• About Me
  • Other Writings
  • Interview Clips
  • All About Me: American Racism, American Narcissism, and the Conversation America Can’t Have
  • Video Clips
  • Boy @ The Window Pictures
  • Boy @ The Window Theme Music

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

~

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Bob Seger

With the World War C Crowd, It Never Ends

17 Saturday Sep 2022

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bob Seger, Capitalism, Cliques, Cool, COVID-19 Pandemic, Death Cult, Death Policies, Humanities, Masking, Mitigation Policies, MVHS, Night Moves, Old Time Rock & Roll, Pandemic, Return to Normal, Shunned, Silent Treatment, Unmaksed


World War Z gif of horde climbing a wall, March 26, 2017. (http://reddit.com).

During my Boy @ The Window research and writing years, I sometimes took requests from the group I initially interviewed to reach out to other Humanities and Mount Vernon High School classmates. And so, even as I struggled to make the family side of Boy @ The Window mesh with the school side of the memoir between 2007 and 2011, I did a dozen interviews outside the first couple dozen. They weren’t very useful, considering the limited contact I had with some of these former mates back in the day. But they did provide some additional insight into my cohort beyond those I had to deal with nearly every day for six years, wisdom more useful for thinking about things like American narcissism or the current national climate.

There was one conversation I had with a former classmate that was more telling than so many others. At the request of one interviewee, I reached out to her sometime in 2009. I called her up, and her husband answered first. Once I went through the professional back-and-forth about who I was calling and for what purpose, there was a pause and gasp on his end, a surprise that I somehow spoke English and knew how to conduct an adult conversation.

 She listened in on the other line. 

“You sound so different,” she chirped. I’m thinking, I’m 39. Of course I sound different. What did you think? Life for me ended at 17? Really? 

“You know, Donald,” she continued, “you were, uh, well, uh—”

“Weird. That’s what you mean to say. I know I was. I know what I was like back then,” I replied.

“Yes! Yes!” she said with bemusement and relief. 

At that point, the husband made some quip and hung up his receiver, and I chatted away with my former classmate for another 90 minutes.

But the whole time, I was pissed. Really, one of your favorite songs while we were in high school was Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Rock,” and I’m the one who’s weird? Especially when “Night Moves” is so much better? Especially when the average Mount Vernon student would have seen both of us as “weird?” Ugh! I asked my wife after the call, “Why are so many of my former classmates such assholes?

I already knew why. Being part of some clique or in-crowd, being “cool” or “special” in some way, was everything for so many of the cliques I was of but not in while schooling between seventh grade and senior year and Humanities (1981-87). When in actual conversation, I could relate to nearly every group at the joint, but those conversations were few, and became fewer by 12th grade. My eclecticism made me not Black enough, my inability to stick with a sport made me not athletic enough. And my ranking as 14th in my class (really 12th, because two juniors were graduating a year early) was both too little and too much for the nerdy Humanities set. So, I did what I always did when the cool cliques couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge my existence or respect my space. I gradually ignored them and built a cocoon for my heart and head. They will not get in, they will not stop my plans for life beyond them. They’re assholes, they can go fuck themselves. That’s what they’ll end up doing anyway.

Three and a half decades later, and nearly three years into a pandemic that has killed at least 1.1 million Americans and made at least 100 million sick (with 6.5 million dead and 611 million sick worldwide), the US is playing Russian roulette with every person’s lungs and lives. Please note that these numbers are massive undercounts, all with the intent of getting everyone back to work and keeping a stalled capitalist economic system of profits over people going. 

Yet a majority of Americans are running around as if it’s 1972, unmasked and hanging out at concerts, sporting events, and barbecues, jumping on airplanes and going to vacation spots, and living their so-called normal lives. All while catching COVID-19 Omicron variants over and over again. Schools and universities (including my own) now have few (if any) mitigation policies in place. Stay two meters or six feet away from me? “No, I want to breathe all over you,” is today’s social distancing. Other than the elderly, the immunocompromised and disabled, and those who live with them, the US has become a dystopian free-for-all of “live now, die sooner or later, oh well, you do you.” 

It’s always been like this in the US, the world leader in claiming narcissism through the guise of individualism. Wearing a medical-grade mask, getting tested, avoiding mass spreading events, and getting vaccinated were just 16 months ago, though, when fewer than 10,000 people were catching COVID-19 per day, and deaths were in the low-200s. And though the rest of the world is faltering at following these basics nearly three years into the pandemic, they are falling America’s death cult lead, after all.

