Money for Nothing

America is in dire straits, and this is not news. We have known this for a while now, and I think we knew it in our collective subconscious well before we really “knew” it all over CNN and Fox News and that other stupid channel that I forget the name of.

America is in dire straits in part because of politicians who have shirked accountability while looking desperately around the world for someone else to blame. Well, they weren’t the ones doing the looking actually. This was and is done by the men and women of our military. 

Then, when American voters (I’d say citizens, but politicians as a general rule do not give a capital-f Fuck about citizens unless they can fire them) realized that our bravest men and women had been sent around the world on a wild goose chase for a vague “enemy,” that is anywhere and everywhere, and that many of them were dying in the process, the politicians decided to send out these big science fiction planes called Drones that can seek & destroy this “enemy” that way. Except, by definition this enemy can be anywhere at any time and actually technically can exist in anyone as well, lying dormant until something is pushed too far. There is no winning a war on terrorism, not by any stretch of the imagination.

However that is just part of the problem. I could write another scathing paragraph about the media, our country’s richest citizens, the corporations who have outsourced like crazy or the banks that gave a mortgage to anyone with a pulse and a 3^rd-grade education. But that’s not what I want to say today.

The other part of the problem that is being largely ignored is US. Us. You and fucking me. Your Uncle Ned. That co-worker who always has the runny nose. You name it. Us. The Normal People. Average Americans.

Every day I hear people just like me squawking at work, on the bus, at the local orgy, playing the same no-win game that the politicians tried to play all over Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan for years. Blaming Democrats. Republicans. Kenyans. Muslims. Immigrants. The Rich. Congress. The President. All the while contributing to our very dire straits by spending $200 on a pair of Beats headphones and $499 on an iPad for the kids and then crying poverty because there’s no money left for a vacation in Aruba this year.

Around this time, I usually hear this complaint, in some form: “The American Dream isn’t real anymore. Things used to be so much better in this country.”

Um.

When?                             

                                                           

We can’t ignore the fact that in today’s America minorities and women and gay people are actually treated like human beings (For the most part. I agree that we still have a long way to go in a lot of ways). That’s been a big step forward, and it’s happened relatively recently given the fact that this country is 236 years old and counting.

Do you mean the 1990s? When everyone seemed to have everything they possibly wanted, unemployment was low and the stock market was sky high? When the internet boom was making 23-year-old kids bazillionaires and everyone in America owned their own home? When the economy was so great that it seemed too good to be true?

Yeah, because it WAS too good to be true. That’s why we are where we are today. People spent too much, saved too little and no one told them that it was wrong. Everyone spent too much, actually, and it built up a few huge bubbles in our economy that grew and grew and fucking burst and left us all covered in gross bad-credit ectoplasm, Ghostbusters-style.

Or maybe you mean the simpler time of the 1970s and 1980s?

Here’s a secret about that time period: They weren't spending $200 on a pair of headphones. Or a piece of plastic and glass that does neat things when you touch it. Remember that scene in Adam Sandler’s movie “The Wedding Singer” when that guy who looks like Brendan Fraser and is supposed to marry Drew Barrymore shows off his fancy new stereo with a CD player? Everyone thought he was a huge douche for spending that much money on a toy. They were logical about it, and laughed it off as what it was: A child who didn't get everything he wanted for Christmas compensating for it as an adult by denying himself nothing.

The good people of yesteryear didn't live like Glenn Guglia (the Brendan Fraser lookalike). They lived like middle class people should live – modestly yet comfortably. The Family Vacation was a major part of American life because that was the priority of the adults in the households. They didn't buy their kids $500 toys; they took them to Europe. Those were the values of the times, and, more importantly, the values of the people.

