I think in this age of irony, metacommentary and hyper-self-awareness, sometimes, in the effort to be arch or urbane or just clever in that obnoxiously superior smug way that has been made almost a lingua franca dialect in all modes of communication since the coming-of-age of my beloved Generation X, people plain ole forget to state simple fact.
In our effort to punish sincerity not only when spoken, but even at the conceptual stage, I think we sometimes forget that somewhere in there, there are a few simple, obvious facts that need to be expressed, for the sake of basic information or, alternately, just so we can have a good solid base to stand on when we decide it's time to piss all over something instead.
Could we, in some cases, take the time to examine--or even consider--ideas before subjecting them to the automatic urinary baptism? Sure. We could. But if MSNBC and Fox News tells us anything, it's that "news" is not what's important. What's important is having a position on what the news presents. And that position has to be RIGHT NOW. Not only right now, but FOREVER. Any change in that position over time, any mulling or shifting or evolving in light of new information is frowed upon as the empty intellectual exercise of dangerous, dangerous elites.
Elites are OK in certain contexts. Say you want to tie a sweater around your neck or maybe hook up your new MP3-capable stereo. Elites are an important limited-use commodity in an information society.
Just never, ever, sit down and watch Jeopardy! with an elite. Because elites, all they care about is Facts. And Things to Know. Not for the sake of knowing it, no; they just want to make the rest of us feel stupid. What's the capital of Zanzibar? FUCK YOU, that's the capital of Zanzibar, Mr. Elite.
What's the proper way to mathematically convert grams to ounces? Gosh, I'm not sure. Let me express it in whole numbers by repeatedly punching you in the liver. Go ahead, start counting.
Elites and their facts... see, you have to take them in small doses. That's not that hard to do because, by nature, elites are limited in size as a group. That's what makes them elites. We just pray that, one day, interbreeding amongst such a closed, limited society will one day bring them down to our level.
And that's why we don't get "facts" on the news, we get analysis, we get punditry. Because we don't want to know stuff so much as we want to know how to feel about stuff, like presidential candidates and hurricanes and financial crises and George Clooney and Listerine and the new Chevy Malibu and Gatorade and Sarah Palin and illegal immigration.
So we forget to state facts because facts alienate people and people buy things and people buying things, well, that's what makes the fundamentals of our economy so strong. It's gotten to the point where we can simply skip events altogether and jump right to the post-mortem, complete with reaction quotes!
I can't tell you how upset I was when I read this headline: Facebook profiles can reveal narcissism, study suggests. Well, no kidding. Really? Is Clay Aiken gay too?
You can't just say something obvious like "Facebook is for narcissists" without giving it a grander schema for understanding what it means. Is it the end of the altruism and community-thinking that animated the World War II generation and, thus, the snapping of the last vertebra of the backbone that once held America up? Or, conversely, is it the final death of the "all kids have low self-esteem" crisis we were told gave us the crack epidemic and teenagers having babies (and, not coincidentally, loads of twitchy crack babies) in the 1980s?
Nobody will say. Now all I've got is this "fact." What the hell am I supposed to do with that?
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, BOOM!
It is a common human impulse to believe one is living in the “end times,” the closing act of this long, ridiculous play that has been human existence. In centuries past, unsophisticated early man would, when confronted with an uncommon or destructive act of nature, attribute the cause to something mystical, unseen and malevolent that had decided, for some inscrutable reason, to wipe us all out with the wave of a gigantic, invisible hand. Silly things like the appearance of a comet or an eclipse, an earthquake or a worldwide pandemic reducing the world population by a third in the space of a week… really, it’s comical when you think about what used to upset people in Ye Quaint Olden Tymes.
As evolved, intellectually superior modern people, of course, we have the benefit of astrophysics, geophysics, epidemiology to explain not only the cause of these events, but the global perspective to understand them as something, while horrible, limited and local in scope. This of course frees us contemplate more reasonable threats to all of human existence, like nuclear holocaust, global warming and whether our not our computers were going to murder us all in our sleep because the calendar that came bundled with Windows 98 couldn’t figure out how to change from 1999 to 2000.
Advancements in the scientific understanding of how the universe functions haven’t been much of a salve for the apocalyptic preoccupation. Even knowing that end-of-the-world anxiety is really just a psychological combination of existential angst and narcissism borne of our inability to reconcile the absurd idea of mortality and the finite individual consciousness--the sad and childish “If I have to go, I’m taking all of you with me!”--doesn’t really help. All we’re left with as we stare into the blank void of a future without us is that nobody will really care if we’re plus or minus five pounds when they lower us into the ground for the last time. So go ahead and have that Twinkie. You deserve it.
