The Rotary Telephone

Greetings from Issue City

2012-02-03T08:58:00.001-08:00

In addition to going to Missouri and dealing with being sick not once but twice, there was something else that kept me busy-ish during the month of January.

I got caught up with some family correspondence. I’ve been neglecting it for a long while now. I’ve been avoiding it as well. Those are two very separate things, I’m learning – avoiding something and neglecting it.

This is the beginning of a long and probably tedious story, but it is one that has to start somewhere and that somewhere, I’m sorry to say, is right here and right now. It began a few days after Christmas with the arrival of a card with a Los Angeles postmark. It was some High Catholic foolishness and on it was scrawled an inane message from my brother down there – the one I haven’t spoken to since two days before Michael Jackson died, and that was in June 2009. I tore it to pieces, which I tossed directly into the trash. Normally I’d recycle something like that, but I’d rather contribute to a landfill than put that kind of toxicity into the earth we all have to share.

Everything this particular brother of mine does infuriates me, but here are a couple of specifics.

The lesser of the two is that this card he sent to me and to others in our family is from a collection that our father kept. They were designed by a friend of his from high school who went on to become a monk who specialized in calligraphy. The problem here is that had anyone else in the family taken these cards from the house and mailed them around as holiday greetings, it would have been turned into a federal case. By my brother in Los Angeles. But because he is special, because he is the chosen one among us, it’s perfectly fine.

Just like it was perfectly fine for him to sit in his apartment and tell me he’s not sure how he feels about another of our brothers taking family photos out of the house. It takes a certain sort of person to say something like that while seated in a living room adorned with family photos, a rug we all hooked together in the early 1970s, several Christmas ornaments my mother collected over the years, our parents’ wedding china. My brother is that sort of person. He is exactly that sort of person.

Worse, though, is that my brother’s casual little holiday greeting implies, I think, that if we haven’t spoken for two and a half years now, that must be because of something trivial and ridiculous that’s entirely on my side of the fence.

I fretted and fumed for a few days. I came down with a cold, one year ended and another began, and I quit smoking. And I started writing a letter. My first attempt was 22 pages long and included footnotes. Attempt number two was shorter – 14 pages or so – and did not include footnotes. The version that was mailed to my brother and that he hopefully received on his birthday – which this year was on Friday the 13^th – was eight pages. I haven’t heard a word back, of course, nor do I expect to. But writing and sending that letter did set a thing or two in motion and has transformed this place of mine here into what a therapy-addicted friend of mine used to refer to as Issue City, and it’s a town, if you will, where I plan to be for a while.

There went January

2012-01-30T07:35:00.000-08:00

Apologies in advance for the negativity, but 2012 is certainly off to a shitty start.

A few days before the end of 2011, I caught some sort of cold thing, which was miserable but that did prompt me to throw out not only the cigarettes but the ashtray as well. The cold lingered a bit and then went away. Sort of, but not completely. Those five words are the theme of the year thus far: Sort of, but not completely. The sickness, the illness, was at just the right pitch that if I was experiencing nicotine withdrawal, they were covered up by cold symptoms.

Underlying the sickness, in the background of it, was the murky malaise brought about by being sort of working but sort of not working. I struggle to see myself and present myself as a flexible, go-with-the-flow type of person, but when it comes to work, I am simply not. Beginning around the middle of December and going straight through until last Friday, there has not been a single normal week. The last week of last year and the first week of this year were screwy because while the holidays took occurred on a Sunday, they were observed on a Monday. Most people in my work sphere disappeared the Thursday and Friday before Christmas, so that week was a weird one. Then on the last Thursday of the year the cold arrived, and I feel like I’ve been hacking and coughing and sneezing and complaining ever since.

The week before last I got on a plane and went to Saint Louis. Then last week I got on another plane and returned. So there went two more weeks. And, just to add to the general weirdness of it all, last Thursday afternoon I was sitting right here at my desk and at about 1 or so in the afternoon, I realized I felt awful. After arguing with myself for a while, I conceded and buried myself beneath the covers, fully dressed except for my shoes. A couple of hours later I got up and was shivering so violently that I could barely shut the computer down. I took the hottest bath I think I’ve ever had and while it was still light outside went back to bed, where I remained until a little past 9 on Friday morning. I don’t think I’ve had the flu for more than a decade. It was strange getting out of bed on Friday. First, I am usually up before daylight. And second, the little white lights in my living room window were on, which was odd. Why I would have turned those on during the afternoon is beyond me. Maybe I did a bit of sleep walking and plugged them in during the nearly 20 hours that I was in bed fighting the fever. Who knows? Anyhow, when I got up I was craving scrambled eggs, which I took as a good sign. But then it got worse over the weekend, then a little better, than worse again. And the sort of but not completely continued.

So, I have a couple of notions about how to better enjoy next January. The first thing I’m going to do is to tell any and all clients – provided I’m still in this business – that I am absolutely unavailable from Christmas Eve through the second day of January. And the days after the second day of January will be normal business days whether clients are working or not. The second thing is to reschedule or completely forego the trip to Missouri. Because January is one of my favorite times of the year, and even though I’m still in the sort of foggy vagueness that can only be brought about by combining little illnesses with fuzzy schedules, I just realized that it’s over this week.

Public seating

2012-01-12T08:13:00.000-08:00

For a couple of years now I’ve been complaining and carrying on about people at the coffee shop in my neighborhood and how territorial they are about tables. Seriously, I often want to scream when I’m down there, just because you have a Twitter account and a Facebook page and a glowing image of a fruit on your laptop does not mean you own the space in which you sit. And sit. By the hour. Wearing earplugs, cords stretched across aisles, that horrible, horrible look of manufactured intensity I know so well shielding the faces from any human interaction.

So I have decided to do something about it. On many occasions over the last few months, when I’ve been seated at a table and people are standing around with mugs and plates in their hands, I’ve shared the table. There were two women who meet for coffee regularly. There was a guy and his sister, who was here for the holidays from somewhere back east. There was a guy and his daughter, who was about eight or nine years old. There was a woman who was expecting someone who never showed. It’s not that big of a deal. We didn’t have to have conversations. The little snippets about each of them that I just shared were all overheard by simply listening after saying hello and you’re welcome and please, by all means, have a seat. Then I’d return to my book. In all instances there was nothing painful or even awkward about sitting at the same table with complete strangers. We all came through it unscathed.

At the coffee shop in my neighborhood there is a large table in the front that I’ve always thought of as the group table, or the community table. Maybe that’s a wrong assumption on my part, but it’s larger than all the other tables and it’s rectangular rather than round. Once, one guy told me in a rather condescending tone that he was “sort of, um,” waiting for a couple of friends to join him and that the seating at that table is, “you know, first come, first served.” And I just kind of glared and said oh, okay, and sat down, and after a few minutes he packed his shit and left. I think that’s what got me started.

Recently, I was at Ikea and I stopped at the cafeteria for the meatballs, mashed potatoes and chocolate cake. In Portland, the cafeteria faces west, and there’s something quite nice about gazing out on a silvery winter afternoon at the fields and the hills off in the distance and the airport, watching the planes come and go. I sat at the end of one of the long, narrow tables that has eight chairs on each side. I want to say that one more time: It has eight chairs on each side. Although the cafeteria was pretty busy that afternoon, I had that table all to myself. I felt slightly guilty as people scurried about with the trays, their worried looks, their merchandise, but only slightly. Of the 16 chairs at the table where I sat, only one was taken. When I got up to leave two groups – one of three, the other four – raced, and I mean raced, toward the table I was leaving. One group got there first, as often happens, and so a woman from the group that reached the finish line second said “Oh, I’m sorry” and stepped back a bit and looked at the members of the victorious party with an awkward expression on her face. “My God,” I said as I walked away with my tray, “there are sixteen chairs.”

I have no idea what it is that infuriates me so much about all of this. People not being able to share space might strike me as a little bit too solid a metaphor for what is either an increasing inability to connect with new people or an increasingly alarmed reaction to my ongoing inability to connect with new people. Or maybe it just underscores what I think is the general self-centeredness of people, which seems to me to be on the rise. Or maybe it scares me deep down inside because it causes me to think: Shit, what are we going to do when we really need to help each other? By that, I mean, how will the seat savers and public space hoarders behave when the water and power get turned off, or shut down? You know as well as I do how they’ll behave: Badly.

Anyhow, the other day I met a friend for lunch over in an area of Portland called the Pearl. If you don’t live in Portland, the Pearl is what happens when a lot of mostly white people with a lot of money decide that it would be cool to acquire an urban lifestyle and, in the course of less than a decade, take over a neighborhood that was previously one sketchy block after another of warehouses, loading docks, broken windows and railroad tracks. I’m developing a bit of affection for the people who live over there, I must say, and here is why. They paid their million dollars or more for their view of the city and the mountains and then demanded that the post office alter its schedule and the trains reduce the pitch of their whistle. And their demands, of course, were met. They have enough money to build a new skyline so why shouldn’t the noises that were there long before they were be reduced? There’s a wonderful honesty about it, I think. We get what we want, the streets and boutiques and hybrid Toyotas over there whisper, because we pay for it.

The cathedral of the Pearl District, I think, is the Whole Foods store sitting there on West Burnside, a swirl of moneyed, mostly white folks coming and going, carrying the Whole Foods bags and wearing expressions of earnest urgency on their faces. It’s important business down there, getting the purest of the pure, the most organic of the organic. Because the grocery store in my neighborhood does not carry it, I go to Whole Foods to buy brown sugar in bulk, which I use for my oatmeal. This friend of mine who I had lunch with the other day – she’s my former boss, actually – has a thing for late lunches, and I do get hungry, so after I filled the plastic baggie (God forbid) with brown sugar I went over to the bakery section, which I had never visited before, and got myself a ham and cheese croissant. I figured I’d take it over to Powell’s with me and order a cup of coffee, but as I came through the checkout line I noticed the strangest thing: There are long, narrow tables with chairs that are more like bar stools on the Couch Street side of Whole Foods, and although it’s in one of the snottiest neighborhoods in Portland, the tables there are shared without questions, explanations or apologies. I couldn’t believe it.

Smoke

2012-01-06T07:30:00.000-08:00

It was the last Thursday afternoon of 2011. I was sitting at my desk and in the course of one hour I experienced the transformation of what had begun as a weird little tickle on the rear roof of my mouth into a full-fledged cold, or flu, or some sort of malady that fits into that category. I woke up Friday morning and realized I was, in fact, good and sick, so I went ahead and met a friend for coffee, as we’d planned to do, and then I got on the train and went out to do a bit of shopping and have some lunch. It was gray, and cold, and rainy and windy, but I didn’t really feel ill. Not exactly.

I got home before dark, and that’s when my nose began to bleed. At first I was surprised. Then I was annoyed. Then I was terrified. I am going to bleed to death in this goddamn house, I thought. I leaned over the kitchen sink as what I thought was a massive amount of blood splattered into the sink and splashed, as I would discover soon enough, up onto the black and white tile. My neighbor did me up an ice pack, which worked for quite a while. I had a really nice bath and then, around 10:45, woke from a deep sleep and noticed that my face was wet. Once the lights were on, I discovered an ungodly mess. Later, toward 3 o’clock in the morning, I fell asleep briefly in the living room, where I’d laid down on the rug but made sure my head was resting on the wood floor, figuring that if the bleeding started again, wood – unlike pillows or sheets or blankets or couch cushions or the rug – could be easily washed.

I think New Year’s Eve, a Saturday, was probably the worst of it. My face would feel so hot I feared combustion. Then, moments later, it was like ice. I cancelled my lunch plans and laid down on the floor again. At noon I got up and read a little and then laid down again. And then a little before five I walked to a potluck gathering, which I stayed at for an hour or so. I walked back to my house and went out to the little enclosed back porch out back, where I lit a cigarette and heaved and hacked my way through two drags. I had a cold that entailed some kind of respiratory issue, so as my chest got heavier the act of breathing became more difficult. And so there I stood, smoking. After two drags I put the cigarette out. An hour later I broke all the cigarettes I had in the house into at least three pieces, drenched them in water and then drained them into an empty coffee can. The coffee can, and the one remaining ashtray, were in the garbage before the beginning of 2012.

For me, smoking fell out of the social realm many years ago. I do recall (fondly, I have to say) going out to bars and cafes and restaurants and smoking with other people. There was something very reassuring, I thought, about lighting a cigarette right after the after-dinner coffee was poured. There was a time when I could smoke my way through most of a pack in a single sitting – or standing – at a bar. I also thought that smoking was one of the very few pleasant aspects of driving. Cigarettes somehow added a fleck of civility to the depravity of sitting in traffic on the outskirts of a city famous for incorporating public transportation into its urban planning.

The act of smoking changed so much in a relatively brief period of time. For me, it became very private, and very confined to one particular space. And not long after I quit drinking, I started trying to figure out what it was exactly that would prompt me to light a cigarette. Almost every cigarette I smoked, I figured out, I smoked in order to avoid doing something else. They weren’t relaxing. They weren’t pleasant. They certainly weren’t a whimsical ending to a tasty sexual escapade, and from the vantage point of the fifth full day without one, I don’t exactly miss them, I don’t exactly want one, but I cannot honestly say that their absence has gone unnoticed.

С Новым годом

2011-12-29T07:39:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that sooner or later every regular blog includes a post about the blog. For this blog, that sooner or later is today.

In September 2009 I decided to post a blog about the death of Ted Kennedy. And then I wrote another, and then I started trolling around here and there for photographs. Then I discovered, much to my surprise, that I had forgotten how much I truly enjoy writing, and by that I mean putting words to a thought or emotion or impulse with zero regard for the audience. That’s the exact opposite of my job, which requires me to write focused exclusively on the audience, with the goal of inspiring the purchase what’s being sold by whomever is paying me to write what they want written. In other words, it’s not writing at all – it’s typing. Writing this blog is another matter entirely. I write for the satisfaction of it, I write to express opinions without having to be polite about it, I write for a certain measure of therapy. It’s a self-centered enterprise, with very little thought given to who might be reading.

But a few months ago I happened across a tool I had no idea existed: In the back room of the blogging program there’s an accessory that spews forth very specific numbers and charts and bar graphs based on who drops in and when and from where. Even though I do not write with a specific audience in mind, I’d be lying if I said that I don’t find the statistics very interesting.

By a huge margin – and by that I mean several thousand – the most clicked upon or opened or read blog post is one I do not even recall writing. It’s about a city in Ohio whose basketball team had just lost a very, very celebrated player, a loss that had much of the sports world worked into a frenzy such that I thought the name of the basketball player had eclipsed the name of the city. After looking at the numbers I went back and read the post, which is one of my rambling odes to the glory of industrial cityscapes and the tragedy, I think, of elevating professional athletes to hero status. What’s truly strange is that the post doesn’t even mention the player by name, so how it caught on is a mystery to me. And it will remain so since I refuse to activate the comments function.

Another mystery pertains to the second most clicked upon or opened or read post. This mystery, for me, is more intriguing. The second most popular post in the history was about a very, very famous Russian author and a big, big book he wrote back in the 1850s. I posted it last fall, when my sisters and I were in the midst of reading that very long and very detailed book. A few months ago I discovered that not only had that post racked up some very impressive numbers but that it also altered the readership of this blog.

To this day, most of those who visit this blog do so on computers – or mobile phones perhaps – that are located in Russia. That baffles me, of course, but I do have three scenarios.

The first is that they’re Internet hackers. According to what I’ve heard and read, it’s something of a golden age of hacking over there in Russia and in countries that were once part of the big union. So perhaps every time their computers pick up a specific word – the author’s name, for example, especially when it’s in the headline – thousands of people either have a look themselves or use computers that are instructed to do so on their behalf. Of course, it’s odd that they’d continue reading, or monitoring. Anyhow, that’s my least favorite scenario.

The second is a bit more to my liking: The Russians remain deeply committed to and deeply in love with the author. Maybe people have their computers set to search for his name as a key word. Maybe people are conducting research for dissertations and on the lookout for something – anything – that testifies to the author’s power to transcend time itself. Or perhaps someone had a few hours to spare and was clicking around here and there on a cold and lonely afternoon on the eve of a Russian winter, when she (I do think of this person as she for some reason) came across a topic with which she was on intimate terms. And perhaps she forwarded it, and, to borrow the phrase of the author, so on and so forth.

Here’s my third scenario. The name of the author in the subject line prompted the blog to be picked up by various individuals and groups who are learning English. A simple forwarded e-mail that said, Look, here’s something about Tolstoy morphed into regular readership as a means of experiencing a regular dose of the language they’re learning in a more conversational rendition. That’s pure fantasy, of course, and it’s therefore not only my favorite of the three scenarios but the one I’m sticking with.

Public grief

2011-12-28T07:32:00.000-08:00

I had some plan-free time last Monday evening so I turned on the television. I didn’t want to watch the local news so, since it was almost 5:30, I tuned in to ABC. I know I bitch too much about the clowns who host the network programs, but even NPR – NPR! – routinely trashes Diane Sawyer. I’ve only witnessed her particular brand of maudlin once, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. As I said, I had a bit of time on my hands.

It turned out she was off for the evening, so I watched a few minutes of George Stephenopolus attempting to put sense to the world. I didn’t get past the first story.

Which is that the leader, dictator, czar – whatever he is, or was – of North Korea has died. The first words out of George’s mouth weren’t that Kim etc. etc. had died, which I already knew, but that thousands (28,000 was the figure, I believe) of “American troops” stationed in South Korea are now within less than 100 miles of North Korea’s nuclear might.

I have a few questions. First and foremost, why are so many military personnel from this country doing in South Korea? Advising? Consulting? Waiting? Provoking?

That issue was not addressed, or even mentioned. I’m also curious to know if the death of the country’s dictator put the troops closer to the arsenal that waits across the border separating north from south than they were before his death. When he died over the weekend, was the launching equipment moved, or did the troops move, or both, or neither?

This question was partially answered by one of the correspondent’s, who expressed the nervousness over Kim etc. etc.’s successor, who is his youngest son. He’s still in his twenties, so the story goes, so nobody is certain whether or not he’ll feel obligated to prove himself. I guess the next logical step in that uncertainty would be to volley a few nukes toward the concentration of U.S. citizens that is, for some reason, stationed less than 100 miles away. And I suppose we should all be alarmed. And nervous.

The best part, though –and by that I mean the most offensive – was yet to come. In addition to providing many opportunities to hear an sh inserted into the word peninsula, the quick montage of footage used as a setup for the first correspondent’s report would lead you to believe that everyone in North Korea was so devastated by the passing of the leader that speaking coherently and clearly was impossible. Here’s a news anchor, weeping her way through the announcement of his sudden and unexpected passing. Here are thousands of people on the streets, crying, shrieking, mourning in the most public way imaginable. And here’s a woman holding up a newspaper and wailing that she’s not sure how she’s going to endure this loss “because he loved us all so much.”

The correspondent summed it up beautifully. This is a forced display of public grief, she proclaimed in the most openly mocking tone I’ve ever heard on a program that presents itself as the news. I know nothing of the people or culture of North Korea. I think their military march style looks nutty, not to mention overtly hostile and vaguely creepy, which I’d guess is exactly how it’s intended. But at least when they cry in public it’s over a politician, someone who for better or worse actually matters to the country. Back home, of course, we reserve that sort of thing for people like Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods.

Winter colors

2011-12-23T07:27:00.000-08:00

It’s been an unusual December in Portland. While I love the atmospherics around here, I’m sorry to admit that the last two winters have been a bit much for me. When I say I like the winter rains, what I mean is that I like the constantly shifting sky, the dazzling ballet of light in response to gigantic cloud banks coasting across the horizon, the mist, the drizzle, the shimmering silver air of winter mornings. I do not mean downpours that last for days. I do not mean the seemingly relentless winds that cause my entire house to shake and groan.

So this December has been a gift of sorts. The week of Thanksgiving it poured, and poured, and poured some more. One day a record was broken and reset. And I thought, I am not entirely convinced that I have what it takes to endure five, six, seven, eight months of this. The morning after Thanksgiving I bolted out of here and caught a bus to a credit union branch that’s not too far from my house and where I have deposit privileges, only to find that the place was closed that day. My irritation lasted only a second or two. It was clear and cold. The sun was bright and the sky was blue. I went back to the corner to wait for the next bus for downtown, where I had some business to tend to, and thought: I’ll gladly wait here all morning. I even smiled and waved at a few vehicles as they sped past, roaring toward the mall named in honor of an interstate highway.

Sometimes when I blink my eyes I see little shooting, comet-shaped slivers for an instant afterward. Sometimes I enjoy this so much that I blink more rapidly than usual. Usually these slivers are sort of gold, or silver with a heavy dose of tan, or beige, or cream. Over the Thanksgiving weekend I sat down on my couch to read one afternoon. Two of the windows in my living room face south, and the sunlight pouring in as I sat there, the brilliance of the blue sky punctuated only by the black bare branches that announce winter like nothing else, all of it made me feel I might just be in another time zone. I blinked my eyes and what was left behind in my vision – the residue, I suppose you could call it – was not silver or gold but the most pleasant shade of blue I’ve ever experienced. It was blue with a very precise dosage of green. It wasn’t what I’d call light blue, but it had a lightness to it. Sign number one of a brain tumor taking hold, I thought. Or perhaps a holiday greeting from my long-gone grandmother. It was from her that I inherited my love of blue, I’m pretty sure. I’ve been searching for her blue dishes for decades now, and I’ve yet to find them.

The fig tree out in my side yard is doing weird things this year. This past summer, and the summer before, the fruit appeared in the spring, as it always does, but then the late-season cold and wet threw it off course. I think the people who come by in the fall with baskets and pick figs must have kept going this year because what they picked the year before was probably not good. At any rate, the leaves fell. Hundreds are composting beautifully in the yard and hundreds more have gone with the breeze. The branches are bare of leaves but the figs remain. They remind me Brussels sprouts display at the grocery store, still on their stalks.

I decided to attempt hanging lights outside this year not long ago, early on a bright and sunny December afternoon. There are electrical considerations – as there always are in this house – but I was on the enclosed porch out back, doing my business, and out of the corner of my eye, through the south-facing window, the sun was striking a bead of moisture on top of one of the figs, which wasn’t swaying in the breeze exactly, but was moving just enough to cause the sun-captured droplet to appear to be spinning. And it was a bright, bright shade of green, almost piercing. Emerald, I suppose you would call it. For what felt like many minutes I just stared out the window, and by the time I came inside, the inclination toward bright lights this time of year made perfect sense to me. Natural, you might even say.

Holiday mating

2011-12-21T08:13:00.000-08:00

One night last week I fired up the candles in the bathroom, turned on the hot water and headed out to the little enclosed back porch right off my kitchen for a smoke. I took one drag, blew out a few smoke rings and that’s when I heard the rustling.

The area behind my house is a treacherous mishap of ill-advised fences, decaying trees, a little pond and bowls of cat food (next door), a roof that slopes down quite low, an overhang that I swear is one day going to hang so precariously that it will simply fall off the house, a shed that’s built onto the side of the house and, like many things that are a part of this structure that has my name on it, is just off enough to render the call of should it stay or should it go impossible to make. It does prevent people from creeping from the front of my house to the back, which is a mixed blessing. At the same time, the underside of it is completely open – I’ll be damned if I know why – so animals, particularly possums, have not only a nice route away from the light and danger of the street but a protected resting area as well. And the roof of the shed slopes upward in such a way that if you were a creature blessed with the ability to leap, it’s a nice springboard to the roof of the house. Best of all, it’s not quite wide of enough to at least serve the one purpose I’d like it to. To put the lawn mower away or take it out requires lifting the entire thing and turning it to the side and then squeezing through the door. I know I dramatize and overreact to almost everything, but each and every time I’ve hoisted the lawn mower in and out my thoughts have carried me back to the afternoon I signed the stack of papers for this house, and in my mind I picture myself quietly and wordlessly taking my cigarette lighter out of my front pocket and burning each and every one of them. I’d be happy to pay the fines.

The other night, there was more rustling, then a pause, followed by more. It was not a possum. Possums have the most impressive size-to-sound ratio of any creature I’ve encountered thus far. Perhaps a cat, I thought hopefully. Then I pressed my face to the door and there, peering around the corner of the house as it perched on the top of the shed, was a big furry shadow and two little bright eyes. Get the fuck out of here, I yelled, making enough of an impression that the animal withdrew its head and scampered on up to the corrugated metal that extends a few feet behind the house. And from there, to the roof.

I turned on every light in the house and turned the water off. Then I went out the front door and stood in the street for a better look. And there, along the fence behind the house next door was another moving mass of fur and behind that, in a lit window, the guy who lives in the house behind me walking back and forth, oblivious to the terror.

My neighbor, a friend of his and I ended up standing in the street just beyond the driveway we share, where we watched the two raccoons roll and shimmy up and down the western slope of my roof. “Ahhh,” my neighbor’s friend cooed, “they’re mating.” A few minutes later they jumped into the car and drove off to a holiday gathering – the loving had not lasted long, and once it was over the raccoons ambled off to tend to whatever business it is raccoons tend to. And I came back inside and resumed the running of the bath and enjoyed the remainder of the blessedly quiet and peaceful evening.

Love letters

2011-12-19T07:35:00.000-08:00

Last Wednesday evening I watched the last episode in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary, which I’ve been hearing about and meaning to watch since the early 1990s. I don’t usually go in for painfully detailed ponderings of and on battle strategies and troop movement and intricate maps with the names of generals and arrows and tiny triangles that I believe indicate hills.

There was plenty of that, to be sure, but there was plenty more as well. For starters, I cannot make up my mind about Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipation Proclamation seems to have been put forth out of convenience more than anything you might call moral or ethical. What’s interesting though is that the northern folks – they were the enlightened side, as we all know – objected to the proclamation strenuously when they realized that it had become the war’s centerpiece. So much so that there was quite a movement in support of pulling out of the war unless he cancelled it, to which Abraham Lincoln said, no. I’m not sure if I consider that heroic. I suppose it is decent, though.

That’s my anti-North slam. On the anti-South side, here’s a good one. Many Southerners who happened to be in New York City protested because, according to them, the war was hurting the south far more than it was hurting the north. And I thought that causing problems – such as basing an economy on the right to own other human beings – and then racing for and clenching the victim medal was something more of our era.

I was completely entranced in a way that even I found alarming by the eyes of Robert E. Lee. Walt Whitman wrote during the war that Lincoln’s face was so complex that it beckoned the talent of the portrait artists from two or three centuries before, but Lee’s face, man, someone nailed that one. And nicely. The care with which the surrender and the dignity on display from both sides was orchestrated and recorded was intriguing to me. There was something inherently civil about it, not the least of which was that Robert E. Lee, unlike Ulysses S. Grant, dressed for the occasion.

All of this, though, falls flat alongside what I thought were the stars of the show: The letters. They were so beautifully written and recalled a language that existed in a state of grace I’ve never known but have certainly dreamed of. I hit rewind many times so I that I could listen again, and in a couple of instances I listened three or four times.

I didn’t live in the era, of course, but from what I could tell the Civil War was debated and considered and reported in vivid detail in the newspapers. This may be due to geographical immediacy and the fact that there was more at stake. At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that even though there were no computers or cell phones, it seems to me that people knew more of the world in which they lived. The number of dead that comes to mind is 800,000, a figure that – and pardon me for saying this – puts another, more recent national calamity into its proper perspective, and by that I mean makes it a shadow at best. And speaking of perspective, as coincidence would have it, I finished the series on Wednesday night, and on Thursday night the CBS Evening News reported that the war in Iraq – the price tag of which is well over $800 billion – is indeed over. But it was the third story of the newscast, preceded by some new bipartisan come-to-Jesus monkey business about Medicare and word that the governor of Iowa isn’t sure that Newt Gingrich is suited for the presidency.

Bashing the balls

2011-12-14T07:20:00.000-08:00

The other day my regularly scheduled meetings got cancelled. One, as usual, was cancelled moments before it was to begin; the other, a few hours in advance. I have a few projects going at the moment, and while there were many things I could have done to move each of them forward a tad, there was nothing pressing. And that’s my biggest shortcoming in this business: If I have six “urgent” things to do, I’ll do all six of them. If, on the other hand, I have two or three or four do-it-when-you-can tasks before me, I’ll drag those out as long as possible. I guess my confession here is that even though I routinely ridicule people who slather every interaction and project with a false sense of importance, I apparently abide.

Anyhow, since it was a very cold but very sunny morning, I decided to go do a little shopping. I was going to run out to Mall 205, which is a nice walk from my house, but I hate that place. I suppose I hate all malls, but this one, starting with the sad fact that it’s named after a highway, is especially nasty in my opinion. For those of you who have never been, it’s several acres of fat, mostly white people who channel their apparent anger into the way they command their oversized vehicles. If you are walking into or out of Mall 205 or, worse, riding a bicycle, get your ass out of the way.

So as I put the key into the door as I was leaving, standing there on my front porch it occurred to me that since I had no emergencies to tend to, why not take the train out to the Target store that sits on the edge of a big shopping spread close to the airport?

The mountains were out on full display. A jet with the word Continental painted on its tail sailed overhead, and I thought, Houston. The train glided almost silently along the tracks. Out the window, slightly below it, cars crawled along and they too were blessedly silent. My visit to Target began as it almost always does. I ordered nachos with cheese and jalapenos and sat on a stool, stuffing my mouth with garbage and looking out across the parking lot, where thousands of cars caught and gave back the rays of sunlight.

After the nachos, I wandered around a bit. I looked at the cloth-covered boxes for storing things and I looked at the selection of fancy skillets and I spent a while looking at the lights. Then, I wandered over to the men’s section to look for the main item I was shopping for – long underwear. The underwear section makes me horny. That’s really all there is to it. All that flesh, all those nice curves and hidden treasures, photographed. I’ve wondered, since a very young age, what goes through the minds of those holding the cameras and what goes through the minds of those holding onto other commodities. It’s a question I never tire of pondering.

And, as it always has, visits to the underwear section have something of a lasting impact. For a certain period of time, every male being I encounter after leaving that particular section is exactly the person I’ve dreamed of for decades. It’s the oddest thing, but it’s kind of fun, being flooded by fantasies that drove me to distraction as a hormone-addled teenager and that drive me to distraction still even though I have perhaps arrived in a demographic one could maybe label “dirty old man.” I loved crotch shots then and I love them now.

Which brings me to the checkout line. I placed my items on the belt. The attractive checker (everyone is attractive by that point) removed each of the two packages containing the long underwear, the shaving cream and razors and the strand of lights and looked at each, it seemed to me, with careful consideration. Then another attractive man (everyone is attractive by that point) came up behind me. I’d say he was 38 or so, really short hair, smoky eyes that were either deep green or brown, sweatshirt, jacket, jeans. He had a cart overflowing with shit, it being the season and all, and the first thing he put on the belt was a rectangular box, the top of which was a cellophane window. And the words, in big letters, on the side that was facing me: The Electronic Ball Basher. A toy, to be sure, I thought, and I thanked the clerk and he handed me my bag and I left.

Dysfunction

2011-12-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

I became familiar with Barney Frank back in what I now think of as the Newsweek days. A magazine used to arrive in the mail, weekly, and in it there was news. This was before the innernets took over, before updates were posted on the so-called news sites every hour whether there was any new news or not, before every story included a link to a video, or a link to anything for that matter. I got to know Barney Frank through words that had been printed on paper, and I thought he was grand. An openly gay congressman. Holy shit.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but my opinion of him has gone down steadily over the years. One of the reasons for this is that I thought his indignation over the financial crisis was not only absurd but insulting as well. Wasn’t he in charge of the committee that was supposed to be minding the nation’s piggy bank? But the main reason I’ve grown less fond of Barney Frank rather than more is that I do not like the way he comes across. When a reporter thanks him for his time at the beginning of an interview or thanks him for his time at the interview’s conclusion, Barney Frank all but grunts. He’s yappy, I think, but in a way that somehow incorporates the worst of smug. It’s a deadly combo, I think.

But man, he does have a certain flair for saying things that I’d imagine will end up in a collection of quotations at some point. There was the exchange at one of the town hall meetings on healthcare, when he responded to one attendee’s blathering by saying she appeared to have all the intelligence of a piece of furniture – a dining room table, I believe. And my personal favorite – responding to a right winger’s lame taunt that he needed to take an HIV test and share the results by saying that he’d be happy to do that once she shared the results of her IQ test. I loved that.

Last week was pretty good, too. On a sort of schmaltzy interview on the Newshour, Barney Frank was asked if he thought Congress was really dysfunctional. Rather than screw around with qualifiers, his response was to ask the interviewer – Judy Woodruff – how she supposed the people who are members of Congress got there. They didn’t parachute down through the dome on the Capitol building and take their seats as if by magic, he said. The U.S. voters elected one party in 2008, and two years later they elected another. So who, exactly, is dysfunctional? While that sort of response shouldn’t be noteworthy, unfortunately it is.

Mirrors and movies

2011-12-07T07:16:00.000-08:00

Without really meaning to, I recently read two novels with Middle Eastern themes, settings and characters. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is an almost unbearably harsh tale of endurance as experienced through the eyes of two women whose lives are forced to adapt to the ever-shifting political and religious landscape in Afghanistan. Maps for Lost Lovers, by Nadeem Aslam, paints an equally harsh picture of what it means to leave Pakistan but only in the physical sense. In both books, there are references – quite a few of them – to the wonders of Iranian cinema. Going to see an Iranian movie, I read over and over, was a vestige of sorts, a reprieve.

