Creative Writings – Page 2

Until The Day It Stops

This scene, this day, has run through my head thousands of times. Over and over again, every action, every moment, trying to understand it all. It is one of those moments that unexpectedly and indelibly changes your life. It fades though, for better and worse, like any other event in one’s life. It seems important to me to write this down, for both personal catharsis and remembrance.

March in the Wasatch Mountains is invariably perfect; the mountains are either being blanketed in fluffy powder by heavy spring storms or bathing in the spring sunshine. I worked as a ski patroller for several years Park City, Utah and always looked forward to March, a month that arrives like dawn after the gloomy frigid night that is February. Work starts picking up, but everyone’s mind is on summer and the levity of silly season builds.

I ended up doing this job as a result of a strange series of events, but in hindsight it seems like something that had to happen; how could I not have worked a job that involved throwing dynamite to set off avalanches with the sunrise, getting paid to ski, and helping people under physically challenging conditions? I got an EMT certification in college on a whim and it became the credential that helped me get every job that I had after college for several years as I was unwilling to go into the mundane grind with obeisance.

The people that I worked with ski patrolling will never be far from my mind, as they were some of the best people I have ever met, especially the team that I worked with for my first year. We maintained a perfect balance between getting our work done safely and efficiently, freezing our faces in grinning rictuses with the fine spray of S-turns made through untracked champagne powder, barbequing, and witty banter while sipping coffee.

March 12^th, 2010 was a Friday, the end of the work week for my team. The sun broke on a high pressure day with no fresh snow, a cold morning under a deep blue sky. I rode up the chair in the morning to the station where I was working, eying up the overnight grooming job and feeling the sting of the mountain air on my face. The main run descending from our shack had been groomed and glistened in the morning sun; it is a steep straight shot that doglegs to the right near the bottom. From our shack I could look out onto the rest of the Wasatch range, over into the Cottonwood canyons and into Park City itself. There is a ritual each and every day: each day we all arrived at the shack an hour before any customers rode up the chair and dispersed to check our area at face numbing speeds. We followed up with coffee time in the shack, a time of discourse on subjects ranging from relationships, to bicycles, to This American Life, to backcountry skiing, to summer jobs, to who brought what food to cook for the day. This is the most tranquil time of the day.

We alternated taking laps through our area during the day, but everything had been idyllic all week, no accidents. Spring was in full effect; the restaurant deck was full of people lazing in Adirondack chairs with layers of clothing draped nearby, sipping beers and reveling in the sun. We fired up our barbeque and sat outside our shack maintaining a running commentary regarding every person who stepped off the chair lift as we ate tubular meat products of uncertain origin. Life as a ski patroller is challenging, a blase attitude towards everything is created by the universally acknowledged reality amongst every individual patroller that nobody, including coworkers, is as cool or righteous as you are. There is nowhere to go from here; it can paralyze you unless you arduously keep this insidious attitude at bay, as relationships with other human beings become nearly impossible. After eating and ruminating deeply on this concept, I decided to take a few laps with another patroller named Mike R. before we finished out the day.

We were hiking up a nearby ridge discussing where we should drop into the trees for a session of combat skiing, a form of ski destroying, sadistic skiing under bad conditions that becomes a weird fetish for anyone required to ski under any and all conditions. I let my skis hang over the edge, ready to drop in when a call came in over the radio from a patroller, Mike T., notifying us that he had just witnessed an accident on a nearby run. The call seemed routine and there were a few other people who were in position to second respond to the call, but we decided nonetheless to wait and see what resources were needed before dropping off the ridge.

A moment later a panic tinged call came in for every resource that we had available, except for a defibrillator. Mike R., and I chattered our skis down the irregular and hard ridge as quickly as possible. I arrived at the shack first, in perfect time to grab some of the equipment that the other patrollers were unloading out of the shack and begin descending. My heart was already pounding; something was very wrong.

