Everything You've Ever Wanted To Know About Taking Me Out For A Drink But Were Afraid To Ask

Identity

A restaurant bar is not a bar, it's a restaurant, albeit the portion of the restaurant that is dedicated to the most important aspect of a night out: drinking. Nothing kills the good vibes of tying one on more than being surrounded by organized groups of talkative, bubbly people focused on nutrition, aka eaters. Such venues convey the sense that drinking is something you do only to kill time before eating or an amusing novelty to be breezed through shortly thereafter and not a desirable activity in it's own right lest you bare the shameful stigma of an alcoholic - a buzz killing paradigm if there ever was one. No one who is serious about a particular endeavor wants to feel like they are an afterthought, appendage, or necessary evil parasitically hanging on to the fringes of some other core activity. I don't particularly like bars that try to serve food either. Whenever I see an eater at the bar itself, sitting on a barstool, etc. I find myself resisting the urge to hand them a map of local restaurants, places that cater to people who eat so that next time there might be more room for drinkers with whom I might share drinks. The only food that should be at a bar should be pickled and dangerous looking; heavily salted peanuts being the only exception.

Noise

The miracle of alcohol is its ability to reliably open up blocked chakras so that the inebriant can see and feel outside of the box of normal waking consciousness and consequently establish a deeper, more meaningful relationship with both himself and others. The audible volume of a drinking establishment, usually determined by the music and/or the chatter of patrons, is inversely proportional to one's ability to appreciate or utilize alcohol's finest gifts. Hence live music (with it's amplification equipment) and the concophany of crowds are often incompatible with professional medicators, such as myself, on a quest for proper medication. At the other end of the spectrum, however, is dead silence - an equally abhorrent condition that can make it almost impossible for people to open up to each other for fear of being overheard by unwitting eavesdroppers. The ideal level of background noise in a bar falls somewhere in between these two extremes, erring toward the quieter side when in doubt for it is usually easier to create more noise when needed than it is to be rid of noise once it has already established itself. Suffice it to say that if I have to shout straight into someone's ear just to tell them I love them or ask for a light then someone better be paying for my drinks and polishing my knob before the evening's end.

Service

A drinking establishment isn't worth much if you can't get served drinks. This condition is most often created by a low server to drinker ratio - forgivable but not easily tolerated. Some bars however - even "proper" bars e.g. bars that aren't catering to eaters - are simply indifferent to the desires (and, in my case, needs) of their libation craving patrons. But I'm thirsty and not concerned with the underlying causes of this condition; I'm interested only in showing people how to identify its various manifestations so that corrective measures can be made - such as changing venues. They are as follows:

A) You can't get a dust cutter (your first drink) within two or three minutes. Prompt service on the first drink, just like most first impressions, is particularly important because it establishes confidence that you'll be properly taken care of throughout the evening. Five minutes is an eternity for the sweet relief of something as simple as a cold draft ale and causes worry about drinking the first round too quickly because god knows how long it's going to take to get served the second round - maybe it will take ten minutes......or fifteen! I might as well have stayed at home where I can nurse myself with a keg and an IV drip.

B) You're standing or sitting right by the beer taps, cash in hand, and wanting only a pint of Guinness while the bartender chats up other patrons who already have their damn drinks. A socially adept bartender is a wonderful thing, but not nearly as wonderful as a fresh pint of Guinness and the company of those you may have brought with you who patiently await the return of your full attention.

And a major service faux pas that must be mentioned: A rare but extraordinarily offensive maneuver wherein the bartender tips himself out of the money you gave him for drinks. That's almost as bad as not being able to smoke.

Oxygen

I've been nearly heartbroken over pubs that were perfect in almost every regard except that breathing was consider a luxury that everyone could temporarily live without while they tied one on. Most often, and somewhat ironically, this is caused by smokers smoking their smokes. But before you brand me with the hypocrite label consider this: There are three kinds of cigarette smoke:

A) the smoke that comes from the filtered end of cigarettes

B) the smoke that drifts off the lit end

C) the smoke that's been exhaled

Guess which one the smoker is exclusively interested in breathing? That's right. Smokers aren't interested in inhaling their own second hand smoke any more than you are - perhaps more tolerant of it, but still pretty much done with the smoke once it's already been in their lungs. Which means virtually no one would complain about a smoke friendly established providing some sort of ventilation when needed. In fact, as a smoker, I'm even more reliant on whatever clean air I can get into my poor, tortured lungs in between puffs and entire cigarettes.