The American Dream isn't lost or gone or dead. It just isn't as simple or easy as we've diluted ourselves to thinking. The equation was never Work Hard = Get Rich. It goes more like this:

Finish High School + Go To College or Learn a Trade + Stay Out of Trouble for the Most Part + Get a Shitty Job that No One Else Wants to Do + Graduate College + Work that Shitty Job for a while Longer + Look for Less Shitty Job + Get Turned Down a Lot for Good Jobs + Don’t Become an Alcoholic + Finally Get a Good Job + Work Really, Really Hard at that Good Job for a Long Time + Save Your Money + Invest Smartly + Don’t Buy Frivolous Things + Keep Working Hard + Stay Healthy + Ask for or Apply For a Promotion + Move Up in the Company + Keep Saving your Money + Take a Vacation + But Not 10 Vacations + Invest Even Smarter + 401k Fund + Use your Expertise To Make your Company Better + Get Compensated More for your Wisdom + Stay Motivated + Suddenly Have a Great Job.

That is the path to the American Dream of a nice house and a white picket fence and enough disposable income to piss off the neighbors. But it does not come easy – it’s not supposed to. Wealth is a privilege. Not a right.

End.

Sturgeon (Sorry for Leaving)

Hello,

 First of all, I apologize for my long absence. Between two job transitions, graduating college and focusing on some longer form works, I've truly neglected this blog and, by doing so, those loyal few who actually read it. I promise that I will try and do better in the coming months, and at least conclude the tale that I set out to tell nearly a year ago, "The Tale of Loring Manor."

 My current major work outside of Loring Manor is a screenplay, as you may expect, about a New England town. This is a small, coastal town; a fishing town called Sturgeon, where, as in so many other small towns across America, a greedy few control everything through manipulation and corruption. I love the story deeply, and I even truly hate a few of the characters, particularly a union thug named Gary, the ice cold son-of-a-bitch who betrays the most righteous man in the whole film. I won't include an excerpt of the script on here - yet. All I can give you now is this, a short description of the screenplay that I intend to use for marketing purposes. I am about 85% of the way done with the writing process, so hopefully I will share a little more of it with you soon.

 "In the small fishing town of Sturgeon, Massachusetts, Patrick “Mack” McLaughlin and his best friend, Jacob “Cobb” Riley are a couple of young muscle guys for the local drug and labor racket run by the old dockworker union and their political affiliates. Along with their mentor, Senior Headbreaker and Hitman-in-Chief Alan “Soup” Suprin, they bust jaws, break fingers and bash kneecaps all up and down the Merrimack Valley to “regulate” competition. For a salary significantly better than that of a construction worker or longshoreman, this is their version of a career. After a transport of coke and heroin gets jacked from a truck that was technically under the crew’s protection, the three of them face tough choices in the face of nostalgia, loyalty, and the strong, relentless current of a violent way of life that churns the conscience the way the Merrimack churns the Atlantic at the river’s turbulent mouth."

 I hope that that excites your imagination for now. I apologize again for the disappearance, and I promise that the concluding parts to Loring Manor will be posted in the near future, one after another after another (yes, there are three more).

The Tale of Loring Manor, Part Two

The next day at school, I couldn't stop hearing rumors about Jamie McLean and her suddenly absent husband. As soon as I heard a group of cute chicks talking about it outside the gymnasium after lunch, I was ready to rock despite any previous reservations. Everyone at Salem Junior High, especially the girls, will want to hear all about how we stormed up the stone stairs of Loring Manor and launched our own investigation right there, just us and our flashlights.

Nick caught this vibe, too. He wanted so bad to be a real tough guy and not just another kid from a Boston suburb. It had seemed like he had been yearning for street cred since the third grade; and busting onto some real rich guy’s property and trying to dig up a murder victim? Yea, that's pretty legit.

Chaz on the other hand never gave two shits about what anyone thought of him, so I was surprised to learn that he was more fired up about the plan than the day before.

“You guys pussy out yet, or are we still goin’ up the steps to find that corpse?” Chaz said, walking up to my locker with Coop waddling behind him. Nick and I shared a set of lockers, with his being on the bottom and mine on the top. Every Friday he would threaten to “shank” me so he could take the top from me as we hustled to grab our coats and hit that sweet weekend pavement.

“We’re still down, Gamble,” Nick said, standing up and slamming his midget locker. “You got a plan?”

