The Group Project #6: "A Chance Encounter"

As far back as I can remember I’ve believed that there was a little something wrong with my psychological make-up. My mind constantly wanders towards behavior that I always thought most people would think was deviant or depraved. I began feeling jaded and resentful of many of the strangers around me at a very young age and I always felt that this wasn’t the way I was supposed to operate. I often felt isolated and closed off from the world despite the fact that I grew up in the city of Chicago and was literally surrounded by millions. I just couldn’t shake the idea that my world was so small no matter how hard I tried. I became convinced at a very young age (somewhere around 10 or 11) that I was slowly turning quite insane. I talked about it pretty freely with my teachers and my family and I think I freaked them out a bit. But I couldn’t let it go… I couldn’t convince myself that the way I was feeling, the way I was viewing the world, was in any way the normal behavior for a human to display in this hyper-tribal environment. It would appear that harmony and cooperation is the only way to make this machine run smoothly, but I just couldn’t buy in.

In those pre-teen years I became obsessed with the written word as, I believe, a form of escape from the craziness I saw all around me and felt bubbling up inside. My first real love affair was with William Shakespeare immediately upon reading Macbeth. It was the most beautiful and compelling piece of fiction I had read to date and its first reading was immediately followed by a headfirst dive into Shakespeare’s world as I swallowed all I could. Everything else failed in comparison. I had always liked reading up to that point, but now it was securely a part of my life. The only problem with Shakespeare was that he kind of ruined me for other fiction. There is no such thing as a writer that writes better, more compelling, fiction then Billy Shakes (see: A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Tempest, and A Winters Tale to name some favorites). The positive result of being so spoiled by The Bard was that I began reading a great deal of non-fiction. I was always required to read poorly written history textbooks in school, but now I was doing my OWN homework (as opposed to the homework assigned by teachers, which I NEVER did). I began doing my own research on whatever topics sparked my interest at any given point. Most of these inquiries began with the encyclopedia that lived in our living room and resulted in a trip to my dad’s bookshelf or to the city library.

One of the things I became fascinated with right away was the lives of the Native Americans. The idea that the Europeans came here and changed the native’s entire way of life seemed so bizarre to me. I wanted to know everything about their culture and their day-to-day behaviors. The tribal mentality seemed appealing to me and I was very interested in how it worked and where it came from. And the more I learned about those lifestyles, the more I became aware that those cultures actually were the successors of other, even older cultures. It was chain of change that led all the way backwards to the Cradle of Life, the literal Garden of Eden, in the heart of Africa. I discovered that my new obsession had a name, and it was called Anthropology… the study of humanity.

When I talked to my dad about all of this (I believe it was around 1995… which makes me 15), he turned me on to a book called “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris. That summer I read that book cover to cover… twice… in immediate succession. Written from a zoologist perspective and reading as a biological analysis, the book is a behavioral dissection of the human animal and separates the human being from the ego and from society and simply holds it up to the light. It’s brilliant and eye opening. It’s a must read for anyone even remotely curious about any other animal on the planet. How can you understand or relate to anything before you relate to yourself?

Fast forward a few years, and a moment of fate occurred in a Village Discount thrift store on Chicago’s North Side. It was the end of the first year of the new millennium and I was home from college on what would end up being my final winter break. I was probably looking for records or a sassy jacket or something when I remember stopping to look at the books. There was a very colorful block-work cover that jumped out to me so I picked it up to see what it was. It was a book by Desmond Morris called “The Human Zoo”. Just seeing his name brought up so many questions that I had been pondering over the last five years. I instantly recalled how his other book had brought me down a path of knowledge that seemed never ending, as it left me wanting to know so much more about this animal that we all are. I left the Village that day excited and optimistic about the future.

It would be almost two years before I got around to reading it.

For two years it sat around… waiting for me. It was added to a growing collection of wonderful books that I was actually reading. I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t pick up “The Human Zoo” for so long, but I can tell you that it came at the perfect time. I had just ended a very, very long and unbalanced relationship and had made a conscious decision for the first time in years that I was going to stay single for quite some time. For the first time in since my early high school years I was not filling my headspace with thoughts if other people and how to make two peoples lives work together. I was only thinking about me and how I wasn’t making my life work for itself. There needed to be much change because I simply wasn’t satisfied.

