Car discrimination

I’m not a geologist, or an engineer, or anything else that requires a thorough knowledge of math and science. I never excelled at those subjects, and I’m not about to start trying. Still, even without scientific proof or solid numbers, I do worry about running out of things. Based on a quick inventory of my house, I have a fear of running out of light bulbs and toilet paper. And I dread the morning I wake up to discover I’m out of coffee. I assume that at one point in history I existed beneath the sea, because very shortly after my current life began I was terrified that running out of water was imminent. My parents must have thought it was a bit strange that their four-year old was alarmed by people who left their sprinklers running all afternoon.

I don’t think any past-life regression is necessary in explaining my fear that we’re going to run out of gas sometime in the not-too-distant future. My feeling that it will happen is not based on statistics, or science, or projections of any sort. It’s based on our stupidity when it comes to resources and our complete disregard for the environment. Who cares if chemicals are bad for the earth when a golf course is part of the equation? As long as the shareholders are happy, who cares if we shovel toxic food onto the plates of our young? And who really cares about gas mileage and lefty issues like emissions control when it comes to our cars? Years ago I had a conversation with a woman that I’ll never forget. Energy conservation wasn’t her thing – her description, not mine. She had children to think about. One of her sons had asthma and she lived in a suburb without a hospital, so her minivan was a medical necessity. The environmentalists in Portland, she told me, need to get a life and stop trying to control other people whose needs they simply do not understand. Another woman I knew drove an SUV the size of my kitchen because she preferred to have as much as possible between her and other drivers. She felt safer that way.

Recently, a conservative talk show host asked her listeners whether or not they think the city of Portland is discriminating against them because they drive cars. Not nearly enough, in my opinion, but I didn’t call. I listened instead to one caller after another carry on about how unfair it is that bicyclists don’t have to pay registration fees, and how every auto owner in Multnomah County has to pay a fee so that we can repair a bridge that’s about to collapse, and how our mayor is obsessed with Denmark – he’s so gay! – and he’s going to start monitoring everyone’s bike usage and assess penalty taxes on those who don’t bike enough, and on, and on, and on. Many of them called in on their cell phones, from their cars. What, I wondered, are these people going to say when we are simply out of gas? And by out of gas I do not mean expensive gas, or rationed gas – I mean out, gone. In African nations with terminal food shortages, do people call the local talkies to rant about how inconvenient and unfair it all is when the famine is staring them straight in the face? I doubt they do. My guess is that they’re probably kind of busy starving to death. I’m not saying that people in Africa go without food because it’s wasted when the supplies are running high. I’m just saying that when we’re out of gas, a bike might come in handy, even if it’s made by Socialists.

But for the record, I’m no better when it comes to this type of logic. I’m trying to flush the hypocrisy out of my system, but it’s an ongoing process. I leave my front porch lights on when I go out after dark, which is totally unnecessary. But I’m less antsy when I come home, because the lights tend to scare away the possums that cut through my yard. So, thanks to a few hours of irresponsible electricity consumption, for the five seconds I spend walking from the gate to the front door, I am not scared.

Our aging infrastructure

Usually it’s the children who underscore my age. Suddenly, one of my nieces, who is permanently stuck in grade school in my mind, is taking college entrance exams and going on dates. Or I’m saying hello to a young man an inch or two taller than me who employs a very informed handshake, even though my memory tells me he’s a little boy who cannot figure out the security code that will open the door to his father’s office.

But this week, I’m aging with the infrastructure. The story about the shoddy repair job done on the bridge that connects San Francisco and Oakland struck me. The country’s bridges are in peril, we’re told. I’ve been across that bridge, and I don’t doubt it. I’ve seen it many times from the air, its impossible length troubling even from a distance. Once, I rode to Oakland on that bridge in a car driven by my brother. Going over, we were on the lower deck, six or eight lanes all headed East beneath a ceiling of concrete. I don’t know if it was the images I’d seen of that bridge collapsing during an earthquake, or my general fear of stupid driving, but I remember closing my eyes and focusing on my breathing during our crossing. We went to our cousin’s house for dinner, and by the time we drove back – on the top deck – we’d had enough to drink that I was no longer concerned about the engineering.

On a cold, dusky afternoon in early January after my mother died, my family and I drove to the riverfront and walked to Illinois on a recently restored bridge that had some historical significance, the details of which I cannot recall. I cannot name it exactly, but there was something ritualistic about it. My family loves bridges. I love them too, even though they seem unstable. On this morning’s news, they showed a time-lapse video of a bridge in New York that sags beneath the weight of traffic. Perhaps, I thought, the cars and trucks are bigger than they were when the bridge was built. Perhaps the people in the cars and trucks are bigger as well. I once tried to walk along the sidewalk on the Golden Gate, and I failed. I realize that it’s technically correct, but the swaying was more than I could manage.

The problem with the bridges, we’re told, is that they’re aging. They may look gracious, they may represent magnificent feats of engineering, but the average age of a bridge in the U.S. is 43. Being 43 myself, it was sobering to hear that number used to emphasize how old something is. When the average age of the nation’s bridges is 43, the experts assure us, they really need to be repaired, if not replaced. Hearing that was painful.

But the bridges and I are not alone in our age. The Arch in Saint Louis is getting old as well: it was completed on October 28, 1965, making yesterday its 44th birthday. There was something very comforting about hearing a radio host in Portland announce the anniversary of a structure that’s the original placeholder in my catalog. But more than that, all the news of bridges and monuments left me feeling very special. I had no idea that so much had been built in anticipation of my arrival.

Pre-existing conditions

One summer not too many years ago a former colleague of mine spent a lot of time and energy trying to get his mother’s health insurance issues resolved. His mother lives in Oregon, but one of her relatives lives in Michigan. She travelled there for a visit that included a wedding – or perhaps a funeral – and while she was there she suffered a heart attack and had to be hospitalized. As a result of sitting close to her son, I now know that having health problems outside of your coverage area is a problem. A big problem. Day after day, my colleague explained in painful detail to the insurance people that even though the insured party lives in Oregon, the charges on the claim forms were from a hospital in Michigan. That’s because the insured party was in Michigan – not Oregon – when her heart failed. What I have written in this paragraph is simple enough. Explaining it to the insurance company, on the other hand, took an entire summer.

At times overhearing the conversations was heartbreaking, but at other times it was actually funny. “I’ll tell you what,” said my colleague, who speaks very deliberately. “The next time my mom has a heart attack we’ll be sure to schedule it so that she’s in Oregon when it happens.”

Unfortunately, I cannot find any humor listening to Harry Reid weasel in and out of one issue after another while trying to reform, allegedly, our healthcare system. What an ass. It’s not fair, but I cringe whenever he comes on the news and stammers through one of his proclamations, almost always read from a script on a podium. I react to him the same way I’d react to a church elder, or a senior member of a school board or a zoning committee. When I see and hear Harry Reid I want to throw a pie.

His public option non-statement yesterday was a perfect example of the half-assed triple talk that I’ve come to expect from Democrats. We’ll have a public option, he announced grandly, but states that don’t want it can opt out. That way the people who vote in favor of it can blast that sound bite around when they’re up for reelection. At the same time, they can pull the opt-out card when they need to appease the other side. And the rest of us can keep spending entire seasons on the phone, or on e-mail, explaining geography. We can keep sending forms back and forth, many of which will be lost in transit, so we can send some more. I thought, very naively, that we’d either have a public option or not. But I suppose that if we have one, we’ll have sort of one, kind of, something like a public option, but that depends, of course, on where you live, and on a few other factors we’ll all be able to easily reference in the “schedule of benefits.”

