June Mission: Holocaust Survivor Shares His Story

Today we visited the Holocaust Museum for a tour with Dr. David Oughton from Saint Louis University, co-author of “Jewish-Christian Relations in Light of the Holocaust”; and afterward we listened as Mendel Rosenberg, a Holocaust survivor of Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps and ghettos, shared how he and his mother made it through hell. I was blown away by hearing an actual survivor tell their story. To be frank, I didn’t realize survivors were still alive.

I’ve heard so much about the holocaust all my life. I’ve seen so many pictures, watched so many movies and documentaries, read so many books; but never have I heard a survivor share their story live. Mendel was in his teens when he experienced the horrors of ghetto life and concentration camps. His father and brother died, and he witnessed nearly unspeakable tragedy in his own life and in the lives of others. I say ‘nearly’ because he is, of course, speaking about it. It still blows my mind how much courage it must take to have to relive those memories of such deep sorrow and loss over and over again to tell people what happened. I honestly can hardly face the prospect of watching harm come to my family, and to have to suffer and then speak is almost unfathomable to me.

Part of me just wants everyone—individuals, museums, universities, community programs—everyone to leave the survivors alone. After all they’ve been through, now they are condemned to telling their stories for the rest of their lives? But besides realizing how necessary it is for the stories to be told for the sake of preventing injustice from repeating, I also heard something Mendel say today that changed my mind a bit about the good of telling the stories for the survivors themselves. He said that for 30 years after being released, he had nightmares on a nightly basis about him and his family running from the Nazis. He said that he didn’t want to talk about his experience for a long time, but when he finally did decide to talk about it, the nightmares instantly ceased. When someone in the audience asked about this during the Q & A time, he said he thought it had something to do with setting a goal and working towards it. Maybe those deep sorrows and fears were finally channeled into a life-giving pursuit? I personally also think there may be something to the idea that expressing what’s inside the mind, even the deeper, darker fears and distresses, helps to provide a catharsis for the bottled up emotions and might even help work out the thought-kinks by full, un-stymied existence as opposed to suppressed cognitive travail. It is true that most things we hope to solve by critical thinking and creating a logical plan, or instead, actively not-thinking and hoping the problem disappears; but as the poet Rainer Rilke wrote, maybe we solve some things simply by existing them back into nature through the doorway of our own DNA:

“…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Either way, I’m glad to here that Mendel is finding some peace. And it was awesome to see photos of his sprawling family of kids and grandkids. He seems happy, and has a great sense of humor. And he’s doing great things in the world simply by keeping his stories from clotting and being forgotten. The gift of keeping the wounds of his memories fresh for new generations of people to see what he saw is not lost upon me. I am grateful.

February Mission: Comic Con Saint Louis!!

So, why did we go to Comic Con?

Simply put…we wanted to see what all the weirdness was about. That about sums it up. It may shock people to know, but neither Matt nor I have ever been to a Comic Con. I was as much interested in the ethos of weird people (including myself) enjoying weird people as I was anything else. I also wanted to see the homemade cosplay costumes, and I wasn’t disappointed. Wow. In every nuance of that word. Except the non-weird nuance. I also wanted to see celebrities, and I ended up seeing more than I’ve ever seen at one time in my whole life: Lou Ferrigno, Ralph Macchio, William Shatner, two actors from Walking Dead, Adam West (Batman) and whoever played Robin (sorry man), and floating around somewhere was the dude who played Dr. Who. We even sat through a panel discussion/QA with Adam West, dude who played Robin, and one with William Shatner. Let me tell ya, Billy Shat is one sharp 83-year-old s.o.b.!

I brought my 7-year-old daughter with me and let her experience all the weird-plight. We both thought the coolest part of the event was being able to meet some of  the amazing comic book artists who were actually drawing live requests for a $20 fee. Pretty awesome.

