Paths of Least Resistance

August 29, 2008. It is now settled that the Republican presidential ticket will be John McCain and Sarah Palin, and the Democratic contenders will be Barack Obama and Joe Biden. CNN and every other news channel have dozens of analysts analyzing this new scenario. For the next two months, regular everyday people will be discussing the upcoming November election, me included. We will be strong with our opinions, resolute with our convictions, and will show deep concern for what will happen, what might happen, and, God forbid, hopefully never happens, if either McCain or Obama wins.

When I was in high school, I was afraid that if Ronald Reagan became president, that the world would end in a nuclear winter. He did, and it didn’t. Years later, when I was an intern at an oil company and made $11.25 an hour during Reagan’s second term, I had forgotten that I was afraid that Ronald Reagan would end the world.

During the Internet boom years, I joined the public in morally being ashamed of what Bill Clinton did. When the Internet boom died, I joined the public in missing his economic growth policies.

Next January, we will have a new president. Will it change my life significantly? Unless he blows up the world, probably not.

Will it make me change jobs, or alter my career decisions? If the past is an indication of the future, probably not.

Will it change the food that I eat, or the clothes that I wear, or the places that I visit?

Will it change the way that I choose my healthcare provider, my bank, my church, my movie theater, my bookstore, my fast food restaurant, my concert, my sports stadium?

Will it make me go to my local library on a regular basis? Will it make me give to charity less, or more?

Will it make me stop to write, seal, and mail one letter of protest or support? Will it make me stop to make a political phone call? Will it make me sacrifice a month of my life to fight for what I deem a worthy cause? Will it make me sacrifice a week? A day? An hour?

Will I spend more time worrying about the election than I will doing the laundry, or driving to appointments, or shopping for DVD movies, or surfing through Digg.com?

Will whatever happens two months from now make me happier than I already am, or sadder than I already am?

For years I’ve known about Tibet’s struggle to become an independent nation from China, and China’s reported oppression and suppression of Tibet. For years, I watched news reports and documentaries that showed physical, cultural and economic atrocities against the Tibetan people. Less than a week ago, I was glued to the TV set watching the Beijing Olympics. Less than a week later, I don’t even think about the Beijing Olympics.

I will debate you tooth and nail for what I believe at this moment. Unless there’s laundry to do, or I’m driving to an important appointment.

Jazz, Part 3

Whenever I want to take an unencumbered breath, I think about jazz.

One of my friends is very much into the music scene, and maintains his own industrial music web site with a group of friends. I asked him recently if he knew of a web site that provides a comprehensive amount of information about the local jazz scene in the Los Angeles area. He responded with, “You know what it is about jazz? There’s so MUCH of it that it’s difficult to organize and categorize, even define.”

I have spent at least a hundred hours, surfing the Web before going to sleep, trying to find a decent L.A. jazz web site, one that has a schedule of upcoming shows, as well as mentioning what kind of jazz will be played. One doesn’t exist.

I have spent another hundred hours surfing through my favorite jazz musicians’ web sites, hoping to find their show schedules, as well as the musicians that they will be playing with that night. Nine out of ten times, I am unsuccessful.

I have never been to a jazz performance that was sold out.

My favorite jazz is hard bop, music from the fifties and sixties, played by a quartet (sax, bass, drums, piano). The best performance I’ve ever seen was given by four musicians (Dale Fielder, Greg Gordon, O.C. Davis and a bassist whose name I have since forgotten) who, until that night, have never played before as a group. Until that night, I have never heard of any of them before—I just took a chance at going, not expecting anything. Neither the group nor the individual players have an album that can be bought on Amazon.com. Their performance of that night was never recorded. None of them are mentioned in the tabloids.

This is my experience with jazz, and I hope it will never change. I hope to continually stumble onto brilliance, instead of having it spoon-fed to me through corporate channels. I hope the jazz that I like never becomes so popular that I have to wait in line, that I have to dress a certain way, that I have to plan my whole day around one event. I hope the jazz that I like will forever be slightly elusive.

On a different note, the Burning Man, which is an event that describes itself as based on radical self-expression, radical self-reliance, art and participation, is going on right now in the Nevada desert. They have a web site. They have a theme for the event. They have a Mission Statement, First Timer’s Guide, complete schedule and directions, a Resource Guide, art galleries, updated news bulletins and a Global Regional Network directory.

If I’m lucky, on any given night I will stumble upon four jazz musicians playing to a half-empty audience, making shit up as they go along.

The Ghost of Me

Although I've dreamt of nightmares
Hover deep and frighten me,
And though they keep the wonder,
Always hoping not to see,
I'll close a pair of living eyes
And stay them tight, til the sun has come--
For nights are used to hauntings
Of people never done.

