Deadlock
I watched the beheading of Eugene Armstrong today.
And if you are like 57% of America, you'll stop reading now.
If that's you, then go now.
And don't come back.
Because I'm going to talk about what happened today, and I need someone who gives a damn. And if you don't, then what the fuck are you doing here anyway.
The video is at ogrish.com, among other places. Someone sent me the link when Eric Berg was beheaded.
This one affected me more than Eric Berg. It stuck with me all evening and wanted to write and didn't want to write; it all seemed so pointless and I felt so powerless.
As God would have it, I met a man named Matt at the Magnet web opening tonight who told me to write anyway. I'm glad he did. What was I thinking not to?
And so:
I was running at Crunch tonight. My legs were stretching and I was getting just the right pressure sensation heel to toe and great lift and it was flowing with ease, and it was up at 8.2 which is unusual for me for a 3 minute warmup but I was full of energy.
Full of Rage.
And I couldn't stop thinking of Eugene Armstrong and my roommate William. They were one face.
I saw the face of Eugene in the footage of his death. It was filmed with better clarity and sound than Eric Berg's, but the moment was just as simple. It was a task completed by three men. Just an activity that might occur like moving furniture or something that might require a little exhertion but was over pretty quickly. I guess afterward they probably rewound the tape and watched it to see how it turned out.
Eugene was blindfolded and in an orange jumpsuit. His hands were tied behind his back and he was kneeling. While a statement was being made by one of the other men in the room, he sort of nodded his head and twisted his body. I tried to figure those movements out.
What would provoke him to shuffle like that? What would I be thinking right then? Is it absurd for me even to wonder? Isn't it the kind of thing that only happens to other people? Or maybe to me, but only because I've done something to deserve it? Was that his perception too?
I thought he probably knew what was up, and it's as if he couldn't make up his mind to try to bolt or not. Could he even understand what the men were saying? What if it wasn't happening today? Maybe if he tried to run it would be worse, or if he just stayed still and did what he was told, it wouldn't happen at all. The indecision raced. It may have been panic.
Kind of an action deadlock.
Who really thinks what was going to happen would happen? He had to have kept his spirits up the last few days by hoping for his release or some other resolution. How do you accept the switch from that fervently held hope to the reality of your end?
The camera zoomed to his face and a hand took ahold of his hair and another pulled up on his chin. Eugene now knew the knife was coming; he had to have seen the video of Eric Berg on Al Jazeera if he'd been over there long. He scrunched his chin to his chest and tried to curl up as he was pushed to the floor. While a third hand tried to work the knife into the tight space between his chin and the orange fabric pressed to his chest, the hands holding his head tried to pull his chin up.
Eugene did his best to clench his neck down, but it didn't last long. You could tell he wanted to scream at the same time he wanted to clench his neck. He was saying something guttural and angry like "no" or maybe just a hard deep scream. Because his chin was being held up, his jaw was shut tight. But if he let go of the pressure of clenching his head down there'd be easier access to his neck.
If he let go, he wouldn't have time to say what he wanted desperately to say, the last thing his mind could think of to maybe, slimly, change the mind of the hand with the knife. Maybe it would be the angry indignant "no" by which any human would abide, right?
But his mind knew that wouldn't happen. So it kept his jaw clenched and gambled on that protection while trying to pursuade with the guttural noise.
Then his neck was exposed and blood was drawn. It was work to keep it exposed and so the hand with the knife moved quickly and forcefully back and forth. That's when the sound changed.
It reminded me of William.
It hurt. I pushed the buttons of the treadmill up from 8.2 to somewhere past nine, and focused out the window of Crunch past the backs of sculptures and friezes of solid, dead men on the exterior of the building. I looked further across Van Ness to nothing in particular.
What came to me about William was a few years ago. It was after one of his motorcycle spills. I had come home from work to see him on the sofa in a shredded red motorcycle jacket.
This was a time right after 2001 when his hours at work had been cut back and he was out all over town working these smaller gigs that weren't paying anything. Everything had gone wrong for him the last few months. Like totally fucking everything. Now he had somersaulted on an onramp near Potrero Hill. He couldn't afford a tow or a cab, so he pushed his broken bike under an overpass and walked from the highway to a bus stop. He didn't have insurance, so he didn't know what else to do and came home, sat on the sofa and turned on the TV.