I have two articles predicting this behavior, both in Al Jazeera. It was so easy to predict, because the same kind of in-crowd behavior I saw in my classmates in the 1980s is exactly how most Americans behave in all areas of their lives. We are truly a nation of attention-seeking assholes. Thirty-five years ago, it was classmates with whom I shared lots of common interests who shunned me because of my kufi or because of my Bible-toting phase or just because cooler cliques might shun them too. Now it’s Americans who otherwise agree we should all wear masks indoors (at least) walking down halls in university buildings literally turning colors and coughing up a lung while maskless. This behavior is disgusting, biologically nasty-disgusting, and calloused, and heartbreaking, and nerve-racking to the point of paranoid. 

As I tweeted to a mutual earlier this week, “I feel contempt, I feel rage, I feel depressed. Mostly, I’m making sure my double-mask (N95/medical mask combo) is fitting tightly.” I make it even tighter whenever a faculty member or my students — especially the “cooler” ones, the buff white athletes and the future hotep Black guys in the classroom — stare at me like I’ve grown two extra heads out of my neck. 

They can stare all they want. This double-mask combo of mine will not come off as long as I can help it. I will continue to spray my classrooms down whenever I can help it. I will spray and wash my hands as much as I can, as long as I can help it. I will stay away from indoor and outdoor dining and indoor and outdoor events with unmasked people as long as I can help it. If this makes me weird, I want to be the weirdest person on the planet. I welcome it.

This return to “normal” smacks of a paranoid desperation of its own. A desperation present in the undead bodies of World War Z. So unthinking and desperate are America’s policies and people to normalize a pandemic that it’s almost as if they think it’s cool to spread their debilitating germs to all of us. We as a nation will pay dearly for this, for years, maybe even for decades to come. In so many ways, many of my former classmates, the World War C set, and the extras in World War Z aren’t that different. They welcome assholery, and they play with and at death, sometimes eating it, sometimes being eaten by it.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

scr2555-proj697-a-kindle-logo-rgb-lg

Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

iBookstore-logo-300x100

Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

Boy @ The Window

Twitter Updates

  • RT @HelenGymPHL: Today is Feb. 1, and on a day when rent is typically due, I made sure our budget set aside $30 million to help landlords a… 35 minutes ago
  • @KieseLaymon Many congrats! I hope the adaptation does full justice to your writing and sense of the world, and the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 hours ago
  • RT @FrankWaln: You know how Harvard’s Peabody museum announced that they have hair samples taken from native children in collections? Well… 3 hours ago
  • RT @myronjclifton: I’ve been testing the new social media platform Spoutible and here is my pre-launch review. It launches 2/1 and I am cer… 1 day ago
  • RT @yarahawari: This morning I explained to @SkyNews how the context of decades of debilitating Israeli regime colonisation is conveniently… 1 day ago
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Archives

  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007

Blogroll

  • Kimchi and Collard Greens
  • Thinking Queerly: Schools, politics and culture
  • Website for My First Book and Blog
  • WordPress.com

Recent Comments

Eliza Eats on The Poverty of One Toilet Bowl…
decollins1969 on The Tyranny of Salvation
Khadijah Muhammed on The Tyranny of Salvation

NetworkedBlogs on Facebook

NetworkedBlogs
Blog:
Notes From a Boy @ The Window
Topics:
My Life, Culture & Education, Politics & Goofyness
 
Follow my blog

616 616 East Lincoln Avenue A.B. Davis Middle School Abuse Academia Academy for Educational Development AED Afrocentricity American Narcissism Authenticity Bigotry Blackness Boy @ The Window Carnegie Mellon University Child Abuse Class of 1987 CMU Coping Strategies Crush #1 Crush #2 Death Disillusionment Diversity Domestic Violence Economic Inequality Education Family Friendship Friendships Graduate School Hebrew-Israelites High-Stakes Testing Higher Education History Homelessness Humanities Humanities Program Hypocrisy Internalized Racism Jealousy Joe Trotter Joe William Trotter Jr. K-12 Education Love Manhood Maurice Eugene Washington Maurice Washington Misogyny Mother-Son Relationship Mount Vernon High School Mount Vernon New York Mount Vernon public schools Multiculturalism MVHS Narcissism NFL Pitt Pittsburgh Politics of Education Poverty President Barack Obama Race Racial Stereotypes Racism Relationships Self-Awareness Self-Discovery Self-Reflection Sexism Social Justice Teaching and Learning University of Pittsburgh Violence Whiteness Writing

Top Rated

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Notes from a Boy @ The Window
    • Join 103 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Notes from a Boy @ The Window
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...