Category Archives: history

Notes from Winter Soldier on the Hill, part one

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“I joined the military to kill Iraqi people,” Kristofer Goldsmith said softly in a Congressional hearing room on Thursday.

The slim young veteran, his Mohawk pulled back from his head in a half-braid, kept his eyes focused forward as news photographers scurried under the table at which he sat, snapping photographs as he continued: ” I remember on September 12, 2001, looking up at the TV screen as a 16-year-old boy, saying we should use biological weapons and eliminate the threat in the Middle East.”

Goldsmith had already shown slides of himself as a ten-year-old Boy Scout who had always wanted to join the military, but soon he had segued to a succession of images of what he had witnessed in Iraq, from “presence patrols” designed to intimidate to an image of a man with smashed face. His last few images displayed a wall with an Arabic inscription: Welcome America to the second Vietnam War.

Goldsmith was only one of ten veterans testifying before the House Progressive Caucus, designed to give legislators a taste of last March’s Winter Soldier testimony. At the event, billed as Winter Soldier on the Hill (C-SPAN video at the top link here), ten members faced the caucus, which on budget day amounted mostly to a trio of antiwar women Democrats: Lynn Woolsey, Diane Watson, and Sheila Jackson Lee.

It was May 15 — International Conscientious Objector Day, marked by Congress mostly in reverse. A Foreign Affairs Committee briefing on “Empowering the Soldier Through Technology” featured flashy brochures on the newest Stryker vehicle. Walking through the first floor of the Rayburn Office Building, I was almost blinded by the ribbons and medals on the brass showing off the new hardware.

But upstairs, soldiers who had seen combat far more recently were honoring both the day, even if they weren’t themselves CO’s, and their own pledge upon enlistment to protect the Constitution.

I sat behind the testimonial table, where the row of dark suits most had chosen gave the event a somber feel, like kaddish or a memorial. And their testimonies, describing alleged war crimes, felt similarly somber, blaming equally their own participation, command neglect, and Congressional endorsement of the occupation.

Jason Lemieux — a sweet-faced young blond whose slight build belies his strength — described “firefights in which the rules of engagement were routinely ignored.” “Unit loyalty and cameraderie,” he said, combined with “an emphasis on minimizing short term casualties,” to create an atmosphere in which troops were authorized “on numerous occasions, to shoot any Iraqi that seems suspicious,” and were told that “the command will take care of you.” (Such emphasis on taking care of one another, sometimes overriding concern for civilians, perhaps the dark side of the terribly romantic, Achilles-Patroclus soldier-bond described in such detail by Jonathan Shay.)

When Lemieux submitted incident reports showing “use of excessive force,” he said, commands either downplayed them or, in one case, actually altered the numbers.

In Tal Afar, now praised by President Bush as a great Army success, “ more innocent civilians were injured and killed by Americans than by the enemy,” said Army scout Scott Ewing, his face blank. Ewing described arriving at homes in Tal Afar that had just been blasted by Apache helicopters: “One little boy pointed to his chest,” he said. “We tried to bandage their wounds,” he said softly.

Ewing also showed a slide of a trashed home, from a day when “thousands of of soldiers were ordered to search aggressively” for weapons. Following orders, the troops kicked down doors, smashed computers, and ripped bedsheets. (In the back of the room Aaron Glantz, reporting for Democracy Now, remarked: “It looks like there’s been an armed robbery.”) Overall, said Ewing, “trashing people’s homes did not win us friends in Tal Afar.”

Part of what made this all possible, the vets said, was racism/dehumanization: a previous generation’s “gook” become “hajji,” and thus other and expendable. Geoffrey Millard, of IVAW’s D.C. chapter, showed a slide of a sedan blasted into fragments at a checkpoint; his commander, he said, had brushed it off, saying: “if these fucking hajjis learned to drive that wouldn’t happen.” He has tried, he added, to reason with his peers, for whom “KBR employees who made our food, they became hajjis.. I actually heard a guy say, I’m going over to that hajji shop to get a hajji DVD from these hajjis.” It was hard, he said, to get soldiers to see why that was wrong.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about the soldiers’ awareness of their own trauma, about the committee’s response to all this, and just a few of my own reflections. But right now, I’m haunted by the opening sentence of Millard’s statement, which feels a little like a warning of what could continue indefinitely.

