The costume party

Over the past few years I have really enjoyed reading The Best American Short Stories anthologies. Heidi Pitlor, the series editor, who must do absolutely nothing but read every magazine and literary journal from across the land, selects 100 or so stories to be read by the guest editor, usually a famous writer either on the way up or on the way down. Then, the guest editor pares it down to the 20 he or she deems the best, writes an introduction and voila … the anthology appears. I read the anthology religiously in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the majority of the stories were from The New Yorker. That, I’m happy to report, has changed. I’m happy not because I object to the magazine but because there are many, many publications that take chances on writers other than John Updike and Alice Munro – both great writers, in my opinion, but there are others.

I have a few rules for reading stories. I read them in the morning. I read them in their entirety in a single sitting. I read them one at a time, letting at least 24 hours pass between the end of one story and the beginning of the next. Short stories are like little worlds, and I do not want to jeopardize my ability to get maximum mileage by mixing them up. Finally, in the Best American Short Stories series, at the back of the book are the author bios along with a short (usually) statement from the author. Some of these statements are thank you notes to the editors who published them, others offer an explanation about how a story that was initially about a house fire evolved into one about fireflies. I do not read the author’s biography or statement until after I’ve read the story because I want to read the story without any interference.

Which brings me to a story in the 2010 anthology called The Hollow by James Lasdun, by far the weakest story in the collection. The story concerns yuppies moving to a neighborhood where control is being relinquished slowly, awkwardly by people who like motorcycles, like chopping down trees, people who take a mix-and-match approach to family infrastructure, people who go up into the woods, or what’s left of them, to get away from it all. On the surface, my main issue with this story is that it’s a cliché: Here are some uneducated people who do weird, sometimes scary shit. A little bit beneath the surface, my distaste for this story isn’t its reliance on amateurish stereotypes but the condescending, bitchy tone of it. These people are weirdos, the story seems to say, and they’re friendly, sort of, but their friendliness is always conditional. Many of them are missing teeth. I finished the story, originally published in The Paris Review, and turned to the bio section: James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York … His story “An Anxious Man” won the inaugural UK National Short Story Award in 2006.

After reading that, I was pretty pleased with myself. Even without knowing anything about the author’s background, I find the British tedious. I realize I’m wading into the waters of bigotry here, but I spent two months in London in 2005, and here’s my take on it: The British are still bitter about losing the American Revolution, and the dour condescension that runs through the blood on that soggy little island is but a horrific sneak preview of what the U.S. will look and sound and sing and write like before too many more decades pass.

And for some reason, we cannot get enough of it. Any day now I expect to hear that Tina Brown has taken over not only Newsweek but NPR as well, where she’ll no doubt amp her accent up to the highest volume possible so that she can explain us to ourselves. The adoration of the accent is alive and well right here in Portland as well, with our British reporter doing stories on OPB in which his main accomplishment seems to be inserting as much British phraseology as possible into what come across as little more than a recital of press releases. Is the accent supposed to be charming? I think it’s hideous. Actually, that’s not quite true: What I think is hideous is the way people who have never crossed the Indiana state line – or broken free of the confines of the northwest corner of Oregon for that matter – swoon over it.

That brings me, of course, to the wedding. If a country that isn’t exactly in sound shape wants to throw millions of dollars at a sad reenactment of its long-gone days of glory, I suppose that’s the country’s problem and not mine. But seriously, this week the U.S. networks are anchoring their evening newscasts from London because there’s going to be a big wedding in town? That sort of foolishness makes the sex confessions of a professional golfer or a staged balloon flight over Colorado seem newsworthy.

Changing majors

When I was in Saint Louis in January my sister and I had an interesting conversation about careers. One of my sister’s chief complaints about our mother is that she wasn’t exactly what you’d call encouraging. This is true, with a couple of exceptions. The two exceptions are two of my brothers. Both of them were quite good at two things my mother thought were important: math and art. She encouraged them accordingly, and it was from her that they learned – and learned well, for they were both A students – that they were, are and will forever be superior. “He is simply above-average in intelligence,” she told me about one of my brothers. If by “intelligence” we mean working through trigonometry at the speed of hot lightening and being able to do charcoal sketches of Abraham Lincoln, then yes, that’s a true statement.

There is lots of bitterness and sibling rivalry in what I’m writing here, obviously, because when it comes to math, I got stuck, really stuck, with the business about multiplying two negative numbers and ending up with a positive one, and from there I never progressed. I wasn’t good at math. In fact, I was really bad at it. But in addition to the bitterness there is a bit of justice. These two brothers of mine – one of whom is in his early 40s, the other in his early 50s – never bothered to get a second opinion. Or if they did get one, they didn’t listen to it, and as a result they are both insufferable, because being better than everyone around you at all times is a lonely, painful way to live, and as we all know, misery isn’t something to horde. I should pity them, rather than sketching out revenge tactics. I’m working on it.

In the meantime, trashing them is fun. When I was talking to my sister the topic of the younger of the two superior brothers came up. He wrote an e-mail to our mother shortly before she died and told her that I was one of the most boring people he knew because I’d been talking about my job. My sister and I had a good laugh over that one in January. “What the fuck,” she said. We were outside smoking cigarettes, out of earshot of the youngsters. “I guess it’s easy to call someone boring for talking about his job … when you don’t have one.” Though he’s issued forth two consumers of resources and “bought” a house that cost more than a quarter of a million dollars, my brother hasn’t had a job since 2006. He lives off his wife and (I presume) his in-laws. So anyone who mentions his or her job and takes a break from participating in conversations (as a listener, primarily) about his children is boring. If that’s intelligence, please, sign me up for illiteracy.

So speaking of “boring,” my sister was carrying on about how precious little encouragement was offered by our mother. I asked what she thought she might have done differently had that motherly encouragement been forthcoming. She told me that looking back on it, had she known then what she knows now, she would have become a pharmacist. A pharmacist? My sister reviews and makes determinations on the cases of people who have applied for a very specific type of assistance, so I asked her what appealed to her about being a pharmacist. “I think it would be interesting,” she said, “and I think I’d be good at it.” And it’s a crime, she went on, that our mother – who majored in biology and chemistry – did not help steer her in this direction.

