Energy (In)Efficiency
Mar.24.2010
Sometimes in life what you see might not be representative of what actually is going on. The lack of renewable energy technologies in downtown Burlington might perplex the city’s progressive and environmentally aware population, but according to Burlington Electric’s Chris Burns it’s a combination of energy efficient technologies that provide the best opportunity for saving money and energy.
“There’s no silver bullet. We call it diversification. You’ve gotta get a little bit from everything,” Burns says.
And everything means everything from insulating every nook and cranny of a house to lighting, heating, and ventilation controls.
In fact, Burns says, “A lot of it is control stuff. A lot of it is outside air economizers. Take a look at Burlington’s climate, there are many many hours in the year where you can have Mother Nature do the work for you.”
This is why Burlington Electric has installed free air ventilation systems in many of the convenience and grocery stores around Burlington. According to Burns, it’s simply more cost-effective than the renewable stuff.
“Let’s say it costs you 5000 dollars to do a free air economizer system in a convenience store refrigeration walk-in—hypothetically—you might be saving 2000 dollars a year on your power costs. Now, the problem with solar—photo voltaic—is that the price is really expensive. So to get a 1000 watt PV array installed right now would cost you about 7500 bucks, and if it was oriented perfectly to solar south it would save about 140 dollars a year. So 140 bucks a year and it’s gonna cost you 7500 bucks to do it.”
The financial incentive is clear, but how do they work? Outside sensors take readings of the temperature. When the temperature drops low enough, the refrigeration compressors are turned off while the duct work is opened and low energy fans bring in the cold air. Once it becomes too hot or humid, the compressors are turned back on.
Another small, but effective technology in use throughout much of Burlington are occupancy sensors, which keep track of whether there’s people in a room or not. If no one’s there, the lights go off until someone enters. In some cases, these occupancy sensors can also control ventilation.
“There’s sensors around the room that sit there and say, ‘This place is unoccupied, or for some reason there’s only 15 people in this room when there should be a hundred,’” says Burns. “’I’m only going to give enough ventilation for nobody or 15 people or 100 people. I’m going to react to what you need.’”
The smart ventilation controls not only save energy, but they cut down on maintenance costs as well.
“The wear and tear on the equipment comes down, but the energy savings are tremendous,” Burns says. “We’re also doing this in underground parking garages with carbon monoxide based on exhaust. Instead of running these exhaust systems 24/7, let’s be smarter about it.”
With everything controlled by computers, it’s natural to wonder what would happen if the system failed. Would people suffocate as the ventilation control system thinks no one is around? Chris Burns noted the concern fire code officials had, but fortunately these systems fail closed. Basically, when they fail the system will remain on 24/7 until somebody realizes the controls have failed. The safety measure is that it reverts back to the way it would operate without the energy efficient controls in place. Rather than stale or tainted air, it’s energy inefficiency until the problem is fixed.
But as Burns mentions, the real struggle is convincing people that energy efficiency makes more sense economically and environmentally than renewable technologies.
“There’s this, I’m not going to call it conflict, but maybe it’s a misunderstanding, and maybe there’s a little competition between the energy efficiency folks and the renewable folks. Energy efficiency just isn’t very sexy. People start to get glassed over pretty fast once I start talking to them about it, but people like solar panels and wind turbines.”
In an effort to make Burlington more energy efficient, Burlington Electric is using what Burns calls a “carrots and sticks” approach. The “sticks”, he says, come in the form of the energy efficiency code for residential and commercial buildings.
“What we did back in the early 90s is we developed energy efficiency construction codes for all buildings,” says Burns. “When someone goes in to get their permit—an electrical permit, a planning and zoning permit, a building permit—they need to prove the building meets this baseline of energy efficiency.”
The code is stricter in regards to new construction projects than it is with existing buildings.
“For a new construction project for them to get their occupancy permit they need to have a medal from Burlington Electric that says you meet the code. And if it’s an existing building, which we have a lot of, if any component of that building which you’re replacing is covered by the code it must be brought up to code.”
So if someone wants to replace the heating system or the windows of a building, those new additions must meet the code. However, whenever Burlington Electric evaluates any potential renovation project, if they see that the building is deficient in certain areas they seize the opportunity. It is in those moments when the “carrots” approach is exercised.
And it is through incentives provided by the P.O.W.E.R program (Property Owners Win with Efficiency and Renewables), which passed in May 2009, that Burlington Electric makes it easier for citizens and business owners to make their properties more energy efficient.
Essentially, if a property owner can’t afford the cost of an energy efficiency project, Burlington Electric will cover 10-50% of the project’s cost. The loaned money is then paid back through an increase in the owner’s property tax. If the person sells the property before the loan is repaid, the next owner will inherit the remaining cost via the property tax.
The challenge, however, has been convincing building owners to take the steps towards energy efficiency. In a city like Burlington, where demand for housing is high and the population is filled with college students and young professionals, who typically leave after a few years, getting people to invest in these renovations is difficult.
