Taking the Hard Road: Concrete

I believe everything I read. And everything I see and hear. I wish I had a better sense of smell, so I could believe more things.

Freddy is Puertorican, so of course he was raised Catholic, but his daughters recently chimed back to him from their bunkbed: "Daddy, we don't believe in God. We believe in science!"

Some people I know try to be honest and authentic, and therefore convey their thoughts and feelings respectfully. Other people spout pure lies. An interesting third category declares things that they believe to be true or that they hope to be true, therefore they're not really "lying" and should not be hated.

As for things I've read, James Redfield wrote in "The Celestine Prophecy," (a must-read for third category non-Christians) that our true path in life is marked by beauty, that a sort of light will emanate from proper life decisions, and if we just pay attention to that light, we will be guided. Paulo Coehlo shared in "The Alchemist" that when we are on the path of our Personal Legend, the whole universe conspires in our favor, making that path easier.

I've felt that kind of phenomena a few times. When I first heard Ghanaian drumming, and let my bare feet touch the dancefloor, I felt a light and beauty that led me to one of the most rewarding chapters of my life. When a sudden wind and hail tormenta in Southern Argentina was literally lifting us off the ground and dashing us against the rocks, I bee-lined for a crack under a boulder, and dove headlong into it, landing on a bed of dry leaves in an tranquil cave. Mike asked me how I knew about the cave, and I replied that I "just knew."

But how does that theory apply when sometimes "pushing your comfort-zone" is necessary for growth? It's not easy to live in New York City! It's not beauty and joy and God that shines from the streets; those are florescent bulbs! Are Redfield and Coehlo really espousing that we take the "easy way out" all the time, and that will ultimately lead us to the "best" life?

Man, there are too many words to put in quotes here, which means that nothing means anything. Daddy, I believe in science!

Zanganos y Obreras

All worker bees have tools to work: wings and senses, legs and language, and thus the ability to create. Creating wax or nectar or honey or propolis is an absolute miracle on an individual level: that one bee is capable of so much... but on a broader scale, the creation of these products is normal, routine. Millions of bees the world over can do the same thing. So there.

Sam opined tonight that the internet and the 21st Century has really changed art. We can write, take digital photos, think and create, and subsequently we can post our work on this incredible international medium, and potentially diffuse our work to a wide audience. Unfortunately, "it's all been done before."

Perhaps this sentiment has been felt since the very first attempt at originality, because the pursuit itself is afraid of being wrong. What if someone has done this already? If so, it will mean nothing.

But it's true that with blogs and YouTube and all the user-content platforms of today, there is a mammoth of content JUST LIKE THIS BLOG, and it's growing all the time.

So where can it all lead? No one is reading my blog (except you Will) just like no one is reading anyone's blog. Except that some blogs have millions of views. Somehow, there is movement in this world, some sort of flow. YouTube or TubetheVote.com are trying to find interesting ways to organize user-content into some digestible serving. There are so many carpenters, building on this internet frontier, Sam believes it would be interesting to be involved with organizing these carpenters into some structure, akin to social and political long-term planning.

Where can we go with all this? I could have blogged about the ridiculous McCain/Palin campaign, but I'm sure that plenty of people already have.

Bailout!

In elementary school, the thing that we learned about Australia was that it was established as a huge prison for the British "thieves and debtors." To my little kid mind that sounded just fine, and perhaps I regurgitated that on some sort of quiz. As I grew up a bit, I vaguely reflected on that concept, and was a bit confused with it.
"Debtors"? What the heck are those? I mean, they obviously owe money, but everybody owes money. In my world, everybody had credit cards, morgages, car loans, student loans. My cousin Teddy had three houses and put four of his brothers and sisters through college and liked to brag that he was 4 million in debt. So what did the "-ors" mean after "debt"? (And if they owe you money, why would you want to send them away to an island, shouldn't you keep them around and try to squeeze some money out of them?)

Then I met Tom, and I learned a few things. With flashing blue eyes and his grey hair neatly trimmed, he would lean over the table and smile at you, and make you feel like a million bucks. His button-ups were always clean and tucked in, and he seemed to have answers to any question, an idea for any slow moment. He invited me on a kayaking trip, to run a river in eastern Bolivia that had never been run, and I said sure, I had a few weeks to burn. And before we even left the house, he asked me to loan him a hundred bucks. I went with it, and we drove for three days, way down into Amazonia, and at some point I started to stratch my head. He knew people in every town and we always ate for free. He would pull the owner aside, and then we just wouldn't pay. Sometimes we'd stay free at hotels. When I'd ask, he'd just smile. At first the smile inspired trust and admiration, but soon the candy melted. I wondered what the catch was.

