Neither Here Nor There

There have been a lot of things on my mind lately, and I’m just going to put a couple of them together in this entry.

One. I have a couple of friends who it seems are being targeted in our neighborhood because of their alternative lifestyle.  They are a married couple, but their relationship is very “open,” and they can be very open with anyone, from the stories that are circulating.  It’s strange to me to judge someone because of their sex life, especially if it is healthy for them.  I mean, what would the close-minded think of some of the stories I could tell them from even some of my most monogamous relationships?  Or even from some of my personal relations with myself… I mean, really!  I probably would have been hunted down by an angry mob like in the old horror movies if I had lived in this community when I was single.

I was raised to have an open mind and to accept people as people.  Good people are good people, period.  In fact, freaks (real freaks) are probably healthier than many other people because they allow themselves to come unglued, unhinged, uncaged from time to time.  Escape is a good thing.  If convention is confining, find your liberty.  And if convention is liberating, then stay inside that cage so that you can live the life you want.  But when you judge, you damn yourself.  You curse Creation for its creativity.  Bah.

Two. This one has been bothering me tonight in particular.  People celebrate their mothers on days like Mother’s Day and their mothers’ birthdays.  Those days are for mom.  For my mom, I celebrate Halloween.  It was her favorite holiday, and she always made it something magical and special (and she wondered why I seemed to be drawn to the dark side even at a young age).  She died on Halloween morning when I was 12.  Every year since then, it has been of the utmost importance to me that I celebrate the day as much as I can.  Not just for me, but for her, to remember her, to celebrate the single most important person in my life before my son.

Out of my own love for Halloween, I observe it like a season, and that season has already started (Aug. 1st is the unofficial start of Halloween for me).  My 3-month observance of Halloween is all about the holiday itself, but the day itself is for my mother.  Now that I have a son, it is even more important to me to give him what my mother gave me through Halloween.  I want to share the magic of this holiday, as it perfectly captures the stories that held my imagination as a child as well as the very spiritual approach to life that my mother carried in her heart, that she passed along to me.  And while wanting to pass this to him comes from my love for him, it also comes out of my devotion to my mother, that I wish him to know something of her though he’ll never meet her.

Last October, things at home weren’t very good, and I feared I would not get to spend Halloween with my son.  That was a very frightening feeling, and it hurt.  Well, tonight, I was told my wife and son might be out of town for Halloween (my response was, while laughing, “He’s not going anywhere at Halloween”).  A relative is getting married in Louisiana the day before.  What hurts most, I think, is that I’m expected to be absolutely okay with not celebrating Halloween with my son.  It’s the most important day of my year.  My entire year centers around Halloween.  And I’m just supposed to be cool with “Oh we might not be here”???  Not hardly.

It’s messed me up all night.  Talk about looking at someone differently . . . when it feels like they don’t even know you . . .

The more I think about it,

the more I wish I could just take time off to write,

the more I wish I could start my own business;

tired of working on other people’s schedules,

living on other people’s schedules,

fighting myself day in and day out,

to be good,

to be a man,

to wear a mask,

a costume,

put on a smile,

act like I care about something that isn’t a form of art or expression of passion.

Since yesterday evening, when my wife told me the news about Peter Steele’s death, I’ve been thinking a lot about the music that’s been influential in my life, especially about the bands and artists I consider important in my life.  It seems everyone has a list of however-many-albums that changed how they listened to music, but I don’t think my personal however-many list really reflects the bands whose music found a special place in me.

So here’s the list:

Guns N Roses, Metallica, Ozzy, White Zombie / Rob Zombie, Soundgarden, Marilyn Manson, NIN, Prick, Type O Negative, L7, N.W.A. (and each member individually), Pantera, Jesus Jones, Deftones, Danzig, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Crowbar, Tool, Pepper Keenan, Rob Halford, Motley Crue, Megadeth.

These bands, artists, and musicians have shaped the person I am and my musical tastes.  They have influenced every aspect of my life, and to lose any one of them is like losing a relative.

