Death.

My Grandma died today.  I don't feel anything.

My dad's Grandma lived in England so we rarely saw her, she died five years ago.  My mom died when I was six and her mom, Grandma Dorris, lives in Michigan.  My stepmom's mom is the one that died.  The irony was that my grandma Dorris was always worried she would "overstay her welcome" and she would end up staying for a couple of days while Lorraine, the Grandma that died, would prolong her stay by a couple of weeks and we all wished she would only stay for a couple of days.  Hemingway once said on writing, “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck."  I don't have to write out the syllogism: you can see its relevance. 

I feel like Marceaux in The Stranger.  I don't remember the book that well but I do remember that his mother dies and he kills a man; the two have no correlation.  When he goes on trial, what troubles society most, what decides his guilt, is not the evidence that he kills a man but his seeming lackluster sentiment for the death of his mother.  We are troubled by the different ways in how people deal with situations, particularly those pertinent to death. 

Right now I'm sitting in the Salt Lake City airport.  Across from me sits a man obese enough that I wouldn't want to sit next to him on the airplane.  He crosses his right leg over his left as his left leg taps aimlessly against the ground.  He eats ice cream from a cone with a spoon.  What I find most troubling is that I have to investigate that he's not actually talking to himself but talking to a little device hooked up to his ear.  He says goodbye and starts talking to someone else.  When he returns from throwing out the paper that surrounded his waffle cone, he is finished with his conversation but leaves the black piece in his ear, prepared for his next call. 

Behind me sits three boys, I assume to be brothers.  The one to the left holds a portable PS2 in one hand and with the other hand, talks on his cellphone.  Madness.

Jimmy

To go to the Library or the Park: that is the question.

At the moment, I am unemployed.  I used to lifeguard, which worked well when I pursued a career on an Olympic Development Team as a cross-country skier, but now that I have decided to stop skiing competitively, I have also decided to put behind me the unbearably bland days of watching the water (I can think of no better euphemism).

I applied as a substitute teacher and hopefully, I get enough work to subsist [If not, the money I make from adsense will have to do (I made two dollars yesterday and before that I had a running total of one cent) Indeed, I was psyched –nay amazed –to see that I had made two dollars].  But in everything there is comedy and I couldn’t help from laughing when I was reading an article in The New Yorker yesterday called “The Death of Kings: Notes from a Meltdown” and I made it three quarters of the way through the article, when I came to a paragraph that branded shame into my complacency.  It was exactly the same as the one transcribed below:

“Economists like to draw lessons from Japan’s lost decade –to see in its example of zombie banks, futile half-measures, mass denial, and a moribund Nikkei a primer in how denial doesn’t pay.  But human nature holds sway, down even at the level of the neighborhood.  In Japan, during the long stagnation, men who had lost their jobs but couldn’t face the shame of telling their neighbors would dress up for work and then spend the day in the library or the park.” 

I can’t say that I get up in the morning and don my red shorts and shirt that bears the word GUARD –made more prominent by the fact that I decided to drop down to a size small once my sinewy ski muscles atrophied accordingly, but by the time I finish the above article on our financial predicament, I will have already finished the article in a park, half a mile from where I began it in the library.  The librarians, perhaps out of pity, give me the old New Yorkers so that I don’t have to bore myself by spending all of my day in one place.

What is it about these two locations that evade the percolations of that rudely awakening existential question that totters over the edge of any café counter or coffee kiosk as we culpably ask for a short, still maintaining some length, black, yet rarely done, latté grandée, a lifestyle that given the circumstances, is currently unsustainable.  And we think that the frothiness, of which we request double, will bury the question.  But the question is everywhere: in the cents we spend on it, in the scents that emanate from it, and in the sense, of which there is none because this question will steam its way to the surface of any espresso, will separate anything we attempt to stir into it, will burn through any enjoyment we try to sip from it.  Fortunately, for me, I have never liked coffee.

Perhaps the park is too windy and too bright for the aroma of such dark flavors and my skimming façade of studiousness in the library is sufficient to suppress any intellectual uncertainties.  Or perhaps, it is just because the visitation of each of these places is free; where as if I even tried to squat at a coffee shop, the empty cup left at my table would be laden with the residue of guilty grinds.