We got deep in the forest, had terrifyingly close encounters with snakes and bees and a puma, and as we looked toward the river trip, I asked about my money. "There's no money here!" he cried indignantly. "How much more money do you have? What? How are we supposed to go on this trip with only that much?"

What the fuck, I thought. We had agreed to this trip, saying that we'd split everything down the middle, but this guy had NO money. He intended to schmooze, borrow, and skate the whole way. And at the end of the tunnel, there was no money. I put my foot down, and effectively stymied the river trip plans, and eventually Tom borrowed money from his estranged wife to pay me back.

This week our government plans to bail out Wall Street with a Trillion dollars from our Treasury. The super-wealthy made years of big loans and bad deals, and like Tom, at the end of the tunnel, there was no money. No substance. I'm not a finance expert, unfortunately, so I'm not sure if saving these companies is somehow "necessary" for avoiding undue pain and hardship for the global populace. If it's not necessary, then let those debtors fall, or send them to Australia!

Jumping Ship

Billy Karesh travels the world as a wildlife veterinarian, and he hesitates to call his New York City apartment "home," and he says that anything that reminds him of the swamps of Charleston Bay where he grew up make him feel that warm "homey" feeling. He figures that humans, like fish, are imprinted with their spawning ground.

There is a place where the morning sun slants through the leaves while the wind plays with the light and blows on my coffee for me. This morning that was the patio of 40 Bank Street in the West Village.

There is a place where I can get off work, ride my bike into the autumn sun and find four guys waiting for me at the basketball courts. I can airball jumpshots and still get high-fives. Yesterday that was in Riverside Park, in Zoo York City.

But there is just one place where I can be, and feel like I'm a king of the dirt beneath my feet. A place where I can walk in any door, shake any hand, or talk to any girl. It's a place that makes me proud, defensive, and makes me cry when I'm too far away for too long. Everything compares to Steamboat, and Steamboat compares to nothing.

Call me a salmon.

A very long walk

At one of the lowest moments of my life, when I felt like crying nearly all the time, I happened to be in one of Earth's most beautiful places. Sitting in the moonlight on the bank of a high alpine lake, with craggy peaks soaring into the stars, I felt lost and alone, and then I looked down behind a rock and found a box of Marlboro Reds with one cigarette and a lighter inside. I smoked it, and I didn't like it. That day I had walked 12 miles, and I felt like that was a very long walk.
My friend Patrick has the outline of all the continents tatooed across his hip, and it looks great. He is a wonderful person, a global citizen, and he's lived in Europe and South America and speaks four or five languages. He remained curious at why his parents loved Colorado so much, so this summer he walked for forty days across the state, along mountain trails, climbing fourteeners eating only cactus spines and wearing just his grasshopper-pelt loincloth. Even for a galactic champion triathlete, that was a very long walk.
My friend Will is a wordsmith, and as such he can create entire realities by mixing christmas lights and a re-renovated Dell with Hot Tamales and a Birth Scream. He also does 100 pushups sometimes, and walks 7 to 10 miles a day in great-fitting jeans. He bought a pedometer, and started tallying exactly how far he walked each day, and through the magic of wordsmithsmanship, he walked across the United States, from California to New York. That is objectively a long walk, and it was recorded subjectively at averylongwalk.blogspot.com.

So, apparently my friends and I are accomplished walkers. When we are sad or curious or stylish, we can really strut. But today I met Pedro, and when I asked him how he got to the US from his native Honduras, he told me, "It was a very long walk."

"What???" I said. "You really came in walking? How?"

"We came in through Arizona. We couldn't walk during the day, because they patrol with helicopters. So we had to walk at night. And we had to keep out eyes down, because they said that if you look up, even though it's night, they can see you from the whites of your eyes. It was such a long trip. So much walking... My dad left Honduras when I was five, left my whole family. But now I am here, and so are my two brothers. My mom though, she's alone back home. They won't give her a visa, and there is no way she could survive the walk... But I can't go back home. There is nothing there: no work, no life. People just sit around and wait for dollars to arrive. I will stay here, and try to get my mom here."

We are in desperate need of a change in our immigration policy. This kind of arduous and dangerous journey is inhumane, but the current system, which demands workers but doesn't provide legal pathways for immigration, forces people to make the march. Our immigration policy must provide safe and fair avenues for immigration, and more importantly work with places such as Honduras, to foster more productivity and positivity in those places. We share so many people with Mexico and Central America, people who are from there, work here, and will likely maintain social and financial ties to their homeland, so we should view these countries as our partners.

