The Kids Aren't Alright

"Courage, sacrifice, determination, commitment, toughness, heart, talent, guts. That's what little girls are made of; the heck with sugar and spice."

-- Bethany Hamilton, the greatest female surfer

Trench Dodgeball is synonymous with CTY Los Angeles. At least it used to be.

In the three months of my life I've spent here, I have played countless games. I have hit countless kids and RAs with dodgeballs. Sometimes in the face. I have been hit countless times. Sometimes in the face. Once or twice in another tender spot.

In all these games, in all the thousands of thrown balls, I have not witnessed a single injury. I have never had to cart a single kid to the nurse. I have never had to get toilet paper for a bloody nose. I have never had to band-aid a boo-boo. Not even after a ball smashes someone's face.

Recently, our CTY site found out that we will no longer be allowed to play Trench. The black-letter email came from the bigshots at Baltimore. It put an end to any game that involves throwing something at someone. This includes Spongeball (dodgeball played with wet sponges), Extreme Cubing (doing a rubiks cube while people throw dodgeballs), Battle Chess (life-size chess with dodgeballs) and my personal favorite, D-Day (RAs bunker down while the kids storm them). Luckily we can still play kickball. Even though it involves a fast-moving ball, there is sufficient "gray area" in the directive to keep that game alive. Oh joy.

The administration wasted no time. Usually we sign up for activities for the rest of the week on Monday. This week, we had a good chunk of the camp choosing Trench as their weekly -- meaning an activity they play every day. As soon as the email landed, we pulled a massive mid-week activity swap. We switched all the kids signed up for Trench -- every one of them healthy -- to Capture the Flag. On the first day of Capture the Flag, two kids got injured.

Upon hearing the news of the cancellation, I was angry, then I was angry and baffled, then I was angry but unsurprised.

I don't know what the impetus was. The Los Angeles administration either doesn't know or isn't telling us. I wish I could rationalize that since Trench has been a CTY staple for decades, then clearly something really egregiously horrific must have happened to force the hand of the big Baltimore bosses. Maybe kids these days are stronger: lots of steroids going around. Maybe kids these days are more vicious: those darn violent videogames encouraging headshots.

But we all know it's not the changing nature of kids that led to Trench's outlawry. Of course kids are changing. They're texting and facebooking. But changing in ways that matter for dodgeball? Please.

I'd like to blame it on protective parents. Or on big bosses who need to feel important to prove some frivolous point. In my bitterest fantasies, I see a conference room with big black leather chairs, bottled water, and vegetable platters with Lo-Fat Ranch dressing. A Power Point presentation flips through slides of kids having fun on a dodgeball field. The same words and phrases fill the air: "lawsuit," "injury," "could," "possibly in our best interests," "risky," "danger," "violent." Words and phrases such as "fun," "competition," "injury statistic report," and "have any of us ever even played this game?" are absent.

But blaming the parents and admin is a surface skirmish of a much deeper way of thinking pervading 21st century thought: catastrophism.

That's the true culprit. We live in a catastrophist society. Like every generation before us, we believe we are living at the edge of the end of the world. If it bleeds it leads. Never mind that the MIT psychologist Steven Pinker has noted that we are living in an era of unprecedented peace. No one wants to hear about peace. Not really. We're not trained to. Tragedy and problems are what catch our attention. They give us purpose. And when there's not enough bad stuff to go around, well, we invent our own. And then Chief Illiniwek is outlawed. And then Trench dodgeball is outlawed.

This kind of stuff happens all the time. One person ruins it for everyone. Appeasing the minority at the expense of the majority in the name of fictitious and sensationalized fears. At first I was shocked that RAs and returning CTY students weren't more outraged. There's plenty to be mad about. Who are a bunch of faceless myths in Baltimore to tell us what to do at our site? Don't they know that dodgeballs don't hurt us, but help us be children? Don't they realize that there's a sort of magic to Trench -- maybe not a major kind, but something that is at least our own? Don't they know that the best way to get jet-lagged newly arrived students in a community is with the competitive camraderie of Trench? Have they forgotten their own childhoods -- childhoods of scraped knees and ding-dong ditching, pick-up games and padless tackle football, bleeding and crying and playing so hard and so often that you're exhausted and dirty and blissful?

But then I realized that outlawing Trench was no surprise. CTY did the easy thing here. They did what, on paper and in the comfort of a chair in Baltimore, seems to be the right thing. There is nothing exceptional, nothing suprising about their decision. People and organizations across the world make the very same decision every day: the one that demands no courage. The one that allows us to nod soberly as we spin worst-case scenario fictions until they seem imminent and so we must act against them. Who cares that suddenly, we're not acting in anyone's best interest -- although we believe we are. Who cares that we're acting only to assuage our own largely unfounded inquities.

