Being Gringo: Me and the Policia Militar & The Brazilian Security Apparatus

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What Price is the Attention to What's Important?

It has come to my attention that people in general have a rough time PAYING attention at all. I send these emails to keep up with everybody and to relay other information that sometimes I feel is important. And people still call me while I'm at work or when I should be reasonably asleep, wanting to know things they could just as easily emailed or texted me about.

Why am I railing about this now? Why I am choosing a little bullshit email as a sounding board for my complaints of some of my friends and in turn, society? Because this man is really concerned past his customary irritation. My criticism is not about a perceived casual disregard for my simple wish It is about our collective failure to pay attention to important details because our brains are currently assigned to running tasks that do not conceivably improve its programming.

Monday, the talk around my workplace wasn't about the war in Central Asia or the coming Depression that's about to drown the United States. What I thought was a fait accompli of a headlining political story with a United States senator propositioning a undercover agent for a blowjob (for once he wanted to give back to the common man, I suppose) wasn't.

The main story wasn't even about Turkey attacking Northern Iraq with a hundred thousand men to harry some more Kurds occupying land the Turks didn't want anyway while rating the United States its number one threat to its security.

It was about something undoubtedly more important. It was the main story on CNN on Monday.

It was about the disaster that was Britney Spears' performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. Just to show you how weak the reportage was it didn't bother to cover the failure on the part of everyone involved.

Please allow me to take a momentary digression. Sometimes I feel like I closed my eyes for five minutes sometime in the Nineties and before I opened my eyes and began to shudder in distress, all of a sudden this smelly-footed virago was all that tens of millions of Americans could care about. And this woman along with an even less talented and racist blonde, Paris Hilton, dominates our reality.

It is as if God decided it would be more cost-effective to outsource the day-to-day responsibilties of scripting Reality to Joe Eszterhas.

We are all--me included-- complicit in filling our minds with this bullshit which is why we cannot recall simple key sentences for vital correspondences. We are losing valuable RAM space for want of the trivial. I plead with you to be more conscious of the everyday jetsam that fills our minds everyday. Watch a little less YouTube. Make a conscious effort to focus on something not so superficial such as the goings-on of the marginally talented.

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In Hoc Signo Vinces

Well sports fans, it's another sizzler of a week here in South Florida. In the southeast, we have our routine threat of hurricanes barreling onto our shores. In the northeast, we have the continual high-pressure angst where it's centralized in New York City resulting in those tornadoes in Brooklyn earlier this summer. Now, If you look carefully, you can see a mixed front of ennui and creeping despair encroach upon the West Coast with a leading edge stemming from the Pacific Northwest on down to the San Bernardino Valley. And in the continental United States is the same pattern we've enjoyed since 2000, with the less educated half of the humans hijacking the desires of the largely godless other half.

For those who bother to read these things I send out and wonder why I put that unusual quote in the subject line, it is a new mantra I submit to get through the day. Feel free to Wikipedia or Google the phrase and you'll see why. Besides, I think Latin phrases are so ill.

But I realize certain things about myself and I have to commit to my mantras more and more because the self I've submerged for so long is rising again. The reason I'm always show my colors as a budding malcontent is because I'm simply not made to be doing what I'm doing. This whole practice of toiling beaverine to make a couple anonymous people rich is chafing more and more against my principles.

"In this sign, you will conquer", is something vague and yet sufficiently encompassing to describe my inner rebellion and determination to make a change.

The utility and frivolity involved in typing out these little ditties on why I ordinarily have a such a hard time keeping up with you all is rapidly coming to an end.

This next job is the last.

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Goodbye New York

Listening to: "Little" Louie Vega; Arnold Jarvis - Life Goes On [Dance Ritual Mix]
via FoxyTunes

How do I begin?

It has taken me several months to write this email. I don't really know where to begin and much less what exactly to say that would sound appropriate. Presently, I type on and feel so maudlin reflecting on the entirety of my five years here. Some of you I haven't talked to in months and sometimes years. But believe or not, if you've gotten this message, you are always in my thoughts.

The story of my five years here in New York has been one of pain, sometimes Pyrrhic sacrifice, loss, and betrayal. It is also a mini-saga of how misunderstandings can lead to anguish and isolation in this enormous city. Conversely, it has been also the story of strangers clinging onto the life preserver of and in the constant hustle, becoming friends, sometimes lovers, and even family.

