RUNNING
HEAD: ANTICIPATION: A LIFE SPENT IN WAITING
Anticipation: A Life Spent in Waiting
Timothy J. Burke
December 3, 2004
She likes
the weather today- says she wanna shake shake shake shake shake
-Adam Duritz, “She Likes the Weather”
A lot of
people are in harm’s way. Some are making better choices than others.
-Steve Jerve, WFLA-TV meteorologist, August 13 2004
Ja, Das Scorpions
Gestört mir wie Hurrikan
Charley tötet
-Tim Burke, grammatically poor German haiku, August
13 2004
My hips shifted awkwardly in the tan
porch chair. Waiting. Right hand curled around a glass of
Having arrived in
Yet there was an air of discomfort
in her tone. It rang true with sensations that had coursed my veins since passing
NO SCHOOL TOMORROW
GO AWAY CHARLIE (sic)
My disquiet had built since passing
the sign. Frankly, I didn’t know if I agreed with it. I continued down the
road, thinking, “I’m kind of excited for Charley to come here.”
Sickening. I knew it at the time,
and I know it now. But what I came to realize from that anticipation, and the
later disappointment, at Charley’s having passed me by is that this wasn’t an
isolated incident. I had grown into a person for whom watching chaos, danger,
and disaster on television wasn’t enough.
I wanted to be there. And while I
knew that the giant red cyclone that hovered over
This is a memoir of my relationship
with chaos, danger, and disaster.
January 28, 1986 – 11:30
a.m.
In a green and black striped polo shirt he sits
attentively in the second row of Ms. Wanamacher’s second grade classroom, along
the windows. It was a dangerous place to put a seven-year-old with attention
problems, but the diagnosing of ADD and ADHD to grade school students would
take a few more years to reach Napoleon, Ohio.
Three hours pass by during which the student pays little
heed to his shockingly blonde and equally overbearing teacher. He knows any minute
now Principal Yarnell will come on the PA and announce that it was time for
teachers to turn on their televisions.
He also knows that there were delays. The moment he’d
been waiting for had been scheduled for earlier in the morning – his father’s USA Today’d had a colorful timeline on
the front page. But there were always delays.
Finally, the crackle and pop comes from the black speaker
mounted above the crucifix that adorned the doorway to the room.
“Teachers, please turn on your televisions for this
historic event.”
The student’s muscles tighten and he shifts nervously in
his seat. This was gonna be so cool. As the ancient television warms up he sees
the gleaming whiteness of the spacecraft point toward the heavens. He opens the
lid of his desk, pulling out the children’s science magazines he’d read compulsively
and repetitiously in the previous weeks, outlining every step of the launch
process.
T-minus ten
seconds. GLS go for main engine start.
He sees the fires ignite, burning away the excess
hydrogen to ensure a clean launch. He would have turned to Christy, the cute
blonde sitting next to him, to explain this, but his eyes were locked on the
television.
T-minus six
seconds.
The main engines fire in an orange burst of color. They
reflect in the student’s blue eyes, squinting in the manner they often did
before teachers ordered the eye exam that would soon burden him with the thick
glasses, his junior-high trademark.
Aaaalll riiiight.
The boy grips the corners of his desk as the craft
launches, clearing the tower in – counting – seven seconds. It turns, exposing
its black insulation that would later protect its reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.
The insulation, the boy knows, was manufactured in a plant not far from his
grandmother’s house in
Unblinking, his eyes never stray from the glowing image
as, 73 seconds later, the whit e and black became an orange fireball. They
don’t stray until his teacher quickly moves from her desk to the television,
with a quickness worthy of comparison to Earl Campbell, and turns it off.
She stands next to it, her sizable body commanding the
attention of all but one of the 15 students.
“Please open your spelling books.”
The boy’s eyes focus with their best ability on the
fading spot of the picture tube.
He hated spelling.
