Heir pollution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.