All of this is why I don’t think I’m going to vote in November. I’ve been watching all the political television ads, paying very close attention to the stump speeches and the conventions and the rallies and the interviews and the only concrete conclusion I’ve come to is that shortly after the election, the world will at last come to an end.
Not just a whimpery, quiet end either; I mean a horrendous conflagration that will consume us all in a gigantic, sadistic fireball of hedonism, lawlessness and mean-spirited bad manners.
I know this mostly from the TV commercials. The Barack Obama commercials say if John McCain is elected, we can expect a future of unprovoked expansionist aggression but without any tax base to pay for it, which will mean all our debt will be bought up by Communist China, who will force us all to live in Alaska, paired up into a rough concubinage with teenaged hockey-playing ruffians before the last, wobbly stab of a crooked, aging finger hits The Button and ends it all in a hail of nuclear missiles we will welcome from the sky.
The John McCain commercials, on the other hand, suggest that an Obama administration will line us all up against whichever wall is handy and shake every last cent from our pockets in form of “taxes,” then take that money and ship it directly to the enemies of America, who will use it to buy dirty bombs and Japanese cars, which will then be used to beat us into physical and economic submission until we all choose self-immolation instead of contemplating a world where you can’t buy a Ford F-350.
These are the choices, people. They wouldn’t be on your TV if they weren’t absolutely true. Other democracies make fun of America because our voter turnout is typically around 50%, but honestly, with this much at stake EVERY SINGLE ELECTION, it’s not apathy; it’s paralysis. Any movement either way makes you an accessory. Seriously, how would you vote knowing those are your two options? I’m surprised anyone ever votes for anyone, ever.
The only good news is that we seem to have a knack for this. Every four years we get the same message: vote for the other guy and everyone dies. And yet somehow, through two and a quarter centuries, we’ve managed to avoid the eschaton promised us. Either we have an uncanny ability for spotting the Four Horsemen in the guise of ambitious governors and senators or somebody’s exaggerating.
But I can’t really say that I care. Because if the choice is between finally being right about the End of Days on one hand and some dude (or lady!) with some minor truth-issues on the other, I’ll take the second one almost every time.
As evolved, intellectually superior modern people, of course, we have the benefit of astrophysics, geophysics, epidemiology to explain not only the cause of these events, but the global perspective to understand them as something, while horrible, limited and local in scope. This of course frees us contemplate more reasonable threats to all of human existence, like nuclear holocaust, global warming and whether our not our computers were going to murder us all in our sleep because the calendar that came bundled with Windows 98 couldn’t figure out how to change from 1999 to 2000.
Advancements in the scientific understanding of how the universe functions haven’t been much of a salve for the apocalyptic preoccupation. Even knowing that end-of-the-world anxiety is really just a psychological combination of existential angst and narcissism borne of our inability to reconcile the absurd idea of mortality and the finite individual consciousness--the sad and childish “If I have to go, I’m taking all of you with me!”--doesn’t really help. All we’re left with as we stare into the blank void of a future without us is that nobody will really care if we’re plus or minus five pounds when they lower us into the ground for the last time. So go ahead and have that Twinkie. You deserve it.
All of this is why I don’t think I’m going to vote in November. I’ve been watching all the political television ads, paying very close attention to the stump speeches and the conventions and the rallies and the interviews and the only concrete conclusion I’ve come to is that shortly after the election, the world will at last come to an end.
Not just a whimpery, quiet end either; I mean a horrendous conflagration that will consume us all in a gigantic, sadistic fireball of hedonism, lawlessness and mean-spirited bad manners.
I know this mostly from the TV commercials. The Barack Obama commercials say if John McCain is elected, we can expect a future of unprovoked expansionist aggression but without any tax base to pay for it, which will mean all our debt will be bought up by Communist China, who will force us all to live in Alaska, paired up into a rough concubinage with teenaged hockey-playing ruffians before the last, wobbly stab of a crooked, aging finger hits The Button and ends it all in a hail of nuclear missiles we will welcome from the sky.
The John McCain commercials, on the other hand, suggest that an Obama administration will line us all up against whichever wall is handy and shake every last cent from our pockets in form of “taxes,” then take that money and ship it directly to the enemies of America, who will use it to buy dirty bombs and Japanese cars, which will then be used to beat us into physical and economic submission until we all choose self-immolation instead of contemplating a world where you can’t buy a Ford F-350.