Alas, the less astute proprietors of some smoke friendly establishments become numb to the stagnant, noxious clouds of incinerated tobacco. A few even seem to have some bizarre, almost subconscious aversion to providing a remedy even if just opening a window or turning on a fan would suffice. A request for relief will often get you labeled as a whiner or wimp of some sort..... as if your willingness to masochistically deprive yourself of clean air were somehow a measure of your machismo and virility.

Hence a venue with alternate outdoor seating is sometimes an excellent solution but one has to be wary of a whole new class of problems that this can introduce: seating discomfort, poorer service, weather elements, less ambience, less intimacy, etc.

Value

Booze is relatively cheap, especially purchased in large commercial volumes. An establishment with lots of frills, Italian marble counter tops, gold plated goblets, located on high-priced land, and trying to feature things to make the drinks more enjoyable such as strippers, bands, DJs, etc. has to mark up the booze to cover expenses. I don't need most of this crap and some of it - as I've touched on above - just gets in the way. When I go out for drinks I'm trying to accomplish just a few very distinct things:

1) getting relaxed, then buzzed, then comfortably inebriated

2) meditating on the mysteries of life

3) having enjoyable, friendly, and inspiring conversation in the pursuit of self-knowledge and intimacy with others

4) flirting, romancing and maybe getting laid

All of this together doesn't require more than a booze stocked bar, a place to sit, someone who can make drinks and pour beer, an ashtray, a juke box, and some oxygen. Pretty damn simple. If you're feeling fancy then throw in some candles and some mirrors. Unless you're in New York City this should keep the pints of Guinness under $5.00, although I've had them recently for as little as $2.50 in a satisfactory establishment.

Accessibility

Nothing ruins a night out drinking like getting popped for OWI and spending the night in a cold cell while your disgruntled significant other scrambles to bail you out. The ideal bar is equipped with teleportation devices but until we catch up with Star Trek it's great if you're drinking right next door to where you intend on going to sleep. Although a nice long stroll toward home can be quite medicinal and even give you a second wind for additional after-hours socializing which is sometimes the most memorable part of an evening.

If walking isn't practical then sometimes a well-intended friend will offer to be the designated driver, or some such thing. My concern here is that I end up stuck in the company of a bored-looking thumb twiddler all evening who constantly appears to be getting ready to leave and who indeed is much more likely to want to leave at any given point in time since they aren't drinking! When I go to an amusement park with a friend I expect them to get on the rides with me, scream and laugh as the wind whips through our hair and our bodies get crushed into each other by centrifugal force, not stand around looking at their watch while I go whizzing by on Satan's Triple Loop Thunderbolt Revenge. Just fuckin' go home and I'll hitch a ride back with someone that wants to be here.

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So let's review. The ultimate waste of time would be to invite me to clank beer mugs together with you in a loud, crowded, remote, needlessly expensive, non-smoking, food serving bar full of "eaters" attached to a restaurant with only one indifferent, chatty, tip stealing bartender assigned to handle everyone's orders, strippers trying to hit me up for a lap dance, and the only thing anyone wants to discuss is sports and cars. You might as well ask me if I'd like to have my teeth pulled out with a rusty pair of pliers. 

At the other end of the spectrum would be a quaint, moderately populated, smoke friendly, well ventilated pub right next door to my sleeping quarters with nothing to eat but salty, pickled turkey guts and hard boiled eggs floating around in dusty vats of vinegar, well regulated juke music, and $3.00 pints of Guinness brought expediently by one or two happy, service oriented bartenders to either my bar stool or my candle-lit nook where strangers openly discuss the pressing issues of our times and wax philosophical about everything under the sun and, if I happen to be single, invite me to have copious amounts of sex with their women.  

Cheers.

Holidays

Ultimate Idiocy

Ultimate fighting has now become a favored sport of children as young as six. Problem? Well, maybe.

As someone who worries about the general pussyfication of the male population of the US I'm certainly not opposed to children learning how to defend themselves, but can we expect an impressionable first grader, who spends his recreational time immobilizing his peers with painful wrestling holds so that he can pound them into submission, to grow up to be a peaceful, rational, good-humored adult? Or are we creating some new breed of demented nutcase whose relationship to the world around him is subconsciously mired in violence.

Back in Fairfield there's a small gaggle of idiots who have delved into this sport in their teens or early twenties apparently as some sort of compensation for their lack of ability to read, write, and generate original, constructive thoughts from the modern myriad of complex sensory inputs that inundate the average human every day. There's nothing particularly charming about them, nor does one get the sense that they would use their newly discover machismo to do anything noble such as defend the innocent and vulnerable against the jaded and belligerent. After all how would such risky, selfless behavior help them win their next match? In fact they seem much more like the type one would find oneself in need of protection from. In the bars they remind me of an old t-shirt slogan: "Instant asshole. Just add alcohol."

