"The Most Profoundly Disturbing Time in my Life"

I woke up early yesterday, because Dani was coming to pick me up and take a few of us involved in the Rural Health Service Corps to the Americorps Kick-off event at The Egg Convention Center in Albany. I got into a scalding-hot bath to wake myself up, and I still found myself practically crawling around my apartment to get ready. I got out the door without any breakfast in my belly.

When we got there, I was at first jealous of the City Year kids, and their head-to-toe SWAG. I later came to realize, that they were more of uniforms, and though they had their housing, metro-cards, i-phones and other expenses paid for during the year, they represented a side of Americorps that I was aforeto unaware of, and terribly disenfranchised by.

My first comment of the day in the crowded convention hall, was do Dani. The City Year kids were on the stage, and they had their image jumbo-sized on the mega-lcd screens flanking the stage. As they lead us in chants and cheers, I looked around akwardly wondering if I was the only one who was disturbed by this turn of events. Then they asked us all to stand up and take part in some of their daily exercise routines; it all seemed rather martial to me, and very purveysive. I leaned over to Dani and said, "I feel like I'm at a Hitler Youth-Rally." I first uttered this statement as a lighthearted--however, dark--joke. As the day went on, I was struck by the severity and profundity of my words.

We spent much of the morning engaged in rabble-rousing activities which served to reinforce us in our particular Americorps Groups. I was, to say the least, quite disappointed by this turn of events, as I had anticipated this conference would be an opportunity to network with, and learn about the work that my peers were undertaking in thier own communities; a sort of service-geek fest. if you will. What it turned out to be however, was a day of being talked-at by the High-Muckity-Mucks, and the poor folks with touching stories of hardship and perserverence.

First of all, I believe that I have abandoned my project of cataloging my days of work. I keep a rudimentary paper journal, and for now that will suffice. Perhaps in time I will have something to share of my experiences with my first real job, but not now.

It's strange--I just watched Motorcycle Diaries again, and was struck by something said in the end. He said that he wasn't himself anymore; that the person he was when he started was not entirely the person he was in the end. There's a sort of uncertainty in there that I can relate to. I know that I have changed through my travels, though I do not know precisely how. It's something big, and it takes time to work through it. As a disclaimer, I should just point out that I don't derive my inspiration from movies like this. Many traveling folk have deep and profound ties to the literature, music and movies of traveling peoples, but I have only come to see these things after the fact. I still do not know quite why I do what I do; "to travel just to travel," or so they say.

There is a longing deep down inside of me for travel. When nothing else makes sense, and I walk under the interstate bridge on my way to work every day, I feel as though I am being swept down that interstate in spite of my forward momentum carrying me closer to the office. Tha-thump tha-thump. There's a squat under that bridge--just some blankets and cardboard set up under there--and there's another one down by the river a few hundred yards away. I cannot adequately express the mystical pull that I experience every day as I walk to work.

My friend Alex tries to encourage me to write a book on hitchhiking. That I might be a sort of modern Guru to my generation. The fact of the matter though, is that when I sit down to write such things, all manner of words escape me. Something which I have come to know deep down inside is at the same time inexpressible. It's not as though I cannot speak about it. My friends will tell you that I often speak at great length about it. It's more that I am wary of being a guiding force to people whom I have no business guiding. The road that I walked may look the same as the road which you will walk one day, but I am not you. I can tell you about sleeping bags and about books and about boots, but when you get out there, my advice could take you through your first day, or your first week if you find yourself truly blessed; the rest of the work is in your hands. The journey itself is a journey down inside of yourself, and between those who you happen to meet. I cannot tell you what road you walk on, though it may be the self-same route I once marched, step by step, on some lonely summer evening.

This is my first full-time job, and it's my first time living in my own apartment. Some people would suggest that I'm well behind the curve of time in relation to standard life tasks, but I think I'm right where I need to be. I enjoy my job, my co-workers and, what seems most important, my home.