I’ll be honest here:  There were tears when I read some of the things members of Type O have said about Peter after his death.  In fact, last night I did not want to sleep until I knew that it wasn’t just another rumor.  There were tears when I found out about Dimebag, and some later when it hit me that it had really happened.  I was still a kid when Eazy-E died, and I remember crying over it the way a kid would.  But I also broke down while recently watching a documentary about N.W.A.  They did a good job in that documentary of capturing  just how sudden it all was for the fans, and it was like living it all over again.  There isn’t a day that goes by that Chi from Deftones isn’t in my thoughts.

I mean, I know it sounds all high-school and adolescent, but music is a very important part of my life, and I feel like the musicians who make the music I consider important have touched me personally even though they don’t know me from Adam.

It’s about that time again, time for everyone to start talking about what’s going to be different next year.  Some will quit smoking or start dieting.  Some may even want to go to church more often or just start giving a damn.  Some people make long, long lists of resolutions for the new year, and usually they just dust it off again the next time and put a new date at the top, having not touched the first resolution.

I’ve been thinking about how to put my resolution since before Thanksgiving.  Since I got out of school and lost all sense of direction, I’ve taken the whole notion of a New Year pretty seriously.  It offers a prime opportunity for self reflection.  You get to assess your progress or success, or lack thereof, and I’ve been trying to use that to make myself more aware of the choices I make.

2010 will be the year of Progress.  My major goal for this coming year is going to be “making it happen.”  After the holidays, I will be putting my life back on the track to success.  I will be moving forward, no more standing still.  There will be some big changes this year, and they’re going to come quickly.

So, here’s to a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and to 2010: the year of the D.

Maybe I’m strange, but there’s a certain nostalgia that comes to me when I’m sick like I am on a day like today.

It’s cold and cloudy, enough so that even with the heat up, there’s still a chill that creeps into your bones, as if your body just knows how cold it really is and there’s nothing you can do to convince it otherwise.  (Now, imagine if it were colder than freezing.)  It’s a good day for warm cup after warm cup of coffee.

Sinus infections remind me of being a kid, staying home from school, and spending a lot of time with my mother.  I stayed sick, it seemed, when I was younger.  Every few months, I’d be blowing it out my nose and coughing it out of my chest.  And coffee is my drink of choice when I feel like this.

Coffee was a big part of growing up for me.  My dad drinks coffee all the time, and I drank it when I was little because it was awesome to do the things my dad did — well, the things I could do, too.

So, all the ingredients are here today to remind me of a certain aspect of my childhood: a warm cup of coffee on a cold, cloudy, stuffy day.

A new form of written – in this case typed – English has emerged in the last few years that really troubles a lot of people: text messaging. Lately, it has been treated as an entirely new phenomenon, when it has its roots in instant messaging on the internet. This form of “written” language uses different grammatical standards and many abbreviations. In many cases, spelling is ignored (so long as the reader can recognize what word is being sent) and verbs are not conjugated. Those of us who prefer more traditional forms of written English fear for the sanctity of our precious language.

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I believe the cons of pits are obvious: someone’s going to get hurt, and it sucks when you’re standing too close and don’t want to get involved. Plus, at a lot of venues, the bouncers will try to stop you, or even go so far as to kick you out for being in the pit. And all because they don’t understand what’s really going on.

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What is it with you people?  You racists, that is.

Granted, I haven’t been around for all that long, but it really puts things in perspective when to think that in my lifetime, the federal government has had to force several states to observe Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.  We all saw the first African-American president get elected, and we all know people who voted either for or against him based solely on race.  We remember the racially charged dialogue surrounding Hurricane Katrina.

I’m white.  I was born and raised in the South, where I still live today, and where I’m raising my own son now.  As a child, it seemed that everything was about race.  The earliest friends I remember were two African-American girls who lived next door.  Then, there were the black kids at school.  The whole time, there was an odd tension, as if being cool with each other caused problems around us.  Things changed, of course, once we reached middle and high school.  Then, the issue became how we were segregating ourselves, though no one did anything about it.

