The Frarful Report

Brookline is gray today, and my second cup of coffee is tasting great.

I have spent my slow morning in my normal day-off way, beginning with reading in bed immediately after I woke up. There’s not much I love more than reading an imaginative book right after I’m pulled out of my own imaginative sleep. Last night I dreamed I was being chased by snipers dressed as Santa Clause. It was exciting, but not too scary because I was being protected by Captain Kara Thrace from Battlestar Gallactica, and if any of you know who she is, you know why I wasn’t too worried about the Sniper Santas.

Going from that dream almost immediately after waking being engulged in the pages of the third book of Phillip Pullman’s Golden Compass Series, was a biazarre and meditative experience that I’m sure will bring about an excellent day. So far it has, aside from this little gem of a newstory on the main Maine News website.

York County Sheriff’s deputies used a Taser to subdue a wheelchair-bound Newfield man armed with a knife who tried to goad the officers into shooting him, a spokesman said Monday.

Fecteau said two deputies went to the house in the early morning hours after a woman living there called and asked for help controlling him. Ackerman, who is disabled due to a war injury, was holding a knife in his teeth and “destroying the residence” by throwing things with his hands, Fecteau said. It was unknown whether he had any more knives, which is why the deputies used the Taser, he said.

I’ll stop there for now. Wayne Ackerman is disabled due to a war injury. I assume, because he’s 25, that he is a veteran of the Iraq War. I wonder what he saw while he was there? The Police tazored him after he threw the knife he was holding between his teeth. He threw it over the officer’s head, after “destroying the residence” (by throwing things from his wheelchair?), while goading them to shoot him.

This story is jam-packed with what enrages me most about the State of the Union, and the way this country is treating the youth of America.

There are many things we are not doing for the soldiers, perhaps the worst of which is often not providing them enough of compensation to finanace a home. However, though Wayne Ackerman apparently could find shelter upon returning home from the war, he was not given a way to protect him from a the deadly enemy known as trauma. Thousands of soldiers are returning back from the mess we’ve made in the middle east with severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is what makes people like Wayne Ackerman, permanently disabled from a harmful and toxic war, beg to be shot by the police.

Fortunately, Wayne Ackerman was taken into a hospital for psychological help after the incident, but not without being tazored by police officers. Lt. Gary Fecteau had this to say about it:

“He was trying to coax them into shooting him during the whole incident,” Fecteau said. “The Taser was the perfect tool for the situation.”

Now, I’m not going to pretend to know a lot about any weapons, even tasers. But I do know that their primary purpose is to cause pain, and therefore I am hesitant to classify it as a tool. A tool, to me, should try to provide more security than pain, and I question the tazor’s ability to do that.

There have been over 200 deaths from tazors since 2001, even though they are meant only to subdue, not murder. Why are they still referred to as a non-lethal weapon? If we can use them to subdue traumatized soldiers in wheelchairs and children on schoolbuses, think of what we could do to peaceful protestors or vacationing civilians (with darker skin, of course) who are wrongfully interrogated in the back rooms of airports. Zap zap!

Regarding the rest of the youth of america, those not disabled physically or mentally by the war: we all remember the student who was tazored when he confronted John Kerry at a rally. Afterward, “Don’t taze me bro!” became a common cry heard on various forms of media. He became the poster boy for the college students of today; we were and are potratyed mooks, buffoons, shallow and blithering narcissists.

The pieces start to fall into place. Traumatized soldiers are coming home from the war and getting no help. Tazors are being humorized and trivialized, along with the intergrity of my age group, by the internet, 24-hour news programs and show’s like Best Week Ever! on MTV.

I’ve heard many people say that the reason my generation isn’t protesting Iraq as our parents protested Viet Nam is because we’re not being drafted. But even though we are not being forced to fight, are we not being treated as though we are worthless and disposable?

I hope our nation can make it out of this mess without being permanently damaged, but I doubt it. If we end up taking Iraq, Afghanistan and other nations down with us, will that be enough to get my generation on their feet? Here’s hoping at least that will come of the miserable, unyielding disaster President Bush calls The War on Terror.

Since childhood, I’ve periodically returned to a thought inspired by the motionless body of a character I saw on the soap opera General Hospital. My mom liked the show, and during the impressionable single digit ages, I lacked the will or pride to differentiate between bad acting and the Ghostbusters. She was a mom. So we watched each other’s shows together. In the only scene from General Hospital I remember, a man was lying in bed, surrounded by about six people. I couldn’t understand why these people were standing around this particular guy, watching him sleep with such distorted looks on their faces. My mom reluctantly explained that the man was in a coma, that he wasn’t sleeping at all, or if he was, that he wouldn’t be waking up for a while. The people were sad because they were his family and they were worried about whether or not the man, including his perfectly maintained curls, would be alright.

