Swartswood: Moving Violations

Clutch in. Gas. Foot off break. Release clutch, increase pressure on gas pedal. Move forward. Increase speed. Punch the clutch, drop into second gear, wind out the engine. Hit third gear, burst forward, and launch all four wheels off the ground. Temporary weightlessness. Gravity held at bay for a fleeting moment before feeling the leaf springs collapse and the skid plate grind against the tar and chip road. You have just gotten your driver’s license, and life in North Jersey is good.

People say you learn by observing the world around you and studying the examples of your elders, but I didn’t see too many adults drift their cars onto two wheels or redline their engines before launching off the town jump. We learned to drive like the Lord of the Flies kids learned to negotiate–in packs and dangerously–then we buckled those self-destructive habits in and took them everywhere.

For years, at least one kid from every local graduating class was lost in a traffic related fatality. My cousin’s best friend was a kid named Shane whose Volkswagen met a gravel truck as he moved to pass another car.  Two of my classmates were obliterated a few years after graduating. We’d always rallied on our way to school; they just didn’t beat the odds that day. We never assumed it could happen to us, and each fatality was a new surprise. It never occurred to us that a car could be dangerous, or that driving safely was a social responsibility.

So, when we left the Swartswood State Park motor pool with a brand new Dodge pickup, the first model released with the premier Magnum engine, our first stop was the town jump.  We returned the truck with a grapefruit-sized dent between the cab and bed, and my vehicle was immediately downgraded to an S-10 with much less power. The little 4-cylinder still had a bubble light on top, so we switched out our safety orange dome with a spare Ranger red one and amused ourselves for an afternoon pulling people over. We’d drive by laughing, watching as nervous looks turned angry, then giving the finger back and continuing with our spree of moving violations.

It wasn’t just kids that disrespected the motor pool. My first week at Swartswood, a middle-aged crew leader left a truck in neutral with both doors open so she could hear the radio while she worked, only to witness the doors get  ripped off as it rolled away backwards hitting trees. A full time maintenance chief began every morning driving wildly across the main lawn, laying on his horn to prevent the Canada geese from settling in. Rangers used their Crown Vics as rolling nap wagons, and every full timer kept either a beer or a bong which they’d “just found in the park” behind their seats. In that respect, we did learn by seeing.  All state vehicles were rolling playgrounds.

Before claiming the keys to my S-10, I claimed the park speed record in the new Dodge. There were other titles to be earned, too: most donuts without hitting another car, best electrical fire caused by rewiring a stereo, and most winch truck rescues required in a given week.  We played hide-a-dent, pinging a truck somewhere and seeing if the fleet manager would notice. Touching a door handle without gloves was never wise.  A dirty windshield was a sign your wiper blades had been removed, and every windshield had deeply grooved arcs scratched in before we learned to check them.  We were kids with no sense of accountability, and it only really hurt when a personal vehicle ghost rolled downhill from the employee parking lot and destroyed tables in the picnic grove.

Our only motivation was not getting caught, so we maintained safety zones where our antics were forbidden. I kept a 5-mile radius around the home of an old farmer who hated me, so I was surprised when I opened and read a letter from Park Superintendent Big Stan stating I was no longer welcome to return for a fifth year at Swartswood.  I wouldn’t debate most of the unproven accusations—before leaving, I’d hidden a large, leaky bag of goose scat in the park office, and had posted a mean-spirited cartoon “summer recap” on the October section of the lunchroom calendar.  There were literally dozens of valid reasons to not rehire me, but the letter claimed that I’d been witnessed driving recklessly past the old farmer’s home on several occasions, and therefore posed a risk to public safety.  I found out shortly after receiving the letter that Big Stan was a close friend of the old farmer’s, and I’d been outmatched by a couple of seasoned North Jersey cronies. 

