Ochlocracy in Action

Tidelock

2012-01-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

As much fun as 2004 and 2008 were for me as a blogger, I didn't really want to get sucked into the election cycle this year. It's my last pre-40 presidential election and I feel like I've already started to lose some of the zip on the ole fastball, if you know what I mean. My sexual inadequacies aside, I'm also not quite as violently moved by politics as I was when I was newly-to-mid-30s. If you live your life correctly, as you get older, the world should get bigger, not smaller. More complicated, not simplified. Less Manichean, more nuanced. The monochrome of surety disintegrated by the Technicolor explosion pushing out the borders of a universe-widening perspective.

Does it help that the president is not only a guy from what I used to think of as "my team," but a black guy as well? It doesn't hurt, I'll say that. If a country founded on slavery can elect a (half-)black president, then look, maybe the whole system isn't fundamentally and inherently broken. Seeing a surprising and welcome result takes some of the sting out of the arguments for Unrelenting Partisan Bloodletting And Armageddon at the turn of every quadrennial. The System whirred and coughed and gurgled and smoked and belched out this aberration. It took me a while to get my head around it, sure, but I looked as closely as I could and nope, that's not soot from The Machine all over him, he really does look like that. The lines demarcating accident, statistical improbability and miracle got a little fuzzy for me.

None of this makes me a conservative; don't misunderstand. This is not me making the predictable rightward drift as I wax elder and accumulate more shit I don't want the government putting their grubby meathooks on. I still enjoy a good meathooking time and again, I honestly do. I just have less vinegary vim colicking up my vital organs. Plus there's way more good TV to get to than there was in the late, unlamented Aughts. Manning the barricades or Mad Men? A guy has to learn to prioritize.

All of this is by way of semi-apology. Because as much as I don't want to get bogged down in the shoe-swallowing Okefenokee of early-contest primary season, here I am with my second consecutive weekly post about Newt Gingrich. Well, not yet, but here comes:

How am I supposed to ignore a guy fighting for his political life who stops to give a serious policy speech in the days ahead of a make-or-break primary about (and this is absolutely with a straight face) moon colonization?

I'm trying to mind my own business, I really am. There's plenty else I could have written about. It's the Super Bowl lull, we've got Navy SEALs killing Somali pirates, the Oscar nominations came out, I've got this pain in my ribcage that is either a slightly pulled muscle or avian flu and yet I can't not talk about Newt Disney's Mission to Luna Base 1. It's frustrating to me.

I really want to ignore it. I do. All the moreso because it's such an obvious pander to a crowd in an area from which space shuttles are no longer launched, kept or maintained. It's him saying "You know who you gonna vote for yet? Nah, don't tell me, let it be a surprise. Oh hey, not for nothin', I found $100 billion laying on the sidewalk over there. Did you drop this? I think you dropped this."

I also don't imagine it's much of a coincidence that this magically ridiculous pivot point plants itself in the ground when a lot of the national political mindspace has been commandeered by the open marriage fooferaw from last week and other shit like Bob Dole calling Newt a corrupt, friendless, unendearing fucktard.

The moon thing is a technique with the deceptively straightforward name "misdirection," a staple of magicians, thieves and parents of toddlers in restaurants. It's an attempt to accomplish an undertaking by subterfuge by employing a distraction. The unsaid act of distraction is always "Look at the shiny thing!" such as the flourish of a wand (magicians), the rapid shuffling of three ordinary-looking playing cards (thieves) or a rag lovingly sprinkled with diethyl ether (parents). I think it speaks to the hubris of the man when he tries the same trick on an audience of tens of millions using the second biggest, shiniest thing we have readily available to us, our one and only natural satellite.

I started this post with the intention of venting my outrage, but the farther I get, it's hard not to be a little impressed.

I told you I was getting old.

The Three-Way Freeway

2012-01-19T21:17:00.000-08:00

I'm getting a little tired of tsking and shaking my head. I've practically got repetitive stress injuries to my tongue and neck at this point. It's always the same story, over and over again: some politician screaming family values and marriage-is-the-fabric-of-all-civil-society ends up being either a serial adulturer or wearing out their own tongues and necks working on rentboys during a "fact-finding tour" to the exotic faraway land of My Wife's At Work.

Here we are again hearing about how GOP sometime-frontrunner, the short-of-breath and probably sweaty Newt Gingrich, the self-proclaimed last bulwark between decent folks and earthy, rapine, Clintonian hippie relativism, wanted to install a swinging door across the gateway in the castle of Heteronormative Monogamy at the end of his marriage to his second(!) wife.*

Out of pure reflex, I shake my head, I tsk once or twice... I wince, but the linament helps. Rest assured, I'm thinking what you're thinking. Your questions are my questions, first and foremost amongst which is obviously this: how the fuck does a guy who looks like Newt Gingrich pull chicks?

He's on his third wife. That's three. Three times he's convinced a different, separate woman to have regular sex with him. I know women aren't supposed to be driven by looks alone, but come on. I've done enough online dating to know that that position is a) mostly bullshit and b) has its limits. The weight women give to looks is lower than what men give, certainly, but speaking of weight, my God. We're talking about a scenario of not just multiple but competitive offers for a companianate sexual relationship with a guy who is built exactly like a matryoshka doll. But with white hair. And a speaking voice like a dropped tray in a restaurant. There were times, ladies and gentlemen, after my divorce when I was alone. By myself. Undesired by anyone, let alone multiples. And I work out. What could possibly be going on?

I know power is the ultimate aphrodisiac or whatever, but how much power are we talking about really? He was in Congress. And not even the Senate, the fucking House of Representatives. Know who else was in the House of Representatives? Gopher off of Love Boat. Yes, a U.S. representative job gets you exactly as much pull as the third co-lead in an ensemble anthology series from the 1970s.

And yeah, he was the Speaker of the House, but that's like being the fastest guy at the wheelchair Olympics. Win by as much as you want, but at the end of the day, all you're left with is the deepest wish that you were overqualified to compete.

There's only one other option. The late, lamented Christopher Hitchens said "An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further."

Maybe that's it. Maybe beneath the petulant, droning, scoldish school-marm with an eschatology fixation lies a sly, winking bandier of bon mots and purveyor of polished wit, delivering droll seduction with the kind of James-Bondian élan that induces women to make liars of their eyes and stills the hands scrabbling in the dark for something blunt and heavy to drive that giant red face away for just long enough...

But no, nope, can't do it. My ability to suspend disbelief on that front has been ruined forever by the occasion of hearing anything the man has ever had to say.

But you know, what do I know? And I'm relying on Hitchens, the drunk atheist so devoted to contrarianism he even now refuses even to be alive. Maybe what chicks really respond to is a kind of cynical, forced earnestness informed by opportunism, small ambition and a desire to dominate a conversation with volume (loudness) and volume (amounts of words) when we lack the capacity or even interest to listen. Who am I to argue really? It's not only working on his wife(ves), it's working on a whole mess of ladies in South Carolina at the moment. And probably more than a few dudes, if my understanding of polling practices is what I think it is.

I can argue if I want, but how many presidential primaries have I ever won? Well, I guess at the moment, exactly as many as Newt Gingrich has. But that could change soon. Then I'll re-evaluate.

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*Not the cancer one, the one after that.

Homeorotica

2012-01-12T22:45:00.000-08:00

I'll come right out and say I'm 100% against child suicide. I know it's an election year and people tend to be a little bit more cagey about their positions on social issues as part of the long tradition of American political rationalism and circumspection, but fuck it, I don't care: I hate child suicide. I said it. I'll own it. If anyone asks you "Hey, did that guy on that blog really say that?" you don't just say "Fuck yeah, he did!" you do them some small bit of physical discomfort and you walk away. You don't have to punch them or anything, maybe just flick an earlobe or encroach a little too much on their personal space to where they feel the impulse to back up just a tad. The point has to be emphasized. I'm counting on you.

Also: love gay people. Love 'em. Not literally of course. And never physically. But mostly as an idea, you know? In person they creep me out a little, naturally, but dang, do they liven up a People magazine.

I get that there needs to be an effort to mitigate the social strain of gayness in an overwhelmingly heteronormative world. It's why we have the It Gets Better project, an idea long overdue according to people like myself in whom, as I've already illustrated, the positions of anti-child-suicide and pro-gayness neatly dovetail.

But the thing is, I'm thinking... does everyone need to contribute? I mean, doesn't it kind of water down the message if just ANYone makes a video about their post-bullying life? If Ellen DeGeneres makes a video about what you get for toughing your way through the difficult, punishing years of adolescence carrying the unforgivable burden of Identifiable Difference, that really means something. She's got a ton of money, a TV show, a giant house and a wife who is not only hot-ass, but ALSO a lesbian. All really long odds, but her life is all champagne in the VIP luxury box at the WNBA games. That's something worth living for.

Did we really need the help from Kristy McNichol, though? She just publicly came out, which is great for her, I guess, but where's the audience, really? Does anyone under 40 have a solid idea who this is? I'm 37 and the best I can put together is that she's the girl from the '70s who wasn't on Eight is Enough. From the article, there are two things we've learned about Kristy McNichol, namely that "she is very happy and healthy" [which is to say, not dead] and "enjoys living a very private life" [cannot convince anyone to pay her to be on television]. Again, I'm very pleased for her and her publicist who finally, FINALLY had something to do for a day, but come on, we're trying to save the lives of bullied gay teens here. We have to aim a little higher, I think.

She seems fine, but I don't know if we've come all the way down to the point where we break the glass and release Kristy McNichol on the movement as yet, do we? I understand that the point of any minority rights movement isn't to win for them the unalienable guarantee of perfect happiness for all eternity but to win the true equality that comes with the freedom to be publicly miserable like everyone else. But I just don't think we're there yet. It's an unfair disadvantage to put on the early adopters of gay marriage and gay... well, adoption, sure, but it's a strategic necessity to put up the Ellen DeGeneres face to prove to the hostile penis/vagina lawmakers that it's safe to treat them the way humans should expect to be treated because they'll buy houses and pay taxes and keep their lawns in reasonable states of repair.

All I'm saying is I think it's a little early in the game for Kristy McNichol. The danger is we'll get a backlash from the moderate right, who'll start listening to whisperings about the Gay Agenda. It's just part of their plot, they'll say, to keep gay people alive. They have to, you know, because they can't breed. And they're doing it by co-opting OUR internets, the same ones we use to watch wholesome straight, man-on-woman-and-another-woman porn, centered around the thrusting, delving and ejaculatory antics of enormous cocks. In the marriage-bolstering manner we procreators enjoy.

Of course Kristy McNichol doesn't need my permission to be gay in public. I'm just saying maybe do the responsible thing and boost your IMDb profile before you commit to it.

Tamaulipas, South of Decatur

2012-01-05T23:13:00.000-08:00

Given my political bent,* it would seem apparent that I would welcome any kind of socio-demographic change visited upon the red map swath from Georgia to Louisiana. Any stray bit of color to break up the albino thicket covering what I like to think of as America's Mons Pubis** should be more than welcome. Anything other than gray, of course.

But I don't know, I kind of like the South as it is. As a hack writer, the cosmopolitanization of the Deep South threatens my wellspring of lazy characterizations of stupid, backward, civilization-averse, anti-book, pro-Book, tight-ass, bigoted, churched-up people easily identifiable by their quaint dialectical phraseology, y'all. And it's not like if the South suddenly became Berkeley 1970 that my need for a go-to demographic is just going to go away. I'd just have to relocate it and I feel like we're already asking the Mormons to do too much.

So at first, I was worried when I heard that Mexicans were invading the South in alarming numbers and threatening to upend its centuries-long tradition as America's last genuinely racist cultural stronghold. I mean sure, we have bigots out here on the Left Coast as well, but we don't go out of our way to institutionalize it. Well, not as blatantly. It's in the police training, obviously, but just about anyone can eat at the diner counter.

I calmed down a bit when I remembered the population I was talking about: the kind of people who form organizations to celebrate the war they lost to defend slavery and won't drink iced tea without it being fortified with enough sugar to shrivel the average pancreas. These are not a far-sighted or forgiving people.

But I dug a little deeper and I saw this article about how Mayans used to live in Georgia and I thought: oh no.

With anti-immigration being one of the three solid planks holding up modern American conservatism,*** I think the door just swung wide open for la raza in el Belt de la Biblia. I mean, who are the immigrants now?

The root of conservatism is not really resistance to change, but an active call to restoring the imagined order of a past delicately constructed from judiciously selective memory. It is a seemingly contradictory reactionary impulse to total social revolution; a drive to re-implement a society based on structures that never were. And shit, the farther back the better, right? So if 1950s America is legitimate, Mesoamericans in Hotlanta a thousand-plus years ago must be just about unassailable. The horseshit-ness of it is always less of a deterrent and more of kind of totally the fucking point.

Plus, it's 2012. It's the Mayans' big year. And Southern Christianists eat all that eschatology up with a spoon. Is it still the Rapture if it was predicted on pre-Christian advanced math? It's all how you spin it. If you can sell the idea that the feathered serpent is just Jesus in drag, you don't have to apologize to anyone. Well, except maybe the transgender community, but let's be honest, they earned that from you a long, long time ago.

In the meantime, I guess all I can do is stand back and watch as the red is engorged with the influx, blushing to ever darker shades of crimson as it struggles against the gush of new life until it is tinged with an almost imperceptible hint of shimmering, vibrating purple.

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*slightly but noticeably left, becoming more pronounced depending on levels of arousal

**you know, the area just above our junk

***the other two are obviously anti-abortionism and I think bow hunting

Rimming the Galactic Equinox

2011-12-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

Nothing is more depressing than when, in this season of socially mandated false cheeriness, people are still po-faced and mopey, looking preoccupied and distracted. I guess I can't say that I blame them seeing as it's been what sociologists call "a shitty-ass couple of years" in a row now. Watching your children malnourish themselves into a good ole fashioned case of rickets makes it tougher to keep the chin up. It also makes it hard not to put your foot through your car stereo when the umpteenth radio commercial set to the tune of Carol of the Bells attacks. But you know, that urge has been there in up years as well. This is not a scientific study.

I thought it would be appropriate to give you something you could use this holiday season in exchange for your time and effort putting up with this barely-there blog as it limps along. I tried to think of the things you would need and, besides a fitting for your children's leg braces, I couldn't really come up with anything that met the criteria I developed.* Well, except one thing. And it's a pretty good thing. The best thing, maybe. The one thing the Christmas season is all about. No, not gluttony. No, not self-perpetuating material acquisition strictly for its own sake. No, not the persecution of the Jews.

It's joy, OK? Joy. Fuck. Why was that hard? Bunch of cynics, man.

I know you need joy. Did 2011 suck balls? You bet your ass it did. Unless a good ball-sucking is something you enjoy, in which case I've confused the metaphor. Replace it with something bad like loneliness or hepatitis C and we'll be on our way. We'll wait.

Good? Good. I thought I would point out what we have to look forward to in 2012 and why it will--must!--be an improvement on 2011.

1) None of you are the dictatorial leaders of Arab countries. I know you're not because I can see where my traffic comes from and none of the originating addresses seem particularly Syrian. Nobody had a worse 2011 than Arab dictators. Well, the Saudi royal family did OK, but they're the good guys, yes? Only the ones we (currently and retroactively) don't like, they got an ass full of grassroots twitterverse democra-fucking, am I right? Did anyone strap you to the hood of a car, drive you into a crowd which then anally violated you with a broom handle before beating you to death and displaying your dead body in a commercial refrigerator? Not everyone can say that. 2011 was better for you than you thought it was.

2) Olympic year! And not the shitty winter ones either where the only things to watch are figures skating and bobsledding, and let's be honest, we only watch either for the crashes. Nope, it's the summer games. In London! It's the magical quadrennial occurrence where the world comes together and pretends to give a shit about pole vaulting. When we find ourselves setting the alarm for 3 am on a workday so we can watch the live feed of the equestrian show-jumping qualifier round, we know things maybe aren't going as well as we'd like away from eventing, but at least we know, for those two weeks over the summer, we have the available option to distract ourselves with jingoism, displaced aggression and some world-class couch time.

3) Election year! Hell, that starts in just a few days. Picking a leader of the free world... what's more heady and engaging than that? Not only are we allowed to stand in awed horror and watch the Menagerie of Shame vie for the Republican nomination but, holy fuck, given the weight of the economy in presidential politics, one of those people is as likely as not going to be the President Elect by this time next year.

OK, the last example was a swing and a miss. Whatever good I might have done in points 1 and 2 was clearly negated by point 3. I clearly didn't think the implications all the way through.

But look, 2011 wasn't great, but we're all still here. Well, not you, Grandpa, but you can't smoke three packs a day forever, can you? Between me, Grandma and the Surgeon General, you can't say you weren't fucking warned. But the rest of us, we're still here. It seemed bad at the time, but in retrospect... yeah, OK, it almost looks a little worse. Bad years happen, but we persist. The trick is to maintain perspective. It's not like it's the end of the world.

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*1) Free; 2) Requiring little to no effort; and 3) Amenable to at least one dick joke in the course of explaining it.

Babytalk

2011-12-22T22:16:00.000-08:00

Just out of curiosity, I asked my kids if any of them knew why we celebrated Christmas. There was kind of a dead pause for a good three or four beats. The middle one thought the answer was "Presents?" Which I have to admit isn't 100% wrong, as far as I can tell. I live next to a mall.

The oldest one--the one who spent kindergarten through second grade in the loving arms and wandering hands of Roman Catholic primary education--put together that it was to do with the birth of the Baby Jesus.

At first I enjoyed the totality of the realization that children in this country can grow up engrossed by and in the iron grip of Christmas Anticipatory Disorder* and not inhale a single whiff of the incense supposedly burning way down at the bottom of the consumerist bonfire. I'm starting to think maybe the "Put Christ Back in Christmas!" people may actually be on to something. It's possibly that we have so thoroughly secularized the holiday that it has become alienated entirely from its beginnings.

This isn't a complaint, mind. Its beginnings include angel visitations, a virgin birth, magic stars and child murder. British people put these elements in plays acted by children for a reason. Espoused by adults, the suspension of disbelief required would be unattainable.

But I did feel a little bit bad. What I want most for my kids is, when they leave my home, for them to carry with them just as much sanctimony as they can cram into themselves. I want them to go out into the world looking directly down their noses at it. The hope is they won't be deterred by setbacks or the idea of failure if they go into a venture knowing that theirs is the best way. Their life experience is the only life experience worth considering. Empathy is for the weak and the homosexual. All setbacks are temporary setbacks, a sign not of their own failings but of the determinations of their enemies conspiring to frustrate the inevitable glory of their Destiny.

Ideally, would I like that sanctimony to derive from an unparalleled precocious intellectual development bolstered by genuine insight and experience in human art and literature? Sure, but dang, is that going to take a long time and a shit-ton of work. No, I can get the same results from religion in almost no time at all. All the impenetrable self-righteousness you could want and none of the book-reading. Well, one Book, but honestly, how many of those people actually read it? One guy, that's who. He's the guy standing in front of the church not only reading it, but telling you what it all is supposed to mean. If you think about it, church is just annotated books-on-tape. Well, again, Book-on-tape. I'd prefer it if Pastor Liturgy would mix in maybe some Tolkien or a Tony Robbins motivational book, but I guess beggars can't be choosers. It's like in-flight entertainment. You don't always get to choose the programming.

Now I know, though, that I can't rely on the society we live in to provide the necessary indoctrination I hoped for my children for me. It's no small blow to my own sanctimonious liberal-progressive worldview. If you'd asked me, I'd have gladly spouted back all kinds of conventional left-thinking wisdom about how pervasive and pernicious the effects of Christianity are in this so-called secular (Constitution-guaranteed, no less) country of ours. I would have told you that the protests of the religious are simply a leftover collective memory cult of victimization still rolling with the learned inertia left over from the last believer fed to the last lion in imperial Rome 1,700 years ago.

But now... now, I'm not so sure. Maybe we're not all as Jesus'd up as I'd thought. I haven't really looked for Him in a while now, but I'm remembering now that Jesus is just like the cops: never around when you need Him.

Being older now, though, I understand the absence better. Jesus wants me to be self-sufficient. To do things for myself. Plus, he's busy winning football games. He's only one man. He can't be everywhere at once. You're thinking of His dad.

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*known symptoms include insomnia, chronic listing and conspicuous displays of calculated good will.

Not Liveblogging the Final GOP Debate RIGHT NOW!

2011-12-15T21:06:00.000-08:00

As I type this, my radio is silent, my television is dark and the only other browser window I have open may or may not feature boobies or videos of cats sleeping.

What I am conspicuously not doing at the moment is watching the last Republican presidential primary debate scheduled before voting begins in earnest to kick off the 2012 presidential election cycle. Well, I say "voting," but it's the Iowa caucuses. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve any actual voting. I will say it's a pretty appropriate name given the ethnic demographics of the state.

By not watching this debate, this brings the number of Republican debates I have successfully not watched to All. I have not watched all the debates. Every single one of them has gone entirely unespied by me. Neither cone nor rod in either of my retinas has been asked to interpret a single gesture or utterance of any of the serious contenders or Herman Cain.

I worry sometimes that I've become the type of Uninformed Voter that I used to spend a lot of time berating and deriding in that adorable, endearing tone of sanctimonious condescension you only get from the chronically overinformed. But no, I don't think I'm one of the Uninformed, even though I've made a concerted effort specifically not to collect relevant data related to the topic of 2012 Republican presidential contenders. There are two reasons for this.

1) Good old fashioned Popsian Exceptionalism. I'm not the same as other people and therefore the same rules do not apply to me. Because I think with my brain and see out of my eyes and am privy to my own thoughts up to and including the most delicate and intricate crystalline webs of rationalization, I can't be held to the same standard as other people. You all out there, with your non-readable brains and inscrutable motivations. If I can't hear what you're thinking, I can only assume you're not thinking anything. Therefore my thought processes are privileged, because I know I've really really thought about them. I even get to invent my own rules of logic. It's one of the perks.

2) I consider it more self-defense. There's a new Anointed Of The Lord frontrunner ever 2-4 weeks it seems. The whole GOP substratum of our society has got all the emotional composure this year of a premenstrual teenager. The whiplash effect in the polling is a threat to most of my emotional soft-tissue centers. It's not the manliest admission you've ever heard, I'm sure, but I'm a liberal, so I'm used to being thought of as kind of a pussy. I use it to my advantage when I can. It gets me out of things. Mostly home improvement and car repair.

I'm also not paying attention because I don't want to get sucked into the game of Would You Rather? As in: which one would you rather see run against Obama in the general election? And I don't even want to consider it. Because people are terrible at it. And the one you thought you wanted fighting Superman is the one who ends up being made entirely out of kryptonite. People don't like Barack Obama all that much. And the economy thing... still not awesome. So as much fun as it may be to hope for the plutocrat with the space-based religion or the tubby dumb-smart guy who looks like your grandmother or that guy who likes to fuck, we don't know what the election will look like. Anyone who tells you they do is either a liar or on cable news. All of the contenders scare me, not just as opponents of the dude I'm likely to vote for, but because once one of them get past the primaries, they have about a 1 in 2 chance of becoming president. And look, I just wet myself a little.

The only good news is that by taking the long view, you are more likely to spot trends than others caught up in the friction heat of the moment. Gingrich is up now, but as I said, the shelf-life of a frontrunner is not impressively long. Sure, we're reaching the point where the music will stop and someone will be left with the last chair. But I'm not sure we won't keep circling long enough for it to end up being one of the two who haven't been shoved out in front yet: Ron Paul or Jon Huntsman.

If it does come down to process of elimination, though, I have to admit it's most likely to be Mitt Romney. He's the GOP 2012 version of John Kerry 2004: he's the guy you vote for because all the interesting ones made the mistake of being interesting too soon in the process. And if we know anything about the modern office of the presidency, nothing precludes you from it faster or more comprehensively than interestingness. Yes, George Bush II was interesting in the drunk-uncle-messianic-eschatologist kind of way. But remember who we tried really hard to elect over him in the first place.

Red Hat

2011-12-08T20:46:00.001-08:00

WARNING: The following may contain baseball-related content. Among certain segments of the population, it is known to cause drowsiness, upset stomach, vaginal dryness and cancer. No, not cancer. What's the other thing I'm thinking of? The one that's like cancer, but isn't? Bah, this is going to bug me all night.

Anyway.

I know things have been looking slightly better in the last few months, but I still know enough people out of work to keep things to myself if they start going really well. It's not that I'm ashamed of the fact that I'm one of the fortunate ones who have managed not only to remain gainfully employed but actually prosper during what I'm told has been a particularly brutal downturn, it's just that I'm sensitive to the feelings of my fellow human beings in this time of difficulty. Plus, if I start throwing money around, people are going to start asking where I got it and nobody wants to hire a high-profile drug mule. It's a contradiction in terms. I just remember there are a hundred other guys with spacious colons and dignity made flexible by crippling gambling debt dying to take my place.

Sports culture has always enjoyed a strange detachment from ordinary social strictures in this country, though. I think it's telling that Americans as a culture are absolutely allergic to any kind of monumental architecture, but we will pony up hundreds of millions in public money to provide enormous stadia for sports franchise owners, the 1% of the 1%, the only fractional fragment of the country with the capacity to pay for the goddamned things themselves.

The total experience for a family of four to visit a baseball game, depending on where you sit, probably ranges from $200 to $300 anymore. It seems like a lot to pay for the opportunity to be struck in the face with a speeding projectile, but people still go, in the millions every year, GDP growth rate be damned. So powerful is the allure of visiting one of the few places left in this country absent the social pressure to throw away your own trash before you leave. It's the same reason I visit national parks.

Still, you like to see some modesty, some kind of sensitivity to the situation. Yes, we keep spending on tickets and merchandise and concessions and parking, even on teams that are cosmically prohibited from winning or teams populated entirely by evil douchebags, but we don't really want anyone's recession-proof largesse rubbed in our faces. It's not that we're unwilling to have largesse rubbed in our faces, it's just that we want to get paid for it, just like the porn stars do.

So when I read that the newly renamed Miami Marlins had offered St. Louis Cardinals free agent 31-year-old first baseman Albert Pujols a 10-year contract worth $250 million, I was mortified on their behalf. Yes, I understand they're about to move into a new stadium in a really shitty area of Miami,* so they want a big-name draw. And he's not just a big name, he's a big name with an ethnic pronunciation, so he'd be an especially big draw to the Cubans or the Dominicans or Puerto Ricans or whatever they have down there where regular people would otherwise have Mexicans. But still. Come on. A quarter of a billion dollars. Not in pesos, but in real money. And this in the time when Sesame Street just added a muppet who may--just may!--starve to death. You know, to teach kids a lesson. About, I think, starving to death.

But then I thought about it some more and no, it still seemed like a wrong-headed dick-move. And then I thought about it again and changed my mind completely. Part of it was my concern for my fellow man. Sports are a welcome distraction in a world full of unwelcome ones, like bills and healthcare costs and the Republican presidential primary process. Why begrudge people the preoccupying whiff of associative glory through the abstract triumph of accumulating more successes within the construct of arbitrary scoring methods in athletic competition associated with a nearby city or metropolitan area when the alternative is more time thinking about how Starbucks isn't hiring anyone with a master's degree at the moment? Celebrating the gaudy expenditure of money on people paid to play games for a living while school teachers are being laid off in droves isn't just OK, it's compassionate. It's right.

I think the last thing that sold me was that it was my childhood team's almost identical offer that Albert Pujols finally accepted just today. I recognize the lack of coincidence here.

----

*I haven't been, but I've heard the entire neighborhood exists inside the state of Florida. Gross.

Passport to Adventure!

2011-12-01T21:16:00.001-08:00

Well, I'm back. Don't worry, I'm not naive. The internet is a big place. I know when I was gone, you were easily able to fill the time you'd normally set aside for me with any number of baubles and trifles. Bet it didn't take long at all, did it? The first one willing and cheap enough to shake their ass at you and I'm sure you were all over it. Right up to your goddamned elbows.

I'm sorry. Look, it's been a long couple of weeks. I had big plans and none of it really turned out the way I wanted.

First of all, I had to serve as a groomsman at a family wedding. It was all nice enough I guess, but if you knew my family, you'd know there's always some kind of logistical challenge. The restrictions they put on the number of visitors you can have at one time at even the most expensive rehab facilities are practically criminal. But we did what we could to accommodate everyone who wanted to participate. Twitter can be an impressive social tool.

Speaking of impressive social tools, right after the wedding, I took my first trip with the new-ish girlfriend. Well, not "with" so much as "to." I planned to surprise her by showing up unannounced in her homeland. Forty vaccinations and one signed waiver absolving the airline of any liability in the event of my probable demise later and I was on my way. The turnaround time was pretty short once I made my decision. I packed light: a couple changes of underwear and socks, some sunblock, a half pound of quinine pills, a brick of hash (strictly for bartering purposes... and in the event of seasickness), a fistful of plastic zip ties, a yard of heavy oak and a burlap sack and I was out the door. Not only did I save myself time and energy by keeping it simple, I needed to be sure I had plenty room in suitcase for the return trip. You know, for souvenirs or whatever.

I'd never been to the Philippines and I didn't actually know where she lived and/or worked. Or her actual name or what she really looked like when not obscured by the grainy pixellation of the internet red light district. But I do have an iPhone, so I figured: how lost could I actually get? I've got mobile Google. The only thing standing between me and Total World Knowledge at any one moment is the strength of my AT&T connection. Yes, OK, I see the flaw in the plan now...

Off the plane straight away, I wasn't exactly sure where I was. My knowledge of Philippine geography is more or less limited to what I could remembered from news coverage of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption and what I'd gleaned from syndicated episodes of Black Sheep Squadron. Now that I'm back, I'm not even really sure anymore that that show was even set there.

I didn't know if I was on Jolo or Luzon or Mindanao or what. I tried to ask, but the natives seemed confused and a little intimidated by my shouting. One man was brave enough to approach. I tried to communicate by typing out simple messages on my phone and handing it over. I assume he's still studying them.

Eventually I got my bearings and won the trust of some locals, both in part with my brick of hash. They seemed to know where I needed to get to. The going was slow and arduous. We forded rivers and penetrated virgin copses of jungle trees, crested hills and navigated by starlight. We went on foot, by horse cart, by ferry raft across treacherous straits, by bicycle taxi until I picked up the C train at 163rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue down 15 stops or so to the Port Authority Bus Terminal where I slept for the next four nights living on guile, the occasional discarded soft pretzel stub, my sexual fluidity and a suppressible gag reflex. The rest of that hash didn't go amiss either, I can tell you.

In the end, I never did track down my girlfriend. Ah well. It's not the first romantic surprise that hasn't come off as planned. But the trip wasn't a total waste. I learned a lot, about myself and about the warm generosity of the Filipino people. Sure, an alarming percentage of the ones I met, especially at the end there, seemed hygiene-averse and prone to crippling schizophrenia, but I admired their dogged devotion to non-material living and total freedom of movement. I tried it. I survived. I made it there. I feel now like I could maybe make it anywhere.

