Once upon a time

Since the beginning of the year, the main occupier of my time and energy, and my main source of income, has been a gig doing ghost writing for a blog hosted by a corporation whose name we all know. It’s been okay. The people involved have been a bit much, as it must be when working with those on the verge of saving the world, but it’s been regular income and, should I be inspired to look elsewhere, a source of very current writing samples. It’s also been a gold mine of opportunity for me when it comes to practicing how to deal with people. One of the things I’ve been practicing is to counteract my gut instinct to say yes, to accommodate by going along and, in the process, avoid uncomfortable conversations. So I’m learning to say no without thinking about it. With no as a starting point, I can then make concessions one at a time … or not. For me, for some reason, it’s easier to go from no to yes than it is to start at yes and move gradually to no. I knew this project was coming to an end when I was not invited to participate in a meeting to discuss, among other things, “future directions.” When I receive bad news I usually react on a physical level. It’s as if every cell in my body stops, and the stillness becomes not exactly painful, but not exactly comfortable either, so I think it would have been irresponsible of me to not notice that when I was told – directly, voice to voice – that this gig was coming to an end, my body did not ingest the information as bad news.

Instead, my body and my mind drifted back to a night in the summer of 1969 or 1970. It’s a long, long story, but here are the bare bones of it. A tavern across a creek from the town where I grew up was robbed. A few people were killed. The men who robbed the tavern got away on foot. As the entire town exploded with the scream of sirens and the blinding, blinding searchlights from the helicopters overhead, one of my brothers hid in a ditch beside the railroad tracks as two of the killers ran past. My one brother’s perilous whereabouts were revealed to my parents by another one of my brothers, who fled the instant he heard gunshots and ran back to the house. My mother was on the phone with the police in the kitchen, describing my brother. “Please do not shoot my son,” I heard my mother say. I was four years old, maybe five. I was at the foot of the front stairs as our house filled with so much light that I could see fear on my father’s face, an expression I would never see again in this lifetime. My brothers had had one of their backyard campouts that night – their last, as it turned out. Once our parents were asleep they’d jumped the fence and crossed the creek and gone to collect golf balls that were shot out of the driving range, which was right beside the tavern. My entrepreneurial brothers would then sell the golf balls back to the range manager in the morning. But not that time.

That night was but the beginning of a story that is a living and breathing entity to this day. If the town I grew up in were a surface of glass-smooth water, that night was like a stone, dropped in from directly overhead. The ripples, though smaller with time perhaps, are eternal. And since today is my last day of regimented employment for a while, I’m going to force myself, or try to, to put that story on paper.

Dancing on television

My least favorite human trait is hypocrisy. It’s my least favorite trait in others, and it’s my least favorite trait in myself. So, after all my ranting and raving about mindless television, imagine how embarrassing and humiliating it is for me to admit this. On Monday night I parked my ass on the couch and watched Dancing with the Stars. And on Tuesday night I parked it in the exact same spot and altered my bathing schedule in order to find out which couple had its invitation to return revoked.

And what’s worse is that I enjoyed pretty much every minute of it.

What a weirdly intriguing show. For those of you who don’t know, it goes like this. Several ‘stars’ are paired up with professional dancers. The couple is introduced to the audience via clips from the sessions when the pro tries his or her best to transform the star into a presentable dancer. Then, pair by pair, they come out on stage, everyone applauds, and the dancing begins. After the dance, the couple goes face to face with three judges, who offer their words of encouragement or ridicule. Then the couple goes backstage and chats a bit with a slightly snide woman wearing an evening gown and tons of makeup. Then the judges give their scores, which are added up for an overall score. Then the woman in the evening gown announces the number viewers can call or text to vote for that particular couple (that part was confusing, because I’m not sure which scores – the judges’ or the callers’ – are used to determine which couple leaves. Maybe it’s a combination of the two.) Then, after a commercial break, the next couple.