The result of that decision is why so many adults are unhappy, why so many adults have lost any semblance of an inner child.

We have smart kids here, and they proved their intelligence in their lack of outrage. They know the game Baltimore played. When I asked one student about how he felt about Trench being outlawed, he said, "I'm angry. But it's more stupid than anything else." The kids get it. Even if they don't yet possess the vocabulary, they get it. For how much longer until the catastrophic world makes them see the end of the world, too, I'm not sure.

The bottom line is this: anyone who has played Trench knows that dodgeballs don't hurt people. Not with any permanence. Not even if Baltimore's worst-case scenario fears are realized -- I'm sure they have been somewhere -- and a dodgeball sends a kid to the hospital. Or a dodgeball leaves a scar. Kids are resilient. I've bled, had the wind knocked out of me, collided, gotten smashed. All those cuts and bruises heal. Even if they scar. This decision left a deeper wound, one that we might forget but one that will not heal. Outlawing Trench killed more than tradition. It killed pieces of childhood. And for anyone who says "Who Cares?" to that, then it's already too late for you.

I wouldn't trade my childhood for anything. I doubt neither would these kids. Unfortunately, they no longer have a choice. They've been nailed by a dodgeball from the grown-up world. And when you're hit by that one, you're out forever.

Mind Games

Returning to Los Angeles for another summer at CTY has forced me to rework my definition of memory and, in turn, redefine myself.

Memory, I've begun to notice, is not a database of capsulated playbacks of previous experiences shelved in the libraries of our minds, but a dynamic force that crashes through our minds and our environments.

Memories are everything. At any one moment, we all are no more than compilations of our memories. Memories form who we are. Even this present moment, this instant, we are functioning via memory. The onslaught of sensory information is only relevant because we can retain it and, in turn, interpret it.

Memories braid together with our hardwiring to make us. Memories guide us. For every decision, we consult, whether consciously or unconsciously, our bank of previous experiences. We can't help it. The story of our past leads us to our status right now. In my case, sitting at Loyola Marymount University, fighting off the flu.

The notion that we are no more than our memories incites some difficult problems. Most notably, one could deduce with Calvinistic determination that we are living out scripted lives. Such as: that terse uncertainty when you tried to decide what new car to buy, that impossible decision about where to go to college, it wasn't real. Your decision was already made. You have no free will.

To push this premise a tad further: each prior decision decides the next decision, which adds another record to the memory bank that decides the next decision...and so on...so by the time we take our first steps as a child -- even earlier -- our whole lives are decided. There is no randomness. No free choice. Not really. Our lives could not turn out any other way.

I'm not alone in expressing discomfort with such a notion. I believe the future is unknowable, and not just because reasons of complexity theory -- which says that, like the weather, there is far too much information to ever process to predict the next step.

Rather, I believe the future is unknowable because the nature of our memories, namely, that they are hugely dynamic. Psychologists have proven it again and again -- memory is darn slippery, not a thing we should blindly trust. And it's my return to CTY at LMU that has reinforced the slippery nature of memory.

Familiar surroundings are peppered with new people. Familiar schedules are rearranged to accomodate new ambitions. Last year it was training for the Marathon on the beach. This year, it is trying to avoid a wicked case of the flu scandalizing camp. Still, the similarities in time and place create a living memory of my time spent here one year ago that runs side-by-side with the current one. This means I am constantly comparing the new with the old. More often than not, they don't fit together. I compare new people with old ones, in turn changing my conception of both. I compare this year's dances with last year's, this year's Casino night with last year's, this year's laser tag, beach days, floor dynamic, In-N-Out stops, etc., with last year's. I can't help it.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The struggle is that all this new information forces me to reinterpret my memories. They get jarred loose, and when they settle back down, they are different. My general tendency is to look back fondly on last year and wonder why this year isn't living up. Nothing good ever comes out of this comparison. I grow wistful for the old people and old ways. I grow frustrated that the new people and new ways won't conform to the old people and old ways -- the ways it should be.

I was hestitant to return to CTY because I thought it was anti-progressive. I didn't want a mere repeat performance. I wanted something new. Little did I know that it would all be new. Even though the stage is the same, the characters have changed. There's a new band and an old band, and they both have very different tunes. But the most different tune is the one that results when they play together, changing and competing with one another, comparing and contrasting with one another, keeping things fresh and new and confusing.