These are the choices, people. They wouldn’t be on your TV if they weren’t absolutely true. Other democracies make fun of America because our voter turnout is typically around 50%, but honestly, with this much at stake EVERY SINGLE ELECTION, it’s not apathy; it’s paralysis. Any movement either way makes you an accessory. Seriously, how would you vote knowing those are your two options? I’m surprised anyone ever votes for anyone, ever.
The only good news is that we seem to have a knack for this. Every four years we get the same message: vote for the other guy and everyone dies. And yet somehow, through two and a quarter centuries, we’ve managed to avoid the eschaton promised us. Either we have an uncanny ability for spotting the Four Horsemen in the guise of ambitious governors and senators or somebody’s exaggerating.
But I can’t really say that I care. Because if the choice is between finally being right about the End of Days on one hand and some dude (or lady!) with some minor truth-issues on the other, I’ll take the second one almost every time.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Fingercuffs
Well, I finally have a few minutes to write and now, by God, I just can't think of anything worth writing about.
Um... I finally got to see No Country for Old Men this weekend. That's interesting, right? Right? No? Look, I'm sure sometime in the next month or so There Will Be Blood will come out on Starz and I'll be all caught up on the 2007 Oscar season movies and we can have what would have been a fantastic conversation about film and art and the direction of cinematic expression in an increasingly segmented, disjointed and visually overstimulated world 11 months ago. But for now, I'm doing what I can do. Me and the boys watched The Empire Strikes Back again tonight if you're interested in talking about that.
I guess my only point about No Country is that I should have taken away from it that Tommy Lee Jones, great as he is, is still grossly underappreciated and that dialogue in films, it turns out, is a tool of obvious hacks.
If you think about it, No Country is the exact antithesis of a Kevin Smith film. You know, the Clerks guy. Sorry, I guess that was a small film at the beginning of his career like 15 years ago. For current audiences, he was also the director of Clerks II. Hope that helps.
If you look at any of the Smith films, it's all talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk. He gets such raves for his dialogue, but honestly, it's horrendously overdone (I defy you to look over his entire oeuvre and find one quiet scene) so that it can't help but be stilted and unnatural. In the place of actual plots, he has conjunctions and transitional phrases and grating, shoe-horned segues to present ideas verbally instead of letting people show something physically or, God forbid, emotionally. He gets beat up for not moving the camera, but it's not that he won't, it's that he can't. There's nothing going on anywhere else except for that spot where that one person is speaking: making some kind of over-wrought point with a liberal sprinkling of "fucks," a shout-out to a comic book hero and no less than eleven (that's a mathematically derived minimum) references to anal and/or gay sex. I think it says something that even the guy named "Silent Bob" can't get through the end of one of those movies without chiming in.
It's frustrating for me because, as unimpressed as I've been with his films, I'm a huge Kevin Smith fan. It sounds strange to say because, what else does he have, right? If you look, you'll see him (not a fat joke, by the way, although, lawks...) on talk shows or on the internets, sitting with people, having great conversations, being smart, being witty, being funny and sharp and very happily profane in a charming, charming way. He's even been able to turn that ability into a cottage industry of books, websites and a video series where he just stands in front of people and talks. Couldn't be more down to earth or into the same retarded fanboy dork pop-culture that motivates me.
So I want to like Kevin Smith movies. When I saw them each individually, I found them to be perfectly entertaining in that kind of "Hey that was fun, let's see if the Jamba Juice is still open" kind of way.
In a way, I guess, his complete inability to develop as a filmmaker sort of embodies the stalled-out pre-emptive failure slacker aesthetic that animated--OK, totally wrong word--Clerks in the first place. The frustrating thing is that, seeing him out there on the interview and personal-appearance circuit, you know the guy has grown as a person (again, not a fat joke, but still, goodness me...) into a husband and father and business owner and general grown-up type. But while his hetero-life-mate Jason Mewes' struggle to overcome addictions to, well, everything is inspiring and makes for spellbinding personal storytelling, it's not enough to excuse Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
I guess what I'm saying is I saw No Country for Old Men and I immediately thought of Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I heard the premise, read the synopsis (synopsises? synopses? I don't know), even watched the red-band trailer and... well, I'm hopeful, but I'm not falling for it this time. I really want it to be good. And it looks good. 11 months from now when it's on Encore, I'll DVR it and we'll see. Until then, he's the guy who brought you Jersey Girl.
And when I do see it on Encore, I will be looking. It won't have to be long, just, like, 30 seconds tops, just one scene when someone just kind of sits there, with no song playing to tell us how we're supposed to feel, just an actor acting, moving, doing something instructive/constructive/related to both the plot and his/her implied inner life. 'Twould be a Kevin Smith first.
