As you were!

Not too long ago, Holly and I were talking about some demerit our house had just earned. Maybe Libby was pathetically pressing her face to the glass of the back door, as she does every other day or so, longing to play in the backyard that isn’t back there. Maybe it was dinner time, and all of the neighborhood restaurants were still refusing to deliver to our block. Maybe we were discussing when we were going to pick up our Fedex packages from my parents’ house, since the last two times we’d had things sent to our own house someone had just blatantly walked up in broad daylight and strolled off down the street with them under his arm. Whatever it was, it was a conversation we had had enough times that I just wasn’t in the mood, and instead of shrugging it off I piped up with, “Oh, you know what? Let’s just pack it up and hit the rails.”

Much to my surprise, Holly was listening to me. Moreover, it seems clear that we were waiting for Jim to say these words for some time; the conversation was exactly two weeks ago, and our house is on the market as we speak. Sign out front and everything. Most people need more time than this to burn a house down.

Of course, now there has to be a new house. The hunt is in full swing, and both Holly and I are having a good time and trying to be open-minded. Lots of former dealbreakers are now negotiable. Really nothing is off the table. Everybody’s being flexible.

In theory. I’m having kind of a problem with one aspect of this commitment to open-mindedness.

Here’s the thing: one of my favorite things about our existing house is that it’s centrally located, near everything I like to do and everyone I like to see. That’s great and everything, but lately I’ve been thinking: what difference does that make if I never see anyone and never go anywhere? Who cares if I live here, or in the burbs, or in Yemen? If they have wifi, the way I “hang out” with people 85% of the time will be unchanged.

I am not happy about that, but it is what it is.

So Holly’s suggested houses that, last time, I would have rejected out of hand with nothing more than a glance at the map, but I’m trying not to do that this time because I am an awesome, reasonable grown-up of a man. I have house-hunted in neighborhoods with man-made lakes, neighborhoods with directions like “make a left at the strip mall, and then a right at the other strip mall. If you hit the third strip mall, you’ve gone too far.” The houses themselves, I could live in, but I look at these neighborhoods and cannot hold my mind open with both hands. I just hate the burbs so f***ing much. I am actively trying not to, but it’s uncontrollable. I have lived within walking distance of a grocery store and two movie theaters, and now I am ruined forever. I’m in the breakfast nook on one of these house tours, and I keep picturing my neighbors mowing their lawns in Dockers, and I feel like the whole thing ends with my daughter voting libertarian and making her first non-white friend in college, and I just want to throw myself out the damn bay window and run until I get to a street where someone tries to panhandle me.

But then I also have a voice in my head saying that this resistance is all a stupid, petulant waste of time and money. That to even think something like “am I selling out?” makes you the emotional equivalent of a fifteen year old. Just shut up and move somewhere where you get an office and can hear the TV over the traffic.

It’s a big decision, and it’s really bothering me. I would dearly love to get some perspective, and if you could offer it, that would be outstanding.

See? Still alive.

In general, I think taking topic requests might be a great way to keep writing and often think about opening the Request Line over at iFanboy.com but don’t, because I am ****ing terrified by what sort of requests I would actually get.

Anyway.

Searching my site this evening, I was stunned and appalled to see that the original Reagan post did not survive the transition from SnipSnap to Wordpress. And so, dear reader, I reproduce it for you now, with the understanding that I will very soon– I promise– do more than just copy and paste old entries I know you didn’t read.

—–

Since you asked:

I voted for Ronald Reagan twice, both times proudly and enthusiastically. During the 1980 race, I even went so far as to join his campaign, fashioning and coloring an elephant of construction paper (what an elephant had to do with strong defense and tax cuts, I still do not entirely know; I think that in 1980 I decided that the kindly old man behind the podium on television looked wrinkly and large, and that that must be the idea) and attaching it to a straw to make it into a crude picket sign. My zeal before the polls closed had very little impact, then as now; in the Sacred Heart kindergarten election, Jimmy Carter crushed my guy in a landslide. (Then as now, it was obvious that the electorate had no idea what they were voting on. Didn’t they see how boring Jimmy Carter was? Weren’t donkeys obviously lamer than elephants to anybody who gave it even a moment’s thought? Didn’t their dads ever make them turn off cartoons to watch the stupid, boring news?) Had the fate of the free world rested in the tiny hands of Sacred Heart, today page 14 of the newspaper would be mourning a genial old actor and union leader who died “after a long illness,” and I’d be saying, “Why do I know that name…?”

Fortunately, the right to a vote that actually counts has only been extended to people who are emotionally kindergarteners, so we got eight years with America’s grandfather. I remember liking President Reagan unreservedly; I would even go so far as to say that disliking him never occurred to me as an available option. Last summer, when I was surer than ever that the current president was going to bring about my speedy personal death, I went on a maniacal Reagan binge at the library in an effort to convince myself that the simple, prosperous times I remembered from childhood were actually just as complex and fraught with peril. (We didn’t start the fire; it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.) What I learned, other than the fact that it turns out I had no idea what was going on around me in the 1980s unless Optimus Prime was involved, is that there was indeed an option to dislike Ronald Reagan and people exercised it with such vigor that you could almost see little bubbles of spit froth forming in the corners of their mouths. Everyone everywhere loved him except for people who really, really hated him a lot.

At the time, though, I never ran into these people. (The only one I remember is John Cougar Mellencamp, on the 80s retrospective “Decade” that MTV ran in December 1989, ranting and raving like someone who was smart enough not to have written “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” You owe it to yourself to borrow this tape from me one day; there’s something about looking back nostalgically at a nostalgic look back that makes you feel like a bad mimeograph. Plus, kids, it counts as a primary source now.) At the time, my every day was Morning in America. Of course we were going to prosper. Of course we were going to triumph over the Reds, the ayatollah’s terrorists, the Decepticons. If cartoons were anything to go by, our enemies couldn’t even aim right.

I remember loving it when Reagan would interrupt shows to have press conferences. Which, I might add, he seemed to do all the time. Remember that? When the president was always on TV daring people to ask him questions? And then he’d answer them like it was his job, with wit and some off-the-cuff facts (most of which, we would learn the next day, he made up off the top of his head?)

(And remember when finding out the president was making stuff up off the top of his head didn’t bother America at all because he was so awesome? I just remembered for the first time in years the phrase “the Teflon president,” which increasingly bewildered pundits used to call Reagan because nothing ever stuck. We let him get away with anything; we didn’t even care! He was gonna kick those Commies in the ass! I never would have even entertained the notion that we were going to get nuked into our component atoms. Ronnie’s steering the ship! So what if he said trees cause more pollution than cars? He scares Kaddaffi more than he scares me, and my dad paid $.35 in taxes this year and bought me an Atari game with the leftovers! Ms. Pac-Man, muthaf***a!)

I remember one time, I had just seen the totally awesome Back to the Future, and then Reagan gave a speech and quoted Back to the Future! He was always referencing movies and giving medals to Michael Jackson (yeah, some of those are real) and sending his wife to visit the Drummonds on Diff’rent Strokes. And then, when I was ten, he tried to make Star Wars real! Laser machines in space?! Are you sure I can’t vote for him a third time?

(SDI aside, the real connection in my memory between Star Wars and Reagan was when I came home from the store one day with a new Empire Strikes Back pop-up book to learn that Scooby-Doo was not going to be on because the president had been shot. That was one time his surprise appearance on television did not interest me, though it seemed to grab my mom’s attention pretty effectively.)

I think I was more interested in presidential politics when I was nine than I am now, and Ronald Reagan was the reason why. (When you’re nine, all you need is a president who quotes movies and cracks you up. At twenty-nine, I’d settle for a president who quotes anything and cracks you up intentionally.) I remember his speech after the Challenger explosion like it happened this afternoon. I remember his debates with Mondale in a way that I don’t remember my most recent meal. The only thing he ever said that made my spider-sense tingle was when the debate moderator in ‘84 asked him why, if he was so moral, he never went to church, and he replied that his presence would be too disruptive and a Security Threat. “mmmmThat smells a little funny to me, Mr. President,” I remember thinking, though I was probably just annoyed that someone else had figured out a way to skip church and still make it sound like he was doing something good.

In later years, of course, there was Iran-Contra, but I couldn’t engage long enough to figure out what was going on there. Something about shredding Oliver North’s papers or something; all that really registered was Fawn Hall’s big ol’ hair. I was in seventh grade by then and had other things on my mind. I do remember a lot of Carson jokes about a presidential astrologer. (Now, Carson, I still miss.) By then, I guess the lustre had started to fade a bit. None of that changed the fact that, when Ronald Reagan gave his farewell address from the Oval Office, I sat alone in my living room and did everything I could not to start crying. In 1989, I had only really gone to one school in my life and had only really had one president, and now both were ending pretty much simultaneously. All my friends and authority figures were scattering into the sunset, leaving me with George Bush and high school and who-the-hell-knows-what-else. In hindsight, it would have been nice if someone’d tried to walk me through that one. As it was, I was left sitting in front of our 3-ton oak-paneled television with a severe case of Ending Overload trying not to choke up.

Strange that I would feel that way then and not now. I suppose that’s a kind of secondary symptom of Alzheimer’s. My grandmother had it for roughly as long as Reagan did, and when she died in January it was almost like we had been at her wake for ten years. We were no less sad that she was dead, but we finally got to go home and get out of those clothes. Six or so years ago, I went to visit her and she asked me if I was still in the service. Six months later, she couldn’t narrow down my gender. Shortly thereafter, she went nonverbal and nonambulatory. Then she got stuck there in a thick, murky, sooty fog for years. She would get sick; she would pull through; she would sit there, either unaware of it all or unable to do anything about it. When they called and told me she had pneumonia this year, I said, “Oh my God, that’s terrible. I guess. Relatively, you know. I hope she… gets better? I don’t– help me out: what should the prayer be here, exactly?” I’m still not sure I know.

The Long Goodbye aside, time does all sorts of things to perception. I sometimes wonder about what I would have thought of Reagan if I were twenty years older, if I hadn’t been looking at the space lasers and exploding rocket ships through the eyes of a ten year old, if my mind wasn’t processing the Soviets and COBRA as roughly equivalent. What is it like to be a fully cognizant adult who turns on the television in time to see your president hold up his veto pen and say to congress, “Go ahead; make my day”? To hear your president call the world’s largest non-you superpower, which has the money for leaky nuclear weapons (to point entirely at you) and essentially nothing else, an Evil Freaking Empire? I would have had a daily coronary with my waffles. “What’s in the paper this morning?… Hmm! we seem to have bombed Libya. Didn’t see that coming! How does our leader explain this, I wonder? Ah, there it is: ‘They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.‘ I see. Sounds good! I’ll be back in bed.”

Would I vote for Ronald Reagan today? Oh, probably not. It’s all moot, of course; if my older cousins are anything to go by, if I’d been in high school in 1981 I’d have been too high to care about any of it. Also, to a large extent, I no longer have to wonder what global presidential hijinks would be like. Just typing the paragraph above gave me a powerful feeling of Eeee!ja vu. The current president is still trying to build a magic missile shield, and he has assured me that his mission is to wipe out the Evildoers, particularly those in the Axis of Evil, evil evil evil, etc. It’s kind of encouraging, in a roundabout way; we did, after all, live through the eighties. I thank Mr. Reagan for that (and any number of other things) wherever he may be.

I am not trying to deny royalties to the writers of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” “Frosty the Snowman,” or “Winter Wonderland” (well, maybe “Winter Wonderland” a little) but I feel it’s important during this season of festivity and generosity to reflect on just how many Christmas songs have f***-all to do with Christmas. No Santa, no Jesus, no mistletoe. Not even any nog. Just a song about riding around in a giant horse-drawn sled, and how much fun that is.

How much fun does that sound like? How likely is it that anyone doing that in 2006 would be laughing all the way, oh ho ho, as opposed to remarking all the way, “This is ridiculous,” “how did anyone even think this up as a mode of transportation,” or “Holy Christ, this brakeless horse-drawn contraption will kill us all”?

I would also contend that even in 1857 the constant ringing of bells attached to a horse’s bobbed tail would only make spirits bright for about a minute and a half before sending you running off the back of the sled, o’er the fields, but I’m not prepared to make a big deal about it. What I do find insidious is that “Jingle Bells’” lyrics contain an ad for themselves. “Oh, what fun it is to sing a sleighing song… and we just happen to be doing that right now!”

(Are sleighing songs a genre? Were sleighing songs the 1850s equivalent of surf rock? I can think of two.)

Only working together can we hope to stamp out “Jingle Bells” in our lifetime. According to a recent study by the International Christmastime Jolliness Institute, 47% of all people who think they hate Christmas actually just hate that song.

“Jim: do you now regret your caution, pessimism, and dourness in the face of overwhelming polling in Obama’s favor?”

Nope!

So, Obama wins by more than any Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson. Record-breaking turnout, record-breaking results, unequivocal victory. Whatever happens next, we have it coming. That feels good.

So, these new justices that the president is going to finally, thank God, at last save the Constitution with in the next four years… what exactly are they planning to do that they cannot currently get going with a mere 7/9ths appointee majority? If 7/9ths won’t get it done, I’m not sure I want to know any longer what “it,” “done,” or “get” is. Are they worried that O’Connor’s going to be a holdout on that amendment legalizing eating the homeless? What sort of cases should I be looking forward to?

If you can imagine this feeling, you have a sense of how I feel every second for the week before Election Day. And once the day actually arrives… up on the housetop, click click click….

This campaign, and the eight years that preceded it (well, seven) have worked me over like a loan shark in a back alley. The cynics in the Beltway have succeeded in at least one of their goals: I now earnestly believe on a primal level that, if I step into a voting booth and color in the wrong circle, we are all going to die. At the same time. On a date you could mark on a calendar you already have. I am completely electorally paralyzed; I cannot trust myself with this kind of responsibility! Even when I am confident I’m making the right choice, I think, “Of course, everyone I know who’s making the opposite choice is equally confident that my guy is the Angel of Death, and they’re not kidding. What if they’re right? What if I’m right, and my guy loses? What if we actually have entirely bad choices? What if I picked the right guy, but the other side is a bunch of sore losers and keeps him from getting anything done, including stopping that shipping crate full of ricin that breezes through a port in Jersey next spring? I need to go have a lie down.”

My friends, I have many a lie down.

For a long time– and the campaign has gone on a very long time, longer than I have been a father or even a father-to-be– I believed that I would be the winner of this election no matter what happened. No matter what, the old guys and all the geniuses they brought in the door behind them were going back to Texas to hide their Yale diplomas and pretend like they were ranchers who didn’t summer in Kennebunkport for my entire childhood. (Did you really think I would forget a word like “Kennebunkport”? How did you get the rest of the country to forget it?) Among the crop of new guys, there were relatively few who put a tingle in my tailbone. Of course, I did publicly declare that I would take my own life if my only choices were Giuliani and Clinton, but fortunately his haunted house didn’t work and she packed up her carpetbag and went back to whatever volcano her lair is hidden in. When the field began to narrow, I took a look around and thought, “Hey! Could be worse. And I speak from experience now.”

Back then, I was under the impression that John McCain was that guy who ran in 2000. The guy who got smeared by push pollsters, as opposed to the guy in 2008 who hired those same push pollsters. This new guy. . . I feel like this is a guy who decided, “Heroes who take the high ground lose to Yale ranchers,” and started signing away one piece of his soul at a time in order to sit in the big chair. I don’t think there are too many pieces of the old guy left. Maybe I’m reading him wrong. I hope I’m reading him wrong. It would be great , six months or a year from now, if the old guy emerged from the husk of whatever this new guy is and sat down for an interviewer or a ghost writer and spilled every remaining gut with bridge-burning, gasp-inducing candor about what Decision ‘08 reduced him to and how broken the system is. I imagine him saying something like, “My campaign tried to turn inspiring people into a negative! Can you believe that? We sarcastically compared him to the Messiah and Paris Hilton, in that order. What does that have to do with levees, or stop loss, or subprime mortgages? I can’t believe I did that; I was a war hero. My bad, everybody.”

This, of course, assumes he loses tonight. Not nearly enough people I know are even considering the possibility that he won’t. Listen to me, friends: start thinking about Santa’s fangs.

But first, before Obama loses, before you turn over my car and set it on fire tonight, consider with me the remote possibility that there is still a decent, bright guy in there despite it all. The other guy does not want to hurt you; he just has a different idea about how to help you, an idea that half the presidents for a century have had without plunging the nation into the sea. (Never mind this last guy, President Mulligan. No matter what happens, let’s all get busy trying to forget the living shit out of this bozo. That is why the campaign’s gone on for two years, right? Everyone’s been bouncing on the balls of their feet, waiting to move the hell on?) My dad occasionally says, “If two people believe two different things, they can’t both be right.” Don’t be like Dad. Even if every bad thing you ever tried to believe about McCain is true, begin 2009 assuming that he has learned the lessons that come with taking over for the least popular, possibly just least president in history. Assume that it will take him a while to dig us out of this hole. Assume that he wanted the big chair to fix what’s broken, and that he will do the best he can to achieve that before dying of cancer six months in and leaving us in the hands of one of my mom’s friends. That’s when it’s time to buy the canned goods.

Oh! And I guess there’s also a chance Barack Obama might win. Which I think might be good. Of course, a lot of people I know think it would be so good, and are so excited about it, that sometimes it seems almost ludicrous. Whenever I start to talk about him, I imagine my diaries behind glass in a museum where a curator is saying, “And these were found in the ruins. It seems almost darkly funny to read them now; this was before President Obama ripped off his mask and announced the construction of the forced labor camps.” I feel bad for my parents, who don’t think what I just wrote is a joke. It’s okay, Mom. Just read the thing I wrote about McCain up there and replace all the names. You voted for Bush a second time; now’s the time for some more of that optimism.

