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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

~

Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Envy

What If You’ve Never Really Had a Crew?

01 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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#ThickTheBook, Academia, CMU, Collaborations, Community, Crew, Envy, Family, Friendships, Hebrew-Israelite Years, Homies, Loneliness, Loner, Misfit, Nonprofit World, Pitt, Posse, Starling, Support Systems, Tressie McMillan Cottom


My copy of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s #ThickTheBook, January 12, 2019 (Donald Earl Collins)

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book Thick: And Other Essays, like so many of the books I’ve chosen to read over the past six years, will stay with me a while. She is brilliant, period. I feel blessed having been on the journey of reading about her experiences, her views of the world, and her Blackness and Black feminism. There are so many nuggets and witticisms in Cottom’s Thick that I should sit down and plan out a way to mine her book for actual gold and platinum. It’s rich and thick like hot chocolate with hits of cinnamon and nutmeg, something to imbibe while taking a bite of a New York-style blondie (which I specialize in cooking-wise) or slice of chocolate torte cake here and there.

But there was one sentence that stood out, before I even began reading the book in earnest. As I randomly flipped through the pages after first getting Thick, this sentence hit me hard, dazing me like the day my one-time stepfather punched me in the jaw for the first time. “Everybody needs a crew,” Cottom wrote to start her “The Price of Fabulousness” essay, adding that she has “many because I am extremely fortunate.” Yeah, no kidding!, I thought immediately after reading that sentence. For a moment, maybe even 0.68 seconds, I was envious. Not like, “Oh my God, the arrogance of this one here!” kind of jealous. Nor was I the “I wish I was her!” green-eyed monster, either. I realized that since the last weeks of sixth grade and the beginning of three and a half years as a Hebrew-Israelite, I hadn’t really had a crew as Cottom defined it at all. That was the spring of 1981, when I was eleven years old, nearly 38 years ago, by the way.

From the day I let my one-time best friend Starling beat me in a fight over my alleged decision to join the Hebrew-Israelite cult and walk into William H. Holmes ES with a white kufi on my head, I had no crew. There’s a reason I consistently refer to my middle school and high school Humanities classmates as either “classmates” or “acquaintances.” They weren’t my friends, some were genuine bullies and assholes to me and to each other, and lacked in most forms of what grown folk would call social graces. They were my academic and (sometimes) athletic competitors, they were friends with each other, but only to a point. But one thing they could never, ever be was my crew or posse or homies or anything close to what Cottom meant. That Wu-Tang Clan-level of professional collaboration and possibly personal friendship didn’t exist in the cauldron that was that magnet program within an even more hostile public school system in Mount Vernon, New York.

College at the University of Pittsburgh was where I’d find friendships again, and maybe at times, the primordial beginnings of a crew. But these proto-crews never quite came together for more than a night on the town here or there. Quite frankly, the other thing my eclectic groups of friends and acquaintances had in common was knowing me. At least, the parts of me I was willing to show folks at the time. I knew most of them weren’t ready for the real me, because I wasn’t ready for the real me. Not at nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one.

Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellows Retreat, Berkeley, CA, February 17, 1996. (Donald Earl Collins)

Graduate school me, though, was more ready. My times at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon earning my doctorate were the closest I got to having a crew. At one point in 1994-95, I probably knew at least half of the Blacks, Africans, Afro-Caribbeans, and Latinxs on Pitt’s campus, and all of the Black diaspora students at CMU (the latter because there were so few of us there). But despite the common interests around campus climate, student and faculty diversity, mistreatment on the basis of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, the fact remained that my crews were eclectic and transitory ones. Masters students would be gone in two or three years. My warp-drive, single-minded race toward the doctorate made certain that any bonds I forged during those years wouldn’t last. There would be no collaborations or calls for career help or advice with these disparate groups. Not even when I lived off the fumes of my last grad school stipend check the summer of 1997.

