20 f***ing years...

Tonight the Pittsburgh Pirates clinched their twentieth consecutive losing season in a perfectly fitting fashion, getting no-hit by HOMER BAILEY of the Cincinnati Reds. But I don't want to write about that. In fact, I don't want to think about that. If I could, I would probably employ some crazy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type shit and erase the last twenty major league baseball seasons from my memory forever. Actually, make that the last twenty-three because if it weren't for those magical seasons in the early nineties when I was just discovering my love for the sport and the team at the tender and impressionable young age of, like, six or eight or six through eight, I figure I would have never gotten into this mess in the first place and I would have taken my mom's advice and gotten the "prettier" Cleveland Indians hat at Toys 'R Us that time and I would have let my grandma defect to the Florida Marlins with Jim Leyland and Bobby Bo and I wouldn't be sitting here tonight eulogizing a twentieth season that hurts so much worse than any that came before it. And I know the point of that movie is supposed to be that it's better to have loved and lost and blah blah blah but right now I'd zap all that mess right out of my brain and never think about Chad Hermansen or J.J. Davis or Kris Benson or Matt Morris or Derek Bell or Aki Iwamura or Jeff Clement ever again.

What in the hell made me so loyal anyway? What is wrong with me? With us. I know I'm not the only person going through this tonight, this month, this season, this... score (Dammit. Now even time is messing with us). What is my malfunction? What about my particular genetic make-up makes me pre-disposed to subject myself to repeated beatings in the name of loyalty? I'm not even sure if it is loyalty. There's never been, like, a conscious decision or a point where I've had to convince myself to stick it out. It's not a choice. If it were, I'd be the one to blame. (And I'd have jumped ship a long time ago. I'm not that crazy.) But it isn't. I can't even play as another team in video games. I've tried. The Pittsburgh Pirates are, for some reason, ingrained into my unconscious so deeply that voluntary lobotomy may be my only hope.

So what say you, Dr. Mierzwiak? Still taking appointments?

I'll see you on the other side of the curtain...

It's been eleven years since the last time the first song on a CD has made me feel like this. Eleven years. Think about that for a second. I was sixteen. I skipped school after petitioning for permission from my mother and drove my '86 Chevy Celebrity to Best Buy to purchase what was the first Weezer album since 1997.  I returned to the Celeb, tore the plastic off of my purchase, and inserted the disc into the most meaningful birthday gift I've ever received, and sat and listened. Then "Don't Let Go" blasted through it with every decibel of force that my GM factory speakers could muster, and I felt like I felt today, eleven years later. (And don't ever talk shit to me on the Green Album.)

That whole scenario is dated.  I was sixteen. Now I'm twenty-seven. I bought a CD. Now that process is almost archaic. I bought a Weezer album. (And, let's face it: even though I'll defend the Green Album till I die there's no denying that their relevance really died with the nineties, and even the Green Album that I have such a strong connection to was simply a reflection and reminiscence of simpler times gone by.) Hell, even Best Buy doesn't seem to have weathered the stormy times since then. 

Now, eleven years later, I repeated the process and generated results that were---somewhat shockingly---incredibly similar. I let my class out early (I didn't need permission) and drove my 2001 Chevy Impala to Best Buy to purchase the first Eve 6 album since 2003. I returned to my Impala, tore the plastic off my purchase, and inserted the disc into the GM factory CD-player (with cassette deck) that's in my car's dash, and sat and listened. "Curtain" blasted through it with every decibel of force that my (much-improved) GM factory speakers could muster, and I felt like I felt on May 15, 2001, eleven years earlier.

While parts of this process were contrived in order to mirror its predecessor (I can't remember the last time I bought a CD, and it's been even longer since I've bought one at Best Buy, so long that I struggled with a bit of a learning curve), the part that matters was absolutely genuine. The part that matters is the ability and opportunity to experience a level of sheer feeling through music. I can't remember exactly what I thought of "Don't Let Go" the first time I heard it on that day in 2001. What I do remember is leaving that CD in my car for almost six months after that without changing even for a day to anything else and sitting in my room and listening to the CD on repeat for the entire day when I should have been toiling away as a sophomore in high school. While I can't be sure of the specifics (i.e. what I made of the lyrics, what crescendos and choruses and guitar riffs really moved me) I know that I felt more that day. Time slowed down. Moments became memories.

Today, similarly, time slowed down and I was opened up to a depth of feeling and of life that can best be described as transcendent.