Which reminded me of the fondness for those films that struck my mother toward the end of her life. It was the strangest thing, hearing about aspects of my parents’ lives together, their habits and their preferences, that took hold after their children were grown and gone. During those conversations with my mother I had to remind myself that I was one of those children, grown and gone, and that she and her husband – my father – had embarked on an adventure or two that did not include me. One of their habits made me think my parents were … dating: They liked to go to the movies, and their favorite movies, my mother told me, were Iranian. In fact, she kept close tabs on the papers to find out when a new one was scheduled to come to town. One time I asked her some questions. Was it the location of production or the subject matter that drew her in? Both, she said. And what, I asked, is it that you like about those movies? Well, she said, they’re gorgeous.

I spoke with a friend of mine on Thanksgiving whose wife died earlier this year. As it happens, her wife and my mother carried through their lives the same, understatedly beautiful name. And as it also happens, her wife and my mother shared a fondness for the Iranian cinema.

So I was out and about the day after Thanksgiving, which was beautiful here, and I found myself at the book store – the big one – and I thought, certainly there must be …

Mirrors of the Unseen, which is not only a good title for a book but could also be a good title for the lives of both my mother and my friend’s beloved, is 400 pages of Jason Elliot’s ruminations on the Iran of then and the Iran of now. The focus, though, is much more on the then, and the then, on Iran’s calendar, is so vastly endless that centuries I’ve never even heard of are referenced so casually you’d swear they’d unfolded last summer and, at the same time, last summer is discussed as if that is what we mean when we say ancient history. The whole book was wonderfully upside-down that way.

I loved the book, personally. Jason Elliot’s main obsession – and you could watch it move in and take over, as if it were a disease, and perhaps it was – is the alignment of mosques to the spaces that surround them. As seen by the naked eye, many buildings seem to be out of synch with one another but are, in fact, “singing in a chorus of geometries.” [pg. 281]. That was interesting, I thought, as were his observations on how truly ancient Persian culture is and the prevalence of its influence on the world, much of which is credited to Europeans. Here’s a good one, specific to the U.S.: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Although quite a bit of that is carved into the main post office in New York, it’s straight out of the fifth century (B.C.), when those words were used to describe Persia’s Achaemenid mail couriers.

The geometry is a springboard to the country’s love – and I mean love – of adornments that could be dismissed as mere decorations but that are, in fact, more riddles of geometry. Calligraphy, tile, textiles, beadwork and, my personal favorite, the architecture. The architects of many mosques and other public buildings spent at least a decade per structure, a decade during which one of their main priorities was the incorporation of lighting, which, according to the author, they regarded as sacred and as or more critical to a building as its physical elements. All of this, of course, without computers.

What really lodged in my mind from the book, though, is this: Way, way long ago, a Persian ceramicist was accused of stealing another artist’s design. His reply: Imitation is the sincerest form of pottery. I’m not sure why that occurred to me as hysterical, but it did, and so I laughed and laughed and laughed some more.

Camping

2011-12-05T07:33:00.000-08:00

Of all the aspects of the occupiers and their movement, there was one that seemed to rankle the general public in a way that no others did. I realized one day that if you want to really aggravate people, you need not waste your time and effort exposing your breasts, going to the gay pride parade bound and gagged, kissing another person – or two, or three – of the same gender or wearing t-shirts with naughty words on them. All you need to do, it seems to me, is camp in a public space. It drives people right to the line that separates the reasonable from the hysterical, and then, very quickly, way past it.

I don’t know what I think of it, or how I feel about it, and I’m not sure it matters. A friend of mine did ask me, nicely, how I might feel if people pitched tents up and down my street.

My initial response was that the question raised something of a moot point since my street is not a public park. The parks in downtown Portland where the camping took place are not, in my opinion, really parks: They’re one city block each (in a city of very small blocks) with statuary and, in one, a building with restrooms. While most people would be hard pressed to name them, during and following the campout these two parks have been discussed in tones and terms so reverent you’d think they were the birthplace of Jesus or one of his very close relatives.

The City of Portland is partly to blame for this. Shortly after the occupiers were evicted and parks employees came to work on a Sunday afternoon to enclose the parks with chain-link fencing to “keep everyone safe,” estimates for what it would cost to repair the parks started getting tossed around, and, as is to be expected, the local news people trumpeted the figures at the top of their talk shows. The most recent figure I heard was $180,000, and I have three things to say about that. First, why do these two city blocks warrant an arborist and a specialist to tend to one thing and another? Does every so-called park get that level of attention? A relatively large park in my neighborhood and the community center housed in it sure don’t. Second, as one occupier pointed out, the estimate for repairing the restrooms reflects what it will cost to restore those facilities to a condition that was lost long before the campers arrived. It’s distorted, in other words. And third, I’ve been on the receiving end of the city’s cost-estimating capabilities - $1,200 for three or four squares of sidewalk that absolutely did not need to be repaired in the first place and that were, ultimately, repaired poorly. I hesitate to bash a government entity, but in this case I think getting a few more bids would be a good idea.

But the more I thought about my friend’s question, the more I thought that I would find a strand of tents pitched up and down my street less problematic than the SUVs and 18-wheelers and pickup trucks sagging with refrigerators and washing machines and dish washers and other vehicles driven by generally careless idiots that roar through with zero regard for those of us who live here. People do need to sleep, and in order to do so most people need to be shielded from the elements. People do not, in my opinion, need to exceed 50 miles per hour on a street that is barely two lanes wide.

I think the revulsion brought about by camping is entertaining in a way. At the same time, I do wonder what’s behind it, or beneath it. Are we that disturbed by people going about the business of daily living, only outside? Does it remind us of where we came from? More troubling or more entertaining, depending, does it remind us of where we appear to be headed? Does it remind us that most of us have lost the instincts that would come in pretty handy if we were forced to survive without what we now consider the basics? Does it force us to ask ourselves as best we’re able what we would do without remote controls, without running water, without the God-given right to waste paper by placing a sheet of it on a toilet seat so that our ass cheeks don’t touch the surface that someone else’s ass cheeks touched before we do our business in a public or semi-public facility?

And what would we do without the perversion of Thanksgiving known as Black Friday? That was an interesting day this year, I thought, because it followed so closely the eviction of the occupiers from the sacred grounds in downtown Portland. For a brief, hallucinatory moment, I imagined that maybe the super sales would fall flat as people honored the time and energy the protestors invested in showing the country and the world that our economy is indeed a fairly tale. What, I wondered, under a trance of almost childlike delight, what if everyone simply occupied their own hearts, souls and spirits rather than rushing out and buying more stocking stuffers for next year’s landfill? But there was no such luck. Record sales, I believe, that actually boosted the stock market, the unintelligible details of which are now broadcast on an hourly basis, and it all got officially underway, as it usually does, with a good old-fashioned campout in the parking lots of malls across the land. And, if the breezy chattiness of the hosts and hostesses who sing the world on the television stations is any indication, that was just fine.

The search

2011-12-02T07:33:00.000-08:00

I don’t normally give much thought to getting dressed. I try to wear clothing that serves its purpose (not short-sleeved sweaters, for example, which make zero sense to me), that’s comfortable and that attracts as little attention as possible. In other words, I strive for the exact opposite of trendy, and usually I achieve it.

This year, because I’ve been half-heartedly hunting around for a specific item, I found myself memorializing what I think is my all-time favorite piece. In 1994, I took a long train trip that wound up at Union Station in downtown Portland, Oregon. Kansas City was one of the stops early in the voyage, and while I was there I went to a Goodwill store with a then-friend’s then-girlfriend and in that store I found and bought a deep, deep blue turtleneck that was made of the heavy fabric usually used for sweatshirts. It was, quite simply, perfect: It fit, the neck and the cuffs were form-fitting but not too tight, the color was glorious and it was warm. Before I had to part with it many years later, I wore that sweatshirt (or was it a turtleneck?) pretty much always except for on laundry day. Had I realized back then that putting clothes in the drier is a pretty sure way to destroy them, I’d probably still be wearing that creation, but alas, with only a single glob of threads connecting the neck to the body, I had to part with the turtleneck-sweatshirt combo. And I remember the day clearly, even now.

I’ve checked at various stores and online, and my search – if you can call it that – leaves me with one question: Have straightforward, no-frills turtleneck sweaters been outlawed? One of the problems with buying almost everything used is that I forgot how maddening the mandatory changing of styles can be. This year, someone decided that men’s sweaters should be crapped out with what’s called a shawl collar. Sometimes these sweaters are adorned with buttons but most of the ones I’ve seen simply have a chest-level gash where one half of the sweater goes one way and the other half goes the other and the entire thing culminates in a sort of quasi hood-type thing that dangles in the back. From the perspective of pure practicality, does that “shawl” keep the wearer any warmer? Does it make the sweater fit better? Is it a structural consideration? Or is it just a decoration?

Looking for a turtleneck made out of sweatshirt-weight material online was even more puzzling. Because I don’t buy much on the Internet, I almost never do searches for specific products, which is good, because I’m not sure what the point is, exactly. Type into a search engine the words “turtleneck sweatshirt mens” and if anything remotely along those lines turns up, please let me know. Because I found pretty much everything but. Cardigans, crewnecks, V-necks, mock this and mock that, button-down shirts, underwear, you name it. It made me wonder what sort of coding actually goes into the search engine algorithms. Although the marketing teams behind the search engine biz would love for you to believe that theirs is a world of pure precision, it’s one of the sloppiest experiences I’ve had in a long while. I put the words in different order and the same shit turned up, over and over, shit I didn’t want before, shit I don’t want now.

Which brings me, sadly, to the Gap, where there is no end of shit. That was the company whose logo was on the tag of my beloved sweatshirt turtleneck – or turtleneck sweatshirt – and it’s the tag that’s on a couple of other items that I really like, items I’ve been very careful to not ever subject to the drier. As I recall, that store used to characterized by sturdy construction, solid lines, buttons and zippers that stayed where they were meant to stay and a sort of no-frills tastefulness in general. What happened?

Compromises

2011-11-30T07:24:00.000-08:00

I found myself in the middle of a word warp last week. From two completely different stories, a single word – compromise – occurred to me in ways as different as July is from November.

First, the theatrics that went along with the committee thrown together to trim a couple trillion bucks from the budget. I thought the entire thing was a circus from the beginning. My first question, and in some ways my only question, is this: With 535 voting members representing the country’s citizenry in Congress, I wonder what’s behind selecting a dozen of them to tackle the task of solving the nation’s fiscal ills. I have two guesses. The first is that the Republicans really do want to increase taxes, but they don’t want it on their record, so being able to blame it on a committee come election day sure would be handy. The second is that everyone in Washington has acknowledged on some level that the money situation – and therefore the country – has slithered beyond the point of no return. Rather than say this out loud, having a committee to personify the dysfunction is yet another way to distract voters from the truth, which we are evidently incapable and unwilling to confront.

Which was my first encounter last week with the word compromise. Millions of us were apparently turned on by candidates whose main campaign message was that they would not compromise when it came to taxes. And based on last week’s roaring about the failure of the so-called super committee to accomplish anything, millions of us are incapable of making the simplest of connections. One evening my mouth just sort of hung open as I watched one national newscast and listened to some big shot representing the retail industry claim that he’d been blindsided by this travesty. And the rancor out on the Internets was even more appalling, I thought: Throw them out of office! What a bunch of losers! Congress is dysfunctional! As long as I’m throwing the term “millions” around, here’s a prediction: The members of the super committee will indeed be thrown out of office a year from now, and they’ll be replaced by candidates whose talking points cater to an even more simple-minded crowd of millions of voters who want to address problems that have been in the works for at least a century with an answer as simple and easy as apple pie. We want solutions, they’ll say, not compromises.

Closer to home, Oregon’s governor announced he’s putting a moratorium on all executions for the duration of his term. During his first go-round as governor, there was at least one execution carried out that left him, he says, with more questions than conclusions. To avoid finding himself – and the state – in that situation again, he declared himself unwilling to compromise. And in my own way, in spite of my tirade against the use of that word in the context of politics, I applauded.

Dreams

2011-11-28T07:18:00.000-08:00

The first time I attempted The Audacity of Hope, I was on a train going to Los Angeles for Christmas. Barack Obama, the author, had just been elected president, and one of his first acts, as I recall, was to enlist for the inauguration the reverend who had just served as the face and voice of the campaign to exclude same-sex couples from marriage in California. I read a few chapters, and with each one the realization that even the country’s first minority president was fully capable of toying with the gays as political collateral became more clear to me, so I left the book on the train.

A few months ago I started it again, and this time I finished it. I can understand the excitement a book such as that would have generated considering the point at which it was published – several years into the W era – but in reading it three years into Obama’s administration, the book read to me like a very well-written bit of campaign literature. We can all gather round and hold hands and acknowledge our differences while at the same time, oh golly gee, we can … hope! the book seemed to be saying.

His first book, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. The key word in the title, Dreams from my Father, I believe, is from. I don’t think Obama’s father is an actual character for a single chapter in the book, but he is a presence on each page. So too are impressions gathered from a lifescape, if you will, that includes Hawaii, Indonesia, Chicago, Harvard and Kenya. What Obama’s writing accomplishes that is truly stunning is the weaving together of all those impressions into an experience that leads not to answers but to questions.

Lots and lots of questions.

Is a man with a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya more black than white? Is arriving in the upper echelons of the middle class a betrayal of the poor or is it an accomplishment for all? Should a black person inherently and fundamentally mistrust a white person? Have the image Kenyans have of themselves been defined more by British colonialism than by their ancestors? Is there hope – audacious or otherwise – for inner-city, serially impoverished black people? Does the black church – as a whole – harm more than it heals? What, exactly, was the significance of Harold Washington’s ascension to the mayor’s office in Chicago? Is it a crime to play your part in order to get along? Or is it a concession?

One of the biggest questions, for me anyhow, is the interpretation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. By the time Obama started his community organizing job in Chicago, Wright’s church had evolved into a clearinghouse of sorts for the city’s impoverished south side. I’m oversimplifying here, but here’s a synopsis of Wright’s position. It’s great for black people to get ahead socially and economically. It’s not so great when they succumb to what he called “middleincomeness” and shift their allegiances away from where they’ve been to where they’re hoping to go. Another of his trademarks is the notion that as much as those who remain in the inner city have to learn from those who have arrived in the inner sanctum, the reverse is equally true: There are plenty of lessons black corporate lawyers can learn from black women raising four children in public housing in a neighborhood where the sound of gunfire is so ordinary it’s barely noticed. Back in 2008, when I first heard the recordings of the reverend yelling about white folks, my guess that it was the handiwork of shrill conservatives, who consider use of the word “context” an act of elitism; after reading the book, I’d put money on that hunch. A lot of it.

For me, the most intriguing part of the book is the way it tackles nuance. While the main point of a lot of what’s written these days seems to be that we all share something called an “American character” that dictates to us a consistent set of hopes and ambitions, I think our president did a stunning job at underscoring the way different experience and history results in different narratives that, when placed alongside one another and occasionally intersected, define the United States. Everyone’s story, the book seems to say, has merit and has a place in the ongoing national conversation. Even those whose job is to fill the empty heads of people like Sarah Palin with empty words written and spoken with the sole purpose of ridiculing and trivializing the idea that a democracy hears the voices of those many would prefer remain disenfranchised.

Thanksgiving with the alcoholics

2011-11-23T07:46:00.000-08:00

Until I became one of them a few years ago, I had always been baffled by people who speak ill of the holidays. What’s not to like? I’d wonder. For me, for years, I didn’t enjoy the holidays because they were a time to gather with people and appreciate one another and share profound – if short-lived – realizations about gratitude and humility. I just tend to like group get togethers and the way that holiday lights and candles and even the music soften the year’s coldest afternoons and evenings. Plus, I really like to eat.

And then, in 2008, I decided to part ways with alcohol, which changed everything. Or it changed the way I experience everything. Most of it is good. The holidays, unfortunately, particularly Thanksgiving, are one of the few exceptions.

It began with one of my brothers. I plan to explore this one more thoroughly someday, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have some sharing right here and right now. It’s the holiday season, after all. He’d had Thanksgiving at his house for a few years in a row. At his house, his wife made the turkey according to her specifications (she read somewhere, or perhaps heard from her mommy, that stuffing can turn toxic, which strikes me, in hindsight, as a spectacular metaphor). At his house the guests included his wife’s uncle and his partner, his and his wife’s children, around whose schedules everything revolved, including the ringing of the telephone, and a group of his and his wife’s friends. At his house the dinner was served on matching flatware from matching bowls and platters on a dining room table with extra leaves so that it could be expanded to seat everyone. Like most of their possessions, the table was expensive, but, also like most of their possessions, it had not put a dent in their budget because it was a wedding gift. Even though this meal was held at his house, I like to cook on Thanksgiving, so I always brought a lot of food with me.

So imagine my surprise when, in early November that year, my brother’s beleaguered, put-upon and yet accusatory response to my mention of Thanksgiving: “God, seems like you could do it at your house once in a while.” I will never forget the shock I felt at the end of that telephone call. Since that year was perhaps the last before he and his wife and their children moved to California so that their children could grow up to be more like my brother’s wife’s people than his own, coupled with the fact that our father was clearly in his final days, I had believed that it was going to be really nice, or maybe even special, to spend an afternoon and evening together. In a way that’s both tragic and worthy of celebration, when it comes to members of my family, I made a vow to never, ever entertain such foolish sentiments again. And thus far, I’ve honored it.

Then there’s my friend who I’ve known for 10 years or so. He’s a writer but he’s also quite good at remodeling and building and he’s one of the most well-read people I know. He’s also quite an entertainer, and every year, the week of Thanksgiving, he calls me to tell me that he and his boyfriend are going, as is the custom, to some long-standing mid-day meal hosted and attended by what my friend describes as the bitchiest group of queens in Portland. But after that, my friend always informs me, he’s cooking a huge meal, which he’ll be serving to “half the town” at his place. Somehow, though I’ve been hearing about this gathering for many years and I’ve lived in Portland for many more, I’ve never been part of that particular half of town. I’m almost proud of that.

Many years ago one of my friends introduced a routine so weird I’m still not sure what to call it. After a family gathering, he would say “My mother asked how you were and said it would have been fine if you’d come to dinner.” This usually happened right after Easter, as I recall. Then, after my mother died, he started railing about how much he dislikes Mother’s Day. To which I finally said, “Don’t worry – she’ll be dead before you know it.” So I suppose what happened last year was an upping of the ante on his part, although I’m not sure because I’ve never broached the subject, nor do I intend to. We went out for breakfast right before Christmas, and as we sat there my friend started telling me about an old acquaintance who was in town and how he was being avoided because he was, according to my friend, one of the most annoying, deceitful people to ever come along. Finally, my friend said, “Oh yeah, and he was always invited to our house for holiday dinners.” Clueless to a point that defies description? Or, fully aware that I was on my own for Christmas, just really mean spirited? While I’ve considered this particular person a friend since I was 30 years old, neither explanation works for me. Nor does the friendship.

But other things do work, and they work quite well.

I do remember that it was rainy and cold on Thanksgiving in 2008. I remember thinking, several times, that being in my house, by myself, on a holiday bedazzled with togetherness was the definition of personal failure. While I don’t remember what I made, I do remember walking down my street in the late-afternoon darkness, terrified that I would run into someone I knew and have to quickly come up with something believable if asked where I was going in the pouring rain with a dish covered with aluminum foil. Because going to a Thanksgiving potluck organized and hosted by one of the many nearby Alcoholics Anonymous groups I’d discovered over the previous two months would certainly turn out to be something I’d later recall as a low point, which is a funny thing to remember, three years later, because it was anything but.

Judging a book by its cover

2011-11-17T07:39:00.000-08:00

There are very few downsides to reading books like Anna Karenina, The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one of them is that whatever novel you read following one of them has an unusually high chance of disappointing. And disappointment is exactly what I was left with after reading the last page of Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam.

I found it at a recent used book sale and there were two reasons I bought it: I liked the cover, and I liked the title. After enduring all 369 pages, I still really like the cover, and I still really like the title.

I think the story itself is compelling. Focused on one family, the book is a tour of day-to-day life among a community of immigrants from Pakistan living in the U.K., in a city that was not immediately recognizable to me. It seems to me there were two, possibly three, main plot lines. The first is the search for the killers of the husband’s brother and his live-in girlfriend. The second is the husband’s affair with a woman who, it turns out, needs to accomplish some very specific things according to the almighty Allah: Since her alcoholic husband beat the shit out of her and then uttered the word “divorce” three times in a row, her mandate, as understood by the faithful, is to marry another man and then divorce him. Once that’s accomplished, she has the blessing of Allah to return to her abusive, alcoholic husband and remarry him. Don’t feel bad if you need to reread that to make sure you’ve got the order of it correctly. I sure did.

The biggest disappointment was the third plot line (and I hesitate to call it that because I’m not sure it qualifies), which focuses on the family’s wife and mother, Kaukab. The most devout of the characters, she’s at war on one level or another with all three of her children, with her husband, with the neighbors and with England, in a way that’s both specific and general.

What fell apart for me was that Kaukab’s concerns, like the concerns of nearly every character, are written in a way that is so trite I think I rolled my eyes through most of it. With the exception of the few paragraphs dedicated to Kaukab’s struggle with the language and the disparity between what she says and what she feels, which I thought were excellent, Nadeem Aslam paints her in the same way he paints the rest. He trots out one cliché after another, and they’re clichés conveyed with writing that rarely rises above the level of an earnest amateur.

Of course, in fairness, I do wonder how the book would have struck me had I read it at a different time. Because after a few weeks in Macondo with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the driver’s seat, most writing is bound to fall flat, including mine.

Pictures

2011-11-15T07:36:00.000-08:00

This is not really a tale of Occupy Portland, but about something that happened as a result of my visit to it a couple of weekends ago. I saw two situations, or scenes, that I struck me much more like photographs than stories.

The first was a weary, weathered looking man in a wheelchair, and leaning into him in a way that suggested her body was constructed not of solid bones but of something more along the lines of rubber bands was a young woman with a clipboard. I stopped just in time to hear her explain something about the process of registering to vote, and then slowly – and this, to me, was the moment meant for a picture – she handed him the clipboard in such a way that it appeared they were at the same level, vertically, which they were not. There was something communion-ish about it, I thought.

The second scene I witnessed – and failed to photograph because I did not, at that time, have or own a camera – centered around the long row of narrow tables, covered in white plastic and stacked high with hamburger buns, loaves of bread, energy bars and so on. Behind the tables stood three people – servers, I presume – and behind them the statuary figures of three men, the hand of one of them holding a gigantic fork someone had placed there. And behind the statue, or over it, a white tarp that transformed the dismal light of a November afternoon into a quality that could almost be called bright. I cannot articulate the particulars of it, or the physics, but as I stood facing the food tables I had the distinct impression that the scene itself was both moving toward and moving above me, like a jet, I suppose, coming toward you as it prepares to lift and fly over the point where you’re standing.

The camera I bought on Sunday morning, after waking up to thoughts of the photographs I’d missed the day before, is a shiny silver Nikon Coolpix S3100. I’m still getting used to it, of course. On the one hand I feel like I’m carrying a pistol without a permit. On the other, I feel like I’m learning a new language, which has always struck me as a worthwhile pursuit.

Letter to the editor

2011-11-10T07:45:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure how I feel about just retyping a letter I saw in a magazine and calling it a blog post. It’s not what I set out to do here, that’s for sure. But, I read a letter in this month’s Harper’s and it says exactly what I feel and think about our president’s perceived stature as a liberal. Or, more specifically, the country’s collective liberal mouthpiece’s ongoing insistence that it’s a stature that’s been abandoned by our president, which is impossible according to my calculations because his voting record clearly indicates that he wasn’t a liberal to begin with, at least not by my definition. But Chris Runk of New York City put it much more succinctly, so I’ll defer to her, or him:

In enumerating his proposals for a stronger America, George S. McGovern assumes that the president is a leftist and thus could be expected to endorse some of them [“A Letter to Barack Obama, Easy Chair, September]. This assumption is not new. Even before he was elected president, many of Obama’s champions took for granted his liberalism, notwithstanding that, as senator, he equivocated on free-trade agreements, indicated his support for an intensification of the war in Afghanistan, and voted for the release from civil liability of the telecommunications firms that assisted the Bush Administration’s wiretapping.

Some Obama apologists are keen to tout the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act as vindication of his liberal bona fides, but, in fact, that legislation represented the apotheosis of Obama’s “preemptive compromise” – in this case, an incremental, regressive abandonment of the ideal of universal health care.

And now, given the president’s near-total capitulation to Republican tax demagoguery, that anyone could still indulge in the pernicious illusion of his liberalism speaks more to the lamentable condition of liberals – and to the success of right-wing rhetoric – than to his political views.

This is just a test

2011-11-09T10:29:00.000-08:00

My about-face

2011-11-08T07:24:00.000-08:00

On Saturday afternoon I went downtown and took a tour of the two blocks occupied by Occupy Portland, and what I spent the better part of the rest of the afternoon and most of the next day thinking about was not the event itself but the response to it.

While I never personally witnessed the demonstrations in the south in the 1950s and 1960s or the protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, I have read and heard enough to register a few common themes, the same themes, believe it or not, that took hold in the 1980s when a shamefully small group of brave men and women took to the streets to call attention to the fact that thousands were dying of a virus most people who were not directly affected by it preferred to ignore. Catastrophically for many, among those who refused to acknowledge or address the virus and its implications were the residents of the White House.

Martin Luther King and those who had to make more than one attempt to even begin the march to Montgomery because they didn’t have appropriate permits to cross a bridge on the outskirts of Selma were deemed lawless in many newspapers, including the New York Times. A few years later, the people who believed that the country’s participation in the war in Vietnam was wrong were dismissed and marginalized for equally trivial (in my opinion) concerns: their clothing, the length of their hair, their music, the fact that they preferred their alteration in the form of smoke rather than drink. Forcing what I consider the ultimate act of patriotism into verb form, they were dismissed as unpatriotic.

From what I think is an impressive range of people, I am amazed, and not in a good way, at the response to Occupy Portland: Isn’t it ironic that they’re using Facebook? Isn’t it ironic that they’re protesting big business and yet almost everything in the encampment contains petroleum? And isn’t it ironic that the rally to urge people to move their accounts from one of the big banks to a credit union was staged at Pioneer Courthouse Square, where there’s not only a Starbucks but a Bank of America ATM as well?

After thinking about it and talking about it and debating it with myself and with others, here’s my answer: No.

In terms of the petroleum content and holding a gathering in a space occupied – pardon me – by two of the most egregious brands of all time, I’m comfortable shooting down both notions with the same missile. Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland is an easy to find, easily accessible gathering spot. The fact that the Starbucks on the busiest corner of the square has a Bank of America ATM beside the south entrance is not the fault of the Occupy Portland participants. Our short sightedness about allowing for-profit corporations to tarnish public spaces should not deter those exercising what’s left of the right to assemble to do so in a place known as “Portland’s Living Room,” a space that as of today still belongs to us all. Similarly, in terms of petroleum’s presence in a mind-boggling array of products, placing the burden of our decades-long preference for cheap over responsible on the shoulders of the occupiers is nothing more than an easy way to ignore the main point and focus instead on the incidentals.

My reaction to the criticism of the occupiers for doing their business on Facebook is a bit harder to explain. I do feel that the role of the cranky old man sitting in a broken down rocking chair out on the front porch, bellowing ridicule at any and all who are not wholeheartedly of his era, is one that I was born to play, not just because I like it but because I am good at it. So try to imagine how painful it was over the weekend when certain thoughts invaded the outskirts of my consciousness, and imagine how painful it is for me right now to type the following letters:

I love Facebook.

Seriously. It’s free, it’s easy to use, you can talk to the world almost instantly and without censure with nothing more than an Internet connection, and if you don’t have one you can go to the library and use the connection there. And, in a way I imagine is similar to how religion was regarded in this country once upon a time, you are free to not participate. While I think a lot of what gets posted on Facebook is horrid, a bit of blessedly uninterrupted reflection during the extra hours of Sunday morning led me to the very simple conclusion that hating Facebook because of the inane postings, of which there are millions (in my opinion), makes as much sense as blaming the U.S. Postal Service, one of our national treasures, for the avalanche of credit card offers and special deals on insuring your car, whether you own one or not.

If you want to get technical about it – and I do – forget for a moment the notion that Facebook is corporate, which, for the record, I think is inaccurate. There is indeed advertising on it, as there always is when the marketing team gets involved, and many companies have pages with thousands of followers who are offered special deals on this that and the other. And that, say some, makes Facebook corporate. As one friend said to me on Sunday morning, if the protesters were truly sincere about opposing corporations they would have chosen craigslist to communicate rather than Facebook. Or they could communicate with blogs. Why the hell should they? Facebook is there, an astounding number of people spend an astounding amount of time already signed in and it’s free. Well yeah, said my friend, but it’s corporate. There’s advertising. To which I said, there is advertising on the Number 20 bus I ride downtown from time to time. Does that mean public transportation in Portland is corporate? And furthermore, if ads make it corporate, does my riding it undermine my belief that public transportation is a critical component of a city’s character? I don’t think so.

What I decided on Sunday morning is that the wrongness of what friends have said to me about the hypocrisy of using Facebook to protest corporate domination really stands out when applied to the protests against Vietnam and last-class citizenship of black people in the south. Those demonstrations, after all, were staged on streets and sidewalks and in plazas built and maintained by the very government against which they were protesting.

So, their endeavors were hypocritical? Yes, according to the many who preferred commenting from the safety of the sidelines over actual participation, but, according to many more, whose clarity of purpose became only more so with the passing of years, no.

No cake

2011-11-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

The latest on marriage arrived in this month’s issue of the Atlantic, a magazine I’d never subscribe to on my own but that a friend of mine gives me as a gift each year, a friend I do not have the heart to tell what I really think of the magazine. I think it’s smug. I think it purports to embrace a liberal point of view when in actuality it’s the magazine version of the Clinton Administration: It’s bourgeois in that it disguises an embrace of the rich and powerful behind a screen of adoration in a way that’s just slick enough that it can be denied later. In addition to publishing writing that I think is of a questionable quality – James Fallows comes to mind – the magazine sponsors all kinds of forums and summits on various pressing issues – like social media – and the lists of speakers always strike me as people with a lot of money and a lot of privileges – like Bill Clinton, like Tina Brown – who think we should all have an equal shot as long as they get theirs first.

This month’s take on marriage was written by a woman called Kate Bolick. Maybe she’s a great writer. Maybe she’s got phenomenal insights and instincts. I don’t know. What I do know is that she’s the “culture editor” – apologies for the quote marks, but seriously – of a magazine called Veranda, which, according to its website, offers its audience a front row seat to “the best of everything.” Compared to the fact that an article about an approach to paying for healthcare in the same issue was penned by a couple of partners at a huge consulting conglomerate who have just published a book on marketing, I guess it’s not so egregious to dedicate many pages to a lifestyle magazine writer’s musings on a subject that many believe is their birthright while many others think it is, of should be, a civil right. But for a magazine once considered a standard bearer, I think it’s unfortunate.

Before I slam the author properly, I would like to applaud her for finally saying something that’s long overdue (even if others with less cache than she have said it before, which I’m sure they have). The business about two-parent families of yesteryear where the mother stayed at home with the young ones while the father went to a job every morning that he returned from in the evening was a television show. That’s because the poor have always been forced to take jobs that required them to do things like build ships or railroads or fight in wars waged by the money for extended periods or, for the poor women, work in other people’s homes, where they raised other people’s children and did other people’s laundry. And the rich, even though they aren’t and weren’t forced to spend a lot of time outside of their homes away from their heirs, did and do so because … well, who knows? Perhaps they’re dialoguing at forums sponsored by the Atlantic.

It’s all downhill from there, unfortunately. It seems Kate Bolick is unable to get her hands on husband material because, in spite of the thousands of words it took her to explain it, she just cannot find anyone good enough for her. And being good enough for her would be a tall order, I suppose. She did an internship at the Atlantic (full disclosure!) and she lives on both coasts and she stayed, while writing the article, at an impressive array of digs described in the article in a way that really flexed her culture editor muscles and that, sadly, seemed perfectly natural in an Atlantic cover story that, if I were the betting type, I’d say will mark her ascent into the realm of big-time culture commentator: books that explain to us how we feel about ourselves and that explain, furthermore, how she discovered how we feel about ourselves and how wrong those who went before her were, and how this all relates to her mother, and how she’s had a much rougher go of it than her mother, and big fees for speaking at conferences and appearances on an endless slew of talk shows, where she’ll doubtlessly explain what’s trending this way and that and why it’s all really, really interesting.

The inclusion of a snippet of chatty e-mail she exchanged with Julianne Moore while writing the article was unforgivable, but worse, I think, was this. Near the beginning of the article, the following passage was so painful that it made my fillings ache:

We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up – and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

I’m confused, you know, about the men you – which I assume means her – don’t want to go out with. I kept waiting for a reason or two, and all I could find, over and over again, was that the kind of man with the looks and the position and the money Kate Bolick believes she’s entitled to is elusive. Which for me, you know, begs a very specific question, one that, in spite of the thousands of words dedicated to her take on the whole situation, was not explained: What’s so special about Kate Bolick?

No smelly books

2011-11-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

Although there are several of them throughout the year, the granddaddy of Portland’s used book sales happened over the weekend. On Monday morning, just for the hell of it, I looked up the Friends of the Multnomah County Library on the Internet and learned a thing or two. This weekend marked the 38th year that the sale has been held. There were more than 100,000 books for sale in the airplane hangar-esque room at the Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel, and there are guidelines regarding what the friends will and will not accept: Books with excessive markings are out, as are computer books older than 2007 and books deemed “smelly.”