In my worst days, I visit two parks.

But sometimes it is in our own dregs of disgust that the ego flicks the switch of its survival mechanism, which involves putting the attention not on you but on others; a light bulb lit in my head that suggested I could use my time in the park to sit and judge others.  I already know all the aphorisms: that when I point a finger, three point back at myself or before I judge someone else walk a mile in their shoes and you should remember this when you think to judge me.  Got to go.

Body Building

 

I sit in the library, at the computers, two seats down from a man in a collared shirt with a more pinkish than beige hue. Cuffs are rolled to just below his elbows revealing a Casio watch with a calculator accessory. His tennis shoes are all black and possibly Velcro.  He tucks them beneath the plastic chair. He is mostly bald but the hair that remains is long and slicked back to the nape of his neck. He is only a little overweight but it doesn't manifest on his face. He doesn't wear glasses but would look more sophisticated if he did. Next to his keyboard sits a piece of paper that once belonged to a pad but has been ripped away. On it is a cheap tie dye plastic pen.

The only reason I notice a man in such detail is because he notices me.  Or rather, I think he objectifies me as a conscious being that might be able to empathize as a fellow sufferer of the slow internet.

"Its like dial-up"

"What's that," I say.  There is a girl at the last seat on the other side of the computers but it is obvious that he talks to me.

"The internet, its like dial-up," he pauses for a couple of seconds as if he is a lawyer in a courtroom and he has just bequeathed his opening statement.  He continues with the evidence, "I am trying to load a picture here and it’s coming up in inches at a time."

Dial-up is a term he remembers much better than I do.  Dial-up petered out in my fledgling years of elementary school.  I do not need the speed of the internet; he has not found sympathy.  I look over at him and disinterestedly acquiesce, "yeah."

But even that's not enough.  He has broken the ice and from there he slips into conversation.

"I'm looking at this body builder.  It says here she weighs two hundred pounds and they call that skinny."

I hesitate to respond.  They say that silence can at times be one of the more potent forms of speech.  Maybe he takes it as a sign of active listening.  Or maybe he isn't even aware of my disinterest, doesn't even care.  His case with the internet is closed; now that he has found someone to talk to he is content to wait for the loading of the picture.

"This one here is six foot eight."  He looks over at me.

I respond, "and that's a girl."

He corrects me.  "A female.  I like to look at female bodybuilders."  He considers it an important distinction.  As if I was accusing him of pedafiliac acts.  He vindicates himself and continues, "I used to be really into body building –much more amateurs than pros.  The pros get too big for me.  I try to keep following it but if your not down in LA," he takes his left hand and throws it up in the air as if this body language serves as adequate punctuation to end a sentence, or at least that is how I translate the ambiguous gesture.  "Most of it goes on down there, I still try to follow it but," he repeats the same motion suggesting that he has completed the paragraph.

For the next ten minutes, except for the obnoxious scraping on the sides of the library in preparation to paint, silence ensues.  In that time he is avidly focused on the computer screen.   So much so that the strain on his eyes is too much and he picks up his sunglasses, which up to this point have lay aft of his pen, and places the stems around his temples.  They are large and circular but not quite aviators and have plastic rims.  They are much too large for his face.  Eminem's "Eight Mile" starts to stream through the headphones at his computer cubicle.  He dons them over his sunglasses onto his ears as if he will not be able to take in the full experience of the web page without the added element of sound.  His expression remains unchanged.  His lips are apart: not like a man drooling but like a man deeply entrenched with concentration and a lack of self-awareness.  Every now and then he picks up his pen, scratches his forehead, and jots something down.  He suggests his departure by picking up his pen, rotating it so that the clip faces away from him and fits it over the ledge of his left breast pocket.  He then folds his piece of paper and places it in the same pocket.

I hear the printer warm up.  It piques my interest; I assume it is his.  He ruffles in his seat, takes off his sunglasses, looks intently at the screen once more, gets up, and fetches his sheet from the printer in the center of the room.  He retrieves his sheet and peruses it for a few minutes and then as he nears me, lowers the sheet and points, "see, that's the gal that's six eight." 

