Push

Thunderstorm at the moment.

Summer's last push?

An anemic attempt, at best. All the components are present and accounted for: Rain. Periodic flashes of white. Cracks of thunder. But there is a tepidness at play here.

This storm is just an old man, slow moving, brittle-boned; muttering obscenities mostly under his breath; filled not so much with fury, as anguish.

And just like that, gone.

Thoughts on the day the sky fell, and the sky from which it fell

It's been a long, hot summer.

Last week brought a string of scorchers, five or six days straight above 90 degrees. The air was dense and motionless, wearing the unique reek of summer's climax like a sweater. Over the weekend, that pressure cooker popped its top. Thunderstorms blew through the area, and when they had passed, I stepped outside to find it was almost twenty degrees cooler. The air had thinned out, started moving again, busily sweeping up the moisture, pushing it eastward in pursuit of the storms that had left it.

My heart raced for the invigorating change. I could sense the skulk of autumn through the late August night, even thought I felt the finest wintry tendril, still just a baby, coil around my ankle, trying to gain purchase.

This morning, post Labor Day, it was downright chilly. Not quite a freeze, but that fine wintry tendril definitely having grown four fingers and an opposable thumb to grip with. I took a walk along the river, and when the sun rose over the horizon, the light swept across the treetops, illuminating dabs of bright color where before there had been none. And the sky was smooth like glass, azure in color.  Dry, cloudless.

Absolutely cloudless.

I have always loved this time of year. But the fresh, reborn air comes with a tremor now. Dismay and unease are implicit in the otherwise simple gesture of looking up.

This morning's walk took place in precisely the same conditions I awoke to nine years ago; awoke, with no clue at all that the very dynamic of my life - and every American life - was going to change forever in a matter of hours. I kept looking up repeatedly at the flat blue expanse dampened by bright sunlight, hoping against hope it would tell a different story, a better story, a less frightening story.

It didn't.

Almost a decade later, I still can't help but cringe a little. It is no longer the September sky I remember in my youth - heralding school, Halloween, a gentle reminder, even, in my overly eager child's mind, that Christmas was out there somewhere.  It really isn't the "September sky" at all, now. It's the 9/11 sky, and it no longer gets me looking forward. It forces me to look back.

For the most part I've moved on, sanitized that day sufficiently, where I can live without thinking about it all the time. That wasn't always the case, but I've gotten better as the years have peeled away (time does heal all wounds, it would seem). But on mornings like this, which remind me as much of how I felt before the first airliner struck as how I felt the rest of the day, my thoughts can't help but turn plaintive:

Was there ever a time when we weren't anxious and uneasy in this country? Ever a time when we were not at war, not accustomed to heightened security and terror alerts? Were we ever not one inattentive baggage checker (in this country or abroad) away from planes being blown apart over major cities, one jihadist's inability to light the fuse correctly removed from another set of thousands dead on our streets? Were our armed forces ever not mired deeply in Iraq and Afghanistan? Was there ever a time when the music of Eminem was considered the biggest threat to the country, our President's sexual peccadilloes the country's greatest scandal and hottest topic? I want to go back there.

It's been a long, hot summer, but an even longer, hotter decade. And we are halfway to an entire generation coming of age knowing nothing BUT being at war.

The debate has been on-going for years the best way to commemorate 9/11. To tell you the truth, I don't care if it is ever commemorated in official channels. I don't need a national holiday or a monument. I don't need a day off from work or a new tower replacing the old towers to remind me of September 11th, 2001.

9/11 shows up in my mind uninvited, stays too long sometimes, like a bad guest. It replicates snapshot after postcard snapshot, clogging the hard drive of my memory with images I can't erase, like a malicious computer virus. I see towers of smoke and fire running parallel to the ground; human bodies falling a thousand feet; buildings falling a thousand feet; Olympic-sized billows of bright white dust chasing throngs of hysterical New Yorkers down streets, through cement canyons, around corners. I see heads held together with blood soaked bandages; faces covered in dust like theater performers, clumped wetly around the mouth and eyes.

I can still hear the low-slung roar of jet engines on a destructive course, the non-stop peal of sirens, a veritable chorus of shrieks and panicked (or dazed) profanity. I hear television newscasters bleating off report after report, trying to keep up - another plane down, this time in Washington, then another in Pennsylvania, then this tower fell, and that tower fell - endless speculation as to the potential death toll, the search for survivors, and who was responsible...I see myself watching the television with shocked co-workers, all of us wondering if it was ever going to end, and feeling, though we were safely fifteen hundred miles away, an acrid mixture of anger and fear (maybe not so safe, after all), and worse, a real sense of the change at hand, that nothing was going to be the same, that things were going to suck for a long time afterward.

And so they have.

All of it took place under the same sky I saw this morning on my walk: post-stifling summer heat / pre-killing autumn frost. Right at the negotiations of the seasons.

I don't like to think about this time of year, and the calm, restful conditions normally associated with it, being inextricably linked with terror, but it has come to that. The first couple of years I should have expected it. But it's been almost a decade, and still:

It's supposed to be 'back to school time', but it's 9/11 time.

It's supposed to be NFL time, but it's 9/11 time.

It's supposed to be harvest time, but it's 9/11 time.

For a full week each year, the TV flares up with a toxic prescription of specials and remembrances as exploitative as they are commemorative. The news media talking heads pinch off what they remember in two-cent portions, each year, like me, a little tireder-looking, a little grayer. The President speaks. We pray. But we don't forget. We won't forget.

We can't forget.

No matter the outcome of the War on Terror - if it ever ends or can ever be won - the terrorists scored a major victory that day. They have forever altered the way I view my world. Not 'The World' - faraway lands mired in complex geo-political machinations I only hear about on the news - but my world, my interpretation of my surroundings as I do something as routine as take a morning walk in no less a benign place than west-central Wisconsin. And one day, I will be a grizzled old man walking slowly along a shoreline somewhere, and if it's the right sky hanging above me, the September sky, I know that I will cringe then, as I cringe now.

------

Sadly, it may be impossible to forget the horror completely, but it helps to remember the heroes that were made that day, the courage that got called up - from NY Port Authority workers, members of the NYPD and FDNY, first responders at the World Trade Center and Pentagon (all intrepidly rising to the call of duty), to the civilians who stepped up at both locations to help out (notable among them, Hudson River boat operators tirelessly transporting victims from the New York side the the New Jersey side), to the individuals who staged a revolt against the hijackers on Flight 93 in the sky above Pennsylvania (and likely saved countless lives in doing so), to the innumerable volunteers who from 9/12 on donated their time and money to recovery, to everyone else ceaselessly donating their thoughts and prayers.

It's comforting to know a kind of clarified heroism can arise in times of crisis. It may very well need to be called upon again one day.

'Brusque and Cranky' has no place in the friendly skies

NOTE: Since I began writing this, The Huffington Post, which, though I am a fan, routinely reveals a glaring immaturity amidst its news writers (as though its entire staff is comprised of 22-year-old interns), has wisely changed 'captured the nation's imagination' to 'captured America's attention', along with other story updates. But I left it in my post. It's truly how it read this morning, and, I believe, in part exemplifies my point.

----

So, the 'famed' JetBlue flight attendant who, according to The Huffington Post, 'captured the nation's imagination' when he snapped like a twig and took a ride down an emergency chute is no longer employed by the airline.

Following an August 9 altercation with a passenger aboard JetBlue flight 1052, which had just landed in New York from Pittsburgh, Steven Slater reportedly unleashed a profanity-laden tirade on the airliner's PA system, announcing he was quitting his job then exiting through an emergency slide he deployed himself. He then disappeared across the tarmac and went home, where he was later arrested.

A spokesperson for Slater says Slater wanted his job back, but JetBlue announced yesterday, without going into details, that he was no longer employed by their company. Since the incident he had been suspended, pending an investigation. Now - at least for now - he is unemployed.

Good.

'Captured the nation's imagination'...??? Seriously?!

There has been way too much talk in the last month painting Slater as some kind of folk hero, too many people happy (desperate?) to play devil's advocate by trying to understand his point of view, even applauding the flourish with which he made his grand exit, as though he did it on behalf of working class people everywhere. One HuffPost reader commented, of his purported frustration, 'we've all been there'; another stated that quitting while 'giving the company a big middle finger' was better, at least, than going on a murderous workplace rampage.

Uhh...okay? Someone shits on my front porch, I don't excuse it by giving thanks he didn't shit in my bath tub.

To boot, a reported tens of thousands of on-line 'fans' have been pushing to persuade JetBlue to reinstate Slater, evincing sympathy for this guy by trotting out some tired old 'us against them' argument - corporate America v. everyman.