And best of all, just as we’ve done with all the gay marriage hoopla that is a direct result of Bill Clinton opting out of taking a firm stand and handing the whole mess over to the states instead, we can look forward to spending lots of time and money on local campaigns that will trick people in and out of voting for or against a version of what they really want that’s so confusingly worded and implemented that I’m starting to wish they’d drop the whole issue. That would be an ideal option for the Democrats, who really need to get busy campaigning. I’m not entirely sorry to say that I predict most them will be voted right out of office in 2010, which is almost here. I hope their forms are in good order.

Fat Tuesdays at my house

Every now and then someone gets on the television and says something so stunning that I write it down in the notebook I keep on the lower shelf of the coffee table. Late last year, when using the words “only” and “billion” in the same breath still caught my ear, when the Wall Street people were still cool enough that they gave themselves permission to be smug, one of the stunningly busy financial wizards grimaced into the camera and said this:

The reason the American economy is in trouble is that consumers aren’t buying things unless they need them.

Tuesdays haven’t been the same at my house since. That’s because every Tuesday a bunch of crap I neither need nor want arrives in my mailbox – the one that’s outside, attached to the house. It’s on Tuesdays that I learn about how much I could save by going with Comcast, how dramatically my life would improve if I subscribed to Clear, how much money I could save on pizzas, chicken wings, windshield repair (a huge business in Portland, for some reason) and Atlantic salmon down the road at QFC, provided I use my QFC card and make my purchase by 8 o’clock on Thursday evening. I wish I were the kind of person who takes the whole mess and dumps it directly into recycling, but I can’t. What if a friend has run off to Australia and sent me a postcard? What if an unknown relative has died and left me millions, which I’ll lose if I don’t respond within 30 days?

Those used to be the questions I pondered as I sorted through all the glossy pages, but after that truly insightful comment about our economy, I started wondering about something else. If QFC stopped sending out its weekly garbage, for example, how many people would be out of work? A photographer, for starters, which implies a food stylist. Someone not as fortunate as me in the writing field earns a living crafting copy about grapes and sirloin steak. There has to be a person who dreamed of being an artist who now uses a computer program to lay it out, and someone runs the printing press and puts the inserts into the bundles so that QFC’s weekly contribution can be stacked with the others (they should consider a tighter folding method, I think, because it’s always slightly off). Someone drives the truck. And somewhere in the mix, you can bet there are a few marketing people, one who “owns” the weekly production, who is probably with an agency, and one QFC employee – “in house,” she’s probably called – who has a big title and a big salary for supposedly leading the charge. Every quarter or so I’d imagine they all get together to “synch up” and when they do that they probably rent space and order catering and go out and spend money on some team building foolishness. Finally, I’ll bet there are a couple of assistants whose job is to keep it all running smoothly and then capture everything in a Power Point slide deck that’s quickly and easily accessible to all.

I call this sort of thing backwards thinking. I start where I am and try to calculate backwards, and it is enough to make me ill. Imagine if the entire junk mail industry evaporated. Imagine everyone who depends on telemarketing for a living losing his job. Every Tuesday I receive news of all sorts of goods and services I don’t need, but like a trained dog I now look at it not as the assault it is on so many levels, but as a piece of the economy. That’s awful. But misery really does love company, and last weekend I found some. On one of the Sunday morning programs the subject was food. In this country we’re addicted to twisted combinations of sugar, salt and fat. We eat so much, in fact, that we spend half a trillion dollars on food every year, and it shows. But there was a cautionary note in Sunday’s broadcast that made me feel a little less guilty about making peace – sort of – with the junk mail. Before we go too overboard getting up off or asses in the name of fitness, a reporter reminded me, it’s important to not lose sight of the economy. Recovering from food damage is a $59 billion per year industry in the U.S. That’s a lot of cash for a lot of people who have a lot of power, for now anyhow, to buy a lot of stuff they don’t really need.

I'll wash your body

I’m not sure when this happened, but at some point my desire for current music evaporated. It was scary, because it was one of those things that made aging hard to deny. “All that racket sounds the same to me,” my mother used to say. “It’s too loud.” We’d all roll our eyes. Wherever she may be now, it’s her turn to roll the eyes because I do not know the difference between Cold Play and Green Day and Third Eye Blind, and I don’t really care. I think Beyonce is to music what leaf blowers are to horticulture, and I’m one of the only homos I know who doesn’t own anything by Madonna recorded later than 1987. Speaking of racket, since I’ve lived in Portland for 15 years now I guess I should be embarrassed to admit that I still don’t know what the hell the big deal is about Nirvana.

My friend Luci and I got together for dinner last week. We went to a place in the neighborhood that has a wheelchair ramp leading to the front door. The ramp was installed the day after I fell out of the place and onto an unforgiving sidewalk at about one in the morning after drinking excessively with a couple of my brothers. Luci and I sat near the front. We ordered a pizza – this place has the best I’ve had in Portland, which isn’t saying much, but still – and got to talking about the nursing shortage, Facebook conversations, organizing a food co-op, a girl I’d gone to grade school with who could make her eyelids flutter like hummingbird wings and whose name was Caveat. A group of guys shot pool a few feet from our table, the burly, somewhat mannish woman who’d taken our order went outside for a smoke, someone at the bar laughed a loud, throaty laugh. The faint drone of other conversations was punctuated only by the clinking of ice cubes.

And then, the music.

In the summer of 1979, Teddy Pendegrass released a song called “Turn Out the Lights.” Three decades later, in a restaurant a block from my house, without the use of electronics or four-letter words or a line of designer jeans, that recording rearranged every single molecule in the building for five minutes and 56 seconds. Arranged above, or below, a beat that will not take no for an answer, a deep baritone voice, simple lyrics, strings and drums, that song says “we’ve got business to tend to, you and me,” in a way today’s technicians can only dream of. During the seduction last week, I looked around the restaurant and realized I was among some people who know the ins and outs of hedge fund management and some others who I’d bet have secret compartments in their wallets where they keep the bail money. I told Luci, rather crudely, about the effect that song had on me when it first saturated the air waves in Saint Louis when I was 13 years old. We sat quietly for a few minutes, Luci and I, listening. During the few minutes of that song, everything changed around us: the way people stood, their faces, the shots attempted on the pool table. Thinking back on it, it reminds me of the way people describe accidents: really quick according to the clock, but drawn out in other ways.

The thing about washing machines and cell phones is that when my parents bought appliances, they expected them to last, and they did. This summer I learned that it’s cheaper to buy a new refrigerator than to have the one you own repaired. Ditto with the cell phones. From what I’ve heard cell phones are obsolete the minute they’re purchased. After a year, they’re decrepit, prepped and ready for the landfill. Listening to Teddy Pendegrass sing about the lights last week, it occurred to me that the reason music from that time has staying power in a way that today’s crap doesn’t is because it was made to last. I could very well be in denial, but I don’t think my inability to appreciate today’s music is a symptom of aging: I think today’s music doesn’t enter my bloodstream the way older stuff does is because it’s as cheap and easily replaced as the rest of our symptoms.

One final thing about Teddy Pendegrass. Entering his name in a search engine yields very little. There was the accident in 1982 that left him paralyzed, the foundation he started, a few chronologies of his releases and pictures of his very, very hot body that were shot at concerts prior to 1982. Finally, I found an interview he’d done with a paper in Chicago, where a theater was about to stage his life story. In talking about his public persona before and since the accident, he said, “You can’t get me off the Internet.” At that point, I took his words to heart, shut the computer down and headed for what we used to call the record store, where I got him the old-fashioned way.

This story is far from over

When it comes to the stories about missing children, I am a lapsed Catholic who needs to get in for confession, and quickly. That’s because I do not care. I shuddered when that realization came to me, and I shudder at the way it feels in its written form. But barely a year into my full-blown addiction to network television, I’ve watched enough of these parodies that I not only do not care about the current one, I find it insulting.

