Author Archives: Dave

Author, blogger, thinker, developer, and all-around digital creative. Applied theatre professional. Mac enthusiast. Coffee fanatic.

Hello, My Name Is…

Sometimes there are joys to living in an apartment building that you just can’t experience if you live in your own home. For example, just two weeks ago, Karen and I were jarred out of a sound sleep by the piercing shriek of the building-wide fire alarm. A false alarm triggered by someone that had had too much to drink. We got back to bed at around 4:00 a.m. by the time the building was cleared.

See? That’s just fun you can’t find anywhere else.

While we were shivering outside, we had an opportunity to meet the neighbors, who were just as cold and just as irritated as we were. You tend to remember the people you meet under those circumstances. Bonding under pressure, and all that.

Well, you would think.

I walked into a local Starbucks late last week. The barista making my drink looked at me quizzically for a moment, and then asked, “Do you live at (enter name of apartment complex here)?”

“Yes.” I blinked. I should know this guy?

“Remember? The fire alarm?”

Ding ding ding! This was the neighbor I had met that night! I hadn’t remembered him. He explained that the girl he was with that I assumed was his girlfriend or wife was his sister, and talked about events around the building, and his life in general. We had a good, if brief, conversation about our lives that had its launching point in a shared experience. But, I hadn’t remembered him. I explained to him that I have a difficult time with names. In fact, though I remember his name now, I can’t remember his sister’s name as hard as I try.

I have a really hard time with the fact that I have a really hard time with that.

The reason is that I think there’s power to a name. Think about how many people you know that fit the etymology of their names. I find it to be very frequently true. The power goes beyond people, as well. Our culture is one of labels. Physicians diagnose illnesses, essentially giving them names. We have titles and labels for common issues and problems and phenomena. The reason we do this is that naming something gives you power over it. We go to a doctor because we are experiencing a problem that we can’t identify. The doctor names the problem. Then there is a staring point from which to begin treatment.

I think that naming a person is a powerful thing, as well. I believe parents are exercising an enormous act of power in naming their children; I honestly think it shapes a part of that child’s future. Names aren’t something to be applied flippantly or without careful consideration. That’s why I have such a huge problem with derogatory labels and defamatory statements that apply hurtful or stereotypical labels to people. As much as we want to insist that these are “just words,” and that words aren’t powerful, that just isn’t true. Words are signs of our deepest reality, and they point to a meaning deeper than just a verbal formation of syllables and consonants.

So, someone’s name is symbolic of the totality of who they are. A name is sort of an umbrella under which all of that person’s beliefs and personality characteristics and thoughts and essence fall. To call someone’s name is a powerful thing, orienting both of you to a recognition that they are a person just like you, and worthy of the same respect.

I endeavor to approach everyone with love and respect, and so the huge memory gap I have with names bothers me a great deal. I’m bothered by it because I feel as though I’m not truly engaged with the person at a substantive level if I don’t remember their name. Whether that person is my wife or the waitress who takes my order at a restaurant, I want to connect with them as a human being. That means calling them by name, because to do otherwise is to reduce them to something less than human in my mind. I don’t want to be so pre-occupied that I don’t recognize a person’s name. I can’t think of anything more de-humanizing than that.

Yet, I do it so frequently.

It’s a work in progress. If I’ve ever forgotten your name, please forgive me. I know it’s a mistake I’ll make again, but hopefully with less and less frequency.

Photo Attribution: quinn.anya 

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect….

I played a game of Monopoly with family this weekend (Star Wars Monopoly, for my fellow nerds out there). I went through a bad spot. I kept landing in the “Go To Jail” square, or rolling the number of doubles that sent me to jail. This run of bad luck resulted in my not passing “Go” and collecting any money for several turns.

I didn’t win the game. The odds were stacked against me.

There’s this nifty phrase I like to use sometimes called “disproportionate response.” You know, when the reaction that a person has to something is far more severe than the situation that triggered that response. I thought about that phrase again last week during a conversation about a Ponzi scheme that was in the news. In fact, there’s been a lot of Ponzi schemes in the news lately…almost perpetually so since Madoff’s venture of ill repute. The conversation I was having last week in particular involved the disproportionate (I really like that word) sentence that an individual received in prison after his conviction in such a scheme.

As if that prison sentence would somehow result in the restoration of the monies stolen from investors. Or, as if the individual sentenced (who in the case of this particular story won’t be released until he’s in his nineties) somehow learned their lesson. I have a huge issue with people who commit crimes (and, let’s be honest: hasn’t everyone committed a crime at some level in their lives?) being locked away from the rest of society for inordinate amounts of time in a system that’s called a “correctional system,” and that, in fact, does nothing of the sort. I understand keeping violent criminals convicted of rape or murder locked away, because it protects innocent victims and the rest of society at large. But the offenses for which an individual can lose half their lives, or the rest of their lives, in prison are simply not serious enough to merit such a punishment. Someone with a drug habit is caught in possession during a traffic stop and goes away for the prime of their life, never to get it back. Someone commits financial fraud (apparently even worse than murder in a capitalist society), and they can easily lose the rest of their lives…literally, being locked away for defrauding money.

