I Almost Picked Up a Prostitute

So Im on my way to a Nashville Sounds game and I get turned around the wrong way. Greer Stadium is off 8th Avenue but I turn down it the wrong way, back towards the Rescue Mission and the Greyhound Station, you know? I realize my error and start trying to find somewhere on the right to turn into, turn around and redirect. I come up alongside a woman walking in the same direction and Im looking at her because Im trying to time things right so I don't hit her when I turn in. Or, you know, not "not hit her" really, like there's really a danger, just not turn in and cut her off unexpectedly and create this weird "Oh excuse the nose of my Jeep" situation, right? So Im looking at her to communicate all these things with just a look, and she's looking at me like "What? What is it?" And I'm like "Well nothing, just. . . you know. Just put the pieces together, okay? Im trying not to make this awkward." But then I kinda get ahead of her a bit and I can turn into the little side alley I've chosen. And it's okay. Except these side alleys down 8th are really narrow. . . it's where Cannery Row is, and there's the train tracks there and the area is just kinda cramped with old, red brick factory buildings with weird little worthless, paved nooks that you can hardly fit anything into. So I'm in now and I couldn't have chosen better sooner, per se, I'm just trying to backtrack fast and not be late to this game. While I'm wheeling around making this tight little four point turn I notice the lady from earlier walks by again and looks at me with that same "What?" look, and there's no avoiding her gaze because I'm literally cornered in this tiny alley pointed straight at her. She passes by. I pull up to the curb to finally hang my left and get pointed back right, and there she is again, this time just five feet to the right of my passenger side window. My windows are down and she looks in at me and says (this time not just with her eyes, but with real words) "Did you need me?" And I'm confused so that I look at her like "What? Do I need you?" And of course, it all clicked together: where I was and the details of this weird little dance of gestures I had inadvertandly participated in. And it disturbed me that a different look on my face would have confirmed what she wrongly suspected, that I suddenly found myself receiving the look that one of her clients would get. A look that asked "Yeah?" and that would be returned with "Yes." And besides her somewhat jagged gait and ragged t-shirt and blue jeans, she kinda looked like one of the middle aged women at my church. Pretty in an elegant but careworn kind of way. I didn't know how to react. Nervous laughter at the absurdity of the situation didn't seem right, and pity wasn't good enough. I was just sad and didn't know what to think or do. The End.

"Lost" in the Supermarket: Why I Stopped Buying It -or- How my Favorite Show Got Jack-ed Up and it Makes Me Want to Hurley

My now soured relationship with the infamous show Lost began as a whirlwind romance. I remember my interest peaked by the pilot: the exotic location, the action, the mystery, the potential for growth and depth I sensed in characters like John Locke. I was soon hooked and we met weekly, with the days in between filled with an aching hunger for more information, deeper backstory, further developments. Rival commitments later presented themselves, such as academics and humans, and I found time in shorter supply.

Years later a neighbor let me borrow the Season 2 DVDs, and I was suddenly transformed into a TV Caligula, gorging myself for hours on the show, my narrative-libido insatiable for more about the island, more, still more. Then the Season 3 DVDs were at my disposal. Numerous classes were bullshitted and social events forgone, all for the sake of learning more about the Others, basking in the glow of new romantic developments, pondering: What the hell is the Dharma Initiative all about? What does the Island want? My curiosity and anticipation left me was primed for Season 4, ready to get back to the courtship days of old with the weeklong wait times. And then? Intimations of escape? Flashforwards, which started with the Season 3 finale, hint at a time OFF the island, the Oceanic 6, etc. But. . . this can't be. The whole thrust of the show is getting off the island. Were there to be an escape or a rescue. . . they would no longer be LOST.

Now some might argue "Oh, but don't you see that they were all lost without one another prior to coming to the island? They were broken and aimless before they got there and then found their true selves through the trials and adversities they endured together." Okay. Acknowledged. BUT, that emotional/moral content doesn't negate their basic, driving desire to get off of the hostile/crazy island back to the comparatively less hostile/crazy real world. Here the affair began to seriously break down. It was the claustrophobia of the island that made the situation so dire, that made the characters so close. It was the mystery of the island as a wholly Other place that made it so appealing.

The show should have been cut short, in my opinion. Let's be honest, it would have been impossible, were the writers given 7 or 17 more seasons, to satisfyingly tie up even half of the loose ends without creating a whole slew of other ones. The problem as I see it: in order for the show to survive it had to evolve, and in the attempt it devolved. New characters with meandering and ultimately irrelevant subplots were extraneously added (Desmond not being included in this indictment). Mysteries were piled on top of mysteries in such a way as to no longer suggest alluring complexity, but rather reveal a dangerous Jenga tower of questions destined to fall and destroy our foolish hopes for clarity.

The real moment of clarity came when I realized this: Lost will not be faithful to its promises. Lost was a silly cocktease who never had any intention of anything serious, just messing with my heart from the start, manipulating my emotions for her own sick penchant for feeling in control. Oh she got me all right. I hope she feels reeeeeeeeeal good about what she did.

