The Mayor of Grace Street

I lived in the Fan and Museum Districts of Richmond, VA for almost fifteen years, starting in the mid-nineties. There were a number of local legends that lived in or around that area at the time, but none were quite as omnipresent as Leo. You would see (and often smell) him on most streets, cleaning up litter or walking to wherever it was he had to be that day. Leo was in his mid-fifties and was homeless by choice for going on thirty years. His face was wrinkled, like cheap linen, with a scraggly white beard which further compounded his image of a grizzled thin man whose age looked far beyond his actual years. The self-proclaimed “Mayor of Grace Street,” he was a continuous fixture for all of us who lived, worked, or went to school downtown.

One of the many traits that he was known for was his refusal to take a hand out. He did odd jobs for local businesses in order to eke out the meager bit of money he would need to live on, and would scrounge the rest from the discarded wares so many of us threw out despite their still usable and working condition. He would sometimes eat at soup kitchens or with the Food-Not-Bombs crowd who handed out free vegan lunches in Monroe Park, but in exchange for his meal he would help the volunteers as he could, spreading the word or encouraging the many strung out addicts that inhabited the city to just eat something already damnit. He frequented the little sandwich shop where I worked throughout college, coming in most often on cold nights for a cup of soup or coffee or both if it had been a good day. One summer night he came in with a carton of vanilla ice cream he'd bought from the grocery store down the block and enough change to get him unlimited refills on sodas. He told me he loved Root Beer Floats and had just had a craving. I hadn't had one in years and later that night ordered one at a diner. It was delicious.

Leo’s shanties became a regular site in the alleys behind the student apartments and small local businesses that used to dot so much of Grace and Franklin Streets, before the university started buying up all the properties and leasing them to the likes of Jimmy John’s and Qdoba. Using thrown away milk crates, boxes, and random scraps of metal, he constructed little homes for himself. When the police would inevitably tear them down, he would move on and rebuild like any good homeowner who suffers a catastrophic loss. These structures allowed him to become an entertainer of sorts, opening up his hovel to others - offering other homeless men and women a place to sleep for a night (but never longer). All were welcome, from the drunks to the stoned to the young squatter kids who hopped the train cars into town in torn clothes but with well-fed dogs. It wasn’t uncommon to find him and his friends sitting out front of his shack, in a circle of salvaged lawn chairs or stained furniture with the stuffing popping out, drinking and laughing and commiserating and recouping, like a surrealist painter’s bizarre interpretation of a 1960’s dinner party.

Not actually one of Leo's, but amazingly close.

Leo built one of his houses in the alley behind my first apartment in Richmond. One afternoon as I was walking home through that alley, I came across him and his group having one of their many campfire moments. Leo and I waved and exchanged our usually short pleasantries as I scuttled past, when one of his guests yelled to me and asked me for a dime. Leo became incensed, cursing at the man that he “don’t like freeloaders so you can get the hell out if you’re gonna keep that up.” The man got up to leave. I will admit that I began to walk a little faster and didn’t look back, not wishing to witness one of the fabled hobo knife-fights people were always warning me about. However in the end, the man wasn’t banished and left to fend for himself as penance for asking me for the proverbial fish. From what I heard, Leo instead taught him to catch his own.

I eventually moved farther from Leo’s stomping grounds, and he eventually died of pneumonia and exposure. However I, along with countless others, never forgot about him and likely never will. Despite his gruff exterior and raspy voice that rarely let out more than a few words at a time peppered with old man grunting, he was a kind person. He was, after all, a mayor, even if that was in name only. And like any good mayor, he looked after his city and those that lived in it, especially those that needed the most help. He did this at no benefit to himself and seemingly refused award or recognition. It wasn't his job, it's just who he was. He was no saint, you can be sure of that, but he wasn’t a shiftless lazy ne’er-do-well either.

Admittedly, I was a starry-eyed young girl back in the days that I knew Leo. It’s possible that I’ve romanticized the memory of him and all that he stood for through some limousine liberal sentimentality of how attuned I was with the downtrodden. I mean, I have other stories about homeless people I knew – there was Bridget who had ovarian cancer and a crack habit, Kenny the schizophrenic who I once witnessed giving a leaping high five to his imaginary friend, Sam who sold Hard Times papers by timidly approaching you, head bowed, saying “Hey boss man, boss man, sorry to bother you.” There are plenty others.

Sister Simone Campbell

Regardless of whether or not my characterization of Leo rings 100% true (and I really like to think it does), there are plenty of Leo’s out there. Just this morning I was reading about Sister Simone Campbell, a Catholic nun who is also director of a social justice group called NETWORK which lobbies on behalf of the poor. Her treatment by her detractors at a recent House Budget Committee are, shall we say, disheartening. There are many others out there like Sister Simone and Leo, those who do this kind of work every day. They live simply and rightly and help others along that path.

It would be easy to just let the take away from this story be about Leo’s self-sufficiency and refusal to go on the dole, and to then use that as an argument against entitlement programs. To me, that would be missing the point entirely and simply reading into something only what you want to hear. One mustn’t forget that it was Leo’s choice to live the way he did. He came from a comfortable home and one day decided it wasn’t the life for him. Yes I did learn lessons of self-reliance from him, but in the end it was his sense of community and willingness to help others that has always stuck with me. His is a story of the two mentalities working together in tandem for the greater good. It’s why I’ve never been able to understand how we’ve come to ignore both sides and thus let the every-man-for-himself attitude overtake our cultural identity and dictate our political discourse.

