rip sean taylor

For those of you who don't know already, Washington safety Sean Taylor died early this morning from a gunshot wound to the leg after somebody broke into his home in Florida. I find myself much more affected by this than I would have thought I could be by the death of somebody I don't know, and don't even really know that much about. Nothing I have to say about this situation is original, so I'll spare you (and myself) the cliches. Suffice it to say that it is tremendously sad. My heart goes out to his family and especially his baby daughter. If you want to read more, here's the ESPN article about it.

what a fucking disgrace

Well, the final opportunity of my student career for us to beat Ohio State comes to nothing because our offense was absolutely execrable. That actually isn't strong enough a word. We were pathetic, disgusting, an embarrassment. Ninety-one yard of offense. Fifteen yards rushing on 24 attempts. Dropped pass after three-and-out after dropped pass. Our D played well, held OSU to just 14 points, but the offense just didn't fucking show up. Walking out of the Big House as the band played the fight song one last time was one of the most depressing experiences I can remember.

new blog...by sebi brown!

Sebi is a kid I went to high school with until senior year, when he went with his family to live in Jerusalem. He's at Juniata now, and really into immigration and border issues. He started up a blog about them, so I thought I'd give him a plug here. Here it is, you should check it out. Sebi, if you find your way to this blog anytime soon: It's been too long, man.

300!

This. Is. Spah! Ta! I still haven't seen that movie, nor do I plan to. This is my 300th post, though. Anyhow, nothing particularly interesting to report other than that I called Kucinich's scheduler back today and left another message, which I'm afraid I kind of blew by making it too snappy. Not in tone, just in a particularly phrase... I'm probably just freaking myself out. Another thing, before I head to fascism class: Reading Sidney Blumenthal's column in the Guardian today, I got to thinking about the US Civil War. Now, I generally picture the war in terms of two massive blocks, blue and grey, going at each other around the Mason-Dixon line. Those blocks are solid on the map, the whole populations covered by each are incorporated by and support them. Of course many northerners were racist and had Confederate sympathies in that they favored slavery and weren't too fond of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln didn't suspend habeus corpus because Marylanders were his biggest fans. So the blue block begins to take on a bit of nuance. But what about the South? I still can't think of anything I've read or heard about that suggests divisions in southern opinion surrounding the secession and then the war. There must have been some southerners who supported the Union, or opposed slavery. Unanimity just doesn't happen on that scale. But who were they? Did they write anything down? How were they treated by everyone else? How did they make out during and after the war? Who knows. And now I'm going to be late for class.

my legs feel like napalm

After lifting Sunday, practice yesterday and a stair workout today, my legs don't feel like jelly. They feel like PETROLEUM jelly. In bomb form. No pain, no gain, though. In more exciting news, today I talked to Dennis Kucinich (!) thanks to Jules. He wants to set up an appointment for an interview as soon as possible! I was practically having palpitations in class this morning waiting to call him. I emailed him and called his scheduler, too. I keep telling myself that I have a pretty slim chance of this going anywhere, but it's cool just to have the opportunity. Also I went and hung out with Hanna Ketai today at her co-op, which was nice because I hadn't seen her in a while. One of the things we talked about was self-expectation and optimism versus pessimism when going for new things. She tends to have really high expectations for herself and other people, so she's disappointed a lot. I tend to have low expectations for myself and other people, so I'm constantly pleasantly surprised. This happened most recently with frisbee. But her point is that the laws of attraction apply; you get in life what you think you can get. So if you think you can't get very much or go very far or make that new friend or get that job, you're less likely to get it. You are what you project, in part. It's also a lot braver to have high expectations than low ones. I'm feeling really unfocused right now, so that's enough for now. But I'll return to this theme, I think it's an important one for me. Also, at some point, to the various discussions I've had recently with people about grad school. And my senior release! I can OFFICIALLY graduate on time as of today. Now, a badly needed shower.

caetano!

Because I'm going to see him at Hill tonight, and because I haven't put up a song in a while, here's Caetano Veloso's classic "Tropicalia." Enjoy!

i mean, you don't even really have to read past the headline

This post, "White House tells Pervez Musharraf to never restrict constitutional freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism" at Crooks and Liars just kind of left me numb. It's unbelievable. What do you do with hypocrisy that deep?

short story

Well, I promised that I'd put this up once it was done, so here's my short story about being in Santiago on September 11 of last year. Hope you like it. It's called, in a stroke of creative genius, "El Once de Septiembre."

Eric took down his blazer, slacks, his one button-down shirt and tie from their hangers and laid them on the bed. Gingerly, using only his left hand, he took off the sweatshirt in which he’d slept, removing his left arm and his head before sliding it down his right arm and onto the floor. He held his right arm to his chest as he slid his pants down his legs and then took of his socks one by one. Shivering against the chill and puffing little clouds of condensed breath from the effort and pain of undressing himself, he put on his button-down shirt and his slacks and black socks. Tying his shoes was the hardest task of all. He crammed his knees into his chest and reached, panting and grimacing, until his right hand could just barely do its job in tandem with the left. The necktie he abandoned after visualizing the motions he’d have to go through in order to get it on. Last, he put on the white mesh sling that the nurse had given him at the hospital two nights earlier.

