Deadhead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadhead

During this very important "Year of Mercy" (as ordained by His Holiness in Rome), Our Most Holy Father has actively encouraged us to speak out against a culture of death that seems to grow stronger with each passing year. Back in the 70s and 80s, the biggest hippie band in America was a rock band called "The Grateful Dead", with skull logos emblazoned on as many items as a wealthy "Trustafarian" without a full-time job could comfortably buy, in between supplemental cash sales from the drugs they used in their psychedelic world. If you've ever heard their sets from back in the day, you'd know why you needed a lot of artificial stimulus to listen to it: it's repetitive and redundant in the extreme, always with the exact same sound.

A lot of other rock bands suffer from an uncomfortable distance between studio tracks and performing live because most of their talent is coaxed out by the excellent producers and sound guys who stay up all night hitting lines of coke with the band to get one or two decent riffs, let alone an entire track. It's really hard work making great music. "The Dead" took the opposite tack, by relentlessly sticking to the same type of meandering playing, as soon as they felt sure their audiences' acid trips had kicked in. Oh, good! The kids have finally zoned out. Let's play whatever we want.

Don't get me wrong. I like their music, but the whole scene was like a cult to me, and that totally turned me off. I know tons of great songs and artists from the exact same time period, but listening to their sound wasn't exactly what this band sold. They wanted you to give up your life to follow them on the road, because what better way to make a living then off a generation of kids raised without parents who are vulnerable to strong outside influences? That's what. And that's exactly who my first real "Deadhead" friend Michelle was back then, and still is today, as I found out during our obligatory "let's meet for after-work drinks after reconnecting on Facebook" routine that marks our life in this digital age of social media.

After blowing her gasket as a publicist at someone elses' PR firm for the fashion industry in the city ("I got a freakin' picture in 'Vogue' fer crissakes! I deserve more money than her!!", jerking her finger at the other junior publicist sitting in their bigwig's office, as she told it to me in a regretful tone, after a drink or two), her rich and totally absent daddy sent her a lot of money to start a fancy business in Midtown, with cushy offices to match the pricey real estate with the obligatory trendy loft apartment to launch her successfully into the future. She dated a really well-known chef who was younger and he lovvved cooking for her at her place, but they just broke up. She was then talking to me about freezing her eggs. Oh. That sounds really expensive....still waiting on that check for me, by the way. 

Anyway, it was the exact same deal as when I met her late in our high school careers, alone and scared and almost bullied to death. Some of the "popular girls" started a rumor that she slept with one of their boyfriends, and after that, the cheerleaders turned on her ruthlessly in the open hallways and bathrooms of our huge New York public school. She wasn't safe anywhere and in her desperation, she turned away from the posers to seek out better friends among kids who had real power, like me and my group of diverse, smart kids from tough homes.

I took her into my social life, but my friends instantly hated her. She was (and is) a breezy, well-practiced con artist by necessity of her home environment, not that she took much from me but an ill-given $45 at the Jersey Shore for a bag of mushrooms bought at the WaWa grocery store on LBI, as an act of revenge for cutting her out of our senior trip to the beach. I shudder to think what that group of adult teens running New York homes with jobs, cars, keys, and futures would have done to her, but at the time, she wasn't thinking straight. 

She was almost gang-raped by a sports team from school, for being foolish enough to be lured over to their fake "house party" that quickly became a group of drunk guys looking to take advantage of the girl "everyone" hated, by blaming it on her bad reputation. I didn't feel that way about her at all, and I told her a few years back at our mini reunion. She never stole any of my boyfriends from me, and even if she did mess around with one or two of the boys in our crowd, it was all water way under the bridge. We don't see them socially anymore anyway. No harm, no foul.

But the redhead from high school that she pissed off then was deeply in love with her teenage boyfriend, and she wanted Michelle tortured for the rest of her school career. I took her under my protective wing, like I've done with many a foundling ousted from the comfort of an empty nest that wasn't ever really all there. I don't recall meeting her dad ever, except maybe for a ten-second brush-up that he would have instantly regretted by blowing out the front door of their family home almost immediately. Her mom was a seemingly ditzy housewife who planned and hosted expensive parties for their clients at their large suburban home. She'd airily invite us to eat the catered Jewish food that was leftover in a fridge full of plastic-wrapped trays in a fake sing-song voice, then leave just as quickly, too. To where? We never really knew.