Today, though, maybe thanks to the eleven extra years of experience and... ahem... "wisdom" that I've accrued, that state of heightened sensitivity led me on a sort of existential journey through that song and myself (I have a forty-five minute drive to and from work).

First, here's the song. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZKnYDxroZ8w]

This song seems an excellent way to begin an album that marks what will hopefully be a triumphant return to form after a prolonged absence in which the band broke up, tried to start up other things, dealt with personal stuff that guys in bands always have to deal with (here, specifically, it seems Max is dealing with an alcohol dependency so often associated with the "rock 'n roll" lifestyle), and then finally got back together and wound up almost right back where they started from. So far it's my favorite on the album. I've listened to it probably thirty or more times today, and I attribute that mostly to the chorus:

I tried to forgive you
For the shit you put me through
But it's just the hardest thing to do
So I guess it's goodbye brother, goodbye Rock 'n Roll
Guess it's goodbye to the only life I know
It's a shame you couldn't just say you were hurting
I will see you on the other side of the curtain

Here, where Max addresses this "Rock 'n Roll" that he's ironically saying goodbye to on the initial track of his first album in nine years, I get it. That's the feeling that I've been meditating on since hearing this the first time today, and it's one I've thought about a lot before. See, he's got this relationship that is abusive in that it leads him to do things that are really bad for him and it makes it incredibly difficult to avoid temptations that lead down dangerous paths and it inevitably leads to more abuse because it makes him vulnerable and there's bound to be bad reviews and people saying you should have stayed away and part of him probably wishes he would have stayed away but there's this... something that keeps him at it.

Why would someone stay in an abusive relationship with his profession even when he knows it's in his best interest to leave it behind?
Why do people try so hard to hold on to something that they know is past?
Why would someone stay in a job they enjoy but barely pays the bills instead of trading it in for a boring, mindless one that pays more than enough to pay the bills and buy a new car and live comfortably and never have to worry about making ends meet again?

What is that something that keeps them at it?

Passion.

It's a manifestation of love and it can't be controlled, and even if it makes you hate it and wish that it would just slough off of your soul and fade away like dead skin into the wind you know, deep down, that you're lucky to have it and feel it and experience it. And if you've managed to make it this far and you're still chasing it and you haven't yet managed to murder it despite your desperate attempts and your sleepless nights and the tears you've cried trying to choke it out, consider yourself lucky. There are struggles ahead, to be sure. The reviews won't all be positive. But passion isn't something that can be resurrected. Once it's dead there's no going back. So if it's still there, either on the surface or suffocating below some prescribed alter-ego, take heed. Nurture it. Follow it through the ups and downs and the dull days and sleepless, stormy nights. Chase it. Keep it in sight, even when you can't run or walk or even stand. It's a universal human emotion, and these are rare in a day and age when all the overarching truths have fallen away and given rise to questions without answers.

And most importantly, I'll see you on the other side of the curtain.

The dream of the nineties is alive in Portland...

What's with this strategy by giant corporations to announce a change in services that will make them more money by further screwing their customers only to retract it a few days or weeks later? I cannot believe that these corporations (whose successes would seem to suggest that they are deftly managed) imagine that these changes will be accepted by the consumers who will be adversely affected without complaint. I also cannot believe that any imaginable amount of threats that would eventually actually lead to loss of business would have any measurable effect on these corporations, as they are large enough to absorb almost any negative publicity. So, if it's unlikely that the management teams for these corporations (greedy as they may be) are dumb enough to think that consumers of their products will blindly accept changes which adversely affect their wallets, and it's also unlikely that the impending changes were abandoned because of a legitimate fear of the consumer's boycotting power, then there must be another reason for these apparent missteps by two of our country's largest and richest corporations. 

I've been thinking about this a lot since the recent news of the proposed then abandoned "convenience charge" that Verizon supposedly wished to impose on its customers who chose to pay their bill online or by telephone. Now, I won't get into the ridiculousness of a company as large as Verizon needing to charge a "convenience fee" for paying bills online to stay afloat (especially when every other company under the sun is practically forcing online billing on its customers to cut back on mailing costs), as I'm sure that point has been obvious to everyone familiar with the scenario. What strikes me more about both the Verizon convenience charge and Bank of America debit card fee situations is a little further below the surface. I'm not usually much of a conspiracy theorist (though I do think they're fun to think about), but the more I think about these situations, the more I start to feel like a Jeff Goldblum character (pre-Law and Order).  

