Author: asitoughttobemagazine

“Outside the Bedroom” by Sean Karns

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Outside the Bedroom

1.

You slouch in the car seat

and mumble ich will nicht ausserhalb vom Schlafzimmer.

I believe it’s about the long red light

blocks from your husband’s home.

There is a pressure outside

the bedroom as potential witnesses

bike the crosswalk.

You cover your eyes

like your three-year-old daughter

scared of seeing something awful.


2.

I stand on the balcony

as you pedal away.

I want to pedal next to you

and do ordinary things—

casual walks, Café Apropos

and the Columbus museum.

But you pedal faster.

When you’re gone,

I find weeks of your hair.


3.

We can go onto the balcony.

It’s getting cooler.  I want to show you

the large oak tree.  It will hide us.

I have bread we can roll

into pebbles and toss onto the yard

to occupy the robins.

The neighbors are at work.

We have this place to ourselves.


4.

Getting used to using each other—

I watch you put your clothes

back on and leave.

In the morning,

there’s a pleasure

smell of you,

two sets of earrings

on the nightstand,

artifacts under dust.


Sean Karns is a poet living in Illinois. His work has appeared in various national literary journals. The above poem originally appeared in Folio and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

FRIDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: William Wordsworth

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A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

by William Wordsworth


A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.


William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) was an English Romantic poet who defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Unconventional for his time, he advocated the use of everyday language in verse. Also unusual was his choice of subject matter – primarily nature, but also women, children, the poor, and the oppressed. This revolutionary style gradually transformed into mainstream acceptability and Wordsworth was eventually named Poet Laureate of England in 1843.

CHARLES DERBER

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CAPITALISM: BIG SURPRISES IN RECENT POLLS 

  

By Charles Derber

According to the conventional wisdom, the US is a center-Right country. But a new poll by Pew casts doubt on that idea. It shows widespread skepticism about capitalism and hints that support for socialist alternatives is emerging as a majoritarian force in America’s new generation.

 
Carried out in late April and published May 4, 2010,  the Pew poll, arguably by the most respected polling company in the country, asked over 1500 randomly selected Americans to describe their reactions to terms such as “capitalism,” “socialism,” “progressive,” “libertarian” and “militia.” The most striking findings concern “capitalism” and “socialism.” We cannot be sure what people mean by these terms, so the results have to be interpreted cautiously and in the context of more specific attitudes on concrete issues, as discussed later.

Pew summarizes the results in its poll title: “Socialism not so negative; capitalism not so positive.” This turns out to be an understatement of the drama in some of the underlying data.
 
Yes, “capitalism” is still viewed positively by a majority of Americans. But it is just by a bare majority. Only 52% of all Americans react positively. Thirty-seven percent say they have a negative reaction and the rest aren’t sure.
 
A year ago, a Rasmussen poll found similar reactions. Then, only 53% of Americans described capitalism as “superior” to socialism.

Meanwhile, 29% in the Pew poll describe “socialism” as positive. This positive percent soars much higher when you look at key sub-groups, as discussed shortly. A 2010 Gallup poll found 37% of all Americans preferring socialism as “superior” to capitalism.

Keep in mind these findings reflect an overview of the public mind when Right wing views seem at a high point – with the Tea Party often cast as a barometer of American public opinion. The polls in this era do not suggest a socialist country, but not a capitalist-loving one either. This is not a “Center-Right” America but a populace where almost 50% are deeply ambivalent or clearly opposed to capitalism. Republicans and the Tea Party would likely call that a Communist country.
 
The story gets more interesting when you look at two vital sub-groups. One is young people, the “millennial generation” currently between 18 and 30. In the Pew poll, just 43% of Americans under 30 describe “capitalism” as positive. Even more striking, the same percentage, 43%, describes “socialism” as positive. In other words, the new generation is equally divided between capitalism and socialism.
 
The Pew, Gallup and Rasmussen polls come to the same conclusion. Young people cannot be characterized as a capitalist generation. They are half capitalist and half socialist. Since the socialist leaning keeps rising among the young, it suggests—depending on how you interpret “socialism”—that we are moving toward an America that is either Center-Left or actually majoritarian socialist.

Turn now to Republicans and Democrats. Sixty-two percent of Republicans in the Pew poll view capitalism as positive, although 81 % view “free markets” as positive, suggesting a sensible distinction in their mind between capitalism and free markets. Even Republicans prefer small to big business and are divided about big business, which many correctly see as a monopolistic force of capitalism undermining free markets.
 
The more interesting story, though, is about Democrats. We hear endlessly about Blue Dog Democrats. But the Pew poll shows a surprisingly progressive Democratic base. Democrats are almost equally split in their appraisal of capitalism and socialism. Forty-seven percent see capitalism as positive but 53% do not. And 44% of Democrats define socialism as positive, linking their negativity about capitalism to a positive affirmation of socialism.
 
Moreover, many other subgroups react negatively to capitalism. Less than 50% of women, low-income groups and less-educated groups describe capitalism as positive.
 
So much for the view that Obama does not have a strong progressive base to mobilize. In fact, “progressive,’ according to the Pew poll, is one of the most positive terms in the American political lexicon, with a substantial majority of almost all sub-groups defining it as positive.
 
You may conclude that this all add ups to little, since we can’t be clear about how people are defining “capitalism” and “socialism.” But in my own research, summarized in recent books such as The New Feminized Majority and Morality Wars, attitudes registered in polls toward concrete issues over the last thirty years support the interpretation of the Pew data, at minimum, as evidence of a Center-Left country.

On nearly every major issue, from support minimum wage and unions, preference for diplomacy over force, deep concern for the environment, belief that big business is corrupting democracy, and support for many major social programs including Social Security and Medicare, the progressive position has been strong and relatively stable. If “socialism” means support for these issues, the interpretation of the Pew poll is a Center-Left country.
 
If socialism means a search for a genuine systemic alternative, then America, particularly its youth, is emerging as a majoritarian social democracy, or in a majoritarian search for a more cooperativist, green, and more peaceful and socially just order.
 
