Rock Smash Scissors Cut Paper Over Life

I can pinpoint the day my world was turned upside down. I haven't really been able to get it completely back together since. Maybe that impossible desire to restore order drives me a little bit.  I'm sharing this story because I know some of the things I plan to write about are a little unbelievable.  The truth sometimes is.  I'm hoping against hope that revealing a bit of the back story will prevent at least a few people from writing me off as a conspiracy whack job.

At a young age I can remember being taught in school about nebulous ideas like love and compassion. Teachers were able to define them very clearly, give examples, and make these things relatable. Movies, television, music and magazines covered this and similar concepts with confidence and authority (and probably a bit of an agenda). To my young mind, there was little mystery about the workings of the human heart. I was a sponge and so I absorbed everything that was advertised to me. I understood love. That is until my first girlfriend dumped me (Thanks Laura) and I realized the media was full of shit. But that isn't what this is about. The point is that commentary on love, only purporting to be truth, is all around us. This is particularly funny because love is completely intangible, even though it can certainly be felt. It's this incomprehensible force that emanates from whatever it is that makes us human. And we, in all of our ego, think we can define it, confine it, and market it. And even though in the empirical sense we can't, we never stop trying.

And then there's this very tangible thing that influences the daily decisions we make in a very real way, and even sometimes takes precedence over love. Anyone know what the leading causes of divorce are? Yet, this thing has never been defined. The media never addresses it. The school's don't educate the students about it. It is just considered too big of a thing to understand. And we just accept it as a foregone conclusion. All the while this thing plays us like puppets, rendering us predictable and controllable.

I remember sitting in Mr. Barsanti's AP Economics class wondering why we kept talking about supply and demand and market drives and blah blah blah when we had never ever defined what money was. We never identified where it came from or from where it derived its value. We never debated how or why it rose to central power in human life. I thought that was strange. But his class was usually 4th period right after lunch and I was never in a curious or motivated mood. The insulin spike that resulted from a my water polo season diet of pizza, snicker's bar, soda, and the legendary, never replicated Crispito ensured that I took naps rather than asked questions. And if I wasn't napping I spent hours and hours covering my arms with gel pen ink, foreshadowing my future career in the art world. After all that time in school, then through college, my questions about money were never addressed. I kept waiting for someone to spoon feed me the answer like they did when it came to differentials or quantum spin directions. But no one ever did. Eventually I realized that if I wanted an answer I would have to seek it out myself. I felt as if the education system had failed me. What a pain in the ass.

And that incomplete saga picked up somewhere around January 2008, several thousand miles from home...

I was touring the state hospital in Jinja, Uganda. The size of most hospitals can be conveyed by the number of beds they have or the number of doctors and nurses on staff. Not so in Uganda. I didn't see a single care provider the entire time I was at the hospital. And there were a few frames that could be loosely referred to as beds.  But most of the patients were scattered about on the cracked concrete floor in various stages of illness. Whatever beds there were, there weren't enough. And whatever load the hospital had been designed to handle, it had been exceeded both in the quantity and quality of illness.

It took quite an effort to get to East Africa and I had spent countless hours in airport terminals and train stations along the way. There's never much to do but sit there and wait. I couldn't help but make the comparison that for many of these people, this was the last terminal in which they would ever wait. Having just spent all that time traveling connected me to the patients a bit and brought gravity to the situation, as if there wasn't already enough weighing us down. Everyone was dying. Malaria, AIDS, general infections. Most of the diseases were treatable in some sense. Unfortunately, there is often a large gap between what is possible and what actually gets done. Never had I seen so many people in one place at one time that were destined to fall in that gap.

After wandering the ward for about a half hour talking to various patients and answering numerous questions about my white skin, tattoos and America, a young woman came up and without a word confidently took me by the hand. It would turn out that she spoke broken English with a very heavy Lugandan (1 of 50 dialects spoken in the region) accent and she must have been about 17. She wanted me to meet someone. And this was communicated without a word. As a person who talks way too much, I am always taken aback by those moments when so much can be said with so little. It should also be mentioned that in certain (most) parts of Uganda, white people are rarely seen. And so when a white person is wandering around, it draws attention. Children would run up as if I were a character actor at Disneyland holding a giant bag of free candy. And despite a certain administration's concerted effort to destroy the international reputation of America, there are still large numbers of people in the world who see an American and see hope at the same time (at least back in '08). I believe this is what was happening here, as unwarranted as it may have been, when she took me by the hand.

The girl led me to the very opposite end of the long ward. We passed every single patient in the building along the way. It was an uncomfortable procession. I could feel their eyes searching me from the ground, wondering about the purpose of my presence. I felt guilt because there was nothing I could do for any of them. I realized that it may have been irresponsible of me to even show my face given what little I could do. After what seemed like an eternity we arrived at the far end where a woman sat, surrounded by a number of children. She looked about 50, but was probably 35 or 40. She was wearing a dingy white dress and a white scarf around her head which contrasted dramatically against her deep, black skin. She had a look of fatigue and sorrow in her eyes. Yellow. And it wasn't more than a few seconds before I realized that she, too, had come here to die. Without an introduction she began to whisper in Lugandan, eyes averted toward the floor. Was it humility, embarrassment, or something else that caused her to look downward? I'm not sure. But I know I felt both of those things intensely. The girl who brought me to her translated. I stood there with my hands in my pocket, listening as she confirmed my suspicion.

