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From Andrew Sullivan yesterday:

“Imagine that this kind of massacre happened every day. Imagine a police force that was far too small to even respond to most of them. Imagine this occurring repeatedly for years until the perpetrators and their accomplices became the de facto power-brokers throughout the land. Imagine the shootings also being accompanied by the brutal torture of victims. Imagine families never having finality on whether their own siblings or parents or children have been murdered or not.

This is Iraq today. Now think of the justified rage many feel at the VT campus police chief and university president for misjudgments. Now imagine them presiding over several more massacres in the same place. Ask yourself: why do we not feel as enraged by those responsible for security in Iraq? Are those victims not human beings too? Are they not children and mothers and fathers and sons? Are we not ultimately responsible for them, having destroyed the institutions of order in their country? Now go watch John Bolton tell the victims to go help themselves.

And I’ll take it one place further. Listening to Morning Edition, which has been some of the tamest and least impulsive reporting on the shooting, had short profiles of the victims. The NY Times and I’m sure a hundred other papers have a growing collection of photos of the victims. People probably need to see this sort of thing. It is a response which has been measured before and this human interest angle is one of the crucial angles that lets people fully understand the magnitude of such an event. Additionally I have been interested in how the narrative takes on a life of its own as well, specifically media driven – with leading questions and a magnetism towards the cliches we assume drive such violent actions. We, as a culture, like things to fit into boxes even if they don’t, and long before we could possibly know if they ever truly will or should. (see: religion)

BUT

Andrew Sullivan is very right. And he is one of the only ones saying this that I have stumbled upon. And most will not follow suit. What happens in Iraq every day is EXACTLY what happened to us on Monday. People need to understand that. But it happens so often that how could any media outlet in Iraq or anywhere keep track of the profiles of the dead. There is probably no record of many of the deaths, no remembrances, no candlelight vigils. I promise you that Prime Minister Malaki does not fly in for convocations. People die, and then later, more people die. Imagine every single citizen of this country knowing someone who had died in the VA-Tech shooting, because virtually every Iraqi citizen knows someone who has died since 2003. I would have to imagine that there are many people in Iraq, that if told of the event would probably respond: “Good. Now they know what it’s like here.” Certainly people die all over the world en-masse, especially in third world countries, and in numbers much larger than 32, but we don’t share a lot of direct responsibility for those. We may not even share much responsibility for the Virginia Tech shooting either. But Iraq is ours. Any way you look at it, these people would not be dying if it was not for us. The hundreds of thousands of dead would still be alive – maybe oppressed, but alive. Which would they choose if given that choice? Which would you choose?  (New Hampshire is on record I think) Add the thousands of US military deaths and other casualties to that pile, and I assure you we are not done yet in that regard. (Are soldiers innocent? No, but they offer their lives with the understanding that they are to be put at risk only if it is absolutely necessary – and I’m sorry but it wasn’t and it still isn’t)

Isn’t it a sort of ignorant hypocrisy to focus so much on our own grief and not on the grief our nation has caused? Are American college students more or less innocent than Sunni marketgoers? Would you rather die at the hand of a disturbed “loner” or an alienated zealot? Both are probably barely past childhood, both unimaginably warped by whatever forces, and the result is the same: They kill, and others ask how and why.

I don’t mean to politicize this, but I’m actually not. This is not about left or right, or war or not; it is about perspective. It is about American self centering. I just wish people could imagine this happening every single day, but without this response because no one has a response like this left in them. It’s been happening for years.

Continue Reading]]> As anyone familiar with my desk can tell you, I have a thing for geniuses – granted a subjective term – but regardless. When I left my last place, wet and sooty, I left all the geniuses up – for some contractor to wonder about when they gutted the place later on. I only took Rodin and Ansel Adams which were prints I’d bought instead of ones I’d printed out. Now as of last night, my desk’s backdrop once again is comfrotably fluent with genius. And I’ve made some changes….

New:

Ron Fricke
Jon Stewart
Gustavo Santaolalla
Phillip Pullman
Holdt
Hemingway (couldn’t find photo I liked before)
David Gordon Green
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Reverend Billy
Roald Dahl
Sam Harris
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Marc Forster
Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Gone:

Michael Moore (just doesn’t feel appropriate anymore, altho I still agree with him on almost everything)
Smashing Pumpkins (Don’t feel right putting bands up – to college student-ey)

Still To Come:

Wright Brothers
Gandhi
Nevin Danner
Arundhati Roy (after I finish some more of her books)
More I’m sure as I remember them

