Week 11: Back In The Saddle

Due to jetlag and illness, Week 11's 2 sessions were actually spread out over 2 weeks. Now we're back into the groove. Owing to our weakened state, Jessica took it easy on us, but alas I am still sore. And I know that's just the calm before the storm.

We did manage to work in a new torture: uneven push-ups. Admittedly, all my push-ups are of uneven (at best) quality, but these are push-ups where the ground is made uneven through the insertion of a ball between one of my hands and the floor. The purpose of this seems at first pleasant enough: to simulate fondling a breast in order to make doing a push-up more pleasant. But it turns out the real purpose is to make the push-up far more painful in one shoulder, reminding me that no matter how horrid push-ups may be, there's always a way to make them worse.

Grow Up

A lot of people I know have been having children lately. Apparently that's what happens when folks get around my age. This has caused Anu and I to consider whether or not we want to be a part of this particular trend. Part of considering this is figuring out just how much it sucks to be a kid, or have one, these days.

When I was a kid, there were plenty of lousy things about being young. Bullies kicking my ass. Girls who wouldn't kiss me. Not being able to drive a car. The fact that the entire planet was not made of pizza and iced cream.

It turns out, however, that being a kid nowadays sucks even more -- and so does being a parent.

When I was a kid, I ran forehead-first into our driveway gate (which I rarely remembered to latch, so it was always swinging in the wind) as I was chasing my beloved kite. I required stitches. I also tried to jump a neighbor's fence on my bicycle, leading me to hit the storm drain, flip the bike, and slam into the fence. I avoided stitches, but I sure looked and felt like a bruised-up moron. Among my many other stupid tricks were: jumping through the branches of a tree the height of our house (washing off blood and sap really sucks), numerous bicycle crashes, punching out walls and windows, building a treehouse that collapsed with me in it, hundreds of dirt clod fights (including ones that turned into fist and/or rock fights), and as I got older, first leaping and eventually riding dirtbikes off a cliff and into a nearby sand and gravel pit.

Friends and I also used to play Star Wars in a nearby bog that looked kind of like Dagobah, and was right next to the four dishes and radio antenna owned by the local cable TV firm. My dad used to bring home fireworks. And skateboards. Sometimes the fireworks and skateboards were deployed at the same time. I also liked to set fires (though generally in safe places), swim in the ocean, and take the train 100 miles into NY City to buy records and go to punk clubs (after I was about 12, I did the latter two unattended).

Many of my stunts resulted in getting yelled at, lectured, or grounded. Were I a kid now, any one of these things might result in my mom getting arrested and/or me and my sisters being taken away from her by Child Protective Services.

So might the fact that I started babysitting my little sisters starting when I was as young as 10 (though not for very long at that age). I was actually paid to babysit other people's kids, and to mow laws with an actual lawnmower, when I was 12. Child labor! Dangerous whirling blades! The horror! The horror!

I even got arrested once as a kid (for graffiti). The judge chastised me for being a snotty young punk, and then chewed-out the cop for wasting his time when the cop should have just dealt with it locally and made me clean up the graffiti and be done with it. Then the judge sentenced me to clean up the graffiti. The idea of arresting my mother for the fact that young people are universally stupid never even occurred to anyone involved.

I left home to go to college at 16. I did incredible amounts of stupid things between 16 and 18 (the age at which my mother was no longer legally burdened with the responsibility for my actions despite being a four and a half hour drive away). And while I was there, a friend of mine was killed in one of the first campus shooting rampages since Charles Whitman.

Was my mom negligent for allowing me to go to college before the age of majority? Based on the culture of paranoia today, I bet a lot of so-called parents today would think so, especially since something actually quite bad did happen on campus. Of course, she couldn't have known. And statistically, the chances of that happening were incredibly small. It was freakish that it happened, not inevitable.

In the neighborhood where I currently live, there is a huge State Park that you can walk to from our house in about 5 minutes. I hardly ever see kids in it. I also hardly ever see kids riding bikes in the neighborhood (once), walking around the neighborhood, or even playing in their own yards. Outside is where bad things are like scrapes and cuts and bullies and the ubiquitous* child abductors.

When I was a kid, my mom was constantly trying to get me to go outside and run around more. She wanted me away from the video games and out in the woods with my friends, not cooped up in the house so I'd be "safe". And she certainly didn't make play dates for me. If I wanted to play, I had to arrange it with other kids myself, like kids have since cavekids dragged each other out by the hair to play a nice game of "hit the tiger with a stick". Parents have become both overprotective, as well as obsessed with the idea of "preparing kids for success" and thus kids' lives have become regimented and contained.

People think they're being responsible with their kids by building these walls around them, and regimenting their lives, but they're really being quite irresponsible. In addition to the fact that sedentary lifestyles encourage kids to get fat and unhealthy, this kind of mollycoddling makes kids lazy, codependent, and spoiled. And it perpetuates the pathetic culture of victimization that has turned America into the land of lawsuits and self help scams. Perhaps, though, this constant monitoring and scheduling is just good parenting after all -- preparing them for constant surveillance and obedience in the post-Patriot-Act police state that many seem to want to turn our country into.

Michael Chabon has written about this. George Carlin ranted about it and accurately named the phenomenon "The Cult of The Child" and "Child Worship". Lenore Skenazy has made combating the insidious forces depriving kids of a real childhood into a cottage industry with her Free Range Kids book and site. And historical fiction author Conn Iggulden achieved international attention for his own Dangerous Book For Boys (which inspired the Daring Book For Girls). All this effort in order to try to inspire, encourage, and occasionally chastise parents into allowing kids to actually have a life.

