Archive | April, 2012

The Homeless Part Two

30 Apr The fire pit, where they heat up their meals.

It’s hard to say what really made me want to go visit “Tent City,” a homeless encampment just outside of Philadelphia in Camden NJ. It’s located right off the highway; drive by it and you will see blue tarps that cover tents, looking like dunes poking up off the side of the road.

Tent City, Camden NJ

It may have been a case of Mad Question Asking curiosity or it may have been a bit of “I just miss the non-conformist ways of the homeless people I knew growing up”. (Read about that here in The Homeless Part One.)

I spoke about going to this place for a couple of years before I finally got there. I was much too big of a wuss to go alone. My friend and neighbor, Jude, told me she could get us in there by way of her friend, Brother Karl, a Franciscan friar who goes there on a regular basis. Brother Karl agreed to meet us at the entrance of the encampment a week later.

Jude is an angel of compassion. I use this expression often to describe a certain kind of strong woman. I admire her greatly, which she dismisses as do all champions of the underdog. She is a social worker who, in her own words, rehabilitates under-aged sex offenders. Some are very much under 18. She also started a basketball league for middle-school aged children in the five catholic schools in Camden. Most of these kids never played a sport before. She told me that in her first year with her league, she was giving the kids crap about not practicing and running after school, to which they replied “We aren’t allowed to leave our house.” Some of these kids grow up in Camden neighborhoods that are that dangerous. And this gorgeous woman who works full-time, along with having three of her own kid under the age of four, took it upon herself to start a basketball league for them, so they had a place to play and build confidence. She’s incredible.

This is my favorite photo of Jude. When these Kenyan guys asked Jude’s husband if they could buy her hair from him, her response was “Men all over the world love Jersey Girls!”

Jude suggested we bring water for the residents of the encampment, which I packed in my truck along with my camera in my pocket, and drove less than three miles from my house to Tent City. I got there first and was a bit nervous, for the same reason I didn’t want to go by myself in the first place. Jude and Brother Karl, who wears a Trappist monk robe over his blue jeans, showed up five minutes later and we walked in the encampment.

The first thing that I notice is how much trash they have. It’s stuffed in the bushes and trees, all over the ground and in bags waiting to be picked up off the highway. As a plastic-pollution-obsessed environmentalist lady, this was troublesome for me, and a little annoying. I know where it goes; into the storm drains and out into the ocean. I also assume, perhaps rudely, that nobody’s really all that busy here. Is there no type-A, neat-freak, homeless person living here who could collect all of it in bags or for recycling?

We are met by Lorenzo, who sometimes goes by the name Jamaica, the famous self-professed mayor of Tent City. He is always in the paper, and has a history of running Camden’s homeless encampments for many years. I ask him if the trash belongs to the camp. Yes, but some of it blows in from the highway. I don’t bother addressing the environmental impact to him; I’ve had stay-at-home moms tell me that plastic pollution is too much to think about, so I doubt I’d impart much knowledge here either.

Lorenzo also know as Jamaica, Tent City’s Mayor

We walk in and I notice that at the fire pit where they cook their meals sit three residents reading newspapers, and two women are sweeping in front of their tents, tents that have large black plastic rat traps in front of them. One young man stops to say hello on his way out of the camp, off to the dentist. He shakes our hands; as a matter of fact every single person we speak to shakes our hands. And as a reformed germaphobe, the old Ingrid is not liking this. There is no bathroom with sink and soap; nobody has freshly washed hands here. I suck it up and let it go. This is no place for prissy-ness.

The fire pit, where they heat up their meals.

Watching all the newspaper reading suggests two things to me. One is, with no electricity they have no TV or radio and entertain themselves the old-fashioned way by reading and, two, they must be pretty informed about what’s happening in the world around them.

One of the women sweeping in front of her tent, Tracey, told me that, when she read that Camden’s Mayor Redd was closing some of the shelters in Camden because they were bringing in too high a volume of homeless people to the city, it made her furious.

“Where are we supposed to go?”

She also told me how the applications for assistance cost money and that you have to prove you are homeless. I wondered how you would prove that. She and Lorenzo told me that they’d like to film an interview with Social Services, to show what really happens.

Tracey had been living at Tent City for over a year and kept thanking me for the water, saying it was just in time, that they were all out. She told me that her sister would put her up, but no way was she going to ever live under somebody else’s roof. Her husband had beaten her black and blue for 20 years; she wanted her own house. Lorenzo also mentioned that his wife had a house. It appeared to me that living this way was a choice for some of its residents, that they had roofs to sleep under and decided not to.

Next I spoke to Marianne; she had on makeup and bright clothes. Tracey told me that she didn’t feel like wearing anything other than her sweats but kindly said that Marianne always looked good. Marianne said that it made her feel good to be put together. I could have had that conversation with the other moms at my kid’s school. Her boyfriend looked much younger than her; I watched him walk up to her and shave her lady sideburns. They were lovers, lovebirds. Lorenzo told me this couple refused housing because they couldn’t stay together if they took it. Marianne told me she had five sons who lived with their father in Deptford NJ. I watched this deep affection these two had and took their picture, which they liked. I have to admit that it crossed my mind that I do indeed own my home, but they had something I do not have.

Marianne and her man

I didn’t do a lot of Mad Question Asking because, the truth is, a lot of MQA is mad listening skills, especially in a new or vulnerable place; but I did ask Marianne and Tracey at one point,

“Who cares about you guys?”

and Tracey replied

“Nobody, we care about each other.”

Marianne

As I quietly walked around, I didn’t feel unsafe at any point. This appeared to be a highly functioning group of adults, at least whom I met. Remember, one guy even left to go to the dentist while I was there. I stopped at one tent to chat with Corrine. She and Tracy were both charming and funny. She had razor-thin, freshly scabbed cuts on her face, three of them about an inch and a half long. I wanted to know where she got them. She had a lot of items displayed in front of her tent and I wondered if she was selling them; shoes, clothes and condoms that were fanned out. I wanted to take a photo and ask about the condoms. I thought of prostitution and those lovebirds but I didn’t ask because the cuts on her face silenced me.

Before we left I listened to Jude and brother Karl talk about Camden, the social programs and people they work with. I wondered if it was only social workers or anyone involved with the church that care about the poor, check in on them. Is it because they literally see them? Do regular people like you and I care about the poor? Do we even see the poor or are we all wusses, afraid of somebody dirty and unfamiliar?

Maybe I should have shared with them the environmental impact of all that trash, instead of assuming they wouldn’t care any more than some stay-at-home moms do. Who am I to judge what they would want to care about? How different are the residents at Tent City than you and me? I kept thinking about all the breaks I’ve gotten in this life and how, if I started to strip them away, one by one, maybe I’d be living there too.

Lorenzo and brother Karl

I’m glad I got to walk through a homeless encampment with a Franciscan friar and an angel of compassion, in the city where I first learned about homelessness at the age of eight. This is my city too, in a way. My grandmother worked in a cigar factory here for $2 a week in the 30s, married an Italian man against her family’s wishes, and they bought a house for $1000 and started a life (that eventually lead to mine) in the Fairview neighborhood of Camden. I’ll be buried here one day, fifty yards north of Walt Whitman’s final resting place in my family’s plot. I should know this place, all of it.

