mind-ambition

We're Moving

2010-02-21T15:52:00.001-05:00

Well after almost 4 years of blogging here at Blogger, I've decided to move to a new location. You can now find me at www.mindambition.tumblr.com. Shorter and simpler name, better photo quality uploads, and with more variety when it comes to templates. Also tumblr has a great platform for mobile blogging - even on an iPhone for goodness sakes. That should facilitate more entries (hopefully).

I hope you'll all join me over there. Ciao for now. : )

FF - Dial "H" for Horny

2010-02-12T15:30:00.001-05:00

It goes without saying that we're living in an age of huge leaps in technology. Multitouch computers, iPhones, GPS guidance systems, satellite television, DVRs, Blackberries, hybrid cars, Google Earth, you name it, we've got it. It shouldn't be surprising, therefore, that technology is taking us to new places in the sexual realm as well. Who among us hasn't lamented not having a suitable phone sex partner on those horniest of nights when we come home lonely, bored, and yes, drunk?

Well lament no more, dear reader! For today's Friday Funnies, hear ("hear," get it?) technology's answer to all your phone sex needs:

What Happens When Your Girlfriend Doesn't Get Her Required Amount of Sleep

2010-02-09T11:04:00.003-05:00

What follows -- because I've been too busy and lazy to write anything in two weeks -- is a guest blog from dear Adrienne, my girlfriend, who, as you will soon see, is in a very bad mood today.

The backstory is that dear Adrienne lives in a fourth floor walkup apartment that is 2000 years old (yes, it was built around the birth of Christ), with creaky floorboards that she shares with her neighbors across the hall. These two miscreants are fresh out of college, married, unemployed, and drug recreationalists. Because they are unemployed, the aforementioned miscreants are able to have parties on any day of the week, any day that is, that they're not screaming at each other at the top of their lungs because they married too young and are both unemployed, or too exhausted from chasing their yappy rat of a dog around their drug den of an apartment. I saw the boyfriend last weekend, with the yappy rat of a dog cradled in his arms; he's got a beard, is on the waify side, and looks like he could be singing for Grizzly Bear.

With our cohabitation imminent (!!!), Adrienne has been selling off her belongings on Craigslist like an auctioneer on crack. Last Saturday, I helped her move her bed down the four flights of stairs and into the waiting SUV of a Long Island teacher. (My back and glutes still ache, but that's a story for another day.) Since she now has no bed, her mattress is on the bedroom floor. Last night was her first night sleeping on her new arrangement, and this is where our story begins, stripped from a furiously-typed Blackberry email that is mere hours old.

Subject: Negative nancy here

So I had to get up at 6 to move car (for first time today-have to move again at 9) so afterward I go back to apt and wander around aimlessly remembering how much noise the fucking neighbors - no that word is too friendly- a-holes next door were making. I look at my bed and see the large brown crystal that is usually on my nightstand is on the pillow next to mine. That's right. In a half-sleep stupor I grabbed the crystal intending to slam it against the wall a couple of times but must have dozed off. That's right. I dozed off until the battery in my ipod died and then the barking, stomping and fighting jolted me awake again.

So after wandering around the apt for thirty minutes and re-listing my apartment I decided I couldn't decide what to do so I put on my coat and came over here to Big Daddys for breakfast. I walk in-EMPTY!! I have the place to myself. I place my order for oat bran pancakes with the russian waitress who doesn't write anything down, but hey, how hard is oat bran pancakes and two eggs? No, I don't want the potatoes or bacon, but feel free to throw in an extra oaty. Nope, cannot do that, but how about sausage? For gods sake. Just the two cakes and eggs.

I am just opening my "Wheels of Life" chakra healing book in an effort to bring myself back to neutral when in walks an UES 20 something mom, with a three year old "Chase" and baby "Wade" in a basket. And guess what... Chase gets to pick where they sit! Yes, please, right next to me. Seriously? So then I hear "chasey, baby, how about eggies and french toast!! Mommy loves you!! Your such a big boy!! What should we do today?? Wadey goes for her four month checkup and then we are going to play and nappytime!!! Jesus christ lady, its barely 8:00. What are you on?

Then the food arrives. Two fat white as my plate pancakes. Umm, are these oat bran? No, you said regular! WTF? Ok, I will send them back she says and asks once more if I want some sausage. What the hell-do you have a box of sausage going bad back there? So now I am eating two oat bran pancakes that surely have spit (or worse in them). While Chase refuses to eat his eggies and waffles smothered in whipped cream and strawberries. UES girl has asked him if he is going to eat those eggies 14 times so far. I am counting. Oh yeah, neil young playing in background.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Decisive Indecision

2010-01-31T12:38:00.012-05:00

It's a common state of the human condition, I have found, that no one is perpetually happy. I don't know anyone whose life is a steady upward curve, who is so pleased with their current state of affairs that they wouldn't change a thing. In my experience, most people have one or two things they'd change about their life if they could. I've also found that the grass is indeed often greener, but that when it comes to effectuating the change we're all considering, the idea often seems easier than putting it into practice.

For myself, I've noticed a disturbing trend in this area. Whenever it comes to making a big decision in my life, to making a change that I can believe in, as Obama would put it, I turn into Hamlet murmuring to a handheld skull: "To be or not to be, that is the question." Should I stay or should I go? Unchartered waters or status quo? I usually realize that something is lacking or I need something different in my life but when it comes to figuring out whether the other side of the black curtain is going to make things better or worse, I just can't decide. And if there's one thing that makes me miserable, it's living in a gray area betwixt two worlds. I absolutely hate it. It's like my mind is split in half and I'm paralyzed by uncertainty. Terrible feeling.

Let me see if I can come up with a few examples. When it was time for me to decide what to do with my life in my early twenties, post-college, I couldn't decide which direction to go. They say it's nice having options, but at the time, it was absolutely maddening. Half of me wanted to volunteer somewhere, maybe join the Peace Corps, and live a simple life, one that was consistent with my values and political beliefs at the time. The other half of me wanted none of that meager living and the certain poverty that would come later. That part of me wanted to travel, wanted financial freedom, wanted a serious career that would justify and reward the hard work I had put into my education for 18 years.

So what did I do? Well, first off, I delayed the decision for a couple of years so I could think it through. I took two years off, backpacked in Europe, and got a little taste of that meager living that I was seriously considering. I talked about my future with my cousins, uncles, and with my grandmother in Italy, who had seen a few things. Some of them hadn't pursued an education and were struggling to make ends meet. It's not pretty, they said. You can't help anyone before you help yourself, they said.

When I got back to the States, I picked up my old summer job in the produce department of a nearby supermarket and another job covering high school sports for a local newspaper. (Journalism was another career I was contemplating.) The supermarket job was for money. The newspaper job, which paid almost nothing, was for love. I got to write. They gave me a sophisticated film camera, which I barely knew how to use, and let me take pictures for the stories I was covering. They even used some of the photos I took. Two of my favorites were one I took of a baseball player for a local semi-pro team who was arguing with an umpire after a called third strike. I caught him mid-rant, with his mouth open. It came out great, though it would have been better with a zoom lens. The second one was a picture I took of a bunch of Special Olympian athletes splashing in a sprinkler during a very hot summer day on the track field at the University of New Hampshire. That one they blew up and used to cover the entire top half of the sports page in the next edition. I remember how much pride I felt when I saw my name underneath the picture. "I took that and I barely knew what I was doing. Holy shit. And they USED it!" I felt the same pride when I wrote about local sporting events and saw my name on the by-line. At first, I wrote them like stories, with way too much descriptive language. The editor made me tone them down. "This is a newspaper," he said, "not a fiction class. You need to simplify things into small, digestible pieces for people to read."

I think back to that time sometimes. It was a transition period, and like I said, I felt miserable a lot of the time because I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life professionally. I felt like the newspaper job was just a placeholder, something to make me not feel like a total loser because I had graduated college and was stocking peppers and cantaloupes in a supermarket. But now I wonder what have happened if I had listened to myself a bit more, had a little bit more confidence in myself, and gave other potential vocations a fighting chance. Because I really enjoyed the writing. I didn't take the photography part seriously because I'd never done it before; in fact, I'd never shown the slightest interest in cameras or taking pictures. The camera was too big and too damn complicated to learn. I'd gotten lucky with a couple of shots they'd decided to use. What I cared about was the articles I wrote. What would have happened if I'd tried to become a permanent employee on the newspaper and worked my way up? Or moved to something bigger later, something digital, once that world took off? I wasn't short of opinions, that's for sure. During this period I wrote a satirical piece to another newspaper when the first Gulf War started in 1991. It was a blog, essentially. I cast myself as a lonely bachelor who opposed the war when everyone in the world was supporting it. I still have it in a plastic folder, along with every newspaper article I wrote, including in college, and every picture I took. I'm glad I saved them.

Life is a one way street. Not too original, but it's one of my favorite sayings, taught to me by my father. (Dad never was too elaborate in his provision of advice, but I've learned that his simple nuggets often were more profound than three hours of heavy counseling by my mother.) Life is a one way street means that there's no looking back; we have to live with the decisions we make. Given the sad state of affairs of the newspaper business, I could just as easily be living in a cardboard box now as have my own nationally-syndicated editorial page. As the Tootsie Roll owl once said, "The world may never know."

I bring this up because lately I have been contemplating some changes por mi vida, in two areas: (i) what I want to do with the second half of my life work-wise, and (ii) where I want to live. For some time, I've had the stirrings of change deep in my colon about my day job. It's not that I don't like being a lawyer -- it's actually fine a lot of the time. It's challenging, I get to do some writing, albeit of the watered down, non-creative variety, and I'm well paid, which allows me to do other things that I enjoy. But damn, I've been in this rut for awhile now. I don't feel inspired at all. I don't feel like where I'm at is where I want to be. And I've never loved being a lawyer so much that I want to go to bar association meetings, jerk off with other lawyers about cutting edge aspects of the practice, schmooze and make contacts, blah, blah, blah. I don't read about Oliver Wendell Holmes in my spare time. I don't even like watching lawyer shows on television. Fuck all of that. When I have free time, I can think of 1000 other things I'd rather be doing than anything law related. Same for getting on the board of some stupid ass company or non-profit so I can put it on the firm website and hassle my friends and colleagues for donations every fucking year. That's what lawyers are supposed to do though. Shake the tree. EMBRACE the law. CLIMB the ladder to the glory of partnership, more money, and beyond (which is what, exactly? A bigger house?). I've got be honest. Time is the only truly limited quantity in this world, and I'll be damned if I'm going to expend any (or very much) of mine on law-related activities outside of work. I like the law, I'm good enough at it to make a living, but I'm not PASSIONATE about it like some people. I don't eat and breathe the shit. It's the last thing I want to think about when I get home. I'd rather be doing this, working on my other hobbies, or watching a good movie.

Not to mention that the profession is stressful as hell, particularly when I'm swamped with work and being reamed by demanding clients. It's also full of conflict, arguing with pricks on a daily basis (sometimes even within my own firm), and basically deciding who is going to get what pile of money at the end of the day. And even when you succeed, they still bitch about the bill. As if it was easy to get them their fucking money. As if I found it ENJOYABLE. The law can be interesting and challenging, but it can also be repetitive and dull. The law doesn't keep me warm at night. And as far as loyalty at my firm goes, well, that only extends as far as the "value" I add to the firm. That's the new catchphrase: "value added." Clients want value, so now we're all forced to dance for our dinner and justify our existence, both within and without the firm. In a lean economy, we're also forced to schmooze within the firm, so we can pry out of the bony hands of nervous partners some of the work they've been hoarding for two years for fear of getting shit-canned themselves. All these rainmakers who make the big bucks, who were supposed to be the business generators, well, they've made a lot less rain in the past 3 years. Now we're all thirsty.

Sound fun to you? I go through phases when I think stacking peppers and cantaloupes wasn't so damn bad after all. By now I could be managing a store for $100,000 a year, have weekends off, and live a more sane life. Or be in upper management and have everyone shit themselves when I come sauntering in to run my finger across the top of the cash register checking for dust.

Daydreams are nice, but reality eventually sets in. The bills come. A trip to Vail is offered. A new camera lens hits the market. And I want, want, want. I like new things, new experiences, seeing new places. Unfortunately, at the age of 41, I have trapped myself in a lifestyle, the very quicksand that those "Why Go to Law School" books I read before I went to law school said I would face sometime down the road, right around my midlife crisis. I'm nothing if not punctual.

There are thousands of unhappy lawyers out there. (Poor poor us.) Many of them, apparently like me, stay in the profession because of the money. It's easy if you never had something to not miss it. It's harder to go backwards to not having when you once had. This mix of want and need and dreaming and malaise has created the same uncertainty and stuckness I experienced twenty years ago. I have a split mind once again, which I can barely tolerate. What to do, what to do? Well, for the past three years or so, I've kind of been doing the same thing I did when this happened before: I'm waiting until an answer becomes more clear in my mind. I'm waiting until the clouds part. My answer the last time was to take the Road More Traveled and go to law school. I can criticize that decision now, but in the grand scheme of things, I probably would do it again. I'm risk averse when it comes to money and financial security and that hasn't changed. It's kind of why I'm stuck now. For all my bitching, I'm fairly certain I won't be eating cat food when I'm 70. But what if I don't make it to 70? I have to acknowledge the thing inside me that is ready for a change, some kind of change in my career, some kind of professional inspiration. We shall see where it leads.

The second big area of indecision for me at the moment is where to live. I have lived in New York City for the past 18 years. I've lived in some decent places, like where I am now. I have also lived in some tiny, run-down apartments that would make you cringe. Apartments that were so old, the paint was crusted over from 2000 landlord slatherings and the shower tiles were buckling from neglect. Apartments where the kitchen could only be called a kitchen because it had a refrigerator and a stove in it. Apartments with impossibly thin walls and ceilings where I could hear my neighbors yelling, fucking, and playing shitty music at all hours of the day. Basically, I have lived in a hotel for nearly half of my life. (More than that if you count my college years.) Why have I done it? Why, to be in New York, of course! Those of you who have never lived here, who have only visited, won't understand this, but outside of Paris, New York is the only city in the world that could make a person want to endure this kind of bullshit -- the cramped quarters, the noise, the stink in the summer -- just to live here. And I have wanted to live here. I have explained why before and won't belabor it now. The energy, the choices in food, the mix of people, the random activities within arm's reach, the feeling I get just by being here, all of these things, just to name a few, make New York special and addictive. Not everyone wants or enjoys the city life, of course, but for those like me who do, it's incredibly hard to think of living anywhere else.

But lately, that's exactly what I've been doing: thinking of living somewhere else. This feeling, too, has been gestating awhile, though not for as long as the one about my job. I'm not sure of its origin. Many of my friends have left New York for the suburbs. Most of them did it for their families, because they have young kids. Some friends have departed because they lost their jobs or they see a better opportunity somewhere else, in another part of the country. For myself, lately I've been getting sicker of the bullshit and craving another experience, some extended peace and quiet. My last three trips, besides to Italy for my grandmother's funeral, have been to Utah, Burlington, and Vail, all distinctly nature-oriented. I got to hike and ski. I got to breathe clean air. I got to hear the sounds of silence. It was beautiful. I have been craving the outdoors for some reason, and I am NOT the outdoorsy type, far from it. But it's like something in me is telling me, okay, you've been eating red meat for awhile, it's time for some vegetables, or you're going to get sick. The problem is, I'm not a vegan either. If I jump to the country and hate it, then what? I'm stuck in a fucking house with nowhere to go unless I plant my ass in a car. That's one thing I've loved about New York, you can walk anywhere at any time and get home easily. You are always minutes from home, no vehicle necessary. Not so in the burbs.

On the other side of it, I confess that I'm tired of city living in many ways. I'm tired of hearing my neighbors in particular. Just once I'd like to go to my own bed with 100% certainty that I'm not going to hear ANYTHING all night until I decide to wake up. That never happens when you live in the city. Some douche might decide to slam his drawer or use his treadmill at 1 a.m. Tough titties, you'd better have some good earplugs or a ton of patience. I am distinctly lacking in the latter. I'd also like some SPACE for my shit for a change. I'd like to buy a ginormous 100-pack of Charmin's, the kind that will last me and my ass until 2012, and not worry about where the fuck I'm going to put it. I'd like a real home office, an entire room devoted to nothing but my computer, printer, and ergonomic chair. I'd like more walls to hang my pictures. I'd like a garage that I don't have to rent. Maybe one that will fit TWO cars. Or a ping-pong table!

I think I'm saying... sigh... that maybe, possibly, implicitly, kind of, perhaps I'd consider the idea of... living. in. a house. Ugh. I've never had one of my own before. I swore I'd never own one. To much work and not my speed. So why now? Well, a big reason for staying in the city -- meeting and having a life with someone -- is now off the table, thanks to Adrienne and where I think we're going. And apartment living with two people -- which we are about to undertake -- is a bit crampy. I could barely stand it here by myself. We'll see how it goes, but I have a feeling we're going to need more room at some point. And truth be told, house living sounds and feels a lot less lousy with her around to share it with. (And Jer too, of course. He can't talk, but I think he'd like a nice yard to shit in every once in awhile, sans leash.) Not a ringing endorsement, I know, but I need to ease into this. We'd be closer to the mountains, so I could ski more. Getting to my parents' house on holidays, etc. would not induce an embolism. I think it would be less stressful in a lot of ways. There's a lot of upside.

I would definitely miss the city though, I love Williamsburg so much. Plus, I think of myself as a city person, not a Dockers-wearing suburbanite. God, even the thought of that makes me want to vomit. I don't know what I'm going to do. If I get a house, it also probably means I won't ever stop being a lawyer either, and any such plans are on hold until retirement. I've done a little surfing to see what you get for your money in the environs of New York City and it ain't pretty. Let's just say it's not inspiring me very much, and I don't have the bank to afford the kinds of places that DO inspire me.

So, to sum up: two things I'm thinking about changing in my life. Both involve contradictory feelings in their own right, and both are in opposition to each other financially. Short of me suddenly acquiring the power to teleport, or winning the lottery, something's got to give.

I should probably think about this some more.

FF - A Haitian Smile

2010-01-22T12:06:00.004-05:00

Even in the darkest of circumstances, a saved life and a megawatt smile can light a fire in the hearts of people thousands of miles away.

No crass jokes or snarky comments today, just good vibes.

My favorite part is the cheers when they pull him out of the ground, and he opens his arms.

p.s. I want that photographer's job. Dang.

Shake Shake Shake

2010-01-16T10:28:00.006-05:00

Few things put life in perspective like a massive earthquake. They can strike anywhere, at any time, and the average person has no clue when they're coming. Cruelly, it's the poorest countries in the world who are affected the most when an earthquake hits. Poverty means slapdash housing, lax building codes, an absence of political or moral will to fix these problems and construct the kinds of buildings that could withstand a significant earthquake, or at least minimize the ensuing damage. A country can't focus on the luxury of above standard buildings when it can't even feed its own people. Even here in the U.S., the richest country in the world, earthquakes can do massive damage, like they did in San Francisco in the 90s. Even here, housing codes and inspections are not up to par. Just imagine how bad it was in Haiti before this happened.

Watching the footage from Haiti has been heartbreaking and nauseating at the same time. Bodies piled on the streets. Kids with dirty, bleeding faces and limbs. People walking around dazed, in shock, not knowing where to go because their homes have been flattened and the aftershocks are still coming. Thousands of people sitting on garbage, tears, desperation, and hopelessness on their faces. After watching an hour of these images last night, I couldn't take it anymore. So I changed the channel. How nice an option that is for some of us. We get to turn it off and forget about it.

Now, days after the initial devastation, reports say that people are becoming angry. They are hungry, thirsty, bleeding, and maimed. People are dying on the streets. They are desperate for medical attention that has not yet come. Now, the machetes are coming out. Gangs are forming. There's a sense, as would be the case anywhere else, as was the case in New Orleans after Katrina, that a bad moon will be rising if the situation doesn't improve quickly. And then we'll see baser human instincts come to bear. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope that today will be the day things begin to turn around for these poor people.

But it's hard to imagine that happening when I see the massive piles of wires, broken concrete, the metal everywhere, the collapsed houses, schools, hospitals, and office buildings, crushed as if God Himself had dropped them from outerspace. It's hard to imagine how things will improve anytime soon. Before this earthquake, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Numero uno in the contest no one wants to win. Before this earthquake, Haiti was already on its knees. After this earthquake, Haiti is flat on its back.

No one gave much thought to Haiti before January 13th. It, like many third world countries, was spinning around in ineptitude and intractable poverty. The only time we paid attention to Haiti was when some of its people, desperate for a better life, took to the seas on a flimsy boat, only to be turned away in Florida after having survived the perilous journey. When certain people were decrying the return of Elian Gonzalez to Cuba all those years ago, I thought to myself (and sometimes said out loud) if poor little Elian had been from HAITI, we would have sent him back on a speedboat and wouldn't have had any of this political nonsense. Haiti was an utter mess before this happened. It's in the 9th circle of hell now. Ask Pat Robertson. According to him, Haiti is "cursed" with bad luck due to a deal it made with Satan in order to escape colonialism and attain its independence. Funny how he never speaks of an American deal with The Red and Horny One when we fought our Revolutionary War to escape OUR colonialism. Or when we massacred the American Indians who were here first so we could steal their land and achieve Manifest Destiny. No, we are blessed by God. Haiti is cursed. That's convenient. I wonder where that douchebag gets his stories?

Politics and delusional maniacs aside, the thing that compels me most about earthquakes is that they are the most natural thing in the world. Literally. I ain't no geologist, but what I recall from 11th grade science class is that earthquakes are caused by a shifting in tectonic plates along the earth's crust. Volcanic explosions in the earth's core periodically lead to a shifting in these massive, ginormous plates that form mountains and the land we sit our asses on when we drink our lattes and drive our SUVs. Since they can't be seen, we forget they even exist. We get surprised when they remind us that no, they haven't gone away, in fact, they are still relevant, were here long before us, and will be here long after we're gone.

Earthquakes remind us that the earth is not actually ours. Earthquakes remind us that in reality, we're only renters who are borrowing a small patch of earth for awhile. We build our houses, our apartment buildings, our office skyscrapers on the assumption that it's us who run the show and can do what we want, when we want, and where we want. Earthquakes say "Not so, homo sapiens. You, in fact, are no more important than plants, animals or any other sentient beings who occupy the tiniest surface of this planet. Beneath you, 99.999% of this orbiting ball contains a different, explosive reality, one that is never quiet though you will never see or feel it, save for the occasional volcanic eruption. Beneath you, great changes, changes that would destroy your entire race, happen on a daily basis. And once in a while, you get the wispiest smidgen, a fractional subset of a subset of a fractional lick of the magma and lava and heat living far beneath you: the earth shakes for a few seconds. The earth is not responsible for what happens after that. It's just doing what it does. It's simply reacting to another part of itself. If you are hurt by that, if you think you are special, that you're more important than what is underneath you, a part of this planet that has existed since it was formed, you are in for a rude awakening."

Rude indeed. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have been killed in this earthquake, which measured 7.0 on the Richter scale. The dead include the poor, of which there are many in Haiti, and the wealthy -- tourists who were staying at the nicest hotel in Port au Prince. American diplomats, U.N. heads, children, shantytown dwellers, all dead. No one was immune. No one got special treatment (though, in typical human fashion, the search and rescue teams are definitely according special treatment to certain categories of people). We sit here and worry day after day about Al Qaeda and 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, and a natural "Act of God" takes the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in a few seconds of shake, shake, shake.

Earthquakes show us the better side of ourselves too. A forgotten country like Haiti now has unprecedented attention from the world. Many generous people have donated money to organizations like the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. The United States has promised $100 million and sent thousands of Marines to keep order. Obama has suspended proceedings for 18 months against Haitian immigrants who are in the United States illegally. People care and want to help. That's the beauty of the human spirit. Unlike earthquakes, our acts are not random. They are purposeful and intentional and when we use them for good, to help rather than to harm, we are elevated to something far greater than ourselves and the meat and bone bodies we occupy. We become spirit. And spirit is something that no earthquake, no matter how powerful, could ever destroy.

FF - Pants on the Ground

2010-01-15T11:04:00.004-05:00

Are you like me? Do you think that a certain gangsta demographic looks absolutely fucking stupid with their designer jeans pulled down to their knees? How do they stay up? They're made that way, right? They're not real jeans, are they? There's got to be some kindo of velcro or elastic involved. Anyway, I can't stand them. I just saw some punk wearing a pair on the subway, not an hour ago.

The foolishness of this look was squarely addressed the other night on American Idol, a show that I rarely watch. On a slow work week, I happened to get home early two nights ago, and tuned in to A.I. to see this 62 year-old gentleman, General Larry Platt, wrap up the show with this disturbingly catchy ditty:

Folks, we have a hit on our hands. A meme. Not seconds later, thousands of people, myself included, updated their Facebook status with some form of the words "fool" and "pants on the ground." Yesterday I couldn't get the song out of my head.

Last night, Neil Young, one of my idols, got into the act:

Damn, Neil makes anything sound good. That was powerful.

NOW PULL UP YOUR FUCKING PANTS!

New Year's Revelations

2010-01-08T00:23:00.007-05:00

Well, here we are. 2010. I like the way that number looks on the page. It's clean. It has clarity. I think it's the zeros, they suggest balance, a leveling off. And why not after the year we just had? Michael Jackson dead. Farrah Fawcett dead. Tiger Woods' reputation nearly dead. An economy in the crapper. H1N1 hysteria. The Yankees winning the World Series. And it all ends with a 23 year-old Nigerian jihadi trying to blow up a plane on Christmas day. Could it get any worse? Probs yes, yes it could. But it won't in 2010. How could it with such a symmetrical number driving the train?

I don't do resolutions. Okay, I do do them, but they're a lot of pressure and ultimately disappointing, so I'm going to try something new. Here are my New Year's Revelations for 2010. These are things that recently were revealed to me by intuition or perhaps divine communique. I don't question the source. I am merely a conduit to enlightenment, here for your spiritual evolution. Hear then, what I have learned:

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking into the FU-TURE. Sometimes it's like I can actually feel it ticking by, day after day, hour after hour, feel myself growing older by the second. I'm attending friends' funerals, watching my parents age, become forgetful and wrinkly, looking at myself in the mirror and wondering where the teenage me went. This is the stuff of which midlife angst is made. I read a poll that says that people are happiest at the following ages: 18-24 and 55-65. 35-44? Unhappiest. How can that be, one might ask? I can only figure it this way: 18-24 year olds are in college and graduating shortly thereafter. Or if not college-bound, they be clubbin', they be chillin', they all be too stupid and inexperienced to know what's waiting for them in ten to fifteen years. Optimism reigns. Disillusionment is a microscopic speck on the horizon that is imperceptible. The world is a red carpet and they have the young bodies and minds to run it down. Few mistakes, apart from drug overdoses, can break their reverie. 18-24 year olds are demigods. Broke and dependent demigods, but demigods nonetheless.

55-65 year olds have seen and done most of what they're going to do in life. They've already worked most of the hard hours they're going to work. They've come to terms with their failures and the dreams and ambitions of their youth that never bore fruit. For the men, sex is not the personal driver that it once was. (Fuck if that'll ever be me!) These AARP inductees possess new identities. They are calm. Sedate. They take painting classes. They play golf, chess, and poker. They enjoy their grandkids, who spark their hearts through toothless smiles, innocent questions, and absurd antics. The white hairs appreciate their health because too many of their friends have already passed. So they're happy riding this life thing out until they, too, succumb to a cough or chest pain that never leaves.

What of the 35-44 year olds, then? You'd think we'd be the happiest. We have money, decent jobs, and we pretty much know who we are at this point. Married or single, we get laid with relative regularity, give or take the societal fringe of course. We're independent, we can go and do what we want when we want. No parents to leash us. No osteoporosis to limit us. Why then are we so angst-ridden all the time?

Hell if I know. Ask me when I'm 55.

Sometimes it's not the place, it's the company. I tried Burlington, Vermont again for New Year's this year. Yeah. I did. It's just too nice a place to stay away from and I had some demons to exorcise. Made a few changes this time though. This time I: traveled there in a Volvo with all-weather tires; brought a snow shovel; wore a brand new Gore-tex lined L.L. Bean jacket that the tag said would keep me warm at -20 degrees Fahrenheit; and stayed there three nights instead of one. Most importantly, however, I was accompanied by my girlfriend of one year (today!), rather than someone I barely knew. And that, my friends, made all the difference. Let it never be said that I don't learn from my mistakes.

We are never EVER going to stop every single disgruntled person in the world who wants to kill himself and a bunch of other people. I am dumbfounded by the gnashing of teeth that is going on over this Nigerian dude on the plane. It's stunning how a single potentially deadly act can induce mass hysteria for weeks from here to Des Moines. It was a close call, to be sure. He should never have gotten on the plane. Security needs to be better. Intelligence services need to communicate with each other and learn how to distill, digest, and react to the billions of bits of data that fly by every month. It is a herculean task.

You know who did that remarkably well? Who had incredibly solid control over their country (and several others)? Who knew where everyone was and what they were doing virtually all the time? The Nazis. Stalin ran a pretty tight ship too, as did some generals in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. You didn't see too many terrorists in those countries back in the day. Pretty high price tag for that "safety" though, eh?

I'm going to make a bold prediction: unfortunately, more Americans are going to be killed by terrorists in the future. It's going to happen on a subway. It's going to happen on an airplane. It's going to happen in buildings, outside of buildings, in the United States and in foreign countries. It's going to happen. I hope I'm not there at the time, but I certainly could be. So could you. Our leaders will and should do their best to protect us and catch the people who want to do us harm, but anyone who thinks that we can stop every single person every single time from killing people when he or she is willing to die him or herself is beyond delusional. We can't even stop disgruntled Americans from killing Americans, in schoolyards, malls, post offices, law firms, brokerage houses, city neighborhoods, and federal buildings. What makes us think we're going to be anymore successful at stopping foreigners from doing it?

And why does everyone shit their pants when it's a foreigner -- an AL QAEDA OPERATIVE -- who does it? Aren't they murderers just like every other murderer? Isn't every homicide victim equal to every other? Maybe it's the mass scale of what the Nigerian tried to do that makes it more frightening. Tell me though, how many people in this country have died at the hands of mass murderers since 9/11? There was Columbine, there was that guy at Virginia Tech, there was that nutjob at the Amish school, there was the BTK Killer, there was Ted Bundy. No - Bundy was way before 9/11. So was BTK. Alright, so we've had mass murderers around for a long time in this country. I'd be willing to bet that more Americans were killed in school shootings during the past 8 years than were killed as a result of foreign terrorism.

