I BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW

I BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW    (originally posted April 16, 2013)

An Andrew Ramble

“We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.”

E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

The person, whom is I, Andrew Goldman, is more or less a mystery to no one.  I wear my heart embroidered with crimson thread on my sleeve; rarely missing an opportunity to cry on any dry shoulder I come across, or just whine to an unsuspecting friend or acquaintance.  In my everyday affairs, my tendency is to never hold my cards close to the vest, but rather to consistently lay them on the table, indicating each Joker and Jack of my persona with a Klieg Light intensity.

It’s no secret, those familiar with me are aware of my complete lack of Stoicism.  For lack of a better term, I am simply an open book.  But wait…there are a few things in my structure that some may not know about this regular, yet mildly, repellant character who over the past four and one half decades has developed into Andrew William Goldman.  So here are some of the things (listed in no particular order) about myself that are ultimately of zero interest to most, but someday might just serve some useful purpose to those who just otherwise think me strange.  Maybe this little ramble will help flesh out some aspect of who I was, to one of my yet unborn descendants.  Whether it matters now, or ends with this blog, I can only offer answers to the yet unasked questions, by offering up this little unsolicited declaration of; I BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW!

I can saddle a horse. – My father lived in the semi rural town of Warwick, NY.  Additionally, he was a procurer of broken down Glue Horses.  When I was about ten years old, he obtained a few old mounts, which he kept in the broken down old barn on his property.  I learned to ride, care, and saddle horses on my weekends with him.  Maybe someday when I’m broken down, I’ll procure a broken down horse of my own!

LETS RIDE!!!

I hate to dig. – It’s not the effort involved that makes me hate shovel work, it’s just some unexplainable aspect of my personality that makes me dislike working below grade level.  Furthermore, I hate working in crawl spaces and basements.

Dead mammals make me wretch. – Large or small, decayed or fresh, I can’t even look at them.   A dead deer on the side of the road has almost caused me to drive into oncoming traffic on more than one occasion.

In my youth, I was too light for heavy work and too heavy for light work.  – Now I’m fat enough for heavy work and not light by any measure!

I can sail a boat. – Sailing started for me as a wee lad on a small Styrofoam sailboat called a Sunflower.  Eventually, I moved up to a 30 foot fixed keel style boat.  I haven’t been sailing in close to twenty years now.  It’s probably the most relaxing activity every created…if the wind is right.

My good cholesterol is really low and my bad cholesterol is really high. – Nice knowing ya!

YEAH, BUT IS IT GOOD OR BAD CHOLESTEROL?

I don’t really “get” art and poetry but I pretend I do. – What kind of pseudointellectual would I be otherwise?

I choke on food frequently. – This action has led me to near death experiences on more than one occasion, and has the effect of making me a less than desirable dining companion.

Once in a while, I think of building a small greenhouse in my backyard. – I would only grow flowering plants, because vegetables, cacti, and evergreens are a total bore.

I always feel like an outsider around other Jews. – All paranoia aside, I think other Jews think of me as an outsider as well. (Is this a psychological condition?)

I hold my breath for really long durations when I sleep. – This has two effects.  One, it annoys the crap out of my wife.  Two, I’m almost certain this problem is giving me cumulative brain damage.

I am unable to tie all but the most basic of knots. – I don’t even tie a slipknot on my shoes.  I just wind two loops of shoelace together in a square knot and off I go.

I WONDER IF IT'S ON KINDLE?

I have tried to teach myself to play guitar three times. – I have purchased three separate guitars and have failed at this undertaking three times so far.

I am actually very conservative. – I just follow a politically liberal ideology because my heart tells me that this approach makes me a better person.  Then again…maybe I’m just a phony.

I enjoy romantic stories and movies more than I care to admit. – Romance is the only way I can think an author can convey humanity through storytelling.  (But those Lifetime Channel Movies are still crap!)

I feel a great sense of satisfaction when my wife makes a purchase she is happy with. – I only wish I could give her more opportunities to do this, despite the fact that she is the most unmaterialistic person I have ever known.

When I was six years old I dreamed of being the Six Million Dollar Man. – These dreams included scenarios where I would utilize my bionic strength to pull a tree out by the roots and clobber my “duller than dirt” first grade teacher with it.