It’s easy for me to blame this all on my friend John, who says he does not watch television but has been talking about this show since July, and so I will. “Margaret Cho is going to be on, and so is Florence Henderson, and Bristol goddamn Palin,” he’s said, many times. And they all were. Florence Henderson was surprisingly trashy, I thought. Equally surprising was Bristol, who was introduced as, I believe, a teen activist, or advocate, and was – I hate to type this – glamorous. Margaret Cho talked about her weight problem and her mommy. She made her angry Asian emperor face during her performance and, in a maneuver that probably required more skill than any of the evening’s dance moves, fell right out of her partner’s arms during their Viennese waltz and crash landed on the stage. Although the judges did not concur with me, I thought the fall was fantastic.

As long as I’m confessing, here’s another: as much as I rail on dumb jocks and pro sports, oh boy, the football player and the basketball player. The football player – Curt, or Kurt, somebody or other – had his dance partner come to his house to meet his family prior to his training. There was something charming about that, I thought. There was something charming about his dancing as well. I’ll bet he’s polite in the bedroom, or the locker room. The basketball player was even better. He’s tall to an extent that looked grotesque in the footage from the training with his partner. But, when these two took to the stage, it worked. I don’t consider myself a critic but when I was watching him I thought, man, that guy stands up straight – he resembled a very erotic crucifix at one point during his performance – so I was pretty pleased with myself when the judges oo-ed and ahhh-ed over, among other things, his posture. I cannot recall his first name, but his last name, aptly enough, is Fox.

Sacred territory

I’ve admitted many times how wrong I was about making marriage the centerpiece of the war between gay people and the heterosexuals. When the issue first surfaced, I thought it was a bad idea. Why, I wondered, must we imitate rather than invent? Why, I wondered, are we so desperate to look like everyone else? And why, I wondered, do we want any part of a tradition so riddled with fault lines? Here is my answer: because it makes a lot of publically heterosexual people with a lot of power and a lot of money really, really uncomfortable. Which I think is great.

But when it comes to the stupidness about being allowed to get a job with the military, I’m sticking, pardon the pun, to my guns. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the hearts, minds and checkbooks of homos across the land with a phrase that became, to me, as annoying as a fly buzzing around the bathroom while I’m trying to shave: gays in the military. Remember that one? That was quickly replaced with “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” the then-new president’s tactic of, by pretending to accommodate two opposing viewpoints, in the end accommodates no one but himself in service of a very short-term and short-sighted (in my opinion) goal. You homos are welcome to benefits of a gig with the military, this non-resolution said, as long as you don’t talk about it, or get caught. That line of thought was articulated and has been enforced, at a cost of $600 million so far, by allegedly heterosexual men. More interestingly, I think, is that it’s the most apt and concise articulation I’ve ever heard of how gay men are expected to behave: be sneaky, and do your business in the dark, and don’t ever, ever talk about it. Gay women, as we all know, are a different story. The puritan enforcers prefer the manifestations of their sexuality very much asked about, and told about, and written about and, if possible, shown.

Anyhow, many homos I know were outraged in 1993 when Bill Clinton took the art of degrading the language to a new level. Though laughable, I thought his post-election reversal made a lot of sense. That’s because the military has the fire power. For those of you who read this blog who are younger than others, Jesse Helms said during an interview shortly after Clinton’s swearing in that he could not guarantee the new president’s safety were he to come to North Carolina, where there are a lot of military bases and a lot of the people who run them. Seriously – the conversation was at that level in 1993, and it’s there today.

On Tuesday it was interesting to read not that a bunch of election-focused legislators “took a stand” against repealing Clinton’s double talk from the last century, but the comments that were made about it. Traitors! Where’s Obama? What about our ‘fierce advocate’? (That’s what Obama calls himself when there’s a sufficient amount of homo money in the room where he’s speaking. Being as susceptible to coercion via flattery as heterosexuals, many of us still fall for it.)