Of course we need to try and stop it. I want to clap and dance a jig every time I find out that a drone has offed some human garbage in Pakistan or Afghanistan. But we need to face reality too. We can't stop everybody. There's a risk associated with being alive: you might get killed. We can't invade every country -- we can't afford it and it's bankrupting us. Bin Laden has said from the very beginning that he wants to bankrupt us. Bin Laden has known all along that when we can't afford our tanks, our drones, our military excursions to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, when Americans are hungry and can't find work or decent health care because we're spending billions upon billions outside the country on war after war after war, when America shreds the Constitution and creates a police state like the Nazis and Soviet Union in an effort to keep out every brainwashed Nigerian or Yemeni or Pakistani who has so devalued his own life that he thinks dying and killing is the only thing that will make him important, well, that's when he knows that he's as close to a complete victory over the United States as he's going to achieve in his lifetime. That's when he and Al Qaeda will have won. He knows it. He's planning for it. And so far, it's working. Because we overreact to every action Al Qaeda takes. Because we fear death so much that we're unwilling to accept a single casualty -- excepting those to our military forces, and even those we find virtually unbearable -- as the cost of doing business in this "War on Terror."

We haven't been asked to do too much in this War since September 2001. The very least we can do is keep our wits, not piss our pants when bad things, terrible things happen -- and unfortunately they will continue to -- and understand that there will be casualties in this War, both civilian and military. It's a War. That's what happens in Wars. People die. When we avoid disaster like we did two weeks ago, we should count our blessings, fix the problems we can fix and accept those that we can't. Because some can't be fixed.

Remember, it wasn't airport security, Predator drones, or the billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan and Iraq that stopped the Nigerian on that Detroit flight. It was two alert, clear-eyed passengers who figured out what was happening and brought the hammer down on that asshole. Same for those passengers over Shanksville, PA on 9/11. They died fighting.

Damn, that was a rant and a half, wasn't it?

Rants can be cathartic.

At some point, I became the parent of my parents. I'm not sure when it happened, but here we are.

I want to ski again. I left this expensive hobby behind when I moved to the city eighteen years ago. It just wasn't easy to keep it up what with law school, no car for more than a decade, and the long hours I worked earlier in my career. Plus it's hard as balls to get out of the city and up to a mountain on a Friday night. Plus no car. Oh, I mentioned that already. Anyhoo, after viewing the whitecapped Alps during my plane ride home last November and driving by the Green Mountains in Vermont over the holiday, I realized that I really miss skiing. I miss being on the mountain, skis underfoot, and trying to figure out how I'm going to survive the black diamond that I mistakenly thought was an intermediate slope. I don't miss kissing tree stumps with my face or bloody lift tickets, though. I'm going to Vail, Colorado in two weeks, so we'll see how strong this rekindled ski bug of mine really is. I heard they wear helmets now, that's probably a good thing for me.

I crave light. I think I have seasonal affective disorder. All I feel like doing this winter, besides skiing of course, is sleeping. I slept so much over Christmas I felt like a hibernating bear. This winter has been cold so far and the darkness is so damn depressing. I'm going to need to wedge in a beach trip before April, methinks.

In another life, I'm an artist. If I wasn't so damn materialistic and attached to my thus far cushy lifestyle, I'd be doing full-time what I enjoy in my spare time: writing and photography. Hell, I might even be a painter! I just know in another life, another version of reality in the multiverse, I'm sitting with an easel somewhere, Mandrake goatee on my face, mixing acrylics and painting the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Or, having graduated from the renown MFA program at the University of Iowa, I'm working on my third novel after publishing two lengthy short story compilations. Or I'm a photojournalist documenting atrocities in Darfur. In this life, I catch fluorescent tans in my Aeron chair, work in front of the computer until 11 p.m., and return home only to collapse on my mango sofa from Design Within Reach and click on my plasma t.v. in a vain effort to forget about the stress of my day. Which sounds better to you? I'm just saying, I was probably destined for more arty things, and I got sidetracked somewheres. I think it was when my Uncle Saverio let me borrow his bottle of Paco Rabanne in the seventh grade before a school dance. (I needed all the ammo I could get, you know, to impress the LAY-DEES.)

It was all downhill from there.

A Few Christmas Thoughts

2009-12-20T11:50:00.009-05:00

It's that time of year. A time for all of us to come together in peace and good will and express our love for each other and all of humanity. In that regard, here are a few Christmas (not "Holiday," CHRISTMAS) thoughts I'd like to share:

Do They Know It's Healthcare After All? I've been watching this health care debate for months, through the Great Teabagger Debates, through the name-calling across both sides of the aisle, through the political wranglings with the Olympia Snowes, the Joe Liebermans, the Ben Nelsons, through the lying, hyperbolic Party of No's ("PON") talking heads, the Palins, the McCains, the McConnells, decrying the Death Panels, abortion subsidies, and profligate spending in what they have deemed "Obamacare." I've seen that $260 million insurance company lobby money in action, opposing any change to the status quo that is bankrupting this country. I watched it all. And now, here we are, on the cusp of a Senate bill that is something like 2000 pages long, that no Republican deigned to vote for, a bill that still needs to be combined with a House bill that has some fundamental differences, and which won't take effect until 2014 at the earliest.

Where do I come down on this leviathan, this laughably watered down version of what I originally wanted for this country, this bill that was written in substantial part by the insurance companies and their lobbies? I'm for it. I wanted a public option. Nay, I actually wanted a single payer system with a private option. I think health care is a right, not a privilege. I feel that health care is a fundamental benchmark by which any country should be judged. I also don't feel it should be driven by a profit motive. That's just my philosophy. The United States pays more for its health care on average than any country in the world. It is ranked 37th in the world in quality of health care. It also has a shorter life expectancy than many countries who spend far less. It has 40 million people who are not insured. There's something fundamentally wrong with that.

I wanted a lot of things. I wanted caps on what insurance companies could charge to customers. I wanted checks on hospital expenses and unnecessary tests. Yes, I could have gone for some tort reform as well. The Senate health care reform bill, passed only by Democrats, addresses some of these problems, too few, in my opinion. But it's better than nothing. It's better than the status quo. It's better than the Big Zero we got from Republicans who held power for eight years after they obliterated Bill Clinton's attempt to pass health care reform in 1995. They did absolutely nothing on this issue. Zero. And now they're pissing all over the first attempt at major transformative legislation that we've had in this country in decades. The PONs nauseate me, I'm not going to lie. Talk about not putting the country first, they wrote the book. And I'd throw plenty of Democrats in there with them. That's why we got the bill we got instead of the bill we should have had. It's not easy to get the 60 votes that were needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. In fact, it's nearly impossible. That's why they're trying to jam this thing through so fast, before the numbers change and the PONs prevent any change from happening at all.

We're going to hear a lot in the coming months about how Democrats "own" this bill; how it costs too much money; how it contains x or y or z provision, which is going to sound ridiculous to a lot of people. Most of that criticism is going to come from the PONs, who have something like a 17% approval rating, and whose sole ambition is to regain power and prevent Obama from declaring any form of victory on any front, save Afghanistan. My response to them will be a series of questions: "What were you proposing?" "What did you do to help pass a better bill?" "What compromises did you propose to the Democrats?" "What were you willing to accept from the other side?" And when it comes to money, how much this thing is going to cost, I will ask: "How much did the drug bill you passed under Bush cost the country?" "How much did the Iraq War add to the deficit?" "Was that money well spent?"

The fact that we're remotely close to health care reform in this country is a remarkable feat in itself, given our decades of failure on this issue. And I'm a pragmatist at heart. I don't love what will eventually pass, I don't know every single detail of the Senate bill -- no one does -- but one thing is certain: it contains provisions that improve on the status quo, which is untenable by any measure. No more denials for pre-existing conditions. National competition among private insurers, which should lower costs for all of us. Tax breaks for small businesses to make health care more affordable for them to provide. 31 million previously uninsured will now have the chance to have health care. That's something. It's better than what we have now.

Do You Hear What I Hear? Deer Tick: Born on Flag Day. Buy it. A few song recommendations on the album: Friday XIII, Easy, and Houston, TX. If you like gravelly-voiced singers with a little country edge, you'll like these guys. It's good for long drives or subway rides, as the case may be.

Another choice: Edward Sharpe and the Magnificent Zeros. Songs: "Home," "Janglin', and "Come in Please."

Silent Night, Holy Night. If you ever want to feel like you're in your own music video, strap on a pair of sound-free Bose headphones, the kind that go on your ears, not in them, plug them into your musical device of choice, hit play on your favorite song, and start walking the streets of New York City. I'm telling you, it's just like being in your own video. I'm not saying it's completely safe -- it helps to be able to hear things around you when you're walking in New York, particularly in intersections and on subways -- but it's worth trying, even for a few minutes.

Blue Christmas. How bad do you think Christmas is going to be for Tiger Woods this year? Damn, talk about a self-implosion. How do you chase that kind of poon (and a skanky category of poon it is!) for that long, that publicly, and not expect to get caught? Why do people that famous, who have that kind of sexual appetite bother getting married at all? Personally, I hate golf and could never understand the masturbatory fawning over Tiger Woods at all.

HE'S A FUCKING GOLFER! GOLFERS ARE NO MORE ATHLETIC THAN PEOPLE WHO SHOOT POOL OR THROW HORSESHOES. MINNESOTA FATS WAS A LEGENDARY POOL PLAYER. GOLF IS A SKILL, NOT A SPORT. GOLFERS ARE SKILLED GAMEPLAYERS, NOT ATHLETES.

Where was I? Oh yes, Christmas spirit. Tiger Woods. As disinterested as I am in his profession and public persona, I'm very interested in the Shakespearean tragedy of his classic fall from grace. It is epic. Watching commercial sponsors like Accenture (a company with its own history of public fuckups, see, e.g., Arthur Andersen, its former incarnation), who previously elevated this talented GOLFER to regal heights, now scurry away from him like cockroaches tasting the first scent of a can of RAID, has been hilarious. Tag Heuer - gone. I think only Nike is standing by him. I like that. Nikes don't fit me very well -- my feet are too wide so I tend to go with New Balance -- but I admire Nike's loyalty. That takes guts. It will be interesting to see where Tiger ends up now. Like Dennis Rodman said on Larry King last night (yes, we've sunk that far -- Dennis Rodman is now the voice of reason on shit like this), Americans like redemption. They like to give second and third chances to people. Hell, this country was FOUNDED on second chances! The Puritans, who were kicked out of England and helped colonize this country, were the embodiment of the Second Chance. We even gave a second chance to the American Indians we massacred and displaced. We stuck them in reservations where they'd have a chance to prosper by building casinos where Americans down on their luck could have, you guessed it, a second chance, by putting it all on red at the Roulette table.

Rodman thinks Tiger will come back stronger than ever. I tend to agree. Probably a few more Blue Christmases for him in the near future though. As for his beautiful wife, Elin? The future for her is so bright, she's got to wear shades. She's going to cash in on a divorce settlement and will be rich for the rest of her life. From what I've read, she's very smart. Her decision to leave this troubled guy (and swing a mean golf club in the process) certainly speaks volumes about her integrity and class. She's gorgeous and will have more than her share of wealthy and eligible suitors. Once the emotional pain and embarrassment of this debacle wear off, she's going to come out in the pole position on all of this. (No pun intended. Okay, actually it was.) Maybe she'll go on Oprah, write a book, et al.

And what of the Skanky Hoors Tiger passed the time with? Who gives a fuck? Those glorified escorts have gotten enough press already. Enjoy the 15 minutes. I'm not going to give them more air time in this obscure blog of mine.

White Christmas. Since I've resigned myself to the fact that the Earth will eventually go the way of Mars climate-wise and the human race is too selfish and shortsighted to do anything about it, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. I only want to address a single point. People who STILL claim that there is no global warming going on, in the face of an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence to the contrary, point to every stupid snowstorm or cold snap as irrefutable proof that our climate is operating the same as it ever did. What these idiots fail to understand is that extreme changes in weather, including snow and cold, are a part of the overall change in climate that has become more pronounced in the past fifty years. Overall the planet is warming at an alarming rate. That is measurable and undeniable. In the process, we're having more extreme weather changes than in recent history. As a kid growing up four hours north of New York City, I never remember having to wait until nearly January for the first snowstorm. We just got ours in New York yesterday, December 19th. It was so warm some days in November, it felt like California. I also don't remember the transition seasons being so similar. Spring and fall now are almost the same. The only thing that's different is the color of the leaves on the trees.

So to hear fools like Senator Inhofe exclaim that everything is operating normally is not only wrong, it's unconscionable. The right wing likes to gnash its teeth over how the left is mortgaging our children's future by spending all this money on health care and TARP. Why don't they apply this same mentality to the environment? A huge fucking deficit and a national bankruptcy in 2140 won't matter a damn if we have a desert in Iowa and the East and West Sides of New York City are flooded with water. Speaking of water, if you think the wars we're fighting over oil today are bad, I'd hate to be a soldier fighting the Great Water War of 2180. Water is tomorrow's oil. And unlike oil, human beings need water to survive.

If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I hope I'm reborn on an alien planet with beings who bear a more selfless, intelligent view of the good of ALL of their kind. Human beings? Earth? They've got a short shelf life. I really don't want to come back here, eat sand for dinner, and starve to death before I'm five years old.

Wonderful Christmastime. Let's try to end this on a good note, shall we? As I've gotten older, the more I've come to realize that Christmas is more about family than anything else. It used to be about the prezzies. Not anymore. This year my family made the decision -- and a wise one I think -- to buy Christmas presents for my nephew and nieces rather than each other. As our family has grown, Christmas had become more stressful, unwieldy and expensive. This decision took the pressure off of all of us, at a time when we all have less money to spend. And it's brought us back to the real purpose of Christmas, expressing love for each other and spending time together.

The thing I'm looking most forward to this Christmas is some quality time with my nephew and nieces, my significant other (our first X-mas together :) ), my parents, my sisters, and brothers in law. I'll enjoy seeing the kids open what I got them. And I'll enjoy experiencing another Christmas with my parents. My grandmother's death reminded me that we are all getting older. There are only so many Christmases left for us to enjoy in good health, with all of us here. My father and mother will not live forever, and there will come a time, hopefully in the distant future but who really knows, when my father's Alzheimers progresses to the point where he becomes so changed that the version of him we are experiencing is a pale comparison to the man we always knew. That time has not yet come, but it will, sadly.

One thing I love about photography is that it is one of the only ways we can capture a moment in time in this life. A picture freezes time. It takes us back to a moment in our past, a feeling, a place. By looking at a picture, we're able to taste it again, albeit in a less intense way.

That's all I want this Christmas. To freeze time, if only for a day or two. To share memories of Christmases past and make new ones with my family. To share my love with them and let them know how I feel about all of them. That's enough for me. That's all I need. It's all I want.

So... to all of my readers, who have stuck by this blog in the face of more intermittent entries, where I sometimes go weeks without an entry due to work and other commitments, I want to thank you for your loyalty, for continuing to read and exchange your thoughts with me. My sincere best wishes to all of you and to your families for a safe and Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year in 2010.

T.

FF - Attention Walmart Shoppers a/k/a Why I Shop Online

2009-12-04T15:58:00.005-05:00

It's that time of year again: Christmastime!!! A time for gathering with family, nestling next to an open fire (or air conditioner, in these days of global warming) with your loved ones, drinking egg nog and reminiscing about Christmases past. It's also a time for SHOPPING for that special someone on your Christmas list. And no one does shopping, no one does CHRISTMAS shopping better than America. With Christmas ads now bombarding our airwaves as early as Halloween, here in America, we can't effing WAIT for the buying to start! Think the economy is a problem? No. Friggin'. Way.

Check this shit out from Black Friday 2009:

Just look at these animals (enjoy the slo-mo and keep an eye out for the lady whose wig falls off)!

Ah, the holidays, how I love them so.

Nonna Vecchia

2009-11-29T10:44:00.029-05:00

In Italian, "nonna vecchia" means "old grandmother." What sounds like an insult in English is actually a term of endearment. In Italy, where 13th century homes and ancient roads line the countryside as casually as American strip malls, old is good. Old is experience. Old is wisdom and respect. "Nonna Vecchia" is what my sisters and I called my mother's mother from the very first time we were conscious of her existence. I asked her once "Do you really want us to call you 'old grandmother,' isn't that insulting to you? Why don't we call you 'Nonna Mimma' and use your nickname? "Ma no," she'd say, "Tu puoi chiamarmi come vuoi, ma a me piace essere chiamata 'Nonna Vecchia'. Per me va bene cosi - non e un offeso." You can call me whatever you like, but for me, "Nonna Vecchia" is totally fine - it's not an offense.

When I was born, Nonna Vecchia was 43 years old, two years older than I am now. Back then she had dark black hair and hazel eyes and her skin was smooth and white. She had a penchant for black and navy blue clothes -- a habit that became more pronounced with the death of my grandfather 36 years ago -- with an occasional flowery print that she'd trot out once in awhile to break the monotony. To my childhood mind, Nonna Vecchia was the spitting image of Patricia Neal, the actress from the 70s show "The Waltons." I remember trying to convince my mother one time that Nonna Vecchia had learned English and was pretending to be the Waltons' grandmother once a week on CBS. "No, honey. That's an actress, not Nonna Vecchia," my mother would explain, laughing at my exuberant imagination. "Nonna Vecchia is still in Italy and she doesn't speak a word of English. You'll see that the next time you visit her."

For most children, going to grandma's house involves a car ride of some duration, or a short plane ride if she lives farther away. For me, going to Nonna Vecchia's house required a passport, a packed suitcase, and an 8-hour plane ride to a foreign country where I didn't speak the language. It meant being a fish out of water for weeks or months at a time. Until I learned to speak Italian, calls to Nonna had to be dictated and translated by my mother. I learned how to say "Ti voglio bene, Nonna" and "Ti amo Nonna." I came to understand my grandmother more by the loving way she spoke to me than the actual words she said. Even through my adulthood, Nonna would end every phone call with five loud kisses into the telephone.

Unlike many Italian-Americans, who speak no Italian and have never bothered to set foot in Italy, it was important to my mother, who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1960s, that we have a close relationship with the members of my family in Italy, especially my grandmother. My mother wanted us to know where she came from. We called Nonna often, whenever my mother could hide the telephone bill from my father. Every four or five years, we'd visit Italy, sometimes for an entire summer. One might think that I was lucky to have this opportunity, but that's not how I viewed things as a kid. My friends were going to Disney World! They were going on Space Mountain, taking water rides, and visiting haunted houses! That's what I wanted to do with my summers. I had no interest in transplanting myself in a foreign country for three goddamn months with people I didn't understand and who didn't understand me. I also wasn't interested in depending on my mother, and her attendant moods, to translate my every word and those of the people around me.

My mother didn't give a shit about how I felt. She took the long view. Today I have to thank her. I have relatives who have never been on a plane because they're too afraid to fly. I took my first plane trip to Italy at 6 months old, then again at two, then again at six, then again at eleven, fifteen, and so on. I have friends in the U.S. who have never left the country, much less visited Europe. And most of those who have traveled to Europe have never seen it the way I have, from the perspective of people who actually live there. I've done it countless times and feel like I understand Italy in a way many Italian-Americans don't.

My first memories of visiting Italy are from when I was six years old. I remember being faced with the prospect of being a mute for 90 days or learning some Italian. It was not a difficult choice. I have many Italian cousins my age and it didn't take me long to learn how to speak their language, albeit imperfectly. (They sure as fuck weren't going to learn English, the lazy bastards!) Even a few words went a long way. Now I have connections with members of my family who, even though they live thousands of miles away and I don't see them that often, are like brothers and sisters to me. At a very young age, my visits to Italy gave me another perspective on the world, allowed me to see how vast, different, and complex it is. To a large extent, these visits and my connections to family in Italy have influenced my life, my opinions, and made me the person I am today, for better and worse.

Domodossola, where my grandmother lived, is my second home and the source of a lifetime of memories. One year, my dad brought a whiffle ball and bat and taught my cousins and their friends to play American baseball in a huge field near my Nonna's house. (Sadly, that field was split in half by a major road ten years ago and is now littered by houses.) In turn, I learned to play soccer on via Giuseppe Chiovenda, in front of Nonna's apartment building. In 1974, the neighborhood was chock-full of kids my age, whom I befriended in my own right. I was "Il Americano," which garnered me instant respect. The neighborhood kids in Domodossola hadn't seen a foreigner before. To them I was an alien from a faraway land. I was a novelty. Or maybe I managed to fit in because my cousins Davide and Massimo already knew everyone in the neighborhood. Whatever the reason, I had instant street cred. I befriended Danilo, Lorenzo, and Gianni. Together we played with model cars on the concrete divider that separated the street from the courtyard to my Nonna's apartment building. We played hide and go seek. We played Risk. I taught them about life in the United States. They taught me about life in Italy.

I remember getting my first kiss from Rosanna behind an apartment building across the street from my grandmother's house when I was eleven. She was thirteen. I remember nearly getting my ass kicked from Rosanna's boyfriend four years later, when I returned to reclaim her for the summer. I remember committing my first infidelity when Rosanna left for a two-week vacation in Sicily and I became infatuated by Daniela, a beautiful girl with piercing blue eyes who lived in another building across the street from my Nonna. The way my grandmother's building was situated, I could see where they both lived from the comfort of Nonna's balcony. I'd sit there listening to music or staring at the mountains and wait for Rosanna or Daniela to appear on their respective balconies. My reward would be a wave and a smile. (This may have been how my voyeuristic tendencies originated.)

Not all of my youthful memories are good ones, of course. One time, when I was six, my cousin Massimo, who was a year older than me, convinced me to participate in one of his many delinquent activities. A monsoon rain the night before had left a large brown pool of dirty water in the field behind Nonna's apartment building. Massimo and I salivated as we viewed the huge puddle from my grandmother's back balcony and contemplated the possibilities. It was extremely hot outside, so we decided that a refreshing dip would be the best use of our new pool. We scurried from Nonna's apartment, skipped down the five flights of stairs, and soon found ourselves at the edge of the shit-brown lake of water. Other kids were standing there looking at the water. None of them were stupid enough to go in. With considerable bravado, Massimo proclaimed that we were going in, forthwith, their cowardice be damned! They just laughed and looked at us like we were nuts.

Then, a thunderbolt behind us, the owl screech of my great-grandmother (Nonna Vecchia's mother) beckoned from Nonna's back balcony twenty yards away and five stories up. With an upraised bony arm waving menancingly, she screamed "Non entrare in quell'acqua! E sporrrrrcha!!!" Don't go in that water, it's dirrrrrty!

Yeah, yeah, whatever. We laughed at the old crone. What was she, 75 years old? What was she going to do about it? Massimo jumped in first. Then me. I wasn't much of a swimmer and hated having my head under water, so I did a quick doggy paddle. The water wasn't deep. We came out on the other side, our white shirts soaked with mud and gunk and god knows what else. We were laughing our asses off, the careless joie de vivre of youth.

Then, without warning, the fun ended. Incredibly, within two minutes of us crawling out of the water like two prehistoric turtles, my great grandmother was on us like a banshee, cackling nonsensically in a Calabrese dialect I couldn't begin to understand. With a strength I could never have imagined in someone so old, she grabbed us both by the wrists and dragged us off the wet field and up the five flights of stairs to my grandmother's tiny bathroom. We were laughing at her the entire time. We thought it was a joke. We figured we'd just change our clothes and be on our way. Nonnina had other plans. She dragged us into Nonna's bathroom, stripped us naked, plopped us in the tub and proceeded to spank us silly while continuing to howl at us incomprehensibly. In between ass-slaps, she hosed us down with the extend-a-faucet, paying no attention to whether the water was hot or cold. To this day I remember Massimo's face, his eyes in a squint, his cheeks red, a face full of shock and tears. We were utterly terrified. How had she done it? How had she gotten there so fast? Was she a vampire who could appear from nowhere? How was she so motherfucking strong that her vigorous spanks could sting that much??? Was it a lack of bone density that gave her fingers such flexibility? There were no answers. Only pain and humiliation. From Nonna Vecchia, who hated conflict to a fault, we received a stern warning that we had gotten what we deserved from Nonnina, as could have given ourselves dysentery or worse from that disgusting water. Nonna Vecchia was the good cop. Nonnina was the bad cop.

Three decades later, after Nonnina was long gone, I remember laughing at that story with Nonna as we sat in her dining/living room, she with her Marlboro, me with my espresso. "Ma lei era in-ca-zz-ata!" Indeed. During my visits as an adult, we'd talk long into the night about everything: my mother as a child, my grandfather, who died of lung cancer at 56, the hell of World War II, through which she, like many Italians, endured famine, the Germans, and the fear of imminent death. We'd talk about life in general. Among other things, she'd give me all kinds of advice about women, some of it old-fashioned, some of it distinctly not. I remember she told me once: "Even if you get married, if you see a woman you're attracted to, don't you be afraid to go for it and have some fun. Just don't tell your wife or it will cause problems. If you don't, you might resent her later." What the fuck?? Of course, this advice didn't pertain to her own relationship with my Nonno, much less those of her daughters, but the men in the family always enjoyed a double-standard with her. And we talked about the members in our family, every single one of them. There's enough comedy and tragedy there that I could write a book.

Though I didn't see Nonna as often as many people get to see their grandmothers, we shared deep experiences that I will ponder and cherish for the rest of my life. I spent two weeks with her in Argentina in January 1995, when she was there visiting her sister, my aunt Marianina, who immigrated to Argentina after World War II. Nonna and I went to the beach together, shared meals, and bunked in the same room where we spent hours talking. In the summer of 1997, she came to the U.S. for Sister J.'s wedding, which was to be in September. I picked her up at JFK in New York and she spent a few days with me alone before I took her up to my mother's house in New Hampshire. At the time, she was 72 years old and had severe scoliosis (a minor form of which she has bequeathed to me), which made her back as crooked as a Utah canyon. She stayed with me in my tiny apartment on the Upper West Side and never once complained about the three flights of narrow stairs she had to climb to get there. I proudly showed her my city from the top of one of those Red Apple double-decker buses, where you get on and off at different sightseeing spots throughout the day. We went to the South Street Seaport; I showed her the Twin Towers ("Mamma mia, come son' alti!"); and my office on Broad Street, where I used to work. We ate spaghetti con vongole at Ernie's, near my apartment. She couldn't believe how big the portions were. ("Non posso mangiare tutto di questo!") I took her to Central Park where we spent the day talking and relaxing in the shade. She walked the entire way to and from my apartment on Amsterdam Ave., again without complaint.

That trip to New York was the last time I remember her being truly happy. A few weeks later, the day after my mother's birthday in July, I received a frantic phone call from my uncle Saverio's wife in Chile. Saverio was my Nonna's son and it's fair to say, her favorite of all her children. His wife was crying. She told me in broken English that my favorite zio had died of a heart attack the night before. He was 48 years old. When I took the call, Nonna Vecchia was dusting my mother's bedroom behind me. Even though I was speaking English, she knew something was wrong because I was unable to contain my shock at the news. "What happened?" she asked me when I hung up the phone. I told her that a friend of mine had been in a car accident and was in the hospital. If I had I told her the truth, I'm sure she would have dropped dead right in front of me. "Oh.... mi dispiace," she said. "Si sta bene adesso?" "Yes, he's fine. It wasn't serious." I snuck downstairs and called my mother at work. Arrangements had to be made. They had to fly my uncle's body back to Italy. We would somehow have to break the news to Nonna so she could attend her son's funeral. She would not make my sister's wedding.

Do you know what it's like to carry around the kind of terrible news that you know is going to permanently change, for the worse, the life of a person you love very much? I do. My mother, sisters, and I held everything in that morning while my mother made phone calls to her family in Italy. We tried to keep Nonna busy upstairs, but she wasn't stupid and knew something was up. My sister was a pharmaceutical sales rep at the time. She called one of her doctor contacts who told us to bring her to his office where he'd give her a tranquilizer and we'd break the news to her. Under the auspices of showing her where my sister worked (another lie), and after discussing the pros and cons, we drugged Nonna's espresso with a mild sedative that Sister J. had on hand. It made her drowsy and eventually knocked her out. A black comedy is all I can call it now. With Nonna sleeping most of the way, Sister J. and I jokingly contemplated the lifetime of guilt and potential liability that we'd suffer if she didn't wake up. Fortunately, Nonna did wake up when we were almost at the doctor's office. Upon arrival, the doctor took us to an examination room where he gave her a simple examination, checking her pupils, heart rate, and blood pressure (since we were there anyway). Then he slowly broke the news to her in English and my mother translated it into Italian. Out of respect for Nonna, I won't share her reaction to this devastating news, other than to say that it was Biblical in proportion. Right out of the Old Testament.

After that, Nonna lost something. She went back to Italy with my mother for the funeral and never left the country again. She kept Saverio's picture across from her dining room table so that it would never out of her sight. She kept another picture of him in her bedroom. Her eyes were perpetually sad. She aged exponentially and her back became ever more crooked. She ate less and less. When I returned to Italy in 1998 and again in 2004, I'd hug her and feel her fragile bones. Each time I left I thought I'd never see her again. "Non aspettare troppo per ritornare, eh Timmy?" she'd say to me. I won't, I promised. In her later years, what little joy she had she got from stories about, and visits with, her great grandchildren.

In March 2007, she became very ill and nearly died. In May, I surprised her with a birthday visit. She had been staying at my aunt's house in Gallarate, which was near the hospital that had attended to her. I walked in and was struck by seeing her tiny body on the sofa, looking so frail. She had an oxygen tube stuck up her nose. "Ah, ciao, Massimo," she said to me when I walked in, thinking that I was my cousin. "Ma, non sono Massimo," I said. "Non mi ricordi?" She looked up again and saw that it was me. Her face suddenly got all red and she started breathing hard and I began to think that I'd made a colossal mistake. A few moments later, we both shed tears of joy, and I hugged her hard. She was so excited to see me. I can't tell you how much fun it was to surprise her like that. The next day, Massimo came down, and we celebrated her 83rd birthday with a cake and champagne that I spilled all over the place trying to open. As she blew out her single red candle, I wondered to myself how many of those candles she had left.

A few weeks ago, Nonna Vecchia slipped in her bathroom and broke her rib. She went to the hospital again, this time in Domodossola. I assumed that she'd be back home soon, just like the last time. I was wrong. Before long, her need for oxygen became greater than an oxygen tank could provide in a 24-hour span. She began to have trouble breathing. Two weeks ago, she told my aunts to take her home from the hospital. She wanted to die in her own house.