Working in the nonprofit world and as contingent faculty has often meant being on the inside, but still feeling like an outsider, anyway. Or really, a fraud, because I never fully embraced the norms of nonprofit capitalism or academia as intellectual capitalism and exploitation. I became friends with a fairly eclectic bunch in these spaces, too. But none of them shared my passion for creative nonfiction writing, or have wanted an alignment between career goals and social justice fights, or even, have had a taste for basketball as a spectator or player.

I guess one could say that my wife and son and two of my closest friends are my crew, but that’s not how a crew works. They are family, a very supportive family to be sure, but family is muck thicker than blood or a crew.

So, maybe Cottom is right. I really, really, really need a crew. I’ve made it pretty far in parts of my life without one. I’m not sure how much more Sisyphus I can do on my own, though.

No Time For Jealousy

30 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Class, Coveting, Envy, Erika, General Foods, Humanities, JD, Jealousy, Love Canal, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon Hospital, MVHS, Smorgasbord, Target, Wendy


Envy, June 2009. (http://psychologytoday.com).

Envy, June 2009. (http://psychologytoday.com).

There are some emotions and human actions in which I don’t allow myself to partake. I usually don’t follow the herd. I don’t get caught up in what’s popular at the moment, no matter how many cool people in my life are riding the wave. I don’t build someone up in order to tear them down. And I don’t allow myself more than a flash of envy or jealousy.

Sometimes, these choices are rather easy, like with me having never watched an episode of Scandal or Empire. Sometimes, the choice to not virtually excoriate someone is difficult, given the narcissisms and moralisms that make up American culture. Sometimes, my path less traveled is one that has become easier over time. With jealousy, I’ve learned over the past thirty-five years that it’s a waste of time, neurons, and quantum energy to peer into the lives of those allegedly better off.

But this was hardly an easy process. I had so many reasons to be jealous when I was a preteen and teenager. My middle school and high school Humanities years were ones of constant, albeit momentary, jealousy. I was envious of classmates whose parents made more in a month than my Mom made working all year at Mount Vernon Hospital. I felt envy whenever I saw a classmate chow down on a smorgasbord of a lunch every day, especially on all the days I couldn’t eat because I either didn’t have the money to buy lunch or because the Hebrew-Israelite no-pork rule prevented me from eating the Friday grilled ham and cheese sandwich. Jealousy would come along when I’d see the mini-cliques of former Grimes and Pennington Elementary classmates getting along like the best of friends. Or, when my classmates would come to school wearing the latest and best of ’80s fashion while I walked around in sneakers with holes in the bottoms.

Smorgasbord, from breakfast to dinner, September 2010. (http://web2printexperts.com).

Smorgasbord, from breakfast to dinner, September 2010. (http://web2printexperts.com).

These first bouts with jealousy quickly turned inward toward my own insecurities and inadequacies, and outward toward my parents’ inability to do anything to make my life better materially. For years after the shock of preteen and early adolescent jealousy, I never saw myself as worthy of my classmates, not even worthy enough to befriend someone whose life, though maybe materially blessed, might have been unstable in other areas.

My first realization of seeing myself as being jealous, though, was toward the end of tenth grade at Mount Vernon High School. That’s when my secret first love Wendy and the contrarian one JD had begun to date. I didn’t feel this sense of love or weird emotional trepidation regarding Wendy by the time we were in tenth grade, though. I sensed as early as seventh grade this particular eventuality. No, I was more jealous of the reality that Wendy and JD could connect with each other in a way that I knew for me was beyond my reach. I didn’t really have any friends, so dating would’ve been like building a bridge over the Pacific Ocean by comparison.

But I learned something as well. Because theirs was an interracial relationship, I got a first-row seat to the stares, the whispers, and the occasional ignorant-ass comments from the other high schoolers about them dating. Seeing that, hearing that, made me aware of the fact that jealousy is a dangerous emotion, and give the life of deficits I had to make up, I didn’t have time or gray matter to waste in the matter of woe-is-me-as-outsider in 1985 or in the foreseeable future.

