My family, my ass

When I was growing up, the main and most persistent topic of conversation was ass. There was talk of it at the breakfast table, where some of us were fed prune juice for irregularity. One of my father’s favorite words was ‘roughage.’ There were powders and pills and regimens galore. Once, one of my brothers left one in the toilet that was so huge my mother was afraid it would, if flushed whole, flood the bathroom. So, divide and conquer. My father used to stop at roadside stands all over Saint Louis County, where he bought bags of Swiss chard and collard greens and all sorts of other nasty crap that ended up on our dining room table in white, steaming bowls. “You’ll be grateful for this in the morning,” he’d say, as he took a huge helping and passed it on.

When I was growing up I thought this sort of thing was normal, because I knew no differently. But as I got older it started to seem odd. My father was diagnosed with colorectal cancer (what else?) in 1992, and this opened a whole new world for all of us. “Lordy,” he’d say, after spending more than an hour in the bathroom, which, thanks to his ‘re-do’ featured a toilet seat that rivaled the comfiest of recliners. “Nothing’s simple anymore.” Including, we learned recently, the log he kept – pardon the pun – after his surgery, in which he listed, in great detail, all ass happenings. One of my brothers told tales about driving cross country and not realizing he was “overdue” until he was at least 100 miles from a toilet. So, since he’s never without wiping provisions, he’d pull over and do his business right out in the middle of it all, where his only fear was that a trucker might happen by and spot him. These stories were told in the house, in front of the fire or over late-morning coffee at the kitchen table, openly and with great pride. My sister in Oklahoma, according to her, has been constipated since the night of her wedding in 1988. She drives from one pharmacy to the next down there in Tulsa, moaning and groaning all the way, in search of relief. Depending on your viewpoint, another one of my brothers, who happens to have two ass-obsessed boys of his own, is either the worst, or the best. I cannot recall a conversation I’ve had with him in the past 20 years that has not, at one point or another, gotten around to the “one wiper.” One wipers, my brother believes, are the harbinger of a good day. They’re neat and clean, they’re easy. Have you had any good ones lately? he’ll ask. Then he’ll fondly recall his own most recent. The alternative to the one wiper, of course, is to be avoided: When it’s squirrelly in the morning, my brother has to go back for a touch up, if not two.

Years ago, I concluded that my family likes to talk about ass – a lot. I also realized that when you talk about ass every day, it’s not special. So my goal became to approach ass and the endless array of related topics in moderation. But then I was struck by the curse over the weekend, and that, I am here to report, changed everything.

It began, in earnest, on Thursday night, when I got onto a bus downtown to come home and remained standing the entire ride even though there were plenty of seats. Although Friday was worse, it was normal enough that I was still prone to embarrassment: I didn’t want to go to Walgreens and purchase a product manufactured specifically for my ass from a person I may need to face the next time I buy Doritos; and I did not want to call my neighbor Bruce and casually ask him if he could go over there for me and pick up some, you know, Preparation H. By Saturday it was a whole new world. By then it felt like a ragged, rusty steak knife, right down there, stuck in. I tip toed around the house for a bit and then set out for the drugstore, in so much agony that I don’t think I would have even noticed had an announcement been made to get some ass ointment for the guy in Aisle 4 … immediately. Sitting and standing were equally perilous, I learned. Laying down on the couch was okay, but getting into and out of the right position was excruciating, and it was never the right position for long. It was hot on Saturday so I kept the house closed up. The radio was annoying, but not as much as the silence. Nothing tasted very good. The hours slogged by, the pain worsened. I finished one book and began another.

And I realized, begrudgingly, that my family might be onto something when it comes to the importance of ass, hence its prominent role in almost all conversations. Consider this: I weigh approximately 180 pounds. So, if half that weight is situated above my waist, that’s 60 pounds of unrelenting pressure on my ass at all times, which makes it one piece of real estate that is indeed prime. At one point I was sitting at the table and I leaned back to check the time. If my torso were the minute hand on a clock, the movement of that gesture would have been like going about one-third of the way from 12 to 1. I thought I was going to faint. I wiggled my left foot to shake the flip-flop off, and it was deadly. White-hot lightening struck my ass directly when I reached down for my coffee mug and moved my right shoulder slightly forward in doing so. My God, I thought, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.

