End of the Year Onion

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.” Octavia Butler

I haven’t written that frequently here as I have in years past. I think I’m tired of talking to myself, tired of my own preoccupations and fears, and if I’m tired, why would any person stumbling upon Shouts from the Balcony on the Internet want to read what I’ve written, about any subject under the sun? 

Who am I? Not a simple question because most of us are like onions, which is why the onion is a useful metaphor for pondering the complexity of most people. Ironically, in my current occupation as a part-time member of the Housekeeping team at Whole Foods Market, onions, and more precisely, onion skins, are a nuisance, which can be found all over the store. Not the messiest vegetable, but certainly the best traveled. 

There’s a difference between having something to say, something beyond the ordinary, and just being a wanker with some technical skill, shouting into the void, hardly different from a street corner preacher haranguing a congregation of broken bottles, orange rinds, cigarette butts and birdshit stains. 

That’s why I gave myself a limit of 1,000 posts or 20 years, whichever comes first, and then I must stop this nonsense. This blog is like a diary. I suppose you can say it’s one of my onion skins, but there is more to me than what I’ve represented in these postings. I tend to ruminate about things that are more remote from my day to day experience, rather than describe what I had for breakfast, how I take my coffee, or what my wife and I argue about. I wander, mostly in the political and historical realm, with some sports mixed in from time to time. I used to write some about baseball, the New York Yankees, who I followed closely for almost a decade, but I completely lost interest in baseball as the Yanks phenomenal core players (Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, etc) aged out of the game, and then I got hooked on football, or soccer as some call it. What captivated me was the World Cup of 2010, played in South Africa. Something between the game and my brain clicked, and I was hooked and remain so. I’m by no means a historical or statistical encyclopedia, but I find the information I need, and I watch matches every week, Chelsea Football Club of England’s Premier League. I also watch Serie A, the Italian top flight, and loosely follow a number of clubs -- Juventas, Napoli, Roma, and lately, Lazio, AC and Inter Milan. I follow the Champions League. I spend a lot of time now on football because it fascinates me. That you can gather these athletes from all over the world, and see what they collectively bring to this very difficult, technical, and physically demanding game is to me supreme in the world of sports. I don’t watch anything else. American football and basketball don’t interest me, though when I was between the ages of eight and fourteen, I liked basketball, followed the Lakers and Celtics in the Bill Russell-Jerry West era, and was a decent ball handler and passer, but I was always too small. In the modern game, the players seem too large and the court too small, and there are simply too many stops and starts, time-outs, commercials for beer and cars and travel and phone service. 

I read a lot and write reviews for the California Review of Books for which I am paid nothing. I like history, philosophy, politics, novels, and memoirs of literary figures. I read periodicals, The Nation, Mother Jones, and the New York Review of Books; the podcast I listen to most regularly is Background Briefing. 

As I said, this is boring shit. There’s no sex, mayhem, murder, or tragedy, very little humor, more than enough snark, some good use of quotations from people I admire. I was very active in a labor union when I worked in public service for the school district. When I joined the management ranks I became a cog in a bureaucracy; though I was often bored and restless and felt the work I did was meaningless, I like the idea of public service and believe in a large public sector. The maintenance and care of public or common goods is tricky and difficult, but worthwhile, I believe. I like public libraries and parks, museums, schools, hospitals, smooth roads and clean water, and baseline services for the needy. 

In 1977 I enlisted in the Air Force and spent five years in Japan. Seems like it all happened to someone else. What strikes me all these years later was how ignorant I was of American history. I read a lot, but I was pretty dumb and swallowed most American mythology, which is why I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. I was only four when JFK was assassinated, but remember looking at black and white photographs from that day, and watching the Watts Riots on television, understanding none of the context, being too young, but I realize I got the standard indoctrination about Black people; meaning, primarily, that they are different and scary, prone to violence and criminality. It wasn’t always overt in the household or neighborhood I grew up in, but casual racial bigotry was always present. We learn a lot through absorption, proximity, and then we have to unlearn through direct experience or by travel, reading and study. 

I have come to the conclusion that, by and large, white Americans love Black culture but hate Black people. 

I got married for the second time in 1992 (still married!) and earned my BA in 1995. It took seven years, but I wanted to be the first person in my working-class family to graduate college. I consider myself a fairly typical liberal arts major. 

I like different kinds of music, but again, I’m not the type who can name members of a band or knows the lyrics to every song. Lately I’ve been listening to Curtis Mayfield, John Coltrane and Ludovico Einaudi. 

I lean heavily toward atheism, drink wine, beer, whisky, gin (not at the same time) and smoke pot from time to time, but never on the days I work. I worry about climate change and this country’s never-ending nightmare of gun violence. I’m demonstrative with my children and laugh a lot with my wife. My physical health is very good for a man of 63, but I now understand how performing a routine repetitive job, over the course of many years, can be disabling. 

I like to think that over the course of my life I’ve done more good deeds than bad ones.