What. The. Fuck. ?.

In fairness, not everyone is on Slater's side (most importantly JetBlue). It has been acknowledged that most passengers who witnessed the altercation (with a woman, reportedly over a carry-on bag) claim not only that Slater was the instigator but, perhaps of greater significance, 'brusque and cranky' throughout the flight.

Soo...WHO are the tens of thousands of fans trying to make excuses for the culmination of his 'brusque and cranky' behavior, exactly? They obviously weren't on the flight. Do they know what actually happened?

Have they ever flown?

When I walk into a Starbucks and encounter a 'brusque and cranky' worker pouring my Venti black...or frankly, when I notice that the individual assembling my sub sandwich, depositing my paycheck, pumping my gas, bagging my groceries, helping me find Season 4/Disc 3 of The Office, installing my DVR, fingering through a drawerful of prescriptions on my behalf, mixing me a Captain and Coke, pouring me a glass of wine, or cutting off a piece of peanut butter fudge for me to sample seems 'brusque and cranky', I get indignant. I suddenly don't want them helping me. Doesn't matter how short-lived their involvement in my day might be, I don't want them involved at all. I don't want them knowing what I watch, or what medication I've been prescribed, or touching my food, if they're - for whatever reason - going to be 'brusque and cranky' about it.

NOBODY involved with whisking me or anyone else away at 35,000 feet - from the individual piloting the big bird, to the person wheeling a cart full of peanuts and Sprite down the center aisle, to the person back at the airport scrubbing the toilet where I (accidentally, to be sure) splashed a little on the floor - should be allowed, CAN be allowed, to get 'brusque and cranky'.

I can imagine, probably more than it seems reading this post, that being a flight attendant is a difficult occupation; I really can. And I'm not completely without sympathy. The relationship between 'server' and 'customer' in any arena is inherently perverse. I myself while away my work week on the 'server' side of things, and from that experience alone, I have no doubt that a large number of airline passengers are awful (beyond 'brusque and cranky') on any given day. I'll even go so far as acknowledge the strong possibility that the woman involved in the altercation with Slater was a real pill.

Tough shit. Deal with it. Keep it together. You're NOT assembling a sub sandwich, Mr. Slater; there is nothing innocuous about your involvement with my life for the duration of the flight. You are, in part, responsible for my life; for ensuring my safety and comfort not only 6.62 miles above the Earth, but from the moment I walk into one airport until the moment I walk out of another...in the post 9/11 world, to boot, where long lines, delays, diverted flights, cancellations and a general sense of unease have become the norm. If you can't handle it, find another line of work.

I hear Subway is hiring...

Is this unreasonable?

Considering reports that he was the instigator, and a lack of anyone willing to corroborate his side of the story, Slater's actions should not have 'captured' anyone's imagination, nor should he be lauded as some kind of Robin Hood. He is at best, and this is a stretch, Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. And even if one is determined to support some imagined cause, there is no excuse for the 'flourish' of his exit. Slater could just as easily have told the woman where to stuff her carry-on bag, quietly left the plane and never come back. No childish public address tirade or emergency chute descent was necessary, or appropriate.

Not in the post-9/11 world. Not in the post-underwear bomber world.

JetBlue should have fired him immediately, not weaseled their way through a month of 'suspension, pending investigation' corporate blah-blah, allowing his folk hero status to take root, then allowing him to claim, as he is now, that he resigned. Symbolically, it would have helped their cause if they'd displayed an immediate zero tolerance policy. That Slater still faces charges of criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and trespassing is a good sign justice, of some sort, will be served.

But folk hero status has long shown itself to be a dysfunctional phenomenon. Once the legal dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from, or about, Steven Slater again. Another airline will pick him up, probably, sure to command an unholy amount of news coverage and analysis when it happens...or we just might whiff a reality show in the works at some point.

Remembering the Braves: one in Atlanta, one in my hometown; both in my heart

I stopped at Cold Stone Creamery tonight, treated myself to 12 million calories packed into 12 ounces of pure pleasure. I've been trying to avoid such indulgences, lately; I've always been thin, and determined to stay that way. But tonight was an ice cream kind of night, the archetypal summer evening that cries for reliance on simple pleasures not as a defense mechanism but aid to the enhancement of experience. Swaddled in a cushion of warm, motionless air, the sun was stained in magenta as it sank into a gauzy haze. It was the kind of evening we tell ourselves all evenings looked like in days gone by and are certain (or at least hopeful) will look like when we are released from this mortal coil.

Apparently, I was not the only one who thought this way. The line at Cold Stone was long and slow-moving, but unlike most lines I get stuck in, not impatient. No huffs of indignation or lizard-like sighs from any of its participants, no muttered obscenities under anyone's breath (including mine...). Though there were times when the teenagers behind the counter seemed more intent on gabbing with customers and each other than serving ice cream (or taking time out from prep to sing whenever they received a tip; always a cringe-worthy gimmick), nobody seemed to care how fast or slow the line moved. Everyone was just happy to be there, in the moment, alive on this particular night, with ice cream in their immediate future.

That is, with the exception of the harried woman directly in front of me. She had two children with her, ages 9 or 10. Both were donned in red baseball caps and jerseys sporting the word 'Braves'; both had mud smears on the knees of their piped nylon pants; one had black and white plastic cleats tied together by the laces and slung over his shoulder; the other was still wearing his, and wherever he stepped on Cold Stone's lobby linoleum, he left behind a little scuffy offering of dirt and grass. It was obvious they had just come from a Little League game, and were being treated by their mother for winning...or perhaps consoled for losing.

At least, I'm reasonably sure she was 'mother' to both of them. At first I naturally assumed they were mere teammates. They seemed too close in age to be brothers, and on the surface did not really look alike. One had fair skin, red hair and freckles, very much like the woman who had brought them there, the other was darker all around - slightly darker skin, hair closer to brown than red, freckles evident but less pronounced. But the longer I watched, the more obvious it became that they were brothers. Embedded deep in their little countenances were physical traits demarcated by their parents' individual genetic contributions but sharing an unmistakable common make-up. They were built the same and even moved the same, walked and pantomimed alike, unconsciously replicating each other, and their mother.

I could be wrong about this, but I like thinking it was the case. I like thinking our heredity reveals truths about our identity without the need for words.

In any case, they were ecstatic to be there, and quite a handful, jumping, dancing, pushing, laughing and shouting as they waited in line, driving the woman crazy. Locked in a shoulder to shoulder jostle, they pressed their faces up against the glass case, announcing loudly the myriad ingredients they planned to have mixed into their ice cream. Sadly, reality fell short of their bluster, when the woman - as much to rein in their unwittingly obnoxious enthusiasm as to establish limits for their own good - informed them they could only choose one. The red-headed boy looked positively bereft to learn he would have to choose between gummy bears and peanut butter cups. I felt his pain in no small measure. Sucks being a kid, having limitations in a place like Cold Stone Creamery.

Peanut butter cups, I urged silently. Choose peanut butter cups!

Gummy bears - gummy anything - have no business being allowed to play with ice cream. When I saw he was flirting with this option (staring at them through the glass, crinkling his nose in heavy deliberation) I was moved to intervene, but too late. He chose the gummies - not even gummy bears, but gummy worms! Unchewable, undigestible, tasteless... - and had them mixed into cake batter flavored ice cream...!

A flavor profile from hell is every child's inalienable right, I guess.

Maybe limitations are a good thing after all.

While the first kid watched his monstrosity get blended before his eyes, his brother (who, much to his credit, was eyeing Oreo cookies and peanut butter ice cream...now that kid's gonna be the frigging President someday!) kept staring at me, taking off his baseball cap and putting it back on, and looking away whenever our eyes met.

"You win tonight?" I asked him, unnerved a little by the persistence of his stare and its rabbit-like retreat.

My question surprised him. His eyes widened, and he responded with a tentative nod of his head.

"That's cool," I nodded back. "I played for the Braves, too." I motioned to the team logo across his diminutive chest.

"My Braves?" he asked quietly.

"No, another Braves. A long time ago."

His response to this was silence, followed a moment later by total disinterest as the woman hurriedly instructed him to tell the girl behind the counter what he wanted.

"Come on, Colin, you're holding the line up!," she barked, louder and more brusquely than I think she intended to. "Colin! You're holding the line up!"

Now I felt her pain in no small measure. I do not miss the never-ending fight to keep the line - any line - moving, which makes up much of parenthood.