The rest of the school day is a blur, in confusion over
the reality of what everyone else had just witnessed. The student feels
unfulfilled, and, during recess, sits alone on the wooden bench near the
swingset. Once back in the classroom, he gathers his belongings in anticipation
for the 3:00 bell, and quickly runs home to turn on the television. He needs to
know more. Entering his house, he rushes to the basement, tosses his books on
the sofa, and selects ABC, his news network of choice.
Sam Donaldson was standing in front of the White House.
This was to have
been another night of triumph for the President, who had planned to tell the
Congress and the nation how good things are in the country. But the shuttle
disaster has changed all that. Officials here are shaken by the loss and by the
fact that this happened on Mr. Reagan's watch. Sam Donaldson, ABC News, the
White House.
The boy chuckles. Donaldson’s absurd haircut always
made him laugh.
I was upset. The other students in
school were upset, too. But I was upset for a different reason. I was angry at
my teacher for depriving me of observing the aftermath. For depriving me the
knowledge of what happened. How it happened. For the experience of being there. My weeks of preparation had
been reduced to an inadequate few minutes of coverage. I didn’t realize it at
the time, but it wouldn’t be long before my access to another
nationally-televised disaster would again be cut short.
October 12, 1991 – 11:30 a.m.
In his baggy khaki pants with the elastic waistband, he
rises from his seat in the eighth-grade classroom and crosses to the
television. The teacher, whom, incidentally, was also his mother, had given him
permission to turn on the hearings taking place on Capitol Hill in the few
minutes before lunch. It’s Friday, and the pungent smell of the weekly fish fry
is permeating the building.
The other students watch with mock enthusiasm, not entirely
sure of the political process they’re about to witness. Mainly, their curiosity
lies with the boy. Why is he so interested in some Supreme Court nominee? Tim’s
always weird like that.
He flips the channel to NBC, his new favorite station. He
sees the professional-looking woman sit behind the microphone, speaking
silently. The boy turns up the volume, unmuting the television. He doesn’t
realize the volume had already been cranked up to an ear-splitting level.
…men with large
penises and women with large breasts…
The comment blasts through the room, turning heads with
whiplash-like speed. The student’s mother/teacher rushes to the television and
quickly silences it.
“I don’t think this is appropriate for you to be
watching,” she voices with as much stoicism as is capable from her diminutive
body. She orders the students downstairs to take lunch.
While the rest of the students
laughed in adolescent maturity at hearing the words so grossly
decontextualized, I was quietly calculating how such an event could be taking
place in my country. The previous year had found a swelling of patriotism and
civic pride in my personality: I’d decorated my room with American flags and
anti-Saddam Hussein propaganda, even collecting the tacky Topps Desert Storm
trading cards. (Colin Powell was my favorite.) Again, I felt deprived. I wanted
to experience the debate, the adversarial discourse that was, in a way,
representative of the nation I was slowly coming to know. Certainly, the
hearings were divisive, and creating damage not just to political and racial relations but to women’s rights. I was hardly
a feminist at the time, but my mother had raised me well in her adoration of
fellow Toledoan Gloria Steinem, and I knew what I was missing was important. I wanted to see Senator Arlen
Specter’s questions, see his condescending tone, and stare at his furrowed
brow. I wanted that chaos of confusion over the validity of Hill’s claims. I
wouldn’t get that opportunity, at least not to witness it live.
December, 1993
He’s hiding under a desk, avoiding Spanish class. A few
other students lie with him in the dark, giggling over the havoc they’re
causing in the school that day. It was eighth period, the last one of the day,
and they were excited to go home. The past two months had been more fun than
they’d ever imagined school could be. The teacher’s strike had left a
collection of unqualified, unprepared teachers (his band of cohorts knew to
refer to them by their proper term, ‘scabs’) in classrooms, and a dearth of
discipline in the hallways.
It’s almost Christmas break, and the students quietly
lament the two weeks of separation. Their subversive tactics weren’t sanctioned
by their parents, but they weren’t discouraged either. In their minds,
everything they did to make sure education didn’t happen was a step toward
success.