Big Stan still works for the state in a high ranking position, but the farmer passed away a few summers ago.  He’d been repairing a gate in one of the fields just two miles from his home, when a pair of kids from the next town collided with his old Jeep Cherokee, killing all three instantly.  I still drive past his place from time to time, but now I drive slowly because I want to, not for fear of repercussions.  I’m no longer a reckless kid found guilty of unproven allegations, but realize that even as a careful adult, I can still receive his sentence at any moment.  

Swartswood: Little Green Men

The Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) is a voracious eater. It is a grazing animal which brazenly gathers en masse to do three things: eat, complain, and relieve itself. The Canada Goose is paranoid, convinced there are hungry predators lurking in the tall grass waiting to devour it. Thus, it primarily restricts its movements to manicured lawns and wide open spaces. They honk at each other incessantly, spend the entire day eating and leave prolific amounts of filth in their wake … sort of like the patrons of Swartswood State Park.

Unlike park patrons, the geese leave behind only their scat. These are small, green pellets about the size and shape of a packing peanut. They’re whitish on the ends, consist mostly of digested grass, and change from sticky to dry and brittle as they age. Prior to being a teenage garbage man, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you any of that, but time working for the state has a way of providing interesting life skills.

For each of the four summers spent working at Swartswood, the first day was always the same. We’d gather in the maintenance building lunchroom for an orientation from Doug, the aging park superintendent. Sounding like Bob Newhart, he’d slowly review rules and regulations, procedures and policies, then hand out copies of the State Park Seasonal Employee Handbook, or "Trash-Picker’s Bible." The TPB was our list of do’s and don’t-get-caughts, and contained a special appendix listing hazardous items we were never to touch. Among these were body parts, dead animals, and most importantly, fecal matter. We were never supposed to touch fecal matter, even if it offered us a quarter to rub its feet.

Scat was off-limits to us garbage pickers, and was only to be handled by the maintenance crews. They had fancy latex gloves and carried bleach, and we were glad to let them do it. We watched the maintenance crews pick up after little kids who couldn’t make it from the beach to the bathhouse, and bigger kids who just didn’t want to walk that far. We watched maintenance crews clean unspeakable things out of water fountains after disgruntled campers were told they couldn’t park six Camaros in one camp site. We even watched them repeatedly scrape clean the pit toilet lids after my friend Carl began a "Phantom Dumper" campaign while on daily litter patrol.

All of that changed when the old park super retired at the beginning of my fourth summer, and Big Stan arrived. Noble, honest, physically fit, clever and likeable, fashionable in a well-fitting uniform—none of these terms accurately described the new superintendent. The only thing he was super at was straining the buttons on his brown state-issue uniform. To our horror, his first act of duty was to wage war on the geese, enlisting our garbage picker crews as his foot soldiers.

Big Stan’s war on the geese began after putting himself in the shoes of the average park visitor, and finding the soles of those shoes covered in poo. He knew that when a guest arrived for a day at the beach, that patron would first pay an entry fee at the gate house, then drive their IROC-Z through a large open lawn often filled with geese. They would park on the acres of hot asphalt, and upon approaching the bathhouse, realize their way was blocked by an army of little green men. Lot, lawn, and beach–even the concrete area under the bathhouse breezeway–it was all occupied territory.

We quickly learned that while our handbook specifically forbid our crews from coming into contact with fecal matter, in Big Stan’s eyes, the geese were chronic litterbugs and not just poorly housetrained. "Stay out of this, kid," he said, pushing me and my copy of the handbook aside, "You’ll pick it up, or you’ll be out of a job." So we picked it up. We used snow shovels and filled garbage bags. We used little brooms and tip-over dust pans. We used long aluminum pickers, and we used our imaginations to make games out of it.

"Hey! These little green men are having a picnic..." as we stacked them in neat piles on each long wooden picnic table. "Check out how many little green men are on the roof of the bathhouse..." as we launched them by the dozen onto the brand-new facility. "Little green men sure like the beach..." as we buried them in shallow graves. With our snow shovels, we excavated quick holes where footpaths ended at the beach, then backfilled them with poo before covering them with a thin layer of sand. It wasn’t really fair to those who got green ankles, but Big Stan had said "pick it up" and never specified where to put it down.