And that's what all of us had back then: a bunch of empty homes without parents. Michelle had all the time, money, clothes, booze, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll she could fit into her busy schedule, but no real family. She had a car filled with gas and nowhere to go, and no one to see. It was heart-breaking to see the way her parents cruelly cast her off like an unwanted pet. She floundered like any troubled kid her age would, and then one year she discovered "The Grateful Dead", and she was instantly hooked. Hippies are savvier than they look, and staying on the road to see expensive concerts is a hard gig to manage, even for spoiled rich kids from decent families. Who'd pay for their concert tickets when the money ran out? She came back with connections to a new group of kids she met on tour from Hastings-on-the-Hudson, who were just as bored and rich as she was.

She tried to talk me into going on the road with her one summer while we were on break from college, which was met in my mother's kitchen with a loud derisive snort that my middle bro liked so much, he quickly pulled up a stool to watch the early fireworks. This should be good! Michelle's plan was to sell the multi-colored yarn bracelets we'd make. I had one in my pocket to show as a sample. My mom was completely unimpressed. It wasn't a great plan, but I'd seen Michelle pull money from some of the dirtiest, lowest-rent pockets around. She could pull it off. Yeah, but...can you? Good point! My mom reminded me that I earned the money I put in my pocket during semesters, and that was indeed true. "You need a job!", as was always the case for the desperate, disordered, and chronically needy surrounding me. Who else will pay for your expenses at school, if you don't? It was suddenly quiet in our large suburban kitchen that'd been an expensive renovation for my proud parents of years past.

I spent a horribly dull summer working at a "Herman's World of Sporting Goods" store at the old Nanuet Mall, waiting for my friend to come back from tour, and fitting in about as good as a shiny new apple among the depressing brightly-colored golf clothes for the rich white men away on vacations who did fit it into neatly assigned roles. She came back early, running out of gas, with an enthusiasm for the old hippie band that was met with a much cooler reception here with her home crowd of well-versed natives with a taste for genuine Americana, like jazz and blues music. Why go for some derivative version when you can hear the real thing? It was the same thing at college: my boyfriend was housemates with a group of similarly rich Jewish kids from Long Island, who were also very strict in their faith. They hated me, too, because I didn't fit into their clichéd world of a rigidly defined counterculture that they had borrowed from an older generation almost entirely, with the same Patchouli-scented clothes and wild hairstyles.

What was the point of rehashing it, by stealing it from other people? Dying in a civil rights march back then was not fun, and these lazy rich kids knew nothing about that. I finally went to see a show with my college boyfriend in the city over a summer break, and I was just as unimpressed as I was by their rote memorization of playlists at school, from old tapes passed around since the '70s. Ehhh...I shrugged my shoulders as we talked on the busy streets outside of Madison Square Garden. They sounded exactly like every mixed tape I'd been forced to listen to at his college house in Oneonta. No surprises here! He immediately defended this key facet of his religion to me, shaken in his faith as he was with me. We were in the middle of a city thrumming with life all around us. Who had time for those old geezers and their lame rock? It was played out! It all sounded the same.

He stammered, citing such magical experiences as a certain "California Dreaming" type of fantasy he'd heard on many a mixed tape gone by, with mystical shows on sparkling west coast oceans he'd never actually been to, explaining that the guys needed to "vibe off " the venue's locale in the same way their fans needed to be stoned out of their minds to be sold on a cult of almost-dead musicians and their skeleton-branded gear. They must've been "bummed out" by the crowd, man! New York City isn't their scene...blah blah blah blah blah. I didn't get it then, and I don't get popular cults now, except that a bunch of insanely devoted kids spent all their money and time following this band, with nothing of note to show for it except maybe an early death by drug overdose, or dying from heart failure brought on by years of heavy substance abuse, just like the overweight singer from the band they loved now playing in the real land of the dead, with a similar name as some famous ice cream flavor. Forever and ever, indeed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/opinion/a-culture-of-death-not-life.html?_r=0

Columbine

Around the world and on my shelf: people in books and photographs.

I lived in Littleton, Colorado during the Columbine Massacres, and even worse than the media orgy that followed, was the timing of my very New York mothers' visit out west. Uh oh... she and I were eating at a local restaurant, when she noticed in horror that she was wearing a dark raincoat eerily similar to the teenage killers "Trenchcoat Mafia" look (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Harris_and_Dylan_Klebold). 

