Musings On Boston, Newtown, Life, and "The Dark Knight Rises"

“Not a great few months for you, eh?”

-April 15 text from a friend

Well, I’ve had better. Although at least we got somewhat of a happy ending this time.

In December, the town where I grew up became the site of an international tragedy. On Monday, the same thing happened in the city where I live now. And on Friday, I woke up to a version of Boston that felt like it belonged in an episode of 24. Two homes, two heartbreaks, four months. If this pace keeps up, I will not make it to age 25 without developing a Prozac addiction.

This is Boston. Pretty cool, huh?

I don’t want this to be read as a complaint because, in a sense, I have been absurdly lucky. To have two horrific events happen in such quick succession in two places that mean so much to me but not lose a family member or close friend or even sustain an injury in either seems almost unfair. I am not a victim, and if I’m presenting myself as one, I apologize.

I guess I’m just tired.

I’m tired of getting the breaking news alerts and hoping against hope that everybody — not just the New York Post — is getting the story wrong. I’m tired of getting frantic phone calls and texts and tweets from friends and family, not because I don’t appreciate their concern but because I don’t want my existence to be a constant source of worry for them. I’m tired of events that are supposed to be celebratory, peaceful and safe being interrupted by madmen. I’m tired of seeing familiar, soothing landmarks overrun with police officers and media outlets. And, most importantly, I am tired of reading about dead children. I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but the thought that ran through my mind most often over the past week didn’t stem from sadness or anger but from exhaustion: didn’t we just do this?

I usually try very hard not to think about this because it’s terrifying, but the past week has made it too hard to ignore: what we normally consider “typical days” can become perilous in an instant. Getting out of bed is a risk. Leaving the house is a risk. Getting in a vehicle is a risk. But most of the time when we do these things — when we decide to live, in other words — nothing happens, which makes it easy to assume that nothing ever will. We learned again on Monday that this is not the case, and the fact that it occurred so soon after Newtown has helped me understand a very basic truth: the fact that I am alive is a miracle. There are so many things that could have killed me over the past 24 years, but none of them have, and this is nothing short of amazing.

I don’t appreciate this as much or as often as I should because of how easy it is to fall into the assumption, especially at such a young age, that I am going to live forever. But lately it seems like I’m reminded almost every day that this is not the case. Death exists. It always has, and it always will, and being a nonsmoking twentysomething doesn’t exempt you from it. The bad news is you don’t get to choose when it’s your turn to go. The good news is you do get to choose how to handle this knowledge.

Judging by the events of the past week, it’s pretty clear that Boston has chosen to handle it by being optimistically defiant. By now, you have a plethora of options when it comes to inspirational images that demonstrate this: people running toward the explosions instead of away from them; the national anthem at Wednesday’s Boston Bruins game; the interfaith service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. The city is going to be fine. I knew that almost immediately after the explosions on Monday, when I walked by a homeless man singing a song about why people should give him change on my way home.

And if Boston can choose this, I think I can, too. To be honest, I’m not even sure what the other option is, but it probably involves never leaving the house, and judging by what I did on Friday during the city’s Dark Knight Rises-style clampdown, I would get bored with that pretty quickly.

Based on the moment of pure terror I experienced on Monday upon realizing how easily those two explosions could have hit me had I decided to leave my office and watch the marathon, I think it’s safe to say that I hope I don’t die for a very long time. But the fact is, I don’t know when it’s going to happen. I’m just not going to let it stop me from living.

I think this attitude is best summed up by a text my mom sent me on Friday morning when the manhunt was still ongoing:

“Text me when they catch him. Busy pouring wine.”

They got him Friday night, mom. No need to stop pouring wine.

My Chemical Adolescence

One of the nicest things someone has ever written about me is also one of the funniest. It was a signature in my senior yearbook, and while I don’t remember the wording verbatim, the gist of it was that I was one of the only people my classmate knew who was completely unaffected by the stresses of high school, a quality she admired.