On Holiday

2011-11-18T15:27:00.001-08:00

Yes, so, I missed yesterday's regular posting day. I had one of those lapses where I get my priorities backwards and let actual life events infringe on my blogging time.

I say that all in preface to the following news: it's likely to happen next week as well. I shall be traveling over the holiday week. I got this e-mail in my inbox from a kind-hearted stranger telling me I can get a 40-inch plasma TV at a Walgreen's in Salina, Kansas, for $7 less than anywhere I can find locally during their 72 Hours of Black Friday Event. I just thought I'd warn you as I don't know what kind of wi-fi signal I'm going to get in the parking lot tent city while I'm waiting. Posting seems unlikely.

Oh, and next Thursday is some kind of holiday as well.

This isn't to say I won't be back next week at all, just not in our predictable time slot. Don't panic though. Irregularity has only gotten a bad name due to the multi-billion dollar television ad onslaught designed to sell you dietary fiber supplements. Resist.

The Glass House Stone

2011-11-10T21:02:00.001-08:00

I'm trying not to read anything or see anything or listen to anything with regard to the Penn State child molestation case. I figure any set of circumstances where the press is using "rape" as the least offensive semi-euphemism to avoid explaining in detail what is known to have happened, my psyche knows enough to pre-emptively recoil.

Suffice it to say I haven't stopped to read any of the graphic bits of viscera oozing out of the now notorious grand jury indictment. By inference (and I have a computer, a television and a radio, so it's a pretty heavy and ubiquitous drumbeat of inference inference inference inference...), I've puzzled together that at one point, one grown man stumbled onto the scene of another grown man assaulting a child in just about the most hideous manner possible and... left the scene quietly and went to tell his dad?

I'm a thinker. This isn't the same as being gifted or especially intelligent. I'd like to argue that I'm sometimes those things as well, but the blunt-force trauma of my physical beauty makes it too hard to convince people I'm something more than a buffet for the senses. Underneath this thicket of lustrous, dense, professionally tousled hair, a wild mind roams free. Like a panther, but made of synapses and propelled through the depths of trackless creativity and existential despair on the back of a snorting, untamed hippocampus. Some people should be carved in marble or immortalized in oil on canvas. I should be airbrushed onto the side of a panel van.

As a thinker, I often find myself involuntarily picking a fight with my initial impressions and/or conventional wisdom. So my first thoughts here after hearing about the non-intervening witness are of the conventional sort: staggering incredulity followed by rage and helplessness and despair. But then the thinking part rises up and I go: hang on. We're talking about what would likely be a pretty horrific physical intervention. And in situations like this, what have child molesters been known to do in order to avoid exposure? The stakes are really all or nothing for both the intervener and the victim should the would-be rescuer come out on the wrong end of a challenge.

And maybe it was just paralysis caused by the horrendous weight of the moment. A subordinate sees a universally respected superior engaged in something one hopes would have been until then genuinely unimaginable. It will be one word against another, where the Other has a half century of built relationships and support networks in place to, if not exonerate, then obfuscate and delay and redirect and, eventually, punish.

And maybe as the father of three boys, I've forgotten what the world looks like through the eyes of a non-parent. In every social situation, we make a calculation of how much of ourselves we are willing to wager. If our relationship is superficial and nonthreatening, we'll talk about weather or the route we took to get to the place we're now meeting; I push the smallest part of myself into the middle of the table with the understanding that I'm risking, at worst, some awkward silence or mutual disinterest. If I'm professionally ambitious, I push more of myself in, risking rejection and failure. If I'm in a romantic relationship and I want to win actual human intimacy, I push almost everything in, knowing I risk heartbreak and depression and long nights alone with my old Morrissey records should I lose.

I say "almost everything" in the last one because there is, I think, one more step where the interaction is inherently negative. In response to a threat to myself, someone I love or any analogue thereof, having been introduced to the true nature of the stakes by witnessing not just human births but those of my actual offspring, I can easily imagine a scenario in which I'm willing to truly risk everything, up to and including my own life, to defend a child suffering an assault of the type I've been very careful not to too closely describe for the sake of my own too-easy comfort.

But again, is this only because I'm father? I play the scenario over and over in my mind and 100 times out of 100, win or lose, I throw myself at the perpetrator and there is always, always blood. The only details that vary are Whose? and How much?

Maybe that's an evolutionary response package opened up on the day I successfully reproduced. I'm not a particularly brave man. I take alternate routes at work if I know I can avoid the awkwardness of deciding to smile/nod at a barely-known colleague. And I also get that we can only know when faced with the choice, like the Jeremy Davies character from the otherwise-mostly-terrible Saving Private Ryan, maybe we're less than we imagine.

I take all that into consideration, and then I think: nah. That guy was a pussy. I don't want to get too sidetracked because, you know, he didn't molest any kids. It's important to maintain our perspective. But seriously, fuck that guy.

Supermassive Black Hole

2011-11-03T21:20:00.000-07:00

Everything I know about economics to this point hangs on the stumpy, worn, rounded peg of my high school senior-year econ class. It was, I think, one of the last of my required core courses to meet the minimum California public school high school graduation curriculum standards along with Government, American Literature, PE, Extended Lunch and Going Home After 5th Period. No one from my school went to Harvard.

I've had to take it upon myself to learn something about how the the economies of polities great and small function, alone and in concert. Reading is an option, sure, but I find it to be the slowest one and the one least likely to be sandwiched between drawn-out, unnecessary sequences of vampires fucking werewolves. Yes, like most obscure, complicated, and civically-crucial things, I turn to HBO to show me what I need to know as a first resort. It had already taught me that I haven't been nice enough to really old people and that the American Revolution is totally more interesting if you took out all the battles and people you may have otherwise heard of. So of course I was happy to let HBO teach me the most crucial things I needed to know about the current world financial crisis which are, in order of precedence: 1) Although it takes an incredible amount of effort on the part of screenwriters and the director, it is in fact possible for Paul Giamatti not to be interesting on screen; and 2) It isn't actually possible to understand economics.

The last part I don't say because the movie itself relied on the relaying of crucial information at crucial times to dramatically recreate the events as they happened, 100% of which I failed to follow. I did what I could with the music cues and facial expressions of the actors, but with William Hurt in the lead, I was playing with both emotional arms tied behind my back. He's actually a really good actor, but I'm convinced all of the direction came to him in the form of similes about glaciers and/or thousand-year-old trees.

If even HBO can't fill in the gap for me, I don't really know what else a civic-minded person like myself can be expected to do. Commentators complain that the Occupy Wall Street et al. movements lack a discernible focus, but in that case, I think the approach perfectly fits the problem. It's like watching smoke fight a cloud.

Instead of actually understanding the roots of the issues in play, I've decided to watch the responses of the players and extrapolate from that knowledge of some kind. From what I can tell, there are three approaches to macroeconomic crisis.

1) Don't do anything. Be angry. And I don't mean as a legitimate reaction to negative stimuli, I mean in as broad a sense as possible. Everything presented as a solution is only worse. How could it not be? This is an economic problem and every "solution" also involves money. Meet all attempts at discussion with volume. Loud, loud, loud. And because there's no clear answer, any move must necessarily be either a) wrong or b) the thin end of the communist wedge. Now, if some of that reckless spending happens to fall on you, yeah, you'll pick it up, but the goal is to sit absolutely still, fight every attempt at action and keep your money safe until the Second Coming of Reagan-Jesus happens, rapture style, and this all sort itself out.

2) Do everything. Why cut spending with a scalpel when you can do it with an abattoir? Colleges are overcrowded and too expensive? Stop educating children so they won't qualify and price out the ones who can. Healthcare of the poor is burdensome and offers no return on investment? Pull away the nourishing Teat of State. If you get that life expectancy down to 65 or even 60, you won't have only have solved most of the healthcare problem, you've done more than your bit to make a dent in the Social Security obligation. No one will mind as long as you never, ever publicly refer to it as "early retirement."

3) Extortion. Very slowly and definitely on the sly, Europe has become a Bond villain. First it was the totally not innocuously named Super Collider capable of killing the world by creating a black hole or something. Now they've got plans to build, and I'm not making this wording up, a laser capable of tearing holes in space. It's all been so sly and in-the-name-of-science so far, but notice these things are ramping up in Europe just as the whole continent teeters on the brink of economic disaster. Hm, plenty of money for the billion-dollar Death Star beam, no trouble finding that cash at all... Maybe because of the potential return on investment? How long before we get a note cobbled together from letters cut out of magazine ads demanding a trillion dollars in Chinese loan money or the fabric of spacetime gets it right in the neck? And then we get an envelope filled with severed, singed bits of dark matter so we know they're serious.

I've seen that movie. And this time, there's no Delroy Lindo to pull us out. At least I don't think there is. I haven't checked his IMDb page in a while. Maybe he's free? I feel a little better.

Birnam Wood

2011-10-27T20:18:00.000-07:00

I've been really careful to avoid ambition all my life. I've read enough Shakespeare to know it's a pretty bad deal. The levels of ambition range all over the place whether it's to be king of Scotland or to nail a 14-year-old or to be a black guy in Italy, but they all end the same way: pile of bodies, a grand summation of woe with especial notes on ironic tragedy and Exeunt.

Even when I was a doctoral candidate, I wouldn't really have called myself ambitious. Had I been, I may have actually, you know, finished. At the time, I was smart enough to get in and couldn't really think of anything else I wanted or was qualified to do. I was shiftless and selfish and childish and essentially unemployable. Luckily the kids started coming. If the parenthood thing didn't happen for me, the only other thing that skill set prepared me to be was a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills. Remember, this was 1999. Like most men of vision, I bore the curse of being ahead of my time.

It isn't just me, though. Rick Perry thought he wanted to be president, but then he realized--wisely, I think, if entirely too late--that the high, high cost of the office might be more burden than his slopey, cowboy shoulders can bear. Turns out it's not just 1) Become governor of Texas, 2) Announce presidential candidacy and 3) Denim-themed inaugural ball. Step 2a is People Ask You Stuff, which Rick himself will tell you really isn't his best format. Of all the things Rick Perry does well, coming up with stuff to say in response to things other people say is probably his second-least-impressive area of competency. Unfortunately for him, the only thing he's proven worse at is Giving Prepared Remarks.

So you see, there's no winning. You make up your mind to do America a favor by giving it a unique opportunity to crown a Texas governor running on a platform of Jesus and suspicion of the readerly and all you get for it is the chance to find yourself looking up at a black guy and a Mormon. But America is cruel that way. I'm pretty sure in Russia, both of those things are illegal.

I'm struggling with the ambition thing now because, now that I'm in the workforce, I find it wriggling into my ear and taking over my brain, like those ear lizard-worms from Wrath of Khan. Because of my lack of experience with the sensation, I'm not sure if it's purely ambition or if it's just the nascent, napalm-esque incendiary resentment of possibly ceding a position of authority (relative to my current one) I'm qualified for to someone who is, both vaguely and hyper-specifically, Not Me. I don't know. Maybe one of you can help me. It feels like I've swallowed knives. Does that help? Is that ambition? I don't know. All I know is in the end, that poor bastard Paul Winfield shot himself in the face with a ray-gun. Awesome? Sure. Scares me a little, to be honest. If Shakespeare's still getting in right in the Star Trek future, what chance do I have today?

Sirte in Autumn

2011-10-20T21:44:00.000-07:00

I haven't quite decided how I'd like to go out yet, but I'm less and less sure I'm actually going to have a choice. I have most of the obvious preferences: sacrificing myself to save a child, heart attack accepting my Nobel Prize for Blogging, extreme sexual exhaustion, death by Death By Chocolate, etc. Nothing lingering, nothing painful, nothing unduly embarrassing. Erotic asphyxiation is fine so long as it isn't the auto variety, for example. I'd hate to shuffle off, as it were, with people thinking I didn't have to foresight to employ a spotter.

The older I get, the more I realize "how would you prefer to die?" is a young man's game. The more I see, the more I realize every year we gain comes at the cost of ceding a little bit more control over the circumstances of the Last Transition. Sure, you get rare cases like Hunter S. Thompson who had that rare triangulation of foreknowledge, the courage of his convictions and a support system to make his ending exactly what he wanted it to be. For most of us with the misfortune of being born into a country without a crippling social expectation of elder care on firstborn sons, the end looks a lot more like tapioca and expressive aphasia. As if we needed another reason to envy the Chinese.

Managing the bit between the decline in professional or cultural productivity and El Siesta Grande seems to be the trickiest part. Nobody seems to get it quite right. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between professional success and poetry or grace at the inevitable setting of the sun. It doesn't matter how many touchdown passes you throw or Super Bowls you win, almost win or almost get to: at some point, before you realize it, you're a dithering, malingering liability sending cellphone pictures of your junk to women half your age who--and this is the worst part--don't even want them. It doesn't matter how many billions of dollars you extort by strip-mining your country's only natural resource or how many civilian passenger aicraft you blow up, at some point down the line, some mob out there is going to strap you to the hood of a car and lynch you. Every peak is just a waystation between two steep-ass valleys. Plateaus are shimmery mirages in the minds of psychopaths and socialists. It seems like the humiliation of the end is somehow karmically calculated as the inverse of your level of achievement. It sounds like a harsh concept, but without it, we'd have no reality television.

It's not that I think we can't do it right, I just think we don't have a lot of practice. "Retirement" is a phenomenon dreamed up in the very recent past. It's born out of the same pinko thinking in the late 19th/early 20th century that brought you trade unions, the 40-hour work week, child labor laws and the New Deal. How many people "retired" before 1932? How many farmers? How many steel mill workers? How many coal miners? And of those, the ones who stopped working usually only did so because the stroke made it tricky to operate the combine. And that period of not-working is what we today know as "hospice care."

No, retirement is a thoroughly modern idea. Like space flight, it's only possible--conceivable even--with a hefty state subsidy, except for the inconceivably wealthy. But we know from my inverse karma algebra equation thingy from before, there are no guarantees of quality there either.

I guess we only have two options as I see it if we want to get off this train with some kind of dignity intact. 1) Obviously, be inconceivably wealthy. Again, not a guarantee that it will be good, but between the hangers-on and the house staff, the odds of your corpse ending up locked in a room, undiscovered, with an otherwise unfed dog for a week or more is as close to minuscule as you're likely to get it. Or 2) Stay off the radar. There's clearly lots of incentive here not to do anything of note. Medical science being what it is, statistically speaking, we're all going to outlive our sell-by dates. The precipitousness of our individual falls will depend upon the height we're standing when we reach that tipping point. Neil Young said it's better to burn out than to fade away. I'm not so sure. That's the kind of thinking that made Kurt Cobain discharge a shotgun into his own face.

Cloud Computing

2011-10-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

Say what you want about the Occupy Wall Street crowd, but can we really call them "hippies"?

I don't monitor media activity around these sorts of things like I used to back when I was scrounging for post material every single day, so my sense of this might not be as sharp as I would like. The broad strokes I'm getting from the contra-movementarians is that we shouldn't bother paying attention to hordes congregating around the major lanes of macroeconomic piracy because a) they didn't show up with a PowerPoint presentation outlining a plan of positive action and b) dirty smelly hippies!

To the first point, look, there are two kinds of public protests: proactive and reactive. A proactive protest forms from recognizing a specific injustice and implementing a plan of action to foment a pre-formulated, executable social change. This would be something like your Montgomery bus boycott: disruptive, impactful, directed, maybe not so mobby, and with a definable endgame. A reactive protest happens when people are pissed off and have free time. This latter form may have some cursory organizational impetus, but it's usually amorphous and unreasonably high-minded, with most of its rhetorical and organizational edge blunted by the fog associated with large-scale organizational logistics and a shocking amount of weed. Actions of this type include Occupy Wall Street, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the invasion of Iraq.

Some heroes of the Fourth Estate have soberly insisted the protests are dismissible because the protesters lack a plan. What that absolutely reasonable demand for pie charts and histograms fails to take into consideration is the sentiment expressed in the sign held in the picture above: shit is fucked up and bullshit. These people don't have a plan. They barely have a slogan. One thing they do have: nowhere else to be any time soon. And that they have in buckets.

Referring to them as "hippies" is a further attempt to minimize and distract and dismiss. Who likes hippies? Even actual hippies have the good sense to be embarrassed by hippies. We know this because they grew up and bought shoes and vacation homes and married ketchup heiresses and lost the 2004 presidential election. It isn't fair to say hippies "sold out" when all that really happened to them is they had kids and-- at least the ones worth a fuck to any society--realized those kids needed feeding and housing and educating. They got folded in to the big layer cake of the mainstream, but to their credit, dragged in a little bit of their hippie thought pollution, giving us modern environmentalism, great strides toward actual gender equality and political correctness. As a result, all we've done in return is bend every single solitary economic aspect of our society to the maintenance of Baby Boomers and their entitlements at the expense of everyone else. But at least we also aren't allowed to say "retard" or "midget" anymore!

So it's not fair to call the Occupy Wall Street crowd hippies. Hippies could look forward to Social Security, reasonable healthcare costs and a political system responsive to voter action and constituent pressure. These people are nothing like that at all.

Mr. Right Now

2011-10-06T23:08:00.000-07:00

It's a strange climate in which to be a top-flight amateur political thinker. Don't get me wrong, it's easier than being a professional one. Those poor bastards are hampered by an expectation to pay attention all the time. Yes, they get paid for their efforts, but I would bet dollars to inflatable post-rectal-surgery seat-cushion donuts I get way more done in the realm of watching YouTube homemade lightsaber duel videos. Yeah, they'll be able to afford to send their children to college, but that's only going to put them on the American job market. My time-use is way more cost effective, considering what I'm getting out of it.

Luckily for me, I only have to be top-flight amateur political thinker when the mood strikes. Normally that means it's Thursday, I have to write and the well's run temporarily dry in the dick-joke department. Don't worry, though: unlike actual water, dick jokes are a self-sustaining, permanently renewable resource. The more pollution, the better.

So I've bent my keen powers of perception and observation to the latest flurry of activity among Republican candidates for the presidency. It's been a busy week what with the fat guy, the black guy and an inflatable sex doll making occasional headlines. And if that weren't enough to process, the headlines all got swept aside by the press fawning over some dead hippie. We've got honest American public servants and Sarah Palin contemplating how best to save the country from the iron-fisted grip of a pro-terrorist dictator whipping the American electorate bloody with the twin lashes of Consensus-building and Rationality and all the Lamestream Media can find time to do is sing dirges over the scrawny body of the only person ever to have left a commune AND earned a living. Typical.

Well I've got my eye on the prize. It's not always easy, especially with this field. That Chris Christie blocks out a lot of light.

I've analyzed the data and as far as I can tell, the message from the GOP voters is this: we hate Mormons.

They've tried everything not to push Mitt Romney out front. Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Christie until he opted out... We're so far down the list, Republicans are actually now favoring an actual black person. But, to be fair to them, he's also the only candidate to openly espouse a blatantly racist position, a non-negotiable party platform plank since Strom Thurmond switched sides in 1964, so that more or less balances out.

Romney's problem can only be the Mormon thing. He seems in every other way very desirable. Every instance in which Obama agrees to compromise, originally Republican positions immediately become anathema, so you need someone totally fluid on every subject, utterly unhampered by conviction, consistency or cognitive harmony.

And unlike the melanin-overblessed Cain or the genital-innie Bachmann, he certainly looks the part. He's stamped out of the finest medical-grade plastic. Not that cheap, toxic crap Chinese people use to make toys, the good stuff Chinese people use to make replacement knee joints. White teeth, resonant speaking voice, penis... it's all there.

So I don't really get it unless it's that the Party of Specifically Protestant Jesus gets all squirmy when they hear he's reading from Jesus II: Jesus Takes Manhattan. It doesn't square with their worldview based entirely around the selectively constructed central figure of the Messiah. It's hard enough holding that picture together with the effort expended willfully disregarding the inconvenient messages of social justice, universal love, forgiveness, tolerance and communal responsibility in the Book they already have agreed to accept. Bringing in a whole 'nother text is only going to make treading the choppy flood waters of hoped-for eschatology that much more difficult.

Plus, the leading indicator of Republican vote-for-ability? A guy you'd wanna drink a beer with. And Mormons? No beers. EVER. How do you trust a person when you can always trust them to be sober?

It can only be the Mormon thing. Unless it's that he's half Mexican. Neither of those is going to poll well in Gobbler's Knob or whatever that place is called.

Of Human Bondage

2011-09-29T20:02:00.000-07:00

As obnoxious as it may sound, finding someone is the easy part, especially living where I live. There are something like 20 million people living Southern California. Yes, I live on the unfashionable, smog-shrouded exurban brink of Greater Los Angeles (or as we call it, the Coughing Edge), but as long as I'm in striking distance of one of the great, gummy arteries of life, love and commerce we call the Freeway System, I'm everywhere at once. I travel to all points in space and time simultaneously, transported in a quantum blood-cell of multi-location in the coincidental shape of a 2007 Toyota Prius. There is no limiting frontier, no velocity threshold, no Newtonian or Einsteinian constant to bind or waylay me. Unless I want to run the air conditioner or encounter an incline.

Between that and the internet, what possible excuse could I have for not at least cannoning into someone interesting along the way? After something as traumatic as a divorce, it takes some time to understand your own social potency, the rhythm of courtship, the contest of romantic barter, but after a while, you develop an approach. And sooner or later, someone will decline to press charges and Burgeoning Potential is born. Kismet!

So OK, that all worked out and, yes, I've met someone. There are all the regular pitfalls of early dating: the insecurity (given and received), the mixed signals, the wild swings of emotion, the selection of an ambiguous safeword, the anonymous drop-off at the emergency room, the chafing of the awkwardly-placed splint... Typical stuff and, like I said, really somewhat easy.

The hard part is: I have kids. Three of them, don't you know. And eventually, once you've worked through all the regular stuff of deciding if someone is right, now past the potentially minutely infinite complications of two people, you've got to decide how to integrate this new person into the lives of these other people for whom you are completely responsible. Well, 50% responsible. That's not a cop-out, that's what the state of California has mandated. The good thing about that is I'm able to drop my expectations for their development by half, which is far, far less expensive. Community college would be something of a triumph.

The process has been slow, but it has at least finally begun. It starts with heavily mediated visitation time, taking very careful and painstaking countermeasures to ensure the kids don't feel any expectation to make an instant family-like connection before they are ready. Sometimes the precautions are general like limiting the public displays of affection in front of them or including them in some of the decision-making processes for our limited bonding-time activities. Sometimes they're far more specific, dependent entirely on the vagaries of the situation. For me, that usually means a strip of surgical tape across the top of the computer monitor. The kids don't need to see "liveasiansluts.org" when we're trying to organize a friendly game of family internet Scrabble or playing Dirty Ring Toss by remote proxy for a nominal fee. The mistake a lot of new families make is trying to force everything into place at once. If anyone knows that, it's my Marta. Or Corazon. Or whatever her name is, I can't really be sure. The point is, we're working up to something. The other point is: sometimes, lube isn't optional.

The long-term goal is for all of us to be comfortable together, without the awkwardness of expectation; where the kids can finally, ultimately feel able to relax completely and express who they are as people in the electronic web presence of the woman I'm pretty sure I probably love. In an ideal world, this will happen when they are old enough to have jobs and qualify for credit cards of their own. Bonding isn't just complicated; it actually costs extra.

Things Have Been OK For Me, Except That I'm A Zombie Now...

2011-09-22T23:08:00.000-07:00

There are a couple of reasons I cling, with steady progression along the J-curve of desperation, to this outmoded form of internet communications the young people know quaintly as "blogging." First of all, firmly ensconced in my mid-late-thirties, it's an excellent time in one's life to try out what it feels like to be old. The unthoughtful automatic rejection of anything developed after you turned 27 is horribly liberating. All the fury of the race to relevance is never in the prospect of winning but in the eventual futility of keeping up. Old people are tired less because of the natural atrophy built into the biological cycle of birth-vigor-decline-death but because they spent all their energy when they were young learning to dance the Froog and trying to procure pomade in unreasonable volume. Or whatever. What I'm trying to say is Twitter looks like too much goddamned work.

Secondly, I keep floating around the blogosphere because of a few personal connections I've made with people I genuinely enjoy reading for their wit, their candor, their intelligence, their insight and their tendency to effectively agree with me on just about anything. It's quite a thing to be surrounded by people--smart people, funny people, gifted people--who echo back the things in your head without having first to express them. One must be careful, obviously, lest one accidentally fall into what Andrew Sullivan calls "epistemic closure" or what I call "Scientology," but the humanist/rationalist crowd I tend to fall in with seems inherently skeptical enough to self-police. We'll have some trouble getting to the point of imprisoning a girl in a hotel room until she dies a horrible death from dehydration, but I like to think we have that kind of organizational potential.

So when my blog-friends and I have differences of perception, it's cause not really for alarm (because alarm is soooo earnest and unironic and therefore Republican), but definitely worth noting.

I read my blog-pal Vikki's latest with my usual relish,* anticipating and getting the usual depth of insight, humor and high-quality sentence construction. But I finished it with a little concern over something I didn't share and can't quite wrap my head around: genuine despair. Nobody's dying** but, as vividly portrayed by someone with her easy rhetorical skills, something is quite amiss. I found out in the comment section and on her own blog, arguably my bestest blog-pal SJ (whose post I can't link because it's password protected, for all the right reasons) shares in the sentiment. If I can summarize, in my own imitable style, the problem goes like this: the Tea Party circle jerk is getting very noisy at it approaches it inevitable climax and it seems like all Obama can (or, if you ask SJ specifically, is inclined to) do is ask anyone if they need more lube.

Their positions are probably slightly more nuanced than that, but if you can't fully make an argument your own, win it with imagery, I always say.

The problem is just that: instead of the automatic head-nod these capable women should usually expect from me, all I can manage to do is furrow the ole brow and wonder. For some reason, I just haven't been able to gin up the outrage and frustration and gloom infecting my fellow terrorist-lovers. In a bid to help and seizing an excuse to become one with my own navel, I've spent some time examining why I haven't been able to share the political doom-and-gloom and here's my best advice:

1) Never watch the news. I'm not going to use the cliche "ignorance is bliss" because it annoys me greatly, but then I think: how greatly would it annoy me if I'd never heard it before? And it's got me, the bastard. I will say that the ignorance policy only applies to politics in the 24-hour media cycle. In most other ways, it's a recipe for a kitchen explosion or possibly chlamydia. It's helpful to take some information on board. Just none of it as it pertains to political television or internet media and the current paradigm of "equal time." Tea Party Fever means any right-leaning rebuttal to any political point is going to be all racist code-words, petty intransigence and a totally unironic misreading of some or all of the Constitution. Remember: these are just the people who get on TV. It's exactly the same level of accomplishment as this guy and just as helpful.

2) Masturbate 8 to 11 times daily. The health and mood-elevating benefits are obvious. So if it's good once, many, many times must be better. That's just logic. And kind of math. The hitch in this policy is the frequency prescribed, I will grant you that. The issue is primarily logistical as it can be quite difficult to keep up, say, at work, in public dining establishments or if you find yourself invited to a child's birthday party. But hey, if we're engaging our creative brains, we're not worried about entitlement reform quite so much, are we? And I find a little chafing is worth a brain swimming in a puddle of self-released endorphins.

3) Hey man, things could always be worse. Lots worse. Grab on to what French historians of a certain wide-view bent call the longue durée. Every time someone tells you "it's never been this bad, this uncivil," you can tell them about Oklahoma City or Kent State or that time we all tried to kill each other at the same time. I get a lot of "no way, it's different this time, man," but... really, Inquisitive Hippie? Is it? And qualitatively? It looks like a lot of reasonable people get shouted down by the mob, the digital street, the ochlocrats, if I may. But they have to have more votes to get what they want. And every time one of them ascends the pedestal, the backlight shows us all their underclothes and they burst into flame. Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, now Rick Perry... This is really the crux of it for me: how outnumbered are we really? How hopeless is it really? It's not that I have faith in people (I voted in 2000 and 2004, I remember), but the trendlines haven't really seemed to match the tenor of the conventional wisdom.

So I feel OK just waiting. Every time they throw another one up there, even within their closed caucus, the ones most closely identified with the microphoned fringe ignite, and like all things combustible, have been quickly consumed. As this is all we really have to go on until a vote is cast to see where people actually stand, I've decided to take these smoldering embers as the dimmest of lights to mark the path forward.

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*a spicy mango-ginger relish, because we're liberals and therefore effete food snobs. Ketchup is for Klansmen.

**OK, almost nobody.

Governor? I Hardly Know 'Er!

2011-09-15T23:19:00.000-07:00

I'm supposed to lead with how a woman's sexual independence is sacrosanct and should never be used as a weapon to impugn her reputation, integrity or fitness for office. But seeing as I'm about to talk about Sarah Palin, the "fitness for office" already has a fat red line through it, so I'm feeling pretty safe. This isn't me making a personal or political judgment either, I'm just reiterating a point she herself made, not unemphatically. Public service or positions of authority aren't for everyone. I give her credit for realizing that a life of making decisions about road maintenance budgets or being the celebrity guest judge at a state fair jam-tasting contest really isn't as exciting as it sounds. OK, the jam-tasting was a bad example because that sounds pretty awesome actually, but the rest of it... Snoozeville, am I right? She did exactly what a 21st century politician should do: use elective office to big-up your Twitter follower numbers and spin it into a reality TV show. Who wants to sit around all day not commuting death sentences when you can be pretending to like camping on TLC? For money! Being commander in chief of the state national guard is fine, but real power is knowing somebody somewhere is asking the girl at the Fantastic Sam's to do their best to replicate your up-do.

So now that we're clear: women having sex is fine. Women in political office having sex is OK to the same extent it's OK for dudes. And if they want to twit-pic some or all of it, you know what, who am I to object? America 2011. Breathe it deep.

I'm not really sure now what I'm supposed to do with the SCANDALOUS!!! revelation that, at some point in her pre-married life, Sarah Palin fucked a basketball player. Author Joe McGinnis spent hours, days, months, years of his life compiling all this information into his new book wherein we learn:

-The image Sarah Palin works very hard to craft and project does not 100% track with who she is as a person.
-Sometimes she's kind of a bitch.
-At one point, she had elective intercourse with another consenting adult, to whom she was not at the time married.

I guess I'm having a hard time seeing how this new information is supposed to do anything. It certainly doesn't disqualify her from the office she's currently not running for, of that at least I am certain.

Maybe I can feel a little bit better about her knowing that she knocked boots (we used to call it that back then, "knocking boots") with a black guy and is therefore, despite her Tea Party associations, not actually a horrible racist? What keeps me from that, though, is the characterization in the article that she had a "fetish" for black guys. I'm not sure how or why that particular word choice was made, but we know that fetishes don't always reflect our personal, intellectual or political positions on a topic. For instance, I don't have any particularly strong feelings (or, frankly, information) one way or the other on the plight of lesbian clowns, I just know they make me really, really happy for very short bursts of time.

So you know, maybe she's not a horrible racist, but one of those nice, well-meaning, self-loathing ones who will occasionally let the object of their irrational fear and social scapegoating time-share in the ole birth canal. I'm hoping if it's OK to let 'em into our vaginas today, we can let 'em into our schools tomorrow. I'm an optimist.

