The Dirty Jester Winks

Rolling Quiet Time

2008-11-10T19:49:00.001-08:00

I've been turning the radio off in the car lately. Not switching to a tape (I have a very old car), but just turning the damn thing off.

I tended to have five different radio-listening modes. Either KJR-AM for sports, AM1090 for lefty-talk, KUOW for national NPR programming, KEXP for general music, or the occasional dial-surfing for some groovy tune.

Now, nada.

And it has felt good. I don't know what it says about my mental state that I need this, that I have become more noise-averse. Maybe the intensity of the last few months of Campaign'08 or the rise and fall of child-induced anxiety or just the need to give my brain some free-play time in the hopes I'll have the time and energy and material to write.

It would be unsettling, as neurotically self-conscious as I am, if it weren't so peaceful.

OBAMA WINS!

2008-11-04T20:44:00.000-08:00

I am beside myself. There have been tears and whoops and an overwhelming feeling of hope.

And now, not a praying man, I offer my prayers to President-elect Barack Obama. Bush is a tough act to follow, though not in the traditional sense of the phrase.

Let's help President Obama realize what the word "mandate" really means, and change the image of government at home and the US abroad.

Many thanks to my friends at SEI for brotherhood through the process and my spot on the soapbox.

I'm proud to be an American tonight, which is damn refreshing.

And very glad I shared all of it, including the voting booth trip, with my girls.

Yahtzees and Valleys

2008-11-01T12:46:00.001-07:00

We have a handheld Yahtzee game in our bathroom. I bought it for Tricia’s stocking a few Christmases ago, and it has lived most its life in the bathroom.

I am unrepentant about the games function. I’ve always been a bathroom reader and I don’t care who knows it. A game of Yahtzee is the perfectly complimentary length for the other business that needs doing.

But there is a problem.

When you play enough Yahtzee, especially at the solo handheld pace, you begin to see patterns. Repetition reveals the subtle but important strategies to the game, constantly angling to put yourself in the way of happy accidents, keeping an eye on secondary options in case the optimal outcome isn’t achieved.

I suppose, for better or worse, there is a metaphor in there for how I have chosen to live my life, but that is a story for a different time.

The issue here is that by finding resonances within the patterns and strategies, the game takes on the air of a gateway to the universal. It becomes, like tea leaves or candlelight or smoke, a meditative focal point for expanding one’s awareness.

But, unlike those things, it also has a win/lose aspect, a metric of success. And I use the game as my own Golden Compass, orienteering the state of my karmic pendulum, taking the measure of my luck, my ability to read and write probalities.

Which is crazy, because it’s just a fucking game.

I put my the health of my mental state into a dollar worth of plastic and circuits loaded with trademarked proprietary code. If I’m feeling down and lose, or second-guessing myself and make a poor game choice, I accelerate myself into a downward slope. And I allow the happy accidents to falsely elevate my self-esteem

All based on pure dumb luck. All based on just things as they happen to be running up against my narratives of how things should be.

Which, perhaps, places my Yahtzee play firmly alongside every other spiritual tradition. And maybe no better or worse because of it.

Down with "middle" fingers!

2008-10-18T13:46:00.001-07:00

I think we've been profoundly unfair to our middle fingers. Only they have no name that is really their own, marks them as individual. They are known only in their relationship to the other fingers.

Thumb. Pinkie. Index. Ring.

Middle.

What happens if you lose a finger? What then? Or, taken further, what if you lost two, thumb/index or pinkie/ring? How could it still be a "middle" finger?

How can we saddle one of our digits with an identity so easily undercut, so mutable and yet without agency?

I, for one, am not going to stand for this. I propose an immediate rename of the third digit, formerly known as "middle" finger.

I'm going to call them the "fuckyou" fingers.

Think how satisfying this will render a session of "Thumbkin."

"Where is fuckyou?
Where is fuckyou?
Here I am, Here I am."

No more of a name dependent on others for meaning.

Thumb. Pinkie. Index. Ring.

Fuckyou.

The Alpha Bum

2008-10-09T19:59:00.000-07:00

I've wondered for years about the Alpha Bum. Some say he's a myth, but I tell ya he lives on these here streets.

No, just kidding. I had to write that second sentence in the voice of some old-timer con artist in a Scooby-Doo episode. Because if I didn't, my head might've exploded, or at the very least I would have had my poetic license suspended.

Now, where was I?

Right, the Alpha Bum.

I probably first started noticing the "Why lie? I need a beer!" signs in use by panhandlers ten years ago. I'm sure they've been around longer, and had I been paying more attention would have noticed at least one in college, where the sales pitch seems particularly suited.

It occurred to me at some point that there must have been some first use of this begging tactic, some panhandler who struck upon the reverse psychology in a moment of inspiration. In short, an Alpha Bum. And, somehow, the stories of this one Alpha Bum's success spread, maybe along the rails, until bums across America, nay, across the globe, were using this now-familiar tactic.

How familiar? It has become self-referential, capable of its own shorthand. On the way to pick up the Munchkin at school today, I passed a panhandler holding a sign that said only "Why lie?"

That is how might the legacy of the Alpha Bum is - it is an accepted meme, capable of carrying it's meaning with an ultimate economy of words.

I'd like to meet the Alpha Bum someday, and give a quarter to Greatness.

From across the cultural chasm

2008-09-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

I almost titled this "What a wonderful world it would be."

The sex-ed PSA from Belgium tells you just how far apart we are culturally from much of Europe.

I'm guessing the MPAA would have made Kevin Smith cut this from a movie. Obviously crazy hyperbole (how many guys did she go down on, apparently all at once?), but just so refreshingly sex-positive in its worldview that I can't help but wonder how much better a place this would be to live in if it were the dominant one.

And the very end? Yes! Gay-positive AND gay-punchline, best of both worlds.

Good show allaboutsex.be!

Now this is the end of an era

2008-09-08T16:10:00.000-07:00

Holy shit.

I'm about to watch a Packers game started by someone other than Brett Favre for the first time in 17 years.

I was a sophomore in college.

Damn, this is fucking strange.

First pass a completion. And off we go...

To Save the Wife & Kid

2008-09-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Because, really, they don't want to hear all the political venom I have these days, I've embarked on a three-way poli-blogging adventure with real-life pal The Beige One and online-simpatico Deni called The Savvy, The Extreme and The Idealist.

Swing over and check it out.

The End of an Era Begins

2008-09-02T19:34:00.000-07:00

So, Liv starts kindergarten tomorrow.

My reactions, they are legion. At the head of the pack is me doing cartwheels, tearing off my clothes and running down the street screaming “Free at last, free at last, thank GOD almighty I am free at last!”

But there’s also this general wistfulness that always accompanies endings for me – the end of high school, the end of college, the end of single life – a persistent but abstract notion that I didn’t make the most of that which is about to come to an end. The suspicion that I should have been taking better notes, that I’ve seeded the past with future regret.

These two feelings among the legion clashed last night. I was out with a couple friends for a little end-of-summer celebration of fish-n-chips and booze at a local pub. When I came home, Tricia and Liv were cuddling in the living room, and I said, “Olivia, are you excited? Tomorrow is the last day of team Livvie-Daddy.”

And she burst into tears. “But, I loved that!” She was inconsolable for ten minutes, but settled down after I backtracked and told her that wouldn’t change, that we’d still go on adventures, and then cuddled up to read her some bedtime stories.

I’ve been so focused on my very real need to have the time to move my life forward that I’ve forgotten, to an extent, what an amazing opportunity this has been to bond with my daughter. And the increasingly crazy and at-times-downright-mean behavior that has been resulting from her anxiety about school made me forget how much this time has meant to her.

Yeah, okay, there were the first couple sneaky tears as I write this.

Anyway, hnh, ah… Some of the other feelings.

I’m anxious right along with Liv. Worse than wearing my heart on my own sleeve, I pin it on Liv’s, and I’m not looking forward to co-suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous playground social dynamics. I so want her to succeed, to feel good about herself and continue to develop this incredible brain she’s been given. I worry about her getting bored. And I even worry that everything will be fine, and I’ll come to realize just how much I’ve come to rely on being needed.

And then there’s this whole thing with finally getting what you want after waiting so so long. I’m going to have time to write, which means no excuses, which means confronting that blank, leering page again and again. I’m afraid sometimes that I’ve been too long gone from serious literary or academic work and that maybe I just don’t got the juice no more. I’ve wanted this so long that I’m looking for reasons it won’t measure up.

More than anything, though, I feel on the cusp of change, of transition, with the inevitable attendant exhilaration. The image of the chrysalis keeps coming back, that the last four plus years have been a chamber from which I’m now being pushed, both forced and allowed to take flight on damp, half-formed wings.

And this makes me feel closer to Liv, because I think she feels the exact same way.

All our friends are dicks

2008-07-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

So we all know that a tomato is technically a fruit, though we use it as a vegetable. It was even, based on the latter reasoning, once legally classified as a vegetable for the purposes of tariffs (Nix v. Hedden - 1893), though even that decision conceded that they were in fact a fruit. It's been said that much of the confusion stems from whether you ask a chef or a scientist the question.

What I derive from this is that the way one classifies a tomato says more about the person or the reason for the classification than it does the plant itself. And I think you can go further, because really fruits and vegetables are just plants. We put them into special categories and sub-categories based on which part, if any, of a plant that people eat.

The way we relate to plants speaks to and of us.

All of which has been kicking around in my head for quite a while.

Recently I read Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, in which he talks about the co-evolution of plants and humans. The apple offers, I think, the best example. Each apple a tree produces contains five seeds, all of which would produce genetically different trees and would also be different from the parent tree. Of the thousands of varieties of apple trees that these seeds could produce, only a portion would be at all palatable to a human being. Enter grafting, which allowed a farmer to produce and maintain an orchard of identical trees bearing palatable fruit (prior to that, untamed and varied apples were mainly harvested to make booze). The apple as we understand it today, as it stands in our lives today, developed in co-evolution with people. Were it not first for our desire for hooch and secondly for consistent, palatable apples, it would be just another plant.

This idea hasn't been kicking around nearly as long as the first, but they bumped into each other this week.

I was walking back home through my neighborhood after the Greenwood Seafair Parade, and happened tp notice some Morning Glory. The stuff is everywhere, covering fences, choking yards - it really is Seattle's native invasive.

But it tripped a bunch of other switches that had been set when I recently read a book about the fisheries of the world called "Bottomfeeder," in which aquatic invasive species are mentioned often. The two that most stand out are, of course, zebra mussels, and jellyfish, whose populations have been bursting into giant colonies in the Atlantic, killing even large predator fish that make the mistake of wandering into their field.

Looking at the Morning Glory, it seemed to me obvious that as human beings began to travel, they would intentionly and unintentionally transplant species, be they zebra mussels in a ballast tank or English ivy planted by a foolish homeowner who thought it looked pretty (and if you have ever, as I have, spent a day ripping ivy out of a public park, you too would curse that foolish gardener).

But given that plants and human beings co-evolve, and that much can be read about human beings in their relationships to plants, what exactly does it say to us and about us that invasive species seem to flourish under our stewardship? That the species most likely to succeed in the world we create are the toughest and most self-centered species, those that have no interest in maintaining a balance with other organisms but instead take up more and more space and resources until everything else is choked out, and even until their are no resources left for their own survival?

Just wonderin'.

Refrigerator Epiphany

2008-07-15T18:53:00.001-07:00

And, no, it has nothing to do with that little light inside. I figured out the refrigerator gnome when I was five, and see no need to revisit the subject.

I'm working the monkeycage tonight, and went to retrieve the salad I had stashed in the Production department fridge. Two slices of pizza that looked like the classic sausage, pepper, onion, black olive to me caught my eye for just a split-second.

Now, let me make clear that I am not the kind of guy who would snake somebody's pizza outta the employee fridge, dig? I got that out of my system working nighttime janitorial contracts with my step-father, and that wasn't food theft from co-workers.

(By the way, the next time you want to get indignant if someone suggests the cleaning crew is stealing food, let it go. They totally are. It's one of the few job perks.)

But anyway it occurred to me tonight as I looked at these pizza slices that I had no idea how long they had been there, and based on my knowledge of that fridge going back almost ten years now, it could be as much as three months between the periodic purges marshaled by some self-righteously irritated staff member. In fact, there is no way in hell I would eat anything out of that refrigerator I hadn't put in there myself.

And I think this actually makes your food safer. It's like an organic camouflage ecosystem develops in office refrigerators. There have to be some items that last long enough and look putrid enough to throw the quality of all other items into doubt. They are the warning signs, the bright markings that say "back up, yo." Then there is the dense undergrowth, the identical salad condiment jars of varied fullness, eleven varieties of low-cal Italian salad dressing, the myriad and diverse-yet-somehow-of-a-kind takeout boxes and tupperware containers.

It is really the ideal place to hide in plain sight, among the false morels, that leftover phad thai that ain't nobody better touch.

Ah, why not?

2008-06-23T21:02:00.001-07:00

at some point
nearly every poet
arrives
at yadda yaddda yadda
etc
nothing left to say

so long in
so self-concious
so self-referential
a medium

it doesn’t seem worth it
especially if the price
is fraternity
with other
self-conscious
self-referential
poets

poetry is then simply packed up
and put away

unless it’s Saturday afternoon
and hazy
garage-cleaning weather

poetry furtively unpacked
so he
can write about writing
and poets

self-indulgent
to see if he still can
indulge

(for ex-poets are
all-in-all
a bitter and nostalgic lot)

Two things I know about kids

2008-06-12T09:41:00.000-07:00

Haven't posted for a while and I've got a minute while the girlie is in time-out in her room.

1) Nobody, and I mean nobody, has a perfect child.

2) If your child is doing a "perfect child" impression, they're probably at someone else's house.

I believe a correlate to the underlying logic here is that other kids' toys and other peoples' kids are more fun.

Persuant to last entry

2008-05-26T12:19:00.001-07:00

I was a little stressed.

OK, a lot stressed. So stressed, in fact, that what I was convinced was asthma or lung cancer was actually the muscles of my back and neck constricting my ribcage and therefore breathing. Which was kind of good news. Being nuts I can handle much better than being dying.

So, the doc ordered me to take a week off of work, not because my job is terribly stressful but because he wasn't able to give me a week off of parenting or housework. And he also suggested happy drugs, which I decided against, and massage, which I wholeheartedly agreed with and to.

And the process of the reminded me of the connections I have in my life, which I can choose to ignore or fail to value or whatever, or I can look to when I'm feeling isolated. Just a little reminder that the world has good people, which I struggle to believe sometimes.

Here it is: I got a (fucking amazing deep tissue plus cranial-sacral) massage from this lovely and wise Amazon, wife of this here fierce intellectual, and while at her apartment met the charming (read "naughty librarian") Ms. K, sister to badass mama Missuz J, none of whom I would have ever met had it not been for my buddy Beige the social facilitator, through whom I also met some fuckwad who fell backassward into a relationship with this foxy Cornish mama and her 'Lets, and whose sister (fuckwad's) is a brood mama with mad skillz.

And you are all really cool people, and the best thing about the advent of blogs as far as I can see. The connections are of different strengths, different types - it was a kick in the pants to meet Ms. K after reading her blog regularly as soon as a year ago, and the Hound has given we great intellectual wank-fests, and ~A~ is a great co-parent resource - but the important thing is just the existence of the connection itself.

It helps when one takes, as I do, life three-steps at a time for too long, just to know there are people out there who you know, and who know you, just in case you forget.

Not as fun as a rant, I s'pose, but I've passed enough venom into the world for now, methinks.

The Joy. The Joy.

2008-05-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

Except just sub in the word "horror" for "joy," and then we're money, on the same page, you're diggin' the vibe.

Yeah, I've been pretty friggin' miserable of late. Some is perfectly understandable, like yet another attempt at quitting smoking, though this will be a less noble and more successful attempt than previously. Why? Well, I can't barely breathe right anymore, so smoking has lost that "fun" aspect. I've always actually enjoyed smoking, but the oxygen deprivation is just a bit much.

Oh, and then there's the joy of home ownership. Missuz J, one of my two faithful readers when I can actually get it together enough to write, asked how we like the new place. I get that question a lot. I think its a little like asking someone if they like being a parent. It more just is. I'm glad we're building equity, but the mortgage makes us poor. I like having space, except it takes a lot more time and energy to clean it. And, this past weekend, the fridge died, spoiling a ton of food and leaving us with thawed beef blood on the floor. Sure wish I could have called a landlord and bitched about that,

Plus, with the quitting smoking, I'll probably put back the weight I lost with the move and the painting and all the cleaning across our four floors. So I can be crabby AND fat.

I'm not writing, I feel like crap, I hate my job and it pays fer shit.

But, I'm not going to leave you all with nothing but my pee for your cornflakes. I'm sure things will get better, and I did recently discover that Pedialyte clears up any booze-related gut issues like it was invented for the purpose, so I got that going for me, which is nice. No, I'll leave you with one Liv story that may make you smile.

She was playing by herself, imagining playing with a girl from preK, and from what I could hear they were calling each other a name. I heard "I'm a _______? You're a _______!" and finally had to ask her what she was saying, which of course she didn't want to do. She didn't want to tell me the new bad word she had made up.

The word, the bad name she was calling her imaginary friend and herself? Assfinger.

Heck, yeah. I've got a new favorite cuss-like name. Just don't tell Liv - I told her she can't use it anymore.

The Evil That Kids Play

2008-03-02T14:10:00.000-08:00

This idea crystallized for me recently while giving Liv a bath. She has a pretty well-entrenched contingent of bath toys at the moment: a wind-up set of diver, sub and shark, a rubber blowfish from Archie McPhee's, four plastic fish, also from Archie McPhee's, a bucket, a net, and several animal-shaped washcloth/puppets.

Liv's an imaginative kid and contrives all kinds of games with these few toys. Their relationships and identities morph freely. It isn't unusual for the fish to be Whinney the Pooh and Tigger or the submarine to be married to the shark.

One particular day, she asked me to be in on the game of the moment. I was going to be one of the fish and the poodle washloth puppet. The fish, she told me, was the baby, and the poodle, Prida, was the mother. Liv would be playing the part of the blowfish and shark.

I asked her what we were doing. "Shark and blowfish are going to try to spike your mama, and you have to try to stop them." Lovely.

I tried the "I don't really want to play a game about spiking" tact, but she wasn't having it, so I figured I'd be sneaky, play along and help her see where the game was going to go. I dutifully swam my purple plastic fish back and forth between the shark and blowfish and Prida, pleading in a little fishy voice "Please don't spike my mama. I love my mama!" as her two would-be assailants circled their way in. She was undaunted.

And, to be perfectly honest, it stopped affecting me on the "I'm-a-progresive-parent-trying-to-discourage-violent-play" level and just got under my skin. I was trying to reach her, but it was me that got creeped out first. I pulled the plug on the game and explained it just didn't feel good to me to play a game about spiking a mama and kid. Liv flashed me a wicked grin and spiked my abandoned fish with the blowfish's barbs.

Now, I don't think that Liv is going to grow up to be a sociopath. She's especially empathic with her classmates, always the first to try and make things right or make a kid with hurt feelings feel better. I think she's just playing at evil, trying it on to figure out what the allure is.

And it isn't just her. Liv's afternoon preschool has kids that turned five back in September and kids that won't turn five until August, but all at once, as though some group-think tipping point was reached, they have all been playing more violent games. Sticks become guns and swords much more quickly than ever before. The terms "blood" and "human-eating" and "kill" have entered their imaginative play. All at once, they seem to be trying evil on for size, sometimes as a group but just as often in their own individual ways.

A co-worker and I were talking about this just the other day. His son, less than a year older than Liv, is fascinated with weapons at the moment, which for a while unnerved my friend. But, he told me, he remembered back to his own childhood, to his own fascination with weapons, and now he wouldn't touch a gun, is in fact one of the most gentle people I know (all 6' 4" galoot of him).

I agreed at the time. I agree still. I loved guns as a kid, whether the green clear plastic squirt gun or the lever-action rifle with ricochet sound or the black plastic M-16 with the clickety-clickety-clicker machine gun sound. And now I hate guns. Hate 'em. It just shouldn't be that easy to kill another human being.

So, I know that I really shouldn't worry about Liv and her PreK mates trying evil on for size. It is play, and much like dreams rarely lays out a clear causal path to interpretation.

But, I'm also paying attention, because I've known guys who loved toy guns that ended up snipers in Desert Storm and brought back a finally-gratified bloodlust from Iraq, and are currently very bad dudes. And I can see those few kids in Liv's class whose delight in playing of evil exceeds the others, and have in mind one boy in particular that I only ever see smile when he's just inflicted some pain on another child.

In either case, it wasn't the play so much as the kid that led them to where they are at or going. That I get. What I don't much care for is the knee-jerks on either side - those that squash all evil play or who ignore it.

Not even so sure I have a point. Maybe just a parting analogy. "They" call marijuana a gateway drug because users of harder drugs almost universally report having tried marijuana first, yet the vast majority of marijuana users never proceed to the hard stuff. I'd submit that playing at evil is much the same thing.

But, I gotta hit this first

2008-02-25T10:55:00.000-08:00

I'll do the evil children thing tonight. I've got to get this one off my chest.

I've got an issue with "global warming." Not just the term, but the whole way the term is used and thought about. I mean, really, it illustrates the failings of school, mass media and the political discourse all at once.

And it wasn't Republican Senator James Inhofe exclaiming, in a Senate committee, that global warming was obviously bunk because they had just had some of their coldest winter days on record in Oklahoma City. Inhofe's got his agenda and I get that - I expect no less from him.

It wasn't even the Hi & Lois punchline this weekend that said essentially the same thing - cold winter days just mean you can worry less about global warming.

It was this dipshit I heard on NPR this weekend claiming that the reason so many NE municipalities are coming up short on road salt is that the ordered road salt at lower quantities because of global warming changing the expected need.

For the love of all that is good and holy, is the whole world fucking retarded? Is it that schools don't teach complex thinking, or that the media rewards simplistic thinking, or that the political discourse devalues thinking at all?

Listen carefully. Global warming is not a misnomer, but it is almost operating as one. When we talk about global warming, the warming we are talking about is a couple degrees of average global temperature. See, the "globe" is literally "warming."

But here comes the disconnect for the mouth-breathers. Global is big and our experience of it is small. Global warming doesn't mean it just gets warmer everywhere. When the average global temp rises two degrees, it doesn't correlate to the temperature in Oklahoma City rising two degrees. It can even, *gasp*, make it colder, on average, for the dumbass Okies that keep electing Inhofe.

While the phenomenon is correctly called global warming, the effects we experience from it can best be referred to as climate change. Yeah, doesn't have quite the pop or sizzle as global warming, does it? It's also harder to willfully misunderstand and misrepresent, so you'll rarely if ever here it from environmental opponents.

What might climate change look like? Not sweating polar bears and ocean views in Iowa. The best narrative description I've ever come across is in TC Boyle's A Friend of the Earth - at the extreme, scorching drought for six months and monsoons for six months.

Not just "warmer."

The idea that you could judge the state of global climate by looking out your fucking window has just got me fed up. Get some perspective, people, and some goddamn common sense.

I just wish, in vain, that people would learn to think, despite their teacher's failure to show them, despite the media's complicity in discouraging them, despite the politicians efforts to undermine them.

Hey, look under this leaf

2008-02-22T17:32:00.000-08:00

Get it? I'd have to turn it over. The leaf. I know, I'm hilarious. We'll see if I end up having to file this under "writing checks my butt can't cash."

Y'see, I wish I could say that the woeful state of this blog was an isolated condition, that I was neglecting it because I've been so busy with other writing endeavors. But, that's just plain not true. I've been barely writing t'all.

There are excuses. There always are. We bought our first home in December. Not that groundbreaking, except we didn't start looking until November. There were 30 days between the start of our search and closing. Whirlwind. And then of course there was the painting and cleaning and moving and cleaning again. All amidst the worse cold-and-flu season I've ever seen. We went over a month and a half without so much as a week of family health. And the hits just keep on comin'. Yesterday I sneezed and threw out my back so badly I crumpled to the floor in a heap.

But, there was still time in there. I just haven't been using it to write. And I'm starting to feel like something inside of me is dying.

I always feel this way at the end of slumps; it's just that this one has been particularly long and bad. I haven't even been feeding my head particularly well, which is sometimes an excuse/reason for putting down the pen.