On November 17, 2009, Nonna Vecchia died in her bed, just like she wanted. Before she died, my aunt put a telephone to Nonna's ear so that she could hear my mother tell her that she and I were coming to see her, that she should try and hold on just a little longer until we could get there. She couldn't speak then, but breathed hard into the phone. She had heard my mother's words. She knew that we were coming, but she died before we could see her again.

Last Friday, I flew to Italy to attend Nonna's funeral. When I got to her apartment, the same apartment I'd visited so many times, I opened the door to her bedroom and saw her lying in a casket with the top removed. The far window was open and the room was cold. They'd moved her bed against the wall to make room for her. The room was divided by a folding wall emblazoned with the Virgin Mary and other religious symbols. Flowers were everywhere -- their smell was overpowering. Nonna lay underneath a thin white netting embroidered with a cross. Her eyes were closed. She looked asleep. My instant thought at seeing her was the word "husk." Her body was there but it wasn't really her. Whatever separates the living from the dead had long since left; we were just looking at the shed skin that remained. Somehow that thought comforted me. I didn't spend much time in that room.

In Italy, there is a certain worship of the dead, of the tragedy of death and mortality, no matter the age of the deceased. Before she died, I discovered that Nonna Vecchia had spent nearly 50 euros a month (close to $70) on remembrance Masses for the members of my family who had died. If we can be faulted in the United States for worshiping youth and ignoring death completely, in Italy, there is too much of a focus on death, on cemeteries and gravestones and the sadness of absence. My beloved Nonna Vecchia is at peace now. She's with my grandfather, Nonnina, zio Saverio, and all of the members of my family who died before her. While I miss her and always will, I don't feel her absence wholly and completely. As with the friends and family I've lost before, her death feels to me as if she's stepped behind a curtain that I simply can't open. When it's my turn to go, that curtain will slide open and she'll be there to greet me, along with the rest of my family and friends who have gone before me.

The day after Nonna's funeral, I took her clothes down from the clothesline that extends from her balcony. Someone, at some point, had washed her clothes for the last time and clipped them to the line with bright yellow, blue, and red clothespins. Maybe she'd done it herself. Taking her clothes down felt to me like a somber ritual, the kind reserved for soldiers killed in combat. Every move of my arms and hands felt calibrated and choreographed. I carefully removed the clothespins, folded her clothes, and placed them in a little basket. I thought to myself how strange it was that of all the members of my family, I was the one taking them down. Who could have predicted that when they were washed and hung there days or weeks before? As careful as I was trying to be, when I unclipped one of her black socks from the line, it slipped through my hands and dropped over the railing to the ground below. I leaned over the edge and saw the sock draped over the balcony railing of Nonna's neighbor, one floor down. It hung peacefully, as if it had always been destined to be there, no matter how careful I was, and no matter what plans it may have had for itself.

Utah Pics

2009-11-07T10:42:00.020-05:00

Meh - I've been working too much lately to do anything I feel like doing, including writing. So, Blogger's lousy picture software notwithstanding, here are some of my favorite pics from Utah, in what feels like a lifetime ago, to try and remind me what leisure time feels like. All rights reserved, of course. : )

Okay, I didn't take these, but they make me look more cool (at least in my own head), so I'm adding them anyway:

Saturday Mournings

2009-10-24T10:58:00.011-04:00

I don't know why this happens on Saturday mornings when I'm alone. I'll be sitting at my computer, surfing, playing Scrabble on Facebook. Inevitably, I'll go to iTunes and try to hunt down a new song that I discovered the week before that I can't live without. This week it's "Sing" by Peter Joback and Kate Pierson (of B-52s fame) - I think it's a cover of an old 60s song. I'll play the song and all these memories and thoughts of people who have died will fill my mind. Anne, Matt, my Uncle Saverio, my grandmother, images of them in my head, like grainy old film. Anne's preoccupied scowl on Melrose Avenue. Riding on the back of her motorcycle. The way she hung upside down on the jungle gym when we were seven while I practically wet my pants. Matt's freckles. Matt's cackle. Matt lying in his coffin with too much lipstick. My uncle's voice on the phone the day before he died. His beard. His smile. The way he rubbed his teeth with the plastic wrapper from his cigarette box when he was done eating. My grandmother's bear hugs. The ten dollars I got from her every birthday. The indecipherable half-English, half-Italian scrawl she wrote in my birthday card. Her pizzelli she made herself and wrapped in tinfoil and fed us whenever we'd come to visit. How we'd have to have my father translate half the things she said because we couldn't understand a word.

I'll think of how they're all gone too early, how their lives ended. How they're not here anymore, how I miss them. How my parents will, one day too soon, not be here anymore. And I'll get profoundly, immeasurably sad.

Life sometimes seems quite pointless, doesn't it? Death makes it so. What do we all live for, what's the purpose of it all when inevitably, there will come a day when it's all over and we're not here anymore? When the writer puts a period at the end of our sentence? We try to find meaning for our lives in our jobs, our children, our families, our pastimes, but in the end, the reality we cobble together for ourselves disappears like a mirage that was never really there.

On Saturday mornings, when I don't have a certain someone and her dog to keep me company, that's how it sometimes feels to me. I don't say this because I'm depressed, so don't get all squirrely on me and advise me on the merits of Prozac. I'm fine. I'm just telling you about a feeling I sometimes get. Instead of letting it pass like a bad fart, I thought I'd examine it for a change. Problem is, the second I try to do that, it's gone. It's like trying to dissect a zen koan. "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Already, even as I type these words, it's floating away, away, away, into the air. The sad feeling never lingers long. It comes upon me like a wave and rolls away just as quickly. I guess I'd compare it to an emotional orgasm. It's short, quick, and cathartic. Once I squeeze a few tears out, I instantly feel better. But why Saturday mornings? And why is it music, a certain kind of heart-tugging song that brings it all out, if ever so briefly? That unconscious, she is a strange bird!

Here's the song and video I was talking about.

The song is beautiful, to me, anyway. A guy, his girl, and their dog, driving through the Arizona or Utah desert, encountering the angry, the frustrated, the dispossessed, and changing their reality in the simplest of ways. It's a choice they make. And it all starts with a song. It's a simple thought: Just Sing. Singing is I am here. Singing is I exist. The connections we make, the people who touch us, whether they are alive or not. There's a purpose to it all, even if we have no idea what it is while we're here. They keep driving, all the way to New York, all the way to Brooklyn. The exhaust coming out of their car is a happy green and blue. You see how loud and angry it is, how mean the people are to each other. A dog gets squirted on. But a song and people change. Even in the Big City. It ends with a Hark the Herald Angels trumpet player, a man on his apartment roof blasting it out while his cat watches. Mission accomplished, our protagonists drive back West, towards the desert.

If only we were capable of that kind of patience and love. Maybe that's why we keep ourselves so busy all the time. Easier to go to work, write that brief, clean the apartment, make lists, check them twice, plan playdates, drive kids to karate, go antiquing, meet that deadline, go shopping, have a glass of wine, zone out to Survivor, or read People magazine to see what hijinks Lindsay Lohan has gotten herself into. A busy mind is an occupied mind, n'est-ce pas? And an occupied mind frets not, at least on the surface.

But is an occupied mind really living, or just passing through? Getting to life's core and purpose means opening up and exploring your guts. It means making yourself a little vulnerable. People don't like to do that. Too much exposure. Too much downside. That's probably why the world is the way it is. No one really knows who they are and why they're here. No one really understands why our priorities are so fucked up in the short time we spend here and we spend so much precious time going through the motions of life. And if we stop the blur for a second, if we bother to think about who we are and what we're doing, the amount of time that's already passed and what we've lost and missed can induce a stark melancholy.

That's why some of us have Saturday Mournings.

Stupid Human Tricks

2009-10-21T12:12:00.007-04:00

I've been wondering lately, what motivates some people to do the stupid things they do? Not the everyday, small, stupid things, but the big, macro, showstopping, get the world's attention stupid things. The kind of stupid things that make headlines, that grab your eyes and draw them to the television. The kind that go international and have people in Kamchatka discussing around water coolers the following day.

First up, Balloon Boy. You watched. I watched. We all watched that jiffy pop inflatable soaring through the blue Colorado sky to parts unknown. What was it? Where would it land? Was there a boy in there? Could there be? Would there be? Did he fall out? Was he clinging for dear life inside of the popcorn basket? I stopped at the plasma t.v. in my office lobby when I was getting coffee and watched the balloon fly for a few minutes on CNN. People were gathered round. There's a kid in there? Waaaaa?

Of course, it turns out there was no kid in there, and the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by a bad-acting, irresponsible, pathetic tool of a father to get himself on television. How sad a person is Richard Heene? What kind of father puts his wife and children at risk and makes liars out of them all so he can get famous? Who teaches his sons to lie on purpose, all for celebrity? We'll see what comes of his boys. My parents have their faults, but they are honest people who value truth and integrity. I once got the spanking of my life for lying to my mother about eating a banana when I actually threw it away. Things are a bit looser in the Heene household.

Heene got what he wanted: he's famous alright. Infamous. Right up there with Octomom. But I'm sure he feels bad celebrity is better than no celebrity, eh? All those fake tears, the pretend kicking of the deck chair when the balloon took off. That floppy moppy hair-do, circa 1994. He'll go down in the anals of American history frauds. Or is it annals?

Ironically, the only honest one in the family, Falcon a/k/a The Falconer -- the kid who told the truth to Wolf Blitzer in his little Yoda voice -- HE's the one getting ridiculed. For the rest of his life, Falcon will forever be known as Balloon Boy. He'll be 22, graduated from college, interviewing for his firt real job, and he'll say "Hi, my name's Falcon" and they'll say, "Falcon, Falcon, where have I heard that name before? OH YEAH, YOU'RE BALLOON BOY!" Hey, maybe it'll open a few doors for him, who wouldn't want to meet Balloon Boy if given the chance? Sure makes a resume stand out, dudn't it?

But it's the parents who should be ridiculed and bitchslapped here. It's Richard and his Yoko Ono wife who should suffer, not the kids. Makes me pine for the old days of tar and feathering. The Heenes would be prime candidates. Yet, I have trouble understanding their motivation, even now. Are people really so fucking desperate to become famous that they'd do something like this? What is in the mind of these people, that's what I want to know. What makes them tick? What defective gene, or millimeter of frontal lobe are they missing that they'd undertake something so dumb, so obvious, as this? Did they really think they wouldn't get caught? I mean, shit, didn't Henne know there was, at best, a 50% chance he'd come out of this looking like a total ass and facing criminal charges? Apparently not.

I don't think we've seen the last of them. I think this whole uproar is a part of the Heene Plan to Get Famous. It has to be. He's going to take his licks, maybe do some jail time, ride out the investigation by Child Protective Services, then he'll do a big mea culpa, maybe write a book, do a tour, appear on Oprah, say he's sorry, and THEN get that reality show he's been dying for. By then everyone will have forgotten how much of a dick he is and he'll just be an entertaining footnote in celebrity history, like John and Kate (or is it Joe and Kate? I never watched that fucking show.) And he'll get the last laugh on us. Oprah, Barnes & Noble book tour, The Surreal Life, Celebrity Rehab. It's the American way.

The above aside, you know what the real tragedy is here? The next time some poor kid gets stuck in a balloon for REALS, no one's going to believe him. And he'll just float away into oblvion and no one will care. Thanks to the Falcon who cried wolf. Thanks to the Heenes.

Then there's those sweat lodges. Three people just died in one this week. I guess the concept is you go into this tiny teepee house that's covered in tarp and rocks and they heat it up inside until it gets so hot you want to pull your skin off, and you just stay in there and sweat to the oldies for like 40 hours, until you start having hallucinations, pass out, or drop dead. Where do I sign up?? Found out tonight that the leader -- another one of those pie-eyed cult loonies -- had people fast for two days before they went in and then told them to "push past" the feeling they were going to die and to not fear death. MMMMMkay. Looks like that worked out real well, for three people at least.

The Koresh types are well documented. They're everywhere. Poople who want to lead sheep. Maybe they're frustrated politicians, teachers, priests, I don't know. I know enough about them, the cults of personality; what's curious to me is the sheep, those who frequent cults and sweat lodges? Who are these people? The lambs of God, the easily led, the easily slaughtered? Where do they come from? Why are they so fucked up? Why are they so willing to bare their necks to the vampire? That's what I just don't get. I go through life, working, living, sleeping here in New York, thinking life sucks on some days, thinking it's great on others, trying to keep a balance where the positive comes out more often, and making the best of this mediocre existence. But somewhere else, people are deciding that they'd like to plant their New Age ass in a sweat lodge and risk death for a few perspiratory hours. And for what? Enlightenment? By who? Some dude with a mesmerizing stare and a God complex? Heaven's Gate. The Jim Jones cult. The David Koresh cult. So many people willing to surrender their autonomy, their money, their critical thinking, their self-worth to crackpots. Misguided doesn't even come close to describing this. But if you're going to go out, I can think of better ways to "get closer to the Creator" than sweating to death like a bunch of pigs in a stinky teepee or burning to death in a Waco, Texas compound. Maybe Jim Jones had it right. Try the Kool-Aid.

My final example of questionable human behavior that is beyond me are these Oath Keepers. I just watched their leader joust with Chris Matthews on Hardball. The gist of this new set of rightwing, paranoid wackjobs who have been coming out from under rocks ever since Obama got sworn in, is that they want members of law enforcement and the military (gun-toters all) to take sworn oaths that they will not do certain things -- allegedly unconstitutional things -- if called upon to do so by The Fedral Gubmint. The Fedral Gubmint is dangerous and bad. The Oath Keepers think the Fedral Gubmint is on the verge of declaring martial law, sticking Americans into concentration camps, and taking away their civil rights. We're on the verge of Armageddon, folks! 2012 is almost here! So let's have all our law enforcement types take a sworn oath, shall we? It's right out of the movie Valkyrie, purportedly designed to prevent a dictatorship from taking root if uh, something should happen, for instance, if a bunch of right wing nutjobs should take a shot at the President and certain members of Congress and try to start a uh, REVOLUTION.

Now, most of us normal people understand that such a scenario is unlikely in our country. We trust our leaders who are too busy sucking the capitalist teat to try to overturn the apple cart and impose a dictatorship. The Oath Keepers beg to differ. Much like Richard Henne, who thinks the world is ending in 2012, they see trouble on the horizon, and it just so happens to have coincided with the first-ever election of a progressive black man as President of the United States.

Purely a coincidence, mind you.

Didn't hear about the Oath Keepers too much when Bush was President for those eight years. Didn't see too many people taking AK-47s to political rallies back then either, after 9/11, or when Bush started two wars and recommended an expensive, government-run bailout before leaving office. But now, surprise surprise, they're everywhere. When liberals organize, they have a sparsely attended rally in Washington, smoke weed, wear tie-dyes, and go home. Okay, maybe they break a few windows during G-8 summits. Why is it when rightwingers organize, it always involves guns, conspiracy theories, and paranoia?

I for one think these people and those like them forebode something very bad for this country. The kooks are stirring. They're armed, dangerous, and restless. They don't like Obama or Democrats running things, even though the Constitution they claim to support is what allowed these people to take power in a fair and free election. What we have here is a burning cauldron of bad circumstances, indeed. Foreign terrorist trying to kill Americans. Homegrown terrorists plotting something equally as bad, if not worse. Timothy McVeigh, one man, managed to destroy a huge federal building and kill dozens of people in a single April afternoon. What could a dozen do? A hundred? A thousand?

Regardless of what you think of Obama and his policies, if something nefarious should happen to him or to other leaders, Republican, Democrat, or Independent, it would do serious damage to this country's psyche. How big a daze were we in after the Kennedys were killed? How long did that last? Sometimes I think we're still not over it. A similar fate for Obama would destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans (those that are left after the tanked economy and the TARP bailout run their course), and call in to question the validity of this so-called democracy of ours. If a person some people don't like can't be fairly elected and take power, then what we have here, folks, is nothing more than a Banana Republic.

Of course, the ensuing chaos of such an event would start some serious ass rioting in certain parts of the country, the type of chaos that play right into the hands of the Left Behind and Oath Keeping crew, as well as the equally pathetic anarchists on the left. They're just looking for a way to validate their doomsday scenarios. What we need to do is keep an eye on these paranoid freaks and counter their attempts to instill fear with a bright spotlight and a heavy dose of reality. That's what Chris Matthews was trying to do last night.

But I wonder. Who thinks like these people? Who sees a threat around every corner? Lives in fear and propagates fear? And why do they always wear black, like Johnny Cash impersonators? Maybe if they mixed in a little yellow or fuschia, they'd lighten the fuck up and start living in reality.

They're everywhere - people behaving badly. Focus on it too long, you start to see a disturbing, completely fucked up world with all kinds of weak-minded, needy, and paranoid people doing irrational things. Maybe it's time I moved to Nepal.

Tears Underground

2009-10-12T20:43:00.002-04:00

I saw a woman crying on the subway a few days ago. She was sitting across from me, diagonal, so I had a clear view of her without being obtrusive. She looked to be in her mid to late 30s, with reddish blonde hair. She looked like the outdoorsy type, the kind of woman who might live in Iowa or Indiana. Her face was puffy and red. Her eyes were wet. She was looking down, not like she was trying to hide her tears, but just enough so that it wouldn't be so obvious. She was impossible to miss though. The car's harsh fluorescent lights hid nothing. Her eyes would crinkle, her mouth would contort, and she'd dab her face with a Kleenex. I watched and watched.

Naturally, I wondered why she was crying. I looked to my right and another woman was looking at her too, probably wondering the same thing as me. I began conjuring scenarios. Was she just dumped? Did she get fired? Did someone die? Did her dog get hit by a car? She wasn't telling. I examined her clothes, as if they might provide a clue. She wore some form of spandex or a leotard, the kind of outfit women wear to yoga or the gym (before covering their asses with a long sweatshirt). She couldn't be coming from work dressed like that, so it was unlikely she was just fired. Probably not dumped either. If he did it in person, at a restaurant (my preferred locale for severing ties), she wouldn't have worn gym garb to the hangman's noose. Of course, he could have done it via email, or text.... I made a mental note. The way she was crying though, portended something more dire. A death in the family, perhaps? A close friend? Had she just received some bad health news? Maybe she'd just come from the doctor where she was told she has herpes. Or HIV. Or cancer. The macabre possibilities grew in my mind, each outcome worse than the last. But she wasn't sobbing the way I'd expect if she'd been given that kind of news. And she probably would have taken a cab, not the subway home. Then again, I'd gotten at 42nd Street. Who knew where she'd come from? Maybe she'd been sobbing up at 125th Street, and I was just catching the tail end of it a few stops later.

I wanted to go up to her and ask her: "Are you okay? Is there anything I can do? Why are you crying?" I felt sorry for her. No one likes to see someone hurt or upset, even a stranger. It's rare to see tears on the subway. It's such an intimate space. We were only a few feet apart. It may as well have been a football field. You don't ask strangers such things. Still, I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. I needed to know. What could it be? What caused this? I got off at the next stop, Union Square. The crying woman went on her way to parts unknown. South, to the bottom of Manhattan. Possibly into Brooklyn. Two New York City strangers crossing paths.

I hope she feels better today.

FF - To the Ping Pong Victor Go the Spoils

2009-10-02T17:13:00.003-04:00

I love ping pong. One of my fondest memories of childhood is playing against my father on our old ping pong table in the garage. It had as many dead spots as the old Boston Garden. Dad pulled no punches. He had a special paddle he'd been using since college. One side was sandpaper, the other was rubber. Dad played me hard and forced me to win on my own merit. That took several years. When I finally did beat him, this is how it felt:

Have a great weekend everyone!

Some Things I've Concluded

2009-10-01T01:20:00.002-04:00

It's easier to stay in shape in Utah than New York.

It's not all Don Draper's fault.

Organized religion is for the foolish, victimized, and/or lazy.

Spring and summer are for photography. Fall and winter are for writing.

I occasionally delude myself.

Obama could cure cancer and Boehner et al. would say he destroyed the drug industry.

Suggesting therapy to anyone over 55 is an exercise in masochism.

Few people act without the threat of a lawsuit.

Fewer people settle without the threat of significant attorneys fees and/or compensatory damages.

No job is perfect; the best one can hope for is to like it at least 75% of the time.

Buy used, don't lease.

2 is better than 1.

The right dog is better than the wrong woman.

We live in a world of strict duality.

I subscribe to too many magazines.

That crick in my neck isn't going anywhere.

Too many people like the sound of their own voice.

Too many people have sex tapes.

Too many people annoy me.

Anger is an en-er-gy.

The words "blast" and "attack" are overused in the news media.

It's not about Republican or Democrat or the good of America, it's about making money and staying in power.

If I've got nothing nice to blog, don't blog at all.

Things I Think

2009-09-17T23:30:00.013-04:00

It's been awhile since I did one of these...

Workplace violence. That's what they're calling the case of Anne Le who was found murdered in a Yale laboratory last Sunday, the day she was supposed to get married. A few days later they had a "person of interest." Today they arrested him, Raymond Clark III. Turns out he worked with Le in the lab studying mice and other animals for science. He strangled her and stuffed her body behind a wall in the basement section of the lab. Why? We have yet to learn why. Some people are saying he was a control freak. There are rumors of some kind of dalliance between the two and she was getting married in a few days. But the thing that's got me thinking about this case is the security cameras. They caught her going in and not coming out. They caught EVERYONE going in that morning. Putting aside the stupidity of Mr. Clark's deciding to murder someone in a place that you needed three swipes of a security card to enter, thus severely limiting the number of individuals who could have done the deed, the thing that gets me is that with all the cameras we've got watching everyone's every move, it's getting very hard to get away with murder these days. We're living in Orwell's world. Now. Today. The only thing Big Brother hasn't mastered yet is how to quickly review all that film and analyze it at supersonic speed so decisions about guilt and innocence can be made instantly, a la Minority Report. But he's a quick study and he'll learn. People are so willing to give up their privacy for "security" that they don't mind more and more cameras. In fact, raise your hand if you're RELIEVED when you hear that a camera was used to capture a murdering fuck as it was in this case. I know I usually am. But deep down I know nothing comes for free. There's a cost associated with all these cameras, we just haven't seen it yet. We're almost there though. It's just around the corner. In the meantime, any sociopath with a brain in his head is going to have to learn that he's got to kill people in the country, not the city. Fewer cameras there.

Obama-as-Hitler. Obama-as-Hitler sneaks up on you. You don't expect to see it, so it's a little shocking at first. There's Obama's face, usually cast in black and white, for that 1941 Invasion of Poland effect, and just above his upper lip is that little mustache, the wisp of black hair, a style that Hitler ruined for all men forever. Invariably, the sign on which Obama's Teutonic/African visage appears is wielded by an overweight, middle aged white male or female with a right wing axe to grind. I have yet to see a black person or Jew carry an Obama-as-Hitler sign. Or anyone in Birkenstocks. This all begs the question: Why the comparison to Hitler? Weeeeellllll, you see, people are ANGRY! Vewwy angwy with Obama. No, no, not because he initiated a holocaust against a specific group of people, or targeted a minority and tried to erase them from history. Obama hasn't done THAT (yet). No, he hasn't invaded France. Or even Belgium, though he's up the ante in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We don't blame him for those, since they were started by someone else. But what he's trying to do is ALMOST as bad as these things. Bad enough to justify that little mustache. What is it? I'll tell you. (But I have to do it really quietly because if he finds out, I may get arrested and thrown into a socialist gulag. He's.... It's almost too hard to say. He's.... He's trying to force universal health care down everyone's throat.) THERE, I SAID IT. I DON'T CARE WHO HEARS ME NOW! He's going to balloon the deficit! He's going to tax everyone! He's going to turn America into a SOCIALIST COUNTRY!!!!

He's just like Hitler.

I ask you though. When it comes right down to it, who's REALLY more like Hitler? Obama, or the guy before him who started two major wars that have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and who locked prisoners of war up in internment camps where they were tortured for years? Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I've been reading about too many gruesome murders lately, but here's my latest stand on the death penalty.
I'm for it. In extremely limited cases. Far more limited than those that exist today. I'd impose it in cases where a murder was committed under aggravated circumstances, as defined under each state's law and only when DNA or other evidence unequivocally demonstrated someone's guilt. In other words, I'd raise the standard to higher than beyond a reasonable doubt for the sentencing phase. Circumstantial evidence could not be used. The evidence would have to be direct and conclusive. I think that's a fair compromise. The upside is people like Garrido, Clark, and that sick fuck Hilton in Tennessee I think it is, of recent fame, would be fully eligible. I've said it before, some dogs are rabid and need to be put down. The same should be true for humans, who have far more freedom of choice than a dog.

The Hofstra Non-Rape. A couple of days ago, an 18 year old Hofstra University student alleged that 5 men, all black or latino, tied her up and gangraped her in a bathroom. They posted the pictures of these men, boys actually, all over television and the newspaper. The stereotyping began. Only one of them looked somewhat cleancut. The others looked a bit gang-y. I read the story when it came out then the comments on cnn.com. One of them said something along the lines of the following: "Oh, and they all just look so innocent don't they? I heard one of their mothers say he was the 'best' and I wanted to throw up all over my television. Sick bastards. They should castrate all of them, or lock them up and let THEM get gangraped in jail." Strong words, yes.

Turns out, however, that the girl was lying. There was no gangrape. The sex was consensual. She was forced to admit it to the D.A. when one of the participants happened to have, you guessed it, a cell phone video of part of the incident that clearly showed that the girl was not being raped or forced to do anything against her will. The charges against the boys were immediately dropped and they were released from jail. (Thanks to those cameras again.) All the more reason why we shouldn't let our Blink! instincts trick us into assuming five gang-y looking boys who find their mugshots on television are automatically guilty of doing what they've been accused of doing. But we'll keep on doing it. We're all too hardwired to stop. But maybe, just MAYBE instead of assuming, we'll think, just for a split second, "Let's wait for the evidence, let's wait a couple of days before we assume anything." That's what I did with Mr. Clark in New Haven. Now I hope he gets his just desserts.

Tough decision. Who would I rather punch in the face, Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, or Anne Coulter? Tough call. I think I have to go with Beck. For right now. But maybe if I get them to stand really close together...

Things I could give a fuck about: Kanye West, Kate & Jon, Joe Wilson, swine flu, town halls,

WTF is up with Ernie Anastos?

Then this:

The guy's got farm animals on the brain - too funny. But really, who doesn't let a slippery curse word out by mistake every now and then? I'm actually surprised it doesn't happen more often on the news. If I were a newscaster, I'd pull a Ron Burgundy every night and go out with something like:

"You stay cock-y, New York City!"

Patrick Swayze, RIP

2009-09-15T18:33:00.003-04:00

Another celeb gone this summer - I can't remember any other period where so many famous people have died so quickly. I'll remember Patrick from Red Dawn (Wolverines!!!), Point Break, Ghost, and of course, this little gem:

R.I.P.

Ut-ahhhh

2009-09-05T16:11:00.008-04:00

Logging in from Utah, where I've been on vacation for the past week with AC. This is the first "active" vacation I've ever done and it's been a lot of fun, though I'll be taking home with me an unwanted souvenir of sore legs and an inflamed perineum from all the driving we've been doing. (Thank you, corn starch!) We flew into Salt Lake City last Friday (not much of a city, IMO) and promptly drove 260 miles to Moab, the birthplace of mountain biking, near the bottom of the state. Moab kicked our ass. We hiked Canyonlands, Arches, drove through the La Sal Mountains, and tried our hand at mountain biking, which did not go as planned. We got up at dawn, after having registered for an intermediate trail with "Moab Adventures" the day before. It turned out to be ridiculously hard. My paved rides in Brooklyn did not prepare me for broken rocks, a steep, uphill climb on slickrock, or loose sand, which was nearly impossible to pedal through. I fell off the bike twice and once landed flat on my back. My partner in crime fell only once - she smartly got off the bike to walk it when she saw trouble ahead. If you didn't know this, falling off a bike on rocks really hurts. Fortunately, I had a padded backpack to break my fall. AC was not so lucky. She wiped out right on an elevated section of slickrock and got a couple of nasty bruises. Seeing the trouble we were having, our 20-something guide, "Bobby," suggested we try an "easy" trail instead. We agreed, and he took us down the road a couple of miles, where he and I (AC had had enough mountain biking for awhile) did an 8 mile ride that was not as easy as advertised, but which was far easier than the hellhole we first selected and went off without a hitch.

Utah is really a stunning place to visit. I can't do it justice in words. Soaring red rock, yellow and orange buttes, wide expanses of desert, lots of room to breathe, virtually no traffic, and all the activities you could want to do. I took plenty of pictures, and will post some when I get back. After Moab, Arches, and Canyonlands, we visited Monument Valley, where many westerns (and some non-western) movies and commercials have been shot. It's on a Navajo Reservation, near the Arizona border. Then we drove to Lake Powell, home of the Glen Canyon Dam, to rest our weary bones for a couple of days. Then on to Bryce Canyon, which was mind-blowingly beautiful. We did a 6+ mile hike down into the canyon and then back up. There was this one pass called "Wall Street," which looks a little like the one in New York, except instead of concrete buildings, there were huge red rocks. Bryce was amazing. And as I write, we are sitting in a resort in St. George, waiting for our room. Here we plan to receive a pair of badly needed massages before leaving in two days for Vegas, where we'll fly home to New York.

All in all a great, though extremely tiring, vacation. I've never been one for doing "active" vacations - I'm more of a plant my ass on a beach or visit a foreign country kind of guy. But I have to say, this one's been fulfilling on a lot of levels. It brought out the mountain man in me (boy, was he neglected).

One strange thing about this trip is that we've run into far more Europeans than Mormons. We saw a few Mormons in SLC, but since then, it's been all Germans, Italians, English, and a couple of Belgians. Everywhere we've gone, all I've heard is foreign languages or accented English. Bizarre. I never knew how popular this area was for Europeans, but I guess that dollar of ours still must be tanking. How times have changed. We also ran into a few New Yorkers escaping the hustle and bustle of city life. When you live in New York, as I do, an escape to wide open spaces now and then is definitely a necessity. Here, I've gotten up early, gone to bed early, and had days full of activity. Here, life doesn't seem to pass by as quickly as it does back home. It's quite nice, actually. When certain people heard we were going to Utah, eyebrows were raised. Utah?? Wha? But let me tell you, there is nothing better than having time on your hands, a car to drive, beautiful scenery all around you, and the open road ahead. It's been fantastic. And there's no better way to get to know someone than take a 10-day trip with them. Alone. With no escape. Not an easy thing to do, but so far, so good. Knock on wood, salt over the shoulder.

Reality, T-minus two and counting.