-In 2000, a “late night” to me was staying up to watch the beginning of Conan. In 2008, I routinely stay up long after Conan despite the fact that I get up earlier now. This helps to explain how I have retained my matinee-idol looks.

-The “documentary” I describe actually turned out pretty well under the circumstances, even though it was edited on a home VCR. I have recently seen movies about the campaigns of Oliver North and JFK that were no better. So… take that. Or whatever.

-The record indisputably shows that, in 2000, I voted for John Ashcroft. I did this based on his qualifications, namely that unlike his opponent, he was alive. At that tender, innocent age, I was not yet in a place where I was ready to vote for a dead Democrat and hope for the best. Try me again today and see what happens.

———

Election Day

4:40 a.m.

Severe sleep deprivation is something I haven’t given myself a chance to appreciate in a long time. In college, it was a way of life, almost an ethos: anything worth doing was worth doing at 3:00 a.m. the night before it was due. In my public speaking classes, I got my best grades by vowing never to prepare more than ten minutes in advance, and my paper writing career had much the same arc. The philosophy (drowsism?) served me well; I graduated without ever having written a first draft that was not also the final draft, although those final drafts often cited “Telepathy, mental” in their bibliographies and contained unusually frequent instances of the phrase, “and, oh, let’s say….” Not a lot of libraries stay open until 3:00 a.m.

My post-academic career is nothing like that. Rarely is anything “due,” for one thing. Any late nights are self-inflicted now and usually center around the opening statement, “God, I haven’t seen Conan O’Brien in forever.” And I never, ever have to get up before 8:00. Except when friends of mine are running for office.

Returning to the all-nighter lifestyle is like running into an old friend just long enough to remember why you weren’t in touch anymore. I had forgotten the sensation of weird pain you get in your spine as you’re setting your alarm clock to go off at a time that seems mere moments away. As the numbers tick by on the digital readout, you think about all the things you would not be able to finish during that brief period if you were awake. “4:30. I couldn’t even read two chapters of my book between now and 4:30. I could maybe get the laundry and some of the vacuuming done. That’s a nap, maybe.”

So I compromise. 4:40. Much better.

Eventually 4:40 a.m. comes, and I dutifully rise from my bed. Today is Candidate Joe’s big day. Months of planning, phone polling, and going door to door with informational leaflets with pictures of Citizen Joe shaking the hands of the elderly. It has come down to today. We have to get the name out there one last time. When the voters of Joe’s district show up at their polling places today, each and every one of them must see a bright, diligent representative of his campaign exactly twenty-five feet from the door with a leaflet and a smile. This representative should be knowledgeable and friendly. Or at least alert. Or at least well propped up and not audibly snoring. This representative should not look like he set a 4:40 alarm in the midnight hour.

As I step into the shower, I wonder if Citizen Joe ever bothered to go to bed at all. Last night, I dutifully planned to turn in at 9:00 or so, but I was overtaken by hubris and my camcorder. I’d been filming the campaign in action, and I just couldn’t resist the idea of being there during the final crunch before election day. I didn’t want to miss anything. I wanted to capture this, to get a shot of that. You know, for the ‘documentary’ that nobody but me would ever willingly watch. One of the things making my movie so great was that I hadn’t broken down and bought the camera until two weeks before election day, so I decided to go over to HQ, helping a little and filming a little.

People are getting pretty goddamn sick of the camcorder.

They’ll thank me in a year, I tell myself as the cold shower jolts me into alertness, assuming they’re still talking to me after today.

I also went over last night because I began riding a swell of Catholic guilt about my friend’s campaign a couple of weeks ago. I’d skipped campaign meetings, telling myself that I was useless and that nothing big was getting accomplished at the meetings anyway. I told myself I was helping in other ways, like… oh, let’s say sending positive vibrations to the chakras in his district from the comfort of my couch. As November approached, I began to think more could have gotten done if I’d just flexed my blowhard muscles, putting down the camera and adding to the dialog more. As I drifted off to sleep on some of those October nights, I’d started saying Acts of Contrition for all the things I hadn’t done; Sister Marie Carol would have been proud. I walked the precincts, putting literature in people’s screen doors. I talked to neighbors and got chased down the street by their f***ing unleashed dogs. And If there was anything that needed doing the night before the election, I was going to be there.

So I went to campaign headquarters, known more commonly by locals as “Joe’s parents’ basement.” I drove some carless volunteers back to the university, which the candidate had mined for support like a forty-niner. I picked up a button maker with Joe’s girlfriend MC. After we went back to headquarters, I hung around for a while filming before coming to the conclusion that I was useless and wasn’t getting anything accomplished. I packed up and left at 11:00 or so. Joe was still wide awake, making buttons and studying the huge map of the district on the wall by the ping-pong table.

5:30 a.m.

A dozen or more of us are standing in the parlor of Joe’s parents’ house. At our feet are a dozen Office Depot bags full of stickers, buttons, flyers and refrigerator magnets with Citizen Joe’s name and/or picture on them.

The magnets are a stroke of genius. Everyone throws away the paper right inside the door. Even the supporters throw away the paper. When was the last time you threw away a magnet? It could have a swastika made of penises on it, and you wouldn’t throw it away. Even in this age of wonders and pocket phones, you’re never too old to be impressed by metal that sticks to metal.

I thoughtfully gnaw on a donut and stare at the bags while Joe ties his tie. He is effusive and cheerful. He has hit the ground running this morning. I have seen no evidence that his batteries ever need recharging. He is the Atomic Candidate.

I wonder what it’s like to be surrounded by this stuff, to be Joe in a world of Joe leaflets and Joe magnets. To drive down the street after a hard day’s Joe work and see great big red, white, and blue Joe signs with your Joe name boldly printed on them everywhere you look up and down the street. To be the most humble person anyone in your group of friends can name while simultaneously being surrounded by an entire staff of people devoted solely to the cause of Joe. People signing up, pulling strings, networking, taking off of work and school, giving evenings and weekends and money, putting on buttons with your face on them and going into the Joe business. What does it feel like to have dozens of people in the You business? I find it deeply bizarre just knowing the guy whose name is on the signs. Does that humility survive the experience? If you don’t lose, I mean? It has to be the most incredibly surreal experience possible for a person, unless that person is some kind of a-hole. The opponent is running for the third or fourth time. It must be addictive.

At 5:30 a.m., I cannot imagine anything addictive about any of this. But I am psyched to be in the Joe business.

Joe and MC hand out the volunteer schedules to us, his coordinators, and give us our marching orders. I’m spending the day at Daughters of America, which is apparently some kind of grown-up sorority for the wives and widows of veterans. I grab my literature and a map and head to the car, thanking God that somebody gave me a map. The south side is a vast Escher labyrinth to me; if I weren’t in the Joe business, I would never go there. In the dark, I pass the Daughters of America twice before seeing it. I later learn that in a nod to tradition, they are still using the building’s original unpainted unlit sign.

Good call, Daughters. After all, signs are on buildings for the people who already know where they are.

Standing next to me at the polling place is our opponent’s sister. We each say hello politely but are eyeing each other suspiciously right from the start. I wonder whether we’ll warm up to each other. During the primary, the gaggle of volunteers outside the retirement home where I was stationed were like Woodstock. It was a great big love fest. We had two opponents then, both Democrats who hated each other, and by the end of the day the volunteers were practically making out and sharing flyers. Standing outside for thirteen hours and being swatted by voters who don’t want your damn papers instills a kind of solidarity, I think. You become a community filled with differing single-minded personality traits. Like the Smurfs.

7:00 a.m.

A quirk of campaign volunteerism: As people walk down the street, I am engaging them in conversation and asking them to do something for me. A second later, a woman facing me from the other side of the sidewalk is politely asking them to do the exact opposite. She and I are required to disagree about most things. Each of us is trying to make the other’s loved one unemployed. For most of the day, the only people we have to talk to are one another. To date, the language has not developed a word for this kind of discomfort.

Political campaigning takes everything I am wired not to do and combines it in one place, like a Swiss Army knife with twenty different ways to stab me in the comfort zone. Knocking on strangers’ doors to prod them about their core values is just the beginning. Even under ideal circumstances, in well-lubricated social situations where everyone was invited by a friend of mine, I don’t like walking up and talking to people I don’t know. I become shy, I feel like I’m bothering them, and it generally makes me feel like I’m covered in spiders. Today, I know for a fact I’m bothering each and every one of the people I talk to, and I’m here aaaaaall day. In order to do the best job I could, I’ve been preparing for this day for weeks, building up to it by trying to be extra friendly to grocery clerks and neighborhood dog walkers. Unfortunately, that didn’t prepare me for the fact that my opponent at the polling place would be on a first name basis with every f***ing pedestrian in the ward.

“Hi, please consider voting for Joe for–”

“Stevie! Long time no see, ha ha! How’s your wife Pat doing? Did she enjoy dinner last night? You guys are going to have to come by again Wednesday! We’re having butternut squash! Anyway, go on in and vote, you scamp!”

My morale is starting to take a graceful swan dive. This is a Democratic neighborhood in a Democratic city, and although I am wearing a button that reads “I’m A Democrat For JOE,” he is not a Democratic candidate. Many of these people are straight ticket voters, and some can barely contain their disgust with me for selling out the human race by not burning Joe’s house down. I do not need to stand and watch them chitchat about little league with the enemy to put a spotlight on how unpopular I am here. I’m too far right (approx. rightness: 1 centimeter) for any of these people to talk to me. When I go back to HQ, I’ll be too far left for any of those people to talk to me. Democracy is awesome.

7:30 a.m.

It’s got to be 45, maybe 50 degrees out here.

In retrospect, some kind of coat would have been an above-average idea.

The Miscellaneous Democratic Party volunteer is a really nice lady. She too knows everyone who walks by, and she tells me all of their dirty laundry and peccadilloes with relish after they go inside. I can’t quite figure out what’s going on with her; she seems to either work here or work for the party. She’s campaigning for one side, but she seems to be involved with the election officials. Her husband is one of them. He brings her coffee. I keep my hands warm by alternating them inside my mouth. We gossip and laugh about the foibles of this candidate and that, and then someone walks by and we hand them directly contradictory pieces of literature. Woodstock returns.

9:00 a.m.

Our ranks have swelled. A guy from the Dick Gephardt campaign is here, as is a kid trying to get people to sign a petition about home rule. The kid was apparently plucked off the street by the special interest group and paid $60 a day to get signatures. He, too, is a Democrat, but he doesn’t know anything about the issues (including the very petition in his hands) so we get along well enough.

When we arrived this morning, all of the candidates’ signs had been yanked from the earth and thrown down onto the grass. The Democrat woman learns from her husband that one of the signs was not 25′ from the door like it was supposed to be. One of the retired senior citizens the election board had hired to be an election official for the day had come out and plucked every single sign as a show of his temporary might. The Gephardt guy has a hammer, so he fixes the Democrat signs. He refuses to fix mine, since I am the enemy, but he does allow me to use the hammer myself. It’s all about principles.

Shortly thereafter, a Republican voter comes by (!) and notices that none of the Republicans’ signs are up. A minute later, the senior election official du jour storms out, marches up to the signs and uproots them right in front of us. His haughty, unblinking gaze says, “This is the first time I have had power over anything in twenty-five years! Fear my wrath! Yoink!” and the signs are on the ground again.

“What are you doing, man?” we ask.

“These signs are too close to the door!” he rasps.

“There’s no way that isn’t twenty-five feet,” I say in unison with about three other people. “Get a tape measure out here.”

“We don’t have a tape measure. They need to go across the street, or I’m calling the board of elections.”

“Across the…? Buddy, I’m 6’ tall. If I have to lie down four times between here and the door to show you how far away it is, I will.”

His eyes flash a warning not to tempt his righteous anger, but all he does is go back inside. We get out the hammer and immediately put all the signs back up in a bipartisan effort to fight The Man.

10:00 a.m.

A police car pulls up with election deputies in it. They carry with them a piece of chalk and 25’ of kite string. They mark off the perimeter of the polling place. All of the signs are 37’ from the front door. The senior is outraged. He seems to shake his fist at us, though in fairness I think his fist always shakes. I feel like I was just in the f***ing Boston Tea Party. Possibly the most trivial election impropriety in the history of democracy, but it beats staring at the sidewalk and waiting for voters.

The polling place has already seen a 42% turnout for the day. All the elections are close. This Bush/Gore thing is obviously going to be great for the country. I can’t wait to get to the party tonight and find out who won.

11:00 a.m.

A new wrinkle. The Republican supervising “election judge” has come out to say hi. He is wearing a gray zippered jumpsuit, six earrings and wrap-around sunglasses. His mullet is longer than my leg. He is not a bath fan.

He goes back inside and my gossipy friend informs me that he is a multiply convicted felon. Apparently, he is an election judge as a way of working off some kind of community service. He is not eligible to vote in the election, but he has been put in charge of it.

He comes back out to hit on women. He jokes about needing to borrow my car. After the third time, I realize he is not joking, nor does he plan to stop asking. An additional volunteer in the Joe business arrives, and with a hearty “screw this” I go home for my coat. On the way back, I take Joe and MC some lunch.

7:00 p.m.

The rest of the day is humdrum. Everyone has made up their minds already, but I am polite and see to it that they get some scrap paper anyway. Rumors begin to circulate by means I cannot detect. People in another precinct weren’t allowed to vote. Scandal! The polls may be kept open until 10:00.

The felon/judge is irate. “This is f***ing bulls***. I’m gonna miss my f***ing bus! They can kiss my f***ing a**.” He goes inside to stab someone.

At 6:59, not even the people running the polls know if the polls are open. They take the American flag inside and lock the doors. I take down Joe’s signs and load them into my trunk.

At 7:01, a police car comes screaming up the street. An election official runs up to the door, but can’t get in. She throttles the knob and says, “The polls are open! The polls are open!”

The man inside comes to the door and says through the locked door, “Sorry, ma’am! The polls are closed!”

I decide to leave before Curly comes out and hits me with a pie.

HQ is in chaos. Nobody knows if they’re allowed to leave their polling place. Joe comes in and gets on the phone. Stay at the polls, he says. He goes to rescue carless volunteers. My job is to await anybody arriving for the victory party. In the meantime, I’m to get on the phone and call anyone who said they’d vote for Joe during the last phone poll. If they haven’t voted yet, I need to tell them the polls are still open. I feel like my head has been emptied out and filled with whipped cream.

8:00

Never mind. The polls are closed again. The people who sued to keep them open got sued.

I love this city.

Now, all we need to do is watch the results and see who won.

9:30 p.m.

Nobody won! Yee hee! It’s a tie! I guess Bush gets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Gore gets the rest of the week. Oh well. They love the country more than they love power; I’m sure they can be counted on to solve the whole thing like gentlemen by tomorrow morning.

I can’t wait to see what Joe did.

We all gather ‘round… the county’s mid-day results have been reported…

…Joe… is…

winning?

Hell yes! Winning! Ohhh, what a relief. Ideas do triumph over cronyism and knee-jerk party lines. That is the deepest breath I’ve taken all week. Now, to go party and hit on some people. You know, after standing in a cold wind all day, when I look and feel my best.

11:30

Oh dear.

I’m sorry. Did I say winning? That seems to have been a bit premature.

Oh, dear.

It was a good showing. Make no mistake. Considering the odds for a first time candidate against an incumbent in an “unfriendly” district, 37% to 59% is pretty good. We have a lot of intangible things to be proud of.

Too bad some of us had our minds set on some tangible things.

That moment when the totals went up on the dry erase board will still be with me years from now, only partly because I caught the whole thing on video. I have never heard air go out of a room like that before. Everything hung there like it was trapped in amber. This was unexpected. What do I do now?

We are all out of the Joe business.

Citizen Joe only pauses once. He’s the only one I never see deflate. He is offering me a drink within moments of conceding the race. Atomic. If that were me, I would have a jagged vodka bottle to somebody’s throat by now. Hell, I may do that anyway; I’ve been up since 4:30.

I stay until 2:30 in the morning watching results that aren’t resulting in anything and talking to people. I have learned a lot today. There’s always that. Mostly, I learned that my support is the kiss of death. Nearly everything and everyone I voted for lost. My state is now represented by a man that has been dead for a month. My country may now be run by a drunk driver who as a governor installed a turnstile in his state’s death row, a man whose foreign policy is to build a magic missile shield in the sky. At least if he’s president someone else will be driving his car. People even voted against the ones I thought were home runs. Propositions that promised sunshine and milk for sick babies got voted down if I was for them. I may opt out of participatory democracy if I can’t get non-dead people elected.

Joe is eternally gracious, but I am wiped out. I think I needed him to win more than I realized. A lot of other parts of my life had kind of quietly taken a turn for the worse lately. The campaign gave me and a lot of other people hope that we had needed at just the right time. In a few days, I’ll realize that the hope was as valuable as any other product of the race. I met and got to spend time with a lot of wonderful people I wouldn’t have otherwise known, and the campaign caused me to have a lot of incredible experiences I’d have otherwise missed. I have a buried feeling that someday soon we’ll be saying, “Thank God for that loss. It turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to us.”

Someday. Today, that feeling is buried pretty deep. Today, all I can do is go home and be grateful that I took tomorrow off. I won’t be getting out of bed any time soon.

_____________________________________________

I imagine being picked as the candidate for vice president. I imagine that, the week I get picked, the press immediately starts comparing me to some obscure TV comedian I’ve never even heard of just because we both have dark hair and glasses. I chuckle warmly the first couple of times people ask me about it; I guess I can see it, I say.

