Part III (The Part Where Eric Meets a Real Omaha Family, Sees the One Handed Police Officer Again Says Goodbye to Someone he Hardly Knew, and Ponders

Part III (The Part Where Eric Meets a Real Omaha Family, Sees the One Handed Police Officer Again Says Goodbye to Someone he Hardly Knew, and Ponders Death and its Relation to Sex)

This past week was a week of learning for me. I learned plenty of things about Omaha and was reminded of very many about myself. For instance, I learned that inside of Omaha is a gigantic cornfield. Right there, in the middle of the town, somewhere in between downtown and the row of Wal-Marts and targets that line the outermost reaches before the landscape once again melts away into cornfields.
Ever since I told her I was going out to Omaha for the summer, my friend Hannah Rose from high school had been telling me about her friend Claire from college who lived there. After one week of getting setup and settled in Omaha, I was ready to meet her. I wondered if after the week the New York-Chicago attitude had worn off of me and I would fit in. Probably not I realized, after all, I barely fit into those places to begin with. Claire and her family decided to take me out for dinner, and they suggested The Cheesecake Factory. I wasn’t much planning on going out with my first real Omahaers (Omaha-ans?) to a chain restaurant that had no bearing to Nebraska, but being a poor, hungry guest, I didn’t complain. I would let them decide how the night went.

It turns out it was a good idea I didn’t argue and we ended up going to The Cheesecake Factory. If I could describe Claire’s family in anyway, it would be much like my family… only more so. Stubborn, unmoving, picky, and incredibly warm and welcoming. Claire picked me up in a big posh SUV, she got out to greet me, we exchanged pleasantries, and then set out up Leavenworth to The Cheesecake Factory, which was in one of the shopping complexes next to a Target and a Wal-Mart. Claire was very friendly and very excited, and when we entered the restaurant, we both began to look prodigiously for her parents. Well, she began to look for her parents, and I began to look for people I assumed would look like her. After traipsing around the restaurant, Claire located her family, and we sat down with them. It became clear almost immediately that the precondition for my being there that night was to be the entertainment of the family. They would take me out for dinner, and I in turn would be forced to give them a bit of a change in scenery, I would submit to their questioning and would regale them with my stories.

They began the highly choreographed kabuki dance, starting with broad questions about what I did with my life in order to reach the truly interesting answers as to why I did those things. I enjoyed it a surprising amount, it wasn’t difficult to talk about myself, after all, that’s what I know the best, I didn’t have to think, I didn’t even have to make up interesting anecdotes that night. Alas, their line of questioning was interrupted when the waitress came over to take our orders. Claire ordered promptly, but when the waitress moved on to her father, the mighty appetite for perfection of Neptune broke out. With no fewer than six substitutions, he completed his order, and then passed his fiery trident onto his wife Salacia and their nymph son Andrew, who didn’t disappoint, ordering in a startling order and with utmost passion that would even put his father to shame. The meal went well, and by the time Claire and I left to go back to her car, the sky had opened up and thunder was resounding off the Great Plains. That night, I had made a friend in Claire, but within three days she would pick up and leave for Poland, and I would be left again where I had begun.

All night long lightning pounded mercilessly against the landscape, causing both man and nature to take refuge, huddled together in fear. I was lying on my mattress on the floor, admiring the beauty of this most glorious thunderstorm, but this attitude was not one that my environment would allow to last. For with each jolt of thunder, my small green house would shudder, trying hard to expel its demons and reach a peace with the heavens. Amid this chaos I fell asleep, and when I got up the next morning to walk to work was well rested, but found the great tree in the middle of Dewey Park on my way to be cleft in two, struck by a bolt of lightning; some warriors made it through the storm, others didn’t. Throughout the week, I engaged danger head on, biking through traffic to get to the grocery store, all the time laughing that a mighty tree could be destroyed so quickly, while I could cower in my bed and survive.