Colin and I said nothing else to each other, but he left me thinking, unexpectedly, about the Braves. Not only the Little League team for which I played in the summers of 1983, '84 and '85, but the major league franchise in Atlanta. Both entities were once inextricably linked to my existence. Colin and his brother were not even a thought yet, and though they'll probably never be able to understand this, their mother, maybe a year or two older than I, was likely unable to imagine them as part of her life one day, or that their father would be anyone other than Simon LeBon, perhaps. Or Ralph Macchio.

When combing through my vast store of childhood memories, my Little League years don't readily spring forth. Probably because when they were over, I let it all go. I became too cool for team sports, walking away from a promising career in Senior League over the harassment I took from the older kids my rookie year. One night in June 1986, after enduring ridicule for a) flubbing an otherwise a routine pop fly to right field and b) responding to a little chin music from an older pitcher on an opposing team with a spasticness that everyone seemed to think was hilarious, I crept up the coach's walkway and stuffed my uniform into his mail box, tendering my resignation in an act of unspoken defiance. Hell with baseball, I'd decided; it was time to grow my hair long and start thinking everything sucked.

In spite of my spate of self-styled insolence (which would consume the next four or five years of my life), my three years in Little League spawned an interest in the sport that has endured. My assignation to the 'Braves' (amongst eight other Little League teams, with names like Pirates, Yankees, Red Sox, et cetera) at age 11 was completely arbitrary, but fortuitous. As it happened, the cable service in my town carried WTBS, Ted Turner's 'super station' from Atlanta, which back then broadcasted every Atlanta Braves game throughout the season. Because of this, the Atlanta Braves became my team, and remain so to this day.

I must here confess having felt a certain ecstasy throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, when the Braves simply couldn't have a losing season. In that time: 14 straight division titles (not including 1994, a strike year in which they'd otherwise been headed for dominance), five World Series appearances resulting in one World Championship, and a memorable finish to Game 7 of the 1992 National League championship game against Pittsburgh (seriously, YouTube it....truly one for the record books). Their success was spear-headed by a nuclear arsenal-caliber pitching line-up (Smoltz, Maddux, Avery, Glavine...) and the strong swings of Fred McGriff, David Justice and Terry Pendleton, who was solid for RBIs and making it to scoring position. All of this was coordinated by Bobby Cox, retiring this year as one of the most successful managers ever and richly deserving the post-career accolades he almost certainly will receive.

But the real love affair between me and the Atlanta Braves was back in the early 1980s. Atlanta was in the NL West then and - at the height of my interest - under the management of Joe Torre (who has since pieced together his own storied legacy with the Yankees). Back in the days of Dale Murphy, Bob Horner, Glenn Hubbard, Phil Niekro and Chris Chambliss, with Skip Caray announcing (wasn't until many years later that I realized Skip was Harry's son), there was no better way to spend a summer afternoon than splayed on the living room sofa with an ice cream sandwich and a bottle of Faygo Rock-n-Rye in front of a loudly whirring fan watching the Braves play in Atlanta-Fulton County stadium. I still remember the action-packed bumper music for 'America's Team' then - da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da, da-da, dahhh...! (Er, something like that...)

What I don't remember is them winning a lot of games; certainly there was little sign of the glory decade to come. Their gutter season was '88, when they lost 106 contests; by then my hair was hanging down to my butt and covering my eyes, and I really couldn't have given less of a shit. But even earlier, when I almost never missed a game on WTBS, it always seemed the crowds at Atlanta-Fulton on any given week day in July were painfully thin, rows and rows of center and right field stands empty, balls hit there caught by no one. There were long stretches of losses, and an ever-present morbid tone in Skip Caray's voice. Yet, contrary to this memory, statistics show Atlanta won the NL West pennant in 1982, and placed 2nd in '83 and '84. How is this possible? Perhaps my recollections are muddled. Childhood memories often are.

Or maybe it's the fact that my Braves were, at that time, the losingest team in our town's Little League history...

At least that's what my older brother claimed. He had no stats or figures to back it up, he was just trying to get under my skin (and was good at it); but it was a reliable assertion. In my three years with my Braves, we were never champions, but in the summer of '84 we went 0 for 14 for the season. Didn't win a single damn game, and our 'perfect' record helped foster a reputation as the league's resident losers, which amongst any group of 10 to 13-year-old boys can be a heavy cross to bear. Every morning after a game, I'd pick up the daily newspaper to find a box score at the bottom of the sports page heralding our loss. Occasionally, as space allowed, there was even a little write-up about the game, with certain keywords for my Braves sure to abound: error, strike-out, missed opportunity, fly out, ground out, rally falls short...

Sometimes, just sometimes, with my last name attached to them...

SUMMER OF '84 - As per rules/etiquette, members of the Ashland, Wisconsin Little League Giants and Braves congratulate each other on a 'good game'. I'm the moppy-haired, fish bellied #4 walking dejectedly. There were no good games for the Braves that season. We went 0-14, the losingest team in league history, or so my older brother enjoyed telling me at the time.

The worst part of that losing season might just have been our unsatiated post-game thirst. The winning team was allowed to go over to the clubhouse where they stored the equipment and score a free can of soda. The losers, if they had money, had to take the walk of shame down to the corner store and buy something to drown their sorrows in. I did not generally have any money, so my thirst usually led me home, to the hose in my back yard.

Why we were a losing team, the mechanics of our failures, escape me. We had some good players in our dugout, a few who had carved out solid reputations for hitting and fielding in spite of the team they played for. A lot of it had to do with the coach, whom none of us respected and blamed wholly for our inability to win games. The umpires were also frequently in our crosshairs, their bad calls and inattentiveness sealing our fate in more than one game. But who knows? Maybe, collectively, we just sucked. Maybe that's all that needs to be said.

I was one of those who fared better individually. I maintained a pretty respectable .290 batting average two summers in a row, finished with 6 career homers (just 749 behind Hank Aaron, I enjoyed telling myself at the time), even managed to make the All-Star team my final season. I executed a one man double play once, and a 3-2 double play that was poetry in motion between me and the catcher, a kid named Scott: After making the out at first, I fired a perfectly aimed throw toward home to catch a third base runner who got cocky. I must declare, it was a low and to-the-point missile, flawlessly snagged at shin level by Scott, who twisted around and applied a perfectly timed tag to the sliding runner. And it saved the game, to boot. The assemblage of parents, grandparents, older brothers and kid sisters on the aluminum bleachers behind home plate all swept onto their feet at once when that play was called.

Andy Warhol was making a comment about society's rising celebrity culture, but I've always interpreted his 15 minutes of fame comment in a more grassroots way. I believe most people get their 15 minutes of fame in little venues, amidst circumstances that hold little sway in the world, but huge impact on the individual's life. I like to think, even, that people get more than one 15 minutes of fame throughout their life. And I believe that dusky evening in the ball park that to this day I still walk past when I go home for a visit (and true to mythology, really DOES seem much smaller than it did at the time) was one of mine.

Little Colin got me looking back on Little League fondly, but he also unknowingly filled me with regret. Tonight, so many years later, I regret stuffing my uniform in my coach's mailbox. I should have stuck it out, gotten through my rookie year of Senior League, seen where it led me.

I could have; that's more the point. I could have hacked it.

If I had, would I have played three years in Senior League, gone onto high school play, then college, and at this point in my life be ready to retire from the Majors?

No, probably not. But that is decidedly not the point.

I really, really wish I had stuck it out. It is an invaluable lesson sports teaches us, elegantly simple and timeless: You can't quit. You can lose. It's okay to lose. But you can't quit.

Hopefully Colin and his brother learn this, in sports or somewhere else. It is not only an invaluable lesson, it is the one most relevant to a successful life, no matter where that life leads.

The noxious seas of reality television might brighten a bit, were Abby Sunderland to attempt sailing through them

It is almost certainly a sign of the times that all sorts of foul is being cried, now that 16-year-old Abby Sunderland has been found and rescued from the Indian Ocean.

The California teenager set sail on her 40-foot vessel Wild Eyes in January, hoping to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo, unassisted and non-stop. Early into her journey, her hopes of achieving non-stop were dashed when she had to land in Mexico and later Cape Town, South Africa for repairs to her boat, but she made the decision to press on anyway, follow through with her trip.

Everything was flowing along nicely until last week, when a rogue wave knocked out her mast and satellite communication thousands of miles from land. She had no choice but activate her emergency beacon, and was discovered and rescued by a French fishing vessel within 48 hours, her own boat abandoned.

I had no idea who this girl was until last week, when she was feared lost at sea. I mentioned her predicament in a previous post on this blog as part of a larger point I was making about myself: about determination, about marshaling emotional high seas. Succeed or fail, Abby Sunderland, and people like her, are to be commended and should be impervious to unfair scrutiny. Not immune or above, perhaps, but impervious.

