A Failure of Enlightenment

I’m both proud and ashamed of myself this morning, because last night I did evil in the service of good, or so it seems to me. It was my girlfriend’s company holiday party (usually well after the actual holidays for those of us in the Industry, for obvious reasons), and though I had a soccer match that kept me away for the first half, I tagged along for the latter part of the evening while she and her co-workers got silly and cut loose, as folks will do in such situations. Having run for most of ninety minutes, I wasn’t in much of a mood to join in, and spent the evening on the fringes conversing with friends and watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on the tv behind the bar. I had a total of three drinks over the course of three hours.

Around 1am, it was decided that there should be karaoke, and the party absconded to the closest bar where karaoke was known to occur. I shan’t say which, only that if there were a French Quarter for hipsters, this joint would be in the heart of it. Garish, lurid, and loud as absolute fuck, though the staff was friendly and fun.

Except for the karaoke guy.

Now, one thing about my girl, she loves to sing her some karaoke. And she absolutely kills it. She’s got a beautiful voice, and inhabits the stage as if it were her natural environment (really, she’s one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever known personally). So of course first thing she does when we get there is go try and sign up. But karaoke guys blows her off. She mentions it’s her company party, that she bartends around the corner. Offers him fifty dollars cash. He calls her a dumb bitch and tells her to fuck off. He spat so much contempt into her psyche it nearly derailed the good feeling the whole party had going.

So I called him out. Continue reading “A Failure of Enlightenment” →

This Guy Last Night

So I’m outside the restaurant last night, taking a break while we run down the clock, hanging out with the kitchen boys and soaking up the night air. There’s lots of bars around where I work, and weekends we’re overrun with revelry and the shit-show that goes with it, so it took us a minute to notice the guy on the corner, screaming his head off at his woman, who is sitting crumpled in on herself on the trim of the building while her friend stands helplessly by, unable to do anything. After another minute I decided I had to intervene, and I wondered if things were going to get violent. The guy was really riled up, so it looked like a real possibility, but my guys had my back and it’s not like I haven’t dealt with ten thousand drunk people in my day.

I walked up to him, and asked how it was going. He kept ranting, but I got him to start paying attention to me and not the woman, so I figured I was ahead. I kept asking questions, got him talking, distracted him while the friend got his woman away. I could’ve called it good right there, but I wanted to buy her some time, so I kept asking questions, kept the guy talking. What he told me broke my heart a little.

From what I could tell, he wasn’t even specifically mad at the woman. He was just worn down from working seven days a week to support his wife and mother. He was literally in tears with frustration at a paycheck-to-paycheck grind in a bad economy, and it’d got to him so bad he couldn’t believe that anyone could understand. He was so at his wit’s end that he wasn’t ashamed to cry in public, and he kept reverting to fight postures out of a lack of any other options to express himself. The guy was literally having a breakdown, right there.

There’s only so much you can do for a guy like that, but we did what we could. We let him speak his truths, and validated the good parts. We shook hands all around a few times. Then we walked back in and closed the restaurant the rest of the way, and he went off to who knows where.

It’s a real shame, I think, that the only coping mechanisms most men are taught is to turn pain into anger, and to hold it in until it bursts, usually under the influence of alcohol. What this guy needs is a safe place to explore his frustrations, but he’ll probably never have it, because the only way he knows how to give himself permission even to engage with the whole tangled mess is to undo his inhibitions with an intoxicant. I’m not saying it excuses his public berations. I’m just saying it’s a shame. I’m just glad I didn’t have to fight him.

Facebook Demetricator

So, one of the things about my life for which I’m grateful is that all the awesome people I’ve come to know and love over the years have attracted other awesome people into their lives, whose awesomeness I am then exposed to, to the enrichment of my own life. A dear friend from back in the day who I recently got to spend some time with seems to have married such a person, new media artist Ben Grosser, who’s got quite a few cool projects (I really dig the painting machine), one of which I started using about a week ago. It’s called the Facebook Demetricator, a little detournement hack that removes (almost) all the numbers from your facebook interface.

No more little red numbers for messages and updates. No knowing how long ago something happened (it’s either ‘recently’ or ‘a while ago’). No friend count on your home page, or any indication other than singular or plural how many people like something, or how many comments an update or link has. It’s surprising what a difference it makes. It’s changed my relationship to the service in a seriously positive way. Continue reading “Facebook Demetricator” →

On Being Possessed

I scored two goals in my soccer game last night. They were sexy goals, too. The first was a single left-footed touch off a cross I had to turn around mid-sprint to track, and that went through two defenders and past the diving goalie’s outstretched hands just inside the far post. The second was a high bouncing pass that I head-tapped over the last defender inside the box before running around him and chipping the ball over the oncoming goal-keeper with a minimalist delicacy that left me giggling after, only able to believe I had done it because I had seen it with my own eyes.

I know. This sounds like I’m bragging. And maybe I am, a little. But I’m not sure how much credit I can really take for the awesomeness that expressed itself through me, because my lived experience of both events did not contain an ‘I’ which could be said to be doing things. Whatever there was of ‘I,’ it was only a vehicle for physical inspiration.

I’ve had this experience many times over the years playing soccer. Something comes over me, and awesome things happen. Continue reading “On Being Possessed” →

An Excuse to Commit Violence

Last Friday night was a rough one at the bar. It started off ugly, with a walk-in group of 12 British tourists, one of whom may have been one of the most spectacularly ugly-on-the-inside human beings I have ever encountered, the assimilation of whom into our seating availability presaged a busy, chaotic, full-moon-feeling kind of night, one I was glad to see the end of when my ten-hour stint was done. We had just locked up, the other bartender and I, and were chatting about the trials and tribulations as we stood outside the bookstore two doors down when a couple of guys came down the street walking bicycles. One of them wore dark clothes and a ballcap, the other an untucked tuxedo shirt and black pants. The second one’s face was covered in blood.

“You wanna give me money for bandaids?” he demanded, in such a way I was pretty sure that whatever had happened to his face, he’d done something to deserve it.

We both declined, and turned away, closing our conversational circle, but he just got more obnoxious, while his friend stood off to the side looking helpless and embarrassed. I put on my 86ing face and told him to fk off and he did.

But then he decided to come back. Continue reading “An Excuse to Commit Violence” →