Kumbh Mela with Sou, Agata, and Gasper

By bluerasberry on 2013-02-22

The night of 13 February I returned from Kumbh Mela with Sou, and I had wanted a peaceful 14 February morning and day with him. Hotels were crazy overbooked in Varanasi and I had not been able to find a room, and I asked Nadya if she could share a room with her cameraman so that Sou and I would have a place to which to return. She can be completely oblivious to daily affairs and she, for whatever reason, decided not to do this and to not inform me either.

Sou and I were exhausted and when we returned to her room she was sleeping in it. I asked her to leave on the basis of her committing to do so, and it being past midnight, and Sou and I wanting a peaceful Valentine’s Day. She was upset and then she left.

Sou and I had been staying awake for most of every night that he had been here. I felt deeply connected to him; I suppose we made love and I suppose we had sex, but the intensity of the experience with him was looking into his eyes and holding his body and having the most grilling uncomfortable conversations. This really happened every night I was with him – I was blissed out in love, crying on his body over the cruelty of the universe for putting barriers between lovers, laughing at all the fun we had been having, and completely exhausted by the confrontational conversations we were both wanting to have. Through all the conversations I was horny as anything and Sou is a lover of otherworldly presence. For a lot of reasons including his intuition, the control he has over his body, his understanding of the nature of love and lovemaking, some uncommon experience in love that he has had, his education in poetry and literature, his artistic nature, and his being physically attractive enough to have been getting a lot of unsolicited attention for a long time, some part of his spirit sourcing the romantic love in him has made him either a sex angel or sex demon. I am still thinking about him and he has been making me reconsider a lot of what I ever thought about sex and love. He gives me the feeling of him being a surgeon who serves my wellbeing, but who has decided that it would not harm me if he removed all my guts and placed them before me so that we could discuss them together. I was entirely shocked by some of the insight he had on me but at the same time was disoriented as someone who is being shown their own liver by a doctor’s latexed hand and asked what they thought of it. Sou strikes me as someone with a lot of ability to examine a person’s parts and consider their character but also still in innocence because of the questions he asked me – I wondered how he could be so naïve and yet be so perceptive, and it makes me think that he is only immature. I would like very much to see what he will become when he actualizes himself.

During that day we met his flatmate from Mumbai, who was visiting Varanasi as it was his hometown. We also met some other Benarasi people all of whom were connected to local manufacturing industry. I could describe that – it was strange to meet people so connected to export to the Western world and yet who knew nothing culturally whatsoever about the kind of people who were buying their products.

Valentine’s Day night we got a room in a hotel. It was the same as any other night except more intense, and he really pushed my limits. It was to be our last night together and we talked about race, cultural divides, dreams in life, career, the arts, family, friends, work and play, sex and love, fear, danger, and whatever else. We both consented to every part of the conversation and I had the feeling that it was climatic to my trying to understand him. I was dizzy and he said that he was also underrested also, because at this point we had each only slept a few hours at most per night for the last week. We talked another 8 hours at least without a break in conversation. At some point he told me to sleep because he wanted to pack his bags peacefully, and I did.

Soon after we met in Kolkata he suggested that he and I had a special connection, and I told him that I also felt it and that I felt it strongly. He progressed a bit further and asked me what I thought of him, and I pushed more told him that he seemed like an ideal partner to me. He suggested that we get married by Hindu religious tradition and I told him that seemed reasonable to me, if he was sure. He considered it and said that he was, so we had been talking about how to do this.

With not enough time to spare before he absolutely had to go to the airport and only just after he had packed his bags, we went through a Hindu wedding ritual. We did it in Varanasi, so Shiv was there, and I had a picture of Baby Krishna, so he was there, and then we had a candle, so Agni was there. We put on new clothes. We walked around the fire seven times. We exchanged mala seven times. I repeated some Sanskrit mantra that he said. We offered Kumbh Mela water. He put sindoor on me – I was taking a wife role, and I am not sure how I feel about being a wife because I rather like being male in every way and dislike female things, but I went with it.

I am not sure what this marriage means. I am as serious about this as he is for sure, but I see no way for us to practically live together at this time because he is planning school and our relationship will be much more likely to be successful if I go on in my career. I really do love him – a lot, he really really does it for me – but I acknowledge that this whole relationship is highly unusual, and it takes more than love to make a happy house and family.

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Arun Pathak documentary

By bluerasberry on 2013-02-22

Nadya had been wanting to film a documentary. I suggested that if she wanted to film in India that the economy there was different, and depending on her budget and interests that she could consider filming there. We talked about different subjects; she settled on Arun Pathak and began talking to him on Skype.

Arun Pathak is definitely an unusual and impressive character. At a young age he began working in political activism as a community organizer, and he quickly proved aptitude in rallying support for all kinds of popular causes. He has a casual way about him that makes people who listen to him like him, and he has business sense to get and manage funding, and people are generally willing to work with him.

In his early career he gained distinction by performing what I would call “suicide artistry”. There is a tradition in South Asia when people want things from the government, then a lot of them threaten suicide and some of them actually follow through. The international media has shown many images of Tibetans protesting Chinese occupation by immolating themselves, and that is one example of this. Other examples include Gandhi’s protests, which frequently involved him taking himself hostage by starving himself and threatening the British that if they did not comply with his demands, then he would kill himself and the Indian people would blame them for murdering him. Following the Mandal Commission, some middle or upper class high-caste students also killed themselves to protest the new barriers which the government created by transferring university admission invitations which they expected instead to low-caste students.

