Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Yes, it’s another BART vignette.

I got on the train this morning and sat towards the back, cracking a brand new massive tome, my Christmas treat The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. Please note the title here – it doesn’t say “Twentieth” Century, but simply “the” Century, as though it were clear to everyone that there was one American century and it’s over. After all, the annual series by the same name uses numbers to indicate which year is being chronicled. Seems they’re betting there won’t be a twenty-first century edition. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, I’m settling into a familiar (I must’ve read it at least twice before) O. Henry piece about a safecracker when a family I’ve seen once or twice before on BART gets aboard and arrange themselves in the seats behind me. Classic American fifties family – mom, dad, three-year-old son, infant daughter. The Best American Family of the Century.

And the dad starts reading a book to the son almost immediately. It’s an Arthur book, from perhaps one of the most warm and cuddly series of books (and now TV shows) around. Some of the kids at Seneca used to read Arthur and I’ve been impressed at how universally relatable this vaguely amorphous child animal character is, even though when someone was watching it was loudly called “baby stuff” or worse.

And as he reads the book, it’s an interactive experience; the son asks questions about word meanings or motivations for decisions made by Arthur or his friends or family. The dad takes time in his explanations, in no hurry, clearly enjoying himself. Personal pet peeve that the dad uses some sort of inflated hyperactive not-quite-baby talk with the child, though a couple glances at him indicate that he may be the type who uses such speech in many forums, including probably the bedroom. His prerogative, I’m sure.

Next stop, a young woman boards the train, probably just over high school age but definitely younger than I am. The fact that I can immediately recognize her as younger than I am may indicate she’s still in her teens, but I’m slowly becoming acclimated to the fact that I’m almost thirty. Very slowly. She sits down in the seat diagonal from me, facing the family.

And she doesn’t pull music or reading or anything out of her stuffed orange backpack – she surveys the surroundings and starts to fixate on the family and their interaction. A few glances sideways from my sunglassed eyes away from my book reveal that she’s pretty much openly staring at them. And over time, this contentedly bemused smile creeps into her mouth muscles, almost forlorn if it weren’t so sincerely appreciative. Something like admiration might be the best label.

And suddenly I can see the whole story. I know the dad that didn’t read to her and may be missing or gone by now. I know the mom who was overwhelmed, stressed out, couldn’t make it work. The fights and eventual dissolution. The struggle associated with the word “family” that this woman has lived.

And yet, here she is, and she can appreciate it all the same. She can take in this moment without bitterness and with minimal focus on her own story, her own angle. She can just be happy that someone else is living the family she didn’t have.

And she just doesn’t stop staring and her face doesn’t fall, the whole way to her stop.

(It should be noted that I’m inclined here to talk about how this family’s success and happiness may be fleeting, or is even likely to be fleeting given the age of its participants and the state of the economy. I believe it was Jess Hass who told me years ago that I had a gift for finding the dark lining on the silver cloud. If I were writing the short story, it would end with the daughter in the stroller ending up just like the watcher twenty years hence, but somehow unable to forgive her parents or get past her own history and fate. Maybe she’d even yell or say something quietly rude to the family on her way off the train, two decades after a bliss with her brother that seemed so permanent on a train ride in 2009.

But it should also be noted that life is not always the way I, or even O. Henry, would write it in a short story.)

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

This one is only the latest in what is becoming just about the fastest growing trend of the last 7 months. People lose their jobs, go home, and slaughter their family.

Sometimes they spend a couple frustrating weeks or even months looking for a job first.

In a couple conversations three months ago, I predicted that these would be the big news story of 2009 – self-defined (or society-mandated) “providers” feeling so overwhelmed at the burdens of being unable to provide that they decided to eliminate the need for provision altogether. All of them killing themselves directly afterwards.

It’s not that things like this haven’t happened in America since the dawn of the nation. But now we have a wider proliferation of firearms, more acceptance and awareness of these types of crimes (I would imagine they would’ve been considered hideously deviant and unspeakable in the 1930’s, whereas they seem sort of quietly understandable and unfortunate now), and of course the impending Depression II (aka the Greatest Depression). Thus the extensive spread of pater familias execution sprees.