As I’ve gotten older, I think about my memories of Leo and what they taught me. I think about them when people talk about “personal responsibility,” “American Individual Exceptionalism,” and freaking “boot straps.” I think about Leo when I hear Libertarian politicians talk about how it isn’t the responsibility of our government, the tool of the American people as a working body, to care for those less fortunate. I think about him when those same leaders claim such duties are solely the responsibility of the disembodied concepts of private charities and churches, as if the burden of fellowship falls only to a few groups and not our country as a whole.

Call it an overused platitude, but the notion that we are all in this together is one that we can no longer continue to ignore. There is no kindness in anarchy, and without kindness there is no peace. Leo understood that, and he practiced his life accordingly. It’s weird to think that our country and its leaders would be best served by following the examples of a smelly disheveled man who once renewed my appreciation of a good ice cream float.

Attack Of The Killer Cantaloupe: Part 1

Recently I had a once in a lifetime opportunity fall into my lap. Now it’s wasn’t exactly earth shattering, and many people wouldn’t appreciate it as much as I did, but nonetheless it made my month (and that’s saying something about the month that contains my wedding anniversary, my birthday, and Halloween). As my tale unfolds, you will find that in the end things didn’t quite go as planned, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. On October 6^th 2012, Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly decided to hold a debate in the George Washington University’s Lisner Hall Auditorium. My husband and I were among the distinguished attendees. Distinguished however only by our tenacity in scoring tickets online for this small event, relentlessly scouring the internet for cheap seats and, when none could be found, grossly overpaying some scalper for the privilege of watching these two guys duke it out verbal style.

So with great anticipation, on the day of the event we made the four and a half hour drive to Springfield, VA, where we abandoned our car and hopped the Metro all the way into the city. It’s a fabulous ride, and I highly suggest it for anyone visiting our nation’s capital. It’s by no means posh, but there’s something comfortably zen about sitting back and letting the train car zoom around corners at what would seem unsafe speeds, to then come to a rocking gentle stop at each station. Am I the only one that thinks Regan National Airport looks like it belongs on Tatooine? I doubt it was intentional, but having an airport reminiscent of one of the biggest pop culture phenomenon pleases me, and I would like to see it repeated again. Maybe if more Supreme Court hearings were held Gangham Style, the youngsters would get more involved in politics.

Hi Mom.

After we checked into our hotel, we tried to fit as many touristy things into the few remaining hours we had before the big event. We went to the Mall, and walked the entire length from the Capital Building, all the way to the GWU campus. We tried to check out the Washington Monument, but it was still closed due to earthquake damage. We did manage to stop along the way to visit the WWII memorial, which neither of us had yet seen. Even for someone, like myself, who had no family fight in that war (that I know of anyhow), it was rather breathtaking and somewhat sad. Yet it still managed to be beautiful and full of a weird hope that I’m not a talented enough wordsmith to properly express. It’s just a feeling you get as you stand there, the noise of the rushing waters from oh so many fountains drowning out the sounds of traffic and noisy kids and their parents telling them to “just hold still so I can snap this picture will ya?” 

We eventually made our way towards campus and the auditorium. We actually at one point took some weird wrong turn and found ourselves on a series of abandoned roads – abandoned except for the armed guards and signs warning against attempted interaction with the absent but presumably well trained guard dogs. It's easy to get lost in the spectacle of cherry blossoms and to forget that so much of Washington DC is shrouded in secrecy and security. Leaving that Tom Clancy-esque scenery behind, we found a cute outdoor restaurant to grab a quick bite. After a dinner of small plates including shrimp on jalapeno polenta cakes, spinach and goat cheese salad, and heirloom Caprese over baby arugula, we managed to make it to the event and through the metal detectors – I, of course, setting them off with my clunky array of costume jewelry that I never think to remove beforehand. Maybe I just like getting wanded in public. Actually, no, I really don’t.

It was once inside that my husband first abandoned me to go to the bathroom. But he was back quickly, so we found our seats and prepared ourselves to be entertained. We were not disappointed. Stewart stole the show with his remote controlled rising floor platform, which he used to tower his self-proclaimed Hobbit sized body over the head of his 6’4 opponent anytime he made a valid point or received gratuitous applause. To top things off, O’Reilly didn’t even come across like a total jerk, even though his use of small poster/flash cards made one think that he was ill-equipped to address such a young internet infographic digital savvy audience. He also, much to many people’s astonishment, went so far as to call the country’s acceptance (and adherence to) the Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh-style hate spewing  as the single worst thing to have happened to modern journalism and politics. 

My favorite moment, where, despite my attempt to maintain decorum, I burst into loud spontaneous clapping and whooping, was a point Stewart made about Title IX and how government spending and intervention can have tremendously positive effects. I couldn’t wait to discuss this one further with my companion, however it was after the debate was over, as we stood outside amongst the throngs of students eager for a iphone-to-instagram shot of one of the two debaters leaving the auditorium, that my husband had to excuse himself again. Quickly. With no public bathrooms within eyeshot, he snuck into the GWU student center and was gone for at least ten minutes. I was left to amuse myself, sitting on the concrete steps, smoking cigarettes, and eavesdropping on the kids' excited furthering of the rumors they heard about which door Jon Stewart would be walking out of, and how they could circumvent his bodyguards to gain an autograph.