I wanted to see for myself what was going on at Tent City, hear the residents’ stories with my own ears. They care about each other; I like that part of their story best.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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On Wool

21 Apr Dope wool sneakers

Dear Wool, you are misunderstood by this modern world, with its forced hot air heating and thoughtless disposable clothing purchases. Seems as though people living today don’t even know that the reason you keep a hat on and button your coat is to protect your head and heart, they would never understand something as practical and old-fashioned as you. This world doesn’t remember that you last forever, keeping me so warm when wrapped tight. And like all things that are worth loving, a little itching or discomfort presents itself first, but fades. The feeling of not being cold is long remembered after you’ve had the shelter of a hand-made Norwegian sweater.

My 30-year-old sweater, good as new, my daughter wore it to school last week.

When I was a kid we had wool everything. This seemed to be one of the few things my mother brought along with her 18-year-old self from Norway, that she was going to pass on as tradition. Well, besides being open-minded in a way I don’t know anyone else ever being. I’ve never heard my mom remark about someone’s race, looks, income, nothing like that. She did once, on me complaining about my daughter’s dance teacher lacking charm, say “Ingrid, she is a Burlington County woman.” I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair.

Dope wool sneakers

My Grandmother's Socks and Mittens

I still have all the sweaters I was knit as a kid, my daughters wear them now. My grandmother knits daily, she has hundreds of socks and mittens. She sells them in one of my favorite shops, in my mom’s hometown that is an hour outside of Oslo, it’s called Handverkstua and they sell crafts made by the town’s seniors. I like everything about that store, beautiful hand-carved framed mirrors, doll clothes, and hand-tooled leather belts with embossed motorcycles on them, even though I’m sure the items sold there would be the equivalent to craft afghan blankets here. I once bought a knit stuffed black cat that my grandmother’s friend, Aslaug made and on hearing of the purchase, Aslaug was beside herself at the transatlantic honor bestowed her knit cat. This cat was going to America. I imagined arriving at Newark Int’l Airport with a sea of Etsy chicks before me, half of them midwestern, warm and chubby, the other half Park Slope moms screaming with Beatlemania for Aslaug’s cat.

Rest in Peace Aslaug

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Hello Norway

19 Apr Serious Ingrid eugenics-reading face. That is one big dark book.

I’ll be in Iceland and then Norway all next week, and my visit coincides with the Anders Behring Breivik trial that just began.

Racism fascinates me to no end, and I will say that Nordicism, the ideology of racial supremacy or a master race, will weigh heavy on my mind as I watch the reactions to the trial. I wonder, how do Norwegians really feel about race?

I did a racism round table in my home a few months back and what I got out of it was that as a white woman, I have no idea what it is like to experience differential treatment on a day-to-day basis because of what I look like. Three of the participants in the round table were not white and when I said I felt superior but it wasn’t because I was white (I meant because I think I may be the missing link between man and woman, but so far nobody will co-sign this theory, I’m guessing because I have no boy-parts but I mean that my mind is just not very girly) the reply I got was, well you will never know. Meaning I don’t walk into a room or a store or a doctor’s office and get treated like a second class citizen because of the amount of melanin in my skin.

This was very confronting for me, it made me see I may walk around not having to feel something very ugly, and maybe it did have something to do with my sense of freedom and self-esteem. It took a minute to sink in, because since I am not racist and don’t know anyone who is a blatant racist, I wouldn’t think it was a day-to-day offense, sometimes subtle in its ugliness. But according to my friends who were at my round table, all with master’s degrees, one who is a physician, it is a daily occurrence for them, to be treated a certain way because they were not white. This blew my mind, but what really blew me away, was that when I shared this with other white friends, a few of them sort of dismissed these stories, saying maybe they were being over-sensitive. Wow, to straight-up deny someone’s perspective and personal story is to me maybe the biggest offense of all. The bigger wow part was that most of the white friends who had this response grew up privileged in all white communities, places they said they never heard anyone speak like a racist. Well I have to point out the obvious, if you live somewhere and everybody looks the same, of course you are not going to hear racism. But if like in Norway’s case, you open the northern socialist gates of asylum and welcome in hundreds of thousands of refugees with dark eyes, skin and hair, who are suddenly dating your daughter or getting a job you want, then I guess racism and superiority would show up. It certainly did for Anders Behring Breivik.

I wonder if Norwegians feel a sense of superiority in being considered a master race? An underlying feeling of self-worth? Or as my friends suggested, a deep unconscious sense of security that comes with being white? Do all white people feel this?

Serious Ingrid eugenics-reading face. That is one big dark book.

This trip also coincides with me reading Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak- Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. I will not only be playing cards with my 86-year-old grandmother all week but doing some heavy thinking on race.

I want to tell you I personally have a bone to pick with that bastard Breivik. I was so excited to watch Rupert Murdoch’s family empire go up in flames or at least half a summer’s worth of juicy news and then wham! out-of-nowhere, like the devil’s hand maiden himself, this nutjob Breivik stole the whole show. And the Murdoch story disappeared. Poof! Gone. I remember questioning if Rupert Murdoch himself somehow timed that whole thing or was the devil himself and just with a snap of his fingers made it so.

 

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Love, Nudity and Chasing Cows

16 Apr brown cows

The land I grew up on was a former farm. New Jersey had lots and lots of farms before it had lots and lots of strip malls. We didn’t have a farm, but we did have cows. We always had cows, beef cows, and a windmill to give them fresh water which, to a kid, is a spectacular thing. To listen to its rhythmic creaking, sitting on top of a wooden board that my brother had nailed in place, 20 feet up a pine tree but 60 feet below the windmill’s blades, was magical; there was no place like it. That windmill once unearthed and pushed out a shark’s tooth for us. That’s right. A dinosaur aged fossil. And that board gave me a place to retreat when the going got tough inside.

The Windmill

The following is the story of a great escape made by a baby cow who I bet just missed her mother.

It was a brutally hot Sunday in August. I had a date that night with a good-looking Israeli guy who had a nice car that he listened to techno in. I’d never dated a guy with a nice car before. This was going to be me growing up. I would date somebody who had a good job and could buy me dinner. I was going to pretend that the techno was forgivable because he was foreign. I felt sick. I was betraying all the guys I’d loved as friends and as lovers, guys who listened to great music. Music that told me they felt things they couldn’t say but could hear, guys who played their own music and on whom I could pretend to faintly smell the scent of pine needles, as I imagined I smelled, all of us growing up, playing up under pine trees in this beat-up state.

I went and got my hair cut and blown out that morning; a let down. I didn’t want layers. I liked my hair very long and all one length, no dye, no blow dryer. But I was given layers and now had a haircut that was many years late, a longer version of the uninspired Jennifer Aniston look. I was starting to feel like I put myself on a makeover show to punish myself for not fitting in. Ever.

Deciding that the only way to fix this was to lay out completely naked in the sun, I stopped home, changed, grabbed a towel and drove to my mom’s. I took off my clothes in my old bedroom and wrapped my towel around myself. I walked in the kitchen, grabbed a huge glass of water, and told my mom I’d be lying out behind the bulldozer and to make sure she told anybody who came over not to bug me, that I’d be naked.

