Max

I have been more than fortunate in my life. I am, in fact, one of the most fortunate of men on our entire planet. I am exceedingly wealthy in friends.

Which is not to say I have that many. The contrary statement could well be true. I have only a few. Yet those I have are friends exhibiting qualities by which the word itself ought to be defined. Among this small number I count Max, and his wife Maria.

This post is about Max. It has a specific purpose, intent and aim. It is, (and I am not bothered to say it) intended to prompt Max to continue writing. The aim, intent and purpose of this posting is to inspire not guilt, but inspiration. By addressing here the role Max has played in my life, I hope to prompt, persuade, prod, propel and provoke Max into writing again.

You see, Max has achieved what few others could ever lay claim to - Max has created a community, in his own name. Without intention of ever doing so, Max has brought together people on different sides of our world, by sheer interest in his words - in the words he has written.

Max writes (normally) everyday. Nonsense shit, often. Pointless but interesting shit, frequently. And not so occasionally, true gems. Things that make the whole internet sit up, stop fondling its own balls, and pay attention. Suddenly, because of something Max said, people's inboxes fill up with mail from unknown and nevertheless welcome quarters, because we are discussing something that Max said. And underlying the whole conversation, often between strangers, is the idea that "you must be a half-way decent person, if Max is your friend, (despite the fact that you sound like an idiot..)" And oddly enough, the theory seems to hold true.

Max has thus created around himself, by investing nothing more than 10 minutes a day, an online community. A group of people who, if they met each other for the first time, would know a lot about the other already, simply by virtue of having discussed the ideas that Max leaves us with. Thus, technology combined with brilliance and persistence has made, or re-made in a new form, that most basic of human necessities - a community.

I met Max my first year of college - an impressionable year by any standard. Max was an unmoving beacon of stability even then; he was a rock, upon which events and turmoil (of which there would be plenty,) smashed and spent their energies.

We spent much of the first semester of our acquaintance discussing literature, and by the end of the first month of our acquaintance, had established a deep and lasting respect for each other. One of the first things I noticed about Max was the quality of his friends. I can assume he noticed the same about me, as my friends and roommates of that period were, and are, people of the highest caliber. Max and I spent afternoons sitting in fields discussing literature, liquor and love, (to steal a phrase from him, "the quivering relations between man and woman.") Which was appropriate as Max was getting married that summer.

I came to recognise a quality of thoughtfulness, a premeditated air to all that he did. Max was no fly-by-nighter. Max spent time deciding what he wanted, where his effort would be spent, and then moved with conscious steps in that direction. His solidity of character was to serve as an anchor to my own life later.

The second year of our acquaintance, Max made his home in a truck-stop. He came to have his own table in the greasy-spoon cum-drunkard hangout which masqueraded intermittently as a business enterprise under the name Stateline Cafe. He would stay at his table, drinking coffee (50 cents, at that point, bought you all you could drink for as long as you could stay,) for 24 hours at a time. He achieved a grudging respect from the toothless waitstaff, and the hapless owner, who would even tolerate his books and such remaining on the table when he had to leave for class, from whence he would return immediately thereafter. I do not recall if Max ever received flying jelly-packets to the head, with the salutation "Hey, college-boy!" (as I did,) at 2:00 in the morning, but if he did, no doubt he handled it with dignity and aplomb.

Because that was what characterised Max. Max was steady, steadfast, sure, with temerity, poise, firmness and a presence of person that could put many global leaders to shame. If I had to, I would compare Max with Chirac. Always talking, always sincere, and always sounding suspiciously as though he knows you know he is right, if you would have just taken the time to listen earlier.

This precise quality is what has allowed Max to beget "the intangible extasy of Maxness," a concept that has yet to take the world by storm, but will probably end up becoming the intellectual forebear of a great philosophical movement someday, on par with the "Chicken soup for (insert your demographic name here)" series of books.

The intangible extasy of Maxness is less complicated than many of the worlds leading paradigm-arrangement systems. It has as its underlying belief something we can all comprehend and admit into the realm of possiblity - that inside Max there is a small man, called the Ego-man. He is probably round in shape, and broadcasts a general air of vague sketchiness about his character, the kind of fellow you wouldn't want to turn your back on, for suspicion he would be found either smearing your wife's chest with chocolate and bad intent, or cleaning the last scrap of meat off your chihuahua's bones by the time you turned back round again. (Were it not for the total absorption he showed in his current task, which precludes all else.) He is clad in nothing more than a loincloth, red body paint, and abundant chesthair. Said fellow has all the self-conciousness restraint of a mongoose in a chicken coop, and spends his whole day beating out interesting rythms on his drum.

