Face Booked

Facebook has been around a while now and I have to say I've never seen any point to it nor any reason why I would actually even visit the site.

I got on because my wife had found many contacts from high school and elsewhere after being on for just a little while. So, I thought, let me see who's there...and it appears that Facebook is what Classmates.com should have become but didn't.

Now, I've reconnected with all kinds of people I probably wouldn't have in any other way...high school mates, co-workers, ex-co-workers, (possibly future co-workers), friends of friends, friends of siblings, childhood friends, et al...

And I find myself spending more time than normal on the site...partly grooming myself to look the best I can to everyone else and partly "spying" into the lives of everyone else.

But there are some things about Facebook behavior I'm not sure I understand and I apologize to anyone I may offend with these comments...It's not you, it's me...I have the problem...

First, some people spend A LOT of time on Facebook doing all kinds of things (quizzes, sending things to other people, etc...).

Second, that function of slapping out there what a person is doing right at that moment...first, what anyone is really doing is spending time on Facebook, duh...second, does anyone really care what I'm doing at that moment (or any other moment)?

Lastly, and admittedly, this is my own personal problem....having reconnected with some people...my life seems to be somewhat less than others....now, I'm no fool, per say, and I certainly don't need an "It's A Wonderful Life" moment to understand my life isn't useless...but there's that little nagging voice in the back of my head that, rightfully, echoes the fact that I haven't lived up to expectations (whose I don't know) or perhaps more accurately to full potential.

I'm sure there's more to explain but...I...need...to...get...on.........Facebook. Bye!

Deepest Desires

Deep down, I think we all have this secret deep desire of what we wish we could do or be. Maybe we daydream about it and many times these are desires that just aren't going to happen due to any number of real limitations, not limitations such as laziness, fear etc...

Here's mine:
I wish I could be a rock singer and guitar player/multi-instrumentalist and had a band made up of great friends, men and women, and we played all the songs I like to a crowd full of other people I know. And one of the members of the band is a beautiful woman who is my wife.

Ah, well, I can't sing a lick, don't have a very good ear but do have a sense of rhythm and played drums for a number of years...until the kids came. I'll probably get another set after they leave the roost. But, I do have a beautiful wife.

What's your deepest desire?

Role Models (The A-Rod Tragedy)

My old friend Pete has an entry on heroes and role models at his blog and I posted asking him and his readers:

What I'd like to know is everyone's view on what they think someone should get FROM a role model. Why should we have, why should there be role models?

And Pete took up the question in his follow up entry. And I agree with him that, to some degree, it's natural for kids to look up to "stars". But kids like to look up to people who can do things they themselves would like to do; to be like people they are not. Now, this is understandable growing up as we look for many examples of what people are like.

But once we are grown...what happens? Why do we still feel the need to have heroes or role models?

I admit to having only one true hero in my adult life but ultimately felt ashamed that I wasn't doing what this person was doing (meaning his political activities) and so my hero was a sign of my personal failure.

Now, all this came about on the heels of the A-Rod admission. In Pete's article for the Poughkeepsie Journal he writes:

Come on, A-Rod! I speak for legions of Yankee fans when I say this: We want to trust you. We want to like you. We've got you for nine more years. You can do better than that; you have to do better than that.

Until you do, how can we trust you? How can we unequivocally support your relentless pursuit of history? The sad truth is, until you tell us more, we cannot. Please, A-Rod. Come through in the clutch for us. Just one time.

Integrity is what we want most from our heroes/role models. We want to know that they are better than us, why else admire them so? But the reality is that, really, they aren't and we have to ask ourselves why we value them more then ourselves? Why do we feel they are some how better than us?

This is why we, as a culture, like to see our heroes fall as well...it brings them down to our perceived level.

Now, in the case of A-Rod, I can't agree with my old friend...as far as I'm concerned, A-Rod, and those like him, should be written off, cut loose. It isn't that he deserves a second chance or that we all make mistakes. If he had come clean the first time he was asked, we'd be more forgiving because, yes, at that point we all agree we make mistakes and deserve a second chance. But he didn't take this avenue. He lied. Lied when he thought he could get away with it.

So, knowing this, how can anyone support him, what more can he say that would change anything now?

The Two Joes

All the reconnection I've been doing has made me a little nostalgic for some musicians I knew. Joe Bilotti and Joey Howell. We all went to the same highschool, though Mr. Howell was a grade or two above.

These are two of the nicest guys you'll ever meet and I'll be damned if you don't always find them with a smile on their faces.

As musicians, they were two of the best I've ever seen. Mr. Bilotti I believe studied music at my alma matter, Montclair State in NJ, while I believe Mr. Howell attended The Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Back when I was single in my twenties, these two played together in a band (of which I don't recall the name)...but they were just amazing together.