Also, at the time she stalked, ambushed and devoured poor, unsuspecting human giant Glen Rice, she was a sports reporter. She only really did what all sports reporters wish they could do. Most sports reporters are heterosexual men. That's just how it demographically works out. Entertainment industry depilatory technicians, you get a different demographic subset. Some jobs are just like that. But if they were honest, of all that crowd holding voice recorders around Tom Brady after a New England Patriots game, what percentage of those dudes would do anything to fuck that guy? They'd wish they had a vagina first, of course, so it's not in a gay way. But Sarah Palin must have been the envy of every other jock sniffer in the sports information department: she was able to taste just a little bit of that oversized, toned, Byronic, virtuosic, next-level masculinity instead of just ogling it from afar as a pale, hairless echo.

I have more information about Sarah Palin now. But do I know more about her? Can't really say that I do. To be fair, I haven't actually read the as-yet unreleased book. Drawing uninformed conclusions based on scant bits of uncorroborated, anecdotal infotainment snippets isn't the most responsible course of action, but it does seem symmetrical and appropriate in this particular instance.

A Wound That Won't Believe In Sutures

2011-09-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

The Basic Laws of Reflex Contrarianism have an in-built weakness in that the people they are supposed to govern aren't really the rules types. I was going to say finish that sentence with "as a rule," but there's a definite danger of infinite regression paradox and one mustn't blunder about with the fabric of spacetime. Have you seen an episode of Doctor Who? That stuff is like wet tissue.*

So in the face of all the 9/11 remembrance and solemnitude and general moment-of-silence-ism, the contrarian reflex makes me want to write about women's tennis, but aha! If all the contrarians are writing about women's tennis, the truly contrarian thing to do is to actually write about 9/11. On the surface of it, sure, I'll just be doing what the non-contrarian everyone else is doing, but motivations are important. I'm embracing it by having already rejected it. So, you know, in your face, Mainstream America!

I've been avoiding all of the anniversary coverage, not out of my normal motivations of petty politicism and bloody-mindedness, but really out of a feeling of tiredness. As the anniversary has approached, I have been seized with the dawning realization that I still haven't been able to sleep off the bone-aching weariness that event infected me with. The cycle of tension and tension and tension and release and tension and tension and tension and release, etc. over those many days after, weeks after, months after pulled from me at first emotional and eventually physical resources the great, peacetime softness of my life before never taught me to reserve.

Tom Brokaw has made something of a fetish of his Greatest Generation meme, but there's something to be said for growing up having been kicked in the collective bollocks over and over and over again when the call comes in to actually stand and fight. If you practically starved to death at home during the Depression, you can kind of conceive of what it will take to survive practically starving to death in Belgium or the Philippines fighting the Hun or the Yellow Peril.

Vietnam ended before I turned a year old. Even my first independent impressions of the Cold War are colored by the softening positions of glasnost and perestroika and the (I'm sure hindsighted) feeling of downward-slopeyness. Economics over decades bump around as they are wont to do, but generally speaking, throughout my entire upbringing, the trendlines have all been upward. Honestly, Generation X has got to be the least prepared group of people in the history of people for harshness and want and sacrifice and heroics. Don't get me wrong, I know we have our individual paragons and models, but if you look at the art that supposedly defines us, speaks for us, sharpens the fuzzy borders between Baby Boomers and the kids with the Twitter, all we seem to really be able to do is lament our own waywardness and bitch about corporatism over a meal of Domino's Pizza and Bud Lights. We're every pretentious asshole Ethan Hawke has ever played in any role ever. And we look just as ridiculous being in charge of stuff. It's hard to lead from a position of ironic detachment.

I guess what I'm saying is 10 years is just too soon. For me, at any rate. I'm still processing. In the middle, we've had Katrina and tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan and the Afghan War and the Iraq War and on and on, all the time goaded forward by this army of flag-wavers demanding you do the same, subtly hinting maybe they'll run you through with a flag pole should you opt out.

Past the generational thing, how is anyone past it, really? Where have we had the space and peace to properly mourn and heal? In an atmosphere of closely-held, furiously-defended, wrent-soul psychic trauma, I'm afraid the anniversary minute-by-minute reliving of every thought and impulse of The Event(s) feels threatening almost; it's asking me to be potentially more deeply introspective than I'm ready to be, bordering on self-flagellating tragedy porn.

I accept that other people have assimilated all this information in different ways. In that case, remember away. My position isn't that nobody else should be allowed. It's just that I don't feel like I've got a solid enough stance on non-pourous ground to keep my feet in the slow-rising flood that crests today. I've spent too many of the intervening years overdeveloping otherwise practically useless muscle groups, leaving me strangely misshapen and ill-suited to function within the normative bounds of a healthy society.

So yeah, I guess I ended up talking about women's tennis after all.

------

*this of course begs the question of what exactly the tissue of spacetime is moistened with, but I find that the dampness of tissues is a question almost never worth investigating.

Internally Displaced Persons

2011-09-08T23:35:00.000-07:00

No long-form, ill conceived, poorly executed post tonight, beloved. I am this evening hampered by the presence refugees from this cataclysmic inconvenience. Yes, I used the word "refugees," but there's no need to worry for my safety. They're the good kind. Not the foreign smelly kind with poor English and a legitimate fear for their physical well being. You know, the ones with no foreseeable course of return and probably cholera. Nope, these ones have all of their shots and their papers. I'm even related to most of them. I'm still going to set the motion detectors on the alarm system tonight. I'm too familiar with my own DNA to trust them entirely.

I'll post something better--or, who am I kidding, just longer--on Saturday maybe. Which means Sunday earliest. But I won't let you down. At least not in ways you're not already comfortable with me letting you down.

These Dreams Of You

2011-09-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

I like to think I provide enough of a counterbalance for my children to prevent them developing that thick, oily blubber-layer of entitlement everyone tells me is a danger to modern youth. The only surefire way to avoid the cruel fate of the unloveable self-involved is to make sure they develop a profound and tactile sense of responsibility for their actions. The problem is my kids are all (so far) capable, intelligent, grounded children with so little penchant for misbehavior substantial enough to construct effective corrective examples. What I've done to compensate for the burden of well-behaved children is I let them develop their responsibility-handling skills by taking on the consequences of my actions. I panic when I see them wash the dishes without complaint or make their beds without asking. How am I supposed to teach them anything if, when I ask them to do something, they just... do it?

They almost always notice when I kick the dog, though. They'll look at me with askance and pity and I'll have to shout "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU BRING HOME AN A-MINUS!" It's a painful lesson (mostly for the dog), but anyone will tell you: when you're a parent, sometimes you have to improvise. There's a lot at stake.

Of course you hope that when you send them out there, outside of your enveloping, all-encompassing grasp, they're going to continue to develop. It's only a matter of time before they shed the homework drills and the dinner times, the curfews and the electronic tracking ankle bracelet and make their way into the world, hopefully to build on the foundation of suspicion and fear every animal needs to survive. It's evolution. If you're wondering what your kids should look like if they're going to last a minute on their own, try picking up a feral cat. That should tell you all you need to know. Evolution tends not to mince words.

Trends in parenting are sliding in the wrong direction, however. The paranoia and fear are there, sure, but the reaction seems to be more bubble-wrap, more packing foam, more inflate-on-impact airbags. No one is every going to invent the jet-packs we were promised because everyone's too busy trying to invent forcefields.

When I lived in the dorms in college, I had three roommates. One was a Brazilian exchange student, a passionate Latin man who was given to politely vigorous sex with his Brazilian exchange student girlfriend (sort of missing the cosmopolitan point, I thought, but they weren't asking) on the top bunk of our shared, all-wooden bunk bed left over from the Eisenhower administration. I think he tried to be unobtrusive about it, but the basic physics of biodegradation and dry-rot will not be gainsaid. I'm not sure how exactly to characterize how bumpy and noisy a ride it was for me except to say I no longer long for the sea.

Roommates #2 and #3 were both just run-of-the-mill assholes in their own petty ways, both lamenting the fact that the low-rent state school we were attending wasn't the low-rent state school they preferred.

Those experiences were at turns uncomfortable and miserable and maddening and demoralizing each in their own ways, but they had some value. With the latter two, I confirmed that my hometown (where my university also was) was just as scorned and belittled and disregarded by people from outside of it as I'd always thought it might be. And with the first one I learned that if you take Nyquil together with dramamine, sometimes you can talk to Jesus.

New college students today, though, are unstrapping the five-point harnesses affixing them to their padded family nests in order to go off to college and experience... someone hand-picked to be exactly like themselves. I'll spare you reading the entire linked article by telling you that, like all good entertainment endeavors, the money shot comes right at the end:

“We like all the same movies, the same music and the same books,” [an online roommate matching site user] said. “I met her mother, and I thought, ‘Your mother is so much like mine,’ and her father too. I feel like I’m talking to myself sometimes.”

Look, I understand going off to college is scary. And if you can control elements of it, you feel more secure. And if you are able to manage to partially reconstruct your comfort zone, I can certainly see how it would make the otherwise wrenching transition easier.

But I don't know that you want to go to college to feel like you're talking to yourself so much. Sure, there are all the points to make about growth through struggle and benefits of exposing oneself to a breadth of human experience, blah blah blah. My main fear in this? More douchebags.

Absence of reflection makes you a douchebag. Echo chambers can only make douchebags. And colleges are already prone to douchebaggery. Count the backward baseball caps and the soul patches and the hackey sack circles on any college campus. These are places that expose young women to Sylvia Plath and young men to reggae. The roommate provides a pivotal role as an antibody to this particular debilitating condition. Sometimes, more than anything, we need a contemptuous eye-roll to remind us that there are consequences to our actions. We need someone to tell us "Hey, you're not the first fucking person to discover Van Morrison, Sheila! Jesus, I'm trying to study!" There should be consequences to your choices. Even the good ones.

Just to be clear, my worries are selfish. If I want to be surrounded by douchebags, I can do that by choice. I live in Southern California. I just don't want them to be everywhere at once. But I don't worry for the kids themselves really. I'm not given to panic about the fate of coming generations. Every time I hear consternation over the unfitness of the kids today, I remember Plato was saying the same thing like 3,000 years ago. If you read Republic, it's all about how kids were indolent, short-sighted, violent, corrupted by entertainment and the inevitable doom of a once-great society. And it doesn't bother me at all that, in his case at least, he turned out to be right.

Plot Device

2011-08-25T22:41:00.000-07:00

It really hasn't been a great week for dictators in general, which should give those of us who love liberty reason to cheer for our brothers across the sea exercising their God-given right to full-throated, democratic, NATO-military-backed freedom from oppression. We of course look forward to the day when Libyans are able to freely exercise their basic human rights in the most traditional ways by electing a legitimate representative government, building a robust, uncensored press and leasing our global, pro-democracy petroleum extraction and refining concerns well-development rights at reasonable rates.

I should be buoyed really, but something doesn't really sit right with me. I think the main problem is Obama. There are the obvious concerns with him being a foreign-born Muslim sleeper agent. That's not really fair as it's mostly just bad luck for him. It's been said about George W. Bush that he was the type of person born on third base but acted like he hit a triple. Obama was born with two strikes against him. And nobody on base. And down by six runs. And two outs in the top of the ninth inning in a road game on dollar beer and Team Logo Chainsaw Giveaway night. And the umpires insisting on using the rules for badminton. Sometimes "post-racial America" just means white people have given up feeling guilty about the whole race thing.

So I cut the guy some slack because he obviously can't win, but I start to see things from the other side when--in the middle of a recession when people don't have jobs and he refuses to cut taxes for rich people--he conveniently goes on vacation. It's hard to find a good time to go on a vacation when you're the world's answer to every problem, fine. More slack. Then the Libya thing hots up and he... stays on vacation. OK, again, I'm sure he's all wired in in case direct intervention is needed. Time away from his desk makes him seem sort of lazy and kind of a traitor, but look, he's been called worse probably just in the past week.

But still, I'm not 100% comfortable. First of all, he's on vacation and I have yet to see him clearing brush, wearing a stupid ten-gallon hat or photographed--even once!--riding a horse. So already his vacationeering has the faintest whiff of effete eau de communisme about it. Nope, no ranch, he's on Martha's Vineyard. It's a "charming" island. Named after a girl and a fruit plant. If we finish this whole debacle with zero pictures of him on a tandem bicycle, I'll be the most shocked I've ever been in my life.

Secondly, what troubles me is that the president goes on vacation, just a few weeks before the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 and, conveniently, just after he evacuates the area, boom, earthquake swarm. I didn't read all the accounts all that closely, but I think I heard the Washington Monument spontaneously detonated and the National Cathedral was sucked through a transdimensional hole in spacetime. And now, Monster Storm of Death heading for the eastern seaboard, like a raging, angry felt eraser bearing down on the scribbly white markerboard of civilization.

Ho, hang on there Pops, we hear what you're saying, but there are such things as coincidences. It wasn't all bad. There was even that nearly simultaneous earthquake down in Peru which gave us all something to laugh at.

To which I say: really? Add in the almost nearly simultaneous dissolution of the long-term relationships of both actress Melissa Gilbert and her adopted gay sister who used to also be famous. And the convenient discovery of the planet made of diamonds. What more evidence do you need? I'm not a conspiracy theorist by nature, but I think this president knows exactly what he's doing. Exactly.

The worst part is the way he rubs it all in our faces by carrying out his plot to physically destroy America by returning to safety at the scene of his most notorious crime. All I can do is shake my head. This is what America has come to: we can't even trust the foreign-born Muslim sleeper agent heads of our government anymore. We haven't had one good foreign-born sleeper agent head of government since Reagan at least. It's almost enough to make you look forward to the day Obama gets around to erecting a super-volcano in the center of the country. Let's just get it over with.

The Digital Elegy

2011-08-18T22:12:00.000-07:00

I debated on how to include it, but there it is, people. I know you're wincing. It's graphic, it's shocking, but hey, it's real fucking life. It hits you without long, windy introductions or preparatory speeches, man. It just waits until you're in the cardio-boxing class, trying to keep up with all the hard-asses,* working the 2.5-pound free weights during warm-ups. Maybe you're watching the instructor to keep your form right. Maybe you're watching his biceps twitch with each alternating curl. Maybe you're tracing a single bead of sweat escaping from his hairline, tracing his clenching jawline, snaking down his sinewy neck and disappearing into that pulled-taut shirt collar across his broad, broad chest and WHACK! Two and a half pounds of solid rubberized plastic held in your own right hand smashes into your left thumb.

I don't need to tell you how bad it was. You can see the picture. It's right... no, along the edge there. No, under the fingernail. I said UNDER, like on it, not under as in below. Yes, it could be a weird shadow or blur or smudge, but no, let me assure you, that's all Injury. Almost an eighth-inch wide of Living Hell. Blunt-trauma hematoma. Or maybe "contusion," I forget. It's been a while since ER went off the air.

The pain was blinding and intense, but I went through the motions of finishing the class, up to and including striking a 150-pound bag several dozen times with both hands as hard as I could. I don't know how I did it, frankly. I've heard of people in wars with limbs blown off who just get up and keep going like nothing happened, carried along by adrenaline and denial. It must have been something like that.

When I got home, I immediately kicked into action. I kept it raised, kept it elevated, gauzed it, splinted it, and administered 5 Advil. Four I swallowed and one I ground up and rubbed directly into the wound. It's non-traditional I know, but my digestive system has let me down before. I needed the relief.

I thought about visiting urgent care, but I've seen people come in with real problems before. The doctors and nurses drop everything, shove you in front of the line, they swarm, they hover, and all the people who have been waiting four hours for their amoxicillin prescription are forced to wait longer. Granted my only experience like this was when my then-2-year-old son was having a severe allergic reaction to his first exposure to kiwi, but it seemed enough like the same thing to make me think twice about it. I was an injured man, but still a Citizen.

You can probably guess I barely slept that night. The nightmares were pretty intense. I've heard that's a problem with post-traumatic stress. I don't remember the dream all that clearly, but my car was being repossessed and the repo tow truck was being driven by a bird of some kind. It was my first PTSD experience. I don't really know how literal these "flashbacks" are supposed to be.

The next day was rough. The dark-pink bruise has transitioned to a stealthy, sinister near-flesh color. I could only assume it was adopting a natural camouflage, blending into my skin-tone, in order to later jump out and catch me unawares, like any other ambush predator. There was no camouflage from the pain, though. It was most acute during very specific points of the day, like when I would take my right thumb and press as hard as I could directly on top of the place where the bruise had been. A good five minutes of that and I couldn't help feeling it. It haunted me.

Just going through the course of the day with an injury like that was an inconvenience. Or would have been, had it not occurred on the thumb of my left hand, which I use for almost nothing. But seeing it there as I would type at work, so close to my busy, busy right thumb, just reminded me of how close I had come to something completely debilitating. It also made me think about the feasibility of the existence of mirror universes existing alongside and simultaneous to our own, where everything is exactly the same, only backward, like in a mirror. In that universe, the bruise would be on my right thumb, which would be so much worse. Except in that universe I'd be left handed. But still: thisclose, people. Thisclose.

I'm doing better now. It was a few days before I stopped limping and I'm no longer considering self-amputation. The counseling has helped. The alternating cold compresses/heating pads has helped. And all the sweet, unprescribed xanax, well, that never hurts, does it?

Debilitating injuries, they make you take stock. This one has been no different. All the health and mobility and dexterity and uniform thumbnail coloration, man, we take it all for granted, every day. Every once in a while, we have to stop, look at ourselves in the mirror and decide, if it's all gone tomorrow, what will I wish I had done differently?

My answer was easy: time to cut way back on the gym. First of all, those places are fucking dangerous. Second, if I only have limited time left, do I want to spend it being uncomfortable and sweaty so I can live more years at the end of a long life, addled and dotardy? And how will I feel if I get there and I never set aside the time and effort to watch the full run of Battlestar Galactica they're showing now on BBC America? It's true what they say: trauma can really help you focus your priorities. Learn from mine.

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*the 50-something women have known childbirth AND menopause.

In Your Heart, You Know He's Right

2011-08-11T22:39:00.000-07:00

If I remember right, it was Barry Goldwater who said at the 1964 Republican National Convention that "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," that "moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue" and a bunch of other things I think about the blood of innocents running in the streets and dogs feasting on the flesh of the infidel. That's a rough paraphrase, but you can see largely what he was getting at: social revolution in the name of a liberating system of prescripted thought. That's Goldwater in a nutshell, but I can't say I'm surprised. He was, after all, Episcopalian, which is as you know, the American arm of the official Church of England. Or after the modern parlance: a sleeper cell.

I bring up Mullah Goldwater and his terroristical firebrandy demogoguery not to slander the man but to portray him in a negative light designed to harm his public reputation. But I'm doing it in writing, so I think it's technically libel.

No, I mention him to illustrate what is to come for our cousins in the United Kingdom and as a warning for ourselves. We already know what happened in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen... the police do something shocking and the people rise up. The tense stand-off leads to violence, perpetuating a brutal crackdown as a wounded and cornered regime lashes out. Only a few more dominoes need to fall before there's helicopter footage of a camel running through Piccadilly Circus.

We've already reached the point, just as we had in Egypt, where the government blames it all on social media, complete with threats to shut the whole messy business down. Because nothing good comes out of people talking to one another, ever.

The next step is clear: to blame the unrest on religious extremists and paid foreign agents. The strategy highlights a) the international fear of a government falling into the hands of a group motivated not by the good and pure motivations of the self-perpetuation of its own power or the economic exploitation of the global poor for the benefit of the few most likely to make generous contributions to the election fund but by something altogether sinister, like faith, and b) internal fear of dirty, dirty foreigners. In America, that means Mexicans. In the Arab Middle East, it means Jews. In London, it used to mean the Irish, but the world has changed so much, it's hard to say. Plus, that country is weird about foreigners. Sometimes they're the enemy and sometimes you invite them over to be the royal family. It's happened more than once.

I don't think we're getting a new royal family this time, though, so you can rubbish those thoughts about a new commemorative plate set. I'm up for looking at this from the perspective of the plight of the working poor, but really it just seems like alot of people being assholes. It doesn't quite have the same motivational and social purity of the Egypt thing.

The complication here is that, if it were just people being assholes, if you clamp down on Twitter and Facebook and whatever else, it will be a government decision that shakes the Etch-a-Sketch and redraws from anarchy some expressions of genuine political discomfort. Although, granted, drawn in a bland grayscale monochrome and with no curvy edges.

Freedom of expression isn't regarded as the unsullied family virgin everywhere as it is in the United States, the besmirching of whose virtue is an act admitting all levels of retaliation up to and including global thermonuclear war. Europeans have a more knotty sort of history with these ideas complicated by a thousand-year headstart of emergency responses and legal precedents. She can stand the occasional smirching and who knows, maybe it will keep her from being such a sanctimonious buzzkill who cries at the banal crassness of your typical PG-13 fare. Europeans, I've always thought, were far less prone to hysteria in matters of speech.

So something like the proscription of expression can happen there in the face of a genuine national emergency because it seems reasonable that justice should be done, even at the price of some liberty.

But that's where they run afoul of Mushroom Cloud Goldwater and his Holy Word Commados. It can happen in Britain, where the language is named after them, so they feel like even if they cut some of it out, it's still going to be around. Over here, no. Over here we can't give one inch. The opposite side of the forms at the DMV are already in Spanish. The next step is Ramadan dinner at the White House. Not on our watch, man.

There's Nothing To See Here

2011-08-04T20:09:00.000-07:00

I've always taken it as a point of pride that I've never seen one episode of Jersey Shore, but I'm starting to wonder. I've never been one to wave a clenched fist and bewail the dumbing down of America and least-common-denominator entertainment, so it's not just that. I spent my summer standing in line for such high-brow fare as the sequel to a sequel to a movie about fighting robot cars and obsessively DVRing a show where people have to figure out the most creative way to cook duck testicles. It ain't exactly Tosca at the Met.

But maybe that was the point: it's important to have a basement. Somewhere to hide in case of cultural or personal turbulence. When the shit starts a-swirlin' and the Lexapro won't kick in, it's a comfort to know the orange people are there for me to lord it over. And I recognize we all dig our own basements; the levels at which we set our foundations are arbitrary. For me, it's what I assume is the false transparence of orchestrated guido "reality." For you maybe it's Facebook or, I don't know, the somnolent wasteland of "reading." The good news about relativity is that nobody's wrong. Well, except the American Idol people, but it almost seems like too obvious a point to make.

I recognize the social importance of the sneer, but again, I don't think it's purely elitism. I have yet to recognize anything particularly dangerous about the path we're on. VH1 just this last week, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of MTV, ran some of the footage from those first days and really: is Jersey Shore really such a cultural downgrade from these people making TV smalltalk between commercials for the recording industry? Again, I've never seen it so it's hard to say, but Mark Goodman's hair is enough to justify the question without regard to the evidence. And if we can track it diachronically over 30 years with no visible shift, is it possible even to say there is anything that qualifies a movement?

We're hardly awash in haute couture, to be sure. There's not much akin to the salon culture of pre-Revolution France going on that I can see nor even an Algonquin Round Table astounding the world with a great depth of linguistic revels and insight. Or maybe there is and I'm just not invited. Or maybe there is, but we don't know it's happening yet. At the time, did anyone know the salon culture of pre-Revolution France was going to be worth a fuck or did they just think they couldn't push two tables together and put out some finger sandwiches without that fucking Voltaire showing up and witting all over everything? And I've always been suspect of the Algonquin Round Table thing considering it was populated largely by people who slowly and painstakingly invented conversations for a living.

I suspect the good and the bad go both ways. Being immersed, it's hard to cobble together the perspective to genuinely see what is going on. Golden ages and cultural nadirs probably wash past largely unremarked-upon until the next generation is neck-deep with the aftermath. Late Imperial Rome wasn't Late Imperial Rome until a Hun stuck the first spear through the first senator's face. Before that, I think they probably just thought it was Rome.

I'd started out with a fairly low opinion of American culture as it was, so I've never been able to imagine the apocalypse foretold and foretold and reforetold by the coarsening of the discourse or the downfall of civility or whatever we have to call it when the club starts to compromise its entrance standards.

But I've been wrong before. Maybe the apocalypse is actually happening. Instead of a thunderclap and a rending of the heavens, it looks exactly like The Bachelorette. We have been judged and found entertained. Purgatory is. The Rapture has happened. The Righteous have actually already been assumed whole into heaven, it's just that they were too fucking boring for any of the rest of us to notice.

Crotchet Man

2011-07-28T22:58:00.000-07:00

I feel like I should say something about the bomb and youth camp massacre in Norway, but it was only a couple of weeks ago that I explicitly stated my complicated position on child murder and I fear repeating myself. In case you don't want to read the whole thing, I will sum up: I'm not for it.

Too glib by half considering the grotesque tragedy of the situation to be sure, but I'm finding it more and more difficult to engage in the daily course of the news as time passes. I almost said "as I get older" but I'm not completely sure that's the main reason. Plenty of old people follow the news. Sure, it's pretty specific news mostly related to prescription drug pricing, Social Security benefits and the enduring, unfeeling laziness of fucking ungrateful grandchildren who apparently have forgotten how to operate the telephone, which is ironic considering when they do visit (five whole minutes, whoop-de-doo), it isn't actually possible to get them to stop for a second staring at the things with the texting and the other thing with the bird logo I forget what and oof, my sciatica...

But it still counts as news and it still counts as engagement. Irrationally angry still = engaged and a vote for cynical populist demagogues waving the Scythe of Death still counts as voting. So as much as I'd like to blame my relative disconnection from the pull of the informational tide on the diminishing gravity signature accompanying the wasting frailty of geronticity, I'm afraid to say the idea does not, as it were, hold water. There's a joke in there about old people and urinary incontinence, but I feel like I'm working way too hard as it is.

I think the main problem is that I'm reaching the point of total crisis exhaustion. Some of it is from the actual events on the ground from the ongoing wars and climate change and economic floundering. Some of it is the nature of modern media, which we no longer imbibe but are obligated to wade through. And some of it is just the entrenchment all around. Everyone's bunkered in, ideologically speaking. At just about any hour, you can find a public servant on some level in front of a television camera or radio microphone someone insisting that whatever issue s/he happens to be championing/opposing is the great and irreduceable crux upon which the survival of our civilization depends. I want very much to say "it's just a sewer usage rate increase we're talking about, councilman, we're going to be OK," but then I'm a traitor and an enemy and someone invokes Ronald Reagan, etc.

So I'd like to just be sad about murdered children in this case, but no, it's actually the scourge of liberal fascism that should, it seems, preclude me from just expressing regular, decent human sympathy for dead people. And, if you have any kind of Google-fu at all, you'll know it's now a whole debate about Christianity vs. Christianism, Fundamentalism vs. Nationalism, Crazy vs. Evil...

I'm tired. It's easy to get discouraged. Especially when the one good thing that might come out of this--a recognition that fanaticism is fanaticism, transcending cultures and religions--is largely undone because something like this comes out and we're right back to where we started with terror = Muslim, and worse, "infiltrating" our own Armed Forces. Can't win for losing.

In the face of all this dire-ness, I catch myself sometimes longing for a simpler time, when I was younger. Which doesn't just make me officially old, but is the animating principle of conservatism. I don't think I have to tell you which of those processes is scarier.

You Can't Make Me

2011-07-21T20:03:00.000-07:00

I don't usually take requests for blog topics. The main reason for this is because I almost never get one. I appreciate that you're reading (both of you!) and I know it's weak as all fuck that I'm down to posting once per week, but still, throw a brother a bone once in a while. Help me out, Jesus. Posting every day as I used to, finding topics was easy. There was always SOMEthing happening and what I missed, I was sure I'd get around to it eventually. You know what happens in a week? Fucking everything. Picking one topic is like trying to pick out one particular snowflake. I think. I don't know, I live in SoCal. I'm working in theoreticals here.

So stalwart and probably busty reader MadameOvary, easily my favorite of all my readers with reproductive-organ-sounding names,* says this, she says: "Give us a meaty, beaty, big and bouncy post about Michele Bachmann's 'husband.'" At first I'm like all "Hey, you're not the boss of me!" and then I realized I had really nothing else developing. Plus she got all her doubled consonants right in Michele Bachmann, so it was almost impossible to resist.

The problem was, I didn't really know anything about Michele Bachmann's husband. Luckily I have Google, so I know everything (eventually, broadband-connection willing). Before I dropped my first character into the search field, I kind of had a feeling that everyone else in the whole world had gotten there before me, though. It isn't always obvious (because I fail a lot), but I like to write things that are funny. And something as a) obviously high-profile and b) patently fucking absurd as a front-running presidential contender's effeminate husband who runs a gay-cure clinic is the most fecund joke-sprouting ground since Dick Cheney shot that guy in the face. Everybody hit that and hit that hard. And repeatedly. At the end of the news cycle, the whole idea was misshapen with exhaustion, like a biker-rally hooker. Methamphetamine means they can go all night.

Same thing here. The jokes write themselves. And I know I'm not going to compete with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or Jay Leno... well, I'd take a shot at Jay Leno, but I trust I've made my point? It's late and I fear I've missed the bus.

OK, so the guy tries to un-gay people. And the center of the controversy (besides, you know, the whole idea of un-gaying in the first place) is the following quote about gays to one of those "Christian" radio shows that Jesus would hate if he weren't all love: "'We have to understand: Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. Just because someone feels it or thinks it doesn’t mean that we are supposed to go down that road. That’s what is called the sinful nature. We have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings from moving into the action steps,' Marcus Bachmann screamed at the top of his lungs three inches from the face of anyone and everyone he could reach."

That last part I added. You know, for clarity.

Partly out of fear of repeating anyone else and partly because I have boringly predictable contrarian instincts, I will say to you directly: I don't think he's gay.

I think he loves his parents. I think he wants, more than anything in the world, to be in a loving relationship with another man, but he had all this "guidance" keeping him from his "sinful nature," to what I'm sure is the great pride of Jesus Mom and Jesus Dad.

And yes, you can say he's a closet case but you can't call him a hypocrite. The strict definition of a hypocrite is someone whose actions taken do not match the path of action espoused (no pun intended). Until we have someone from rentboy.com "helping him with his luggage"if you know what I mean, then he's who he says he thinks he is. Maybe it's a charade, but we don't know it yet to be an absolute lie, do we?

I will go as far as saying this is probably the least gay man ever. I don't think he's in denial. Nobody has thought as long and hard about his sexuality as this man has; not Dan Savage, not Brian Boitano, nobody. It lives with him, just under what must now be a surface comprised entirely of tough, impenetrable emotional scar tissue. The absolute force of will it must take each and every minute of every day to get by, to maintain, to not do that thing that his nature is screaming out for him to do is impressive as all hell if you really think about it. My God, he must feel the passage of every second and say after each one falls away, "Phew, managed not to blow anyone for that one... oh God, here comes the next..." and the cycle starts all over again. The only peace the man gets must be when he nods off to sleep after dutifully servicing his wife, where in the totally excusable privacy of his subconscious thoughts it can be all backrubs and volleyball in the We Hate Shirts Club for Men. And as he lays in bed awake each morning, waiting the hour or so it takes for his unbidden and carefully untouched erection to subside, he can regard his dreams not as a source of pain or confusion but as a resounding defeat for Satan and temptation; a magisterial triumph for the limitless power and infinite tough-love of a vagina-preferring God.