There are many reasons I love this particular sale. First of all, it’s huge, and it’s annual, and there’s a certain ritualistic feel to it. Somehow it’s highly organized without being regimented for regiment’s sake. I also like the fact that it’s held in the fall. Saturday was so autumnal it was almost Midwestern. It was warm, and the sky was blue, and the sidewalks my friend and I hurried along were covered with gold and golden brown leaves that whispered across the concrete.

Inside there was, as always, row upon row of long tables marked with signs and covered with books of all shapes, sizes and subjects. Which brings me to one of the best aspects of the book sale: The people who shop it. You have to move slowly along the side of a table looking down at a stunning array of titles on the spines of books. Even though there are people on either side of you doing exactly the same thing, there is, for reasons I have yet to understand, a rhythm to it that enables people to glide along the edges of tables going in different directions and somehow not run into each other. Here’s what it looks like: Hold both of your hands up in front of you, palms out, and move them slowly toward each other. When they’re about to touch, pull your right hand back and continue moving your left hand in the same direction until it is eclipsed from your view by your right hand.

I have no idea if these two facts are related or not, but first of all, I did not witness or experience a single sloppy, slovenly collision. And secondly, although there were many hundreds of people looking at books for the more than two hours that I was there, I did not overhear a single cell phone conversation. And I didn’t see anyone texting, either. Is that because people who go to events sponsored by an organization whose sole purpose is to support the democratization of the written word have better manners? Or are they simply more focused? Either way, as “an elitist” I like it. I like it a lot.

Before I get to the books, there are two other things I really like about the sale. Maybe they do this every year, but Saturday was the first time I noticed what they call The Book Depot. If you’re finding so many books that they’re getting difficult to carry, you just go to a table and they put them in a box, write your name on it and hold it there until you’ve got another load. The second is that, in the same way I prefer yard sales and thrift shops to stores where everything is new, the tables at the book sale are full of surprises.

Every time I leave a job, voluntarily or otherwise, I take a dictionary with me, so I have a lot of dictionaries. And now I have one more: The Tormont Webster’s Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary. It’s huge, and it’s beautiful, and it’s printed in a font a bit larger than my others. That was the first thing that caught my attention, and while I moved on initially, two tables later I returned. The second find of the morning was even better. On Saturday morning, as I was finishing a section of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the sister book group, I thought that I’d like to start Christmas morning this year with Love in the Time of Cholera, preferably a hardback edition. And there it was, waiting for me.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is Khaled Hosseini’s second novel. His first was The Kite Runner, which I thought was great. I’ve always wanted to read Willa Cather, and now I have a beautiful copy of My Antonia. I picked up Dreams from My Father because my enthusiasm for knowing that I live in a country whose president can write a decent sentence has yet to wane. One of the books I bought is Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam. I had never heard of the book or the author, but I bought it for a reason that has never before compelled me: I really like the cover.

And finally, a bit of moderation. I forced myself on Saturday to not lunge after everything that catches my attention. While I haven’t craved either of them, there are two fairly recent books by David McCullough that seem interesting to me. One is entitled, simply, John Adams; the other, entitled even more simply, is 1776. I’ll buy one, I thought, and then, next year, if the interest is still there, hope to find the other. The one turned out to be 1776, and while I try to not have two books going at once, figuring that one novel and one history doesn’t really count as two – it does, of course – I started 1776 on Sunday evening, and although I’ve barely dented it, the tales of this country’s quest for independence, I must say, are as intriguing as they are familiar.

Stadium ghosts

2011-10-31T07:28:00.000-07:00

Whenever people start talking and shouting and carrying on about their sports teams, I roll my eyes and make remarks that are as snide as possible and then I run along. And then the Saint Louis Cardinals make it into the World Series, and my sports snobbery goes right out the window. I am not sure if it’s because I know the particulars of the skyline when it appears on the television, or if it’s that the players are consistently hot, or if the fact that the team has been swinging bats in the same city for more than a century does actually give it an edge in the vibe department.

There’s something really elegant about baseball, I think. I think the beauty of fielding in particular is on par with ballet, or can be. I’m impressed by the combination of speed and accuracy required to throw a baseball with such force that it clocks in at 89 miles per hour as it blasts through a very small, very precise box of space. And the men who throw those balls with such speed and precision. I watched one of the league championship games broadcast from Milwaukee a couple of weekends ago, and the sight of the pitcher holding forth out there on the mound, winding up and letting it rip was something else again. Then my sister e-mailed me a three-word message on the morning of the second World Series game: Jaime’s up tonight. So I went across the street to my neighbors’ house and watched, and besides Jaime Garcia’s beautiful, beautiful mouth, I saw very little baseball.

Measured against the nation’s clock, Saint Louis is an old, old city, and in a way that I’ve never seen quite pulled off elsewhere, it’s a place that manages to accommodate itself to the times and, at the same time, refuses to. For two centuries, a lot of people have moved there and a lot of people have left there, and there have been a lot of people born in that city and a lot of people who have died there as well, and what I think I saw watching those baseball games recently, more clearly than anything else, was the ghosts.

There are parts of it that are intact. If you go to Saint Louis during the summer – which I do not recommend – you can still stand in line on Chippewa Street or South Grand and, as long as you don’t collapse – it happens – order a frozen custard concoction known as “a concrete.” They’re so cold they’ll make your brains sore for a minute or two, and they are good. You can still order brain sandwiches in certain neighborhoods. At nearly every grocery store, regardless of neighborhood, you can get a cut of pork that for some reason has yet to arrive on the other side of the Rockies. You can still see cemeteries at a rate that would be alarming if they weren’t such spectacular manifestations of the deep, almost festive reverence Saint Louis bestows upon her dead. The recipe at Imo’s hasn’t changed as far as anyone can tell. Although it was moved for a number of years to Chesterfield, the Strassenfest has returned to its original neighborhood in South City, which is where my brother and sister and I once witnessed, in fascinated horror, a very rotund woman who simply leaned out of an arched brick doorway and puked with a propulsion I’ve yet to see equaled. The river remains mighty and the sight of the art museum in that normally elusive period between sunset and darkness still has its own vocabulary and the first 10 to 12 minutes of the local news is still a quick run-through of the homicides and, if it’s a slow day, the investigations of them. The Arch is still there, and it’s still called, amazingly enough, The Arch.

But people in Saint Louis now work for Boeing, and most of the airport is vacant. Jack Buck and Jack Carney are long gone, replaced from what I hear by Rush Limbaugh, who is from Missouri and now cheapens the airwaves of KMOX, which is a travesty. Styx Baer & Fuller is history, as is Bettendorf’s. Channel 2 is now a Fox affiliate. The Globe Democrat folded – literally – long ago and for years I have not been able to find, even on thoroughfares such as Choteau or Vandeventer, a single copy of The Evening Whirl, a black paper with news stories that were once upon a time, even though rap music had yet to come along, written in rap pentameter. And, as a result of one of the most bizarre and contentious real estate transactions I’ve ever witnessed, as a result of the most indisputable indications that one phase of life has ended and another begun, my sister now presides over the house where we grew up.

And that’s the wall of ghosts I crash into, recklessly, at high speeds and without air bags, at the mere sight of the Saint Louis Cardinals on national television in the month of October, playing against a backdrop of stage-lit courthouse domes and cathedrals and a very tall stainless steel sculpture that is a monument to leaving town.

Which might be the point of sports, professional and otherwise. At their worst I think they encourage a lot of herd behavior, but at the other end of the reaction spectrum, maybe one of the purposes they serve is to remind us of ourselves, to divide the passing of time into chunks that are for the most part manageable. A couple of weeks ago and a couple thousand miles west of my childhood, I was reminded of an autumn afternoon in 1982 when the last, make-it-or-break it game of the playoffs was played down at what is now called, in memoriam, the old Busch Stadium. The high school I went to didn’t shut down early, not officially anyhow, not in a way that was discussed or announced: Everyone just left early. It was a warm afternoon, one defined in my memory by the almost blinding contrast between the golden leaves and the brilliant blue sky behind and above them and by the voice of Jack Buck on KMOX, seeping as sure as cigar smoke through screen doors and open windows as I walked along Big Bend Boulevard. Shortly after I got home that afternoon, the Cardinals won.

An honorable pact with solitude

2011-10-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

Although we’ve been interrupted by the World Series and one of my nieces checking herself into rehab, my sisters and I are progressing on our reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I told a friend of mine this recently and she replied that the man she lives with read it a few years back and that the experience ruined for him every other book. I am not there just yet, but I’m close enough that I’ve caught a few glimpses of how different the world, after this book, might look.

At the heart of the tale is the Buendia family whose patriarch founded the town of Macondo. I am only about halfway through the book, and already I have conceded any hope of summarizing the twists and the turns – some of them feasible, others, based on my standards anyhow, completely surreal – encountered by the family, or, as Ursula, the matriarch, calls it, “the line.” On any page you are likely to encounter gypsies and alchemists and babies born with a century’s worth of memory and young men who fall in love with their aunts and the remains of parents contained in a bag that hums and jostles and many, many characters who are named Aureliano, Arcadio, Jose or some combination thereof.

The way my sisters and I tackle books is to read a pre-determined number of pages per week. So, since I tend to get ahead of our schedule, I read each section twice. The story is hard to follow, so a second read is helpful, but the main reason I’ve read each page twice thus far is that I’ve permitted myself the luxury of dedicating the first reading to simply enjoying the sensation that follows the intake of a truly exquisite sentence. They’re infused with personal history, swerving, often with nothing more than a comma, from one generation to the next, or a couple back. They are thrust forward by action, by movement, by a masterful use of the verb.

In the sentences of One Hundred Years of Solitude, time comes home to roost with the most prudent use of language I’ve ever read. Here, just for fun, are two of my favorites thus far.

Looking at the sketch that Aureliano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendant of the plans with which Jose Arcadio Buendia had illustrated his project for solar warfare, Ursula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle. [221]

Which explains, among other things, not the plot of the novel, or its theme, but the writing, because time is indeed going in a circle, one that expands and contracts many times on a single page, often within a single sentence. Jose Arcadio Beundia is Ursula’s husband, long gone but eternally present, the founder of Macando. Aureliano Triste is one of her 17 grandsons who bear the name Aureliano, each of whom was born of a different mother during the war years. He shows up in Macondo one day with the rest of them – it is quite a gathering – and is one of the two Aurelianos to take up permanent residence there. The other Aureliano to remain in Macondo – Aureliano Cantes – picks up the family’s multi-generational fascination with the making of ice, drawing from a childhood memory that is not his own but his father’s, who is Colonel Auereliano Buendia.

I am not certain about this but the main character of the book is either the colonel – the original Aureliano Buendias – or his mother, Ursula. Thus far, I believe it is the colonel. For me, he seems the most likely embodiment of the theme, which seems to me to be pitfalls of becoming a part of the world::

Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. [199]

Super responsive

2011-10-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

I was talking with a woman recently whose work is similar to mine. We get together regularly and we bitch. A lot. She was explaining to me that one of the things she does to keep things as organized as possible is to draw a circle on a piece of paper, divide it into quadrants and then fill those quadrants with the things she needs to do according to their urgency. The top two quadrants are important, one more so than the other. The two quadrants at the bottom of the circle are not.

Lists really are not my thing. Until recently, the last serious list I made was to prioritize the things that needed to be done with this house. The top portion of the list was for things that needed to be done “this year,” which was 2002. The bottom portion of the list was for those tasks I figured could wait until “next year.” A year or two ago, I happened across that list as I was searching for something else, and it is completely and utterly comical.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to give list making another go. The reason for this is that over the past several months I have felt like my work projects are slowly but surely becoming unmanageable. I feel like I’m racing from one thing to another without ever truly focusing on any one specific thing. I’m making mistakes that should not be made, and there is less breathing room between the time I finish something and the time at which it is due, which cuts into my ability to carefully read through documents before I send them. I usually shut my office down sometime between 5 and 5:30 in the afternoon, and I noticed that more often than not the experience of watching my computer screen go black had ceased to be a relief and was becoming, instead, another source of anxiety. I wasn’t thinking of the things I’d accomplished during the day. I was thinking of what I’d missed.

So one Wednesday night, on the back of an envelope in which a credit card offer had been mailed to me, I wrote down the four things I wanted to accomplish the following day. My list was deliriously simple. I needed to write a blog post about how to transfer the contents of one PC to another, write the final section of an article about developing applications for mobile devices, rewrite the tips and tricks section of an article I’d written about professional networking in continuing education classes and write two of the five executive biographies for a client that’s a local technology reseller and customizer. On paper, I don’t have that much to do. I don’t have an overwhelming volume of what the cool people call “deliverables.” In fact, it’s almost embarrassing how little I have going on at any one time.

What was most beneficial about the list was that it served to turn the work portion of my day completely off when it was over. There are many things I like to do in the evening, and I am absolutely intolerant and inflexible about interruptions, especially work-related interruptions, even if they’re only in the form of wondering if I did this or that or having a little spell of panic as I contemplate what needs to be accomplished the following day.

Contrary to what has evidently become the standard way of doing business, I refuse to check mail during my off hours. I don’t synch the shit to my cell phone because (a) I do not have a cell phone and (b) that sort of blind flinging of things far and wide and letting them land where they may, with or without a clear purpose, breeds inefficiency. It took me nearly a decade to draw these lines in permanent ink, and I am sticking to them. First and foremost, sending mail around in the middle of the night and from airports and while driving to the coast gives those to whom they’re being sent the impression – rightly so – that you’re available around the clock. And from there the logical conclusion is never far behind: If you’re available around the clock, everyone should be. Number two, it’s the mark of a person with zero capacity to differentiate and prioritize one thing from another: When everything is deemed urgent, the result is that nothing truly is. And number three, it demonstrates that you either are incapable of completing what’s expected of you during business hours or completely disorganized. Either way, people who consistently send things back and forth at 10:47 p.m. either need to hire someone to help out or find a new job.

The least beneficial part of the list is that I discovered – by making check marks beside an item on the list each time I needed to tend to it – that there is always one thing that derails the day. And it’s usually the smallest, or seemingly smallest, item on the list. And we return to it over and over and over again because each time we craft and send responses and edits and one thing and another at the speed of lightening, we do so, alas, in a way that’s more mistake than solution. To my horror, the PR people I work with and with whom I’ve discussed this call it being “super responsive.” I call it super sloppy.

Musings on empathy

2011-10-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

Twenty summers ago I was glued to a radio in a windowless office in Madison, Wisconsin. I shared that office with a brash older woman called Beryl who was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever encountered, and she and I, like millions of others, sat there and listened – speechless, for the most part – to a young woman from Oklahoma testify before a committee of white guys about pubic hairs on Coke cans and long dong something or another. In what remains for me the second best reason to reject any and all moral authority assumed by the supreme court (W’s selection being the first), Clarence Thomas, after claiming he’d been lynched (lynched!) was given a robe and sworn in. And there he sits, two decades later, interpreting.

Last week I went downtown to hear Anita Hill speak to a group of women lawyers. I was surprised in many ways. Most of the ways I was surprised have more to do with me than with her.

At the back of the ballroom where she spoke there were long tables covered in starchy white cloths. There were bowls of fruit and pyramids of coffee mugs and there were coffee urns and two varieties of cookies and, in bowls full of square ice cubes, there were little green glass bottles of Perrier. And cans of Coke. Without meaning to I sort of blurted out a little laugh and made split-second eye contact with a couple of the servers, a young man and a young woman, who looked at me with expressions of what I thought was concern but may have been mere curiosity. It occurred to me that the two servers were probably still in diapers the morning Anita Hill took the witness stand. I went back to my seat, quickly.

The talk itself was disappointing. Anita Hill was organized and informed, certainly, and she made her points more clearly than most who speak into microphones. The problem, for me, is that she spoke like a lawyer. She kept returning to the concept of empathy and how it was bandied about during the hearings for the two most recent supreme court nominee hearings. When people say empathy, do they mean this? Or do they mean that? What about the legal philosophy? What about the judicial underpinnings of one thing and another and its impact? Are they perhaps using the term empathy to talk about anything that falls outside the realm of their own specific perspective? What about so-and-so’s published response to this issue that wasn’t really, technically speaking, a response but that was, in fact, a response?

Here’s my question: What about announcing – without hiding behind the perversion of language known as legalese – the fact that Congress is run by a lot of misogynistic heterosexual white guys who were sulking 20 years ago and are sulking still because the girls are no longer there, allegedly, to put cream in their coffee and sharpen their pencils? A couple of years ago it was revealed that Sonya Sotomayor had used the words “wise” and “Latina” in the same sentence, and the uproar over that couldn’t have been more deafening had she arrived at the U.S. Capitol for her confirmation hearing on the back of a mule. And more recently I heard almost zero griping – except in the “alternative” press – about the fact that when a group of 10 lawmakers was assembled to come up with a plan to slash billions from the federal budget, a whopping 10 percent of that group – or one – was female.

I know this sounds anti-intellectual, but seriously, enough about philosophy and theory and approach and so on and so forth. Here’s what I’d like to hear someone with both a microphone and a place in history as a genuine hell raiser say: Vote the fuckers out.

I don’t necessarily fault Anita Hill, though. She was speaking to a group of people who, as women, are at best second-in-line to their male counterparts. But like Anita Hill herself, like many of those who sit on committees to grill supreme court nominees, in fact, almost everyone in the audience was a lawyer, and for me that’s a slippery slope. It’s a slope so slippery that I was appalled to sit in a room where most of the people who were not white were opening bottled water and clearing away cups and saucers and hear the word “struggle” used in reference to the difference in income between male attorneys and female attorneys when, as best I can tell, there are far too many attorneys in the first place and all of them I’ve ever met earn considerably more than people in professions I think are far more critical. It’s a slippery slope because of the sense of entitlement that goes along with earning a law degree, an accomplishment that apparently – based on the alarming percentage of elected and appointed officials who have one on their resume – qualifies a person to run things, to manage things, to interpret what should be clear as crystal in such a convoluted, confused and contrived manner that millions of dollars and immeasurable anguish are spent trying to straighten out the aftermath. Most of all, though, it’s a slippery slope for me because of the language, a language that at once says nothing at all and anything you need it to, a topsy-turvy language of procedure and process and precedent – or not – that leads to some truly weird shit, like Clarence Thomas holding a sanctioned gavel in his hand while I laugh at Coke cans in the ballroom of a hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon, waiting for a woman I heard on the radio when I was 25 years old take the stage and talk in circles about legal philosophy.

More cars

2011-10-18T07:36:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who works for the state of Oregon, and one of the benefits she’s enjoyed over the years is the ability to purchase a Tri Met pass that allows her to ride the buses and light rail at a significantly reduced cost. The cost is further reduced by the ability state workers have been granted to purchase these passes with income before it is taxed. A few weeks ago, my friend told me that this benefit has been eliminated as part of the current campaign to tighten budgets by cutting costs.

The conversation I had with my friend brought to mind a local talk show, the hostess of which threw grenades at the city’s mayor a couple of years ago because – according to her logic – he hates cars. He wants to spend millions and millions of dollars on bike paths and streetcars and light rail tracks and stations. His agenda, said she, is to force public transportation on as many people as possible whether they want it or not. Like our then-newly elected president, our mayor is a Socialist, she proclaimed. He’s a Marxist. Everything the mayor does and says is linked in ways large and small to his deep-seeded hatred of cars. He wants to model Portland after Amsterdam. On and on she went.

Because he’s a public official, the mayor must have felt pressure to participate in the third-grade level of discourse (as so many left-leaning politicians do) by denying, repeatedly, that he hates cars. He said that he simply believes there are many other modes of transit – buses, bikes, skateboards – and that he thought it would behoove the city of Portland, and the region as a whole, to accommodate as many of them as possible.

Since I am not running for public office and do not plan to ever do so, I will say what the mayor perhaps felt he could not: I suppose that technically I don’t hate cars, but I do hate what they represent. We’ve built our economy around them. We’ve subsidized them and their operating costs for well over half a century now. For their sake, we have sacrificed what was perhaps one of our few shots at national redemption – our oldest, grandest cities – and replaced them what I think is our most noxious innovation: Almost every city in the U.S. is surrounded by mile after mile of pure shit suburban construction accessible mainly – and in many cases exclusively – by obscene stripes of pavement that stretch out until they disappear beneath the horizon. Along with the cities, we’ve let the rail system deteriorate into a severely broken calamity. Like riding a bike or a bus, traveling by train has been blasted by the conservatives as a European thing to do, and to their way of thinking – which I fail, absolutely, to comprehend – that means it’s undesirable.

What I really hate about cars, though, can likely be attributed to the marketing team. It seems to me that at some point it was discovered, or observed, that more people were spending more and more time in their cars. According to my logic, the best solution at that point would have been to work toward reducing that time by investing in the cities and the transit infrastructure. Instead, the cars started getting bigger, and, like many of the people who sit in them, they’ve been growing steadily for many years now. It is no longer even noteworthy when a vehicle roars past my house that is bigger than my kitchen. I guess what the marketing team set out to do was not to not reduce the hours people spend stranded behind the wheel but to make the vehicles feel less like a car and more like home and, as usual, the marketing team succeeded. So, to make it possible for drivers to tend to other business while they’re driving, some of the best engineering minds around are hard at work not on coming up with new ways to consume resources more wisely or to reduce the volume of toxins belched into the air we are all going to breathe sooner or later, but on state-of-the-art air bags. If you hit someone head on, don’t worry: You’re safe. And so are your children. And your hound dogs.

But those are just my opinions, and while I happen to think I’m right, I don’t expect anyone to agree with me. In terms of axing the Tri Met pass from the benefits package for state employees, on the other hand, there are a couple of facts that hold their own against the right wingers’ tantrums about Amsterdam.

The first is that by eliminating a benefit that can be taken advantage of on a pre-tax basis, the disparity between one end of the income scale and the other expands. Number two: There is a parking garage close to the building where my friend works. The monthly fee for parking there and the monthly fee that state employees will now pay for a Tri Met pass are similar enough that there is no longer much financial incentive to use public transportation, so my guess – and it is only a guess – is that two conditions will change. First, there will be less money in the checking accounts of state employees who work in the Portland area. And second, there will be more of them driving their cars to and from work.

Which brings me back to the radio hostess. In addition to taking pot shots at the mayor, she loves to attack public employees and their lavish benefits packages and she loves to blame public transportation for pretty much every problem in the area. At the same time, she loves her SUV, and she loves to complain about how backwards the prevailing mindset in Portland is because the roads on which she drives her SUV have not been widened to the extent that she thinks they should be. And now, thanks to the fervor against public institutions and those who operate them – a fervor for which she is one of the most ardent cheerleaders – she can now share the streets and highways of Portland with even more vehicles. Even though having more cars on the road will only impede her “right” to burn as much fuel as she can afford as she blasts across the suburbs of Portland, I guess she and her compatriots really showed the public employees on this one.

The gangs

2011-10-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

I can think of very few things that cannot be taken to an extreme that’s ridiculous. And I sometimes think Portland – particularly the part of it that’s east of the Willamette River – is world headquarters of ridiculousness. All of our elected and appointed officials are on the take. The television and newspaper let the powerful and wealthy get away with all sorts of no good because half of them having affairs with those on whom they’re paid to report. The attempt to recall the mayor failed to gather enough signatures because many people – by that I mean, oh, 200,000 or so – are afraid he’ll come after them. The schools, under the directives of the almighty teachers union, let water heaters and furnaces break down so they’ll have something riveting the next time they’re on the ballot. And when it comes to black people, here’s what the police do: Shoot now, ask questions later. It’s practically in the training manual, say some.

A woman who was once an Oregon state legislator now rails on the radio every Thursday morning, more often than not about how quickly the police label black males as gang members. While I don’t doubt that there are assumption issues at the police department, prior to a few days ago, every time I heard this woman start in, my reaction was not aimed at the issue but at her. People are armed. People are violent. If that rage is organized in the form of a gang, what’s wrong with saying so? I don’t think the subject of violent crime should be thrown off stage for the sake of a discussion about language.

A friend of mine with whom I’ve been talking politics for more than 20 years now recently came to visit, and that’s the example I shared with him when we started talking about how quickly liberal people enter the realm of the absurd. And not an hour later we were driving along East Burnside and my friend – who has listened to a fair amount of grousing from me over the years about my neighborhood – commented that the area didn’t look that bad to him. And then we turned on to my street, and down at the intersection where I live there was such a spectacular display of lights – red, blue and white – that it appeared Christmas had arrived a few months early.

In stark contrast to the collective preference for YouTube videos over actual local news shown by each of the four major television stations in Portland, each of those stations had a van, a camera crew and a reporter on my block by 9 a.m. on Saturday. By Monday, the Oregonian – our ever-shrinking daily newspaper – had run not one, not two, but three stories on the incident in the Metro section. On Monday afternoon – three days after the incident – I looked down my street toward Glisan and saw an antennae shooting up into the sky, which was attached, I noticed as I walked down the block, to a van emblazoned with the KGW logo. I wandered down and asked the reporter, the same one who had gone door to door on Saturday morning with his camera guy, if any suspects had been caught. Nothing new, he told me. I must have given him a look that asked him why, if there was nothing new, he and his crew were getting ready to broadcast live from my block, because he added, This is an update story. As I was walking away I noticed dozens of switches and levers on a control panel on the side of the van. What fun it would have been to just start pushing and pulling and flipping. By Tuesday morning, when I turned my computer on for the first time since early Friday afternoon, there were dozens of e-mails sent out via the neighborhood listserv – a mixed blessing, to be sure – and it was the content of those messages, along with the headlines written by the Oregonian and the drive-by reporting, if it can be called that, on our local network affiliates, that caused me to reconsider the conversation I’d had three days earlier about ridiculousness.

By the time I pulled up to the corner where I live on Friday night, the entire block was marked off with yellow crime scene tape. It was attached to my fence and a strand of it had been wrapped around one of the columns on my front porch. My friend and I ducked beneath the tape strung across the front walk and came inside and enjoyed the lights of the two police cars parked not 20 feet from the living room window.

What happened on Friday night is that 40 bullets, or 40 rounds of bullets, or 40 rounds of gunfire were exchanged from one side of Glisan Street to the other. Two people were shot at a place called People’s Bar and Grill and taken to the hospital. Many reported seeing young men fleeing the scene on foot and in cars immediately after the sound of gunfire. I’ve heard that there were three men, and I’ve heard there were 20 men and I’ve heard pretty much every numerical combo between the two.

What happened very shortly after daybreak on Saturday morning was that the word “gang” began to feel like little nails hammered into my ear drums. The police issued a statement saying that the city’s gang task force was looking into the incident. “Gang” was the first word in the headlines in the Oregonian. The television people used the word “gang” in almost every sentence of their reports. The use of the word “gang” was the least offensive aspect of the wisdom issued forth by the listserv warriors, who shared endless tales of the “gang bangers” that, according to the mostly unsigned writers of the e-mails, have always hung out at that particular establishment and the “no questions asked” leasing protocol for the apartments above it, about how scary it is around here, about how someone – maybe someone’s child! – could have been seriously injured, about one element and another moving in and out, about weird looks exchanged by someone or another a couple of years ago, about the concerns of “gang-related violence” expressed by a business owner who asked not to be identified, and so on and so forth.

I started pondering the term itself. When someone says “gang” in Portland, it means a group of three or more black or Latino males who are adolescents or older and who are prone to violence. There’s a slightly different nomenclature for Asian gangs. Describing them requires two words rather than one: Asian gangs. For some reason, I started wondering if there are any Native American gangs. I’ve never heard that term, but if they exist I’d be curious to know more. And I’m not sure what a group of white males who dig violence would be called. The police department, perhaps. Or KGW.

I expect the worst from the media outlets and the Internet, but I found the misinformed, generalized, half-assed, accusatory hysteria vocalized up and down my block a lot more disturbing. I do not mean to make light of lots of bullets exchanged in a way that would do the magistrates of the Wild West proud, but I don’t think it’s as alarming as forging a link between that incident and the black woman who lives across the street and has a lot of visitors, or the influx of newly homeless who were supposed to arrive in Portland after Hurricane Katrina (but never did) or “them Mexicans” who came to Oregon, according to local legend, from the barrios of Los Angeles, or the black people who scattered throughout Portland during the rebuilding of Columbia Villa a few years ago. All of this insight – and so much more – by Tuesday afternoon.

Which brings me to the ridiculousness issue. I’ve asked many people how it is that they’re so certain that the shooting was in any way related to or caused by a gang, and the most common answer thus far is that sureness up and down our lane here is based on the fact that the two guys who were injured are, according to the Oregonian, refusing to cooperate, from their hospital beds, with the police. Given the swiftness and certainty with which they were labeled “gang bangers” not just by the media but by the court of the neighborhood, I don’t blame them for not cooperating. Nor do I plan to continue thinking of a former state legislator – who is a black woman – becoming agitated over the use of the word “gang” as an overreaction. I think the correct word is response.

Signals through the snow

2011-10-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

I recently interviewed a guy for a project I’m working on, the topic of which is mobile computing and how important it is for those who develop gadgets and applications and services to be well versed on mobility. In spite of my general disdain for technology, I do seriously enjoy interviewing the engineers. Unlike the marketing people, they generally seem to know what they’re talking about. And very few of them, in my experience, use lingo or jargon as a way to pave over that which they do not know. Nor do they giggle or throw the word “right” into two out of three sentences or mindlessly repeat really stupid shit like “ … at the end of the day.”

This guy was no exception. What I thought was particularly interesting about him is that he is not an engineer by education. The two degrees he’s earned could not be less technical. He’s also set up and volunteered for a couple of non-profits that extend technical capabilities to those who would not be able to afford them otherwise, not to show them the wonders of Facebook or Netflix but in an admirable attempt (I think) to even the playing field for people who are looking for a job. He “picked up coding” along the way, he told me. I cannot even imagine.

He shared an interesting story about a motorcycle accident, and how, for him, the ability to remain connected regardless of location became, one afternoon, a matter of life or death. And then we started talking about phones. He was used to being able to see the person he’s talking to, he said, so it was odd that he couldn’t see me. And it was equally strange that our discussion wasn’t integrated with one thing and another – documents? profiles? preferences? I have no idea. That led to the discussion of the smart phones. You start a new job, he explained, and your new employer hands you a smart phone on your first day because everyone knows how to use one. So I asked him, naturally, about what happens when someone doesn’t. I did not identify myself as the someone. He paused for a moment and then said, “I feel badly for them. I feel sorry for them. They’re sad.”

I got together recently with a woman I met at the coffee shop a few blocks from my house. Like many coffee shops on the east side of Portland, it is typically as unfriendly as it is connected, which is to say quite. So imagine my surprise when a complete stranger struck up a conversation with me because she’d noticed that I was reading a book that she’d once read as well. A few months passed, a few e-mails were exchanged, and on Saturday we were sitting down there talking about many things, including smart phones. She told me that her phone is not particularly smart, and that since it wasn’t designed with the structure of the human face in mind, she pulls it back and forth between her ear and her mouth. It what has come to feel like a confession, I acknowledged that I do not own one, and that I do not want to own one.

We also talked about Motown music, which she loves and which I love as well, and I told her that I am completely unable to articulate what it is exactly that I love about it, and she told me a little story. Growing up in New Jersey, she told me that on nights when it was snowing, if she sat in a certain spot in her bedroom and held her little radio at just the right angle, the signals came all the way from Detroit and brought the music with them. I know it’s a bad idea to mix and match conversations that happen in different spheres for very different purposes, particularly when one of those spheres involves earning a living, and I know it’s pointless to compare the magic of 1960s radio on snowy evenings to the wonders of being connected to the entire world by a plastic contraption smaller than a walky-talky, but I did it anyhow.

The occupation

2011-10-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

For the last few years, I’ve been perplexed over the country’s money situation. It’s an old, old story: The masses lose most of what little they have while those who have way too much to begin with somehow acquire more. And merrily merrily we go, down our stream. Where’s the rage? I’ve wondered. Where’s the anger? Where are the protests and marches and rallies and sit-ins? In a weird way it reminds me of a couple of my brothers. As if answering to the same calendar as Wall Street, as the money trouble came into full view in the fall of 2008, so too did the fact that two of my brothers appear to have no bottom line when it comes to accepting and distributing one thing and another, including cash. Recently it hit me that the financial crisis and the family crisis have some similarities, chief among them that fighting either situation is crippled before the first swing by one simple question: Where exactly would you start?

I haven’t figured out what a good starting point for decommissioning my brothers would be, but in terms of the country’s financial troubles, it seems to be on Wall Street, or close to it. When the protests actually got started a few weeks ago, you’d think I would have been elated. I was not. I am ashamed to say that the only thing I heard in the scant coverage of the protests was that they were using a lot of social media technology. Thanks to my job and my personality in general, I am so sick of hearing about Facebook and Twitter and all the rest of it that any time I hear words related to any and all of those inventions, I tune out the rest. Unless, of course, it’s in another country. Then I think, man, what would that have been like without Facebook? Closer to home, though, I am weary of those who appear to be dependent in a life-or-death sort of way on their connections and their devices, devices that as best I can tell are welcome in any venue, devices that, in my opinion, seem to have the power, quite ironically, to really make a good dent in the ability humans have to communicate … with one another.

Then, as the number of protesters grew, the heavy hitters of television started covering it, which I guess they sort of had to since the protesters were just a few blocks from the network studios. And the condescension in that reporting, from PBS to NBC and everywhere in between, was all it took to turn my ass around on the whole thing.

For some reason, the protestors were not allowed to protest on Wall Street proper, which I think is questionable. So, they set up shop in a park, where many of them also camped. And when one reporter showed up one morning to poke around, he was shocked to discover – are you ready for this? – that some of them had not woken up yet. These protestors are sleeping late! There was an interview with one young woman who was listing off a number of issues that concerned her, including global warming, modified food, the treatment of women in various countries, budgets for schools that shrink as budgets for military adventures get bigger. The reporter paused, looking into the camera, as if to say, can you believe this? And the dweeb in the anchor chair commented that there didn’t seem to be much focus. One guy set up a radio station, but it doesn’t transmit any further than the park where they were camping. An interview with one young man got botched because his mouth was covered with duct tape. My guess is that the duct tape was a representation of voicelessness, but the reporter struggled with it.