The saga began early this week. A young girl, Somer, disappeared while walking home from school with her brother and sister somewhere in Florida. A lot of these stories originate in Florida, I’ve noticed. I do not know why. In absolute adherence to the formula, Good Morning America and its battalion of cameras and microphones was on the scene almost immediately after the girl’s mother reported her missing. And they wasted no time: By morning the mother was on national television, sitting beside the cop, sobbing as George Stephanopoulos asked her to tell everyone about Somer. She did her best. Then the cop answered a few questions about the search effort. During the search discussion the mother managed to compose herself, so George wrapped the cop chat up quickly and asked the mother, again, to please tell everyone what a wonderful little girl Somer is.

I cannot say which aspect I find more disturbing: the television people doing their best to work as many tears as possible out of a woman whose child has been snatched, or a mother whose child has been snatched appearing on national television. It’s dead even for me. I’m not raising a child, but if my son were abducted on his way home from grade school I cannot fathom taking the time to go downtown to the local affiliate’s studio for an interview, if you can call it that, with the purveyors of the cheap, two-dimensional sentimentality for which this country’s appetite is apparently insatiable.

But enough about the hosts and the parents: the best part of these shows is almost always the neighbors. The Somer saga is no different in that regard: this week was strewn with images of a large group of co-mourners. They were holding hands and they were holding candles. There were close-up shots of tear-streaked faces as the crowd broke into song: You are my sunshine, they sang, my only sunshine … When I see crap like that I cannot help but imagine an outline the news crew scribbles onto a piece of paper prior to the broadcast. The songs and the candles probably fall under the section labeled COMMTY COMING TGTHR. Finally, a shrine: candles, flowers, stuffed animals, balloons, lots of ribbon. Hate me for writing this if you will, but when I see those shrines I think not of a terrified, missing child. Instead, I find myself wondering what’s on sale this week at WalMart.

For some reason, I feel compelled to state very clearly that I do not dislike children or the people who have them. What I object to is how willing the television people are to manipulate, and how willingly manipulated the audience is. To say that the sort of shit served up by the “news” people has anything to do with childhood, or parenthood, or communities, or love itself is like saying a scratch and sniff experience is as good as taking in the glorious aroma of rain – the real kind, the kind that’s wet and falls from the sky.

They believe they’ve found Somer’s body in a dump in Georgia. Yesterday an expert was interviewed briefly about the search. He lauded the cop’s instinct to go check out the dump as “insightful and very innovative.” George paused for a split second and said, “This is so devastating.” Robin Roberts, who must have been in a particularly truthful sort of mood, closed the segment by saying, “This story is far from over.”

Getting organized

In addition to being really annoying, one of the most unfortunate aspects of excessive marketing is that when something relevant does come through, it often ends up in the trash with the other messaging. It pains me to admit this, but technically speaking the company whose e-mail program I use notified me that there was a very specific thing I needed to do on a very specific date in order to keep it functioning. The company whose e-mail program I use also notified me that I could access my contacts on my cell phone, easily transfer pictures taken with my cell phone to my e-mail and to my Web site, incorporate Web cam functionality into my e-mail, streamline my contacts in a number of ways, set up profiles so that I could communicate with a predefined group of recipients, “organize” and "integrate" all of my Linkedin contacts with all of my e-mail contacts, horse around with movies and music and on and on and on. These e-mails arrived once every 48 hours or so. I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t have a Web cam and I’m not interested in doing anything that marketing monkeys refer to as “streamlining” or “organizing.” I have plenty of time to spare, but there are hundreds of things I’d rather do than read trick mail, so I simply deleted the messages as soon as I saw them.

Unfortunately, I deleted the one about the download I had to do in order to keep the e-mail working, so it came as a huge surprise to me when, on an otherwise glorious morning toward the end of August, messages to and from me simply stopped coming and going. Over and over again I tried to fix it myself but the error message my e-mail coughed up about it simply said my connection to the server that handles the sending and the receiving had been terminated, which even I understood quite well. Rather than offer a solution to the problem, there was a long, long line of numbers and letters. A friend suggested that I type the error message into Google, which I did. I needed to download a program that connected my main e-mail program with my secondary one.

Let me explain. Years ago I signed up for an instant messenger program, which happens to be offered by the same company that offers the e-mail program I use. When I signed up for the instant messenger program, a new and separate (I thought – stupid me) e-mail account was automatically set up. Since I still use the messenger program, the other e-mail address is still active. The company that offers the service that powers both of my e-mail programs and the insant messaging system decided that everything needed to be connected. I live and die by e-mail, so once I figured out the error message, I downloaded the mandatory upgrade. The lawyers would argue, and rightly so, that the upgrade was not mandatory. It's true - I did indeed have the option of not being able to send and receive messages from my main e-mail account. I declined most of the add-on options for integration, many of which were similar to the marketing e-mails in their focus on my contacts list. While I’m certain that there are all sorts of technical benefits to this “upgrade,” thus far the main way my life has improved is that I now have five separate calendars included in my main e-mail account. As of today, I have:

· Original Calendar
· Personal Calendar
· My Calendar
· Birthday Calendar
· U.S. Holidays Calendar

Again, I’m sure I’m missing something on the technical front, but my new calendars don’t communicate with each other. Sometimes they don’t even communicate with me. I get a meeting request in the form of an e-mail, hit “Accept,” and sometimes it goes to birthdays, sometimes it goes to holidays, sometimes it goes God only knows where. Which is okay, because I like to pick up free logo-emblazoned pads of paper and pens at conventions, and I always keep one of each on my desk, right beside the computer. Directed by the force of habit, before I hit “Accept” for a conference call I jot down the time, the date, the dial-in number and the pass code required to participate. And oddly enough, I am usually the only one on the call who manages to arrive on time.

My green community

It is pledge week in Oregon. Actually, it’s pledge season in Oregon, where our NPR affiliate, OPB, seems to take its fundraising cues from the marketing people who bring us the holidays. What I mean by that is that I recently read that Valentine’s Day is on February 14 in order to bridge the sales and marketing wasteland that would otherwise exist between Christmas and Easter. Isn’t that pathetic? Our lives are on a spreadsheet, and included on that spreadsheet are OPB’s pledge drives, which used to happen two or three times a year. These days, the next one begins, it seems, before the current one ends.

I don’t know if it’s my general mood, or the very disturbing article I read, and reread, and reread yet again about some of the more remarkable ways that we’re doomed, but this particular pledge drive is driving me to a place I never thought I’d go: I am now one of those people who talks back to the radio.

This being Portland, and this being 2009, most of the jabber this weekend revolved around two terms: community and green.

Let’s start with community. When I was in the third grade, my father fell off the roof of our house. He had a thing for ladders, and heights, and impossible angles. He landed on the sidewalk at the base of the stairs that led to the front porch. He almost died. During the month he spent in the hospital, three of the husbands in the neighborhood came to our house and finished repairing the roof. There were no television cameras, there were no prayers posted to Facebook or tweeted out indiscriminately, there were no statements about the importance of “giving back” uttered in voices trembling with emotion on the evening news. Our neighbors helped my parents because they liked them. My parents were liked because the liquor cabinet at our house was always stocked and always open. The correlations were so much clearer in those days.

I never really thought about it until a few days ago, but that experience has always been my default definition of the term community, which got a real workout this weekend. On Saturday evening the pledge drivers were gushing about how very cool it is to get an update about some live music somewhere in Portland, perhaps a performance by a band you’ve never heard of, and because of OPB you can get in your car and go see a show and be part of the community. You can share it all with your friends on Facebook, you can use Twitter to talk about it, send some pics from your cell. By going to see a show, you can be a part of a community. Hell, you can even build a brand new community! “If you’re a new community member or a long-time member of the community, and you’re on your way to a concert you hadn’t planned on going to, call us here at OPB and let us know how that feels for you,” gushed a male voice. Here’s my answer, I thought from my couch: it doesn’t.

