Is Christhe man in Tiananmen Square?

Saturday, January 11, 2014

I hate the concept of “what comes around; goes around,” partly because karma is a lot like one of the great laws of physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite action.

Wishing ill even on bullies, tends to create a sphere of negative influence for the wisher as well as the wished.

So the scandal involving Gov. Christie and the alleged misuse of the Port Authority for political retribution leaves me a tough place and makes me wonder just what the hell he was thinking.

We all have to be more than just a knee jerk reaction to things we like or dislike, and that a large part of being civilized is self control. A person who resists the urge to create instant karma in others has real power.

I keep thinking of that scene in Schindler’s List, when Schindler tells the Nazi that real power is the ability to have it, and choose not to misuse it, not to give in.

Perhaps I feel sorry for Christie because I am so much like him in some ways – not in the political opportunistic way, but in the personal need to tell every jerk I see in the world how big a jerk they are, regardless of the circumstance.

I relate to that poor fool that put himself in front of the Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square, knowing that my personal power cannot possibly match the wrath of the world, but I do it anyway, simply because someone needs to object to wrong things, even when they are impossible to stop.

Like Christie, I can’t stop from reacting. This got me in trouble with countless bullies in the mostly white high school my family sent me to after I got in so much trouble confronting street gangs in Paterson as a kid. I recall on very large tackle from the first string of the football team throwing a school desk at my head (and missing).

But there is a huge difference between me and Christie.

I have no political motivation. My idea of person power comes out of the martial arts training I had when younger in which personal strength comes from within, not from those who endorse me. I am like a stone in a road that the tanks must steer around or go over, but I won’t go away.

Christie comes off at a champion of the people, and has worked his entire career building up an image of an independent force that will not tolerate corruption, a phony front that is fed by us in the media and the misperception that the urge to blurt out inappropriate things is power, when all power comes from the ability to control the wrath and steer it in an effective way.

I kept thinking of that video of him holding an ice cream cone when on the boardwalk at the Jersey shore, and his chasing after some critic – his state troopers making any physical confrontation impossible, Christie’s invulnerability paid for by the state.

The problem with manufactured power like Christie’s is that it can’t last. A man shielded by false pride and misperception becomes an easy target when the pieces of his armor fall away – such as the missing link in the dragon Smaug’s armor into which the hero of The Hobbit shoots his arrow.

Christie has been bullying people for several years, scaring people with a badge he bought with his fundraising efforts for George W. Bush, and for the most park, none were willing to stand up against him, fearing that they might be the next target in some bid rig crime scheme his brilliant staff thought up as the next link in his long term plans to become president of the United States.

Seeing him whine at his press conference this week, squirming to get out from the inevitable Karma his pushing and shoving have brought him, made me realize how unpresidential he had become, and how much more like the bully who threw the deck at me head in high school, unable to control himself but always trying to control others – and this lack of self control that so many found refreshing will deny him long lasting power.

He is not the guy in Tiananmen Square; but the tank that ran that guy over. And that is sad.

Morning music

Thursday, January 09, 2014

The change of routine – going to Hoboken instead of Bayonne – each day, hasn’t yet become fixed in my mine.

I’m like an old LP record in which life is inserted in grooves that allow me to function. I start my day at one point and let everything run according to plan, reacting to any sudden bump that might deviate me and cause me to skip something.

Yesterday, I nearly went straight down Summit Avenue rather than turning back north after the stop at the train station in Journal Square.

In my trips to Bayonne, I knew where I could pause and purchase coffee along the way. But with the shorter, but circular route back to Hoboken, I’m still confused, partly because I never know what to expect on the lack leg when the streets converge and we all flow down into the mile square city along one of two routes – any traffic back up at the Lincoln Tunnel creating a nightmare of uncertainty.

During back ups I try to look out over the landscape, but the route is clouded with the outstretched limbs of trees, so thick that even in winter without their leaves, the view is obscured.

