I wanted to listen, over and over again.

I was a sophomore in college, and a film major. I had spent the last year doing sound for friends and for class assignments. I had stayed in an audio editing suite for more than 24 hours. I wanted to be a sound engineer when I grew up, and I was finally getting a chance to explore that. I didn’t know that the job market was shit for sound engineers; I doubt I would have cared.

Anyway, I don’t remember the context, but the TA for the class had played a few seconds of this mournful, lonesome trumpet in class, and afterwards I rushed her to ask what that was. Who? What? How? She laughed and gave me the name.

It was a French soundtrack, so I knew Dr Wax wouldn’t have it, so I stopped by Chicago Compact Disc (RIP). The older brother behind the counter greeted me in his empty store, and I heard the absolute smoothest composition playing. I told him that I was loving what he was playing, but did he happen to have…? He pointed me to the back of the store, under IMPORTS.

It was there. It was also $30. And to someone on work study money, that was a LOT.

But I also had to have the album that was playing. I’d never heard anything like that before, and it was completely new to me. And that CD was $20.

Needless to say, I bought them both, and then survived on chicken cutlets from my cafeteria meal plan for the next good while.

I shoehorned Miles’ trumpet into a short film I made, which the professor recognized right off. I didn’t use Dexter for anything, but it is one of the first things I play for people who want to know jazz.

So, here’s to Miles Davis’ Ascenseur pour L’echafaud and Dexter Gordon’s Go. A lifetime of good music, only remembered; it has to start somewhere.

This has been bubbling in my head for a while, and with Sean Connery’s death last week, it’s brought to mind again.

By the end of this week, we’ll either be a smoldering husk of democracy or a fasting ball of proto-fascism, driven by one political party. It is what it is.

This scene from The Untouchables kept popping into mind. Walk with me.

The past few years, we’ve seen laws broken to no consequence. The Hatch Act. Rules about campaign finance, and business interests. At every turn, one party shrugs, and the other yells (but not too loud, as to be civil) how wrong it is…and nothing happens.

Now, we’ve been warned as to to what can happen on Tuesday and afterwards. Voter disenfranchisement. Intimidation at the polls. Disinformation all over social media. A fifth estate interested in the “humanity” of people who wish others harm. A gotdamn pandemic.

And the question I’ve had through all of this, as I see a dearth of leadership from a lot of state offices and the White House, is “what are we prepared to do?”

Now, I have ideas of what we SHOULD do, but what are we prepared to do? We’d like an end to white supremacy, and end to police brutality, a need to hold certain people accountable for things that they do. But what are we prepared to do? How uncomfy can we be? With months of semi-lockdown, an increasing positivity rate, and people yearning for “normalcy”, what do we have in us to do? Four years of being bombarded by flouting of justice and rule of law ; how tired are we?

What ARE we prepared to do?

I didn’t know what an empath was until I was in my 30s.

Before then, I would wonder why I’d physically hurt when I watched a senior citizen fall, or when a character in a TV show got embarrassed or humiliated. I’d wonder why I felt so cranky when I didn’t get a hug.

I care too much. Or, better put, I have a physiological reaction to mistreatment and suffering.

I’m writing out what’s in my head, particularly right now, because there a ton of people like me, but there are a lot of people who are going through a thing called “skin hunger”. It’s an actual thing.

Basically, without human touch, we become…not human. We need affirmation, and declarations that we exist and matter, and without that, we get angry and sullen and not quite our full selves. I learned that the hard way.

Three years ago today, my stepdad died. And my mother went…into, well, shock. And when I talked to her yesterday, she offhandedly mentioned that today would be hard for her. My mother, while not the model of stoic, can deal 364 days, but that 365th is a bad day.

The fact that I cannot hug my mother, and say I understand, and that I loved him too, and sit and talk stories and laugh about my Air Force dad, who believed everything had its place, and could eat Cheetos without getting orange dust on his hands (MAGIC! SORCERY!) could be lauded and toasted, but, as it is, that can’t happen.

I want to hug my mother. And I can’t. And that physically pains me.

In this line of work, there’s really not a lot to take personally. Computers don’t care about you, and, truth be told, don’t care about what you need or when.

But one thing I learned from my folks, putting in years in the US Postal Service, is the notion of your reputation and of your word. And how it’s like a castle; takes years to build up, but can crumble in a day.

I’ve been doing this tech thing for over 20 years. I’ve been in this place for more than ten. And over that time, I’ve cultivated a reputation that, professionally, I know what I’m doing, I don’t BS you, and as long as you treat me with respect, I may go above and beyond for you.

I get a call this morning from a co-worker who’s trying to help a faculty member at our other site. She insists that she can’t install printers, and they “used to work”. He gets her machine and finds out that NONE of our standard software is on the machine. The profssor insists they have no idea what’s going on.

Now, this is a Mac. And the reason why this is important is that, for the past nine years, no one in this institution has gotten a institution-owned Mac I haven’t touched. And this name doesn’t sound familiar at all.

They, meanwhile, are actually in the background, huffing and puffing bout how unacceptable this all is. How could this happen? What kind of shop are you running over there? Maybe I need to have a talk with someone’s superiors. Et cetera.

I’m angry now. You’re doubting my work, AND you’re calling me a liar. You’re insisting this is my problem, and you want me to know just how put-upon you are. And if I were a scared, fresh-out-of-college kid who was oblivious to the gaslighting, I might have bought into it.

But, as Cedric the Entertainer would say?

“I’m a grown-ass man, dawg.”

I ask my colleague to look at the bottom of the laptop. Every machine we buy has an asset tag, a sticker we put on for our internal records.

There’s no sticker.

I ask him to press the prof on how do they log in. When did they get this laptop? Because I may be old, but a quick glance through my email’s Search function tells me I’ve never talked to this person, a function I do with everything I build. Int the very least, I have to talk to you about when you’re coming to get the machine, or what software you want on it.

A light bulb goes off. “Ask them if she knows who I am.”

They’ve never heard of me.

After pressing that nerve, they finally admit that this is their personal laptop, and they wanted to get all of our software for free instead of going through the proper channels. They wanted to bully my colleague into just doing what they wanted with no questions. They even admitted that, no, they’ve never installed the printers, or printed, or ANYTHING of the sort.

But you were brolic enough to question my work. My work ethic. My reputation by insisting I did not do my job.

Okay. Let’s go.

Someone wrote (and I can’t find it now, because Twitter) that the notion of karma is harmful in society because it leads people to believe that, not only do bad people eventually have bad things happen to them (applicable in these times), but it leads to thinking that, if something bad happens to you, that you’re a bad person and somehow deserve it.

The point was that economic hardship faced by people in this capitalist society was explained away by karma. That “if you can’t afford it, if you go broke, then it’s obviously a personal failing.” And while I see that, I don’t think that EVERYONE sees it that way. Especially in this here US of A.

I know a ton of good people, some of whom may be reading this now. And I know a lot of those good people have gone through some shit. Because of my capacity for empathy, because I’ve been through some shit as well, and because I’m aware that good things happen to bad people, I can also believe that bad things can happen to good people. I believe that’s the difference with this.

Sure, those who’ve never been broke, or never had something repossessed, or faced down a huge hospital bill, would look at the array fo GoFundMes and requests for CashApp and think those people must be doing something wrong. That they must be deficient in some way. But their experience isn’t open to the fact that, perhaps, bad things happen to good people too. And in a society which sees you as a cog anyway, someone who will be replaced tomorrow at work, one or two paychecks from being homeless, savings almost nil…I think enough of us have that empathy to understand and rejective notion that, just because someone’s not doing well, that they necessarily deserve it.