You know what Lost? You had such a big budget and your stars might be featured in films and you had legions of faithful followers, but you know what YOU are?

You're a soap opera. You feature a cast of at times overly dramatic characters with outrageous back-stories. Your central characters weave in and out of unexpected liasons and love triangles difficult to follow. You leave us as an audience longing for the next episode and we don't even know why. You're an narrative-emotional addiction without substance, without telos, and you're not even ashamed of that. You're a fickle bitch and I'm glad it's all over. . .

I'm coming over later to take back the 80 plus hours of my life you stole from me. And my Clash Greatest Hits CD, I think it's in your car. It better not be scratched up.

Exchanges with Strange Children

Both having occurred today at school--

In this first one Im walking the kids outside.

Me: It feels great out here!

Small child 1: No it doesnt.

Me: No?

Small Child 1: No, it feels soft out here like your skin.

At which point he reached up and rubbed my arm, and

I recoiled, made uncomfortable by his weird and unexpected

observation/touch.

In this next one we're sitting in class, and the child has his head

down on the desk.

Small child 2: Mr. Walton, my head is hurting me. . .

Me: Well, tell your head to stop it.

Small Child 2: I don't speak Brain. . .

Dignity, Always Dignity

"We will guard each man's dignity and slay each man's pride."

-A hymn

Today my pride was repeatedly wounded. Actually, before I even get in to that, I should begin by saying that the title of this blog will soon no longer be applicable. I've secured a position as an Educational Assistant in the Special Education MIS classroom at an elementary school in Metro. MIS stands for Moderate Intervention Services, which translates roughly to kids with severe behavioral disorders who can't function in a normal classroom because they throw fits all the time. So my pride is wounded daily now, which is probably absurd for it to be so wound-able by small children. But their continuous disregard for my authority --the thing I am being paid to wield so as to make a peaceful learning environment possible-- as well as their personal insults and violent abuses really do dig in after awhile. This is, I've both concluded and been told, "meaningful work." Yet the children say "I hate you" to us multiple times a day, as well as "I love you." I reason "They don't mean it" when I hear the former, and therefore cannot help but conclude the same with the latter. Reading and basic math: these are the ultimate meaning thus far, the only thing I know that these kids are taking home a little extra piece of each day, if anything. Tough love, self-discipline, the fruit of encouragement and new challenges: all these seem to just bounce off of their prematurely thick hides like the rubber erasers they methodically break off of all their pencils and toss to the floor.

Whenever they're not working they thrust their seven-year-old hips in the air mimicking movements from the music videos their parents watch, or stab the tables with their pencils or knock chairs over. And they are not working most of the time. Unable or unwilling to focus, Quiondez takes ten minutes to write his name. Baror, a 2nd grader from Rwanda, told me today, "I hate brown people. I'm black. I hate brown people." Briona is the most consistent screamer-kicker-cryer, putting in at least a solid half an hour a day into the act. And Kavian cannot keep his body still for longer than ten seconds at a time; it's a miracle he completes any work at all, which when he does he's typically a whiz at, be it math or reading/writing.

Today, after two weeks of being with them, was their worst day ever. On the way home I determined to make it home without falling to pieces, a nervous wreck, and through prayer and a bit of delirious laughter I thought I had overcome my soul-sickness. Then I parked in the wrong spot to pop in to FYE and see my brother, and my Jeep was almost towed. I don't know why, but it absolutely set me off. I was screaming at the cop and the tow guy. I told them about my day, about how I was there to see my brother because I didn't have any groceries or money and my paycheck hadn't gone through yet, that I just needed a break. The cop let me tear up my $95 ticket, but the tow guy wasn't having it; he demanded $45 immediately or else he was towing it. My brother thankfully paid it (with money he doesn't really have), but something about it was just a huge affront to my pride. I have felt grateful lately to have found a job being disrespected by children for seven hours a day for low pay, so the line between learning needed humility and enduring unreasonable humiliation has been an easy one to blur. But it's a line that must be made. Because I earnestly want for myself the same thing that these kids need: the preservation and enrichment of true dignity, and the slaying of false pride. So below is a clip from one of my favorite movies that I'd like to dedicate to keeping the old head up.

Dignity. . . Always Dignity clip

The Non-Sequiturs of Mrs. Solomon

It's Quiet Time in Ms. Donaldson's Special Ed class (the teacher I'm subbing for), which means we draw the shades and turn the lights off. Everyone is expected to put their head down and rest for a good forty-five minutes. That is, everyone besides Johnny and Eluvenay, who are constitutionally incapable of this and instead reel their heads around the room eying different parts of the ceiling. I write by the only dim light in the room which seeps under the two inches of window not covered by the shade. We listen to a recording of keyboard Beethoven backed by ocean sounds. In several films I have heard the genius lull of the real Beethoven sonatas somehow paired with scenes featuring the quiet simmering pathos of a man on the verge of some senseless act of cold violence. What are we to conclude about you, Beethoven? That only people in some way out of their minds or divorced from normalcy really understand your work? I'd prefer to reason that these sonatas are chosen to ballast these young ones down into sleep, and that in their full form these children are much more like small concertos, startling pieces that boggle the mind.

