Bonfire

Late night writing. Hope you enjoy.


The afternoon was hushed, overcast, yet taut with excitement, a struggling prisoner gagged by the events unfolding before it. This was the last afternoon of the summer, the last time Micah would be at this house. He had one thing he wanted to do before he left. He wanted a fire.
   He had seen them before in the canefields, the orange flames tearing a wanton path through the stalks that would blacken and topple, helpless in the heated grip of the oppressor. He had stood at the side of the road, the excited cries of the other children he had come with drifting over his consciousness like leaves on the surface of a pond he had sunk willingly into. He had stood there spellbound by the power that was harnessed every year in the harvest season, and today he wanted to use that power for himself.
   He went out to the backyard, errant chickens scattering before his footsteps as he went barefoot into the grass. At fourteen paces he stopped and examined his tools. Three bundled newspapers and a box of matches. It was no jug of kerosene but it would have to do. All the trash was piled high on the heap, almost above his head, and he shoved pieces of paper into the crevices until he had exhausted his kindling. Finally he sat on his haunches and opened the matchbox. He tried to mimic the way his grandfather did it, with the stick at an acute angle to the side of the box, and failed with the first attempt. The smell of sulphur was in his nose now, and he wrinkled it as he tried again. This time, the flame blossomed and held its shape, a burning teardrop, as he considered what was going to become of this one spot of heat. Then, suddenly impatient, he thrust his hand forward, holding it under the comics page, smiling with satisfaction when the corner of the page curled forward as it started burning.
   He heard a door swing on its hinges, and looked back to see the neighboring house's back door swing slowly open. Their housekeeper peeked out timidly. Everyone on that street thought that she was mentally handicapped, and no one ever thought to step outside the walls of their presumption and verify it. So there she was, cast aside and disregarded at every turn. Maybe that was the reason why she said nothing. Maybe that was the reason she didn't go back inside as she saw the fire, tiny as an idea, begin to feel itself. She stood on the steps, wordless, and watched with the boy.
   The flame came into existence and felt for what it could consume. The newspaper came first, and was set upon with the desperation of a starving animal. The nature of it was simple, burn to survive. Yet, as it felt the sticks and paper under it, supporting it, its nature changed. No longer were the orange licks born of desperation, but now greed began to surface. On it grew, past the jeans and shirts the boy had piled on. He had been a long time getting this all ready, many trips to the house as the day had been born, heralded by the rooster with the bent comb. The flame tasted the cotton and polyester fibers, took them into itself and reduced them to charred tatters. The boy looked on and thought of the times he had seen those clothes come into the house for the first time, expensive apologies for violent incidents that went back to the custody battle. He could feel the flame going over the Jordans and suede boots the same way he felt his emotions over the years. His disappointment when the terms of the custody were explained to him. His father's fits of rage, fueled by tequila and frustration with life that was mostly his own fault. The flame grew bold as it went over the crumpled bills that had been stashed in the mattress, and the notes all went up with a rustling sigh that was almost lost in the low roar that his project had become.
     Micah felt the flame blow against his face and realised that he was very close now to it, and he reluctantly straightened to his feet, stretching upward as far as he could go. He knew he had been here for a while, yet he had to see it through to the finish. The couch cushions, stained by alcohol and laziness, seemed almost eager to surrender to the rage of the flame now. It was full, strong, and determined, and the boy felt something as he looked at it tear through the bedsheets with greedy, almost lustful abandon. Pride? No. Not just that. That was too simple. He thought about it, and eventually decided that he could not pin it down. The word he wanted was cathartic, but he would not know about that word til much later in life, and he forever associated it with this moment in his life. He watched the monster he had created shrug its mane of black smoke and roar at the afternoon skies, and he saw all the rage he had kept inside for all these years given shimmering shape. His eyebrows were long gone, yet he did not flinch from the heat as the wooden chairs crackled and collapsed in a shower of sparks. Why the housekeeper had not told anyone what he was doing was beyond him, and he looked back to see her still there, her mouth pressed into a thin line, refusing to look away as he stared at her. She nodded her head gravely, slowly, then returned her gaze to the fire, as he eventually did himself.
   When it finally went down to the cinders he turned his back on the pile and met her gaze one final time. He shouldered the bag he had packed last night and set his eyes on the road. Halfway down the road he saw the  pickup truck coming down on the other side of the road. He made no attempt to hide, and was not relieved when he was passed with no signal of recognition. He had no particular destination in mind, and yet he was unafraid.
  He had the fire.

From Yesterday to Tomorrow

I woke up on Tuesday with a feeling of dull pain. Nothing physical, mind you. And yet it was there. My friend messaged me before nine and I already knew she was feeling it too. We discussed it at length, and a few things about our conversation stood out. One was this quote: "I think I do this every year, just longer this year I suppose....cuz think about it, its been ten years. In that time we went to school, got jobs, found love, you got married, have a son. I'm engaged. And Kyle is like frozen in time."
   Of everything there, only one thing sat in my brain, candle burning away the darkness. Ten years. A long time by anyone's standards. At this point more than a third of my life. However, the phrase 'remember it llike it was yesterday' has never been more applicable.
   Kyle Caesar, or "Tweez" as we called him, was trying to make it back to class at school when his car malfunctioned and slid off the road. He made it to the hospital, but died on May 1. Looking into that coffin was the last time I have ever looked into a coffin, outside of my grandmother, and that took some doing. He had died in the car he had always wanted a scant three months after getting it, and it felt and feels very unfair. One of the more memorable moments was at his parents' house, when my friend Charles looked at me and said, "Why don't we go out and rob banks and beat people up and stuff?" When I asked why, he responded bitterly, "Because, nothing will ever happen to US...".  Yet, I feel that it would be a disservice to his legacy if all that I took from my time with him was how it ended. Today I choose to remember the things about him that made him so memorable all these years later.
   When I first went to secondary school as the poor kid from the small island and the people who would later become my best friends made fun of me, my skin was thin to nonexistent, and I was very upset. Kyle was the one who defused that situation and let me know that there was no need to overreact to good-natured ribbing. From then on, we were in classes together, Sea Scouts, swimming on Saturday. I remember him telling us about adjusting to having glasses, and how he took a shower with them on multiple times. The craving he had to drive that his father would later tell us was in his family. Going fast was in his blood, and his family raced quite often. I remember his father giving him a pickup truck to drive when he so badly wanted the Mazda RX-7. A normal kid craving racing cars would have blown up or sulked or reacted in some negative fashion. He drove it everywhere, making it do 180s on grass. I cannot think of a person quicker to laugh, and he rubbed off on everyone. When it was just us in school and I told him how I was stressing out about my SAT score, he cheerily told me about his lower one and laughed about it. He talked me through my stress, and by the end of that day I had adopted his views on it, and was much more casual.
   Ten years later, so many things have changed. I don't even live in Trinidad anymore. I have matured slightly. Memories don't change, though. I think the most significant thing I have done since then is learn not to dwell on the negatives. I can now use him as inspiration, use the fact that I still have a chance to go on for him as a motivator. I can smile because I know he would want us to, and so I will.