Ultimately, I think the thing I really took away is that there is a place for everyone, and a community who will love and embrace them. Maybe it will grow more common in our culture of global socialization to find a community who shares one’s interests and hobbies, no matter how unique, and having this confidence might help many people with unappreciated talents and values to endure environments where they might feel alone. But they are not alone.

And maybe I’m not either.

March Mission: Pick-A-Basement

So, we thought it would be cool to go somewhere and treasure hunt, just like the dudes in Picker's do. What better place to start then my friend's grandma's basement (with permission of course)! Things got real, fast. It is amazing the kinds of things they had stored down there. Old Jukeboxes, old books, old coins, old cash registers, old lunchboxes, old clothes, old clothes, old clothes, old clothes, God help us, old clothes. We were literally digging through stratified history, discovering things like old blowtorches, cameras, and flash bulbs. I had truly never experienced anything like this. Originally our objective was to find stuff to turn around and sell, but, honestly, it was just fun surfacing some old forgotten gem of a person's unique history and experience of life, like a St. Louis school lunch coin that must have been used when it wasn't worth more than an actual U.S. coin.  Also, it was a testament to the luxury of American life. We have so much stuff! What are we going to do with it all? Worse, what is the next generation going to do with it all? Probably throw most of it away. Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden that farmers may feel enslaved by inheriting the futility of farms and farming from their parents, a way of life that was oppressive for one's ancestors, and will be oppressive to the progeny doomed to inherit this dubious 'gift'.

"I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have

inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these

are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been

born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have

seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who

made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres,

when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they

begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?"

On the other hand, maybe it's NOT that we're trying to save stuff for others; maybe we're trying to forget-not-forget it ourselves. Maybe basements and attics and garages are a way of burying what we would rather pretend we don't already have and which hasn't satisfied us yet so we can keep buying more and trying to feed spirit with matter. Well, whatever it is, when I see the stuff people leave behind, I think about the mountains of stuff I'm accumulating for posterity. I hope I leave something more than 'stuff' behind. Maybe that's why I'm glad I picked through someone else's basement, someone else's humanity, someone else's problems, someone else's answers that didn't quite clear the atmosphere or even make it out of the basement. Or maybe I'm just a garage-sale rat. Yeah, I think it's the last one.

April Mission: World Book Night!

I love this time of every year. We literally give out butt-spanking new, bestselling books for free! Absolutely free! No catch. No gimmick. No hidden gospel tracks to make us feel good about ourselves. Just walking up to random strangers and sharing the kind of good, old-fashioned bibliophilia that makes the heavens spin. This is now our third year of getting off our duffs and hitting the streets with the kind of brain candy you snort with your eyeballs. Do we love books? Yes. Do we love people? Sort-of. Do we love giving books to people? Now you're just trying to get me high.

This year we applied for two bestsellers between Matt and I: The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell, and The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Fiction and non-fiction. One is about how a study of the spread of disease yielded secrets about the tipping points in social change, and the other is about one dude surviving a killer disease that knocked off most of humanity. We thought about setting up shop outside the Center For Disease Control, but we were afraid of catching herpes. So...we just gave the books out in fast food joints and strip malls. The only kind of disease we hope people catch is a love-for-reading-flu. St. Louis, consider yourself infected!

We always start the Night Of the Book-lover-virus (NOB) with pictures (see below). In this case, we were beside my house and thought it would be cool if I lifted Matt up and had him hold the books for a photo--which didn't work because he was a friggin' heavy tubalard. The rest of our ritual includes partaking in a gourmet meal (Emperor's Palace buffet!), and then we head out with aching bellies full of sour energy. A good time was had by all.

1. Matt and I hold books

2. Bookmarks I created to insert in the books to help people dig in

3. Us trying to look cool. 

4. The super-official ids we created to look professional so we didn't scare people off with my tattoo.

5. Da books.

6. Me trying to lift Matt up so he could stand on my shoulders and hold the books out for a picture.

7. Matt tries uses his wall-climbing skills (he's bred for his skills and magic) to scale the side of my house (fingertips only folks!) after I realize he's a tubalard (or that I'm weaker than I thought).