I only recently found out Mr. Bilotti was playing in Soft Parade and that made me try to hunt down what became of Mr. Howell, who is currently playing in a band called Parrot Beach. If you ever get the chance to see these bands with these two playing, go; you'll see true musicianship.

I maybe off on some of my info here, so anyone that knows, please feel free to correct me.

On Writing

I maybe a book snob but I can appreciate the ability to write well. My old friend Pete once told me (or at least this is what I remember him telling me) of a journalism or some other writing class he was taking in college one year.

I don't recall if this was the first day of class, but the classroom was on the ground floor and apparently the professor entered class through a window. Then he proceeded to discuss some bumper stickers he'd seen and engaged the whole class in this discussion. Finally, some uptight person asked what bumper stickers had to do with the class they were in. Of course, the professor said "everything" because bumper stickers had to say so much with so little...concise writing at its best.

Now, Pete's story might really be an Urban Myth but....

I think good comic books are the same. You've got limited space for narrative and dialogue so you need to be as concise and effective as possible.

I recently came across a film making blog where the writer is taking his comic and converting it to a script. His comic did much with just pictures but he made effective use of the limited space of his text. Comparing his comic to his script is interesting to see what goes into the process. And he's open to feedback....

School (or Glory Days)

High school is big down here in the south (high school football bigger than that). I think it is bigger in most areas of the country than in the Northeast, though I think I may not be a good one to judge that.

Was high school a big deal to you?

Perhaps I underestimate it's influence but here's how I see high school as I reflect back on it:
First, as my previous post states, my memory isn't all that and high school doesn't seem to enter my mind very much.
Second, my mind drifts back to elementary school and seems to me to have been a bigger influence on me than high school.
Third, college was more important to me than high school.

As for reunions, I'd certainly like to attend them more than I have, but being out of state limits my availability, however, lots of times, some of the people you want to see don't attend. And of your fellow classmates, those that you haven't continued friendships with into adulthood, we really don't know each other at all, do we?

But why does elementary school have such a pull on me? For a number of years in my thirties (perhaps the aging process?) I was even fixated on those years. So much so, that I thought about going back to my old school and obtaining a print that sits on the wall from when I was in second grade donated by a family of a classmate who died along with her parents in a plan crash that year. I did go back and visit the school to look at the print, though no one there knew anything about its history (which is why I thought of obtaining it, at least it had some meaning to me if not anyone currently or attending in the future).

Director Michael Apted (Thunderheart, The World is Not Enough and the forth coming third installment of the Narnia series) created the documentary Up series where he interviewed 14 seven year olds and has followed up with them every 7 years since 1964. "The premise of the film was taken from the Jesuit motto "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man," which is based on a quotation by Francis Xavier."

Perhaps this is why I seem to get fixated on the elementary years. Perhaps these are really the years that forge who we are. And as previously mentioned, I can recall more from those years than from high school.

I went to Mount View Road Elementary School in Morris Plains, NJ (I lived in Cedar Knolls and based on location was able to walk to school) from 1970 to 1976. We buried a time capsule under a new tree planted in the parking lot--if I recall correctly, I was the second to last person to sign it, I think John C. was the last, but I could be wrong.

In second grade, Karen D. was my "girlfriend" (you know how that goes)--Paul D. would make fun of her and I'd chase him around in her gallant defense. I remember she moved after that year across town and attended a new school--I recall being crushed.

Paula S. would chase Steven S. through the swing sets trying to kiss him. I got my ass kicked by Jeff G. who was a couple of years older than me (I psuedo "dated" his sister Susie in 4th grade).

Mrs. Hamilton pulled my hair backstage during a play once for talking too loud, in second grade. Karen Jo W. moved to the area and during a talent show one year she sang "Over the Rainbow" in a most beautiful voice (she's one I'd like to see at a HS reunion). Frank S. and I played a clarinet duo that same talent show. Doug S. broke his leg one year and couldn't walk around the school during the Halloween parade. In third grade I had a huge crush on Patty W. who started school with her sister Lauren--the same year Vin P. started school and for some reason he and I didn't hit it off, I think I was jealous of him for some reason.

My good friends those years: Tommy H. (whose oldest brother died in a car crash years later-he was a great guy too), Rob D., Rob M, Kevin M., Frank S. (who died in a car crash during high school), Paul D, Paul L. and Pete C. (who were a year older), Denise T. who is my oldest, continuous friend (we've known each other since Kindergarten).