41 is on the Clock

2009-08-25T01:12:00.004-04:00

I'm 41 today. Happy Birthday to me. My birthday was enough to make me post for a change. Sad I've been so absent, but this summer has been one hectic mofo with work picking up and all the other stuff that's gone on. Strange number, that 41. The "1" still makes it seem small. Small enough to forget that I'm now on my way to 50. Fifty. WTF? Okay, I have time to consider 50 later. For now, let's talk about 40, and the year that was. Last year at this time, I was definitely in crisis mode, not a severe one, not completely debilitating, but most certainly disorienting. I don't know what it was about turning 40, but it threw me. 40's a big fat number. 40 could not be denied. I got used to being 40 around December, when I was in the Caribbean with my family. Actually, I don't think I got used to it as much as I forgot about it. And that's what you do when you get older, you forget how old you are. I never felt 40, whatever 40 was supposed to feel like. And I don't feel 41 now (or won't in 12 hours, the time of day I was actually born). I'm still immature in some ways, still anger too easily about dumb things people do. I still go to bed too late, get up too late. Childish things I still find funny. I laugh just as hard as my 8 year-old nephew about most jokes involving shit, poo, pee, farts, or any combination thereof. Is that a 41 year-old trait? Who's to say?

Forty was a year of transition, an eventful year for me. I started the year off having a falling out with a good friend over a situation that at our age, just shouldn't happen. Soon thereafter, I found out that my father is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. I spent time last fall helping my mother track down bills that my father never used to let her see and locate assets and bank accounts that only he knows about. I reviewed the living wills and trusts that my mother had an attorney prepare for both of them. Last fall was fun! I took my first ever cruise and visited St. Thomas, Antigua, Tortola, and St. Lucia for the first time. I boycotted a dolphin swim, to the bemusement of my family. I flew to Nebraska and back in the same day. I spent two weeks on jury duty in Brooklyn and got to experience a different slice of the world. I lost another childhood friend too soon.

I also had to face certain physical realities. I bought my first pair of loafers the other day. Loafers are the style of shoe I've always steered clear of because I thought they were goombah, lazy ass shoes meant for old men. But I found a couple of nice pairs on Zappos and they actually look pretty good. (I still won't do penny loafers or those ugly ass tassel kind....oooh, I get the shakes just picturing them.) My feet are thanking me. The hair? As previously mentioned, it's going, going, gone and it ain't coming back. It zigged, so I zagged. You have to go with the flow in life. I'm shaving it close now, and you know what, my melon isn't nearly as deformed-looking as I thought it would be. I dare say I like it better than having lots of hair. Very low maintenance, and I've always been about convenience. My back is another story. If I don't stretch that bitch out and hit the gym at least once or twice a week, it tightens up on me and makes me susceptible to the most absurd of home injuries, like straining a muscle when I reach for my Blackberry alarm clock in the morning. I know my back is going to give me trouble from here on out, but on the whole, I actually feel pretty good.

The most significant event of the past year, however, is that I met someone special without any clue that it would happen. Seven months later, she's unlocked a door and shown me a peaceful, stable side of life that I never believed was meant for me (or never seemed to want). My life is a lot richer now, and most days, I have to admit, two is better than one. I say this not to make it sound all strawberries and cream, but what I mean is that when you care for someone and know they care for you, and when they give as much as you give, and you're there for each other and both on the same side, it's amazing how much it opens you up as a person. It's like my Grinch heart has grown to three times its prior size and the tiny birdcage it was in snapped like a dry twig. I've tapped into reservoirs of patience that I didn't know I had and it's made me a calmer, happier person (if for no other reason than to keep HER calm and happy). That's a joke! Okay, so maybe I haven't become funnier. Every night now, no matter how late I get home from work, I water the flowers and plants that she bought for my balcony. And a few nights ago, when she wasn't feeling well, I walked her dog (Jersey Adler a/k/a Jer Jer) all by myself and even picked up his five, saddle brown poo logs (a quantity I'd never seen him emit before and which I'm sure he intentionally saved for me) for the very first time. All of this is baffling because I actually don't mind doing any of it. Me, a hermit by trade, doesn't mind having a woman and her dog in his one bedroom apartment with increasing regularity and doesn't mind picking up that dog's shit (once in awhile).

Something's amiss. Or very right. Better late than never, that's what this new 41 year-old says.

FF - Why Doesn't This Ever Happen on the J/M/Z?

2009-08-21T12:09:00.004-04:00

Gonna post something substantive real soon, but for today's FF, I ask, why this get-naked-on-the-subway fun doesn't ever happen on MY train?

It's been so damn hot in New York lately, I'm seriously thinking about doing this myself, just to cool off.

FF - Slip N' Slide

2009-08-14T17:45:00.005-04:00

Shee-yit. It's f'n August and I haven't been to the beach ONCE this summer. Except for that trip to Montauk in June. What the hey?? I actually prefer the beach in winter when everyone's freezing their tits off, but still, I can't believe the summer is almost gone and I haven't ventured to the beach at all.

Which regret has spawned daydreams of summers past, when I was carefree and had all the time in the world. Remember Slip N' Slide? Just a thin sheet of plastic with some water on it for you to slide on. Watch out for those rocks! Lay that baby down on the wrong part of the lawn, and you'll have a raspberry on your boo-tox through Christmas. And they were always too short, like 10 yards and that's it. The world craved more!

In memory of the Slip N' Slide and endless summers past, for today's FF, I present a video or two of people showing some SNS love.

For these first two, you really have to love American ingenuity. Why go out and buy some fancy expensive yellow plastic when you can make your own in privacy of your own abode?

This one is borderline insane but looks fun as hell.

This one's for the boys (ahhhhh summer).

This one I so WANT to believe is real.

This last one is just stupid. And that's where we'll leave it.

Photophelia

2009-08-11T15:38:00.005-04:00

Well, it appears that photography has supplanted writing as my passion du jour, at least for now. I don't know if it's a passing phase or what, but all I've felt like doing lately is taking pictures and learning about photography. I think it may be because I'm a time-obsessed, visual person, and there's something about capturing a moment in time and an image that compels me that I really like. Writing, on the other hand, takes so much more time and thought and preparation, unless I'm letting loose and just writing whatever the hell is in my head. Maybe I need to do more of that. Writing is also solitary, it takes you out of the world, puts you in a room by yourself with your own thoughts. The way I'm built, I get entirely too much of that, on a daily basis. With photography, you're out there in the world, on the street, documenting everything. It's more socially immersive than writing. I like that.

That said, I'm still an amateur. I never took a photography class in college and never worked with film, so I'm kind of learning as I go here. I never realized how F'ing complicated real digital cameras are if you don't want to let the camera do it all itself, what with that white balance and exposure and F stops and metering and ISO and shutter priority. And don't even get me started on Photoshop! I've had it a year; I bought it thinking I could just follow the instructions on the DVD. Not even close. The instructions, if I could find them, wouldn't help me at all. So I've been hunting and pecking and self-learning. Last week, I finally bought a dumb it down book to learn how to use it. The book is like 900 pages. Learning Photoshop is a bit like trying to learn calculus again.

While most people are happy doing the ol' point and shoot, once you've used a real camera and seen the results, it's hard to go back. I want more control. I want to get better. I haven't felt that way about anything since I took my first Gotham Writing class three years ago. Another disadvantage of using a real digital camera is that DSLRs are heavy as hell. I have a Nikon D200, which I bought before my trip to Japan in 2006, and it weighs over 3 pounds when you put a lens on it. Because it's so heavy, it's not easy to carry on my way to work every day for those spur of the moment shots around the city. In fact, I discovered that even though I live in one of the most photographed cities in the world, I was only taking pictures when I decided to make a day of it and lug out the D200. I wasn't taking any candids or fun shots, which is half the fun of photography. So a few weeks ago, I dropped some cash on the brand new Olympus EP-1, which is a little bigger than a point and shoot, but it comes in this new format called Micro Four Thirds, which is halfway between the compact point and shoots (Nikon Coolpix, Sony Cybershot) and a big DSLR like my Nikon. That's a picture of it up there. It doesn't have the huge sensor or mirror of my DSLR, but the sensor is way bigger than the miniscule one on a point and shoot. More importantly, it has the capacity to change lenses, which you can't do with a P&S. While clothes may not make the man, a good lens can make the camera.

I don't have any EP-1 shots ready to post yet, but will do so soon. In the meantime, attached for your viewing pleasure, are some of my favorite pics from this past summer using my Nikon. As I said, I'm still learning, and unfortunately, Blogger's software washes them out quite a bit when I post them on here, but you'll get the idea. (Click on them to see full size).

This is Jersey a/k/a "Jer Jer," A.C.'s French Bulldog, hanging at the dog run on the Upper East Side. Jersey has brought a great deal of fun into my life (not as much as A.C., but close). He enjoys rubber bones, marking his territory in strange lands, doggy treats, Del Frisco's porterhouse leftovers, wrestling, doing the Indy 500 around the apartment, cooling off his undercarriage, and sleeping in my bed. Notice his wagging tongue, which practically blurred out the entire picture, and the Red Sox collar that I bought him. Love that dog. He's going to get his own post one of these days.

Lighthouse & flag @ Montauk, last June.

New Yankee Stadium, my first visit when they played Boston in May, back when the Red Sox were still winning.

Montauk pier.

Ortiz kid. Exposure's off, but I still like the picture.

Yankee Scoreboard.

Chambers Street subway stop. I couldn't duplicate this if I tried.

Williamsburg sunset. So purdy.

A&W sign near Lake Placid. Great friggin' burgers.

Ski jumper #1. We were tooling around the ski jumps, checking them out, and all of a sudden we saw these guys practicing, in the middle of summer! So I whipped out the camera and tried to capture a few of them in the air. It wasn't easy and impossible to use an autofocus when they were moving like that. These are the only ones that came out halfway decent.

Ski jumper #2.

Ski jumper #3.

Wait. I didn't take this. How did that get in there?

On the ski jump. I just thought the numbers looked cool.

Fifth Avenue, looking uptown, late July.

6th Avenue, near Saks.

Back to Yankee Stadium, Old Timer's Day game.

Yankee Stadium from the subway platform on my way home. I really like this one.

Chrysler Building. One of my favorites.

And last, but not least, my beautiful niece, with Dad in the background. I love the look on both of their faces.

Dog Day Afternoon

2009-07-30T22:57:00.009-04:00

This is the part of summer I hate. It's gotten sweaty-balls hot here in NYC the past week or so. Too hot to make you feel like doing anything. So hot, in fact, that I'd rather be in my office working than walking the streets surrounded by scantily clad women. (Can I write that now? Will she get pissed? Guess I'll find out.) And writing about BEING hot is so lame, but I just walked home from the subway, and it's all I can think about. Woe unto me.

If you've never been to New York, I can't describe for you how disgusting it feels to drag yourself into the bowels of the Brooklyn Bridge subway stop in the middle of 80% humidity and then be blasted in the face by a wave of impossibly hotter air originating from God knows where. (Mercury, maybe?) For some reason that stop has no air conditioning, or even a fucking fan, and I have to encounter it every day on my way to work. "Bloody hell," as they say in the Olde Country.

So where were we? Ah yes, The Dog Days. In the dog days of summer, a black Harvard Professor of African Studies gets mistaken for a burglar in his very own home. Then, when the cops show up and ask him offensive questions like "Do you live here?" and "Is there anyone else in the house?" and "Could you please step outside?" said black Professor of African Studies at Harvard gets arrested when he gets angry and starts acting all disorderly and shit. Problem: said professor is a personal friend of one Barack H. Obama, who happens to be El Presidente of Los Estados Unidos, and who, reportedly, is also African-American. Oh sights and wonders, what fun ensues!

Without knowing all the facts, El Jefe Barack says at a press conference that the police acted "stupidly," and promptly immerses the country in another racial crisis. How many crises is that now? Let's see. We've got the Health Care Crisis. We've got the Economic Crisis. We've got the Iraq War Crisis. We've got the Afghan War Crisis. We've got the Illegal Immigration Crisis. We've got the War on Terrorism Crisis. We've got the Social Security Crisis. We've got the Bailout Crisis (though that's linked to the Economic Crisis, so it probably shouldn't be treated as a separate crisis.) If you're a conservative, you need to add the Socialism Crisis, the Government Gun Theft Crisis, and the Liberal Supreme Court Crisis. That's a lot of crises we're dealing with here in America. And now, throw on top of it all this silliness with Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department and Professor Henry Louis Gates of Haaaahvid University.

If you're looking for my opinion on this -- and why else would you be here? -- my view is that Crowley was doing his job, but that Gates had a right to be pissed about being questioned as to what he was doing in his own house. But before I can fully judge these two gentlemen, it's necessary to keep a couple of things in mind. First, I'm not a cop and I'm not a black man, and I think the life experiences of both men in these respects were critical to what happened. Objectively, I think Gates let his anger get the best of him and was unnecessarily hostile to a guy who, from all that I've heard and read, was just doing his job, responding to someone who called about a possible burglary. Crowley didn't know who else was in the house and he followed protocol. The caller referred to two people. I don't think Crowley said anything to Gates that warranted the reaction he got.

So where did Gates' reaction come from, then? From his own experience as an African-American man in the 20th and now 21st Century, first of all. Who knows what he's been through in his life? Who knows what many law-abiding black men go through when the first thing people assume about them in a given situation is that they have bad intent? That must get old after awhile. And for someone to question his right to be in his own house, well, put that together with maybe one or two or three or ten shitty experiences with white people or cops in his sixty-plus-year old life, and maybe then one can begin to comprehend his overreaction. I'm not saying that what Crowley did was wrong, but that his questioning and intrusion may have been PERCEIVED by Gates as racist. And if you've read Blink!, you know that this situation presented a classic case of instantaneous perception run amok. It wasn't about objectivity; both men were going on their instincts -- instincts that have racial edges to them -- and this is where it led them. Gates' reaction was OBJECTIVELY unreasonable, but SUBJECTIVELY, I can understand it, though I don't condone it. If any white person had acted that way with Officer Crowley, said those things about his mama, you have to think that they would run as high a risk as Professor Gates of being cuffed and stuffed. But maybe not. Maybe Crowley would have been more patient with a white person, not because he's a racist, but because of the primal, instinctive biases we all carry around, the ones that Blink! talks about. And maybe Gates would have been more patient if he was confronted by a black cop, instead of a lily white Irish guy like Crowley.

I also think that Gates' potential arrogance came into play here. He's a Harvard Professor who has a personal relationship with the President of the United States. You don't think that gave him some intestinal fortitude in this situation? That it contributed to Gates' thinking that he could shoot his mouth off in a situation where most people would have shut up as soon as it was clear that he belonged there? I think Gates' arrogance and self-perception had as much to do with this incident as his race.

As for Crowley, I think he was too touchy himself and could have Gates' tirade go, even with all the bile and disrespect coming out of Gates' mouth. If he was that pissed off at the end of it, he could have warned Gates once more and written him a nice fat ticket. Hit him in the wallet. To arrest someone in their own house when they were minding their own business before the cops showed up, seems excessive to me, and unnecessarily escalated an already hot situation. But maybe someone else got in his face recently. Maybe he was annoyed to be there at all. Maybe he heard one too many insults from a civilian that day. Or that week.

And how about the neighbor? The concerned citizen who reported the incident in the first place? I originally thought she was a racist busybody, but the facts don't bear that out. I listened to the call she made to 911, and she actually came off pretty sane. She didn't live there and called on behalf of someone else, an old lady in the house who thought she saw two people breaking into Gates' home. On the call, she expressly said that it could be nothing, that it could be people who live there who are having trouble getting inside. On the other hand, before you go and call the damn police, don't you observe awhile and try to get some more information? Or maybe you go out there and see what's going on. It was broad daylight for goodness sakes.

And doesn't it beg the question: Does anyone in this country know their fucking neighbors anymore? We've become a nation of shut-ins who play video games, write blogs, watch t.v. and who only associate with our close friends and family. What happened to community? Where have the neighborhoods gone? No one knows anyone anymore. I can understand that somewhat in New York where everyone's crammed together like sardines and anonymity is a means of escape (and safety), but in the suburbs? In Cambridge? Even my parents in New Hampshire, who live in a super rural town, don't associate with their neighbors much. Only the ones across the street, that's about it. I'm not sure what this means, but you have to believe that if people interacted more and recognized each other's face, maybe we'd not only have safer neighborhoods, we'd avoid stupid misunderstandings like the one between Officer Crowley and Professor Gates.

After removing his foot from his mouth, Obama, to his credit, tried to turn this into a "teachable moment," by having the feuding fogles over to his house for a beer. Forced to pick an American brand, Obama went with Bud Light. Pathetic. Gates chose Red Stripe, which is brewed in Jamaica. Shocking. [UPDATE: turns out it was actually Sam Adams - a last minute change.] And Crowley went with Blue Moon, a favorite of mine, which he sipped with a slice of orange in his glass. And Joe Biden joined them, because he had nothing better to do. We'll never know what was said. From the pictures I've seen, it doesn't look like there were too many smiles around that table.

We know that no one apologized. God forbid. It seems everyone expects an apology these days. Contrition. I wonder why that is? Why do the words "I'm sorry" carry so much weight? They're just words. If you go punch someone in the face and then a month later say you're sorry, does it change the fact that someone got punched in the face and got hurt? How many "I'm sorrys" could Bernie Madoff dish out right about now? And yet, everyone WANTS an apology. They want to hear one. Obama should apologize to Crowley and the Cambridge Police Department. Crowley should apologize to Gates. Gates should apologize to Crowley. I'll tell you what's behind it. The people calling for an apology usually have no personal involvement in a situation, and they do it because they perceive the act of giving an apology as a form of weakness. A concession. A chipping away at the veneer of pride that carries us all through life. I've never viewed apologies that way. I actually see them as evidence of strength and power, not the opposite. If you're so fragile that you can't survive an apology and learn from the circumstances that led to it, then to me, that's evidence of weakness, not power. Try telling that to Bush, who never apologized for anything. And now Obama, who won't apologize for anything in this situation. He's so verbally proficient, though, that he can throw enough words at something to make it SOUND like an apology. He's just that good.

So what have we learned from all this? Fuck if I know. It's so damn hot in here that I'm totally rambling. I have no idea what I just wrote.

FF - Wedding Dance Party

2009-07-24T10:34:00.003-04:00

There's a craze sweeping the land. It's wedding season, you know. But in today's world, it's not enough to push all your cards to the middle of the table and say "I'm all in." Now, you're expected to cap off your wedding day with some carefully choreographed dance moves, preferably with all members of your wedding party included.

Don't know what I'm talking about? Watch and learn:

That one was pretty good, and in a church no less.... Try and work in some retro Michael Jackson, however, and you're asking for trouble:

Alrightythen.

Surreality

2009-07-18T10:00:00.002-04:00

I first caught a glimpse of Matt's body through a crack in the door at the funeral home. We were late, my parents and I, on account of my long drive up from New York. It was all I could do to get out of bed by nine and on the road by ten. I didn't arrive in New Hampshire until nearly three o'clock, long enough to change into a gray suit, white shirt, and dress shoes, corral my parents, and head on up to Newmarket for the wake. We walked in and heard the priest in the middle of prayer. Matt's family was seated around a room, lined up in a row, listening to him. Through the crack in the door, right above the hinges, I could see a sliver of Matt's coffin, which was draped at the bottom with an American flag. Matt had served in the Army, but I hadn't realized he was honorably discharged. I thought his mental issues had interfered.

It wasn't until after the prayer, after we signed the book, that we walked into the room and I saw him for the first time in six years. The coffin was metallic gray and about eight feet long. The top half was open and there he was, dressed in a blue suit, blue shirt, and green tie. His eyes were closed. I didn't approach closely at first, so the details still escaped me, but it was him, a guy I'd grown up with, lying at the head of a funeral home at age 41, as if he were asleep. He had such a fucked up sense of humor, I kept waiting for him to jump up, point his finger at all of us and laugh his ass off.

People were milling about, talking and hugging in front of Matt's coffin. It seemed strange. At times, it felt like they'd forgotten that he was there, a captive audience to their conversations. A couple of times I caught myself with my back to him, and I had to force myself to turn around so I was half-facing him while I talked to people. It seemed the only respectful thing to do. It was his party, after all.

I went up to his brother Luke, who'd given me the bad news in New York, just after I'd returned from a reception with Mayor Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion. "Tim, this is Luke M--. I've got some bad news about my brother Matthew. Give me a call when you get this. I hope you can call me tonight, I'll have my cell phone on, so call me when you can." I called him back, and in the same night, traveled from the high of shaking the Mayor's hand to the low of hearing that my friend had died. I gave Luke a hug, he thanked me for coming. His eyes were wet and red. As a kid, Luke, who was two years behind Matt in school, was younger than his age, awkward and a little goofy. Now, a wife and two kids later, he appeared calm, controlled, and very much a man. Of all Matt's siblings -- originally there were nine of them, all older than Luke -- Luke was the leader. He was the one who called people. He was the one who consoled. I have no doubt that he played a big role in Matt's arrangements, since he lived only a few minutes away from where the service was being held.

I found Matt's father who looked nothing like I remembrered. The last time I saw him, many years ago, he had black hair and a dark face with an intimidating stare. Whenever I went to Matt's house, he'd walk around like he had somewhere important to be, like he'd rather be anywhere else, all serious, never saying a word. He wasn't friendly and he always intimidated me. At the wake, he was a changed man. He was smiling, clapping me on the back, talking about Matt. He'd aged significantly. His hair was all white, his face more wrinkled. He said something about Matt living the way he wanted to live, going where he wanted to go, and dying quick without any pain. "That's how we all want to go, right?" I didn't quite know how to respond. Honestly, he seemed like he was in shock. From his beautiful eulogy the following day, though, I'd learn the depth of this man, how he truly felt about his son, and how much pain he was in.

I found Matt's mother next, and she was crying. "I'm so happy to see you," she said in a shaking voice before hugging me hard. Even through the dizzy, numb state I was in, it almost made me cry. Remarkably, she looked almost exactly the same as I remembered her. Short, freckled, sharp blue eyes, and chestnut hair. She'd gained a little weight, but other than that, she was little changed from the last time I saw her. I couldn't believe it. And she still had the same thick New England accent. She asked if I was going to the funeral, and I said "Of course I am." Then she asked if I'd say a few words about Matt. I told her I'd be honored to. I learned later that it was Sister J. who volunteered me to speak, saying I could help lighten the mood with some stories about Matt. A moment later, she asked me how I was doing, if I had a special someone in New York. I said "Yeah, he's great!" She looked at me, confused, and I said "No, no, I'm kidding, it's a "she" and she's wonderful." Then she laughed and said it would have been perfectly alright if it was a "he," whereupon I reassured her and some grade school friends who were standing with us (some of whom I know believed I was serious) that I am in fact involved with a woman.

That's how it was. We were at a wake, a sad, miserable thing, and yet, we were seeing old friends, which made us all so happy. It was surreal, feeling such joy at seeing these special people from my childhood, hugging, smiling, laughing about our respective lives, while Matt lay at the head of the room, frozen in his final box. We made plans to get together the following night at a bar somewhere, to extend this reunion a bit more. Matt, however, would not be coming. He had somewhere else he had to be.

Afterwards, it was time for me to visit Matt up close. I've seen three dead bodies in my life: my grandmother, the father of a grade school friend, and now, Matt. Anne was cremated, so even though I attended her funeral and burial, I never saw her like that (which was perfectly fine with me). Even after having done it before, it doesn't prepare you for doing it again. I'd been edgy all morning, impatient with everyone, because I was unconsciously dreading the whole experience of going to my friend's wake and seeing his dead body. But I'd put it off long enough, so I excused myself and walked up to Matt's coffin.

I kneeled down on the pad and took a close look at him. He looked like he was sleeping. They always do. His eyes were closed and his freckled face looked peaceful. Then I noticed that his hair was lighter, almost blond, and it struck me that the stupid mortician must have done that. I got annoyed. Nobody better dye my fucking hair -- if I have any left -- when it's my turn for this. But his father told me the following day that it was Matt who'd gone blond to hide his graying hair. So instead of changing it back to the brown hair Matt had all his life, his father told the mortician to leave it blond. That's how Matt had it and why should he change it? Matt's hands were crossed over his chest. They, too, were freckled. I noticed a red scab on one of his fingers, an overlooked remnant of the violent way he died. He'd been hit by a car -- an S.U.V. There must have been blood. Nicks, scrapes, and bruises. They'd done a good job on him, though. He looked whole and peaceful. Still, like every body I've seen in that situation, there was a fake, waxy quality to him. He wasn't Matt anymore. The life, the "Mattness," was gone. The word "shell" kept popping into my head. That's what he looked like, a shell of himself. Take the life out of us, and that's all we are, these empty meat husks, useless slabs of carbon and water that can only lie there doing nothing. Rotting.

Luke came over while I was near Matt and we talked about how Matt was and how difficult his final years had been, both for himself and the family. I learned how Matt would pick up and just GO somewhere, anywhere -- to Memphis, to Biloxi, to Colorado, to the Blue Ridge Mountains, anywhere he wanted. When he called to tell his brothers and sisters he was in "Augusta," they thought he meant Augusta, GEORGIA, not Augusta, Maine. Matt lived off his VA benefits, but he often ran into financial trouble because of his illness. Whenever he'd lose a credit card or run out of cash, he'd call his parents or Luke or one of his other siblings for hotel money, or food money. They did their best to help him. It wasn't easy. They were perpetually worried that he'd hurt himself, or worse, hurt someone else. They lived with those fears every day. At the funeral, Matt's father compared Matt to a white water rafting trip. "A lot of the time, it got really bumpy and there were a lot of waves. But other times, it was serene and beautiful. We got to experience so many things, learned so many things, from Matthew."

I worked on a short eulogy that night. I felt drained, and honestly, all I felt like doing that night was sleeping. I didn't feel like being creative. I didn't feel like being funny. A lot of memories that I had of Matt were too crude to discuss at a funeral or were hilarious only to us. And how to convey those memories I could remember without offending anyone or making an ass of myself? The next day, at the end of an interminable Mass, a formal, ritualistic affair that gave no comfort to anyone, Matt's father spoke about him in such an eloquent, emotional way that I was dumbstruck. He sounded like a CEO who'd given 1000 speeches and who knew how to inspire people by describing his son's life in such an emotional way. I'd never heard this man speak more than 10 words, and now here he was moving me to tears.

My next, selfish thought was: "I have to follow THAT?"

I did my best. I talked about Matt's sense of humor, his laugh, his mockery of anything and everything. I conveyed some funny stories about us, some of which I alluded to in my entry last week. His parents loved it. His father was laughing the entire time. And as I looked at Matt's family while I was speaking, especially his parents, I got the strangest sense of deja vu. Seventeen years before, I'd given Anne's eulogy in Bethel, Maine, and it was her father and her sister who were looking up at me with tears in their eyes, smiling at my stories. Matt was in the audience that day. He'd driven us up, me and another friend, and we'd gotten lost. We finally arrived, so late that we almost missed it entirely. Matt was in a bad mood that day. It was May 1992, around the time his illness was probably beginning to manifest itself. He was surly and pissed off. Anne died at 23. We were all in shock and angry.

How could Matt know then that he would die 83 miles away from where we were burying Anne? Maybe his unconscious knew the troubles that were coming for him. Maybe that's why he was pissed. I've been thinking about things like that in the past week. How many times have I walked, driven, or flown past the place where I'll meet my end? How many times have I thrown on the suit and tie I'm going to be buried in? Do I own it yet? Maybe my bad mood on a given day is because I got too close to my dying place. (I must have a lot of dying places then.)

Matt died too young. He was 41. He'd just celebrated his 41st birthday the night before he died (though Luke told me he got confused and thought his birthday was actually the day before). Matt spoke to his mother an hour before he was killed, a final gift to the woman who brought him into the world. She said he sounded happy and optimistic, like he always was. That he liked Augusta and planned to stay there awhile. "The thing about Matt was, he was always trying to learn something, always trying to improve himself," she said. And it was so true. It comes through in all the old letters from him that I've been reading. He was always moving forward, always trying to be better, always exploring and seeking. His mother said he had spanish tapes in his car. His father said that one time he had to drive Matt's car home from somewhere because Matt had run into some problems, and the car was loaded with Matt's belongings and had no acceleration. "I wondered, what the hell did he HAVE back there?" It wasn't until he got home and unpacked the car that he found 300 pounds of weights and a broken down bench in the back seat. "Matt said that he needed them to work out and stay in shape," his father said, laughing.

And what is he now? Where is he now? Seeing him last Friday made me realize that there's much more to us than the bodies we temporarily occupy in this life. It has nothing to do with religion, which I've never been more down on than after that depressing Mass. It's just a realization, an understanding that there is a live body and a dead body, and it's not the body that gives life, it's something else, something mysterious and powerful. Even believing that he's taken a different form now, it was hard seeing him like that, especially knowing how hard those final years were for him. An illness he didn't ask for or deserve. One that even with medication is not easy to predict or control. It all has made me quite sad, and I think it's hitting me late. I was on autopilot for awhile there. Now it's setting in. I'm sure by now, Matt has been reincarnated and is on to his next life. Maybe he's a female baby in Thailand this time. Maybe he was the next baby born in Augusta, Maine the following morning. Whatever he is, wherever he is, Matt is now whole again and restored. Whether spiritual or physical, Matt has a new life.

Me? I'm just trying to get through this one.

FF - Craig Ferguson/White Lines

2009-07-10T08:22:00.005-04:00

There is arguably nothing funnier than lip syncing to 80s classics with puppets. Extra points if it's to a song that many of us danced to in our spiked hair, parachute pants and Reebok hightops. Kudos to Linda for bringing this to my attention.

Oh man, did I need a laugh. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Matt

2009-07-09T17:08:00.007-04:00

Matt

Moved to my hometown in the fourth grade.

Introduced my class to a new form of dodge ball.

Used to mock everything and everyone, in the way all junior high school boys do. I loved it.

Got into a rock-throwing contest with me after one catechism class. I hit a neighbor's car. He scampered home.

Went skiing with me for the first time at King Ridge mountain. We fell every ten yards, got our jeans soaking wet with snow, and laughed our asses off the entire time.

Was there when I put my face into a tree stump at Gunstock in '86.

Liked to shoot off M80s in neighbor's yards.

Was a healthy bad influence on me.

Induced a laughing fit in me just by hearing him laugh, to the point where I'd get light-headed.

Played football on my high school team.

Used to get the class fool in trouble by convincing him to do stupid things.

Loved Pink Floyd, the B-52s, and Echo & the Bunnymen.

And Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin.

Got confirmed with me.

Found the word "confirmandi" (plural of those who are being confirmed) fucking hilarious.

