Oh, to be young and dumb again… Young like before I saw my first funeral. Dumb like I believed my mom who replaced my dead bird with a yellow one that looked just like it. Young and dumb… like before my first cardiac arrest on the fire department. Dead people look so different before they meet the funeral director before they meet you… you know what I mean? Young and dumb before I saw my first family of seven with all the kids under 10 burned up in a house fire. They couldn’t escape because they had nailed blankets to the windows to stay warm. It was winter and the adults couldn’t afford the heating bills… those pesky shut-off notices…
Young and dumb. Like the first time I saw a young doctor do CPR on her infant son. After we drilled a needle into his bone, his veins were too little for an IV, gave him Epinepherine, Sodium Bicarbinate, and provided ventilations, he still died. And not like in the movies, even when the kids die in the movies. Because it’s a movie. Not real life. This is real life…
…the shrill and desperate scream from that woman will make my voice crack and the muscles in my face contort until I go to sleep and never wake up...
Oh my love for that child and his mother and the people who love her will outlast my days…. but perhaps I am just young and dumb. I should take that as a compliment since we worship youth in this country. Notice, I didn’t say young people. I said youth. That sounds more like the old living vicariously through the young, fantasizing and ruminating like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite on all the things in their life having not worked out and projecting those conclusions from their life onto the woefully ignorant young people, probably like your parents or grandparents did to you. Me too mate.
Young and dumb. Young when I thought very little about how video games like Call of Duty and movies like “In the Army Now” painted those adversarial to American interests (middle-eastern/Arabs, Russian) as savages, writing in characters like Pauly Shore to attract goofy kids who felt like they didn’t have a place otherwise into our nation’s freedom-fighting forces.
I remember George Carlin having a bit about if firefighters fight fire… and crime fighters fight crime… what do the freedom-fighters fight?
And I was dumb when I thought that corruption and coercion didn’t extend to the furthest reaches of the noblest professions. Yeah, I was young and dumb man… imagine my face when I found out that the CIA had a movie production division, and a video game development division, that rewrote the Americans as the good guys in storylines that featured the slaughter of innocent civilians, women and children. That Hollywood only has access to all that fancy equipment when our nation’s military, the protectors of free speech, run over it with a fine-toothed comb to disseminate what free speech looks like on the big screen and on the PS4s.
I was young and dumb when I watched multi-million no-bid city contracts awarded to retired coworkers on modest pensions.
Young and dumb when I started my career on the ambulance in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Young and dumb when I saw my coworkers, paramedics who moonlit at the police department, hit restrained patients in the face.
And after the calls would turn violent, how often did we ask how we presented when we entered into the stranger’s private residence, man? Yes, they called. But if you called on any other service - like, say a plumber - would his demeanor, first impression, the way he stepped into and walked around your house, have any sway at all in the way you felt towards him as he carried out the work that you called him to do? Yes, young and dumb, right?
I was young and dumb to believe that people are all honest actors on the stage doing their best. That people do what they say. That they don’t wear different masks, personas, when they walk out of the house. Young and dumb to believe that I wasn’t doing the same in my own way. Young and dumb of me to not look outside of my own skin to admit being wrong so many times, and in that way be in full command of every plan I successfully wrecked, as I have heard it said. Perhaps this is what it means in Toaism to strive towards the genuine fake, the one who knows the big show, the drama is a game - a dance - with no winners or losers, yet returns to play the game anyway, eyes unclouded with hate and agenda.
What face do you put on to pay the mortgage? And what does that demand of you? What does it require of you? What does it require you to look away from? And what does that do to you when you take the mask off? When was the last time you did it? What does it look like under there?
Do you see the lines on my face? There is a term in medicine called lines of demarcation. When someone had been dead for a while, the blood would settle in the direction of gravity, leaving this two-tone hue of blotched purple and ashen hue along the skin. Man, I was young and dumb to believe that people died like they do in the movies. Seeing how death is hidden from us cradle to grave, I wonder how many people go to their graves, having not had to consider such a thing. Does that make them old and dumb?
The lines on my face are valleys in time - lines of demarcation if you will - where so many of the things I was convinced of myself and of others fell into to die, carving out the lines of a life traversed in unknowns. That’s why they don’t follow straight lines. Instead, they curve and wind around my jaw, eyebrows, and mouth, having had to find new paths and relax tired dispositions on this world and those I share it with.
The “olders” who have lost their way will soon be gone. I know because the ones many of them complained about when they were young are now gone. Spring… summer…. fall… winter… spring again. Everything changes, my friends... But if the same old stories find their way into new faces, the cycle will continue to repeat. And in a generation’s time or so the young people who decry the things they see and feel like it’s the first time (because it is) will learn the ways from those who have come before them. That needs to change, not the algorithm. The algorithm is human biology and we are still playing in the sand when it comes to that stuff.
Religion gets it right sometimes, they just don’t show both sides.
Train up a child in the way he should go, And when he is old he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6
How about one that was shared with me, more revealing and perhaps more personal to individual families and storylines?
How do we learn to love? By being loved.
How were we taught to love? By our parents, extended family, culture and society, and time and place we grew up? Messy, isn’t it?
Everyone is young to someone, but am I dumb for coming to different conclusions than those I have seen repeat in dozens of generations? By my own eyes, and in my own hands, from cradle to grave I have been there. I saw the poor, and the rich have their dance with the most faithful partner any of us will ever know, and they all have one thing in common… they’re dead. And so will you one day. And me too.
I don’t know shit man. I write about things I see and occasionally give my opinion on the matter. Mostly, I just listen to the people around me and try to be present with them so I’ll remember what they said. But memories fade and the story gets cloudy. So despite these long diatribes, I do try and reserve my opinions, particularly of individuals. I have heard it said to gather near those who search for the truth but flee from those who claim to have found it. The only ones who know are dead. And I don’t see any dead motherfuckers running around here. They might look like reanimated corpses, but I can see their big-ass jugular is pounding away. That’s the medical juggernaut hard at work keeping those paying customers around for the most expensive five years of their life… the end of it.