Anyway, I'm not going to let that piece actually die. I'm declaring myself back, and that includes blogging to some extent. Probably won't see much in the way of "here's what's going down in my life," but I do want top return to using this space for fleshing out and kicking around ideas as they arise.

I'm even going to go out on a limb and set myself an assignment. The evil that kids play. Watch for it. Both of you.

I been up to this

2007-11-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

Oh, I been up to lots. Not so much that every single second of my life is being used, but I'm pretty sure every microdealy of energy is. The housework, that's the regular boulder up and over the hill and back again. Kid gets sick and suddenly three days disappear. An opening night at work somewhere in there, a date night that kept us out past 2am, aren't we crazy.

Just really fucking busy. I'm tired a lot. Barely got time to drink copious whiskey anymore.

One thing I'm working on at SCT is the new blog, just one more reason I haven't been here. But, I'm pretty proud of how it's shaping up, and you should totally go take a look, because the 8 hits that make up my combined readers will be a nice stats bump.

SCT Behind the Curtain

What can I say?

2007-10-13T19:54:00.000-07:00

Isn't that the question that holds you off after a long silence? When I haven't spoken with a friend for a long time, allowing that time to stretch longer gets incrementally easier. And blogging is kinda the same.

Actually, family is the same, too. At least for me, and this I know because I finally saw my father for the first time in over five years, well before I got married. We hadn't talked or written in all that time. It's complicated, of course.

But I had settled into a submission to his absence from my life, because I just didn't know what to say. Didn't know how to bridge the ever-growing gap. It took a call from my step-mother telling me he'd been living in a West Virginia VA for a couple of months and had been diagnosed with dementia, to go along with the seisure disorder, the years of medicine for which added a blood disorder, to break the inertia.

It was a good trip. In the middle of an absolutely crazy time, new job, start of school, I took a red eye to Baltimore and drove to Martinsburg WV and spent a couple of days connecting with my dad, for the first time unmediated by mother or step-mother.

No such seismic event helped me break the inertia here. I'm still not sure what to say. I'm living very much in the moment these days, in the space directly under my nose. This is the most writing I've done outside of work in over a month, easily.

So, maybe I'm just calling to say hello, but strategically at a time when I expect to get your voicemail because I have no real news.

Because I don't want the bridge to get too big.

Five Years

2007-09-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've been, um, busy. New job is crazy, took a trip to see my father in West Virginia after not talking for over five years - lots to talk about.

But later. Because today is my five year anniversary. And taking a cue from my lovely wife's blog post on my birthday, I wanted to share five things about Tricia in honor if this day.

1. I

2. Would

3. Die

4. Without

5. Her.

Really, truly. We fight, and I bitch and whine about married life all the time, but the simple fact of the matter is I couldn't have chosen a better partner in life.

I love you, Tricia. Here's to five more years.

But after that, I'm out. I mean, c'mon, ten years, that'll be pretty good, right?

You say it's your birthday...

2007-08-17T07:50:00.000-07:00

...it's my birthday, too, yo.

Just one year later than my last inspiring birthday post, we have this. I'm 35 today. Whoopty-fucking-doo.

Liv is really into it. She painted a bunch of wooden letters to spell our last name for me to put in our hallway, and she made a treasure hunt of birthday surprises this morning, even giving my cutout letters as clues where to look. Damn cute.

But, I'm not planning much of anything. At this point, my plan is dinner and miniature golf with my girls, then cocktails later somewhere within stumbling distance of home. Oh, and Liv and I are going to a birthday party for one of her preschool friends (it's also my favorite of Tricia's cousins birthday and another friend wedding anniversary).

I'm just worn out. We had people over two nights in a row this week, which is rare and involved cleaning and cooking above the usual levels, which would be fine except I've been running well below usual levels as I transition into the new job.

And that has been crazy, too. Not only was I hired about three weeks later than I ideally should have been, which has me scrambling to catch up, but my lovely new boss lasted one day with me before she ended up in the emergency room with symptoms that point more clearly to lymphoma (which her sister is currently dying of) every day. She's out for at least weeks, maybe more. And she's really a nice lady, and deserves to be in your prayers, or thoughts, or chanting, or what have you.

It is the constant change of pace that is taking some getting used to. A usual work day is a couple hours of cramming in housework and Liv quality time, followed by a half-dozen hours at the theatre trying to learn everything and contact everybody at once, followed by at least another hour or two of housework when I get home.

I know, boo-fucking-hoo. I actually really do like my new job. And Liv and I and one of her preschool friends enjoyed the first perk yesterday with comps to The Green Sheep.

Just too whipped to party much. Which I suppose I should bee getting used to. I'm not getting any younger. My liver is already 73, and my lungs around 80.

Oh, and on that note, probably a good place to leave off - my gifts to myself today are a bottle of whiskey and a couple big boxes of Nicorettes. I made it six weeks before falling apart in early May, and it is time too get it done. With any luck, it'll be my liver that is over 80 and my lungs that are in their spry early-70s by this time next year.

Anyway, happy birthday to me. And Robert DeNiro and Mae West. And Liv's friend Nathan and Tricia's cousin Miranda. And happy anniversary Joe & Steph.

Enough with the summer and the cats already

2007-08-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

There are a number of things that make me feel old. Some are pretty obvious, not particularly subtle, like when one of my students said to another (not about me directly, but still) "No, he's pretty old. I think he's like thirty." There's the grey in my beard, the lagging performance of my liver, the perplexed looks I find myself casting towards teenagers talking in public.

(And, you know what sucks? Most of my friends are older than me. My five oldest friends are between 53 and 62. Many more are in their 40s. And none of them has a lick of sympathy for me feeling old as I approach my 35th birthday.)

Here's the newest thing to make me feel old: summer. I realized this morning, as I rushed about getting Liv ready for another summer camp, that I'm already ready for summer to be over, to return to the steadier schedule of Liv in preschool.

Part of it is the new job, which will work well around the preschool schedule but has me scrambling for childcare options right now. But it is more than that. I'm tired of having to schedule so much of Livvie's time (because if she doesn't get playtime with other kids, she becomes quickly intolerable). I'm tired of the heat, and how much more difficult it makes the chores during the day in our sweltering apartment, and how much less energy I have in the evening while Liv is still hard-charging.

I'm tired of summer. Who'da thunk it?

On a completely unrelated note, have you ever noticed that living with cats is a lot like living with slacker teenagers (which, if you asked my step-father, is redundant, though my step-father probably didn't know what that word means)? I mean, seriously, you're busting your ass all morning and suddenly around noon they appear, blinking, squinting and smacking their lips, looking for food. And if you ask them to do anything? I'd almost prefer the teenager eyeroll to the feline long, slow blink while turning the head away, keeping the eyes shut in the calm cat way that says "behind these eyes you no longer exist, and they won't open until you're gone."

I only really dislike teenage boys. But I'm starting to hate all cats.

Goodbye, Unemployment!

2007-08-02T20:55:00.000-07:00

Hello, um, employment.

After months of searching with barely even nibbles, I was offered the PR manager job at Seattle Children's Theatre this morning, and plan to accept officially tomorrow.

Should be a perfect gig. I love that theatre, it's part-time and will work well around Liv's schedule, and won't make me give up other pursuits such as writing and regular whiskey consumption.

I'm pretty damned excited.

Wow. A job. Just like a real grown-up.

Boys & Flutes & A Lesson Learned

2007-07-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

I suppose he thought he was doing me a favor. Can’t even quite clearly remember his face even though I can remember all of the other details.

When I was in third grade, my family lived in Medina, NY, a small town outside of Buffalo. We hadn’t lived there long, moving to town a month short of the end of second grade, and I was still the new kid. I had a nemesis, Aaron Slack, and a gang, the Avengers, formed for and dedicated to hating me.

Fourth grade was the start of band in Medina, so toward the end of third grade we were given a slip of paper to submit our top three instrument choices. All I really wanted to play was flute. I loved the sound, thought Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull was cool, wanted to be able to play Greensleeves, a song which still always creeps me out. I put drums second, not because I had much interest but because my stepdad had played drums in high school and in drum corps. I put tuba third for no particular reason beyond ludicrousness.

This is what I remember clearly. Sitting in the library, reading at a big, dark wood table. The music teacher, a guy, youngish, skinnyish, I seem to remember dark hair and a mustache. And he was holding my slip of instrument choices.

He sat down with the air of a man sent on an unpleasant errand. He was here to explain to me that only girls had signed up for flute, only girls ever signed up for flute. He held that little slip of paper with my sloppy writing – flute, drums, tuba – as though it was the illustration of my folly and would help me understand. I can see those words clearly, though that might be an illusion of time because I’ve long been obsessed with how distasteful I find my own handwriting, and so have always studied and picked at it like a scab.

I also remember that my throat felt dry and tight when I said “Yeah, okay, I can do drums.” Because I didn’t want to, and because I had just watched that shiny flute of my dreams dissolve in my hands.

Liv and I have been listening to orchestra music the last two mornings during our hour commute to her day camp – Elmo & the Orchestra yesterday and John Lithgow’s Farkle & Friends today – and it was that old longing for the flute that swelled up into my memory. I dutifully banged away at a practice mat in drum practice with a bunch of kids with long hair, black t-shirts and behavioral issues, and was berated by my stepfather for not showing any of his aptitude or work ethic, throughout fourth grade. That summer we moved to a school district that had started kids in band a year earlier than Medina, and so I was a year behind, and so I had an excuse, though, it was clearly intimated, a lame one, to quit.

I’m sure I missed all kinds of opportunities to pick up the flute or some other instrument over the years, but missing out on school band, which would have meant not relying on my parents to pay for lessons or me to practice alone because it was built into school, has always stung.

Really, it’s another chance for me to blame current ennui on the past, but it is also a good reminder. Because if anyone ever tries to tell Liv that girls don’t do some thing that Liv would like to do, I’m going to teach her to tell them to fuck off.

Surviving Harry

2007-07-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

[This is a spoiler-free zone - fear not.]

Yesterday I felt a way I had not in many years. There is a particular kind of depression or ennui the day following psychedelic drugs. The world simply isn’t as pretty, colors seem dull, eating a little pointless.

And I felt this way not because I had returned to my heady youthful days of mushroom consumption, but because I had finished the seventh and final Harry Potter book.

I was a late adopter, but have been pretty hardcore ever since. I picked up a paperback of the book at a friend’s house, started it a week later and finished it the day after that. The first four had been released by that time, so I bought the hardcover boxed set and proceeded to get my wife hooked as well. She bought me Order of the Phoenix a week or so after my daughter was born, and I devoured that in two evenings sitting up waiting for the 2am feeding. We actually pre-ordered number six, and stood in line at midnight for this final one.

Hell, over the last month I re-read the entire series (none of them for only the second time) so I could have the entire Potter arc in one massive marathon of reading.

I can’t imagine that I’ll ever do that kind of re-reading again. Oh, sure, I’ll read the final book at least once more, but the series has lost its mystery now that is has been concluded. Part of the joy of the books has been looking for clues, speculating on what’s to come, and now that everything has came, what’s the point?

I haven’t been able to pick up any other reading material since I finished Saturday evening. I can’t get myself beyond the lead paragraph of any of the many news articles about the book and the surrounding phenomenon.

I will sorely miss these characters, this world. The wonderful consistency of it, the way that even the names of people and places helped paint the pictures and portraits. A governing morality that understood the inevitability of evil and yet valued hope and love above all else.

I’m exceptionally thankful that I have a child to one day share this series with. I can’t wait to begin reading them to her, can’t wait to be begged for just one more chapter before bed, can’t wait until that moment I can begin reliving these stories through her in a way that I just won’t be able to again for myself.

Which I suppose has always been one of the joys of parenthood.

Forkin' Hell

2007-07-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

So, I haven’t been around much lately. Last weekend was swallowed whole by 14/48, and most of this weekend by a marathon reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. Add to that four-plus days of rain adding a bored and highly-distracting child to the mix, and not much has gotten done.

But that isn’t what I wanted to write about – my pretend-online-blog friends just have to accept my occasional disappearances the same way the live-and-local ones do.

No, I wanted to write to you about our vacation, a term I use exceptionally loosely here.

The morning after 14/48 concluded, the girls and I loaded into the car and headed out to Forks, a very small town in the upper left corner of Washington State. Perhaps you aren’t familiar with Forks? Let me elucidate.

Forks is where Hope goes to die. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is the place where Hope can not live, because the only kind of Hope born in Forks is “I Hope I can escape this shitty little town.”

Forks is in post-logging decline. All and I mean ALL of the buildings are rundown because there’s neither reason nor money nor inclination to build anything new. Forks Outfitters, the only real store in town, is either a bloated general store or the runt offspring of a clumsy mating of a Red Apple and a Wal-Mart. Homes are abandoned to be consumed by the local flora, mainly creepers and mold, because there is nobody willing or able to buy them. The people are old, ugly, slow and stupid.

Ok, maybe that last bit is a bit much, but it is fair to say that Forks is the land where the rain is unending, the prospects bleak and the isolation palpable.

It is entirely believable, after spending a few days there (and not for the first time), that Forks will eventually die off, perhaps devolving briefly into a Children of Men-style chaos before being consumed by the Olympic Forest, leaving only the last gas station between Port Angeles and Hoquiam.

And yet I’m still drawn there, and to the other small, dying towns of the Olympic Peninsula. Much like standing on an ocean shore reinvests me with the vastness of this world, a visit to Forks grounds me with the baseness of the human animal. The feeling of hollow survival, of overwhelming inertia, dark feelings which I romanticize, pervades in the wake of these visits.

And maybe that is the real reason it has taken me so long to write, and why it finally comes today. I emptied myself at 14/48, reveled in emptiness at Forks, and then refilled myself with the final chapter of an epic I love.

Thank you, Forks, for helping push my Reset button.

And sorry about calling your people slow, stupid and ugly. But, I mean, bloody hell, just look at them.

Holy. Shit.

2007-07-20T23:38:00.000-07:00

I am mere fucking moments away from picking up my book.

Am I wearing a pointy hat?

Yes.

Is it covered with silver moons and stars?

Yes.

Does it have dangly grey hair hanging down the sides?

Oh, yeah.

Bring the Deathly Hollows on. I'm ready to roll.

EDIT:

This, by the way, was me posting last night just before we left for the bookstore.

And, yes, the hat came with us.

Happy birthday, USA!

2007-07-04T10:26:00.000-07:00

I love ya, ya big lug.

But I gotta agree with Keith Olbermann - the dickheads running you have got to go.

Birthdays are a great time for new beginnings, so, y'know, heave ho.

For the record

2007-06-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

I am not a big NBA fan. At all.

When I was younger, my uncle was married to the original voice of the Seattle Sonics, Bob Blackburn, so I got a lot of free Sonics stuff. So when I moved to Seattle, I was willing to be a fan. And damn but 1996 was fun.

Since then? Not so much.

The NBA draft happens in a couple hours, and the Sonics have the number two pick. Really, the only reason I wanted to post this afternoon is this - Greg Oden is the consensus number 1 pick, going to Portland, and Kevin Durant, the newest next Jordan, is the consensus 2 pick.

That ain't how its going to happen. You heard it here.

Durant to Portland, and a superstar future. Oden to Seattle, to become the best many silently fear he could be.

And in a year or two, the fans in Oklahoma City will be bitching about how the Sonics (maybe the Okies or the Oilers or some other Oklahoma name) screwed up the pick back when they were in Seattle.

And you can say you heard it here first.

Tomorrow: a non-sports post. Promise.

EDIT: OR exactly the opposite. Oh well - that's why I avoid the sports book in Vegas. Get more return handing money out to hobos.

One Month

2007-06-21T20:36:00.001-07:00

One month from this very day, the first day of summer, the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series is released.

You have just had one of two reactions: either you rolled your eyes, or you thought about where you have the book pre-ordered.

Truth be told, by this time one month from now, I'll be at least half done. Tricia and I each pick up a copy at midnight at our local book store, and already have plans for Livvie to be spending the night at grandma's.

When I got an invite to do 14/48, we actually changed vacation plans so I could do the fest and not interrupt our Harry Potter geekfest.

I've got one burning question, though. I saw a preview for the next Harry Potter flick, which I think wisely (did the studio get Rowling to push the release back? interesting conspiracy) opens before the book is released, and which is the adaptation of my favorite of the books, and I got to thinking - will people care about the movies once they've seen the series to its end? I mean, sure, eventually, but will the conclusion of one eliminate the anticipation of the other?

I think it might. Mid-series, full of speculation, we're driven to any HP we can get. But I feel like once the arc had ended, it can digest for a good many years before I need to seee any interpretations thereof on the screen.

Anyway, how you doin'? You thinking about anything more interesting than this?

Oh, wait, before I forget. Yes, I am big enough a geek I'm re-reading the first six right now in preparation.

EDIT: PS - My first post for RIVET Magazine's blog has just gone live. Check it out.

Things may be looking up

2007-06-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

I've been languishing the last few months. Since I finished my thesis, this here blog has accounted for maybe 95% of my writing. Truly sad when you look back at how few and far between the posts are.

Mostly, I've been trying to figure out what the hell I want to do next. I don't really feel cut out for this stay-at-home-parent business, but can't afford childcare either. I want to write, but I need to make money. And I was worrying myself into total inaction.

But, things are beginning to look up a bit. First off, I'm going to do a little admin work for this crazy bitch, who is totally cool, and which will bring in a smidge of cash to augment the monkeycage. Then I found out this weekend that I've been taken on as a blogger for RIVET Magazine, which will bring in no money but helps the rep and resume. And, I nabbed an invite to write again for 14/48, which is as much fun as one can have with their clothes on.

All of which has me a bit happy, which is weird and unsettling. But I know myself well enough to not sit on that. The above is positive inertia at best, but will dissipate if I don't push.

So, don't ask how I'm doing. I might say "well."

Contentment = doom.

Trifecta Monday

2007-06-11T10:31:00.001-07:00

1) If you are a parent and you haven't checked out Offsprung yet, go there right now. I'm serious, stop reading my crap and go. If you aren't a parent, you should still check them out because the writing is just plain good.

Should you need any more enticement, try out this video of a very pregnant Jenna Elfman in a pick-up basketball game.

I didn't used to love her. Do now.

2) This just wandered into my mind the other day, and I was struck by the truth of it:

3) I was going to comment on this article one of the co-op parents sent me regarding types of praise, but I'm just not up for a parent rant this morning. So instead, I'm going to share this, which I told a friend this weekend, and he told me I should blog:

I've been engaged twice (married once), and the father of each fiancee was/is missing the same finger on the same hand (one to a lawnmower, the other while chopping wood).

But that's not all.

My mother has been married three times. Each man is blind in his right eye.

Weird and meaningless. That's me all over.

It's not what you look likewhen you're doin' what you're doin' It's what you're doin' when you're doin' what it looks like you're doin'

2007-06-04T20:48:00.001-07:00

OK, so it started, most recently, with Jon Krakauer, just about my favorite journalist, nonfiction writer ever. I loved “Into the Wild” and “Into Thin Air” and dig on reading about religion in general, so was especially excited when “Under the Banner of Heaven” finally dropped into my library queue.

And, frankly, it scared the shit out of me.

I have long preached religious tolerance for all faiths. Belonging to none and doling out equal kicks to all their sacred cows, this was an easy position to take. But Krakauer’s look at Fundamentalist Mormons and the history of the Mormon faith in general shook that belief to its foundation. The zeal with which Joseph Smith’s farcical tale of receiving a story, itself more farcical than the way Smith came by it, and the violence that has been wrought in its name, not to mention the ever-increasing political clout of the LDS church, had me questioning whether tolerance was really always the right course of action.

And, really, perhaps it wasn’t that big a dissonance to rectify. I just moved the Mormons from the group containing the Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Wiccans, Moslems and whatnot over to the group containing Scientologists.

But this little challenge to my belief wasn’t sitting well with me. As the Unitarian minister that married me said when we first met, “It is not for me to decide what is right. It is only for me to seek Truth.” Part of my religious tolerance screed, which if you’ve ever been too close to me on a whiskey night you have no doubt heard, has been the central claim that every religion, every religious person, goes flying off the rails when they take their eyes from Truth and look to pointing out the False in the beliefs of others.

Into this crisis of belief drops "Jesus Camp", a documentary on American evangelicals with a focus on a Evangelical summer camp. Where “Banner” scared me, "Jesus Camp" made me sad and angry.

If you believe anything short of exactly what Evangelical Christians believe, I challenge you to watch this film and not call the things you see “brainwashing.” Seven-, eight-, nine-year-old kids shamed into sobbing fits every night for a week, terrified with the visions of what will happen to them if they stray an inch from the path and the phantoms of Satan coming after them from every direction. Screaming, speaking in tongues, thrashing on the ground, and constantly talking about war.

I imagine their vision of the Lamb of God to have gritted teeth, tats of the cross, a sword and a shield and a sneer, all reminiscent of a caricatured college mascot ready for battle.

It made me sad because of the kids, robbed of the chance to think about anything for themselves, battered into submission, and angry that a faith that I have seen produce incredibly generous, understanding, centered people can be so perverted.

Because that is what the Evangelical message expressed in “Jesus Camp” is: a perversion. The actual words of Christ, the lessons he attempted to teach, would find little place in the modern Evangelical movement. Mega-churches don’t do service to the man that told a rich man “Give away all you own, sell your property and give the proceeds away, and follow me, for it is easier for a camel…” etc (you don’t have to have been raised Christian to know how that one ends). Their constant talk of war doesn’t cotton with “If your brother strikes your cheek, offer him the other cheek as well.” There is no generosity of spirit, no sense of boundless love, none of the critical inquiry tradition in which Christ himself, as a Jew, would have been raised.

Now, before my progressive friends start in with some nodding and muttered “yeah, dumb fuckin’ Christians” nonsense (because while the War on Christmas is an O’Reilly fabrication, one of the few things the Right has correctly identified is a knee-jerk anti-Christianity among us liberal elite), the problem isn’t the faith itself. Fundamentalist Islam is a perversion of Islam, Zionism a perversion of Judaism, hell, I imagine there are Fundamentalist pagans that just can’t stop with the sacrifices and are a perversion of paganism. No faith, system of belief, is immune to fundamentalism.

My point, ridiculously long-winded as it is, is this: religion isn’t the problem. Sorry, Hitchens, you insufferable prig dickhead, but beliefs in divinity and Cosmic Law and God are not the root of our problems. Fundamentalism is. Whatever its stripe, fundamentalism is by its nature divisive, focused at least as much if not more on what is wrong with others as its own search for Truth.

No, wait, check that. The problem with Fundamentalism is that there is no search for Truth. Fundamentalists believe they already know the truth. And that is what makes fundamentalism dehumanizing. It removes from the religious experience the natural and inescapable human desire to question. We all search for Truth, whether we identify that quest with atheism or Islam or the Sutras, and that should be the one thing that binds people of all different faiths together. But, fundamentalists are not seekers, have no desire to make connections between faiths.

Religion is not the problem. Religion is a natural outgrowth of the human condition. Atheists are not given a pass in this. In the words of Rush, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Fundamentalism, however, is the problem. Terrorism is not endemic to Islam, which non-fundamentalist Moslems are right to characterize as a religion of peace, as should have been made abundantly clear when Mark Uhl brought bombs to Jerry Falwell’s funeral. Terrorists are, though, almost without exception, fundies.

This is an important distinction because attacks on religion in general or individual faiths in particular actually further the cause and message of the fundamentalists. It is as important to remember that “Jesus Camp” is not indicative of Christianity as it is to understand that the images of 9/11 are not indicative of Islam.

I’m not sure where this leaves the Mormons and Scientologists, however. They still trouble me, and confound my calls for tolerance.

Though, maybe, it isn’t ever the narrative you choose that matters, just how you use it.

I find myself at the end of the page with the same lack of answers I had at the top.

I know what it takes to be a man...

2007-05-31T14:11:00.000-07:00

...and I'm only four.

(That title, by the way, is from a Tesla song. Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Tesla. Anyway..)

Liv’s preschool class does “special days.” Each kid is given one day to do or bring in his/her favorite things. The boy whose dad is a firefighter had a firetruck in the playground for outside time. Another boy had everyone come to school in pajamas and made English muffin pizzas for snack. Kids have brought relatives, pets, favorite storybooks, toys, etc.

