Filed under: self indulgence
I count the aches in my body as the weekend’s funeral procession crawls along the overpass. Still groggy from the sort of night’s sleep that happens in an unfamiliar bed, I roll my right shoulder back, trying to work out the persistent kink between my shoulder blades. I flex my big toe. This guy I used to see said it was probably tendonitis, but a small, nagging voice whispers things like gout and arthritis. I wonder if that woman over there plucking dozens of napkins out of the dispenser has problems with uric acid crystals. Swollen toe joint? Perhaps a bunion. Something. I’m sure of it. Why else would she wear such atrocious shoes?
The parking lot fills up as I stare listlessly out of the glass cafe front. Real estate agents with gaudy earrings, mothers with children in tasteful navy strollers, and retirees and their wives with their oversized taupe purses — people with no where to be at 9am on Monday morning — wander in from their SUVs and squint myopically at the menu over the barista’s shoulder.
Women with voices like hungry chickens sit down at the table next to me. One of them drops with a spectacular flop on the shared bench and it bounces like a teeter totter calling my attention to her presence and the stiffness in my back. I lift the mug to my lips but the last half-inch of liquid has gone cold.
I scoot out from behind the table, grabbing the cup from above in a clumsy, desperate way, and claim the last from the carafe. I give a half-nod to the barista then tap the empty vessel. He flashes me a smile and retrieves it from behind the counter. It’s not the first time we’ve had this exchange today.
When I turn to go back to my table, I see you. Maybe ten yards in front of me. You’re wearing that grey Batman shirt you used to wear weekly — I wonder how it has survived over the years. Your glasses, gait, posture haven’t changed. You look the same even though you’ve shaved your head. The stubble gives away that you’re going bald.
I forget you when I recount past loves. My longest relationship, but the least formative. We were together when I wasn’t yet myself. Still raw. Sore. Fetal. Too young to know that chronic boredom is a death rattle. I became bloated on frustration. Fat. Tired. Melancholy. I still can’t stop myself from blaming you.
I’m forty pounds less sad now and sporting the coiffure of the sexually satisfied. You don’t recognize me as we pass.
I get lost later in the day and turn around in the parking lot of our old apartment — the one in the hills — and regret not saying I’m sorry.
Filed under: art/writing
“Pain and suffering are in themselves bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex, or species of the being that suffers. We are all animals of this planet. We are all creatures.” [1]
We are creatures of this majestic, perverse, brutal planet. Tiny organic specks glued by forces unseen to a pebble careening through a frozen, yawning void. Our very existence is so absurd — a complex systems of cells, composing a complex systems of organs, composing a complex systems of bodies, composing a complex system of societies — that one must appeal to the probability of that which is unlikely becoming real in an infinite stretch of time and space to accept it as true. We are not special. We are a statistic.
Complex systems are doomed to fail. Our cells suffer from generation loss. Daughter after daughter after daughter, the data is corrupted, and we fall — victims of entropy, victims of our own longevity.
Every second of our lives, a battle rages inside of us. Our cells attack and kill invading organisms. Viruses, bacteria, parasites, allergens, foreign bodies. This is not merely the world we live in, but the world that we are. Microcosms mimicking Earth’s brutality.
This is the world I see. This is the world I feel when I still myself and Be. The awe I feel is an awe of terror and humility at the feet of a vast expanse that does not give a shit. The solidarity we feel with nature is a solidarity of hostility, or worse.
Herzog, near the conclusion of Grizzly Man:
…what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell, this bear was a friend, a savior. [2]
This exchange with Peter Watts (he is quite approachable for a Hugo Award winner) echoes Herzog’s sentiment:
“We enter as lords of the earth bearing strange powers or terror and mercy alike. . . [But] Human beings [should] love animals as. . . the knowing love the innocent, and the strong love the vulnerable.” [1]
Timothy Treadwell, as seen in Grizzly Man
Timothy Treadwell did not feel awe in the same way I feel it. He did not feel minuscule. He felt large enough and loved enough to go out and befriend the cold brutality, expecting that Nature would embrace him and hold him to its bosom like an anthropomorphic Mother.
A bear ate him.
We have the hubris to think we can manipulate our world to conform to our wishes. We will die and the pebble with continue to fly through space without us — Mankind, Animalkind, and Plantkind alike — implacable and impassive.
–
Sources
1. Earthlings, DVD. Directed by Shaun Monson (USA: Nation Earth, 2005).
2. Grizzly Man, DVD. Directed by Werner Herzog (USA: Lions Gate Films, 2005).
Filed under: art/writing
A fat, brown R. norvegicus heaved herself over the sooty rail into the brash of the man-made canyon. The bulge of her abdomen said she would give birth in the next day or two in some warm nook under the station. Ivy League rat pups carrying a number of infections that would kill inbred lab strains in a week. Given life and fleas during parturition. Acclimated to the vibration of approaching steel. Born to thrive off of the crumbs of Starbucks cranberry orange scones, hamburger buns discarded by the carb-conscious, and spilled vermicelli from the Vietnamese joint in the mall around the corner. Compared to albino clones destined for neoplasm and regulatory sacrifice, these were Nature’s favored children and Regina loved watching them before getting on the train home.
