There is Nothing Quite like Hope

"The only way you can get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them" -John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Sometimes I hate politics... sometimes I lose faith in democracy. Sometimes I think I'm an arrogant ass, sometimes that those around me are morons. Most of the time I just wish people would take a bit more interest in politics, that they would just care a little more. Care to take the time to do some research, to vote on the issues and not the personality of a candidate, to vote on more than one issue. Sometimes the system depresses me, and what depresses me more is that I have no real solution to any of the problems inherent in it. Yet, this isn't one of those times... for once, I just feel happy, because after what seems like an eternity I feel like I have won. I feel there is something to look forward to, for once I have hope.

Barrack Hussein Obama is President-Elect, defeating a craggy old candidate who I liked so much more when he was just a Senator from Arizona and who I have a feeling I will like a lot more now that he's just that once again. I don't really think that the Washington establishment will change, but that was never why I wanted Obama to win in the first place. But at least there is a little hope for once.

I'm not going to go through his platform and explain why I voted for him, but just enjoy the moment. For now I just want to say that on election night I felt optimistic again. Seeing the scenes from all over the country, from all over the world of people jubilant was amazing. To see so many people happy because they believed something great had happened, voting for something positive, rather than because they were afraid.

The United States has taken a huge step toward wiping away the remnants of slavery and segregation. But it is bigger than just that, what I am most proud of is that this is a resounding denunciation of the idea that "American" means WASP or hick. Yes, the goal is that someday we will be able to elect a black man and that won't be anything special, but we are finally on the right path. For once the President is something more than a white Christian male. Someday we'll elect a woman, a Muslim, or an Atheist. And someday none of those categories will matter.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hopefully this election truly is the resounding defeat of the Christian Coalition that it seems and that social conservatism will die with them. Hopefully the Republican party can transform into something more akin to what it once was, can transform into a party focused on a capitalism tempered by The New Deal. While I doubt I'll agree with such a party much, at least I'll be able to respect it.

Someday maybe Owen Meany will be wrong, that people will look around themselves and care more than what is effecting them that very instant. We as a people, need to fight for what we believe in again and stop the infringing upon our freedoms. I truly believe that November 4th, 2008 was a huge step in that direction. We have a long way to go, but I have never been prouder of this country.

Father and Son

It’s a dreadful day when you finally realize that your father is human, that the pillar of strength and discipline, that paragon of everything safe and good in the world is just as scared as you are, when you realize that he is just as flawed as us all.

It’s a terrible moment when you finally beat him at one-on-one and you know by the look in his eyes and the sweat dripping from his brow as you sink that last jump shot that this time he didn’t let you win. It suddenly hits you that you are too fast, too strong, too skilled, too young (and maybe not young enough). And maybe there is a triumph in that moment, a gloating, but that grin soon falls from your face. You know that the days of throwing a Nerf football in the front yard are gone, the days when a tackle meant being picked up in a giant bear hug. You can see it all in his eyes and the heaving of his chest, that strange mixture of pride and defeat that must come when your progeny eclipse you.

It’s a horrible feeling when you realize that your father can no longer help you with your math homework, that you’re a better speller than he, that you have a better grasp of astronomy and history and philosophy and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that you can beat him at Jeopardy without trying. And maybe some of it is just forgetfulness, and maybe some of it is technological and scientific advances, but you don’t think of that at the time. It just hits you like a dull thud.

The transformation in your relationship is not a sudden thing, it’s gradual, just as growing up is, but when you finally make that realization that he is human, it is the beginning of the end of the world as it once was. You begin to see his flaws in you instead of all the good and maybe you don’t want to be just like him anymore, maybe you want to strive to be better, strive to overcome those flaws. Maybe that’s natural and necessary, and maybe it doesn’t matter so much whether you succeed or not. It’s the mother bird pushing her babies from the nest and hoping that they fly. It is a jolt when the big picture appears to you, though, that you are your own person now, that nothing is tying you down anymore. You stand with him on a little cliff overlooking Lake Huron and stare out into the water, stealing yourself. You tell him he’s being an idiot, that he’s not thinking and the reason he’s arguing with your mother and that he made a scene is not because he’s upset with her, or you, but he’s stressed from work. It’s quite possibly the hardest thing you have ever done in your life, to confront him damned the consequences, but you succeed, you embrace and your world is turned upside down, is opened up. Maybe we all need that eye-opening jolt of realism to know who we truly are, but that knowledge never comes at the time. You just feel alone, and defeated in the moment of your greatest triumph. You feel lost and confused

