Not Even Not Zen 364: Biomythography - Note 104: Riots in the Streets

Riots in the Streets

When I was seven years old, anti-war protesters flooded onto college campuses across the nation. Hand-drawn signs, long hair, people in sunglasses, and fists raised high in the air appeared in the news. I didn't understand what the protesters wanted, who the 'pigs' were, why we were involved in a war overseas or, well, pretty nearly anything. I lived within walking distance of a university, though, and I dimly understood the adults were up to something. 

"There's a riot on campus," my mother told my father one day. 

She had heard a news report on the radio, apparently, and glanced out the window. She could see the signs of a problem. 

"If I can get out to the store," she continued, "I'll never get back."

She cancelled the errand, for which I previously had been drafted. Now I had most of the afternoon free. 

"Go out," she told me. "Shoo, go and play."

After I changed into my stained pants, the ones my mother insisted were the best for outside games, I headed out to round up other kids in the neighborhood. When I marched from door to door, though, I found my friends either weren't home or couldn't come out. I hiked across the street into the park. For a few minutes, I threw stones in the ball field and pretended I was throwing strikes. After a while, I climbed the flood levees to gaze down at the fields below.

The sky was blue with light, wispy clouds. The air was warm but not hot. If there had been someone to play with, it would have been a pretty good afternoon. 

After a while, my younger brother wandered out of the front door. He was a long way off, but my house was in plain view, so I noticed him. I watched him search our yard for a while and then catch sight of me across the road. I hopped down from the dike wall and marched south. We met at the street and I made sure it was safe for him to cross.  

"No game?" he asked as we met. Together, we hopped the ditch to march back into the park. 

"Nah." I grabbed a stick and threw it at a tree. "No one can come out."

"Okay." He pointed north along the levee wall and across the big ditch to the traffic jam on University Boulevard. "What's that?"

"The riot, I guess." I threw up my arms. I wasn't sure what a riot meant, exactly, but it seemed to involve a lot of stopped cars. As my brother and I watched, drivers started to get out of their vehicles. They knew they were in for a long wait, whatever the reason.

"Can we go see?" my brother asked. 

I glanced back toward our white, aluminum-sided house. We had no parents in the yard. They wouldn't know if we crossed the dike and ditch.

"Okay." I nodded.

We trudged across the two ball fields to the north slope of the levee. When we crested the slope, I could see a man outside of his green sedan, wearing a grey suit and smoking a cigarette. In front of him, a woman sat slumped in her white convertible with her eyes closed. In the lane behind, a couple men were talking through their open windows. They looked grown up and boring. 

I climbed down the north side of the levee into the ditch and back up to the road with my brother following. He grabbed onto the tall reeds of the cat-o-nine-tails to pull himself across the rivulet of water between slopes. That looked like a good idea, so I did it, too. 

At the top, we reached the road and I headed east along the rows of cars. There was a young woman with blonde hair, flowers in her hair, and sunglasses. She looked all sorts of fashionable and cool sitting in her VW Beetle. When I asked her if she wanted to play, though, she gave me a startled look. She seemed kindly enough after that moment of surprise but she waved me further east, where a quartet of college-aged folks were kicking a ball around. 

They seemed awfully big and scary. I stopped to stare. My brother came to a halt behind me. 

After a moment to think and observe, I marched two cars further down the line, where a long-haired, clean-shaven young man had gotten out of his car. He wasn't smoking, just standing and resting.

"Do you want to play?" I asked him.

"Huh." He gave me a thoughtful look. The girl in the car in front of him waved to him for some reason, as if to encourage him. He gave her a gesture of acknowledgement. Then he turned his attention back to me. "Well, did you kids bring a ball or something?"

"No." I knocked myself in the head with my fist. My little brother had gotten a pretty great idea, it seemed, but we hadn't come ready for it. The young man frowned for a moment. Then he turned and gazed at me out of the corner of his eye.

"Can you throw a frisbee?" he asked.

"Yeah!" I hopped on my toes. Frisbees were kind of new. Not every kid could throw one. My brother couldn't. But I could. 