May have invented the acronym N.E.R.T.S. (Nipples Erect Right Through Shirt), which we applied to junior high school girls with noticeably new boobies.

Built a mountain of Coors Light cans at one infamous New Year's Eve party at my parents' house. And promptly knocked it down.

Drove me to school dances, Friday nights out, and to my friend Anne's funeral in his old Honda.

Kicked my ass in Atari Warlords.

And in Rocky on Colecovision.

Wrote the most hilarious and perverted doodles in high school math class, which he always shared with me.

Had lots of freckles.

Never stabbed me in the back.

Take that back. In the fifth grade, the asshole announced to the class that I had a crush on Celeste, after I told him not to, and I cried like a baby with my head on my desk in front of everyone. The memory still makes me cringe. Asshole!

Was always himself, for better or worse.

Was my best friend for awhile.

Visited my father down at the beach when my parents separated.

Saw me off to college in August 1986.

Wrote me postcards and letters during my miserable first semester.

Joined the Army.

Was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Wouldn't take any medication for them.

Got discharged by the Army.

Disappeared out west for a long time.

Got arrested for vagrancy and spent time in jail.

Received the long letter I sent him and the accompanying doodles I reprised from our old math class.

Moved back to New England.

Seemed to be on the right track.

Had dinner with me and his brother a few years ago.

Wasn't the same.

Dropped out of life again.

Celebrated his 41st birthday on July 6th.

Was crossing a dark road in Augusta, Maine the following night.

Was hit by an S.U.V. driven by a 21 year-old camp counselor who didn't see him.

Died.

Is having a funeral on Saturday.

The Curious Case of Michael Joseph Jackson

2009-07-02T11:53:00.004-04:00

Have you heard the news? Michael Jackson died. I needed a few days to get some perspective and sort out some very mixed feelings about this. Of course, the first feeling was disbelief. Michael Jackson? Dead? No, like most people, I didn't think he'd live to a ripe old age. As frail and sickly as he was, I didn't think he'd be eating the corn mash in a Mickey Mouse themed nursing home one day. At the same time, I didn't think his time to die would come so soon. Michael Jackson was one of those celebrities I took for granted. The kind I thought would always be around, occupying space like an old sofa. Like Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, and Ed McMahon before him, he was celebrity background noise. You knew his best days were behind him, but you couldn't picture him being gone either. Yeah, he got weird at the end of his life. Weird-looking. But in retrospect, I put him into this Liberace/Carol Channing/Siegfried & Roy category. A flashy and weird dude, but he was still Michael Jackson. To hear that he was dead was surreal. Cardiac arrest? What?

The next feeling I had was one of deep sadness. I'm 40, so I was in high school when MJ hit it big with Thriller. To say he exploded is a vast understatement. Before Thriller, I have a vague recollection of songs from Off the Wall, the kind I'd hear in the summertime on my Dad's Motorola transistor radio while he was painting the garage doors. Rock With You, Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', Human Nature, P.Y.T. All amazing songs. All classics. But I didn't associate them with Michael Jackson. They were just songs I liked. But in the 80s, with the advent of MTV, which used to play music videos, Michael became HUGE. First there was Billie Jean and the video that is still one of my favorites.

Then the moon walk. The beaded white glove. Then came Beat It. Then Thriller, and the rest was history. For us, the 80s adolescents, his videos were EVENTS. They were Broadway shows captured in 5 minutes. When MTV announced a new premiere video from Michael Jackson, you stopped what you were doing -- you put down the Battleship, the whiffle ball and bat -- and you went to watch it. Seeing Thriller for the first time was like watching a freaky movie, with all those dancing zombies and special effects, and Vincent Price, and then him at the end, looking at the camera with those yellow cat eyes. It hadn't been done before and hasn't been done since. (As an aside, that's when I first started thinking he was taking a weird turn. People begin whispering that he had this weird fascination with the occult. Right after that, he started hanging out with Bubbles the chimp, Brooke Shields, and Emmanuel Lewis. Bizarre.)

Sure, looking back, a lot of it probably seems hokey. Especially if you weren't alive then, or were just a kid. But to some of us, at that time of our lives, Michael Jackson was fucking cool. The moonwalk was cool. His glove was cool. All of it. The guy moved like no one we'd ever seen. And it didn't matter if you were into hard rock, like AC/DC, or the New Wave stuff, Flock of Seagulls, Men at Work, Human League, no matter what music you favored, you still liked Michael Jackson. You made a place for his music.

That's the Michael Jackson I remember. The one I choose to remember. And when I heard he was dead, it made me really sad. Sad for a lost part of my life that his music was a part of. Sad for another chip away at my mortality, a feeling that was compounded by Farrah Fawcett's death the same day. Sad for the tragic arc of Michael Jackson's life and what he ended up becoming, a grown man who, because he suffered so much as a child, transparently tried to re-create his childhood in middle age. He became a man in remarkable denial, oblivious to the world around him, a world that doesn't tolerate 45 year-old men sleeping with children, innocent or not. Through delusion, denial, or something else, he didn't seem to care what the world thought. He loved children and surrounded himself with them anyway. Maybe because they were the only people he could relate to. Maybe because he saw in their innocence a small part of himself that he wanted to reclaim. Maybe it was something more sordid, though that was never proven. I'd like to think the stories about him weren't true, that he wasn't capable of what he was accused of. If in fact the stories are not true, then he's an even more tragic figure -- someone who actually tried to do well and befriend children in need, help them bear their cancer more easily and make their lives better, only to be betrayed by some out of greed. And it may have destroyed him, stripping him of his reputation, his dignity, and his health. If the stories are true, then he should have been in jail a long time ago, and there are a lot of people who didn't do their jobs to put him there, including friends and family who should have stepped in and stopped it. That none of the above happened makes me seriously question the veracity of the people who accused him of pedophilia and other misbehavior. I see slimy parents who smelled a payday. Maybe that's what I want to see because the alternative is too disgusting to consider. Either way, the problems he encountered at the end of his life are not what I choose to remember about him. I'd rather focus on the positive aspects of his life, what he contributed, and what he left to the world. Judging from the posthumous testaments that are being paid to him in every corner of the planet, including a famous Filipino jail, he left us a lot. Music, joy, and idealism for a better world.

As things are going though, Michael's becoming another Elvis, another Marilyn Monroe. A tragic celebrity eaten up by fame, plagued by pills, and dying under suspicious circumstances. The parallels between MJ and Elvis -- whom he reportedly was afraid of becoming -- are striking. There are two Elvises that people remember. The youthful Elvis, strikingly handsome, strong, and sexy, with the high cheekbones and shaking hips. Then there's the old, fat Elvis, the one addicted to drugs who shot up a television, sweat a lot, and threw scarves to screaming middle-aged women in Vegas. The one the impersonators favor. Thankyaverymussssh... The one he was when he died.

There were two Michaels, too. Three actually. The little kid, smiling, happy, innocent, and slightly robotic, having been trained with a belt by his abusive father, Joe Jackson (Have you heard about his new record company? It's gonna be huge!) Then there was the teenage/20s Michael, a legend at his peak, snarlin', moonwalkin', high-kickin', yelpin', SHAMM-OWN!!! HEE-HEE-HEE!!! True-skinned. Handsome. Strong. Picking up an award from President Reagan in Blueblocker shades and a dark blue Sgt. Pepper soldier's uniform with gold trim and epaulets. Then there's the older Michael, who was nothing short of a creepy Kabuki doll. The Michael with the ghost mask and alien eyes, the oversized lips, cleft chin, and thrice worked over nose. All of it manufactured to specification. The Michael with the stringy haired wig. Rumors he was bald, that he wore white makeup to cover up his vitiligo. Rumors he was a man in perpetual pain, a man who managed to find a doctor to give him a dangerous anaesthetic just so he could sleep. The Michael he was when he died.

Like old Elvis, old Michael was not the best Michael, not the one people want to remember. Not the one I want to remember. Celebrities that big, who fly that high, always crash the hardest. And when they do, it's never pretty, it's a bomb going off and we feel the reverberations for months, sometimes years. There are people who still think Elvis is alive.

Once celebrities -- legends -- die, two things happen. First, there's an outpouring of feeling from people over what's been lost and an appreciation for what the person accomplished in life. The one thing Joe Jackson has said right since his son's death is that he wished Michael could have seen the outpouring of positive feelings for him when he was still alive. But that's not how it works. When he was still alive, Michael Jackson was a beyond-weird 50 year-old man who slept with kids, buried himself in financial debt, and hooked himself on prescription drugs. Now that he's dead, he's suddenly become a tragic figure whom no one appreciated. He's never been more popular. His CDs and songs are at the top of the charts. They're flying off the shelves. Death not only makes you more popular, it can make you richer. Isn't this world fucked up?

The second thing that happens when legends die is that people gather like vultures to pick at their bones. They tear open the person's life like a dissected cat in biology class and examine it, organ by organ. They suck the marrow out of every piece of the person. Decades later, they're still doing it to Marilyn Monroe. Shit, Megan Fox has a tattoo of Marilyn on her forearm. Does anyone even know anything about Marilyn the person, instead of Marilyn the caricature? Does anyone care? The same thing is happening already with MJ, and given the strange second half of his life, he's all the more ripe for morbid fascination. Suddenly the things that he kept secret for so long are being shown in stark relief. The scars on his face. The holes in his body. The baldness. The skin problems. We're going to learn more about Michael Jackson in the next few weeks than we ever wanted to know. We have already. Once we're shown all the things he tried to keep secret, maybe we'll have a little more sympathy for Michael Jackson the human being and appreciate all the more the things he overcame and the beautiful music he left us.

FF, Part Deux - MJ/Iran Mashup

2009-06-26T15:09:00.001-04:00

Okay, this one actually made me smile.

Bringing cutting edge news issues together, for your viewing pleasure. It's what I do.

FF - Thriller

2009-06-26T10:48:00.004-04:00

I tried to get a laugh out of myself by watching this video again, something millions of people have seen on YouTube, and one that I've posted before. It had the opposite effect. Maybe it'll work for you.

R.I.P., Michael

2009-06-25T18:55:00.005-04:00

I'm Gonna Make A Change,
For Once In My Life
It's Gonna Feel Real Good,
Gonna Make A Difference
Gonna Make It Right . . .

As I, Turn Up The Collar On My
Favourite Winter Coat
This Wind Is Blowin' My Mind
I See The Kids In The Street,
With Not Enough To Eat
Who Am I, To Be Blind?
Pretending Not To See
Their Needs
A Summer's Disregard,
A Broken Bottle Top
And A One Man's Soul
They Follow Each Other On
The Wind Ya' Know
'Cause They Got Nowhere
To Go
That's Why I Want You To
Know

I'm Starting With The Man In
The Mirror
I'm Asking Him To Change
His Ways
And No Message Could Have
Been Any Clearer
If You Wanna Make The World
A Better Place
(If You Wanna Make The
World A Better Place)
Take A Look At Yourself, And
Then Make A Change
(Take A Look At Yourself, And
Then Make A Change)
(Na Na Na, Na Na Na, Na Na,
Na Nah)

I've Been A Victim Of A Selfish
Kind Of Love
It's Time That I Realize
That There Are Some With No
Home, Not A Nickel To Loan
Could It Be Really Me,
Pretending That They're Not
Alone?

A Willow Deeply Scarred,
Somebody's Broken Heart
And A Washed-Out Dream
(Washed-Out Dream)
They Follow The Pattern Of
The Wind, Ya' See
Cause They Got No Place
To Be
That's Why I'm Starting With
Me
(Starting With Me!)

-- Man in the Mirror, Michael Jackson

May you now find the peace that eluded you at the end of your life. R.I.P., Michael.

Iran, the Beautiful

2009-06-21T18:19:00.014-04:00

I said a few entries ago that I was following the Iranian election with considerable bemusement. After the events of this weekend, it's safe to say that I'm now following post-election events in Iran with considerable captivation. Hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the streets, risking their lives to dispute a presidential election that looks, smells, and tastes like a fraud. (We Americans know an electoral fraud when we see one.) In all the years since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, I never believed that there were so many Iranians who were so disaffected. First, it should be said that notwithstanding everything that's happening there right now, Iran is a democracy, arguably the only democracy in the Middle East besides Israel. People get to vote for their leaders, though in this case their choices for president were one of 4 men handpicked by Ayatollah Khamenei. They also have the freedom to assemble and voice their protest against the government, though there are limits to that right, as we're seeing before our eyes. There's a Constitution and a Parliament, both of which must adhere to Sharia, or Islamic law.

Is Iran a perfect democracy? Of course not. Khamenei, or whoever occupies the position of the "Supreme Leader," controls the security apparatus and the armed forces, and has the final say on the candidates who run for office. Women in Iran are still second-class citizens when it comes to politics, education, and employment. Many of the freedoms we know in the U.S. don't exist in Iran. But let's give credit where credit is due. Iran is a credible Islamic democracy, with Islamic rules and limits. The fair comparison is not to the U.S. or Western Europe. The fair comparison is to Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, where there are no elections, even sham ones, and where royal families and political elites retain power in perpetuity and rule with an iron fist.

For all of its warts, Iran is a sophisticated, though evolving, democracy. This weekend we saw its limits and how far it needs to go. We saw police in Darth Vader riot gear, looking every bit as ominous as the movie character they resembled, cracking down on protesters, who themselves were becoming increasingly impassioned. Jittery cell phone videocams recorded screams, tear gas, fires, people running away, people shot, people lying on the ground bleeding. A young Iranian woman, "Neda," who'd been marching peacefully with her father, was shot and died before our eyes. Her final moments were recorded and posted on YouTube: blood trickling out of both sides of her mouth, her blank eyes staring at the sky. It was graphic and shocking to see. This young, anonymous woman achieved a tragic fame in death that she never could have dreamed of in life. Much like the students who were killed at Kent State, Neda was a casualty of political anger and spiraling violence. While the names of the Kent State students are long forgotten, YouTube has ensured that Neda's never will be.

What's happening in Iran is truly inspirational. People literally dying for their vote in their own country. People who know that they are taking their lives into their own hands when they hit the streets decked in green. The Iranian police and paramilitary squads have to be shocked at the size and ferocity of the crowds they are seeing. But the tide hasn't stopped. To protesting Iranians, their cause is worth the risk of death.

America used to be that way. Americans used to protest things, stand up for what's right, stand up for fairness, justice, and the American way. And we used to do it en masse, not with a trickle of hippies in Birkenstocks and tie-dyes, but with a FLOOD of people of every stripe, color, and creed. The March on Washington. The Vietnam War protests. The 1968 Democratic Convention. Kent State. But that was all in 1960s, and early 70s. We don't do that kind of thing anymore. Certainly not over an election. I mean, fuck, the 2000 election stolen by Bush was grounds for a sizable protest with some yelling and "hell no" chants, wasn't it? Do you remember one? I don't. The 2000 election was as fraudulent as the 2009 election in Iran, but when it was finally over, and Bush took power, you heard nary a whimper out of most Americans. Okay, maybe at cocktail parties and on some news shows, but on the street? NOTHING. It all blew over by Christmas. Americans take to the streets over one of THEIR elections? You must be joking. There's football to watch! Thanksgiving turkey to eat!

Oh, I find it hilarious how outraged our Senators are that one man, Ayatollah Khamenei, the "Supreme Leader" of Iran, gets to decide the result of this election. In 2000, nine people (actually five) on the United States "Supreme Court" decided that Florida should have no recount, effectively handing the election to Bush. In Iran, the judge of last resort is Khamenei. Here it's a partisan majority in the Supreme Court. Really, how different are they? Maybe Gore should have fought the 2000 result like Moussavi is doing. Maybe he should have had his own Green Revolution. Too late, sick fate.

Historical digression: It bears mentioning that Iran had a more secular democracy once. A democracy without Islamic law and clerics and Assahole-ah Ayatollahs. In 1951, the Iranian Parliament selected Mohammed Mosaddeq as Prime Minister. MM was a normal dude, he wasn't a cleric or anything like that. The problem with MM was that he wanted to nationalize Iran's oil, you know, so the IRANIAN PEOPLE could benefit from their own natural resources. Britain didn't like that because well, see, they wanted Iran's oil to benefit the BRITISH PEOPLE. So in 1953, Winston Churchill convinced President Eisenhower that MM was going all Commie on us. Eisenhower didn't like Commies. No one likes Commies. But everyone does love oil. Iranian crude. Black gold. Working together, the British and American intelligence services effected a coup d'etat and overthrew poor Mosaddeq. Code name: Operation Ajax. I shit you not. They literally "cleaned things up." Out went the bad Commie democrat and in his place, UK/US installed an old reliable monarch, Reza Shah. Reza and his son, who took power after his death, were a 20th Century versions of the Saudi royal family. They ruled Iran with an iron fist while ensuring the free, non-nationalized flow of Iranian oil to Britain and the United States. Just say "no" to nationalization!!! Unless of course American banks and insurance companies are failing, then say YES!!!!

The point of this brief history lesson is that things blew up in 1979 when Iranians took their country back, deposed the Shah, and installed an Islamic theocracy. One has to wonder if Britain and the U.S. had left well enough alone in 1953, let Mosaddeq stay in power and allowed Iran to evolve as a secular democracy, whether we'd ever have seen self-righteous pricks like the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Ayatollah Khamenei running things 30 and 50 years later. I think not. But short-sighted American foreign policy often leads to this kind of blowback. See Exhibit B: Mujihadeen, American support in Afghanistan, 1979-1990. Today, Iran seems to have strayed from its revolutionary ideals. That's the problem with revolutionaries: once they take power, they get so addicted to it that they come to resemble the very autocrats they overthrew in the first place. Now the Iranian religious police and secret service are as thuggish as ones the Shah used to use to retain his power. But, history repeating itself the way it does, young Iranians, who make up the vast majority of the population in that country, are chafing under Islamic law and absurdly conservative rules that require women to wear the hijab and treat them as second class citizens (not good odds when women make up 65% of the Iranian population).

Young Iran wants change. It wants freedom. It wants better relations with the West. And they're willing to die to get it. The other half of Iran? The half that voted for Ahmadenijad? It likes things the way they are and thinks Mahmoud and Khamenei are doing a wonderful job standing up to the West and keeping Iran in line with its Islamic ideals. So there's a political split in Iran, you might say it's a red-state-versus-blue-state divide.

Sound like any place you know?

FF - Love, Jacques Chirac Style

2009-06-19T16:54:00.004-04:00

For today's FF, I present you with a version of love, Jacques Chirac style. Monsieur Chirac has always been known as a ladies' man. A shameless flirt. A cad, if you will. He's admitted to several affairs and loving other women "discreetly." His wife of 53 years knows about these shenanigans, and for some inexplicable reason, has stayed with him. Must be love. Or something. Watch how, in the following cringe-worthy video, Jacques openly flirts with a (not attractive) blonde while his wife gives a speech right in front of him (them).

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Hollow Man

2009-06-19T13:13:00.001-04:00

I've been lost inside my head,
Echoes fall off me.
I took the prize last night for complicatedness
For saying things I didn't mean and don't believe.

Believe in me, believe in nothing
Corner me and make me something
I've become the hollow man,
Have I become the hollow man I see?

Oh I see...This echoing.
You have placed your trust in me.
I went upside-down.
I emptied out the room in thirty seconds flat,
I can't believe you held your ground.

Believe in me, believe in nothing
Corner me and make me something
I've become the hollow man,
Have I become the hollow man I see?

I'm overwhelmed, I'm on repeat,
I'm emptied out, I'm incomplete.
You trusted me, I want to show you
I don't want to be the hollow man.

Believe in me, believe in nothing
Corner me and make me something
I've become the hollow man,
Have I become the hollow man I see?
I see...

Hollow Man, R.E.M.

FF - Colbert: Maverick or Ice Man?

2009-06-12T14:30:00.002-04:00

For today's FF, we honor Stephen Colbert, who broadcast The Colbert Report from Baghdad this week. In this video, Stephen goes Top Gun for us and takes a ride with The Thunderbirds, not to be confused with The Thundercats. Totes hilarious.

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Operation Iraqi Stephen - Fallback Position - Air Force Thunderbirds

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor

Stephen Colbert in Iraq

Things I Think

2009-06-12T12:00:00.009-04:00

It's Friday, and I have a lot on my mind. Let's get started with the ugly:

Everyone's worried about foreign terrorists. Gotta keep Al Cater out of the country or he's gonna kill a lot of people. Gotta keep those Iranians in check. While everyone's busy hunting for bad guys "over there," we've got homegrown terrorists -- Americans -- shooting abortion doctors, blowing up federal buildings, and now, killing a guard at the Holocaust Museum, a stone's throw from the White House. And let's not forget how, a few years ago, a former Army sharpshooter took a young kid on a shooting spree in Maryland and Virginia. They murdered countless people in parking lots and gas stations and scared the shit out of everyone in the mid-Atlantic States. Oh and remember how, right after 9/11, some kook mailed anthrax to Tom Brokaw and other media personalities? The moral of this story is, that there's no shortage of American nutjobs with axes to grind, people full of venom and hate. And in a developed country like ours, you can buy all the shit you need to kill a lot of people at the local Walmart or Home Depot. Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City with a truck full of fertilizer. The next American mass murder may decide to build a dirty bomb out of all that extra radioactive waste lying around your local hospitals. Actually, another school shooting is more likely than that. For now. These people are terrorists too, right? I mean, you don't need a long beard and catchy "Down with America" chant to be considered a terrorist, do you? They say the hate groups in this country are all riled up because of Obama's election. No shit. They're on the wrong side of history; they should be riled up. I just hope someone's paying attention. If 88 year-old racists with nothing left to lose are pissed off, we're in bigger trouble than I thought.

Now the purdy:

That Miss California -- ex-Miss California -- what's her name, Carrie Prejean? She sure has some stupid views about gay marriage. Real dumb. Redneck dumb. But honestly, the first thing I think every time they show her sauntering around with those fake boobies of hers, is "Damn, that girl is f'n hot!" For what it's worth, I'm not proud of it.

David Carradine, WTF? That is one weird way to go out. And we're never going to know how he really died. It sure as hell wasn't suicide, like they originally reported. His hands were bound. That's impossible to do if you're going to hang yourself. Option two is auto-erotic asphyxiation, a form of masturbation where you cut off the oxygen to your brain to induce a more intense orgasm. Michael Hutchence of INXS supposedly died that way. I'm not sure I buy that theory either, even for an edgy dude like Carradine. Who needs an ex-tree intense orgasm at age 72? I mean, if I'm still that horny at 72 -- and mind you, I PLAN to be -- I'll be happy just to be able to pop one off at that age. I won't need all the extra fixins. I just don't think Carradine would be practicing that kind of thing at that point in his life. And if he was horny, baby, he was in friggin' Thailand. He had money. He could have gotten himself a very affordable playmate. It just makes no sense. I'm thinking he pissed someone off and got his ass killed.

Last night we had another thunder storm. I feel like I've been living in a thunderstorm for a month. The other night, the thunder crackled so loud at 3:30 a.m., I nearly wet the bed. I don't even remember what the sun looks like. It's almost summer, right?

Could someone please explain to me ESPN's inexplicable obsession with Brett Favre? Last year they wouldn't shut up about him coming out of retirement to play for the Jets. This year it's the Vikings he's courting. I say WHO GIVES A FLYING FUCK!!! Is that asshole paying ESPN royalties to mention his name every thirty seconds? Does anyone outside of Minnesota care if he retires or not? I CAN'T TAKE ANYMORE FAVRE STORIES! I JUST WANT THE F'N RED SOX HIGHLIGHTS! PLEASE MAKE THEM STOP!

In other news, my Boston Red Sox have played the New York Yankee$ eight times this season, and they have won all eight games. Sweet, sweet ambrosia.

I have been following the Iranian election with considerable bemusement. You might be surprised to hear (a) that Iran is actually a democracy (more of one than say, China or Iraq); and (b) political elections there are as bareknuckle as they are here. There's a reformist candidate -- Moussavi -- running against Ahmadinejad, and I really hope he wins. He's a painter, an architect, a real renaissance man. Mahmoud is a cock gone flaccid. All arrogant flash and self-delusion but nothing real to er... stand him up when he needs it most. Just like our ex-President. Bush is gone and now it's Mahmoud's turn to leave. I'm really hoping things go that way. Funny how the leaders of Iran and the U.S. create all kinds of conflict inside and outside their countries, but the Iranian and American people seem to want peace and good relations with one another. Fingers crossed.

I loved Obama's speech in Cairo. It's about time an American President said those things to that audience. And it's about time that an American President didn't kowtow to Israel's every desire.

The GM bankruptcy shows that the companies everyone says were "too big to fail" were not too big to fail. I hate to say it, but the Republicans were right about this one. Though they're being totally hypocritical about it because most of them supported Bush when he was pushing these bailout plans nine months ago. Everyone screamed that we needed to save GM or the world would end. Billions of dollars later, it didn't work and GM is still going bankrupt. What a colossal waste of money. Not Iraq War wasteful, but wasteful nonetheless. Obamer got this one wrong. There, I said it.

The twenty-year anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square just passed. Did anyone notice? People seemed to give a shit '89. Guess we can't make too much of a big deal about it now since China owns our ass. Literally.

Palin's pissed about a tasteless Letterman joke about her daughter. Here, Dave explains what happened:

Good, now someone please grab a cane and drag dear Sarah off the stage. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill and misleading people in the process. Shit, if she didn't have any kids, she'd have no publicity at all. She should be thanking Dave for the airtime, not getting all up in his 62 year-old grille.

Here's a final thought to ponder over the weekend: what if every single thing our five senses tell us is actually an illusion? Descartes said "I think, therefore I am." That may be true. But what if none of what we think is real, the things we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is the real reality? What if it's all a dream that the collective mind is having? A bad dream where Big Mind believes that it has divided into billions of individual bodies containing tiny, smaller minds? Where Big Mind has forgotten that it's actually one mind and is now divided and subdivided and at war with itself. Where it watches millions of tiny minds -- broken pieces of itself encased in symbolic bodies -- fight each other in every way possible, from household arguments between spouses to drunken fisticuffs, to criminal assaults, rapes, and serial murders, to world wars. What would it mean if nothing in this world really mattered, that it's all an illusion to serve some unknown purpose? What if nothing we see is real and we are living in Matrixland?

If you think this is a bizarre idea, tell me, did you have a dream last night or the night before? Have you ever had a dream where you thought you were flying? Or you were shagging that boy or girl you've had your eye on for awhile? Then you woke up and you realized it was just a dream, that you can't really fly, and Bobby/Georgina never looks in your direction. (And you were pissed!) Your mind, my mind, they have the power to create worlds that defy the laws of reality, or what we think is reality. We do fantastical things in our dreams. We do bad things to good people and bad people do them to us. If there is a powerful, collective unconscious mind out there, one that encompasses the electromagnetic strength of every living thing, isn't it possible that it too could be having an incredibly intense dream (or nightmare, depending on how you look at it) where it created a world -- this world --that's not the real reality? And time, birth, life, death, winning, losing, sex, killing, wars are all an illusion occuring in the dream? Me, I not only think it's possible, I think it's happening.

Meet the Parents

2009-05-30T12:28:00.010-04:00

Last weekend, it was time for AC to meet the parents. Memorial Day weekend presented a golden opportunity, two days to undertake the meet and greet and a third day to deal with any fallout. Having a new significant other meet your parents is fraught with peril. It's a minefield of potential faux pas and unintended offenses. First impressions matter and because I live a good four hour drive from my parents and don't see them every week, opinions are hard to fix if something goes wrong. They can harden over time like petrified wood.

Or maybe that's just in my family. My dad's pretty easygoing and would give Medusa the benefit of every doubt ("Your hair is very nice, what do you feed those snakes to keep them so lively?"), so I never worry about him. But my mother is a different story entirely and more than makes up for any obstacles my father could impose. God love her, she's blunt, opinionated, and doesn't suffer fools gladly. She's open but also very proud and a bit stubborn. When she's around new people or family she doesn't see too often, she wears all of it like a suit of armor. The right person knows how to get past it and quickly learns what to disregard and what to pay attention to. It doesn't take long for my mother to warm up to someone when she sees they're not an asshole and that she can trust them with her real self. But that takes time, and often, repeated visits. Not everyone has that kind of patience.

AC, who I'm sure was on her best behavior (as I was two weeks ago when I met her grandmother and siblings), handled MTP very skillfully and with the requisite social adroitness. She listened to my mother's stories -- my mother has some great stories about our family, I've heard them 100 times and they never get old -- knocked back some wine and Danny Devito Limoncello, which she brought for the occasion, and even cleared the table with mi madre, which went over very well. I even felt comfortable leaving her alone and never worried that she might pee on the floor or chew on the furniture. AC is completely trustworthy that way.

She even met my cousins and uncle, who came up on Sunday. That was fun. My cousins N and P are like these older brothers who I vaguely remember making me dance like a monkey for their entertainment in my prepubescent years. P doesn't remember it, but when I was 5 or 6, he taught me how to say the words "fucking asshole," which he then prompted me to scream as loudly as possible from behind a chair in my parents' living room. N, who's as tall as the day is long, a trait of which I've always been jealous, I remember as a gentle giant who only occasionally went along with P's subversion of my integrity. Of course, now that we're older, the significance of our age disparity has mostly disappeared. I remember commiserating with N at my sister's wedding last July about dating, how hard it is at this point in life, and how finding someone special is like trying to pick out a unique grain of sand on Myrtle Beach. I never could have imagined a conversation like that with him twenty years ago. The same with P, who manages to stay sane and menstruation-free in a house of four women (one wife, three daughters). P keeps it reals.

And then there's my uncle, my father's older brother, who's an Italian soccer fanatic, former high school math teacher, and chess aficionado and who, at some core of his being, I know views himself as the Michael Corleone of the family. Whenever I've seen him, he's been good to me, interested in my life, what I'm doing, what my plans are. But like my mother, he's a proud man, thinks he knows better than everybody, and is not a fan of self-criticism. And, like my dad, he's not what you'd call a feminist. So putting Uncle A. and my mother together in the same room is like watching two elephants walk across a frozen pond in late March. You're reallly hoping they're going to make it across, but deep down, you know there's at least an 80% chance they're going to dunk their asses in frigid water before it's over.

Fortunately, getting older takes a bit of the edge off of all of us, and the same is true of my uncle and mother, who got along better than expected and even disappeared for a half hour to discuss my mother's new gardening/landscaping passion. They do have some things in common: both are avid readers and pay close attention to the news. On Sunday, Uncle A. was at his most charming -- he has a great sense of humor and loves to bust balls -- and he even helped my mother clear the table (!) Things were looking pretty good until the wine and limoncello kicked in and the old family stories started to surface. Funny, all of them, but there are some you just can't tell in mixed company without someone getting defensive or upset. That didn't stop my mother (it never does). I'm telling you, she LOVES stories. Of course, she tends to favor those where it's other people who did something stupid or played the misguided antagonist.