So for whatever reason, I finally cracked open the other Desmond Morris book in the fall of 2002, and life hasn’t been the same since. Just like in 1995, I read this new book twice in a row, and in no way by choice. I felt as though I had to. I felt as though there were so many answers in those pages.

What Morris discusses in “The Human Zoo” is the nature of the human animal within the confines of the hyper-urbanized, overcrowded, techno-crazy super civilization we live in now. And he does not do it in a very happy light. He points out how there are very chaotic, aggressive and mindless behaviors and complicated, deadly diseases that animals never display or contract in the wild and how all these same maladies exist with these same animals in the confines of zoos. He draws parallels between these occurrences and the occurrence of similar situations in modern man. And thus, in this relation, the modern society becomes the Human Zoo.

The focus of the book is how modern man cannot avoid the insanity that it feels because we have over-civilized. We have gone to far from what we, as members of the animal kingdom, were designed to be. The isolation and frustration and drive to fend for ourselves, rather then the group, is a direct product of the environment that we have created around us. And there’s no regression in our future… in fact there is nothing but rapid and mind-numbing progression.

I finally got it! I finally understood why I had been feeling so insane and so misplaced for years… I WAS misplaced! And I no longer felt alone because I finally understood that everyone around me felt in some way similar, even if they didn’t acknowledge it. I began to embrace my insanity and love it for what it was. I grew an even stronger love for the urban environment that had shaped me and became obsessed with observing it. I wanted to understand every facet and the mentality that had gotten us to this point. The mental struggles and hurdles that we deal with on a daily basis are not unique unto our personal experience, but rather a shared collective struggle to deal with a society that has grown beyond our means of comprehension and control. So much of what happens in our lives is completely out of our hands… this is what I walked away with and it will stay with me forever.

Recently I discovered that this book was written in 1969. Don’t ask me why I never bothered to look until recently, but I never would have guessed. The book seems like it was completely crafted and designed for today’s over the top, technology driven world. I feel like this book, as long as our society drifts further and further toward the absurd, will be timeless. I’m sure that 1969 was a pretty scary place for someone that was apprehensive to embrace technology and isolated, urbanized society, but 2010 has taken it to the next level. The applications of this book ring so true in this time that I can imagine that Desmond Morris saw it coming. Just imagine how this book will read in 2035… I shudder at the thought.

I passed my copy on to a friend several years ago with the hopes that he would get it the way I did, and I think he did. I hope that someday he passes it on as well, as this is what you do with knowledge.

Man, I should read that book again…

The Group Project #3: "Pause, Flash"

I invest way to much emotion and energy complaining about the evils of this western society that I willingly and guiltlessly patronize on a daily basis. It’s not the way this society is run, you see, that I am upset about. It’s our influence on the other varied cultures of the world that others me. More and more you see nations across the globe “westernizing” for one reason or another. I don’t think it’s right for the entire world to look to one culture as a role model and I likewise don’t agree with any country holding itself up in that manner as a representative of model behavior. What makes the world so beautiful is the diversity of it’s people and I just hope that an over-homogenizing and graying out of cultural influence is anywhere on mankind's horizon.

Truth be told, I love consumerism! It fits just right in this country and I take advantage of the opportunity to procure more stuff all the time. I’m in love with the idea of stuff. That’s not to say technology, mind you, but just stuff. I tend to see things that I deem as “must own” all the time. I've also several times in my life now shed great quantities of stuff in an effort to simplify. I love that action and look forward to doing it again in the future.

But in the meantime… ACCUMULATE!

There are a lot of things that I’ve had for huge portions of my life that I’m sure I’ll never want to part with. A stuffed Jack Russell Terrier comes to mind… a bass guitar that I rarely play… several movies I may never watch again, but can’t leave behind. I try to not form to many relationships with items and keep in perspective that all possessions are temporary… but nostalgia is a motherfucker. Memories are strong and can keep you coming back over and over again.

My camera is something I can’t see myself getting rid of anytime soon, either. I’ve only had it a couple of years, but it’s an integral part of my existence. I’ve always loved taking pictures and trying to freeze moments and images and having something at my side at all times that makes it so easy is a luxury I’m not about to give up.