Public Enemy logo (note the crosshairs target), September 30, 2016. (http://twitter.com).

Public Enemy logo (note the crosshairs target), September 30, 2016. (http://twitter.com).

A year later, when I sensed on some level that some of my classmates were actually jealous of me, I balked at the idea. I thought, “I have nothing that anyone should be jealous of.” To me, this was literally true. With some of the cool kids literally laughing at me as I walked by them in the hallways, I couldn’t foresee a situation in which anyone would ever be jealous of me.

And yet I was wrong. My academic success, my fierce insistence to fight isolation by making myself independent of fads, trends, and conventional wisdom, had already made me a target of other’s envy. It wasn’t until the summer after I graduated when a co-worker at my General Foods job, one who was one year behind me at Mount Vernon High School, cut through the psychology for me. Erika cleared up so many things for me about the nature of friendships, relationships, and jealousy. I owe her big time for that, then and now.

Love Canal, suburban community turned EPA Superfund site, circa 1980. (http://buffalonews.com).

Love Canal, suburban community turned EPA Superfund site, circa 1980. (http://buffalonews.com).

Nearly thirty years later, and I am still surprised when I discover that someone is jealous of me. Really, I am. I guess it’s because I operate by the moment-of-envy rule. Meaning that I allow myself to feel jealous, but only for a moment, and remind myself of my own path, my own destination, and the work I must do to get there. After all, I don’t really want someone’s else job, promotion, salary, status, car, or house. That’s their life, and only God truly knows if their life would be one I’d want to have. And then I move on, knowing that the green grass on the other side of the tracks can often obscure the Love Canal underneath. I move on, because there’s always more work to do, for me, my wife, and my son. I move on, because after all these years, that’s all I know how to do.

Aside

Running Away, 30 Years Later

25 Tuesday Aug 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"Emotion (Ain't Nobody)" (2014), "Runnin'" (1995), 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Dreams, Envy, Family Responsibilities, Fleetwood, Lliy-White, Loneliness, Making Plans, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Maverick Sabre, MVHS, Pharcyde, Single-Minded, Spin Moves, Visions, Whiteness


Today’s date marks three decades since I took on my idiot stepfather Maurice Washington, and actually won, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. I’ve written about the incident and my twenty-three-hour trek through Mount Vernon, my dreams, prayers, and wishes, and my confrontation before, here and in Boy @ The Window. (Even now, the baseline to Pharcyde’s “Runnin'” (1995) is running in my head, temporarily replacing my writing theme song for the past week, Maverick Sabre’s “Emotion (Ain’t Nobody)” (2011), but that’s how my mind works). So I won’t go over all of the details again. Still, there are a few important takeaways that puts Sunday, August 25, 1985 in my lifetime victory column.

Michigan WR Jeremy Gallon's spin move gif on way to a 61-yd TD against Notre Dame, Ann Arbor, MI, September 7, 2013. (http://thebiglead.com/).

Michigan WR Jeremy Gallon’s spin move gif on way to a 61-yd TD against Notre Dame, Ann Arbor, MI, September 7, 2013. (http://thebiglead.com/).

1. Physical advantages. It never occurred to me until Maurice tried to blindside me in the apartment hallway with a punch that I had much faster reflexes than the idiot. It also never occurred to me that I had a better sense of balance. I managed to avoid the punch and spin around him by using his 350-400 pounds of bulk against him (I really hated having to touch the unwashed, greasy fat frog of a man), and in only a foot of space between the two of us. That’s how I escaped Maurice’s punch and grasp, and got out of the apartment to begin my trek. Knowing what I know now, I should’ve tried out for basketball instead of baseball in eleventh grade.

2. Not finding my father. I kind of wished I had, just to have a few hours that day not to think about my present and future. But my alcoholic dad was a significant part of my present, and his absence gave me real time to think about how jacked up my family life was. I knew, if nothing else, that Maurice, Mom, and Jimme couldn’t pin that on me.