Little green men began to appear everywhere. They liked to play in the water fountains, hide in park vehicle glove boxes, and even in the lunchroom microwave. We played spirited games of lacrosse using our little brooms as sticks. We played baseball, using our pickers as bats. Bags of them made fabulous parting gifts, as Big Stan would learn later that year.

Big Stan’s thank you note arrived on October 7^th, exactly 5 days after discovering my other going away present. I had returned to Meraki College at the end of August, but before leaving, had posted a small pencil drawing commemorating him as the new park superintendent. It depicted a balding man with bulging buttons and a name tag that read "S. EMMETS" storming the beach, ordering his troops to "Pick up those feces...er...I mean, that LITTER!" while trash pickers threw gobs of the stuff in the background, and it had been carefully glued to the October section of the lunchroom calendar by a pair of little green men.
　
　

　
　
　
　
　

Swartswood: The Inappropriate Name Tag

Nicknames have always been a part of my world, and I’ve long been fascinated by the way they are ascribed to a person.  By age 12, the funniest nickname I knew was for an older kid named Thomas, whom my cousin had dubbed “Scro-Tom,” thus ruining the name for me from that day on.  By 13, I was aware that some friends no longer expected to hear their given names from anyone but parents and teachers.  Spaz.  Helmet.  Spock.  Moo.  Whether you had a nervous twitch, anchorman hair, anchorman hair with big ears, or were a developing girl raised on a dairy farm, there was little a person could do to reclaim their given name.  They had been labeled, and like it or not, labels are sticky and sometimes take years to wear off.  To this day I still answer “fine, and yours?” when someone asks, “Hey, Orphan, how was your weekend?”

At Swartswood, my favorite nickname was a sleeper, assigned to Craig Litts at birth, and awakening the first day I saw his name tag.  The thick plastic name tags distributed by the Park Service were a signal to the public that if they had a question, you could help.  They were bright red with engraved white letters, and displayed the first letter of a person’s first name followed by the full last name of the wearer. 

Mine would have read “S. WHEELING,” but only employees who were expected to interact with the public were required to display theirs above their left breast pocket.  Since I was expected to interact with the public’s discarded picnic leftovers, I was exempt, but Craig Litts was a Junior Ranger.  He spoke to the public every day, which is why every day he pinned a piece of thick plastic with “that word” on his shirt and hoped no one would notice. 

We noticed.  EVERYONE noticed.  With most nicknames, once we got over the initial laughter, life would go on and we’d go on with it.  But Craig’s name was a gift, because while WE had long since gotten used to it, HE met new people every day.  Each day while roaming the park with our garbage bags, we might see the eyes of another sweaty patron widen a little before stifling a laugh and nudging his wife, who would blush and pretend to cough.

The next summer, Craig didn’t return to his seasonal post as a Junior Ranger.  One of my friends heard a rumor that he’d taken a job at the Shop-Rite, where people called him Litts-terine.  The name tags at Shop Rite only displayed the employee’s first name, so Craig accepted the new title cheerfully enough.  He had started the mouthwash habit while working closely with the public at Swartswood, so nobody would have an excuse to pick on him for having bad breath.

Swartswood: Roadside

People in North Jersey will throw anything out their car windows. As a teenage garbage man, I’d pick up empty Snapple bottles and their "clicker caps," sandwich wrappers, potato chip bags, and a remarkable number of domestic beer cans. Sober driving was viewed a little like celibacy in our neck of the woods—one way to get you to your destination, but certainly not the only way.

Once a week, I’d don an orange safety vest and start walking. If I didn’t want to wear the vest, I could choose from several clothing options abandoned along the shoulder. Socks and shoes, farm and feed hats, dirty black t-shirts with heavy metal silkscreening–on roadside day, I could usually find enough stray clothing be considered well-dressed at any North Jersey social, as long as I took off the orange vest first. If it wasn’t food, it was clothes, if it wasn’t clothes, it was porn, if it wasn’t porn, it had been used to wipe a body part. Everything got thrown out the window next to Swartswood.