A big part of what Burlington Electric does is form relationships with its biggest energy users because unlike most energy companies, BED isn’t about upping usage rates to make more money. After all, it’s a non-profit branch of the city. Instead, Burlington Electric is concerned with reducing usage rates. By reaching out to its biggest energy users they not only provide the opportunity and incentive to become energy efficient, but they also make it so BED is among the first places called when those customers do want to upgrade their property.
“I think the problem is that Burlington is a popular place to be. It’s the landlords’ market,” says Burns. “It’s not like we have a glut of empty apartments around. So low supply, high demand, the landlord can pretty much get what they want and they don’t have to take care of their buildings. That’s why we put the energy codes in place. We adjust that code every few years as the technology improves. The code has been around since 1991, but it’s been revised about 5 times.”
Disturbing Downtown
Mar.22.2010
In a college town like Burlington, where drinking is as common as Vermont cheddar, it would be easy to assume fights at the downtown bars happen quite regularly.
But as downtown lieutenant, Art Cyr, puts it, “It’s not so much that we see a lot of assaults, but we have a lot of disturbances. On a weekday night, we may not have any. The bulk of our disturbances are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, more so Friday and Saturday.”
A disturbance usually involves some angry drunk person, who has been removed from an establishment. Rather than cut their losses, move on, and go home or to some other bar, they decide to make a scene. Yell at the bouncers, try to sneak back in, or refuse to go anywhere. These kind of disputes are common and it typically takes a cop to come along to get the person on their way. Sometimes, they make matters worse and end up taking a ride to the police station.
Another regular cause for either a fight or a disturbance is what Lt. Cyr calls the “Beer Bump”.
“It could be two people, who were drinking, that if they were sober and bumped into each other it’d probably be, ‘Hey, sorry about that man.’ But now because they’re drunk it turns into a fight.”
However, a fight doesn’t technically have to be two guys punching each other.
“When I say a fight, a pushing match, that’s a fight, but it doesn’t rise to the level of an assault charge,” says Lt. Cyr. “One of two things can happen: depending on the severity of what’s going on you could be arrested for disorderly conduct or you could be issued a ticket for disorderly conduct.”
From January 2010 to March 2010, Burlington’s downtown has had 114 disturbances. More times than not, the people involved are college-aged, not necessarily college students, but people between the ages of 21 and 26. While numbers for the assaults could not be provided, Cyr mentions that some of the instances of assault have been quite severe.
“There’s been numerous fights where there’s many people involved, but we’ve also had stabbings downtown related to late night parties and stuff going on downtown.”
Out of the average 5-6 disturbances that the Burlington police deal with on a weekend night, most are typically two people getting into some kind of disagreement while intoxicated. At least, that’s how Lt. Cyr sees it, and he’s spent much of his 15 year long career downtown.
“If there’s a fight, there’s usually an underlying issue, and it’s either one of three things. This is not a guarantee, there are times when other circumstances can cause a fight, but it’s alcohol related, drug related, or significant other related.”
And while most would assume many of the fights involve primarily men, Lt. Cyr notes that the ladies get into their fair share of brouhahas.
“There’s just as many female fights as there are male fights.”
Nevertheless, the key to resolving many of the problems so no one gets hurt or unfairly arrested seems to come down to quick response times. There’s a reason for a heavy police presence downtown, especially on weekends. The sooner they can get to and stop a dispute, the more likely it is the problem hasn’t gotten out of hand.
“Sometimes we’re right there in the very beginning. Sometimes it already ended. Sometimes in progress when we get there,” says Cyr. “You have to do an investigation. It’s not like a week long investigation. You do the best you can on the scene at the time.”
Even then, there’s always a chance that the sight of cops won’t get the people involved to calm down.
“You have to take into consideration a couple things,” says Cyr. “One, are tempers still flying? If tempers are still flying we’ll take both people, and may have to take you into protective custody and get you out of there. But if tempers have calmed down, and the crowd’s not going nuts, we can do it right there. We’ll talk to both people, and then there’s witnesses. Then you have door bouncers, who aren’t drinking, and they can give you a witness statement in regards to what happened.”
If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to fight to defend yourself, don’t be afraid to do what you need to do in order to disable the attacker. But if you do successfully fend off some ill-tempered brute, rendering them unable to continue, make sure you stop.
“If you’re fighting and you’re defending yourself that’s not a crime. It’s not illegal to defend yourself,” says Cyr. “Now, you have to be careful. If you keep hitting the person after they’ve stopped or are unable to keep fighting you then become a combative assaulting person.”
And that is one surefire way to make a bad night awful. After all, having to defend yourself against someone too drunk to reason is one thing. However, being taken to jail and charged with a crime just because you threw in a few more shots after knocking someone out is a rotten way to end a night.
Fortunately, the State of Vermont and the Burlington Police Department offer training and advice to all bars in regards to diffusing or quickly reporting a disturbance.
“It deals with protocol for the staff, how to deal with fights, your responsibility as a bar owner or a staff member, signs of intoxication, what to look for when people haven’t got to the stage of fighting yet but are working up to it,” says Cyr.
