A Thought-Poem on Society
What now,
That you’ve
taken
the joy of sex,
and made it
a
neurotic
to be cured,
alleviated,
anesthetized?
What now,
that you’ve turned
Creation
of ex proprio,
so that even
the imagination
is a crime?
What now,
With no God,
no
heaven, no hell,
no life,
or after death;
when all the
world
is maya,
does your navel
become
the Buddha
breast?
There was, I think you must have read about it, a scientist who figured out how to wire the brain of a cockroach with micro-electronic radio receptors and control it via a remote. Well, it was my general misfortune to have picked up the cockroach by accident at a Taco Bell. It has apparently gone rogue. Anyway, it got into my pants leg and while the scientist was apparently going a bit mad trying to get it to angle the camera 38 degrees, it did happen to have a pretty good view of the entire length of my body all the way to my head. And so as I went to… this is the embarrassing part… a Dungeons & Dragons game, and sat there passionately playing Johan the Paladin of the Platinum Dragon God, the entire session was being recorded. What’s most annoying, probably, about the fact that it got loaded to YouTube was that the editor saw fit to filter out all the cool bits where I was playing Johan as a True And Noble Hero of Good-n-Holy Righteousness, but instead loaded the bit where I was snorting at some joke that a fellow player had made, along with another bit where I was pretending to be Darth Vader, though of course I was just KIDDING – Johan is nothing LIKE Darth Vader… but I digress. The good news is that of the two minutes on the video those scenes the editor only took about 8 seconds, so that’s not too bad.
About the Author:
Mark is a wierd combination of diometrically opposing mental constructs. On the one hand he exercises a Spock-inspired reverence for logic and order and is a computer programmer/analyst by trade. On the other hand he's a thoroughly unaccomplished traveler/adventurer, artist, musician, poet, writer and pencil & paper role-playing game designer (which he's been at for three decades). Eventually he plans to come out of his shell and introduce himself and his creations to someone else... but don't rush him.
Because every other teenager has electronic gadgets and name brand clothes, status in their cliques is established on ownership: having cell phones with built-in cameras, ipods with all the accessories, and jeans with the right cut are important attributes for many teenagers. These two girls don’t look like they want for anything. But giving children whatever they want often comes with a cost; with each new toy or gadget (especially those that are unearned), children can lose respect for parents and the hard work it takes to provide such luxuries. Such children come to believe that parents exist only to serve as a means of satisfying indulgences, and the parents succumb to guilt for fear of being labeled mean, unfair, or even worse, neglectful. I’m convinced that as a culture we create monsters out of our children.
My sister tells me to mind my own business but each time I resolve to ignore the girls I end up staring at their intent faces and how they practically fall into their cell phones. They are waiting for a text message from somebody, anybody who’ll answer them. Why? Out of desperation, loneliness, boredom? Why must they know the whereabouts and exact activity of the others? Is knowing that so-and-so got that date with the cute boy truly that important? And…when can they get together to have fun. What is their kind of fun, I fancy?
The rock-jazz music is good enough to take my attention away for a brief time. Then they get up and join the table of two adults that look like their mother and a man old enough to be a grandfather or the mother’s second husband or boyfriend. I say, second husband because he is totally passive, looks through the kids, and does not interact with them at all. It’s almost as though the teens do not exist. As their food comes, each girl gets a super-sized coke. Diet, of course. It has to be diet because being thin is supreme. During one musical set they leave four times, walking out with cell phones in hand as though the things had been crazy glued on permanently. The girls were too young to smoke, so it had to be a pee break then back to the table for more fries and coke, and maybe a blank stare.
Then I see one of the girls take a sip from her cup and spit an ice cube at the woman, looking over at the other teen that joined her in quiet laughter. The old guy could have been blind; he did not even wince or comment. The woman made no audible response. I sat behind her and barely got a glance at her stoic face as she stooped to pick up the ice that had fallen on the floor near her foot. I waited in anticipation for the mother’s reprisal. There wasn’t any.
Coming Up: Part III...