Within a week and a half, every time I check my goddamned e-mail, another one of my “friends” has sent me a link to some Youtube clip where this “comedian”– this asshole– is dressed like me on national television making fun of the way I talk. When my little sister used to do that thing where she repeated everything I said just to get on my nerves, it was all I could do not to punch her out, and now I’ve got someone walking around behind me for the whole nation to enjoy, aping my every mannerism in my favorite suit. Great; guess I can never wear that suit again now. Thanks a lot.

And then my advisors start weighing in, like it’s a campaign issue. They want me to go on the stupid show.

“You have to show the voters you have a sense of humor about yourself,” they say. “You seem more relatable and human if you show you’re not bothered by it.”

“Not bothered by it”? Mark my words: when I take office, the first order of business is to dispatch a small squad of Secret Service guys with silencers to take care of this clown once and for all. Sure, I have a sense of humor! For example, you know what’s hilarious? Having the IRS audit the shit out of a sketch comedian. We can share that little joke in January, joker.

In the meantime, I have to stand here like a yutz in front of 10 million people, watching from 20 feet away as this bozo mimes what an idiot I am and a studio audience laughs and applauds the whole thing right in front of me. And oh, joy, here comes Alec Baldwin. Maybe someone from Nickelodeon can just come pour some slime on me from the catwalk now, then douse the whole thing in feathers and call it a night.

Ha ha, America! See how well I’m taking all this? See how the smile never falters? That’s electability, huh? Laugh it up, America. You’ll get yours.

Marky Mark now. How did I get here? If you had told me two months ago….

Oh well. Apparently this is the way people decide who to vote for now. And they’re questioning my qualifications. What qualifies you to decide who runs the free world, geniuses? Make fun of all the pageants you want; the talent competition factors into my final score all the same.

_____________________________________________

I also imagine what it must be like to be the comedian who resembles the candidate and gets pressed into satirical service, even though I have my own show to worry about. Here I am onstage, going, “I’m gonna be VP, duh duh duh!” and I can literally see the person I’m making fun of out of the corner of my eye, staring at me intensely from 20 feet away. I wish I’d foreseen this evening when I told that reporter I would “leave the planet” if the Republicans got elected. As we pass one another mid-sketch, I get a look that I’ll be describing to my grandchildren one day. Oh yeah. Tonight’s afterparty is gonna be super comfortable. It’s still open bar, right?

_____________________________________________

For that matter, I wonder if anyone who ever wrote a campaign song ever stopped to think about what’s going to happen if their guy loses. That single is out in the world forever, dating you to new fans, reminding old fans of the sting of defeat. It turns from an anthem to a dirge overnight, and if your cards really suck people start to resent you for getting the Adlai Stevenson song stuck in their heads. Every time I hear a bad poll for the Republicans, I think about that guy who wrote “Raisin’ McCain” hearing the boos rising up from the crowd, thinking, “It could be worse, right? I could be a Dixie Chick.”

_____________________________________________

One day’s news, compressed:

“If there is any single upside to this economic crisis, if there is one positive outcome in our behavior, it is that this brush with the Depression should finally be the thing to shake this consumerist, credit-obsessed culture out of its irrational spending. This could finally be the thing to get the American public to live within its means, to conserve, and to spend less of its money frivolously chasing the latest status symbol instead of responsibly OH MY GOD A NEW MACBOOK IS OUT! It’s made of one piece of aluminum instead of five pieces of aluminum! I have to go call my lender!!”

_____________________________________________

I imagine being an older conservative guy. Actually, I imagine being someone like one of my dad’s friends. You’re a little older; the eighties were pretty good to you, and you worked your way up the rungs into management so long ago that when you look at a union guy your mind’s eye sees him turn into a giant cartoon rat. Your faith is very important to you, and your brain is burning way more calories on the pro-life movement than anyone you know even realizes. You see the poll numbers for this Obama character on the TV, and you feel like the anchorperson is going to turn into a Cheshire cat and vanish before your eyes at any moment. A ten point lead, for a community organizer? Is something psychotropic being put into the water supply? So when the McCain campaign has a rally in the suburbs of your town, you are standing in line outside bright and early, singing “God Bless America” to drown out the protesters across the street.

You get inside, and the rally is a moderately loud, manageably fun party. There are dozens of people with signs that say “Give Em Hell, Johnny” and “Blind Deer Hunters For McCain” and all of the things you would have expected to see among your people. There are also some other signs, though, that don’t mention McCain at all. They’re all about Obama. Some of the things the signs say about Communism and al Qaeda give you a little bit of pause, even if you worry too on some level about the things they allege.

Then the candidate comes out, and the place goes nuts. For a while, you can forget about the polls and the signs and the presidential approval ratings and the worries and just enjoy John McCain, the man you want to give the keys to the car. Let the other side have their electrifying celebrity orator; the steady hand of the Maverick on the wheel is all the inspiration you need. For now, you can let your guard down among your own people and enjoy being like-minded in a world that seems to have gone crazy. Even without the singing and the shouting, it’s a great time just knowing everybody in the room is on the same page as you. You don’t have to watch your tongue for fear of getting into it with anybody. It’s like a warm blanket. It’s like being at Cheers.

Then McCain mentions his opponent, and the two guys standing next to you– younger guys, a little rowdy and unshaven– shout loud enough to be heard on the other side of the auditorium. “Terrorist!” one screams. “Kill him!”

Kill him. These people are standing right next to you. You could reach out and touch them if you wanted.

What do you do? How do you react?

Do you recoil? Do you look over at them disapprovingly and say, “Now, now, fellas”? At this moment, do you hear the anger in the shouting all around you and, your own pro-life passions weighing suddenly heavily on your shoulders, look around the room thinking, “What sort of company am I keeping? What have I signed on for?” Does it stick with you in the car all the way home, and for days thereafter? Or do you stand there clapping and put it out of your mind?

_____________________________________________

I suck at donating. Years ago when I was unemployed and living on macaroni and NPR, I swore I was going to give money to public radio one day. In the end, it took so long I just stopped listening to public radio. I am a drag on society.

I haven’t given to a campaign in years either. It’s the balloons that do it to me.

I watch the conventions every four years, and every four years the candidate gives his triumphant speech and 70,000 balloons descend from the rafters. Those balloons have to come from somewhere. Someone had to sell them; someone had to ship them; someone had to inflate every single blessed one of them and get them up there. Very few of those someones did that out of the goodness of their hearts. Money changed hands for that minute forty. And then someone had to clean that popped disaster up.

This year, Ted Kennedy spoke to the Democrats for what unfortunately was likely the last time. He took the stage to thunderous cheering, and thousands of the delegates in unison began waving uniform, professionally printed “We Love Ted Kennedy” signs. It was very moving, to someone; I kept looking at the Ted Kennedy signs individually and thinking, “That’s my donation right there. I cracked open my piggy bank so Barack Obama could pay his staff, and he spent the money on two ‘I Love Ted Kennedy’ signs.”

Imagine what it must be like to be that little kid who sold his bike to donate to Hillary. Remember that stump speech? Little Timmy’s not gettin’ that bike back. Though I’d certainly try if I were him.

more like this:

The e-mail was from my dad. The subject line was “FWD: Video of Obama MOCKING the BIBLE.”

It had been seven days; the time had come to put this in the rearview mirror one way or another. To watch or not to watch? Delete unseen, or arm myself with information? Should I send the usual response to Dad: “Interesting! Thanks!”

All I knew for sure was what I would not be doing, namely replying, “Hilarious! Obama really nails it, although the guy who compiled the video is a douchebag whose tone makes me want to egg the next megachurch I drive past.”

In the end, I opted for watch-seethe-”thanks!”-delete.

The bland, grateful failure to engage is as close as I can come to matching Pops frustration for frustration. Pops would dearly love to get this dustup a’dusting; that was the whole reason he had sent me the e-mail (and dozens more like it) in the first place. He’s not trying to sway my vote. He is itching for a scrap, and even pulling out semaphore flags and hiring a skywriter cannot successfully convey the signal that I am not having any. Returning each broadside with the Blank Thanks is all I can do, partly to dodge the scuffle and partly to aggravate him as much as the forwards are meant to aggravate me.

I’m guessing I probably seem like the sort of person who would get knee-deep in this sewer before you could say “hockey mom.” The more I talk to people, the clearer it becomes that they think of me as just this sort of person, the person who is waiting for the chance to push up his sleeves and put up the dukes. That’s not how I see myself. From where I’m sitting here in the beehive, we just want to quietly glide from flower to flower, buzzing happily and making our delicious honey without bothering anyone. But as I go through my day, flitting from daisy to buttercup, people keep spraying me and swatting at me as I try to mind my own pollen until I have no other choice but to plunge my stinger in as deeply as it will go. Once the stinger is out, it will find a home, even if it means getting my thorax ripped out.

I do not go looking for trouble– I will go a mile out of my way on side streets to avoid it, in fact– but if you insist on bringing it to me I will eventually give you a nice return on your investment.

I’m not a conservative, generally speaking. Yes, every time someone mentions Gossip Girl or that skanktacular Katy Perry song about how awesome it is to be one of the Girls Gone Wild I want to have my family spirited away to a Ruby Ridge cabin where we homeschool and sing only the dourest hymns. Generally speaking, however, it’s my understanding that I am an unwitting member of the Communist party. I get this understanding from some of the out-and-out conservatives I know, and I know plenty.

In my daily life, I see my share of venomous (true!) stories about John McCain or President Bush eating babies on film. I’m occasionally very tempted to forward those e-mails to those conservative people. I don’t do it. I don’t make it my business to offend or infuriate the people I care about just because they made the mistake of opening some e-mail. Somewhere along the line, I got the loco notion that confrontationally bringing up politics was a rude thing to do, although clearly I was not raised that way. I don’t say or think, “Dad loves that John McCain. This right here is a direct attack on everything that’s important to him philosophically. He needs to get this from me right now. He’s certainly not going to change his vote because of this, but I want to damage his worldview in some way for no reason. Maybe it can lead to a pointless, protracted argument somewhere down the road.”

I cannot even imagine doing this. I send none of these e-mails. Last week, I disconnected my Twitter updates from my Facebook account, thinking, “I ‘friended’ people who I’m really only acquainted with; they don’t need to be getting these status updates where I attack their candidate. They didn’t sign on so I could freshly offend them ten times a day. That’s obnoxious.”

So: why isn’t anybody worried about offending me?

Because they’re not. They’re really not.

Maybe it’s because they know they can get away with it; all they’re going to get, after all, is the Blank Thanks. I have friends and relatives alike who will wait until I get into a room and bring things up they know I disagree with, things that have nothing to do with whatever we happened to be talking about, just for the sake of sort of loudly braying their opinions like donkeys and daring the rest of us to make somethin’ of it. These people know, though: if anyone does actually rise to the challenge and disagree, go f###ing meth-bananas on rocket fuel. I have a friend who gets so mad in these situations that she starts screaming with you for agreeing with her. You have to keep tranq darts in your crisper just in case.

The only time I ever came close to letting the vessel stray into these waters was the time I wrote a letter to the editor, and I learned a valuable lesson from that experience: shut the #### up. Should I be teaching that lesson to other people? When I get these forwards about Obama trying to outlaw flags for Christians, should I too begin to squawk and caw like a chicken caught in a barbed wire fence?

In the interest of full disclosure, I have been trying to dip a toe into these waters lately over the fact that John McCain is calling Obama the actual, literal, biblical antichrist in language only evangelicals would recognize. You may have seen these ads from McCain’s web site; they were supposedly lampooning Obama’s popularity by calling him the Messiah and the Chosen One. When I saw the actual ads, I thought, “These aren’t especially funny or witty. Actually, the wording seems really stilted and peculiar.” Then I realized, the language isn’t peculiar if you remember anything about the Left Behind books, because it’s the language used to describe the antichrist character in the books. Of course, to know that, you’d have to be the kind of person who reads the Left Behind books.

That’s the truth. That’s actual. Nothing there is satisfactual.

Oh, and it’s working.

Naturally, when all of this clicked for me I thought I might have to stop talking about everything else until election day. I don’t carry a torch for Obama, but I sure would like to lob one at McCain’s head. I feel like that could be the entire case against him. You’re John McCain, and you approved that message.

So I sent out an e-mail about it to people, but even in this case it was as ginger as walking a sleeping baby through a room full of low-hanging windchimes. “Hey, d’you guys see these ads? What do you guys think about all this? Jeepers. Does it… you know, does it feel good? Being on that guy’s side? If you don’t mind my asking? What are your thoughts, for an open exchange of your crazy ideas?”

No response.

Probably for the best.

November 21, 1998

These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about something that happened this summer outside the tenement where I live. I realize that I don’t talk about my apartment or my neighbors very much. That isn’t because nothing happens between my neighbors and me, but because our interaction is typically kind of unpleasant and lingering, like some kind of reverse mouthwash that starts with a minty sting in the morning and leaves a bad taste in your mouth all day long.

I went through a late summer phase when I’d basically hibernate in my apartment for days at a time, returning home right after work and staying there until the next workday beckoned. It wasn’t the kind of life you write stories about (which is part of my excuse for that huge gap in these pages a few months ago) but it was what I needed. During the hibernation, I became acquainted with the Neighbor Children.

At the risk of sounding like the unpleasant old man down the street who takes the softballs hit into his yard, the Neighbor Children are miserable, wretched little trolls. I felt kinda bad for them at first; they were part of a family of four or five people, living in the same kind of one-bedroom refrigerator box I do. With that in mind, I always tried to be understanding when they would run around the parking lot right outside my window like loosed zoo animals, screaming at the tops of their lungs for hours at a time. Kids need to play. I remember being that age. If I’d lived in an apartment like this when I was five, I would have started huffing glue just to make my bedroom feel bigger. I don’t know how I feel about kids almost literally playing in traffic, but I always told myself that their folks were keeping track of them by listening for the sharp, unrelenting shrieks they produced until sunset every single day.

At any rate, it was understandable for a while. It was summer, there were no classes, and the kids needed to play somewhere. After a while, though, the yelling that initially made me think of my own games of cops-and-robbers eventually just made me think of the cops. And it wasn’t just the yelling; after a while, they started to play fun games like “who can bang on the railing the hardest?” and “who can pound on the most doors?” These games, like drums and Nintendo, are only fun to the people playing. They certainly don’t do your sleep cycle any favors.

Nevertheless, I stayed out of their way. I minded my own business. I never imagined that the children would come gunning for me.

One Saturday, after a morning of bad TV and chatter from outside, I went to see my then-girlfriend. As I went outside, the chattering from the stoop above got more agitated, as if someone had walked up to the cage and started mimicking the chimps, daring them to get off their tire swings and do something about it. “Bar bar bar!” they yapped, and as I often did from inside my apartment, I wondered, “Just what the hell are they so excited about? Are they even saying anything?”

I got into my car. I rolled down my window and started the engine. I started to recognize the faint traces of words. I fastened my seat belt. I released the emergency brake. The fog of sounds was starting to take shape. They were talking. They were talking to me.

It all came into focus as I drove off. They were shouting at me.

They were shouting, “Hey, Gay Dude! Why don’t you ever leave your house, Gay Dude? Don’t you have any friends? Hey, Gay Dude! Ha ha ha! Gay Dude!…”

I almost turned the car around right there in the alley. “‘Gay Dude’? What the hell is that?” I was being mocked by a group of people that couldn’t have had a combined age of 12. I felt like I was back on the playground, covered head to toe in snowballs.

I mean… six year olds didn’t even mock me when I was six. Had I actually become a bigger dork since then?

It upset me on levels that weren’t even under construction yet.

Was I just the victim of a hate crime?
Could they even know what a Gay Dude is at that age?
Did they hear that from their parents?
Are their parents going to come kick my ass?
Can’t their parents hear them taunting strangers out on the stoop?
Who the hell says “dude” in 1998? When did Keanu move in upstairs?
…Oh, hey, wait a minute: also, I’m not gay.
I mean, sure, I’m wearing a Hawaiian shirt and driving a car described in its brochure as “electric purple” and described by my friends as “Barney the Dinosaur,” but what does that prove, really?
Do kids still call people “gay” as an insult?
No gay person has ever said an unkind word to those kids.
I’ve never said a word to those kids. Never ratted on them, never bothered them, never gave in to the urge to run outside with a wiffle bat and concuss them one at a time…

People suck.

In the days since, I’ve been a little sensitive about the straightness of me. Those kids took a lead pipe to my whole self-image. The sensitivity is more pragmatic than anything else; women who think you are gay, as a rule, do not try to date you. And God knows I’m not making the first move again for about 30 years. The lesson I have learned from the whole incident: you can make the most profound, lasting impact on the lives of complete strangers without even meaning to. Those kids didn’t give a @%#$ about me, and they probably never gave any of it a second thought. They played Bang the Railing all day, taunted Gay Dude downstairs, then went in for some juice and never thought about it again. They moved away awhile later, I think, unless somebody finally shot them.

——–

A few months later— yesterday, as a matter of fact— I went to see a concert with my friend Michelle. Michelle is the kind of person who actually has a hard life, rather than the matinee melodrama that passes as my stress. Michelle once left college and is now clawing her way back to graduation while working full-time as a wage slave at a nearby theatre. She has a “car” that is powered primarily by karma and kind thoughts that she could never even hope to replace if her luck ran out. Three weeks ago, her two roommates (engaged to one another) moved out of the apartment. They made no mention of their plans to do so; they left her a terse note and a $700-a-month rent bill. They took half the furniture, some of her stuff, and her cat. Yesterday, she had to pack up all her things and move them to her boyfriend’s parents’ garage. She is now literally homeless; she resides on the couch of her boyfriend’s pal. Just in time for finals. As a testament to what kind of person Michelle is, she chose this exact time in her life to do me a favor and get me a front row ticket to the Barenaked Ladies concert through her theatre clout. She escorted me to the show, despite the fact that she had moved all her worldly possessions hours earlier (without asking for my help!) and was probably about to go “home” to the most depressing night she’d ever had.

