Mr. Nighttime becomes Mr. NyQuil........

In between sneezing fits and hacking up a lung, I will try to get something up soon.

I knew that the luck of not having a cold for over a year would run out at some point, but did it have to be this past holiday weekend when the weather was so nice? Oh well, I watched everyone else enjoying themselves from under my covers.........Bloody ingrates..........How dare people enjoy themselves when I am keeping Kleenex and Robitussin in business single-handedly.......

No, it's not "man-flu," so don't even go there, ladies...........

Ecclesiastes on a rooftop.

I thought that for those who have never seen, or possibly don't remember Blade Runner very well, a little insight to this blog's tag line might be in order.

To be certain, there is a reference to the things I have seen when I worked as a paramedic for 22 years. I saw things that most people should never have to see, ever, and I saw them with a frequency that most folks couldn't comprehend.

The literal reference however, is to a scene towards the very end of Blade Runner, after Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) has saved Deckard's life, and is now confessing to him atop the roof of the building they have just jumped to. It is one of the most compelling speeches in all of filmdom, and one of the most repeated.

Batty is baring his soul, and freeing it at the same time. He is an organic machine, without empathy, that finds empathy in his last moments of life. The symbolism of the dove flying away should be fairly evident, and has been talked about by Blade Runner fans incessantly, as has the argument over whether or not Deckard is actually a replicant. (Oh, but that is for another post!)

For now, here it is:

Madness......

Not again.....Please not again..........

In my last post, I mentioned how Brooklyn had been eating itself alive in the time I spent there. This was from the mid 1980's to the mid 1990's. Crack had taken the entire city by the throat. During the summer months, you had a hard time distinguishing the gunshots from the firecrackers. In the summer of 1991 however, Crown Heights exploded with a wave of racial violence that pitted Jew vs. black, religion vs. race. This was a full year before the LA/Rodney King riots in, and while not on the same scale in terms of size, it was just as ugly. (The Wikipedia article is pretty good, and explains things well.)

Everyone was afraid that these riots would spread. If you worked EMS in that area during that time, you put large swaths of tape over the driver's side and passenger side windows of your ambulance if you had to respond to a call in there. If someone were to throw a projectile into them, the hope was that the tape would minimize the spray of glass particles. You just had to hope no one put something through the windshield.

When riding through Crown Heights back then, it was as if you stepped into a Czechoslovakian revolution. Riot police were everywhere, being taunted by Orthodox Jews and blacks alike. Madness had gripped Crown Heights; madness that was just as potent as the small white rocks that were smoked in glass pipes in alleyways and homes. The old prejudices of fear, religion and race were stoked, and the fires that blazed from the overturned cars and trashcans made you wonder if perhaps a mini-Armageddon was being witnessed.

Everyone was fair game. EMS, police, FDNY, what-have-you. An EMT unit from my station had a brick thrown through the driver's side window of their ambulance. ("Bus," in NYC-EMS vernacular.) The tape did its job, and the both of them escaped without injury. I got lucky, and nothing happened to me during that time, save for being screamed at by protesters when being escorted by police into a building on a call.

If there was any good that came out of the insanity of those days, it is that the Hasidic and black communities started talking to one another after the violence ended. It took a long time, but good relations were established, and it appears as if the report today of the Hasidic boy that was assaulted and robbed was the victim of a gang initiation as opposed to the start of a wider display of hatred. (At least, this is what the video report from NYC Ch. 2 would seem to suggest.)

I hope so. The very idea that the Heights would return to the old bigotries is not something I would like to hear about.

New: Then again, I might be wrong.... http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/26/crown.heights.ap/index.html

Wringing out the mop....

I still shake when I think about it. I still wonder if I will ever screw up the courage to confront it. Do I read it, or see it? Which choice is the lesser of two evils? I know what I am facing, or what I will be faced with. It will force me to relive certain things that I have only recently come to terms with.

