frames of figure & ground

making connections

2011-05-24T13:47:00.002-04:00

important Washington Post op-ed piece:

http://action.350.org/signup_page/connections

Bill McKibben

2011-04-21T15:29:00.010-04:00

Bill McKibben's in Ithaca today. I saw him give a talk last year when he was in town and just had the pleasure of attending a question & answer session with him. He's the most articulate speaker I've ever heard. And the message he's promoting is perhaps the most important that we have to hear.

Check out the 350.org website link in the sidebar of my blog to find out more about the movement he started. And see the link below to Bill's reply in the Washington Post to Glenn Beck's recent accusations that he's a communist. I wonder if people like Beck, and McCarthy before him, who paint everyone with that brush so indiscriminately even know what it means.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022803518.html

challenging growth

2011-01-24T20:04:00.003-05:00

Dear Planet Money team,

I tune in to your podcast regularly and have an immense respect for the work your team does in translating complex economic themes into understandable and enjoyable stories for broader audiences. The world needs more people with your kinds of skills, that is, the ability to both critically analyze and clearly communicate.

I have been waiting expectantly, however, for any hint of discussion that might challenge (or even encourage critical thinking of) the current dogma of continued growth that implicitly underpins all economic news I hear on NPR. I'm not an economist. I've spent the past decade working in international development and more recently nutrition. And so my thinking on economic issues is certainly not supremely refined or informed. I can't help but wonder though if our dependence on continual growth for economic well-being isn't setting our economy and society up for disaster.

I often look to biological systems to understand the rationality of human behaviors. And I'm hard pressed to find a healthy, functioning biological system based on a model of unchecked growth. In fact, the most salient example of unchecked growth I can point to in nature is a cancer cell. In such a cell, the regulation of cell growth and differentiation breaks down resulting in uncontrolled growth. The eventual devastating consequences for the organism containing the cell are obvious. Algal blooms are another example, the population of algae in a river, for example, explodes in response to excess nutrients, but quickly creates a hypoxic environment that destroys both the algae and the local environment.

Authors have critiqued the growth paradigm for decades (e.g. Herman Daly, Lester Brown, Donella Meadows). It seems that their voices are slowly retreating from the margins and establishing themselves on increasingly higher ground in certain public spheres. The silence from mainstream media channels on the issues they've raised, however, and the relentless daily discussion in the news of economic growth indicates that their voices are still not broadly recognized as valid. Endless economic expansion is not sustainable in the long term and 20th-century-style economic expansion may even be unrealistic in the short to mid term. Especially considering that the basic functioning of our economy, including the bulk of our food production, relies on an abundance of easily-accessible, cheap liquid fuels whose supply is unequivocally limited, doesn't it seem prudent to discuss alternatives to the current economic paradigm, even if those alternatives challenge our current way of life? Does the topic at least warrant treatment on the podcast? I think so and I hope you'll consider tackling this issue in upcoming Planet Money broadcasts.

Many thanks for your great stories and best wishes to you all,

born to run

2010-09-29T15:13:00.002-04:00

"Born To Run" by Christopher McDougall. This book is freakin' blowing my mind. I'm seriously considering running into the woods after work today to "persistent hunt" white-tailed deer.

sleeping angel

2010-07-19T18:20:00.010-04:00

It had been raining all morning. The diffuse mid-morning light was swallowed up by the soaked cobblestone walkways of the town plaza. The day was barely new and it was already dragging out like the stay of an unwelcome guest. I awoke that morning to a familiar malaise brought on by the hopeless repetition and routine of this sleepy Andean town. Life was anything but surprising here and by sundown, a child would die in my arms.

I was in the back of our team’s field truck practicing English with my Bolivian counterpart, Yesmina, and sucking on a chocolate-strawberry lollipop, the kind with bubble gum at the center. The rainclouds that greeted us in the morning had persisted throughout the day, slicking the already treacherous mountain roads we used daily to reach the isolated highland communities where we worked. Breakdowns and flat tires were as common as sloped dirt up here so when we rounded a turn to see a half-sized passenger bus stopped ahead with a crowd of people huddled around it, I was not surprised. You saw this type of roadside gathering all the time. The crowd would hang around until the driver managed to jury-rig the engine or whatever, and then they’d be off. As we approached though, the desperation in the faces of the crowd that was now coming into focus from behind the hazy, late-afternoon drizzle betrayed a gravity to their predicament far surpassing a broken axle. Several young men shouted loudly enough to be heard comfortably through the closed windows of our truck and waved their arms hurriedly in the air motioning for us to slow down. Our driver, Jorge, quickly stopped our vehicle and within moments we were surrounded.

“What’s going on here?” Jorge asked as he wound down his window.

A half dozen heads squeezed into the space left by the open window and peered about frantically into the truck as if they’d lost something valuable inside.

“There’s been an accident,” one man said seemingly out of breath. “The driver’s dead, four others are dead. They’re in the river. Our bus went off the road half a kilometer back. So many are dead. You have to take the wounded with you. Please. We don’t know when an ambulance will come. There are women and children hurt. They need to get to the hospital in Acasio.”

I had never been to Acasio, though I knew there was a hospital there. We passed by the town frequently enough on our field trips, but never had a need to actually descend into its mish-mash of corrugated iron roofs and dead-end dirt roads. The road to Acasio necessarily passed through the enormous Caine river valley. Navigating the sharp switchbacks of the sheer canyon walls on either side of the river added at least an hour to an already long and arduous trip, so we usually avoided that route. Now it was the rainy season though, and our other options were washed out. From the crash site, it would take us at least an hour to reach the town's hospital, and that was driving quickly on poor roads.

Several men were already moving back to the bus. There were other voices and pleas. I couldn’t make them all out.

“We’ll take who we can,” Jorge assured them.

Yesmina moved over in the back seat to the far passenger-side window to allow room. I scooted over to the center seat as the rear driver-side door was opening. Outside a young man was holding a collection of blankets piled haphazardly in a bundle. Before I could protest or react the blankets were inside the truck and in my arms. They were damp and unexpectedly heavy.

“We can’t take the dead!” Yesmina shouted to the man as if she’d somehow encountered this situation before. “We can’t take the dead! Is the baby alive?”

“Yes, yes, she’s alive,” he said nodding, distracted now. “We just checked on her a little while ago.” He was already turning to go help transfer more of the wounded to our truck.

Two men supported a woman balanced between their shoulders. She limped toward us wincing in pain with every forward motion, crying and mumbling something about her back and her baby. The men wedged her into the back seat with great difficulty, her mobility severely restricted by some unseen wound. She screamed out loud as her body bent forward to clear the truck door. I sat motionless cradling the fragile warmth hidden inside the blankets.

A young girl, maybe nine years old, who looked to be in shock, was now in the front of the cab, sitting on the lap of another one of our team members, Grover. I soon learned this girl was the daughter of the woman writhing next to me, and the child in my arms was her four-month old baby sister. I peeled back part of the blanket from the tiny figure as if it were a shroud. The child's eyes were closed and her face was damp and spattered with dried mud. I searched for obvious signs of injury but found none. Her every detail was in miniature. I strained to detect the tiniest flare of her nostrils. I rested my cheek close to her mouth and nose and searched in the stillness for some sensation. I felt for her carotid pulse. When none of this convinced me, I looked over pleadingly to Yesmina. She took the cue and repeated everything I’d just done. She never took the child from my arms, but kind of held her with me, our arms interlocked, embracing this little life that could easily have been balanced in one hand, but that we supported with all our strength at this moment, unsure of what else to do to save it. I felt so helpless.

The moon was nearly full that night. As darkness overpowered the dim light of dusk, our headlamps illuminated the rises and turns in front of us. Beyond the road, moonlight traced vibrant outlines of the clouds and mountains. We passed one, then two, and finally a third ambulance en route to the hospital. We motioned to each one to stop and told them we were carrying passengers wounded in the crash and that they needed immediate assistance. Each time we were told there was nothing they could do and that we should take them directly to the hospital.

After awhile the woman next to me turned and asked, “Will my child be alright?” People here quite often mistook me for a medical doctor. They were always calling me doctor, an error I would quickly disabuse them of. Forty years of paternalistic development projects in the region with “professional” Westerners parachuting in to apply their expertise left a singular impression of what white people did (and did not do) when they came to northern Potosí, Bolivia. In that moment, I wished so badly though that I was the knowledgeable expert she erroneously took me for. I wished I had some skill, some piece of knowledge that could help this child. But I didn’t. I was a child, and she was losing her baby. I just stared into her eyes, past them actually into what I found beyond, until we hit the next pothole in the road, bouncing the truck and twisting her body in pain. She quickly forgot her question.

The warmth in that blanket faded as we approached the hospital that we would soon find out was already being overwhelmed with wounded and dying victims of the bus crash. I wanted to believe the child was alive, and so I prayed. It seems that when it’s convenient these days, I pray. I prayed to the God of my childhood, the God I fell in love with once and who I come to as a child when life brings me to my knees. I asked Him for grace, that somehow His grace would work through me to save the child. It occurred to me that the child was already with God. I imagined her looking down from Heaven smiling at me, already promoted to angel, as sure of her decision now as when she made it, to enter this world knowing full well she would exit it in tragedy, having only briefly tasted life. I prayed. Though I didn’t know how anymore.

When the truck stopped in front of the hospital Yesmina was outside in an instant with the child in her arms and racing into the building. I followed her. A pale yellow light lit a cramped corridor inside. I hurried past half-open doors muffling intermittent cries of pain, concealing mangled bodies. Inside one door an old man was splayed out prostrate on a gurney; he was nearly falling off the front of it. He stared at the ground, his head and upper torso dangling off the one end, his legs and arms in the air behind him flailing. I had never heard shouts of pain like that before. The man was alone in the room.

As we turned a corner dozens more wounded lay at angles on the bare floor of the hospital’s reception area. I entered an exam room. An elderly woman lay on her back, bleeding from her head. She was motionless staring down at her own body, as if captivated by her predicament and not wanting to miss what happened next. A middle-age man lay next to her. His left leg was bound with gauze and at the mid-calf, was twisted in the wrong direction. There was blood caked on the sheets of his gurney. He looked to be wavering in and out of consciousness, his head thrown to one side and his hand covering his eyes. The attending nurse laid our baby down in a gurney on its back. She leaned her head in close to the child’s nose and mouth and held it there for long moments. She felt for a pulse, and began listening for heart and lung sounds with her stethoscope. Yesmina and I looked on in silence.

This continued for a few minutes until the nurse suddenly stepped back fearfully from the child as if she’d seen a ghost. “Ya no,” she announced in a panicked whisper, her face contorting from an oncoming sorrow. She rushed toward the exam room door, brushing past us with a determined look on her face. I hoped she was going for some piece of equipment or vial of medicine, but since I’d entered the hospital, I saw nothing but cots and gurneys. Where were their supplies and equipment? How did they heal patients here? With cardboard and linen? My heart sank as I moved closer to look at the child. The size of the gurney was absurd in contrast to her tiny body. It was liked she’d been dropped in a snow bank. Her face looked the same as it had for the past hour and a half in my arms. Peacefully at rest. I felt a sudden rush of guilt. Had this child died in my arms or was it already dead when given to me? Why hadn’t I tried to do something? Jesus, I know CPR. I could’ve at least tried to do CPR. You mean to tell me you can’t even tell if someone is alive or dead? What kind of person are you? Who lets a child die in their arms without doing something?

Outside in the hallway, this child’s mother was being treated for a spinal injury. She lay on the floor while a doctor and two nurses tightly bound a large section of corrugated cardboard around her torso from underneath. Another piece of cardboard was used to stabilize her neck. She shouted out in pain as they cinched down on a length of material to secure the cardboard. I wondered how this demonstration could possibly help her. Within a few minutes the doctor and nurses left to attend to a new group of victims now arriving by ambulance. The woman’s young daughter stayed by her side with her arm on her shoulder. Neither of them yet knew of the child that lay dead in the next room.

There was a long silence in the truck during our remaining three-hour journey. I could hear Yesmina stifling sobs for some time. She eventually was silent all together. I couldn't find any tears. From my rectangular window on the world in the backseat, I searched the silhouetted hills and farmhouses for a reason. The scattered stars, most having retreated from view in the shadow of the brilliant moonlight, offered no answers. They revealed nothing of purpose or providence. I thought of the mother who would wake up tomorrow without her baby. I tried to imagine that pain, to summon it from within myself, but the uninitiated cannot choose to open that door. What choices are given to us, we make, the rest is current, tumbling and raw, wearing us down until we’re stripped of all but Truth.

the window

2010-02-16T15:52:00.004-05:00

There's a window looking out behind this old house.
It has no glass. It has no screen.
Anything can come in through it to the room where I sleep
if it can reach the sill or has wings to fly.

It's a portal between the pale blue sky
and the musty shadows here on the other side.

Vestiges of an abandoned burlap shade drape down over the opening in jumbled frays like her hair after she showers—wet and tangled waiting to be brushed.

A breeze sets to the air carrying thoughts and feathery things with it along its route West.
It keeps no schedule and reveals nothing of its purpose.
The burlap willow branches spring to life in its wake.

I hear the cows in the pasture next to the ripening corn rows.
I hear the river that I'll bathe in tomorrow.
There are too many lazy-day birdsongs to count.

Nature is taking back this old house,
its mud brick walls a foot-and-a-half thick,
baked with earth, straw and pig hair.
Its foundation is stone. But the rain is mindless,
all it knows is its desire for the sea, and in its zeal it has collapsed the ceramic tile roof in places.
The kitchen wall is pulling apart where it has no business to do so. Two massive plates now duel across a widening fault line.
The ceiling swells and where I can see the afternoon clouds from my place at the lunch table, has burst.

Nature is taking back this old house.

If we could just fix 'er up this place would make a great tourist hostel.
We'll put the entryway columns back the way they were,
with their fanciful, foreign design.
We'll make the roof new, the way the schoolhouse roof looks new,
solid and restored,
rusty orange from the distant mountaintops over town.
We'll carve out new windows and resurface the walls where the water has warped their even plane.
We'll get the lights on,
and the water running,
the brick oven fired up and the chicha vats fermenting.

One day I'll learn to do these things,
in another place,
in a different language.
I'll have a place of my own,
a simple farmhouse that I will have built with my own hands.
A place to raise crops and mend clothes in the daytime
and write by candlelight in the evening.
I'll name the thousand stars with my daughter.

And then it occurs to me that maybe I won't do these things.
That this is a dream like so many others,
that the mountains call to me more than the hammer and Earth,
and that I have to move,
away from here to the next peak, the next border, a new horizon.

Ramblers don't build houses,
though they sometimes find homes.

under threat of death (May 1998) [3 of 7]

2010-02-12T10:43:00.007-05:00

I’m an idiot. I’d just like to get that out of the way before diving into this one. In case it isn’t abundantly clear by the end of this story, let me just repeat. I’m a moron.

I had never picked up a tennis racket in my life. I knew nothing about the sport other than the fact that there was a net a ball had to clear and that Andre Agassi’s toupee looked ridiculous. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a “let” and a “deuce”. I didn’t know there was ever a time when four people were allowed on the court at the same time. And I certainly didn’t know that the worst you could do per game was to attain a score of “love”. But by the time I entered high school, most of my close friends had somehow managed to become moderately skilled at this alien sport and decided to join the junior varsity tennis team. They convinced me to join too.

Those JV years were the good ones. We had an excellent coach—Mr. Happy. He was an actual tennis pro, who despite his conspicuous propensity to expectorate tobacco juice on the court during demonstrations, was a talented teacher. He taught me a lot about tennis. And women. My buddies and I worked hard those first two years. We traveled around to neighboring school districts, mostly got our asses handed to us, but we PTed, had a skills training regime, and honestly improved our games. Some of us improved a lot. For me, improving in leaps and bounds landed me the ability to get the ball over the net on a forehand and occasionally connect with a backhand.

Then, around the time we were realizing Mr. Happy wasn’t kidding about why women put studs in their tongues, some of us suddenly found ourselves qualified for the varsity team. I certainly wasn’t first on the promotion list, but I was definitely bumped up to the big leagues before my ground strokes indicated I should be anywhere near varsity competition. And as exciting as getting a chance to compete with the bigger fish in our small, western Pennsylvanian pond might sound, there was one large problem. The varsity coach didn’t know anything about tennis, let alone coaching. She was skilled enough at organizing a schedule for the team, making sure a bus arrived to take us to games, and getting us to matches on time, but other than that, we were pretty much on our own. She was a kind woman and harmless in her ineptitude, but a varsity sports team doesn’t need kindness. It needs someone who knows how to train team members, push them, keep them disciplined, help them to improve as players, people and help them to win. Our coach did none of these things. By mid-season of our first year we’d spend most of our practice time firing balls at one another from the ball machine, trying to see if we could get them lodged up the junior players’ rectums. We were 15 and 16 years old. Only my buddy Beres, who is now a company commander with the U.S. Marine Corps, had the self-discipline to keep training with any kind of consistency. Go figure. The rest of us had our moments, but mostly we slacked off. I don’t remember learning anything at all from our coach, despite the fact that I was in desperate need of direction.

None of her ineptitudes, however, justifies what I did. I only preface the meat of this story with those details to perhaps explain the frustration we all felt with this woman. Regardless, the moral of this story rests in the truism I mentioned above: I’m an idiot.

It was nearing the end of the season of my senior year. We only had one more match left on our schedule before we all closed out our four-year high school tennis careers, most of us never to play the sport competitively again. I had just lost my singles match in straight sets. Losing doesn’t feel good. Losing in straight sets feels even worse. My teammate Ben came over to sit on the courtside bench I was sulking on. We started bitching about our coach and whining about how badly our team sucked. We then started tearing down the other team’s players to lift ourselves up a bit. Then, quite seamlessly, I took a pen and wrote an anonymous death threat to my tennis coach on one of the score sheets attached to the clipboard next to me on the bench. The bitching, whining and making fun of was quite commonplace. That was our standby routine after most matches. The death threat, however, that was novel. It was kind of like a period, well, rather several emphatic exclamation points on our post-loss venting session. Perhaps I did it to extract a laugh from my teammate. (Though, if I remember correctly, he didn’t laugh, he just sort of looked at me with wide eyes and a goofy grin). Perhaps I did it to vent my anger at feeling like we’d been slighted by our coach for more than two years. Perhaps there was no reason for what I did. It may have been just an inexplicable, spontaneous reaction to the cocktail of emotions I was feeling at the time. I certainly, not even in the remotest corner of my being, had any intention of harming my coach. I don’t even think I could fathom what that would have meant at the time. Plenty horrible, harmless comments about our coach had been exchanged between teammates during the past several years. These were uttered and died in that moment. My comment was inked in pen and was not so easily forgotten.

The next day I was sitting in calculus class when an office runner came in and called one of my tennis teammates down to the principal’s office. The chatter started immediately. Conspicuous whispers darted around the room simultaneously from all corners like a game of telephone gone awry.

“Mr. Garda’s calling the entire tennis team, one at a time, down to his office.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, seriously.”

“I heard someone threatened to kill Mrs. Flarshenbracker.” (OK. “Mrs. Flarshenbracker” was not the name of our tennis coach. I’d just prefer to keep her real name out of this.)

Not that there’s ever a swell time to threaten to kill your tennis coach, but the time I chose was certainly one of the worst. There had been several cases of death threats against teachers in the news at the time. One rather well-publicized threat was delivered earlier the same week as I wrote my own special letter. It was a BIG deal, got a lot of media coverage all over the local news channels, and the guilty parties were going to juvenile jail. And here I was, weeks away from finishing 12 years of formal education, most all of it with a good name, and I’m crapping my pants in calculus thinking I just ruined all of that and instead of a four-year college in my future, I’d be facing a four-year sentence in the state pen. And I’d just turned 18 less than a month prior. That meant I was a big boy, too old for juvenile prison, but perfectly ripe for the adult fish farm.

I was called down to the principal’s office later that day. Maybe they suspected it was me and wanted the fear to simmer in me deep and long throughout the day. Maybe they ruled me out as a suspect because I had a good name and my father, who had worked as an industrial arts teacher at my high school for the past two decades, was enormously respected by teachers and students alike. Whatever the reason, I was called down after everyone else, at the end of the day. I walked into the principal’s office, my first time ever in his office, and before I could even round his desk to sit down he asked me, “Did you write this thing?” No formalities, no explanations. We both knew I knew what he was talking about. I told him “no” with a straight face. I was just about to sit down in the chair across from him when he said, “OK” and told me I could go.

I usually stopped down to my Dad’s classroom after school if I didn’t have any extracurricular activities going on that day. I drove in with him in the mornings and we would usually drive home together in the afternoons. I had barely crossed the threshold of the door to his classroom when he sat down, gave me a no-shit glare and asked me if I did it.

“No,” I said.

“OK,” he said looking convinced. He paused for a few moments before continuing.

“They’re bringing a handwriting expert in from the police department to determine who wrote this thing.”

My stomach wrenched into a ball and lurched into my throat.

“I did it,” I said without any hesitation.

He looked up at me with eyes I’d never seen before. I don't know how to explain them. All I knew is that I would unquestioningly do whatever he said next even if his words were "throw yourself out of that window over there."

He stood up. “Get your ass down to the principal’s office and tell him what you did,” he said without any hint of emotion.

I expected him to get fired up and angry. But he never did. Not then, and never afterwards. The palpable, pervasive disappointment in me that his frequent silence expressed in the weeks following my admission was punishment enough. It bore down on me, made the air seem thicker and harder to breathe. That I had destroyed my own name was acceptable fallout from this monumental blunder, if not a welcome, just punishment in the mind of an already guilt-ridden teenager. But to have sullied my father’s reputation was unbearable.

The principal’s office, though right down the hallway from my Dad’s classroom, might as well have been in the next county over. My insides roiled and my feet, now unwieldy dumbbells, dragged along the floor as I willed myself down the hall. These were the last steps I would take, I thought. The principal cursed out loud and slammed the file folder he was carrying onto his desk when I walked into his office and fessed up. I had never heard a school administrator casually use the word “shit” in front of me before. But I wasn’t surprised. I think I had in my head that I would certainly be headed to prison and probably physically beaten as a first round of punishment, so taking some verbal abuse was not shocking in the least. He might have asked me why I did it. Perhaps not. Regardless, I blathered something at him about the threatening note just being a joke, that I wasn’t thinking at the time. He left me alone in the office rather immediately, rushing out the door without telling me where he was going. I remained sitting in the chair I had so briefly gotten to know earlier in the day, wondering if they removed the seats from jail cell toilets to make the experience of crapping in full public view that much more uncomfortable. The principal returned in short order with the tennis coach and her husband (who had been my orchestra teacher in years past). I formally apologized to them both. I remember it being hard to keep my head raised and look them directly in the eyes. It was like someone had slung one of those airline travel pillows around my neck, but instead of being inflated with air it was packed full of ball bearings. The shame was heavy. My coach was visibly upset, but she didn’t seem angry at me, only relieved to know her life was not actually in danger. I can’t imagine what the previous 24 hours must have been like for her and her husband. I did that. I caused that fear. It’s a terrible feeling. Even writing this now a sinking feeling rises up in my throat and stomach.

I received a three day, out-of-school suspension and was kicked off the tennis team. I spent those days pondering jail, feeling like my end was inevitable. If my coach had pressed charges, I would have gone to jail. If not for my Dad being her colleague, and a well-liked, well-respected colleague, she very well might have taken action and my life would be very different than it is today. My Mom didn’t want to have much to do with me during those three days. I don’t blame her. I didn’t want to have much to do with me. But to my surprise, she wasn’t outwardly angry either. She too was enormously disappointed in me, that much was painfully obvious, and that was punishment enough for me. I wanted so much for them to tell me it would be alright, but they didn’t. In hindsight I’m glad they didn’t because it wasn’t alright and I needed to feel that.