And what is this crap about ultimate fighting being a "mixed martial art"? Mixed with what? Gay snuff porn? All I see are two Spartan queers, frozen in a contorted embrace with their noses buried in each other's armpits for what seems like an eternity while trying to smash each other in the head. It's reminiscent of those tasteless Chinese gladiator fights between arthropods e.g. emperor scorpion versus rose hair tarantula, where the two multi-legged opponents circle each other for ten minutes then both pounce into a stagnate tangle of appendages until one dies of the other's venom. And I make this comparison at the risk of insulting arthropods who are involuntarily thrust into these sadistic situations, rarely drink, and are probably not repressing latent homosexuality.

Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Steven Seagal.....that's martial arts, not this Brazilian jiu-jitsu / grappling / taint-sniffing bullshit. If you're going to entertain me by beating the shit out of someone then you need to be launching your caterwauling ass six feet into the air with a triple roundhouse back flip and landing on your opponent's chest with both feet. If I want to watch two burly, sweat-soaked rednecks hump each other I'll install spy cams in the RNC's bathroom facilities.

But back to the children.

All other points aside, isn't there something just instinctively wrong about encouraging six-year-olds to do anything they can to hurt each other as long as it doesn't involve eye gouging or trachea crushing? Maybe it's just me.

Trolling On A Sunday Afternoon

Me: Iraq vet rapes 3 month old so hard that he breaks 17 of her bones and gives her brain damage.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331372,00.html

MrBBonz:  While I can agree that this is very very horrible. This type of thing does happen in every country by every group of people. It isnt based on religeon/nation or any thing like that. So for you to try to paint a picture that all American vets are like this is ignorant. I can just as easily post a story about a muslim doing this, or an african, or euro. Any group will do this type of thing. 

Me:  Perhaps. But not as much as american war vets. The US is number 1 in the world when it comes to rape in general:  http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap-crime-rapes 

MrBBonz:  Well, one reason for that is that the US is third in population. So that is going to weigh in a little on that graph. I didnt even see china in there though. Maybe I missed it. At any rate, that proves very little, all it shows is what I said earlier. Any group will do it. 100 people do it once 1000 do it 10 times. The math is about right.

Me:  No, the math is not "about right". The rapes per capita list has us at number 9 out of 190 countries with several times more rape per capita than the vast majority of all the countries that rank beneath us. 

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_rap_percap-crime-rapes-per-capita

The only country that is substantially worse than the US, in this regard, is South Africa, a colony of our closest ally. Pretty sad.

Superdude: Ha, Canada is number 5. Statically speaking your more likly to be raped in Canada then in the US.

Me:  Statistically speaking you're more likely to be raped in the US than you are in 95% of all other countries. At least Canada doesn't run all over the world waving the "we're number 1" foam finger.

MrBBonz:  But you see, the US is the best country in the world overall. Yes you can line up other countries in some individual catagories. But on those same countries try an overall comparison. We beat EVERYONE... That is why everyone wants to come and live here.

Me:  Overall comparison between Norway and US:

Literacy: Norway better than US
Poverty: Norway better than US
Life expectancy: Norway better than US
Infant Mortality Rate: Norway better than US
Pollution: Norway better than US
Murder: Norway better than US
Rape: Norway better than US
Life Satisfaction: Norway better than US
Happiness Level: Norway better than US

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_lit_tot_pop-education-literacy-total-population 
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_pop_bel_pov_lin-economy-population-below-poverty-line
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_lif_exp_at_bir_tot_pop-life-expectancy-birth-total-population 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate_(2005) 
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lif_lif_sat-lifestyle-life-satisfaction 
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lif_hap_lev_not_ver_or_not_at_all_hap-level-not-very-all-happy
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_pol_car_dio_fro_fos_fue_200-carbon-dioxide-fossil-fuels-2000 

Overall? Norway better than US.

Aspire:  Military? GNP? etc..... Kind of selective aren't you? We are used to that from you though.
Your Canadian, right? Why do you hate the US so much?

MrBBonz:  Funny how we still have the biggest and best military, and have the most money by far over any other country.

Me: My next door neighbor's gun is bigger than mine and he uses it to rob everyone else in our neighborhood so that he has the most money. I guess he's better than me.

Me:  Norway doesn't need a trillion dollar military to force it's will upon the world because they don't suck like the US does and are relatively well liked. Having a ridiculously bloated military is more of a sign of having serious problems with your society than it is of being "good" or better than everyone else.

