squidbag

The Mall in Your Mind

"I'd like to be a mall."

"Really? And have people going in and out of you all day?"

This is the scintillating back and forth that can ensue when you're on your 6th day together, with very few breaks away, lots (for us) snow on the ground, no school, and minds wandering deprived across landscapes of disconnected weirdness. So, if you were a mall - what would you have in your Food Court?

I would have a Petro's. I can only say this now because I have spent a fucking half hour looking up various permutations of "Chili Cup Mall" and thinking that they were a defunct chain. They aren't, and I am happy. I was describing this to my kids, everything from the "you could carry this thing around the mall like a street taco" to the diagram you see at left, to the magical slurry of chili goodness and saturated corn chips that was left over at the bottom of the cup when you got close to done - man, that is a vivid childhood sense memory. I can only assume (based upon where they are located) that this was a field trip gastronomic adventure experience.

Next to Petro's, I would have an Orange Julius. Orange fucking Julius, man, with powdered egg whites, and they mixed that shit right in front of you, and there were little ice crystals on top of the drink that bumped up against the lid and crackled in the foam. And I hope that they put powdered egg whites in there, but I bet they don't, I bet it's EGG CHEATERS or something like that, just like they didn't used to advertise "GF" on the Petro's sign, and I don't think they used to have pasta/macaroni, either. Yankee tourists.

Near that would undoubtedly be a soft pretzel place, a Chinese restaurant with fucked up name owned by Chinese people, and a Noodles & Co., because we don't really have that where I live, either.

So, carbs. Carb up, motherfucker, and walk my goddamn mall. The mall in my mind plays the Commodores' on endless repeat in a dark hallway with a carpeted ceiling that runs between the Food Court and the fully-functional arcade, where nothing costs more than 50 cents to play, and there's Smash TV and Narc right out front, and lots of shooting and driving games and real pinball machines (mostly ones that have movie and rock band stuff on them) and an endless line (but really it's just a mirror with gold leaf in it) of Skee-Ball machines with plenty of shoulder room between each one. Also? Skill cranes and a couple of awesome driving games that didn't exist when I was a kid.

There's a kiosk where you can have your name inexpertly applied to anything, and an actual music store. Out front of the music store, there's a display with dinosaurs in a tarpit, and it says "EXTINCT TUNEAGE" and there's 8-tracks and minidiscs and cassingles and shit all in it. And a video display on repeat of the Parental Advisory logo going in flames on a loop. That's right - repeat AND on a loop. Shaddup. There's a bunch of technology stores, and the anchor stores? The big bastards that the mall is ostensibly for? They're just mock-ups. We occasionally drive our 4-wheelers through them and knock everything down. Then we go back out into the mall proper and play glow-in-the-dark mini golf and eat big cookies and buy Chucks from Journeys and books from everywhere and try not to get VD from Spenser's, where it feels like everything has VD on it. There are no nail places, no underwear emporiums, no blouseterias, and no FUCKING JEWELRY STORES, and you can extend a line of credit everywhere, because it's that kind of place.

There's a theatre, and they fucking spell it like that. It's called the Six-Shooter Theatre, and they have six screens and the kids who work it love film and talk like bartenders. Frozen coke comes with free refills, and there's always something playing that's decent and also always something you can walk out of if you don't want to make fun of it. A walk-out will have their money happily refunded if they can say why they walked out. In complete sentences. Don't fuck about - tell us what you didn't like.

It goes without saying that outside of the dark, carpeted, Commodores hallway, that the rest of mall plays 90s rock interspersed with 80s hip-hop and anything else I like, and that there's football and old movies broadcast on monitors around the interior, and roving bands of teenagers find themselves mute when they hit the SnarkMeter® limits. (SnarkMeters® are subcutaneously installed on every teen upon entering. Old people, too. Everybody.) Finally, there are game stores and comic stores fully functioning and raking in profit, an Irish pub at every junction, and cigar dispensaries throughout. The interior aisles are dotted with tables for sitting and smoking and drinking and talking and eating goddamn magical bowls of layered chili stuff that I thought had ceased to exist.

