Demented And Sad, But Social

My wife said, "I guess all media is social media." Her voice came to me, as it often does, from behind the open lid of her laptop computer. Like so many of us, particularly those who live in our house, we tend to begin and end our days in front of a screen. There's all that news on which we feed. All those notes, tweets, messages and instametagrams, they won't read themselves. All those cat videos need to be considered and cataloged with the hours already compiled and discerned. There is so much media to be digested and then regurgitated in outward streams to keep the cycle moving. It's a full-time preoccupation.
There was a time, way back when we were young marrieds, and my wife and I would sit down in front of the television with our dinner to give ourselves the maximum amount of input for later dissemination. If we hadn't watched Must-See-TV that week, our conversations with others would suffer enormously. Keeping up with Ross and Rachel was a chore, but one we took on gladly. Around this time, I began to subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, which allowed me Cliff's Notes on pop culture that was starting to edge away from me. I was no longer living in the center of the demographic that would allow me to appear hip simply because I was standing where the media stream was aimed. I learned about Miley Cyrus, but I never cared about her. I cared a little about Lindsay Lohan, but I couldn't fully understand how she got to be so darn important. It was right about this time that Al Gore invented the Internet. Now my wife and I were compelled to find out more about people and things that millions of others were discovering and would most certainly be chatting about on the next trip to the water cooler.
I never worked anywhere there was a water cooler. And when our son came along, we moved our little family dinners back to the kitchen, where we could share pleasant, unemojied conversation so as to aid our digestion. We did a very nice job, I think, keeping social media and media of whatever other sorts out of those bonding moments. Then our son grew up and we all got smart phones, and tablets and laptop computers and now when we sit down in front of the television there are times when the three of us are juggling two different devices in addition to the communal screen to which we have all consented to pay attention. There is so much information and so very little time to gobble it all up.
It makes me think about those screen-free weeks that we used to try and participate in when my son was in elementary school. Little did he know that his parents were sneaking a peek at Jon Stewart after he went to sleep. A sad existence, but so full of amusement and distraction. We look up from our screens now and then to make sure the others got our text to watch the link on YouTube. Then back we go into the mire. Happy in our overstimulated blizzard.

Connections

The headline read, "No Evident Connection Between Suspect And Victims In Face Eating Attack." I went back and re-read those words. It gave me pause. No connection? I would imagine that the connection of teeth to fleshy bits nose and cheek would count as some sort of connection. A rather intimate one.
Maybe I should back up a step, in case you aren't as prone to as I am to click on those odd and tawdry stories that have this kind of macabre tint to them. A nineteen year old Florida State University sophomore walked three miles into a suburban neighborhood where he found a couple in their garage where he attacked them. When officers arrived on the scene, Michelle Stevens was dead, as was her husband John who had the added complication of a rabid college sophomore on his chest, gnawing on his face.
I'll give you all a moment to decide if you want to continue with this discussion. A chance to digest, if you will.
What made this case even more disturbing, if this was really a frontier that needed to be mined, was that there was a similar occurrence four years ago in Miami: the case of the Causeway Cannibal. Another young man in south Florida who took a break from our collective reality and ended up making a meal of someone else's face. Not that face-gnawing is a practice limited to residents of Dade County. This behavior is linked to the use of "bath salts," or Flakka. In the same way that breakfast every morning is good, Flakka is bad. Like you would benefit from having breakfast every morning. By contrast, you would benefit from having Flakka, oh, let's say never. I am pretty sure that when you go out shopping for a chemical mood enhancer, the mood you're attempting to enhance isn't the hunger for human flesh. If you get stoned, you get an appetite for Cheetos. If you snort, vape, chew or swallow Flakka, you might end up doing your best impersonation of the Donner Party. Or being a walk-on for the road company of "Night of the Living Dead." Or the subject of some awful story people will read on Al Gore's Internet when they really should be doing something responsible like balancing their checkbook. Or writing a friend to encourage them not to rub, sniff, grind or otherwise consume Flakka.
Nobody did that for Austin Haurroff. His course of study at Florida State University will be interrupted. For some time. He currently enjoys our legal system's distinction of being referred to as the "alleged assailant." Not exactly the type of thing that looks good on your transcript. His status as a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity will need to be revisited. But he will always have a connection with John and Michelle Stevens. Forever.

