Hello. I am e.n.d. Once upon a time I came from Minnesota. But then I moved everywhere.
Curiosity didn't kill the cat. Complacency did.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
A young boy playing outside of a school in Nanyuki, Kenya. Classic home-made toy.
“AGAIN? Jesus, how many times have we listened to this album tonight?” (Arm around me as he sits in the passenger seat with a Camel Light in his hand, other arm out the window.)
“Dude, I dunno. It just came out. We gotta listen to it a MILLION times to hear every fucking detail. It’s RADIOHEAD. And this is UNBELIEVABLE. You know it and won’t say it. Have you heard anything like this? I mean, I think it’s better than the first two. Well, the first one for sure. But, well, maybe not The Bends. Anyway, it’s AMAZING.” (Me, in the driver’s seat, also with a Camel Light in my hand, left arm out the window, occasionally reaching up to ash my cigarette out of my sunroof.)
“Ugh. Fine. Then at least start it again this time with ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ and after that, put ‘Let Down’ on repeat. Those are my favorites. I can actually understand what he’s saying in ‘Let Down’ and don’t say I told you so but I like those lines. They make me think. They don’t mean what you think they mean. You know what I mean?”
“Yes. Okay. Hey Eric?”
“Yeah?
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Pause as we listened to a few minutes of those tracks.
“Emily, I really love you. And you know what - I’m not even just talking about these songs - but when you love things, Emily, man, you really love them. I love you for that so much.”
- Somewhere at the end of July, 1997, when OK Computer was released (in the United States.) Tomorrow celebrates the 16th anniversary of the official first release date globally.
Eric was my first boyfriend. We had this conversation around 3:00am on a weekday in my Volvo, driving around the Twin Cities with the sunroof open. Grab yourself an Eric and put him in your pocket.
About to change my flight next week to see this cutie in NYC.
Preparing for Audion live at Movement in Detroit. Expect 85% new material… #movementfestival
I loved reading this. To interview this man more must be a treasure.
From my Dad:
Village elder, age 82, recalls persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Dali, Guizhou, China.
Perhaps with a foreign group, this elder felt he could bring up the Cultural Revolution……but it is still very surprising to hear anybody at any level of society in China even mention the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution started in 1966 and ended 10 years later in 1976. People dispute why the Cultural Revolution even happened, but one theory is that Mao felt threatened by others in the Party who wanted to abandon some of the tenets of communism, and who felt that China could progress faster if it embraced economic reform. By seeking to eradicate ‘The Four Olds’ from society, Mao through the Red Guards reasserted his standing as the author of the Communist Revolution in China.
The Four Olds were:
- Old Habits
- Old Culture
- Old Customs
- Old Ideas
At the national level, the Cultural Revolution was all about purges in the Party, and power struggles. At the local level, it was all about persecution and survival. Mao’s ‘army’ was the Red Guards, which were young people between the ages of 13 and 25, primarily. The schools were closed during those 10 years, and these young Red Guards roamed their communities looking for anyone or anything that represented one of the Four Olds. If you stood out for any reason, then you could become a target, and that meant a public struggle session in which you were forced to confess your own crimes against the people. Many people were executed, others committed suicide, others were imprisoned. The elder we spoke with spent two years in a small dark room.One of the reasons nobody in China today talks about the Cultural Revolution is that the people in the Red Guards were usually your own children or grandchildren, who denounced you in these struggle sessions. In this particular Dong village in rural Guizhou, everyone was labeled either a ‘red’ or a ‘black,’ and you wanted to be a red if at all possible. But not everybody could be a red, the Cultural Revolution required that there be ‘blacks’ to be denounced and eradicated. That was the fate of our elder, who so foolishly had suggested that rice production could be increased by adopting modern cultivation methods.Everybody over the age of 60 in China remembers all too well the Cultural Revolution. But the level of shame - young people turning against their parents, their teachers, their elders - is such that rarely will anybody talk about what they personally experienced during those dark years. Who the heck wants to remember that?
People today sometimes think that China is moving to modernize too fast, but that may be partly a result of never wanting to return to something as viscerally disturbing as the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution.
I still can’t get over how beautiful this is.
