The Aerie
I have to admit, this was a good idea.
I mean, we spend so much of our time complaining, and taking things
for granted, it really does make sense to devote a day to
appreciation. To taking stock and realizing that having any stock to
take is better than the alternative.
So despite the fact that I'm as broke as hell and hoping some checks
arrive sometime soon, what do I have for which to be thankful?
Plenty.
Spiritually I'm thankful that I'm not burdened by religious thought.
Life's a lot simpler and straightforward when you're not trying to fit
your conclusions about God into the evidence of day to day living.
Other people have other conclusions, and apparently their beliefs suit
them, so that's all well and good. But for me, this works, and I'm
thankful for it. I have a sense of spirtuality and transcendance that
exists without the need for Deity.
I'm thankful that I have a chance to measure myself against my dreams.
That means that I'm free to act (thanks to all those who made this
possible throughout history), I'm skilled and intelligent, and I have
ambition. With the exception of some of my skills, the rest is the
product of circumstances outside my control, and for those gifts I'm
thankful.
I'm thankful for my family. I have three healthy and intelligent kids,
and for that no amount of thanks will ever be sufficient. I have a
spouse who is funny and smart and supportive, a great mom and a great
cook, and for that I'm very thankful.
I have good friends and acquaintances, people who I know I could count
on in time of need. People who have been there for me in the past when
things were rough, friends who share my interests and tolerate my
jokes. Thanks.
I'm really thankful for my business partner, who puts up with my
scatterbrained approach to business. Having been in several different
ventures in my life, I know the value of a steady, reliable partner,
and it cannot be expressed in terms of dollars. Thanks. I'm thankful
that I'm able to work on this business, however thready the income: it
beats sitting on tenterhooks waiting for a layoff notice. And I'm
thankful I can have a beer with lunch whenever it suits me!
I'm thankful that I have a good home, however messy. A safe place to
live. A good environment for my kids.
And I'm thankful that at my ripe old age I'm still able to work on
improving my health and physical well-being. I'm thankful that I'm not
completely insane.
Food. Friends. Family. A roof over my head. Good work to do. A safe
place to live.
I really don't know what I have to complain about.
[1]Last
So far so good. Relaxation at 100% and holding. I am avoiding becoming
involved with the politics and dramas unfolding around me by applying
the philosophy of "I am a chip of wood floating down the river." It
works really well. People start to stress around me, someone asks what
we should do, I just say to myself "I am a chip of wood floating down
the river." I don't care. It's not my problem. I'm on vacation.
Of course, no vacation would be complete without weirdness. In this
case I received a message shortly after leaving home that a Chicago
ABC-TV news station wanted to interview me for a followup to a screed
I launched into the ether some weeks ago regarding ICANN and internet
governance.
Normally I don't know what they'd have done -- either interviewed me
by phone or not at all, or maybe had me go into a local ABC affiliate
and done it remotely? Anyway, it just so happens that I'll be driving
back through Chicago on Monday afternoon. So suddenly I have an
appointment at 1:45 in Chicago.
Of course, if I'm going to be on a TV interview I need something to
wear other than three day old sweatshirts and vendorware from other
companies. So now alluvasudden I have to get a dress shirt and a tie
(at least).
Well, that's not so bad -- I need a new white dress shirt anyway. I've
been suffering a rash of scorchmarks on my shirts, and I'm not sure
where they are coming from. Ironing? That's what I thought, but then
some scorchmarks turned up on a pillowcase, and an undershirt. I
haven't ironed those! So it's either the eleven-year-old dryer, or the
brand new washer. No idea.
So yesterday I skipped one of my games and went shopping for a shirt
and a tie to wear on this interview on Monday. And of course I'm
stingy, because I'm broke, and I want a good price.
I started with the local campus menswear store, the Tall and Snooty
shop. They showed me a dress shirt for $58, but curled a lip and
suggested the $115 model, rahlly. Man, I don't know what kind of weed
theyre smoking. Maybe college lads preparing for their first job
interviews can be bamboozled into buying a $115 dress shirt, but if I
paid that much I'd expect the shirt to include satellite TV and
electric heating.
Then I headed over to Kohls. For $20 they offered a shirt that
appeared to have been stitched together from white packing tissue, and
felt like it too. It was so thin you could see the threads of my
undershirt. No thanks.
Finally, I head over to Target. In their limited menswear section I
come across my goal: $10.48 on sale, nice fabric. Perfect. Now for a
tie. I look around. I must be missing them. There are Christmas boxers
and twenty shelf-feet of leather belts, but I can't find the ties. I
pick up the Target Help Phone, and a cheerful computer tells me to
push one and then to push two.
"Now paging a team member!" she perks.
