Music, Sunny Days, and An Altered State of Consciousness

I have this theory that any music that you like when you are in an “altered state of consciousness” will have a special place in your heart for the rest of your life. I think back to some of the songs that I liked that were played at college parties, and while these are good songs, I think that I love them a little too much. I mean, let’s face it, is Dark Side of the Moon really that great an album, or is it that most of us are stoned off our ass the first time we listened to it? I mean my father can sing all the words to most songs by The Steve Miller Band, but he can’t remember something that I told him 5 minutes ago.

But maybe it has nothing to do with the Booze or the pot. Maybe music has a way of bringing us back to special times in our lives. I remember a year ago, my company had a Christmas party, and one of the clubs we went to was a Salsa club. Later in the night, they played Bachata, which is good music, in moderation. It all sounds the same, the melodic bass undertones and the high pitched guitar accompanied by an extremely whiny guy singing about some chick who either will not give him some or has stopped giving him some.

Hearing this brought me back to the Dominican Republic, which has a special place in my heart. I started to just picture guys sitting outside El Colmado (the corner store), drinking beer, playing Dominos and blasting Bachata into all hours of the night. I yearned for San Cocho (Dominican Stew). I missed the torrential downpours that happened every day for 10 minutes only to be followed by sunshine. I longed for whatever it is that they do to pork down there that makes it so good. I wanted to feel the sense of community that they have down there. Down there, friendship is transitive, so if you are a friend of a friend of mine, then you are my friend, no questions asked. I think that I really missed the weather most of all. Last week, I was walking to the train, and it was cold and started to snow for just a second. I thought, boy, I would give my left testicle to be in Santo Domingo right now.

So why does music have this effect on us? I remember starting to read Uta Hagen’s Respect For Acting, and of course I didn’t finish it, because, well, that isn’t something that I do. I remember that she was talking about sense memory. She was saying if you want to feel hot, don’t remember a sunny day but something small that you remember on a sunny day, like if you were wearing flip-flops, remember the flip flops. Maybe music is the flip-flops of our lives that take us back to those sunny days.

That's pride fuckin' with you

While I don’t worship at the alter of Tarantino, Pulp Fiction was a great movie. It has one of my favorite scenes from all of film. All we see is Marcellus’s neck while he is telling Butch to throw a fight. I love this scene because the mood is perfect. I didn’t know that anyone could express so much emotion with the back of their neck. I really like the use of Al Green in the background. But most importantly, this is one of the best monologues that I have ever seen.

Marcellus: I think you're gonna find, when all this shit is over, I think you're gonna find yourself one smiling motherfucker. The thing is, Butch, right now you got ability. But painful as it may be, ability don't last. And your days are just about over. Now that's a hard motherfuckin' fact of life, but that's a fact of life your ass is gonna have to get realistic about. See, this business is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their ass would age like wine. If you mean it turns to vinegar, it does. If you mean it gets better with age, it don't. Besides, Butch, how many fights do you think you got in you anyhow? Two? Boxers don't have an Old Timers Place. You came close but you never made it. And if you were gonna make it, you would have made it before now. (holds out the envelope of cash to Butch, but just out of his reach)You're mine, dig?

Butch: It certainly appears so. (takes the envelope)

Marcellus: Night of the fight, you might feel a slight sting. That's pride fuckin' with you. Fuck pride! Pride only hurts, it never helps. You fight through that shit. 'Cause a year from now, when you kicking it in the Caribbean, you gonna say to yourself, "Marcellus Wallace was right."

Butch: I got no problem with that, Mr. Wallace.

Marcellus: In the 5th, your ass goes down. (Butch nods silently) Say it.

Butch: In the 5th, my ass goes down.

I was thinking about how we all think that our abilities will last forever. When you are young, you think that you can only get better at everything. You think that you can party all night and still get in a productive day the next morning. You think that friendship is easy as long as you have fun. You think that you can go around and “just chill” with people of the opposite sex forever and not make any kind of commitment.

Then, you wake up one day with a big hangover because you thought that you could party like you did in the old days. You feel like crap, but you still have to go to that job of yours, where you are overworked and under appreciated, to pay your mortgage on the picket fence house in the Burbs, along with little Jimmy’s piano lessons and little Sarah’s ballet, jazz, and tap. You lose touch with a lot of your friends, because your work and your home life consume you, and you are so tired that you don’t know how to be a good friend to anyone.

I think that in most areas, if we are lucky, we do age like wine. I can only hope that I am a better programmer from year to year. I hope that I can be a better friend to those that I care about. I hope that my knowledge and wit will grow. I hope that I can be happier as time passes.

But I think that we all have our ups and downs. We can’t feel like we are on the top of the world forever, but it seems like when we are at the bottom of the barrel, it does last forever. Everything, at the end of the day is transient. We find and lose love. People, friends and foes alike, come in and out of our lives. Work has its ups and downs. We pursue our passions and we give them up in pursuit of something else. We live, and like all living things, we die.