Of course, if that was my situation, I’d probably rather be at a concert too. It was still very nice of her.

So, we arrived at the show and I was treated to the nicest seats I’ve ever had to anything. We were in the front non-orchestra pit row, “a safe distance from performer sweat,” Michelle promised. Still, as I sat down, I remarked to her, “Wow! We’re so close that shouting, ‘You suck!’ would actually impact the performance!” It felt almost powerful. I would soon see that power used for evil.

The opening act was a guy named Rufus Wainwright. It did not take long to see that Rufus was not gonna light the crowd on fire with his antics. He was full of nervous laughter and uneasy twitches. He paused a lot, and in the pauses you could hear the sound of people checking their watches.

Then we heard something else.

About three songs from the end of Rufus’ set, the frat guy two seats down from me decided that he didn’t like Rufus very much at all. He thought to himself, “This flamboyant man has come to my town and tried to entertain me. How dare he! I came down here in my backwards white ball cap and my khakis to see a rock concert! He has a lot of nerve, coming here and trying to make people happy. He needs a lesson I am uniquely qualified to teach.”

(At least, that’s what I guess he must have thought. What do people think about as they initiate the heckling process? I wish to understand, people of Earth.)

The lesson Joe Frat decided to teach was a simple one: entertainers who aren’t famous need to be punished. So, during one of Rufus’ nervous pauses as he desperately tried to get us to clap or breathe or something, Joe Frat implied very loudly that Rufus enjoyed having sex with other men. In essence, he called Rufus a Gay Dude. If the Neighborhood Children had known the word Joe Frat used, they’d have used it on me. It’s all the same big swastika.

The thing is, as I prophesied to Michelle, we were close enough to be heard very clearly. The word hung there in the air, thick and hot, as if someone had suddenly unfurled a huge banner that just said “HATE.” The world froze like a haiku, this little ugly moment in time photographed and captured eternally.

“What?” said Rufus, scanning through the lights for a trace of Joe Frat. “What did you say?”

Oh God. Rufus is gonna come down and kick some ass. There’s a kickoff for your evening.

“Shut up!” shouted indignant people at Joe, now suddenly big Rufus fans for the first time all night. I felt so tense, you’d have thought I came with the guy. I was waiting for somebody to throw a chair. I was ashamed for humanity for the first time since that Star Trek convention, for many of the same reasons.

Rufus did one more song, thanked “some” of us, and beat it. At the time of the slur, his little sister had been onstage performing with him. Can you even imagine? I’d rather get pantsed on national television than witness something like that again.

Michelle returned from the restroom, having missed the whole thing. Soon after, Barenaked Ladies came out and performed several songs in a row. The crowd was pumped. People were on their feet. The ugliness was almost forgotten when the band decided to linger a bit.

“We have a very special guest with us tonight,” said the guitarist after the first few numbers. “We have with us a time traveler! From the fifties! Or from some other time when it was considered acceptable to ridicule people for their sexual orientation!”

An esctatic cheer went up from the crowd as the singer began to talk about tolerance and then, as they often do, Barenaked Ladies launched into a somewhat impromptu freestyle song/rap, which this time turned out to be about gay-bashing. For a brief moment, I was rather glad they were standing up for ol’ Rufus. But then an odd thing happened.

As they sang, the guitarist from a few yards away looked at me— looked right at me— and smiled and winked, sort of nodding his head. It was the sort of wink I have delivered myself a time or two. It was a wink that said, “I’m smiling to show you that I’m not bothered by how much you suck. Hi. How’s it goin’. You suck.”

Oh, good Christ. They heard the taunting coming from over here, and somebody pinpointed it, and they think it was me. Barenaked Ladies think I’m a Nazi!

I looked over at Joe Frat. He was clapping wildly and shouting, “Yeah! Tolerance! Woooooooooo!”

I felt so bad, and the whole time I just wanted to say to someone, “But… I’m Gay Dude!”

Stay classy, cable news!

—————
Dial-An-Anecdote
November 20, 1999

When I was a senior in high school, I was the chauffeur in a one-car carpool. I drove a 1989 Dodge Colt, a wheeled red jelly bean most notable for the half-dozen occasions on which friends of mine– and not many of them, mind you– lifted it up and moved it, sometimes without my knowledge, sometimes at my request. (Ever parallel park so tightly that you just can’t get out on your own?) Into this slight Tupperware roller skate three or four younger fellows from my neighborhood would cram for the daily 40-mile round trip, paying me a king’s ransom in gas money they got from their moms at the end of every week. Usually, it was a very jovial ride home, especially after Knuckles, a vain primping used Kleenex of a kid, got his own set of wheels. Or maybe he was the manager of the wrestling team or a football tackling dummy or something. I forget. The important thing was that he wasn’t in my car anymore.

Unfortunately, this created a vacancy in the back seat which was occasionally filled by Drew. Drew, though he didn’t ride with us often, was easily fifteen times more grating than Knuckles. He made Knuckles look like a shrinking violet. Chris Farley was Woody Allen compared to Drew. Even now, when I type his name, I’m rewarded with a stabbing pain in the temples.

I’d known Drew in grade school, when he was in my little sister’s class, and he’d never gotten on my radar as anything but a nice kid. As far as I can tell, his chief problem in high school was that he was a freshman in a car full of juniors driven by a senior. We were upperclassmen, and yet we didn’t pummel him (initially). He was a feral animal; our kindness excited and confused him. A stiff breeze excited and confused him.

It was like transporting a chihuahua raised entirely on Pixie Sticks and Dexatrim. Drew’s methods of fitting in and joking around with his carmates included calling them names, elbowing ribcages, taking tone-deaf jibes at anything anyone expressed an opinion about, yelling directly into people’s ears at top volume as a “joke,” and most venally, lunging into the front seat to change my radio stations. There are former acquaintances of mine who walk this earth without hands just for trying that from the front seat, and none of them ever knocked my car into neutral on the highway.

Yes, that happened. And not once.

The thing Drew found hilarious, more than anything on earth?: our anger. Oh, it was his sustaining tonic.

Frankly, it was a long enough commute without him. That car felt like Das Boot even when everyone in it understood personal space.

One day, after a long and joyous respite, Drew joined Brian, Matt and I once again with a passenger. He threw his bookbag in my trunk/hatch/shoebox and piled into the backseat with a bag of flour. Naturally, the flour was wearing a diaper. It had a face. It was smiling at me in the rearview mirror. Its skull said “STAN.”

There was a pause.

“Hey there, Drew,” I said. Just knowing that he was getting in my car had already made me preemptively tired, but I rallied my patience as best I could. “Aren’t you going to introduce us? Who’s this Stan, the happy incontinent flour bag?”

“This is Matt Bell’s flour baby.”

The pause was longer this time.

“I see.”

Satisfied with the amount of information he’d provided, Drew leaned between the seats and started scanning the dial for some Paula Abdul.

After feeling some swats with real sincerity and passion behind them, Drew sat back down and explained that one of the freshman theology teachers had decided to teach the 14 year olds to keep an eye on their sperm by showing them what a pain in the arse it is to take care of a baby. Instead of the traditional fragile baby surrogate, an egg, the teacher had settled on personalized bags of flour. (A superior choice, if you ask me; like babies, flour can survive the occasional accidental dropping. Plus: no morbid baby-frying parties at the end of the project.) Stan the Flour Bag’s father was a football player, and since being caught stuffing your baby in a locker resulted in some extremely severe penalty that the teacher couldn’t have possibly carried out, possibly involving a firing squad, Stan’s dad needed a babysitter during practice. The father, having the mental capacity of a football player, decided that Drew would be an excellent nanny.

The ride home was typically unbearable. Hurricane Nitwit bounced around the back seat, jabbering and yapping and thrashing like an epileptic. About five miles in, his jostling became too much and Brian shoved him. Lapping up the attention, Drew elbowed him. We were headed for Cuban Missile Crisis territory; I could see in the mirror that Brian and Matt were going red in the face. I was looking back to shout, “Stop touching him! Stay on your side of the car!” like a soccer mom when suddenly everybody got very still.

“Oh, s***,” said Matt, without the luxury of asterisks.

“What?” I said. “What ’s***’?”

“Jim?” said Drew meekly. “Jim? Stan… Stan is bleeding.”

I made a noise like a chicken laying an egg and flailed my arm behind my head in a vain effort to grab Drew’s spiked hair and scalp him with my bare hands. In crisis mode, Matt and Brian had become a flour baby EMT unit, applying pressure to the wound and trying to hold the growing tear together as spilling flour turned my car into a giant hourglass.

“Hold it… dammit, hold still!”

“You’re making it worse! You’re making it worse!!”

“Do you have any Scotch tape?!”

“Oh yeah, I always have Scotch tape in my car! It’s in the glove box, underneath the glitter glue and safety scissors, you little nutsack!”

“Well, I don’t know!”

“Ack! What the hell are you doing to my backseat? It looks like a drug deal gone bad! I hope you know your way home from here, genius, because so help me God–!”

Drew made a last desperate effort to quell the flour, and with a mighty POOF my car looked like a steam room, full of puffy white clouds and hacking coughs. My passengers looked like the Ghostbusters after their climactic battle with the marshmallow man. If Brian had not taken action at that exact moment, it would have been Drew, not Stan, who needed to be contained in a bag. At that moment, however, the juniors had an epiphany.

Matt and Brian took one look at one another as the human pastries they now were, simultaneously said “oh, to hell with this,” and grabbed Stan by the face while I rolled down the window.

Several more ounces of Stan ended up in our laps during the ensuing struggle, as Drew, meek for the first time in a year, pitifully cried out, “He’s a football player! He’s a football player!” Stan dangled out the window like an action hero for a minute, spewing a white trail that made it look like the poor man’s James Bond smoke screen. A fellow motorist honked in appreciation from behind us.

And then it was over. Stan hit the shoulder of the highway like a dunked basketball and burst in one last apocalyptic POOF, leaving us to somberly ponder what we had just done as we caught our breath between the hysterical gales of laughter. Except for Drew, who sat in horrified silence trying desperately to preserve a mental picture of Stan until he could get to the grocery store for a bag of flour. I was told later that neither the father nor the theology teacher ever noticed. (Even if the teacher had noticed, the football player earnestly believed that he was doing a good job, since Drew wisely never told him what happened. Plausible deniability.) Every day for the rest of the year, we would slow down on the way home and look over at Stan’s decaying corpse. One day, a road crew cleaned him off the highway. We learned a lot about ourselves that year.

Why am I thinking about this story?

Just now, my friend Joe called as I watched TV. My spirits leapt; my other plans having mysteriously vanished, I was eager to do something.

“What are you doing right now?” he asked.

“Nothing!” I said. “Nothing at all! What’s the plan?”

“We’re on our way to a play. Could you tell my girlfriend the flour baby story?”

So I did. They thanked me. They hung up. That was all they’d wanted. They called me up to tell the story, and that was pretty much it. I never did end up going anywhere.

I think I should start charging.

When Mom and Dad met at the altar on that gray November Saturday in 1968, they had been dating for two years and decided to stick with one another for life. They were both 23. My mom had been engaged once before, to a police officer, but that relationship’s murky entry into the family history book is simply that it “didn’t work out.” The record is similarly fuzzy on how my parents met, exactly; I do know that my grandparents were notorious drinkers and carousers back in the day, and reading between the lines I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad met because Dad and Grandma used to frequent the same neighborhood bar. (It was a different time.) All the murkiness is probably for the best; how much do any of us really need to know about our parents’ love lives? I’m friends with some of my exes, and occasionally when I’m playing with their kids I think, “If I told you how your parents and I knew one another, your head would explode.” Some things are better left in the past.

The record is window-clear about the wedding, though. Everyone in the family talks about that morning as if they just fled the church a minute ago.

As planned, the whole thing was to be an unspectacular affair, just the standard Catholic ceremony at the neighborhood parish (Holy Name, which sounds less like the name of a church than a placeholder until someone could think of a cool saint) followed by the standard pot luck at the neighborhood VFW hall. Everything went according to plan until about 11:00; the young priest said his words, the couple said their vows, and then they went to lay some flowers at the feet of a statue of Mary. Mom had just placed the flowers and started to kneel when suddenly she felt her knees shaking.

“Why would my knees be shaking?” she thought. “I’m not nervous.” Mom is very hard to impress, and the thought of being nervous about something like marrying my dad would have been ridiculous. It was then that she realized she wasn’t shaking; everything else was. That was when the plaster started falling.

The papers the next morning would say the earthquake measured a 5.5 on the Richter scale, nothing to get excited about on the West Coast but something akin to the apocalypse for Midwesterners whose town hadn’t so much as twitched in almost 100 years. At the site of the plaster crumbling, everyone in attendance lost their minds and began climbing over one another to escape. The sanctity of the event went right out the stained glass window; if anybody in the church was thinking about God, they were thinking that He was scary when He was mad and they’d better get out of His house. When it was all over, the priest would make Mom and Dad go back into the church to finish the ceremony and walk down the aisle “officially”; not a single wedding guest would go back into the church with them.

The thing that always stuck with me was that, when the earth moved, my mother and grandmother both froze. Grandpa took a second to evaluate his chances and left Grandma standing right where she was, bolting for the door; some people remember him at least pausing to yell at her to run. My dad heard the rumble and immediately took Mom in his arms and ushered her out the side door to safety. I have often wondered, as they got older and more tired of one another, whether my mom or dad ever looked at one another in the middle of an argument and thought about that moment. When you go to God’s house and ask Him to bless your union, and He responds with an earthquake, it’s hard not to take that as a bad sign. But maybe Mom saw the way Dad cared for her when everything around them was trembling and decided it was a pretty good omen after all.

Any time I put something online, I have the hardest time grappling with that moment when the blog post or column or bon mot I wrote disappears from the site’s front page, having been replaced by the latest piece of new content after an agonizing descent. No matter how many times it happens, it still fully obstructs my craw.

“Don’t go, my precious, precious words!” I cry as each gem drops into eternal obscurity. “O sweat of my brow, how I toiled on you, forever immortalizing the time my little sister put the Capri-Sun in the microwave! Now who will remember you there in history’s dustbin, the ‘Older Posts’ link?”

Sometimes, it gets to the point where I let the whole site come to a standstill. “Ooh, I worked really hard on this one. I better not post anything else for a while so it stays in the spotlight.” It’s like the online marketing experts always say: “Always let your content stagnate. Visitors love that. The constancy makes them feel safe in a changing world, like a big fluffy blanket.”

Or am I remembering that wrong?

It feels bad enough when it happens here, on a site where I control everything, but on the always-fresh iFanboy it’s like a staple gun to the throat every week. I mean… that’s no Jimski.com. I actually work on that stuff. People are looking at that site.

Lately, though, I have been better at putting it all in perspective. Whenever the drop-off gives me the blues now, I cheer myself up by remembering the ultimate futility of mortal existence. As Ted Koppel put it the night he left Nightline:

There’s this quiz I give to some of our young interns when they first arrive at Nightline. I didn’t do it with this last batch. It’s a little too close to home. “How many of you,” I’ll ask, “can tell me anything about Eric Severeid?” Blank stares. “How about Howard K. Smith or Frank Reynolds?” Not a twitch of recognition. “Chet Huntley, Jack Chancellor?” Still nothing.

David Brinkley sometimes causes a hand or two to be raised; and Walter Cronkite may be glad to learn that a lot of young people still have a vague recollection that he once worked in television news.

What none of these young men and women in their late teens and early 20s appreciates, until I point it out to them, is that they have just heard the names of seven anchormen or commentators who were once so famous that everybody in the country knew their names. Everybody.

Trust me. The transition from one anchor to another is not that big a deal.

The world is full of stuff like this, people and things that were so unbelievably well-known and beloved that Amish toddlers could tell you about them, only for those same things to be completely forgotten within a generation or two. John Belushi died in 1982, and seven years later I mentioned his name in the cafeteria one day and had an entire table of blank stares for dessert.

Even Belushi pales in comparison to Vaughan Meader, who had a life so amazing it’s begging for me to write a book about it. He was the most successful comedian in America, ever, as of 1962. Unfortunately, his claim to fame was his amazing JFK impression. He went from selling 7.5 million records to being banished from public life in the span of a year; he was a comedian, and just looking at his face broke people’s hearts. He suddenly reminded America of the worst thing that had ever happened. 7.5 million records forty years ago, and you wouldn’t meet three people who know his name.

One of the best gifts I have received in the last several years is a cast recording of the original 1902 Wizard of Oz Broadway musical. Well… they didn’t really do “cast recordings” since they had just, you know, invented recordings. It’s actually a collection of every remaining Edison Records wax cylinder and piano roll of the music that they could find. (I know they were Edison Records because back then apparently every single began with some carnival barker who sounds like W.C. Fields announcing the names of the singers and the recording company, a tradition that P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Records carries on to this day.) At the time, this show was phenomenally successful; it ran for a ridiculously long time on Broadway before beginning a ridiculously long tour. Performances would go on for four hours because of all the encores. The sheet music was in every home and/or bird cage. The success of the play was what inspired author L. Frank Baum to write the rest of the books. It was bigger than Jesus Christ Superstar as performed by Jesus Christ.