Their heavy breathing fills the small room. With watches
synchronized, the eight students rush out of the abandoned room with one minute
left before the school day’s end. They move with well-planned fluidity, scattering
across the school, ensuring every teacher hears their battle cry.
DOWN WITH SCABS!
DOWN WITH SCABS!
They call themselves the Teekays. Teacher’s Kids.
And while they know that adolescence is the time to hate your parents, their
labor is one of love.
I can’t think of a more exciting
moment in my high school career as the five-month teacher’s strike that erupted
in the first month of my sophomore year. I had just been elected by my fellow
students to lead them as their class president, and a week later, the
unexpected strike ensued. National media followed us to school, taking photos
and conducting interviews. The teachers we loved stood on street corners,
screaming invectives and cursing their replacements who drove by under police
cover. Strange people took over teaching our classes, and my father, one of the
school’s most senior teachers and the head coach of the football team, began
growing a beard, vowing not to shave until a settlement. The air was electric.
A variety of different methods were
devised to deal with the situation, including canceling school several days a
week, hiring full-time substitutes, or holding only half-days of class. Our new
principal, Mr. Long, was a good man, and as someone on the committee who helped
select him, I felt sorry that he was in this situation. Yet even at age 15, I
knew about the thickness of blood.
My enthusiasm for the situation,
however, wasn’t shared by my family – or the community. My town swelled with
dread and wondered when the crisis would come to an end and “life would go back
to normal.”
I’ve never been fond of normal.
The economic impact, was, of course,
far from my mind. Even when I came home the day before Thanksgiving and found a
large turkey in our refrigerator, “Courtesy of the teachers of the
I enjoyed a time that seemed to be
everyone else’s misery. Their financial shortcomings, as well as my own
family’s, were irrelevant. The calculated horseplay and devious activities my
friends and I were able to accomplish without risk of discipline were a thrill.
The fun came to an end when I
arrived home to find a headline in the paper that would bring reality to my
literal doorstep.
Teachers,
school board agree to binding arbitration to settle dispute
When the union finally signed a
contract in March, I was disappointed while my household celebrated. My father
would eventually lose his coaching job on account of the strike, but I knew he
never really enjoyed it anyway.
The strike would leave scars in my
community that have yet to heal. Its fiercely conservative voters have roundly
rejected subsequent levy issues to purchase new books, repair the
hundred-year-old middle school, or fund athletics. Yet, in the face of this
obvious damage, I still look back on the experience and smile, wishing I could
live through it again.
I miss my father’s beard.
October, 1994
His 1987 Buick LeSabre’s beefy six cylinders rumble before
him. His right foot pins the accelerator to the floor as he screams down
His eyes carefully focus on the narrow strip of asphalt,
lined between two deep ditches. The night sky stretches out before him as he
slides the long fingers of his left hand to the headlight switch, darkening the
road and leaving the cloud-covered moon his only illumination.
He drives.
The rest of my high school career
was marked by a series of stupid and dangerous behavioral choices. Certainly,
most teenagers at some point drive their cars too fast on country roads – but
I’m not sure how many consistently pulled what I came to call “External stealth
mode.” Greene et al. (2000) explain the differences between standard adolescent
high-risk behavior and motivated, aggressive risk-taking. They would draw a
link to a desire for self-fulfillment. I can’t say I disagree. In the face of
risk and disaster, I consistently chose the course of action that would sate a
yearning for the speed, a yearning for the excitement.
June 12, 1998
He’s doing his summer internship at the local radio
station as a reporter. He receives a phone call informing him of a hostage
situation down in
“Hello, I’m Tim Burke from WZOM and I’d like to know
what’s happening.”
“Can’t tell you anything. Sorry.”
The boy tries again with other officers, and rotates
around the block, trying to get a better look at the house where the incident
appears to be taking place. His resilience leads to some progress, finding the
story to be the following: man comes home, finds wife has been cheating on him,
and pulls a gun on her. The man is also claiming to have a “sizable amount” of
TNT as well. The boy continues roaming the area, trying to find the best spot
to watch the events unfold. As reporters arrive from
The boy becomes the source for everyone’s facts on the
crisis. He proudly shares it with the cute brunette from the NBC affiliate, the
one he knows graduated from his school’s rival journalism program only a few
years prior.