Pathak did lots of such protests. He is a passionate person. I am sure that he loves life and would not want to die, but I also am told and have read that he has stood in high places and precariously waved his body, and that he has jumped in front of politicians’ moving cars, and that he has somehow mangled his arms with some kind of death machine or cutting contraption, and that the poison he took at a barely sub-lethal level is what still makes his hands sweat continually to this day. Most famously and how I heard of him was his protest of Deepa Mehta’s water, in which he tied his torso to a rope and bound the other end to a stone. While she was filming the river, he was in a boat sliding into the background. In a scene which should have only shown two actors talking to each other, the camera was capturing an odd distraction in the distance in which an unnamed character not otherwise in the film was heaving a stone out of a rowboat and consequently jerked into the river’s depths. Pathak has survived all these protests so far.

Pathak worked as a regional contact for Mumbai’s Shiv Sena for years. Sometime later he began supporting BSP, but after that party lost the elections, he has been considering how to develop himself as an activist. Today he is still a community organizer. He is resident in a Jain temple in Varanasi where he occupies several apartments and the rooftop. As the birthplace of one of the Tirtankaras, The temple is one of the holiest in Jain religion, and Pathak has particular oversight over the apartments which are available to the pilgrims visiting the temple. I am really not sure of his relationship with the place; he has not yet ever been interested to talk to me about why he cares to do so much to promote Hindu faith and religion while living with Jains, nor am I quite sure why the Jains see best that he assist them there in their holiest place.

One of his plans for his future was to fund a movie about his activism. When I went to Mumbai I visited his office there. It was then full of people having a meeting about the filming schedule. Nandan tells me that he has read the script (it is Hindi) and that it seems like a professionally written script in accord with Bollywood traditions. He says that he music is appropriate and that it could be as any other popular Bollywood movie. Some controversy in the script includes criticism of particular politicians with whom Pathak has been in conflict in the past.

I asked Pathak what role he was to have in the production of his biography and he told me that he was, “Director, Producer, and hero” and “hero” is the word in India for the male lead. I could not immediately think of another movie in which someone has sought mainstream release and also served all those roles, and I asked Nandan if it was common in India. He told me that Pathak was trying something new.

I met the writer, the videographer, a dancing girl, some song boys, and others involved in the production. There were about 15 people there, and the office seemed quite nice and in a good location. Pathak told me that his plan was to transport about 70 people from Mumbai to Varanasi for filming on February 15, because his astrologer told him that day was auspicious. Something must have delayed filming because that day came and went, and if I understand correctly Pathak would like to start soon otherwise.

Through all this, Nadya has been visiting him nearly daily, filming him for a biography on his life and documenting his process in directing/producing/acting in his film. I love hearing Pathak talk and love seeing him do his daily activities. I look forward to seeing what Nadya produces and how his film progresses.

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Underwear shop with Sou

By bluerasberry on 2013-02-21

On perhaps February 12 Sou and I went to some mall to exchange a broken suitcase of his.

Sou has, and Indian people in general can have, attitudes about service workers that I rarely see in Western culture. Sou pushes my limits for detecting how suave a person could be, and if he had any more finesse, I am sure that he is so smooth that I would not be able to perceive him becoming any more of a gentleman. I mean when he wants to be, of course, but even when he bites or missteps he does so with a lot of style.

I would have trouble describing his attitude or how it is different than anyone else’s, but I suppose that I could say that he expects to be surrounded by service and in fact in his society he often is. In the United States, when one wants service one typically has to have some social transaction with the employee who would give the service. I am just now reconsidering why this is, but I think it has to do with the US attempting to be a more classless society, and because the US industrializes a lot of processes to give a consistent and uniform experience to consumers, and because there is not a large economic divide between the poorest half of society and (perhaps) the 51-90% of society above them, or wherever the divide becomes sharp. Also there is a history of hierarchy in India strengthened by the caste system and by a history of governance by kings.

Sou expects service in the same way that I expect to walk into a business and find that it is temperature controlled. I never would expect to ask a place to please adjust the air conditioning, because they can manage that themselves and when I walk in I should expect comfortable conditions and escape from harsh weather outside. I am making this analogy but I hardly even know how to talk about something which is so fundamentally natural to me in the service industry that I never notice it.

Sou and I went to an underwear shop. India has fewer department stores than the United States, and frequently there are store complexes in which many small stores all sell one thing. I have never seen a male underwear shop in the United States that did not target a gay clientele, but in India, there would not necessarily be any such targeting because there really would not be any other place to get underwear except an underwear store so all people would go there.

At this store there was staff who was managing it. This person seemed to me like the typical Indian shopkeeper who had been living in his business for a lifetime, and he was only taking money and giving receipts. All other work was done by his employee, who was some boy who got the job somehow. We were in a mall so the place was a little upscale.

Sou and I were talking to each other about underwear and I asked him about his size. He told me that he did not immediately know, so the sales boy pulled Sou’s pants down to examine the tag on his underwear. Following that the boy got on one knee in front of him to measure Sou’s waist with tape, and then he started producing large amounts of underwear and putting them in front of Sou for his perusal. Sou never acknowledged the boy except when he had a question for him, and I would say that he treated the boy with the utmost respect and politeness, but the forwardness of the sales staff in entering what I would call personal space and for going to a lot of work to layout everything in the store which Sou could have without getting any information from Sou about what he would like is typically of Indian service, and this especially so for someone likes Sou who projects the attitude of one for whom receiving service is as natural as breathing in conditioned air.

The boy helped me with my purchase decision as well but it was Sou that he felt the need to measure twice. I asked Sou later what he thought of the underwear boy; I would not say that his behavior was unusual for India but the differences in it still stand out to me. Sou was completely unconscious of it. By my perception, the boy was of a lower social class than Sou, and indeed of likely all his customers, and that he really wants to do his job well. At the same time, a job selling men’s underwear is best suited to someone who likes the idea of putting underwear on men, and that idea was probably not why the manager at the cash register got into the business, but it probably was related to why the sales boy thought to apply to work at this store.