Have you ever heard of a single one of these blockbusting hit singles that captured a nation’s heart? Let me save you some thinking time: no, you have not. Not one of them survived in the popular culture, mostly because 1) all the jokes were 1903-topical and 2) the people of that era seem to have spoken some kind of crazy made-up twin language. I understand Shakespeare’s jokes better; I listen to some of these comedy sketches by turn-of-the-century Laugh-In on the CD and think, “Man, I’ll bet there were some Irishmen steamed about that zinger! Since presumably they knew what a ‘codswallop’ is.” My favorite track is “Budweiser’s a Friend of Mine” (I beg you, do not ask me how it relates to tin men and scarecrows) which contains the line,

Although Bill the Kaiser’s a friend of Budweiser,/ Budweiser’s a friend of mine.

“Bill the Kaiser!” Sassy World War I jingoism from the Tin Man and an effing barbershop quartet! I wish this had been my prom theme.

But it wasn’t, because nobody remembers the most famous play in the world. And that’s not even the worst of it.

Ever heard of Franklin Pierce?

I know what you’re thinking: “Wasn’t that Alan Alda’s character on M*A*S*H?” In fact, no! He was the president of the United States.

I know what you’re thinking now: “No, I’m almost positive that was Alan Alda’s character on M*A*S*H.” I’m telling you, he ran the country in the 1850s. His incompetence reopened the wounds that ended up starting the Civil War.

Pierce’s eleven year old was squished to death right in front of him in a train derailment right before his inauguration. Franklin’s wife believed God was mad at him for taking the presidential job, and apparently Pierce was mad right back at Him because he was one of the few presidents who didn’t get sworn in with his hand on the Bible. The three historians who know anything about him remember him as a man completely overwhelmed by the challenges of his office. In 1856, when it was time for him to run for a second term, the Democratic Party flat-out didn’t renominate him.

Can you even imagine? You’re the damn president, and when reelection time comes your party sits you down and says, “Frank, we… we’ve just decided to go in another direction. It’s not anything you did; the kids have just got Buchananmania right now.” Rush Limbaugh’s heart would launch itself through his ribcage if that happened today.

I was delighted recently when a friend of mine designated Pierce the hipster president, primarily because it confirmed that someone else had heard of him. I think he may be my favorite president, not because he made a bunch of sly moves or because he was a misunderstood genius. (It sounds a lot more likely that he was a breathtaking drunken imbecile.) No, I love Frankie Pierce as a symbol. For one thing, he makes President Bush look like Franklin goddamn Roosevelt, and yet the damage he did does not even live on in anyone’s memory, so that’s sort of inspiring. More importantly though, he achieved the highest office in the land, landed the job that gets you put on money, and unless you’re from New Hampshire the name doesn’t ring a bell.

What chance can any of us have at immortality, or even fleeting public success, if Frankie Pierce doesn’t have any staying power? Even if you get published, what does that buy you? Ten years?

All of this actually cheers me up immensely, because it frees me from the notion that my words are some precious, delicate time capsule, that every whimsy that falls out of my word-hole has to be spun gold. Bad news: in the long run, none of it matters. Good news, though: in the long run, none of it matters. I don’t have to craft and hone every turn of phrase like I’m carving my statue for the park. It’s not one for the ages. Hell, it’ll be off the home page by Wednesday. Be free, little words! Scamper along and join your friends. Be as creative as you can with the time you have, because there won’t be any time devoted to you after you’re gone. Get yourself out there while you can enjoy people enjoying you.

I know what you’re thinking: “Something something Spider-Man blah blah Catwoman.” But, in fact, no; today’s offering would fit in quite well on this very site. It hews quite closely to the themes explored here in years past, specifically “One of the Most Privileged People in Human History Complains About His Childhood.”

I’m composing my thoughts on a lighter subject– mortality and the ultimate futility of it all– but that’s going to take a little while to keep from sounding like it came out of a random text generator. My baby’s not letting me get a good night’s sleep these days, and the more I try to write a decent page the more it comes out looking like I tore it into confetti first.

To enjoy a show for a couple of years and then find yourself on said show is an experience that is hard to describe. It’s rather schizophrenic: the people from the iPod are talking to me, telling me to do things!

Mind you, if you don’t read the things we’re discussing, I don’t know what it will do for you. But if you’re a friend of mine, I’d rather you find out about it here instead of stumbling across it the next time you’re Googling my name to find out if I’m still alive.

On the morning of my wedding, I sat alone on my old bed in my parents’ house for an hour, staring at my rented tux in the mirror. We had watched every video, listened to every lecture, attended every class, taken every quiz and successfully landed on the other side of the last flaming hoop. Nothing left to do but cleave together as one blah blah blah. I was surprised not to be more nervous; everyone had always warned me that I would be hyperventilating, but I had spent ten months hearing and thinking about little besides this day, and I was ready to move on to the next thing. I was prepared. I was excited. I was profoundly uncomfortable.

The tuxedo had not proven to be my natural habitat. Every component of it existed to restrict and contort; I had spent twenty minutes threading fake buttons into a shirt that already had buttons on it, ten minutes linking my cuffs into something unholy, something that seemed designed to inadvertently blind someone before the end of the day. I felt like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and moved as gracefully. I would have torn the starchy suit of armor from my body by noon if not for my shoes.

In high school, I had fallen in love with the Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star high top and had been wearing a pair ever since. When one pair wore out, I’d buy an identical new pair. I had a very liberal definition of “worn out.” Once, a girlfriend had written an expiration date on the soles to encourage some whisker of common sense, but the relationship expired first and I’d continued wearing them until the sole gave up and left the shoe altogether.

“Which of these shoes do you want to wear?” Holly had asked me that day at the tux place, holding up three rental loafers that looked like they were made out of stale licorice.

“None of them!” I exclaimed. “I don’t want to wear a one of them. They look like they’d flatten my arches like a ball peen hammer before we even made it to the dance floor.”

Holly regarded the foot torture devices for a moment. “Talk to me after you’ve tried heels for six hours. So what, then? What are you going to wear on your feet?”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m wearing my high tops.” I looked at her and grinned mischievously in anticipation of the look on her face.

She grinned right back. “Okay,” she said. “Good idea.”

She had called my bluff. I laughed and dropped it, but later that week she arrived at our premarital apartment of sin with a brand new pair of All-Stars that she informed me were my wedding shoes.

“Don’t wear them until the wedding day,” she said. “I don’t want you to walk down the aisle scuffed.”

They were black and white, to match the tux. We weren’t animals, after all.

Technically, the shoes were the bride’s idea. I would find myself repeating this often as the day wore on.

I waited until my parents and sister had retreated to their separate bathrooms to prepare for a day of having their pictures taken, shouted, “I’m taking off; see you at the church,” and slipped out the front door in my sneakers before anyone could see me. We had made it all the way to the big day without any strife or arguments, and I didn’t want Dad to see my footwear until it was too late to talk about it. My sister would laugh; my mom would roll her eyes; but Dad would take one look and filibuster until I lost my will to walk down the aisle. Dad had grown increasingly dogmatic since he’d retired and had nothing to do but go to church, and as he aged he seemed to genuinely believe that Jesus Christ was watching us all walk into His house like Joan Rivers on the red carpet. Never mind that you were one the three remaining people still going to church; if you were wearing jeans, you might as well just steal from the collection plate while you were in there. As an adult, I could not count the number of times I’d met up with him at a funeral and instead of saying “hello” or offering a consoling hug he had greeted me with, “No tie?”

“It’s disrespectful,” he would say in the conversation I imagined having as I tiptoed out the front door. “They’re insincere.”

“They’re shoes,” I’d reply. “I don’t even know what an insincere shoe is. I talked to them earlier, and I assure you they’re taking this very seriously. Besides, on the list of things God cares about today, I promise this does not make the top three billion. He probably appreciates the personal touch. He’s having a giant invisible chuckle in the sky about it right now.” This would be the point at which Dad would pin me in the foyer and begin unlacing. Best to leave it a surprise.

I stood by the asphalt sea in front of Our Lady of the Galleria for an hour while the photographer thought of new ways to position me and my ushers in front of a nearby tree. My in-laws and family were soon buzzing in and out of the church like worker bees, shuttling programs and flowers and whatever mysterious beauty implements Holly needed far from my curious eyes. After a bit of milling about, the photographer pulled various relatives over for pictures with me in front of the tree. Eventually, everyone’s eyes would drift down to the footwear. My sister laughed, and my mom rolled her eyes. Dad made a face like he was beginning to turn into a werewolf, but my mom shushed him and since there was nothing he could do at that point he stepped into the photos and accepted defeat. He would pray especially hard for my feet on Sunday.

The wedding would not start for another hour, and I had already nearly had my fill of flash photography when over my shoulder I heard the double doors to the rectory swing open. I turned and saw Bob headed over to the tree with the same bright smile and genial manner as always. Good old Bob.

He had gotten halfway to me when his teleprompter went blank again. His gait barely changed but got just a bit too stiff, a bit too quick. His smile got wider, but his eyes were not smiling at all.

“Hey, padre!” I said as he sidled up to me. “The big day!”

He was close and quiet, like he was telling me a secret. “I didn’t know you were going to wear those.”

“Wear…? Oh, yes! The shoes. Believe it or not, Holly actually–”

“That is completely unacceptable.” His lips barely moved, and the smile never failed him for an instant. Any bystander would have thought he was posing for one of the pictures with me. Above his smile, his eyes bored into my skull as if to say, “I’m nice to you, and then you pull this shit on me? If there weren’t so many witnesses out here, I would break a sacramental candle on your spine, you little asshole.”

“Huh?” I replied. I was the one drawing a blank now. “I don’t– Seriously? Completely unacceptable?”

Dad’s ears perked up when he saw the look on my face, and this turn of events nakedly delighted him. “Completely unacceptable wedding shoes!” he said, trying not to clap.

“Those will have to be changed,” said Father Bob flatly.

“I can’t change them,” I said. “I didn’t bring any other shoes. I have nothing but these.”

“You look about my size,” said Father Bob. “You’ll wear some of mine.” Without any part of his face betraying anything, he turned with the precision of a robot and walked calmly back toward his bedroom.

“You’ll just wear some of Father’s shoes!” said Dad with a mixture of relief and don’t-panic chirpiness. All of those years praying had paid off for Dad. Within minutes now, he would get his wish: God would deliver him a reverent son with a little divine punishment thrown in for free. He cheerfully led me right behind Father Bob, behaving like if he could just be happy enough for the both of us, he could stop me from having a stroke.

“So what you’re saying,” I said at increasingly high volume, “is that I have been through forty-seven hours of ‘instruction’ on how I’m supposed to talk to my spouse and not use birth control, I’ve actually agreed to sign a document that says I will raise my hypothetical children Catholic, I have spent entire Saturdays being told things I already know all for the sake of playing by each and every one of your rules, and now you are telling me you are not going to marry us because my feet have canvas on them instead of leather? Canvas is offensive? To God?”

“Here we go!” said Father Bob, pulling a pair of small black loafers out of his closet. I might as well have said nothing; my participation was no longer necessary. The momentum would carry everyone through the rest of the afternoon now no matter how hard I floored the brakes.

On the other side of the church, one of my ushers who had witnessed the kidnapping had run off to tell Holly what was happening. Surrounded by her half-assembled dress, she listened with equal parts exasperation and worry as he told her about this latest theological crisis.

“This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” said Holly as her attendants froze in their tracks. “The shoes? I bought him the stupid shoes. Tell them that. His dad likes me.”

I stood in the rectory with the priest’s sincere shoes in my hands. I stared at them very hard for a long moment. How could I have forgotten Best Woman v. Pope? No man who treated that speck like a sandstorm would ever be able to handle something like canvas shoes. Of course this was happening. I was so naïve to think that we were friends and equals just because we had some Chinese. This was a hierarchy, and he would always be three rungs up; we were sheep in the flock. If I jumped through every hoop, my only reward would be new, smaller hoops higher off the ground until the last jump killed me.

I took a breath. The two men were both staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to bend down and undo my laces. On the other side of the church, Holly was hearing the latest report and saying, “Oh, good Christ. I’m not getting married today.”

If this were any other day, any other moment in the history of my life, time to think would not have been something I would have burdened myself with. “Fair enough!” I would have said on any other day. “Go on in and tell everyone I’ve ever met that you won’t say the wedding. March into the church right now and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I refuse to perform this wedding on account of shoes.’ I dare you to be that big an idiot in front of everyone who has traveled here. I will be delighted to come along and see how that goes for you.”

But it was not any other day in my life. It was my wedding day, and I had started all of this in an attempt to act like an adult.

I bent over and undid my laces. I crammed each foot into a little fist of leather. They didn’t remotely fit, but today they would have to. Father Bob and I stood in the room behind the altar in silence for the rest of the afternoon as people filed into the pews. Father Bob kept breathing deeply, periodically saying, “Whew!” as if he had just had the scare of his life. After correcting the inappropriateness of my attire, he prepared himself for the ceremony by donning what appeared to be a bright purple tablecloth.

Holly and I got married. We sat on the altar, and Father Bob recited his sermon as if it were instructions for assembling a bookshelf. He had collected dozens of anecdotes and funny stories from the time we spent with him that he had planned to use at the service, but he was so thrown by seeing my shoes that he couldn’t regain his equilibrium. He was too dazed by the sight of canvas on the feet that would walk down the aisle to recover for the rest of the evening.

I saw Father Bob only once more, from a distance. Holly and I tried going to church after our honeymoon, and Father Bob was the one standing atop the altar in the center of the room, talking to his flock about how to stay in God’s good graces. I couldn’t concentrate on a word; I kept catching myself looking at his feet. It was as if a small absurd thread had been pulled and unraveled the whole crazy sweater. It all seemed ridiculous and infuriating; what about this was I supposed to take seriously? The only good option left was to lace up my running shoes and run the hell out of there as fast as I could. If I ever felt like returning, I still had Father Bob’s shoes in my trunk; he would not be getting them back.

The sun was setting when we parked in front of the rectory that first night, but the June heat was still pitiless. The Church of the Immacollatta loomed at the top of a hill surrounded on all sides by its massive asphalt parking lot. The main building was a giant beige pie wedge that pointed like an arrow to the mall just down the street; for years, I had referred to this place as Our Lady of the Galleria. Now, we were headed to the squat brick rectory behind the pie wedge to ring their faded buzzer and ask to become members. This was what we had chosen.

“So, how is this going to work?” Holly asked as we crossed the asphalt. Holly wasn’t Catholic, and while she hadn’t bought into the faith yet she was interested in leasing if it meant we could get married.

“Well,” I said, “this is my first marriage, but as I understand it they assign a priest to us, we meet once a week for a few months, and we talk.” Six steps away from the car, I had already started sweating, only partly from the heat.

“And what do we talk about, exactly?” Holly asked.

“Well, marriage,” I said. “What marriage is, what it involves. Whether we’re ready. Whether we’re compatible.”

Holly crinkled her nose. “What marriage is? He’s a priest. He’s never been married.”

“Welcome to my people.”

“And who is he to say whether we’re compatible?”

“Well, that’s why we have to see him all summer. Don’t worry; they give him worksheets or whatever down at the home office.” I patted her shoulder in mock-condescension that probably felt like real condescension.

“Oh, God,” Holly said as we approached the bolted glass door to the rectory, “we have to take a test. What if we fail the test?”

I smiled. “I presume they arrange a better marriage for each of us and baptize you.”

“Ha, ha,” she said, trying not to smile back.

“‘True or false: I appreciate my spouse’s wit’ is a question on the test,” I said.

I was being as upbeat as I could. Holly was worried, but she was a worrier by nature. She said “what’s wrong?” instead of “hello” when she answered the phone. But this time, I was secretly as nervous as she was for completely different reasons. Holly was a Lutheran from small town Missouri. She had no frame of reference for postmodern pie wedges of worship; she grew up in a church where it was against the rules to sing any song newer than 150 years old. She was nervous because she didn’t know about Catholic priests. I was nervous because I knew about them.

We were going to get married in April, right after my thirtieth birthday, and I figured that was as good an excuse as any to try becoming an adult. For years before meeting her, I had been the kind of person who you occasionally read about in the paper, the kind of person who dies in his one-bedroom apartment one night and isn’t missed anywhere until neighbors in the hallway start noticing worse smells than usual. I had no “strong ties to the community,” as they say at bail hearings. I was only marginally more Catholic than Holly at that point; I went to Mass about once every six weeks but didn’t know anybody when I got there, hopping from church to church each time depending on which of the services most conveniently fit into my schedule that day. It was always only a matter of time before the priest said something in a sermon that pissed me off so much I had to vanish, especially during an election year. I was a ghost; I didn’t volunteer anywhere or belong to anything. Then one day, without warning, I belonged to Holly.

While we waited in nervous silence at the buzzer, Holly looked up and regarded the pie wedge like it was an alien spacecraft that had crash-landed in the asphalt. When the intercom finally squawked to life, she leapt like she’d set off an alarm.

“Hello?” The voice coming out of the box didn’t sound too old or grouchy. This was a good sign.

“Hi, Father Bob?” I said, not sure what part of the ancient device I was supposed to talk into. “It’s Jim and Holly…? We spoke on the phone earlier…?”

“Just one minute,” said the box, and then nothing happened for a long time. Standing there wilting on the oversized welcome mat, I stared past the first set of bolted glass double doors at the second set of bolted glass double doors. My eyes rested on the keypad on the wall just inside the entry hall.

“For people who are supposed to have faith and love their neighbors,” I said absently, “these guys have an awful lot of security.”

The doors unlocked, and through them walked a genial middle-aged man with a tentative smile and a hand extended for a shake.

“Bob Stevens, nice to meet you,” he said. “You’re here for the marriage prep instruction?”

We were relieved by Father Bob’s relative youth and harmlessness. He couldn’t have been any older than forty-five, with slightly receded black hair and a broad, plump pleasantness like a large Keebler elf. He was even wearing a sweater vest. Holly’s preachers back home had filled her head with a lot of intimidating ideas about the Papists and their priests (she had spent half an hour deciding how to dress, as if we would be turned away at the front door if her sleeves were too short) but one look at Bob popped those ideas like a big black balloon.