“But,” he says, “I have to get back to finding out more
about the situation.” He leaves her, smirking to himself, and heads down the
block to spew the same scarce information to the blonde from the CBS station.
Hours pass with no result, as the negotiator tries to
extract the hostage safely. The boy finds a viewing spot on the porch of a
neighboring house, in direct line of the back door of the hostage-taker’s home.
If he were to come out with guns blazing, this would be a bad place to sit. It
doesn’t matter to the intrepid reporter, with his cell phone pressed to his
ear, recording every moment for immediate broadcast.
Then, more quickly than the reporter can describe in
words,the criminal concedes defeat and offers himself up to police without a
fight. The boy is disappointed at an opportunity missed.
And, as it turns out, there never was any TNT.
I felt defeated. While I had been
the first on the scene, the first to report the hostage crisis, and the go-to
man for the other journalists, reporters whom I looked up to and hoped to be
one day, reality hadn’t matched what my imagination had created. I didn’t want
bullets whizzing past my head, but a firefight sounded intriguing to me.
Typically, we hope situations like this end without violence. It did. I was
hoping for something else – perhaps not violence, per se, but the appearance of
violence. The possibility of violence. The attempt at violence.
Something with action.
March 20, 1999
It’s his spring break. Again, he’s working as a reporter
for the local radio station, covering a Ku Klux Klan rally in the nearby town
of
Carrying his Marantz tape deck over his shoulder and
wearing his grey felt reporter’s cap he enters through the journalists’ gate,
steps through a metal detector, and finds chain link fences corralling the
media between square cages on each side – one for self-professed Klan
supporters, the other for the anti-Klan protestors. The media corral spans
about eight feed wide.
He squints into the sun to see snipers perched atop the
county courthouse, where the racist thugs elected to hold their rally. The cage
designated for those protesting the Klan’s presence is already full of young
college students, also on their spring break. The boy wonders whether he should
be over there instead.
The other side slowly gathers a handful of rednecks with
long hair, flannel jackets, and Confederate flag t-shirts.
The rally begins with a loud and distorted playing of “
“Get out!”
“We don’t want you here!”
“Go back to
The cameras roll and the boy presses “Record” on his tape
deck. The lectures begin. The boy is surprised at the nature of the hateful
rhetoric. African-Americans are never mentioned. Today’s topic of Klan
conversation seems to be Latinos.
“Them wetbacks are takin’ yer jobs!”
“You people are gonna let them spics get the best of
you??”
The college students, bored, turn to face the ragtag
group of Klan supporters who scream at them through the fence. The words
quickly become ugly and the poorly-supported fences begin to shake.
The Klan’s courthouse activities are swiftly forgotten as
media members scramble to get a good shot of the havoc. Violence is pledged, on
both sides. Some covert protestors enter the supporters’ side, and fisticuffs
erupt. The fences appear ready to fall at any moment. Cameramen gather their
tripods and scramble to the exit, while blonde reporters trip in their high
heels on the brick pavement, no doubt questioning whether their safety is worth
an audition tape-worthy standup.
The boy stands there, taking it all in, calmly monitoring
the audio volume levels on his tape deck’s VU meter. He, too, is thinking of
his audition tape. Unfortunately, the police break up the groups and declare an
end to the rally before a full-blown riot can erupt. The college students rush
to the Klan supporters’ exit, hoping for a crack at the rednecks, unaware of
the irony of their desire for violence.
The inadequacy of the previously seemingly excessive
police presence soon becomes evident. Overalls-wearing Klan supporters begin a
sprint to their car, parked three blocks down
The supporters reach their white Buick and escape, as the
crowd throws shoes and rocks, cracking their rear window as they speed away.
The police, having long given up on controlling the mass of angry students,
watch quietly from the sidewalk, hands cupping their gun holsters.
