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The Month of Giving Dangerously

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Elizabeth Greenwood | Longreads | January 2018 | 25 minutes (6,900 words)

Another fit of insomnia. I reach for a book I’ve read before, in times both happy and sad: Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness. I open at random to a chapter toward the end, on the subject of generosity. “When a strong urge comes up in my mind to give something — even though the next fifty thoughts may be ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that. I might need it!’— I give it,” Salzberg writes. “Even if fear or other considerations come up, my resolve is to honor that first impulse to give.” As I read these lines, my heart seizes. Something in this passage contained the remedy I’d been craving because everything in my life felt as if it was contracting.

My first book was hot off the presses. I’d heard about the cruel process from other authors: You expect your life to change dramatically. This will not happen. There will be a short-lived flurry of attention and things will go back to normal. I steeled myself, but a part of me thought maybe they are wrong. Maybe my life will change!

 Dear reader, I am here to tell you there was no such reversal of fortune. I’d spent the past six years researching people who had faked their deaths and I was back to the drawing board. Typically, I would have been teaching several writing classes, but due to the vicissitudes of the adjunct professor labor market I was underemployed, anxious, and blue.

I got a prescription for Klonopin and I started getting acupuncture, which left me weeping on the table for thirty minutes while the poker and her interns assured me this outsized reaction to tiny pinpricks was totally normal. I’d have loved to have indulged in some old-fashioned talk therapy, but my disaster health insurance didn’t cover it. I even tried equine therapy, which I wrote about for a travel magazine, and spent the afternoon corralling two miniature horses in order to learn to trust myself.

I was still questioning whether the choices I’d made over the past few years were worth it if all I had to show for it felt like a big nothing. The luxury of complaining about any of this — I’m a childless, educated woman in America — made it feel all the more shameful. So the cycle compounded. Something needed to change.

Then the election happened. In a confluence of a precipitous adrenalin crash, a gaping daily schedule, limited finances, and a political climate that had everyone adjusting their meds, I was crying almost every day at the pointlessness of it all. My sleepless nights stretched into twos and threes. I wanted to figure out the way I was going to help but had no clue as to how.

That’s when insomnia propelled me to open randomly to Salzberg’s lines about generosity. Something in this challenge to give blindly, to listen to the part of oneself that blithely seeks to contribute, instead of the cacophony of voices concerned with balancing the checkbook. Expanding beyond one’s postage-stamp reality seemed like it could be the antidote to the feelings of scarcity propelling my anxiety.

We all want to give, at least in theory. But when presented the opportunity, we come up with excuses as to why the time is not ripe. We imagine we’ll donate to charities when we are more financially secure. We consider getting up from our subway seat for the weary-looking woman, then demur. As if extending beyond ourselves even slightly will make our precarious balance of time, energy, and emotional resources come crashing down.

So I made a resolution — for the first month of 2017 I would give everything. The rules were simple: If I got the urge to be generous, I’d try to honor it. I would try to do this in every category of giving I could imagine — in time, in money, in undivided attention, in suspending judgment, in forgiveness, in giving people the benefit of a doubt. I’d volunteer, drop dollars in the most dubious panhandlers’ cups, I’d pick up the tab. I’d try to take generous interpretations of others’ baffling behavior, as I take most everything personally. I’d dispense unsolicited praise. For years I’d resisted the urge to invade other New Yorkers’ privacy. No more! I would compliment freely, and they could put my name on a registry if they wished. My great hope for this experiment was to plug back into my life and to brandish a big middle finger to a regime intent on making us feel separate from one another.

Then, just before Christmas, my dog decided to treat herself to a Ziploc of trail mix from my purse. The concoction contained raisins, which are lethal to canines. One $1500 vet bill later I was feeling exceptionally broke. This was the exact moment when excuses are made, when we chicken out. But I’d already committed to my experiment. With utter terror in my heart, I stepped off the ledge. It was time to give dangerously.

Day 1

I wake up in Oakland, having spent a few days with my best friend from college who is tremendously pregnant. Our daily routine consists of binge-watching shows, doing a light activity, and then returning home to rest. I’ve been giving Zoë shoulder rubs all week and paying for whatever she’ll let me — ice cream, gas, Mexican takeout.

What isn’t as easy is lunch with Krista, a longtime family friend, something of a cousin to me. We have a strained relationship and have little in common, but get together when I’m out west due to a misplaced sense of obligation. We were raised high WASP, and the conversation glides along the surface of things like a figure skater. Resentment? What resentment! Isn’t this cheese divine? We meet at a loud, overpriced restaurant in the Ferry Building. We discuss her kids, her “personal brand,” and Marin County real estate, all of which she has achieved. She takes a tone with the busboy when our food takes over half an hour to arrive. When the bill comes, I pick it up, much to her surprise and mine. The total comes to just over a hundred dollars because I tip extra.

I get back on BART in a disassociated state as I often do after spending any amount of time with Krista. Zoë picks me up, and we repair to an outdoor mall, my favorite California institution, and I spend over $200 dollars on various serums and unguents at Sephora. This doesn’t feel like self-care or generosity. This feels like mania.

Day 3

Back in New York I have ten dollars out for the cabbie on the way home from JFK and put two back in my wallet. Shameful. I go to a crowded resolutions-fresh yoga class. I typically set up in the front row, not because I am good at yoga but because I want as few toned yoga bodies in my line of sight as possible. A Lululemon doyenne with the triceps to show for it takes her place to my right, and I wedge into the front corner with the wall to my left. Perfect, I think. Just one other human in my peripheral vision, the rest of the class a jam-packed sweaty moving organism of good intentions. I will really kick this year off right.

Once the sun salutations begin, my neighbor flings her arms out to the side to Namaste the morning. She makes strong contact with me and gives not a nod of apology or acknowledgment. Oh well, I think. Round two, smacks me again! Every New Yorker knows well and good that in a crowded yoga studio you throw your arms up, not out. Round three, full on bopped this time! My heart starts pounding. She’s interrupting my flow with zero regard! After exchanging sweat with this precious soul several more times, and audibly sighing with each brush of her manicured hand, I decide: Fuck it.

I will extend generosity to her by allowing her to hit me. I will offer my body to her as a battering ram for full sun salutation. This requires much deep breathing on my part in lieu of biting her, but I am shifting my mind toward expansive acceptance rather than anger at a person oblivious to my moral outrage. I still want to bite her.

Day 4

I go to work on my laptop at a coffee shop near my house. I usually tip my beloved baristas $1 — and only about half the time, depending on my feelings of poverty that day. I will do this only if the coffee slinger sees me, in the sad hope that maybe she’ll give me an extra shot of espresso for free. But not today! I slip two dollars into the jar while the woman working the counter grabs my drink. She doesn’t even see me do it. I am basically Mother Teresa.

Day 5

The super in my building is a lanky fellow named Junior. He runs a small racket out of the recycling in the basement, distributing cans and bottles to neighborhood vagrants who line up around 10 a.m. every other day, for which I imagine Junior is taking a cut. Since I work from home and walk the dog around this time, I have a front row seat to the cottage industry. Junior will often stop me to kvetch about the weather for a while, then ask me “to hold ten dollars” so he can buy cigarettes. I rarely carry cash as part of an ill-advised ploy to spend less. I instead offer cigarettes from my own aging stash. He refuses, preferring Kools. Today we go through the same rigmarole, and in my wallet, I have a twenty, not a ten. “Here, take this,” I say, my hand quivering in giving over an Andrew Jackson. Junior is pumped and promises to get me back in the next few days. I never see the money again.

If I claimed this was an act of selfless generosity, I’d be lying. Junior lives in the apartment above me and often cares for his toddler granddaughter, whose bedtime is around 1 am. Junior seems to be prepping for his Riverdance audition both day and night. It is not infrequent that I will stomp upstairs after midnight in my housecoat asking in my white girl voice to “Please be mindful, as I am trying to get some sleep.” I’m hoping the crisp $20 will buy me some quiet. It does not.