At some point, race magically faded into the background.  We all just became kids.  There were a few here and there who didn’t like other people, but for the most part, we were all just kids with simple differences.  Then came college, and it seemed like everyone was blind.  When race did come up, the attitudes were strange to me.  It seemed that the whites I knew were overly sensitive, and the blacks didn’t seem concerned at all.  WTF?

Upon returning to the real world, after living in a dimension where the race part of race relations had all but faded into obscurity, I was shocked to see that the race issue had grown worse.

With the election of our most recent president, it seemed that our nation had grown to a surprising stage of maturity, but, instead, it seems we’ve simply reached a point in the racial history of our country where the race issue must be faced head on before we can move forward.

From the black side of the fence, you hear a lot about the days of slavery and a pretty good bit about disenfranchisement (remember when that word was popular on the news?).  From whites, you hear a lot about affirmative action, ethnic scholarships, and BET.  No, there aren’t any cultural differences between blacks and whites.  Blacks want to know why the drug war targets them.  Whites want to know why they’re worried about it.  Blacks want to know why there seem to be more liquor stores in their neighborhoods.  Whites don’t understand why minorities seem to drink more.  (I want to know why the liquor stores in those neighborhoods have better selections.)  Whites want white scholarships and White-Entertainment-Television.  Blacks don’t understand why it’s such a big deal.  Whites think that if blacks can say “nigga,” then whites should be able to say “nigger.”  Many African-Americans are waiting for you to say it so they can explain why you shouldn’t in no uncertain terms.

I recently received an email that claims to quote the words of Patrick Buchanan.  While I haven’t been able to connect the email directly to Buchanan, I have found similar rhetoric from the man’s blog.  The email states “We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?”  That sums up the email’s attitude toward blacks.  In it, Buchanan (or someone parading as Buchanan) argues that no one has done more for African Americans than white America.  I don’t think anyone can argue that a lot of good things have been done to try to right the wrongs of the past.  I also don’t think anyone can disagree that a lot of new wrongs have been perpetrated.

The email attempts to support its argument with statements like “churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated their time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes” and “untold trillions have been spent since the ‘ 60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs.”  Last time I saw a soup kitchen on the local news, I did see a lot of African Americans in line, but we have a large African American population here.  I also saw many white Americans in line with them.  I had a friend in college using food stamps — oh, friend isn’t a racially identifying word . . . she was white.  I’ve known whites in Section 8.  I’m a white who used Pell Grants and student loans to gain an education.  Adult education does not just serve one racial section of the population.  Sounds to me like someone wants to reinforce racial stereotypes.

THE EVIL OF STEREOTYPES: A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

Many African-Americans blame unemployment, poverty, violence, illiteracy, illegitmacy, crime, disease, and other major problems in the black community on white Americans.  Whites say, “Stop feeling sorry for yourselves.”  But hold on.  How many times do we see or hear the stereotype that blacks are lazy, addicted to drugs, illegitimate, illiterate, living off that government check, etc.?  Sure, we can argue that stereotypes usually start somewhere, like Mexicans living together in large numbers — there may be any number of reasons for those who actually do this.

Whatever the source may be of the stereotypes against African-Americans, these ideas are so ingrained in American culture that even blacks are beginning to expect it of themselves.  When I was teaching, I was shocked to hear some students tell me, in all seriousness, that they were going to drop out of school and collect a government check for the rest of their lives, maybe sell drugs to supplement their welfare income.  Why work?  And who can blame them?  Daddy ran out because that was what was expected of him.  According to everything else they’ve heard, only white people are supposed to know how to read (after reading the history books, that sounds awfully familiar).  Get it?

Once upon a time, stereotypes were considered a social evil.  Nothing more, nothing less — something that needed to be addressed though comedians were the only people with enough balls to tackle them.  Through the lack of intelligent conversation over them, they’ve formed an unfair set of expectations.  As a manager and a teacher, I’ve seen in action what psychologists will claim:  people will live up to your expectations of them.

Instead of asking, “Why are you people like this,” maybe the question should be “What has led many of you to be this way?”  That goes for both.  When African-Americans want to know what’s up with whites, the questions should be phrased the same way:  What has led you to this behavior or belief?

The days of pointing fingers need to come to an end if we ever want to see this through.