The parents of Abby Sunderland, whose older brother Zac briefly held the much sought-after record last year (until it was broken by an even younger Australian adventurer), were already under fire for allowing their daughter, barely old enough to legally drive a car, to undertake the long, treacherous journey by herself, when it was revealed early this week that they had been in talks with a production company for a possible reality show chronicling their family's adventures.

This really got fingers pointing. The entire thing smacked of last October's 'Balloon Boy' incident, when Richard and Myumi Heene were called out for staging an elaborate hoax involving their youngest son Falcon, in hopes of landing a reality show deal. And on the surface at least, such a conspiracy would make sense: Wunderkind Abby is plucked from the perilous ocean, just in the nick of time. Et voilà! Instant name recognition, dialogue and intrigue! Sit back, and watch the offers pour in!

In response to such accusations, the family has recoiled, disavowing any current 'deals' - television, book or otherwise - and plans for any in the future.

Admirable, but hardly necessary, in my opinion. The most pencil-thin scratching at the surface will reveal this is not even remotely the same situation as Balloon Boy. Little Falcon Heene was just an unwitting pawn in his talentless father's sad gambit for 15 minutes of fame. Abby Sunderland, on the other hand, is obviously a skilled sailor. Whether it was some kind of publicity stunt or turned into one after the near-tragedy (and neither scenario really seems to be the case), this young lady still came close to sailing around the world by herself, and probably will at some point in the future. There is something about her abilities, and her brother's, and the parents that raised them, that is - at the very least - interesting, and undeniably inspiring.

At least they bring something to the table.

And by that reckoning (once you've come to terms with the fact that the reality television phenomenon is probably not going away anytime soon, of course) the Sunderlands are more deserving of TV and book deals than a lot of established reality celebs.

More deserving than the entire cast of Jersey Shore combined.

Ah, the good ol' Cold War; when fear itself grew larger than what we were afraid of

When I was twelve years old, I had a frightening dream. I dreamt about a music concert taking place in my school's gymnasium, an orchestra of my fellow 6th and 7th graders sawing away an almost on-tune rendition of Mozart, the teacher swaying her arms as tolerantly as she was rhythmically. In the waking world, this scenario would have included me playing with them, dutifully shoring up last chair cello as I did for seven years. But in this dream, I was merely a bystander, an unseen but omniscient witness to an awful chain of events that, for better or worse, could very easily have happened. And, in fact, had already.

It was the tail end of the school year, a warm, late spring evening. The setting sun was shining through the west-facing windows of the gymnasium, casting the entire space in a dense orange glow. Parents filled the bleachers on both sides, listening to the performance as attentively as possible but mostly just fidgeting: struggling with babies, programs, and purses, telling toddlers to settle down, clearing their throats while shifting to get comfortable on the stiff wooden seats...all of this creating a din that underscored the dowdy melody rising from the center of the gym floor. Our principal stood in the wings near the front entrance, arms crossed, watching and waiting to be of assistance if necessary - his job at all the school events. It was hot; the air was saturated with a potent mixture of lilac, sweat and sneaker, mirroring - it would occur to me much later - the conditions present in the bedroom where I slept on the night this dream took place.

Midway through the concert, at no particularly significant moment, an ear-splitting roar came from outside, rising sharply in volume and quickly drowning out the young musicians' best efforts. It was similar to a jet engine - seemingly in motion, as if something were shooting from one end of the sky to the other - but it had a shrieking quality embedded in its deeply-throated howl, like a bottle rocket.

Everyone looked up at once, then at each other with growing unease. The unnatural noise lasted several seconds, then was punctuated by a seemingly bottomless explosion that sent everyone into a spastic auto-response, a motion suggesting both jumping to their feet and crouching with their hands over their heads, in equal parts. They grabbed hold of their children, began making their way toward the steps leading off the bleachers, surrendering immediately to the impulse to bolt. Each had at least one child down on the floor, a child playing or waiting to play; a child they had to get to before they could get the hell out of Dodge. In a strangely inadvertent delay that sticks out in my mind, the music carried on a second or two after the explosion, almost deteminedly, as if Mozart would, or might, continue to matter; but when it stopped, it stopped dead in its tracks, the young musicians - my classmates and friends - dropping their instruments at their feet in a cacophony of wooden twang and clatter and rising up to signal their parents where to find them.

There was a new light filtering into the gym now, but not from the west. This time it barreled its way through the east windows; a bright, shade-your-eyes glare that caused the rich western light a moment ago to disappear, swallowed into the sooty periphery of this blinding white dazzle. This hastened everyone's panic.

The principal tried to take charge, shouting for people to remain calm, remain seated, but that ship had sailed; 'people' had become animals in stampede, pushing their way down the steps to the gym floor. They shouted at each other - to move faster, to get out of the way - and in the same breath called out sharply to their kids on the floor - first verbally, then through a series of frantic hand gestures when the collective noise began drowning out individual voice - to meet them by the doors. Some forsook the stairs completely and jumped over the railing, willing to absorb the shock of the six-foot drop if doing so would expedite their escape.

In a last ditch move to feign control of the situation, the principal backed his way toward the entrance of the gym as calmly as possible, though he too was sweating, trembling, a grim look on his face. He opened one of the doors and peeked out to see what had happened, what had caused the explosion (still, in the last seconds of his life, believing it was something manageable; very bad to be sure, but manageable. If everyone stayed calm, they'd be okay...). In the instant he looked up his head was thrown back, then his entire body. An unstoppable sweeping force pushed him feet over head back inside, and a moment later, the entire gym - building and occupants alike, along with memory of every ass that had ever been towel snapped, every spitball shot across the locker room, every dream of sports glory ever concocted, or realized during Tuesday night intramurals - was stripped off its foundation like a scab, and all that bright light switched to pitch black, and that big crescendo of sound - all the scrambling, screaming, calling and crying - ceased as abruptly as Mozart had, replaced by a thickly insulated silence.

The dream wasn't over, however, it just switched arenas. Suddenly I was part of it, all of it in fact, a lone survivor standing on high ground to the west. In the distance I could see the lake bay I'd grown up in. Splayed alongside the familiar embrace of lake and shoreline curving its way toward Michigan was my hometown, and from the center of all I knew at age twelve, a colossal mushroom cloud erupting to dizzying heights - 5000, 15,000, 30,000 feet, and climbing. It was the most vivid part of the dream: the terrifically animated cloud, the very symbol of utter destruction in my youth, snaking its way skyward. A slowly but powerfully moving plume of white so large it seemed to be sucking everything into the sky with it.

I turned and started running across a great field, feeling to the core both the frustration of trying to cover lots of ground in a vast open space and the electric terror of being pursued. I knew the destructive wave that emanated from ground zero was on its way fast, raking the ground it crossed, vaporizing everything as cleanly as it done away with my school. I ran for hours. So fast the sun never set on me. So hard that when I finally woke up I was out of breath, marinated in an ice cold sweat, trembling beneath the covers as the disorientation dissipated; thankful beyond description to hear the television droning benignly from downstairs.

My dad, I sputtered in my head, still awake. Watching David Letterman.

The creak of my brother's footsteps walking in his bedroom across the hall confirmed the blessed safety of the moment.

This, followed by crickets outside my window as my senses unfolded. A warm but dark and peaceful night in northern Wisconsin. No loud noise. No bright flash. No running. No dying.

All was still. I was still twelve. Mozart still mattered.

A few years ago, I had almost the same dream, only this time informed by an adult's capacity to imagine best and worst-case scenarios in detail. Once again I woke up with a start, catapulted into the tranquilizing safety of my bedroom, out of breath but none the worse for wear. It was early that second time around; the dawn was beginning to swell. I was never more thankful to see it, or hear the first twitter of birds, or the clang of a garbage truck outside that normally aggravates me with its metallic, crashing bluster, but now sounded like a lullaby.

Why the dream came back to me in almost exactly the same way more than twenty years later I can't say. Frankly, there are facets of it that a pyschologist could have a field day with: my detached, omniscient role in a world I was otherwise immersed in; viewing the destruction of my hometown from a initially safe vantage point that eventually becomes invaded; being chased; getting nowhere. But it was never a mystery to me that I should have the dream. It was not only a dreadful hallucination, but uniquely Cold War-era, and I am nothing if not a card-carrying member of Generation X, the second of two generations to shudder beneath the disquieting thought of nuclear annihilation, the completeness of the end brought about by either 'us' or 'them' doing something so maddeningly simple as pushing 'the button.' 

