Pure Youth

It’s a good time to reflect.  I’m back at home, and now I feel like I can leave, but I keep wondering how I can make myself leave when I can’t focus.

Why can’t I focus?  Haven’t I done so much?  Even if I hadn’t, would that not be perfect reason to focus all the more?

I think it’s my curiosity that has an adverse effect on my productivity.  Maybe it spurs and inspires investigation and fails to nourish it as my eyes wander and catch a hold of another mysteriously beautiful new thing.  Oh yes, curiosity.  Welcome home my best friend and worst enemy.

I wouldn’t doubt that I have other enemies of the human condition.  I just guess it would be fair to work on one at a time.  This particular one of the curious type alone leaves me with a mountain of ideas and interests… the ideas and interests that in turn build upon themselves the longer I ponder and brood.  In this case fomentation is certainly an anomaly.

Is it a fallacy to believe being interested in many subjects, people and things is helpful?

It would seem so when a self-pledge to study lends itself to an indulgence in comical satire and light-hearted improvisation.  Especially if said self-pledging man were only a spectator.

My whole life has been a struggle to concentrate.  My mind is a continual aversion to practical thinking.  That must be why closure feels like a huge relief.  I want to get a conclusion so I can move on to that which I concern myself with…at that time.  I’ve been a perpetual flâneur deep under the surface of introversion and self-consciousness.  I could write a book.  Then again, who wants to read about someone who hasn’t really done anything without his full attention?

In speaking of books, I often look to the sky and wonder who has already told my story.  Haven’t all of life’s questions already been answered?  Isn’t there someone who can give me the mental nourishment I need to move on?  Then again, should I really spend more time looking for someone to solve this “problem” of who I’ve always been?

 

Awe (2009)

I was thinking about this last night

To you, ladies and gentlemen, I have this one question
Do you understand the word “awe”?
Have you known your heart to sprout wings
And flutter
After a large thump in your chest
Sending a surge of energy to the tips of
Your fingers and ends of your toes
Letting you know
That what you are
Is living
And that now
Is the only moment
You concern yourself with?

Have you found yourself intensely focused
On such a specific moment and subject
That it releases you from any other concern
As all sensory reception opens wide
To welcome every single
Split-second of the incoming
inundation that comes your way?
Have you felt so alive
So strong, so tall, and so real
For so many hours that
Hours later you find yourself on your back
Reaching backwards to attain the distant memory
Of what is was like the last time you slept?
Have you woken up the next morning and wondered
Will I ever feel that way again?

 

This is “The End of Men”

Looking back on the year 2011, it is difficult for me to reflect on the highlights without acknowledging the ominous atmosphere of the country’s economy and my own burgeoning cynicism.  My lengthy unemployment period began to feel like a lesion that could aggravate and ruin my life.  My peers agreed when I said it was tough.  I was in disbelief of my job status, and yet I felt unable to shake the thought that something worse could fall in my lap.  This strange instinct told me that the foreseeable future only held more complex and arduous challenges on the horizon.

It made sense to evaluate my rough run at employment with the rate of job growth and unemployment in mind. The statistics seemed like good reasons to explain my situation, but I still was unsatisfied.  There had to be more to the story.  Enter Hanna Rosin.  With her article ”The End of Men” Rosin provides a cultural context for the changing times that gave me a new perspective on the workforce.  It essentially illustrates the apparent aftermath of this 2011 statistic: for the first time in U.S. history women are the majority of the workforce.

For some time now I have been interested in male and female social roles, and I feel like we have been heading in this direction for some time now.  Higher education is paying off better and better for women.  At the same time, traditional male jobs that don’t require higher education are dramatically less available.  And while the surface of the issue is economic, there are deeper social implications.  Does the shift in the workforce get represented or accelerated by the present media culture?  Do movies and television reflect the present, or promote a vision for the future of how genders can be represented?

These questions tend to rattle me when I watch movies or television.  Watching movie characters written by Judd Apatow set the pattern for awkward guys and women who seem to be too good for them.  I recently started to ask myself why these couples were so funny.  Granted they can be funny on their own merits or just cater to a specific audience, the types of roles in Apatow movies may indicate an exaggeration of an increasingly social world and a real social disparity between men and women.  This one example may be a stretch, but the movies may be funny because of the truth in them.  I think there is an intention behind screenwriting to react to culture (or a culture) in order to find out what it is so interesting in the first place.

An increasingly important factor for young workers and college graduates now is to recognize the social atmosphere of the workforce.  This will continue to be a part of finding a job, keeping a job, and recruiting partners to do jobs with.  Knowing a trade in itself is losing value as the 21st century presses on.