3. Walking up Gramatan Avenue and into Fleetwood. It was partly a walk that reminded me about how the other half of Mount Vernon — affluent and predominantly White — lived. I knew that I’d never be a part of that Mount Vernon, and not just because most of them would run me over with a car sooner than say “Hello.” It was the sense of exclusively, the ability to check in and out of progressive issues, like Humanities and magnet programs, that made me see. These folks I could never befriend.

St. Ursulas Roman Catholic Church, 213 East Lincoln Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, August 2012. (http://maps.google.com).

St. Ursulas Roman Catholic Church, 213 East Lincoln Avenue, Mount Vernon, NY, August 2012. (http://maps.google.com).

4. MVHS overnight dreams and Catholic church prayers. Both reminded me that if I played my cards right, I could be on my way to college in two years, twenty-four months, 730 days. I could cope with 616, Maurice, my older brother Darren and my younger siblings and high school and Humanities for that much longer, I thought. But I also knew I needed to make a conscious, almost single-minded effort to do so. Even then, I was tired of burying my thoughts and emotions and playing the role of enigmatic weirdo, though. I realized this was going to be a battle with myself.

Yet what I didn’t learn from my ordeal would also be two more reasons to leave Mount Vernon. I wouldn’t learn those reasons and lessons until the spring and summer of ’87, when the respectability police, the good middle class folk of Black Mount Vernon, would give me just the push I needed…

Merit-hypocrisy in the Air

18 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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"Who-You-Know" World, Academia, Ageism, Bruce Anthony Jones, Daniel P. Resnick, Dick Oestreicher, Envy, Hard Work, Hypocrisy, Jay Wickliff, Jealousy, Jelani Cobb, Joe William Trotter Jr., Ken Williams, Meritocracy, Nepotism, New Voices, New Voices Fellowship Program, Nonprofit World, Presidential Classroom, Racism, Wendy Goldman


Meritocracy cartoon, October 29, 2010 (Josh C. Lyman via http://www.clibsy.com/).

Meritocracy cartoon, October 29, 2010 (Josh C. Lyman via http://www.clibsy.com/).

One of the hardest ideals for me to give up on in all of my life has been the idea of meritocracy. Even when I couldn’t spell the word, much less define it or use it in a sentence, I believed in this ideal. It was the driving force behind my educational progression from the middle of fourth grade in January ’79 until I finished my doctorate in May ’97. The meritocratic ideal even guided me in my career, in both academia and in the nonprofit world. Only to realize by the end of ’09 what I suspected, but ignored, for many years. My ideal of a meritocracy is shared by only a precious few, and the rest give lip service to it before wiping it off their mouths, concealing their split lips and forked tongue with nepotism instead.

Being the historian I am — whom people like Jelani Cobb joked about on Twitter as a curse — I am programmed to look back at situations in my own life to look for root causes, to understand what I can do to not repeat my own mistakes, my not-so-well-planned decisions. I’ve thought about my advisor Joe Trotter and my dissertation committee of Trotter, Dan Resnick (husband of education researcher Lauren Resnick) and Bruce Anthony Jones. The biggest mistake I made was in putting this hodgepodge committee of a HNIC advisor, racial determinist and closeted wanderer together to help guide me through my dissertation and then into my first postdoctoral job.

Aaron Eckhart as main character in movie I, Frankenstein (2014), August 12, 2013. (http://sciencefiction.com/).

Aaron Eckhart as main character in movie I, Frankenstein (2014), August 12, 2013. (http://sciencefiction.com/).

Of course, I didn’t know enough about these men to describe them this way, certainly not until I’d graduated and couldn’t find full-time work for more than two years. The signs, though, were there. Trotter’s unwillingness to recommend me for any job before my completed first draft of my dissertation was really complete (it took me two weeks to revise my dissertation from first to final draft). Resnick calling my dissertation writing “journalistic” and saying that my nearly 2,000 endnotes and thirty pages of sources was “insufficient.” Bruce pulling back on his schedule with me even before taking the job at University of Missouri at Columbia in July ’96.