Continue Reading]]> I hate that terminology, but it is the best possible way to get the average person to understand what I mean by a moment where you’re struck by something you see and it makes you feel some inherent goodness running behind life itself. I’ll try to think up a better less cliche way to say it as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I’ve been sick for almost a week, hacking up technicolor phlegm (isn’t that a weird word, look at it again), but on Wednesday took a walk to Trader Joes to replenish my soy milk and eggs as well as finish pricing out the food items lost in my involuntary move. Anyway my new official Trader Joes is the one by Hynes Convention Center, instead of the far superior Coolidge Corner location, (larger, easier) and the trick to this Trader Joes is that it’s in the basement and you take an escalator down and then back up. So I do my pricing, then my shopping, and then head back out…  but at the top of the escalator, someone’s cherry tomato has fallen out of its container and (new annoyingly smaller) shopping bag, and while I’m not sure where on the escalator it happened, now it was spinning happily at the very top where the floor re-eats the stairs, – where as a child you’re always worried your shoelace will get caught and you’ll be horrifically killed. Anyway here is this cherry tomato, rolling perfectly, gently enough that it doesn’t rupture, on this huge somewhat violent manmade mechanical contraption. And think about how big the “teeth” of an escalator are…. it was just amazing this little tomato was able to stay there, on its de-facto hamster wheel. Anyway it struck me, not about the inherent goodness in the universe, but about the tiny little things you simply have to stop and notice, laugh or smile about, and then, as you can read, tell people about. Should I have videotaped it, smoked some G13, and then gone over and screwed my insecure neighbor’s daughter? perhaps..  but I always feel like I am some rare kind of person that actually notices things, and that it must be a good kind of person to be. Thus, cherry tomato Vs. escalator. Random little shit is awesome.

In another funny little story, I saw on the always amazingly horrible Headline News yesterday, that some lady starting choking on a piece of apple, and with no one around to help her except her golden retriever, she fell down and starting hitting her chest – at which point the golden retriever starting jumping on her chest, until she spit the apple out.

The dog then ate the apple.

Cue Bob Saget circa early 90’s America’s Funniest Home Videos: “I’ve heard of dogs begging for food, but that is ridiculous”

I find that news much less horrifying than the “tsunami of sewage” that killed 4 people in Gaza. Remind me never to live downstream of a treatment plant. There’s a joke I want to make here, but will not.

SIDE STORY: I want to go into further detail about how Trader Joes keeps changing their paper bag design and it’s gets worse and worse every time, but instead will explain why I watch Headline News over breakfast. It’s because of Obama (oh wait this isn’t fox news, I mean Osama) and his 911 assholeness. Anyway I woke up late for work on 9/11/2001 and wolfed down something and ran outside to my car to rush to work. Normally I’d call but I just left that time. The night before the Sox had been meant to play the Yankees in NY but it had been rained out and so my car radio was on (usually I was CD only at this time) and it was tuned to 1080 AM which was news during the day and Sox games when they were on. Thus I get in my car, start driving, listening to what was on, and thus heard the following combinations of phrases: “attacked the United States” “Pentagon is burning” “World Trade Center” etc etc. Now of course I almost had a heart attack, and that’s not a great thing to have happen when you’re driving. I remembered yelling at the radio, something like “THEY #@#^%^%# BLEW IT UP?!!?” and raced to work at 100mph to get to the TVs there and see what was going on. There I was brought up to speed. Nobody seemed to care that I was late. (and the lunch crowd that day all drank entirely hard liquor for the first time I’d ever seen.) Anyway – I was so jarred by the way I found out about the attack, that I have tended to turn on some 24 hour news channel over breakfast every day since, just to make sure, that if the world is no longer there, I know about it before I head out the door. Even tho I hate the 24 hour news cycle and how it is slowly killing journalism, and my father’s attention span.

Continue Reading]]> My friend Steve Porter has a new mix CD out, entitled Porterhouse 2, and while I’m just getting into it now – it is pretty freakin amazing as far as thumping brilliantly programmed/mixed dance music goes, so do yourself a favor and support the guy with your hard earned greenery.

HERE

BIG001 has apparently sold close to 350 copies…  which is pretty great if I can just say…

Continue Reading]]> Here in my new apartment, I’ve just reorganized a bit, moved the piles around so they make more sense. By piles I mean what little I took from my last place to make it thru the month until all my stuff comes back to me from its restoration facility in New Hampshire. Living like this has not been good for me so far. After all I am sort of a wannabe OCD person, always wishing my life had some irrefutable order to it that would practically arrange itself. And your home should best exemplify this. When I get frustrated or particularly unfocused, I tend to start doing dishes or some other form of cleaning. Putting things into their place and taking some solace in the order around me that I perhaps cannot ever attain internally. Its a broken record response but it seems to make me feel better too, so whatever.

