Life Expectancy by country :
#1 Japan 82.6
#38 United States 78.2 (In 2000 the life expectancy of New Yorkers surpassed that of the United States national average.)
#149 – Haiti 60.9
#188 – Afghanistan 43.8
crazy. the raw numbers.
blessed. alive. thanks.
peace love & light
t
from 7/09
[2nd verse in particular....]
sorry kid there’s no room to spare
no more buttons to press
i’m pushed to my limits of expression
never scared, no more running there is no unless
no exceptions, here is everywhere
One is All, no difference from creeds and the 10 commandments
I’ve seen Ready to Die, strength & weakness in the hearts of men
this is why I read the news, and I saw who remember
and I saw who we forget
it’s no surprise to see no honor for those left anonymous
Doesn’t every life deserve more than a blurb?
Say the word and I’ll do more than log-in and blog
give me your blessings I’ll put my high beams to the fog
Let there be Light! Though I never claim to be God
I figured out how to get those switches on
I make sure the listener is always right a long
by my side together with my pen how we’re heavily armed
the difference between 0 and 1 is infinite…
You could never count the amount of pieces in a whole, but you could never have the whole without every piece.
All is one, one is all. Believe that while a countless number struggle to see another day in Haiti.
PEACE
pray
donate
whatever you do
do SOMETHING
everything is in play
The good games are the ones where it’s a hard fought and earned win. The good games are not blowouts. The good games are the ones where you say “that team lost, but damn they did their best”. Good is not being successful. Good is doing the best you can. Everyone wants to be great. We don’t need great. We need good. BE good. There’s a lot of bad out there. A lot of imbalance. Throw your weight towards something right (even if that means going left). Everyone who had a chance to play the game can be a winner. Let’s give everyone a chance to play before we get mad that we haven’t won yet.
peace
t
and keep sending in those texts to 501501 … YELE
You know so much of the time we’re just lost, we say please God, tell us what is right, tell us what is true. And there is no justice, the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time we become dead. Little dead we think of ourselves as victims. And we become victims. We become weak. We doubt ourselves. We doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law, but today you are the law…
You are the law. Not some book. Not the lawyers, not the marble statue. Or the trappings of the court. Those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are in fact a prayer, a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion they say “act is if ye had faith, faith will be given to you”… If.. If we are to have faith in justice we need only to believe in ourselves, and act with justice. See I believe there is justice in our hearts.
PEACE
TO OUR WORLD
ACT WITH JUSTICE
PLEASE DONATE AGAIN IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY TO THE HAITI RELIEF EFFORT
‘YELE’ TO 501501 HTTP://YELE.ORG
OR ‘HAITI’ TO 90999 RED CROSS
WE ARE ONE WORLD
ONE LOVE
I never took a class in : public speaking, poetry, quantum mechanics, a musical instrument, saying good morning, saying thank you & please, holding doors or being courteous and respectful. I never took a class to be a busboy, to put up christmas lights, to rig 125 foot machines with lighting & grip equipment or fill dumpsters with the broken pieces of wrapped sets.
I graduated from Staten Island Technical HS in 2003. It’s like Bronx tech or BK tech there is a limited acceptance. MY zoned school was New Dorp HS. New Dorp HS at the time had a dropout rate of like 60%. Both of my brothers went to New Dorp. Now both of my brothers got GED’s. I was lucky to go to the other school. I still never went. At the end of the 4 years I had 196 absences total. I think there are 180 days in a school year. I used to figure out what days I would be absent by only showing up for the ‘review’ day before the test. I never did homework I only did the necessary projects. I had cutting school down to a science. I worked harder avoiding school than I would have if I’d have just went.
I was doing fine until my senior year first semester. My 1st two classes were Gym and English. I don’t need to walk laps around the track. I was playing handball every day. As a 17 year old kid I was as fit as I could be. English – I love english, obviously I write all the time, I HATED the class. SO BORING. They would dictate chapters of books I’d finished reading in 2 nights. And here I am in this so called special acceptence ’smart’ school bored out of my mind because this shit is so simple. So I failed those two classes. Now the 2nd semester comes around and I have to make up for it.
The guidance counselor who was a very nice woman and I’m pissed I can’t remember her name came up with the idea that there are night school HS classes at the school and I could finish my last semester there. I had TWO gym classes and one english class. That was my last semester of high school. Because it’s a technical school with extra curriculum built-in I already had all the other required reagents and credits to graduate except for the 2 gym and 1 english. So off I am in night school. I show up at my graduation and not one of the kids in my graduating class had seen me for 6 months.
HOW’D YOU DO THAT?
I like to do things my own way. Common sense & experience have treated me very well and I’ve learned to trust them over data forced down peoples throats.
I’ll save my one and only year at SUNY Old Westbury for another blog. Ha. I haven’t been in a classroom in 6 years. I never stopped learning!
The Greatest Generation is a term referring to the generation of people who fought World War II and afterwords rebuilt everything that was destroyed.
I was thinking about this.
Do I want to be called a member of the Greatest Generation? I do.