The dam looked up from the brown clump she’d been nibbling before human ears could pick up the chucks and grinds of the oncoming train. She was gone before the engine hit the bend and the wheels began to shriek, metal rasping metal. The Red Line had screamed her way into Harvard Station for the last three decades and no one had the inclination to silence her.
A blast of high-pressure blew black strands free from under Regina’s scarf and into her eyes as the cars flew past like a flip book of sullen and somnolent ghosts. Having waited for this train daily for a year, she knew where to stand. As the train came to a halt, the second door of the third car opened before her. She stepped aside to let three confused tourists stumble out, consulting digital maps and cursing the lack of signal. When they made their way out of the station, they’d see the lights strung like cobwebs in the skeletal winter oaks; and they’d admire new snow blanketing the lawns of the campus and roofs of brick buildings older than their home towns, and clinging to the Euclidean muntins with their peeling paint; and they’d pause to stand on warm grates in sidewalks; and they’d wrap their scarves around their faces like humid gags; and, for a moment, they’d forgive New Englanders for all of their rudeness, because they would understand that the layers of clothing that kept them insulated from the cold also kept them insulated from each other.
Regina stepped into the car. Hours after the rush had subsided, the concentration of passengers was unsubstantial. An Asian couple holding hands and gazing at vague points by their boots. A middle-aged man with a glistening scalp and underbrush eyebrows reading a tri-folded sports section. A black kid with large headphones bobbing his head and mouthing lyrics. She remained standing by the door.
As the train pulled away from the station and into the system of tunnels under the city, the glass became black. She inspected her consumptive reflection in the dark window. The fluorescents gave her normally tawny skin a sallow tinge. Cheekbones, jawline, brow accentuated by artificial lighting reflected in glass before a moving wall of earth. Eyes of deep brown turned black in their sockets under the arches of her eyebrows. Had her lips not concealed her teeth, it would have been the face of a skull draped in a forest green wool, chasing her through the depths of Cambridge.
Someone had told her that suicides in New England peak around Valentine’s Day. When the days are shortest, you wake up in the dark and you walk home in the dark. February is howling wind and perpetual night. The snow is dirty and hard. Too many months of short strides and downward gazes in the dark let you forget the tingling of sun on skin and the green of young spring leaves. When these things are forgotten, it becomes easier for paper hearts to remind you of things you cannot have. And so, she imagined, this is how the red of saccharine love becomes clots of sanguine in bathtub drains and on bedroom walls.
With a grinding and unenthusiastic announcement, the train pulled into Central. The rhythmic clang of a Salvation Army volunteer’s bell came suddenly with the opening of the doors. He stood by his scarlet easel that suspended donation pot and wreath, and swung the brass bell like a pendulum from his shoulder. Eyebrows got off. Two men wearing the navy blue, polyester coats that typically denoted “union member” got on and sat facing each other at the far end of the car, legs spread, tan work boots splashing the dark, rubberized floor with melted snow and clumps of sand. Their Southie voices were amplified by beer. The one in the Red Sox cap laughed and clapped his knee. The couple stared. The kid bobbed. The doors closed. The bell died.
She thought of her rats. The PI had been hoping to conclude this round of experiments before Christmas — three weeks from the holiday, and their tumors weren’t large enough to harvest yet. He would be going home to Minnesota and Regina would spend Christmas week sacrificing rats, taking biopsies, and making slides alone in the lab with the miniature tree in the corner, lab-mates’ stations dark, the hum of the bio hood, white bodies with thoracic incisions and cardiac seeps, and pink eyes staring deadly at her through clear, plastic shrouds.
* * *
Evan Berthold exited the maze of concrete through the libraries. The concentration of students increased exponentially as finals approached. Clusters of them around tables with bouncing knees, worried-at bottom lips, and exposed bits of scalp or scabs where pressure gave way to compulsion. He stood by the door to prepare. He wrapped a thick, cream colored scarf around his neck twice and lay the ends flat against his charcoal sweater. He buttoned the single-breasted, houndstooth coat and popped the collar as added protection from wind. Took the dark, knitted cap from one coat pocket and matching gloves from the other. Tugged over the ears and past the wrists. Messenger bag filled with reams of cryptic writing and slim books of dense ideas slung across his body, and nestled in the small of his back. He checked for his wallet in the right pocket of his coat.
Beyond his reflection in the exit doors was darkness punctuated with the glow of yellow lamps suspended from high poles and sides of buildings and office windows of dedicated geniuses with their brown and crisp potted plants and labs filled with the next generation that would neglect plants in favor of chalk. A storm was approaching and large clumps of flakes were beginning to drift on the other side of the glass. They lingered in the air like frozen feathers and settled on the shoulders of passing students and scientists and clung to sidewalks already covered in the re-frozen grit of sand and that afternoon’s melt. The drifting snow gave way to the pattern of his coat and he focused on the image of his own face in the glass, smeared with the fingerprints of undergrads too hurried to aim for the word PUSH on the frame of the door.
Dr. Berthold was an aloof man of 31 years. His grandmother said it was something in the water in Madison that made the boys grow so tall, but his suspicion was that genetic material from his now-dead father caused him to be 6’3.” Similarly, he had inherited a narrow frame, large nose, small chin, and insistently straight hair that extended from his scalp like hay-colored quills. He could blame Wisconsin for the accent, though. For someone who looked and sounded very much like a mid-western farm boy to be a professor of mathematics usually came as a surprise.