And just because a nation of only 4.5 million people doesn't have the GNP of a nation with 300 million that means they suck?  How about a MEANINGFUL comparison like gross national income per capita?

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gro_nat_inc_percap-gross-national-income-per-capita 

Norway > US

MrBBonz:  How often is Norway called upon to help others in the world like the US is?

Me:  My neighbor, who actually lives 10 miles away, got in an argument with his wife. So I drove over there, kicked the door in, handed them both switch blades, smashed up the place, killed their two kids, and ran off with their valuables while they sliced each other to ribbons. My neighbors are always inviting me over to help.

Me:  So....back to the baby raping.

Justice 4 all:  Raping a 3 month old baby? What the fcuk is wrong with Americans?

John Stark:  Don't worry, unlike sweden where such things are virtually legalized, this person will be punished if found guilty.

Me:  Then released on parole to make cell space for a medical marijuana user.

John Stark:  Wanna wager that he doesn't get relaesed on parole?

Me:  Sure. I wager eleventy gazillion.

MrBBonz:  How many people in the world does the US feed, give medicine to?

Me:  A hell of a lot less than they murder, starve, rob, and send into turmoil..... under the guise of "helping" them. My neighbors were growing their own organic food and breast feeding their healthy children without paying me a dime. So I kicked their door in, forced them to buy my GMO seeds and my poisonous baby formula then shot their backyard up with depleted uranium and buried a few land mines. Thank god for my food and medical assistance.

MrBBonz: Ah, yes. Africa the breadbasket of the world sure has been under tons of attack from the US. Same with asia. I think it would be funny if the US stopped ALL aid to ALL countries. What would the outcry sound like?

Cloud Strife:  Africa is not the breadbasket of anything.

Me:  Whereas the US is the bread basket of GMOs, divorce, antidepressants, illiteracy, and, most recently, prosthetics.

Me: We're the 5th fattest in the world also:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mor_obe_percap-mortality-obesity-per-capita 
So we're basically a nation of lard asses and rapists struggling to find the pacific ocean on a map and write at a 4th grade level while we remain less literate than Guam, North Korea, and Kazakhstan. All the while vigorously insisting that the USA is the greatest country in the world.

Mexicantornado:  Quit trying to make America look bad. When you have a country as large as ours your going to have slums and very bad parts of society.

Me:  I'm hardly "trying". Quit trying to make it look like a utopian paradise when it clearly is not - especially when compared to other industrialized nations.

MrBBonz:  The US is the lone super power in the world. Military and economy crowns belong to the US.

Me: 19 hungover muslims armed with nothing but boxcutters destroyed our world trade center and took 3000 american casualties in the process thus establishing a decisive victory in the battle of 9/11. Doesn't sound like much of a "world power" to me.

And 72 trillion dollars in the hole along with being a debtor nation to places like Mexico doesn't sound very powerful to me either. So much for the economic crown.

MrBBonz:   https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2186rank.html
Unless I am reading that list wrong, it shows norway with more debt than the US per %.  I also see ALOT of countries with more debt in terms of %.

Me:  I thought you wanted to look at OVERALL comparisons not just single categories.

Overall comparison between Norway and US:

Literacy: Norway better than US 
Poverty: Norway better than US
Life expectancy: Norway better than US
Infant Mortality Rate: Norway better than US 
Pollution: Norway better than US
Murder: Norway better than US
Rape: Norway better than US
Life Satisfaction: Norway better than US
Happiness Level: Norway better than US

and.......National income per capita: Norway better than US

Hot Rod: What is your fixation with Norway?

Me: MrBBonz said that USA was number one OVERALL if you looked at a broad range of categories. I arbitrarily picked Norway to show him that he was wrong. I could have picked any one of a dozen or so countries to show that he is completely full of crap on this.

Why don't you ask MrBBonz what his fixation with the USA is all about since statistically it falls way beneath many other countries on many categories and is clearly NOT the best overall....or even the 2nd or 3rd or 4th best, etc. etc.

MrBBonz: You didnt pick a country out of anywhere. You picked a tiny nation (smaller than our states) and compared it to the US.