None of this had anything to with my work. It was about me, whether I as a twenty-six year-old had suffered enough, had gone through enough humiliation, to earn a simple letter of recommendation for a job. When Trotter finally decided it was time to write me a letter of recommendation, it was December ’96, and the job was University of Nebraska-Omaha, “subject to budget considerations,” meaning that it could (and it did) easily fall through. Resnick flat-out refused to share anything he wanted to write about me, with all his “confidentiality” concerns, while I wrote all my letters for myself for Bruce. It was a disaster, and none of it had anything to do with the quality of my work as a historian, educator, or academic writer.

The work I ended up getting after Carnegie Mellon was the result of my dissertation, my teaching experiences, and my networking. The idea that I’d earned my spot, though, was still lacking in the places in which I worked. Particularly at Presidential Classroom, where I was the token highly-educated Negro on staff, and working at Academy for Educational Development with the New Voices Fellowship Program. In both cases, I had bosses whose racial biases only became clear once I began working with them. The then executive director Jay Wickliff never cared about the quality of my work or my degrees. Wickliff’s only concern was that I should keep my mouth shut when he acted or spoke in a racist manner.

My immediate supervisor Ken, on the other hand, wanted all the credit for work I did under him, except in cases when he deemed my methods “not diplomatic enough.” Even before his bipolar disorder led him to a psychological breakdown, Ken regularly accused me of gunning for his position, sometimes turning red whenever he heard about my latest publication, teaching assignment or conference presentation. I had to fight to keep my job and to move on within AED in those final months of ’03 and early ’04, a fight that had zero to do with merit.

Dixie Biggs, Lip Service teapot, April 19, 2015. (http://pinterest.com).

Dixie Biggs, Lip Service teapot, April 19, 2015. (http://pinterest.com).

I say all this because the one thing that every one of these folks had in common is their lip service to the belief that hard work and results are the keys to success and career advancement. Yet for every one of them, the merit that I had earned didn’t matter. My relative youth, my age, my race, my heterosexual orientation, even my achievements, either scared them or gave them reason to have contempt for me.

I say all of this because in the past eleven years, I have been very careful about the company I keep, about the mentors I seek, about the friends I make, personally and professionally. I went from not trusting anyone as a preteen and teenager to trusting a few too many folks in my twenties and early thirties. All because I believed that my hard working nature and talent mattered more than anything else. What has always mattered more is who you know, especially in high places like academia and with large nonprofits and foundations. So, please, please, please be careful about the supposedly great people you meet. Many of them aren’t so great at all.

That’s why the idea that academia is a place full of progressive leftists is ridiculous. Yes, people like Dick Oestreicher, Wendy Goldman, Joe Trotter and so many others wrote and talked about progressive movements and ideals while I was their student. But fundamentally, they couldn’t have cared less about the actual human beings they worked with and advised, particularly my Black ass. Their ideals stopped the moment they ended their talk at a conference or wrote the last sentence of a particular book. They only cared about people that they could shape and mold into their own image. And that’s not meritocracy. That’s the ultimate form of nepotism.

The Audacity of Low Expectations/Jealousy

19 Monday Sep 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, race, Work, Youth

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Boy @ The Window, Envy, Exceeding Expectations, Humanities, Jealousy, Low Expectations, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Setting Standards, Success


Mimi and Eunice, “Low Expectations,” September 19, 2011. (Source/http://mimiandeunice.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws because of image’s low resolution and without the intent to reproduce or distribute for profit.

It seems to me that I’ve spent a lot of time over the past three decades overcoming other people’s psychological issues. Regarding race, race and gender, race, gender and class, not to mention performance issues, success, jealousy and envy, and other psychoses that had little or nothing to do with me. It’s something that most folks who aren’t Black, male, grew up in poverty and had some success (however one defines that) really can’t understand unless they have parents who’ve told them every single day that they “weren’t good enough to live.”