“Not yet,” Chaz admitted as he made eye contact with me. “But we’ll work on that today. After school meet up in back of the soccer fields. You got any butts, Nicky P?”

“You know it.”

We slapped skins and started to split up. Chaz let Nick and Coop walk away before he started to walk with me towards my American History class.

“You’re gonna be late for gym again,” I observed, not wanting to get into our planning routine before class, as it usually involved a lot of my thinking and planning on my part, with him egging me on to be ‘less of a pussy’ and ‘tougher than a bag of lettuce for once.’

“Fuck gym,” he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure no teachers heard him. “I want to make this happen. Before it was just to scare Coop and show him that he’s an idiot, but now I want to go up there and see what’s what. If we don’t, some other group of kids will. Gloucester kids, or Marblehead jackasses, I don’t know. I just want to do this ourselves. We always talk like we’re the shit; well, let’s fucking prove it for once.”

He didn’t bother checking to see if anyone had heard him swear that time.

“Mr. Gamble!” Mrs. Adler shrieked from her open classroom door across the hall. All four feet, eight inches of her came flying at my best friend; her face was a cross between a pit bull and a witch doctor channeling the dead. She had been a Navy officer in her twenties, and here in the halls at Salem Junior High, thirty years later, that toughness and discipline had only sharpened over time. I cowered from the scene as she grabbed hold of Chaz’s ear by sliding into my own classroom for the next period, which was luckily across the hall from Mrs. Adler’s.

“Yo!” Chaz yelled as she began to usher him to the stairwell and down to Vice Principal McCarron’s office. “On the hill! After school!” His voice got further away as he was led down the stairs by the Admiraless of SJH, the way a cartoon character’s shouts slowly dissipate after they fall off a cliff. “After detention…” I heard him add, far away and trailing off. I imagined Mrs. Adler giving him a hard nudge in the ribs after he had the audacity to try and make after-school plans while he was her prisoner. Chills went down my spine.

Last period went by slow. I listened to McHugh drone on about how messy things were in the 1840’s as the country attempted a hard transition. In my head, I was at Loring Manor. Not in it, yet, but around it. I was across the street from the house, regarding the steps, the massive front porch, the strange pillars that had a Greek or Roman quality to them. Inside, someone was waiting. I didn’t know who they were and they sure as shit didn’t know who we were – who I was, actually, since I was alone. The darkness of the windows seemed to reach outwards, somehow creating an effect that was the complete antithesis of shining. I reached one foot off the curb and into the street; off the safety of my sidewalk, towards the big stone steps.

After school, we circled up on the Hill behind the school that overlooked the soccer fields to wait for Chaz to get out of detention. We huddled behind a row of tall bushes that shielded the grounds of the school from the residential neighborhood adjacent to it. This is where Chaz and Nick liked to smoke their Lucky Strike's out of the view of the teachers and the lamer kids who were known to snitch to get on Vice Principal McCarron's good side.

"I don't know about you guys, but all this talk about Old Man McLean all dead and bloody is really pumping me up," Nick said. "The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Hot chick marries old dude with lots of money. She thinks hey, it'll give me an easy out in life. She don't have to work, she gets access to all the finest shit, and soon enough he'll be gone anyway and she'll have it all for herself. Hell, she can put up with the old man for a while if she gets a free ride out of it. But not so fast; he ends up being more of a burden than she expected. He's so rich he don't have to work neither, so he's around all the time. He tries for a while to keep up with Jamie's party lifestyle but ends up dragging behind, and since he has all the money, he's calling the shots. If the Old Man's not going out to party, Jamie's funds are limited. She only has what he'll give her. So she gets pissed; decides to cut out the middle man. Now, the party never has to stop - she just has to cover it up. Considering they got that big old house and close to no contact with the outside world - at least the one that us normal people live in - it would seem like she's home free."

"So I guess it's up to us," I said, matter-of-factly. I still felt partially stuck in the daydream from history class.

"I don't know guys," Coop started. "I don't really think we could find anything anyway. I mean, we're not cops or anything like that. How would we know where to look?"