In 1993, I thought that if people insist upon sending their heterosexual (presumed) sons and daughters (though mostly sons) off to get shot up and maimed and disfigured physically and otherwise in order to have a corner on bragging rights of having “served” our country, why the hell are we arguing? And now, even though it’s 2010, I thought the same thing. You want the military? Although – as is the case with marriage – there are certainly benefits to be had in exchange for what you give up with your signature, you can have it. Besides, as far as I can tell, the military is already pretty gay as it is. Come to think of it, if the personal ads are any indication, so is marriage.

God makes a touchdown

My mother thought television was a profoundly bad idea, so for most of my youth we didn’t have one. But every now and then one of my brothers would find a cast off and drag it home, and when that happened we watched the news. In those days, in Saint Louis, the news consisted mainly of two things: murders and baseball. Saint Louis was, for many years, the murder capitol of the world, which was, oddly enough, a source of local, homegrown pride. So too were the Cardinals. I’m not a sports fan by any means, but those guys did have a certain panache. By contrast, when the owner of the football team (also called the Cardinals) started making demands about either reconfiguring Busch Stadium or building his team a brand new one, and when those demands fell on truly flat ears, the team moved to Arizona, and nobody really cared.

Last night I watched the local news in Portland.

A dog survived in a car that tumbled down a steep hill and into Crater Lake. For context, even though the city and the state are facing deplorable economic conditions and everything that goes along with them, the local news in Portland almost always features an animal video. Not long ago a zebra broke out of its quarters and took to the streets of Sacramento, and, in Alabama, there was a monkey who had been trained to ride on the back of a dog and run a race in the state fair. “So irresistible,” said the anchorwoman, whose voice is the auditory equivalent of a rash. The dog story last night, while infuriating, was at least local.

The other story last night that caught my attention – primarily because of the disproportionate amount of time dedicated to it – had all the elements: football, tears and God, lots and lots of God. Recently a high school football star made “the play of his life” (at 18!) and then collapsed on the field. A cardiac nurse emerged from the stands and got to work on him. Yesterday he had surgery, after which the coach did a press conference where he announced that the boy’s recovery, which is expected to be quite rapid, is nothing short of a miracle. I could almost hear the pages in the hymnals turning slowly, and when I looked up from the television, it was as if the windows in my living room had been replaced, mysteriously, with stained glass. It was not enough to simply waste minutes allocated to news with the nonsense about the boy’s surgery going well. First, there was footage from the actual game with a recap of the play and the incident. Then, footage, post-trauma but pre-surgery, of the kid at a subsequent game, where the cardiac nurse was introduced as, you guessed it, a hero. The quarterback came out to the field and he and his heroic nurse embraced before the cheering crowd of football enthusiasts. “That’s when the tears really started flowing,” said the voiceover, in case you missed it.

It got better. First, the quarterback, confessing, with a sparkle in his eye, that he’s always felt that “someone” is watching over him. Then, the coach, who said the boy has a certain aura, a certain glow, as if he’s special and he’s protected. And then, the grand finale, or, in baseball parlance, the home run: the nurse! She too believes that the whole thing was God’s handiwork! “I just had a feeling that I was meant to be there that night,” she said.