But the most notable part of the weekend wasn’t the pain: it was the fact that it was discussed, not with my family, but with my neighbors. Cindy brought a bowl of beautiful red lettuce from her garden on Friday morning – not for its impact, but its freshness. “Well, I see you’re sitting down,” she said hopefully as she handed it to me. And on Saturday night Terry and Bruce and the dogs stopped over. I’d just had my bath, and was still in my robe and feeling slightly better. Have you ever experienced this? I asked once I'd tip-toed my way to the door, sort of tentatively but sort of not. I don’t want to go into too much detail about other people’s business, so I’ll have to close by saying that the conversation that followed my question would have made my father proud.

More outdated questions

The next time Rahm Emanuel decides to go on The PBS NewsHour, I hope Jim Lehrer’s line of questioning goes something like this:

So, Mr. Chief, pardon me if this comes across as outdated, but did the president order the firing of Shirley Sherrod over something that even an eighth-grade level of fact checking would have cleared up, or was he simply briefed on it? Are the Clintons now advising the Obamas on personnel issues? If you’re giving a speech and people laugh at bigoted remarks, should you leave the event before you get to the part of your story where you say you think that treating people based on their color is wrong? Is it possible that the laughter in that tape was among a group of people near the microphone who were having their own conversation, or is it assumed that everyone in a room is focused solely on the speaker? Who, at the White House, is minding the Tea Party? Is the Obama administration the chicken and is the NAACP the egg, or is it the other way around? How many hours per week, in terms of staff time, are spent at the White House reading blogs and then reacting to them? Does Obama watch Fox News or is he just briefed? Who drafted the statement the secretary of agriculture made on Wednesday? Barry? Michelle? Hillary? Maybe Joe! The secretary took full responsibility for the mishap, so does that mean the president didn’t order Shirley Sherrod’s termination? Or was he briefed on that? I guess it would make sense, come to think of it, that the secretary would have made this decision independent of input from the president. After all, surely the president wouldn’t meddle in an agency overseen by a member of his cabinet, especially not for purely political reasons. Did the president direct the secretary to offer Shirley Sherrod a new position with the USDA, or was he briefed on that? Does the president direct the staff on how much due diligence needs to take place before decisions are made and statements are issued? If not, who briefs him on these types of things? Does the president approach other situations with this same degree of uninformed haste, or are there people briefing him?

Confusing the children of God

Over the years I’ve known many people who find homophobia in every gesture, word and deed. People who get married are homophobic because gays cannot do so. People who buy their health insurance under a group plan? Homophobes! Married couples who file joint tax returns? What a bunch of bigots. And let’s not even get started on those who adopt children. Man, they’re a spiteful bunch.

It was exhilarating for a while, yelling and screaming at people. It felt so good, correcting the misguided and the misinformed, here and there, but after a while it got exhausting. When every utterance is pressed through a filter of a zealous search for offense, it limits the conversation. Plus, it gets really hard to like people. I think there is no shortage of bigotry in the world (you should hear me talk about the Mormons). I also think that most people are doing the best they can with what they’ve got and that most people mean no harm to others. This may be naïve of me, but it’s an essential, life-giving sort of naïve, and I’m sticking with it as stridently as I can.

Which is difficult when it comes to Hillary Clinton. I think it’s an outrage that at least 22 women have not been elected president of the United States. At the same time, I am thankful that she is not – thus far – the first one. I was wowed by her in the early 1990s, of course, but after listening to her explain her voting record once she got herself a seat the flame began to fade, and it’s been fading ever since. My problem is that I don’t believe a word she says. It’s one thing to think someone is a liar from the beginning; having to acknowledge that someone I once found inspiring turned out to be just as sleazy as those she purports to take on was another matter entirely. And this week I’m completely finished with her after listening to her crow about her daughter’s upcoming wedding, an occasion she’s using to express how grateful she is to live in a country where everyone is free to marry the person he or she loves. That’s impressive, even by her very slippery set of standards. In a twisted sort of way, I’m looking forward to hearing her explanation.

In related news, they’ve legalized same-sex marriage in Argentina, where, by chance, they have a president who is female, one who speaks, even through translation, in a way that’s refreshingly clear and direct. Argentina being a most Catholic country, I suppose it wouldn’t be quite proper to not quote an official or two. So here’s a good one, from the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who described the sharing of matrimonial communion wafers with the homos as “ … a move by the Father of the Lies that seeks to confuse the children of God.” When I read that in a newspaper on Saturday morning, I couldn’t summon the energy to be offended by it. Father of the Lies? Confusing the children? I’ve read, heard and watched lots of news over the past several years about child molesters that aligns perfectly with those themes. And yet there’s Jorge, wearing one of his finest gowns, spewing forth some trumped up monkey business that’s so hypocritical it’s comical. And to a world that takes the pageant seriously enough to print his words in the newspaper. I am not, by the way, drawing a comparison between child molesters and same-sex marriage. What I am doing is saying that I think it’s laughable that the Catholic church is entitled to a place on the opinion pages when it comes to anything regarding human relationships. That makes as much sense as authorizing me to hand out citations to people caught smoking cigarettes. It’s laughable, so I laughed.

