How One Sock Turned My Life Upside-Down

Just before Christmas, I innocently decided to post a picture on facebook that would make everyone laugh in disbelief. I borrowed my partner's Norwegian sock, took off all my clothes, and stood by our tiny Christmas tree with nothing but a sock covering my most vital organ. 

The response, as expected, was wild. Within an hour, I already have over two dozen likes and just as many comments. As the CIA-loving American that I am, I don't have anything to hide, therefore I don't censor my facebook to anyone whose friend request I accept; that is something I am certain won't change in the near future.

My mom commented on my picture: “I see you have lost all shame,” and then unfriended me. I deleted her comment, not because I believe in censorship, but rather because the comment was in caps lock. I hate caps lock and have told her repeatedly what poor internet etiquette they show, but she never listens. Anyway, I digress.

My self-righteous aunt (let's call her Mary) started posting religious songs on my wall and even had the audacity to send a private message to my partner. In so doing, she made presumptions about who my partner was, and also jeopardized my relationship. Naturally, I was furious.

Mary has never left out small town in the developing world, nor has she achieved anything of note. “Who the hell is she to go over me and contact someone she doesn't know with a complaint about me!? Who the hell is she to call me immoral!?” I angrily thought to myself, trying to contain my fury.

It was that point, in a fit of rage, that I gained the capacity to finally: talk back; to abandon my typically silent, stoic persona; and to publicly express my feelings. My anger just kept screaming that this was a woman too blinded by her own ignorance to have the capacity to recognize her own cultural failings. I decided that I needed to explain to her publicly just in what ways we are culturally and morally different.

So, just howculturally different am I from some of the members of my clan? In my view, it comes to Nudity vs. Violence.

When I was 6 years old, I weighed no more than 25 kilos. I was a skinny, curious child. Though mischievous, no one can say I ever hit or talked back to any adult in my family. Nonetheless, one day I happened to arrive home a few hours after dark, thus breaking curfew. My father, whose troubled brain killed him at 46 after many months of headaches he neglected, grabbed his belt and shouted, “Child of the devil, where the coño were you!?” before commencing to whip me with all his adult fury once, twice, thrice, 30, maybe as many as 70 times. I defecated mid-way through the beating, right there on the sidewalk on Nicaragua St., for the whole of Villa Altagracia to watch. My brain shut down mid-way through the beating, and time has now erased the memories of the pain I felt each time I showered for weeks afterwards.

If you think that I hate, or hated my father, you'd be mistaken. The ratio of beatings-to-candy, and the fact that I saw him everyday because he lived up the road, made him a righteous, kind man in my eyes; I loved candy, enough to forget his beatings. My mother, on the hand, was just as cruel, beating me similarly after I accidentally broke a small, pink glass table in Los Alcarrizos. The table probably had a value of no more than 30 dollars, if that. I didn't hate my mother, but I certainly felt no love for her. She wasn't around much, and when I saw her, she was almost never happy, always ready to reach for the belt. During a period of 7 years, I saw her for a total of 11 days when I flew from NY to Curaçao. I remember good things, but my strongest memory is her with the belt, berating me for closing the door in a loud way.

That beating that I received in Nicaragua St, and in Los Alcarrizos, are my two oldest memories. I have many good, loving memories, but my two oldest are those. Though loving, I left the Dominican at age 8, and moved to the Bronx with my father. If you think the Nicaragua St. beating was excessive, by age 10 my father had escalated to a broom stick, but I should spare the reader the gory details, since they do nothing but stir a great, vengeful anger in me. Fortunately, with middle-school came puberty and a growth spur. I also became menacing-looking enough that no one in the Bronx was willing to cross me.

And so, puberty came and my subconsciousness started working on burying that feeling of injustice that cursed through my very core. It was Mary's hypocrisy that opened wounds and refreshed my memory. On the 24^thof December, I smashed a wine glass against a wall, and cried myself to sleep. I spent the 25^thin a dark room, staring out of the window as a great anger consumed me, even helping me eschew the need for food or water.