I never asked our mother what she thought of me majoring in reading books and, believe it or not, she didn’t offer much commentary on the subject. But I’ve thought about it a bit since January, and I have decided that if I were to go back to 1984 for a redo, I would not have majored in English but in economics. I realize this probably constitutes being boring, but I think money is interesting. The lying and cheating and stealing and killing done in the name of money is phenomenal. It’s almost like sex that way. And I think, furthermore, that I could overcome my numbers issue. I am betting, in fact, that in the realm of economics negative numbers stay that way until they are enhanced not with another negative number but with a positive one. As in, the more money you lose, the more money you lose. It’s not like you’re suddenly ahead by the amount – and then some – by which you were previously behind. That kind of monkey business is for those who excel at math.

But I think the main thrust of my interest in learning about money is that it’s so truthful. Sooner or later, lingering behind and beneath the stories we’ve all come to believe there is some cash. Entire nations and kingdoms and empires do the craziest shit to get their hands on some more. That’s where my love of reading comes in. Would I trade that in to study the ledgers? I don’t think I’d have to. I could spend the rest of my life reading about money, because that’s where the real narrative is, I think, to the extent that the story of money makes history books look like bedtime stories. If someone can show me a narrator of this country that’s more honest than the national checkbook, I’ll sign up for basic algebra and learn to really understand how multiplying two negatives yields a positive.

So stressed

In one part of my life, I’ve avoid sponsorship in a way I think is admirable. But when it comes to sponsoring people through their recovery from PR I am, to use one of the industry’s obnoxious phrases, on-boarded. Completely and utterly, because these people need help.

When I left “the agency” nearly four years ago, I was offered – and accepted – guidance from a few of those who had gone before me. At some point, I was told, I would no longer label not responding to an e-mail in five minutes or less “non-responsive.” I would realize – and it would probably be painful – that nothing I had worked on in seven years was remotely “urgent.” And it would become clear to me that people who were clients and people who were co-workers (called “teammates”) were, most likely, not friends of mine. All of these predictions have turned out to be wide waterways I’ve encountered and crossed over the last few years, and for that I am grateful.

I’m currently sponsoring one person. I like her a lot. I think she’s intelligent and has a number of good ideas. That said, her recovery is more challenging than mine for two reasons. The first is that she didn’t leave “the agency” entirely on her own accord, so there’s lots of residual weirdness there. The second is that she climbed much higher up on the ladder and she did so, as is usually the case, by diving deeper into the mirage. So it’s more difficult for her to get out, and while I think her progress has been admirable, we got together recently and it did not go well.

The fifth step in recovery is to admit the exact nature of our wrongs, and here’s mine: Our get-together didn’t go well because I was pissed off before the waiter had a chance to put the coffee mug on the table. That’s because there was a link posted on Facebook by several of my “friends” called “America’s Most Stressful Jobs 2011,” which led to one of those infuriating top 10 slide shows on CNBC. If you loathe those as much as I do, just to piss yourself off a bit more, the next time you find yourself clicking through one of them, take note of how each slide has a different ad. The marketing team calls that “monetization.”

The people who had posted the link on Facebook are PR people, who love nothing more than to bellow about how busy they are, the pressure they’re under, the stress of it all. So I was prepared, sort of. What I was not prepared for was that with the exception of being a commercial airline pilot, “PR Executive” is the most stressful job in the land. I’m sure CNBC is aware that one of the few things PR people love more than talking about themselves is when other people talk about them, so the reposting “metrics” and the “click throughs” on this particular slide show must have been phenomenal, all of which probably “drives ad revenue.”

Whatever it is our PR friends are getting so stressed out over at work every day must be pretty important to society (or, as the PR folks would say, “mission critical”) because the PR executives are making, on average, $101,850 per year. To me, that figure makes the amount of rhetoric we’ve heard lately about how much “public” employees earn even more astounding. But there’s a reason we’re more up to speed on the average salary for a public school teacher than we are with the six-figure takings doled out at PR agencies across the land. While the teacher is teaching, the PR executive is exerting influence over what’s covered and what’s not. It’s her job, and it’s stressful.

At any rate, the slide show struck a nerve with the PR people (as it was clearly meant to do) who posted and reposted and reposted over and over again, each time adding a comment of their own, followed by a chorus of comments from their “friends.” Here, just for fun, and just to explain why I was so cranky when I sat down with my sponsee, are but a few: “Yep – that sounds about right!” said one, to which I wondered, the salary or the text? “I thought I was just imagining the stress!” commented another proudly. One PR person whose unoriginality is noteworthy, which takes some doing, wrote “Welcome to my world [SMILEY FACE]” And yet another: “Now everyone will understand why I don’t sleep! SIGH!”

I bitched a little about the whole thing (“Grrrrrrrr!!!”) and said, as I’ve said a thousand times, that the PR people need to work for a year at the McDonald’s on West Burnside and live according to the wage. Then, if they’re still able to speak, they can complain about the stress. Then my sponsee said, “Well, yeah, but it is stressful.”

While I’m proud of myself for not chiming in on Facebook, I am not proud of what I did to punish my sponsee for that one comment: I flunked her on step four, which had required that she take “an inventory” of herself by writing out situations and scenarios and, furthermore, acknowledging her role in each. She did an admirable job, with one glaring exception: the lingo. She kept calling jobs and positions “opportunities.” And she could not get through a sentence without referencing either her “level” or her opponent’s “level,” as in: She was a couple of years older than me, but I was at a higher level. In her narrative, people didn’t share things with her, or tell her stories. They “provided feedback.” And worst of all, I think, my sponsee never calls anyone, or e-mails anyone. Instead, she “reaches out.”

So because I was crabby to begin with, I “dinged” her because I find her lingo offensive. As a sponsor, I know I have a moral responsibility to not sink down to that level, but I couldn’t help myself. And even though it felt good, momentarily at least, my joy is yet another bit of evidence that my recovery is far from complete.