The Cold War was everywhere when I was growing up. I have vivid memories of nuclear fallout shelter signs posted throughout my elementary school, memories of being educated by school staff as to what they meant (both literally, and metaphorically). I remember being taught how to 'duck and cover' in gym class, where to go if a siren began blaring. The answer: undergound, which is where my classmates and I were sent for periodic drills (the old cobwebby basement of our turn-of-the-century schoolhouse, where we'd crouch along a wall in unison and wait; school staff apparently thinking under our desks was simply not 'underground' enough). I knew what would happen if a bomb were dropped, and exactly where that bomb would come from: the Soviet Union.

Ahhh, the Russkies! Remember the good old days, when we knew exactly who and where the enemy was? They were The Red Army during World War II, our reluctantly acknowledged allies. But not six months after Fat Man and Little Boy landed on Japan to end the war, the American media was already referring to them as the Red Menace.  By the time they were known simply as the Reds, the Cold War was in full swing. 'Reds' could be anywhere, and were likely everywhere, for a while, even the highest levels of government.

All of that was before my time. When I was old enough to be instilled with such fear, the 1960s and most of the 1970s had come and gone, and the outright paranoia had been mitigated significantly, thankfully. The Reds were now known largely as the Soviets.

But they were still a menace in my young eyes; or more accurately, what they could do, what they were capable of, remained a menace, remained a big presence in my thoughts.

Strangely, other people my age whom I've talked to have no recollection of this. They might remember the Cold War, but they don't remember duck and cover or nuclear fallout shelters in their schools. Perhaps my small town was behind the times, anachronistically beating the old drum of a by-gone era. The more I think about it, that was almost certainly the case.

And yet, while it's true that when people think of the Cold War they immediately picture its golden age - that grim, repressed, 'black and white' world of McCarthyism, Sputnik and the man in the gray flannel suit - fact is, it was still going strong in the late 1970s and early 80s. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did nothing to ease tensions. Germany was still two countries. The A-bomb had become the H-bomb - or hydrogen bomb - and its destructive power, were it to be unleashed in the States or anywhere on Earth, really, would make the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like Sunday picnics. To top it all off, America was reeling with a sense of fractured vulnerabilty in the post-Vietnam era. We boycotted their Olypmics in '80. They boycotted ours in '84. And these little symbolic pissing contests seemed to have as significant an affect on international relations as nuclear arsenal build-up and geo-political machinations.

All of it spilled over into my school system. It was not a priority, I'll concede, and it was always mitigated a little by some of the more enlightened peace and love rhetoric of the time; but it was there, and we were made aware of it, with no idea whatsoever that it would be over before the decade was out.

In fact, one elementary school teacher said something she shouldn't have, sometime around Christmas 1979. Not sure how the subject came up, but during a discussion in which, to her credit, she had taken to answering as honestly as she could our questions about the possibility of nuclear warfare happening, a kid in our class asked a simple but loaded question:

"What would happen, exactly...?"

The inquiry spanned the entire universe of his young thoughts, I imagine, because it sure as hell did mine. It spoke to the fallout shelter signs we saw every day on the way to and from the cafeteria. It spoke to the snippets many of us heard on the evening news, or the things we caught our parents saying from the periphery of their world. It spoke to our imaginations churning out worst-case scenarios, and the fact that not really understanding any of it made it worse. Indeed, what would happen? What was this all about?

I will never forget her answer. She replied, "Well, there probably wouldn't be much left of anything or anyone."

This planted itself on us, and stayed there.

The only comfort I received contemplating nuclear annihilation as a child was gossamer at best: adults assuring me that my town wouldn't be a target. Thin consolation, having been made aware of the level of destruction that was possible, knowing it would be planet-wide, that everyone would be affected. I labored under a slow, drawn-out terror for years, became a news junkie at eight so I could keep tabs on US-Soviet relations (as if knowing what was going on might somehow keep me safe, or more absurdly, keep it from happening), and freaked out not a little whenever I heard those relations were going sour, even temporarily.

As a result, I still bristle a bit at the sound of a civil air defense siren, even though they go off for relatively innocuous reasons these days (severe weather, or in some communities just to signify it's time for lunch). To me, that multi-tonal wall of noise signifies a great jarring polarity - both the dizzying heights achieved by the mushroom cloud, and the only purported route of safety from that cloud, which is underground. The cloud goes up, and you go down.

I watched a History Channel program recently about the fateful August day in 1945, when the city of Hiroshima, Japan helped usher in the nuclear age. The program recounted in dramatic detail an otherwise serene summer morning in the city, citizens waking up and going about their everyday lives as they always had and assumed they always would, whether Japan won or lost the war.

The scenario depicted in the show so movingly mirrored my dream I was unable to watch the entire thing.

It wasn't even the thought of dying so much as it was the thought of hearing the siren going off, being awoken by it perhaps, looking out my window and seeing that cloud on the horizon, the sky a strange hue. I was more afraid of those final twenty seconds of my life, or final hours, or worse, the long hours and days of nuclear winter following the event, than anything that did or did not await me in the afterlife.

And this perhaps is the defining characteristic of the Cold War: the sense of fear, the practice of being afraid - of cringing, bristling and being ready to cower - growing larger than that which is being feared. This was the pall under which the world labored to breathe for almost fifty years! The air raid siren and mushroom cloud were not alone; there were other images to fill out the picture: the hammer and sickle, the trefoil nuclear symbol, the fallout shelter sign, armies goosestepping, tanks rolling, even the color red (at least in some capacity), both in terms of the Soviet flag, and Red Square, and, of course, blood itself. All of it swirled around in my mind at eight, signified a great threat to not just my world, but all the world, and still pinches me a little bit - just a little - when I think of it today.

And frankly, I was one of the calm ones. There was a kid in my neighborhood growing up who was worse off, kept a truly uneasy vigil for the tenuous relatonship between what could happen and what suddenly looked like it might soon on any given day. It wasn't so much that he was terrified (which he was, bursting into tears more than once), but strangely assured that it was going to happen, resigned to the fact; ready for the end.

The end did come, of course. But it was the end of the Cold War. The United States won the Cold War, and though personally I wouldn't get too comfy with the idea that nuclear warfare could never happen, that mind-pounding oppression in our imaginations, where there is a sky larger than the real one for a mushroom cloud of unearthly size to unfold up and spread across in white, sun-blazed billows of the end of days, is simply no longer present, even in today's wholly troubled world.

In other words, kids today don't fear terrorists the way I feared the Soviets. Do they?

I could be wrong about this, but I just don't see it. And the fear amongst adults isn't the same either, does not seem to be as pervasive, or oppressive. The propaganda is not so artful now as it was allowed to become in the days when it was focused on single enemy, nor as free from scrutiny now as it was then. And that last, on balance, can only be a good thing.

Aside from a certain preparedness that might arise from fear (and this, naturally, always teeters on paranoia), I guess kids today are lucky. They are masters of their own fate. If something, God forbid, happens, it happens. But they don't, and shouldn't, lose sleep over it.

Or dream about it.

They live their lives, as they always have and always will. And that's as it should be.

Confessions of a (former) Facebook junkie...

I was a Facebook user for exactly one year out of my life - twelve months, three of which I might very well have qualified as a junkie. I set up my page in April '09, climbing on board just as everyone, it seemed, was climbing on board, and in April 2010, disembarked with equally fortuitous timing, just when everyone, it seemed, was starting to complain about Facebook, looking for other places to network on-line, fed up with its lax privacy policies and the reported jerkiness of its primary founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

I say 'disembark' because I don't know how else to describe it. I've disembarked the ship, but the ship is still there; that is, my page still exists. They wouldn't let me shut it down permanently. Deactivation seemed to be the best (and only) option, and even then 'the Facebook' pleaded to keep me, asked if I was sure I wanted to do it, even going so far as to suggest that certain people on my friends list would 'miss' me when I was gone.

Uhhh, yeah... *sigh*...

For this and other reasons, it's unlikely I will ever sail Facebook's negligent blue seas again. Never say never, of course, but my decision to bolt was about more than just privacy. In the last twelve months I've gotten everything I possibly can out of Facebook, everything it can possibly offer, and a little more than I bargained for.

It's been around since 2004, growing steadily, but in 2009 Facebook was like a virtual reality boom town; its population grew exponentially, surging to a reported 400 million users (and counting), lending the ever-changeable English language new words (like 'unfriend') and the ever searching human race new ways to idly while away an afternoon at work. It was this mad dash that I got swept up in.