Yesterday was Liv’s special day. She’s big into dancing and listening to music these days (a favorite CD occupies her more fully and for longer than any DVD or OnDemand video she weasels out of me) so she decided she wanted to start her special day with a little dance party.

First, though, she wanted to show off the ballet routine she’ll be performing in a couple weeks for her first real recital, galloping, sashaying and plie-ing in front of the class to “Small World.”

(Quick aside to anyone that complains about the lingering of this song after a trip to Disneyworld. You don’t understand torture by “Small World” until your child practices a dance routine to it. For two months. Several times a day. Every day. Now I can’t even go to Disneyworld for fear of a psychotic episode.)

Then it was time for everyone to dance. Liv chose a rockin’ little number called “Go Wild!” by Milkshake, one of several CD suggestions I stole from Alternadad’s book. It starts slow, and then, predictably, gets wild. And Liv was working the room, saying “wait for it, it’s gonna get crazy.” And when it did, the wild, exuberant dancing you’d expect from a room full of 3- and 4-year-olds erupted.

Every girl was dancing. And not a single boy.

One boy, the fireman’s kid, was all excited to dance when Liv was prancing to “Small World,” and jumped up when “Go Wild” started, then ran and hid in his cubbie when he saw all the other boys sitting, looking uncomfortable. Another, the crazy, long-blonde-tressed son of our crunchiest, hippiest parent recognized the potential freedom of going wild, and jumped around a little, but gave up when he couldn’t convince the other boys to join in. Parents tried to get the recalcitrant boys up and moving to no avail.

I looked around, dancing myself, and thought “Holy shit, does it really start this early?”

And these are the children of progressive parents in a highly liberal city, composters, raw milk drinkers, the kind of people that argue during parents meetings about the number of field trips when people are dying for oil and whether time-outs are too harsh a disciplinary action.

I laugh when my brother-in-law gets freaked out by his son, a few months younger than Liv, trying on a princess costume, and I was disappointed when a friend told me she and her husband told their son he shouldn’t try on those costumes at preschool or the gym’s daycare because he’ll be ridiculed, so maybe I’m naïve. The truth is, I’m less concerned about her occasional exposure to high fructose corn syrup than I am restrictive gender roles.

So, this display of “typical” behavior at so young an age bummed me out.

And it brought into sharper focus a couple of items I cam across last week. The first came courtesy Adrants, which linked to the 2007 nominations for the Image in Advertising Awards from the Commercial Closet Association, an organization dedicated to promoting positive gay, lesbian, transgender images in advertising. The award list includes a category called “Clean-Up-Your-Act Notice,” and among the nominees was the Milwaukee’s Best Light campaign with the tagline “Men should act like men, and light beer should taste like beer.”

CCA criticized this campaign for it’s mockery of men who don’t fit the macho gender ideal. They did themselves no favors in turning my “get-over-yourselves-its-friggin’-Milwaukee’s-Beast” reaction around when they ended each description of the ads offense with some deadpan reference to advocating that girly-men “should be squashed by giant beer cans.” (And Green Giant advocates all farming be done by the giant and tiny mutant offspring of a man and an asparagus.)

I wasn’t through being snarky and smirking about this when I found mention in Salon’s Broadsheet of a study on sexual harassment that tied harassment to adherence to (or divergence from) gender ideals. The article and the study focused on the behavior of women, but it was this line that jumped into my brain:

"She [lead researcher Jennifer Berdahl, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto] calls this phenomenon 'gender harassment' and defines it as 'a form of hostile environmental harassment that appears to be motivated by hostility toward individuals who violate gender ideals rather than by desire for those who meet them.'"

I’ve never really met gender ideals. I was raised by my Sicilian-Irish stepfather, a former wrestler, football player and drummer, and my fear of snakes, lack of coordination and tendency to cry never measured up. We moved around a lot, too, so I rarely if ever had a group of boys to run with, grow with. Around groups of men, I’ve always been a slightly alien presence, a bit too Other, the emotional spaz in the midst of their stolid objectivism.

And, the truth is, sometimes it felt like they’d just as soon see me squashed by a giant beer can.

I can’t really blame the boys in Liv’s class for picking up on this already. Seems the last 15 years are crowded with more attempts to differentiate the genders, from books speculating on their celestial origins to Oxygen, Lifetime, SpikeTV and The Man Show. I'll spare you a rant about "divide and more effectively market to" strategies.

I have distinct memories of dancing like a fool with a friend to a song called “Roly Poly Polar Bear” when I was five or six. Granted, that was the seventies, when disco and a constant supply of sex crafted a different, or at least varied, male ideal. Still, it seemed like it was all about the joy of motion, and it feels like it was before any awareness of what my gender role “should” be.

I wish I believed that space, that time “before,” could be stretched a little further for my kid and her classmates, but I don’t.

I’ll keep trying, keep modeling different ideals and striving for balance. I’m already trying to let go of the fact my girl is going girly-girl and will only wear skirts and dresses and wants to change several times every day, while subtly tempering it with Mariners and Seahawks games, and giving it some Grrrrl edge by playing her (carefully selected) 7 Year Bitch.

But it is an uphill battle when the boys of hippy parents are too macho for dancing before their fourth birthdays.

And, hey, why does it matter? What's so bad about rigid gender ideals anyway?

Oh, wait that's right, the continuum from social anxiety and personal drama to bulimia and date rape.

The Evil That Women Are...

2007-05-28T11:30:00.000-07:00

...gets more pub than The Evil That Men Do. We the people just find it the more palatable concept.

OK, Ladies, yes, I see the stares and the crossed arms and the tapping toes, so I'll get to 'splainin'.

This resurfaced into my mental radar when I saw mention in Salon of the Joss Whedon post to Whedonesqe (a blog about, but not generally written by, Whedon) that has been making the rounds - Let's Watch a Girl Get Beaten to Death.

I'm not a huge Whedon fan, but I respect him, and admire the strength he brings to his female characters (the very fact that is admirable is part of the point to which I'll be getting). This post was a reaction to cellphone video of the "honor killing" of Dua Khalil, juxtaposed with the trailer for the upcoming film "Captivity.*

Whedon asks mid-rant "What is wrong with women?" And the question isn't directed at women, isn't "what the hell is your problem?" It is a question asked of us all, what do we find wrong in women that makes us hate them so? For how can we not hate them if death by torture is a reality for them and an entertainment for us?

Still, this is Joss Whedon. For all the godhead bestowed on him by his cult of fans, he's just a writer, and one given, at least in my aesthetic judgement, to a bit of hyperbole. I took my usual "Yeah, this is a sign of the sick and twisted nature of our culture, but this is news to you how?"

But, that essential question took up residence in my head.

Let me back up for just a moment and say that in college, I publicly identified myself as a feminist. I was first media relations chair and then president of a sexual assault education and advocacy group, and used the term "rape culture" almost reflexively in presentations. And even with all of that, I resisted the idea of an inherent hatred of women, classified the hatred as "Other" and, in a sense, marginalized.

So here I am, over a decade later, and some comic book writer whose name is most closely-associated with the word "buffy" gets me thinking.

And, over the weekend I catch some NPR discussion on the issues and discourse around the approval of Lybrel, the pill that eliminates the menstrual cycle. One guest astutely side-stepped that argument of whether this was "natural" or not, and keyed in on the mentality behind the marketing of the drug, in which the period is cast as a barrier to a better life. The guest (I wish I could remember which, but I was in the middle of marathon dirty dishes) said, and I hope I'm being faithful to her here, that aspect of the message is true, men's perception of the menstrual cycle has in fact been a driving force behind keeping women out of power.

This caught some fire with me, because it is so obviously, dumbfoundingly true. Regardless of the exceptions, the cycle, not childbirth and mothering and such, but the cycle itself and its attendants is what men are most uncomfortable about with women. We see it as a source of weakness and object of ridicule, almost instinctively, and its centrality to conceptions of women brings them down with it.

The joke. Maybe even Joke. "I don't trust anything that bleeds for three days and doesn't die."

But, even the more subtle examples. The period has essentially been the crudest and most base criticism of a woman president, the idea that she won't be able to maintain her composure in the face of cramps and blood and tampons and hormones, and will fuck up world events.

(Though they have something in that last, as Bush's hormonal codpiece catwalk across the carrier deck attests.)

The same idea behind that joke and that criticism is behind the marketing of Lybrel.

And then I read about labial reductions. Cosmetic procedures on perfectly functional vaginas, side-effects of which include reduced sexual sensation. What in the name of all that is good and holy would lead women to make this choice?

Ever hear this punchline to a joke? "Let's see. You look terrible, but you feel great. Ah, it's right here. You're a pussy!"

Or, how about the profusion of the term "camel toe," along with whole online galleries of examples, as a way to demean the vagina? Again. Already.

After all of this, I was primed to come across the pre-Christian translation of God's curse upon Eve before banishing her from the Garden, the pains of childbirth, the curse of blood, and an unquenchable lust for male seed, and to compare that last to the many modern translations' "your desire and craving shall be for your husband," wondering whether we liked women more as slut or domestic slave.

I'm less concerned than Whedon with knowing the specific answer to his question. He goes for "womb envy," but I've never been a big believer that inverting a flawed paradigm yields much truth. The reason is whatever it is, and it's likely varied, but it boils down to some notion of women and womanhood as evil.

Here's the facts: We hate women. And unless your "we" is a big group of politically-active lesbians, you do, too. And I know that is like racism, where you want to wiggle out from under, talk about your individual love for a rainbow of people, but in both cases I'm talking about a cultural hatred, one which is essentially inescapable. For every advance women might make, we'll find a new way to hate. It has been around too long to go away. Love-hate between woman and man may well be the essential struggle, tension, balance.

Language creates culture. Some argue that the formation of language is the basis for human development. It is the code with which we create our world.

And when I call a woman a "bitch," it carries the weight of cultural enmity, brings to bear a hatred ratified by centuries. And she has no equivalent response.

And that's not a coincidence.

And I wish I had an answer.

*- For similarly disturbing resonance, try and get your hands on Sut Jhally's editing of music videos into the rape scene from The Accused. Particularly compelling as it was originally done in the '80's, looooong before the term mash-up entered the parlance.

My Mothers' Day

2007-05-14T11:33:00.000-07:00

It was really a quite lovely Mothers’ Day.

My mother lives three thousand miles away, so we do the obligatory early morning phone call to catch up and then we’re done with it. And, my wife took a trip in early April with girlfriends that was expensive enough to free me from the responsibility of getting her any substantial gift. Instead, I just helped Liv pick out hers.

“So, what do you want to get Mama for Mothers’ Day?”

“Shoes, because all of Mama’s shoes make her feet hurt.”

Which is true, and some fine thinking on Liv’s part, but no-how no-way am I trying to pick out shoes for my wife, especially not with the “assistance” of my three-year-old.

“Uh, I think Mama likes to pick out her own shoes. Do you have any other ideas?”

“How about a bra? She only has two good ones.”

I assume she know all of this because of girl talk. But, the bra is a good idea and Tricia agreed when I ran it past her, so a bra it was. I believe the most fun part, at least in retrospect, was taking Liv bra-shopping at Macy’s, where she ran around saying “this cup is too small” and “this one doesn’t have a wire” and “ohh, this is lacy,” leaving scattered intimate apparel in her wake.

(And I say in retrospect because, while it is fun to write about, she was actually being a little punk that day.)

Tricia loved her bra, and wore it to our big event of the day: the Mariners-Yankees game. Not only did I marry myself a girl who likes sports, but one who comes from a long line of sports fans – this is the third Mothers’ Day we’ve spent at the ballpark with Tricia’s parents, her grandmother, her sister and brother-in-law, and their kids. And everyone, including grandma but not the kids (obviously) or me (a little hungover), enjoyed a couple beers we watched the M’s topple the Evil Empire 2-1 to take the weekend series.

I mean, really, I should have nothing, and I mean nothing, to complain about in the Mothers’ Day department. Minimal shopping? Baseball? Beer? How can I possibly have a problem with Mothers’ Day?

Because I’m a crank, and I’ve got a problem with everything, that’s why.

Men who spent the last week in jewelry stores and yesterday complimenting their mothers and wives on the dry ham and watery mashed potatoes will undoubtedly roll their eyes when I say this, but I’m just irritated by the iconography of Mothers’ Day and it’s upcoming paternal counterpart.

Because all those things Mom does, that we’re supposed to remember and reward on this special day, I do. I stay at home with our daughter, work in her co-op preschool, cook 90% of the meals, do most of the baking from scratch (except Christmas cookies, which are all Tricia) and the majority of the household chores. I’m a housewife without the breasts (actually debatable, given that I have yet to drop my winter padding).

And there’s something about Mothers’ Day that goes beyond celebrating the one who bore you. The imagery, the narratives, the sales pitches are all geared toward the Mom-job as much if not more than the Mom-person. Common Mothers’ Day tropes like making Mom breakfast in bed don’t have the same resonance in our family, because I make her breakfast every weekend, and rarely is it cold cereal.

Similarly, Fathers’ Day is rarely satisfying for me because it focuses on the father that works outside of the house. You know what I most want for Fathers’ Day? Usually to get the hell out of the house and away from my wife and kid. Which would sound terrible if I worked 40 hrs/week. Instead, most daylight hours are spent at home and/or in the presence of my kid. They don’t write Fathers’ Day commercial with daddies like me in mind.

We aren’t particularly traditional; when Liv first started playing at family life with her dolls, invariably the mother went to work and the father stayed home to take care of the babies. Non-traditional families aren’t particularly well-served by the firmly entrenched traditions of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Days.

As a result, every year I’m surly around Mothers’ Day because its messages seem more geared toward my reality than Tricia’s, and surly around Fathers’ Day because it is supposed to be about me and yet doesn’t feel like it at all.

I don’t know if there’s any kind of answer to this. As gender identity politics continue to evolve, maybe there will be subtle shifts in the way we talk about the holidays, relying less on outdated-stereotypes. Maybe Fathers’ Day rhetoric will become more inclusive of dads like me, and Mothers’ Day ads will start sounding less like my life.

Of course, then we’ll have the Right claiming liberals like me are trying to ruin the traditions of the holidays. “Next, on The O’Reilly Factor: The War on Mothers’ Day. Should we allow feminists and femmy men undermine or celebration of Mom? What’s next for these sickos? Apple pie?”

Damn, that would be the best Mothers’ Day gift ever.

It's a sad, familiar love story is what it is

2007-05-12T13:55:00.000-07:00

Just getting ready to head out for an evening monkeycage shift, which means I’m fried by the day and baked in anticipation, while Liv is puttering at the nook and Tricia, home early from work with a nagging cough, is sitting on the couch reading Positive Discipline for your Preschooler: A to Z.

“You should read this and then we should talk about it.”

“That sounds especially serious. Are we going to talk about all the things I’ve been doing wrong?”

“They’re things I’ve been doing wrong, too.”

And she reads off a few. Time outs aren’t effective when used as punishment (I told Liv that very day that time-outs were supposed to be hard because they are punishment). Us I statements (an ex flogged that into me, but I advocate it better than practice it). Walk away from whining when you have to (I suck at this).

As she talks, I almost crumble. Because it is so hard already. I’m convinced of my incompetence without good reasons, much less with good ones. Liv and I have been struggling lately. Too much sharp edge from me, too many histrionics from her. And I see myself reinforcing behavior and outlooks that I still find crippling in myself.

And it had been a hard day. Tears. Brattiness. Selfishness. Take your pick as to wich one of us I’m describing.

“I don’t think I can do this right now. I don’t think I can handle this.”

She’s silent, because what can you really say in response to that?

“I’m already afraid that I’m a bad daddy. Right now, before I leave for work, I just want to watch her play and love her.”

Which I do, while the frustrated tears remain unwilled, in a hard ball, just behind my nose, and fear makes my icy belly rumble.

It’s a new religion, this parenting business, and for the first time in my life I’m a self-immolating charismatic. But only in my head.

Outside I’m a neurotic and depressive stay-at-home-daddy with a good heart and a three-meter deficit of patience. Conflicted and self-abusive as a Catholic with a hard-on, though hopefully more noble.

No, that’s literary bullshit. I said it because I had to, because it popped into my head and the fine print on the poetic license in my wallet said I had to run with it.

What I am is just another guy that loves a girl he believes he can never do right by. Ever.

Doomed.

Call him Alberto "Bubba" Gonzales

2007-05-10T18:48:00.000-07:00

I can't help but think that somewhere Bill Clinton is watching our "Attorney General" play the prancing matador with Congress.

And I imagine his Bubba drawl, "Oh, this man is good. He is very gooooood."

Professional respect. Same reason sharks won't eat lawyers.

Monday in the Monkeycage

2007-05-09T21:39:00.000-07:00

The season closed yesterday at the Rep. I expected a quiet night in the monkeycage. Moments into the shift, actually even moments into the building and before my shift, that illusion was shattered.

College kids and the SRO. I didn’t bring enough wine to handle this.

There’s a reception for UW’s PATP (Professional Actor’s Training Program) in the lobby, and a performance showcase by PATP artists schedule in the jewelbox theater. Actors in there early twenties have flooded my entrance. Well-proportioned boys with sonorous voices to make me feel inadequate, buxom girls with intriguing faces and the balls to make meaningless eye contact that remind me why the inadequacy matters.

And the SRO, the Seattle Repertory Organization. Meeting to plan their annual NYC trip and tour of Broadway, Legions of confused, Aquanet-coiffed, pancake-makeup-ed elderly women. When they ask for directions to the boardroom and I answer, they start tottering away at my first instruction, no longer listening, as though “turn right” is either all the instruction they can imagine needing or all the instruction they can handle. The few men in the group avoid eye contact with me, the women, or each other.

So, when he shuffles in, I make an assumption.

“Here for the NY Trip?”

He’s thin, bearded though it looks out of place, as though he’s been stranded somewhere away from his razor. I’ve seen him before, but never noticed how water, how red-rimmed his eyes are.

“Uh? Yes.” And he looks away from me.

I stumble on forward. “Do you know where the boardroom is?”

He’s clearly uncomfortable with me speaking to him, keeps casting glances over his shoulder, out the windows of the small waiting area in front of my monkeycage. He doesn’t want to have to answer.

“I’m here for the big party.” He isn’t looking toward me when he says it. I’m not sure if that means the NYC trip or the PATP reception, and I’m convinced he doesn’t either.

Now he stares out the window, and his helplessness, beyond even his frailty, comes crushing down on me, because I didn’t allow him to conceal it. “I’m just waiting for Tammy to...” And he trails off.

And she swoops in from parking the car. His wife. Small and powerful and vivacious, a board member. She pulls him along in her wake, and he is clearly relieved. They are attending the PATP reception.

At least three groups of the SRO ladies get lost retracing their steps from the boardroom and I have to go retrieve and redirect them. Two of the PATP performers have a loud conversation on the stairs to backstage where they can’t seem to resist using “fuckin’” in every sentence.

I can’t stop thinking about the lost man going to the big party.

A Story

2007-04-30T14:52:00.000-07:00

One of my short stories is appearing this month at thelocalwriter.com.

It's a small, simple site, but I've liked some of the stories they've posted so far, so I figured "what the hell?"

Cruise over and check it out.

There's just something so Canadian about this

2007-04-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

I don't know how else to describe it, other than that it tickles the crap out of me. Dry, unintentional humor usually does.

This, from the Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education:

It's that kind of insight that makes Canada the world leader in consumer food safety education.

It's the new thing, just like the old thing

2007-04-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

When blogging hit its vogue-stride, I believe there developed a new trope - the introductory blog post. Really just a technological cousin of the first diary entry, it was a highly self-conscious proclamation of what the blog would be, fueled with all the ill-advised optimism of a New Year’s resolution.

And now, as we enter Blogging 2.0, there is a new trope-ic creature – the guilty apology. What we write when blogging becomes balancing your checkbook, or maybe more accurately becomes sitting down and writing an actual had-written letter to a friend. We occasionally, often as a result of a New Year’s resolution, promise we will write more letters, but the magic wears off quickly, and we accept that it is often just a pain in the ass. Like blogging. Another petty source of guilt that allows us to self-flagellate, and also imagine that someone in the universe, or maybe just the universe itself, notices.

So, should I sound contrite and promise reform? We both know either would be bullshit.

Truth is, I think of things I could write in my blog all the time. I converse with my five readers in my head, but when time comes that I can actually sit in front of my laptop, blogging just don’t make the short list.

I seriously need to earn a fucking buck, and my lack of options for doing so is freaking me out. So, when I have moments, I’ve been trying to make a website/portfolio that doesn’t suck, and have been pounding the net looking for potential gigs. Feeling a little hopeless. I was turned down for a job with the title Request-a-Rhyme Poet on Monday, and today read an interview in Salon.com with a guy that used to work for me in the phone room. Depressed and focused. Awesome.

So, don’t linger here. I’m just gonna start apologizing for not writing more. Go over to JimJewell.com and look around and tell me if I can send prospective employers and editors there. Nothing good will come of this space but every-three-weeks apologies anytime soon.

Good Night, Mr. Rosewater

2007-04-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut died last night.

He was the second author, after Anthony Burgess, that I took as my own when my reading turned more serious as a teenager. I've read nearly every novel excepting Slaughterhouse 5. The regular, non-advanced, dullard English classes in my high school read it, and so I read everything but. With another exception, that being the 100 pages of it that I read while shivering at a Toys for Tots table outside a grocery store in upstate NY winter, never to so much as touch a copy again.

It is a sign of my affection for him that I imagine he would be pleased with my relationship with that particular novel, and the reasons that drive it.

He had ties to my part of the country. That he spoke at my commencement is one of the few things I don't regret about attending Syracuse.

Vonnegut had a deep love of the human, which in no way contradicted his ability to see into the worst of human nature. His novels are populated by the damaged and deformed, resonate with suicide and insanity and apocalypse, but always with pathos, always with hope. His core values are such dominant themes in all of his novels that they blend into each other to become one massive tapestry of the Vonneguttian worldview, the reassurance that the individual's life is important even if the sum of all human life is, perhaps, not.

I want to thank him for the goofy magician's trick flowers that he pulled out of his robe at my commencement, right after he said "Oh, and, we love you." I want to thank him for making cragged and scraggly beautiful. I want to thank him for that story in Welcome to the Monkey House where the war veteran breaks the young actress's heart and then she redeems them both because it made me cry, for God Bless You, Mr Rosewater because it was brilliant and has instructions for the best ways to kill flies, for Sirens of Titan for the reminder just how small we are, for Galapagos and Deadeye Dick and Mother Night and Player Piano and Hocus Pocus, and for Cat's Cradle because it was my first, and boku-maru is sexy.

My copy of Cat's Cradle has this poem, my favorite of Robert Frost's, taped in the front cover, both for the obvious connection and because it seems a sentiment with which Vonnegut would agree.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Not really the proper tribute for a writer I cared so much for, but tied to my memories of him. These words, from an AP interview with him, probably sum up his sensibilties best, at least for me.

"When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon... My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I'll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children."

You set a great example, Mr. Vonnegut. Consider your wampeter complete. We'll beware granfalloons, and be diplomatic with our foma, and always have a cot ready for Kilgore Trout. Good night.

Oh, and, we love you.

EDIT:
Beige and The Hound pay tribute as well.

Can you tell me something?

2007-04-11T13:17:00.002-07:00

Why is the NBA logo so clearly a white hayseed with 1950's-era short-shorts and what are most likely canvas Chuck Taylors?

I'm not sayin' it should be a silhouette of Dr J, or maybe it should, I don't know. I'm just sayin'.

Imaginary or Pretend?

2007-04-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back, my blogger friend Missuz J wondered aloud about her kid’s imaginary friends. I never had any myself, nor many of the flesh-and-blood variety, and the idea of them has been kicking around in my head. As a result, I started paying more attention to Liv’s imaginary playmates.

Well, maybe not imaginary. The term she uses is “pretend.” And there is kind of a distinction.

Liv’s pretend friends are all co-opted from reality to some extent, and much more so of late. I started paying attention when she went on her Mary Poppins kick, and suddenly I had to make room for Jane and Michael Banks in the backseat of the car when we drove anywhere. She and Jane and Michael played hide-and-seek and cleaned the nursery and kept each other busy for hours at a time.