A moment of silence.
"MENS!" she bellows from the earpiece, as I feel my eardrum ricochet
off my uvula.
"MENS!" she cries again. I hadn't realized that the computer was going
to page personnel out of the telephone handset.
"MENS!" she shouts. I hold the phone up so that any team members in
the vicinity can hear the cry, and wonder why I didn't follow my
original plan of just shouting "Could someone help me?" Of course, the
team members are probably trained to only react to the keyword "MENS!"
She shouts "MENS" for two solid minutes, and then the line goes dead
without a word, as if the computer has suffered a seizure and fallen
over.
Nothing happens.
I take another pass through the section. No ties. I try the phone
again. Two minutes later, the magical invocation has failed, and no
employees are visible.
Finally I walk over to the dressing room attendant and ask her if
anything is supposed to happen after I use the Friendly Target Helpful
Help Phone of Help.
"Aw," she says, scraping the barest film of buttery consolation upon
the unsalted cracker of her concern, "We're real understaffed, they're
trying to save money."
According to my brother in law who works for Target's labyrinthine IS
department, Target just posted its third-straight profitable quarter.
But in the Target on Ann Arbor-Saline road (named for the artesian
eye-drop well that makes Ann Arbor the Mecca of allergy sufferer's
everywhere), the economic recession is in full force.
So failing to find a tie (and thus doomed to visit yet ANOTHER store),
I make my way to checkout. There they have one of those new
credit-card boxes that eats your card when you arrive and gives it
back after you sign.
"Fifteen forty five," says the girl behind the counter, and the box
lights up for my signature.
"That's not right," I say, "The shirt is $10.48."
She gives me the look that underpaid cashiers everywhere give to the
odd nut who fails to properly complete the ritual. Here she was, all
ready to send me off with a deeply insincere and passionless
"Havaniceday," and I've broken her rhythm.
"What?"
"The price is wrong, the shirt is $10.48." Behind me exasperated
shoppers are starting to put the items on the belt back into their
carts. My left arm and shoulder are encased in the ice of their
glares.
"Was it on sale?" she asks with the resignation of someone given the
choice between ice- and boiling-water enemas.
I briefly ponder what difference the sale price would make, but ask
instead, "Well, can't you re-ring it?"
"Naw, the shirt is already sold. That's why you gotta sign the credit
card."
I look down. The box smiles at me in expectation of producing an
inaccurate, jagged representation of my already slapdash signature.
There is no cancel button.
"I have to sign this?" I ask incredulously. In response the girl turns
and insolently throws the switch on her aisle light. It begins to
blink, the coded signal for "Troublemaker, send goons." She picks up
the phone.
"Yeah," she drawls, "I got a customer who says the price is wrong.
Yeah, he already bought it." She hangs up. "You gotta go to customer
service."
I raise my dispairing eyes to the sight of the purgatory that Dante
never trod, the Customer Service desk at Target. The throngs there
differ from those waiting in line for a Buchenwald shower only in that
they are clothed; their hopeless gazes are the same.
I still haven't signed the card, so I ask to speak to a manager.
Another call, a five minute wait beneath the froglike stare of my
nemesis the cashier, and a perky young woman arrives. She brims with
glee. She bubbles with delight. In a warm and sincere tone she repeats
almost verbatim the words of my surly torturer: You've already bought
the shirt, you have to sign the card, if there's a problem we will
deal with it at Customer Service. Have a nice day.
I sign the card.
Unable to resist her indoctrination, the cashier tells me to have a
nice day, although the tone of her voice suggests that the words "in
Hell" are only being choked back with difficulty.
Customer Service is still as crowded as the lobby on the morning after
Eid at the Mecca Holiday Inn. I swing across the store, back to the
desolate steppes of MENS! and confirm for my self that I am not wrong.
The sign is still there. The shirt is $10.48, and I don't have the
wrong tag or the wrong shirt or anything. Armed with the sword of
righteousness, I make my way to Customer Service.
I was just finishing War and Peace when I got to the front of the
line. The man in front of me couldnt understand why Target wouldn't
take back the $58 X-box game that he had bought. Upon learning that
his GameCube would not read the X-box disk (imagine that!) he had
hurried it back to Target for an exchange, only to learn that they
didn't accept open packages. I suppose someone in corporate was
worried that the purchase had been digitally duplicated, although why
you'd go to all the trouble to steal it from Target when you could
simply download it off of Kazaa is not clear. Possibly the Target
policymaker had no idea what Kazaa is. Possibly he or she is not a
computer nerd.