The young man smiled at us. He walked to the back of his car, popped open the trunk, and pulled out a fluorescent green disk. It looked battered but it was in better shape than the red one my mother had bought for me, probably because I had used mine to play with my dog. 

"Hey, you're pretty good!" he shouted as I made my first throw to him. I managed to keep a straight line between rows of cars. He caught the disk and snapped it right back to me. The game was on. The young student maneuvered my brother and I between rows of cars, motioning us to take different strategic spots. Half of the other drivers had stepped out of their vehicles. They made room for us, maybe because they saw my brother, only four and trying hard to learn. 

In retrospect, the other drivers must have gotten tired of my brother and I slamming the frisbee against their windows or skimming it along their hoods and roofs. Every time they started to shout at us, though, with one middle aged man going so far as to get out of his car, they took a look at who we were and stopped. Even the middle aged fellow sort of slumped and said, "Hey, be more careful."

"We'll move back down the road a bit," volunteered our young man, who was probably a college student.

"Good." The fellow sat back down, grumpy but mollified. 

We played long enough to switch up games, trying someone's softball, realizing it was dangerous, then going back to the frisbee again. Sometimes we paused to talk to other drivers. Around us, members of the unmoving traffic jam gave my brother sips from their soda cans, played card games standing up, talked about the news, and played music on their radios.

Finally, up ahead, the young man with the frisbee saw movement. 

"Okay," he said. "Looks like this is it. You need to get out of the road."

"Aw." My brother couldn't see the cars starting to roll. He didn't want to stop.

"Are you guys going to be okay?" asked the young man. The woman who had sat in her car most of the time got out to check on us. She wanted to make sure we stayed safe, too. 

"Yeah." I pointed towards my house. It was hard to make out across the park and the line of trees on Metzerott Road but it was still in my line of sight. "We'll just climb down to the playground."

"Wave to us from the field, okay?" said the woman. 

From that day on, whenever I heard there was a riot somewhere, I rushed to my window to check the traffic on University Boulevard. Four times more, if I'm remembering correctly, I discovered gridlock again, parked cars with people standing beside them. I always rushed out to play. That's what a riot meant to me at the time, a chance to play in the street with drivers who had nowhere to go. 

The college kids on their way to the University of Maryland would get out of their vehicles if they weren't already. They'd play guitars, throw footballs, kick beach balls, share their drinks (one man tried to give my brother and I each a beer but the other college students frowned him down), and they would generally just talk and relax. I would play until the brake lights ahead started to flicker. Then the grown men would say, "Sorry, kid, here's your ball back. We've got to go."

Not Even Not Zen 363: Biomythography - Note 103: How Does It Feel?

How Does It Feel?

Four of us hunkered down in the recreation room. Like any nine year old, I wiggled into place in front of the television, which was our steel-grey Zenith Chromacolor. I took my seat on the checkered, tan and brown footrest. That thing was a piece of furniture we never used for our feet. My brothers and I had turned it into our favorite backless chair. 

After my father pulled out the start knob, he slowly spun the television dial to channel 7, our local ABC station. For a moment, I stared at the faint, yellow glow of the station number. With a rush of static, the big tube hummed to life. The colors swirled for a moment. When they came into a faded sort of focus, they showed us a stadium with a gravel track. Runners had finished a race, apparently. They walked, half-stumbling, hands on hips. 

This was another night of the 1972 Olympics. After a two day break, the games had resumed. Earlier, I had watched announcements about how ABC was broadcasting the events live to our television all the way from Munich, Germany. The production team ran articles on the satellite technologies they were using. They were obviously proud and I was excited for them.

Mostly, in the track and field events, I focused on the decathlon. That's what my father announced as the event determining "the best athlete in the world."

After a commercial, the scene cut to a different event, a medal ceremony. 

A reporter pushed a microphone in the face of an athlete in a track suit and asked, "How does it feel?"

I turned to my parents, perplexed, and said, "Why did he ask that?"