And slowly you realize that he is no longer your boss, the King of the castle, but a cog in the unit that is your family. You realize that the two of you are equals, compatriots. He stops telling you what is right and you begin discussing things… there aren’t anymore time outs, or yelling, even when you do something boneheaded like flip his van over three times and almost kill yourself. He knows that you’re a smart kid (or maybe adult?), that you’re not going to make the save idiotic mistake again, he trusts you…

It’s a nice feeling, but one with immense consequences, because you no longer have that safety net. Sure, your parents are there for you, but you know that it is time for you to set out on your own, to make your own decisions, to make your own mistakes, to have your own victories. It is that old universal truth that freedom and safety are polar opposites. You are free from the nest, but not longer secure, and it is terrifying and terrifyingly exciting at the same time.

And as I am Peering down Springs Blouse...

Why will I continue to search for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe? Why must I reject those beautiful bouts of chaos? They hit me like pleasant strokes, bubbles in the brain-at the park last summer they floated through that cramped air and sun streaked sky.

Sitting in the tub I am four and my mother’s blowing bubbles over my head and they stick to the white tile walls and the water is getting cold and the bath is full of mountains of white that keep popping and a hair floats by and I get scared. When the water is too chilly for me to take and the heater in the basement is already dead from exhaustion mother fills a pot on the stove. Pouring it over my toes I know she loves me.

But then it was summer again and for some odd reason music sounded better then it ever had before. Something in the air had changed and what more than that, Spring had crept out from 45 degrees of rain into a stuffy car and suddenly its 63˚ at the city airport. And that damn it all to hell April 6, 2006 or was it 2005 or 1994-0r-2 had pumped me full of thoughts of perfect folds of red summer blouses and divine bosoms with perfect playful cleavage as a girl asks me to turn in her paper for her because she can’t be bothered by the niceness of the day to leave her seat and I’m peering past her name in the upper corner and seeing her smile and the shrug of her shoulders on the same depth of field while her breasts pull daisy stalks into that V you see when two leaves or petals or legs or parts of summer met.

And then I am back at the park and that damn it all to hell April has set girls on every thought and emotion and sense I have. And there’s something in the air where I breath that causes something inside of me to feed and I can’t tear any bit of my over worked mind away from the breasts I see floating across the sky and over my bath and then I realize that they're bubbles I am remembering and I was four in that tub again.

And sometimes, we just have to be happy that summer and winter are so set in their ways. Spring and Fall, no matter what month, have a way of going either way, running a bit cold or feeling un-restfully warm as the wind blows. But, there is something about the middle of summer, something which is absolute, solidified by the heat of a July day which only summer has. Summer time is strong and sure, letting itself be known in every drop of sunlight into sweat, shouting out it’s presence like a boy with his ball in every long hour of the longest days. Summer burns a memory into your mind so surely that your brain peels. So definite that every blade of grass ever plucked up and rolled between your fingers, pulled at from the ground till it burst out singing dirt into the air as it gave to you is locked away in your mind. Summertime brings on emotions so dormant that even the bugs shoot off electric joy as they dance through the night, little thunderstorms so soft they could mock the lull a baby’s sleep. And, what’s more there is the memory of the first smear of that galvanizing green against the pavement where it is smeared into the heart and the soul of you the first time you see a fire fly die. Summer brings all the calmness of a nap, all the comfort of grass hugged feet, all the joy of nights so dark the sky is filled with lights that out shine cities and so warm that the day might not ever end and summer will just last forever.

And then I realize that it is April again and I’ve set out to get myself and there are a million pretty girls I’d love to kiss before I’ve lost my sense of Spring-supple breasts and supple heat that reaches inside of me and turns my chest up to the nth˚.

A Siren's Call

I wrote this a few months ago, and while I have already released it onto the web, I figured I’d post it here with a few minor revisions so that it can be with the brethren that sprung from it. Because, it’s the spark that started this whole thing, at least for me. It began like this… and everything sort of took off from there.

I never write anymore, I used to, constantly. Letters, words, sentences flowing from my fingers through the keys and appearing almost instantaneously onto that big, bright convex screen, streams of consciousness just rushing from my brain to my fingertips. I wrote a lot, it was soothing, cathartic, and my company in the dark, me, my mind and the screen. And it always returned to the same feeling.