One of the remarks I heard repeated most was that this group has no leader. As I’ve said before, I have issues with the words leader and leadership. I speak only of my experience in a corporate setting and in volunteer activities I’ve done over the years for community efforts, and in those two realms, those who toss those two terms around may as well announce that they’re full of bullshit. So I overreact to them almost more automatically and more adamantly as I do to the use of the term “community” when the discussion is about computers. But, in this case, I thought the tossing around of the leadership nonsense was particularly inappropriate, because to me it’s clear as crystal that a protest against the stranglehold in which those with hold those without is, almost by definition, a protest against the abuses of leadership. Another comment made by many reporters that’s equally nonsensical, I think, is that the protestors had no message. Aren’t messages the current that carried us to this point?

One morning I heard that the protesters had been forbidden from using microphones. The next morning I heard that not only were more people showing up in New York but that people were protesting in other cities as well. In Portland, the media’s primary concern seemed to be whether or not the protestors and the participants in the Portland Marathon would clash. What if there was a conflict? What if they were planning to occupy – pardon me – the same public space at the same time? What would happen then? What would the police do? What would the protestors do? And the runners? Are you scared? Hell, I am. Terrified.

One woman traveled to New Yrok from Denver to join the protestors because, as she had to explain to the reporter twice, she had protested at the Democratic convention in 1968 in Chicago – another leaderless, message-free gathering, I suppose – and she thought a little generational continuity was in order.

It took listening to her to clarify for me what I think of the whole thing: The protests near Wall Street and beyond mark yet another arrival of a new generation of citizens who have enough faith in our system to question it. And they brought their computers with them. One of the weirdest little bits of reporting I heard was the declaration, in a slightly shocked tone, that many of the protestors don’t have jobs. This was echoed on one Portland radio station (one that can always be counted on to up the ante when it comes to dumbing it down) who declared the protestors “lazy, unemployed spoiled brats.” And I thought, that’s kind of the point, is it not? They don’t have jobs because, well, in spite of the good times in the board room and on the quarterly earnings conference calls, there don’t seem to be many available these days. They do, however, have Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all sorts of other outlets that probably haven’t even been named yet. Good for them.

Justice has been served

2011-10-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

I am regularly appalled by people who connect personally to events and people they’re familiar with only through media. So imagine my surprise when I came very close to throwing up three times on the night the state of Georgia killed Troy Davis. Throughout most of the six-hour live broadcast on Democracy Now, which I’d tuned in to on the radio quite unintentionally, my body and all of its cells responded in a way I’ve never experienced before and hope to never again. My pits were drenched. My skin was hot. My stomach felt like a wash cloth being wrung of water long evaporated.

I have always been opposed to the death penalty. I have hundreds of reasons, none of which are original, all of which feed neatly into my main reason, and that is that I think it’s wrong to kill people. I think it’s wrong to kill people during a war. I think it’s wrong to kill people during arguments or robberies or traffic stops. I think it’s wrong to kill people in public facilities. That’s my filter, and I’m a fundamentalist about it.

Something happened a few minutes before the killing was supposed to take place and the crowd erupted in cheers and in song. A woman who spoke with Amy Goodman – who deserves an award for the coverage, I think – said she was very grateful for the stay of execution granted by the U.S. supreme court. And then it was revealed that it wasn’t a stay at all but a little pause. The court was reviewing, or reconsidering, or something that for reasons I don’t understand caused the grizzly proceedings to stall, which seemed to me to make it only more grizzly. Hang on a second, I heard the voice of a judge say, but only in my head, let’s make sure one more time that we’ve got this right before we off this guy.

During the delay, there were several mentions of Clarence Thomas, who is not only black but from the same part of Georgia as Troy Davis. This was discussed by many in a tentatively hopeful way that I found ominous. Excerpts of Amy Goodman’s earlier conversations with Troy Davis’s two sisters and his nephew were played. One hour went by and then two. Every passing minute, said many, constituted a miracle. One of the most harrowing parts of the broadcast, for me, was the scream of sirens. “That cannot be a good sign,” someone said the first time the sirens wailed en masse. There were leaders of this and leaders of that – the NAACP, Amnesty International – and there were people who had traveled to the prison for the vigil and there were, of course, those who were personally involved, gathered across the street from the prison entrance. The sirens apparently were nothing more than an intimidation tactic, and even from a distance of 3,000 miles and the relative manageability of a radio, they worked. Those gathered held their candles and sang. Amy Goodman continued striking up conversations with people until the moment she said, in a voice that sounded barely her own, that the court had, with no dissent and in a single sentence, declined the invitation to intervene.

And man, the rest of it was quick.

To be fair, I don’t think there is a single fact that could dissuade me from my belief that the case against Troy Davis was so cracked with questions that I think the carrying out of the death warrant – the execution of it, if you will – is cause for serious alarm. Also in the spirit of fairness, I am not talking about whether or not he was guilty of murdering a man in Savannah in 1989. To me – and this should explain why it’s a good thing I am not an attorney – Troy Davis’ guilt or innocence is practically beside the point.

For the past many months I have been reading and listening and watching the tales of black people and white people in the south and the weird dance between the hundreds of mockeries made of fairness and equality in those states and the federal government in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. I am not an expert by a long shot. I am just disturbed by what little I know. In the year of my birth, 1966, white people in Georgia kept black people in line by murdering them, raping them and inflicting terror on them in many other ways, and in the state of Georgia they carried their deeds out with the full support of many governmental institutions whose purpose, on paper, was and is to ensure that the concept of liberty and justice for all does not languish on the printed page. There is no shortage of documented cases where a group of black people was met with the fists and pistols and clubs of a group of white people infected with a brand of racism that I think can only be described as pathological. These encounters took place in settings ranging from dark country roads to the front steps of the courthouse. And then, when the police arrived – the ones in uniform – it was the black people who were charged, fined and jailed for disturbing the peace.

A mere 45 years later, regardless of its racial composition, trusting a commission or panel of citizens elected or appointed in a place such as Georgia to not be influenced by skin color when deciding if a person lives or dies strikes me as dangerously naïve. I don’t trust the citizens of our southern states to be responsible and ethical stewards of the law when the crime in question involves a black person and a white person for one simple reason: They are not trustworthy.

Why did the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Savannah Morning News refer to Troy Davis – as far back as 1992 – as ‘convicted cop killer’? Wouldn’t a simple ‘convicted killer’ have sufficed? In legal matters, I don’t think hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions should determine the outcome, but it’s curious to me that Jimmy Carter, the pope, archbishop Tutu and the many former federal officials of various political inclinations – including a former director of the FBI – were ignored. It’s even more curious to me that our president – who would blend in effortlessly on death row in nearly every state that has one – said absolutely nothing. Why were there so many questions about the witnesses recanting their testimony? I read a lot about witness intimidation. I read a lot about the lack of physical evidence. I read a lot about most of the case being built on a foundation of eyewitness accounts, which, according to any expert I’ve ever heard or read, is about as solid as mud.

I read, many times and in many places, that one of the witnesses who signed a statement implicating Troy Davis did so without reading it first because he is illiterate. I’d toss the whole thing based on that and that alone, but, as I’ve aptly demonstrated, a lawyer I am not.

Why did the guards and officers at the prison put on riot gear? Why, when Troy Davis was already inside the building where the killing was to take place, were the sirens heard so often throughout those hours of waiting for the court jesters to craft a single sentence? Why do these awful gatherings tend to be a sea of black faces? Why do the guards and the officials and the politicians announcing one thing and another tend to be white? Why do the cops show up at these things, regardless of the time of day (or night) wearing sunglasses that cover a third of their faces? What sort of perversion was behind the decision to have a black woman emerge from the homicide chamber to tell the watching, waiting world that Troy Davis, as of 11:08 p.m., was dead?

For me, the most unsettling aspect of the entire spectacle was not that Troy Davis died: It’s that his sister was alive enough to have realized, in a few swift minutes, that she had lost. Not her decade-long fight against cancer, but a fight, and an admirable one, waged against the centuries. It was she I thought of most for several days after the killing when I kept hearing and reading the phrase “justice has been served.” The words baffled me the same way that bumper stickers that say “Support Our Troops” do. What, exactly, do those words mean? Served to whom? And by whom? If justice is a master to be served, who are the servants? And what exactly are the terms of servitude? And are those terms nuanced, as so much else appears to be, by geography?

Though those four words may have been uttered in an unexamined way for the most part, for me the purpose they served was to flood my mind with images of Troy Davis’ sister. Listening to the narration on the radio the night of the killing was awful enough; looking at the images on the Internet the following morning was nearly unbearable. There were pictures of the sister from throughout the years, appearing in court rooms, marching, speaking, protesting and praying. Then, that Wednesday afternoon, her cancer-weary frame sitting in a wheelchair hours before her brother’s scheduled killing, speaking to a group that had gathered in a church near the prison. And finally, surrounded, shielded by a tight tangle of black arms and hands and bowed heads in a cordoned off area near the entrance to the building where her brother’s life, it had just been revealed, would soon end. In the images I saw spontaneous humaneness juxtaposed with brutal barbarism and I hoped that the very brave woman at the heart of that cocoon experienced, if only for a few moments, something that felt like safety.

Revision

2011-10-04T07:23:00.000-07:00

Well, that was interesting. Since it was the 10th anniversary of you know what, and since I have shared my own recollections of the day enough times with enough people, and since I have such a negative attitude about the day’s aftermath, I thought I’d turn the microphone over to others. Around April or so I noticed that the number of posts lined up beautifully on the right side of this blog, the number 10 appearing beside each month. I like the evenness of it. And since it was the 10th anniversary and all, I decided to ask 10 people one question – what do you remember about September 11, 2001? And then write, without ever once veering into the first person. It was a good exercise for me, and to those who shared their stories, thank you.

In listening to and writing the recollections of others, I started thinking about my own memories of that day from a perspective that was different in that I was not writing it, or talking it, and I realized that over the years there’s a major detail in my own recollection that’s been distorted into something quite different from what it was.

I wasn’t terrified of the prospect of us going to war that day. I was terrified of the prospect of the power of PR people, the force of which I had – as of that morning – yet to fully comprehend.

I clearly remember setting a cup of coffee down on a table as I tried to figure out what all the racket outside was. I lived in one of the center apartments of a courtyard complex at the time, and the first thing that came to mind was that someone’s cat had been run over by a car. I lived in that building for eight years, and more often than not there were more cats in residence than people, so the thought wasn’t exactly out of the blue.

I was at work that morning by 10:00, and already little U.S. flags were being handed out at the front desk. I have, up until now, maintained that the reason the gesture was alarmed me was because it struck me as the beginnings of the beating of the war drums.

It was worse than that. I had been working in the PR industry for a year and a half at that point, and it was dawning on me slowly – I wasn’t nearly as jaded back then – that I was spending the majority of my waking hours with people unlike any I’d ever encountered, people who believed with spectacular fanfare in storylines in which billion-dollar, global corporations were cast as the underdogs not because they were true but because they were paid – six-figure salaries in many instances – to write them, people who did not answer to their conscience not because they made an honest decision to instead follow the money but because they did not have one. It was mind-fuck city down there, and there I was in their midst, functioning for the most part. I do not know what that says about me, and I’m not sure I want to know.

By the morning of September 11, 2001, the U.S. military, George W. Bush, Iraq and burning buildings were the last things I thought of when one of the most unscrupulous people I’ve ever met thrust a flag in my face and bellowed, “We’re going to get them.” She was a big, loud Amazonian woman who, in spite of having been born into a lot of money and showered with the most expensive and exclusive private education available, conducted herself without a trace of tact, class or decorum. I have never, before or since, met someone with quite the same knack for sniffing out power and then stomping over the head of anyone who interferes with her mission to align with it. She has children now, I hear.

The worst of the worst, to be sure, but still, one among hundreds of people whose mere presence put me on the defensive. I would work in that agency for six more years, and the feeling of being under siege never really went away. It gelled that morning, what I’d been sensing in an abstract way for months, as they handed out desk flags and gathered in conference rooms to yell at big-screen televisions as if the whole thing were a football game – which, in hindsight, was an almost refreshingly authentic reaction. That office was in downtown Portland, a nice distance from the mothership office, which was out in a suburb proudly inaccessible by public transportation (including walking). We were outcasts at that agency, I think, regarded as misfits because we worked in a neighborhood where there were drug rehab facilities and homeless people. We weren’t watched very much, so I was pretty liberal with the smoke breaks, and that day, I was even more so.

Jason

2011-09-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

For years, Jason’s dream was to become a pilot in the U.S. Navy. By the morning of September 11, 2001, he’d retired those dreams after discovering that he couldn’t withstand the extremes encountered during flight simulations. He’d moved to Washington, D.C., but that morning he was in Roanoke, Va., where he’d just sat down at a restaurant to have breakfast with his grandmother.

“When that first plane struck, the first thing I thought was that it was too clear a day for something like that to happen accidentally,” he says. “Everything in flight school is about not hitting things. You’re wired for survival. That means knowing where you are and avoiding things.”

His grandmother was pretty old by that day, and she couldn’t see very well, so Jason explained what was happening to her. He recalls feeling angry, not just at the attack but at the way it was being discussed on the news.

“I thought the people on the news were jackasses,” he says. “Up until the time the second plane hit they kept saying ‘Maybe the pilots were disoriented.’ I was struck by the intentionality of it from the moment the news came on.”

Michael

2011-09-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

Michael, a writing professor, was in New York state on the morning of September 11, 2001. “I had been there about a week, and I had been with people who had left two days before and were supposed to arrive in the city on the 10th,” he says. “So I was staying in someone else’s house. I walked by the phone and it rang and I thought, I have to answer that. I wouldn’t normally answer the phone in someone else’s house.”

It was his wife, calling from Portland, to tell him that a friend of theirs in Seattle had seen the news, thinking that Michael was not just in New York state but in New York City. “That’s how I found out about it,” Michael says. “Like everybody I was just sick about it but also somewhat fascinated by what these guys had done.”

He recalls feeling helpless as he sat and watched the news. “I remember going outside,” he says. “It was amazingly beautiful, with a little chill in the air. It was so noticeable that there weren’t planes in the air. It was great not to have the noise but it was also eerie.”

He experienced another eerie moment that day. He was in Olean, New York, doing research for a book he was writing on Bob Lax, whom he describes as an experimental poet who left commercial America behind and went to live with fishermen on a Greek island. “He dedicated his life to poetry and contemplation and the idea of peace,” he says.

He was also good friends with Thomas Merton, with whom he’d spent time in a cottage in the town. Michael, as part of his research, had arranged to visit the cabin on the 11th of September. “So we go into the cottage and there’s someone living there,” he says. “There’s a huge television. As the guy is telling us about this cottage I’m standing behind him and on the television they’re showing the routes of the planes, identifying them by airport codes,” he says. “One of them said BOS LAX and from across the room, where I was standing, it looked like Bob Lax. It was odd.”

Katie

2011-09-23T07:12:00.000-07:00

In 2001, Katie was looking forward to September 11. It was her friend’s birthday. As an 8th grader at a middle school in Ketchikan, Alaska, the day began as it usually did, with no radio or television and a two-block walk to school. “I started to figure out that something was wrong because everyone was talking,” she says. As she recalls piecing it together, she says her initial assumption was that there had been a bombing. “Ketchikan is a small place,” she says, “so I assumed it was happening someplace bigger.”

Her teacher announced to the class that there had been a plane crash. Then the principal came over the loudspeaker and called for a moment of silence. “Then my friend, whose birthday had been completely overshadowed, said sarcastically ‘What a great birthday present,’” Katie says.

She cannot recall whether or not school was let out early that day, but she does recall that the significance of the day’s events became clear when she went home. “That’s when the devastation of it hit me,” she says. “My mom was crying and I ended up crying about it as well.”

She remembers watching the news the rest of the night. “It was surreal, watching it all and knowing that people in those towers were going to die,” she says. “It was also confusing, because I didn’t know what it meant, and scary, because I thought if people can do that, what’s next?”

Her sadness that evening, she says, had a lot to do with her feelings about New York. “As a kid,” she says, “I thought New York was the greatest city in our country and maybe even the whole world.”

William

2011-09-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

At around 4:00 on the afternoon of September 10, 2001, William boarded the Amtrak Empire Builder in Portland and began his journey east to Montana, where he would visit his mother and father. After steadily rising throughout the evening, the track leveled out around daybreak on the Montana prairie. There was nothing unusual, initially, about the train grinding to a halt. “After a couple of hours I started to wonder,” he says. “People started getting phone calls. There was a lot of shrieking and shouting and gasping, so I stopped someone in the aisle to ask what was going on.”

New York had been attacked, he was told. The city was burning. Thousands were dead. “Five hours later we went to the next station – Shelby, Montana – and we stayed there for another five hours, watching television,” he says.

The rest of the trip was unusually slow because every time the train reached a bridge, a crew would get out and check it manually to make sure it wasn’t rigged with explosives. “There were no announcements made on the train,” William says. “It was just people passing stories back and forth. We had no idea if this was just the beginning or not.”

William recalls feeling astonished. “People were saying that Arab terrorists were responsible for it, but I remember hearing the same thing right after the bombing in Oklahoma City in the 1990s,” he says. “Montana was a really odd place to be. It was alienating to be on a train crossing the Montana prairie because it all seemed like a world away. It felt very disconnected.”

James

2011-09-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

The most prominent recollection James has about September 11, 2001 is the sky. “Turning the country into a no-fly zone was like being on another planet,” he says. “It would’ve been cool on any other day. On that day it was terrifying. I had never been in a city with no air traffic.”

And then, he says, the F-15s flew over Portland, either late that morning or early in the afternoon. James worked in a hair salon at the time. He left work after two hours or so, not just because people kept calling in to cancel their appointments but because he found himself unable to concentrate. “My reaction was a monumental wave of sadness,” he says. He believed that one of his cousins worked at the World Trade Center, but even after he found out that his cousin was employed elsewhere by that time, the sadness persisted. “There was this hopelessness that nothing could be done, this realization that everything had changed,” he says. “It was like seeing the curtain being ripped down and knowing that the illusion we’d had that we were somehow safe from the shit you see on television was no longer possible.”

James says he was fairly knowledgeable about the Middle East at the time, and it was that knowledge that informed his reaction to the events of that morning. “I did wonder how it was possible that we’d gotten that far without something like that happening,” he says. “And I thought, oh shit, this country is going to become like Palestine.”

Matthew

2011-09-15T07:20:00.000-07:00

Matthew had just quit his job as a reporter for a newspaper in Salem, but the first day of classes in the graduate program to which he had been accepted was still a few weeks away. So on the morning of September 11, 2001 – a Tuesday – he was between one phase and the next. After getting up around 8:30 that morning, he turned on the Today show. “Katie Couric was on,” he says, “and listening to her voice while watching the towers fall was an interesting mix. She said something like, ‘America, this is your 9-1-1 call.’”

At the time, he was doing specific things for a 24-hour period and then writing about them. So that morning, after contemplating driving to Salem to report as a volunteer, he decided to instead spend the next 24 hours observing and writing. “I didn’t know how to respond other than to write,” he says.

He played with his cat, who was entertained by a scratching post and a strand of string. “It would have been a good day to be a cat,” he says. He went to the post office. He rode the MAX. In the afternoon he went to the zoo. “The zoo wasn’t any different than any other day,” he says. “My guess is that parents just said, ‘We’re going to the zoo.’” Driving along Northeast Broadway, approaching a store called Elmer’s that specializes in flags, he noticed the line was pouring out the front door and snaking around the block. “I understand patriotism,” Matthew says, “but what the hell does a flag do?” Big flags on big trucks in one of his recollections.

One thing that stands out for him is hearing, over and over, the people on television announcing that things had changed forever. “It was annoying,” he says. “Of course things change. Don’t tell me that before anyone knows how they have changed.”

He does recall crying over the events of the day and what they foretold. “We immediately went after quick, severe retaliation,” he says. “I knew we’d retaliate with force, and given who was in charge at the time I knew it wouldn’t be very well thought out.”

He rented a few videos. “Something light,” he says, not recalling specific titles. And he looked out the window of the apartment he and his wife lived in at the time and there, in the courtyard, was the couple from across the hall with their infant, having a picnic. “Watching them doing something as simple as having a picnic,” he says, “there was a sense of innocence that had not been lost.”

Kristin

2011-09-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

As the publisher, it wasn’t unusual for Kristin to start the day by signing for the delivery of 10,000 copies of the current issue of the magazine. What was unusual was that her mother, father and one of her brothers were already up and gathered in the kitchen with her fiancé. They had driven out from Nebraska and Missouri for her wedding, which was to take place on September 15th. On the morning of the 11th, what woke her up was the noise of the delivery truck arriving. On the morning of the 11th, by the time she came downstairs her fiancé was entertaining her family with embarrassing stories.

“Outside the delivery guy said, ‘Wow, that’s pretty amazing what happened,’” she says. “He told me about the plane crashing into the Pentagon but not the World Trade Center.” As she recalls, the image in her mind was of a relatively small plane. “So I came inside and we turned the television on. Even though I’d come in to say that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, you could see that obviously the World Trade Center was a much bigger deal.”

In addition to watching television most of the day, she recalls three conversations in particular. One was with her sister, who had travelled to Kansas City to catch a flight to Oregon with her husband and three children, a flight that kept getting cancelled. Another was the woman doing her hair, who was being yelled at by a guy who had come into the salon. “He said that when we find out who did it we need to carpet bomb the country from one end to the other,” she says. “I knew the woman doing my hair was married to a man who is Lebanese, but she agreed with the guy who was shouting, and I knew that things were going to change for the worse.”

Then she talked to her brother. “I told him that this was going to be a big wake-up call for America,” she says. “I said we can’t keep mucking around in other countries. He said ‘Someone’s in for a wake-up call, but it’s not us.’”

Luci

2011-09-09T08:08:00.000-07:00

For Luci, a public health administrator who was born and raised in Eastern Oregon, every September 11th is memorable. In 2001, she took the day off, as is custom if the date falls on a weekday, and planned to start the day by sleeping late even though she knew better. “Every year on my birthday my mother calls me early in the morning to sing Las Mañanitas, which means sweet little morning,” she says. “Mexicans do that – it’s a celebratory greeting, a blending of ‘morning’ and ‘tomorrow.’”

She recalls that she answered the phone and giggled as her mother sang the first verse – she estimates the song has between 30 and 40 – and then the bridge and then told her to go turn on the television. “She told me that planes had crashed into the tower and then at the Pentagon,” she says. “I asked her what was going on. She didn’t know. She told me to be careful.”

She says that even though she’d taken the day off she couldn’t resist calling a few people at work. And she was on e-mail, sending messages to people she knew in New York and receiving a few as well. A decade later one in particular stands out. “I received a ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ message from someone I would not have expected it from,” she says. “It would bug me if I received a message like that today because it’s so tired, but back then I felt compassion because it was written from a place of fear by someone who had lived in New York.” But moments later, a friend who had also received the message replied to all that she believed the sentiment behind the original message was ridiculous. “The reply came within moments,” Luci says, “and the main point of it was ‘Hold on, let’s not grab our torches just yet.’”

She remembers the evening being like most other birthday evenings in one sense. “I like to be with friends on my birthday, so I invited people to meet up at Produce Row,” she says. “A few friends came.” While the gathering may have been in keeping with Luci’s birthday tradition, the conversation was not. “We talked about our fears,” she recalls. “We talked about the hawks swooping down. We talked about W and the New American Century.”

Leslie

2011-09-08T07:24:00.000-07:00

On the morning of September 11th, Leslie called in sick to work. Not because of what was going on a continent from her home in San Francisco, but because she was actually sick. At around 5 that morning she left a voicemail message for her supervisor at the social services agency where she worked. Her timing turned out to be critical, because the agency reacted negatively to people who called in due to the trauma because they were unavailable to help those the agency served.

After making her call, she started the morning in the way she starts many mornings – by making coffee and getting comfortable on the couch. And then she turned on the television to watch the news.

“I was watching when the news broke,” she says. “They did that breaking news thing. The first tower had been hit and then, while I was watching, the second tower got hit and it was surreal.”

Leslie, who has worked in various aspects of marketing and fundraising throughout her career and who now lives in Portland, doesn’t focus so much on the events of that morning as she does the presentation of them. “Really, the second you start watching television it’s surreal because there is an element of fictionalization even if it’s real,” she says. “Everyone forgets that there’s a lot of editing. There’s a point of view, which by definition means there’s editing. But that morning it was completely real in that they didn’t know what was going to happen next. I mean, I’m sitting there watching a plane fly into a building.”

She stayed on the couch. She called her children, who lived in different states at the time. And she called a few friends. And then she had what she recalls as a “profound” conversation with her husband. “We were both saying that America had just joined the rest of the world,” she says. “We hadn’t been attacked on our mainland since 1812. We had come to believe as a country that having big oceans at many of our borders would keep us safe.”

A big part of Leslie’s perspective on the event is informed by places she’s lived. Of living in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis, she says “it got strange …” in reference to the period when it was believed that hiding under desks would protect people from nuclear blasts. And she spent a significant part of her childhood in South America, which trained her to look at the U.S. through an external lens. “In other places terrorism is a fact of life,” she says. “You cope with it. I didn’t think of September 11 as being any different, no more or less tragic. My husband and I talked about it that day as the beginning of a forced awareness.”

Kathleen

2011-09-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

Kathleen, who is in her mid-sixties, paused initially when asked to recall Sept. 11, 2001. “I am wondering how it is that we had the television on?” she says. “I don’t remember physically turning it on.” A lifelong resident of Portland, Kathleen worked in management at a major healthcare organization at the time. She was also tending to her mother, who was dying. She was already watching the television “in horror” when the crash of the second plane was caught on camera. Then the Pentagon, and the plane in Pennsylvania.

The numbers announced on television stand out for her. “I believe they said that it was possible that 56,000 people might have been at work in those towers,” she says. “So when I learned later that 1,100 people had died all I could think was, it could’ve been much worse.”

She recalls vividly her drive to work. “As I was looking at other people in other cars, I realized that everyone else was listening to the radio, too,” she says. “It was a sense of connection that I’ve never experienced before.”

By the time she arrived at work a television had been turned on in the gym. As a manager Kathleen says she told people to do whatever they need to do. But as a human she did something else. “I reached out to a woman who was sitting on a bench and put my hand on her shoulder,” she says. “There was this sense of shock. You could see that the news people were horrified. None of us were sure if it was over or not.”

Motown in the mail

2011-08-31T07:20:00.000-07:00

I was going to say I’m on another Motown bender, but that would imply that I’d abstained for a bit, and I have not.

A while back I got an Amazon gift card. I’ve received many of these over the years – they’re so unimaginative that they’re perfect for people in the PR biz – but for some reason I had never used one until this month.

The book group my sisters and I do is resuming shortly after a summer hiatus. We were going to read yet another Russian novel, this one by Bulgakov. For some reason, it was in very short supply at Powell’s and cost considerably more than War and Peace, which I thought was ridiculous. Also, it was labeled “new” even though it clearly was not. I think that’s what got me clicking around on Amazon. I loathe the concept, but man was it fun, sitting here looking at all sorts of shit. It’s my Tulsa sister’s turn to pick the book, and she changed her mind about the Russians and chose instead One Hundred Years of Solitude. So I selected that book and added it to my cart.

Then I started looking at the music.

I really do strive to buy locally. While I think the management of Powell’s is deplorable, I do think that with an institution like that in town, it’s almost unforgiveable to buy books online. But when it comes to music, it was a guilt-free experience for me. In spite of how cool “the scene” is here in Portland, I’ve never had much luck at the record store. I think Music Millennium is painfully precious, and for some reason I usually walk out of Everyday Music with something that I’m not really wild about, which is, in all fairness, not the store’s fault. Basically I don’t buy much in the way of music.

Every time I hear something new – new to me – by Gladys Knight, I am pretty much floored. I have no idea how musical careers are managed or mismanaged or anything, really, about her personal story except that she’s from Georgia, but she – alone or with her Pips – embodies for me the term underrated. I’ve shared this observation with many people, and many of them have agreed, and many more have confessed that, in spite of their quiet admiration, they don’t own a single thing by Gladys Knight. I don’t either, and even though I ordered a CD of hers from Amazon, I still don’t. I ordered it for the upcoming birthday of a friend who says that he needed a week to recover after seeing her perform in Las Vegas.

I ordered some music for myself as well, of course. I keep a list of groups and individuals in the back of one of my notebooks, and I put two of them in my Amazon shopping cart before I clicked my way into the credit card part of it. When I listen to a new CD I’m always a little nervous. What if it turns out to be crap? What if the one song on it that I know turns out to be the exception? The only exception on either of the CDs I bought for myself are the last tracks on each, which are live recordings of some Motown gala.

Other than that, I hit the jackpot with both David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks. I cannot say which I prefer, nor do I feel obliged to. Eddie Kendricks does seem to have an edge in the voice department, but it must be said that David Ruffin – or his handlers, or managers, or perhaps just him – regarded the backup singers in the same way that I would if I had been the producer, and that is as anything but backup. Eddie Kendricks recalls, at moments, Marvin Gaye, while David Ruffin does not. I’m not a music critic, so I’ll spare you a song-by-song, but I did read the liner notes and learned that Eddie Kendricks is from Alabama and David Ruffin is from Mississippi. Like many others who emanate from my music collection, both took their unbearable sadness to Detroit, where they committed it to perpetuity for people like me to enjoy – if I may use that word – half a century later.

The cycles

2011-08-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

One of the more maddening aspects of the deterioration of what I used to call the news is that the elections seem to never end. While I usually enjoy ridiculing people in specific industries who make up new terms that either hammer home the critical importance of whatever product or service it is they’re selling or that are simply bantered about to make those who use them appear more informed than the rest of us, I must admit that the news people’s coining of the phrase “election cycle” strikes me as completely appropriate. I started watching a lot of television back in the autumn of 2008, and I was stunned when the television hosts and hostesses were unable to contain themselves: Before Barak Obama even walked onto a stage in Chicago and made his victory speech, they were referencing “the midterms.” And once Michele Bachmann emerged as the punchline to that particular joke, we were – in the words of Gwen Ifill, unfortunately – “ … off to 2012.”

It’s an election cycle alright, and it never stops. I have no idea what the people on Fox have to say because I don’t have cable, and for that I am grateful. The people on PBS – who I consider a few ranks above the rest of it – are bad enough.

Every Friday night, the two columnists sit down with Jim Lehrer and analyze, vote by vote, strategy by strategy, what various elected officials are up to and cram it into the context, if you will, of the next, or current, election cycle. And then feign surprise – and often disappointment – that Washington is no longer the way it was back in the good old days when the lions sat down and drank and smoked cigars together after punching each other in the head over at the corporate headquarters – allegedly – of democracy. Why is it not like that anymore? Why has compromise become a bad word? Or, in the tone of astonishment that only Jim Lehrer can deliver, Why are they acting like that? Every week they wonder and ponder and pontificate, and every week I think to myself: You, for starters. And Facebook. And Twitter. If your next election cycle begins before you’ve made your acceptance speech for the election cycle you just endured, it seems to me that our elected leaders do what any halfway sensible person would do: They run. For election.

Gwen Ifill is one of the best journalists on television, in my opinion, and even she is deplorable when it comes to ensuring her own job security not by creating stories she can report exactly, but something along those lines. Every Friday night she sits down with a group of reporters – some of whom I think are worth listening to, many of whom I think reflect poorly on her and on PBS as a whole – and rehashes two or three major stories, sprinkling each with brilliant insights about how everything from the congressmen’s crotch shot to the situation in Libya will impact the next … election cycle.

It occurred to me on Friday night that the main effect of this new (to me) and improved way of covering the news is that it degrades electoral politics to the level of reality television. They needed someone to counter Barak Obama’s initial popularity and there, lo and behold, was Sarah Palin. Then we had to have a little conflict in that story – it was, after all, getting “down to the wire” back in 2009, a year before the midterm elections, three years before the 2012 presidential election – so suddenly a woman running for office in Delaware who had had some sort of brush with witchcraft made headlines around the world. So too did a woman in Nevada who, in spite of the fact that she was running for a seat in the United States Senate, refused to meet with reporters. And a woman in California, who in spite of her status as corporate heroine and record-breaking campaign spender, failed to even come close to her competitor even though the race was promoted – and I do mean promoted – by the television analysts as quite close, which, once the novelty of an Internet empress deciding she was meant to govern California wore off, it simply was not.

A couple of months ago, with nearly a year and a half to go (by my calendar anyhow) before the 2012 election, Gwen Ifill seemed relieved that the Republican race was “finally” taking shape. It was as if she’d been on the verge of getting worried that nobody would run.

And on Friday night, while dissecting the impending showdown between Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, Gwen Ifill and her guests had a few aw-shucks laughs over how much they “love election years.” And all I could summon by way of response was: I used to love them, too.

An afternoon with the drinkers

2011-08-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

It is still a little strange to be in situations where drinking is the main event and not drink. Last weekend I went to a fundraiser at a tavern in my neighborhood – a beer festival – not to drink but to sit at the neighborhood association’s table, where I gave away t-shirts, answered general questions about the meetings and collected information from people who want to be on the mailing list.