And the People who Raise Them
Maria R. Burgio on Difficult Kids, Inept Parents, and Societal Indifference
I am often flabbergasted and worried as hell about the fact that every year teenagers commit 2,000 homicides in America and that ten per cent of these are committed by girls. This concern makes me excruciatingly aware of disruptive behavior in children. Over the holidays, I had an opportunity to observe two bad-mannered teenage girls. I say ‘bad-mannered’ to be polite; their behavior would actually be called “acting out” or aggressive in psychological terms.
My sister, her husband, and I walk into Tiny’s Bar and Grill located on State Street in Utica, New York, a neighborhood bar and family eatery that’s been offering an interesting jazz venue for about twenty years. It’s a bitter cold night, but in the holiday spirit, we’re excited to spend a fun night out. We take the only table left, meant for a party of eight at which sat two teenage girls. Tiny’s is tiny: small tables cramp into what looks like the basement of a ranch style house converted into living space. The acoustics are awful and the food is just as bad, but the family atmosphere during Christmas week makes it all okay.
Most of the servers are off for the holiday, so the bartender takes our orders. I go up to the bar and case the stools for people I’ve known in the past who never moved out of Utica like I did. I didn’t recognize anyone except for the usual local crowds of men with one too many beers in them. The Utica brewery is nearby and well known to the locals for good cheap beer. Utica is a beer town, your classic upstate New York small town where long brutal winters, high unemployment, low paying jobs and cheap housing creates a simple life centered on raising kids. It’s a lonely place if you’re not married.
The two fifteen-year-olds (not so young that they look thirteen, not so mature looking that they may be sixteen, I thought, aging them as I do any child I see) are quietly sitting bent over the table as they look into the minuscule screens of their cell phones. They could almost be twins wearing the same skin tight jeans, sneakers, short tight bomber jackets, their short straight hair meticulously brushed into ponytails that are held in place from the elastic band wound several times to coerce each hair into place. Both of them are spaced out into their cell phones as the twenty piece brass and string ensemble is playing one of Chicago’s hit songs. They are oblivious to the music and I later find out that they had left their table to get away from the adults that brought them. They remind me of those I encounter in the shopping malls of small town America, arrogant, bored, toting cell phones with text messaging so they can stay “connected.” I try to ignore them as best I can.
To be continued...
For my first piece, I would like to introduce myself so readers will appreciate my position on society and child/family mental health. I’m an NYU graduate, with a degree in human development, which deals with the development of humans from the prenatal period to every stage of life thereafter. From there, I went on to study nonfiction and fiction writing at USC, where I worked with such notables as, Kenneth Turan (LA Film Critic), Shelly Lowenkopf (teacher extraordinaire), Janet Finch, Noel Finch, Gay Talese (who blew my mind in fiction class!), and others.My thesis, Is My Child Normal?, became a parenting guide that should soon reach bookstores on the West and East coasts. Having worked with children from every walk of life in my private practice and at a psychiatric center, I have a broad psychological-sociological world view about childrens’ importance as it’s related to the structure of society.
Being born and reared in Sicily, Italy and then living in a working class Sicilian neighborhood in Brooklyn, I can see the cultural differences between an old European culture and a modern (21st century) American one. How children fit into the lives of parents, teachers, and neighborhoods varies greatly: for instance, in my native country, children and family are the center of life, as is eating together every day. Every business and school closes at noon, at which time everyone quits work/school and goes home, usually to the mother’s house or to another matriarch's. During the two- hour long, five-course meal, we tell stories and laugh about ourselves and our lives. We comfort, cajole, admire, love, and yell at those we eat with everyday. The children are the focus of all this; they are made the center of the conversation.
Generally speaking, Sicilians are focused on being together as a family: the family is life, jobs are secondary. This is not always so in America, where competition for money and material things like cars, televisions (now with flat screens of varying resolution), computer toys, telephones, and cell phones (which have progressed into time-consuming strangulating communication devices) conspire to keep us mentally busy and emotionally isolated. And American children have bought into all of it.
