Author: colter

David Stories

I need to collect these here so that I don’t forget them all.

Kerri Long reminded me this morning of the time in 3rd or 4th grade when David got in trouble at lunch for pretending to snort powdered sugar off his piece of cake. I think he got a paddling, and had to write an essay on the dangers of drugs.

I think it was at Crawdad Days or some other festive occasion at the square, David, Laura Brightwell and I actually managed to win a firehose tug of war. There was a prize of some kind but we never got it. I only just now realized that my cohorts were both children of firemen. Perhaps our performance was not so meritorious after all.

Sleepovers at David’s meant sandwiches at Coursey’s next door. Free chips and sodas, too. Most of my early memories of David smell like smoked meats.

I heard License to Ill by the Beastie Boys for the first time at David’s house.

In 2004, I remember going out on David’s boat. The water on the river turned out to be really low, so David had to get out and push. Here’s a picture. And just to embarrass him more, another.

I think it’s fitting that Paul Newman has now passed away. David reminds me a lot of Newman in Cool Hand Luke: the most likely guy to eat fifty eggs for no other reason than fifty seemed like a nice round number.

David Neal 1975-2008

It started with a text message from Emily Neal: “Please call me. I need to talk to you.” I was in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from Ground Zero. I found a quiet spot in a park to call her back. Then I heard the words, “David is dead.”

They’re still just words to me. They sit like a block of concrete poised above my head, suspended by apparently very strong dental floss that will, I’m sure, snap at any moment. Fortunately not before I endured the longest, most cramped ride on the F train I’ve yet experienced in my 9 months as a New Yorker. So I’ll continue to write in the strange clarity that imminent grief provides.

David was a magnificent jackass. He had a charm that I always appreciated, even if few others seemed to. There was a certain Corey Feldman-esque flavor to him[1]. My fondest recollections of him usually involve us getting into trouble in some form or fashion, like the time Mrs. Smith held us in from recess after we made too much noise playing a game in class. We kind of lost touch during junior high and high school, but we maintained that special bond that two people have when they’ve broken rules together. As Stephen King says in Stand By Me: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.”

We were reunited just a few years ago at our high school reunion when we discovered we’d both been living in Little Rock for some time. So I’d go out to his place in Maumelle to hang out every few months. He or Emily would cook dinner and we’d play dominoes (the man was a kung-fu domino player) or just visit. After their son Cooper was born, I looked forward to being another adopted uncle, and in the back of my mind pictured my future children hanging out with wacky uncle David. But that’s not the way it’s going to go down.

1.) Which then made me Corey Haim. Or more accurately, Sean Astin. We were the Goonies of Boone County.

David Foster Wallace

The writer David Foster Wallace died recently, and Philip Martin at the Democrat-Gazette posted on his blog this commencement speech Wallace once gave. It’s lengthy, but very much worth the read. I’ve actually edited it down considerably. The full text is available on Martin’s blog.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

Continue reading David Foster Wallace

The High Country of the Mind

I’m returning to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the first time in over 10 years. Here is a great sample passage:

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one’s way out.

Many trails through these high ranges have been made and forgotten since the beginning of time, and although the answers brought back from these trails have claimed permanence and universality for themselves, civilizations have varied in the trails they have chosen and we have many different answers to the same question, all of which can be thought of as true within their own context. Even within a single civilization old trails are constantly closed and new ones opened up.

I’m going to do something I’ve yet to try on this blog: use the More feature! Continue reading The High Country of the Mind

Small Towns

Much was made of small towns at the Republican National Convention, so I’d like to offer you my thoughts as someone with expertise in both rural and urban areas of life. These are of course broad generalizations; your mileage may vary.

Small town folk are friendlier and more laid back. The almighty dollar is seldom the bottom line in small towns[1]. People wave to strangers. Doors are left unlocked and keys are left in cars. Small town folk are generally just simpler people. That strength is also their weakness, and so they are easily misled. They vote for the person who most resembles them, and not who is smarter or more qualified. They tend to be suspicious of anyone more educated than they are. They don’t take the time to learn more about the world because their environment does not require it.

Big city folk often don’t know their own neighbors. They seldom make eye contact. They are more private, but they are often more intelligent and observant. Without much complaint they tolerate entire ethnic neighborhoods of different cultures because they understand what it means to get along; peace requires quiet sacrifice. City folk endure a psychological battleground of high-stress jobs, gridlock traffic and public transit. They enjoy a wider understanding of history, socio-economics and politics because their environment presents it to them every day. The luxury of safe homogeneity is something they traded in for the excitement of living on the frontier of modernity.