As I return to the heat and squalor of my room
I reflect once again that I am for once
Seriously, blissfully happy to be alive
My stomach hurts from playing with friends
The leather and cloth ball, once soft and friendly
Becomes a screaming meteor, shattering the world that is my ear
Pride surges like a tide, even as I stumble like a newly born bird
I shake off what I can and rejoin the battle
It seems that time stops for those brief moments
When the people I respect and look up to
Have their most cunning efforts thwarted by my actions
Even as I slide in the mud and taste the earth that supports me
Even as my muscles protest their unusual workload
I reflect in idle moments that many I love are under this earth
And would rend the dimensions asunder
To be able to feel a cramp, a bite, a cut
Would weep with happiness to have a scar to touch
So I accept the pain, my body and my place in the world:
A defender, sworn to carry on the hopes of my friends and teammates
As far as my body will let me, and then my soul must push forward...
Yes...today was a good day to be alive.
I wonder and wait for tomorrow....

An-Tie-Matter

I hate ties.

    Socks absorb sweat and make a buffer between the shoe material and your (stinky) feet. Underpants protect your rear from rubbing on polyester all day. Cufflinks keep your sleeves together. Hats can protect from wind, dust, sun and rain. Shoes, gloves.....every part of my wardrobe is earning its keep in the workplace of my body. Then we have the guy just there for the ride. The shameless leech who refuses to put in work, hides when the boss is around and takes your food out of the fridge right before lunch. The necktie. 

    Deemed so important in years gone by that there are (albeit satirical) books published about the correct way to fasten them, men have always been judged as soon as they walk out the door wearing a shirt without a tie. I think we can agree that no man in the business world dares leave his bedroom without one of these strangulation facilitators hung around his neck. Even men in such position of power as director of the BBC can't escape judgment. I have done research over the years, and at no point have I found a reason for wearing a necktie outside of "fashion". 

   Well I like practicality, and as such have fought for years against having to wear those things. There are ways to look formal without wearing ties. Suits like these collect dust by the wayside, and I fail to see why.

"Well, Dominic," the GQ gentlemen sneer, "it just looks better. Clearly your fashion sense is nonexistent."

So why is a tie fashionable? Why have we come so far, from having women wearing corsets and metal banded skirts, men wearing white powdered wigs and starched collars so stiff they could kill, to our modern fashions, yet maintain that wrapping cloth around your neck is the only way to appear professional?

"Well, Dominic," the clerk at Men's Wearhouse says wearily, rolling his eyes at me for the fourth time, "it's a way for a man - OR woman - to express their individuality."

   I'm going to have to disagree. You can make that case for body art and piercings. Even barbed wire tattoos around the bicep say something about you. Sites like Suicide Girls celebrate body art, and I'm sure many piercing sites exist where you can go through and not see two people exactly the same. When I look at a picture like this:

I cannot help but see how.......similar all the guys look. I see an amorphous mass of dark hues and cloth around the neck. Is this what the adult world is? Looking alike? Conforming to have a shot at a job? Thankfully, not everyone thinks so. Instead of using Google to look for ties, I looked at what Google thinks of ties. Seems a divisive issue at best. In a letter to the Financial Times which you can't read unless you subscribe, which is why I can't link it here..........Google's privacy chief spoke out against ties. In the quotes I saw, he seemed to think the same ways I do, even saying that ties constrict the flow of blood to the brain.

   Obviously he's trying to be funny, but in the moments of seriousness you can see the points he raises for regular t shirts vs suit and tie in the corporate world. I'm with him.

   This final article discusses clip on ties. I have gone this route a few times. Skimming through the article I kept finding objectionable material. He mentions cops and security personnel wearing clip ons to avoid being strangled. Common sense over fashion, I nodded and continued. Then I got to THIS:

 Similarly, people in factory environments who wear ties are also advised to wear clip-ons – in the unfortunate event that the tie gets caught in a piece of machinery, it will simply clip off, rather than pulling its owner into the machine as well. (Then again, why people in factories would wear ties I have no idea.)

So what are you saying, sir or maam? People in factories don't have to wear ties because what....only professionals wear ties? So factory workers aren't? What, working in a factory takes you off the list of people who can "express themselves as individuals" in such a way? Get out of my internet browser with that.

I hate ties. If you made it to the end of this you no doubt get that. I do not ask that if you like ties you change your mind. I simply ask that you seriously ask yourself why you like them, and if it was ever your choice.

Vigilante Injustice

By now, the entire world has heard about the bombings in Boston. I'm not going to use the bombers' names because that kind of martyrdom via social media is not what this blog is about. Neither am I going to get into an in depth discussion of the people saying Syria, Israel etc have blasts every day. What I am going to talk about....is Batman. Stay with me.
   Everyone knows who Batman is, his tragic past and his shadowy brand of justice. Everyone loves the idea of this masked badass going out at night and wrecking evildoers. Everyone snickers when the Gotham police refer to him as a vigilante and outlaw, because hey, he's the hero! Laws don't apply to the good guy! They are for the other pitiable mortals out of the panel. So when Boston runners were caught in the blast and the FBI was hungry for clues and CNN was very clearly not a good source of accurate info , the Internet decided to turn to the one source of information it should have doubted immediately. It turned to itself. Thousands of people on social networking sites like Reddit and 4chan donned their alter egos of "justice" and started scanning photos of the race and monitoring police scanners (which, honestly, I'm kind of surprised is legal). What happened as a result? Sunil Tripathi.
 
A young Indian male, dark skinned, missing since March. One reddit user made the logic leap, and immediately the wolf pack started howling. His name was never said on the scanner, and I have looked for files of the scanner mp3 files which you can listen to for yourself. It's not there. Yet, one person said the name, and in the spirit of "social media is better than policework" this man's name was posted thousands of times in relation to this tragedy. Hours later, the true names would come out, but in the meantime, the torches were lit, and thousands looking for someone to blame had their target. He was slandered to no end, vengeance was sworn. Even after the fact, people refused to apologize. Pulled this from a reddit thread discussing the whole fiasco:

   Even here in this thread I have still seen people today claiming the missing guy is involved - and in one shocking instance, blamed for disappearing. Specifically - kposh said -

"no one owes anyone an apology to this kid he disappeared that makes him real suspicious looking"

So what is left? Where IS this man? No one knows. His family has to deal with his month long disappearance and the fact that he was the most wanted man in the country for a while because of incorrect data offered up by the Internet Justice League. In addition to this, there was a second name being floated around. Mike Mulugeta. How did our brave heroes come up with this name? On scanner at 2:14 AM an official said, "Last name Mulugeta, (spelled out), M as in Mike, Mulugeta." Clearly a small clarification in spelling is a name indication. No one knew what this name was in reference to....a suspect? A house owner in the neighborhood? Some guy with Red Sox tickets? If his name had started with D police might have been told to look for Dog Dulugeta. These are the jumps in logic made latenight online. 

