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

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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.

Not Finding My Musical Center

16 Tuesday Jun 2015

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

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Authentic Blackness, Authenticity, Bad Ideas, Bad Music, Black Masculinity, Columbia House, Coping Strategies, Crush #2, Dahlia, David Wolf, Escapism, Estelle Abel, Glass Tiger, Honors Convocation 1987, MVHS, Phyllis, Richard Capozzola, Self-Discovery, Silent Treatment, Sylvia Fasulo, Terre Haute, Thompson Twins, Tower Records

Glass Tiger, The Thin Red Line (1986) album cover, June 6, 2015. (http://www.amazon.ca).

June ’15’s calendar is exactly the same as the one I lived through in June ’81, June ’87, June ’98, and June ’09 (you can look it up). But June ’87’s the month I graduated from Mount Vernon High School. At seventeen, my Blackness, my authenticity as a young man and as a Black man, my place in the world, all were question marks. Between Black administrators like Estelle Abel and Brenda Smith (not to mention White ones like Richard Capozzola and Carapella), teachers like David Wolf and my guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo, plus the fifty or so “cool” kids with their ’80s pre-Nu Jack Swing/post-Purple Rain Prince look, I might as well have been an alien from another planet. That’s not even counting my strange and out-of-character incident with Dahlia, the humiliation of the Sam and Laurell Awards Show, the dissonance of dealing with Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice and my siblings at 616, my father Jimme’s drinking, and the run-ins with not-so-normal Crush #2 in Phyllis.

The day I realized most how differently the world outside of Mount Vernon viewed me from how I viewed myself came the day after graduation at Tower Records on West 66th and Broadway. I’ve told this story before, here and in Boy @ The Window, about how some NYPD officers working security there accosted me and accused me of stealing tapes that I had bought the previous week. What I have left out, though, was my state of mind in the two-week period prior to this incident. As I said in the memoir

I had my latest Walkman, my first Sony Walkman, actually, and my book bag with my recent tape investments, including a few I’d bought at Tower Records the previous Friday. Investments like Fleetwood Mac’s Tango In The Night, Genesis’ Invisible Touch, Whitney Houston’s Whitney and Glass Tiger. Glass Tiger, by the way, was a good indication of my state of mind. Boy was I pathetic!

Here I was, attempting to discover myself through what was then my normal coping strategy of escapism via eclectic music. Given my long periods of deprivation from pop culture between religion, abuse and poverty, I’d really only been at this discovering music thing for a little more than three years. I was basically a preteen in terms of pop culture and musical development outside of choir in elementary and middle school and playing the trombone and fife.

Seriously, I look at this Canadian group Glass Tiger’s ’86 album cover The Thin Red Line now and think, “this stuff isn’t even Michael Bolton worthy!” Songs like “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)” and “Someday” were actual Billboard chart-toppers in ’87, though, and because I had no friends in whom I placed trust, I trusted my coping strategies and Casey Kasem.

That, and Columbia Record Club, which I signed up for off and on between ’86 and ’89, with my high point for using their Terra Haute, Indiana mailing operation being the spring and summer of ’87. I could use them to find music I wouldn’t dare buy even at Tower Records or Crazy Eddie’s. I bought new age music by Phillip Glass, took a hand at jazz with Dizzy Gillespie, bought Van Halen’s 1984 and 5150 (California-crazy me), and went for it with Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte and Salt ‘n Pepa.

Thompson Twins, Here’s to Future Days (1985) album cover, June 6, 2015. (http://audiokarma.com).

But for every Simple Minds‘ Once Upon A Time (1985), there was Toto’s The Seventh One (1988), or Thompson Twins’ anything, really. For every song that stuck with me, like Sting’s “Be Still My Beating Heart” (1987) or Anita Baker’s “No One In The World” (1986), there was Whitney Houston’s “Love Is A Contact Sport” (1987) — one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard a voice as awesome as Whitney’s sing — and Howard Jones’ “Things Can Only Get Better” (1985). “Things Can Only Get Better,” by the way, is in my iPod’s random rotation, as I have come around to it again in the past decade.

I was trying to figure out what I liked and didn’t like musically on the fly, having lost a significant amount of time growing up for the triviality of enjoying music. This was hard to do, though, in a world in which my peers and many adults assumed that I knew myself well at the ripe old age of seventeen. No matter what my IQ score was in ’87 (about a 130, for the eugenicists out there), my emotional and psychological development probably put me about five years behind my now former classmates.

