December 2006

the country as a whole spends countless billions of dollars on health research, healthy-lifestyle advertisements, improvement programs, medicines, and such. this is all good, no doubt. but don’t think of any of it as insurance.

on pages 2 and 3 of today’s daily news i find two bizarre and unexpected deaths that testify to the fact that when your number is up, it’s UP, and it doesn’t much matter how healthily or unhealthily you’ve lived until that time.

for example, the young lady killed by a hit-and-run driver in staten island was just 20 years old, and had already triumphed over a bout with hodgkins lymphoma when she was 17. her hopes for the future were bright, and though it’s not mentioned in the article, i am certain that stephanie was living as healthily as she could in order to take care of herself after the cancer terror. but none of that helped her when some papers blew out of her hand, she stepped to grab them, fell over the highway divider and got crushed by an SUV. (as of this writing, the driver of said SUV has not yet been found, though the car was abandoned a short distance away.)

oh, you say, but people die in car accidents every day, that’s part of the statistic. true enough. so how about this one:

a guy is sitting in his living room when a car doing 70mph crashes through the wall of his house and several interior walls and kills him dead right on his own couch. drunk driving drug suspect being chased by the police loses control of his vehicle and rams the guy’s long island house the same way corey lidle rammed that upper east side apartment building not too long ago. the man’s son was in the basement, watching TV, when the car came crashing in. even gamblers won’t take odds like this: what if the guy had been watching TV with his son, what if the driver wasn’t drunk, what if the cops didn’t chase the driver, what if the son instead of the dad was sitting in the living room, what if the house wasn’t so close to the highway…

you see what i mean? sure, we ban smoking and trans fats and god knows what’s next. nothing wrong with any of that except the idea that IT WILL KEEP US SAFE, the idea that YOU WILL NOT DIE if you take certain steps. people, we’re all gonna die, and most of us don’t know when or where or how. and your bodybuilder neighbor with zero body fat, perfect blood pressure and no cholesterol can have a car ram through her living room just as easily as can your beer-drinking bacon-eating fatass apoplectic best friend.

i believe that this somewhat perverted american idea of circumventing death causes more problems than it solves. like helmet requirements on bicycles. who on earth could be hurt by the absence of the helmet other than the rider of the bike? are they going to ram into somebody at 40mph and bash them with their bike-riding skull? if that’s the case, a helmet will only only make things worse…the only person who could possibly be hurt by the absence of one is the rider him or herself. and shouldn’t that be their choice?

i don’t know if this is still the custom — given global warming, they may not even have the option — but old eskimoes used to get onto an ice floe and simply float away when they felt their time had come, or that they had become a burden to their people. something like that happens here, and we’ve got kevorkian in jail. why? it’s gotta end sooner or later, why not have the option?

all of this is part of the right to choose — we limit ourselves when we use that phrase only in connection with abortion. we have the right to continue our bodies or not, to protect them or not, to artificially extend the life of them or not. these are the most significant and personal choices anyone can make, and everyone has to make them on their own — and should be allowed to, with no government interference. isn’t it enough that paying taxes has “turned us into a nation of bookkeepers” as another (german, i think) writer has noted?

a few pages later i find a health report in the paper. new yorkers die less often of stroke than people in most other states. oh, joy and rejoicing. BUT! we die far more often of cardiac failure, something like the 2nd highest rate in the nation. i’m no statistician, but it seems to me that if we’re all dropping dead of early heart attacks, maybe we don’t have time to catch that stroke. this kind of thinking makes such reports meaningless. the one thing doctors and scientists agree on is that they DO NOT UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY HOW THE BODY WORKS. and i believe we’d all agree that none of us understand completely how the universe works.

that being the case, let your spirit — or your heart, if you will — guide your choices. not the warnings and the bans and the restrictions.

salute!

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a couple of weeks ago, in a flurry of posts and comments after kramer’s n-word meltdown, i was contacted by h. lewis smith, author of “bury that sucka”, a book that advocates that the black community stop using the word. i ordered a copy of the book, and provided the link where the book could be purchased.

well, right after this that link is coming down. word of advice to mr. smith and anyone else who is contemplating self-publication: GET YOURSELF AN EDITOR.

i couldn’t even make it through the introduction. the few — very few — sentences that aren’t littered with both spelling and grammatical errors (let’s not even talk about the punctuation), don’t even make sense in the english language.

for example: “In the pursuit of this endeavor, other doors are swung wide open interrelated to the vicissitudinous racial friction encompassing life in America.”

huh?

okay, let me bypass a few more convoluted, even tortured, sentences and move on to a few selected fragments that would have been redlined in even a third-grade class:

“Apologizes are made in advance to you, the reader” (well, at least he understands that apologies are in order!)