"Relax Coop," I replied condescendingly, even though I have less than a sliver of an answer. "As long as we get up there, it'll be worth it."

"Exactly!" Nick exclaimed with the enthusiasm I’d been counting on from him to make my lame answer feel more legitimate. "We'll just tear the place up!"

Coop shook his head and kicked away a pile of dead leaves that were at his feet. "Even if she did do it, I don't think we'd have any luck at all up there. It'd just be a scary time where we'd probably get caught for trespassing again. My dad'll never let me hear the end of it."

"Oh fuck you, pussy," Nick sneered. "At least you won't get hit. Every time the cops drive me home I take a hiding that you could never handle." This was probably true, although at the time we all dismissed as typical Nick Peabody tough talk. We didn't want to think about someone we knew so well actually getting beaten by their dad, so we chalked it up to bullshit. That was probably a mistake on our part.

“You never get hided, Peabody,” Chaz spat out as he climbed the grassy side of the hill up to our little alcove. “But I sure as hell will for saying ‘fuck’ in school again.”

“I do too get hided!”

“Chaz,” I said, “how was detention?”

“It was fine, but they made me write some bullshit essay about the ‘proper tradition’ of Salem schools and how my language was a determinate to that.”

“Detriment,” I corrected him.

“My way sounded better,” he said with a straight face. “So, you guys come up with anything yet?”

“No plan,” Coop said, sounding defeated and exhausted. “They just want to go in guns blazing and dig up any damn spot we see.”

“Is that our plan?” Chaz asked, looking to me and then to Nick. I shot Coop a dirty look and Nick spat on the ground.

“Our plan,” Nick started, “is to go up there to Loring Manor, and to look around, and to either find a dead old rich guy, or to take something that proves that we tried. And then, we tell everyone except for our teachers and our parents.”
“Or the cops,” I add, making eye contact with Chaz, who has a bad habit of thinking he’s better than officers of the law.

“Or the cops,” Nick allows, handing Chaz a cigarette. “That, gentlemen, is what we’re gonna fucking do. Any god damn questions, pussies?”

The guys finished their cigarettes as shot the shit about curfews and sleepover arrangements that we could lie about to our parents, and we walked down the hill and off towards our houses. Nick split off towards The Point, and Coop got picked up at the corner of Wilson and Jefferson by his mom like always. Chaz and I were left to trek back down toward Wisteria Street, where we had both lived our whole lives.

"Are you really excited about all this?" Chaz asked me.

"Kinda," I said, trying to act cool and level about it. "It'd be pretty badass to find out the truth for ourselves. Even if the Old Man is alive, we'll be the ones who have the eye witness account of it. We'll know the real story before anyone, and that's pretty boss."

"You've always been all about the stories, man," Chaz said with a chuckle. He was always giving me shit about how much I loved telling stories. For someone who brushed everything off, I guess it was weird to see someone who had an overwhelming need to dramatize everything for any audience that would have it.
Suddenly Chaz looked sad. This confused me at first, considering we had just been laughing. Then I remembered what he was going home to.

"Wanna come over for a bit?" he asked. “I don’t feel like starting homework yet.”

The Tale of Loring Manor, Part One

“You guys never believe me,” Chris Cooper said, disappointed, as we sat in his room one Tuesday after school. “I swear guys, Joe O’Donnell told my brother Mikey all about it,” Coop stammered. “They were in high school with that chick, she was two years ahead of them. They said there’s gonna be an investigation if the old man doesn’t turn up soon!”

“Bullshit,” said Nick Peabody, the designated badass of our little gang. “That’s just Joe talkin’ about nothin’, that’s all people ‘round here ever do.”

“There’s no way anything that cool happened in Salem,” Chaz Gamble, the undisputed leader of our gang said.

“Yeah, that chick probably just ran him off with all her shopping and partying," I said,

"The old fart just couldn’t keep up with a stallion like her I bet,” Chaz chuckled, nudging both Nick and I on the arm alternately.