When I started my job, I told myself that I would keep a blog for various immediate and future purposes. In many ways, public journaling like this keeps my mind in a heightened state that I have a hard time attaining elsewhere; perhaps in college. This also helps me to learn and reflect over time past, communicate with friends and loved-ones, and to create an account of what has happened. That being said, I have been taking notes in my compositions book since I started, so I'll just expound upon what's in there.

October 9th, 2008 Thursday

I rode my bicycle to work, and it was a nice warm day. I went around what was called the "traffic circle" when I was last living in Binghamton, but it has been re-designed in a multi-million dollar project. It still sort-of resembles a circle, so yea, I went to the traffic circle, and took the exit towards the Oakdale Mall. I rode on a two mile section of road that had signs posted every half-mile saying "Pedestrians, Bicycles or Motor-Driven Cycles Allowed." I was just hoping not to get a ticket on my first day of work.

I tied up my bike and went into The Mall, and right to Center-Court to meet Ed Blaine, my new boss. We were to be there the whole day tabling for the 26th Annual CHOW (Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse) Hunger Walk.

Meanwhile, I was just taken back by being in The Mall of my youth. I couldn't remember the last time I had been there, though, I placed it sometime during high school. Bob Griffin, a Sodex-Ho manager at SUNY Binghamton's dining services, came by soon after my bewilderment subsided. They delegated the task to me of canvassing every business in the mall with Hunger Walk posters and donation envelopes. I took my first task on with gusto.

Now, even in my high school days, I never went into some of the stores in the mall, like Ambercrombie and Fich for instance. When I went in there I was blown away by the amount of control in the atmosphere, and within a mall which is already and incredibly controlled atmosphere. I came to realize early in my day that I was going to be hard-pressed to get any of the Hunger Walk posters put up inside any of these businesses where the aesthetic could be summed up in three words, "half naked models."

By the time I had swung around to the table in Center Court again to get more materials, Ed was gone and Bob was manning the table by himself. I sat down for a moment to catch my breath, drink some of the mint tea I had made the night before, and eat half of my lunch. I talked with Bob for a while about the Chili Championship at SUNY Binghamton in May, another CHOW fund-raiser. Bob's the guy on campus who coordinates the logistics of the event. After a brief discussion about this and other CHOW related stuff, I got back to canvassing. By sometime in the early afternoon I had hit every business in The Mall, and got back to the table in time to relieve Bob so he could go back to work.

Ed showed back up a couple of times through the rest of the day, and was to be with me for about an hour and a half at the end of my first day, because he was going to be doing an interview at the Channel 34 Mall Studio. I haltingly asked Ed questions about CHOW, not really knowing where to begin. I began to get the sense that raising money was going to be a high priority for me in my tenure.

We began to speak of what Ed referred to as "The Mall Promotion," which happens from Black Friday up until just before Christmas. Last year, apparently the creator of BC comics--a Binghamton Native--donated a whole bunch of his new books to CHOW, and they proceeded to sell them off in The Mall at the price which they were being sold in Barnes & Noble. It was a huge success. This year's Mall Promotion remains uncertain.

I opened up my notebook and asked Ed, "Would you like to do a brainstorm about it?"
His brow furrowed, "What do you mean?"
Clicking my pen-tip out I replied, "Well, we can just throw out ideas about The Mall Promotion, and I'll write them all down."
"Okay."

After about ten minutes we had a few ideas: Get a local business to donate a Christmas Tree, real or fake, and have it placed in a mall store window for raffle; have a Christmas Tree placed in the mall in a public place, and put an ornament on the tree with people's name on it when they donate money to CHOW; then we came on the idea of a raffle, which expanded into a holiday buffet raffle where we could canvass businesses all over the Tri-Cities area to donate an item for the raffle, and then when people buy the tickets, they have the potential to win one or more of many many prizes. A combination of all of these ideas seemed to be the ideal choice.

As the day wound down, we spoke of the people walking around The Mall, and how so many of them looked the same. We spoke of how amazing the flow of capital was in The Mall even on that Thursday afternoon, and that just a small fraction of what passes through the doors of those businesses in a day could feed the Southern Tier for a year.

