tinynotebook

…

Posted by Aaron - 27/04/07 at 01:04:00 am

It’s been a great week work wise, an off week socially. Maybe they’ll merge later.

Dodgers

Posted by Aaron - 23/04/07 at 07:04:00 am

Then on Sunday, I went to my first Dodgers game. Dodgers lost, 7-5, to the Pirates.

Joshua Tree

Posted by Aaron - 23/04/07 at 06:04:00 am

I have a lot to write. My mind has been working overtime this weekend churning out little bits of criticisms, stories and even a bit of poetry. But that can wait. Instead, on Saturday, I saddled up the ol‘ VW and motored down to Joshua Tree National Park. Some hippy sold me climbing shoes, a chalk bag and some carabiners for $55, and I went into the park to climb on top of rocks. Enjoy the photos.

The story before you is not the whole truth

Posted by Aaron - 20/04/07 at 04:04:00 am

I often forget to ask my subjects why.

Looking back on the poverty workshop I covered today, I did not get the full story. I got the facts. What causes poverty? What is being done to help those in poverty? What people in poverty think? What those helping those in poverty think? I could have even included how many people in San Bernardino live in poverty, but I didn’t.

I also didn’t ask why. Wrapped up in covering the story at hand, the workshop and its substance, I missed the larger story of poverty.

Talking to David after lunch, I realized I missed it. We were talking about my first dabbles in journalism, discovering myself through a personal essay. I first wrote the facts, what I knew, the story as it first appeared to me. Then I was pushed to answer the question of why. Why had the change occurred? What’s the story behind that?

Of course I forgot that. Those questions are tough to answer. They take time. They take guts to ask.

I watched Bowling for Columbine tonight…because it was on Bravo and nothing else was on. Well, I started watching it, and then got sucked in, but I watched it. I still don’t like Michael Moore, but I respect him a bit more. He pushed the question of why for two hours and got himself a movie.

The Virginia Tech tragedy has had me at a loss for words. I have been unsure how to respond as a journalist. Instead, I have sat back and studied the response, ample enough for a course. Since the shooting, we have been faced with the question of why. Why did this man do this? Journalists have carried this banner and produced some answers.

Maybe that will put me at ease.

Mid-day update:

Looks like I am not the only one thinking about this. SPJ President offers some advice here
http://spj.org/blog/blogs/president/archive/2007/04/17/6928.aspx

Also, check out VA Tech student newspaper, The Collegiate Times (http://collegemedia.com/)

4.16.2007

Posted by Aaron - 17/04/07 at 05:04:00 am

Thirty-two people died this morning during one man’s rampage on the campus of Virginia Tech University. He died too, making it 33. Thirty-three kids in one morning, the worst shooting in American history.

I gave myself two minutes to be pissed then went back to work. As a journalist, I wanted to write the sentence that would make everything alright. I wanted to craft something that could sooth the uncertainty that pervaded all day long.

As I prepared my side-bar for the national story on the shooting, my words failed me. I wrote, “Tragically, for the victims of the rampage at Virginia Tech, for their classmates, for their families, it was not a drill.” My words failed me.

“Students Slaughtered, (CNN)” “Blacksburg Bloodbath (CBS)” words failed other journalists today. How do you write about this?

The only appropriate response happened at the Barstow City Council meeting tonight. After reciting the pledge and receiving the invocation from Pastor Tate, the mayor asked the audience to remain standing. A moment of silence.

(This is the New York Times lede photo courtesy of the AP. It’s beautiful.)

Rain and roses

Posted by Aaron - 16/04/07 at 12:04:00 am

It rained today. The roses are happy.

The Vonnegut

Posted by Aaron - 13/04/07 at 05:04:00 am

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. My first reaction, a very vocal one, was to yell out “shit” in the newsroom.

Shit.

We needed you Kurt. His insight in his final work, “A Man without a Country,” is the type of commentary often overlooked in America. It is constructive. He did not shoot from the hip, Don Imus. He made a point.

But we needed you Kurt Vonnegut. His work drifted away from the common fictional form. His characters became un-stuck in time, traveled to distant planets, experimented with new concoctions and sold used cars. He wrote about the past, the present, the future and the unimaginable.

But for 23 years of his life, he was living in my life. He was not a relic of the past. I writer already dead before I got to them. A Kerouac, Salinger, Ginsberg, Whitman, Williams, Bukowski. He was Vonnegut, the contemporary author, a part of my history. We needed you. You wrote in our time. You were an author we could get around. We listened to your graduation speech remixed by Baz Lurhmann, the sunscreen song.

Missing the war: A personal essay

Posted by Aaron - 12/04/07 at 05:04:00 am

BARSTOW, Calif. – March 20, 2003.

