Memories of the Witch Sisters

Every year, when the oak leaves would begin coloring our backyard and driveway with russet and crimson, and when the skies would turn gloomy and heavy and low, my father would begin telling us about the witch sisters.

The witch sisters were probably born on a piece of scrap mat board dad pulled from the bin under the work table in his old art gallery on 111th street.

Like bluish wisps of Bond Street smoke curling from his pipe, the sisters materialized into our childhoods.

In those days, he was a great storyteller. He spun the lives of the sisters through the autumn air as if he was weaving strands of DNA together - witch DNA - one part likable and one part evil.

Those sibling sisters were among his most creative productions. We'd rather hear about them turning someone into a frog then the history of the Union Stock Yards or some old building on Prairie Avenue.  Give us the girls.

Before the internet, before Ghost Adventurers - before ghouls were cool - we could download the witches. Anywhere - on the front porch swing, accompanied by rain and thunder as we watched the autumn storms. In the station wagon on the way to Tippecanoe or Fish Lake.  And at bedtime, where everyone would (and could) fit into the same bed, listening to the tall tales of the fall.

Tales beloved and remembered every Halloween.

Thanks to my father's artistic touch, we could see them in all of their wicked glory.

As the stories would unfold, the images were etched on left-over mat board and brown wrapping paper. Their pointy hats, warts and flowing black dresses. Personalities and quirks. Dark castles and haunted houses, teetering and comic; part Albert Gorey and Part Tim Burton. A spooky Dr. Seuss.

The stories were alternately scary and funny.

The witch sisters worked by day in a six-story room for making broomsticks.  It had all the required materials - straw, sticks, and whatever else was needed - illustrated in magical detail.  The Broom Room was the place where naughty children were taken; cleverly captured by the sisters and, until they were contrite or escaped, helped the sisters make their brooms.

When finished, they'd be eagerly tested; flown up into the cavernous space and accompanied by evil cackles and room-spinning moves.  Quidditch before J.K. ever thought of it.

The children's punishment was always administered by the eldest sister with surprising fairness, but that lack of evil courage was resented by the younger sisters. They would complain and scheme behind her back. The matriarch was often found scolding her sisters for inappropriate acts; some of them unseemly - even for witches.

Everyone's favorite witch was the youngest of the sisters. She always carried fire - whether it was a lantern, torch, or matches.   She was resentful and confrontational, and would always throw fire on those that got in her way. Or she'd burn things up. We loved her.

The middle sister lived in the shadow of the other sisters and unfortunately, I can't seem to remember much about her.  But she had some big personalities in her family and it was easy to get overlooked.

The memories of the sisters are becoming somewhat foggy, like the Halloween scenes they lived in.  But, in retrospect, the most remarkable part about the witch sisters is that a father of seven would find the time and the energy to give them life - and to share his creativity and excitement with all of us.

Which we all have today - in our own ways - thanks to my dad.

Call of Duty

In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, my father's uncle was hit with bullets from a German Browning machine gun as he was climbing off his Higgins boat, in the freezing ocean water, just off the beach in Normandy France.

The same uncle he used to sit with in his backyard, drinking root beers and talking about baseball.

On the other edge of the world, his twin brother was in the Pacific, sweating and scared, climbing through island mangroves with his M-1 Garand carbine.  While this twin survived, he was never the same, having lost his sanity and his brother while the war raged throughout the world just a single generation ago.

William Tecumseh Sherman said, "War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over."

And although the real visions of the war are dimming with time, they can still be seen.  In faded tattoos on veterans - the pale ink images of ships, symbols and companies on wrinkled and spotted forearms.

They have witnessed what most Americans will never see. Incredible, extreme violence and suffering. The core or warfare - eliminating the enemy by causing their death.

Perhaps they have earned metaphysical retribution for those indescribable moments of terror in their lives - a new life, after the war, which is sweeter, more valuable, and more poignant.

But as those real memories blur in the distance, the newest generation of children all over the world have been recruited into an electronic, virtual reality version of that experience - the "Call of Duty" computer game.

It started it's existence as an interactive version of D-Day, but evolved to include many battlegrounds and killing fields, a menu-driven cafeteria of war's death and destruction.

The latest version is the seventh installment of the game.  Within 24 hours of going on sale, more than 7 million copies were sold. A Japanese version was also released.  The total sales of the 2010 version alone exceed 25 million copies. Just six weeks after the release, Activision reported Black Ops had earned $1 billion in sales.

And all over the world, we are now losing a new generation of children to World War II - again - but this time it's the cyber version.