So... when the stories started to come out after a few drinks, I could feel a shift in the wind. Uncle A. and madre started getting a little snippy at each other, doing the passive-aggressive dance, or what passes for passive-aggressive in my family, it's actually not that subtle. Things began to escalate, and that's when I heard the fearful sound of an elephant's foot crunching through ice. N and P got really quiet, like obedient cows waiting for the thunderstorm. As my mother was about to pursue a story she told that starred a baby cousin N., my deceased grandmother, Uncle A., and a paper bag (don't ask), one that had raised a hackle in Uncle A., I firmly suggested that we change the subject. That deposition jousting with prickish opposing counsel does come in handy sometimes. It worked; the elephants made it across the pond unscathed.

That night, I got my parents to break out "The Slides," 20 carousels of Kodak slides that depict my family origins: my parents' wedding and honeymoon, my birth and toddlerhood and those of Sister J., and various and sundry childhood trips to Italy. I hadn't seen The Slides in at least 10 years, and boy, they blew my mind this time. My parents were so young, so beautiful, and possessed an innocence and humor that I wish they'd managed to hold on to in subsequent years. My mother was 21, gorgeous, stylishly dressed in the pink-checkered pants and belted dresses of the day. She looked happy and open-hearted. My father was 27, so handsome with a full head of black hair, a megawatt smile, and incredibly hip collared shirts, slacks, and dress shoes that I have never seen him wear in my life. He looked like a movie star. They both appeared hopeful and optimistic, engaged and open to each other.

There was one interesting slide from their honeymoon where my father is sitting a canoe or kayak (from a 2009 vantage point, my parents in a canoe together is completely hilarious -- trying something similar today would result in one of them getting paddle-boarded within 10 minutes), my father is wearing a tight navy bathing suit, his ropey muscles are shining in the sun, and he has on these trendy Wayfarer sunglasses. A string of long, wet black hair is hanging over his face, Elvis style. He's got a cigarette in his mouth and he looks totally badass.

In his left hand, he's holding a plate with two Sloppy Joe sandwiches that my mother made for him. "I didn't know how to cook back then," my mother says. "Your father didn't like it." Indeed, he looks disappointed, and has this WTF pout on his face as he looks at the camera.

A couple of things strike me about this slide. Besides how young and handsome my father looks, I was interested in the fact that my mother took the picture, which came out really good, as did many others she took on their honeymoon. I've never seen her with a camera in her hand. She doesn't even like to pose for pictures. Then my father holding the Sloppy Joes with a scowl on his face. Two slides later, the Joes are still on the plate, uneaten, as he lies napping in the sun. I think how that must have hurt my mother's feelings. I think about the expectations and hopes they both had back then, how little they knew each other, how young they were, and everything that came after. I think how raw they both were. I think if maybe my father had been a little different at that point in time, if maybe he'd eaten the Sloppy Joes and runny eggs my mother used to make before she became the gourmet that she is now, maybe the future would have been happier for both of them. And if my mother had continued to take pictures, played more with my father, kept that happy, willing spirit that I saw in so many slides that night, maybe.... But that's easy to say. I'm 40, living in an age of therapy and marital awareness. They were kids. Therapy was for crazy people. A husband did this, and a wife did that. They were babes in the woods with a lot to learn. They were just people, with their own idiosyncrasies and imperfections. It's easy to look back, but I still wish we could do a rewind and work on some shit.

There were slides of me too. Me red-faced and utterly naked at 3 months, lying on a changing table. Me clad in Buster Browns, plaid pants, and a furry blue winter jacket, racing outside in five feet of snow. Me crying ten minutes later because I wanted to come back inside. Me with the jacket off and crying ten minutes later because I wanted to go back outside. Apparently, existential indecisiveness plagued me from the get-go. There were a few of me on my first birthday, mashing pink and blue cake all over my face. There's one of me at about 6 months old, where I'm crawling on a blanket and I'm smiling, and another one where I'm around the same age and sacked out on my mother's ass while she sleeps. But in most of them, I look like I'm trying to figure shit out, or like I have the world on my shoulders already. I seemed anxious. Pensive. There were a few slides of cousins N and P too. They were years older than me, but they seemed to have the same look on their faces as I did.

Were we born like that, or did it come from somewhere else? Both, I think. Of course, we bring things to our personality when we're born, that mysterious chemistry that comes from the combined DNA of our mother and father. But beyond that, much of who we are is socially injected in us within our first six years of life. We suck up the environment around us like tiny vacuum cleaners, for better or worse.

How much can we be blamed for what comes later? After all, it's not easy to meet the parents.

Happy Birthday, Bloggy

2009-05-30T10:24:00.006-04:00

Bloggy turned three last Thursday. Unfortunately, I was too swamped with work for a deadline yesterday that I wasn't able to celebrate it appropriately. Three years of doing this and now Bloggy's all growns up. Yes, some things have changed. She's learned to walk and doesn't poo as much. Used to be she pumped out an entry every few days or so but now she's in the toddler phase and weaning herself off diapers. Now it's all about quality over quantity. And let's face it, Bloggy has other interests now too. She likes to watch the SpongeBob, for example. And she likes playdates with other blogs. So it's not always easy for her to focus on blogging, which is what she was born to do.

Still, three years going on four is nothing to sneeze at. For that, Bloggy, I raise a keyboard to you. Happy Third Birthday, and may your fourth year bring you much snark and wisdom and humor and all good things.

Your father,

T.

FF - Liberty the Iraq War Mascot

2009-05-22T09:01:00.000-04:00

This video is all kinds of wrong on the Friday before Memorial Day, but it's funny as hell, so I'm going with it.

Pentagon Reports Army Mascot 'Liberty' Killed in Iraq

Sometimes, in a miserable situation, you can choose to either laugh or cry.

Have a great holiday weekend everyone, and make sure you take a moment to think of the all men and women in our armed forces who have served and died on our behalf, from the Revolutionary War to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Time Won't Give Me Time

2009-05-16T10:13:00.011-04:00

If, like me, you're a child of the 70s, it's been pretty disturbing to see the celebrities who have died recently: Paul Newman, Dom DeLuise, Bea Arthur, Ricardo Montalban, Paul Benedict (played English neighbor Bentley on The Jeffersons), Clint Ritchie (played Clint Buchanan on One Life to Live - I used to watch it sometimes before General Hospital) and Marilyn Chambers (okay, that last one was for me). There are a bunch of obscure, one-hit-wonder 70s singers I could name (i.e., Danny Seals, who sang "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight"). And Farrah Fawcett, the object of lust for every adolescent boy born between 1962 and 1970, is dying of cancer. Forget that bizarre kookiness of hers in her later years, in the 70s, she was THE sex symbol of sex symbols. Her iconic red bathing suit poster was practically being handed out at supermarkets - 12 million copies sold. Damn, she was hot! Next to Olivia Newton-John, Farrah was my very first Celebrity Viagra. The fantasia quadrupled when I learned that she was married to The Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors. It gave me a great deal of pleasure to imagine all those $500,000 babies they would make together, babies who would increase in value over time and develop into Ten Million and maybe even Twenty Million Dollar supermen and women. Alas, their relationship didn't last and they cut the cord in '82. By then I'd moved on to Donna Dixon and Phoebe Cates.

Part of the way I measure the passing of time is by accounting for famous people who have died. Celebrities are an easy benchmark, because I remember how old I was when I first encountered them and how I felt back then. Whether the kitchen counter was above or below my head. Some of these people died at a ripe old age. Dom was 75. Ricardo and Bea were in their 80s, I believe. Some lived very long lives. Others didn't. Others died in their 60s, or younger. And so, in my time analysis, I do the math. I deduct the years and address the ramifications. 2009 minus 1976 is 33. 80 minus 33 is 47. Okay, so some of these people were on the older side when I watched them. But hold on just a second. I'm 40, 47 is not that much older than I am now. Shit, seven years ago, it was 2002 and that was AFTER 9/11. And if I tinker with the math a little, let's say I deduct 33 from 70, we're at 37, which is younger than I am now when I was watching these people, sitting in my red bean bag chair and eating my Swanson t.v. dinner! How quickly did those 33 years go? A blink. From childhood to middle age in 33 years and it happened at warp speed. If I slow it down and think of it year by year, no, it went slower, but when I think of it cumulatively, it's nothing, a microsecond.

I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the passage of time, but I think about it a lot. Not necessarily death so much but just time passing and how little most of us make of use of it. It's the one commodity that no one, not the richest or most powerful person in the world, can get more of. You can be Donald Trump or Ted Kennedy or Osama bin Laden or the Sultan of Brunei. You can buy all the cars, houses, jewels, guns, and women you want. You can run countries, foment revolutions, blow shit up, build skyscrapers, or have your own narcissistic t.v. show where you get to act like a prick and fire people in front of your kids. You can spend your life working your ass off in a fluorescent office, saving your acorns for a rainy day, or living a life of complete freedom, hopping westbound trains like a hobo, with just the shirt on your back, taking whatever the sun brings that day. What no one gets, though, no matter how they live or who they are, or what they do, is more time. Somehow, some day, at a time not of my or your choosing, the body's clock runs out. Rich, poor, or neither, the body quits, it breaks down, and it's time for us to go. We all know this in the back of our minds and still, what do we do about it? What can we do about it? Thinking about this too much would make life unlivable and not very enjoyable. But to ignore it completely seems wasteful too.

Ten years ago on May 10th, I joined my current law firm, leaving one of the best law firms in the country for the promise of better, more interesting work, with nicer people, and the promise of partnership after a few years. Not all of that worked out and there have been more than a few times when I thought I made a mistake, or I got bitter about how certain things went down, or how some people have changed over time, going from humble, easy-going friends when I first encountered them all those years ago, to Class A, two-faced assholes totally out for themselves. Fortunately, there are enough people who stayed the same and wonderful friends who came along later that I can still tolerate the place. But in the end, does it really matter? Isn't it the same, or worse, at other places, doing other jobs? It has to be. Or maybe, like my father, I'm just too much a creature of habit. I'm the immovable object.

My entire life, I've never had a job at one place this long and yet, when my ten year anniversary arrived last week, I didn't celebrate it, or even acknowledge it. Why? I'm not totally sure. Maybe because it's just a job to me now, maybe because it's not exactly a wedding anniversary or birthday, so why make a big deal about it? But I think it's deeper than that. I think it's because I've realized that while my job is important in the I've-got-to-eat-and-travel-and-pay-my-mortgage sense, and yes, I'm happy to be busier than I've been in awhile, at the end of the day, life is life, and work is work, and work is not the measure of my true happiness or who I am. People are. Friendships are. Relationships are. Family is. Experiences, doing new things, making the most of my FREE time is. I know a few people who define themselves by what they do, how many hours they bill, how much money they bring in, how big their house is, what kind of car they drive, and I feel sorry for them. There are one or two people I'm thinking of right now who love the sound of their own voice, schmooze inside the firm like advertising agents on Mad Men, kissing asses and taking names, and who I wish would just. shut. the fuck. up. They are nails on a fucking chalkboard. Serenity Now. Sereeeeenity Nowwwww. Lawyers seem to be all they are, and they want you to know it! How boring.

I'm not going to say I don't like what I do, don't like to work hard, or don't like nice things. Anyone who knows me should know none of that is true. But for me, work is a means to an end. Not an end in itself. I have my limits. For example, I'd sooner live in one of those modular, modern-looking houses -- the kind you design yourself and they put together with a crane in two weeks -- than a McMansion. Any spending spree I undertake, which hasn't happened in awhile, actually -- is followed by a much longer period of hermitlike frugality. Okay, so these aren't exactly choices people get to make in Angola or Sri Lanka, but everything in context, people. I live in the United States.

A bigger difference, though, between me and some of my peers is unless I really need to, I don't go out of my way to tell people I'm a lawyer or discuss my cases, or banter about legal strategy and the interesting subtexts of client relations, or novel issues presented by the latest reporter squib. Probably not great for my prospects, but right now, I couldn't care less. I don't define myself as a lawyer, and I don't enjoy kissing gray-haired asses or promoting myself to people as an expert on this or that, even if I've been doing this for 14 years now (shit, really?) and have learned a thing or two about a thing or two. I don't like self-promoters. They may be higher on the ladder, they may make more money, but there is something needy about them, like an ego itch that needs to be scratched, one that won't ever go away no matter how well they do. They're insecure and fake. What they do is their identity and they wear it like a Superman costume everywhere they go. Take their job away, even if temporarily, and what are they? Husks.

Apart from nostalgia over dying 70s icons, a couple of things happened this week that are making me go off on this time/lawyer tangent. First, a few days ago, I logged into Above the Law and read about two lawyers, both partners, from my old law firm whose careers have completely derailed. One I didn't know well. Apparently, he intentionally overbilled a client $500,000 for work he hadn't done, and he got fired. The other, I knew really well, mostly from my days as a summer associate when I did a foray in the corporate department. Fantastic guy. Down to earth, supportive, just an all around decent person. He made partner in 2001 and I was thrilled for him, even though I was long gone from the firm by then. I don't know what happened, but he got fired in April. Partners at this firm don't get fired unless something has gone horribly wrong. Picture in the paper wrong. So I'm really curious about what happened to him. I've been trying to track down his email address but they took it off the website and I have no way of contacting him until he joins another firm (if he ever does). Both of these guys were at the top of their profession, partners at a prestigious firm where the average partner clears $1 million a year, easy, and everything combusted. Why? What was the purpose? Why do multimillionaires with impeccable integrity like Bernie Madoff decide to steal from people when they don't need the money? Why would they choose to run the risk of dying in jail? Wasting the time they have left rotting behind iron bars?

The other thing that happened was I got an email from a friend yesterday telling me that a partner at another law firm, someone he'd introduced me to when I was interviewing to join a new firm ten years ago, died a few days ago. He didn't say how, but this man had some physical issues; I remember that when I met him at his office a decade ago, he used a cane or some kind of walker to get around. And when I got the email, I thought to myself how when I was sitting across his desk in his nicely decorated office and he was telling me about the firm and giving me advice on interviewing and other places where I had offers, how strange it would have been to know that this man had only ten years left to live.

And how much time do any of us have? It's not like a bell goes off that tells us. How much would it suck if it did? We'd all need megadoses of Prozac to make it through whatever time we had left. It's the not knowing that makes life livable. But it's also the not knowing that makes us think we're going to live forever and fucks up our priorities. It makes us chase the wrong things. It makes us proud. It makes us flaunt our positions in society or our wealth or our status like we're Zeus, like we're immortal gods. It's the mother of all delusions, as Saddam would say if he were still alive and had chosen to spend his time in existential contemplation rather than trying to hold on to his tenuous power by torturing people.

How do we spend our time? Why do we spend it the way we do? What's the best way to spend it? Why did I just spend a great deal of the past month following the Boston Bruins, who haven't won a Stanley Cup in 37 years, only to be crushed when they lost to the Hurricanes in sudden death overtime two nights ago? It was meaningless, really, but it felt important at the time. Why am I enjoying doing Sudoku when I get home from work lately, instead of writing or watching t.v.? Are either of these activities worth my time? For those of you who have kids and families, do you ever lament how much time they require? How little you have for yourself anymore? Maybe your own time stops mattering as much once you have them. Maybe you find a way to squeeze your own interests in and you don't need as much time for them, like a condensed zip drive. Maybe your kids are how you spend your time and you're happy with that.

I don't have the answers to any of these questions. But I am asking them.

Is that a waste of time?

FF - Dane Cook Appetizer

2009-05-15T21:00:00.003-04:00

Yes, I'm a bit late on the FF this week, as loyal reader KLB duly pointed out. For today, we're going light and airy with Dane Cook, who I personally find hilarious. He uses a different kind of humor, one that is more situational without the typical punchline. Below are two very short clips from a special of his coming up this weekend. Enjoy!

Jokes.com

Dane Cook - Suicide Note

dians.comedycentral.com

Dane Cook Kool Aid Video

No Pennies for My Thoughts

2009-05-12T10:21:00.009-04:00

Oh the blogs have slowed down, oh yes they have! I feel bad you've been checking in and looking at those three pigs for almost two weeks. Here are a few reasons why I've been on the down low lately:

I've been working every weekend on a summary judgment brief that's due May 29th. For a change, it's a case I care about quite a bit, so I'm what you say? Motivated. I want to win. Badly. So I've been spending a lot of time in front of my computer and the last thing I feel like doing when I go home is spending more time in front of my computer.

New relationships are bad for blogs. When I've had free time, I've been spending it with AC. Let's call her Atlantic City. When I've had free time, I've been spending it in Atlantic City, cooking out on the grill in her backyard (it's pretty cool having a small backyard in the middle of New York City, I have to say), wrestling with Jersey, her French Bulldog, and generally enjoying the things couples do, which I haven't done in about three years. We went to Montauk a few weeks ago; I met her grandmother, brother, sister, cousin, and niece on Sunday; Atlantic City is distracting, but in a very good way. I'll need to come up with a better nickname for her though.

I've had writer's block. I don't know what it is, but I've been in this weird zen mode lately where few things are pissing me off enough to write about. It's sad that so much of my writing derives from misplaced anger or sadness, but hey, they keep me on the edge, where I gotta be. Take them away and I've got nothin'. I haven't even tried writing a short story since December. Though I've been doing plenty of reading and reading about writing and Sudoku. (I loves the Sudoku!) Maybe it's the economy, maybe it's the swine flu, maybe it's too many trips to Atlantic City. Whatever it is, I need to fix it and make a place for l'ecrire en mi vida, or eventually I will feel its absence and start behaving unpredictably. No one wants that.

I've been taking more pictures lately, which is easier and less time consuming than writing. It's instant gratification, a few snaps, a little touchup and voila, there it is. Writing takes way more thought. It gives me headache. I should kill two birds with one stone and post some pictures on here, but most of you probably saw them on Facebook already, and I hate being redundant.

Hmmm, I think those are the only excuses I've got for now. Only four? I thought I had more. I've considered going on hiatus, taking a few months off, but it feels too final. Maybe I'll just continue writing more sporadic, sucky blogs about blogging and why there aren't more blogs, and just smack your faces with more bloggerrhea. Or I'll do some more lists. Yeah, lists are good. Lists are easy.

Or... I could get over my perfectionism and try and finish the three longer entries I've started and post them. Maybe I'll do that. Oh, perfectionism, that's five excuses!

Pig Paranoia

2009-04-30T18:53:00.009-04:00

This swine flu insanity is driving me batshit. Seriously, I can't take it any more. People running to drug stores and emptying them of Tamiflu and antibacterial soap, mind-numbing news "updates" about where the swine flu is, where it's going, how long it will take to get there, debates over whether it's an epidemic or a pandemic (Do YOU know the difference? Bet you don't.), stock footage of old epidemics that killed hundreds of thousands of people, reach stories lamenting the death of a single toddler in Houston (He visited a MALL dontchyaknow! Hundreds could be infected!), more stories about who's gonna die and when, shots of a Mexican kid who had the first known case -- they now call him "Patient Zero," foreign countries limiting travel to the U.S. and Mexico, school closings in Queens and Brooklyn regardless of whether any students were actually infected, a Vice President saying he wouldn't be taking any subways or planes right now, oh, there's a retraction, hundreds of pigs slaughtered in Egypt, which hasn't had a single case, offended Jews and Muslims who want the name changed from swine flu to something else, racists who want to call it the "Mexican flu," people who aren't eating pork even though eating pork doesn't cause swine flu, and last but not least,

THE PIGS, THE POOR, FUCKING PIGS!

Blamed for a virus they did not, could not, create by themselves. A virus that could just as easily be blamed on birds and the biggest a-holes on the planet: human beings, who bring birds, pigs, and humans together to cause these airborne plagues. Humans are the real culprits here. So why not call it the human being flu? Or the homo sapien flu? No, instead, they blame cute little piggies, who were minding their own business the whole time, eating whatever they were fed and frolicking in mud and pig doody. Have we sunk so low that now we're going to scapegoat the Charlottes and Piglets of the world for this virus? FOR SHAME!

The hysteria is comical. I mock it. I've been mocking it on Facebook and I'm mocking it here. People are freaking out over nothing. It's the flu and a fucking mild version at that. You get it, it makes you shit like the dickens for a few days, maybe you puke a few times, get a fever if it's a nasty slice, and eventually you feel better. For the average person, this is no worse than the common flu that kills X many people each year. But because it's NEW and it comes from SWINE, we're supposed to worry, panic, and run around like chickens with our heads cut off. Sorry, I'm not buying it. I'm doing what I always do. I ride the subway, I hold the pole, I wash my hands when I get to work, I napkin bathroom doorhandles and don't shake the hands of gross-looking people, which is about 2/3 of New York City. That's just common sense. I don't need CNN to scare me out of my Calvins to use the brain that God gave me, for goodness sakes.

This kind of silliness has happened before you know. It happens every time the media tells us to be afraid, but courtesy of the website Freewilliamsburg, which I link to on the right there -----> I found this gem from the 70s that made me LOL heartily. Take a gander.

Poor Betty. Or was it Dottie? "Hey, I play golf every weekend!" Love those ominous sound effects too. Fortunately they're all actors and likely died of something else.

The point here is, the media sensationalism is worse than the virus. It's designed to make money and scare the shit out of people so they'll keep reading newspapers and watching the news and buy Tamiflu and batteries and water and Cipro and whateverelse. Be not afraid. Be smart instead. Take a deeeeeep breath. Relax. You're going to be okay. Chances are you won't get it, and if you do get it, you'll survive. The alternative is far worse. You could make yourself sick with worry and weaken that immune system of yours. Then you'll probably get it and don't say I didn't warn you.

Trust me, when Ebola or a reasonable facsimile someday goes airborne and your eyes, hair, and skin are literally falling off and you're begging for it all to be over, THEN you'll have something to worry about. For now, it's just the fucking flu. Get over it.

FF - Cartman the Pirate

2009-04-24T14:12:00.005-04:00

Ripped from today's headlines, for today's FF, I have two short clips offering South Park's take on the rash of piracy happening off the Somalian coast. Give it a few seconds to load, it's worth it.

Damn, I love that show. Good weekends, everyone!

Preguntas y Respuestas

2009-04-24T02:56:00.002-04:00

Q: Are Susan Boyle's 15 minutes up yet?

A: Not quite, but we're at 14 minutes, 38 seconds. 39, 40, 41....

Q: Hugo Chavez is a: (a) menace, (b) comic relief, (c) politician, (d) blowhard, or (e) rogue?

A: (b), (c), (d) and (e).

Q: Will the American embargo on Cuba end during Obama's tenure?

A: Yes, but not until after a lot more Caribbean Lambada.

Q: Does waterboarding work?

A: Probably, in some cases, but at what cost? Assume that the 183 times that Khalid Sheik Mohamed was waterboarded saved lives. How many lives did it save? Let's say it saved 10,000 lives. It may have saved none. It may have saved 20. It may have saved 2700, like on 9/11. Nobody knows. Let's say 10,000, ballpark. Is debasing ourselves, lowering ourselves to an Al Qaeda in Iraq level, worth the trade-off? Is saving 10,000 lives a fair exchange? Before you answer, consider this: According to the CDC, between 2000 and 2004, there were 443,000 American deaths each year attributable to cigarette smoking. Other sources estimate that alcohol kills about 85,000 Americans annually. Car crashes? 26,000.

We could lower those death rates if we wanted. But instead, we're willing to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths every single year so we can drink, smoke, and drive like assholes. That's all fine, but if a TERRORIST caused that many deaths each year, there would be mass hysteria! Rioting in the streets! If we do it to ourselves though, it's okay.

ASSUME that waterboarding people -- torturing people -- is a sound counter-terrorist strategy. I don't happen to believe that's true, but let's accept that it is. Is saving 10,000 lives, assuming it's actually that many (assuming it's ANY), once every 7-10 years, or even every year, which hasn't been happening, worth our humanity? Our morality? Our identity as Americans? Do you really want to nationally sponsor this medieval behavior? This throwback to the Middle Ages? If so, how are we better than terrorists ourselves? And please don't tell me it's about saving lives. We could save hundreds of thousands of lives every year by outlawing cigarettes, alcohol (!), making safer cars, lowering speed limits and taking shitty drivers off the road, removing the Second Amendment from the Constitution and passing draconian gun laws.

But we don't do it. Why? Because some things are more important than saving lives. Aren't they?

Q: If an Earth Day falls in the forest and no one cares enough to hear it, does it still make a sound?

A: No.

Q: Human cloning, Yea or Nay?

A: Nay. Wait, that's not fair, let me ask Tim's Clone to see how he feels. T.C., what do you think? Yea. That's one Nay and one Yea. The Yeas have it. Tie goes to the Clone.

Q: Is it hypocritical for Dick Cheney to clamor for the release of classified CIA documents that purportedly support the former Bush Administration's policies when he fought to keep these and other documents private when he was in office?

A: Absofuckinglutely.

Q: Is Dick Cheney the Antichrist?

A: No. The Antichrist is much better looking and has a billion times more charisma.

Q: If you're a young, clean-cut medical student embarking on a career as a serial killer, is it a good idea to store your victims' underwear in your apartment after you rob and/or kill them?

A: No.

Q: Is your friendly neighborhood blogger in a new relationship and happier than he's been in awhile?

A: Probably, but don't tell anyone. It'll ruin my street cred.

Q: Does anyone know why I haven't had my Time magazine delivered in over a month?

A: No, that's a real question, does anyone know?

Q: How much would you pay for a Hitler watercolor?

A: $15,000.

Q: Would the average person bankrupt him or herself to save 1100 people from certain death, like Oskar Schindler did?

A: No.

Q: How would the world be different if, instead of rising to power and becoming a mass murderer, Hitler had been accepted into the Vienna Academy of Arts and allowed to fulfill his dream of becoming an artist?

A: We'll never know. History, like life, is a one-way street.

Free Write

2009-04-18T12:52:00.001-04:00

This is free write, this is my way of trying to loosen my mind and shut up my critic. I don’t always feel like writing, actually I always feel likewriting but the story never matches what’s in my head and it pisses me off. I’m hoping that this is a way for me to shut up my head and let the images come. Writing is hard. I hate it. I wonder why I want to do it, sometimes. It’s easier to take pictures thatn it is to create cahcaracters and make them do things. I have stories I want to tell but I can’t get them in the shape I want them. It’s because I suck at this, but a lot of writers say they suck too and they just push on through, so I have to push on through too. Through too. It’s nice not worrying about typos and edits, though I still catch myself trying to fix typos. Then there’s my blog, wchich more and more is starting to seem like a cjob than a fun exdrcise. I need to do something about that, maybe take a break. I’m trying not to look at the screen as I o this but it’s hard not to. I hate making mistakes, I think that’s hwat’s holding me back the mose, I expect my stories to be perfcc the second they come out of my head. But that’s not how it works, is it? But it feels tood to do this to let go and just write, just fucking wwrite anything I want. What’s in my head? What to write about, sick things, dirty things, perverted t hings, things that pappen to people, nice pieople bad people, most of my characters suffer, I wonder why that is, I have this thing about not wanting happy endings, why is that? I think it’s because happy ending s strike me as too cliché and when I reace short stories the best stories don’t have tidy endings but they just leave you like whaaa is going on here. This seems easier than writing a story, I wish it were this easy to jut write whatever, maybe it is. So many people read stories about writing instead of writing, and it’s like whell if you want to be a writer, sometimes you have to write shit down, you can’t just read everything. Right write?

I hate running. Working out too, but one has to do it we can’t just let our bodies go to shit now can we? I hate it when =’m doing it how much time it takes how I have to squeeze it in how hwen I don’t I feel like shit, and when I do, I feel awesome after. I wish they could squeeze that feeling into like a ten minute thing you doand just compress it. There aren’te enough hours in a dayfor me, too fucking few. That’s what I hate most about this existence, how little time there is, there seems to be. 245 hours isn’t enough, and to think it’s all just a goddamn illusion, space and time time isn’t even real, we just think it is. How did it even start and how do I get more of it. I’d like more time please. And make my burger medium well and a side of fries and no, I’m don’t going to have the Coke I don’t really drink soda it rots your pipes. Have to go run now, maybe now that I did this I’ll feel like I accomplished something. They say it’s like scales for a piano player and let’s be honest, I haven’t been doing my xdercises now have I. I wonder if I posted 1000 of these entries how mnay blog readers I’d have left afterwards. On the other hand, maybe this would be more entertaining for people to read, on the third hand, who gives af cuk at the encd of the day, it’s all meaningless ins’t it. You think about death and how emporary everything is and itaactually calms you down. How can yo u make such a bitg deal of everything when it’s so temporary and nothing is important enough to last forever in this dimension. Well, that’s a happy note to end on, time to go run.

Quick Hits

2009-04-14T00:55:00.006-04:00

Let me make sure I understand this. Somalia is a failed state, mired in poverty, overrun by weapons of every stripe and color, has thousands of miles of unguarded coastline and is conveniently located near major shipping lanes, and people are surprised that piracy is rampant in that country? No guns or soldiers to protect millions of dollars in cargo? Didn't anyone see Black Hawk Down? C'mon.

Damn those Navy SEALs are good. Seriously, they're badass. The whole time I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. You had to know that someone on those battleships was waiting to take a shot, the only question was whether Phillips was going to make it out alive. Thanks to those SEALs, he did. He was lucky too. If those three pirates didn't happen to show their heads all at the same time, if there was even a single one of them left in the boat with Phillips, he'd be dead or still floating in that lifeboat.

Is it true that there's a mountain of garbage the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean? I sure hope not, but my money's on "yes."

Went to NH for Easter this weekend. Took my 8 year-old nephew on a drive to Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, and Chris' Comics. Put him in the front seat of my car and buckled him in. He said "Uncle Tim, isn't it against the law for me to be sitting in the front seat like this?" I was like, I don't think so, you're seatbelted in, we've got airbags, I don't see why we'd have a problem. He didn't seem too satisfied with my answer, and had plenty of questions about how airbags work, when they get deployed, and what would happen to him if that should occur. I fielded all his ground balls and threw to first. When I got home, my mother told me he was right, that if kids are not of a certain height and weight (my nephew, like me at his age, is on the smaller side), you have to put them in a carseat in the back, or use a booster in the front seat, otherwise you can get a massive fine and if there's an accident, even go to jail. Of course, I did neither. I had no idea. C'mon, how often do I have kids in my car? The funny part is that he knew it and I didn't. Score one for the 8 year-old without the college education and law degree.