I was getting eager to get a move on. This was, after all, our anniversary trip, and we planned to make the most of whatever debauchery we could get ourselves into in this new and different city. We have friends that are either from the DC area or who visit a lot, who had recommended a great bar/restaurant that happened to be a block from our hotel. This was to be our spring board towards a night of festivities. Once my husband finally emerged, looking a little green but assuring me he was ok, we took the metro back to the few blocks we considered base camp and began walking towards the bar. When we passed our hotel, he excused himself again to go into our room to use the restroom. I waited, somewhat impatiently but still sympathetically, in the hotel lobby. After fifteen minutes, he came down, and sheepishly admitted that beer was a bad idea, and that he needed to call it a night. We spent the rest of the night in the hotel room, he going back and forth to the bathroom, each time making horrendously sad noises, while I overpaid for pay per view movies, forced him to eat the errant wheat thin which we had purchased at the CVS down the street, and fretted over his fever. Needless to say, it was a good thing the hotel messed up our reservation and booked us a room with two beds instead of one.

Alas, this was the entirety of our trip. What started out fun and exciting and rosy cheeked, was brought down hard by what we assumed was just some stomach virus that picked the most inopportune time to strike. After what can only be described as the most absolutely dreadful car ride home, he slept for two days. On the second day he woke up with a stiff neck.

Now this stiff neck could have been attributed to numerous things – sleeping in a strange bed (or rather not really sleeping but moreover dozing then waking up every twenty minutes to run to the bathroom). Or it could have been the awful wracking and straining that the body goes through during all that mess - something we all know so I will spare you the gross details. It could have been the car ride home. Or it could mean that this wasn’t a stomach flu at all. 

It could mean that this was listeria.

Listeria sickness comes from a bacteria found in contaminated food, and is responsible for one of the highest instances of food poisoning deaths (salmonella being number one). It has a mortality rate of 20%. One of it's dangers comes from it's determination to morph into meningitis, hence our worries over the stiff neck. Even though the vomiting and other digestive discomforts had ceased, we both still agreed that he should go to the doctor, just in case. My husband has a history of ER visits and hospital stays for food poisoning and stomach flus, and I have a history of overreacting to minor illnesses and turning them into worse case scenarios. Turns out, he was going to be ok. It was just a stomach virus, probably picked up at one of the crowded events we had attended in the previous weeks.

And so here is where we get to the heart of this post - the real reason for my overly long introduction. I've been telling you all about my trip to DC and my husband’s gross interactions with a myriad of public toilets for one simple reason – to point out our reaction to his stiff neck and our reasoning for sending him to the doctor. I mentioned Listeria above, and that really was a major concern we had - which the doc said we were justified in thinking given the prevalence of outbreaks. In fact, I only mentioned the contents of the dinner we had eaten in DC, not to brag about being foodies (because I really hate that whole cultural trend of calling oneself a “foodie” just because you don't eat processed garbage from a box), but to demonstrate the kinds of foods we tend to eat. Fresh, raw, or lightly cooked vegetables. As of late, our beloved fruits and veggies are under attack from more and more exposure to bacteria that can make people very sick and sometimes even dead. Leafy greens and sprouts, when eaten raw, are fast becoming one of the most dangerous foods to eat, and I don't want to live in a world without kale. You're not even safe to grow your own because contamination can live in the seeds as well. Since when did salad become the food equivalent to Russian Roulette? Leave that to the gastronomical daredevils who are into fugu or raw oysters.

Some suggested reading.

A 2011 listeria outbreak, caused by tainted cantaloupe, was the deadliest outbreak of this particular bacteria in almost one hundred years – well past the point of prevention by modern technology and (most importantly) modern attention to the safety of our food. The worst part, the part that really burns me, is that in the weeks prior to the deaths, the responsible farm had received a passing grade from food inspectors. Had the Food and Drug Administration let everyone down? I mean, aren’t they there to protect us? In this case no, because it wasn’t the government that gave these farmers top notch safety ratings and the go ahead to use improper machinery to sort the fruit. It wasn’t the government that either ignored or missed the improper storage and gross negligence that eventually led to the deaths of 33 people and one miscarriage. It was an outside non-governmental inspection company. Yes, the safety of our food has been privatized, and it appears to be failing.

According to a devastating report by Bloomberg (who, in this age of one-sided journalism, seems to do a fabulous job of just telling it like it is), the FDA simply doesn’t have the money to properly inspect our food. They now have to rely on what they call “third party auditors” (those same groups that gave that cantaloupe farm glowing passing marks just weeks before they killed a bunch of people). It’s these third party privatized auditors who are responsible for almost 94% of the inspections performed in order to ensure that farms and food processing plants aren’t cutting corners or simply unintentionally screwing up. The FDA asked for more money, but “the food industry lobbied for, and won, enactment of a law in January 2011 that expanded the role of auditors -- and foreign governments -- in vetting producers and distributors of food bound for the U.S.”