Anyway, my predecessor departed with his $58 coaster, and I presented
my case. I showed the paper where I'd written down the real price and
the code. Regardless of my statement, the matronly woman behind the
counter was forced to believe that I was a hamfisted liar and thief,
attempting to score $3.50 of cash out of Target, for only a two-hour
investment of time. Deploying one of the nonexistent MENS sales
assistants to verify the price only took another 20 minutes, not
counting the time necessary for thawing them from the carbonite.
When she discovered that i was NOT lying, that the sign actually did
proclaim the exact price that I had only verified myself, the service
representative summoned over the manager and the cashier. The three of
them together threw themselves to the floor, salaaming grievously and
apologizing for assuming that I was a lying thief. My money was
refunded to me, and a gift certificate was added thereto, in order
that I might again consider patronizing their humble establishment.
"What?" I said, snapping out of my reverie.
"This is a same-day purchase," she said, "We'll have to cancel the
transaction and re-ring the shirt."
"In other words," I said, "I may have used a bad card that will
bounce, and if you refund the difference I may get away with $3.52 of
cash from a bad card, as well as the shirt."
"Yeah," she said automatically, involved in re-ringing the shirt.
Man, I am the most determined, persistent thief of $3.52 that I've
ever met.
Finally an hour after entering the store, I leave with my shirt,
having avoided paying an extra $48 by investing an hour of my vacation
time.
And I still needed to buy a tie...
"I am a wood chip upon the river of life... I am merely a wood chip
floating down the river of life..."
[1]Last
...at the University of Michigan student union.
They have Mac's with OS/X running in the commons for people to use to
check their email.
During yesterday's 11-hour road trip, we passed dozens of trucks with
their company's website listed on the trailer.
And today in the pub restroom, someone had scrawed, "For a good time,
e-mail so-and-so@hotmail.com..."
The world is sure a weird place.
The fellow helping us at Kinko's asked if I knew how to use the
computer that I had requested in order to help design a friend's
business cards. When he told me he was 32, I told him I'd been using
computers since he was seven.
I got a call from a reporter at ABC News in Chicago, following up on a
story the're doing regarding ICANN. This is a followup to my column in
CNet a couple weeks back. Since it just so happens that I'll be
driving through Chicago on Monday, we may end up doing an interview.
Which means I'll need to run out and et a shirt, a tie, and a razor
blade!
I was prevailed upon by my spouse to attend this convention bearing
only a paper notebook rather than a computerized one. I think it was a
good decision, although this entry is testiment to my inability to go
completely cold turkey. Nonetheless it is kind of refreshing to carry
around only a completely losable paper notebook and a pencil.
And I've even gotten a little bit of writing work accomplished. My
story had managed to chase most of the characters up trees and had
begun throwing rocks at them. However not I have to figure out which
will fall out of the trees and upon who they will land. And I've been
able to work some of that out with pencil and paper along the way. So
that's good! If I'd had my laptop, I probably would have exhausted the
battery playing solitaire...
So it's a couple of hours until the con itself begins. I should
probably take the time to fulfill my promise to buy a couple of
gifts...
Meanwhile, I've been on vacation for two days, consumed three beers,
and gotten ten hours of sleep. Relaxation quotient at 100% and
holding...
[1]Last
I'm off, five days away. Still haven't decided if I'm going to take
the laptop or go cold turkey. If I take the laptop I could get a
little recreational writing done. If I leave the laptop home I could
get more rest. Hard to say which I need more, although everyone says I
need the rest more.
It used to be that getting away was a break from the hectic life of
raising three kids. But that benefit has been diminishing as the kids
get older. They're less work and more fun everyday. Of course, all
Minnesota kids are above average, but my kids are REALLY above
average.
My eldest son is a sensitive, thoughtful, and brilliant boy. He's fun
to talk to, and breathtakingly beautiful with his mothers face and
eyes. He's got an amazing ability to construct things from written
instructions, totally mindboggling to me. I simply don't learn from
written instructions at all. And he's also an interesting thinker: all
his life he's titled his statements. He'll say "Dad, here's something
I don't like..." or "Dad, you know what's interesting about trees?" I
don't think he's aware of just how smart he is.
[tree.jpg] My eleven year old daughter is lovely and sweet, and
terribly smart. She also has immense creative talent. She's been
drawing all her life and is quite good. Her tree, intended for a
website she was thinking of building, drawn about eight months ago. I
like the spare manner in which she treated the leaves, tree and
grounds. Rather than filling in all the colors, she just left the
outline. The tree is the elm in our back yard, accurately rendered
down to the missing limb at the primary crotch of the tree. And lately
she's taken up giving her poor, tired parents backrubs, and frankly
she's better at it than a lot of adults.