“Other stuff is having enough staff on duty, and having them clearly marked so people know who they are and what they’re doing so that people know who they can turn to if there’s an incident.”
While the training might not prevent disturbances, it makes it easier to get them under control quickly. Lt. Cyr believes reducing the number of disturbances comes down to education and getting people to be responsible in regards to the decisions they make. In particular, he believes teaching people to stop binge drinking is vital to preventing the kind of assaults and disturbances he deals with throughout the week.
“When you’re 21 years old, you’re not a 14 year old kid anymore, you’re a young lady or a young man, and you’re on your own and you have to take responsibility for your own actions,” says Cyr. “Before you even get downtown, take responsibility, and realize binge drinking is not the thing.”
Opportunity
Apr.27.2010
Learning to recognize a good opportunity is vital to leading an interesting and pleasant life. Hell, being able to recognize a bad opportunity is also useful, but if there’s anything that can be said about opportunities it’s that they are everywhere—you just need to see them when they present themselves and react quickly.
Yet so many people miss their chance, and the opportunity fades way like water vapor into air. And while they might dwell or regret missing out, more will come along as each day is an opportunity sub-divided into multiple opportunities.
For Chris Burns at Burlington Electric, recognizing an opportunity to ask a building owner to make their property more energy efficient has profound effects. It can save tax payers and the city of Burlington money and resources. But if Chris wasn’t proactive, he’d probably be out of a job as his position requires him to be an opportunist.
Too many people consume more energy than necessary and as we’ve seen, energy consumption, or overconsumption, can have devastating consequences. Thanks to energy efficiency ordinances, whenever a property owner renovates their building they have to bring whatever they are renovating up to code. It’s in these moments when Chris seizes the opportunity to talk about how to make the rest of the property energy efficient, and while he mentions renewables like solar and wind are sexy, the cost-effectiveness of energy efficiency often helps property owners realize the opportunity they have to save money and resources.
In Mark Nastasi’s case, capitalizing on opportunities is essential to his survival. If this were the 50s, Mark would be considered a tramp, but given how outdated that sounds, he’s more of a traveler, bouncing from place to place exploring the world in order to better understand life.
His beard is full and his hair unkempt. He makes most of his money “busking” or performing music on the street. But as far as finding places to sleep outside his Jeep, he must have a keen eye in regards to meeting people who can put him up. However, the greatest evidence of Mark’s inner-opportunist is when he met a guy from Arizona at a party in New York. When the man offered Mark a place to stay, Mark set out for Arizona because that opportunity created another opportunity, which was being reunited with his father, who left Mark when he was 3.
As far as my own life is concerned, seeing opportunities and taking advantage of them is big reason why I’ve had plenty of fun and been able to experience so much. What I noticed most is that seizing an opportunity requires the suspension of fear or doubt because most opportunities involve taking some kind of risk. The risk might be small like personal embarrassment, but once you overcome that fear it’s easier to overcome bigger ones like financial or physical risk.
After all, any opportunity is a moment to break the monotony that many people get trapped by. A routine might be safe, but prolonged monotony leads to boredom and boredom is dangerous to the psyche. What it really comes down to, in regards to opportunities, is the willingness to avoid the known safety of your current routine and venture off into the unknown in search of something more.
Yes, the opportunist is not just a risk-taker, but someone who is deeply curious by nature. If they weren’t then there would be no reason to explore the possibilities of an opportunity that came their way. A non-curious person simply wouldn’t care about the end result because they know by not acting, nothing will change. And if they’ve grown content or complacent with the current state of things, the prospect of change isn’t something they are interested in.
Opportunities are vehicles of change or progression, and left unseized, life goes on as is. There is a reason many successful people also happen to be opportunists because they are constantly looking for ways to move forward, to enhance their situation, and even once success is achieved, they don’t stop taking advantage of all the opportunities life throws their way.
And the best part is that opportunities lead to more opportunities. When one is presented and seized upon, the opportunist creates more opportunity for themselves. In a way, it’s kind of like walking: it starts with one step forward, followed by another and another, and before you know it you’re somewhere new. However, if you never take that first step, you’ll go nowhere and life will remain stagnant. Given the nature of life, a progression from birth to death, merely existing is contrary to everything life stands for, which is the progression from one point to another.
As the Chinese say, ““The Gods cannot help those who do not seize opportunities.” Whether you believe in God or Gods, this is as true today as it was when it was written hundreds of years ago. Missed opportunities are essentially wasted moments in life. After all, a life worth living is one where each opportunity is greeted by the willingness to grab on and see where it goes.
Curious Mark
Apr.27.2008
On a Thursday day night in February, Mark Nastasi carried a cup of jelly beans through Nectars in downtown Burlington, offering a handful to whoever was willing to accept. Most refused, paranoid about the bearded man with unkempt long hair, who was dressed in a tan duster jacket with a military vest over it that had a Grateful Dead patch on the back.
He looked like a shellshocked vet, trapped in the misery of war—flashbacks of friends’ deaths haunting him—but once you talk to him you’re surprised. He’s coherent, he’s not crazy by any conventional standards—but he’s different.