Day 7

I’ve been meditating for a few years now, and not because I am virtuous. I have to meditate for 15 minutes each day in order to not get arrested. I bust out my meditation technique prior to nerve-wracking situations, like giving a talk. I’ll begin to summon the feeling I’d like to exude, sit on a few couch cushions, take some deep breaths and visualize myself fielding questions and criticisms with a smile and élan.

I’ve been trying the same strategy in the morning for the past week or so to psyche myself up to be generous. I close my eyes, picture an exhausted mother with bratty children entering the subway and see myself magnanimously, selflessly, standing up for her. Other passengers notice my benevolence, maybe even rousing inspiration. I see myself standing aside in line, letting some harried citizen to cut me. The bill comes after a big dinner with friends, and I quietly pick it up. The waitress even writes a small note on the receipt: If only there were more people like you.

But today it isn’t working. Seeing the slideshow of generous events only makes me feel stricken with anxiety, more aware of my limitations.

So I try something different. I instead conjure the feeling of having enough, visualizing what that would look like. I see myself engaged in each moment of my life — the tedious answering of emails, listening to my boyfriend instead of unloading on him, responding to prison letters for my new book project with the utmost care. My bank account doesn’t contain a certain target number, but I engage a feeling of peace toward it. I try to sit in the sensation of having enough, feeling generosity move through me. I am the conduit — the thing I am giving away was never mine in the first place. My chest begins to swell and my limbs experience a pleasant, groggy glow. I feel rooted to the ground in a way that doesn’t seem ponderous. I feel bolstered instead of weighed down.

Rather than picturing myself giving, I reverse engineer the feeling of abundance to make that the baseline for the day. I manage to:

  • Drop off my boyfriend’s bags of detritus that had been lingering in the hallway to Goodwill
  • Respond to all correspondences and queries, even ones I’ve been avoiding
  • Try to be extra nice to all customer service people I speak with, even the trifling representatives of New York Sports Club
  • Give a $20 tip (double the amount I normally would!) to the aesthetician who lasers my bikini line. She basically works with genitals all day and didn’t go to medical school for the privilege.
  • Let my dad lament my failure to procreate without rebuff
  • Drop $1 bills into four different panhandler’s cups

I felt a little surge, a little electrical current of belonging, each time. Belonging to what? I’m not quite sure, but it was something bigger than my own plight.

Day 8

There’s a homeless woman who sits in front of the falafel place near my boyfriend’s apartment. I can understand the words she says individually, but collectively they make no sense. She has a kindly way about her, so I call her Eunice.

Today I pack up a sack of food to give her on my way to the gym — clementines, granola bars, bananas, trail mix — a cornucopia of organic Brooklyn fare. I hand it to her, and she is gracious. I see her carefully stuff it into the innards of several bags nestled inside one another like skins. She smiles, I smile back. She thanks me, and I say “you’re welcome.” It’s all so easy. I could do this every day. I am a motherfucking saint.

On my way back to Scott’s building, I see his neighbor. She’s wheeling a little grocery cart, closes in on Eunice, and…she’s giving it to her! Goddamn her! Here’s something Eunice can actually use! I was supposed to be the good person today, and here she goes, showing me up.

Perhaps I still have a few dark and petty corners where the light of generosity could give a good scrub.

Day 11

I have volunteered to subject myself to something called MulchFest.

It’s Sunday. I’m hungover, it’s freezing, and Scott is sprawled out on the couch with coffee and The New York Times. I sit with him and debate the relative merits of submitting myself to the elements, and to the perky knowingness of the Park Slope canvas bag-toting crowd. Scott is from the Midwest and believes that life should be difficult. I put on two pairs of socks and my heaviest coat and head out.

I’m several hours late and somebody in a neon pinafore hands me a clicker counter to tick off the trees as they get mulched. I have the overwhelming urge to punch my thumb down, to feel the satisfying click click click but know this will irretrievably fuck up the count. So I stand at attention, desperately resisting the urge to pull out my phone and appear occupied. The point of MulchFest, I have decided, is to commune with my surroundings, my neighbors, to behold the circle of life as manifested by browning pine needles, the melancholy stench of decomposition signaling the promise of a new year. A fellow who looks to me like a human hacky sack sees me with my brow furrowed and waiting to count trees that never arrive. Everyone is still at lunch, he informs me. I return the clicker and he gently ushers me over to a little white tent and presents me with a new task: creating pine sachets from freshly mulched trees to distribute to park patrons.

For years I’d resisted the urge to invade other New Yorkers’ privacy. No more! I would compliment freely. They could put my name on a registry if they wished.

The rhythm of dipping a trowel into the needles and tying off the bag is lulling, relaxing. I merchandise my wares attractively on a card table. Park goers stop by and ask, “May I take one?” “Take TWO!” I implore, “and a snack!” chucking an apple and a granola bar at them. I am giving people something they want, for free, something crafted by these two hands. I’m loving this. An hour and a half passes and it feels like but a moment. I’m in love with Brooklyn, with humanity.

I once dated a journalist who never stopped giving — to strangers, to the less fortunate, to people he was writing about, mostly. Every Sunday morning, Rob would throw back the comforter and go to prepare lunch for homeless people in a church basement. He became close with one of the regulars, helping him advocate to get his VA benefits reinstated, putting his name on housing lottery lists, taking him to doctor’s appointments for his chronic pain. Rob was widely regarded as someone who would interrupt his life for the benefit of others, one of the most generous people anyone had ever known. But I could never get him to open up to me, not in any deepening intimacy. A frustrating part of our relationship was how his service made him somehow unimpeachable.

To whom are we generous, and why? For Rob, caring for strangers came second nature. For me, not so much. Looking back, I think Rob threw himself into others because he was a little scared of his own life, and of people getting close. Giving, for him, was, in part, a way to hide. This is an ungenerous interpretation, I realize — but on which side of the ledger does our giving fall? And who is keeping score?

Day 12

The worst words a New Yorker can hear on the subway: What time is it? SHOWTIME! Out-of-town visitors film the acrobatics with glee while I contract further into myself. I give a dollar to Showtime, which I loathe. But giving the dollar somehow makes me loathe them less.

Day 15

I am still meditating in my new style, conjuring a sense of abundance. The phrase that came to me today was “less afraid.” In that tiny moment in the morning, I certainly feel a wash of quiet confidence. Getting up off my meditation cushion, well, that’s a different story.

Day 18

I understand my little experiment is made possible by the fact of my privileges: I enjoy a degree of freedom and mobility unknown any time in previous human history. I am in charge of keeping alive no one but myself and a 15-pound dog. My career choices may not pay in money, but I am wealthy in time, flexibility, and multiple breakfasts. I’m healthy and able-bodied. Perhaps my generosity experiment is a foray into a kind of first-world problem, manufacturing a false sense of adversity. What would, say, a single mom think of my enterprise? I ask the best one I know: my own.

I give her a call and explain the project. “What would you have said to somebody embarking on such a journey back when my sister and I were younger?”

“Well, I can tell you what I would’ve thought,” she says laughing with the irreverence that is my genetic inheritance. “My whole life is about being generous to my children. I use up my finite supply of generosity in keeping the household together.” It’s true. I remember her falling asleep on the couch by 9 p.m. every night of my childhood.

“But generosity can also be about receiving, allowing others to be generous to you,” I counter.

“When I was raising you guys, I had to convince myself of my own strength. I had to get into the mindset that I was capable of doing this on my own. If the spark plug went out on the lawnmower, then I needed to know how to fix it myself.”

Then she tells me something I didn’t know: “I also felt so alone, and I didn’t want to depend on anyone else. And then you start to build up walls, and even a martyr complex, like, ‘I’m the good responsible one, I have to be sensible.’”