A good morning

Tuesday morning sure did get off to a strange start around here. For one thing, I got out of bed at 5:15, which is ridiculously early even by my standards. But, I could tell I was finished sleeping. I had to take a leak. And I was ready for coffee. So I got up. My kitchen faces south, and as I stood at the sink filling the coffee pot with water, in the upper right-hand corner of the window was the full moon, obviously on its descent but still, quite full and quite lovely. The sky was beginning to lighten, very gradually, and the full moon was surrounded – framed, you might say – by a scattering of clouds that to me looked like open palms extended to hold the gorgeous white ball, as if it might otherwise fall and break.

By 7 o’clock, the sculpted clouds had receded into a solid bank of them, a gray-white wall beginning at the rooftops’ edges in my neighborhood and ending at eternity. To the east, though, where the sun was rising, the sky was at least partially clear. The most beautiful light shone on the north-facing side of the long, low-slung building right across the street from my kitchen, on a wooden fence, on shingles, on the north side of chimneys and, most spectacularly, on the thousands of white blossoms that have recently appeared on massive black limbs that, by the height of summer, will canopy and shade a large portion of a yard and a lot of the intersection. I stood in the window, drinking my coffee, watching blossoms brightened by a sun that was rising stage left set against a mostly flat, gray skyscape.

To me, those few moments represent my favorite part of not spending 10 or more hours a week on a highway praying for your life, and more than 10 hours a week praying to substances that life, as you know it, will end. Lucky me, I thought as I stood there, watching.

I often talk about sky scenes, and just as often I am asked why I don’t take more pictures. Here’s why: I don’t own a camera. Plus, I’d hate to miss out on what’s happening right outside my window while horsing around with one. On Tuesday morning I poured myself another cup of coffee, and when I stepped back in front of the window – walked would be an exaggeration, because it’s only one step from the window to the coffee maker – one version of the sky had ended and another begun.

A couple hours later I stepped onto a bus and rode downtown to meet a friend for breakfast. The bus was cool and dark, like the changing room at the public pool where we used to take swimming lessons. By that time the clouds had moved on, and Northeast Portland was bright and clear, with sharp lines and contrasts so defined even those who had arrived in town five minutes earlier certainly recognized that this was the first burst of sunshine following many, many days of downpours, sog, hail storms, wind and general gloom. I don’t normally read on the bus because it tends to make me dizzy, but I’d grabbed an anthology of short stories that has been sitting on my table for a while as I was leaving the house. I took my seat, opened my book and began: “Because it had rained and the rain had caught the black soot of factories as they burned, Paris in the dark seemed covered by a dusky skin, almost as though it were living.” I continued because, really, how could I not?

As the bus glided across the Burnside Bridge, as the buildings downtown shone like mirrors, and the deep green of the Hawthorne Bridge – two bridges to the south – actually glimmered, I sensed that something was deeply, terribly wrong. Even though white birds with gigantic wingspans patrolled the river, even though there were boats and other buses and trucks and cars and vans, all moving, all going somewhere, there was something ominous.

I recall a beautiful February morning when the earth shook with enough force that I thought my heart would fail. And I remember another beautiful morning one September when the earth shook, but for very different reasons. Those mornings had been so quiet, so ordinary, so sunny and orderly. I recalled them as the bus sat at the traffic light and the only sound I could hear was the hum of the engine and the sound – a whisper, really – of a city going about its morning. I closed my book and put it into my backpack and looked around the bus, nervously at first, wondering what sort of calamity was about to be set into motion.

And that’s when I realized what was so troubling: From Northeast 79th and Glisan all the way to Southwest 5th and Alder, I had been afforded the luxury of reading about a group of war correspondents in France as the bus I was riding made its way across the city beneath a clear, bright blue sky. What had caused my unease was not the presence of something but an absence: I hadn’t been subjected to a single cell phone conversation. And it’s been so long since I’ve had an experience in public free of that toxic racket that its absence caused me to assume the worst. And that, in turn, caused me to do something even more old-fashioned than conducting telephone calls in a private location: Shortly after I got off the bus, walking along the sidewalk, I made eye contact with others, smiled and even said “good morning” a couple of times.

Ballsy

I have a soft spot for Sixty Minutes. While the show is as prone to bad taste and slipping standards as any other, there’s something about it that prevents me from unleashing my arsenal of scorn at full tilt. My memories of it go back to the days of an old black-and-white set whose reception was dependent on coaxing the two prongs of the antennae that, when done with the correct precision, put a clear picture on the screen. It was watching that show, I suppose, that preset my default to a strong and lasting preference for television programs formatted like magazines. Sixty Minutes – like TWA and Bettendorf’s and Boatman’s Bank – is something I regard almost as a dignified, wise elder whose very presence prompts me to mind the language, carry the luggage without being asked to and hold the door.

And then Katie Couric comes on. I know I rail on her way too much on this blog. I believe I have said this before, but it bears repeating: Of the three network anchors, I actually find Katie Couric the least troubling. But still, Sixty Minutes? Hearing her, of all people, say at the end of the opening “All that and more on Sixty Minutes” is as harrowing to me as the thought – and I do mean the mere thought – of going to a Saint Louis Cardinals home game any place other than Busch Stadium, the real one, the one with soaring, elegant aluminum arches, the one that has persuaded more than one youngster to imagine, briefly, that his life was not taking place on the shores of the Mississippi River but in Rome.

But there she was on Sunday night, actually asking relevant questions of a very brave young woman who was allegedly raped by members of the men’s basketball team at University of the Pacific. I use the word ‘allegedly’ because I don’t know whether the case has been officially settled or not.