My youngest is simply brilliant, a vibrating tuning-fork of energy,
sensitive, intelligent, observant, and determined. The world had
better watch out for him when he grows up, there won't be anything
that he can't do. He's very insightful and comes up with very
interesting comments... and to add insult to injury, tomorrow is his
birthday! We gave him his presents tonight and had his family party
Sunday, so tomorrow he will have his party at school.
With kids like this at home, there isn't a lot of benefit from
"getting away" anymore. About the only thing left to get away from is
the work.
Which kind of makes it reasonable to leave the laptop home, I guess.
Why bring the work and leave the kids when I'd rather bring the kids
and leave the work?
But we'll see. I would like to do some writing-for-fun.
Either way it will be time to head off in a few hours, so I'd better
get going. But I'm missing my family already...
[1]Last
Welp, just a few more days til I get to go on vacation. I intend to
turn off my brain and my cell phone at the same time and hopefully
keep them off for the duration.
I wasn't sure I was going to go, but about a month ago my partner said
to me "You should go." I think he's afraid I'm burning myself out or
working myself to death. Ha! Little does he know! I burned myself out
YEARS ago, and am just going through the motions, waiting for
retirement!
So Thursday I take off for the fourth annual trip to [1]U-Con "in
beautiful Ann Arbor Michigan!". It's not much as annual getaways go,
but where some guys tromp through the woods in search of deer, I tromp
through the hallways of the University of Michigan Student Union in
search of Tekumel games.
Of course, the gaming is about 25% of the experience. The other
portions are 1) not being at work, 2) the road trip, 3) the Sunday
night party, and 4) not being at work. When you consider that half the
gaming experience is (for me) the fun of the Live Action Role Playing
(or LARP), and the fact that I put FIVE total entries in under
"experience", then the ordinary gaming is about 10% of the deal.
Of course, this year we have the fun of poverty to add to the mix. Not
only how will I enjoy my weekend, but how will I enjoy my weekend
while not spending any money? I don't care. If need be, I'll live off
of the free packets of sugar and non-dairy creamer in the union cafe.
No, it'll be five days of mind-numbing nothingness, and quite welcome.
And Joe will be under standing orders to hit me if I start talking
business. Seeing as there will be at least three Joes present, I'll
either come back relaxed and ready for December, or very bruised.
[2]Last
Yes it was Writing Group tonight. Terry brought the final installation
of his novel and a bottle of Asti Spumante with which to celebrate.
And Tam brought something new, despite the fact that she does
technical writing for a living these days. But as we had nothing new
last time, we were left with time for a writing exercise. We
squandered it chatting and griping about politics, and ended up being
in group til ten p.m. Anyway, here is tonight's entry...
(Copyrighted 2002, so there!)
We used my wife's Writing Exercise Cards but contributed random
characters that we made up and tossed into a hat. I drew these:
Character: Taste Tester @ Pillsbury Lab
Character: Candlemaker
Place: gym
Emotion: jealousy, envy
Plot: a search for something
They met and fell in love and had children and grandchildren and died
within weeks of each other at the ripe old age of ninety-seven and
ninety-five respectively because among other reasons she couldn't
place his face. At this time they are still young, thirty five and
thirty seven, but consider themselves old because they are no longer
in their Twenties, and their bodies have shed the immortal radiance of
youth and begun to succumb to the minor indignities of life such as
hemorrhoids and grey hair.
Her hair is a pale, unprepossessing mousy brown that at upon one
occasion or another most of her lovers have suggested she dye blond.
She has in fact been so often advised to color her hair, change her
style of clothing, pierce various fleshy areas and lose weight that
she has begun to wonder if she is perhaps a seat-holder at the awards
ceremony of someone else's life, and these men are waiting for the
glamorous, sequined occupant of her seat to arrive.
So when she sees him at the gym she is inclined to hate him. She is
not licentious but she is a fully modern woman of her time and place
(those being the first decade of the Twenty-First Century) and she has
felt free to have as many social, emotional and sexual relationships
as she could manage while also forging a career as a taste tester for
a large international chain of food manufacturers. She is in fact
being spiritually drawn and quartered by the expectations of her
parents, her culture, her fears and her desires, but she does not come
to this realization before the sudden onset of children renders all
these expectations moot.
For his part he is to remain oblivious to her attentions for a few
moments more, despite the fact that if her gaze were in fact as icy as
it appears he would be encased in a glacier some fourteen feet in
height, width and depth. In attempting to broom-handle his identity
from beneath the refrigerator of her memory she has dragged into the
light some extremely dusty and unpleasant recollections of sticky,
bug-ridden relationships past, and is pre-emptively holding her future
husband responsible for the resulting debris.
So while he stubbornly and repeatedly compels a pair of innocent
free-weights to resist the blandishments of the gravitic pull of the
planet at his back, she is failing to be impressed by his musculature
and becoming increasingly convinced that he is a cad named "Reginald"
who treated her rudely during her last year of college.