So my music tastes varied from genius to God-awful. They still do. The difference is, I recognize I may be the only one who listens to DMX for comic relief, because there’s no way to take him or his rap seriously. Or that I find Tupac and Eminem equally compelling and equally problematic. I still

Taco Bell’s Waffle Taco w/ syrup, sausage, eggs and cheese, March 27, 2014. (http://vice.com).

don’t understand the genius of Miles Davis, no matter how many times jazz enthusiasts like my friend Marc try to convince me to keep listening. Still, half of my music comes from the period between May ’87 and October ’97, and the rest crosses boundaries in time, genre, race and language (Deep Forest, anyone?).

I also recognize complete schlock, too. Unfortunately, commercial music these days is about as emotionally and mentally nutritious as a McDonald’s Big Mac and a Taco Bell Gordita combined. I try every few weeks to find out about the latest artists, just in case my son ever becomes interested in music again. Thank goodness, though, there’s no Lil’ Wayne, Rick Ross, or Iggy Izalea in our house! I’ll take my Glass Tiger (not really) any day over that!

My Take on Carnegie Mellon University

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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47 Percent Video, Affirmative Action, Alumni Association, Barbara Lazarus, Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon University, CMU, Conservatism, Disappointment, Exclusion, Fundraising, History Department, Isolation, Joe Trotter, Mitt Romney, Pitt, Silent Treatment, University of Pittsburgh

View of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning from Carnegie Mellon lawn, Pittsburgh, PA, October 22, 2012. (http://www.broadwayspotted.com/).

It’s with extreme disappointment in which I write my latest post, this one on Carnegie Mellon University, or as the locals and attendees call it, CMU (sorry, Central Michigan University folks). But I feel I have little choice, given the amount of crap I’ve received over the past few months from my doctoral institution. The alumni association and the fundraising people at Carnegie Mellon ask me for money at least twice a week, and don’t seem to get it when I say “no” or “never” or even “when Hell freezes over.” I’ve known creditors less persistent about getting money out of people than the fundraising arm of Carnegie Mellon.

The last straw for me, though, was last week. I received three emails on the same day, not to mention a letter in the mail, all asking for donations. One also included an alumni survey, which I dutifully filled out and rated Carnegie Mellon at the low-end of every category in the survey. “Not only do I not mentor my students or aspiring college students about Carnegie Mellon,” I said. “I go out of my way to make sure that they do not ever consider applying to or attending Carnegie Mellon,” I added at the end of the survey.

Romney in 47 Percent Video, September 18, 2012. (Joe Pompeo/http://capitalnewyork.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright Laws – cropped/low resolution.

I don’t think that the alumni association or the fundraisers really understand the depths of my disappointment regarding my four years at CMU between ’93 and ’97. I found the university culture about as welcoming as going to a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton, and with many folks from the same crowd as well. Anytime your campus refuses to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a holiday, or insists on having Dinesh D’Souza give a two-hour talk on race without an opposing viewpoint, it’s a stifling place. A campus in which the College Republicans stage marches while not having a strong College Democrats or progressive group in place is a bastion of conservatism, not just politically, but socially as well.

In four years, I became friends with a very small group of students and professors. I would’ve made more of an effort, if I hadn’t been told practically from day one that my master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and my other achievements meant little because, well, I had a degree from Pitt. And these sentiments came from my professors!

From my fellow students — who often walked by me as if I were a ghost until I forced them to say “Hi” — there was the impression that I must’ve gotten into the History program under some “special dispensation,” as one White guy put it. Yeah, my M.A. — earned in two semesters with a real committee examination — and a year of PhD work had nothing to do with my ability to write rings around my fellow students!

All in all, my Carnegie Mellon experience only worked out as well as it did because I reached out beyond my department and beyond the university to maintain connections and friendships with real people. My list of good folks at Carnegie Mellon is pretty short. The late Barbara Lazarus (see my post “Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Barbara B. Lazarus” from July ’09), Susan McElroy, John Hinshaw (who himself didn’t talk to me for two years after I’d gotten a Spencer Fellowship), and “My Friend Matt” (September ’12). The Black Graduate Student Organization (or BGSO), the graduate students of color/women graduate students working group that Barbara headed, and our group of fourteen doctoral students of color (the total number of non-White and non-Asian PhD students at Carnegie Mellon). That and playing intramural and pick-up basketball as much as three times a week were the sum total of my positive people and experiences at CMU.

Carnegie Mellon’s University Center, or “the new sanitarium,” October 22, 2012. (via Wikipedia).