In 1996, Joe Connelly wrote "Bringing Out The Dead," a novel based on his experiences as a paramedic in Hell's Kitchen, the area around Times Square. Frank Pierce, a burnt out paramedic is haunted by the life of an asthmatic he could not save. Frank is a symbol for many of us who worked EMS in NYC, myself included. He is a fictional character that by all accounts, based on what friends of mine that have read the book said, is as true-to-life as it gets. The book was made into a movie with Nicholas Cage, directed by Martin Scorcese.

When it first came out, my first thoughts were, 'Oh, great. Someone else thinks they know how to show what it is like to work the streets.' I must admit I was a bit jaded. There was a book that I reviewed ("Paramedic.") for the professional journal I wrote for back in the 90's, and while it was non-fiction as opposed to fiction, it was a piece of garbage, and I said so in the review. I was not expecting much when I heard about this book, but then, snippets of opinion from colleagues started filtering in. They were all positive, and I was encouraged to read it.

I chose not to.

My reasons were simple. I lived the life. I did not need to relive it in a book. I did not need to know about a paramedic who was on the verge of suicide because of events that haunted him. I already knew a paramedic that went over the edge, in no small part due to the job.

In 1992, six NYC paramedics/EMT's committed suicide. One of them was a guy I worked with. We were not steady partners, but I knew him well enough. He had a monkey on his back from the age of 15. He already took time off once to get clean. We thought he had really beaten it back this time.

Then I got to work one morning, and the first thing I was greeted with was that Bill was found on the side of the FDR Drive with a needle in his arm. Devastation is too mild a word to describe how we all felt. There were those who said it was an accidental overdose. Those of us who knew Bill knew better.

I worked Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights in Brooklyn. As bad as Hell's Kitchen might have been, Brooklyn made this section of Manhattan seem like a suburban house party. Brooklyn was a war zone back then. Brooklyn was Beirut. Brooklyn was Belfast. Brooklyn was LA 2019.

What we all had in common was the sheer volume of calls that would descend upon us during a given tour. It also had the effect of wiping any naiveté from you very quickly. The young EMT's that would come in, full of that "I am here to save the world" attitude had it chipped away. There are those that could adapt, and there are those that never could. I watched some come through my hospital and stay 6 months or less; they simply could not cope.

"I realized that my training was useful in less than ten percent of the calls, and saving lives was rarer than that. After a while, I grew to understand that my role was less about saving lives than about bearing witness. I was a grief mop. It was enough that I simply turned up."

The above was what Frank comes to realize about what his job was all about. (I found the line on IMDB, from the movie, but I believe it is in the book as well.) It sums up what I did, what Joe did, what we all did in a way I have never seen expressed before. It is exacting, and painful at the same time.

This book/movie has become my Balrog. It is the thing I have yet to face. It is the demon from the depths of my brain that while I have contained, I have not yet conquered. Even if I do face it, what will it do for me? Will it help me come to terms with my own set of memories that still haunt me as they did Frank? Will the fiery whip come and pull me down again into the pit that I fell into once before? I made a promise that I would never venture down into that hole again.

I'm forced to wonder though, if one day I will have no choice but to face that Balrog once and for all.

Am I missing something here?

I'm not quite sure what to make of this one.

I can certainly understand the need to protect parishioners, but it makes one wonder; how is this an example of Christian compassion? Certainly there had to be another solution than to take out a restraining order.

The Catholic church wonders why it is losing people in droves. This kind of behavior does not exactly help its image any.........

Who the hell took my spring????

Okay, so it is 49 degrees outside, the wind is whipping up a storm, and it is going to pour cats and dogs later.........This is spring?

If (man - made) global warming is indeed a reality, then Rochester must be an oasis.......

The Fourth Estate expresses itself.......sort of....

Professional journalists doing what they do best...........

http://gawker.com/390156/top-ten-angry-on+camera-meltdowns

I wonder if they offer classes on this style of presentation in journalism school?