BILL ZELLER'S STILLED HEART

Many people in today’s world survive the horrors by simply not knowing about them.  Even if they know about them, they turn their heads away.  It’s too terrifying and they don’t know what to do about it anyway.  If you are one of those people, don’t read this blog and, specifically, don’t read this post.  

Tim Barrus and I are people who see trouble and head straight for it -- Tim more than me, but then the trouble I’ve seen has been minor compared to what Tim knows and lives with, fighting with his endless energy and rage even as his body fails him.  The hardest thing for him when he was attacked by the pseudo-literati over his Nasdijj gig, which put his profile up high enough to make him a target, was double.  On the one hand the superficial little twit who made the big revelation had the idea that a nice-appearing house and conventional-SEEMING family meant that no one there was ever abused.  On the other hand he exposed that family without even knowing it, sending them into desperate coverup mode and separating them from Tim even more.  He didn’t know about the uses of disguise, being intent on crowing from rooftops himself.

Now comes the death of a Princeton Ph.D. candidate, Bill Zeller, who was known for his brilliant computer programming.  His suicide note rips the covers off a family as full of abuse as Tim’s. The story was published in the Huffington Post.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/07/bill-zeller-dead-princeto_n_805689.html

That’s not all.  His female relative is a blogger who was also abused throughout childhood.  These situations develop whenever there is poverty, lack of education, closed head trauma, drug use, alcohol abuse, violence.  Anyone who thinks this sort of thing just doesn’t happen to the upper classes and that if they can just manage by hook or crook to get up there into the prosperity zone, they will be safe, is deluded.  Anyone who thinks that suppressing and hiding what has happened to them can make it go away, is deluded.  But sharing the story has taken this woman to grad school and recovery -- or at least compensation/coping.

Tim understood that early and set out to take a devil’s route, but one that was empowering enough to keep him alive.   Both Zeller and Barrus are prodigious workers, Zeller at programming and Tim at his vlogs and boy group, Cinematheque -- now The Studio.  Tim and Bill both say that the intense concentration of work is the only way to escape pain.  Got that?  The best drug is work. 

I will make nothing of the difference between Zeller’s solitary programming and Tim’s communal vlogging.  I think both men are intelligent contributors.  The difference was in temperament, Bill’s quietly imploding and Tim’s dramatically exploding.  As some perceptive person asked in the many online comments,  “What if Bill had written that eloquent suicide note and then SENT it while staying alive?”  

In the note Bill hints that constantly fighting alone was beginning to feel like a pressure-cooker, that he might explode in a way that would hurt others.  What if someone had recognized that and intervened?  The signs were far more subtle that the Arizona shooter, but they probably weren’t invisible.  Still, his relative couldn’t see them and she had suffered in the same way, just reacted differently.

Tim has looked for a specific marker:  infection with HIV-AIDS acquired by hustling or by drug use.  Once he had a core group, the boy-telegraph system brought more boys.  The work he offers them is art: studio art, street performance, vids.  And when the dark monsters rise up, he takes them to a red chair and makes the monster sit there and account for itself.

My friends and relatives are nervous about my friendship with Tim.  Am I becoming a dotty old lady?  Does this mean my house will fill up with delinquents?  Am I possibly carrying HIV and not telling anyone?  (Remember my name is Mary: it would be an Immaculate Infection.)  Most of them decide not to think about it.  I myself RE-think it constantly.

Not long ago a college professor I respected, an email friendship, found out about Tim and googled.  He read Wikipedia and LA Weekly and Matthew’s little brags.  He went ballistic, accusing me of depravity and enabling a monster.  (Whose name he failed to spell properly.)  So I did another self-check.  Passed.

When one does emergency responder work, even just being an animal control officer, it’s there in front of your eyes.  If a dog in the family is being abused, you can bet the children are, too.  When one lives on a reservation or in any other high-deprivation, high-risk place (which might be a fancy condo or a mansion behind walls), the violence and secrecy will be obvious.  Scary.

People want to say,  “Oh, that’s not me.”  Even though they have mocking parents, raping sibs, not enough to eat, no safe place to sleep.

Joel Johnson, writing on the blog called “Gizmodo” says:  “I think a person has the right to live or end their life as they choose. If Zeller really felt that suicide was his only option, so be it. But as someone who has had similar experiences in my own life, I want to say to anyone else who feels the way Zeller felt: You can't escape your past. Not completely. But you can deal with it. You can contextualize it. You can learn how to prepare for the times when you feel like it's not even on your radar and then it totally broadsides you.”

http://gizmodo.com/5726667/the-agonizing-last-words-of-bill-zeller

Zeller said he went to doctors and found no help there.  Few ministers and not many psych people have the willingness to confront and participate that it takes.  Zeller's suicide demands a COMMUNITY response and I don’t just mean the Internet community or the American community or the religious community.  (There is some heavy responsibility in that last.)  I mean the human community that brings babies into a world that is too apt to destroy and deform them.  How is it that this kind of sexual and violent abuse hasn’t evolved out of us?  Maybe it’s the secrecy.  Maybe secrecy can deny evolution.

Johnson says:  “And you can talk to people. You really can.”  Because you are not alone.  There are others out there just like you and there are people who are not, but who will believe you.  It’s heart breaking that a programmer only blogged about tech stuff and not his own dark heart, now stilled.