If I were to buy underwear at a gay boutique in America, then I would not be surprised to find flirty sales staff. There are also plenty of people in the United States who simply do not have time to acknowledge sales staff. But what I perceived in this situation was something fundamental in Sou that he gauged the interaction as a class–based transaction, and the boy was doing what he needed to do for his job, and if the boy liked his job then he should but it was not Sou’s place in society to personally acknowledge him. It also might not have been appropriate for the boy to be acknowledged; he was just doing his job, and if he might have enjoyed selling Sou underwear, he should also feel safe in being able to go into his personal space and even touch his body a bit without worrying if his actions could be construed as a come-on to be acknowledged.

I found the entire exchange to be fascinating as an example of how people could interact with each other in a personal experience like choosing underwear and not have any chance of having the interaction being perceived personally by either party. Sou was buying and the boy was selling a store-product, and nothing more.

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Tanvir introduces me to Shabab

By bluerasberry on 2013-02-19

Tanvir met me at my hotel in the morning and we got in an autorickshaw. He talked about everything we passed detailing what happens in which neighborhood and the sort of development which happens in Dhaka. He proposed his own alternative urban planning schemes including the destruction and rebuilding of entire neighborhoods and and minor things like reforming organization of the cycle rickshaw workers’ community with new technology in their rickshaws and a sort of workers union. Transportation was a major concern of his, as it may well be a popular topic for discussion among many in the city, but I was thrilled to get his insight on the subject because I understood him so readily.

Tanvir took me to a nearby mall, the largest in the country and purported to be the largest in the region, and we went to the roof to find a coffeehouse he liked and said that he visited several times a week. I was thrilled that he drank coffee, and was happy to hear that Dhaka is nurturing a growing coffeehouse culture. After talking we went to Dhaka University and saw part of a city-wide photography exhibition called Chobi Mela. Also at the university there was a mausoleum wherein the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam and other people associated with the university were memorialized. Adjacent to this place was a mosque. Students were hanging out and studying in the mosque, and I asked Tanvir if this was common. He told me that mosques were a place for study, which I did not realize. Elsewhere in the university there were a lot of happy students including couples in love. I knew that Bangladesh was a Muslim country, but I had never visited a Muslim country before and did not know what to expect. I had no idea that Bangladesh was so secular or that the people in Dhaka would be so fashionable, but I saw this repeatedly. From there went to this nearby university restaurant where his friend Shabab was to meet us.

Upon arriving Shabab started talking as if we were not introduced, but rather as if we were already in the middle of a conversation somehow despite his just having joined the table. He has a casual way about him that made me feel not only that his attention was only on my interests, but also that we could collaborate on anything and achieve it were we only to take the time. He was telling me about his work in software development, and again he rejoined with Tanvir in talking about reform politics for Bangladesh, and he told me what I should see and do in Dhaka and who I would like to meet as if he anticipated such things by knowing something about me. We ordered food that was supposed to be representative of Dhaka and they told me that they trusted the restaurant, and we were delivered an enormous pot of rice and goat. I thought it looked great, smelled great, and was great. It seemed spiced in a way totally foreign to me and the rush of smelling it as the lid opened and steam came out was just something done in a way that was not familiar to me at all. I thought the food was wonderful and new; Tanvir and Shabab said that it was terrible and that the restaurant staff changed it because of the color of my skin and their expectations that I could not eat food in its normal preparation. I did not know what to think of this but I thought it was absurd for several reasons, and I laughed about it even though I did feel bad that they were not enjoying the food at all despite it being fascinating to me. I was to see Tanvir and Shabab in much of what I did in Dhaka.

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arrival in Dhaka

By bluerasberry on 2013-01-31

When I arrived in Dhaka I went to a cell phone store nearby and asked if I could use a phone. I called him, the people at the store described where I was, then he came and retrieved me. He took me to a hotel (Hotel Givenci Int. 76/A, Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue Farmgate, Dhaka 1215 Phone: +88029113947, +88029133312 www.hotelgivencibd.com) which was in Farmgate in what I would consider a good central location within the city.

I had just arrived after the bus ride and Tanvir raised the issue of politics, which was fine with me and following from our other conversations. He explained the history of the Bangladeshi political parties to me for the first but not the last time, and he made the story interesting and understandable. We made some plans for the week – I would meet other Wikipedians, and they would attempt to organize a meetup, and we would talk otherwise. I felt very well received and was anxious about coming because Tanvir had recently had a family problem, and I was unsure whether I should still visit. That night Tanvir again told me that it was good that I came, and said that he was quite sure that he would be leaving the country to go to school in Germany in a few months as he had been wanting.

Let me say something about the hotel – one night I gave them laundry and they said they would return it the next day. The next day it was not returned, so I went to sleep. At 11:30pm I was woken to receive my laundry, and the delivery person insisted that I pay cash immediately and that I could not just collect it the next day. I have experienced this kind of behavior from South Asian hotels before, but this was a rather nice hotel, and I was hoping to at least be not disturbed at night. I gave laundry again another day, and requested that the laundry not come back to me late at night. The next day I did not get my laundry so I went to sleep. In the morning at 5am I was woken to collect my laundry.

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Arriving in India 2013 – meeting Sherwin

By bluerasberry on 2013-01-29

I had planned a month-long trip to India, leaving from JFK Airport on Sunday 20 January and leaving from Indira Gandhi Airport the morning of Saturday 6 February. Nadya had asked me about doing a documentary in India and I told her many things, and she settled on Arun Pathak. She had been talking to him for about six months so I planned to meet her a few days there. Besides that I wanted to visit Nandan, Bunti, and the family. I also wanted to visit Wikipedians.