And of course there were giveaways. This being Portland, OPB has new recyclable shopping bags that they’re giving to new and renewing members to show their appreciation. The bags have cooler designs on to them, brought to us by some community-minded “artisan.” Has “artisan” officially replaced the word “artist”? It seems so. But back to the bags: I’d bet everything I own that there are more than a million recyclable shopping bags in Portland. I have 10 myself, and I haven’t even tried. And I wonder: Where are those things made? What are they made of? Is there a difference between reusable and recyclable? If you’re using something made of petroleum products, wouldn’t it be more environmentally considerate to use the brown paper bags from the store? Brown paper bags, by the way, make great wrapping paper. What about the dye used for the design? What kind of environmental impact do the colorings have? As I was pondering these questions, and laughing – sort of – at the shameless fakeness of it all, the female funding seeker chimed in with this gem: she loves the new bags from OPB, adores them really. That’s because she uses them to organize all the odds and ends that seem to never stop accumulating in her car. Perhaps she drives a hybrid, I thought as I popped in my favorite Willie Nelson CD.

The worst vote of his career

For many years I have made an honest effort to not become a single-issue voter. When I think of single-issue voters I think of the anti-choice crowd, or the pro-choice crowd for that matter, each of which crucifies candidates regardless of how closely all parties agree. If there isn't 100 percent alignment on the abortion issue, all bets are off. Period.

It’s always seemed wasteful to me, and shockingly inflexible, but the idea of voting against politicians simply because of their stance on gay issues is starting to appeal to me. I love Obama, I thank God for Obama, and have done so each and every day since he was sworn in. But his decision to have Rick Warren say a public prayer at the inauguration is unforgiveable, and I for one I’m psyching myself up to not forgive it. Why the hell should I? After all the talk about hope and change and progress, why would Obama select the chief cheerleader in the California crusade against recognizing marriages between two men or two women to deliver the nation’s message to God on inauguration day? And why, really, was it okay for him to say he’s against gay marriage during the campaign? If that was just a political move, did he really need to follow through with it in a way that absolutely degrades gay people? I’ve heard enough about the big tent, personally. When it comes to the fact that I’m of a lower class of citizenship than my brothers and sisters – literally and figuratively – in the eyes of our government, the talk of reconciliation and reaching across the aisle – what aisle? – resonates with me about as much as the weekly mailers announcing that whole fryers are 79 cents a pound at Safeway while supplies last.

And I have heard enough out of Earl Blumenauer. I have always been happy to vote for him to be my voice in the U.S. House of Representatives. I agree with his positions on most of the issues, including public transportation, the death penalty and our law that allows doctors to help their terminally ill patients end their lives on their own terms. But I’m baffled by his recent PR blitz regarding his rethinking his vote in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed in 1996 and signed by Bill Clinton. First of all, Blumenauer came out with his confession that it was the worst vote of his career on the Huffington Post, where he explained that the logic behind his vote was to block the efforts of Newt Gingrich and company so that he could work to advance other issues important to gay citizens. How very bold and brave of him. I love the Huffington Post but it’s really nothing more than an applause machine for liberals. The congressman wasn't nearly as forthcoming on his own Web site. If his news of his admission is posted there at all, it's very well hidden. Still, we were pretty stoked about it in Oregon, of course. High fives for Earl all around, you might say.

I’m not joining the chorus just yet. I’m not here to complain about his actual vote. What puzzles me is how someone could mistake the intentions behind DOMA, vote for it and then, more than a decade later, suddenly see the light. If a heart and head can be unclear enough to be changed about legislation that clearly says some unions are more constitutionally defensible than others, I’m starting to seriously doubt that they belong to a person I want to represent me. Think about different religions, or different races, or different native languages, and substitute those terms for “gay” in the DOMA wording and see how it sits. Is there any way that it could be mistaken for anything other than a calculated tool for dividing people and pitting people and groups against each other? How could someone not know that from the start? How could someone not anticipate the impact?

Earl Blumenauer will be reelected next year with or without my vote. He’s the pope of left-wing Portland. As for me, I’ve never joined a political party, or a church for that matter, and while I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life, I’m sorely tempted to try it out and see how it feels. In the abstract, the thought of it is a weird blend of shame and elated nastiness. In the abstract it reminds me of the first time I kissed another boy. On that hot and oppressive summer evening we hid in the back bedroom of the house where I grew up, which was permeated with the scent of freshly cut grass as my father carefully maneuvered around the tomato beds with the lawn mower. I’ll never forget the thrill of knowing I was about to do something terribly wrong, and loving it.

10,000 for whom?

Second only to the fact that there is no comments section, my favorite part of reading history books is how eerily familiar they are. Change the incidentals of a few major plot points and update the proper names and linguistic conventions, and history could easily serve as a primer for the evening news.

I’ve always been interested in U.S. history. Maybe it’s because I was born in this country and will likely die here. Take the Civil War, for example. The assumptions, the psychology, the schemes – they’re all breathtaking, really, twisted and convoluted in a way that would engage even the most ardent reality television devotees.

Even with all of our so-called sophistication, here’s something quite simple from history that endures: the people with the power, the money and the control can always rely on those beneath them – those they exploit – to do their bidding. Before the Civil War, the poor whites who did not own land or other humans aligned not with the slaves, with whom they had much in common in terms of money and influence, but with the masters. At the corporation where I used to work, the support staff – “the admins” – didn’t band together to protect one another from an abusive “senior exec” who made 10 times what they did. They took each other out as a brutal show of loyalty to their “senior exec” instead.

And last week, guess who led the cheers over the news that the Dow had reached and surpassed 10,000 for the first time in a year? I logged onto Facebook – my deactivated account still grants me access – and was shocked at the number of exclamation marks and smiley faces on behalf of the stock market. Many of these cheerleaders lost their jobs last year, when their employer decided that the bonus pool was more worthy of preservation than their position. Many of them are borrowing money to make payments on mortgages that are worth more than their property. Many of them have foregone health insurance in the past six months. Many of them are contract workers for big, global companies, “at will” employees who receive zero benefits. Many of them are on the receiving end of the dirtiest trick ever played on this country’s middle class: their 401k accounts could disappear at any time, with or without warning. In fact, many of them lost more than half the money they thought was theirs for retirement.

Many of these people – myself included – are not wealthy. We do well, we have enough for now, but the truth of it is that our demographics could skid in an afternoon. Those of us – myself included – who have fooled ourselves into believing we’re members of the middle class need to take a truth pill. When it comes to cash, we have a lot more in common with minimum-wage earners, whose paychecks are being adjusted downward to accommodate inflation, than we do with Wall Street, where record-breaking salaries and bonuses are being handed out just in time for the holidays. I for one don’t care how many bottles of champagne are popped by the men and women on the news who have the audacity to wear baseball caps with “10,000 2.0” printed on them. I say audacity because as the Dow rises, so too do two other numbers: the national unemployment rate is about to tip 10 percent, and we now are now spending a trillion dollars that we don’t have. Apologies for my premature bah humbug, but I don’t think the wealthier using public cash to get wealthier while the rest of us don’t is cause for celebration. Even Diane Sawyer asked if perhaps a “quiet revolt” was brewing. Then Karl Rove came on and explained that excessive salaries aren’t the issue. The issue is that Wall Street saved the day and if it hadn’t received government money, many people would have lost their jobs and small businesses would have collapsed. The Obama people shouldn’t be trying to dictate how much money goes toward salaries, he explained. That’s not how the system works.