I think Verizon and Bank of America, for their ultimate, long-term advantage,  intentionally drew the ire of their customers so they could instill false senses of hope and power in the American consumer. 

Think about it. I'll use the analogy of a toddler who is up past his bedtime. He's clearly tired. His eyelids are tiny anvils. Most likely he's stationary after having exhausted his second, and maybe third, winds. He's staying awake for one reason: his mother told him to go to sleep. We Americans are rebellious and independent from the start. We want things our own way, and we want to feel like we have an influence over our lives, from the smallest decisions to the biggest. It's a nice feeling to be empowered. The little boy is just discovering his independence. He doesn't have to go to bed just because his mother told him to. He has the right and ability to defy. We all appreciate that right and ability. It's one of the biggest pieces of the "American Spirit." Each year, millions of Americans celebrate Independence Day by lying to salesmen and proceeding to break minor laws about firework control repeatedly in back yards, streets, and parks around the country. 

Eventually though, after weeks or years of sharpening his skills of defiance, the boy's mother stops forcing the issue, or the rebellion loses its fun, and the boy goes to bed at a reasonable hour without prodding. He's given the false sense that he's won the war and set his own bed time, but the fact is that it's a product of a daily conditioning that's been going on since he was born. We sleep at night, and wake up in the morning to go to school or work or whatever else we do. The same boy that threw a fit at age eight when his mother suggested he sleep when he was tired will be begging for a bed on a Saturday morning with he's sixteen. But it will be on his terms (or so he'll think). 

That's what scares me with these recent situations with Bank of America and Verizon. It's a lot easier to accept potentially negative consequences when you think you've got the power to change them or that it was your power that created them. Sure, I'm glad to not have to pay a convenience fee every time I pay my phone bill online for the time being, but I'm also extremely concerned about what exactly I'm being set up and conditioned for. 

Hey, Jude

I'm currently supposed to be finishing a paper about Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, which I recently read for the first time. I fell in love with it. I can say without a doubt that it's my favorite novel I've ever read that was written before 1900. It's so full of things that I can relate to, and things that I think the universal male can relate to, and things that I think the universal person can relate to. That's when you know you've got something special: when all sorts of different people can relate to it and get something meaningful out of it. That's going into what Hardy calls something "truer than truth."

A quote that is particularly striking me this evening, and one that I'd like to meditate on a little bit, is spoken by the title character as he faces some characters he's known in the past who confront him about his failed ambitions:

It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man---that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times---whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays---I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes.

I think one of the reasons I liked this novel so much was because of quotes like these, and the entire predicament of the title character. He's a man stuck between two worlds, born into one, and trying desperately to force his way into the other. Though, in the end, he fails, his ambition is admirable, and he is somehow, for the most part, able to maintain a shred of hope to nearly the very last, finally becoming jaded just before his sad and premature death. This hope is something I hope to also maintain through to the last, and while my results will hopefully be less tragic than Jude's, I know that these failed ambitions are a very real part of life.

Where Jude and I grow apart in our worldview, and where I am perhaps most disappointed in him as a character, is in the paragraph that follows the above quote:

However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses---affections---vices perhaps they should be called---were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies.

While I agree that it seems vices are much more difficult to overcome for those of the lower economic classes, I simply cannot, or rather, I will not, accept that Jude's ambitions failed on account of his poverty rather than his will. Indeed he had more will than many, and likely more will than many more financially fortunate men who in fact achieved the goals he originally set for himself, but his continual acquiescence to vice is ultimately what does him in. Sure, we all have our vices. I am no different. But we must, at some point, learn to resist them at critical junctures where our opportunities are made available. Perhaps this difference of opinion is a product of the different times in which our lives our set----the United States in 2010 is certainly much different from Victorian England----but I, perhaps naively, choose to believe that a person of any socioeconomic standing can achieve his ambitions if his will is strong enough both to continue pursuing the goal, and to withstand the temptation of vices (at least when it is most necessary) that would serve to derail him, at least in the time and place that I am so fortunate to be living in.

Perhaps I have not yet lived enough.

But I  wish to maintain this hopefulness, be it naivety, stupidity, or gross optimism, so that I can continue to believe in the dreams on which I and my contemporaries have been raised. Should that hope, that dream, that belief system that is so instilled in children of the working class by parents who hope their progeny will have it better, fade away and cease to exist, I, like Jude, will fall into irrevocable obscurity, and I should think that I would meet an end lacking none of the epic tragedy so described in his final pages. 