He brought a finger up to his nose and pressed the bridge gingerly. It was still sore but not bruised or swollen. He was right to have not called the police. The time was better spent on research. He took the bend of grey steel in his hand and pushed. Heavy air forced its way inside and he stepped out into the icy down. The cold felt good on his nose.
Flakes clung to The Big Sail on all sides wherever they touched the frozen black curves of its surface. Geometric planes arching up into the limitless sky, webbed with rounded sheets of steel. The sculpture was supposed to be reminiscent canvas tugging huge ships through the sea, captured in a single moment, and anchoring the court. Berthold thought the five-legged mass looked closer to an oddly bound Togliatti surface than organic billows. A strange intersection of art and algebra.
He walked briskly through the gauntlet of concrete and glass, carried by the raw efficiency of long legs and practical shoes. Past bare trees catching puffs of snow on their branches and hanging icicles — glistening and ochre under the tall lamps. Past the abandoned tennis courts and their dusted, chain link enclosures. Left on Ames Street.
Follow the sidewalk — avoiding the groups of students walking shoulder-to-shoulder, hands in pockets, exchanging tense phrases in Korean, Russian, and Hindi — until the intersection at Main. Turn right — glancing up to check for irritable people driving luxury cars through the snow — cross Ames. Follow the sidewalk. Descend into the station.
Berthold bit the middle finger of a glove and pulled his hand free to remove the wallet from his pocket without stopping. Pressed the leather bulk to the black, plastic rectangle on the turnstile. The Plexiglass gates parted. He knew where the doors of the train would stop and came to a halt on the precise point he stopped on every evening.
* * *
The second set of doors of the third car opened at Kendall. A tall, thin, stooped man got on and sat on the edge of the seat immediately next to the doors without looking at Regina or the other passengers. He removed his hat revealing a spectacular mess of spiky gold hair graduating down to sideburns framing his long and unshaven face. He looked like he wanted to curl up into himself like a snail shy of the sun — shoulders tucked forward and up, head down, elbows on knees, and hands clutching the mass of knitted material under his chin.
“So ah says tah him, ‘It ain’t my fault you keep cloggin’ up the plumbin!’ An’ he says tah me, all uppity-like, ‘I wouldn’t be cloggin’ tah plumbin’ if you union pricks did half ah the work I pay you to do.’ So I punched him,” the man in the ball cap said.
“Fahkin’ ovah-educated types. Spend all day with their noses in books and can’t use a plungah when they clog up the shittah!”
The long-faced man sat back on his bag and, alarmed, looked over at the conversing men in their work boots and blue coats. Despite his obvious nervousness, he had the expression of curiosity that illuminates the faces of intelligent men. As he was turning back to center, Regina smiled at him. A rivulet of blood ran from his nose and onto the white scarf tucked into his overcoat.
“Your nose is bleeding,” Regina said quietly, touching her upper lip.
The man brought the back of his hand to his nose and pulled it away, covered in a slick of crimson. His face grew pale and pinched. He stuffed his clean hand into each of his pockets apprehensively and, coming up with no napkin or tissue, pressed a glove to his nose.
“Oh! No, here, I have a tissue,” she said, rifling through her sizable purse, pulling out a neat plastic envelope of Kleenex.
She stepped forward and held the open pack out to the man. He took one and held it under his nose. A poppy of blood bloomed on the tissue within seconds. He pulled it away. A small pool collected in his philtrum, his stubbled chin was streaked, and it dripped freely onto his scarf. He glanced at the tissue and then up at Regina, clearly nauseated. The damp tissue was wavering in his shaking hand.
“It’s OK, a lot of people don’t like the sight of blood. It doesn’t bother me — I see it all day. Here,” she said, sitting next to him, “let me help. Just a nose bleed. Bad one, but it’ll stop in a second. Tilt your head back and pinch. Like this,” she cupped the back of his head and pressed a fresh tissue over his nose, tipping his head back.
She felt the muscles at the base of his skull tighten. He turned a grey eye to her and then stared up at the ceiling of the train car, giving himself over to the care of stranger.
* * *
Feeling embarrassed and utterly helpless, Berthold had let the woman take his head in her hands. The initial discomfort of being touched started to subside when he looked at her face from the corner of his eye. Her mouth was tight — half bemused, half pitying his situation. Eyes round and brown with straight black lashes. Her skin was the healthy tan of people from places beyond Europe and there was a flush in her cheeks. The soft tissue of her breast was pressed to his shoulder through the padding of coats and scarves. Her thigh against his. One breath. Two. He looked at the fluorescent bulbs above his head. Five breaths later, he took hold of her hand and pulled it from his face and pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand. She shifted away from him, settled back into the seat, and gave him a fresh tissue.
“Thank you, miss,” he said, letting his head fall forward again, and began dabbing at his face with the proffered Kleenex.
“No trouble at all,” she smiled, closed-lipped, and forced a small laugh through her nose, “You alright?”
“Ah, yes. Too much time with the nose in books. Can’t handle blood. Or toilets, I guess,” he gave a subtle nod towards the men at the end of the train car.
“You?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Me. Assaulted by a plumber in my apartment bathroom this morning. I did call him a prick, though, so perhaps I had it coming.”
“Small world,” she smirked and peered over his shoulder at the men.