For those of you who have read this blog before, it’s pretty obvious that I have a lot of progressive/liberal leanings. However, I don’t consider myself party affiliated – just because I’ve never voted for a Republican doesn’t make me a Democrat. I say this because I want to make sure that you people are aware that, while I don’t believe in a small inconsequential federal government, I also don’t believe that the government should run everything. I don't want people to disregard these words as just another Democrat blathering on in favor of the nanny state. However, and this just seems so painfully obvious to me, when the end goal of an organization is to ensure the safety of others and not to turn a profit, then a privatized system just plain makes no sense. Isn't one of the tenants of capitalism the fostering of an atmosphere amenable to and encouraging of competition between companies, so as to maximize profits and provide better products to those that will purchase them? This doesn't work when the purpose of your organization is likely not to benefit those paying for your services. Would you hire an inspection company who consistently finds fault and problems in your process, as they should when they are there to be found? It seems like the best and most competent inspectors would be those that find and force correction of the most infractions, thus angering those that hired them in the first place. One would think that if left entirely up to the free market, those auditors who do the "best" jobs would go out of business fast and hard. It’s not in a company’s best interest to continuously bash its client base and point out where they need to spend more money simply on the chance that they could cause an outbreak. Not to mention the fact that these third party auditors, not being under the government purview, have less accreditation, credentials, and oversight and often already work for the company for which they are inspecting. It's mind boggling the depths to which this critical aspect of a healthy society has been corrupted. And for what? Money? The assurance that the "govmint can't tell me what to do"?

The idea of privatization has been a major talking point this election – from Social Security to Big Bird. In some places, I can understand the inclination to explore private sector options. However in some, it’s just doesn’t bode well for maintaining the welfare of Americans, which in the end is the one true function of the federal government. Education, the FDA, and public broadcasting are some of the biggest examples (and to a lesser extent healthcare – but that’s a topic for a different day). Sometimes it's beneficial to everyone if the federal government steps in, as with Jon Stewart's praising of Title IX. Or what about the GI Bill? Head Start? Welfare for Work programs? The list goes on. Sometimes government programs don't work, and sometimes they collapse under the weight of bureaucracy and corruption. But you know what? Sometimes things have to fail for a society to move forward. If every program worked from the start, if every government official had all the answers from the beginning, then there would be no need for elections or reform or oversight committees. We would live in a Utopian society filled with unicorns and butterflies, and we would all get paid in candy and hugs, and we would be happy about it.

People always argue that “what company would purposefully cut corners and make people sick? Those businesses would go under so fast.” Yeah, that makes sense in theory, but it’s not reality. It’s part of the idealistic notion that businesses, left to their own devices, would put consumer wellbeing above their own stock interest. What a wonderful world that would be, huh? Plus, if that were true, then why are food borne illness recalls on the rise? Why are more and more people getting sick from contaminated food caused by distributors with sub-par conditions? Plus, there’s that old risk analysis adage where sometimes it’s just cheaper to pay the lawsuit settlements than it would be to fix the problem initially.

One night I found myself discussing union labor disputes with an "old school Republican," and he (unintentionally) made the best argument against privatizing organizations designed to give a leg up and even the playing field for the little guys (the kids, the workers, the public). He said “a company’s main responsibility is to its shareholders.” I think he was absolutely correct, and this idea extends far past our late night dinner table debate. Simply put, privatizing the aforementioned government programs would basically negate the necessity for those programs, because it takes the focus away from the people the programs are intended to help. It makes profit the main goal of those programs, instead of service.

Let’s return to food for a moment. It was the utter failings of the private sector’s ability to act humanely and safely that led Teddy Roosevelt to sign the Food and Drug Act of 1906 which ultimately led to the creation of the FDA. So history showed us that the private sector failed, and when the government stepped in, things got better. Why then, are we letting the FDA back slide back into The Jungle? I have a hard time thinking that it's just all greed. The idealist in me wants to believe that people just aren't thinking about it correctly.

I’ve never understood people’s insistence that you need to run a country like a business. A business is designed primarily to make money – to benefit the shareholders. I see no problem with this, but it's not the same with government. We can break it down like this, the “shareholders” in a country would be the politicians and the very wealthy (we’ll liken them to investors since they pay the most taxes). The middle class, the poor, the children, the elderly, the labor force – those would be the "customers." This would be the vast majority of people in our country/business, and without whom there would simply be no country/business. As we've seen in the past 12 years, screwing over the "customers" to make money for the "shareholders" doesn't work. It's because a country simply isn't a business. A country's main responsibility is to its customers - to the safety, health, and fair treatment of it's people. Asserting that a government should model itself the other way around in order to bolster its position as a global economic giant doesn't ring of the America I love. You're thinking of China.

 

At the end of the day, I don’t have all the answers, nor do I pretend to. I’m not a business woman or a farmer. I’m just someone who really loves cantaloupe. I’m someone whose husband sat through the last hour of a political debate, an event we both looked so forward to and which was to be part of a celebration, in digestive distress and pain. I’m someone who thought, given what I know about the correlations between defunding the FDA and the rise in contaminated food, that the distress and pain might have been caused by a bacteria allowed to fester due to the systematic chipping away of valuable government intervention in favor of this all mighty concept of privatization. I’m also someone who just wants to be able to eat raw broccoli sprouts again without fear. They go great on just about everything.