Unbelievable... except... not at all.

So I'm racking my brain trying to decide in which direction to move in the future with my studies---in particular because I'd like to start writing papers from that scope as soon as possible and I've got one due in a few weeks---and I start to think about things I would like to study and write about. I recently watched Scotland, PA for my Shakespeare in film class and it really resonated  with me because it's this cool, working-class retelling of Macbeth that just so happens to be set in the 70s which, so far as I can tell, looked like an awesome time to be alive. My experience with this movie reminded me of a similar experience I had while reading an excerpt from Alfred Lubrano's book Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams. In this excerpt, Lubrano described how he grew up in a working-class family in New York, and how that has affected him in his life as an academic today. It was the first thing I'd read discussing the working-class in academia, and it really fired me up.

So I'm thinking about what these two things had in common and I'm left with this: the working-class. The class which I'm proud to be a part of and that consists of all the people with whom I grew up with and most of the people that I've become close friends with and the people who I want to stay in touch with regardless of how much we have in common because there's one unspoken and unseen bond that is just there and always will be.

I want to study and write about the working-class in literature.

So I started to do a little research to see where this kind of study was going on so I could read some stuff to get my feet wet, and guess what the first freaking page that pops up is? This. Yup. Fucking YSU. Unbelievable... except... not at all.

So I do a little more research and find this. Yup. Pittsburgh. Not even a little surprised. Not sure why this never occurred to me in all my months/years of soul-searching, but it's been a pretty wild trip and I wouldn't trade it.

Who says we're not all products of our environment? Thank god for that.

Here goes nothin'.

A Bridge to Nowhere...

...and you're gettin' there fast.

Recently I've been thinking about the following belief that I hear being passed around by people whose minor screw-ups have left them feeling down, or who have given in to a rekindled old flame, or who made good on a broken promise, or whatever: that everyone deserves a second chance. While I definitely see where this kind of thinking comes from, and I cannot refute the belief that, at times, second chances can be warranted and make all the difference, I have to ultimately disagree. Not everyone deserves a second chance. In fact, I think that most people don't deserve a second chance, and it's a mistake to just hand them out for free.

Second chances, like everything else in this life, should be earned.

Sure, sometimes people screw up and it's either a mistake or the product of some kind of unalterable unfortunate circumstance that causes that person to act outside of his or her normal range of behavior. Even in this case, the mistake should not be overlooked. If someone wrongs you, they're certainly capable of doing it again. Suppose that same circumstance arises again. Will that person a.) learn from his or her mistake, correct it, and respond accordingly, or b.) allow that unfortunate circumstance to again dictate a harmful response or action? How the person responds to this criteria should dictate whether or not the second chance be granted.

I know that life is a long time, and nobody's perfect, but just as those good seeds who work hard to correct mistakes and improve themselves day-to-day who deserve every opportunity to succeed and atone past sins, there are those who will simply take advantage of each opportunity that is presented unearned, who do not deserve these second chances.

"I suppose it is possible...

...to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age." --Ernest Hemingway

I'm reading For Whom the Bell Tolls for the first time, and it's reminding me of why Hemingway is my favorite author to read. Chapter Thirteen has one of the best descriptions of love that I've ever read paired with a meditation on quality of life and trying to get the same out of seventy hours that you'd hope to get out of seventy years. That's some good stuff, and it's serving as my motivation for the day.

Why not try to get seventy years' worth of life out of every seventy hours? It might be tough to keep this pace up for long, but I think it would be admirable to try. I've always been of the opinion that really living life is about experiencing everything it has to offer, the ups and the downs, and this fits right in with that. Since we never know how long we've got, we might as well try our best to cram as many of those experiences into as short a time as possible. So what if we age quicker because of it. I know I wouldn't care much to die a few years earlier at the expense of having lived a life full to the brim with experience. Hell, I think I'd trade ten years of floating along for one year chock full of everything I wanted to do.

The cliche that comes to mind from my days as an athlete is "leave it all on the field," which basically translates into holding nothing back and giving it everything you've got while you've go the chance to give it. And so, with Hemingway's Robert Jordan as my inspiration, I've decided to try my best to live intensely in every way possible. Not that I've necessarily been holding back on any of my emotions or feelings, as I've actually made great strides recently in embracing these things, but I think there are times when I, like most people I know, get a little content and relaxed and take some time---days, hours, minutes, whatever---for granted.

So, here's to taking a more active role in experience-making and the continued embrace of each and every opportunity for life.