It was sort of fun, actually. Saturday was the first day it’s gotten above 90 degrees in Portland this year, and the heat has been so absent this summer that it felt exotic to sit there and sweat. Since I worked the first shift, I had to set up not only the table but the elevated awning that shades it. The awning was actually easy to set up – which was a pleasant surprise – but it did take two people. So I asked the woman in the next booth, who was selling jewelry. As I was folding the shirts so that they could be arranged in a cascade pattern with only the logos showing, the woman and I struck up a conversation. She said to me, for some reason, “I am disabled!” Her fiftieth birthday is coming up, she went on, and three days before that she’s going in for her Social Security hearing. Then we started talking about her business. I am always curious when I see people selling jewelry at festivals. Is that how they earn a living? Can you earn a living doing that? I could not stop staring at her breasts, which would not be ignored.

She told me many things about the custom jewelry business. The third most interesting is that everyone has a mother, so I had no excuse to not buy something from her. The second most interesting is that she doesn’t buy her own raw materials – a friend goes out and does that for her, and she works with whatever falls out of his bag. The most interesting thing is that she makes the bulk of her income from festivals, at which she camps and that she travels to and from on her “chopper.” I was drinking ginger ale with a lot of ice that I’d had to go inside to the bar to get, and she looked at my cup and told me that she always had admired people who go straight for the good stuff. We had a moment there, the two of us.

In addition to being pretty much trashed by 1:30 in the afternoon, most of the people at the brew fest were what I’d call trashy-ish. Here’s my take on it: They are the exact opposite of “the creatives” and other assortments of hipsters that seem to think they founded Portland and, at the same time, they are exactly what “the creatives” and the others want so desperately to emulate. It’s a gloriously mind fucky thing to behold, I think.

I watched people arrive who had clearly already started drinking, and I watched them try to cover up that fact as much as possible. I saw people buy three large containers of beer at a time even though there was no line. Many people came to the neighborhood association booth for the shade, and as they stood there they rambled incoherently about the weather, their cars, the bands that were coming. Most of them looked a little unhinged, I thought, a little desperate. The people in AA, who are wrong about many things, like to say that you should never be too comfortable in your sobriety, and while I can see the logic of that to a certain extent, I cannot even begin to imagine.

My civil rights bender

2011-08-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

For many reasons, the saga of black people in the United States has always interested me. When I was a very small child, black people lived and worked and went to school in a place and manner that was completely separate.

That separateness came to me recently as an answer – or the beginning of an answer – to a question that keeps presenting itself in what I think may be a civil rights bender. Earlier this year I started and actually finished a book called Parting the Waters, the first in a trilogy chronicling “America in the King years” by Taylor Branch. Now I’m well into the second book, Pillar of Fire, which welcomes onto the stage the enchantingly cause-and-effect character of Malcolm X. At the same time, over the past few months I watched a PBS special commemorating the 50th anniversary of the freedom rides, parts of which gave the U.S. and the world a startling view of just how skillfully the word “equality” had been parsed in places like Anniston, Alabama and Greenwood, Mississippi. Then I watched a documentary that was produced in (I believe) the 1980s called Eyes on the Prize.

And now, one dreadful episode at a time, I am watching Roots.

Roots aired for the first time when I was in grade school. In fact, it was aired shortly after the school I’d attended beginning in kindergarten was split down the middle in what must have been the result of some highly localized pulling of various strings. One half of the school remained there and the other half was sent to a new school for the sake of desegregation. The half of the school that remained were the households in a little Catholic borough called Shrewsbury. The house where I grew up was on the new-school side of the boundary, a boundary drawn up by people whose names and faces were not, to the best of my knowledge, ever made public. It was the middle of the 1970s, we were sent off to the black school, and we were terrified.

As I read these books and watch the images on the television screen, it hits me that neighborhoods were torched and people were killed and the jails were crammed way beyond capacity over what boiled down, in my opinion, to seating charts. Many people did not want the particulars of their daily routines to overlap or intersect in any way, shape or form with the routines of black people. When I went to my new grade school in fourth grade, I remember thinking that black people were from a world so separate from mine that it was foreign. They had different dogs. They drove different cars. Their music was different, and the way they talked was, while intriguing, completely baffling. I hate to criticize my parents, but I have questions about why the separateness issue wasn’t discussed and explained at our dinner table. I had no idea that people were being strung up in trees two states away because they had the audacity to think they had the right not only to go to school but to register to vote.

As my bender has progressed, I have become almost bored with the black point of view, and by that I mean it’s as clear as crystal what motivated them: For centuries black people had lived under the rule and law of terrorists and they were, accordingly, terrified. What I am curious about is the white point of view. I have a question about gay marriage as well – I am dying to ask someone who is opposed to two men or two women being married how such a contract would impact his life. I am even more curious to know what a white guy in Mississippi in the 1960s most feared losing by not being able to systematically segregate, oppress and terrify black people. Did the civil rights movement threaten to compromise what must have been seen as sacred remnants of the glorious days of slavery? Was it some sort of Tea Party-ish resistance to the federal government? Or did white people fear payback? Had I known a fraction of the story I sure would have.

I have not found an answer, of course, but I did read a quote that – to put it mildly – gave me pause. And here, in all its breathtaking callousness, from an interview with a white male in Mississippi in the 1960s, are the words:

“We killed two-month old Indian babies to take this country,” one white voter explained succinctly to the press, “and now they want us to give it away to the niggers.” [Pillar of Fire, pg. 68]

Little divisions

2011-08-18T08:01:00.000-07:00

Every great once in a while I experience something I am tempted to call happiness but that I think of as timelessness. By that I mean that there is no time, that time ceases to matter, or to even exist. A few weekends ago that’s exactly where I found myself.

As is almost always the case, it began with the atmosphere. I do not like heat – I am terrified of it in its extremes, actually – but the summer here has been so cool and cloudy that a clear blue sky and bare feet on warmed concrete sidewalks and floorboards out on the porch and shorts and a t-shirt and that honey-colored glow that comes about only when the sunlight makes it through the front door and seeps, almost like water, across the living room floor, amplifying not only the grace of the grain but every single micro-speck of dust as well – I liked every bit of it.

I’ve been planting again. I am trying to break myself of the habit of putting plants in right beside one another and then waiting to see what happens. There is a triangle of plants in the front corner of the yard, and then around it I’ve arranged – I think – plants of various height and width and texture and color. I’m training a couple of vines on the fence, or trying to. This particular corner of the yard, as it happens, is situated a few feet from the intersection of two streets, the corner on which I live, and my goal, I suppose, is to create a wall of growing, blossoming, climbing, evolving plants.

Because my front porch, for various reasons, is public territory. I think all front porches should be to a certain extent, but in my neighborhood, on my corner, if you are looking for a place to sit and read or ponder or simply experience the elements by focusing on them, by feeling them, my front porch is not the place. Cars and trucks speed and screech through the intersection. The sound of sirens is so normal it’s almost not even noticeable. There are barking dogs and slamming doors and people with phenomenally loud voices yelling and shouting and repeating and then firing up power tools of one sort or another and throwing two-by-fours around their yards and then yelling some more because whomever it is being yelled at cannot hear what’s being yelled. I think it’s important to know your neighbors, to be known to your neighbors, to be available if needed, but there are many neighbors – there always have been, regardless of my whereabouts – who believe that if I am visible I am waiting for them to tell me something. I often want to say, This book, the one in my lap that is open, is not a prop. I am reading it.

So a few weekends ago I was sitting out on the porch on an uncommonly quiet Saturday afternoon. There were plenty of things that needed to be done, all of which I was ignoring, because I was mesmerized not only by the weather but by the most recent translation of Anna Karenina. It’s a love story with a lot of money troubles and class conflict and political posturing woven in so when the noise began it occurred to me not as an interruption of my reading but as an enhancement.

Hundreds of black people arrived within half an hour. The women wore dresses mostly covered with flowing white wraps. Some of the men wore the wraps as well, but their clothing seemed more exposed: They dressed in pants that were either black or very dark gray, and either white or pale blue shirts and solid-colored ties. The children were miniature versions of their (I presume) parents, sans the white wraps. They arrived, as they do every weekend (though usually on Sunday mornings) in larger-than-normal vehicles polished to the point of shine. As I read about some of the finer points about the difference between society in Petersburg as compared to that in Moscow, I imagined the vehicles whooshing around corners and into parking spaces as stagecoaches. Look, I thought to myself, it’s Darya Alexandrovna! Look, it’s Countess Lydia, and Kitty, and … Anna.

These people are from Africa. According to one source – dubious at best – they are Ethiopians. On this particular Saturday, rather than going to the church building to the west of my house, they went the opposite direction, one block to the east, and that was where the festivities began. There were booming drums and chanting and clapping and singing with words in a language that I may not know but that I felt I understood. And it could be because I was really enjoying my book, or because the day was so glorious, or that I was experiencing that rare sensation of feeling like I’m accomplishing more by willfully accomplishing nothing (I don’t know what to call that), but for these reasons and perhaps much more, the festive ruckus only added to the harmony I’d already established with the day.

Until, that is, I picked up a tid-bit of conversation among a group of women getting into a SUV across the street and realized that the celebration was, of all things, a wedding. And that, I’m embarrassed to say, changed everything.

This is terrible, I think, but it’s true: The first thing that came into my mind was how dare these people, who were not even born in this country, have the right to get married when I don’t? Isn’t that gross? I think so. I think it’s even more gross that it went downhill from there. I could not look into their faces – any of them, their children included – without seeing an enemy. How dare they flaunt their privileges in a neighborhood where plenty of folks live who are denied them? And so on and so forth until I reached rock bottom – my definition of it, anyhow – and that was when I realized that this is what happens when politics and religion are used to divide people into camps. What happens is that people – me included – disappear into camps and become tribal and start looking at others not as people but as enemies who must, must be conquered. If you are after my food – or I believe you are – I need to either kill you or starve to death. I was horrified by myself, honestly, but at the same time I have a whole new brand of respect for the people who orchestrate that sort of shit – Christians, usually – because I am here to tell you, based on recent personal experience, it works.

Sent from my stupidity

2011-08-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

On Saturday afternoon I noticed that there was yet another young man wearing a vest and carrying a clipboard walking purposefully through the neighborhood. The vest-clipboard combo is not uncommon around here, and while I suppose that maybe wearing a vest to identify yourself as someone going door to door to pester people into buying new windows or new security systems might be the result of some kind of well-intentioned ordinance, I find it annoying. When there are people with vests and clipboards pacing around, I feel like I’m under inspection, and I do not like it.

I opened the door just as the young man was about to set foot on the walkway leading to my front steps. He looked up and smiled and raised his right hand, pulled into a gentle fist, and said, “Knock, knock.” He was going door to door on behalf of a big, big company famous for terrible service to let everyone know about a new special combining an Internet connection, the cell phone and the direct TV. “You guys aren’t interested in any of that?” he asked when I said no thanks. (I love the “you guys” bit, which is used by almost everyone who comes to the door). “We want less of all three of those things,” I said, “not more.” He looked shocked, but only for a moment. Soon enough he glanced at the home security sign in my yard – which is fake, of course, which I probably shouldn’t write, but oh well – and said, “You know, you can connect and manage everything. You can even turn your alarm off and on with your cell phone … no matter where you guys are.”

One of the things I started noticing earlier this summer is the proliferation of seriously sloppy e-mail that goes around. There is nothing new about this, of course, but it does seem to be getting worse. In June, for some reason, the stars aligned for me and I found myself in constant communication not with one or two or three but four people – clients, of course – who are relentlessly, outrageously, unapologetically sloppy in e-mail. Directions are vague and unclear and usually wrong. Documents that are attached to messages “for context” more often than not turn out to be – oops! – the wrong document. According to the rules of what I fear is the new normal, the sloppsters answer questions by simply forwarding a mail from someone else equally sloppy. It is because of this experience of working with four of them at once that I now have a new rule for responding to work-related e-mail: No response from me for at least an hour, because I really do not trust myself to not begin an e-mail sent moments after receiving one with, “Hey, dumb fuck, read my message, which I intentionally wrote at the third-grade level, and then, if you must, borrow a brain from someone before sending another single speck of nonsense, because my patience for your idiocy is gone.” You can’t say stuff like that when they’re paying you, I’ve learned. So I wait an hour.

One thing I did notice, though, is that a great many of the worst e-mails have a little tag line at the bottom: Sent from my Blackberry. Or: Sent from my iPhone. As a person who thinks cell phones should have the living hell regulated out of them and their usage, it won’t surprise anyone that I find this sort of half-assed behavior appalling. And that fits into place perfectly with another thing I’ve noticed over the past few years, which is that the city seems full of people reduced to a zombie state as they screw around with their walky-talkies while they’re in line for coffee, at the grocery store, waiting to board a flight, riding the bus, riding an elevator. People are doing a lot while they're on the go, including, I presume, answering work-related e-mails. They're able to do more than ever before, so we're told, and as far as I can tell they're doing none of it well.

There’s another computer issue I’ve noticed lately. I recently bought a bike and I’ve been riding around here and there quite a bit. And I’ve noticed that it is not at all uncommon to see someone else on a bike fucking around with his or her cell phone while riding. Texting? Checking e-mail? Believing, as many people in Portland still do, that it’s hip and edgy to use a cell phone in public? I have no idea, but here are a few observations. In addition to being incredibly stupid from a personal safety standpoint, and in addition to being what I consider sacrilege, it forces me to ponder a very specific scenario: If a person riding a bike and using the cell phone at the same time were to be hit and eternally confined to a wheelchair by the careless driver of an SUV, toward whom would my sympathies align? As much as I loathe and detest SUVs and those who drive them, the answer to what was once a very simple question is not clear to me.

The doors are closing

2011-08-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

There has been so much going on lately. The mayor of Portland either decided or had it decided for him that he will not seek a second term next year. One of our congressmen, true to the spirit of Oregon, resigned after it was alleged that he’d done it with a very young daughter of one of his supporters. And the country came very close, from what I understand, to going into default. So I watched the news.

Believe it or not, the lead story the night I watched was about a woman who had gotten separated from her young son while they were riding the light rail train – or trying to – in downtown Portland. She was appalled by the lack of urgency shown by the local transit authority, called Tri Met. And the clowns who have taken over the newsroom egged her on, capturing the indignation on her face and in her voice and then putting this non-story, as they so often do, at the top of the broadcast. Because, according to the graphics, this tale constituted “breaking news.”

What happened, according to the story, is this: The woman’s son ran ahead of the woman and her other children and boarded a train before the mother, for reasons that were not made clear, was able to board with him. So, after the two (if not three) pre-recorded announcements that say, and this is a direct quote, “The doors are closing” well, the doors did in fact close. And the train pulled away and headed up the street to its next stop, three blocks away.

The mother was appalled for two main reasons. First, even though she caught the attention of the train operator, he didn’t stop the train. And second, when the boy was released from the train three blocks up the street, the Tri Met person who escorted him off the car (the train operator? – I don’t know) did not verify or prove that the man to whom he presented the child was in fact the boy’s uncle. There should have been a team of people from Tri Met there to handle the situation, the mother said. Though not at all unusual, the self-centeredness, the arrogance, the entitlement of this woman’s face and voice and tone offended me to the point of speechlessness.

But it passed. Since I still have the right to communicate both complaints and compliments, rather than e-mailing the station, which I believe is pointless, I sent an e-mail to the public affairs group at Tri Met to share a couple of thoughts. The first was that I think it’s ridiculous that our local news stations seem to jump at any and all opportunities to portray public transportation as a dangerous, seedy enterprise. And second, I thanked the officials of Tri Met for having a policy that forbids light rail operators from stopping trains once they’ve pulled away from the platform. Because I’ve watched people attempting to get on and off of trains and buses, fully abled (physically) people, and I’m here to tell you that once trains start stopping for people who are too stupid or too arrogant (or both) to follow the simplest of procedures, we will get nowhere.

But even in e-mail I censored myself. I think I’ve moved beyond this ‘it takes a village’ mentality, but for some reason I hesitate to just come right out and say what I think about it, which is that if you are not capable of caring for and managing your children you should not have them. Many people in the village, including me, are happy to help out but it seems to have become an expectation that we’re all on board with this mostly unspoken rule that people with young children exist in a weird zone of exemption when it comes to public conduct. It is not the transit authority’s responsibility to provide basic management services to people who apparently are not capable of managing themselves or their offspring, and it’s not mine either.

Efficiency

2011-08-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

For many reasons, I was thinking about all the talk about the general inefficiency of government. There are a couple of examples that stand out in my mind. One is the legend about the amount of money the Pentagon pays for light bulbs. That one seems to date back to the 1970s. The second one is a comment a friend of mine made recently after having to wait in line at the post office longer than she thought was necessary because there was only one window open. And there was only one window open, she said, because the other clerks must have been taking their union-mandated coffee break. This particular friend of mine often plays online games during the work day with her husband, who is employed by a nearby municipal government, the same municipal government, I believe, that provides the family insurance package that I’d imagine has come in quite handy lately with the new baby and all. I’m not singling out my friend to criticize her; I am singling her out to illustrate that it is a common assumption that the public sector thrives on inefficiencies carried forth by lazy employees.

For more than a month and a half I worked on a project with a woman I’ve come to think of as Kitty – she’s the one who made the tom cats nervous – and just the other day, for some reason, it occurred to me that if you want a shining example of inefficiencies that are so deeply embedded in the processes and procedures that you can very accurately predict what will happen by identifying the way something should happen and then assuming that the exact opposite will prevail, man, this is it.

Kitty blew thru at least $500,000 – some of which is now in my checking account – so that a few documents could be posted on a corporate web drive and never looked at again. Never looked at again because they are of zero value. They don’t explain anything whatsoever, and what they allege to explain is in no way significant for anyone except a couple of handsomely compensated private sector employees, one of whom thought that writing “Theoretically, I guess you could include this data …” constitutes expert feedback.

The documents were written in a way that intentionally avoids anything definite. Since the reason for the lack of anything definitive was never stated directly, here’s my best guess: Nobody wanted to get busted for not knowing much. There were designers and industry experts and writers and brand strategists and “creatives” and so on and so forth. When Kitty was able to pull herself together enough to schedule a conference call, we all had them on our computers – live meeting, it’s called – so that we could look at documents together – the wrong version of documents more often than not. Then, a torrent of e-mail that sought to confirm that we had all correctly understood what we’d been directed to do during the conference call. Kitty usually ignored those e-mails, but when she did answer them her answers – if they can be called that – ignored or muddied the very simple questions she’d been asked and necessitated more questions. Which was a phenomenal waste of time and money.

And then there was Kitty herself, sitting on top of it all, spending hours reformatting documents in ways that not only didn’t make sense but were actually great examples of the exact opposite of sense. Then she’d go through whatever it was she’d assembled, defending the necessity of having a separate box within the table she created not for each slide but for each line within a slide “so that we can really drill down” and then talking through each of the graphic images she imported into the Word document – which required hours and made the file so huge it bogged down everyone’s e-mail – and how, when it was pointed out to her that the images didn’t match the text, would say, “you know – it’s just a thought.” The meetings held to explain things that should have never, ever been created in the first place were endless.

And this is efficiency in the private sector. Kitty is but one person. There are thousands, many thousands, at her company alone, a company that loves, interestingly enough, to point out how it’s bringing efficiency to many industries, including the public sector. And yet the myth persists. We must get government spending under control, I hear frequently. We must really be aggressive about waste in the public sector. I suppose the anthropologists would call these beliefs of ours something like a cultural truth, or maybe a societal assumption, but as Kitty and the millions like her sit in conference rooms across the land, bogging down everything they get their hands on with a level of inefficiency that’s worthy of a case study while, at the same time, make one crack after another about “the government,” a non-anthropologist like me has a simpler, less sophisticated way of describing it: Lying.

Those days are over

2011-08-04T07:24:00.000-07:00

I am astounded, generally, by what people think and believe. The recent “budget crisis” was, of course, a bonanza of bafflement. One day the speaker of the house and president of the country staged a very carefully rehearsed blowup – or meltdown – that called for the speaker to “storm” out of a meeting with the president. The speaker was followed down a number of corridors by dozens, which created the impression, for me at least, of a fighter having just left the ring after a particularly grueling match.

And next thing you know, there’s the speaker on television, following his script and talking – yet again – about the fiscally reckless ways of Washington and how he knows – as a former small business owner or manager or whatever it was that he was – that this sort of irresponsibility would never play in the world of roll-up-your-sleeves businesses out there in the “real America,” where a dollar is worth exactly a dollar and the vast and rolling plains are populated by decent, hard-working folks who don’t rely on fancy accounting gimmicks. Then, the speaker declared with all the authenticity of a talking statue, that funny money business? That spending of cash we don’t have? In Washington, he said, those days are over.

And I thought, and I think I may have even said out loud to nobody but my television: Bullshit. The fact that John Boehner – and Barack Obama, for that matter – are on national television is all the proof I need that “those days” are anything but over. They’re part of the system, and part of the problem, and if they weren’t they wouldn’t be in office and would not, therefore, be on the television telling what’s over and when and how one “new day” or another officially begins.

My question is this. For whom are those kinds of statements intended? It reminds me of every presidential candidate I’ve ever followed declaring, with a sentimental little quiver in his voice, “America’s best days are ahead of her.” Who, who exactly, believes this? Who hears those words and thinks, that’s our man! He’s going to fix some shit! He gets it!

I find my answers – and then some – on Facebook. I think Facebook is more than a bit evil, but man, what a view it offers – which is critical, since the news is useless in that arena.

And just in case you have neither the time nor the interest in delving into the nation’s prevailing mindset by simply typing a password, I’m here to tell you, the messaging works. We balance our checkbooks at home, cried the chorus, why can’t they? Thanks to the people who control the news, this is what the entire “crisis” came down to. I pay my mortgage every month without bouncing a check, one of my “friends” wrote, and then added that she “expects the same of Washington.”

I don’t. Out here in “the real America” we elect year after year after year the same squeaky clean, sentimental candidates who will lie directly into the camera about the virtues of fiscal responsibility. They call it “speaking to our values.” And at the same time they accept donations from those individuals – and corporations – with enough money to influence how these candidates vote once they’re elected. Who do we suppose pays for those slick, hallucinogenic commercials upon which we base our voting decisions and the “strategic counsel” provided by the PR team – the kind of “consulting” without which nobody in Washington could prevail? It’s easier, I suppose, to sit back and, as long as all our needs are met, bitch and complain on Facebook about “Washington” and a term I’m pretty sure nobody, myself included, is capable of defining accurately: “A balanced budget.” Anyone who defined it correctly and actually talked about it wouldn’t make it past the most preliminary stages of a campaign. Besides being the kind of thing elitists talk about, it’s too boring to captivate our attention the same way as a congresswoman whose head was nearly blown off appearing on the floor for the first time “since Tucson” to cast her vote in support of ensuring the people with lots of money will continue to pay taxes at a lower rate than everyone I know. Now that, like all effective PR campaigns (in spite of my criticisms, they do know what they’re doing) made quite an impact.

Singing ourselves

2011-08-02T07:24:00.000-07:00

One of the things I find most satisfying about reading history is the realization that regardless of how low we may feel we’ve fallen, human behavior and inclinations are no worse today than they were centuries ago. Conduct that is coarse and crass is backed up by history – and a lot of it. No matter how many times this simple fact leaps out at me from printed pages, it never fails to amaze.

Walt Whitman, of course, is no exception. After putting my John Irving novel where it belonged – on the donation pile – I took a book I’ve owned for more than a decade down from the shelf and immersed myself for a couple of weeks in the life and times of our country’s most infamous dirty old man. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds is my kind of history. It paints pictures not only of what the poet was doing and thinking and writing but it also frames those pictures with lore about other overlapping happenings. Before reading I thought the term ‘cultural biography’ was a bit grandiose, but I now believe it’s perfect.

Here, just for fun, are a few familiar themes, straight out of the mid- to late-1800s.

The country rallied around war back then, so the story goes, as we do today (allegedly). Walt Whitman considered the Civil War the heart and soul of not only his career but his entire life. And in a way that’s frightfully familiar to me, he considered Abraham Lincoln not only the president but the redeemer. The war, in Walt Whitman’s day, put all the family troubles into perspective and gave order and purpose to the general slovenliness that had taken hold in places like Manhattan and Brooklyn. Reading about it made me wonder if our current adventures in other lands were, in some sense, an answer to the cultural malaise that had set in after nearly a decade of ‘liberal’ presidential politics. We needed to clear our heads, it seems to me, of all that sleaze, all those blowjobs. I wonder at the perfect timing of certain incidents in terms of directing the country down a path of restored national glory. Most of all, I wondered about our not-new tendency to make heroes of the soldiers. Here’s a good one from one of the war hospitals: “While at Falmouth, he saw some of the war dead, including a soldier who prompted this line in draft: ‘Young man: I think this face of yours is the face of my dead Christ.’” [pg. 411] Holy shit, Uncle Walt.

Gay marriage was not a problem for the Christians back then. In fact, gay sex wasn’t a problem because it wasn’t considered. Besides, they were focused on something far more immediate: Masturbation. Known as ‘the solitary vice,’ masturbation “ … was a major concern of purity reformers … [with] 60 to 70 percent of twelve- and thirteen-year old boys [masturbating] with some going to what Graham called ‘the still more loathsome and criminal extent of an unnatural commerce with each other!’ (probably a reference to mutual masturbation).” [pg. 199] As they are today, the piously inclined were stuck – as if bounded there by steel and concrete – in other people’s underwear. I have never noticed before, but Walt Whitman’s poetry alludes – quite often – to jacking off, which was, of course, a big problem because it was killing young people “ … by the thousands.” [pg. 199]

Remember in 2008 when it was slowly coming to the surface that the nation’s bank account had been robbed by people who continued to receive bonuses that exceeded – by a long shot – the average annual household income? Remember how the word ‘populist’ was used to dismiss and ridicule anyone and everyone who asked: Who stole the goddamn money? Oh well, said the television experts, that’s just populist rhetoric. For three decades prior to 1865 political speeches – which featured poetry readings, the warm-up bands of yesteryear, if you will – were well attended and debated and discussed at length. “The driving forces behind oratory in the antebellum years were populist politics …” [pg. 167]. And, this: “Voter turnout in the presidential election of 1840 was a remarkable 83.4 percent, and the elections from 1848 to 1872 averaged a very high 75.1 percent, in contrast to the 1932-92 period, when it averaged only 56.3 percent.” [pg 167] Is it any wonder that the banking people who own the television people will not tolerate anything ‘populist’? People might start voting, I suppose.

One of the crudest spectacles of our time, for me, is the practice of throwing litter onto stadium fields after or during a game. Well, “Whitman would long remember the primitive early theaters, with their dark entrances and the stark rows of plain wooden benches where the audience sat … Food was brought along and freely eaten during performances. Working-class viewers in the upper tier regularly tossed bones and other dinner remains onto those seated below.” [pg. 157] I don’t go to plays much, but I have to admit that that particular tradition sounds like fun.

Finally, the business about whether or not Walt Whitman was gay – and, if so, how so and how much and how often – is something I found tiresome. The discussion of it is endless, with one theory and school of thought after another trotted out and beaten practically to death. It is fruitless, in my opinion, to try to hang on the erect penis any sort of academic theory. So I’ll get straight to it: Walt Whitman’s sexuality, in his own words, reminded me of many of the ads I see on the men-seeking-men section of craigslist. Here’s one, from a letter to a farmhand – he liked them a little rough around the edges – called Edward Catell, with whom he’d had a “brief but intense” relationship of some sort. He wrote: “There is nothing in it that I think I do wrong, or am ashamed of, but I wish it kept entirely between you & me - & - I shall feel very much hurt & displeased if you don’t keep the whole thing & the present letter entirely to yourself.” [pg. 526] Like many more recent homos I know – including myself – Edward Catell didn’t take kindly to the as-you-go rules of secrecy, so in spite of Walt Whitman’s directive, he didn’t keep the letter or its implications to himself, entirely or otherwise.

Adding a stitch

2011-07-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

Fall is in the air here in Oregon, as it has been since April. In just a few weeks we’ll find ourselves in September, which is, with one glaring exception, one of my favorite months. This September, I fear, will be considerably worse than the nine that came previously. I am preparing myself for spectacles that truly redefine tasteless. So, without further ado, let’s get it started.

First, a very good friend of mine had an experience at an airport recently that I think warrants some consideration. She was waiting to board a flight when the invitation was issued via the P.A. system that various groups were welcome to get on the plane, including “active military.” I had no idea that such a practice was in effect. Since leaving the ever-toiling, put-upon private sector, I’ve only flown on Southwest. It’s odd, though, that if this particular manifestation of our country’s vulnerability to uniforms is now standard operating procedure that Southwest – a Texas company, after all – would not partake.

Anyhow, my friend told me that when the “active duty” call was made, a uniformed government employee went to board the plane and a woman shouted out “Thank you for serving!” The response of the other passengers, my friend said, was tentative at best, as if most people weren’t really sure if automatically applauding the nation’s killing agenda was still part of the script or not.

That’s a great sign, I think.

But the following morning – a Sunday – I was brought back to the reality. I got on a bus to go do some grocery shopping on the other side of the river. Scattered about on the floor toward the rear of the bus were several sections of The Oregonian. I picked up the “Community News” section. As an aside, I assume that it was the Sunday paper, but I cannot say for sure, because evidently the dates are no longer printed on each page. Instead, at the top of each page appeared the following (and to me meaningless) words: “Volume 711, Issue 4 E.” A lame attempt at timelessness, perhaps? I have no idea, but I do think it’s strange, not to mention sloppy and irritating.

Anyhow, one below-the-fold headline caught my eye: National 9/11 Flag stops in Portland, by Anne Saker The Oregonian. Here’s the first paragraph:

On its way back to New York City for the coming 10th commemoration of one terrible September day, a large American flag lay in the lobby of the U.S. Bancorp building so that Portlanders could add a stitch to help bind up the wounds.

That’s where I stopped because I’d read all I needed – or wanted – to know. We were wounded one terrible day in September, I learned, just in case I’d forgotten, and now we’re stitching shit up to “bind” those wounds … at a bank. Man, that may be the most honest paragraph I’ve read about that terrible day since it happened.

The white lighter

2011-07-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

Although it would not even register on the scales used to define and measure dicey in places like New Orleans, Memphis or Saint Louis, my neighborhood is sketchy. The prostitutes who peddle their wares out on 82nd Avenue use this area as a staging ground. I wouldn’t object to that so much if they’d stop flinging used condoms into the street. The drug business, which was dormant for many years, is making a comeback. The deals go like this: Two cars arrive from different directions within seconds of each other, goods and money are hastily exchanged and then both cars depart abruptly, in different directions.

The apartment building across the street is a big problem. One of the residents – a woman who shot her boyfriend two days before Thanksgiving, which prompted at least 15 Portland police cars to arrive, along with the local Fox affiliate – runs a mini-mart of sorts. I don’t spend a lot of time peaking out the window to keep tabs, but when the traffic reaches a certain volume it’s hard to not notice. People come and go constantly, walking timidly down the sidewalk, looking back over their shoulders and then bolting for her door, from which they emerge a minute and a half later. She and various other drivers squeal in and out on a very regular basis as well, on errands that are either completed or aborted within four or five minutes at most, at which point the car returns. It is entirely possible that she is feeding the destitute or handing out and delivering batteries for cell phones out of the goodness of her heart. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, harbored no such doubts when, as he lay in the courtyard bleeding beneath a limestone-colored November skyscape, announced to the law enforcement brigade and the entire neighborhood “Every mother fucker she sell to is on that mother fucking computer!” All that, and so much more, without a microphone.

In addition to the entrepreneurial, pistol-toting grandmother – she is a grandmother, this much I know – there is another problem over there. Two or three young men moved into the apartment at the end of the building most directly across the street from my living room. They’re loud. Their friends are loud. They keep odd hours and they drink. And one of them – the black one, unfortunately – is dealing. Every morning at a few minutes after 8, he charges out of there and walks quickly past my house on his way to the market down on Glisan Street, the one that’s owned by the Lebanese family and that has a payphone in front. My neighbor walks with his head down, texting the entire way.

There is something abrupt and unfriendly about him. He shuffles along, head down, scowling. On cold mornings he wore a navy blue wool pea coat and a wool cap pulled down almost to his eyebrows. He’s scowly. As it got warmer, though, he started wandering around in tank tops and shorts that flowed in such a way that they could have easily been mistaken for skirts. (Basketball shorts, I believe.) And instead of hustling down to the corner to do his business, he’d chuck his skateboard out the front door and then – in what must require multiple motions but appears to be just one – jump onto the damn thing while closing the door behind him. It made me think, that’s the same dexterity you’d need to jump off a bridge and land on a moving train without killing yourself.

One morning I was sitting on my front porch having my coffee and smoking a cigarette when he skated past. Seconds later I heard the sound of a lighter that’s either dead or close to it. It sounds like a little corner of sandpaper rapidly rubbing a small block of wood. I have a big outburst of ornamental grass beside my front stairs so that I can sit there without being completely on display, but the grass is not soundproof: I heard the wheels on asphalt, coming my way. Great, I thought. He appeared in front of the gate, facing me.

Mercy.

“Can I get a light from you?” he asked. I’d describe his voice if it weren’t for the fact that all of my attention was focused on his face. I said sure and got up and went to the kitchen to get my lighter. And when I came out with it he looked at me with an expression of dread. “I … I cannot use that lighter,” he said. I must have looked puzzled, because then he said, “White lighters are bad luck. They’re cursed. Every time I use a white lighter it’s just before something bad happens.” I held my cigarette out and he leaned forward and inhaled my fire to create his own. I said, somewhat clumsily I think, that I guessed I could have just offered him my ciggie in the first place rather than going after the lighter. He asked me if I had anything I thought brought bad luck. Other than charming and sexy young men, I wanted to say, no, nothing much. Instead I told him, while silently hoping I was not jinxing myself, that since I was born on the 13th, I have always felt immune to superstitions for the most part.