I’m not here to tell you that the life of clients we serve at my work (or any similar location) is glamorous. I’m not going to say that living on the government dole or even the street is the best situation ever.

But compared to being shot by one’s father?

Have we really created a set of male adults so enamored with their standard of living and their self-image that any major break from that reality manifests in gunning down the 3-6 people they most love?

We need a public re-education program, and quick. Talking about the programs available, the way to subsist in a modest, humble, government-sponsored life when one no longer has viable employment as an option. We need the AdCouncil going on the airwaves talking about free after-school programs and free clothes and free everything for kids of the unemployed, overleveraged, and flat broke. We need people to understand that losing a job is not the end of the world, any world, certainly not the world of those who have not yet reached the age where they’re expected to take a job at all.

I’m not trying to minimize the pressures and weightiness that these individuals face – I am blessed to be in an entirely different financial category than the patriarchs I am addressing here. But right now, a notable portion of the population believes that losing their job without much hope of being rehired somewhere soon is literally the end of the world. Think about that for a second. They are so convinced it’s the end that they cannot imagine a future of anything but pain for any of their children or their spouse. To the point where they are willing to effectuate an end to pain, despite how blindingly painful the act of doing so must be.

Maybe if less energy were spent in this country defining “hope” as “everything will magically turn around tomorrow for no reason” and instead turning it toward “this country might be able to get accustomed to not being so unsustainably greedy and abundant” – maybe then we could reduce the number of job-loss-related filicides.

Until then, I have only this personal appeal. Stop. Think. Realize that most people in the world raise children on less money per lifetime than the government gives US citizens in your situation in a year. Even if you think it’s the end for you, let your children decide for themselves.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

It’s simply miserable in San Francisco today.

It’s cold and rainy and the type of weather that most anywhere except this good-weather-forsaken vortex known as the Bay Area would bring thoughts and hopes of overnight snow to salvage the otherwise dismal atmosphere. The utter impossibility of snow, the hopelessness to even thinking about snow, is perhaps the greatest curse among many weather hexes in this region.

I made the mistake of going out to lunch, instead of just holing up with my cereal in the office and hoping to not get too hungry. I had to amend my course from Chipotle (crazily optimistic, being about a half-mile away) to Herbert’s Mexican Grill, a far cry in quality at a third the distance. I wound up with under-cheesed nachos on a noticeably sticky tray.

Shortly after starting to eat and read, a series of women sat down at the table adjacent mine. They were all casually dressed but had this remarkably similar look to them, a quality almost that was hard to exactly typify. Upon a little listening to their conversation, it became clear that they were flight attendants, apparently on a brief tourist stopover in San Francisco – long enough to change out of the uniforms and get up to the cable cars.

And then they started talking about January 16, 2009.

“I was on a LaGuardia to Denver the day after, scheduled on an A320. The day after, you know. And everyone on it just kept going on sick list. And they’d refill the flight and then all the new people would go on sick list. I had a friend who offered to vouch for me and put me up if I wanted to too. She said she had a hotel room for a week and everything.”

Prepare doors.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Periodically, I’ll get to the point where I’m almost incapable of writing new posts because every post idea I have is an old half-cooked one from two and a half weeks ago. And at the point at which there are twelve of these or so, it’s time to clean out the closet and just put the leftovers on the table for consideration. Could I mix my metaphors any more? Could I care any less?

Think of this like your Lewis Black interlude in The Daily Show, only way less painful and with punchlines that, where applicable, are capable of inducing at least a chuckle. On second thought, please consider nothing that I do remotely akin to Lewis Black in any way.

Stocks are the New Fantasy Football or It Takes a Distraction
If I’ve learned anything about trying to live life while somehow enmeshed in the trash compactor known as an American Day Job, it’s that one must find things one looks forward to doing at, around, or directly after work or one will spend far too much of one’s energy contemplating different ways to throw oneself in front of the train (or swerve the car off the road, etc.). I wish I were less serious.