Over the next few days, I found myself unwilling to talk or touch my partner much. I had returned to my angry Bronx self. I just wanted to lock myself in a room, punch the wall, and curse everyone to hell and eternal pain. My new/old attitude thusly placed my relationship under strain. I had reverted to something dark.

I was easily irritable, and just wanted to let loose. Alcohol helped on New Year's, and I awoke on the 1^stin a good mood. It didn't last long, however. I forget what it was that my partner did or didn't do, but I was overcome again by anger even before I left the bed.

My partner, trying to cheer me up, reminded me that I had promised to do a New Year's Dive a month earlier. Figuring that I had nothing to lose, I proceeded. I walked out of the apartment, and jumped into the canal around the corner.

I emerged from the freezing water a new man. My anger was now gone, replaced by contentment. Contentment at the fact that I was now a man, that I had finally developed the courage to express my feelings publicly, and to make the Trujillistas in my family realize just how culturally different we are.

The past 11 days have been great! I finally fell free here in Amsterdam; free from the demons of my past.

How One Sock Turned My Life Upside-Down

Just before Christmas, I innocently decided to post a picture on facebook that would make everyone laugh in disbelief. I borrowed my partner's Norwegian sock, took off all my clothes, and stood by our tiny Christmas tree with nothing but a sock covering my most vital organ. 

The response, as expected, was wild. Within an hour, I already have over two dozen likes and just as many comments. As the CIA-loving American that I am, I don't have anything to hide, therefore I don't censor my facebook to anyone whose friend request I accept; that is something I am certain won't change in the near future.

My mom commented on my picture: “I see you have lost all shame,” and then unfriended me. I deleted her comment, not because I believe in censorship, but rather because the comment was in caps lock. I hate caps lock and have told her repeatedly what poor internet etiquette they show, but she never listens. Anyway, I digress.

My self-righteous aunt (let's call her Mary) started posting religious songs on my wall and even had the audacity to send a private message to my partner. In so doing, she made presumptions about who my partner was, and also jeopardized my relationship. Naturally, I was furious.

Mary has never left out small town in the developing world, nor has she achieved anything of note. “Who the hell is she to go over me and contact someone she doesn't know with a complaint about me!? Who the hell is she to call me immoral!?” I angrily thought to myself, trying to contain my fury.

It was that point, in a fit of rage, that I gained the capacity to finally: talk back; to abandon my typically silent, stoic persona; and to publicly express my feelings. My anger just kept screaming that this was a woman too blinded by her own ignorance to have the capacity to recognize her own cultural failings. I decided that I needed to explain to her publicly just in what ways we are culturally and morally different.

So, just how culturally different am I from some of the members of my clan? In my view, it comes to Nudity vs. Violence.

When I was 6 years old, I weighed no more than 25 kilos. I was a skinny, curious child. Though mischievous, no one can say I ever hit or talked back to any adult in my family. Nonetheless, one day I happened to arrive home a few hours after dark, thus breaking curfew. My father, whose troubled brain killed him at 46 after many months of headaches he neglected, grabbed his belt and shouted, “Child of the devil, where the coño were you!?” before commencing to whip me with all his adult fury once, twice, thrice, 30, maybe as many as 70 times. I defecated mid-way through the beating, right there on the sidewalk on Nicaragua St., for the whole of Villa Altagracia to watch. My brain shut down mid-way through the beating, and time has now erased the memories of the pain I felt each time I showered for weeks afterwards.

If you think that I hate, or hated my father, you'd be mistaken. The ratio of beatings-to-candy, and the fact that I saw him everyday because he lived up the road, made him a righteous, kind man in my eyes; I loved candy, enough to forget his beatings. My mother, on the hand, was just as cruel, beating me similarly after I accidentally broke a small, pink glass table in Los Alcarrizos. The table probably had a value of no more than 30 dollars, if that. I didn't hate my mother, but I certainly felt no love for her. She wasn't around much, and when I saw her, she was almost never happy, always ready to reach for the belt. During a period of 7 years, I saw her for a total of 11 days when I flew from NY to Curaçao. I remember good things, but my strongest memory is her with the belt, berating me for closing the door in a loud way.