The sentiment wasn’t totally off the mark. I had a great time and a solid group of friends throughout high school despite being a huge nerd, probably because I managed to develop a sense of humor almost immediately after realizing how bad I was going to be at sports. (“Have a good sense of humor” is the first piece of advice I would offer to all young nerds out there. The second piece of advice would be “Do not take advice from me.”) And I think I always knew on some level that any problem an upper-middle-class suburban white teenage male thought he was facing couldn’t actually be a real problem, which helped me keep most of the stereotypical adolescent angst at bay. So, yes, my overall high school experience was fun and largely stress free, especially now that I get to filter all my memories of it through seven years of nostalgia.

This usually wasn't me. But I dabbled.

But there’s one image that comes to mind whenever I read that signature that makes it hard not to laugh about: 16-year-old me going on a run with “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” by My Chemical Romance blaring through my headphones on repeat, upset because a girl doesn’t like me and my world is ending. I may have dealt with the stresses of high school pretty well, but I certainly wasn’t immune to them.

“I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” was always my song of choice when it felt like being a teenager had become too hard. Apart from an early dalliance with Jimmy Eat World, I never really embraced the emo scene (mocking it was a lot more fun), but that track was the exception. Whether it was a girl issue, a grades issue, an I’m-not-having-enough-fun issue or something else, my coping mechanism was almost always the same: put on My Chemical Romance, and go running until I felt too tired to remember what was getting me so worried. It was surprisingly effective.

To be honest, I’m not sure what “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” is actually about. I usually tuned out most of the lyrics to the verses while listening to it and focused solely on the intense, guttural screams of “I’m not okay” that made up the chorus. That was the only part of the song that mattered because that was the only part that I sometimes felt like I needed to say. I’m 16; I’m happy; I’m healthy; but every now and then, I’m still not okay. I promise. I just don’t know why.

Anyway, I eventually got older and more emotionally stable, and my use of “I’m Not Okay (I Promise)” as therapy became something to joke about with my older and more emotionally stable friends while we listened to super cool indie music by bands you probably haven’t heard of. And then, a few weeks ago, My Chemical Romance broke up, and I started thinking about that song again. It’s been a while since I’ve needed it as an antidepressant, and I’m much more likely to laugh than feel like the band is speaking directly to me when I hear it nowadays, but that doesn’t change the fact that when I was faking my way through adolescence, it was genuinely helpful in a way that not many other songs were.

So thanks, MCR. And don’t let anyone give you shit about “Welcome To The Black Parade.” Because that’s a pretty epic song, despite the confusing and kind of terrifying video.

Goodbye, Flippy

Dear Flip Phone,

I think we can both agree that this is a little melodramatic, but after you spent over two years gamely putting up with nonstop mocking from basically everyone you came into contact with, it felt a little inappropriate to replace you without saying goodbye.

This disdain started right from the day we first met, when the salesman at the Verizon store decided he wasn’t even going to let me know that you existed. The only phones he bothered to show me were the ones with giant screens and names like the Kinoba 4G Energy Network Mitsubishi Galant that were far too busy uncovering nuclear secrets with nearby iPhones to give a crap about whether or not I bought them. When I noticed and asked about you, he responded with a befuddled statement that went something like, “It doesn’t have high speed Internet access.” I decided to buy you anyway, working off of the assumption that I would still be able to call and text people without high speed Internet access. Luckily, I turned out to be right.

Granted, I did have my doubts, especially when your front screen cracked just a few weeks after I bought you for reasons that are still a mystery to me. (I did keep you in the same pocket as my keys. Were they hitting you? You could’ve told me; I wouldn’t have blamed you.) But instead of sending you into an inexorable spiral of decay, this crack turned out to be just a one-time malfunction. It actually became a little endearing after a while. Plus, it made you virtually theft-proof—who’s going to bother stealing a cracked flip phone?

Over the years and months that I owned you, having a smartphone gradually transformed from a pretty cool luxury to an apparent necessity for anyone who had anything important going on in his or her life. This mean that the amount of crap you took from the general public gradually increased—first linearly, then exponentially, then whatever the thing after exponentially would be. (I was never much of a math guy. It’s why I used your calculator so often.) And that whole time, you continued to reliably keep me in touch with my friends and family, which is really all I thought you were there for.