My Intolerance

When my parents were my age, my father went to Woodstock and hitchhiked all around the country living in communes and my mother was in the Peace Corp in the Dominican Republic living in a tin roofed shack with no indoor plumbing. I went to a school where you called your teachers by their first name. When I told a kid their that I didn’t shop at the Weavers Way Co-Op, I would have gotten a better response if I had farted in his face. I’ve heard “Touch of Gray” by the Grateful Dead more times than you could imagine. Needless to say, I grew up liberal. Naturally, being a liberal, I was tolerant of other people. Or was I?

A few years ago a nice family moved in next door. I had many conversations with them, and I was always welcome at their house where something was always cooking on the grill and the Cappuccino was always flowing. These people were great people, so naturally, I thought that they were liberals. Well, it turns out that they were Conservative Christian Republicans. I guess we all assume that people who we like are just like us.

They are slowly being “outted” to the people in the neighborhood. I say this because being Republican in Germantown is like being Gay in Alabama. The exchange goes something like this, “Is it true so and so is a Republican?” Then I say, “Yes.” Then they say, “Oh, I never would have known, he was such a nice guy.” Needless to say, this family still lives next door and has taken to the community well.

When we were coming back from the movies, this same neighbor told me that he had a friend who was a programmer who liked beer and cigars and went to Seminary. Naturally, I had to meet this guy, because that seemed like an Oxymoron. I mean a techy that isn’t a total lush? I had never heard of such a thing. If you have ever been around programmers in the heat of the battle, it is like a case study in Turrets Syndrome. You will be sitting there coding and someone will yell motherfucker or cock smoker for no apparent reason. Bitch is an often-used word, but never in a bad way. It is a pronoun, adjective and variable. You might say something like this, “Take that bitch right there and put it under that bitch.” What do we call a useless column only used for testing? Well, it’s a bitch field, of course. I should not forget the infamous line of code to open up a useless connection to a database, “bitch.Open”.

Needless to say, this guy wasn’t like that. He and his family weren’t anything like I thought that they would be either. They were decant and intelligent people who welcomed me into their home and became my friends. They didn’t try to convert me, although they would like me to. They didn’t put me in a little category like the atheist guy who eats babies and isn’t nice to pets. They are just a great bunch of people who I now call my friends. It was sometime in one of my first few visits to their house that I realized that I, too, was intolerant.

See I was tolerant of different beliefs, as long as those were liberal beliefs. I was fine with families making their own decisions until the wife decides to stay home and home school the kids. I was fine with people having whatever religion they want until they start openly talking about it. I was fine with people having all kinds of hobbies unless these hobbies included hunting.

See liberals have their ignorant group too. I call them Coffee Shop liberals. You know the type. There are about ten of them, sitting in a Starbucks on the Upper West Side or “insert liberal YUPY gentrified neighborhood here”, talking about changing the world. They are hopped up on Zoloft because “they have hurts from their childhood”. They talk about what to do to help the Black community, but there are no Black people there. They talk about what to do to help poor people, but there are no poor people there. The ironic thing is that the neighborhoods that they live in were once populated by poor people and Black people, but one day, the Ghetto became trendy, and these people, who love poor and Black people, drove them out of their homes because they wanted to be in the hip part of town next to the lot where they are going to put up the next Whole Foods Market.

I talked to this guy at my neighbor’s house who is into all kinds of liberal causes. He said one thing that I will never forget. He said that if a corporation had the same racial makeup as most of these groups, then they would boycott it. It’s funny, cause I actually went to my friend’s Church one Sunday mourning. How I got up that early, I have no idea. Not only was Church fun, but this was literally the most integrated group that I ever saw. Aren’t liberals supposed to have a Monopoly on diversity?

To see something like that and to realize that a year back, I would have blown these people off is something to think about. Now there are things that my friend and I don’t agree on, religion being one. There are things that he would spend the rest of his life advocating that I would spend the rest of my life fighting against. But there is something that I learned, and that is that there is more that unites us than divides us. He is a programmer just like me, likes good cigars just like me, and appreciates art and music just like me.

So where does intolerance come from? I’d say that it comes from ignorance and fear. We are ignorant of what motivates people, so we put them into little groups. We divide ourselves by race, sex, religion, orientation, career, hobby, you name it. We do this because we fear that people will not understand us. Telling someone that I just meet that I am a programmer is a sure way to separate the men from the boys. They either think that you can’t hold any kind of lively conversation or they are so worried about that Virus that they just got from opening an attachment on that “want a bigger penis” email that the conversation is halted. Or they think that you are in it for the money, as if people could pay me enough to do this job if I didn’t love it.

