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PHOENIX, AZ, USA - 19 November, 2004: Perhaps it is my imagination, but it certainly seems that every fifth television commercial is suddenly some celebrity and Marlo Thomas asking for donations to St. Jude's Children's Hospital. Ahh! It is again the "Season of Giving" and already Old Navy stores are reminding us to start shopping for Christmas early so that we don't wait until the last minute or forget someone on our gift-giving list the way we did last year. The Old Navy carollers joyously remind us that it's already November and "the Holidays will hit you like a brick!" Thanks, Old Navy!
By all rights, and considering my on-going level of destitution and desperation, I should certainly be flakking for donations and reminding people, who actually have something, to give. In a subtle way, I try to. We have the Roll of Honor list on our cover page and this one, listing those people who have been kind enough to donate time and or money to keeping this magazine coming out every week and keeping me from living on the street. We have advertising on these pages that we use to encourage you to click-through now and again so that maybe, just maybe, one day there will actually be a check in the mail helping to pay the expenses of keeping this effort alive, if not thriving.
Judging by the contents of my snail mail box, though, most of these efforts are to little avail.
I have been blessed this week, thankfully, to have landed a part-time job as an online tutor. Another distance learning project. This time I shall be teaching students here in the United States, though, in elementary and high schools. It will bring in a whopping $120/week if I manage to get a full complement of classes. So I am still looking for other work. Meanwhile, a temporary employment agency here in town tells me that, if I call every day, they should be able to drum up some work for me. I trawl Craig's List (the local Phoenix version) every single day and try to send out at least two more copies of my CV.
I tried to improvise on the coffee situation these last few days while testing for my new job. I dug the old grounds, still in the filter, out of the garbage and tried boiling them, Turkish style, to get the last bits of caffeine out of those grounds I could. It helped while I was doing the training and testing for my new job.
Today, before my final tests, Doug came up with some packets of green tea I could use.
There is little joy in Mudville, I can tell you.
The little doughnut sales girls no longer bother to visit El Senor in the evening.
I had hoped, upon arriving in Phoenix, that I'd be in the position to visit old friends -- much of my surrogate family -- in California for the Christmas/New Year's period. (It's only the next state over, after all. Closest I've been in years.) That is obviously something for another season, another year ...
I shouldn't even watch television during this time of year, I suppose. The treacle and schmaltz of the holidays is evident everywhere -- in the commercials and the programming -- there to remind one, if one is in a desert, metaphorically speaking this time, that seemingly everyone else is planning and will be celebrating. Everyone except you.
So I'm happy to keep busy and keep my mind off the circumstances. (Insert the adjective "bleak.") I have my tutoring now, this magazine, I've got a new writing project to work on in concert with a close friend. Maybe I'll drop an e-mail to my agent to make sure he hasn't forgotten me, too.
(That's a joke, little love!)
FROM ROD'S PHOTO ALBUM
Here's something more uplifting.
My pal, DC, in Florida, sent me another bunch of those outrageous pictures he seems to just find on a natch. This time they are photos of accidents, of all things. But outrageous accidents. Look at that one of the plane going into the house, for example. That motorcycle accident shouldn't be funny. I'm sure it wasn't for the people who were actually involved.
The captain of this ship was probably the same guy who was steering the Exxon Valdez. Maybe I'm amused by all of these because I feel like my own life is a trainwreck right now.
But the capper is certainly this pile-up shot. I can only begin to imagine what that brother standing in the center of the picture is saying right now!
Stop laughing!
MORE PHOENIX NOTES: When I decided to move to Arizona, it did not come to mind that the famous Four Corners are in this state. So-named because the states of Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona come together at that point. Neither did I think about the implications of this meeting of borders. I, like others from other parts of this country, did not think much about the closeness of Arizona and Utah and that there might be a large community of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) here.There are such communities. I have learned that there is large contingent here in the greater Phoenix area, since my arrival. In addition, the local "alternative" paper, the New Times spares no energy in castigating state officials, all the way up to Governor Janet Napolitano, for ignoring the situation of some of the women of that creed.
For those readers outside of the United States or unfamiiar with the situation I refer to, it would seem that there are some fundamentalist members of that denomination that continue to practice polygamy. This practice is not officially sanctioned by the church itself, it is illegal everywhere in the United States, but people still do it.