“On some nights—the bad nights when I don’t make much playing music—I’ll just take the change I make and buy the jelly bean thing out and give them to people,” he said.
Mark ended up in Burlington after hearing that a friend knew a glass blower in the area. Ever since he was a kid, Mark had this affinity for glass work.
“You’re taking particles of sand and you’re turning them into this complex and complete object,” Mark said.
This fascination with the idea of taking scattered pieces of matter (such as sand) and melting them together to create one unified piece could stem from a childhood that was anything but cohesive.
As Mark tells it, when he was 3 his mother cheated on his father with a mafia-connected mechanic. The act prompted Mark’s dad, Joseph Eugene Nastasi (also a mechanic), to leave and cut ties with his family.
Mark spent his childhood living without ever knowing his father, and the man who had the affair with his mother became Mark’s step-dad.
“It went straight from my father to being with my stepfather. From the age of 3 years old to just about 12 years old we were living with him. He’s my younger sister’s and my younger brother’s father.”
But Mark remembers his stepfather as an abusive alcoholic, who would come home drunk and beat him, his mother, and his siblings.
This childhood abuse would effectively deny Mark a normal childhood as it robbed him of the innocence and naiveté many children have—traits that shield them from the unpleasant realities that adults know all too well.
For Mark those realities were known from a very young age. “My mother left me to myself because I was independent—she knew I could take care of myself.”
However, being forced to be self-reliant from such a young age created all types of stress for Mark, and he admits the first time he ever felt happy as a kid was when he smoked pot for the first time at age 15. It temporarily removed the fear and hopelessness that he was constantly living with as a result of his familial situation. Mark also mentions that kids at school treated him as an outcast because his way of thinking and operating was not the same as theirs. After all, most of the kids who went to school with him didn’t have to deal with the chaotic home-life that was the norm for Mark.
Talking about his stepfather, Mark said the following. “I despised the man. There was very little about my childhood that was good because of him, and the only parts of it that were good because of him were because we had money growing up. He was a mechanic , and plus, he had his fingers in mob business, so we had money coming in all the time.”
Mark explained the various hardships of his youth. At age 11, he was diagnosed with depression and institutionalized after trying to strangle himself with a lanyard. At 17, he left home and went off by himself. By 19, he was institutionalized for roughly 4 days after being picked up by the police because he was walking around trying to get hit by cars.
It was around New Years Eve 2005 when Mark was in Oneonta, New York. He was there because he was on probation and couldn’t go anywhere. He had just got out of jail for stealing a steel pipe, a night he called an “eye-opener” and a “stupid story for another time.” Nevertheless, he knew he couldn’t be in Oneonta anymore and had decided to leave.
“I couldn’t stay in New York anymore. I kept getting in trouble,” said Mark. “I was having problems with trying to find a place to stay and work. The same kind of troubles that plague me a lot of the time, but I was going to be 21 soon, and 18 years without knowing my father—without ever having spoke to the man—I was getting sick of it: having to go on what everybody else had told me about him.”
While partying with friends on New Year’s Eve, Mark said he met a guy from Flagstaff, Arizona, whose name he doesn’t recall.
“I’m so horrible with names, and it was 5 years ago. I meet so many people, you know?”
According to Mark, the guy from Arizona offered to put him up for a few days after hearing that Mark was trying to head out to Arizona to find his dad.
“I knew my dad was in Arizona, but I didn’t know exactly where,” Mark says. “My mom told me a few times that was the last place she knew he had been.”
Mark decided to break his probation on New Year’s Day and hitchhike west in order to finally meet the man, who’s genetically responsible for his existence, but never actually made an impact on his life besides not being in it—an impact that might have been more severe and life changing than if he hadn’t left and raised Mark instead.
“It took 28 days to get there,” Mark says. “A lot of rides, a lot of zig-zagging around, a lot of stay over a night here and over a night there, a lot of sleeping in tractor trailers with truckers.”
Once in Arizona, he got together with the guy he met in Oneonta, who offered him a place to crash.
“I was in Flagstaff chilling with that guy, he took me to a party, I met some girl at the party, hung out with her for a couples days—her name was Daisy, she was awesome—really nice girl.”
After hanging in Flagstaff for awhile, Mark said the same guy he met in Oneonta introduced him to other people who were also wandering around. From there, Mark happened to find his way to a drop-in center for the homeless. The center serves as a resource for homeless people and other transients, providing them with information on local shelters and social service programs.
“At the drop-in center, they had a poster board up and on the poster board was the information for a halfway house,” Mark said. “I called the lady and she told me it was $90 a week.”
At the time, Mark said he was working as a day laborer—essentially odd jobbing for whoever could pay him that day—and figured if he kept it up he could pay the $90 a week. However, after telling the lady at the halfway house (whose name he can’t remember) that his sole reason for being in Arizona was to find his father, she told him she used to be a foster parent and would help him out.