He was badly banged up. His riding jacket and pants were ruined, one leg was almost entirely a bruise, his ribs were too sensitive to touch and the skin of his calf was grated.
He was acting like it was no big deal, but I told him he should go to a doctor. He told me he couldn't afford it and it'd be better in a little bit anyway. Then he changed the channel on the TV.
I looked at him for a minute. That's all he had, was the hope "that it would be better in a minute anyway". I knew he didn't have any money and he was behind on the bills. I knew his next paycheck was going to be even smaller than the last. The only thing he had of value was his ride to work and it was wrecked and hidden under an overpass across town. Things did not look good. And now it hurt to stand up.
So he sat on the sofa and watched other peoples' lives for a while, and said "it would be better in a minute anyway".
Kind of an action deadlock.
And I told him not to worry about the bills, that I make enough money and go to the ER at Davies and we'll worry about the cost later. And he said no no and I said yes yes and he thought about it for a minute, and you could tell he kinda let go and accepted the help and then he got all small and weak and he tried to stand up, just tried to lean into an upright sit, and then he whimpered.
And it was the kind of whimper that we've all done, where you wonder why this is happening and what did you do? What did you do wrong? And it's frustration too. And fear that it might not get better.
His eyes watered up but he didn't cry, and it was just for a minute that he made that noise and I had helped him up and he was carefully, slowly on his way, and he was back to himself. Banged up, but himself. That's all it took.
But for a moment he was a child. He was totally innocent.
And it isn't that Eugene made the same noise when it was a reality that the knife was passing his esophagus and the hot blood was pushing around his chin and chest and splashing more reality on his face and throat.
It was not the same noise.
But the quality was the same. The quality was so exactly the same I couldn't keep the two images from crashing together. It was the same child.
Eugene's angry, scared, mad "no" became a noise that said "this is real and I'm going to be hurt really bad and you have to stop it now guys or it's really really serious please!" and then it was a really desperate clenched high in the throat terrified scream of someone who knows help isn't coming and then it was a noise that was everything that was in William's tone and the two slammed together right then in my mind and I wanted to cry.
And replaying it in my head on the treadmill I did cry. I ran and I sweated and I cried. Quietly, so no one would notice. Tears. Sweat. Running.
My parents call a person who did what I did for William "A Bleeding Heart".
They don't mean it like a compliment.
Eugene needed a whole country of Bleeding Hearts.
There are 43% of them. Not 57%.
Did that math go through his mind? Probably not. There were probably a lot of other thoughts running through his head in those last moments.
Probably he wondered what the fuck he was doing there. He probably wanted to be home.
Was he even a nice guy? I don't know. He was a child for a second, though. He had the same common denominator as me, you and William.
There was a woman the other day who took a plain T shirt, probably a Hanes or maybe a Beefy T and printed "President Bush You Killed My Son" on it. I don't know if she did it with markers, or if maybe she went to one of those T Shirt places in the mall, but she did it.
Her son was dead, and she made a T shirt.
His name was Seth. He died in February in Iraq.
What are you gonna do? She put it on, went to see Laura Bush give a campaign speech and started shouting questions at her. I don't know what they were. I don't know that it really matters.
I mean, what if she was yelling for the square root of pi? What if she wanted to know how many licks it takes to get the center of a Tootsie Roll Fucking Tootsie Pop?
Her son is dead. He blew up diffusing a bomb.
Console her.
The crowd drowned her out by shouting "four more years".
Four more years.
Laura didn't stop to acknowledge her. She didn't even change her speech. The speech mentioned 911 several times and the successful campaign in Iraq.
Successful.
911 and Iraq have nothing to do with each other.
Fox News no longer provides reasons for the war, but has lately been running a number of articles on the amount of cash Saddam was funneling out of the oil for food program, and somehow that money funneled through the same places Al Qaeda money funneled. So that's the connection to Al Qaeda, and therefore Saddam represented a threat.
Oh.
I wonder where the Carlysle group keeps it's money? Probably not the same place. Well, not the Bush money anyway. The Bin Laden money probably runs through the same houses. But they are no longer the news. Iraq is the news. Mostly.
Seth's mom was arrested and charged with "defiant trespass" and released.