I took the fast groomed run down from our shack as quick as I possibly could while carrying a backboard and a trauma pack; I fought to maintain control as the backboard jerked me from side to side as it caught wind with each turn. I was worried that I would overshoot the spot where the accident was, as it was called run left, in the trees. There was no missing it though; I saw a few people standing on the side of the run, popped off my skis and launched down into the trees where a young man looked up at me with blank eyes, copious amounts of blood staining his face and the snow around him. He had lost control near the start of the dogleg and collided with a tree. EMT training is about teaching you routine, as you need the ingrained steps to be able to approach a situation like this. Mike T. and I haltingly ran through a rapid, adrenaline spiking assessment; there was something resembling breath, a very faint wheezing and a weak, virtually nonexistent pulse. He had severe blunt force trauma to his head and chest. I remember thinking that this can’t be happening, this isn’t happening. I remained surprisingly calm in a detached way, watching myself go through the motions.

We called in a code red; patrol’s signal for anyone in respiratory or cardiac distress. We began CPR. Claire, someone who was accustomed to situations like this, had arrived with a defibrillator, quickly followed by Mike R. and Randy with a toboggan. Claire took charge of the situation and everyone quickly integrated themselves, continuing CPR, as I fumbled with the defibrillator. With shaking hands I attached the electrodes of the defibrillator, which mechanically announced in a neutral voice ‘No shock advised.’ I futilely pressed the little button with a lightning bolt several more times. It all seemed like it was happening slowly and through a lens smeared with Vaseline.

We alternated giving CPR, breath and compressions; I looked down into the pale face of someone who looked just like me, my same age, before giving each breathe, felt the laterally unequal response from his ribs with each compression, only pausing when surprised by the quick arrival of the helicopter. Amidst much yelling and exertion, postholed up to our hips, the five of us lifted him onto a backboard – he was incredibly heavy in a way that seems inexplicable – and out of the tree well. We loaded him into a toboggan with Claire kneeling over him continuing CPR. I frantically dug the toes of my boots in, running alongside and giving Mike R. an unnecessary push downslope towards the helicopter and more advanced care.

Then it was completely quiet. I looked around for the first time and immediately realized that the group gathered was his ski buddies. I shifted my gaze down to the snow, I didn’t say anything, couldn’t say anything, in the end nobody did. Randy, Mike T. and I started picking up all of the equipment that was scattered about, aimlessly moving it from place to place in transfixed shock. I looked at my hands, my fingers wore ripped rubber gloves coated in blood, they seemed suddenly frozen with cold. I became needlessly preoccupied with the loss of my work gloves, aimlessly searching, ultimately to no avail. We slowly skied down the run without saying anything; as if we wouldn’t have to deal with what lay at the bottom if the run never ended.

We came across the helicopter in the middle of a run and looked on momentarily as the flight medic and nurse worked diligently, using last ditch efforts as a few patrollers assisted. It set in at that moment; I took off my skis, turned my back, and began walking up the run towards the chairlift, to get back to the shack and finish the menial tasks that mark the end of each day; there was nothing else left to do. I seemed to be in some sort of postictal state; everything seemed surreal and obscenely lit by the afternoon sun.

Randy, Mike and I rode the chair back to the shack together. I looked over at them and then tears ran down my face for the rest of the ride up. I began shivering, the cold cutting to my core. It began, the unrest, the replaying, the constant oscillation between many different thoughts; trying to grasp it all; trying to convince myself that I, that we, had done the best we could; pitying him, me, us all; images painfully bursting forth, provoking unrest. For a long time I just wanted it all to stop, but it comes from somewhere deep, like the tears, somewhere so deep that it isn’t controllable; it just washes over, completely taking over.

Death is there like the sun, taken for granted, ignored, but occasionally we become aware, forced to acknowledge its blinding brightness, its ubiquity; in these moments it passes through the temporal, transparent pettiness that characterizes our lives, to illuminate more profound, substantive truths about existence. It transmutes our perception as we watch its light suffuse everything that abounds. It is what defines life; it is the very fountain of beauty and love.

When we cry about death it seems to be equally about those who remain as those who were lost; none of us truly understand it. There might be something to learn from it though.

Until the day it stops.