I want to make this move while I am healthy, still unburdened, and still young and resilient enough to take risks and recover from my mistakes. I'm proud of what I've accomplished, proud of the things I had the guts to try to take, and proud at what I've lost (which meant that at one time, I at least, had it). In the various the stages in which I've met all of you,you all of touched my life, all of you helped me learn or added new mysteries to my life for me to contemplate further. All of you have had a hand helping me become something I was not when I first came here. I am now tougher, wiser, more patient. Like it or not, all of you helped me become a man, fully capable, and indomitable like those I aspire to become more like.

But it is time I go home.

This departure is the real deal. Sometimes my plans simply evaporate into stale talk but it's very real this time. I've already squared away my apartment in Miami Beach. My mail is already being forwarded home starting yesterday and I'm transferring within the company I work for to work back home. Funny, my landlady is actually a bit distraught that I'm leaving at the end of February (for some of y'all who've had to hear my trials with the various landpeople I've dealt with over the years, I'm certain that at least raised an eyebrow). Several months ago, I asked myself a question, if the whole point of me coming to New York was to create something that would make me happy, what if I failed to do it or changed tack and did something else; could I just bypass the whole "trying to be happy thing" and simply went someplace where I've always been happy? Wasn't it the the whole point?

I realize now that no matter what, I am happiest at home. If I lose everything I own in a fire, be relentlessly pursued by killer watermelons, or be beset by wild dogs; if were at home somehow I'd find a way to be happy. I cannot explain it to you very well except I know Miami Beach is kind of my spiritual home. I want to stop complaining about and how much New York City sucks and just do something about it.

So I'm gone. I'll be in New York a lot after I leave, mostly for business and shopping (I think I've turned into a chick), but I'm done and tired and I've proven everything that I needed to myself in relation to this city. I'm just too old for the struggle, I rather chill at home and climb my mango and grapefruit trees in the backyard when they're bearing fruit and eat my Argentine steak sandwiches in the evening.

Thank you all for the experience.

Kamal.

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What I Did On My Days Off Last Week

via FoxyTunes ----------------
Listening to: Unknown Artist - Track 15

In the last couple of weeks, I've been brusquely ushering all of you into the mechanics of an otherwise mundane little life here in South Florida. In the last couple of weeks you've heard me rail twice against the continual intrusion of non-detrimental phone calls at 4am. You've also heard me sort of wild out and describe an existential weather report with a major despair front encroaching onto the West Coast. However, by virtue of my writing, you've gotten me to establish and maintain a static and hopefully growing web of personal associations.

Last week's installation of my travails was met with what some thought was another withering email unto "that unnamed person" from me. Really, it wasn't intended to come off that way but sometimes particular colors of passion can paint an unintended picture of outright vexation. I write here to present another story of vexation. On a certain level, I am embarrassed to discuss how something so minor to most represents the finish of one of the major dramas in my life.

It started in 1996. I was an Airman Apprentice in the Navy's Carrier Early Warning Squadron 126 in Norfolk, Virginia; and like so many men at roughly 19, 20 years of age while owning a black car; I was an exceedingly fast driver. No hollow boast, but I habitually covered the distance from Norfolk to New York City in under five hours, one time in four. While being a habitually fast driver, the law of averages virtually guaranteed I'd catch a ticket. And I did--two in the same pissant town of Harrington, Delaware. One each going to and coming from New York City in the same weekend. I was lucky not to go to jail over either offense considering I averaged in excess of almost forty miles an hour between both tickets, and I knew the business wasn't finished until I'd paid both.

Being a member in a naval aircraft squadron means you have to continually train in various environments and staging points. My squadron was constantly on training deployments, which meant we didn't spend two uninterrupted weeks in Norfolk at times. One of the places we had to go to train was where the Top Gun pilots trained at Fallon Air Force Base near Reno, Nevada. For three weeks, we endured days so hot (sometimes 120 degrees by 2pm) on the flight line it was dangerous to all personnel to be exposed to the outdoors more than half an hour at a stretch. During those weeks, I received a paltry two pieces of mail; both tickets. They asked that I enclosed some form of payment and mail the closed envelopes back to sender's address. It seemed simple enough. In those years, I didn't play fast and loose with my life like I tend to do now. I was extremely fastidious about all the affairs that governed my life; maniacal perhaps, but thorough. So I sent both envelopes before their due dates…assuming the issue was solved.

A couple of weeks later, I get some kind of notice from the State of Delaware saying I didn't pay my fines and they were recommending the Commonwealth of Virginia to suspend my license. This was some kind of joke. I already paid them their money. I figured this was some auto-generated response letter and that Delaware was on its way to cashing my checks. About a week or so later, I got a letter from the Commonwealth of Virginia saying that they were about to suspend my license on account of Delaware's recommendation. Again, I assume that was an auto-generated response. On both counts, I assumed wrong, and soon I got a letter from the Commonwealth of Virginia saying my driver's license was suspended. The culprit all along was the traditionally slow military postal system (later that same year, I would receive a letter from my family in New York, telling me an elderly family member had died. By the time it reached my hands, she spent her first two months in the winter dirt). The postal service didn't deliver any of my correspondences on time…and now my license was suspended because of their practices.