The crowd quickly disperses and the street grows quiet,
silence broken only by the occasional crackle of a police radio.
I don’t consider myself a violent
person. I’ve been in very few fights in my life, and, by my memory, picked none
of them. Yet I remember distinctly that desire to see a brawl erupt. Halfway
through the sprint to the white Buick the need to witness chaos mixed with my
liberal hate of the racist Klan supporters like the pouring of vinegar into a
baking-soda volcano. It exploded.
The peaceful result everyone had
hoped for didn’t happen. Certainly, it could have been a lot worse. I lamented
the outcome, but not in the way my fellow citizens did. Perhaps I had in mind
the violence portrayed in John Grisham’s A
Time to Kill. I felt, at the time, the climax would be the moment when the
other journalists scattered, thinking the fences would come down. (They never
did, a testament to Toledo Fence Supply.) It was that point of danger that I
had been seeking, in the midst of a total breakdown in control, in the midst of
impending chaos.
April 20, 1999
He comes home from his morning class and turns on CNN,
his news channel of choice. He grabs the tin of Skoal, puts in a dip, and opens
a book, but gets only to the first page as news breaks of a shooting in
He doesn’t move from the futon for hours. The massacre
intrigues him. He wonders if the windows will shatter at any moment from the
blast of the alleged pipe bombs buried within.
He wants to be there. He wants to be among those still
not knowing if the killers were alive. He wants to shake with the fear of
wondering what the next step would be.
I’ve tried to place myself in that
school on that morning in
I realized that my need and desire
for the high-threat situations, combined with the increased access to those
situations due to being a journalist, would certainly end badly for me as a
human being. I had to cut off my hand to save my soul.
November 7, 2000
He sits in the corner room of the Tower Inn restaurant
and lounge in
The beers come quickly. The beers go quickly.
All of us networks made
a mistake and projected
He calls
We now will be
considering
Another beer is ordered. The boy returns to his seat and
vows not to leave it until he knows who his next President will be. The bar
owner, a Greek immigrant used to the grad student regulars in his back room,
keeps the bar open.
“Don’t expect this to be a regular thing, ya?”
Little changes in the next six hours, but the ragtag
group of political junkies continue drinking and smoking. Talking heads keep
talking.
This is a
worst-case scenario.
“This
is a best-case scenario,” the boy thinks to himself, soaking in the smoke,
booze, and confusion. He always loved indecision, probability, Schröedinger's cat.
At 8:00, the boy struggles to his feet, aware he has to
teach class at 8:30. He staggers across campus to the classroom, smartly leaving
his car at the Tower Inn.
His students are only slightly more awake than he. The
boy moves to the blackboard, grabs a small piece of white chalk, and slowly
writes in large letters on the blackboard.
CHAOS.
He looks at his class, winks at the cute theatre major in
the front row, and shuffles out of the room. He walks three blocks back to his
apartment, shrugs off the brown tweed jacket that had embraced his shoulders
for the last 24 hours, and collapses into bed.
I’ve always felt that night to be a
kind of quiet chaos. The action, as we now know, was taking place in
September 11, 2001 – 9:00
a.m.
He ends class early, like he usually does on Tuesday
mornings. He steps into his department chair’s office as he does every day
after class.
“You hear about what happened in
“No…?”
“About fifteen minutes ago a plane crashed into the
“No shit.”
He rushes to his office, causing posters and handbills on
the hallway bulletin boards to go flying. A small black and white television
sits upon his desk. He tunes in NBC, the only station that he can tune in from
campus. His nose crinkles as his eyes try to focus through the blurred screen. Matt
Lauer announces the second plane has just hit.
He bursts out into the hallway and finds department
colleagues each sticking their heads out their doors, amazed at what they’re
seeing. The television station advisor unlocks the control room door and turns The
Today Show on each of the monitors. The six professors stand there, silently
witnessing what would become their nation’s darkest day. Nothing is said.
Nothing has to be.