Then came the American Idol judges. That was a bit more disconcerting, but only mostly because I’m not a fan of Idol. First she’d set up three chairs in her bedroom, dress up in a princess costume and sing along to her Farkle McBride CD for them. Soon, however, they broke out of their real-world roles – seems Paula had a tendency to run off and get herself in trouble, requiring rescue from waterfalls and lava caves by Randy, Simon Cowell and Liv.

Then it started to get weird.

She had a boy from school over for a play date, and they started playing rescue. This time the object of rescues was the mother of another schoolmate. The two of them ran around the park across the street rescuing pretend Cynthia B from lava sharks and the island called Skull for over an hour.

It tickled me, of course, because I hadn’t really seen that type of imaginary friend play before.* This led me to what turned out to be a colossal mistake the next day. As Liv and I were walking into school, we ran into Cynthia B and her daughter, and I mentioned to Cynthia that she had been an imaginary friend the day before.

This embarrassed Olivia to no end. In the weeks since, she has been shy and ashamed in front of Cynthia, previously one of her favorite preschool parents. I felt like a total jerk, while still certain in the knowledge that it wouldn’t be the last time I embarrassed my child.

Anyway, the embarrassment in front of the real Cynthia B didn’t stop Liv from playing with pretend Cynthia. In fact, Cynthia was quickly joined by pretend versions of another parent, Sue K, and both Cynthia and Sue’s daughters, as well as the boy that had been part of the initial series of Cynthia rescues. Rescuing, in fact, has remained the dominant theme, with pretend Audrey, pretend Clare and pretend Nathan helping Liv rescue Cynthia from lava caves and getting sick Sue to the hospital.

It all seemed a little odd and amusing, but this week it kind of edged toward creepy. Liv was making her usual rescue plans with the pretend gang when she mentioned two other names from preschool, a kid and a parent. When she noticed me listening, she looked at me and said “Oh, Daddy, did you know I have a Courtney and an Ivy now, too?”

See, there is something about this casual addition to her flock that gave the whole endeavor a Stepford, collectable action figures, Body Snatchers vibe, like she has a parallel world inhabited by people from her real world, but stripped of will and subservient to Livvie whims.

I know that’s a little overdramatic, and my wife assures me she is just being creative, but the one fact that pushes me closer to concern is that she seems to be struggling a little with undirected play these days. She stands at the fringe watching, hesitant to just join in, sometimes comes home and tells us that she couldn’t find anyone to play with. I worry that she has begun making clones of real world friends because those relationships are easier, allow her to exert a control she feels is missing at school.

I’m sure it is a lot about me. I don’t want to see Olivia go through the childhood that I did. When loneliness was better than the torment that was the alternative. My propensity for eliciting strong negative reactions in people isn’t recent. In third grade there was a gang in Medina, NY, twenty kids strong, whose whole mission, reason for being, was to hate me and hiss “disgrace” at me at every opportunity (Aaron Slack, one day we will meet again and I’m gonna kick you in the balls).

So, I worry. I worry that she’s already developing defense mechanisms for problems I hoped she wouldn’t have. I’m worried that the choice of making pretend copies of real people instead of imaginary people shows a lack of creativity (which, I know, makes me sound like THAT kind of parent, but so what if I am?).

Maybe what I really fear is that a pretend version of me is in the offing.

I’m sure it is just a phase, like the year when she had to hear Stray Cat Strut at least once a day. But, worrying seems my natural state of being as a dad. And there’s always something new.

* - One exception being that the parents of one of my favorite kids in class told me that she sometimes likes to play at being Olivia, and makes her parents be Tricia and I. But, when it is someone else’s kid, its just cute. And oddly flattering.

Because I Admire Forthrightness

2007-04-05T18:52:00.000-07:00

When I stop at the local grocer on my way into a shift in the monkeycage, I almost always at a loss for what I want to eat. A bottle of soda water (preferably San Pellegrino) and a bottle of cheap merlot (Papio has been a stalwart of late) are pretty standard, but I usually wander about aimlessly waiting for some snack item to jump off the shelf at me.

Tonight, I couldn't resist the blunt honesty of this package:

No shuck-n-jive, no marketing spin. We're selling you broken pretzels, period.

What can I say? They spoke to me.

Suicidelessness

2007-03-22T22:44:00.000-07:00

I’m just reacting to part of a novel I’m reading, so nobody schedule an intervention, but I’m thinking about suicide.

I think that a large part of identifying who I am is the fact that as miserable as I have been, full days spent sobbing and finding corners to crawl into, ending spent, passed out, crashed, or in the rage that burns red and long into the evening of guilty despair and repairs, suicide has never been an option.

It has been considered. There has been yearning for eternal escape. There has been indignation at the lack of caring sure to be felt in the wake of my tragic death. But, I’ve never really fooled myself. Implicit in my nature is righteous suffering, too proactively guilty to choose death.

And I wish that were noble, instead of seeming indicative of an essential lack of passion. Of a sort.

I mean, I would kill, even in revenge (as opposed to self-defense). I’m not really afraid of dying for a good reason, though I’m terrified and almost sure I’ll die for a foolish one. It is simply the case that suicide is the bluff I can't call. In the pits of despair, even I don’t believe my own suicide threats.

Am I crazy to believe that is a problem? Well, no, not problem, but a troubling sign for someone that so wants to wear that mantle of “artist” (as long as nobody knows I want it).

Here’s the analogy that I think explains it. There is absolutely no possibility of my wife cheating on me. Just won’t happen. Such a thing is not in her nature. Of which I should be glad. And yet, it would be sexier if there were a chance, some danger. Ya dig?

I’m no danger to myself. And, somehow, that makes me feel just a little detached from life.

Inhofe = douchebag

2007-03-22T14:16:00.000-07:00

I'm not a fan of Republicans. Not by a looooooooooong shot. But, I am always willing to respect the position if not the opinions. For the most part, I believe I could conduct polite, if potentially heated, debate with a political foe.

But, I'm pretty sure I'd call Sen. James Inhofe a dick right to his face.

Take a look at the transcript of his exchanges with former VP Al Gore over the issue of global warming (about which Inhofe is a leading skeptic). He sounds like a petulant child as he attempts to control the discourse (which is really the only response a non-scientist skeptic can score any points, given the consensus they face).

My favorite part? When he uses the "where is global warming when you need it?" argument, pointing out that, among other things, Oklahoma had three of their coldest days ever this winter, betraying a complete lack of understanding of climatology.

"How can you say water carves through rock, when I just watched the rain run right off a rock for three minutes? Can you tell me that?"

Whatta douchebag.

The Potentially Creeping Nature of Hate

2007-03-17T22:55:00.000-07:00

I must confess to not really understanding why people so hate Hillary Clinton.

Some measure of the hatred directed her way is clearly political gamesmanship. In our increasingly divisive political climate, loyalists of each party hate members of the opposing party on pure principle. But, there are plenty of Democrats that don’t attract the vitriol of the former First Lady.

I mean, just look at Joe Leiberman. Republicans seem to genuinely like him. Or at least enough to invite him to their birthday parties and stuff, for, like, y’know, a goof.

But, Hillary is really and truly despised. Just take a look at this email (partially debunked by the awesome urban legend researchers at Snopes.com), and what people are willing to believe about the woman dubbed “the HildaBeast” by her many detractors.

It has caught my attention because this level of hatred seems irrational. I’ve asked Hillary-haters like my in-laws exactly what their problem with her is, and they can never articulate it. She is merely the enemy. One member of my in-family responded to my observation that the military should have at least informed Congress when the Abu Ghraib abuses were uncovered with, “Well, you know, you’ve got that Teddy and Hillary in there.” In other words, her presence in the chamber is reason enough not to talk to Congress, regardless of how serious the situation.

This has been bothering me for a combination of two reasons. The first is that I kind of hate Hillary, too, and I have no idea why. I didn’t believe any of the accusations in the email referenced above, but I hate to hear the woman speak, and can’t really imagine myself voting for her. This despite the fact that I agree with almost all of her positions (except when she goes all weak-willed like she did on the Iraq War vote). My feelings about her are as irrational as those who dub her HildaBeast.

Which is enough reason to be interested in this idea, to ponder on it in the light and meaningless way that blog-writers do, but not enough to give the idea much weight, and that brings me to the second reason this has been bothering me. A South Korean publisher is pulling a best-selling kid’s book from the shelves because it contains claims that the Jews created the hatred that caused 9/11, control all US media, and ensure that Korean-Americans can’t succeed.

Do you have any idea how many people have hated the Jews and for how long? And have you noticed how none of their rationale make any sense? It all seems to fall into a handful of nonsensical categories: Jews keep me from succeeding, Jews are a powerful secret cabal, Jews are monsters (the catch-all for claims that Jews drink the blood of the goyim and such).

Okay, maybe race-based and religion-based (the case of the Jews is a bit of both) hatred is always irrational, but what I have been struck with in both the case of Hillary and the Jews (and I’m sure some far-right whackjob will have a field day with that connection) is how widespread and utterly without basis the two hatreds seem. Maybe you can try to posit the actions of Israel as a reason for Jew-hatred, but the fact is they have been bullied and battered for no good reason for centuries.

It is chilling to me because, as I said, I really don’t like Hillary, and I can’t even figure out why. And I wonder just how much of the hate that exists in the world does so for no reason.

Don’t give me the hippy flower-child angle of “all hate is irrational,” either. I can give you rational, sane reasons for hating the woman in our co-op preschool that tries to batter people into submitting to her beliefs and for hating the Dallas Cowboys and for hating anyone who tailgates, ever.

But, irrational hate is slippery and scary, and all the more so when you step back and take a look at just how widespread it is.

I worry about things like that. About how short the distance might be between hating a politician I actually agree with to hating a class of people I have no beef with.

Wallflower

2007-03-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

They said we were a lock, riding a positive wave at season's end, quality wins. But, today the selection committee decided to overlook the conference record, the late-season wins over top 10 opponents, and my beloved Orange were denied an invitation to the Big Dance.

I'm a bit crushed. The last two years, Syracuse won the conference tournament, so selection Sunday was anticlimatic, they were already in. And this year, I knew there was no such thing as a lock until the brackets come out, but I really wasn't sweating it. EVERYbody said they were getting in. I never prepared myself.

So, I need to find a team to back, and I say why not the Washington State Cougars. They make the tourney once per decade or two, and my wife's family are HUGE supporters. Wazoo is a place where football is king, a state school in the middle of fucking nowhere that turns into Siberia every winter - not the easiest place to recruit. They were good enough this year to grab a #3 seed, and yet they still feel like a cinderella.

Oh, and the best part? Washington State University is the goofiest bunch of hayseed-looking motherfuckers to lace up Chuck Taylor's since Dennis Hopper called the picket fence play.

Seriously, Robbie Cowgill appears to be mildly retarded, a fact not helped by the wispy, pubescent mistake of a beard he's been sporting lately. Derrick Low is a nice player, but this little girl called and she wants her 'do back. And, don't even get me started on Taylor Rochestie (pictured here with mom), whose bedhead and unfocused eyes on the court make him look like a stoner playing NBA Live on his X-Box.

And I'm pretty sure one of their few players of color, and by extension one of the few people of color in Pullman and its immediate environs, is a woman.

Together, they exude a comic presence on the floor. Look at their faces and you expect any one or all of them to break into tongue-lolling guffaws any moment.

But, when they play, they are a damn disciplined team, crisp, well-coached and determined. So, for the next week at least, they're my team.

Besides, maybe I'll score some points with the in-laws. And, anyway, how could anyone root against them when their first-round opponent is named after this dickhead?

Caution - Ad Rant Ahead

2007-03-05T20:42:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the most recent ad for Cisco Systems? Oh, you might probably have without realizing it, because it doesn’t so much stand out as blend into all of the other ads hawking similar messages.

The ad is part of Cisco’s “the human network” campaign. It starts with a boy in an average suburban kitchen, and a camera phone held, presumably (all you can see is the hand) by his father. “Do something,” the father implores his son, and the son starts getting down, busting some moves, doing a sort of fluid robot. The commercial then zooms around the world, showing all types of people watching that very same kid dance on a variety of devices, from a child turning on a TV to a group of Tibetan monks gathering around a laptop.

On a side note, why have Tibetan monks become the visual shorthand for “we go anywhere, and I mean ANYwhere.” Reminds me of the scene from Living in Oblivion when the midget actor freaks out about his role. “Of course it must be a dream sequence, there’s a fucking midget!”

Anyway, the Cisco ad ends with the kid’s video playing on a Times Square billboard and the not unfamiliar advertising sentiment, “Now everyone can be a celebrity.”

On its face, this ad and others like it (this isn’t exactly a fresh perspective from the advertising world) are merely pandering to the celebrity-fetish of American consumers, but the message is indicative of something far more insidious. It is an example of how capitalism co-ops the mediasphere.

It hinges on the tagline, on this idea that everyone can be a celebrity. Which, of course, isn’t true. “Celebrity” is by definition a privileged status, demands an audience from which the celebrity can be separated, over which the celebrity can be elevated. It isn’t as innocuous as “everybody gets 15 minutes of fame,” though that is the viral shell that the message is packed in. It is really about setting celebrity up as a positive value within the discourse of networks and interactivity.

Injecting the notion of “celebrity” as a value into the greatest tool for open-source collaboration in human history serves to preserve capitalism a place by introducing a false scarcity. Celebrity presents an achievable thing for individuals, something to aspire to, to desire, the access to which can also be controlled. Celebrity as a positive value is commodifiable, giving it the power to create controllable consumers. Further, it opens up roles of passivity – in creating audience it enables audience membership, a surrender of active participation.

Perhaps it would be less worthy of comment if it was an isolated message, but “everyone can be a celebrity” resonates across media, various iterations hawking all manner of product and service. These tiny bits of narrative become the pieces we use to construct our world. They are the seeds. Corporate media is Monsanto. I think that makes us dead monarch butterflies.

Give it up for Shaq!

2007-02-28T12:50:00.001-08:00

I have never been much of a Shaquille O'Neal fan. Didn't help that he won some rings for the Lakers, who I hate just a little less than the Yankees, who I hate a little less than the Cowboys. But, Shaq has brought me around.

Asked about getting an NBA All-Star spot after only playing a few games this year, Shaq said, "I'm like President Bush. You may not like me, you may not respect me, but you voted me in."

If only the Shrub was capable of such candor, he might paraphrase some Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back for us: "I'm the chucklehead? You're the dumbasses who voted for me."

Ahhhh, weeee. It's funny because it's true.

Watch the f@%$ing language!

2007-02-25T17:12:00.000-08:00

What’s the deal, lately? Could just be Doppler waves of media resonance, but stories of linguistic prudishness are rife. There was the Florida theater that responded to complaints about their marquee and changed The Vagina Monologues to The HooHaa Monologues. And a recent flapdoodle in a Seattle neighborhood over a high-end dog care store called High Maintenance Bitch. Now, for the last two days, I’ve been hearing stories of a Newberry-winning children’s book being criticized by librarians as inappropriate for using the word “scrotum.”

Really? Is this really where we are heading?

I mean, this isn’t exactly “fuck” we’re talking about. I’m at least willing to hear someone out on the bitch thing, because there is serious cultural baggage in that term and its various and sundry appropriations, but the fact of the matter is it is a real term in the dog world, entendres be damned. But vagina and scrotum?

The worst part is that in each case, it is a vocal minority putting the clamps on. N open dialogue about where limits should be set and why, but the pissiest wheel getting the grease.

Makes about as much sense as placing proscriptive grammar ahead of descriptive, or rule of law before common sense, and is yet another example of a culture infantilizing itself.

The Place We Call The Zoo

2007-02-22T23:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve always had somewhat conflicted feelings about zoos. I understand the conservation role the largest play, but the zoo-as-attraction unnerves me even as I enjoy it.

It’s my mild claustrophobia, mostly. Looking at a snake, and I don’t much like snakes, I can imagine myself living in the odd rhomboid of habitat with its attendant wall of glass. The animals don’t have to be cute or anthropomorphic for me to identify with their plight. Even as the habitats have become larger and more authentic, so far beyond the grey concrete blocs of feces-carpeted cells I remember from elementary school field trips in upstate NY in the late ‘70s, I can’t look at them without thinking, “trapped.”

Today’s visit to the local zoo (so forward-thinking they nabbed zoo.org as their url), did little to settle my conflicts. Don’t get me wrong – we’re zoo members and love it, but it isn’t untainted love.

Let me start with the Zoomazium, because that’s where we usually start anyway. It’s at the zoo, it’s part museum, and it’s amazing – Zoomazium. Really a bunch of climbable rock formations and a tree to help burn juice off the kids on gloomier days, a toddler play area within line of sight of some big cushy chairs so mother’s can breastfeed, and a tent, desk and racks of stuff for the Nature Exchange, which I’ll get to in just a moment.

After scrambling about for a bit, Liv and I ventured into the Nature Exchange tent to see what was what. A bunch of kids filled one table looking at a couple books together, and an “older” volunteer was trying to push through them to retrieve a small storage chest. Wrestling it out, she looked at us and said “You wanna make some bugs?”

Of course we did. We’ve made bugs here before. So older volunteer lady started pulling bug parts out of the storage chest and setting them on the empty table, and we started making bugs. After she’s been sitting there, morosely scattering thoraxes, mandibles, wings and such, she winces in pain. “Gahd, to they have to screech like that.” And she looks up at me, pissy, as though I am going to agree, “Yeah, noisy fuckin’ kids.”

This lady is a volunteer at Zoomazium. Remember – zoo + museum + amazing? Does that sound like a place kids are going to be quiet? Or might you guess, when applying for the position, that the laughter of children will be part of the job? I checked her ankle for a bracelet, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt that maybe this was community service, but no such luck.

After we built a few bugs, we went over to the Nature Exchange desk to turn in a couple of bird cards we made last summer (took pictures of birds at Discovery Park and used WhatBird(great site) to find out what they were and printed it all up on a nifty card). I had grave reservations about this program, or, more pointedly, the ability of the zoo to administer it. When volunteers first started pitching it last summer, they babbled through some vague “you can build a bug or do a scavenger hunt, or bring things in, and earn points!” nonsense, and responded to any questions with the exact same Carroll-esque spiel. Their were hints of promise in there, but I could never get anyone to explain what exactly we were supposed to do, which, as an old ENTROS game guide and guide trainer, just baffled me. I even emailed the program director at the zoo, and her response was pretty much “it’s new.”

But, damn, they have got their act together now. Liv brought the two cards (Hairy Woodpecker and Mallard) to the lady at the desk, and said lady engaged Liv in at least a five-minute discussion about birds, and these birds in general. She didn’t talk down to Liv but kept her interest, and I even learned that when ducks eat with their bottoms in the air, that’s called “dabbling,” which is a fact that delights me. And, she gave us a few other directed activities, including an animal observation exercise we did with gorillas.

Score one for the zoo.

So, my outlook on the upswing, Liv and I headed off for some animal-looking-at-ing. She digs the jaguar, but he was sleeping and their were so many noisy kids in that area that Livvie covered her ears and said we had to leave because they were too loud.

After that were the Day/Night exhibits. The Day side was uneventful, other than my heart breaking just a little at the indignity suffered the grass snakes they have living in a country still life, complete with little antiqued abandoned wagon wheel. The Night side was very cool because I distracted Liv long enough in the entry exhibit for her eyes to adjust to the light, and then she astounded me with her ability to find the nocturnal critters better than me and roughly a thousand times better than the group of guys who marched through, ignoring the “please be quiet” and “give your eyes time to adjust” signs and loudly asking “what, aren’t there any friggin’ animals in here?” Between all of that and the bush baby that launched himself onto the plate glass and stared at us with bulbous eyes screaming “LET ME OUTTA HERE!”, I think the whole building resulted in a zero sum game.

Daddy Dumbass forgot to pack snacks, and we were deep into lunch time, so we had to hit a zoo concessions stand. They call them concessions because you have to make concessions to the ridiculous prices they have ask you to pay, and I get that, I expect that, but must the food also suck? The three dollar bottle of orange juice was bad enough, but for another three bucks I expect the soft pretzel to have a more tender consistency than a MilkBone.

I’m taking a point away for that pretzel. Zoo food should at least be better than prison food. (But, wait, is there a diff… no, stop it, just enjoy the pretty animals!)

Walking up to the raptor exhibit, I thought we were happening upon another example of cranky staff. A woman was leaning over the fence cluck-tutting at an owl that a trainer was holding, insistent that the bird make some noise for her, when the trainer said “It’s not a parrot. It’s a raptor.”

Now, I was all ready to put a check in the con category here, until the woman replied “But, I thought it was an owl,” then looked at us with an expression of disbelief that was obscured by the crazy written all over her face. The trainer tried to be more patient after that while the woman nodded over long sips of her bottled Frappucino and then interrupted the trainer mid-sentence to ask where the bathroom was.

I liked the trainer better, but this is a zero sum, too, because of where it segued.

Already, on this unexpectedly sunny day, the crowds at the zoo were getting to me. Not their size, but their make-up. Ever notice how much zoo patrons remind you of bus station patrons? Or the folks lined up with you at the DMV?

As we rounded the corner coming out of Willawong station and skirted the emu and wallaby enclosure, I noticed a group in front of us. Handful of kids ranging from probably six to twelve or thirteen, and two women. Two big, fat, foul-mouthed, slovenly women. Remember the Sir Mix-a-lot song Bremelo? Them chicks. The kind that always seem to have thin, greasy hair pulled tight up on their head into a limp imitation of a ponytail.

Anyway, the whole group had been sitting on some rocks across the path from the enclosure, and were getting up to move on. The oldest boy got up from the rock less-than-quickly. I might call it “at a moderately insolent pace” at the very worst. And, one of these troglotrolls starts slapping the kid in the face, telling him he better get up faster when she talks to him. And not even the kind of full slap that might at least make him a man to take, but the little half-ass pokes and swipes, one after another, that just humiliate. I wanted so badly to say something, to point out that it wasn’t helping, and might conceivably have felt justified if she had really walloped him. But, this was obviously a woman that would escalate, and I had Liv with me, and I know how I can get, and I just, well, didn’t. (Sure put me in mind of the spanking law discussion we had here.)

I wish I could say she was the only shitty parent I saw today, that he was the only kid I saw bullied and/or berated today, but the place was just sick with them. More than I’ve seen anywhere else (maybe because I don’t ever, ever go to the mall). Is it just that the zoo is the lowest-barrier-to-entry somewhat-educational attraction around? You can walk around outside, look at animals, try to get the to behave to your standards, disrespect their space, and still feel as though your doing something for your kids?

Our last stop on the way out crystallized my conflicted feelings. We stopped back at the jaguar exhibit to see if he had woken up and found yet another school group, older this time, probably about fifth-graders, boy-heavy so they annoyed me more right away. They were all plastered against the glass, tapping, yelling, making faces, and the jaguar was pacing along that very patch of glass, quickly back-and-forth across maybe six feet, agitated, so badly wanting that glass to disappear so he could rampage. And, provided I could get Liv out, I kinda wanted that, too.

We’re still going to go to the zoo. Often, even. Liv is really attentive to learning about animals, I finally feel invested in the Nature Exchange and she and I have some projects planned out, ZooTunes is one of the best family events going.

But, and I think this will always be the case, the conflicts remain.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

2007-02-18T11:38:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make. Actually, that sounds too dramatic. This is more of a clarification. But, I have an odd feeling of guilt attached to it. So, maybe it is a confession.

Ahh, get on with it, fer fuck’s sake.

Those books that I list off to the right here? I add each to the list when I start reading it. Maybe not the day that I start, but the next time I log on to Blugger I add whatever title I’ve picked up since the previous post.

But, I don’t always finish the books, and I never take off titles I haven’t finished. Still, it seems a little intellectually dishonest to post a reading list because the implicit assumption is that I am listing books I have actually read.

Now, it isn’t like I’m artificially inflating my reading profile by massive amounts here. In fact, there is currently only one book on then list I haven’t finished. What has prompted me to confess is, in fact, this one book. Because I am making a conscious choice not to finish it.

It isn’t the first book on my reading list that I haven’t finished and it won’t be the last, but usually some outside force makes some of the decision for me, most often that the book is due at the library and on hold for someone, so it can’t be renewed. This time, however, it is only choice.

That’s really where the guilt is coming from for me. Not the idea that I may have led people to believe that I complete 10% more books than I actually do (estimating that one in ten is unfinished), but the fact that I am giving up on a story.