Either interpretation is hopeful. It should give progressives assurance that even in the “Age of the Tea Party,” despite great dangers and growing concentrated corporate power and wealth, there is a strong base for progressive politics. We have to mobilize the majority population to recognize its own possibilities and turn up the heat on the Obama Administration and a demoralized Democratic Party. If we fail, the Right will take up the slack and impose its monopoly capitalist will on a reluctant populace.

Charles Derber, professor of sociology at Boston College and author of Corporation Nation and Greed to Green. He is on the Majority Agenda Project’s coordinating committee (http://MajorityAgendaProject.org, info@majorityagendaproject.org).

This article originally appeared at CommonDreams.org

Poisoned

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Breast Cancer Action's "Think Before You Pink" logo
Breast Cancer Action's "Think Before You Pink™" campaign cautions consumers to resist buying pink-ribbon products from companies that worsen the cancer epidemic. Source: Breast Cancer Action.

Poisoned
By John Unger Zussman

When Bonnie was diagnosed with breast cancer almost two years ago, she was unwilling to chalk it up to random chance. She took it personally. “I wasn’t unlucky,” she said. “I was poisoned.”

Last month, I wrote about Bonnie (a pseudonym), her decisions about cancer treatment, and what I learned from watching her make them. Bonnie and I both appreciate the support, comments, and stories you shared after that post. Now I want to talk about what we learned from her quest to find out who, or what, poisoned her—like an infected film-noir heroine who has just 24 hours to identify the poison, catch the culprit, and find the antidote.

It was in 1971 that President Nixon declared war on cancer, one of the few actions of his presidency that I applauded. Since then, many billions of dollars have been spent and millions of lives lost. We now have innumerable new treatments touted as “cures” for cancer. Yet cancer is still prevalent and survival rates have improved only slowly if at all (much of the decrease is attributable to reduced smoking and earlier detection). Post-menopausal breast cancer in particular is now common, and Bonnie is a member of a large and ever-growing community.

In my opinion (and Bonnie’s), the war on cancer has been undermined, like many wars, by a failure to cast the mission correctly. It placed all its reliance (and budget) on screening and treatment, on detecting cancers early and on finding a “cure.” And although it’s laudable to “race for the cure,” at some point you’ve got to wonder what is causing all this cancer.

But causation gets very little attention, probably because there’s a lot of money to be made in screening and treatment, but not so much in prevention.

How do we prevent cancer? An obvious place to start is our lifestyle, especially diet and exercise. The American diet is overloaded with fat, salt, and high-fructose corn syrup. We pig out on fast food and snack food while we sit on the couch watching “The Biggest Loser” and ignore the treadmill in the corner. Obesity is at record levels and increasing.

So is our diet predisposing us to cancer? Studies are suggestive. As Nicholas Kristof points out in a New York Times column called “Cancer from the Kitchen?,” most women living in Asia have low rates of breast cancer. But ethnic Asian women born and raised in the U.S.—including the daughters of Asian immigrants—have higher rates.

In a recent book called Anticancer, David Servan-Schreiber talks about the “terrain” of the body as being more or less hospitable to cancer. The idea is that cancer cells need a certain environment in which to flourish, and there are things we can do to make that more or less easy for them. For example, the antioxidants in certain fruits and vegetables, such as green tea, cabbage, and pomegranate juice, seem to antagonize cancer cells. “Eat your veggies,” it turns out, was not just maternal nagging.

This is not to say that green tea will cure cancer, and in fact, early studies of the impact of diet on breast cancer survival produced only mixed results. But a recent comprehensive study of diet and exercise—the Women’s Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) study—was more definitive. For survivors of early-stage breast cancer, eating at least five servings of vegetables and fruits a day, and walking briskly for 30 minutes, six days a week, cut their risk of death from breast cancer by 50%! This should have made headline news—and would have if a drug company could have patented it.

(The link above is a summary, or you can read the actual journal report here.)

Now, Bonnie’s diet has always been reasonable. She hasn’t eaten fast food for 20 years, eats minimal snack food, and isn’t obese. Since her diagnosis, she eats more vegetables (especially the “anticancer” cruciferous ones like broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage), less meat, little processed food, and no soda. This is far from being a burden. Bonnie’s a terrific chef, and the new meals are delicious.

But in her quest to prevent a recurrence or metastasis, Bonnie is focusing on a more insidious cause of cancer—carcinogens in our environment.

This is not just her opinion. It is shared by the 2009 report of the President’s Cancer Panel, which was released last month. (The link above is to the full, 200-page report. You can also read commentaries on it in another Nicholas Kristof column or in a Huffington Post article by Alison Rose Levy.)  Here is a sampling of the panel’s findings:

  • “A growing body of research documents myriad established and suspected environmental factors linked to genetic, immune, and endocrine dysfunction that can lead to cancer and other diseases.”
  • “Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety.”
  • “Weak laws and regulations, inefficient enforcement, regulatory complexity, and fragmented authority allow avoidable exposures to known or suspected cancer-causing and cancer-promoting agents to continue and proliferate in the workplace and the community…. Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”

Why is our world filled with toxic chemicals? Because it’s profitable. Because the corporations that put them there do not want to be troubled to clean up their mess. And neither do the legislators they bankroll.

What kind of chemicals are we talking about? Since we’re talking about diet, let’s start there. Commercially processed food—in additional to its fat, salt, and high-fructose corn syrup content—is full of additives, preservatives, artificial colorings, hormones, antibiotics, and pesticide residues. This is a result of our “modern” food system, which over the past 50 years has replaced family farms and conventional farming methods with factory farms, monoculture, overreliance on pesticides and fertilizers. If you have any doubts that mainstream food is poisoning us, check out the Oscar-nominated documentary, “Food, Inc.”

But the problem doesn’t end with what’s in the food and the way it’s produced; it’s also how it’s packaged, stored, and cooked. It comes to us in cans and plastic containers that contain bisphenol A (BPA) and leach phthalates and endocrine disruptors. We microwave it in the same plastic containers or cook it in Teflon pans that begin to degrade at cooking temperatures above 500° F. (In the case of microwave popcorn, we get both—the bags contain perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a known carcinogen related to Teflon.) We are living laboratories for artificial chemicals. Kristof’s column gives a good introduction to some of these toxins.