I was sorry that Tanvir was unable to get a visa to come to last summer’s Wikimania in DC and I wanted to visit him in Dhaka. I booked my flight to India before I planned an itinerary, and as it turned out, it seemed best for me to visit Dhaka immediately after arrival. I flew to Delhi, stayed a night, then took my connection to Varanasi, and said hello to everyone. I met with Jeremy and the other tour guides of VaranasiWalks and then went home to rest a bit before going to the train station my first night in town to connect a direct train from Varanasi to Kolkata. From there I would take a bus to Dhaka, and just call Tanvir whenever I arrived.

That night I started following up on some emails to people I knew in India telling them I arrived. I messaged Sherwin to tell him that later I would be in Mumbai, but he told me that he was in Kolkata. I thought that was fortunate and he said that he would receive me. I was to arrive early morning and that evening we would go to a wedding, and I was keen to see what Bengali style was.

Nandan and Mark took me to the train station. There was a notice that the train would be an hour late, and then when that notice changed to two hours, Mark went home. Nandan stayed with me and we talked as the announcement changed hourly to add an another hour or two to the expected time. It finally came 12 hours late. I had hardly slept on the plan, or in Delhi, and not at all in Varanasi, so I was on my third or fourth weird day of travel when I got on this train and went to sleep.

I arrived in Kolkata rather late. Sherwin was at the wedding and I was to meet him there. He texted me an address and I bought a pre-paid taxi ride, and the driver dropped me off somewhere. I got out and asked people about the address. No one spoke English and no one recognized the place. Some people sent me walking in a certain direction. In hindsight, I now know that I was about a ten-minute walk from where I wanted to be. There were two weddings nearby. At each of them I asked for directions, and one of them was the correct place, but the person I asked did not understand me and it had a sign calling it by a different name than the place I expected, so I moved on. I asked a lot more people – they all gave me answers, mostly to continue walking in the direction in which I was already going. Sherwin called me regularly and at 30 minutes, 60, 90 minutes I was still lost. He could not comprehend what I was doing or how this happens.

He was expecting that people would know the place and that I would be able to find English speakers. Neither of these things happened. I got into other taxis and let him talk to the driver, and I found a police station which sent me along with a police escort and let him talk to that person as well. It took me over 2 hours of wandering to at last find him in that time he continually called and texted me and I was helpless to get anywhere, and he was angry. It upset me that he has a temper and I never respect that in a person. He was instantly much nicer to me when I arrived. The wedding was mostly over and the people who remained were the family engaged in doing rituals. He was on the street, and as I approached him some other boys were walking by. We were going to get a taxi but the hour was late and taxis were fewer, and the boys stopped to get involved in our business as happens so often here. One of the boys, seemingly straight and certainly with his friends, was quite taken with Sherwin and wanted to help, wanted to give him a tour of the neighborhood, and asked twice for his phone number. I was not surprised that Sherwin could have this effect on others but it was interesting to me to see how it played out in this foreign context; my guess was that the boy did not know why he wanted to be with Sherwin or even that he was attracted to him, and there was no particular reason that his friends should be conscious of what was happening either. It made me think about how homosexual attraction could express itself in a culture with no mass consciousness of the phenomenon, which is what I think was happening. Sherwin explained to me later that he knows this behavior.

We went to his place and I said hello to his mother. We went to the roof and talked from after midnight until just before daylight. Perhaps an hour before daylight Sherwin gave me a hug, and I hugged him, and we held each other. I needed Sherwin as a friend more than I wished for his physical affection, although he is definitely exactly what I want physically. He has as much choice in love interest as a person can have without celebrity status, or maybe he is somewhat of a celebrity as a journalist, and I was flattered and entirely receptive to his advances. We went to his bedroom and talked more still. I slept with him and felt out of control of my body; he gave me the sensation that he understood me entirely and that my body was involuntarily reacting to his movements. This was the first real time I had spent with him despite being in touch with him since 2009 and seeing him in 2011 also, but I felt deeply connected. That night on the roof was really something – the air felt humid and cold to me, but I was not uncomfortable, and it had been a long time since I had seen the stars like I was able to see them from there. We could see so much of his neighborhood, but no one else was around, and I felt so together with him out in this open space. When I was near him I felt the heat of his body.

We woke up late the next day and did nothing except talk until night. He took me to meet a travel agent he knows and she explained the process for getting to Dhaka. She was able to get much less expensive flights to Kolkata than I was able to find online – I am not sure how that works, but it seemed legitimate. She also said there was a bus, and I thought why not take the bus and save money. I was to take the bus the next morning. Sherwin and I went to see Inkaar, a Hindi-language movie portraying sexual harassment in the workplace. I was completely baffled by the foreign cultural presentation of the topic but Sherwin wanted to interpret the movie as a story and not social commentary. We walked back to his place after the movie and I was scared of the dark streets. He insisted that they were safe and we both held hands, but he would pull away when cars would drive by or we passed by people who were sitting and staring from the darkness as just seems to happen in such cities. Wild dogs prowled the streets, angry and festering with their wounds and broken parts, and Sherwin told me that one had to be careful because they were dangerous to the unwary. We went back to his room and spent our time peacefully. I felt that I could fall in love with him easily, or that I had.