Black Ops (Call of Duty) is mesmerizingly and almost medically addictive and disturbingly and shockingly desensitizing.  It has graphic images of limbs being blown apart by high caliber bullets and blood being sprayed from torn arteries.  Points are collected and tallied on screen for each measure of carnage and gore.

Internet versions of the game allow players to join the virtual battle from anywhere in the world - one  click on an X-box icon and they appear on the other player's screen instantly. A 15-year-old in a basement in Ohio can engage in a real-time virtual fight with a 17-year-old in Kiev.

For the players, the hours seem to be mere seconds. On the surface, it appears to be just a video game. But complex social, psychological, and neurological effects are all in play.  It's anything but a harmless video game.

"Game players have some or even many symptoms of drug addiction, in that some players become more concerned with their interactions in the game than in their broader lives.  Players may ... gain or lose significant weight due to playing, disrupt sleep patterns to play and suffer sleep deprivation as an effect, play at work, standing in the middle of nowhere looking into space for a considerable amount of time, avoiding phone calls from friends and/or lying about play time." (1)

I have heard countless stories of college student addictions.  Having had academic success in high school under the watchful eyes of their parents, they falter in college under the spell of Call of Duty.

Move over marijuana and Miller Lite.  C.O.D. is the new headliner, featuring all-night sessions, sleepless weekends, and an indifference to college academics. In 2008, one of the five FCC Commissioners, Deborah Taylor Tate, stated that online gaming addiction was "one of the top reasons for college drop-outs."

And 20 something women know all about the perils of Call of Duty. There are Facebook sites, blogs, and support groups for women whose boyfriends have become Call of Duty zombies.

Constant exposure to three-dimensional geospatial views within the game are also potentially harmful, and can trigger epileptic and other types of neurological disorders.  So extreme are the jarring changes in perspective that many adults cannot view the game for more than seconds without experiencing vertigo or nausea.

So, 67 years after allied forces landed on the beaches of Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah, and Sword, the memory and the pain linger.

And we are fighting a second battle, part cyber and part social .  Parents need to understand the truth about Call of Duty and its effects. It has a clear effect on the social development, physical, and behavioral health of teens and pre-teens.  It can strain adult relationships.

It is clearly and undeniably addictive - and tens of millions of copies are sitting in disk drives all over the world.  Addicts are as anxious to spin them as they would be to hold a lighter under a spoon.  

America has to begin saying "no" to the uber-cyber Call of Duty.

It is not harmless.

It is as destructive as the fifty caliber shells that rained down on the real soldiers in Normandy, on that fateful date in June, 1944.

1) Grüsser, S.M.; R. Thalemann, M. D. Griffiths (April, 2007).CyberPsychology & Behavior (Mary Anne Liebert, Inc.) 10 (2): 290–292.

Hair

I heard a voice say, "now keep your eyes closed so I can trim your eyebrows."

The voice was Sherry's, spoken between pillars at Salon nirvana.  Like a seductive Delilah, she was poised to steal my Samson Chi.

Clip it, snip it, steal it, keep it.

Half-Berlinian, half-Dublinian guys like me don't have a lot of body hair.  Sure, after years of rain and wars and living in forests and on cold meadows we've evolved into pale-skinned arm-wrestlers, but we've never had the DNA for GQ beards and sideburns.  

And substantial eyebrows in our gene pool are seen about as often as Paul McCartney is seen in the weight room wearing a muscle shirt.

I've never had them either, but lately things have changed.  Now there are some stray loners, like you'd see sticking out of a mole on the chin of a gnarly old witch.

Pull it, tweeze it, tug it, toss it

Wild and unwelcome, anti-Darwinian un-survivors of the fittest.   Crazy and curling and discolored, like the fingernails of some old Indian yogi that haven't been cut for thirty years.

These are new settlers on the Germano-Irish landscape.  Once populated by freckles and peach fuzz and Coppertone, it's now a dangerous alley with suspicious strangers and escapees from the nearby sanitarium.

What happened here?  It seemed so impossible a few short years ago. 

Wet it, comb it, part it, clip it

My mother always used to warn us not to stand in front of the Radar-Range when we were kids. Now I know why. It was a peach fuzz zapper.

Innocence long since zapped, now I have this strange hair.

Hair like my dad used to have (and still does) - his arms looking like that of an Icelandic Yeti monster. I remember staring at his arms in church when I was bored, thinking "how can someone's arm hair get that long?

God, if you're trying to pay me back for a lifetime of condescending feelings like that - of hair superiority and infallibility and permanence - congratulations.