In the mean time, I may watch No Country again. Or OK, more likely, Hot Fuzz. But same idea.
Um... I finally got to see No Country for Old Men this weekend. That's interesting, right? Right? No? Look, I'm sure sometime in the next month or so There Will Be Blood will come out on Starz and I'll be all caught up on the 2007 Oscar season movies and we can have what would have been a fantastic conversation about film and art and the direction of cinematic expression in an increasingly segmented, disjointed and visually overstimulated world 11 months ago. But for now, I'm doing what I can do. Me and the boys watched The Empire Strikes Back again tonight if you're interested in talking about that.
I guess my only point about No Country is that I should have taken away from it that Tommy Lee Jones, great as he is, is still grossly underappreciated and that dialogue in films, it turns out, is a tool of obvious hacks.
If you think about it, No Country is the exact antithesis of a Kevin Smith film. You know, the Clerks guy. Sorry, I guess that was a small film at the beginning of his career like 15 years ago. For current audiences, he was also the director of Clerks II. Hope that helps.
If you look at any of the Smith films, it's all talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk. He gets such raves for his dialogue, but honestly, it's horrendously overdone (I defy you to look over his entire oeuvre and find one quiet scene) so that it can't help but be stilted and unnatural. In the place of actual plots, he has conjunctions and transitional phrases and grating, shoe-horned segues to present ideas verbally instead of letting people show something physically or, God forbid, emotionally. He gets beat up for not moving the camera, but it's not that he won't, it's that he can't. There's nothing going on anywhere else except for that spot where that one person is speaking: making some kind of over-wrought point with a liberal sprinkling of "fucks," a shout-out to a comic book hero and no less than eleven (that's a mathematically derived minimum) references to anal and/or gay sex. I think it says something that even the guy named "Silent Bob" can't get through the end of one of those movies without chiming in.
It's frustrating for me because, as unimpressed as I've been with his films, I'm a huge Kevin Smith fan. It sounds strange to say because, what else does he have, right? If you look, you'll see him (not a fat joke, by the way, although, lawks...) on talk shows or on the internets, sitting with people, having great conversations, being smart, being witty, being funny and sharp and very happily profane in a charming, charming way. He's even been able to turn that ability into a cottage industry of books, websites and a video series where he just stands in front of people and talks. Couldn't be more down to earth or into the same retarded fanboy dork pop-culture that motivates me.
So I want to like Kevin Smith movies. When I saw them each individually, I found them to be perfectly entertaining in that kind of "Hey that was fun, let's see if the Jamba Juice is still open" kind of way.
In a way, I guess, his complete inability to develop as a filmmaker sort of embodies the stalled-out pre-emptive failure slacker aesthetic that animated--OK, totally wrong word--Clerks in the first place. The frustrating thing is that, seeing him out there on the interview and personal-appearance circuit, you know the guy has grown as a person (again, not a fat joke, but still, goodness me...) into a husband and father and business owner and general grown-up type. But while his hetero-life-mate Jason Mewes' struggle to overcome addictions to, well, everything is inspiring and makes for spellbinding personal storytelling, it's not enough to excuse Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
I guess what I'm saying is I saw No Country for Old Men and I immediately thought of Zack and Miri Make a Porno. I heard the premise, read the synopsis (synopsises? synopses? I don't know), even watched the red-band trailer and... well, I'm hopeful, but I'm not falling for it this time. I really want it to be good. And it looks good. 11 months from now when it's on Encore, I'll DVR it and we'll see. Until then, he's the guy who brought you Jersey Girl.
And when I do see it on Encore, I will be looking. It won't have to be long, just, like, 30 seconds tops, just one scene when someone just kind of sits there, with no song playing to tell us how we're supposed to feel, just an actor acting, moving, doing something instructive/constructive/related to both the plot and his/her implied inner life. 'Twould be a Kevin Smith first.
In the mean time, I may watch No Country again. Or OK, more likely, Hot Fuzz. But same idea.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Reproductive Organs Included Below!
The downside to not being able to post every day--or, OK, every week--is that you lose some of the immediacy that daily blogging affords.
I had some really good blogposts all queued up and ready to go in my head during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, but then, you know, some family strep throat here, a camping trip there and next thing you know it's September and all the good teen-pregnancy/snowbilly jokes are spoken for. I didn't even get to come up with "Caribou Barbie," which is fine considering it's totally sexist and inappropriate, but still, damn.
Yes, it's true, I would have had less to work with during the DNC because of my regular pinko America-hating lefty bleeding heart pro-terrrorism views. But that whole maelstrom with the Sarah Palin thing, that frothy, frothy 24 hours following the announcement... I swear to you I was thisclose to quitting my job just for the blog time.