She had a ticket to the speech.
This isn't how I was raised.
Why is this happening? Where is America?
George Bush says "Freedom is on the march".
Why was it Eugene? Why was it Eric? I guess it'll be Jack Hensley next.
This was shit and I was tired of these same circles in my mind and I had already ramped the buttons on the treadmill down to 5 something. Then realized I couldn't run at all anymore and I hit "cool down". Cool down takes you to a nice walk timed for a few minutes. You don't have to think about anything because it stops itself and you can just catch your breath and feel good about your run.
I pressed a towel to my face. I wasn't crying anymore, but that just meant I was mad again. Those were my options this evening.
It was dark behind my towel; dark as a blindfold.
I would like to trade Laura Bush for Jack.
I mean, somebody has to die for freedom, right? Why not Laura? In Jack's photo there's a small child. Laura's children are grown. Sort of.
Now I'm just being silly.
What has Laura done? What would she even be doing over there?
Why isn't she over there?
Or at least why isn't she consoling Seth's mom?
What if she really, really, really gave these absurd questions some thought? Would it break her? Would it make that child come out?
Just suppose, in a topsy turvy world, if she did go and Jack came back, and George saw the video of Laura's child come out.
Laura would make the same noise as Jack. Of that I am certain.
Would George cry, or would he think about his own neck?
I wonder.
And suburbia. Would suburbia get it then?
When does that levee break?
And do you get it? That slim chance that you who didn't get it at the start is still reading... do you get it?
Can you put away the Swift Boats and the Flip Flops and the Freedom Fries and the price of oil... oil that is speeding it's way down a brand new pipeline right across Afghanistan...
Can you see it's not about any of that individually but about all of that at once and so much power it should make a sane man's head explode?
But it hasn't.
But there's a severed one sitting on a body that's still hot.
And I don't know what to do.
I hurt so much and rage so much and all I can do is run on a treadmill.
And I still don't know what to do.
Kind of an action deadlock.
And they're counting on it.
...54, 55, 56, 57.
But I'd rather be like this than numb. I'm awake and I'm paying attention, and it makes my heart bleed.
It means I'm alive.
It means I'm sane.
And I've written.
Have you read?
.
And if you are like 57% of America, you'll stop reading now.
If that's you, then go now.
And don't come back.
Because I'm going to talk about what happened today, and I need someone who gives a damn. And if you don't, then what the fuck are you doing here anyway.
The video is at ogrish.com, among other places. Someone sent me the link when Eric Berg was beheaded.
This one affected me more than Eric Berg. It stuck with me all evening and wanted to write and didn't want to write; it all seemed so pointless and I felt so powerless.
As God would have it, I met a man named Matt at the Magnet web opening tonight who told me to write anyway. I'm glad he did. What was I thinking not to?
And so:
I was running at Crunch tonight. My legs were stretching and I was getting just the right pressure sensation heel to toe and great lift and it was flowing with ease, and it was up at 8.2 which is unusual for me for a 3 minute warmup but I was full of energy.
Full of Rage.
And I couldn't stop thinking of Eugene Armstrong and my roommate William. They were one face.
I saw the face of Eugene in the footage of his death. It was filmed with better clarity and sound than Eric Berg's, but the moment was just as simple. It was a task completed by three men. Just an activity that might occur like moving furniture or something that might require a little exhertion but was over pretty quickly. I guess afterward they probably rewound the tape and watched it to see how it turned out.
Eugene was blindfolded and in an orange jumpsuit. His hands were tied behind his back and he was kneeling. While a statement was being made by one of the other men in the room, he sort of nodded his head and twisted his body. I tried to figure those movements out.
What would provoke him to shuffle like that? What would I be thinking right then? Is it absurd for me even to wonder? Isn't it the kind of thing that only happens to other people? Or maybe to me, but only because I've done something to deserve it? Was that his perception too?
I thought he probably knew what was up, and it's as if he couldn't make up his mind to try to bolt or not. Could he even understand what the men were saying? What if it wasn't happening today? Maybe if he tried to run it would be worse, or if he just stayed still and did what he was told, it wouldn't happen at all. The indecision raced. It may have been panic.
Kind of an action deadlock.
Who really thinks what was going to happen would happen? He had to have kept his spirits up the last few days by hoping for his release or some other resolution. How do you accept the switch from that fervently held hope to the reality of your end?
