On Teen Suicide

Listen up, kids: Making life-altering decisions based on things that happened (or are happening) to you in high school is ridiculous. The ultimate example of this is suicide. Chances are that whatever is making you so miserable is not as awful and certainly not as insurmountable as you're making it inside your head. If you're in a place where people are treating you badly, try moving somewhere else. Whatever problems you are facing, I guarantee that living in the wrong sort of place will compound them immensely.

Up until now you've had to live wherever your parents took you, but guess what? Now you can go anywhere. Not only can you go anywhere in this large, beautiful and varied country of ours, but since you are in possession of a US passport, you can also pretty much go wherever in the world you would like to. If it's a choice between doing yourself in and getting on a bus and taking a chance in some new city, take the chance. What's the worst that could happen? You can't get any more unhappy that you are already, and you've already decided that you're willing to die, so you have nothing to lose. You are free. Why relinquish that?

Saturday, September 25th 2010

APOLLO'S KARATE preserves the ass-kicking ethos of 1980's America.

Monday, September 6 2010 (Labor Day)

Gardner's inventory of used books is so large that it must housed in four airplane hangers somewhere at the airport. Richard Gardner, an eccentric local accountant, founded Gardner's in 1991, but it feels like the bookstore has always been there, the store seems ageless, maybe because it's piled so full of discarded, dead things. After all, no one talks about a "new" cemetery. But, it's not cheerless at all, it's like someone pried open the door to a crypt, and has begun shouting out to all and sundry that for a small fee you too can resurrect the dead.

The first time I went to Garderner's was in the summer of 1999, and I had just gotten back from spending my junior year of high school abroad, and it was absolutely amazing not only the number of books available, but the number of serendipitous finds you get from just browsing. In fact, it is very difficult at Gardner's to find what you want, books are shelved haphazardly at best, and their division between "fiction", "classics", and "popular fiction" is debatable.

IN 1999 Time magazine published their list of the 100 best books written in English of the 20th century (interestingly one of the books on the list was written in German, not English) and Gardner's taped up the list on the side of one of the bookshelves. It's still there, ten years later, the newsprint strangeley preserved, almost new.

I wanted to get as many of the books on the list as possible, unfortunately, I couldn't seem to find any of the books on it. I gave up on trying to find something specific, and started wandering up and down the aisles, looking for what would jump out and gab me.

Schedule Adjustments

Community college is like buying bargain-basement clothing, at first you can't believe the savings, then the public shame sets in, and finally you realize you got exactly what you payed for. At school I sometimes get the sensation that I'm walking down the aisles of the local Wal-Mart.

There aren't many other options, though. Our state university is two hours from our city; so, you can study or you can work, but you cannot do both. Cities like Austin, Texas, Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Berkeley, California have the advantage of pairing affordable universities with nearby jobs, and the cities there seem to grow as if by magic

Once upon a time the City College of New York was considered the Proletarian Harvard. The college didn't charge tuition until 1976, enabling people to get a degree who otherwise wouldn't have had the chance. The class of 1937 alone produced four Nobel laureates.

The first universities in our sense of the word evolved out of monasteries, sex-segregated complexes removed from the cities and manors of the middle ages, surrounded by walls. To this day universities have aped this monastic impulse to hide away from the world. Indeed, medieval monasteries had walls not to keep the monks in but the world out - the world was a violent place and knowledge was difficult to preserve. This was at a time when books were literally worth their weight in gold, when even the ruling class was functionally illiterate, when one stray spark could burn an entire library to the ground; we can say that a library was not really a library, it was a vault.

Universities are no longer finishing schools for would-be aristocrats, or citadels of learning, or hermetic retreats - they are information factories that are frequently paid for by holding copyrights on their own production. Universities are integrating directly into the economy, with students, workers, and academics shifting back and forth from school to private sector and back again, rather than simply graduating from one to the other. The old paradigm of school as something you complete before entering the workforce is no longer optimal.

Hometown

This is a view of downtown Tulsa taken from near Cherry St., about 1.5 miles from the official center of the city. Cherry St. in my mind was one of the first urban redevelopment areas in Tulsa. Throughout my childhood this place just barely sort of hung on, with commercial enterprises bravely renovating abandoned buildings and sometimes (unfortunately) entirely replacing them; few if any of these early adopters remain.

Five years ago I lived right off of there on Quaker St. in a 1920s-era apartment complete with hardwood floors, a fireplace, tiled bathroom, and over-sized front porch - renting for 600 dollars or so a month. Since then many of the period buildings have been torn down and replaced with luxury condos renting at twice that figure.