On the other hand, as much as I love a good maelstrom, the gift of time and distance can force you to be a little more circumspect, a little less beholden to the 24-hour news cycle, a little more able to pretend you knew shit was going to happen after it already happened.
Like Sarah Palin, I can go ahead and claim I held positions at the time between my last blog post and now, when none of my thoughts were broadcast and really, in blog terms, I ceased to exist at all. In essence, a blogger not blogging is the blog version of Alaska.
Honestly, though, I thought about all the hue and cry about the Palin nomination, how her 18-month gubernatorial experience in a state with a smaller population than the freeway between my house and the Orange County line RIGHT NOW, her pregnant daughter and her baby with the Down's somehow meant that SHE was retarded. Like she was going to walk out on stage at the RNC, quiver behind the podium for a minute, foam at the mouth and then, from somewhere on her person, produce a live beaver and then eat it.
I mean, she is a governor. Sure, of a totally BS state like "Alaska," but you have to be able to talk in pulic for that job, at least. And she spent the better part of a week in lock-down with very serious national campaign political professionals so gifted in digital human simulacra programming, they were able, on occasion, to even make George Bush seem like an real boy.
So she walks out, eats NO BEAVERS (hello, Googlers!) and we, as a nation, gasp and cheer and swoon over the Magic Talking Lady.
I mean, seriously, what did we think was going to happen?
And still, amidst all the political lust and soft hands, I have to hear about liberal media bias.
I have decided that while Sarah Palin might not actually be all that smart, that's not really what she's selling. Fuck, I don't know what a "Fannie Mae" or a "Freddie Mac" is either. And I bet if you asked McCain, Obama or Biden, none of them would be able to break either one of those people/thing/entities/whatever down into digestible pieces either. What I think is that, the reason why we get this Palin-mania has taken hold amongst GOP base voters and your Liberal Media is because she, ironically, by far has the most balls out of the four major-party candidate/vice-candidates.
I probably shouldn't say that. Is it sexist or anti-sexist to describe a woman in terms of male anatomy? I haven't been able to figure out if I'm being patriarchal or gender-blind egalitarian. Seriously, what's the girl-equivalent? Fallopian tubes? Not quite the same rhetorical ring to it, you have to admit.
But look, this is someone who knew her daughter was pregnant, who knew she was being investigated for something I don't care enough to remember about, who knew she was not only Queen of a made-up place, but had only been so for about 18 months and STILL took the job when Crackers McCain asked her if she wanted it.
And now she's out there making declarative statements about shit she KNOWS she never heard of before AND boldly proclaiming things we all know to be lies.
Fallopian tubes? As big as church bells.
See even I can't make that work.
But hopefully you get the point.
I might not be here every day, but I'm glad I still get to play.
I had some really good blogposts all queued up and ready to go in my head during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, but then, you know, some family strep throat here, a camping trip there and next thing you know it's September and all the good teen-pregnancy/snowbilly jokes are spoken for. I didn't even get to come up with "Caribou Barbie," which is fine considering it's totally sexist and inappropriate, but still, damn.
Yes, it's true, I would have had less to work with during the DNC because of my regular pinko America-hating lefty bleeding heart pro-terrrorism views. But that whole maelstrom with the Sarah Palin thing, that frothy, frothy 24 hours following the announcement... I swear to you I was thisclose to quitting my job just for the blog time.
On the other hand, as much as I love a good maelstrom, the gift of time and distance can force you to be a little more circumspect, a little less beholden to the 24-hour news cycle, a little more able to pretend you knew shit was going to happen after it already happened.
Like Sarah Palin, I can go ahead and claim I held positions at the time between my last blog post and now, when none of my thoughts were broadcast and really, in blog terms, I ceased to exist at all. In essence, a blogger not blogging is the blog version of Alaska.
Honestly, though, I thought about all the hue and cry about the Palin nomination, how her 18-month gubernatorial experience in a state with a smaller population than the freeway between my house and the Orange County line RIGHT NOW, her pregnant daughter and her baby with the Down's somehow meant that SHE was retarded. Like she was going to walk out on stage at the RNC, quiver behind the podium for a minute, foam at the mouth and then, from somewhere on her person, produce a live beaver and then eat it.
I mean, she is a governor. Sure, of a totally BS state like "Alaska," but you have to be able to talk in pulic for that job, at least. And she spent the better part of a week in lock-down with very serious national campaign political professionals so gifted in digital human simulacra programming, they were able, on occasion, to even make George Bush seem like an real boy.
