Greeting and/or Salutations, loyal readers.
I've been a stranger on this site lately.
Where have I been?
That's a long story, but to keep things simple, let's just assume I've been in the desert, getting tempted by the Devil for the past few months.
Yep, my DAW absence has been a time of ups and downs.
After plunging into a fairly gruesome spiritual crisis (complete with that demon-ripping-out-your-soul dream but without that Middle American retreat to some creepy Fundamenalist church in a strip mall), I clawed my way out of the abyss.
The short-term answer to my problem was pretty simple: even if God doesn't exist, I'm not going to make myself any happier by being a cockholster and moping about The Meaning of Life while sitting alone and getting hammered at a dive bar.
Instead, I realized that regardless of whether there is a grand Message etched in Hebrew and Aramaic on the dark side of the moon or it's all a pointless waste of time, I might as well focus on keeping things simple, try to make the world a little better by doing little things every day, and remember that life has an uncanny way of working out.
Yes, I have crossed the Rubicon with a simple message - don't be an asshole.
With apologies to Pascal, if you're determined to be an asshole, if life is truly meaningless, you're only pouring gasoline on a fire; if it's not, then you're really screwed.
Never one to do the plunge into depression or the bloody knuckled climb to redemption half-way, not only am I getting back on the writing horse (as well as getting back into surf fishing - a tale for another day!), I've also jumped back into another old hobby of mine: boxing.
Those of you who have somehow remained my friend for more than a few years remember that boxing was what got me to put down the beer and turn off the spelling bee marathons on ESPN Classic when I was unemployed back in 2004. And once again, boxing has helped me quite literally fight my way out from a gloomy cloud of dread in this unseasonably crisp summer.
You can't half-train for boxing.
After all, you never hear boxers complain, "man, I totally overtrained for that bout! I was simply too prepared, and that's why I lost..." So three or four times a week (ideally) I spend two or three hours at a boxing gym downtown, sweating off five pounds and working out until I've gone so far beyond tired that I don't have the energy to feel sore.
After a brisk shower, a stunned moment on the scales, and a few of those fist-pump handshakes that boxers do, I emerge from the gym a new man, at least for a few hours, and wander up Greenwich, take a right on Liberty, and work my way to the Fulton Street J train stop.
For those of you who don't have downtown Manhattan memorized (i.e., pretty much every cab driver), let me explain what this really means: I must begin my exhausted Odyssey home through the throngs of Death Tourists.
If you live in New York and you've had guests from out of town, you know that everyone has a little Death Tourist in them.
You rattle off all of the world-class shit to see and do in this town, from visiting ancient Roman art at The Met (highly recommended) to catching Avenue Q (ditto) to playing Galaga and drinking until you can't see straight at Welcome to the Johnsons' (essential). But every guest inevitably gushes, "ok, that sounds great, but we have to make sure we see Ground Zero!"
I like to think I understand the need. It's a need for closure - a need to try and put the tragedy of 9/11 into context, to make it tangible. I like to think there's a little bit of hope in there, too, like, "I know we can rebuild without forgetting..."
When you get there, though, all that shit has an unnerving tendency to go right out the window, replaced by actual quotes from actual people, including:
- "Is there anything else to see besides a big hole?..."
- "Is there anywhere I can get a better picture? There's all kinds of construction and shit and this fence is in the way!"
- "Wait, I want to buy something while I'm here..."
I'll pause a minute so you guys can settle your bets on Human Nature.
I don't know what's worse - the vendors with their folding tables hawking 9/11 postcards with scenes of the jets hitting the towers and little WTC snow globes or the people actually pushing each other around to buy the shit.
It used to be grim to see when I was simply coming home from work and walking by Ground Zero, but now it's even more exhausting, as I'm dehydrated and spent from a boxing workout and some yahoo is elbowing me so he can get a cheap knockoff FDNY T-shirt.
There's nothing like spending three hours working through your demons on a heavy bag only to have someone ask you to take their picture and to "make sure you get the hole."
Let me add that, in the past, I would always take pictures for rude tourists whenever they asked, regardless of what kind of mood I was in, no matter where I lived at the time, and that includes the extremely un-touristy Louisville, KY.
See, in the pre-digital age, it would be weeks before people would be sitting around a family dinner of McDonalds' value meals looking at 4x6 prints from their trip - only to come across one picture in which all of their heads were cut off.
I was always there in spirit, asking, "did I look like I had time to take your picture?"
Nowadays, though, people will actually critique my skills the minute they review the shot on the tiny digital screen.
"Oh, can you take it again? I don't like my smile in that one..."
So I break with tradition and don't even acknowledge the Death Tourists when they interrupt my post-boxing walk. That way, I can bottle up all my passive aggressive rage at their casual irreverence deep down inside, where it can fester and harden into a little frustration diamond that I can later share with friends and loved ones.