“In Iraq, a year becomes a month, a month becomes a day that repeats over and over and over,” Millard said.

reasons to go get an MBA

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Today, the NY Times’ business section finally noticed something that’s been glaringly obvious for some time, at least if you’d paid any attention to the past few years of landlord-tenant strife. No longer are tenants fighting the traditional landlord, who is penny-pinching to keep his profit-over-expenses margin healthy. Now, they’re facing companies with names like Cardinal/Vantage/Pinnacle/GFI Investment Corporation, who bought their buildings with loans that cannot te repaid if their current, rent-stabilized tenants remain in their homes. As Gretchen Morgensen’s piece explains:

As regulatory filings and promotional materials show, the companies expect to generate higher returns quickly by increasing rents after existing tenants vacate their units. Their success depends upon far higher vacancy rates than are typical in rent-regulated apartments in New York.

I’ve also looked at those “promotional materials,” though I’m glad someone more numerically adept than I is looking at the financial data. No, short of me going off for a third masters’ degree, I have one question– for Morgensen, James Surowiecki, and perhaps the Court of Appeals:

Do our current banking/lending laws not proscribe giving a loan that can ONLY be repaid if the creditor breaks the law?

I asked that of Al Amateau, a smart and sage writer whose desk is next to mine. He shrugged. Is that really our final answer?

“the intervention that makes change possible is love”

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About two weeks ago, I offered a few thoughts on the latest work by Jeanette Winterson, offering one sideline smart passage while mostly urging you to seek out the book itself. Whether you did or not, I advise you to check out this review + interview in Gay City News. (One of the perks of my current job is that I sit next to GCN’s brilliant, singleminded editor, Paul Schindler.)  Michael Ehhardt’s smart review articulates the themes and more of the story than I did; I do feel gratified that one of the passages he chose to quote is the same one I did, which he calls typical of Winterson’s  “fierce Voltarian satire of future society.”

Interestingly, though, the author herself sounds less like Voltaire (who was, after all, one of the literary world’s first human rights campaigners) than like a cross between Barack Obama and Harvey Milk:

Everywhere I look, kids want to feel, want to care, want things to matter, but strength of feeling is frightening. One of the things that art can do is find a channel for strength of feeling at the same time as prompting thought – so the old split of head and heart is relieved.

This is something I have always followed in my work, and in the repeating worlds and circular mistakes of “The Stone Gods,” the intervention that makes change possible is love. Love of all kinds is crucial, not least because it resolves the head/heart tension too, and when I listen to music or read a poem or go to the theater, I am opening myself up to difference and to change — the possibilities of love. I think the artist is someone who is always falling in love — with life itself, and with the creative playful spirit of human endeavour.

Which means we get our hearts broken  every five minutes. Thank god the heart is muscle, and can lift far more than seems possible.

what’s in a name? A lot, if that name is The Chelsea Hotel.

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I always miss my former editor Larry Lerner, who left in February — but never more than when the subject of the Hotel Chelsea comes up. Long before I arrived, Larry had made the famous artist’s denizen a second home; with the help of his camera, his terrific prose and the hotel’s own Ed Hamilton, he charted its ways and the diverse group of artists and writers still within its walls. And when the big story arrived — the sudden expulsion of beloved owner-manager Stanley Bard by fellow shareholders– Larry knew its soul and got it right.

Now, it looks like Big Story #2 has arrived, and I’m completely unprepared.

Of course, the Chelsea wouldn’t deserve the name if it weren’t in upheaval, though in the past year rock and roll drama (think Sid and Nancy) has been of late replaced by Chelsea’s surreal real estate dance. shareholders. Last July longtime owner Bard was replaced by BD Hotels, the brainchild of boutique hoteliers Richard Born and Ira Drukier, and a host of changes followed, including ominous eviction threats from the new 28-year-old manager. Numerous tenants have complained about BD’s sluggishness in performing repairs, according to longtime residents Ed Hamilton (of the hotel’s blog Living With Legends) and Linda Troeller, whose exhibit on the hotel’s artistic history opened this week.

And BD’s renovations, said Troeller, did not match the vision of Bard’s daughter Michelle, who “was always so careful when she upgraded the rooms, in choosing which of the artist’s work belonged in the space. BD was more like one of those European spas – kind of cookie-cutter.”