The camera zoomed to his face and a hand took ahold of his hair and another pulled up on his chin. Eugene now knew the knife was coming; he had to have seen the video of Eric Berg on Al Jazeera if he'd been over there long. He scrunched his chin to his chest and tried to curl up as he was pushed to the floor. While a third hand tried to work the knife into the tight space between his chin and the orange fabric pressed to his chest, the hands holding his head tried to pull his chin up.
Eugene did his best to clench his neck down, but it didn't last long. You could tell he wanted to scream at the same time he wanted to clench his neck. He was saying something guttural and angry like "no" or maybe just a hard deep scream. Because his chin was being held up, his jaw was shut tight. But if he let go of the pressure of clenching his head down there'd be easier access to his neck.
If he let go, he wouldn't have time to say what he wanted desperately to say, the last thing his mind could think of to maybe, slimly, change the mind of the hand with the knife. Maybe it would be the angry indignant "no" by which any human would abide, right?
But his mind knew that wouldn't happen. So it kept his jaw clenched and gambled on that protection while trying to pursuade with the guttural noise.
Then his neck was exposed and blood was drawn. It was work to keep it exposed and so the hand with the knife moved quickly and forcefully back and forth. That's when the sound changed.
It reminded me of William.
It hurt. I pushed the buttons of the treadmill up from 8.2 to somewhere past nine, and focused out the window of Crunch past the backs of sculptures and friezes of solid, dead men on the exterior of the building. I looked further across Van Ness to nothing in particular.
What came to me about William was a few years ago. It was after one of his motorcycle spills. I had come home from work to see him on the sofa in a shredded red motorcycle jacket.
This was a time right after 2001 when his hours at work had been cut back and he was out all over town working these smaller gigs that weren't paying anything. Everything had gone wrong for him the last few months. Like totally fucking everything. Now he had somersaulted on an onramp near Potrero Hill. He couldn't afford a tow or a cab, so he pushed his broken bike under an overpass and walked from the highway to a bus stop. He didn't have insurance, so he didn't know what else to do and came home, sat on the sofa and turned on the TV.
He was badly banged up. His riding jacket and pants were ruined, one leg was almost entirely a bruise, his ribs were too sensitive to touch and the skin of his calf was grated.
He was acting like it was no big deal, but I told him he should go to a doctor. He told me he couldn't afford it and it'd be better in a little bit anyway. Then he changed the channel on the TV.
I looked at him for a minute. That's all he had, was the hope "that it would be better in a minute anyway". I knew he didn't have any money and he was behind on the bills. I knew his next paycheck was going to be even smaller than the last. The only thing he had of value was his ride to work and it was wrecked and hidden under an overpass across town. Things did not look good. And now it hurt to stand up.
So he sat on the sofa and watched other peoples' lives for a while, and said "it would be better in a minute anyway".
Kind of an action deadlock.
And I told him not to worry about the bills, that I make enough money and go to the ER at Davies and we'll worry about the cost later. And he said no no and I said yes yes and he thought about it for a minute, and you could tell he kinda let go and accepted the help and then he got all small and weak and he tried to stand up, just tried to lean into an upright sit, and then he whimpered.
And it was the kind of whimper that we've all done, where you wonder why this is happening and what did you do? What did you do wrong? And it's frustration too. And fear that it might not get better.
His eyes watered up but he didn't cry, and it was just for a minute that he made that noise and I had helped him up and he was carefully, slowly on his way, and he was back to himself. Banged up, but himself. That's all it took.
But for a moment he was a child. He was totally innocent.
And it isn't that Eugene made the same noise when it was a reality that the knife was passing his esophagus and the hot blood was pushing around his chin and chest and splashing more reality on his face and throat.
It was not the same noise.
But the quality was the same. The quality was so exactly the same I couldn't keep the two images from crashing together. It was the same child.
Eugene's angry, scared, mad "no" became a noise that said "this is real and I'm going to be hurt really bad and you have to stop it now guys or it's really really serious please!" and then it was a really desperate clenched high in the throat terrified scream of someone who knows help isn't coming and then it was a noise that was everything that was in William's tone and the two slammed together right then in my mind and I wanted to cry.