Smarty Hooves Part II

The search for intelligence in other species leads us to watch animals closely, to determine what they do under different circumstances. Because we can't ask them, "what are you thinking about?" we have to watch their reactions to different circumstances, and try to infer what they were thinking. A chimp in a mirror will see food in his beard and pick it out, thus showing that he knows that the hairy face in the glass is actually him. Inference: clear sense of self. A chimp confronted with a piece of food hanging from a string and pulley in the middle of the room will find where the string is tied to the wall, and untie the string, dropping the food. Inference: understanding of space, and logic with mechanical systems.
But comparative behavior studies can also raise questions about our own actions. When a chimp feels threatened or uncomfortable, it will show all it's teeth, and give an exhaling yell, chopped up by an almost rhythmic detention of breath. In short, they laugh. Smile and laugh.
We share over 99% of our genetic code with chimps, so it's safe to say that they're pretty similar to us. And in this case, it's possible to see the connection between our laugh and theirs. When do we laugh? What pushes our buttons? Jokes find social pressure points that make us feel vulnerable or uncomfortable. Stand-up comedians shine a light on our weaknesses, prejudices, social problems. And we laugh. Tickling is effective because it makes us feel nervous, self-conscious, or vulnerable. And getting tickled, we laugh uncontrollably.
If it is true that human laughing is the same as a chimp's, and is a defensive response, then why do we like it? Why do we seek it out?

Smarty Hooves Part I

We assume ourselves to be the smartest creatures on earth. People also commonly list elephants, dolphins, pigs, or small-toothed whales as other "intelligent" non-primates. It's interesting to examine what exactly we view as intelligence.
A sense of "self" and "other," social hierarchies, language, and learning are factors considered in the search for cognitive ability. Interestingly, these skill sets all have to do with group life- social life- and so they necessarily favor socially adapted animals. The ability to share an everyday idea with a friend is imperative for a human or a dolphin, but it's not a necessary activity for a puma. Solitary animals are thus disadvantaged in this system.
The search for language as a sign of intelligence is particularly bothersome, because it seems like a pure extension of the "man is master" concept. We humans build our entire life around language, and when we see an animal clearly communicate, we are seeing a reflection of ourselves. To conclude that that is "intelligent" involves the built-in assumption that we are wondrous.

Great Apes

One of the greatest humans that I know on this earth lives in Western Colorado, works as a botanist, and upholds such firm beliefs about lessening her impact on the earth that she chose not to have children. She sees that it is PEOPLE that are the issue, and nearly every problem comes back to the fact that we are too many.
On the other side of the world, wrapped in the noise and movement and rhythm of New York life, Freddy has worked construction for 12 years, is married and has two girls, and he doesn't know anything about overpopulation. Maybe he's heard something, but "ecosystem health" or "global environmental health" are absolutely foreign concepts in his world of subways, jobsites, calzones and paychecks. "If I win the lotto, pop, my wife better look out! She'll be pregnant every nine months, until I've got ten kids!...Big families are the love, pop, cause even though you're poor, you've got family there, so it's happy."
The idea that Tamara has no kids and Freddy could have ten makes my head reel.

go, keep, close the windows, wear it, run away from her, carve, live.

breathe, stretch, be yourself.

I was feeling pretty high on myself, because he's this big tatooed Boriqua and I hang out with him for eight hours a day. Words come smoothly for him, his steps are sure, the kind of ease that comes with knowing you are the big man on the block. I jitter around the room, unsure if I've ever done anything right in my life. Should I sweep again.

But after two weeks, I could surely stoop sit in Bushwick and dance with a Nutcracker. I can surely way, "tu sabes" at the end of my sentences. I may be me, but I can be many things.

And as if in cue, he came to work and showed me why I can't ever be him. He'd been at a funeral the night before. A lady with three kids, and breast cancer took her. She was a COP, so there were 75 COPS there. But her brother and partner were "from the hood," so all sorts of neighborhood guys were there. Henry came, and Henry used to be a "big, strong dude, like, beautiful, shiny black, and strong." But he showed up, skinny and ashen, with "like, full-blown AIDS." AIDS has "hit the community hard, will all the dudes who used to shoot up dope."
The funeral was nice, but a lot of the guys didn't want to be inside with the mourners, so they went out on the street to drink and smoke weed. The funeral had attracted "a lot of different dudes, too many motherfuckers," and he could feel that there was a weird vibe. He went home, and got a call that one of his friends was got shot there on the street. "Ignorance, man. I knew somebody would do something. It's stupid shit."

