Appalling

look at this link before reading my comments.









Ok, my comments. The photos don't show all of what the text describes, which I just find so horrifying that I can't get it out of my mind, it's haunting me. It says that the dorsal view is fully detailed with the baby crowning. I just can't imagine walking into the living room and staring down the business end of Britney Spears with a BABY coming out. Holy freaking gods, that's just mind bogglingly horrible. They describe the artist as wanting to make some anti-abortion point with this, and I think it just proves that anti-abortion people are really anti-sex, 'cause I think every time I saw that I'd be unable to have sex again for a week. I'd get something started, and that image would come into my head and I'd shrivel right up like a dead shrimp.

Fear

I'm counting seconds. I start off, nice and slow, lugubrious, but before I get to three I'm racing. "One....chimpanzee2chimpanze3chim", three short little hot chimpanzees before my eyes fly open. I'm on Highway 101 near San Francisco, trying to see how long I can drive with my eyes closed.

It freaks people out when I ask if they've ever driven on the freeway with their eyes closed. They give me The Look, and I know they think I'm some psycho death-wish loony. It's not about that at all, though. It's a triumph of reason over fear.

How it works: You wait until you've got a nice clear spot with no turns upcoming, lots of space in front of you and nobody driving wildly who might swerve in front of you and slam on the brakes. You look for potholes. You guess the odds of anything happening that would prevent you from holding a straight steady path for the length of the game. If you think there's any real chance of needing to react to something, you don't play. Reason has to be on your side, or else, yeah, death wish.

Then you close your eyes, and count seconds, "one chimpanzee, two chimpanzee..." You try to hold the pace, one chimpanzee per second, through your whole count. Try not to speed up. Try not to give in and open your eyes before your target count. On a really good day you can pass your target. I used to be able to do a solid 8 chimpanzees regularly, sometimes 10 on Highway 280 up north of Highway 92.

I'm trying it today, and the best I can do is those three short little hot chimpanzees. I was perfectly safe, of course. Nobody had cut in front of me. I still had a long way before the next car. I was square in the middle of my lane. I could have gotten away with 5 or 6 chimpanzees easy, but I just gave in to the fear.

And that's it, isn't it? Reason over fear. I'm always looking at the worst possible case, weighing odds, considering outcomes. People sometimes think I'm a pessimist. But it drives out the fear if you're prepared to face the worst. You have to arm your reason to overcome your fear.

Tonight I walked into the clubhouse of the East Bay Rats motorcycle club. It's a dingy little space in a warehouse district in Oakland. It's like someone's garage, with boxing gear and leather jackets and motorcycle parts stacked around the edges. There's a plywood bar, but it seems like a formality. At any point in time, anyone could be in front of the bar or behind it. I don't see any booze, I'm guessing that they only stock it for parties. There's a soda machine dispensing cans of beer for a dollar in one corner.

I'm here for a boxing lesson. They host open boxing lessons every Thursday. The club president, Trevor, is working with me. I'm starting from zero. He's good, but the real boxing coach is Kwesi, who's training with with a skinny little asian and a white guy with biceps the size of my head. Kwesi seems to really know his shit. "Rotate your shoulders on the jab, really get your obliques into it."

I didn't do very well, I ran out of steam pretty quickly. I was doing ok for awhile, about 15 minutes, but then I ran out of gas and I just couldn't recover between sets enough to make it worth Trevor's time. I'd jab, jab, cross, hook, two times, maybe three, then have to stop and gasp for breath. Before I ran out of steam though, I learned a lot. Gotta rotate the shoulders on the jab. Pivot on your foot for a hook.

After I wimped out, I chatted for awhile with Trevor. Trevor's a big solid guy, he works as a bouncer in the city. I really liked him, he's a decent guy with a lot of integrity and no fear. I could picture him being very intimidating. I could also picture him being completely mild mannered until the time came to tear you apart. Then calmly ripping you limb from limb.

I asked him questions about, what if you really need to protect yourself? What if you're out in the street and the shit goes down? What happens to the rules then? He gave me some great tips. Keep the other guy off balance. He's a bouncer, he always tries to defuse a situation when he's on the job. But otherwise, strike first, strike hard, give it all you've got, and keep the other guy off balance. If you lose, take it like a man, it only hurts for a while. If you lose to somebody once and are willing to fight him again next time, you'll have his respect.

But it's really all about managing your fear. Learning what the worst possible case is and learning that you can handle it. When I get started for real on learning to box, I need to get somebody to punch me in the face. I think that's the reason I want to take boxing instead of tae-kwon-do or some other martial art – at some point when you're learning boxing you're going to get punched in the face. I'm terrified of getting punched in the face, and I need to get over that. I'll bet it's not so bad. I need to train my reason to overcome fear.