By now, two more people have sat down at the table of computers.  Nobody seems to notice.  Nobody seems to consider as I would, if he hadn't already informed me of his obsession with bodybuilding, that he could be holding pornography.  I look. Unimpressed, I nod my head, "oh yeah, hmmm."  It is not just the six foot eighter but a collage he has assembled of an amalgam of body builders.  He stands at his computer, logs out, puts his glasses back on his face.  As he walks by he lowers the sheet once again to give me one last look as he leaves, "I can't imagine that a gal could be that tall."

It is a statement; he doesn't expect a response.  As he approaches the front desk, he holds the paper out readying himself to show the librarian, like a child eager to demonstrate his productivity.  He leans on the desk and slides it over to where she stands, behind her computer.  I see his lips move.  The lady who has maintained an expressionless face up until now releases a forced smile probably pondering in the back of her head, with this sheet in front of her, whether this is an appropriate use of the computers and wonders what would be the most effective way of reprimanding this elderly but infantile man.  But before she finishes her thinking, he says one last thing, smiles, and walks out the door.  She goes back to the computer.  And I wonder, has this man discovered his passion?

What it Means to be Jewish in Five Hundred Words or Less (yeah right)?: The Reflections of my Jewish Roots through a Recollection of Past Rosh Hashanah Experiences Spent in Services at the Synagogue.

A lot of times what we don't want to remember, we suppress.  There in lies the problem for most mid-twentied Jewish men (at least those I went to Hebrew School with) –the conflicting predicament in answering the headliner question. How do you remember what you have suppressed?  Should you try to remember what you’ve suppressed? 

I do see the cathartic potential in this exercise but I also question the safety of confronting past emotional traumas in the absence of an experienced therapist.  What if I were to trigger that one memory that opens the dam to a reservoir of memories that up until now, have floated placidly below the surface, unleashing the titans to teeter my ship just enough to cast me overboard to be engulfed by a whale –not the tale of Jonah but of Jimmy.  


Moreover, I don't want to mislead you that my self-hypnotic undertakings will flagellate anything to the surface; it is very possible that my mind, in order to protect me, could shake itself blank of my etch-a-sketch tracings of any unwanted memories.  For those of you who have studied psychology, you are also aware of the number of studies that demonstrate the susceptible nature of the fickle and fragile childhood memories to implantations from others; therefore, I can’t promise the complete veracity of any of my recollections.

Lets start with what I do remember.  I remember being happy that I didn’t have to go to school because it was a Jewish holiday but then being told that we had to go to services at the Synagogue (there was a "temple" closer to our town but this was for the less Jewish people so we traveled to Burlington to the... "Synagogue"). If my dad was feeling extra Jewish, he would announce that we were going to 'Hillel' (Hillel is the Jewish slang for Synagogue: like one would refer to Sean Combs as Puff Daddy, P. Diddy -Diddy for short -Puffy, and/or Sean John).  It was already a barrage of mixed emotions –feelings of deceit and sometimes betrayal for a confused adolescent –while I didn’t have to go to school, I was confronted with a questionably more tedious and monotonous, over all potentially worse, scenario.

I cringe when I hear the word "Hillel"...probably equal to the amount your Grandma would upon hearing Puffy perform Victory with Biggie Smalls.  We all have our trigger words that snap us from our hypnotic trances: this particular word alerts me to the subtle indoctrination of subliminal suggestion that I was being subjected to over the years in hopes that my father would, like a rock wearing away from years of water flowing over it, slowly overtime, insinuate that my mostly atheistic family has Jewish roots more tenacious than we do.  Or rather, not that our Jewish roots hadn’t at one time thrived deep beneath the surface but that upon their uprootal, which possibly began with my generation, you couldn't just take a spade and dig another hole and everything would be fine.

