Category Archives: Musings

Reggie Lewis, AAU, and the Sultans of Swing

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I was driving home from Boston with my younger son today. We had spent the previous day in Roxbury MA at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center for and AAU basketball tournament. We had his iPod plugged in and jacked up. My son was almost fully reclined in the passenger seat, the window rolled up and the sun warming his face; he was teetering between wakefulness and sleep when the Sultans of Swing came on.

I was never a huge Dire Straits fan growing up – I mean, I liked them well enough, but I didn’t love them; but in my opinion that song comes as close to a perfect song as musically possible.  Everything about it seems perfect to me – and I am not sure why. Whenever I hear it, I am transported back in time; and I do not mean in a general sense. I mean I am transported to a very specific memory of me driving my car, turning right from Union Street on to East Main road in Portsmouth RI, on a bright sunny day listening and marveling at how good a song that was.  That was in 1979,  34 years ago – and the memory remains crystal clear for some reason. When I hear that song, I remember the warmth I felt from the sun that day; I remember greenness of the trees against the blueness of the sky as vividly as if I were experiencing them in the present.

Truth, Human Nature and the Internet

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Everyone wants to be right.

We humans yearn for validation. Bestowed our moral compass by our parents, teachers, religion, origin of birth, and ultimately our experiences, we move through life; sewing affiliations with those that share our viewpoint, accept our opinions, and smile back at us assuredly.

We live comfortably unchallenged and quite purposefully so. We get our news from either Fox or MSNBC and we surf internet sites that mirror our viewpoints. We drink from a river of information filtered specifically to our tastes and preferences. We rarely stray from our comfort zone.

Sure, liberals and conservatives cross enemy lines occasionally. Every-now-and-then we liberals turn to Fox news or listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck – but let’s be honest, we do so mainly to validate what we already believe, that Rush is an asshole and that Beck is a deranged mental case. I suspect that conservatives engage in similar excursions, switching from Fox News to give a listen to comrade Chris Mathews, while muttering under their breath what a Communist-Marxist-Pinko-Douche bag he is.

I used to think that free-flowing access to information would somehow lead to less polarization in society; that availability and factualness were cousins in a sense (pretty naive I know). In reality, unrestricted access to information has made us more polarized, more firmly ensconced in ideology, and (it seems to me) less willing to investigate even the possibility that we might be wrong – about anything.

It seems to me that people are more interested in having their feelings validated than searching for substantive truths that might lead them onto unfamiliar shores. And make no mistake, those who create and deliver the content take full advantage of this. Today when faced with information that is contrary to what we hold true, we have a penchant to disregard it, seeking shelter in pools of information that allow us to continue to believe what we believe, and deflect that uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance.

In a way, truth has become a cottage industry –  and we are all the worse for it.

You

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Reflective expression

Distant as a galaxy

You bend upward like a drunken sunflower

Like a broken saint

Unhinged and uninhabitable

Your to-dos laid out in front of you

Like a stone path through an open field

Of dusted daisies, fireflies

And dancing grass blankets

You drift across the floor

Like a ghost with a plan

Diligent, determined, and oblivious to the living

You go about

In and out of rooms

Where memories blend and fade

Into hutches, drapes, and hardwood floors

Loose Pile of Rubber Bands

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I am exhausted. Inside my skull there is a frazzled mix of broken synapses and buzzing noises.

I want 3 weeks of nothing. I want 3 weeks to clear my head and empty my brain – to decompress and decelerate to a normal pace, if at all possible. I want to disconnect from everything and everyone so that I can rediscover who the fuck I am – I am totally and undeniably lost. I am over connected to everything but myself.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. I need a radical shift, to jump paradigms, to poke my head through the streaming protoplasm of some parallel universe, to stick out my neck and look left, and right, and then left again and decide whether to pull the rest of myself out of the only world I have ever known and into this new place.

I need to rage against myself (screw the machine) I need to lead a coup d’état on my mind, body, and soul, to rise up and throw out the new me and retrieve the old me, to restore myself to power in a bloodless revolution. How did I get so twisted and discombobulated? It’s like someone blindfolded me, spun me around and placed me in the center of a crater on the dark side moon and said, “OK. . . READY? . . . GO!”