And I recalled a conversation I’d had years ago with a very good friend of mine, who was also raised in a marginally Catholic way. The Catholic church may be evil, she said, but the Protestant ones are mediocre. I hate to generalize, but I tend to agree. And, given a choice, I’d much rather be evil.

Cheap shots

I relish the fact that Obama is the president almost daily. After eight years of W, I think I have the right to enjoy the fact that most of the people in power these days have a good command of the language. But every now and then Obama and his crew say stupid things. When mistakes are made, the conservatives blow them so far out of proportion it’s comical. And the hardcore liberals immediately switch into group think and say things like (and this is a direct quote from a friend of mine so drunk on Obama he’s lost all focus), “Could you do better? If not you should shut up.”

I have no idea if I could do better. What I do know is that I haven’t been elected to public office. I haven’t been appointed to a position of power. But, I do have the password to this here blog, so I’ll say whatever the hell I want until someone takes the keys away and revokes my license.

Once upon a time W referred to “the Internets.” The world gasped at how out of touch the president really was. The term caught on and became a wonderful – I think – little bit of code speak. A few weeks ago Obama was giving a speech and he used the term “Twitters.” I have no idea if he was trying to make fun of W or if he honestly thinks the twits are plural or what, and I really don’t care. What I do care about is the White House’s response: it was the speechwriter’s fault. Seriously, the speechwriter? This guy may be our first social media president, but when it comes to covering his ass he has no problem playing the oldest trick in the book. If something goes wrong, blame the writer. Writers are almost never seen. They’re behind the scenes, generally, a ghost behind the voice and the face, and a really, really easy target when something goes wrong. And if his people are going to resort to that sort of crap, you’d think they’d do it over something that matters a bit more than Twitter. It was a cheap shot, I thought.

Speaking of cheap shots, crammed in among all the basketball nonsense last week, Rahm Emanuel, one of Obama’s most dubious appointees, I think, went on The PBS NewsHour for a chat with Jim Lehrer. A while back, the Obama messaging crew decided that saying “the president has been briefed” on something was better than saying “the president has ordered” something when the time came to muddy the waters of accountability – their word, not mine. Jim Lehrer, as we all might imagine, was having none of it. The Russian spies are being sent back to Russia. Now, Jim Lehrer said, did the president order that? He’s been briefed, Rahm smirked snidely. Jim Lehrer kept on, and on, and on. In spite of the fact that, according to him, he’s one of the most savvy people in Washington, he apparently forgot that Jim Lehrer is not in the entertainment business. As I’ve said, he said. Let me try to explain, he said. To which Jim Lehrer replied, whatever you say.

I lost track of the topics, but each one that came up – and there were many – were received by Jim Lehrer in the same spirit: Did the president approve that? Did the president order that? At one point, Rahm said something along the lines of: finally, after five questions, we’re making progress. This reminds me of conversations I have with my kids! That comment reminded me of two points I’d like to make. First, this is one of the most insidious moves employed by the hot-shit crowd. They derail a conversation, or a project, and then turn around and say – in tone, not words, for they convey precious little substance when you get right down to it – your deficiency is the reason this has required five questions. I’ve seen PR careers built on that strategy, so I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to see that it works in Washington. But the second, more important point I’d like to make is that if his pathetic attempt to not answer really simple questions reminded Rahm of conversations with his kids, he must not be a very good parent.

It got worse. Apparently even Rahm realized his non answers were getting him nowhere. So, after warming up with some gibberish about not meaning any disrespect, he told Jim Lehrer that his questions were outdated. A journalist asking for a straight answer to a very simple question is outdated? Jim Lehrer, whose understanding of Washington certainly eclipses that of everyone at the White House combined and then multiplied a few times, outdated? What a punk. Anyhow, I took that one to heart and did something quite outdated myself. I wrote to the White House, which I had never done before, and said I thought they should avoid making “ageist” comments. The population is aging, I wrote, and it would be a shame to exclude the old folks from the era of hope and change with careless comments made in a lame attempt to save a little face. I haven’t heard back.