I broke down crying the evening of my first day out of school. I was formally apologizing to my parents together for the first time and something snapped. Tears, heaving chest, sobbing, the whole catharsis. They told me that they still loved me, and my Dad insisted that I hadn’t ruined the family name, even while I maintained that I had. Though my situation hadn’t improved any, that was a turning point for me and the days following were just a bit less painful. I played basketball down the street with a group of friends on the evening of the third day. I don't recall having left the house in the three days prior to that evening. It felt amazing to be outside, to see people who cared about me, and to know some trace of the former me, the guy who didn’t threaten to kill his teachers, still remained. I felt normal again for a few hours. When my friends looked at me they saw the guy they’d always known. They didn’t judge me. I was the same person to them. That acceptance, at that time, was a blessing of immeasurable proportions.

After my three day suspension, I returned to school to finish out the year. I heard reports during those final weeks of some teachers using my name in their classes as an example of everything that’s wrong with modern society. Some people stopped talking to me, others wouldn’t look at me. In my English class, during the last week of classes, we were asked to talk about the most significant event in our high school careers. Everyone went around and told some story. The class listened with moderate interest to most of the stories, but certainly no one reacted to any of them. When it came my turn, I told the story of me threatening to kill the tennis coach. Though everyone knew the story (and I’m sure everyone’s family and relatives knew the story as well), it was never spoken about out loud in my presence. The entire classroom went silent. I could feel all their eyes on me. Our teacher too listened intently. I told my story and said it was the worst experience of my four years of high school, and probably of my life. I said it had also been the best. I had learned humility in a way that few people my age were able to really live a lesson. And I knew the lesson would never leave me. A few moments later I finished my story and suddenly the entire classroom erupted in applause. It was unprecedented. 17 and 18 year old public high school students are not that supportive. Kids applauding for one another without prompting normally only happens in after-school Lifetime television programming. I'd never seen any like that in all my years of public education. I couldn’t help but smile a bit. I walked out of the classroom that day feeling reborn, and I spent my final days of high school in a deep calm knowing that everything would be alright.

The tennis team lost in their final match that week. I wasn’t there to see it obviously. But I heard about it from my former teammates. We all graduated in June and I walked with the rest of my friends and classmates. Months later my Dad walked into the mailroom of the high school and found in his mailbox a small, sealed envelope. There was no writing on it of any kind to indicate who it was from or what might be inside. When I returned home that day I found the envelope on my desk and opened it. Inside was a gold pin. It was my varsity tennis letter.

Pap (June 1990) [2 of 7]

2010-02-07T09:32:00.004-05:00

My Dad’s parents moved to Florida before I was born and so I never really spent much time with them as kid. Family holidays were usually spent with my Mom’s side of the family. In particular, her parents, whom my brothers and I called Nan and Pap, were around all the time growing up. My folks would drop us off at their house for a weekend visit a couple times every few months and we just loved it. Nan and Pap would spoil us with on-demand sugary baked goods in the evenings, Sunday morning syrup-drenched pancakes, much extended bedtime hours, and most importantly, freedom. Freedom to watch cartoons for hours on end without a pre-designated time limit, freedom to engage in whole-house hide-‘n-seek games hiding in cupboards, closets, nooks, the occasional cranny and any other shadowy storage area we deemed a satisfactory hiding place, freedom to beat the crap out of one another without consequence, and freedom to generally indulge our deepest drives to get into boyhood mischief of all sorts.

Though I remember Pap clearly, I’ll forever see him through the eyes of the boy I was when I knew him. He was a man of routine with certain unwavering habits. He watched the same TV news show at the same time of day, every day. You could set your watch to his weekly lawn-cutting operation and set as the standard for the neighborhood the impeccably uniform length to which the lawn was kept. He only ever paid cash, in full, for the few cars he bought in his life. He and Nan would go shopping the same day every week. And we always sat in the same pew at mass on Sundays. He used the same glass every day, what we called the “Pap glass”, a forest green, plastic cup with a tapered lip from which he always drank. Because we’d often eat snacks in the evening in the living room, the house was full of little fold-out tables. Pap had his own, with its own unique design of insects and critters painted in brown on a cream-colored background. This he inevitably placed in front of the most enduring fixture in the house, the “Pap chair”, a cushy, dark-colored reclining chair situated near the entryway to the house. I remember so vividly Pap stretched out in that chair, doing his newspaper crossword puzzle, his magnifying glass in hand, the “Pap glass” on the foldout table next to him. I’d look up at him from the floor where I was reenacting the Battle of Guadalcanal with my G.I. Joe’s in the amphibious afghan landscape I’d dreamed up. Pap would glance away from his newspaper for a moment, look down at me, peering over the massive arm rest of his recliner reassuring himself I was contented playing at his feet. He’d give me a deep, warm smile. It made me feel like a special little dude. I remember thinking, “But I’m just playing G.I. Joe’s, Pap. What’re you so pleased about?”

Sometimes when he’d tuck us in at night, he’d tell us a bedtime story. Well, it wasn’t that exactly. You see, my brothers and I were used to my Dad’s rather exotic bedtime routine. He would update us on the continuing adventures of Joey and Dave, two boys not unlike my brothers and I, who were always getting into PG-rated trouble. Then there were the Eeyore shows. I received an Eeyore hand puppet one year as a gift (the donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh) and my Dad would bring it to life in the evenings having Eeyore, which we pronounced “eye-ore”, entertain us as host of his own variety show complete with a zany voice, theme song and dance and special guests. Pap’s bedtime style was a bit more subdued, though in hindsight, just as endearing. Pap would recite the Gettysburg Address to us. Verbatim. We looked forward to it every visit with excitement. And every visit I’d try to anticipate the words, somehow deluding myself into thinking I’d retained something of them from the previous recital. I never made it past “four score and seven years ago” though.

Pap died from a heart attack in June 1990 when he was 70 years old. I was ten. I don’t recall the exact number of days between his admission to the hospital and his death, but it all happened extremely quickly. One afternoon when Pap had already been in the hospital for a couple days, we were at my grandparents’ house and I was given the phone receiver by my mother and told it was Pap on the other end. Kids aren’t usually very good on the phone, and I was no different. I didn’t have much experience talking to Pap other than face-to-face. I had been told Pap was sick and was in the hospital, but I didn’t really understand what that meant or why I needed to talk to him at that moment. I assumed that what he was doing at the hospital was similar to my own experience a few years earlier when I had a tonsillectomy. My attending nurse sped me around the hallways on a gurney making racecar noises and providing commentator play-by-play of how my car (i.e. my gurney) was handily beating the competition (i.e. people in wheelchairs and sundry medical personnel roaming the hallways unaware they were involved in a stock car race). Then I was placed on the operating table by some nice doctors, I fell asleep, woke up next to another really nice, older man who was all smiles, and then I got ice cream and toys for a week straight. I figured Pap was going to come home in a few days and we’d all go to Baskin-Robbins together. Pap started crying when he heard my voice. I think he’d already been crying from talking to my brother Chris before me. He wasn’t crying hard, just choked up. I think he did his best to hold back the tears so as not to alarm us. I don’t remember what we said exactly. The conversation was short. At the end, he told me he loved me and I did the same. I gave the phone to my Mom feeling strangely comforted, that way Pap's presence always comforted me. It was the last time I ever spoke to him.

A day, maybe two later, I was playing in the living room of my own house. My aunt and her family were in town now. They lived in Atlanta and so I never saw them much, but they were here now. My cousin Jeff, one of only two first cousins I have on my Mom’s side of the family, was sitting on the couch in front of me. It must have been dusk because there was so little light coming in the sliding glass door from the outside to our living room. No one had turned a light on. The phone rang and my mother answered it. She murmured a few hushed affirmations and hung up the phone. She began crying softly, and as she did she turned to us and told us that Pap had died. Even then, as a 10-year-old boy, I had an abstract sense of the finality that those words implied. Up until that point in my life however, nothing had ended. Seasons changed, you got a new teacher every year, but this was all part of a continuing cycle that didn’t end. I didn’t have much use for the future because I knew it’d always be there, and besides, the present was good enough. The people I loved would always be around and so would I. I looked up to see that Jeff was crying now. I don’t know if I’d ever seen a grown man weeping before then. It frightened me. And so did my mother’s crying. I looked over to the person I perhaps trusted most at that time, my brother Chris, for some cue as to what I should be doing. He just looked stunned. So, I sat there stunned. But I didn’t cry.

At the funeral home, our parish priest performed a short service. I had been an altar boy at my church for a few years by that time, and so I was elected to be his assistant for the service. I held open the prayer book while he read from it, performed a few other inconsequential tasks and it was soon over. I remember the viewing room was just packed full of people. “Couldn’t they’ve found a bigger room?” I recall thinking. I felt claustrophobic, and after a short time managed to escape to a much larger, much less people-occupied space in the funeral home. A massive area rug extended to the furthest reaches of the room, covering nearly its entire expanse. I’d never seen a rug so big in my life. There was a tiny table in the corner of the room with a small lamp on it. Its light was meager, solemn like the rest of the place. I sat down in a chair next to it and let the images play in my mind.

We had arrived to the funeral home earlier than most of the other guests. So I had time to view Pap’s body in the casket. My Dad and I knelt before it and I was told I could say a prayer for Pap if I wanted. I don’t know what I said, if anything. I remember staring at the body though. It was as if someone had gone to the extraordinary, and quite unnecessary trouble, of fabricating an incredibly detailed wax copy of Pap, like the ones I’d seen in the wax museum, so that we would have a backdrop to admire during the funeral ceremony. Though they’d done a bang-up job on getting his features correct, it didn’t fool me. This figure was pale. The skin didn’t sit right on his face—it was shriveled somewhat and unnaturally pulling away from the bone, like the way my fingertips looked after playing at the pool all day long. And Pap’s eyes never looked that way when he took naps. This guy looked like he had no eyeballs beneath the artificially draped eyelids. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Pap.

I thought of that guy in the casket while I sat there in that chair, next to the table with the lamp on it, in that big room with the enormous rug. It occurred to me again that it wasn’t Pap in that box in the other room. I thought, "Pap is gone." He wouldn’t be coming back from the hospital. That’s why all these people were here. They were sure proof that our ice cream outing wasn’t gonna happen. I pictured Pap alive, the only way I’d ever known him. He picked me up into the air and hugged me. I saw his strong, sure hands on the inside of the steering wheel, guiding the car along and us passengers with it. I saw him in the “Pap chair” pouring over his crossword puzzle. I saw his smile, warm and safe. Then, I felt a certainty settle in. I knew he was gone. I had nothing in my prior experience to point to what "gone" meant. But yet, I understood. I felt loss for the first time in that moment. And I cried.

My Mom was there then and she held me. She cried too, but she wasn’t crying tears for herself, I think she cried for me. She’s always said, “I hate to see my boys cry.”

There were more tears for Pap that day and in the months that followed. But I never mourned him again. I ached for him for a long time, and learned the hurt that comes when you can’t reach out to hold someone you love, but I never again felt the need to cry from this pain. In the twenty years since his death, I’ve thought of Pap often. Sometimes it feels like I dreamed him up. I’ve been without him for nearly two-thirds of my life. People say he looks down on us from heaven. I don’t know about that. I feel like Pap probably has better things to do than keep tabs on all of us every day. I don’t need him to be watching me from 30,000 feet to feel his presence. A part of the profound love he had for my brothers and I fills me every time I think of him. And I remember why that wax guy was there that day instead of Pap. It’s ‘cause the part of him that matters most never went anywhere. I carry him inside along with the gift of love he gave to all of us. I suppose that means we can still get that ice cream cone together after all.

crybaby [1 of 7]

2010-02-07T08:27:00.002-05:00

The following blog entries began some five months ago. I wasn’t particularly sad at the time. On the contrary, I was preparing to return home to the United States after having spent most of the past year in Bolivia. It was a transition time for me—those times I think I seek most in life. When I’m dangling on the cusp of change, I always feel quite alive. Perhaps it was because of the vitality of that period of time that I felt inspired to begin writing stories I knew would challenge me. I didn’t imagine, however, that the challenge would be so great as to leave me struggling to get these experiences down on paper so many months later.

There’s a wrenching sensation in the center of your chest right before it happens. It’s as if muscles with a singular purpose, muscles that don’t otherwise make their presence known in day-to-day life, suddenly spring to action, closing off internal passages normally reserved for the flow of blood and air. Your entire body abruptly tightens and contorts. It screams out in silence. This is always shocking. It’s always paralyzing. Then, without warning, you remember that the paralysis has a purpose. That it’s a primer. A primer for what happens next. One must know bondage to properly know liberation. The wrenching is the bondage. The tears are the liberation. Someone throws the lever. Cogs turn. Chains rattle. Partitions retract. And the release takes hold. It is profound and it is the tears that make it possible. Just as occult muscles moments earlier choked you in their intractable grip, now different, equally unfamiliar muscles, held in constant, unconscious tension, release in choreographed unison across the entire extent of your body. You fall into arms unseen like a trusting, helpless infant. And you cry. There’s no thinking, no questioning. There are just tears. Until there aren’t.

I can recall crying only six times in the past twenty years. For guys in Ford commercials, maybe that’s six times too many. But after making my mental tally, the figure seemed shockingly low. Perhaps it’s testimony to the relatively pampered life I’ve led. No great trials, constant abundance and opportunity, and little pain. On the other hand, it may speak to an inherent or learned stoicism, or maybe just a basic emotional repression defense mechanism. Either way, I’ve found it difficult to cry or feel otherwise connected in my life at moments when I sincerely felt a desire to do so. When I have found a way to let go however, the crying bouts have been intense. This behavior aligns well with my typically “all or nothing” approach to living.

When looking back on these six episodes though, I see that in fact, the times are a changin’. And not randomly so. The intervals between these episodes are declining at a near constant geometric rate so that by this time next year I will have cried three more times and not too long after that, I’ll pretty much be a soppy mess on a daily basis.

First interval: 8 years.
Second interval: 4 years.
Third interval: 4 years.
Fourth interval: 2 years.
Fifth interval: 1 year.

But I’ll hold off on further future speculation at this point and stick to the past facts as I remember them.

V-day

2009-10-31T09:22:00.011-04:00

I walked out onto the tarmac this morning. Three planes were parked in front of me. The one to my right had the word Aerosur painted across the fuselage in big teal letters.

“That’s not my airplane,” I thought. “The name of the airline on my ticket should match the name painted on the plane. Yes, past experience leads me to believe that this is the way air travel works,” I assured me.

I looked in front of me. “I belong to the Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano fleet,” stated this aircraft plainly. “I, too, am a major airliner in Bolivia.” The plane to my left shouted, “I AM TAM!” Transporte Aéreo Militar. TAM. That was the airline I was flying with this morning on my journey to La Paz. The logo was unmistakable: the huge blue block letters, T-A-M, squeezed side by side with a goofily grinning yellow pelican zipping by in the foreground. The perfect imagery to connote the enduring presence, strength, and majesty of this, the civilian wing of the Bolivian Air Force. As I approached the plane I suddenly felt like I was in the wrong place. Everyone but me in the vicinity of the plane was dressed in military fatigues or was pushing around large pieces of cargo, roughly instrument-of-war sized, on dollies and lifts. I walked back to where I’d exited the terminal. Passengers were boarding the plane. Passengers whose tickets were taken by the terminal attendant at the same time as mine. This wasn’t an uncommon procedure for the Jorge Wilstermann International Airport in Cochabamba. Very often two different airlines would board their flights at the same time from the same gate. I looked up at the scrawny tarmac guard standing at attention with his helmet’s chin strap hiked up past his jaw functioning only to support his lower lip. A toy nightstick hung from his belt. He looked like a 12-year-old State Trooper, but much less frightening. I thought of asking him what the hell was going on, but he wasn’t making eye contact. I don’t mean with me or the other passengers, I mean at all. He was performing a standing doze with his eyes closed.

I looked back up at the airplane, down at my ticket, over at the TAM airplane, back at my ticket, and back at the plane in front of me. And then, against every instinct in my body, I walked over to the Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano plane, climbed the boarding stairs, and got on the wrong plane. The words Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano were painted on the inside cabin walls as well further weakening my resolve. I walked down the aisle toward my seat. The already seated passengers stared at me as already seated passengers always stare at still boarding passengers. We all have panicky looks on our faces while making that slow procession down the cabin aisle. We stop and look up to our left and right at the strange symbols carved on the paneling below the overhead bins. From the befuddled looks on our faces you’d think the seat numbers and letters were written in Thai script or were Roman numerals, really long Roman numerals, the ones no one ever learns (that is, all the numerals above 10). Many of us peer down the aisle fearfully examining the chain of numbers that extends off into the distance. Though they’ve progressed in pretty much increasing order thus far, we don’t trust that they’ll continue to do so. “What if they end or start going in reverse before they get to the “21A” written on my boarding pass?” we think. We can never get to the seat fast enough. If someone has the gall to stop for more than half a second in front of us to lift their carry-on luggage into the overhead bin before maneuvering into their seat, we get flustered, frustrated and frantic. When we finally do near our seats there are those horrifying few moments when we realize someone else has already claimed our plot of the cabin. “How could the airline have done this? Printed two boarding passes with the same seat number? Will they make me ride in the cargo hold?” The whole process is thoroughly traumatic.

The looks on the faces of the already seated passengers wavers between conceit and disdain. They’re very proud that they’ve staked their claim to their seat so quickly and looking at those of us who haven’t yet achieved on their level makes their accomplishment that much more savory. Seeing the lost lamb fear in our eyes reminds them of their own terrifying predicament just minutes before though, and this disgusts them. And so we disgust them. But they can’t look away. And they won’t throw tomatoes. So they just stare in silence. But we all know what they’re thinking.

I took my seat. One of the all-male, over-50 flight attendant crew came by shortly.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Where is this plane going?”

“La Paz,” he replied.

“I see,” I said. “And what airline is this?”

He looked down at me as if he’d been unexpectedly stumped by a crossword puzzle clue.

“TAM,” he said flatly.

“Of course,” I replied with a grin. I showed him my ticket, pointed to where it said TAM on it, clarifying for him that I was one of his literate passengers, and looked back up at him smiling. “Very kind,” I said.

He smiled hesitantly and shuffled off.

*****************

I’ve been reading a book by David Sedaris off and on for the past couple weeks. A friend who visited gave it to me as a gift last month. The most prominent words on the cover are not the title, “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” but rather the author’s name written across the top in large, white lower-case letters made even more prominent by the black background. This makes sense. Anything David Sedaris writes will be picked up off a store shelf not because of its title, but because of the author’s name recognition. The cover art of this particular selection is a skeleton smoking a cigarette and appearing to enjoy it. Back home the guy next to me on the bus might glance over, see I’m reading David Sedaris and think, “This fellow appreciates good humor.” Knowing the satirical nature of the content, the jovial skeleton might even make him chuckle. However, no one knows who David Sedaris is in Bolivia. The byline might as well read L. Ron Hubbard. All they think when they see the gringo reading the book with the creepy cover is, “sicko.” They look at the cover, slowly up at me, and then scoot over as far as possible in their seat. I’ve become very self-conscious as a result. I find myself placing the book face down on my lap during pauses in the action. When walking around I carry it with the front jacket concealed, facing in against my leg. I made the mistake of leaving it on the downstairs table in my host family’s house one evening a week or so ago. The repercussions in the morning were severe. My host Dad, Rubén, with whom I consider myself good buddies, was waiting when I came down the stairs from my room that morning, book in hand. He just kept looking up and down between me and the book, shaking his head in disappointment. I was devastated. The guy in the seat next to me on the plane shot me a dismissing glare after catching a glimpse of the smoking corpse in the hands of his aisle seat neighbor. People here obviously think the skeleton summarizes the content of what I’m reading when in fact, it’s just a silly image to go with the even sillier book title, taken from a random line Mr. Sedaris pulled from a safety guide booklet in a Japanese hotel. The sick thing is is that I’m quite accustomed to reading books with skeletons on the front cover that actually deal with skeletons, zombies, demons and other spawn of the Devil. The undead is one of my favorite reading subjects.

*****************

I walk a lot faster than Bolivians. Part of this has to do with the fact that I’ve got a good 6-18 inches on most of them. I also just walk fast in general. I like walking. I like walking around town, I like walking up mountains, I like walking up stairwells. And unless I’m on a beach, stoned, or holding someone’s hand, I like to do it fast. It exhilarates me. It makes me appreciate what I might otherwise take for granted—my ability to walk the Earth, touch it, and find peace in those steps. Walking around in La Paz this morning I followed my normal routine. I was on auto-pilot headed to the Migration office. I weaved in and out of pedestrians on the sidewalk, passing most people like they were standing still, and when the path ahead became too congested, I’d drop down into the street dodging buses, taxis, and more pedestrians. Though my stride and pace are longer and faster, respectively, than most Bolivians, the main reason why I’m speedier than them is not because of anything about me, but rather, Bolivians are just pretty laid-back folk. If they have a place to go, they’ll get there. Eventually. But they’re not about to hasten their pace just to arrive punctually. Like most places in the world, time isn’t valued here in the same way as it is in the States. For that matter, I’m not sure space is either. Later this morning I was visiting the offices of medical equipment suppliers pricing some new floor scales for our field work. I entered an office complex and got into an elevator with an older gentleman carrying a briefcase who sprinted in, out of breath, just as the doors were closing behind him. I pushed “7”.

“What floor do you need?” I asked him.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Any of them.”

I looked up at him expecting that he’d be joking. He wasn’t. He had a crooked grin on his face. His shoulders heaved slightly as he caught his breath, and this somehow triggered his arms to jiggle at his sides. His knees buckled a bit too, like he was gearing up to do the Charleston. The awkward, detached movements made him appear boneless.

We arrived at 7. I got out and started walking to the office down the hall. Crazy legs took off out of the elevator at a full sprint and bolted up the stairwell. This office complex had more than 20 floors. I wondered if he knew what floor he was headed to. Or maybe this was his morning exercise regime.

*****************

When in La Paz I always like to make believe that I’m a city person. I don’t know what this looks like on the exterior, but from the inside peering out, I look pretty damn smooth. I have the street smarts, the street cred, and usually even end up with some street poo stuck to the bottom of my shoe. How do I pull this off you ask? Well, I generally just try to suppress revealing how impressed I am by all the buildings taller than three stories. I figure if I look indifferent to big, shiny things, people will assume I know what I’m doing. The truth is, I’m usually always lost and overwhelmed in big cities. Spending most of my life in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, rural Kazakh villages and northeastern college towns hasn’t exactly heightened my urban instincts. Plus, I have asthma. Wheezing and choking on the unfiltered, leaded exhaust fumes spewed out by every passing bus doesn’t do good things for my otherwise suave urban image. When I was in town back in June enduring the medical exam for my visa physical, my blood work came back reporting that I had eosinophilia, which indicates an abnormally high concentration of eosinophil granulocytes, a type of white blood cell, floating around in the bloodstream. The screening doctor suggested it was caused by intestinal parasites. I was ordered a battery of tests which involved consecutive days of fishing around in the toilet with a plastic cup and Baskin-Robbins ice cream sampler scoop to present the good docs with some valid stool samples. Turns out I was parasite free and the high white count was only the result of my asthma acting up. The whole experience did help me to build character though.

One thing I think I am quite adept at in the city though, is the taxi hail. I’ve been practicing for years and I take pride in my ability to wave down public transport. The key is to act like you don’t need the ride, to in fact look a little disgusted by the fact that you have to get in the car, shared or otherwise, and take it to your desired destination. The less appreciated they feel, the more likely a driver is going to pull over. The etiquette differs from country to country, but this central principle remains the same. I remember starting out years ago waving my arm about, really making myself known to the passing cars. How young and stupid I was. I barely extend my arm these days. Granted, I probably miss a lot of potential passing rides because of this (i.e. the drivers have no idea I’m waiting for a ride), but that’s not the point. They gotta earn my fare.