‘That chick’ referred to Jamie McLean, formerly Jamie Allen, who was once the prom queen of Salem High School, and the undisputed hottest girl in town. She was eye candy to every kid our age since we were old enough to pretend to care about girls. Every girl in middle school was compared on an attractiveness scale of 1 to Jamie, no joke. She had up and married a much older man shortly after she dropped out of college at the age of 19. As you may expect, this older man, Dick McLean, was very, very wealthy. I mean stinking filthy fuckin' rich, this guy was loaded to the god damn gills.

The two had moved into Loring Manor, a large old colonial house that was set back from the rest of Loring Avenue by a large hill. The house was accessible only by its gigantic stone staircase that ascended the hill. These steps had once been surrounded on either side by gorgeous green bushes that framed the elegant property perfectly. However in the past several years, these bushes had stopped being maintained, and then after one Winter, they disappeared completely. They were replaced that Spring by an overgrowth of gangly looking thorn bushes that seemed to stretch up to eye level and then out over the stone staircase, turning back anyone who would try to climb the steps to Loring Manor.

The rumor in question, which Coop was now so adamently defending despite our refusal to believe him, involved the recent absence of Mr. McLean. No one had seen him down at the yacht club, which was the one place he had previously hung out, playing tennis on days when he knees weren't acting up. When they were acting up, he mostly just drank. Jamie, on the other hand, never saw tennis and drinking to be mutually exclusive, and unlike her spouse, she had been seen down at the yacht club lately. Quite a bit, actually, and usually with a collection of other young, pretty girls, often from out on Marblehead Neck. They were the queen bee's of the dining room there at the Corinthian, and they had made many a man feel weak and many a woman feel worthless with nothing more than a well-timed stare. It was something in their eyes, Jamie's especially, that was menacing in a way that was certainly sexy but also slightly dangerous. It was that exact stare that had probably prompted the first housewife to mutter the phrase, "I bet she killed her husband. He hasn't been seen in weeks, you know."

A comment such as that is often not intentional, and is often later forgotten in moments of logic and reason. However a comment like that is also always overheard. In this case, it was likely a Marblehead High school kid bussing tables who heard it, and he surely passed it along, half jokingly, to a half dozen or so co-workers to get a reaction. They apparently must have reacted fantastically, because now every older kid from Gloucester to Saugus knew the rumor. Even us lowly middle schoolers were hearing about it now, albeit with help from our older brothers.

"Do you guys really think it's impossible?" I asked. We all had walked by the house recently, and Mr. McLean's car had been right in the spot it was in over two months ago. It seemed to be gathering quite a bit of dust next to Jamie's shiny Lincoln that she took out so often to cocktail parties and gallery openings.

"Well, of course it's possible," Nick Peabody said. "I just don't think it happened."

Coop, the one we all called a pussy so often, gulped. "I don't know, man. The windows of the house are all smudged and shit. You can't even see in if you walk right up to them, I bet. I don't know. I just don't know."

"Quit babbling about it," Chaz chimed in. "If you pussies want to know for sure that Old Dick is still alive and well, why don't we go knock on his door. Worst case, he answers the door and we all go home bored and pissed off that another cool story turned out to be bullshit."

"What's the best case?" I ask, genuinely curious.

"Jamie opens the door, says she's lonely for a man, and invites us all in for some handjobs!" Nick says, snickering with Chaz about this ridiculous possibility.

"Or he's actually dead," Coop says. "And we find the body when we go up to check it out. Probably hidden in the basement or something." This was unlike Coop. The kid was always so carefree and naïve. He wasn't himself because of this dumbass rumor, and I was damned if I was going to let this shit continue.

"Okay," I say, "Let's go then. This Friday."

"What?" Coop stammered.

"Yea," Chaz said, "Why not? There's probably so much cool shit up on that hill to check out. That chick almost always goes out on Friday's anyways so we can look around the backyard and stuff. If the old man's there, we'll just run away and say we were playin' man hunt with the older kids."

"I love it," Nick said, looking eager. "We're gonna find a fuckin' dead guy."

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe we'll just get handjobs."