He is, in fact, not Reginald but an employee at a gift shop two blocks
from her workplace with whom she has had several bland but not
unpleasant social interactions during her twice-yearly visits to his
store before both her mother's and sister's birthdays. He has asked
her if there is anything that he can do for her three times. He has
instructed her to have a nice day on four occasions, to no actual
effect. She has once asked him about a scented candle that she was
purchasing, and in fact it can be said that all of their children,
grandchildren, great-grand-children and eventually as sizable portion
of the entire human race owe their existence to this lavender scented
candle.
For it is as she glares in irritation at the man repeatedly
demonstrating that objects lifted against gravity eventually succumb
to it again that a woman passing behind our dear girl employs a very
common phrase within earshot while conversing with a friend.
"...well she couldn't hold a candle to that offer..."
And deep within the her brain her synapses carry the idea of a lit
candle, which crashes down among several concepts of regarding candles
in general, one of which knocks against the memory of the lavender
scented candle given as a gift. This memory teeters in an uncertain,
bowling-pin fashion, but finally gives in to the gravity of the
situation and clatters against the rather favorable mental image of
the well-groomed man behind the counter at the gift store who had
explained to her that he had in fact made the lavender-scented candle
himself, that morning, in the very back of the shop.
And suddenly the scales, as the saying goes, fall from her eyes,
although in fact it is a thick layer of preconceptions and projections
that collapse in a heap, and she sees the young lad in a new, more
favorable, and somewhat guilty light. For although he was entirely
oblivious to her stern attentions at that point, she could not have
been more enveloped by guilt if she had actually been cursing him with
the name "Reginald" only to have him turn around and not be Reginald.
So when he does, at that moment, happen to turn around, having
completed his ritual thirty-six attempts to convince iron weights to
fly, his eyes meet hers. The gauze of guilt that she wears so
compliments her features, enhanced by a brief look of shock, a sudden
blush, and a demure ducking of the head, that he immediately and
somewhat egotistically attributes her reactions to sexual attraction
rather than unwonted shame and guilt. And she, her opinion so clouded
by an entirely unnecessary sense of obligation for having silently
abused him in the name of others, is rather less inclined than she
might usually be to dismiss his attentions.
And so, swathed in a fog of misperceptions and entirely misread
motivations, the two of them begin the rather long, slow process of
falling deeply and entirely in love.
[1]Last
Recorded at 1:30 a.m.:
Clarity emerges from a longer dream in which my wife and I are alone
in a strange, old, ramshackle house, the kind of grand boulevard house
that has long become part of a college slum. It is night and we are
sleeping in a non-sleeping room, a living room with sliding doors that
open on some kind of patio. Through the glass door, a dim pre-dawn
light leaks in, exposing threadbare carpet, a damp rundown couch, and
gray walls. She is lying crosswise and above my head, asleep, when the
squirrel awakens us as it runs across my face. I am sleeping with my
head between an ottoman and the couch and it leaps from one to my face
and dashes off to the next, its foot landing on the soft flesh of my
eye-socket.
"It ran across my face," I say quietly. I hate the damned squirrels
that infest this rundown house.
"I know," she replies. I am just about to say "I can still feel the
warmth of its little foot right above my cheekbone" when she says, "I
can see where it stepped." I realize that it has left a dirty
footprint on my face.
I wake later to the tickle of snuffling. The squirrel is standing on
my recumbent head. My right cheek is on a grimy carpet, and a squirrel
is standing on the back of my head and neck on the left side. It is
snuffling my ear, and its paws slip and scrabble for purchase on my
face. I don't want to do anything to frighten it, both because I'm
afraid in its panic it will bite me, but also because it's kind of a
cool experience to have a squirrel standing on your head.
As a result a few minutes later its breath becomes soft and regular,
and I realize that it has fallen asleep on my head.
"It's asleep," I whisper, expecting it to leap away.
"I know," she says again.
With great difficulty but decreasing carefulness I rise. I realize as
I climb with difficulty to my feet that the squirrel is not likely to
wake, being deeply asleep, and that it is quite heavy. At one point
she has to help me. I rock up to my right hip, and then she has to
push on my right shoulder to get me upright.
When I'm finally on my feet, the squirrel clumsily braced against my
left shoulder and head, the creature murmurs something in its sleep. I
make my way down a railed stairway to the main floor, through a dark,
quiet front room, and out the great dark door onto a porch of
weathered old wood, warped and veined with age.