The difference that having this (or these) upside distraction(s) make(s) cannot be underestimated. Simply cannot. It makes the difference between a spring in one’s step as one whistles on the way to the next lobotomizing task and being so overwhelmingly Eeyorishly depressed that one cannot hide it from one’s supervisor. (At least for me. Your possibly more emotionally flatline results may vary.)

When I worked at Seneca, I had to pull 16-hour shifts on Sundays with no breaks or lunches. This is legal, they told us, because we were technically in medical care, where apparently rules about taking care of people do not apply to employees. I think some people were told they could have breaks if they really raised a stink, but it was on them that the ratio dial was being turned from “Absolute Minimum Containment” down to “Life-Threatening”. And who wants that on a Sunday morning?

Nevertheless, there were natural downtimes in the rhythms, such as “Quiet Time” (less of a misnomer than the “Quiet Room”, I can tell you), where the kids played in their rooms for 15-20 minutes and staff got to be on the computer. Theoretically we were supposed to work on mental health notes during this time, but anyone who could write even such rote stuff in the midst of a 16-hour shift was differently constructed than I. I checked Fantasy Football.

It was perfect. I don’t even like football that much, but Sunday is devoted to football in America and the scores would roll in over the course of the day. Looking for opportunities to check football stats was the highlight of every Sunday, to the point where half the year was considerably more dreary because there was no football. But I started the job in August and that’s right when football gets going, so it acclimated me to 16-hour shifts as much as imaginable. And I wouldn’t have been able to get into it without Fantasy Football as a reason to care about so many different games and players. This whole association may actually be a big reason that I can’t play Fantasy Football any more – the associations are too strong.

Anyway, reading books on the train is definitely a big help in the current compactor, but that becomes inconsistent. Especially when I’m still immersed in The Idiot, which is really starting to show why it’s not discussed in the same breath as C&P and Brothers K, at least by most people. Basically, it seems there are about 40 pages of scattered brilliance that mostly consists of asides and non sequitirs sprinkled across a rather unremarkable story. Though I can sort of see why this book would’ve shaken up Russia’s society at the time it was written. Big D still has about 50 pages to salvage a message, though, so I’m holding out. Anyway, the point is that books help, especially if they are engaging and thus give me a reason to want to ride the train to work.

But stocks – stocks are the biggest help. Starting to play the stock market (I’ve basically broken even so far over 9 months, which I’m guessing is beating the average experience) has been my recent salvation from eight unending hours of drudgery. There’s always plenty of five-minute spurts in which I can take a break and get the rundown, and being on a computer all day makes it easy to keep in the background and monitor live-update sites. It’s gotten to the point where there’s a little pang of sadness in part of me every weekend because there are no exciting stock movements to keep an eye on. Which is perfect – if one’s resigned to not resigning a day job for a certain period, one wants a distraction so great that one misses it (just a little) during the weekend. (Please note that if this is making you want to stay at a job you should be leaving, you’ve gone too far. Use this method only in moderation to stay at jobs you have to for brief to middling periods of time.)

Huh. I guess that was plenty of post by itself after all. But wait, there’s more….

Time is Just a Bit Outside or Calendary Dreaming on Such a Winter’s Day
It occurred to me walking home from work in early January (maybe the first day back after all the breaks) that our calendar almost makes sense. I noticed that the days were getting longer again, as they say, and it was a new year. But these events are not quite aligned. Winter Solstice is 9-10 days before year’s end, when really it makes perfect sense to have it right at the end of the year. The shortest day of the year should always be the last, with the longest at mid-year. Doesn’t that just make obvious intuitive sense?

The only complication of this I can really see is that, for some reason, the Solstices and Equinoxes don’t always fall on the exact same calendar day. Which, if you think about it, seems to indicate that our calendar is off. Shouldn’t those always come around at the exact same time if a year is really what we say it is? But, of course, there are complications like the quarter-day (leap year every four) and the skipping of leap year every few leap years and the extra second and such. Years don’t comport with days perfectly, so there must be a little flexibility. However, I don’t think it would be too much trouble to alter our year length to ensure, at least, that the last day of the year is always Winter Solstice.