I constantly ache for the river and the simplicity of an earlier life when I jogged a long the waterway each morning, getting my fill of nature before civilization imposed its will on me.

In Bayonne, this was an easy stint, a stop in one of several parks before making the trip to the mid-town office. This became a little more complicated a year or so ago, when the office moved farther south, and though only a mile farther away, it changed everything.

Small alterations have huge impacts, and I was at a loss for how to make it up in my routine.

Sometimes, bigger changes like the one that transpired at the turn of the year are easier to accept, because they are so abrupt that I’m not lulled into an old, out of date pattern and shocked when at the end, it is no longer valid.

For several years, I stopped to pick up my editor before making the trip south, a routine that allowed me to write in my notebooks as I waited. When she moved on, I struggled to fit that little bit back into my life, and did, but lost that, too, with the extra mile of travel.

The trip is shorter now, and though the job is tougher, a new routine will emerge that will allow all these pieces to fall back into place, providing a season and a time for everything necessary and everything that I need to have, a new record running with new grooves, the music of which only I can hear.

New Years Resolution

Wednesday, January 08, 2014

This is the time of year we’re all supposed to resolve ourselves to change – making promises to ourselves that we hope to keep.

I’m good for a lot of promises, and then spend the year struggling to make them happen.

But change in my life has always been something that comes upon me whether I intend it or not, the next stumbling step in some direction I vaguely intend to go, an uncertain, precarious step that I am often relieved when the heal and toe find solid ground upon which to land.

It is hugely difficult to resolve anything about anything when each step in life comes as a reaction to what the toe might stumble over or bump into or might jerk back from – life being a process of anticipation and reaction, never a certainty.

Routine – such as my Sunday morning laundry – is a comfort zone, a place of refuge where I can almost predict the future and what to expect, and find more solid ground than during the rest of life where each step is a reaching out into the unknown and the immense relief of landing on something that doesn’t fall out from under me.

Over the long years, no resolution has ever come to fruition except as a backward glance at what I hoped would be, and what I managed to salvage from any promise I made myself when starting out on this trek into and out of the unknown.

What I vow most to accomplish always comes from steps I take inside myself, that constant struggle to make the ticks of the clock inside of me keep pace with the real clicks of the real world – which often as not I have failed to keep time to.

It is a great concept to be that soul who marches to his own tune, but it’s a horrible to be so out of harmony with what actually transpires as to not accept what happens next.

I don’t believe in fate as most people would define it. But I do understand that I need to direct my foot somewhere and be conscious of each step I take to make certain that it lands somewhere solid so that I can take the next step with the confidence of knowing where I’ve been.

The coffee that didn’t spill

Monday, January 06, 2014

The fog fills the dark so thickly that it seems light outside – a wall of mist that rises from the wet ground where the snow has been.

I can hardly breathe as I rise and make my way to the kitchen to perform the morning rituals.

After so many days on and off duty, it seems strange to face a week in which there will be no break – nothing but the newness of a new beat, filled with unfamiliar faces and issues, and this idea that I am the same person who must deal with each.

We live our lives in constant change.

Over the weekend, I talked to a sister I didn’t know I had until recently, and a best friend with whom I had not spoken in years, and this is part of the change of habit – like that old favorite Elvis movie with Mary Tyler Moore in which the change at the end is unresolved.

Love being love means it can’t always been easy.

The man Angel Market where I get the papers each Sunday warned me when I left not to slip on the ice, a bag in one hand with Times vision of the world, and a container of coffee in my other hand to deliver consciousness so I can face the world.

I slipped on the ice anyway, and landed on my back – uninjured. I didn’t even spill the coffee.

But it brings back all the old routines of that time when I made my way through the world in such a condition, for months a few years ago even with a patch over one eye, and prior to that, the daily routine in Montclair of walking to the bus stop, and eating breakfast of buttered roll and coffee while waiting for the bus to arrive for the trip over the Orange Mountains to the warehouse where I worked.

The talk with my friend reminded me of that, too, and how simple life was when we kept thinking there was something to look forward to, some aspiration to drive us, some mission we needed to accomplish in life.

