one of their overweight daughters, one very irritated boyfriend and a fry daddy. No one in the house was over 20, and all of there lives were in some way intertwined with meth.
We met them at our show and they generously offered their home and food. As usual we were in no place to be picky, and we were grateful for their hospitality. On the road, some of the most generous were those with the least to give, those who can only afford to believe in things like music. These are the kinds of people that offer their homes to traveling nobodies but don’t make enough money to be concerned with buying organic. These are the kind of people that can be consumed by dreams of get rich quick schemes like Avon, Herbalife and slinging crystal.
The refrigerator was stocked with typical frozen food-stamp fare. The government had provided them with nutrition fit for a heart attack; taquitos, fried tacos, deep-fried frozen burritos, deep-fried chicken, fish and hamburger patties, Tampico and push-pops. We started the fry-daddy, we ate, we slept and we left. The family didn’t cook with passion; there were no traditions, no kitchen table, no seasonings defining the pallet of unity and love. Food took on a scary role in Madera, it was something the family was ashamed of, because of where it came from (welfare not a paycheck), something that alienated them.
In this country the rich are gladly accepting the alienation of healthy, eco-friendly eating. Eating Green is a welcome burden to those wealthy enough to swallow it, not only does it show a deeper consciousness but deeper pockets as well. Recipes are lost to ingredients, and thus the importance of family is lost to the shallow political statement a meal can make.
So here we have these two extremes. The impoverished, struck with heart disease and diabetes, losing family identity to convenience and subsidy. And the rich, flaunting the luxury to sacrifice for the political impact of their diet. Neither are identifying culturally with their food. Both starved for the substance behind their sustenance. The poor will never get a Big Mac tattooed to their ribs. The rich will never get an organic locally produced jar of hummus on theirs.
Eating is something you must do, but feeling full is something taught to you.

Getting your dollars worth...kinda

We often correlate value with rarity; if something is rare it must be valuable and if something is valuable it must be rare. Rare things are expensive; the first edition of Action Comics (June1938), in which Superman makes his first appearance is said to be worth $440,000, the last record John Lennon ever signed, a copy of Double Fantasy autographed five hours before Lennon was shot, is worth about $525,000.
Counter to this idea, rarely do we equate the things needed for survival with much value.
Is this the best Superman comic and will it most aid your ability to sustain? No, modern comics make this early attempt look like a tofu dog next to a rack of ribs and as far as getting you out of the woods alive one would be better suited with a plastic grocery bag. Is Double Fantasy the best Lennon album? Certainly not (half of the songs were written by Yoko which might actually be a detriment to your survival) but because of humanities desire to detach from the natural world we give irrational value to impractical objects.
In a survival situation two of the most valuable things, things that increase the chances of living exponentially, are not things at all. They are perspectives about the situation that cannot be strapped to a utility belt or bought at REI; a sense of humor and a sense of purpose.
A sense of purpose is manifested most effectively in an injured or near dead member of a group. In all logical terms this makes no sense. It is assumed that the injured should be left for dead. Only the strong survive, survival of the fittest, a bad apple spoils the bunch. But clichés are so cliché. You would never think to strap a martyr to your utility belt, but making a dying person live can make someone believe that their own death is not an option. A sense of purpose is valuable.
A sense of humor is valuable. When you can laugh at the ridiculousness of your situation you no longer are a victim of unreasonable chance and circumstance. It like saying, “Hey, fuck you god, you can take my legs but you can’t take my funny bone.” The heart rate slows and endorphins are released to ease physical pain. Interestingly the active element in your endorphins is morphine, no wonder laughter is so popular in rehab. No one would ever think to pack a whoopee cushion backpacking in the Andes, but the laughter could save your life.
I work in an insanely high volume Chinese restaurant, with a demanding clientele on a competitive slab of real estate. The pressures of this job can be so intense at times that I regularly have coworkers quit mid shift with a section full of hungry tables frothing out the jaws for an plate of crispy sugar meat. On average I train two new servers a week. On average about half of them show up for a second day of work.
I would call this a survival situation. Business usually comes all at once and hard, unpredictable, like a levy breaking or an engine failing. Then suddenly, you are free falling, tray loaded, fake smile cemented, running rapidly for the safety of the moment when all drinks are down, all food is rung in and finally when all checks are printed.
This moment usually resolves in what I call a “red light,” something that makes you stop and change your course of action because a weaker server needs your help. Sometimes they ask; usually they are too blindsided to realize that they even need it. In the dash of a salt shaker, suddenly five tables need refills, two tables need to pay, all of the food is taking an unreasonably long time to cook and a party of 15 (the new owner’s family) just went down. When I begin to fall in and help the drowning server all of the responsibilities to my tables no are longer as dramatically important, they become periphery. It becomes more important to save the dying member than to save my own ass.
When in the heat of a rush I mistakenly order a kung pao chicken “PLANE, NO SAUCE,” instead of “PLAIN, NO SAUCE,” and I have to explain this message to Chef who understands very little English. I am able to laugh at myself and in that moment all of the momentum, all of the pressure is put into perspective.
These pauses are so important to my survival I cannot understand why they are not marketed, traded and sold. They are illogical and common, and of great value to me. In my restaurant I honestly believe that my illiteracy is often my Action Comics #1. It is what is valuable to me, because it is what allows me to survive. My signed Double Fantasy is an empty glass on a co-worker’s table, not rare at all but I need it more than anything I can buy on Ebay.