* * *

While Eric struggled to dress himself, shopkeepers across Santiago began to unlock their front doors and put their merchandise out on display. On this day, the thirty-third anniversary of General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup against the ailing socialist government of Salvador Allende, many added a Chilean flag to their front windows, or made sure to have patriotic music playing extra loud. Pinochet ruled as a brutal dictator for 17 years, and the anniversary of his rise, so long officially celebrated as a great victory in the fight against socialism, had become a day of anger and protest. In the central places, the shopkeepers made sure they had brooms ready to clear the sidewalks of broken glass, and most did not remove the metal screens from their windows at all.

* * *

In the kitchen he put on water to boil for tea and made some toast with jam and then called a cab, relishing briefly in his mastery of this small interaction in another language. As the tea began to wake him up, Eric thought about the day. It had been a perfect morning five years earlier, as everyone recalled now. But his thoughts were interrupted by a beep-beep outside: the cab was waiting.

The taxi driver smiled at him as he got in. “Buenos días, señor, ¿a dónde va usted?”

“La embajada de Estados Unidos, por favor” said Eric.

The cabbie nodded and started to drive. “¿Le molesta si subo el volúmen?” Do you mind if I raise the volume?

Eric did not mind, so he shook his head and the cabbie turned up the radio, which crackled with the iconic voice of Victor Jara, of whom Eric had never heard before coming to Chile.

“Seis de los nuestros se perdieron
en el espacio de las estrellas.
Uno muerto, un golpeado como jamás creí
se podría golpear a un ser humano.
Los otros cuatro quisieron quitarse
todos los temores,
uno saltando al vacío,
otro golpeándose la cabeza contra un muro
pero todos con la mirada fija en la muerte.”

Eric translated to himself, Six of our own were lost in the space of the stars. One dead, another beaten as I had never imagined a human being could be beaten. The other four wished to remove fear from themselves, one leaping into the emptiness, another striking his head against a wall, but all with their gaze fixed on death. “God damn,” he said out loud, but the taxi driver didn’t hear.

The taxi turned off of Los Leones onto Once de Septiembre and five minutes later they arrived at the US Embassy, where Chilean policemen in formal dress checked Eric’s passport before allowing him through the gate. A steady stream of somberly-dressed Americans preceded and followed Eric out of taxis and into the fortresslike embassy’s garden. In twos and threes they addressed each other in hushed tones, shaking their heads and clicking their tongues. In the garden, they gathered around a temporary podium by a small patch of flowers. Eric, alone, wandered off to admire the mountains to the east, beautifully lit in the morning light, and wished that Santiago’s urban planners had decided to build in a place that obscured less of the view, or perhaps to limit the height of new buildings. Behind him, the US ambassador began to speak, and Eric turned around.

First in Spanish, the ambassador talked blandly about the grief everyone present felt, the need for togetherness and cross-cultural understanding. Then he simply read from President Bush’s prepared speech for the day. “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other,” he said. The ambassador was serious but stoic and unemotional as he recited platitude after platitude.

Eric sneered and turned away. He was embarrassed by the ambassador’s execrable Spanish accent, by his lack of creativity, by the gigantic glass office buildings, by the Starbucks he knew was right down the street. This is what we have to offer to the rest of the world? Exasperated with the present, Eric slipped into the memories that had been interrupted earlier by the taxi’s arrival. He turned his mind back to the morning, five years ago, when he had been sitting in English class, close to the window, and his government teacher had walked into the room and said, “Turn on the TV.”

Ten minutes later the class was in total silence, its attention undivided as it watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center. A second plume of thick gray smoke joined the first. No one could call anyone; the cell phone circuits were jammed. At quarter to ten, CNN cut to a shot of the Pentagon spewing that same smoke from a new, gaping hole and his friend Carla screamed. Both her parents worked there, worked in that part of the E-ring. They and their offices had been blasted apart. So much grief came out of that day. Anger, too, a desire for revenge, but mostly it was just pain.

The sound of “Taps” being played mournfully by a lone bugler brought Eric back into Santiago. Marines came out and laid a wreath of flowers on a small monument next to the podium and then the mourners, perhaps 70 of them, filed out just as quietly and gravely as they had entered.

His shoulder throbbed dully as Eric walked down El Bosque towards the Metro. As he passed Roger de Flor he saw one of the other kids on his study abroad program, Lewis, on the other side of the street. He called to him and Lewis stopped and waited for Eric to cross over.

“Coming from the embassy?” he said.

“Yeah,” said Eric. “Where were you?”

“Why freeze my ass off at some ceremony? I know what happened, I don’t need them to remind me.”

“True, true,” Eric said. “I mean, it was kind of bullshit anyway, the ambassador just read Bush’s speech. He barely mentioned Chile, I wanted to be like, ‘Dude, we’re ten blocks from a street named after this date! We know what happened to us sucked, you’re the fucking ambassador, why the fuck aren’t you talking about what’s up here?’” But I thought that maybe other people wouldn’t appreciate me yelling in the middle of the ceremony.”