Comparing the excitement over this week’s Wall Street surge expressed by those who will inevitably be damaged by it to the poor whites siding with plantation owners in the pre-Civil War South isn’t a perfect analogy – I’ve yet to see one that is – but it’s close enough for discomfort.

Quite a show

I really should know better, because tricking myself into thinking that things cannot possibly get any worse is almost always a bad idea. But yesterday’s stupidity was so offensive to me that I thought I’d better go buy a crash helmet. Certainly, I thought, we are close, very close, to hitting bottom.

I wish I could say that’s it’s just the morning news shows doing their best to confuse people. Good Morning America spent the first 17 minutes of this morning’s broadcast replaying footage of the balloon. Over and over the screen filled with the image of the balloon leaving the family’s yard, flying through a beautiful Colorado sky and, finally, coming down for a landing. The airport in Denver diverted traffic, helicopters were recruited into the rescue effort. Diane Sawyer interviewed the family and at one point the boy who was believed to be in the balloon – whose name is Falcon – said, “We did this for the show.” That’s not what he meant, the father said. Oh wait, the ‘for the show’ comment was made during a Larry King interview. Everyone’s tired, exhausted from their ride on the emotional rollercoaster. Falcon had to be taken to the bathroom to throw up – you could hear it during the interview – because he has asthma and sometimes it upsets his stomach. The family was on some spouse swapping reality show, and it can get exhausting. Diane Sawyer put on her best shocked voice and asked: Could this have been a hoax? For a brief, hopeful moment I thought she was referring to her career.

It’s offensive enough that this crap poisons the morning air waves, but it’s inexcusable that it was the lead story on the CBS Evening News (that was Walter Cronkite’s program once upon a time, not that terribly long ago, relatively speaking). This morning, the death of four U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was mentioned for about 10 seconds after the 17-minute analysis of the balloon family. And last night, after Katie Couric and her crew were finished with their lead story, they let us know that people who depend on Social Security for their survival will not be receiving a cost of living adjustment this year.

The whole thing reminded me of one of my favorite news stories. Years ago, an elderly man in Missouri – not one of my relatives – was sentenced to jail because he used his unregistered rifle to destroy his television set. I apologize for switching gears from the riveting story about the balloon family to something as mundane as the economy, but if anyone in Oregon is considering taking the television out with a rifle today, please, if your weapon is unregistered, sit back and take a few deep breaths. The state offices that issue permits for firearms are closed today due to mandatory furloughs. That’s because we’re broke.

Was Anna Nicole a Victim of Conspiracy?

Although it wasn’t on my calendar, I’m pretty sure Monday was National Juxtaposition Day.

I often wonder how what makes it into the headlines gets there, and on Monday I think I found out. Partially found out, I’m sorry to say, but it’s a start.

On the Media is one of NPR’s more obnoxious programs, but I listen. I think it’s an interesting idea, and I do like the stories they fish out from around the world about how news becomes news, or doesn’t. Unfortunately the two hosts are hard to take for an entire hour – they’re so caught up in their own self-congratulatory brand of cleverness that they somehow wink over the radio, which takes talent, I think. I tune in and out depending on what’s going on in my house.

And what was going on in my house on Monday was Brent Payne, the search engine maestro for Tribune Interactive, as in Chicago. Search engine optimization, or SEO to the cool kids, is all the rage. Job descriptions are littered with the term and, not surprisingly, so are resumes. There is a certificate factory in Portland that specializes in SEO training. There are conferences on SEO, there are SEO columns in trade publications. If there isn’t already, there will soon be a monthly magazine that is all about SEO, and there will be an awards program for SEO experts.

I could hardly listen to Mr. Payne, who came across as a pompous ass of the most insufferable sort, but I couldn’t stop listening either. Headlines written with intelligence and linguistic dexterity, he explained, are no longer the goal. That’s because it’s important to keep the searching function in mind when writing a headline, which, in his world, is nothing more than a tool for driving traffic (that means getting people to click on your Web site, and the more traffic you attract the more you can charge for advertising). He illustrated the complexity of his job by saying that if you’re writing a headline about Michael Jackson, check the alliterations etc. at the door and just be sure to include the terms “Michael Jackson” and “dead.” And if you don’t, he’ll change it for you, because that’s his job. In fact, he can change the stories too. He’s been given that much authority. This guy is so ahead of the curve he didn’t even use the word “newspaper.” He used the terms “Web property” and “destination” instead.

Convincing me further that it was a juxtaposition holiday was the fact that Brent Payne, much like the social media experts I’ve encountered, took a good shot at the “elitism” of what they call traditional journalism. What made the news used to be determined by a select few. Now it’s more of a conversation. The playing field, so they say, has been leveled. Which is funny, because each and every one of these self-appointed czars of the next big thing I have ever met, heard or read has come across as completely condescending. Payne, for example, posted a Tweet recently about how even though there isn’t a single condo in his building that cost less than 400 K, he can still hear neighbors arguing. How cool of him, how down with the masses he is. I guess I’m stuck up, but I’d trust the news more if I thought it was influenced only by “media elites” rather than people like Brent Payne, whose resume reads like a marketing textbook glossary, including the part about his degree from a college I’ve never heard of in Utah, where he majored in technical sales. That’s right: a person who majored in technical sales, whatever the hell that means, is playing a role in what news goes where. Given that, it’s not quite as surprising that news about dead celebrities and reality television holds its own against news about our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the other end of the juxtaposition, and toward the end of the holiday, I received a telephone call from a woman with a very smoky voice. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in being part of a focus group that goes around town evaluating grocery stores. I like grocery stores, so I said sure. She asked me a few non-invasive questions as I pulled her company up on the Internet to make sure it wasn’t a bogus call. Then we got to the employment part. She asked if anyone in my household – including me – had ever worked in marketing or PR. I told her I had and that I still do. She said she was sorry but that my employment history disqualified me. “I’d love to work with you, but we don’t make exceptions,” she said. She apologized for wasting my time and we said our goodbyes. I shut the computer down for the day, figuring I’d quit while I was ahead.

A few extra minutes

Anyone who knows me knows that I hate nothing quite as much as driving. I have a mental block about the whole thing. I’m on intimate terms with the energy it requires to pedal up a hill, so the concept of barely exerting your foot to propel a deadly assemblage of metal, glass and fuel forward at horrifying speeds is more than I can grasp. As they say, you need only scratch the surface of hatred to reveal fear. That’s right: I am scared speechless by vehicles and the people who drive them.

Oddly enough, the traffic report is one of my favorite parts of the local morning news. The traffic reporter, who favors short-sleeved, belted jackets, comes on every 15 minutes or so. First we see the endless expanse of brake lights on I-84, our highway without a shoulder. That’s followed by a shot of the people from Vancouver sitting at a dead stop while they wait to get onto the bridge to Oregon. Finally, there is almost always a jam on the Sunset, which connects Portland and the suburbs in Washington County. “It’s a good idea to give yourself a few extra minutes this morning,” the traffic reporter says cheerfully.

So I started wondering about a couple of things. First, give yourself a few extra minutes this morning for what? That’s simple: give yourself a few extra minutes so that you too can sit in traffic. I guess there are some useful things that could be accomplished while sitting on a jammed up highway. People could think about their relationship with God, maybe. Or they could masturbate, which would perhaps lead to contemplating their relationship with the universe, especially as a beautiful Oregon skyscape gradually, as if by magic, unfolds all around them. But, speaking more practically, I suppose people could post a status update to Facebook, or send some Tweets, or read e-mail messages to prepare for a 9:30 meeting – but read only in a half-assed sort of way, because it is impossible to really read something with one eye on traffic, even if it is at a standstill, but that’s okay, because being too busy to really prepare for a meeting is a status symbol like no other. I guess the most productive thing people can do when they sit in traffic is call everyone they know on their cell phone and explain, in excruciating detail, how bad the traffic is and then say very insightful things, like, “sorry, but we’re gonna have to push the meeting out a bit because there’s no way I’ll make it on time.” Or they can call their office, or their assistant, or some other poor soul to ask the question that, based on my many years of listening to one side of cell phone conversations, is the number-one concern for the mobile crowd: Did I get any messages?