But it’s one reason I love my dad –that although he was brought up in Brooklyn where he suffered through Hebrew school five days a week, each session being longer than my two hours I was forced through twice a week, he didn't try to bequeath to me this hand-me-down generational suffering, which parents are so wont to do these days.  Instead, he realized that our ancestors who escaped from the deserts of Egypt (thanks to god's outstretched hand) had already suffered enough, which was only embittered by the fact that the only food they had time to consume was matzah.  Trail mix (or gorp as some people ridiculously insist on calling it), which would’ve been far preferable, was not invented until years later.

But that is the Jewish quagmire for each lost soul half-assedly raised to be purportedly Jewish.  For some reason, parents fail to realize that if they Bar Mitzvah a child (which contrary to what it used to be –a celebration of entering manhood –is now instead, a celebration for no longer having to go to Hebrew school and coincidentally, getting a lot of money) a Jewishness will not be brand into him.  So do I let 5,770 years wash down the drain because I am too lazy, disinterested, or insolent to bear the torch of tradition; it seems like that would leave a stained ring of guilt on the font of my conscience.  But on the other hand, should I really winnow the amount of minnows in the pond because of my dad's lackadaisical insistence that I marry a Jewish woman?  Although, college opens your eyes in many respects –for me it dilated my pupils to the fact that there was no dearth of beautiful Jewish women –it’s only shortly after I passed through the camel's eye of a needle’s ingress into the ‘real world’ that I realized I was duped by that alma mater of mine -that it truly was a microcosm for absolutely nothing.   

But let’s be honest, I live in a place where the number of unoccupied girls are few and far between.  Of the four girls I have had, to revert to the schoolyard term, ‘crushes’ on –none of whom I know to be Jewish, although this isn’t one of my first inquiries–all of them have had boyfriends, all of whom they were ‘in love with’: none of which abided here, all either living in similarly exotic places as San Francisco or off in Alaska valiantly fighting wild fires.  Of the one Jewish woman I did meet, a happenstance encounter out at a nearby hot springs, she would soon be departing to Africa.  It was for this reason that I discovered her religious orientation because she inserted an addendum that ‘therefore, she wouldn’t be fulfilling her mother’s wishes of taking a Jewish doctor’s hand in marriage’.  I told her that although I was not yet a doctor, and didn’t really have any intention of becoming one, I had completed three quarters of my pre-med requirements.  But it was too late, she had made up her mind, she was defecting to Africa.

And it’s not a lack of effort on my part, its not like I’m just sitting back reclining in the hot water of a sulfurous spring waiting for some Jewish princess to bubble up next to me; when I first arrived in Sun Valley, I went to a picnic with the Jewish Community, a minuscule colony at that, hoping to find that one girl who had been suckered into going to the event with her family and sitting down next to her, ideally off and away from her parents, perhaps at the children’s section quarantined from the ridiculous rituals, and being her knight at the round table (they did indeed use round tables), caressing her left hand, while our right hands held the stems of crystal wine glasses, our arms interlinked as our wine glasses clink, the swissssh, swissssh of the Manischewitz oxidizing as we jostle our wrists back and forth, allowing the centrifugal force of our glasses to commandeer the swirling substance around and around as we raise them to our mouths, sniff, and slowly sip. 

And as we bring the glasses down in sync, me lulling her with my deeply resonant but softly soothing voice, “see its not that bad, even if some of them are borderline wackjobs, we still have each other.”  And each of our hands saying shalom as they meet and then pass by, our arms outstretched to the other’s mouth, our fingers gently delivering hummus atop falafel spread onto a bagel adorned with locks. 

But alas, the only people who sat at the children’s table were children, jubilating with their Jewish coloring books too young, too content, too conditioned for my liking and apart from that table I was surrounded with Cougars in their fifties, the contingent I sought in age absent from this gathering.  And there I sat sulking, eating hummus slathered on a crumpled Falafel, which sat on the plate adjacent to a stale bagel sans locks, answering questions concerning where I was from, why I was here, and what I wanted to do with my life and where Judaism fits into it all.  I realized my mistake far too late, having hitched a ride down to the picnic with a Jewish couple I had severely played my cards wrong, and there I would remain for another couple hours before god would outstretch his mighty hand to deliver me to freedom.

My memories must be painful; I can't even talk about them without going off into a deluge of delusional fantasy.  You get the gist.  L’shana Tova.