There are two things about his face that are compelling. The first is that he is clearly not black. This may be a minor point but calling this guy black is like referring to the family two doors down as Chinese. They aren’t Chinese at all: they’re Korean. My superstitious neighbor obviously has some black blood in him, but there is something else – from what country or continent I do not know – but it’s clear when you look at him directly. The races mix and match around here in a way that reminds me of riding the subway in London or going to the farmers market in Los Angeles. With the exception of me and very few others, the racial demographics are unclear. Perhaps I am overemphasizing this point, but my patience for sloppily shouted matters of fact without a single thought (apparently) is all but gone.

And then there’s the duality issue. Looking directly at him, for me, is like looking not only at a composite of the races but a quiet collision, if you will, of the genders. It’s as if two negatives were used to generate one print. His face is a map of stern and sharp and unforgiving angles one second, and the next an almost musical grace that is utterly, unapologetically and magnificently female. When his face switches from one gender to the other it takes a little bit of what it left behind with it, so sometimes he looks mostly male with a remnant of female and at other times he’s almost all woman with just a trace, a hint, of scattered maleness. It is mesmerizing to watch, the back and forth of it.

It wasn’t until a number of weeks after he asked me for a light that it occurred to me that perhaps he was hoping I’d just walk to the gate and, with my cigarette in my mouth, lean into his face and connect mine with his. Then we could stare into one another’s eyes and agonize for moments that would be recalled and recounted, over the years to follow, as entire hours before we each …

He is polite but not in a way that is gushy or particularly encouraging. One of the things I’ve noticed about him is his size. There is something grand about his face and his voice but when I look at him from a bit of a distance it’s shocking to me how compact he is. He isn’t more than five feet and eight or nine inches and, although the pounds are distributed and arranged in a way that seems damn-near perfect to me, he is slight. And his walk is ungracious, almost clumsy – as if the ground beneath him is not quite reliable.

There’s another thing I noticed about him recently. One morning a few weeks ago I was getting ready to go downtown to meet a friend of mine who I had not seen in a while. As long as I was downtown, I decided to take care of a bit of banking, pick up a few birthday cards and run some other errands. As I was washing the coffee grinds down the drain my neighbor hustled by, head down, scowling, as usual.

A couple of hours later I saw him again, not in our neighborhood, but downtown, where he – as usual – had his head down and was wearing a frown on his beautiful, beautiful face as he squinted down at a page of a book, standing beside the shelf where they display the new arrivals at the Multnomah County Library. I looked at him, then looked again – I had to remind myself that even though we were downtown, it was still him, and it was still me – and then looked quickly away, and as I was doing that I think he may have looked up, or started to, but my mind was too busy processing, in a few short seconds, where I know him from, where he was, why he was there, why it was strange that he was there, why it was strange that it was strange that he was there. The simple explanation for the strangeness is that, according to the very loud and utterly certain narration in this neighborhood, my neighbor should not even know where the library is. Me thinking his presence there was strange was jarring: I pride myself on rejecting – with great fanfare sometimes – every single utterance of neighbors whose areas of knowledgeable authority are without borders or boundaries. I reject it, and yet the confusion knocks at the door of my awareness, softly at first, then not. At any rate, I am unable to speak when the logical sequencing part of my brain is at work, so rather than stop and smile and say hello, I kept walking.

Quitting while you're ahead

2011-07-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

“You should just quit while you’re ahead,” my mother used to say. I’m sure she said it to me a time or two but I do not recall the circumstances because it was not sufficiently traumatic. Recently, though, I quit a couple of things and it is the most perplexing thing to me. I quit watching a movie before it was over and I quit reading a book a little beyond the halfway point. I felt defeated, and guilty and more than a bit sloppy.

The Grapes of Wrath is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It was my pick for the book group I do with my sisters. While one of them said she would have preferred a more conclusive ending, I thought the ending, though horrifying in so many ways, was perfect. Right after we finished it I put it on my Netflix queue and when the movie arrived I sat through about an hour or so and then turned it off, thinking I would finish it in the morning. Only when morning came I wasn’t really interested so I tucked the disc into the envelope, sealed it and sent it on its way. I felt like I was cheating. I read the book, I know the ending, and yet. It wasn’t a bad movie, by the way.

Steinbeck’s masterpiece is perched at one end of my spectrum, and unfortunately, at the other, is a novel called Until I Find You, by John Irving. I made it to page 480 – which is just barely past the halfway point – before I pulled my bookmark out and put the book back on the shelf, where it will sit until it’s thrust back into circulation via a donation.

It is horrid.

I really like John Irving. I thought Cider House Rules and Hotel New Hampshire were outstanding (although I was much younger when I read them). This book, on the other hand. It’s the story of Jack Burns, who grows up to be an actor, and his friend Emma, who grows up to be a novelist. Really, though, from the very beginning (when Jack is four years old) the book is a story about his penis. Although I read little more than half of it, I believe the narrative – if it can be called that – is structured around Jack’s relationship with his mother, Alice, a tattoo artist, and their search, together at times, for his father, who abandoned Alice before Jack was born. Emma and Jack meet in grade school in Toronto, where she becomes the master, if you will, of his penis, which is referred to over and over and over again as “the little guy.” Every time Emma says something to Jack her quote ends with “honey pie.” Hundreds and hundreds of times, Emma calls Jack “honey pie.” And many, many sentences in this novel end with an exclamation mark, which drives me nuts.

I didn’t quit reading the book for those three reasons alone (although they helped). I quit reading because it struck me as a stupid story populated by really, really unimaginatively created characters engaged in one cliché-laden situation after another. To me, it was a amateur comic book without any illustration. Jack’s mother Alice, for example, pairs up with Emma’s mother, whose name I cannot even recall, and they become lovers. Lesbians! Where that one fell down is that for me it didn’t seem to have much of an impact on any of the situations or characters. That, I fear, is because “the little guy” kept getting in the way.

The last I read, Emma died as a result of her vagina being too small to accommodate someone she’d brought home from a bar (I am not kidding) and it is revealed that Jack’s mother had breast cancer many years while he was away at boarding school (he’d wondered why his mother hadn’t come to visit but again, the little guy … ). The last scene I read there was an envelope on the kitchen table that Emma’s mother was suggesting Jack open.

What really prompted me to abandon the book, though, was this: Until I Find You is, according to one reviewer, “a mass of lazy, unrefined writing.” I normally avoid reviews until I’ve experienced whatever it is that’s being reviewed, but I made an exception in this case because I needed, desperately, to confirm one of two things: Either it really is a bad book, or I was missing something, really missing something.

It’s the former that I found. I didn’t read a single review that really praised Until I Find You. The review that most aligned with my impressions appeared in the Washington Post and was written by Marianne Wiggins. The paper ultimately apologized for the review – which was scathing – an event that was explained in a competing newspaper like this: “Wiggins wasn’t the only reviewer to dislike Irving’s book, but she was likely the only one once married to author Salman Rushdie, a longtime friend of Irving’s.”

While I detest the critics club – their fascination with one another negates their reviews as far as I’m concerned – regardless of her marital history, I did not quit reading Marianne Wiggin’s review until I reached the end. Here are a couple of the better lines: “The story reads as if Irving woke from a recurring nightmare and started dictating compulsively.” And, even better, “I hope I’m wrong to read this as a cry for help that it appears to be. It does go on and on, and someone, somewhere in the production line at Garp Entertprises, Ltd., should have advised John Irving not to rush to print until he’d crafted pain into art, as he’s done so masterfully before.” On my list of things I think the Washington Post should apologize for, those lines are pretty close to the bottom of my list.

Fostering global monetary cooperation

2011-07-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

It’s always interesting to me, and a bit disconcerting, when there’s a big, big story all over the news and then, as if by magic, nothing. Not long ago, a man from France was detained in New York because he’d been accused of sexually assaulting a maid at the hotel where he’d stayed. This man was the director, or leader, or president of an organization called the International Monetary Fund, referred to by the television people simply as “the IMF.” As if, I thought when I first heard the story, the term “the IMF” is as common to all of us, as automatically recognizable as, say, the FBI or the CIA or the DEA.

Even though I try to keep a close eye on the money people, I’d never heard of the IMF. And I’d certainly never heard of its leader, who was spoken of by the reporters as if he were an icon. It was said repeatedly that he was widely considered to be a strong contender to be the next president of France. I had no idea.

Anyhow, I looked up the IMF, and here, according to the Web site, is how the organization describes itself:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.

In those 36 words there is more wiggle room than you will find in the U.S. Constitution. Let’s start with the number. Though estimates vary, the number of countries in the world at the moment appears to be somewhere between 190 and 195. So what countries are not part of the organization?

Then we’re off to three fantastically flexible words: foster, monetary and cooperation. The IMF is working to foster monetary cooperation. What in the hell is that? When I pay my taxes is that a form of monetary cooperation? And by paying am I thereby fostering or is someone fostering on my behalf? I recently transferred some funds from a dormant retirement account in what’s known as an “IRA Rollover Account,” which is not only linguistically amusing but which also pays dividends quarterly based on a “Moderate/Aggressive” investment strategy. When my account is credited with those dividends, has monetary cooperation been fostered? If so – or if not – who makes the call? Who knows?

Financial stability. There’s a good one. Financial stability for whom? When thousands are laid off and then, six months later, what’s left of the news industry reports that the company’s CEO earned 22 percent more this year than he did last year, is that financial stability? I have a savings account – on paper anyhow. Is that financial stability? What if I withdraw all of it and move it to another bank? What if someone – singular or otherwise – decides to stop purchasing things that are, for the time being, unnecessary? Is that person or group a threat to financial stability? And if so, what’s to be done about it? What’s to be done, in other words, to “secure” financial stability? After all, that’s part of the IMF’s mission, according to its Web site. Secure is a very, very interesting word, I think.

I could go on like this for hours.

But back to the guy who was accused of raping the maid in the hotel. He was sent off to a pretty rough jail, which horrified many people. The maids came out in full force to demonstrate their disgust, which gave me hope, briefly: Minority women, some of them perhaps unsanctioned immigrants, on the television sets with banners and voices and fists in the air. The main question during that particular news flurry seemed to go along these lines: Do you think the French guy’s wife knew that he was screwing around in hotel rooms halfway around the world? Well, that’s a touchy subject. It’s understood, according to many of those quoted, that politicians in certain European countries are more likely than not to have something going on in addition to their marriage. This is offensive to many of us in the U.S., so I heard, but in places like France and Italy it’s not really a deal breaker.

Some deal, though, was broken because two really strange things happened next. The first is that the guy from France was excused from the court room because it was revealed that the accuser had some serious character issues. (This story is full of loaded phraseology, and there’s another one: character issues. What that’s supposed to mean I cannot begin to say because my energy for digging around for what should be on every headline page across the land appears to be waning.)

A couple weeks after the alleged incident in the hotel room, the treasury secretary (of the U.S.) was on the radio throwing his – and the country’s – support behind a woman, who is also from France, to become the new head honcho at the IMF. This move, according to radio, in effect blocked someone from a Latin American country from taking over the organization. I’m not sure why that’s important, but something clicked in my mind when I heard this particular detail, and I did a very tiny bit of digging around on the internets and discovered that where I had heard this woman’s name before was on the goddamn Charlie Rose show, where he had salivated over her “for the hour.”

I still don’t know who these characters are, or where they get their power, or what their power is. I’ve spent less than a minute on the IMF site because there is only so much PR writing I can read (or write) on any given day before my eyes and my soul start to ache. As is almost always the case when the money people put their plans into action, I think two things. First, I think it’s strange that there aren’t more headlines about it. And second, I think it would make an interesting novel.

I’m comfortable leaving my questions right there, but I am starting to wonder about all this rehearsed foolishness about the debt ceiling, and the deficit, and the country’s soon-to-tank credit rating, and the people at Moody’s (whoever they are) and Ben Bernanke, who is so spazzed out he can barely focus on his audience during hearings. There was a report on The PBS Newshour last week on the theatrics concerning the debt ceiling, not the IMF (not explicitly anyhow). Among other things: Wall Street is alarmed, as is China.

Well, in that case, I thought, it can’t be all bad.

And then, fairly quietly and over the weekend, Barack Obama threw Elizabeth Warren right over the cliff. The dutiful journalists reported that the Harvard law professor who thinks the fine print at the bottom of credit card statements ought to be checked against the rules and regulations, is simply too controversial to survive a confirmation process. Then, since their paychecks are signed by the people who think forcing the money people to obey the law is a bit extreme, they dutifully reported that the man who will be put forward to lead the consumer-focused agency that Elizabeth Warren has been constructing for at least two years now isn’t really such a letdown for progressives because he is one of her protégés. And – get a load of this – he sometimes takes his shoes off at work and walks around his office in his socks. While all these tidbits come to us courtesy of the people who have the password to the checking accounts, I have no idea if they’re connected. Still, I feel better already. I mean, socks at work.

Pardon the oversimplification, but when news is reported questionably, if it’s reported at all, there is no protective barrier solid enough to prevent certain questions from having a seat right beside me on the couch as I watch the news. And since hospitality is in my blood, I refuse to kick them out.

Safeway

2011-07-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

Although I know better, I feel another wave of community-ism coming on.

Like all the waves I’ve been hit by before, this one started with a slow, quiet brew and was then amplified by a single incident. The incident came in the form of a Facebook posting. A woman who I am friends with on Facebook posted yet another of her loud and boisterous status updates. An article from a business newspaper in Portland reported that Wal Mart is seriously considering making a more aggressive move into the local grocery biz. The article listed a number of locations the company is considering. So the Facebook friend posted the article along with her comment: “I hope they’re considering 82nd and Burnside!” The way I know this woman is that she’s a member of the neighborhood association board, and she apparently thinks Wal Mart would be a mark of progress.

The Safeway located at 82nd and Burnside is a relic. Since I began shopping there in 2002, the order of the aisles have been switched so that the light bulbs and index cards are now on the south side of the frozen food aisle – which has remained in exactly the same spot, an anchor – and the canned beans and hot sauce, which used to be on the south side, can now be found on the north. Other than that, I don’t think anything’s changed in almost nine years, including the hands-free clock above one of the doorways. In fact, if the structure itself has ever undergone a significant renovation, it’s well hidden, and that’s what I like most about the store. It has a 1950s vibe about it. In fact, when viewed from 82nd Avenue, the arching roofline reminds me of the main terminal at the Saint Louis airport.

Another relic-y aspect of the Safeway is the people who work there. Many of them live in the neighborhood. They may not be the edgiest people in town (and for that many of us are grateful), but there’s something nice – for some reason – about seeing the people who ring up my groceries walk by my house on their way to and from work. As if they know me, they say hello. It’s the strangest thing. Like the building itself, it reminds me of the 1950s (even though I didn’t experience it personally). And if we’re going to draw conclusion based on skin color – and that’s exactly what we’re going to do, so I’ll go ahead and get it out of the way – the workforce at the Safeway at 82nd and Burnside either meets or exceeds any EEO “metrics” imaginable. We love diversity in Portland, we cannot stop talking and dialouging about how turned on and titillated we are by diversity here in Portland, and it is there, ladies and gentlemen, at the intersection of 82nd and Burnside.

And that’s all without even taking into consideration the people who shop there, and I have come to believe that that’s where it all breaks down. The store is full of people who are on food stamps and people who are on drugs. There are black people there, and Asians and Latinos. There are lots of people who go there to turn in their cans and bottles and then take their receipt to a register, where they’re handed their cash. There are old ladies there who walk slowly and wear coats and jackets in the middle of the summer. There are people there with many small children who do not always respond to their caretaker’s commands. I’ve seen people there who are clearly drunk or high on one thing or another. I’ve gone there quite lit myself, actually.

Because the people there are not, generally speaking, reflective of Portland’s preferred image of itself, and because the store suffers an inordinate amount of theft, the Safeway in my neighborhood is not like the Safeway stores in many other neighborhoods. I want to preface my complaints about the produce at the store by acknowledging that it feels almost criminal to be complaining about it. If I lived in Bagdad or in any major city in Africa or in Haiti, looking at the stacks of vegetables at my Safeway would be a hallucination in the direction of a much more fortunate way of life.

That said, comparing what’s available at the Safeway at Burnside and 82nd with the stock at the Safeway in the Pearl District or the store close to the art museum makes one thing clear: Whomever does the distribution gathers what’s left after the stores in better neighborhoods have been supplied and sends it our way. It makes sense from a business perspective – sending your best quality to the place where it’s most likely to be stolen would be foolish – and that leads to my next question. Why, I wonder, are the prices for a pound of tomatoes the same at my Safeway as they are at stores in other neighborhoods that are clearly higher on the quality list? The city of Portland does a fantastic job at ignoring this neighborhood – if I hear one more bureaucrat absolve himself of any responsibility for 82nd Avenue by repeating that it’s “technically speaking” a state highway I may start screaming. So as the city pours funding into its favorite neighborhoods, Safeway follows suit by selling higher quality in those same neighborhoods but at the same price it charges for the rejects. So those of us who live here not only pay the same city taxes for fewer amenities since development projects don’t tend to come this way (nor do the abatements that go along with them), we also pay the same price for our food. Is this an example of what’s called a public-private partnership? Is it a form of class warfare? I don’t know.

The day after a member of the neighborhood association blew her horn for Wal Mart on Facebook, I was on Hawthorne in Southeast Portland, a trendy little stretch of well-funded sanctimony where everything is as green and alternative and locally sourced and sustainable as can be, and I noticed that within 10 blocks – and the blocks are short here in Portland – there are three – three – pretty showy grocery stores. There’s a brand new New Seasons. Then there’s the recently renovated – with green building methods! – Fred Meyer. And at 30th and Hawthorne, where the Safeway store I used to shop at stood not long ago, there are bulldozers and mounds of dirt and no more trees out by the curb. That’s because Safeway decided that the existing store was no longer sufficient for that neighborhood (I have endless questions about that but I’ll spare you, as a way of thanking you if you’ve read this far) so it knocked the building down and is putting up a new one.

Recently a sign was taped onto one of the glass doors at my Safeway announcing that that particular entrance is no longer being used and, although we apologize for the inconvenience, please head over to the south entrance, which actually faces east. That just screams ghetto, in my opinion, but what’s worse is that our answer to the Safeway in this neighborhood is to go shop somewhere else. For all the passion about community and inclusiveness and all the rest I am really surprised that the best we seem able to do is form a committee of community-minded folks to open a food co-op, which would charge people an annual membership fee to buy more expensive groceries. That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? After nearly two years of meetings and ill-advised fundraising events, this is what the group has: less than $10,000. The neighborhood association seems more interested in yard signs and sign-in sheets and painful public reviews of the grammatical errors in the bylaws and how to best correct them. And Wal Mart.

Wait, wait: Is it possible that in spite of all our talking and twittering and Facebooking about how important community is to us, and what a critical role food plays in the community, and how inequitable it is, and how the “lack of diversity” is a crime, do you think that maybe we’re not really interested in rubbing elbows with people who do not look and smell and talk and earn like we do? That cannot be! Not here on the east side of Portland! No way!

I have a few ideas but I’m not sure what to do with them. First, the pressure needs to be organized in such a way that Safeway will do anything to avoid ever hearing from anyone in this neighborhood for as many years as possible. Forever, if possible. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the employees at the store would gladly sign on to this effort because my guess – again, a guess – is that they don’t like working in the reject bin any more than I like shopping there. Then there’s the parking lot. It’s huge, and from what I hear the store owns it outright. I think there should be a weekday farmers market there, and, since 82nd is technically under state jurisdiction, let’s forget about the chefs and wine experts and cookbook connoisseurs and “the foodies” and get a nutritionist with the state health department out there to do some demos about the amazing things you can do with shit that comes straight out of the ground.

Here’s my final idea (I promise). If shoplifting is a big problem at Safeway, rather than going into lock-down mode, I think the neighborhood association should step in and help out. There’s some sort of program where people awkwardly walk through the neighborhood every now and again dressed in bright orange vests, as if on patrol. Until further notice, that effort would have a greater impact, I think, in the aisles of Safeway.

The most visible Republican feminist

2011-07-13T07:23:00.000-07:00

It was because of Betty Ford that I asked my mother the meaning of the word prosthesis. It’s a new body part, she told me. Why, I asked, did the president’s wife need a new body part? Because she had cancer. Where, I wondered, do you go to find a new body part? I pictured a store of some sort, but in my imagination the inventory at the store was mainly legs, standing on end, toes pointed toward the ceiling the way they were in the pantyhose displays at Famous Barr. There were lots of amputees roaming around my childhood for some reason, so once I learned the meaning of the word prosthesis, every time I saw a picture of the country’s first lady, I focused on her legs. You could barely tell that they were not the ones with which she’d been born. I was impressed.

Betty Ford died last Friday at the age of 93. I thought it was odd that I knew nothing of this until yesterday morning. I click on and off of MSN dozens of times a day on my way to and from the Internet, and I didn’t see a single banner headline. Nor did I notice anything on the section where the other, less urgent headlines linger. There wasn’t a word on Facebook. There’s probably a lot that could be read into the lack of instant fanfare over her departure – the most persistent of which in my mind is that she bled and blurred into and out of a few too many categories for the technicians who have taken over the newsroom to wrap their heads around.

But it strikes me, most persistently, as tasteful. The politicians are busy with their own summer stock theater production, and the celebrities are desperately looking for a new disaster with which to affiliate themselves – Haiti is getting to be old news, after all – and the rest of the country seems occupied with the Casey Anthony verdict. So the woman who apparently did a lot of the heavy lifting toward inserting the word “breast” into the everyday vernacular died out there in the California desert and was, for the most part, left alone. The ghouls, for once, were too busy with other things.

Of the very few remembrances of Betty Ford that I heard, there’s one comment that wrote itself in ink: Betty Ford was the most visible Republican feminist. And what, asked the reporter doing the interview, could today’s Republican women learn from the legacy of Betty Ford? Like a bottle rocket shot into a drizzly evening, the answer sort of collapsed on itself. Which is fine with me, really, because even though I don’t know any of these people personally, I have a hard time even imagining the likes of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann even … you know, there’s really no point in even finishing that sentence, so I won’t.

My favorite part of the Betty Ford legacy is her mission to help people dry out and sober up. It’s interesting to me that at some point the mere mention of her name – Betty Ford – came to mean that the battle against the pills and the drink and the smoke and the needle was on. Talk about effective brand strategy. What strikes me about it is that it must have been really, really scandalous back then for someone to publicly acknowledge a substance abuse problem. Today, based on what little I know about it, it seems to me that Betty Ford’s issue was the most normal thing imaginable, and for descandalizing that particular area of human frailty I thank her. My husband’s been running the country, she seemed to say, and now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to rehab. What sane person wouldn’t be?

New wheels

2011-07-11T08:19:00.000-07:00

Last week, on Friday afternoon, I received one of those invitations via e-mail (an “evite”) to an event I really want to attend. It’s my friend Amy’s annual barbecue, which is always a good time. I got up at about 4:30 on Saturday morning to use the bathroom and as I was drifting back to sleep I started running through the various ways to get to Amy’s barbecue and back. I could walk, of course. Or I could take the bus, but it would require at least two buses, one on a line that I believe has been severely cut back. Or I could take the light rail, stop at Trader Joe’s, and then either take a bus or walk up Sandy until I reach her neighborhood. Or I could invite someone to go with me for no other reason, really, than to hitch a ride. I went back to sleep but when I got out of bed a few minutes before eight, it was with a mission, and at a little past two o’clock in the afternoon, after “thinking about it” for more than two years, I got on my new bicycle and glided through downtown Portland on SW Salmon Street.

The first time I rode a bike through downtown Portland – or any other downtown for that matter – was in May of 1995. Though it quickly became a way of life, I never considered myself a bike activist or a competitive cyclist. I never bought any “gear.” Once, I did load my bike onto a rack and went off to some trail somewhere south of Portland with a group of people whose main priority seemed to be standing around sizing up one another as they noisily gulped water from logo-ridden water bottles, and it struck me as so out of synch – putting the bike on a car and then driving somewhere to ride it – that I never did it again.

I simply used my bicycle for what I believe it was intended: I rode it from where I was to where I wanted or needed to be. And along the way I found something that I believe was in the realm of religion. Riding across the river on the Hawthorne Bridge was, for me, a cathedral on wheels. There was a measure of mystery on that bridge, and in the river below, and in the mountains off to the east. I saw things on my rides, I felt things that were not accessible anywhere else, particularly behind the wheel of a car slogging down the interstate toward an office park on a dead-end street so scrubbed of what I consider life that, even though you are nowhere when you’re there, you could, at the same time, be anywhere.

Thus far, that move was the most damaging thing I’ve been through, which I believe puts me into the lucky category, because here I am, eight years beyond (or behind?) the days that I regularly rode the bike I bought in 1995, and I can still get on one, nervous at first about riding in such close proximity to traffic (as I was so many years ago) but quickly find myself woven into the sky and the traffic and sounds as I pedal my way toward the entrance to the Hawthorne Bridge. What a day I had.

It's a conversation

2011-07-07T07:17:00.000-07:00

In September of 2008, I did something that had ramifications then and has ramifications today. With one hand I poured several cans of beer down the drain, then rinsed the cans out and dumped them into the yellow “Portland Recycles!” bin, which I set out on the curb. And with the other hand, in what I consider part of the same gesture, I picked up the remote control for the television set.

For many years I had heard rumors. I did watch occasionally – I was aware of 9/11, for example, and I’d endured the election night coverage in 2000 and 2004 – but other than that I hadn’t watched anything regularly since 1992. I’d heard that things had gotten bad out there. Many people I knew and whose opinions I respected said that what used to be the news had deteriorated to the point where it was almost painful to watch. As I learned in the fall of 2008, that was no exaggeration.

Every morning on the Today show one of the top three stories concerned the disappearance of a little girl in Florida, an unfortunate member of the clan that appeared to be a serious contender for the title of the country’s First Family of Trash. The significance of the story baffled me. The trashy mother of the disappeared girl, aware that her daughter was missing, had apparently been out at the clubs and at parties and so on and so forth. Her trashy mother and her trashy father had lots to say about one thing and another. At one point, in fact, another child went missing in Florida – it does not seem to be uncommon there – and the trashy father managed to get on the television to talk about that situation as well. There was a boyfriend as I recall, or an ex-boyfriend, who would chime in periodically. There were lawyers and forensic experts and psychics and religious people and family therapists and as baffled as I was by the prominence of this story on the morning airwaves, I was blown away that it made the evening news, which was hosted (I will not use the term anchored) by Katie Couric.

When the body of the missing girl was found – her name was Kaylee, I believe – the networks interrupted their programming to make an announcement, and when the remains of the unfortunate child were put to rest, I recall hearing that a woman from Texas had driven to Florida to attend the funeral not just to leave some plastic shit sitting around but to “pay her respects” to the departed.

And I thought, man, this is not good.

For many years the most brazen PR whores I worked with added their voices to the chorus about the “death of print” by blaming it on the newspaper reporters. They don’t get it, they would sneer. It’s no longer about forcing the news onto people – it’s a conversation.

It sure is. It’s a conversation that we apparently cannot stop having (just writing this makes me guilty as charged, I’m afraid).

In the fall of 2008, among many other travesties that were taking place, billions of dollars were changing hands in ways that were poorly explained if explained at all, millions of jobs were evaporating and people were being thrown out of their homes. And this country, in its infinite illness, could not get enough of the Anthony family. As if on cue, as if following a script, the whole country seemed to participate in a group hug that extended from sea to shining sea. I watched with a sense of heartbroken horror, and wondered, is this what it is like to not drink a lot of beer?

This week, when the jury acquitted the semi-literate mother, MSNBC blared the non-news across the Internet with one of its red “BREAKING NEWS:” banners. Seconds – and I do mean seconds – later my Facebook page lit up like Christmas in July. People were shocked and horrified and offended and on and on. “When the justice system fails, karma will prevail,” wrote one tech PR know-it-all. “She’ll have her day in God’s court!” blathered another. I finally gave up writing responses with this: One of my adamant Christian Facebook friends wrote something vindictive about the jury, so I responded by writing that as of today, the television screen is not an extension of the court room, and for that I am thankful. Then someone else, Missy someone or another, or perhaps Mindy, wrote, below my comment: “You’re right Yvonne! She should have her tubes tied!!!”

And I thought: You shrill, officious, uninformed bitches should all have your tubes tied. But I didn’t write that, of course, because I’ve kind of given up on it.

The funny thing about it, to me, is that the only way these loud mouths could be so sure of their stance on the whole thing is if they had been there themselves – and by there I mean at the scene of the murder. But they weren’t, and that doesn’t seem to stop anyone, and I guess what that means is that we are all connected to stories that are not our own, that we all participate in lives that are not our own (because we are lonely? Desperate? Horny?) that we’re all part of the conversation launched by news outlets that are owned by pretty big, pretty powerful companies, and isn’t it interesting, really, how little we hear about what the CEO’s are taking home as thousands of people lose their jobs, and if the Anthony family foolishness is any indication, that’s a tactic that seems to work pretty well.

Reading through the underworld

2011-07-06T07:25:00.000-07:00

Don DeLillo is one of those novelists whose name and whose books I’ve been vaguely aware of for years, but with no idea why. I just finished reading Underworld, published in 1997, and my understanding of him and the significance of his work remains as vague as it was prior to reading page one.

I found the novel at one of the book sales I troll from time to time and put it on the bottom shelf with the rest of my collection of recent finds. When Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom was published late last summer, I could not help reading the reviews, which I usually avoid until after I’ve read a book. The reviews of Freedom, I believe, were the result of an orchestrated PR campaign. One – in the New York Times – declared Freedom “the novel of the century,” which is a strange comment given that the century was only 10 years old when the book was published. A gush like that, of course, must be followed with a bit of brutality, referred to by the PR team as “David vs. Goliath,” and it was. A review in The Atlantic criticized Freedom for its childish writing (I disagree) and the novel’s lack of movement, of progress, of development (I really disagree). These characters and the landscape they occupy, the reviewer of Freedom wrote, don’t evolve. It’s like they’re all living in a world created by Don DeLillo. Don DeLillo and his books, it seems, are prone to being included in sweeping statements about the state of literature, the state of the American novel, the state of what we think of ourselves and what we’ve become and so on and so forth. Though rarely explained, he is frequently mentioned.

Here are some things from Underworld. The Giants beat the Dodgers in 1951 and went to the World Series. A homerun was hit into the stands. Many lives were arranged, more or less, around the ball itself, searching for it, paying for it, snatching it, stealing it, worshipping it, tossing it, accidentally, sort of, into the trash. Getting rid of trash is an enormous challenge, so much so that you might call it a theme (I am not good at themes, themes are my weakness, so forgive me for not being more definitive). There is nuclear power, and Vietnam, and all those retired B52s parked out in the desert somewhere (California or Arizona). J. Edgar Hoover is involved in much of this, as are Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleeson. A boy sits on a roof in the Bronx and listens to the baseball games on KMOX, which is, oddly enough, “the voice of Saint Louis.” Another boy reacts in horror as his genius manifests itself in his ability to beat any and all, it seems, at chess. A grainy movie of the Kennedy assassination is shown. A nun becomes obsessed with a graffiti artist. A woman beads sweaters to earn extra money, although there’s much more to it than that. A man begins shooting people at close range on the highways of Texas and becomes a celebrity of sorts. The number 13 rises to the surface over and over again, as does the Lucky Strikes logo. A father disappears.

Underworld is 827 pages long, and on each and every one of those pages there was at least one sentence that was so captivating – to me, for various reasons – that I read it again. Here, just for fun, are a couple of my favorites:

“There’s always a clock somewhere that’s stopping,” Marvin said morosely. [page 306]

And: She is part of me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully. It is only a statement of the power of what comes after. [page 804]

The prologue of Underworld is 60 pages of the most engrossing writing I’ve read in a long while. It’s the baseball game, recalled and reenacted through the eyes and souls of several characters, the most intriguing of whom is a black boy named Cotter, who has skipped school and jumped the turnstile to get into the game. It is Cotter who actually gets the ball. Cotter has a breathtaking understanding of motion, of color and class, of the roles he plays and how to bend and meld them to his advantage. And after those first 60 magical pages, he is never heard from again.

As I was reading the last 20 pages of Underworld, I started wondering after the novel’s main point, and for me it came in the form of a question. Nick Shay, who is the closest thing to a main character, is an executive in the waste disposal industry. He does some terrible things, of course, including dirty dealings with an outfit in the then-collapsing Soviet Union. At the same time, his heart, for the most part, is in his marriage, in his relationship with his children and his grandchildren, in his life-long struggle with the disappearance of his father, who left him, his brother the chess player and their mother the beader, to fend for themselves. So here’s the question I was left with: Do his good traits soften the edges of his bad, or do his bad traits chip away at his more honorable characteristics?

It’s a worthwhile question, to be sure, but here’s the end of what I have to say about Underworld. Good writing is worth its weight in gold as far as I’m concerned, but if you’re going to invite people along for 827 pages, speaking only for myself, I need a bit of connection, some coherence, something, anything really, that sustains. Those elements, for me, never presented themselves.

Woven in Italy

2011-07-01T07:24:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, I have an opinion on fashion. While it might surprise anyone who knows me in person, I do have a bit of a system when it comes to clothing. My goal is for me – not what I wore – to be what’s recalled. I am not interested in updated, or current, or fashionable or – God forbid – trendy. I like solid colors that have some depth. Stripes are okay as long as they’re on the subtle side. Plaids and other busy patterns – particular geometrically inclined sweaters – are forbidden. I like simple forms and very little (if any) adornment. If I had to pick a single fabric it would be linen. I like the way it feels, and I like the way it looks. Because my association with it is primarily weddings and funerals, I refuse to iron shirts, which would seem to be incompatible with my fondness for linen. But linen, along with cotton, is meant to wrinkle. Wrinkled shirts, in my opinion, are not a sign of carelessness or sloppiness. What they’re a sign of is that you’re not wearing fake fibers.

