Phthursday Musings: Behind a Bunker

In fifth and sixth grades, our classes at school spent three days / two nights together at what I’ll call a “retreat” at Atwood Park on the outskirts of Rockford. Atwood is a large forested park along the Kishwaukee River and there’s a learning / interpretive center there, and there were also long rooms with bunks, where we slept. In retrospect it seems crazy we would actually do something like this.

Atwood Park is a fascinating facility. During World War I, it was the site of Camp Grant, a U.S. Army infantry training site and artillery range. During World War II, it was an Army induction center, and then became a prisoner of war detention center, with about 2,500 POWs held there. Decades later, a lot of the vestiges remained, including small concrete bunkers which rise a couple feet above the ground and are dug out a few feet below ground level, and it was still common for people to find bullet shells and similar ordnance debris.

This photo of a Camp Grant / Atwood Park bunker is on a fascinating page about similar abandoned sites in Illinois:

When we were there in sixth grade, they took us out to this long grassy area where there were a couple of these old concrete bunkers, and which also adjoined a wooded area. They divided us into four groups: herbivores, omnivores, carnivores, and diseases. We were given something like a key ring about the diameter of a baseball and depending on what group we were in, we were given a number of colored squares with holes punched which could slide onto the ring. I think herbivores were green, omnivores were yellow, carnivores were red, and diseases were purple.

We were told to wander around, but when we encountered someone else, we’d have to tell each other what we were. If you were lower on the food chain, you’d have to give one of your squares to the other person. So if an herbivore met a carnivore, they’d have to give up one green square. If anybody encountered a disease, the disease would get a square. Obviously in this game herbivores were at a distinct disadvantage, but that was offset by them having the most squares to start out with, omnivores less, carnivores less still, and diseases only one square. You were out of the game when you lost all of your own squares. This whole thing was supposed to be a representation of the laws of nature or something like that.

The one additional wrinkle was that at some point, the teachers would also enter the game, and they would represent humans, and any kid they came into contact with, that kid was dead and out of the game.

So we ran around and herbivores tended to hide while carnivores tended to chase. (I’m thinking it was essentially “tag” rules but I might be misremembering that.) I was an omnivore. I want to say I started with five yellow squares but that I’m really not sure about. I gained a couple of green squares, lost a couple of yellow squares. It was an odd game in that I’m not really sure you could “win” by having the most squares. The only way to “win” was to stay alive.

I remember being near the edge of the woods at one point when one of the teachers appeared a little ways away. The kids who were right there were all out of the game, including one who was a disease and couldn’t have been killed any other way. When I saw humans arriving, I did what I thought was the most sensible thing, and I took off the other direction. I ran a while, ran some more, and eventually I hid behind one of the bunkers.

A while later - I want to say something like 20 minutes later - one of the teachers finally appeared. By this point I hadn’t seen anyone else for most of the time I’d been hiding behind the bunker. When he found me, he didn’t “kill” me… because the game had apparently been over for a while. I’m not sure if people had been out looking for me or what, but when I got back to everyone else, the game had already broken down, somebody else had apparently already been declared the winner for being the last person standing… but then suddenly there I was. There was something really awkward about it all, even though, I guess, I’d really won. Not that I was trying to “win”, mind you. I had just been trying to stay alive, because that was the game.

Somehow in the aftermath of all this people seemed mad at me, and I heard people saying I’d been hiding in a bunker (which we had explicitly been told not to do), and, well… I suppose in the end, I figured out how to survive, but it didn’t feel great about it.

All of this came rushing back to me this evening when I read the third different thing today about how terrified people are about the possibility of ICE raids. Many people who “have something to fear” are people who at some point in time did something “wrong” by entering this country “illegally” because they were trying to get away from a place which this country pillaged the living hell out of. Many other people who have not actually done anything “wrong” themselves are also fearful, not just because friends and loved ones might be in the crosshairs of this fascist administration, but because history has told us time and time again that just because you’re “free” doesn’t mean that you’re not subject to all sorts of collateral abuse. Indeed, deportations don’t actually seem to be the main point of any of this bullshit. As an Atlantic article put it years ago, the cruelty is the point.

Why did the Atwood experience come rushing back to me today? I think, for me, that was a formative moment in the long-term construction of how I experience empathy. The reality is that the kind of fear that a lot of people feel today is not something I can very viscerally appreciate, but, I think, if I come close, it’s in that image in my mind of a game where I fled for survival, succeeded according to the rules of the game, and somehow wound up socially punished for it all anyway. Far be it for me to say that’s “the same thing” as what people are experiencing today. But empathy is largely rooted in personal experience. It has to take root somewhere. God knows we need a lot more of it right now.