Aside from the tree, the week was marked with another farewell. After 14 years Chris was leaving NICO to move to Kansas City. Chris could best be described as oak-like. A massive beheamouth of upper body strength, my only interaction with him in my one week at NICO had been repeatedly running into him mixing protein drinks in the bathroom. And, like a tree, he had a type of aloof silence about him. I often wonder whether the silence of individuals can be attributed to wisdom or simplicity, and for Chris, I suppose I will never know, but either way, he exude a mystical power that humbled others around him. The office decided to go out for lunch for Chris’s last day, something that seemed to embarrass him until the leader Marty informed him that we would be going to Fudrucker’s to get hamburgers. Chris glowed.

To get to Fudrucker’s, the other intern John offered to drive me. Over the past week, John and my interactions had been limited at best, and I decided this would be a good time to try and peer into his being. As we walked to the car, we again passed the police officer with one hand. A bad omen indeed. Luckily, we got to Fudrucker’s safely and ordered our food. Chris ordered the biggest hamburger on the menu, and everybody watched him in awe and he bit into it and let it pass through his throat. After he had finished, he sat back and began to murmur to himself. Slowly people began to realize, stopped their conversations, and leaned in to hear what he was saying. By the time that everyone had quieted down to hear Chris, he was talking about how NICO had been the one thing constant in his life over those 14 years, while everything changed around him. You could tell from his tone that Chris really did love his past 14 years because of that. He didn’t want excitement, he just wanted consistency. We wished him well, and split up into our separate cars to go back to work.

On the way back, John the intern and I talked. It turns out he’s more interesting than I thought, but told me when he was going through long worksheets, he had trained himself to zone out. It was the only way he could get through the day. I told him that sounded like a horrible fate, and I pitied him. Anytime I was given a boring assignment, I would revel in the boredom and triteness, fully engaging it and battling it head on. Perhaps I would be fighting a losing battle, but I would try not to develop coping mechanisms until the very last possible moment.

When I got back to work, I began to sort through some of the companies that we wrote coverage for, categorizing and summarizing their business for a future model we would be creating. The project was in some ways repetitive, but interesting, each company telling its own unique story. For the first time, I was seeing what America really does for business, reaching my hand into the great grab-bag of general liability and pulling out interesting small business after small business. NICO literally covers every type of company in the US. Their motto could be taken straight out of the Kris Kristopherson song Me and Bobby McGee, they cover companies “from the Kentucky coal mines to the California sun.” also, they cover lots of fireworks companies. Americans love fireworks, these small rockets that go up into the night sky and suddenly, in a burst of flame, illuminate the world around you, if only for a second, and then shroud it once again in utter darkness. As I went through the companies, I noticed what for me was a surprising number of companies that were run by husband and wife together, both a romantic and working pair. I couldn’t determine whether this was a romantic notion or just a way to get by, but to me it seemed rather quaint, and in that way natural and romantic.

When I returned home that afternoon, I saw four people sitting on my porch. “That’s odd,” I thought to myself, “they don’t seem to be the normal people I live with. What if they are hoodlums??” In fact, two of the people were people I already knew, Matt and Paul, but taken out of the context of their rooms, they seemed quite alien. There was another man out there, and then a woman, the real reason they were all sitting on the porch at 5 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon drinking. Her name was Baily, and she was obviously the leader of this little expedition, encouraging all to drink and engage in socializing. Baily passed me a bottle of straight vodka and then a jar of cranberry juice mixed with vodka to wash it down, and being a sucker for that type of nonsense, I drank one and then the other. By seven, I was pretty drunk, and when the four of them went to a bar downtown, I went up to my bed and talked to my friend Zach from Chicago on the phone.
Baily stayed with us, sleeping in the living room on a couch through the weekend, and was always an interesting person to converse with for five minutes after entering the house. That weekend, I decided to go downtown for the first time. So I got up early, mounted my bike and began to ride down the street. In no time at all, I was in the cobblestone section of the Old Market. I stumbled into a used book shop and got lost in the cavernous stacks of books for an hour before realizing that the time had passed. I left, with two books on Mythology in hand, and went looking for a place to eat. I wandered in and out of restaurants, but couldn’t find anything that suited me. Having given up, I wandered into a small alley, where I stumbled upon a small Mexican restaurant, where I felt comfortable sitting down by myself and reading Hindi myths. The waitress was very kind to me and kept refilling my lemonade. I thanked her as I left and was ready to bike back home when I came across a gigantic arts festival, complete with a large stage full of bluegrass singers. I sat back, realized, and then biked home, which happened to be up hill all the way.