Nope, sorry, no messages, but someone did leave a question: Where the hell are you going? I live in Portland, which is consistently lauded for its technological sophistication. You can’t go anywhere in this town – including my front porch – without being subjected to someone blaring into a cell phone. There are laptops everywhere, from the hardware store (seriously) to the hospitals and hotels. Coffee shops in my neighborhood don’t even boast of their wi-fi capabilities anymore. That would be as redundant as a Chinese restaurant announcing “We have rice!” Even I receive text messages … on my land line, where they are translated for me by an automated voice. Why then are the roadways clogged every morning with vehicles, most of them carrying only one person?

I’d like to know more about it. I’d like to stand in a jam on I-84, say, and go rap my knuckles on car windows and ask the drivers to tell me about where they’re going, and why they’re going there at this particular hour. Maybe someday I’ll do that, but for now I’m really enjoying sitting on my couch with my coffee and enjoying the traffic report instead. The mornings have been noticeably cooler lately, and the sun rises later by a few minutes each day, and that blur of red and white lights on the screen as the traffic reporter whizzes through her delay update sort of puts me in the mood for Christmas, which is right around the corner.

This is not how we do things in America

On Friday morning I was up earlier than usual. I made my coffee, made my bed and turned on the television. That’s when I learned that in the very wee hours of the morning something unexpected had happened.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am so glad that Barack Obama is the president of the United States that, if given the chance, I’d gladly vote to have his portrait replace Andrew Jackson’s on the $20 bill. Hell, in the spirit of Andrew Jackson’s criminal tendencies, I’d even vote twice.

I’ll probably never have the opportunity to cast that vote, though. Another issue I’ll most likely never be able to vote my opinion on concerns the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t think I would have voted to give the award to Barack Obama. I think I would have voted for someone who has committed his or her heroics off camera in a more immediate, one-on-one capacity. That said, I do think that Obama has done more for my country’s standing in the world in less than 12 months than the Bush family did in 12 years. If there is any hope for a peaceful future – and I am not convinced that there is – we have to have people in power who bring an inherent sense of respect to the equation. In my opinion, W. and Condoleezza Rice were abysmal failures in that regard, and I for one am glad their reign is over.

I expect the worst of people who speak into microphones for a living, but even I was appalled at the tantrum that started before sunrise on Friday morning: This isn’t fair! This is undeserved! This is just more of the liberal agenda being forced down our throat! He should give it back!

For a while it was amusing. Then a radio host in Portland said that awarding someone a prize based on aspirations rather than accomplishments just isn’t how we do things in America. I was tempted to call the radio station and explain to whomever was unfortunate enough to be on telephone duty on Friday morning that Nobel prizes are based in Sweden, with the peace prize being awarded in Oslo, which is in Norway, and that’s to honor a union between the two countries – Sweden and Norway – that was in effect at the time of Alfred Nobel’s death, so it’s kind of not so surprising that it isn’t done our way. But instead of getting on the telephone I made another pot of coffee and went out on the front porch for a smoke (it was a gorgeous morning in Portland), and that’s when it occurred to me that the whole thing was being talked about as if it were Dancing with the Stars or American Idol or some other utterly brainless contest show that encourages zombies from around the world to text in their fakeness so that they can feel like they’re part of something relevant.

Of course, I do feel kind of left out and neglected. Nobody called me from Sweden prior to the announcement, and nobody called from Norway. Even the White House hasn’t called me to find out what I think, and how I feel, which is too bad, because I know exactly what I’d say: Good morning, President Obama. Congratulations.

Moving to Oregon

One of the more tasteless relics of Oregon history is a billboard that thanked people for visiting the state and then reminded them to please go home at the conclusion of their vacation. It ranks right up there with the bumper stickers that were patterned after the old license plates that said, simply, Native Oregonian. The real message behind the billboards and bumper stickers, I think, is this: We stole this territory, we exploited it for our own purposes, we treated the people who lived here before we arrived poorly, and now it’s ours and you’re not welcome. I’m not sure what hope we can hold out for an informed future that includes an honest perspective when we’re so willing to erase our history and carry on as if the land didn’t exist until we stood on it. At best it seems lazy, and at worst it strikes me as dangerous.

And yet.

For many months now the unemployment rate in Oregon has been above 12 percent. For a while we were behind only Michigan and South Carolina, but then they tried to balance the checkbook down in California, which caused Oregon to fall in the rankings.

The numbers, when they’re repeated often enough, fade to abstraction. They’re overwhelming, they exist independently of any context, but every now and then I hear something that sticks. In September a waitressing job was advertised by a café in Hillsboro, a suburb of Portland that not too many years ago was verdant farm land before Intel blessed the town by building a chip factory there, which it promptly shut down last year. Even though it was a part-time job with no benefits, more than 250 people applied.

Then, this: approximately 36,000 people with college degrees have moved to Portland in the last 12 months. Assuming a commercial jet can ferry 150 passengers, it would take 240 of them to transport the new residents of Portland into town. I didn’t have a job when I moved here in 1994. Not only did I not have a job, I didn’t even have a plan. My move to Oregon was completely accidental. What I did have was a savings account, which I’d funded by setting aside a certain amount of money each time I got a paycheck. Savings accounts, I’ve learned, are about as outdated as love letters. They’re old-fashioned, quaint.

Not long ago a woman who has been desperately looking for a job for more than a year said on television that she thought people who have lived in Oregon for more than a year should be given a few bonus points during the application process. To me, that’s a horrifying sentiment, until, that is, I see someone with a degree from Brown or Yale or the University of Michigan smile across the television screen and say, “If you’re going to be on unemployment, Portland’s a great place for it.” Blaming problems on people based on their demographic is a cheap and easy way out, I think. The logic of it has led to atrocities from the beginning of time. But I’ve heard statements like that enough times that my thoughts now automatically leapfrog to wondering if that’s why a statewide tax hike is in the works.

I don’t really subscribe to the hype around here about Oregon’s “green economy” or our “creative class.” Instead I follow the math part of the story, which is blessedly free of talking points and messaging: There are more qualified applicants here than there are jobs. To put it into perspective, to give it a little color, last weekend the computer network that handles unemployment claims, along with the telephone service it relies upon, couldn’t process the number of transactions, which increased dramatically over the previous week because Sunday was the day to file for an emergency extension. In a very eloquent example of cause and effect, the system was so overwhelmed that it crashed.

It really does take a village

I have been meaning to get rid of the porn for years. The four plastic DVD cases reside in the back of one of my sock drawers, and the only purpose they serve these days is that whenever I see them I know I can no longer put off doing the laundry. I’m not at all high-minded about porn. I understand it, and I’ve certainly indulged. Maybe it’s age, or experience, but after watching enough of it, seeing two or more attractive naked people do nasty things in front of a camera is no more exciting than grocery shopping, or smoking a cigarette. I know the ending long before we’re there.

The non-porn movie situation at my house is equally ho hum. That’s because I’ve been living without a DVD player for more than a year now. A friend got me one for my birthday a few years ago. I got it hooked up and working all on my own. The process included a trip to Best Buy to get a box with color-coded cords and plugs that in some bizarre way connected the television with the DVD player. When the player stopped working it only took a few phone calls to realize that nobody really repairs them. It’s cheaper, I learned, to just buy a new one. More useless shit for the landfill, I thought bitterly.