I realize there are people in the world that will find the guilt strange, wonder why I would make any kind of big deal about not finishing a book. Well, I think you people are strange, ok? I had a roommate my junior year of college that could get up and go to bed twenty minutes before the end of a TV movie we’ve both been watching, and it boggled me every time. How could he not have to see how it ends? Who are you people that aren’t compelled to stay up well past reason to see the end of a movie? Who never sit in their driveway listening to the end of a radio program? Who feel no guilt over dropping a novel mid-stream, refusing to consider that they should, yes SHOULD damnit, wrestle with it to the very bitter end?

I’m abandoning Captain Bluebear, and it is kind of tearing me up a little inside.

There isn’t anything to hate in this book, and I’ve been delighted at moments. It is the utterly absurd tale of a blue bear, found by Minipirates floating in a walnut shell being sucked into a whirlpool, and of the 13 1/2 lives of the blue bear that follow. Well-written, brilliant concept.

But, it just isn’t moving me. I feel like I am just going through the motions, trying to get to the end only out if a sense of responsibility and no real joy. And, maybe that is why the guilt. If I hated the book, if it had somehow betrayed me (which, without question, books can do), I could drop it in better conscience. But, no, no, this is a good book. I just don’t want to read it any more. I don’t care how it turns out. There are other books I want to go read.

It’s not you, it’s me, Captain Bluebear.

I feel like a cad.

Find Your Voice

2007-02-10T20:32:00.000-08:00

I can't sing fer shit. I mainly blame my stepfather, who was stone cold tone deaf and sang to me as a child. That, I believe, is the origin of my tin ear.

It isn't really as bad as all that. I can manage to carry a tune as long as it requires little range, so I tend to sing the songs of crooners like Bing Crosby or Kermit the Frog (Rainbow Connection was once a karaoke staple, and now is a Liv favorite) or deep basses like Johnny Cash or Tennesee Ernie Ford (16 Tons also karaoke and Liv staples).

But, damn but I don't wish I could really sing, like SAHNG, y'know. And, there are a few voices I'd really love to have. John Popper tops the list, with his ability to hit the rapid fire delivery and warble up into the angelic registers. Or Chris Robinson, whose otherwise unremarkable voice can produce those certain tones you need to nail blues and soul. And, of course, Andrew Strong, the kid with that voice, my God, that voice from The Commitments.

I've asked a couple of people this question recently in person, but want to throw it out to my nearly half-dozen loyal readers - If you could have any singing voice in the world, from a singer living or dead, whose would it be?

EDIT Sunday 2/11

If y'all wouldn't mind, I'd love it if you could slide over to JimJewell.com and tell me what you think about my efforts so far. I'm trying to create a big portfolio/resume site as I start looking for work (because I defend my thesis Wed, completing my MA, so there's no excuse after that). Thanks!

See these shoes? Walk in 'em.

2007-02-08T22:05:00.000-08:00

There was this kid that was kinda in my circle in high school, Steve Noxon. Blonde, natural athlete, well-off family, moderate academic success, the most conceited, self-important Aryan I ever met. We mocked him constantly behind his back, but likely all would have been willing to be him (as long as the douchebagness wasn’t an essential part of the package).

Steve’s birthday was early enough in the year that he was able to take Driver’s Ed during the second semester of sophomore year, and had his license at least six months ahead of me.

So, one night, after I’ve had my license maybe a month or so, Steve is in my car during the endless circling of the satellite suburbs looking for non-existent parties that passed for our Friday nights, and he’s talking about driving, because he noticed that I used two hands to turn.

“When you’ve been driving long enough, you’ll start turning with one hand. Trust me. Trust me.” (And, yes, he did say it twice – on this my memory is crystal clear.)

My car at the time? A 1980 Chevy Citation with rotting floorboards and no power steering. Not just regular non-powered steering like my current beloved Escort Pony, but what had been power steering and no longer worked.

I tried to explain this to Noxon, that spindly-armed distance runner that I was I couldn’t reliably turn the wheel with one hand. Wasn’t feasible. Not a matter of experience but the reality of a shitty car. He kept slowly shaking his head, eyes closed, repeating his mantra, emphasis on the first word, “Trust me. Trust me.”

He was absolutely sure that his experience afforded him an insight I simply could not understand. I bristled against it then, and every other time I encountered that notion, in situations of far greater import than some Stepford son’s assessment of my driving. All variations on a set of themes – you can only understand when you are older/wiser/more experienced. I hated that, always wanted to believe that I could bridge those gaps through intellect.

That belief may well define being young.

But, here’s the thing. The experience thing? It’s true. Often. Like, all the time. Some things you can only understand in the doing. Like having kids. You can’t understand having a child until you do, every parallel, every analogy you try to draw that shows you do in fact understand comes up short.

Makes you angry to hear it if you don’t have kids, and nod knowingly if you do. That’s just the way of these things.

I’m thinking about this because of the anti-spanking law introduced into the California legislature. BY A WOMAN THAT DOES NOT HAVE CHILDREN. Obviously, I think that point important.

Granted, the law itself isn’t terribly heinous (but the early ones never are, are they, you slippery, slippery slope). It makes punishable, up to a felony, corporal punishment of any child under three. Even most spanking advocates acknowledge that corporal punishment isn’t effective, and is likely harmful, for kids under three.

But, the very idea of the law galls me, because I feel an incursion here, one which is all the more infuriating because it is being launched by a woman who has not walked in my shoes. I don’t spank, but that is my choice. On one level, it only holds meaning because it is a choice. The galling part, though, is that this woman believes she has the insight to legislate a relationship she hasn’t had.

And, I don’t think this intrusion into parenting is limited to this incident. As this Salon writer so accurately points out, there is a great deal of public anxiety being a parent today. I feel it all the time, perhaps more acutely because I am a stay-home-daddy and therefore stick out, invite observation and critique. I raise my voice, even a little, to Olivia in a public face, and I can feel the stares, and I know it isn’t the other parents that are, in that moment, the most judgmental. Strangers have felt somehow both allowed and compelled to give me parenting advice numerous times, none of it welcome, and more than once from people that admitted they don't have kids themselves. Yet, they, liken this woman, feel a need and a right to decide what good parenting is, where the lines should be drawn.

And, let me be absolutely clear here, WITHOUT PUTTING UP WITH AND SURVIVING THROUGH ALL THE SHIT PARENTING THROWS AT YOU.

Where does the rationale for this law lead next? Will there be an anti-cavity law, so I can fear even more that Dum-Dum Livvie begged me for, and eventually cleaned her room to earn? How about psychological health standards that set tone, pitch and volume standards for verbal discipline? Maybe I could just outsource discipline to a consultant familiar with community standards?

Look, I accept the public interest in the health and well-being of every child, but I’d like to see that feeling exercised in better funding for schools and outreach to at-risk youth. But, that isn’t the way we play it these days, because that involves giving, making an investment with only a hope of return. Much easier to say the problem and solution lies with people whose lives you’ve never lived.

Fund and empower CPS. Encourage open dialogue about how best to meet kids’ needs. Be willing to extend yourself, agree to fund schools and outreach to at-risk youth, because while the return on investment can’t be guaranteed, we all benefit from a society that produces healthy children. Help parents as a whole, but for the love of all that is good and holy allow them autonomy in dealing with their own children.

If we actually love all kids the way parents love their own instead of blustering and trying to legislate good parenting, we’ll be better equipped to find and save those kids that really need our protection.

In related news, Salon, whose reporting I usually love, has broken the startling news that the Ashley Treatment is controversial, thus allowing numerous medical experts who have never met Ashley or her parents the chance to see their names in print condemning said parents as appalling mutilators. Well done, Slate. Good to see progressive media is still cannibalistic media.

Call Me Kreskin

2007-02-06T08:31:00.000-08:00

Yet one more example of my underappreciated genius, hot on the heels of Rick Reilly of SI stealing my "Ben Rothlisberger met the devil at the crossroads and sold his soul for a Super Bowl" idea for his column.

Proponents of gay marriage rights in Washington have introduced Initiative 957, which would limit marriage rights to couples able to conceive children. Unions that produce no children in three years would be annulled.

Perhaps they got the idea from my August 1st, 2006 post on the subject.

I swear, I just keep giving this shit away. Like my audiobook project three years ago that crumbled when my director pulled out - this weekend NPR had a little piece about the booming audiobook market. Le sigh.

For Your Listening Displeasure

2007-02-05T11:32:00.000-08:00

We bought a second car not too long ago. Just needed something to make the wife’s commute, which cuts between neighborhoods and sucks by bus, and the general kid-juggling easier. We found a little 91 Escort Pony with 80k miles on it for cheap enough, one that is so base-model it doesn’t have a passenger-side mirror. But, I love it. 5-speed stick, it’s like driving a go kart.

It also has a tape deck, unlike the spiffy new Mazda we got a couple years ago. All of our old cassettes have died or not made the cut during our multitudinous moves, so last week I did something I haven’t done in a long time. I made a mix tape.

I’ve made plenty of mixed CDs in recent years, but they are different. The demand is lower. You can play them shuffled, or skip around manually. But, with the mix tape, order matters. A lot.

Truth is, I never was particularly good at mix tapes. I’ve gotten lucky at times, and I know a good mix when I hear it, but for the most part I just don’t have the patience for the crafting.

And this most recent effort? Well, I believe I have made one of the crappiest mix tapes ever. Especially for a car-specific mix. It sucks.

And so I feel the need to share. I imagine there are at least two music-snobs out there, with varying levels of baldness, who will waste no time jumping in and diagnosing the problems. So, the mix, and my thoughts:

SIDE 1

Kik It, by Brooklyn Funk Essentials

As a first song, I’m actually somewhat satisfied with this choice. It is a relentlessly funky groove that demands chair-dancing. But, it sets a tone/pace that the rest of the mix can’t support.

Bring the Funk, by Ben Harper

I like Ben Harper just fine, but this song reveals its suckitude after just a few listens. Funky enough, in that Ben Harper way, but strictly bush league as a song. It never should have made the cut.

Do It For Free, G Love

I think Philadelphonic is a great album, I dig G Love’s rhythms and he sings better on this album than that first release would lead one to suspect he can. It is not awful, obviously an attempt to bridge funk to the next songs, but the transition is week.

The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist, Aimee Mann

I have a huge crush on Aimee Mann, and her music just simply appeals to me. Heavenly voice with woeful and hopeful lyrics. This song has been stuck in my head since Aimee shepherded me through writing for 14/48, with great crescendos and tiptoes. Satisfied with this selection.

Mellow Yellow, Donovan

Was I fucking high?

Romeo and Juliet, Dire Straits

I’m a closet Dire Straits fan. Love Knopfler and whoever he chooses to play with. This is a lovely song. But it is way too lovey-specific to be on a general car mix tape. I always skip it.

SIDE 2

Problems and Bigger Ones, Harvey Danger

This album has nostalgic resonance with me, but it sticks around because Sean Nelson can flat-out sing. I think this works as a first track, with a slow build into towering “foreswear what you undergo” and I always always sing with it.

Open Letter, John Popper

The only transition I’m really fond of in the mix. The songs progress in similar ways, though this down the blues/soul road instead of HD’s 90sIndyAltRockPop. I dig Popper’s voice, and he’s never written lyrics.

Whiskey Before Breakfast/Over the Waterfall, Leftover Salmon

So, why did I follow a beautiful spiritual song with Greatful-Dead-with-the-bluegrass-turned-to-11? Because I suck at mixed tapes. Didn’t I already tell you that? Leftover Salmon is fun enough, but I don’t know what I was thinking here.

Never Can Get Enough, London Funk Allstars

The album this comes from, Flesh Eating Disco Zombies vs The Bionic Hookers From Mars, is one of my all-timers. Great for roadtrips that demand trippiness. But, the electrofunk comes right outta left field here.

Can’t Find My Way Home, Blind Faith

“Short-lived supergroup” – that phrase tickles me. Otherwise, see “Mellow Yellow” above.

She Talks to Angels, Black Crowes

Every time I hear Chris Robinson sing, I think Kate Hudson is a bitch. I want his voice. Because his is that kind of soul voice that may not have the greatest range, but can produce the kinds of sounds soul demands and that other voices can only flaccidly approximate. This is a perfect car song, because it has to be played loud and you have to feel free to sing with wild abandon. Which I do. I imagine it is scary to witness. I’m fine with this closing a side.

So, there it is, my failure laid out for all to see. I’d like to say it sucks only because I was rushing it, but that isn’t it. I just don’t approach the task with the requisite care.

I’m better at happy accident. Like the fact that, on my laptop, in iTunes, when X’s Los Angeles ends, it segues into a Bill O’Reilly rant about rounding up and prosecuting critics of our Chimp In Chief. Now that’s a great transition.

Battling for Position is Boxing Out

2007-01-31T21:08:00.000-08:00

So, there is an interesting battle shaping up in the mediasphere. It's the tax guy versus the tax box.

I don't really watch a ton of TV, but I have never been able to totally deprogram my brainwashing in the process of getting an advertising degree. Often, I will turn to my wife and make some comment about and ad that has just run, and she'll say "huh?" I realize I'm different here.

Except on Super Bowl Sunday, everybody is like me.

Anyway, there are at least two competing ads. The first, and obviously the most effective because I actually remember it was for H&R Block, features the ad-typical dipshit male lamenting over his taxes (or in another iteration, finding out he is being audited). His wife walks up and coyly suggests he talk to their tax guy. Except, they don't have a tax guy, they have a box, a tax software box (with TURB just barely in view). The wife pretends to try to talk to the box.

Aww, cute. They're telling us we're too stupid to do taxes on our own.

Then, we have it's mirror twin. I've seen two versions, but they've got no pop, no sizzle, and I have no idea what the actual product is. A man or woman is sitting across from the tax guy, and he is that boring dillhole they always cast as the soon-to-be-obsolete middleman. And, sure enough, while he lumbers through, the guy/girl grabs the keyboard away from him, starts doing his/her own taxes, and the tax guy fades away (less wicked witch and more Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance).

Get it? Tax guys are like betamax, dude.

Really, this little battle is only mildly interesting to me in and of itself. I actually like doing taxes, and used to do the long form when I was in my twenties just for shits and giggles (because there wasn't any aspect of my financial situation not covered by an EZ). Now, I'm pretty happy with online TurboTax because we don't own nothin' and it takes me less than an hour. So, I don't really care who winds the tax guy vs tax box battle.

But I think it is very much a narrative we will see played out again and again. It isn't as simple as man versus machine, it is competing ways of doing business that will have to find a way to coexist.

Over the next decade, we as a culture are going to decide, for each aspect of our lives, which path is best (and it will be majority rule by-and-large - almost pure market decisions). And neither choice is going to be best every time. There's no question I want a real, actual chef making my expensive meal, and a real actual person taking my pulse and gently hefting my testicles. And I'm pretty okay with tax guys and travel agents falling by the wayside. But the grey areas are most interesting. Por ejemplo, if CGI tech gets far enough, why would we need actors?

How we answer those questions will contribute a great deal to the society we continue to become, going beyond questions of economics to becoming future bases for value judgements. What will be good sense? What will be luxury? Where will we establish or baselines? Our benchmarks?

For what industries, for what tasks, in what arenas will we struggle to keep our tax guys? And when is it okay to submit to the box?

Why do you act like that?

2007-01-27T22:55:00.000-08:00

When you are the parent of a three-year-old, you spend a lot of time asking essentially-rhetorical questions like “Why the fuck do you act like this?” Me, frustrated intellectual without a home that I am, tend to overanalyze the potential answers.

So, just trust this jump, having someone else comb your hair, especially when it is a rat’s nest and preschool starts in twenty minutes, isn’t the most pleasant experience in the world. Liv has never really relished it. But, lately, she responds as though she is an enemy combatant being “questioned” in the shadow prison of a US “ally.”

I’ve decided that kids of Livvie’s age have reached the point when they begin to question the essential nature of things. Up to this point, she relied on her parents to tell her what a thing's essential nature is. Thus, combing the hair was necessarily uncomfortable, but that being the ordained (by mom and dad) nature of the thing, her protests were minimal.

But now she has assumed enough agency to begin figuring out the essential nature of things on her own, and her assumptions are. Naturally, not always in accordance with mom and dad’s. Thus she can question whether, for example, hair combing must really be uncomfortable. And, as a result of questioning whether the discomfort is essential, she can rebel against it. Because, damnit, combing her shouldn’t have to be uncomfortable.

The thing is, explaining it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with at 9:05 when I’m dropping her off at 9:30.

It has me thinking about the nature of such resistance, though.

Those things we believe to be essential, inevitable or necessary, we don’t resist. There is an innate disinclination towards exercises in futility. In fact, once your brain tells you something is essential, must by definition exist, there is nothing to fight against. You’d as soon rage against the sky being blue, water being wet, or death being final.

It is this that I think most gums up the works of religious discourse. There is no perceived need to resist the doctrines one has decided, or been told and accepted, are essentially true. And there must be a comfort in that, being in a place where resistance is from outward appearances futile, but from within beyond question, mere folly. Once not only the conception of God/the universe/everything has been accepted, but also the rhetorical/conceptual framing that accompanies that acceptance, the idea of resisting, of questioning, is Quixotic.

This isn’t to be simplistic, to say that accepting a truth is childish and the resistance a sign of maturity. In the case of Liv and combing hair, she will likely, one would hope, eventually accept the discomfort of combing long hair as necessary to hair combing. But it is to point out that this relationship, for each individual, to what is worthy of question and what is not is worthy of consideration.

Because this is how we create our personal store of knowledge, of wisdom – deciding what questions to ask, what battles to fight.

And so I let Liv, for the most part, rage on, and do my best to teach her how to make good choices, and hope that the lessons, in the teaching, rub off on me.

Reflections on my lexicon

2007-01-19T11:34:00.000-08:00

For a couple days over the holidays, some friends of mine asked me to keep an eye on their cat, Shakespeare. Shakes is a mammoth cat, more animate ottoman than feline, but it wasn’t until I saw his special food that I realized he was a specific breed – a Maine Coon Cat.

And since then, ole’ Shakes has had me thinking.

I’ve been thinking about an “uncle” I used to have. He was the brother-in-law of my father’s second wife, so no whiff of blood relation but someone I considered family on those odd weekends and summer vacations I’d spend with my father.

Truth is, I’ve forgotten his name. I haven’t spoken to that side of my family in years, and it is remarkable how swiftly names and faces and times start sliding away when their memories aren’t refreshed by shared narrative.

He’s also many years dead, eaten alive by a host of different cancers right about the time I graduated high school. A career in asbestos installation, and later removal, will do that to you.

He looked like a cross between Jerry Lewis and R. Lee Ermey, like the aging sound guy for a rockabilly band. Jet black pomped hair, horse face, and teeth that grew impossibly long and yellow when he smiled.

Oh, and, like most of that side of the family, he was racist.

Because of him, I can’t say, even in my head, the word “coon” without dragging out the oooo and adding a touch of twang. It was the punchline to some joke he told me one summer, waiting in front of a small country store for my father to come back from buying smokes. I was standing next to him, and he delivered it leaning down over his shoulder toward me, smiling long and yellow.

TBO and I have gone back and forth a bit about the n-word before, him saying he found “n*****” more insulting than “nigger”, me saying I just don’t like using the word, even just writing it write now, and every time I have used it in my life (except when privately singing along to rap songs, in which case I let it all hang out) it has caught a little in my throat.

But, for me, “coon” is the far more racist term.

I don’t like using the word “nigger” because I grew up being taught it was vulgar and crass, and that is how it sounds on white lips to me. It is a sign of ignorance.

“Coon” isn’t about ignorance, it is conscious, intentional racism. There is this belief that racism is simply ignorance, as though through exposure and familiarity alone we will all hold hands and sing spirituals together. And surely that is sometimes the case. I’d be willing to take the leap that the white kid that uses “nigger” is more reachable, more teachable, than the kid that uses “coon.”

I recognize that all of this is just because of my personal lexicon (an idea Kundera explores to lovely effect in The Unbearable Lightness of Being). And that the effect of our personal lexicons is inescapable. Otherwise I’d be able to let go of this nagging feeling that my friend’s cat is vaguely racist.

14/48 is HERE!

2007-01-11T11:16:00.000-08:00

I'm so freekin' excited I can't stand it.

14/48, fourteen plays from writing to performance in 48 hours, is as much fun as one can have fully clothed (though nudity isn't out of the question).

Tonight, starting at 8, I'll be writing a ten-minute play, due by 8am Friday. Tomorrow night, starting at 10, I'll write another, due 8am Saturday.

Wish me luck. The last time I did this, I got the theme "biodiesel" and drank too much while bitching about the theme and proceeded to pass out until almost 6am. Wrote a play about football in just over an hour.

Go check out the website. Gots lots of nifty stuff on it. The guy who designed it is a total stud. And dead sexy.

Happy Birthday, Baby!

2007-01-09T10:19:00.000-08:00

32 years ago today, my lovely wife was born. A day for which I am eternally thankful. Nobody else could put up with me the way she has, nobody else has so much love in her heart. She's a wonderful mother and wife, and I am a blessed man.

Happy Birthday, Tricia. I love you very much.

Spouting Off Again

2007-01-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

But first, does anyone else find humorous the in-store special I found at my local QFC yesterday? Buy any 6 Lean Cuisine frozen meals and receive a 56oz Dreyer's Ice Cream for FREE! Them's some sadistic bastards. I saw a fat lady standing in front of the sign weeping.

Anyhoo, I'm trying to finish my friggin' thesis project, and so not writing here so much, but I did let TBO con me into participating in another Spout Off on his blog. You should check it out - probably be up by late in the day Sunday.

The Decline of a Child Actor

2006-12-28T16:34:00.000-08:00

Among the UNGODLY number of gifts my darling daughter received this year was a doctor's kit, complete with scrubs, crash cart with defib paddles, and a doctor's bag full of doctorly doodads. One of said doodads was this tube of what one must assume is a sort of panacea salve called Soothe:

So, Liv and I are playing with the kit today, examining her Dora the Explorer doll and removing the duck we heard quacking from within her guts (the same duck Liv would later remove from my guts, which was very disturbing), when I look closely at this ersatz salve and very nearly say "What the fuck?" out loud.

Because, and maybe you saw it right away, I'm quite fairly completely certain that is Calvin from Bill Watterson's genius Calvin and Hobbbes strip, mugging for Soothe pseudo-salve.

What the fuck is Calvin doing here?

Now, I realize this little fake tube o' goo was likely made in China, where intellectual propeties are pretty much viewed as free clip art, but this is still odd for so many reasons. The little cartoon head as placed doesn't really make any sense, regardless of whether it is a famous cartoon child or not. Obviously, the fact that this is just one tiny piece in a set that wastes an astonishing amount of natural resources proves that the fact it is Calvin made no difference to the manufacturer - Calvin isn't having his likeness cashed in for sales, he isn't the draw, he's just a graphic nugget of convenience.

And maybe that is the hardest thing to accept. I was a HUGE Calvin and Hobbes fan back in the day, and credit Watterson with preserving whatever childhood glee remains in my withered husk. Watterson is to be respected for bowing out at the strip's height, and refusing to sign on to merchandising deals (millions of bootleg peeing Calvin stickers notwithstanding) that would have made him crazy wealthy. Calvin is a figure of integrity, and is now relegated to visual filler on cheap plastic imports.

It was a surprising injection of nostalgia into my day, and one whose implications are very depressing.

I think I need my tiger.

Merry Christmas, y'all!

2006-12-25T08:08:00.000-08:00

My Christmas miracle? My father-in-law got a deal on some Grey Goose vodka. Premium vodka on the rocks for Christmas Eve is a goooooooooood thing.

If you're here, reading this, I love you, and wish you the very happpiest holidays I possibly can. Mwuh.

Requiem for Milkfat

2006-12-15T10:02:00.000-08:00

I went to the doctor this week.

That probably isn't that big a deal for many people, but it had been 11 years since I went to the doctor (not including one brief visit to the student health clinic at WWU a few years ago). And, I was kinda terrified what I was going to find out.