Maybe because I am half Norwegian, a first generation Norwegian-American, nudity is simply not a big deal to me. I was dropped off at my grandmother’s house in Norway for the summer when I was seven. That summer, not only did I repeatedly see the video for “The Safety Dance,” teach myself how to burp the entire alphabet on my brother’s command, break into a neighbor’s house to retrieve a pair of my sister’s sunglasses that I had left there before the family left for holiday, watch a public service breast exam infomercial that had an entirely naked woman in the shower showing how to check your tits for bad lumps, I also saw five moms at a kid’s birthday party, sitting on the deck, all with their shirts and bras off, sunning the parts of their bodies that were above their jeans. You know how little kids run chasing each other through a house party? I stopped and stood motionless looking at 10 boobs in a circle. What the fuck was this? My parents had a lot of nerve not letting me in on this country’s cultural norms so I could at least be prepared to see this before they disappeared for three months. I mean, the televised breast exam was one thing . . .

Back to the cow story.

I set myself up, hidden in the way back of the backyard, parked right next to a bulldozer, my glass of water on its giant tracks. I was surrounded by my dad’s construction equipment, trailers, rows of steel beams, and all sorts of salvage. There were acres and acres of trees; nobody could find me. No music nor book, just me and my mind thinking that love is one elusive element, like trying to catch mercury slipping on the floor from a broken glass thermometer. Where was the mythical True Love? All I ever saw was partnerships made out of settlement or security. I never saw love that blinded two people at the same time, just couples with banter of annoyance or control. This day, with the haircut and the techno I’d be listening to that night, was desperate. I was ashamed that my lonesomeness lead me to vanity; I had never taken a second look at anybody because of looks or money before. It felt like I was cheating on the man who I hadn’t met yet, who I hoped one day would love me like I was the only thing he ever saw when he closed his eyes.

My mood was shifting now—that thing that sun worshipping does—when I started to hear a bunch of commotion coming from the house. I sat up, turned my ear towards the house and listened; one of the new calves had gone missing. I wrapped myself back in my towel, slipped on my flip-flops, drank all my water, and hurried to the house.

I stood there on the patio, listening to my brother tell my mom that the police got a report of a cow sighting an hour back. This was not good. Poor girl could be anywhere.

I ran upstairs to get dressed. Shit. I did not have any underwear, the top or bottom kind with me. I hadn’t worn any on the way over. I didn’t even have an elastic to pull my hair up. To make matters even worse, instead of SPF 400 I had put on olive oil to attract the sun. I had only planned for an hour of body baking and it was easily 97 degrees out. I threw on a thin, cotton, cream-colored skirt with a 50s pattern of cherries, a tight black wife beater, and my flip-flops; I should have had on sneakers, a sports bra and biker shorts. This was the worst outfit for what I was about to spend the next two hours doing.

My mom, brother and me, we set off separately; they headed towards a corn field and I ran in my flip-flops across the street. I would run through a gigantic, empty (it was a Sunday) corporate complex. These places built up all around our creaky windmill, replacing farm after farm, decade after decade. I ran through a half mile or more of parking lots, circling huge mortgage and tech companies, and there she was, reddish-brown with white spots. At four months she weighed 300 pounds. I started to moo sweetly and ran towards her. This of course made her run faster. She left the corporate complex and ended up in the yard of a neighboring, small house that was there long before these corporate buildings were. She was headed right into a street with two lane traffic.

Brown Cows

I prayed for the second time in my life then and there. The first time didn’t help so I never did it again until then, and never since.

“Please God, do not let this calf run across the busiest road in my hometown and have an innocent driver die hitting her. Please, please, please God.”

I even did the sign of the cross I had learned about in Catholic high school, the same school my dad told me I could drop out of because I didn’t need to listen to that shit. I was terrified, making promises I would never keep with a God I never thought about. Timing is truly the biggest bitch of all, and it’d be just like her to have this cow and a car collide in perfect stupid union.

She crossed safely into a new, manicured, idyllic, middle-class, tract of homes, the street bent like a spoon, but she decided to get off the hot pavement and headed right into a backyard; one with a pool, that was having a party, the balloons telling me so. Cows run fast and don’t stop to shit. She ran right through that party with me behind her and took two huge craps that looked like two gallon’s worth of chocolate soft serve. I could hear “Is that a cow??” Some clever bastard said “Holy Cow!” and chuckled.

“I’m very sorry!” I shouted behind me, only about the poop. My newly layered hair flying like a tattered flag behind me, and this cow looking like a mirage on that still cloudless day.

Coming up to a fence, she weaved back onto the street. I passed two perfectly faux-goth 12-year-olds whose moms clearly picked out their clothes for them at Hot Topic, and I yelled

“Hey! Grab some of your friends and help me!”

They took off like the posers they were, on their nice bikes. Then, miracle of miracles, a cop car.

I was soaking wet in sweat, pissed I had to smell all that product coating my hair from the salon drip down my neck (I hate perfume or any manufactured odor with fervor only a genuine racist could match.) Breathing hard, heaving deeply, I ran in front of his car and put my hands up, stopping him, and quickly asked him to please call some more cops and help me. He told me that it wasn’t really the police’s problem. I went completely Annie Oakley on him, my gesticulating arms and hands, more effective than any weapon, doing most of the communicating. I reminded him that yes, it was his job to help me and he’d better get me some more cops, and, if not, I’d tell every crappy provincial newspaper around us a story how he, Officer Andrews, left me, a nice girl stuck chasing a reckless wild baby cow, helpless and alone. He conceded. I was taught early in life that the only thing above the law was the media and there it was; he bowed to my threats. I started after the cow again. I couldn’t lose her, even though I had zero idea how exactly I was going to catch her.

I realized she needed a name at this point. We had been getting cows in pairs or double pairs for the last many years and I consistently named them all Maybelline and Clementine each year. This was the first year that we had three cows and I was starting to think maybe that was this girl’s problem; maybe her grass grazing mates had made private jokes or turned their backs to her. It came to me quickly, along with Emmylou Harris and The Band singing along loudly in my mind; I named her Evangeline. And then I started to sing to her, after her namesake, a song so perfect. Evangeline was goin’ insane.

Three cop cars showed up 15 minutes later and, suddenly, I was no longer alone with this cow. My mom and brother had found us too. Evangeline had found her way into a backyard that was fenced in, with one exit, a four-foot gate.

There were maybe eight of us now. She was surrounded. The owners of this house stared from inside their home in what I assume was deep confusion as to why there was a cow in their backyard, as well as five cops. The cop that happened to be covering the gate, her only exit, decide to step aside casually enough that a polite “pardon me” would have fit, and let her pass when she bolted for the exit. We all made a huge collective “Awwwwwww!” We’d lost her and now we all started to chase her again.