Here It Comes

Right now it's all about tables, desks and chairs. We are moving things around in preparation for the first day of school. For kids. Teachers have already had a week of wandering around empty halls, looking up at the clock not in anticipation of the next bell but rather of that moment when there is no time left and like it or not the children will all file in. Or rush in with a summer's worth of energy and stories and friends who need to be caught up on every last thing that happened in the past two and a half months. There will be joy. There will be tears. There will be reunions. There will be school once again.
But for now it remains a somewhat desolate place, as if grades K through Five had been raptured up to Heaven, or Stockton, maybe. In the twenty years that I have been working at this particular school, I have probably had occasion to handle each and every stick of furniture in the place, from the main building to the office across the way. Every Fall it's the same drill: The desks in this room need to be switched with that one, or the ones down the hall need to be raised to fit the ever-expanding fifth graders. Coming to the teaching biz as a recovering mover of modular steel furniture, I possess a unique set of skills that allow me to take some of these mildly absurd requests and turn them into a reality. This allows the rest of our staff to puzzle over just how many copies of that first day worksheet they will need, or if they would like to have the kids sit in groups or nice neat rows. That's not my concern. Once the number of desks and chairs match the number of students on that first day's roll and they are all essentially level, I am on to the next crisis.
Like the paper on the bulletin boards. Soon enough, those vertical surfaces will be filled with the scribblings and mathematical assertions of the young minds we are attempting to coax into new and exciting revelations. For now, there are great expanses of primary colors, with border around the edges for that finished look. And as soon as these boards become filled with the work of our young charges, one or more of them will get it into their heads to see if they can't rip a hole in one of them. Or tear the border off as they run down the hall instead of being outside for recess. Or lean back in one of those chairs that have supported dozens of backsides for as many years until they finally just give out. Or that desk that seems to have lost a screw that keeps the front leg from collapsing, just out of the blue.
But for now, it's peaceful and orderly. It is the calm before the storm. The storm that begins on Monday at eight AM.

The Lowest Form Of Wit

So there's this former mayor of New York, and he walks up to a microphone and says, "eight years before Obama came along, we didn't have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States." Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in November of 2008. Eight years before that was November, 2000. George W. Bush was the president back then. In September of 2001, seven years before Obama came along, America suffered its most catastrophic loss of life in one day when radical Islamic terrorists flew jet airliners into the side of both World Trade Center towers. The World Trade Center towers located in New York City. The former mayor of New York City could be forgiven for forgetting this little dustup, except he has made a career in the fifteen years since those attacks of reminding anyone within earshot about them. If there was such a thing as a "Mister 9/11" scholarship competition, Rudy Giuliani would have my vote. The former mayor of New York City will probably get my vote for the most unfortunate bit of calendar math over the past decade or two. The former mayor of New York City will not be getting my vote for President of the United States, nor will he be influencing that vote in the direction of his creatively-coiffed partner. 
Of course, it could be that he didn't mean it all. It could have been sarcasm. The former mayor of New York City may have been attempting to use sarcasm. To wit: " the use of words that mean the opposite of what you really want to say especially in order to insult someone, to show irritation, or to be funny." Since there obviously was a successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the eight years before Obama came along, he may have been trying to be funny. Or insulting. To whom, exactly, is unclear. Or perhaps Rudy has just become so rabid on the loco weed that they must be feeding him that he is losing track of his holiest of holies. All that frothing at the mouth seems to be SOP with the GOP.
Or maybe it was sarcasm in the same way that referring to Barack Obama as the founder of ISIS was sarcasm. Maybe we just don't get it. And maybe that's just fine. It's been eight minutes since the last idiotic utterance from the Tahrump campaign. Was that sarcasm? 

Watching The Clothes

On the last weekend of his father's summer vacation, my son decided to empty his laundry bag. The laundry bag that had been holding all those secret treasures, mostly dirty clothes, and had been carefully placed in a corner of his room since he came home in mid-June. Over the course of the past couple of months, I have been aware of a somewhat truncated cycle of T-shirts, underwear and jeans that comprise his daily wardrobe. It caused me to reflect on my own sartorial choices, noting that I didn't skew too far from that model myself during these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. I probably wore a larger variety of T-shirts, having this break in the elementary school dress code to fill in with some of those favorites that otherwise remain at the bottom of the drawer.
But finally, the rest of the story emerged in the form of all those pairs of pants and sweatshirts and assorted socks that weren't ready to see the light of day. And now, suddenly, here they were. It made me wonder about my role as chief laundry officer for this ship, and I was reminded that my son had managed to do his own laundry in his dorm facilities for all those months prior. I could have simply let the pile grow until there was no getting around it. Once he was unable to get in or out of his room without having to move that mass, he would have broken out his own detergent and attacked the problem just like he had before he moved back in.
But the truth is, I was eager to have that odd bit of connection. I understood all those times I had gone back to visit my mother, and her eagerness to toss around a bit of my dirty laundry. It's a way we can show that we care, we parents. We're doing a load anyway, is there anything else that needs to be washed? Of course there is, but when you're a nineteen year old boy, discerning and locating said items becomes a bit of a scavenger hunt.
I am going back to school, but he still has a few weeks left at home. He has already talked about how next summer he might end up staying at school, to pick up a class or two or get a job near campus. And then he'll have to get his clothes clean all by himself. Just like he was already doing before I barged in and started doing it for him.
He'll be fine.