Now, not all of these chemicals are proved to cause cancer.  But that’s the cancer panel’s point. Since the research hasn’t been done, it only makes sense to be wary of them. We are so concerned that the medications we take be both safe and effective, and the FDA generally takes a hard line at enforcing this. Why aren’t we (and they) equally concerned about food additives?

So, in Bonnie’s quest to transform her diet, the food she eats is almost less important than where it comes from. She now buys the vast majority of her (mostly organic) produce from farmers’ markets, and has found a local farm that raises natural lamb, pork, chicken, and eggs, without added hormones or antibiotics. She thinks it’s essential to avoid factory-farmed anything, since mass farming techniques use so many questionable chemical additives. She abandoned her non-stick skillet, bought glass containers for storage, and microwaves food in a Pyrex pie plate.

And she’s found that she has to be eternally vigilant. Tricks and traps are everywhere. For example, “fresh” orange juice from cartons, according to Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, may have been picked and squeezed months earlier. It’s stored without oxygen, and then flavored with synthetically produced “flavor packs” produced by fragrance manufacturers. The manufacturers don’t have to label these additives because they’re made from orange byproducts.

But toxins aren’t just in food and our kitchen utensils; they’re also in our air, our water, our cosmetics, at work, and at home—they even find their way into newborn babies.  As the Cancer Panel points out:

“To a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’ … [They] can be exposed to toxins in utero via placental transfer and/or after birth via breast milk. Tests of umbilical cord blood found traces of nearly 300 pollutants in newborns’ bodies, such as chemicals used in fast-food packaging, flame retardants present in household dust, and pesticides.”

The study they cite was conducted by the Environmental Working Group, one of the premier groups working to remove toxins from our environment. You can hear more about it in a recent address to the Commonwealth Club of California by Kenneth Cook, EWG’s president.  You can listen to it for free here , or download it as a podcast here or from iTunes.

It’s essential to become smarter, toxin-avoidant consumers, and the EWG website offers abundant helpful information.  For example, you can find a series of tips for making your home a healthier place.

Companies that pollute the environment with carcinogens are particularly insidious when they present themselves as green—or pink. Breast Cancer Action, a small but effective activist organization, has focused on this “pinkwashing” problem with a campaign called “Think Before You Pink™” It urges consumers to resist buying pink-ribbon products from companies that actually worsen the cancer epidemic.

A recent and egregious example of pinkwashing is KFC who, in partnership with Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is now selling pink buckets of factory-farmed, fat-laden fried chicken to “cure breast cancer.” We expect this kind of deception from KFC, but the Komen foundation should know better.  You can tell them to stop by sending a message from BCA’s site—and by not patronizing this product.

Since BCA first criticized the KFC/Komen partnership, outrage about the hypocrisy has gone viral. It was featured on The Colbert Report and has been roundly criticized by bloggers like John Robbins.

BCA successfully persuaded General Mills to stop putting the bovine growth hormone rBGH, a known carcinogen, in Yoplait yogurt. They are now trying to get Eli Lilly to stop manufacturing rBGH at all. Unlike other breast cancer organizations, they accept no donations from pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, or other companies whose products are involved in cancer diagnosis or treatment. They also accept no money from chemical manufacturers, oil or tobacco companies, or others who might possibly contribute to cancer incidence.

As Bonnie says, there are no certainties in life or cancer. No one can guarantee that eating organic food will keep you cancer-free. Bonnie relies on Western medicine and the guidance of doctors who are trained in it.

But she is not going to sit back and simply wait for them to cure her. She is also doing everything she can to strengthen her immune system and keep herself healthy. And that involves eating right, exercising, avoiding toxins, and supporting organizations that are trying to remove them from our environment. Nothing about this cancer epidemic is going to change unless we become proactive. Bonnie’s message to you is: Don’t wait until you get cancer to take responsibility for your own health.

Let me repeat the disclaimer from last month’s post: I am not a medical doctor, so my reflections are meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive. I wouldn’t pretend to tell anyone else what to do. Again, I invite your comments and, especially, your own stories.

My thanks to “Bonnie” for her input and inspiration.

Copyright © 2010 by John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.

Resources and Notes:

David Serban-Schreiber, MD, PhD, Anticancer: A New Way of Life (2008).

Keith I Block, MD, Life Over Cancer: The Block Center Program for Integrative Cancer Treatment (2009).

Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie, Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things (2009).

Food, Inc. (documentary written and directed by Robert Kenner, 2008)

President’s Cancer Panel 2008-09 Annual Report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now (2010)

Environmental Working Group website

Breast Cancer Action website

Think Before You Pink™ website

Breast Cancer Action’s “Think Before You Pink” campaign cautions consumers to resist “pinkwashing.”

ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

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Mine company’s headquarters, Megalo Livadi, Serifos. Panoramio photo by glavind.

“JUMP!”

by Andreas Economakis

Serifos is a beautiful little island, not 3 hours from Athens by boat. Rocky at first glance, one soon realizes that there is quite a bit of greenery hidden here and there, mostly in the craggy gorges and Lilliputian valleys. The island is deceptive. It has a ghostlike quality at times, the majority of visitors being Athenians who come only for the weekends. The real natives, a scant 600 or so, work as construction workers, shop-owners, municipal employees or fishermen. The rest are old folk.

Serifos’ once booming population and economy, both products of the island’s iron ore mining facilities, slowly disintegrated when the mines shut their doors in 1963. In the small village of Megalo Livadi, on the far side of the island, the German mining company’s neo-classical headquarters stand semi-dilapidated amidst a row of palm trees at the end of the seaside village’s only main road, a dirt road. Kind of like a spaceship that landed in the middle of nowhere, the “villa,” as the locals call the building, is too huge for the place and yet beautiful to look at. Chickens peck along the dirt road an the sandy beach in front of two solitary coffee shops, both devoid of customers in this once bustling mining town that must now have no more than 10 permanent inhabitants. Tourists tend to roll in with mouths agape, sensing that they’ve happened upon some sort of landscape conjured up by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or his Greek equivalent.