Still, these issues have mostly cropped up for me when I’ve experienced what most people would recognize as success, as if the only role I was ever supposed to play in life was that of a doormat. The first time I went through this process of blowing up other people’s low expectations of me was at the beginning of my senior year at Mount Vernon High School, about this time twenty-five years ago. A couple of weeks into the school year, MVHS released our class rankings. Out of the 545 or so students eligible to graduate as part of the Class of ’87, I was ranked fourteenth with a 3.83 average.

My MVHS trascript, courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Admissions Office, January 7, 1987. (Source/Donald Earl Collins). Note the circles from the admissions officer all over the transcript.

I understood that this was pretty good, but I was also disappointed that I hadn’t cracked the top ten. In fact, the top twelve students in our class all had GPAs above a 4.0, all because of our weighted Level 0 and Level 1 courses. Crush #1 finished just ahead of me, thirteenth in our rankings, something I saw as ironic. Despite this sign of academic success, I hoped and wished for more, and spent several late-night walks over the next few weeks second-guessing my work in tenth grade.

My classmates started to show their darker sides, some for the first time since the days of 7S. One came up to me after my AP Calculus class soon after the rankings were posted. “The only reason you’re in the top twenty’s because of history!,” implying that I was an average student in all of my other subjects. Another, much shorter and much more condescending classmate chimed in a few days later, saying that “the only thing you can do with history is play Jeopardy.” I wasn’t exactly walking around school celebrating my good fortune. I chalked it up to the stress of years of academic competition, the boiling over of senioritis and the rage associated with college preparations. The possibility that jealousy was involved didn’t cross my mind until much later. I didn’t think that anyone could be envious of my standing.

Fast-forward four years to the fall of ’90, as I prepared in earnest for grad school. Not only had I endured a short conversation at the beginning of that year with the great Sylvia Fasulo and her attempts to discourage me from pursuing grad school, law school or a career in law (see my “The Legend of Sylvia Fasulo” from September ’09). I had two professors from Pitt who told me that they weren’t sure about my chances for getting into grad school, and Reid Andrews, who flat-out told me that he didn’t think that I was “graduate school material.”

I have no doubt that if these yahoos were jealous of me at all, it was because of my age, and not my potential. They simply didn’t see how a 3.4 GPA and a 3.82 in my history major would be good enough to get me into a master’s — much less a doctoral — program. The fact that I completed my master’s degree in two semesters within twenty months of essentially being told that I was a fool left Andrews, at least, at a loss for words.

There are so many other instances in which a grad student, a professor, a supervisor, even my siblings, have expressed their low expectations and jealousy over my tiny little crumbs of success that it has left my head spinning on a broom handle. I mean, what did I really do to earn or deserve that kind of attention? I don’t own a house or have a million dollars in gold lying around. I have yet to publish an article in Rolling Stone or in The Atlantic Monthly. I don’t exactly have LeBron James or President Obama on speed dial.

So what is it about me, I’ve asked myself so many times? And then, I’ve reminded myself of something I figured out about twenty-one years ago. That the only expectations that I ultimately need to meet or exceed are my own. That what other people say about me, no matter how distasteful, really doesn’t matter, for those folks were never going to be there for me anyway.

Maybe it’s my refusal to live under someone else’s low expectations, to not allowing myself the luxury of envy, that irks those around me. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s as simple as misery loving company, and not loving mine. Either way, it’s ironic that we live in a time in which we prefer to tear each other down rather than help each other get going in our lives. Which makes my relationship with the rest of humanity so bittersweet. I guess I really am a writer!