And while he beats his drum, and admires his own chesthair clumped with paint, he dances a little dance, and chants a big chant. And he chants :
Max is Great.
Fuckin Great.
Yah, yup, yum and yahoo.
Great fuckin Max.
Max eats a cheesburger
cuz its fuckin great
Max read his book
cuz its fuckin great.
Great, great, great,
Max is great.

And then he goes on to sing the cigarette song, followed by the coffee song, the Maria song, the family song, the work song, and then he sings an antihistab song, and then he starts again, with minor variations on the theme.

And the fact is, if you sit around Max for too long, you begin to hear the song, too. And you start to sing along. But you don't realise it until he gets up to go to the loo, at which point you have that odd feeling that you are singing a song that has left the room. And then you understand.

I ain't overjoyed

In retrospect, this realization, like many, has been a long time in coming. It is always that way, at least for me. Once I realize something, I also suddenly realize that I have in fact known this for some time now, the only difference being that it has finally become so damn painfully apparent that a retarded monkey under heavy sedation in a sensory-deprivation chamber would have taken notice by now.

This flash of insight came, just like its predecessors, in a moment when my emotions were on the more extreme end of my emotional spectrum. I was walking along, pushing a bicycle whose mere sight I have come to loathe, and trying to make up lame anti-bicycle jokes.

Q: "Why did God give bicyclists hands?"
A: "It'd be pretty difficult to push your bicycle home without 'em!"

This was the 2nd time this bicycle had been out of the house in about 2 months. During the majority of those 2 months, it was languishing with a flat tire which I used as an excuse to avoid having to use the damn thing. When I finally got it fixed, and back out the door, now it had another flat, leaving me stranded about an hour and a half's walk from home.

So as I walked my stupid walk, and joked my stupid jokes, I had plenty of time to notice the crappy architecture of the buildings I walked past, and the shabbiness of many of the stores, whose bald and paint-skin chipped mannequins clustered in faux conversation outside dusty-windowed stores. I noticed that what few buildings didn't look as though the designer nursed a grudge against humanity had their plaster falling off in large chunks, revealing the brickwork underneath. And everywhere, all the buildings are coated in a coal-smoke residue that could pass for the color of dirty dark concrete, were it not for the streaks under the windows on either side, where the water washed off the sills, and left cleaner streaks to stand out.

The sidewalks are all made of individual concrete paving stones, frequently broken, pushing up out of the ground at odd angles, grass growing up between the blocks. My useless pointless fucking bike bounces and rocks over the jutting, angled blocks, and I curse boredly to myself.

All the while the cars go by, the sun shines down like something I haven't seen since a past life (which is not so far off, in case you were wondering,) the birds and bugs squawk and screech, and life is generally pleasant, considering. Then suddenly it occurs to me. This general pleasantness in outdoor life, this hideous lack of consideration for they eyes of passer-bys on the part of any architects, this small, humming, inbred small-town self-satisfaction - WHERE HAVE I SEEN IT BEFORE? And the answer comes to me - Hesston, Kansas.

Now, if your life has seen anything signficant happen during the last 9 years, this may be an indication that you are unfamiliar with this particular metropolis, so allow me to help you. The wikipedia entry for Hesston, Kansas, which has no pictures whatsoever, (due to the fact that there is nothing there worth taking pictures of except 2 girls who have been raised on nothing but corn and milk, and there are other websites for that sort of thing,) states that the population in 2000 was 3,509. And since credible research has demonstrated that the median IQ is indeed rising, we can assume that the population of Hesston has probably declined since 2000, since no person with the braincells necessary to steal candy from a person in a semi-vegetative state would remain in Hesston. I know this because I had a friend who lived his life in a highly functional semi-vegetative state, and even he left Hesston.

Nowy Sacz reminds me of Hesston. How can this be? How can a town of more than 100,000 remind me so much of a town of 3,500? Well, I suppose it is due largely to the magical, reality-bending forcefield which seems to be present in most small towns, which make them all resemble one another. But that aside, let's try to reason it out.

Is it the physical town itself? Well, yes and no. I mean, the buildings are in a dreadful state of disrepair - no doubt about it. Whereas Hesston was, on the whole, very well kempt. But Nowy Sacz is improving everyday, and slowly becoming a cleaner, nicer, less gray place to live, which is encouraging to see. When I first arrived here, I puzzled long and hard over the buildings that were painted on one or two or three sides, with the other side(s) left concrete gray. I pondered - had they run out of paint? Was paint truly that expensive, that the building had to be painted in stages? (This was not such an unreasonable assumption, as you could see many houses that had obviously been built in stages with the material available at that time.) It was only over the summer that I saw workmen erect scaffolding, and apply six-inch blocks of styrofoam all around the building, and then cover it in a light layer of mud, and paint it that I realized . . . they were insulating and painting at the same time. And the combined cost was indeed too much, so they were doing the buildings in stages, improving the heat retention and the appearance, one side at a time. Nowy Sacz, after the long, dark night of communism, is indeed on the mend. But it still has a long way to go.