I vaguely know the smell of them,
But deep, to thoughts, they sink.
And memory betrays the young,
When at night it makes them think
Of ghouls and goblins, all the sorts,
And truer things, that do live, and breathe,
And walk among the living,
And wake only when they die.

But I sometimes know this feeling
From the other side -- the sight
Of a child who's now lying
Near the place where I died of fright.
I can see him cower, look away
From the windowpane, where stares a face
That's sadder than terrifying,
Who, before, feared children nights.

And I'll stand outside, still watching,
And wait for him to die
As he lets them go, his childhood fears,
When he starts to fear true life,
And endure the empty darkest nights
That soon, will seem just the loss of light.

For soon, the boy must simply see
That a man's the ghost of me.



I wrote the above poem years and years ago, when I was a young adult. If I remember correctly, it was during a time when I was about to begin a job that I didn't really care about, and I was doing it simply because I needed a job to save face and to end the scrutiny of my peers and my parents for not having a job.

I quit that job after four days. One of my friends had told me to stick it out with the job for 6 months, then I can decide if I should quit. I'd told him that if I'd stayed with that job for 6 months, I'd have died of a heart attack or some kind of cancer. A day after I quit, I wound up working freelance for a design company, and I've been freelancing ever since.

Years and years later, I look at this poem and am beginning to understand it. I think what I was trying to say back then was, It seems the difference between children and adults is that adults have accepted the fact that they will never be able to fulfill their dreams or finish a really cool project, because they're mired in the day-to-day activities of being an "adult". As an adult, there is no more listening to your inner self because your job, external responsibilities, and social circles are too loud and overwhelming to allow you to do that. As an adult, you become a ghost, a shell, of what you used to be, which was a free-thinking, free-moving, free-breathing child.

There's an old Twilight Zone episode, where a young, happy woman, one day while riding on a horse, is chased by a screaming, bitter old woman also riding a horse. It turns out the old woman is the young woman's older self, warning the young woman that if she doesn't follow her heart, she will ultimately become a bitter, old woman. Maybe that's where I got the idea for the poem.


This is what made me think of all this today:

Breaking Free from Social Programming

The Joke

There is a scene in the movie The Dark Knight where, in the middle of a fundraising party, Bruce Wayne goes outside by himself and tosses the champagne from his glass over the side of the building. Later in the same scene, the Joker crashes the party and also tosses the champagne before drinking from his own empty glass. It seems both men do not drink while at work.

Also in the movie, Police Commissioner Loeb is poisoned while having a drink from a liquor bottle stashed away in his office desk drawer. Seconds later, Judge Surrillo is blown up in front of her home as she sits inside her Mercedes Benz. Using the luxury car’s large emblem on the steering wheel as the background, the camera shows Judge Surrillo taking out a piece of paper from an envelope and reading the word “up” before her car explodes.

Bruce Wayne’s most effective use of his Lamborghini is to intercept a truck that's about to ram another vehicle, using his sports car as a shield and destroying it in the process.

Somewhere out there, not in the movie world, a man is working eighty hour weeks so that he can save up for a Lamborghini. A woman is losing weight and making friends with people she doesn’t really care about so that she can be invited to parties to shmooze with the rich and popular. A group of people is spending an hour discussing champagne.

There is a gleeful absurdity with Heath Ledger’s character that, as viewers of it, takes us one step away from our slavish lifestyles of dues, duties and conformities. The Joker openly mocks and disrupts a system that we are unable to mock and disrupt ourselves, because we are bound to the judgments and preconceptions of our environment. The Joker picks environments that he ultimately wants to control, while we pick environments that ultimately control us.

One night a year, on Halloween, adults get to hide behind masks, get to hide behind alcohol, and get to pretend to be what they really want to be every day of the year, if only it were socially acceptable. On all the other days and nights, we hide behind our own version of a Mercedes or a Lamborghini, an office suit instead of a batsuit, a fake smile instead of a prosthetic one, a diplomatic handshake instead of a knife.

I am thinking of being the Joker this Halloween. I did some quick research on YouTube to see how others have done it, how they dressed and how they spoke. Some aped Heath Ledger’s delivery line for line, pause for pause. Some mimicked his makeup and costume down to the stitch. To emulate the Joker and recreate his words of anarchy, they copy him exactly.

I am short and stout and do not look anything like Heath Ledger. I do not match. I am unable to copy. It is impossible for me to fool anyone to think that I am Health Ledger’s Joker.

All of the above reasons are why I am thinking of being the Joker this Halloween. Or not.



* Eight hours after writing this, I looked up the exact definition for "slavish" and was surprised to read #2:

slavish
adj.

1. Of or characteristic of a slave or slavery; servile: Her slavish devotion to her job ruled her life.

2. Showing no originality; blindly imitative: a slavish copy of the original.