So she walks out, eats NO BEAVERS (hello, Googlers!) and we, as a nation, gasp and cheer and swoon over the Magic Talking Lady.
I mean, seriously, what did we think was going to happen?
And still, amidst all the political lust and soft hands, I have to hear about liberal media bias.
I have decided that while Sarah Palin might not actually be all that smart, that's not really what she's selling. Fuck, I don't know what a "Fannie Mae" or a "Freddie Mac" is either. And I bet if you asked McCain, Obama or Biden, none of them would be able to break either one of those people/thing/entities/whatever down into digestible pieces either. What I think is that, the reason why we get this Palin-mania has taken hold amongst GOP base voters and your Liberal Media is because she, ironically, by far has the most balls out of the four major-party candidate/vice-candidates.
I probably shouldn't say that. Is it sexist or anti-sexist to describe a woman in terms of male anatomy? I haven't been able to figure out if I'm being patriarchal or gender-blind egalitarian. Seriously, what's the girl-equivalent? Fallopian tubes? Not quite the same rhetorical ring to it, you have to admit.
But look, this is someone who knew her daughter was pregnant, who knew she was being investigated for something I don't care enough to remember about, who knew she was not only Queen of a made-up place, but had only been so for about 18 months and STILL took the job when Crackers McCain asked her if she wanted it.
And now she's out there making declarative statements about shit she KNOWS she never heard of before AND boldly proclaiming things we all know to be lies.
Fallopian tubes? As big as church bells.
See even I can't make that work.
But hopefully you get the point.
I might not be here every day, but I'm glad I still get to play.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
I thought I'd let you down, dear, but you were just deflating
It isn't particularly adorable when my youngest son rests his head in my lap. Yes, I know, it sounds adorable, especially after I tell you he's still only five years old. After double digits, it just gets weird.
Usually when my son rests his head in my lap it's either because he's horribly sick with something and resting his head in my lap, while temporarily making him feel better, usually just means the proximity just about assures transmission of whatever it is that's eating him alive one red blood cell at a time and leaves me zero recourse, space-wise, should his gastrointestinal system decides to revisit lunch...
...or (there was an "either" in there, remember?) it means he's being obnoxious in that way that only labrador retrievers and children can be, insisting on attention when you're not ready/willing/able to give it, in the most persistent non-verbal way possible. It's a way to say emphatically "Here I am. You will mind me." The hair on top of a human head for a five year old, yes, keeps the sun off the ole scalp, but really is most useful at lessening friction so s/he can fit their entire head between your tricep and ribcage and worm his/her way through to unignorable lap time. It's a trick they learn on the way out of the birth canal and never, ever seem to forget.
In any case, head-in-lap time usually dovetails neatly with sleepy-time (sick and/or needy, right?) which means they fall asleep, they drool and 30 minutes later, I can't feel my feet.
And what's more adorable than functional paraplegia? I ask you.
Like today, we're at Back to School Night (not to be confused with PTA Family Night, School Open House, Student of the Month Night, Parent-Teacher Conferences... it sounds like a lot, but do you know what they make teachers out of in California? 23 year old ladies. Just saying) and I'm sitting there trying to follow along with the State of California 4th Grade Standards in Mathematics and the youngest will not stop. He's clawing and fighting and baby-talking and pressing his way to get his head in my lap, while I'm trying there pretending to both listen and to be comfortable sitting in a plastic chair designed to hold roughly 1/3 of me.
Finally, as usual, the little parasite wins. And not only does he win, but his eyes are rolling in the back of his head and for some evolutionarily involuntary reason, as I always do, I'm sitting there stroking his stupid hair, cursing myself for being such a sucker when I have the following thought:
How many people out there started out just like this? How many boys laid with their heads in their dad's lap when they were five, all golden and safe and eager and comfortable and soothable and warm, still uncomplicated, still unhurt, still innocent, still wondering and wondrous, still uncorrupted by stress and wisdom and doubt and self-awareness and fear. I mean, he has fear. He won't look under his bed after 6 pm, but you know, he's not worried about the mortgage.
But there he is, still mostly perfect; a downey, blue-eyed, person-shaped bag of limitless potential. How many boys had moments just like this with fathers just like me and still, no matter what we did, they still managed to grow up to be complete and total assholes?
I don't really have an answer except to say that even though parenting isn't my main gig anymore, it's still kind of freaky, not to mention practically impossible.
So what I did was, when we got home, I let him eat Twinkies and Sprite. Because I figure, you know, I have all these rules, but what will they really matter in the end? He might as well be happy in the moment. They have cures for diabetes. Or, you know, they will.