Brain Music

Some songs in the right circumstances are like keys to doors to the past, for me, to my personal, individual past - a trip backwards in time where the word "nostalgia" seems like a weak attempt to explain what's actually happening, which is this:

The music keys off a series of tumbling domino memories which come unbidden and avalanche down onto whatever I'm doing or thinking at the time, erasing the present and overwriting the new/old into currency. I step backward into a previous version of me that is so different and pure and incandescent with supercharged potential and anticipation and unlocked grit-your-back-teeth-and-GAH! that it/he feels utterly alien, but I remember being there, then, him. I remember how the smells of those people around me made me feel, seeing them in my mind's eye, through my perhaps unconsciously edited memories of that time. I hear them and the spaces around them, I feel the anxiety and rush of events past. Hormones, surely, but I'm in touch with them now, and the rush of the chemical wave is something tangible, tasteable - it has mass and I carry it. It carries me.

I am transported - not through something so lame as the hackneyed and ham-handed "power of music" but along neural pathways I thought I burned out with injury and drugs and booze and sadness and happiness and new experiences long ago, but the brain abides. It pushes back against the present, be it mundane or thrilling or necessary or all three and says, "this is a thing that happened, this was a time you were in, these were people you knew, and all of it is still in here, locked behind a paper-thin Japanese sliding panel and it can be unlocked at any time by this song." Or not. It's not consistent. The subconscious must be in a mood to cooperate or you'll just get the song and "...yay."

And then, the tumblers in the lock click and slide and roll back the other way and I am left with a desperate need to preserve the experience by using what I know will be inadequate words, as best I am able, but with the hope of crystallizing what it was like, and maybe even sharing the ineffable with someone, anyone else.

Love & Trust

Trust is whether or not you can keep your mouth shut and believe that another person will properly operationalize your definition of "careful" while handling something precious to you like a fragile memento, sentimental antique, comic book, child or heart. The keeping your mouth shut is the hard part - you have to trust them enough to allow them to earn your trust - it must be filled as it gets used up; it's a perpetual emotion machine.

I promise not to do that again.

I love a lot of people I don't trust. Their presence in the world makes me happy, I'm glad they're around, but I wouldn't give them my important shit, and I damn sure wouldn't hand them my heart and feelings. Sometimes you come by that knowledge/realization the hard way, and sometimes you just know. Often, experience allows you to pick them out before you get your heart broken, and people mistake this toughness for wisdom. It might be both - I'm not smart enough to tell the difference.

I find that exposure (in terms of time) makes no difference here, some people will simply have your back, and others will not. Some of the people I feel this way about I have known for decades and spent lots of time with, others I hardly ever see.

I trust people I don't love; there is a kind of intense value that I place in a person who is loyal and honest and dependable which is like love without quite being love; a really intense form of like, a kind of love that Greek people probably have a word for and German people have a word to make fun of. The most interesting people in this category are folks who do or have done deplorable things but who are really decent to me personally - I like to think that this is indicative of an overall effort to be better, and I have to value that or I'd be a hypocritical bastard. Moreso. Again. Whatever.

That is all. I now return you to your Thursday, which I have decided to call Jerry. So enjoy Jerry.

SquidWordle

So a bunch of kids got the same assignment from their teacher today, and they all came into the library to make these using a couple of different sites. Since I had to help them install Java and help them print and so on, I ended up being exposed to this stuff over & over again. The site I used is called Wordle, and assuming Wordle can be used as a verb, I simply had it Wordle this page, the front page of the Squidbag. Go, look - Wordle your own stuff.

Always Words

It remains to be seen whether we, the human race, are capable of labeling without backloading a lot of assumed or misappropriated content.

"Calling a spade a spade" is one of those manly calls for simplicity and honesty which has its origin in the classical Greek (Plutarch) but that we avoid for the most part because of the history of racism that we can choose - or not - to backload into it. Even this exhortation for honest and brief naming of a thing sidesteps a deeper reflex of many people, which is to assume judgment attached to the naming of something. That is, people attach judgment to the very act of saying, because our words carry the baggage of history.