I was in a shared mini-bus today heading out of the city when I witnessed a true master at work. I was two rows back from the sliding door of the mini-bus and had a window seat. Out of nowhere the driver suddenly slowed down, yanked right on the steering wheel crossing 3 lanes of traffic nearly killing everyone on board, just to pull us over to the curb where a Jedi master dressed as an unassuming elderly Bolivian man in a black bowler cap was walking toward our vehicle. He never motioned with his arm, never lifted his head in signal, never made any outward indication that he needed a ride. He just looked offended by our existence, like how dare we be driving around his city giving out rides to the public. He played it perfectly. The man wasn’t even standing still. He just emerged from a group of people on the sidewalk and without slowing down or changing his pace walked up to the mini-bus and got on as if knew ahead of the time this driver would be in this spot at this time and he would need to take exactly 17 steps from such and such place to arrive in time once he’d gotten inside of the head of the driver to pull over and pick him up. I saw the whole scene in slow motion, and though it probably didn’t go down like this, for a moment he transformed into Cyrus the Virus, played by John Malkovich in the movie ConAir (1997), in that scene when the airplane explodes behind Cyrus and a whole group of other sundry bad guys. They act like they don’t even know gargantuan fireballs are hurling into the sky behind them. Simon West slows the action down to let us know how badass these criminals really are. Well, there may not have been exploding people and vehicles on the sidewalk behind him, but this dude was just as badass as any escaped convict. He was, in fact, my hero today.

*****************

They had rearranged the desks and service windows in the Migration office. I stood gawking for a good five minutes in the entryway, scanning the new configuration of people and angles for signs of the familiar. I located Ronald, former window 7 Ronald, at his new post. He’d received an upgrade—he was now walled in behind plate glass. Good ol’ reliable Ronald. I watched him do business for a few moments. Everyone that approached his window either had their documents returned to them with an unforgiving head shake or were directed to a different window. They can change the furniture arrangement, but they can’t change the man.

I walked over to the new O.R.P.E. desk. I don’t know what that stands for. It’s just another acronym for the people behind another desk who I need to smile at and pay money to to get another piece of paper.

“I’m here to pick up my foreigner identity card,” I said to the kind-looking woman behind the desk.

“Is it for a one-year residency?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I confirmed.

She opened a worn wooden drawer from her desk. It stuck a bit as she pulled it out. Inside was a lidless cardboard box with a divider in it, and a several dozen identity cards. She pulled out one of the stacks and started thumbing through them. She got about three-quarters of the way through the stack and my photo hadn’t yet appeared. I was pretty sure I was screwed. My only hope was that my card got accidentally placed in the other stack of cards still sitting in the cardboard box on the other side of the divider. “Yeah, right,” I thought to myself. “It’s not that some bureaucrat didn’t want to sign the card, or didn’t want to extract more money from me in this process, it’s just that it was mistakenly placed in the wrong pile. I’m sure that’s it.”

Just as my stomach was sinking I saw my photo appear in the stack in her hand.

“The Lord be praised!” I squealed. Well, inside anyway.

I tried to contain my excitement, but very nearly hopped the desk and hugged the woman. We reviewed the information on the card to make sure it was correct. I said it was.
She looked up at me after a moment and said, “Would you be able to come back…”

Before she could finish her sentence I had already figured, “Here’s the rub. I gotta come back in 3 more weeks because they have to put a stamp on it or something.”

“…in a half hour,” she finished.

“Oh,” I said.

She indicated with her head a desk with a computer on it across from her. She mumbled something in a low tone that I couldn't hear or understand.

“Ah, yes, the desk,” I said. “Of course. Can I just wait here?”

“That’s fine,” she said.

I told her my name and made sure she repeated it.

“So you’ll just call me, right? Using my name?”

“That’s right. Just wait over there and I’ll call you,” she assured me.

Then she took my passport. They always take your passport. I went and sat down in waiting area. I watched her intently for 20 minutes. The sign above the doorway opposite her desk that led to the back room where the Migration evil lurks read, “Jefatura de Inspectoría.” Which translates as, “We’re never going to give you your documents, Andy.” She passed in and out of this doorway several times. Through this door I pictured a pack of overweight men in fatigues, nametags and esoteric honor badges pinned to their shoulders rubbing their palms together mischievously, giggling, and scouring manila folders full of photocopies and lawyer-signed letters for inconsistencies in my legal paperwork. Now they were skipping in a circle around my passport, in rapture, chanting wildly with some exciting find they’d made, and sending the kind-looking woman back out to me to tell me, “not today youngster.”

But this didn’t happen. She called my name after awhile just like she said she would. I went over to her and she returned my passport to me with my laminated foreigner identity card. I waited for her to tell me the catch. But she just smiled and said, “That’s it.”

“Right,” I said. I was sure she was overlooking some detail, but I didn’t want to stick around for her to remember it and take my documents away from me again.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” she said smiling.

I walked as calmly as I could out to the sidewalk, glanced up at the large “Dirección General de Migración” sign above the doors to this building for the last time, and ran away up the road as fast as I could.

special

2009-10-31T08:49:00.004-04:00

you’re not special you know this you know this by now
by now more than ever
every time you look into their eyes you see you’re a fraud you see it reflected so clearly their expertness your scam you hack their vibrance your dull loneliness their direction your hopeless wandering you’re not special
special would be more than you could manage
special requires sacrifice it requires urgency no it requires calm some insight an insight to see what it’s not given others to see to see the world through eyes unclouded to have the courage to give it all up to work harder than you ever thought you were able to to tackle the most tedious task and repeat it repeat it like an inane cog to embrace drudgery as the creative element itself like creating a new color and new petals to paint them on to not fold when all eyes are on you to swim past the breakers and let come what may to
live like trees send out scouts from the soil deliberate spontaneous simple connected ever-changing momentary committed brilliant

you are the middle child of history, with no purpose or place you have no great war, or great depression the great war is a spiritual war the great depression is your life you were raised by television to believe that you'd be a millionaire and a movie god and a rock star—but you won't and you're slowly learning that fact and you're very, very pissed-off you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake you are the same decaying organic matter as everything else you are part of the same compost heap

you are pissed-off!!
you weren’t born to do this can’t you see you aren’t here to play the game like everyone else you weren’t supposed to be here doing this you weren’t supposed to be here in silence adrift among the crowd you were supposed to be heard seen cheered you were supposed to be special there’s some formula they wrote on the chalkboard in kindergarten for all the kids to copy down in their Trapper Keepers you must’ve still been on the bathroom floor pressing finger paints to construction paper
a formula to make it all make sense some golden rule a rule you could follow to find your way you were supposed to be special it was supposed to be different you’ve never saved a life you’ve never sacrificed everything for someone else you’ve never sacrificed anything! you don’t see things to completion you’ve never created something truly wonderful because of it you’ve never created life you’ve never watched a life slip away you’re a boy holding the world’s hand fearful to cross the street looking up waiting to be led

the action?! the action??!! how would you even know what it is to think you’re missing it?? you are the margins you are the periphery your revolutions are in vain you’ll never reach the center if you ever did you’d be too blinded by ego to even know where you were standing

you hide from pain you avoid it without even tasting it pain that comes with doing what has to be done pain of being alone pain of an empty room pain of her just being out of reach pain of losing who you were pain of rising to what you might become

you are not special
there is no special life you tell yourself and there is no normal life only life through and through you tell yourself Obama is not special Einstein and Eisenstein are not special you tell yourself Craig Venter is not special Rachmaninoff is not special Augustine is not special their lives are famous but they are just lives lives like all of ours
lives
lives that have value no more or no less than the rest but you don’t believe that you want what they have and you hate that you want it and you bury your want and your hate of your want

*****************

Do you remember Tyler? There were Tyler and Tyler. They were three-hundred-pound freshman offensive linemen. You saw them on TV later that semester running onto the field in celebration of the coach’s 350th career win. You were the only non-jock in that entire acting class. In the morning circle of hugs you always ended up next to one of them. You came up to their navels and your shoulder-to-shoulder girth was about as wide as one of their thigh muscles. You were sure your lung had collapsed that one morning after Tyler put a little extra TLC into his warm-up thespian embrace. There was Katie too. The gymnast. Way out of your league. She was relegated to the bench that season nursing some unseen calf wound. You acted opposite her for your final scene. It was an angry scene, a tired couple half-heartedly battling to save their union. Tired of the relationship. Tired that they still didn’t understand one another after so many years. You thought then you might be an actor someday. You couldn’t act, never could. But you loved it nonetheless. The same way darkened theaters stole away reality, standing on stage did the same for you. Everyone performed their final scenes in pairs during the last week of classes. Katie and you unleashed five minutes of pretentiously-played frustration, forced blocking and disingenuous motive. But it all seemed real enough to you. The class sat huddled, allowing space for your stage, watching from desks piled to the periphery of the classroom. As your lines of dialogue peeled away from the page their signal slowly disappeared like a spacecraft’s crew losing touch with command central, radio communication deteriorating to jumbled static. It faded away. All that was left was the world of the embittered couple. You could be whoever you wanted in that space. You didn’t have to wear a mask—your mask was there in the space between you and Katie. You could be whoever you wanted. You could be special because your existence was there and gone. Each moment was new and different. Who you were left no traces and no one could challenge that because you had created it.

climate action we can all believe in

2009-09-27T15:19:00.005-04:00

Followers of the climate change debate have been so hoodwinked in recent years by the personal responsibility mantras of the organic shampoo, off-the-grid, localvores and the populist delusions of grassroots organizers thinking they can end off-shore drilling by knocking on doors and making vegan ginger noodles to bring to the “change-you-can-believe-in” pep rallies, that the single issue that’s going to save or sink our warming planet has been all but ignored. And that is, volcanoes.

That’s right folks, as you sit there deciding what ten friends to forward Bill McKibben’s most recent e-petition calling for the U.S.’s signing of the Kyoto Protocol or turn the pages in your bedside copy of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, 20 volcanoes just erupted and up to 50 more will blow their tops by year’s end. There are more than 1,000 magma systems the world over, each of those containing any number of vents, cinder cones, and other sundry terrestrial sphincters just itching to spew out heaps of carbon dioxide and rock particles that will trap in the heat radiating from the Earth’s surface, thus helping to melt another glacier or raise sea level another few millimeters. And those are just the surface volcanoes. Scientists have a hard time even estimating the ridiculous number of eruptions that take place along the volcanic fissures splitting open the sea floor. Not only do these submarine spreading centers billow out copious quantities of atmosphere-choking CO₂, but they could also be insidiously melting the Antarctic ice caps from below and spurring on El Niño cycles by warming the waters of the East Pacific.

You’ll hear arguments claiming that CO₂ production by volcanoes represents only a small fraction of those greenhouse gases sent skyward each year by human activities. But if we take another look at the numbers I think you’ll see that this logic, spun to make us think there’s something an individual can do about this problem, is fatally flawed. On average, volcanism produces about 500 billion kilograms of CO₂ per year. Let’s say 70 annual eruptions, a liberal estimate, contribute most of that output. That’s more than 7 billion kilos of carbon dioxide per volcano per year. Now, let’s consider the average yearly CO₂ contribution of a U.S. household, households which wear the clown shoes of the carbon footprint world. Depending on what you include in your calculations and how you run the numbers, the average U.S. household produces anywhere between 7,000 and 19,000 kg of CO₂ per year. At most then, the average U.S. household leaves behind a carbon footprint 0.00027% the size of your average erupting volcano. With these sobering statistics to draw on, does it make more sense to focus efforts on reducing our household energy consumption, a proposition that will prevent hard-working families from leading fulfilling lives and will lower some of our best national-level indicators of happiness (e.g. GDP), or is the clearer course of action to blow up some friggin’ volcanoes?

The volcanic eruption of Mt. Asama in Japan in 1783 released an estimated 900 trillion kilojoules (kJ) of energy. That’s not too shabby. While all eruptions may not be so energetic (that one killed 1,500 people and leveled 500 square kilometers of countryside), it wouldn’t be prudent to lowball estimates of these kinds of things when the future of the planet is at stake. The way I see it, we need to strike back against these so-called “natural” carbon emitters (as if being around longer than us somehow exempts them from culpability) with at least as much force as they seem disposed to muster toward the destruction of our atmosphere. Medium-range ballistic missiles aren’t going to cut it; they’re destructive power isn’t in the same weight class as these hulking coned polluters. No folks, we’re gonna have to look nuclear here. Your run-of-the-mill megaton is equivalent to 4.18 trillion kJ, still not up to par with the explosive power of the big-boy composite volcanoes, but drop a salvo of B83s down the vent and we’ll see how eager they are to talk back. This strategy is clearly a win-win for all involved. We’ve got nearly 10,000 intact warheads in our nuclear arsenal. The Joint Chiefs would be more than happy to oblige the release of a couple hundred from the weapons shed. Nuclear energy, traditionally such a divisive issue, could finally be embraced by both the environmentalist community and the free-market neoliberals as a practical solution to our climate woes. U.S.- Iran relationships would assuredly improve. Volcanic nuclear destruction could be used as a starting point for negotiations regarding the purpose of Iran’s newly-discovered uranium enrichment facility near Qom. Presenting Iran with new options for the environmentally-friendly use of weapons-grade plutonium would demonstrate the U.S.’s willingness to accommodate the despot nation’s nuclear ambitions and may even earn us a new trade partner in the petroleum and pistachio markets. At the very least, it would soften Ahmadinejad’s hubris on the subject. And the American public, eager for some novel infusions into the primetime lineup, could also get behind the idea provided the bombing runs were televised.

October 24, International Day of Climate Action, is fast approaching. On that day, instead of wasting time writing letters to senators, cutting back on your 30-minute showertime, canceling that round-trip air travel for your Icelandic honeymoon, installing carbon-reduction art exhibits, biking through downtown with “350” banners, or marching on the capital steps, why not drop the self-sacrifice and publicity stunts and rally around clear, tangible climate action that will unite us across nations, political parties, races and creeds. Let’s nuke a volcano.

i feel like chicken tonight

2009-09-26T15:38:00.017-04:00

I stabbed at the chicken on my plate, prying away a chunk of breast from the bone.

“Andy, I need you to kill a chicken for dinner tomorrow,” my host mama said matter-of-factly.

“Excuse me?” I choked.

“We’re having guests in the afternoon and there’s no meat at the market this weekend. So, you’ll have to kill one of the chickens.”

I’d been in Kazakhstan now for about four months and spent more time in closer quarters with cows, chickens, goats, sheep and horses than I’d had in the rest of my twenty-two years combined. I’d even witnessed the slaughtering of a sheep on the eve of some important religious holiday two months prior. I didn’t speak Kazakh, wasn’t familiar with Muslim holidays yet, and was pretty much constantly enveloped in a fog of cultural confusion in those days so I couldn’t tell you what the occasion was. That wasn’t important to me though. I rushed upstairs to grab my camera the second I was informed about what would be going down. As it turns out, it wasn’t the kind of event you’d want to capture on celluloid to savor at a later date. Friends arm-in-arm, toasting frothy mugs of eggnog, smiling bright and wide, framed by a freshly-cut Christmas pine decorated with tinsel and gnomes—yeah, you’ll dig that photo out of the closet every December to warm your spirit. A hog-tied sheep bleeding from its neck into the dog’s food dish, convulsing, shitting and pissing all over the front patio as it breathes its last, with host papa turning to the camera, grinning fiendishly, and brandishing a bloody knife he just used to serve you dinner the night before—uh, not gonna go into the family album.

That was when I was living with my first host family. They had strapping, capable men in the house who took care of the manly household tasks, for example: setting fire to things, heaving medicine balls, playing chess after dinner, and, of course, butchering sheep. In my new host family, I was the sole source of testosterone under the roof. And I was pitifully failing to pull my weight in that role. I lived with an industrious, middle-aged, single mom named Aliya and her two daughters, Aida and Aziza. They were half-sisters, and were as selfless, hard-working and driven as they were refined and beautiful. I’d never had sisters before them, but they were the kind of sisters I’d always imagined myself having since I was a kid. All three of them saw me as an utterly helpless child. They weren’t far off base, but I can’t claim total responsibility for their hasty perceptions. Most of the men they knew were utterly helpless children. Correction—utterly helpless, drunk children. In their eyes, I wasn’t remotely qualified to clean myself, feed myself, or hang my laundry to dry. But I was more than capable of beheading poultry. In fact, aside from baby-making, that’s really the only reason they kept men around. While at that point in my life I hadn’t yet learned to prepare anything more complex than a cheese omelet or peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I was still scalding myself regularly during my once-a-week bath in the family’s Russian-style wet sauna, I was even less capable of slaughtering animals. At least I had some experience with ingesting food and removing dirt from my skin; sending animals to their death, however, was a whole new world. I told my mama no, I would not be killing dinner tomorrow.

The next day I was chopping wood out back with my friends Niki and Paul. I love chopping wood. It fulfils perfectly my need to distill the world into organized, comprehensible subunits. You take a big, honking log, gnarled and unseemly, chop it in two, chop those halves down again, and keep on beating back entropy until you’ve got a neat stack of matching-length kindling sticks. Chopping wood also makes me feel like a man. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re still wielding a damn axe. From a distance, this appears quite manly. And this was particularly appealing in a country where the depth of my masculinity was challenged daily by the locals. I’d grip that medieval tool with both hands and grit my teeth a bit like I was amping myself for a charge against Longshanks’ armies knowing I was outnumbered and that this sacrificial act would be my last. Then I’d heave the thing over my head and bring it down with all my strength splitting apart my adversary and concomitantly conquering some tiny bit of nature. If destruction and conquest don’t define a man then I don’t know what does. And besides, what other household activity allows you to tear something apart with an axe? OK, as it turns out, killing chickens, but that’s beside the point.

“So you’ll eat meat, but you won’t kill the meat yourself? Is that what you’re saying?” Paul asked.

Paul was a tree-hugging vegetarian. Niki was too.

“Huy-ya!!” I grunted as I brought the axe down driving it into a seam along the grain of my foe.

“It’s not that I wouldn’t kill an animal if I had to,” I said, “it’s just that I don’t have to and so I’d prefer not to.”

“You don’t think that’s hypocritical?” Niki ribbed. “I mean, you have no problem eating the animal, but you won’t take the responsibility for killing it yourself.”

“No, it’s not hypocritical,” I spit back. I was getting defensive. “Like I said, I would kill the chicken, but I’m not in a position where I have to kill the thing. There’s a difference. If push came to shove, I’d take care of business. You know, like Anthony Hopkins did in that movie The Edge. I could kill a bear.”

I passed the axe to Paul.

“But Aliya asked you to kill it. You are in a position where you have to. You’re just avoiding the fact that you’re a hypocrite,” Niki or Paul said.

“Look man, we’re supposed to eat meat. It’s why we have these handy incisors,” I said. “Just ‘cause I’m not the one behind the disassembly line in the slaughterhouse doesn’t mean I shouldn’t eat the stuff.”

The sparring continued for quite some time. We eventually chopped all the wood and took the conversation inside. The many sides of the vegetarian argument were expounded for me in round by my two friends over the course of the next hour and into lunch. My host mom served us horse meat and salad. Niki and Paul ate salad. I eventually tired of rebutting their statistics. In all honesty, I hadn’t thought much about these issues before meeting these two clowns and didn’t have many counterarguments to defend myself. No one in my family was a vegetarian. None of my close friends were vegetarians. I grew my hair long for a couple years in college—that was about as close I came to anything resembling counterculture. And here these two were talking to me about the environmental impacts of carnivorism as if this were required material for college entrance exams.

I downed a forkful of horsemeat and decided to sleep on it.

It was probably a week later when I asked Aliya if she would cook me vegetarian-only meals from then on. She was, predictably, incredibly accommodating of my request and over the course of the next six months became regionally famous amongst tree-hugging, herbivorous Peace Corps volunteer circles for the diversity and delectability of her vegetarian dishes. Why did I do it? How was I so easily swayed to drop a lifetime habit after a mere day of haranguing by two bleeding hearts who relied on beans for protein? The truth is, I don’t know. Looking back now it seems so unlikely. I had never before considered the origins or morality of the different colored items on my dinner plate, let alone contemplated discriminating which of those colors I’d allow to pass between my teeth. To the first people to ask in the coming months why I became vegetarian I could only respond, “Mm-mm-mm,” in between bites of endive. The way you pronounce “I don’t know” with your lips closed. As my thinking became more refined, however, and my ego larger, I honed in on “personal sacrifice” as my motivation.

“I wanted to see if I could do it, you know, give it up. Asceticism seems like it can’t hurt to try. And what the hell, I’m young,” I'd say.

My experiment in personal sacrifice ended up lasting five years, interlaced with a few brief lapses into meat-eating. I never found the “sacrifice” to be that exactly. Sacrifice requires trial and struggle. And aside from a drunken sprint to the roast beef table at a wedding reception one night a year in, when I was overcome by the temptation of cow flesh (an attempt which was summarily denied by the kindness of a carnivorous friend who laid himself out to barricade the sandwich rolls at the last minute), I never really found it difficult to not eat meat. I think the same obliviousness that fueled my eating habits for the first twenty-two years of life allowed me to remain indifferent to the combination of tastes and colors that entered my mouth in the years after. I’ve since adorned my list of reasons for vegetarianism with the more altruistic motivations for the lifestyle (e.g. saving the environment, not starving the poor), but from the beginning, it was really just a fluke.

___________________________________

I did kill that chicken. A month after her initial request, I heard my host mama telling Aida she had to kill a chicken for dinner. Aida was seriously distressed about this and pleaded to be released from the responsibility. The poor girl, in addition to maintaining a sterling academic record, took care of just about every household chore one could think of during the course of her sunup-to-midnight workdays. I couldn’t bear the thought of her killing a chicken. It seemed like it would do some irreversible damage to her womanhood and I just wouldn’t be able to live with that on my conscience.

“Aliya, I’ll kill that chicken,” I said with my chest pushed out and my head held high like I was volunteering to march in the frontal assault on Fort Wagner.

“You really don’t have to do that,” Aliya replied. “You’re just a helpless child and I don’t trust you anyway.” She didn’t actually say that second part, but it was implied in the tone of her voice when she rebuffed my offer.

“No, no. I insist, Captai…err, I mean Mom,” I said.

Aliya and I went out to the wood-cutting area back by the outhouse later that day. The hours leading up to it were torturous. I had gone outside to contemplate the half dozen or so chickens in their coup darting about and pecking at invisible morsels in the dirt. A couple of chicks looked up at dinner, I mean, their mother, and asked, “Mom, you’ll never leave us, will you? We love you so and don’t know what we’d do without you.” They then squeezed under the wire mesh of the pen and wobbled over in a shaky line to where I was standing and watching.

“Uncle,” they said addressing me, “won’t you take us for a stroll around the garden? The day is so lovely and we couldn’t be happier with you as our Master, taking such good care of us and our family.” I looked down at them curiously, tilting my head to one side.

“Andy.”

“Andy.”

“Andy!” Aliya shouted, snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Snap out of it. Here, take this.” She handed me an axe. “And this.” She handed me a chicken.

Thoughts of orphaned chicks retreated from my mind. I paused and looked down. There was a chicken in my hand.

“Aliya, um, how do you kill a chicken?” I asked.

“Put its head on the chopping block,” she said in exaggerated tones, “and take its head off at the neck.”

“Right.” I said. “Take head off at neck.”

“With the axe, right?” I confirmed. It occurred to me that they may have had some exposure to Ozzy Osbourne concert tapes here in KZ.

“Yes Andy, with the axe.”

I wasn’t accustomed to handling chickens. I didn’t know how you picked one up even if you weren’t about to lop its head off. It fluttered and flapped in my hand sending white feathers and avian flu vectors scattering about in the air all around me. I held my arm out and danced my body around in a tiny circle jig trying to avoid the chicken’s fussing, but realized I was holding it in my hand and as I turned it was just going in the same direction with me.

“Put the chicken, on the chopping block, and take its head off,” Aliya repeated in slow, deliberate syllables, pausing after each instruction.

At this point I’m sure she would’ve just taken the chicken off me and done the deed herself had she not had a chicken of her own to kill. She already had hers on the chopping block and was ready to deliver the death blow. My ineptitude was frustrating her rhythm.