It was an unfortunate synergy to the events of the day, not least of which was the almost ecstatic release of pent-up psychological energy loosened upon the area, a public hysteria that stood out sharply to the mostly sullen reticence of the prairie people I met native to the land, and therein lies the problem: affluent white people are often really fucked up. Rich white kids terrified me in the Ivy Leagues and Ivory Towers of school and work, a feeling that did not abate with exposure to more of them existing in isolated pockets around America. Needless, my mom told me I should leave Colorado and move back home, which she reminded me about almost every time we talked on the phone, and we both agreed: "There's something wrong with the people out there." She was right. We saw it in the people around us.

 In Colorado, there are two types of humans: whites and Mexicans. Some adopted Asian orphans are thrown in for diversity''s sake, but when I lived there, being from New York was considered so exotic, my fellow New Yorkers traded in their actual personas for an easier "Seinfeld" version of themselves to show locals over their truer colors, because native Coloradans just didn't understand them. There wasn't enough inside of them for us talk to, which is horrible if you are indeed the parent of a fucked up white kid. Who talks? Exactly. No one does. 

As the story unfolded, supposed new "details" emerged, none of which were particularly new or interesting to me: the killers had schemed and plotted their violent psychotic episodes right underneath their parent's noses, because the mom and dad were too busy with their petty careers to learn more about them. Teenage years are the prime check-out time for the dysfunctional parents who spawned their little messes, because high school age adolescents need less time and care, which is exactly what they got from their parents: nothing. Sure, both boys had enough money from their parents to stockpile a lot of weapons (same as the fucked up rich kid in Cali, with a plush movie-producing dad to go along with his intimate knowledge of video and youtube), and they lived in houses so big, there were plenty of spots to hide anything they wanted to, which is exactly what they did. Expertly.

Not teach, not learn, not grow, not function, and ultimately, not live. Just die. It was the same "here we go again" feeling I had early this morning on a rare coffee run to the corner because I was out of milk. The t.v. was on in the convenient store, showcasing fat white lady after fat white lady, crying about the cycles of dementia and abuse they remain trapped in (redundant to me already at this age), because their bodies tell me everything I know to be true about them with one quick glance, without me ever having to hear it from someone like them again: they're sick, and so are their kids. Again. 

What's next? First: drop the gun, asshole. Speak up about that sick kid in your class, or at your job, or sitting next to you pretending to work at a public library's computer so he can stalk you while smelling badly, openly and without censure from people who see me daily, in my own community. Tell someone, tell anyone, and keep on telling the truth about that sick motherfucker sitting next to you every single day, until someone around you does something about it. Speak up!

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/mass-shootings-increasing-harvard-research

You're almost home, human. Join me: http://bit.ly/1j5tc6Y

Nightswimming

In art school, real fun was hard to come by. Chills were plentiful, along with fear, hope, and crippling doubt. Combined with your average rich kids' inability to sleep at night without a safety net of cushy money and psychiatrist-prescribed pharmaceuticals, it led to some insane freak-outs, as we dared each other to the dizzying heights that are brought on by frustration and rabid competition. They'd show up to classes exhausted, with shaved heads, and really dark, unhealthy circles under their eyes, with the requisite heavy-lidded baggage. I've never met a more dangerously fucked up group of people in my life. 

When Littleton, Colorado erupted into murder and suicide from the particular kind of violence that is a rich kids' ennui, I wasn't all that surprised. I'd be openly talking about the toxic combo of money and madness for years, to anyone who cared enough to listen. That my theories about white men with money congealed in reality, into my very worst fears about life, actually scared me to death.

It was into this mix that someone in our group mentioned an empty rock quarry as a potential swimming hole. I was desperate for cool water, as an East Coaster. Summertime just ain't right without the beach and swimming to me. I jumped at the chance. We snuck onto the grounds underneath a chain link fence, and past the "No Swimming!" signs, giving it the right amount of transgression for rebellious youth. Of course, my crazy Yankee housemate, with his backwoods working-class attitude and lust for rampantly unchecked athleticism, spurred us on to higher and higher jumps. It was thrilling and really fucking scary (Kudos, Riddell). I mastered cliffhanging from across the quarry, my toes gripping onto a narrow rocky ledge, but the other side of the pond was even worse because it was much, much higher than it seemed.