Indeed, simple labeling is actually a form of judgment, taxonomy is a classification, separation, distinguishing this thing from that. It is a mistake, however, to treat the words and phrases we use in everyday discourse, our everyday speech, with this kind of knife's edge precision, because while scientific classification is meant to be bloodless and free from passion, the things we talk about with each other most certainly are filled with emotion and perspective and personal experience. They have to be, or they wouldn't exist in the first place - or at bare minimum, they'd certainly be skull-bendingly boring.

When someone commits suicide, it creates a ripple of havoc that extends out into the world. In the case of Robin Williams, that ripple is huge, due to the impact of his life on this world of people. Part of the wave of havoc is the emotional reaction of the survivors, whose reactions are complicated. It'd be great, by comparison, if people were just "sad." That would be so much easier to deal with. But that's not how people work. Packed into the hole in your guts created by the tragic news of loss is a bunch of anger, confusion, guilt, and a desire to learn from the experience coupled with a sense of futility that as much as you'd like for no one to ever do this thing again, people are going to keep doing it.

So, then - taking a douche newsanchor to task for calling Robin a coward? He's a newsguy and should know better, but is suicide a cowardly act? To say that it isn't - ever - infers that choosing to live isn't braver than not choosing that, and I'd like to think that choosing living takes a hell of a lot more guts than choosing not to. By contrast, then, and in this context, suicide is a cowardly act. Labeling someone a coward over one act does not make sense, but calling the act what it is, again, in this context, is not inappropriate. We're angry with Robin for removing himself from our lives - people say dumb stuff when they're angry - it's just possible that the CNN guy needs to be cut some slack.

Neither is labeling the act "selfish" a completely wrong thing to do - suicide is, I believe, an inherently selfish act. Loading judgment into that word is the problem. Why do we have a problem calling the act of suicide selfish when it is entirely concerned with the self? Whether a person is capable or not of thinking of others at that moment does not enter into it; it is a self-centered act. Labeling the whole person selfish, or even the baseline connotative assumption that selfishness is always bad - these are what get us into trouble. Taking time for myself is selfish - taking too much time or all of the time would make me a selfish person. The rule of excess is important to remember. There's nothing wrong with sex or cheesecake - it's too much of either that lead to problems.

We invariably cast blame, and it is easy to blame the depressed person who killed themselves without acknowledging (as such knowledge was once thrust upon me) that depression changes brain chemistry and thus perception, and so the person who killed themselves may not have been looking at things in a way that non-depressed person - or perhaps even, any other person - can fully comprehend. You can't get inside someone's head, and you probably wouldn't want to. This is the thrust of the world filling up with "depression is a monster"-type articles. We need reminding.

It's also easy to blame others, but at the end of the day, if someone wants to kill themselves, they will, unless you rob them of their freedom, and even then, people find ways. The blame here is pointless. The best that we can do as the group left behind is engage in the previously mentioned exercise in futility - knowing that it will happen again, always, but trying your best to not have it happen once in a while. Those are called victories, because those individual people keep going, and that is a success.

To end, then: Robin Williams was an important part of my late-Middle and early High School existence. While my first memories of him are as Mork, obviously, he was in and out of my awareness until I got my hands on a VHS copy of A Night at the Met. I was amazed when I got it because Robin went from being goofy to being wise and livewire comedy genius in one hour. I must have played that tape hundreds of times, putting in my VCR and turn my TV's black levels up and falling asleep to just the soundtrack. Like a lot of people, I loved Good Morning, Vietnam, the Fisher King, One Hour Photo, his Genie & Fender the robot, and a bunch of other stuff, but A Night at the Met will always be Robin Williams for me.

Send My Friend to Africa

This is Whitney. And Tanzania. We're trying to get them together.

As I sit here eating mango, my good friend, Whitney Flatt, who has helped with my mental health on more than one occasion, and who is, in all likelihood, one of the most giving people you will ever meet, should you be damned lucky enough to actually meet her, is trying to scratch together enough - well, scratch, to finance a trip to Tanzania, where she will speak Swahili, help those in need, and escape elephants. This is what I have pictured, anyway.

How can you contribute money and not read the rest of this entry? Well, you can click your happy ass on over to her project website at 2Seeds, throw in, and move on. But you'd miss your chance to read her answers to your collective theoretical questions about her journey:

Hey, Whitney - where the heck are you going?