Thank You Chase Bank

I graduated college in May of 2008, walking out of academia in a black Chinese-made robe befitting of an executioner into an economy and s society catching the first whiffs of the miasmatic decay created by our materialism. I decided to spend another summer fighting forest fires and save money for what could be a long winter. I worked 112 hours running a chainsaw on a good week, spending most of the summer in Northern California’s timber stands. I finished the season in September and moved back to Chicago right as Lehman Brothers collapsed; the first limb shed from the leprous system. Chicago had a ‘good job market’ and it was time for me to seek out a Sisyphean task that would bestow me with a stainless steel refrigerator, George Foreman Grills (yes, plural), a waffle maker, low slung Japanese chic memory foam orthopedic bed, and the slimmest profile television available as the centerpiece my loft in a district where meat used to be packed. In essence, all that I was promised and deserved after years of studying. I lackadaisically applied for quite a few jobs as I watched and read about the hornswoggling, the avarice, the delusion, the Ponzi schemes, the fraud, the losses, the prospects of retirement evaporating for millions; It was like watching 300 million people find out that Santa isn’t real. Fighting a forest fire has a clear cut purpose, something that could not be further from the idea of bundling something, derivatizing it, rating it as quality since you don’t really understand what it is and then selling it to people who don’t understand what you are selling either. But everyone is going to earn a lot of money, right? Right. Nobody loses? Nobody. I was appalled and stressed about my future, until Chase Bank offered me a job interview. I was going to get a low level position in the orgy!

I was going to get rich, if only I could figure out how to convince myself and these people that I would be good at doing something that I had zero interest in doing. If I got rich then in quite a few years I could possibly do something that I would enjoy; it is just like indentured servitude, it wouldn’t be that bad. I began sweating as soon as I received the phone call as my mind frantically searched for a way to lie to myself and everyone else. If I could pull it off, I would be perfect to work in finance. I entered the office, shorn of my beard and wearing a suit; the lie started there. Four pale faces sat behind a desk, some sort of panel of midlevel managers from far-flung, forsaken branches of the bank in the Chicago suburbs. They were still doing the indentured servitude portion of their career from what I could gather. We cover the formalities; I kept a copy of my resume on my lap to make sure that my words corroborate with the carefully tailored distortions written in sexless, sleek Arial Narrow. I worried that I might lose control of my hands and watch them float away or that my face would tire from smiling incessantly, but neither came to pass. I sat thinking about how I should have drank either more or less coffee, until it became apparent that merely handing them my resume was insufficient to get me a piece of the sweet apple pie that is America. They wanted me to do some role playing, but I was already role playing. You can see how this might become confusing.

‘Okay. Let’s pretend that I am a bank customer who simply wants to make a deposit. You will be my teller. Your goal is to convince me to refinance and move my mortgage to Chase Bank.’ She actually pretended to be driving a car, her hands rotating the steering wheel to pull up to a hypothetical air tube and speaker through which we would communicate. I am not sure if her feet were doing the pedals as they were under the desk and I could not seem them.

‘Hello, I would like to make a deposit. Could I have a deposit slip?’ She calmly leaned towards the non-existent speaker.

‘Good afternoon! I will send that right out to you!’ I can’t remember if I pretended to put it in the airtube or not, but my adrenaline was building to crescendo amid a sense of impending doom.

‘While you are writing that out, DO YOU CURRENTLY HAVE A HOME MORTGAGE!’ I asked in sheer terror, surprising myself as I yelled the last part at the fictional speaker and the woman.

‘Yes, but it is with another bank.’ She curtly replied, seeming unfazed by my loss of control.

‘Have you ever thought about…..refinancing… your loan with Chase Bank? It could…..save money. RATES ARE LOW!’ I consciously took breaths in between words in an attempt to hold it together, making it until the last bit before my tone and volume began rapidly fluctuating again. The adrenaline and disgust were rising rapidly and overcame me. They must have been able to smell the sweat and fear, I briefly wondered if they enjoy this? I contained the overwhelming urge to run.

I felt like some sort of lab rat being grotesquely tortured, completely incapable of understanding the overarching purpose for having electrodes attached to my miniature nipples. I was shaking at this point, my fists balled, my pupils dilated, and my feet twitching in fight or flight response. They asked me some benign questions and things slowed down a little bit. The adrenaline slowly wore off and I sat in a post-ictal state as they talked more about the specifics of the Personal Banker position. I peered out at the glimmering SUVs backed up behind a red light. I observed a woman talking on her phone in one car, looking absolutely crazy as she gesticulated in the absence of context. I alternatingly glanced at the desk, at these people, at my shoes.