Although the Asian couple was watching them intently, the men were talking animatedly about sports. Miraculously, they hadn’t noticed the bloodshed at the other end of the car. Regina took the man’s hat from his lap and tugged it over his hair.
“You’re awfully distinctive looking. Don’t want you to get popped again. I’m out of tissues.”
“I think I’ll be getting off at MGH and ducking into another car.”
“Not a bad idea,” she smiled broadly.
* * *
As doors slid open with a hydraulic hiss something hit the window above Regina’s head. Startled by the sound of multiple pounds of flesh striking the train, she sprung from her seat. A swath of bloody striae stretched down the window. Berthold stepped out onto the tiled platform to see a large bird at his feet, sprawling in all directions. Its long, dark neck had folded back on itself. One wing lay stretched out from its body and shuddered. Black, webbed feet thrust out and retracted spasmodically.
Regina pushed past the half-dozen passengers clustered around the animal and knelt by its side. Her green scarf fell forward over her eyes; she ripped it off and threw it aside in irritation. Berthold moved behind her, hands in his coat pockets, frowning, watching reluctantly.
“What is it?” from the Asian woman in her black pea coat, tall boots, and Burberry plaid scarf. Berthold heard someone talking to the driver through the set of set of concentric holes in the back of the car.
Small droplets fell from under the extended wing to the brown tiles. A pool of supernatural scarlet was spreading from the creature’s bill, clotting in the geometric angles of grout. Flakes fell and were consumed by the warmth on the bird’s blood.
“Eh, Frank! Check it aht! Ah fahkin bird hit the cah!” the plumber in the Red Sox cap proclaimed with unabashed zeal.
Regina spread her hands out over the animal like a faith healer, an inch above its bent and gore-mottled feathers. The snow was heavy now, and was sticking in clumps to the animal’s back and wings. Slipping down the back of Regina’s pale green, quilted coat and nesting in the curls of her dark hair. Melting on Berthold’s warm cheeks and catching in his lashes and the folds of his spattered cream scarf. The driver approached through the haze densely falling snow, puffy, dark, and shapeless in thick, winter garb.
“Hey, lady, birds is dirty,” the kid had taken off his headphones, “They’s got Lime Disease. Don’t go gettin’ ticks. It ain’t none uh yo bidness.”
She touched its wing and the animal flinched. Its neck jerked, impotently, to the side and its bill gaped open. It gasped and exhaled quickly. Small red bubbles burst from its nostrils. Agonal breaths. She covered her mouth. Thick drops oozed where bubbles had formed. It didn’t take another breath. Berthold put a bare hand on her back when her shoulders began to heave like waves under the quilted padding of down. She leaned into his long thighs, hiding her face from death.
“Eh, Frank! Get the fahk ovah here! It’s ah fahkin dead swahn!”
“Actually,” Berthold said, the snow in Regina’s hair melting under his palm, “it’s a Canadian Goose.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
A weird loneliness has crept in over the past week. Losing people leaves holes in your life that they used to fill. Gaps in your thoughts, openings in your schedule, words unsaid. I’ve been filling in those holes with work — math, specifically. But last weekend I had nothing to do. Nothing. Going to school full time and not a single problem to complete. I went beserk on my apartment and cleaned everything I could find, ran every errand I could run… just to not be alone with my own thoughts. Then, after I had decoupaged my coasters, I had nothing to keep me from feeling the sullenness of failed relationship creep in.
I’ve been alone with that for five days now. It always happens like this — when you start to feel the loneliness, you start to think back on past lovers.
The most vivid of them were usually the shortest lived. The most intense experiences were had when two lonely people collided. Lovers offer a respite from the plodding journey and the rote interactions of daily life. A displaced Californian programmer when I was 18. A historian having a premature midlife crisis when I was 25. Individuals as exposed in mind as in body. Hands on skin. Debates. Sweat. Exchange.
They leave no physical trace of their presence but impregnate each others’ minds with memories of temporary closeness and ideas that can only be transmitted in the nude.
Pillow talk involving anarchism and sizes of infinity. Intercourse and discourse immortally entwined.
Filed under: self indulgence
Not too long ago, a coworker at the hospital found a Buddha on the side of the road with both arms broken off. He later gave the figure to me. At times like now, I not only do my best to curb the tendency to want, but try to remember that succumbing to the inability to control circumstance may be the only way to tolerate uncertainty. Impotence is, at best, an uncomfortable feeling. For someone who thinks in terms of possibilities, chronically speculates, and plans as if it were a symptom of OCD… Being powerless is waterboarding for the mind.
Over the past six months, I have managed to disentangle myself from an identity that no longer serves me now that I am not accommodating my illness. No longer obsessed with embracing transience (relationship, mood, location, etc.), I’m starting to make progress in the direction of a suitable career, contributing to a cause that I care about, developing close relationships, taking better care of myself physically, and contemplating starting a family of my own. These goals are obtainable, and I’m obtaining them with an ease that I would have found impossible a few years ago.
I recently became involved in a long distance relationship. My first serious relationship since March of 2009. With every passing year — every passing relationship — I get closer to knowing not merely what I desire, but what I need. This person has the potential to be both. It is exciting, terrifying, and baffling.