Then there was the day we found the baby.

My second year at Swartswood, my childhood friend Carl and I were assigned to the same crew, which lasted for exactly one week. Compared to me, Carl was an inch shorter, 10 pounds lighter, and five times smarter. He only looked and sounded like an idiot, which always left people surprised after he’d taken advantage of them. I could only look smart, so the two of us made a pretty good team keeping people on their toes.

Our supervisor that year was a domineering first year coed who’d done her part perpetuating the stereotype of the "freshman 15." Carl immediately dubbed her "Fat Jen," and we were officially off on the wrong foot. We mocked her openly, unmindful we were perpetuating stereotypes of our own, until she’d snap, making us laugh even harder.

The morning we found the baby, Fat Jen had already had enough. After being locked inside our truck with one of Carl’s "silent but deadlies," she’d taken the keys and walked north, while we took her dignity and headed south. It was a humid morning, already topping 85 degrees as we approached our 10 o’clock state-sanctioned break. As we walked along, I picked up a dirty diaper, and we threw it back and forth every few steps until bagging it. Carl found a pair of women’s sunglasses and asked if I wanted to give them to my (dead) mother on her next birthday. I found an empty fifth of Wild Turkey, and said his alcoholic and abusive father must be passed out nearby. Life was good, a literal walk in the park.

I’m not sure about a few things in life.  I don't know why people willingly smoke, don't know why people can't put down their smartphones in restaurants, and I don’t know why someone would toss a perfectly good Butterball turkey out their car window. Had it been mouthing off, or had it threatened to vote Democratic in the next election? I’m also not sure what made us think that what we did next was a good idea. I am sure of one thing, though—when life gives you a frozen turkey, you take the filthy diaper out of your garbage bag and pretend it’s a baby to make your boss cry.

Tucked down low in the roadside weeds and freed from its plastic wrapping, the little diapered Butterball really did look like a baby. We worked up some fake tears, and the next moments confirmed two of life’s irrevocable truths: if something is said sincerely enough, people will believe anything, and some offenses are really hard to forgive. I also know now what I suspected then–that I should have stopped the joke before the Rangers arrived. Sometimes a joke goes too far and can’t be taken back.

Carl and I weren’t allowed to work together after that, but that didn’t stop us from being a nuisance, or switching crews when the opportunity allowed. The turkey-baby was given a proper burial in the sand of the public beach. Fat Jen even delivered part of the eulogy, displaying a surprising degree of self-depricating humor I hadn’t expected. Soon after, she became "Big Jen," and we traded insults every day. She even set me up with a friend of hers who was way out of my league, then laughed when I tried to get a second date.

By the time "just plain" Jen gave me a mothers day card which said "HA HA HA" inside it at the end of the summer, I knew our friendship had arrived.

Swartswood: I was a Teenage Garbage Man

Swartswood State Park was once a lake retreat, a super-swank vacation place for the upper echelon of society during the 1920’s.  Its once-forested shoreline stood mostly unbroken.  The real recreation took place on Dove Island, a little breakwater knoll which gently crested the surface of Swartswood’s 500-acre lake.

Dances held on the Island had a special quality not found “on the mainland,” only a few hundred yards away.  The distance offshore was more of a formality—any one of the wealthy patrons could have built a floating boardwalk over—but the physical separation lent the place an air of mystery.  It was the happening place of its time, a destination to which the privileged would gladly travel a dozen or so miles across rutted farm roads to spend a night or weekend.  Pale yellow squares of light shined each night from the main hall onto the lake’s placid surface, while echoing laughter and live music called out to the locals and raccoons watching from the shore.  It was a place which I would only know in my imagination, for Dove Island was long gone, and my Swartswood was a hole. 

Busloads of city kids dropped wrappers by the hundreds each day.  Fat Italian mothers nagged sweaty Italian fathers and smacked obnoxious Italian children on the backs of their greasy heads.

“Put some LOTION on, Tony!  Look how RED you are, CRIPES that’s gonna hurt!” 