She told me that several months ago she began to feel unwell and her urine was "different." But she didn't have money to go to the doctor and she couldn't stop working for even a day or her children would go hungry. They looked at me, understanding the words their mother said before they were translated to me. I don't know how I looked, what my expression said. I just hoped it was appropriate. Her husband had died from AIDS a few years earlier, which "by the grace of God" she never got. They always talked about the grace of God. Even as they lay dying on dirty floors. The rest of her family was gone as well. And so it was only she left to raise the children. She kept working, kept denying what she was feeling, expecting it to be gone each following day. But the following day never brought relief and so she eventually broke down and went to the doctor with great pangs of conscience over the sacrifices it would force upon her children. The doctor determined that she had cervical cancer. The treatment was surgical removal of the cancer and the prognosis was good... at that time. The surgery would cost her just under $200. It might as well have been a million. The average annual income in Uganda was around $250. Annual. Not monthly.

She continued her story. The cancer had since metastasized to her lungs and liver. All this, the diagnosis, the metastasis, and coming to the hospital had happened over the span of 3 weeks. Hardly ample time to prepare for one's own death. The future of the children sitting around her was entirely uncertain. As she told me about her life expectancy, in my pocket I felt a familiar sensation between my fingers. It was the friction of American money rubbing against itself. It was cotton paper, dyed green. I still remember exactly how much there was. I had nine twenty dollar bills and another fifty six dollars in fives and ones because very few shops in Uganda could break a twenty. $236. This woman's life and the right of the children to be with their mother was, in essence, folded uselessly in my pocket. I maintained my composure on the outside. But inside, everything I had ever built was crumbling. Every edifice was falling apart. The bridges, collapsing.

I know I couldn't have turned back time to before her cancer had metastasized. But that doesn't change the feeling that I wish I could have. And I know the fact that I had that money in my pocket is not the reason she died. Her death was simply a catalyst. That isn't entirely accurate.  Her death wasn't simple and it wasn't just anything.  Some synapse in my brain developed a strong association between that woman and the $200 that stood between her and her life.  I had to know how something so contrived and made of paper became so valuable that her children are now orphans.  At some point, after returning from Africa, the smell of the jungle dissipated from my clothes, the red dirt washed away from under my fingernails, and life got back to normal. Even though I couldn't have saved her, it would have been irresponsible of me not to figure out what the $236 in my pocket actually meant. It would have been reprehensible of me to try and hold on to my previous notions and continue to  embrace the ignorance in which I so lavishly basked during Mr. Barsanti's lectures . And so I began earnestly to seek answers to the few questions I had and to find more questions for answers I needed. Druing Mr. Barsanti's class the mystery of money was simply a juvenile rationalization to not pay attention.  The questions now seemed a matter of life and death.

In my intellectual pursuit to understand the fundamental basis of money, for the first time in my life, I started to understand something my dad had told me over and over again. I'm still amazed at how long it takes to really grasp a lesson that's been repeatedly given since before I can remember.  And I'm even more amazed how adults who seem like out of touch jackasses are actually very wise out of touch jackasses.  In this case, it took me 25 years. The thing my dad would always say, "money is just a tool."  He never really expanded any further. I guess he knew that I would have to figure it out for myself.

So what's the point of all of this? The stock we put in money has very real implications. And depending on the person, being informed can make a world of difference in their lives. I know it's allowed me to cope with the world as it currently is, make some intelligent (and more interesting) decisions that I might have otherwise not made, and release myself from some of the metaphorical shackles that people often allow money to place upon them. Very simply, money no longer holds the value that it once did.  And that's a freeing realization.  When I was young all I wanted was to be rich.  It was the only measure of success I knew.  Now, I just want to be fulfilled.  Money is just a tool.  I think understanding this fundamental idea will be of vital importance if we are ever to unite together and become something more than we are.  And that's really the overall theme.  True freedom and true unity.  They can coexist.  I'll write about my economic findings in the futre. But you don't have to wait. Google is about as convenient as it gets. And I know you have unanswered questions.

Consider this. We have love and money. And they are often pitted against each other. Love is something very real, with us even before we take our first breath, and immeasurable. And then there is money, which has only been around for milliseconds in the relative span of human existence, is the arbitrary construct of the human mind, and only continues to exist because of a sustained social agreement that it should have power. It's not difficult to decide which concept to stake a future upon. Because even at this moment, as sure as we live and breathe, the edifice is crumbling. And a broken tool is hardly useful.

Bleeding, Hearts, and Tutus.

After what seems like 10 years my brother and I finally sat down and worked on his tattoo for a little bit.  It was good to get back into it.  Only 400 more sessions spaced apart in 1 year intervals left to go and I'll be able to post a completed picture.  It's not that we aren't both committed, it's just that there are a lot of really good TV shows on and even if there weren't we would just watch every episode of Arrested Development in sequence until the end of time.

Molly, inspired by Natalie Portman in the Black Swan has began pursuing a career in the performing arts.  Look for her to make a meteoric rise to the top of the ballet world.

And I made this drawing a while ago.  I don't know where it is now... Washington D.C. or San Diego or somewhere in between.