I know I'm getting a taste of the "Daddys" when we get to Best Buy and instead of taking my time gadget-surfing, I breeze through the shit I'm interested in and spend more time with him walking through DS games and Pokemon DVDs. I also found myself excessively concerned with how bored he was waiting for me to be done looking for radar detectors and Rock Band drum kits.

It's April 2009, over five months after the November election, and Al Franken still hasn't taken the Senate seat he won in Minnesota. After yesterday's big court victory though, he's one step closer, finally. He's the first non-N.Y., non-Presidential candidate I've ever supported with hard currency, so he'd better do me proud and not be Mr. Funnyman for the next 6 years.

Cuba's callin'. Looks like Obamar is going to loosen the restrictions on traveling to Cuba. About fucking time. I can't wait to visit. Of course, much of the cachet of traveling to Cuba will disappear the second we're allowed to go. If I want to see fat Americans walking around in flower print shorts and floppy hats, I'll go to Florida. Maybe once the old embargo is gone, there should be a new one imposed on clueless American tourists. Haven't the Cubans suffered enough?

Um, can someone explain to me how Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo are earning major profits after supposedly needing taxpayer bailout money not too long ago? And once you're done explaining that, can you tell me whether I should be happy or sad about this? Talk about redistribution of wealth. Why is it okay when the redistributed wealth trickles up but not down? I know why: because the United States is an oligarchy and our economic policies favor the rich. There, that was easy.

Guess that trip to Thailand is on hold for awhile. I don't do civil war vacations. Or "local unrest" vacations. Or "anti-government" demonstration vacations. Not my bag. All I want, all I NEED, is a long sandy beach, a warm sun, and a prettysomething to rub oil on me. Awwww yeeaaaah.

Add this to the list of shit to worry about: Clostridium difficile, a contagious and potentially deadly bacterium. According to the New York Times, health officials estimate that in the United States the bacteria cause 350,000 infections each year in hospitals, with tens of thousands more incidents occurring in nursing homes. It kills an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people annually. And surprise, surprise, the disease is often helped by antibiotics. "The drugs wipe out the targeted illness, like a urinary tract or upper respiratory infection, but they also kill off large portions of the healthy bacteria that normally live in the digestive tract. If a person comes into contact with C. difficile, or already has it, the disruption to the beneficial bacteria creates an opportunity for the harmful bacteria to flourish." Keep on overmedicating, people. Superbug, twelve o'clock.

Speaking of losing weight, those calorie signs they have up at McDonald's and Wendy's? They're kind of effective. It's one thing to order a Quarter Pounder with cheese and surmise that you're not helping yourself healthwise. It's quite another to see that a QP w/C, medium sized french fry, and Coca-Cola will inject 830-1100 calories into your guttus biggus. That's negative reinforcement alright. Kind of takes the joy out of gorging. You know how long it takes to run all those calories off? Me neither. As soon as I'm done eating my Quarter Pounder, I'll figure it out and get back to you.

FF - The Poisonous Queen

2009-04-03T13:13:00.008-04:00

It's a rainy, foggy bottom day here in New York. Thick as cheese it is. Can't even see Madison Avenue from my office window. We city dwellers sure could use a laugh, a pick-me-up, a FRIDAY FUNNY, to get us out of the doldrums. Let's see...

I find fewer things more asinine than news reporters going on and on about the clothes the First Lady is wearing, describing them with breathless fascination, as if she's Angelina Jolie on the red carpet, doing catwalk turns on her way into the Oscars. (I actually find that stupid too.)

"The First Lady is wearing a mustard-colored dress with black fringe, designed by Hari Kamemberto, her hair is swept back to reveal white fondulac pearls from the Metazoan era, culled from Neanderthal oysters that were found in an underground cave in Malawi. Doesn't she look GOR-GEOUS???!!!" Ugh.

But wait. Let's turn this around and see if I like it any better when it's about my favorite person: Me.

Today, your blogger T. is sporting an eye-catching ensemble of Banana Republic khakis, tinged just the right shade of 40-something brown-beige, two utility pockets in back, two in front; and a navy blue V-neck sweater crafted by that edgy new designer who's all the rage with hip, young Angelenos on Melrose Avenue: J. CREW. Yes, that one. Underneath his sweater, T. bears a familiar staple, a black t-shirt, handstitched by longstanding American clothier The Gap, to mask that hairy chest of his. And finally, just LOOK at the ACCESSORIES T. has on today! A saddle-brown Armani belt I'm told he bought in London twelve years ago during a salesgirl flirtation gone awry. Rather than ask out the sexy strumpet he'd been chatting up for twenty minutes in a boutique clothing store, T. chickened out and, in a pathetic attempt to show he wasn't a total loser, purchased the overpriced Armani belt he's wearing today, one that will forever remind him of his remarkable gutlessness all those years ago. On his size 9 1/2 feet, T.'s got on a pair of John Varvatos/Converse hybrid canvas sneakers, colored a trendy military green. We don't know what undies he's got on, but rumor has it he's partial to black Calvin Klein boxer briefs with a button fly. Wink wink.

Nope. Still stupid.

Another thing I think is absurd is the overzealous, archaic protocol always accorded the Queen of England when dignitaries visit, as if she's an elevated form of human being deserving of special treatment. One would think we've moved beyond this medieval silliness, but apparently we haven't. Indeed, the talk of the town this past week was that Michelle Obama, Woman of the People, had committed a faux pas by, gasp!, TOUCHING the Queen. Oh, me oh my! Monkeys and jumping jacks! NOBODY TOUCHES THE QUEEN!

Here's Jon and John to address both issues with the mocking satire they deserve:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

The Poisonous Queen

comedycentral.com

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Running Man

2009-03-30T00:35:00.009-04:00

I've had this inexplicable urge to run lately. To just sprint somewhere. Not jog, but RUN. I don't know where it came from. I was standing in my bathroom the other night and I'd just finished brushing my teeth, when for some reason, this strong desire to start running overcame me. It was late, about 11 p.m., too late to go outside and test my feeling, so I started jogging in place, right there in my bathroom. If you'd seen me, you would've thought I was crazy, doing the high step by myself in my bathroom at that hour, but there I was, going with the moment, running to stand still. After a few minutes, I stopped and just stood there, feeling my heart race and smiling stupidly at myself.

I thought the urge would pass, that I'd had a temporary bout of insanity, borne of boredom or too much solitude, but it didn't go away. At the gym a couple of days later, I found myself on a treadmill with Cinderella, Ratt and AC/DC blaring in my ears, and BAM! I took what was normally a half-assed, can't-wait-until-it's-over ritual of misery and pain and kicked it up a notch. I hit the incline three times on that sucker, cranked the speed up to 6.5, and ran faster than I'd ever gone on a treadmill before. I was Carl Lewis. I was Ben Johnson on steroids. I was flying. My feet barely touched the rubber mat, which swirled around and around under me, in sync with each step.

For two miles, I felt no pain. And when it was over, 25 minutes later, I was panting like an overexerted pug and every inch of me was drenched with sweat. My gray t-shirt looked like a Rorschach painting. I was exhausted, but it was the good kind of tired, the kind that's wired with endorphins and electrifies your skin. This wasn't the feeling I was used to. In recent years, after a good run, I've felt nauseous and in no hurry to do it again. All that wind-sucking and ab-wrenching, who needs it? Truth is, I've gotten soft in my old age. Too used to instant gratification, relaxing and sleeping in. When it comes time to work out, it's far easier to just lift weights and do other things. Running's hard. It hurts. It's a war, not just against the treadmill or the road, but against yourself. Your own mind. How long can I go? Can I beat my prior time? I don't feel good today, I want to stop now. Please, let's stop. Don't be such a pussy, keep going you whiner, it'll be over soon!

Running wasn't always this way. This hard. As a child I ran all the time. We all did. We ran upstairs, we ran downstairs. We ran in our yards, playing Kick the Can, or Ghost in the Graveyard, or whiffle ball. We ran from our mothers wielding bare hands, wooden spoons, or belts (!) We ran down the street until we learned how to ride bikes, then we ran a little less. Running was freedom. The wind in our face, the rustle of sound in our ears, our shaking vision as our feet pounded the earth below us. We ran until we hit something or fell down. And then we laughed about it, got up, and ran some more.

Back in high school, I ran cross-country and track. I trained almost every day of the year and typically ran a minimum of three miles a day. Rain or shine, winter or spring, I'd hit the pavement or track, alone or with my teammates and we'd RUN. We didn't have iPods or shuffles or Zunes to keep us company back then. To make the time pass, we'd talk to each other along the way, push each other to finish what we started. Other times we'd take along our Sony Walkmans, those oversized hunks of plastic that played cassette tapes or FM radio, and we'd listen to them on headphones, the old fashioned kind with the foam ear pieces. Back then, running was second nature to me. If I didn't do it, I felt weird, like my body was congealing on me, growing fatter as I did my homework or watched the Dukes of Hazzard. I was in the best shape of my life.

My senior year, I was named co-captain of my spring track team. There were three of us. We had a big team, so the coaches chose one captain for the long distance runners (me), one for the sprinters, and one for the field athletes. I was quite honored, to say the least. It was the first time in my life that I'd been captain of anything. I was granted the honor based on a great winter track season I'd had, where I'd won a race, attended all the practices, and was awarded the "Unsung Hero" trophy at our team dinner, a marble and silver beauty that's currently buried in a wooden box somewhere in my closet, along with a third place plaque from a karate tournament when I was ten and various and sundry other achievement certificates, plaques, and pins.

My event was the 2800 meter race, a/k/a The Two-Mile. The 2800 was 10 times around a 400 meter track, the longest running event of them all. Because it was so long, it was also the last race of the day, and for both reasons, few people liked to run it. It wasn't easy staying sharp for hours while you waited for your race. When everyone else was done and ready to party, we were just pulling off our sweats and getting ready for our race. And because it was so long, the Two-Mile was not only boring as hell, it beat you down psychologically. It was not for the faint-hearted.

First, there was the starting line, where I'd stand, heart racing, waiting for the gun to go off, knowing that I had a long, hard two miles ahead of me. Then BANG! we'd be off, and instead of a dead sprint, like you'd see in the shorter races, we'd break into a fast jog, so as not to burn ourselves out too quickly. It was slow enough to give one hope, but fast enough to exhaust me by the halfway point, mile one, where the pace would really pick up. With any luck, I'd find myself in the middle of the pack, trying to figure out how much I had that day, trying to decide if I had enough cojones to burn a faster pace, or whether I needed to conserve until later. It wasn't an exact science. More than once I blew a tire trying to catch the leaders when I didn't have the stomach for it, and I'd end the race with bile tickling the back of my throat. I still have a picture my father took of me once after I'd just finished a race. My face is flushed, I'm sweaty as hell, my hair is sprouting around my face like palm tree fronds, and my hands are outstretched, pleading, as if to say "Please take this fucking picture now so I can fall over and pass out!" Other times I finished with far too much kick, and I'd be mad at myself for holding in too much instead of leaving it on the track. It was hard to get it exactly right.

Our running wasn't just limited to school sports. My friends and I entered local road races -- The Village Green Run, The Market Square Day Race, The Winner's Circle Race -- to stay sharp and be a part of the local running community. I remember one time, one of our "creative" cross country coaches had us run in the fucking water in Hampton Beach. "It's good resistance for your legs," he said. It didn't faze us then, but to think of it now, he must have been crazy. That water had to be 60 degrees, at best. Still, it was fun to be a part of a running community like that. We compared running shoes, commiserated over the best practice routes, and discussed the best gear to wear outside in the rain or during the winter time. We supported each other and got in great shape in the process. In fact, I'm proud to say that one time, when the wind was blowing just right, and I'd eaten my Wheaties that morning, I ran a 1600 meter, the equivalent of a mile, in just under 5 minutes: 4 minutes, 54 seconds, to be exact. It was my best time ever. I miss that camaraderie and the friendly competition that went with it.

Of course, like anything else in life, my brief running career was marred by a couple of unfortunate incidents, which I shall now recount. Before one cross-country race in Concord, NH (cross country is 3.1 miles through a marked course, usually over fields and through the woods), I was running extremely late for the team bus. In my rush to get dressed, I put my running shorts on inside out, so the elastic band on my shorts was holding high and tight on the outside, with all the extra nylon material flopping out from the inside. I looked like a European greaser stuffing a Speedo. I didn't notice though and I even ran the race that way. At the finish line, my teammate Dennis caught my faux pas right away and burst out laughing. He pointed to my crotch and said, loud enough for everyone to hear (including all the women on the team): "Did you run the RACE like that?? AHAHAHAHA!!!" What could I do? It was too late to change, so I sheepishly pulled my jogging pants over my increasingly uncomfortable Euro-shorts, clambered on the team bus, and found myself a dark corner in which to cringe.

Worse than this, however, was how I lost my track captainship, all for a woman and the prospect of sex. Sounds sordid, doesn't it?

Here's the backstory. I was a senior in high school and a few weeks from my graduation. Our track season was coming to an end; there was only one meet left. As a good and loyal co-captain, I'd attended every single practice and meet that year, including several that certain teammates of mine had blown off. My attendance record was spotless. The last meet of the year, however, posed a real problem for me. Due to some unfortunate scheduling months before, my high school had arranged for our senior prom to take place the Friday night before our final track meet. In order to make the bus the next morning, I would have had to get to my high school by 8:00 a.m. This was troubling, for several reasons. First, I was not then, and am not now, an early riser. Getting up early after a late night out has always been hard for me. Second, I didn't want to go to my senior prom with a track meet and an early rise the next morning hanging over my head. I didn't want to worry about running, competition, alarm clocks, or any of that horseshit. I'd studied my ass off for four years, run hard all year long, dedicated myself to school and sports, and by May 1986, I was over it. I felt like Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate: "It's MY time now!" Besides, what was one lousy track meet in the face of my senior prom, with all the awesome memories it portended?

Third, and most importantly, at the time I was still a virgin, and as one might imagine, like every red-blooded American male under the age of 18, I was eager to remove the Scarlet V from my chest at the earliest opportunity. So. Very. Eager. I was going to the prom with my girlfriend, a fellow member of my track team no less, and I'd convinced myself that on Saturday, the morning of the meet, I'd be lying somewhere comfortable, in bliss, with a very large smile plastered on my non-virgin face. Indeed, my friends and I had big plans for that night: first the prom of course, with the eating and the dancing, etc., followed by a limo with the all the lubricant wine coolers we could drink. The piece de resistance? The coital nail in my virgin coffin? A visit to The Tub Shop in Portsmouth, for some sweet late night lovin'. She'd have to be impressed by the Tub Shop. I did the math, weighed my options, and decided I wasn't going to half ass my senior prom for a track meet that didn't mean anything. We weren't making the play-offs or anything like that, regardless of how we performed at the meet, so what was the point?

Now, I wasn't just going to pretend I was sick and not show up like some of my teammates planned to do. To me, that would have been dishonorable. Instead, about a week before the prom, I went to one of my two coaches, the same guy who'd coached me for years in cross-country and track, explained my situation (I left out the part about wanting desperately to get laid), and told him that in light of everything, I didn't plan on making the last meet. What I expected him to say in response was something like "Listen, I obviously would prefer that you be there, but I understand that it's your senior prom and you only get one, so have a good time and don't worry about it. You made all the meets, so this one won't make a difference." What I got instead, to my utter shock, was: "You're a co-captain on this team and it doesn't matter if it's the last meet of the year. Your prom is the night before, there's no reason you can't make the meet the next day. We expect you to be there. You do what you have to do, and we'll do what we have to do."

That was it. I blew off the meet as promised, as did another co-captain. I went to my prom, got drunk, argued with my girlfriend, had a crappy, uneventful time at The Tub Shop, and never got laid. About a week after my prom, we were both informed by our coaches that we were being stripped of our captainships because we'd missed the last meet. I was surprised, because they hadn't threatened to do that when I went to them the week before. Had they done so, I probably would have dragged my ass to the team bus the next morning. Or maybe not, who knows? I'm sure they thought they were teaching us a "life lesson" about honor and responsibility, but these many years later, all I can say I learned was that they were a couple of self-righteous pricks who couldn't put things in perspective. They chose to emphasize one meaningless meet over all the other time we'd put in, even after we'd given them notice. Ironically, my slight was partially avenged a couple of years later when one of those same coaches was fired because he'd been fucking a (15 year-old) long distance runner on the girls' track team.

I guess coach did what he had to do, and the school superintendent did what he had to do.

In the end, was it a fair trade? I don't know. I didn't get the brass poonanny that night -- had to wait another four months for that -- but I made a choice for myself and stuck to it. I also thought that I acted honestly, but sometimes there are consequences regardless of how up front you are about your decisions and the reasons behind them. My only regret is that I didn't get laid on prom night.

So now... here I am at 40, jogging in my bathroom. Clearly, I've got the running bug again. Is it a passing fancy or is it something more? We shall see. I bought some new running shoes today, my first pair in 28 years, and I'm planning on making running a part of my life again. Not going to run any marathons or anything like that. I just want to run. I just want that feeling back.

Back In The Blogger's Seat

2009-03-26T01:05:00.007-04:00

Interesting the effect that jury duty and trying to replace lost billable hours will have on one's blog, should you in fact have a blog, as I do. I got two weeks "off" and to the powers that be, it looks like I took a two-week vacation but sitting in that courtroom for two weeks was far from it. Since my professional success and compensation are measured in large part by how many clients I have and how much I bill every year, being on jury duty has put a crimp -- no, let's call it a crAmp -- on my employment, the trickle down effect of which has also cramped my style when it comes to posting regularly.

So with that mea culpa out of the way and as I continue working on a longer piece that I hope to post this weekend, let me hit the reset button and throw a few random thoughts up in here.

I'm quickly realizing that I'm a much bigger Obama fan than I am a Democratic Party fan. He's only been in office two months, but I really like the way he's approaching things and the way he clearly explains his thinking and what he's trying to do. He's stuck between two poles: dealing with seriously P.O.'ed Americans whose pockets were, and are continuing to get picked by corporate greed; and recognizing that the only way out of this mess, is to allow more corporate pick-pocketing. The guy really can't win because he can't make everyone happy, but you wouldn't know it because he's as cool as they come. What sitting President does Leno? What sitting President laughs at these problems on 60 Minutes? As John McCain would say, "That one." I love it. His political enemies are so desperate to lower his approval rating that they've taken to criticizing small shit like his use of a teleprompter and the fact that he went on Leno. It's ridiculous. George Bush spent 40% of his Presidency on vacation; Obama's been in office two months and they're ripping him for doing a 20 minute spot on a late night talk show? Please. Is that all you've got?

He is the Black Ronald Reagan. Barring any kind of sex scandal or a crack-pot trying to take him out, he's a two-termer. He's just too smooth. Sure, he'll do something dumb out of hubris in the second term (the guy does like himself a little too much), but we'll get a good six years out of him or so.

As for the Democratic Party, what a bunch of pansy fuckups. They haven't played this stimulus bill out wisely. At all. With their inability to exercise discretion on the programs they're spending our money on and learn from the Republicans' mistakes, they should expect to be turned out in large numbers in 2010. I know it's early, but these fools don't seem to have learned anything from the Republicans' foibles the past six years. It's a bit like watching one of those grainy black and white movies where you see all these nutty people driving Model T's in the middle of a city with no traffic lights. Who the hell is in charge? Why do they think pork is acceptable at a time like this? Does anyone in Congress have a brain? Now I hear some of them are defecting on the spending package because they're up for re-election and don't want to be labeled as big spenders by their future opponents. Then you have dirty coal-state Democrats like Robert Byrd blocking Obama's efforts to improve our policies on global warming.

Let me tell you something that you should already know. There's no difference between the two political parties in this country when it comes to self-interest and perpetuating their own power. All they care about is getting re-elected, not doing well by this country. Obama would do well to chart his own course and show the Democratic Party the back side of his hand every once in awhile. He seems to be doing a bit more of that now, but I didn't like how he gave Pelosi et al. the steering wheel on the budget and this stimulus package. Not that The Party of NO! is any better. Top to bottom, they're pathetic and transparent. Jindal is a joke and Eric Cantor is the biggest douche-face I've seen since Tom Delay. The guy hasn't met a camera he didn't want to fellate and he sniffs out free publicity like Toucan Sam chasing Froot Loops.

So much to be done and so many ineptiks in power to perpetuate this mess.

Rarely have I appreciated my job more than right now. We all piss and moan about work and all the things wrong with our jobs and the people who make decisions about our fate, blah blah. But when the shit hits the Stop sign, I realize how dependent I am on my job for all my necessities, wants, pleasures, and the freedom that I enjoy. That's when I understand that my job is my lifeline. It's the fountain from which all happiness springs. You can't travel without a job to pay for it. You can't save for a car or a house or clothes or that lovely leather murse if you don't have a job to leverage your materialism. Of course, the merits of full employment are easily taken for granted when I'm mired in work and killing too many Saturdays in the office. But not right now. Now, I WANT to work more. Which makes me despise this recession even more. Damn you, Recession, for making me even more of a slave and happy about it! Damn you for binding me closer to the alienation of which Marx spake!

Whither the Kindle? Do I need a Kindle? No. I can get by reading a normal book in my hand and buying the occasional newspaper. Neither will stop me from getting one, however. Raise your hand if you don't know what the fuck a Kindle is. Luddites.

Whither the Watchmen Movie? I went out and bought the graphic novel to see what the fuss was all about. Also, Time magazine had picked it as one of the 100 best all-time books. I really enjoyed it. Some weird-ass superheros though. A guy who dresses like an owl? Another who calls himself The Comedian? Who came up with this? Dr. Manhattan, well that's a cool name, I like that. I'm not sure how I missed it when it came out in 1988, but the story works and has stood the test of time. Now the question is, do I ruin it all by seeing the movie, which purists have sworn off, or do I leave it alone? I don't know. Maybe I'll ask Kindle and see what he thinks.

Total number of Palestinians killed in the recent Gaza conflict: 1400, including 900 civilians. Total Israelis killed: 13. Hmmmm. Disproportionate, much? New York-based Human Rights Watch is calling the Israelis' indiscriminate use of white phosphorus in densely populated areas a war crime. Who am I to disagree? Hamas is being pegged for its war crime of deliberately shooting rockets at civilian targets in Israel, this which precipitated the Israeli invasion, according to Israel. Me, I think it was more Obama's election that precipitated the Israeli invasion. They had to get their last licks in and try and decapitate Hamas before Obama came in and took away W's blank check, so-far-up-Israel's-ass-that-his-head-came-out-in-Tel-Aviv policy. Why can't anyone in this country criticize Israel without being villified? How is it in our national interest to go along with everything Israel does? Aren't there as many Israelis as Americans out there who think their country's foreign policy sucks a lot of the time? There have to be.

Disturbing environmental factoid of the week: Scientists are discovering with increasing regularity traces of prescription drugs in our water supply. Our rivers in particular are loaded with it. Scientists are also finding that due to their constant exposure to the water, many fish and frogs are loaded with all kinds of pharmaceuticals: bipolar medication, anti-depressants, high cholesterol drugs, high blood pressure and allergy medication, among others. Doesn't that sound great? Now we can all take Paxil and Zoloft just by eating sushi. Cut out the middle-man, that's what I say!

Don't look now, but Mexico is exploding. It's the new Colombia. While we cavort around and engage in an ill-advised military adventure a world away, Americans are being killed right next door, in our very own neighborhood, and it's barely making headlines. Mexico's political system is hopelessly corrupt. Politicians and cops on the take, pay-offs galore, and cartels who have their own armies. I don't see any end to it either because the DEMAND for the drugs that these entrepreneurs are selling is VERY HIGH here in these UNITED STATES. Americans like their Mary Juana and Coke-hyena. Kill the demand, you kill the industry.

All this wasted money on a "drug war" that is rotting from the inside out, swallowing itself. Mark my words: Mexico is on the verge of a civil war. There is too much poverty and corruption for things to continue too much longer without blowing up in a big way. Then we'll see what REAL illegal immigration is like. Except instead of calling them "refugees" like we would if they came from Cuba, we'll deport them as quickly as possible.

This just in: Octomom once worked as a stripper. Perfect! Octomom, I've got just the guy for you. Have you met A-Rod? A-Rod, Octomom. This'll be perfect. A-Rod, you've got the $$$ to take care of Octomom and her 14 kids, and Octomom, you're just nutty enough to make A-Rod look stable. Two great tastes that go great together. Mazel Tov!

Jury Fury

2009-03-15T21:16:00.006-04:00

I haven't posted in awhile due in large part to my having been called for grand jury duty on March 6th. For the past week, instead of going to work, I've taken the subway down to the criminal courthouse on Jay Street in Brooklyn, and proceeded up the elevator to a nondescript courtroom where I've been performing my civic duty as an American citizen.

Most people run from jury duty. That's because it's inconvenient, disruptive to one's life, and often boring as hell. My service has been no exception. Many have asked why I wasn't able to get out of it since I'm an attorney and that's supposedly Jury Kryptonite. Um, no it's not. Time was, neither attorneys nor judges could serve on juries. That was a very long time ago, however. Now both can serve and in the State of New York, unless you've got a medical condition, are under 18, have committed a felony, don't understand English, or can demonstrate some major emergency or hardship under penalty of perjury, you HAVE to serve. So that's how I got here, jury service for 10 straight business days, from 10-5:30 or however late they decide they need us. And it could get extended beyond the 10 days (hopefully not).

I'm on a grand jury, which is not to be confused with a petit jury, the kind that decides who wins or loses trials. Grand juries decide whether or not to indict criminal defendants and the legal standard for doing so is very low: you only need to have legally sufficient evidence and reasonable cause to believe that a crime was committed. Contrast that with the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard for a criminal trial and you can see that an indictment requires far less than a conviction. Hence the old saying: "A grand jury could indict a ham sandwich." Grand jury proceedings typically involve only a few witnesses per case, sometimes as few as one. Typically, defendants do not appear because they can be cross-examined and anything they say can be used against them during a trial. So most of the time it's just the prosecutor calling his or her own witnesses and then us voting on whether to indict or not. It's been an interesting experience, to say the least, and I thought I'd share a few quick thoughts on it, now that I'm halfway through my 10-day service.

1. There's a real mix of people on my jury; about as diverse a group of people as you could ask for: 5 Whites; 3 Asians; 10 African-Americans; 2 Latinos; and even a Native American, believe it or not. These are the ones I can remember. 23 were originally picked but a couple seem to have dropped off the radar somewhere. And with that kind of diversity comes a wide variety of opinions on things, based on life experience. It's not a perfect system we have, but it's about the best we can do, in my opinion.

2. My attitude about grand jury service has evolved thusly: Oh fuck, is that a grand jury summons?? This intro video is borings as hells, should I slit my wrists now? Damn my ass hurts. I agree, Wonder Woman is a lousy superhero, totally. But if they're making a movie, I think she should be played by Katie Holmes. No, not Angelina Jolie, for fuck's sake. I'm sick of her. Okay, Megan Fox is a fair compromise. When are we gonna deliberate on some shit? Whoa, did that guy just say he was punched/robbed/stabbed/shot? Why is that dude in a wheelchair? Oh. That's why. Damn. Remind me never to look at anyone funny. Or get into a bar fight. Oh my God, I can't believe I'm hearing this. I'd kill that motherfucker if he ever did that to anyone I cared about. Sick son of a bitch. I'm ready to vote right now. Do I really live in this kind of world? I guess I do. It's even worse when you see it close up. This jury shit is serious business.

3. That scraggly dude on the subway, the one with the dreads and crazy eyes, the one who looks like a drug-dealing, gun-carrying freak? Well, there's a very good chance that guy is an undercover cop. It is unbelievable how authentic they look.

4. That said, the drug war is a monumental joke. Drug bust cases comprise the vast majority of the cases we've heard and the amount of manpower, money, time, and legal resources devoted to rolling this large stone up a mountain is incomprehensible. There has to be a better way to deal with this problem. I'm more convinced than ever that the problem is on the demand side, not the supply side.

5. I hate to say this, and maybe it's not much of a surprise, but more than a couple of my fellow jurors are not taking their job very seriously. One of them routinely snoozes through presentations; another prefers to play with his Nintendo handheld than listen to testimony; and two routinely don't bother to vote at all, purportedly because we have more than the requisite 12 votes to accomplish something. It's really pissing me off. Since the first day, when we were given our marching orders by the Warden and his clerk, we've been unsupervised and it shows. One of the jurors has taken to playing his iPod earbuds over the microphone to give us some music of his to listen to. That's when he's not busy pretending to be on trial and testifying on his own behalf. This all happens during breaks of course and sometimes it's fun to break up the monotony, but some people don't know where the off button is when it's time to be serious.

6. The sex crime cases I've heard are heartbreaking and will be in my head for the rest of my life.

7. It is VERY easy to find trouble, even when you're not looking for it. Sometimes trouble finds you. Most of the time, it's far better to defuse potentially-ugly situations than escalate them. No joke: in one case, someone ended up dead because someone called a girl a fat pig and her friends felt the need to confront the offender, rather than just leave it alone.

8. Good people who live in bad neighborhoods have it much harder than anyone gives them credit for. Like you and me, they're just minding their own business, trying to make a living and get through life. But for them, even the mundane -- going to work, visiting a friend, going out for some food or a drink -- involves risk. I've heard many of these people testify about how they were going about their daily business, engaging in an activity that I do every day of the week, when something bad happened to them: they got robbed or stabbed or shot. People say that in America we all have the same advantages, that anyone who works hard can make it. It's not remotely true. If you live in a certain place and you're surrounded by crime and human garbage, it doesn't matter how smart a person you are, how great your parents were, or how hard you work, you've got a much higher bar to reach in order to succeed.

9. A couple of my fellow jurors, both African-American, were surprised to hear that I was an attorney. They both had me pegged as a cop. Now THAT's funny. Second time I've heard that in a month. Maybe I missed my calling.

10. A stubborn few of those on my jury keep confusing the role of a grand jury with that of a petit jury. They're acting like we're voting on guilt or innocence, rather than the sufficiency of the evidence for the purpose of an indictment. It's beyond frustrating. They forget that the defendant is going to have a trial, even if we indict, where many of their irrelevant questions about the case will be answered. We're not hearing from every relevant witness and we're not seeing every relevant piece of evidence. We're only seeing and hearing what the prosecutor feels we must in order to indict someone for the alleged crime. There is a BIG difference, but it's lost on too many of my fellow jurors. Maybe that's because they're too busy sleeping or playing Nintendo to pay attention to what they're actually supposed to be doing.