The Louisville Slugger
I’m in Kentucky. Louisville, Kentucky. I’m technically here for a conference about compassionate organizations. Pretty interesting topic, right? I think it’s fascinating. It represents topics that continue to be obsessions of mine: compassion, resilience and compromise.
Like most trips, the initial reason I travel evolves into a variety of reasons after I land. The additional ones sneak up on you pretty fast and whisper in your ear.
Some of the whispers hit me this morning as I laid comfortably restless in bed for the second night in a row. That’s where I am now. It’s about 6:30am. I woke up officially about an hour ago, staring at the wall thinking and sending myself emails of the all of the things I need to do.
Then I grabbed my laptop and just started doing them.
I’m not alone now. I’m still in my bed but in the company of a phone charged at 6%, a copy of Audre Lorde’s book Sister Outsider, a copy of Vogue magazine, some notes from articles about street lights in Somalia, and a laptop charged with 2:21 remaining.
I’m pretty sleepy but I am also pretty focused.
Back to Kentucky.
I’ve never been here before.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Hasn’t Emily been everywhere? No way, man. No, no way. If you’ve been to Kentucky, or for that matter Delaware, you got me. Slam. Never been! But like most destinations, when I officially arrive, I go deep. So I feel like I’ve been here for weeks already.
The quick depth - that probably has something to do with my childhood.
Louisville only meant one thing to me when I was a kid: the Louisville Slugger. (Do they even make those bats here officially? I don’t know, I didn’t dig into the website. You check. Report back.)
These things were lined up on nearly every fence of every baseball field in every park I can remember in Minnesota. Spring time. Summer time. For years. Baseball bats galore. I always preferred the wooden ones. Even when they’d send spikes of painful shivers into my hands and arms after I’d hit the ball, I’d go back every time and choose them over their aluminum homeys. I can still feel the pain and hear the sound. And smell the field.
I played a lot of baseball and softball as a kid - baseball first. They didn’t split teams between girls and boys until I was eight or nine. And of course I initially resented it when they finally did draw the line. I preferred baseball. Softball seemed too easy after I was forced to make the change. I mean, until fastpitch in junior high, I had to watch (and bat to) pitchers pitching underhand. It was like a painful, slow itch waiting to be relieved. I’d stand with my bat, staring down the pitcher and hovering strong in front of the umpire, thinking to myself: Just. Send. The. Ball. Over. Homeplate. Already. I. Got. This.
Underhand: ugh, too easy! Fastpitch, sure more challenging but I still missed straight-up baseball.
Whatever. I got over it. I accepted that life was hard enough and maybe softball was someone’s idea of giving me a break from it all.
Yeah, I know. I’m one of those chics - often expecting and seemingly almost wanting difficulty and not knowing why most of the time. But changes can be nice even when someone draws the line for you. They just might know you as well as you know yourself in some areas. Those rulemakers who drew the line between boys and girls and baseball and softball knew one thing I didn’t back then: we were different.
I really liked those baseball bats, though. Mostly because they reminded me of carefree times. The 1980s. Whoa.
THE NINETEEN EIGHTIES.
Well, and early nineties.
Baseball, softball, track, playing tag outside (maybe even capture the flag), and even sometimes ding-dong-ditch (shhhh, I am sure some of my old neighbors are still super pissed) - these were active, outside versions of free babysitting that could afford my Mom more time to work (or, in the event of a miracle, some rest). But for me, the Louisville Slugger meant stepping up to home plate again, whatever inning, and swinging that bat like it was the first time ever. And most of the time I’d get a good hit and grab some bases. Sometimes even a homer.
The transition from baseball to softball was contextualized generally by one thing: change.
As the copywriter for the Louisville Slugger site currently asks, “How will you leave your mark?”, Kurt Vonnegut continues to say, “so it goes”.
Love this guy.
The Starman falls to earth. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, whose David Bowie cover captured the imagination of Earthlings yesterday, landed safely Tuesday on the steppes of Kazakhstan.
Photograph: Mikhail Metzel/AFP/Getty Images
“In the Garage” by Weezer
“And I love everyone. Waiting there for me. Yes I do, I do.”
Music can make you own a situation.
Joe