They were Catholics, and weren’t going to walk around taking the Lord’s name in vain, Bob-dammit.  They’d just quietly hope the Blessed Mother (sign of the cross) didn’t crack their knuckles for calling out phrases which rhymed with things that heathens had the audacity to actually say.

“SWEET REGIS, Who finished the PEPSI?” 

“Leave a Tastycake for your SISTER, Anthony!”

“You’re dripping ICE cream on my TOWEL, Vincent!” 

Half the summertime patrons were local, loud, and second-generation Italians.  Besides the occasional Michael, you could safely wish a good morning to an Anthony, a Tony, or a Vincent—there just weren’t that many deviations from a good traditional name. 

The other half were day-tripping city people.  People who had never ventured outside of Hoboken seemed magnetically drawn to Swartswood, and it was my job to pick up every piece of crap they couldn’t hold for another five steps till they could find a trash can.  Wrappers, condoms, batteries, diapers, half-eaten sandwiches crawling with flies, and the occasional adult magazine:  these were the realities of every day I spent as a kid working his first summer job.  I was a teenage garbage man.

I spent four summers working for the State as a seasonal garbage picker.  Recently, while going through some old journals and reading about things long forgotten, I came across notes written in the mid 90’s, which I’d jotted down for a rainy day laugh.  Like Dove Island in the 1920’s, it’s likely that if I hadn’t ever written them down, I would never have thought about The Phantom Dumper, Swartswood Stimpy and the Stolen Keg, or even The Inappropriate Name Tag ever again.  I’ve forgotten more than I can remember, but these notes jogged my memory enough to tell their stories in future postings.

I’m struck by one last thing—how much of a prick I was as a kid.  I’ve moved a lot further toward the center (both geographically and philosophically) since my time at Swartswood, but one thing remains the same.  My eyes still pick out every piece of litter I pass, and my ears sometimes still even hear that fat Italian mother loudly complaining, “MARY and JOSEPH—can you believe they couldn’t walk FIVE more steps and find a frigging TRASH can?”

Keys

For a few years as a kid in New England, I came home about an hour before my father locked up the retail part of our apple farm to help me with homework. I was a latchkey kid before I knew what that meant, even though we lived in an area which didn’t really warrant locking our doors at all. When you’re surrounded by hundreds of acres of heritage apple trees, you become pretty confident that no strangers will wander into your living room. Even so, we each had a key and made use of it. No use taking a chance, we’d say.

At their core, keys are invitations to come inside, to be initiated and welcomed into a social clique. The giving of a key is a gesture entrusting of our selves, our possessions, and our well-being to another. The taking of that key is an unspoken acceptance that we’ll not break that trust, or at least not ding it too badly.

Years ago, shortly after moving, I entered my little red house in Prairie View and found a small bearded man in my front room. He wore a two-toned grey flannel shirt, heather grey suspenders, and a pair of charcoal grey pants. Despite his seated position in my favorite "Memorex chair," I could tell he was a little person. He confirmed this as he stood, taking his grey wool bowler cap from his knee and clutching it nervously between shaky hands. His eyes were clearly visible and slightly enlarged through his steel rimmed glasses, with bushy grey eyebrows raised with both hope and anticipation. Overall, he gave the impression of a slightly oversized garden Hummel, whom some sketchbook artist had drawn quickly using varying shades of grey markers. I’m slightly color blind, and so was disturbed for two reasons: had my eyes finally given up seeing color altogether, and who was this strange, grey little man?

I would later learn that he was the estranged father of the previous owner’s wife (also a little person, which explained why all of the counters were so LOW when I moved in). He’d been given a key 17 years earlier, before a few poorly chosen words had revoked visiting privileges and cut him off from the life behind what was now my front door. His key still worked, it just didn’t open up the chance he’d hoped for.