NOBODY ROCKED THE ORANGE TRACK SUIT LIKE LEE MAJORS

Every time I look in the mirror I feel totally gypped by my looks. – My minds’ eye says I look like Brad Pitt, but the mirror insists I look like Napoleon Dynamite.

I really wish I had one of those “cool” Scottish accents. – They are intense.  Especially when you agree by saying “Aye” or referring to another dude as “brother.”

I had a Charlie’s Angels poster in my room when I was eleven. – It wasn’t even one of those cool Farrah ones.  It was a Charlie’s Angels 2.0, with Cheryl Ladd.  In spite of this décor, I still turned out to be a heterosexual.

My temper can be harsh and violent in nature. -  I just want to give a formal Thank You to the Pfizer Corporation for first making Paxil, and then Effexor.  Without your noble efforts, my wife and children would have surely run for their lives by this time and I would probably be in the “big house” for some offense relating to rage and idiocy.

Most mornings, I am afraid of the world.  – But by the time late-night rolls around, I am reluctant to give up my battle with the day.

I am a praise and attention-craving psychopath! – Why else would I write a blog?

HERE'S LOOKING AT ME.

DYSTOPIA NOW!

DYSTOPIA NOW!  (originally posted January 26, 2013, the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting  was December 14, 2012) 

An Andrew Rambling Tirade

“Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster.”

Neil Young – Mr. Soul

Maybe it’s the winter.  It could be age.  It’s certainly the times.  Regardless of what is occurring, overstimulation and our growing resultant indifference is quickly moving to blow the roof off of everything we have ever known, loved or cherished.  The world has changed and for our soft little species with our enormous crinkly light grey brains, there will be no return to the way it was before.  Before, when we listened and cared about what we heard.  Before, when a picture saved our memory.  Before, when we spoke in words face to face. Before, when music was in the foreground and books were physical entities with presence.  Before, when we enjoyed the company of our own kind.

One month ago genocide occurred in a kindergarten class.  In one more month it will all but be forgotten.  Forgetting is a gift.  It’s a gift that is more overused with each smart phone release, every “added” fake friendship and every stock dividend we earn without lifting a finger.  On a daily basis, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that we’re just not designed for the world that is unfurling before us.  We’re meant to be a certain way, but certainly not adapted to thrive in this world, which we inadvertently or accidentally created.  The information flow we all experience daily is crushing to most.  The pace is unrelenting and unmaintainable.  We can’t seem to remember anything.  Then again, why should anyone remember in the first place?  The new “Humans” just don’t do that anymore.  Just get it once, click, save or add, and our brains are free to focus on our new species wide addiction.  It’s not drugs; it’s not sex, and it’s not money.  This growing habit which is making us truly different for the first time since we went from being homo erectus to homo sapiens is truly new to the human race.  The little “game changer” for humanity has ultimately turned out to be silicon chips.  Little slices of cooked sand that have given rise to the electronic society, the false reality that now dominate our consciousness, our communication, and our community.

EXACTLY WHEN DID THIS BECOME A PART OF MY BRAIN?

 Not long ago, we were human.  We created in the physical world.  Sometimes a letter written with smeared ink on a sheet of paper conveyed our thought to another or a group.  Sometimes when the conveyance of this thought was complete the letter would be saved as a memento or testament to the thought that went into its creation.  Let’s just ask this question.  Who ever through away a love letter?  Yes, there was once such a thing.  And they were arguably the most beautiful bits of information our species was ever able to convey in any format.

“Click” was the sound of memory.  Twenty-seven chances at most were all you had on each roll of film.  The silver coated filmstrip captured a moment in time.  What that moment was, was and unknown until all the exposures were shot out and sent away for developing.  Many came back to us as blurred rectangles, but most of the time they were kept anyway.  Mementos of a time and a place, even if they were less than perfect representations of our outer selves, were put in an album and cherished by their subjects, while being cheered, jeered and laughed at in later days.  Now only the best is retained.  The imperfect, the unflattering are wholly discarded.  Today’s snapshots have somehow become more valueless representations of what we keep telling ourselves is a more perfect world.