A number of alleged horrors have been concomitant to the practice. As recently as this week, Channel 3 here in Phoenix did a special investigative report, an hour long, alleging that the city of Colorado City is a hotbed of the practice and its worst abuses are against young girls -- who are alleged to be forced into marriages as young as fourteen years of age -- and women. According to the Channel 3 report, the town, including its law enforcement officers, is completely in the grip of a Mormon elder who takes it upon himself to arrange all the town's marriages for all of its families and ostracizes -- as in evicts people from their homes -- dissenters. Young boys are regularly removed from school and chased out of town -- there is now a community of them across the state border in southern Utah called "The Lost Boys" -- so that this Mormon elder can keep the ratio of eligible males in the town low enough to reward his remaining male followers with new wives. The "Lost Boys," according to the report, are simply shunted aside, uneducated and homeless. This Mormon elder in northern Arizona can do this, according to the report, because all the property in town is owned by a trust which he now holds, bequeathed to his family by the church years ago. Not a pretty picture.
Further, it turns out that Phoenix, where I live now, is a major "station" on the so-called "underground railroad" for women and their children attempting to escape this abusive system. Not usually what you think about when you think of Phoenix, Arizona, is it, Luv?
I guess I'm back in America, all right, with all that that entails.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE MOUNTAINS. You can't stand on many streets, look out your doorway, travel around Phoenix, without facing or passing the the looming brown towers, the shoulders of rolling majesty, that surround this city. Over at 24th Street, you can see houses nestled among the cliffs, some quite lovely and resembling something built for taking off into outer space.This city was and is actually an oasis in this desert. There is water here, canals, even lakes. Much of what keeps it going, of course, as is true throughout the Southwest of this country, is "borrowed" from other places, other states; rivers don't exist down here in what was once the northern reaches of Mexico.
The big issue here in Phoenix in the last election, speaking of Mexico, was Proposition 200, a law to deny social services to illegal Mexican immigrants. Phoenix and southern Arizona have been complaining about having more than their share of illegal immigrant traffic since beginning of the stepped-up Border Patrol enforcement in El Paso, Texas, to the east and in San Diego, California, to the west, began. The "coyotes," people who make their money smuggling human cargo, have made crossing the Sonoran desert to Phoenix a major hub of illegal immigrant traffic. But now that homeland security has been stepped up, too, it's a tough place get an airplane out. So many of the illegals who come through Phoenix just hunker down and stay here. Arizona has always had at least one in five citizens who is of Hispanic origin. The numbers are now going up and the Anglo immigrants who have settled here are uncomfortable about that fact; hence Prop' 200.
There were 2.4 million people in Maricopa County, which includes the city of Phoenix and its cheek-by-jowl suburbs, at the last census. Of those, 800,000 were of Hispanic descent.
That is why I have no problem living with la raza. Gottah learn Spanish, though.
NEWS TO ROD
I have had scant time for news from The World this week, my Darling. Too m any worries, too much scrambling. But some tidbits still managed to filter through.ITEM ONE: Rico, in Texas, sent me the URL to this excellent piece at OutlookIndia.com by Jonathan Schell which opens, uncharacteristically for someone in the MM, with a quote from our old friend Tacitus.
Between Tacitus, Thucydides and Livy, I've practically developed a cottage industry in this space of references to the Roman Empire, so I enjoyed seeing someone else doing the same. Mr. Schell says, regarding the new conotation of the phrase "hearts and minds" for two writers he cites:
...We expect to hear at this point that winning hearts and minds is necessary, and Hoagland does not disappoint. But he introduces a variant of the old phrase. Falluja, he says "is part of a battle for minds rather than 'hearts and minds.'" (The title of the article is "Fighting for Minds in Fallujah.") What can he mean? What happened to hearts?
The answer is that the "immediate objective is to dissuade Sunni townspeople from joining, supporting or tolerating the insurrection," and "the price they will pay for doing so is being illustrated graphically in the streets of Fallujah." This isn't a lesson for the heart -- the organ of love, enthusiasm, positive approval. The reaction of the heart -- whether Iraqi or American -- could only be pity, disgust and indignation. Thus, only the "minds" of "the townspeople" could draw the necessary conclusions, as they survey the corpse-strewn wreckage of their city. In short, the people of Iraq will be stricken with fear, or, to use another word that's very popular these days, terror. Then they'll be ready to vote.
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Bowden takes up the same theme. "Guerrilla war is always about hearts and minds," he notes. He acknowledges that most of the guerrillas would have escaped in the long buildup to the attack. Still, he argues, the attack was important. True, it will not influence the "boldest" souls, who are motivated by "nationalism, religion, kinship or ideology." (All these things were applauded in the recent American election, but they apparently are to have no place in the life of Iraqis.) ...