   

With the situation now resolved, no one cares to look back on what the net did or didn't do to contribute to this case, but it showed a staggering lack of professionalism and proved a couple of things to me. One, the public is a bad place to source info from at night. Two, people don't care about who gets run over in the stampede to be right and get a pat on the head. Being first with information is seldom being right.

Meanwhile Sunil's family is still looking for him. Don't try to find him. Last time we didn't let the qualified people do their job, he was identified as a murderer. Just let him be.

First Lap

Well, we made it.
   A year ago, I was sleeping on a hospital couch, wondering what life would have in store. My son had just been born, and after initial worries about low heart rate, they let him into the room with us. I worried extensively about his nose. He has what I suppose would be called a button nose, but days after birth, it was pressed into his face such that he was struggling to breathe every minute. I sat there in the early afternoon and watched his face, thinking that anything could happen at this point. He made it past that.
    When he refused to go to bed, and I realised as I sat on the couch at 4:45 am with him that I was living every cliche joke about parenthood that I had ever heard, I wondered how this was going to work. I am not super dependent on sleep, but I need at least four hours to soldier through the average day. So how was I going to manage this guy waking up every two hours? It took us a long time but we figured out that the secret was counter intuitive. The milk he screamed for after dark made him urinate, which filled his diaper and made him uncomfortable, which woke him up. So we weaned him off of that, and he started sleeping from 8 pm to 6 am. Another hurdle down.
    I realised that I had made it past some invisible hurdle every morning, as I looked down at him, he would look back at me and smile his toothless smile. Some cosmic karma accountant had checked my books over and decided that everything I had done in life qualified me for one more day with this guy. This little man who figured out how to take off his dirty diaper and threw it across the room, who scared the cats every time they came into the room, who still occasionally decides that sleep is for the weak and raises hell at 230 am. He is not easy to deal with sometimes, and I often remembered my old pledges to never have a son and have the karma of my younger self to deal with. Yet, he earns his place in my soul daily. His insistence on saying 'Da Da' even when asked to say mama is amusing and heartwarming. The moments when he would stop crying and start crying when I sang songs to him add up. I find myself constantly thinking of things I can teach him in the future, principles, games, sports, languages. Right now, he resembles a lot to me, but most of all, he is the embodiment of limitless potential, and I find it fascinating. Sure, he's barely twenty pounds and has a grand total of three teeth showing, but I'm looking down the road at the horizon.
   So, every day I think of what could have happened to him, and I count it as a victory. Obviously and hopefully we have a long way to go, and I plan to be running right next to him the entire way. Happy Birthday, Damian Matthew. Welcome to lap two.

The Language of Immortality

   Today the dawn brought with it dark news. Chinua Achebe was dead.
    When I was young, I prided myself on reading books adjudged to be too mature for my reading. I read Doris Lessing's Nine African Stories just as often as I read Samuel Selvon's A Brighter Sun. The people I hung around with, as well as older family members of similar mind, suggested I read the work of Chinua Achebe. I neglected to do so. Again, in secondary school. In 1999, while watching BET, I saw the Roots had released an album called Things Fall Apart. Again, I neglected to read. Finally, in university, I had no choice. We had to read it for class. I took it home and felt regret soaking through my brain. This work was excellent. So too his other books, Arrow of God etc. Today, he is dead. Yet, I would argue, he is not lost to us.
    He remains with us because of the questions he posed with his work. The eternal conflicts of old traditions and principles meeting with the new. The positive and negative effects exposed at such meetings, and a person's willingness to adapt or hold firm formed the basis of a lot of his work. We dare ask questions now about communication between races, between religions, between ethnicities. This man did it at a most unfriendly time.Africa in the 1960's was not the safest time for an intelligent Black man to be writing thought provoking literature that hit so close to home. In doing so, he became a banner under which intellectuals and the average man could both draw inspiration and knowledge from.
    Today, you will hear the names of countless prominent Black artisans and academics. You will hear them all praise the name of Chinua. The man who mentally shuddered in disdain at references to Africa as the "Dark Continent" and went to intellectual war with any and all who would refer to his people as savages. When no one else would, he went to very public war with the images presented in Joseph Conrad's Heart of  Darkness book. A direct (If lengthy) quote:


Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart of that talented, tormented man. But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts of indiscretion, irrational hate can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a dream for psychoanalytic critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction is by Bernard C. Meyer, M.D. In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead (and sometimes inconceivable ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long disquisitions on the significance of hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet not even one word is spared for his attitude to black people. Not even the discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was enough to spark off in Dr. Meyer's mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria.
Whatever Conrad's problems were, you might say he is now safely dead. Quite true. Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is why an offensive and deplorable book can be described by a serious scholar as "among the half dozen greatest short novels in the English language." And why it is today the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses in English Departments of American universities.
   
     Today, you will hear many people laud this man. You will probably read about Maya Angelou praising him. Nelson Mandela once said that when he was imprisoned, he read Achebe and "...the prison walls seemed to fall away." You may not hear about the opposition he met when he published his books in English and was at first reviled by his peers for using the "language of the oppressors". Though he recognized the argument, an issue for non English literary figures worldwide, he persevered, and the widespread appeal of his work bore out his decision.

   The man was filled with golden quotes. Asked about the fact that he never won a Nobel prize among his many accolades, he responded "My position is that the Nobel Prize is important. But it is a European prize, not an African prize..." The one that stays with me the most is this. "The man that would hold his brother down in the mud, in order to achieve this, has to stay in the mud himself."

   Today, Chinua Achebe is dead. His work, his tireless spirit, his philosopher's attitude to life and its inner workings....these things may never die. So long as his teachings, his trailblazing for literary figures in Nigeria and worldwide live on, his legacy cannot fall apart.