Cleveland: a cowardly betrayal

A while back I saw something on television that amazed me. The Portland Trail Blazers – our city’s assemblage of semi-literate ‘role models,’ better known as an NBA franchise – were on their way to the playoffs. A chubby, dough-faced white guy (unemployed, due to ‘these hard economic times’) was interviewed while he stood in line to buy tickets. This is worth it, he said, beaming into the camera, this is important. I’m a big fan of succinct, and this guy, I think, deserves a prize. Using less than 10 words, he explained so much.

With the possible exception of Detroit, Cleveland, if you haven’t been, is the most tragic stage in the U.S. But in tragedy, you can usually find a lot of romance, and in Cleveland I think there are all sorts of love stories. That place, like my own Saint Louis, was not constructed: it was built. To borrow a bit of my father’s phrasing, the infrastructure there is breathtaking. Mile after mile after mile of sturdy, solid, utterly romantic, I think, homage to an age when things were actually made in this country. I don’t believe the politics of the industrial age were any more savory than the politics of today, but man, they sure knew a thing or two about cities. Big cities with big plans. Architecture and urban planning guided by what must have been a sense of optimism the likes of which I’ll never experience.

That’s because we traded it all in to save 49 cents on a box of laundry detergent at WalMart. With nary a question, as best I can tell, we bought the messaging provided by the marketing team about the superiority of cars and cul de sacs and houses with attached garages that can be opened and closed from within the car, making it easy to not know people. In the most astounding betrayal of our ancestors – talk about unpatriotic – we came to regard the ‘inner city’ as a place of danger and risks not worth taking. Riding the bus was for losers, as was sending children to the public school. So was shopping at stores where we knew the people who owned them. We got really, really afraid of black people.

Except, of course, for the ones in uniform. As a confirmed hater of professional sports and its devotees, yesterday was something of a bonanza. We’ve been betrayed, cried the people of Cleveland. He’s abandoned us in an undignified way. He’s turned his back on his people, and his city. He's a coward, bellowed the owner of the team. Oh, shut up. A society that sanctions outsourcing jobs anywhere it can while simultaneously cutting off unemployment benefits, a country that cannot seem to provide adequate healthcare to its poorest people, a country that clearly doesn’t prioritize public education, is at the same time a country that can cough up hundreds of millions of dollars to court – pardon the pun – a basketball player and fuel up a degree of media hype that surprised even a person who expects the worst of these people. Even Katie Couric had a bitchy remark about the whole thing, referring to it as “the audacity of hype.” Of course, given that she devoted a full and uninterrupted 12 minutes to the golfer’s press conference not long ago, she should know. My main gripe with the whole thing, though, has nothing to do with the basketball player. My problem is that a great city’s name is now synonymous with something that should be way beneath it on the scale of dignity. And the people of Cleveland, as has been the case so many times before, have nobody to blame but themselves.

News alert: today it will be hot

This week, I’ve asked myself, out loud more than once, in fact, how on earth my parents managed. On the Fourth of July, which was five days ago, my neighbors and I gathered in the intersection and watched the sky explode around us. Then we went to Safeway for cake and ice cream. Then I came home, took a shower, put on my long underwear and a hoodie and climbed into bed with the Winter blanket lineup still in effect.

If we don’t get up to 100 degrees today, we’ll get very close. Yesterday it was 95, and tomorrow it’s supposed to be 94. It’s July, and our glorious reprieve is over: it’s hot. I’m keeping the house closed until the sun starts to go down this evening. I’m eating salads and drinking more water than I usually do. I’m wearing a tee-shirt, flip flops and shorts. The hoodie is sitting at the top of the laundry basket, an artifact missing its museum.

And I’m wondering how I survived my own childhood. I have no idea what it was like to be an adult in, say, 1970, but I’ve searched my memory and I cannot for the life of me recall even a tiny fraction of the hype we have today about the weather. The power grid on the East Coast is being pushed to its limits. People are having heat strokes, or about to. You should drink water, you should stay out of the sun if at all possible. Drink water, but don’t drink too much water, and the time to drink the water, according to medical editors on two of the networks, so far, is before you’re thirsty. People are dying. Oh no, some people on a boat got thrown overboard yesterday. Wear your life vest! Be careful, whatever you do. Don’t leave the babes – or the dogs – in the car when you run into the grocery store. If you do that, they could die. Last night, the most offensive weather guy in town did his hour-by-hour foolishness to make sure we all knew how ‘uncomfortable’ the evening would be. And this morning, on one of the local news shows, this little gem: your child’s ADD meds could cause some problems during extreme heat.