Four years ago on March 20, the gun went off and soldiers poured across the border between Iraq and Kuwait. It was a race, a race to Baghdad. Four years later, we’re still running circles around the finish line.

Four years ago on March 20, my friend, Sharat Reddy, and I threw our hiking packs into the trunk of his car and drove across the state of Michigan. We listened to the war as we drove. Correspondents did live reports from the front. Shots rang out; bombs fell and exploded. We did not talk much about the war.

As newly christened college intellectuals, we had debate the war months before there was a war. I remember ending countless dinners in the smoking room of the Kalamazoo College cafeteria cursing the French for holding up a perfectly just war in the United Nations.

I wanted a war. I wanted a war to study. As a political science major, I could think of nothing more meaningful to my field than a war. Forget the dusty book covers of theory. I could use CNN as my textbook, put theory to practice, and liberate a country with my science.

So Sharat and I drove across the state. Kalamazoo to Detroit, Detroit to Dallas, Dallas to Phoenix, Phoenix to Sedona, it was spring break. The plane ride from Detroit to Dallas was my first solo flight, and the man sitting next to me kept me company. He told me not to go to Phoenix. I would not make it, he said. Terrorists would hijack the plane and crash it into a nuclear reactor outside the city. I cursed the man in my head but felt nervous.

In Dallas, I saw my first M-16. A military man stood with it across his chest near a security checkpoint.

In Phoenix, I smoked a cigarette. The plane did not crash into a nuclear reactor.

In Sedona, I unplugged. The high red rock canyon walls of the little desert new age community, where rumor has it that you can ride the white buffalo into the fifth dimension, kept the news out. While I hiked through the desert around Sedona, soldiers hiked through the desert around Baghdad.

I did not read about it. I did not watch. I did not listen to it. Talking heads and pundits had a field day with my war, and I drank microbrews and recited poetry with a bunch of hippies around campfires.

When I came back from Sedona to complete my first year at Kalamazoo College, I was still a desert rat, drinking exotic beers and reciting poetry with hippies around campfires though without the high red rock walls canyon walls to keep out the world. I stood at the top of Kalamazoo College’s quadrangle, looking down at a college will the word “war” on their lips. I was not interested.

I dropped my politics class that quarter and enjoyed a nice, healthy, liberal arts diet of German, Asian philosophy and art history. I would later rejoin the political foray, but I thought I would like this whole war thing blow over.

Four years and this whole war thing has not blown over. In that time, I have taken many solo flights, across the Atlantic to Europe, across Europe to the Middle East. In that time, I have seen many M-16s, even had one jammed into my chest at a security checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah. But in that time, I missed the war. I studied it, knew enough not to look stupid, but it did not interest me. I had wanted the war, and I wanted to return it.

March 20, 2007

The small daily newspaper I work for in Barstow, Calif. ran a story about the war across the top of the front page. I did realize it was the four year anniversary. The war has become a part of everyday life for me. The newspaper runs stories on it almost everyday. I write stories on the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, the last stop for troops from across the country before the land in sands of Kuwait, almost every week. I hear stories from new friends in Barstow who fought in the war almost every time we talk.

I talk to generals about the feasibility of three-part government solution in Iraq. I talk to worried business owners in Barstow, dependant on the war boom economy, about troop withdrawal. President Bush drove a robot used to find IEDs at me the other day.

I am closer to the war than ever. And like the rookie political scientist four year ago, I am using the war as a rookie journalist. I milk it for stories and am building a career on it. But I do not want the war; I never did as a journalist.

Did you know hamsters are nocturnal?

Posted by Aaron - 11/04/07 at 04:04:00 am

Hi. My name is Harvey.

GTA: white man driving a black VW

Posted by Aaron - 09/04/07 at 04:04:00 am

Lost in Victorville on Saturday night, I was cutting through parking lots on Seventh Street looking for the only Indian restaurant in the city. Suddenly, lights flared up in my rear-view, and I pulled over for the local sheriff’s deputy to have a look-see around the ol‘ Volkswagen.

“Why were you driving like that? You lost?” she asked.
“Yes, I am lost. I am looking for this Indian restaurant around here.”

She had no idea what I was talking about. She asked if I was drunk, no, high, no, on parole, no, any warrants, no, any speeding tickets, yes. She took my license and left. Her partner probed my car from the outside with his flashlight.

I am 20-something white man, looking far from intimidating. I drive a black Volkswagen Jetta with factory tires and hub caps. I had Saturday’s Desert Dispatch on the seat next to me and was listening to country music.

When the deputy came back, she gave me my license and told me not to cut through parking lots.

“We thought you were driving a stolen vehicle,” she said.

Everyone in Victorville fits a description.

Search