I will live in a small village in the Usambara Mountains just outside the city of Korogwe, Tanzania. I will be a part of what is called The Bungu Project, a project that works in most host village and adjacent villages to diversify crop output and improve market access.

Who are you working for? Who's putting this thing together?

The 2Seeds Network, and despite the number "2" in their actual name, the artist currently known as Prince is not affiliated with their work. Wish he was, though - that guy's got deep pockets.

Okay, so what are you up to over there?

My official title is “Project Coordinator,” and for the last five years, Project Coordinators from 2Seeds have been partnering with 8 different villages around Korogwe. Our goal is to undertake agricultural and market initiatives that will foster human capital development. All that fancy lingo aside, our goal is to help people live the best lives they can possibly live, ascending from the confines of poverty.

As a Project Coordinator, I will not only plant and harvest crops with these partners, but I will also provide micro-loans for projects as well as help teach basic management skills, helping my partners run their own profit and loss sheets for agricultural/market initiatives. A lot of times in development work, the old adage of “teach a man to fish” versus “giving a man a fish” has been tossed around to describe how development should work. But 2Seeds doesn’t believe that our partners are inept or that they are incapable of knowing how to properly farm their own land. They simply don’t have the capital to invest in their land and/or take risks. So my role isn’t to teach a man how to fish; my role is to be there when he desires to buy the line, the hook, and the bait and to help him consume/market his catch in such a way that helps him move from subsistence farmer to one that makes a profit and removes himself from the cycle of poverty.

So, what; there's no actual fish involved?

No.

Okay, how much dough do you need?

$8,000. This includes everything from my living expenses to agricultural initiatives we’ll undertake in my village. Any amount that anyone can throw into the hat would be great, though - even if I get a whole crowd of people at just a few dollars each, there's some matching funds to be had, so in this case, every little bit does really, truly help.

How long are you going to be gone? 12 months, August 11, 2014 to approximately July 15, 2015.

Do you really have to learn Swahili before you go?

Yes.

Really?

Yes. There’s minimal English spoken in my rural village.

Last but not least, why should anyone give you money?

You get to become a partner in something amazing and help people live up to their fullest economic potential. Plus, people always complain that they never know how their money is being used when they give to charitable organizations. But when you donate to my project, you literally become a partner in my village. I am accountable to each of my partners and will give you updates every 6 months on how your funds are being utilized.

Convinced yet? It's so easy to donate to this project at this link, that you could have done it while you were thinking about doing it. Here again, too - ANY amount. Chuck a buck in the bucket, and if she racks up a bunch of folks, it's a good thing. And you know, if you've got more than a buck, she'd like to see that, too. Ask for more details. Ask for emails in Swahili. Tell your friends, family, foodie acquaintances, and your rich uncle. She's a little less than a quarter of the way to eight grand, and I think we should show her what anonymous strangers who claim to care about other groups of anonymous strangers can do while sitting on their asses at computers.

Don't you?

My Wife's Head

For those of you not paying the strictest attention, it was two weeks ago today that my wife shaved her head. I am intensely proud of her for being brave enough to do it, and so I shall give you the whys and wherefores and thoughts behind it now.

Her school decided to do an event with the St. Baldrick's people, those who go around shaving heads to raise money for cancer funding everywhere. Initially, it was just a bunch of guys, and my wife, being who she is, questioned this: "Why can't the female teachers do this?" When she was given a sort of "Well, I guess they can..." kind of answer, her students responded enthusiastically. She responded to this with "There's no way I'd shave my head for less than a thousand bucks." 

They raised $435 that first day, and she came home telling me that she might have underestimated them and would likely be bald by Friday.

By Thursday, they, together with the student council, had poined up the rest, and we talked about her getting it done, since she was pretty much on the hook for it by that point. She asked me if I would come and watch it done at what was essentially a pep rally, and I had two objections: one is the carnival/exploitation atmosphere that frequently accompanies such events, and the other was the underlying current of disease tourism that I feel can accompany such things. How does a person who must shave their head feel about someone who simply chooses to do so? Apply that logic to a wheelchair or a blindfold, for instance.