Me:  Norway 125,004 square miles

New Mexico 121,593 square miles
Arizona 114,006 square miles
Nevada 110,567 square miles
Colorado 104,100 square miles
Oregon 98,386 square miles
Wyoming 97,818 square miles
Michigan 96,810 square miles
Minnesota 86,943 square miles
Utah 84,904 square miles
Idaho 83,574 square miles
Kansas 82,282 square miles
Nebraska 77,358 square miles
South Dakota 77,121 square miles
Washington 71,303 square miles
North Dakota 70,704 square miles
Oklahoma 69,903 square miles
Missouri 69,709 square miles
Florida 65,758 square miles
Wisconsin 65,503 square miles
Georgia 59,441 square miles
Illinois 57,918 square miles
Iowa 56,276 square miles
New York 54,475 square miles
North Carolina 53,821 square miles
Arkansas 53,182 square miles
Alabama 52,423 square miles
State Area Ranking Area (square miles, including water)
Louisiana 51,843 square miles
Mississippi 48,434 square miles
Pennsylvania 46,058 square miles
Ohio 44,828 square miles
Virginia 42,769 square miles
Tennessee 42,146 square miles
Kentucky 40,411 square miles
Indiana 36,420 square miles
Maine 35,387 square miles
South Carolina 32,007 square miles
West Virginia 24,231 square miles
Maryland 12,407 square miles
Hawaii 10,932 square miles
Massachusetts 10,555 square miles
Vermont 9,615 square miles
New Hampshire 9,351 square miles
New Jersey 8,722 square miles
Connecticut 5,544 square miles
Delaware 1,954 square miles
Rhode Island 1,545 square miles

MrBBonz: But how much world influence does your norway have compared to the US.

Me: How much influence do they NEED to have? And I thought we were comparing how good nations are overall, not how much world bullying they engage in to get their selfish way with everything.

Worcester:  So when are you moving to Norway?

Me: Why do you hate Norway so much?

Montgomery

It’s Alabama, 1973, and I’m eight-years-old. My recently acquired stepfather was in the Air Force and had been re-stationed from East St. Louis to Montgomery. He, my mother, and I moved into an apartment on the white suburban outskirts and I was immediately assigned to an inner-city grade school in the disgruntled black ghetto – an assignment I would later understand to be the result of the federally mandated desegregation/forced busing program of the civil rights era. One bus-load of lower-income white kids were to be bussed in daily to a large, dilapidated brick structure in the middle of hell, but, at the tender age of eight, I hadn’t had the opportunity to form any cognitions about the distressing scenario I was being forced into. So, on my first day, I arrived as innocently as one would expect at the doorsteps of a socio-educational abomination.

As we filed off of the bus on a cold and dreary Monday morning I took notice of a towering, leafless tree arching menacingly toward my new alma mater ejecting flocks of blackbirds that would circle near the top of the school building then reassemble along the power lines and ledges chirping excitedly in a sadistic celebration my new enslavement. No one took much notice of us as this tiny influx of white children had been routine for a couple of years prior. No national guard had been required nor had there ever been protests or blockades of angry black citizens demanding that “whitey go home” presumably because this side of the forced desegregation formula was perceived to be a great potential boon to the educational and economic status of southern blacks – and perhaps it would prove to be just that but only through the involuntary sacrifice of lower income white children from the low rent burbs.

We were absorbed into a river of several hundred black youth. My white entourage didn’t seem very concerned about what, to me, looked like a fairly serious predicament. But then again my previous peers in other grade schools always seemed much more excited about being warehoused like appliances all day than I did so the added stressors of a 50-1 ratio of black to white students, the conspicuous urban decay, and the badly neglected building in front of us bursting at its seems with gloom didn’t seem to impinge upon their delight. And apparently I was the only one among them who was seeing all of this for the first time. Still I remember becoming deeply suspicious of all of them even before we stepped through the cracked, graffiti covered, glass front doors propped open with what I imagined were the maggoty skulls of last year’s Caucasian imports.

I tensed up as we funneled inside and were directed down badly lit corridors to our assigned homerooms. Plaster hung from the walls and ceiling in places where pipes had burst or storms had blown rain in. It seemed everywhere that you looked you saw corroded plumbing, wiring, heating ducts or some other unsightly internals that you’d expect to be tastefully hidden from view for aesthetic reasons alone if not for the safety of occupants. What few windows there were started at about eye level, stretch up toward the vaulted ceilings, and were embedded with some sort of wire mesh. Between their sill height, the mesh, and the decades of soot, grime and bird feces that appeared to taint both sides of each pane it seemed implausible that anyone ever actually used them to see outside, not that there was probably anything pleasant outside to be seen. Cleaning them may have served only to expose the even deeper shame of what was occurring inside, and the funds for doing so were probably diverted to other commodities like chalk and pencils. Color was completely absent except for the few pathetic art paper projects tacked onto to a few cork boards or whatever they could be made to adhere to – a terribly feeble attempt to generate some sense of creative pride and accomplishment amongst a population of youth that almost certainly couldn’t have cared less.