I’ve fancied myself an artist of many mediums over the years and have always romanticized about the idea of creating art that changes the collective mindset. The truth, however, is that I simply think with an artistic point of view and wasn’t able to direct my creative energy in the proper way until I started writing after college. Turns out that words were the medium I had been searching for the whole time. I wasted so much energy talking about doing that I didn’t realize that the doing was in the talking. My camera gives me a whole separate way to emote through art. It’s the moments in life that I am obsessed with and always trying to recreate somehow. So how better to do that then through capturing an image as I see it? I’m not to interested in trying to create something that is necessarily open to intellectual interpretation… I’m simply trying to convey emotion. It’s that authentic emotion that I’ve always been after in all artistic endeavors. Nothing has helped me do that more then this little hunk of plastic and metal and glass that my lover bought for me a couple years back.

The Group Project #2: "I Don't Wanna and You Can't Make Me"

I wonder how much time people really invest in thinking about the meaning of life. Has everyone devised their own truth or could it be that some people actually never give it much thought at all. Man, I think about it all the time. I couldn’t imagine at least making an effort toward ultimate wisdom… to define the underlying message in all of this.
I really think I figured it out several years ago and most of what I think about now when revisiting the subject is how I must be right because no other explanation makes sense. Sometimes I think about ways I can build onto the theory and make it even more elaborate ( that‘s a whole different essay). Sometimes I play devils advocate and try to understand people that are driven by things like success and acclaim and the need to be “something.” As far as I can tell there’s only one point to all of this and it has nothing to do competition. Life is to be lived, not raced.
All you need is love… and love is all you need.
When I first really started pondering the reason for our existence I came up with a very fun little juvenile way of looking at it all. I decided that the meaning of life was the pursuit of meaning… cute, huh? Just a constant life of a constant search. Sounds pretty damn draining in hindsight. I imagine some people live like that. That must be why so many people look so beaten in this life… they are. The world around them has won and they’ve just lagged behind… constantly searching. Now, I’m in no way knocking learning here. I love learning… it could be my favorite pastime. I hope my life sees no end to learning. But learning and searching are very different things. Searching sounds hard and desperate… learning is simply fun.
I wasn’t even searching when I decided that love was where it’s at… it just came to me. I had actually decided to stop searching and just live in the moment for a while and one day I just woke up thinking about how I needed to love things as much as I possibly could. And not just the romantic love we’re all so familiar with, but all of it. Love the air, the food, the sun and the moon. Love the sky and the trees and everyone’s face and love the joy and burden of waking up everyday. Love the most rotten, desperate, woeful times you may have because without them how would we know what really prosperous times were. Love life.
And I do… or at least I do my best to everyday. I try to stay satisfied and content with what’s around me because the whole world is so beautiful. Whatever I get to experience today and tomorrow is a gift and I just try to keep that all in perspective.
All that being said, I’ve never really been one to fantasize about trading lives or experiences with anyone. There was a time in my life where I often thought about how I would like to change or enhance certain parts of my own life (“wouldn’t it be cool if I could”, or “… if I had…”), but I’ve never been interested in abandoning my own experience. I suppose it would be very interesting to get to see the world through someone else’s perspective… but I’m talking the full monty, here. I don’t want to be me living in someone else’s shoes. It’s gotta be all or nothing. I want to feel things the way that person feels them… but then be able to remember my experience in that persons life when I return to my own. I’ll chalk it up as a learning experience. I figure that the more points of view you can relate to and connect with, the better off your overall experience in this life will be.
Contrary to how I usually feel, I am a human being, and that comes with certain emotions that we cannot deny. I do have a small group of people who’s lives I am rather jealous of and wouldn’t mind at least knowing how to get to where they are. Three of my favorite contemporary writers, Chuck Klosterman, Bill Simmons, and Richard Meltzer, all seem to be doing things the way I would love to be doing them. I mean, where do these guys get off, anyway! All they write about is what they think about the most trivial of concepts and I bet they all make a rather comfortable living at it. I could go for that. Just wake up, waddle over to the computer with caffeine in grip, and just start spewing out random thoughts and observations about the things that intrigue me the most. I mean, I guess it’s not to far from what I do in my life now, they just get to do the writing without having to stop to go to some other job that pays the bills… the writing
pays the bills.
But again, I digress. I’ve become wary over the years of using the thing you’re most passionate about to put food on the table. Don’t get me wrong here, I love my job, but it’ll never be my whole life and that’s very much by design. I don’t really like it to effect my whole life very much at all except for the time investment. I’ve tried turning art that I love into a career and all it did was make me hate the art… and that’s just really sad. So it’s a slippery slope.
And I imagine that once the pressures of selling books or meeting deadlines comes into play that it gets a little complicated. Meltzer touches on the difficulties of being an aging writer in one of his more recent book, “Autumn Rhythm.” He talks about how as a young writer under contract with a publisher that words and books would just poor out of him for years. He believed that at that pace that he could publish 30 or so books by the time he was 50 and that he could retire and live prosperously… then he realized that he was 60 and had written 3 books in the last 10 years… he’d fallen off the pace. I’ve read an article where Klosterman talked about how he felt forced to write “Downtown, Owl” (his first fully fictionalized novel) out of an obligation to the craft. He felt that if he didn’t write something that at least vaguely resembled a real book, that he was betraying his art. What a weird emotion that must’ve been to feel.
The book wasn’t very good, and I don’t say to many bad things about Chuck Klosterman. It felt forced and contrived… but what a thing it must’ve been to feel an obligation to the art itself! I don’t know if I want that.
So all in all, I am pretty jealous that some pretty wonderful people get to play with words all day and create things the way I like to create them, but I don’t know if I want to live in their shoes so much. They do a fine job at it and I don’t want to mess that up. And aside from that, wouldn’t that just mean that I had to miss something from my own experience? Fuck that, no way…