‘Are you motivated by financial incentives?’ A bald man officiously squaring a stack of papers over and over again asks me.

‘I don’t think so, no not really. Well….I mean… it depends. I want to earn some money.’ I couldn’t lie, the fear had evaporated. It all fell apart, but the honesty was a release. I knew the job was lost at this moment. I view my general indifference to pecuniary remuneration as a virtue, yet what I had just said was tantamount to confessing to a battery of priests that you don’t believe in god. These people lived for money, they worshiped it. There was no other reason they would work within this nightmare.

I walked out of the sterile box into the afternoon sun with new knowledge about myself and the world. Thank you Chase Bank for changing my life. I went home and bought a plane ticket to Mexico that left a few days later. I have never put that suit on again, it currently serves as moth food in some unknown closet.

I am certain that some will read this and perceive me as selfish, privileged, shortsighted, a shirker of duties, an addled mind detached from reality, a bum, naïve. In response: you can take whatever path you would like, but I have chosen a different path, something that can probably be gathered from this strange collection of writing seemingly devoid of purpose. I have had to struggle, but I have found profound happiness and tranquility. I have chosen to make time to sit in the sun, to enjoy my food, to walk, to meditate, to meaningfully converse, to make sumptuous food, to travel, to read, to write, to learn for learning’s sake, to make love, to challenge myself. I watch the frenzied pace of society with the utmost mirth.

I have made the effort to live the life that I want to lead in a world that increasingly seems to strive to make this more difficult.

We can never perceive where the path that we chose to walk will take us, the end is only an illusion, yet we can make decisions in each moment that will continue taking us down the path that we would like to walk. The radiantly profound moments drawing one onward, happiness is found in moments that pass as we walk the path, not in an end or in abstraction. I find my life expanding, flowering with each passing day. I chose this path with full consciousness and all of my heart.

There seem to be few dissenters bothering to speak over the din; I am writing to elucidate that it is an individual’s choice how they lead their life. I am exhorting you to sit down and take the time to figure out what your values are and examine to what degree you are living in accordance with them. You only have so many moments left.

A Top Down Approach to Aid

There is a community that to this very day remains beyond the reach of aid, in the periphery that lies outside the blinders of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations. A place where thousands live frantic and stressful lives in a perpetual famine of time and resources, their needs marginalized and left unaddressed due to stereotypes, their lives spent frantically striving simply to meet their perceived basic material needs with limited time to spend with their families or on the simple pleasures in life, forced by their environment to live in a perpetual state of debt, resiliently putting on a smile despite, day after day, waking to face a world that will never be capable of meeting these needs. A place of alienation and shame, neighbors living isolated in fear of judgment for their relatively low standard of living. A place where stressed wracked parents frequently erupt into violence at children’s sporting events. A place where families are torn apart as breadwinners are forced to commute long distances as the local economy is unable to provide a living wage. A place where children and adults frequently resort to drugs to escape their reality. A place where suicides are swept under the Oriental rug, dismissed as just another case of ‘autoerotic asphyxiation.’ A place where the majority sees the need to drink bottled water out of fear of drinking from the tap. A place incapable of locally meeting its own food demands. In Lake Forest, Illinois the cries for help go muffled into down pillows or echoing through the dozens of rooms and furnished basements in each home.

Save the Poor Rich People will be there to listen and help carry these misconstrued miscreants into a brighter day. We will work to foster appreciation for the inevitably limited resources that one has. We will try and teach basic financial management courses to enable families to live sustainable and meaningful lives within their economic means. We will provide economic opportunities for children, so that they are no longer offered the limited choices offered to their parents’ generation: lawyer, doctor, businessman, financier, robber baron. We will provide other avenues for self-actualization and try to fight against a culture that turns to drugs, prescription or otherwise, as a solution to legitimate psychological issues developing out of an unhealthy environment. We will try and repair broken homes, to bring families back to the dinner table.

I feel the gravity of my home calling me back, my 28 year celestial cycle coming full circle, calling me to stop escaping the poverty of my homeland by gallivanting around Latin America; to return and share what I have learned from other cultures regarding human development and quality of life.

Let’s go America, we have work to do! The top 1% has not grown as a percentage of the population in decades. Email me for funding opportunities to improve the world from the top down!