You can read Mr. Schell's complete thesis by following this link.
ITEM TWO: My friend, DC, celebrated the sixty-fifth anniversary of his birth this week. I, sent him an e-card and a number of jocular comments about the milestone and some of the gifts he received. (I even went so far as suggesting that his wife providing him with a new sports coat might be a subtle hint.) During on electronic "discussion," he shared this note from his granddaughter, dearest, which I found utterly charming. So I'm sharing it with you.
20 November, 2004: I have punctuated the editing and designing, this weekend, with my Butt Runs. Those of you who joined us during the latter part of my sojourn in New Orleans will remember those but new Loyal Readers will be unfamiliar with the term. So I'll explain it again.When I reach this level of broke, it's impossible to purchase cigarettes. In order to keep myself from climbing the walls, I wander the streets looking for discarded cigarette butts that might have a bit of tobacco left in them. Discarded Marlboros are particularly good for this purpose, as they usually retain a bit of tobacco above the filter line. I collect as many of these as I can and take them back home with me.
Taking these butts apart to retrieve the tobacco inside always reminds me of cracking eggs. Once I've collected enough tobacco for new stogies, of whatever size, I roll that into store-bought (remember that term, old-timers?) cigarette rolling papers if I have them. (I try to keep cigarette rolling papers on hand as long as I can. I never throw my cigarettes butts away. I always recycle them. Another scar left by abject poverty.) If I don't have actual rolling papers, I use leaves torn out of a small notepad in which I keep telephone numbers. George Orwell and Henry Miller have nothing on young Rod in the "down and out" department.
Now and again, I get lucky. Someone leaves the better part of an unsmoked cigarette on the sidewalk. Tonight, on my last run, I came upon a complete cigarette that someone had mistakenly lit at the filter end and just tossed to the ground. The downside was that it was a menthol cigarette. So I mixed the tobacco in with the other butts, less fulsome by three quarters, that I had collected and the flavor was not overly obnoxious ...
Even as I type this, I am aware that my readers in the United States, most likely, never comprehend this level of poverty. Words like "desperate," "anxious," "panicked," roll across your eyes like the proverbial water across the back of the duck and you don't personalize them in any way. You have become inured. You don't say:
"His stomach was growling because he knows he needs to eat less; he is scavenging the sidewalk for cigarette butts; he is lying awake at night in a sweat worrying about the bills; his skin is breaking out; he is counting down until the last meal; he is spending hours on tests and agency interviews even though he knows that should a job come through that does not involve telecommuting he doesn't have the bus fare to get there; I suppose he isn't doing laundry any more since there is no money and he must wears the same socks and underwear more than once; I'm sure he's in a very uplifted frame of mind, though."You just do n't, Luv, do you? Because that would personalize the concept of suffering too much. None of us wants to do that, do we?
Even I, until this point, have tried to distance us both from the moment-by-moment aspects of what it means to be poor.
Do you know that feeling of footsteps approaching behind you? I had that feeling this week, while editing AAMENA JIWAJI's piece in this edition. Just last week, NGOZI RAZAK-SOYEBI asserted in these pages that no one writes like Rod. I'm not so sure. In fact, I heard the footsteps distinctly.Those footsteps, for a writer, usually portend being met and then overtaken, you know, my love ...
- That combination of "heart and stone" as she herself has dubbed it -- though Ami leans more to toward the heart than the stone part of the mixture;
- providing the dates upon which the perceptions or experiences took place;
- the off-handed phrase that captions the passage;
- the reporting mixed in with the personal ...
Thanksgiving Remembered
I have never liked Thanksgiving. It brings back too many bad memories.My first thankgiving at university, I was one of perhaps less than a handful of people who remained, on campus. I had to get a special dispensation from the powers that were to remain in my dorm room over the holiday because -- well, I had no place to go. I had been living the life of the orphan for years by the time I entered college.
What was extraordinary about this first dismal Thanksgiving of my "adult" life was that I did not spend it alone. A young woman, a fellow freshman, heard that I had gotten permission to remain on campus and she asked if she could stay with me. (She wanted to avoid the embarrassment, she told me, of trying to get the dispensation necessary herself and admitting that she, too, had no family to go to. Also, she said, she would be afraid, being a woman, to simply spend the time alone.)
