Kurt has a bad day

There was an Amber Alert posted recently for a boy who had gone missing with an ex-convict. An article on the web posted a link to the ex-con's Department of Corrections bio. Seeing the bio reminded me of a former classmate of mine who made headlines a few years ago. His name is Kurt. I looked him up. This is him:



According to the bio he's 6'7", 240 lbs, gray hair, 38 years old. He's got a couple tattoos. What stunned me, though, was just one word below his picture: Life. As in, "Term: Life."

In high school, I sat behind this guy in Spanish class. We went to junior high school together.

A list of Kurt's convictions followed. Nine of them, all committed a few days before his 33rd birthday almost six years ago. At the top of the list was first degree murder. Then first degree criminal sexual conduct, then kidnapping.

As I remember from the article in the Press 5+ years ago, Kurt kidnapped his ex-girlfriend at gunpoint and brought her to her house or her current boyfriend's house. There he held his ex and her boyfriend hostage, and a standoff with police ensued. I believe a SWAT team was called in. Kurt evidently raped his ex-girlfriend a couple times and shot the boyfriend. Eventually he surrendered. The picture in the Press showed Kurt, shirtless, with his hands on his head.

At his arraignment, Kurt asked the judge if he could be put on a tether so that he could be with his son. The judge replied, "I would never do that."

Back in school, kids used to pick on Kurt. I didn't pay much attention to the things people said or did to him, so it's hard for me to relate how bad it was for Kurt. They called him "Skittles" because one time at a basketball game he left behind a candy wrapper on the bleachers where he had been sitting, probably by himself. I called him Kurt once after that, and he corrected me. "Call me Skittles," he said, as if he preferred the appellation. I might have called him Skittles just that once.

I remember a junior high study hall with Kurt in which he made a chart with a list of all the girls in his class down one column. Other columns had headings like "Face," "Ass," and "Boobs." Then he rated the girls in each category. Had he shared this chart with his male classmates, everyone might have been entertained and gotten a good laugh out of it, despite (or perhaps because of) its poor taste. Instead, Kurt showed the chart to his female classmates, who understandably lashed out at him. I watched him try to appease a few of them by bargaining for their friendship in exchange for higher ratings. It didn't work.

I sat behind Kurt in high school Spanish class. He would turn around in his seat and tell me these ridiculous stories, and I would play along, half out of kindness and half out of fear.

"I got pulled over by cop for speeding on my bike," he told me once. "He said I was going 55 miles per hour in a 35 zone. I think I was really only going 45."

"Uh huh," I said. "What? Where going down a hill or something?"

"No."

One day he turned around in his seat and told me: "One time this guy said something to me and it pissed me off so I hit him. I punched him in the face and he fell to the ground and he did not get up."

I had a hard time stifling a nervous laugh at this one. I turned to the person sitting next to me and, mimicking Kurt's tone, said "and he did not get up." My voice cracked.

"Glacial," Kurt said. Our eyes met. He was serious. "He did not get up."

"Right," I said. Clearly, if I had kept it up, I would have been punched in the face. Kurt wasn't the kind of person to box a person in the ears as a warning. He'd sucker punch, go straight for the nose and hit hard enough to break it and send blood spurting.

He didn't finish my high school. There was a story circulating about how he had taken off in his car with his girlfriend for Florida or California. They were found together in a seedy hotel here in town a day or two later.

Kurt transferred to a public school nearby. There he was known as "Link" - as in the missing link in the evolution of mankind.

That was the last I heard of Kurt for a while. While I was dating my wife several years later, I ran into him at a department store. He was a sales clerk in the electronics department. He had a skinny beanpole physique with square shoulders, and he acted uptight and impersonal in his navy sport coat and tie. His politeness was awkward and rehearsed, and he didn't seem to recognize me.

Now Kurt's in jail for the rest of his life. When I told my cousin about Kurt's standoff with the police, he shook his head and said, "You know, people used to pick on him. It just makes me think he was doomed to do something like this."

"I don't know," I said. "In some ways he brought it on himself."