Yesterday reminded me that these subtle things are still important, because at the end of the day, they are what life is: the coffee that doesn’t spill, the buttered roll devoured while waiting for the bus, the unresolved mysteries of the universe only emphasized by the ending credits and the holy-moly Elvis song sung as the film fades.

Sometimes a snow storm is just a snow storm

Saturday, January 04, 2014

The ranting over what amounted to an ordinary snow storm shows how pathetic media has become.

And how much we tend to believe in the hype.

I stopped off at the supermarket after work to get a few cans of cat food and found the aisles mobbed and the check out lines so long I almost gave up and went home without my purchases.

We are suffering from global warming, but not every storm is a super storm that my local radio station (CBS) can exploit.

Sometimes, a storm is just a storm.

But we act as if we might starve if we do not stock up.

I talked to my neighbor about it while shoveling the walk yesterday morning, and she was as appalled by the over reaction as I was.

The problem goes back two decades to that time when the United States first invaded Iraq and people on this side could not get enough of scud missile reports, glued to their radios and TVs for a blow by blow account.

This was the first time I noticed the insane need to instant information, and something I believe led to the impact of internet news – a kind of extension of the insane nightly body count we used to get during the evening news during Vietnam.

A rubber necking mentality where we cannot get enough gruesome reports, and cannot get them soon enough.

For the news industry with not enough major events to justify our existence, we have to hype up everything until the real thing comes along.

So every terrorist threat is treated like a new 9/11 and every storm treated like a Sandy.

This idea that we need to keep people scared scares me, because it suggests manipulation, and an acceptance of the monstrous behavior of groups like the NSA who justify their intrusion into our private lives with the idea that they are keeping us safe.

A scared population serves this group well, because we believe anything they say, hyped up inside with the inner fear that we might not survive the next Sandy or 9/11 when as Freud once pointed out we get our wish for it.

The NSA and other political powers tend to make enemies of us around the world, and then defend us from the enemies they create, and so every snow storm becomes a major tragedy, and every threat becomes an excuse for additional erosion of rights.

I keep thinking of the guy who wanted to put explosives in his shoes, or in his underwear, and how similar it sounded to the plots the CIA used to create to go after Castro in the early 1960s. Sometimes a terrorist is just a terrorist, regardless on whose side he’s on. And sometimes a snow storm is just a snow storm, no matter how much the radio wants it to be something more.

Capturing the moment

Thursday, January 02, 2014

I spent New Years’ Day getting rid of stuff, dumping that collection of junk that has mounted up in my closet and work room for years.

This might have been prompted by the calls from my new found family or from my best friend (whom I hadn’t talked to in about a year).

This last year has been startling for a number of reasons, not least the fact that I went from being an only child at the start of 2013 to having three sisters (one adopted), two brothers (who I haven’t yet made contact with) and a host of cousins – one of whom has become extremely close.

I even have a step mom, who I spoke with twice, who gave me further insight into what a scoundrel my father was, something my own dearly departed mother only hinted at on her death bed.

I had been at a loss since early 2012 when the last of my closest family members passed away, with me being the youngest of what some called “the Sarti clan.”

I didn’t fully appreciate what this meant, even though Mrs. Swartz from School No. 11 in Clifton, once referred to me as that during my one year in public school in Clifton. She had taught many of my uncles, and recognized the breed when I came along, even though my last name was technically “Sullivan.”

She was being divisive and yet not without a note of tender regret as if putting up with the Sarti wildness was part of the challenge of teaching that she would miss once I moved out of her care.

In some ways, I was wilder than any of the uncles (who were more like brothers), getting into deeper mischief before actually getting into serious trouble, and somehow coming out on the other side of both unscathed.

The lessons on my father taught me just where I got this wild streak from – a rebellious nature that I barely contain even with age, as if this beast inside of me remains at bay only by whip and chair, items my father apparently lacked especially when drunk.