I've always been a soft touch, as you know, Love, so I agreed to let her stay with me in my dorm room.
Let's step back and think about this proposition (and I do use all of the word's meanings) for a moment:
In hindsight, I kick myself for three things: being a soft touch, my naiveté, my innocence.
- Freshmen dorm rooms, even in the most prestigious of colleges, are rather small.
- The single rooms have single beds.
- If this woman would be spending the holiday with me, we would have to share that tiny bed or one of us (presumably me?) would be required to sleep on the floor.
The girls name was Jennifer Jones, of all things, and she had a body to die for. She was a sister from somewhere in the MidWest, if memory serves about her hometown, with a large, lush afro that I felt she did not keep very well, but she a great "rack," as we say, long legs and this high-pitched little girl voice. It was the type of voice that one would either find irritating or endearing. I felt that latter. It was the voice, in fact, I now think, that made her seem all the more vulnerable.
So, considering some of my other escapades, dear, you would think, "Rod hit on this girl." And you would be absolutely wrong. (Reason for kicking above.)
Jennifer told me that she was a Christian and a virgin and asked that I not attempt to take advantage of her. She said she had only thought to ask me because I had always been a perfect gentleman and she felt that she could risk sleeping in the same bed with me without fearing the danger of my being untoward. She had read me incredibly well. I would feel honor-bound not to try anything.
It was like the New England custom of "bundling." We slept in our clothes each night.
This part of that holiday was not what made it so awful for me. Jennifer could be good company when she felt like it. I was not yet in the rutting frame of mind, in fact felt it would be a distraction from my writing, as I had not yet met Lynda and fallen in love. I'm not saying that there was not a bit of "making out," as we used to say, but I never even attempted "first base."
What made the holiday a true disaster was my decision to take Jennifer into town on Thanksgiving Day for dinner. She had no money to speak of, so I had been buying most things for us both. I decided that if we were going to spend this holiday together we should make the best of it and I would splurge on a meal, though I wasn't actually rolling in money, either.
Jennifer ordered this outrageous amount of food and then declared that maybe she was not hungry after all. Considering how I had to pinch every penny, I was outraged! I couldn't believe she would do such a thing. I exploded. We argued all the way back up the hill to the dorm room.
"If you didn't want it, why the Hell did you order all that?" I demanded.
"It sounded good at the time," she replied to me in her little girl voice. "I guess I just liked the idea of seeing all that food spread out on the table!"
I was apoplectic. "THE IDEA! The idea! Jennifer, did you think about the goddamned money!?!"
If you're in a couple, chances are you're familiar with how these kinds of arguments can go. I shan't belabor the point.
AND we had to sleep together again that night. The building her dorm room in was locked, of course, like every other building on campus. She had nowhere else to go.
It never crossed my mind for an instant --- remember the reference to being naive, above -- that this might have been Jennifer's blatant attempt to give a trial to us playing house. (Only years later, when dating The Count, would I learn the fight-and-make-up dynamic that some people required to have good sex.)
When my friends got back from their holiday, I was the butt of an unremitting stream of taunts and gibes. No one could believe that I had not made the attempt to have that fine sister.
"Wait a minute. You slept in the same bed with dat every night and you didn't nail it? You lying, man!"
Jennifer and I were not on speaking terms by the time this derision began. I was still steaming over the wasted meal/money. She probably had more legitimate reasons for being angry, I understand now.
Yes, I'm looking forward to this Thanksgiving very much.There is an apartment complex a few blocks away that sent me a mailer saying that, if I came by and took a look around, they would provide me with a coupon for a free turkey from Fry's Food and Drug. The food supplies I stocked in are evaporating here, so that free turkey sounds like a small price to pay for getting a sales pitch.
My pal Matt, in New Orleans, tells me he'll snail mail me a few bucks for bus fare (hoping the temporary agency comes through) and perhaps smokes on Monday. I find that timing ironic, since we both know that no mail will be delivered on Thursday. It's Thanksgiving Day, my favorite holiday next to Christmas. Not.
THINGS I PRAY FOR THIS WEEK
1. A rapid infusion of cash.
2. Respite from constant worry.
3. Another job.
"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "
Love,
Rod
Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.
In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. Our Resident Philosopher is now looking for creative ways of re-inventing himself in the Valley of the Sun. He works during the day in a real estate office in downtown Phoenix and spends his nights dreaming of a better life. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.
Rod plans publication of the first Glass House book before the end of the year and is already working on the second, sequel, manuscript.
He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.
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