Reporters had done it a couple of times before. Now I was noticing how irritating it was. My father took his cigar out of his mouth for a moment to answer. 

"I don’t know," he said. He shrugged. Behind him to his left, my mother grunted.

"Didn't he work his whole life for the race?" I pointed to the athlete on the television. My parents had told me most of them trained for ten or fifteen years to get this good. 

"Yes." My father nodded.

"Doesn’t everybody know how he feels? Can’t everybody see it?"

"Everyone can see it," my mother agreed.

"Then why ask?" It was such a waste of time. I knew I could be learning about how to throw a javelin, or to run faster, or take a racing dive in swimming, or something more satisfying than this, anything. Anything but this embarrassment of stumbled phrases applied to what I already knew. 

"It’s just a question," my mother said.

I thought about it for half a minute.

"Don’t the reporters have brains?" I asked her. I tried to imagine how they could fail to know how someone felt, especially when the feelings were so obvious. 

"Yeah. They think we don’t have any," my father answered.

#

The sports-reporter question of 'how do you feel' became a standard one, accepted everywhere. We hear it asked at almost every major event as if it's part of a ritual, which of course it is. It even comes with ritualized responses. We know, as an audience, that the question is meaningless and the answer is another step in the ritual. People would miss it if interviewers stopped asking it, even though everyone pretty much knows how everyone else feels in the moment. 

Not Even Not Zen 362: Biomythography - Note 102: Embarrassment

Embarrassment

As teenagers, we mostly live in a state of mortification - some of us, at least. In my teens, I couldn't bear to have people stare at me when things were going wrong. To my mind, they always were. But I also agonized if no one noticed me.

In tenth grade at Sidwell Friends, I correctly used the quip "How gauche" in a sarcastic conversation. Unfortunately, I had learned the word from reading, not from hearing it, so I pronounced it "gow-chee." This is how I said it to the son of a diplomat who was already in third year French. He burst into laughter, pointed at me, and called over other students of French and everyone else nearby so he could tell them how I'd mispronounced it. 

In retrospect, I sympathize. It’s still sort of funny, even to me. But the fact that I remember the incident is an indication of the emotion behind my teenaged self-reminders of Just Shut Up And Here's Why. Everything I said or did seemed horribly wrong in some way. 

Later, in a different school, I took theater classes, where I did embarrassing things because they were required. And I found I could do them in character, which somehow made it better. 

In my early college years, I came to a decision to let go of my desires (a process that took around three years, starting at sixteen, or seven years starting when I read Siddhartha at age twelve, or one year when I decided to really get serious about my practice). At around the age of nineteen, my bouts of severe embarrassment faded along with my desires. Then came dropping back into college, where my friends hated my lack of desires and said so, repeatedly. I considered deliberate reattachment. And with reattachment to the reasons for suffering came troubled emotions.

This time, though, I could choose to let go of them. It was interesting, a trick I tried to share in my conversations with friends. No one wanted to hear about it. The benefit remained mostly private. I continued to let go of attachments selectively. 

And I chose to lean into the embarrassment. And to enjoy it. Because I could.

In my early twenties, I stood in the parking lot outside a popular bar. I was talking to a young woman who had invited me out. And now she was turning me down. She had changed her mind three or four times during the night. Yes, then no, then yes, then no. She was the sort of person who did that, and who didn't like doing anything at all if she wasn't sure about it. This was the type of romantic experience I had once shied away from. But I leaned in. 

"I know this must be confusing for you," she said. 

"It's okay."

“Well, it’s even more confusing for me!” She wailed. And I realized that although I was enjoying the embarrassment of the situation, she was agonized by it even though she was the one calling the shots, or so I thought. (Eventually, and not in any parking lot, she explained the traumatic events that seemed to leave her so conflicted about everything.)

In college, I found myself confronted by a writing professor. 

"I wouldn't have accepted you if I knew you wrote science fiction."