8. We finally figure how I can hold him for a half second for a clumsy picture without said books.

9. Uh....

10. Our eager start at the theater before we realized it was closing and we had to move to other shops.

11. We did it! And had a great time.

For those who enjoy the pain, here is my essay that I entered into the World Book Night Essay Contest. Odds are slim, but it was fun to write.

Essay Title: Free Eyeballs

World Eyeball Night.

I carry a whole box full of freshly-harvested angles on the world. Ready to supplant all old eyeballs—retinas screen-burned with ghost images of fears and boredoms that never turn off.

My fellow giver and I have on our “Official Distributor” badges, and now recipients can sub out a tired viewpoint for one from Malcolm Gladwell or Peter Heller. Sometime at home or on the bus or a plane, the old eye will come out, probably easier than expected, and Gladwell’s or Heller’s will slide into the empty socket. It will feel peculiar at first, wheeling them around in their slight eccentricity. Flavored with another’s adventure. Recalibrating the cosmos. But the experience is accompanied by small waves of vague reminiscence. Like something you thought yourself once.

Some will choose one nicknamed “The Tipping Point” and see, really see, how a little idea well-placed, and a few minutes more of courage and hard work, can make a big change. Learn how to team up with Nature’s rhythms and human economy, not just steel oneself against the children stories—like Santa and the Easter Bunny—she pulls as pranks on new arrivals. Make life work better.

For others, “The Dog Stars”: don’t need an End-Of-the-World to know what’s going wrong. But it might be nice to see someone else struggle to eat and breathe for once. Someone who wasn’t fed happy-fat on a silver spoon. To witness how people with a center of planetary gravity play it. Maybe spark a new survival strategy. Be nice to know we’re not alone, that the lean ribs of someone else’s hardy existence are showing too. Make friends with them.

Ninety percent of life’s ills probably stem from staring out the same holes all our lives—mere pinholes when it comes to trying to see all there is to see. Even when there’s nothing to see, we project the nauseating samenesses into the blanks. We believe we see what we believe we have to see by dubious virtue of always having seen it. White-wall torture, and a horrible reason to keep staring if you ask me.

Wet-with-life perspectives I dole out this night, blood-ready organs still raw from the seeing! Hoping to revive those dying from same-sightedness.

First stop: Dobb’s Tire & Auto. Talked to the manager. The technicians come shuffling out, one by one, from the sweltering shop-oven of parts and problems. Hands knuckle-busted and gristle-built from full-body torque on bolts and lug nuts, and setting one’s chest deep against an impact wrench. Huddled together as if to deter the universe from spotting a protruding limb to latch on to.

I display the new Life-Filters. New-Life filters.

They hesitate. Perhaps wondering, “What’s with the eyeball? Does it contain a secret that can get me out of from under people’s cars and looking down on them from one of the skyscrapers downtown? There’d better be something in those flimsy things built better than Hondas. Need something greater than the density of car metal that daily breaks my skin and warps my bones. Something like that I could take into me, fuse it with the load-bearing bones, knees, and fingernails. Push back against the universe. Give it hell.”

They listen to my description of which is which. They watch each other. They each slowly approach and point to, not take just yet, the one they might want. They wait for a price. For the catch. For me to preach my sermon, or pitch my product. Nope. I reach over and toss an eyeball to each.

“Free?”

Yep. That’s it. Someone from the outside cares.

They smile, grateful for a kindness. Or a cure.

We walk through retail stores getting ready to close. Directing our gifts to employees who know by now that things for sale are mostly just price tags. People are buying the tags. Everybody in retail knows this as they sweep the floors at night and unpack boxes of duplicates. Tags make you feel you finally have something worth something.