Now the screen is flat, and the colors are sharper, but nothing has truly changed the experience. I just don’t do it. I used to. A lot. Sometimes I think about it, and I long for it, sometimes I wonder why I don’t write anymore. Sure, I write… I write essays, and I write e-mails, and I write instant messages. I write notes on marker boards, and random bits of info on scraps of paper, but I don’t write.

The urge still comes to me late at night, an urge that I can’t even truly describe. I grapple with the words, with the idea, with the logic of it all, but never feel I have anything concrete. I want to write, not just about anything, but about it. It is as if my soul is longing for release, my mind needing some sort of outlet, but that’s not really it. My first memory of it came in the low, hallowed whistle of a train passing through the night. How many times when I was young I sat awake at night, the darkness wrapped around me just as securely as my blankets, staring at my ceiling, and that train beckoned me like a siren’s call. How often I wanted to fling my covers off of me, and run through the deserted streets to find that train, as if the answer could somehow be there.

The struggle is still the same now, a fight for some sort of meaning from this feeling I have deep in my gut, in my mind, in my heart. Frost once wrote, “I could say 'Elves' to him, but it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather he said it for himself.” That’s how it feels to me. I can only grasp some fragment, some part of the mystery. The mystery wrapped inside an enigma. It is not loneliness, not discontentment, nor contentment, not fear or anxiety, or excitement. It’s not need, or worry, not calm, or wonderment. Is it rational? Irrational? I know others have felt it, but here I am still searching.

It is the sensation of staring at a Hopper painting, of singing to myself late at night while driving in the car alone, the rumble of the wheels on the pavement and the streaking lights of suburbia surrounding, but never touching me. It is gazing up at the stars on a cool spring night and feelings so small, and yet so large at the same time. It is the existence of a sparkling, shining world of newly fallen snow, where everyone is safe, yet isolated in their little igloo of knowledge. It seems to take shape in Something Wicked this Way Comes, in the insomnia of Charles Halloway and the running pf Will and Jim. But does Bradbury truly understand it? Do I misunderstand him? It seems to be a paradox, but it cannot be. I will not believe that. It makes me feel like Holden, wandering through the streets of New York, searching for something he doesn't understand.

It is the longing that someday someone will understand, and the fear that no one will ever be able to grasp it, least of all me. The drive to discover the true meaning, and the wish that one day someone will be able to help me find it.

And as I tap away at the keys, it always comes back, welling up in my gut and causing my mind to long to understand it, my heart to reach out and grab it. It is the realization that every word I write, every thought I think, every feeling that strikes a chord in my being is inherently entangled with it, this unknown that is so familiar. It is the hope that humanity has some purpose, and that I have some reason for being, but the fear to truly believe.

Sometimes I look back for it in the ignorance of childhood, sometimes forward into the future, but it’s always there, throbbing in my gut, whispering something I cannot truly hear.

Half-Mast

A flag stands for so much. History, culture, government, peoples, countries, ideas… It satisfies the universal human need for symbolism, a need to define the intangible with the concrete. It represents so much for so many people.

The flag, the star spangled banner, possibly symbolizes more than any other. It is truth, justice and the American way personified. It’s the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the National Anthem. It’s the 13 Colonies, and all those states. The red, white and blue are the colors of our forbearers and those who helped us gain our independence, and it represents the blood we shed against and with them. It is the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, to the freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion and thought. It is capitalism and liberalism, and the republic. It represents the new School of Hellas. It is imperialism and philanthropy, struggle and triumph, poverty and prosperity, war and peace. It stands for all those who died under it, and all those who died for it. It means so many things to so many people, at home and around the globe and it means so much to me.

There are few things more stirring than seeing the stars and stripes waving against a bright blue sky. It’s a sign of protection, a sign of power, and a sign of right. To me, it symbolizes everything that this country was meant to be, everything I know it can be, the nation’s true soul. I’m not talking about those banal displays of patriotism that you see every day: the cheap plastic flags flying from mini-van windows, the signs stuck in lawns, or the gaudy political bumper stickers. I never found any of that to be honest, or pure. The flag flying high upon a silver pole with a bronze orb perched atop, though, that is purity. Watching those colors flying overhead gives me hope for the future, and a pride at being part of something wonderful. I may not believe that everything the government has done or will do is right, but I believe in what this nation is meant to stand for. There is a difference between a patriot and a fanatic. A love for one’s country and jingoism are not the same thing, and there is not a fine line between them. It’s not the politics I follow, but the ideals espoused by Washington, Jefferson and Adams; it’s simply “We the People... “

Lately, though, old glory hasn’t been flying so high. Lately, it has been languishing at half-mast. Whether it’s for the death of a President, the loss of a soldier, or the mourning of a national tragedy, the flag has been laid low often these past few years. It shows the vulnerability of the flag, of the country itself, and the despair of the people in these times. I know that I for one cannot look at the flag at half mast without getting a hollow feeling in my stomach, without my head falling and my heart sinking. It’s an entirely different language that the flag is speaking in this condition, one of sorrow instead of pride. I believe that it is important to remember what the flag represents, and be affected by what it is telling us. We cannot get desensitized to the sight, because we must look back to remember and mourn, but we must also look forward and create change. We the People... together.

