May days

Old man, take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you.

I turn on the iMac I bought in 2002, my first computer. An alert pops up saying that the computer’s date and time are set for a date before March 24, 1970 and that this may cause some applications to behave erratically. My eighteen year old iMac is not connected to the internet, you see. It is out of touch. I am to go to System Preferences, click on date and time, and re-set, which I do, using my new iPhone’s clock as a reference. 

The phrase “to behave erratically” stands out for me, as does the peculiar date mentioned in the alert — “March 24, 1970” — not even the date to which the computer was set, but a date after the unnamed date. Maybe it was set on my birthday, which is March 19, and in 1970 I turned sixteen. If the date given was May 4, 1970, instead of March 24, the alert could be about a glitch in my own operating system and my own kind of erratic behavior since the events of May 4, 1970. 

Today is May 4, 2020 and 1970 is on my mind.

I look up the word “erratic” on my five year old MacBook and Merriam-Webster tells me “erratic” means: 

“having no fixed course: WANDERING” 

or “characterized by a lack of consistency, regularity, or uniformity”

or “deviating from what is ordinary or standard: ECCENTRIC”

or the archaic meaning: NOMADIC.” 

Related to  “erratic” is “err, error, errant.”

According to another dictionary, the term “erratic” is used in geology for a boulder that is different from the rocks surrounding it because it was probably “transported from an original resting place, especially by a glacier.”

I imagine “erratic” describes my “journey” from adolescence to seniority. Like a boulder pushed by some historical force at a glacial pace from my parents’ living room in Florida to my studio in New York.

May 4, 1970 is an important date for some, not all, in my generation, as December 7, 1941 is an important date for my parents’ generation. Pearl Harbor was attacked by a foreign power on December 7, and four students were killed by a domestic power on May 4. 

If December 7 summoned my parents’ generation to war against foreign powers, what did May 4 do to my generation? What did the events of May 1970 do to me to transport me from from childhood in Palm Beach Gardens to old age in Brooklyn?

“Who cares?” you could reasonably respond. How do the deaths of four white kids at Kent State, plus the two black kids in Jackson State killed eleven days later, compare to the uncounted thousands of black people killed by cops? Or the uncounted Asians bombed by Nixon’s B 52s? Or the uncounted indigenous people killed by European invaders? 

Kent State, for my generation, is analogous to Ferguson, Missouri to this generation. An act of official violence and point blank homicide shook people, some people, awake to the America history we had been taught to ignore, to keep out of mind. The history of genocide, slavery and imperialist war was hidden behind red, white, and blue bunting and drowned out by fireworks. 

The next day: May 5, Cinco de Mayo, and I’m reading what I wrote yesterday about May 4, when I was wallowing in a bitter pool of memory and history, and I delete most of it.

It is OK if May 4th has become Star Wars Day. Take a deep breath. It’s OK. Life goes on. Generation replaces generation.

Today is May 5, 2020 and the thing to keep in mind is

if you must go outside for essential tasks, wear a face covering and keep at least 6 feet of distance between yourself and others. A new poll indicates that only 22% of Americans “feel comfortable” eating out at a restaurant now, 33% feel comfortable going to a retail clothing store, and 56% feel comfortable going to a grocery store. I go to a grocery store once or twice a week, but I don’t feel comfortable when I do.

The same poll claims that 56% give Trump negative ratings for his response to the outbreak while 44% of Americans are out of their fucking minds. Many people in more rural areas seem to think the pandemic is a New York City problem, if they even think it is a real problem. They say that Covid 19 is being hyped by fake news, that the morgue trucks in my city are fake, that all the people I know who are sick aren’t really sick, that my friend Robin wasn’t really in the hospital for 43 days, and my friend Dean didn’t really die alone at home, that healthcare workers and transit workers and other essential workers aren’t really dying of the virus. These are the people who say I don’t know what I know because they saw some videos on Facebook that told them what they prefer to believe, that what is happening is not happening and if it is happening it is a “plandemic” designed to make Dear Leader look bad, or something.

This madness of the moment, when so many are in denial — the present Commander in Chief, for instance — this madness of the executive power and his followers reminds me of the madness of fifty years ago.

Fifty years ago I decided I would not go to war if I was drafted. I would become a conscientious objector, I’d move to Toronto. Or maybe a sympathetic doctor would say I have bone spurs. 

It would be hypocritical of me to criticize the decision Trump made when he was eighteen. We have had three Presidents who were faced with the draft during the Vietnam War era and in different ways all of them avoided combat. As Commanders-in-Chief they were authorized to send eighteen year olds to kill and die. I have protested their wars. 

The draft had in effect ended by the time I turned eighteen. Some general said we needed to change the color of the bodies, so the bombing was increased and the draft was put on hold. I was given 1-H status. American boys lived, Asians of all ages died, Nixon called this “peace,” and the American people re-elected him. Some of my friends voted for him and I found I never really knew them or their strange religion.

I walked out of the SAT and dropped out of high school. I could not imagine how I could possibly fit into this insane society, so I set off on my erratic course. I found that art was a good category for my kind of error, because no one is sure exactly what art is, least of all artists.

History, or some other force, has deposited me in Brooklyn, as a boulder is deposited by a glacier. This place feels like home, this place in which I shelter, even in this pandemic. As we slowly became aware that we were in a pandemic we had little real data. There were not enough tests to do enough testing, but we knew the virus was here. The virus had been far away in foreign lands and now it was here, maybe everywhere, and maybe I was already infected. In those days I considered the possibility I might soon get sick and die. I didn’t want to die in a hospital with a tube stuck down my windpipe. I wanted to die at home, if I’m fortunate enough to be given a choice.

Now that I am here, the path that brought me here no longer seems erratic, but a matter of trial and error. My art making is a series of trials and errors that I organize into some kind of order, some kind of meaning. I attempted to give some kind of meaning to a random date in a message on my old iMac, but the message was not really so oracular. It had been popping up every time I opened that computer, which wasn’t very often, and I ignored it until last Monday. Has my life really been erratic? It has often seemed glacial in its pace.

A friend posted an article about a comet named “Swan” that will appear in the sky soon. Supposed to be worth looking at. “My time has come,” I said. Am I like a boulder pushed by a glacier, or like a comet falling in space, drawing an arc in our sky? Neither, of course. 

On May 7, 2020, I’m where I belong, and I’m right on time