Still, I needed my car to get to work at the base. Naval Air Station Norfolk is one of the largest military installations in the world. From my room to the hangar where our planes were was at least two miles. I felt like I had no choice but to continue driving until I resolved this issue. That was the decided-upon course of action until I was stopped (for what? I don't remember) on base and had consequently had my license physically confiscated.

I thus learned the obvious lesson about asses and assumptions.

Coming forward eleven years later, I called the DMV in the State capital Tallahassee and inquired what it would take to receive a new license. They told me all I had to do was provide proof I had a Virginia license and my transfer to a new Florida Class E was guaranteed. Really, it's just that simple? I decided I was going to do the very South Florida thing and show up to the DMV office like I was going to the club. I wanted to look sexy for my Driver's License picture. It was my little act of a sexy defiance against "the system". Yes, this will show them. I am insouciant and cavalier.

I am reminded of the bucolic Forrest Gump character in the scene where he touched off the running craze in the early Eighties and subsequently stopped running on a road in the middle of a desert and dumbly say, "I'm tired". I think it is one of the most telling and poignant scenes in all of cinema. Tom Hanks perfectly captured my feeling. I just wanted it over, I didn't care how much I had to spend, I didn't care which offices I had to malinger in like some jit in order to get what I wanted. I wanted to be free. I wanted to be an adult and first-class citizen. Like every good decent American I wanted the right to help to collectively fuck up the environment just like everyone else. The years of hindrance brought to the surface a level and flavor of frustration I was never fully conscious of until that moment.

It might fascinate one to see what kinds of events trigger certain types of psychomotor responses and sometimes its corresponding secretions. In my life, without much apprehension; I've thrown myself outside a flying airplane, re-robbed leather thieves in Turkey, got thrown through a bathroom urinal in a melee with nightclub bouncers, and watched fighter planes catch on fire with bombs and missiles onboard. Once I was on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier to see an F/A-18 explode before it landed ...but I am constantly amazed by the other events in life that elicit fear in me. Those are the points in my life where my personal gully counted for nothing and I'm just left with my fear.

The wait to regain my license was long and it seemed to double itself to an unbearable amount; it was only 22 minutes. My hands were tingling and moist, the moistness being an almost unfamiliar sensation to my hands. I feared having to spend hundreds more dollars to gain this important foothold onto my life. I was afraid to be an impotent, a bewildered and vexed eunuch returned to the queue at the DMV. What seemed so simple and so routine had turned into something dramatic and yet an accurate extrapolation of my adult life.

The people at the County Square DMV near the Miami-Dade/Broward County line must have seen something different in my demeanor, or in my eyes; or at the least, taken pity at me. They were good enough to call the Virginia DMV to sort out the problem on my behalf. After wading through several voice prompts, I had to deal with another underpaid employee in the bureaucracy. The lady was already sounded irritated at my call, answering me with a forced formality.

She said, "We'll need your Virginia driving record, Mr. Shaw".

This was absurd. Why would the Virginia DMV need my driving record when they are the agency that issued it in the first place? Trying not to let my customary impatient condescension be a factor in this situation, I tried to think it through coolly.

With the best dulcet tone I could summon, "But your agency gave me my driving record in the first place, even if it you don't have it, you should be able to cross-reference it somehow".

She then told me she could not. That was when the less-than-nice version of me came to the fore.

To the onlookers, it must have been a scene hysterical at the Florida DMV as this strangely dressed up man in a typically onerous DMV must have seemed so unnecessarily imperious demanding that the staff surrender his rightful license. I struggled to find a higher pitch or volume that might intensify the impact velocity of invective I wanted to hurl and make it stick to my counterpart, this faceless operative who was deigned by the gods to answer my call. I felt something find force within the channels inside my body and in a flash become an unholy urge to flush a chair, well, flush against her body. Luckily for her she was not there, she was close to a thousand miles away in America's Anus, the Commonwealth of Virginia. I was too close...too close to have my whole momentum nullified for want of a driving record that should surely (and prudently) as a last resort been archived.

