|
|
|
weirdoes, rednecks & rabbis
Sunday, August 4 2002
I was eating corn nuts by the handful this morning, and yet again an unpleasant thought occurred to me: they look like bad teeth, specifically, teeth that are so infected that they have actually become swollen. I don't think it's possible for a tooth to swell up, no matter how bad it gets, except perhaps in cartoons.
I was drinking coffee and being my usual slightly-hungover goofy Sunday morning self, and the subject of "weirdness" came up. Gretchen had always told me she thought I was "weird" back in college, but the extraordinary nature of what she was actually saying had never really sunk in. Today, though, I realized something: she was saying that I was weird even by the standards of Oberlin, even by the standards of the weirdest dorm in Oberlin, Harkness. Now that's pretty fucking weird. That's tantamount to winning the Nobel Prize in weirdness. But just for clarification, I asked Gretchen, "You thought I was weird by the standards of Harkness?" "Oh definitely," she said. She then proceeded to tick off all the weird things I did back in the day: I didn't change my trousers for a whole semester (a slight exaggeration!), I drank huge pots of weird tea hybrids (often with big black tea leaves stuck to my teeth), I stuck pieces of toilet paper to my ceiling and claimed they were "jellyfish," I talked endlessly about such subjects as the sexual anatomy of ducks, I drew huge anatomically-correct penises on the walls of the kitchen, I drank vanilla extract as a cost-free form of alcohol, etc., etc. Gretchen even made the claim that I was as weird in my own way as Carl Muckenhoupt, who was notorious in those days for wearing a superhero cape and climbing up the side of a flight of stairs instead of using the steps (later on, Carl would go on to co-found a successful on-campus hot toast delivery service). Whoah! I'd never realized I was quite that weird! I really must have repressed my weird tendencies in order to come through Redneckistani high school so relatively unscathed. If George W. Bush could repress his mentally-vacant, pro-corporation disposition as well as I must have repressed my weirdness in high school, he'd be coming off now as some sort of Harry Truman figure.
In the evening David the Rabbi came over with a six pack of Rolling Rock and Gretchen, he, and I sat out on the back porch. We got to talking about the trauma of death and violence, something that was such a reality for most of David's early life in New York that he never thought there was anything strange about it. David says he was mugged more times than he can count back before conditions started improving in the 1990s. In 1990, murders were up to over 2000 per year in the city and people always kept their wits about them, particularly when coming home in the wee hours of the morning drunk and stoned on the subway. Now, though, murder rates are a quarter of what they used to be and David has become completely fearless.
Still, the city remains a dangerous place in ways that do not change with the times. Just the other day, in fact, Gretchen's friend Sarah the Korean (who is not Korean) happened to see someone hit by a garbage truck down on 7th Avenue in Park Slope. It was gruesome; the victim was disemboweled and killed by the accident. I couldn't imagine seeing anything so horrendous. I'd have nightmares for the rest of my life. But this got me to talking about the things that I have experienced that have left scars on my personality, most being the result of troubles adapting from life in cosmopolitan suburban Maryland to those in provincial Redneckistan. These weren't just the disputes with neighbors that occasionally led to gunfire, they also included such details as my refusal to conform to the religious orthodoxy that had been permitted to intrude into the Augusta County public school system.
This led into a conversation about my friendship with Josh Furr throughout the 1990s. I talked about our pot, porn, and beer-fueled jam sessions, our confrontational CB radio broadcasts, the huge inheritance Josh squandered in the course of months, a supposed conspiracy of Staunton's African Americans (which Josh hoped to ameliorate by inviting his black neighbor over frequently for beers), and the time Josh moved in with the Faubers, a police-scanner-obsessed Staunton family who turned out to have murdered their patriarch and sealed him away in a concrete tomb in the basement. David the Rabbi was so fascinated by these tales that he urged me to publish my memoirs.
Later we got to talking about the essential nature of mankind. Both Gretchen and I took the pessimistic view. I said that the world was entering an increasingly-dangerous period as technology multiplied the destructive potential of the world's craziest individuals. What happens when they inevitably get suitcase nukes? David, though, being a rabbi, had a rosier view of human nature. He said he had faith that the ultimate goodness of humankind outweighed its evil. Normally David has a clear and logical approach to conversation, but at this point his reasoning seemed to devolve into mush, something I found kind of unsettling. For me, my pessimism made perfect sense, particularly in a world of ever-increasing technological sophistication. "Even the good things we do are bad," I said, adding, "we import vast amounts of oil to do good things, but that itself is bad." David nodded his head in agreement, but then he was right back to his hand-waving faith in the goodness of humanity. As Gretchen explained later, David's mind won't allow him to think any other way, and that's why he can succeed at being a rabbi.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020804 feedback
previous | next |