I remember, wait, no I don’t.  I don’t have to.  The HAL 9000 lost his mind when David Bowman removed his memory cards way back in 2001 A Space Odyssey.  We are losing our minds by supplementing our neurons and synapses for SD Cards.   These days, I personally know approximately 20 phone numbers.  I once knew more than a hundred.  “I forgot.”  This has become an acceptable excuse to the Millennial Generation!  This has been taught to me by my 13 and 15 year old sons.  Why I just could not accept the legitimacy of their claim was beyond me.  But now the reality is starting to shine down.  I think they did in fact forget, because it’s becoming true.  They don’t remember.  They don’t have to!

2001: THE GOOD OLD DAYS, WHEN YOU COULD JUST TURN IT OFF.

We talk and talk and talk.  Everyday we have more ways to talk and fewer people to converse with.  In fact most conversation has become less interaction and more regurgitation, recap and reiteration.  People are just so uninteresting, when I can know everything they know just by false fact checking their statements on Wikipedia.  Human beings speaking with one another was once the ultimate interactive experience.  It was informing and stimulating.  We built bonds with speech and resolved conflicts.   We learned from one another and grew together.  The new reality is that speech almost solely conveys information.  Our new habit is to ignore the other participants in a conversation and try to wait for our turn to blurt out some predetermined platform.  Sometimes we do show an interest in what the other participants are saying, but only so long as we find them entertaining or amusing.  Sadly, the noise and the babble is just another addiction that we can’t stand to be without.  When was the last time any of us rode more than 2 miles alone in the car without putting on the radio.  In quieter times, a very wise friend once said this just after switching off the car radio; “You know, ya don’t always have to have it on.”

It’s time to check our heads.  They’re anything but empty, but they are becoming more impacted with crap by the hour.  The term for coveting unnecessary material items was once thought of as worshiping “False Gods.”  We worried and prayed for the things we needed.  What has arisen in our time is the empty reality that everything we need is simply a list of “wants.”  Maybe it was the generation that came before mine that changed want to need.  The two are certainly no longer mutually exclusive.  I’m afraid that objective and speed have suffered the same fate.  The processes of our lives and society’s endeavors have deteriorated into a blend of these two factors.  It no longer matters how a thing gets done, just that it does get completed, and completed quickly at that.  Evidence is everywhere.  Just look up at a building facade the next time you are walking the streets of any city.  The buildings of a century ago were completed by Artisans who put their talents into ornate expression of individuality in every piece of architecture they laid their hands, chisels, and hammers on.  In that world the means certainly justified the ends.  Now, the only beauty on a new structure was prefabricated in China and glued into place by a Beta human, not fit for a skill or existence equal to that of society’s “Makers.”  Even the makers would have to admit that for the most part, they themselves are detached observers of their lives in this new world.

The facts are in….  read ‘em and weep!  We have become our own spoiled brat children, entitled to the point where there is no longer any true desire to want.  There is no need.  All that remains is stagnation.  Maybe that is the roll of the new humans.  Just exist and forget every previous day, even when those days contain a weeping procession of thirty-six inch long caskets.

ALL GONE?

ALL GONE?

 An Andrew Ramble

“If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine

And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung....”

Robert Hunter, Ripple

 Death is the universally feared equalizer, but it’s the idea of death that we really detest.  This is to say that we all know death is waiting for us, but for the most human of reasons we have an impossibly hard time accepting this reality.  The biological reality that immediately after anyone draws their final breath, they’re simply All Gone.

So here’s the question; are we really done once each and everyone of us turns in for our eternal sleep?  Personally, I’ve always considered and accepted the finality of “The End”, thinking that it would just be an enormous waste of the Cosmos’s extensive, yet efficient distribution of natural resources, to have me spend eternity sitting naked on some ethereal cloud, strumming a golden harp for eternity.   (Now there's and image!)  The alternative, Heaven forbid (check out my irony) of being boiled alive in a subterranean cauldron by some malevolently laughing demon seems…well it just seems silly.  Still, I encounter many folks who forget their adult reasoning selves and slip into some level of accepting these fairytale concepts as guideposts for their everyday existences.  But yet, the other side of the coin must be addressed.  Just being All Gone is certainly more final and disturbing than my slowing and now firmly middle-aged mind is willing to accept.  Knowing that this ultimate open-ended issue has the potential to drive me ever closer to the nearest in-patient psychiatric center, I decided to turn some of my reflections to the question at hand:  How do we live on beyond death?