What I do know is that the story raised a few questions for me. The first: Why is it still acceptable to imply that one of the causes of a rape is that the person who was raped had consumed too much alcohol? The young woman who says she was raped had, according to the story, downed a few shots of tequila the night it happened. She’d been at a party, from which she was offered a ride by the three alleged rapists, who drove her to their townhouse (the athletes don’t usually bunk with the students who are at college to get an education) where, according to her, she assumed the party was going to continue. Time and again, the accused claimed the young woman was drunk, and perhaps she was. But here’s my question: If she was drunk, and they were all at a party together, is it not likely that they were drunk as well? And if they were, doesn’t that cast a pretty serious degree of doubt on not only their conduct that evening but on their ability to accurately recall and recount it? When it comes to rape, we seem a bit fixated on the amount of alcohol in the victim’s blood. I am curious why we – or I – hear so little about the intake on those who find themselves on the other side of the courtroom.

Another strange part of the story is that the University of the Pacific, for various reasons, assembled a review panel of sorts to sift through the case. Granted, the young woman decided to not press formal charges; she was terrified, she said, of the details about another young woman’s experience, one who had pressed formal charges and had been made to testify and be cross examined for hours in a court room. These details were shared with her by the man she’d had to meet with in order to begin the process of pressing charges – a law enforcement employee of one sort or another, I presume. She was intimidated, in other words, out of taking legal action. I have no idea if this intimidation was intentional or not, of course. Perhaps it’s the man’s job to make sure people are well aware of the territory into which they’re venturing, the way a doctor tells a patient about potential side effects before the chemo begins. But perhaps it’s yet another symptom of how we categorize women, how we manage their sexuality by making it an issue of public spectacle. I do wonder.

At any rate, the university creating a panel to resolve the issue seemed wrong to me. These panels – which are always, in my experience, assembled in a dubious manner – are laughable enough when it comes to deciding how to punish a jock who is consuming scholarship funds that would otherwise go towards, well, scholarship, who got busted cheating on the math exam is bad enough. But putting together a group of “peers” to resolve a rape charge seems to me like a good reason to sue the university. For a lot of money.

None of it was as outrageous, though, as the story’s grand finale. Of the three accused basketball players, two were suspended. Both returned, after serving their suspensions, to the court at the University of the Pacific. While the third accused player was expelled outright, he missed very little playing time: After a three-month absence from basketball, he made his debut on the court at the University of Idaho, where one of the coaches is the twin brother of the coach at the University of the Pacific.

Budget theater

When offered a front-row seat to watch the prize roosters claw one another’s eyes out so that one of them can keep the piggy bank in his coop, I am weak: I cannot resist tuning in. On the one hand, the spectacle of “balancing the budget” and “reducing the deficit” is depressing in the truest sense of the word, particularly when it digresses into this “Gang of Six” horseshit, which is but a poor parody, I think, of an episode of Gunsmoke. But on the other, as theater, it’s a great show.

Once again, the president put forth some pretty tough talk last week during a speech at George Washington University, when he proclaimed that the authorization of millions and billions of dollars of tax breaks for the ultra wealthy would not happen while he’s president. While I’m sure this was an error made by the speechwriter or the typist, the word “again” – which should have been between the words “happen” and “while” – was somehow deleted. Believe it or not, I salute the president for that one: We’re too lazy to pay attention, and short-term memory is so outdated it’s almost quaint. Extending W.’s tax cuts back in December? Hell, that’s old news. And best of all, imagine the Republicans slamming Obama for his little lie. What are they going to say? Obama gave away billions in tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the land and then said it was something that wouldn't happen while he is president! Wait a minute, that's the wrong message.

The president’s speech, though, was but a sideshow compared to the conservatives’ reaction to it. Paul Ryan, who allegedly crafted the budget supported by the super Republicans, was utterly shocked by the president’s speech. On one talk show after another, the full-throttle hottie from Wisconsin whined and sulked and sneered over the fact that Obama’s speech was … partisan. According to Ryan, a group of conservatives had met with the president shortly before the speech to discuss the particulars of the budget. Then, the president got up and used the bully pulpit to attack and belittle the Republicans. And furthermore, the knights of that party complained, Obama’s speech wasn’t really about the budget: It was the kickoff of his 2012 campaign. Which, speaking of short-term memory issues, makes me wonder where the Republicans have been, because Katie Couric, Brian Williams and many other celebrities who play journalists on television announced the start of the 2012 “election cycle” on a very cold evening in November 2008, and as a result, everyone with a platform has been in campaign mode ever since. Who can blame them? Not I.

There is plenty of eye clawing going on right here in Oregon as well. While I am not necessarily proud of this, I do have to admit that I find the local budget churn as entertaining – if not more so – as the doings in Washington. Here’s how it usually unfolds: A group of loud, well-funded people who throw terms like “reform” and “fiscal responsibility” into every written and spoken sentence in support of a candidate who, like Christ himself, appears as the clouds part and offers up a simple, back-to-basics brand of wisdom. At home, you don’t spend more money then you earn without running into trouble, we’re told. The government’s the same.

Except that it isn’t. Over the past three works I’ve received e-mails from all sorts of groups. Some of them offer educational opportunities to inmates, some provide services to people suffering from mental illnesses, some organize and administer programs meant to preserve the environment. Different missions, to be sure, but, when it comes to “balancing the budget,” the same identical message: Not if it affects us. That’s where the e-mails come in: Write your representatives, they instruct. This is important, this is critical to our future. This, according to the e-mails, is the one thing to which you, as a responsible citizen, should dedicate your time, your energy, your money. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the big one.

Which brings me, unfortunately, to the Portland Public Schools. Last year, we voted in favor of a property tax increase to save the schools. And next month, voters will be asked to approve a levy to save the school district, once again, from demise. Last Monday, the main attraction at the neighborhood association meeting was a presentation on the levy. The presenters, unfortunately, did not show up. So we winged it. One of the attendees – a parent – threw out some platitudes about our duty to fund schools, to provide for one another. Another attendee – a retired engineer who is not only a parent but a grandparent as well – using the flyer that had appeared at the meeting (whether it was forwarded in e-mail or dropped off I couldn’t say), explained the levy as follows: The school buildings need a lot of work done in order to be brought up to safety standards. Otherwise, if there’s an earthquake, the children will die.