Inside my head, pressed up against the inside of my skull is a mess of wires, tangled and thick with no beginning or end. Basically, it’s a fucking mess in here. Like a tightly wound ball of rubber bands on steroids. I wonder what would happened if I picked at it, pulled on it just a little, would it suddenly heave, expand, and unravel all at once? What if it did? Then what?

I see myself staring inquisitively at this freshly unraveled mass of rubber bands, wondering why there was nothing at its core. What was I expecting, something pure and pulsating and glowing? But there is nothing now but a loose pile of rubber bands – Maybe the ball of rubber bands was the core? Could it be that THAT THE BALL OF RUBBER BANDS WAS THE CORE?? If I had thought this possible, I never would have curiously tugged and picked at it – I would have just walked away from it. But now I have a loose pile of rubber bands. I thought I had synapse issues before the unraveling. Now it will surely be worse – whose idea was this? NOTHING AT THE CORE? Rubber bands with no purpose, with nothing to rally around, nothing to hold them together – now what? Should I roll them up again? Should I reform this pile of rubber bands back into a ball or should I just let them lie loosely all over the place? If I choose to reconstitute this loose pile of rubber bands, will things be any different?

I am standing in the middle of a white room staring at this pile of loose rubber bands, my arms dangling uselessly by my side like clapboards, my mouth agape, my eyes wide shut, screaming at the top of my lungs and from the bottom of my heart in total silence.

I don’t have a good feeling about any of this

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The fiscal cliff, the debt, the high unemployment, the low testosterone, the unrest, the religious fanaticism, the cost of a higher education, my inability to focus, the never-ending deadlines, the gridlock in government, my dog’s lymphoma, my weight gain, my memory loss, my crow’s feet, my achy back and my fluttery heart. It’s hard to be hopeful. Sure it’s always darkest before the dawn, but it just seems like it’s been dark for a long fucking time. Where’s the dawn already?

DOMA, Dogma minus the G

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As the date for opening arguments on the constitutionality of the defense of marriage act (DOMA) approaches, we are seeing a flurry of newspaper articles and talk show discussions related to the case.

The defense of marriage act (DOMA) defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman for federal and inter-state recognition purposes in the United States.

Predictably, those affiliated with the Catholic church and religious-right believe DOMA is constitutional, but argue their case mainly on the basis of morality.

On the state level, RI lawmakers have introduced bills to legalize Gay marriage. This week Bishop Tobin, called on Rhode Island’s General Assembly to reject same-sex marriage in the state, stating that same-sex marriage is “immoral and unnecessary” .

Now, in my opinion, the catholic church preaching about morality is akin to the Chinese government espousing the virtues of freedom and democracy – that boat don’t float.

Many hundreds of years ago, the religious powers-that-be saw homosexual behavior as out of the norm and, without the benefit of science or understanding, labeled it as sinful, immoral, and abhorrent.

Now, fast forward to today, where, with the benefit of science (and a slightly more tolerant society) we know and understand that sexual orientation is an innate trait. Homosexuality is not a disease to be cured any more than eye color or hair color is. But still the Catholic church and religious-right refuse to acknowledge science, reason, and basic fairness and instead remain blindfully obedient to dogma.

If we woke up in “bizarro world” tomorrow, where heterosexuals were the minority, would we not fight for our right in the same manner that gays and lesbians are fighting today? I believe we would. Would we naturally continue to prefer the opposite sex? Yes, we would. Would we just accept being labeled as perverted, sinful, and immoral? God, I hope not.

I’ll end with a message and some advice to the catholic church:

You are on the wrong side of this argument. More and more people, especially young people (you know, the ones you should be trying to bring into the church!) understand that homosexuality is not a learned behavior or character flaw. They see hardworking, caring, and intelligent people who “happen to be gay”. Be open to the idea that many hundreds of years ago, when mankind did not have the benefit of science, the church mistakenly characterized homosexuality as a sin. Don’t continue to mischaracterize it, instead, embrace the science, reverse your position (no pun intended) and stick to what you’re good at, providing spiritual guidance and helping the needy and the poor.

What the hell does that say?