And replaying it in my head on the treadmill I did cry. I ran and I sweated and I cried. Quietly, so no one would notice. Tears. Sweat. Running.
My parents call a person who did what I did for William "A Bleeding Heart".
They don't mean it like a compliment.
Eugene needed a whole country of Bleeding Hearts.
There are 43% of them. Not 57%.
Did that math go through his mind? Probably not. There were probably a lot of other thoughts running through his head in those last moments.
Probably he wondered what the fuck he was doing there. He probably wanted to be home.
Was he even a nice guy? I don't know. He was a child for a second, though. He had the same common denominator as me, you and William.
There was a woman the other day who took a plain T shirt, probably a Hanes or maybe a Beefy T and printed "President Bush You Killed My Son" on it. I don't know if she did it with markers, or if maybe she went to one of those T Shirt places in the mall, but she did it.
Her son was dead, and she made a T shirt.
His name was Seth. He died in February in Iraq.
What are you gonna do? She put it on, went to see Laura Bush give a campaign speech and started shouting questions at her. I don't know what they were. I don't know that it really matters.
I mean, what if she was yelling for the square root of pi? What if she wanted to know how many licks it takes to get the center of a Tootsie Roll Fucking Tootsie Pop?
Her son is dead. He blew up diffusing a bomb.
Console her.
The crowd drowned her out by shouting "four more years".
Four more years.
Laura didn't stop to acknowledge her. She didn't even change her speech. The speech mentioned 911 several times and the successful campaign in Iraq.
Successful.
911 and Iraq have nothing to do with each other.
Fox News no longer provides reasons for the war, but has lately been running a number of articles on the amount of cash Saddam was funneling out of the oil for food program, and somehow that money funneled through the same places Al Qaeda money funneled. So that's the connection to Al Qaeda, and therefore Saddam represented a threat.
Oh.
I wonder where the Carlysle group keeps it's money? Probably not the same place. Well, not the Bush money anyway. The Bin Laden money probably runs through the same houses. But they are no longer the news. Iraq is the news. Mostly.
Seth's mom was arrested and charged with "defiant trespass" and released.
She had a ticket to the speech.
This isn't how I was raised.
Why is this happening? Where is America?
George Bush says "Freedom is on the march".
Why was it Eugene? Why was it Eric? I guess it'll be Jack Hensley next.
This was shit and I was tired of these same circles in my mind and I had already ramped the buttons on the treadmill down to 5 something. Then realized I couldn't run at all anymore and I hit "cool down". Cool down takes you to a nice walk timed for a few minutes. You don't have to think about anything because it stops itself and you can just catch your breath and feel good about your run.
I pressed a towel to my face. I wasn't crying anymore, but that just meant I was mad again. Those were my options this evening.
It was dark behind my towel; dark as a blindfold.
I would like to trade Laura Bush for Jack.
I mean, somebody has to die for freedom, right? Why not Laura? In Jack's photo there's a small child. Laura's children are grown. Sort of.
Now I'm just being silly.
What has Laura done? What would she even be doing over there?
Why isn't she over there?
Or at least why isn't she consoling Seth's mom?
What if she really, really, really gave these absurd questions some thought? Would it break her? Would it make that child come out?
Just suppose, in a topsy turvy world, if she did go and Jack came back, and George saw the video of Laura's child come out.
Laura would make the same noise as Jack. Of that I am certain.
Would George cry, or would he think about his own neck?
I wonder.
And suburbia. Would suburbia get it then?
When does that levee break?
And do you get it? That slim chance that you who didn't get it at the start is still reading... do you get it?
Can you put away the Swift Boats and the Flip Flops and the Freedom Fries and the price of oil... oil that is speeding it's way down a brand new pipeline right across Afghanistan...
Can you see it's not about any of that individually but about all of that at once and so much power it should make a sane man's head explode?
But it hasn't.
But there's a severed one sitting on a body that's still hot.
And I don't know what to do.
I hurt so much and rage so much and all I can do is run on a treadmill.
And I still don't know what to do.
Kind of an action deadlock.
And they're counting on it.
...54, 55, 56, 57.
But I'd rather be like this than numb. I'm awake and I'm paying attention, and it makes my heart bleed.
It means I'm alive.
It means I'm sane.
And I've written.
Have you read?
.