And I know what I said earlier about not being an asshole. That's why I avoid the whole thing altogether these days - after all, there's no point confronting people when their heads are so far up their asses that they can't even see your face.
"So, smarty pants," you may ask, "why bring it up here?"
I bring it up because of something that happened last weekend. It took me a week to figure out why it bothered me...
For those of you who missed the news, there was a fire last weekend in one of the nearby buildings that was damaged in the 9/11 attacks, the Deutsche Bank building. The fire erupted just as I was walking out of my boxing gym, a block away. I was directly across the street as two guys came running out of the worksite, and I looked up to see smoke and watch windows on the side of the building explode onto the street below.
Exhausted from boxing, I was briefly pleased with myself for my ability to pull a Robert Duvall from
Apocalypse Now and simply saunter to the other side of the street as broken glass and asbestos crashed down behind me. It was uncharacteristically calm for me, which means my Energy Meter was at something like 5%. And it was at that point I noticed the two guys running
towards the fire.
"Shit, we missed the explosion..."
"Hopefully those flames stay long enough to get a picture."
I stared at them, dumbfounded. There were still construction workers scrambling to get the fuck
away from the building. It was raining glass on the street. And it was clear that things were escalating quickly.
This was not a drill.
A whole crowd of Death Tourists came running down the road, trying to angle it so they could get a picture of themselves in front of a real-live 9/11 building on fire.
I was one of the most depressing mob scenes I've ever seen.
If you live or spend a lot of time in New York, you can picture the crowd. Rich foreign tourists with bleeding-edge cell phones and designer sunglasses. Plenty of fanny packs. Yes, there were the obligatory mullets and NASCAR tank-tops. And two skateboarders who had been tearing things up on the deserted weekend downtown streets. Some of that makes for nice easy humor most of the time (I have a reflex that declares "sweet mullet" faster than most people recognize a car's about to hit them), and it's pretty representative of a summer afternoon's tourist crowd.
What started to creep under my skin, though, was the rush of joy and excitement that was running through a significant part of the crowd. There were people on their cell phones, calling hundreds of miles away with the exciting news that they got to see part of Ground Zero burn.
People had come to see a tragedy and they got a bonus feature; a depressingly high percentage of them were pumped about it.
In the end, firemen lost their lives, a tale of mis-management at the demolition site began to emerge, and downtown residents again had to worry just what they were breathing. I like to think that later in the day, when the magnitude of the fire became apparent, the initial rush faded. I was long gone by then, as they started shutting down the block ASAP, so I don't know what the mood felt like after I left, but I remember the initial reaction and it really stung.
It hurt to see people so unapologetically bloodthirsty about something so dangerous and so threatening and so unexpectedly real. I'm a boxer and a fight fan, and boxing crowds get equally as ugly when things get rough - but boxers (ideally) know what they're getting into, and it's controlled danger. It's part of the show...
I was struck by the sense that, because it was Ground Zero, it was somehow unreal to some of those people; it was "just a show" - as if the endless loops of the 9/11 attacks hypnotized us all the day it happened to the point where they became nothing more than an action movie without a soundtrack.
At the same time, it was simultaneously eye-opening and depressing to feel that raw, mob moment calling for blood and destruction; it reminds you that civilization hangs by a thread on even good days.
I know you can't prepare for a disaster, and you can't prepare your response to something you never expected. But at the same time, I don't think there are people driving around tornado-ravaged mobile home parks while they're trying to rebuild, secretly hoping to see one hit again (but also hoping they don't lose mobile coverage when it does). I'm willing to bet they don't make postcards with pictures of the aftermath, either...
It bothered me that Ground Zero is somehow different.
At the end of the day, I like to think I understand the good reasons why people want to visit places like Ground Zero. And I like to think there are good people visiting it for good reasons, pausing for a few moments to pray or think or whatever strikes them at the time. And maybe they're even able to make something positive out of it - a fresh appreciation of life or the desire to do something difficult but good, whatever it is...
I've visited some grim places in the past (quick observation: it is always 40 degrees and drizzly at Nazi concentration camp sites in Poland and Soviet death camps in Lithuania, regardless of the weather a mile away...) . I like to think it made a positive impact, even if the experience itself was depressing.
In fact, I think it's a horrible mistake to smooth over or ignore the tragedies that pepper history, and visiting these sorts of sites should make us realize just how real and how horrible they were - as well as how precariously close we are to losing our humanity before we even know what hit us. But I also like to think the phrase "never again" is always a part of those experiences and that phrase should stick with people long after their visit.
So go ahead.
Check out Ground Zero when you're in New York, but make sure to ask yourself why you want to visit it in the first place.
As for what not to do? It's simple: don't be an asshole. That's what it comes down to, people.
Oh, and don't ask me to take your picture.
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