When one sits down to conjure their perfect mate, they imagine his or her physical features, interests, personality, sexual proclivities, life goals, domestic compatibility, and so on. As a planner, I do this in extreme detail — almost to the extent that the standards would be impossible to satisfy. So, imagine my surprise when I came across someone who satisfies them extraordinarily well on paper. Even more surprising when there is mutual attraction.
He has obligations tying him in one city for the next few months, then will be abroad for a year. I have obligations here in Austin for the next two years. The timing lines up neatly; there’s even an active plan. Hoops to jump through. Compatibilities to test. If things go well over the next few months, we go on to the next six-month round of waiting and correspondence. Then another round. What happens at the end of that? How can I look forward and determine if waiting a year-and-a-half for a man I’ve known just seven weeks will be worthwhile?
The question, “What do you want?” has been volleyed. What I want is to settle down. I want to be done with school, in a career, married, and starting a family five years from now. I’m done with the restless period of my life, and I’m anxious to create something stable and satisfying. It’s a twisted game of Russian Roulette where no one wants to say, “If we get through the 18-month obstacle course, I think you’d be worth marrying.” That’s an insane thing to say to someone you’ve known for so short a time, and easy to misconstrue as an attempt to corner and capture them like big game. So in our delicate treatment of the subject, for fear of scaring the other person off with an extreme level of intensity, we’re circumventing the very discussion that needs to happen. Neither one of us would be involved in a long distance relationship if it weren’t for this perfect storm. I don’t know if it can wait to be discussed until he comes to visit in March, or if the revolver will go off before then.
Due to the nature of the relationship being a variable, any attempt to plan for two years from now is futile. All I can do is see him in March, again in six months, and then in a year to determine what will happen. The huge swaths of time between visits allow him ample time to decide it’s not worth the investment, or meet someone else, or simply tire of me. I’m deeply worried, feeling extremely vulnerable, and almost anticipating ultimate rejection. An equal low to match the high I’ve been feeling since I last saw him.
This is where Buddha comes in. There’s nothing to cling to yet. It hasn’t had a chance to solidify. I need to relax my grip and allow events to unfold as they may.
Or perhaps I just need a strong drink.
Filed under: self indulgence
I started 2009 confused and rough. The year chewed me up and spat out a softer, more sentimental Ash than I can recall myself as ever having been. I consider the first 25 years of my life to be a false start. My life, as I want it to be, began this past year.
Volunteering at the state mental hospital in the Peer Support program forces me to repeatedly rehash my family history. Given the Jerry-Springer-ness of it, one would think that this would be traumatic. But much like repeating the same word over and over again, it begins to lose meaning and becomes abstract, an academic curiosity, distant to me as the Iran-Contra Affair, defanged. For this and countless other reasons, my experience at the hospital has been invaluable.
For a long time, I skirted the subject of my family. At first, I’d refuse to respond to inquiries — angry, lonely, and still stinging sharply from the first eighteen years of my life. Then I minimized. Sometimes I’d lie and say that my biological mother was dead. I’d shrug my shoulders at my father’s death and mutter, “Don’t worry about it; you didn’t kill him” to those who instinctively apologized for my loss. I didn’t want to deal with the stigma of a broken family. I didn’t want to be perceived as damaged goods. Then rage and self defense. I hated my biological mother so intensely — the pain of rejection and abandonment melted and left a hard pit of independence. I felt as though I were without family, alone.
I moved back to the Northeast, in part, to be closer to my aunt and uncle. My aunt had been in poor health and had had a close brush with death that was not communicated to me at the time because I was too far away (in Austin) to do much besides worry. Faced with the prospect of her dying and being unable to see her before that happened prompted my return.
I visited them frequently over the next year and a half while living in Massachusetts. I loved everything about it. I loved the drive down (two hours from Boston, breaking 100 mph multiples times in my new, light, beautiful car). I loved her exuberance when meeting me at the door. My uncle’s good-natured stoicism. Helping in the kitchen. Knocking back beer and playing cards with my uncle until after midnight (he’s still my favorite drinking buddy). Picking marigold seeds completely sloshed on glühwein. Badmitton for hours on Heineken. (Detecting a pattern here…) They are relaxed, content, joyous people who love, accept, and support me as I am and as I wish to be. Each visit felt like a celebration. I slowly realized that I was not without a family. I had a perfect, chosen family.
In addition to my aunt and uncle, I also had Dr. McAwesome at home. He is, to this day, the person to whom I am closest. He receives the uncensored, unembellished truth, processes it rationally and returns in the same fashion. He shares my hobbies, my curiosity, my desire to spend quiet hours indoors, and my domestic patterns. He is brilliant, affectionate, accepting. He is irreplaceable and I will love him forever no matter what the form of our relationship.
When I moved back to Austin, I moved in with a close friend, and quickly made other supportive, mature, and fascinating friends that I admire and love sharing optimistic thoughts and time with. Musicians, artists, nerds. Passionate, intelligent people. People I want in my life forever. That will come to my wedding, that I will call at Christmas, that I will weep for when they die someday.
In short, I am surrounded by awesome human beings. Even Dr. McAwesome’s mother, who wrote me the sweetest, most earnest thank you email for a scarf I sent her for Christmas. My new family is an oddly shaped tree worth embracing, and I heartily thank my biological mother for leaving the month of my 18th birthday. My life will be rich and filled with love.
Happy New Decade, y’all!