As I’m writing this, I’m watching a 1969 performance of Jimi Hendrex playing Red House live in Stockholm. It’s a long video, but at the 5 minute mark, Jimi and the little grey man could commiserate–neither one could open the door they’d hoped to just moments earlier. Jimi got another chance, but I’m not sure if the little guy did. I changed the locks that weekend, blocking the doors each night until I could get to the hardware store and ensure I wouldn’t be surprised by any more tiny visitors.

Jimi Hendrix can be seen performing Red House at the following link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TZeCntatHQ

Locks

I unlocked my front door’s deadbolt this morning, hit the auto-unlock on my little car, and heard the satisfying click of the thumb latch as the front door snapped shut behind me. I ate breakfast with a friend in a restaurant that never closes and doesn’t have a lock on their front door–they throw a chain and padlock across the crash bars in case they have to close unexpectedly.

My friend tells me that on mornings when we eat together, he runs ahead of schedule and is the first at his office. On those mornings, he unlocks their front door and punches in the code to deactivate their security system. Each morning, he logs into his corporate server with a personal password, accessing client and personnel files until calling it a day.

My debit card doesn’t work unless you punch in "3VOM." I’ve linked my PayPal account to Overstock, iTunes, Amazon, and eBay in order to make online shopping convenient, but only after typing in the mystery pin phrase that prevents online phishing programs from accessing my online data. Hopefully, this makes it a little tougher for people out to steal Scott Wheeling’s identity and protects me from hacking.

Before turning fairly ridiculous, movies like Eagle Eye and Minority Report raise a not-too-subtle voice to the issue of being watched, self protection, and privacy. But when we leave the house to visit the silver screen, why do we lock the door behind us? Why does the school janitor carry a belt loop full of keys? Why is the keycard at your average hotel (yuck, bedbugs) only coded to your door?

After 20 years, my friend’s father installed a lock on the front door to their split level home in rural New York. A troubled niece had moved back into town, and they hoped to avoid returning home one night to find she’d pawned their valuables to pay for a nagging maple sugar habit she’d acquired at college. Their neighbors had found numerous small tools, a GPS, and sunglasses missing the previous week, and credited an unlocked side door as the likely point of entry for the opportunistic borrower.

Toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic "The Shining," Jack Nicholson’s character reminds us that locked doors only prevent honest people from getting inside a locked room. His maniacal smile tells us that if someone wants to get in badly enough, a locked door is really just a formality. Hopefully, few of us will ever have to face such an unwelcome intrusion, but the nagging question remains: when I walk away from my locked door for the day, whose hand might jiggle the handle to see if they could conveniently slip inside?

One key behind locking our doors is that we distrust. It may be our oddball neighbor, or the thought of a late night visitor with an eye on our canned goods, but fear of the unknown is a strong motivator. Why else are we so intimidated by the giant shark in Jaws, even though we don’t get a good look at the beast until the movie is nearly over?  Beyond trust is the proven poor track record of humanity–given the chance, we’ll steal from, cripple, and even eat one another–if the door’s unlocked and it’s convenient enough. Now I just need to be careful to watch who has access to my keys.

Borat, where have you gone?

My neighbor is a Russian home builder, and I’m pretty sure he has defaulted on his mortgage and is living secretly in his home while no longer making payments. I came back from a trip to New England to get out of town for the holidays, and when I returned, the four cars that he and his family use every day were gone. Not leaving early and returning late, but GONE.

Victor lives with his wife, whom I have spoken to once and is only seen outdoors smoking on the back stoop. Victor also has two sons. The oldest is in his early 20's and reminds me of one of my cousins, who works for the railroad and in turn bears an uncanny resemblance to a shorter version of my late father. I have no idea what his name is, but guess it’s something Russian-sounding. I know that this son jogs occasionally, drives a Scion coupe, and overall seems to be the most normal member of his family. I say this last part, "seems like the most normal member," not based on his relationship to his immigrant parents, but because of his younger brother, Alex.