I worried about him being angry with me on the phone because I dislike being around anyone with a temper, but I was wondering if he was angry at all. I suspected that he was acting out some behavior unfamiliar to me or playing some social game to see how I would respond. He was upset about something else – I had told him several times that I would look into a website problem he had, but after some time, I realized that I could not solve it myself and I told him so. By that time, the matter had been pending for some weeks. It was not a big problem, but something I could not sort, and I told him that in America to pay someone to sort the issue would cost maybe $250. He told me he found someone to do it for $100, but was upset that I committed and left him waiting. From my perspective, I get asked to do a lot of things and too often I say that I will do something when I do not have time. I resolved while hearing his perspective that I cannot do this any more, and I should never have gotten in the habit of overcommitting myself, but at some point I must have gotten more useful than I was when I was developing my habits and I never subsequently updated them. He also criticized my work in India in ways that other Indians had also. Lots of Indian people resent anyone foreign who has any interest in development of low-income communities in India, but Sherwin was more emphatic than most. The line of thought is that people who talk about India should talk about strengths first, and not look at weaknesses like social problems. Furthermore, social problems are the concerns of the communities who have them – I may be describing this incorrectly, but there is some cultural difference in the Indian concept of social responsibility and my own and I have heard such things many times from Indians, but never understood them. Sherwin talked about this in the context of poverty, lack of education, and high birthrate in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, all of which are interests of mine. My perspective is that problems in UP and Bihar are international problems because poverty in such a large population (about 300 million, the same as the US population) affects global development, and this region is especially receptive to development so if people like to see then they should be able to do so. I also think it is an Indian concern because people from this region migrate throughout India and are resented by all for taking service jobs, and even Sherwin complained of this while blaming only the states themselves for having people who do this. In short, we have different political perspectives, and something about my perspectives personally agitated him. Part of his complaint was my very race and nationality.

We stayed awake and then it was morning and then I had to go. Sherwin instinctively sorts a lot of business when he is doing his routine affairs; the efficiency and carelessness with which he accomplishes things is striking and continual. He got me to the bus station later than I was supposed to be there and put me on just in time to leave, completely nonplussed about coming late but I had no idea how scheduling would work. He told me goodbye and said that he would meet me in Benares. I wanted very much to meet Tanvir and others in Dhaka but I was having a lot of second thoughts about whether I should stay with him, and I only settled my thoughts by thinking that I should have time to collect them and then meet him again in Benares in two weeks.

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First train crash

By bluerasberry on 2012-12-24

Marcus and I went to Philadelphia on Saturday 22 December. I wanted to meet Smallbones to talk about a collaboration between the Khan Academy’s Smarthistory program and Wikipedia and to meet with UseTheCommandLine and Ocaasi to talk about instances of the campus ambassador program at medical schools in Portland and San Francisco. Wiki Med just got founded and those two are each organizing classes in those places, and it just so happens that both lived in Philly and that I could visit also. We met at this coffeehouse and it was probably one of the most important meetings in the history of medicine because I think it represented the first in-person conversation about group collaboration among Wikipedians who are designing best practices for applying the campus ambassador model of the Wikipedia Education Program as a medical school outreach strategy. This project has potential to propagate itself in a highly attractive demographic and I wish the best for it.

But before this happened, Marcus and I were taking the A train south to Penn Station. Suddenly, at 81st street, the train crashed!

We hear a loud noise and felt the train shake. The train stopped and we just stood around for 90 minutes. Later we heard that the track broke because of material fatigue and a wheel flew off the train. There was a pregnant woman on our car, and had she gone into labor Marcus would have had to deliver her baby. While we were waiting, the announcer said that a rescue train was coming. Somehow everyone in our car had the idea that the train would arrive parallel to us and that its doors would match all the doors in our train. There was speculation that this train would have some large number of bridges, because people would not be expected to jump the large space between trains on two parallel tracks, and they would therefore need bridges. When the rescue train arrived everyone was disappointed because it actually just backed up to the front of the train and we traveled between the cars in the very ordinary way in which people travel between train cars without special bridges. When we looked out at the 81st Street Station we saw perhaps 20 police and firemen. The firemen had axes, which I presume they would have used to cut the subway cars open like cans had we needed to get out through something other than the doors. I am often not conscious of conversations around me, but Marcus said that he was worried about a gentleman on the train who became increasingly vocal throughout the wait for rescue that if someone did not take action to relieve him of the problem of his delay that he felt a need to respond to the situation by acting to “knife some bitches up”.

After everyone was on the rescue train it took us to the next stop on the A line, Columbus Circle, and they kicked us off the train. We got out there and booked new tickets because by this time we missed our bus to Philly. We arrived in Philly only a bit late and the crisis for us ended there, except for the trauma of the experience.

Evidently this was a really big deal because it got a lot of media attention.

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First attempt on my life

By bluerasberry on 2012-12-04

On Friday night people decided to threaten my life. I was robbed at knifepoint by potential murderers. Fortunately, no one was hurt, the cops caught the criminals, and I recovered my stolen property.

I was excited about Marcus coming over. I walked to Greystone station to receive him and we were walking back to my place. The walk is 1.3 miles and we walked to within a block and a half from my place. We were on a major road in the commercial center of my little neighborhood, within sight of a deli and some shops. We were on a well-lit street which gets most of the local traffic including the buses. Suddenly someone came quickly behind Marcus and touched his backpack. My first thought was that someone was in a hurry and wanted to pass us, like a jogger. Marcus later told me that his pack was pulled. Very quickly, the person behind us was in front of us, and then another guy was with him.

“Give me your money and phones!”, he said. The guy who had talked then said something like “Where are you going?” and I was wondering what he was talking about because I was still standing there, and had not yet realized that I was being robbed. I turned around and looked and Marcus was already really far away and running. He had been mugged previously so he had more awareness of the attack. When I saw him far away I was wondering when he ran because he seemed to have had a lot of time before I even became conscious of the situation. I looked again and there were four guys surrounding me, two in front and two behind. I had not seen how any of them came around me. I was in front of a nice house in a nice neighborhood where everyone has nice lawns, and I never felt any danger here. They must have all been hiding in someone’s yard, I suppose. I looked down and saw that the guy in front of me who was not talking was with a guy with a knife, threatening to kill me right then and there.