I know New Yorkers and Bostonians who have moved to Arkansas for its slower pace and friendlier society. And I know Arkansans who have moved to New York for its faster pace and competitive job market. I often wonder if everyone in this country would be better served by moving out of their preferred environment for some length of time in order to better understand both sides. Maybe that’s what I’m doing here.

P.S. As a side note to all of America: voting for the candidate to whom you can most easily relate is what got us where we are these last 8 years.

1.) I say this because while Wal-Mart’s bottom line is saving you money, Hudson’s Supermarket’s bottom line is making you happy. You don’t find sackers who carry groceries to your car in cities anymore and this is a societal tragedy.

Where Have I Been?

For the last week I’ve been driving around New England in a rental car, just exploring the northeast. I’ve been to Providence, Cape Cod, Boston, Portland, various points in New Hampshire and Vermont, and Philadelphia so far. Some destinations were of historical importance (Walden Pond, Sleepy Hollow Cemetary), but most were completely random (Woodstock, Vermont). Here are the lessons I’ve learned:

  • The roads in and around Boston and Philadelphia actually make less sense and are more frustrating than New York. NY streets are generally grid-like, whereas Philly and Boston are all triangle patterns and medieval-narrow widths. Trying to get from Berklee College of Music to Fenway Park only a few blocks away, was a Griswoldian nightmare of urban circumnavigation. Also, the suburbs feature parkways that give you no place to turn around, and that are so shrouded in shrubbery that you have no idea if a given exit has an underpass or not. You don’t know what will happen. I drove for 15 minutes down a highway before I took a chance on an overpass.
  • Massachusetts apparently has laws against gas nozzle latches. So you have to hold the thing the whole time. This actually sucks worse than New Jersey where you’re not allowed to pump your own gas at all.
  • Maps of Massachusetts show a “Walden Pond” deep inside an impenetrable fortress of residential streets in the town of Lynn. Needless to say, this is not the Walden Pond you’re looking for. It’s near Concord, which you’d know if you bothered to look it up.
  • Moose collisions are a legitimate threat to your vehicular safety in Maine. Mind you, moose collisions kan be pretti nasti.
  • Vermont is a lot like northern Arkansas if every town were like Eureka Springs. Seriously I never once saw a vehicle on blocks, major appliances in a yard, or anything that wasn’t disturbingly picturesque. The entire state is like a watercolor painting, or the set of Gilmore Girls.

More observations as they come to me. I should have written this stuff down earlier but the days have been packed. I’m still not sure what to do with the remainder of the week until the car is due back. I think tomorrow I’ll go up to the Catskills and see what happens.

Oh, and I’d also like to give big ups to Red Roof Inns for having THE most comfortable hotel bed I think I’ve ever slept in. And kudos to the desk clerk who gave me the “all-in” upgrade (king size bed plus free wi-fi) despite my expired AAA card, which made the night only slightly more expensive than the Motel 6’s that have thus far anchored my travels.

One of These Fabulous Prizes

I’m having trouble picturing any scenario that would result in someone leaving a brand new $130+ Lego Star Wars AT-AT at the curb with their trash.

And yet there it was. Thursday as I was walking home from Prospect Park, I came upon it. Of course I took it home. Some of the bags had been opened and resealed in Ziploc bags. There were two AA batteries out of the necessary 6 installed. It didn’t look like any parts were missing, and after several hours of putting it together, it turns out there weren’t.

I could very easily have been wrong; it’s entirely likely that I would have spent the necessary hours putting it together only to find that it would be incomplete somehow. But that’s life: a gift with no guarantees. New York City is a very one-man’s-trash-is-another’s-treasure town. People leave out books, furniture, appliances and more for others to peruse and take home. This time, though, I’m really tempted to go back and find out why someone would do this. Did they get frustrated really early? Was it an unwanted gift? Was it free?

Not having much room to store toys here, I’m also tempted to return it fully assembled to its previous owner. What do you think?

Presidentiality

I’m not sure which disconcerts me more: stadium politics or stunt veep-ing.

Moving the Democratic Convention to a stadium[1] seems to be the culmination of politics as entertainment form. It’s already the case that reporters largely view politicians as celebrities, and if you don’t believe it, read this, so this kind of clinches it. Super Bowl production values at a political convention? I mean, I guess that politics is something everyone should get excited about, but this wasn’t what I had in mind.

Selecting a young female governor as a running mate to grab a potential gender vote seems, at least for a Republican, marvelously shrewd. The Machiavelli in me is thoroughly impressed, which means that the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in me just passed out at the end of his filibuster.

1.) I’m still trying to find out if this was intended to be a surprise or not. It seems like it was presented as a surprise.