Pier One Imports. Closing shift. Quiet as dusted dishes. Quiet as an urn. We’re greeted from the back, and we tender our ocular wares. The manager calls her friend, stocking in the back somewhere. They are absolutely giddy to hear their choices, which are still only two, but more than they’ve had all day. The customer isn’t right this time. They are right. They choose their best-possible world, given the circumstances, for the first time. Whole vistas will appear and disappear with a blink of their new eyes. They want to know all about World Eyeball Night, so they can find some being to be grateful to. “Thank you for your eyes.”

They were right to feel grateful. These eyeballs have seen things. Blue waters and skies of pure potential. Yellow suns of morning-hope. White stars of guiding dreams. Black nights of coffin-sorrow and loneliness. Grey ash softly falling on peeling, ruined cities. Pink flesh scraped thin against the stony earth. Brown fur of dead friendship. Warm purple of delicate but deeply cheerful bruises.

These sights are uploaded direct into another mind, forcing a perspective and a feeling that would be incompatible, perhaps, with the old world; but the alarms of ideological incursion are stuffed with cotton for just a few experimental moments. Losing a lost world is the double negative of finding one.

We drop in at Smashburger. End of the night. Last order taken. I saunter up, but the look on my face tells the cashier and table-cleaner to relax. Like I’m a friend who saw what they were going through. We smile at each other. One laughs as if I’ve seen how hard she has worked, and how little it paid off.

I offer rinsed perception, free of fry-and-burger grease. A new start. See it another way. The entire world. The whole thing beginning to end. Over and over until you find what you are looking for. And THAT—what you are looking for—again and again, until you’re ready to complicate things with a different look. The old world hemorrhages when the old eyeball is plucked out, replaced with another’s. The old—forgotten—until you’re ready to remember and rebuild it.

“If you only knew the kind of night we had. The order that we just busted our asses on a minute before you walked in. This feels like it was worth it. Like we’re being rewarded.”

I am brought behind the counter to call my offer through the order window. The 16-year-old grill-master pokes his head out of a grease-globuled cloud of steam rising from smashing beef on a hot grill. He chooses. I hand him his glimpse past the hanging receipts.

At the end of the night my box of eyeballs has run out.

I wish I could have taken all the worn out ones and recycled them. Eyes change with the living. Passed to the next person, they change again. Enrich with each interchange. You’re only stuck with the ones you die with.

A boxful of eyeballs goes a long way. Line your shelves with them. Carry a pocketful. Ready for when you reach the limits of your positivity, honesty, courage, hope, options, solutions. Pop in another’s eye. Look again.

Sometimes everything hangs on another look. Sometimes everything hangs on another’s look.

Everything.

New 2014 Calendar!!

The new Not-Rot calendar for 2014 is out! Read and weep for all the brain fat that will be consumed this year!

March 28—Picker's challenge

April 5—Comicon

April 23—World Book Night

May 16-17—Jackson Falls camp-n-climb

June 8—Holocaust Museum Tour

July 11—Ice skating in the summer (possibly with kids)

August 29—Japanese Festival, Botanical Gardens

September 13—Casino night

October 17—Cigars and book burning (a book we choose to read together)

November 7—Art event

December 5—Jen/Melanie's Choice

Watch this blog for all the updates after we experience an event. We will try to post our reflections within two weeks after the event. If you want to join us for a not-rot experience, let us know!

January Mission: Panel Discussion And.......2014 is going to rock with all the not-rotting we plan on doing!!!

So, here we are again. The Not-Rot team-of-two took a break from blogging because of life changes and general laziness, but we're back and we're sexier than ever. Even without keeping the blog current, 2013 was still eventful and full of death-prevention of all sorts, including thrift-art design, website building, video creation for The Muse, and serving at The Bridge and Rainbow House. No sitting around and letting our ass fuse with the sofa cushions going on here.

For January, Matt and I went to a panel discussing interfaith activities happening in the St. Louis area. It was interesting. Some may criticize these attempts at dialogue as wasted breath--pie-in-the-sky talky talk--but discussion is still...something...next to people fighting like dummies over what heaven will be like. I had a wonderful chance to meet for coffee with a panelist after the event, so, that's nice. You can read the interview with Leslie here. It was neat to see people from non-faith, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism backgrounds talking together amicably and actually working towards a peace that doesn't diminish diversity. I can't wait to see what happens next as things move from talk to action.