She came up to the side of a house, huffing and puffing between the bushes that lined it. At this point there were five of us left. My friend John showed up. He was a hunter; I figured maybe he could help. One of the cops said he could call his sergeant and ask if he could just shoot her. We all paused and looked at him like he was nuts. She was just about to break away again when my brother did the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen; just as she turned, ready to split, he jumped on top of her and took her down, wrestled her to the ground. My brother was done; he was not chasing her anymore. I stood speechless. To this day, it is in the top five things I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. While he had her down, John hog-tied her legs. He switched places with my brother while he went to get the pickup. She seemed to finally start to relax while lying there, not trying to run, suddenly passive. It took John, my brother and one cop to load her into the truck and return her to the two other calves, both mooing and moaning for their mothers, standing under the windmill.

Driving home, I thought about that cow’s will to run and be free. I wondered how much of that will exists in every living creature, even weeds that demand to be seen, or circus fleas. I had felt the need to run fast out of my own life many times, sometimes permanently, but never had the guts to make one bold move, someone else’s feelings always trumping and quieting mine. In this past year I’ve come to realize that was my excuse; the good daughter, wife and mother, a phony mask of pat-myself-on-the-back principles, noble kindness concealing a coward afraid to risk what I safely had. It didn’t matter whether I was happy or felt anything in real-time. It was easy for me to be whomever anybody wanted or needed me to be. I was always retreating happily to the safety of living and breathing inside the dreams in my mind.

I was tired but I had a pretty good story. The Israeli called me and canceled our date. His friend’s wife had a baby; he was going to the hospital instead. I was dissed for a baby? With this good story too? Aw, fuck it. That’s as low as it gets. Maybe he had a nice car and a good job but, clearly, he had no blood running through his veins with any sense of hunger, at least none for me. I’d rather be alone with my good stories than cry over a case of “He’s just not that into you”, even if I felt a bit bruised from the diss. I sat alone outside on my porch stairs, leaning my head against the yellow stucco I’d painted the summer before, chin in hand, thinking and smoking cigarettes all night, listening to the crickets of summer, wishing that, someday, a beautiful, fucked-up man would show up with his own good stories, let me love him and want me just as much, that somebody would finally listen to my whole story and really hear me, out loud.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Local Gov’t

14 Apr

Thursday night I left my kids with a friend, stopped and grabbed a pack of strawberry Hubba Bubba, and drove over to Cherry Hill’s Municipal Building to hopefully watch the cell phone tower some creeps were trying to put in my tiny hamlet not get the big ok. This 150 foot tower would be ugly, dangerous, and affect our property values.

Man, it was packed, I bet there was 100 people there. I walked past a woman in a wheelchair who later happened to be the biggest bad-ass in the room and I sat in the back, next to a friend, who gave me an adorable motherly scolding look when I started blowing bubbles. What? We were in the back row, who could see me!

It was four hours of listening mostly to white guys who I wondered if anybody wanted to have sex with, talk in a language so unbearable that the portraits of public officials from decades past that were in front of them started to come to life and make jokes at their expense. As a nonacademic, I basically in all seriousness consider myself to be a 35-year-old juvenile delinquent, one who is always waiting to slip my foot in the aisle and trip the jerk in the room. I find the language that professionals or any person who speaks in front of rooms of people to ALWAYS be peppered with words (like quantify, quantify must be in a pamphlet passed out in men’s rooms somewhere informing them if they use it repeatedly, it will hypnotize the listener to nod yes to whatever they say) that are used to make them sound like they know what they are talking about. The buzz of the lights overhead were more affective in getting through, words spoken need emotion to make them heard. Duh.

Although we were there to fight a cell phone tower, I did spend a bit of time texting on my iPhone. The irony. My head looked up when it was pointed out twice that according to some 1996 law, in no way could the potential health hazards be used to stop this tower from being put up.

I considered getting involved in local gov’t a few years back. I am a social animal, and could befriend anybody because for the most part I like everybody, and I have an interest in politics in the way that it affects us and is so embedded in everything we do that I thought maybe this would be a good place for me to park my adult self. Nope.

The lighting and climate control in those ugly rooms, the extreme length and dullness of forming agreements to effect change. I couldn’t do it. And that’s sad. I was one of the youngest people in that room. Who is going to run this place (our country) if no cool people get involved in the dull, hard work? It’s positively frightening. I believe part of the problem is all the quantifying. My opinion is nothing groundbreaking, but if charisma and even a hint of sex was allowed to enter the room instead of fear of litigation and political correctness, then maybe people like me would get involved. The world could change overnight if lightheartedness was used and treasured instead of austere correctness (ew). Here is a for instance.

I went to get a coffee at Olde City Coffee recently and when I parallel parked, I bumped into the guy sitting in his truck behind me. Now like everything I normally do well, I fucked this up too because my mind is on fire with life changes. I got out and walked over to him. He had a grumpy face and before he spoke, I said “What can I say, I’m a girl.” He laughed and it was over. Some feminist somewhere is so angry with me, but you know what? I made that guys day and instead of it being a big deal, it was done. Quick resolve, not some long drawn out 1200 page nonsense. Imagine a government where things just got resolved quickly or where logic said that health risks were allowed to be discussed when talking about the impact of a cell phone tower?

Well, the cell phone tower didn’t get approved. Great news. It was wonderful to watch my friends faces light up who work so hard trying to fight the big guys with petitions, signs, and who pay attention to what happens in our town. They may not be public officials but they do effect change, invite me along and let me sit in the back row blowing bubbles.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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American Strip Mall Yoga

12 Apr Classy sunset yoga silhouette. Oh look, a silhouette of yoga pants too.

Some weeks back, I was on the schoolyard chatting with two Mom friends while we were waiting for the kids to be let out. The topic of yoga came up. I listened to them talk about how much they enjoy yoga and find it relaxing. I thought about my own experiences with yoga and told them that I didn’t like it, this fake Americanized strip mall yoga. I didn’t like being trapped in a room with a bunch of women attempting to free themselves from their self-imposed prison, the heavy burden of over-scheduled kids, and their even heavier burden of lacking a sense of humor, all the while having to stop myself from asking the woman next to me if that was a fart or did she just quiff? In all the yoga classes I’ve ever taken, most of the tightly-wound participants looked like they’d sue me for spilling their green tea on their trendy mats, colored cheap imitations of aubergine or celadon.

Classy sunset yoga silhouette. Oh look, a silhouette of yoga pants too.

Two months ago I went to the Vedanta Society of New York with my friend Kelly, who told me this is her “yoga church.” It was a pretty Sunday up on the Upper West Side. Swami Vivekananda, who was the first teacher of Vedanta to come to the West, founded the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894. Kelly told me this was where yoga began in the US. We listened to one of the Swamis speak for an hour. I did feel like I was at church—rare as it is that I ever go—but as always, my mind drifted off to the naughty place that takes up most of my daydreams.

It was nice to be there; it was peaceful, modest, and sincere. They have a lunch after the talk in the basement, prepared by the followers, and for anyone who attends. I thought that was beautiful and kind. When I told Kelly about my feelings about yoga, I was afraid she’d be hurt. But she agreed, and told me strip mall yoga is not even yoga at all and that most instructors seem to not even know the basic teachings. It’s about a removal of the ego not about how great your ass is being lifted. She told me that one of the founding principles is non-harming. I thought about the last yoga class I ever took and how the instructor certainly meant me harm.