And I had plenty of fear coming out here. I'm going to a MOTORCYCLE club. Like the Hell's Angels, people who kick each others asses just for fun. I didn't know if the whole club would be in, and if so, what would they think of this fat old chickenshit tourist? Was I walking into an ass-kicking? I had a bunch of chances to bail out on the way. With Bay Area traffic, torrential rains of biblical proportions, and getting lost in the Fruitvale ghettos it took a solid hour and a half driving to get there, the little voice nagging the whole way, "Are you sure you want to do this?" ,

But every time I'd want to chicken out, I'd think about likely results. Worst possible case? I'd get my ass kicked and end up in the hospital. But at least then I'd KNOW.

In the ghet-to

"Hey! Hey Mister!"

My mind swims through the hazy late afternoon heat towards awareness. I'm napping on the ratty couch.

"Hey Mister, you awake?"

My eyes come open to see a young black woman standing in my doorway. She's probably about 18. A little heavy, not un-pretty. She's wearing a yellow and white striped tube top and shorts, her hair in a short 'fro. Her friend is peering over her shoulder. She sees I'm awake and strides confidently into the room. Her friend still lurks behind.

"Uh, yeah, awake, yeah, I'm awake" I manage.

"Well you shouldn’t oughta leave your door open like that in this neighborhood if you're asleep. Somebody come in and steal you blind."

I file this away for future reference and get to my feet.

"Hi, my name's Sharon," she informs me, "and this here's Darlene." I introduce myself. She's looking around. I'm just moving in and what little I own is in boxes and trash bags around the apartment. There's some furniture that I got from the cheapest classified ads, I probably could have done better driving around with a truck picking up stuff people had abandoned. The kitchen is still filthy from the previous tenants. Sharon and Darlene aren't real impressed. "You mind driving us to the store for some smokes?"

"No, sure, fine, glad to help!" I'm being as cheerful and helpful as possible. Partly, that's my nature, partly I'm so far out of my element as to need absolutely every friendly gesture I can get. I carefully lock up the place and drive the girls in my 1974 Pinto to the nearest place for cigarettes.

This is my first apartment after college and if I had the slightest sliver of a shred of a clue I would not be here, but I'm an idiot so here I am.

My room mate, James, is out of town; he'll be moving in after a week. He's visiting his family in Modesto for the last week before school starts. Although I've graduated, I'm really not ready to cut the ties with school and really go out on my own. James and I were good friends through most of school.

Well, not really. James is an asshole. Everyone pretty much knows it, especially his friends, but James has a twisted charisma for losers like me and his other friends. James (don't call him "Jim") will look you in the eye and say, without the slightest irony, "I'm here to live the true and intense life, to experience absolutely everything with unflinching intensity." The word "intense" is his favorite word and comes up a lot. Almost everyone listens to him for five minutes and knows he's an asshole and avoids him, or openly mocks him. Me? I'm enchanted. I'm in the fan club. I'm the only male in the fan club; I'm also probably the only one in the fan club who hasn't slept with him. I'm his bitch, though, all the same. No mistaking that.

We'd decided during the summer to get a place together to start the next school year, and I'd done some ad-searching and phone calling. Somehow James was never around to look at the good places, but I found this cheap place not too far from campus. I'd called on the ad, and the owner/manager Mr. Johnson had us over a few times to talk about it. The place in the ad was gone, but he was going to have another place available real soon. Any day now. Real cheap.

Johnson had a heavy duty barred screen on his front door. That didn't worry us, everybody's gotta be careful. Johnson said that he was evicting the people from the place he wanted to rent to us. That didn't worry us, he'd clean up before he gave us the place. Either of these neon scarlet red flags should have warned us away, but didn't.

We were idiots.

The apartment complex was in the middle of a decent if declining neighborhood down by the freeway overpass. The neighborhood was not too bad. It was just a few miles from the fancy neighborhoods up by the college. The apartment complex, though, was a little bit of ghetto right there in our own backyard. The only white faces in the neighborhood were James, me, and friends of ours we could convince to visit.

Here's the standard disclaimer: I'm not a bigot. I'm consciously as open minded as I can be, but I grew up with mostly white faces around me, white or Hispanic. Blacks were a curious alien species to me, to be treated kindly and with respect, but I couldn't help the curiosity. And maybe a bit of fear. Yeah, fear, definitely.

And I was there by myself for the first week. Sharon's warning to lock the doors even when I was there asleep in the front room didn't help my confidence measurably.

I took Sharon and Darlene out for smokes, and I came back to the apartment. I had some broom sticks and other braces that I used to block the windows shut. I'd unpacked the kitchen enough to have a pan to cook top ramen in. I had some bottles of wine that I'd gotten cheap from work. So, ramen and a glass of wine for dinner.

It was still hot, especially with the windows closed up, so I left the door open while I enjoyed my feast. I guess this was an invitation for the neighbors to drop by. One by one they did, I met Marcus and Big John, and Alfonse and Joey. Sharon and Darlene came around. I started opening bottles of wine, which made a party of it. We all sat out on the blasted bit of dead grass between my apartment and Marcus's and drank up three or four bottles of it.