I kept thinking I would pick up a new one, but at the time I was sort of busy not drinking, and there was a very interesting presidential campaign underway, and I became very fond of some truly trashy television programs and before I knew it it was Spring and time for the conversion to digital. A week – an entire week! – before the conversion and with no help from anyone else I was good to go.

Good to go with one exception: hooking up a DVD player would require another series of connections and routings and plugging this into that and reading directions that were clearly fast tracked right past the proofreading desk and on and on to the point where I thought, screw this.

Now it’s October, and it all happened so fast it left me dizzy. First I was at a birthday party and a woman I know and I got to talking. Her mission used to be to eradicate Styrofoam but now it’s to write new lyrics for Happy Birthday. Still, for old times’ sake we chatted a bit about how evil the disposable DVD player situation is. It exploits the people who work in the factories where they’re manufactured, she said. “Ahh come on,” said her husband. “It keeps ‘em cookin’!” Seven days later I was at Fred Meyer with my neighbor and friend Cindy and her husband Chris (he was the birthday boy at the party). Chris knows how to take things apart and hook things up. He took one look at the box and immediately honed in on the text about batteries, which I’d been unable to find. “It doesn’t come with batteries,” he said. “You’ll need to get some batteries.” So I did, but only after the very friendly guy behind the counter in electronics sliced the box open so we could see if it required AA or AAA (it was AA). This is a total aside, but if you’re going to take the time and money to print things on the box of your product, such as “Batteries not Included,” why wouldn’t you go ahead and specify the type of batteries that aren’t included and therefore need to be purchased?

Anyhow, on Sunday afternoon, without reading a single line of directions, Chris connected everything: the DVD player, the digital converter box, the DVD-to-television box and the television itself. Before I knew it the time for a test run had arrived. I went into my bedroom, opened the sock drawer and froze. There was no way. My friends are not prudes in the slightest, but I’m starting to think I am. I was horrified at the thought of walking into the living room with a little travel adventure film about Damon’s trip to New York, or Dawson’s weekend on Fire Island. What had seemed very funny seconds before was suddenly anything but, so I went next door, where my neighbor Steve was power washing a carpet in the driveway. I asked him if he had a DVD I could borrow. “Any DVD,” I said. “I just need one to test the new DVD player and I … I don’t have any.” He said sure, no problem. “I’ll find something that’s worth watching,” he said, and went inside.

And that’s how this week started. Sunday night is a big television night at my house, so I resisted the urge to play with my new toy. But I got up extra early on Monday and made the coffee in the dark. I put on my favorite sweats, plugged in the white string lights – they’re not just for Christmas around here – and parked it on the couch. With a cup of strong coffee in one hand and my third remote in the other, I hit Play at 5:57 AM and watched The Godfather.

Helen

I have a thing for women named Helen. My grandmother, who was my first Helen, would have turned 111 last month. She drank whiskey and smoked menthol cigarettes. She knit sweaters without patterns and baked bread without recipes. Once she called one of my brothers “asinine” because he flunked his driver’s test by speeding. That was more than 20 years ago, and he’s still pouting over it. She had that kind of power, I think. My grandma was so cool that she knew I was gay long before I did, and, in her own sort of coded way, said so.

The library in the town where I grew up had huge columns in the front and looked sort of like Monticello. Inside there were quiet, orderly aisles lit by daylight that poured in through huge windows. You could go places in that building, but it was always under the watchful eyes of Helen Mardorff. What I recall of her is that she wore her narrow, chained eyeglasses low on her nose, and the quick and quiet way she pulled the long yellow pencil from behind her ear as if it were a wand and then printed the due date on an index card, which was then tucked into a pocket taped inside each book’s front cover. I also remember the whispery sound the books, protected in their plastic sheathes, made as she pushed them across the counter once she’d done her business. I don’t know if she’s alive or not, but in my mind Helen Mardorff lives on as the sheriff of Storyville.

Helen Thomas has been working at the White House since Kennedy was president. She’s now 89 years old and requires assistance to get in and out of the press room. In a more perfect world, Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric would be taken off the air and reassigned to a new, more productive role: assisting Helen Thomas.

I could waste quite a few words in support of my idea, but the following exchange between Helen Thomas and Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, says it all better than I ever could:

Helen: Has the president given up on the public option? I ask it day after day because it has great meaning in this country, and you never answer it.

Robert: Well, I apparently don’t answer it to your satisfaction.

Helen: That’s right.

Robert: I’ll give you the same answer that I gave you unsatisfactorily for many of those other days. It’s what the president believes in.

Helen: Is he going to fight for it or not?

Robert: We’re going to work to get choice and competition into healthcare reform.

Helen: You’re not going to get it.

Robert: Then why do you keep asking me?

Helen: Because I want your conscience to bother you.

Regardless of how you feel about healthcare reform, or lack thereof, certainly you will understand how this simple exchange gave me a glimmer of hope that we can live in a country where the reporters don’t only ask real questions – an accomplishment all on its own – but also expect real answers.

Brazil

I had a good laugh on Friday morning when NPR announced that Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics had been rejected. In round one of the voting, no less. The whining began instantly. How could this have happened? How could this be? Rio is so overrun with crime and poverty and how oh how could they have chosen Rio over us? Chicago, according to many, was the clear front runner. Even the bookies favored it just before the vote in Copenhagen. I laughed some more. By noon – Pacific time – the voices on the radio were already connecting the dots between Obama’s handling of healthcare to Obama’s handling of the Olympic bid. He talks a good game but he’s clearly not a closer.

Part of my amusement on Friday was the residual rage I still harbor from a realization I had before I was old enough to vote. I give my father an A for the tact with which he explained something to his flaming gay son that still burns my ass: sports teams play by different rules. In high school, the glugs who artlessly lumbered around on the field on Friday nights were forgiven if they skipped biology class, if they got caught drinking at parties, if they got into fistfights every now and again. I knew a fine young man who was obsessed with Tennessee Williams and William Shakespeare. When he took the stage magic happened. He got straight A’s in Latin class but ended up in summer school – that was polite speak for detention in the early 1980s – because he’d been late for gym class too many times. Rules are rules, we were told. Here was the main rule: He wasn’t a jock and therefore not a darling of the Booster Club – that was the group of parents who believed they were still in high school. “Sports makes money,” my father told me. “If the team wins a big game, the rich people write checks to the alumni club. But creative writing, well, you know …”

Certainly, I remember thinking, my father was wrong. But in college most people I knew scraped together student loans and worked part-time jobs and ate questionable diets for four years (it was the Reagan era) and then spent the next two decades paying it all back. Not the football team. They had nice workout facilities, their books were paid for, their meals covered. In Madison, Wisconsin, members of the football team beat some guy within inches of his life and kept right on playing. As I recall, the guy they beat up was unable to identify his attackers because he was in a coma. Go Badgers! In Portland, this year, one of the players repeatedly punched people on the field, but he’ll probably be back in uniform by next month, having learned, according to the coach, from “his teachable moment.” Go Vikings!

I’m 43 now and I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the religious fervor of sports. It’s that powerful, and then some. The local and world economy is collapsing, people are starving, we’re poisoning ourselves more rapidly than ever before. There are no jobs and the schools, as always, are broke. But when it comes to sports, we’ve got cash to burn. If there’s a combination of laughing and shuddering, it’s my reaction to seeing the working stiffs interviewed on the local news, where they explain they’ll gladly pay more for tickets to the Portland Trailblazers’ games if there’s a chance the team is going to make it into the playoffs. We worship basketball in Portland. Go Blazers!