In those days, Mount View was also open during the summer-the true "summer school" which was strictly for recreation. We'd spend nearly every day playing softball, all of us along with Chris C., Billy C., Ed M., Rick L., Ted C., Greg D. and others. And we'd curse like sailors, F'in everything. It was marvelous. And we'd leave in the morning and come home at night without our parents wondering where we were or worrying if anything happened to us.

Yet, if I try, I can't really pull the same level memories of high school...those years seem so inconsequential, as if they never happened. (Though I do recall a bunch of us staring at Marisa C.'s ass-she was a grade below us-one day through the glass door and pointing this out the Mr. Shoe--and a fine ass it was.)

Even my dreams, on occasion, will pull in these elementary year friends and fellow students more than from the high school years.

So, while the media makes HS seem so important and my impression is that to the rest of the country HS is important, is it the same for us from the Northeast or is it just me who doesn't seem to think so?

PS
All this reflecting and confessing makes me think of one other thing I'll throw in as a confession: during middle school (6th grade) thru HS, I always had, to one degree or another, a crush on Christine F.--to the point where I always thought it would be cool to make love to her in the grass on a warm summer day when it would do that really light warm misty shower even though the sky was really black.

TMI, I know...sorry....

Fiction 3

The old music, reconnection with an old childhood friend, has made me a little nostalgic.  Here's an old scene I wrote in that vein about my old elementary school, Mount View:

The crumbling blacktop in the afternoon sun, the blackberries we picked and ate until our fingers turned purple, the names carved in the silvery birch trees, the sand on the infield, the salamanders in the stream that runs through a giant storm pipe, the gently rocking swings where Paula Sager endlessly chased Steven Smith for a kiss, the rusted basketball backboards with rusted half-hanging chains that annually defied paint, the rain water trapped on the kindergarten side roof of the school.  Forty years of children.

There were hills of green and yellow crinkly-dry crabgrass; grass that fought back when you stepped on it. Silver bars of play equipment worn smooth, glistened in the sun while the torn fabric seats of the swings gently swayed in a ground hugging breeze that came down the hill and stretched out around the school; swirling the sand of the ball field before hitting the woods and shattering into hundreds of tiny streams that rustled the leaves of the trees.

A  patched asphalt path wound its way around to the back of the school where it joined itself then shot off in the opposite direction cutting through a small thicket of trees, forking and ending at perpendicular dead end streets.  At the center of the thicket was a small clearing with a large dead tree that never seemed to rot and  was polished smooth with use.  A  timid stream, its banks thick with skunk cabbage, trickled into a tiny storm pipe underneath one end of the school property and came out through a giant pipe at the other.  There were two basketball courts (or blacktops as we called them).  The oldest for the first, second and third graders; the other, which sloped in one corner by the blackberry bushes and pooled water, was for the fourth and fifth graders.

The echoes of children at play screamed silence when school was out.   A peacefulness that was filled with the sounds of nature: bushes, trees, insects and the stillness of approaching dusk.  A stillness so thick you could touch it and eat it until it filled you and with every step you would enter deeper into it until there was nothing left of yourself but the movement of your body through air.

I knew a girl who only made it half way through.  She died in a plane crash and whatever her name was it’s been absorbed by the stillness and will remain there forever.  Her face a blur like trying to peer through a filthy classroom window with the sun at your back.  

I stand on the ball field and shout the names of childhood friends and listen as they are carried off;  absorbed into the bricks of the school and scatter among the top branches of the trees. And they answer me back, each and every one, from the stillness, where no child is ever forgotten.

Music: 51st Grammys

Rant. I'll now admit I'm getting old and crotchety about my music.  I made it into the 90s with Pearl Jam/Soundgarden et al...  However, the 00s haven't been very fruitful.

So, in my cruise through iTunes looking for new music (as I received an iTunes card for xmas), I came across the nominee list for the 51st Grammys.  The male/female pop category has always sucked.  But take a look at the other categories; does this just confirm my view that there's nothing new worth listening to?  Look at all the old timers, good God, even Motley Crue.  Even that crappy Eagles album has been nominated.

Now, in my defense, in my trolling for new music, I did come across a few bands who had a handful of decent songs: Shinedown, Egypt Central, Deepfield, Thriving Ivory, Pop Evil, Midnight to Twelve.  Not that I'd buy their entire CDs but a song here and there. So, I'd like to think I'm somewhat open minded to what's happening in today's music.

But this one thing I must be said, compelled yet again am I; Coldplay SUCKS.  I don't understand it; how is it anyone thinks that crap is any good?  They just plain suck.  I know I'll catch hell but...it must be stated.

The only solace I have in all this is that an old friend, along with his brother, have educated his son in music the likes of Led Zep and Gov't Mule.