The Misinformation Of Walter White

I watch a lot of TV. I know, given my desire for academic cred, I shouldn’t admit that. I should probably tell you that I read a lot of books. Heavy ones. That smell old. Well, truth is, I don’t much these days. There is just some TV out there that is really too good to miss. I like to tell myself that at least I'm watching highly respected award winning shows, but I also have my guilty pleasures that won't be found on any critics Top Ten lists. End of the day though, I’m a bit of crime drama junkie (which could be the understatement of the year). I’ve seen every episode of Law and Order (the original only please). The Wire was the best show I had ever seen - that is until I finally finished Breaking Bad. It doesn't help any that I've become a bit of a homebody in my old age. I mean, we do leave the house and are social , but my life lately has sort of become rather boring, at least by my previous standards.        

    

Save me zucchini plant

Add to that the fact that I live in the suburbs, and I think my twenty year old self would be aghast. I haven’t always lived in this kind of a place. I grew up in a small coastal area on the Chesapeake Bay in a much larger city known nationwide for it's touristy boardwalk and ample military bases. My neighborhood was one of many small two street communities dotting a major four lane road. After that I lived in an urban-residential city that suffered from a bit of an identity crisis between its breathtaking antebellum architecture, its ultra-high housing prices, and its crime rate. I may have spent many a restless night there after foolishly plugging my address into the National Sex Offender Registry, but man I had a pretty view from my balcony. This isn’t the case in my current digs in the burbs. Oddly enough, I love it here. It's quiet. At night I hear crickets and bullfrogs, not trains and sirens. I have a garden. I feel safe here. Don't get me wrong, it definitely took some getting used to. No amount of homegrown cucumbers could initially make up for the lack of a corner store within walking distance. Even worse, the restaurant scene is virtually non-existent. I don’t even have the excuse that I’m inundated with chain restaurants. It’s quite the opposite in fact. The strip malls here are filled with independently owned but sub-par joints where the food comes second to being able to offer parents a place to bring their kids – well behaved or not.

But sometimes you find that you’re ok trading these conveniences for others. I mean really, it’s not too hard to drive fifteen minutes for good risotto if it means I no longer have to worry about being mugged when I walk the dogs at night.

On top of that, we even managed to find a neighborhood that’s older (well, old by this city's standards anyway) and which still holds a lot of charm. No two houses are the same and seem to have sprouted up organically over a ten or fifteen year span. This isn’t a planned community drawn up by some developer, and individuals take pride in their homes and in their sense of community. In a previous post, I said of my neighborhood “It’s the kind of sleepy little burg where kids play in their front yards – not in the back, fenced off from the world. The kind of idyllic middle class retreat of yesteryear, where people look up from weeding their well-kept flower beds and wave when you drive by, even if they don’t know you.” In fact, we got home the other day to find a flyer for a block party tacked to our front door. “Join us for an afternoon of games, activities, and lots of fun with your neighbors!” What a cool idea! And what great timing too.

It will help us all feel better about the meth lab that exploded here the other week.

The house wasn’t totally destroyed, and thankfully no one was hurt, but that doesn’t change the fact that the police were called to investigate two explosions in my neighborhood, and the night ended with lights and yellow police tape and crews in hazmat suits tediously sifting through the wreckage and trash.

Part of a transcript of one of the news broadcasts: “It’s such a quiet neighborhood. You’ve heard the cliché so often associated with this kind of story. But this one really is.”

I didn’t know this house prior to the news breaking. My husband had to show it to me. It’s not terribly close to us but is on his morning dog walking path. Looking at it for the first time, you can’t help but notice that it’s a total outlier. When you drive by, it sticks out like a sore thumb – overgrown grass, two immovable cars (one with its front wheel completely horizontal to the ground), and now a noisy orange condemned notice splayed on the front door.
       

I am the one who knocks - to ask if I can borrow some sugar.

Having a meth cook for a neighbor is not like Breaking Bad. I think back to those early episodes, where Walter and Jesse cooked in Jesse’s basement - emerging from their dank chemical closet into the fresh blue-skyed air of the burbs, wondering just how the hell things got so twisted and complicated. Was that how it was for my neighbor? Maybe he, like Walter White, had been befallen with some unimaginable expense, some life-altering obstacle. I could possibly develop a tenable kinship for him if that were the case, as I have for weird and scary Mr. White. The family man. The mentor. The victim. The criminal. Actually I don’t know much about the alleged perpetrator in my hood, and unfortunately, his mug shot belies this idea that he’s some working class shmoe who got caught up in a world of danger and exhilaration. According to that image, plastered on the news and the internet, he’s a scary old weathered dude doing that The Rock eyebrow thing. He doesn't give the impression of hiding in plain sight. There is no mild mannered Walter White facade. He looks and seemingly conducts himself like a ne'er-do-well.

Surprisingly, this turn of events hasn’t shaken my cushy sense of security in my so very much loved home. I know that this isn’t the new norm for my neighborhood. It’s the exception. It was the homeowner cooking the meth, alone, in one pot. It wasn’t a criminal enterprise or a haven for tweakers. Which is good, because meth addicts really freak me out. Something about that ever constant twitchy desperation makes me incredibly uncomfortable, not that addiction should ever be comfortable for those watching it. Yet amphetamine addiction is somehow different for me. The spastic hopelessness is so anathema to how I think and act, that it makes users seem all the more alien to me. They exist somewhere I can never understand, as I do for them in my grounded sense of intention.