Next to the crumbling headquarters is a memorial to the four miners killed in a protest strike against the mining company in 1916. The miners died fighting for better work conditions and an 8-hour workday. During the strike, the despised owner George Groman suddenly ordered his thug-like foremen and a small group of gendarmes to open fire on the striking workers in order to get them to return to work. Four miners fell dead and scores more were wounded before bystander wives and workers picked up stones and counter-attacked, killing the armed detachment to a man and throwing all the bodies into the sea. A workers’ commune was proclaimed and set up but it was quickly thrown into disarray by the arrival of a French battleship. The French returned Groman to power on the condition that he accept the 8-hour workday.

When I first visited Serifos I had no idea this village existed, no idea Serifos was a mining island, no idea people had died here fighting for a bit of human decency. There is something mystical about Serifos, something hidden from the eyes. There’s an old sayin in Greece that wherever you dig, you will find the bones of brave ancestors. Serifos is no exception. People died on this island fighting for justice. The dirt and rocks have been soaked with blood. One gets the sense that the land has taken notice of this, that something important is stirring under the earth, deep in the island’s history. Call it a feeling, call it an energy. One definitely senses this energy when visiting Serifos. At least, I did.

A few summers ago, when I first set foot on the island, I wanted to be alone. I needed time to gather my thoughts after a long job and an even longer broken relationship. That desire lasted all of 10 minutes after I set foot on the port. All of a sudden I wanted to be social. Not yet aware of Serifos’ history or powerful energy, I attributed the change in my disposition to the brilliant white buildings, the crystal blue sky, the seagulls, the happy people riding on scooters, everything and everyone so very alive in the clean salty air.

Like most first-time visitors to Serifos, I had been deposited by the ferry on the busy side of the island, near the small hotels and bars and restaurants and boats and noise. I remembered that my cousin Anna had a summerhouse up in the mountain village of Chora.  I called her up on her mobile, wondering if she was nude bathing on the island’s white sand beaches as I’d heard she liked to do.  Anna was happy to hear from me and invited me up to her village for drinks right away.

The epidemy of a social creature, Anna was surrounded by a horde of lively people at the local café.  I took to the new climate and crowd like a fish to water. I met Rachel, an English lawyer specializing in Romani law, with whom I would eventually develop a film on Kosovo Gypsies, a film we never made (if only someone would have given us the money…). I also met a couple from Manchester. He was a musician in a fairly successful band there. She was a teacher.  She was gorgeous, simply stunning.  I spent every minute I could with this English couple.  Simply looking at her in her flowery see-through summer dresses made my heart skip a few beats.

On their last night on Serifos we all went out drinking.  We were down by the port where all the bars are.  Eventually the bars closed and we bought some beers and decided to go back up to Chora and catch the sunrise.  As there were three of us and I was the only one with a bike, I offered to give them a ride, one by one, up to the village. She rode first.  We rushed up the hill, she clinging onto me tightly. I could feel her warm body against my back, her soft thighs pressed against my legs. She rested her head close to my neck to shelter her eyes from the wind.  Her breath sent shivers down my spine.  I swear I could have ridden all night.  I wanted to take her to the abandoned mining headquarters, to swim naked in the phosphorescent sea with her, to gaze at the yellow moon together as it slowly drifted against the pinhole black sky.  At the fork in the road, I made a right and continued to Chora, to our original destination.   Maybe if I’d made a left my life would be different now.  Simple as that: right or left?

When we got to the village, it was all I could do to not kiss her.
But I rode back down for her boyfriend.  Back up in the village we stumbled around the small, cascading white houses, which literally crawl up against each other like a Lego blocks.  We were having fun jumping from one house to the next.  We came across a big divide between two houses.  Perhaps one could leap to the other side, but it would be suicidal.  Especially with all the booze we had consumed. Her boyfriend had developed a macho attitude over the course of the night, perhaps sensing the turbulent chemistry between his girlfriend and me.

He announced that he was going to jump. His girlfriend pleaded with him to not do it. The more she pleaded, the more he wanted to jump. He took a few steps back and prepared himself for the death leap. I watched with baited breath. This musician was going to sacrifice himself at our feet, right there before the altar of our burgeoning love. He would surely die and I would end up in her arms, kissing her wet salty cheeks, sweaty skin and arms entwined, little children laughing, a house in the English countryside, summers in Greece, the trickle of cold ouzo gliding down suntanned skin as frothy blue waves washed over our tingling flesh, alive, together, eternal…

“Don’t do it man,” I yelped at the last moment. Why did I say that? He stopped and looked at me. “You’ll never make it. You’re way too fucked up,” I went on, my lips moving mechanically, some greater force controlling me like a puppet. His girlfriend stroked my arm in thanks and a flash of electricity rushed through me. My other self yelled, silently, desperately: “Jump, you English fuck. Jump!”

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANI DIFRANCO

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FUEL

by Ani Difranco


They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan
And they discovered a slave cemetery there
May their souls rest easy
Now that lynching is frowned upon
And we’ve moved on to the electric chair
And I wonder who’s gonna be president, tweedle dum or tweedle dummer?
And who’s gonna have the big blockbuster box office this summer?
How about we put up a wall between houses and the highway
And you can go your way, and I can go my may

Except all the radios agree with all the tvs
And all the magazines agree with all the radios
And I keep hearing that same damn song everywhere I go
Maybe I should put a bucket over my head
And a marshmallow in each ear
And stumble around for
Another dumb-numb waiting for another hit song to appear

People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people playing music in a room
Now everything is cross-marketing
Its about sunglasses and shoes
Or guns and drugs
You choose
We got it rehashed
We got it half-assed
We’re digging up all the graves
And we’re spitting on the past
And you can choose between the colors
Of the lipstick on the whores
Cause we know the difference between
The font of 20% more
And the font of teriyaki
You tell me
How does it… make you feel?

You tell me
What’s … real?
And they say that alcoholics are always alcoholics
Even when they’re as dry as my lips for years
Even when they’re stranded on a small desert island
With no place within 2,000 miles to buy beer
And I wonder
Is he different?
Is he different?
Has he changed? what’s he about?..
Or is he just a liar with nothing to lie about?

Am I headed for the same brick wall
Is there anything I can do about
Anything at all?
Except go back to that corner in Manhattan
And dig deeper, dig deeper this time
Down beneath the impossible pain of our history
Beneath unknown bones
Beneath the bedrock of the mystery
Beneath the sewage systems and the PATH train
Beneath the cobblestones and the water mains
Beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals
Beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels
Beneath everything I can think of to think about
Beneath it all, beneath all get out
Beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel

There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel
There’s a fire just waiting for fuel


You can listen to “Fuel” by clicking on the “Play song from Lala.com” link here.


