Poynette Calling

I had no idea they were keeping track until Chief 2 Jeremy pointed it out.  I just thought you showed up when you could, did your best, and that was that. 

Remember the “permanent records” they used to threaten us about?  Like most of school, I thought that was nonsense, wrapped in bureaucratic bluster.  “Hey, teacher … leave those kids alone!”, Pink Floyd shouted at the time.   That they shouted it in my senior year of high school must have had some impact, but I am pretty sure what threw me over the edge was the Clash’s “Clampdown”.   “What are we gonna do now!?”, the Clash shouted. 

What I was gonna do back then was not graduate with my high school class.  Out of the orphanage.  Father disabled and unable to work.  Mother passed away from cancer.  Working full-time on evenings and weekends, I had about as much use for the conformist dogma of the Grayslake High School Gulag as I did for my real driver’s license with my actual birthdate.  One of their genius RULES was you had to confess your grammatical sins in a “correction sheet” that detailed how you should have written the paper you wrote in English class.  There was this hefty book of grammatical imperatives, and you had to cite the law you broke, then rewrite your sentence, then lay naked on an ant colony at dawn while matching subject and predicate clouds as they passed in the sky. 

Or some such thing.  The RULE was if you did not complete the “correction sheet”, you got a ZERO on your paper.  That makes it kinda tricky to pass English class, and there was some state law about passing a certain number of English classes to graduate.   The gulag warden was not about to risk his comfy pension on some impertinent kid with irregular punctuation, so I got flunked repeatedly, and banned from school grounds at graduation.  He’s probably down in Florida today, telling anyone who will listen at the early bird about how society itself was at the precipice, but he saved us all by holding the line on verb tense.   

Having ditched school with Buelleresque regularity and invariably ending up at the Art Institute, I blame Van Gogh.  The entire team of school counselors / assistant football coaches would haul me in for a “conference” and I’d let em’ have it.  Do you think ol’ Vince just flung the oil on canvas randomly?  Do you think he was unaware that “smoothing” was a thing?  He did not go gently or randomly into that starry night ... and I ain’t changing a word in this paper.  Seriously, I was out of my mind.   But if you’re gonna knuckle under to The Man at 16, what kind of life are you going to have? 

And so it went.  And so it goes.  The permanent records get layered atop each other like sedimentary rock.  College GPAs, memos, performance evals, reference reports, more reference reports, and still more reference reports and speeding tick… I mean, ceremonial keys to cities.   There’s a charter school application somewhere in the files of the Illinois State Board of Ed still working its magic, grant applications all over the place and a docket in progress at SCOTUS.  There’s parks and neighborhoods and libraries and fire and police stations and village halls and county courthouses and ballparks and ball diamonds and schools and skateparks and more skateparks and … well, a fair bit of stuff.   To be sure, I’d do some of it differently if I were to do it again.  More out of wisdom that arrived too late than care which did not arrive soon enough. 

If there’s a theme in the record, conformity ain't it.  David Reisman’s  “The Lonely Crowd” has one of my favorite two paragraphs in any book, ever.  They go like this:

“Is it conceivable that these economically privileged Americans will some day wake up to the fact that they overconform?  Wake up to the discovery that a host of behavioral rituals are the result, not of an inescapable social imperative of an image of society that, though false, provides certain secondary gains for the people who believe in it?  Since character structure is, if anything, even more tenacious than social structure, such an awakening is exceedingly unlikely -- and we know that many thinkers before us have seen the false dawns of freedom while their compatriots stubbornly continued to close their eyes to the alternatives that were, in principle, available.  But to put the question may at least raise doubts in the minds of some.

Occasionally city planners put such questions.  They comprise perhaps the most important professional group to become reasonably weary of the cultural definitions that are systematically trotted out to rationalize the inadequacies of city life today, for the well-to-do as well as for the poor.  With their imagination and bounteous approach they have become, to some extent, the guardians of our liberal and progressive political tradition, as this is increasingly displaced from state and national politics.  In their best work, we see expressed in physical form a view of life which is not narrowly job minded.  It is a view of the city as a setting for leisure and amenity as well as for work. But at present the power of the local veto groups puts even the most imaginative of city planners under great pressure to show that they are practical, hardheaded fellows, barely to be distinguished from traffic engineers.”

Page 306.  From out of nowhere, city planners saving the day and whupping on traffic engineers.  Awesome. 

(note to self: impracticality = winning) 

Anyway, the latest addition to the permanent record has the impermanence of a sheet of paper push-pinned to a bulletin board in the muster room.  Which is bemusing of its own accord.  There are good and prudent reasons for the fire department to keep track of your training hours, and community efforts and fire calls and whatnot.  I had no idea about how any of it worked or that it was recorded until Chief 2 noted at a meeting last year that the quarterly stats were updated, and he told me I was in the top ten.  To which I guffawed.  I still don’t quite know how some of the stuff is measured and I DO NOT want to ask. 

Because where I rank in total points at present is a little goofy.  As in there are so many better firefighters at the department that I got no business being represented in any manner by a single digit.  Upper teens, maybe.  But there’s a bug in the system where living ninety seconds away from the fire station and working forty-five seconds away results in fire call attendance that’s closing in on obsessive.  The Mrs. has taken note.  But the high energy thing was one of the original attractions, so taking note is not to be confused with complaining. 

I’ll say this.  Being There is not just Wilco’s sophomore effort, it’s a solid way to figure out most anything.   When the pager goes off, I go.  Not just for the shear public good of it, but because I’m going to learn something that is going to help me, my fellow firefighters and the department.  More importantly, maybe the next person who calls 911.  

I’ll also say this one other thing.  It ain’t a competition.   It is enthusiasm that I could not turn off if I tried.  At age sixtyish I get to do something new and fun and worthwhile, with a tremendous group of people.  What a great, unexpected gift.  

So...getting back to the Clash's question; what am I gonna do now? 

Keep at it.