The Art of Terror

First, let me say that I am terrible with horror movies. Really bad. My mother would routinely laugh every time I left the room and went to bed rather than watch X Files with her and my cousin. The one time I let my friends take me to the movies for my birthday, they chose The Grudge. That was the last time my friends took me to the movies for my birthday. I watched "It" through a crack between couches. Yet I have read probably 90% of Stephen King's books. Yes, that Stephen King. "From A Buick 8" peeks at me from the shelf as I speak. So why am I a fan of these and not the movies?
   The stuff I am drawn to is not shock. After all these years, stuff jumping out in your face is still effective. Annoying, and effective to the point of feeling cheap, but effective. If I know that throwing something in your face is the easiest way to get you to jerk, why would I do anything but that? It has led to some of the most successful Halloween movies being simply a guy creeping in a dark hallway, a shape moving quickly, a deadly attack and a scream. That's fine, and if you make those movies, keep raking in that money. What I am drawn to is suspense. We must refer to one A. Hitchcock on this subject. He believed in the art of keeping one drawn into the scene emotionally with his stories rather than just scared. It was more of an emotional spectrum. This interview is one of the best ways to explain how his creative process worked, where he explains how he would set up a scene. In another interview, he explains that, to him, the actual facts of the movie are meaningless. What is important, he says, is how the story is told.
   Which brings us to Stephen King. What he manages to do with his books is, bluntly, genius. He melds the otherworldly with the mundane at such a level that it becomes less scary and more fascinating. Concepts that would otherwise die pretty quickly in anyone else's hands become magic. I think part of it is because he works in so much day to day life that one cares about the individual in general, and not just how grisly of a kill they will make. It is a fine line to walk without losing the edge of the story or becoming cheesy, yet he pulls it off time and again. Put a person you meet for five minutes in danger, yes, your instinct would be to be concerned. Put someone you have known for a year in the same danger and it becomes way more crucial.
   Even in games, some companies are able to generate this emotional response. Mass Effect 2, for example, universally regarded as one of the best games of our time, if not all time, earns such platitudes by taking a page from Hitchcock. In the face of death on the horizon, day to day activities take on new meaning and are soaked in suspense. ME2 works this by telling you at the start that at the end of the game, you will be going on a suicide mission that no one expects you to come back from. You have to build a team of agents that will work with you, and sorting out their personal troubles before the end feels very ominous, like the prisoner on death row clearing his conscience before death. By the end, when people start falling, it becomes much more significant that these people are dying.
   However, death is not the only tool of the artist who wishes to create suspense. The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite TV shows, and while they tend away from Hitchcock style techniques, their ability to create tension without death is a testament to their skill. Probably the most well known episode is Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Young William Shatner sits at the window seat of his plane and watches as a gremlin tears at the wing, yet disappears whenever he tries to point it out to anyone else. If the gremlin were on the loose in the plane biting people, I would have lost interest rapidly, as would most people. However, it is done far better than that and by the end you are wondering if it was a nightmare or reality. I won't spoil the end itself for you but it is a fine piece of fiction.
      So, going to watch a movie? Pause for a while and check out some Twilight Zone, or some old Hitchcock movies. More than one way to get the blood pumping.

Interracial Marriage

By my self imposed deadline of Friday, this post is late. I am going to get into why that is.

About a week ago today, I got onto Facebook and was poking around when I saw a post from a guy I know. The headline picture was a split image; first of two black people in traditional Egyptian garb holding hands, then of a pregnant white lady with her black husband behind her and a superimposed image of the word "Why??" Decided to read. The content was a response to a letter published by a (newspaper? magazine? never got to verify) about how a strong and respectable black man could never choose to be with a white female as opposed to a black woman. Said person commented on the link "And the church said Amen!"

   Those of you who know me know that I am currently married to a white woman as of 2007. Instantly I got upset, and I was going to get very annoyed, put people on blast and generally fly off the handle. Not generally my style, but things that hit close to home are usually emotional triggers. I waited til this long because I wanted to calm down and approach this situation rationally. First I had to understand why I was upset. Reason being that condemnation of interracial union in 2013 struck me as petty to the point of being ridiculous, especially by black people. So many centuries of struggling to be free of condemnation only to inflict it on each other. Seems highly illogical. Then after consultation with like minded individuals, I dug deeper, and found a lot of interesting information.
   One might think that the furor over interracial relations is a feature exclusive to black and white relations, but not so. In my research I found that Nazis and Jews had their own issues with this theme. No one wants to compare themselves to the Aryan nation, yet on an almost daily basis their concepts bias our interactions. "Keep the bloodline pure!" "We grow weaker when our genes are spread around!" "S/he doesn't look like us, and I can't abide that." Oh sure, this exact phrasing isn't used, but the concept is there. The idea. Ideas are bulletproof, after all, everyone is quick to cite from the V For Vendetta film, yet cannot see how it applies to daily life.
   So why did everyone fight so hard to end apartheid, to bring the struggle for equality to a world spotlight, to battle dogs and hoses and lynchings for all these years to get to this point, where what racial intolerance there is is frowned upon (but not nonexistent, I can personally attest to that)...and then have all of it go out the window because of people who choose to view equality only as a way to get money, or to sustain a lifestyle, instead of a way of life? Why must I be told I have "sold out" because my wife is not Cleopatra? Why must whispers dog my heels as I go down the street with my mixed son?
   After more research, I think the answer goes back many years, into the doctrines of one Willie Lynch. I urge everyone to look into this speech as much as possible. I can already tell that some will stop to question the veracity of such a speech, and I say to you you are being bogged down in semantics. Look at what it says, then look around at many of us. Europeans have used the principle of divide and rule for so many years to conquer African countries, one of the major results being the Genocide in Rwanda after Belgian immigrants enlarged racial divides between warring factions, for their benefit. Distrust and envy still abound today in black communities and it does not have to be this way. I hear the phrase "sell out" and think about it. To sell out indicates that someone has given up everything of value to attain something. What of value has been given up by either member of an interracial relationship? The chance to stay single? Values? What values would forbid someone from loving another because of the color of their skin or their race? Does that not in itself form the foundation for what we openly condemn as racism?
By the way, I know the word miscegenation is used quite often to describe interracial relations...this is why I shy away from it now. Anyways, back to the point.
   The distrust and envy entrenched in so many societies worldwide is leading us down a path of futility that is quite frustrating to watch. Far from unifying to better ourselves, we insist on fragmenting along lines that we claim we fought to erase decades ago. I waited this long to air out my thoughts because I thought that this issue deserved more than a knee jerk reaction spiel of "Y'all just hatin'!" I provided ample reading material here for anyone reading to dig into themselves, and I think it helped me too doing the research on this.
I went back to that guy's Facebook wall tonight to get that picture so you guys could see it.....and he had deleted the link. I hope that was done for the right reasons. Yet one more thing to think about, something I have had to do a lot of.
     One more thing. Since I wrote this on her birthday, check out this lady.