Ani Difranco is an American singer, guitarist, and songwriter. She has released over twenty albums, is a Grammy Award winner, and is a feminist icon.

Editor’s Note: This post was by request. If you have a request of your own please feel free to post it as a comment.

Today’s post continues our conversation about music and poetry, and whether songs are, in fact, poetry. The consensus from our earlier discussion seems to be a resounding yes, and I agree.

For me, some songwriters are really getting at the heart of poetry with their lyrics. Ani Difranco is at the top of this list for me. My personal favorite Ani Difranco lyric is from “32 Flavors” and reads “and god help you if you are an ugly girl / course too pretty is also your doom / cause everyone harbors a secret hatred / for the prettiest girl in the room / and god help you if you are a phoenix / and you dare to rise up from the ash / a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy / while you are just flying past.” I simply cannot see that as anything other than poetry.

I think today’s piece is extremely exemplary of how a song can be poetry. If you listen to the recorded version you will see that Difranco essentially speaks the entire song. This is almost more of an example of spoken word poetry with accompanying music than it is a song, and yet, it is featured as a song on the artist’s album “Little Plastic Castle.” Beyond that, the song covers topics such as politics and the state of the world today – topics traditionally covered in poetry.

Want to read more by and about Ani Difranco?
Ani Difranco lyrics from a devoted fan
MySpace
Wikipedia

FRIDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: Amy Fleury

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At Twenty-Eight

by Amy Fleury


It seems I get by on more luck than sense,
not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,
breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud.
I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
At turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance
as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude
she counts as daylight virtue and muted
evenings, the inventory of absence.
But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.
Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry.
I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,
singing like only a lucky girl can.


Amy Fleury’s upbringing in rural Kansas shaped her unadorned poetic style and her appreciation for the outdoors. Her first book of poetry, Beautiful Trouble, received the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. She is currently the poet-in-residence at her alma mater, McNeese State University.


CHRIS HEDGES

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine


HOW THE CORPORATIONS BROKE

RALPH NADER AND AMERICA, TOO

by Chris Hedges

Ralph Nader’s descent from being one of the most respected and powerful men in the country to being a pariah illustrates the totality of the corporate coup. Nader’s marginalization was not accidental. It was orchestrated to thwart the legislation that Nader and his allies—who once consisted of many in the Democratic Party—enacted to prevent corporate abuse, fraud and control. He was targeted to be destroyed. And by the time he was shut out of the political process with the election of Ronald Reagan, the government was in the hands of corporations. Nader’s fate mirrors our own.

“The press discovered citizen investigators around the mid-1960s,” Nader told me when we spoke a few days ago. “I was one of them. I would go down with the press releases, the findings, the story suggestions and the internal documents and give it to a variety of reporters. I would go to Congress and generate hearings. Oftentimes I would be the lead witness. What was interesting was the novelty; the press gravitates to novelty. They achieved great things. There was collaboration. We provided the newsworthy material. They covered it. The legislation passed. Regulations were issued. Lives were saved. Other civic movements began to flower.”

Nader was singled out for destruction, as Henriette Mantel and Stephen Skrovan point out in their engaging documentary movie on Nader, “An Unreasonable Man.” General Motors had him followed in an attempt to blackmail him. It sent an attractive woman to his neighborhood Safeway supermarket in a bid to meet him while he was shopping and then seduce him; the attempt failed, and GM, when exposed, had to issue a public apology.

But far from ending their effort to destroy Nader, corporations unleashed a much more sophisticated and well-funded attack. In 1971, the corporate lawyer and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote an eight-page memo, titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” in which he named Nader as the chief nemesis of corporations. It became the blueprint for corporate resurgence. Powell’s memo led to the establishment of the Business Roundtable, which amassed enough money and power to direct government policy and mold public opinion. The Powell memo outlined ways corporations could shut out those who, in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals,” were hostile to corporate interests. Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes to churn out ideological tracts that attacked government regulation and environmental protection. His memo led to the successful effort to place corporate-friendly academics and economists in universities and on the airwaves, as well as drive out those in the public sphere who questioned the rise of unchecked corporate power and deregulation. It saw the establishment of organizations to monitor and pressure the media to report favorably on issues that furthered corporate interests. And it led to the building of legal organizations to promote corporate interests in the courts and appointment of sympathetic judges to the bench.

“It was off to the races,” Nader said. “You could hardly keep count of the number of right-wing corporate-funded think tanks. These think tanks specialized, especially against the tort system. We struggled through the Nixon and early Ford years, when inflation was a big issue. Nixon did things that horrified conservatives. He signed into law OSHA, the Environmental Protection Agency and air and water pollution acts because he was afraid of the people from the rumble that came out of the 1960s. He was the last Republican president to be afraid of liberals.”

The corporations carefully studied and emulated the tactics of the consumer advocate they wanted to destroy. “Ralph Nader came along and did serious journalism; that is what his early stuff was, such as ‘Unsafe at Any Speed,’ ” the investigative journalist David Cay Johnston told me. “The big books they [Nader and associates] put out were serious, first-rate journalism. Corporate America was terrified by this. They went to school on Nader. They said, ‘We see how you do this.’ You gather material, you get people who are articulate, you hone how you present this and the corporations copy-catted him with one big difference—they had no regard for the truth. Nader may have had a consumer ideology, but he was not trying to sell you a product. He is trying to tell the truth as best as he can determine it. It does not mean it is the truth. It means it is the truth as best as he and his people can determine the truth. And he told you where he was coming from.”

The Congress, between 1966 and 1973, passed 25 pieces of consumer legislation, nearly all of which Nader had a hand in authoring. The auto and highway safety laws, the meat and poultry inspection laws, the oil pipeline safety laws, the product safety laws, the update on flammable fabric laws, the air pollution control act, the water pollution control act, the EPA, OSHA and the Environmental Council in the White House transformed the political landscape. Nader by 1973 was named the fourth most influential person in the country after Richard Nixon, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and the labor leader George Meany.