“Drop your pockets!” I thought that was a strange thing to say but that same guy said this. I reached into my pockets and pulled out my phone, wallet, and keys, and just dropped them on the ground. One of the guys from behind me came to my front to pick up my stuff and as he did, I walked away. When I got to the street corner I turned to look at them all because I was far enough away to outrun them. The tall guy in a conversational tone said, “Hey, come here.” and at that point I realized that I had been robbed and could have died. He wanted me to come back so that all of them could kill me.

Just then very close by the bus arrived at the bus stop, and one of the guys said, “The bus is here!” I was wondering if that was their plan to get away, and they ran toward the bus but then it left. Then another guy came up to me and I was wondering if he was with the robbers. He asked me what happened and I told him, and he suggested that we go chase the attackers. I asked him if he had a phone but he told me that he did not. I told him that I wanted to call the police, but he insisted that he would chase them. I walked with him to the place of my mugging and looked at the ground. My phone and wallet were gone but my keys were there, so I retrieved them. I was happy that they did not steal my keys but I wanted my wallet and identification cards also. If any robbers are reading this blog and you want to be nice, take the money but drop the id cards. It is nice for your victims and also good for you to not be caught with ID cards. Tell your victims to give you cash and they will get it for you. The loot they got from me was like $35, so their rate starting the night with my case was almost $9 per robber per felony.

I passed the deli and walked to the grocery store and called the police with their phone. I told the police I was robbed and they asked me where I was and they told me that they already caught the guys. I was wondering how they could catch my robbers before I even reported the crime, especially since it was just a few minutes ago. They told me that someone else had just called them and that he was at a deli. I went to the deli and Marcus was there, and he had called them. Only a few minutes later the police were there. They asked us some questions and then asked us if we wanted to ride in the police car. We agreed and I was wondering if we were just going to tour the neighborhood.

We got in the car and the police started driving very quickly and turning corners sharply. I was wondering why they were in a hurry when they were so relaxed asking questions in the deli. They took us to a park and there were other cops there along with some guy. About three minutes later more cops brought another guy there and I recognized him as the guy who did all the talking in the robbery. A few minutes after that more cops bring two more guys, making four total. They were as I remembered – one tall white guy about age 23, and three shorter younger black guys maybe age 16-18. The cops started searching their stuff and found the knife and they had a pellet gun. Also I saw that the guy who said he would chase them was there talking to the cops, so I guess he chased and caught the guys.

phone generated walk data – see explanation at end of this post

Marcus recognized the guys and I did too. The cops separated them and I presume that meant that they would tell each of them that all of the others accused him so as to get accusations, information, and confessions. The cops asked Marcus and I to go to the station to give statements and we agreed. When the cops drove again they went very quickly and did sharp corners, and also they drove through red lights. I was wondering if they were always in a hurry. We were not at the station long and the cops hid us in a room and told us that we should not see the guys if they came in. I suppose that was the reason they wanted us there quickly so as to set up interviews of the perpetrators quickly. Marcus and I gave statements to the detective and said that we would attend court if subpoenaed. The cops were very professional, orderly, and hospitable but just like my experience with NYC cops they say “fuck” continually which I thought was strange but it seems to help them communicate effectively.

The cops said that it is very uncommon to catch armed robbers. They recovered my things and gave them to me at the station. For some reason, the robbers tried to smash my phone. It is a cheap phone and it is smashed hard but they did not damage the screen, the phone body’s integrity, or any of the functionality. It just looks scuffed. All of the contents of my wallet were there except my money, which presumably they co-mingled with their own and which I suppose the court may give to me later.

The cops then drove Marcus and I to my place. Marcus and I often go to the city together and we wanted a chill night but this adventure was not so bad. Marcus got an adrenaline rush from this. He asked me if I was scared and I told him no, because by the time I realized what was happening it was already over and I did not feel any reason to become scared. I told him about the White Queen who cried in pain before accidentally hurting herself with a needle so that she would not have to cry while injured. I felt the same way, but in my cause I could not manage any feeling for something which was not still happening. Marcus asked me what I thought of him running, and if I thought he should have stayed with me. I told him that him staying was not an option to consider, and that no matter what was happening to me, it was his place to get away because he could not have contributed sufficiently to my protection such that I would want him there at the cost of delaying police intervention. He still was not entirely satisfied with his response even though he agreed and said that nothing good would have come from him staying. He also said that his instinct told him to run, and I told him that it is best to follow instinct and that now perhaps I will have instinct to recognize trouble and run.

We decided that it was a good outcome for a robbery; no one was hurt, the robbers were caught, and I got stuff back. Armed robbery is serious and I talked to a criminal lawyer friend the next day who said that they would likely all plead to get a year sentence. I was wondering what they were thinking and what would happen to them next. The police told me that all of the guys were from a bad neighborhood a few miles away, and that they should not come to my nice neighborhood. I agree that I like the benefits I receive from the class divide but also it is strange that I know their neighborhood and it is a bad place. People there are all poor, there is no healthy food, the streets and sidewalks are full of garbage, and I assume that there is high unemployment and poor education there. I used to teach boys in jail in Seattle and I wonder if they jails here have classes like in Seattle. Jail is not the ideal place to do any studying or self-betterment, or at least it would not be for me, but I hope that these guys do what they can to improve their career prospects. I certainly have spent time teaching boys like this in jail for such things.

The image above is from data which Marcus had. He tracks his walks with a phone app. Here is a Google map of the walk from the train station to the mugging. You can see that he stopped where we were mugged then turned around, went to the deli, then turned the app off. The graph is from another data set which plots elevation versus speed. On the right side of the graph there are two pauses marked by dips were we were stopped by muggers, followed my him running away, pausing to look back, then run more. He had this other application for which I have no screenshots which shows movement rate versus clocktime, so we could actually give the second the muggers stopped us if need be. Having phones in pockets produces a lot of information about a lot of things. I wonder what that means?