I spent the majority of my non-classroom time on Pitt’s campus hanging out with friends there, working on my dissertation, meeting with some of my former professors, or otherwise enjoying my status as an alumnus. If anything, I needed to walk across that bridge between Carnegie Mellon, Schenley Park and Pitt as much as I did in order to keep my sanity, to make sure that I was essentially the same person I’d been while going to grad school with comparatively less uptight folk.

Of course, I could also go on about how my experiences with Joe Trotter as my advisor (see my “Outrage, Maybe” post from May ’10) turned me into an anti-Carnegie Mellon advocate, or how the sanitarium look of the university buildings could leave Polyanna depressed. But for those involved in alumni fundraising and related tasks at Carnegie Mellon, get this. I will never, ever, ever, give CMU one penny of my hard-earned dollars. I’d sooner give my idiot ex-stepfather a penny at his grave before you could pry a cold copper piece out of my hands, alive or dead. As far as I’m concerned, you owe me for four years of unnecessary anguish in the midst of my determined success.

The Silent Treatment

21 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Mount Vernon High School, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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616, Class of 1987, Coolness, Culture, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, Race, Silent Treatment, The Roots, Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health

Source: Screen Shot from The Roots, “Silent Treatment” Music Video, Geffen, 1995

Right after the MVHS graduation ceremony at Memorial Field in June ’87, it started. I’d walk down the street to the store, and bump into one of my suddenly former classmates, say “Hi,” and get no response at all. The few times I bumped into a certain Ms. Red Bone, she’d stare straight at me, then straight through me, all as I said “Hi.” She just kept on walking, as if I had phased out of our space-time continuum into a parallel universe. By the beginning of August, I honestly thought that these people, my classmates for so long, were showing their true colors. They just didn’t like me, not me because I’d been a Hebrew-Israelite or me because I was poor or me because I listened to Mr. Mister. It was all about me, something within me that they detested.

“You can’t pay any attention to that. They’re all just jealous,” my new friend E (see “The Power of E” posting from August ’08) said when I told her about the ghost treatment over lunch one day. She and I worked for General Foods in Tarrytown that summer.

“Of what? Of me?,” I asked in disbelief.

“It’s because you’re not trying to be anybody except yourself,” she said.

“That’s a good theory,” I thought, but I didn’t really believe it. E was fully in my corner, and much more obvious about it than anyone else.

This pattern of treatment had only occurred two other times. Once was in sixth grade, after I came to Holmes with my kufi for the first time. My best friend Starling stopped talking to me, and refused to even acknowledge my presence for nearly two weeks before our second and last fight. The other was earlier in my senior year, in the weeks after the final class rankings were posted. Some in the Class of ’87 were upset with me because I was ranked fourteenth in our class. Three of them responded by not talking to me at all. They’d walk by me in the hallways, looked at and through me, and kept going without so much as a nod. That went on from mid-December through the beginning of March.

The Black “Party All The Time” folks in my class, the popular and dapper folks, snickered whenever they saw me. So I guess that they decided that to acknowledge me after graduation would me contaminating themselves with the knowledge that I was still alive, still figuring things out, still not cool enough to be bothered with.

Three years later, I bumped into one of these folks on my way home from my summer job with Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health in White Plains. I was walking home to 616 on East Lincoln, having just gotten off the 41 Beeline Express. It was after 6:30, and I was beat from another day of database work and my research preparations for my senior year at Pitt. Coming in the opposite direction toward North Columbus was a party-all-the-timer, a popular, slightly light-skinned dude named J. Since I assumed that he would walk by me as if I were thin air, I started to walk by him as if he weren’t there.

Surprisingly, J stopped me and said, “Hi, Donald.” He said that he needed to talk to me, to tell me that the path that I walked in high school, while weird, was a better path than the one that he was on. He told me about his mind-bending experiences at Howard, about his dropping out and need to take care of some serious emotional and mental health issues. After a year of work at Pitt and in Westchester County, I could tell, too.

At first, I was taken aback. I mean, this was a guy who laughed at me for nearly six years, who’d never lowered himself to so much as to give me a thumbs-up while in school. Now J was sharing the most intimate of details about his life with me? I asked him, “Why are you telling me this?” Among the other things he said, the thing that stuck with me was, “Because you’re true to yourself.” I gave him a handshake, and wished him well.

That was nearly twenty years ago. I guess that J and others were under a lot of pressure — peer pressure, girl pressure, family pressures — to be cool, to be successful, to be something other than themselves. None of this justified how they treated me back then. Nor does it justify how any of them may see me now. I’m just glad the only silent treatment I get now is from my wife when I’ve taken a joke too far. At least I know that she’ll talk to me again, eventually.