That beating that I received in Nicaragua St, and in Los Alcarrizos, are my two oldest memories. I have many good, loving memories, but my two oldest are those. Though loving, I left the Dominican at age 8, and moved to the Bronx with my father. If you think the Nicaragua St. beating was excessive, by age 10 my father had escalated to a broom stick, but I should spare the reader the gory details, since they do nothing but stir a great, vengeful anger in me. Fortunately, with middle-school came puberty and a growth spur. I also became menacing-looking enough that no one in the Bronx was willing to cross me.

And so, puberty came and my subconsciousness started working on burying that feeling of injustice that cursed through my very core. It was Mary's hypocrisy that opened wounds and refreshed my memory. On the 24^th of December, I smashed a wine glass against a wall, and cried myself to sleep. I spent the 25^th in a dark room, staring out of the window as a great anger consumed me, even helping me eschew the need for food or water.

Over the next few days, I found myself unwilling to talk or touch my partner much. I had returned to my angry Bronx self. I just wanted to lock myself in a room, punch the wall, and curse everyone to hell and eternal pain. My new/old attitude thusly placed my relationship under strain. I had reverted to something dark.

I was easily irritable, and just wanted to let loose. Alcohol helped on New Year's, and I awoke on the 1^st in a good mood. It didn't last long, however. I forget what it was that my partner did or didn't do, but I was overcome again by anger even before I left the bed.

My partner, trying to cheer me up, reminded me that I had promised to do a New Year's Dive a month earlier. Figuring that I had nothing to lose, I proceeded. I walked out of the apartment, and jumped into the canal around the corner.

I emerged from the freezing water a new man. My anger was now gone, replaced by contentment. Contentment at the fact that I was now a man, that I had finally developed the courage to express my feelings publicly, and to make the Trujillistas in my family realize just how culturally different we are.

The past 11 days have been great! I finally fell free here in Amsterdam; free from the demons of my past.

The Hardest Class at Yale

I took a lot of difficult classes at Yale; everyone did. Somehow, I managed to cruise by doing merely what was required of me, while maintaining a 3.2 (B+) GPA. To be honest, Yale was easier than high school for me, especially in terms of workload. In high school I had regular classes from 9am to 3pm, after-school athletics, a commute from my house on 170^thto my school on 151^st, then from 151^st to Fordham University, and a myriad number of year-round programs. I had so much free time at Yale that, honestly, I was bored. I was involved in many groups my freshman year at Yale, but it amounted to no more than 30 hours a week of my time, as opposed to 60-70 hour weeks in high school.

I wasn't simply bored because I had nothing to do, but rather that I was disappointed; with Yale students, and with my future interactions with other intelligent individuals. I was disappointed because I had expected Yale to be this place where students had heated discussions in class sections and actively expressed their feelings and opinions. Participation did happen in some of my classes [athro classes being the best] but overall the fear of offending, of saying something inappropriate, made for silent classes and silent cafeterias.

There were times when I would enter the Ezra Stiles cafeteria and be able to hear a pin drop. The average Yale student was tired, stressed out, and almost defeated. If I could compare him to any character I have encountered in fiction, it would be the Stasi official in “Das Leben der Anderen,” who deliberates over every single word, lest it not be in line with party doctrine, or deference to the right individuals. Given the brutalist architecture in Ezra Stiles college, and the fact that the residential college provided most of its students with single rooms and no common room (I had a single all to myself throughout my 4 years,) and I can truly say there were times when I felt like I was in East Berlin.

Some people merely spoke about their workload: “Man, I have to write a 7 page biology paper later on.”; “So, what did you do over [insert holiday]?”

The reality? Small-talk dominated most conversations. It took me a week to find out about Katrina, even though many, many American lives were lost.

There was the small-talk, the self-segregation [a topic for another column,] but hardest for me was dealing with other people's fear(s). I lived in a working-class town in the Dominican Republic for almost 9 years, before I moved to the South Bronx.

Once in 7^thgrade I was chased from the sidewalk of Intermediate School 117 to Grand Concourse by members of the Elliot St. gang. They chased me across traffic on Grand Concourse, where I almost got run over several times, ultimately catching me outside of a building where the leader of the group produced a silver-like metallic object which he pointed at my chest. I felt a tug, and an old lady stepped between me and the gun. She pushed me into her building, and locked the door before calling the police. Had it not been for that lady, I may very well be dead today.