I’m not especially desirous of shifting my writing focus into increasingly being a series of “political critiques”. The argument I’ve made at home is that one of the hallmarks of the current political moment is that these narcissists thrive on sucking all of the air out of the room, on having everyone constantly talking about them, good or bad. All publicity is good publicity, etc.

I’d like to think that my more typically offbeat positive tone is not just central to what I write but also central to what keeps people reading what I write, so I want to try and stick with that as much as I can. I want to write more about empathy and less about contempt, if you will.

Sincerely, I’d like to hear from people about what would resonate with them in this moment, how we might maintain the right kind of discursive balance. If we just talk doom and gloom… well, that’s not how we come together to help lift people up. But we also can’t hide, like that sixth grader who fled from the arrival of the humans who would kill everything. He survived, sure, but it’s got to be about more than that.

In the words of Rocket J. Squirrel (or was it Monty Python?), now for something completely different?

Because of a two-day work management meeting this week, semi-conveniently located near O’Hare, I had occasion to drive my 2004 Hyundai Sonata for a couple of longer excursions than usual. In all of 2024, I filled the tank only twice, and the car probably went about 600 total miles. Back twenty years ago was about the time that Hyundai was trying to make a point that Korean cars weren’t made like crap and they rolled out the first 10 year 100,000 mile warranty in the U.S. market. We’re only the second owners for this car, have now had it for over 13 years, and while it’s definitely got issues, I don’t see why it wouldn’t stay on the road for many years to come.

The car is old enough that the radio has both a CD player and a cassette player! The antenna got ripped off by a car wash many years ago though, and although I got a replacement antenna, the radio doesn’t always do a great job of picking up FM stations around us. And, of course, bluetooth wasn’t a thing in 2004, or at least not for car stereos. So I’ve just taken to having a couple of CDs in the car. This week’s choice was London Calling. The Clash seemed an appropriate choice for these times.

London Calling is really a crazy record. In college I had copies of the self-titled and Combat Rock and I just didn’t appreciate at the time how deeply the band had gone into ska and reggae. I also don’t think I ever quite got the right take on their politics, because I’d gotten my copy of their first album around the same time I got a copy of Nevermind the Bollocks, and I sort of internalized an idea that the Sex Pistols were more famous but The Clash were more important but this was a really thin idea overall.

I listened to London Calling more in my 20s, but I was always more of a devotee to the first record. Today, though, I manage to hear something new and surprising with seemingly every listen of London Calling. I hear really prime pop hooks in some places, I hear things which I suppose were “experimental” but which in their own way sound even more punk rock than just punk rock.

A few weeks ago I made a new playlist for myself at the gym which is new wave heavy, but also punk and power pop, largely from a pocket around 1978-79, and fairly heavily British at that. One of my all-time top 10 albums, the Buzzcocks’ A Different Kind of Tension, is from 1979, and is sort of the exemplar for me of punk-but-not-exactly-punk complete with slicing guitars. Joe Jackson’s debut Look Sharp!, which is really a stunning power pop record that had been completely off my radar until just a couple years ago, is also from 1979. So too was London Calling.

In constructing that playlist, I added what I think is now my favorite Clash song, the Paul Simonon penned-and-sung “The Guns of Brixton”. Somehow, here’s a video from the same location, almost certainly the same cameras, just weeks before the Warren Zevon video I shared last week:

Now, there are a couple of things here. For one, I don’t really much like reggae, but this is a freaking reggae song. For two, Simonon couldn’t sing worth a shit, but I think that’s actually central to why I’m so drawn to the song. There’s an undeniable authenticity. Or something. Whatever it is, I can’t get enough of it.

The other thing, I think, is that for years the version of the song I was most familiar with was, of all things, the Joel R. L. Phelps cover from The Downer Trio EP. I guarantee this is not an arrangement you would ever have guessed at:

A final note about where and how META-SPIEL gets shared. I had taken in recent months to sharing everything published on Bluesky (where I didn’t really think anyone was noticing it), Instagram (where some people who already subscribe see it, but nobody else seems to, except that some of the pizza pieces I did got noticed by the pizza places themselves), and Facebook (where, I think, some people do see it, who aren’t also subscribed.)

I’m actually going to take a close look at my metrics (ha ha) and see where I should keep sharing. Instagram kind of feels pointless because it’s not really Instagram-type stuff, and it’s seeming like Facebook is about to get a whole lot worse again, plus a lot of people are leaving Facebook now anyway. As ever, I’m all ears if anyone wants to weigh in with thoughts on this stuff.

Wherever and however you read META-SPIEL though, thank you! It is always very appreciated and I hope that these help make your Phthursdays (or more likely Friday mornings) (and/or whatever other days I might publish) as phthrilling as can be.