I took a deep breath, grabbed the chicken by its two legs, and tossed its upper body onto the chopping block with a thump. I waited for it to struggle and flap itself off the block, but it did neither. It just laid there placidly as if it didn’t know it was about to be in two places instead of one. I raised the axe over my head like I’d done hundreds of times before and brought it down heavy. As I did, the words my father recited to me scores of times as a kid raced through my head:

“Keep your eye on the ball, And. Nothin’ to it. Just watch the ball connect with the bat.”

I tried, Dad. I really did. But just like in little league when my best at-bats were walks or foul balls, I missed the mark here too. Well, I didn’t miss it exactly, I just didn’t follow through on my swing so to speak.

The axe landed with a dull thud about three-quarters of the way down the chicken’s neck. The noise it made lacked the crunching sound I had assumed would accompany the shattering of its cervical spine. My blade sliced through skin and sinew, spraying blood everywhere, but not cutting through the entire neck, and therefore, not killing the chicken.

“What are you doing?!” Aliya shouted.

“I don’t know! I shouted back panting and waving the chicken in her general direction. “The chicken’s not dead!”

My chicken squawked and gyrated frantically. And bled. Frantically.

“Hit it again!” Aliya cried.

Determined, I tightened my grip on its legs, repositioned it, and curled my body back for another strike. You see, I was used to the two-handed, wood-cutting axe grip. Two hands, as it turns out, provide much more force than just the one. I’d underestimated my one-armed manhood. In addition, because the chopping block was low to the ground, I had to hunch over slightly to maintain my hold on the chicken’s legs with my left hand, so with my knees bent I couldn’t harness my body’s full torque capacity on the downward swing. These are the excuses I came up with later.

I brought the axe down again, this time with more strength than I thought I needed to compensate for my disadvantaged, one-armed (and frankly, unfair) fighting stance. I was so concentrated on the oomph of my blow that I took my eye off the ball. Sorry, Dad. The axe carved a deeper and wider gash into the chicken’s neck this time, still not penetrating, but also not in the same place as the first chasm I’d inflicted. This pleased neither me nor the chicken.

Blood was now spewing forth from this pitiful creature's neck like a nozzleless watering hose you stifle halfway with your thumb to concentrate the stream. I was pretty bloody at this point, not nearly as bad as the chicken mind you, but my clothes and face were spattered everywhere with pockmarks of chicken blood. Also, I was going into shock.

The shaky line of chicks now turned the corner from their coup area to enter the killing fields and watched in silent, baby-chicken horror as their mother leaped about in my hand, now bursting forth in a bout of combative flapping, now hanging upside-down in wet noodle acquiescence. Oh yes, and bleeding to death.

“Give me that,” Aliya insisted, impossibly frustrated.

She wrenched the chicken free from my traumatized hands and tossed it into a cardboard box with the headless body of the other chicken she’d just ended. I assume it bled to death because later on the family ate it for dinner. I was a vegetarian by this time and so didn’t partake in the flesh eating. But seeing the cooked chicken on their plates gave new meaning to the term “farm-to-fork”. I went on to harvest potatoes, carrots, cucumbers, garlic, onions, strawberries, apples, peaches and other edible, non-vertebrate goodies from the gardens of many friends in the coming months in Kazakhstan. The meal always tasted so much more delicious when I had a role in bringing the food to the plate myself. Participation in the meal was palpably fulfilling and I was actually conscious of it. Somehow though, with that chicken, none of these benefits of personal involvement accrued. I just felt sad and sick. Doesn’t say much for my manhood I suppose. Makes me wonder though, how many more vegetarians there’d be if we all had to kill our own dinners.

friends in low places

2009-09-19T18:27:00.018-04:00

He spots me before I’m even entirely through the threshold of the open doorway.

—Andy! Come on over here you!

He’s wearing an awkwardly large smile, like he has a mouthful of pancake batter and finally just managed to pry apart his upper and lower jaws wide enough so they won’t stick shut.

—Marcos. Chum. I announce flatly.

I walk up to window eleven. We talk through a little circle cut into the glass plate that's partitioning us.

—What’s the news? I ask.

—No complaints from this side of the glass I tell you. God, how long’s it been?

—About ten days, Marcos, I say.

—Really?! That long?

—Yes, indeed, I shrug. Yes, indeed. How are all of the files in your file cabinet?

—Oh, they’re all in their respective folders, same as always. Hey, you remember that time I made you wait for your passport for like two and a half months? That was a hoot!

He cups one hand under his belly and leans back at the waist to give his laughter maximum room to maneuver.

—You had to come back here like half a dozen different times! And we still didn’t give it to you!

He points in my direction. His whole body convulses with glee. After a minute he begins calming down until there are only giddy tremors rocking his shoulders.

—Ahhhh, he sighs. Those were the days, buddy. Those were the days.

—Yes, good stuff, I say unable to manage any manner of facial expression whatsoever. Well, just wanted to check in, Marcos. You take care now.

—You too, friend. I’m sure I’ll see you back here real soon.

He snaps the fingers of his right hand, quickly turning the hand into a fake pistol, his index finger pointing straight out at me. He brings his thumb down to touch the extended finger, this somehow meant to represent the pulling of a trigger. What guns do you discharge by touching the top of the barrel with your thumb? He winks and pretends to shoot me.

—Hi Valeria, I say cheerfully, now at window ten.

I like Valeria. She is at window ten. And she never rejects my documents. By the time you get to window ten there’s very little that can go wrong. Your money’s been taken at window nine. Ronald at window seven has tentatively approved your stack of papers. Even Crusty Guy at window eight who pages through your passport with no discernible purpose has let you pass. Granted, not without leaving some residue of bodily excretion on your paperwork—most likely phlegm, sweat, or earwax—but, you’ve been given the green light nonetheless which makes the general disgustingness of the moment seem alright.

And Valeria always smiles at me. She smiles at everyone though. I’m not special. But her smile makes me feel like I am. There’s no one else in the Migration office I would rather have tell me how many weeks I have to wait for my paperwork to come through, how many scores of times I’ll need to return to pay more money or run through more hoops, or how long I’ll be without an official document and unable to leave this country in case of emergency. Her voice and smile always soften the blow.

—You doin’ alright, Andy? she asks.

—Yeah Valeria, just fine. Thanks for asking. Just here to deal with some paperwork. You know how it goes.

She smiles. Yes, she knows how it goes. And that smile tells me she knows it will keep on going…for a long, long time.

I move to window nine. This is Walter’s station. Walter is balding. His shoulders aren’t massive, but they look that way because of his head. It sits on his neck like a deflated balloon, entirely too small and out of shape for his otherwise stocky proportions. I’ve never heard Walter speak. And I’ve never seen his eyes. His chin is always buried in his neck examining the impeccably parallel lines that cross the pages of his many ledgers. They are more tomes really. The information inside them is endless, esoteric, and will never be looked at. Walter is the cashier. When you approach his window he slides a colorful sticker across the length of his desk to you and points to the amount of money displayed on it. This is the amount you need to pay to keep the Earth spinning on its axis for another twenty-four hours. You then pass the correct number of bills under a narrow archway at the base of his plate glass window and he counts them skillfully, the way bank tellers do, fingering through brick-sized wads of cash in a flurry of inexplicable hand gestures and thumb licking. Your name is entered into a ledger, and then another. Other numbers and letters are entered. Then you do that again. Walter then affixes stickers in his ledgers and in your documents. Then in a separate notepad. Then onto the forehead of a young boy who sits behind the desk. The entire transaction is conducted in silence and Walter never picks his head up to glance at you from behind the miniature pair of glass ovals resting on his nose.

I say nothing to Walter. But he knows I’m in front of his window. And that’s enough.

I steer clear of Crusty Guy at window eight who is sneezing on the medical certificate of a six-foot-five Brazilian man wearing what appears to be an oversized Brazilian flag as a shirt. He doesn’t seem too pleased about the soiling of his documents, but in time he’ll learn to give Crusty Guy only the expendable copies of his forms that can be thrown into the biohazard bin immediately afterward being processed.

Ronald at window seven is playing a first-person, shoot-‘em-up video game where the main character has to hunt down and destroy wandering zombie hordes.

—Ronald. What are you doing? I ask.

—Hey, hombre, he replies. Sorry I can’t talk now. I just cleared level five and the underwater level takes forever to beat. It’s not fair, you know. How come I can drown but the zombies can’t?

—I hear you. Well, just wanted to say hello.

—You working on your foreigner identification card paperwork?

—Yeah. How’d you know?

—You were just in here ten days ago starting the process. I guess we’ll be seeing lots of you in the coming month.

He chuckles and a zombie’s head explodes on the screen.

—Yeah, I say. I guess I'll be seein' you.

I walk over to two police officials at a desk across the room.

—I’m here to register for my foreigner identification card, I say.

—Give me your passport and take a seat over there, one of the officers say curtly.

I do.

I’m called back to the officer’s desk after a short wait. We spend half an hour reviewing the personal information form I filled out last time I was here. He crosses out large chunks of what I wrote with a red pen and scribbles down new words in their places. He seems to take special pleasure in striking the Spanish acronym “E.E.U.U.” I wrote in several places on the form and writing in the letters “U.S.A.” instead.

—United State America, no cierto? he asks me.

—Yes, that’s correct, I confirm.

Getting some solid English down on the form makes him feel better about the process. And I'm feelin' good as long as he's feelin' good.

Near the bottom of the form, the pronunciation of my Dad’s middle name takes him quite awhile to grasp. The letters arranged in the order they are in that name don’t convince him that the name is an actual word. I have little patience for him on this topic though. I wouldn't have even included my Dad's middle name on the form had it not been explicitly required. I was forced to write it. I had no choice. I swear.

When we were kids my parents would assign a new password to our lives every six months or so. The following rule applied: if a stranger ever came up to us claiming Mom and Dad had been in an accident and offered us a ride to see them at the hospital, we were to grill them for the password. And if they were unable to come up with it on the first try we were to get the hell out of there.

The password was top-secret, classified. No one but the inner circle had access to it and even then we never spoke it out loud for fear of exposing ourselves. One day on the playground I overhead some boys swapping their respective family passwords like they were Fleer baseball cards, the crappy ones that still came in the packs with that splinter of pink, petrified chewing gum, extracted centuries earlier from some primordial gum quarry and impossible to penetrate with the human jaw. I couldn’t believe my ears. What were they thinking? Didn’t they see all these other people all around? Look at all the adults on this playground. Sure, they were all teachers at our school and we knew them, but they surely knew other adults, adults we’d never seen or met before. And these unknowns were undoubtedly strangers. These idiots were exposing their entire families. Without that password intact, they’d be defenseless. I retreated from eyeshot determined not to be drawn into the conversation for fear that I might let slip some clue that could lead to the deciphering of my own precious code.

My Dad’s middle name was the password for at least two six-month rotations, including the final rotation of my childhood—the rotation six months before it was decided my brothers and I were either competent enough to know not to get into vehicles with pederasts or if we did end up in a car alone with one, we were mature enough to be able to execute a jump and roll maneuver from the moving vehicle before being driven into the woods. So officially, that last password, my Dad's middle name, is still the one we're acting under. I’m still sworn to secrecy. My Dad’s middle name is reserved for the inner circle and this olive drab public servant certainly isn’t part of that. In fact, I’ve never seen him before today. That certainly classifies him as a stranger, and here I am actually delivering him the password in black ink and in a tidy government folder. I feel like Benedict Arnold.

—You need to give me three, 4 cm x 4 cm photos of yourself in front of a red backdrop with these numbers across your chest, he says. He points to an eight-digit sequence of numbers on the form in front of me.

—E0033273?

—That’s right, he says.

He hands me a red slip of paper with an address for a photography shop up the road.

—4 cm x 4 cm?

—Yes, that’s right.

He pulls out a tiny photo from his desk drawer and places it in my hand.

—It should look like this, he says.

The man in the photo in my hand looks like he’s just murdered someone and has absolutely no opinion about what he’s done. It’s possible that he’s hungry. A placard with eight digits hangs around his neck and he might just as well be staring into the vacuum of space as a camera lens given the utterly lifeless and lost look in his eyes.

The photo store is the size of a janitor’s closet. I find it a short time later crammed in between a photocopy shop and a lawyer’s office in the back hallway of mini-mall up the street. I tell the proprietor what I need and he pulls out a placard identical to the one in the photo of the hungry man. The letters and numbers in the nameplate are already arranged in the exact order I need them to be save for the final digit which he promptly switches out for the number three. He brings me out into the hallway in front of a large piece of red felt hung from the ceiling behind me.

—Please take off your glasses and put this around your neck.

The nameplate barely makes it over my head. I look up to the hazy world of uncorrected vision. A crowd has begun to gather. I can’t see the details of it, but it’s big, blurry and growing.

—I feel like a criminal, I say to the shopkeeper who’s now fussing with his digital camera.

—Yeah, he chuckles.

He snaps off a few shots with the flash. I do my best to look lifeless and lost. It’s surprisingly easy considering I feel like I’m headed to prison. He shows me the photos in the LCD screen of the camera when he’s done and I agree they look good even though I still can’t see anything without my glasses and I’m not sure which aspects of the photos he’d like me to affirm anyway. The deer-in-headlights glare from the point-blank flash exposure or my thousand-yard zombie stare? I’m not going to show this photo to my mother and it won’t be going up on the refrigerator. If it’s 4 cm all around and depicts me as a convict on a photo shoot in an angry, red room then I think the inner circle interloper back at Migration will be satisfied.

When I return to Migration with my photos I’m fingerprinted again. This is the fifth time I’ve been fingerprinted in the last four months. My new confidant doesn’t need to tell me which thumb to offer him first. When my pictures, prints and password are all neatly filed away in Marcos’ file cabinet I’m told to come back in three weeks to pick up my foreigner identification card. It won’t be ready by then. He knows it. And I know it. But when you're as tight with the good folks of the Bolivian Migration Division as I am, you can just leave so much unspoken. I nod my head to him and give my left pec a quick double pound with the side of my right fist. He nods back. We understand each other. And we never even say a word. Hey, that's what friends are for.

love well

2009-09-14T15:43:00.000-04:00

"We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love."

—Valentino Achak Deng, in What is the What by Dave Eggers

soccer rules

2009-09-14T15:12:00.004-04:00

At halftime we would affix the orange halves inside our upper lips like prosthetic gums and those juicy crescents, so perfectly refreshing, hit the spot like that first swallow of water after crossing the desert. That’s possibly the only thing that’s ever been clear to me about the game of soccer. I played for just one season when I was about ankle high. I spent most games sprinting around in confused bursts at the rear of a snaking mob of boys who all had the same idea—do anything in your power to put shoe leather to ball before an adult has a chance to blow a whistle. I managed to do this maybe twice per game, feeling the thrill of having the ball between my legs for a fleeting moment before I tripped over my own feet or was otherwise clobbered by the mob. The starts and stoppages in play never made any sense to me. I played because it seemed like that’s how boys my age should occupy their time. Also, my parents seemed really excited about my role in the whole venture, like I was specially spectacular on the field. I think I felt that all the parents planted on the sidelines in their foldout lawn chairs had come especially to take in the two to four seconds of ball handling excitement I supplied them with during our games. Despite the stardom though, I only lasted one season.

Tonight I witnessed my first live Bolivian soccer match. It was a family affair; all were in attendance except for my host mama. It was Cochabamba’s home team, the Wilstermann Dudes in Red, versus the San Jose Dudes in White, a team from a city called Oruro about 75 miles south and west of Cochabamba. The game was important. If Wilstermann lost they would be demoted from major league play and would have to spend the next year fighting their way to the top of the minors to restore their status. It wasn’t clear to me that anyone in my host family held a particular allegiance to either team. When I inquired they never really provided me a straight answer. But they were excited nonetheless. And because they were excited, I was excited.

Felix Capriles Stadium is two blocks away from our house. I pass it nearly every day. It’s an oblong, open-air, concrete structure resembling a big top circus tent with the top shaved off. It’s painted red, yellow and lime and peppered with promotional billboards for Tigo, a local cellphone company, and Aerosur, a popular Bolivian airliner. After we’d taken our seats and most of the rest of the crowd had filed in, it was relayed to me that there were 24,000 people in attendance. I don’t know what the stadium’s maximum capacity is, but the place looked to be standing-room-only. The riot police weren’t sitting down anyway.

Halfway into the first half of the game the fans in the south bleachers set fire to the stands. I sat between my host sister Leisa, and my host brother Andrés. I was intrigued by the presence of the fully armored officers with body-length shields who were patrolling the area in front of the San Jose fans before the game began. I asked Leisa why they had decided to show up to the game.

—Oh, she said in a tone that suggested we might be discussing cake recipes, the San Jose crowd set fire to the track in their home stadium last week.

—Oh, I said.

Up on the postage-stamped size pequeño-tron several riot police were shown restraining, then tackling a shirtless man who was wildly swinging at the air with beverage in hand, struggling to break their hold on him. That encounter must’ve angered the folks in the generally vicinity. I say this only because right after it happened they set fire to the stands. I counted maybe half a dozen bonfires of varying heights and intensities. This number grew in the next half hour. About a twenty policemen formed ranks facing the crowd on the athletic track that wound around the field in front of the burning area. I thought they might’ve been planning a rush or some kind of crowd dispersion strategy, but as they just watched the fires burn I think they were just arranging themselves so everyone had a good view of the spectacle. No one around me seemed to find the stadium burning down of any great importance. The game went on and people went on watching it. I decided I should do that too.

When we first entered the stadium Leisa was carrying a small purse. In it were a sweater, a couple drinking glasses, miscellaneous girl stuff I suppose, and an unopened two-liter bottle of Pepsi. We passed our tickets to the ticket takers and then came upon the friskers and bag searchers. After a moment I suddenly noticed that Leisa and my host dad were terribly upset about something the police officer probing through Leisa’s bag was attempting. I leaned in to see. He was twisting open the cap on the Pepsi bottle. My host family was understandably frantic because opening the Pepsi bottle now would decarbonate the beverage for when it was needed later and the Pepsi wouldn’t leap off your lips and tongue on the way down to your belly in that way that makes you feel a little bit proud of yourself. The police officer, however, was just being diligent, doing his job ensuring no alcohol entered the stadium premises. I didn’t realize this was even a BYOP event. In fact, later on, I learned from the family of ten sitting behind us that this night was actually a BYO-entire-family-dinner-including-pots-pans-fried-chicken-and-corn-on-the-cob event. I guess that promo line wouldn’t fit on the ticket stub. Regardless, I felt encouraged by the extraordinary measures and attention to detail carried out by the hometown police force to provide for the safety of those in attendance. Once inside the stadium, however, it appeared that the friskers may not have thoroughly searched everyone. Nearly all the teenage boys had surprisingly large quantities of fireworks, flares, and other small-scale explosives. They shot these off frequently and without abating throughout most of the game. It’s my layman’s opinion that these may have played a role in the burning of the bleachers.

I learned tonight that in the twenty-five years since I’ve played organized soccer, I still don’t understand a thing about the game. I followed the ball easily enough. I could tell you with little doubt in which direction it was heading. But beyond that, gameplay was a mystery. Play would stop frequently, sometimes for short moments, sometimes for long moments. When it did the ball was never brought into play anew in any organized manner. On the contrary, some player would toss the ball in the air with some backspin, see where it landed and came to a stop and give it a boot. Alternatively, one of the ball boys (OK, that’s probably not what they’re called, but that term’s good enough for tennis so it’s good enough for me) on the sideline in his florescent orange pinny would hastily toss a new ball to a player and that would begin play. It struck me that this would often happen while the officials were still dealing with the reason for the stoppage in play in the first place (e.g. a player was slide tackled or clipped from behind) and half the players were distracted discussing it. The direction the ball boy tossed the ball and the rapidity which with he helped bring the ball into play after the stoppage seriously influenced game events. Several times it spawned breakaways. Another time the goalie was in mid-run ready to boot the ball downfield after a pause in the action, and suddenly it was decided the ball should be brought in from a sideline on the other side of the field. Now, I’m sure soccer doesn’t have the most complex set of rules. It’s got a center line, a small box around the net, and a bigger box around that box. You use your feet, not your hands. The ball is round and rolls. That’s pretty much it. Someone unfamiliar with the rules, like myself, shouldn't have all that much trouble picking up the basics. Ice hockey, on the other hand, must just befuddle newcomers: line changes, the face-off circles, offside calls, icing, crease rules, red lines, blue lines. And American football—forget it. I watched the Superbowl this year (you know, the one the Steelers won) with my host family and a dictionary in my lap. Hash marks, first downs, false starts, a line of scrimmage, toe drags, the red zone, intentional grounding. I’ve been watching that sport since I was a kid and it still manages to confuse me. So comparatively, soccer’s pretty straightforward. It just seems so needlessly random. Take “stoppage time” for instance. This is the time after “full-time” has ended, that is, regulation time, and the game continues. Until it’s over. Now when exactly it’s over is interesting. My host family in South Africa spent about an hour trying to explain this to me once many years ago.

—So each half lasts 45 minutes, is that correct? I asked.

—That’s right, my host dad said.

—And then how long does the overtime period last?

—The referees decide that.

—Based on what?

—All the stoppages in play throughout the game. They add those up and let the game go that much longer.

—How do they know how long all the stoppages in play add up to?

—They estimate. But they let the game go longer sometimes anyway.

—What do you mean?

—They’ll just let the teams play until they’re ready to end it.

—So it’s up to them how long the game lasts?

—Yeah, I guess you could say that.

—Don’t you think that’s unfair? I mean, one guy with the power to end the game whenever he wants, that could certainly influence the outcome of the game in a big way, don’t you think?

—Well Andy, they are the referees.

I imagined after that conversation how fans of American football would feel if the refs allowed the trailing team an extra couple minutes in the fourth quarter to advance the ball further down the field on their last drive. You know, just because it didn’t feel right to end the game yet without at least giving them a chance to get into field goal range.

I said only a handful of words the entire match. When my host brother or sister would stand up eagerly, gasping and staring intently at something on the field, I would stand up and stare in whatever direction it was they were looking and try to look equally flabbergasted. When I did speak it was some variation in verb tense of the phrase: what’s happening?

—What happened?

—What has happened?

—What was happening?

—What happens?

After awhile I stopped standing up at all. I would just look up at them like a lost child with my mouth agape and choose a tense. The game environment didn’t help my confusion. There were lots of distractions. Every now and again the fans on the short ends of the stadium would unfurl enormous banners, rolling them out row by, hundreds of people at a time, displaying their team logo and the phrase, “Proudly Wilstermann”. One of the banners was in the shape of a T-shirt. The massive piece of fabric shimmied with the movement of the thousand people beneath it as if they were all wearing it and simultaneously shivering to stay warm. Bottle throwing was another crowd strategy to stave off boredom. They threw bottles at the riot police, the regular police, the referees, the players, and each other. Thick plumes of colorful smoke appeared at times spiraling upward from patches of fans and dissipating like smoke grenades popped at helicopter landing zones. Confetti eruptions would white out entire sections of the stands at random intervals. Brightly-burning road flares dotted the bleacherscape like swaying torches paying homage to a rock ballad. Fireworks were constantly exploding overhead. After the bleachers burned, someone turned a firing tube on the crowd, exploding several fire crackers right over the heads of a row of onlookers. That was worrisome. And nothing had even happened in the game to set all of this off. I wondered what would happen when someone scored a goal.

About five minutes into the second half play was stopped.

—What has happened? I asked Andrés.

—Gas, he said.

—Gas has happened? I thought. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but it didn’t sound good.

—What is happening? I asked Leisa.

—Gas, she said.

—Gas? I asked. What do you mean?

—Tear gas, she said.

—From the police?

—No, someone in the crowd threw a canister.

Thankfully, the fumes didn’t waft over to peanut heaven where we were seated. I started hoping now that the game would end scoreless.

When a goal finally was scored by the home team, the reaction was ecstatic, but thankfully not all that violent. The game would remain 1-0 until the end of full-time, and even until much later in the evening when the referees decided they wanted to go home and so called an end to stoppage time as well. Everyone kept asking when the game would end. They seemed as confused as I was. That brought me some pleasure.