As destiny, in all its whacky wisdom, would have it, the week after his house blew up my neighbor was due in court on unrelated charges during the same week that I happened to find myself serving jury duty. Luckily I didn’t get his case. Lucky for whom, I’m not really sure, but I’m pretty sure it was a good thing somehow. I was sent to another trial, and while I wasn’t picked to serve on the jury I was assigned to, I did get to sit through over five hours of voir dire. It was at times infuriating, fascinating, uncomfortable, and downright good. I was actually excited to do my civic duty, unlike my peers who only complained and joked about making claims of racism or religious nuttery in an attempt to force dismissal. The look on my face in that courtroom, as I prepared myself to watch a real life Jack McCoy in action, would suggest that I needed only popcorn to complete my rapt enthrallment. At least, at first.

It was a violent crime for which we would sit in judgment. A man was accused of threatening to, and then actually beating his girlfriend and some form of kidnapping which we weren’t given the details of. Because of the nature of the crimes, each prospective juror was asked if they or their family members had ever had any dealings with violence. Of the twenty jurors who answered questions that day, at least half had stories to tell. There was the girl who helped a co-worker steal away in the middle of the night to a battered women’s shelter. The woman who witnessed a body dump in front of her apartment. The man whose daughter had been held hostage by a deranged boyfriend. The gentleman who’s grandfather murdered another man in cold blood. As these stories unfolded one by one, my earlier voyeuristic excitement grew to compunction for my morbid curiosity.

The DA was disappointingly reticent through much of the proceedings, seeming to simply go through the motions. However, the defense attorney was relentless, taking each person’s very personal tale as ammunition to berate them into thinking that, because they had once known violence, they couldn’t possibly be impartial to his client. Time and time again, despite the judge’s numerous admonishments, he would ask “Are you sure? Really sure? I mean, don’t you think your judgment is clouded?” It was this bullying that made the day so long. People shifted aimlessly but often on the hard wooden galley benches. The potential jurors sighed, rolled their eyes, and pursed their lips. People wanted out. You got a sense that those in the jury box had already banded together as a group. It was as if they stood as one against this man’s continual challenging of their integrity and character.

The day’s events came to a pinnacle when he got to this one girl. Our pre-trial commissions and the hours of voir dire ended shortly thereafter. I had actually met her earlier that morning, as we joked about the terrible coffee available in the courthouse deli (at least it’s hot enough to burn your mouth so badly you can’t taste it, am I right?). She seemed nice, and had we not been called to the courtroom when we were, I think we would have continued to make small talk – if for no other reason than to save her from the recently-hair-plugged business man who divided his time equally between reading a biography of the Pawn Stars guy and hitting on her. When it was her turn, she told the court room her story of the domestic abuse she and her mother suffered at the hands of a stepfather. Abuse that went on for years until the day her mother had found the courage to leave him. Despite this she adamantly insisted for the third or fourth or fifth time, as had the others, that she understood what it meant to be a juror, and that she wouldn’t let what happened to her get in the way of giving that young man a fair trial. She drew much more attention from the defense attorney than the others had, as he spent nearly thirty minutes prying at her for specifics about what she went through, seeming to pick at minutia on which to hinge his theory that she was unfit. 

“But how can you not let it influence you?” he demanded. 

Without missing a beat she told him, “We’re influenced by everything that happens in our lives, good or bad.”

What followed in that moment was total silence, as the DA fumbled in his failure to quickly respond. You could see the other jurors nod in appreciation. I swear the judge even cracked a smile. I kept waiting for someone to start the slow clap. Hell, I wanted to start the slow clap. With one sentence, she dismantled his argument, and everyone in that room knew it. Once the tension lessened and things returned to normal, the defense attorney gave up his line of questioning, thanked her for her time, and promptly told this very courageous girl that her services would not be needed.

Soon after, court was adjourned and those of us not picked were sent on own way. Now I'm free from jury duty for another two years, and I've received my whopping $12.00 compensation check from the county for my time. I didn't see my meth kingpin neighbor in the courthouse that day, and in fact, haven't seen or heard anything about him since. It seems things have neatly fallen back into the normal day in day out, and my life is boring and crime-free again. However, what I’ve taken from these recent brushes with malfeasance and the justice system is that violence and crime and safety and security are all wings on the same fly. We're never truly free from crime, no matter where or how we live, and total separation from it is an illusion. Everyone has their stories and brushes with danger, as my neighbor and those ten jurors showed me, but that doesn't mean that society is doomed.

No amount of TV, no matter how "ripped from the headlines" it is, can really prepare you for when you come face to face, neighbor to neighbor, juror to attorney, with these darker sides of humanity. Walter White and Jack McCoy are great characters that are part of even greater story lines. They are nuanced and thoughtful, and speak of worlds we hope to keep at arm’s length. And yet we misguidedly think of them as realistic. When they do find their ways into our lives, we find that everything we thought we knew, even if deep down we knew better, was just so amazingly wrong. But isn't that what keeps bringing us back? That unreal reality?