Behind the glaze of TV shadow puppetry projected on my face, my mind guessed at what it would be like to be in a coma. After a few scenarios, I suddenly wondered…what if I’m in a coma? Certainly I would have no way of knowing. No one in my coma-land would tell me because no one would know that they were imagined, or at least none of them would want to admit it. They would all go about their business under the same silent understanding that they would be just as disheartened as I would if anyone ever accepted that everything was just some elaborate production staged by a mind that wasn’t theirs, only created because that mind could do nothing else.

As I grew, so did my explorations of coma-land. If I am in a coma, I thought, then I could just be having a never ending dream. I may have dreamt the English language, and part of the Spanish language. And the names of those languages, and other languages too. There may actually be no Earth, no Milky Way (galaxy or candy bar), no Internet, no good friends with significant names, no plungers. Or, maybe worse, coma-land is so closely based on the reality I used to know that waking up from the coma would cause a catastrophic culture shock from not being able to understand how almost everything really existed, except for one or two important people or memories.

Movies have been made on similar themes, but I was reminded of my possibly comatose state tonight while riding the subway, thinking about two recent readings: a lecture given by Borges in 1977 called “Nightmares” and The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J Maarten Troost, a book about the author’s self-stranding on a forgotten atoll in the South Pacific.

While surveying various attitudes on the relationship between dreams and reality, Borges tells an anecdote about his young nephew, who shares a dream he had about a certain white house in a forest. After a careful description and some elaboration, Borges interrupts his nephew because he has described Borges’ house exactly, the point being that the child casually intertwined his sleeping and waking realities. As Borges continues, he also considers what he calls the hypothesis of the poets, which says that these two realities are not fractions of some whole at all, but rather intertwined.

The poets must ride the subway, because here waking and sleeping life don’t seem so distinctly separated either. A little after five tonight, on the C-line, the monotony on dozens of weeknight faces seemed like a prop put in place for the exact moment when I looked up from the page to consider what Borges said. Looking at them, I saw myself on the couch again, feet not touching the floor, TV projecting…maybe I am just dreaming all of this…maybe I am in a coma. There are volumes of science to explain what happens in our brains when we dream. But they don’t begin to answer exactly where we are when we dream or who is in that place, whatever it is.

The only differences between each state seem to be minor variations in consciousness and the actual experience is extremely similar. On the subway, as in dreams, there are characters and images that enter and exit for no definite reason, too many to keep control of, like an entire play acted out at once under the spotlight of the person giving the big monologue. In either reality, you are an observer. And just as we try to make meaning of our observations in dreams, we make meanings on the subway too. We use the spectrum of existences as we’ve come to divide it, economic, ethnic, sexual, professional, etc. to qualify what we see. But we do not confirm anything as much as we survey it, just like we do in dreams, where we are mildly in control of our bodies, and little else. In a recent dream, for example I knew that I had to run away from my dad—chasing me on a riding mower after being suddenly stricken with a bout of Shining type madness—but I couldn’t move. To say that a subway car full of people is more qualitatively real than a dream is to say that you understand enough about all of the people to conclude beyond a doubt that they are what you perceive them to be and those perceptions make sense. But you can’t account for any of these people or their actions much more than you can really account for yourself. In many situations, waking and sleeping, you are able to control your body to an extent, but your mind, your thoughts, your emotions, all of these are wanderers, and likewise for those of the other people that you may be imagining. So if you are equally and ultimately at the will of wandering impulses asleep or awake, regardless of conciousness, it would seem to me that the distinction between the two states, dreaming and not, is much cloudier than assumed.

People who submit to these wanderers and follow them across mountains and oceans and jungles and cities are called travelers. The objective of the conscientious or ambitious traveler is to surmount perception’s natural inclinations, assumptions. I have traveled at home and abroad on trains, and it seems that on any train, subway or cross continental, conversation is the barometer for this kind of transcendental ability. In a foreign country, conversation can be more of a challenge because of the isolation of not sharing the common language. But perhaps it is even more isolating on a subway car at home because most people on these trains do speak the same language, yet there is often the silence of those who cannot verbally communicate, reminding me of those familiar sleeping dreams where I had something I needed to say or wanted to say, but couldn’t say it for some unknown reason.