The site of the elf made me lower the shields. I’d been on the team since birth, but I was dreading what might come next. There was no way we were getting out of this without watching at least three hours of marriage videos. We would be going to classes on “natural family planning” given by people with half a dozen children. Years of lectures like these always left me itching for a fight. Holly knew there was a good chance when we arrived that this priest would say, “Won’t you have a seat?” and I’d blurt, “Who the hell are you to tell me how to live my life, old man?” but Bob immediately put me at ease.

Bob led us on a tour of the rectory, which looked like a finished basement from the seventies. The carpet was a little too orange; the walls were a little too wood-paneled. Every wall had at least one picture of Jesus, most of them painted in the motif I recognized from my eighties Catholic grade school religion books– Hippie Guidance Counselor Jesus. The whole thing could have used some updating, maybe a woman’s touch. Holly’s eyes darted around like we had just crossed the threshold to Wonderland.

We arrived in his leathery office and sat down on opposite sides of his desk. Any other man in this setting would have made it feel like being told you have cancer during a job interview.

“So!” Bob said. “Getting married, huh?” He seemed genuinely excited to be doing this part of his job. This was what he had signed on for.

“Yep!” said Holly a bit too quickly. “Finally found someone who can put up with me, ha ha!”

Bob smiled warmly. “It is always so wonderful to see two people coming together. I understand from talking to our secretary that you, Jim, are a lifelong Catholic…while you, Holly, are… let’s see… Lutheran?”

“Yes,” she said. “Is that okay? I heard that might not be okay.”

“Oh, it’s no problem at all. People outside the Church have a great many misconceptions about supposed rules and restrictions, but in fact mixed marriages are quite common.”

Holly unclenched. I had assumed as much, but it was nice to hear him say it out loud.

“Of course,” he added, “in a few weeks you will have to sign some documents promising to raise the children Catholic, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first! Everyone focuses on the flowers and the deejay and whatnot, but the most important thing any wedding needs–besides the priest, of course!–is two official witnesses. Do you have anyone in mind for your maid of honor and best man yet?”

“We sure do, although not all of them are Catholic either….”

“Again, not a problem.”

Holly was beaming. This thing was actually going to happen.

“See?” I said. “No problem. The only thing a little out of the ordinary is that we’d like my sister to be ‘best man.’”

Father Bob’s expression changed almost imperceptibly, as if he had been flash frozen. His car salesman grin never faltered, but his eyes widened unmistakably, like he was giving a live speech on national television and his teleprompter suddenly went blank. His face still said Hey, we’re all buds here, kids, but his eyes said Don’t panic, Bob. Keep it together. We trained for this. Everything’s going to be okay.

“Really?” he said.

“Yeah,” Holly said with an embarrassed chuckle. “Instead of one of those weddings with nine bridesmaids where you leave half your friends out and leave the other half with ugly dresses, we decided we’d just let all our friends enjoy the party and go with an all-sibling wedding party. And Jim just has a sister, so….”

Already nervous about this Catholic magic man and his power over our wedding, Holly was struggling to fill the silence. If Bob didn’t talk soon, she would launch into the story of how we met.

“I…” Bob said very deliberately, his grin desperately rigid, “am not sure that you can do that.”

I was so taken aback by his transformation that I caught a laugh in the back of my throat. I knew they were called “best men” for a reason, but Bob was acting like I’d drawn a gun and ordered him to drop his pants, like he just needed to keep me calm until he could furtively call for help. I glanced over at Holly so we could share a get-a-load-of-this-guy look, but when our eyes met hers were saying, “Oh, no; I have to cancel the invitations.”

It was hard to take this crisis seriously, but since I had gotten engaged a lot of things that were hard to take seriously seemed to have gotten important. I could see I was the only person in the room who wasn’t panicking. I decided to diffuse the situation with a joke.

“The best man actually has to be a man, as a rule?” I said with a raised eyebrow and a chuckle. “Well, I wouldn’t want to break such an important rule, but it would be a shame if we had to get married out in the parking lot.”

“Now now now, it won’t be necessary to marry outside the Church,” said Bob. He had completely missed that I was joking; he thought he was about to lose my soul to the heathens. He walked briskly over to his bookshelf and began piling the leather-bound volumes out on his desk and rapidly thumbing through them. “I will just need to do a little bit of research. Don’t–just–give me one week. Oh! I’m having lunch with a fellow who specializes in canon law on Thursday. I will ask him. Okay. Yes. I will ask him.”

Here we go, I thought. They set up the hoops, I dutifully come in to jump through them with a big smile on my face, and now my best woman has induced a legal crisis. This is actually happening. Before this is over, I am going to end up faxing something to Rome to get stamped.

Thankfully, we learned a few days later that our best woman would not destroy the Holy See; the religion-lawyer told Father Bob out on the golf course that all we needed were witnesses, and it didn’t matter which gender was witnessing for whom. With that settled, Holly and I only had 3,947 things left to worry about before the big day, so the case of Best Woman v. Pope was quickly forgotten as our thoughts turned to flowers, deejays, and cake flavors. The sweltering summer nights passed in the rectory’s wood-paneled office. Before long, we skipped the office and started just taking good old Bob out for Chinese, or inviting him to our apartment for Holly’s lasagna (though we had enough sense not to mention that it was our shared premarital apartment of sin). The meetings became get-togethers; we started spending a lot less time going through exercises and more time chatting like friends, though at no time did Bob ever realize when I was joking unless Holly told him.

Next: Is the Church finished with our heroes? What does Chuck Taylor have to do with any of this? Wouldn’t a good writer have said by now? Tune in to part II to find out!

Five years ago last month, I didn’t know my wife. Not in the way my dad doesn’t know my mom; I mean we literally had not been introduced five years ago last July. I was living in a perfectly lovely one-bedroom apartment on the edge of the city in a pretty great neighborhood. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to two different movie theaters. I was rarely walking to either of those places five years ago this month, however, because I was still in the midst of my “early retirement”: I’d abruptly quit my job in September of ‘02 and devoted most of the following year to a long term research project determining the effects of sleeping until 3:00 p.m. on the human body. (My hypothesis was proven: all of the effects are positive, particularly those that offset the effects of staring at the ceiling until 4:00 a.m., until one day at the six-month mark when a switch flips in your head and your whole life turns into the last ten minutes of The Shining.) When the funding for my project reached ramen noodle levels, I took a subsistence job doing digital work for the local historical society. This job was fun and felt Important but did not put money back in the coffers. My checks were the fiduciary equivalent of slamming on the brakes at 80 miles per hour; you’re still crashing, but maybe you can give people a chance to get out of the way before you roll the car.

This was the state I was in when someone introduced me to my future wife. Was I so successful a fraud that I seemed like a good match for someone– anyone?– at that stage? I would have told you that day that I was perfectly happy; was I hiding the cracks as effectively from everyone else as I was from myself? Was I being given this beautiful young woman as something to shoot for? Was she just supposed to occupy me until the white-coated men with the butterfly nets arrived? I have no idea. I do know that my wife was a fish out of water here in town, and that she was fed up and just about to move back home when she met me. The poor thing.

Instead, we went to the Mexican place, and then we went to X-Men 2 at the second-run movie house, and then before you knew it we were a married couple with a damn-near-one-year-old and a big ol’ house and hopes and plans and that goddamned cat. It’s been an instant. It’s been forever. I have no idea how we got here, but I’d never go back. Thank God you came along when you did, sweetness. You are a miracle; if you hadn’t come along when you did, I’d be under a bridge somewhere right now.

As I look back on those five years, there is one story from our wedding that I keep wanting to tell. If you were there, you heard it already; if you weren’t, you won’t believe it. I wrote it up for a creative writing class I took a couple of months ago; it is gargantuan, but I’m going to try to serialize it here over the next few days. By this time next week, I will have gotten The Shoes out of my system once and for all. Be on the lookout.

But now, of course, I’m also a parent, and it seems likely that the kidbrain is going to fade. As my little one gets less little with each passing day, I keep waiting for the point where I go from thinking everything my parents said was stupid to saying all of those stupid things.

It doesn’t seem to be happening.

This is on my mind today specifically because I’m wondering: when do you reach the point in your relationship with your children where you start to see them as field hands?

“…and it’s his job to cut the grass,” I overheard some tubby IT lazy-ass say to his coworker in our office this afternoon, “and, you know how it is, all I get is ‘it’s hawwwt outside, what are you gonna paaay me?’ And I’m like, ‘I pay you in room and board,’ amIright?”

Suddenly, I was having some kind of post-not-particularly-traumatic stress flashback to every Saturday in 1987, and I wanted nothing so badly as to sneak up behind this complete stranger, tug on his waistband, and empty a coffee cup into his pants while bellowing, “Cut your own ****ing grass, fatty.”

See, I’ve had the yard work foisted on me before. That was “my job.” When you’re a kid at home, where no labor law can save you, employment works a little differently. You don’t even have to be looking for work. One day, someone with a lot of frustration in his life walks into your room and sees you playing Nintendo and announces that you have a job. Your resume and interests are a non-issue, and asking about benefits or vacation time would be a mistake. It’s more like olden times, when you’d be walking down the street and someone would bludgeon you over the head and put you in a sack, and when you woke up you were in the navy.

My parents hated the task of mowing the lawn so much that they would sooner put their only son into regular close contact with gasoline and a rusty whirring blade, but my dad was stunned and affronted that I would even ask to be compensated for doing this task which he literally vowed never to do again the day he showed me how to start the mower. As an 11-year-old boy, that seemed insane to me, but now that I’m 33 I realize that it is actually ****ing insane. It is a sign of deteriorating mental health when grown people refuse to part with ten dollars in exchange for a manual laborer caring for their property.

If it’s your mess? Absolutely. If you splayed the Barbies all over the floor, yeah, you’re cleaning those up without a payday. If those are your Cheerios all over the tile, there isn’t going to be an awards ceremony after you put the broom away. If a cat lives in my house because of you, exactly one person in the house will be handling cat puke in the course of that vile creature’s lifetime. But I cannot imagine getting to a place in my life where I think, “I bought that, and I still want it, but I don’t feel like taking care of it. Ooh!: I’ll make a child do it. That way, it’s free.”

My money and my mouth are adjacent here. When my wife and I bought our house, the lack of a backyard was 40% of why I liked it. When we look at new houses, and I say, “My God, look at the size of that lawn,” the real estate agent thinks she has made a sale, but she is mistaken. At home, her kid is pouting as he power-washes the boat.

And I love the “room and board” thing. That takes me back. I wanted to go shake the guy’s hand today. “Wow. I can’t believe your child isn’t more grateful to you for meeting the bare minimum expectations keeping him out of state care. You both house and feed the baby you willingly had? And he has the nerve to wonder why your lectures about the value of a dollar do not apply to his conscripted labor? Sir, I don’t like to use the word ‘hero’ lightly, but your story reminds me of some kind of film. The Right Stuff. No, wait! Sorry. I mean Cinderella.”

Will I reach the point where I forget being a kid? Wanting things on days other than my birthday and Christmas, and wanting the means to obtain those things without shoplifting? Will I one day expect my daughter to kiss my ass in gratitude for providing her with the exact same standard of living I have provided her every day of her life, like she’s supposed to know any better? Will I one day grow irritated when she doesn’t say, “Oh, yes, father, I would love to spend my time away from school pacing an acre of land, cutting down plants I just watched you water all week expressly so they would grow this tall; I wouldn’t dream of asking for anything in return; you go watch the ballgame in the air conditioning”?

Even as I sit here, I can feel the wheels starting to turn. “My God, we can make the baby fold the laundry and go to the movies.”

“So, let me get this straight: in order to play the game, you have to sit here and load a copy of the entire disk onto this ‘drive’ before you can do anything with it? Um… yeah. Good luck with that. My computer has 256k of RAM; all I have to do to play a game is put in the disk and go. You have bought a lemon here, my friend.”

1991: Gerardo

“Oh my God, Mark, you have to get in here; you will not believe what they’re showing on Video Jukebox right now! There’s this shirtless guy doing the lamest rap I’ve seen since that one they did for Dragnet. Bahaha! ‘Rico… Suuuuave’!! Ohhh, if I laugh any harder I am going to throw up. Ach! Mariachi guys! My God, was this locally produced for public access? We have to cherish this moment, Mark. This is the most ridiculous thing that has ever been captured on film, and we are the only people we know who will ever see or hear it. I’m almost embarrassed for them, thinking this was something they should release to the public. We should tape this, or we’ll never be able to convince our friends it existed. It will certainly not be a top ten hit for several weeks later this year.”

1994: Friends

“Get a load of this, now. Yeesh. TV just gets more and more derivative every year. A bunch of single friends palling around in New York between their apartments and their favorite coffee shop? How much more obviously could this show rip off Seinfeld? A successful show is like blood in the water for these hacks– oh my God, was that a monkey? Okay, twelve seconds of this was enough. Sorry, NBC; if you can’t be bothered to name it, we can’t be bothered to watch it. Enjoy your thirteen episodes before being replaced by an episode of Dateline. Better luck next pilot season, girlfriend from Family Ties.”

2003: Ang Lee’s Hulk

“Well, the movie didn’t light my world on fire, but did you see how Lee would put multiple angles of a scene on the screen at one time, in panels, just like a comic? That was a real innovation, my friend. No matter how well this movie does– and I think it ought to do pretty well– a year from now, you’re going to see that technique in every movie that comes out. In five years, we won’t be able to remember a movie that was done without it.”

—————————————————————–

In all his years of delivering pizzas to the suburban zombies of Deercrest Village, Charlie had probably driven past the man-made lake bordering the neighborhood three hundred times without ever giving it a second glance. Now that it was too late, now that he was standing at the edge of the water in the light of a full autumn moon, his eyes flitted over every last detail, taking in a list of his mistakes with photographic clarity.

From the troublingly well-lit cul de sac, in his state of mind, the lake had seemed like exactly what he needed just when he needed it the most. True, it wasn’t completely secluded– the manicured backyards of Mountain View Drive were plainly visible just across the water– but the dry, gray reeds and weeds on the north shore of the lake were just tall enough to conceal a grown man from the road, and in the heat of the moment that had seemed good enough. Now that his pulse had slowed a bit, though, Charlie scanned every ornate porch light and bay window on Mountain View Drive with gnawing dread.

I can see them, Charlie thought, which means they could see me. Could anyone be up at this hour…?

The smell, too, had seemed like an advantage at first. Fat tendrils of algae extended across the surface, strangling the life out of the fish the lake had been stocked with to attract retired fishermen to the neighborhood. Apparently not many had been attracted, since the lake was now mercilessly assaulting Charlie’s senses with the reeking algae and dead bass floating near the shore. Once his eyes had stopped watering, a wave of relief had surged through Charlie: if it smelled this bad already, nothing he hid here could possibly make it smell any worse.

Now, of course, the tepid green water had soaked into his sleeves and pants. He had been careless in his haste, had slipped on a bass in the darkness, and now he looked and smelled like a papier-mache sea monster. This would be difficult to explain. At the very least, he would need some air fresheners for the car now.

And then there was the mud.

Back at the house, Charlie had been so preoccupied with keeping even the tiniest speck of red away from his clothes, and now like an idiot here he was nearly up to his ankles in thick, murky mud, unmistakable coffee-colored gunk that surrounded the lake and would now trail behind him all the way home like a yapping puppy. A little bit of the lake would be with him all the way to the car, maybe even all the way back to the laundry room. Worse still, the once perfect man-made monstrosity– a little too symmetrical, a little too smooth around the edges, less like a lake than the dirtiest pool in the neighborhood– was now completely ringed by dozens and dozens of footprints from his large, distinctive work boots. The banks looked like a marching band had held a parade around the damn lake now. He couldn’t attract more attention to himself now if he waded out to the ducks sleeping in the water and wore one as a hat all the way home.

Charlie briefly thought about taking off his boots and tossing them in the lake before deciding muddy sock prints would be no better. Besides, in the silence of the night, with not so much as a breeze stirring the willows around the lake, his every footstep made a sound like a plunger in a toilet. Without traction, and with his luck, he’d probably end up stuck in the mud altogether at this rate. All he could do now was get a move on and make the best of it.

He took a deep breath and gazed at his reflection in the water. With the algae dancing just below the surface, for a moment it was as if he had glimpsed a monster from the depths. He shuddered and quickly put it out of his mind. The feeling in his chest would pass in time. For now, there was still work to be done.

In other news, my baby tried to pull my head off.

So I chewed off her arm.

But we put it behind us.

(I hope those images work, or everything I just wrote will look insane. More insane.)

It’s been an interesting couple of months that you haven’t heard about here. The previous post/transcribed conversation came with uncanny timing, just when the tectonic plates in my head were pressing hardest against one another and I was looking for any excuse to erupt with some petty, petty steam about Why We Write. Last fall, literally twice in one day, I had essentially this conversation:

“You really should write.”

“What?”

“You have a unique voice that I really enjoy; it would be great if you wrote.”

“I don’t underst- I do write. I write all the time.”

“No, man. Like, I would love to open up a newspaper every day and see you as a columnist, just offering up your skewed take on whatever is going on in the world. That is where your talent lies.”

“Fine, but I do exactly that all week long. I’ve had a web site for this express purpose since 1997. You could be doing this reading you’d like to do right now; your dreams are realized. I’ve known you for about eleven, twelve years now; ever pop over to jimski.net?”

“What? No, I don’t read your little ‘blog’. What am I, in junior high? I have a job.”

(I would still like to find the guy who invented “blog,” by the way, and taser him in the throat. He really kicked over my sandcastle.)