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Reverend Billy’s sermon

By bluerasberry on 2012-11-25

I went to see Reverend Billy at the Highline Ballroom on Sunday 25 November 2012. Chuck had received some notice that he would be preaching and when he told me about this, I was excited and went. I had been a fan of Reverend Billy since about 1999, about the same time I discovered Adbusters. I had forgotten that he lived in New York, and it was a nice surprise for me that he did and that I could visit him.

He was on stage with this choir and ran the show like the Sunday church service it was. They sang songs about anti-corporate activism and protesting to help people. Billy called a woman on stage and she led the congregation in learning a song and some gestures which anyone should remember and teach when they are organizing a protest which might have police around. The song was as follows:

Stay cool, stay calm,
you have the right to remain silent!

Don’t run away, don’t resist,
and get that (police) badge number!

Keep – your – hands –
where the officer can see them!

I liked the song a lot and committed to remember it.

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First kidney stone

By bluerasberry on 2012-11-20

I had and passed a kidney stone last Saturday night. It was a trippy experience characterized by feelings of extreme pain, panic, urgency, defeat, restlessness, helplessness, and dependency. I know that I did not like the experience but once it was over I felt as if I could remember it objectively without any traumatic memory, which I felt was not expected considering how intensely horrible the experience was.

The previous weekend I had stayed with Marcus at the place where he was housesitting and I did again this weekend. Friday was cool. On Saturday we walked to Hoboken and toured damage from the hurricane and visited coffeehouses. I went to this one place which was outfitted like a proper coffeehouse with an impressive-looking espresso machine with espresso cups on top of it. I was happy, because most of the coffeehouses in the area try to serve espresso in paper cups. I ordered an espresso and the barrista reached for a full-size coffee cup and I asked him about the little cups, and he said that the machine makes big espressos. I did not really know what he meant but I let him do his thing, and he pulled an espresso which was so long that it filled most of an 8-ounce cup. It was horrible. I tried to drink it but gave it back to him and he asked me if I liked it and I told him no, and he did not ask anything further. It seemed to me that someone had invested a lot of money in setting up the shop as a coffeehouse where people hang out, but then completely disregarded any attempt to have staff learn to use their nice equipment. We went to the headquarters of academic publisher Wiley which was in the area.

Marcus was telling me that lobster was inexpensive in this region of the country and that it was a privilege to be able to prepare it so we bought a lobster. I had never cooked a lobster and had hardly eaten any. We cooked the lobster and ate it and it was tasty and fun. Then we started watching a movie. During the movie I felt like I had to pee so I went to the bathroom and tried to pee, and hardly peed at all. I thought it was strange but I forgot about it and just went back to the movie. Not long after I had to pee again, and again the same thing happened, and in hindsight that was really strange because never in my life do I recall ever feeling the need to pee then going to the bathroom and not peeing. For some reason, I again thought nothing strange was happening at all. I sat back on the couch to watch the movie and after some time I began to notice that I was having back pain on one side of my back. It felt like I had slept on an uncomfortable bed or in an uncomfortable position, and I recognized the feeling as the sort that I might feel only for a few minutes after waking in the morning from a bad night of sleep. Again, for some reason, I did not think anything was strange despite my never having felt this feeling in any context other than waking in the morning and only for a few minutes. After thinking about the pain I realized that again I wanted to pee, and this the third time in perhaps forty minutes. I went to pee and nothing came out, and then I realized that something was weird.

I told Marcus about it and he asked me what I wanted to do. I told him that I was not sure but that I wanted to try lying down. We went upstairs and lied down and he asked me questions, and I realized that my back hurt a lot on one side. I suggested that it might be a kidney stone and he checked the symptoms online, and they seemed to match. I was familiar with kidney stones because I had watched Lee have about ten of them. Another theory was that I had a shellfish allergy only realized because of my first eating of a lobster. Another theory was that this was related to a pulled groin muscle injury which I had from a new exercise I was doing earlier in the week. Another theory was that I had blue balls, which I thought was absurd because I did not believe the condition existed. Marcus proceeded to tell me that he had experienced this condition from being horny for an extended period of time, followed by a period of sexual arousal which did not end in orgasm, and ending with him being in discomfort and pain for some hours. I was not keen on the idea of having either an allergy or a kidney stone so I jerked off. That did not help the pain at all but at least I was not horny anymore in addition to the pain, so it seemed like a good response.

I got in the shower because I thought warm water might help me pee, and it did feel good, but my back pain was getting worse. I called Lee and he told me to go to the hospital. I had Marcus call a taxi and we went to the nearest hospital. After the call the pain seemed worse, and then felt panicked, then I felt the pain increase perhaps because of my panic. I felt nauseated and I attributed the sickness in my stomach to the pain, and I vomited a lot. The yummy lobster suddenly seemed like a horrible thing to eat. I have heard of people being sick after eating something and then having an aversion to this thing, and although it is not rational I now feel like lobsters taste like vomiting kidney stone pain and would not want any more.

Marcus holding a wire in the hospital

Marcus told me about wires because it could keep him talking continually

By the time the taxi arrived I was completely ready to go to the hospital as the pain and urgency had escalated into a completely captivating focus of my attention. I very much wanted to pee and was faced with the realization that my body does what it wants and I had been going through life assuming that my instincts would always direct it at my behest, and that now when I attempted to bee if my body did not pee then I had little control over doing anything other than willing that the physical world do as my brain request.