I can’t?
Because I haven’t fought a war?
Because I haven’t killed anyone?
Well…
They are the Greatest Generation. I acknowledge and honor all veterans who’ve fought. The women who stepped up and supported them. The children, the innocent ones lost. Whether they were wrong or right they died. Anyone and everyone. But I want us to be known as the Greatest Generation. How can we top reuniting and rebuilding a world after a war?
We can top that by uniting and building a world WITHOUT war.
That would make us the greatest generation. That would have people speaking(and tweeting?) of us as the ones who collectively decided that enough was enough. The tools for such communication were never in place. The wealth of common knowledge has never been more accessible. I’m not on some crazy biblical the light is gonna shine down and all will be granted heaven-ish. I’m saying “the people united will never be defeated”. That’s a protest slogan I’ve heard. It’s true but how could the people of the 60’s be truly united when they were small groups of people limited by physical mail and telephone for communication? That’s only 50 years ago. We’ve been “modern humans” for thousands of years. Now look what we’ve come into just in our lifetime(every single person who will read this).
These are not toys we’ve been given they are tools. Let’s use them.
Happy New Year
I said to my friends & fam I hope we all get JUICY
I say the same to you
PEACE for 20-10
t
I was 20 years old. I’d been working in the film business 3 months. Up until that point I’d only been on small stages in regular size places moving a wall or two doing construction on sets. Learning. This WAS My first big job. I arrive at the Bedford Armory. It’s HUGE. If you live in NYC you’ve definitely seen the Armories - Marcy(in Williamsburg), Kingsbridge (in BX), Bedford (in Crown Heights) and there is one on Park Ave uptown in Manhattan. They look like castles. I think there are more but they are all National Guard buildings that as far as I know since 2003 they’ve been rented out for major film/tv productions. I’ve read that they want to make the Kingsbridge Armory (which is a place that will get a post of it’s own) into a shopping plaza. There’s a rumor that they’re all connected by underground tunnels. But that’s another story for another day.
I walk into the big bay doors in the middle of Union St. Here I am. In awe. A kid in the middle of all of this, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Picture Calvin[&Hobbes]. Gawking. Look at this huge production. I wish I had a camera then. My job? To clean the construction shop. Vacuum the saws. Sweep. Put away lumber. Keep things organized. Make sure no one trips on debris. Give the carpenters a hand when they needed to move something. Simple things. “Shop bitch”. I didn’t mind, I was a kid and I was learning. Happy just to be there making some money and watching it come together. It wasn’t easy.. there are no comfort controls in the massive armories. No A/C. We were starting at 6AM and sweating by 6:17. In the winter it was freezing cold no matter what you did. Here I am, I’m in the middle of 8 table saws going. Dust everywhere. A lot of it MDF (medium density fibreboard – another story…) – a toxic composite wood made of glued together sawdust. It was filthy. But from all this filth the set started to come together. The floor. Then the walls started rising. Then the carpenters added detail. Then the set dressers came in. The electricians lit it and the rigging crew had everything set. And then the shooting crew arrived. The cast. The exras. Craft service. Catering. Where did the star of the movie park their BIGGEST-EVER bus size trailer? INSIDE the armory right next to our carpentry shop. The armory, this HUGE armory, was EMPTY when I got there. By the time I had left we filled every inch three times over. We’d built sets, knocked them down, and built new ones, new floors on top of old, at the end of the job the floor we put down was 10 layers of wood and we used 2 forklifts to break it into huge chunks. At the end it was empty and cleaner than when we’d found it. And I saw it all.
One of the first mornings I was there, probably looking confused, “hair in my eyes”, a carpenter who knew I was new to the business said to me “C’mere kid I wanna show you something”. He turned me around and said “This is the first rule of the business” and pointed at the wall of our tool room – on it in huge letters was:
Sweeping is not just sweeping. If the floors don’t get swept the movie doesn’t get made. I applied that lesson to everything. I learned a lot from that carpenter. We did that entire job together and I didn’t see him for almost 2 years and he said he saw me working and he couldn’t believe how much I learned. I’m extremely lucky to work around people that are not just my peers but people who’ve lived life much more than I…. that carpenters name was Eddie Ferrara. He passed away 3 days ago of Lung Cancer. He was in his 50’s. A true character in the story of life.
Rest in Peace to all those we lost in 2009 and all of us left behind
we are ALL a part of the Big Picture
LOVE
t
∞
Jaggy jigsaw pieces tossed about the room,
I saw my grandma sweeping with her old straw broom,
but she didn’t know what she was doing,
she could hardly understand,
she was really sweeping up pieces of a man.
I saw my daddy meet the mailman,
and I heard the mailman say
“now don’t you take this letter to hard now jimmy..
they’ve laid off 9 others today”
but he didn’t know what he was saying
he could hardly understand
that he was only talking to pieces of a man…
One of my favorite songs… listening to it now thinking how relevant it is for the year of 2009. Onward we go
Peace & good luck to all of us trying to keep all the pieces together
t