A fine mist settles through slivery morning light of autumn, and in
the front yard the leaves are wet upon the ground. I cross the uneven
front walk to the short flight of stone steps to the sidewalk. There
is a bus shelter in front of my home and a man and his young son
(about the age of my eldest, 11), are waiting in the bus shelter that
rests beneath the rain-blackened arms of a great bare oak.
As I pass them I notice some grimy, Hispanic workers in the shelter
too, but I move on. I am trying as I walk to adjust my grip on the
squirrel until I have a good grip on both legs, and it has slid down
onto my arms against my chest. It is still asleep but I think it will
be awake soon.
I find a stony part of the low retaining wall that borders my front
yard at eh sidewalk. I take a good grip of the squirrel's legs. It is
very heavy, and I realize it is almost awake.
Swinging ponderously, I slam its head against the stone.
It looks at me in confusion, not dead.
With greater strength, I slam its head against the stone.
Bloody dark, it looks dead at first. Then it raises its head slightly
and its eyes flutter. It's covered with blood.
One last time I swing it against the rock by its legs. Unexpectedly,
its head shatters, the top skittering aside to rest like a halved
walnut, the two hemispheres of gray brain matter very fine-grained and
not bloody. I realize the squirrel is now dead, but this is wrong. I
was supposed to kill it, not break it.
I feel ashamed as I turn to meet the stares of the workers and the
man, who is covering his son's eyes.
As I pass them to return to my home, one of the Hispanic workers asks
me a question about the squirrel. I don't understand the words, but I
know that he's asking, "Why did you do that?" When the man opens his
mouth to speak to me, his scraggly black beard surrounds his mouth
like fur. His teeth are yellow, crooked, and filed to sharp points.
They look like the teeth of a squirrel...
And then I woke up.
(And now I'm real hungry!)
[1]Last
So far I'm not impressed.
We're halfway through "Monster's Ball", and I'm unimpressed. Maybe
that's being prejudicial -- and with a movie that touches upon the
topic of racial prejudice I suppose I wouldn't want to do that -- but
I'm not buying a lot of the film.
My spouse is not a "night person," and the equation that describes her
likelihood of falling asleep equals one percent chance for every
minute past nine p.m. The other night we got to the climactic scene in
"Fight Club" (an excellent film, BTW), and moments later she lurched
up and said "What did I miss?" I turned off the set in exasperation.
So tonight we started watching "Monster's Ball" at 7:30, allowing the
children to tend themselves downstairs. Now we're taking a break while
they eat their bedtime snacks of industrially-packaged factory-second
green Macintosh apples covered in 100% non-caramel crystallized
glucose containing red, orange and blue dyes.
These were gifts to them from my mother, and came in formed plastic
shells similar to those used to package compact-flourescent light
bulbs or hairbrushes. When my son took his out of the package the
apple fell right off the stick. Fortunately I noticed that the stick
was covered with a disagreeable looking black substance, and inspected
the apple. Inside the hole I saw a small ring of mold. Taking a knife,
I prepared to core out the moldy spot, only to discover that the only
thing holding the apple together was the 100% non-caramel crystallized
glucose shell. The apple was rotten to the core.
Sorry.
Fortunately his sister's braces prevented her from enjoying her gift,
so he ate her caramel apple instead, and an emotional crisis was
averted. Shortly the children, energized by crystallized glucose, will
be laid in their beds where they will vibrate softly until 1 a.m.
Whereupon my wife and I will resume watching "Monster's Ball."
So far we've just gotten to the rather contrived point where Halle
Berry and Billy Bob Thornton are drinking together and looking at
sketches. It's clear what will happen next: they'll have sex. Then
they'll find out the truth about each other, they'll have an emotional
scene, they'll reunite and live happily ever after.
Or not. It's not really the plot contrivances themselves that bother
me. I mean, it's gotten to the point where I can pretty much
anticipate where the Gratuitous Sex Scene Ten Minutes Into the Film is
about to appear (usually about ten minutes into the film). And maybe
the writers will put an ironic or tragic twist on the usual plot and
have Berry be a murderess, or otherwise cast the film into a dark
spiral.
Whatever the vagaries of the plot, here's the big problem I have: if
you're going to make a movie about a bigoted white man overcoming many
obstacles and falling in love with a black woman... why make it so
easy?
I mean this is Halle Berry for goodness sake. She would give a gay
bigoted white man a hardon. It's supposed to be daring that Hank
Grotowski, played by Billy Bob Thornton would overcome his tortured
past when the reward for doing so is Halle Berry? You want to make
this movie daring? You want to make a REAL movie? Have Billy Bob fall
in love with a woman as black and as overweight as Coronji Calhoun,
the actor who plays her son. And don't make a joke out of it!