Writing to write.

No opinions today, just a little fiction (?)



As Nathan neared the intersection, the traffic slowed, then jerked, then started again, a greedy predator slinking up to its prey before seeing something better in the distance. He fiddled with the radio as he leaned on the window, four inches of glass refusing to go down any further, no matter how he slammed the door, cursed it in the early mornings, entreated it in the evenings as he worked on the car during the weekends. He could always fix the most serious issues, but never the glass. He was resolute in his stand against the mechanic; no money would fall from him until they justified the bill for the last repair. $400 bill for replacing an $80 part had struck him as unnecessary to the point of blasphemy, and he refused to go back. These were the thoughts in his head when he saw Mel again.
    She was the reason that the traffic had slowed, as some lady had given her a little room to cross the street, and now the cars were speeding up again. She hit the sidewalk, turned and saw his face. They had some...history. If you wanted to call it that, he thought. She was wearing a white shirt, buttoned pretty high, and a dark green skirt sufficiently long as to be called professional without being frumpy. A small clutch in hand, her face went through the muscular aerobics that usually happened when the mind is desperately shoveling through memories to assign a name to a face before it became awkward to stare, and inwardly he quailed at the thought that she would not remember him. Ah, but there it was, the widened eyes, the relieved smile and his name, coming to meet him over the sounds of horns, arguments, and the whining of sweaty children. She took a step forward - and pulled her foot back rapidly as she remembered where she was. They both instinctively looked for a place where he could pull over, and seeing none, her brow knotted, before smoothing again. Before he could lift his hand in a farewell wave, she had stepped into the traffic, which had slowed down for an instant and swept like a wind around the nose of his growling Honda. Her clutch slid along his window, and then just like that, she was sitting in his passenger seat.
"Well, what a way to see you again!" she said, and a small part of his brain marveled that she didn't seem at all winded by that quick spurt. Keeping in shape, it would seem. The majority of his brain, however, was taken up with the fact that here was Mel in his car. He flashed back to the last time he had seen her.
   They had been nothing but children playing then. She was staying up the street with her father, a well known dentist in the area. Nathan had been staying with his aunt in the city for the time while his parents decided where their marriage was going to end up. They had met once or twice, but hardly ever in a setting where they could actually talk and get to know each other away from adult eyes. He had thought of her as fun: she knew all of his games, enjoyed climbing onto rooftops just like he did, and their fascinations with Batman ran parallel. Outside of these things, she actually seemed like a boy. Oh, not physically. Her hair was far too long for that, but she didn't act like the other girls. She liked Batman! How incredible was that?
    Eventually the day came for hide and seek. Nate's few friends scattered like ashes in a storm as the counting began, and Nathan made a beeline for his uncle's van. Though it didn't look likely, he could fit under there, and had often used it as sanctuary in these games. He slid under the side and could not contain a reflexive yelp as he slid face to face with Mel. Her eyes widened, and she put a finger on her lips and shook her head rapidly, hair flying from side to side. There they waited as the hunters sought in vain, and when they heard footsteps next to the van, his hand found hers and held it until the steps faded. Giddy with adrenaline, he looked at her grinning back at him, the excitement of outwitting their pursuers filling both of them until it seemed impossible not to scream. In the middle of this, out of nowhere, her hand squeezed back hard on his, and she kissed him. They were children, so it was not graphic, no tongue kissing. It did not even last three seconds, and by adult standards would have been pretty tame. For a young man not even fully aware of himself as he related to girls, this was a mind blowing experience. She had walked up the street as night fell and the street lights came on like lonely fireworks late to the show, her yellow dress spotted with oil. He had never seen her since that day.

   And now here she was.

   "So, you, uh, you jump into strange guys' cars often?" he said smiling.
"Well, no. But I haven't seen you in forever, and if memory serves, I can take you pretty easily."
"That is all in the past, and I wouldn't assume. I could spring some kind of suplex on you and you'd be done."
"Oh really. Well while you consider what kind of body slam you will fail at trying to do on me, tell me what's been going on! It's been forever!"
So he told her. He avoided the depression, because that wouldn't make a favourable impression. He stuck to the basics, ranted about the car for a while, traffic, school, the whole nine. She told him she was working as a secretary in town and was liking it so far. The chatter continued until she abruptly looked left, said "Oh, there's the diner. I should probably actually eat on my lunch break. You have time for some food?"
He was broke, and he was trying to be early for counseling on the first day, so he deflected it with a "maybe next time. I'm about to go to a work meeting, then some football. Good day for it."
"Maybe next time might be never..." his brain warned. He shook it off.
"...catch you some other time then, maybe hang out. At least now I  know you're downtown sometimes. Next week maybe?"
"Yeah, that works."
"Okay, have a good one!" She punched him lightly on the shoulder and got out of the car, leaving him to process what had just happened. A ghost of his past had drifted back into his life, but unlike Jacob Marley she had come with the sounds of traffic heralding her approach.

   He was still thinking about it as he went up the nondescript stairs to the counseling center, turned the corner and opened the door. All the same posters were there, and he studied the art pieces above the fern until he was called in. He got on the couch, steepled his fingers much like his counselor, and closed his eyes. How to begin...
Outside, he heard another appointment being registered, children outside the window, a mower buzzing, then stopping, then a man's cursing all mingling in the afternoon heat. He lay on his back and let it all comfort him, how normal it all was, how relaxing. He let all his frustrations out, and Dr. Charles remarked that he seemed more uplifted today. "Maybe not uplifted," he said, "but reflective. In a good way."
   Finally, when he was out of time, he went back into the lobby, eyes fixed on the exit. Behind him, he heard a low gasp, and he turned around, not knowing what to expect, yet somehow, knowing exactly who it was.
Mel stared at him from a chair in the waiting room, and the secretary smiled.
"Do you know each other?"
"Ye-"
"No."
He stiffened as she avoided his gaze, and drifted into the next room soundlessly.