Anyway, this got me thinking about calendars and time and whether our current incarnation of a year really makes the most sense. Without going all Robespierre on you, I was going to present the case for a new 8-month calendar of evenly-sized 45-day months, punctuated by a brief universal holiday period of 5-6 days each year. But I wasn’t sure that was right – I was then thinking about changing the lengths of weeks to align more exactly and then maybe going back to 30-day months… it all got jumbled to the point where I decided I couldn’t post on it, pending further study.

So I’ll get back to you on the full-scale new calendar proposal, replete with equivalences of every current day to the newly proposed day. That might take a while. But I’m convinced that we should end each year with Winter Solstice. It’s just sort of obvious.

Analyze This or I Miss Debate
I’ve been dreaming a lot about debate lately. A lot. Sometimes the dreams make sense and sometimes they don’t, but it’s sort of reaching a critical mass.

This is not particularly new, though this recent wave is above average. For a long time, especially when I was still debating, I had debate anxiety dreams that closely mirror very common school anxiety dreams. I had a round about which I was uninformed, I was ironmanning (no partner), I didn’t have a case, I couldn’t find the room, I was late, etc. etc. (Sometimes, I swear, every single one of these would happen in one dream about one round.) Those have thankfully faded over time, though they still crop up every once in a while.

The last few years have graced me with many more painful dreams about debating in important rounds, often finals or at least outrounds, and realizing very sharply that I need to savor and enjoy this round because I will miss debate terribly painfully when it’s over and there will be no more chances to be part of a debate league and I don’t want to feel like I’ve left something on the table. The crippling disappointment that comes from waking up from these dreams long since retired from the debate circuit is indescribable. Especially since, in almost all of these dreams, the round never really got going. I just sort of lived in the milieu of the round without actually kicking off the debate.

(Which is a fairly typical thing in dreams for me – for the first fifteen years of my life, I could never eat anything in a dream. I would have dreams in the middle of grocery stores or restaurants and be unable to consume anything. Attempts to do so would either magically be rendered impossible or directly wake me up. This prohibition was actually lifted right around the time I became a vegetarian and started having accidental meat-eating anxiety dreams. Of course, I’ve always been able to die or splat on the ground or what have you in dreams, which is supposed to be impossible – or at least rare.)

It’s gotten to the point where I can actually identify and describe a place that is a frequent setting for my dreams that doesn’t seem to exist in real life. There are only about four such places I can think of, whose recurrence is so strong that they have become real places in my mind despite not tying to any real locale during waking hours. In the dreams, it’s always called “Dartmouth” but is absolutely nothing like any venues actually on the Dartmouth College campus. I think a subconscious association of that school’s tournament and my success is in play here, even though my sophomore year there was my only final. It was my first varsity victory, after all. It’s (the dream venue) a relatively modest GA/final round lecture hall – modest in size, I should say, but pretty grand in decor. It’s aligned a certain way, with the lectern raised about half a person’s height atop ascending stairs on the right side and the colors are vaguely red and gold, but faded in the way of day-to-day college campuses.

There are more details, but I won’t bore you. The point is that this place has become real and I think about it often, even though it doesn’t exist. A place hasn’t ensconced itself this substantially in my mind since the aquarium room with the shark tank and the holes in the glass and the paralyzing dilemma about drowning vs. death by shark tooth. Which still pops up from time to time, but has mercifully receded from the fever-pitch of a decade ago.

I was going to talk about a specific debate dream I had just two nights ago, but maybe another time. It’s getting late and this Roundup has become more of a Cattle Drive.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Groundbreaking research out of the University of Iowa today has confirmed what many have long suspected: most babies are clinically depressed.

A shocking 83% of babies have been found to have the hallmark symptoms of a newly identified strain of depression. The numbers may be even higher among infants.

“When you think about it, it makes sense,” noted Steven Bernard, MD, part of a team that led the study. “Most people are able to cope with the struggles of life without breaking down crying multiple times a day. Babies are notorious for being unable to demonstrate these coping skills.”