We all laughed and stood up to grab our bikes and head down to the park to play some wiffle ball. Chaz grabbed Coop around the shoulder on the way out and said "Look, Coop. We're not gonna really find a dead guy. But you gotta learn sometime not to believe dumb shit, so we're going up there to check it out."

"Yea," Coop said, "I know. I just don't want to get us into trouble, that's all."

"Pussy," Peabody sneered.

Just like that, it was decided. Friday night we'd climb the stairs to Loring Manor. Then what? Would we just dick around in the backyard, looking for body parts and hoping we didn't find any? Probably. But when Nick and Chaz got together and excited about something, especially when it involved proving that Coop was a pussy, crazy shit always seemed to happen.

Fireworks in the Point

It’s a little before midnight as I walk up Lafayette Street in Salem, past Los Amigos Market and Harbor Street. The sound of a loud bang startles me, and I feel terribly unnerved as I try to keep cool and continue on my way. A second clap of violent noise follows, however it is accompanied by bright blue and red lights in the sky. I feel instantly relieved. I had forgotten that it was two days before the Fourth of July, and it was only natural for the neighborhood kids to test out a couple of their bootlegged fireworks in advance, if only to make sure they hadn’t been ripped off. Three nights ago there was a shooting on Ropes Street, right behind Major’s Pub, about a block from where I am when I see the fireworks. Tonight, the commotion in this neighborhood is celebratory in nature, but I wonder how many other people jumped when they heard the first bang tonight.

I always look out of place on my late night walks from the Hotel to my house on Linden Street. My tailored suits and designer ties get strange looks from the people who pass me on my journey. Most people have been out of work for hours by the time I begin my trek home from the office. Sometimes I’m curious what people think. In a town that is rarely innocent or normal, I doubt people draw the correct conclusions. A young man in a nice suit walking through a rough neighborhood at night could mean any number of things; an aspiring sports writer who is working a hotel job to make ends meet doesn’t seem as plausible in this neighborhood as a prominent drug dealer, a corrupt local politician, or a crooked used car salesman here to buy stolen parts from carjackers. Any of those things would fit in better here than I actually do, so sometimes, I pretend.

Often times I find myself thinking about the guests of my hotel on these walks. The people who stay with us are often here for their annual vacation, or for a wedding, or a graduation. They see the sides of Salem that they want to see: historic, intellectual, up and coming, “liberal” and “green”. The dozens of museums and gift shops and boutiques give a great image of a beautiful New England vacation destination, and as a transplanted local I have to admit these tricks sometimes fool me as well. However the real Salem is here, in the Point, and once you’ve seen it you are always aware of it’s presence. This town is not rich; in fact it is barely even middle class. The incidence of mental illness, drug addiction and alcoholism is startlingly high, and the longer you live here, the more visible it becomes. Spend even one day volunteering at the homeless shelter downtown and you will realize the sad reality that there aren’t enough beds there for those in need, even in the warm summers. The disparity between the perception and reality of Salem has become irreconciliable.

The Hotel, which sits on the edge of Pickering Wharf, the Point and Downtown, is a symbol of the duality of the city. A four-star, luxury facility, the Hotel is mandated by law to provide public bathrooms. The result of this law? The homeless come here to piss and shit. If you work the front desk, you get to know many of them by face, and the more amicable ones by name as well.

I never really know how to feel about these conflicting aspects of Salem. Living in a relatively safe and nice neighborhood allows me a certain amount of distance from the harsh realties of Life Bridge Shelter and Lafayette Park. Being a college student gives me the even greater luxury of belonging to a unique and united subgroup of the cities population. In many ways I admit that embracing these factors is a cop out; a way of ignoring how hippocritical it is for me to stand behind a desk and ask for $265 for one night of shelter while dozens lack money or food just a few blocks away.

Tonight, however, there are celebrations. There are fireworks in the Point, and there will be tomorrow as well. After Monday, the sources of sounds of the night are anyone’s guess.