When I was in my very early twenties I saw an ad in the Philadelphia Weekly for Hot Yoga. It sounded appealing enough, especially at the end of winter. I don’t think the word hot was over-used yet, it later used to describe everything, making me cringe, like the sight of Paris Hilton supporting John Kerry. I had taken less than half a dozen yoga classes by then. I was still open to falling for it at the enthusiasm of friends but I wasn’t connecting to it. It felt phony, whereas running alone over the Ben Franklin Bridge felt dangerous and breathtaking.

The “studio” was off South Street. I walked into a small dark dirty room, with black velvet curtains and wall mirrors, front to back. It looked much more like a place I’d get my cards read by an expressionless woman, age unclear, and fronting an entirely different business. Three women were sitting on the floor waiting for the class to begin. I smiled and said hello, attempting eye contact with all of them. The reply I received made me question if I had, in fact, walked into a rape victim support group. Jesus Christ, out of respect for the people in this world who are truly suffering, maybe these women shouldn’t have taken themselves quite so seriously, or would have found a charm school more beneficial than a yoga class.

I shrugged my shoulders, sat down. The instructor appeared from behind the curtain. Her body language was extremely tense but loosely covered by her wardrobe of wannabe-centered calm. The instructor asked me if I had ever taken yoga or hot yoga before. I replied. And then she said one the most unbelievable sentences ever said to me. Get this. Ready? She said, “This is going to be the hardest hour of your entire life.”

Now I really wanted to know based on those three girls faces and this sinister proclamation what the hell was going on in this dirty room. I was going to point out that I was pretty sure that digging deep into my humanity, which I am certain we most likely part with when separated from the master cells of our cord blood at birth, that to forgive the person who with one hand at my throat pinned me to the hood of his car and with the other punched me in the face, was probably a bit harder then the next hour would be.

I didn’t reply. I willed myself to not sweat in her 105-degree room and to mimic her every pose with precision. She commented on both at the end, encouraging me to continue. I was a natural, she said. I stared at her for a few moments too long, and enjoyed her growing discomfort. I smiled slowly while putting on my coat. Reaching for a Camel Light, I continued to burn my dark brown eyes into her weak crappy soul. As I reached for the door, I told her she was a natural at being an asshole and I stepped out, lit up and walked four blocks home.

It’s not likely I will ever take a yoga class again. For me, having to behave all day by being nonconfrontational or listening to conversations that begin with “oh, my favorite flavor of Crystal Light is definitely lemonade” when really I’d like to talk about hermaphrodites or the blight that killed the American Chestnut tree, forces me to do all the pretending that I’m calm or centered I’m capable of.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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My Curiosity Knows No Bounds

11 Apr

The Homeless Part One

9 Apr Joe Louis in his garden.

Where are all the cool rich people? This is something I’d wondered about a lot last year while spectating the 99% vs. 1% class match. They must exist right? Maybe cool is the wrong word, because some people would think having Jimmy Buffet visit your sailboat would be cool. Let me rephrase this, Where are all the generous, eccentric cool rich people?

This winter, I was in coastal Maine for two seven-day spells of running around the woods alone, pretending I’m the first or last living human, and playing games I should have outgrown two decades ago. As I was walking with my kids and mom around her giant seventy-five acre wooded hill of a property—which she pays half a teacher’s salary in taxes for each year—I asked her, “Why not have an occupy my big-ass estate?” and piss off the town she pays all that tax to by moving a hill’s worth of homeless people in.

She laughed, agreed she didn’t know where all the cool rich people are; she had never heard of any either. And no, I couldn’t have the property even though I’ve asked for it a hundred times, probably in the same tone someone asks to borrow a sweater, her reminding me each time that I cannot afford to keep it. (True, I don’t know how to make that kind of money or even have a resume.) And also, no, she wasn’t going to welcome the liability of having her property occupied by hundreds of tents inhabited by homeless, jobless folks.

But if it were my property, I would. Or I’d like to think the Robin Hood disguised as the beautiful Maid Marian that is my fantasy alter-ego would. I wish we’d hear stories like that. Robin Hood never even existed, he was a just a story. Seems sort of nuts that in a world of seven billion people that not one person who is unbelievably wealthy will stand up and stick up for the poor and take them in. Like in their home. Richard Branson as Mother Teresa instead of mega-hobbyist? I know Bill Gates is inoculating Africa, but that seems suspicious to me, and no doubt lots of money is being made on that. Or how about just one fella on Wall Street doing some kind of reverse ponzi scheme and Pow!, right under their noses, takes millions and hands it out to the poor?

The funny thing is that a homeless person always lived on my mother’s property in Maine. My dad built this house in the 80s by trucking up his lifetime collection of antique architectural salvage from our home state New Jersey, most of which he got for close-to-nothing by taking it off the hands of demolition jobs when Camden, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City were being torn down and rebuilt in the 60s and 70s. During construction, which—true to his madness—commenced during a blizzard, he started running into a theft problem. He decided to have a watchman and for over twenty-five years they were always men who were previously homeless.

The bulldozer sling like a pageant sash. These statues were part of a fountain made by Gustave Eiffel’s foundry, dismantled and unwanted by Fairmount Park, they came to live with us.

I was about eight-years-old when I was told to get in the car by my dad; he needed me to help him find a homeless person. Oh, no. I stood in the kitchen and looked at my mom, my eyes moving rapidly across hers for having been chosen to do something I didn’t understand but knew I couldn’t ask questions about. I got in, feeling small, wishing my brother was with me and as we drove twenty minutes to Camden, I was instructed to look for anyone who looked homeless. Because all little girls would know exactly what that meant. I think I actually pointed out someone just to save face, wanting to impress my dad. He was getting frustrated, not seeing what or who he wanted, and so he pulled over suddenly, got out of the car, left it running, me in it, no explanation. He walked up to two thirty-something black guys standing on a sidewalk. I watched as their body language changed from tense-and-ready to loose-and-laughing. My dad could disarm anyone. One of the two men touched my dad’s arm and pointed with the other hand to wherever it was my dad asked to find. We drove in the direction he pointed.

This is me at 8. When I gave a wallet size photo to my bus driver Mary, she laughed and said, "You sho look like an angel, but you ain't."

Again, I was left in the car, not running this time, in the parking lot of a homeless shelter in what is now the third most dangerous city in America, while he went in. I wasn’t allowed to go, he did not want me to “pick anything up.” Herpes? AIDS? A stray cat? Maybe an orphan baby, I would have liked that. What could I have picked up? I was scared so I did what I did my whole life, I watched. I kept my body perfectly still, hands flat and shoved under my legs, my eyes and ears alert. I made eye contact with men passing our car—always a brand new Cadillac—who didn’t look like anybody who lived in my town, which wasn’t a town so much as a road with two developments four miles apart. (We were living in the middle of all this in a house my dad built, which resembled a Swiss chalet that looked out of place on those flat NJ farmlands.) He came out ten minutes later, laughing, and walking fast—sort of how somebody walks out of a 7-11 happy their scratch won them a surprise twenty. He had found who he wanted.