In the study, to be published in the February issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Bernard and his team explain that most parents miss the critical warnings that their baby is depressed. “Parents assume their baby is simply crying, when it may actually be a cry for help. Crying more than once a day is a sign of a serious inability to integrate with the expectations of normal, healthy life in society.”

While the causes of the disorder are unclear, the symptoms are not. Crying, incontinence, and low attention span are hallmarks of extreme and chronic depression. One theory about the causes of the disorder prompted researchers to tentatively dub this strain of depression Womb Exit Trauma Disorder, or WET-D.

The solution? Medication.

“Babies are notoriously undercommunicative about their feelings,” Bernard says. “They are unlikely to respond to talk therapy as they tend to have underdeveloped language skills.” Resistance to the development of language skills may, itself, be a further complication of depressive disorder. “When people don’t want to talk about their feelings, that’s a warning sign. Having to act out on emotions instead of using words is a red flag.”

Tragically, many parents may not get many warnings before it’s too late. New research is attempting to link this disorder to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). “Babies may actually be exhibiting a form of suicide,” Bernard warns. “Further study is needed to demonstrate a causal link between WET-D and SIDS, but it looks promising.”

In the meantime, parents can watch for the warning signs and request a battery of new drugs just approved by the FDA. Bernard and his team urge parents to be patient when trying medication. “Babies may not always react right away. That’s not a sign that medication doesn’t work, but that the dosage may have to be increased.

“The worst thing you can do for your baby is let the symptoms of WET-D go unchecked. If your baby continues to cry repeatedly, it’s a sign that more medication is required.”

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Last night I went to bed at 9:00. PM. I never do this. But I was done and could really think of no reason to be awake. The tank was empty and it was time to recharge.

One of the reasons I never sleep like that is because it leads to dreams. And you all know how I feel about dreams.

I had two major dreams last night – both of them seemingly epic in length and of at least somewhat uneasy character.

The first was unending, but quite simple in nature. I was high atop a precarious, sort of ramshackle structure that wasn’t quite complete. Somewhere between a rundown treehouse and a suspended high-rise construction project, with elements of both. And about 500-1,000 feet up.

The only functional railings or embankments against the edge were up in the far upper-right corner from my vantage and they themselves looked worn and inadequate. Everything else was basically a flat or downsloping surface toward the edge of the vast lethal drop to ground level.

The whole dream was me wrestling with my gut inclination to run toward the edge and jump into oblivion.

I never did jump off, but the battle between my logical understanding that I had no desire to die and my deep-seeded interest in the experience of jumping off was exhausting. And when I looked for alternative extrication methods, I of course discovered that there were no ladders or trapdoors or paths – nothing to break the surface of the top level I was holding onto against ever-increasing winds. And while the structure itself was relatively stable (thus there was no immediacy or urgency to leaving the present location), the inevitable need to leave was confronted by an overwhelming dearth of options besides jumping.

The second dream was much more convoluted and realistic, involving Fish and I taking a road trip from Albuquerque to New York during an extended weekend. Somehow we had four or five days to hang out in Albuquerque, drive to New York, hang out in New York, and have me back at work by the end of the last day. It didn’t really seem feasible.

The whole dream was me wrestling with the ever-decreasing feasibility of the trip’s timing against a backdrop of tons of people that Fish and I know coming and going in Albuquerque or lining up in New York.

This one also never got to a point of resolution… we just had ever diminishing time as we stalled and delayed, hemmed and hawed in Albuquerque while wanting to stay longer and see people and take the road trip and have lots of time in New York.

I woke up from all this feeling more or less untenable.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.

Can’t get enough of my opinion? Ha ha!

If so, head on over to The Mep Report, for new quick-hitting posts like this one, which I almost cross-posted here.

It’s mostly going to be stuff like obvious news stories and general making fun (basically, the same stuff that I used to say on TMR, now in text format).

Cross-posting (except for big announcements or really important stuff) sort of undermines the idea of writing in two places. By posting different content, you need to follow two blogs just to make sure you aren’t missing anything. And that’s how they getchya. And by “they”, I mean “I”.

Read Duck and Cover at the Blue Pyramid.