 

MLK

Martin Luther King Day is the nation’s answer to Columbus Day.  May the reverend live on in our hearts and may our dreams find harmony with his own.

 

Letter to a Cell

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I am far away from you all.  I could do a triathlon, and even that distance would leave me so far, so removed.  I think about how far away I am so much that I have to catch myself and calm down from my mixed emotions.

Despite this distance I still feel like we are.  I believe “I am because we are”*, and we are connected because of our foundation.  My heart feels joy when I am reminded that community is more than an idea to us—it is an action and we live out that action.  When I think of you getting together for cell meetings, as a cell, I feel happy.  I am happy knowing that voices are being heard and God is being witnessed.  There is joy in knowing that there is access to that peace.  That heart-warming peace of mind is brilliant and beautiful.  It is like a sheer victory that can move any soul to sing, and it is uplifting to know that you invite others to share in such peace.

No matter what I say or do I love you.  I am because of you and I love you, there is no doubt.  May you continue your walk knowing that He loves you and will never forsake you.

With Love,

Brother

*an Asante proverb

 

Can I Call It Poetry?

If I am blind to convention

And I admit my ignorance openly, leaving myself exposed at every stroke as I wield my pen-grasping arm, this mind-crippled blunt instrument

And I blend strange murals with my fragmented memories, drawing criticism from the crafted eyes of the studied and love from the oblivious, melding odd couples as though they were high school sweethearts, forging patterns of dissident chordal harmonies, mending contrary minds as kindred spirits

And I shuffle around in formal dance rain, multiplying puddles, foot chasing street bikes, fraternizing with misfits, collecting water for the next rainy day

And I pursue this dilligent search for significance in these seemingly meaningless meanderings of thought,

Can I call it poetry?

 

Jansport J and His Beats

Jansport J and His Beats.

 

Slow, if not Brief

I am wading knee-deep in the lonely testosterone blues rock of The Black Keys.  The song strikes a balance of grit and grimace, and the sound of it all speaks to my soul.  It is energetic but not hopeful, striving but not attaining.  The only true joy of feeling like I was sinking was its reflection in other beings.

 

Sean Waters’ Next Film: Blondes Vs. Brunettes II!

Sean Waters’ Next Film: Blondes Vs. Brunettes II!.

 

A Word about Idiot America

Charles Pierce writes for Esquire and has a show on NPR

Like I said in my recent post, Charles Pierce’s novel wasn’t a push for education reform.  Idiot America was not what my preconceptions made it out to be.  There was no big idea for the next generation to catch on to in order to benefit the country.  No research on improving our methods for governing ourselves better, and no unprecedented studies on keeping the public informed.  Instead Pierce examines the modern social consciousness and compares it to history.  This book is his answer to why Americans have a tendency to accept outlandish ideas as truth.

As Pierce’s argument unfolds the “Idiot America” he writes about more describes a loss of meaning rather than a new problem altogether.  He first defines what he calls “cranks,” or people who experiment with new ideas.  These people very well may be nothing more than noisy people who are wrong.  He writes:

“The American crank is one of the great by-products of the American experiment.  The country was founded on untested, radical ideas.  The country’s culture was no different from it’s politics.  They took rists in creating their vision of the country…”

Cranks try to promote new ideas, create movements and change conventions.  For some cranks the motive is as simple as making money.  This is fine, according to Pierce, so long as the cranks aren’t taken seriously without being challenged:

“The crank is devalued when his ideas are accepted untested and unchallenged into the mainstream simply because they succeed as product…There is nothing more worthless to the cultural imagination than a persistently wrong idea that succeeds despite itself.”

Using this template for argument he examines recent events from the opening of the Creation Museum to Terri Schiavo’s incident to the war in Iraq and the 2008 election campaign.  He argues to show how easily people go from idea makers to prominent figures on television who look like experts to the public eye.  To his credit, he put in a lot of work to show for his opinion.

"How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free"

What won me over with Pierce’s book was the actual reporting that was involved.  The man went out and talked one on one with people who were directly involved with the recent events he wrote about.  Of course this is the MO for reporters but, especially in regards to subjects that deal with political decisions, Pierce’s work stands above many social commentaries that do little more than lampoon the powers that be.  The work he did to write the book added to the value of his own commentaries, which ultimately made him more respectable.

While I myself felt smarter by reading Idiot America, I can’t say that everyone will enjoy it.  The only way to find out if you like it is to read his interviews and judge for yourself. —AJD