Always a Cadillac.

And so, Joe Louis was bought a ticket, Greyhound-ed north, picked up on the other end by a carpenter hired by my dad. Joe Louis was the first of a total of nine homeless people who were put up as watchmen on the property in a little red one-room house with a twin mattress, TV, washer/dryer, shower, oven, and food, which was delivered by another hired hand because these guys didn’t walk the half mile to town to shop or really ever even seemed to notice they were sitting on top of what is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I never saw any of them walk the 100 feet past our house to sit and look at what 3 million people visit this island for each summer to see. They never left the little red house.

When we were back in NJ, I’d be sitting at my assigned seat to the right of my dad at the kitchen table not complaining about eating meals like Ox Tail soup. The kitchen table was also used as my dad’s office and desk and I’d listen to him talk to his watchman. He had a never-ending Easter egg hunt of cigarettes and alcohol with each of them. Whatever it was they wanted, he’d hide it all over the property and ration out their addiction from 500 miles away, calling them with no particular schedule, and letting them know where the goodies were hidden: a carton of Salem cigarettes triple wrapped in plastic and hidden under a wheelbarrow; or a bottle of booze tucked behind a fallen pine tree.

When we were in Maine, which was often, we kids were always instructed to never go near the watchman’s house but to always be respectful and say hello or wave. There was a series of watchmen, each with his own particular ways.

Joe Louis always had two twigs sitting crisscross between his nose and mouth—his lips pushed up to hold them—and wore a dirty zip-up blue jumpsuit. He swore by stories of nine-foot deer knocking on his door and talking to him and we would brag about how good his potatoes were until we saw him peeing in his garden.

Joe Louis in his garden.

Whenever my dad would carry over to Pee-wee—another watchman—a plate of whatever incredible meal my mom made for dinner, Pee-wee was always found lying completely naked. He was asked to leave. My dad didn’t like that kind of weird. He said that one was “off,” and was afraid one of us would see this very tiny man naked.

Pierre, a Basque woodsman, who cleared a third of the property with a chainsaw on his own accord, got pissed and left when the townspeople supposedly called him a faggot.

A homeless couple lived in this little red house for a month but that didn’t work out, probably much like a submarine, this was a solitary job.

Merritt was the only one who left the hill and got a job at a restaurant, he ended up getting married and moving two towns away. His wife was accused of drinking him to his death in order to collect his Social Security.

Eddie stayed the longest. Eddie was probably one of the most polite people I’ve ever known, never mind that he never wore a shirt and that his dogs—inherited from Merritt, the watchman that preceded him—were named Connie Chung and Duke. He sent me a semiliterate scrawled card for my first Mother’s day with a $50 bill, splitting with me the money he won playing my daughter’s birth stats. He called me England instead of Ingrid. I never corrected him.

My dad died in Maine when I was 27. I held his hand for two nights and two days, while sitting in a hospital chair, watching his body methodically rock with the life support system, and trying to stuff my memory with his physicality—so afraid I wouldn’t remember the texture of the wrinkles on his knuckles, how his nail beds bent, or the exact black of his hair still there but mixed with grey. On the third night I went back to the house on top of the hill to sleep, when the phone rang in the middle of the night my sisters and I knew it was over. He was gone; we would go to the hospital now. We silently got in the car, the weather wild on the hill, the wind and clouds low and moving fast. It was winter and the snow was hard to the ground but bright, the stars and moon above, and me sandwiched in the middle.

I asked my sister to pull around to Eddie’s house since he heard the phone ring—we had the same number— and he deserved to know too. I got out, the wind all around me and Eddie came out, no shirt or shoes on and I said, “Eddie, I’m sorry, but my dad is gone.” He cried loudly, repeatedly pounding his fist under the flood light on the side of the small red one-room house, sobbing “No, no, no!” “Eddie it’s ok, he’s somewhere good I bet (the only place I could think of and still do was the bar or Catina from the first Star Wars), you have to just look after the house like he’d want you to, ok? That’s what he’d want. To know you’d look after it for him.” My voice monotone, then suddenly I laughed softly, starting to cry a little now. With all the dark natural drama of those billion stars behind fast moving clouds and wind I looked up, shook my head and thought “You son-of-a-bitch, you’d leave just this way, I haven’t even had a chance to think of my own loss and here I am, consoling Eddie first.”

Maybe I just miss my dad and these homeless ghosts and wish I could put them up in tents or little red houses in the woods, leaving them alone and taking care of them all at the same time, and in return hear their stories and watch their eccentricities, which I don’t see or hear anymore—except in my memory. But I have to wonder, if I dream of being Robin Hood, there must also be someone who actually has the guts or power to do it, and who wants to do it too, right?

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Perfect Party

8 Apr

Ingrid and the Captain

Last night’s party for Captain Moore and his book Plastic Ocean was wonderful, we had a packed house, topping off at 49 guests. You can see more photos on Mad Question Asking’s facebook page.

 

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Yesterday was a Good Day

7 Apr

Last night, I drove in Black Friday – oh, I mean Good Friday – traffic up the NJ turnpike to fetch Captain Moore and his long-time partner, Sam, at Newark Airport. They were flying in from Bermuda and landing at 5:30. I had meant to leave much earlier but I didn’t, because for the last couple of months I find myself stuck mentally trying to rationalize things I can’t change and ways that I feel, and now I am behind when once I was always spot on time. I got in a heavy dose of stop-and-go traffic, called my sister to find out if the traffic would change and what the status of their flight was, and got off the turnpike just as they landed.

Picking up the Captain was exciting. I am certain that he will be thought of as one of the most important people of this Century. His discovery of the Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge discovery even if it’s not widely known of or thought of. It will be. When, I do not know, but someday its effects will suddenly concern the masses, maybe when they are sick enough from its consequences. Or, don’t want to feel like every moment of their lives feels like the feeling of unbuttoning your pants after eating Thanksgiving dinner, fat on consumption.

As I drove through ez-pass, the excitement was building, I was going to meet a hero in a few minutes. Just as I rounded past the Budweiser Brewery, ELO’s Turn to Stone came on the radio. Awesome. I had been thinking about Jeff Lynne earlier that day, too. This proving life is weird and filled with minute coincidences that mean little but feel like a lot.

I found Captain Moore and Sam, and they where just as I imagined. He wore an embroidered shirt with his name on it. Sam asked if I was surprised they agreed to have a book signing for me. “Yes, very much.” I answered, smiling. She said I didn’t look like someone from NJ. I laughed and said unfortunately I would probably be the flashiest guest at the party, but maybe they’d see a Snooki-type somewhere in our travels. I did point out that the Kardasians were how we all imagined California so that made us even.

We drove back to Exit 4 and went to the hotel I was able to comp a room for them in, my Uncle owning it and being very generous to do that. We took the luggage up to their room and then went out to eat dinner at a pretty good Chinese place. They liked it.