“Then something very interesting happened,” Nader said. “The pressure of these meetings by the corporations like General Motors, the oil companies and the drug companies with the editorial people, and probably with the publishers, coincided with the emergence of the most destructive force to the citizen movement—Abe Rosenthal, the editor of The New York Times. Rosenthal was a right-winger from Canada who hated communism, came here and hated progressivism. The Times was not doing that well at the time. Rosenthal was commissioned to expand his suburban sections, which required a lot of advertising. He was very receptive to the entreaties of corporations, and he did not like me. I would give material to Jack Morris in the Washington bureau and it would not get in the paper.”

Rosenthal, who banned social critics such as Noam Chomsky from being quoted in the paper and met frequently for lunch with conservative icon William F. Buckley, demanded that no story built around Nader’s research could be published unless there was a corporate response. Corporations, informed of Rosenthal’s dictate, refused to comment on Nader’s research. This tactic meant the stories were never published. The authority of the Times set the agenda for national news coverage. Once Nader disappeared from the Times, other major papers and the networks did not feel compelled to report on his investigations. It was harder and harder to be heard.

“There was, before we were silenced, a brief, golden age of journalism,” Nader lamented. “We worked with the press to expose corporate abuse on behalf of the public. We saved lives. This is what journalism should be about; it should be about making the world a better and safer place for our families and our children, but then it ended and we were shut out.”

“We were thrown on the defensive, and once we were on the defensive it was difficult to recover,” Nader said. “The break came in 1979 when they deregulated natural gas. Our last national stand was for the Consumer Protection Agency. We put everything we had on that. We would pass it during the 1970s in the House on one year, then the Senate during the next session, then the House later on. It ping-ponged. Each time we would lose ground. We lost it because Carter, although he campaigned on it, did not lift a finger compared to what he did to deregulate natural gas. We lost it by 20 votes in the House, although we had a two-thirds majority in the Senate waiting for it. That was the real beginning of the decline. Then Reagan was elected. We tried to be the watchdog. We put out investigative reports. They would not be covered.”

“The press in the 1980s would say ‘why should we cover you?’ ” Nader went on. “ ‘Who is your base in Congress?’ I used to be known as someone who could trigger a congressional hearing pretty fast in the House and Senate. They started looking towards the neoliberals and neocons and the deregulation mania. We put out two reports on the benefits of regulation and they too disappeared. They did not get covered at all. This was about the same the time that [former U.S. Rep.] Tony Coelho taught the Democrats, starting in 1979 when he was head of the House Campaign Finance Committee, to start raising big-time money from corporate interests. And they did. It had a magical influence. It is the best example I have of the impact of money. The more money they raised the less interested they were in any of these popular issues. They made more money when they screwed up the tax system. There were a few little gains here and there; we got the Freedom of Information law through in 1974. And even in the 1980s we would get some things done, GSA, buying air bag-equipped cars, the drive for standardized air bags. We would defeat some things here and there, block a tax loophole and defeat a deregulatory move. We were successful in staunching some of the deregulatory efforts.”

Nader, locked out of the legislative process, decided to send a message to the Democrats. He went to New Hampshire and Massachusetts during the 1992 primaries and ran as “none of the above.” In 1996 he allowed the Green Party to put his name on the ballot before running hard in 2000 in an effort that spooked the Democratic Party. The Democrats, fearful of his grass-roots campaign, blamed him for the election of George W. Bush, an absurdity that found fertile ground among those who had abandoned rational inquiry for the thought-terminating clichés of television.

Nader’s status as a pariah corresponded with an unchecked assault by corporations on the working class. The long-term unemployment rate, which in reality is close to 20 percent, the millions of foreclosures, the crippling personal debts that plague households, the personal bankruptcies, Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury, the evaporation of savings and retirement accounts and the crumbling of the country’s vital infrastructure are taking place as billions in taxpayer subsidies, obscene profits, bonuses and compensation are enjoyed by the corporate overlords. We will soon be forced to buy the defective products of the government-subsidized drug and health insurance companies, which will remain free to raise co-payments and premiums, especially if policyholders get seriously ill. The oil, gas, coal and nuclear power companies have made a mockery of Barack Obama’s promises to promote clean, renewal energy. And we are rapidly becoming a third-world country, cannibalized by corporations, with two-thirds of the population facing financial difficulty and poverty.

The system is broken. And the consumer advocate who represented the best of our democracy was broken with it. As Nader pointed out after he published “Unsafe at Any Speed” in 1965, it took nine months to federally regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Two years after the collapse of Bear Stearns there is still no financial reform. The large hedge funds and banks are using billions in taxpayer subsidies to once again engage in the speculative games that triggered the first financial crisis and will almost certainly trigger a second. The corporate press, which abets our vast historical amnesia, does nothing to remind us how we got here. It speaks in the hollow and empty slogans handed to it by public relations firms, its corporate paymasters and the sound-bite society.

“If you organize 1 percent of the people in this country along progressive lines you can turn the country around, as long as you give them infrastructure,” Nader said. “They represent a large percentage of the population. Take all the conservatives who work in Wal-Mart: How many would be against a living wage? Take all the conservatives who have pre-existing conditions: How many would be for single-payer not-for-profit health insurance? When you get down to the concrete, when you have an active movement that is visible and media-savvy, when you have a community, a lot of people will join. And lots more will support it. The problem is that most liberals are estranged from the working class. They largely have the good jobs. They are not hurting.”

“The real tragedy is that citizens’ movements should not have to rely on the commercial media, and public television and radio are disgraceful—if anything they are worse,” Nader said. “In 30-some years [Bill] Moyers has had me on [only] twice. We can’t rely on the public media. We do what we can with Amy [Goodman] on “Democracy Now!” and Pacifica stations. When I go to local areas I get very good press, TV and newspapers, but that doesn’t have the impact, even locally. The national press has enormous impact on the issues. It is not pleasant having to say this. You don’t want to telegraph that you have been blacked out, but on the other hand you can’t keep it quiet. The right wing has won through intimidation.”

–Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a graduate of Colgate University and Harvard Divinity School. He is a former Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times (where he shared a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for coverage of terrorism) and has also reported on current events in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. In 2002 he was the recipient of an Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism and in 2009 the Los Angeles Press Club named him the Online Journalist of the Year. He is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. Hedges is the author of nine books including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

This piece was first published in Truthdig on April 5, 2010.

ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

MY LAST DAY IN HARLEM

by Andreas Economakis

I enter a dirty, run down bathroom.  My hair and blue work clothes are covered in white dust.  The wall is pockmarked with holes, sprayed with messy graffiti and blood.  My steel-toe boots crunch over spent syringes and a bunch of empty crack vials with colorful plastic caps.

Drilling sounds and faint Salsa music can be heard in the background.   A door slams and a couple can be heard arguing and screaming at each other.  Then a baby starts wailing.

I take a leak and approach the cracked bathroom mirror.  I look at myself.  Red eyes, tangled hair, unshaven.  I exit the bathroom and head toward the living room.

“You know, I’m going to miss this place,” I say as I walk down the dark dirty hallway.

“This dump?” Ernesto calls out from the living room.

I enter the living room, which is in the process of renovation.  Tools and building supplies are stacked here and there.  A small radio plays Willie Colon.

Ernesto is on a ladder, swaying his hips to the music as he dismantles a light fixture.  Thin stiletto mustache, angular Puerto Rican features.  He has a V-shaped body-builder’s torso, huge muscular arms and a powerful neck.  Strangely skinny legs in tight jeans, the same blue NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development work shirt as me.  Difference is he’s clean, spotless.

“The City should tear this shit down instead of trying to renovate it.  What’s the fucking use anyway?  This place is going to be trashed the moment we turn it over, right?”

“Depends…” I reply.

“On what?  They should blow up the whole block. Cono!  Filthy crackheads!  How can these people live like this?” Ernesto says, snipping a wire.

“Ernesto, man, it’s the culture of poverty.  Like the reverse Midas touch.”

“The reverse… what?  Did you just smoke a joint, cabron?” he says, looking at me with a quizzical smile.

I pick up a tattered old black and white photo.  An elderly Harlem couple smile arm in arm on the street, circa 1930’s.  They are dressed in their Sunday finest.  A clean, safe, grainy world.  Frozen in time.  At least, frozen in this frame.

“Just as wealth begets wealth, so it goes with poverty,” I say.

“Wealth beget… Shit!  Is that what they teach you crackers in college?” he quips.  “Hand me the crow bar.”

I rummage through Ernesto’s heavy toolbox, looking for the crowbar.

“It’s been planned this way.  They want to keep the people anesthetized and divided.  Racism, sexism… all the “isms” really, they’re just a weapon created by the powers in charge to increase their profits.”

“Cubism too?” Ernesto says, smiling.  I smile back.

“And they don’t even need to wield the ‘ism’ weapon themselves.  It’s a like virus.  They just hand it over to people like you and me and we turn it on each other.  We become self-replicating stereotypes while they provide the junk that destroys us at a profit.  They wait until we chop each other up into little pieces and then they have us for dinner.”

“Shut up, maricon!  You’re making me hungry!”

I finally find the crowbar and pull it out.

“Have you ever wondered why there are so many liquor stores and funeral homes in Harlem?  And why is it easier to buy crack here than pizza?” I say, extending the crowbar toward Ernesto.

“Crackheads don’t eat pizza, bro.  They’re never hungry,” Ernesto replies with laughing eyes.

One hand on the fixture wire, Ernesto grabs the crow bar, sending a jolt of electricity through my body.  I fall on my ass in a cloud of sheetrock dust.  Ernesto bursts out laughing.

“Wake up, dude!”  Ernesto yells.

“Jesus!” is all my shocked lungs are able to squeeze out.  Ernesto steps down off the ladder.

“A full year here and you didn’t learn anything college boy!” he says, helping me up onto my feet.  He tries to dust me off but quickly gives up.

“Ich!  Hopeless,” he says, a disgusted look on his face.  He looks to clean his hands instead.  He then looks at his watch.

“Shit!  Let’s pack it up.  Time to get the fuck out of this rat hole,” he says, excitedly.

Ernesto pulls his shirt off, grabs his bag and dances to the bathroom, in tune with the music.  His muscular back is covered with a huge tattoo of a bald eagle in flight with a bleeding heart in its talons.  The heart has an American flag printed on it.

“I can’t believe it’s your last day, bro!  Fucking blowing this dump!  How does it feel?”

“Like a refreshing bolt of electricity,” I reply.  “Jolting!”

“You know, I’m going to miss your do goody good Leave it to Beaver humor…”

“You’re going to miss electrocuting me!” I say, trying to dust myself off.

“That’s right bro!  Call it the reverse Puerto Rican touch!  Death row revenge!  It’s about time we turned up the juice on you crackers!”

Ernesto stalls in the bathroom, horrified by the filth.

“Oh fuck!” he cringes.

Careful not to touch anything, he starts washing himself by the sink.  I start packing up his tools.

“So, you excited?  All that sun, the chiquitas…” he asks over the trickling bathroom water.

“I’m psyched to see Marisa again,” I reply.

“It was about time, bro!  You’ve been going on like Groucho… Marx and shit!  You get all fucking political when you haven’t gotten laid!”

“You think?”

Ernesto shines me a big sunny smile from the dark bathroom.

“Just listen to you,” he says.  “You’re like a god damn pocket revolution about to go off.  Yeah bro, you’re ripe!  Ready to drop off the tree ripe if you ask me.”

“Ripe and ready to join all the other fruits in Cali-forni-ay, huh?” I smile back.

Ernesto looks pensive.

“You know what I like about California?  It’s clean out there.  Sunny and clean.  That’s why everybody’s got a big ass smile on their face.  Just like in Chips.  Not like this dump!”

Ernesto pauses as he inspects himself in the mirror.  “My man, Eric Estrada,” he adds.  I’m not sure if he’s just mentioned the actor because he’s a symbol of California or if he’s referring to his mirrored self.  Ernesto could easily play in the movies.  He’s got the look.  He’s got all the right angles.  Cameras love guys like Ernesto.  And Eric Estrada.

Transported if ever so briefly to the Golden State, I start humming a Woody Guthrie tune as I finish collecting all the tools.