The following is transcribed from the point of view of the outsider; it is truncated for brevity:

"So explain to me, how in this age of Homeland Security, how my driving records could just disappear? That's one of the first things they check!"
Pause.
"No, I do know what 'purge' means. You want me to conjugate the verb for you?"
Pause.
"But oh, I bet you don't know what 'conjugate' means either?! And you can't tell me when your little commonwealth purged my driving record? You have no record of that, is that what you're telling me? Well, what DO you know then?"
Pause.
"So how is it possible for me to possess a Virginia's driver's license, and know my license number, but you tell me you have no record of me ever having a license? There's an obvious break in the logic."
Pause.
"How do you just erase a man's driving records? That bullshit doesn't make any sense!"
Pause for backtalk.
"No, just find me somebody with the authority to make a decision".
Pause.
"No, it's not you."
Pause.
"Nope."
Pause.
"Make some freaking sense. I don't care, make up a new lie, 'cause this one you're telling isn't passing muster. I'm dead-ass serious, tell me a new lie. I'm waiting"
Pause.
And I continued, "the fuck do you mean you can't find my records?! Bit--MAN, find me my records. You're not making any sense. No, you're not making sense. Make some sense."
Pause.
"No, FUCK your state--just get me a supervisor! Yes. I'll wait."
Long pause.
A low stirring in my bowels, "Oh, it's you again. Where's the supervisor?"
Pause.

An hour had passed till I realized I was at an impasse, I couldn't transfer my old Virginia license to Florida, because Virginia in its beneficent wisdom thought it was efficient to wipe my record clean. Suppose I was a "terrorist", that was indeed one less important datum in which the Department of Homeland Security could levy against me.

I hadn't been this angry in Miami since those moving men held my all my possessions hostage in a cube truck outside my apartment in South Beach; demanding I paid them double the money we agreed to before I departed New York*. I was an impotent; an outsider to a process long terminated without my cognizance or its subsequent approval. My lips sagged as my face's strength; my brain's electrical signals were totally rerouted towards mitigating that plume of smoke slowly rising from the top of my dome. I was in disbelief, I lost.

For that day.

Let me begin by saying this, I am not one to run to my mommy. I do however; consult with her before I make most emotionally-influenced decisions. My emotions were anguish, frustration, a far-away resignation to the consequences of the actions taken long ago, but prevalent was the need to do something feral. I do not trust my emotions to guide me in those moments. I call my mother because I know she would listen to me bitch long enough for me to return to rational thinking. I already knew what had to be done, but it never hurt to get the validation from Mom to let me know the course of action I chose would be right. My mother calmed me down while suggesting the same course of action I would take next after an hour of cursing the Fates.

Outside the DMV were representatives from the various driving schools which set up shop around the outside. To obtain a first-time Florida Driver's License, you have to endure a four-hour drug/alcohol/safety course by watching a video that was so dry in content and looked as if it was shot on the very first ENG Camera--while it was still a prototype. I enrolled in the class, paid still more money for the course materials and the video. I took in the as much of the video as I could, which turned out to be all of it. I studied the test gouge cursorily later that night, watched a lot of Star Trek and followed it up with The Last King of Scotland and promptly went to bed.

The second day was my more routine than the first. Already, I had been to this DMV. I recognized all the clerks from the day before. On the second day, I actually saw white people at the DMV, which put my little personal theory about how white people have a separate DMV they don't tell the rest of us about back into the "Hypothesis" folder. Wearing a similar outfit, I was still idiotically determined to look sexy for my license picture. The wait again, seemed interminable. Under the fluorescent lamps in the bright afternoon, I could smell the various colognes, perfumes, and body odors. I took in the faces at their various angles. My mind typically racing to catalogue the sensations experienced in the line, I couldn't stop the thoughts, and I was tired and bored. I just wanted it over.

This time when my name was called, all my papers were in order: my birth certificate, my passport, my Social Security card, a receipt showing I took the safety course from the driving school, another Washington, DC identification card. If some technicality arose to stop me then, I wouldn't know what to do. I finally took my written test, missed three questions, and soon, took my driving exam, drove prefect. After some ten minutes, I was asked to take my picture. I smiled despite the emotional weariness of having gone through so much to get so little.

It has been ten years since I've enjoyed something so elementary to one's life. I was tired and I sorrowed to myself about how the lack of something so basic has hindered so much progress in my life and my goals so. My mind wasted little time in wanting to celebrate. Instead I enjoyed a perfect sober clarity. There were lots of things that had to be done.

Now.

*If you wondered what the asterix was all about and what become of that situation; let's just say it helps to mention to certain types of shysters and charlatans that I have two very good lady friends who are graduates of the Howard University School of Law. It makes for a very strong negotiating point.

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