In places where only baby-fine strands could be seen in the summer sun at Memorial Park Pool, I can now cut it with a scissors.

Not cool.   

Pinch it, squeeze it, twist it, pluck it

In my ears, curling and bothersome. On my ears, which feels like a constant stirring of insects, which are only quieted when I get the tweezers and start plucking.

Hair like my grandpa had. 

It's a freakish distraction for me and others.  On a Southwest flight recently, a three year old boy wanted to "play" with my arm hair.  His mother said, "Now JJ, don't do that, it's rude."  I told her I didn't mind, so he spent the flight with his fingers on my arms, brushing it this way and that, bunching it up in his fingers and pulling.

But where is the good hair, the cool hair?

I can't grow a beard (thanks again you know who).   When I don't shave I don't look like an off duty fireman playing hockey, I just look shabby - not even Bohemian. It's sort of like a splotchy faux acne made of red, white, brown and bronze whiskers. Well, maybe not whiskers in the macho Derek Jeter sense of the word - more like just hair.

So I wait. I know I won't have real eyebrows or a cool beard.

I've decided the next best hope for me is a pre-mature graying, where at least I can get to cool in a wise academic sort of way.

I'm waiting.

And thinking of Broadway.

Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it

I want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty

Oily, greasy, fleecy, shining, gleaming, streaming
Flaxen, waxen

Knotted, polka-dotted
Twisted, beaded, braided

Powdered, flowered, and confetti-ed

Bangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghetti-ed


There ain't no words
For the beauty, the splendor, the wonder
Of my...
Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair


Oh say can you see
My eyes if you can
Then my hair's too short
Down to here
Down to there
I want hair
Down to where
It stops by itself
They'll be ga ga at the go go


When they see me in my toga
My toga made of blond
Brilliantine Biblical hair
My hair like Jesus wore it
Hallelujah I adore it

Wicked Wall Street

We learned last week that six banks account for nearly 60% of the US GDP, or 60% of all of the money in the US economy.

We also saw that the top 1% of earners in our country generate 20% of all income.  Ten years ago, the top 1% generated only 10% of the GDP.

This elite strata used to be filled with business owners and entrepreneurs - from silicon valley whiz kids to pizza tycoons and movie rental moguls.  Today, they're almost wholly constituted from financial companies.

Today's robber barons sit behind glowing green screens and look out on concrete and glass vistas they helped finance.  They are money managers, traders, executives, and consultants.  They invent things that average people can't understand, like credit default swaps and complex derivatives.

They spend more on lobbyists and politicians to keep the slot machines running than the entire GDP of many small countries.

And when it looked like their own reckless arrogance (see credit default swaps and toxic mortgage products) would be their demise, the US borrowed money at the taxpayers' expense to keep them afloat - so that the derivatives could keep coming - unchecked and unregulated - and the roulette wheel could keep spinning, smooth and well-oiled with fiat money.

It has been said that a few years ago, economists and government leaders understood that our financial system (primarily our banking and monetary structure, which include Wall Street and the Federal Reserve) was unstable and unsustainable, and that the US was at a critical juncture.

It was time to make a choice.  Start over (as in letting the banks fail) or delay the inevitable by continuing to move jobs overseas - stockpiling profits and manipulating the stock and equities markets.

Alas, they chose wrong.

They could only keep the consumers spending using credit.  Certainly not with new or better jobs or increased income.  Credit.  Mortgages from Freddie and Fannie, easy credit cards, lines of credit, home equity loans.  A bubble just waiting to pop.

And at the same time, they turned a blind eye to the export-dumping, currency-suppressing Chinese, who under-consume (because underpaid and oppressed populations can't afford the flat screen televisions they export) within the new global economy.  Drive the price of the currency down so that Chinese goods are cheaper than american goods, even if they have to be shipped from the other side of the globe.

Chinese goods, built with Chinese labor, then stamped with the logo of a US company, make their way into retail stores across this country.  When they're sold in a retail outlet in Detroit or Columbus they profit no one in Michigan.  Or Ohio.  Or Illinois.  Except the clerk at the register, who gets minimum wage.

With these new profits, banks increased the levels of their own capitalization.  They receive federal interest payments on banked capital as an ostensible hedge against future crises.  But these payments oddly entice banks to grow even more capital rather lend out money to soon-to-be-laid-off Americans.

And now that capital has grown to 60% of our country's GDP.