When the game was finally whistled over a couple players from opposing teams got into a tussle on the field. Luckily, there were thirty or so riot police not doing anything right nearby and so they managed to get in between the two men and break it up. A few minutes into watching this someone in the exiting mob of disgruntled San Jose fans took a pot shot with his firing tube into the lingering Wistermann fan section. A triple explosion crackled through the air a few meters from where we were standing. Everyone jumped and shoved their pinkies in their ears. The smoke wisps were a few feet above our heads.

I exited the stadium past stoic police officers wearing body armor, jet black combat helmets, and clutching automatic weapons. My ears were ringing. The home team had won, which is more than I can say for most of the games during my soccer years…er, year. Somehow though, I walked away not feeling quite as special, bright and shining.

a letter to Valentino Achak Deng

2009-09-14T13:38:00.007-04:00

Dear Mr. Valentino Achak Deng,

You don’t know me. We were probably born in the same year, and if not, very nearly so. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, not far from where you went to college in Meadville, but very far from the Bahr al-Ghazal river and the town of Marial Bai where you grew up in southern Sudan. I’m the second of three brothers. They both have wives and children of their own. My family is healthy and for the most part quite happy. Nothing tragic has ever happened in my life, and so, there can be no empathy from me for the events of your life.

I just finished reading your story in Dave Eggers’ novel What is the What. This letter must be one of many thousands of correspondences you’ve received since the book was published three years ago. And so I realize you may never even open the envelope in which it arrives, but I write it as much for me as I do for you.

Your life’s struggles have been truly herculean. Because I knew you were alive by the fall of 2003 to share your life story with Mr. Eggers, I knew you survived the events described in his book. But as I turned each new page, it seemed impossible that this could be true. That a small boy could continue walking and breathing through the horrors that civil war inflicted on you and so many thousands of others. Some might attribute your survival to the work of God. I don’t have the arrogance to suggest that possibility to you. As your book states, “For many years, God had been clear to boys like us. Our lives were not worth much. God has found innumerable ways to kill boys like me, and He no doubt would find many more.”

Somehow though you’ve managed to retain a faith, hope and belief in humanity in spite of the atrocities and the doubts you harbor “in the angriest corners of your soul”. I believe I would have despaired long ago, Mr. Deng, and those dark corners would have consumed me. And yet, you endure, albeit with a struggle. There is always struggle.

“Though whispered doubts have ringed my head and though I have had certain godless hours, my faith has not been altered, because I have never felt God’s direct intervention in any affairs at all. Perhaps I did not receive that sort of training from my teachers, that he is guiding the winds that knock us down or carry us. And yet, with [the news of my girlfriend’s murder], as we drove, I found myself distancing myself from God. I have had friends who I decided were not good friends, were people who brought more trouble than happiness, and thus I have found ways to create more distance between us. Now I have the same thoughts about God, my faith, that I had for these friends. God is in my life but I do not depend on him. My God is not a reliable God.”

I, too, have struggled with God, Mr. Deng. The tests of my faith have been relative whispers, perhaps inconsequential compared to your confrontations with death, disease and deprivation. These tests you've faced are blaring trumpets. Drawn into the hungry maw of countless men, their hearts twisted by hatred, loss and power lust, you were spit back out onto the earth wondering if and why you exist. My tests have not brought me to the brink. But my tests have been uniquely mine and ones that have become the focal point of my life. I think in this struggle to understand our purpose and the actions of men, we share a path.

I, too, have struggled to understand the divisions in this world that we find, even seek, to separate ourselves from one another, Mr. Deng. Whether the boundaries are of nation or religion, wealth or race, sex or education, or of our emotional hearts, the walls we erect have always seemed false to me. My struggle with division has mostly unfolded reading the pages of history books and newspapers, watching films, and hearing others’ stories. Yours, however, has been lived first hand in the throes of racial genocide and class discrimination. Yet even now you speak of a hope in humanity. You’ve seen unlikely compassion, even Arab and Dinka friendships, like your father’s relationship with his business partner and friend, Sadiq. And you’ve seen great acts of kindness in the midst of horrors. I think in this struggle to hold onto a faith in the bonds we share, rather than the colors that divide us, we share a path.

I, too, have struggled with independence, Mr. Deng. You came to a new country, a life wholly foreign to you and the life you knew in southern Sudan, western Ethiopia and Kenya. You were dependent in Africa on the charity of strangers (the man who did not exist, and the quiet, loving grandmother). You were dependent on the United Nations and foreign governments. You were dependent on them because living life in refugee camps left you no other choice. You were dependent here in the United States on neighbors, sponsors, and the Sudanese diaspora. How would you know the rules for attaining a driver’s license or opening a bank account if you had never done these things? But you don’t want to always need another person’s help. I understand. I was given abundant opportunity to enjoy the best things of life since I was very young. When I’ve been sick, a doctor has been there to heal me. When it was time for an education, the doors of high schools and universities were opened to me. When I’ve most needed the love of a family, it’s been there without fail. I’ve been nurtured. Perhaps as a result, I’ve badly needed to prove that I’m self-sufficient. I left my country for two years to serve in the U.S. Peace Corps in Kazakhstan after studying at university. I think I did this in part to demonstrate my independence, my ability to take care of myself. When I returned home I found my mother still wanted to take care of me like I was a needy child. I remember having a phone conversation with her at that time. I was angry. I didn’t understand why she didn’t trust me to take care of my own affairs. I was not living with her and my father then, I was working, paying rent, moving forward with my life. I didn’t need anyone I thought. I could succeed on my own. What did I have to do to prove that? But she kept me under her wing. I pushed away that shelter then because I felt like it somehow diminished me. I felt I wasn’t a worthy individual if I couldn’t go it alone. I’ve since had a change of heart.

Father Matong, the priest who baptized you and gave you your name, Valentino, told you that you would have the power to make people see. He told you that you would remember what you saw, see the lessons, and bring light to others. We have different work to do with each person that we meet in this life, Mr. Deng. Some people we pass in the street and exchange smiles. We never see them again. Other people we call mother, brother, or friend. Still others are here to bring us to our knees so that later someone else can lift us up. You avoided helicopter bullets, rifle bullets, lion’s jaws, crocodiles and conscription. You survived blindness, bombings, starvation, infection, unforgiving deserts, and the burning of your village. You did not sink back into the earth like so many of your companions. I have to think you impossibly survived all of that because of the work you had to do with me, and the hundreds of thousands of others you touched with your story. I can’t walk away unchanged from your story. The light it brings is too strong to soon be forgotten or extinguished.

Do you know why I had a change of heart, Mr. Deng? Why I stopped needing to not need others? I found the more I pushed away the help of others, the more I pushed away my own humanity. We don’t walk this road alone. We were never meant to. The space I provide others to help me is a blessing to them, just like their hand reaching out to me is a blessing I’ve been given. Now my parents’ charity only gives me comfort, like your mother’s yellow dress that you see in your dreams. You’ve blessed many by opening yourself and allowing them to care for you. And now I bless you. Because I’ve been here waiting all these years for you to help me. That’s our work together. Thank you. The step out the door this morning, and every one from now on, will be different because of you. And because your story will be with me now wherever I go, I know we share a path.

big food vs. big insurance

2009-09-12T21:56:00.001-04:00

September 9, 2009 New York Times Op-Ed piece by Michael Pollan:

Big Food vs. Big Insurance

dog eat dog

2009-09-11T21:19:00.008-04:00

The floss silk trees were radiant, blooming magnificent lavender flowers. The path he followed wound along a pair of near parallel ridges through idyllic farmlands and across eroding hillsides. The afternoon sun bleached the earth from its pinnacle overhead. He’d walked this footpath maybe a dozen times in the past months and the dogs sometimes barked. Sometimes gave chase. Sometimes slept. Today though something had lit a fire in them.

The first one sounded an alarm when he was still far above making his way down a series of steep switchbacks. The barking echoed in his ears the entire long climb down. The traveler suddenly realized how tired he was of these animals. He knew them well in his own country, even loved them. But here they were untamed, their animal instincts not caged by wealth or sterility. They chased cars mindlessly, mauled one another, barked for endless hours in the night, and satisfied themselves. His thoughts retreated to a city street he’d walked along a few weeks prior. Two of them were locked rear to rear and surrounded by a pack of six others bounding over one another, howling, pawing, tackling. They spilled into the street from the sidewalk, oblivious to the thick traffic. Oncoming cars and minibuses spun them around, toppling them over and sending them smashing into street posts. But they persisted. The pack orgy followed in a frenzy creating havoc for sidewalk vendors and pedestrians. He remembered feeling sick to his stomach. As he passed by the two copulating beasts he caught the eye of the cur. It was panting and wild-eyed, nearly flattened at each new instant by a passing vehicle, but numb to it all. It was consumed by its lust, had no soul of its own in that moment. Its desire controlled it, owned it.

By the time he reached the small farm homestead at the bottom of the hill the dog had climbed to meet him and was barking furiously. He bent down under the weight of his pack and picked up a rock. The dog inched forward, but he continued his pace. When he descended past the dog’s position it charged. He turned to confront it, extending his leg out and planting his right foot firmly in front of him at once threatening a counter and at the same time bracing for a rush. The dog turned away running down an embankment to a narrow yard where the path led. It ran about in convoluted patterns lost in its anger that this interloper had entered its territory. It charged him again as he made his way through the yard, this time diving at his heels. Before he did it, the lustful, lifeless look in the eye of the city dog flashed through the traveler’s vision again. The sickness returned and then an anger descended on him like he’d never experienced. He felt defiled by that animal and the act it had performed so conspicuously. But that wasn’t the source of this anger. No, this anger was the anger of fear. He saw himself in that animal. It was the ugliness inside him revealed, turned inside out and laid bare for all to see. He knew he had looked out into the world through those same eyes. Consumed by impulses of desire, anger, sloth, agitation, and doubt. And to look out into the world and stare back into those eyes was unbearable for him. The humiliation was complete. He had to erase the eyes to set things right.

He swung around and flung the rock in his hand at the dog. Dogs scared easily. They usually ran and didn’t return when you threw something in their direction. But he wasn’t aiming to scare away the beast, he was aiming to end it. The rock struck it square in the muzzle. It reeled back surprised at what had just happened. Before it had time to gather itself the traveler was on it. The rock had fallen on the ground in front of the animal and now it was in the man’s hand again. He raised his arm high above his head and brought the rock down hard, bludgeoning the back of the creature’s head. It let out a howl and lunged at the man who now had it pinned to the ground with both knees. It sunk its teeth into its attacker’s shoulder before receiving a second, and then a third blow to the back of the head. Stunned and bleeding the dog collapsed. But the man did not relent. His swings became faster, more crazed and aimless. A memory now appeared. He gathered water in his green and white buckets one overcast, winter morning. The day was unremarkable. Two well-fed, adult canines emerged from a patch of bushes batting around a kitten playfully, tearing it apart in slow succession. The kitten gasped terrified yelps for long minutes as the two thugs had their way. Soon its body was limp and carried away in the jaw’s of one to be devoured in the shadows.

Like the river waters in the canyon below following the spring rains, the fury inside him surged anew. He had paused in his pummeling of this dog, but now began again. He didn’t stop until the animal was unrecognizable and the rock caked with its blood and fur. He had never killed anything as sentient as this before. The anxious thrill of taking a life coursed through his body. But his anger wasn’t assuaged. He found a length of rope tied to a nearby tree limb, fashioned a lasso around the dog’s mangled neck and tied the opposing end firmly around his waist. He began to walk. The dog dragged behind and its blood trail closely after.

Further on the path suddenly turned from dirt to sand. Fields of alfalfa sprang up on either side, sown in dark, rich soil fed by a rotating sprinkler. The three dogs somehow hadn’t seen him approaching and were taken off guard. When he came into view they erupted in a paroxysm of growls and bounded at full sprint across the planted rows towards him. His grip tightened on the rope around his waist. He wound it over his hand and around his wrist, choking up on it and pulling his cargo closer to him. As the first of the three was nearly on him he heaved the carcass around, both hands on the rope now, sending it crashing into the charging mutt. It flew backwards tumbling end over end. He dropped the rope from his hands and from around his waist and dove feet first into the second of the dogs. Its neck snapped in an instant and a chilling crunch sliced through the air with finality. The third dog now careened into the man knocking him flat to the ground. It came for his face but the man rolled to his stomach. The dog fell to it haunches and gathered for another thrust, this time sinking its teeth into the man’s thigh. He roared. Binding his hands together in a swollen fist he swung at the animal’s head jarring his leg free from its grip. He stood up now and reached for an errant fence post that had not yet been wrapped with barbed wiring. He wrenched it from the ground and turned in time to meet a final rush. The dog’s muzzle was spattered with the man’s blood and as it jumped again for his face the fence pole he held extended in front of him buried itself deep in the dog’s neck. Its body crumpled limp around the wooden stake. The first dog ran off squealing in agitated cries. These two new trophies the man slung across either shoulder, refastening his rope to the first, and continuing on his way.

Those that crossed his path further along scarcely made a sound, whimpering as they trotted away, defeated before they’d begun. His anger only grew though. Those eyes weren’t erased. And the more his anger grew, the more the eyes became his own. The path climbed ahead of him disappearing behind a broad mountainside in the distance. The eyes, the act could not be erased. His acts could not be erased. They were now written in time and memory.

As he walked off he wondered if he would see those eyes again and if he did, who would he see looking out from them? He knew the answers to both questions. The road ahead was long and this new weight he carried cumbersome. The traveler always gathered more, never shed his burdens along the path. Though he toiled because of it, his mind knew no other way. And neither did the dogs'.

2009-09-11T19:27:00.002-04:00

When infants and children cry at the sight of your beard, you know it's time to shave.

—Andean proverb, author unknown

in all seriousness

2009-09-11T19:12:00.004-04:00

I’ve been noticing in passers-by and actors recently that furrow you get between your eyebrows when the sun makes you squint or when a math problem makes you think too hard. I’ve been noticing it in my own face even more frequently. From the backseat of the car I sometimes catch my reflection in the rearview mirror and see that distinctive groove between the folds of skin in my forehead. I realize I’ve been gazing out the window lost in the landscape, scrunching my brow against the sun’s rays. The impression lasts longer and longer these days. Soon it’ll stick around for good.

I remember in college we hung around a group of especially chipper girls. They were constant smiles and bubbles. One in particular spent the majority of her time around me telling me I needed to smile more. That really irked me then as I didn’t feel the need to be smiling all the time to be happy. In fact, at most moments when she’d be proselytizing me, spreading her particular brand of smiley, happy salvation, I recall feeling especially calm and content. It struck me as odd that she chose those moments to speak up. Was my calm interior reflected by a serious or sad looking exterior?

After college in the Peace Corps many of my fellow volunteers would ask me if I was upset or sad about something at the strangest moments. We’d just be hanging out, eating a meal or chatting and I’d get these questions. Again, it was at moments when I felt most relaxed and my mind most emptied that people raised doubts about my happiness. Last week a woman I work with here asked why I was more serious now than I used to be. A few months prior during a Skype conversation a friend made me promise to not take life so seriously. Not long after I was told in person I need to go easier on myself. In a recent e-mail and then subsequent conversation with respective friends this blog was referred to as “serious”. I’m starting to think I should maybe take these comments seriously.

I know I have a serious side. Perhaps stronger than many people. And I know graduate school has reinforced that side. The high-paced, workaholic, dog-eat-dog environment could hardly cater to any side but the me-and-my-issues-are-extremely-important-get-out-of-my-way side of one’s personality. And I suppose I get sad or upset at times like anybody. However, the day-to-day Andy I feel inside must be different than that which I exude in the world, because I don’t particularly feel like a serious or sad guy. The abundant practice Peace Corps offers its volunteers at lounging and loitering revealed in me a theretofore previously socked-away ability that I’ve carried to this day. Namely, I find it incredibly easy to sink into a peaceful place of mindless observation. The environment makes little difference. I just slip away. And I think that’s how I picture myself—just a dude checking out the world. Graduate school has buried that ability to a certain degree, but having had the opportunity to leave Ithaca for a long period of time by living in Bolivia this year has shown me that it’s still alive and kickin’, if not a bit subdued. Those places I slip into feel true. I feel like me inside them. Maybe that’s why I’ve felt so off-kilter at school. It’s like I’m pretending to be someone I’m not. Hyper-achievement, publish-or-die, work-‘til-you-drop doesn’t suit me too well I suppose.

However, the grad school tempering aside, I still think there’s something to this serious business. I have a penchant for self-flagellation. Few of my actions meet the subconscious standards for virtue and purity I set for myself and guilt is a constant companion on my journey. My solid Catholic upbringing certainly assured that that reproachful passenger would be content and comfy during the ride. One afternoon last year when rummaging through deliberately labeled storage boxes with titles such as “Andy’s Childhood Collectibles I: cards, yearbooks and memories” I came across a pre-fashioned journal I kept during a week-long Catholic catechism summer camp. I was tenish at the time. I opened to a page formatted with staggered notebook rules contoured around a picture of Jesus reaching out to some children. Directions at the top of the page instructed campers to jot down a confession for the day. My handwriting was horrendous even then. But in awkward, choppy block print I spilled my guts about recently being mad at my older brother for not letting me play with him and his friends and how I needed to be a nicer person to my parents because disobeying them hurt their feelings. It was clear in that moment that my present-day guilt complex has deep roots.

Guilt has driven many of my life decisions. It’s probably why I find myself today hanging infants from spring scales and splaying them on measuring boards to confirm if my nutritional education program is adding centimeters to their growth and helping to rescue them from chronic malnutrition. If I allowed myself some breathing room to do what I truly wanted instead of what I felt obligated to do given the wealth and opportunity I’ve been handed in life, I’d probably be eating a spam sandwich and scribbling down song lyrics in the back of an orange Volkswagen Type 2 en route to the next empty bar gig with my shower-a-month, sufficiently left-of-center bandmates. Or maybe I’d be editing video footage of crazed botanists squaring off with charging elephants in the Congolese bush while transecting threatened forest blocks as part of a publicity stunt for National Geographic. Or maybe I’d be bent over under the weight of a 70 mm camera trudging up the side of a near-vertical, snow-covered slope in the Himalayas, sucking wind because I refuse to use auxiliary oxygen as I approach the summit and prepare to film the final scene of the next Imax blockbuster. Or maybe I’d be herding sheep in Montana.

What I’m doing now certainly seems more serious than any of those other jobs. But knowing me, I’d probably find a way to take any of them a bit too seriously. I dive into endeavors with steam and vigor, and when my unrealistic expectations for my performance aren’t met, I start the flogging, abandon ship, and move onto the next promising horizon. That goes for relationships too, not just career paths.

So yeah, I guess I’m a serious guy. While seriousness has kept me tasting lots of what life has to offer, it has probably also prevented me from savoring its most sensual, subtle flavors. I can live with that though. Could I use a little more self-compassion and disorder in my life? Certainly. But most days I manage to ride a certain calm despite the fussing of the world around. And more and more I feel connected to something solid behind it all. So I’ll take the spirit and personality I was born into, without complaint. I’ll even take that serious-looking crook in my forehead. It might mean those looking in on me from the outside will think this guy's sullen and serious, but it won't mean much to the me looking out from the inside.

I do wonder though, what would a shepherd’s crook do for my serious image?

"If you don't have a sense of humor, it just isn't funny."

—Wavy Gravy

worlds away

2009-09-04T09:39:00.004-04:00

This past week Bolivia revealed its many splendid colors to me. All it took was me leaving the city.

After returning from our most recent six-day stint of field work I left Cochabamba for the weekend with a friend to see the much talked about Chapare region southeast of the city. I’ve been hearing about El Chapare for the better part of a year now as the bulk of Cochabamba’s fresh fruits, fish and supply of coca leaf inevitably originates from this particular region of the Amazon basin. My host family has been touting its many marvels and virtues for the entirety of the past year. However, I only now gathered the initiative to go. And so my friend and I hopped on an early morning minibus descending out of the highland urban sprawl of Cochabamba and watched brown scrubland and scorched foothills give way to tangles of low-lying brush and eventually dense, verdant tropical rainforest. Spring-fed mountain streams tumbled under the highway down overgrown, spindly channels. Rundown boxcar eateries boasting plastic deck furniture fought back the jungle’s edge at uneven intervals along the highway serving hungry truckers—travelers in the constant caravan of freight rigs that crawled up the mountain. Our vehicle was hastily searched for drugs and contraband at a police checkpoint further along the road in what seemed more a display of political will than a sincere crackdown effort (in the next lane over an officer merely ran his hand along the outside of the cargo crate being hauled by an enormous truck leaving the valley; this thorough investigation seemed to satisfy the officer that the load was clean). Nonetheless, I was reminded of the history of cocaine trafficking here and the decided animosity toward the United States held by the coca growers of the region who have seen their harvests destroyed by USAID-funded seek-and-destroy missions for decades. We reached the valley floor in three hours and a goliath river appeared parallel to the road, roaring mindlessly along its massive floodplain, greedily gorging itself on the waters of its watershed’s tiny tributaries.

Driving into humidity always alerts some part of me that R&R is imminent and it lays me back. I felt my muscles relax and sank further down into my seat. We breezed into our destination town, Villa Tunari, and I was barely able to stop the driver to let us out before he sped out of it as quickly as he’d entered. From the welcome arches to the exit bridge the town occupies maybe a half-mile strip of highway lined with various lodgings, restaurants and eco-parks. We found a vacancy at a well-kept, unassuming hostel that catered to local visitors and soon ventured out to the local nature reserve. It was the first time I’d worn shorts in Bolivia. In fact, I hadn’t even brought shorts to the country. Luckily I’d packed my swimming trunks—they proved to be worth their weight in luggage.

El Parque Machía is a 90-acre wildlife sanctuary housing abandoned, poached and abused monkeys, macaws and all sorts of other tropical species rescued from their respective former lives. You’re made to leave all belongings at the park’s front desk and you’re told that you carry personal items at your own risk, that is, at the risk that they might be lifted from your person by the local wildlife. In the wild, the park’s monkeys would certainly be considered naïve (i.e. they’re not afraid of humans), but in this park they’re anything but. These bold critters will pick your pockets clean, actually reaching into pockets, climbing up skirts, and searching the tiniest crevices and folds of your clothing for change, sunglasses or monkey photos. One sat on my friend’s head for nearly half an hour rummaging through her hair, cleaning it with his teeth and generally hanging around (quite literally). A crew of mostly European travelers pays to work as volunteers in the park during pitstops in their travels. They were in charge of feeding the monkeys and warning tourists around which primates to be especially vigilant with possessions. My friend and I were the only foreign tourists in the park that day and the Bolivian tourists kept mistaking us for the volunteers who worked there. I assured them I had no idea how many kilos of papayas and bananas the monkeys eat per day or which ones are most prone to fling their poop at visitors.

My friend and I had read about swimming holes in my Lonely Planet Bolivia guide book. The author made these seem like the number one attraction of Villa Tunari and that their sheer abundance would require you to watch your step as you walked the streets to ensure you wouldn’t accidentally plunge into them at every turn. They proved to be a bit more elusive, however. In fact, after being groomed by the monkeys we spent the better part of the afternoon dodging speeding sixteen-wheelers as we walked along the town’s shoulderless bridges and highways searching them out. Five or six consults with locals and as many dead ends later we were finally led to a quiet, secluded stream by an eager little girl determined to direct us hopeless gringos to her neighborhood swimming hole. The stream pooled in places, one deep enough for cannonball leaps from a nearby rock ledge. The water washed away the sweat of the day and I sat on the pool’s edge, out of time, reminded of the calm that comes when you can sit in perfect, comfortable silence with another person.