“It does seem we expect more automatic generosity from women, and are then delightfully surprised when men go beyond themselves, huh?” I say.

“Hell, yes! Women are always putting other people first. All our energy goes into other people. Think about Grammy, her life was cut short because of it,” my mom says breathlessly. My grandmother had three kids, a paraplegic husband, a rural mail route as a postal worker, her elderly parents across the street, a dozen grandchildren, and innumerable wayward souls she cared for. She literally worked herself to death.

“If you could go back in time, what generosity would you have offered yourself?” I ask.

“I would’ve just allowed myself to take more time for me, I suppose. I could’ve hired a babysitter for the night, but that seemed unthinkable. Same too with little splurges, like a facial or a massage. Those lines just seemed so clear to me then, and I couldn’t cross them. It’s not selfish to take care of yourself.” she says. 

Day 20

One of the greatest generosities I’ve known is when strangers reach out to let me know they’ve enjoyed my book. This means more to me than any review or professional accolade; it buoys me during the rough times and makes my whole day. I think about how many books I’ve devoured and recommended to anyone who will listen — save the author. So today I send laudatory notes, thanking writers whose work has meant much to me.

When you truly love something, there is nothing easier or more natural in the world than to say so. I write my friend Amitava, letting him know I will teach his essay about performing Hindu burial rites for his mother, and how moving I found his recollection. I send an earnest letter of gratitude to a beloved actress thanking her for a recent personal essay she wrote about her relationship with reviews, and how it made me feel less alone. I write an Irish fellow about how much I enjoyed an excerpt of his book. Though it feels a bit awkward to telegraph admiration to total strangers, the feeling of lift far outweighs the embarrassment. It feels like an unburdening.

Day 21

Generosity, thus far, has proved illuminating when giving comes easily — giving compliments, sending texts to friends trying to brighten their day, in little gestures like getting up to offer a lady in nurse’s scrubs my subway seat.

But money is where I am stuck. Scarcity is the heart of my fear. Being in deep student loan debt and in precarious employment, my inner monologue is a stream of calculations, always trying to suss out how many more months I can exist in New York. Instead of getting a real handle on my finances, like by following a budget, I adhere to Coinstar, consigning clothes, cooking big batches of chili to eat throughout the week, and prayer.

So today I decide to give away money. I send $10 to a friend of a friend’s GoFundMe to help replace clothes and furniture lost in a fire. I then notice more calls for help which I skillfully tend to ignore — $10 to a friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s sister’s fundraiser to get a seeing-eye dog, $10 to my second cousin who wants to record a demo of songs. And because we live in end times I send $10 to the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Planned Parenthood. Then I give a whopping $50 to WNYC because it’s pledge drive time and every little bit helps. That’s $110 in total. Turns out that donating via the internet is pretty much like any kind of online shopping: You end up spending far more than you would if the cold currency were to physically depart from your wallet.

By evening I receive an email from a former tutoring client about starting sessions with her younger son, and another query about subletting my room. Did parting with my funds send a rupture of wealth through the universe? Did I just manifest money by giving it away? Steeped in the culture of The Secret and living in late capitalism, it’s tough to imagine giving without getting anything back in return. Does this mean my project is sullied?

Day 24

I decide to take this line of inquiry to somebody who may know. I meet Richard Bascetta, a senior Buddhist teacher at the Shambhala Center of New York, for coffee. He’s a bit of a silver fox and wears cool square-framed glasses. I explain my project and my query — how can we give selflessly without expecting anything back? Since this giving thing has been feeling pretty good, is it okay to use generosity as a panacea to feeling bad?

Richard has lived in New York and practiced Buddhism here for decades, and realizes generosity’s challenges: “In this environment, we are fighting for space, for money, for status, for a fear of not having that money and status. People come here to accomplish. I’m sure you’re a good writer, but there are at least a hundred people here who are as good or better.” Damn, Richard.

To whom are we generous, and why? For Rob, caring for strangers came second nature. I think Rob threw himself into others because he was a little scared of his own life, and of people getting close.

“Our inertia typically prevents us from acting for others,” he says, his eyes never wavering from my gaze. “We buffer ourselves through our lives. Through parenting, running a business, careers, chasing one love after another, our anger — whatever buffers us from the rawness of the moment. The more layers we put on like an itchy coat, the more difficult it is to access a sense of generosity. Generosity, in its most powerful form, is breaking through the inertia.”

Richard tells me that a few years back he started carrying a stack of ones in his front pocket. Each time he’d pass a panhandler or street musician whose tunes he admired, he’d drop a dollar in their cup. But lately, he’s been pulling his hand back. And he’s not sure why. “It’s been a pinching reminder that I’m compromising my original intention—to give regardless of my inner commentary about the person,” he says. But he doesn’t see this as all bad: “It’s given me the chance to reflect and see how my judgments get in the way and clog the flow of generosity.”

Richard assures me this is okay, because the benefit of generosity — beyond how good it feels, beyond helping someone else — is that it reveals to us where we are stuck. “We are working with that resistance. Where does that mistrust and worry reside in you? That’s the investigation.”

Buddhists believe that one moment of presence is a moment of enlightenment. And when I think back over the past month, I see I’ve built a repository of these moments: connecting with Eunice before I was shown up; becoming hypnotized by the rhythm of filling a cloth bag with pine needles; hearing about a time in my mom’s life that was a struggle. Enlightenment is a distant shore for me but these moments are undeniably fractals of a larger mosaic.

Day 27

On Inauguration Day I take a train to Philadelphia to rendezvous with my sister, mom, and aunt, where we will set out for the Women’s March before dawn the next day. I expect to have many opportunities to exercise generosity, what with thousands of strangers vying for catharsis and a bathroom. The last time I saw my sister was over Christmas, when she called me a sausage, referring to the growing weight differential between us. I close my eyes on the train and silently release that hardened gem of hurt. The release is more gestural than actual, a bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it.

Day 28

We are on the road and our excitement swells as we pass dozens of charter buses at rest stops and see pink floppy hats all around. But when we go to drop our bags at our hotel, it hits me. The inauguration crowd is still in town. Staying at our Marriott Courtyard just outside the Pentagon are not only protesters of the new regime but supporters as well. I see whole families decked out in matching red hats and commemorative t-shirts. My body seizes up. I actually feel terrified of these people, even though I think the fear is irrational. I’d been envisioning practicing my giving toward allies, my family, people as outraged as me. Now I have to dive deep into the wells of whatever reserves of compassion I’ve been cultivating over the month toward my perceived enemies. How can I engage those from the other side? What will be my part in making things better? I decide today will be about extending generosity to these folks, to people who took off work and spent their hard-earned money to bear witness and lend their enthusiasm to the installation of our new president.

The march itself is magical, and exhausting, and inspiring. I behold so much generosity around me: There are people passing around bags of trail mix and carrot sticks; people creating a human microphone to reunite a lost child with her mother; there are cops and medics rushing to help the fallen in the crush of humans. But what impresses me most about the day is the new reality we live in. I feel safe and secure in the sea of witty signs and like-minded representatives of the popular vote. But the second we break away and walk along the Mall we pass more Trump supporters. What would my generosity even look like to them? Would it register? Right now the most generous thing I can do is to not push them into traffic on Independence Avenue. But I think about a quote, supposedly from the Dalai Lama: “If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.”

As we walk back across the bridge toward Arlington Cemetery, where my grandfather, a veteran of World War II and Korea is buried, I lag behind. The day is gray, thick, and unseasonably warm. We are all hungry and cranky, legs achy from standing for hours. In the distance, I see a pack of white boys in red caps walking toward us. My body responds before my brain, sensing a threat. They pass my mom and sister, who are still wearing their pink hats, ahead of me. I took mine off when we left the March because I am an actual pussy, fearful a Trump supporter would hurl an epithet or punch me in the face. When I catch up with them, my mom and sister seem shaken and tired, trying to be stoic.

