Carmen Lacherza

December 3, 2003

Final Portfolio

"My Blues"

In a deep and raspy voice sanity is a full time job blares and crackles from ten-year-old speakers mounted above my head. I lie on my bed and shift to avoid the sun’s dusk glare. I close my eyes and fantasize in an unadulterated silliness; it is the rapture of pretending to live my life the way I want to. The realization that I have the winning lottery ticket, seeing my soon to be formed band on a stage with hundreds of people chanting my name, and having a drink with the girl with the long hair in my psychology class all flow through my mind as vividly as walking through the woods on a warm fall day. Each fantasy hops from one to another at supersonic speeds, without consult from, or care for, me. If I could only live in my mind’s eye!

I break myself from my chimera and tell myself that I do not have time for such joy. I slide off my bed. There is work that needs to be done, but I am without inspiration. No great epiphanies have come to me as I fall asleep, and no witty conversations have spurred me with ideas. Even my little tricks no longer work. I try watching my Noam Chomsky DVD. Nothing. I pull out my CD case and search. I decide on CarmOrama Vol. 3: The Best of Bad Religion, the favorite of all my mixes. I place it in the rickety tray and set it to random.

Still nothing. This is obviously pointless, so I’m going to go out.

It is now thirteen hours later and I think I have something to say. I turn my stereo back on, look at a few things I have scribbled on a napkin, and prepare to tell my story.

I decided to go to meet two friends, Jimmy and Adam. Both of them live at William Patterson, so it was about an hour drive from my house. It was a good time to work things out in my head, but the attempts at synthesizing any kind of thoughts were without germination.

I arrived at William Patterson around eight o’clock. Jimmy greeted me just outside the lobby with a smile and a cigarette. As in usual fashion, he yelled, "What the fuck is up man!" We could be on a bus filled with nuns and school children, and he would still say, "What the fuck is up man!" Jimmy is tall, has thick black rimmed glasses and always wanted to be a politician. He frequents local democratic conventions and reads The New York Times everyday. When he talks about being president, he always mentions that I would have to kill Adam because "he knows to much", then he would appoint me ambassador to some beautiful island. Just like every other night we go out, he was wearing his Ask Me About Updog shirt. Sadly, no one ever asked him about Updog. We embraced in a handshake, he dropped his cigarette, and we walked inside.

After going through the overnight procedure, we headed up the loud silver elevator to Adam’s room. I busted through the door to a myriad of cheers and belated happy birthdays. The room had the familiar smell of cheap beer and cigarettes. I did my rounds of hellos and sat on the couch next to Adam. Adam is the smartest person I ever met. We came up with a game plan for the evening: go to the Shepard Inn with Jimmy, then meet up with everyone else later. The patron saint of The Shepard is Jack Kerouac. To myself, I excused the night of binge drinking ahead as an evocation of the muse.

I pushed the heavy oak door of the Shepard open. It was dark and smoky. The yellow lights reflected off the red furniture to produce an aura of deep magenta around everything. A few men sat at the far end of the bar wearing pipefitter union shirts. A florescent jukebox flashed in the corner of my eye. It was perfect.

After ordering, we sat down and began to talk. What developed from common chat turned into the reason we live: the great conversation. It was the kind of conversation that swells and twists and grabs you by the throat and caresses you at the same time. It is where we form all great bonds. It is rare a marketplace of insight. It was the kind of conversation that hops instinctively from one topic to the next. Religion, friendship, and politics all flow around truth like dolphins following a ship with no destination.

As Adam took a sip of his double chocolate stout, I heard a woman behind me talk about how she stubbed her toe this morning. Jimmy spouted off about how he didn’t want to see Rudy Guiliani speak next month and amidst his proof slammed his hand against the table three times, each time spilling a little bit of my beer. I watched Adam watch Jimmy. I shifted to my left, ruining the perfect right triangle we were sitting in. No longer feeling the need to fulfill the Pythagorean theorem, my head bobbed back and forth between the two.

"Jimmy, you are going to be one terrible politician."

"Why, because I stand for what I believe in?"

"No, because you only listen to what you want to hear."

"I already know what he is going to say and don’t want to waste my time."

"At very least you need to know your enemy."