To be honest, I truly wasn't phased by that incident. The year before, I had seen a guy stabbed 4 times, in broad daylight, outside of S&A store, just across my building. The stabber threw the knife to the top of Moscoso pharmacy and shouted, “if anyone talks, you are dead!” His victim then stumbled towards Grand Concourse, where the perpetrator, in an act of kindness, put him in a cab towards Bronx Lebanon Hospital, perhaps an aptly-named hospital.

So, I guess the only thing at Yale that made me even bat an eye in all my 4 years there was hearing that David Light had shot up his frat house. My classmates on the other hand, seemed to be afraid to venture to the Rite-Aid behind Payne Whitney gym because, in the words of my freshman year wallmate: “That's the ghetto.” Yes, my wallmate was too afraid to venture two blocks from the place where he lived for 4 years. We are talking about Connecticut, the wealthiest state in the Union, not Somalia.

I simply couldn't relate; I could sense other's fears, and it made me angry. I began to look down upon the average Yale student. I saw him/her as motivated by fear; fear of offending, of disappointing their parents, of their friend's opinions, and above all jeopardizing their careers.

Sometimes, people are so guided by one overruling emotion, that it is almost impossible for them to relate to one another.

The Hardest Class at Yale

I took a lot of difficult classes at Yale; everyone did. Somehow, I managed to cruise by doing merely what was required of me, while maintaining a 3.2 (B+) GPA. To be honest, Yale was easier than high school for me, especially in terms of workload. In high school I had regular classes from 9am to 3pm, after-school athletics, a commute from my house on 170^th to my school on 151^st, then from 151^st to Fordham University, and a myriad number of year-round programs. I had so much free time at Yale that, honestly, I was bored. I was involved in many groups my freshman year at Yale, but it amounted to no more than 30 hours a week of my time, as opposed to 60-70 hour weeks in high school.

I wasn't simply bored because I had nothing to do, but rather that I was disappointed; with Yale students, and with my future interactions with other intelligent individuals. I was disappointed because I had expected Yale to be this place where students had heated discussions in class sections and actively expressed their feelings and opinions. Participation did happen in some of my classes [athro classes being the best] but overall the fear of offending, of saying something inappropriate, made for silent classes and silent cafeterias.

There were times when I would enter the Ezra Stiles cafeteria and be able to hear a pin drop. The average Yale student was tired, stressed out, and almost defeated. If I could compare him to any character I have encountered in fiction, it would be the Stasi official in “Das Leben der Anderen,” who deliberates over every single word, lest it not be in line with party doctrine, or deference to the right individuals. Given the brutalist architecture in Ezra Stiles college, and the fact that the residential college provided most of its students with single rooms and no common room (I had a single all to myself throughout my 4 years,) and I can truly say there were times when I felt like I was in East Berlin.

Some people merely spoke about their workload: “Man, I have to write a 7 page biology paper later on.”; “So, what did you do over [insert holiday]?”

The reality? Small-talk dominated most conversations. It took me a week to find out about Katrina, even though many, many American lives were lost.

There was the small-talk, the self-segregation [a topic for another column,] but hardest for me was dealing with other people's fear(s). I lived in a working-class town in the Dominican Republic for almost 9 years, before I moved to the South Bronx.

Once in 7^th grade I was chased from the sidewalk of Intermediate School 117 to Grand Concourse by members of the Elliot St. gang. They chased me across traffic on Grand Concourse, where I almost got run over several times, ultimately catching me outside of a building where the leader of the group produced a silver-like metallic object which he pointed at my chest. I felt a tug, and an old lady stepped between me and the gun. She pushed me into her building, and locked the door before calling the police. Had it not been for that lady, I may very well be dead today.

To be honest, I truly wasn't phased by that incident. The year before, I had seen a guy stabbed 4 times, in broad daylight, outside of S&A store, just across my building. The stabber threw the knife to the top of Moscoso pharmacy and shouted, “if anyone talks, you are dead!” His victim then stumbled towards Grand Concourse, where the perpetrator, in an act of kindness, put him in a cab towards Bronx Lebanon Hospital, perhaps an aptly-named hospital.