Actually, for defrauding numbers in a bank account. Since leaving the gold standard, it’s not even real money. I mean, really. That’s was someone’s life.

I guess my issue is with a criminal justice system that is based on punishment instead of restitution, that has almost no allowance for second chances for offenders. In short, I have a problem with a justice system that does not include grace.

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I imagine a system that takes those convicted of a crime and places them into restitution and reimbursement programs based upon their crime; into rehabilitation and educational programs based upon their offense. The teenager who vandalized a store front by breaking out a window is forced to work as an apprentice to someone in the trade of glass repair, with one of his projects being the replacing of the glass he shattered, until he masters the craft. He then has a skill with which to earn a respectable living and has recompensed the business owner for the damage he caused. Someone who defrauds people of money if forced to serve enough labor time with an organization until the amount of money that they defrauded (as much as possible) is returned to the victims. You get the idea. These are productive uses of tax money, and productive to those who have made a mistake. They aren’t locked away in subhuman conditions, losing their right to vote and, essentially, their ability to have gainful employment because of a mistake that any of us could have made in similar circumstances.

In Western culture, there are very few second chances afforded anyone who makes an error. Sometimes, you just roll the dice wrong, and being prevented from passing “Go” really doesn’t help you to get past the poor choice. I find it little wonder that many would have difficulty with faith, believing that there was a chance for redemption after an error, no matter how egregious. A government of any society must enforce penalties for breaking laws that maintain the common good…this is certain. Those penalties, however, must leave room for hope.

Because there’s precious little hope to go around in our culture, as is.

Riding into the Sunset. Or Not.

There’s something about the ending to a story.

I remember an undergrad journalism course in which the professor advised us to not irritate our readers. If we do, they tend to not come back. While that is well-intentioned and effective advice for a factual article written in the inverted pyramid, it becomes problematic in fiction. Problematic, but no less true. I’ve read similar advice to writers about the endings of scripts and stories. How the loose ends tie together is key, they say. Upset your audience with the ending, and they tell their friends to not bother seeing or reading your work. Should there be a sequel, they won’t be interested. The ending is critical, and, if Hollywood and much genre fiction are to be believed, must be done in relatively routine ways that border on formulaic (in the case of Hollywood, remove the “border on” from that sentence).

My issue with this is that, if the story is to be true to life, there will be messy and unresolved issues at the end. Because that’s the way life ends. Messy. With unresolved complications.

This is culture informing art, I think, because Western culture just doesn’t grieve well. We don’t accept that death is a part of life, and so we run from it, minimize it, and pretend it doesn’t exist. I can almost see producers around a table in a smoke-filled room saying things like, “Happiness is key, and we all must live happily ever after. Except we don’t. But let’s not tell them about that.”

I recently read this flash fiction piece and thought it appropriate here, because it portrays (rather poignantly, I think) what happens when we don’t permit ourselves to grieve. I’ve talked before about how obscene I’ve witnessed the death process to be in our culture…an emotional barbarity I’ve experienced firsthand. I think that the reason grief is such an alien process to us is because we’ve been taught to avoid it.

Karen commented recently that those mourning a loss are surrounded by well-wishers and supporters initially, for several days or a month or so. Then the supporters phase out and go on with their lives, and the grieving are left in an emotional abyss. That is when they truly need support…I think that is when real friends are proven. There are other causes of grieving, though, than just the loss of a loved one. The loss of a career, the ramifications of poor choices, the ending of a relationship; all leave us entrenched in the grief process. Psychologists will say that this process takes longer for some than others, and that is certainly true. What is clear, though, is that there is no cultural custom built in to assist us in walking through grief, such as other cultures (I think specifically of ancient Israel) have in place. As much as tradition finds itself wanting for me, I can see its value on occasion, and this would be one of those occasions.

The all-too-neat endings of our stories speak to the desire we have for life to end the same way. We like things to resolve the way a chord resolves in music. Yet, true life is closer to the unresolved chords of some jazz musicians, the ugly endings of some indie films, the “artsy abstractness” of literary fiction. I think that there must be a negative before there is a positive in mortal life, that we cannot truly appreciate the positive unless we’ve experienced the negative…the tragedy before the comedy, as Buechner phrased it (and, following his phraseology, I certainly don’t mean to imply that I don’t believe in the fairy tale). Yet, our culture’s stories grasp at an eternal desire for the positive without living nearly long enough in the negative, or else exist solely in the negative and eschew the positive in an attempt to glamorize the negative. This tendency makes for a very unbalanced story.

And that is a symptom of a very unbalanced culture.

Photo Attribution: bensisto