“All I had was his name and his birthday—not much at all,” said Mark. “She was able to find his phone number, and give him a call. She called him and told him I was there so it wouldn’t be so awkward me just showing up on his door step. Which is kind of what I wanted to do, but at the same time it might have been a different situation if that is what happened.”
Instead of ambushing his estranged father, Mark said his father picked him up in Flagstaff. They spent the day together, first getting breakfast, but mostly driving around and talking. His dad eventually asked him to stay with him, and Mark took his dad up on the offer.
“It took some time before we could actually have discussions about why things were the way they were,” says Mark. “And still, I think there’s a lot left to be said, but nobody wants to talk about it.”
Mark admits it didn’t take long for his dad, Joseph, to figure out Mark was using drugs—mostly pot.
“It was pretty obvious,” Mark said.
He attributed a lot of the early issues and conflicts his father and him had to Joseph’s opposition to the lifestyle he was living.
“My drug of choice is pot, and it’s not that big of a deal in my opinion, but it was a huge deal to him because it’s illegal still. And I had the cops looking for me for leaving New York to go to Arizona. He wasn’t about that—and other things as well—because he doesn’t do anything illegal anymore because he’s had his run-ins with the law and doesn’t need that kind of attention.”
However, the monotonous routine that Mark felt his dad was living wasn’t what he expected or wanted. For the then 21 year old, he wanted to be going out to parties or bars—not to drink since Mark doesn’t really care for alcohol—but his father was never up for it, hindered by his own bank account.
“My dad’s always very much about saying, ‘We don’t have the money for things like that,’ and I’m the kind of person who believes you don’t need money to have a good time.”
According to Mark, it was this difference of opinion that created tension between him and his father. Mark was expecting to bond with his father, but sitting in his apartment watching movies as he unwound after a day of work wasn’t what Mark had wanted.
“My father’s not a very social person,” he said. “That’s part of the reason we have such a hard time communicating. My father’s really just angry about a lot of things.”
Mark recalls the day he met another tenant at the apartment complex his dad was staying in. They got talking, both realized they liked smoking weed, and became friends.
A little bit later in their friendship, Mark learned the kid also was a user of crystal meth. In fact, most of the apartment complex had plenty of tweaked out residents.
“We were living in an apartment complex where a lot of the kids in there used that shit—a lot of people in Arizona, in general, use that shit.”
Mark said he eventually tried meth, and consequently, became addicted to it. His reasoning for doing it was because the kid, who introduced it to him, seemed fine. Mark said he didn’t seem like someone whose life was in shambles, but in hindsight, Mark realized how stupid the drug is.
Once his dad found out, Mark was asked to leave. He headed out to San Diego, where he slept on the beach for what he feels was 3 months. The problem, according to Mark, was that he had cleaned up and got off meth before heading to California, but it didn’t take long before he met people who used the drug.
“That drug makes you lose connection with time and reality,” Mark says. “It’s a very dissociative drug. It makes you not yourself, and there were times where I wasn’t sure if I was living on the beach for 3 months doing that shit or only a month. I’m pretty sure the span was 3 months, but there’s times when I was awake for 4 or 5 days on end with zero sleep, 150 plus hours zero sleep, delusional—completely out of my mind, not sure if I’m even part of reality or if I’m just the manifestation of somebody’s thoughts—like really crazy, tripped out ideas.”
The breaking point came when Mark said he almost hit a guy with a shovel after being severely tweaked out for a few days. What caused Mark to snap was the theft of all his belongings—the loss of everything he had. Only one person, Mark says, had known where his things were stashed, and when Mark saw him he grabbed a shovel and charged him before being subdued by his friend.
“I snapped out of it and was like, ‘Get me out of here.’ I started crying, and I’m like ‘I’m tweaked—I am a spun fucking duck,’” Mark said. “Over material possessions, too, and I try not to hold myself too much to material possessions because you don’t take anything when you transcend.”
He had to get as far away from meth as possible, and that’s what he did.
At first, he said he tried to joined the military, but when he told the recruiter about being institutionalized, he was turned away. Mark said he returned to Arizona, clean and sober, and took a job at a car wash. He was living with his dad again, but as Mark put it, all the car wash employees smoked pot, which led Mark back to his weed habit. And just ass before, tensions grew between him and his father.
“What it boils down to with me and my father having so many problems is the whole money thing. He obsesses about not having the money to go out and have fun, and that I shouldn’t be smoking pot.”
So Mark said he picked up and returned to California; this time to Fresno. While in Fresno he learned of the inheritance check his grandma had left him when she passed, which had been sitting and building interest. Mark returned to New York to get his birth certificate in order to claim the check for $176,000.
“I lived off that for a few years in New York,” he said. “None of it’s left. I loaned some people some money. I gave my mom $10,000. The girl I was with for awhile, I bought her a car. I bought the Jeep I have now…I bought a lot of pipes since I have this obsession with glass.”
In fact, the last of the inheritance money went to glass blowing classes at the Bern Gallery in Burlington, where Mark continues to crash in his car or on people’s couches. While he has returned to visit his dad in between, he’s not sure if they’ll ever have the kind of relationship he imagined they would.