“They called us ‘clits,’” my mom says, shaking her head.

Now my limbic system is just confused, outraged that these assholes would dare speak to anyone, let alone two women. But I’m doubly confused because “clit” is perhaps the most bizarre term they could have lobbed. “They wouldn’t know where to locate one on a human female!” I counter. I try to make light of it, but we are all on edge.

Back at the hotel, the air conditioning is blasting and we devour our burgers. More white people are milling around in stars-and-stripes gear. It occurs to me I have a choice. I can treat all of these people as a monolith of hatred and ignorance, or try to see them as individuals. The results are nothing stunning: I allow a Trump-supporting couple to enter the elevator ahead of me. I move my bag at breakfast the next morning so a teenage girl in a red cap can sit down. I leave a tip for the housekeeper, her political affiliations unknown. I let the same Trump-supporting couple board the airport courtesy van first. It doesn’t matter, we’re all going to the same place anyway.

***

The month ends. By my count I’ve given away 19 subway seats, picked up the check at dinner and drinks half a dozen times, sent 36 “I just called to say I love you” texts to friends, sent $320 dollars to different fundraisers and organizations, given $47 to the homeless, and spent 15 hours of my life volunteering. I’ve let Scott’s innocent yet potentially inflammatory comments slide more times than my ego is comfortable with. I bought coffee and a sandwich for my ex without sending a Venmo request for the privilege. I traveled to distant neighborhoods to meet friends for dinner closer to where they live. I’ve left notes in Scott’s pockets for him to discover during the day. I’ve bought bouquets of flowers to bestow upon unsuspecting pals. I’ve done nothing but listen on the phone, seated, taking it in, when usually doing household chores simultaneously. I’ve stayed past my office hours to meet a student who was freaking out about an assignment. I’ve sent e-books to a friend to use while nursing. I’ve been generous to myself by wearing the good underwear at the back of my drawer that I save for a special occasion that never comes. I’ve tried to do only one thing at a time.

We buffer ourselves through our lives. Through parenting, running a business, chasing one love after another — whatever buffers us from the rawness of the moment. The more layers we put on, the more difficult it is to access a sense of generosity.

But the experiment doesn’t feel like it’s over — I didn’t do this perfectly. There were times when I grabbed a subway seat like manifest destiny. There was a time I decided to get offended by a friend’s offhanded remark. I spent an afternoon at the Brooklyn Food Bank silently cursing the project director, who I took to be an imperious asshole. I noticed I have the hardest time letting things slide from the people closest to me. Like Richard said, examining oneself through the lens of generosity can be illuminating. At the beginning of the month I was listing all my generous acts. But by the end of the month, I was listing opportunities to be generous that I didn’t take up. Those moments taught me more about myself. Instead of feeling defeated by my imperfection, I feel curious, inspired even.

You make yourself vulnerable by making an offering the other may or may not take. You extend yourself in giving praise, attention, patience. You let the other in. You see the sky does not fall. You do it again. Giving becomes easier. Defensiveness can soften because you’re not fighting to preserve what little you feel you have to protect. From the constant gnaw of scarcity, you realize there is enough.

I’m still grouchy as hell. But I’ve found giving to be the easiest, quickest, even cheapest way to feel good, better than therapy, equine or otherwise. If I want to reset the chemistry of my brain on a particularly down day, I’ll just try to listen to what someone is telling me. I’ll text friends telling them how much I adore them. I’ll buy coffee for the person behind me in line. And a little bit of the weight lifts.

When I think back to the first day of my experiment, when I endured and paid for a frustrating lunch with Krista, I see it differently now. The truest generosity I could’ve offered wouldn’t have been in picking up the tab, but in looking directly in her eyes and meeting her where she is, where we all are: imperfect, flawed, all-too-human, locked into our own stories of what is going on, the only story we understand to be true. For all I know, she had to do deep breathing just to be around me.

I haven’t mastered generosity and the fearlessness that comes with it. But I’ve touched it in moments. I want to experience more of those moments. And because life always gives us a heaping helping of stress and awkward lunches and unexpected vet bills, I know I will have more to do. Because I didn’t die this month, nor did I go into the poorhouse, nor did I feel overextended. Instead, I felt connected. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by how much further I have to go, I feel ready. Instead of feeling stretched thin, I feel full.

***

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud, a nonfiction book about people who have faked their deaths.

 

A Toxic Tour Through Underground Ohio

An injection well near the family home of Michele Garman in Vienna, Ohio. (Courtesy: Jane Spies)

Justin Nobel | Longreads | January 2018 | 14 minutes (3,538 words)

We begin with a glass of wine on the wraparound porch of Michele Garman, who lives with her husband Tom and teenage son Dominic in the rural Ohio community of Vienna. Just 200 feet from the family’s house is a narrow shaft that the oil and gas industry uses to pump waste riddled with toxic chemicals deep into the earth, one of Ohio’s 217 active Class II injection wells. “I still enjoy sitting out on my porch,” says Garman, “but it was a lot more enjoyable before the scenery changed.”

The small white and maroon trucks that deliver the waste often come at night, she says. They contain what regulatory agencies innocently refer to as produced water, or brine, a slurry generated during fracking operations that can contain more than 1,100 chemicals and which is carcinogenic, flammable, and radioactive. Garman says she and her son occasionally smell, “a sweet odor in the air, almost like antifreeze.” One night last winter an alarm went off. “There was a red light and a real low siren,” she says, “and no one to call to see what was going on.”

Trucks line up at the K&H injection well facility in Torch, Ohio. (Courtesy: Felicia Mettler)

In the morning, before heading off to work, Garman is back on her porch with a coffee, staring at a series of tanks, where the waste is temporarily held before being shot down the injection well. “The biggest thing,” she sighs, “is the worrying. What am I not hearing? What am I not seeing? What is being released into the air? The water? The soil? What does this mean for our health years down the road? That is the stuff that really eats away at me constantly.”

Michele Garman and her family are not alone. We journey 200 miles south, to a land of low wooded hills not far from the Ohio River, where Phyllis Rienhart, 66, lives with her 78-year-old husband Ron in a stick frame house that Ron built with their son. Their town, Torch, doesn’t have a single store. But for Phyllis and Ron, it is home. “Most of my family lives on this road,” says Phyllis. “And yet we have this monster on that hill.”

The house is 1,800 feet from a mammoth injection well. Unlike Michele Garman, she has never heard an alarm. Instead, her injection well clangs. “One day we were outside here on the porch and I was thinking, it’s raining, because the bird bath was vibrating,” says Phyllis. “I went in the house but could still hear the noise — clang, clang, clang, clang, clang, clang — and it just got louder.”

In 2016, she and some neighbors staked out the injection well for a period of 24 hours. They observed 108 tanker trucks come and go. The trucks discharge their fracking wastewater into holding tanks. Hydrocarbons in the waste emit flammable vapors that accumulate in the tanks and are vented off the tops. In April 2016, lightning struck an injection wastewater storage tank in Greeley, Colorado, “heating the metal to thousands of degrees, which ignited the vapors inside,” reported the local paper. “The tanks subsequently exploded, shooting up hundreds of feet into the air.” The thought of a similar fireball erupting in her backyard keeps Phyllis up at night. She fears thunderstorms. She sees a neurologist. “I have anxiety,” she says.