My friend is an orchid lover. Villa Tunari houses a small orchid nursery so we decided to check that out the following day. My only prior encounter with orchids was through the Spike Jonze film Adaptation (2002). I remember thinking when watching that movie that these flowers were very likely alien species propagating our planet and at some unknown, unexpected point in the future they’d uproot from their earth, rock and tree hosts to take over our minds and turn us into pollinating slaves with their otherworldly psychic powers. My friend has a somewhat more sophisticated knowledge of these amazing flowering plants than I do so I chose to save face and refrain from sharing my science-fiction suspicions with her. The owner of the hostel where we stayed, a pudgy tinkerer type with thick glasses and an unflattering white tank top told us with all confidence that the orchid nursery was a short 500 meters up the road. Our swimming hole expedition the previous day suggested we should probably multiply any distance calculations made by locals by a factor of five. And in the hot, mid-morning sun with lumber-stuffed trucks and motorcycles speeding at you like bullet trains you really don’t even notice the additional two kilometers to the nursery.

We joined a New Zealand hippie couple on a tour of the nursery grounds. Though we only came across three orchids in bloom this day, three of the more than 25,000 species on Earth, I felt by the end that I had gathered enough evidence to take my case for alien presence on Earth to INS Division 6. I leaned my head in close to one these entrancing flowers after our dreadlocked tour companions had fully documented it with several hundred digital photos and inspected its bizarre contours. This fellow had evolved an exquisite pollination system, so specialized we mere humans have difficulty grasping the rhyme, reason or complexity of the ecological dance it performs with its unique pollinator. The folds and seams flowed flawlessly together as if this organism were not composed of constituent subunits, organelles and molecules but was a unified whole, the least common denominator of matter on the planet. I imagined its labellum—its long, slippery tongue— suddenly swallowing me whole. I wanted to look out from the inside of it at the jungle and tourists, curl up in its soft, hidden curves like a lazy hammock and see if the achings of love and longing had the strength to reach me there.

All around the jungle bristled with life. A four-legged insect performed an awkward tightrope walk on stilts across a leaf stalk. Woody aerial roots a foot in diameter grew in length down toward the soil from bulbous tree husks a meter or more off the ground. Oversized, sky blue butterflies flitted about like scattered sound waves in the oversized foliage. Countless species of spiders finished construction of their feeding nets right as I arrived along the path to take them in the face. As I swatted at the air frantically and peeled sticky debris from my hair and eyes, tiny black, blood-sucking bugs drained the veins in my exposed shins and calves. Meanwhile, the big toe-sized, paralysis-inducing ants that our guide had warned us about during her intro pep talk crisscrossed our trail searching for a shoeless victim who thought barefeet and flip-flops were appropriate for jungle strolls in the tropics. The diversity was overwhelming. This wasn’t the Bolivia I’d known for the past year. Looking up into the canopy I felt worlds away. I couldn’t believe this was the same country. I couldn’t help but marvel at this place. And feel small in the world.

Riding back to Cochabamba the following morning I daydreamed about climbing the distant mountains we passed as our driver sprinted uphill past slower traffic into blind curves. The air cooled and dried, puffy clouds shrank to gaunt wisps, and the green blanket of vegetation covering the landscape slowly tired and fell away exposing bare rock faces and barren soil. Nostalgia set in for what I was losing before I’d even lost it. My friend curled up in the seat next to me staring out her window. She was worlds away.

new toys

2009-08-15T17:38:00.003-04:00

Parents come up with ingenious ideas sometimes. My brothers and I had more than enough toys to play with growing up. However, to stretch the playability of those toys to the furthest extent possible, my mother came up with the concept of “new toys”. There were upstairs toys and there were downstairs toys. We had unfettered access to those toys upstairs and we masterfully exploited the close proximity of those particular action figures, Legos® and board games for three or more joyful weeks: creating bloody battlefields, constructing medieval castles, and fireballing each other on the plastic relief map of the deadly Fireball Island. And all the while in the throes of that carnage and adventuresome intrigue my mother’s internal “child-dar” was twirling, ever watchful, ever vigilant. Only she could properly interpret the subtle signals and patterns detected by that special gauge, but when the time was right she was alerted and took action. Perhaps some of the signs were two of us beating the crap out of each other in boredom, or an increase in the pitch or duration of whining for those extra 17-20 hours of video game time (which was allotted in 1-2 hour chunks only on the weekends), or maybe my afternoon afghan G.I. Joe battles became too predictable. When Destro and Cobra Commander are ambushed in the same corner of the living room by the same three Joes in the same way all week long (knife to the back for Destro and grenade shrapnel for Cobra Commander of course), it’s clear that it’s time for a change.

One morning we’d wake up and the announcement was made: we’re going to bring up “new toys” today. New toys??!! Whaaa??!! Well, I can hardly, I mean, what is…you mean to say, I didn’t even see this, how can this…??!! New toys??!! Woohoo!!

We’d rush downstairs to the basement and with my mother acting as facilitator and insanity checker, we’d select “new” toys in as calm a manner as frenzied children are capable (think crazed puppy flipping cartwheels in tail-wagging paroxysms of excitement when Mom and Dad finally come home from work after a long day in the crate). The beauty of the system was that these were clearly not new toys. These were the same toys we’d be playing with for years in many cases. We’d so exhausted the creative possibilities of these toys during scores of hours of previous playtime that we would actually invite neighborhood kids over just to see if they could play with them in some new and exciting way that we hadn’t already thought of. They never could. But every “new toy” day, these toys became brand new. It was something about how my mother advertised the day in that you-won’t-believe-the-incredible-news-I-have-in-store-for-you kind of way, how the reality of out-of-sight out-of-mind is amplified for kids, and how children can find wonder in the simplest of things to which adults have long become blind. In fact, these toys were almost better than bona fide new toys; they came with scratches and dents, they carried a history and memories, and every new chance we had to spin them around in our imaginations we created new stories special for them that would live on in us until growing up would dull our minds and bury the magic deep inside where we would scarcely be able to reach it. We greedily sprinted back upstairs with armfuls of “new” toys and began reworking our magic immediately and without pause for the next few weeks before the toys we’d just brought down would become the “new” ones and the beautiful gems we now possessed would become yesterday’s forgotten antiques.

If I ever have kids I can’t wait to spring the genius of “new toys” on ‘em.

the darkness

2009-08-15T17:04:00.005-04:00

The church bells rang tonight from the bell tower in the big white church on the corner of the town plaza. I walked in late, genuflected, and quietly slid into a pew. A trio of charango players strummed their instruments in tight unison at the front of the altar as the congregation raised their voices following lyrical passages in tiny paperback hymnals. The priest read from a Quechua Bible, lectors read scripture from the altar podium, and another fellow gave an improvised pre-homily of sorts before the priest delivered his formal remarks. I hardly understood a word of the content of the Quechua mass, but I followed the shifting tides of spiritual energy in the church just fine. The shadows were deep here. Four candles and a dim chandelier shone little light across the white-washed walls. Two spotlights seemed to miss their target at the front of the church, painting an eerie silhouette of the crucifix that hung above the altar. I closed my eyes and let the sounds and feel of this echoey chamber transport me back to those quiet Saturday mornings at Holy Angels parish in Hays, PA. I was a teenager. I would sit on the altar in silence between my various work duties and chat with God until my relentless guilt was assuaged. I did a lot of the talking back then. I find I have little to say these days and much prefer to listen. And breathe.

I was speaking with a friend the other day and she told me she can’t find herself (or anything beyond herself) in a church. They are dark, depressing places. She much prefers the solitude of a mountaintop or the chatter of a forest teeming with life. I’ve summited a number of peaks and more often than not I’m filled with a sense of vitality, of spiritual elation when I finally reach the top. Perhaps it’s the physical high that comes with my lungs being pushed to their limits and finally being restored with copious helpings of oxygen as the exertion abates. Or it could be a transient euphoria induced by the lactic acid dissipating from my thighs and calves and the fading of the pain that accompanied its presence. But maybe it’s these things and a precipitous awakening into the unity behind the veil that spectacular vistas and intense confrontations with the awesomeness of the Creation uniquely allow. Nevertheless, churches have always spoken to me. I think you need to have been raised with a relationship to the Church and to churches to be able to find God in them with any ease. Even having served as an altar boy from grade two through to the end of high school and having worked at my church as a sexton (minus the grave digging) for almost as many years, I still struggle at times to find God in front of the altar. So I certainly understand my friend’s aversion to these temples. But the darkness is exactly what attracts me to churches.

This same friend quite enjoys sunny days. She’s not alone. I told her I was looking forward to going home later this year and as she was interested in visiting Ithaca for its famous vegetarian restaurant, Moosewood, she should come in November when I’d be there and I could host her. “November? What a horrible month!” she exclaimed. November is one of my favorite months. I like the cold, the darkness. And in November these qualities are starting to set in across the Northeast. I’ve found in the past ten years or so that maybe four other people on the planet feel this way about temperature and the seasons. People I meet usually provide one of two reactions when I tell them I don’t like the sun, sunny days, heat or summer and much prefer clouds and cold. They either scrunch their forehead and rear their head back as if they’ve been overtaken by a sudden bout of nausea, or they’re rendered utterly motionless and stare for long moments before plainly, sincerely inquiring, “Are you f*#@ing crazy?” During my interview, the Peace Corps recruiter asked why I wanted to be placed in Mongolia. I told her, “Because I’ve read it’s the coldest place Peace Corps sends volunteers.” She went with reaction #2.

I like the darkness. Sunset, with its promise of night, inspires hope in me. I like the desolate places of the Earth. The Kazakh steppe and the cookie-cutter Soviet towns across Asia, devoid of vibrancy, spontaneity and dislodged from the foreward tumbling of time, stir me deeply. I feel a connection to the past in these places, an alignment with some creative element inside me, and a whisper of the possibility in the world. Stepping out from the warmth of my apartment onto snow-covered ground and inhaling crisp, soberly cold morning air renews me. The dearth of life in the surrounding frozen landscape places in stark contrast the abundant life inside me—the life I forget to recognize so often. And the darkness I sink into as a cuddling lover in the shadow of dusk or in the back corner of a church fills me fully. It draws my awareness inward and awakens me to the promise of Light that’s available to me at every moment.

So yeah, I like the cold, the dark, the desolate. You gotta know we exist (me and the three others I mean).

staring contest

2009-08-15T16:57:00.003-04:00

We arrived at our hostel in the late afternoon. Today was the first of a six-day field work trip. Our research team is well acquainted with all the hostel owners in the main hubs where we work in the northern part of Bolivia’s Potosí “department” (i.e. province). There’s usually never more than one habitable hostel in any given town up here so being familiar with the few folks is those places is no great feat. Doña Paula is the name of the woman who runs the “Hostel Vasquez” here in the town San Pedro de Buena Vista. I pulled the Landrover into the main gate of her hostel and the doors were closed behind me. Our team spent the next half hour or so unloading and organizing supplies for our community visit the next day. Doña Paula’s daughter, who’s maybe four years old, took a special interest in this process and me in particular. She tracked circles around the SUV following me as I carried boxes and backpacks here and there. After I finished shuffling about I went to unpack in my room. It was a ground floor room and I had left the door open. As I turned from what I was doing I suddenly found the little girl standing on my doorstep, finger in mouth, staring at me much like she’d just done for the past half hour, but this time with a greater intensity and concentration.

I’ve never much cared for talking gobbledygook to kids or treating them as special in conversations regardless of how old they are. And in my experience kids never fail to prove their ability to understand so-called “adult” conversations if they’re given the chance. Granted, they understand in their own way, which is usually simpler (and more enlightened) than the adults’ take on things, but it’s an understanding and competence nonetheless. But instead of trying to engage this girl in a chat I just decided to stare right back at her and see what she’d do. You gotta love kids—even if only for the wonderful opportunities they present to conduct mind experiments. She didn’t take her eyes off mine for a solid 90 seconds. She was really throwing down. An old-school, no-shit staring contest.

For the first two periods of our showdown it struck me as somewhat odd what was happening. If someone were to walk by and see an adult and a four-year-old staring mesmerized at one another some uncomfortable questions might be posed. But as I aged in the process of our visual joust I lost track of the silliness and was just transfixed by this little girl. I realized that I never just stare into another human being’s eyes. What’s the longest you ever look into someone else’s eyes and have them stare back at you? Five seconds? Ten seconds if you’re batting eyes with your lover? As I looked at this little girl I wondered what she must be thinking. I felt like I was staring into the essence of wonder, pure innocence. She was probably thinking very little, just going about her day as she always does exploring the world and the transient travelers who spend a night or two in her mom’s hostel. And a bearded gringo was an especially entertaining find. Whatever was passing through her little brain, and between us, our battle of wills brought me fully into the moment. It woke me up. In the end she couldn’t handle the resolve I brought to the contest. She broke. She dropped gaze and stared at the water bottle I was holding, caught my stare for another 15 seconds or so, drifted her focus to the side and then slowly turned about and hesitantly walked away as if she were confused by what had just happened. I hadn’t smiled, smirked or inched a muscle in my entire body. We were just in different leagues of competition. She couldn’t handle my A game.

I found her later wandering about with the chickens. I gave her a matchbox car. She took it and ran.

stand firm

2009-08-08T11:51:00.007-04:00

I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or
      resting?
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no towrope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no
      ford!

And there is no body, and no mind!
Do you believe there is some place that will make the
      soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don't go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of
      imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.

—Kabir as translated by Robert Bly

swings

2009-08-07T07:36:00.004-04:00

I walked down the street tonight to a nearby park and got on the swings. I haven’t been on swings in many years. But I still remember how to do it. The memory of coiling my arms and legs on the backswing and outstretching on the forward lunge pulsed through my muscles like water from a rainstorm racing to fill air pockets in the soil. I felt like a professional. It was hard not to grin big and wide at the peak of the forward swing when your stomach falls out from under you and you feel as if you might tumble up and away in defiance of gravity.

An inky blue sky hung heavy behind the foothills to the north suffocating the last light of dusk that haloed the horizon in shades of turquoise and periwinkle. A few scattered stars timidly stepped out onto the stage. Tungsten streetlamps across from my commandeered jungle gym bronzed the surrounding treetops with their rusty glow and cast the whole scene in the sad warmth of a Norman Rockwell painting. Trees were all around. Their weeping branches reached down to the earth swinging in gentle orbits to the spring breeze that filled the Cochabamba highland basin. This moment was full. It didn’t fill me however. Somehow I managed to remain standing apart from it all.

I passed a young fellow with long black hair tied back in a ponytail on my walk home. He was sitting on a park bench by himself intently reading a paperback. He was nearly finished. His left forearm was tattooed deep red with four trapezoids sewn together like a gauntlet cuffing. I looked back after over my shoulder as I passed him. He continued reading. A twenty-something couple cruised by on a motorcycle. She wrapped her arms around his waist from behind holding on tight as the wind lifted her hair and fanned it out in wild gyrations. They were both smiling and laughing. A taxi cab drove up slowly and flashed its highbeams at me offering its services. Miniature red, green and yellow flags with a condor perched over a coat of arms in the center were affixed to both side view mirrors marking this day of independence for Bolivia.

I dishearteningly approached the now-locked gate of the local ice cream shop that had closed for the day. The owner was inside wiping down his freezer casings. Ice cream was the reason I’d left the house tonight. Not swings. The two five-boliviano coins in my pocket that I was planning to use to pay for my evening treat were suddenly impossibly heavy. I stared at the over-sized ice cream cone on the big wooden sign outside for a few minutes and wondered what flavor it represented. Walking home past the perpetual adoration chapel I pass every day going to work I thought about ice cream not being in my belly. I then remembered the fear of the past three days when it looked as if my work visa might be rejected. In the distortions of those helpless moments I wondered with sincerity if I’d ever see my family again. I had no passport, no legal standing, and I was constructing a big lie. Would I spend the rest of my days in La Paz’s San Pedro prison carving out street cred for myself in one of it barrios? My predicament was so real and pressed everything and everyone else to the margins. Now it was ice cream. When do we give up the capriciousness of the ego’s drama and let the Way live us?

zip-a-dee-doo-da

2009-08-04T14:34:00.002-04:00

"There are two kinds of music: blues and 'zip-a-dee-doo-da'. This ain't 'zip-a-dee-doo-da'."

—Townes Van Zandt

answers (part 1): air travel

2009-07-13T10:38:00.006-04:00

When I first joined the few dozen students and faculty in my graduate program nearly three years ago I quickly learned that the professors I would study under maintained grueling travel and work schedules. They seemed to zip off to a new far-flung corner of the globe every week—sometimes multiple times per week—for conferences, consults, lectures, or research activities. Even then it struck me as strange that no one questioned the merits of this all-too conspicuous travel culture. It was as if this behavior were nothing out of the ordinary. Given that at the time I had reduced my self-worth in the presence of my academic colleagues to that of a step below pond scum, I didn’t raise any objections. Quite to the contrary, I convinced myself that being important required flying around the world and that the work of such important people was sufficiently important (and of such benefit to the world) as to justify any potentially harmful consequences to the environment or society. After all, this was a program in international nutrition. How could international work be done by remaining planted in upstate New York?

However, on every one of the many occasions I’ve boarded an airplane in the past year I’ve carried an uncertain weight on my shoulders—the case of intuition hinting at the gravity of one’s actions, but the mind not grasping the details. As I read more about the carbon emissions of the combusted kerosene fuel that powers subsonic aircraft, its targeted delivery in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere¹ (altitudes between about 9 and 13 km—the cruising altitude of most commercial airliners), and the potentially harmful contrails formed from the additional emission of nitrous oxide (N₂O) and water vapor, I’m no less convinced that the choice to travel by air can have far-reaching and even destructive consequences.

My obvious assumptions here are that climate change is a real phenomenon, that it is not desirable (and in fact efforts should be made to actively curtail it), and that human beings are in large part driving the changes we are now witnessing. I won’t argue these assumptions here as I think most of the people who might read this blog would agree with those three statements. I recognize though that not everyone interprets the same data the same way. But for the sake of brevity and focus I’ll sidestep the controversy surrounding these underlying premises for now.

I consistently see a certain argument appearing in articles on the environmental effects of air travel. The argument states that a focus on lifestyle politics and individual consumption decisions needlessly steals attention away from larger efforts to change government policy, limit consumer demand, and influence private industry. Adam Ma’anit of the New Internationalist states:

“If there were the political will to do something about climate change so much could be done in so little time and aviation would play a relatively small role in reducing the global footprint…([e.g.] ban all electronic devices with standby mode…government-sponsored housing insulation, combined heat and power units for residential blocks, support for microrenewables).

There are lots of things that simply can't be done at an individual level and have to be done by society as a whole—reining in corporate power and wasteful energy transmission, decentralizing energy grids and promoting renewables, stopping subsidies of fossil fuels, ending aviation's tax-free fuel ride…So let's stop the incessant navel-gazing and agonizing over our personal carbon 'footprints' and build the momentum for real change.”²

I agree that there are priorities in any campaign and in this one the priority should be on making sweeping societal change with realistic investments of political will. Certainly pride and ego will only hinder forward progress. However, to simultaneously discount personal responsibility and individual action seems self-destructive. Those individuals sacrificing for a cause they believe in will likely be more engaged in broader efforts to advance that cause. The most expansive grassroots movements to change public policy and sway public opinion begin with individuals awakening change in their own lives and taking action in local communities. An individual may not be able to stop fossil fuel subsidies, but without individuals society is equally powerless to effect change. Those that advocate for change without themselves taking responsibility for their actions risk accusations of hypocrisy.

I love airplanes. I love airports. I love flying. I love the thrill of landing in a brand new city or country, the anticipation of forging out into the unknown and recreating myself where not a single soul knows my name. Air travel has allowed me to learn new languages, to peel away prejudice and the trappings of identity though confrontation with other cultures, to deepen my relationship with God by discovering truth amongst a diversity of faiths, and to wholly humble myself before the infinite complexity of this world. I wouldn’t be who I am without air travel. But I think there are points in our life when we receive new eyes to perceive clearer our actions, and new strength to make sacrifices, however hard they might be. I find I can no longer justify the ends of my work with the means I use to accomplish it. I’ll find out in the months ahead if I have the strength to do anything about it.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”

“My life is my message.”

—Mahatma Gandhi

¹Penner, JE, et al. Aviation and the Global Atmosphere. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1999.

²Brazier, C. “To Fly Or Not To Fly?” New Internationalist March 2008;409:4-9.

questions

2009-07-12T16:26:00.007-04:00

I remember the sun had nearly dropped behind the mountains just an arm’s reach away. Its low angle in the sky had cut its warmth, but I could still feel its last trailing rays searching my face. There was no snow on the ground. A figure was scuffling towards me as I passed a cross street. I didn’t look up until I heard his voice, “What are you doing here?” he shouted without wanting a reply. I turned to see an elderly man, mostly drunk, scowling at me. “You don’t belong here!” he insisted. “Foreigner, go home. We don’t want you here.” Our eyes met for a long moment silencing him. He hadn’t shaved in several days and wore a ratty overcoat torn in places from the wear of too many winters in this place. We’d probably never met before. At least I didn’t recognize him. But he undoubtedly had seen me. I couldn’t pull my pants on in the morning without someone knowing about it in this town. I turned back around and kept walking. I could feel his stare on my back and felt as if it might send me reeling forward. He continued grumbling and spattering insults as I walked off. I never saw him again. That was five years ago in my Peace Corps site in Kazakhstan.

_______________________________________

I placed my hand over the continent of Africa. It was cold. In the upper left corner of the painted wall map was the Bolivian flag. In the upper right, the Peace Corps flag displaying red and white waving stripes and three of the state symbols transforming in succession from star to dove. This was the World Map Project that so many Peace Corps volunteers had undertaken with their respective English, ecology, business, or whatever students. The enormous map spanning all countries and continents covered the entire north wall of the meeting room here in the World Neighbors training center in the town of Sak’ani in northern Potosí, Bolivia. It was the only dash of color for miles around this one-burro town. Quite a symbolic memorial to the service of the Peace Corps volunteer who was stationed here at one time. The map project brought together individuals from different cultures in an activity that placed questions of differences in the open. Candidly sharing differences has always enriched me. Looking at maps has always excited me. I like playing games memorizing all the islands’ names and the contours of the political boundaries within continents that fit together like puzzle pieces. Traveling to those places has always felt like a fresh chance at life.

My first two years of graduate school were dizzying times. I was overwhelmed by the stress of class assignments and exams, the behemoth task of developing a research plan, and the struggle to find secure footing in a new university and new environment. I was trying to navigate the confusing emotions and responsibilities of my new role as a member of the burgeoning family that my girlfriend and I were creating. And I struggled to adopt the same desire that all my new colleagues seemed to share for a host of foreign, abstract accouterments: data, publications, conference presentations, and collegial recognition. I looked to fellow students and professors to find out who I should be in the heady, new academic world in which I was immersed. I rummaged through memories of the lifetime of examples my father had left for my brothers and I to understand how a man should serve a family. And I lost myself completely in it all. Within 4 months my relationship was shattered along with the vestiges of my self-confidence, and any anchor of the identity I had clung tight to for the past 26 years. When it came time to leave for India that first summer I was flat out running.

The following summer I left for Bolivia to begin my graduate research and I recall feeling like I might explode if I had to stay planted in Ithaca for one more week. The previous year had been a lonely, reckless one and I again needed another escape. This cycle of fear and fleeing is nothing new for me. I hopped a jet to the other side of the world after college to serve the ends of peace and global unity, but perhaps more so to hide from the commitments that I feared might strangle my independence if I confronted them. And so I’ve moved and I haven’t stopped for long. Traveling has been my escape. My constant excuse to avoid my past (and my future). An annual chance for redemption.

But I am changing. As I’m slowly gaining the courage to face the fears that have haunted me on the inside, road signs are appearing on the outside leading me to question more critically than ever the motivations and consequences of my work and lifestyle. I’d like this entry to be the first in a series of ramblings on these issues that are increasingly gripping me emotionally, but which my logic and intellect have scarcely begun to grasp. I hope my blog will serve as a way to start to clarify some of these ideas in my own mind and hopefully to generate a bit of discussion with any or all of my four readers. Some of the topics I’d like to touch on include:

1. Should foreigners be working in others countries? If so, what should their role be?

2. What is the justification for “development” work? What are its effects on the individuals who work in it and the ostensible recipients of its projects and programs?

3. What does it mean “to belong” to a place? What does it mean to be “home”? Do we have a responsibility to serve a place as well as society?