Soon, word is received that the college president has
canceled classes for the day. The boy calmly walks to his car and drives the 20
minutes back to his house. He glances at the other drivers on the highway. Each
share a similar 1,000 yard stare.
He pulls into his driveway, unlocks the door, and descends
the creaky wooden stairs to his basement and finds his American flag. He grabs
a hammer and two nails from his work bench, and hangs the flag from his front
porch. He goes back inside, pulling the screen door shut so it doesn’t slam.
He tunes one television to NBC and the other to CNN.
Pulling up a news chat room, he glances at the latest rumors.
<dinodrac>
ABC - Oil Refineries in
<ttownboi1>
According to the
<RevTom>
Major League Baseball: All games for the remainder of the season indefinitely
postponed. Possible cancelled.
<Underdog>
ok!, how many planes were there.. and how many crashed? EVERYONE keeps saying.
8, or 11, or 4.... whats the OFFICAL #?
The screens grow green, grey, blue, and white. He
waits for news of another attack. It doesn’t seem like something this big would
be over already. The number of dead doesn’t register to him. He tries to keep
the energy and chaos of the morning continuing into the evening, but it doesn’t
happen. He tries to will all the false rumors true, but they don’t happen
either.
He thinks now might be a good time to call his
girlfriend.
A popular idea in American culture
is the asking of “Where were you?” followed by the assumption that when a sad,
notable moment in history occurs, we’d like to be as far away from it as
possible. Most people who work in
It took weeks for the guilt about my
reaction to kick in. The body counts and personalization of the victims helped.
Still, there’s an echoing call, like the chorus of the John Denver song: “I
wish I could have been there.” It’s as if the single defining moment of an
alchemist’s concoction of chaos, danger, and disaster happened and I wasn’t a
full participant – missed the chance for my ultimate high.
A common misconception is that guilt
builds into self-hate. Not so. Self hate, as defined by Bushman & Baumeister
(1998), is a specific lack of self-esteem. I’ve equipped with a healthy amount
of that. In fact, Cramond (1995) explains that high levels of personal ego can
be commonly linked with high-thrill seeking individuals (especially when linked
with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). It’s still unclear how this
factors into my personal reaction to public tragedy, however. It’s a personally
troubling issue.
August 13, 2004 – 6:00
p.m.
Steve Jerve’s blond head is talking to him, but he quit
listening hours ago. Charley is well on his way to
The boy picks up his video camera and digicam from the back
porch, plugs the cork back into a bottle of Chardonnay and puts it into the
refrigerator, and trudges upstairs to his bedroom.
15 instant messages await him on the computer screen.
Canalian (1:41:16 PM): getting a little breezy there?
markwsickmiller (2:26:21 PM):
dude, that hurricane is going directly into
Tautura (2:33:19 PM):
shouldn't you be evacuating?
adamsickmiller (2:58:13 PM):
how likely is your building to blow down?
He laughs a little and wishes he had more to tell
his friends. As it was, it was a whole lot of nothing, at least for him.
He lays down on the bed, glances once more at the blond
meteorologist, and falls into wine and bourbon-induced slumber.
September 5, 2004 – 8:30
a.m.
He sits on the back porch with a glass of Chardonnay, the
wine left over from the last hurricane. He smokes cigarettes with his roommate
Jenn and watches the trees in their backyard calmly sway. He’s convinced it’ll
be better this time, more exciting. More dangerous. Foreign objects will go
flying by his window. He’s sure of it.
It rains. The wind blows, but not particularly hard, by
his opinion. The litany of hurri-concern from friends continues.
Canalian
(12:00:42 PM): Nice day for
windsurfing I hear
javank (1:25:40 PM): um, is
it windy there
By two o’clock the power’s gone out and Jenn has gone
back to take a nap. He grabs his guitar, sits on the porch, and strums out
chords from a songbook he made back in high school, singing along, and hearing
the reverberations off the concrete walls of the porch.
It’s twelve o’clock
and it’s a wonderful day
I
know you hate me but I’ll ask anyway
Oooh!