The retired engineer added that while it would be less expensive to just build new schools, it’s more in line with “Portland values” to preserve the old ones. That forced me into strange territory. I think that new construction is almost criminal when you consider what already exists. At the same time, while it pains me to admit this, any rhetoric put forth by the Portland Public Schools, especially when it includes terms like “values” and “sustainability,” makes me suspicious. My reaction, in all fairness to the schools, is but one of the side effects of working in PR.

The very next day yet another e-mail, this one from my state representative, who I think is quite good, announcing that he voted against the governor’s budget but that he is holding out hope that the levy next month will help save hundreds of teaching positions in Portland. So I wrote to him and said that unfortunately the people who were going to speak about the levy to the neighborhood association had not shown up but that the flyer and the conversation were about buildings – not teachers. I do the write ups of the neighborhood association’s meetings, I explained, so I asked that he please clarify for me how the funds from the levy would be spent.

His assistant answered me promptly: Neither she nor the representative had been “as engaged” with the levy issue as they would have liked due to the demands of the state budget. In all seriousness, I salute the honesty of that response. So I went to the Portland Public Schools Web site, and discovered that there are in fact two levies on which we’ll be voting on next month, one for buildings, the other to save teaching positions. Then I went back to the flyer, and it does actually acknowledge that our duty is to not only save school buildings but school jobs as well. That information, though, is woven in subtly, put down at the bottom of the bullet points that bellow in big, bold print the news that while the sky may not be falling at the school district, it won’t be long before the ceilings do.

Making baby look like Daddy

I guess the topic of slicing off parts of baby boys’ penises was bound to come up on this blog sooner or later. A few weeks ago a friend of mine mentioned it and I kind of lost it. Not because I’m necessarily opposed to it, but for another reason: Her husband.

I’ll get to him later, but first, some nasty talk.

In the realm of personal ads, one’s circumcision situation is right up there with hair color and shoe size. Cut means you are, uncut that you’re not. While both contain what usually turn out to be at least one exaggeration, statements like “7 inches cut w/low hangers” seem to have replaced “I like long walks on the beach.” For a while there were many men on the east side of Portland who were attempting to restore their foreskins with little weights and pulleys. They’d meet for coffee on Saturday mornings to compare stories and offer support. I have been with a couple of men who were uncut, something I thought was interesting though not particularly earth shattering. Since I’m sure anyone reading this is dying to know, I myself am cut, but the particulars are not something I ever got around to discussing with my mother or father, so I have no idea why. The complete absence of any curiosity on my part about the removal of my own foreskin puzzled me, and for a while it concerned me.

The first time I saw my youngest nephew, a nurse was changing his diaper as if she were teaching a class, offering little tid-bits of baby butt wisdom as she went. He began to pee, which messed up the blood-stained dressings between his legs. When she was finished, the nurse handed him to me and as I was holding him the words “I see the butcher was by” flew out of my mouth. I hadn’t intended to criticize or condemn, although seeing an infant who has yet to pass the 24-hour mark sporting battle scars is a bit much. The baby’s mother, who has a graduate degree in childhood development informed me, defensively, I thought, that circumcision is a proven way to combat infections. “Well, hopefully he won’t come down with an earache,” I said. Things were never quite the same between us.

My friend’s husband is in many ways a gift. For various reasons I’ve been railing on heterosexual white males for the past couple of years (it’s fun, for one thing, and for another they’re long overdue), and this guy is a green light for my worst inclinations. In a way that seems symptomatic of being a heterosexual white male of a certain age and mindset in Portland, this guy is “into” very specific pursuits. For a while it was camping. Then it was brewing his own beer. Last I heard it was scooters. The pursuits change, the habits do not: Everything this jackass is “into” requires lots and lots of expensive, hard-to-find equipment and gear and accessories and a supporting cast of lots of other heterosexual white males, who grunt their approval communally, as if part of a herd attempting to migrate. or breed or both. In the same way that discussions about my work projects are more often than not not about the projects but the computers, this guy and his buddies manage to take over every conversation I’ve witnessed with endless talk about what they’ve just bought, and where they found it, how great it is, and what it cost. Actually, they don’t talk: Since they’re heterosexual white males who have been awarded 50 out of 100 points for simply being born to those demographics, they assume that everyone is interested in what they have to say. So they shout. Shouting comes easily for our friend: He has a voice that seems to project itself nicely, which probably comes in handy when he’s at work, teaching third grade, God help us all, at a public school in Portland.

The last time I saw him was at a backyard barbecue. He said something that was, as usual, anti gay, but only vaguely so, not quite ignorant enough to justify me calling him a bigot in front of his wife and his buddies. In fact, his comment – as is often the case with him – was just the sort of thing that would have prompted one of my white, heterosexual male brothers to say, had he been there, “Man, his pussy sure was showing on that one.” So I said something equally vague, something along the lines of how sad it sometimes was to watch kind-of sort-of hot hets (I refuse to use the term “straight”) go to flab. Then he said, “Everything you say is gay.” Then I said, “Everything I do is gay, you dumb fuck.” I don’t know about you, but if someone called me a dumb fuck in my own back yard he’d be on his way shortly, but for this moron, who is raising two young boys and teaching third graders, that’s about an unremarkable as scratching your balls while talking to your mother-in-law. Manners, I suppose he thinks, are for chicks and fags. Later, I was out front on the sidewalk, having a smoke with two other homos, one of whom worked at the time with my friend. She came out and joined us. Then her husband came out and for some reason, after a bit of bantering that tends to occur when people smoke together, he felt compelled to say, as if he were marking and defending his territory “I’m an ass man.” If you couldn’t see it before that gem of a direct, word-for-word quote, I’m sure you can see now why I consider this idiot a gift.