After I got home, I took a shower, and began to let my mind wander. Naturally, it wandered to Death and Sex, two of my most favorite and most feared subjects. I had recently been watching a slew of Woody Allen movies and had been reading reviews about a book about Death & Sex by Volk and Sagan, so it was natural that I think about those things. Plus, I am a human.

These two subjects are two that are often analyzed, but rarely in relation to each other, how they are interconnected and cause one another. I began my shower by thinking about death (a natural place to start), I wondered what made death a necessity. Outside of violence and disease, many people still die what we deem as a ‘natural death’, something which seemed to me to be quite a burden and unnecessary. At first I tried to justify it with scientific, bio-chemical answers. “Well,” I said to myself, “all of the universe tends towards entropy and our bodies are part of the universe, so they too must tend towards entropy and die.” But I thought to the small organisms that can be frozen and then regenerated after thousands of years, maybe eventually the universe must end and we must dye, but in the mean time, our bodies possess the mechanisms to resist flying apart. Surely, our complex body could create some type of mechanism to prevent the atrophy of our internal organs, after all, we grow and add matter to our bodies until we are about 25, there is really no conceivable reason why we should stop. The necessity of death still eluded me.

Then I remembered a quote that I had read on Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish earlier that week, in a break from my work. The quote was from famed scientist Max Planck and went as follows: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Thinking along that line, but in evolutionary biology terms, in order for new and beneficial traits to be formed, so that genes themselves may live longer, our bodies need to die, in order that they be replaced with a new generation. Our genes dictate the need for death; those crass chemical combinations of causality have little care for our bodies or souls once they have mediated the further propagation of the genes. Because of this, the genes abandon our bodies once their purpose has been attained, in fact, they kill the body so that there is room for the new generation. Sex is the way in which the process continues. This mixing and mutating of genes creates new combinations that allow the current genes to further progress.
Sex and death are really tools of the same mechanism acting on us, two opposite sides of the same coin (which makes them not really opposites at all!). Sex begins the process, it introduces mutations and new combinations into the system, that will hopefully allow the genes to survive for longer. And death finishes the sequence, allowing room for those mutations to take over. In some ways, sex can be seen as a precursor to death, the necessary prelude to it. Freud argued that the sexual act was one that mimics birth, and is an attempt to re-attain the prenatal state. But sex is actually precisely the opposite! It mimics and foreshadows death! Without one, it is inconceivable we should have the other. Man only has to rebel against his genes and stop having sex to attain immortality. Or something like that. Actually, in some ways, it’s precisely the opposite. It is only by acting through the given system that immortality can be achieved.

Joseph Campbell tells a story in The Power of Myth that speaks to this idea very powerfully. He talks about a ritual present in the men’s societies of New Guinea. There is a great initiation celebration that goes on for five days, until the participants are exhausted and in a state of utter mysticism. At last comes the great moment that the ceremony has been leading up to. The young initiates are brought forward as a class, and with drums blaring and people chanting, each one enters one at a time into a small hut and has sex with a young girl. When the final boy goes in, the entire tribe rushes on the hut and pulls the supports out, killing both lovers in the midst of their embrace. Their bodies are then removed, stewed and eaten by the entire tribe, the powerful vigor of the young couple reintroduced into each member.

This story is both horrible and beautiful at the same time. Here is a people that truly understands that death and sex are not things to be feared! They are a part of life, integral boundaries that need to be embraced and brought together. It is only through sex and death that one can reach a point above both of them. Therefore, there is no need to fear either, the society and its constituent members accept death, just as they accept life.