Friday, August 22, 2014
Comfortable Privilege
Thinking about Ferguson from comfortable privilege. How do you make a death meaningful? A deep racial divide cuts across this nation and we all bare the scar. It is the way we are most connected.
Empty Headed
I saw a movie last night about a people in ancient China whose artists spent years constructing elaborate statues of bronze, only to decapitate them as a gift to the gods. Sometimes I feel blood boiling and muscles coiling, my head is light and empty. I am waiting for the mold to be made and the bronze to be poured.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Marie
My sister's baby was born half size and deaf to her own cries, and I did mean to criticize, she wasn't getting proper care.
My sister didn't eat and the baby didn't drink.
Living in a hotel room that barely had a sink.
I didn't know what to think,
with beauty stripped naked on the floor,
and she could still be there.
Barely breathing through cigarette air
in Carson City, the capitol of capitalism.
Where fat old men inquire into good fortunes
and ailing wives in casino bathrooms.
Where desperation rests heavy and sick sweet on conditioned air.
If it has anything to do with winning you won't find it here.
y = a(1-r) to the power of x
This morning I awoke to look through myself in the mirror. This new symptom of my singular condition, although long theorized by better mathematicians than myself and manifesting on schedule, terrifies me. How could it not? As I type this now I find it difficult to impart the necessary force to depress the keys. I am with increasing frequency disintegrating. These are the last words of a man fading from existence. I will then attempt to be brief, in the hope that I may convey the core of my life's experience with these few words in the few moments I have remaining.
At the age of ten it first became evident that something was wrong with me. While I appeared outwardly healthy and continued to grow in size, I was in fact decreasing in mass. My volume remained constant and my density was stretched beyond the limits of understanding. A neighboring mathematician and close family friend, acting on a hunch that he would later call insane, began measuring me daily. Over time a pattern emerged and his most outrageous fears were confirmed, I was decaying exponentially.
He told me I was living half-lives and a time would come when there would be nothing left to halve. He then taught me the math, carefully and kindly illustrating the simple formula and function that would define my life. First I learned Archimedes' formula:
density = mass/volume
When I understood the formula and its components he patiently explained the function for exponential decay.
y = a(1-r)x
[Where a is the amount before decay begins (my initial density), r is the rate of decay (1/2) and x is the number of intervals (my half-lives).]
My decline continues to progress rapidly, but the rate of change will decrease over time as there is less and less to halve. A ghost of me may outlive you all. But that ghost's density will be so insignificant that it will not be able to interact with the physical world. In fact, it is likely that it will fall through the earth, a victim of gravity, to further reduce within its core.
I spent a life alone with mathematics. Feeding my diminishing whole with numbers; frantically searching for a different solution. And having failed to disprove the irrefutable, I now regret those years in the narrow halls of academia. The ghost that I will become will have nothing but time to remember, and very few memories.
Beyond the psychological, my condition cause some discomfort, but little pain. And even as I continue to fade, a strange calm pervades. We are not to know our future. The curve of my life was graphed and anticipated. With all my ability I could not alter it. Now that there is nothing more I can do, my mind is free to wander without the oppressive need for haste. I go willingly into the theoretical void. I am awake. At first, and at last.
At the age of ten it first became evident that something was wrong with me. While I appeared outwardly healthy and continued to grow in size, I was in fact decreasing in mass. My volume remained constant and my density was stretched beyond the limits of understanding. A neighboring mathematician and close family friend, acting on a hunch that he would later call insane, began measuring me daily. Over time a pattern emerged and his most outrageous fears were confirmed, I was decaying exponentially.
He told me I was living half-lives and a time would come when there would be nothing left to halve. He then taught me the math, carefully and kindly illustrating the simple formula and function that would define my life. First I learned Archimedes' formula:
density = mass/volume
When I understood the formula and its components he patiently explained the function for exponential decay.
y = a(1-r)x
[Where a is the amount before decay begins (my initial density), r is the rate of decay (1/2) and x is the number of intervals (my half-lives).]