Group Project #1: "Grateful For Being Grateful"

There are only traces left of what I remember the old neighborhood to be. Being there now actually makes me feel uncomfortable. I’m sure some young professional, given the choice of Ashland and Division in 2010 or Ashland and Division in 1987, would quickly jump at the opportunity to move into the up-and-coming, developing neighborhood. The property values are sky rocketing, condos are going up everywhere, the number of coffee shops seems to be doubling every few years… in fact, I still remember when the first one opened up and myself and some local kids egged the exterior, busted in one of the windows, and spray painted things like “die yuppies, die” and “not wanted!” on the sidewalk around the little shop. Our revolution was not televised, and nobody cared. Progress will never rest in a land that has no head. If you had shown these latte swilling folks some images of the old hood from the 80’s or early 90’s though, they’d probably want nothing to do with it. Dilapidated, burnt out houses surrounded by struggling families and corner stores. Taverns on the corners and gangs and drugs rounding out our cultural influence and it was just fine by us.

I think my parents hated the old hood when my brother and I were little. It was certainly a different place then when they grew up in the area some twenty or so years earlier. Violence had risen and per capita income had plummeted. They probably didn’t feel very good about having children in such a messed up environment. However, my grandparents owned the building that I grew up in and the drastically reduced rent was all my parents could afford at the time. I’m pretty sure that they actually feel guilty about it to this day, no matter how much I’ve reassured them that I am, in fact, very grateful for the way I was raised.

We were poor people surrounded by severely poor people and my parents always made a point of pointing this out. In no way were they ever gloating or bragging… quite the contrary. My brother James and I were taught to be thankful for every little scrap of everything that we could ever get our hands on. They were running a scheme that I didn’t catch onto until I started venturing out into the world. They were constantly telling us how fortunate and lucky we were to have the things that we had. My mother in particular constantly made reference to the fact that a lot of people around us didn’t have the things we had…things like toys, hot food every night, soap, TV, a bed, hot water, new clothes, coats in the winter, shoes, two parents, any parents. No matter how much or how little we ever had, we were always being reminded that life could take it all away at any moment. There was constant reminder of how fortunate and, in fact, wealthy we were.