Phyllis is trying to figure this thing out, but it is bigger than her. “What if they got it wrong?” she wonders. “What is it doing to our earth? What is it doing to our water? Not to mention the air that we breathe. I mean it is waste for god sakes, it is chemicals…And I ask them, are you going to have enough hazmat suits for all of my grandchildren? These people are dealing with paper and statistics, I am dealing with my family. They say it’s good for the economy, but I can’t find anything it is good for. And these things are popping up everywhere. There are more, and more, and more…”

“This is a humanitarian crisis,” declares Ohioan activist Teresa Mills, Executive Director of the Buckeye Environmental Network. “Ohio is in a state of emergency.” Read more…

The Only Downside to Lower Infant-Mortality Rates? All Those Baby Books

We typically think of narcissists as people with an inflated sense of their own uniqueness. If you’ve been around a parent in the past, say, century, you will have been subjected to a more peculiar type of narcissism: the one that assumes the universality of their highly anecdotal experience. (As a parent myself, I’m certainly part of the problem.) In the Guardian, Oliver Burkeman shows how the baby-advice literary-consumerist complex has capitalized on this tendency, producing book after book filled with often-useless, self-contradictory insights.

It’s no surprise, argues Burkeman, that this publishing explosion came about just as newborns’ chances of survival increased dramatically. The removal of most life-threatening circumstances from the experience of giving birth and raising an infant opened up the space for anxiety around the more trivial aspects of parenting.

Child mortality began to decline precipitously from the turn of the century, and with it, the life-or-death justification for this kind of advice. But the result was not a new generation of experts urging parents to relax, on the grounds that everything would probably be fine. (Books informed by 20th-century psychoanalysis, such as those by Benjamin Spock and Donald Winnicott, would later advise a far less rigid approach, arguing that a “good enough mother”, who didn’t always follow the rules perfectly, was perhaps even better than one who did, since that helped babies gradually to learn to tolerate frustration. But they were still half a century away.)

Instead, the anxiety that had formerly attached itself to the risk of a child dying took a more modern form: the fear that a baby reared with too much indulgence might grow up “coddled”, unfit for the new era of high technology and increasing economic competition; or even, as at least one American paediatrician warned, ripe for conversion to socialism. “When you are tempted to pet your child,” wrote the psychologist John Watson in 1928, in his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child, which was hardly idiosyncratic for its time, “remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument. An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.”

Thus began the transformation that would culminate in the contemporary baby-advice industry. With every passing year, there was less and less to worry about: in the developed world today, by any meaningful historical yardstick, your baby will almost certainly be fine, and if it isn’t, that will almost certainly be due to factors entirely beyond your control. Yet the anxiety remains – perhaps for no other reason than that becoming a parent is an inherently anxiety-inducing experience; or perhaps because modern life induces so much anxiety for other reasons, which we then project upon our babies. And so baby manuals became more and more fixated on questions that would have struck any 19th-century parent as trivial, such as for precisely how many minutes it’s acceptable to let babies cry; or how the shape of a pacifier might affect the alignment of their teeth; or whether their lifelong health might be damaged by traces of chemicals in the plastics used to make their bowls and spoons.

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Silicon Valley’s Spin Master

Jan Haas/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

From setting the talking points in interviews to addressing negative publicity before it leaks, an effective communications agent can help build a troubled brand and save a CEO. After doing her job in Silicon Valley for over two decades, Margit Wennmachers has helped companies like Skype, Etsy, Facebook, and Amazon shape their public identity.

For Wired, Jessi Hempel makes Wennmachers the focus of an article, instead of letting Wennmachers be the one behind the article, to describe how communications agencies shape our perception of startups and their founders, and how communications works. As tech’s old reputation changes from a group of nerdy outcasts to a greedy power center run by sexist, gentrifying capitalists, she’s now helping shape the narrative of tech itself. She’s angling for something driven by the old maxim that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Controlling the message of tech has become both easier and harder. In the early days, Wennmachers needed to hustle to put the firm’s founders at the center of tech conversations, which often happened in the pages of a short list of reputable publications. Yes, Andreessen Horowitz had a blog, but its most powerful ideas were conveyed by the traditional press. Consider Andreessen’s iconic August 2011 missive announcing that “software is eating the world,” which became the rallying cry for the generation of tech startups that followed. It was first published as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

That media ecosystem has now been upended and the path to success has changed. Wennmachers’ ability to push out a narrative no longer depends on having an editor’s ear. Andreessen Horowitz can advance its own editorial ideas through blog posts, podcasts, social media, and a newly launched YouTube channel independent of the media, connecting directly with people starting or building companies.

Its founders write frequent blog posts, and they have access to enough social channels that they no longer need a Wall Street Journal to push out their perspective. A former WIRED editor produces a regular podcast that is downloaded and listened to by a wide audience of aspiring founders, business people, policymakers, and tech enthusiasts. “The running joke of the firm is that we’re a media company that monetizes through venture capital,” Andreessen says. It’s a joke, but also an inevitable evolution of Wennmachers’ role—in which a communications lead begins to look much more like a media tycoon.

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The Handgun and the Haunted Range

Justin Quarry | Longreads | January 2018 | 22 minutes (5,444 words)

 

When my father died in the winter of 2000, back when I was newly 19, the single thing he left me was a nine-millimeter pistol. The day after his funeral, my grandfather simply told me my father wanted me to have it, handing it to me in its ragged original packaging — spare bullets, along with the pistol, spilling from the Styrofoam encasement as I opened the discolored box.

This inheritance both surprised and confused me. For one thing, though I’d spent my early childhood with rifles and shotguns racked against the walls of our home and the rear window of my father’s Jeep, with countless taxidermied deer heads gazing down at me apathetically, I’d never known my father to own a handgun. For another, unlike all the other men in my family, I’d never spent a second in a tree stand, didn’t even recall playing with toy guns; rather than pretending to shoot deer or Iraqi soldiers, for instance, one Christmas I requested and received a custom-made deer costume for my Cabbage Patch doll, Casey.

The pistol also puzzled me because I hadn’t necessarily expected to inherit anything at all from my father. Over the prior 10 years, my mother had to fight for nearly all the child support she’d received, and it was an open secret that, when my mother had divorced him, he’d spent the $20,000 my great-grandmother had given him to split between my older brother and me, once we were of age, on a revenge Grand Prix. My mother had pined for a Grand Prix in the months before she left him, and so he bought one for himself, kept it immaculate, and always left it in the furthest reaches of parking lots, where it was least likely to get dinged.

Two weeks before I’d gotten the gun, and hardly a month into my second semester at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, my father’s family called me back home to Northeast Arkansas to visit him for the last time I would see him conscious. Only a week after that, they called me home again to see him, then in a coma, die.

That day, when we all knew his body was finally going to expire as we listened to its death rattle, none of the other men in my family, which is to say none of the people closest to him, could bear to be with him. My brother, who was six years older than me and had lived with my father after our parents divorced, was too afraid. My grandfather, who was also my father’s best friend, my father his namesake, was too emotionally unstable, sleepless for weeks, having had a dream in which my father was lost on a hunt at night, and as he called for my grandfather, no matter which way my grandfather pointed his light, no matter which way he stumbled in the woods, my grandfather couldn’t find his son. And so there I was at my father’s bedside with the women of the family — with the women, where I usually was. I thought that as one of his three closest living relations, even though he and I weren’t at all intimate, it was my place to be with him when he died.

Read more…

How to Win Founders and Influence Everybody

Longreads Pick

Some of the best communications strategists remain highly influential yet invisible. Here’s how Margit Wennmachers became one of tech’s best.

Source: Wired
Published: Jan 21, 2018
Length: 15 minutes (3,824 words)

Stewards of the Blood

A memorial for one of the four young men killed in Long Island in April 2017. The street gang MS-13 has been blamed for the deaths. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

 

Caille Millner | Michigan Quarterly Review | Winter 2016 | 16 minutes (4,329 words)

I need to tell you about someone whose name I can’t speak. The lack of a name is inconvenient, but it’s not the most important thing about him; he gave it up so long ago. Everything important that I can tell you has been a fight against time and language, and I’m still only halfway there.