I'd been doing so well at holding out, too; resisting, as I usually try to, what 'everyone else' is doing. To that end, I had plenty of practice. I'd been resisting a MySpace page for years, tempted, but unable to ignore that MySpace always seemed a little too youthful to me, to the point of lameness. Most pages I visited were like the digital equivalent of a teenager's bedroom: posters of bands and babes plastering the walls, music blaring, clutter all over the floor, a visually self-indulgent story of one's existence far too random to avoid looking like a big amateurish contrivance, no matter how carefully considered.

Facebook seemed more staid, more 'adult' somehow, and therefore more organic, the focus centered on making a real connection with other people, without the need for flash (that is, a wallpaper background of smokin' hot fairy demons crying tears of blood, NASCAR insignia, masters of metal, or some such...). But even then, I did not jump into it quickly.

It's not that I'm technologically impaired. I know the ins and outs of the Internet, the ins and outs of the Windows operating system for that matter, and possess a fair amount of experience with Mac. I'd spent a number of years designing websites, though admittedly this was back when it was a simple matter of HTML (strange to think that so much of that early Internet lexicon is now as dated to the late 90s/early 00s as the 8-track player is to the 1970s). And only the year before, I'd started this blog, not so much because other people were doing it, but because it's good practice, and any writer hoping to achieve and/or maintain relevance in this day and age needs to recognize that the future of the written word is on-line.

Facebook, however, was all about peer pressure. I signed up simply because 'everyone was doing it,' like a joint passed around at a party, or my first sheepish swig of beer way back when. My impulse had been to resist, but curiosity was quickly eclipsing apprehension in April 2009, and when my girlfriend set up her own account, the whole thing was legitimized for me. She too is a resister by trade, adopting a wait and see attitude in the face of nearly every new fad, gadget and political wind blowing, and far more distrustful of all this integrated technology than I am (in terms of the effect it could have on our privacy). So when she caved to pressure from friends and family members to get on board, I let her pull me along.

When I was a little kid, I dreamed of starting a sign company one day. Seriously, I wanted to make signs. More than the artistic element of doing so, the thrill for me was thinking of one of my signs being in a public place and seen by a lot of people. My dad owned a bookstore, and I was all too happy to make a sign if he needed one. A special on comic books, or penny candy, a 'back in 5 minutes' placard if he had to run to the bank and there was no one to watch the place, upon request I'd carefully craft it with wide-tipped magic markers. My signs were simple and direct; they got the job done. And frankly, that was much the point:

I absolutely loved the thought of dispensing pertinent information.

Dispensing pertinent information. 'Broadcasting' in its many forms. Given some of my various career choices since then - radio deejay, web designer, book editor, newspaper publisher -it's clear I still do. And I fully admit, I liked that Facebook was not only about making a connection, but about being seen.

It was not hard to become happily mired in the Facebook world, but in the first few days, as I enthusiastically chose photos to upload and cobbled together information for my profile page (marveling at how easy it all was), something truly unexpected happened: I found myself inundated with more friend requests than I ever thought possible. Every time I logged on, there were five or six new ones. Sometimes a few would pop up while I was logged in.

I was shocked. I'd been expecting close friends to find me on Facebook, my girlfriend's family, my parents, some of their friends perhaps, maybe some co-workers here and there, et cetera. But it went way beyond that. People from high school I had not thought about since then - ex-classmates with whom I competed for everything (attention, grades, jobs, identity), upperclassman I mostly remember avoiding in the hallway at all cost lest they give chase, underclassman who at best lingered on the periphery of my world (and sometimes avoided me for the same reason), several people I simply didn't get along with in those days and a few I never particularly liked - all had Facebook accounts, and all poured into my request box like fans besieging a box office for tickets that have just recently gone on sale.

Most of them, on the rare occasion I thought of them, had remained age 17 or 18 in my mind for two decades. To my astonishment, they were now in their late thirties, married, or divorced, with kids or step kids, balding heads, widening hips, mortgages, beer bellies, tired but still mostly pleasant smiles. It was trippy to have these people come back into my life - so many at once, and so quickly. Overnight, Facebook became not a boom town of strangers, but a grand entrance into a high school reunion in a virtual Holiday Inn banquet room; a reunion where everyone actually showed up, the jocks, the dirtballs, the geeks, dorks and drama queens...everyone was on one level now, everyone was an adult. Everyone was a Facebook user.

Recollections of the past spilled over in short but violent bursts at this reunion. It's truly amazing how memories we think we've forgotten are actually lying dormant, waiting to burst back to colorful life, like desert flowers after the rains come. It all came back to me and my new Facebook friends, hundreds of details I'd considered lost to time: things we said, things we believed, things we thought about ourselves and one another. Weekend first times moments of glory and cringe-worthy failures on courts, fields and stages were trotted out, dusted off, reveled in. First hour hilarity became new again, memories of sneaking into class, sneaking out of class. Teachers with bizarre habits, or bad breath became the butt of our laughter, now electronically transmitted across miles as well as years.

We recalled the jobs we shared washing dishes and bussing tables, flipping burgers and mopping lobbies; recalled the pop culture bric-a-brac of our youth, our Atari 2600's, our camouflage and parachute pants, our Swatch watches, our acid-washed mullets; we talked about cruising up and down Main Street looking for someone to buy us beer in big 1970s boats, the Chrysler Newports, Ford LTDs and Olds 88s that had been set aside as the junkers we could afford; we all remembered sneaking it into seedy apartments above the main street in town to consume the beer with the twenty-somethings living there, those who were reluctant to grow up and move on; whom we swore we would never turn out like.

Those apartments were our sanctuaries. Our Studio 54's.

All of that past was merged with the present. We learned about each other's lives now - what we did for a living, who we ended up marrying, who we divorced, who had quit smoking, who had quit drinking. Who had started drinking. Much of this we did through private messages, or open wall posts, sometimes live chatting if we happened to catch one another on-line, but frankly, Facebook allowed this dialogue to be carried on without saying anything to one another. About even those 'friends' with whom I did not communicate at all (and there were several of these; people who requested me, then fell strangely silent...), I learned everything I could possibly ever want or need to know simply by perusing their wall a couple of times a week, meandering through their photos now and then. There were lots and lots of photos on display - of their children, their cars, their camping trips, their homes, their ways of life, everything that was part of the world they lived in as something so outrageous as a (near) middle aged adult! It satiated my curiosity in the most savory way. I was glad for the opportunity to recall old times, and happy to learn most of them seemed to be doing just fine.

But this melancholy madness lasted only a few weeks, two months tops, mostly fortified by the non-stop stream of friends who joined my ranks early on. When that inundation leveled off, and eventually petered out, it did not take long for the past - having been hashed out six ways from Sunday - to become a tiresome subject. When that happened, we all fell silent.

No big deal if this were a real high school reunion at a real Holiday Inn. In that scenario, you get together, drink copious amounts of alcohol, remember the past for a night, or a weekend, but then it ends. There is a clear distinction between the real world and the reunion world, the past and the present. On Facebook come mid-June of last year, at least for me, it suddenly felt like Monday morning. The reunion was over; we were all supposed to be back to work, but we were still sitting in the banquet room, trying to think of something to say to one another, and failing.

In response, I turned to the variety of Facebook distractions, and promptly got swept up in that. This is when I became a true junkie.

Over the course of the summer, I contributed my 'Top 5' picks for everything under the sun, from beer to movies to rock albums to flowers, affirmed my knowledge of 80s trivia and song lyrics (70s trivia and song lyrics for that matter), established my IQ to be at least over 100, tried my hand at being a virtual farmer and a virtual gangster (though I must say, my interest in games like Mafia Wars, Farm Town and YoVille lasted about thirty-six seconds each), and learned a few things about myself I never even thought to consider:

If I were a Popsicle flavor, I'd be cherry.

If I were a Kool-Aid flavor, I'd be Purplesaurus Rex.

If I were an American president, I'd be Millard Filmore (uh...okay?)

My 'ultimate' light saber color is red.

If I were a Twilight character I'd be Edward (assuming that's a good thing...right?)

And if I were a character from classic literature, I would be Fagin. (I took this test twice, and came up with 'Buck' from London's Call of the Wild the second time. Edward Cullen, Fagin and Buck the dog...hmmm, a motley assortment, to be sure...)

All of it fascinating, or fun (kind of...) for a little while; a reliable distraction from any odious, chore-ridden day in the short term, but no good over the long haul. Just as my interest in the likes of Farm Town lasted thirty-six seconds, my interest in the sum of distractions Facebook has to offer held out for thirty-six days, give or take a day or two.

By October, I had exhausted the options, and felt exhausted. There was nothing left for me to do on Facebook except log on and read all the status updates on my stream, treat it like a kind of daily news ticker...