“He took care of me the best he could, but it was kind of too late for him to be my dad. At the same time, he probably felt like it was his right to be my dad. And that’s another issue. You gotta remember, if you’re meeting your parents for the first time after a long period of time, they will still feel like they’re your parents and that they can tell you what you can do.”
It was that possibly instinctive paternal response, which made it hard for Mark to connect with his dad. In regards to forgiving his dad, he had the following to say.
“A lot of people told me a lot of bad things about my father for a long time, and I wanted to believe they weren’t true. But don’t do that to yourself. Don’t have false expectations,” he says. “I have more negative feelings towards my mom than I do my father. Because my mom cheated on my father. Maybe that’s why he’s so angry.”
One thing about Mark, which is surprising—given his past—is how positive he is about the future.
“I think it’s every generation’s job to break the negative cycle, and my negative cycle is that I didn’t have my father growing up. So if I ever have kids I’ll never leave them. I’ll raise those kids to be better than I am.”
Mark also offers the following advice for those in a similar situation to his.
“If I could give anything to any person like me, where you have no connection with your father or haven’t for a very long time, try to have a very open mind about the situation. Try to see things from their point of view…I can sit back and look at the situation from when my father told me what happened the day he left and understand why things happened the way they did.”
But for now, Mark is enjoying his time in Burlington, Vermont.
“I love this place,” he says. “I think this is where I want to settle down.”
Mark said he recently met a man, who is letting him stay in a cabin about an hour and a half outside of Burlington. He continues to take glass blowing classes, and is proud to have finally made a piece he can smoke out of. For now, Mark is attempting to take the pieces of a shattered and scattered life and create something whole out of them.
“I know I was meant to do something great with my life cause I wouldn’t still be here if I wasn’t,” he says. “After all the crazy things I’ve been through.”
What that is he still doesn’t know, but his attitude is one focused on being better than the people who shaped his adolescence. His generosity and willingness to talk to anyone has made him a fairly well known fixture on Main St. in only about 2 months, but there are times, he says, that he feels the same hopelessness and anger he felt as a kid.
“I just have to remember that only hurts me,” Mark says. “I have to remind myself not to be anything like the people who made me feel that way—I have to keep positive.”
Curious Mark
Apr.27.2008
On a Thursday day night in February, Mark Nastasi carried a cup of jelly beans through Nectars in downtown Burlington, offering a handful to whoever was willing to accept. Most refused, paranoid about the bearded man with unkempt long hair, who was dressed in a tan duster jacket with a military vest over it that had a Grateful Dead patch on the back.
He looked like a shellshocked vet, trapped in the misery of war—flashbacks of friends’ deaths haunting him—but once you talk to him you’re surprised. He’s coherent, he’s not crazy by any conventional standards—but he’s different.
“On some nights—the bad nights when I don’t make much playing music—I’ll just take the change I make and buy the jelly bean thing out and give them to people,” he said.
Mark ended up in Burlington after hearing that a friend knew a glass blower in the area. Ever since he was a kid, Mark had this affinity for glass work.
“You’re taking particles of sand and you’re turning them into this complex and complete object,” Mark said.
This fascination with the idea of taking scattered pieces of matter (such as sand) and melting them together to create one unified piece could stem from a childhood that was anything but cohesive.
As Mark tells it, when he was 3 his mother cheated on his father with a mafia-connected mechanic. The act prompted Mark’s dad, Joseph Eugene Nastasi (also a mechanic), to leave and cut ties with his family.
Mark spent his childhood living without ever knowing his father, and the man who had the affair with his mother became Mark’s step-dad.
“It went straight from my father to being with my stepfather. From the age of 3 years old to just about 12 years old we were living with him. He’s my younger sister’s and my younger brother’s father.”
But Mark remembers his stepfather as an abusive alcoholic, who would come home drunk and beat him, his mother, and his siblings.
This childhood abuse would effectively deny Mark a normal childhood as it robbed him of the innocence and naiveté many children have—traits that shield them from the unpleasant realities that adults know all too well.
For Mark those realities were known from a very young age. “My mother left me to myself because I was independent—she knew I could take care of myself.”
However, being forced to be self-reliant from such a young age created all types of stress for Mark, and he admits the first time he ever felt happy as a kid was when he smoked pot for the first time at age 15. It temporarily removed the fear and hopelessness that he was constantly living with as a result of his familial situation. Mark also mentions that kids at school treated him as an outcast because his way of thinking and operating was not the same as theirs. After all, most of the kids who went to school with him didn’t have to deal with the chaotic home-life that was the norm for Mark.
Talking about his stepfather, Mark said the following. “I despised the man. There was very little about my childhood that was good because of him, and the only parts of it that were good because of him were because we had money growing up. He was a mechanic , and plus, he had his fingers in mob business, so we had money coming in all the time.”