If you've never free-falled into 30-40 feet of cold murky water that hides its' depth, I can't really explain to you. I asked my friend questions about it while in the water, trying to steel my nerves for the jump. We listened to him talk about the sharp edges of rusty metal that lay on the bottom of the small lake, since it'd been a teenage fad to dump your car there and claim it as a total loss from theft on your insurance, back in rural 1970s Rhode Island. Yeah, okay. That's it, huh?

I climbed up the rocky ridge to the other side, and stood there for a little while, my crazy friend yelling at me encouragingly from the other side of the pond, taking his umpteenth leap into the depths below, from even smaller and more dangerous footholds. Shit. I have to do it. I'm no chickenshit, dude. I did it, and instantly regretted it. I saw sharp rocks quickly rising up to greet me, and thought (really thought) I'd just made the worst mistake of my life. I could hear Riddell yelling that I didn't jump far out enough to totally escape danger ("Oh, no! She didn't jump far enough out!!"), and then I gasped, hitting the water at an odd angle that smacked me in the ribs hard. I could tell he was as scared as I was, and for the first time in my life, I thought I might drown. The fall took all the wind out of my lungs. I screamed underwater, water rushing into my mouth that I had no choice but to gulp down.

I did drown a little bit, but years of swimming lessons really paid off. I bobbed up to the surface, letting out the remaining air in my lungs by yelling out from the pain of my fall. There was silence when I broke through the water. My friends had been bracing for a possible rescue dive. My housemate laughed right after I surfaced. I quickly explained to my friends in the water that I hurt myself by slamming down hard, and that's why I surfaced screaming. "Oh, shit....", as the ones with less experience drifted away from me in the water. I treaded water lightly by myself for awhile, watching other kids take jumps. I was fucking done for the day, man. It was one of those rare brush ups with mortality that I've had over the years that never really leave you.

But back up on the safety of the warm rocks, laying out and drying in the sun, we were happier than we'd been in awhile. So much so, we convinced each other to ride out there on a stifling warm summer night, a night so muggy, it begged for relief. I was a lot safer than my previous trip out there, because sharp rocks don't exactly look nicer under scant parking lot spotlights, but we were buoyed up by our nighttime adventure. Some of us descended into madness and never came back from its' gripping depths, like Greg and his sometime-love Crystal, with the long dark hair. He hugged her briefly on the rocks, in a rare warm embrace of the true boyfriend/girlfriend type, before she wriggled out of his grasp to escape to safer waters like the rippling blackness below.

He was routinely having nightmares, which he tried to capture on film in grainy black and white (and he did get it, as one student duly noted during a crit), the hauntings of madness combined with searing brilliance, hard work, and born-to-it-ness. He looked at me after she left his arms, trying to regroup from the sting of her leaving by shaking out his tight curls, opening his eyes really wide and saying to me shakily, "I've never felt this clean, you know. This water...." he trailed off, shivering in the night, ...."it just makes me feel so clean, you know? I've never felt this clean in my life!" I didn't understand, because quarries aren't exactly filled with pristine spring water, especially those right outside of a major urban area, so I quizzed him further, but to no avail. He repeated it, and I was baffled by it again.

On the ride home, we fell silent as a group, in our caravan of cheap, college-kid cars, watching the moon through open windows, a stark difference to the chatty excitement of our semi-drunk and raucous ride out there, because there ain't nothing' like the feeling of somnolence that comes over your limbs after a long day (or night) of swimming, like those times when your parents drove you back from a beach vacation during summer's off. I remember Greg mentioned the magical way that the moonlight had shimmered on our wet skin like diamonds, and the feeling that anything could happen (which it did, because we summoned it up out of the water for our creation), and that this was the one final, brief respite of summer session before we bore the full, crushing weight of the highest Ivy heights during a real semester, ill-prepared as we were with our small, hard, working class lives.

It was a lot to consider, you know? Take the time out this summer during your vacation to charge your batteries. You don't want the burn-out of an empty and used old battery that's about to be discarded by your respective industries, because when you let someone (or something ) use you like that, you don't ever get it back. And they just throw you away to get another one to feed off of creatively. You are their business; the beating, breathing heart of it. Remember that, through all the games and petty roles being played out in front of you daily, in some generic overly air conditioned office environment. Be unique. Be you. And persevere.