What? 9/11? Again?!?!
Who can forget that fateful day when that thing happened to those people somewhere.
A blunted emotional response.
While thinking this might have something to do with weed is totally understandable, in actual fact it has everything to do with what therapists might call “under-reacting.” In general, prior to, let’s say, the 1960s, American men were notoriously…blunted. To hear a character described as the “strong, silent type” became a shorthand for a generation of men post-WW2 and mid-Korean Conflict, and usually it was a compliment.
They fought the wars away and the wars back home? Well, some stuff just didn’t bear being talked about.
Then their sons and daughters came of age in the ‘60s and had completely and totally enough of that crap. You got PTSD from the War, well, we want to HEAR about your PTSD from the War because then, maybe then, it’ll help us make sense of how weird you’ve been and how weird we should be about the fact that pieces of paper were trying to send us to Vietnam to die for something you supposedly took care of.
So the pendulum swung and everyone in the ‘60s suffered/embraced some form of extreme logorrhea. Nothing was something that couldn’t be talked about and if it could be talked about, it could also be talked into dust. Some of that ended up effecting positive change. Looking at how we interacted racially from each and every available angle, served an overwhelming positive purpose. Ditto women’s roles in the larger social setting. But astrology and whatever conversations were had before someone decided to play 20-minute guitar solos, or worse yet, drum solos? Well, another deal entirely.
The hangover though had a nation zooted up on coke in the ‘70s having pointless nightclub convos about the worst and most minute of minutiae. For, like, the entire decade, even outlasting America’s first love affair with heroin. Because, in the end, it was the drugs that made much less of a difference than our tendency and proclivity to talk endlessly about everything. Forever. This we became addicted to.
“Sit down. Please.” A little more forceful this time.
“Sir! I am a MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL!” I proclaimed.
“Oh. Sorry,” he apologized. “Are you?”
“No,” I said.
In a lot of ways this had tuned us up perfectly for the subsequent social media landscape where people watching people eat and talking about watching people eating became a thing. Or complaining about parking tickets. Or announcing to a clutch of invisible “friends” that are divorced/divorcing/dying/or knowing someone who was that the same thing is happening to YOU. Please click “Like”.
Admittedly, the attack on American soil that first struck on September 11, 2001 was a pre-social media shock to the system. I watched it on television as I readied myself for work. As a New York native I shrugged, “drag,” and packed my suitcase for my job at Adobe. But by the time I had gotten to the office there had been subsequent attacks, and the announcement went out that the building I was in, which was in the flight path of an airport in San Jose, was now closed.
“Whatever,” I thought. And kept working. I had stuff to do.
What happened next was just as surprising as what had happened though. “We” all lost our minds. I had lost one friend in the building, the World Trade Center, that I had been in many a time. He was a husband and a father. I lost more friends in the wars that followed. I pulled into New York in October 2001 and got as close as I could to see what was left. Of the building, I guess. A building I had watched George Willig climb one day while I was on my way to high school. That Petit had tight rope walked across. A building I had never really liked because on the upper floors you could feel it swaying.
It all smelled like an apartment fire. Like the fires that had burned the South Bronx decades earlier. Someone had also, not-so-coincidentally, called the Feds on me because I was there to play an OXBOW show and had sent out pre-press with a business card whose legend proclaimed: “you have just received The Treatment. Please tell your friends about it.” The recipients were weirded out enough that they thought the authorities should know.
I’m not complaining now. Just noting.
However, 21 years later, and death upon death upon death, of the innocent, unsuspecting, and the blameless unlucky, and I find my position has not migrated much at all: drag.
“Eugene…” the voice on the other end of the phone was laden with what I largely had already suspected would be misery. “…your grandmother has died.” Or maybe it was my aunt. My now ex-wife told me, and her eyes searched mine for a reaction, of some sort. Any sort, really.
Like we do with dead school kids. Maybe we’re just better off making believe none of it is happening.
“OK.” I said and inquired after who was handling “the details”.
It was not that I felt nothing but in the cases of loved ones I had rehearsed their deaths so many times before in light of dealing with the most damaging face forward, that their actual deaths emerged as somewhat of a relief in a really weird way.
But during the birth of my first daughter, I was actually overcome with an unfamiliar sensation. An emotion. A sensation that was an emotion. In the grips of this the attending doctor had initially asked me to sit down. I declined.
“I’m going to have to ask you to sit down.”
“I’m fine,” I demurred. “I want to stand.”
Some men get queasy, light headed and faint on the occasion. In fact someone in San Jose the same year had passed out, gashed his throat on something on the way to falling and bled out.
“Sit down. Please.” A little more forceful this time.
“Sir! I am a MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL!” I proclaimed.
“Oh. Sorry,” he apologized. “Are you?”
“No,” I said. “I just said that.”
“SIT DOWN!!!”
I sat, under protest, but seeing my daughter’s head pass through my wife and then my daughter’s face, there was a rush of the unaccountable and I could feel it, something, rising up in me just in time for me to catch the eye of the attending nurse who, it seemed, was collecting this moment for a story she could later re-tell over chips and salsa. And just like that, my outer moment became my inner moment, swaddled in the silence of the non-expressive.
Now 21 years later, after the shock, surprise and awe of an attack on American soil and all of what that wrought I find no quicker way to kill a conversation with me than to utter “I feel like…” or “It feels to me like…”. In fact there’s a school of psychology that questions whether remembering is the best thing for a prognosis of future wellness. I didn’t care enough to read the whole paper but it, and let’s call it the psychology of forgetfulness, seems to support what Black people, Native Americans, and women are often being told: just get over it.
OK. So now I am, and suggest you do too. Like we do with dead school kids. Because maybe we’re just better off making believe none of it is happening. Which would, in total, make my blunted emotional response make a lot more sense.
In the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip of yore in talking to his pet tiger Calvin, the young boy, proclaims that he’s not going to think or focus on anything difficult anymore. The tiger, Hobbes, responds with a question that undercuts Calvin’s premise by asking if Calvin didn’t think that was a pretty shallow way to live.
Calvin’s response? “My, what wonderful weather we’re having today.”
Today? It really is, isn’t it?
There…see! Much better!
#teamCalvin
I swear, I learn something with each article from you. Thanks, Eugene, srsly. I needed this one especially... "logorrhea." This is me.