Real people fall in love all the time. Real people overcome obstacles
without the advantages of a perfect complexion, enormous boobs, or
grizzled good looks. In the spare, stylized South of Monster's Ball,
the erotic and aesthetic quality of Berry's Letitia Musgrove is almost
absurd.
Instead of letting Grotowski be pulled by his gonads past his bigotry,
fear and anger, give us a 350 pound sweaty black woman, and let their
shared pain draw them together. Let their humanity overcome their
looks. Take the protagonist past his fears, sure, but take the
audience along with him! For a movie that is supposedly about learning
to overcome appearances, it depends all too much on appearance to make
plausible the protagonist's attraction. Where Hank has to overcome his
bigotry to find his heart, the audience in this film is never asked to
move from their initial position that equates beauty with
desirability.
Even as the movie suggests that love doesn't care if you're black or
white, it suggests that love is pretty picky about a woman's
measurements.
So that's my review from halfway through the film. Now I'll go
upstairs and hope to be pleasantly surprised...
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Well, that was interesting. As cynical as I get, I don't think I
expected such a rout for the Democrats as happened last night. Still,
I don't know why I care. As Ben says, "Just remember: who is elected
does not matter, the system is corrupt, large corporations run the
country, politicians do not represent the interests of the People." Or
as I replied, "Strength through Cynicism." So disaffected, and he's
more that ten years younger than me.
One problem, IMO, is that the Democrats are no longer liberal, or even
particularly differentiated from the Republicans. They are in fact
lame Republican knock-offs, too timid to take a position, or as like
as not without actual beliefs of their own. Why SHOULD anyone vote for
a Democrat, when they can get the Real Thing with a Republican?
Of course, this all started when the Democrats, and in fact everyone
in the nation, allowed the Right to set the agenda. This was Ronald
Reagan's greatest political achievement. Turning the word "Liberal"
into an epithet was a stroke of genius. Letting that happen was an
unconscionable error for the Left.
Another problem is that of organization. The Right has had a distinct
organizational advantage. For the last few elections they've carefully
coordinated and targeted their opponents. The Democrats, and the Left
in general, have either waffled or -- more egregiously in my opinion
-- been complacent. In Minnesota the last two Democratic gubernatorial
candidates, Moe and Humphrey, were old-boy politicians who approached
each election as if they were simply entitled to the job due to their
connections and prior public service. Moe in particular has to take
the responsibility for this one. From my perspective as a largely
uninformed voter, he repeated all of Humphreys errors and learned none
of Humphrey's lessons. From where I sat, ready to be convinced to vote
for him, he seemed distant, arrogant, and unattached. You can tell me
I misperceive him, but in this case perception IS everything...
In contrast, our Governor-elect Tim Pawlenty (an ambitious young
weasel) was initially going to fight for the Senate position. A call
from Dick Cheney convinced him not to split the party at the primary,
and offered him the gubernatorial run instead. Imagine if Tom Daschle
had called Moe and said "We want you to stand aside and let some
ambitious young buck make a stronger run." Strategic Democratic
planning? What a concept! Taking one for the team? Unthinkable!
And, finally, the Left needs to stop looking backwards. The Boomers
are so fixated on the past that every Left action is viewed as
"another 60's movement" against "another Viet Nam". They keep looking
to the Kennedy family as if that dissolute pack of pseudoaristocrats
represents the only possibility of salvation. The Left needs to find a
charismatic leader of the present generation with an eye towards the
future, a leader, not simply a figurehead for their lost youthful
idealism. The Left needs to promote just causes for their own sake,
and oppose unjust causes on their own terms.
Ralph Nader is the past. Ann Richards is the past. Molly Ivins is too
shrill. Michael Moore is too self-serving and decidedly NOT
charismatic. Whatever the Left hopes to accomplish, it must do so for
its own sake, not in an effort to resurrect a Glorious Past that never
really was.
The present incarnation of the Right was formed of Nixon-era castaways
who rallied around Reagan to form the present ruling cabal. (Opening
my wife's 1970s-era encyclopedia to show my kids what rum was made of,
I found a picture of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of State... under
Ford). Even with Reagan long gone, they maintain their structure with
both persistence and organization. The present incarnation of the Left
is none, no central theme, approach, or creed, and no central figure.
The Democratic party isn't a party for something, they're a contrarian
party of not-Republicans. And not very convincing ones at that.
Until the Left finds it's own moral center and it's own charismatic
leadership, it's doomed to failure after failure. And that's how the
pendulum swings, because at some point the oppression of the Right
will become painful enough that people on the Left will step up to the
plate to oppose them. Let's hope that someone does this before the
Right succeeds in completely disassembling the pendulum and shipping
it to Crawford, Texas.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the next couple of Perfect years.
