The Accidental Embrace

One Moment More - Mindy Smith (mp3)
Leviathan Bound - Shearwater (mp3)

On Tuesdays, it is my parental duty to pick up one of my three chillens from her piano lessons and schlep her to soccer practice. Last Tuesday, I got delayed by a massive traffic pile-up on the Interstate mere miles from reaching my daughter.

Because my default mode is to push punctuality to its limit, any unexpected delay is certain to send me into an ulcerated hissy-fit, and this was no different. I hit the wheel, I murmur expletives about people who can’t drive or must not be in any friggin’ hurry or don’t believe in God, whatever might offer me some kind of balm for my own tension and misery.

As I approach an off-ramp and the salvation of a short-cut, I see it ahead of me. A dark blue Pontiac or an Oldsmobile in the second lane, its entire front end crushed like a Blutarsky Coke can, the hood taking the shape of a narrow A-frame roof, oil and other car fluids pooled up, as if the car were a gunshot victim slowly bleeding out on the asphalt.

The first thing that comes to mind is that the second car was missing. What about the car the driver rear-ended? Where did it go? As I’m looking around for it, my eyes catch a human form on the edge of the interstate. The form was actually two people, embracing one another so tightly it was as if they were forcing their bodies to become a single form. The woman was facing away from me, but you could see by the movement of her black track suit that her body was heaving and convulsing as she cried into this man’s chest. The man wore a white windbreaker, and his ballcap was backwards, and they embraced in front of an undamaged maroon truck some 15 yards from the destroyed automobile.

Logic and the scene suggested this was her boyfriend, husband, brother, a close loved one. Yet when I first saw them, and even now, I imagine them as strangers. I imagine that this man, having witnessed this terrible wreck, pulled over to help. He went to the car and patiently helped her out and over to the side of the road. Her legs wobbly, her brain in a jelly-fied shock, he held her strange arm and her strange hand and led her to safety.

Then, several minutes later -- long enough for me and my traffic to arrive on the scene, but before the police could make it -- I imagined that she begins to pull out of the fog of shock, realizing she had almost lost her life, possibly leaving behind children or family not to mention friends and an entire collection of the connections and accomplishments that make up one’s existence, and she began to weep uncontrollably. And this man takes her into his arms, not out of any remote selfishness, but rather because to have stopped to help and not have offered his chest and the comfort of his embrace would have meant failing her somehow.

A car behind me had to honk at me. I can’t remember a time I’d been so entranced by what amounted to rubbernecking.

After creeping past the scene and reaching my destination minutes later, I found myself so very grateful to have arrived that I gave both of my children the kind of overlong hugs that raise child eyebrows with that What’s up with Dad today? look, hugs with origins and motives you keep to yourself and hope one day your children will understand.

As my younger daughter pulled back to look up at me, I imagined the accident victim, looking up after several minutes of the kind of crying that exhausts every last calorie from the body, to thank this man. She wouldn’t even be ashamed of how things might look or care how uncomfortably close her body was to some strange man’s.

And, for just that one minute, she would fall in love with him. Not in any kind of shameful way, not in a way where she couldn’t go home to her significant other and hold him while grateful that the blood continued to pump through her body. She would love him the way humans are capable of truly loving one another, sans sex or romance or even gender. A love borne because we see a deep and powerful tenderness in one another, and because we can know in moments like these that life is precious and connections are precious and people, for all we do to fuck each other up, are amazing creatures full of inexplicable and sometimes unfathomable compassion.

This encounter occupied perhaps 120 seconds of my life. It could populate decades’ worth of Thanksgiving prayers.

The ChatRoulette Rabbit Hole

The Strangest Party (These Are the Times) - INXS (mp3)
Clothes Off! - Gym Class Heroes (mp3)

I heard the word(s) "ChatRoulette" several times on my weekend in New York City, and when a connection up there sent me a link to this "explanation to the uninitiated" post, I read it and decided to link it for our parents... on the off chance they look at our page and read those links.

ChatRoulette allows people to connect, randomly and anonymously, to other people via webcam. Ms. Yardi describes the site very well, and she also lays out the pitfalls and concerns of the way the system works. Yet, very much like my experiences with Internet-broadcast terrorist beheadings and "the video that shall not be named," something about the ease with which one's curiosity can be ferreted and soothed drew me to pay the site a visit last Thursday evening.

Clad in my blue jeans and T-shirt, I hopped on. Two of the first five cams I encountered were singularly focused on exposed manhoods being fondled in an onanistic manner.

At that point, I hopped off and contemplated my own ground rules:

1. Upon exposure to genitalia of either gender, I would immediately click "New Game." (Yes, the mere phrase "new game" as a way to switch "partners" is a little discomforting.
2. I would attempt to type to anyone, male or female, not exposing themselves and not clearly prepared to do so. Any communication leaning in that direction would be cut off.
3. I would chat with no one longer than 5 minutes.

With that in mind, I reentered.

When I was in eighth grade, I went on a school trip to Louisiana. Six classmates and our English teacher, a Louisiana native, spent a day and night in the French Quarter. Although I had by that point been exposed to dirty magazines and the like, it wasn't until walking down Bourbon Street, seeing pictures of strippers, their breasts exposed right there outside the strip club, that I realized that what I'd seen in print actually found ways to translate itself into real life.