It all started with a little hypochondria. Starting a few weeks back, there was this intermittent shooting, prickly pain across the left side of my chest. I convinced myself I had angina and was dying. But, I have the kind of hypochondria that lives in denial, so I didn't say anything about it. I did, however, cut caffeine out completely, radically cut down on smoking (from probably 3 to 4 packs per week to maybe five cigarettes per week and many non-smoking days), started eating better, and woke myself up at five some mornings to take a walk. And, I made a doctor's appointment.

Before the appointment ever came around, I figured out I didn't have angina. I put so much stress into the muscles of my neck and shoulders that they were pulling against my pecs. A damn good massage from a LMP friend cleared it pretty well up.

But, really, I'm 34 and laden with vice, and am going to need a referral for the snip-snip I want anyway, so I kept my appointment (as well as the no caffeine, diminished smoking and such). And, despite the angina phantom dissipating, I was still scared of what he might tell me.

Day of the appointment, I was sweating it. I answered all the nurses questions honestly (yes, ma'am, I am vice-laden) and mentioned the history of minor-but-eventually-exacerbated heart conditions in my family. So, she gave me an EKG, and the doctor came in.

I'm too young to need his finger in my ass just yet, but I was measured and prodded and my testicles hefted to and fro. The only bad thing I heard through the entire visit was my weight, which cracked 200 for the first time. But, my blood pressure was low, my EKG looked fine, and the doc told me I had the resting heart rate of an athlete. They took some blood and piss and sent me merrily on my way.

And, really, I was riding pretty high. That little angina scare had woken me up, improved a few habits, and was now a thing of the past.

The next day, however, I had to call in for test results. My exuberant mood crashed.

My cholesterol is 220. Not quite to the "here's your heart pills, dear" level, but squarely in the middle of the "time to clean up your act, dipshit" range.

This surprised me, and pissed me off. Because, I rarely eat red meat, or much meat at all for that matter. We are (forgive us, ~A~) a soy-heavy house, and I sneak as much fish in as I can when my wife isn't looking. I'm not a lover of fruit, but am a lover of vegetables (have yet to meet one I don't like), and eat mainly whole grains and always have.

No, don't jump in, you don't have to tell me because I know. It is eggs and cheese and butter.

I'm willing to make egg white omelettes and buy reduced-fat cheese, but this butter thing is total bullshit. That is the loss that cuts deepest.

When I moved out of the familial homestead, the first thing I did was switch to real butter. We were margarine-only, and I hated that, hated the barely-meltable Country Crock asscheese-in-a-tub, or the I Can't Believe It's Not Asscheese nonsense that always produced oily belches.

My father's house (my parents divorced when I was one and both remarried) had butter, and it was just one of the many bits of exoticism I enjoyed on weekends and summer breaks (along with cable TV and sugary cereal with toys inside). To this day, though mine has been a butter house for 16 years now, the taste and smell of butter reminds me of my dad's house (as does sulphur, because they lived on a mountain over Ithaca, NY and the wells were all sulphur, but that's another story).

I'm gonna miss butter, and feel a little cheated. Granted, any time I try and claim that I take fairly good care of myself my liver just chuckles derisively, but still, this was not the problem I foresaw. What I eat has rarely been the issue, at least not so much as what I drink or setb on fire and inhale.

Now I've got my SmartBalance spread, and my nonfat yogurt vegetable dip. I guess I should just be happy they don't come with a side of angina and heart pills.

I'm still gonna cheat every now and again damnit, because if I've eaten my last flank steak, then, well, life ain't barely worth livin'. Sure going to miss that butter, tho'.

SantaGod is watching!

2006-12-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

There is a television commercial out there somewhere, I forget for what (so it’s very effective), that shows a young kid engaged in some manner of foolishness. When his father notices what he is doing, he says “Santa’s watching” and the kid straightens up. Whole thing about taking advantage of things while you can.

I thought, back in the halcyon days of idealism before actual parenthood, that I would never stoop to such manipulation, wouldn’t taint the Santa story with tales of coal and naughty lists. I would communicate with my child, talk to her, help her to understand and make the right decisions about behavior.

Then my child turned three.

(The Terrible Twos, by the way, are a fallacy, an urban legend like Target being owned by the French or no-strings-attached sex. Age three is when the shit, damn near literally, hits the fan.)

We have been working the Nice and Naughty lists for all they are fucking worth. Throwing a fit because it’s bedtime? Santa sees you. Interrupting Mama and Daddy talking by screaming and hitting one or the other? Spend the day on the Naughty list. Won’t clean up your toys? Imagine how hard it will be to clean up after coal.

Oh, you want to get back on the Nice list? How about some steamed broccoli and a thorough room cleaning. That should do the trick.

I don’t feel entirely right about this, but only in a theoretical sense. In practice, it rules. I want it to be Christmas every month and I want her to believe in Santa until she leaves for college. But, I do understand the issues with coercing your child into good behavior.

I’ve been reading an analysis of the writing and compiling of the Bible lately. There are literally centuries for which there are no records of the Bible’s development, when the texts that would become the New Testament in particular were hand-copied by scribes who would often take liberties (or just make mistakes) in transcriptions. There is abundant evidence of deliberate edits, of competing versions and visions.

Laden with my new insight into the power of Santa (long may his concept live!) for parents, I’ve decided that the temptation for these scribes and other learned religious folks to make the same move, to pull a Santa and lean heavily on the “God’ll get ya” in order to make the hoi polloi straighten up and fly right, was just too much. They likely saw congregants as children, being as the literate, the only ones that could look for themselves at what a text said, made up less than a tenth of the population. I mean, really, because look, the words of Christ and the dogma of the Christian church are quite far apart, and if I can succumb to the temptation and justify my means with the ends, why wouldn’t community leaders and intelligentsia of the early CE.

Thing is, kids are allowed to stop believing in Santa at a pretty young age. I don’t recall ever being angry at being forced to be good once I discovered that the coercive force, the myth of Santa, was just that (though of course I’m secretly convinced, down deep, that Liv will in fact resent me for it, because I’m also secretly convinced I suck ass as a father). But, maybe that was because I wasn’t told to hate queers or vote Republican for Santa.

Unveiling to the devout that it wasn’t God or Jesus threatening them to stay in line but rather some elitist intellectuals of the first few CE centuries is likely to create a bit more of a backlash. Which is too bad, because read as an allegory run through a centuries-long game of telephone instead of divinely-inspired, error-free literal truth, the Bible could be a greater source of good than it is these days.

And maybe more of my friends would have as little beef with God as they do Santa.

Some backpedaling

2006-11-28T14:11:00.000-08:00

My beige buddy TBO directed me to an interview with the two victims of the Michael Richards tirade. Gotta say, if what they say is true, and I don't have any reason to believe it isn't, then I'm through giving Richards the benefit of the doubt.

Let me be clear - I never in any way condoned what he said, but I wanted to know more about the context before I entirely judged hi. The more that comes out, the clearer it is that he didn't just get flustered but has some serious damn issues. No space for hate comics anymore, and that seems like what he was pretty much going for.

But, I remain opposed to a monetary settlement. I don't think a performer should be held legally, financially responsible for offense taken at his or her words. That's just a slippery slope I'm not willing to start down.

Now, if Richards is any kind of man, he'll offer a personal, face-to-face apology (screw this retired judge bullshit), and he'll try to make some amends, which could include money, gifts, what-have-you. But, it would only mean something if he does it by choice. It shouldn't go to court, it shouldn't be mandated, because it is bad precedent and robs the act of meaning, would make it crass (but, of course, what do lawyers know for crass?).

Seriously, Allred should fuck right off. And you know what? Richards should, too.

Dues

2006-11-26T21:54:00.000-08:00

My lowest point as an activist, well, I should have seen it coming.

Sophomore year of college, I was still the dumbass yokel I was when I entered college. Then, my best friend called me from her school to tell me she had been raped the year prior as a virgin. It struck me deeply, and the next day I found the office for SCAREd (Students Concerned About Rape Education) and joined up.

It was the first time I had ever been welcomed with exuberance in my life. This was an organization that, due to some very unfortunate events on the Syracuse campus, had gained a national reputation, appearing on Geraldo and the front page of The Village Voice the year before I joined (I had no idea, of course), but which was still struggling to gain real traction on campus. And, here I was a clean-cut white boy that didn’t even look gay asking to join up. Ya gotta just step back and understand the significance.

I threw myself entirely in. Within weeks, I was presenting sexual assault education programs in dorms and at frats. And, it made sense to me. I believed in what I was saying. I advocated the same message amongst my friends and acquaintances, became known within my circles for what I was doing.

The following year, I was elected SCAREd’s Media Spokesperson, meaning all media interviews were either conducted by me or our president. And they were often contentious. Early 90’s, media was not very willing to hear our message, but were very willing to put us in front of cameras and microphones.

So, mid-year, I agree to a phone interview with a woman that writes for a national insurance company newsletter, and mid-interview she says “Well, don’t you think we can chalk some of this up to ‘boys will be boys’?” I said, no, hell no, we have an obligation to teach boys to act like men, and real men don’t rape. I was happy with the answer, but stewing at the question.

Shortly after the interview was over, a group of SCAREd women walked into the office, and when one of them asked about the interview I shared that question. She followed up by asking me if I thought the interviewer was serious or just trying to play devil’s advocate. I responded, “No, I think she was just a dumb bitch.”

Reading that last sentence, if you know what a group of college-age feminists are like, you understand how colossally stupid that response was. I spent the next 15 minutes having my ass group-chewed.

But, here’s the thing. Though I took it, and understood my mistake, I never thought it was fair. Here I was, a barely-adequate male on a testosterone campus spending the majority of my time working on what most people thought a feminist cause, constantly questioned in my intentions by both men and women, slammed for a moment of anger that still seems, 15+ years later, perfectly valid. Ass-chewed because I dared call a bitch a "bitch."

It wouldn’t hold much significance, being that I went on to lead that same organization the following year, stood in front of numerous official committees, brought the university chancellor, personally, practically holding his hand, over to our side, not to mention being the first person to break into the athletic department and be allowed to present programming to SU’s beloved athletes, except that I find I still piss people off the same way I did that day.

But, here’s the thing. Rarely have the people I piss off with an offhand statement stood on the front lines. Rarely have they risked anything for their opinions as I have. Stand on the front lines and you have the right to say what you want (though sometimes what you say understandably demands an explanation you have every right to be given the chance to offer up). And, I know I stood there, and I’m going to keep talking the same way.

And, this being the whole reason I started writing in the first place, if you come at me, after saying some of the shit I do, and don’t offer me that chance, don’t get that I’ve risked more than you do with your locally-defined RIGHT way to think, I’m NEVER going to listen to you. Wrong as that is, I just won’t.

The message being – fight, and you can say what you want, you have proven your responsibility to your words. Otherwise, shut the fuck up, until you are willing to lay it on the line. And NEVER, EVER try to take a moral high ground you haven’t earned (and remember that the way you are born isn’t earned, it just is).

Oh yeah, and this – engage first, judge later. I’ve got a real knee-jerk reaction to knee-jerk reactions.

The Week(s) in Race

2006-11-25T19:23:00.000-08:00

It’s been a couple of weeks of race in high profile, thanks mostly to Michael Richards’s inability to either handle hecklers or distinguish boundaries. I’d love to believe that a positive dialogue can actually arise from discussions of the incident. I’m encouraged in that slender hope by the fact Richards is planning to appear on Rev. Jesse Jackson’s radio show. I’m far less encouraged to learn that the gentlemen that Richards berated have a lawyer and made public their request for a personal apology and “maybe some money.”*

But it was the end of a story, or more accurately the story of the spiking of a story, that has most engaged me, and that is OJ Simpson and the “If I Did It” interview and book deal.

To the issue itself, I fell both ways at different times. I believe freedom of the press begins with the person that owns the press, so even in my initial disgust never entertained even for a moment the thought they should be censored. It just struck me as ridiculously poor taste. The more I thought about it, however, the more interested I was in seeing it go ahead.

Why would somebody do something like “If I Did It”? It cracks me up that somebody, apparently, actually asked OJ this question. I mean, why the hell do you think? He has a civil judgment against him that was set as large as it is to insure he could never make enough money to pay it off. He sold his Heisman trophies and every other damn thing he owned, and has only an NFL pension and his home. Of course he did it because someone was willing to pay. Regan? I’ve decided to take at face value her explanation of needing to find closure, even if only vicarious, after a history of spousal abuse. (And, just because there is another why out there in this case, let us harbor no notion that Murdoch made a moral decision to cut the project, as a man with no morals can do no such thing – it was just business.)

But, my reason for wanting to see it done was different. I wanted to see old wounds torn open.

I’m not sure if the OJ Verdict is quite one of the slam-duck “where were you” moments of my generation, but for me it ranks with the Rodney King verdict (standing in front of my tiny b/w TV in my dorm room saying “all hell is gonna break loose now”), the first bombing of Baghdad (playing Ultima III on a friends NES), and the first shuttle explosion (wandering the halls while cutting class in eighth grade). The OJ verdict arrived a few months after I moved to Seattle. I was working for my uncle at the time, installing framed artwork for commercial clients, and was hanging marine-themed prints in the common building of a large condo complex. The complex’s cleaning and maintenance staff were all on break together, watching the judgment read on TV, and it wasn’t until my “you gotta be fucking kidding me” was drowned out by applause and cheers that I realized I was the only white person in the room.

I remember being stunned, and keeping my trap shut. I couldn’t understand how anybody could cheer this verdict. I knew, obviously, that folks were pissed off by the Rodney King verdict, and rightfully so, (though I didn’t understand yet the complex issues that a prominent black man married to a white woman raised in the black community, especially among sisters), but I couldn’t see how letting this asshole walk proved anything. Still, I had no intention of starting a public debate on the issue.

And that, to me, seems the wound that needs tearing open, because I believe we left things unsaid that are festering just below the surface. Beginning with the slow Bronco freeway roll, the OJ case drove a wedge between women’s advocates and minority advocates, creating a rift that took years to heal. But, it did, because progressive activists have to work together, have to talk to each other. The rest of us didn’t really do that. The civil case came along later and brought a measure of justice, but I think the whole case left a feeling of “them colored folks is crazy” rolling about in white folks’ heads.

Now, before anyone gets all riled up, don’t think I’m asking for black folks to explain themselves to white folks, as though white folk approval is somehow necessary or ever desirable, because that isn’t it. I wanted to revisit the OJ story because we were afraid to talk about it in the aftermath before, or maybe we were just tired of it, and I feel like there was something to be gained, another slender hope that black folks could admit they were a bit ghoulish in cheering the freedom of a double-murderer, and white folks could admit that they were taking a little too much glee in waiting for a famous and accomplished black man to be strung up, and we could all admit we still don’t understand each other.

I feel like, watching Richards, that what welled up from him was, in Jackson’s words, deep-seated. And, I believe that it is things like this, a lingering frustration over not being able to understand the other side, and being afraid or unable to talk about it, that create that pressure of hate and pus building up. And I don’t believe we are necessarily aware that they are there. Richards sure seems shocked as hell.

These are all slim hopes, I know. That a pseudo-confession or a comic’s latent racial hostility spewing forth could become productive focal points of discussion, that we can overcome our own fears and intellectual laziness, emotional sensitivities. But, I’m gonna keep hoping.

Just like OJ will keep looking for the real killer.

* - In three separate accounts that I read today, this type of wording was used – maybe some money, the possibility of money – and I think it’s a little sick in the head. The “maybe” makes it clear they are fishing, clearly have no legal basis to demand money. It makes them sound like punks, to be perfectly honest. Richards damn well better apologize to them face-to-face, but he damn well better not give them any money. Think of the precedent – an artist, a performer offends you, and you are awarded damages. Yes, in this case Richards just went off, but it casts a chill over any kind of controversial art. Give them their money back for the price of the show tickets, ok, maybe, but I’d draw a firm line beyond that.

Kramer vs Kramer

2006-11-20T12:59:00.000-08:00

For the love of Pete, have you seen the Michael Richards video?

Now, I was never a huge Seinfeld fan - liked it, and still like it, just fine, its ok for when I ain't movin' from the couch. And, I have no idea what Richards is like as a person or as a stand-up comic. But, damn, dude, what were you thinking?

Maybe I'm naive, but seems like if Richards was a flat-out racist, we woulda heard about it by now. I mean, Mel you could kinda see coming, but this?

Clearly, he lost it, lost control of the situation, but I'm trying to figure out what he might have been going for. The mumbling at the end, just before he gets off stage, about "these words, these words" sounded, sorta, just for that minute, like he was evoking Lenny Bruce. Earlier he made another move, something about us being outraged or shocked, that sounded like, especially in light of his "the horror"esque, it could be heading toward a Lenny-riff. But, he was clearly worked up and pissed off at these guys, and handling nothing like nuance.

There are times and places and ways to use such language to make a point, and clearly this wasn't a time or place or way, but was there any intent? If we are too quick to assume he's a racist cracker-ass motherfucker, is that the same as being quick to assume John Kerry thinks our military is full of dumbasses?

I'm not trying to make excuses for him, because I care so little about him, but I'm wonderin'.

Something like I'm wondering what Bill Cosby and Aaron McGruder might have to say to each other if they sat down and watched some BET together.

Anyway, this will likely slide him from the B list solidly down to C or D, and good riddance if you can't show a little more sense than that. I'm sure he'll be drying his tears with Seinfeld residuals checks.

UPDATE!

Richards' apology makes me think he is 1) shithouse crazy, 2)hopelessly behind the times and 3)probably not an "active" racist and yet possessing of some ugly hidden anger.

Liv n' God

2006-11-08T14:46:00.000-08:00

I started trying to post about this weeks ago, but haven’t really had the traction with the issue to move very far forward. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and haven’t yet come to much resolution.

A few weeks ago, Liv spent a Saturday night with her grandparents. Tricia and I were attending a wedding that Liv was invited to, but which would carry on well beyond her meltdown zone, so the grandparents, bless their generous souls, drove out to the wedding site to pick her up mid-reception.

On the Friday evening before the wedding, my mother-in-law sprung a little surprise on us. She wanted us to pack Liv some nice clothes as she would be attending Sunday school before we picked her up.

Now, I’ve known for a long time, even well before Livvie was on the way, that religion would be an issue with my extended family. They are very traditional Christians, led by my mother-in-law and her sister’s family. I am not, by a long shot.

My religious views are difficult to articulate exactly – I was raised a sort of general Protestant Christian, attending Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodists churches. I was baptized in a Baptist church and confirmed in a Methodist church, the latter of which I was active in to the point of once delivering a sermonette to the congregation. I stopped attending church in my late teens, however, and embarked on my on religious education, spurred mainly by the illogic of condemning Jews, queers, Muslims and others to hell. I’ve read a ton of Hindu texts, much of the Koran, work by Jewish scholars, Buddhist texts, and have come to believe in the Truth they all hold in common and vehemently resist the efforts of any to say they are the only way to access that Truth.

Which, y’know, is a damnably difficult position to present to a three-year-old, but one I know I will have to present as an option to balance against the other viewpoints Liv will encounter.

I just hadn’t expected her to encounter those other viewpoints quite so closely, quite so soon.

So, anyway, the surprise was popped and Daddy capitulated. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t come back from one day of Sunday school calling Jews the “Christ-killers.”

Now, my daughter, she asks a lot of questions. I mean, duh, she’s three, but there is just a constant patter of inquiry pouring out of this kid. I try to be as respectful as possible of her questions because I want to encourage her inquisitive nature, but the strings of “why” questions become a bit hard to handle. Like, why a word means what it does. She just isn’t satisfied with an “I don’t know.”

Post-Sunday-School, the questions have become significantly more daunting.

More than anything, she just seems to want to understand who this God character is that she has heard so much about from grandma. My belief in a non-personified God is a little abstract for a three-year-old, but I’ve just plunged in headfirst. Mainly headfirst, anyway. I haven’t tried to directly address her limited understanding of the personal “He” God, but I take pains not to validate it, eschewing pronouns entirely when we talk about God. But, I have tried to present the idea of “God as everything” as best I can. As a result, our conversations often devolve into:

“Are you God, Daddy?”

“Yes, I am part of God.”

“Is Spikey God?”

“Yes, Spikey is part of God.” I declined to point out that our cat, Spike, also is a sizeable portion of the devil.

“Are the trees God?”

“Yes, baby, the trees are God.”

“Is God nice?”

“God is love, babygirl. God is all the love there is combined.”

This might all be deflecting the questions that Sunday school and her grandma’s general God talk brought up, but, with the possible exception of the very last bit, I can’t help but feel it isn’t very helpful in terms of general spiritual education. I feel like I am very much failing at that, and maybe even that it was inevitable given my tendency to deconstruct existing religious messages instead creating or pursuing any nourishing spiritual narrative.

And, I’m not sure what to do about it.

This past weekend, Tricia was visiting friends in the Boonies and Liv and I took a walk to the playground a dozen blocks north of us. Ballard is known for its concentration of churches, and we passed now fewer than four starting up, letting out, or in full swing of worship services. And Livvie asked me when we were going to church, and why we didn’t go to church.

My first, internal reaction was along the lines of “why in the hell would we?” I’m on the far side of what the churches we passed want to offer, or at least believe I am. I silently cursed my in-laws for bringing this kind of question down on me, as I’m prett sure it wouldn’t have occurred to Liv otherwise.

Then I remembered some of the positive experiences I have had in church. The sense of community I felt in the Methodist church, where I cleaned up after vandals and served pancake breakfasts and helped with the toddlers, or the power of a weekly reminder of the size of the universe and the existence of love. I remember the utter rejuvenation I felt walking out of Glide Baptist in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, led by an inclusive preacher and a choir like I never knew existed.

I have gotten where I am in my spiritual understanding not by being told a truth, but through the living of my experiences, which included church.

I don’t think I am suggesting that Tricia and I are going to sign up for Mars Hill Church and start teaching Livvie to hate the gays like the Bible says (though a couple passages after the one fundamentalists claim demonizes homosexuality points out that the smell of a burning bull is perfume to the nose of God, and burning a bull carcass sounds kinda fun), but I’m wondering about my deficiencies in spiritual education and the value of participation in a regular spiritual exercise like church (is supposed to be).

While I’m wondering, I think perhaps the best I can do is not deflect difficult questions but rather point to Liv the aspects of God that appear to us every day.

“Livvie, the Republicans lost control of the House and maybe the Senate today, and Donald Rumsfeld resigned, and that makes me happy.”

“Is God happy, Daddy?”

“God is happiness, babygirl, all the happiness that exists combined.”

Happy Halloween!

2006-10-31T13:06:00.000-08:00

Happy Halloween, all my scared and scary friends!

Presenting Dumbassdore!

Photo credit Olivia Jewell.

The Legendary Notebook

2006-10-23T11:13:00.000-07:00

I bought myself a Moleskine notebook a bunch of months back, and it has been a prized possession since. When it went missing for a week or two, eventually turning up under the driver’s seat of our car, I was frantic. My current favorite pants/shorts selections are made in large part to how easily they fit the notebook and a pen.

I’ve always carried regular notebooks. My thinking is so scattered and my writing so referential and tangential and my short-term memory such a mess (I can remember quotes from movies and strings of numbers and faces even in passing but continually lose my car keys and double-book my calendar and fail to remember birthdays), that I need a place to jot thoughts as they occur. This notebook has been different in two key ways.

The first is the simple fact it is still around. I had a brief three-notebook string of actually filling books before they were misplaced so long or proved so inconvenient to carry that they were discarded for a new ones, all of then paperback-sized sketch books. I have far more half-filled notebooks (or less) than anything else in my writing file (which only qualifies as a file because there are some folders present and I keep all the paper in something whose label read “file box”). But, this little Moleskine, mainly because it is perfect size and so damn sexy, has, it’s brief disappearance notwithstanding, exhibited some staying power.

The other is my inability to actually read anything I have written in it. Short of the very few times I have written a phone number, email address or author’s name, I can’t bring myself to read the damn thing.

To some degree, the re-reading isn’t really necessary. The act of writing is often enough to cement an idea in my head; in college, I took copious notes that I almost never returned to after learning from experience that I forgot most everything, didn’t pay enough attention to the incoming information, when I took no notes. And it is true with many of the thoughts that end up in my Moleskine. If I spend the few moments of reflection it takes to pull the thing out and write, I will remember the thought later.

But, there is a lot more than thoughts I’ve already recalled in this book, and I know that, and I still won’t let myself read them.