Wall street has weapons of mass destruction besides credit default swaps.  They are computerized, high frequency, high volume trading programs that execute thousands of stock transactions every second. They use quantum algorithmic formulas based on world news, other markets, insider information, and their own visibility into market orders at certain levels.

And so, each time the stock market plunges and surges, you can be sure that the big banks have been busy pushing the market one way or another. They buy and sell to themselves, affecting huge market swings, now common on a daily basis.

These millions of trades and their immense profit represent the new production line of the once-great american economy. Imagine Henry Ford's amazement that a single quantum-trading computer the size of a Model T's back seat could earn a thousand times more money in a single session than his whole plant could earn in a year.  Or ten years.

Is it surprising, then, that the american future seems so dismal?  Why would banks lend money to build a new plant in Indiana or Ohio when they can roll that money around in the stock market?

The result is that we have few visionaries and risk-takers.  Too few innovations by our best and brightest. And we make little use of the windfall of our vast natural resources.

Main Street is so afflicted by the loss of jobs and confidence and their inability to envision the future that they are on the verge of paralysis.  And too inhibited by regulations and taxation.

Local businesses hire local residents.  But local businesses are small businesses.  And on Main street today they're as uncommon as the horse and buggy.  The real small businesses got big-boxed out of the market in the 1980's and 90's - and kicked into the unemployment line.

What's left? The big box job with the plastic name tag? Or the small cubicle in a sea of cubicles; dialing for dollars and competing with colleagues in India?

Thus, the new american employee rides the current of change, channeled now by the ebbs and flows of corporate earnings and losses, of shorts and longs, of market winners and losers.

Wall Street has sat down in the american kitchen, poured itself a cup of coffee, and put its feet up on the table. Its cigar-chewing grin makes you think the news is bad, indeed.

Robot Voice

"... the checking account is overdrawn because I paid the car insurance ... it was $5600 ... what's the problem? ... you think insuring teenagers is cheap?" 

"... yes, they did put his braces back on. Why are you upset? ... I don't know, maybe he didn't wear the retainer ... that happens sometimes."

"... well it's not my fault, that teacher is sooo bad, she's giving everyone a D because someone stole the test.  Why are you yelling?"

"... and his phone was over a year old and you know it was one of those old slide keyboard ones. He can't use that ... so I got him a smart phone ... it was only $150 after his trade in credit just $30 more a month as long as we signed for two more years ... he needed it ... what's wrong with that?"

Listening to conversations like this, I regularly dream about doing a 781 foot swan dive from the top of the Sunshine Bridge. Because I don't think there's enough Xanax in Florida to make these exchanges less painful.

Even the great yogi masters would shake their heads sadly in cross-legged levitation and say, "Dees ees deeficult prohblem, meester John. Why you hev foor keeds?

But thankfully I have developed a work-around. The robot voice.

I have discovered that anything stripped of emotion and delivered in a electronic monotone tends to lose any harmful potency. Like a verbal Ad-aware or anti-emotional McAfee, this computerized delivery strips spam and viruses from the message and cleanses the code.

This robot-like context has an amazing effect. Consider the CIA android drone that took out two terrorists this week in Yemen. Hey, it was a flying robot, it just saw the bad guys and zapped em. What?

And the robot voice is a multi-purpose tool.

It can be used to diffuse an escalating situation, "You - are - eating - what - we - are - eating - or - you - will - go - to - your - room."  You can also add modifiers on the end of the sentence, which won't escalate the situation but are very pleasing to the speaker, "Do - not - spit - in - thee - kich - enn - sink - you - id - dii - utt ."

But the best and most typical use of the robot voice is just stopping the speaker at the earliest warning sign that an anxiety-filled exchange is coming. Then, raise a hand and refuse to listen unless the robot voice is employed.

A statement that would have been something like: "Oh my god dad, you're the one that said I need to study and not work and it's not my fault it's a V-6 and mom never gives me enough money for gas and I am driving my brother to school and why are you yelling at me?

Is transformed to: "Daad - myy - cahhr - iss - emp - teee - of - gaas - ahh - gannn. Caan - i - puhh - leees - haave - summ - mohn - eee?"

Wow, I'm kind of glad to give the kid twenty bucks for that kind of creativity.

It works for all kinds of everyday problems, like: "I - did - not - ask - the - doc - torr - fore - a - jenn - err - ick, that - iss - prob - ub - blee - why - it - iss - three - hun - dread - doll - errrs."

Whew, that didn't even seem so bad, see?  You just robotically reply, "You - will - call - thee - doc - torr - on - Mon - day, - right?

And you can add a modifier too, if it makes you feel better.  I sure would.