So what’s the new Big Story? I only found it first through Ed’s invaluable blog: the hotel’s board has ousted both Travis and BD. “[Board member] Marlene Krauss has filed a suit against them. We think that her reasons for firing them are that they are losing money and not fixing the place up,” Ed Hamilton writes.

According to Hamilton, BD at first contested its firing in court, claiming in its defense that since last July its management increased net operating income of the hotel by 225%, revenue per available room by more than 35%, occupancy from 73% to 88%, and room nights sold by 41%. But on Monday BD withdrew its petition, leaving the hotel currently without a manager at all.

Rumors that longtime shareholder David Elder would be taking over have met with high scorn from Hamilton. who points out that a long-running lawsuit by author Piri Thomas is seeking to have Elder removed from the hotel’s board entirely. Meanwhile Troeller, when I called her this afternoon, would say only that Elder had been “very kind last December, when we knew nothing” and helped her secure the hotel’s ballroom for this week’s exhibit. “I’m not that privy to the real estate gossip,” Troeller added. “But it’s clear that BD didn’t share the vision of the hotel – for so many years, we has leadership that made this place somewhere that welcomed artists, so much so that when Christo and Jeanne-Claude arrived in the 1980s, they only knew one thing: ‘The Chelsea Hotel’….Now,” she said, “We don’t know what it will be like.” Troeller suggested that the hotel’s new direction might take a page from the Lloyd Hotel and Cultural Embassy, the 75-year-old hostel in Amsterdam now turned boutique hotel, called by Guardian UK “a riot of creativity” that showcases top Dutch designers such s Marcel Wanders and Jurgen Bey. “That owner turned the first floor into a gallery,” Troeller said. “You can do a lot, if you have vision.”

All of which is very diverting, but leaves out a lot – like Ed’s last-minute discovery of asbestos at the hotel, and whether the web of housing-court precedent being set by the losses of last year will mean to artists trying to live in this town. And all of it leaves out the history of the place itself, and what it has meant to generations of New Yorkers.

A big story? No story, because too diffuse? I’ll figure it out in the next few weeks, I guess (Meanwhile, my least favorite story has just done the fizzling into air that many expected..)

Update, May 17; After I wrote the above, things kind of exploded. Here’s the story I wrote about it all….

the courage not to bomb

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Amid primaries, protests, and my quixotic effort to make progress on my book, I’ve kept headlines like this and this tucked away at the side of my brain, where my belief in the strong possibility of an October surprise lives and worries.

But now, I hear Tim Russert has taken time off from Hillary-bashing to let the cat out of the bag.  Dday notes that

… yesterday, Tim Russert kind of came out of nowhere by basically announcing to Barack Obama that we’re about to drop multiple bombs on Iran. I’m guessing that Russert, who talks to all sorts of foreign policy elite members and figures inside the Bush Administration and presumes those conversations to be off the record unless specified, knows a lot more about this than he’s letting on. And over the last week, we’ve paradoxically seen Administration rhetoric over Iran grow more heated, with the head of the CIA claiming that Iranian policy is “to help kill Americans in Iraq,” while the US has joined major powers in offering a package of incentives to Iran to get them to curtail the nuclear program that the latest NIE says they’ve already stopped.

We already know what song John McCain will be singing. Will the Dem nominee have the guts not to sing along? Or will they do as Tim O’Brien says grunts in Vietnam did – kill for fear of being called cowards?

yearning for the engineers?

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My friend Lily was one of the first on the net with this story you might have seen on CNN — the first, that is, after the dad whose desperation threw on Youtube the substandard housing contractors had built at Fort Bragg:

The screen capture to the left is a soldier plunging a clogged bathroom drain, on a bathroom floored filled with inches of standing water and raw sewage. Ft. Bragg’s living conditions, at least as shown in this video by a suitably outraged father, bring to mind those at Walter Reed, profiled by the reporting team at the Washington Post last year. The Fayetteville Observer has weighed in with an article on the conditions at Fort Bragg, prompted by the release of this video, and they’re asking for answers, too. Do yourself a favor and watch what one citizen journalist did to document the conditions facing some returning military. We are not remotely giving them the care that they deserve. And it’s shameful that public pressure has to be brought to bear, by videos like this, before conditions are improved for returning servicemembers.