This has never been a problem before. My notebooks have been workspaces, the places I worked out writing problems, grappled with ideas. And the work shared space with shopping lists and rummy scores and doodles. Filled, or partially-filled and then cast aside, they became documents of efforts to write and the time in which I was exerting those efforts. Even now, I return to those notebooks looking for ideas, examining old problems, or simply nostalgically flipping through the remains from some portion of my interior life.

So, why can’t I just open this stupid little black notebook that is sitting next to me right now and read it?

It is, after all, “the legendary notebook, used by artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin.” I mean, it is, as I believe I mentioned, dead sexy. And, as such, I haven’t been willing to let it become the same kind of workspace, or maybe more particular livespace, other notebooks have been. Those few numbers and emails that have snuck in were hard for me, screamed “exception!” the same way this notebook screams “boutique!”

I have fetishized this notebook to the point it isn’t useful. It is so pretty and cool that I have become overly precious about what goes in it, first by design, by not allowing it to be used for the mundane, and then by reflection – if I have written something in the Moelskine, which I think is precious, then what is written is therefore, by association, precious, and I don’t want to read it.

But, the truth is, I know that is kinda bullshit. Not entirely, just kinda, because it ignores the real issue, the real answer I knew I was coming to when I started writing. I’m not particularly good at examining my own life anymore. It makes me uncomfortable, and it makes me confront truths I have been skimming past, suppressing, or maybe even, and this is the scariest of all, been in complete ignorance of. Many likely have to do with my father(s), even more with my complicity in my own unhappiness, repeatedly for as long as I can remember.

And here I have a record of my interior life, made precious and recorded in a fetishized, ritualized manner, stripped of the bits of the mundane that might humanize the me written into the words and offer some hope that the me reading might give that recorded me a fucking break.

I’m scared of reading my little black book because I know both how vicious and how sensitive I can be, and I fear what happens when the two sides meet.

That makes me a pussy, doesn’t it? A pussy with a pretty little notebook.

Effluvia

2006-10-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

I had a bad week last week. There was the cable guy debacle, friends getting married, friends having preemies, friends having crises, my daughter scratching my wife's cornea, preschool preschool preschool. So, what I got, sitting in my monkeycage tonight, are just some bits and pieces to share.

Radio ad heard during a weekend football contest:
Ever wondered what it would feel like to be Columbus discovering a new land? Now you can!Really, now I can wonder? Gee, thanks.

Stephen Baldwin, "actor" and born-again evangelist in a Radar interview, on Tom Cruise:
I'd like to give him a spicy Jesus roll!"

And, a thought from me:
Those days when you wake up positive and your kid stymies you anyway are as painful and jarring as jumping into a quickie with an unlubricated condom.

More, something better, soo, I promise.

Where have all the fucking poets gone? I hope they're dead.

2006-09-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I came up with the brilliant idea to write every digit from one to one million. I thought it would be an interesting meditation and an exercise in wrestling with the actuality of a truly large number.* I planned to begin and end each number-writing session with a few paragraphs of writing, exploring any ideas that came from the experience.

I don’t recall exactly how far along I got. I made an early tactical error by computing how many digits would be involved. Writing every number from one to one million requires 5,888,896 digits, which really just sounds as abstract as one million. So, I converted that to time. Imagining that I could consistently write one digit per second, it would require over 1600 hours to complete the task, and even estimating the rate higher would only cut the time to 800 hours at 2 digits/second or 550 at 3 digits/second.

This knowledge was enough to dishearten me. It didn’t help when I began to consider how long between true milestones. At my highest estimated rate of 3 digits/sec, I would reach 100,000 after 45 hours of work, but would have to work twelve times again that long to make a million.

Regardless, the Sisyphean and essentially empty endeavor went uncompleted. I hadn’t even given it much thought in the intervening years. That is, until I was thinking about my repeatedly-stalled novel (which is also my thesis project, and my last major hurdle to graduation), particularly about the narrator and the distaste for idealism I share with him, and I wondered why I never write poetry anymore.

For years, poetry was all I really wanted to write. After drunkenly announcing to a group of friends from back East that had all ended up here together that I wanted to be a poet, that was my central, sustaining artistic goal for years. I’d try stories here and there, and wrote some sketch comedy (during which time I met TBO), but poetry was my love. I wrote it, read it, performed it.

I didn’t suck. Some of my work didn’t translate well to the page, and I’ve only ever had a few published, but even the harshest critics from my circle at the time had to admit that when I read my own work, it made for damn good art.

But, at some ill-defined point along the way, I stopped. I found I was relying more and more on poring through old notes to get something together for a show. The last bit I wrote specifically to be performed was a one-man poetry slam with layered costumes so I stripped my way from caricature to caricature of slam poets. Then there was just some noodling, and then really nothing. The last serious poem I wrote was for Liv’s first birthday, the second-to-last was for my friend Julianto’s memorial, each over two years ago.

There doesn’t seem to be a simple answer for why. I’m excessively cynical, but I always have been. I definitely grew to hate the poetry scene, especially the slams, and had the hatred reinforced all over again in grad school. I mean, fucking poets. Get a fucking life.

That right there typifies the change, though. That night, just before Christmas, a lot of years ago, exchanging cheap gifts with friends and getting hammered on a Jagermeister knock-off, when I announced I wanted to be a poet, it wasn’t a grand proclamation. I looked at my feet, gave the word half-voice, was almost asking permission. It felt so fucking romantic and right. I want to be a poet.

Now the word catches in my throat.

I even still like poetry, good poetry. Wislawa Szymborska. Carl Sandberg. Tennyson. Blake. Bukowski. Sometimes Ginsberg but fuck that Ferlingetti hack.

It is just such a mad enterprise, and one so lightly taken up by fools (and not the good kind of fools, the dumbass ones). It only works with dead solemn determination and in absentia of the artists themselves, who are insufferable. There is such a thing as a humble novelist, but there is no such thing as a humble poet.

For me, poetry came to occupy the same space the writing-to-a-million project. I only cared to engage it on the meta-level, thinking about doing it without actually doing it. Like poetry. I have poetic thoughts, I write poetic notes, I imagine single lines delivered, but I’m unwilling to engage its actuality. I would write to a million if it didn’t take so long, and I’d write poetry if I didn’t have to be a fucking poet to do it.

Were I still idealistic, or at list willing to choke down my gorge when confronted with idealism, then the actuality would be the thing, would be worth anything. But, it just isn’t anymore.

Maybe I am losing faith in art.

Though I appreciate more, I think, the irreproducible beauty of everyday life.

A cynical romantic? Yeah, that’s healthy. Morose and angry is no way to go through life, son.**

* - It was also inspired, I have to admit, by a friend who suggested, when I asked if he wanted to play rummy, that we play to a million. We made it up over the 50,000 mark, with multiple pages and pieces of moulding and walls and empty tape rolls as scorecards. We gave up shortly after I figured that with 380 available points/hand, even if one player scored every possible point every hand, which is of course not possible given the rules of the game, it would require over 2600 hands to complete the game. I just don’t think we liked each other quite well enough for that kind of commitment.

** - Bonus points if you can identify the classic movie this last line has been paraphrased from.

Just a thought I thought I'd share

2006-09-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

I'd rather have a little bit more than I need than a little bit less.

But, I rather have a bit less than I need than a lot more. And I'd rather have much less than I need than a whole lot more.

But that's just me.

Race, Fruit, & Survivor

2006-09-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

TBP (The Beige Pain-in-the-ass) has been hounding me about my take on Survivor’s decision to break contestants into four tribes based on race. I threatened a blog post about this when the announcement was first made, but haven’t really been moved to actually write about it, mainly because I care so little about Survivor and believe my criticism will be misinterpreted.

But, I have finally been goaded into it by TBP’s repeated forwards of links with subject lines like “Preemptive rebuttal to your blog post.”

The problem I face in presenting my opinion is that my opinion isn’t reliant on actually seeing the show. Preposterous? I know TBP thinks so. But, my criticism is not about what the show will potentially do, that there will be, as some critics have said, inevitable editing choices based on stereotypes. So, as crazy as it may seem, and as much as it opens me up for easy counter-criticism, I haven’t and won’t watch the show.

See, my problem with the race-based tribes of Survivor is in the very concept of dividng people by race. I believe race is an illusion, a set of prejudices built upon the arbitrary decision to identify people by skin color.

Arbitrary in what way? Much like fruits, vegetables and plants. Ask anybody what the difference between fruits and vegatables is, and they will provide an answer based on seeds and vines and trees and such, but the truth is that fruits and vegetables are all just plants. We have made up arbitrary distinctions based on which part of the plant we happen to eat. The fruit/vegetable distinction actually says very little about the plant in question, and much more about us.

And, we’ve decided that skin color is a distinction that can predict other traits about a person. That skin color and hair color and eye color actually say something meaningful about who a person is and will become. And dividing people in a game show based on these traits reinforces the idea that these traits actually hold significance. But, they don’t.

Which isn’t to say that cultural distinction don’t exist, or that racism doesn’t exist. There are in fact cultural differences that have a high correlation to race, but not because of a necessary link but rather as an extension of our belief in the arbitrary significance of those traits. They matter, they correlate with culture, because we think they do.

And what we think means everything in this case. Besides reinforcing the idea that race is a meaningful way to divide people, that certain people have innate characteristics, this move by Survivor presents the opportunity for prejudices that individuals hold to be played out in a perceived “safe” venue. So, when Rush Limbaugh goes on about black people being poor swimmers and Hispanics being willing to do things other people won’t, he can shrug and say “Hey, I’m just sayin’, in the content of the game…”

What it comes down to is this – I think CBS played the race card to boost ratings. I think they were willing to support the idea that people of different races have different innate characteristics, which is the foundational idea of racism, to boost their audience and make a few more bucks. And I think that sucks.

I’m not calling for them to pull the show, or for advertiser boycotts, or anything like that. But, I’d sure like to see more in-depth discussion, a discourse that can get beyond the “c’mon, it’s not so bad, it’s just TV” rationale to which even Salon falls prey, one which would be the only (or at least by far the best) hope for any positive outcome from what host Jeff Probst has called “a social experiment.”

And, one more thing, before I get any of TBP’s flak about being a white dude and talking about racism when I should be “let[ting] minorities dictate amongst themselves what is or isn’t racist?” White is as much a race as black, which is to say not much of anything in my worldview, I’ll admit, but for two long has been seen as invisible, as being without race, which to my mind reinforces the idea of white superiority as much as seeing women as penis-less reinforces male superiority. The discourse on race affects everyone, and everyone SHOULD (I know, I know) take part.

Ideally, I’d like to see everyone take part in dismantling the idea that race means anything, as that seems to me the key to dismantling racism.

Interesting side note – The flap over whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable stems from the fact that fruit was assessed a higher import duty in the late 1800’s than a vegetable, and a tomato grower successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for the vegetable designation to improve his profit margin. Hmmm, reinforce arbitrary distinctions for financial gain – that sounds familiar.

Preschool

2006-09-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

Our preschool has a set of rules that are the foundation of conduct in the classroom. They are all simple and direct, and one of the reasons I am starting to like this place.

My favorite? “You can only knock down what you build.”

This rule is pretty specifically geared towards the block area, of course, but I like its wider connotations. You can only tear down those things to which you have contributed, you can only take what you have given.

There is something beautiful and poetic and sweet about that sentiment.

I find as a whole that the co-op preschool we have joined is not nearly so fearsome a prospect as I imagined. I mean, yeah, of course. I’ve never really been able to adopt the maxim “Don’t worry - if that about which you worry comes to pass, you will have worried twice, and if it does not, you will have worried in vain.”

What became clear quite quickly is that this will be a fun experience for me, because I really like the kids. I was worried about my interactions with the parents, but that isn’t why I am there when I am there. It’s about the kids, and I like kids, actually play with and talk to, never at or down to, kids.

And I can even say this after being called in the very first time I was listed as the sub, at the end of the very first week.

I’m trying not to develop favorites or prejudices, but they are there.

The little Danish-Asian boy I call Chah Li after a character in a long ago favorite novel about Vietnam, who never speaks but understands and communicates incredibly well with his body and face, and likes to play catch with me.

Or little Pinhead, a sweet and doomed little girl that was the first one to ask me to take her to the potty, and told me I was nice at the flax seed table.

Or ACAC, the Alpha Cool Asian Chick, that everyone loves and yet clearly harbors a malevolent streak, and told me flat out that I wasn’t funny while she was laughing at me.

Or The Game, named unfortunately after a famous sci-fi character and apparently completely unaware of the concept of discipline, with whom I can already see the conflicts and the possibility, which I won’t be able to shake, of breaking through and making a connection.

There is the buoyant Swiss Miss, and crazy blonde Eraserhead that loves him some Jim, and Heartthrob already wooing all the girls and waiting to be pie-eyed for a decent piper.

It is already easy to ignore pSAM (the pSeudo-Alpha Mom) that tried three times to take over my table and tell the kids what to do, or OldLoon, the grey-headed uber-Lib that snapped at me when I asked her mean little prick of a boy to put on a coat for outdoor playtime in the rain (apparently, I was limiting his creative expression by suggesting that a t-shirt and leggings would be a bit cold). They don’t matter, the kids matter, just as their opinions of my parenting don’t matter, only Liv does.

But, since I’m sounding all fucking noble here, I have to admit something. Because, really, I don’t want to mislead anybody into believing I’m a twink. I am, as one friend nailed perfectly, a son-of-a-bitch. And part of me, when I’m playing with kids, treating them like people, always dropping to their eye level, being charming at the same time as being authoritative, which kids just naturally respond to, dropping their attitude like a barista will drop her panties when confronted with the same confidence, part of me just wants to be better in that room, with those kids, than any of the parents I’ve already tagged with self-righteous worldviews.

Nice guy. Good with kids. Sick fuck. Jim Jewell.

Why don’t they make a pill for me?

The Corrie Calls Begin

2006-09-16T16:48:00.000-07:00

I fielded my first Rachel Corrie call today.

Rachel Corrie was a student at Olympia’s Evergreen State College that was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza. Her journal entries and emails home have been adapted into a play called My Name is Rachel Corrie, which the Seattle Rep is producing in the spring.

Other productions of this play have already sparked protests from the Jewish community, and the same is expected here, especially in light of the recent shooting at the Jewish Federation’s offices in downtown Seattle.

The call that turned out to be what is likely the first of many Rachel Corrie calls started out innocently enough. The man on the phone asked where we were located. Potentially odd, as we have no shows currently running, but it didn’t raise any red flags. I told him we were located on the northwest corner of the Seattle Center.

“Is that part of the Pacific Science Center, then?”

“No, we’re are on the opposite end of the campus from the Pacific Science Center.”

“But, you are still a part of… what do you call it?”

“The Seattle Center, yes.”

“So, you are a public organization, run by the city.”

“No, we lease the building from the Center.”

“So, you’re an independent organization operating on public land?”

“Well, leasing from…”

“But, you are an independent corporation?”

“I’m not sure I am the right person to give you a detailed and definitive answer.”

At this point, the red flags began to appear. The questioning was just too pointed.

“Can you tell me how you can justify using public land to promote this Rachel Corrie play, which is going to generate a lot of hatred for the Jews?”

“Uhhh… I think there is probably someone better equipped to answer that than the weekend receptionist.”

What is going to kill me about fielding these calls is the fact I can’t really engage these knuckleheads. This man, for example, I wanted to educate on how appallingly little artistic input is actually solicited from the monkeycage staff. I wanted to wonder aloud whether he had actually read the play. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. But, I couldn’t. There are some unfair limitations placed on us monkeycagers.

“Who should I call, then? The mayor’s office?”

“I’m not sure that the mayor’s office would have much to offer, sir.”

“Aren’t you using city property to produce this Rachel Corrie thing?”

Apparently, what he is hoping for is that the mayor’s office or Seattle Center will pull the longstanding lease from Seattle’s largest producing theater because of our spring play selection. Nobody that calls and harasses an innocent monkeycager is looking for reasoned debate. And his desire to suppress a play that is based on first person accounts of a historic event made me hate him just a little more.

“Sure, maybe you should call the mayor’s office.”

And, here’s the thing. I’m entirely conflicted on the Israel-Palestine issue. There is plenty of blame to go around.

And, further, I see little reason to consider Rachel Corrie a folk hero. She was a privileged white girl that spent her entire life in Olympia, WA and got herself killed by getting involved with someone else’s fight. I have a love/hate relationship with idealism.

But, I absolutely think the play should be produced.

Then I wondered why. I’m suspicious of issue plays for the same reason I am suspicious of protest poetry – so much of it sucks on an artistic level (though, when done well, I believe they are powerful agents of social change). And, much as I suspicionated about my Corrie caller, I haven’t actually read the play. Maybe I had no right to get internally uppity because in fact Rachel has a two-page monologue starting on page twelve that ends with “Death to Satan’s bastards! Death to the murderous Jews!”

So, now I’ve guilted myself into reading this stupid play, and if it sucks as much throughout as it does in the first few pages I plan to start protesting along with the angry Jews.

Anybody got the mayor’s number handy?

Breaking the Silence

2006-09-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Clearly I need to find some way to break this writing drought. I wish I could say it was only in this venue that I’ve fallen silent, but that is sadly not true. As much as I’ve been able to muster lately are my typically snarky and “nuanced” (read “spin-doctored”) comments on the blogs of others.

I could write about my attempt to enjoy a ballgame with a couple of guys from work on Friday night. Beautiful evening, tickets waiting under my name at will call, creeping along the viaduct toward the 1st Ave S exit, fully in the midst of gameday traffic and just blocks from the stadium when the transmission begins to slip. And then, nothin’ but revving, no power. My momentum just barely carried me to the top of the off ramp, and I coasted down to an hour-long wait for the tow truck, followed by a long truck ride to the auto shop, all of which rendered it impossible for me to get my or anyone else’s tickets. An evening fairly typical, if to an extreme degree, of my luck these days.

Or I could write about where I was five years ago tomorrow, though there was little special about it. My wife, then just the woman with whom I lived in sin, was in California for the week for work, so I was likely hungover. My mother-in-law-to-be called me around 7am, I wondered what she was babbling about and went back to sleep. Eventually woke to find the whole world gone crazy. Smoked and played chess in Discovery Park watching the jets circle Seattle and a frigate pull into Elliott Bay. But, if I wrote about that I’d digress into a story about WWF Smackdown two nights later in my favorite family pub and how much more caring and human and reasonable the messages from the wrestlers between bouts were than anything the talking heads were spouting on cable.

I could even just go off on Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which I just read for the first time, and which was the second satisfying fantasy story I’ve read recently, along with Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, that fell apart with ridiculous resolution in the final pages. L’Engle’s dash from mortal danger to I-can-win-with-love-oh-there-I-have-Papa!-Mama!-TheEnd in six pages was the most ham-handed conclusion to an ambitious and engaging work since young lit phenom Nick McDonell had a maniac walk out of the bedroom with an uzi four pages shy of the end. And, please, Ray, you’re a fucking genius, you could have come up with a better way to destroy the darkness than laughter. Why does it seem like you are ripping off Peter Pan?

But, what is really at me right now is Livvie starting preschool. We joined a preschool co-op nearby, which I am already beginning to fear may be as noble and doomed an effort as Communism. The thing about the kind of people that join co-ops in Seattle is that they are progressives who are very proud of themselves for being progressive. They are the root of my anger with “should.” For secular humanists, they are very Christian in their condescension at times. And where my little girl is concerned, I just don’t take kindly to being told how it should be, much less when it is passive-aggressively inferred.

Yeah, I think it is safe to say that I have built up some ridiculous fears and prejudices going into this experience.

And, really it is more about me than them. I’m incredibly hard on myself as a father. I’m sure I’m doing a terrible job more often than not, and that really isn’t a cry for affirmation, I swear, because I wouldn’t believe you. I worry about giving too many treats. I worry about not giving enough. I worry about finding the line between listening to my daughter and being conned by my daughter. I worry about giving her enough access to things that will help develop her wicked smart brain, getting her enough exercise, shielding her from acquiring my anti-social tendencies.

And I’m really worried that suddenly exposing myself to a community of other parents is going to needle every one of those vulnerabilities.

Of course, I’m also going to get a couple hours to myself twice a week. I shouldn’t be bitching, which just makes it a little more pathetic that I want to.

She starts tomorrow morning at 9:30. And thereafter September 11th will be known as the day our whole lives changed.

Pluto's just a rock, and that rocks

2006-08-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

I, for one, am happy that the International Astronomers’ Union decided to strip Pluto of its designation as a planet.

It isn’t so much the science of the thing, though I agree there, considering that leaving the designation would have required also granting planet status to some decidedly un-planetlike objects kicking around the solar system. And it isn’t merely the subversiveness of the move (Topple the dominant cosmological paradigm! Burn the motherfucker down!), or the fact that opponents were waving plush Pluto the dog toys and bringing sentiment and even kitch into a scientific discussion.

It is that we need these occasional reminders that knowledge is not static, that deeply and widely held beliefs can prove to be wrong.

All your life there have been nine planets. It has been a fact. And now it isn’t. Now you’ll have to learn some new mnemonic (my favorite – My Very Erotic Mate Joyfully Satisfies Unusual Needs Passionately – is an easy edit), and maybe help out at your kid’s school sawing that last arm off all the solar system models.

But, you have been reminded, facts are just falsehoods waiting to be uncovered, and maybe that reminder will bubble up through your subconscious at the right time, when the fact in question really needs subverting.

Would the last Seattle sports icon to leave please shut off the lights?

2006-08-20T09:43:00.000-07:00

Jamie Moyer has left Seattle.

Yeah, doesn’t mean much to you, unless it does, unless you already understand the world in which the story lives.

Moyer is a small man by pitcher standards, smaller than me, and weird, and aloof. He is the Mariners career leader in wins, starts, and innings pitched, the only Ms pitcher to have two 20+ win seasons, and at forty-fucking-three years old is respected around the league as the craftiest no-stuff-havin’ leftie veteran you can hope to face.

He has a veto on any trade, chooses where he goes, because he has damn well earned it. He and his wife run the best sports-related non-profit in the city, and get millions of dollars to people in need, especially children.

Moyer is one of the last, check that, THE last old Seattle sports icon in the city. Nobody else could leave a Seattle team with more history in tow than Jamie.

But, he’s gone to Philly for a couple of prospects. I heard it on the way back from work last night as the final, almost toss-off, clip in the ESPN radio update.

See, given who Jamie is, this means some things. It means he’s done pitching after this season. He isn’t going to start a season as anything but a Mariner at this point in his career. So, why go to Philly at all? Why not play your final games for the organization in which you built your legacy?

Because the veterans of Moyer’s caliber understand and respect this game differently, both more purely and with more compromises, than fans. It is late August, he is given the chance to pitch a month and a half for a contender and get his home team, his real team, some young blood for the future. It is the right thing to do, mainly because to refuse would be the wrong thing, would cross the line to selfishness that a career team athlete just can’t accept.

Fans are going to be upset, but it happens. We’ve seen this before. When GM Bill Bavasi announced the trade, he spoke of Moyer almost as a lost legacy, as though we had to be reminded that he was once a Mariner. No, we’ll have to be reminded, some day, that he was once a Philly, much as San Francisco 49 fans will have to be reminded that Jerry Rice was once a Seahawk. Patrick Ewing ended his career here, Vince Lombardi coached the Redskins after he had achieved icon status in Green Bay, and what was the last jersey that Jordan wore anyway? Moyer will still be remembered as a Mariner.

But, there is something poignant there, regardless. Because he didn’t get to finish the perfect string. It was a shutout, but not a perfect game. He’ll always be ours, but we’ll remember how close he was to being that rare athlete that gets to stay home until the very end.

We may never again see the superstar athlete that retires from the team that drafted him. John Elway got to. Larry Bird. Magic. Better sports geeks than I could extend the list, but might be hard-pressed to name the most recent examples. We settle for players like Brett Favre, drafted by Atlanta, but 13+ years becoming a legendary Green Bay Packer, and though we’re willing to forget if they play a final season, a last few games, in another uniform, it still stings.

Moyer will be remembered as a Mariner in years to come, but we’ve all just been denied the chance to see the final tip of the hat in our stadium, in our colors.

Makes me sad.

I coulda been pithy without this pain

2006-08-19T18:22:00.000-07:00

Growing up in upstate New York, John Gotti was a mythopoetic figure, especially in my life. My stepfather’s father was first-generation Sicilian, and I always believed he “knew people.”