“California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see.  But believe it or not you won’t find it so hot if you ain’t got the do-re-mi…”

“What, is that from the Bible or something?” Ernesto asks as he starts to brush his teeth.

“You could say that…”

“You know, I never could figure out what a college-educated, Upper West Side boy from fucking Europe and shit is doing over on this side of hell.  I mean, shit, what’s the point of college if you end up in the ghetto?” Ernesto wonders, blue-green toothpaste suds overflowing out of his mouth.

“Depends on what you mean by end up in the ghetto.”

Ernesto spits the toothpaste out.

“I mean end up in the ghetto, bro.  Here.  Rubbing elbows with the living dead.  This is where we are, right?” He wipes his face with a towel.

“How do you mean?” I ask.

Ernesto dries himself, puts on a fresh shirt, combs himself carefully and splashes some cologne on.

“Questions, questions.  But who’s got the answers maricon?”  He emerges from the bathroom, looking fresh.  He smells like springtime in deep winter.

“You got a date or something?” I ask, my nose tingling in the minty chemical breeze.

“What? Just ‘cause I work in the filth means I gotta be filthy?”  He looks at me with a frown on his face.  “I mean, just look at you, bro!  Aaach!   You look like a… god damn… junkie ran over you.”

“I’d get jumped in a second if I walked out of here looking all fresh like you.”

Ernesto laughs.

“Homeboys would be lining up to bust all over your cracker ass!” he says with a wide grin on his face, air fucking just in case I didn’t get it.

“And what if God is black?” I ask.

“Then your ass better be the size of Texas, bro!” Ernesto quips right back, slapping his skinny leg with his muscular hand in full glee.

Some sort of “Dennis Dalton meets the Mahatma Gandhi for drinks in Hailie Selasie’s Ethiopia” thing takes over me and I turn toward V-Man with a skeptical look.

“What if we go to heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the black man as an inferior, and god is there, and we look up and he is not white?  He’s black.  What then is our response?” I ask, quoting Robert Kennedy (how did I remember this?  I mean, I’m from Greece…).  What’s gotten in to me?

Ernesto sizes me up with a glint in his eyes.  He smiles, a small pointy curve of a smile barely visible on the corner of his mouth, like a small and concealed fish-gutting knife.

“There you go again, bro!” he says, preparing himself like the Pro Wrestler of all orators.  He snorts.  I take a step back.

“Well shit, first off I’d ask God to put down the motherfucking crack pipe he’s been sucking on like a titty all these years and explain to me why the fuck he’s been torturing his people so hard.  Shit!  That’s what I would ask the crazy motherfucker!  And I’ve got a million other questions for him too!  Like what’s up with slavery and prostitution and AIDS and poverty and kids dying of hunger and disease and thirst while all the fucking Nazis controlling all the wealth and power party it up in our faces.  If God were black!  Where the fuck do you come up with this stuff, homeboy?”

Not sure if Ernesto is joking or serious, I watch him stomp his way to the door.  He grabs his heavy toolbox like it’s feather light and exits, leaving me all alone in the dusty room.  The familiar sounds of the building breathing with life come back, making me feel all the more alone.  I look around one last time and head for the door.

I slowly exit into the rundown hallway.  Syringes and crack vials, broken walls, filth and blood and graffiti everywhere.  Hard to believe people actually live in this building.

Ernesto steps out of the dark, a shiny American padlock in his hands.  He pulls the chain around the doorframe with force and closes it with the padlock.  He pushes and kicks the door hard to make sure it can’t be forced.

“Don’t know why we fucking bother.  Fucking zombies always get it, right?” he says.  He turns and starts walking down the stairs.

A nearby door is unbolted and a little old lady in her seventies cautiously peeks out into the hallway.  She makes eye contact with me and quickly closes her door in fear.   I turn and follow Ernesto down the stairs, leaving a trail of dusty white boot prints.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

Let x, by Chad Simpson

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

Let x

by Chad Simpson


Let x equal the moment just after he tells her he’s starting a club for people who know something about computers.

It is summer, 1984, and this is their grade school playground. She is idling on a swing over a patch of scuffed earth. He stands just off to the side, one hand on the chain of the swing next to hers.

Let y equal her laughter. Her laughter sounds like a prank phone call at three a.m. It sounds a little evil.

She throws her head back, and even though he is hearing the y of her laughter in the wake of that moment x, he can’t stop staring at her hair. He can’t believe how black, how shiny, how perfect it is.

She stands up out of the swing and asks, “What do you know about computers?”

It is 1984. Nobody at this elementary school—or in Monmouth, Illinois, in general—knows all that much about computers.

Let z equal the face he makes. The face is not a reaction to her question but to her laughter.

He was trying to impress her with this computer club. He knows she is smarter than he is. He knows that she was, in fact, smarter than everyone in the entire fifth grade, and that next year, when they start pre-algebra, she will be the smartest person in the sixth grade, too.

He can’t help the z of his face. He feels humiliated. His ears are tiny fires, and her hair and face, both of which he finds beautiful, has always found beautiful, are beginning to blur together. She has stopped laughing, but he can still hear the ghost of it as he searches for a variable that might make it as if none of this ever happened.

In a moment she will step closer to him, recognizing in some way his humiliation, and wanting to make him feel better, but he will think she is about to say or do something even worse than she has already done, and he will misinterpret her gesture. When she gets close to him, he will kick her in the stomach—harder than he has ever kicked anyone.

He will regret this before she even begins to cry. She will double over, gasping for breath, and look up at him with dry eyes, and he will know that the hurt he has just inflicted upon her is at least equal to but probably greater than the hurt caused to him by the y of her laughter.

He will feel terrible, and he will immediately think back to x, the variable that started this whole rotten equation.

Let x equal not the moment just after he tells her about the computer club, but the moment just before it.

Let x be his saying nothing about this club and instead telling her something he’s always wanted to say.

Let x be a different gesture altogether. Something honest. Tender.

Let x.


Chad Simpson‘s stories have appeared in many magazines and journals, including McSweeney’s, Orion, and The Sun. He lives in Monmouth, IL, and teaches fiction writing and literature at Knox College. The above story originally appeared in Esquire and is available in his recent chapbook, Phantoms. It is reprinted here by permission of the author. For more info, visit Chad’s website here.