So today, I’m tuned into a radio station where everything is in Spanish, which I do not speak, read or understand. Therefore, I have no idea how dangerous the territory I’m in is. I hope I make it!

Intriguer

I met a meth addict in Sydney in 2006 who told me her life’s problems could all be explained by the lyrics of one seemingly simple song. “The Crowdies have a song about the weather,” she said. Her name was Laverne. “Heard of it?” Australians – especially Australian women – have the most mesmerizing way of speaking. Once in your life, you need to hear an Australian woman say the word ‘weather.’ Even for a fag, it’s like phone sex … in person. I suppose Australians speak a version of British English, but it’s infused with so much atmosphere, as if words originate not in the vocal chords but in the sky, or perhaps the sea, that it exposes people in the U.K. (not to mention the people in the U.S.) as irreparably tongue deficient.

I assured Laverne that I was indeed familiar with Crowded House. In the early 1990s, in Wisconsin, I went to visit my friend Julie one day. She was recovering from back surgery, recuperating in the dining room that her companion Carolyn had transformed, as only she can do, into a sanctuary of sorts, and at the midst of it, in my memory – which is, of course, not the memory of the person recovering from surgery – was a CD, although it may have been a cassette tape, called Woodface. So here we are, two decades and many continents and CDs later, and I’m in Portland and Julie is in Texas, where Carolyn is waging an all-out war with cancer, so it seems weirdly fitting that the Crowdies have just came out with a new one, called Intriguer.

I bought it this weekend. I cannot recall the last time I bought any brand new music, especially brand new music that hasn’t been out for at least a decade. And in the best way possible, I don’t like it.

I don’t fully understand my adoration for Crowded House. Technically, this band should not be part of my Australia fetish portfolio: the Finn brothers and others are from New Zealand, as so many in Sydney are, but they got their start in Australia. In 2005, the original drummer hung himself from a tree in his front yard in Melbourne. I haven’t put the calculator to work on this one, but it seems that far more words have been devoted to the death of the drummer than to the band’s entire body of music, which I find endearing for some reason. Of course, the band’s music is driven, in large part, by percussion, although it’s a whispery sort of percussion, so maybe the attention paid to his death isn’t just sweet but logical as well. Over the years they’ve recorded and toured with plenty of Australians (and even a few people from the U.S., which surprised me a bit). I probably wouldn’t say this if I were in Auckland, but since I’m in Portland I will say that I have to remind myself that the Crowdies are not, strictly speaking, an Australian band.

Pardon the cliché, but for me listening to most of their songs on all the previous CDs is something like looking at a painting over and over, and seeing something new each time. Or like reading a book you’ve read many times, only to discover entire passages you don’t recall. Most of their songs seem to me to have all kinds of detours that are jarring initially, but somehow, after some time passes, seem like the only way to go. All of their songs, I think, are steeped in unsentimental, magically understated and almost unbearable melancholy. It’s a wonder they aren’t black.

But the most notable aspect of Crowded House, for me, is that it’s taken at least a year to warm up to each of the CDs I own. Intriguer is the fifth in my collection, and it’s no different. I played it a few times over the weekend and didn’t really care for it. It’s inconsistent, veering, as they all do, recklessly in and out of all sorts of incongruent musical neighborhoods in a way that’s hard to follow. But if Intriguer is anything like the others, at some point it will morph, with zero warning, into something I love. The CD Together Alone is the best example of that phenomenon to date and, I think, the band’s best CD. I not only didn’t like it the first hundred or so times I listened to it, I actively disliked it. A lot. And then it all changed. The music shifted: the melodies, the musical incarnation, somehow, of clouds and breeze and waves and shadows and winter-grade sunlight in rooms with sand-colored walls, all of it slathered with heartache, all there in the songs, impossible to miss. My affair with that CD must be what it’s like to meet someone who is intolerable in an endless number of ways, and then find yourself, for reasons that you wouldn’t explain even if you could, marrying him.

I do.

But enough about what I think of Crowded House. Here’s what Neil Finn thinks of Crowded House, taken from a musing on the band’s website on his approach to live performances. “The intention is the same as ever to get the people involved, to hit some heights and leave the songs hanging in the air …” I just wrote seven paragraphs trying to say that.

Anyhow, I dislike Intriguer more than I disliked Together Alone, so my guess is that someday I’ll love it more as well. But for now it’s probably a good thing I’m not a music critic.