So, I guess the only thing at Yale that made me even bat an eye in all my 4 years there was hearing that David Light had shot up his frat house. My classmates on the other hand, seemed to be afraid to venture to the Rite-Aid behind Payne Whitney gym because, in the words of my freshman year wallmate: “That's the ghetto.” Yes, my wallmate was too afraid to venture two blocks from the place where he lived for 4 years. We are talking about Connecticut, the wealthiest state in the Union, not Somalia.

I simply couldn't relate; I could sense other's fears, and it made me angry. I began to look down upon the average Yale student. I saw him/her as motivated by fear; fear of offending, of disappointing their parents, of their friend's opinions, and above all jeopardizing their careers.

Sometimes, people are so guided by one overruling emotion, that it is almost impossible for them to relate to one another.

My Fuck Buddy Was in Skull & Bones

“In the early 1990s, the Russel Trust, the group that controls the money, changed the locks to the tomb and kept that year's class out because they rebelled and allowed women,” she said after we both drank ourselves stupid and set out from Toad's to my room in Ezra Stiles College. In the few months that we shagged, she never brought it up again, and I doubt she even remembered that one brief utterance. But how could I forget? It was the elephant in the room, the one thing that she kept off-limit.

Yes, Skull & Bones is real. The secret society counts multiple presidents in its roster, despite only selecting 15 members a year. It is the oldest, most prestigious secret society at Yale, and thus one of the most powerful in the world. The CIA was founded by Bonesmen, as somewhat accurately depicted in the movie, “The Shepherd.”

Many sources on the internet describe Skull & Bones as a Satanic organization, but this accusation is ridiculous. Skull & Bones is as Satanic as Christmas is a pagan winter festival; the members are too smart to believe in spirits or divinations. The only belief of most Bonesmen I know is the belief in self-betterment and the acquisition of power or prestige. But of course, some members are evil. I think the average person would argue that the Bush family, the most famous family in the gang, is not the nicest in America.

However, could I say that my buddy is evil? At the risk of being accused of serving as an apologist, allow me to quote Senator Palpatine: “Evil is just a point of view.”I never got the impression that my buddy was evil. She is not the kind of woman who could kill, order a killing, and in the many years I've known her, I have never felt an evil presence. I have a sixth-sense for these things.

Nonetheless, talking with her has allowed me to find myself, to come to my own conclusion on evil. We had few political disagreements back in college, since neither of us liked Bush. I always told her of the sulfur emanating from Bush, even through the TV; she just saw him as a joker who made too many mistakes. However, the Obama administration, and her blind support for all of his policies, has been the true test of our acquaintanceship.

My buddy believes in the legality of giving Obama the power to act as judge, jury, and drone executioner even when it concerns American citizens and their underage children (Anwar Al-Aulaqi.) Evil is merely a legal concern in The New Amerika – the thousand year superpower. She has other opinions on which we disagree, but the drones has led nearly to the end of what little we had. This article will surely be the last I hear from her, no doubt.

What we had in college burned to ashes; I saw her off to her investment banking job, and I went to Europe to waste my night drinking, smoking, and playing pool under deafening heavy metal at La Perra Gorda. I did a lot of thinking all summer over that dirty pool table. I pondered the true meaning of evil. I eventually came to conclude that evil was inaction, evil was passive cooperation, evil was participation. I was evil too.

I returned to Yale the fall of my junior year a different man. Secrecy clouded my thoughts on a near daily basis. I am not privy to all the secrets, but the Skull & Bones of today is not the same as it was during Prescott “The Nazi War Profiteer” Bush and his East Coast blue blood establishment. I met four Dominican women of color who rocked the 322, the number that represents Skull & Bones. Some were on track merely to become doctors and mothers.

These women are as innocent of involvement in Bush's crimes as any random student at Yale. Nonetheless, there is a reason why Poland makes it illegal for members of secret societies to serve as members of government: Catholic countries tend to be very afraid of anyone they perceive to be a Mason, and with good reason. There is no place in a true democracy for secret oaths, secret alliances, and possibly secret allegiances. This should apply even if some of those people are kind-hearted, innocent mothers. The 2004 presidential election is a perfect example of how secrecy can endanger democracy. 