I see my friend regularly. She’s a lovely woman, I think. She’s intelligent, she’s evolved, she pays attention. And yet, when it comes to her husband, she’s been presented with two choices: Either delete him or lower her standards. Even though she refuses to take his name, which is surprisingly rare in Oregon, I’ve found, she has chosen the latter. I don’t necessarily blame her for that. They have two sons, one who must be getting close to kindergarten age and another who was born last summer. Recently, my friend had to reschedule our get together because the youngest wasn’t sleeping, which had turned her schedule completely upside down. “And I’m getting tough with [HUSBAND’S NAME],” she told me. That piqued my curiosity, of course. Her husband presents himself as a progressive kind of guy, one of those left-of-liberal sorts who knows the real story on a deeper level than most – “Obama’s a pussy,” he shouted once. Followed by “Democrats are fucktards.” Proclaimed politics aside, when it comes to childcare, he considers that women’s work. So after weeks of sleep deprivation, she’d taken up residency in the guest room and informed her husband that it was his job to get up several times during the night to take care of the infant.

Naturally, I asked why the baby wasn’t sleeping. Well, she said, he was circumcised a few weeks ago. Why, I wondered out loud, recalling my nephew, was that not done shortly after his birth? “Because he has a crooked wiener,” my friend told me. “So we went back and forth on it, and finally I just told [HUSBAND’S NAME] that he needed to make the decision, and he decided that he wants [BABY’S NAME] to look like him.”

The most amazing part of this story is not what I said to that – even if you’ve only read this blog twice, there’s a 98 percent chance you could fill in the blanks correctly – but the fact that we’re still friends. In fact, we’re getting together for this week for lunch, which is always a lot fun.

My news diet

I’m still on a reduced news diet. I was talking to my sisters over the weekend. Both of them have avoided any and all news for decades now, a habit I used to find appalling but that I have lately come to appreciate – and envy. As I explained to them on Sunday, I am starting to fear that if I hear the sky is falling too many more times I am going to begin to believe it. “That’s what they want you to do,” said my sister in Oklahoma. “That’s exactly what they want you to do.”

I don't know if what "they" want me to do is to fear a falling sky or watch less of the news, but I did recently learn that my sister and one of her daughters – the lesbian – are avid followers of a very large group of conspiracy theorists. After the simplest of Internet searching, I learned that this group believes, among other things, that the world is controlled by about 14 individuals, each of whom is wealthy enough to keep his or her name – though mostly his – off the lists of the world’s wealthiest. Conspiracy theories and those who subscribe make me nervous in the same way haunted houses and psychics do: I am terrified that they might reveal something true. So I exited the page I’d happened across and returned to my regular business.

On Friday, I skipped both the News Hour and Washington Week. Instead, I got comfortable on my couch to read a biography of Flannery O’Connor that I found at a branch of the Multnomah County Library I’d never visited until Thursday afternoon. On NPR, I heard the newscaster announce that “The looming government shutdown has been averted by a last-minute …” at which point I switched to the jazz station. A government shutdown that includes airports operating as usual and regular mail pickup and delivery isn’t a shutdown at all: It’s a crude, unimaginative brand of show business, and until the real deal comes to pass and the Tea Party is forced to “message” the consequences of its stupidity, please, shut up. In the meantime, even though I don’t think Brad Gooch’s biography is particularly well written, I do believe that Flannery O’Connor’s life story is not only more interesting and more honest than what passes for news, I think it’s more relevant to the state of affairs in 2011 as well. Kind of shockingly so, actually.

I did see a very interesting article posted on Facebook late last week. A columnist in Seattle wrote that if you’re going to repeat and subscribe to the notion that “education should be run more like business,” do not bitch when your youngsters don’t get into the UW because the out-of-state applicants have taken most of the spots. The out-of-state students, after all, are a win-win for the university: They pay higher tuition and are not subsidized by Washington tax payers. That’s how businesses in a capitalist economy function, wrote the columnist. Don’t advertise the fact that you don’t think before you declare your position by taking it personally. Beyond the Internet, on printed pages, I read more: “The people … couldn’t have gone past the fourth grade but, for the time, they were mighty interested in education,” said Flannery O’Connor, not about the grousing in Washington but about a KKK cross burning in the 1940s to protest racially integrated meetings hosted by a state college in Georgia. It is tragic that she’s not alive and posting on Facebook.

Finally, early Sunday afternoon, the single weirdest radio commercial I’ve ever heard. In 1999, the world’s population topped 6 billion for the first time, said a female voice. And today you can get your oil changed at Jiffy Lube for $19.99. I’m not sure if I’m paying more attention to commercials because I’ve been watching less news, or if I’m just in a more mistrustful state than usual, or if the commercials have become even more offensive, or what. Fortunately, I was at part in my book that detailed how Flannery O’Connor’s characters in her early fiction were composites of the unlikeliest combos of people from her daily life and how many of her plots were taken directly from the local newspaper, so I didn’t ponder the relationship of the world’s population in 1999 to the advertised price of an oil change for long.

A new emergency

The April issue of The Sun arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago. Though I cannot really describe it, I love the writing in The Sun. I love the fact that there is absolutely no advertising in The Sun. So I have a bit of a system when it comes to reading The Sun. It’s usually 50 pages or less, so it needs to be rationed, it needs to be read in moderation. I only read it in the morning, and I do not begin an issue until the calendar on my refrigerator and the month printed on the magazine’s cover align.

The profile this month, which I read Saturday morning, is “Fighting With Another Purpose: Veteran Paul Chappell on the Need to End War.” Great, I thought, something soldiery. Then, as is often the case when I’m reading The Sun, I was totally surprised. I can rail on the idiocy of warfare with the best of them, but not with anywhere near the gusto of someone who graduated from West Point, has done time in Iraq and who believes, and adamantly so if the word count is any indication, that the difference between rage and fury is important. Paul Chappell didn’t come right out in the article and say that battle-mangled bodies should be hauled into the elementary schools and put on display for all the impressionable young ones to see, so I’ll say it for him: Battle-mangled bodies should be hauled into the elementary schools and put on display for all the impressionable young ones to see. I wonder what Republican-leaning mothers would have to say about that.

Here, though, is something that Paul Chappell did say. When asked about the role of violence in this country’s culture, one of his comments struck me. “Whenever you repress a natural part of life,” he said, “strange behaviors emerge.”