He and I worked together on some trim and molding pieces, and helped some subs pour the shower concrete. But I didn't feel like I could just say "tu sabes" and be a new-recruit Boricua. No, I'm not from Bushwick. I'm from Steamboat.

Coffee break in the E.R.

Perhaps it is the fragility of the thing that makes us love it. We ride atop it, within, bleeding and feeling and breaking and dying, and all the time we convince ourselves of immortality. Divine, perfect, created in the image of. As if it's a right of man, we forget that anatomy and medicine was unknown to Western Europeans until the Crusades. Now we expect to never be sick, to never hurt, to never die. We want to look like this, move like that, perform just so. It's just balance, just gravity, just orbit. It's electron sharing, it's magnetism, it's water. And it's an incredible coincidence that it's happening at all. So we ride on, turning those pedals and pounding peanut butter pretzels. Coffee is the stay-up late and the get up early. Obligation is the make-it-through-the-day. Wind it up tight, keep it going, expect more. C'mon. With 10 billion dollars we will find a cure for cancer. Cells divide all the time in the body, and regulatory mechanisms turn that division on and off. With three changes- caused by mutation or damage or insertion- the cells can begin to divide without stopping, creating a tumor. Coffee and obligation keep me going, cranking the pedals, beyond the limits. But 10 billion dollars will find the cure so that the regulatory limits stay in place.

Wisdom

A city so big, it has everything. In any instant, you choose what you want, and it's there. If you're not doing just what you want, it's not the city's fault. It's yours.
-Liar

You create every opportunity, every moment, for yourself. You choose your state of mind, and by embodying that choice, you project outward, and your inner decision will manifest outwardly.
-Dreamer

Five people, together, bonded by friendship, can create joy and beauty and productivity. The Rule of Five.
-Bennie Beall a.k.a. The Truth

Check Minus for Everyone!

Ben Beall IV is the only person I know who can ask, "John McCain is a hero for being a POW? He crashed his plane, and then got caught. How does that make him a hero?"
If anyone else said that, they'd be shunned. Thanks for being here Dad.

vanguard express

mitkin provono pa
interes mayombe ba
sino con otro imaya
valasa conprede ta

cubana mulata pero see
if only intrecana me
hills and rafters confundo
and hillis mister intruso

calama mama
carlos santana
pintorama
if you wanna

cmon papa
cry for mama
cry for Sana
feel for fama

hear it, por favor
seal it, drag a door
fore eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

salamalecu ye
salamalecu ye
salamalecu ye
sal-a-ma-le-cu one two three for five!

Transparency...Vamos Windex!

On the pick-up soccer field at Stanton and Forsythe, Mexicans and Colombians, and one white kid, played a 6v6 match. The field is caged in by thirty-foot-tall fence, the turf is wonderfully green and soft, and as the grundgy grey Chinatown bustling rails on around the field, inside the cage is an oasis. The latinos llamaban al gringo algo que no era "gringo," y yo pense que era su nombre. Pero cuando empece a jugar yo, me llamaron lo mismo. They were calling us Windex. Why man? Because you're so clean and clear. Ok. !Vamos Windex!
Funny thing is that transparency is actually something that I genuinely struggle with, something that perhaps a lot of people struggle with. Many a sit-com script has included the girlfriend character yelling to her man, "I just don't know what you're thinking! You need to talk to me!" And often the boyfriend character doesn't understand where he's been unclear. He WAS clear, wasn't he?
I've often felt that way, because my natural reaction to conflict is to walk away. Isn't that what Sesame Street taught me to do? Don't fight, walk away. So when someone says something that I perceive to be wrong, or hurtful, or arrogant, or insensitive, the last thing I'm going to do is say something to them about it! Then I'd be the one starting the fight, Big Bird. No, I'll walk away before it even becomes a fight.

...
[edited out for personal reasons]
...

But she never knew she had insulted me! I had never said anything about any of her comments, and therefore she had no way of knowing that I even heard her! And my tiptoeing was both awkward and confusing, because it had no logical basis. And like we always do, she filled my silence with her worst fears. If the sitcom boyfriend is silent in response to an issue with the GF, she'll naturally fill that silence with an assumption that he no longer loves her, obviously has met someone else, and is about to break up with her.
It's awful. We need to communicate honestly in order to safeguard our relationships, in order to value our frienships. We need transparency. Vamos Big Bird!