Usually when my son rests his head in my lap it's either because he's horribly sick with something and resting his head in my lap, while temporarily making him feel better, usually just means the proximity just about assures transmission of whatever it is that's eating him alive one red blood cell at a time and leaves me zero recourse, space-wise, should his gastrointestinal system decides to revisit lunch...
...or (there was an "either" in there, remember?) it means he's being obnoxious in that way that only labrador retrievers and children can be, insisting on attention when you're not ready/willing/able to give it, in the most persistent non-verbal way possible. It's a way to say emphatically "Here I am. You will mind me." The hair on top of a human head for a five year old, yes, keeps the sun off the ole scalp, but really is most useful at lessening friction so s/he can fit their entire head between your tricep and ribcage and worm his/her way through to unignorable lap time. It's a trick they learn on the way out of the birth canal and never, ever seem to forget.
In any case, head-in-lap time usually dovetails neatly with sleepy-time (sick and/or needy, right?) which means they fall asleep, they drool and 30 minutes later, I can't feel my feet.
And what's more adorable than functional paraplegia? I ask you.
Like today, we're at Back to School Night (not to be confused with PTA Family Night, School Open House, Student of the Month Night, Parent-Teacher Conferences... it sounds like a lot, but do you know what they make teachers out of in California? 23 year old ladies. Just saying) and I'm sitting there trying to follow along with the State of California 4th Grade Standards in Mathematics and the youngest will not stop. He's clawing and fighting and baby-talking and pressing his way to get his head in my lap, while I'm trying there pretending to both listen and to be comfortable sitting in a plastic chair designed to hold roughly 1/3 of me.
Finally, as usual, the little parasite wins. And not only does he win, but his eyes are rolling in the back of his head and for some evolutionarily involuntary reason, as I always do, I'm sitting there stroking his stupid hair, cursing myself for being such a sucker when I have the following thought:
How many people out there started out just like this? How many boys laid with their heads in their dad's lap when they were five, all golden and safe and eager and comfortable and soothable and warm, still uncomplicated, still unhurt, still innocent, still wondering and wondrous, still uncorrupted by stress and wisdom and doubt and self-awareness and fear. I mean, he has fear. He won't look under his bed after 6 pm, but you know, he's not worried about the mortgage.
But there he is, still mostly perfect; a downey, blue-eyed, person-shaped bag of limitless potential. How many boys had moments just like this with fathers just like me and still, no matter what we did, they still managed to grow up to be complete and total assholes?
I don't really have an answer except to say that even though parenting isn't my main gig anymore, it's still kind of freaky, not to mention practically impossible.
So what I did was, when we got home, I let him eat Twinkies and Sprite. Because I figure, you know, I have all these rules, but what will they really matter in the end? He might as well be happy in the moment. They have cures for diabetes. Or, you know, they will.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
We Believe In Nothing!
This is the part where I'm supposed to have started an actual content blog, where I am inspired by or self-generate topics of discussion of interest to me and, by hopeful accident, to you, the reader, as well.
Sadly, I have yet to work through the questioning, feeling out phase where I talk endlessly about myself, my hopes, my fears, my expectations for my new blog-venture and hope you all don't mind while I swim laps in my own navel.
See, the process used to be that I would wake up, take kids to school, come home, ignore my youngest child and, in the process of dedicated parental neglect, read other peoples' blogs and countless news aggregators looking for that one little spark to get me going, words-wise.
Then I would spend a lot of time crafting and mulling and shaping until, ultimately, I would give all that up, find two diametrically opposed topics, invent a spurious and questionable rationale to shoehorn them both into the same blogpost and shazam, blog day done and it's right back to four search engines scouring the web for Lindsay Lohan nipple slips.
I took my child neglect very serious in those days.
Now, as I reboot the writerly part of my brain that I had given over to Excel spreadsheet maintenance and most troubling decisions in cubicle decoration (Ziggy or Garfield? Ziggy or Garfield?), I find myself unplugged in a fashion that makes this something of an outright effort.
And that is saying something considering that we're in a content-repeat of the days of my first blog, what with the white-hot popular culture meltdown fueled by the spinning antipodes of presidential politics and Olympic sport.
But again, those were days of swift boats and Alan Keyes and me caring enough to read things. I'm afraid my lack of free time has pushed right over the line where cynical stops being adorable and becomes nihilism.