I think it’s fair to say that I put up with the incessant derision about as well as you did. At its worst, it was slightly annoying; at its best, it helped me feel like I had at least a modicum of independence from technology despite spending about 12 hours a day staring at various screens. But there is one thing about the criticism that I never quite understood: you really weren’t that stupid.

You came with a built-in calendar, alarm clock, calculator, stopwatch, two types of cameras (pictures and video), and something called “Bluetooth” that I still don’t fully understand. And you did have Internet access, even if it wasn’t high speed, so I could easily email, tweet, Facebook, and come up with several other reasons to pay attention to you instead of the people I was hanging out with whenever I needed to. (It’s not my fault you were more interesting. If I ever meet someone who can instantly tell me what Jon Stewart’s last movie was, I’ll pay more attention to them, but you’re number one until that happens.) (It was “Doogal,” by the way. I haven’t seen it.)

So I’m not exactly sure what advantages smartphones actually have over you. I guess the obvious answer would be speed—why wait 40 seconds to figure something out when you could do so in 10?—but I don’t think I’ve ever been busy enough to the point where those extra 30 seconds would really make a difference. The other advantage I keep hearing about is how, when you get lost, a smartphone can tell you where you are and how to get to where you need to go. I’m sure this is true. I’m also sure that I’ve had pretty good luck asking people so far.

But I'm still on the family plan (I should probably be more embarrassed about this than I am), and my benevolent father has decided it’s time for my sister and me to upgrade to smartphones, so that’s what’s happening. I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you and goodbye before I forget how I ever lived without a constant stream of Twitter updates and the ability to make new photos look like old photos instantaneously. I’ve never had a phone hold up for more than two years before, let alone in the face of continuous ridicule and harassment. Nice work.

Regards,

Eddie

P.S. Sorry about all those times I dropped you. But don’t even try to tell me you didn’t love the adrenaline rush.

Bad Boys Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do?

I wrote this from an aboriginal community called Kintore. It’s in the desert, about a five-hour drive on mostly dirt roads from Alice Springs, a small town in central Australia that’s roughly 1,500 miles away from any metropolitan area. And then there’s the fact that Australia itself is approximately 14 hours from the US by plane.

In other words, I’m about as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get in 2012. And yet, when I walked into Kintore’s dialysis unit, there was a television set up, and it was playing Bad Boys 2: The Baddening. (I may have made up the part after the colon. It’s impossible to know for sure.)

The sheer reach of American entertainment continues to amaze me. It would seem to defy logic that one could travel to a desert halfway around the world and find two aboriginal Australians who don’t speak great English watching Martin Lawrence and Will Smith do…umm…you know, I’ve seen Bad Boys 2 one and a half times, but I’ve never actually paid enough attention to know what the plot is. But the point is, they were definitely watching them do something.

And this isn’t limited to Kintore, either. One of my roommates in Alice Springs recently referred to two of his friends as Lily and Marshall, the forever-in-love-except-briefly-in-season-two couple on How I Met Your Mother. When I was in Dublin, my Irish friends loved talking about the Family Guy gag where an airplane careens through a mountain of empty beer bottles as it lands in their country. And when I was in Toronto, stores actually accepted American money, which, while not really related to entertainment, was something I found hilarious and quintessentially Canadian, so I wanted to mention it. (Can you imagine if anyone tried to pay for something using a coin with a beaver on it in the States? I don’t think it would go over too well.)

Even the country that we’ve stolen adapted plenty of entertainment from—the UK—was filled with advertisements for American media when I visited a few years ago, an observation that helped contribute to what may be my proudest ever moment as an American abroad. After using the word “movie theater” in a conversation with some Brits, I was laughed at and derisively informed that the proper term was “cinema.” I told them that, when they started using these cinemas to show movies that were actually from their own country, they could call them whatever they wanted to, but until then, I was sticking with “movie theater.” Then George Washington and I high-fived.