In a few sentences, Adam explained what was wrong with American politics. All politicians put up barbed wire fences called party lines. They are looking for a victory for their cause, but what they can not see is there are no victors. There are only winners in sports, with everything else there is just change. Politics have turned into another bad religion. They are another group of automatons blindly following a set of rules set by a falsely omnipotent power. Usually, democrats religiously follow other democrats and republicans do not question other republicans. Criticism has become only a tool to promote the home party. It is them against us; to the winner goes the spoils: money, praise, a place in history. Adam didn’t know how to fix the problem and really didn’t seem to care. After about five minutes Jimmy conceded with, "Your right Adam, totally right."

"God… damn… stupid CD". I. I. I. Annoyance shoots from the back of my brain to my fingertips while obscenities fly out my mouth. I. I. I. I pick up my shoe from underneath my desk and throw it at my stereo. It makes a weird noise and starts the next song.

I left the booth to buy another round and think about what I just heard. There was something more to what Adam said. What he was talking about went beyond politics and he knew it. It was why he didn’t care how to fix the problem. We all put ourselves in boxes covered with labels. We need to define ourselves, sometimes in great simplicity and sometimes with great introspect. But all it does is hold us back. I can call myself an English major and then see how much I have in common with all the other English majors. For anything other than self-gratification and to prove you aren’t that different from everyone else, what is it good for? It is the same as calling myself a comedian, a philosopher, and a musician. It adds a neutrality to me, and detracts from who I really am.

I paid the bearded bartender ten dollars and grabbed the three black beers. The now faceless voice that earlier in the day talked about how the United States always has to have an enemy slid into my consciousness. Without a them, there would be no us. But really there is no difference between them and us. I bumped into a beautiful woman who gave me an ugly look. The only person one can really know is the self. We can draw border lines or personality lines or ethical lines, but we are all here and have no place to go. The only purpose the line serves is to hide the other side.

I arrived back at the table and divided up the booty. Adam was telling Jimmy about the paper he had to do on Aristotle’s group of lectures called "The Nichomachian Ethics". Adam was using his hands to talk. That is how I know when Adam is drunk. He nodded at me as I sat down and continued his conversation. "So you have this guy who goes into crazy detail about the what the good man is, how he should get there, and what is good really is. It’s all very self-orientated, you know? Then, at the end, there are three books of him talking about friendship. You can talk all day about that existential bullshit, how you are alone in the universe. But, sometimes you just need a pat on the back." He looked at me. "It’s just that I know, right now, that Carmen and Jimmy aren’t going to screw me over. Sometimes that’s enough."

I guess lines aren’t all bad.

Then there was a lull in the conversation; there always is in great conversations like these. I used to think of them of breaks, but now I think of them as soaking up periods. If the conversation keeps flowing, that is all it does, and nothing is gained. Adam got up and went to the bathroom. Jimmy and I talked about the Mets.

When he came back, I decided that the bathroom would be a really great place to be right then. I stumbled a bit getting up. The walk of ten feet became an Odyssey. Perhaps not an Odyssey, but definitely an adventure. I took three steps and the beautiful woman gave me another ugly look. I took two more steps. Some old man looked at me and mumbled something about how his wife left him last week. I told him I was sorry and took five more steps. Then, this man put his hand on my shoulder. He was wearing a light blue shirt, dark blue tie, and darker blue pants. It like looked instead of going to work; he decided go straight to the bar.

"I haven’t seen you around here before," he said in a fast and squeaky voice.

"Yea, I’m fresh."

"I’ve got a question for you."

"Shoot."

"Do you know Jesus?"

"Yea, I heard of him."

"No, I mean do really know him."

"I’m assuming you do?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

"Here, there is something I want to show you."

"I’m just trying to take a piss man, leave me alone."

He gave me a look uglier than the beautiful woman. I took two steps back, and slid into the bathroom. I was in ecstasy in my aloneness. I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed the blemishes on my face and the spot I missed shaving. I was humming a Bad Religion song. I then took inventory of the drivel written on the walls. The "NO DIVING SHALLOW WATER" sticker on the toilet caught my eye. I washed my hands and splashed some water on my face to prepare myself for public.

I stepped out of the bathroom and walked up to the bar. I threw my last three dollars down and received another black beer. The lights hanging from the ceiling glimmered off of the sides of the glass. I returned to the booth with a smile. Jimmy and Adam were staring at the table. I caught Adam’s attention. "Yo, I was thinking," I said, then began to explain to him what I thought about Bad Religion. He is the only person who would understand. "So there are some guys from California who play in a band no one knows. Greg (the lead singer and writer) has impacted my thought more than Emerson, Descartes, and all my professors combined." Adam nodded. "I mean, he’s just some guy, not a huge intellectual or anything. You know what I think it is? He has insight. I mean most of the time I’m pretty close to the politics and all, but I just think he has insight. That’s all I’m looking for, you know?"