Contempt is easy. It's also lazy and too easily come by. Compassion is more complicated and nuanced and, in knotty questions like this one, the sign of an advanced mind. Plus if I, as a non-Christian, can find compassion whereas people like Marcus Bachmann profess to follow the tenets of Christ and fail to... well, it's hard not rub up against the irony and purr, isn't it?

Not in a gay way, though.

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*sorry MonsieurGonad. Get you next time.

Arithromancy

2011-07-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to be a good citizen and pay attention to all this debt-ceiling stuff, but it's really not easy. First of all, I have a vague idea that it in some way involves math, so right out of the gate, I'm uncomfortable. It's not that I can't do math. I do have 13 years of American public school education under my belt, thanks very much, which means I'm smart enough to know that I'm statistically unlikely to be able to understand advanced economic theory.

Also, I'm a words guy. Always have been. I understand that the two worlds aren't entirely mutually exclusive, but there's always some hostility whenever someone from my camp is asked to cross over, even if only briefly. I have it on good authority that most of World War II was the result of someone asking Hitler to mentally figure the conversion rate for the wildly inflation-impaired Weimar Republic reichsmark. Remember, he was an author. And worse, a painter. Words vs. figures is bad enough, but the pictures people, forget about it. What else could he do but overthrow the regime and install a much more sensible system of currency? That part later where he murdered all those innocent people probably had as much to do with irredeemable Voldemortian evil as with his reluctance to consider the sums involved in keeping track.

To be fair, though, the figures involved in this debt-ceiling nonsense are as much words as figures. What does "14 trillion" mean anyway? There aren't 14 trillion actual dollars anywhere, never have been and never will be, ever. We couldn't print that much money. We'd run out of trees. Well, not trees, as U.S. currency is mostly made out of linen. The demand pressure on cotton production would be immense. We'd be forced to consider some kind of draft servitude system just to get the crops in which, if I recall, we may have already tried at one point in the past, with decidedly mixed results. It could be socially feasibly if we based qualifications on something other than race. Even if we weren't squeamish about the reintroduction of human bondage based entirely on the arbitrary distinction of melanin levels or nation of origin, there really aren't any isolated or powerless groups left to effectively exploit in that way. The most obvious choice would be the Native Americans, but with the whole casino phenomenon, they can afford fences and guns and really good lawyers. The traditionally next most marginalized of course would be the gays, but a) there just aren't enough of them to construct a reliable labor pool, even if we made the bisexuals work part-time and b) they've gotten all testy in the last 10 years or so. If we push them any harder, we're going to be cutting our own hair and designing our own clothes. A revolt would strike at the very heart of our society. Well, not the heart seeing as the heart exists in the unphotographable deep recesses of our bodies. But the important bits that could someday appear on a reality show.

It's a moot point I suppose because, no matter what our intentions might be, all the field work would go to the Mexicans and how many times can we go back to that well, really? At some point they're going to ask for health care and we'll all have to give up and move to Canada.

So the actual $14 trillion is unlikely to happen. It will stay pretend money, floating around as the most tenuous of fictions, existing only because all the world continues to agree to pretend it does so. I don't understand economics because of the numbers, that's true, but as a words guy, I do understand stories. Economics isn't about figures, it's about narratives. Vast, multinational, interwoven narratives with the most elaborate sets and pantomime shows in the history of show business. It's bigger than Star Wars. It's even bigger than Harry Potter.

I'd watch it if it were actually a pantomime show. If they'd stop pretending it was so god-awful important, it would be less insufferable. And maybe mix in an action scene. And maybe some boobies. Not gratuitous ones, but brief and tasteful and totally germane to the plot. PG-13, not hard-core X. That's how you keep the audiences these days anyway, with PG-13.

I want to be up on this stuff, I really do, but if they're not going to show any respect for the rudimentary basics of showmanship, I can't be held responsible for my disinterest. If it's a choice between CSPAN and Harry Potter this weekend, I think we all know which way I'm leaning.

The Innocents

2011-07-07T22:25:00.000-07:00

Let me just say up front: I think it's a bad thing to murder children. I want to make that as clear as I can possibly make it. I'm worried that later you'll think "Hmm, I think I see the point he's trying to make, but I can't be sure unless I can cobble together a better picture of his position on child murder," so I'm saving us all some time. Don't wonder. In my book, it's definitely something to avoid. Even if you're pretty sure you can get away with it.

I put that last caveat in not because I have any concrete plans or by way of legally-actionable, court-admissable confession. It's just that I've spent some time in Social Awkwardness Jail over the last couple of weeks because I don't have an opinion about this Caylee Anthony thing.

The conversations all start the same, with the tsk and the head-shake and the "Can you believe...?" For the record, no, I can almost never believe. Especially if we're only work acquaintances. Whatever you say that follows, no, in fact, I can hardly believe that such a thing could have occurred in any universe. If I nod long enough and say something like "Man, isn't that just the way?" I can get back to my desk way faster than I would were I to engage in even the slightest hint of critical pushback or even minimal engagement.

Usually it's something blandly tolerable like ...the outcome of a sporting event of some note. Or ...the extremity and/or notable inoffensiveness of the current weather conditions. Those are safe because then people are really only just looking for a walk-by affirmation anyway. I'm happy to distribute those when I can. They cost me nothing. Well, apart from time. And it's not much time. Yes, it's irretrievable in the zero-sum, linear progression of finite existence, nudging me one step closer to inevitable death trapped in a meaningless bubble of irrelevancy and discomfort beyond my control. But I'll feel less awkward next time I see you in the corridor than I would had I blindly brushed past you as I so desperately wanted to, so, you know... fair trade.

But when people have been watching "the news," with all the implied pre-digested outrage, and are trolling for a position for something as heinous as child murder, well, you have to put in a little bit more effort. Even if--and this is important--even if you know nothing about the merits of the case.

Have I watched a minute of the trial coverage? I have not. In fact, I have made a concerted and increasingly strenuous effort to avoid it completely. It stalked me through most of the news outlets and basic cable channels I'm known to casually peruse, so there was no small amount of tacking and plotting going on to avoid the shoals of Child Murder Television. I'm an American in 2011. There's a lot of competition these days for my depression attention. I really don't feel a strong desire to go seeking out new sources of despair.

The obligation remains, however. I feel like there is room to make a sophisticated point: this woman was accused of horribly murdering (I'm rethinking the adjective already... is there a non-horrible option?) her defenseless child. There is a trial. The outcome is acquittal. Can I believe it? Turns out I can. Especially when I know nothing of the circumstances. Was it a clean acquittal? Don't know. Prosecutorial incompetence? Purely circumstantial evidence? Jury tampering? Insanity? Demonic possession? Self-defense? Absolutely no idea. There are a thousand ways a person might not be convicted of something, up to and including non-guilt. It seems reasonable. But if I get "Can you believe..." and don't come back with the head-shake and the tsk, I get the very strong impression that I'm somehow perceived as being pro-child murder.

This is where I refer you very quickly back to the beginning of this piece. I will restate: Fully, 100% anti-child-murder, I am. AND STILL I have no opinion about the outcome of this case. It is possible both things are simultaneously true.

And before you get started, don't bother: I already know what it says about me that I didn't put the flag out on the 4th of July, too. See, I'm more than used to having my actions imply sentiment. You won't get a long treatise out of me about that, though. I'm pretty comfortable being a presumed terror-loving communist. Child murder though, that's where I have to draw the line.

No Evil Shall Escape My Sight

2011-06-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

Back when I used to be a writer, I had this thing where I reviewed movies I'd never get to see, at least not in a timely fashion. Like everything else in those days, the bitterness of too much free time and not enough freedom was the driving motivating factor behind its creation. It's the same combination of factors that got me kicked out of my housewives' online reading club. Let's see how much Jane Austen you have to read before you start SWEARING IN ALL CAPS too. And if you're reading this, fuck you, Brenda. I still say the girls would have liked Palahniuk if you'd just let us give it a chance.

Now I have less free time than I did when I was staying home with the kids, but, ironically, I have all the freedom I want to see movies. It helps that the kids have gotten older now, so there's less worry about being the guy with the crying children in the movies. It almost never happens now. Almost. But look, the rules are R is Restricted wherein no one under 17 is allowed in without parent. With parent, it's every pre-teen for himself. Sometimes Daddy wants to see the one with exploding heads and plot-unnecessary boobies. So yes, sometimes there is crying. But it's manageable. They're all past what the Catholic church calls the "age of reason." For the church I think it's mostly a legal out for implied consent. For me, it means I can convince them to cry at a more reasonable volume if I threaten to take away their Nintendo DS.

The daddy-time outings are rare. I may now have the time to whip out the suffocated, insufferable, douchebag of a cinephile long dormant in me, but I'm stuck for the most part seeing things that a 12-year-old boy might want to see. Or does want to see. I know this because he asks me directly. Or when the commercial comes on, he says something compelling like "Whaaaaaaaa, awwwweessoooomme!" in the way only California public schools can teach one to articulate.

So hooray, more movies! And boo, Green Lantern and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Yes, I know there was a gap where I wasn't able to get out as much, but at my age, there's no excuse for not expecting big stupid loud action movies to be some combination of loud, stupid and big. So that's not really the complaint. Although, that said, I should be allowed to complain about another fucking Transformers movie. Not just a fighting robots movie, but a Michael Bay fighting robots movie. Not really a haven for nuance, unless by "nuance" you mean a new invented single-word meaning describing the ability to ascertain the pubic-hair configuration of a woman via the tightness of the dress she's wearing. Which I now do. Most nuanced film ever.

Green Lantern had kind of the same problem except all the tight and/or missing clothing happened to Ryan Reynolds. He basically spent the entire film in a green onesie. I spent most of the film, as you can imagine, thinking "dang, this film could use a lot more nuance."

That said, I was still a little ashamed of my erection.

The moral of this and probably all other stories ever is be careful what you wish for. As I noted above, my oldest is 12. And all the movies he wants to see are PG-13. Which means, as a parent, this means not only do I have to sit through shitty movies and pretend they're not shitty afterward while the kids talk about how awesome they are (don't worry, I puncture their self-esteem by "accidentally" referring to them by girls' names), but quite often I will have to sit through these films twice, once solo as a pre-screening, then with the boys.

Rarely does a pre-screen lead to an overrule. With the last Harry Potter movie, it just meant I knew when to tell the scaredy-cat ones to cover their eyes, but we still went. The only one I rejected on their behalf was X-Men: First Class. The part where the Nazis murder someone's mother and then later when a guy dies by having a coin very slowly and lovingly passed through his skull were enough to exercise my executive veto.

You'll be happy to know I don't have to see all of them twice. Transformers, I mean, fuck, come on. First of all, Mr. Bay lacks the narrative or constructive skill to manufacture a scene of any psychological impact, frightening or otherwise. Plus, I fucking wish a movie like that would give the kids nightmares. Then maybe I can dare to hope they'd at least pause before considering seeing the next abomination of CGI battle porn.

#paxil

2011-06-23T22:52:00.000-07:00

I went to the 10 year high school reunion neither willingly nor unwillingly. Somehow I had managed to carry with me--whole and unspoiled, a decade after separation from the place and the concomitant social experience--the same exact feeling of detached indifference. I went because my wife and I were in the same graduating class at the same school. The logic of me being her escort to the event outweighed any of the alternative dating options I considered proposing for her.

The 10-year for me was way back in 2002. I should have been somewhat nervous about it I guess considering the primary motivating factors for conversation at these things are nostalgia and/or schadenfreude. In high school I was on that social level of invisibility below even the geeks and the nerds, because they at least existed in a social space necessitating a label. It's hard to be nostalgic about that time we had French class together for three straight years and never spoke. So that was out as an option. And the schadenfreude, well, at the time I was still a housewife. Not that I was ashamed of it, it just requires very little explanation. When "So what are you doing now?" is followed with something like "forensic accounting," you have social permission to drone on endlessly afforded by the fact that nobody knows what the fuck you're talking about. That can kill a whole hour! But when you're a housefrau as I was, nobody doesn't know what that is. And nobody wants to hear the details of your job, 70% of which is another person's feces. They have parents. They know what you do. Being a dude in that role seems interesting, but it works out to about one extra sentence of conversation, usually something vaguely condescending. Proud as I was of my work at the time (no children died!), it made the schadenfreude part kind of difficult. Plus, even if I did fight off the social acrophobia long enough to look down on someone, the only person I would have had to share it with was my date/wife who had made me swear I'd be nice. The running list of who had gotten fat/gone bald I kept to myself. Which sucks because, I mean, what else is the point?

That was the 10. The 20 is coming up next year. I haven't yet gotten the invitation yet, but if anyone on the organizing committee is reading this: I'm not going. Ostensibly the draw is to catch up with people you haven't seen, but with Facebook, I'd be reunion-ing with people whose breakfast menu from that morning I could probably reliably produce for you. The people I would see in a hallway 20 years ago in an acne-fied, gangling mob of backpacks and elbows but had not then and still have never physically spoken to I could already give you their marital status, their jobs, what kinds of cars they drove and to where they drove them, the names and ages of all their kids and the positioning of most of their tattoos and/or piercings. A reunion now is a physical redundancy from a pre-digital world. The conversations will still start with "remember that time..." but we'll be talking about earlier that week.

Plus face-to-face social interaction requires a level of politeness that digitality does not. I think I would know more about a person if I followed their Twitter feed immediately after our conversation rather than from the conversation itself. I could make empty small-talk with a guy whose face I vaguely remember, end it with a handshake and the obligatory false promise to keep in touch, then go straight to my iPhone and see he tweeted: "20 mins talking to some tool about mortgage rates. I think maybe he was a janitor? Gay vibe. Party sux."

A friend of mine just went to her 30-year reunion and says she likes them more the more years pass. I'm going the opposite direction. My indifference at the first one is bleeding into overt hostility toward the upcoming one. It's a new order out there. Social media has smothered the idea of a reunion under a pixellated mountain of information, asphyxiating it into obsolescence. I've turned my back on the 20th century in every way imaginable. My oldest kid was born in '99 and I'm trying to see if I can offload him to a circus or an Amish family. The world moves too fast now. I don't have time for anything pre-2000. Not going is a stand on principle, one for which the rest of you will thank me when my example kicks over the card-house of rickety, reified "tradition" perpetuating itself for the sake of itself.

That and my ex-wife will probably be there. I could do something childish while I'm there like start a rumor about her, but I'm above all that. Besides, that, like everything else, would work way better on Facebook.

The Wasteland

2011-06-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

I've had a birthday semi-recently, which makes me 37. This means I've finally made the crucial life transition from late-mid thirties to early-late thirties. It's a strange sensation to finally be on the other side of the momentous divide I've been staring down for so long. I can say it doesn't feel anything like it did when I crossed the other major social turning points in one's life, like 18 or 21. It's hard to explain what feels so different about it. There's a kind of general tightness, like the icy grip of mortality, squeezing not so tightly as to suffocate, but just enough to remind, constricting not quite to pain but certainly to a vague, numbing tingling. Mostly in the area of my prostate.

Life expectancy is a weird calculation, varying study to study, but I don't think there's any question that now, for any American man born in 1974, I've definitely crested the hill. Like most people who make this realization, all I can really think of are those summers before high school when all I could think of was how excruciatingly bored I always was with nothing whatsoever to do except watch cartoons on black-and-white television and sweat. The television wasn't black-and-white because it was 1950, it was because we were poor, which was kind of the same thing, standard-of-living wise, in the 1980s.

The crux of the memory is the sensation of time standing absolutely fucking still. And to tell you, once again, that I grew up poor. I'm not sure why it ends up being the point of most of the stories I tell. Partially it's because I don't have a lot of stories about growing up not-poor. I notice that I almost always manage to work it in. If I sit and think about it at all, I guess I use it as a kind of a social inoculation. Sure, I can be an asshole in many, many, many other ways, but how can you stay mad at me when you know I went all through junior high school living in a trailer park? Or that, when I did live in a proper neighborhood, it was such a economically disadvantaged area, the only lawns being mowed by Mexicans were their own.

Time no longer stands still, summers be damned. I've got air conditioning and HDTV, which both seem like mistakes now in retrospect. Time absolutely hums as it whips past me. This used to be a stressor, but I'm less afraid of dying that I used to be. I find my level of existential dread comes and goes with what my current relationship status is. I remember toward the end of my marriage, I went through a particularly bleak period of morbidity and fatalism. It turns out that was mostly neurological side effects from the metal filings my ex was sneaking into my scrambled eggs, but that doesn't mean it was all coincidental. Right now things are going pretty well, thanks very much, so I have a more settled sense of completeness. It's an absurd idea, though. I'm not sure how or why it would be easier to face the act of ultimate aloneness in someone else's company. Some people like to point out that we're born alone and die alone, but that's the kind of horseshit false symmetry people always throw over their heads to block out the view of the end. As mammals, birth is something we always do in tandem. But even on a crashing airplane surrounded by a couple of hundred others, every set of eyes closes individually. Unless Jesus is suddenly there, which for me would just be awkward. I would have a philosophical obligation to pretend not to see Him, which I imagine one can only keep up for so long.

Being the age I am, I also finally have the life experience to know that what is now will not always be. I appreciate the moment of satisfaction because I have moments of despair against which I may contrast it. "Contrast" is the right word. The colors shimmer and pop, individually and in concert, an ordered kaleidoscope of stark and subtle, overt and subdued, garish and sublime. It's through this fractured and fracturing lens I can see a little farther into what's coming and a little more clearly what's behind and weather both with letting the swirl affect my balance.

For instance, I know I'd never riot after a hockey game. Hardly an act of perspective there. But I guess in their defense (or in this case, "defence," the suck-ups) they do live in Canada. Hockey season is over and nothing televisable will occur again until the puck drops again in November or whatever it is. Frankly I'm amazed they don't riot every day.

Airing It Out

2011-06-09T19:11:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to do it.

It's not that I don't want to. I really, really want to. And it's not that I think you don't want me to, because it's either that or something that's both more work and less interesting. Not a great combination.

But the guy's name is Weiner. And even though he spells it wrong, he still pronounces it the right way for it to be absolutely perfect for the continuing news story about the man's dick. His junk. His schlong. His cock. Rod. Love muscle. Trouser snake. John Thomas. Shaft. Boner. Old Fella. Meatsicle. Dong. Pole. Third leg. Gnarled hedgehog. Spartacus. Wookiee. Coldstone Creamery.

I could keep going, sure. But as I said, his name is Weiner already. It just feels like piling on. One of the lobby televisions at work was tuned to CNN yesterday and (this is absolutely true) the graphics banner underneath the story read "Mounting Pressure On Weiner." I can't... there's just no way to top that. It's like standing in Pompeii, looking up at erupting Vesuvius and trying to think of different ways to talk about volcanic ash. Sometimes your senses are overwhelmed and there's just no point. Sometimes you have to just stand there and let it happen all around you.

Nobody likes a dick joke more than I do. They're simple, they're always funny and they allow me to express my phallophilia without that vanilla-almond scent of gay. You tell people you love dick and all of a sudden they assume you mean hiding a foreign one in one of your available orifices. You can't just appreciate the thing in all its majesty and procreative, tubular glory; you automatically have to want to swallow one balls-deep. A guy could stand in front of the Washington Monument and suggest it looks like a pillar of marble tumescence and everyone assumes you're a comedian or a feminist instead of an earnest and ardent appreciator of nature's pointiest wonder.

So I'm not going to do it. No dick jokes this post. This Weiner kerfuffle has gotten everyone all stirred up on the subject, but we all know it's only a matter of moments before interest climaxes, flags and then suddenly falls dormant.

Tell me, where is Fancy bred?

2011-06-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

I know I don't believe in fate or destiny, just in general but specifically and especially when it comes to matters of love and romance. The idea of a soulmate is nauseating to me, not just because I'm a heterosexual man threatened by the lingering fear that notions of emotional accessibility will click over the last number on the combination lock that finally falls open and reveals me as a gay.

As I said, it's not just that. It's also that if I'm in a relationship, I want some credit for the work I put in, thanks very much. If my connection with another person is being directed by Meant To Be or Destiny or the Three Fates at their spinning wheel or Jesus or Criss Angel or Body Thetans or Marxian Dialectical Materialism or whatever hoodoo mysticism you believe in, then all my efforts at compromise and understanding and vulnerability are pointless and unnecessary and everything Dr. Phil says is a lie.

OK, I muddied the thesis up with that last point, yes, but I stand by my original position: nobody is fated for anyone else. My ex-wife was fated for me until she was fated for the guy she's with now. Which makes Fate just as much a fickle, rationalizing motherfucker as any other corporeal, limited creature, but wandering formless and homeless with neither purpose nor function. And we all know the best thing to do with the homeless is to just pretend they're not there.

But that's all changed for me now, people. I'm happy to announce that your boy, ole Pops hisself, is in love. It's a change for me, certainly, and totally unexpected. But I finally found someone I connect with on a spiritual level. She's the jigsaw shape that fits the hole I didn't know I had in my soul. I love her and she loves me.

At least I think she loves me. My Tagalog is not that strong. Also, it's hard to make out what she's saying over the webcam. I'm pretty sure the people she works for at liveasiansluts.org have optimized the webcam we use to communicate more for video than audio transmission, which I guess makes sense given the nature of the business she's in. So we don't talk much. Actually, I have to pay to get her to talk at all and for the same price, I can have her put her whole fist in her rectum. All the way up to the wrist, I swear to God. I maxed out the credit card last month, so I have to space out the meaningful communication. It's OK though, we don't have to say much. That's the sweet thing about a soulmate: if there's only the one for you and you for him/her, you don't really even have to try.

Dollar Tree of Liberty

2011-05-26T22:49:00.000-07:00

I've come through most of this recession largely unscathed. Yes, I am down one wife, but most enterprises have had to endure some kind of reduction in force to maintain costs and streamline business practices. A 20% personnel cut for any going concern is going to be noticed, if not downright painful, but given time we realize the one day's unthinkable is the future's possibility-of-regular-sex-with-other-people. It's a well-known entreprenurial aphorism. I'm pretty sure it's engraved somewhere at the Wharton School. Probably near the student health clinic.

The secret to my success through these difficult economic times has been to find something that is both a niche and a growing market. Easier said than done, I know, but if you can find that sweet spot, while one of Adam Smith's invisible hands is smacking down MBAs and the entire manufacturing sectors, the other will be massaging your prostate.

I've found a safe place to be is where I am: in government. Once you get in, it's almost impossible to get you out. It's like being a tenured public school teacher, except your boss has nuclear missiles. For instance, I had a great growing, niche-type job seeking out and firing gay Arabic linguists from intelligence agencies. It was good work, indespensible work, but my God, exhausting. The things you have to do to confirm gayness in a manner irrefutable in a court of law... all I'll say is it will keep you up nights. Not a lot of guys willing to put in what you need to put in to make that work.

But then the don't-ask-don't-tell repeal had me scrambling a little. Politics is a fickle business, so just in case, I kept trolling the clubs for deviants, left the ads up on craigslist, collected some irrefutable evidence from a few of the shiftier, linguist-looking types. Sometimes my primary lead was that they only spoke Spanish, but foreign is foreign. They may not have all worked for the DoD yet, but I've got the footage had they thought of trying. Proactive. That's how you stay right, economically speaking. That and barrier-type prophylaxis.

My work-ethic, my unique skillset and my first-hand knowledge of some of the proclivities of the people who make the hiring decisions saw me through that rough patch, though. That's the second way to keep yourself safe in a downturn: networking. It's a much nicer word than extortion, and way, way less legally actionable.

90% of the people I worked with were fired at one point. I was not one of them. There was a paycut involved and the loss of some fringe benefits. Finding someone to reimburse my amyl nitrite outlay was almost impossible, for instance. But it's hard to complain when you're working and so many aren't. Again, the trick is to find a niche, make yourself indespensible, do the things nobody else is willing to degrade themselves to do. Right now, it's my job to monitor the Republican field of presidential candidates for 2011. There are four of us on this. In the whole country I mean, not just at work. Hey, it has to be someone's job to know who the fuck Herman Cain is. As long as he's in it, I'm working.

So yes, I've got some résumés out...

I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

2011-05-19T21:41:00.000-07:00

You don't become famous so you can fuck the maid. You become rich so you can fuck the maid. If maid-fucking is what you're after, you just need a moderate middle-class income and the schedule flexibility to be home on a weekday afternoon when the service turns up. You become famous so you don't have to fuck the maid.

Chris Rock once famously said men are only as faithful as their options. This is partly true. There are complicated laws of spacetime involved, less to do with wormholes and causality loops than with the basic fourth-dimensional reality that time moves forward. Ancient cultures used to conceive of time as cyclical, but this is because ancient cultures are stupid. I give them credit for making the empirical observation of the repetition of seasons and the structure of the year, but it's not like they didn't notice grandma drying up and dying when she hit one too many spring cycles on that particular roulette wheel. Plus they tended to build giant fuck-off-sized pyramidy things way out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood. I don't trust any civilization that doesn't grasp the basic fundamentals of real estate. They always go broke eventually.

We modern types realize time rolls inexorably forward, like a bowling ball thrown by a four-year-old, crawling along the wax-slicked lane of no return,* edging toward one or another gutter or toward some sort of limp collision with the obstacle pins at the end, the outcome of which is irrelevant. There is no way in which a resolution will not be had. And when it is, nobody will give a shit what your score was.

The point is, we don't have all the time in the world, no matter how either rich or famous we are. So the rich and famous men must consider their options. Option 1 we'll call the John Mayer, where you can leverage your status for some really high-class poon, but given the visibility, you're going to have to play it very carefully into a series of time-consuming relationship-type enterprises in order to crack each individual sexual code. If you're out there slinging it around, TMZ is going to jump out of a dumpster with a camera and suddenly, Jennifer Aniston stops returning your calls. All that work, wasted.

Option 2 I think of as the Tiger Woods, meaning you can have as much random, self-destructive sex you like, so long as it's with anonymous and discardable partners you can credibly describe as opportunistic money-seeking liars should one get loose and start talking to the dumpster press. The problem there, obviously, is in numbers. At a certain point you reach a critical mass where total containment is no longer possible as you have too many free radicals bouncing around. Once one leaks, you have meltdown, which looks an awful lot like your wife beating in your SUV windshield with a golf club.

You can do Option 1 or Option 2, but there really isn't time for both. I don't want to say the approaches are mutually exclusive, but they certainly aren't complementary.**

So I don't think we're going to hear that Arnold Schwarzenegger was up to his narrow hips in Cameron Diaz or Linda Fiorentino or other women who were hot in the '90s. But I would say that seeing the manner in which he chose to sow his Alpine rye, there's almost no way this is the last we hear of freakishly strong, gap-toothed fatherless children running around the state in humble financial circumstances. Once you go Tiger Woods, you go the whole golf metaphor, baby. Don't act like you don't know exactly what I mean.

----------------------

*unless you count the automatic ball return machine, which I don't. Because what am I, a Hindu?

**as with every rule, there are exceptions. In this one, it is, predictably, Madonna; because she's the center of the sport-fucking Venn diagram. She's all categories.

Pyritesque

2011-05-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve had 25 years to think about it and I still don’t understand Solid Gold.

I was very young when it aired so I’m certain I’m misremembering, because it couldn’t have been what I think it was: a television show counting down the top 10 songs of the week, but just to keep things spicy and tele-visual… interpretive dancers? No, that can’t be right. It can’t be.

I think the main problem with it is association. It used to come on Saturday mornings either right before or just after the cartoons, so I was either impatient for it to get over with so I could watch me some Smurfs or I was pissed off at it because it meant my primary-colored world of weekend escape was lost again to live-action Adult World with its muted palettes of mauves and taupes. That might be a slight exaggeration as it was the ‘80s and the mauve was usually in the hair, but I think you get the general point. I cherished my brief open window into pen-and-ink moral simplicity for those few hours of a Saturday. It was only respite in a popular entertainment landscape zooming way over my young, uninitiated head with the needless ambiguity and tortured complexity of grown-up TV like The A-Team and Airwolf. Solid Gold slammed that window down on my chubby young fingers, mocking me while it did it by making me ask my mom who the fuck Dionne Warwick was. I never did get a straight answer out of her.

As I said, the problem is one of negative association. I’m emotionally aware enough to recognize my recollection is tainted by disappointment. There’s no way television executives sat in a room and decided to fund, produce, hire a union crew, rehearse, film and broadcast people in leotards, precision-torn off-the-shoulder T-shirts and a Hindenburg of AquaNet dancing to anything by the Cars.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the Cars. But between my relative youth and all the rails of blow, some of the ‘80s are a little blurry for me. Did we not have radios? Could we not have heard those songs elsewhere? I don’t think anyone was clamoring to see Ric Ocasek lip sync “You Might Think.” Nobody was clamoring to see Ric Ocasek at all. And certainly not fronting a troupe of pseudo-Indians in DayGlo facepaint doing unspeakable things to the watusi in horrible, choreographed unison.

Maybe it’s unhealthy, but I choose denial. There’s no way that happened.

The End of History

2011-05-05T23:54:00.000-07:00

The base-level contrarian in me doesn't really want to react to the death of Osama bin Laden at all. That's the catch to contrarianism as a rule: a sometimes smug (or smug-like) self-ostracization from the impulses that direct and inspire the passions of the whole, or at least the majority. So I don't know who the contenders are on American Idol and I'm not sure what a Twitter "hash-tag" is or what it's used for.

So we the contrarians miss out on proper context for the water-cooler talk sometimes, but there are advantages. Like... um... well, I did mention the smugness already. I was going to also say "sanctimony" but that's really the same thing, for all practical purposes. Ah! Think of all the money we save not buying ribbon-shaped magnetic car decals! A couple extra dollars to spend on indie-rock albums and pre-washed organic kale is more than worth the price of appearing not to publicly give a shit about autism.

People gathering together and waving flags and shouting always makes me a little jumpy. Groups like that, giving over individual judgment to the kinetic, inertial flow of CrowdThink, I always feel are one thrown shoe or misheard remark from whipping into a red-white-and-blue-blooded lynchmob looking to focus their pent-up fervor on... well, probably someone like me. The guy not waving the flag in a crowd of flag wavers is the teetotaler at the office Christmas party. It seems like he's minding his own business, trying to make conversation with an ornamental artificial potted palm, which would be fine, even borderline logical were he soused. But really what he's doing is ruining it for everyone else by providing a contrast to the prevailing social convention drinking-and-overeating-and-probably-dryhumping-in-the-unused-cubicle-we-haven't-filled-since-Jerry-retired. Nobody dryhumps the teetotatler at the office Christmas party. The only options are a) offer him a drink; b) angrily insist that he drink; c) passive-aggressively suggest he could be a homosexual if not for his irredeemably appalling fashion sense and d) find a way to make him pay on his next performance review. The protruding nail-heads will be hammered down until flush.

Patriotic crowds are the same way, except someone almost always actually has a hammer.