If you’ve ever seen Sasha Baron Cohen’s movie Borat, you’ve got a pretty good start on painting a mental picture of Alex. At 22, he looks 16. He wears thick plastic rimmed glasses which darken in the sun, and a struggling wiry mustache that would be right at home on a junior high school dance floor. A thick carpet of black hair is swept straight back, but sits very high on his narrow head, giving him the impression of a slightly tall 4th grader who has dressed as John Travolta’s disco playboy character from Saturday Night Fever.

My most vivid memory of Alex is watching him methodically throw grape-sized pieces of gravel at his bedroom window screen in order to entertain the family housecat.

CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.

"Alex, what are you DOING?", I ask.

"Throwing rocks at my CAT," he responds.

He expels the words, as if each sentence is started after exhaling 60% of the air from his lungs.  He talks like Napoleon Dynamite, if Napoleon had a really thick Russian accent and spoke while holding his nostrils shut with the hand not holding gravel. "Throwing rocks at my CAT! GOSH!" CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.

My second clearest memory, though far from the most bizarre, is of Alex backing his lime green Civic directly into the corner of his house. After slowing down to 10 miles per hour and jamming the transmission into reverse (his signal to the neighborhood that he’d returned from his usher shift at the movie theater), he revved the engine to a high whine and lost control of the steering wheel. It was good that Victor was a builder, at least on that particular day.

Besides these things, I’ve watched Alex swear at a uniformed female police officer while attending the neighborhood block party, and consequently be sworn at by the Japanese lady that lives at the end of my street. I’ve watched him corner the garbage man for 10-15 minutes while asking about possible career opportunities.  He regularly appears next to my driveway, pretending to examine the gas meter while waiting for an opportunity to ask what I know about community colleges in the area.  At random times, I see him standing on a ladder and swearing into his gutters, or just walking around the yard swearing at nothing.  There is seldom an normal or dull moment around him.

When the siding needed to be repaired, it was convenient that Victor was a home builder. But this is where his luck stops.

Upon moving into the house in 2007, Victor told me that he’d be in the house “three months, six tops,” because they intended to rehab and then flip it, in real estate terms. Four years and a dried up home construction market later, I saw his little SUV last night for the first time since the beginning of the new year. He had hidden it behind the house, secretly parking it there for a few hours so that no one could see it.  To my best guess, he was sneaking back inside the house which his bank had foreclosed upon, after an increase in property taxes made meeting the already thin payment schedule an impossibility to continue.

I have no idea into what house Alex, his nameless brother, and immigrant parents picked up and disappeared. I just hope that wherever it is, the window screens are strong, the driveway is wide, and the mortgage payments are within their reach.

Drains

Ever wonder where the water goes after you’ve rinsed your mouth and put away the toothbrush?  Recently, I came across “The Moving Finger,” a short story by Stephen King which was also made into an odd little short in 1991’s “Monsters” video collection.  A New York City apartment-dweller hears a tiny noise coming from the bathroom, and upon investigation, finds a little index finger poking out at him from the bathroom sink.  Upset, confused, and eventually freaked out, the man goes on the attack, using everything from drain cleaner to a discount pair of hedge trimming shears.  As the neighbors hear the struggle and NYC’s finest arrive, our leading fella’s sanity is called into question—just what in the world happened to this guy?

Upon hearing King’s author’s notes on the story, we find that he wrote the story to illustrate just how wrong things can go for normal people going about their everyday lives.  Driving yesterday on a local toll road, I saw four sets of black tire marks on the fresh asphalt, and as traffic slowed, saw the lines intersect into the remnants of two SUV’s who had presumably started out the day “on track.”  In a local town, police SWAT teams responded to an accidentally dialed cell number, after his wife mistook his muffled car stereo audio for a gangster-style attack upon his schoolroom.  Presumably, she assumed that his day may have gone…wait for it… down the drain.

But King’s story isn’t about things going DOWN the drain, it’s about something coming UP from it.  It isn’t about things falling apart so much as it is bizarre happenings coming out of nowhere to throw our lives out of line.  When a United Airlines pilot recently spilled his coffee on the plane’s radio and triggered a highjack alert, that was his fault.  When something happens that we can’t explain, it’s a little more difficult to pin down. 