Lewis laughed a little. “Yeah, probably not. Where you off to now?”

“Well, I don’t really want to go home right now, you know, my family is all pinochetista and I don’t think I could handle a lecture about how great the coup was right now,” Eric said.

“Yeah, man, sucks that your family’s like that,” said Lewis. “It’s so weird that people still think that way. I mean, most don’t but so many people still support him.”

“I know, right? Where should I go instead?”

“I don’t know, man. I’m about to go to Starbucks, do some reading, if you want to come.”

“Nah, Starbucks is not what I need right now,” said Eric. “But thanks, though.”

Lewis laughed again. “Fair enough. Alright, see you mean.”

“Chao,” Eric said.

They parted ways and Eric walked the rest of the way to the station. He boarded a train and stayed on past his stop, watching as more and more people got on. No one seemed to be getting off and Eric absently wondered why. He thought about the ceremony that he had just left. It had been so sterile, so disconnected and false. Of one thing Eric was sure: Everyone there had been truly sad and had come to the embassy desiring a meaningful shared reflection and recognition of their tragedy. What they got instead was a selection from the President’s official address for the day and a wreath. They left in the same ones and twos and threes in which they had arrived, talking together in the same hushed tones as before.

At Estación Plaza Italia, the central stop on the line, the cars emptied, and Eric flowed out with the crowd through the gates and up to the vast intersection of Santiago’s main arteries. When he arrived at the top of the stairs, Eric paused and looked around and his eyes opened for what felt like the first time all day. He took in the scene that faced him. An angry crowd had gathered, chanting, banging drums, waving flags and bearing bright signs and portraits of Salvador Allende. The current of people around him dispersed into the crowd and swelled it, and the plaza rang with their fervent shouts. In the middle distance stood a line of policemen on horseback, but the throng paid it no mind. Eric saw more police peeking out of every side street up and down the main road, standing in riot gear alongside their hulking armored cars. The people around him pulsated and moved in all directions at once, but the police were very still.

His pocket vibrated: a text message. It read, “US Department of State security warning: In light of day’s events, all US citizens are advised to avoid large crowds,” and Eric was suddenly very aware that no one else in sight was wearing a blazer.
He sat down on a bench and took off the sling in order to stretch out his elbow and take his shoulder through its still-limited range of motion. Just as he was finishing this already-routine exploration of his shoulder’s pain tolerance, Eric felt the crowd snap. A great shout went up and people who had been milling about aimlessly suddenly chose a direction and started running: half towards the mounted police and half in the other direction. Eric did not know what to do, so he remained seated and watched.

A short man with a moustache stopped in front of Eric, grabbed him by the lapel and pulled him to his feet. “Qué carajo estai haciendo ahí, huevón? Ándate! Vamos!” the man shouted. What the fuck are you doing there, man? Move! Let’s go! So Eric got up and ran. Over his shoulder, he could see the mounted police advancing on the crowd, shields up against a barrage of rocks. And down the street, the armored cars were beginning to move. As he ran, Eric found to his surprise that instead of being afraid, he was exhilarated by the movement, the noise, the violence he could sense behind him. Up ahead he saw a plume of smoke and as he drew closer he realized that someone had set fire to a car parked along the sidewalk.

The flames and heat and billowing smoke transfixed Eric. He slowed to a walk and then stopped beside the car. People rushed all around him but several stopped next to him, to watch. The heat became to much and he blinked and turned away and, his concentration broken, noticed that he no longer had his sling. He wanted to go back to get it, but he realized with a jolt that the ache in his shoulder was gone. Looking back up the street, Eric saw police beating back surging young men with sticks and high-pressured hoses and felt suddenly overwhelmed by the scene, by the seething fury of the mob and the cold, systematic advance of the police. Young men, his age, alive with fear and rage, were beating at each other to commemorate the anniversary of their deeply ambivalent national trauma.

He ran again, away from the truck and the burning car, until he found himself in the lobby of a friend’s apartment building a few blocks away. He called her to no answer but then remembered that she was visiting family on the coast, so he took the elevator up to the roof and joined a small, quiet gathering of people watching the action on the streets below.

The day slouched towards twilight and then night. His fellow audience members began to move back downstairs to their apartments, but Eric could not join them. He stayed on the roof, leaning on the railing and watching as more cars went up in flames, as new skirmishes started and finished, as shop windows were shattered by stray and sometimes not-so-stray rocks. It was in the small hours of the morning when Eric finally went back out onto the street and hailed a cab to take him home. As he climbed into the taxi, his shoulder began to throb again, and he remembered his dislocated collarbone for the first time since he’d jumped up off the bench many hours earlier. He thought ruefully of the pickup soccer game where he’d injured his shoulder a few days earlier. A mid-air collision with his friend Carlos had ended with him writhing on the ground in pain and Carlos frozen between celebration for having won the header and scored a goal and guilt for having rammed Eric into the ground.

Eric smiled to himself. “Poor guy,” he thought. “At least it wasn’t confusing for me. For me, it just hurt.”

PS: I kind of hate this ending, but I couldn't think of anything that would work better there despite trying at least eight or nine different things. Any suggestions?