So I stayed in on the evening of Bin Laden Day. It was an easy choice considering NY and DC are thousands of miles away. I was comfortably ensconced in my safe, crowd-free home, as conflicted and overanalytical as ever, comparing my reaction to what I was reading from others online.

And then Andrew Sullivan included a quote from a writer Hot Air, a right-wing blog I can't quite bring myself to link directly. It says:

I feel strangely low key about the news, to my surprise; since it broke a few hours ago, I’ve been thinking of the sound the second plane made when it hit the second tower. Nothing will undo it, not even this. But it’s rewarding to know that Bin Laden spent 10 long years hiding his face from the world and that, when the moment of truth came, he had to look Americans in the eye. It’s better than a happy ending. It’s a just one.

And then I'm all: Damn. I guess I am one of you.

But just for today. Tomorrow you'll want to play that fucking awful Lee Greenwood song and I'm right back out again.

Roll The Stone Away

2011-04-27T22:30:00.000-07:00

Here I am nearly a year and a half into this whole separation/divorce business and I'm still sorting through new experiences. I know some people would find the idea of a constantly forming and reforming emotional lifecycle to be exhilarating as some kind of constant perspective paradigm shift, but not me. I like my paradigms where I can see them, and preferably in the fixed shape of something I can recognize, like maybe a television with some premium cable channels. My normal approach to shifty personal paradigms is to whack them with a fireplace poker until they stop kicking. Please note that this is not generally applicable advice. It will also work with, say, snakes, but I don't recommend trying it on Jehovah's Witnesses. Fireplace-poker subduing is a slow, labor-intensive business requiring most of your attention and the JWs almost always roll three deep. And it turns out pacifism has limits.

This past Sunday, it happened not to be my weekend with the kids. It also happened to be Easter. Now, plenty of things have changed over the past year-plus besides just the divorce. I've replaced some fat with muscle tone. I've been known to roll out in public in the occasional pair of Levi's middle-aged-single-man ballcrusher specials (all of the ubiquitous culturo-fashionable indifference of denim with none of the comfort!). I've dated a few women here and there. I've exponentially improved my ability to use innocuous euphemisms for anonymous, spirit-breaking sex. The alterations are subtle, but noticeable. Mostly in the way I walk. It's the chafing.

A slightly bigger deal is that as I've had more time to myself, I've crept more and more toward a truly secular and humanized state of being. More than any other Christian sect in the US, I think, Catholics tend to be more socially churched-up than others. The historical depth of the liturgy and ritual give the practice of the faith that deep thrum rhythm that comforts underneath the accelerating high-pitched scree of one social convention shattering after another.

Even those of us who lapse still feel the draw of the liturgical calendar. There's something comforting about dropping the exhausting just-me-against-the-whole-of-existence position of the truly secular and giving yourself over, if only briefly and entirely superficially, to some aspect of faith. For Catholics, this often means opting in to the least convenient and longest obligation block of the year, Lent right through to Easter.

It's not that the divorce killed my faith. I think it was that, with no one else around, I couldn't think of a good reason to make the effort. Last year I believe was the first in a long time that I skipped the Lenten sacrifices entirely. The formerly-inconvenient Girl Scout cookie season came and, with the resultant unhooking of calories and sin, an abomination by Thin Mints was realized. This requires you to know that I always gave up dessert for Lent. I tried a few bullshit other ideas for the interval ("I'll write every day, Jesus, honest!"), but I always felt like, somehow, the omniscient God would eventually figure out it wasn't the fullest effort I could make to better myself.

But that was all behind me. And this year, with the kids out of the house, it was my first fully-realized non-holiday holiday. No baskets, no plastic grass, no home-invasion by an existence-by-implication world-touring lagomorph. Not only have I made the leap to irreligious, I've even left the cultural bits behind to.

I wish I could say it was entirely liberating, but here I am, with no leftover Easter candy to pick at for the next month. The church has it's good points, but I think it's the gluttony I'll miss the most. It was its second-most tolerated mortal sin, right after pedophilia. But I could never quite bring myself to be THAT Catholic anyway.

Get Your Coat, Love, You've Pulled

2011-04-21T21:30:00.000-07:00

There are downsides to not currently dating anyone. The first and most obvious is that your blogposts tend to become a bit one-dimensional as far as content topics go. I want to write about gas prices and Libya, I really do, but it's hard to focus when you know as soon as you get done typing, whatever it is you do to fill the rest of your evening, sex will not be an option. We tend to romanticize the nuts and bolts of relationship-having when we're not in one, however. I usually write this fairly late, preferring to wait until the house is asleep so I can really focus and deliver for you people the highest of high quality dick jokes and metaphors-that-sound-profound-but-are-actually-dick-jokes, gratis. That means if there were a lovely young lady upstairs in my bed asleep as I type, any post-composition nookie would have to be of the Midnight Suprise/Shameful Morning variety. I can assure you, there aren't words enough to convince her you thought she was awake and "seemed into it." Generally speaking, anything along the rape spectrum--however far down--is one of the harder fights to win.

The upside to being untethered is the absolute nature of your free time. When I'm done here, I can do literally anything I want. Well, the kids are here tonight, so that's not a literal literally. It's more of a 15-year-old-girl text-message "literally." So not at all literally. Probably spelled "ltrly." Whatever the opposite of that would be.

Because I'm young and interesting and full of vim and pep and vigôr and vitality, I do exactly what you'd expect someone cannon-fired free from a 14-year relationship to do: I watch British television on YouTube.

Hang on, it's not as stodgy and hopeless and unfavorably-comparable-to-suicide as it sounds. It's not like I'm watching the kind of tweedy Received Pronunciation drawing-room dramas about the 18th century art of emotional constipation that would occasionally slough off onto public television over here in the '80s and '90s. One of them is a very with-it panel show about arcane bits of trivial knowledge existing in contravention to conventional wisdom presided over by a pedantic, classically-educated, Latin-fluent, 7-foot-tall homosexual. In retrospect, that was not my best sales pitch. But the people on it are funny! Sometimes. You'll only want to kill yourself if you DON'T want to know about cuttlefish or what a "henge" is. Which, let's be honest, doesn't seem likely. I mean... cuttlefish. Awesome.

The other one I've seen but resisted for a while, but have finally happily given in. It's a little precious as the main conceit of the show is that all the camera work is first-person. The POV shifts between people often enough, but if the person looking out takes a drink, a giant cup comes at the screen and angles toward you. And it's one of those shows that leans heavily on awkwardness and personal embarrassment as sources of humor. But it's also at turns wildly sociopathic and achingly sweet. These are terms the young and the cool use.

And yes, Doctor Who starts again Saturday. I don't have a faux awesome explanation for that one. If loving the spaceman with the magic flashlight is wrong, I'm just going to have to be Sarah Palin. Wrongness Invictus.

Eventually I get someone to fall for my standard girl-catching approach* but until then, I'm going to get myself all cultured up. And then she can spend a few months helping me to stop saying things like "bollocks" and yearning for the days of Empire. This is what girlfriends are for.

*Baileys Irish Cream with a twist of rohypnol

Schema

2011-04-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

So here we are again, back at Square One.

The good(?) news is that, this go-round, I was only able to fight my way through to about Square Two, so the knockback isn't quite so neckbrace-inducing as it otherwise could have been. Things don't start to get tricky until about Square Four and from then on, the whole system of polygons and numbers can get a bit overwhelming. I know a guy who dislocated his pelvis trying to make the ill-advised leap from Triangle Eleven to Dodecahedron Nineteen. The problem is, there's no guide to tell you where you're going. There's no Euclid of interpersonal relationships to sketch out the way for us. We're left alone to grope in the dark, falling into every manner of trapezoid when all we're really after is a little rhombus.

Well, see, I'm punning again, so there's evidence that I'm doing better than I thought I'd be doing so soon after yet another setback in the state-mandated basic skills grade-level-appropriate subject test in romantic coupling. From what I understand, a lot of funding for very necessary things is determined by the results of these tests, mostly in the direction of florists, department store cologne counters and condom manufacturers. So far they've all gone begging.

Don't fret, gentle readers. I'm not going to wind up and unspool at you another One Giant Metaphor Post of Apocalyptic Seriousness that kicks around in the dust looking for shoots after the locusts have gone. Was I the dumpee instead of the dumper in this scenario? Turns out I was. With all that implies. But really, what more can I do? Be more awesome? Can the sun be more sunny? You radiate and you radiate and you radiate and then, later, you realize the other person is crippled with polymorphous light eruption. Nothing is less sexy than a partner who makes you itchy. Nobody wants to date a wool coat. Except perhaps very lonely necrophiliac sheep. Which, I'm sorry, is a metaphor too far, even for me.

Again, though, don't fret. I'll feel sorry for myself for a bit, sure. But in all these situations, I like to find what President Blackman likes to call the "teachable moments." Collectively from my experiences, I think I can say I'm developing a better idea about what it is women are looking for. Generally, they want honesty (penis size), sincerity (penis size), emotional availability (penis size) and penis size (girth). Three of those I can probably do. The fourth one... well, if it's dark enough, I guess I can use my fist.

Not on the first date, though. The fist is way down the line. I think it's Oblate Spheroid Ninety-One. But then, like most things, it depends on the girl.

Attached

2011-04-07T23:11:00.000-07:00

Well. It turns out I forgot to mention that tonight I'd be out spending four straight hours in the grippy, guilty embrace of Little League Baseball. I'm thanking whatever totally imaginary spirit it is that watches over me that the middle child turned out to be something of a nellie when it comes to sport, otherwise we'd have three playing at the same time. I don't think my social life, fragile as it is, could take a third more intrusion than I'm already getting with just two in. As it is, I'm thinking of getting my penis a subscription to Cat Fancy or paying for three months of banjo lessons just so it will have something to do until this scheduling monster dies and it's free to live again.

Plus, seeing as we both have DNA dibs on the children in question (and there's no practical or sanitary way to undo that. I did ask), baseball time means ex-wife time. I can say categorically that sittting in a group that includes a woman roughly your age and three children who look, from varying angles, like the both of you is no way to pick up chicks. They draw all the wrong conclusions. Sure, you can wander over and lean casually against the stucco wall of the snack bar all by yourself, drawing that downy, form-fitting single mom away from the pack of other parents for an easier kill, but it only takes one "Hey, dad!" from the stands 10 feet away to slather that ugly "Married, but Looking" stink all over you. That's an odor that lingers as well, especially when it goes off in a crowd. It's a long enough season as it is without being the Pervy Dad. Pervy Dad never, ever gets invited to the end-of-season pool party.

So until early June, as far as meaningful non-familial interaction goes, you people are basically it. There are the people at work as well, but things got weird there in the period between when I stopped wearing my wedding ring and the ring-finger tan-line finally blended in. I still get the occasional crinkly-nose look in the hallways farthest from my workspace, where the whisps of old rumors linger. I can live with it, though. Most of those guys in shipping and receiving aren't really my target demographic anyway.

Do Not Try To Shrink Me, Gypsy

2011-03-31T21:21:00.000-07:00

I've somehow managed to avoid getting sucked up into the Great Charlie Sheen Popular Culture Vocabulary Takeover of 2011. It's been a lucky thing too as it seems to be particularly virulent among males of my age group. I credit my immune system of iron with the happy fact that nary a "Duh! Winning!" has escaped my lips, nor have I mused in any way, idle or otherwise, about tiger blood, Adonis DNA or warlocks of any type, up to and including the Vatican Assassin variety. It seems remarkable, but remember, I'm the same guy who got all the way out of the mid-2000s never having attempted an Austin Powers impression.

I won't dare to claim I came through the Borat business entirely unscathed, but what do you want from me? I'm not made of stone.

While I have been able to keep my lexicon free of the inky, cottonmouth flavor of Sheen taint, I won't say I've been entirely able to avoid exposure. This has less to do with the robustness of my constitution and more to do with the fact that I own a television, a computer, a radio, etc. Ubiquity is ubiquity. We are the tenuous, unclean Mediterranean world and media are the Chinese junks approaching harbor, promising unheard-of spices but delivering only plaguey rat-fleas of Sheen to ravage us.

What I did notice is that someone got around to asking his dad, former pretend President Ramón Gerardo Antonio Estévez Sr., about the situation and he said:

"You know, Charlie’s 45 years old. He’s not a kid. Emotionally he still is. Because when you’re addicted, you don’t grow emotionally. So when you get clean and sober you’re starting at the moment you started using drugs or alcohol. You’re emotionally crippled."

Which made me wonder (and you knew this would be about me eventually, didn't you?) if the same were true about married people. Now, I'm not suggesting being married is the same as being chemically dependent on narcotics. One is clearly more destructive and unnatural a state. But it has occurred to me--and this is a staggering bit of insight I managed completely without the guidance of a trained professional--that I am not 21 years old.

OK, that was more mathematic than epiphanic, but it still counts as insight. What I mean is, emotional development of some kind is going to happen, whether we're trying for it or not. You can go the Charlie Sheen Permanent Blotto route and develop to the point where, on the sliding scale of social fitness, you're looking up at the Asperger's kids. Development isn't always positive.

When you're married, you develop and yes, I get there is more than one route within this route to go. But if you find yourself single again, is it necessarily true that you come back to the social scene as you were when you left it, like the addict does when he finds sobriety?

I was 21 when I started dating the woman I married. A person roughly my age who remained single through that same period is going to have a quantifiably different life-experience curriculum vitae to show for his trouble. He'd be somewhat less self-conscious buying prophylactics, for a start. And he'd certainly know how to make less than 10 pounds of food every time he cooked something. If he ever cooked anything.

I wonder if having been out of the scene, as it were, for a decade and a half puts me at an automatic competitive disadvantage with men my age and at an interpersonal disadvantage with unfamilied single women. I can say certainly that I don't feel 21. By that I mean sometimes I fall asleep in the middle of an afternoon for no apparent reason and that a large majority of my erections now are both purposeful and impermanent.

Maybe that's the point. Efficiency. I haven't learned anything about how to plow through stacks of first dates really or a whole lot about coffee bar etiquette or the strictures dating in the context of fourth-wave feminism. It's been over a year now since I've been out there and, even though I've started behind, I'm comfortable at least in the knowledge that that stuff is learnable.

What I have from being married that an unmarried bloke might not have is a razor-sharp idea of what it is I want. Not from geometrical guesswork or through the sludgy, wet fog of unformable Hope, but marriage (if you do it right) is a laboratory setting for interpersonal relationships. The safety goggles of committment may not be 100% effective, but as long as they work, you can try out an awful lot of shit to find out what is Dr. Phil sloganeering and what is actually useful.

Sometimes in the lab, yes, you get unintended consequences and you spend a certain period of time with tweezers and a magnifying glass picking bits of melted safety gear out of your charred flesh. But the eyebrows grow back eventually and, again if you've done it right, you may stagger out of the wreckage with some basic truths proved in the Newtonian method sticking haphazardly from your vinyl-protected pockets.

The permanently single dude is faster, more agile maybe, somewhat more adept with a tail-feather display. But I know what I want. Specifically because I can say, categorically, what it is I don't want. Because I've tried it.

The best way I can think to put it: I'm pretty sure I'm a lot better off than Charlie Sheen.

We-Time

2011-03-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

It's a day earlier than my normal schedule, but I've got some real-world kid-related BS happening tomorrow night, so here I am now. Normally I don't like to do anything that might upset my reader(s?) and their carefully regulated lives. I know the orderlies can be strict about internet time and it's hard to read when the haldol makes you all twitchy. But look, sometimes life intervenes. I can't always squeeze this through your narrowing windows of lucidity.

Look, I'm sorry. It's lazy and cheap to make fun of the fucking crazy, no matter how funny the weird bastards are. If we weren't supposed to laugh at them, honestly, they'd have come up with another name for them besides "the fucking crazy." But then without it, mental health texts would be far, far less entertaining.

The scale on which we measure mental health is in itself a bit weird, though. Times were, not so terribly long ago, that a good, solid wank was admissible evidence of sexual deviancy and actual medical categorization existed to explain the times when bitches be actin' all crazy. And then, not so long after that, the prescripted fix for "female hysteria" was masturbation. The line between deviancy and therapy can, over time, be completely rubbed out.

Where does this leave us? I mean besides with a generally socially unproductive way to fill our special alone time. You don't have to work very hard to convince me of the benefits of naughty-touching, believe me. I accept that it can have certain mood-altering qualities, but you have to admit with me that at no point in any crisis has the solution been to jerk off at it. Excepting in the case of maybe a really small and slow-moving fire.

And certainly I don't think anyone is going to argue seriously that the best way to lighten the mood in Japan would be a prefecture-wide circle jerk. Frankly, I don't know how a people rebounds from that kind of compounded trauma, earthquake, tsunami, nuclear fallout and, eventually, inevitably, giant walking lizard seamonster. One kid at an American high school drives their car into a pond (speaking of inevitability) and the school shuts down so the "grievance counselors" can put in an appearance.

What do you do for a traumatized nation? I'd like to believe in the myth of Japanese cultural stoicism, but I'm not sure I buy the media projection of the trait. Sure, there are most likely hundreds of thousands of people who, to the extent that they can, take the Sendai Disaster in their stride, urged forward by an inculcated, culture-deep impulse to preserve the common good without complaint. But these, too, are the same people who, in the face of losing a war they started, would volutarily fly airplanes into enemy ships screaming BANZAI! the whole way down. I don't have a dictionary of psychological terms here in front of me, but I feel safe enough suggesting that's not the example to lead with if stoicism is what you're trying to prove.

I'm sure there are thousands upon thousands of suggestions of what it is we can do for the Japanese to help them in their time of deep grief and immediate physical and mental anguish. But if I know Western Culture like I know Western Culture (and I know Western Culture), I imagine the best we're going to get is the one-size-fits-all-tragedies self-adhesive bandage: the all-star charity fundraising novelty single.

I'm not saying don't do it. The cause is worthy. I'm just saying before you unleash Justin Bieber duetting a verse with Lady Antebellum over a clumsy rhyme for "Fukushima," remember these are the same people who perfected the art of ritual suicide.

On your heads be it.

The Weight of Water

2011-03-17T21:36:00.000-07:00

I was only able to watch the tsunami footage the one time. Part of it was the trauma of witnessing a literal cataclysm. And then I was drawn away because my new episode of House was about to come back from commercial. It was the good one too. This guy got really sick, then only exhibited worsening symptoms when engaged in character developing conversations with key members of the main cast. Then he was nearly subjected to a cripplingly invasive procedure only to be saved at the last minute because Hugh Laurie got that weird face palsy he gets every time he talks to Robert Sean Leonard, recovering in time to save the day, all in a very convincing American accent.

I think the most frightening thing about the tsunami is the realization of how illusory the comforts of first-world civilization are. Of course there are mind-blowing material advantages in terms of quality of life just in infrastructure alone. I don't think anyone would argue they'd have rather been in Japan than Indonesia come the deluge. Even as compunded as the Sendai Disaster has become by the very, very first-world problem of nuclear fission, I'd still prefer my chances against the angry, angry escaped isotope than face down the risen sea with only a palm tree and a thatched-roof hut for my shelter.

The tsunami footage, I'm confident in saying, is the worst thing I've ever seen. 9/11 might have shaken me more on a visceral and immediate level, but once it became clear that the threat had passed, I was able to assimilate that and put it behind me by doing what Americans do when faced with crisis: hanging out the flag and watching the subsequent war on TV. This is not to say that I've forgotten or that it's less horrible an event, but it was, after all, a wholly human endeavor. Not just physically, but way down at the drill-down core of motivation, no matter what you imagine it to be. It's people doing in people for people-generated reasons with people-made weapons.

Something like this is different because, unless you're a complete and total asshole, there's no logic to it beyond the cosmic-scale logic of rudimentary planetary physics and hydrodynamics. With the obvious exception of Angry Jesus, nobody planned this. Just as nobody will plan the next Giant Unexpected Emmerich Event that plagues us.

The last time it really rained hard out here in SoCal, I remember driving home in it at something like 2 in the morning (I'm single, remember) and trying to think of the number of countries in the world where it would be a) possible or b) safe to drive 70 miles an hour in a fucking wet gale in the middle of the night without the reasonable expectation of paralysis or death. The answer is: not a whole lot. We've put the money and the resources in. Infrastruture-wise, we have it where it counts.

I've been reading a lot of speculative scenarios about what if something like the Sendai event were to hit SoCal or Seattle or Alaska or Hawaii. The Alaska thing made me laugh a tiny little bit, sure, but past that, I could only think there is no security that is actual security. Even amazing things like passable roads and on-demand potable water are tissue-thin smallpox blankets thrown over the ramparts by an unamused and conquering Mother Earth.

I think if we found the nerve center of our civilization and conjured up the self-awareness to disregard the disembodied head with the booming voice, we'd actually be relieved to pull back the curtain in the corner and find an unassuming bald fucker throwing a bunch of switches. At least that would imply someone had some kind of functional control over something. But I have the creeping, horrifying feeling that were we to throw back the curtain, all we'd find is a monkey riding a dog. And I'd probably know as much about interpreting design or intent from that as I would a tsunami.

The good news is, we're people. It was us who split the atom. If we had never done that, those 50 essential personnel at Fukushima wouldn't be the heroes we know them as today. We can remake the building blocks of the physical world. There's no security that isn't attainable if we are willing to disregard the cost, even if the enemy is the earth itself. Maybe we could try tapping its phones without a warrant.

Am Not

2011-03-10T21:36:00.000-08:00

It's later than I'd like it to be as I start this, but it's not for the usual reasons. Tonight dozens of women went unstalked on Facebook because Little League Baseball season is upon us again. Yes, the rite of almost-spring, where young men take up the historical mantle of America's Least Exciting Sport and parents are reminded once again about the crippling inconvenience of procreation.

It seems great in all the brochures with the cooing infants with oversized eyes and their jerky, floundering movements mimicking our own just enough to flatter our egos and induce us to laugh at them. That's how they get you to take one home, for the entertainment factor. We're not allowed to laugh at the developmentally disabled, unless it belongs to you and there's the possibility they'll grow out of it. It gets less funny when they can't manage a handclap by the third grade. Except to other third graders, who find this endlessly hilarious.

Which brings me to my main point. After watching 11 and 12 year old kids practice baseball for... um, I lost track of the exact time somewhere in there, but let's go ahead and call it for-fucking-ever... I've reached the point where I cannot conceive of any way in which 11 year old boys have any friend in other 11 year old boys. They are, all of them, assholes. Absolutely nothing to say to one another that isn't a wild haymaker aimed at the ole burgeoning sense of self-worth. The second line of every conversation, without exception, is an indictment of the first line of the conversation as the Stupidest and Most Obvious Thing Anyone Has Ever Dared Utter. Or a reference to testicles. But then the third line, definitely, will be the indictment of the thing, like I said.

Don't get me wrong, it could be worse. They could be girls. Nobody is walking off the baseball field with the seed of an eating disorder planted. But it's like watching hyenas circle around, not even cornered prey, just another hyena. One that's been wounded slightly. By speaking.

The stereotype of men as non-sharers probably has some validity to it, and not for the typical C-level comedian reason that, ho ho, who can speak when a woman won't shut up, am I right?! No, I think it's more akin to PTSD. But learned PTSD. Earned over years. If you know someone will challenge the entire validity of your existence because you had the audacity to plump for a disfavored Pokémon, imagine what would happen if a boy dared express something approaching an actual human emotion. How could it be less than bloody crucifixion?

It's been a while since I've been that age, but honestly, I'm surprised men grow up to be able to say anything at all. Women, if you can find one who can change out the brakes on your car and can drag you over Orgasm Ridge on a regular enough basis, I say count your blessings. If you're waiting for emotional nakedness to follow, you can only be disappointed. The best you can hope for is to find one who had no "friends" at age 11 to inflict the damage. But unless you're really, really into World of Warcraft, I doubt you'll hit it off.

Now I Eat Meat

2011-03-03T18:42:00.000-08:00

I worry sometimes about he gap between perception and reality. I don't really mean some kind of scenario out of The Matrix where the simulacra are indistinguishable from the actual and where the illusion of life is marked by being chased by Hugo Weaving through decreasingly interesting divisible thirds until, right at the end, you realize you just spent the whole thing watching Keanu Reeves play a video game.

No, I just mean the basic human instinct to systematize; to order the unorderable chaos of experience into arbitrarily arrived-at categories of same-ness in order to render sensory input small and individualized enough to be digested. I think you'll find that a great deal of what we think of as intolerance is an instinctive lashing-out at something that threatens the boundaries of these categories. There are men and there are women. Implicit in that is the biological imperative to procreate and perpetuate. If you crown the whole biological drill-down with the fripperous plumage of tradition and religion, you get not only homophobia, but self-justified anti-gay violence. RuPaul might be a dude in a dress, but he doesn't LOOK enough like a dude in a dress to be a dude in a dress. How much rage in this world comes from loudly-self-proclaimed hetero men who have felt a twitch in the ole gentleman's area when contemplating RuPaul? The confusion, I can assure you, hits some people right in that space between the solar plexus and the spleen, leaving less a bruise than the ultimately unscratchable type of itch that can only be caused by metaphysics. Or maybe a tapeworm. They're more similar than you'd think.

Those of us with critical thinking skills are able to reconcile the difference, leaving space for cross-dressers, gender-normative homos, women's rights, abortion right alongside the continued propagation of humans as a race. It's made all the easier by our in-the-know enjoyment of the bio-evolutionary benefits of non-straight people, including a social reservoir of a population not burdened by the biological necessities of childbirthing, a rich theater culture and bold-yet-tasteful window treatments.

Beyond the gayness question (which is here used more as an example and an excuse to talk about window treatments and tapeworms in the same thesis), I don't know that there's an answer for the anxiety when our preconceptions are disabused or revealed to be entirely illusory. All of economics leaps to mind. As does every aspect of living with in the certain knowledge of inescapable death.

But if you really want to freak yourself out, do what I did a few years ago and consider this self-delusion and question ye all ye ever knew.

The problem I have with it is that the press has finally settled on a spelling for the non-leader leader of Libya. It was always fun to see news outlets spar over Qaddafi, Khadafiy, Gaddafhi and every other variant, sometimes in the space of the same article.

The internets seemed to have settled on something close to "Gadhafi." Which is fine, except if you consider the scrambled-letter-reading thing, I almost always initially read as "Gandhi." I just do. The headlines come out somewhat awkwardly. "Gandhi orders airstrikes." "Gandhi vows to fight until the last drop of blood." "Gandhi orders soldiers to fire on unarmed civilians."

It fucks with me on two levels, with the weird I'm-never-really-reading-what-I-think-I'm-reading letter-scrambling thing and with the bloodthirsty Mahatma image, the flecky gore of martyrs staining his homespun Indian cotton dhoti.

I'm sorry, bapu, it's involuntary. If it helps, in the unbidden fantasy, you always win.

There are easier ways to get venison

2011-02-24T19:50:00.000-08:00

There’s probably some kind of evolutionary advantage to the way human beings can take any set of circumstances and, if they are consistent or at least in some way repeatable, integrate them into the cosmos of first routine, then “normal.” The joke is that poor kids don’t know they’re poor until someone else points it out to them, usually around junior high school age, often in the form of a rhyme accompanied by pointing. The Payless Shoe Source Pro Wing sneakers were always a dead giveaway.

The ability to absorb and assimilate is sometimes called “complacency” with a bit of a sneer, but it really is one of the great magic tricks of human emotional self-hypnosis. 9/11 was bad, but was it worse because of the horror of the violence of the event or because of the way it forcibly re-coded our preconceptions about our personal safety and the way in which we as Americans are viewed by the world? And further, if 9/11 happened every day in some form, at some level, how long would it take us to take it in our stride? I’m thinking of the famous bit of film footage from the Blitz in London during World War II where a man walking down a street leans over a piece of burning rubble to light a cigarette and casually continues on his way. Horror is horrible, but is it only thus because you don’t see it coming?

The side-effect, of course, is that we get blindsided and upset by alterations. Blindsided because the safety of routine constructs a natural sort of tunnel-vision, where we take our eyes off the road, confident in our ability to navigate the expected, so that any reaction we might have to an unforeseen curve or an animal crossing will almost necessarily result in corrective action that is too late, ill-considered and born entirely by panic. I call this the Highway Deer of Unexpected Circumstance. It is in some ways related to the Roadkill Skunk of Somebody Else’s Problem, but far more violent and, at least initially, a lot less smelly.

One ends up with lessons misapplied, if not simply missed, in a flurry of action dissipated by the heat friction of we generate in the act of flailing. Sadly, the only remedy is to be prepared for all eventualities at all times which is functionally impossible, especially now since the late-night informercial telephone psychics have all been chased away by scolds, ethicists and (probably) Scientologists. If there’s one thing a Scientologist will not tolerate, it’s someone making money preying on the psychological gullibility of others.

These days, of course, we all have computers, we all have television, we all have that other thing where you get sound out of it but no pictures... man, it... um... there are the dials in the front and you usually get one in a car... you know what, we’ll circle back to it.

So we’re inundated with new new new information all the time. And who can help, especially in the last week or so, but be astonished and transfixed and maybe just a little bit terrified by the looming, accelerating freight train of change. I’ve been alive now for just short of half of the life expectancy of someone who is, for demographic purposes, exactly me (white, over-educated, decent physical shape, crushingly handsome, sexually dynamic, etc.). I’ve seen a lot. Less impresses me than it used to, certainly. But if you had asked me 10 years ago, six months ago, hell six WEEKS ago if I saw any of this coming, being honest, I would have said yes. But I would have been lying.

Because deep down, the novelty of events turns my head, the nature of events transfixes me and the magnitude of them refuses to let me be no matter how monumental an effort I make. And in case it’s unclear, I’m talking mostly about the North Africa/Middle East foofaraw. This is not me freaking out because maybe it will snow on me this weekend in SoCal. I’m not that shallow. I can be moved by the struggle of my fellow man against the chains of tyranny in Libya and Egypt and whatever else Brownmanistan. They just want the chance to be hated for their freedom the way they already hate us for ours.

Seriously though: snow.

And oh... Radio! Thank God. That was going to bug me all day. That would have been tragic.

Midwifery

2011-02-17T19:02:00.000-08:00

OK, so I forgot to come back to this and add something after last week's half-ass post. I can't believe I used to do this like six days a week. I guess it's what you condition yourself to. The dynamic nature of human tolerances has always been fascinating to me. I figure at some point we'll stop being physically able to set 100-meter dash world records, but I don't know, it just keeps happening and happening.

Just a single child birth falls into this category. I've seen it happen, live and in person, three different times and I still have no idea how any single human can endure it, let alone two of them. I know it's too much for three. The second time around, I had the prescience to keep a chair near me. Watching someone suffer like that--and it is suffering, don't let anyone try to sell you anything less--and not only see the thing through to the (ultimately satisfactory, in our case) conclusion but then to VOLUNTARILY DO IT AGAIN at any point later in one's life is more than my active mind can fully reconcile. I'm convinced there's some kind of collusion going on between the obstetrician and mothers to convince present fathers that the whole thing is worse than it is. I don't know where they find the time to rehearse or where the keep the box the ACTUAL baby comes out of, but I have a hard time believing there's any way the whole business with the fallopian tubes and uteruses and birth canals is actually real. I've seen my share of the necessaries pre-pregnancy and I'm sorry, it just doesn't seem scalable. So it's either a complete put-on to put the lifelong guilt-whammy on dads or OB/GYNs are actually some class of sorcerers. I'm willing to accept an answer that's a hybrid of those two positions.