“the proceeding chapters reveals”

“The endearingly usage and acceptance”

“consideration is giving as to”

“the earth isn’t flat but in — actually — is basically round”

i’ve got a couple of problems with that aside from the elementary grammatical one. the earth is “basically” round? not really round? just basically, or sort of, or possibly?

and, finally: “Then, there are times we reach a fork in the road of having to accept true reality and since old habits die a hard, slow agonizing death; we eventually but grudgingly give in to it.”

well, that was my fork in the road, all right: i just don’t have the time to try to make it through such a hard, slow, agonizing morass of writing, however well-intentioned (or even correct — there’s really no way to tell from the language) its author might be.

i’m no stickler for the generally accepted rules and regulations of writing. some of my favorite writers, such as carole maso, regularly disregard them. (in fact, maso has written a wonderful book about writing called “break every rule”.) but you have to know the rules before you get the creative license to break them, and if you’re trying to convey a point you’re pretty much obligated to make it in a way that doesn’t leave your readers with their eyes crossed.

i have nothing against self-publishing (this book was produced by Publish America; click the blog title link to find out a little bit about their reputation). POD and/or vanity presses, as they used to be called, have their place, and with the economics and politics of the publishing world being what they are, many fine books would never see the light of day without these types of resources. but you have to “come real or don’t come at all” as they say in the boroughs. h. lewis smith would have done much better not to have come at all, or at least to have found a reasonably skilled writer to hold his hand part of the way.

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quoting today’s daily news, al sharpton said — in an article recalling the howard beach lynchings of 20 years ago — that “I think there has been some progress. I don’t think racism is over, but we’ve learned to deal with it more maturely.”

yes, al, i think WE have but i’m not sure YOU have. i’m talking here about your characterization of sean bell’s murder as being based in racism. you’ve been pretty outspoken about that lately, and you are completely full of shit.

was sean bell murdered? absolutely.

does somebody (or several somebodies) deserve to go to jail? absolutely.

were the shootings based on race? absolutely NOT.

the shootings were based on fear. not necessarily justifiable fear, particularly in the case of the detective who stopped to reload and then continued firing despite the fact that no one was firing on him or his partners. but at least three of those partners weren’t white. to say that sean bell was killed and his friends were wounded because they were black is flat out untrue.

there are other questions, of course. is it LESS likely that he and his friends would have been shot at if they were not black? absolutely. but is that based on racism, or is that based on fear?

here’s my take on it. late night, outside a strip club, known drug spot, plainclothes on point needing an arrest. here come sean and his crew. they’d had some arrests between them, so maybe one or two were doing the “pimp roll” — and if you know what i mean by that you know what i mean and if you don’t i can’t explain it. go to harlem or east new york and watch some of the young men on the streets and then you will know.

somebody says that somebody’s got a gun. i don’t necessarily believe in the mysterious “fourth man”, but i don’t completely disbelieve in him, either. i do believe that something was said that made the cops think that sean and his crew were armed. and what happens then? adrenaline. pure adrenaline. adrenaline and common sense and training are mutually incompatible.

but why would the police so easily believe that they may have been armed? there’s a simple answer to that. first, the boys weren’t white and it’s less likely to find a gun among a group of white boys. this isn’t racism, it’s statistic. yet, it’s terrifically easy to get a gun in NYC, and a lot of borderline criminals (or borderline upright citizens, depending on how you look at it), have them. so what’s the real, underlying, problem here? THE LACK OF GUN CONTROL.

while i can fault the detective who fired dozens of shots, i can’t fault the undercover squad as a whole for being afraid. you can read the news and see how many cops — whether undercover or not — have been shot with illegal guns in recent years.

like the young man shot the other night in NYC. i believe his last name was “Person” but i can’t find the newspaper and he doesn’t turn up on internet searches. too insignificant? i don’t agree. here’s the short story: he was doing tag graffiti with a couple of friends. here come the cops. the friends run one way, he runs another, gets snagged in the vestibule of an apartment building. cop tries to arrest him, he resists, there’s a scuffle, the cop feels a gun in his waistband and hollers to his partners. the boy is shot, killed. he has a loaded .357 magnum stuffed in his pants. so what’s the sentence on graffiti? time served? 30 days? he only scuffled because he knew he had the gun. maybe he only ran the other way to protect his friends. a street hero, of sorts.

did he deserve to die? i think that even the police who shot him would agree that he didn’t. was there a reason for him to die? yes. the cops here, being targets themselves, have no choice. i would bet you anything that if they’d known in advance that this juvenile graffiti artist had a gun on him, they would not have pursued the chase — in order to avoid exactly what occurred.

is any of this racist? NO. NO. NO.

this is all about guns and fear. GUNS & FEAR. inseparable. guns are made only to shoot human beings. deer hunters don’t use guns, they use rifles.

i cannot comprehend that there is still a pro-gun element anywhere in politics, much less in NYC. although rudy giuliani pissed me off quite a bit, he was dead accurate on this one. there are too many guns, far too many guns, in the street. the presence of those guns creates a universe in which no one can operate with sanity.

and what is the result? murder. sometimes sanctioned. sometimes not.