On Working and Karma

In our world, to work is to exist. At least that’s what I tell myself whenever I find myself lugging wheelbarrows full of crushed rock from one end of a yard to the other at 7am on a Tuesday morning. It seems like a strange job, when one examines the implications of putting down something as ordinary as rock in someone else’s garden so they can later show it off to others as a symbol of their own success and hard work. Such an analysis shows the hierarchy of the situation: that person is not only successful enough to have a wonderful garden, but to have the luxury of paying others to move their barrows of crushed rock for them. They’ve worked so hard that at this point, they’re beyond hard work. What a life.

Of course, in this whole scenario, the job of moving and then arranging glorified pebbles isn’t the strangest occupation imaginable. Consider, for a moment, the life of the man whose job it is to crush those rocks, or pluck those rocks from the earth to be crushed, or to choose which rocks would look lovely in a garden after being decimated into tiny remnants of their former selves. Such jobs seem to me like the work not of men but of minor deities, at least in terms of responsibility. I don’t think I could ever be comfortable with such an arrangement; I would just find myself feeling sorry for the rocks.

That’s not to say, however, that my capacity for weird jobs is limited to picking up small bits of stone from one place and moving them to another. I have had a whole plethora of odd experience. For a ten month stint a few years ago I was a butler for a very wealthy 104 year old woman living on the top floor of a rather upscale hotel just outside of Boston. My tenure with Mrs. Kirshner was not ended by her death, as one may expect, but by an argument I had with her rather confrontational daughter, June, after I had allegedly lost Mrs. Kirshner's slippers. They were later found in the backseat of June’s car.

Before beginning my tenure with Mrs. Kirshner, I held a temporary job at a prestigious University in Somerville. I was hired as a “Security Technician”, a job which required me to walk through each of the University’s twenty-six buildings while they were unoccupied and check the accuracy of the floor plans. The most important part was to make sure that every door in the floor plan would swing open in the way indicated on the chart I was given. The purpose of this endeavor was to ensure that, in the event of a hostage situation, a State Police sniper would know where to aim his weapon when dealing with any given door on the campus of this prestigious institution of higher learning. One would surely expect that I had some knowledge of architecture, or training in security planning to be selected for such a position. However I did not have any of that, and was hired solely on the basis that I didn’t mind spending the summer of 2006 walking through the empty buildings with endless floor charts, opening hundreds of doors to ensure that they did, in fact, swing open in the correct direction.

Over the course of that summer I found seven mistakes on the University’s floor plans, read fifteen books rented from the University’s library, and made exactly one friend. Alvin was a janitor on the North side of campus who would occasionally bring an extra donut to work for me and thought it was fascinating that people actually used GPS devices while driving. In the world Alvin grew up in, everyone just tried their best to make it to where they had to go, and if they needed directions, they asked at a local gas station or coffee shop. Him pointing out things like this contributed to my ever increasing cynicism towards the changing landscape of our society. The GPS itself represents a world where people care only about the destination and disregard the value of the journey. Such thoughts make my brain feel sore and tired, a feeling I truly detest.

It was realizations such as this that led me back to my landscaping job. Here I can be sore of body, but rarely sore of mind. There is honesty in this work, and even when I don’t know where my next job site is, I never use a GPS to get there. I trust that the roads will lead me where they are supposed to, and take in all I see as I daydream about the day when I can pay someone else to make my yard look good enough to show off to the neighborhood. I don’t think I’ll ever have the heart to use crushed rocks though. No matter how much of a big shot I become, I refuse to take the role of someone who sentences something as indestructible as a rock to its demise. I believe in Karma.

Her Sky

I took a walk the other day,
Down to this park that meets a beach
That I hadn’t seen before,
And there you were, but you didn’t see me.



You weren’t looking out or down or around,
But up, up at the sky above the water
That swirled with colors of purple and red
As the clouds danced around above you
In other worldly steps with the stars.



Now, I saw it too but I knew right away
That they were dancing for you.
And with every twitch of wonder in your eyes
The colors got brighter and the movements
Of the moons and stars more elegant.
I had no idea you were a choreographer.



Really though, part of me did know,
Because although you always denied being an artist
I’ve said from day one that
Every little move you make when we’re together
Is a chapter in a story I hope you never finish.