Love In The Air

We just got past February 14 a while ago. The things that this date brings up are quite disparate in nature. Some people find it a time for love. Others find it a time for mini revolutions against the capitalist machine that is Hallmark. Some guys like me find it six days out from the Playstation 4 announcement. But everyone can identify it as Valentine's Day. Now what does that day mean to me?
   I have a story to recount.
   I want to say it was 1999, and I was really bad at romance etc. I had my eye on a lady we shall call...C. C was in pretty much all my after school classes, and I was very taken with her. I made up my mind that I was going to get her something for Valentine's Day, and I got a scented rose and some other small gift, I think it was a bear. Now, school was over at 2:05 pm, but class began at 3. The plan was that I would approach her in a private manner as she came over, before class and the public setting could override the plan, and present them to her. Man makes plans......
   Flash to 1 pm. I am in English Lit class with two of my best friends Chris and Niko, and they start in on me about C, because they know that is my lady of choice. Niko makes a comment about her head being really big and laughs. I laugh because I know he is only saying this to get to me, and yet, I have to make some gesture to show that I will not stand for such blasphemy! So, manipulated by the social and moral codes, I chase him out of the classroom - into the chest of the vice principal. Guys....I honestly cannot remember the last time I weighed under 180, and I was FLYING out of that room. So we made contact in a pretty decisive way. He adjusted his glasses and immediately said "Detention!"
   Normally, this would be a groan worthy sentence. I would go, do detention and get out around 3, maybe 330. Today, however..I could not afford the setback. I had to modify the plan. I knew another friend, Nicholas, who I could trust to be my emissary in this case while I went to detention. I gave it to him and went, thinking that it would not be that bad, and with sufficient numbers we could knock this out. You see, detention at our school was to clean the classrooms, as the dean figured that mere studying would not be enough to humble us. It worked to a degree, but then not much works after a certain age. So I go to detention, everyone else has the common sense to dodge it, so I am working alone. No pity from the dean, as I did just go all Juggernaut on the VP. So I'm sweeping, people from my class start wandering over.
"Nice flower!"
Heart stops. What is going on?
Eventually I figure out what happened. Nick had to leave, so he just left everything on the desk she usually sat in. Well before anyone had even started to come into the classroom, including her. Well....so much for privacy. Now everyone knows. And they make it known for my entire detention. I can take the laughter, that's fine, but my thoughts are consumed with C. Will she think this was mockery? Did I just screw up majorly?
Eventually I get out of detention at 4, show up in class looking like I went nine rounds with Taz, and sit far away from anyone else. C is there, but definitely not looking at me. Spirits low, I leave directly after class for juice and she calls me over.
"Thank you for the rose and the bear...that was really nice of you, you didn't have to do that," she says, looking at me. Down the corridor I see some of my friends peering through the class doorway.
"Well, you deserve it."
"YOU DESERVE IT? Nice lines, Casanova," my brain screams.
The very next class we had she brought me candy, and a note saying "You deserve it."


Now, this is what I remember usually on February 14. I don't force these stories down anyone's throat, and I cut a lot of detail off of that memory as is. The reactions I get are usually along one of these lines.
"I can't believe you of all people are part of the marketing machine for Single Awareness Day aka Hallmark Day! Keep all that lovey dovey stuff to yourself."
"Oh my gosh that is so sweet! I've been thinking all day of what my boyfriend will get me! It better be something amazing!"
"Yeah yeah that's fine. Now you have to help me think of something to get my girl. She's expecting something amazing!"

The reality is that you should not need a day to act upon the fact that you are with someone you like/love/are infatuated with. The year consists of 365 days, and if only Valentine's, birthday and Christmas are the ones you treat someone special, then you're doing it wrong. Too many people get that chocolate and foot rub or whatever on that one day only. If you are doing it on 2/14, that's fine. Great. Just don't let it be the only time.
The reality also includes the fact that people not in relationships feel extra pressure to find someone to be with on this day, which should not be. Societal pressure to feel attraction to someone cannot, I repeat CANNOT end well. There is nothing wrong with being single, and a lot of times it beats the hell out of being with someone you hate. It goes back to how often we pay attention to the lives of others instead of our own. Seeing movies like The Notebook and *insert Lifetime Channel schedule here* should just be for entertainment, and not to blueprint life. Art should ideally imitate life.

Now to wait for PS4....

The Fail State, and Life.

The people reading this who know me are aware that I am fascinated by games, and not just on an enjoyment level. I have tried base level game design many times, and one question I have to ask myself is the one that not many people consider.
"How do you lose?"  
   Not how do you win. Most games paint that picture extremely well. Save the princess, shoot the other guy, collect the letters, knock out Tyson. How do you lose? Well, if you are playing something like Mario, it is a simple answer. Don't bump into the spiky shell/get bitten by piranha plants/fall into the hole, or you die and have to start over. Over the years, you get conditioned into a dread of those words. "Game Over" represents a complete failure on your part, an incomplete grasp of mechanics, a too-slow reflexive twitch, an errant shot or jump and all is lost. This creates incredible stress on the player as the complexity of the game increases. No one wants their hard work lost, for nothing. Understandable, to be sure, but what was once played for fun is now played in dread of screens like this that are pretty demoralising.
    Eventually, as you can imagine, the bright minds behind our modern games realised that these allegedly relaxing pastimes were just stressful, and they sat down and thought. Somehow they had to solve the problem they had inadvertently created all in the name of fun. This task fell to a company called Crystal Dynamics, and what they were able to do was special.
   Now we get to my favorite game series probably of all time, Legacy of Kain. In the Soul Reaver games under the LoK umbrella, you play as Raziel, a vampire serving under Kain who is betrayed and seeking revenge. That's how it starts, anyway. Not the focus here. He is a ghost, and can assume physical form to adventure, solve puzzles etc. Sometimes however he has to give up the physical body and return to ghost form to pass through environmental hazards etc that would stop his physical body. So in a very real sense, there is no fail state. Take too much damage physically, become a ghost, wander til you can become physical again, repeat. This was for me a milestone! I had no need to play in fear, I could do as I wished and have fun regardless.
   Over the years, this philosophy went into other styles of games. In Heavy Rain, for example, you can "die" with a character and continue the story from the POV of another person. Failure is much more of an organic condition.

"Ok we get it he plays a lot of games. What does this have to do with life?"

    What are our fail states in life? Head to work without the project you were working on? Decide that you and your boyfriend are incompatible? Having your child say "I hate you"? What a lot of people fail to realise is that there is only one absolute fail state, and it is usually mentioned in the same breath as taxes. What we need to do is realise that life is far bigger in scope than our individual daily successes or failures. Dwelling on these things gives them power over our lives and keeps us at that "screen" indefinitely. We try so hard to not fail that we would rather not try. Advice like this scene from The Wire sounds more viable than ever in modern times. I urge everyone to embrace the fact that setbacks are ever present, even inevitable. Dwelling on them removes the probability of learning from them or moving past them into a new attempt. Everyone has talked about Jordan's famous quote that he succeeds because of how many shots he missed and games he failed to come through in. All that happened was that he refused to make his situation a fail state every time he did not succeed. I encourage everyone to take their situations in perspective and analyse their lives. See what your fail state is, and move beyond it. Be free.

Don't be this guy.

Introversion

I avoided writing this one for a couple weeks because I didn't know how to approach it without getting too personal, but in the end I decided maybe that is what is necessary.