April Mission--World Book Night Giveaway!!

April 23 was World Book Night U.S. giveaway. Over 1 million books were given out for FREE on one night, and Matt and I were one of a select number of volunteer distributors chosen to hand out 20 of our favorite books....again...for FREE! Here are our stories:

Matt's version:

This month’s mission marks the 2^nd year that Chris and I participated in World Book Night. The goal of WBN is simple, if not totally understood: hand out half-a-million books. I say it’s not totally understood because we got a lot of questions and suspicious looks this year; more on that later.

Last year we had an approved location to hand out the books, and it went over really well. This year we decided to wing it, as we headed out into nearby restaurants and stores with our books. I had chosen my favorite children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, and Chris had Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The list of books this year was impressive, and it was hard to choose just one to give out. With two of us handing out books, people were able to choose which one they wanted.

There was a lot of interest in the books, but more interest in why we were handing out free books. Several people at McDonald’s asked me if they had to sign something. I found that it wasn’t too hard to convince people, since we really didn’t have an ulterior motive. Aside from one guy at Fazoli’s, no one turned us down unless they had already read both books.

The WBN organization wants you to target light readers. I think we did a better job of this last year (reading takes a backseat to finding shelter, food, and water), as many people we talked to said that they were book lovers. The thing about book lovers is that they love to get free books. They ended up being the most excited about what we were doing, but I was more intrigued by the people who reluctantly agreed to take one. I wish I could find out if they ended up reading the books, and how it affected them. The thing is, I know how powerful books can be, and it’s nice to think that some of these recipients had a good experience with a book they may have never read otherwise.

I’d say this year’s WBN was another success, and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

Chris' version:

I had a wonderful time handing out books at random establishments. Since we weren’t going to be sitting at a table with a clearly defined purpose like last year, we needed something to put people at ease when we approached them. We didn’t want people to feel put-out, harassed, solicited, or just awkward. We created our own I.D.s and lanyards that made us look all ‘officially’, and tried to match our outfits to look casual-phenomenal (black shirts and jeans). We grabbed a mixed stack of about 5 books each, and headed out.

First we went to Fazolies…to eat, naturally. We scoped out the place, and by the time I came back from a potty-break, Matt had already broken the ice at a nearby table, and made a family very happy by giving them one of each book. Seeing the smiles on their faces, and the ongoing conversation between Matt and them, helped to encourage me to remember that what we’re doing is really cool, and could bring more smiles than raised eyebrows. We handed out a few more in Fazolies, and proceeded to distribute the rest of the books in Taco Bell, Deals, Blockbuster, Subway, and McDonald’s. My greeting was, “Excuse me, did you know this is World Book Night?” (No.) “Well, over a million classic and bestselling books are being given away across the U.S. tonight, and we were selected to be World Book Night distributors!” (A smile comes across their face.) “Would you be interested in either of these titles?” (They ask questions about the titles, and end up taking one with a ‘Thank you so much.’) “Enjoy!” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how it is done. Put THAT in your Kindle and read it!

Even though the rain was coming down hard that evening, we covered our books with our shirts and ran into establishments where people were looking for bargains and low prices…who better to offer something free to? And they were truly excited to receive these gifts. I must have encountered more people than Matt who didn’t seem to be regular readers, and were undefensive about our approach. It was fun to watch people look askance at the books, ask questions about the stories, and slowly grow persuaded that they wanted to read it. I felt like I talked a lot of people into reading these awesome stories that still have a powerful message for our time.

Overall, a fun and adventurous night. And then, to top it all off, we went to watch the movie Oblivion on the mega-screen. A movie after books is, I imagine, a lot like a cigarette after sex. Love me a little sweet desert of Tom Cruise after a hard night in the rain. Wait, none of that sounded right. Can’t go back. Must…go…on.