I got to talk to them about ocean pollution, one of the things that fascinates me most, one-on-one, for many hours. It was incredible. It was a good day. As we drove back to the hotel, Captain Moore told me based on our conversations, he was going to organize a presentation that he thought would address me and my friends best. Then he asked if he should wear a suit and bow-tie or his Captain’s shirt. This was the most endearing question he could have asked. I told him to save the suit for The Explorer’s Club he’d be presenting to in a couple of days and to wear the Captain’s shirt, because for all of us longing for the days to play Cowboys and Indians again, we’d all love to be a Captain and have a shirt to prove it.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

Go Fish, Mr. Fish

5 Apr web2

In the middle of May 2011 I was pretty upset. It seemed to me that almost everyone I talked to was really jazzed about Osama bin Laden’s death. I couldn’t figure out why it didn’t appear to anyone else like we were all being played. I mean, who wouldn’t re-elect a swell enough guy who finally finished off the world’s biggest mother fucker? Our public schools are broken but let’s recreate bin Laden’s digs and plan his quick but pricy end with Navy Seal precision. We can just add it to the estimated $4 trillion we Americans will have spent, or borrowed rather, on our decade long war on terror. Osama bin Laden being the cherry on top of the 236,000 already dead, who make up this flesh and blood sundae that somebody is getting fat on and nobody wants to talk about. I wanted to understand why I kept seeing so much glee? How did his death heal, protect, or comfort us? My ten-year-old stepson happened to be at a Phillies game the night the story broke, and he got caught up in a stadium chanting USA, his smile so broad retelling a tale he didn’t understand. I was crushed he felt the power of that. I told him that when he grows up and sees people in other countries burning our flags, that sweet chanting nationalism in the face of death, anyone’s death, is the same thing but just looks different, it’s hate.

This leads us to how I fell for the work of editorial cartoonist, Mr. Fish. I had seen his work on Truthdig, a site I read because I think Chris Hedges is cool. I’d smile here or there looking at his cartoons, sometimes agreeing with what I perceived to be the comment I thought Mr. Fish was making, sometimes not getting it but always liking the tone and art. So when I was upset in the days after the big bin Laden kill, he published a cartoon on Truthdig and looking at it I felt something sort of in between an epileptic-seizure—complete with a false pipeline to God—and the sensation that comes when somebody stands behind you and pretends to crack an egg over your head.

The cartoon showed Jesus embracing bin Laden and written above it was, “Jesus Christ pissing off his American constituency by demonstrating the number one value absolutely crucial to understanding his radical, middle eastern philosophy.” Bulls-eye. So began my first stint as a fan. I should like to say I do not believe in fan-ism and neither should you. I have no business with anybody I can’t see with my own eyes or get a read on with my own built-in sincerity meter. But I made an exception and started to pay closer attention to his work after that beautiful cartoon.

He published a book—Go Fish, a collection of cartoons and essays—which I bought on Amazon. I was annoyed it was printed in China and the cover felt like thermal cash register receipts laced with BPA, but nobody’s perfect. What was under that dirty Chinese cover was great. I read those essays like I was eating an almost-the-right-temperature-but-you-still-have-to-blow-on-it bowl of tomato soup. Slow, carefully ingesting each word or idea and how it partnered with the one before and after it. It was bright, filled with dry misery and sticky-sweet vulgarity. Once the book got in the house, I’d hand it to anybody who would sit down at my coffee table, and like a gentle push of dominos, each and every person would be laughing within moments of looking at the cartoons. His work looks and reads like he is the curator of his own carefully catalogued solo member Mr. Fish’s Thought Museum. My only criticism of Mr. Fish is that he is a real name-dropping hero lover, much too often letting you know who inspires him. This reads to me like an Achilles’ Heel-ish point of weakness that made me wonder what he’d be writing if he wasn’t so busy thinking about who to measure his work up against.

Mr. Fish had been posting on his Facebook page about book signings here or there, none that I could make. So I jokingly suggested he have one at the mall food court near me on a weekday at 10am please. Ten days later, we had the book signing in my house. In less than a week, the one before Christmas too, I got a hold of twenty friends to eat, drink, and listen to Mr. Fish share his work with us. To me it felt like my mind’s prom. I got to think about something, like, admire, and respect it and its owner presented their work in MY living room. The Q & A was too brief, I’ll admit I wanted to get his books out of my house and spread his disease into other homes before friends left to releave babysitters, so my natural inclination to hustle actually got in my own way. I never got to ask any of the questions I had. But even without any questions asked this perfect winter night ended up being the very beginning of Mad Question Asking.

Check out Mr. Fish and all his dopeness at www.clowncrack.com

This is a video of Mr. Fish’s presentation with a sliver of Q & A.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Party with the Captain

4 Apr

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Captain Charles Moore sails into MQA

3 Apr images

On April 7, 2012 at 6:00 pm MQA will be hosting its second book signing.

It’s pretty cool to reach out to somebody you respect, ask if they will share their work in your home and they say yes. In fact, when I read that none other than Captain Charles Moore, author of Plastic Ocean, one of my favorite books I read last year, emailed me himself and wrote that he would be in my neck of the woods and yes he would have a book signing at my house…I screamed, like a girl. And in four days from now, the Capt. will be in my living room discussing ocean pollution with my friends, how cool is that?

I was already fascinated by ocean pollution before I read the Captain’s Plastic Ocean. Roughly two years ago, I found myself wide awake at about 3:00 am with a strange and sudden need to understand what I heard was a giant floating island of garbage—in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean—supposedly twice the size of the United States and made up, for the most part, of plastic trash. I hadn’t just learned about the garbage patch that day; I vaguely knew about it for many years. But it was on that particular night that my mind rattled me to consciousness to learn everything it could, then and there. So I slipped on my black robe and glasses, quietly tip-toed downstairs, careful not to wake my youngest. Soaked in the silence of the middle of the night, I sat down at my computer, and Googled “garbage patch.” Within minutes, after reading a couple of news stories, I found myself at Captain Moore’s Algalita Marine Research Foundation site.

The garbage patch is not an island of trash; it’s a soup of debris, most of it tiny, confetti-size pieces of degraded plastic. I was half expecting to read about real estate speculations, thinking someone, or some man, would have dropped his flag, claiming it to be the next Dubai. This is the best description I can give you from what I understand. These garbage patches are located in each of the five oceans, inside each ocean’s gyre. A gyre is a large system of rotating ocean currents, like a vortex. Most of the trash trapped inside this huge swirling vortex is believed to come from land. Imagine what happens to every piece of litter (soda caps and bottles, cigarette butts, lighters, plastic straws, and so on) that goes into storm drains and of course what is dumped by the world’s fishing fleets, and even the United States Navy.

For instance, Captain Moore writes in Plastic Ocean: “By its own admission, The [United States] Navy has added more than 4.5 million pounds of plastic to the world’s oceans. In degraded form, most of it would still be there. (The U.S. Navy may be the worst ocean polluter the world has ever known, having secretly dumped, by its own account, 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines, and rockets, and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste—either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.).” Incredible.

This is a sample of the soup from the Pacific Garbage Patch I got to see up close at a plastic pollution talk given at NYU last month.