There comes a certain point at which one is just typing with no paper in the typewriter, talking into an unplugged phone. Feeling I had reached that point, I figured, “This is really time that could be better spent warping my child.” (She has to listen to me. She can’t reach the doorknobs.)

And yes, yes, “write for yourself,” whatever. I could spend a bunch of special me-time writing for myself. Then when I finish, I can go in the kitchen for an hour and craft an epic sandwich and then just cram it down the garbage disposal. I write lengthy essays full of bon mots “for myself” every day. I do this writing without paper; it is a genre I call “thinking.”

Then again, typing that just now felt good whether anyone sees it or not, so what the hell do I know about anything?

Anyway.

I was in the middle of my self-imposed fallow period (seeing the bookmark for my own site made me grimace) when a friend of mine cajoled me into taking a creative writing class, mostly because bringing me along meant she couldn’t chicken out and stop going unless she offered me a generous bribe to keep quiet about it. I liked the prospect of the bribe, but I was extremely apprehensive about the class; I pictured a room full of frustrated housewife poets and brain-damaged copywriters holding the shreds of my story, saying to the workshop, “I just didn’t, like, like it.” I also didn’t relish the prospect of having to evaluate their stories without everything ending in some kind of slap-fight. Worst of all, I hadn’t written fiction in an eternity, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t actually, strictly speaking, do it at all. I had been leaning of the crutch of wordy nonfiction for far too long. I was fairly certain this was going to be an atrocity against the language.

But miracles do happen: the class was small and full of bright people, and their stories were easy to praise. I was especially impressed with my friend’s work (although she is not currently challenging me in an output contest; peer pressure!) The criticism was almost all constructive, and I think I have abandoned some bad habits as a result of the time I spent there. It turns out, every once in a while, a second draft is beneficial. It also turns out that I like writing fiction after all these years a lot better than the other stuff; for one thing, there’s a lot less of your characters coming up to you with their eyes ablaze going, “That’s not the way it happened at all, you jerkoff.” You can just make them say whatever you want, and then throw them off a levee. I don’t know why I haven’t been doing this for years.

Of course, the class ended about a month ago and I haven’t written a line of fiction since. That does not mean, however, that I haven’t been writing. As a matter of fact, good people, I got myself a gig.

Well. I didn’t “get” a thing. That sounds like I went out and made something happen, instead of hearing a whistling noise from above and suddenly having a gig plummet into my lap, which is what actually occurred.

Quite, quite unexpectedly, I was offered a place at the table over at the web site iFanboy.com, where I now write a… column? article? “piece”?… once a week or more. iFanboy was a podcast I had been a fan of for many moons; being suddenly approached with this opportunity felt a lot like what I imagine it would feel like to be mugged by a leprechaun, just brained with a pot of gold.

And make no mistake, I am an idiot and gave a good twenty seconds of thought to fleeing from responsibility and turning the offer down before the last ball bearing of intelligence I have left rattling in my skull said, “Are you out of your goddamned me? This is exactly what you have been crabbing about. Audience! You write! They read! Should I draw you a chart? Gahh, so stupid.”

That was about four weeks ago, and while I think a couple of the columns I’ve written since then have come out pretty well I haven’t really talked about this gig with anybody I know. Outside the target audience of the site, I am not sure that what I’ve written is technically English. You sort of have to know a lot about Hellboys or who Grant Morrison is, and among my friends and family that accounts for about .00000031% of the population. Nevertheless, if people start hearing about this a year from now, it’s gonna look like I was holding out on everyone or living a secret life or something, so here’s what’s out there so far:

• The Handoff
  My first something something, about what happens when a new creative team takes the reins of a long ongoing story. Remember when Aaron Sorkin left West Wing, or they let the Gilmore Girls woman’s contract expire? It’s like that, but with unitards.
• Are Comic Book Movies Ruining Summer?
  A sort of point/counterpoint between me and fellow newbie Mike Romo about an Entertainment Weekly article that was so dimwitted I’m not even going to link to it.
• Requiem for Nu Marvel
  This is just me being nostalgic for the comics of my mid-twenties, and when I look at each of those words in the same sentence they combine into a perfect Voltron of sadness. And then the Voltron reference makes it that much sadder.
• Stack Week, Part One: The Shaming
  What is with the human impulse to buy a book you really want, set it down, and then buy another book without ever reading the first one? (Substitute DVDs, video games et al. as applicable.) I don’t know, exactly, but based on the full week of columns we did and the resulting comments, it is nearly universal behavior.

The funny thing is, now that I have made up that list, it occurs to me that 50% of my traffic is going to come from iFanboy just to see me telling them where they just came from. Sorry. This is all new to me. I’ll go back to posting baby pictures or whatever shortly.

Dude, just checked out your website and saw that you haven’t written since Christmas. What could have happened around Christmas that keeps you from writing?

I’ll tell you!: around Christmas, I realized that even my best friends in the world only visit my site every four months.

You think I’m joking. If you think I’m a good writer, and you’ve known me half your life and actually care about what’s going on in my life, and not even you think to read it more than twice a year then what, I ask you, is the point? Make a case.

Now, it may interest you to know that I have succumbed to peer pressure recently and started taking a creative writing class that has been very fruitful. I have been considering posting some of my assignments; I’m just not sure they’re up to snuff. I’ll flip a coin.

In the Charlie Brown Christmas special, Charlie Brown gets his little tree because he is depressed, since he feels the holiday is becoming overly commercialized and plastic…

…and now they’re marketing a plastic version of it.

How’s that feel? Living in that world?

Get the turkey out of the oven to make room for my head.

No. That’s not true. We both wanted completely different things out of life, but the differences were so compatible they fit together like Ikea furniture. Each of us was wandering around with an abstract portrait of the ideal partner in our heads, someone who was everything we were not, but both of us had resigned ourselves to the idea that this person was imaginary or pulling a Carmen Sandiego out there somewhere. Most of our early courtship was wonder and incredulity; I spent some time trying to prove she was actually a grifter working a long con on me, until I remembered that I don’t have any money or prospects.

We were especially sympatico when it came to children, though as usual it was for completely different reasons.

—

I was adopted when I was three months old. Before that, I had spent time with a foster family so negligent that my head was flat from spending so much time lying in the crib untouched. The pictures from the day my parents picked me up should be captioned, “Honey! There’s a little Frankenstein in this dumpster!” I would not have picked me up without a radiation suit, but pick me up they did, and they continued to spend the next two decades keeping me from just lying there staring at the ceiling.

I literally could have ended up anywhere. Everyone talks about their potential and their possibilities and what-might-have-been, but if a check hadn’t cleared on time or a paper had been filed differently, I could be a mechanic in Wisconsin named Charlie. I could be Fr. Steve right now. Sometimes it stops me in my tracks to think that everything I have in my life, everything I am, is because once I had no one in this world, not even my own mother, and two people with no obligation to me whatsoever walked in off the street and said, “We volunteer to take care of that kid for the rest of his life in exchange for nothing. I dunno. He seems cool.”

In terms of heritage, this meant my family tree was one of those fake, pre-lit Christmas evergreens you screw together the day after Thanksgiving, but I wanted to pass on my legacy in my own way: when the time came to have kids, I would adopt too. I can’t remember a time when this wasn’t a given. When I was twelve, we became a foster family, the people who cared for babies after their moms give them up but before the adoption paperwork went through. I got to see a lot. Sometimes the biological mom would get cold feet; sometimes the dad would be in and out of the picture; sometimes the social worker would put the kibosh on the new guys; those kids were getting tossed around on some pretty choppy seas. I took all of this in at the time and implicitly understood, I will be a solution to this.

I grew up Catholic. I have known a lot of ardently pro-life people in my day. I know exactly one person who adopted his kid. My personal feelings on abortion are way, way more convoluted than a checkbox, but I feel like I can’t say “I sure wish they’d let those babies live” unless I’m prepared to answer the question “Live where, exactly?” with “my house.”

—

As a teenager, my wife exhibited symptoms of about four unrelated medical conditions, and in real life Dr. House doesn’t come in with three guys and a dry erase marker and pace around you with his cane challenging your belief system until someone’s offhand comment gives him an epiphany and everyone in the audience takes another shot and wonders when they’re going to write a new episode. In real life, they run all the same painful tests as Dr. House, but at the end the doctor sighs and says, “Ohhh… I don’t know. What do you think it is? We’re thinking either a bird allergy or tuberculosis. Or cancer. Tuberculosis? Let’s say tuberculosis and see what happens. Drink plenty of fluids.” This is how my wife’s story sounds to me, anyway, and it certainly tracks with my own health care experiences.

“And, oh,” the doctor added as he waved goodbye to my wife-to-be, “don’t have kids. Aaanyway, I have another thing to get to, so I really have to wrap this up, but if you get pregnant you’ll die. Good luck taking that news into puberty! Have a nice summer. I gotta scoot.”

This made something of an impact.

Before she had ever even been in a serious relationship, huge chunks of my wife’s life had been spelled out for her in blood. At some point between that crisis and the day we met nearly ten years later, she took a clear-eyed look at this huge obstacle and decided that she would just adopt. Nothing was going to stop her from having her family, not her health, not even a spouse. When I met her, she was already thinking about starting the process as a single mom.

—

By the time we met, I think each of us had been in the same conversation with a friend at least once:

“Adoption? Seriously?”

“That’s the plan.”

“That’s great of you, and you’re very heroic and brave for doing that, but your spouse might want his/her own children. That could be a dealbreaker.”

“Well, so f***ing be it.”

People with no exposure to adoption say a lot of awesome stupid things. The one where they act like you rushed in to save people at the Twin Towers because you bought a baby is my favorite. Less than my favorite is “having our own children.”

“I mean, no offense. No offense intended. Adopted children are technically real too. My husband and I would just rather spend $750,000 on fertility treatments than get one of the ones from the discount bin. We want to be able to love our baby, because it’s our own.”

“Oh. Well, now that you put it that way, f*** you.”

I think my wife was the first person I met who saw these things exactly the way I did. It was a revelation. I all but chained myself to her. It didn’t matter that she was a driven career woman who wanted to rise through the ranks of a corporation, eventually hiring someone just to get her coffee, while I was the kind of person who would walk away from my desk one afternoon and never come back, cashing in my retirement money for rent rather than look for more work. The only thing I ever really wanted to do was stay at home and raise my kids, and all she wanted was to work while her husband stayed at home and raised the kids. She never thought she’d meet a man who would stand for it. I never thought I’d meet a woman who would let me get away with this scam. It was a goddamn miracle. And she wanted to adopt! Check, check, check. I do; see you at the reception.

I married my wife knowing that she is a certified expert at planning. She spends most of her conscious hours planning and running those plans by me. Executing the final plan? More of a challenge. Me, I just don’t plan. Whatever happens will happen. Settle down; it will sort itself out. Stuff will happen.

Stuff started to happen.

Our carefully laid out plan for buying a house made us antsy. We had a chance to buy a house way ahead of schedule, so we did.

I heard more about my wife’s health and started asking questions. We mentioned it to a college friend who had become an ob-gyn, and she started asking questions too. “But what exactly did they say? Where are these test results? If that’s true, shouldn’t you have been sick for the last ten years instead of fine?”

My wife started thinking about choices. She went to a new doctor, demanded he get all the test results, demanded he run all the tests all over again.

And she was fine.

Whatever it was, it was gone. And none of the serious stuff she was diagnosed with just goes away.

Suddenly, holy s***. A whole set of barred, barricaded doors flew open in my wife’s life. She had new possibilities. She had unlocked the bonus level.

She could just have a kid. Just make it at home and pop it on out. There’s something that doesn’t happen to you every day. That might be wicked cool.

What was I supposed to say to that? “Sorry, hotshot. We had a deal. A-dop-tion. Take it or leave it”? I’m not a complete douchebag.

She came to me, a little worried about what I’d say, and in our marriage’s typical Bizarro fashion she made the case for not adopting a baby.

I thought about it for a second and said, “You know…? Whatever. One way or another, we’ll sort it out. Let’s see what happens.”

So we had a kid.

(To be continued)

In the meantime, though, I cannot overlook the date on the calendar. For a couple of reasons, ranging from my desire to use Good to eradicate Bad to my warped sense of humor, it would be sort of awesome if my daughter were born on 9/11. (I originally wanted my wedding day to be on 9/11 for similar reasons, but at the time it didn’t seem feasible. It would have been totally feasible, as it turned out, but everyone always makes you think wedding planning is on par with planning a moon landing so I chickened out.) Leaving all that aside, however, I was looking at my thoughts from this time last year and found my thoughts today were essentially the same. With that in mind, I thought it might be nice to do a reprint of myself. Enjoy (?)

a moment of silence, but only a moment

Happy Apocalyptic Death Cult Christmas, everybody!

How were your family’s celebrations this year? Did you get a chance to catch any of the parades and decorating ceremonies on TV today, or any of the many specials and movies that they rerun at this time each year? This year, CNN.com started running a 24-hour marathon of themed programming, which is sure to become a holiday tradition for the whole family to enjoy in years to come. Signs of the season were everywhere today; all the cubicles at work were decorated, and many local radio stations stopped their regular programming to bring us horrible, stomach-turning sounds of the horrible, stomach-turning season over and over and over again.

Not commercial-free, mind you. What, are you kidding me? Everybody’s listening to talk radio on Apocalyptic Death Cult Christmas; you’re never going to find a better time to sell American Equity Mortgage. This year– and this is absolutely true– I heard an excerpt of a Tony Blair speech about the way They Hate Our Freedom played over the Battle Hymn of the Republic, followed immediately by a chirpy pitch for Dobbs Tire and Auto Centers. So presumably they were the sponsors of that hour of audio of people on fire.

I don’t know how your family chooses to celebrate, but my wife and I like to get some cremated remains from the funeral home and just roll and roll and roll around in them.

“Never forget”? “Remember 9/11″? Is that supposed to be a fucking joke? What else have you been thinking about for the last five years? I don’t remember the last time I went a day without hearing about a plane being urgently diverted by air marshalls, but 9/11, yeah, that I remember pretty okay. Thanks anyway for rerunning the footage of people jumping to their deaths. Could you trot out some more of the victims’ kids? Thanks again. My memory’s gotten fuzzy in the last couple seconds. September the which now?

I was going to say “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since 2001,” but that’s not true. What is true is that I have not had a pleasant awakening since 2001, starting with that Tuesday five years ago. At the time, I was working with friends at a company with no dress code and a 9:00 a.m. start time, so I usually got out of bed at about 8:46. That day, before my alarm clock had a chance to get to squawking at me, my friend Chris (who worked at a real job) woke me with a message on my machine telling me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. At the time of his call, it was just the one plane; I can’t remember now whether his message made it sound like a small craft way off course or the first wave of a coordinated attack. I only know that it was armageddon on the radio by the time I got into my car and headed to work. It must not have sounded intentional when Chris called me, because I don’t think I even bothered to turn on the TV before heading out the door.

I remember that everyone showed up for work, and that nobody did any. I remember somebody produced a flippin’ 17″ television from Mary Poppins’ satchel or somewhere and set it up by my boss’ office. I remember my boss asking me if anyone was getting anything done at about 11:00; I thought he’d be mad if I said no, so I assured him that, oh yes, they were, nothing is more important when WWIII starts than daily tasks at a bullshit internet company. Had I been honest with him and said “no,” his plan was to let everyone go home. As a manager, this is probably only one of the many ways I inadvertently screwed over the people under me during my tenure.

I remember my friend Nicole, a school counselor at the time, calling me from Texas to ask what was going on. The kids were being kept away from all the information, so she was in the dark too. I wish I’d had more to tell her, but as you may remember the things you were hearing that day were about 85% crap. A plane had been shot down headed for the White House. A car bomb had gone off outside the State Department. They just found a big pocket of survivors in the rubble. They found a stewardesses’ bound, severed hands on a nearby rooftop. To this day, there are a couple of those that I never verified or debunked. For all I know, they were true.

I remember– and this is one I never hear anybody else say in this era– that the World Trade Center meant absolutely less than nothing to me on September 10th. In the aftermath of the attacks I would hear about everything it had symbolized to us as Americans in its heyday, but I had never given it a moment’s thought, and probably neither had you. I also didn’t know anyone who’d said a kind word about Rudy Guliani; at the time, he was mostly known around these parts for letting his mistress shack up with him in Gracie Mansion. A few months earlier, Virginia and some other states had complained about the excessive amount of New York trash that was being exported to their landfills; Rudy’s response, as I recall, was “New York is the cultural center of this nation; you are lucky to get our garbage.”

I remember driving home from work that night past abandoned streets and businesses. The city’s most upscale mall had been closed in case more attacks were on the way; even that day, the idea that United 93 was headed for Frontenac Plaza struck me as somewhat unlikely, but only because I knew bin Laden had never tried to shop there.

I remember that gasoline shot up to $1.25 the next day for no reason, and that the price never, ever went down again. Given that none of our pipelines or refineries had been attacked and we were still on good terms with the Arab nations that provided us oil, I thought that $1.25 a gallon was a scam and an outrage.

I remember that everybody was nice to one another for a good long while, and though there were reports of isolated foreigners chuckling at our fate the nations of the world rose in solidarity with us. We were all Americans for a while. We really had a chance to do some excellent things.

I remember driving to work on September 12th and, in the midst of the end of the world, seeing a lone woman in front of Planned Parenthood with a poster of a fetus. Though sympathetic to her cause, at the time I wanted nothing so badly as to murder her with the bumper of my car. “Really, lady? Right now??” I decided that, in such desperate times, it became all the more important to cling to the vestiges of our normal lives. Me, I defrosted my refrigerator for something like four days. Maybe if my new fridge didn’t self-defrost, I wouldn’t be here right now.