He talked about how my writing was worthwhile but my liking science fiction was not. I needed to have more appropriate tastes, ones that rose to the proper level of a college intellect. I immediately agreed I would not turn in any science fiction in his class, which should have made him happy. That’s what he said he wanted. Instead, in the face of my acquiescence, he got increasingly embarrassed and defensive - although he eventually accepted me on those terms. 

And of course I ran into many more confrontations, more situations that should have seemed embarrassing for me but my leaning into it had gotten so fast, so reflexive, that I might have seemed like I was seeking out the situations.

Of course, sometimes people would confront me with the idea of shaming me about something they thought was embarrassing, most often about sex, and I would just sort of lean into the conversation and make the issue bigger and bigger, so that everyone around us felt the tension. Even the person who initially approached me would realize the situation had gotten weird and, somehow, extra confrontational.

It was always sort of funny, always sort of fun. Even now, it makes me laugh. Because I used to run away from embarrassment so hard. And at some point, I learned to lean in. It made so much difference.

If I had written about this in my twenties I would have stopped there. But after a while, I also stopped leaning into making things more embarrassing because, as it turns out, that’s just a bit mean and there’s no need. Unless someone is trying to be cruel, of course, and they're usually not, very much. 

Not Even Not Zen 361: Biomythography - Note 101: The Fourth Plane

The Fourth Plane

In the fall when I was seventeen, I lived alone in a basement apartment. The apartment sat within a mile of the University of Maryland.

This wasn't a good year for me at UMD. It was a fast-food-working year. It was full of relationships failing, college courses flunking, over-drinking, and a bit of learning. But the learning wasn't scholarly. For distraction from my various failures, I had access to a television and a radio. One afternoon, I turned on the radio while I was cleaning. 

"... the lighter side of the news."

Radio news was important. I couldn't afford the newspaper. So when the story resumed, I turned to make my bed, so I could stay close.

"When a fire broke out at an asylum in Massachusetts, the staff fled. They left the residents locked in their rooms with no means to escape the fire." The narrator paused long enough for me to wonder why this was light news. "Fortunately, a set of patients had prepared for this eventuality.

"These patients escaped their locked hallway. They went to the safe where the master keys were kept. They knew the combination. And when they opened it, keys in hand, they started freeing other patients. Because these patients, now the ones in charge, had planned well."

Again, the announcer paused for effect. He was pretty good at it.

"The patients not only freed the ones who were trapped in their rooms, they lined them up. They marched everyone out of the building and lined them up again on the front lawn. Who were these patients?"

In the background of the radio studio, I could hear the rustle of a piece of paper.

"They were the paranoids. The patients diagnosed with paranoia were the ones who were prepared."

After I finished making my bed, I got out the vacuum and started on the recreation room. I chuckled about the news until I sighed about my looming course homework.

By the end of the week, I found myself still thinking about the radio article. I started to wonder why I found the story reassuring. Maybe it was because it reaffirmed my general approach.

I had a certain amount of wariness, usually, and it likely came from the decade or more that my father crept up behind me while I was distracted. He always slapped me on the back of the head. Those years of getting hit tended to make me slightly aware, even when I was otherwise lost in my reading. I would keep a sense of the noises around me, the scratch of pencil against paper, the click of the screen door latch, the squeak of a floorboard. Often, I would react too late and get hit. But I had built up a level of awareness, however inconsistent it might be.

One of my younger brothers would launch sneak attacks, now and then. It was another reason to stay wary, especially out in the yard. In the road, of course, cars would speed through. Four times, they ran over our pets. I retained some awareness there, too, although the road would vibrate under my feet. Even if I hadn't been paying attention before, I could feel a car coming.

Awareness was useful in the woods, where I could be silent enough, sometimes, to see animals. It was useful in public school, where the football players were not able to knock my books out of my hands and I was able to tease them into giving up.

Years later, in the fall of 2001, I wondered if my background level of paranoia was normal. I stayed home from work to tend to my sick kids on September 11. I turned on the news. When I returned to the room with diaper wipes, a television announcer told me that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

My response was, "Again?"