So what I'm saying is, every time I feel like I'm in position to complain about something, I have to remember that the tolerances are always stretchable. Yeah, trying to date people again sure seems like it sucks, but it's probably because I'm just not applying myself. If dating one person seems hard, the answer is probably to date five people simulatneously. Then one will seem like a piece of cake. Plus, then when I finally get chlamydia, I won't be so accusatory toward the one person since I won't be sure who introduced it to the group. Because at that point, it will probably have been me.

I just remind myself that a downer is only a downer in the context of my emotional stamina and my serotonin levels. Plus, no matter how bad things are, worse things could happen. Much worse things.

I'm Being Semi-Serious Here

2011-02-10T22:06:00.001-08:00

This evening has kind of gotten away from me. I assumed I'd have more time, but it turns out that if you're going to introduce your children to uncomplicated-yet-tediously-multi-step gourmet-style food, you're going to have to be willing to sacrifice blog-preparation thinking time to whipping egg whites on occasion. The thing about Oreos is, yeah, trans-fat and the emotional burden of the American Diet, but apart from the effort to separate the halves to get at the sugar-lardy goodness in the middle, they require almost no prep time. And even fewer dishes. In future, I'll steer my Thursdays that way.

I'm exhausted and creatively tapped for the evening. This weekend there are no kids around. I will try to add something here then, if I can free up a hand to type from the restraints and, of course, if Mistress grants me permission. Which I kind of doubt. Even for a dom, she's kind of a bitch.

Instead, spend the three minutes you would have spent reading this nonsense to watching a goodly portion of what is possibly my favorite movie scene ever:

Vaya con dios.

This Must Be How Marc Antony Felt

2011-02-03T21:21:00.001-08:00

The events in Egypt have been running a little ahead of me, sometimes on a camel, brandishing a whip. I know to keep my distance. There are things evolution has given us a natural aversion to, for the sake of our safety, like pocupines, cacti, nuclear power plant cooling towers and whip-wielding camel-riders.

And while the camel-riders are bad news for those in their path--journalists, women and women journalists, from what I gather--I can't help but think of what a tremendously invigorating breath of life this is for some almost-dead anti-Arab stereotypes. I mean, a literal camel-jockey. What a gift for the disconcertingly large portion of America south of the GED Line. It's like having video of a Chinese guy eating a dog or a black man having sex with a white woman. We all have to endure at least six more months of our Local "Hey, I'm just calling it like I see it" Guy.

Speaking of the uneducated, the joke is that Americans learn geography after the war starts. We're not threatening to invade Egypt (that I know of... come on, Wikileaks!) but TV and internet news make this kind of the same sort of scenario. The idea behind the anti-American preconception is that we're uncurious about the world outside until events propel us into a crash course in cultural apprehension, which ends about how you'd expect anything involving the word "crash" to end, with lots of twisted, smoking metal.

Events are moving fast in North Africa, the Levant and elsewhere in the islamosphere, to be sure. And in the rush to keep up, in our existing state of Zero, it's tempting to look to others to color in the outline for you. This is where Glenn Beck makes a lot of money, but consider: it's been 10 years in Afghanistan, and what do we really know about the place? Taliban, burqas, opium poppies. Even though it's closer and far more westernized, I'd say we know less about Egypt since our perception of it is warped by the historico-magnetic fields generated by pyramids and Cleopatra. Go back and watch the beginning of Despicable Me. But for the shrink-ray, it's a nature documentary.

We should be doing better. This is the information age, after all. The worst commercials going are the Microsoft Bing! ones where they seem to suggest that search engines giving you lots of results for things you're looking for is a problem. We should use their search engine, the argument goes, because their search engine does less of a good job, saving us from the labor of discernment. In cases like this, with Egypt for instance, I'm not completely sure they don't have a small point. The volume of information to be had is staggering. If only it weren't Microsoft, I'd almost trust them enough to try it out.

It's lazy of me, but instead of fighting the tidal wave, I've picked a couple of fiberglass-wrapped polystyrene vessels to float me in, mostly Anderson Cooper on CNN and Andrew Sullivan's site. One gives me raw pictures and the other an idea of what people who think about this stuff are thinking. But I don't let them carry me all the way to shore. Part of that is a bit of contrarian-fed self-respect; I want to do some of the work myself. The other part is that I don't want to let the water get too close to shore as, from what I understand, camels swim.

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2011-01-27T20:54:00.000-08:00

The internet has taught me how to share; I can't remember the last time I had a thought that I automatically assumed was purely private. It has also rewired my brain to comprehend language in an entirely different way. For instance, I see the word "share" and I understand it to mean "download copyrighted works without paying."

It has brought an audience of very tolerant readers to a woefully non-self-starting writer. It has imbued in me the nearly-spiritual belief that hearing two songs in a row from the same artist means my shuffle function isn't working properly. As a boundless source of information and experimentation, it has answered for me some questions I had assumed were unanswerable, like how much voyeurism can I stand and is it possible to watch too much porn? Without it, I would never have achieved personal milestones in narcissism or paralyzing hypochondriasis.

For me, the World Wide Web is one of those ideas that, even though you know better, you think, somehow, it was for you personally. When I was a kid, I would read encyclopedias voraciously, not cover-to-cover like some kind of beast, but jumping from article to article, pushed by the SEE ALSO references at the end of the last totally engrossing thing I'd just read about Lady Jane Grey or mincemeat, places held first with fingers, then any bookmark I could find, usually old receipts or torn up bits of junk mail. It's hard for me to imagine that ole Tim Berners-Lee didn't dream up hypertext with me specifically in mind. In that way I guess you could say my relationship with TBL is not unlike Mark David Chapman's was with JD Salinger. Words can be so inspirational.

I'm staggered (still!) by the things the internet is capable of. It literally puts fear in the hearts of dictators. It's not just a conveyance for collected phonemes arranged by syntactical precedent, it's an engine of learning, organizing, revolutionizing, earth-shaking or even, at its peak, a vessel for joke references in bad taste about murdered pop stars. There's almost nothing it can't do.

With Tunisia and Egypt in mind and the president's stirring call to post-Sputnik action, it's time we took the training wheels off and made the most of this God-machine.

It's time we made up a really sweet rumor about Charlie Sheen.

He's already done half the work by being admitted to the hospital with mystery stomach pain. It's the classic set-up. Just look what just the whiff of something similar did for Rod Stewart or Richard Gere. And both those got started pre-internet. If we do this right, we could be totally famous. You know, in the way that totally anonymous and ultimately unattributable sources of urban legends generally are.

So what could we say was the problem? We can't do "gallon of semen" or "colon gerbil" because, well, spoken for. Which sucks because they were the awesome ones. Hey! Maybe we just one-up both of them and say they had to pump his stomach to clear out a gallon of gerbil semen. It's a lazy pastiche, sure, but that describes 90% of our culture anymore anyhow.*

Plus you have the admit, the visual is a winner.

Go forth and spread the word. Revolution in Iran, whatever. If we play this right, we could get Two and a Half Men off the air. I told you this internet monster was capable of greatness.

------

*the other 10% is divided between an escrow account held as collateral by Chinese bankers against the national debt and, as per tradition, Jews.

Glub glub glub

2011-01-20T20:50:00.000-08:00

Friends.

If there were any other way, I would choose it, and gladly. But some things are fated. Predetermined. Colored with inevitability. They have the taint of the sure-to-come.

By the time you read this, I may already be gone.

This isn't a suicide note. You can tell because it is boring and stupid. If I were writing a suicide note, you'd fucking know it. Knowing it would be the last thing I ever wrote, there'd be no holding back. The metaphors would support the analogies, spun together in a fine mesh web of gossamer prose wafted on the butterfly-wing breezes of lyricism and wit. Also there would be more blocks of quoted song lyrics, probably by Pink. What can I say, she speaks the secret language of my soul.

While I have no intention of offing myself, I do live in Southern California, which has to at least count as a retardation of the Darwinian instinct for survival. This state is constantly trying to shake us off, sometimes literally. Whatever natural catastrophe finally does us in, we certainly couldn't reasonably argue that we didn't see it coming.

The latest ABSOLUTE CATACLYSMIC INEVITABLE ESCHATOLOGICAL CATACLYSM OF DOOM isn't the usual suspects of earthquake, wildfire, mudslides or state legislature budget negotiations. This time, it's only a Biblical drowning in a river that falls out of the sky.

Really, they're calling it an "atmospheric river." It seems hyperbolic, but not when you consider it next to the description of the confluence of storms deluging us "at the same rate as 50 Mississippis". That's more like the California I know. Rain is what happens when homo indie filmmakers can't afford a halfway competent cinematographer and try to cheat by adding fake, wet, concrete-darkening "atmosphere" to their movies about feelings and shit. This is SoCal. If we're going to do death-by-rain, we're going to do Michael Fucking Bay. Believe it.

And just to keep things in perspective, the scientists studying this phenomenon (remember, these are the SCIENTISTS) refer to this as the "ARkStorm." Just like that, with the fucked-up mix of caps and small letters, like the name of a shitty minor league baseball team texted by a 14-year-old.

I get why they're going big with the the talk, though. We're Californians. You have to try really, really hard to scare us anymore. The gang violence didn't get me. The crack epidemic didn't get me. The shark attacks, the child-snatching rampages, the elderly drivers, the smog, global warming, Mexicans, firestorms, earthquake after earthquake after earthquake... and look, still here. Well, not all of us. But we replace the ones actually killed by that stuff faster than we can bury them. Every successful movie with a no-name star sends at least 100 deluded people here just over the opening weekend. I think 40 Year Old Virgin raised the population of Culver City by about 600 all by itself.

We're not all the smartest ones ever, sure. And will the earthquakes get us eventually? Sure they will. Hell, even this Deathstorm thing happened before in like 1861. This apparently didn't count because there weren't any white folks living here at the time. But also it got us in 1969 and again in 1986. Man, I remember 1986. It's hard to forget the day everyone in the state was wiped out by a river from the sky.

In the Absence of the All-Merciful

2011-01-13T20:53:00.000-08:00

I didn't see the Obama Tucson eulogy thingy speech. I heard it was very nice. Or the fatuous brayings of a dead-souled charlatan molesting the corpses of the slain to jiggle free the directed aura of Klieg lights and the affections of the unblinking electric eye. One of those two things. I've seen it described both ways.

I didn't watch the Sarah Palin response thing either. Partly that's because I still can't fathom why I should give a shit what her position may be, on this or anything else. I have a list of reality/non-scripted television personalities I would seek out for guidance on any number of issues sorted by order of importance and I'd have to say she ranks somewhere south of Anthony Bourdain, Andy Richter, Jeff Probst and most of the cast of Jersey Shore.

I just don't have the energy to see this, as everything else since at least 2000 but probably 1992, devolve into the charge/countercharge incest-infused slap-fight called Seize the News Cycle. It's almost impossible for me to imagine engaging in any way on any level with this whole assassination business without being speckled with the vomit-splatter of 21st century American pop-culture political discourse.

It's not that it makes me sad. It's that it makes me exhausted. Even before I engage. So so weary.

And yes, OK, part of the problem is that I know if I start digging in too deeply, at the bottom of this pile of refuse and detritus, there's a murdered nine-year-old girl, a fact I'd rather pretend doesn't exist. It's an incovenient horror that stands out as a sharp-edged silhouette of reality against the rampaging white-out of manufactured political noise. The wholeness of it, its inescapability, it's root-level mortal truth invokes more than a pang of Sartrean nausea. I find it difficult to even construct an intellectual framework to express any of it as the first spun-sugar lattices shatter with the screeched compression-wave shout THIS IS WHAT MATTERS.

It doesn't help that I'm the father of a nine-year-old myself. And a recently former nine-year-old. And a nine-year-old-to-eventually-be. So like Sarah Palin, I choose to take this inadequately-named tragedy and make it all about me and my reaction. Here on the Thursday following, it's all a bit much for me, I admit it. Out there somewhere there is context and reason. For now the Daleks have appeared and I choose to hide behind the sofa.

How it plays in Punxsutawny

2011-01-06T21:11:00.000-08:00

So you're asking yourself: how is 2011 going so far?

Well, by this time last year, everything seemed fine as well, so I'm not getting lulled into a false sense of security. The wife didn't do the moving-out thing until early in the second week of the year. You have to keep your head on a swivel.

Sometimes things can creep up on you. Like the apocalypse, for example. No, not because birds and fish died, but because the event spurred a very public Kirk Cameron sighting. I don't think he's the Anti-christ, nor do I think his appearance, like some kind of eschatological groundhog, portends the Biblical fire-and-brimstone End Times. I just think there are a limited number of Kirk Cameron appearance the world is prepared to take before it just kind of shuts off out of cosmic ennui.

I was a little bit heartened by a warm-fuzzy bipartisan Congressional ritual reading of the Constitution. It seems like a really awesome use of the new majority's time to stand around with their Democratic colleagues and not actually do anything for two hours on a work day. But then Democrat punchbowl-turd Jerry Nadler had to up and say something I agree with in principle and fuck up a perfectly good pro-America half-a-chub-on, pointing out inconvenient stuff like "...Republican bills to strip courts of authority to consider constitutional challenges to specific congressional or executive actions, and attempts to undermine the rights of all Americans to be free from excessive government surveillance and intrusions into their private lives."

The response to Nadler's utterly disrespectful employment of his critical-thinking faculties ("You are not supposed to worship your constitution. You are supposed to govern your government by it") has been met with a strong and equally thoughtful approach, mostly pointing out that Nadler is both Jewish and fat.

The stuff about him being a gay communist traitor pedophile are all unconfirmed as of press time.

On the West Coast, we are still but six days into the new year and about 12 hours into the new Congress. And so far, it's a mixed bag. The good news is I learned that no black people lived in America until 1865. Believing it makes me feel less guilty, so I'm not going to look at that one too closely. I like learning new stuff, so we'll call that a positive. On the negative side of the ledger: everything else is exactly the same. But with a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Motivated entirely by... something, I don't know what.

The re-balancing positive there is that people will only give a shit about Congress up until the State of the Union speech in like three weeks. And then it all goes pear-shaped again because that kind of kicks off the next presidential election cycle, which promises lots of very public speeches by Mitt Romney. Is it too early to be underwhelmed?

Apocalypse... you know what, I'm not going to say no right away.

2010: The Year We Make Contact

2010-12-30T22:35:00.000-08:00

The time between Christmas and New Years (Year's? Years'? I don't know) Day is, as you know, traditionally known as List Season. Best Films of the Year. Top 10 Albums. Worst Dressed. Top 10 Garments Made of Meat. The usual stuff.

It is also the time for Year in Review retrospectives, wherein writers take a bunch of disconnected events and force a false symmetry on them because of where they fit within an arbitrary social construct of temporal demarcation. I'm sure the Katy Perry video where she shoots whipped cream out of her boobs and the ratcheting-up of martial tension between North and South Korea have a great many mutually explanatory facets, causes and repercussions. Except I don't remember Snoop Dogg being in that second thing.

Compelled by the inertia of tradition, I will now list for you my Top 10 Personal Experiences of 2010.

1. I got divorced.

I think I'll just stop. From there it just gets depressing.

Actually, breaking news, that point (see #1, above) is now actually literally true. As of today, according to the state of California, I am officially an unmarried man. My ex-wife (I now have an ex-wife) moved out in January, so the process took 11 months and 23 days in total.

I was warned that, however I felt about the process, when it became final, I should steel myself against an untapped reservoir of unprocessed emotion that wouldn't be available for use until the moment arrived. Now that it's here, I'm ready to face it, damn the consequences. And in all raw, unvarished honesty, the first thing that pops into my head: Hellooooo, ladies.

2011 could be OK.

Ex-Mas

2010-12-23T21:37:00.000-08:00

As much as getting divorced wasn't really my idea, I can say that I don't really miss my ex-wife. Part of that is semantic treachery on my behalf seeing as I don't actually have an ex-wife as yet. The State of California, in all its wisdom, has a mandatory minimum six-month wait from the time the respondant (that's me!) is served papers before the divorce can become final. That period has lapsed, and it is still not yet final. With a lawyer involved, technicalities become more or less unavoidable. But I bring it less to launch into an anti-lawyer screed and more because I enjoy using the phrase "mandatory minimum" with regard to the memory of my marriage. It puts it on par with sentencing guidelines for holding misdemeanor weight of marijuana, which makes me feel kind of like Willie Nelson. And who has more of a reputation for being cool without ever having once done anything actually cool than Willie Nelson?

Back to my original point, I don't miss my ex-wife. Once you shake off that feeling that the only thing wrong with someone else's life is you, it very quickly becomes difficult to imagine wanting it back. It's like that time I took omnicef for a throat infection and it killed all my bowel flora. Sure, I lost 30 pounds because I couldn't eat for three months, but that doesn't mean I look back on the era with any kind of nostalgia.

Around the holidays--our first holidays apart in 15 years--I will admit to just a tinge of wistfulness that creeps up on me. Mostly this occurs standing in line at the Toys R Us. Or trying to fold wrapping paper around the edges of tiny boxes containing Nintendo DS games. Marriages work or don't work on lots of levels. Being married to a control freak can be a pain in the ass when you're trying to assemble an IKEA bookshelf, but holy God, does it come in handy when the holidays come around. Not being allowed to do something is only emasculating if it's something you want to do. Being 100% in charge of Christmas is not one of those things. Projecting forward, there will be other things I miss in the future, certainly. Probably mostly the alimony checks.

* * * *

Sorry. Holiday cheer really isn't my thing. Following on last week's discussion of Stuff What Makes Us Come Over All Weepy-Like, this was the last thing I saw that really caught me off guard. Note: don't make the mistake of watching it at work like I did. It's a bit long (7 minutes plus) and the heavy stuff doesn't come to the end, but dang...

And just as a counterpoint, this made me laugh harder and longer than anything I've seen in a long time. Warning: it's even longer than the above (this is 13 minutes). And it does contain some incidental bits of actual information. But I don't know, it just sort of destroyed me.

These are all the gifts I have for you. Merry Christmas. Unless you're one of my Jew friends, in which case... how's it hangin'? I don't know. Fill in what you like. Movies and Chinese food are traditional, from what I understand.

No Way We're Watching Finding Nemo

2010-12-16T21:14:00.001-08:00

Way way back before, in the misty haze of memory lost to time and I forget what else, I used to be married. I was under the impression that it was a pretty sweet deal, what with my wife making money and me committed to the not-working angle. But now that there has been some distance (I refer you back to the first sentence re: misty haze) I can see things with a bit more perspective.

This is my way of admitting that yes, maybe, OK, some things about it sucked. It made dating pretty inconvenient. You can't display your collection of vintage lesbian clown porn in the way it deserves. The day your spouse says they probably never loved you just before they move out is kind of a drag. Going to movies got really hard after the kids were born.

I think of all those challenges, I'd say the movie thing was the worst. I even devoted a whole series of blogposts to the movies I longed for but was denied access to by the oppressive laws against child neglect.

Now that I have 3-4 days free per week (that's every week!), things are much different. Being a fully functional, self-contained adult, I have no compunction nor reservation about going to movies by myself. The up-sides are almost innumerable. It's always automatically at least half price versus taking a date. And it's been at least a year since I had to see anything starring Reese Witherspoon and all her fucking single-gal pluck. You're not fooling anyone there, Chinny. We all know by the end of the movie you're going to end up with that guy, just like the rest of them do. Hell, she even ended up with Johnny Cash and he was a womanizing drug-addict brother-murderer with a fucked-up Joaquin Phoenix harelip.

OK, so those are just two up-sides. Turns out they were pretty easily numberable.

The only downside is that now when I go to movies... just sometimes... I weep.

I know. It's embarrassing. There's nothing more pathetic than a dude by himself at the movies weeping. But come on, Leonardo DiCaprio hadn't seen his kids in all those years and the top was spinning and then it kind of wobbled... I'm not made of fucking stone, OK?

What bugs me is that I didn't used to be like this. I used be a man. I did manly things. I used to yell at the television when the performance of the local sporting franchise would displease me in some way. I would drive, relying solely on my innate hunter-gatherer internal compass to guide me, often to places I did not know I had intended to go. I would stand around at the port of Long Beach on a Friday evening and offer handjobs to longshoreman in exchange for beer money.

That last one is still manly. It has to be. Jerking off is manly. Being a longshoreman is manly. Ergo, jerking off a longshoreman? Double-manly. That's not just logic, that's fucking algebra. And if that isn't enough to convince you, consider: I don't even drink beer.

I don't cry at every movie. I made it through most of The A-Team relatively dry. But then it was all I could do to concentrate on the dialogue and the delicate subtlety of plot, so it was hard to let myself go all the way, emotionally speaking.

I have some specific triggers. One now is anything to do with fathers and sons. One more way in which my kids have ruined me. There's a scene in the new Harry Potter when one of the weird clone Weasley boys has his ear blown off. There's a moment of parental concern, totally fleeting, by the parents (expertly, if briefly, played by Mark Williams and Julie Walters) that choked me up--it pains me to say--both times I saw the thing in the theaters. And no, I hadn't forgotten it was coming the second time, either. Knowing it was going to happen actually kind of made it worse.

The other thing is stuttering. My oldest boy stutters a bit. I saw this movie called Rocket Science on cable one time about a kid who stutters and the crass high school bitch who lures him onto the debate team (played expertly by then-newcomer Anna Kendrick), the last scene of which is the kid struggling heroically to place an order for pizza. Total emotional devastation. I could lose a goddamned limb and feel less.

What is wrong here? I get that there's some kind of paternal instinct-o-meter kicking in and whatever, but I fail to see the evolutionary benefit. How does it make it more likely that I will survive and allow my offspring to survive by turning me into a total pussy?

The problem is the next movie I want to see is The King's Speech, with Colin Firth (yes, yes...) playing reluctant King George VI attempting to overcome his debilitating stutter to give an important wartime speech. There will be much struggling, which will no doubt be of the heroic type. In the end the violins will swell and Colin Firth will act his pasty old ass off and... hang on.. hang on... there's something in my eye...

...Or Maybe I Just Need A Bit More Sleep

2010-12-09T20:54:00.000-08:00

There are, if one is lucky, at least two seminal points of transition in our emotional and intellectual development as humans. The first is from child to adult, having mostly to do with recognizing responsibility, realizing one's agency and earning a perspective that allows the benificent combination of reason, compassion, wisdom and some sense of calm. Please note that this transition is by no means automatic, as a mere function of accumulated age. Most of us know several people very old indeed whose primary achievement in that time is simply to not have yet died.

The second transition point, even less common than the first one, is from adult to mortal. It's trickier than the first one as the point of departure is almost always one of deep Kierkegaardian crisis, where a person not just sort of guesses at, but finally and irrevocably knows they will one day die. Imagining the moment the last light is translated into images by your eyes is not a jolly good time, not by any stretch. It does make one drive a bit more safely. The really really old folks doing 35 in the right-hand lane on the freeway haven't succumbed to any cliché gerontological atrophy; they've simply put it together that life is too precious to risk on your spatial relationship to a yellow light. Plus, dang, look at that tree, young person. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?

Recognizing someone who's made that switch to the latter is hard though because there are swarms and swarms of pretenders. The good news is, the pretenders aren't that hard to spot. It's the eyeliner that generally gives them away.

If you do find yourself in the company of an honest-to-Jeebus mortal, do yourself a favor and stay put. These are people who have grasped the black, yawning awe of finitude and don't rush to embrace it, but nod to it with knowing reverence. They know. And as a result, they have little time for the petty hysterics of demagoguery or factionalism or any of the self-limiting thought systems that pretend to know and thus insist on their self-perpetuating dogma versus that other lot who know just as well, but in exactly the opposite way. As a result, the actual mortals are immune to the allure of surety. There's no buy-in to anything whose primary selling point is the "mystery" of its own internal contradictions. The only real human depth is in truth and the only real human truth is "I don't know." Everything else is unverifiable.

If I seem a bit maudlin and mawkish, it's because I've been made so by a series of slow circumstances as I watch public figures I admire grapple with disease and waste away to nothing before my eyes. Had I made the last transition myself, I'd observe with more stoicism and resigned dignity, not just on my behalf but for theirs as well. Instead I choose to be grumpy about it and succumb to fits of unwarranted melancholia, resulting in the teenage-girl sop you've had the misfortune to read here.

Christopher Hitchens is a controversialist and kind of a motherfucker, but how many American public intellectuals do we actually have? Sure, we had to import him, but he's still with us. I'm not an atheist, but he sometimes makes me wish I were. Now he's got esophageal cancer and the odds are not good.

One of my great heroes, the writer and satirist Terry Pratchett, has been beset with early onset Alzheimer's which renders him unable to speak coherently or smoothly (though he can still write) so that even in this clip he has to have a surrogate deliver the speech he wrote (he's actually the guy in the long beard, nodding along in silence). I get to watch his own brain squeeze itself out of existence.

Roger Ebert, the Fat Guy Film Critic, has lost his voice and his ability to eat because of various cancer-related illnesses in the mouth and neck. Luckily he can still write. Sneaky, sometimes heartbreaking essays about various and sundry things that I regard much higher than his film criticism as it seems like now everything he reviews starts with a minumum level of three stars (out of four). His condition seems to have mellowed some of his more strident critical points of attack (bad movies are small things), in exchange for a blossoming of human understanding.

What they have in common is the late-game mastery of the collision of rationality and love. A stark practicality rooted in human betterment, even against our wills. The trouble is the rest of us, in for a pound on the distractions of the moment, are too distracted by the car-alarm of the everyday to listen with the attention their perspectives deserve.

It might just be that I really don't want to put up Christmas decorations. I don't think my kids will buy any of these arguments from perspective. Not unless they're delivered via NintendoDS-3D.

Secret Word!

2010-12-02T21:59:00.000-08:00

I'm not really sure how I feel about WikiLeaks entirely. I give them points for having a name that makes 9-year-olds giggle, certainly. Entertaining my kids while teaching them about current events is not as easy as it sounds.

I'm kind of a nearly-unreasonable First Amendment guy. Not like ACLU unreasonable, and by that I mean I lack the physical courage to actually do anything to support my slighty out-of-mainstream crackpot beliefs. Plus, while I support free speech in close-to absolute terms, the idea of associating myself in any way with those most in need of free-speech protection makes me feel all unclean. Why does it always have to be homophobes and white supremacists and zealots and other assorted purveyors of scumbaggery who need my protection? You almost never find anyone making outrageously controversial and inflammatory public comments about rainbows or pie, unless it's to deny access to either one for gay black atheists.

The WikiLeaks guy is in a weird position because he's not even an American, so I'm not sure where I stand in regards to his rights. As far as I know he's an Australian living in Europe. Scandinavia I think I read. So I'm not really sure what kind of danger he's in other than to be tackled by state agents and forced to undergo a medical procedure at a reasonable price which is then underwritten by the government.

The Obama administration, in my opinion, is already suprisingly squirelly on this issue. I'm sure the rationale is something along the lines of the "fire in a crowded theater" exception as they keep telling us the leaks will cost lives. Although I can't help wondering if they don't just mean Julian Assange's.

But I'm not sure if the problem is less that this kind of public document leaking happens at all or just whom it happens to be embarrassing at the moment. When it's the U.S. government, it's painted as life-and-death, sure. How much more muted will the reaction be when other kinds of information starts surfacing, say about bailed-out banks? We won't know what principles are actually at stake until we get something that really flicks at our prurience. If the public evil suddenly becomes a public good, I'll have a better idea about how and where to go shoving my First Amendment umbrella, unsolicited.

Like for instance, if WikiLeaks had a document or two about how the fuck Qatar won the right to host World Cup 2022 over the US, I'll be the guy on the barricades, defying the tanks in the street.

Well, OK, probably not defying as such. But certainly there. At least in spirit. And my God, what a whithering tsk of disapproval I'll let fly when I see it unfold on TV.

Wrapped

2010-11-25T20:05:00.000-08:00

I think I'm going to forego the obligatory points to be made about Thanksgiving as a celebration of present-day gluttony and past genocidal exploitation. More than enough has been said about the employment of tryptophan as a soporific agent to muddle the minds of Massachusetts Indians in order to strong-arm them into unfavorable adjustable-rate mortgages and eventually seize all of North America in a brililant four-centuries-long pincer movement of firewater and foreclosure. Who benefits from treading that old track again?

And no, I'm not going to spend any time dwelling on the Black Friday phenomenon and the spinning-up of shopping as bloodsport. Are there some interesting parallels to be made about the simultaneous onset of consumerist mania in the form of Black Friday and blockbuster films in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s? Probably. But the end of the story is always the fall of the Soviet Union, so capitalism wins. Again. Bo-ring.

Mostly I just wanted to assure all of my readership that just because the pope says condoms are sort of sometimes OK, it doesn't mean I'll be rushing back to the arms of the Mother Church any time soon. First of all, it initially only applied to gay male prostitutes, which, come on, considering the structure of the church, is more than a little transparently self-serving.

Plus once you get off the Jesus train completely, it's really hard to get back on. The problem isn't that you can't catch back up, because NOTHING moves more slowly than the Roman Catholic Church, but as you stand beside it and watch it pass, you really begin to appreciate how gaudily overbuilt it is, too lumbering and heavy to efficiently do its stated job, and entirely powered by a combination of extortion and magic. The songs are pretty though.

But I will give them credit for acknowledging that the gays, though still totally an abomination before God, don't actually deserve a slow, painful death by horrifying disease. As an agnostic, I don't really have an opinion as to what the theological ramifications of this are. I just know that given the extra logistics involved, it's going to take a little bit longer now to get a stall in the men's room at the next Knights of Columbus mixer.

Small prices to pay. This is me being thankful.

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PS- As a divorced man, I had the privilege of banging together my first solo Thanksgiving meal. How did I do? Let's just say no one has done this much for turkey since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Magical Realism

2010-11-18T21:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a good week to be English. And not just for the regular reasons it's preferable to be English every other week, like free health care and all the drizzle you can eat. This week, our trans-Atlantic cousins are holding us up and demanding our filthy colonial shekels, like highwaymen of old, but in the particularly English idiom with so much politeness that you end up just sort of acquiescing to spare them any further embarrassment.

Not only is there going to be a royal wedding, but it's also finally time for the first half of the beginning of the end of Harry Potter.

I think of all the money pouring into that feisty little downtrodden third of an island, scraping by all these centuries with the right combination of pluck, blind good luck and the subjugation of peoples of varying shades of brown the world over, and it gives me some hope. Between the flood of tourists pouring in to try to experience something they would be shot trying to actually attend or reveling in the soap-opera antics of teenagers inhabiting a world cobbled together from other worlds already written about but could never actually exist, it looks like they've stumbled on to a formula whereby they are able to spin money from quite literally nothing. And that is an encouraging feat in this still-struggling economy.