Honestly, I don't know. This is just me talking. This post isn't supposed to be some indictment of the pervasiveness of the media, the corruptness of the criminal justice system, or how crime is creeping into our neighborhoods. There's a saying among writers that sometimes a whale is just a whale, and the above is just a little baby whale, just a story I wanted to tell. Well, two stories that happened so serendipitously right after the other, that I couldn't not tell them. So, yeah folks, stay safe out there and thanks for listening.

Running Mad Men

The proverbial torch has been passed to Rio and the stadiums are dark in London as the once-every-four years athletic spectacular spectacular has packed up shop. The 2012 Olympics was one filled with firsts – from the plethora of record breaking to the media’s utter fascination with and then quickly pivoted condemnation of a swimmer whose intellectual prowess seems to suggest that he’d be just as much at home talking to the fish as swimming with them. Not to mention the utterly astonishing knowledge that this is the first year women have been represented by all countries and in all events (hell yeah woman boxers!). Love it or hate it, the Olympics is one of the few things that we as a global community have to celebrate as one people, and its power and importance is unparalleled.
   

Source: Jordan Burroughs

Leaving the fanfare, the spectacle, and parental hand-wringing aside, there’s a darker side to these most prestigious games. Woe be the tale of Olympic Marketing. The Great and Powerful Olympic committee is notorious for staunchly guarding any trademark infringement, keeping the image of those awe inspiring rings under lock and key seemingly rivaled only by the most oppressive of tyrannies. I mean, I heard a rumor that this year they locked offenders in the Tower of London, strapped into an Iron Maiden, only to be let out once they'd renounced everything they believed before and swore allegiance to the one true torch. Or something like that, I may be fuzzy on the details. 

This being said, one of the interesting things to come out of the 2012 Olympic games was Nike’s guerilla ad campaign. Not granted officially sanctioned Olympic sponsorship, they were not allowed to actively use any logo or phrasing resembling the Olympics in any of their ads. This didn’t stop them from making their omnipresence known though. I mean, we all couldn’t take our eyes off those hideously neon green shoes adorning the feet, and therefore the victories, of so so many runners. And then there was the subsequent commercials banking on the concept of “Finding Your Greatness” – whether that greatness be demonstrated by Olympians or by their lesser known, but by no means lesser esteemed, everyday counterparts. One ad in particular drew an unexpected amount of attention, but for all the wrong reasons. Here is Nike’s version of the story of Nathan Sorrell from London, Ohio.
   

    

   

Nathan is twelve years old, 5 foot 3 inches tall, and weighs 200 pounds. In this ad, we are told, in the soothing honey tones of Tom Hardy’s voiceover, that “Somehow we’ve come to believe that greatness is a gift reserved for a chosen few. For prodigies. For superstars. And the rest of us can only stand by watching.” I can actually get behind this. I mean, we’re not all meant for Greatness with a capital G. If we were all great, then who would we have to compare ourselves to and thus define our greatness. If we’re all superlatives, then there are no longer superlatives. We thus knock greatness down to the level of the norm.

Hardy continues: “You can forget that. Greatness is not some rare DNA strand. It’s not some precious thing. Greatness is no more unique to us than breathing. We’re all capable of it. All of us.” Ahhh, ok I see. This is coming together a little more clearly. We all have within us the ability to be great, it’s just up to us to realize it.

Let’s look at Nathan. This kid, now thrust into the national spotlight, is having his journey for attaining this idea of Greatness put on display. Nathan admits that before the shoot, he wasn’t a jogger, wasn’t an athlete. In fact, partway through shooting, the physical exertion was too much for him, and he threw up his lunch in a ditch. Does knowing this necessarily detract from the message at hand? More importantly I suppose, does this knowledge somehow make Nike’s ad men evil? One can't help but wonder how Nathan got on Nike's radar in the first place. Did they simply pluck him from the probably depressingly large pool of overweight children who showed up? Was it his good fortune of living in a town called London? Or was he picked for his story of personal struggles with weight loss and gain? Given that he got the job after showing up for a casting call for a husky kid with no speaking lines, and wasn't picked through some peer or community nomination process, I'm guessing Nathan just fit into Nike's predetermined ideal of what a chubby kid should look like jogging alone, on a deserted road, sweating.

Nathan has now stated that he and his mother are going to try to lose weight, through good old fashioned diet and exercise. He says that his role in the commercial has inspired him. This is probably a good thing. No, it is a good thing. Nike will even return to Ohio some time in the future and will film another spot with his family if they do lose the weight. This and the positive outpouring of support for Nathan has led lots of respectable folks to argue that no, “Nike is not abusing fat kids.” Meanwhile, the obese sympathizers (also respectable in their own right) assert that if Nathan now wants to “lose weight because the Nike Corporation put his fat body on display to sell shoes, then that's creepy and depressing” and have used the ad to further their cause of shining a light on the unfair treatment of the overweight by the I-don’t-get-what’s-so-hard-about-losing-weight-calories-in-calories-out-right-fatty? thin crowd. I’m not sure yet where I stand with either of these camps. I suppose I’m somewhere in the middle of the road, sleeping bag over one shoulder having missed the bus, and now left to wander the predator filled woods alone. Yes, that was a camping metaphor. Sorry, it's late and that's the best I've got right now.
   