My decline continues to progress rapidly, but the rate of change will decrease over time as there is less and less to halve. A ghost of me may outlive you all. But that ghost's density will be so insignificant that it will not be able to interact with the physical world. In fact, it is likely that it will fall through the earth, a victim of gravity, to further reduce within its core.
I spent a life alone with mathematics. Feeding my diminishing whole with numbers; frantically searching for a different solution. And having failed to disprove the irrefutable, I now regret those years in the narrow halls of academia. The ghost that I will become will have nothing but time to remember, and very few memories.
Beyond the psychological, my condition cause some discomfort, but little pain. And even as I continue to fade, a strange calm pervades. We are not to know our future. The curve of my life was graphed and anticipated. With all my ability I could not alter it. Now that there is nothing more I can do, my mind is free to wander without the oppressive need for haste. I go willingly into the theoretical void. I am awake. At first, and at last.
Steven
I hadn't seen Steven since Bill's Off Broadway closed for renovations a few months back. There he had played the pool table almost nightly, drinking “coast to coasts”, an inexplicably named off menu special, consisting of a shot of bottom shelf bourbon (from Kentucky) and a tall-can of Busch (brewed in similarly landlocked Minnesota). Steven and I never spoke more than the few words that were necessary to facilitate a proper pool game. Which, barring the uncommon eight-ball scratch, he easily won with a poised and practiced drunkenness, which at times bordered on buffoonery.
We were outside Clever Dunne's, an Irish bar not far from Bill's that blessed by proximity was serving as temporary respite for its hard drinking refugees. Walking up Olive I had stopped to say hello to Greg, a large young black man, whose voice and mannerisms seemed gentled by the reactions he saw in others to his size (and occasionally) his race. He moved with a slow methodical purpose that belied his early twenty-something age. This, and a simple earnestness made him quite likeable. We smiled and greeted as people who drink together, but know little of each other do. He was smoking a spliff with Steven and I joined them. Steven, in contrast to Greg was much older, on the short side of average and white. He was loud and gesticulated, often and with wild fervor; only still and calm the second before he shot a pool ball and the moment after. The spliff dwindled and Greg went inside, leaving Steven and myself. Steven grew uncharacteristically quiet. I looked over the man. He wore, as always, white dungarees splattered with numerous paints, a black leather jacket, at least twenty years out of fashion, and open at the front exposing a Cosby sweater with zigzagging vertical stripes. His short cropped white hair stood straight up above a round face, featuring a round nose reddened by broken capillaries. He pulled a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket and leaned towards me, rolling a pregnant cigarette as he spoke intimately, stale beer smell permeated his gruff speech.
“What's your name again?”
Not for the first time, I reintroduced myself, “Arlo”
“You know Harlo,” I wasn't going to correct him, he would forget it before we met again. “I'm not even supposed to be here.”
Thinking that he meant he ought to have been at the defunct Bill's, I said as much, thumbed a camel out its pack and placed it between my lips. He shook his head, and lit his cigarette then mine. The lighter looked small in his large hands, which I surmised had grown slowly around paintbrush and roller handles.
“I'm fifty-two years old.” He looked older. “And I was not brought into this world with love. My dad raped my mom.” His voice rising, “I shouldn't be HERE,” he gestured with both hands wide, to make clear that “here”, meant everywhere. I had no response to this and did not think he wanted one of me, so I smoked, and he smoked and then he went on, “I got them together in the same room 30 years ago, today. And I told them they needed to talk, that I needed them to talk, so I could move on. My brother and sister said it could never be done, 'don't even try it,' they said. But there they were, big Harold,” he raised a hand above his head, and lowered it, “And little Marie, ninety pounds dripping wet, both there in the living room. And they talked. To make a long story short...” A common refrain of his, bordering on apology.
“My dad said he was drunk and he was sorry.” He re-lit his cigarette. “My mom said that if it wasn't for me, she would have killed him. I shouldn't be here.”