The day concluded with a sense of accomplishment, new perspective and exhaustion which I had not experienced in any of the manual-labor jobs I have had over the years. I was already excited about the next day.

You know, when I tell people that I was homeless for a couple of years, they generally ask me, "by choice, or like, homeless homeless?" And honestly, the only people who ask that question are people who have no frame of reference. Either that, or they're trying to justify the way that they live, and the way which they treat homeless people. When I was homeless, or even when I tell other homeless people that I was, they never ask me to qualify it. They understand that, it doesn't matter how you got there, what matters is where you are at. If you are homeless, then there you are, with them, experiencing the hardships that they experience and longing for what they long for.

Same thing goes for hunger. I've been thinking a lot about hunger lately. My job has led me to do a lot of research into hunger in America, in New York, in Broome County, in Binghamton and in my community. Being hungry taught me a considerable amount about what it's like for me to be hungry. Now I'm gaining perspective. I'm gaining understanding. So, when there's a discussion about the need in my community or in my country and someone ventures to say, "Why are they without? We need to get to the root of this." I say yes, and we need to feed them. Anyone who is hungry, I have no need of asking why in the moment. That is a question for me. The question for a hungry person is, "How will I eat?"

This infectious moralizing has the effect of helping us deal with our own guilt, but rarely does it help the hungry get fed. It has a sort of mass appeal, because in the way in which we live where even life sustaining food is commodotized to the point where everyone could eat their fill and there could still be enough to go around, we maintain our ideas even to death, lest we face the reality that life is much more simple than we suppose it to be.

When I think about moments in my life when I humbled myself, I can understand it all. One time when I was hitchhiking in Alabama, I was tired. I was hungry. I was sick.

I had heard that Cracker Barrel was owned by Mormons, and that they do not refuse hungry people who need to be fed. I found a Cracker Barrel in an interstate strip-mall that looked like most others. I went inside and I said, "I am hungry, and I am tired. I have no money, and I have heard that you will feed me." They took me in and they fed me biscuits with sausage gravy, cornbread and hot tea until I could eat and drink no more. Then they sent me out with a bag full of biscuits and cornbread, which lasted me for days. I did not feel judged. I did not feel ashamed. It was the very most human of experiences in a place which I so often associate with inhumanity: the interstate strip-mall.

~

I hear through the Americorps Alumni network that there is a national civil service school in the federal legislature that, if established, will offer by way of civil service, what the government now only offers for military service. A place where someone can serve their country for a number of years, and learn the most essential skills in serving their community, and get their degree as part of the package deal. And I can think of nothing that my generation needs right now more than a thing like this.

I see the listless and directionlessness of my generation all of the time, and it worries me. Many people I know have joined the military because it offers them the structure in their life which they cannot seem to attain elsewhere. What better way to find that structure, that meaning, than through serving one's own community. Military service is alright, and I suppose that it provides some indirect service to one's community, though I have yet to really understand what that is. Teaching young people to find a meaningful life in service to the place in which they live is so tangible, so visceral.

If we had a generation of youth who were capable community servants as a simple matter of course, then what would we come to expect of our leaders? We would likely expect them to at least be capable community servants; capable of administering a municipality with the deftness and acumen which mothers and fathers come to know the act of changing a diaper. What use would we have for so many ranting ideologues in government, when we come to realize that efficacy in civil service is not like locating wells with forked sticks?

This is only my second week on the job, and already my mind is buzzing with the possibilities. The people with whom I work posess political beliefs that have been formed through trial and error. This serves to reaffirm my belief that tempered and effective political ideas are the result of tapping into one's own well-spring of empassioned action. When we submit ourselves to that which truly motivates us, even without a bit of understanding, we come--in time--to efficacy and the temperance of understanding. Wisdom comes through the journey of self-actualization.

I find more and more that people who act in order to understand are the kind of people who I want to work with, and the people who act from a place of knowing are people whom I am compelled away from.