Noise Terrorism and the Piss-poor mp3 - Part VII - Conclusion

Around here, people are very generous with their standing ovations. In fact, it's practically a given. Obviously, not all performances are outstanding. Around here, I'd say they're mostly mediocre. I've wondered why it is, then, that standing ovations are so prevalent. None of the reasons I've imagined are good: 1) People stand up because they are anxious to leave. 2) They want others to think they are sophisticated enough to be moved by boring classical music, or that they know a great performance when they hear it. 3) They convince themselves it was good because then their money was not spent in vain. 4) They're just being nice. 5) Like a yawn, it's contagious. 6) etc.

[INTERLUDE: When I was in junior high, our basketball coach took the team to a Christian athletes breakfast. The guest speaker was a born again former mob thug named Jimmy the Greek (maybe it was Sammy the Greek?) At the end of his speech he prayed, and he prayed that whoever was moved by his speech to claim Jesus as their Lord and Savior should stand up. To me the speech had been a little boring, and besides, I was already a Christian, so I didn't see the need to stand up. I could hear chairs squeaking as people around me stood up, but I thought to myself, "I don't need to stand." This went on for about fifteen minutes - no joke. The prayer became a contest of wills. Jimmy the Greek wouldn't stop praying until everyone had risen to their feet, and I sat there thinking, "This is not something I'm going to do insincerely." It was the principle of the thing: I wasn't going to stand up and proclaim newfound faith in Jesus just to satisfy this guy's ego. Jimmy moved through the audience and stood by my side, yammering, and I sat there, hunkered down. I began to think that my coach and team mates would think I lacked faith. Well, they'd be wrong, I thought. What if I was the last one sitting in this room full of hundreds of people? Why doesn't Jimmy just move on? Finally, through my tightly shut eyes, I sensed the audience had moved from sympathetic apprehension to flat out boredom. Mercifully, I stood and opened my eyes. I was the second to last person to stand up. After another five minutes of yammering the last guy got to his feet with a heavy sigh. He avoided my eyes, but I was smiling at him as a comrade.]

Is capitalism causing a decline in aesthetic appreciation?

The mp3 is another example of declining music appreciation. When they came out, CDs were a technological improvement over their predecessors, the magnetic tape and the LP album. Besides being more convenient and durable, digital sound quality was, in theory, superior. CD producers eventually realized that people get more excited about loud music than soft music, however, and they started compressing the recording volume, diminishing the range between loud and soft and making everything louder overall. This is just one reason why live performances are better than recordings, and why many audiophiles today prefer older recordings.

The mp3 is another step back in terms of sound quality. Honestly, I don't listen to many mp3's, but to my ears they sound "metallic." That's a weird choice of words, I know, but for me the sound of an mp3 is analogous to spreading butter on bread with a razor blade. A sound recording technician for the CBC once told me it was the file compression and consequent loss of information that made the sound of mp3s distasteful.

I've been to enough concerts that I am no longer cynical about standing ovations. Not that I ever had strong feelings about the matter. We all have to deal with our own perceptions of society's shortcomings, and standing ovations are hardly a tragedy or an injustice.

As for mp3s, I am reminded that people used to listen with delight to tinny broadcasts on their old transistor radios. In spite of the poor quality, listeners inject their own romance and meaning, and the musicians' expressiveness can make it past the limitations of the technology.

Sometimes life's drudgery overwhelms me, and I'm peevish about noise. The pursuit of quality, especially in music I think, is something that touches the core of one's being. As Beethoven said, "Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life."

Thoreau said he moved to Walden Pond "to live deliberately." One can ponder the meaning of quality, but there is no point to self-reliance if ultimately one does not live joyfully.

Noise Terrorism and the Piss-poor mp3 - Part VI

About twenty years ago I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In it, Robert Pirsig intersperses descriptions of a cross country road trip with a discussion of his attempts to define quality. Honestly, the philosophical discussions became too difficult for me when he got to Kant, but I persevered. One idea from that book which lingers in my mind is the idea that quality exists in the moment. It made me wonder if my faith in Christianity exists only in the moment. Whether one considers a moment to be a brief Maslowian peak experience or a lifetime, I suppose faith does exist for a moment. When you think about it, there is no "saving up" faith for the future. A person can conduct daily devotions, and in that sense build faith, but he has earned nothing from God. Even the present moment is a gift from God.