IT JUST CAN'T BE THIS EASY!

Installing ceramic, porcelain or stone tile is one of the more permanent material installation tasks I complete on a routine basis.  I undertake this task as part of my  ongoing effort to provide shelter, food and clothing for my beautiful family. (Believe me, tile never seems to go away, think of the wall mosaics they uncovered in those buried Pompeian whore houses from millennia past, or worse yet, think of the aged pink and grey tiles in your grandmother’s bathroom. Permanence indeed!)  Well getting back to the thought at hand; while recently laying down some customer’s ungodly ugly tile selection, a strange notion came to mind.  This was not a thought relating to my job, but rather a small epiphany, that at that exact moment I was creating a small vibration, a vibration that in its own way will resonate long after I am Gone, but probably not forever.

Continuing to spread tile mastic with my three-sixteenth inch notched trowel, I went on considering the reality that each motion I was completing was creating a very small vibration in and across the world.  Simply put, the more motions I make, the more vibrations I was triggering.  (As a point of clarification, I don’t smoke pot at work, so stay with me.)  As I understand the nature of these things, from my Science Channel education, vibrations are waves and many waves have the ability to last long and travel far.  Case and point; light waves from billions of years ago arrive here on earth daily.  Now, I’m all in favor of searching for an afterlife, and maybe making waves or vibrations is a way to achieving some type of afterlife, but billions of years?  That might be more time than even I am willing to bite off. 

Regardless of my personal requirements, let’s continue along this path.  First, lets go to Hell.  As I said, eternal damnation is one of the sillier concepts we humans have ever conceived of, however, Hell in the form of a forgotten abyss surely exists.  It is the hole that portions of the life we waste descend into.  Those days spent sitting in a cubical; the years spent watching our 401K’s performance; the time we spent trying to get a new video game high score; the hours spent cruising around Facebook, and the endless segments of our lives we spend sprawled out on the couch channel surfing.  These are the non impact portions of our existences.  During these “down times” we made no waves, no vibrations and no production.  Surely these parts of our physical time here on Earth will be forgotten.  Those who make a lifetime of this nothingness, experiencing, contributing, sharing, thinking and creating nothing, ultimately leave nothing behind upon their death and truly are All Gone.  Gone into the forgotten void of indifference and ineffectuality.  To Hell for lack of a better explanation, a Hell that ultimately awaits us all in some vast measure of Time’s incredible expanse.

In spite of this dour assessment, the real focus here is afterlife and our pursuit of the Heavens and an eternal presence in the world, as we know it.  Well, in its typical context, Heaven is right up there with eternal damnation on the ridiculous side of the many philosophies we have regarding an afterlife.  What is not silly or ridiculous is making a difference and having an effect on the world around us.  Effects that are hopefully for the good but sometimes for the bad.  This is when making vibrations in our world comes into play.  Put in simple terms, life can be looked at as an oak table and we can consider ourselves tuning forks.  When we live; show compassion or allow it to be shown to us; fall in love; have children; serve humanity; create works of art; develop new philosophies, or even install someone’s ugly tile, we are striking ourselves as that metallic tuning fork against that oak table and sending out vibrations through all of creation.

IS THIS THE KEY TO HEAVEN?

This is why the concept of judgment is so absolutely true and resonant in our existence.  Life is short, fleeting to be more exact.  We all have a portion of eternity before us, but that eternity is proportionate to how willing we are to strike ourselves against that table and let our vibrations ring through the ages.  So take the chances you may not otherwise consider.  Pick the fight you are bound to lose.  Shoot off your mouth when you shouldn’t.  Help those who need it and ignore those who just want it.  Focus on life’s in-between moments and remember that becoming a parent makes you somebody’s ancestor in the distant future.  Most of all, hit as many moments of life with as much effort as you can possibly muster.  Just maybe, this will insure some long-term marker of your existence beyond that of a long forgotten grave.

ANDREW...SEEK HELP!