Filed under: nerdtastic
1. Establish which qualities are most important to you in a mate (e.g. intellectual compatibility, domestic compatibility, child rearing, sexual compatibility, mutual hobbies, etc.).
2. Assign these qualities a score between 1 and 5, indicating level of importance relative to each other. If you are uncertain of the importance of a quality for whatever reason – possibly uncertain if it will come into play, such as “child rearing” – assign that quality an arbitrary variable.
3. Score the individual on how well they satisfy each quality. I used a 1-5 interval again, but you can increase your interval for greater precision.
4. Multiply the individual’s score for each quality by the relative importance of that quality and add the individual quality scores together for one overall score.
5. (optional step) You can translate this raw score into a percent satisfaction grade by dividing the raw score by the maximum satisfaction (relative importance by max possible grade, add all scores).
Please note that you need to isolate variables, if you use them, as they will alter grades when/if they come into play.
(This is how the world appears to an INTJ.)
Although the ethics of clinical investigation are currently based upon voluntary and informed consent of the subject, it was not until the mid-Twentieth Century that federal legislation provided ethical safeguards in biomedical research involving human subjects. Largely as a response to “reported abuses of human subjects in biomedical experiments, especially during the Second World War” and the Tuskegee experiments, the United States began to define basic ethical principles in medical research in the late 1970s (“The Belmont Report”). Until guidelines were provided by the American Medical Association and laws were enacted that created such entities as Institutional Review Boards, human research went largely unregulated in the United States leading to the exploitation of the infirmed, incarcerated, and ignorant.
The international cornerstone for research ethics came on the eve World War II: the Nuremberg Code. The first paragraph of the Code reads:
The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
While the experiments of Mengele and Ishii receive great historical attention, the United States cannot claim ethical purity before or after the advent of the Nuremberg Code.
Concerns regarding human experimentation arose in the late nineteenth century, with the roots of the movement planted firmly in animal antivivisection soil. Humane organizations began to include child welfare in their aims in the 1870s, likening the innocence and helplessness of children to that of animals (Lederer 29). Although argued from fallacy, antivivisectionist warnings that animal experimentation would inevitably lead to human experimentation were, ultimately, not without credence. Multiple cases of human experimentation in the 1890s, both in the United States and abroad, fueled apprehension. Foremost was the case of an Italian bacteriologist, Giuseppe Sanarelli who, in 1897, claimed to have isolated the causative agent of yellow fever. During his research, Sanarelli inoculated five of his patients with the inactivated agent, claiming to have produced symptoms of yellow fever (Lederer 49). In another instance, Swedish researcher Carl Janson selected fourteen orphans as test subjects over calves, owning to affordability, in his experiments on smallpox (Lederer 51). In the United States, George Fitch’s syphilis experiments on young leper girls, Henry Berkley’s use of mental patients in thyroid extract trials, and Arthur Wentworth establishing the safety of spinal taps on children did nothing to allay concerns (Lederer 61).
By 1900 the first stirrings of regulation on human experimentation had reached the federal level. Closely linked to the issue of animal experimentation, the aforementioned cases of human experimentation appeared as Senate Document 78 which was entered into the minutes during a Senate hearing on a proposed animal cruelty bill (Lederer 62). Senator Gallinger of Ohio, the originator of Senate Document 78, later introduced Senate Bill 3424 — the first proposal on a federal level to regulate human experimentation (Lederer 71). As a precursor to future legislation, Senate Bill 3424 aimed to protect those incapable of informed consent and proposed procedural oversight (United States Cong.).
Although the American Medical Association’s Council on the Defense of Medical Research circulated a set of codes pertaining to animal research that were, in some form, adopted by fifty-nine of out of seventy-nine medical schools contacted in 1910, the American Medical Association (AMA) could reach no consensus regarding human subjects (Lederer 73). According to Susan Lederer, “Clinical investigators would continue to work without any formal guidelines until the 1940s, when the AMA amended the code to require voluntary consent of the subject and prior animal testing” (74).
At the heart of the ethical issues surrounding human experimentation lies informed, voluntary consent. By current standards, a subject must comprehend both the potential risks and potential benefits of participating in a study as well as feel no coercion to participate. While the nature of comprehension is still very much debated, the AMA’s Code of Ethics demands that:
Voluntary written consent must be obtained from the patient, or from the patient’s legally authorized representative if the patient lacks the capacity to consent, following: (i) disclosure that the physician intends to use an investigational drug or experimental procedure, (ii) a reasonable explanation of the nature of the drug or procedure to be used, risks to be expected, and possible therapeutic benefits, (iii) an offer to answer any inquiries concerning the drug or procedure, and (iv) a disclosure of alternative drugs or procedures that may be available. Physicians should be completely objective in discussing the details of the drug or procedure to be employed, the pain and discomfort that may be anticipated, known risks and possible hazards, the quality of life to be expected, and particularly the alternatives. Especially, physicians should not use persuasion to obtain consent which otherwise might not be forthcoming, nor should expectations be encouraged beyond those which the circumstances reasonably and realistically justify. (“Opinion 2.07 – Clinical Investigation”)
Of particular concern are those who, until National Research Act was signed into law in 1974, were exploited by researchers. These individuals, including the mentally defective, prisoners, and otherwise ignorant, were historically either not informed of or were incapable of ascertaining the risks posed, or were in positions where cooperation was, implicitly or otherwise, mandated. Breach of voluntary and informed consent can present in different ways: a violation of volunteerism by coercion or bribes, a violation of comprehension in instances where a subject is incapable of understanding the risks or their role, and the use of subjects without their knowledge. Each of these three flavors of violation occurred in the United States before the egregious human rights contraventions during the Second World War in Germany and Japan. More disturbing were the violations that occurred after the advent of the Nuremberg Code.
