cannot be created or destroyed

Interesting facts about physics: matter, energy and momentum are all conserved. This means that they cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. For example, a quarter in the fist of an insubordinate juvenile atop a highway overpass has a certain amount of potential energy (PE=MGH). When the insubordinate decides to ruin your day by dropping the quarter onto your windshield, it will reach your car with a certain amount of kinetic energy (KE=MV^2). The amount of potential energy is directly proportional to the kinetic energy (KE=PE or MGH=MV^2). The kinetic energy then turns into heat energy upon impact with your windshield and then that heat energy disperses (not disappears) into the atmosphere. It never disappears.
Yes, the scientific principles that govern reality are just as frugal and recycle-minded we are.
Interesting fact about humans: experiences are conserved. Everything you experience is the consequence of a long series of experiences that have happened before. The world works like an endless series of dominoes or the neck of a giant hourglass where we are pushed through by the weight of all that is behind us. It is impossible to destroy or create what has already happened or what is yet to happen.
Which brings me back to the topic of insubordinate juveniles.
They are the perfect example of social conservation. At thirteen I decided to devote a substantial chunk of my time to juvenile insubordination. After school most days I ran wild in the streets of the small town I grew up in. I skateboarded where I was told not to, I made out with girls who were supposed to be at cheer practice in public parks while I was supposed to be at the library and a handful of times, before I started listening to straight edge hardcore, I smoked weed under a bridge where homeless people slept and little kids dropped coins practicing for their teenage years.
I smoked with the same three kids every time.
Interesting facts about the three kids I smoked weed with under the bridge: one is now dead due to an overdose of Oxycontin, one went mad after a misjudging the potency of the New Testament and hallucinogens, and one I lost contact with after his second stay at a juvenile detention center in San Diego. Their experience under the bridge was conserved. It was not created or destroyed; it was confined to one form. Like water in a plastic bottle, their contact with reality was limited to one medium. Their existence may have been limited and finite but it did not end with them. It took on the form of urban legend and inspiration for this blog (cheers).
For me, my exposure to the world of weed turned into skateboarding directly into a bored small town cop who wrote me a $200 ticket that my mother forced me contest or pay (inadvertently changing the form). The contesting of the ticket inspired in me a legitimate and intelligent disdain for authority through which I identified with politically charged music and subcultures. That disdain motivated me to loudly articulate my frustrations in hardcore bands and through community activism. … and the list streams out into my life story (quaint, I know). My water bottle was busted open across the sidewalk, was evaporated into the atmosphere and turned into a storm cloud somewhere over the Midwest.
Historically we can trace the dominoes falling on top of us from the dominoes that fell before us. Dependence on a finite recourse for our energy led us into Iraq. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand led us into the Cold War. Dungeons and Dragons led us to World of Warcraft. Scientifically, we can calculate the velocity of dominos falling. A sonic boom is the conversion of kinetic energy into sound energy. Smoke and ash are the results of heat energy converting cannabis back into carbon. If we combine them, perhaps we can calculate how the quarter dropped in youth can shatter the windshield of adulthood.

(images stolen from Denis Darzacq http://denis.darzacq.revue.com/)

Phase: Change

When creating a change we tend to do one of two things. A) We bend our expectations around the framework of reality, i.e., “Wow, I am depressed! I bet this has something to do with the fact that I am dependent on external sources to determine my self worth. I should really change that”, or B) we bend reality around the framework of our expectations, i.e., “Wow, I am depressed! I’ll bet this has something to do with my bust line. I should really change that”. They both have their benefits, but I’m going to bet the first one is more effective while strangely, the second is far more popular.

Don’t think so?
Let’s all hail the masterpiece that is the human form (or twist it around, poke at it and pump a bunch of Botox, plastic and silicone in it until we can look at ourselves in the mirror). In total, Americans spend approximately $8.4 billion annually on cosmetic surgery. The average nose job costs between $3,000 and $7,000. The average breast augmentation runs around $3,500. Oh yeah, bending the reality of the body around internal expectations is popular and (for a short time) effective.
The gratification that comes from losing love handles is fast and easily measurable, thus its success has swollen and plumped in the modern world of microwave media. The more we rely on the physical as a source of happiness, the easier it becomes to bow out of emotional accountability (this is coming from a guy runs 30 miles a week and spends six days a week in the gym). The logic is simple: “Hey, I know why Dad’s depressed, because he looks like a frozen chicken when he’s naked.”