Ultimately, I decided to go. At the rally, the student energy was overwhelmingly positive, and there were only three people who said objectively annoying things to me (Objectively annoying = I get someone else's quick opinion about whether the thing that pissed me off was legit or just me. Think about how often I must have to do this.) and the mood was really high and sweaty and excited, and kids went and broke out band equipment, and Christie's head got totally shaved. She was solely responsible for more than a third of what the school raised, and there were like, 12 guys who did this thing that same time she did. Heh.

[This will be the part when, should you ask her about it, she has some media imagery / social context stuff that went through her head while it was happening that she'll share with you.]

And it looks great. She has a head for this, clearly. And the tourism thing? Well, when the little girl with cancer wants to give my wife a big hug and pose for pictures and some of the high school kids are moved to tears and want pix with my newly bald wife - that argument kind of sails out the window.

So, it was for a good cause, raised a bunch of money, made kids happy, and she checks off a bucket list item just before Spring and Summer when she wouldn't want to deal with a bunch of frickin' hair anyway. Nothing but upsides. Also, it looks great. Did I mention that?

I Am A Kite

I am a kite.

I am a kite and fuck you, I spend most of my time up in this tree, the tall elm just off the backyard.

Apparently, you think that leaving me on the wall of the garage for nine months of the year only to come out at Springtime is okay with me. It's not. I am a kite - being on the wall is not the same thing as soaring high above the grass and trees, touching the sky as sun illuminates my panels, briefly turning me into a piece of stained glass art against the backdrop of a temperate, windy day. I'm a kite, you prick, and you think you can just park me on the wall like a shovel and expect me to cooperate when YOU decide it's time for a little kite flying?!? Do I look like a shovel? Bitch.

I am a kite. I am a delicate construction of fabric and string arranged upon a light framework and held together not only with stitching and pockets and fasteners, but also with love and light and altitude and wind beneath the canopy of my bright colors, struggling to break free, holding me aloft against the firmament of the sky. I am a kite, trailing colors and laughter and fun. Ideally. I am not a simple toy to be dashed across the dirt and rocks because your legs and understanding of basic wind physics aren't up to the challenge. I am a miracle of lightweight aerodynamics, you dumb sonofabitch, and I will not be told what to do by you, or any grubby-pawed little simpleton with an itch - I obey the wind and whimsy, and I might decide to spend the whole Spring up in this fucking elm, or on the roof, precariously niched against the gutter's edge, my sun-bleached panels a silent rebuke, reminding you that if I'm not cooperating, it might just be because you stuck me in a darkened room until winds brought blossoms and barbecue smells to your nose and you thought, "Ooh. Kite weather."

Maybe I decide when to fly, and maybe it's the wind, but you're not the boss of me. I am a kite, motherfuckers, a majestic wing on the air, a symbol of hope and freedom, and an object of joy. When I want to be.

I am a kite.

"What Are You Doing?!?"

It was never my intention to be deliberately cagey; I just underestimated how much people would care.

A couple of weeks ago, after being a shiftless unemployed student (and being out of a job for the longest time in my life since I was 10 years old) for four years, and after job hunting for about three months, I got a job. The job was with the EMS service, doing dispatch in the county where I live, and I was ambivalent about it. The money was good, the hours were rough and weird and inconsistent, and I needed to do it for a while to see if I was going to be any good at it or get anything out of it.

As it turns out, I am ill-suited for the position and I have just emailed my resignation this day. This was why I didn't really want to go into with the whole world - because I wasn't sure if I was going to keep doing it anyway.

It was a very strange experience which will fade with time - it started with interviews and more interviews and many, many documents to sign, and then me being drug-tested and told that I have weird fingerprints followed by 10 hour stretches of sitting at a desk and listening to 911 calls, typing in codes and echoing radio traffic, which was as far as I got. What I discovered is that many of the people who work in the dispatch center feel "called" to it, and get something emotional out of it. Ultimately, I was never going to be one of those people, so it seemed like it was time to quit wasting everyone else's time, so I did. Plus, there was this thing of never knowing how things turned out for the diabetic, the parking lot heart attack, the flipped over Subaru, or the unresponsive toddler. I was supposed to be able to capture satisfaction from being a link in the chain, but I couldn't do it.

This is okay. I start my job with the downtown library tomorrow, and I've got some consulting work, too. I have a couple of other applications out there, so we'll see what happens next, but in the meantime, mystery solved.