My color wheel is a bit limited. I own a lot of black clothing. And I have a distinct weakness for blue, especially pale blue. So a couple of weekends ago, I did something I haven’t done in years: I bought a white shirt.

Once a year, the moneyed liberals in the Eastmoreland neighborhood of Portland – which is a comfortable stroll from Reed College – get together and have a yard sale. This is no ordinary yard sale: There are refreshments and toilet facilities and scheduled entertainment and walking maps and a Web site. For one weekend out of the year, it’s okay to wander aimlessly through the neighborhood, wonder at the beautiful yards and the enormous homes and paw through the shit that the rich folks no longer want.

I love the concept of yard sales. Based on what I’ve seen, there is really no reason to buy much of anything brand new. But this year I did show more restraint than usual. I bought one book – Angela’s Ashes – and three CDs. The CDs I found on a deep, sturdy table on sale for $3.00 each, which seemed high to me. So I asked the woman sitting in the rocking chair whose music collection she was selling and she told me that it was but a fraction of her father-in-law’s inventory. Her father-in-law, she went on, was a doctor, and he used to come home and listen to his jazz music to clear his mind of the operating room. That’s a bit of a cliché, I thought. A retired doctor’s beneficiary doesn’t need $3.00 per CD – I give myself permission to be unusually scornful at yard sales, especially those held in the driveways of the ostentatious – so I held up what I wanted – Carman McRae, Diane Reeves and Sarah Vaughn – and offered her $3.00 for all three. To which she said, “Deal.”

A few driveways later, like a flag of some sort, once the white shirt caught my eye it didn’t let go. It was all clean lines and quality seaming and well-pieced fabric, hanging there on an enormous wheeled, chrome-plated wrack. I ran my fingertips over it and turned it inside out. Banana Republic, according to the tag, 100 percent cotton, made, according to a tiny, oddly placed tag, in Hong Kong but, so says the third and very prominent tag, Woven in Italy. The problem with white shirts, in my experience, is that they never stay that way for long. In the past, if I’ve managed to avoid spilling or splashing to dribbling something onto the whiteness, over a very short period of time the edges of the collars and the cuffs begin to fade and smear. I don’t use bleach.

I held it up and examined it from various angles. I’d probably only wear this a few times, I thought. This is beautiful, I thought, but even though it only cost $1.00 – it was everything half off by the time I arrived at this particular sale – it goes against my general guideline of buying clothing only if I’ll get a long run out of it.

I’m not sure what word I’d use to describe how I felt when I put the shirt on after a bath and a shave. Noticeable, perhaps. Pristine, maybe, although that may be too strong of a word. It fell perfectly just beneath my hips. It was loose without being tent-ish. My complexion and my hair and eyes looked somehow more pronounced. If the shirt had ever been worn before, it didn’t reveal it. I wore it with a pair of pale tan pants and black shoes. I wore it downtown to a birthday gathering held 40 floors above the pavement. I wore it as I chugged down at least a gallon of ginger ale, as I ate wonderfully spiced and fried calamari, a sloppy cheeseburger and a desert that was more or less deep-fried doughnuts, coated with sugar and served up with a cup of melted hot fudge on the side. In a departure from what I usually experience when I wear a shirt for the first time, the white shirt was a shock at first, a source of self-consciousness. But after a bit of time passed – 20 minutes? An hour? – I forgot that I was wearing it and returned to my more familiar self. Forgot, that is, until I came home, took it off and hung it neatly on a hanger in the bathroom. Later, as I was brushing my teeth before bed, I took a closer look at the shirt and noticed that in spite of the colorful and greasy food I’d scarfed down while wearing it, it still does not bear a single stain.

Cats and husbands

2011-06-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

A couple of phrases have recently entered my ears, then my mind and then, finally, my memory. I pride myself on my listening skills, but still, most of what I hear on a daily basis evaporates. I am surrounded by blather, as most of us are. So when something sticks, I figure it must be good.

A few months ago I was at the tavern down the street having breakfast with a friend of mine. In this tavern, there are four booths that sit in a neat row between the bar and the area with the pool tables and video poker machines. My friend and I sat in one of the booths. It was barely 10 o’clock in the morning so it was fairly quiet. Fairly quiet, that is, until a couple seated themselves two booths away. Without seeing either one of them (my back was to them), I heard the woman say to the waitress, who she spoke to in an easy and familiar way:

He’s my husband now.

I love that line. It’s not going to change the course of history – or probably anyone’s life for that matter – but it is quite a statement not because of what it says but because of what it could say. Does the word “now” imply that the woman and the man have been a couple for a certain period of time and that they’re now married? That’s the most likely scenario, I suppose. Or is the “now” added on to the end of the sentence in the way that southern people sometimes say “Ya’ll come back now,” which does not, in spite of the sequencing, mean to return at the instant the command “come back” is uttered. Or should the emphasis be on the word “he”? As in, someone else was her husband previously but now he is her husband. Or, my favorite option, for some reason: He used to be someone else’s husband, but now … The woman’s voice didn’t emphasize one possibility over another, so I’ll do it for her: He’s my husband now.

The second phrase that keeps gallivanting through my mind involves animals. A woman I’m working with revealed one Friday afternoon that she had not yet sent the work we’ve been doing to those who need to review and approve it. “My bad,” she said, which I must admit is sort of gracious, all things considered. But here’s the problem: According to the almighty workback schedule, this sharing of documents should have happened two weeks prior to our Friday afternoon chit chat. So rather than saying what immediately came to mind (which was “Why in the hell did I bust my ass to get stuff to you according to schedule if you’re not going to do anything with it?”) I very nonchalantly asked what these reviewers and approvers had to say about the fact that here we are nearing the end of June (the end of FY10-11!!!!) and they’ve received nothing to review or approve. “Oh,” said the woman, “they’re as nervous as tom cats.”

Yes indeed, tom cats. This one resonated with me in a number of ways. The first is that two or three days prior to this conversation I was telling someone what it is like to work with this woman, and without thinking about it I described her voice as “slithery.” Which struck me, when I thought about it, as a term you’d use not to describe a voice but to describe a cat. So it was funny, and kind of uncomfortable, when she brought up the tom cats. For a split second I wondered if she’d been listening in on my griping. And that made me nervous, not as nervous as a tom cat, necessarily, but nervous all the same.

But then I wondered about the word nervous. Are the tom cats nervous because it’s getting to be the end of the fiscal year and they’ve got too much to do? Are the tom cats nervous because reviewing and approving marketing documents that no remotely sane individual is ever going to read is a weighty responsibility that most of us couldn’t begin to comprehend? Or are the tom cats nervous because they know – based on their own painful experiences – that anything coming across the wire from this woman is bound to be a complete disaster and require them to waste hours just trying to determine what in the hell it is that she is asking them to do? And just to take that a step or two further, by mentioning the tom cats and their nervousness, is this client of mine acknowledging her ineptness and, if that’s the case, is her acknowledgement intentional or was it just yet another example of her ad-hoc, slap-dash approach to everything? Or was she kind of pleased with herself, proud of the fact that the mere mention and/or sight of her name can make even those damn tom cats nervous? Because I am here to tell you, the sight of her name in my e-mail inbox is enough to inspire me to do anything, absolutely anything, to postpone opening the message, including wiping down the bottles of cleanser sitting on the top shelf of the kitchen closet.

It all fell apart, ultimately, as do most things with this woman. I started wondering about tom cats, and to me, they’re sort of sexy and tough and macho and smoky. And they’re nervous over some slide decks regurgitated by the marketing team? For me that’s where it fell apart to a point that’s beyond repair.

The blacks vs. the gays: Another round

2011-06-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

The whole spectacle of the black guy who is for some reason considered a comedian doing a routine in Nashville about how he’d react to the news that his son was gay sure is interesting. I love uncomfortable topics, not because I’m particularly bold or brave but because it is interesting to me, and entertaining, to watch and listen to people react. Just bringing up certain topics – Israel, for example – is like being handed free tickets to one of the greatest shows on earth. People react. They react so much they do not know where to begin reacting, or where to stop reacting. Sometimes, they react within themselves to such an extent that you can practically watch one corner of their brain arguing with another. I think of that as getting lost in the reaction.

Israel is one thing, but holy shit, bringing up the blacks and the gays, now we’re getting somewhere, or getting ready to go somewhere. Fastening our seatbelts, if you will, in preparation for the bumpy ride to Reactionville.

I do have a bias or two when it comes to this topic: I am just a little bit terrified of black people, particularly black males. Whether or not it’s justified or whether or not it makes me a bigot is debatable. What is not debatable to me is this: My grade school, junior high school and high school experience was defined by verbal and physical torture and abuse delivered via the mouths and fists of black students.

With the passing years, my perspective has shifted a bit. I grew up in what was and remains a plantation town. Most of Webster Groves, Missouri is white as can be, although, as the town demonstrates to this day, white comes in more than one shade: A road called Lockwood divides the Catholic part of town, known as Webster Park, from the Protestant enclave, which is called Sherwood Forest. It is indeed churchy, the entire town. Jutting across the northwest corner of the town is a road called Kirkham – which happens to have a railroad track running parallel to it – and beyond that street, shitty little houses on shitty little streets are crammed onto a gently sloping suburban povertyscape and it’s there, of course, that the black people live. If you look at the town on one of those satellite maps, it is not hard to interpret the discrepancies as the homes of the masters and the homes of the slaves. It’s pretty clear.

So it is not hard for me to empathize with a black child in the first grade, say, who finds himself surrounded by white youngsters from quietly wealthy families and there, tucked in among them, is the swishy little sissy with curly blonde hair who, when the class is asked to name the woman who sewed the first U.S. flag, raises his hand quick as lightening and shouts, “Diana Ross!” What a prize I must have been.

I get the inherent inequity that was and is the foundation upon which my life has been built. At the same time, the instruments of my memory play a drastically different tune. My instinct when a black male is within my line of sight or hearing is self defense. On the one hand, I know that my experience does not define all black people, and on the other hand, I have not undergone a lobotomy yet, so the residuals are still there and probably always will be.

Which brings me, unfortunately, to Tracy Morgan. Number one, this guy is funny? Like many who are called entertainers, his primary talent seems to be to dumb things down, to hack every element of experience he can get his mouth around free of any and all nuance, and for that he earns millions of dollars. And we laugh.

Number two, beyond the unfortunate subject of the statement, does anyone honestly give a shit what he would say if his son came home and told him he was gay?

And number three, for me, is this: Why is this story a headline? We have another black male lashing out at the gay folk. Oh, wow. Like the never-ending onslaught of female celebrities going after each other, I’m a tad bit suspicious of the amount of coverage given to Tracy Morgan. My suspicion, though, is hardly clean cut. In fact, it’s kind of sloppy.

First, can we all agree to retire the word “homophobia”? Who’s afraid of gay people? Gay people are loathed and despised, of course, but feared? That’s a hefty dose of self-aggrandizement, I think. We are, after all, one of the very few groups whose basic liberties can be put on a ballot. I don’t think anyone is afraid of gay people. Some may be afraid of getting caught hating gay people, but that’s about as far as any fear factor goes. Tracy Morgan either loathes the fags, or he recognizes the degradation of fags as a great way to sell tickets, or both. But afraid?

My second strand of sloppy thinking is that the frequency with which these stories – the blacks vs. the gays – are propelled into the large type of headlines seems suspect to me. I cannot help but wonder about the general character of someone who believes that a member of one minority group attacking members of another minority group is so worthy of headlines. It’s in the same tactical neighborhood as tossing a couple of blood-crazed dogs into the pen and dividing the cash based on which one dies first. Personally, I’m so used to being one of the dogs that I cannot honestly say I’m even tired of it.

What I do not wonder about is the work ethic – the productivity, if you will – of the headline writers, because the headlines, the emblems of their handiwork, it seems to me, are endless. A retired black football player in New York made a statement against gay marriage. So did William Clinton. Black preachers routinely and automatically denounce the queers every time the opportunity presents itself. So do the Mormons. And the Catholics. And the Evangelical Baptists. A black woman led the Oregon charge against homo-on-homo marriage a few years ago, forgetting, apparently, that had she had her moment at the microphone 50 years earlier, she not only would not have been allowed to legally marry outside of her race but would not have had the right to own property in this state either. I happen to know a number of white folks who are on the verge of losing everything they ever believed or imagined they owned whose number one concern is the looming queer takeover. A person who is considered a comedian spews forth some violent talk about the fags. Well, in a commercial that aired not that many years ago, one white man threatened to kill another white man over some sort of sissy talk. I cannot recall the company, unfortunately, but the jist of it has stayed with me.

As do my recollections of the black youngsters I grew up with. Were they, and are they, more anti-gay than the white kids who grew up to be more churchy and conservative and hostile toward any ‘ism that does not mirror them than their parents ever dreamed of being? My answer is this. No, they were not. They were simply more vocal, and more prone to violent aggression, which, in a weird way, strikes me as a step in the right direction.

A great concern for punctuality

2011-06-23T07:24:00.000-07:00

Here’s a little something from the 43-page dress code for employees of UBS, a Swiss bank:

A man who wears a watch conveys reliability and a great concern for punctuality.

For my thirteenth birthday, my grandmother gave me a watch. It was a Timex. The face of it was tiny black and brown checks. The hands, the numerals, the framing and the tiny button used to wind it were silver. What was particularly cool about it was that there were two little displays on the right side of the face. One was for the day of the week, and the other was for the date of the month. In order to ensure that the date and the day aligned with the calendar, at the beginning of most months I had to go through an elaborate winding routine that involved tricking the date forward by going past the 12 hand but stopping before reaching the 2 hand. If this procedure was performed in the morning, as it usually was, it required winding around the face of the watch twice because the first go-round, as interpreted by the watch’s innards, was noon, not midnight. As I recall, the date changed at about 10 minutes before midnight, the day of the week at a little past 1:00 in the morning. It’s breathtaking, really, to ponder the hardships we endured in the 1970s and 1980s. That watch needed to be wound – in person, by the way, not remotely – each and every night. If it wasn’t wound it did not work.

That’s the only watch I’ve ever owned, and it’s the only one I intend to ever own. I love the concept of marking time but I do not like the feeling of buckling something onto my wrist, so the watch remains in a box tucked into a drawer as it has for more than two decades now. I like my watch because it was a gift from my grandmother. I also like it because it’s something of a relic. It requires a little bit of knowledge – rather than announcing in exact numbers that it’s 5:32, it requires that you understand, based on the fact that the short bar is halfway between the five and the six and the long bar is a couple of paces past the six (toward the seven, or, in another relic-y term, clockwise), that it is in fact 5:32. I wonder, as I write this, how many years will pass before the youngsters become so accustomed to the blue, green or red digital numbers, usually with a dot or absence of a dot to differentiate between a.m. and p.m. that they look up at traditional clocks – the round kind – in town squares across the land in utter confusion.

And I wonder how many years will pass before the wearing of a watch is no longer associated with punctuality. That’s because even though I haven’t worn a watch since the last century, I do indeed have a great concern for punctuality. Or maybe I should rephrase that: I have a great disdain for those with no concern for punctuality. I live in a world where time is everywhere. In the lower right corner of my computer screen there is a clock. There’s a clock on my new boom box. There’s a clock on the stove and another one, four feet away, on the coffee maker. There’s a clock on my bookshelf and one on top of my dresser and there is a vocal clock inside my telephone that tells me the day, date, hour and minute that someone has left a message. Even though I do not wear a watch and even though I do not own a cell phone, I am surrounded by time, immersed in its passing, and yet I have an uncanny knack for collecting people who are perpetually, habitually five, 10, 12 minutes late, as a matter of course, for anything and everything from conference calls to coffee dates, which I’m starting to think is perhaps my grandmother’s spirit chiding me for not wearing the only watch I’ve ever owned.

Heir pollution

2011-06-21T07:17:00.000-07:00

For more than 20 years, my mother’s father (my grandfather) and one of his brothers (who was, as chance would have it, my mother’s all-time favorite uncle) did not speak to one another in spite of the fact that there were only six blocks between their homes. As legend had it, the root of the problem was that my grandfather did not like his brother’s wife. Speaking off the script of legend, I happen to agree with my grandfather on that point. My mother did as well. While that particular brother of my grandfather’s was her favorite uncle, his wife was her least favorite aunt. My mother, who not only aspired to clarity but actually achieved it, always referenced her as her “aunt by marriage, not blood.”

As a child I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Family gatherings – the few of them we attended – were something like gymnastics tournaments, with entrances and exits – not to mention the routines themselves, especially the more advanced ones – orchestrated and choreographed with great care and finesse. There were different cars travelling on different streets at different times. Certain names could be mentioned at certain houses, but not at others. But as an adult, I’ve denounced my take on the situation almost completely: I not only understand why siblings elect to not speak to one another, I appreciate it. At times I even celebrate it. For two years now I haven’t spoken to one of my brothers, nor do I intend to start any time soon, and for more years than that I’ve been seething over another of my brothers and speak with him so rarely that moving his name into the incommunicado column would be nothing more than a formality.

I have many reasons, most of which I’ve shared to anyone who will listen, so here, in an abbreviated form, is my case as I understand it. One of my brothers is the most pompous power tripper I’ve ever endured. The other is vindictive but in a way that I consider unforgivably sneaky, snide and underhanded. Conversations with either of them, as I recall, are never good. The most cogent memory I have of speaking with either one of them is hanging up the telephone or leaving the kitchen table and being struck by the overwhelming sensation that I’ve just been insulted or attacked – or both – but in a way that’s almost impossible to pinpoint exactly, which, of course, only leads to more pondering along the lines of: Did he really just say that? Could that possibly have been a reference to …? And so on and so forth.

Many years ago I had a boyfriend. I don’t recall a lot about the relationship itself, but there are some things I have learned since its demise. The first is that desperation drives me to do truly crazy shit, like moving in with someone … along with his roommates. The second is that there is no lonelier place on earth that I’m aware of than sitting across the table from someone you’re in a relationship with and realizing that there is absolutely nothing to say. And the third thing is that forgiveness is a truly amazing entity.

As was painfully clear from the instant we met, my boyfriend and I were together because each of us, at that specific time, needed someone right here, right now. Two decades beyond that head-on collision, I have no problem making a couple of acknowledgements that not so many years ago I would have found so embarrassing that I probably would have fled the country just to avoid them. The first is that my boyfriend never loved me at all. The second, which I think is worse, is that I never really liked him. We lived by a silent, invisible code of conduct that I am convinced was fully accessible to us both: When the need that bonded us expired, when it contracted or expanded beyond repair, when someone else more capable of fulfilling that need appeared, one of us would be replaced and the other would be on the line for the worst job of them all: rewriting history without getting busted for doing so. I felt victimized, of course, because I’d been so quickly and thoroughly replaced. For quite a while I dreamed and schemed and fantasized about my boyfriend’s demise, pondered how I would celebrate it. If there is any human disorder I’m more prone to than lust it is revenge, and I was all over it.

Then one night I saw him at a bar in Seattle. As he walked toward me I thought, oh look, there’s David. He caught my eye and within a split second turned around and left. But in less than the same split second that drove him from the building, I realized that some sort of short circuiting had taken place inside of me, because I bore him no ill will. He was there, I was getting ready to say hello and then he was gone. There was no thrill, there was no agony. I thought about it, then I forgot about it, then I thought about it some more, and one day a few years ago I was talking with a friend of mine and it occurred to me that what had transpired is this: The opportunity to fuck with this guy’s head a bit, maybe make fun of his weight a little, or mention that I’d heard he was still having a horrible time staying in one job for more than a few months, or ask if he’d gotten around to telling his parents he was gay … none of that even seemed like fun anymore. It was a disappointment, actually. In fact, I found myself sincerely hoping that he’d found a way to live that didn’t involve heavy doses of self-torture because I had come to believe that that had been a big, big problem.

Is that forgiveness? I have no idea, and I don’t really care, but I can tell you what it is not. It is not exhausting. Plotting revenge is exhausting. I have been hard at work on it for a few years now – BB guns and kneecaps out in the back yard is my preferred scenario at the moment – and I need to figure out a way to have the same experience with my brothers that I had with my ex-boyfriend, because they are starting to make me really, really tired.

The MEMO line

2011-06-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

For many years I have been willfully ignoring the health insurance issue. It’s too murky and it’s too nasty. I have a bare bones policy that I pay for every month. It’s a policy that I’m quite sure would barely scratch the surface were I to require any sort of critical care. Like billions of other people, there are few better ways to motivate me to hand over the cash than to scare me. I have this notion that having health insurance is a good thing, and so, in spite of almost every single health insurance story I have ever heard, I experience a few moments of complete incongruence each month. As I write out a check to Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon, I pray that when my departure time arrives it is expedited by something along the lines of a triple-trailer truck moving toward me at at least 50 miles per hour, or a very large appliance – a refrigerator, perhaps, or an air conditioner – falling out of a window many stories up as I just happen to be walking beneath it on an otherwise uneventful morning.

The strange thing is that my health insurance premium goes up at least once a year. The rate increase is foreshadowed by the arrival of several pages of sheer bullshit in the mail. What motivates me to read the text is as corrupt as the industry itself: I feel guilty for my participation in PR and marketing tactics designed – or ‘executed’ – to sell technology. I feel guilty, that is, until I read what the wordsmiths over at Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon are willing to commit to paper. They are all about serving me, I am told. They are all about my health, my well-being, my comfort and joy. I don’t have the courage to figure it out precisely, but as long as I’ve had my policy each and every rate increase has been by at least 20 percent. I’m not a math expert, but my assumption is that if we continue along at the rate that’s apparently standard operating procedure, my monthly payment to my health insurance “provider” will, in three years, achieve a 100 percent increase over what it was two years ago. In other words, it will have doubled.

I haven’t written any letters about it, or gone to any demonstrations, or even written about it on this blog. That’s because I’m resigned to it, and that resignation is due to a couple of facts I discovered recently, facts that are not at all hidden but right out there in public for us all to see and enjoy.

The first is that Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon is – are you ready for this? – in words copied and pasted directly from its Web site, “ … a nonprofit health care company.” Does that mean that the company doesn’t pay taxes? Does that mean that my monthly health insurance premiums can be written off as charitable contributions? I have no idea.

The second fact of the matter is that even though the health insurance company I deal with is a nonprofit, and even though the health insurance business in general – as we’ve all heard – is suffering terribly due to the rising costs of modern medicine, I heard not long ago that the CEO of Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon earns more than …

It’s really tricky to make a clear statement about that. I could have sworn I heard something about “a million” but when I did some digging around to confirm or deny, I read a report from 2010 that said the CEO’s Oregon salary was cut by 40 percent. Even by that margin, though, he earned $521,873. But that’s only the beginning. The key term here is “Oregon salary.” The CEO is also paid by the Regence Group health plans in three other states (Idaho, Utah and Washington). While the article I read said that the figures for the take-home pay from those three states wasn’t available when the article was published, it did point out that the previous year’s paycheck from Washington state alone was more than $900,000.

That is one hell of a nonprofit they’re running down there on the banks of the Willamette.

Anyhow, the company went before a commission in Oregon to petition for permission to increase premiums for holders of individual policies – that is me – by 22 percent starting in August. One of the most interesting things I read in the articles about the hearings was that the ‘membership’ for Regence in Oregon is at record lows. Without having any data to back myself up, I’d say that there’s a pretty good chance that the reason for declining ‘membership’ is that many people cannot afford to absorb double-digit increases for already inflated premiums each and every year. So to make up for it, they now want to raise the premiums more? That makes no sense whatsoever to me, but I do not, dear reader, have a marketing degree.

I may or may not shop around for some other insurance company. I’ll have to figure that out when the time comes. For now, I’m just having a little fun writing nasty notes on the MEMO line of the checks with which I pay my monthly premium. I have to start somewhere, and that beautifully blank line at the lower left corner of the check seems as good a place as any.

You're warmly invited to be excluded

2011-06-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

The latest collision in this household of mine involves the New York Times, the novelist Jane Austen and Mike Leigh, a British writer and filmmaker. I am reading, and truly enjoying, Pride and Prejudice. This is my first time with Jane Austen, and while I do not think she’s nearly as compelling as Charlotte Bronte or John Steinbeck, I am impressed not so much by her writing itself but by her ability to simultaneously thread into her needle many agendas and many schemes.

“Another Year,” the latest from Mike Leigh, was perhaps the most uncomfortable film I’ve ever watched. It is painful. Like Pride and Prejudice, the film’s story revolves around marriage. The central married couple, a therapist and a geological engineer, seems to have arrived at that magical plateau where they move through the seasons – a year’s worth, in fact – almost as one. The way they revolve around each other may not elicit bottle rockets but it does go beyond comfortable and arrives at the ultimate destination – comforting. They have careers, a home, a vegetable garden, a grown son, relations and friends.

And that’s the strangest part of the film: their friends, Mary in particular. Mary’s ineligibility for marriage seems to have been irrevocably confirmed and it becomes more so with each passing scene. The more stark her status as ineligible becomes, in fact, the more out of control her behavior, which reaches a crescendo of sorts when the married couple’s son decides to surprise her by introducing her to his new girlfriend. Mary does not react well – she feels thwarted by him, for starters – and for that her open invitation to the household is more or less revoked. As the wife explains to Mary eventually, “This is my family. You have to understand that.”

I understand that all too well, personally, but I couldn’t help but wonder, as I watched the horror unfold on my television screen, why married couples pal around with their hopelessly single friends and then banish them the moment one of them goes off script. Is it some form of charity? Is it an attempt to democratize the alleged good fortune they’ve found? Does setting a place at the table for one who has failed to settle down suitably somehow sweeten the success for those who have achieved bullet proof couplehood? Or is the opportunity to always have a built-in butt of the jokes too good to pass up? The married couple, their son and his girlfriend all dread Mary’s arrival and scorn her immediately following her departure, which I suppose is their right, but my question – for the family in the film, and for certain relations of my own who are unfortunately not confined to film – is this: Why invite people whose company you clearly do not care for into your circle?

In the meantime, circles are being formed and broken and then reformed at the speed of sound throughout the Bennett household and its surrounding towns, villages and cities. Mrs. Bennett has a bitingly sarcastic husband, a home she’s in grave danger of losing, a weakness for making declarations before they’re ready to be made, a fierce competition with one of the neighbors and, not least among her concerns, five daughters. For Mrs. Bennett, getting those girls married off is hardly a romantic fancy: It’s all business, baby. As I’ve said, I’ve never read anything by Jane Austen so I have no idea where this is going but I am enjoying, as they say, the journey.

As I was sitting on my couch on Thursday night pondering the overblown significance of marriage in both film and print, a show on NPR called Tell Me More came on, and guess what? It being June and all – wedding time! – it seems a gay guy has written an opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times in which he announced that he’s declining invitations to friends’ weddings this year because he’s tired of supporting an institution from which he is legally excluded. The institution of marriage exists, he explained, because people participate in it by getting married. And the institution of marriage thrives, he continued, because people participate in it by … getting married.

Why this line of thinking took until June 2011 to bubble up to the surface is beyond me, but I’m glad it finally did.

The strangest part of the interview, I thought, was the gay guy’s apologetic tone. “I don’t want to punch my straight friends in the face,” he said. Good for him, I suppose, but punching is exactly what I feel like doing. As is the case with commenting truthfully about ushering forth children as if the act itself were a favor to us all and then buying SUVs to cart them around town in, I think we – me included – tiptoe around the marriage issue, making one weird little exception after another in order to not offend or more seriously wound the people we like. But I’ve come to believe that in the current climate, getting married, not to mention creating a spectacle over it, is a deal breaker. I don’t think expressing your “support” for the gay marriage crusade makes much difference either. I “support” the crusade against grand theft on Wall Street, yet I keep my checking account at the Bank of America because there are ATMs aplenty. That alone, in a single stroke, renders my “support” null and void.

I know we’re not supposed to mix and match and borrow and compare when it comes to struggles, oppression and discrimination, but here’s a scenario that keeps meandering through my mind. If I patronized a restaurant known to refuse to serve or employ people of a certain ethnicity, nationality or color, and especially if I refused to shut up about how good the food is – even if I hastily added “And I can’t wait for the day when you can eat there too!” – I’d expect my friends to accuse me of supporting racism. And to disagree with them would be not only foolish but impossible.

Critiquing from the left

2011-06-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

One of the best parts of the Internet, I think, is that the stupid people use it to turn themselves in. Not long ago, two women beat a transsexual so severely that she started having seizures on the floor of a McDonald’s in Baltimore. The degenerates who not only stood by watching but actually cheered on the attackers shot video with their cell phones and, in a gesture of good citizenship, did the cops' job for them by posting their handiwork on YouTube. Thanks, boys.

The media ignored that particular story, but it wasn’t long before another individual turned himself in from the comfort of his own computer. For the past couple of weeks the latest non-news distraction piece has been, of course, a hot little congresssman’s close-up crotch shot. In spite of the fact that he’s supposedly some kind of rising star with the Democrats, one who was (and perhaps still is) being buffed and polished to run for mayor of New York City, he was so taken with his dick’s star quality that he sent a picture of it to a woman he’d been talking dirty to online. Then he lied about it for a week or so. Then, “choking back the tears,” as the reporters described it, he confessed that he had in fact sent her the picture and then some.

For a few reasons I didn’t follow the story very closely. It’s not because I’m above a good crotch shot (trust me, I am not) but because these stories have become so formulaic that they’re boring. I want to hear something about one of these fools exploring something kinkier, maybe a couple of women at once, or a man and a woman, or maybe some sex toys, or a … dog. But doing something slightly nasty on the downlow – but neither down nor low enough – and then confessing tearfully and then a million pictures of the just-fallen hero with his wife? Something tells me that that sort of thing and then some goes on all up and down the street I live on.

There are a few things about the story, though, that I would like to say.

The first is that it was only mentioned by one of my Facebook “friends.” While that group is hardly representative of any specific demographic, I thought it was interesting that, with one exception, there were no status updates on the whole tawdry tale. The one person who did mention is interesting, I think: She’s a former “major-market” anchorwoman. She couldn’t shut up about it, actually, nor could her “friends,” many of whom chimed in, and many of whom, I noticed after clicking around a bit, either used to work for television stations in large metropolitan areas or still do. Journalists, in a word.

The second thing I thought was interesting was that the night the confession was made, I tuned into CBS Evening News, which I have not watched since Katie Couric set out to become the next Oprah. I was expecting a full-blown blast on the story, but I was shocked nearly speechless by the fact that the story was the third item on the lineup, one that did not come on until after the first commercial break.

Which brings me to the third thing I thought was interesting about the story. The new anchor, Scott Pelley, formerly of Sixty Minutes, concluded his coverage of the non-news story with a question I thought was very good, one that, to me, is what we should expect from the anchors of national network news programs, but that, given the PR people's takeover of the news business, borders on extraordinary.

He asked the correspondent why (besides having a nice big photogenic dick – my words, not the anchor’s ) the congressman is considered newsworthy. Why, he asked, should we care about him?

He’s very significant, mewed the nodding correspondent. He’s a mover and a shaker, mentioned and considered and looked to for this that and the other. But more significantly, he critiques Obama from the left. The left counts on him for that, the correspondent proclaimed. He’s an ally of the left. I don’t know about you, but I don’t count on anyone whose wife is a senior staff member of Hillary Clinton’s operation to criticize his wife’s boss in any way more significant than sending some naughty pictures out across the innernets. Of course, in that context, it is kind of perfect.

Parenting toward purple

2011-06-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

At a birthday dinner a month ago, a woman I know said something about Jane Austen, and I said I’d never read anything by her but that I wouldn’t mind giving one of her books a try, and so now I’m making my way through Pride and Prejudice. I did not go into this without a few biases, most notably that I am way, way sick and tired of fiction about British people who are so uptight about anything remotely sexual that it’s nothing short of miraculous that they manage to reproduce.

Much to my surprise I am really enjoying the book. There’s a lot of just-beneath-the-surface bitchiness and cracking of stereotype code. So there I was on Monday evening, trying to read my way through the introduction of Mr. Bennett’s cousin, Mr. Collins, when the daily rebroadcast of Think Out Loud came on the radio. The subject for the day: Gender-Neutral Parenting.

While I consider public media a national treasure well worth fighting for, I have many reasons for not contributing to OPB – the station’s CEO earns more than a quarter million bucks a year, for starters – but even if I didn’t, Monday’s show alone would suffice. I believe the story got started with a couple in Canada that has decided to keep the gender of their child a secret. Not to be outdone on the scorecard for inflating irrelevant topics with a sense of urgency, OPB managed to round up a few folks who perfectly personify the disorder of bringing up children not to be independent, self-directed citizens with critical thinking capabilities but as monuments to those who are raising them.

Let’s start with the use of the term “parenting,” which makes me cringe. You’re raising children, I want to scream. And the word “parent” is not a verb. So the insufferable mother character introduced herself by blathering about herself and her partner, though mostly about herself, and their young child, to whom she referred as their “assigned male child.” As if reading my mind, the host of the program asked her guest to please explain what she meant by “assigned.”

Well, said the parent, lots. She and her partner want the youngster to have lots and lots of choices. Choices regarding whether the clothing he – I’m assuming I can use the term “he”? – wears is traditionally male or traditionally female. Choices regarding whether the toys he plays with are traditionally male or traditionally female. She and her partner have abolished pink and blue, if spirit if not in deed, and are instead parenting toward purple. Isn’t that cool? Most importantly, as best I could tell through all the blathering, they want him to have choices on “gender construct.”