Mark explained the various hardships of his youth. At age 11, he was diagnosed with depression and institutionalized after trying to strangle himself with a lanyard. At 17, he left home and went off by himself. By 19, he was institutionalized for roughly 4 days after being picked up by the police because he was walking around trying to get hit by cars.
It was around New Years Eve 2005 when Mark was in Oneonta, New York. He was there because he was on probation and couldn’t go anywhere. He had just got out of jail for stealing a steel pipe, a night he called an “eye-opener” and a “stupid story for another time.” Nevertheless, he knew he couldn’t be in Oneonta anymore and had decided to leave.
“I couldn’t stay in New York anymore. I kept getting in trouble,” said Mark. “I was having problems with trying to find a place to stay and work. The same kind of troubles that plague me a lot of the time, but I was going to be 21 soon, and 18 years without knowing my father—without ever having spoke to the man—I was getting sick of it: having to go on what everybody else had told me about him.”
***
While partying with friends on New Year’s Eve, Mark said he met a guy from Flagstaff, Arizona, whose name he doesn’t recall.
“I’m so horrible with names, and it was 5 years ago. I meet so many people, you know?”
According to Mark, the guy from Arizona offered to put him up for a few days after hearing that Mark was trying to head out to Arizona to find his dad.
“I knew my dad was in Arizona, but I didn’t know exactly where,” Mark says. “My mom told me a few times that was the last place she knew he had been.”
Mark decided to break his probation on New Year’s Day and hitchhike west in order to finally meet the man, who’s genetically responsible for his existence, but never actually made an impact on his life besides not being in it—an impact that might have been more severe and life changing than if he hadn’t left and raised Mark instead.
“It took 28 days to get there,” Mark says. “A lot of rides, a lot of zig-zagging around, a lot of stay over a night here and over a night there, a lot of sleeping in tractor trailers with truckers.”
Once in Arizona, he got together with the guy he met in Oneonta, who offered him a place to crash.
“I was in Flagstaff chilling with that guy, he took me to a party, I met some girl at the party, hung out with her for a couples days—her name was Daisy, she was awesome—really nice girl.”
After hanging in Flagstaff for awhile, Mark said the same guy he met in Oneonta introduced him to other people who were also wandering around. From there, Mark happened to find his way to a drop-in center for the homeless. The center serves as a resource for homeless people and other transients, providing them with information on local shelters and social service programs.
“At the drop-in center, they had a poster board up and on the poster board was the information for a halfway house,” Mark said. “I called the lady and she told me it was $90 a week.”
At the time, Mark said he was working as a day laborer—essentially odd jobbing for whoever could pay him that day—and figured if he kept it up he could pay the $90 a week. However, after telling the lady at the halfway house (whose name he can’t remember) that his sole reason for being in Arizona was to find his father, she told him she used to be a foster parent and would help him out.
“All I had was his name and his birthday—not much at all,” said Mark. “She was able to find his phone number, and give him a call. She called him and told him I was there so it wouldn’t be so awkward me just showing up on his door step. Which is kind of what I wanted to do, but at the same time it might have been a different situation if that is what happened.”
***
Instead of ambushing his estranged father, Mark said his father picked him up in Flagstaff. They spent the day together, first getting breakfast, but mostly driving around and talking. His dad eventually asked him to stay with him, and Mark took his dad up on the offer.
“It took some time before we could actually have discussions about why things were the way they were,” says Mark. “And still, I think there’s a lot left to be said, but nobody wants to talk about it.”
Mark admits it didn’t take long for his dad, Joseph, to figure out Mark was using drugs—mostly pot.
“It was pretty obvious,” Mark said.
He attributed a lot of the early issues and conflicts his father and him had to Joseph’s opposition to the lifestyle he was living.
“My drug of choice is pot, and it’s not that big of a deal in my opinion, but it was a huge deal to him because it’s illegal still. And I had the cops looking for me for leaving New York to go to Arizona. He wasn’t about that—and other things as well—because he doesn’t do anything illegal anymore because he’s had his run-ins with the law and doesn’t need that kind of attention.”
However, the monotonous routine that Mark felt his dad was living wasn’t what he expected or wanted. For the then 21 year old, he wanted to be going out to parties or bars—not to drink since Mark doesn’t really care for alcohol—but his father was never up for it, hindered by his own bank account.
“My dad’s always very much about saying, ‘We don’t have the money for things like that,’ and I’m the kind of person who believes you don’t need money to have a good time.”
According to Mark, it was this difference of opinion that created tension between him and his father. Mark was expecting to bond with his father, but sitting in his apartment watching movies as he unwound after a day of work wasn’t what Mark had wanted.
“My father’s not a very social person,” he said. “That’s part of the reason we have such a hard time communicating. My father’s really just angry about a lot of things.”
***
Mark recalls the day he met another tenant at the apartment complex his dad was staying in. They got talking, both realized they liked smoking weed, and became friends.
A little bit later in their friendship, Mark learned the kid also was a user of crystal meth. In fact, most of the apartment complex had plenty of tweaked out residents.
“We were living in an apartment complex where a lot of the kids in there used that shit—a lot of people in Arizona, in general, use that shit.”