Look, I think the conversations America’s smart people are currently having about our nation’s decline are both productive and necessary. I’m no expert in international politics, but I do know that it’s not 1947 anymore, making the notion of any one nation being the world’s “sole superpower” pretty outdated. But as far as I can tell, we still absolutely dominate in terms of giving the rest of the planet something to do after work.

In short, you’re welcome, other countries. Because without America, you might have to talk to your kids.

(Hey, how’s that for a national motto? It’s at least better than "In God We Trust.")

Fotohut. It's Phabulous.

I’ve never taken pictures on a vacation or a trip before, outside of a few spontaneous, low-quality shots with the camera on my cell phone. For a while it was just unnecessary, as the only trips I went on were with my family, and my sister took more than enough photos for all four of us. But then I grew up and started going places without them, and even though my sister was no longer around to cover for me, I still never brought a camera. Maybe it was force of habit; maybe I was just being contrarian; or maybe I was still mad at cameras for taking so many bad school pictures of me. Whatever the reason, at various points over the past 24 years, I’ve spent time in Paris, London, Rome and Toronto (not as impressive, but I felt like this list needed a fourth) without ever taking a picture for my own amusement.

But now I’m in the Australian outback (the real one, not the steakhouse), and this is no longer the case.

To be fair, this trip is different from previous ones, as it’s an assignment, not a vacation. I’m here to report and write an article, and it made sense to bring a camera with me to help add a visual dimension to the story (although, as I’m sure you can tell by now, my prose is often so vivid that it renders photography irrelevant).

So most of the pictures I’ve taken so far have been for work rather than for pleasure. Still, there is some amazing scenery out here, and since I typically already have a camera around my neck…well, it seems silly not to use it.

Overall, taking these photos has been very enjoyable and mainly reinforced my belief that not bringing a camera anywhere for the first quarter of my life was probably due to some odd and ultimately pointless type of stubbornness. It’s cool to thumb/scroll through things you’ve taken pictures of, and remembering fun experiences is much easier when you have a visual reminder of what those fun experiences looked like.

Still, having now done both, there is one thing about not taking photos that I think is superior to taking photos: it makes it much easier to live in the moment. When I’m taking a picture of something, it’s hard for me to be fully engrossed in the present since there are so many things for Future Eddie to be concerned about: how the photo will look on my computer, what other people will think of it, what clever caption to write underneath it, where to hide the body, etc.

It’s an annoying part of living in a world where it’s so easy to figure out what anyone else is doing at any given time. In some respects, actually having fun has become secondary to letting people know how much fun you’re having. It’s not enough just to go to a concert anymore; you have to photograph the concert, tweet about the concert, Facebook about the concert, basically do all sorts of things to let people know that you were there and you had a great fucking time and, damn it, they should’ve come with you. It can make sitting down and enjoying the music difficult.

Look, I own a sort of expensive camera now, so I’ll probably continue bringing it with me on trips if only because of my stinginess. And I certainly don’t mean to denigrate photography, which has been around for much longer than Facebook and Twitter and does have a few decent capabilities. I just think it’s healthy to put the camera down every now and then and simply enjoy a gorgeous landscape or a night at the bar without worrying about having something to show for it later. If you’re really in a situation worth photographing, you won’t need a picture to keep its memory alive, and it won’t matter how many other people know what you did or what you saw. What will matter is the experience you had while you were there, not the experience you have while looking at it later.

Also, Instagram is not worth a billion dollars. I don’t really know anything about economics, but I feel pretty confident about this.

A Brief Thought

I have a library card and a Spotify account. In other words, I have free access to virtually every book ever written and every song ever recorded.

So I really don't think I have very much to complain about.