Halfway. We were half-grown when we met: eleven years old. Some concerned adult had determined that he was at risk. We all are, but in his case there were metrics. He had immigrated from Mexico. He lived with too many siblings; there was a rotating cast of uncles and cousins in his life. This seemed dangerous ─ we lived in San Jose before it became a booming city, when it was still threaded with apricot orchards and poverty. Some of his uncles and cousins had joined La Nuestra Familia, the Norteños, the gangs that offer protection to Chicanos and Mexicans who lived in Northern California. Joining the gang meant that they had joined a violent feud, with the Sureños from Southern California and also with the Salvadoran gangs — La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

I should have asked him questions about this. The truth is that I failed to find the language to do so. The first reason for this failure is that I was impressed with the ornate speech used by so many of these uncles and cousins. They never spoke about gangs or violence or illegal anything. Instead, they had a seductive patois of slang and simple commands and complex phrases about their respect for tradition, their commitment to duties as men. To my 11-year-old ears these were ancient, powerful words; it sounded like the language of legend. Warriors and glory.

I could only speak about homework and grades. Such words could not compete with theirs even in my own imagination. How could I use them to convince someone else?

When I was near all of them I couldn’t even say what it was that captivated me about the drudgery I was supposed to be championing. When I was alone it became all too clear: That drudgery was my way to be special. What I really liked was the approval I received from those concerned adults for caring. The kind of regard that allowed me to be chosen as a positive influence in another 11-year-old’s life was intoxicating.

Looking back, of course, I made sense as a translator of this other life. I was going places even then. My family was steady and ambitious. They were teaching me the language of the higher classes, but more importantly, they were teaching me their timelines. I understood that for many years my life would be a slowly unfolding landscape of education and that in the distant future I would have nothing to do with boys like him.

Not that this mattered in our moment. I fell hopelessly and immediately in love with him. He was smaller than I was: a thin body, all angles like an arrow tip. His was a face of beveled edges rather than common features — the only curve on him was a radiant smile. As soon as I met him I wanted to see more of it, and I hung around for as long as I could.

To even speak about it now is to risk embarrassment, for this was eleven-year-old love: a love that bloomed over secondhand video game consoles and dimly lit strip malls. We gawked at passing teenagers; we pooled our quarters to split Orange Juliuses and McDonald’s French fries. It was the love of one child — puffy, awkward, patiently hoping to bloom into beauty — for another child who was beautiful and lean and waiting only for others to be overcome by his charm. He never had to wait long. Where I was aloof and serious, he was open and easy.

He knew how to be eleven years old. He took joy in the moment — in the good slice of pizza, the trip to the arcade, the tickle fight. As part of a big family he was happy to be in company with lots of people. To his relatives I must have seemed like the strange one: quiet, introverted, demanding of difficult pleasures that were a long time in coming. I never talked to him, or to them, about love.

The next year he joined the feud.

We lost him, one of those concerned adults told me.

I found the judgment unfair. Even today I can tell you in which prison his body may be found.

He is doing time. Yet I wonder if he sees time in the way that I do, in the way that all of those concerned adults do. We cling to years because our imagination does not extend to the language of duty and obligation. We hoard our years because they belong to us alone, not to the ages.

At 11 years old it is easy to believe in the ages; I was enthralled by them myself. And in many ways, his transformation happened much faster than mine did. At 12 years old he had a new name, new clothes, new friends, a new body. New constraints and intimacies. He had a duty now, and it stood as an immutable fact of life, something beyond individuality. When it was clear to me that I should abandon him so that I could continue on my own slow line of time I did so without regret, and for many years I stopped trying to find words to talk about him. I spent much time on my education and my goals. I busied myself with the intricacies of language and the books of long-dead men.

They never spoke about gangs or violence. Instead, they had a seductive patois of slang and simple commands and complex phrases about their respect for tradition, their commitment to duties as men.

Then as our paths diverged my own line of time sped up. The years that are ticking slowly for him, in his cell, are moving much faster on the outside. Time has become a relentless crush for skill and for money, at least in the land of his feud. San Jose has changed. Like me, it became educated and upper-middle-class. The orchards were paved over for expensive housing; the immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador moved to cheaper cities further south. The crime rates dropped, the feud grew quiet.

Things were different now, I thought. The wounds from the feud would heal. There would be no need for these battles that seemed to have no purpose. Too many were gone but at least it would slow down.

* * *

Years passed. I moved to San Francisco. I chose to live in a neighborhood that seemed to have the familiarity of my birth neighborhood and none of its problems. My neighbors came from Mexico and Panama and El Salvador and Nicaragua and Brazil. It was a neighborhood of modest and miraculous prosperity. Everyone worked as often as they could. Their children played on the sidewalks day and night and they were full of memories of the children they had left behind in the old countries. Their lives ran on the rhythms of phone cards and remittance payments and scratch-off lottery tickets.

When I moved in I asked many of them about the feud. We had similar worries about it, and similar feelings of denial. It was close but we believed that it was far enough away. Two gangs — one linked to MS-13, the other linked to the Norteños — operated on the blocks that bounded us. But because there had been no violence in our small bubble for years we thought that they would always remain there.

Around 8 pm on June 16, 2007, a 15-year-old named Edivaldo Sanchez was standing with a friend outside of his family’s apartment on 24th Street. Eddie, as we called him, often stood outside of that apartment in the evenings. It was a practical choice. He had five siblings and a rotating cast of relatives in his life. He needed space, like any teenager.

Eddie was a student at Horace Mann Middle School. He was a recent immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, a city whose important industries include maquiladoras and drug trafficking.  After her husband died, Eddie’s mother had brought the family to San Francisco. She thought that the move would give her children the peaceful years they needed for an education and a more prosperous future.

What is there to say about him. Eddie made friends in the neighborhood fast. His personality was gentle. He was crazy about soccer and music, eager to help fellow students fix their old electronics or put together a pick-up game. He smiled easily and often. I remember thinking how delightful it was to see that. He was at the age for boys when smiling tends to stop.

We had a nodding acquaintance when we passed each other on the street. He was shy, and being a recent immigrant he was also tentative about the way he sounded. I didn’t want to make him feel nervous by speaking too often. It was another one of my failures of language.

Two men in a stolen Honda pulled up beside the boys that night. We will never know what they said, or if they said anything at all. In the neighborhood, we decided that the men asked who they claimed. We decided that because we knew that the boys claimed no gang associations, and because it was the only question we knew that fit with what happened next.

The passenger in the car pulled out a gun. The boys ran for their lives and he shot at their backs.

Eddie’s friend escaped.

Eddie was hit. He staggered for half a block, collapsed, and bled out in front of a taqueria on 24th Street at the corner of Balmy. He was dead before the emergency response team arrived.

Eddie died near a mural painted with folk spirits, one of whom is giving birth to the world. It’s the first mural at the entrance to Balmy, a short block that’s also a gallery for more than 60 murals. These bright, splashy scenes stretch from the roof to the foundation of almost every building. The murals were begun by a collective of artists known as La Mujeres Muralistas, whose desire to add more peaceful, domestic images to the macho mural art scene in San Francisco during the 1970s grew into a massive visual celebration of Latin American myth and history. Eddie died among a kaleidoscope of life from all around the Americas, the red of his blood joining an explosion of yellows and blues and purples and greens. While he died he was watched over by Archbishop Oscar Romero, by Frida Kahlo, by Diego Rivera, by La Virgencita of Guadalupe, by children escaping war and poverty, and above all by weeping women, women who are weeping for Mexico and for El Salvador and for the innocents massacred in those countries and in this one.

Eddie died near a mural painted with folk spirits, one of whom is giving birth to the world.

When I stepped out of my house the next morning the altar for Eddie had already been assembled. The sun was bright but the red candles were blazing. Most of them filled tall glass cases to the brim and were plastered with a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Every corner store on 24th Street sold these candles, but that day they handed them out for free.

Within a few hours it was impossible to walk down that strip of sidewalk. The mourners spread a blanket of flowers and candles and homemade signs that crowded out all of the space in front of the taqueria. Eddie’s family members hung small cardboard signs to rest his soul in peace on the lampposts nearby. The schoolgirls he had helped at Horace taped up pictures of him.