I wonder if this new age stuff is standard issue for Metro school teachers or if the Educational Assistant Mrs. Solomon hand-picked it. It doesn't seem her style, really. She has just informed me that she is taking her lunch break, will be back in half-an-hour, that I should not turn the lights on until she returns. She then walks ten feet away to a corner of the room where she pulls out a five foot tall, accordioned piece of cardboard which she positions around a small desk. Here she eats her microwaved lunch. In the dark. Obscured in sight but not sound, her munching a lonely effect. There's just something very desperate about telling me that she's leaving, instructing me on "hold the fort" protocol, and then hiding behind her own makeshift fort across the room almost as if she were playing a trick on me. Or it's like we live in a cramped ghetto where there's nowhere else to go and such awkward living arrangements are our only option.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I hadn't liked Mrs. Solomon within five minutes of our introduction. These five minutes were ironically the most personal, friendly moments of our entire day together. Tony, an Asian boy with cerebral palsy, had begun fooling with the Trix cereal that she had spread out before him when she started in on what she assumed was her entirely necessary chant- "Tony, bite. Tony, bite. Tony, bite." Over the course of Tony's ten minute breakfasting she said this non-stop. By this same logic, the rest of us should have been cheering him on towards the finish line, I guess. But it wasn't like that. She wasn't sitting beside him looking intently into his empty eyes, motheringly imploring him to eat. She was merely parroting the phrase over and over again as she walked around the class doing other morning duties. Her words sounded utterly drained of meaning, obviously said every day during this same ritual.

It seemed quite clear that once he had started eating, he needed no further motivation to continue. What's more, her broken verb choice had to be baffling everyone. Bite? Tony, bite? Tony like "Huh?" Rest of us like, "Tony no bite, he not doggy! Tony eat!" It took me awhile to even discern the word. This was in part due to the strange context she was using it in, but also because it was hard to filter through the thick haze of her Arabic accent. At many points throughout the day she would yell at one kid or another--"You hear understand me yes!?" With me standing by thinking, "Lady, I sure as hell don't, and that poor kid doesn't understand a lot of things."

This language barrier was ubiquitous to the room, really, creating walls upon walls between us all that were as dense as the Pentagon. Many of the kids were non-verbal. If they did talk, when asked a simple, direct question they might reply with some Confucian non sequitur like "In the sky?" This particular phrase came from Johnny, a manic little guy whom Mrs. Solomon had developed a special distaste for (one can tell). These phrases were usually succeeded by a beam of satisfaction spreading across his wide-eyed face, a reveling in his own peculiar genius and/or comic timing. This tendency in Johnny was actually an excellent example of what is a commonly beloved past-time among the delayed: deliberately frustrating other people. Practiced by most of the Special Ed kids at one time or another, this kind of aggravation creates a strange tension in the aggravated party. On the one hand, patience and the ability to long-suffer typically unacceptable, abnormal behavior is not only par for the course, it's pretty much rule number one. On the other hand, what I'm talking about is decidedly intentional. A condition of this discipline of patience is the understanding that They know not what they do. But while they might not know some of what it is they're doing exactly, they're nevertheless often intuiting something of the meaning of their action, able to measure it in our reactions. If I have it right, I think that they know the frustration they are causing and that their intention is something of a mirroring effect. It's an exact communication that transcends many barriers; they create in us great frustration so we can feel what they feel. It's a request, not for a hug or a pat on the back, but for true empathy and shared suffering. Which is a hard but good sharing that makes the day totally worth it.

Roller Skates

I like to try to make sense of these kids. It's a challenge. With these fifth graders, their lack of self control really isn't something to fault them for too harshly. At this point they are slowly being given more and more responsibilities for the first time in their lives and its a lot to have to handle. As these pile up in their arms, no wonder they're droppingthings everywhere and giggling with embarrassment at one another's clumsiness. Despite all the stupid stuff that comes out of their unfiltered mouths, you know that their grey matter is coursing in asexual heat, it's unused capacity expanding exponentially every day. And with bodies that seem to be transforming into completely new creatures, it's like they've been put at the controls of a strange, powerful machine, simultaneously as silly and as dangerous as a monkey with a gun on roller skates. And though the better part of my roller skating career was pre-adolescent, roller skating might be the best image for what I'm outlining. It's as if suddenly one finds themselves outfitted with shoes that have wheels on them and you have to learn to walk again, only you're not just expected to walk, you are actually a big gay pussy if you don't try to go fast. When once you work up this nerve, and YMCA is pumping through the shoddy house system and the party lights click on, then you see that brick-o-block wall looming straight ahead. And who the hell ever learned how to use those weird toe brakes?