Infinite Jest Take 1.5

Generally, when someone asks me whether or not I’ve read a book, I answer in one of two ways: yes or no. Occasionally I’ll need to throw in a qualifier about having seen the movie (Sahara—what a fucking waste of a night that was) or having started but not finished (some book about dinosaurs I tried to read at the beach in middle school that a seagull pooped on) (this is one of the reasons why I asked my parents if we could stop vacationing at the Jersey shore), but for the most part, “yes” or “no” have proven to be very reliable and satisfactory answers.

The one exception to this is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Whenever someone asks me whether or not I’ve read it (caveat: this does not happen very often), my typical answer is that I turned every page. It seems like the most accurate way to describe my experience with the book. I can’t say “no” because I have, technically, read it, but I’ve always felt like saying you read something also implies that you understood something, and I certainly did not understand Infinite Jest. I turned all the pages, and I looked at all the words, but the whole time I couldn’t help but feel like I was just giving off the appearance of reading rather than actually absorbing anything Wallace was trying to say. In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure why/how I finished it, given that I’ve given up on several other books both before and since. But I did. I just can’t talk intelligently about it.

I’ve read some of his other books since turning the pages of Infinite Jest, all of which have been much, much easier to get through. I never really considered trying to read the 1,000 page tome again because…well, why bother? It’s not like I’ve gotten significantly smarter between age 20 and age 23 (exception: last summer, I learned that the first letter in the Disney logo is actually a D, not some weird, G-like creature), so there’s not really a reason why something that didn’t make sense to me then would make sense to me now.

But my attitude about this started to change last year, when one of my roommates (Stina, if you’re reading this, hello, and I hope Europe is treating you nicely) showed me the commencement speech Wallace gave at Kenyon in 2005. This probably did more for me than anything else of his I’ve read. It just seemed like such a good set of instructions for how to get through life (click on the link and go read it if you haven't already--it's much better than this), and the fact that he delivered it so eloquently and with such little condescension gave me a very strong impression that this was a person who knew what he was doing, not just in terms of writing but in terms of—to borrow his words—“how to think.”

The added level of complexity that comes with reading this speech in 2012 (or really any time after September 12, 2008) is that there is now a very glaring, impossible to ignore sign that Wallace actually did not know what he was doing.

I have no idea why he killed himself. I suspect it had something to do with depression, but I’m certainly not going to pretend I can speak with any type of authority about him or why he thought it was necessary to take his own life, especially when so many other people who are both better writers than me and actually knew him have already done so. All I can really say is that it still makes me sad to think about, despite a pretty funny Onion-related attempt at levity.

Now, celebrities committing suicide is nothing new, and the fact that authors aren’t especially happy is not exactly a stunning revelation. But Wallace’s death has always stuck out to me for a pretty simple reason: I really, really love his writing (the parts I can comprehend, anyway). And because I’m a naïve idealistic twentysomething who likes to write, I’ve always equated the ability to write and think and understand as well as someone like David Foster Wallace with a certain level of happiness. So it’s been particularly difficult for me to reconcile the fact that a man who could remind a group of people that maybe the “fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line” isn’t always that unpleasant and is rather just tired because she’s “been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer” was the same man who felt the need to commit suicide.

All of this is an incredibly roundabout way of saying that I think I’m going to try reading Infinite Jest again because, if I want to figure out more about David Foster Wallace, it might be helpful to understand—or, failing that, to try to understand—what his seminal piece of writing was actually about.

(To be fair, this probably isn’t the only reason I’m attempting to give it a second/first read. I also recently got an unexpected $20 Amazon gift card, which meant I could just buy a copy instead of having to worry about trying to finish it before the draconian U.S. library system tells me it’s due. Also, about a year ago, I went to a party with a girl on what may have been but probably wasn’t a date, and I asked why the host had two copies of Infinite Jest, and she seemed impressed that I noticed this. So I might just be subconsciously hoping that something like that will happen again.)

I have no idea whether or not this will be effective or whether I’ll even finish this time (I am currently in grad school, meaning I’ve spent the entire time writing this being worried about the other work I should be doing), but I figure I might as well give it a shot. Hell, even if it winds up not helping at all, hopefully I’ll at least make some people on the subway think I’m smart.