The Troost book I mentioned earlier could have been any travel book, just because it got me thinking about the broader experience of traveling as one blatantly honest way to live one’s waking dream. When you travel, you see a more accurate vision of the world in which the temporal nature of everything is illuminated. The transitory interactions with people that you may have on the subway are the same that you have with the people you meet abroad, even those with which you make the strongest connections. Surreally, you pass, and they pass, and people become historical characters, and buildings and sunsets become icons in your memory that stay there only as you saw them, rather than being buildings and sunsets that you see in greater and less exciting ways everyday. They become that way out of a need to understand them, to label them somehow, much like we label the people we see in a subway car on the C-line. At home, in the comfort of routine, we can convince ourselves that there is not only a difference between dreams and reality, but that what we perceive is really permanent in some way. Travelers, Troost or anyone else, make a point to not only recognize that the nature of the human experience is closer to a dream, but to make it a lifestyle.

The choice then, if we are in fact living various cycles of one long dream, is what to dream and how to dream it. Unlike the writers of General Hospital, we don’t have complete control over when and how the dreamlike state ends. But we can decide, while we’re in it, in the most lucid fashion, how to shape it. Troost and other travelers live their dream by acting in opposition to the procedures established by the society they know.
You may prefer another dream.

Besides, traveling and riding the subway are just possible renderings of coma-land as seen from a train-window perspective, where you see two worlds at once, the stable one inside the car and the one on the outside that you see only for a moment before it changes into something new, even if that too seems familiar, one might say recurring. But what you see on both sides lives on both sides, and with the exception of some metal and glass, in a relatively similar place, just like sleeping dreams and waking ones.

A decade and a half after I began to suspect that, somewhere else, I am in a coma, I still don’t have a much more of a conclusion than I did then. But if Borges’ poets are right, and they could be, then just as he told his audience in 1977 that he could be dreaming them, I will say to you that I am dreaming you. And you are dreaming me. And that is our relationship to each other. In coma-land or out. Which is why we can attribute a huge part of our existence as we know it not only to apes, but also to soap opera actors from the 1990’s—depending on what these words mean to us if we wake up.

RITA:

Early this morning, I caught the Ski Valley Shuttle from Arroyo Seco, a small town halfway up the (particularly, today) sub-freezing and snowy mountain, down into an only vaguely-warmer Taos. I was the only person on board (it’s becoming a ghost town around here, now that the holidays are over — gone are the rich Texans, back to Dallas with their Cowboys-loving tails between their legs . . . it’s all just locals and ski bums, now, which is bad for tips but definitively better for my IQ) and the driver, a polite 74-year-old Taos native named Leo, recognized me from my frequent trips up and down (I’m still trying to get the hang of driving stick shift, in my little white sunstripped Dodge Dakota Sport, and learning to drive manual transmission on a mountain = terrifying, so I take the bus as often as possible). I haven’t seen him in about a week, so he was excited to have a chance to catch up and find out how I’m settling in. I told him, quite honestly, that everything’s going great — I love my apartment (my little adobe abode, I like to quip at least once a day), the job is fun, I wake up grateful every morning to be surrounded by mountains instead of buildings, I have a friend (yes, one friend), and overall things are cruising along swimmingly. He glanced up into the rearview, gave me a big grin, and said, “Well, good things happen to good people!” I laughed and thanked him, saying that I hoped he was right while thinking to myself how very odd it was to be so rapidly deemed a “good person”by this near-stranger — someone I’d met all of four or five times, and in most of those situations I functioned in his life as little more than just another silent bus passenger.

I’ve been consistently surprised, since I got to Taos just under three weeks ago, at how very involved people are in each other’s lives here — and in an extraordinarily trusting, ungrudgingly helpful fashion. I’d forgotten what living in a small town is like, after three and a half years in Boston. There, I lived in two different apartment buildings over the course of my final two years, and never knew the last name of a single one of my neighbors. Most of them I knew only by face, if at all. Everyone, myself included, is on their own agenda in the city — it’s hard to randomly pick new friends from the endless wash of people going about their own lives in their own pattern. Here, in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, (no Prudential Center in sight, I occassionally realize with a twitch of nostalgia) I’ve already met more people than I met in my entire last semester of college. It’s typical small-town dynamic — when there are a limited number of places to go and people to see, a strange face is rapidly identified, isolated, and (here, at least) invited into the fold. Sometimes, at the end of a long work day or at the beginning of Hormonal Hell, the excessive socialization which occurs in this kind of neighbor-friendly culture can be exhausting and invasive and obnoxious as shit. But most days, it’s surprisingly comforting to find out that everyone really is willing to help out when things go wrong. People really pay attention to each other, and counting on the kindness of strangers isn’t just a nice idea, it’s a way of life. Maybe it’s the clear air here, or the shared euphoria of existing together in such a sacred space — and maybe it’s just that when there is a finite number of people in motion around you each day, there’s finally enough time to slow down and focus on one person at a time. (Let me briefly add that excessive use of hallucinogencic drugs may be a large influence the neighborliness of many Taosenos).