If all the mythology were scraped away, my calculations tell me that a rational society would stage a worldwide riot after watching just five minutes of the extravagance that took place in Copenhagen last week. Fortunately we’re not a rational society, because there were no major uproars over the fact that, even though Chicago is in a dismal state of financial affairs, $74 million was essentially flushed down the toilet.

I’m no better than anyone else, I suppose. Rather than agitate all the time, I do allow myself to savor one part of the Olympics: the opening ceremonies. In 2004, the multi-million dollar drag show in Athens was truly spectacular. I remember it well. My sister and two of my nieces were in town because my brother and his wife had just welcomed their son. We hadn’t had any new babies in the family for years so a trip to Portland was in order. One night, most of the family went down the street to a sushi bar. My sister-in-law stayed in the bedroom with my nephew and tried to get some sleep. One of my nieces and I sat on the couch and watched the parade of athletes with the volume way down. My niece was just learning to appreciate the allure of fine-tuned male flesh, so we sat on the couch, trying to predict which wonder jock would appeal to the other. The teams filed in in alphabetical order, and we had each other’s tendencies figured out by the time France entered the stadium: she liked the blonde, Nordic types, me, the Mediterraneans. It was a wonderful show, and it left me a very fond memory. Which is great, because even though my niece is now halfway through college and my nephew started kindergarten last month, the fine people of Athens are still paying down the debt their country incurred that evening. And for that I thank them.

Be careful out there

If the state of Oregon were a person, and that person came in for therapy, and I was the therapist on duty, here’s what I would say: As a child your parents forced you to stay at home too much. They denied you the experience of participating in your own narrative. As a result, every time you see another group or individual having an experience that you’re not a part of, you act out in ways that allow you to be at the heart of the action, confused into a state where you believe the experience is your own.

On that dark and tragic June afternoon when our Michael was taken from us, the regular radio and television programming was interrupted by the national town criers, who were in turn interrupted abruptly with word that for those of us in Portland the loss was indeed personal. That’s because one of Michael’s former guitar players lives in one of our suburbs. As more than one stunned interviewee stated, often through tears, this really hits close to home. So close, in fact, that many of us gathered that evening at vigils that sprouted up like hope itself throughout the city. There were songs and speeches and prayers and lots and lots of weeping. But we supported each other in our moment of grief and together we got through it. Michael would have wanted it that way. He loved us so, and we loved him.

That was nothing compared to the coverage of the tsunami this week, reported live from the Oregon coast. If you are reading this and you don’t live in Oregon, you may be wondering what the disturbances in the Pacific – an earthquake and a tsunami, in American Samoa and Indonesia – have to do with Oregon. That’s a great question. And here’s a great answer: absolutely nothing.

According to news this morning, the death toll has surpassed one thousand. Lives have been lost, roads have been washed away like a mistake in a water color painting in progress, buildings have been turned upside-down and inside-out, people are missing. But here in Oregon, our reporters jumped in their vans and raced one another to the coast, where they beamed updates back to the gravely concerned news anchors, who reassured all of us that there probably wasn’t anything to worry about but still, a little precaution was probably in order.

When it comes to the 10 o’clock news on our local Fox station – channel 12 – I am a hopeless addict. I know the danger of the needle, but I shoot up anyhow, just this one last time. Each night, about 12 minutes into the newscast, a booming voice announces, You’re watching the 10 o’clock news, and we are just getting started.

And Fox 12 does not disappoint. On Monday, in addition to having a reporter standing beside the shore in San Francisco and many more reporters on the coast in Oregon, one guy really delivered. He held a plastic water bottle that was about half full. The camera panned in on the bottle, which he held sideways. He jiggled it a bit from the bottom, the South Pacific, and water subsequently splashed toward the top of the bottle, which represented the Oregon coast. “That’s how a tsunami works, basically,” he said.

With award-worthy performances like that, who cares about a bunch of dead and displaced folks halfway around the world? This story is ours. It hits close to home, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

A new faucet

Last week I got a new kitchen faucet. That may sound like the most mundane thing imaginable, and in a way it was. In another way it wasn’t.

I have a kitchen fetish. The kitchen was the nerve center of the house I grew up in. My father built a table that accommodated the dimensions while still seating eight. I was four or five years old when that table was built, and my father let me make a couple of brush strokes on the underside of it. I could write a book, or maybe two, about the things I learned at that table, which is a very mod shade of orange. It was eventually retired, replaced with a smaller, more squareish table and exiled to the attic, where it sits today, waiting for me to have it shipped to Oregon. My brothers and sisters and I divvied up everything in that house after our father died last year, and that table is the only thing I really want.

Portland misses the mark when it comes to kitchens, I think. They’re small and boxy, most of them, too big to be called a galley, too small for a real sit-down table. In the newer homes – the suburban monstrosities and the ostentatious condos in the city – the open kitchen seems to be all the rage. Personally, I think an open kitchen is a bad idea. First of all, do you really want to sit in your living room and look at the dirty dishes waiting for you in the kitchen? I don’t. But more importantly, open kitchens take all the romance out of it. There is no place for secrets in an open kitchen, and without secrets what’s the point?

The kitchen in my house is awful. It’s “L” shaped, sort of, but the small end of the “L” is where the refrigerator is, so there goes any chance of having a real table and chairs. Unless, that is, I were to move the refrigerator, which would require tearing out cabinets and cost lots of counter space. The cabinets on the wall are the originals, I think, although they’ve been painted so many times – including the hinges – that their surface is like a sponge. The counter is uneven, installed on the cheap, I’m sure. One of the lower shelves is about to fall right off its hinges, and rather than fix it I hold my breath every time I walk past it. The walls are the color of an antacid tablet.

It’s embarrassing to admit that for the past two years – yes, two years, eight seasons – I worried about the faucet. There was a single lever that required a shift to the left for hot water. There was a knob on the end of the faucet that, when pressed, switched the whole thing to spray mode. Shutting the water off made me nervous because it required more and more finesse. Guiding the lever to the left and slightly toward me usually worked, but the faucet always dripped. Over the last few months the handle felt less and less solid, less connected, which made me think that the washers were about to give out.

And then what, I wondered. I pictured water gushing out from where the faucet used to be, I pictured the kitchen flooded, so I made a few calls. My friend Derek rolled his eyes and grunted when I told him what the plumbers I’d spoken with told me it would cost, per hour, and how many hours they imagined it would take, and how those hours did not include going to buy the new faucet, which would be extra.

It was done in a couple of hours, and that included a stop at the post office. The most time-consuming part was removing the old faucet, which included a very odd connection to the water filtering system and a built-in soap dispenser. I’m still laughing at the soap dispenser, a gift from the same cleanliness-minded family that put contact paper down in the cabinet beneath the sink before removing the shrimp tails, which I swept out the afternoon I ripped up the paper and scrubbed the gluey residue off with a copper scouring pad. Last week, holding the hardware down and in place as Derek pulled everything into place from beneath the sink, I loved the symmetry of it all. The hoses from the new faucet, which fit perfectly through the three holes at its base, all matched up with the pipes. Home Depot had an entire aisle of faucets to choose from, and somehow Derek and I had managed to select just the right one, which amazed me then and amazes me still.

It was a week yesterday that the new faucet took effect. I still marvel at the fact that there is no dripping and the smoothness with which the handle goes up and down and side to side, for hot or cold, its glide as smooth as a gear shifter in a very expensive car. Derek did the work, but I paid very close attention, and I think I’m close to overcoming my fear of disconnecting something. The whole experience also taught me why plumbers are so expensive. When you wait until your pipes burst to call someone, the time for bargaining is long gone, a concept I need to embrace without remorse the next time a client calls me for an estimate on a project that is overdue before my number is dialed.