I plan on sitting down and watching the “Moving Finger” video online this weekend.  For me, it’s a great reminder that no matter how much I may try to line everything up and make my own plans, there’s only so much I can control.  If you read such things, the New Testament book of James goes a step further:

“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.  What is your life?  For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (ESV)

There’s only so much we can control, and admitting that is not only honest and humbling, it’s freeing.  King is echoing the point made in the James excerpt:  we don’t know what tomorrow will bring along, and we’re giving ourselves too much credit when we insist otherwise.  It may be hard to know who to point that moving finger at, and even the sharpest pair of hedge clippers may not protect us from everything that comes up the bathroom drain.

“The Moving Finger” can be viewed online at Google video at the following address.  Happy viewing!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5741702786654941097#

Phish heads for deeper waters with Joy

In their latest studio album, their first since reuniting in 2009, Phish has produced their most original, thematic, and personal album to date. In past studio and live albums, the New England group has certainly been no stranger to original work. Even in their cover sessions, such as their annual Halloween shows in which they perform as other bands in character, their work has a uniquely creative intelligence. But prior to this point, the more thoughtful, personal and reflective aspect found in ‘Joy’ has been absent from their catalogue. It’s Phish at a new place in life; no longer a college party band, but now a band who’s graduated and is in the process of paying back their student loans.

Joy progresses as an ensemble more than any album Phish has released. Where albums like Lawn Boy, Hoist, and numerous live recordings are fun to listen to and can be more easily skipped through for favorite tracks, Joy is better listened to in one sitting. It’s not an album that plays as well in single-play format, which is brave in the modern world of radio-made songs. Phish has the integrity and the loyal fan following to express themselves in an old-fashioned way, recalling grandly arranged albums like the Grateful Dead’s Terrapin Station.

While much of their past work has been lighthearted and often humorous, ‘Joy’ isn’t. Even tracks like ‘Kill Devil Falls’, the fastest and most upbeat track, is really a reflection on youthful mistakes. Its placement in the album speaks to being dumb in your early 20's, and not even being aware of time wasted or behavior patterns which are unknowingly ripping relationships apart. Nearly every song on ‘Joy’ is written in past tense, but none come off as idealizing or lamenting the past. Instead, it’s a playlist which honestly and objectively remembers it, whether good or bad.

In Joy, Phish addresses maturity, honest self-reflection, and a recognition that the events of our younger years shape the way we face our latter ones. The title track speaks of losing a loved one, and while ‘Joy’ hints at sadness, it doesn’t leave the other tracks grief-stricken. Losing someone we love (whether through physical or emotional loss) seems to be like that–we heal emotionally, but we may view the world differently after they’re gone.
Joy commemorates the maturity of Phish as a band. They’ve grown from their "party band" roots, and seem to have grown as a family. This is not the same band that separated in 2004, it isn’t the same band you might have known in college, and yet it IS the same. Their creativity, their musical adeptness, their incredible talent is better than ever, yet now they’ve channeled these strengths into an album which commemorates their growth into an incredibly talented and thoroughly thoughtful group.

During the same year that Phish released ‘Joy,’the Black Crowes released their ‘Before the Frost/After the Freeze’ double album. Watching Chris Robinson and company perform today, it’s hard not to see a comparison. Early recording work from the Crowes showed incredible energy, but ‘Before the Frost/After the Freeze’ demonstrates they are now light years beyond their 1990 ‘Shake Your Money Maker’ debut. It’s as if artists like the Crowes and Phish have safely survived their youthful years to become timelessly talented musicians, and ‘Joy’ commemorates this passing into a new era.

In some ways, Joy is the soundtrack to the Facebook generation. As the online social service grows at an exponential rate, it allows long lost relationships to be reconsidered or rekindled. With each friend request from a life long ago, we have a chance to look past our current relationships to the ones which may be less current, and reflect on the ways they’ve shaped us. Joy is a beautiful album which notes the passage of time, recognizing that it is up to each of us to eventually leave the days of childhood behind and update our own status.