4. What are the consequences of traveling on the physical environment and on our collective consciousness?

Recent conversations with friends about these questions have demonstrated to me that I’m on the brink of a change in worldview, but that that change is motivated by my gut—which has a mixed track record for accuracy. As much as I love you gut, I’d like a second opinion.

"Well, I've been listening to my gut since I was 14 years old, and frankly speaking, I've come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."
—Rob Gordon (played by John Cusak) in High Fidelity (2000)

growing power

2009-07-09T09:35:00.005-04:00

For all you budding urban agriculturalists (ahem...Rob), a truly inspiring story...

July 1, 2009 NYTimes feature: Street Farmer

“We need 50 million more people growing food—on porches, in pots, in side yards.”
—Will Allen, farmer and CEO of Growing Power farm

tangled up in red

2009-07-08T20:32:00.003-04:00

Dear Mr. Doe,

It has come to my attention recently that you’re a U.S. citizen in need of a long-term visa for work you’re planning to conduct in Bolivia. As I’ve had some recent experience in trying to obtain such a visa I’ve been asked to offer you whatever small measure of assistance that I can in preparing your necessary documents.

First of all, there are two kinds of Bolivian visas for which U.S. citizens may apply: the tourist visa and the visa “for a specific purpose”. As you’re probably going to want to spend as much money as possible in this process, I’d recommend purchasing the tourist visa first—in fact, go ahead and get two of ‘em. This visa is good for 5 years; however, you may only enter the country for 90 days per year. I purchased my first tourist visa last year for $100. After my three month stay in Bolivia last year my passport was about to expire so I had to apply for a new tourist visa to be placed in my new passport. This new tourist visa cost $135. In addition, I had to submit the following required documents for the second time:

1. a completed “Sworn Statement of Visa Application” official form (accompanied by a passport-sized photo of you not wearing eyeglasses)

2. a copy of your hotel reservation or a letter from the friends or family you’ll be staying with indicating their address

3. a passport that’s valid for at least six months

4. round-trip plane ticket or copy of your travel itinerary

5. proof of economic solvency (e.g. a photocopy of a major credit card)

6. a copy of your yellow fever vaccination certificate

Why not just apply for the visa “for a specific purpose” straight off you might ask? Well, upon the suggestion of the organization with which I’ve been collaborating here in Bolivia, I was told the required documents to obtain such a visa might be difficult to arrange and so I should just come to Bolivia on a tourist visa for 3 months while those documents were assembled. I waited my 3 months and left Bolivia on a bus to Peru with a notarized letter in hand from the organization in Bolivia that was going to host me. The Bolivian consulate in Peru wasn’t satisfied with my notarized letter, passport, yellow fever vaccine, $85 visa fee, and proof of economic solvency though. They wouldn’t give me the visa. I couldn’t go back to Bolivia, and though the Machu Picchu ruins were quite nice I couldn’t stay in Peru indefinitely. So I went home. All told I dropped about $800 that trip.

You’re probably thinking 5 bus trips totaling over 50 hours, numerous office visits, trips to the post office, vaccinations, 4 flights to get home and roughly $1035 is no small investment of time or money to drop on seemingly meaningless diplomatic red tape. I beg to differ though. When you the set the bar as high as I do for masochism in international graduate research this special sort of torture doesn’t even make you flinch. At least not yet.

Moving on.

After spending 6 amazing weeks in the U.S. I finally received the necessary paperwork from Bolivia to get my visa “for a specific purpose”. What a relief I tell you. I flew to Washington, DC where I dropped in on the Bolivian consulate. Their waiting room was full of patient Bolivians, many tending to twins in double-wide strollers. A public health office was conveniently located inside the consulate. A nurse came out every 20 minutes or so to pass out fliers on how to prevent contracting swine flu and herpes. She spoke casually with many of the individuals in the waiting room on a first-name basis. When my name was called from the sign-in list the nice official took my entire folder of documents and within an hour I was called to the back office where my passport was returned to me with a brand new visa “for a specific purpose” inside.

“The visa is only good for 30 days,” the woman behind the big wooden desk told me.

“But on my work contract it says that I’m being hired for one year—until May 2010,” I protested.

“Yes, that’s true. So when you go back to Bolivia you’ll just have to go the Ministry of Migration and they’ll extend it for you,” she replied. “It’s very easy.”

I smiled at her and looked up at the panoramic photo of Bolivia’s capital city La Paz that hung on the wall above her desk. The photo was taken at night. Tentacles of brilliant gold and blue lights fanned out in all directions scaling up cliff walls and covering the entirety of an impossibly deep and wide mountain basin.

“Are you from La Paz?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said, her already cheery demeanor suddenly blossoming into a huge smile and giddy tone. “I’m going there at the end of next month,” she beamed.

I continued smiling at her. “How nice,” I said. “You can sit there and smile all you want lady,” I thought, “and pretend the Bolivian Ministry of Migration hands out visa extensions like freeze-dried potatoes to little kids. But we both know the deal. If you’re from the damn country then you surely know the bureaucratic hell I’m in for when I get back down there.”

“Thank you so much for your help,” I said as I shook her hand smiling and turned to leave.

Despite the sense of impending doom I felt leaving the office I was pleasantly surprised at how easily I conquered this phase of the visa process. And between FedEx Express charges, visa fees, and airfare I was only out another $1200.

Bolivia let me in a few days later with no problems. I left for two weeks of field work. When I returned there were only about 15 days left on my 30 day visa “for a specific purpose”. I flew to La Paz to visit the Ministry of Migration.

Now Mr. Doe, when you plan your trip to La Paz you’re going to want to allow yourself about an extra two and a half hours of driving time from the time you land to the time you want to be anywhere in the city. You see, the La Paz airport is actually located in a different city called El Alto which sprawls for miles around the lip of the basin that houses La Paz. The city perches just on the edge of that urban bowl on a spectacularly flat highland tabletop landscape. El Alto’s known for its traffic jams and cramped, rutted streets, but it is also known for its spontaneous civic strikes. I was picked up from the airport by a friend and we drove around for much of the morning trying to find a way out of the city. Every possible exit, however, was barricaded by stone-wielding grandmothers and huddling circles of scheming middle-aged men in derby caps burning tires, carrying rubble, bricks and grandmothers to block roadways, and threatening to unload on approaching vehicles that weren’t performing about-faces. My friend was talking on his cell phone with his father throughout most of the ordeal receiving coded instructions as to which back road to take that might lead us safely out of the city. It seemed to me that his father must be circling our position in a helicopter spotting for us. After all of our escape routes were deemed to be closed we drove back to the airport, stashed the car, piled into a taxi with some traveling French hippies, drove to the nearest blockade, and set off on foot down the mountain into La Paz.

I met Fabian later in the day. If you expect to have even the slightest success in acquiring the required documents for your visa extension you’re going to want to have Fabian accompanying you. He stands at about four foot nothing, walks with a decided limp, wears a perpetual look of concern on his face, and is dedicated to the task in front of him with all seriousness. He was asked to help me by some friends who’ve had my back during this whole visa adventure. I soon found out that all the gringos in these government offices were accompanied by their respective tramitadores. That’s what you might call Fabian’s position in Bolivia. It comes from the word trámite which www.spanishdict.com translates as “formal step, procedure, or paperwork.” The concept of red tape is so ingrained in this culture that you can be a tramitador, your passport can be in trámite, you can tramitar, that is, the verb form (to process, apply for, or be totally screwed over by a government agency). There must also be adjectives and adverbs derived from this root that I haven’t discovered yet. At any rate, it’s a whole new vocabulary created especially for the Bolivian red tape monster that has an insatiable appetite.

Having escaped the blockade of El Alto, Fabian and I set out that afternoon with the list of 18 required documents that I would need for my visa extension. And as I found out, most of the 18 had their own list of required papers, so actually strolling into the Ministry of Migration office with everything you needed for that visa extension was more a pipe dream than an achievable reality—a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow except instead of gold the pot’s filled with llama poo. Because I’m single and have no dependents I was exempt from 6 of the 18. That only left:

1. a legal petition soliciting residence in Bolivia

2. a valid passport

3. a photocopy of my visa “for a specific purpose” showing the stamp of my most recent entry into Bolivia

4. a photocopy of the identity pages of the passport

5. a work contract approved by the Ministry of Labor

6. photocopies of the host company’s tax documents

7. certificate of criminal record check from F.E.L.C.C. (the local Bolivian police)

8. certificate of criminal record check from INTERPOL (the International Criminal Police Organization)

9. residential registration approved by F.E.L.C.C.

10. medical certificate approved by a competent, accredited authority verifying the applicant has no infectious diseases

11. a 4x4 color photo taken in front of a red background

12. $189

We first arrived at the hospital. It was 11AM. The hours to get medical exams to obtain certificates for Migration ended at 10:30AM. We needed a special consult form though that cost 25 bolivianos (Bs.), the local currency in Bolivia (about 7 bolivianos to the U.S. dollar), and needed to purchase a plastic cup for a urine sample at a local pharmacy. In addition the urine sample they’d be drawing a blood sample and extracting a couple hundred bolivianos for the exam. I paid for the special consult form, bought the piss cup, and went to the next item on the list planning to head to the hospital first thing the next day.

Fabian and I took a taxi to the office of F.E.L.C.C. which stands for Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Crimen which I’d like to take this opportunity to translate as: the Special Crime Fighting Force. Oddly, nothing remotely resembling the traits insinuated in that title came out in the individuals from F.E.L.C.C. I was to interact with over the next few days.

“Where can we get a certificate of criminal record for the señor?” Fabian asked the police officer behind the desk referring to me.

“Do you have your certificate of criminal record check from INTERPOL?” the officer asked more than a little surprised at the possibility that we might not have checked my criminal record once at a different agency before doing it with them a second time.

“No,” replied Fabian. And we were shooed away.

We hiked a few blocks to the office of INTERPOL. All the offices we visited this day were dark, depressing places. Passing beyond the threshold of any one of them the color of the day drained to shades of grey, smiles vanished to empty stares and droning voices, and people became islands of fear turned inward, hopeless and dazed, wholly enveloped in the melodrama of acquiring their particular trámite. Most offices were windowless. Light seemed to retreat in trepidation even in the most open of spaces in these buildings. Broken glass, peeling paint, and floor-to-ceiling shelves full of bulging folders and stacks of dusty files. Every time I walked into such a building I felt like I was transported into the world of Terminator (1984) when they flash back (that is forward I guess) to the time after Judgment Day when humans live in the shadows hiding from robotic killing machines. Though I wasn’t afraid the police would kill me per se, that same sense of despair and loss of my future set in immediately.

We wound up two flights of stairs past enclosed glass cases displaying samples of the past four decades in police headgear as well as ancient firehoses and nozzles used by firefighters in the early 20th century. Upstairs a dozen or so officers clad in puffy green army jackets, 10” combat boots, and olive-drab collared shirts and ties shuffled about busily carting pieces of paper out of rooms with unmarked doors and into other rooms with equally nondescript doors, scrawling figures in enormous ledgers, and hammering away on ancient typewriters. Fabian and I waited in line for our turn to enter the room that everyone else seemed to be waiting to enter as well. We explained our plight to the officer inside and he handed us a printout of the required documents we would need to get our required document. There were about six items on the list. The final message at the bottom of the slip stated:

“Place all of your required documents in a yellow folder with a fastener.”

The jacket of the officer we spoke with was extra puffy. It made it seem that his pecs, delts, and biceps were enormous. It also made him look ridiculous. He placed special emphasis on the color of the folder in which we were to deliver our documents. And then we were shooed away. Fabian called a lawyer he knew and within 10 minutes were in the lawyer’s office getting an official memorial (I suppose this translates as a petition, or formal request—the Bolivians love these things, in fact, I’m convinced if the army of lawyers that fill the many office highrises in La Paz didn’t exist the entire bureaucratic behemoth in this country would grind to a halt) drafted as part of our required documents. The lawyer’s office had two couches. One was filled by several very large cholitas, local women dressed in traditional garb. If one got up to leave another emerged from the shadowy hallway to take her place. I’m not even sure they were there for any reason other than to occupy those couches. The lawyer was very professional. He got us our memorial in no time. On his desk was a figurine of Iustitia, the Roman Goddess of Justice, blind-folded and lifting measuring balances in one arm. On the wall above the couch was a monthly calendar featuring a topless woman with enormous breasts.

Fabian and I returned to the INTERPOL offices with our fastened yellow folder. I was summarily fingerprinted and processed. The attending officer entering my information into the computer wasn’t all that computer literate. And he couldn’t grasp the order of the letters in my name. My information was a mess. We left with a tiny, stamped piece of paper and were told to come back in 15 days to pick up my processed criminal record files. We went back to F.E.L.C.C. with our little slip of paper in hand. I shelled out some more money for another piece of paper. Afterwards, they directed me to another desk across the way where I was fingerprinted for a second time. I was then told I would need another memorial signed by a lawyer. I can’t even recall what this one was for. Luckily for us, the Special Crime Fighters have trained lawyers on the premises. We hiked some steps and waited in an office for about a half an hour while a lawyer typed us up his specialized nonsense and printed us copies. We photocopied all of this (Bolivians have a knee-jerk reaction to make 3 photocopies of any document that is placed in their hands—I don’t blame them, after all, they’ve been conditioned to expect to be blindsided at all turns by the system). However, we still couldn’t actually get my criminal history approved by F.E.L.C.C. until INTERPOL approved my criminal history. That would be 15 days from now. I was leaving for two weeks of fieldwork in a couple of days and if I waited that long to get my paperwork, the 30-day visa I was currently in the country on would expire. So, as you’ll see, I would need to take extraordinary (turns out to be not so extraordinary) measures to get my documents sooner.

Fabian and I then hopped in a taxi to the offices of the Special Crime Fighters in the southern zone of La Paz where I was to have my residence.

Mind you, the entirety of this charade is a big lie. From the company I’m purportedly working for, to where I’ll be living, to my purpose in the country. The really remarkable lesson that you’ll see emerging from this circus show is that the purpose of all this red tape is to ostensibly prevent criminals, diseased persons, illegal aliens or otherwise shady individuals from obtaining permanent residence status in Bolivia (and undoubtedly to deter foreigners from trying to stay here for long stretches). But in the end, here I am, a student working to improve the nutritional status of infants and young children in rural Bolivia, some might say honest intentions, and yet I’ve had to wholly lie and fabricate my entire existence here in the country just to serve those ends.

So, we presented the F.E.L.C.C. fellow in the southern zone with the bulging folder of documents I had already accumulated in the hopes that some of them might appease him. What a naïve assumption. This kind gentleman presented us with a new slip of paper outlining the following required documents I would need to obtain my approved residential registration:

1) an official petition signed by the Director of the Special Crime Fighters

2) a photocopy of your valid passport

3) a photocopy of your official criminal record from INTERPOL

4) a photocopy of the property deed where you’ll be residing (forgive my translations here; I know nothing about housing or property in the U.S. and much less when the terms are in written in Spanish)

5) a photocopy of the last page of your property taxes

6) a photocopy of the testimony of purchase of the home

7) photocopies of an electric and water bill from the home

8) photocopies of the identity cards of two neighbors who will serve as witnesses (neighbors who are not relatives or from other zones)

9) verification of the existence of the house by personal visit by a Special Crime Fighter

I started laughing out loud. I wasn’t quite sure what other reaction to have at that point. We had to stop our prancing about the city for the day because government offices were closing. Water bills and neighborly testimony would have to wait until tomorrow.

The next morning I returned to the hospital. I was the first one there and waited outside in the cold for 30 minutes until someone arrived. I spent 2 hours bouncing around to every conceivable door on the first floor of the hospital building. They weighted and measured me, drew blood, took a urine sample, blasted me with chest X-rays, ran me through a dental exam, took my medical history, blood pressure and heart rate, and generally grilled me on my physical condition. Oh yeah, and they charged about $50. They said to come back in 2 days for the results. I bargained them down to 24 hours.

While I was at the hospital, my friends had spent the morning gathering all the required documents for my residential registration. We returned to the offices of F.E.L.C.C. in the southern zone to present all the paperwork. The man behind the desk said everything looked good except (and there’s always an “except”) we needed more than just photocopies of the identity cards of two vouching neighbors. No, we actually needed the neighbors to come to the office themselves and testify that I indeed lived where I said I lived. We bribed the dude. The bribe allowed us to leave, get the neighbors’ signatures on a document, and come back with that document. He said it would take a week to get us the form I needed. He couldn’t tell us what exactly what would take a week, but that’s how long it would take. We bribed him again. He’d have it for us by tomorrow afternoon. As I quickly learned, every document requires a dozen and a half signatures. And the higher-ups who sign these documents like to take as long as possible to put their penned name to paper. I see now it would have been impossible for me to get all of the documents I needed in the 30 days that my visa allowed me to be in the country legally. The bribe is built into the system.

The next day I picked up my medical certificate, my residential registration, and returned to both INTERPOL and the other F.E.L.C.C. office with bribe in hand to get my approved criminal record that day. I don’t know how much money I laid out for taxis, mini-buses, bribes, or document fees over those 3 days. I felt like such a lamb, such a criminal, so utterly beaten down that I gave up on everything. I felt like an ambulatory shell, a pinball batted around by paddles and bumpers always risking falling through the cracks and ending the game into which I’d pumped so many quarters. The goal of getting my visa extended was entirely lost in this foray. It seemed like a fantasy—an imagined objective placed on paper to keep me chasing other papers, to keep me churning through the gristmill.

Thursday morning. I’d been in La Paz for 4 days now. I finally went to the Ministry of Migration to submit my paperwork. The gentleman at window 7 looked at my documents and somehow zeroed in on the passport number manually typed into my residential registration form. He looked at it, then looked at my passport, then looked at the number again.

“This isn’t correct,” he said. “It’s missing a digit.”

I punched him in the face. He went reeling backwards. The friend I was with tried to restrain me, but I was too quick. I hopped the high counter that separated the persecutor from the persecuted in a single leap and tackled the stunned official. He was bleeding from the mouth from where I’d walloped him. I’d connected solidly. I had him pinned now and stood up kicking him in the neck. His swine flu-prevention, SARS-imitation surgical mask snapped off. I began stomping on his chest, but only got in a few blows before two puffy-jacket police goons overtook me.

“You’re kidding me?” I blurted out in disbelief, snapping out of my fantasy to the conversation at hand.

“We can’t accept this,” he said. “They have to correct this at the office where you got your residential registration completed.”

“It’s one number,” I pleaded. “You have my passport number recorded correctly on at least 10 other documents in this stack of documents. You also have my passport. Can’t you just write in the number on the form?”

He looked incredulous at the suggestion. “You have to have them correct this form themselves and then have the colonel down there sign this stating what the error was and that it was officially corrected,” he stated flatly.

I unzipped my jacket and revealed the sawed-off shotgun I’d been concealing this whole time. I took him down quickly with a mouthful of buckshot and dropped the rest of the Migration crew in short succession. I mean, I shook my head in disbelief, turned and hopped in a taxi back down to the F.E.L.C.C. offices in the southern zone to get this mistake cleared up. An hour and a half later I was back at the Migration office with my corrected passport number, visited two more windows where they took $189, all my paperwork, and my passport. I was told to come back in 3 weeks to pick up my passport with my visa in it.

On the plane ride back to Cochabamba I remember feeling like a human being again. It was such a strange feeling. The flight attendant offered me a single-serving snacky cake in the most unthreatening of manners. I remembered my name, that I had a family and people who cared about me, and that there was a place in this world where I belonged. I felt a gripping tension release from my shoulders.

It is three weeks later. I’m back in La Paz. I’ve been here for two days and I’m in the airport ready to leave to go back to Cochabamba. I still don’t have my passport or visa. It turns out the tourist visa in my passport had to be formally renounced in order for them to issue me my new visa. So, they didn’t actually advance with my visa in the two and a half weeks I’ve waited. The tourist visa renunciation required more money and another memorial. That was Monday—yesterday. I was promised the new visa today—Tuesday. I waited nearly all day at the Migration office. At 4:30PM I was told the colonel wouldn’t sign my visa today. He was meeting with some important officials and was leaving tonight on travel. I could get my passport on Monday. My friend’s father arrived to try to see what could be done, but the best we could do was convince the man behind window 11 to let my friend’s dad (who lives in La Paz) pick up my passport and visa on Monday. That way I wouldn’t have to fly back to La Paz next week. Another $75 or so on flights this trip. I don’t believe for one second that my passport and visa will be ready on Monday. At least I got to hold my passport again for a half hour (they let me take it with to get the memorial from the lawyer stating that I was going to cancel my tourist visa). At least I know they haven’t lost it yet.

Call me a poor sport Mr. Doe, but this ordeal makes me want to abandon international travel. I know this bureaucratic hassle isn’t unique to Bolivia. Most countries are like this—the United States included. Our bureaucracy isn’t nearly as convoluted or inefficient as those in “developing” countries, but I’m well aware of the misery foreigners go through in trying to gain entry to the U.S. But as much as I’ve always felt like an outsider when I’ve traveled, I feel so much more so now. And, it’s just a crappy feeling. I feel exceedingly lucky and blessed to have had the help I’ve had in this process. Help from some wonderful friends and individuals who have treated me like family. And I’d go as far to say that the Bolivian people are some of the kindest and most genuinely giving people I’ve met in my travels. Somehow though, the forces pushing on me from the other end have seemed to overwhelm all those good vibes and leave me feeling like I should just go home where I “belong” and do what I can to make the world a better place among my “own”. I never thought I’d be confirming the concept of “one’s own” as I’ve never believed in the self/other dichotomy. We’re all a big family and I’d be the first to cheer the fall of nations that artificially divide us. But my human anger and confusion won’t allow me to see the larger human family right now. So maybe it’s time to give up the humanitarian act and just do what feels right. Go home and stay there.

Good lucky Johnny.

fog of war

2009-07-07T12:19:00.001-04:00

What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.

—Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009)

squiggles

2009-07-07T11:20:00.005-04:00

We work with child nutrition in a number of poor, rural communities here in Bolivia. Not all of the communities we visit want to work with us, however. They sometimes request that we produce some kind of contract of mutual agreement that the entire community needs to approve. Recently we delivered the draft of such a contract to one of these communities. We said we’d be back in a week to discuss any questions or revisions they had to the contract and if they were in agreement with the terms, both parties would sign it. When we came back after a week we asked about the contract at the house of one of the community members. The fellow had been threshing wheat so after cleaning himself up a bit, he walked into his back room and came out with the copy of the contract we'd delivered the week prior. He perused the document as he approached us and as he did a smirk appeared on his face. I could see the contract was all marked up with red ink.

The director of the NGO with which I work had drafted this contract on my English-language laptop before we left for the field a week and a half prior. He neglected to use all the appropriate Spanish punctuation in the contract—perhaps because he couldn’t figure out how to finesse my keyboard to produce all the needed Spanish bells and whistles. In particular, Spanish sprinkles the letter “ñ” (pronounced “enye”) through many of its words. This letter can be quite important. For example, if you were drafting a politically-sensitive letter to a community expressing interest in working with families who have children between the ages of 0 and 5 years you’d want to get the word “year” correct. In Spanish, this word is “año” with that elusive “enye”. Dropping that seemingly insignificant squiggle above the “n” changes the meaning of the word just a tad. In fact its absence might even turn a good day into a bad one. It most certainly requires red ink revisions. The content of the squiggleless letter expresses something quite different. Now, we are no longer interested in families with children of a certain age, but rather in a range of children harboring a different characteristic entirely. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice to say that children with 0 to 5 of this particular biological feature would need a lot more help than just improvement in their hygiene and diets. Details, details, details.

the Cup has come home

2009-06-14T15:39:00.002-04:00

Lord Stanley, Lord Stanley bring me the brandy!!