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I was one of two or three whites in my homeroom, a statistical stroke of luck as far as I could tell from the general population, but this wouldn’t amount to much because there seemed to be an unspoken collective understanding that we (the very small white minority) were not there to intermingle with each other lest we risk the creation of yet another privileged subclass of crackers and once again disenfranched the black student body. Too many white people hanging out with too many other white people had been deemed as the root of all evil by unseen powers in Washington DC. The conscious intent behind this would become more apparent when we were broken into groups for various games and exercises but you’d never see the only two white kids in the class assigned to the same group. Eventually, what was supposed to indirectly make black children feel better about being black mostly served only to make white children feel bad about being white, but it would be a long time before I was mature enough to make such an analysis. To me, at the time, I was just an eight-year-old trying to lay low in a volatile environment in which I clearly did not belong, not that anyone else – black or white – belonged there either. Children generally assume that adults know what the hell they are doing and we all understood, at some level, that we were all there together at the behest of adults including my own presumably pro-desegregation, liberal parents.

I sat idle and cautious, waiting for order to beset the classroom and trying to repress the ever-encroaching sense that some well intended adults had made a terrible mistake. I let my ears take in the din of twenty or thirty dirt poor, inner-city, southern black 3^rd graders and realized that I couldn’t understand more than a third of what they were saying. Phonetically it sounded more akin to Swahili than English and was pocked with vulgarities. I wasn’t raised by the Rockefellers either but how the hell do you get a trash mouth like that by the age of eight or nine, was my only thought as I worried that the teachers, whom were all black as well, wouldn’t be any more decipherable. Fortunately that was not the case and I would come to give and receive substantial sympathy and respect with these woefully underpaid public baby-sitters of what were probably the most hopeless youth in the nation.

Suddenly there was an explosion of rage near the grimy windows in the back of the room. A desk had been flipped over; its contents strewn across the floor and two black students had each other by the throat and hair with one hand and were smashing each other in the face with the other. The slightly smaller one, “Charles”, was screaming a blue streak of obscenities while delivering the preponderance of blows. The other kids barely flinched, some of them not even bothering to pause their conversations or turn to investigate the melee behind them. Our teacher, Mrs. Hill, leaped from her desk where she had been studying a roster or something, sprinted to the back of the room, jumped in between the two aggressors who were still exchanging blows, threw one to the floor, grabbed the other, Charles, by both arms, and shook him mightily until he went limp. Charles was crying so hard, generous rivulets of tears streaming down both sides of his face and soaking his shirt, I thought he might drown. Mrs. Hill held him firmly in place and delivered a harsh scolding. Once both pupils were reassigned seats on opposite sides of the room the day could finally begin. 

Fights like these were a daily occurrence either in the halls, in the classrooms, at lunch or at recess. Fortunately they would never involve myself; it seemed I, and the scant few other white students, were too inconsequential or passive (or both) to elicit such altercations. Eventually, though, I would be targeted for considerable harassment as my cloak of invisibility wore thin and my innate differences became more apparent. In the mean time however, no one seemed to be hated by angry little black kids more than other angry little black kids. The teaching staff, as stern and seasoned as they were, seemed overwhelmed at times from breaking up fight after fight routinely filling up the stained and cracked, plastic time-out chairs in the principal’s office.

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I’ve always firmly maintained that American public schools, in general, are colossal wastes of money at best and, at worst, government indoctrination centers invented exclusively for the control and repression of the many and the enrichment of a small few. But never would this be clearer to me than in the slums of 1973 Montgomery, Alabamastan. The concepts of “learning” or “teaching”, in the end, were little more than shadowy movements on the very periphery of everyone’s mind, students and teachers alike. Lunch and recess were all anyone seemed to care about and, indeed, at least these two periods were providing some tangible benefits through food and exercise - even if the food was tasteless and the exercise prone to arguments, fights, and chaos. I’m sure the teachers in particular enjoyed the simple act of eating as well as the relatively little oversight that kickball required and then, afterwards, the relief of whatever humble abodes they retreated to in the evening.

Any “education” came in the form of rote exercises such as single digit multiplication tables or practicing penmanship with the twenty six letters of the alphabet, routines that the suburban white schools I had attended, with their superior funding I suppose, had exhausted by the first or second grade. Nevertheless participation in even these simplest of tasks seemed completely voluntary. I would always hungrily digest whatever was put in front of me simply to forget about my dismal surroundings and certainly not because I enjoyed performing the same mindless activities over and over again. What half of the other students were doing was anyone’s guess but it certainly wasn’t what I was doing, but I cared not unless a fight broke out and disturbed my serenity. Aside from this there were occasional assignments that required more intellectual engagement and focus but would prove to be only sources of humiliation for most of the students.