The problem is magnified by the complexity of our lives, which include constant thrill seeking, buying sprees and instability in the home--all of which take attention away from the children and instead focus it on advancement and the resulting materially-driven lifestyle. Instead of family, children become tax exemptions, or one more thing to deal with after a hard day’s work.
So I ask, do American parents really know their children? Some, definitely, do not: starlets, for example, have popularized the idea of getting pregnant and having a child out of wedlock, which is a far cry from the family-centered traditions in many other parts of the world. And although the saying, “children are our future" is often espoused, how we spend our time and money shows that we don't always care about our children or our future. In fact, the saying itself is nothing more than a cliché, both overused and ignored.
Instead of cliches and sayings, come and share your stories, both good and bad, of what makes a family. And let us together figure out how we can better provide for our children and our future.
About the Author:
Maria Burgio was born
in Sicily, Italy, raised in Brooklyn, New York, and practiced at her upstate
New York clinic for twelve years. She also had a private practice in Los
Angeles for four years. Dr. Burgio earned a Ph.D. in applied developmental
psychology from New York University. She specialized in neuropsychology, child
psychology, and psychopharmacology, while teaching at various universities
including UCLA School of Medicine, Utica College of Syracuse University and New
York University. Dr. Burgio is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing
program at the University of Southern California. Through her non-fiction
writing, Dr. Burgio helps parents and society identify what is abnormal in
children's behavior and what can be done to help.
I do not own a couch. Instead, there is a full-sized mattress and box spring set up in my living room with a coffee table and the TV in front of it. This causes my mother no end of concern. It is the physical manifestation of a larger ideological issue. Her baby girl is living 3,000 miles from home, working at a factory, dating a boy whom she doesn't plan to marry, and is generally not the woman everyone thought she would become. My mother wants to buy me a couch for Christmas, and I seriously considered it. I did not want a couch, but I thought “If it is so important to Mom, why not just get one?”
The answer is that couches are difficult to move. On a practical scale, I will only be living in this apartment for another six months. Why haul a large, clumsy piece of furniture up three flights of narrow stairs only to have to drag it back down in a very brief time span? On a much larger scale, owning a brand new, expensive couch makes it impossible to pack all of your shit into a car and skip town. This latter issue is the one that concerns me more than anything. And I think that might be another reason my mother wants me to have one. If she can't get me to stick around at home, at least she can pin me to one location so she doesn't have to worry about her daughter being a transient on top of everything else.
Of course, I am somewhat of a transient. I have never lived in the same apartment for more than a year. I have trouble sitting still for more than a few months. And while I've lived in the Boulder, Colorado area for almost three years now (a different town each year), I'd like to keep the option of moving to, say, San Francisco this summer when my lease is up. Couches are the enemy of all of us geographical-commitment-phobes. One does not merely abandon a brand new, nice sofa on the side of the road like some half-broken table handed down through generations of roommates. One has to either break the rules of minimalist moving and rent a U-Haul to tow the thing behind you as you make your getaway, or rent a storage unit for future recovery. But this ties you to the very location you're fleeing, and I'm not one for looking back.
About the author:
Alexis Degan is a graduate of Ithaca College's Writing and English departments. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado, where she works as a batch operator at the The Learning Tree's factory.
Describe your reading style in a word? I know mine: insatiable. What about your writing style? I'd say, sensational, but that's just me. Of course, these are merely words; can they capture
the entirety? The Zen Buddhist would shake
his head and say “the finger is not the moon.” The semanticist would nod gravely in agreement and state “the map is not the
territory.” As for me, I think it’s like a Rorschach test, only, to figure
out what the blot means, I ask, “should I look at the blot, or the empty space
(negative space, my art teacher corrects)?” The answer? Both? All? None of the above? What the hell, life is not a multiple choice
test. You want answers; become a priest,
a scientist. You ask questions; become a
writer, and never stop asking. What, you
say, you can do both? Well, good for
you, then do it, don’t say it (‘Show, don’t tell.’ Make it a Greek chorus in your head). Believe me, it will fit in with all the others. Remember. Listen to voices. They might have something to say...
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