But, like Barack Obama and that girl who does gymnastics whose name I forget, I have hope. Like a black dude who runs for president or an 85-pound female who has arrested her own development through a years-long, rigorous regimen of malnutrition and brutal self-inflicted systematic physical punishment by assenting to being dropped from great heights on to unforgiving obstacles, I believe in myself. No matter how ridiculously useless my striving is or utterly, laughably hopeless my goals, I believe I can get to where I am going.
I will be blog-great again. Or, you know, if not great, at least minimally up to my standard. Which, OK, wasn't that high. But I did try! Most days.
What I won't be is like Garfield, who just lays there and utters witticisms, refusing to move, wallowing in his own wretched dependency and morbid obesity, even refusing to protect himself when Jon comes home with the groceries and inevitably trips over his sad, enormous, self-loathing pet. That cat hates exercise! And Mondays!
And I can't stop laughing.
So I guess today's lesson is... you know what, I think I lost it.
Sadly, I have yet to work through the questioning, feeling out phase where I talk endlessly about myself, my hopes, my fears, my expectations for my new blog-venture and hope you all don't mind while I swim laps in my own navel.
See, the process used to be that I would wake up, take kids to school, come home, ignore my youngest child and, in the process of dedicated parental neglect, read other peoples' blogs and countless news aggregators looking for that one little spark to get me going, words-wise.
Then I would spend a lot of time crafting and mulling and shaping until, ultimately, I would give all that up, find two diametrically opposed topics, invent a spurious and questionable rationale to shoehorn them both into the same blogpost and shazam, blog day done and it's right back to four search engines scouring the web for Lindsay Lohan nipple slips.
I took my child neglect very serious in those days.
Now, as I reboot the writerly part of my brain that I had given over to Excel spreadsheet maintenance and most troubling decisions in cubicle decoration (Ziggy or Garfield? Ziggy or Garfield?), I find myself unplugged in a fashion that makes this something of an outright effort.
And that is saying something considering that we're in a content-repeat of the days of my first blog, what with the white-hot popular culture meltdown fueled by the spinning antipodes of presidential politics and Olympic sport.
But again, those were days of swift boats and Alan Keyes and me caring enough to read things. I'm afraid my lack of free time has pushed right over the line where cynical stops being adorable and becomes nihilism.
But, like Barack Obama and that girl who does gymnastics whose name I forget, I have hope. Like a black dude who runs for president or an 85-pound female who has arrested her own development through a years-long, rigorous regimen of malnutrition and brutal self-inflicted systematic physical punishment by assenting to being dropped from great heights on to unforgiving obstacles, I believe in myself. No matter how ridiculously useless my striving is or utterly, laughably hopeless my goals, I believe I can get to where I am going.
I will be blog-great again. Or, you know, if not great, at least minimally up to my standard. Which, OK, wasn't that high. But I did try! Most days.
What I won't be is like Garfield, who just lays there and utters witticisms, refusing to move, wallowing in his own wretched dependency and morbid obesity, even refusing to protect himself when Jon comes home with the groceries and inevitably trips over his sad, enormous, self-loathing pet. That cat hates exercise! And Mondays!
And I can't stop laughing.
So I guess today's lesson is... you know what, I think I lost it.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Tick Tick Tick
The good news is that I was totally right, I AM finding it incredibly difficult to find any time to do this again.
The bad news is, well, see above.
I'm trying to cut down on the time requirement by bypassing blog traditions like reading what other people have to say and keeping one of those mutual blog-link lists where I send you all to blogs that linked to mine. Anticipating some kind of readership, I feel kind of bad about that on a pre-emptive sort of basis, but what makes that squirmy social one-sidedness tolerable is the basic truth that I am an asshole.
Very freeing, that last part. Can't tell you how much my wife and kids love that.
The other thing is that I have settled on a name, finally. I like Poplicola because it recalls my old blog handle (you can shorten it to... something... if you like) and still also kind of sounds like a brand name for people-flavored soda.
I got it from here. I'd explain more, but there is that time thing I was talking about...
The bad news is, well, see above.
I'm trying to cut down on the time requirement by bypassing blog traditions like reading what other people have to say and keeping one of those mutual blog-link lists where I send you all to blogs that linked to mine. Anticipating some kind of readership, I feel kind of bad about that on a pre-emptive sort of basis, but what makes that squirmy social one-sidedness tolerable is the basic truth that I am an asshole.
Very freeing, that last part. Can't tell you how much my wife and kids love that.
The other thing is that I have settled on a name, finally. I like Poplicola because it recalls my old blog handle (you can shorten it to... something... if you like) and still also kind of sounds like a brand name for people-flavored soda.
I got it from here. I'd explain more, but there is that time thing I was talking about...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