Until then, Penthouse was a sexualized fiction. Instead of orcs and hobbits, there were breasts and penises, engaged in epic battles and exposed in ways that just didn't really happen. The letters section of that magazine were, to our minds, clearly made up. Stories of fast food workers having sex in the drive-thru window or at wild parties. That stuff was no more believable to me than tales of dragon-slaying or the Balrog.

Bourbon Street wasn't merely sexualized. It was an exposure to several new dimensions. The street performer as pseudo-art, high-end panhandling. The restaurant as cathedral. The gutter as acceptable receptacle for vomit. All of this was powerful and revelatory to me.

ChatRoulette is Bourbon Street on techno-steroids. The kind of Bourbon Street that might interest Congressman Massa more than, say, the average guy.

Over the course of about an hour, I encountered at least 200 web cams.

Only twice did another male even say "hi" to me. And both times the chats lasted only long enough for me to say no, I'm not interested in jerking off with you, but thanks for the invitation.

Only eight times did I encounter a cam with females. Four times, they instantly clicked "New Game" and ejected me. Twice I had 5-minute chats. One was a 25-year-old Brazilian woman who shared with me some of her favorite Brazilian musicians. We also talked about the World Cup. I asked her for the names of their best players.

The other longer conversation I had was with a pair of young college, or possibly high school, girls. The conversation was amusing and lasted about three minutes before it seemed to cross the line and inched into the inappropriate. (It's tough to know where that line is when their first words to me was, "OMG, it's a fully-clothed man!")

The other two times, the chats lasted maybe a minute. Long enough for them to be certain I wasn't whatever they were interested in seeing or talking to, I guess.

No fewer than 40 times did I encounter a penis.

Another 20-25 times, the cam was focused in such a way that masturbation was clearly the end goal. Cam trained on bulging underwear, or in downward-facing angle where crotch could be seen in a moment's notice.

Another 10 or so times, I encountered drawings of penises, as if that kid from Superbad had taken over a percentage of the ChatRoulette computers. (One funny one had, written beside the penis: "This is a drawing of a tree! I swear!")

Nothing about me should suggest I'm a prude. Even the best parts of our great civilization requires cesspools and garbage dumps. All part of the Yin/Yang thing. So I get it. ChatRoulette is 95% Yang. (ha.)

Thanks, but I'd just as soon go find my Yang somewhere else.

Oh yeah, and three times I encountered a group of kids. Like, middle school age. Two groups of three, and one single boy. And that's where the whole Yin/Yang, ChatRoulette, let's-make-fun-of-the-penises thing gets a little bit weightier than I can handle.

It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?

Are You Talkin' To Me?

The Smiths--"Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" (mp3)

We all have people who talk to us too much, who can trap us in our offices and ignore whatever hints or body language or continual returns to our computer screens we might offer.

(Hint: unless you have your coffee machine in your office, I've learned that the best way to break the spell is to stand up with your empty coffee cup and ask the person if he or she wants to go get some coffee. It works!)

But I'm not here to condemn those people; actually, I like those kind of people a good bit of the time and have enjoyed where those unexpectedly-lengthy conversations have taken us. I've been witnessed to, cried to, made to laugh harder than I've ever laughed, and made friendships I didn't expect to make. I'm a pretty good soundboard because I don't say much. It's only when I'm under time pressure myself that those "super talkers" are too much for me to handle.

I think I'm getting older and more generous. Ha.

But, I'm sure you can tell my bow and arrow is indeed pointed at a target: it's those people who will tell you something that they've already told you, and probably more than once. And here's why: those people have devalued you as a human being.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have a father in his 80's who occasionally repeats himself. I had a grandmother with Alzheimer's whose turntable needle got stuck in the groove of the vinyl album of her life in about 1939 when she was visiting her family in France and war was declared and she had to return to America on an ocean liner where they feared that they might be torpedoed at any moment. If you have to hear a story over and over, it's not a bad one to hear.

But there are people out there who have lost touch with humanity in a far more tragic way. They are walking around the rest of us, engaging in what they think are meaningful human interactions, when the reality is that they are only talking. They are dispensing information, and, more often than not, because they are dispensing information, they do so in a montonic manner. And the thing is, they would be talking about the same thing, whether it was you or me or the security guard standing next to them, or, quite frankly, if it was the same you or me or security guard that they said the same things to last week.

People tailor conversations. That's what we do. We tell the story differently, we emphasize something that might be important to a particular person, we edit what someone might not need to hear, we ask questions, specific questions, that remind both parties in a conversation of previous encounters and shared memories. The talker does not do this. Instead, he has a flow chart in his brain that offers about 5 different options to him, and, whether or not his listener pushes one of those buttons, he is going to take the "conversation" down one of those paths.

The point, you ask? The point is that this is one of those seasons that highlight loneliness, and this time around, it strikes me that there is nothing more lonely than a person who walks through a day talking to people about things that neither he nor they are listening to. He's already had the conversation with himself in his head. The other person, no doubt, heard it before. And both probably walk away with misconceptions--the listener with the idea that this person cares so little about him that the talker doesn't even remember the previous conversation(s), the talker with the belief that he has made contact with the human race.

"Stop Me If You've Think You've Heard This One Before" is off the Smiths' Strangeways, Here We Come, available at Itunes.