It’s important to understand that the pollution described above is not something you can just scoop out and recycle. This was one of the first questions I thought when I learned about plastic ocean pollution: Can’t we just recycle it? Captain Moore explains what a possible cleanup would require: “For the cleanup we start with 145 million square kilometers that comprise the subtropical gyres. And, to be generous, let’s say an advanced cleanup vessel can do 5 square kilometers a day (10-meter-wide net traveling at 20 kilometers an hour, wider and faster than anything in use today). It will only take that vessel 29 million days, or 79 thousand boats 79 years working 24-7. This is surface debris only, and we don’t take into account the associated organisms that would be destroyed.”

In my mind, I hear 79,000 boats working 79 years 24-7; I hear it over and over. I think about how that’s what is there now, and that more pollution continues to accumulate. We, as humans, who are responsible for each other and this planet must stop our wastefulness. This pollution is living with, and within, the tiniest organisms of our food chain and being consumed by other members of the food chain, which I must remind you we are a part of. It affects us. Not just because it’s heartbreakingly sad or a gross example of how careless humans are.

We can all make decisions in our daily life that can stop adding to the soup. The first one is to cut out as much single-use plastic from your daily life as you can: stop throwing away something you use once. Examples of single-use plastics are shopping bags, water and soda bottles, straws, ziploc bags, saran wrap and plastic utensils. The fact is that it is quite possible that the chemicals that make up all this plastic we coat our food with are endocrine disruptors, which are chemicals that may interfere with the body’s endocrine system and produce adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects. I am not suggesting that you, my reader, carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. I am saying that small incremental changes and just being willing to think about it, is a big deal. We can’t change the past, but to a certain extent, the future is in our control.

Captain Moore, who is considered to have discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is a hero to me. He took it upon himself to care about something HUGE and didn’t say, “Oh well, I’m just one person, what can I do?” I think about Captain Moore probably how a 10-year-old in 1969 felt about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I think of him and his colleagues as sea-based astronauts, discovering and exploring something so important and mysterious to the rest of us. Think about it. They travel all over the world to far-flung parts of the ocean to research these huge moving soups of plastic debris. It’s really hard for us to imagine that there is anything on this planet that is not understood. But all of the landmass on Earth could fit into the Pacific Ocean alone, there is A LOT of ocean out there and it should not be forsaken.

Visit these sites to learn more:

www.algalita.org

Captain Moore on CBS Sunday Morning

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Oh, New Jersey

1 Apr toookie

I’ve always had the good fortune to see lemonade when confronted with any sort of lemons. Living in New Jersey for some people—perhaps most of the developed world—would be considered trashy, tacky, too Italian. Whenever I am out-of-state or country, and asked where I live, a look of pity or disgust subtly sweeps over the question asker’s face when I tell them “New Jersey.” I never defend my state to them, Tom Waits did it for me. I love NJ for all the reasons it’s hated. I also love it for what it once was, all farms and those glorious pine trees that I learned how to climb high and daydream in.

Drive up or down any one of New Jersey’s many ugly corridors and you will pass a shop I’m sure you’ve never been in. Just today I marveled at Wicker Dynasty, which is also—rather puzzlingly—selling gluten-free food products and bottled water. Perhaps to offset the presumed decline in wicker sales since the 80s? It’s not just the wicker and gluten-free combo-shops here in the Garden State. We have a crazy high number of exotic bird stores too.

I visited Todd Marcus Birds Exotic once a couple of years back and, of course, when I drive by it, I always smile to myself while thinking “Can these birds really be considered exotic since they live in a cage in a warehouse on Route 130 in Delran, New Jersey?”

I—not using the time my kids are in school to jog with other women wearing baseball hats, bake, or do any of the things that would justify my five hours of stay-at-home mom free time as put to good use— found myself pulling into the parking lot of Birds Exotic last week.

I went in and was suddenly overwhelmed with extreme joy; this was one happy and very clean place. I was quickly visually confronted with two women, one who worked there and the other a customer, both had birds on their shoulders and one of the ladies had a bird inside her cardigan. They were both wearing bright turquoise eyeliner, thick under their lower lashes. I wondered if this was some sort of bird lover’s identification makeup like how jeep owners wave at each other or the hanky code, a secret society signal.

I decided that this could end up being my favorite place to waste my five hours of kid-free time rather than lying on top of my neatly made bed listening to Led Zeppelin while staring at the ceiling wondering why Robert Plant had such bad taste in women. MQA definitely needed to further probe the crazy beautiful world of exotic birds. I asked the eyeliner woman if I could return with a friend of mine, who would film me asking her questions about this wonderful sanctuary, assuring her no one would probably ever see it because I’m nobody. She said I needed to talk to Todd and went and got him. He came out and agreed to be filmed with very little concern what I was doing and gave me his phone number. I left Todd Marcus Birds Exotic very happy that day.

A week later Lisa and I showed up and this is what she filmed.

After the camera was turned off I asked if Todd and his wife would consider adopting me if I ever became an adult orphan because they are perhaps the nicest people I have ever met. I called my Mom after leaving Birds Exotic and picking up some take-out Indian buffet to see if I could bargain a bird purchase out of her.

“Hi Mom, I met this bird today with a hair style very reminiscent of Whitney Houston at certain points in her career, he’s some sort of toucan with black curly hair, I wanted to know if you could buy one like him for me?”

“How much is he?”

“$6000.00″

“Oh Ingrid, that is too much.”

“Yeah, but he NEVER has to go to the beauty parlor.”

“No.”

“Why don’t you want me to be happy?!?”

“No, that’s too much, wasn’t there one there that was much less?”

“Sure, but I want the one with the black lady hair. Mom, remember when I was in fifth grade and you, in your stoic get-the-fuck-over-it-already Norwegian way, informed me while I still had my book bag on after school, that you mistakenly pointed out from the kitchen window my cat Meow-Meow to be a groundhog, your caddyshackish mortal enemy, so Dad also mistakenly shot and murdered my pet? AND now I tense up around all pets afraid you or dad might show up out of nowhere and murder them ‘by accident’? This $6000.00 bird could fix that.”

“No, it’s too much.”

“I didn’t go to college, this is so much cheaper than Sarah’s Dad paying all that money to Emerson so she could NOT end up an actress.”

“You made that decision to not go, just like you wouldn’t do ballet, join Girl Scouts, or go see Santa. I had nothing to do with it.”

“What if I drive you down the shore and buy you a hamburger?”

She laughs, “No.”

“Ok, will you at least agree to go with me to Todd Marcus Birds Exotic and meet this toucan?”

“Yes.”

“See Mom, now that’s a democracy at work.”

We hung up and I wondered why she doesn’t ever express guilt for the murdered cat. The story ends with a sweet mention that my dad really liked that cat—as if his one-time only cat affection made Meow-Meow’s murder less in vain—or why she doesn’t ever just say yes to any request I have since I’ll forget about it in a week. I don’t want to take care of a bird anymore than I want to take care of a bouquet of flowers.

I thought about New Jersey, too. And how I’m proud of my filthy bruised motherland, which I could never leave for long. The first place I go when returning from any trip is 7-11, to get a Coke Slurpee, hope somebody bumps into me, or starts yelling at somebody else, while I smile silently comforted by the commotion and absolute zero pretentiousness. Just like Birds Exotic, the lemonade is all around me here.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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