Our geography teacher, for example, instructed us to select a region of the earth, read about it, then present a one page report to the class – an assignment I already knew would be well beyond most of my classmates whom had demonstrated almost complete illiteracy on several occasions. When the reports were due hardly anyone had even attempted to prepare. Students were called forth to the front of the classroom one at a time with nothing written at all and our excessively patient teacher would simply ask them a few softball questions about Africa, Canada, the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazilian rain forest, etc. many of which were answered incorrectly – if at all – with heads bowed humbly to the floor until each student was compassionately dismissed back to their seat with a gentle recommendation to “try harder next time”. A more tragic waste of public funds I would not witness until the US invasion of Iraq thirty years later, or perhaps the notoriously useless “war on drugs” initiated in the Reagan era. Finally one courageous black student stepped forward with a crumpled sheet of notebook paper he had been scrawling on titled “The South Pole” from which we learned that the South Pole was “all hot and deserty”. The teacher mercifully stopped his reading before he could finish the third sentence, briefly explained Antarctica to him, congratulated him for trying, and then sent him back to his desk more shamed than informed.

I can’t remember what region my report was on but I can assure you that it was Nobel Prize winning material by comparison. I wasn’t even asked to come forward and read it because of the humiliating contrast it would present between what white kids from white schools in whitey-land were getting and what black kids from black schools in the urban ghetto were getting.

Excluding me from participation was a face-saving trend that started in my math class when the teacher thought it would be fun and instructive to play a math game. She divided the class into two teams. Both teams stood in a single file line in front of her while she held up cards with simple arithmetic problems on them. Whichever student at the head of each line said the correct answer first went to the back of their line while the loser from the other line took a seat. Then the next two students would face off with another flash card. This process of elimination was to continue until one team ran out of players and the other team was declared the winner. My team ended up being so weak that there was no one left but me at one point while the other team still had most of their players standing.

So there I stood, one lone, undefeated, white yankee to be faced off against a line of eleven or twelve black southerners who, to put it simply, did not stand a chance in hell. The teacher paused, wide-eyed, nervously looking for an out - some way to end this diplomatically and without causing a scene. She reluctantly flashed a card turning it slightly more to the opposing team for clearer viewing. 13+9. “Twenty two,” I said with zero hesitation. My opponent took a seat and the queue next to me shuffled forward. 8x7. “Fifty six,” I blurted out just as soon as the photons from the card hit my retina. The line shortened again. After the third card it was crystal clear how this was going to end. The teacher stopped, gazed in despair at the floor for a moment then looked up at me and said, as sweet and apologetically as she could muster, “Corby honey, I think we just gonna call dis one fo da otha team. There is jus too many of’m for you to win. Mmkay, sweety?” For a second I felt indignant and wanted to say no. I just wanted to win something; I didn’t give a damn what color anyone was. Flash the next card, god damn it. Flash it!

But the look in her eyes……I’ll never forget that look. It was a deep, quiet desperation, completely vulnerable, and full of shame. She wasn’t telling me the game was over nor was she just asking me either. She was begging me to end it. Begging. Her eyes glazed over. My need for ego gratification was suddenly replaced with a deep empathy. If she was afraid to continue then I should be too. I nodded humbly in agreement and bowed my head feeling bad that I had taken more than a second or two to respond. I was no longer looking directly at her anymore but I could feel her showering me with gratitude in my mind. I’d spend the rest of my life looking into those sad, frightened, black math teacher eyes, pleading me for mercy. Years later I would conjure this event in an attempt to assess the injustice of getting gypped out of a decisve victory, but then those eyes would appear again and I'd realize that I had been victorious  ........ that through compassion and humility lay much greater rewards that perhaps only the soul could fully appreciate.   

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Lunch was usually insufferable, at least for me. The cafeteria smelled bad, looked bad, and sounded like a zoo. The food sucked even by public school standards which are barely on par with those of prisons, but this didn’t stop the students from woofing down every last crumb like it was the only meal they would see all day (and it may very well have been for some of them). They would eat so fast that they’d clear their trays, get bored, and start picking fights with each other before I had even finished half of what was in front of me.

Every meal was served with starchy cornbread which I couldn’t stand. It didn’t take long for some of the hungrier patrons to notice that I wasn’t eating my dry, yellow square. By my third or fourth day several of them started simultaneously demanding that I hand it over to them (even though they could have just asked and I would have gladly obliged). Before I could decide what to do they would start fighting over who would be the lucky recipient. While they were distracted with battle I’d break my square in half and give the halves to two much less aggressive candidates, an act of pure instinct in the spirit of natural selection, survival of the fittest being equated with survival of the most congenial. When the fighting ended – sometimes on its own, sometimes through adult intervention – the participants couldn’t seem to remember what they were fighting over in the first place. They’d just sit there looking confused and unsated until the bell rang signaling the end of lunch.