Others drew connections to last week’s GAO report on the outsourcing of Iraq reconstruction, also know to some as why we went to war in the first place:

In addition, the audit said many reconstruction projects were being described as complete or otherwise successful when they were not. In one case, the U.S. Agency for International Development contracted with Bechtel Corp. in 2004 to construct a $50 million children’s hospital in Basra, only to “essentially terminate” the project in 2006 because of monthslong delays.

But rather than terminate the project, U.S. officials modified the contract to change the scope of the work. As a result, a U.S. database of Iraq reconstruction contracts shows the project as complete “when in fact the hospital was only 35 percent complete when work was stopped,” said investigators in describing the practice of “descoping” as frequent.

But how do we get this stuff done without hiring someone to do it? I hear you cry in agony. But here’s where the history slut comes in: we seem to have forgotten what was learned from costly wars in earlier centuries, that outsourcing war doesn’t work. Those underfed, mutinying troops I talked about from the Revolution were supplied by private companies, who couldn’t keep up with the demand.

That’s why when we had to get serious, during World War II, whole companies of the U.S. Army were only about building stuff — not the defense plants, but literally putting supplies together right in theatre. I learned about this when reading about the great wartime journalist Ernie Pyle. As his biographer notes, Pyle spent weeks with the Army 75th Ordnance Company, which made

…trucks and tanks and supplied the ammunition, for though “the layman doesn’t hear much about [it] … the war couldn’t keep going without it,” [Pyle wrote.]….It was a grievous distortion to imply, as all newspapers did, that the only parts of the war that mattered were the high commands and the line of battle. All the tankers and riflemen and bombardiers put together made up only the sharp point of a long, long spear constructed of signalmen, cooks, quartermasters, engineers, drivers and clerks.

Now, that long spear’s been subcontracted to KBR and its spinoff subs, who are too busy counting their money to evaluate whether the job they were hired to do is well done. Or even done.

I better stop writing before I start talking about this film, which is about the thousands of Asian employees those companies are busy retaining, and endangering, in Iraq. These are the days of miracle and wonder only in the Paul Simon sense – I have to take myself to the last line of that song.

that’s what you’d expect in a democracy

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I’ve been a huge fan of Jeannette Winterson for more then ten years, ever since her novel Passion knocked me out of any literary or emotional comfort zone I’d ever had. I can’t say I emulate her: her brand of poetry, vision and audacity just can’t be mimicked, though I did tell students they could learn bravery from her fearless descriptions:

One woman who kept a fleet of boats and a string of cats and dealt in spices is here now, in the silent city. I cannot tell how old she may be, her hair is green with slime from the walls of the nook she lives in. She feeds on vegetable matter that snags against the stones when the tide is sluggish. She has no teeth. She has no need of teeth. She still wears the curtains that she dragged from her drawing-room window as she left.

The city in question is the same as Calvino’s, the period early enough that the narrator ends up traveling with Napoleon’s cook.

Admittedly, I’d sort of lost the thread of her work in more recent years, as it focused more on myth than I felt I could. But The Stone Gods, her newest, feels simultanously like yesterday’s news, tomorrow’s headlines, and the kind of poetry that rattles the brain. At first her dystopia, in which humans all choose to genetically stop aging whenever they wish, is hysterically funny as it horrifies:

Making everyone young and beautiful has made us all bored to death with sex. All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis. At least it’s a crisis in the countries of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned Genetic Fixing, and the SinoMosco Pact does not make it available to all its citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favorites. This way the leaders look like gods and the rest look like shit-shovellers. They never claimed to be a democracy.

The Central Power is a democracy. We all look alike, except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That’s what you’d expect in a democracy.

I was going to quote a much later section, wherein she explains and describes the apocalypse that put her society into being, “the ugliness of how we had destroyed it, the brutal, stupid, money-soaked, drunken binge of a 21st-century world.” But I’d rather you read it in her book — which I first read in an addictive rush, pulled by her well-constructed love story/space opera/reverse-Jonathan-Swift commentary. Then I read it again, to savor the poetry, and the crystal palace Winterson has constructed.

Meanwhile, I do have one question for her. When is the film coming out, inevitably directed by the guy who dreamt up Torchwood?

Luxury [boring] City

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At Chelsea Now I often feel like I’m writing a subtler version of one of those blogs chronicling the loss of old New York in the crush of New York’s new development, like Lost City or Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York. Roughly a quarter of my stories feature efforts to Save something, whether it’s Save the Garment Center, Save [Historic] Chelsea, or — this week — Save Saint Vincent de Paul, a historic church that served former slaves among its congregants back in the pre-Civil War Gangs of New York days.