Pittsburgh is the first city ever to win the Super Bowl and the Stanley Cup in the same year. 'Nuff said.

the heart of man

2009-06-11T18:35:00.002-04:00

I received this quote in an e-mail from a friend today:

...The conclusion, therefore, is that of Augustine, who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father’s heart. Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place. They seek Him down below, and He is up above. They seek Him on the earth, and He is in heaven. They seek Him afar, and He is nearby. They seek Him in money, in property, in fame, in power, and in passion; and He is to be found in the high and the holy places, and with him that is of a contrite and humble spirit (Isa. 57:15). But they do seek Him, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him (Acts 17:27). They seek Him and at the same time they flee Him. They have no interest in a knowledge of His ways, and yet they cannot do without Him. They feel themselves attracted to God and at the same time repelled by Him.

In this, as Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa. 29:8).

Science cannot explain this contradiction in man. It reckons only with his greatness and not with his misery, or only with his misery and not with his greatness. It exalts him too high, or it depresses him too far, for science does not know of his Divine origin, nor of his profound fall. But the Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed. Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.

-excerpt from Our Reasonable Faith: A Survey of Christian Doctrine, by Herman Bavinck

warner

2009-06-11T16:38:00.003-04:00

One of my best friends (and a fellow bassist), Tim, just started up a blog (check out the link in the sidebar: "Imitation is the Sincerest form of Flattery"). He's one of the funniest, most insightful, and smartest people I know and his nascent postings are already making me laugh out loud and ponder the hidden whims of the universe.

So thanks Warner. And don't let the experiment be one-and-done.

the essentials

2009-05-26T00:31:00.004-04:00

"Belief & Technique for Modern Prose: List of Essentials"

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

—by Jack Kerouac from a 1958 letter to Don Allen, in Heaven & Other Poems (1958).

failing consistency

2009-05-26T00:19:00.005-04:00

I’m miserably failing the pact I agreed to with my friend Rob earlier this month to write something every day. I find it incredibly hard (just as I had predicted), but I’ve also found that pinning this task to the list of daily to-do’s has turned sour the thought of writing most days. Producing a blog entry has morphed into an assignment to be fulfilled rather than a releasing valve I crank open when in need of catharsis or clarification. After the first week of keeping pace with the one-a-day entry I realized to my surprise that indeed I had something to say every single day. It was just that most days I didn’t have anything I wanted to say. However, none of the above is a reason to abandon my attempts to write daily.

A friend told me today that she runs four miles three days a week. She’s been doing this for quite a long time now. But she says she isn’t a runner yet. I told her the fact that she’s disciplined enough to run consistently makes her a runner. If we do the things we want to with our lives we can’t help but become those things. If we don’t, we won’t become those things. My friend runs. She’s a runner. The reason more folks who want to be runners aren’t runners is that they don’t run. They find reasons to skip the morning run or choose to fill their time with other concerns. They don’t need compete with the pros, break records, or earn their living running to be a runner. What separates us most often from the visions of our lives that we see in our heads is simply the will to do something about those visions. If you want to be a runner you run. If you want to be a writer you write. Most days I find an excuse to avoid the blinking cursor on that blank Word screen. That damned cursor terrifies me. But that’s the whole point—writing is hard.

“It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great.”

—Jimmy Dugan (played by Tom Hanks) in A League of Their Own (1992)

Those people who are disciplined enough to do every day what they love to do are the exceptional people in this world. I want to be a writer. I don’t think I’ll ever do this for a living (and I don’t think I’d want to), but I want to write. That’s makes me want to be a writer. When that desire’s real enough the excuses won’t be to avoid the blank page, but rather to drop everything so that I can confront it.

feetprint

2009-05-19T22:57:00.007-04:00

Every year the entire public school system in Kazakhstan endures a series of national “who’s the best” exams in a number of subjects. English language is one of these subjects. English teachers in rural Kazakhstani schools are usually not very well versed in their profession’s language. Not to say they don’t work hard or try to improve their language and teaching skills, but they just haven’t had the best teachers themselves and operate from ancient texts that do more to mangle their speaking than refine it.

When I served in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan my fellow volunteers and I, bringing to bear in our communities the only real skill we had at that time (well, the one guy was a professional jazz trombonist), were the local English experts. As such we were annually invited to advise the team of regional English teachers who were in charge of deciding who indeed was the best amongst the adolescent English language test takers. The challenge for these English teachers was that the Kazakhstani Ministry of Education provided them with the exam questions to proctor to the students but no answer key. The questions on these exams were dizzyingly obscure even for us weathered native speakers, and without a key it was near impossible to figure out which of the five wrong multiple choice answers the Ministry assigned as correct. For the local English teachers trying to make sense of the esoteric grammar questions in front of them, they might as well have been given the task of deciphering the meaning of Bohemian Rhapsody.

Early in the morning on the day of the exam all of the teachers would huddle together in the foreign language chamber of that year’s chosen school building and pour over the questions that had arrived clandestinely the night before. I recall seeing their eyes glaze over as their heads tracked down the page reading each question silently in succession. They’d start to mutter to themselves and look vacantly around the room searching for answers in the misquoted lines of Shakespeare prose painted on the walls. You had to toss up your hands at their predicament. Imagine yourself, you, a fully-functional wielder of the written and spoken English word, trying to figure out if the sentence "Jane had answered phone before William is knocking on door" is in the present perfect or past perfect tense. Now shave off that lifetime of exposure you’ve had to the language, swap the Latin letters for Cyrillic ones, throw in a crappy education and picture yourself trying to figure out the answer.

I’m gonna go look up the definition of present perfect on Wikipedia.

One teacher’s name was Skeletor. It was not her God-given name (or even the one her parents gave her), but that was her name nonetheless. She taught at my friend’s school and had what you might call a stubborn streak running through her. At times the streak was outright exploding from her pores. That year one of the exam questions asked for the plural of the word “footprint”. Clueless as we were in general about life and grammar, my friend and I were pretty confident that we knew the answer to this question. Skeletor thought the same for her answer—which not surprisingly was “feetprint”.

“What’s the plural of foot?” she asked us.

“Feet,” we said.

“And when children come school their feet what do on snow?” she came back at us.

“Umm, make footprints,” we replied.

“Feetprint!” she insisted adamantly.

My friend and I battled with Skeletor over the answer to the question for the equivalent of three of four Saturday morning cartoon episodes. At several points in the tussle I have to admit her unwavering confidence in her correctness almost had me convinced that feet made feetprint. In the end though the native English speakers prevailed through a plurality vote by the assembled teachers. I think Skeletor just wanted to impress upon us that she knew foot had an irregular plural.

baseball in May

2009-05-14T23:50:00.003-04:00

Even if your hometown team is the Pittsburgh Pirates, there ain't nothing like the nighttime ballpark in May. Right on the river under clear, cool skies in a city that's home—what tops that?

figure it out on your own

2009-05-14T22:55:00.007-04:00

I drove down to the Southside of Pittsburgh today to interview some magicians. I bought an audio recorder about a week ago and since receiving it in the mail I've interviewed my Mom and a handful of friends. Those chats rolled smoothly. A few touching moments, some nice memories, and genuine conversation. This interview was different though.

The magicians own a store called the Cuckoo's Nest. Walking up to it this afternoon I was nervous and not certain in the least as to what I might ask these folks. I just knew I'd been in the store the week before to purchase some cards and walked out wondering how the hell a brick and mortar magic shop was surviving in urban Pittsburgh. The couple inside were friendly and accommodating but we never moved beyond generalities and niceties. This afternoon I listened back to what I'd recorded and couldn't make it through to the end. It was that bad. To be fair, it was an honest effort and had a few bearable moments, but honestly nobody wants to hear that sleight of hand and card tricks allow people to believe in magic again in a world where we've lost our sense of wonder by hearing someone say that "sleight of hand and card tricks allow people to believe in magic again in a world where we've lost our sense of wonder." If that's the message we want to find out it through a story. How did the down-and-out hedge fund manager find renewed purpose in bunnies, tophats and cheap illusions. Give us something personal, something we can empathize with. At least give us plot.

The interview kinda bummed me out. But also kinda made me smile. I remembered how hard it has been for me to talk to people on tape and to get them to relate something real. It brought back a lot of memories, frustrating memories, but memories of fumblings that eventually turned into projects I was proud of.

Ira Glass, executive producer and host of the radio program This American Life, has been called "the Pied Piper of public radio (the getting people to travel with him part, not the drowning rats and disappearing children part)". I've been digging around on the Internet for the various pearls of wisdom he's humbly and selflessly imparted over the years for aspiring radio storytellers. Below is an excerpt from a 1998 talk Ira gave as part of a journalists' lecture series at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota:

This is the structure of the stories on our show: There's an anecdote--a sequence of events. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And the reason why that's powerful, I think, is because there is something about the momentum, especially in a medium where you can't see anything, especially in radio. That you just want to know what happens next. It's irresistible. You just cannot help but want to know what happens next.

Then, there's the part of the story where I make some really big statement like there's something about the kindness of strangers. Because you can't just have an anecdote. It's got to mean something. You can have people read the little story from the Bible, but unless you tell them, you know, the lesson they're trying to draw from it, it's not a real sermon. And radio, in particular, is a very didactic medium.

The way that we're taught to listen to it is, I think, largely from news shows, where they're constantly telling you: here's what happens, here's what it means. And so we're used to that. And if I didn't say, "There's something about the kindness of strangers," this story just would not be as satisfying.

I read this and it slapped me in the face. My most respected and influential film professor in college left me with the words: "If you can't tell the story with images then you shouldn't tell the story with film." I remember the day in class he came in and immediately started throwing down on American History X (1998), lambasting the film for lecturing its audience and failing to tell its story and convey its message through its images. That example has never left me. And that lesson has stayed perched on my shoulder, whispering in my ear anytime I've held a videocamera in the attempt to tell a story. "Don't lecture your audience," the voice tells me, "tell you story through pictures and through the words of the people who speak to you. If you can't do that, put down the camera 'cause you don't deserve to be behind it." Now this mammoth radio personality is telling me that if we don't tell the audience what the story means, they'll never get it.

We'll Ira, I don't get it. Now I've got this sweet new voice recorder and an expensive audio editing suite. What kind of story do you want to hear and who's supposed to tell us what it all means?

Check out a complete transcript of the lecture by Ira Glass mentioned above at Mo' Better Radio. Ira's "Radio Manifesto" might also be of interest at http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200406.review.glass1.html.

2009-05-12T23:09:00.002-04:00

When I shut my eyes
on my sitting cushion
or when I go to bed
the words in my mind
say what they mean,
say just enough
and leave nothing unspoken.

New project plans unfold
seamless and real,
courageous curbside admissions of love
cross years and oceans.
Yes, she'll come in for awhile
to lay her head in my arms.

The world looks different with those eyes.
Opened, the walls close in—
dreams and words are less beautiful.

mother's day proclamation

2009-05-10T23:04:00.004-04:00

This morning at 1AM my friend Paul told me about the origins of Mother's Day. Is it surprising to us that this day has been appropriated by commercial interests? It's so fully expected as to almost seem to be a truism of this time--a Sunday in May, 2009.

Returning Mother's Day to its Original Meaning

Mother's Day Proclamation

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

--Julia Ward Howe (1870)

answer the questions

2009-05-10T22:55:00.002-04:00

“Don’t be afraid to answer the questions. You will find endless resources inside yourself. Writing is the act of burning through the fog in your mind. Don’t carry the fog out on paper. Even if you are not sure of something, express it as though you know yourself. With this practice you eventually will.”

--Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones

What are we to do with these images and sounds?

We are to swallow them whole like enormous pills that stir in our mouth bobbing in orange juice. We imagine them choking us. But if we are to be healed by them we must swallow them. Don’t chew them! Just swallow them whole!

uncertainty

2009-05-10T21:55:00.004-04:00

"The uncertainty is great. It just keeps things wide open."
--Ram Dass

The uncertainty is great
it keeps things wide open.
The uncertainty is great
it holds me to its breast
and I drink.
The uncertainty is great
its unknown depths send me cowering,
knees to chest,
waiting to be cradled.
The uncertainty is great
it can be no other way.

M.I.C.K.E.Y. M.O.U.S.E.

2009-05-09T20:59:00.007-04:00

Bolivians don’t seem to share the same spirit of discretion that we do in the U.S. when it comes to media and violence in public fora. For example, the in-flight movies on American carriers are always the most antiseptic, sappy “family” films one could ever hope to drudge up. Adam Sandler playing cute, naïve, small-town values guy stumbling over himself and winning over the girl by the end with his boyish innocence. Jimmy Fallon teaching us that genuine happiness can come from staying true to the love of a girl and the love of a game. And I’m sure any romantic comedy Hugh Grant has ever starred in is also a frequent movie-of-the-month selection.

But whereas American Airlines might screen the Lifetime classic, smiles-and-fuzzy feeling, childhood-fantasy-come-to-life Bridge to Terabithia (2007) on their flights, Bolivian bus lines are much more likely to show Bridge of Dragons (1999) with Dolph Lundgren playing the kick-your-ass commando Warchild on a bloodthirsty mission to destroy his former mentor General Ruechang. Kiss of the Dragon (2001) with Jet Li (part of a Jet Li triple-header one day) and Cobra (1986) with Sylvester Stallone are other emblematic choices featuring gruesome final scenes with villains impaled and screaming while they’re burned alive. Lethal Weapon 4 has been the most family-friendly film I’ve seen shown on public transport thus far in Bolivia. The superb Spanish-language dubbing and maxed out volume knobs on the monitors make the all-night cinematic experiences all the more fulfilling.

One day in March I returned to a remote farming community named Hualqueri that I had visited a number of times last year. Thirty or so tightly-arranged houses spill down the side of a sharply sloping mountain. Standing alone at the base of this hamlet is a cramped, one-room schoolhouse. Walter, a quiet man who avoids eye contact keeping his head bowed in conversation (a mannerism that gives one the false impression that he lacks self-confidence), is the teacher here. He shows a perfunctory interest in the nutrition work we come to do, but makes all efforts to accommodate us and offer his hospitality. Last year the schoolhouse contained only a handful of shoddily-constructed desks with attached benches and some scattered grammar lessons displayed across the walls on butcher paper. By the time I arrived this year, they’d made some upgrades.

I sat outside the schoolhouse observing an interview a member of our survey team was conducting with a young mother breastfeeding her 18-month-old child. A group of adults began to crowd around the doorway to the schoolhouse with eyes fixed on something in the back corner of the room. I got up and squeezed past a few of the onlookers. Inside a dozen or so children aged six to ten years old were sitting staring at a large television screen. A DVD was playing and the entire group was transfixed watching it. On the screen a line of American soldiers in battle fatigues ran for cover behind the remains of a concrete wall. The backdrop was an eerie landscape of shelled and abandoned buildings. Scattered fires burned brightly in the periphery casting odd shadows throughout the frame. One soldier lay on the ground alone wailing in pain and bleeding to death. Another was suddenly shot through the neck by a sniper. Gasping and choking up blood, he died in the arms of his buddies. Yes indeed, the afternoon film for the students and parents of Hualqueri that day was Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Full Metal Jacket, one of the most raw and disturbing war films I’ve ever seen.

I kept watching the film for about 20 more minutes. After all, I love Full Metal Jacket. I’ve seen it probably five or six times. I watched the children watching the film as much as I followed the events on the screen. I wondered what they were thinking, what assumptions and prejudices the images were creating or destroying in their subconscious. At the end of the film the surviving GIs crowd around the sniper that has killed several of their comrades. She’s just a young girl and she’s been mortally wounded. She begs for the Marines to shoot her. Animal Mother, a particularly amped and cold member of the unit, wants to leave her to be eaten by the rats. He finally agrees to a mercy killing but only if the less combat-tested Joker will finish her off. Joker finally ends her. The final scene shows the entire platoon marching away silhouetted by the glow of distant fires and singing in unison the Mickey Mouse Club March.

Kubrick steals away our humanity in the first part of this film and leaves us numb to the horrors portrayed in the second. What are we to do with these images and sounds?

Who's the leader of the club
that's made for you and me?
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E
Hey! there, Hi! there, Ho! there
you're as welcome as can be.
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E

a letter to Obama

2009-05-08T00:36:00.007-04:00

Below is a letter I wrote to then President-elect Obama in early November last year following the national election. I shared it with a few close friends at the time, but I post it here now for perhaps a few others to read. Six months later I'm filled with the same hope.

Dear President-elect Obama,

I’m writing to you tonight because something has changed inside me. I don’t know its name yet. It may not even belong to me. But these past 24 hours have transformed me in a way I’m now struggling to understand. This letter is a response to that struggle.

At about this time last night, I watched as you were elected the 44th president of my country. I was in a crowded bar surrounded by friends and strangers. As we erupted in cheers when you were first projected the winner, I felt the first twinges of something. There was a surge of relief. The same you feel at the end of a long journey that leaves you weary, but proud to have crossed such a great distance. Then there was joy. People were embracing, smiling, dancing and rejoicing. But after this, something else, unknown and intangible, began stirring inside.

An hour later I watched your victory speech. There were maybe 30 people huddled around a small television hung from the corner ceiling of the bar. Our heads were all perched at the same angle. We stood earnestly listening. I looked around and envisioned this scene multiplied millions of times over across the country and felt a connection to Americans that I had faintly ever experienced. I looked at you and felt such pride that you were going to be my leader. I wanted so much to be led. And this, I’ve never once experienced.

I’ve spent nearly as much time living in foreign countries over the past six years as I have living in the United States. I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity and support to travel and meet many different people with an enormous diversity of worldviews and cultures. And though I cherish this diversity, and respect these cultures deeply, when I’m away from my home in the U.S. I’m always reminded of how much I love my own country—its efficiency, its lack of blatant corruption in day-to-day encounters, its work ethic, and its people’s enduring faith in its ability to change. But I have never waved the American flag. I have never attended a rally for a politician. I have been embarrassed to drive my parents’ car with the American flag sticker on the rear windshield proclaiming “Freedom Isn’t Free.” I have criticized the U.S. government, our people, and our policies much more often and with much more passion than I have ever commended any aspect of our country or culture. Particularly over the past eight years, I have felt like I don’t belong here. And patriotism has seemed like a euphemism for bigotry, hatred, and imperialism.

I recall returning to my parents’ home in Pittsburgh from college once several months after September 11, 2001. I was eating lunch with my mother and we began talking about the state of the world. I was likely spouting a lecture on American war-mongering and its impoverishing effects on much of the world. I don’t remember the exact content of the conversation, but my mother said then that she thought sometimes that I was actually glad the 9/11 attacks had occurred. As happens so often, I overlook the significant moments in my life as they are taking place. Instead of recognizing this as one of those moments, I was moved to anger and our conversation exploded into a shouting match. I hurled hurtful accusations at my mother and I left the encounter ashamed. I was upset with myself that I had been so reckless as to give the impression with my angry words that I thought U.S. civilians deserved punishment of any kind for the actions of a nation. But I was more disturbed by the detachment I felt from my country at that moment, the sadness I felt at having to watch my loyalty and hope for my country die with the intolerance that was reaching fever pitch around me, and the absolute sense of powerlessness I felt to do anything to reclaim, or achieve what I saw so clearly to be the potential for my country to embody a higher moral ethic and to be a true leader in the world.

I felt powerless because I had never known that a politics existed that moved beyond the rhetoric of appeasement, sentimentality, and sensationalism. I didn’t know political leaders could strive for a higher ideal, and exhibit the courage to change the rules. I didn’t know politics could be more than a game. I had never known a real political leader.

Something has changed inside me Mr. President-elect. Things are changing around me. There’s an overwhelming sense that something great is possible. Not only possible, but perhaps inevitable. I’ve already heard scores of interviews on news programs of individuals reaching out to embrace perceived adversaries and rallying around a common hope. People in my own life are swapping stories of feeling so emboldened that they are connecting with perfect strangers to discover their stories, they are seeking compromise within contentious relationships, and they are being filled with a faith that their individual actions might catalyze the change they wish to see in the world. The idealism is so thick you could choke on it. But even if an inkling of this momentum could be maintained, imagine the progress we could witness in the years ahead.

Something great has begun.

I feel like I want to wave an American flag. It means something different now. It means that you’re a true patriot. Not someone who subscribes to blind nationalism, arrogant superiority, or intolerance, but one who knows that allegiance to country is second to one’s allegiance to humanity. That strength as a nation comes from humility and not dominance. I feel like I want to lay down the anger I’ve been harboring toward the Administration, and its policies and supporters of the past eight years, and transform that tension into an energy of compromise and unity. I’ve surprised myself at how inspired I am by an individual, by an event. And I’ve surprised myself that I can write these words at all, words I have dismissed in the past as clichéd and bereft of substance. But now I need look no further for substance than how I’m feeling at this moment.

Thank you for giving me back my hope.

Andrew Jones

November 5, 2008
Ithaca, NY

2009-05-07T19:15:00.003-04:00

Think of the poorest person you have ever met, and then before acting ask if or how this act will be of benefit to that person.
—inscription over Gandhi’s tomb in Delhi

I wish I had the heart to live my life so open to the suffering of others that I could embrace it all, know my true names, even while playing Balderdash and drinking beers with friends.

just breathe moron

2009-05-06T23:18:00.005-04:00

Mario interviewed 37 consecutive people aged 32. It’s inexplicable. What are the chances that 32 people from randomly selected villages over the course of 13 days would all have been born in 1977? “Impossible,” I thought sitting still, eyes closed and back straight. This thought and the number 32 plagued my conscious mind last night as I sat in meditation. When I’m in Pittsburgh I return to the sangha, or spiritual community, that I joined when I moved here 3 years ago. They’re called the Laughing Rivers sangha. I found them quite randomly one evening as I searched the Internet for meditation groups in the Pittsburgh area. Though I’d practiced meditation before stumbling upon this group, I’d rarely done so in a disciplined, routine fashion and never sat in community. Laughing Rivers was the first group to offer me such a community and I’ve stayed close with them to this day.

I’ve been immersed in a sheltered little world of data and programming these past couple days—neither of which I’m comfortable confronting. So my thoughts last night were still swimming with my anxieties about my programming failures and my doubts about the accuracy of the data the programs are meant to make sense of. As my thoughts pulled me away from the conscious awareness I was trying to cultivate by sitting silently in a roomful of 25 other silent sitters, I returned to my breath every few minutes. “Just stay with your breath,” I implored myself. I counted the in breath. I counted the out breath. “Breathing in, breathing out,” I repeated. Two rises and falls of my chest later and I'd drifted away to an imaginary squabble. I scolded Mario, one of the interviewers I hired two months ago in Bolivia to conduct a month-long field survey. “Why would you enter the number 32 repeatedly for the age of everyone you interviewed?” I demanded of him. "Did you even ask the question?" He had no reply. He just bowed his head in shame. “Damn right,” I thought. “You feel ashamed! Now I’ve got to deal with your crappy data!” I emerged from the shouting match victorious—although I suppose it’s not really a match if only one person’s doing the shouting. I continued flexing my anger and disappointment at Mario several more times throughout the evening’s hour-long silent meditation. By 8 o’clock, I think he got my point.

Six years spent practicing sitting quietly and just breathing. You’d think it’d be easier to remember to just sit quietly and breathe.

welcome

2009-05-05T09:12:00.001-04:00

Welcome to “frames of figure & ground”. This past weekend I visited my friend Rob in Philadelphia. Rob’s perhaps the most honest writer I’ve ever encountered. He’s given me most of the courage I now have to trust what I have to say and share it with others. We shook hands around his kitchen table on Saturday night agreeing to write something every day. Tackling that task alone for someone like me who’s mostly talk and little action would require monumental effort. Even with a companion on the journey nudging me along it’ll still be extraordinarily difficult for me to follow through on this pact. But I’ve always wanted to take writing more seriously and maybe this is a first step in that direction.

I’ll be using this blog as the outlet for these daily writings. Some days I may scribble nothing more than a sentence or two. Other days I hope to post entire short stories. Writing makes my life feel more vital. It releases me into that ocean of awareness as fully as my meditation cushion or the back pew of church has ever allowed. So to be sure, these postings are as much to enrich my own life and maintain my sanity as they are for any reader to take away some value. Having said that, I hope these frames of my life prompt someone to reply with their own story helping us to find something we share and thus bringing us out of ourselves.