Not the best option. Doing so set the beginning of the end in motion.

Like any Facebook user, I was very conscious of making sure I presented myself in as wonderful a light as possible, and good status updates were central to this campaign. I kept mine smart or clever, always, either commenting on something in the news or popping off little witticisms.

"Jared Glovsky has himself flown in fresh daily..." I would post, and always receive an enthusiastic 'LOL!' from someone.

But without the distractions of games, Top 5's or memories of our wild and crazy teenage years, everyone else's status updates started getting really annoying, to the point where the observation my son had made about Facebook prior to my joining (and his joining) was proven to be spot on:

"Facebook exists so people can provide answers to questions that have not been asked."

Through the holidays, logging onto Facebook became a chore. My 'stream' of friends had little to say that was of interest or relevance to me, and nothing that, frankly, wasn't starting to piss me off a little. This I say not in any way to disparage them as people, as human beings, as moms and dads and productive members of society (or as the ones with whom I shared my much-vaunted youth, and who shared theirs with me), but as virtual buddies/veritable strangers streaming their way insipidly through my consciousness during morning coffee.

Some examples of the headlines that greeted me:

'XX' is having a second piece of cheesecake for dessert tonight, because he DESERVES it!!!"

"'XX' spent all morning cleaning up the kid's room. Dentist appointment later. Baseball practice. Then what to do for dinner? Yikes! :p"

"'XX' hears birds outside her window..."


"'XX' prefers the brown M & Ms...."

Once in a while, there was something of some import. Somebody had a job interview, or landed a new job, or a baby was born, disease was mitigated or crisis averted. Wonderful. All of that is just fine, and I'm happy to have people share it with me.

But that was rare. Facebook statuses were ordinarily a daily diet of banality, to which posters were nevertheless guaranteed (and this is the worst part) to get someone feigning to give a shit.

Being guaranteed a response for something you say, or write, is intoxicating. It means that what you're saying is being heard, thus affirming that you are here, and people know you're here, in this world. That's the allure of Facebook, I think (and MySpace, and Twitter...). The same thing I loved about sign-making as a kid. A Facebook status is like putting up a new sign, viewed by tons of passers-by, each day.

Yet in a way it's not at all like the sign-making I dreamed of as a kid. The dispensing of information, perhaps...but pertinent information? Nah...

Nor were the responses people got to their status updates any less aggravating. 'Hearing birds outside her window'... was sure to get someone quipping, 'At least you're not hearing voices! Ahahahahah...!'

'Brown M & Ms...' could not possibly fail to garner a critique of the green ones, with a sidebar about eating them on Thursdays, or something or other...

'Cleaning up the baby's room...' was guaranteed a Krakatau-caliber explosion of respondents, each one a parent filled to the brim with empathy. I'm a parent too...I know what it's like. A never-ending process. I get it. I still could find no way to respond, no honest way to make myself look like I gave a rat's ass. All that kept coming to mind was the 6th grade crush I had on her in the cello section of our middle school orchestra; but that was neither relevant nor appropriate.

And as for 'cheesecake...', well, seriously...have a second piece, buddy. Have a third. Eat the whole thing and let the rest of your family share a stale box of animal crackers beneath the sink. But just do it; I don't know that it has to be heralded as news, or some kind of personal triumph on your part, capitalization, multiple exclamation points and all (in this world of abbreviated grammar and truncated thoughts, multiple punctuation where there is no need seems to be a counter-intuitive development....counter-intuitive, and hugely annoying). Please don't clog my stream with that stuff. Please!

"Don't clog my stream, bro...! :)"

I thought about responding to his post with that, but decided against it. There's a fine line between indignation and rudeness, and I like to think I know where that line falls. Besides, Cheesecake Guy got plenty of response for his effort; timely, exuberant response, as though he'd announced he was going to run the Boston marathon or spend six weeks touring Vietnam, or switch careers after more than a decade:

"Right on! You go, dude! You DO deserve a second piece of cheesecake!"

Or, "I'll be right over! You better save me a piece!"

Or, "Try some strawberries and whip cream on there. Mmmm....Yummo for my tummo!"

*Sigh...* Maybe there's something wrong with me. I just don't know any of these people well enough anymore to warrant sharing daily, hourly, or up-to-the-minute thoughts with them.

By New Year's Day, I had become painfully aware of this fact; painfully aware that there's something unnatural about the inter-personal dynamic Facebook creates. This, combined with all the privacy issues that have come out in the last six months, turned it into something I could do without. In February, I started paring down my friends list...but by April, I just said screw it. I'm done.

If you're in my life, we already communicate in person, or at least on the phone, or email, and do it well. Everyone else -the former child stars of my youth - well, I'll see you all at the next reunion, when the past can feel new again.

For just a couple of hours. 

SeaWorld tragedy a grim but important reminder there's a difference between wild and domesticated animals

In my hometown, there's a park legendary for its facilities. It's built around a wetland, with artesian wells and walking trails, verdant campgrounds and sandy playgrounds. For 70-some years it's been a source of pride in the community and the gold standard spot for holding summertime activities, particularly the kind that won't fit in your back yard. From family reunions to 50th wedding anniversaries to company picnics, this wooded enclave with the big wooden pavilion is where you want to be, Memorial Day through Labor Day.

For many years there was an enclosure at the western edge of the park; three or four acres of fenced-in marshy area containing a few whitetail deer, which park goers could come watch in what was touted as natural habitat.

The inhabitants of this natural habitat rarely showed themselves. More often than not, they stayed in the interior of the enclosure, hidden in the tall grass, leaving few signs of their existence: the occasional scat visible through the chain link fence, a ragged tuft of brown fur clinging to it, perhaps, and these combining to create the unmistakable odor of (any) animals living in a confined space. But that was about it. The only reliable clarification that deer were anywhere in the vicinity was a posted wooden sign that announced, in no uncertain terms, Whitetail Deer, prompting visitors without further instruction to wait and see if they could catch sight of one. There was a feed dispenser as well. 25 cents bought you a handful of dent corn and the possibility - if you were lucky, patient - that a deer might emerge from the tall grass, approach the fence and eat out of your hands.

Growing up I spent many summer afternoons in the park, fistful of corn at the ready. On the rare occasion a deer made an appearance (always a doe; never once spotted a buck), I can't say I was all that impressed. They seemed to creep unsteadily over the gravel and straw beneath their hooves toward my outstretched hand and stop short - always stop short - of taking the offering, dark eyes gazing vapidly at me, ears twitching erratically as though their head had short-circuited. I'd stretch my arm as far as possible through the portal in the chain link, rattle the corn around in the palm of my hand a bit, maybe offer a cooing 'Come on...it's okay...' (as one might coax a kitten to jump onto one's lap), but it did no good. Invariably, these tired creatures chose to forsake the corn, turning and walking off, their slow, arthritic gait suggesting neither apprehension nor comprehension; at best, a low-wattage disinterest in everything.

I don't think this wholly uninspired behavior was due to malnourishment or maltreatment. These penned-in deer were simply couch potatoes, lazy and domesticated, a far cry from the swift, alert denizens of the forest I saw bounding with a flash of white in and out of the thicket behind my house. And it got me thinking, though not knowing exactly why, that this was no way for them to be living.

I wasn't the only one. The deer park was a frequent target for animal rights activists in the late-1980s. Ordinarily, their dissent took the form of a letter to the local newspaper calling for the park's closure; less frequently a live appeal before the city council. But every once in a great while, some naive albeit well-meaning individual (usually a young college student, immersing himself for the first time in a newly realized freedom to set the world - which he'd been watching deteriorate throughout his childhood - on the right track...), would sneak into the park late at night and cut the chain link fence open in hopes of setting the deer free.

If any deer escaped, they didn't get far, and such efforts did little but arouse the ire of town officials, who insisted that setting the deer free did more harm than good because the animals had become too domesticated to survive in the wild. This argument made sense, yet I couldn't shake the thought that the animal rights folks had a point. I'd seen it, and felt it, myself after all: they weren't in especially bad shape, probably not unhappy or mistreated, but there was nevertheless something off - something not right- about these deer in captivity.

By the 1990s, the protesters were raising questions about not only the morality, but the efficacy of the deer park. Times had changed. Deer were no longer a special thing to see. The state's wild population was well over one million, and the species was not only becoming a hazard on roadways but encroaching into suburban areas freely. In my town, it was strange not to wake up and find whitetails raiding a garden or bedding down behind the neighbor's garage.

A deer park was no longer a big deal. Everyone had their own.