As Americans, we should take note. If anything screams out the soul of American genius, it's the ability to bastardize someone else's idea and then sell the inferior product for twice the cost.

All we need to do is:

1) Start a royal family. We tried it with the Kennedys for a bit in the 1960s, but with all the sex and disease and adultery and divorce and murder and untimely death... well, OK, that's all pretty good for a royal family, honestly. But back then, I'm not so sure. As a cultural embarrassment incapable of governing itself and existing at a level of cognitive dissonance between what they are projected to be and what they actually were, they were just too far ahead of their time. Hm. Maybe this just isn't our bag.

2) Multi-film fantasy franchise to capture the hearts and minds of children and shut-ins the world over. Again, we did this already with Star Wars, but considering the quality of the last three, I'm not sure it actually counts. I'm not exactly in a big hurry for another Indiana Jones movie either. And now that I think about it, the more I catch snippets of Avatar on HBO (which is not hard considering they run it more than GoDaddy.com ads run during a Super Bowl), the more that shit just makes me angry.

OK, so maybe this isn't the answer. But the only other economic "plan" going is banning budgetary earmarks for Congressional pet projects. Really, that's all. This is your Tea Party Revolution.

Frankly, I have more faith in the Kennedys. But then all the attractive ones are dead. The only ones left are all toothy and bony, with that grievous overbite, like Habsburgs in reverse. Nobody's buying a commemorative mug if Joe Kennedy II decides to get married a third time.

Math Into Chemistry

2010-11-11T21:06:00.000-08:00

The central conceit of online dating is narcissism. Fill out this profile in which you talk about you. Now upload some pictures of you. Answer these questions about what you would do in some hypotheticals so we can pass them through our Totally Scientific Dating Alogrithm Producer (a Speak N Spell, an olive press, eight feet of pig intenstines and a Magic 8-Ball) so you can have a printer-friendly analysis of you as you are, probably with some clip-art graphics for both presentation and for those of us for whom maybe reading isn't in our top 10 list of strong points.

And now that we know all there is to know about YOU, what we're going to do is take YOU and press YOU up against our other users of appropriate gender and see if we can find someone as close to YOU as possible!

I can't be the only one who sees the inherent problem.

There are only two options: 1) You have a modicum of awareness that rightly inspires you to levels of self-loathing that are crippling, nihilistic and entirely appropriate. Dating someone as JUST LIKE YOU! as possible may at first seem like an easy relief, but turns out to be the kind of socio-personal mirror into which no human outside of Guantanamo Bay should be impelled to look. You may think you want someone who completes your sentences, but you have to be prepared for how retarded it sounds when someone else says it. Also, seriously? I'd like to complete a sentence, thanks. Let's save codependence for the second date.

2) You lack any and all self-awareness, which obviates the problem of self-loathing, but also automatically makes you a douchebag. Now imagine sitting across from this same level of boomerang douchery over bruschetta, a nice box wine and peanut butter cheesecake. And as you walk out of that chain restaurant trying to floss your teeth with a folded up corner of a credit card receipt, you will think of your date, without a trace of irony, "Man, what a douchebag." You will have dodged that bullet, but you'll get home, log on and the cycle of awful will begin again.

As these online sites are also service-providers, they have to do a certain amount of coddling of their client base, which precludes them from collecting or reflecting information about the things that make you unsuitable for human coupling. That would make you feel bad about yourself and thus unlikely to return. Of course the free-form profile section we can call the "Just Enough Rope" section if you like, so there's a certain amount of self-culling going on in this herd. But the site-builders want you to come back and view their banner ads or pay their fees (depending on their profit model), so already there's something of a conflict of interest.

And look, I get that there is a difference between service-providing and humanity-contributing and not all endeavors are required to fit into the latter category, at the expense of or even independent of the former. But I don't think I would have to sell too many people too hard on categories like "Really Prominent Adam's Apple" or "Dad Never Said 'I Love You'".

In the absence of these things, all I can do is take what I have and what they give me, mash them together and hope for the best. That means willfully trying to pair up with people the Totally Scientific Dating Alogrithm Producer tells me I have no business even speaking to. At least then if they try to complete my sentence, I stand a chance of being surprised at what they come up with. Especially if it has something to do with math.

I'ma Bust You Up

2010-11-04T19:42:00.000-07:00

It's on now. It's on. It is so on.

All according to the script.

When the story starts, your Great White Hope is supposed to be humbled and chastened, stripped of his (yes, necessarily his) dignity and rightful place by the lesser and undeserving usurper. If this doesn't happen, he can't slink off into the safety of obscurity, paring away the excesses brought on by the blinding, shining burden of too much success to do hard and sweaty penance for the sin of being too far out ahead of the slow-witted people who profess to follow. Away goes the StairMaster and the machines that go PING! and out come the sides of beef and the running chickens, which I guess in this metaphor are white people with no jobs and people who can quote passages from The Turner Diaries.

So there's an extensive and NOT AT ALL GAY training montage leading to the rematch with the (again, totally metaphorical) scary black man from Chicago with the weird name.

And now... woo? We have achieved structural storytelling balance! Most of the people are back again where they should be. We've scared off that half-a-communist Pelosi and her awful, awful vagina.

But what happens when the third act is over?

We don't want ownership of the economy that Barack Hussein Obama managed to turn from a City of Unblighted Gold to a smoking crater filled with shovel-defying mounds of pigshit in 22 months. And speaking of craters and pigshit, nobody wants to get any Afghanistan on them. What we need is something comforting to fight. Something defeatable. Something that reflexively scares the fuck out of baby boomers so they won't think too hard out about the imminent drying-up of their social security and Medicare benefits.

That's right, people: Russkies.

Or whatever. Iran maybe, but they kind of fuck up the boxing metaphor. We'll worry about the details of governance later. The point is to WIN. Take our country back! Not because we have better ideas, but because we're supposed to.

Sing it if you know it.

Untreatable

2010-10-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

As usual, I'm leaving it late to choose my Halloween costume this year. It's sort of a ritual where I pay the holiday no attention whatsoever, but then I run in to do my regular weekly shopping at the Rubber Fist and the zipper-mouthed gimp masks are up there on the shelf with... well, more zipper-mouthed gimp masks, but with a paper spider stuck in a cotton-ball web next to the display. But then also there is another display behind the male masturbatory aids designed appropriately to look like sexy, sexy flashlights showing costumes for the discriminating self-esteem challenged adult* and it hits me all at once: the silicon-based lube is outrageously overpriced. Then also it hits me: Halloween is upon us!

There's a lot else going on this year, what with the new part-time single-parent business happening, divorce happenings, negotiating terms with the Russian mafia to get the wife I ordered out of their layaway program, I've just got a lot on my plate.

To be honest, I'm on a streak now where I leave it late, there is some hemming and not an inconsiderable amount of haw and then, at the last second, I panic and go again (21 years running!) as Guy In Underwear Answering The Door. I vary the details. For example, some years he wears a shirt. But in essence, my main Halloween effect is to make children think hard about how badly they really want candy.

All three of my kids are still young enough to where dressing up is still appropriate. Once they reach about 3/4 of adult size, a band of black-clad young men roaming the streets, knocking on doors demanding payment... I'm not sure, but I think that's how Vito Corleone got started.

This year my kids are going as Malaise, the first quarto of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Wolverine.

Halloween isn't the only thing that snuck up on me this year. Did you guys know there's also an election? I keep getting robocalls about it. I think they want me to vote for pot legalization, but they kind of lose their train of thought about half way through. Also, Jerry Brown is running for governor, which is amazing. Usually if you have the opportunity to vote for the guy who was in charge the day you were born, it means you live in North Korea.

Voting is the last thing on my mind though, honestly. Most of my time is taken up considering and planning for my costume. Mostly that involves not doing laundry.

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* Sexy nurse, sexy cop, sexy motorcycle enthusiast, sexy ninja, sexy Chinese takeout, etc.

Sein und Zeit

2010-10-21T21:59:00.000-07:00

I've come to the conclusion that I don't ever really want to be famous. Sure, it was fun for a while back in the go-go Aughts and yeah, I do occasionally pine for the groupies, the complimentary mango-tinis and the time where I woke up in bed with the guy from Fall Out Boy, but I'm older now. It's six years since I've started this blogging deal, plying my non-paying trade in a public space in hopes of... what, exactly?

I gave it up once already. I did for the right reasons, part of which was burnout, part of which was a fear of being able to maintain a standard of quality,* then I got a job, then I got nearly divorced, then I got actually divorced and here I am.

And still no answer. The most basic metaphysical question is: why is there something instead of nothing at all? Heidegger asked that question. I read his book looking into it and, even though I only understood about 20% of it, I think his answer had something to do with protecting us from the scourge of International Jewry.

But that's not why I blog. Well, not exclusively.

And I don't want to be famous. My first blog did accidentally land me some paying work as a writer in some local stuff. I had a by-line and a picture and everything. A horrible, horrible picture. It was blurry and cropped and I was probably the most I've ever weighed in my life when it was taken. And yes, there were groupies and complimentary apple-tinis and the time I woke up in bed with the subalternate recording secretary from the Greater Riverside Chamber of Commerce, but still, fulfilling? OK, a little. In the most literal of senses. But there was no plan there, no master strategy to market and triangulate and build a brand.

The reluctance is that famous-ness means a sure compromise of the self at some point. Either you're actively seeking it where you try to become famous and debase your basic sense of dignity in pursuit of a cause that is guaranteed not to repay you in kind. Alternately, you can have fame thrust upon you and you have to spend the rest of your life trying to explain what exactly happened between you and your fellow thrustees way down there in the dark, rocky fame-womb.

Or you could be as cool as George Clooney, handle it all right way, twist it all just as it should be twisted in a publicist's wettest-ever wet dream and still people only ever want to know why you're not married and what's up with the pot-bellied pigs.

Any way you look at it, all roads on the flow-chart leads back to fucking Kim Kardashian. Or a Real Housewife of [Wherever], the only qualifying criteria of which is to be otherwise unemployable and to not be on speaking terms with your Personal Sense of Shame.

So no, look, all three of you, dear readers, I don't do this for the glory. I don't do this for the glamor or the applause. Would I take a groupie if one offered herself up? Sure, probably. Provided she was under 40, in reasonably good shape and with little to no gag reflex. But that's not the motivation. The motivation is... you know what, I still don't know really. But you have to admit, I'm totally crushing the not-famous thing. Crushing.

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* mediocre and erratic are way harder to maintain than they look.

I'm On My Way

2010-10-15T20:43:00.000-07:00

When you're post-divorce and Born Again Single, there are times when the biggest obstacle you face is the gap of unplanned-for quietude between the periods of buzzing, fuzzy, giddy newness. Unbroken-home family life is often a sequence of predictable and repetitive task-mastering, the challenge being not so much in the creation of the plan as the execution. In a lot of ways, married family living is like being welded shut inside a 55-gallon steel drum and then rolled down a steepish hill. You know exactly where you're going and, because gravity is what gravity is, you're fairly certain you're going to get there; the mode of transport can be a little stultifying, dark, suffocating, restrictive of all movement or creative thought, hot, noisy and an immediate hazard to both your spiritual and physical self at all times all times all times.

You know what, I forgot what my point was.

Anyway, we'll pivot to this: there's only so much porn you can watch. Flap A fits into Slot B, no matter which angle you shoot it from. You can mix and match the ratio of flaps to slots, experiment with the esoterica and the body fluid happenings to whatever capacity your Bucket of Personal Shame will hold, but in pursuit of distraction, it always, always overflows eventually. I sometimes think this is what lesbian clown porn was invented for specifically. It's out there to say: "What, really? No, just... just go back. Stop it now."

Plus eventually some asshat porn actor gets HIV* and now every time I see human copulation pixellated on my computer screen, all I can think about is how much Paul Rodgers sucks. Masturbate to that, I defy you.

This is where online dating becomes both welcome and effective. Not to masturbate to (at least not specifically), but as a filler of time. I've been on several sites, paid and free, and in every case it's a neatly closed system: men send out dozens of inquiries, a tiny fraction of which are returned by women receiving dozens of unsolicited inquiries from increasingly desperate and bitter men.

It always starts out so simply: you fill out a profile and you cobble together lists of both desirable traits (bachelors degree or better! must love sushi! hiking is a plus!) and dealbreakers (smoking is so gross! no kids under 10! anal is not welcome!) and then the search begins. When the first messages go out and come back either not at all (90%) or with polite refusals (8%), you start by widening your physical search parameters (county-sizes are relative anyway), maybe broadening the age rage (Susan Sarandon is still hot, right?). Still nothing, or at least nothing promising, so then the desirables soften (I guess an associate's degree is OK if they have a stable job) and ultimately crumble completely (do you know someone who has a GED?) and you're left with just the dealbreakers, the edges of which begin to blunt as well from taking such a beating (OK, I'll consider it, but the lights have to be off and you go when I say go and not beforeISAIDNOTBEFORE!).

So maybe, in retrospect, the first couplings aren't perfect. You don't know what you want, you've been out of the game for a good long time and you can't seem to get anyone to notice you in Online Dating World. So you take what you can get and hope there's some value in the experience. Which is strangely like every other human endeavor that ever there was.

But good or ill, happy or sad, anal virgin or no, look up and it's been hours, days, weeks, months... The time has been filled. And even better, when the Chilean miners are rescued from entombment for something like 70 days, you can weep in genuine human empathy instead of eating your own liver out of bitterness when you consider that, sure, even stuck underground THEY had someone to argue about the latest episode of Mad Men with. Or whatever. I don't know if they got AMC down there.

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* This is virtually guaranteed if one performs asshat without adequate protection. And by that I mean a sturdy chair, shoulder pads, some kind of pulley system and, just for the look of the thing, a condom.

How Can You Consciously Contemplate, When There's No Debate?

2010-10-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

I used to enjoy pointing out to people before they had children that there was nothing anyone could ever actually tell them to prepare them for it. There are no combination of words, up to and including "Don't expect to get much sleep" that can adequately convey or even obliquely demonstrate what it feels like on the third straight night of nonstop inexplicable screaming, finding at last that blissful moment of silence, letting the ache of your overworked back and your sweat-sour muscles drain into the unfamiliar pillow-top of your mattress, only to have it shattered 20 minutes later by yet more inexplicable screaming.

Some things you have to be hit in the face with before you will notice them. Like being hit in the face, for instance. Seen it a million times on television: artificial to the point of camp (John Wayne) all the way along the scale to realistic to the point of pornographic (mixed martial arts). You can even take all the martial arts classes you want, but nobody there is going to really really try to put their fist through the back of your head by entering through the front, like someone would if they meant it. Oh the flash of colors, the vertical inversion of balance, the heat, the light, the existential oneness and mortal chaos all at once... As bullshit poetical as all that is, it's just a string of words that most people don't know doesn't come close to the actual thing of it.

There are milestones and activities that aren't necessarily necessary, but likely over the course of one's life (parenthood and being violently struck are two, and more commonly linked than you'd imagine). Caution is fine, book-learnin' is perfectly nice and good, but when you get right down to it, there is no substitute for experience. There isn't even a good preparatory course for it. This extends to many aspects of human life, social, physical and otherwise: sex, drunkenness, infatuation, kidney stones, wasabi...

Divorce is another one. Not just the act of being divorced, I mean more specifically the post-divorce living as a single person. It really is a crash-course re-education process wherein one is left alone with the quirks and failings of their own personality, no longer apologized for, mitigated, excused or ignored by the presence of another person. It can be crushing. But the only options are hermitude or to stand up on wobbly legs, like a newborn horse, and see if you can run. The latter can only occur if/when we accept that mistakes are not only likely but inevitable. Along the path to self-actualized true independence, there are bound to be reversals, some trivial and teachable, others paralyzing-bordering-on-catastrophic.

I'm not immune. For instance just this weekend I realized I totally overcommitted to new television shows on the DVR. I don't know how I'm going to recover. Before I had someone else with me to veto the horseshit I'd buy in to based solely on shiny, shiny hype. Because seriously: I have two episodes of the new Hawaii Five-0 waiting for me. You could have told me anything you wanted nine months ago, and I would have never, ever, ever believed that was possible. Some things you just have to feel.

It's Like Die Hard starring Bonnie Bedelia

2010-09-30T18:56:00.001-07:00

I was raised by a single mother, my two sisters and I, trying to get by in the poverty-hating Reagan era while mom was in school and working like nine jobs at once.

Then after grad school, I stayed home with the kids while we lived on the sole earning power of my then-wife. Yes, I should mention that she, like Ma, was also female. Luckily that's where the similarities ended, but those types of comparisons aren't really the thrust of the story.

What I'm trying to say is that you'd have a hard time finding a dude who was more pro-gender-equality than I am. Equal pay for equal work sounds like a fairly simple cocktail of mathematics and rudimentary social justice, but still there are men in this country so averse to such a mixture, you'd think it was garnished with just a splash of menses.

Even though real money and a hand-grenade couldn't get me to vote for Sarah Palin or Christine O'Donnell, there's still probably something to the idea that the reaction to them has to do with their gender, at least to some small degree. I'd rather hear Sarah Barracuda called a fascist than a stewardess, to be honest. Mostly this is because I think, personality and skill-set wise, she'd make a shit-awful stewardess.

While the Mama Grizzly-types let me down, there are examples of creeping gender social equality. Hillary Clinton just missed her party nomination and probably certain election as president. That one lady who was not James Cameron won the Best Director Oscar last year.

I think the great exemplar of female social progress certainly has to be Mackenzie Rae Putnal.

Who is that, you ask? Clearly, you're not listening to nearly enough sports talk radio on your drive home from work.

She's the 19 year old cheerleader dating a big, bad NFL football player named Kassim Osgood. She's the one who was at her parents' house, chillaxin', as the kids say, with Mr. Osgood when a dude wanders in with a plastic bag over his face and brandishing a gun. Turns out he's some kind of ex-boyfriend or whatever. Tough guy drags her around by the hair, pistol-whips them both up a little bit. Bad scene.

How does it end? This is the interesting part: Mr. Football barricades himself in a room alone and jumps out a window, leaving the girl behind. Ostensibly he's running off to "get help."

Left alone with an armed and deranged man, what does our Damsel in Distress do? She breaks free, runs down stairs, finds a gun and exchanges gunshots with the intruder. The article doesn't say if she did so in slow motion while jumping sideways through the air or if, when she landed, she popped up and let go with a stinging, punny one-liner like "Plastic bags are what I use to store my dead meat" or "I always choose paper" or whatever.

I think the Lois Lane archetype is dead.

First of all, an ex-boyfriend shows up, all clingy and whiny, and throws a temper tantrum about the lost partner he pines for.

Football Man throws himself recklessly out a window and runs off into the night.

Mackenzie Rae goes downstairs empty handed and comes up blasting.

Who's the bitch in this scenario?

Nobody was hit or injured outside of some bruises. And we know violence never solves anything. But we know somebody came out of this episode a winner: America, that's who.

Only if it means Vice President Jackie Chan

2010-09-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

I remember 1994. At 20, I was solidly post-pubescent, meaning I had all my adult wits about me. The employment of same was spotty, but the gears were all in place if I did have some trouble with the clutch now and again.

Kurt Cobain was already dead, that I remember. I was doing the junior college thing and driving a 1974 Ford Galaxie 500, the primary feature of which was irony: it was more than large enough for fully-reclined multiple-partner sex in the backseat, front seat or the cavernous space in between, and yet the car itself guaranteed that no woman would ever consider climbing into it. Most of this is because the passenger-side door didn't open so much as not.

I also vaguely recall, in the early days of my politicization, a lot of red-faced white-people on TV, standing at podiums outdoors, really really mad about how hard it was to be a white person in America. Being in control of everything all the time was very stressful, apparently. The Man always had his hand in your pocket, fucking with your fundamental rights to tax shelters and limited financial damages in the case one was civilly sued.

The stress was so much, that some of them had to find an an outlet to release all that stress while simultaneously trying to impeach the president for doing the same thing. It seems quaint now, but you have to remember this was in the days before free internet porn had really come to the fore. If a man doesn't get regular sex, he can get really sick. It's true.

I also remember those same red-faced white people codifying a bunch of promises that mostly had to do with what GOP policy is usually about: sex negativity, persecution of those least able to defend themselves and washing up Ronald Reagan's wrinkly balls something fierce.

But, as I recall, it was also a list of stuff they were actually going to do. Arcane and narrowly focused stuffed wrapped up in a bacon-and-batter layer of populist hooey, deep-fried in reheated post-Cold War anti-socialist claptrap. But there were verbs in there, I know it.

Because I haven't recently suffered any kind of penetrating brain trauma, I also remember 2010. With the young-ish Democratic president struggling to find his footing, spending all his political capital wrestling a health-care reform bill through Congress, fighting through a serious recession left over from the previous GOP-dominated political era, we're one blowjobbing intern away from 1994 all over again.

Now we've even got a new list of stuff the once-and-future Masters of the Universe are rallying around.

Things have evolved, though. Maybe it's just a function of memory, but the atmosphere 1994 seems so quaintly polite by comparison. It's natural to view the crises of the moment--what with their impolitely unknowable outcomes--as the most difficult moment in history ever. It's hard to say it's that much worse now. In some ways we seem a lot more tolerant. The president is a black dude. And Republicans just nominated a witch to run for Senate. Lots of things have opened up.

This new list of stuff, though, just reads like it was written by scared people for scared people. As far as I can tell, they're too frightened of themselves to even come out and say they're going to do anything. Mostly it's just a list of stuff that's kind of a bummer, man. Taxes, job losses, bad legislation... the whole document is a total downer. And maybe they're just not telling us what the solutions are because they don't want to ruin the surprise.

As a card-carrying Kenyan Muslim Socialist myself, naturally I'm drawn again and again to something Karl Marx said.

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

The only hope I take out of that is that the first time we got Barack Obama; if the Marxian pattern holds, the next black president will definitely be Chris Tucker. And there, now we all have something to look forward to.

Pun and/or Song Lyric

2010-09-16T19:29:00.000-07:00

Dear person who used my credit card number to shop for $800 worth of stuff from some tacky French website,

You have shitty taste.

All my love,

P

I'll Offer You A Poke In The Eye

2010-09-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

I wasn't really mad when I heard about the nice retarded man in Florida whose idea of celebrating the sacrifice of Americans and several non-Americans nine years ago would be to perpetuate a crime against one of the basic American guarantees (the free exercise of religion) and thus inadvertently (or more to the point, ignorantly) partially invalidate the unwilling sacrifice made by those murdered on that day.

Mostly I was nonplussed. Wow, somehow the swirl of rhetoric producing white-hot anti-Muslim vitriol around the building of a religious center within an imaginary Boundary of Sanctimony in Lower Manhattan escalated past cynical political point-scoring to an actual act of discriminatory social violence, even if it's only against helpless books.

No, I didn't get really mad until that fucker decided he wasn't going to do it.

Because it turns out I think he should burn the Quran. He should burn a lot of them.

This isn't because I think he's right. Actually I'm pretty sure he's loaded down with a bonus chromosome. Were he here, I'd as likely kick him square in the balls as shake his hand because that's how we should greet moral and physical cowards.

But the conventional-wisdom position is: he shouldn't perpetuate his act of political expression because it is a threat to national security in some fashion. OK, that's the Dick Cheney position, as far as I can tell.

The thing about free speech is that it also affords us the freedom to be douchebags. Further, it saddles us with the responsibility of suffering the company of douchebags so that we might enjoy the unimpeded right to douchebaggery should it occur to us to exercise it.

If I take a public position, there's no way the President of the United States, the Secretary of State and the military leader of the most critical active combatant command should take the position (official or even public) that I should shut the fuck up. And certainly, with no crime committed, should I ever, ever, ever expect a visit from the FBI.

When one guy threatens someone else's constitutional guaranteed rights (intimidating people from the expression of their religion), that's one thing. When the government and the military exercise their influence to suppress one dude's fucked-up expression of his political rights (basic, stupid-ass free speech), that's really something else.

So now I'm mad because I have to be on this guy's side.

If I were any kind of non-coward myself, I'd burn a Quran just to make my point. But I won't because the idea of destroying a book not written by Glenn Beck makes me queasy.

Now I'm stuck taking what is probably the ACLU position on this, which also pisses me off. I feel about the ACLU about the same way I feel about PETA: it's probably a good idea that they're around, but sanctimony in all its forms is unattractive. Yeah, because of both of them I can burn a flag and there's a social stigma attached to fur-wearing, but if that means you have to be on the side of the Ku Klux Klan or vegans (respectively?), I'd rather enjoy the fruits of your labor than watch you work.

As for what I will actually do, I plan to mark the 9/11 anniversary the same way I always do: intending to put the flag out and then forgetting.

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PS: Taking a cue from Andrew Sullivan, let's take a step to Google-rescue the name Terry Jones and keep it where it belongs:

Man Down! Man Down!

2010-09-02T19:12:00.001-07:00

It's OK. Nobody panic. Everything's OK. I'm fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine.

Yes, I was there when the shooting at the drive-in occurred, but between nearly a decade of martial arts training, the inherent sang froid from the gene pool that produces paramedics and nurses, the crisis-management skills hard earned by 11 years of fatherhood and the fact that the incident took place a hundred yards or so from me and was over before I realized what was happening, I have to say I came through it all fairly well.

It shakes you though, it really does. To hear someone superficially wounded just 150 yards or so from all my vital organs... it makes you pause, take stock. Sure, you wet yourself a little, just for the look of the thing, to assure your drive-in movie companions don't feel bad for their own embarrassing lack of composure, but what's a little urine in the big picture? And if a little urine is OK, what's a lot of urine, by comparison?

The world got a little smaller after my near-near-death experience, I can tell you. Right around the exact size of my bedroom, in point of fact. I took some days off work and really dug deep to help myself come to terms with and contextualize what it was I had almost been within earshot of someone else losing. I am able to write to you now because I was able to fight through it thanks mainly to my faith in Jesus, vermouth straight from the bottle and reruns of House on Bravo.

That poor cranky doctor with the bad leg. And for some reason he only gets patients in really, really bad shape. But every week, he's a dick to his staff for 40 minutes, talks to that kid from Dead Poets Society, suffers a petit-mal seizure and bing! the answer comes to him, saving the day in the nick of time. It helped put things into perspective: if that gimpy sociopath can save people from being eaten to death by all manner of pathogens, then I can sure as hell put down the Cherry Garcia, get off my ass and get back to... doing whatever it is I do at my job.

If you haven't lived it, there's no real way to explain it to you. Death comes for all of us eventually, my friends. Except, I'm starting to think, for me. I mean, I was so close to actual bullets flying and not a scratch on me. It seems possible--likely?--that I'm actually some kind of indestructible demigod sent here as the vanguard of a race of immortals, to live among you and learn your ways in order to facilitate your conquest from within. When that happens, the lesson here is that the best you can hope for is that this little incident has given me the tiniest taste of what it is to be human. When my people arrive in force and it is my job to decide death or a life of perpetual servitude for every living thing on this pathetic planet, maybe that will somehow work in your favor. I don't really see how though, to be honest. Maybe I'll just decide to kill you quickly.

Globular

2010-08-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

I've finally reached the age where I can't quite figure out what is happening with the young people. On the one hand, you've got the whiney, self-absorbed, development-arrested types of kids crushed by a moon-sized sense of entitlement. There is some socially redeeming value there as without those kinds of people, there would be no reality television, but I shudder to think of what a life lived locked in that pattern of thinking will do to a person.

On the other hand, you've got the plugged-in, ambitious, adventure-seeking types who are out to push themselves beyond the limits of human endurance, right up to the blurry edge of life and death. There were some kids like that when I was growing up, but most of them faced down the black and empty eye sockets of the Grim Reaper by affecting a nonchalance toward posted speed limits or huffing compressed air computer cleaner.

These days, all the rage among the kids is to go all Magellan and sail alone around the world. Most of these who have attempted it are girls not old enough to drive.

The most obvious question: who took the shine of a good ole fashioned unwanted teenage pregnancy? Gestation takes about as long as sailing around the world, you get just about all the same amount of nausea and you're just as likely to be the subject of idle talk in the streets and alleyways of your home town. You still get that whiff of adult independence and cheaply won notoriety, but if statistics are to be believed, the threat from Somali pirates to pregnant American teenage girls is almost negligible. Or at least well within the range of acceptable losses.

Global circumnavigation. How does a fourteen year old conceive of such a thing? I'm trying to remember what my greatest ambition at 14 was and I'm pretty sure it was figuring out the whole walking-with-a-boner-while-wearing-sweatpants conundrum that has plagued man since the invention of the elastic waistband.

But I guess I see the appeal. We still remember the name Magellan today, don't we? They'll probably be OK so long as they have the requisite training and avoid pissing off the wrong Filipinos.

Yes! We're All Individuals!

2010-08-19T19:35:00.001-07:00

This is the face and voice of hateful radicalism:

Allahu akbar, ululation aaaaand.... scene.

So anyone can build anything anywhere just because it happens to be done in accordance with local laws? Convenient. I can tell you first hand that that simply does not apply to everyone. If it did, the municipal-sized iteration of The Man wouldn't have been able to crush my dream Fireworks By Candlelight themed restaurant and hash bar at the planning stage. So there's another way Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a liar.

You have to pay attention to what Barack HUSSEIN Obama says. Like "As a citizen, and as president..." But he doesn't say as a citizen OF WHERE. Cagey, sir. I watch something like that and I just shake my head. You know, this would all go away if he would just come out and say. I once saw him give an entire speech at an auto plant in Indiana that contained not one mention of the strong Moslem beliefs instilled in him as a child in his native Mozambique or wherever. Not one. And he wonders why people don't trust him.

It's really very simple: all he has to do is have a shirt made with a copy of his birth certificate printed on it and lead the press corps in a recitation of the Lord's Prayer at every event he attends. Then he can finally put these things to rest. But no, this is his problem: arrogance. He refuses to do the little things it takes and as a result, no one's fears are assuaged, no questions are answered and everyone has to spend their extended unemployment benefit on more ammunition.

We Call Do-Over. Do Over, Do Over!

2010-08-12T20:26:00.001-07:00

This is all it says. Just read it:

Amendment XIV

"Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

See how easy that was? It was a five-second Google search for me and a single click for you to find this page and just read a whole existing constitutional amendment right there in the comfort of your own tabbed browser window, between babypandas.com and ladiessteppingoncockroachesinbarefeet.org or whatever it is you do when you're not reading this.

Does this seem safe to you? Having our sacred Constitution out there for public consumption for any-ole-body to, you know, consume? People who read get ideas. People with ideas start to do shit, like agitate for the vote or escape slavery. Now we have activist judges WITH THE SAME WIDE OPEN ACCESS TO THE CONSTITUTION THAT YOU HAVE JUST EXPERIENCED and using that access to coddle the usurping brown man in his reconquista crusade to reclaim Aztlan. It's worse than dangerous. Reading the Constitution and doing exactly as it says? That's practically treason.

People talk about the Constitution applying to everyone when we know all that stuff about "all men created equal" in the Declaration of Independence was specifically directed to remedy the injustices of aristocratic and monarchical 18th century British society, not to let the gardener send his daughter to a junior college on my dime. It's like people take no time to understand historical context.