Mark said he eventually tried meth, and consequently, became addicted to it. His reasoning for doing it was because the kid, who introduced it to him, seemed fine. Mark said he didn’t seem like someone whose life was in shambles, but in hindsight, Mark realized how stupid the drug is.
Once his dad found out, Mark was asked to leave. He headed out to San Diego, where he slept on the beach for what he feels was 3 months. The problem, according to Mark, was that he had cleaned up and got off meth before heading to California, but it didn’t take long before he met people who used the drug.
“That drug makes you lose connection with time and reality,” Mark says. “It’s a very dissociative drug. It makes you not yourself, and there were times where I wasn’t sure if I was living on the beach for 3 months doing that shit or only a month. I’m pretty sure the span was 3 months, but there’s times when I was awake for 4 or 5 days on end with zero sleep, 150 plus hours zero sleep, delusional—completely out of my mind, not sure if I’m even part of reality or if I’m just the manifestation of somebody’s thoughts—like really crazy, tripped out ideas.”
The breaking point came when Mark said he almost hit a guy with a shovel after being severely tweaked out for a few days. What caused Mark to snap was the theft of all his belongings—the loss of everything he had. Only one person, Mark says, had known where his things were stashed, and when Mark saw him he grabbed a shovel and charged him before being subdued by his friend.
“I snapped out of it and was like, ‘Get me out of here.’ I started crying, and I’m like ‘I’m tweaked—I am a spun fucking duck,’” Mark said. “Over material possessions, too, and I try not to hold myself too much to material possessions because you don’t take anything when you transcend.”
He had to get as far away from meth as possible, and that’s what he did.
At first, he said he tried to joined the military, but when he told the recruiter about being institutionalized, he was turned away. Mark said he returned to Arizona, clean and sober, and took a job at a car wash. He was living with his dad again, but as Mark put it, all the car wash employees smoked pot, which led Mark back to his weed habit. And just ass before, tensions grew between him and his father.
“What it boils down to with me and my father having so many problems is the whole money thing. He obsesses about not having the money to go out and have fun, and that I shouldn’t be smoking pot.”
So Mark said he picked up and returned to California; this time to Fresno. While in Fresno he learned of the inheritance check his grandma had left him when she passed, which had been sitting and building interest. Mark returned to New York to get his birth certificate in order to claim the check for $176,000.
“I lived off that for a few years in New York,” he said. “None of it’s left. I loaned some people some money. I gave my mom $10,000. The girl I was with for awhile, I bought her a car. I bought the Jeep I have now…I bought a lot of pipes since I have this obsession with glass.”
In fact, the last of the inheritance money went to glass blowing classes at the Bern Gallery in Burlington, where Mark continues to crash in his car or on people’s couches. While he has returned to visit his dad in between, he’s not sure if they’ll ever have the kind of relationship he imagined they would.
“He took care of me the best he could, but it was kind of too late for him to be my dad. At the same time, he probably felt like it was his right to be my dad. And that’s another issue. You gotta remember, if you’re meeting your parents for the first time after a long period of time, they will still feel like they’re your parents and that they can tell you what you can do.”
It was that possibly instinctive paternal response, which made it hard for Mark to connect with his dad. In regards to forgiving his dad, he had the following to say.
“A lot of people told me a lot of bad things about my father for a long time, and I wanted to believe they weren’t true. But don’t do that to yourself. Don’t have false expectations,” he says. “I have more negative feelings towards my mom than I do my father. Because my mom cheated on my father. Maybe that’s why he’s so angry.”
One thing about Mark, which is surprising—given his past—is how positive he is about the future.
“I think it’s every generation’s job to break the negative cycle, and my negative cycle is that I didn’t have my father growing up. So if I ever have kids I’ll never leave them. I’ll raise those kids to be better than I am.”
Mark also offers the following advice for those in a similar situation to his.
“If I could give anything to any person like me, where you have no connection with your father or haven’t for a very long time, try to have a very open mind about the situation. Try to see things from their point of view…I can sit back and look at the situation from when my father told me what happened the day he left and understand why things happened the way they did.”
But for now, Mark is enjoying his time in Burlington, Vermont.
“I love this place,” he says. “I think this is where I want to settle down.”
Mark said he recently met a man, who is letting him stay in a cabin about an hour and a half outside of Burlington. He continues to take glass blowing classes, and is proud to have finally made a piece he can smoke out of. For now, Mark is attempting to take the pieces of a shattered and scattered life and create something whole out of them.
“I know I was meant to do something great with my life cause I wouldn’t still be here if I wasn’t,” he says. “After all the crazy things I’ve been through.”
What that is he still doesn’t know, but his attitude is one focused on being better than the people who shaped his adolescence. His generosity and willingness to talk to anyone has made him a fairly well known fixture on Main St. in only about 2 months, but there are times, he says, that he feels the same hopelessness and anger he felt as a kid.
“I just have to remember that only hurts me,” Mark says. “I have to remind myself not to be anything like the people who made me feel that way—I have to keep positive.”