The special advisor

I guess it’s kind of sort of perhaps maybe a good thing that there were rumors sailing around yesterday from anonymous sources that Elizabeth Warren is going to be appointed not as the head of the new consumer protection branch of the federal government, but as a special advisor to the Treasury Department charged with getting this new agency up and running. Among people I know only via television and the Internets, Elizabeth Warren is one of my favorites. She’s a total bitch with the big boys when it comes to trying to balance the books. When she was asked, on camera, where the TARP money had actually gone, she said, simply, “I don’t know.” Timothy Geithner, on the other hand, is one of my least favorite people from that realm. As the head of the Treasury, I can think of no more blatant example of how far one can go in this country on inherited privilege than Timothy Geithner. As the person appointed to oversee TARP, Elizabeth Warren openly and frequently criticized him for not showing up at meetings. Now he’s going to be her boss. That could make for some interesting television, certainly, but I don’t quite buy Obama’s comments about putting Elizabeth Warren in the role of special advisor rather than head honcho due to the urgency of the business at hand. The work is important, he’s said, and there’s no time for a drawn-out confirmation process. In fact, I don’t buy it at all. I think what’s going on is a typical instance of Democrats screwing up what could otherwise be a golden opportunity. Imagine Elizabeth Warren taking a seat at the witness table. Bring your questions and comments, boys and girls. If any elected official wants to ridicule and humiliate someone for demanding to know where tax dollars are being spent, and on what, hell, let them. In fact, there’s the soundtrack for the campaign commercials.  It would be great, except that I’m dreaming, of course. The problem is that Elizabeth Warren cuts both ways. She goes after Democrats who have cozy relationships with the money with the same fervor she unleashes on Republicans. Unlike the two go-alongs Obama has appointed to the big court thus far, I doubt a confirmation hearing starring Elizabeth Warren would have at its center sentimental, schmaltzy recollections of holiday dinners and the importance of good, old-fashioned parenting. And that could cause problems for lots of people who claim the banking industry must be brought under control, including the president himself. In spit of all his tough talk, he is as beholden as anyone in Washington to the banks, including the top contributor to his 2008 campaign, Goldman Sachs. That could make things a bit awkward, I suppose.

Flashing Tolstoy

For quite a while now I’ve wanted to start or join a book group. I’ve tried these in the past and each time, after reading two, perhaps three books – and I mean really reading them, from the first page to the last – the groups have disintegrated into chat clubs focused not on the book but on the reasons why each person didn’t get around to reading it. It’s great to socialize, I think, but over the past two years I’ve read a lot of books and it would be nice to talk about them with others who have read them as well. I’ve half-heartedly searched for a book group, but usually they’re either focused on authors or genres I’m not interested in (science fiction) or they meet in far-flung suburban places at times that don’t work for me.

So a couple of Mondays ago I powered up my computer on a fine, cool morning and saw that I had an e-mail from my sister in Oklahoma. My sister in Oklahoma does not send e-mails – it overwhelms her, she says – and when she does, she doesn’t bother with the subject line. So I assumed someone had died, or was about to. I poured myself another cup of coffee. Then I read the bargain fare mail from Southwest Airlines, and Apartment Therapy, and a couple of others. Then, my sister: we’re dropping emma off at college next week so i’ll be sad for a while. do you want to read war & peace?

I am a snob. I know I’m a snob. I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m a snob. But, before I go any further, I want to say that my siblings and I are not the sort of people who go around dropping Tolstoy into casual conversation. What happened was that I started reading Anna Karenina - a book I wrote a paper on in college even though I had not read it - at my sister’s house earlier this year. That was when she told me that she’d just finished reading it herself, but that she’d read the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the current rock stars of the Russian literature set. “It was just, just wonderful,” she told me. I liked it well enough when I finished it nearly three months later. But over the summer, I returned to novels by authors who used naming conventions I could easily understand. I read The Corrections, East of Eden, Look Homeward Angel, two novels by Flannery O’Connor. I fell in love a little bit with a novelist named Ian McEwan, a British writer whose work is said to elicit a sense of “serene tension.” I agree. At the bookstore, I leafed through the Prevear and Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina and thought about giving it a go, but I wasn’t that moved by the story to read it twice. As I put the book back I saw the darlings of the translation world’s version of War and Peace on the shelves. It’s hard to miss. Described by Henry James as a “large loose baggy monster,” War and Peace is more than 1,200 large pages long. The print’s not fine but it’s not big either. Me, I thought as I walked away from the “T” aisle, intimidated by size. There is a first for everything.