The right answer, of course, is to simply change the Constitution. A black Sharpie should do it and when we're done, it should look like the military censor got hold of something posted on WikiLeaks.

This is a tried and true tactic: whenever the politics of the moment do not suit your tastes, the best plan is to fundamentally alter the legal underpinnings of an entire civilization. Usually it's a Republican thing. Nothing fires up the GOP faithful coming at a foundational document with some Liquid Paper and a ballpoint pen. Well, almost nothing...

I'd Rather Be Right

2010-08-05T18:23:00.000-07:00

Most people consider themselves open minded, I suppose, the same way in which just about anyone you ask would describe themselves as easy-going, non-judgmental, sarcastic to some degree and fond of hiking. Hiking. Yes. I don't know, maybe I've spent too much time on online dating sites, but when did this hiking nonsense take off? Are there no marshmallowy suburbanites left? Who are we as a nation of single, digitally-connected people to cast aside our God-given aversion to snakes and those poky seed-pod things that get stuck in your socks? Are we actually all into hiking or is this a phenomenon localized to online dating profiles, to be noted and ignored the same way SUVs are supposed to be ready for the rugged outdoors but only ever touched dirt that one time you cut the turn too short and went one wheel up on the landscaped median in the parking lot of the Trader Joe's?

But now I can't stop thinking about the traffic that will be diverted here looking for people "digitally connected." I'm not saying I disapprove (hello, new audience!), I'm just saying there are cleaner ways to lose your wedding ring.

So when I say I am open minded, I do so knowing that to say it is virtually meaningless. If you ever need me to prove it to you, we should go out to dinner one time and you can watch me take 45 minutes to figure out what to order from an 8-item menu. Just because I don't know what fennel chutney is doesn't mean I'm going to rule it out immediately.

This is why, politically, liberals, even in the governmental majority, can't ever get anything done. Not to denegrate my conservative friends (well, OK, I know one guy who didn't vote for Nader in '04, but these terms are relative), but we liberal types, we like to consider stuff. From every conceivable goddamned angle. Yeah, we're against murder, but you know, there are socioeconomics to consider; the antagonistic relationship between the justice system--police in particular--and the disadvantaged, who tend often to be amongst immigrant or ethnic minority populations; and finally a combination of photogenics and the interlinked ratio of exotic weirdness of the name of the accused and how said weirdness assuages white liberal guilt when worn on a T-shirt. Not only are we too busy dithering to stand up to conservative types, all this considering is fucking exhausting.

Conservatives on the other hand have monumentally simple considerations to make based on a small number of preset ideas that make decisions all by themselves. How does a presecribed economic policy square with the sacred independence of anti-communist market forces? Where does a social question stand vis-a-vis the template of 1950s America? Are there any Muslims or Muslim-y people or things involved? Does the idea, whatever its merits, seem like it might do Barack Obama the tiniest bid of good at any level? What would Jesus* do?

The answers to these questions, when applied to specific problems, have an almost binary elegance to them that brings a great deal of clarity, allowing purposeful, united action in the name of... you know, whatever it happens to be. And if a question proves to be a bit too much of a poser, they even have a handbook they can consult for absolute answers to all questions.

I'm not going to lie, I envy that. I'm a wishy-washy, flip-floppy, heart-bleeding liberal. I like hot tea and foreigners. I speak a little French. I'm out here trying to date women and I'm practically Quentin Crisp.

This is why I am not pleased about the court ruling overturning the gay marriage ban in California. I identify as a heterosexual man, yes. But I also identify as liberal, so now I have to at least consider everyone, regardless of gender. Do you see my dilemma? My options now are both genders. I'm not great at math, but let me see, that works out to... yes, roughly... um... oh yes, 100% of the population.

You don't know what this does to me. I have a friend who has taken to exploring in depth the social realities of interracial relationships. Even the thought of that many more choices knocked me practically catatonic for a week. I was only brought out of it when I realized what a favor I'd be doing some nice oppressed woman of color by bringing her into my world of white equality. And now I can't. Hypothetical Interracial Date's heart is broken because now it's my duty to rescue a member of an even smaller and more actively persecuted minority, namely the gays.

I'm beginning to see the appeal of conservatism. Saving the world is a lot easier when the only threats you have to worry about live in James Bond movies or are already under close, close surveillance by the George Alan Rekerses of the world.

And I'm beginning to understand the antipathy toward activist judges.

----

* You know, Jesus. Blue eyes, blond hair, Situation abs, meat-eating, beer-drinkin', gun-totin', titty-squeezin' Jesus. The one from Nazareth. The one with the NASCAR track.

On the Day that Your Mentality Catches Up with Your Biology

2010-07-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

As far as I can tell, everyone else has got something each individual human wants, but has no idea how to get it and thus a part of them, in varying degrees depending on personality basics and the relative potency of antidepressants prescribed, is paralyzed and strangled with envy and longing and frustration, shame and failure. It isn't necessarily that the grass is always greener because I can guarantee you that the person with the greenest grass in the history of the visible spectrum will look over at his neighbor's lumpy stretch of gopher-eaten kindling thatch and die just a little because the gophers won't give him a second look.

This is related to the idea I've heard bandied about (and this is entirely anecdotal, one suspects, as scientists rarely bandy) that overall, people are certain they would be happy if only they made 20% more money. Twenty percent more of what? Exactly. Just 20% of whatever their particular number happens to be. So the man who makes $50,000/year would have all his troubles magically melt away if only he could find a way to make $60,000/year. Meanwhile, the lady up the street with the same house and the same mortgage and the same 2.4 kids who makes $60,000/year is half-dead from starvation because she can't figure out how to pull in $72,000/year. That's not sociology, that's shared psychosis.

I can't figure out, though, if it's a condition basic to humans (inherent) borne out of the lizard part of our brains, informed by the Darwinian impulses to procreate and leave robust offspring in a strong position to procreate in their turn and thus perpetuate the species. Or if it's specific to Americans (learned) who, as a nation, from our shared and checkered history, have come to collectively understand if you use Axe-brand body spray, women will want to fuck you.

The answer to that question is obvious: Axe-brand body spray only works on gay men. Joke's on you, frat-guy; you won't have any trouble in the unisex dorm, but it won't be the one you were hoping for. The answer to the larger question is also obvious: it doesn't really matter. Nature vs. nurture is pseudo-intellectual's version of sports talk radio. Lots of energy spent and emotion unnecessarily invested in something that is unanswerable and just as ultimately relevant as whether or not Lance Armstrong uses performance enhancing drugs.*

The point is, I think, that we are, hardly any of us, practicing Buddhists. If we were, we wouldn't buy into the circular complex of suffering and craving and recognize instead that such longing and self-imposed hardship--that extra 20%, the sprinkler guy who works with his shirt off in the summer, all the stuff they talk about in rap lyrics, etc.--is merely a doorway, a first step. The purpose should be to recognize the hardship for what it is--illusory--and seek to move beyond it to a space of spiritual transcendence rooted in truth and the utter eradication of want.

Every stupid hippie, New Age, self-help, Oprah-fucking slogan for living is pyrite Buddhism. "Love the one you're with." "It's not getting what you want, it's wanting what you've got." "Be the change you've been waiting for." Except those are typically used in commercials selling those shoes that exercise for you on the episode of Oprah where she gives everyone a car.

To put it another way, along your path to total enlightenment, if you have a BMW 3-series listed as a prerequisite, you may have missed something along the way. And no, the type of sound system doesn't count.

Or to have somebody else put it still another way: "The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not."

That's Viktor Frankl in what is close to my favorite all-time book (a very near-run second behind this one), "Man's Search for Meaning." But then again, he was only relaying stories from his experience as a Holocaust survivor. Nobody ever talks about what Hitler did to the Buddhist population of Vienna.

So here it is: I've got some girl troubles. Yes, I do. There's want and suffering and self-inflicted wounds (of the existential type, don't worry) and confusion and doubt and questioning and basically just me really really wanting something that I alone keep fucking up. Being a non-Buddhist and non-Holocausted makes it tough to grapple with sometimes, it really does.

But the bottom line, I realize, is that I am sick and sad and depressed and denied the company of someone well more than worthy because of my own tortured decision-making processes. It's dark and unsettled and lonely and I just feel kind of stupid all the time.

But none of it--not a whit--has anything to do with my ex-wife. That's progress, people. Bask in my example of emotional growth. How far away could nirvana be, really?

-----

* Answer: a man with one testicle should be allowed all the externally-procured testosterone he can shove into his system.

What's the Feminine Form of 'Messiah'?

2010-07-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

I've never been to New York City. There are good reasons for that. I live about as far as you can live from New York and still be in the continental United States, so expense and logistics are issues. My boosters for tetanus and dengue fever are out of date, so there are health issues. Plus, I live within easy driving distance of one of the great metropolises of the world--the second largest in this whole nation of ours, in fact--so I'm all set if I get the itch for some really good crack. Really, it's an itch. Like all over at once, man.

I'm thinking of going now, though. I was always hesitant before. Some horrific shit happened there, the trauma of which is not likely to be forgotten in my lifetime. A whole raft of unrelated devilry repellent to human happiness still persists, resistant to all cures, corrosive and ultimately fatal, like HIV of the human soul.

So why even consider going? Becuase Sarah Palin is on the job.

Yes, OK, she sort of directly said that New York (and places like it) were not the "real America," which is apparently determined by communal relative illiteracy, a buddy-buddy familiarity with the Poverty Line and extreme difficulty in procuring good Chinese food. But come on, she said she was sorry. And she's not like other people who SAY they're sorry, but just keep on and keep on... She's actually doing something about it.

I don't like New York. Never been there. I base my entire impression on 1970s Scorsese films, which means lots of swearing and violence and crime, most of which are perpetrated by Robert DeNiro. Make that guy move to New Jersey where he belongs and maybe we could talk.

I don't like New York, but what have I done about it? Nothing. I'm one of those people, the kind who bitch and bitch and bitch, but won't lift a finger to help out.

Sarah Palin is not like me. Sarah Palin is on the case. She's going to fix New York all by herself, even if it means all of her aids have to stay up all night crafting social-networking posts to get it done.

A mosque in New York? Near the World Trade Center?! It makes no sense. What kind of colonial insensitivity and brute arrogance must it take for an interloping group of foreigners to even consider such a thing?

You go, Sarah. Kill it. The local government voted for it overwhelmingly, but how do they know better than you? All the nice ladies in the women's department at Barneys seemed dutifully shocked when you brought it up that one time you were there, I'm sure, just as they were collecting your debited Rupert Murdoch lucre in exchange for shoes you will only wear once and then donate to a battered women's shelter in Real America. Because nothing gets a gal through a near-fatal beating from her husband like a pair of last season's slightly used Jimmy Choos.

I trust her because she doesn't have to do it. There's nothing for her to gain. She's a true altruist. I think it's amazing that Sarah Palin has taken such an interest in this country's politics even though she's not from here. In that sense she's like that Andrew Sullivan, except without the suspicious beard, accent or gayness.

Well, OK, a little bit of an accent. You betcha.

The North Minehead By-election

2010-07-14T21:14:00.000-07:00

I was going to craft some kind of clever run-up, but just... oy:

Let's just leave the Lenin thing for a minute.

But really? Again with the Hitler?

And again with the lack of understanding of what "irony" is? You have a warning about preying on the naive using fear on a billboard that features Hitler. Adolf Hitler. Not Brian Hitler, the nice man from the neighborhood with the unfortunate name who goes door to door collecting money for the United Negro College Fund on his days off from the dolphin rescue mission. Like Adolf, THE Adolf Hitler. The one with the Panzers and the Bergen-Belsens and the shouting and the bendy-X insignia dealy and the audacious Chaplin 'stache. The guy with all the kampf.

I guess the intellectually fair thing to do would be to assume there's a legitimate point to be made with the comparison. Really, I've tried mockery and dismissal and ignoring, but this keeps coming up over and over again. Just to take it seriously for just the one second...

OK, so I'm struggling to come up with a real parallel thus far in the Hitler-Obama comparison. There was nothing comparable to a pre-election Beer Hall Putsch. To which a Tea Party person will probably respond with "ACORN! ACORN! ACORN! ACORN!" To which I say... touché? I don't really mean "touché," I'm mostly hoping that French will confuse and annoy them enough so they will stop saying "ACORN!"

There was nothing on par with the Reichstag fire to solidify resistance to his political enemies at any point in the campaign process. The only thing I can think of that happened that garnered cross-party sympathy for the guy was that his grandma died just before the election. I guess if we're being intellectually open to the idea that Obama is Hitler, we can at least entertain the idea that he murdered the woman. We'll mark that as a "maybe."

And as far as I know there hasn't been anything comparable to the Night of the Long Knives wiping out suspect comrades who had outlived their usefulness once power was achieved and consolidated. The closest equivalent to the quasi-oppositional potential fifth-column brownshirts would be the PUMA Clinton supporters. But not only are they not all murdered in their beds, Hillary got to be Secretary of State which, when you consider all the travel and non-TV-face-time that involves, it's sort of like exile at least. So yeah, we can call that as almost the same as countenancing the political slaughter of one's intrafactional rivals. So we're getting closer.

But what we don't have are the identifying of race or blood-enemies, marked for extermination to feed a propagandist self-perpetuating mania. But then I guess if we're being careful, we should say it's only two years into his term, so maybe he's still working on it. Given the non-racial roots of American society, it would be hard to identify an enemy like, say, the Jews. It would take a team of 20 experts three solid years just to figure out what to do with Lenny Kravitz. The bureaucracy required to sort that mess out here in 2010 would be impossible. Although with census work just about done, we do need the jobs...

No, the enemy would have to be ideological. The Tea Party people would be the most likely candidates (which they would LOVE, by the way). But look, they're still walking around free to make public asses of themselves with stupid fucking billboards.

But maybe... just maybe... we're looking at it a little too closely. Maybe if we take a step back, we'd be able to see what's really going on. Maybe it's already happening. I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is: if Oklahoma City was a concentration camp, how would we know the difference?

And the Lenin thing is just stupid. Lenin was a foreign-born agent of an shady international conspiratorial organization bent on toppling the government of one of the great powers of the world in order to forcibly remake it with an aggressive leftist agenda with pie-in-the-sky promises of real equality but really meant to subjugate and dominate the masses by crushing their throats with the boot-heel of compulsory orthodoxy of thought.

OK, in retrospect that fits. Hadn't considered that one. Nicely done.

For Your Information, There's an Inflammation in my Tear Gland

2010-07-08T21:00:00.000-07:00

Generally speaking, divorce isn't great for the ole self-esteem. Of course the quality of your experience depends entirely on your role in precipitating the dissolution. Forced to leave your spouse because you were finally worn down by the sheer weight of propositions from the opposite sex accumulating like a Biblical flood over the course of your marriage so that you spend your first night out of the marital bed four-deep in a quorum of flight attendants? I'd say your first problem is less self-esteem and more something that can be solved with an adequate supply of water-based industrial lubricant.

Find yourself on the other end, however--the brutally quiet conversation top-heavy with I-don't-know-that-I-ever-really-loved-you horseshit rationalizations and appeals to personal martyrdom--and it's possible for one to catch just a slight case of Total Collapse of the Ego.

Now, sure, the second option sounds way worse. I get that. But with the former, your whole sleep schedule is ruined, all your social circles are broken and you find yourself financially ruined in short order trying to keep up the pace of appletinis and Japanese microproceessored self-sucking condoms. If you're looking to eventuate a crisis of self-identity, spend a month or two living in a way completely foreign to you and every sensibility that has shaped your reality for what probably constitutes a goodly portion of your adult life.

On the other hand, spending four months confined to a six square foot portion of your own bed not only affords you rest, but just watch the savings pile up! Field the occasional call from mom or a sibling or the neighbor, just enough to keep the fire department from going battering-ram on your front door, and in relatively short order, you're looking at a tidy sum. Not Crazy Hermit money where really it's a marble, a length of unwaxed dental floss and a dead gypsy moth. We're talking actual shut-in money. Like Silas Marner money. And by that I mean, the retelling of its getting will likely be responsible for dozens of spontaneous suicides amongst American high school students.

I'm not arguing that rejected and alone is better. But it sure cuts out a lot of confusion. There is no wilderness except that which is self-imposed. Both approaches involve a fair amount of wallowing, the only difference being which of one's bodily fluids is involved. Alone time, I would argue, is a better approach for the rebuilding of personal character, understanding of the self as the self, outside the context of coupling (long-term or immediate/temporary). That kind of growing perspective, put together with alternating fistfuls of Zoloft and Ambien and everything will work out great, activated-charcoal willing.

But yeah, the flight attendant thing? Way better stories.

Keep Driving. I Think That's Rutger Hauer.

2010-07-01T21:04:00.000-07:00

I did actually see a hitchhiker for the first time in my adult life just this week. There was a period of about a decade or so there, from about 1968 to 1979, coincidentally sandwiched between Free Love and AIDS, where the idea of the hitchhiker was associated with freedom and openness, the American spirit and an expanded sense of community responsibility. Before that, hitchhiking was associated with dirty, smelly hobos. Since then? Mostly rape.

My dad, then still enlisted in the Navy, tells the story of how he hitchhiked his way all the way from San Diego to Long Beach (rougly 100 miles, non-SoCalians) to get here after my older sister was born. But this was 1973, right in that window of safety and hippie socialism. Plus he was a Sailor, in uniform. If there was any rape, he never mentioned it.

Culturally, cars have become fortresses, like little Iron Man suits of armor, complete with guidance software, satellite entertainment uplinks, heads-up displays, touch-screen interfaces, proximity alarms, automated self-parking, speech recognition... You don't let people into your Iron Man suit of armor. First of all, sorry, suit of armor is a one-man deal. It's not Iron Men, is it? I know it looks roomy, but with my yoga mat, my reusable canvas Trader Joe's shopping totes, this giant bag of organic vegan dogfood made primarily from pine nuts and soy, the hybrid engine is pretty well taxed as it is. And second, if you're in here, I'm talking to you and not working my way through MacGyver season four on the in-dash DVD player. My Netflix queue means something to me. I take my commitments seriously, sir. Keep walking.

It seems harsh, and you can argue if you must, but I'm just going to say, the last guy who fucked with Iron Man, this happened to his face.

I don't know if the world has become more paranoid, more cut-off and fearful of our fellow man since we all started taking way, way less acid, or if we've just more or less grown up and realized what a bad idea most everything that came out of the '60s and '70s was. Lots of beads and tassles. Little tiny eyeglasses. Asymmetrical warfare half a world a way with no clear criteria for either victory or withdrawal. We've learned our lessons. Not letting people get into your car is one of them.

Case in point, did you hear what happened to that guy who was terrible in Mallrats? I guess I should be more specific. Not Affleck. Not Jason Lee. The other one.

Christ, it was this guy, OK? Remind me never to reference Kevin Smith movies again. Nobody ever knows what I'm talking about and he's too old and a proven shitty filmmaker too many times over to score me any indie cred anymore.

It wasn't a hitchhiker per se, but it goes to show you, if someone you don't know gets into your car, kidnapping-at-gunpoint-and-forced-to-do-drugs is as close to a certainty as science will allow.

His family needs to get with the program, though. They're all like "Oh, he's already a drug addict and his story smacks of total bullshit, like the time he told us it wasn't his ketamine, he was holding it for Russell Brand." Just because he never met Russell Brand doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't true. That guy used to do a shit ton of drugs. They may not have belonged to him at the time, but they'd get to him eventually.

I believe Jeremy whatever his name is. His story has happened a thousand times. Well, OK, just that one time on Six Feet Under, but that show was about fuckin' death and shit, so you know it had to be true. I saw one episode where this dude got ate by a cougar. That really happens too. Ergo, all else is as well. You fell into my logic trap. Now suffer as it digests you slowly in an airtight chamber of secreted infallibility.

Throughball

2010-06-24T19:30:00.000-07:00

Finally, finally, the Thing happened. That Thing soccer people have been waiting for: the result that changes everything and finally makes soccer a relevant sport culturally in the United States. All those years of the oppressive, slow monopoly of baseball. And football. And basketball and sometimes hockey and, on the distressing increase, NASCAR and professional wrestling. And boxing and the college version of most of the above sports. And MMA fights. At long, long last that twenty-something-pronged monopoly has bent upon the rock of the world's game, the beautiful game, surely ready to take its place in the pantheon on American niche sports, like tree-felling or poker.

It's exactly like the last time soccer rocketed into and solidified its place in American hearts and minds with the shock upset of Colombia in 1994 that was such a big deal, some dude got murdered over it. Or like when we defeated horrible archrival sneaky Mexico to reach the quarterfinals in 2002, despite the onfield gang rape of forward Cobi Jones, sending the country into soccer mania, forever lodging the sport in our collective consciousness like spinach between the teeth, never to be removed.

Especially until now, when even more, for an unprecedented at-least-third-time, the single, defining, indelible moment has been achieved. Again! With one dramatic victory, I'm repeatedly told, the difference has been made for real real, this time. Honest. No fingers crossed, no backsies.

Because one guy did that one thing, now you all have to like soccer. It's the law. It's like gay marriage. A few people smuggled it in from Europe or Gamorrah or whatever and now we all HAVE TO do it. That's the way things work here. Exactly how the Irish did it to us with the potato.

You don't have to believe me. You can just watch this video of people absolutely losing their shit when the goal is scored. That's shared experience. That's group thinking. It got us into Iraq. It can certainly lay claim to our free time and a small slice of our disposable income. What is more American than that?

It's here, people. And it's here to stay. Until we are humiliated in front of an unprecedented national audience vs. tiny Ghana on Saturday afternoon (11 am West Coast, everyone else do math). Then it's back down there with lacrosse. But that just means in probably another 8 years, a chance to experience that Absolute Singular Difference Maker moment for an even-more-unprecedented fourth time.

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UPDATE: Fuck.

Oh No You Di'n't!

2010-06-17T22:32:00.000-07:00

I am traveling this weekend (tomorrow in fact) and thus have little time to write. In lieu of content, I will present for you the first five entries of popular culture words/phrases I am proud to say I have resisted using in conversation as yet. They are:

chillax
whatevs
whatever's clever
hot mess
ridonkulous

I get that language is fluid and dynamic, constantly shedding obscure and obsolete words ("newspaper") and adding mashed-together neologisms by the second (who saw "teabagger" coming? I mean in the political context... usually you can see a teabagger coming. The other kind I mean. They tend to fill up your field of vision). And it's not like I'm some old guy complaining about the kids today with their newfangled indecipherable jargon, pining for the nonexistant utopian golden age, when things were either simply "tubular" or "grody" and that was it. I've been known to take on a new word or two. Sometimes I'll get wild and describe something as "the bomb" like the kids do.

But those ones I've skipped, the ones listed above... I don't know. Try harder, I guess is the message. If it comes up on an MTV "reality" TV show, chances are I'm out. They try to come at me with all their prefabricated zeitgeisty corporate-sponsored adver-speak, but I'm just all like "you can talk to the hand." And they do. And my hand suddenly will only tolerate Dolce & Gabbana and wants to be seen at Les Deux dry-humping in the VIP section with that girl from "Jersey Shore." No, not the little stupid one, the other one. The stupid taller one with the giant cans. The hand is weak.

Upper Ninety

2010-06-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

Did I just spend four straight hours watching South Africa play Mexico followed immediately by Uruguay vs. France in consecutive televised soccer matches from half way around the world? Not only did I, but they were both recorded on my DVR, which means I spent all day purposely avoiding situations where I might learn the outcomes, adding no small amount of inconvenience and stress to my day. Lunch at the Hooters was even more awkward than usual, and I didn't even try the Hot Dog Trick.

When I did get home to watch, I found very quickly that the outcome of each game was really really really important to me. The children went unfed. The dogs I think might have trapped and murdered either a monster raccoon or some kind of small bear in the back yard. I can only go by the pitch and ferocity of the animal screams I neglected to check on. I was too busy falling in love with the inscrutably unpronounceable Siphiwe Tshabalala or being hypnotized by the flowing blonde locks of Diego Forlán. Really, that's how you say it, with that extra "la" on the end: Tshabalala. It's like doo-wop lyrics. That or some kind of exotic blood disease transmitted by tse-tse flies that makes your eyeballs implode. "I'm sorry son, it looks like you've got Tshabalala." Best news ever.

It's World Cup time. It's World Cup time. It's World Cup time. Whee!

What do I know about any of those four countries? South Africa is one of those countries so fucked up, it's got its seasons backwards, rendering it already unnatural and suspicious. But I did finally see District 9, so I feel like I know the place pretty well. I feel like I'd do OK there so long as wasn't a shrimp-looking alien. Plus I hear if you're not nice to them, they will wrap you in a tire and set it on fire. Add to that the fact they were playing Mexico and, well, not so hard to figure out all I needed to know to be invested in that one.

France is... well, it's France. They were dressed all in béchamel white. And you can always count on a certain percentage of their players to refuse to kick the ball, merely regard it with disdain, spit on a sidewalk (not easy to do on an all-grass field) and walk away, all the while impassively dangling a hand-rolled cigarette from their lower lips. And Uruguay is universally regarded as the Country That Makes It Hard To Remember Which One Is Paraguay. So I was rooting for a tie. Wish granted!

So far so good? No. So far so AWESOME. It lasts a month, which seems like a long time, but considering a) the NBA playoffs inexplicably last roughly 14 months by comparison and b) it's a quadrennial event, a month isn't really all that long. It will be no time at all when I will go back to being insufferable about the normal slate of things I am insufferable about. In the meantime, I welcome your scorn with regard with my effeminate/unAmerican/Eurotrash tendencies. Get them in while you can. I plan on being all the way back to my butch, re-educated, white-trash, xenophobic, provincialist self just in time for American football season.

TOMORROW: USA vs. England. 10:30 am Pacific/1:30 pm Not Pacific. I'm not kidding when I tell you if it weren't on a Saturday, I was going to take a vacation day. I am unwell. I am comfortable with this, however. Try to cure me and I will cut you.

I think of myself as more spiritual than religious

2010-06-04T22:48:00.000-07:00

I can say, happily, that I've spent very little time in the Dark Place since the whole marriage thing I was trying out went tits-up on me. I had a few moments early on, some gloomier than others, but at a certain point you realize, if you can't make it happen after nine rounds of Russian roulette, you're probably supposed to power through it and, with the help of some cognitive behavioral therapy and just the right amount of sticky green, everything going to be irie.

It helps to recognize and then surrender to a Higher Power, however you imagine It manifests. Unfortunately I've seen too many Stephen King made-for-TV adaptations, so It always shows up as a scary murdering clown* who wants to eat my soul. I spend a lot of time running screaming from my Higher Power or hiding in well-lit closets, wondering if It's vulnerable to buckshot. But this kept me from dwelling on the paucity of personal high points in the early days, so I'm grateful to my Higher Power for that transitional boost. We still see each other every once in a while, but less so since I cut way, way back on the Thai stick and realized It was way more interested in my kids anyway. That last bit really helped keep the other rejection beats in perspective.

Now, as most of the paperwork portion of the legal dissolution is past the rough and tumbly bit and more of a benign, blinding tedium nature, things have become... almost... and I hate to say it outloud... hopeful? I don't know. All I know is I almost never contemplate firearms these days in areas not related to the stupid fucking dog we inexplicably bought after the missus knew she was moving out but hadn't yet shared this information with me. Adorable? Sure. But the diggingest, barkingest, furniture-shreddingest motherfucking non-purebred thing in the history of animal domestication. But at least we only paid four figures for it at the mall.

Just to be clear, I could never bring myself to hurt a defenseless** dog. When I do shoot, it's more to emphasize a point than to land one. Plus I'm in such a chilled-out Zen-y place, I don't really have it in me to go off completely just because I get a little curious about what kind of sound his little doggy neck would make were I to snap it.***

But I do catch myself wondering: where's a soul-sucking murderous clown when you need one?

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* yes, I recognize the redundancy.
** sometimes I'll put a knife or a heavy flashlight within paw's reach just to give it a fighting chance.
*** I'm guessing: "snap!"

Remember, my boy, despair is a mortal sin

2010-05-27T20:20:00.000-07:00

I think if Barack Obama were to personally swim down to the site of the oil leak a mile underwater at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and halt the flow with a giant cork, there's still a base element of the population who would insist on being displeased. It is likely they would argue that sure, maybe he did it, but we heard the stopper was made out of aborted fetuses held together by gay pride flags manufactured in Mexico.

And then a further segment would deny him any credit it all, saying the story is the invention of the groveling, fellatiatic mainstream media driven by an unslakeable bloodlust to devour the descendents of Confederate soldiers, long the promise of international socialism. As undeniable proof they would cite the scientific certitude the fact that black people can't swim.

The problem is, there is no counterargument, not to any of it. You could challenge any or all of it, listing as evidence anything from Cullen Jones to the native buoyancy of aborted fetuses, but it wouldn't matter. These are the dinosaurs-on-Noah's-Ark people. Or fuck, just the Noah's Ark people. There's no talking them out of anything. When they watch Glenn Beck, they aren't doing it for the irony.

How Can I Convince Her That I'm Invented Too?

2010-05-18T19:12:00.000-07:00

Things are now starting to wind down with my first post-marriage girlfriend. We knew from the beginning that it wouldn't be forever. There are just too many complications and we're both too old, her especially, to let things like feelings knock us off the path of what we must do. Seriously, she's like 70 or something.

We're both slaves to our obligations, unfortunately. It's the oldest story going. I'm a newly-single father of three boys, bound by fatherly obligation to keep them in an environment with which they are familiar, close enough to have access to their mother and maintain a level of sane security that will help usher them through this time of upset and trauma. And she, well, she has a staff of four people just to manage all her hats. And the ribbons at the opening ceremonies for refurbished wings of hospitals for racehorses, do you think they cut themselves? And all she has to do, she has to do with the embarrassment of living tax-free on a giant pile of money ensuring no descendent of hers will have to put in an honest day's work for a thousand years. That's a lot to carry around. I've seen it up close and the emotional toll is harrowing. Especially with no makeup.

I live in California and cannot do otherwise. She is London-based and... well, she's really free to do whatever she wants what with no job and unlimited resources. But the sunlight out here, it just doesn't agree with her. Sometimes if she's backlit just right, she's like a barreleye fish. I find being able to see her internal organs working endearing. Children, however, they will sometimes scream.

So she's going back. I imagine it's for the best. I can say I've learned a great deal about myself during out time together. I've learned that I can be a fully-realized adult, able to express thought-out opinions in adult company. I learned there exists a world outside of just family and routine, exploding with nearly infinite possibilities and admixtures for entertainment and culture.

Lastly, and most importantly, I learned that the very nice men with Royal Protection will not give you two warnings when you approach their charge's car in the dark of night with your hands in your pockets. Very professional, those lads, not very apologetic, but johnny-on-the-spot with the call for emergency services. I'll miss you guys. I only wish you'd missed me.

Goodbye, HRHAPRUKGBNI. You've given me so much. I guess the best way to sum it all up is to say, I would have taken a personal check.