All of them fear the future envisioned by Mayor Bloomberg and his aspiring-Robert-Moses deputy, Daniel Doctoroff, which was illumined beautifully by my J-school classmate David Freedlander in Thursday’s AM New York. David ended his article with a quote from urban scholar Fred Siegel; “”You can sum up the Bloomberg legacy in two words: luxury city.”

I found myself quoting Siegel, and by extension David, on Friday to some folks in Philadelphia, the city I’ve always thought of as a second or third home. For a journalist, I speculated, their town might offer much more interesting terrain than the latest $2-million condo or yet another elegy for a historic church/concert hall/bookstore. It was enough, I added, to make like John Cusack in this movie, telling his editors from a wild and woolly Savannah, Georgia: “New York is boring!”

Of course, I may just not be taking the long view; there’s no doubt that at least some of the new building is Ozymandian. Brooks at Lost City warns:

I still think the big wake-up call is yet to come, long after Bloomberg has left office and taken up his new job in Albany, when the City wakes up and realizes it has no working class, no artistic class, no small-business culture, no middle class to speak of, no younger generation that didn’t come out of law school or business school, or clings to a trust fund.

But by the time that happens, I’ll be collecting Social Security. And I wonder if I will be in New York or some other, more little-engine-that-could town.

“we ground troops still exist”

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As some of you know, I was kind of devastated to miss Winter Soldier week before last. And the glimpse I got yesterday reminded me why, in the presence of a half-dozen members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Some I’ve written about, like Garett Reppenhagen; some I’ve always wanted to meet, like Garett’s buddy Jeff; and other were new to me, like this active-duty sergeant, who demonstrated that you can be both warm, gorgeous and a kick-ass, totally disciplined organizer at the same time.

In a way, yesterday’s event was more important for the narrative of this book, even if I’d had to choose. While they talked a little about Winter Soldier, they offered yesterday not testimonies of Iraq atrocities but of their own resistance —starting with something as simple as Jeff placing anti-war stickers on signposts on his Iraq base, so that their command would know that their troops were serving under protest.

I wrote last time about being impressed by this generation, when they were my students: I’ve also been convinced from the beginning of this war that the White House didn’t know what it was in for when it sent people like this — smart, self-aware kids who believed deeply that they were doing something important — to fight a war that violates many of their core principles.

The other highlight yesterday was meeting Richard Boyle, perhaps best known as the guy played by James Woods for his exploits in Reagan’s first war. Before then, Boyle tooled around Vietnam as a super-freelancer, and in 1971 witnessed first-hand the GI resistance that was pivotal in ending the U.S. war against Vietnam. Back then “the peace movement back home was OVER,” Boyle bellowed yesterday. “They’d marched, and petitioned, and written to Congress — and they were ignored.”

Boyle then described the famous mutiny at Fire Base Pace, up ner the Cambodian border. “They were still saying in the [official briefing, nicknamed by soldiers] Saigon Follies, that there were no U.S. troops up there.” Meanwhile six men on the base were refusing to go on night patrols they deemed suicidal – and sending with Boyle a secret petition, to be delivered to Ted Kennedy. As Boyle writes in his book Flower of the Dragon, the petition read:

We the undersigned of Bravo Company, First Battalion, Twelfth Cav, First Cav Division, feel compelled to write you because of your influence on public opinion and on decisions made in the Senate.

We’re in the peculiar position of being the last remaining ground troops that the U.S. has in a combat role and we suffer from problems that are peculiar only to us. We are ground troops who are supposedly in a defensive role (according to the Nixon administration) but who constantly find ourselves faced with the same combat role we were in ten months ago. At this writing we are under siege on Firebase Pace near the city of Tay Ninh. We are surrounded on three sides by Cambodia and on all sides by NVA. We are faced daily with the decision of whether to take a court-martial or participate in an offensive role. We have already had six persons refuse to go on a night ambush (which is suicidal as well as offensive), and may be court-martialed. With morale as low as it is there probably will be more before this siege of Pace is over.

Our concern in writing you is not only to bring your full weight of influence in the Senate, but also to enlighten public opinion on the fact that we ground troops still exist. In the event of mass prosecution of our unit, our only hope would be public opinion and your voice .[Signed by Sp4 Albert Grana and 64 other men — listed in Boyle’s book.]