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i’ll keep this one short, and i won’t name names. maybe later on i will.

but what the hell is going on with the so-called activist community if they don’t have a clue about global warming?

for example (ok, i’m naming names): amnesty international is a fantastic human rights organization. i’ve never made a donation or any communication to them other than online, yet i suddenly receive their year-end reports and requests for further donations via snail mail in my PO box. and we’re not talking a one-pager stuffed into an envelope by some intern, hell no. i mean four-color slicks that need special-order envelopes to fit in.

i’m not singling out AI — they’re just one of many. even greenpeace does it, and they’re an environmental org. because i support the causes i believe in, i tend to get a lot of this kind of mail. but when i get the same request via email and high-gloss, high-impact snail mail, i just get angry.

most of my mail comes to my PO box, that’s how it is for many — if not most — writers. i don’t even wait to get it home to sort it. if i go to the PO once a week, there is a minimum - a MINIMUM - of three or four POUNDS of mail for me to sort through. and 90% of it is junk that doesn’t even make it out the front door.

some of the junk comes from retailers that i like. LL Bean, for example, or Land’s End. they may not be ben&jerry’s, but they make good quality stuff (mostly in the USA) and don’t have a lot of BS hype to go with it. but why do i need 15 land’s end catalogs a year when i NEVER order anything from the catalog, but only online?

and now i get to the root of the matter: goddam xmas cards. PLEASE do not send me a holiday card! PLEASE do not waste gold foil and creamy card stock to tell me how valued i am. and if you are a personal friend, send me an email, please do NOT, EVER, send me a holiday card. i can barely tolerate birthday cards, but anonymous holiday cards make my blood boil. opening them, all i can see is landfill, smog, clogged raingutters.

people, i’m not being picky. i wish i had the luxury of pickiness. the world is at stake here, and we have to do EVERYTHING we can because our present government isn’t doing anything at all.

do NOT send holiday cards. DO recycle.

do NOT subscribe to catalogs. DO shop online.

do NOT leave your TV on when you’re not in the room, even if you like having it for “company”.

for more do’s and don’ts, please DO visit www.energycrisis.com. and take the time to sit through al gore’s video, “an inconvenient truth”.

many of our current truths are quite inconvenient. but we ignore them at our own risk, and at the risk of the next generation.

social security is the least of our problems. if there’s no livable planet, it won’t matter whether or not you’ve got a retirement plan.

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it’s almost 11pm eastern time on 12/11/06. why the fuck is my air conditioner on?

because we don’t update our statutes to align with the realities of a rapidly deteriorating world. here in NYC there is a law that landlords have to turn the heat at the end of october. there’s no codicil about outside temperatures, climate change, nothing like that. presto-chango, on goes the heat. and in buldings like mine, those that are a couple hundred years old, there’s not much in the way of ventilation or crossbreeze. and even if there were, doesn’t it seem that if it’s still running around 50 degrees outside, we should shut down the damn boilers?

thousands and thousands and thousands of people have died in the iraqi holocaust, and if somebody tells me that war is not about oil i think my head will explode. yet we burn energy to create heat simply in order to burn more energy to dissipate the unnecessary heat we are creating, and paying for with our lives, eventually, or at least the lives of the next generation.

in brooklyn we used to say “lights on, doors open, nobody’s home”. these days, that level of drooling vacuousity describes the entire american government, from the pathetic, borderline-retarded heap of crap at the top, to local governments such as that in NYC, without the foresight to change laws that were created at the turn of the last century to protect immigrants who had to burn street trash in spaghetti pots to keep their families warm.

i’m no primadonna. for years i never owned an air conditioner (and still don’t own a television). but i’m getting older, and it’s to the point that on days i have to spend 12 hours at my company computer “keeping up”, i just can’t concentrate if my apartment air reeks of stale, processed heat and the temperature is nearing 80 degrees (yes, i checked, that’s the temperature of the tiny bit of air that makes it in through my front window, exhaust fan or no exhaust fan). not that things are any better in the office: there, i’ve got a heater used only in summer to combat the arctic levels programmed into our a/c; and a fan used only in winter, to combat the artificial inferno.

is it me? am i picky, arrogant, overcritical? or is this like the taking of the pelham 1-2-3, a runaway train with a maniac at the switch, pressing and pressing the unfamiliar pedals….

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