The volunteerism of prisoners in biomedical research is a contentious issue. Liberty is, by definition, curbed by incarceration. In 1915, the cause of pellagra was a matter of debate for researchers, and a serious problem in the state of Mississippi. It was suspected that the disease, which could lead to dementia and death, was caused by a nutritional deficiency rather than a bacterial infection. “U.S. Public Health Service investigator Joseph Goldberger,” Lederer writes, “approached Governer Earl Brewer of Mississippi for permission to conduct an experiment that would induce pellagra in male prisoners. . . Placing male prisoners on a pellagra diet for six months would provide a convincing demonstration of this theory” (110). Due to an incredibly generous offer of a full pardon many men volunteered; twelve prisoners “convicted of crimes ranging from bigamy [to] murder” participated and were released (Lederer 111). Although the incredible leniency toward felons is ethically questionable, the offer of a full pardon in exchange for a six month nutritional study constitutes bribery. Today, research using prisoners as subjects is limited to studies that deal directly with crime and imprisonment: the impact of incarceration, the possible causes of criminal behavior, drug and alcohol addiction, the effect of class, vaccines of prevalent diseases in the prison population, and studies that stand to improve the health of the subject (Macrina 104).
One of the more infamous cases of unethical research is the Willowbrook Scandal. New York Mental Hospitals in the early 1960s were dealing with overpopulation and a huge influx of patients. Struggling to make an arrangement for their mentally retarded children, parents eagerly accepted their children’s admittance to Willowbrook State School in exchange for the children’s participation in a hepatitis study. The consent forms parents signed indicated that their children would receive a hepatitis vaccine; instead, the study was on the natural progression of the disease, and previously healthy children were intentionally infected between 1963 and 1966 at the school (Goliszek 250). Arguing that the children would have contracted the disease within six months anyway — speaking volumes about the sanitary conditions of the hospital — researchers claimed a controlled study of the disease would be more beneficial to scientific progress. They proceeded, at first, to administer purified fecal samples from infected patients to the children orally; after further refinement of the process, intravenous injections took the place of ingestion (Goliszek 251). Current participation of children or the mentally ill, along with all other federally funded medical research on humans, is approved and overseen by an Institutional Review Board which has access to the research protocol and consent forms. In cases where and individual is incapable of granting their consent, a guardian or legal representative gives consent, and the consent must be documented and signed by a witness not of the investigational team, ideally a personal acquaintance the subject (Macrina 100).
The case drawing the most attention in the United States would be that of the Tuskegee syphilis study that took place from 1932 and continued for on for 42 years. Ironically, the university founded by Booker T. Washington became the scene for a long term study of the effects of untreated syphilis in black men. The men were, in fact, unaware that they were infected, were told that they were participating in a study on “bad blood,” and were offered neither heavy metal treatment for symptoms nor penicillin when it became widely available in the 1940s (Pence 279). After criticizing the experiment for six years, and concerned by the Center for Disease Control’s refusal to stop it, a doctor leaked the story to the press in 1972, leading to a congressional investigation and a civil suit that was settled out of court (Pence 283). The subjects of the study, their wives, and their children received restitution and free medical treatment (Pence 285). The case brings up numerous ethical issues concerning race, socio-economic status, education, and deception of patients. As a result of the Tuskegee experiments, the federal government began requiring all institutions receiving federal funds and conducting human research to have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) (Pence 295). Today, IRBs stand as the first line of defense for the subjects of research.
Aside from research conducted for the betterment of public health, United States weapons development opens a veritable Pandora’s Box of ethical issues. From the pardoning of Shiro Ishii, head of Japanese Unit 731 during World War II, in exchange for bacteriological warfare data obtained from unwilling participants under sadistic conditions (Goliszek 54) to the various radiation experiments performed on humans (Goliszek ch. 4), weapons research on humans in the States is an expansive subject that would set a conspiracy theorist alight.
With the advent of germ theory came a wave of research leading to vaccines and antibiotics. Undoubtedly, the sacrifices of the subjects, whether ethical or otherwise, have benefited both the public and modern science. Though today’s biomedical research subjects are protected by the guidelines of physician’s associations, federal legislation, and oversight committees, the history of medical research in the United States is steeped in exploitation. Regulation may guide scientists, but the choice of right versus wrong is ultimately an autonomous practice. When Stanley Milgram went about studying the role of authority in ethical decision making to better understand the events in Nazi concentration camps he discovered that otherwise average people would do harm to strangers if instructed to do so by an authority figure. The extent of evil experienced in the camps was not limited to Nazi potential, but human potential. “Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.” (Milgram)
Works Cited
“The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research.” The National Institute of Health Office of Human Subjects Research. The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, 18 April 1979.Web. 9 November 2009.
“Code of Medical Ethics: Opinion 2.07 – Clinical Investigation.” American Medical Association. Report: Issued prior to April 1977; Updated June 1994 and June 1998. American Medical Association, 1998.Web. 9 November 2009.