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Have you ever noticed in news reports, or in photographs of war-torn streets in the Arab Middle East, you see (every now and then) graffiti scrawled on the side of buildings in looped and curved Arabic characters? Here’s the thing – I always assume that every single scrawling like this has a foreboding message related to Allah or Jihad. Am I being prejudiced in thinking this way?

I think news organizations should make it a policy to translate such text whenever it makes its way into one of their reports (television, newspaper, or web). Maybe some of this graffiti is just graffiti.  Maybe some are messages like “Abdullah loves Aisha” or ‘Mullah Omar is a Douchebag”

Man, if that were the case, it would affirm my faith in humanity!

Newtown CT, December 14, 2012

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When I heard the news out of Newtown CT yesterday, I was of course saddened. I stopped working for a while and watched the news reports, worked a little bit more before heading to Providence to watch my son play basketball.

When not directly affected by such tragedies, we absorb the news of them, we process that news (fairly quickly it seems to me), and we move forward.

Next week, for the vast majority of us, life will go on. We’ll put our little ones on the school bus or shout a goodbye to our teenagers as the fly out the door in the morning, and we will do so with only the slightest bit of hesitancy.

I suppose our capacity to push through these types of events is a survival mechanism. Natural selection has weeded out the trait of extended emotional grief. Our ancestors saddled with that trait did not survive long enough to pass it along, and I suppose that is a good thing. I only wish we could find a place somewhere between “crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our head” and “life goes on”.

This week will have a familiar sickening feel to it. We’ll watch the news coverage and walk around a bit dazed. We’ll struggle with the feelings that come with resigning ourselves to the negative in life. We’llfeel it behind our eyes, on the back of our necks and shoulders, and in the pit of our stomachs.

The end is NOT near

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I had a dream where I saw a stone-faced man, steadfastly standing on a busy street corner, head and shoulders above a dreamy river of blended polyester suits, silk ties, and leather brief cases, holding above his head a cardboard sign informing the masses that “The end is NOT Near”

Some might see optimism in this dream, where the stone-faced man’s epistle serves as a sunny counterbalance to “The end is near” message that we’ve all learned to ignore because, let’s face it, that message has been proven false, time-and-time again.

But to me, the message from the stone-faced man in my dream rang true almost immediately, and not in a good way. I saw it as a reminder that the big issues that plague our planet seemingly go on forever; the fighting in the Middle East, the disparity between rich and poor, the war on drugs, the war on terror, climate change discussions – none of these things ever seem to end, making a prophet of the stone-faced man.

It leaves me hollow that our biggest problems, the ones we need to resolve in order to propel humanity forward, remain perpetually ensconced in our lives.

On the other end of rockets

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I woke up at 2:30 AM to the thin blue haze of my television, news footage of multiple rockets being launched in succession from flat barren lands somewhere in Gaza.

Set against a peaceful pinkish-blue sky, the angry hiss of missile-fire – followed by a few seconds of pre-dawn serenity was eerily beautiful, as witnessed from a darkened bedroom thousands of miles away.

On the other end of the rockets, Israeli citizens huddle in bomb shelters, enveloped and cradled by rock and earth, they wait and listen to muffled explosions. Warning sirens blare in the distance, they sit in dimly-lit rooms stocked with gas masks and crackers.

In Gaza, Palestinians scramble and crawl over a pile of dusty rubble, twisted steel, and flesh, courtesy of a reflexive trigger finger and weapon system designed to target individual terrorists and minimize civilian casualties. They dig and scream, dig and scream. I begin to wonder if over time (generations actually), that the repetitive dig and scream might somehow become part of Palestinian people’s make-up, branded into their psyche, to the point where it becomes as natural an act as waving goodbye to their children as they go off to school.

It’s all too big to absorb at 230 AM, my head comfortably cushioned by 3 large pillows, my snoring yellow lab warmly wedged between my wife and I, as the thoughts of my own pending day begin to seep into my consciousness, steadfastly pushing aside and supplanting my thoughts about the other end of rockets, I reach for the remote and turn the TV off, the blue haze dissipates quickly, surrendering to the darkness I close my eyes. It is 2:36 AM.