New York Limbo

August is on its way down. I’ve been here almost 8 months. I’ve gotten a good job and given it up, I’ve explored the city and gone down every road that has caught my attention. I’ve seen shows and hung out with great folks. Yet I’m still not feeling it. I just don’t (yet?) see myself living here for more than a year. I haven’t warmed to New York the way I did to London. I was there for three months, the first few weeks of which were defined by an overriding desire to leave, while the remainder by abiding affection. Part of the reason I chose to try New York was its cultural resemblance to London. So far it hasn’t delivered.

I’m not saying I’m ready to bail, but I’m having a hard time right now envisioning a life here. Even if I found a really good job, I’m already getting tired of…the experience? Here is the short list of complaints:

  1. The summer heat. It’s not as bad as Arkansas, but you have to walk around in it. A lot. Plus stuffy hot subway platforms are like dirty, dirty saunas.
  2. Grocery shopping is an ordeal. Going to Target even more so.
  3. The food isn’t that great. This town loves its comfort food, so the only good stuff is the gourmet stuff, which is prohibitively expensive. Everything cheap is mostly crap. There isn’t a lot of middle ground. When I do find the best food (tastiness at a reasonable price), there is the problem of mileage. I have to cross Manhattan into Tribeca when I want some Vietnamese fried rice as good as Lily’s in LR. And Barbecue? Forget it, unless you want to go all the way up to Harlem[1] to eat at Dinosaur. Which is still only just OK.
  4. The pizza comes in two styles: generic NY slice and authentic Italian. That’s a narrow spectrum for me, coming from Little Rock’s wide spectrum of Vino’s, Damgoode Pies, US Pizza, and Shotgun Dan’s. Don’t get me wrong; I’d eat at DiFara’s weekly if I could, but it’s way out in Midwood and takes an hour to prep.
  5. I don’t think I could ever play music here. Getting my amp to any gig without a vehicle is going to be either expensive or physically taxing. And even my favorite musicians, the guys who impress me most in the area, are disheartened by the impossibility of making a living as an original band in this town. Compound that with the fact that actually getting a gig here is made difficult enough by all the other people who came here to play music.

That last one reminds me. It seems like there are only 4 reasons to live in New York City:

  1. You’re very good at something and you want to do it here with all the other people who are good at something.
  2. You want to be famous for doing something you may or may not be good at.
  3. You want to be here to observe and/or interact with Groups 1 and 2.
  4. Your family is here.

At the end of the day, I think I’m really just a #3. Sure there are things I’m good at, but I don’t think I’m good enough at them to make it worth my while to stay here. Especially since I don’t know what my while is worth. Plus the volumes of #2’s seem to outweigh the population of #1’s by a factor of about 20.

And this is something I’ve been mulling over lately: The New York Celebrity-City Effect. New York City is, in itself, a celebrity. Coming here is like meeting someone famous, and I’d wager that a significant portion of those #2’s are here so that they can see themselves in their minds’ eyes as having New York for their own mental movie backdrop. A quick glance at the top movies of all time shows that New York outpaces Los Angeles as a film setting by almost 2 to 1. NYC is a character all its own[2], providing backdrops for films from such diverse sources as Woody Allen and Spider-Man[3]. That’s the magic of it. But that magic seems to have less spark these days. The artistic community has been all but shoved out of Manhattan by exorbitant rents, with the exception of Harlem, but give it time. Ironically, the cleaning up of the crime here has made nearly every portion of Manhattan a haven almost exclusively for the splendidly wealthy. And Brooklyn is already well on its way down the same path.

It also seems like a lot of people (the #3’s perhaps) move here so that they can have the status of saying “I live in New York City,” to their friends back home, as though simply by relocating they’ve achieved something. Moving here isn’t any harder or easier than moving to Detroit or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. Yet given the number of expatriate Arkansans here, I have to suspect that a lot of people move here for the sake of saying they’ve moved here. New York City is indeed a place of wonder, and I have to admit it does really feel like you’re advancing to a second or third act in your own personal screenplay, but a change of venue isn’t guaranteed to make your life any more or less interesting or fulfilling. At best you get to see more music and art, but when it comes to things that are really important – being creative, having friends and loved ones, enjoying life – these are things you can do anywhere.

So, I came here for the same reason mountain climbers do what they do: “because it’s there.” Now that I know what’s here…maybe I need more time to find the magic, but at this point I think I’ll most likely be back in Arkansas before the year is out. But who knows.

1.) A distance Elizabeth and I lovingly referred to as “Fayetteville” because that’s how long it takes to get there (or here from there) by train.
2.) Los Angeles is too decentralized and homogenous to have any real identity of its own to captivate an audience the way New York does.
3.) And let’s face it, Metropolis and Gotham City are essentially New York stunt doubles.