Ever since, my alarm clock has gone off with the sound of the day’s terrible, frightening news of the people who hate us and our plans to torture them till they like us again. This morning, already a Monday with a sky that looked like death on Halloween, I awoke to the sound of the president saying, “…must never forget that there are still people out there every day that want to kill us.” When did we forget? Will anyone ever get the chance to forget?

This minor, temporary inconvenience became more of a problem when the water still had not been returned to our house as of 8:00 this morning, my not-difficult-to-compound irritation compounded somewhat by the fact that the rest of the household’s concern in the midst of the crisis was that the cat (whose chief job is ruining my stuff) would run out of water to drink despite the fact that his bowl holds more water than either of the much-larger humans in the house have swallowed all week. The first time my beautiful, talented wife mentioned it, I almost said, “Oh my God, that’s right! The cat has water!” and ran upstairs to bathe with it. Though not comfortable when I left the house this morning, luckily I’d recently gotten a haircut and could show my face outside without washing my hair, as my chief job is going to my job.

I wouldn’t be mentioning any of this to anyone if not for the fact that it butted up against one of my most frequent pet peeves. My calls to the city’s Water Department were… let’s just go with “not fruitful,” but I wanted to find out more about what was going on. Water mains don’t hide behind the bus stop and jump out into oncoming traffic; I would imagine breaking one open, particularly in a way that disrupts a whole neighborhood’s water supply in a way that takes more than 18 hours to set right, takes some doing. I saw where the break was; there’s no construction or demolition going on at that corner. What was the deal? Did something explode? Did something hit something that hit something else, etc etc? Since it was happening to my neighbors and I, obviously I wanted to know what was happening.

“Well,” I thought this morning after I called the city and said “we haven’t had water for 18 hours” and the zombie on the phone said “the water main broke” and I said “I gathered as much, is there anything you could tell me about the repairs” and the zombie said “they are trying to fix it right now” and I said “I gathered as much, have the people working on it had any prior experience fixing water main problems like this that might inform an educated guess as to how long I’m going to smell like this” and he said “they will be working on it until it’s fixed” and I said “I gathered as–” and slammed the phone down again and again and again for emphasis, “it affects an entire neighborhood in the city. I’ll look in the newspaper.”

I looked at the stories in today’s newspaper, and this is what I saw:

Democrats push new Iraq withdrawal bill (AP story, happened in DC)
Vick to enter plea on conspiracy charges (AP story, happened to some goddamn football player in the South)
New British Prime Minister to visit U.S. (AP story, happened in England)
Sept. 11 rescue dog dies of cancer (AP story, happened in New York)
SKorean envoy heads to Afghanistan (AP story, happened in Afghanistan)
Indonesian quake sends people fleeing (AP story, happened in Indonesia)

Arguably, these are stories that an informed person should know (ignoring the fact that two of the six are about hurt doggies) which is why it’s a good thing the stories were available on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, cnn.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, USA Today, Yahoo.com, Google News, 10,000 blogs, and every site on the internet. Significantly less available on all of those sites: local news, of the type one might expect to find on the front page of a local newspaper.

The paper’s lead story, at least, was written by a local reporter: apparently, milk prices have gone up.

You understand the Urban League is having its conference in town right now. Every Democratic presidential candidate is going to speak there.

Pricy, pricy milk. Locally.

This normally doesn’t bother me so much, but only because I stopped reading the paper. Newspapers across the country fret about declining circulation, but it looks like the pep talk editors are cheering up the newsroom with is not sending the right message. “All right, people! News is happening out there in the big world! Let’s wait for that news to come off of the wire and retype it. Now, get out there and give our readers the same thing they can get everywhere else, often for free! Old people who’ll be dead soon still don’t have the internet; let’s tell them what it said yesterday! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting with the publisher about why fewer people keep paying for our paper. I think today’s the day we figure it out. I think it’s environmentalism. People want to conserve trees; that’s my theory.”

They can’t really believe people turn to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to find out what the president is up to, can they? You have the world at your fingertips; how often have you wondered about Tony Blair’s tour of the Middle East and gone out looking for the St. Louis Post? This is what people did when there were three television stations and you had to stay up till 11:00 to see the news. We have the wireless telegraph now.

CNN, on the other hand, is never going to mention the Central West End’s water supply unless al Qaeda poisons it. (Which, for all I @^#%$ing know, they did! It looked like Transformers had rampaged through Delmar and Belt. Is the Post covering up the Transformer invasion?) The Post-Dispatch could be all over that shizzity. There are three guys working for the Post who didn’t have water this morning. They could fill the paper entirely with stories that happened to the people buying the paper. Wrap your mind around that.

But they don’t have the staff to do those stories. Because they don’t have the money. Because people don’t buy the paper. Because they don’t have the staff to do those stories. So I’m dirty and cranky, and I have no idea why. I might as well walk my happy ass over to the guy working on the pipe and just ask him what’s going on. And hey, then I’ll post the story online! I smell a business model.

The Post does have some staff for my neighborhood: last night, while the water was leaking everywhere, an old man tried to cross the street against the light a block away from my house and got killed by a car. The Post web site posted three stories about it in the span of 24 hours. Which story affects more readers? Oh, well; at least it happened here, right?

Having neither partied nor picked a career path in any meaningful way, I left academia cranky and adrift. Having grown more than accustomed to calling my own shots for a few years, the prospect of moving back into my parents house was anticipated with all the excitement of a trip to the gallows. (At my school, the end of senior year culminated in “senior week,” when studies were over but the seniors were allowed to remain in their dorm rooms and party before graduation. I did not participate in any senior week activities, but I told my parents that it went on for a month and spent that month sleeping on my girlfriend’s floor rather than face the inevitable.) But move back in I did, having failed to come up with any non-blood-plasma-based source of rent before May, and though my relationship with my parents had never dipped below “cordial” in all the time I’d been alive the air began filling with poison like a sub that had been underwater too long. They didn’t know what to do with me; I didn’t know what to do with me; the cracks were definitely going to start showing if I didn’t come up with some kind of outlet and/or source of cheap opiates.

It was under those conditions that ten years ago today (well, tomorrow) I started what would become this site. Fascinated with the then-new web, I wanted to put something out there but had nothing new to say about any subject that didn’t already have ten sites listed in Infoseek. I was an expert in bitching about myself, though, especially in July 1997. So I sat down at the keyboard and put the best available face on. In theory, I have grown as a person since then, but looking back on that first entry today (as you will now do) I can’t help noticing how many 1997 attitudes are exactly the same as the 2007 attitudes, as well as laughing out loud in glorious thanksgiving about all the things that have changed. I stopped updating the site for a good year or two in there, when it got so grim that even I didn’t want to know about it, but I’m glad I never tossed it. Its purpose may evolve a bit in the coming months– blogs are all too commonplace in 2007 (goddammit)– but it has been a useful chronicle of times that would have been otherwise forgotten. May the next ten years be as good as the last ten. Well, most of the last ten. All right, half of the last ten. Okay, the last four years. The last six months.

7/19/97

One of the best things about my life right now is that I somehow graduated from college. I don’t mean that I expected to fail; I’ve always been blessed with good grades, although whether I deserved them or not has always been a topic of debate. No, when I say it’s amazing that I graduated, I mean that I thought I’d be in college until I died. More precisely, I thought I would die from being in college. Between cafeteria food, dorm living, and the hordes of reckless imbeciles who only seemed to be getting dumber with each passing year, I was positive college would kill me. Somehow, someday, someone was going to pour beer on the floor and light it on fire, flames would spread through the shanty until they hit the cafeteria’s grease supply, and the resulting explosion would blast us to the Dakotas. By the time it was over, college had really wound down.

Graduation, however, never winds down. No matter how bad my life may get, I will never have to take another test again. There will never be another ten-page paper about Aztecs. There will never be another “finals week.” Never again will I have to care what Marx thought about Napoleon. I have earned the Magic Piece of Paper. If I ever decide to earn another, even more magical piece of paper, I can do it one class at a time for the next 45 years if I want to. I don’t expect I’ll want to.

So, what now? Well, now comes what I always thought would be the fun part. I get out of school, go to work wherever they’ll hire me, rent out some modest apartment somewhere, and start being Grown Up. Sure, dorm living was a kind of Grown Up simulator, but even in college there are far too many people intruding on your life. Leaving college and the dorms, I couldn’t wait to live someplace where I could cook my own dinner with whatever appliance I chose, without having to check a policy manual to see if it was okay. I couldn’t wait to leave classes in favor of work. If you hate your professor or your course of study, you more or less have to suffer through it. Either that or drop the class and justify yourself to your parents, your advisor, your friends, the janitor, etc. If you don’t like your job or your boss? Go the hell home and get a new one. No explanation necessary; you’re your own person. No parents, finally. No roommates, for better or worse. No responsibility to anyone but yourself and the people you choose to include. Your own space. Your own life. What a gift from God Almighty is the holy and blessed Graduation!

Or at least that’s what I thought for the first month of unemployment. See, it’s all fun and games until you run out of money. When I was still in the graduation process, I thought the world was at my feet. I sent out a couple resumes; I looked at apartments; I collected graduation checks from relatives. In a fit of stupidity, I told my parents they were controlling and overbearing, and that living with them drove me crazy, and that they could basically kiss off. I could afford to be brutally candid; after all, I was graduating.

Then, a funny thing happened: the resumes didn’t lead to anything. The apartment was no longer in my price range (considering that my price range was $0 a month). The graduation checks stopped coming. I had to move into the last place on earth I wanted to be, my parents’ new house in the middle of nowhere, with people who didn’t particularly want me to be there.

When my boyhood chums and I were in grade school, and someone tried to give us cooties or something, we would periodically defend ourselves from the attack by announcing that it was “Opposite Day,” thereby smiting our enemies with their own cooties. Well, every day since graduation has been Opposite Day. I have a degree, but I feel dumber than ever; I’m at “home”, but I have no idea where anything is; I have more life experience than I’ve ever had, but getting a job keeps getting harder and harder. And I probably have cooties.

My parents, who are both clinically neurotic, have somehow gotten the impression that my job hunt is a team effort and buzz around me like flies. Maybe it just seems that way after all those years of living relatively alone. Still, you know that sound a radio makes when the station is just out of range? That’s what my brain sounds like all the time when I’m at home.

My sister, who has gone absolutely schizo since going off to college, spends most of her time pouting because she had to go to summer school instead of following Phish. Last week, workers started cutting down trees across the street to build a house. This made my sister so mad that she threatened to “go get an axe and cut them down and see how they like it.” Needless to say, I sleep with my door locked and I certainly do not walk on the grass.

The rest of the world hasn’t made things any easier on me. During graduation season, Tom Brokaw and the other nightly news guys fell all over themselves to make me feel like an idiot. For years now, the nightly news would do a story every May about how graduates could expect a crappy economy and insurmountable employment odds. So, what was the story when I graduated and couldn’t find work? “This just in: any monkey can fall out of a tree and get a job this year, especially if the monkey has a degree. Unemployed people are morons. That’s Nightly News for this evening.”

In my experience, “there’s a lot less unemployment than there used to be” translates into “there are a lot more Taco Bells than there used to be.” There are hundreds of job opportunities, as long as you’re willing to make $6000 a year. I am not. Yet.

In fact, I have snagged a couple jobs in the past few months. I was in line for a reporting job at the Suburban Journal; all I had to do was spend the next year living in Hillbillytown, going to Hillbillytown Council meetings and turning them into fifteen stories a week (all of which would be printed, I was told, no matter how bad they were). Before that, I was hired as a retail ninja; I was told we’d go into Wal-Marts under cover of darkness with counting machines, doing inventory on the entire store, only to vanish without a trace before the store opened. It certainly sounded sexy, but it just didn’t scream “advancement opportunity.” Actually, it screamed “den of vampires.”

I’m not a careerist or anything; I’m not working my way up to the big corner office with the huge picturesque view. For rent and grocery money, I would do all my work sitting on a little wooden box. With nails sticking out of it. Under train tracks. That drip acid on me. For the rest of my life, no questions asked. All I want is enough money for a small apartment, food, an occasional night out, and an almost constant stream of unnecessary trinkets.

I should probably mention that my mom tries to prevent me from reading the “Help Wanted” ads. Given my luck so far, she has come to the conclusion that I’m not actually sending out resumes. After all, how could I be sending out resumes all this time and still not have a job? Why, the job market’s the best it’s been in years. Tom Brokaw says so! So obviously, according to my mom’s thinking, I must just be pretending to send out resumes so that I can continue having the fun of telling people I live with my parents. As a result, she takes the ads immediately and reads them aloud to me in an attempt to make my head explode. If she is unfamiliar with a word in an ad, she will skip the word. Words she often skips include “doctorate” and “custodial.” You can see how helpful this is.

And Dad? Well… he really needs to keep in mind that, someday, it will be my job to pick his nursing home. I’ll leave it at that for now.

Believe it or not, I actually feel pretty positive about things right now. Despite the above complications, I have a pretty decent life. I’m not sick; I have great friends and a great girlfriend; and legally, my parents have to love me even when I tell them to kiss off. I’m optimistic about jobs (still). Most importantly, I can look forward to the day when all my friends go back to school… and I don’t. Long live graduation.

Did Paul Shaffer do the music for Pirates?

Does Chevy Chase play the undead monkey?

I’ll be workin’ on this one like a Rubik’s Cube for the rest of the week.

NOT PICTURED ON THE COVER: a thing that happened in the news this week

Problem: things keep happening, and you don’t have time to keep up with them all. More to the point, things that seem like a big deal on Tuesday turn out not to be worth a good goddamn by Thursday, meaning reading about said things would have been a monumental waste of your time.

Solution: a magazine could be printed once a week that just f***ing told you the news that happened that turned out to be important or meaningful.

Exact opposite of solution: a magazine could be printed once a week that assumed you were reading the “news” five times every single day. It would provide detailed analysis of the stories you didn’t read, along with content that was 65% health news because only aging Boomers buy magazines. On one hand, it would tell you nothing, but on the other hand it would cost you money and make you want to punch a wall.

Grrrrrr.

My current position on electoral politics is pretty similar. “Who do you like in ‘08?” “Well…! There are currently 24 people running between the two parties. By the time I can cast a vote in the Missouri primary, roughly 4 will remain, and my opinion about the other 20 will have been rendered completely moot by some old women in New Hampshire 6 months prior. So here’s what I’m going to do: 1) not care at all 2) rename every debate night ‘Playstation Monday,’ because I am utterly powerless and impotent.’” I admit that I am secretly a bit concerned about the overall outcome, of course, because (not to be outdone by Alec Baldwin’s nakedly ridiculous threat to move to Canada) I did publicly declare that a McCain vs. Clinton race would prompt me to kill myself. And God help me, America, I want to live.

So, here’s my question: what is a “rec-ord”?

Ah, the big plastic platters? Used to play music… oh, with the needle? Those things my parents used to have when I was small? And I’m very old now, and haven’t seen one in person in easily twenty years? I’ve had a CD player since 1989?

I see.

That’s… yeah. Are we planning on retiring that one any time soon? No? Just gonna get louder and more annoying until everyone who remembers where the sound originated is dead? Gotcha.

-Also, I would like to renew my call to retire the “Save” icon. 99% of the time on a PC, “Save” is a cartoon picture of a floppy disc. My last floppy disc sighting was about 12 years ago. Kids who’ve never seen one are creeping up on driving age. Let’s brainstorm something else. Life preserver. Crucifix. I don’t care.

-Another renewed call: it’s 2007. Just tell me your domain name. Telling me that I get to your web site by “visiting double-you-double-you-double-you-dot” anything has officially reached the stage where you’re insulting my intelligence. I’m hip to the need for the Ws; as it turns out, this is not my first night on AOL. Again, the web was popularized in roughly 1995. Let’s go ahead and lump that time-wasting chestnut in under whatever exemption the “http://” and “1″ from long distance calls got.

-Finally, if you find yourself watching the NBC Nightly News, here’s a good way to blot out the day-to-day horrors of the world: every time Brian Williams begins a segment with “There’s a growing controversy in this country…” take a shot. You might want to consult your doctor first. I’m starting to wonder if it’s actually the name of a featured segment, he says it so often.

1. If I gave you a text file full of code for your web page, and that file was named “Code to paste.txt,” what would you do with it?
   a. paste it onto the page
   b. see its name and decide to turn it into a Javascript file and put it somewhere completely different

2. In the aforementioned text file, there is a line of code that literally says “CHANGE
_ THIS _ LINE _ TO _ WHATEVER _ THE _ FOLDER _ NAME _ IS” in capital letters. What would you do with that line?
   a. change it to whatever the folder name is
   b. put the code online having left that line exactly as written

3. Towards the bottom of the code in that same text file, there is a line that literally says “DO NOT ALTER ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE” in capital letters. Upon seeing that, would you
   a. leave the remaining code alone?
   b. delete everything that came after that line?

4. After doing all of the above incorrectly, you are troubled to find that the site does not work properly for some reason. Do you take three seconds to read over your own handiwork, or do you pepper a busy, hard-working, handsome young man with repeated e-mails  saying, “Your code still doesn’t work,” forcing him to repeatedly go to the web site, deduce where you’ve hidden the code like a leprechaun with a pot o’ gold, download the work by hand, and eventually have a life-threatening stroke?

This quiz is meant to illustrate a common misconception about web designers and IT nerds. Conventional wisdom holds that they are clever, obsessively technical, inventive, and operating on an IQ level normal people cannot even understand. In fact, they are borderline goddamn illiterate and incapable of cognitive activity. Most computer code actually began as a series of increasingly horrible misspellings on English essays.

Did you ever get so mad that you could see your pulse from inside your eyes?