Speaking of strange behaviors, oil tanks are a problem in Portland. They’re buried in yards all over the town, and apparently, even though they have lingered there for decades (that’s the crux of the problem, so we’re told) they’re hard to find until you decide to sell your house. Having them removed is a right of passage among a certain crowd here, an Eagle Scout badge, if you will, for environmental stewardship. It’s something you can bizz-bazz about with your friends and neighbors in the organic produce section at New Seasons. It’s that awesome.

Although it is ultimately a tale of karma, my brother’s experience a couple of years ago tells the story nicely. He bought his house in 2002. In 2009, before putting the house on the market, the inspection revealed, lo and behold, an oil tank in the back yard. So, in accordance with a rule or a regulation or a law, the yard was torn to hell, a tree was cut down, a fence was removed, all sorts of energy-consuming equipment that’s exempt from emissions regulations was brought in, and $14,000 later the tank was removed. Removed to where nobody seems to know, but, according to local lore, it’s good for the environment. Unfortunately, I could not stop laughing at my brother long enough to ask the most obvious question: How was an oil tank missed seven years earlier when he bought the house? Given the toxicity of a buried – or decommissioned – oil tank, would missing one during an inspection jeopardize the inspector’s legal right to continue inspecting? And where – seriously, where – are these oil tanks, once removed, put to rest?

I am still taking a one-chapter-at-a-time approach to Howard Zinn’s history book. On Sunday, I read Chapter 14, War is the Health of the State, which covers, among other things, some of the rules and regulations that came about before, during and after World War I. While buried oil tanks in the city of Portland were not mentioned, many other alarming things were, and here’s one of them: “(The Espionage Act, thus approved by the Supreme Court, has remained on the books all these years since World War I, and although it is supposed to apply only in wartime, it has been constantly in force since 1950, because the United States has legally been in a ‘state of emergency’ since the Korean War …)”

That sure does explain the current panic, and the emergence of strange behavior, which seem to have eclipsed those oil tanks: carbon monoxide. Although I know a woman who killed herself with it in 1979, carbon monoxide, like many things, is a brand new threat here in Portland, where it constitutes – make no mistake about it – an emergency. HB 3450, otherwise known as the Lofgren and Zander Memorial Act, passed in 2009. The rules of the act, which I read on Monday afternoon, would have been entertaining had they not been so infuriating in terms of sheer vagueness, which makes me think that they were bought and paid for by someone anticipating a nice profit. The rules took effect on December 28, 2010.

So on Sunday afternoon, after reading that we’re in a state of emergency, legally speaking, I heard on a very mainstream radio station – not KBOO – a commercial about the dangers of carbon monoxide. And protecting yourself against it, said the studio-smooth voice, is now the law. Carbon monoxide is a silent killer. It’s deadly and you should be very afraid and make sure you’re safe. And don’t take our word for it, the commercial continued. Then, a woman, a mother who had lost two children. She doesn’t want anyone else to go through what she went through, so she’s sharing her painful story.

So I started to wonder. I’d like to know, for starters, how many people have died each year as a result of carbon monoxide in Oregon. Then I’d like to know how many reported deaths could have been prevented by using common sense. Does the list of the dead include those with furnaces and water heaters that cannot be easily turned on and off? Are those legal? Do those numbers include hoarders whose own shit traps them in their homes? Do the numbers include people who bring the barbecue pit inside during cold spells, fill them with charcoal and fire them up?

I wondered why protecting ourselves against carbon monoxide is now a priority. Is it more dangerous than it used to be? Are there more leaks? If so, why? I wondered – sorry for repeating myself here – how it’s possible that carbon monoxide issues could evade the eye of a professional inspector. I wondered how an individual or organization persuades the legislature to transform an issue of concern into a law. Under what pretext are those discussions initiated and by whom? Do “green” companies contribute to politicians? If so, to whom, and how much? I had a new water heater installed in December, just before the rules of HB 3450 took effect. Is it going to eventually poison me or has it been checked? I know better than to expect a reliable answer from the company from which I bought it. Should I just go ahead and buy a gas mask? It is pretty scary around here, after all.

I’d like to pursue all of those questions and then some. I’d like to write a book about it, actually. I believe our environment is in serious danger, and I think it is, in fact, an emergency. But I think letting the marketing team loose on it to drive profits by first scaring the shit out of people and then offering something that for reasons I’ll never understand loll the thoughtless masses into believing they’re doing something to delay the end of the world is more odious than convincing people that without the latest software they will forget their mother’s birthday. But for now, I took the easiest route possible and e-mailed the radio station’s sales team to find out who had paid for the carbon monoxide commercial. And the answer, prompt and polite, seems to me a great starting point: Home Depot for Kiddie Carbon Monoxide Alarms.

Achieving status

There are sentences that are difficult to read, and there are sentences that are difficult to write. Here is one that is likely a lot of both: When it comes to making it legal for two people of the same gender to get married, I still cannot say for certain how my gavel would fall if my job required me to wear a robe to work.

Before dismissing me as someone who suffers from internalized homophobia, meander with me, if you will, back to 1992. With the defeat of the first Bush appearing more imminent by the day, the end of the Reagan era was, at long last, within reach, and calling that fact glorious is the ultimate understatement. And there to greet us after 12 years of grandfatherly Republican presidents stood something of a wonder: Bill Clinton, whose words alone suggested a rich and deeply felt understanding of how far we’d slid to one side and, at the same time, the urgency with which we needed to slide back. His voice, his words, the empathy behind everything he said came to me as nothing less than a love song. Remember, I was desperate. I think many of us were.

While I fell hard for Bill Clinton during the campaign and the early years of his administration, from the very beginning I disagreed vehemently with one of his alleged stances, and I still do.