We went to the emergency room and the person at the front desk asked too many intake questions and had too little urgency to match the needs of my emotional state. I had seen this many times before with Lee, in that people working at the hospital are there to do a job like any other and people visiting a hospital are there for an intense emotional event, and there is a discongruency between the sense of importance which the patients feel versus what the workers feel. I reflected on this as it happened and I accepted it because I know some of the systemic problems of hospital management but Marcus asked why it was necessary that they question me for demographic information at all. I did triage and the nurse was nice to me. I had to wait in the lobby for about fifteen minutes and I spent that time becoming increasingly restive as I felt compelled to refuse to sit down and to repeatedly attempt to visit the toilet and try to pee. Somehow, going to the toilet and making the motion of preparing to pee seemed like a better idea than just standing and not peeing, even though both actions had the same result of me not peeing.

I got a bed in the emergency room before many others and I wanted to lie down. I took off winter clothes and I put on comfortable bed clothes and I was feeling confused. I vomited in various buckets stored around my bed in my space in the emergency room, then I wanted to pee some and I did but not enough for comfort, then I laid down. I could not figure out how to wear the hospital gown so I wore no shirt. Marcus could not figure out the gown either and I was cold so I got into the blanket. The pain was bad and I wanted to pee so I got up every few minutes to try to pee in a bucket near my bedside, and I had this urge to be on my hands and knees shirtless and barefoot on the cold hospital floor with my dick out of my pants over a bucket, as if that were the position in which a person could most easily pee. Never in my life have I tried to pee from a crawling position but I get in this position after having tried other strange ways to pee before this point and somehow I pee some. It was a huge relief even though I hardly peed at all. I got back in bed and the pain was worse. I told Marcus to talk to me an he started talking about anything, and I listened to him. I asked him if he would stay with me and he said of course. I knew that I would be in the hospital till I peed normally and that probably that would be within 6-8 hours; I am not sure what he expected but I think most people would expect not so long.

Sometime after this the pain got even worse and already it had been the worst pain I had ever imagined even since I was back at the apartment. I felt so destitute and alone, but at the same time very much comforted that Marcus was with me. I felt like crying so I started to cry a little, but then suddenly I could not help it and I cried a lot and hard. I suppose that did what it was supposed to do because it summoned a doctor to me which was the first I had seen of one since I came to the emergency room and had been waiting perhaps 20 minutes going through perhaps 8 attempts to pee in that time. I was immediately catheterized in the inside of my elbow and given fluid, and then with that they gave me a drug. At some point I signed some papers – they have me three documents to sign and one in multiple places. Someone told me what they were but I was completely unfit to understand anything and would have agreed to or done anything, and I signed the papers somehow. I perceived the drug to have no effect whatsoever, but Marcus later told me that the drug visibly relieved me instantly. By my memory, I still felt the entirety of the pain, and minutes after being injected I recognized that I still felt the pain but somehow the drug had prevented the pain from capturing all of my attention as it had been. In other circumstances I had taken opiates, and this drug was not an opiate. Opiates, I think, actually make the pain imperceptible. That is not what this drug did, nor did it seem to have any other effect on my body or mind that I could perceive.

I went to sleep. When I woke Marcus told me that I had slept for an hour, and I realized how physically exhausted I must have been because I awoke to notice that I was less exhausted now, and I thought that was strange. From my perspective, I had not slept, so what I felt was that I was suddenly relieved of tiredness when I had not even noticed how tired I was. I stood up and peed a little but much more than I had since this began, and I thought this was a good sign. The doctor had requested that I have a CT scan and because of the Choosing Wisely program I was trying to think of whether I was supposed to question CT scans for kidney stones or not. I knew the material rather well and felt sure that there was no kidney stone advice in it, but I resolved to ask the health workers anyway if it were necessary for me to have this. They told me yes and it seemed entirely reasonable because if I had a large kidney stone then I would want it detected. Another view was that a large stone was very unlikely as this was my first kidney stone, I have no family history of this, and I was already peeing a bit. I had the CT scan some time later.

Later still I peed normally. What a relief. My pain was managed by the drug by this time but after I peed I knew that pain was gone. I felt nothing of the stone passing. I had been drinking lots of water continually and not so long after that I peed fully again, and was feeling very pleased with myself. The doctor came and made me take off my pants and underwear and poked me around and asked me about my groin and explain the pulled muscle, because the CT scan detected it. Then the doctor wrote me a script for a painkiller and a vasodilator. Eight hours had passed and I got dressed and went home. Marcus and I napped and in the morning we went to the pharmacy and grocery store to get juice and my scripts filled. In the end I took none of my prescribed drugs because I was peeing normally. In the course of a night and some hours I had experienced the most awful physical pain, the weird experience of having my body tell me to pee but not respond to my command to pee, and the strange experience of being in a public place vomiting and trying to pee on everything while people go about me doing their normal business as if a crying vomiting screaming man with his dick out is normal behavior for the location because no one paid special attention to me except on my request. Thanks Marcus for being with me – I would have felt so destitute if I had been without a friend.

I went to work on Monday and I felt like I had just returned from a long trip and had learned and experienced many things after being a long time gone. Everyone I met seemed to have been so far away for so long, and it was as if I recognized them all anew. I felt as if I had traveled for a long time but thinking back I had no particular memories except the sensation of return and being reminded of old things. I have no health insurance. I wonder what they will bill me? I am getting paid enough to be healthy but living in New York is not cheap and if I were working in Seattle for a lot less money I think that I would be retaining more extra income than I am here, just for everything being more expensive in New York.

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purpose of this blog

This is Lane Rasberry's personal blog. None of the information on this blog is private, but it is personal and I have not written it with the intent to make it of public general interest. Anyone visiting this site has my permission to use anything they find here for friendly, share-alike purposes.