Now, here, nothing makes any sense. My dishes have no place. What clean clothes I have sit in piles ontop of my opened luggage, tomorrow all the rest of my clothes come back cleaned and I presume in bags, which is where they will stay, because I have no shelves or sets of drawers to put them into. I have several boxes of smoked belongings I have no intention of dealing with anytime soon. I even have 3 sealed ziplock freezer bags containing spindles of data DVDs that are still sitting in black water. Each one has to be hand cleaned….  when would you have the energy for that? I still haven’t dealt with my computer, or my claim spreadsheet, or even built all the furniture I have since purchased. It’s distracting. It’s depressing. But…  I like this place I live now. I could deal without the frigid drafts (at least tomorrow I get my slippers back) and I could deal with stores being closer in this awful below freezing weather. But I have 15 foot ceilings. I have more space than I own art. I have some new stuff I really am happy having chosen, like this drop leaf table that will become a real dining table when my desk legs arrive. And when its not 10 degrees by them, I will move this table to the windows and I will eat breakfast in the sun every single day. When the spring comes I go out on my deck and grill and drink cold beer while listening to the city. In the summer I will go down and sit next to the Charles which is closer than the T. I will hit the Paramount in Beacon Hill for pancakes at least twice as much as usual, seeing as I can walk there now. Potential is the currency of hope, and I am rich with that.

But in the meantime, my favorite word has become discombobulated. And so yesterday, I took one room, my bathroom, and made it mine. I fixed all the crappy installations people had tried before. I build and installed a case for my toiletries. And I put up three pieces of my stuff, one piece of art and two of personal artifacts (my map to the post office outside Tokyo and the 4 CDs I retired from my early music geek days). Then I closed the door and sat on the mat on the floor of my bathroom and felt like I was home. The most since I have gotten here. It has been nice to start eating my normal breakfast again (two organic eggs, Joe’s Os with TJ Soy Milk, sencha). Its nice to have a bed and my Japanese paper lamp next to it. Its nice to have my music playing again. And while I miss my movie theater terribly, and I miss my pantry and pan hooks… sure enough this place will make sense to me. And as soon as I install my towel shelf and the replacement shower curtain for my old wonderful one (hooray I could find another one) my bathroom will be complete pretty much. And in the main room I have spread out my art, not hung where it will necessarily end up, but out and visible. Each piece calming me just a tiny bit every time I see it. As much as I dislike the Fight Club realization of how “the things you own, end up owning you” I cannot express how meaningful it is to have my stuff talking to me again. How much the place I live reflects me to myself. And while I have no doubt in any way I could live in the woods with nothing but my wits and hopefully some handy gear… here in the city, all these little things that mean something to me – more than they possibly could to anyone else in the world – they are my support system.

Home redefines itself as your life stretches out. At first it is your house, the place your family lived. I loved that house, loved my room in it, the neighborhood, the park across the street, the connection I had to most everything I could see. My parents sold it and I was pissed. Home is supposed to stay home I thought, independent of all other factors. But life is not a feel good movie like that. It was sold, and the new owners put up a decorative faux fence in the front yard that my parents would have needed to have been brainwashed to even consider. (my parents actually fought the local political groups over their “gentlemen’s agreement” not to put up any political signs in the front lawns of the town – and replaced our Dukakis ’88 signs after annoyed local officials stole them in the middle of the night – welcome to yuppy suburban CT) Then home was a rented place with my name on the lease, and this was fine – but that first place never really took off for me sentimentally. When I got to Boston is when my real nesting began. And eventually home is no longer where your parents live (further proved when they left my even earlier childhood home in the North Shore for sunny smoggy California) Home is then where you live. And while it can be wonderful and peaceful being around my folks, or my sister, or one of the empty places I once spend some serious life, your compass centers on your bed, your good tea, your friends you can depend on like I’ve had to in the past two weeks, your stores, your routine. And the great thing is that this can always be rebuilt – always be moved, even under such great duress. And as you get older there are more things soaked with sentiment that you can utilize for this effect. People, places, stupid little things like a tin of smooth stones from some distant shore. Everything emits this kind of magnetic affirming energy. And maybe most of these things were destroyed like they could have been for me so very recently… maybe one thing survives – bruised and beaten – well then it goes on my mantle. Home is where that thing sits for me to look at.

So in the next few days my postcard art is going back up near my bed. When my desk is built I will rebuild my wall of geniuses. Whenever I can get a ladder in here I will fix my curtains, affix some handmade paper over the big window above my deck door. I will hang Paul’s painting, and Victor’s crate front, and Grandma Stuart’s Wyeth print, and eventually my screen again. Some day soon … home will be totally home again. Albeit expensiver and drafty.