I had a million reasons at that time for thinking that pushing the notion of homos serving openly in the military was questionable. Today, I have two million reasons, and here are just a few. Blind adherence to a hierarchy that rewards overt, male-dictated heterosexuality is a big thing in the military. So is following orders without question. So is the belief that brute force not only trumps diplomacy, but the notion that it should trump diplomacy. The military, in my opinion, is a Petri dish for conservative tendencies. And that was where we, gay and men women who I’d always believed had been born to fight the power, wanted to be? Wasn’t that like black people agitating for a seat on the board of the local KKK chapter? I was floored. Besides (keep in mind that this was the early 1990s), hadn’t enough gay men died already? I thought so. What the “gay community” should have been working toward, I thought, was not its place in the military machine, but a society where the military is but a showpiece for parades. That would be a more worthy pursuit.

I almost laugh out loud – LOL! – at my own naiveté, recalling the mid-20s version of myself, earnestly believing that what we should be striving for is a world where armed forces are not required, one where political candidates are judged not by their war records but by their peace records. But every time I get close to laughing, it occurs to me that today, two decades later, my reaction to the push for “marriage equality” is identical. When it comes to stifling my own urge to laugh, there are few things more potent than the realization that even though most everything else has changed (it’s even a new century), I have evolved very little.

But I’m far more troubled by the gay marriage issue than I ever was by the push for the “right” to serve openly in military. That’s because there are parts of it that seem matters of fact, the right-and-wrong, black-and-white kind, and because of those facts I have to agree with those who have decided to force the issue.

The first is that having one set of privileges for one group of people and one set of privileges for another is discrimination. It’s discrimination based on sexual orientation and it’s discrimination based on gender. Why can’t two women get married? Because there’s no dick. Work some of that rationale into a decision about whether or not to promote one employee rather than another, or whether or not to rent an apartment to a certain applicant, and you’ve got a nice little lawsuit on your hands.

The second factor that pushes me toward unconditionally supporting the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples is that the reaction to it proves to me that it’s still okay to regard homos as a notch or two beneath everyone else. It’s muddled behind a smokescreen of trumped up bullshit about “protecting the children,” as usual, but the millions of dollars spent each year to ensure that the gays and the heterosexuals are kept separate and anything but equal convey that millions and millions of allegedly heterosexual people in this country hold one simple belief near and dear: Marriage belongs to us, and unless you deviants arrive at the wedding with a gift and lots of well wishes, you are not welcome.

It’s that arrogance that motivates me to volunteer, to donate, to e-mail slick politicians and corporations that open their checkbooks for one side or the other. But I’d like to think that what motivates me is something beyond a reaction to attributes in others that I don’t like. Strange though it may sound, I’d like to answer to a higher calling.

But in my search for a higher calling, what I keep hearing is quite sinister: We’re seduced by a pull toward what I can only call cultural cathedrals, grandiose minefields of symbolism such as marriage and the military that are, at their root, fundamentally conservative. Having never been legally married myself, I am not an expert on it, but I’ve watched and listened and I think I’ve learned a few things. And apparently I’m going a little hard on myself for my failure to evolve: In spite of our advancements, the ancient dream of two people pairing off and separating themselves from the herd in order to enjoy state-sanctioned sex in the name of procreation seems to be alive and well.

The story, as I understand it, goes something like this. We consult with our religious leaders and sign papers with the lawyers and spend obscene amounts of money for ceremonies and then buy houses and cars and struggle with mortgages and health insurance and contributing to the college fund for our young. One bit of political activist improv at a time, it seems to me, we forget from whence we came and become, simply, “too busy” to get involved on behalf of the greater good. And then, in numbers that continue to shock the experts, wake up one day and realize we’re miserable, realize that we’ve made such a huge mistake that we fork over an even more obscene amount of cash than we spent on the ceremony for the legal privilege of walking away from it all and buying ourselves another shot at true happiness.

Where do I sign up?

Those are stereotypes, of course. Stereotypes are the octane of the entire discussion as best I can tell, so I thought I’d use a few myself. And there are more stereotypes to be found just beneath the surface of the entire movement, and to me they’re like gigantic, bright yellow cautionary signs on a slick road in the middle of the night. Here’s one: A group moves to the U.S. en masse. For a couple of generations they stick together. Then they get themselves some legitimacy, some assimilation, and some money, and next thing you know they’re not only voting for Republicans, they’re running for office as Republicans. The gays, I’m sorry to say, are just as prone to that sort of treachery as anyone, and my fear is that the push for gay marriage is but the beginning.

It’s already started. Log Cabin Republicans? What on earth. Young-ish gay guys who could easily pass as heterosexuals comfortable enough in their convictions that they will publically, in print and on the Internet, try to ban drag queens from gay parades because they’re bad for “the community’s image.” Never mind the fact that the drag queens in Greenwich Village who were not hiding in suburbs were the people who got the whole gay rights movement underway. It was certainly not the “straight acting/straight appearing” semi-closet cases. I shudder to think where we’d be had we had to rely on them. And I shudder to think what might become of the drag queens and many others as we march closer and closer to the altar. Hopefully they’ll stay under cover when the news cameras are out, because they do make the conservatives uncomfortable. Ditto for those who are “femmy” or “queeny.” They don’t look Republican enough.

And then, more recently (the week before last, in fact) the sex advice columnist. There was an interview on NPR, much of it about bullying, when the topic of gay marriage came up, as it often does. He doesn’t think it’s fair that he and his partner, who are raising children, do not have the same legal rights that male-female couples. I agree. He doesn’t think it’s fair that were he to find himself in a dire medical condition, it would be perfectly legal to exclude his partner from any and all decision making. I agree even more. He wants the privileges of marriage, the ones male-female couples simultaneously take for granted and expect. And he wants, “you know, the status of being married.”

Ahh, the status. The word “status” makes me nervous. People who throw that word around, in my experience anyhow, are usually quite aware of the rankings of things, aware of who is above them on the status scale, and aware of who is beneath them. How many years do you suppose it will be before we see and hear married gay folks, those with status on their side, wading into the ultimate conservative rite of passage, which would be to find another group – preferably one that looks quite a bit like they did at one time – to scapegoat? Pondering what I fear is that inevitability is what gets me thinking about sentences that are hard to read, and then start writing a few of them.