Why? Well, that’s a great question. The parent, who writes a blog about her “boychick,” is very concerned that, according to her, between one and five percent of children are born into some sort of gender- and genital-neutral territory. So she and her partner are buying a lot of shit in order to do something about it. Now that’s what I call grabbing the world by its …

The male parent managed to be even more offensive. Apparently realizing that he’d been pretty much castrated by simply taking a seat in the studio, everything this guy said was said in the tone of apology. He and his wife have two daughters. He lost his job a few years ago so he and his wife, who is a doctor, decided to sit down and talk about their values. Can you imagine?

Assigned Male: Holy shit, I got fired today.
Assigned Female: Oh.
Assigned Male: I think it’s time to talk about our values.

So the father stays at home “to parent,” which I suppose is one of the perks of having a doctor’s salary fueling the checking account. The father figure explained that he’d started “thinking about gender issues” long ago. In college, in fact, when he’d developed a preference – an erection? – for strong, independent women, women who go mountain biking and surfing and who go on far-flung travels by themselves. So imagine the horror he experienced when his mother-in-law gave the older of the two girls a Barbie doll for her birthday. Crisis time, to be sure. He even wrote about it on his Facebook page, and everyone who responded, he said, wrote that when it comes to “parenting,” gender stereotypes abound and there’s not much to be done about them. The painfully earnest, gender-sensitive father was crestfallen by how resigned everyone seemed, and he, in solidarity with the mother of the assigned male child, is committed to tackling the issue head on. And then, as if he’d been kicked under the table there in the studio, this idiot apologized for “stereotyping” about what makes a strong female. Of course he knows women who are able to … repair their own cars.

The best part, though, was this: The host asked him something about what might or might not happen when his daughters “become sexual.” Well, said the assigned father figure, he hasn’t really thought about that, and he hopes he won’t have to for a long while. Even though that sounded like a lie to me, I stand with him in hoping it’s a long time before he has to think about a young person’s emerging sexuality, not for his sake but for theirs.

Charlie

2011-06-06T07:42:00.000-07:00

Well, The Project is going as well – or as badly – as can be expected. I am making a little bit of progress on my approach to working with people from a company that I really do not like but that I am unable (as I’ve said before) to rid myself of completely. It’s been one unclear calamity after another for the past couple of weeks. There will be some pretty fancy invoicing going on here at the end of the month, but in the meantime, I keep thinking of one of my father’s aunts. She burned herself badly one day when her dress caught fire after she backed up into the stove in the kitchen of the house where she lived, alone, well into her nineties. My mother, of all people, who was perhaps the most unsentimental person I’ve yet to meet, took pity on her, and this aunt of my father’s came to live … with us. She regained her physical strength and lived several years past the century mark. But her mind was pretty much shot after the burning burner incident. There are a couple of things I recall about her. She used to wear several dresses at one time, some of them facing the right way, many of them backwards. And, prior to doing laps up and down the upstairs hallway, she used to put on her big black shoes on the wrong foot so that the toe part faced outward. And my father used to say, “God, Margaret, what you trying to do? Look like Charlie Chaplin?” So I channel his voice and my mother’s compassion for the terminally wounded with each and every silly e-mail that comes through. What, I ask myself, sometimes out loud, are you trying to do? Although it’s only the second week of the month and therefore way too early to predict how it will all turn out, I must say that so far my revamped approach is working out pretty well.

Memorial Day in Portland

2011-06-01T07:37:00.000-07:00

The Memorial Day weekend was a little funky around here, as it often is. For a few months now it’s been wet and chilled and generally unpleasant in Portland. The three-day weekend, though commonly considered the beginning of the summer season, was no exception. There have been very few days thus far that I’ve left the front door open, and I have yet to open any windows. There was not a single week in May that passed without a downpour … of hail. I’m still sleeping under a stack of blankets and taking hot baths.

Memorial Day is strange. Although I don’t need any convincing that where you’re from flavors where you are, this particular three-day weekend and the days leading up to it offer just that. I’m not sure if there’s a scientific (or medical?) name for the way I experience this time of year or not. What it is – in my own terminology – is a complete and utter confusion as to what season we’re actually in, and about to be in.

I remember the first time I experienced this. I was riding my bike away from the apartment building where I used to live. At the T-shaped intersection toward which I was riding stood a grand old house. On top of the house, three or four men in overalls and sweatshirts and big boots crouched on the slope and hammered plywood down to the frame. And as I rode my bike toward the intersection, I thought – or felt, or sensed – that they were working as quickly as possible to get the new roof on the house before the winter started in earnest. Then, half a second later, I was jerked back to the real calendar and I almost laughed at myself, thinking, Jesus Christ, it’s May. And then I almost fell off my bike, because this whatever-it’s-called that I experience yanks me back and forth from late October to late May and then back again in a fraction of a second and it leaves me dizzy.

This year was no different. Outside the gray layer of sky held behind it, faintly, a silvery shimmer that can only mean one thing: Winter won’t be long now. On Saturday I cleaned my house. On Sunday I walked down to Fred Meyer and bought a new radio, which felt like a holiday shopping spree. Then I called my aunt to wish her a happy 85th birthday. She was “getting the table set” for a birthday dinner, an occasion she spoke of in what I thought were holiday terms. On Monday I worked on my current nonsense project and went out for coffee. On the walk back to my house the smell of autumn struck me. I came home, finished Grapes of Wrath and made pork chops for dinner. Then I cut my hair and took a nice hot bath, and when bedtime arrived, I settled in and then, moments later, got up to get a hat, because on cold nights, there’s nothing quite as nice for an all-but-shaved head.

Karma

2011-05-31T07:12:00.000-07:00

There were many things that charmed me about Portland when I arrived here in 1994. I believed my brother was a decent human being for one thing. I loved the coffee shops and the thrift stores. I loved the bagels at a placed called Big Bear Bagels on Southeast Hawthorne and the museum-quality cloudscapes that were on display more days than not. I loved the oranges and the bridges and, perhaps most of all, I loved downtown.

In most U.S. cities I am familiar with, the downtown core is a sore spot, one that’s been haphazardly neglected and then rescued and “improved” in various ways and according to various plans. In Saint Louis, for example, efforts to “revitalize” downtown have been underway under various logos for as long as I’ve been alive. I just turned 45, and downtown Saint Louis remains a cluster of office towers shadowed by the Arch and surrounded by blight. It’s occupied by day, but at 5:00 sharp each evening, it’s car-by-car exodus time.

Portland was quite different. In 1994, it struck me as kind of New York-ish in that downtown was a place where people lived and worked. I used to work for a law firm in one of the bank towers downtown, and every now and then a group of us would go out for drinks after work, and I remember being shocked, when the time came to get on my bike and ride home, at the sight of people on the streets and sidewalks long after closing time at the offices.

There were bars and restaurants and cafes and bookstores and record stores. There was a shopping mall that managed somehow to not look or feel quite like a mall. There were department stores and a public square where people sat on the brick steps and smoked cigarettes and watched the youngsters play hacky sack. There were light-rail trains and buses and cars and lots and lots of people on bikes. People were forever coming and going, as I recall. The sun would head down for the day, the sky would turn a serious shade of deep blue and the evenings would gradually, respectfully take up where the afternoon had left off. At all hours of the day and night, heading either into or out of downtown Portland, I rode my bicycle across the Hawthorne Bridge – which was the color of copper back then – sharing the narrow strip of concrete, in the days before designated bike paths, with people on skateboards and on foot and other bicyclists, with downtown always in the foreground or the background, and I remember, clearly, thinking: Man, this is the place to live.

I think it’s kind of shitty down there these days, but I cannot decide if my perception is based on actual shifts and changes or if it’s just that I’m older now and nostalgic for my own history.

But there are other factors. Businesses – ignoring the brutally honest example of places like Saint Louis – have moved to hideous office parks in the suburbs. The like-moneyed have set up their own city in a place called the Pearl District that, in my opinion, gives the hideousness of the suburbs a run for its money. There are empty storefronts and empty sidewalks. One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s not unusual for a space formerly occupied by a local merchant to have been transformed into a store where you buy not cell phones but cell phone plans. Liquor stores used to be considered the harbinger of urban blight. Have they been replaced in the lore of urban planning by the purveyors of cell phone plans?

Not surprisingly, the people are different as well. I remember people downtown being friendly, smiling and nodding and saying hello as we passed each other on the sidewalks. I remember people waiting for the Walk signal even if there weren’t any cars coming. I remember people waiting to reach a corner before crossing the street. I remember buses within downtown being free. And I remember people paying attention not to their cell phones and their iPods but, it seems to me, to where they were, to those who were there with them and to where they were going. If this doesn’t sound like something an old person would say I don’t know what does, but it seems to me that there was more courtesy in 1994 than there is today, more civility.

But here’s what I really set out to write about: The clipboard activists. While I appreciate the fact that they are earning a living just like the rest of us and while I am respectful of the mission, their tactics make me almost sympathetic to the constantly connected crowd, which takes some doing. The fundraisers make earplugs seem like a good idea. They stand on corners, at a distance from public entrances that are set forth by the city (talk about a bad sign) with their clipboards and game-show smiles and bug the living shit out anyone and everyone – including me – who ventures into their sphere.

And, as you cross the street and approach the side of the street that they’re on – again, as mandated by the city – the attack begins like this: “Hey man, that’s a really nice shirt you’re wearing …” I fell for this the first few times, but after the first few hundred times, I began behaving in a way I’ve always found offensive in others: I glared at them with as much hostility as I could muster. Most people I know don’t answer their phone unless they recognize the digits that pop up on their caller ID. Most people I know don’t answer the door unless they’re expecting someone. Most people I know spend the majority of the time they spend in their e-mail programs not sending or receiving but deleting.

Most people I know are not open to exchanging pleasantries with strangers on downtown sidewalks. And most people has come to include me, because I am not willing to have the time I spend downtown be dominated by fundraising tricks. So when someone compliments the shirt I’m wearing, I glare and keep going. And lately they’ve taken to muttering “karma!” as I pass. Which strikes me as an odd thing to say, given the fact that they’re chipping away, one aborted interaction at a time, at the foundation of one human’s natural inclination to engage in pleasantries with others.

Getting my head around it all

2011-05-26T07:24:00.000-07:00

I am completely powerless over my stomach’s reaction to people from A Certain Company. After working with these people in various capacities for more than 10 years now, I have finally made peace with that fact, and here’s how.

Since September, I have been on a bit of a hiatus from A Certain Company because I’ve been doing a project for A Certain Other Company. Because I think any group of people is bound to be dysfunctional sooner or later – particularly when the purpose of that group is to market technology – it’s hard for me to really believe this, but working for A Certain Company and A Certain Other Company are two completely different experiences.

Though she is not without her challenges, since September, the woman who is my client at A Certain Other Company has yet to send me an e-mail with a red exclamation mark beside it. Since the week before last, when the project with A Certain Company began – or tried to begin anyhow – the majority of the e-mails I have received have been sent with high importance. Though I know better, I respond to those exclamation marks with anxiety. As I believe it’s intended to be, my reaction is automatic.

My job, allegedly, is to write documents based on a messaging framework, an overwrought, endlessly verbose rambling that purports to explain why making a certain purchase is the best thing you’ll ever do. The documents are to be geared toward people and companies in specific industries. So, given the fact that neither the messaging nor the industries to be targeted has been finalized, why are any of the e-mails relating to this project deemed worthy of clicking on “High Importance!” before sending? To take logic a step further, if the information I’m basing these documents on hasn’t even been finalized, why are e-mails being sent at all?

Pardon my language, but fuck if I know.

I sometimes have dreams in which I am rushing to catch a flight even though I haven’t even started packing. The emotional foundation of those dreams is this weird sense of dread that must be the aftermath of going back and forth between “There’s no way in hell I’m going to get out of here on time” and “There’s no way I’m not going to be on that plane when the door closes.” Working with A Certain Company is almost always like that. As I write this there is a torrent of e-mails going back and forth about “ETAs” and “the workback” in spite of the fact – again – that the messaging has not been finalized. To me, that makes about as much sense as demanding to know when your meal will be ready before you’ve picked out the food. Which is to say, none.

I am prone to oversimplification, but here’s my attempt at an explanation. People who work at A Certain Company, and the thousands of people like me who work with them as vendors, make everything as complex as possible because if we didn’t, well, we’d just be ordinary folk doing ordinary things for which we’d be paid very ordinary wages.

My own shortcoming in this situation is that I am neither bold nor brave enough to make it known that I’d rather not be considered for projects with A Certain Company. In asking myself why, there are a couple of possible answers. The first is that the money is good and that I’m familiar with the drill. The second, which is more disturbing to me, is that on some level I equate taking a permanent pass on projects from A Certain Company with admitting that I’m not capable. So, rather than delving more deeply into those questions, I’ve decided to do a little experiment. I’m going to stop trying to boil messaging frameworks and talking points and all the rest down to their simplest form. Instead, I’m going to try going along with the complexity junkies. My first task is to utter, as if in awe, the following line during the next project meeting: “Wow, there’s really a lot here to get your head around.” While I doubt my ability to say that convincingly, I am rehearsing.

Freedom writers

2011-05-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

More than two decades ago, I started reading Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, which is the first of three volumes concerning the history of the civil rights movement as told by Taylor Branch. My first attempt stalled because my boss fired me. I aborted my second attempt to read the book when my boyfriend dumped me for a guy who was the guitarist for a grunge band. The book sat on my shelves for years and, since it’s hard to miss, I’d look at it from time to time and think, I really should give this another try. But it ended up in one of the many boxes of books I donated and I didn’t think about it until I saw it – again, it is hard to miss – on the three for $5 cart down at the library. Maybe this book is cursed, I thought. Maybe it has the power to usher forth disasters – disasters that turned out to be blessings in both cases, but still, disasters. But maybe the third time really is the charm. So I bought it.

The thing about Flannery O’Connor’s short stories is their simplicity: In very few pages, and using very few “big” words and even fewer plot tricks, they strike me as winding trails of nuance, one on which you cannot avoid finding something new each and every time. Which is what I’ve been experiencing with “The Geranium,” her first published work. The story can be read as a series of beautifully crafted sentences. It can be read as an account of moving from one environment into another. It can be read as a commentary on family dynamics both rejected and embraced from one generation to the next. It can be read simply as a story about missing home.

And it can be read, of course, as an analysis of how people organize their thoughts and instincts – or not – along the lines of color and race. Last week, PBS aired an American Experience documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of the summer that some very brave young people boarded buses for a little ride through the South. I could not help but be inspired by the group that has been indexed into our history under the name Freedom Riders.

Technically speaking, desegregation had been outlawed by the time the riders boarded their buses a mere five years before my birth and an easy day’s drive from where my birth took place. But thanks to politicians whose mindsets allowed them, phenomenally, I think, to use words like “freedom” and “equality” while at the same time refusing to appear in public with a black person, it was not only not safe for black people to travel in certain states, it was not safe for black people to sit next to white people while travelling through certain states, or while stopping at bus depots in certain states. It’s an understatement, I think, to call places like Anniston, Ala., Birmingham and Jackson, Miss. war zones. That term was so apt, in fact, that many of the people on the buses drew up their wills before joining the crusade. And they referred to themselves as soldiers.

One of the risks of reading history, I’m learning, is that it’s not unlike discovering that your parents really did enjoy oral sex quite a bit: In history, the myths implode, and in reading Taylor Branch’s account of the early 1960s in this country, disappointment waits on almost every page. The Kennedys? I’ve never been a big fan, and I’m less of one now. Inspiring speeches about hope and change, I suppose, but in terms of addressing the fact that millions of U.S. citizens couldn’t vote without endangering not only their own lives but the lives of their families and friends as well, well, publically addressing the civil rights of black people was considered “belittling” to the president, who was more interested in the space program. The supreme court – which I consider a national disgrace to begin with – didn’t help: It set a horrid precedent by letting a southern man of the law walk free after beating a black man to death because it could not be proven, specifically, that the officer intended to deprive his victim of his civil rights. The lawman’s name was Screws, which would have been a stretch in the symbolism department even for Flannery O’Connor’s fiction.

Unfortunately, the black people in the story of the civil rights movement are not exactly free of blemishes. And that’s the wall I keep running into. Is it acceptable to dismiss the movement’s leaders because their bigotry toward the gays was drawn from the same well as the bigotry that drove white people in the south to resort to terrorist tactics – there’s no other way to phrase that, in my opinion – at the mere thought of being seated beside a black person at a diner? Is it okay to dismiss the actions of individuals for the sake of what the cause achieved overall? Martin Luther King kicked a man named Bayard Rustin out of the club because of an indirect threat from Adam Clayton Powell – a black U.S. congressman from Harlem – who promised to fire up the rumor mill in order to link King and Rustin “in a homosexual affair” unless King dismissed Rustin from organizing efforts. Ultimately, King did not dismiss Rustin, who had dedicated years of his life to the movement, who had stood beside King through some of his most difficult times and who was not only black and gay but a communist as well: He had someone else do it for him.

Although they clearly have no qualms about tossing the gays right off the bridge, I think Barack Obama and Bill Clinton give amazing speeches, but neither of them, in my opinion, are quite as artistic as Martin Luther King when it comes to sheer oratory octane. Which brings me to another wall: The church. The civil rights struggle in this country took root in “the black church,” which, like all churches I’ve found thus far, is where people go to absorb the finer points of division. Even when it’s preaching to millions of systematically disenfranchised souls, a Christian church will find a scapegoat, so is taking note that blatant homophobia was at play as buses full of principled young people roared across Alabama in 1961 an overreaction on my part?

I cannot decide. On the one hand, I don’t think it’s fair to hold it against the people who put their lives on the line to make it happen the fact that churches were the foundation of the civil rights movement: Black people, after all, were not exactly welcome at the city hall, or the department store or the departure lounge at the Greyhound bus terminal. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to consider the ability to splice and dice the word “equality” as anything other than a character defect – and a pretty major one at that. The ease with which Barack Obama can sell the gays to the highest bidder is inexcusable. As for Bill Clinton, I guess I do sort of make excuses for him by sympathizing with him because of the fact that there is no number of Ivy League degrees and million-dollar wedding ceremonies that will ever liberate him from his hillbilly inclinations and instincts. But Martin Luther King?

For me, the best way to read Flanner O’Connor’s story is as a configuration of three men. The main character, Old Dudley, Rabie, a black man back home in a small Southern town and another black man, one who lives in the apartment next door to Old Dudley’s daughter in New York City and who remains nameless. Old Dudley, who has left his home to go live with his daughter, is appalled that she lives in the same building with a black person, so much so that he initially assumes the next door neighbor is a servant. His mere presence is an affront not only to the order of the world but to Old Dudley’s child-rearing skills. It’s all as bad as it sounds, until it gets worse. Old Dudley clearly considers Rabie a friend – he longs for his presence, actually – but there are conditions, of course. While he’s offended by having a black person in the apartment next door, living beneath the same roof as people whose skin color is different than his own does not represent a new frontier for Old Dudley. Back home, Rabie and he lived in the same building, but it was a boarding house, and Rabie, who was more or less the maintenance man, didn’t live right next door but in a location that fit more smoothly into Old Dudley’s scheme of things: in the basement.

Accountability

2011-05-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

There is a type of person who gets off on being brought in to either restore or impose a new level of order upon things, and I have endured the onslaught of this type of person in many settings. Of all the nonprofit organizations and “community efforts” I’ve volunteered for there has not been one that has not, sooner or later, been subjected to a savior, usually someone who (though white) really “gets” one ethnic group or another and is here to raise a little awareness among the Caucasians. In my family, one of my brothers engineered and executed a hostile takeover after our father died, claiming all along that he was acting in “everyone’s best interests.” And at the PR agency where I used to work, even though I had the good fortune to leave before being able to type on Facebook and Twitter became more valued than fluency in a language other than English, every eight months or so someone would be introduced who was really, really going guide us all down a new path that would lead to a new level of glory – one we’d never even imagined. We’d never imagined it because, as it turned out each and every time, it didn’t exist, and that was always the theme of the after-work gatherings organized for the sole purpose of celebrating the quiet termination of the once rising star’s employment.

In my experience there is only one thing at which these people truly excel, and that is damage.

I recently read an article by the former chancellor of the public schools in New York City. Not long ago he resigned and went to work for some corporation, which warranted an interview on the PBS Newshour, which didn’t make much of an impression on me one way or the other. What the article promised, though, was an insider’s view of what’s wrong with public education in this country, so I was interested. After many years at the helm, he left the schools pretty much as he found them, which is to say not good. It had nothing to do with his leadership, though. The biggest problem crippling the public schools in New York? The teachers, of course, and their damn union. The whining in the article was kind of funny, actually. Those union people got together and caused someone they didn’t like to lose an election. Sometimes they met with legislators to influence votes on specific bills. When they sensed that someone like the former chancellor was trying to undermine them one concession at a time, they refused to budge. Worst of all, they expected their seniority to be factored into their salary. The nerve, I thought.

While I believe education (not training) is as important as healthcare and a livable environment, I do not worship at the altar of teacherhood. I don’t know many teachers, but I wouldn’t trust either of the two I do know to correctly sign the pets in for their annual checkups down at the veterinary clinic, never mind run a classroom. I also think I’ve had the “it’s for the children!” card thrown in my face a few times too many by our friends at the Portland Public Schools. At the same time, the louder the anti-union drum beats in this country, and the more often it’s recited in any number of venues as a matter of fact, the more I doubt it. You do not have to take in too many pages from the history books to realize that we do not like it when people who earn working class wages organize. And thanks to some amazing marketing campaigns, even people who earn working class wages don’t like it when people who earn working class wages organize.

So, now that we’ve shipped millions of jobs to countries that do not have unions, even though corporate profits are soaring – and soaring they are, in spite of the recession - our main focus is government employees. And there is no group of public employees we seem to enjoy bashing and blaming more than teachers. For those who prefer easy targets over substance, public school teachers are a bonanza: They’re lazy. They cannot get a real job. They get the summers off. And they have pensions.

It’s the pensions, of course. Isn’t it funny how a pension used to be a pretty much standard part of job, kind of like health insurance and paid holidays? It an amazing testament to the power of marketing, it’s not just the pensions that have disappeared; logical conversations about them have disappeared as well as people who do have pensions have been cast as borderline criminals. Why? Because the rest of us allowed ourselves to be spoken for by people who were either too gullible or greedy (or both) to acknowledge that handing the country’s retirement affairs over to the stock market was and is a profoundly bad idea. If we think pensions are expensive, just wait until people my age start retiring on funds long gone in the name of extending shareholder value.

And it’s all the union’s fault, of course. The former chancellor has such a low opinion of unions, in fact, that he prefaced a quote from a member by saying it was “… surprisingly enough the best case for greater accountability …” There were two words that caught my attention, the first being “surprisingly.” Because the union folks are stupid? Because they’re hiding something? Because union people aren’t capable, usually, of making a “best case”?

On my scorecard, that’s zero points for the former chancellor and two points for the teachers and their union, the first for having the sense and stamina to fight the horrifically short-sighted idea of abolishing pensions, the second for perceiving and receiving the former chancellor as exactly what he is: a condescending, confrontational bully. Like my brother who was shocked when one of my sisters retaliated after he said he was “very surprised” that she knew the answer to a trivia question about the largest country in Africa, the former chancellor, in spite of the fact that he basically called the teachers and the union not quite a bright as himself, seemed surprised that relations between them and him weren’t so great. The fact that many people do not respond positively to authoritarian condescension seems to be a challenging concept for aspiring saviors.

The second word is accountability. In addition to accountability, his article was laced with enough corporate non-language language to banish a person not only from the position of chancellor but from ever setting foot in a classroom. There was talk about measurement and metrics, teacher value-add, standards (lots of standards, a term so vague and prone to distortion that new sheriffs cannot help falling in love with it), test data, evaluation criteria and so on and so forth. There was also a ton of boilerplate rhetoric that appears in nearly every one of these articles where someone – anyone, really, including billionaire software tycoons – tries to position himself as having the secret combination to unlock “education reform”: Our schools are failing! Our students are falling behind! Our students will not be able to compete in an increasingly global economy!

Just for the hell of it, here’s my boilerplate rhetoric: Throw the standardized testing bullshit into the fire pit. Teach the little ones the parts of speech and use the classics to teach them to read and write. Force the youngsters to master Latin. Terminate, immediately and irrevocably, the employment of anyone who uses words like “metrics” and “measurement” in buildings leased, owned or otherwise occupied by a public school district or entity. I know there’s no way to cancel the option to major in education (it’s too late for that) but I think that rather than hiring a person with an education degree to teach math, a mathematics major would be a better bet. Get as many brutal, middle-aged women in front of the classrooms as possible, and reward them for scaring the living hell out of the children as often as possible. Though not popular, fear works.

But that’s just my opinion, so back to the former chancellor. He went in to save the schools from themselves and the evil forces undermining them, namely the teachers union. For eight years he was a glorified bat boy, working for those who think it’s a good idea to teach youngsters not to think critically but to pass tests, for those who make sure the national focus remains on teachers’ pensions rather than the fact that enormous corporations do not pay their fair share of taxes, and even at the rank of bat boy this guy failed. I suppose his quitting to take a corporate job where he doesn’t have to endure the horrors of employees organized in order to protect themselves from him is a form of accountability. But why does he get a few thousand words in The Atlantic to blame everyone else for his failure?

I can't get a connection

2011-05-16T08:19:00.000-07:00

One of the projects I’m working on currently is to write blog posts for a very, very large company. While it is not my job to look around for topics that are relevant to the target audience and then recommend them to the alcoholic, narcissistic client and her magnificently inept PR team, I must say that it’s the most enjoyable part of the project.

I do most of my trolling in the sites that are online editions of national business magazines, and man, the shit people write about, and the shit people get paid to write about. (You could say the same of me, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but at least I have the humility – or so I tell myself – to seek out projects that are “authored” by someone else, “authoring” and “writing” being, for those of you who are unaware, two very different designations).

Recently I ended up in a blog post written by some social media pioneer who, according to his bio, is a total rock star when it comes to infusing global brands with a personal, local level of experience. How could I not read what he had to say?

Before I go on I have to digress. I recently realized something after watching Dancing with the Stars: If I like the dance being performed, I automatically believe that the dancers performing it are dancing well. If I don’t like the dance being performed, if I am unable to notice any obvious missteps, I just go ahead and imagine a few.

So I’ve been trying to keep that in mind before I read something, and it’s a bit jarring. Another blog I recently read chastised – beautifully, for the most part – people who will not shut up about how busy and stressed out they are. The only problem was that the writing was terrible. On the other hand, our social media rock star, I hate to admit, writes quite well.

But his story – his “content” – is objectionable, I think: Coffee shops that don’t bend over backwards for the laptop militia deserve to go out of business. His blog was inspired by a barista who, when the author had problems getting a wireless connection, did not respond with sufficient “urgency.” (Urgency, by the way, is a big thing with the PR people – particularly those who are passionate about social media – and in addition to the fact that in more than a decade in the field I have yet to experience anything, directly or indirectly, that constitutes “urgency,” I’m here to tell you that the more trivial the matter, the more frequently the word is used.) I resisted the urge to post a comment on his blog along the lines of “What’s the name and address and operating hours of the coffee shop in Portland that doesn’t bend over backwards for the laptoppers?” I’d go out of my way to patronize such a business. Because I am so tired of coffee shops where one of the main visual characteristics is an illuminated approximation of an apple. I miss the artwork of yesteryear, displays that were rotated in and out once a month or so.

But I started thinking about it, and I think I’m being self-centered. I go to coffee shops – to one in particular, which happens to be in my neighborhood – to get away from computers. My addiction to caffeine predates e-mail, texting, wireless connections, laptops, cell phones – all the little innovations that have come along that seem to me little more than increasingly fancy and increasingly tiny renditions of what was once called the ball and chain. I remember, vaguely, going to coffee shops to meet people, to hear music, to read. I remember going to coffee shops, in fact, simply for a good cup of coffee.

These days, I go down the street to get away from my office and my job, both of which I adamantly confine to one room in my house, one with a door that is shut when the work day ends. I have never taken my laptop with me, nor do I plan to. What’s odd to me is that I often leave the coffee shop carrying a tension that I didn’t have when I arrived. It’s a sea of laptops in there, presided over by blank, vaguely dead looking faces, made even more ghoulish by the glow from their screens. It’s quite territorial, I think, even up front at the group table, where unfriendly faces belonging to unfriendly people glare up at anyone who dares to take a seat, as if that table is a campground and the spots have been reserved and paid for.

There are power outlets along one of the walls, and it’s sort of fun to watch those who couldn’t snag a seat beside one get a bit twitchy as – I presume – their batteries wear down. They stare at the tables along the wall, anxiously, a bit desperately, trying to calculate if anyone is getting ready to leave and, if so, how quickly. It’s like watching an addict on the verge of withdrawal.

And then there are the cell phones. In an era gone by, as I understand it, protocol dictated that when you went into a saloon you placed your pistol on the table or the bar for all to see. Whether that was meant to be a concession or a threat I cannot say, but at the coffee shop in my neighborhood the tradition lives on: There is a cell phone of one sort or another sitting on nearly every table. Sometimes I make a point of glaring at people who are braying into their devices, usually about whether or not an e-mail message has been sent or received, or whether a program or application is working properly or not, or a painfully detailed accounting of who the cell phone caller has spoken to thus far, who hasn’t returned calls, who has left messages and what the messages said, what time the caller arrived at the coffee shop, what time the caller plans to leave, where the caller is planning to go next. My glaring, like everything that falls outside the wireless network, is completely and utterly irrelevant.

That’s where I ended up: I’m not even objectionable to the constantly connected crowd. I’m simply irrelevant. Although the urgency appears to have taken over almost every coffee shop in Portland like the sickness that I believe it is, I still like sitting in well-lit places with good coffee and reading books and magazines that are printed on real paper, and I really enjoy having the freedom to write a blog post of my own (at home) applauding anyone unfortunate enough to earn a living accommodating the graceless who has the balls to respond to the social media rock star’s urgency in the most appropriate manner possible, which is to ignore it.

Decisive

2011-05-12T07:32:00.000-07:00

On Sunday night I could not help myself: I sat down with my bowl of roasted chicken and black beans and watched all 40 minutes or so of Sixty Minutes, which was devoted, exclusively, to our newly decisive president, who said that anyone who does not agree that justice was served with the killing of Osama bin Laden needs to have their head examined.

So here, for examination, is my head.

Declaring that any murder – including those brought about by the death penalty – is a manifestation of justice is a task best left to God, or to those decisive enough to be one of his or her delegates. In other words, not me. Osama bin Laden, our president declared, deserved to be killed because he was directly responsible for thousands of deaths on American soil. I cannot say one way or the other if I agree with that because I have too many questions, beginning – and ending – with this: If that’s the measure of justice, how broadly, or narrowly, is it applied?

So leaving behind the question of whether or not I agree with the president, I’m assuming that my refusal to take his word on the justice issue means that I need to get in line for an examination.

I thought the president’s performance on Sixty Minutes was deplorable. I thought it was cynical, I thought it reached down and stroked the lowest chords of blind nationalism and I thought it was embarrassing.

One of the most troubling parts of watching our president transition from “nuanced” to “decisive” is that the theme of the entire performance (and by performance I do not mean Sixty Minutes but the presidency itself) comes across as painfully macho. I wish I would have counted the number of times the president used the word “guys.” Those guys and these guys and our guys and on and on it went. Most importantly, the president said not with words but with a truly sickening sneer on his face and in his voice and his churlish laughter, was that our guys, who really are awesome, as they were banging around in the dark and kicking down walls managed to “retrieve” a lot of very valuable paperwork. Had John Wayne been tuned in on Sunday evening he would have had to change his undies. The president was that good.

In case anyone missed the male angle, the show included clips of the president actually speaking directly to the guys, lots of them, at military bases. “Job well done!” he bellowed, swerving a bit into that good old Negro dialect. And then, again, “Job! Well! Done!”

Running a close second on the offensiveness scorecard was the reference to Geronimo. The president, being decisive and all, let that one out as if it were a silky, odorless fart: It didn’t stink and he didn’t flinch. Was that his way of currying favor with those who dismissed the reaction to referring to Osama bin Laden with the code name Geronimo as “political correctness”? Hell if I know. What I do know is that a black male born and raised in the United States who thinks it’s okay to legalize discrimination against gay people has no bottom line, so exploiting a fairly easy target for the sake of political gain is to be expected, but Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden? Did neither of them object to the code name or are both of them also … decisive?

Then, as a way of acknowledging the importance of Mother’s Day I suppose, the president said that not letting the officials in Pahki-stahn know about the mission wasn’t a particularly difficult decision. That’s because he didn’t even tell his family. So, if we are to take the president at his word, a major factor of some pretty significant diplomacy issues and tactics and strategies is whether or not the president’s wife and his daughters have been apprised of the action plan? I wonder how people in Pahki-stahn – a U.S. ally, from what I hear – feel about that. Not good, would be my guess.

In spite of his new decisiveness, the president did, as always, provide a bit of ammo for the Republicans. The delivery of justice to Osama bin Laden, the president said, was a project that began last August. So, to “get” one guy took nine months? (For the sake of comparison it took only 14 months – assuming he began the project on his very first day in office – to get what he called healthcare reform through the U.S. House of Representatives.) Those nine months must have been riddled by lots of nuance, lots of cerebral elitism put forth by the guy formerly known as the professor in chief. I can just hear a Republican hopeful or two declaring that not only does the nine months it took to complete the mission not speak well for government efficiency or national security, it’s hardly decisive.