No one had driven a plane into the World Trade Center before, of course, but the place had been bombed. And bombed again. And there was another bombing attempt. And again. I had figured someone would try a passenger jet just because planes had always seemed so easy to weaponize if you could take over the cockpit. A series of hijacking incidents had, in the past generation, indicated it wasn't hard to take over.

A week later, I visited my friends Richard and Andrea. Richard had seen and felt the attack on the Pentagon that day. He and everyone around him had known the explosion meant they were in an emergency situation. But he hadn't been able to call Andrea with the airwaves clogged. His phone had turned into a useless block of metal that day. His standard modes of transportation had ground to a halt. The subway had closed down and turned away passengers. Cars had flooded the streets and halted, blocked by one another. Taxis couldn't get anywhere. Richard had to hike out from the center of the city to get home.

"What do you mean, you expected the attacks?" Richard asked me, rather reasonably, when I said I felt they were years late.

"It's just that we've been bombed before. And at the World Trade Center before. And the Pentagon is a military target."

"You weren't surprised at all?"

"Well, yes," I replied after a moment of consideration. "I was surprised the buildings fell."

That calmed Richard for a moment. He nodded.

"Everyone was surprised by that part," he agreed.

"But they used passenger jets," said Andrea. "That was new."

"Not ... really." I flashed back to all the hijackings and mis-uses of planes. Andrea was right, strictly speaking. No one had quite done this. But I was right, too, if only I could articulate the thoughts I hadn't spoken. "I've been expecting planes to get used in attacks."

"Why?" asked Richard.  

It was a hard part to describe. The pattern of attacks seemed readily evident. What about them seemed less obvious to my friends? They seemed to be constantly expressing their shock about the planes in New York, the jet in DC, and the fourth one crashing over Pennsylvania. And why did so many people forget about the heroism of the passengers in the fourth plane? 

The fourth flight, I realized, is where I automatically put myself. Even on September 11, when the news had broken late that fighter jets were scrambling toward the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, I had thought of being a passenger caught up in the battle.

Our country had been attacked many times. And we had responded with violence. And we had bombed towns. And we had supported one side or other in wars. We had done a lot of things other countries would say deserved revenge. How could people not know, in the face of so many attempts to murder us, that people wanted to murder us? It seemed incredible.

Part of our national awareness problem was that so many people lived lives of peace. War makers, then and now, are a minority. Another difficulty is the distance. It’s easy to forget about remote horrors.

But I think the main difference is a variation in our personal senses of revenge. Most people seem to give up on it after a while. They have problems believing that someone whose brother was killed by an American missile might be committed to acts of vengeance a decade later.

I remember burning with the desire for vengeance as a child. Maybe mostly as a child, although sometimes as a teen. And I had exacted it, too. I had waited for years, sometimes, to take revenge. My brothers plotted for years, too. I thought plotting for years was normal. Mostly, I planned for my defense. But I fought for what I perceived as justice. I imagined committing murders, dying in righteous battles, and more.

"If I thought Americans killed my friends, I'd hate Americans, too." I considered the problem for a moment longer. "Well, maybe."

I didn't know if that was actually true. Even when I had wanted vengeance as a child, I had wanted it due to specific incidents with specific perpetrators involved. I knew who deserved cruel, cruel justice. I hadn't often been in a situation where I didn't know the perpetrator and, in those few times I didn't, I had tried to find out rather than committing random violence.

That's why, mentally, I was on the fourth plane. I genuinely expected attacks and it wasn’t that I thought I could do anything useful about them. Sometimes in my best mental scenarios I would be caught at a disadvantage and die. But in all my plans, really, I expected to die trying. I would always attempt some sort of defense, even if the situation was hopeless.  

Between my watchfulness and my sense of how people seek revenge, I found that I had been waiting for the World Trade Center attacks for years. It made me feel like a paranoid in contrast to my friends. But in my defense, the expectation was right.

People want justice. They will plot for years to achieve it. Then they will commit injustice because they lack the social power, expertise, and sense of dispassion to achieve real justice. Recognizing this seems cynical. Maybe it even seems paranoid. But it's true.