By the mid-2000s, in addition to ethical and functional questions, the deer park had become a financial burden, and that was what spelled the end. I don't know how it came to pass, or what became of the animals (if there were any left by that time) but the deer park was closed down.

The tragedy at Orlando's SeaWorld this week, during which an experienced trainer possessing a reportedly loving relationship with the animals she worked with on a day-to-day basis was grabbed by an orca (killer whale), pulled underwater and drowned in front of spectators, got me thinking about that deer park; specifically the varied and complex relationships humanity has with the natural world and the animals that inhabit it.

I'm by no means an animal rights kook. I eat meat...love it, in fact. I believe that our species is supposed to love it, that we're intended to take advantage of the resources available us, like any animal in the food chain. I support the rights of hunters and fishermen (am myself an avid fisherman), believe that, contrary to stereotypes, most are stewards of the land who strive for clean shots and either practice catch and release or obey bag limits, fully understanding that such regulations are put in place with their interests in mind. I believe that while Humanity's relationship with animals is inherently violent, and has been through time, our treatment of the animals we quarry for food and put to work for us has - on balance - become consistently more humane through the ages; certainly in the last century a whole new consciousness about this treatment has arisen. That being said, there is still much work to be done. With the rights implicit in being at the top of the food chain come a host of responsibilities, which are not always being met by certain people at certain times.

I won't bother mentioning things like dog fighting and cock fighting; these and other wanton acts of animal cruelty, usually going on underground and illegally, are universally criticized. There's no way to stop it from happening really, but when it's discovered, every effort is made to put a stop to it. Sadly, that's probably as good as it's ever going to get.

Nor will I spend any time decrying the methods by which we slaughter the animals we eat - the huge chicken and cattle yards where so much filth and carnage reportedly begets our Saturday ribeye and Sunday fried chicken. Though to some this is no more humane a process than cock-fighting, it is legal - an industry too deeply embedded in our society's infrastructure for much to change anytime soon. An argument for another time, perhaps...another blog.

The complex and touchy subject of animal testing too demands another time and place. On the issue, I'm ambivalent. I believe it depends largely on what's being tested, and what testers hope to accomplish.

A cure for cancer, right on.

A new make-up that won't sweat off in the sun, no way.

Some new biological weapon to level human populations in another hemisphere, forget it.

'Accountability', 'watchdog'....these words should be part of any relationship we have with animals in a testing environment, to minimize and/or eliminate exploitation and undue suffering. And frankly, I think I could be swayed to denounce the entire practice.

What gets me uneasy is the use of animals for our entertainment. Generally, any scenario where a species is being trained (forced) to do something it wouldn't normally do, exposed to unnecessary pain and stress for no reason other than spectacle, is, to say the very least, troublesome.

I don't know why this should upset me more than animal testing, chickens being bred in their own excrement, or cattle being abused before getting put to death with a steel rod to the skull. Maybe because we are too entertained these days. With so much out there, so many options for keeping ourselves nice and distracted, anything even marginally reminiscent of with our past dalliances with animal blood sport seems not only unnecessary, but fatuous.

Even still, I'm willing to concede some shades of gray. Things like rodeos and bull-fighting are quickly defended by people who think of them as tradition, and I'll grudgingly go along with this. Not so much because I think in this day and age driving spears into a bull's back and watching it die in ever-decreasing circles, or wrapping a belt around its balls to piss it off then jumping on top of it for 8 seconds are either traditions worth preserving or a reasonable barometer of manhood, but because at least - at the very least - these activities involve domesticated animals. Species that have slowly, over time, been acclimated to live amongst humans - to serve our needs, satiate our appetite, and for better or worse, indulge our folly.

Problems arise when we throw wild animals into our midst. The worst example of this would seem to be the exotic pet phenomenon - people harboring large reptiles and snakes, poisonous or otherwise, big cats, big apes, bizarre birds from far-off lands and sometimes things completely out of left field, like kangaroos, civets, bears or hyenas (it apparently does happen...) with little concern for how doing so might adversely affect their lives, the lives of those around them or the environment. Too often, without really understanding the animal's needs, physiology or life expectancy (some species of parrots live longer than most humans!), they mistakenly treat their new best friend as they would a house cat or dog, or become hell-bent on anthropomorphizing every instinctive thing it does in an effort to legitimize owning it. This invariably leads to living in ultra-close proximity to it, and allowing it to do things they would never let an ordinary pet get away with.

But at least exotic pet ownership has a flavor of personal choice. There are larger and more organized menageries being cobbled together purely for spectacle and profit, which many of us don't give a second thought to. Circuses, for instance, where horror stories of animal abuse periodically rise out of the flatulent morass of the collective greatest show on Earth.

There is something to be learned from circuses, actually. Every time an African elephant brings down a big top in an angry spray of splintered tent poles, peanuts and human body parts, it's a reminder that perhaps these animals should not be getting forced to stand on their heads and walk around in a circle and wave at the crowd with their trunks. They don't want to 'wave' at the crowd.

They neither like, nor trust, the crowd. They're wild animals. Why do we delude ourselves into thinking otherwise?

In this same vein can be found a host of smaller animal parks sprinkled across the country and the world, where 'handlers' (should anybody be a handler of a wild animal? Can anyone be...?) purport a special bond with their animals that allows them to do really stupid things, like jumping on the backs of alligators, swatting tigers on the nose and sticking their heads inside a lion's mouth...all for the amusement of paying customers.

Do we need to see this? Is it worth the price of admission? Worth the risk to the 'handler'...to the audience...to the animal?

It is essentially what goes on at SeaWorld: wild animals are held captive in a confined space and taught to behave unnaturally, for our entertainment.

In fairness, I don't regard SeaWorld the way I do any average circus. SeaWorld is just someone's antiquated idea; conceived, I believe, in an age when families did not have the options they have today, for either entertainment or education. In the 1960s and 70s, who knew about killer whales? They and their flippered brethren were mysterious to most people, especially those living away from the ocean, where nothing about them or the lives they live on this blue marble was likely to come up in conversation. A place like SeaWorld provided an up-close-and-personal encounter with these marvelous creatures for people who might otherwise never get to see such a thing.

That's not true today, just as it is no longer true that seeing a whitetail deer holds the cachet it did when my hometown opened its deer park decades ago. We live in the information age. No small amount of literature, photos and video - live and otherwise - is available on the Internet or in libraries about orcas and every other type of marine animal, and they are featured on countless television shows and movies.

Not the same as seeing one in person? Of course not. But that's what aquariums and zoos around the world are for.

Which brings up an important point: animals, even wild ones, kept in captivity strictly for educational/appreciation purposes is (marginally) acceptable, if it's done with their comfort in mind. And that would make SeaWorld acceptable, were that all that was going on. But it's not. SeaWorld likes to tread a fine line between education and entertainment, but people don't go there to learn; they go to watch 'Shamu' do flips, swim backwards on its tail, sling-shot a trainer off the tip of its nose and beg for a piece of fish.

And does that need to be going on? Should these multi-ton animals - any multi-ton animals - be sentenced to living in cement pools so that we can laugh, cheer and clap our hands when they spit water on the guy sitting next to us? Should they be anthropomorphized to the point where we're considering them one of us, considering them friends, considering it appropriate to watch trainers take rides on their backs, and therefore believe they like what they're doing? That they enjoy the stardom?

Is that part of our God-given dominion over animals? Should we be riding on an animal's back for any other reason than to get from one place to another?

I'm sure the animals at SeaWorld are treated just fine, and that the tragedy with this hapless trainer was an isolated event (although this particular orca apparently has a 'history' of erratic behavior and has been involved in similar incidents in the past, it is now being revealed). I still don't think they need to be played with. We think we know them; this ties into our propensity to turn them into friends, laugh when they do almost-human things, convince ourselves that they're smiling at us with their little bristly teeth...almost child-like, right? But we don't know them.

They're not smiling.

We were reminded of this at SeaWorld in Orlando.

A woman in Connecticut found this out last year at the mercy of a chimpanzee named Travis that had no business living the life it had been allowed to live up until that awful day.

Siegfried and Roy learned a harsh lesson in 2003 with one of the tigers in their act.

That same year, the same week in fact, Timothy Treadwell paid the ultimate price for wanting to believe he had made some kind of connection with the Alaskan grizzly bears he considered family.

Perhaps that's why the bedraggled deer in the enclosure back home rarely made an appearance and always stopped before they reached the fence. Maybe they knew, if only instinctively (but hey, instinct is what keeps them alive), that no matter how much I wanted them to, no matter how hungry they were, they simply were not put on this Earth to eat corn out of my hand, and I was not put on this Earth to feed it to them.