Ideas, Beliefs, Principles, & Living

Kevin Smith touched on it in Dogma when he had the 13th Apostle Rufus talk about the superiority of ideas over beliefs.

An idea is simply something that exists inside your head; you have an idea that God exists, or that people are made of purple cheese, squirrels are all evil (totally), that ZOG or Freemasons secretly run everything, or that doing good things for others will have good consequences. Idea spawns belief when a person decides (consciously or not) that it is has become one, or that they need one for some reason, or when they feel as though they must defend it (no one does - more on that later) or finally, when they attempt to be "right" by collecting information to back up their idea. These last two are the most contentious by definition, as they're the ones that involve other people. More people = More problems, and thank you, Bobby Louis.

There are a lot of reasons people need beliefs. Maybe there's something lacking in their lives, creating a hole, and they can fill that hole with belief in something. Maybe it's a fear of pain or death or loss or loneliness - the classic reasons beliefs are born. Often, for whatever reason, ideas provide no emotional assistance or satisfaction, and beliefs come along to fill the void. In this way, beliefs are good things; an internal construction that helps a person function. Because beliefs are such helpmates in times of need, we become attached to them and feel the need sometimes to share or defend them, and this is when, often, things become problematic. Once the belief is outside of your head, it is vulnerable to the slings and arrows of others, and often, deprived of its raison d'etre and time/space context, a belief becomes not only unbelievable, but laughable - like looking at skinny ties or bell bottoms; hey, made sense at the time, right?

Herein lies the reason why beliefs should likely not be defended, at all, ever - they are eroded in the act of protection. Simply the process of trying to explain this ineffable thing that happened in your head will dilute it, much less parsing it out and guarding it against attacks and questions. In order to understand properly, we literally "had to be there," and no one but you was in your head when this belief happened. Hopefully. The only incontestable reason for belief is feeling, since no one can argue that. It may seem like a belief is strengthened in the sharing, but in truth, no two people will believe a thing exactly the same way, and if they do, they have engaged in groupthink, which is more like viral meme-transmission of an idea involving a conscious decision to think like someone else (or your approximation thereof) and less like actually organically agreeing in totality. 

The groupthink phase is typically when people try to be "right" or more often, "correct" about their beliefs. They will want to prove the thing out, if not to you, then to themselves, at least. Therein lies the major problem with most beliefs. Science is based upon observation + idea, where we see a thing and then theorize what might be making that occur, then collecting data to see if we can prove that out. Good science will bail on the idea if the data doesn't back it up. Beliefs, on the other hand, tend to be these pre-constructed mind fortresses surrounding the idea, impregnable to fact, holding up whether there's anything outside the head they were born in to back them up or not. They kind of have to be like this to do their job, and their job is ill-suited for shared reality.

Castles & forts are pointless without people in them, and the people are more important than the buildings - we'd typically tear down a historic edifice to save but one life of a person trapped inside. In the same way, a belief is simply a hollow structure with an idea more important than it is at the core. Principles are much the same. Principles have increasingly become something that people who have them hide behind or inside of, instead of what they probably ought to be; a firm foundation upon which we stand, exposed, when making decisions. Having principles is ultimately a good thing; like tools in a toolbox or arrows in a quiver - one is prepared for what might happen and has some ideas about right action for dealing therewith. One hopes, however, not to have anything break badly enough that one needs a toolbox, and no one would prefer to use arrows to solve a problem. Principles are best kept to oneself and should never be allowed to interfere with even and decent dealings with actual people. If you find yourself not helping a person who needs it "on principle" it might be time to rethink your life.

So, if you ought not share your beliefs and principles can't govern actions, what do we do? How do we do what's right and fix stuff? I would contend that perhaps "we" needn't do anything. Individually, it's on us to engage with what we know needs fixing, and if we can't bring anyone along on that train, maybe we're not supposed to. Leading by example should be all the convincing that is required, because no convincing is required; one simply sees, responds positively, and chooses to emulate. In this way, we cut out the chaff and red tape of things that don't appeal to us, harvesting only the best in forward progress.

Or, you know, such is the dream. Obviously, I'm not trying to convince you of anything.