Continue Reading]]> So last night was my first night at my new apartment in the Back Bay. It was weird as it always is…  noises and serious drafts and mixed feelings… Think I woke up at 4 am and then off and on every hour..

My neighbor upstairs follows monday night TV with sex it seems, at least in the first week of March. Nothing is a funnier introduction to a neighbor than a series of sounds that make you think: “wait is that what I think it is?” In this case there was a what sounded like the perfect oscillation of a improperly loaded washing machine and then a womanly sound, then later there was a loud male gasp and then double gasp. My neighbor upstairs also likes to listen to bad loud music on tuesday late mornings. I will call this neighbor “Molina” after his mailbox name tag. I am merely hoping this pattern does not indicate he is in the restaurant business, as that lifestyle leads to lots of off hour noise which I am not paying this much to deal with.

Today I woke up to real sunlight for the first time in an apartment of mine in more than two years. I cleaned the wonderful woodsmoke enriched seasoning off my cast iron frying pan and made some eggs on my new cramped stove, made some toast in the same pan, found out my faucet’s hot water is hot enough for tea, and ate standing up. Then I built my new Ikea drop leaf dining room table which sat next to my bay windows until I decided my feet were about 14 degrees and moved the whole operation next to the wall mounted space heater by the kitchen door. I am stealing some wireless internet from the unsecured connection entitled “Chandler Bing”. I guess someone, maybe even Molina, thinks that Chandler was the insecure one. Regardless I am grateful to them.

So here I newly live surrounded by piles of my stuff, some still smoked and others newly deodorized. I have two new plants with another on the way soon enough, and have virtually no furniture to put anything on or in. I have a new Ikea 6 month el cheapo foam mattress that is losing its foam smell without me in my loft area, my counters are about 2 inches too short for comfort, and my mom very kindly went off to the Covina, CA Ikea today to track down one of the last pairs of Vika Artur trestle desk legs in the country and ship them to me so that I may have two surfaces to work off instead of just one. I hit Bed Bath and Beyond later for essentials like a shower curtain liner and hopefully a cheap mattress pad. I have ten times as many things to do as I can think of, and am looking forward to getting some kind of routine going again.

Cannot thank Bogie and Dara and Wrigley enough for putting me up for a week at their place while I resorted my Bostonian life. Or Paul for lending me a very capable hand organizing the carcass of my old apartment for excavation. Or Dayna for accompanying me not once but twice to the Scandinavian designed circle of hell that is Ikea, and handing out some helpful advice to ease the process. And while we survived my wallet surely didn’t. Also have to thank my Mom for sending me a proper comforter and some great pillows. Nothing says new home like packages from Mom in the front hall when you check in for good.

Can’t wait to have this place feel like home. God knows when that will be. In the meantime I need thicker socks.

Continue Reading]]> At JFK, on a layover. So while I slept a lake house in Coldspring, Texas (near Houston) my apartment building was ravaged by fire yesterday, wiping out most of the top floor. I just read the Boston Globe’s story, talking about the 2 BU kids that were killed, both 21. There had been a power outage the previous night, and I’m assuming the fire was candle related. Apparently they had a big party that night as well, after the power went out, or even because of it, as it was a scheduled outage, which means I’m sure alcohol played a factor as well. If this was the apartment I am thinking it is, these guys had parties all the time. It was a bit of an epidemic at the building, especially this past Sept. 1st cycle. I am virtually certain i was the oldest person who lived in the building. I can’t help but think of all the times I lay in bed staring at my ceiling, hating college students and their love of alcohol and extensive partying.  And now these kids I resented so much, two of them are dead. And whatever terrible scene awaits me at my home when I get there later tonight, above me in unit 6 is a forensic investigation, Stephen Adelipour’s devestated parents will have to sift through it to claim whatever charred remnants of their son’s life are still intact. I wonder if I’d even recognize him whenever they post his picture. I can’t help but feel on a gut level that carlessness played a role in this, and I truly hope that is not the case, but the combination of situations points that way. Life is just so perfect and precious, and death so sudden and random. All we can ever do is try and increase our chances, hedge on sense and wit, and hope nothing stupid and avoidable ever takes us down. I don’t believe in fate, but I do think think you can fight off random demise to some extent. I’m not sure how sensitive these remarks are, because I actually do feel horrible about all of this, far beyond whether my RAID array is fried or my great grandfather’s photos are destroyed, because these kids were people with families and friends, fantasies and futures. All things I still get to enjoy. And while all my family and friends are all remarking how happy they are that I was not there to die or not, and I joke that if I had been there I’d have been petting my Antec P-180 right now like it was a sooten little dog…. I really am lucky. Being alive, any time of any day, means we are all a little lucky. More later….