   A few years ago I was talking with a friend of mine about introverts and extroverts. It was going well until I casually said that I was an extrovert. My friend's head snapped around and he quickly shut that idea down.

"You? Are you serious? You're at least 60% introverted." Then he continued with the conversation. I spoke with him, but in the back of my head there was a nagging question.

"AM I introverted?"

Over time, I decided to look into it, and the results opened my eyes to a lot of things.

First, the nature of introverts is not so easily defined. I saw the word, analysed 'intro', thought about 'inner' as it applied to emotion, and came to the hasty conclusion that introverts are people who internalise everything and are uncomfortable in their interactions with other people. This was why I was hesitant to self label because I know a fair amount of people, and I would not think that this would be the case were I to be an introvert.

This common assumption is completely wrong. I have been doing a lot of research in the past year, and one common thread ran through the articles I read like this interesting one...introverts are not scared of interaction, or terrible at empathy or any of those traits. They - though I suppose I should say we - are just not fond of continual external stimulation. My words for "sometimes I just need to be alone." This is not because I am depressed or sad or angry or unstable or moody - this is just how I am. I find it easy to be socially saturated and need time to process by myself. The more I read, the more the hair stood up on the back of my neck as I saw myself, depicted over and over again in these psychological surveys and reports.

     So introverts exist. What is their place in this society?

Well, as the old Batman show would say, things don't look good for our heroes. The extrovert is in almost every way the archetype for what regular society deems "a normal individual", and the one on the outside usually looked at askance, with judgements flying left and right. Again, though, this automatically rules out the introvert as a contributing member of society. This then leads to assumptions that we are shy. Not so. In her book that you can look up here Susan Cain makes this point:

Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not.

The problem is, in the school system, there is no time for introverts to play catch up. Schools are run on very tight schedules, and introverts that process things alone much better are forced into environments that have twenty, thirty, forty screamers all around them for at least six hours a day. Extroverts thrive, introverts can struggle in this uncomfortable environment. Then throw in the inherent meanness of children and you have someone who is not doing well and teased about it, boom, cycle. I'm not saying this always happens. I am saying that given the personality types it is easy to see it happening.
    Over time, I grew out of my fear of being an introvert, because I realised that it was not a bad thing. This was not me being some kind of freak, but rather a specific personality trait. Nothing was wrong with me. Now how to express to my friends that sometimes I would rather not have their company? Tricky, very tricky. It has never come up, and I would like to think my social deftness is the reason, but it is inevitable. When that time comes, I hope this quote applies.
 We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush." - Jonathan Rauch.

I wrote the following some years ago in some frustration, and it is eye opening to look upon my own works and understand myself through them. Figure I can just tack it on the end here and no one will complain.

The Party

The room is dark, and occasionally smoke drifts by
Teasing his nose, tugging on his senses
Before drifting off, a flirting ghost
As he stands in the corner, feet leaden
Drink clutched forgotten in his humbled fingers
As he returns a smile from his friend, avoiding any further eye contact
As she gazes, confused, at the shy man-child next to the speaker
As his friends party their lives away, he holds his in humiliated fingers
And wishes he could give flight to his soul
Watch it twist and dance, a freed albatross
over the sea of society, following whichever friendly ship 
Gives him permission to land
And yet, his friends murmur, confused
As yet another night is wasted, stationary
He has been here before
In this pit of anxiety and ridiculous embarrassment
Resisting the throbbing drums that try to nudge him out to the floor
And the slightly concerned and exasperated female advances
An interesting tableau, altogether...
The angel, in the air, falling to earth
Rather than use his wings....

Music Segregation

I wrote a paper on this many years ago, so in some aspects I am cheating. Nobody will care except that solitary teacher (maybe) so I think I am good.

    Right now, what are you listening to? Could be just your computer fan humming, or your air conditioner, or even your stomach grumbling. This is likely, sure, and you can eat while reading, so go make that sandwich. The majority of you, however, are likely to be listening to some kind of music. I am. I have on the Wolf's Rain soundtrack, which helps me write. Mostly instrumental music that I don't have to focus on. So in this age of music's unprecedented prevalence, what is the appeal? 

   Well, in my time of digging about it, I came upon these findings that only solidified what I had suspected all my life. Music is an immense influence on our minds and temperament, and does so with remarkable efficiency. Usually, I am listening to something, and many of the conversations I have with my friends include music at some point. Now it is easy to think about your favourite genre. Well, for most of us. Some people are sufficiently diverse as to make that a tricky question. The far more interesting question, I think, is 'What music do you NOT like?' The clutch answer is usually polka, old joke. Go beyond that line, though, and conversations become a little touchy. Say you don't like rock or r&b and someone is going to look at you sideways, guaranteed. Why is this?

       The reality is that music is so connected to some peoples' identity that it has become its own form of prejudice.

"Hi, I'm Mark. I'm from Jamaica-"

STOP! What does Mark listen to?

Were you forced to make a choice, the majority of people would shrug and say reggae. Our hypothetical friend Mark is quite insulted, and you no longer have a ride home. While you walk, you wonder why you said that. "Well, most reggae artists come from there, and Bob Marley..." etc etc.

That was an easy one. Let's go a little deeper.

"Hi, I'm Maggie. I come from Alabama-"

Same question.

"Well, she's from the country, so I'm gonna say country western music?"

"Well I listen to hip hop and some black metal..."

Just picture the general populace's reaction.

"Those don't go together!! What are you Maggie some kinda hipster? Pick one!"

Why are people like Maggie judged because of what they are "supposed" to listen to?

I have a lot of stories from my history about this that I wasn't going to pull out. Just realised though that this is my blog, and I am allowed a bit of self indulgence. So here we go.

   I listened to reggae,soca and dancehall pretty exclusively until about 93, when I started getting into rap. By 98, I was deep into the Wu Tang well, and oftentimes 2 am would find me with a new album in the radio, literally too hyped up to sleep. This was the situation until I heard Third Eye Blind's 'Jumper', which chilled me out. Seeking more of this effect, I got pretty heavy into alt rock as well, which opened me up to rock in general. One day I walked into a classroom with a friend and saw some band names scratched into a desk, with a younger kid clearly disgusted. I walked up and saw "pantera" "metallica" "slayer" "judas priest" gouged into the wood, and read them off. The kid looks up at me.

"You know who those are?"

I had seen their names in magazines for years, so I said yes.

"You're a disgrace to black people," he said, shaking his head.

I was too confused to hit him, so he walked out while I stood there. What had just happened?

Another time, a girl in the house next to ours had her stereo speakers on the porch playing music. Not uncommon where we were, but she clearly wanted to push some buttons. This was when Backstreet Boys were pretty big, and she started playing them loudly. Before I knew it, people were yelling at her and throwing stuff. When the bottles and shoes started knocking down her flowerpots, it finally got to her that maybe she should turn it off. 