Dividing this way is just nonsense, because, like I said before, there is more that unites us than divides us. We all want love, friendship, and spirituality. We all want to know that there are people out there that understand us. We all want our children to have a better life than we had. We all want a to feel a sense of community. We all want to be happy. Life is way to short to be following senseless labels.

I used to live by these labels. I would only associate with liberal people who were techies or artsy fartsy intellectuals. Why? It’s so easy. You don’t have to give anything of yourself. There is always something to fall back on. When you are tired of looking inside yourself or being supportive of others, you can talk about that kick ass program that you did or the fact that David Mamet is one of the best fucking playwrights known to man. You let intolerance get the best of you because you don’t think that you are enough. You have to be you the programmer, you the artist, you the Black man, or you the whatever, when the only thing that you needed to be was just you.

What do I really hate?

I posted this over at Daily Kos a while ago, and I will post it here with some additions.

I hate running really hard for the bus or train to only see it pull away in front of my face. In fact, I hate the public transit schedule. I could talk about Dykstra's algorithm and the fact that getting from one place to the other with multiple stops is a pain, at least here in Philly. But I'm not. I really hate the divine providence that says that when I am on time or a little bit late, the train leaves early, and when I am a little bit early, the train leaves late.

I hate this new phenomenon of automatic toilets and sinks. With these sinks, you would figure that these geniuses could give us lukewarm water, but of course, that would be too easy and useful. They only have two temperatures, which are burning hot and ice cold. And the toilets, well, I'll let you guys figure that one out yourselves.

I hate Starbucks coffee. Yup, I said it. In fact, I hate the fact that there is almost no convenient coffee shop that makes a cup of coffee like the one I have at home. Ironically, one of the only places that did was a coffee cart at Temple University. Go figure.

Oh, and along the lines of coffee, I hate coffee shops that make you get waiter service for all the good seats, as if I can't walk 10 fucking feet and get my own God damned cup of coffee.

As a self-proclaimed artsy fartsy intellectual, I hate these bullshit pseudo intellectuals. You know, like the guy in the scene from Annie Hall, where Woody is waiting in line only to hear this professor in the background spew out a bunch of garbage, only to have the guy who he is talking about appear and correct him. What I hate more is that there are beautiful women who fall for this nonsense. I know, I'm kind of hating there, but jeez ladies, you are better than that!

I hate being around un-accepting people. This goes for "liberals" too. We have our own un-accepting people.

I love being around religious people of all faiths and denominations, but I hate being around religious people who are fake, un-accepting, insincere, or all about themselves and not God. They talk about doing God's work, but what they really are doing is lining their pockets. If you are a preacher, and you drive a brand new Mercedes, then I would say that you are your own God.

I hate lazy programmers. You ever been to a website that asks you for your SSN or credit card number, and they have that little thing at the bottom that says “no spaces or dashes” or “enter in this form XXX-XX-XXXX”? Well, it’s hard enough that these things aren’t uniform, but it takes about 5 minutes to fix this problem. In fact, it would take less time to fix this problem then it does to write that stupid comment. As a programmer, stuff like this just really gets to me. Ah, we all have our mysterious buttons.

I hate that at the end of an Orchestra performance, people walk out before they finish giving their dues to the artists. This is a partnership people, a beautiful connection. For those few hours, these people give you their heart and soul, and all you have to do is sit their and listen, and at the end, clap for a while. It’s kind of like making love to someone and then cutting the cuddling short because you needed to rush home and watch a re-run of Seinfeld. Yeah, maybe I can sympathize, but what’s right is right.

Pasando Con Ficha

In the game of Dominos, the object of the game is to be the first person to get rid of all of your pieces. When someone passes when they really could have played, the Dominicans call that Pasando Con Ficha, or "passing with the piece". This saying is also used to describe life, whether it is love, friendship, spirituality, career, or just plain old hedonistic fun. We usually give up one move in pursuit of the other, or we just plainly don’t see that we can smack that Domino down and start talking trash. So, life is a game, with fun, boredom, partnership, individuality, love, hate, triumph and defeat. All we can do is make sure that when good opportunities arise, we are not caught Pasando Con Ficha.

Pissing In The Ocean

I'm not going to get as personal as most people do on these things, but I will do so in my own way. This is going to consist of my random thoughts, mostly about the Arts, Politics, and Technology. I hadn't started my own blog, because, frankly, I didn't feel like I had much to say before, but now, I guess I do. I remember when a friend of mine at work was trying to explain to me the insignificance of some things. He posed the following riddle, "After you piss in the Ocean, what does the Ocean taste like?" Well, of course the answer is "the Ocean". I only say this because this little thing of ours called "The Internets" is but a Sea of information. Some of us are lucky to make our tidal waves, but most of us are just pissing in it. I hope, at least, that someone out there enjoys this.