Sacrifice

As a public school teacher, I make a lot of sacrifices. Some of them are little, and easily maintained, like the absence of a first name replaced by "Mister." Some of them are not as easily managed. My language choices, for example. It's pretty standard English, but within the confines of the school building and throughout the school year, my use of expletives is limited to my living room on Sundays while watching professional football. Which brings me to to the topic of today's post: Being an orange and blue peg in a silver and black hole.
My allegiance to the Denver Broncos gets tested out here in The Black Hole of Raidertown. Twice a year for the past decade and a half, I gird my fanatical loins and go out on the playground full of die-hard Oakland fans. I confess that this has been made easier for me due to the impressive winning percentage that my team has been able to maintain over their team. I am also grateful for the generally good sportsmanship that exists between my pre-teen charges and myself. I admire the way these kids cling to their hometown team the way I maintain my connection to my beloved Broncos. But every so often, the National Football League  decides to open up their bountiful coffers and spread joy and pigskin passion to the communities in which they reside. Here in Oakland, that means we get a lot of Raider swag. Which makes sense. It's a promotion, after all, and the NFL is not in the business of being short-order cooks. If you're in Oakland, you get the big bag of silver and black shirts, and we are all pleased and happy because we got the big bag of free shirts from the NFL. Which brings me back to the sacrifice: Last week, the NFL and its partners in the Dairy Council offered up a great big sack of flag football equipment and curriculum to supplement each elementary school's Physical Education program. All we had to do was send a representative down to Raiders Headquarters to pick up our big bag of flag football. And that representative would participate in some training and some instruction to be able to pass along that knowledge. I was that representative.
So there I was, in my shorts and ESPN T-shirt, running drills and tripping over myself on the same field that Marcus Allen and Howie Long and all those other Raider greats practiced. Each time we came together to prepare for another drill, we were encouraged to shout, "Go Raiders!" as we broke our huddle. Of course we were. It was their field. It was their photo op. But I'm a good sport. I'm a good teacher. I wanted to make sure the kids at my school got that big bag of football fun the Raiders were offering. Near the end of the training, we were told that our big bag would be sent to our school sites by the end of September. Furthermore, if there were school sites that didn't send a representative to the training, they would be sent to those sites as well, they just wouldn't have a "to the attention of" name to put on the bag. My name wlll be on that big bag. That big silver and black bag. Ah, the sacrifices I make.

Jagged Little Pill

"My brain? That's my second favorite organ." - Woody Allen

I leave it to you to decide for yourself what your first favorite organ is, but Woody's comment was what flashed through my cerebral cortex as I sat in my doctor's office discussing brain chemistry. So much about what I am can be attributed to the way dopamine and serotonin flit about my skull in patterns that, according to my mother, may have been established before I was born. The blog you are currently reading is a byproduct of some of those obsessive compulsions: the need to stay busy, the need to fill the world with words that sound good to me in combinations I string together. 

Backing up a moment, it should be noted that my wife and I go to the same doctor, and we often have appointments one right after the other. My wife uses this opportunity to tattle on me, or to be more relaxed, to share her concerns about me. Which is a nice thing, considering the alternative. That means that when the door opens and I am asked by my doctor if I have any questions or concerns, I know that there are probably already a few in the pipeline. 

Like a lot of humans my age and gender, I have a few extra pounds that eating kale on a more frequent basis along with a decent exercise regimen hasn't managed to disappear. My cardiovascular system was aided by that running and growing up in the thin mountain air, along with some decent genes. Still, my blood pressure was a number that raised an eyebrow on most of the folks who have witnessed it. 

Stress? Could be. That must-do feeling that exists around most every enterprise upon which I embark would be a nod in that direction. Hearing a little about my job made my doctor suggest that maybe mood-altering pills could be handed out at the door of most public schools. And what if there was a pill that could scientifically and safely round the sharper edges of my day? What if, as my doctor described, the pendulum swings weren't quite so wide? 

My immediate reaction was to worry that I would no longer have anything to write about. Would it make any sense to check my blood pressure right before and right after I wrote a blog? Or maybe, as I started to relax into the notion, there was a sense of relief in letting go of all that responsibility for my own stress. That last sentence gives you an idea of how quickly things stack up in my mind. 

And so I am embarking on a trial. To see if there is a little pill that makes being me a little easier. A little pill that makes it easier for me to be me longer because I won't eventually burst like a tick on a hot stove from the internal strife my brain has created all these years. My doctor assured me that I can still keep all the stress in my life, if it is important to me, but maybe I will be able to see the big rocks coming at me and step aside without having the stroke beforehand. That last bit wasn't a medical term, it was more hyperbole. It makes me wonder if there is a medication I can take that will help reduce my stress about the medication I will be taking to reduce my stress. 

Life is funny. Stressful, and funny.