Is it the variety of things to do, the limited offerings of entertainment in this small town? Well, that certainly may have something to do with it. I would hesitate to leap upon it as the definitive answer, since there is an occasional movie we can see here in English or Spanish, and there are a sprinkling of restaurants, of the Chinese, Polish, Pizza and Kebab variety, from which we can choose. But that gastrological cornucopia aside, (please note ironic tone) the fact remains that the streets are quite still by 9:30, and the nightlife here consists mainly of sitting in chairs around a candle in the center of the table, and listening to your friend tell a story quite similar, but different in some details, than the one he told you last week.

Is it the people? Well, yes and no. I mean, the people in Hesston were dreadfully closed off. If you hadn't grown up there, and molested the same cattle as them, well, you just weren't family. We could communicate in the same language, but there was still a barrier between us.
People in Nowy Sacz are far more open to outsiders than Hesstonites. At least the one's I deal with are far more intelligent in general, and open to outside influences, than their counterparts in Hesston. But, at the end of the day, there is still a barrier between the great majority of them, and yourself. In large part they were bred, born, and will live and die in this town. With some exceptions, their conception of life outside of Poland is no greater than my conception of a life limited to a 400 mile radius.

Which is not to say that they aren't splendid people. The ones I've hung out with have been generous, kind, and largely polite to a fault. You certainly couldn't say the same for most Spaniards. But despite their politeness, generosity and kindness, there remains a barrier between you - that you will never truly understand them, nor they you.

So . . . Nowy Sacz reminds me of Hesston, Kansas. And the fact is, every single instant that I spent in Kansas I now regard as having been a waste of my precious, God-granted life, and thus, an offense against the Almighty himself. I wish I had not been so stubbornly tough in my youth, and insisted that "when the going gets tough, the tough get rough," and had rather stuck by the maxim, "when the going gets tough, the smart move and let the dumbasses carry on in their stead." Yet, what am I to do? Having finally realized (what has been a long time coming,) that I am definitely not overjoyed to be living here, am I going to move?

The fact is, no. The job-hunting season is largely past, and I made a commitment to this school. But if you think that is enough to keep me here, you don't know your Matt very well. The real fact is that I am here for a reason; I am on a mission, and I won't quit till I get what I want. I am getting an advanced degree, which will be one more stepping-stone on the way to my ultimate goal of getting a PhD. I always said I could do time in prison, if need be. And this is a far cry from prison, but I still feel like I am doing time. I may not be locked up, but I still ain't overjoyed.

Where have all the Ninjas gone?

I recall, upon returning to the U.S. in the year of our Lord, 1985, ninjas. Not any specific ninjas, mind, but ninjas galore peeking out from a million places. The world, (or central California, at least) was absolutely infested with ninjas. Turn on the telly, walk down the toy aisle, or enter the video store, and ninjas came flying feet first at you from around every corner. There were white ninjas, black ninjas, grey ninjas and red ninjas. Rambo faced off against ninjas in his cartoon, (if you were so fortunate as to catch that particular artistic marvel,) as did G.I. Joe. Cobra was about half staffed with ninjas, if memory serves. There were teenage ninjas, little kid ninjas (sometimes in groups of 3,) caucasian ninjas, black ninjas, and of course Asian ninjas. Well, Japanese ones, anyway. The burning question of whether a Chinese person could ever become a ninja never seemed to get addressed - I have to assume that the ninja schools turned away all the Chinese aspirants, telling them to "Go kung-fu yourself," or something like that. Ninjas were so ubiquitous in the mid 80's that we couldn't even confine them to one species, (witness Splinter the rat, and the Turtles,) let alone a single ethnic group or neighborhood. There were ninjas-a-plenty in Beverly Hills, if you recall. Enough so that they formed a club, and went about ninja-ing things. (I can't be more specific because I don't really know what ninjas did when not hanging from ceilings, moving incredibly stealthily, or throwing small, very sharp objects that result in instant, fantastically silent mortality. I just did a web search, though, and actually found an answer to the question -
Q: "What do ninjas do when they are not cutting off heads?"
A: "Most of their freetime is spent flying, but sometimes they stab."
I am glad we got that sorted out.

My point, however, is that something very dramatic has happened among the ninja populations over the past 20 years. Today we have far less ninjas than we used to. I attribute this to one of two things (or maybe a confluence of both factors.) First, global climate change, and secondly, the return of Pirates. I will explain in greater detail later.