Wait ‘til tomorrow!
The boy thinks it’s going to get worse. He believes it will get worse. He has a
dramatic image in his mind’s eye of what a hurricane is supposed to look like,
and knows that reality will merge with his imagination. It doesn’t. His
shoulders slump and his brows furrow with frustration. His friends call him up
and invite him down to
September 26, 2004 – 8:30
a.m.
Canalian (1:06:04 AM): hey,
how's the weather there?
He and his roommate are now used to the routine. Bottle
of wine, back porch, Parliament Lights. He’s smoked more cigarettes in the past
month than the rest of his life combined. His lungs feel like they’ve been
soaked in molasses. He’s got hope that this will be the big one, but it’s
tempered by the disappointments that were Charley and Frances.
Hours pass and he is not impressed. It looks
strikingly similar to the one he saw three weeks ago. Steve Jerve’s voice
echoes from the other room, repeating the same information he’s heard all
morning – then is silenced. Power’s out again.
The boy grabs a bagel, a cup of coffee, and John Irving’s
The World According to Garp. At least
he knows T.S. Garp won’t be a letdown.
The hurricanes were hardly a letdown
for the 126 people who died because of them. They were hardly a letdown for the
25,000 families who lost their homes as a result of
Yet that’s exactly what happened.
And things didn’t change much after Jeanne. I anxiously awaited
All told, I said, I preferred
blizzards.
I’m not happy with my response. My
heart turns black when, for example, a friend just starting his first job at
In the end, I find myself more often
than not silently disagreeing with the public response to impending disaster. Is it because my own life lacks drama? Or is
it the opposite, that I have been exposed to so much, that I am desensitized to
anything but pure, utter, horrific disaster?
In any case, there’s a great deal of
personal growth that needs to take place. There’s a reason the anecdotes are
written in third person, and always refer to a “boy.” In my mind’s eye, when
looking at the stories and how they happened, that’s who I see. It’s always
that second-grader in the green and black shirt, whether he’s on the porch
watching a hurricane, soaking in the chaos of a Klan rally, driving in darkened
silence, or sitting crosslegged in front of a television, glowing with the 120th
replay of a jetliner crashing into the World Trade Center. That little boy is
the one reacting that way, because a grown man would know better. And that’s
where the guilt comes in.
They say those of us who went to
Catholic school are particularly susceptible to feelings of unwarranted guilt.
That might be true. I think my guilt is deserved. I think it’s proper to feel
guilty about wanting hurricanes. I think it’s proper to feel guilty about
wanting to experience a terrorist attack. I think that’s reasonable. And I
think it’s reasonable to use the word guilt
rather than shame. I see my reactions
as behavioral, not personal (Henry, 2003). I want to believe I have a choice in
the way I respond to the world around me. I have to maintain that assertion,
because living a life in search of danger is best left to
Philosopher James Park (2001)
explains the purpose of guilt is to demonstrate deviation from social norms in
order to force conformity. After the episodes presented in this memoir, and the
guilt not just recalled but recreated through the writing of these words, has
conformity happened?
Not yet, it would seem.
November 17, 2004
It’s nearing the end of hurricane season. There hasn’t
been an Atlantic tropical storm since Matthew, over a month ago. There’s little
chance, now, of another one developing. Yet, he still obsessively clicks the
link on the left side of his web browser. Hoping. Anticipating.
Click.
There
are no active Atlantic tropical cyclones at this time.
Click.
There are no active Atlantic tropical
cyclones at this time.
Click.
References
44
days of dread (2004, November 26). The
Cramond, B. (1995). The coincidence of attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder and creativity. Retrieved from
http://www.borntoexplore.org/adhd.htm on November 20, 2004.
Greene, K. et al. (2000). Targeting adolescent
risk-taking behaviors: The contributions of egocentrism and sensation-seeking. Journal of Adolescence, 23, 439-461.
Park, J. (2001).
Our existential predicament: Loneliness,
depression, anxiety, & death.