Let me backtrack and set a quick scene here. I grew up and spent the first twenty or so years of my life in a garden apartment on Chicago’s near west side. People got shot on a fairly regular basis somewhere within earshot. Cars caught on fire sometimes. There were more bars then grocery stores in the area and as a result, there were often very, very drunk people wandering all over… yelling things to no one for some reason. The space itself, if described in a classified add today, would probably be referred to as a very large one bedroom apartment. It was used, however, as a very small three bedroom single family home. The rooms that my brother and I would come to occupy would probably serve better as large closets or perhaps small offices. Jim and I started out sharing the room that would eventually become my parents room while they occupied on of the closets together. This would change when my brother became a teenager. My mother didn’t work until I was in school around 1985. It was a decision not enough people make anymore about being around their children during formative development years. Believe me, I understand that the fact that this happened was indeed a luxury that was a result of another luxury… I had two parents. My father most often worked two jobs, sometimes three. His primary job for the longest time was working in a metal plating factory where they used to give him a big box of Jelly Belly gourmet jelly beans every year around Christmas. At home we called this his Christmas bonus and made a very big deal about it every year. It was definitely a noted event when the company no longer sent out the jelly beans. His second jobs varied throughout the years from stocking shelves at the Jewel to delivering newspapers. My mother worked retail until she landed a sweet gig with the board of education in the early 90s. By sweet, I mean that now we had health insurance… not dental insurance, but at least health insurance. We were not wealthy... we were poor.

But you see, that’s how they tricked my brother and I. They made us think that we were so well off because of all of the blessings that we had in our life that we had no idea what poor really was. Poor was all around us. But I believe that my brother and I came to understand that poor is a state of mind. We were taught that money means nothing. It’s just a thing. Wealth is derived from love, togetherness, strength, self-security and state of mind. So much energy is always wasted on chasing after dollars.

I walked away from my adolescence, entered my adulthood, and now enter my thirties with a pretty clear perspective on this life. I owe it all to the way I was raised by the wonderful people that did the raising. They, in conjunction with that environment, helped me understand what really matters in the world. I walk through my days with two constant focuses; two thoughts that I strive to make a reality with every choice I make everyday: 1) Never accumulate more money then I could possibly need for fear of losing sight of what real wealth is… and 2) I will always be very wealthy!

Another Attempt at CyberSanity

Jesus I hate the internet! Isn't that the way with all true vices, though? You rely on them and fall back on them and consume great amounts of comfort and satisfaction from them. And then, just under the surface, you truly, truly hate them and wish that they had never entered your lives. Why do we feel so much like we need or desire these things that cause us so much grief? This, in essence, is my relationship with the internet.

I feel like I've recently conquered a similar situation as this with cigarettes... those fuckers! I started smoking to impress grrrls and generally look cool in the fall of 1994. I continued to smoke them happily and with little-to-no negative relationship with them whatsoever for a little over 10 years. I distinctly remember making a conscious decision that I was going to quit smoking on my 25th birthday because it just sounded like the right thing to do. 25 sounded like a round number and I had recently decided that I didn't want to smoke for the rest of my life.

I woke up that birthday morning in a frenzied state. I had gotten myself so worked up about the idea of quitting that I literally woke up in a panic attack. I couldn't breath right and I felt really dizzy. I dragged my sorry ass from my bed to the couch, curled up into a ball, and gently started crying. I realized that I was so powerless against the physical and mental strain that was consuming me. I derived no more pleasure from smoking anymore, why did I feel like I needed it. It had become so expensive and I was getting nothing back on my investment. That feeling of unfulfilled powerlessness was a new feeling for me and it gave me a rather bitter and putrid taste in my mouth. It was in that very moment that I began to deeply hate cigarettes. The romance was over immediately and the battle instantly began.

This very noble and valiant endeavor lasted all of about a week or so and then failed miserably!

That was five years ago....

The last time I smoked was sharing a cigarette with my beautiful lover outside O'Hare airport 5 weeks ago. We were on our way back to Portland after visiting home for a wedding and to see some family and friends. I smoked a lot on that trip. I knew I would. But I swear every cigarette I smoked came with a sense of disbelief and disdain. The last one I smoked before the trip home, though, was about a month prior. I don't know if I'll ever really win, but I'm close.

This damn cyber-box, on the other hand, is a little different. There's no emotion involved. I used to actively love cigarettes. I used to shout it from the rooftops for all to hear and spit (sometimes, in my youth, literally) in the faces of anyone who even gave me the slightest sneer. I was defending her.

I don't defend the internet. I mock it and make fun of it and berate it and rant on and on about how it's destroying the very fabric of what humanity is supposed to be... and yet every single day I can be found right here staring into the glow. It's sucking my soul...

.....sooooo anyway, I'm on blogspot now...

fancy that, this Hater Duck giving in to more interwebby devices for the sake of his own sanity. Desperately trying to claw his way out of his creative hole by writing as much as possible about as much as possible.

The internet as therapy... now there's an idea. I need to market that shit!