After we finished the tape, Al Grana handed me the petition with the sixty-five signatures. It was two-thirds of the company, more than anyone had expected. Time was running out. If I was ever to get out of Pace, it had to be now.

Grana shook my hand the way grunts shake hands, clasping the thumb.

“I hope you can make them listen,” he said

As Boyle recountes it, Kennedy initially refused to meet with Boyle, and then refused to do more than “”request an investigation” of the events at Pace. He also advised John Kerry, whose stirring speech before the Senate wasn’t six months old, not to do so either. All of which explains better, to me, why Kerry was AWOL from the new Winter Soldier, as vivid a presence as he was in 1971. I hadn’t realized that Kerry had already begun, so early, to distance himself from what some consider his finest hour.

rashomon, via NYC schools

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This past Tuesday, I sat in a windowless classroom on my beat, getting yelled at by a principal, four assistant principals, and a handful of teachers and students from a local high school. Many of their sentences began: “Do you even know..?”

Did I know that their math team had done well? That their media school produced numerous magazines and books? That their fine arts academy’s music and art teams had worked together on a concert, the latter painting the sets till all hours? And one young teacher hissed at me, “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

They were responding to one of four articles I’d written about their school, which like other large high schools in New York has been undergoing rapid changes under Chancellor Joel Klein: breakup of its student body into small “learning communities,” shifts in curriculum, and its first “report card.” These teachers and students felt I had stigmatized the school, that I had written a borderline racist way about the changes in the school’s demographics “without writing about the amazing things that happen here every day,” as the director of their business school put it. And their principal accused me of “twisting the facts to suit your (my) agenda.”

Now I know why education reporters burn out.

I’ve spent close to six months now trying to sort out fact from rumor on both the overall citywide reforms and on what’s going on in the local schools, to the extent possible when my beat isn’t Chelsea schools but all of Chelsea. I get letters and emails challenging this or that point as well as giving me tips about where to look. The stories told by each vary hugely, both in simple facts and in the mood about the schools themselves. Especially this one. I began to work more slowly, to examine each claim and to prepare to ask for an official response from the school.

Then news broke: a kid at the school had been shot a block away. With three bullets in his body, he had run around the corner to the lobby of the school and collapsed. Suddenly it was front-page news (for us), and a followup to the first story these teachers had hated, about rumors that swirled about gang activity after three of their students were stabbed.

After months of looking into it (to the extent possible while writing other news stories every week), I feel like I’ve been part of a 2000’s NYC version of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. The school blames the community, with its out-of-town partyers and public housing complexes. The community blames the school — most of whose students live in less affluent neighborhoods, like the South Bronx or my own ‘hood Washington Heights. A longtime expert on NYC schools tells me that many parents from those neighborhoods likely chose it partly because it’s in a rich neighborhood, and they figure the kid will be safe there. OR they only send them reluctantly aftet their child begs, “because she wanted to take a chance on Manhattan,” as one parent in the room said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a kid is recovering at St. Vincent’s Hospital. The school is trying to recover, the Tuesday group said, from the damage my articles have done. And I’m still turning the crystal around and around, hoping to distinguish between objective fact, personal testimonies, and the bigger picture, if there is one, while pulling out an actual story by deadline.

It’s a journalistic truism that if all your sources feel equally maligned, you’re doing something right. But as a sometime educator, I did feel bad that the kids felt I’d ignored their heroism. Because much of their work as I’ve seen it is indeed brilliant, like the short films and newspapers I’ve seen, a testimony to both students and the teachers who shepherd them. These kids’ writing sure beats the pretentious drivel I produced in high school.

If there’s one thing I learned from my time teaching at CUNY, it was that many of the students struggling to learn paragraph structure had already done things I’d never have the strength for — like living with alcoholic parents, or crossing over from Mexico in the dark of night. (I don’t remember the latter guy’s name, Department of Homeland Security, should your Google-enabled software find this entry. I do remember that he was a cook in a fancy Manhattan restaurant, and a hell of a poet.)

Time to shake off the dragged-to-the-principal’s office feeling from Tuesday, and finish my piece (deadline this afternoon). Most of the investigative stuff will have to wait for another week. If I succeed in describing one facet of the crystal with accuracy, I’ll be happy. I don’t expect them to be.