11. The defendants who have chosen to testify in the hope of avoiding an indictment have been VERY convincing. Seriously, these guys should be in Hollywood, they're such good actors. They're practiced liars. The one thing they have in common: none of them have looked at the jury when testifying. All of them have given their "statements" while staring straight ahead or at the prosecutor. I suppose it's easier to lie when you don't have to look at someone in the eyes. I wasn't buying what they were selling but I'll tell you, several of my colleagues are eating their b.s. UP. It's eerie to me how some people are such good liars. But I guess when you're trying to stay out of jail, freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.

12. The Assistant District Attorneys are a competent, if comical bunch. Most of them seem fresh out of law school and appear to be feeling their way through things. It's not too hard; most of them are reading from scripts and outlines. There have been more than a few times when a defendant had the balls to come and testify where I've wanted to stand up and try and do their cross-examination for them. Still, most of them are good and you can tell they care about what they're doing. We've given a couple of them nicknames. One guy has a real young face, floppy hair, and goatee. The first time he came in, someone said "He looks like he skateboarded to work." So now we call him The Skateboarder. Another one wears a scarf over his suit, a dubious affectation to say the least. I call him "Scarf Guy." A young female ADA came in the other day with a mod haircut and strangely cut skirt that I found inappropriate for court but which showed off her rocking legs. She held my full attention and I now call her "Legs." Another one had her zipper down during her entire presentation, an unfortunate circumstance that a tactful juror felt the need to point out in front of everyone. "You'll never forget me now," she said. She's right.

13. The world we live in is violent, painful, and sad. Forget Al Qaeda, North Korea, and Iran. A major war is going on right under our nose. People are suffering and dying every single day. Right here.

14. Love it or hate it, jury service -- particularly grand jury service -- brings one closer to the nature of man and the disturbing passions that drive people to do despicable things. It's voyeuristic, educational, fascinating, and depressing all at once. Next time you get called, I wouldn't try so hard to avoid it, you'll learn a lot about your city, your country, humanity, and especially yourself. You may not like what you see.

FF - If Facebook Was Real

2009-03-05T14:02:00.006-05:00

If you're like me, then you've gotten yourself a little addicted to Facebook. There are days when I could take it or leave it, but all too often, especially lately, I can't let ten minutes pass without logging on. It's cybercrack. Why? Well, for one, it's gotten me back in touch with people I haven't seen in nearly 30 years. Old grade school friends. Friends from my old supermarket days. Even my Italian cousins have gotten in on the action. And that's just fun. It doesn't have to go anywhere and usually doesn't, but there's something nice about reestablishing contact with people I grew up with, who knew me way back when, or with family I don't see very often, but I can now easily stay in touch with (and see their hot friends so's I can maximize that next visit, hee hee).

Of course, there are a handful of people who've attempted to "Friend" me that I could live without seeing again. I barely knew them then and I sure as hell don't need to know them now. And that's where today's FF comes in. This video captures what happens when Facebook fantasy meets real world reality.

Scary, isn't it? Some people are better kept at a safe electronic distance, wouldn't you agree? I should mention that this video was sent to me by a Facebook friend from my college days. Footnote to you, Maureen.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

The Winter of Our Discontent

2009-03-04T01:49:00.003-05:00

Sorry for that little delay. I got back from Vegas a couple of days ago and am just now getting back to normal. Since the cliched rule of Vegas is you don't talk about what happens there, I'll have to focus on other things. I'll only say that it was a bit quieter there in terms of population than I've experienced in the past. That Las Vegas has been hit pretty hard by the recession is no surprise given that most people prefer to spend their money on rent and food than gamble it away at the blackjack table. We stayed at the Bellagio, and it was far from empty, but I can't say that it was as filled and boisterous as I've seen in the past. Many tables were empty and it easy to get around.

A quiet Vegas, however, is symbolic of how bad things have gotten in this country, as the U.S. economy limps along like a wounded coyote on a parched desert road. Two days ago, the Dow traipsed below 7000 for the first time since 1997. How far it's fallen. People are walking around scared and a bit shellshocked. Everyone's nervous. We all want to know where the bottom is. How bad this is going to get. The ranks at my law firm have quietly thinned. For many of the survivors, salaries have been frozen and cut. It's the same or worse at other firms. And you know it's bad when lawyers, the plankton of the economy, are disappearing like deer during hunting season. Last month 2000 lawyers were laid off. And today, I heard one firm alone is going to cut 300 by itself.

Now, I know no one feels bad for lawyers, but I only bring this up because I am one and for me, it's personal and raises a larger issue about the negative mass psychology driving everything right now. If you believe as I do that to a large extent our thoughts and beliefs drive our reality -- literally -- then we are in a world of doo-doo and it's not going to end any time soon. In the late 90s, when the market was going gangbusters and everyone was talking about a "New Economy" like we were entering a new age, with fresh opportunities to generate huge wealth not seen since the mid-1800s, the mass mentality was, in Alan Greenspan's words, one of "irrational exuberance." People were happy because everyone was making money. All you needed to do was invest in something other than pork bellies and chances are you were going to earn a profit in a short amount of time. The Dow broke 10,000; NASDAQ broke 5,000. Retirees and pseudo-retirees were investing in tech stocks, sometimes at the urging of pushy brokers, but often, more often in my book, at the urging of their friends, family, and their own egos. Ten percent returns? Why am I ONLY getting 10% when my neighbor, brother, rabbi, nephew, son-in-law, and shoe-shine guy are getting 20 or 30%? Put it all in AOL and ENRON! NOW MOTHERFUCKER!

It was insane. It was momentum investing. It was ignorance. And when the bubble burst in March 2000 people were genuinely surprised that the good times were over. Actually, people didn't become fully aware that the good times were over until late 2000 to early 2001, and by then it was too late to get out. It was as if no one saw it coming. Because no one did. Well, a few people did. But no one listened to them, because an irrational, optimistic psychology was driving everything. A mass psychology. Back then it was the opposite of now: everyone was bullish, everyone thought things would just keep going up and up and they'd get out at the right time. People were chasing the rabbit and the rabbit was fast. And when the party ended, as all bull markets do, the fall was a long one.

It's interesting to look back and consider that time because now, after the bursting of yet another bubble -- the housing market -- it seems as if the collective psychology has swung waaaaaay over, to the opposite pole. Now, instead of irrational exuberance, it seems that everyone is suffering from irrational pessimism. The negativity floating around is palpable. To be sure, it's hard not to feel pessimistic when friends and family are getting laid off and jobs are disappearing faster than an African lake. The market is tanking on a daily basis and nobody knows where the bottom is. You turn on the television and it's fear, fear, fear 24/7. The media is doing what the media does. When the times are good, it pushes people to throw their money at the stock market or into real estate investing. And now that the economy's in the shitter, all you see on television is this self-righteous analysis of what capitalist, overextended pigs Americans were for so long and how it's good that we're all forced to save now. As if the media -- magazines, newspapers, and television -- weren't pushing materialism on us like a bunch of heroin dealers for the past 30 years. Now all they have is special reports about saving pennies, clipping coupons and surviving on Ramen Noodles and Spam. Yes, Spam is back. Finally.

That's when they're not trying to scare the piss out of us. As maniacally loud as the Jim Cramers of the world were back in 1999, urging people to invest and ride the wave, now it's a funeral dirge, all wailing and gnashing of teeth. The media would have us believe that The Economy is this living, breathing manic-depressive, up one day, down the next, and we're all fucked if it goes down, the world will end. It's absurd. People are freaking out and it's all because a bunch of politicians and economists have told us, repeat after me, This is the WORST economy since the GREAT DEPRESSION.

HOLY POOP ON A STICK, BATMAN! GET THE BUNKER READY BILLY BOB, IT'S THE END TIMES!

Time Magazine's cover this week shows a hand gripping a thick rope that's frayed and about to snap. The title? "Holding on for Dear Life." That about covers it. Hmmmm, do you think maybe that the corporate beast, weakened though he is, is trying to PROFIT off of this fear by building it up? Do you think that maybe there's something in that big fucking stimulus bill that's benefiting someone? This is America. Even when times are shitty, you can bet that there's some asshole who's profiting off of it. Ask Halliburton. Ask Blackwater. Ask all those Bush cronies who revolved in and out of positions of regulatory power and are now back heading the corporate boards and lobby firms of companies they once regulated. Wait, let me put that word in quotes: "Regulated." There.

I say, fear not, oh Blog Reader. For though yea, this is the winter of our discontent, verily, things are not as bad as they seem. They can't be. For all the people who have been laid off, there are millions more who are still working. For all those whose homes are being foreclosed on, there are far more people who still have their homes and are in no danger of losing them. This isn't to discount people's suffering, because many people are suffering. This is a bad recession, to be sure. My only point is, the sky is not falling. The world is not ending. So let's all get a grip, shall we? Just as it was easy to get caught up in the insanity of a climbing economy built on mirrors, balsa wood and paper clips, it's even easier to look around now, see the shitstorm smacking at the windows, and feel afraid.

But that self-fulling prophecy isn't going to help anyone, not me, not you. The worse we think things are, the worse they'll get. And right now, everyone's funereal mood is contributing to the problem. We need to remember that the market was due for a correction. It was only a matter of time before things went the other way and a bunch of greedy motherfuckers screwed things up for everyone. That's capitalism. That's the risk we take when we decide we don't want a communist economy where a bunch of government bureaucrats dictate who buys and sells what and at what price. If communism's downside is lack of innovation and motivation, then capitalism's downside is human greed. Regulatory oversight is supposed to prevent what's happening now, but it didn't work this time. Too many important people were making too much money to put the brakes on. No one wanted to be the bad guy and turn on the lights.

Mark my words: the economy is going to turn around within the next year or two. You'll see. I'll even go out on a limb and say the market will jump 1000 points the first day that Obama unveils a coherent plan on how to handle those troubled bank assets that are preventing banks from lending money right now. I'll go out on another limb and say that the smart people are investing right now. Buying stocks at bargain basement prices. The smart people are long term investors and they are not selling into a diving market. They are not panicking.

Not an easy task, keeping a cool head in this, the winter of our discontent. But someone's gotta do it because the alternative is far, far worse.

Tweener

2009-02-21T11:03:00.002-05:00

You'd think that by age 40, I'd have my romantic shit sorted out. That I'd be able to tell the difference between a mirage and reality, that I'd know when it's time to get off the single train and hitch on to one that carries two, that I'd understand what I'm doing. But I don't. I have ideas, sure. I have instincts telling me to do one thing over another, to go in a certain direction. The problem is, I've stopped trusting my instincts because they've led to questionable decisions in the past, decisions I'd rather not repeat, because, well, I'm 40 not 25, and I don't have the time, or frankly, the energy to waste anymore.

I used to be someone who jumped into relationships. All it really took was someone I was attracted to, who, for some inexplicable reason, was attracted to me. Not just on a physical level. It could be a sense of humor or something in the way she conveyed herself, but what I'm saying is all I really needed to jump into a relationship was some form of chemistry. Something that hit me when I was around her. Or, let's face it, the prospect of new and frequent sex. And then in I'd go, like a moth to a flame. And without fail, a few months or years later, there I'd be, Hamlet holding a skull in front of his face. "To be or not to be. To stay or not to stay. To go or not to go. That is the question." For as sure as the sun doth rise, the thoughtless and carefree way I'd entered into the relationship would blow back in my face like a Bush foreign policy. It was only a matter of time. Before long, I'd realize that one thing or the other wasn't working as well as I'd hoped, that the egg was missing its yolk, that the relationship had no soul. What started out as fun, a lark, an adventure, hadn't remained so. There I was alone when I wasn't alone. Torn and angst-ridden about what to do. Wondering how it all had come to pass. Had I been attracted by the wrong things? Had she? What was it? And why had it happened that way? Why hadn't she or I said "No" after date number 3 or 4 when it would have been so easy, all those months or years ago?

Not to say that my relationships have been a waste of time. Quite the opposite. Maybe it sounds like that's what I'm saying, but I'm not at all. Regardless of how long or short my relationships have been, I truly cared for, and learned from, the women with whom I've been involved. I guess what I'm saying is that more often than not, I've kept re-learning the same lesson. Over and over again. Instead of progressing and evolving as a person, I kept making the same mistakes with very similar people, based on the original sin of my decision to enter into a relationship.

I have a theory, one that I've culled from years of experience and conversations with friends, married and single, women and men. It goes like this. Quite often, too often, what we're most attracted to is dictated by the most dysfunctional part of ourselves, the part we keep in a dark room behind a locked door. And, like it or not, it goes back to our childhood and what we became used to as children. Maybe a parent was completely absent, as a result of a divorce, a simple disappearing act, or perhaps an untimely death. Maybe one's mother or father favored a sibling, or you just remember it that way because you were an out-of-control freak of a child who required loads of attention. Or maybe your parents tore each other a new one every night over dinner, trading barbs and criticisms and you're this and you're that, but no... rather than divorce, they decided to stay miserable together and make you miserable in the process. So you became used to fighting and conflict in relationships and now, as an adult, you're perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop. No one can make you happy because you don't even know what the hell happiness looks like. And if it taps you on the shoulder, you don't trust it very much. Or maybe your parents or peers in school made you feel so worthless or unattractive that deep down you don't believe anyone could truly want you. So you either don't date at all, or you date and then sabotage whatever you find with distinctly counterproductive behavior.

There are hundreds of examples. People typically sum all of this up in one word: Baggage. And the funny part is, the people who usually use that word, baggage, are the ones who think they have none. They say "I don't want any baggage in my relationships." "Leave your baggage at the door, pal." "She had so much baggage, I couldn't deal with her." I don't like the word baggage because to me, it's a negative word that always connotes having to lift something heavy and undesirable. To me, baggage is another word for the human condition. Few of us had perfect parents or childhoods. Fewer of us have tried to sort this shit out and become more self-aware and self-actualized before we finally commit to someone. But so MANY people think they have great relationships and they have no baggage at all. That is, until something happens, seemingly out of the blue, an affair, a loss of a job, a mid-life crisis, the death of a loved one. Then it's a watershed and all those repressed emotions and baggage come to the fore. I, for one, think everyone carries something around, even those seemingly perfect people you see who think they have it all, know it all. Most of those people, in my humble opinion, think they have no emotional issues because they're not self-aware or honest enough with themselves to admit that this is the case. Maybe it doesn't affect them on the surface, maybe it does. But the fact that no one is happy 100% of the time in this world, that people are continually impacted and upset by life and circumstances and react accordingly, says something. Just because you're moving up the professional ladder and have achieved success or seem to have a great marriage doesn't mean you don't have something churning under the surface, a sleeping dragon you don't want to wake up. Look at Eliot Spitzer. Look at Bill Clinton. Look at your attractive, happy neighbors. Look at your siblings, your cousins. Unless you're living an exceedingly charmed life, it's impossible to live in this very imperfect world without being pockmarked by a few asteroids. Life is a school and those asteroids are your teachers. To me, it's not a question of whether some people have baggage and others do not. It's a question of whether two people are willing to help each other lift the other's bags, or whether those bags are just too fucking heavy or the wrong color.

Then again, it's possible to overthink things, isn't it? Blink certainly suggests that's the case. Sometimes the instant feeling is the correct one. The tough part is distinguishing between that feeling and the one that's dictated by your bagg--, I mean human condition. Why does that girl make my heart race? Why doesn't the other one? And is heart racing the true yardstick of love and future happiness, or should we be looking for something else? If so, what? I used to pursue the former. As I've gotten older and a bit more wise, it seems to me that most successful relationships are more about friendship, communication, sharing, and being on the same page in life. They're about finding someone who has your back, someone who's uncalculating, who loves you for you, and who isn't going to run off as soon as a prettier and more successful butterfly comes along. But why are we still drawn to the butterflies and the head-over-heels and the zing? Why do we still demand it? Is it from societal conditioning? From Hollywood and Cosmo? Is it innate, a hand-me-down from our Cro-Magnon ancestors? Who knows? From what I can see, that want doesn't ever leave, and people seem to expect it even after years of being with someone. Maybe not from the person they're with, but when they get it from other people, people who are not in the relationship and therefore have nothing to lose, it can be a powerful draw.

What's my point? I have no idea. I think it's in there somewhere.

M'am, How About A Free Travel Voucher?

2009-02-16T10:57:00.004-05:00

Are you like me? Have you ever missed a flight? Maybe you got to the airport a few minutes too late, ran into a logjam in the security line, or went to the wrong gate? I'll bet you were pissed, at least for a little while. But I'll bet you never reacted like this:

Sheesh. Mom, I'd like you to meet Imelda. Imelda, Mom. (Ma, Meldie gets a little emotional sometimes, so don't make any sudden moves.)

25 Random Things

2009-02-16T09:43:00.008-05:00

Alright, alright, I’ve resisted this Facebook virus, this “25 Random Things” long enough. It’s been sweeping the land, sucking in everyone in its path, like a malevolent black hole. And now you won’t leave me alone! You can't get enough of me, you just HAVE to know more about what makes me tick, what I care about, the things I deem important in life. What better way to do that than by discovering 25 random things about me? So fine, OKAY! I’ll tell you 25 random things about myself. Relaaax. But let’s be very clear here, I’m only doing this to make YOU happy. This is not for me. I'm not such a loser that I need this kind of attention. I don’t require a self-indulgent exercise like this to gratify my own ego by going on and on about myself. I don’t need it, seriously. This is an act of altruism on my part; it’s not for me, it’s for you. So HERE!

1. I detest unoriginality. Like the idea of this list and the thousands of copy-cats that will follow, which I will most likely ignore.

2. I often contradict myself.

3. I’m a sarcastic prick a lot of the time. I wish I could stop, but I enjoy it too much. Actually, if I’m being honest, I don’t want to stop at all. And I really don’t care if it’s a defense mechanism or something I’d be better off without. As Vincent Hanna said in the movie Heat while discussing his angst: “I keep my sarcasm here. I preserve it because I need it. It keeps me sharp, on the edge, where I gotta be."

4. As previously accounted on this blog, during my long, 40-year career, I have owned many hairstyles. Here are a few, correlated by age:

Newborn (The Alfalfa). No ridicule allowed, as I had no choice in the matter.

Pre-pubescent, ages 6-13 (The Moe a/k/a The Bowl a/k/a The Dorothy Hamill). These were really bad years, a true, follicular nadir for me. I can't look at a picture of myself during this epoch without cringing.

High school (Spiked Mousse with occasional rat tail accompaniment). I used more product in my hair during the 80s than Vanilla Ice.

College (Confused Potpourri). I went from Spiked Mousse to military cut to mullet to preppy cut parted on the side to long on top, short in the back to God-knows-what. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing in college. And it showed.

Post-graduate, 20s (The Wedge and yes, for a time there was The
Ponytail (sigh)) These were my best hair years, when I had so much to work with and operated under the foolish delusion that it would last forever. How wrong I was.

30s to present (The Short and Blunt). Kind of like me. Basically, I’m working whatever I’ve got left for as long as it lasts.

5. I own close to 2000 comic books, mostly Spiderman and Avengers, and have lived with them in four small New York City apartments. I keep them in a closet, sealed in plastic bags with white, acid-free posterboard backings and stacked in long comic book boxes. Cuz I’m a Virgo. I began my collection at the age of 8, when my cousin Paul agreed to give me 20 Invaders if I’d sing “The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace. Then again, it may have been “The Night The Lights Went Out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence. I remember the word “Night” was in there. I didn’t know the words, but I knew a deal when I saw one. Still do. Now I have a bunch of comic books and Paul doesn’t have any. See what a little humiliation can get you? I’m not above that.

6. I have more female friends than male friends, and I prefer it that way. Some exes don’t. Or didn’t.

7. When I was young, I trusted people too much. Now I trust them too little.

8. My first car, handed down to me by my father, was a powder blue, AMC Gremlin. It had a black racing stripe down the side, as if that accoutrement could solve its image problem. No power steering either, so it took me a half an hour just to make a right or left turn. It had six cylinders though, so it could fly. But the best part of the Ol’ Gremlin was that whenever I went parkin’ down by Hampton Beach with some lucky lass, everyone in southeastern New Hampshire KNEW who was in that car. You can’t buy that kind of publicity.

9. Four things I believe in that you probably don’t: reincarnation, a sixth sense, universal consciousness, and UFOs.

10. Four things you probably believe in that I don’t: organized religion, hell (other than the place we’re in now), terrorists are lunatics who hate us for our freedom, and the importance of patriotism.

11. If I had any balls, I’d quit my job, apply to MFA school, and devote myself to writing full-time. But I left my balls in a posh office on Broad Street, where a fat Sullivan & Cromwell partner made me a lucrative offer to join the firm as an Associate in 1995. It's been a downhill compromise ever since.

I miss my balls sometimes.

12. I’ve often thought that I’m too attached to New York City for my own good.

13. I have little patience with the following people: those who push their way on to the subway before I get off; “true believers,” be they atheists or fundamentalists of any religious stripe who think they know it all; those with martyr/victim complexes; the highly attractive, who act as if fortuitous genetics absolves them of the need to have a personality, compassion for others, and/or a brain in their head; and the unfailingly stinky.

14. On a related note, repeated use of a bad-smelling perfume can turn me off for good.

15. Habits I have that do not make me gay: a regular shiatsu, manicures, pedicures, wearing cologne, a clutter-free apartment, and carrying a murse a/k/a male purse a/k/a man bag. Gentlemen, before you mock me on the pedicures, which an ex introduced me to a few years ago, take a reeeeeal good look at your Flintstone feet and lawnmower toenails and get back to me. And yes, I hate the word “metrosexual.”

16. You couldn’t pay me enough to shave all the hair off my body, for I have no desire to look like one of those Davidoff Cool Water models. However, a tidy manscape now and then is certainly reasonable. Wait, was that too much information? It’s a fine line, this silly list.

17. I am not a morning person and never have been. If you talk to me before 10:00 a.m., you likely will be met with a growl in response. In high school, when I was forced to catch the bus at 7 a.m., I’d sleep until 6:30, shower, dress, and brush my teeth, and run to meet the bus at 6:57. In the wintertime, my still-wet hair would freeze on my head, forming tiny hair icicles that I’d crunch with my fingers once I got on the bus. Now that I’m an adult, I get up when I want. On Christmas morning, I’m always the last one out of bed. My family always bitches, and my nephew and nieces literally have to jump on my bed to get me up. What they all don’t realize is that I’m doing it for THEM, not me. Don’t fuck with Mr. Zero.

18. Ladies, I’m really glad you can’t read minds.

19. I love my nephew and nieces like they were my own kids. My nephew, who’s seven, often wears the same world-on-his-shoulders look on his face that I carried around at his age. This concerns me. So when we were on our Christmas cruise this past December, I told him that if there’s ever anything he wants to talk about, anything that’s bothering him, he should feel free to come to me and talk about it. He looked at me for a moment, then he said “Uncle Tim, what does ‘gay’ mean? I know it means ‘happy,’ but what else does it mean?” Shocked and chastened, I promptly referred him to his father. Henceforth, I will look both ways before diving into deep water without my floaties.

20. I’m afraid of snakes, bedbugs, ocean water that’s over my head, tight spaces, and death. Uh, to name a few things.

21. I think the use of antibacterial soap will end up exterminating the human race. If global warming and nuclear war don’t get us first. The future version of me isn’t too pleased about any of these possibilities. Or the asteroid.

22. I don’t take medicine – not aspirin, not Sudafed, and especially not flu shots – unless it’s absolutely necessary. But I do believe in napkining bathroom door handles and washing my hands (with regular soap, not the antibacterial shit) after holding a subway pole. I don’t get sick any more than anyone else. In fact, I’d say it’s less.

23. When I was a kid, I played with guns all the time. All the time. I revered cop shows like Starsky & Hutch, S.W.A.T., Baretta, and the M.O.D. Squad, and for some reason, my parents had no qualms about letting me play with plastic pistols, M-16s, or any other toy firearm I could cajole them to buy for me. I played Army in the backyard, crawling on the ground in my plastic green helmet and M-16, ready to shoot at anything that moved. My friend Anne and I used to pretend we were Starsky & Hutch, and we’d ride around the neighborhood on our Big Wheels spying on neighbors and fighting imaginary crime. Then we’d shake down our sisters, who alternated as Huggy Bear. One would think that with this kind of background, I’d be a gun fanatic at this point, subscribing to Soldier of Fortune magazine and going hunting with Dick Cheney. But it’s quite the opposite. I’ve never held a real gun in my hand and have no desire to. I’d never even THINK of having a gun in my house, even unloaded. And the thought of shooting a gun or rifle at a living thing -- person or animal – makes me nauseous. In other words, unless it’s self-defense, I can’t get behind guns. So parents, the moral of this story is, don’t be afraid to let your kids play with guns. They won’t end up more violent than anyone else. Unless, of course, you're raising a little Jeffrey or Jane Dahmer. Then you're on your own.

24. Three books that have impacted my life: Siddhartha, The Disappearance of the Universe, and A Course in Miracles.

25. I have taken the Lord’s name in vain and coveted my neighbor’s wife more times than I care to count. On the upside, I honor my mother and father, and so far, I’m doing pretty well on not stealing or killing anyone.

The Warren Harding Effect

2009-02-13T00:08:00.020-05:00

Ohhhh, Valentine's Day is upon us once again! I love it all. The pomp! The circumstance! The frolicking! This year, V-day falls on a Saturday, preceded oh-so-appropriately by Friday the 13th. If you've been reading this blog the past couple of years, you know that Valentine's Day is one of my favorite days of the year. And most likely, you also know that I've been high on Valentine's Day even though I've been single and alone in the nearly three years I've been doing this.

Well, I have news for you: I won't be alone this year. I only mention this on Friday the 13th because I am superstitious as hell and really enjoy sabotaging myself. I'll write more about that subject another time. Today, what I want to talk about is the Warren Harding Effect. What is the Warren Harding Effect, you ask? I'm about to tell you. I didn't know about it myself until I read the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, which I highly recommend if you're into learning about how the mind works and why our snap judgments can be incredibly accurate or mislead us into folly. There's a chapter in the book that's devoted to how we, all of us, give the benefit of the doubt to physically attractive people, which makes us overlook some obvious character flaws. When someone is really good looking or charming, we get blinded. It's primitive and visceral and hard to avoid. Ladies, I'm talking about Mr. Hardbody. Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome. The Charmer. The guy with a wink in his eye, even when he's not winking. The smell good man. The dude with the perfect hair and day old stubble who makes panties drop just by walking down the street. That guy. Gentlemen, I'm talking about Ms. Hotstuff, the minx who looks so smoking hot that you feel like crying when you see her because you're never going to get close enough to do her laundry. The girl with the sculpted glutes, the tight hamstrings, the floating boobs, the flawless skin, the combination of which would lead you to commit a felony just to spend 10 minutes alone with her. The girl who doesn't even SEE you, because she's wearing heels and her eyes never wander below her chin. That girl.

When we see Mr. Hardbody and Ms. Hotstuff -- or, more typically, people who are a few rungs below them on the hottie ladder -- we are hypnotized and it affects our judgment. For all you "deep" people out there who claim to be above this, please review your history and tell me that you never got jelly-legged over someone you were attracted to. It happens all the time; it's natural. We see things that aren't there. We fixate on that sexy smile, the one that's seemingly focused on us and only us. We fill in the personality gaps ourselves. We assume they have a sharp sense of humor, wit, intelligence, and compassion for others. They are the ideal and if we could capture them, attract them somehow, we too would be elevated to bask in their carnal powerwattage. We are more compelling, interesting, and attractive just by our association with these glittering jewels.

Of course, it's all a delusion. We're blinded by beauty. For, sometimes -- not all the time of course, but a lot of the time -- these people are not what we think they are. They're just people, genetically gifted, yes, but just people. People with flaws, sometimes serious ones. So why do we attribute great things to them before we even know them?

It's the Warren Harding Effect.

In Blink, Gladwell discusses Warren Harding, our 29th President. Harding is commonly regarded as one of the worst, if not THE worst President in U.S. history, though Bush is going to give him a run for his money one day. He was completely incompetent. So how in the world does a man like that ever become President? (Okay, silly question.) Gladwell provides an answer. He may not look like much to you, nor to me, but in his day, Warren Harding was considered a very handsome man. That old coot you're looking at was yesterday's equivalent of Mitt Romney: charming and attractive. No scratches on the surface. He LOOKED Presidential, it's as simple as that. And no joke, women who'd just earned the right to vote through the 19th Amendment to the Constitution (which Harding supported), thought he was dreamy. Which is ironic, since by many historical accounts, Harding was a poon-hound who had several extramarital affairs.

Much like today, partisan politics predominated back then, and it was party bosses, not voters, who decided Presidential nominations. When the Republican Party -- apropos, yes? -- was looking for someone to nominate, most of the other candidates had too many enemies or were deemed unsuitable for one reason or another. Enter U.S. Senator (R-OH) Warren Harding. Harding looked the part and he was so dim, he'd never pissed anyone off with a loud opinion. The Republicans met in one of those smoke-filled rooms and chose him as a compromise nominee for the 1920 Presidential election. He won in a landslide, the largest in history, served two years, and died of a heart attack in 1923. During those two years, corruption in his administration was rampant. His Secretary of the Interior accepted bribes and illegal loans and ended up in jail. Another cabinet member was convicted of accepting bribes; another skimmed profits and accepted kickbacks from the Veterans Bureau, and directed underground alcohol and drug distribution. He too, went to jail. Two aides of the aforementioned helped them destroy evidence and then promptly committed suicide. All in just two years.

And you thought Bush was bad?

The moral of the Warren Harding Effect is an old one: Beauty is skin deep and we're often blinded by it to our detriment. So, on this Valentine's Day 2009, let us make a pact to FIGHT the Warren Harding Effect. Let's agree not to be blinded by beauty, charm, and a tight ass. Let's look a little deeper. For I see a correlation between the Warren Harding Effect, absurdly unrealistic expectations among today's dating masses, and the loneliness that many people feel on this singular day of romantic love. So, please, for the love of Warren Harding, stop undressing Mr. Hardbody and Ms. Hotstuff with your eyes! Stop picturing them naked! Stop fantasizing about them in the shower! Instead, draw your gaze past these two self-absorbed airheads and take a long, meaningful gander at Mr. Troll and Ms. Witchwart. No, a little lower. Down there. Yes, that's it. And the other normal people standing in Hardbody's and Hotstuff's aura, look at them. Sure, maybe they're not what you thought you were looking for. But that's a GOOD thing, trust me. The genetic medians, most of us, need love too. And maybe you'll be surprised. Maybe, just MAYBE, they'll have what you need because they're far more equipped emotionally than Mr. Hardbody and Ms. Hotstuff to provide it. Or maybe, if you're more open-minded, you'll get lucky and meet someone you're very attracted to, who has all those important qualities that the diamond couple is sorely lacking. Can life get that good? Yes.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!