And they ought to be Perfect. For the last twenty years the Right has
complained that everything would be Perfect if the damned Democrats
would just stop blocking their plans. Republicans now have what
they've always wanted, free and clear: exclusive control of the
Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of government. They can
now do whatever they want without anybody stopping them (short of a
constitutional amendment, and I wouldn't put that past them at this
point). So I fully expect that in a couple of years EVERYTHING will be
PERFECT.
So get back into the closet, plan your abortion now, crush out that
last doobie, and be thankful if you have a job. Because the Right
holds the chisel, and they're ready to carve out the Perfect Future.
Better make sure you're not left in chips on the floor.
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And suddenly there it was. Really, it just illustrates the power of
clichés.
I mean, most people deride clichés as being as ugly as a mud fence, as
dumb as a brick, too stupid for words, and other cliché descriptions.
Nobody has any respect for clichés.
And yet... clichés are just words, phrases, scenes, rendered
contemptable by familiarity or frequent misapplication. Tea-leaves of
folk wisdom with all the meaning boiled out of them. They are, to use
a pseudointellectual buzzword, memes. Ideas. Concepts whose value has
been compromised by an overlay of social approbation that divorces
them from their underlying context.
Or to be less fancy, they're tiny little keys to mental locks that are
worn from overuse.
Anyway, there I was, settled in to what has become a pleasant
Hallowe'en ritual. For the last several years it has run this way:
after a hasty dinner my wife and I get the kids into their costumes.
Then she puts a CD of spoooky sounds on the stereo, and lights candles
all around the house. She shows me all the candy and advises me on
exactly how many candies to hand out to each person. Then we get some
photos of the kids in their garb, and she escorts them on their
rounds.
Back at home I turn off the spooooky CD which experience has
demonstrated is not audible from outside the front door. Instead I
load up the CD player with my favorite music, figuring that the notion
of a man sitting home alone listening to the Indigo Girls is probably
scary to some people. I turn off all the house lights, and sit down
with the laptop to write between the infrequent visits of neighborhood
children. When they arrive I hand out candy in awe-inspiring fistfuls,
and usually have a third left at the end anyway.
So I was settled peacefully into place for some writing when my mind
returned to the topic which has been troubling it for some time:
death. All my regular readers (ha!) know that I've been troubled by
the unusual number of tragic deaths lately in the news, and the way
that death cares nothing for character or justice. Jim Henson, dead:
Idi Amin, alive. Paul Wellstone, dead: OJ Simpson, free; ad infinitum,
ad nauseum.
And it was wrong, it was just wrong. It was shaking up my view of the
world. I mean, I had become accustomed to the idea of this frenetic
token liberal senator, a horsefly buzzing in the faces of the
back-room reactionary cabal that has taken over our government. And
I'm sorry, but for those of us who grew up with Kermit the Frog, his
present incarnation seems like a space cockroach climbed inside his
skin.
Who's next? I wondered, Who? Some aged relative? Some young celebrity?
A friend my own age? Someone near and dear to me? Who among all of the
people I know will be the next one to vanish, and according to what
unknowable schedule?
And that's when the cliché key turned in the right mental lock, and
understanding glowed through the newly-opened door. That's when I
realized that the unknowability and unpredictability are exactly the
point. Because as my mental spotlight turned from one person to the
next upon the proscenium of memory I saw each one anew. "What if he
were gone?" "Oh no, what if she were gone?" Reminded of the mortality
of each of my friends and loved ones, I grasped how sad the world
would be without them. For just a moment I glimpsed each person's true
value, and the depth of what the world stood to lose if they were
gone.
For just a moment, I failed to take for granted the people I love.
And I was struck powerfully that that is the whole point of death.
It's not a punishment, and it's not a reward. It's not justice, and
it's not according to some plan. Death is a random light, illuminating
the fragile web between all of people.
Because of death's erosion it is incumbent upon us to make new links
in web, or find ourselves wholly disconnected. Its randomness
threatens our complacency and urges us to appreciate those around us.
And its inevitability compels us to accomplish something with our
lives in the limited time that we have.
And it's cliché. It's all cliché. Mundane sentimentality expressed in
cliché phrases. And yet for me the clichés leapt to brilliant life
when placed in the proper context. Under certain circumstances and
from a particular position, illumination poured through the old
clichés like sunlight through the Tenochtitlan temple on midsummer's
day.
And that's just the point: death is there to make us appreciate life.
Droll cliché, springing to magically to life at the cold touch of
death.
The feeling has faded, the glamour worn off, but in a brief epiphany I
got it, and understood a little bit more of What It's All About.
It's not about justice. It's not about right. It's about appreciating
whatever it is you've got, even if you haven't got much.
Like I said, cliché.
Somebody's at the door. Trick or treat!
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