The Joker Made Me Do It

I've procrastinated long enough. I told myself that I wanted to grow distanced from England before wrapping up my travel posts with one last glazy shebang.

I told people that was the plan. One big pleasant red bow to slap on this package of stories and travel narratives and then we're done here. We're shipping out. We're moving on.

But today, at the Center for Talented Youth's Scavenger Hunt, I became the Joker. White face paint, streaky scarlet lips, a purple jacket, and a salty admiration for the legendary Ledgerian interpretation of the Batman villain and BAM: tiers of teary half-horrified half-enchanted brilliant young students who also felt the air snap as the normal rules twisted, bent, warped. I'm no actor. But for the first time, I lost myself in a character. The Joker, ever his anarchist self, inverted the rules. And all I could think about was how I had to write about it.

So I've decided to resume this blog. A quick blog history: My original intent was to create a record of my trip to England, something just for myself and whoever else stumbles across. I fully intended to set this thing aside. I have other projects to pursue, other words to write, and at the moment, a hall full of gifted children building particle accelerators in their rooms.

But giving up this blog for a month or so was like living in a void. I started having less fun. I started taking less risks. I conceived of myself in a dingy lost at sea, the scent of my direction long lost and the adventures I'd logged since returning from England melting through my fingers like my last chocolate bars. I needed to write. I needed to write so I could be accepting of tragic twists. This blog was, is, and will continue to be a magic machine that turns lemons into lemonade sans sugar-coating. And you don't even have to pay a quarter to some sticky-fingered kids.

Why did I need to write? Why did it feel as if I'd lost not a space to rant and preach, but a friend? I'm not sure. But I think I part of the answer is the interpretation writing affords. (Interpret that.). The blog brought out this devil/angel quality of interpretation in many varieties -- especially streaks of introspection and skepticism. It proposed and I hope will continue to propose, with blackhole-inducing irony (you've been warned), the challenge to get the spotlight off of myself by focusing it so intensely on myself that I reveal where the machinery of moi exists, responds, clashes, and fuses with my environment.

Being the Joker was all of the above.

Exhibit A:

Unruly and Uncooperative Kid: "I'm Batman. You stink at being Joker."

Joker: "You're the Batman, eh? You look more like a Sit-Behind-The-Tree-Man to me. Go to that palm tree and sit behind it and stop being so serious, Sit-Behind-The-Tree Man."

The kids loved it. When they ran the obstacle course in the oversized shorts (i.e. "Batman's" shorts used to find out which of them was Batman), I -- or the Joker -- would kick the cone they were trying to reach. The Joker would approach them and force myself to laugh wildly until I actually was laughing wildly. The Joker would send the unruly ones to get me a glass of water, then spit it through my teeth as they ran through the obstacle course. The Joker quoted my favorite lines from the movie -- the Scar Story, the "why so serious?", all in that nasally pitch that masks a bright lust for anarchy, like magma cracking through the crust.

When I was done, I was sapped. My throat burned. My head pounded from wearing so much make-up in the sun. Absolutely drained, but absolutely exhilirated.

By being someone else, even for a moment or two, you reconnect with who you are. There are lots of ways to be someone else. One is to dress up as the Joker and lose yourself in the role. Another is to try lots of new things that force you into new shoes. Another is to travel. And another is to maintain a journal, blog, whatever.

Because let's be honest: no matter how detailed we are, no matter how scrupulously honest we aspire to be, writing about ourselves is about spinning some yarn to weave another identity as we step into it. These words that we write, these stories we tell, they are certainly not us, but they do give us a little more slack to climb a little bit higher on the endless journey to become us. Identity is a constantly recrafted thing, just like every couple months we are at the cellular level completely new people. We are forever reinventing ourselves, or at least should be. When we stop is when our lives become stagnant and dull.

None of that is pretty. Must we be someone else to be ourselves? Must we pretend, or, using the other L-word, lie, to gain some truth about ourselves? Honesty is the best policy, after all. We all know this. We like to think of ourselves not as beings but as a being. There's only one (your name here). We are individuals. One, uno, une. So to claim each tap of the keyboard is more play-acting with another identity than reliving, more dialogic theatre than documentary, seems ludicrous. A joke, maybe.

All I can do is speak from the trenches of my blogless existence. I felt I had lost a friend. And friends, even when made of suspicious things like stories, are special because they can dole it to you straight. They let you know who you really are because around them, you can be that person -- or, more accurately, those persons.

So I welcome this friend back with open arms and a sly smile. I predict many more adventures together, as we probe the world for its sweetness.

And we'll take with us a new lesson -- one straight from the mouth of the Joker: Sometimes, we should all ask ourselves, "Why so serious?"