Bush and Kerry were both members of Skull & Bones. Whoever won that election, Skull & Bones was fated to win. A group with less than 900 members should not be providing both of the presidential candidates for a nation of 300+ million diverse individuals. And so, this year, 2013, we shall once again get a Bonesman in the White House. During John Kerry's confirmation for Secretary of State, expect no one to ask him if he has ever masturbated in a coffin, or taken secret oaths. Yes, that much, and the orgies, are real. I got confirmation during a game of truth-or-dare.

Overall, I was too discreet, too afraid of what her reaction might be, to ever directly question her. Not on the details of what goes on in the tomb, but rather on how she felt about being part of a group suspected of hijacking the American democratic process. Instead, I simply remained stoic whenever she told her friends, “I am in one of the big ones.” It was those words that helped me understand just how much we all like playing for a winning team.

Take for example Derek Jeter, the Yankees baseball superstar. In the same way that Jeter rationalizes in his mind the hate that a Red Sox fan has for him and his success, so do the drone pilots in Nevada, the bureaucrats who rubber-stamp the legislation, and all the other tiny links in the chains of tyranny around Lady Liberty. They believe themselves to be hated because they play for a winning team.

And it is the “My Team VS. Your Team” mentality that has placed us in the precarious situation we find ourselves in today. The United States has essentially started a new global arms race – a drone war – with China, Russia, and Iran not far behind. Instead of setting a precedent that would have made it difficult for despots to target dissenters in foreign lands, far from any battlefield, and an international crime in the eyes of the law, it has made legal and acceptable. Only Muslim names currently make their way from CIA headquarters to the president's desk before he decides who gets taken out. Will we trust Obama's successor with that power?

In America, the people are silent. The Department of Homeland Security has purchased 2 billion rounds of hollow point bullets; bullets that have to be used domestically, since they are banned by international law. Hollow point bullets are designed exclusively to kill. And surely, one must wonder why the Dept. of Fatherland Security would go from nothingness a decade ago, to needing such a staggering number of bullets today. Congress just weeks ago, in codifying the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, gave Obama the power to indefinitely detain US citizens.

Only Abraham Lincoln had a level of power comparable to the power that a treasonous congress and a complacent American public have willingly handed to the executive branch, and Lincoln rode us through a civil war. Only history can now truly say whether The American Republic has fallen to tyranny, or will be restored to its tradition of the right to trial by jury. Will military tribunals behind a glass and sound delay in Guantanamo become the norm, or will we return to the principles of democracy which our drones supposedly help us export.

At this point, a civil war is either inevitable or necessary; I can't predict which as of yet. All because a bunch of men got behind close doors and shook hands. My buddy once casually told me: “Handshakes build more bridges than steel.” I didn't fully understand what she meant by it until just a few days ago.

I'd sent her an e-mail wishing her a happy new year, and eventually we ended up on the phone. We spoke about good things, eventually politics, and it was with one sentence that she inspired me to write this article: “Why are you worried? You're not some [emphasis mine] Muslim in Yemen or Pakistan!”

And that may be true, but China now has a working stealth prototype, and Iran recovered an SQ-170 Sentinel drone almost unscratched. Who will challenge China when it starts using drones on Uyghur rebels in Kazakhstan? Who will challenge Russia when it starts targeting rebels in Georgia?

We have probably already entered a phase that historians may describe as the Second Cold War, or if it escalates further... World War III. This time around, however, there won't be trenches. There won't be masses of foot soldiers behind a blitzkrieg. This new war will be fought on classified grounds, behind classified rules, with classified technologies, and by individuals with classified alliances. We have opened a Pandora's box that promises to shape the 21^stcentury in the same way the atom bomb shaped the 20^th.

Like the Cold War, this war won't have any end in sight. If people ultimately end up demanding the downfall of their regime, we should all remember that not all individuals who belong to a certain group are evil and responsible for what is happening. The criminals are in the CIA, in the executive, and the complacent legislative.