Odyssey

For one night, college life was all that it was supposed to be. No, not what was promised to me in countless television series, crappy made for TV specials and movies. No, I didn’t get smashed out of my mind. I didn’t do some night putting with the Chancellor’s daughter, pull a prank on the Dean of Admissions, or even wear a toga. There weren’t any drugs, or loud techno music thumping in the background, though there were some rather amusing drunken students stumbling around. But, none of that ever mattered to me. College was never about any of that stuff, not in my mind.

What was accomplished that cold Friday night was far more important. In just one voyage up a cold stretch of interstate, I reunited two star-crossed lovers, navigated through the wintry streets to find long lost friends, stared down the site of my greatest defeat and jetted through with two hands clenched upon the wheel, screamed my lungs out under the dark sky, while a river of bright yellow lights chased after me and I made friends out of complete strangers.

I slept cramped in a bed with too many people, lied awake listening to the droning snores around me and the rustling restlessness of the creature in the bunk beneath mine, and faced the jeers and catcalls of the locals. I drove home through the Plains of Lansing on barely four hours of sleep, and my eyes strained to count the water towers against the bright blue sky. Everything had that spark of exhilaration that comes from an over-abundance of adrenaline, a lack of sleep and a body fried from laughter, smiling and singing until one’s voice is hoarse. Everything had that glow that only happens when you push forward with no regrets and go because you are young and you can. Before I took off with my energetic co-pilot, my mom gave me a sad smile and told me she had forgotten what it was like to be young. Those were perhaps the saddest and sweetest words she had ever spoken to me, and while they won’t be forgotten, I simply hugged her and vanished into the night.

It was like being a kid again, and moving forward into the great wide open at the same time, throwing aside my inhibitions, my anxieties, my duties, my regrets, and simply living. I could have stayed home and fretted the hours away, but for one night at least, nothing mattered but the present. Perhaps it seems foolish to put so much stock into this one trip north, but it meant more than the simple facts could ever portray, so to hell with the mundane detail of it all. In the end, they don’t do it any justice. It was not a mere car ride, but an odyssey of the likes of Homer. So, when I tell you that I was accosted by three trolls guarding a bridge and gave up my sword to be allowed past, does the truth really matter? What is more important, anyhow, the mere facts or is it the meaning behind the experiences? Besides, they could have just easily been the warriors of Leonidas at Thermopylae, or mermaids frolicking in a river, and I suppose in some ways they were.

It was an adventure that rivals my greatest as a child. I met a Princess by the name of Leia, a doctor, a mentor, a soccer player and lecturers from Harvard and Yale, yet they were all one and the same. Where is Yale anyhow? For once, it didn’t even matter. And so, I sat down and talked with those mythical creatures, those fictional characters, those three Spartans, my back up against a hallway wall and lost all concept of time. I simply watched the world go by around me. Couples danced down the corridors, doors opened and closed, people walked past, and I sat and talked to three strangers that soon became friends because I was young and this was exactly what college was supposed to be. I talked and laughed and navigated my way through the myths they weaved. I got a sock thrown at me, and found further evidence that rock ‘n’ roll is the answer to all our problems. The minutes flowed past and I forgot that I was expected elsewhere, that I was late, and must’ve seemed lost to those I had left behind. Perhaps I was lost, and after an hour in that state, Eli found me, and was quickly lost right along with me. Because, who wants to be found when there is so much more in being lost?

It was the kind of night that college life is supposed to be full of, and all too often isn’t. It was spontaneous, exciting, new, yet familiar, and fun. And I learned for certain, it is important to just seize the moment, and act. Otherwise, you just end up with regrets. All that was missing was one red headed kid, but then again, how fairytale can this get? I’m not sure I could handle that kind of perfection, anyway.

“And you, you help me with your voice, you listened when my voice was void of sound, you touch me with your smile, you show me to my smile, and you…” – Cindy by Tammany Hall NYC