For a few weeks, I passed by him every day. We all looked up when we saw him. I think the memory of seeing him on the same corner, alive and wiry, kept us from cleaning up his memorial in the normal frame of time. We left Eddie’s altar up until it had fully disintegrated. As the days and then weeks passed it underwent a metamorphosis. Bunches of flowers shrank and died. They stained the sidewalk with the violet colors of exploded petals and the yellow powder of broken stamens. The cathedral of candles melted onto the sidewalk, spreading out into red gooey puddles. The goo hardened into something brittle, geological. If I squinted, the sidewalk in front of the taqueria looked like a mural on Balmy.

And above the mess floated Eddie’s face — thin, a little pimpled, forever smiling.

* * *

After Eddie’s time stopped and I was yanked back into an age of ruined myths and false legends I began to look for the language that would help me speak about it. Though I’ve read many pieces about MS-13 and the Norteños, most of them are disappointing. I’m not looking for lurid chronicles or patronizing analysis of the young men who join what is, for them, a ritual battle that exists not just in our time but in all of the ages before us.

Where I’ve found the language to express this has been a matter of accident: like the 1978 novel Broken April. I picked up this book because I was curious about its author, the great Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare. I wondered how a learned, upper-class man (his author photos show him reclining in his Parisian apartment, clad in cashmere sweaters) had found the words to chronicle the martial traditions of his tiny, impoverished country. Kadare’s work is awash in blood and violence — war, feuds, sieges, occupation, brutality — and he writes it all with the calm candor of a professional and the deep passion of a lover.

So I picked up Broken April and I discovered that, for Kadare, it’s partly a matter of translation. The novel is all about making clear the circumstances of the blood feuds that still take place in Albania today, feuds that seem strange to outsiders yet indispensable to those who act them out. As usual, Kadare doesn’t shy away from the horrible toll: Broken April opens with the premeditated murder of an innocent man.

On an early spring day in Albania’s High Plateau region, Gjorg of the Berisha has been perched behind a ridge overlooking the highway since daybreak. As the hours drag on, he’s startled over and over by passerby. He pulls out his rifle at each disturbance.

He’s waiting for a man named Zef Kryeqyqe. Zef Kryeqyqe and Gjorg of the Berisha barely know each other and have no personal animosity, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened the previous year, when one of Zef Kryeqyqe’s relatives killed Gjorg of the Berisha’s elder brother, Mehill. In keeping with the blood feud that their families have been engaged in for generations, it’s now Gjorg’s duty to kill Zef.

The fated man doesn’t appear until dusk. He wasn’t expecting to meet Gjorg near the highway. When Gjorg appears before him, rifle cocked, Kryeqyqe fumbles uselessly for a defense.

Gjorg shoots him. He falls. Gjorg steps out of hiding onto a deserted road and stares at the fallen body.

The crucial act of violence takes place over the first ten pages. By swiftly dispensing with the murder, Kadare can expand at length on the real subject of Broken April: the culture that surrounds and maintains the blood feud. It is a culture that, above all, depends on a strange sense of time. Its rituals are measured in moments and days but its sense of value and consequence stretches over centuries. We learn that the Berishas are villagers in a part of the country that has seen little social change since the Dark Ages. The economy is subsistence agriculture; the residents abide by a medieval code of conduct known as the Kanun. The Kanun regulates manners, marriages, and above all the blood feud in which the Berishas have found themselves.

After Gjorg kills Zef, Kadare flashes back to the weeks after Mehill’s death. Abiding by the age-old custom, the Berisha matriarch hangs her dead son’s bloody shirt up on the family clothesline. She leaves this shirt on the line so that the neighborhood, and Gjorg, can see it. They need the sight of the bloodstain to torment Gjorg until he avenges his brother.

It works. Gjorg has an extended, Hamlet-like season of agonized inaction, but when the winter ends he leaves his family and goes to the highway. In killing Zef Kryeqyqe, Gjorg knows that he is launching his final cycle in the feud. After a month’s truce, he will no longer be the killer but the prey.

Still, when Gjorg walks back into the village he can walk with pride. He has returned honor to his family and banished humiliation, its dark twin. For a long, slow moment in his short life, he is envied and feared and powerful. The villagers spread the word that he has “taken back his brother’s blood.” His mother pulls the stained shirt down from the clothesline and washes it. His father can look at the neighbors with satisfaction. A brief expansiveness opens his family’s existence even as Gjorg feels the looming constriction of certain death.

Zef Kryeqyqe’s death launches another series of actions set forth by the Kanun. The two families fulfill their roles solemnly, without emotion, as though what were at stake was not a murder but a legal transaction. Everything is prescribed and organized, including the fine, or blood tax, that Gjorg of the Berisha’s family must pay. They must pay this tax not to the Kryeqyqe family but to the prince. So, after the men of the village have negotiated the 30-day truce, Gjorg of the Berishas embarks on a long walk across the Plateau to present this payment.

Gjorg’s only possibility for escaping death would be to hide in one of the 74 Towers of Refuge. These towers dot the bleak landscape that we travel through with him. With their comfortless cells and desperate inhabitants, they resemble prisons: “scattered, dark forbidding, with their black loopholes and their heavy doors.” The values of the Plateau villagers assure that their purpose is to function as places of incarceration as well. There’s a special shame for the men inside, one that is visited on their families. Deprived of their prideful place in the community for as long as they have unredeemed blood, these families do not farm: “Whole clans allowed their fields to go uncultivated and themselves to suffer hunger so that the blood might be redeemed….Each man chose between corn and vengeance.” Despite the business-like aspects of the feud, the concepts of comfort and profit are foreign to its priorities of duty and pride. Comfort and profit are concepts for another time, another moment, outside of the feud.

Eventually, we make it to the castle and to one of the most loathsome characters in the book: Mark Ukacierra, the prince’s first cousin. Ukacierra is the “steward of the blood,” the man who is responsible for keeping accounts of all blood feuds on the High Plateau. His archives, which stretch back for centuries, detail every feud that has gone settled or unsettled, and every murder that has maintained it. Ukacierra loves the feud with a possessive madness, fears for its survival, and looks upon the incursions of the contemporary world with hatred. An educated man, he reads contemporary books and journals from the capital city, Tirana, and stokes the flames of his hatred with their interpretations of the blood feud. In the opinion of these learned authors, the feud has been “changing gradually into an inhuman machine, to the point of being reduced at last, according to the author of the article, to a capitalist enterprise carried on for the sake of profit.” The idea that the ancient feud can be reduced to something so shallow, so contemporary, as capitalism — that, to Ukacierra, is outrageous.

Thanks to the impertinence of these outsiders, as well as a general worry that the men of Albania have grown soft and do not take the feud as seriously as they used to, Ukacierra looks on the pale, shaking Gjorg with the closest approximation to love that we see in Broken April. To him, Gjorg is the future of an age, an actor in a long tradition that he adores. Meanwhile, the writers of the contemporary books live in a “weakening” time “without honor.”

The time that Ukacierra lives in is expansive and everlasting. Meanwhile, Gjorg’s time is growing precarious and short. Once he has paid his fee and began the trek back to his village, he has already used up many precious days of his truce. While he walks, Zef Kryqeqye’s family is watching the calendar and making their preparations. Should they miss their son, they may visit his murnanë — a small stone altar that passerby built to mark the place where the dead man fell.

* * *

In the seventh year after Eddie’s death I requested the public documents for a murder case that had started just a few blocks away from where he was murdered. The U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco released these documents in October 2014, after the three young defendants were each sentenced to 27 years in federal prison on charges related to the murder of Alexander Temaj-Castanon.

It was a strange moment to see a case like this one. I still thought about Eddie, though seven years on it was clear to that he would never get any justice. No arrests were ever made in his case. No murderer was ever found. His family had moved back to Mexico, torn by their grief, to face their uncertain future in a more familiar country.

