We are having seafood for dinner. My usual impulse when I have an exceptionally lousy day is to combat it with seafood. The day after I was pinkslipped from my job at the University of California, KC and I went to the greatest seafood joint ever, intent on eating 1,000,000,000 oysters. Now, it would take most people decades to snarf 1,000,000,000 oysters, but KC and I can do it in a couple of hours. We wound up only eating about 300,000,000 or so, however, since they had other things on the menu and we decided we would try some of their fresh tombo … which is what I am making for dinner. I call this particular dish Sicilian Tuna Carpaccio since it’s served in a similar fashion to the beef dish. I whip out my light sabre of a fish knife and slice it thin to the point of transparency. Red onions, capers, olive oil, fresh lemon. That right there is the greatest food in the history of foods.
I need these sorts of reminders from time to time of goodness – and few things are better on my palate as an impeccably fresh tuna served raw. And this definitely felt like a bad day, even though nothing happened to me personally. I couldn’t help, however, but be concerned when I saw what was going on in Boston. I have family in the city. I also a number of great friends there, a good number of whom happen to be avid runners, so seeing film of the carnage from multiple bomb blasts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon immediately sent me into disquiet. I worried for all of their safety. Furthermore, a good number more of my friends were in the Boston area over the weekend for a tournament, a good number of whom were likely playing the role of tourist as well as competitor over the long Boston holiday weekend. So I was immediately pretty worried, but I’m pleased to report that, as of this writing, all of the people who I feared for are accounted for.
Days like today were always the worst sorts of days to be working in the media. As dull as a “slow news day” can be, I also subscribe to the adage that “no news is good news.” Outside of elections, the biggest stories you ever cover extensively, frenzily and spontaneously are the bad ones. And contrary to what many of the sock puppets and blowhards on Faux News might tell you, journalists are, in fact, objective in principle. Yes, we do root for people, and will snicker and chortle and personally engage in some schadenfreude, but when it comes time to put out an edition, we’ll refrain from commentary and attempt to be as objective in possible, present the facts as best they can for the public to make sense of what happened.
And that’s where the difficulty comes in. How do you enable others to make sense of what is senseless?
Columbine was possibly the worst. Reading column inch after column inch about bullet-ridden teenagers nearly killed my will to live. I think some of us cried that night in the offices of the New Mexican and afterwards at the bar. 9/11 was an awful day to work in San Francisco, knowing that some of your neighbours weren’t going to be home that day (remember, and never let it be forgotten, that the United 93 which crashed in Pennsyvania was originally headed for San Francisco), but it was also surreal and somewhat jittery – my office was in a complex of Federal buildings and above a BART station (and thus seemed like a potential target for any sort of further terrorist act) and all of us just wanted to get the fuck out of there and go home as soon as possible. Trying to prep an edition for the next day centered on a particularly terrible story like the two I just mentioned becomes a sensory overload, as you plow through story after story on the wires and comb through all of the available information, all of which is bad and a great deal of which saps whatever hope you might have for humanity. Natural disaster stories like hurricanes or massive wildfires at least have an air of awe to the proceedings – “holy shit, mother nature is a fucking badass” – whereas killings just seem needless, seem preventable and unnecessary. Senseless. That’s the word I’m looking for. Senseless.
A lot of these bad days on the desk in previous press offices came flooding back into my mind today. Saying which day and which incident was “worst” is irrelevant, because “worst” implies that somehow something about the others was better. No, they were all terrible. Two particularly terrible days on the job, however – days which I’d not thought about in a decade, if not longer – came into focus again for me. Both were in New Mexico. The first was a fatal shooting erupting on the Santa Fe Plaza during Fiesta de Santa Fe, a harvest festival which has been going on in Nuevo Mexico since before the U.S. was a country. The second was a double homicide, a couple of high school kids shot during the traditional Good Friday pilgrimage to Chimayó, which is one of the most sacred sites in the Western Hemisphere. Both events were precious to the local community of Northern New Mexico, events which were part of what defined the unique community in which I lived. Events which would, from then on, be forever altered. And for what? What was the point of that? What was the fucking point? It was senseless but also selfish – was compromising an entire culture really worth whatever petty squabble resulted in this violence?
Once that culture and community is altered, it never seems to quite return to how it once was. I’m reminded now of another particularly bad day at the office, albeit due entirely to an act of self-inflicted and self-contained violence. I remember hearing on the radio while sitting in my office that Kurt Cobain had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I spoke with a local wanna-be promoter I knew, a fringe hanger-on to the scene much like me and seemingly 1,000,000 other people, and he told me straight up that, “Kurt just killed the Seattle music scene.” The scene which, somewhat confoundingly (the record execs were pretty perplexed by the sales numbers) had come to define, through sound, the collective since of hangover and malaise and economic detachment of the post-Reagan era. I thought that statement was a bit far-fetched but I have to admit that the promoter was correct. After that death, all of the flaws and the warts and wrinkles in the scene were out in the open, were fully exposed, and the seemingly endless stream of northwest bands dominating the airwaves began to run dry. The inevitability of the great run coming to an end seemed more certain with each passing day.
These past incidents I would up immersed in from the supposedly detached and objective perspective of a news gatherer came to my mind today when I watched bombs going off at a sporting event, at a community event on a holiday. I don’t really care who did it or what particular axe they have to grind. I don’t care about their politics. Sport is not political. It is those surrounding sport who politicize it. The people standing at the finish line of the race had nothing to do with whatever agenda the perpetrators wished to further. They may even sympathize, or they may not. It doesn’t really matter. It was senseless. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people?
My hope is, in the end, that Boston does not let this particular incident take away one of the unique traditions that has come to define it over the years. Rebuild, renew, and encourage thousands to run through the streets next Patriots Day. And leave it at that. And then do it again the next year, and the next. I think I got my sense of civil resolve (one tinged with a stoic defiance) from my time in Britain. Having an IRA bomb go off in London four blocks from your hotel is a little bit disconcerting. I asked someone at the pub about it and he shrugged it off.
“We just go on,” he said to me. “It’s an excuse for another pint of bitter.”
Well I don’t have any bitter ale in the house, but I do have seafood. And I am going to eat seafood with my girlfriend, and eat some of the fresh bread she baked today, here in my comfy little house with my two cute little evil black kittens circling around and attempting to steal the fish off my plate, and I’m going to remind myself of some of the things that are genuinely good in and of themselves. And I hope that you do the same. Some days, humanity loses a bit more than others, and the littlest gestures can go a long way to getting it back on a winning path, little actions that others may never see nor hear nor even know. Let's not lose our minds or any more pieces of our souls. Clearly, some other people who acted out today have already lost theirs.
My heart goes out to those who lost loved ones, and to those who were seriously injured, and my heroes of the week were those first respondents who probably saved countless more than have been lost, the people who do the work I know that I never could do.
“... everything is complicated by the presence of the opposing team.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