Anger Issues and Management, Inc

25 Saturday Sep 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Mount Vernon High School, Religion, Youth

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7S, A.B. Davis Middle School, Anger, Anger Management, Christianity, Envy, Fights, Jealousy, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, MVHS, Patience, Pittsburgh, Race, Ridicule, Righteous Indignation, Scorn, University of Pittsburgh, Wisdom


Rage of the Incredible Hulk. Source:http://www.ramasscreen.com

Exposure to abuse, ridicule and scorn in fairly large dosages when you’re young will leave you with anger issues to manage. I should know. Don’t believe the impressions that my classmates from Humanities and MVHS and my friends from my first two years at Pitt have of me. I may have appeared to smile, to be happy-go-lucky, to be sober and monk-like. But mostly, I was angry, not in a raging, vengeful way, but in a depressed way, a constant, gnawing, sometimes envious, sometimes ironic and sarcastic way. My anger was the kind of anger that I chewed on and swallowed, simmered at low heat for a while in the pit of my belly, then I’d regurgitate it into my mouth, and then chewed on it and swallowed it again.

But, despite what some folks in certain religious circles may say, not all anger is bad, evil or sinful. In fact, sometimes anger is necessary, even if and when it’s dangerous as an emotion or a state of mind. Why, you may ask? Because without anger, you take what life gives to you, even when most of what good you get out of life comes in a miserly and begrudging way. Everything else that comes, if indeed bad or evil for you, isn’t taken in stride or taken with difficulty. You simply don’t take it at all. You become so emotionless that whatever happens doesn’t matter at all, as if your purpose for existing is merely to exist, not to succeed, not to do good works or make yourself a better person because of or despite your circumstances.

That, by the way, is what I’ve heard over the years when some of my former classmates from Mount Vernon — and a few people who knew me in my early days at the University of Pittsburgh — describe me. It was as if I was Porgy in Porgy and Bess, Louis Armstrong or Paul Robeson singing, “I’ve got plenty of nothin’, and nothin’s plenty for me.” That would and did piss me off, but I reminded myself that this was how I had to be to deal with the anger I had within. With emotion, I could’ve easily flown into a rage many

In Treatment Screen Shot. Source: http://sepinwall.blogspot.com

a day between ’81 and ’89.

At the same time, I had the wisdom to allow my anger to rise up, to channel it many more times than not into what I needed to have happen at a particular moment in time. It’s amazing how much you can get done with a sense of righteous anger and indignation, a feeling of got-to-get-it-done-or-else anger. It came at the right time, usually when I felt that my back was up against a concrete wall, with no way out except to fight my way out.

Like in February ’82, the middle of seventh grade, when I just got tired of my 7S classmates thinking that they could say and do anything to me without me getting angry, and tired of days on end at 616 without food to eat. After a fight in the boy’s locker room with one of my classmates — which I won, by the way — I channeled the energy unleashed by that rage and fight into two things. Improving my mediocre grades, and my infatuation over Crush #1. It was three months of relative bliss in the middle of the worst eighteen months of my life.

Richard Marx, 1987.

Or in January ’88, after recovering from the crash-and-burn of my first semester at Pitt. I was mad and disappointed with myself over allowing my obsession with Crush #2 hijack the final six weeks of my semester, not to mention my generally hopeful and creative imagination. After an incident with a couple of my more evil and drunken dorm mates — one in which I cracked a broom handle on the crowns of their heads (no injuries or investigation, luckily) — I summoned some discipline and theme music to get through that second semester. From Richard Marx’s “Should’ve Known Better” to Paul Carrick’s “Don’t Shed A Tear,” I spent fifteen weeks turning anger into A’s and jadedness into new friendships.

I’ve had other periods in my life — in ’93, ’98, and ’03 — where the circumstances dictated that anger, with some patience and understanding, was absolutely necessary in my overcoming of them. The lesson here is that anger — like fire, electricity and nuclear fusion — can be and is often dangerous. Yet it’s also necessary, a potential evil that can be an actual good, if channeled, allowed to dissipate, if tempered by wisdom and patience. At the least, anger allows those of us under stress to know that we are very much alive.

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:

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

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

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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

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