I then had to wonder if I agreed with Leo (even beyond whether his seemingly-premature determination of my nature was correct), because that’s a pretty bold statement to make — “good things happen to good people.” Yes, perhaps that’s true, but let’s not forget that good things happen to bad people, too. And bad things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people, and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles, that’s always been my outlook. (I remember calling my dad in 2004, frustrated with a country that would actually reelect George Dubya and looking for some rational explanation, only to have him tell me, “Well, Rita, sometimes the bad guys get to win.”) Not to say that I don’t believe in actively trying to be a good person, and I usually do my best to keep my karmic-balance pretty even, but I’m not entirely convinced by the idea of cosmic-justice coming to those who deserve it. 2007, for a certain group of my friends, will largely be remembered as the year that one of our dear friends battled leukemia, which was a terrible thing to happen to a very good person. Matt never hurt anyone a day in his life (although there was once a questionable incident involving a flying garbage bag and some Beanie Babies, but I think we’ve put that behind us). He came through it fine, and 2008 is looking bright and healthy — but every once in a while, I remember what he looked like the first time I saw him in the hospital in Rhode Island, sick and tired and alone and so morphined-up that music, his passion and his calling, made him cry, and I can hardly begin to comprehend what crazy immortal party must have gotten Lady Justice drunk enough to let that happen.

So, I did as we all do when we’re wondering how the universe works, and turned to Google (which, incidentally, is featured in a fascinating article in the New Yorker this week, check it out CHECK IT OUT!) where I discovered these two promising-sounding books:
1) “Why Good Things Happen to Good People,” by Stephen Post, PhD, and Jill Neiman; and
2) “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner.
Having just discovered the local library a few days ago (small town libraries are unbeatable, especially when elementary school construction-paper-project season is in full swing), I headed down to check out what other people think of the Scales of Justice.

Immediately afterwards, I took my friend Jake (a beautiful, lean, caramel-eyed, brown-and-black romper of a dog) for a walk on a small, ridge-set neighborhood of low adobe houses as the sun set over the mountains behind me, casting the most incredible orange ripple on the mountains in front of me. And as Jake stretched and sniffed his way through the underbrush, and I slid my way along the icy-dirt road (the traction on my spike-soled Pumas shockingly disappointing, in this persistently cold climate), I had to think, maybe, Leo, maybe you’re on to something. I mean, I’m not sure if I ended up here because I tried to be a good person for the last 18 years (the first 4 years of my life, I think, deserve to be excluded upon mentioning that my siblings used to call me “the demon child”), or from a chance moment in eternity just dropping me off here for a while . . . but there’s something about looking up every night at the way Casseiopeia hangs upside-down over this ring of New Mexican mountains that makes me think I must have done something right.

Finally, here is a Dylan Thomas poem that you should all read, if only for the last stanza.

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed,
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

When you walk out the door of your apartment, do you give yourself a pat down to make sure you have what you need for the world? James, my roommate, calls this the “Keys, Wallet, Cell phone” check.

I just finished watching this talk for the third time, on my new favorite website www.TED.com. It’s not the best talk I’ve seen on that website, but it’s worth watching. The best part comes when he analyzes our “centers of gravity”, which I think most people have whether they are aware of it or not.

Last thing I’ll say about gravity for today is my observation that my life is much more chaotic and peaceful (they can coexist) in part because I allow myself to have so many centers of gravity. Certainly it makes it tougher when I find my keys resting on my bedside table rather than on my dresser, and it may take me a little while longer to pack my life up and go out into the world. But allowing myself to settle in many different locations, be it a new job, a new apartment, a new country, and new attitude, is part of being adaptable. And adaptability, in my few years of experience with it, seems to be the key to constant and true happiness.