Goliszek, Andrew. In the Name of Science. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. Print.
Lederer, Susan E. Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Print.
Macrina, Francis L. Scientific Integrity. Washington, DC: ASM Press, 2005. Print.
“Memorable Quotes.” StanleyMilgram.com. Stanley Milgram, 1974. Web. 18 November 2009.
“The Nuremberg Code: Directives for Human Experimentation.” The National Institute of Health Office of Human Subjects Research. Reprinted from Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, Vol. 2, pp. 181-182. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949.Web. 18 November 2009.
Pence, Gregory E. Classic Cases in Medical Ethics. New York: McGraw Hill, 2004. Print.
United States. Cong. Senate. A Bill for the Regulation of Scientific Experiments upon Human Beings in the District of Columbia. 56th Cong., 1st sess. S 3424. Washington: GPO, 1900.
Filed under: art/writing
“Ronnie Cutrone: I loved Jim Morrison dearly, but Jim was not fun to go out with. I hung out with him every night for just about a year, and Jim would go out, lean up against the bar, order eight screwdrivers, put down six Tuinals on the bar, drink two or three screwdrivers, take two Tuinals, then he’d have to pee, but couldn’t leave the other five screwdrivers, so he’d take his dick out and pee, and some girl would come up and blow his dick, and then he’d finish up the other five screwdrivers and then he’d finish up the other four Tuinals, and then he’d pee in his pants, and then Eric Emerson and I would take him home.” [1]
I have a fascination with vice. Hedonism has its degrees and, at the far end of the spectrum, it becomes animalism. Prostitutes. Junkies. Transients. All living for “lesser” pleasures. Is it a simple addiction, or a driving life philosophy? How self-aware are these people? Are they knowingly exchanging time for intensity of experience? Is it worth pissing on yourself to feel that good?
The obtainment of pleasure is the master of human focus. When will it come? How long it will last? How do I maximize it? This includes all types of pleasure. Everything from religious to physical passion. A great emphasis is placed on the security of future pleasure. Indulgences of less decadent flavors — such as family, home, and other domesticities — are the commonly accepted goal. Fleeting pleasures like sex, drugs, adventure, and other dopamine-steeped activities are considered less valuable experiences and, from a religious perspective, of an evil bend. I don’t intend to discuss the merits of pleasure varietals, but to explore the curious habits of those who live in a near-animal state of sensualism.
When living in Boston, I frequented the Harvard Book Store. One afternoon I was scanning the fiction section when I noticed a sign indicating that both Bukowski and Kerouac were available only by request. As an avid Bukowski reader, I found this odd. Certainly, he was a filthy old man constructing semi-autobiographical novels out of lewd diction and awkward sentences, but I never considered him worthy of censorship — and most definitely not at my usual bookshop. I approached the counter and asked a young man in an argyle sweater vest why Bukowski was kept off of the shelves. The employee looked at me, smirked gently, and replied, “Because people steal it.”
I now had something tangible in common with those who would shoplift.
A common question asked of me by the uptight, educated sorts is, “Why do you like that drunkard?” Because he was free. He lived his life as he chose, which is a greater achievement than may be seen from the Harvard students across the street from the bookshop. Those students will spend their lifetimes questing for a socially acceptable happiness. Respect, financial security, and acknowledgment on the menu. These items are complex desires with winding roads leading up to them. Life seen as a series of obstacles between the man and his goals.
There was a purity to Bukowski’s lifestyle. He existed. He woke, he drank, he wrote, he fucked. His goals were no more complex than procuring a bottle, or orgasming. Crude, but nearly touching on Buddhist ideals in that he removed a number of the wants most men experience. As he put it:
“I made it to the bed, got the clothes off, dropped in as down in the railroad yards they moved across the tracks picking cars, places, hoped destinations — better towns, better times, better love, better luck, better something. they’d never find it. they’d never stop looking. I slept.” [2]
Perhaps the most self-aware example of living in a hedonist, animalistic state would be Dash Snow‘s Hamster Nests. The Nest would entail hundreds of shredded phone books, Dash and a group of his friends, and enough drugs to render them burrowing, defecating, fucking, drooling animals. Dash, Dan Colen, and fifteen of his pals “rolled around” in a room filled with shredded books for eight hours in preparation for the installation at the Deitch Projects gallery for the first public exhibition of a usually private party.
Snow, born into an art-royalty family, was self taught — possessing a ninth grade education. Presented with incredible wealth and a choice of outcomes, Dash chose a life that ended with one final binge in July, 2009. Addled with drugs and alcohol, in constant trouble with law enforcement, and living the life of voluntary poverty, his point is not to be mistaken. He saw purity in the lives of rodents.
Spiders and rodents know something that we have forgotten. Whether that simplicity is nobler than the complexity of culture, economics, and intellectual engagement is open for debate, but I cannot dismiss these artists as mere drunks and junkies. Authors and artists, emissaries of beauty and emotional existence, are too often entwined in lives of abuse and insanity.
“I wasn’t asking for love. but something was odd. the books never spoke about it. the parents never spoke about it. but the spiders knew.” [3]
[1] Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (Grove Press, 2006) 31.
[2] Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1969) 88.
[3] Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1969) 116.
Filed under: unsolicited opinions
Take that spending and shove it.