John Gotti had a nickname that had to be shared in exactly this way. It demanded it, because it was so satisfying.

Someone mentions Gotti, and you say “Ah, yes, the Teflon Don.”

And then you wait. And after a pause…

“The Teflon Don?”

“Can’t make anything stick.”

Y’see that? Satisfying.

My job shares this quality in way. I work the monkeycage at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

*pause*

“Monkeycage?”

“Yeah, because a reasonable intelligent monkey can do my job.”

Buh-dump baaaah. Satisfying.

The monkeycage is the tiny hut-like office at the stage door entrance of the theatre. During the day, it operates as the main administrative desk, but I and my fellow simians work the off-hours. Sometimes, the incredibly off hours.

I have been here two hours, and I have received a single phone call from the guy working before me telling me he had walked off with the front door key, and have buzzed two people in. They are the only souls I have seen or heard, and it isn’t likely to get hopping any time between now and 10:30 when I finally lock the place down. I’ll be back here tomorrow, Sunday, morning at 9, and could well see nary a hide nor hair until my relief comes at 4.

I’m going batshit crazy already.

Granted, much of the allure of this job is the solitude and almost utter lack of responsibility. If the place doesn’t burn down, it’s been a good shift. I can read and write without 35 pounds of small child hanging off my arm. I’ve been known to drink on the job, often at the behest of my supervisor, and in fact have a bottle of Beaujolais sitting next to me at this very moment.

But, damn, did I mention the batshit crazy part?

It’s a terrible price to pay for a pithy nickname for your job.

I knew I shoulda asked Grandpa Tony for an in. Then I coulda been pithy and cool.

“Jim Jewell. Ahh, yeah, the Oily Whore.”

*pause*

“Oily whore?”

“He’s a slippery fuck.”

Satisfying.

Happy Fucking Birthday To Me

2006-08-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

I turn 34 today. It may well be the least significant possible age to turn. There is little essential difference between a 33-year-old and a 34-year-old. There are no milestones attached. I can't even run for president yet.

To top it off, I kinda mortgaged this birthday. My mother gave me a little cash in July to help fund my Vegas gambling kitty, and Liv and Tricia bought me golf sandals last week. So, no big surprises - I was very capitalistic with my birthday this year, turning it into goods.

But, the girls are still working it. Livvie climbed into bed with me this morning and sang a very quiet Happy Birthday, then brought me the card she made for me, and then led me into the living room where Happy Birthday Daddy! and We Love You! were written on the windows in those bitchin' washable window markers I bought Liv this week. Very cool. And I got a peek at my cake, which was going to be a plain double-stacker, but then the top piece crumbled and Tricia managed, with the help of some of those cob-shaped corn-spearers, turned it into a way cool monster head. Pretty sweet.

And, I imagine I'll be getting rather drunk later.

Just been a bit blue lately, and unable to motivate myself to write much, which always makes me bluer. Staying on top of house chores and Liv trips and projects, but that's about it. I suppose I could force my birthday into a turning point, but that just feels a little more pathetic.

OK, I'll try.

Look out 34! Here I come! It's a whole new woooorld!

*sigh* Yeah, that'll work. Maybe the Jameson will do the trick. 8 hrs and counting down.

Defense of Marriage Act II: The Vendetta

2006-08-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

This Whole Gay Marriage Thing

I’ll tell ya, it is finally pissing me off. I haven’t been terrifically invested in the issue because I was never particularly invested in the concept of marriage (as opposed to my specific marriage, which I am totally invested in, but as a relationship more than an institution). I believe in equal rights and equal protection no matter what, but don’t really care how that is achieved; I’m onboard with states throwing open the doors so everyone can get married or getting out of the marriage business and only conferring civil unions that are accessible to anyone, letting the churches do what they want with marriage. Whatever. I want loving couples of any makeup to be able to adopt and share insurance coverage and receive survivor benefits, but as causes go it just has never ranked high on my agenda.

But, the rationales provided when courts in particular (because I expect spun rhetoric from legislatures) uphold gay marriage bans, as they did recently in Washington State, has sufficiently rattled my cage. Because when official bodies, with a straight motherfucking face, start laying out self-righteous arbitrary bullshit, it is information warfare, and the only tactic is to slice up the arguments, peel the skin back, expose the black heart, and feed it to ‘em.

What really gets me is the disingenuous nature of the arguments. If they just stepped forward and said “Listen, we don’t really like gay people and neither do most of the voters, mainly because gay sex skeeves us out and gets our juices flowing at the same time, so we’re just not going to let them marry,” then fine. They're douchebags, but at least douchebags that admit their small-mindedness and petty hate.

But, noooOOOOOOooooo, they gotta go and start talking about procreation, make that the link, play it like a fucking trump card. “Gotcha there! That’s the one thing you fudgepackers and carpetmunchers can’t do, so we’re going to make it the basis of the decision.”

This from the majority opinion in the Washington case: "The Legislature was entitled to believe [when it established the law] that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation is essential to the survival of the human race…” Forget the twaddle about the benefits of living with biological parents that follows, which is not supported by the research (stable, loving homelife IS a benefit, but regardless of the blood relationship). Survival of the human race? Are they fucking kidding me?

Listen, it seems perfectly reasonable to believe that we won’t be around in a hundred-some years, but insufficient hooking up of dicks and pussies is not going to be the cause. We have more than enough people in the world. I’d vote too many.

But, further, the claim, the connection, is just bullshit. As Dan Savage points out in his recent NYT op-ed, his 60+ grandfather didn’t remarry for procreative purposes or to ensure that his (fully-grown) children had both mommy and daddy. Procreation and marriage aren’t in any way necessarily connected, meaning that a marriage without procreation is still considered a marriage. But, should it be?

Maybe the WA Supreme Court and everyone else that has trotted out this thin veil to throw over institutional homophobia are really on to something. If lack of procreative ability is reason enough to deny gays marriage, then it is reason enough to deny any non-procreative couple their license.

Let’s put some balls on the fucking Defense of Marriage Act. Those pussy Republicans didn’t go far enough. You want to get married, show that you can have children, period. Too old? Too bad. Shooting blanks? You’re flying solo. Post-hysterectomy? Cry me a river, spinster.

But we can’t stop there. The Lord don’t love no shirkers nor cheats, after all. Marriage should be provisional until the procreation happens. Can’t make the magic happen? We’re sending you back to living in sin, and you can buy your own damned insurance when you get there. Marriage is for the baby-makers.

Think I can’t get support for such a measure? Then you don’t understand the quiet contempt parents hold all childless couple in, with your sex whenever and especially wherever you want, and your going to movies and plays and concerts, and your vacations and your disposable income. We hate you for not suffering along with us, almost as much as the WA Supreme Court hates man-on-man lovin’ and the thought that a precious, precious egg or seed might go wasted in mankind’s relentless war against extinction.

Dudes, I’m fucking serious. This is their argument, and they are totally safe making it, because there are too many people like me, that damn gay marriage with faint praise because they aren’t gay, they don’t really care, it doesn’t really affect them.

Let’s make it absolutely fucking clear what their rationale means, and hold them to it. Applying their argument in any way short of universally, which suddenly implicates a lot more people, falls illegally short of equal protection.

Fuck ‘em with their own twisted logic. Now excuse me while I go paint up my “Marriage is for breeders” sign and prepare to march.

'Cuz That What Dreams Are Made Of

2006-07-22T21:21:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling of late. Can't get my head into any kind of productive space. Much of that is the new no-nap, ten-straight-hours regime of LivCare these days, but nearly as much is the result of unrest and chaos in my heart and mind. In such times, I turn to comfort foods.

I watch Scrubs. I re-read Harry Potter.

The latter I am up to right now, book six. I've read them all a number of times, and even wrote a grad school paper on literary dialect in the series. Just came upon a point in book six that interested me.

At then end of book five, Harry hears a prophecy about him and Voldemort that says "Neither can live while the other survives..." Rumors about the prophecy spread, leading the wizard media to brand Potter "The Chosen One."

What I am finding interesting is the unmitigated optimism of such a move, and how really very likely a move it seems. News leaks that Harry and a famous evil wizard cannot both survive, and it is interpreted to mean that Harry has been Chosen to rid the world of the evil. Yet, that is not at all what the prophecy says. There is no promise of a happy ending. The inevitability of a happy ending is the lens through which the news is interpreted.

And damned if that isn't one of the smart little things that Rowling slips into her books. Much is made of her being a single parent, but she was also an accomplished university student in her time, and I stick with the series because it betrays a wisdom behind it.

We are conditioned to believe, to hope. It is reflexive. One of two who must die becomes The Chosen One because it has to. Good must win. We assume eventual success on the part of good because we have to. These aren't mere illusions to hold on to, but the bedrock of the impetus forward through each bone-crushing, soul-deadening day we encounter.

We don't believe the best because we want to, but because we have to. It has to be reflex because it defies sense, and it has to exist at all so that we can live, can continue.

And we kinda know it. It is the fallibility, the intellectual decrepitude that writers like Rowling and Vonnegut refuse to deride or disavow, and instead celebrate. Silly as it may seem in an intellectual moment.

Hope makes us human. Lack of hope makes us dead.

Beware false prophets

2006-07-12T20:15:00.001-07:00

I just read Lyam's post on his official move to Buddhism, and have been a frequent and vocal correspondent with TBO on the same subject to the point of being unfair in a non-disclosure kind of way.

It sounds like a fantastic move for Ly, and TBO damn near emits light when he speaks of his beliefs. And yet, I find myself time and again the kicker of sacred cows. Which in itself I am ok with, but which is completely unfair when I allow no access into my own beliefs, admit to no cows suitable for kicking.

So, here is my deal, as far as I can articulate it.

Our, meaning all individual's, struggle to rectify a finite life to an understanding of the infinte is the fundamental thing that binds all of us together, mainly because it produces such an elaborate array of flailings about, nearly all of which manifest in the creation of false binaries. At best, we understand Truth in bites. But when we do... well, that is what we live for.

Any path one might find to even the briefest contact with Truth, I'm down with. But, I believe that seeing Truth is a one-way proposition: one can only see Truth when looking towards and contemplating Truth, and not when looking toward or contemplating non-Truth (which is just mullings over of the false binaries we create).

I trust and am willing to listen to any person of faith, any strain of religious thought, up to and until the inevitable move of "beware false prohpets" and its like. When someone, Christian or Buddhist or proclaimed atheist, tells me what they believe and how it makes them feel and what it helps them understand, I am rapt (largely because of my own difficulties feeling the same way). The moment they begin to tell me why any other strain of thought is wrong, I tune out. The conversation is over.

If you are enlightened, if you have found an access to Truth, there is nothing to be gained from kicking anyone else off the train because their ticket was punched by a different agency than yours. And while I will not jump to the support of any particular ticket-punching agency, I will rush to defend the holder of any ticket from assault.

Here is the important distinction: religions almost invariably develop political arms. This is the portion of a religion that enforces the "beware false prophets" edicts. Christianity is a prime example of the importance of this distinction. I will join in on kicking the Chrisitian church for its every attempt to spread its dogma into political systems, and find much to hold in contempt in both the history of the church and its current agenda, but it does not follow in my worldview that Christianity cannot provide an access to Truth.

When that distinction is crossed, I rebel, every time.

As to what I believe, well, I'll try. I believe in the essential fallibility of human beings to resolve the paradoxes of existence, and in the redemptive power of embracing those paradoxes. I see little of the universe to be mutually exclusive, if any, but rather always a negotiation of forces whose existence is inextricably tied. I believe in more than I am, which is also incomplete without me, and that the goodness, the infinite Love, of the universe proven in the fact of existence, of Life.

I believe that all paths are equal, have the same potential for bearing fruit, and the one slap-across-the-forehead-able offense is to lose focus from the path to Truth to denigrate another path.

Plus, I really like kicking cows, but only sacred ones. Because the only other thing I believe is that the Universe is a colossal joke played upon those who don't get it.

Because it's fun to cut yourself

2006-07-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

I hain’t been writing fer shit lately (I won't use the w.b. word on principle). Have to muscle it up for this effing blog even. So, being the stupid sombitch that I am, I figured the sure cure was to start picking apart my “writing,” such as it is. Here's my first go-round.

I believe I rely on the word unsatisfying, and render it exceptionally unsatisfying as a result, because it is an equation. Not merely an empty word like nice or weird, but an equation of a word like unsatisfying because it appeals to my need to use logic as a ruse and a dodge. That word enables me (and boy do I know about enabling) when asked by an astute reader “what does that mean?” to draw myself up and state, not say but state, “it is that which does not satisfy, depending upon what the conditions for satisfaction are,” implying all the while that a truly astute reader should know what those conditions are without having to be spoonfed by me (the classic dimunization of critic move). It is exactly the copout of poorly crafted postmodern fiction, which believes merely embracing meaninglessness has meaning. (It doesn’t.)

It is the kind of shortcut you don’t realize great writers aren’t taking until you wonder why their prose stands erect while yours flips floppily flaccid (yeah, take a bite into that with a feminist critique – juicy!).

Specificity. It’s hard. That’s why we get married. So we can approximate and be understood. (The reason used to be sex, but we have that anyway, so we really needed a new reason.) * I shit you not, but True Companion by Marc Cohn is playing on the coffeeshop radio as I pen these poignant lines about matrimony.

Yo, actors. Give me a shout out. Specificity. You dig, right?

I'd like to make a motion

2006-06-30T15:51:00.000-07:00

I just came across this again reading one of the local weekly rags earlier today, and it has long bugged me, now enough to move me to action. It is a sign of linguistic laziness, of writers relying on convention without thinking things through for their own damn selves.

It is the literary dialect spelling of talk as "tawk" to indicate Long Island/New Jersey coffee klatch pronunciation.

You know the pronunciation of which I speak. Go ahead, say it out loud right now.

It doesn't sound like tawk. I mean, really, just read tawk aloud. Tawk rhymes with hawk, and moves my mouth to drawl. Have a conversation with a Texan, and you're tawking.

But, I'm not one to merely bitch and offer no solution, or at least not this time.

Gotta get or give the downlow on the cheating ways of a neighbor's spouse over cups of Folgers? Here it is. Lean in close and say "Can we toowk?" Try it, say that one out loud. Just do it. There, you sounded all Joan Rivers, all Mike Myers on SNL.

Toowk. Learn it, use it, love it.

Do I hear a second?

Vegas, baby. Just because.

2006-06-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

I’m going to Vegas this weekend. Three days with one of the best men (I couldn’t pick, so I made them all best men) from my wedding, with some time with a buddy of his from high school and a crazy beefcake metrosexual we both know from Seattle.

Gotta tell ya, I love Vegas. I fucking LOVE it, love it the way you love the lust of your life who you’re pretty sure gave you crabs. How decadent is Vegas? You can smoke in the fuckin’ elevators, man!

The dirty wicked unbridled joy of Vegas is a truth I assume is self-evident. So, I’ve been taken aback when I’ve been asked, as I have a number of times lately, by an incredibly broad range of people, after I announce that I’m going, “why?”

They pinch up their faces when they ask. What, you like throwing money away? What, you want to get fucked up, sell your little girl’s future to strippers one dollar at a time? What, you want some woman of loose morals to help you desecrate the sanctity of your matrimonial vows?

Why, why other than becauses you shouldn’t have, why would you want to go to Vegas?

To which I say: Listen! Back up offa me, you friggin’ Puritans. The Mayflower is thataway, and she’s sailing soon.

No, I don’t go to Vegas to lose all my money, get lap dances, and philander. Yes, I will likely get quite fucked up while I am there, but not the other things. I hate losing money so much it is a natural governor, think strip joints are fun because they are ridiculous, not sexy, and besides, I’m pretty sure I’ll be leaving my penis home in Seattle, tucked safely into my wife’s purse as usual.

So why do I go?

Because I love being near to the people that are doing all of these things. I get to enter this liminal zone, not one of those guys but close enough to taste the risk, no longer upright, uptight Daddy at home and not quite on a “What happens in Vegas” tear. I’m neither good nor evil in Vegas, neither safe nor dangerous. I’ll be sucking down Camels and free beer while playing nickel slots and looking at waitress tits when I answer a call on my cell and start telling my babykid how much I love and miss her. In babytalk if necessary.

I live life in the spaces between. Always have. It confuses people, which is good.

If you care to work, it's play

2006-06-20T15:36:00.000-07:00

A recent NYT op-ed lamented the increase in summer homework, by turns also questioning overloaded homework during the school year and the pedagogical value of homework at all. The article is pretty thin, relying on anecdotal evidence to infer that summer homework is widespread and excessive, and, it will soon become obvious that I think, misses the more important point. Granted, it is an op-ed piece, and the authors’ upcoming book will likely, one would think (hope), have greater substance, but their shallow and barely-warranted claim that the argument against summer homework amounts to “kids need playtime” really got under my skin.

OK, disclaimer here. I was an even huger geek growing up than I am now, and my family moved a lot, often at the end of a school year. Summer wasn’t always unadulterated joy; sometimes it was sucky and lonely. I would have welcomed directed academic activities during those summers, and would have learned much more than I did in calculating each day how many hours I had to play outside before my mother wouldn’t bitch when I parked myself in front of the TV watching reruns of Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes.

Like I said, even huger geek.

But, here is what I feel like I missed out on: the chance to equate intellectual pursuits and play. That is how I view English study now, and the experience I embody in my classroom – we have language, we have texts, we can do whatever the fuck we want with them. Just the idea that I could have sniffed that earlier, to engage intellectual activities in the air of warm weather and freedom from the atavistic social Darwinism of public school... damn. It is a mistake to insist that here is play that is fun, and over here is school that is work.

Because, here is the really important thing that these two “educators” completely missed in this piece: when a student doesn’t care, the completion of an assignment doesn’t matter. If student A cares and works across the summer to finish homework at their own pace, and student B doesn’t care and knocks them all off Labor Day weekend, even if the quality of the finished product is the same, only student A got something out of the experience. So, yes, summer homework may in fact fail, but not because it is an inevitable failure, but because the school has already failed any student that doesn’t care.

That is what I have imagined my job to be when I’m in the classroom (and I do understand the limitations and privileges of the fact that I have only taught and only plan to teach at the college level): my job is to entice or encourage or bully or cajole my students into caring, into having some kind of sense of purpose beyond “do the work, pass the class, advance.”

It isn’t particularly instructive to say too much homework is too much. It is always about the why. Homework activities that aren’t scaffolded into the curriculum are just the kind of busywork and knee-jerk pedagogy that the authors lament, but it is the design of the activities and not the existence of homework that they should be targeting.

Oh, our kids need time to play! Well, yeah, no shit. But they also have to be instilled with the belief that there are ways to bridge what they already care about with the things they are told to care about, and that it is possible for work and play to be the same thing.

Think about those few people you have known for whom work and play really were the same thing, or those moments in your life when it is true. Those are sublimely happy people and moments, worthy of our children and students.

Magic loses out to reality

2006-06-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

I wrote this self-indulgently wonderment post about these pictures, speculating on what they might be, with geeky digressions into fantasy because "fairy circle" came so immeditaely to mind. Then I looked up fairy circle and found nearly identical pics.

I'm not as smart as a I pretend. At least I don't even try and affect "sharp."

Anyway, Liv and I found a couple cool fairy circles today on Sandpoint's kite hill.

(My speculation about possible military cover-up of a magically-empowered alien race was way cooler.)

The Evil That Men Do

2006-06-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

(Not the kickass Iron Maiden tune.)

I just read a great little piece in AdBusters that described, in a short second-person narrative, what you could do to a prisoner and not be considered a torturer, none of which would leave a physical trace. You could do all of these things and short of killing the guy, any claim that torture took place can be called hearsay, testimony vs testimony, deniable.

There is no doubt in my mind that the activities sanctioned by the US military for interrogation are morally reprehensible, clearly torture, and just plain wrong, but I wouldn’t make those arguments to a proponent of torture. I’m not going to ask them to accept my moral system. I would make an argument of efficacy.

It is widely held in intelligence and law enforcement circles that information acquired through torture is of dubious value. Testimony supplied under duress is easily and believable recanted, making it worthless in a court of law.

At some point, if you are being tortured, notions of truth fly out the window. Because, if it isn’t the truth the torturers are looking for, it won’t do you any good. You just want to say whatever it is that will make the pain stop.

And everybody seems to know this. Yet, torture continues. It seems to me the only way to explain its persistence is that it has nothing to do with the information gained (because we know it to be of little value) and all to do with venting the anger of the captors at their own failure to advance the narrative they are living.

Which is extra especially scary when the people deciding who to torture are so sure of a narrative so misguided that the only way to make it remotely plausible was to lie. How could you possible satisfy such people? How could you possibly tell them what they want to hear? Except to lie?

It is the evil in men, beyond rationality and completely in the service of dark, bloody passion, that allows torture to exist.

MNF R.I.P.

2006-06-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Monday Night Football will never be the same.

At the end of this past football season, Monday Night Football left ABC for ESPN. I didn’t give it much thought, as I have both and will watch football wherever it goes. I recognized the sentimental nature of MNF leaving the network where Howard Cosell made it great, but, whatever.

Then last night I see an ESPN promo for the new MNF that shows historic moments like John Elway having his number retired.

Now, Elway played his entire career in Denver, took them from synonymous with Super Bowl losers to two straight, stretching his aging ass out in a dive for a first down and willing his team to victory. Wouldn’t say shit about you if you stuffed a handful of your own in his mouth.

Dude’s an icon whether you like him or not. Just is. And I was moved by the clip that ESPN showed.

But, I realized quickly that those moments, watching an icon tip his hat to the home town fans one last time, will NEVER happen on MNF again, and ESPN is offering a false bill of sale.

I have long said that football is the working man’s game, because you can devote one day to watching per week and get most of the season. And Monday Night Football became the commonplace for all of the fans. On Sunday, you watch what is local and follow the rest of the games, and then Monday night, after dinner at 9pm on the East Coast or instead of dinner at 6pm on the West, all the fans watch the same game.

And, this is important, I mean ALL the fans. Any fan with a bent clotheshanger and a $10 B/W set from the thrift could watch. Last game of the cycle, we’re all family here, this is home wherever it happens.

When MNF was on ABC, free to all, it was the kind of place you might hold a ceremony, because for it to mean anything (and I understand that the non-fans out there question whether sports ever menas much of anything) everybody has to have the opportunity to be there. Suddenly, MNF has this gatekeeper level added – you have to have cable, or go someplace that does.

The NFL is savvy, and exercises formidable control over its broadcast partners. They just aren’t going to place their pomp and ceremony where only a cable audience can get it. Likely, it will be the late Sunday game that takes over that function.

For me, it’s sad because Monday Night Football won’t be the icon on ESPN that it was on ABC – it can’t be. It will be just another game, a former commonplace.

And ESPN trying to whore out the former iconic status isn't going to help. Not that it’ll stop them from trying.

Done!

2006-06-05T22:32:00.000-07:00

I mailed off my final paper of the term today. I've been complaining most about the commute this quarter, due mainly to the half-hour roll through Everett rush hour and the assholes contained therein, so I tried to convince myself that I felt like it was over last Thursday. But, as soon as I walked out the post office and no longer had any kind of assignment hanging over my head, I felt free.

I mean, I can read Ultimate X-Men or this weird Twelve bullshit that has sucked me in today from that little prick McDonell I mean where does he get off publishing a novel at seventeen damn but if that doesn't make me understand how women feel when the little hottie can actually sing y'know? Where was I? Oh, yeah, I can do that without guilt. There's nothing else I should (shudder) be doing. The opportunity cost for anything my fancy might strike has dropped.

I see a first ever watching of Firefly on the horizon, some throwing down with this Haruki Murakami novel that's been teasing me from the shelf, fuck yeah.

Of course, I'll always have my friggin' blog to make me feel guilty, but I was raised WASP, whattya want?

2006 Addy for Ironic Contradiction in a Tagline

2006-05-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Update
Intelligent People... Sharing Intelligent Knowledge

Man, that made my night.

*EDIT*

Oh, please, for the love of all that is good any holy, read the articles on this site. I found their ad on craigslist, and giggled at their tagline, but then I started reading their articles. Oh, my, I just...

Go, now. My favorite moments are the guy that quotes himself as an expert and the chick's beer tips.