Other favorite lunch room pastimes included contests to see who could empty their milk carton the quickest by pouring the milk directly down their throats bypassing the lips and mouth altogether, chewing their food into a moist paste then holding their mouths wide open to see who had produced the most disgusting looking concoction, and a bizarre ritual that involved amusing each other by turning their eyelids inside out, a feat that nearly a third of them seemed to have mastered. When all else failed though there was always another student (or even a teacher) that needed to be punched, kicked, or spat on.

Then there were the restrooms, often the least pleasant part of a public or commercial building, these were no exception. My only objective was to get in and out of them as fast as I could, and god help me if I needed to take a crap. The toilets were missing seats, the stalls were doorless, and everything from the floor to the sinks to the toilet paper seemed to be splattered with urine or some other substance. Custodial services must have been sacrificed for more chalk, pencils and colored art paper.

The urinals were large, foul smelling tubs that hung off the walls where seven or eight of us were expected to pee at the same time. I’ll leave it to your imagination to transpose the standard cafeteria antics to what passed for entertainment in the restrooms. I learned within the first couple of days to wait, whenever possible, for everyone else to get done with their business before I proceeded with mine. And not just because of the vulgar and dangerously unsanitary things that were occurring but because the first time I participated in a group urination one of the boys pointed down at my groin laughing and yelling “look at dat boyz dick!!” I was the only one who was circumcised and apparently none of them had ever seen this before. It was way too much novelty for me to be associated with; I instinctively knew that this difference in genitalia, if not kept discrete, would lead to something bad. So I tried to urinate alone or, when nature was too insistent, I would share the urinal and simply cover my alleged deformity with my hand.

Later I became an outlet for the frustrations of these kids; I was the smart honkey from a privileged and alien white world they would probably never see and who didn’t like cornbread and had a deformed penis. “Sick’m!” And so begun the bullying, the threats, the constant intimidation, the name calling, etc. They didn’t want me there and I sure as hell didn’t want to be there so what was the point? Desegregation was a joke. In the end it had virtually none of it’s intended consequences unless the intended consequence were increased levels of poverty for urban blacks, increased animosity and distrust between whites and blacks and more money pouring into government coffers to execute this agenda and to be embezzled – like most tax dollars – into other questionable projects and private bank accounts.  

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We had lived in Montgomery less than a year before my mother and stepfather, Tom, got divorced. I left with my mother to the low rent suburbs of Atlanta where I would attend two schools that were fully “racially integrated” and just as violent. I would encounter black and white kids who seemed capable of just about anything. One had beaten a teacher with a baseball bat (why he was still allowed to attend school was a mystery). Another had, with the help of a couple friends, tied some poor kid to a fence and beat him into unconsciousness, was sent to a state bording school for a while then returned in presumably worse shape than when he had left. I’m sure if you asked anyone attending public schools in the poorer neighborhoods of the deep south around this time period you’d hear plenty of similar stories. It’s just how things were down there.

At any rate, these subsequent schools just reinforced what I somehow, in the innocence and clarity of youth, already understood: Violence, depravity, illiteracy, and rage were not exclusively the products of black people; they were the highly predictable results of chronic poverty, repression, and stress. I came to see blacks and whites being pitted against each other by higher forces that I would eventually trace back to Washington DC and even to the world elite. I would read and observe much about the divide and conquer strategies of the ruling class, the artificial creation of resource scarcity, the corruption and hijacking of government by ultra-rich private corporate and banking interests, and how all of this and more translated into racism, America’s most underrated, dirty little secret.

I’d be asked by whomever I shared my Montgomery experience with how it was that I didn’t become jaded and racist myself. I’d be asked to explain the irony of having spent more than half of my adulthood in and out of relationships with two black women. The answer was, and still is, that there is no irony involved. I simply never made the simplistic and ignorant assumption that bad behavior from blacks was innate to their racial genetics anymore than bad behavior from whites was innate to their genetics. I suppose, if I must proffer up an even deeper explanation, that I was simply blessed with enough mental discipline to not blindly accept the cues I was constantly being given to adopt a racist paradigm. And as I began to see these queues as part of something much more sinister and deliberate: the domination of all people, of all racial backgrounds, by the world’s ruling elite (whom also come in many skin tones) I slowly came to believe that there was no war to be fought, no conflict to be settled, no sustainable resolution to made other than that between the rich and the poor.