The first War and Peace get together, which will happen on Sunday afternoon, will include not only my sister in Oklahoma but the one in Saint Louis as well, who I believe has forced herself beyond the second thoughts she had after reading through the list of main characters, each of whom has no fewer than four names, which are used in differing orders depending upon the social and/or military context of the scene and who is addressing whom, and most of which are variants of Alexander, Nicholas, Boris, Natalie, Natasha, Anna and Julia. Sometimes, just to keep it interesting I presume, the characters are referred to by their title only, such as the count, or the princess, or the empress. We’re going to have our get together using what I call the cheap person’s conference call system: the flash key. I’ll call Saint Louis. Once my sister is on, I’ll hit the flash key and, after the beeping dial tones, I’ll dial Oklahoma. Then, when my sister there is on, I’ll hit flash again, and we’ll all be connected. All six of us perfected this method when we were planning our mother’s memorial service five years ago. This time, though, whether we stick to Russia or delve into marital issues instead remains to be seen.

The Jack Johnson problem

Like most people, I presume, my mind contains all kinds of tangents that fly around without clear direction. Usually, much like my dreams, they do not connect into anything cohesive. But sometimes they do, and on Thursday morning, two of them did: Jack Johnson and New Orleans.

When I moved to Portland in 1994, there was a radio station I’m tempted to call magical. It was at the upper end of the dial. The hosts were a definite presence but they weren’t obnoxious. Pardon this cliché, and it’s a really bad one at that, but I felt like I knew them. Interestingly, I think, many people who visited me in Portland in those years commented on the station’s unlikely yet very likable mix of music. The station, for me, demystified music a little. Typically, when I hear a song I like enough to go out and buy the CD, I often discover three or four songs on the CD that I like better than the one I heard originally, which always makes me wonder why stations don’t play more than one or two tracks. This radio station did.

But it doesn’t anymore. I tuned in and out over the past several years. I latched on to other stations from time to time; I started not getting out of bed until 10 minutes before I needed to leave for work. Things changed, of course, including the station. I tuned back in a few months ago and I am very, very saddened to report that the station once commented on by out-of-towners as ‘interesting’ could not be any more non-interesting if it tried.

The reason, I think, is simple: Jack Johnson. Even though there is a world of amazing music out there waiting to be heard, this station plays Jack Johnson as if he were the nipple upon which our survival depends. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is I loathe about the music of Jack Johnson, and here’s my attempt to articulate. It’s dumbed down. It is not imaginative, or lyrical, or whimsical. It’s dull and repetitive. The way he sings reminds me of the way semi-literate jocks talk (Jack Johnson is a surfer, I believe). The way he sings reminds me of whiney, about-to-be obese white guys in their 30s or 40s who cling to how cool they were, or believed they were, in high school or college, even though they’re clearly no longer on any counts. The way he sings reminds me of the white guy who must be his musical godfather, Dave Matthews.

Which brings me to New Orleans. I was dumbfounded by the report from New Orleans on Thursday morning. Personally, I consider New Orleans the crown jewel of our country's culture. I think the collison of time and geography is that city is stunning. Matt Lauer, of course, was not there to report on anything related to that, but to report on – and this should come as no surprise – the football game. Standing in Jackson Square, the Jack Johnson of network news (mentally, anyhow) was backed up by the cheerleaders, who did a rendition of that utterly retarded ‘who dat?’ stupidness and waved their gold pom-poms. There was a picture of some football player holding his young son up during or after the game – “so emotional,” Matt Lauer said as the screen filled with a pretty unremarkable image – and guess what: he’s going to do it again! This, I thought sadly, is what we see and hear when we see and hear the great city of New Orleans. Football. But it got worse. There is a concert taking place before the big game, and headlining this concert is Taylor Swift and Dave Matthews. Completely ignoring the Taylor Swift issue, that’s one of the most pathetic things I’ve heard in a good long while. What sort of sensibility would it take, I wondered, to even conceive of a Dave Matthews concert in New Orleans? Portland I can understand – we like ‘em white and smug here – but New Orleans? When people say ‘post-hurricane New Orleans’ is this the type of thing they’re talking about? Which got me wondering about Jack Johnson, and that led to the radio station, and that, ultimately, led to me hitting the power button on the remote and turning the television off for the morning.