Adam knew.

Then Adam said, "It just sucks that you could never email him and thank him."

"I know."

I did know, but I didn’t know why.

Jimmy was quiet.

I’m not sure how, but the conversation then shifted. I was talking about all the recent sadness in my life. I told them everything, all the loss, all the death, all the helplessness. They both just listened to my whole thing. When I was done there was about a minute of silence. I looked at both of them and they weren’t speechless; they were thinking. Then Adam explained to me the greatest insight of the night. "Sometimes you’re supposed to be sad. It all part of being human, you know? I mean be content with your self and all but don’t cheat yourself by being happy all the time. It’s just like that song from the album everyone hates, ‘If your only goal is peace and love, you’ll end up discarding most of what you’re made of.’ It’s not even you can’t appreciate happiness without sadness. The sadness is an entity of itself." The neurons were exploding in my brain.

"But Adam, there is no reason for suffering. Why do we need it?"

"You know why."

He was right and Jimmy was still quiet.

"You see, Carmen," Adam said, "it’s all about integrity. When things are fucked up, I need to know that it’s not all my fault. You got to…"

The phone rings. I am startled from my computer daze and turn down the music. I make the stretch from my computer chair to the phone perpendicular to my desk. It feels good to move other body parts besides my fingers. The Caller ID shows my best friend Dave’s name. I answer with a "what it is" and close the window I have been living through for so many hours.

I sit back down in my cushy leather chair and about twenty hours have passed. I wanted to come back earlier, but I felt Sonny’s Blues and Conan O’Brien were much better for me. I crank the stereo back up, this time much louder than last night.

Wait, no love songs today. Definitely, no love songs today. I hit skip on my remote.

That’s much better.

Dave called me because he needed help on his philosophy paper. He was reading Descartes’ Meditations; I guess this is the prevailing idea among most of my friends: you think philosophy, you think Carmen. I’m not sure if I like that. I explained to him what the Great Deceiver was, and why he doesn’t exist. He seemed to really understand it better. The conversation then moved to our lives. We both were pretty depressed about the way everything turned out the last twenty years. We talked about coping and how important cigarettes and video games are to the process. As we talked, I realized how important a bond like we have is. Dave didn’t have to say everything that was going on; I knew. I thought about what Adam said about friendship. It is so much more than a pat on the back and having trust. It is a weightless mass that follows me everywhere I go. It is that I will never be alone. It is about seeing through and looking in.

Adam went on about integrity for what seemed like an hour, but probably only was ten minutes. He had another epic conversation a few days earlier with his uncle. His uncle was a homicide detective for thirty years. When Adam asked him why he would subject himself to such horrific sites everyday he said, "Someone has to do it." This is what it means to fit into society. Each person, each piece of the puzzle, has to "do it", and everyone knows what "it" is. That is what integrity is, but it is not done for other people; it is done for the self. I’m not afraid of going to Hell, and I still don’t give a damn of what people think of me, or at least I try not to.

I lean back in my chair and yawn. I think back to a couple of months ago. I tried to put myself through some sort of self-purification ritual. I tried to be a great person, but I had it all wrong. I don’t have to be a great person; I have to be a good person. I don’t have to be happy, I have to be content. I need regrets and mistakes.

As with all great conversations, it ended on reflection back on the conversation. We talked about how much we needed things like this, but we didn’t know why. We then thought about what made a conversation great. "It’s all about knowing what to say and when. You got to pick your battles know when to shut up," Adam said. I was looking at the ceiling. I figured this out of couple of hours ago but never thought it. "That’s right," I said, "Especially when you know everyone around you is outspoken and smart, saying nothing is just as important as saying something." Jimmy raised his fist like Billy Idol and said, "Exactly."

Right after he said that the lights dimmed. The bartender said, "Go the fuck home," with a smile. We were the only ones left. I looked at my watch. It was hard to make out, but I think it said one o’clock. I looked at Adam.

"Weren’t we supposed to meet everyone else like four hours ago?"

"Ah, they’ll understand."

"Your right."

We walked out the door and back into the real world. I could see my breath even before I lit my cigarette.

I feel pleased with what I have said. Then, I turn up the volume on my stereo till the windows shake.

* All lyrics are written by Greg Graffin and/or Brett Gurewitz from the albums "Generator", "New America", "No Substance", "No Control", "Suffer", and "Tested".