If raising kids is going to mean getting arrested and sued for trying to let my kids experience the world, I am not so sure I want to do that. At least, not here. When I was in Denmark visiting my sister Katrina and her husband Troels, I saw kids actually riding bicycles and playing in public parks. Maybe in Europe, a kid can still go to the mall without anyone getting arrested.


(* Child abduction is far from ubiquitous. Based on reported statistics, while approximately 1.1% of children are reported missing annually (approx 800,000 missing child reports, out of a child population of approx 73.7m), being reported missing includes runaways, etc. About half that 800,000 number is accounted for by abductions by family members. Only about 7.5% of that 800,000 number is claimed to be stranger abductions, and only 115 (0.01%) were "stereotypical kidnappings". Approximately 99% of kids reported missing are found. So based on these reported statistics, in any given year a kid's chances of going missing with a non-family member is about seven hundredths of a percent (0.07%), and of going missing permanently is approximately one hundredth of a percent (0.01%). Even if you believe the claim that reported statistics are under-reported by a factor of 20x, which seems an absurd claim in our current culture of paranoia, we're talking about 1.4% and 0.2% chances, respectively. According to child violent death statistics, a kid has a 0.01% chance of a violent death (0.004% chance of being murdered). On the other hand, heart disease, which obesity and lack of exercise is a factor in, is responsible for 27% of all U.S. deaths per year.)

Best Band Ever?: Public Image Limited

After the Sex Pistols, there was Public Image Limited. And perhaps I commit Punk heresy here, but while the Sex Pistols were incredible, PIL was even better. Possibly not as influential, but better. Though in true "it's better to burn out than fade away" fashion, PIL did survive long enough to become less urgent and relevant in later years. Never bad, mind you, merely not as amazing a band as they once had been.


PIL was founded by John Lydon (Rotten), ex-Clash guitarist Keith Levene, and bassist Jah Wobble (that lineup is shown above). Within two years PIL started undergoing lineup changes that would continue throughout its existence -- with Lydon being the only constant over the years. While that makes PIL Lydon's band, the sound formed during those first two years laid the groundwork for the original PIL sound that held sway from 1978 to 1986 (when "Album" was released). The first two albums, "First Issue" and "Metal Box" (later rerelased on CD as Second Edition) are uncontested postpunk classics, whose sound (along with Joy Division, another band that will show up in this series) became the metric by which all other postpunk would be measured.


The often reviled "This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get" is for me, however, quite possibly my favorite PIL album. It is the first one I heard in its entirety (I'd heard "Public Image" and "Low Life" at friends' parties, and sought out a recording by the band, which I'd been informed was called PIL), when I was 11 years old, and it made a lasting impression on me with its minimalist, rhythm-driven sound. I played my first cassette copy of this album so much that the tape broke. This album, along with the nearly as excellent "Flowers of Romance", featured Martin Atkins (later of Killing Joke, Ministry, and Pigface) on drums.

"Album" is another favorite of mine, and I played it as constantly as "This Is What You Want..." when it was released. A near total change in sound, "Album" is a sonically dense, anthemic rock album layered atop the traditional PIL foundation of strong rhythms. This Bill Laswell produced album features several luminary players: Steve Vai on guitar, Tony Williams and Ginger Baker on drums, and Ryuichi Sakamoto on keyboards. But despite the sonic density and "noodly" guitar work by Vai, this is clearly still a PIL album, with the last vestiges of the original postpunk sound still poking through here and there (particularly on "Ease"). That all-star lineup lasted one album.

PIL's first five albums are utterly essential (even if Allmusic does give both "This Is What You Want..." and "Album" 2 stars -- B.S. I say, those are both five star albums). Later albums, during the Lu Edmunds (Damned) and John McGeoch (Siouxsie, Magazine) era, "Happy?", "9", and "That What Is Not", are not so essential. These albums are all good, to be sure, but by this time PIL had become so pop / R&B / new wave influenced that not much of the original postpunk sound remained. They lost essentially all of their original fans, and an increasing number of their recent converts, and the hitmaking trailed off. The sense of urgency and relevance faded, and so did PIL. Never officially breaking up, PIL has announced that they will reform in 2009 to play a series of winter shows. Hopefully this will lead to a reunion in the studio, because even at their worst PIL was always among the most interesting bands around.

Week 10A: Preparing To Occupy Europe

Today's special torment was front squats with balls of unusual size (ok, ok they were of usual size but unusual weight). I got to go from a 16 pound ball to a 28 pound ball over the course of 3 sets of reps. Oh, lucky me. The only place there should even be a 28 pound ball is hanging from an elephant.

We also did push-ups. After nearly 11 weeks of training, I can finally say that push-ups have gotten a little bit easier. When I first started, push-ups were like trying to shove the planet in one direction while shoving the sky in the other direction. Now I've finally realized that thanks to the wonders of fluid compressability what I'm really doing is shoving the planet in one direction and merely most of the sky in the other direction. So instead of 3 sets of reps of push-ups making me want to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, they make me want to jump off the Manhattan Bridge instead. High fives, everyone!

But it turns out that I am some kind of a freak, because I actually wish I was getting to go to the gym a second time this week. The terrorists have clearly won. But I'm not going a second time this week. I'm going to Europe instead, which is technically much, much more awesome than going to the gym. On the positive side, after being away from the gym for ten days I'll utterly and completely suck at everything again, instead of just mostly sucking, and that'll be good for at least a half-dozen more snarky blog posts.