There were few people left in the neighborhood who remembered Eddie, or had any knowledge of what the feud was.

Time had transformed another place. Many of my neighbors were long gone. They left for a less tragic reason than Eddie’s family had: they simply could not afford to live there anymore. The new residents were upper-middle-class and educated. They needed things that would help them thrive on a faster line of time ─ coffee shops, express workouts, places that sold the latest technology. The neighborhood sped up to reflect their needs.

Yet for all that time was speeding up something was still happening in a slower and more ancient era.

On the night of June 21, 2010, Davie Jimmy Mejia-Sensente, aka “Crazy,” or “Loco,” Carlos Mejia-Quintanilla, aka “Sleepy,” or “Dormido,” and Luis Amilar-Zanas, aka “Trucha,” or “Yomo,” were on a 14-Muni bus, traveling on Mission Street from San Francisco to Daly City. The three young men were members of the transnational gang known as La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

A 26-year-old man named Alexander Temaj-Castanon boarded the bus after leaving his job as a cook at a San Francisco barbeque restaurant. Mejia-Sensente, Mejia-Quintanilla, and Amilar-Zanas watched Temaj-Castanon and decided that he was a member of La Nuestra Familia, or the Norteños. They based this decision on their observations of Temaj-Castanon’s tattooed body and his general bearing.

When Temaj-Castanon stepped off the bus on a quiet stretch of Mission Street in Daly City, Meijia-Sensente and Mejia-Quintanilla collected a backpack from Amilar-Zanas and followed him. Amilar-Zanas had placed a gun in the backpack.

The night was dark, the hour was late, and the street was deserted. They crept up behind him. Mejia-Quintanilla pulled the gun from the backpack and shot Temaj-Castanon once. Mejia-Sensente took the gun and shot the dying man again. They watched the body fall. Then they ran.

Temaj-Castanon was not a member of the Norteños or any other gang.

None of these facts were in dispute, not even by the defendants. This was a senseless murder, executed for no other reason than that the defendants believed it was their duty and obligation to eliminate a rival in a blood feud that has persisted for decades. But that duty and obligation, though so compelling as to bring these three young men to assassinate an innocent man, is nowhere to be found in the public documents. The U.S. Attorney’s office dismisses it in the same way that enraged the steward of the blood: “MS-13,” reads the sentencing memorandum for the case, “constitutes an ongoing organization whose members function as a continuing unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise.” In this rendering, murder has been reduced to a business enterprise that must be done on a schedule according to the time demands of a corporate entity.

I can understand this sense of time. I live in it, I fought for it, and I will do all that’s in my power to remain within it.

But in looking through the public docket for this case I located one time factor that the U.S. Attorney’s office may have overlooked.

In 2002, when he was jumped into MS-13, Mejia-Quintanilla was a 12-year-old named Wilfredo Oliva-Castro who lived with his family in El Salvador.

In 1996, when he was jumped into MS-13, Mejia-Sensente was a 12-year-old, name unknown, who lived with his family in El Salvador.

In 1991, when he was jumped into MS-13, Amilar-Zanas was a 12-year-old named Luis Sana who lived with his family in El Salvador.

We will never live in their time but they will always live in ours.

There is one more important notation in the paperwork for this case. Though they’re not publicly available, the docket shows that each defendant requested a translator during the course of the legal proceedings. Presumably the three defendants, all native Spanish speakers, wanted to be certain that they could follow the language of the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, and the judge as these people presided over the direction of the rest of their lives. The case files note that the translators all came to assist the defendants.

I am so glad that they came. But how I wish, oh how I wish, that these translators had spoken sooner.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the Winer 2016 issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. It was also named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2017. Our thanks to Caille Millner and the MQR staff for allowing us to reprint this essay.

 

How ‘Cops’ Became the Most Polarizing Reality TV Show in America

"Cops" screenshot
Another night, another arrest, on "Cops." (Cops.com/Langley Productions)

Tim Stelloh | The Marshall Project & Longreads | January 2018 | 25 minutes (6,325 words)

This story was published in partnership with The Marshall Project.

***

Morgan Langley leans toward a large computer screen. He isn’t sure if the video clip is still there, posted to a random YouTube channel named after a ’90s punk-ska act, but after a few moments, he finds it. Out of a black screen flashes a white Ford Mustang with blacked-out windows and chrome rims. Langley, who is an executive producer of one of America’s longest-running reality shows, “Cops,” narrates. “This kid here is actually selling a thousand pills of ecstasy to an undercover cop,” he says excitedly.

On the screen, a skinny white kid with a straight-brim baseball cap and a collection of painful-looking face piercings has plunked down on the Mustang’s passenger seat. Next to him is a woman whose blurred face is framed by sandy blonde hair. They briefly discuss logistics, and a second guy with dark skin and wrap-around sunglasses hops in. He asks if she has the cash; she asks if he has the goods. He asks if she’s a cop; she laughs.

“Okay, we’re just gonna do it like this,” he says, grabbing a pistol from his waistband. “Just give me your money.” Seconds later, officers in green tactical gear swarm the car, and he’s nose-down on the pavement, handcuffed and delivering a tear-streaked explanation: “Sir, they gave me a gun and told me they were gonna kill me.” Read more…

Diary of a Do-Gooder

Illustration by Nusha Ashjaee

Sara Eckel | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,774 words)

In the fall of 2016, I stood on the concrete steps of a mustard-colored ranch house off the New York State Thruway in Ulster County, a broken red umbrella hooked below my shoulder. The mustached man at the door — 50ish, in a t-shirt and khakis — had the stern, dry look of a high-school science teacher.

“Hi, Thomas?”

He nodded.

“Hi, Thomas, my name is Sara, and I’m a neighborhood volunteer for Zephyr Teachout for Congress.”

Thomas didn’t tell me to go away, didn’t slam the door or scold me for interrupting his day. He stoically endured my spiel about why I was spending my Sunday afternoon doing this — because Zephyr has been fighting corruption for her entire career, and I believe she’ll go to Washington and represent the people of New York’s 19th District, rather than corporations and billionaires.

“Okay, thank you,” he said, closing the door.

“Would you like some literature?” I asked, proffering some rain-dotted pamphlets.

“No, you people have sent us plenty.”

You people.

Read more…

We’re Not Done Here

CSA Images/Getty

Laurie Penny | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,764 words)

The problem of sexual violation can not be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself. The ubiquity of sexual violations is obviously related to what is taken to be routine, everyday sex, the ‘facts’ of pleasure and desire.
— Linda MartAn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance

This kind of mania will always at some point exhaust itself.
— Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

***

Oh, girls, look what we’ve done now. We’ve gone too far. The growing backlash against the MeToo movement has finally settled on a form that can face itself in the mirror. The charge is hysteria, moral panic, hatred of sex, hatred of men. More specifically, as Andrew Sullivan complained in New York magazine this week, “the righteous exposure of hideous abuse of power had morphed into a more generalized revolution against the patriarchy.” Well, yes. That’s rather the point.

Sullivan is far from the only one to accuse the MeToo movement of becoming a moral panic about sexuality itself, and he joins a chorus of hand-wringers warning that if this continues — well, men will lose their jobs unjustly, and what could be worse than that, really? The story being put about is that women, girls, and a few presumably hoodwinked men are now so carried away by their “anger” and “temporary power” that, according to one piece in the Atlantic, they have become “dangerous.” Of course — what could be more terrifying than an angry, powerful woman, especially if you secretly care a little bit more about being comfortable than you do about justice? This was always how the counter-narrative was going to unfold: It was always going to become a meltdown about castrating feminist hellcats whipping up their followers into a Cybelian frenzy, interpreting any clumsy come-on as an attempted rape and murder. We know what happens when women get out of control, don’t we?

Read more…