Perhaps this is more indicative of our culture; the tendency to treat the symptom instead of the sickness. We are putting air into leaking tires; bailing water on the Titanic.
My stepfather had surgery on his hip a few years ago. It was a common procedure, executed at one of the best facilities in the country. But as he recovered, he noticed certain pain that he had not experienced before. He was patient, and worked with his physical therapist for months to regain his flexibility and strength but still there was an unnatural discomfort that kept him from feeling healed. The doctors offered him cortisone and painkillers, they offered more physical therapy, they offered him condolences and let him know that these things take time.
My stepfather looked at the reality of his situation (real shitty pain) and tried to bend his expectations around that reality (something probably went wrong in the healing process).
A few months ago the doctors discovered that as his hip was healing, groups of nerves had been pinched between the new metal ball and socket of his state-of-the-art hip. Imagine a G.I. Joe’s hip socket after a kid had played with it for hours on the beach. Bits of sand accumulate in the joint scraping and impeding mobility. Now imagine those bits of sand are nerves. His doctor’s solution: eat some pills and we will deal with reality when you get tired of that.
For most of my junior year of high school I rode to lunch with a friend who drove a brilliant white dying American car. It had problems; we called them character and ignored them. When the car made an unusual sound, the problem was clear…the stereo was obviously not loud enough. This lasted a few months and inevitably our “solution” backfired leaving us walking to lunch for the remainder of the year.
If this logic is ridiculous when applied to a car, why is it not when applied to our lives?
Because, for most of us, the prospect of immediate tangible change (“change we can see” ) is far more valuable than change that will last but takes time to achieve. For the cost of a cheap new nose, I could see my therapist every week for three years. Would a new face make me feel better? For a time, but the deeper lying insecurities that led me to despise my face so much that I had it surgically manipulated would still be there.
Real lasting change is hard. It is often conceptual and intangible. For me is like rearranging my living room using levitation and fairy dust. It is scary and hard to turn down the radio and open the hood. It is painful and difficult to reopen the wound and tear the nerves from the bone. It is lonely to look away from a mirror or a scale to measure progress. But it’s lasting and its honest…and it’s real.


(black and whites courtesy of gymjones.com)

Come on baby make it hurt so good

Escaping pain is part of what America is about; rubbing your flesh with the ice cube of dreams before the rusty safety pin of momentary pain is jabbed through it. This leaves us with a nasty little hole called experience from which we hang things like personality and character. We go into debt to go to school, to get a job to pay back the debt. We to go into debt to buy a house that is paid for by working so much that we are never home.

This why we are taught to pray on our knees. Because it’s supposed to hurt.

We escape through our vices: through media, sex, prime time, Bowflex and red velvet cupcakes; through US Weekly, nightcaps, flirty text messages and submitting irrelevant socially analytical essays in the blogosphere. We become our vices; we begin to fantasize about sleeping with the cute new hostess instead of fantasizing about selling the script that is supposed to get us out of doing the job we are miserable in. Sitting through the pain works to keep us focused, while being numb only works to get us through the pain.
Through the process of evolution, those who were able to sit through the pain were those who lived long enough to spawn. Reproduction favors the numb. This could explain why we play such cold, indifferent love games or why the good girl always seems to chase the distant cold boy. Perhaps—instinctively--she understands his lack of vulnerability will make him the strongest provider because he is free from pull of momentary desires. The downside is this will also make him a boring asshole.
The body is designed to deal with momentary pain in a way that is so mechanically merciful; it is almost proof for god. When the feeling of pain is triggered, the brain instantly releases hormones through the blood stream. These hormones are called endorphins (the name actually means the morphine within). The body then is absolutely unaware of the physical trauma it is experiencing so that it may get through whatever has caused the pain.
The problem, of course, would be that if we are not aware of this pain (and are actually enjoying the dragon chasing sensation caused by it) what kind of damage are we capable of doing while blitzed out on pain juice? The question that comes to mind is, at what point does numbness become a vice of its own?
We deal with emotional discomfort in a similar way, we push it down until we do some kind of lasting damage like giving our soles a hernia. 51% of Americans feel that they are underpaid; only 27% are satisfied with the stress level of their jobs, yet nearly half (48%) say that they are satisfied with their jobs. What this means is that we are for the most part content with being uncomfortable (underpaid, over worked and over stressed) as long as we’re making dolla dolla bills, y’all.
My grandparents live differently; I do not. They have worked as farmers for the past 50 years. This is an industry that is the base for every overused metaphor about patience (don’t count your chickens before they hatch, you reap what you sow, the fruit is too ripe on the vine, the good farmer is patient while the city boy just wants to go to the damn 711, buy a cup of coffee and think about how hard his life is).
They are not a numb people. Every moment of their labor is filled with joy and passion regardless of the results. They don’t need to shield themselves from momentary pain, they hardly need to watch TV.
In contrast, I feel numb because I hurt; I hurt because something displeasing is happening; I am unaware of how displeasing something is because I am numb; I am numb because I hurt.
If America were a philosophy class this behavior would result in a C-. While the logic works, it is recursive and endlessly destructive. Unfortunately, America is far more like a history class where we must learn information only to unquestioningly regurgitate it. We die from hypertension and loneliness; from debt and regret. We die from our vices and often are not aware that we have been dying for years.

(all images on this post were stolen from Robert Frank's, The Americans...fucking brilliant)

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.