I wish I could remember that conversation. I'm sure I expressed my naiveté and curiosity with astute questions like, "So what's it like to be black in America in 1981?" but I didn’t write down their answers. I'm sure we talked about the "what kind of work do you do?" and the shitty store that I worked in was looking like a shrewd career choice by comparison. Marcus was the only one with big plans, he was going to take the exam and get a job at a prison. That's good money. We didn't talk much about the college I'd just finished.

We drank on into the evening. Somebody brought out some beer. Alfonse came into the apartment with me while I got another bottle of wine. He looked at my room and said, "How come you ain't got one a' them gals spending the night with you?" and I didn't know what to say. It hadn't even occurred to me that it might be possible to get one of them to sleep with me, and it seemed pretty late in the evening to start trying, if I could even think of a way to start.

Pretty soon it was midnight, one am, and people started drifting off to their own places. Big John said, "I'ma stay right here. As long as I've got a beer can to use as a pillow, I’m perfectly fine." and as far as I know he slept the night on the grass.

I staggered in and carefully locked the door. I went to bed on my classified-ad mattress with the big blood stains in the middle. How naïve I was: I assumed that the blood stains were from a woman having a menstrual accident once or maybe a few times. It actually looked more like someone had given birth on the mattress, or maybe been stabbed on it.

That night was about the best time I spent in that place. I was drunk, people were outgoing and friendly, patient with the idiot white college boy. The rest of the time I was there, my mind told me, "it's fine, I'm safe if I pay attention and keep my wits about me." but I was scared. And, we now know, I had no wits. I wasn't in school, my shitty job didn't occupy me at all when I wasn't there, I couldn't afford entertainment. So I just sat there, read books, talked to the neighbors, and tried very hard not to be scared or to feel poor.

When James finally got there, we had huge fights. I just had to get out of there, I spent as much time as I could up at the college with my girlfriend, who'd also returned for the school year. "I spent two hours trying to scrub that kitchen floor!" James would scream. "Where the hell were you?"

I just looked sheepishly at the floor, I couldn't explain. He didn't understand that I needed a break from the place. He was pissed that I wasn't there for him when he needed to adjust to the place.

"Fuck you, I don't care if you don't hang out here with me, I had a fine afternoon flying kites in the park with Marcus!" James was pissed that I wasn't hanging out with him during the days (I guess he'd forgotten that I had a job).

James was pissed that I wasn't his bitch anymore.

"Alfonse and I went up to campus today." James told me one day. "It was kind of funny, campus security was on our ass, I think it's because he's black. We just ignored them, though. I had to tell Alfonse that campus security is a joke" James doesn't seem to share my concern that teaching young out of work black men from our neighboring ghetto that campus security is a joke may not be the greatest idea.

A few weeks later, the apartment got robbed. James had brought in a cheap tv he'd borrowed from a friend of his, and had lost some cheap stereo equipment. Net value probably wasn't over $50. James was furious. He called the cops, tried to get Mr. Johnson in on busting the bad guys, I think he even had some sort of sting going at some point, trying to buy hot goods to light up the "bad guys". James was pissed that I wasn't outraged and helping him get his stuff back. The cops didn't seem that interested either, unless James could use his pissant loss to help them bust some of the known bad guys in the complex. Of course, James never got any of his stuff back, or helped bust anybody at all. He's lucky he didn't get his ass kicked.

To me, his outrage was a bizarre waste of time. You don't belong here, white boy. You are tolerated. Nobody here trusts anybody, not even their friends, and you ain't a friend. If you are extremely careful about locking the doors and blocking the windows, you may be able to keep from getting robbed blind. If you value something, if you can't chain it to the plumbing or find some other way to make it safe then don’t even bring it in the door. Only an idiot would get upset about it. You play, you sometimes lose. In this place, pretty much, eventually you lose.

We moved out a few weeks later. The boxes of our stuff that we took away had hitchhiking cockroaches, it was two moves later before I finally saw the last of them.

I never told anyone that I always wondered if the guy who came onto campus a few weeks later and raped a woman I knew might have been taught that campus security is a joke by James. I'm sure it never occurred to him, so I have to feel guilty for both of us.

Lost

7 days, just gone. Missing. Lost. It was a week ago today I got the flu, spent 4 days pretty much laid up in bed. The 4th day, I watched dvd episodes of the TV show Lost, which seemed significant somehow. Been getting slowly better, yesterday and today I'm pretty much back in the saddle.

I'd been riding high, too, starting to feel like I was getting it together. I was feelin' the anger, feelin' the power. Starting to feel like it's MY game.

Now I feel like a weak little puppy again, and I look at what's it going to take to get back there again? I feel so far behind on things, like I need to get caught up on all the life that I missed in a week of down time. "One day at a time" is starting to have a real meaning for me - I can't regain that lost time. I can't regain that lost feeling. It's gone gone. Just today, what can I do now? How do I feel now? How do I want to feel?

I think the key is in the gym for me, for now. I think I need to get my body working again.

I'm an idiot.