The last year was a good year for a number of reasons – although it also showed me that I need to get back on track and return to those things that I have long aspired to do.

My friend’s calling a few days before New Year’s also brought that fact home.

“We could have been great,” he told me, referring to the numerous projects we did for fun – music and radio plays, even some videos. “If we had paid more attention to them, we would have gotten somewhere.”

Most of these projects, I pointed out, were done under the influence, and were more self-entertainment than art – the fake radio shows, the odd-mocking operas, the video history of the band, musical score to a film that did not exist, video skits in which I always played some odd character, the science fiction pink Floyd like projects he and I did with guitars and keyboard  and many more.

We recorded everything – just as I always did with a written account of my experiences – but many of the tapes were lost over the years, some of which I ache to hear again such as the sessions we had in the uptown apartment in Passaic where we jammed for hours, tracking on a Teac (a tape recorder I sold later for a down payment on a new Pinto).

I have some of these old tapes, and so does he, which is promising. But he wants to go back there, and redo things we can’t find.

Redo them?

Some things can’t be redone, I told him. Some things are special in that moment of inspiration.

The best we can do is to get inspired by the here and now. This has always been true, even back then, when we were keeping a sound record of that moment (the way I keep a written record in my journal) special to that particular moment, filled with the aspirations and the sense of space we felt then. We cannot redo such things. They are of that moment, which is why we needed to put them down on tape or paper or in some other medium.

We always need to capture the moment before it slips away.

It was a very good year?

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

People tend to say “Happy New Year.”

This is most likely because they look ahead to some new beginning that the new year promises.

I’ve never thought of this day that way.

For me the change of year has always been something sad, something left behind.

This is not a case of “could have beens” or “should have beens.” I subscribe wholeheartedly to Lawrence of Arabia’s philosophy “nothing is written” unless I write it.

Still each passing year leaves its own indelible mark on my life, clumps of time that will never come again, to which I know I will later look back with some fondness and yes – to some degree – regret.

Each year’s passing means leaving behind more than just a memory – and though I often promise to keep in touch with some of those who made up that part of my life, I know with some I won’t, and I will instead carry away an out-of-date image of who those people are, my life lived in a moment that has already expired.

This change of year marks a significant shift after a decade working in Bayonne – a place I came to love even when each year it became a different place from the place I inherited a decade ago – just as when I left Secaucus in 2003, Secaucus was different.

Over the last few years, I needed change, something to jolt me out of routine and into the world again, and yet, finally, when it comes I shudder from the expectation of it.

Change may be good, but it is also uncomfortable.

On this day of every year, I tend to look back to each of the clumps and the people who were deeply involved in my life. I look back at those who got left behind – this year Ralph, and Eddie, and others who I shall not see again in this world.

I reunited with my best friend, Pauly, one of three companions I hung with over the long years though had lost touch with over the last two. He could not remember the year Hank died, a date and time I cannot shed from my mind.

Some of us are born to keep records of the world, not the history of civilizations, but that of people who love or even hate, those history might consider insignificant, but are hugely significant in my life and the texture of life as we know it – the every day people whose struggle is what life is all about, the happiness and sadness, the accomplishments and yes, the disappointments.

These are the things worth recalling, and keeping alive.

I keep thinking about the Comet Shoe repair shop in Bayonne I went into during the first months on the Bayonne beat, and Erwin’s Department Store, and Hyman’s Shoes – bits and pieces of a past that should not have existed even when I encountered them, but had somehow waited for my arrival before they passed on.

I miss them, and the people associated with all such places, because they take with them something that we can never get back a living memory of times and places that only they possess, and cannot fully convey even to recorders of personal history like me.

Some people become monumental in my life, and I tend to pay more attention to them than others, but even the small stories, the brief encounters, that look on the street are precious to me, and linger inside of me long after the reality has vanished.

This is the day of the year when we take notice of the changes that go on around us everyday. For me, it is a bitter-sweet day in that I am leaving behind in the old year as much as I expect to gain in the new one.