Over the next half-hour, before Greg leaned out the open window to tell him he was up on the pool table Steve told me his whole life in small discontinuous segments. He told me about growing up on Air Force bases in Puerto Rico, Oklahoma, and Spokane. About his brother's death of lung cancer. (He is terrified of cancer, he knows the medical names of most common forms.) He told me of his sister, 26 years his senior, and her niece, older than him as well. Of his mother's three marriages to Air Force men. And her fourth and final to the cook who stayed. He told me of his only son, and his six grandchildren who live in Florida. Of his halcyon days hitchhiking across the country in buckskin and fringe in early '70s.
He told me lies, but mostly truths. And he told it to a stranger. He told it because I was a stranger. He didn't want advice or conciliatory words, he just wanted to be heard. To confess all to someone with no vested interest, and then walk away lighter.
We were outside Clever Dunne's, an Irish bar not far from Bill's that blessed by proximity was serving as temporary respite for its hard drinking refugees. Walking up Olive I had stopped to say hello to Greg, a large young black man, whose voice and mannerisms seemed gentled by the reactions he saw in others to his size (and occasionally) his race. He moved with a slow methodical purpose that belied his early twenty-something age. This, and a simple earnestness made him quite likeable. We smiled and greeted as people who drink together, but know little of each other do. He was smoking a spliff with Steven and I joined them. Steven, in contrast to Greg was much older, on the short side of average and white. He was loud and gesticulated, often and with wild fervor; only still and calm the second before he shot a pool ball and the moment after. The spliff dwindled and Greg went inside, leaving Steven and myself. Steven grew uncharacteristically quiet. I looked over the man. He wore, as always, white dungarees splattered with numerous paints, a black leather jacket, at least twenty years out of fashion, and open at the front exposing a Cosby sweater with zigzagging vertical stripes. His short cropped white hair stood straight up above a round face, featuring a round nose reddened by broken capillaries. He pulled a pouch of tobacco from his jacket pocket and leaned towards me, rolling a pregnant cigarette as he spoke intimately, stale beer smell permeated his gruff speech.
“What's your name again?”
Not for the first time, I reintroduced myself, “Arlo”
“You know Harlo,” I wasn't going to correct him, he would forget it before we met again. “I'm not even supposed to be here.”
Thinking that he meant he ought to have been at the defunct Bill's, I said as much, thumbed a camel out its pack and placed it between my lips. He shook his head, and lit his cigarette then mine. The lighter looked small in his large hands, which I surmised had grown slowly around paintbrush and roller handles.
“I'm fifty-two years old.” He looked older. “And I was not brought into this world with love. My dad raped my mom.” His voice rising, “I shouldn't be HERE,” he gestured with both hands wide, to make clear that “here”, meant everywhere. I had no response to this and did not think he wanted one of me, so I smoked, and he smoked and then he went on, “I got them together in the same room 30 years ago, today. And I told them they needed to talk, that I needed them to talk, so I could move on. My brother and sister said it could never be done, 'don't even try it,' they said. But there they were, big Harold,” he raised a hand above his head, and lowered it, “And little Marie, ninety pounds dripping wet, both there in the living room. And they talked. To make a long story short...” A common refrain of his, bordering on apology.
“My dad said he was drunk and he was sorry.” He re-lit his cigarette. “My mom said that if it wasn't for me, she would have killed him. I shouldn't be here.”
Over the next half-hour, before Greg leaned out the open window to tell him he was up on the pool table Steve told me his whole life in small discontinuous segments. He told me about growing up on Air Force bases in Puerto Rico, Oklahoma, and Spokane. About his brother's death of lung cancer. (He is terrified of cancer, he knows the medical names of most common forms.) He told me of his sister, 26 years his senior, and her niece, older than him as well. Of his mother's three marriages to Air Force men. And her fourth and final to the cook who stayed. He told me of his only son, and his six grandchildren who live in Florida. Of his halcyon days hitchhiking across the country in buckskin and fringe in early '70s.
He told me lies, but mostly truths. And he told it to a stranger. He told it because I was a stranger. He didn't want advice or conciliatory words, he just wanted to be heard. To confess all to someone with no vested interest, and then walk away lighter.
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