This kind of stuff happens more often than you might even realise, and it is tied to a simple truth. Stereotypes about race are not limited to food and clothing, but music as well. From my own experience, I have made an effort to not judge people or assume what they listen to, nor do I assume that fandom of one style of music eliminates a desire for another. It all comes down to what you are listening to the music for. I listen to rap and rock in tandem for a reason. I listen to R&B when I feel the need for that kind of mood, reggae when I feel it, soca when I feel it. Each fills a particular void in my musical needs, and makes it hard to profile me as anything but someone with a short attention span. 

In the future, I challenge you to try something different. Listen to something you would not normally try. (If you shy away from polka, I'm not going to judge you.) Above all, do not assume that Mexican people should only listen to reggaeton, White people have an exclusive claim to metal or that all Black people listen to 2 Chainz and Gucci Mane. You might offend someone. 

Sorry, Polka fans.

From Russia With Love

This one begins with an anecdote. Recently, a friend of mine was at work in the break room. Another employee is on the phone in the break room, and overheard snippets of conversation. These snippets followed this general line. "Yes, she was supposed to be in London this morning, and flown over to Fort Wayne today at 1:30.....yes I have arranged for transport.....yes....YES, I paid for the ticket! My name is [redacted], card number [also redacted]! She's pulled this before, but I'm going to get her through this time!"
     The average mind at this point will go for the conclusion "haha, it sounds like he's ordering a mail order bride! But no one does that these days....right?" Being in possession of an average mind, these were my words  in response to this story. So I relate it to my friends, and in the retelling, a small light bulb blazes its way into existence, battling its way through the flotsam in my brain to ask its nagging question.

'Is it possible?'
I decided to investigate.
I started in the simplest way possible...I went to Google (sorry, Bing) and typed in mail-oh hello, the smart response system Google implements to guess your search has 'mail order brides' as the third most likely search. Eyes widening, I went on a tour of the web's vast knowledge banks, and found out some crazy things.
1: They're not all from Russia.
The mail order bride system is based around women who post their details in a way so that people from more developed countries can see it (magazine or internet), arrange for marriage with a willing partner and thus be set up for life with some lucky guy who can then parade around his "exotic" wife. Marriage maybe for the wrong reasons, but I'm not in the business of judging. Anyway, these brides can come from anywhere. The stereotypical source is Russia, but also Belarus, Ukraine, China, Thailand, Philippines, Taiwan and Colombia are only some of the countries that also supply this market. Motivations usually come down to one thing; financial security.

2: This is really old.
Apparently this has been going on since the 1800's in the U.S. Frontiersmen would get out west, stake their claim, build a house....then get lonely. So through an elaborate pen pal system in which pictures would be sent back to the guys (pre phone sexting, good lord) and courtship letters sent back East, women would agree to marry guys they had never met or seen. In the age of E-Harmony and match.com, I find it harder to laugh at that idea. Nothing is new under the sun.

3: They stay together.
According to USCIS, fully 80% of the marriages that started in this way stayed intact as long as they were being monitored, with an estimated 4000-6000 marriages happening per year. PER YEAR. That's wild.

So after reading all of this, I wonder about the kinds of guys who are doing this. Are these just guys who don't want to go through dating, holding hands, long walks on the beach.....just skip straight to the altar? Are they hoping that they will avoid drama by picking up a woman from a country with a history of subservient spouses? Whatever the reason, and with apologies to the guys doing it for the right reason, a lot of these guys are terrible, and can only get a woman with the promise of money and a house in the U.S. I'm willing to bet that a lot of them see it as some kind of sex slave catalog for 'exotic chicks'.

Which brings me back to the incredulity of my initial reaction. This still happens? You can compare it to internet dating, but it's generally understood that there is the matter of citizenship status and financial burden to factor in. Also.....a lot of the women doing this are trying to get to the U.S. Funny, in a time when so many citizens want to get out.

Finally, in case someone wants to make the point, I'll do it myself. I, as a foreigner, married an American woman. Does that make me equivalent to a mail order husband?
Something to think about tonight...as well as if that woman ever caught her flight.

'By: Anonymous.'

        A popular tag line for the internet-savvy, to be sure. Stop and think of how many times on a daily basis you see that word, and how few times you ponder what it signifies. Not what it means, as even the most basic man in the street can fumble out a definition, given the context. "It means that nobody knows who you are? I guess that's what it means. By the way, who are YOU?"
        I did not start thinking about the consequences of this status until a few months ago, when YouTube proposed having their millions of users open up their profiles to the public, and using their actual names to post. This was met with immediate and massive resistance by the vast majority of their user base. Why, though? Well, as far as I can see, it means culpability. Comment sections on the internet are generally a no fly zone for me, as I know what is waiting for me there. Racist, bigoted and outright idiotic comments are a dime a dozen. All the fun would be sucked out of it if XxSwaGZiLlaxX had to actually post "fuck you faggot" as, say, Theo Wilson. The same for gaming consoles. Xbox Live would be a far tamer place, I think, if the entire user base had to use their actual names. Underage gamers, the landfills of verbal abuse shoveled down billions of ethernet cables daily, discriminatory emblems and such, all accredited to the people instead of the personas? Madness.
        Mind you, I understand that the shield of anonymity has its uses. A person who would normally be easily identified and attacked, verbally, legally or even physically, can conduct their business privately with no fear. This helps millions of young people reach out for help for drug problems, sexual questions, mental illnesses and much more. Hell, one of the most instrumental documents making the case for American freedom from British rule was a pamphlet called 'Common Sense' written by Thomas Paine, but published "by an Englishman." I get it. So here we come to the grey area.
           Anyone paying attention to the news for the past couple of years should know about the internet hacker activist group Anonymous. They are represented by men wearing Guy Fawkes masks, and as the name suggests, no one knows who they are. You can make the case that this makes them a more romantic idea, that the everyman can make a change, it could be anyone etc. Under the blanket of anonymity they have made it onto Time magazine's 100 most influential people list for 2012, exposed homophobic practices, publicized the names of the Westboro Baptist church members (those guys that tried to picket the funeral for the Sandy Hook children) and generally were e-vigilantes on a level that is usually hit only in movies. They are also breaking the law maybe once a minute with database violations and other hacking related crimes. Is anonymity their shield or sword? Would any of them be around if their names were fodder for the publicity machine? I doubt. Is that a bad thing? As of this post, I am still not sure.
             Before I start dinner, I will leave you with this one. A new bill being put forth wants website admins to delete any comment posted by an anonymous account. Examine for yourselves.