I have to think long and hard about whether the ad is exploitative. After all, that is everyone's beef (get it? chunky people like cheeseburgers). Being skinny-challenged myself, when I saw the kid, slowly coming into focus, the outlines of his body coming clearer, I immediately thought “hell yeah little dude, tell the haters to suck it!” Then as the ad drew to a close, you can see Nathan struggling for breath, and in my head I could hear him huffing and puffing. My indignation turned to sadness. That heavy breathing was all too familiar. It was all too real. It’s what I hear when I get to the four minute mark trotting on a treadmill. It’s the noise I try desperately to hide as I struggle to pretend I’m totally fine while trudging up an incline behind my thin friends, hoping they don't become aware of the growing distance between us. Pro tip: fat people aren't really yawning while walking uphill, and whatever they stopped to look at isn't really there.
     

And that is what hit it home for me. Nathan Sorrell is a real person. He is not an invention born out of a smokey board room, where men with rolled up sleeves brainstorm and shout out ideas. This kid has a life to go back to after this which doesn’t just fade to black. Those media folks trying so desperately to make him a symbol of something don't seem to be bothering themselves with what happens now.

One can’t help but wonder about his first day back at school. His Facebook friends list has doubled in size - no doubt equal parts supporters, looky-loos, and cyber-trolls. Yet how would his brick-and-mortar friends treat him? And oh gosh, what will the bullies do? Would they have a field day with him? 
     

youtube commentors are awesome

The internet jerks already have. Read this article if you have a strong stomach. It’s one writer’s compilation of some of the awful fat-bashing comments the youtube video has produced. It’s a tough read. Why making fun of fat people is socially acceptable is beyond comprehension. We're the last remaining group that doesn't have hate crime protection. I have friends that make fat jokes in front of me (or on social media sites where maybe they don’t realize I can see them) without blinking an eye. It’s somehow ok to them. Maybe since I’m not morbidly obese they think I’m somehow disconnected from the others they are making fun of, but I really think that’s giving them too much credit. Come the first of the year, I dread those inevitable Facebook comments from regular gym goers lamenting the "New Year's Resolutioners" who have taken up all the machines. As if your assertions that their new found momentum won't last is in any way beneficial and not devastatingly hurtful. Yeah, you're stronger willed than other people, and you should be commended for that. It doesn't make you better though, it just makes you different. The large have different circumstances to deal with. I'm not sure if people realize that one of the main reasons you don't see more chubby people at the gym is not that we're lazy, it's that we're embarrassed. More specifically, we are terrified of your judgement. We see it in how you look at our oversized work out clothes, meant to hide the bodies we more than anything want to one day show off. We feel it as you tap your foot impatiently, waiting for the next available stationary bike. The way you wrinkle your nose, even if you don't realize you're doing it. Recently science and the media have begun making more strides to explain how depression and self-esteem can have just as much impact on your weight as what you eat. Thank goodness too, because I'm getting a little over it.

Once when I was in middle school, a little girl was telling me and another friend some story or other, and, I kid you not, she said “Oh, and this one woman was really fat” then turned, looked at me, held up a very polite hand, softened her eyes, and said “No offense.” This girl was maybe ten, and to be honest kind of an asshole (she kicked me in what I think she thought should be my testicles once too).

I've had waiters in fancy restaurants explain to me what it is I just ordered, as if the concept of fine dining is somehow foreign to me. "Now you know that fish isn't fully cooked right?" "Oh really? It's not like the Gordon's Fisherman? Cause them sticks is the only eatin' fish I know. Can you make sure they put a lot of ketchup on it?" Too bad they didn't tell the aging millionaire cowboy at the table next to me the same thing, because they could have avoided his loud "What the Hell?" when they plopped his seared tuna on the table in front of him. Other times I've had restaurant staff go out of their way to let me how their restaurant works so that I know what I'm in for. Just because their tiny minds can't believe that I've ever eaten anything that would fit on a "small plate" doesn't mean I don't understand tapas.

   

The worst part? They don't even realize how messed up the whole thing is. That little girl thought she was being nice to me. Those waiters thought they were helping me out, making sure the big girl wasn't sad when she only got two dumplings.

America’s weight problem is as much a societal issue as it is a personal one, and no one seems to be able to get it right. Either they're too mean or too sympathetic, and really, both are terrible. I've talked about it before, and surely will again (much to the chagrin of my thin readers). I know instead of just talking about it (or complaining as the eye-roller sect would call it), I should be doing something about it. Yet for me, working through the reasons I got myself in this mess in the first place is the most important step. It should be for every overweight person. Understanding how society treats us and how we should act in response (internally and externally) is just as important as how much ice cream we eat to make ourselves feel better about it. What dear sweet sweaty Nathan Sorrell does, more than anything, is contribute to the necessary dialogue of that push-pull place we're in between the haters and the motivators, and for that, I offer my praise and admiration. So at the same time is Nike's ad exploitative of big kids like him? Yeah, I think so.

Nike's main purpose is to sell to athletic types not to inspire couch potatoes. If the latter were the case, then their website would offer more than just eighteen pieces of plus size women's clothing total (they sell one hundred regular sized bras alone). Nike's failure to live up to it's grand statements isn't something that should come as a surprise though. It is, after all, a marketing ploy. It also should not, in any way, detract from the greatness that young master Sorrell found when, after puking in a ditch, he got back up and ran the rest of the way down that stupid lonely road.