Self Interview

A couple of weeks ago I was approached by the good people at Jet Magazine to do an interview regarding the "Influence of Blogging in Black America." For reasons that are unimportant the offer was ultimately withdrawn, but I decided to continue with the interview (without the needless distraction of another person) for the edification of all involved; and, perhaps, humanity at large.





Steve (with an affected British accent): Don't you think that the idea of interviewing yourself on your own blog is frankly masturbatory, even by your own promiscuously liberal standards?

Steve: Yes, but I haven't written anything in nearly a year and am starting to worry about losing my creative mojo.

Steve: Yes, but that implies that you once had a creative mojo. Is that necessarily true?

Steve: Are you going to use that accent for this whole thing?

Steve: Don't deflect.

Steve: I don't know if I can assess myself accurately, but I think I've got some game.

Steve: Right, but isn't that the very reason that the internet is full to overflowing with the lunatic ramblings of everyone who has some spare time and $17 a month for a DSL? Because they believe they have some game?

Steve: Sure, but I treat it as a lark. It's just a fun way to play with some ideas I have that don't fit anywhere else.


Steve: But by treating it as a lark aren't you merely trying to protect yourself against potential criticism?

Steve: Probably. But it is just a blog.

Steve: Well, what about your music?

Steve: What about my music?

Steve: Haven't you kept your music hidden for similar reasons?

Steve: Right now I am in the process of getting my music out through a band that I am in.

Steve: Yeah, but what are you? Forty-seven?

Steve: I'm Forty-three.

Steve: Same thing. What the readers of Jet would like to know...

Steve: This isn't for Jet anymore.

Steve: I know, just go with me. What the readers of Jet would like to know is: What took you so long? And...

Steve: Can I answer?

Steve: AND.... Are you sure you are even going to be able to do what you say without making an abortion out of the whole thing?

Steve: I'll answer the second question first. No. As far as your other question, I was hoping that upon my death people would discover the songs on my computer and, Emily Dickinson style, preserve and praise them throughout human history.

Steve: Jesus Fucking Christ!

Steve: You asked.

Steve: I know, but isn't that just a slightly more elaborate way of indulging your cowardice? When you are dead, there won't be a you there to appreciate any praise OR to be hurt by any indifference.

Steve: Well, like I said, I'm trying to get it out there now.

Steve: And what is your assessment of your music?

Steve: I think it is unique, strong, and maybe a little too idiosyncratic.

Steve: Really?

Steve: I can't lie to you.

Steve: Sure you can. You do it all the time.

Steve: I stand by my assessment.

Steve: Fair enough. So, how is your love life?

Steve: Calm. Sporadic.

Steve: By love I mean sex.

Steve: Calm. Sporadic.

Steve: Do I really need to push you on this?

Steve: It's like the old AA saying. One is too much, ten thousand isn't enough.

Steve: Cute. But I suspect that you just can't stand the fact that other actual people are just more difficult to manage, and to understand, than the energetic, free-thinking, lesbians that you conjure in your mind.

Steve: Well, they aren't true lesbians, but I get your drift. I think there is an innate fear of people within me that seems to be connected with my innate loathing of them.

Steve: And, by extension, your innate loathing of yourself?

Steve: Ha, sure, a little. It is more of an ambivalence. I don't know what to make of my unconscious mind or its role in my decision making processes. I mean, if I am not in control of my own actions then what hope do I have with a largely indifferent, if not hostile, universe?

Steve: You mean like the tooth thing in that book?

Steve: Exactly.

Steve: The readers might not know what we are talking about.

Steve: It doesn't matter.

Steve: OK. You are clearly not going to elaborate on this any further. Do you have a philosophy of life?

Steve: I'm glad you asked. This is how I see human existence. Picture the...

Steve: Yeah, you've been waiting for this the whole time. I hate it when you do that to me.

Steve: It was your idea.

Steve: Go on.

Steve: This is it. Picture the most impossibly cute little girl that you could ever imagine, (beautiful clear eyes, a white dress, a warm carefree laugh) and know that every single day, without exception, she shits.

Steve: And what am I supposed to make of that?

Steve: That that is what we are. It is the best we can hope to be. Creatures capable of such astounding beauty, poignancy, resonance and joy, and that all of it is deformed by our inability to come to terms with the sheer brutal fact of our animal nature; the pustules and dark thoughts, the vulnerability in the hands of capricious circumstance, the directionless void, both internal and external, the...

Steve: If you start quoting Nietzsche, this interview is over.

Steve: I made my point.

Steve: Right. Then why don't you kill yourself?

Steve: It might hurt.

Steve: Don't be glib.

Steve: Well, in a way I am. I am just taking the long route. I took up smoking, I drink like a Russian nanny, my diet consists primarily of cheesecake and chicken skin, and my financial acumen is hopeless to the point of folly. But there are conflicting impulses. I still play tennis, write songs, and go out every day thinking that I might run into somebody who will let me put my penis in their vagina.

Steve: And you just got paid.

Steve: Yes! Of course I'll end up buying several trombones which I will accidentally ding up and then have to sell, at a tremendous markdown, sometime near the end of the month so that I can feed myself.

Steve: Also, I can think of at least one person who will think that your take on drinking is a gross rationalization.

Steve: He might be right, but without rationalization I would have been gone long ago.

Steve: Which is another rationalization.

Steve: See? You're getting it.

Steve: Just a couple of other questions. What do you think of birds?

Steve: I hate them.

Steve: Do you also genuinely hate midgets?

Steve: No, I'm just happier when they are not around.

Steve: What's the deal with your fascination with pubic hair?

Steve: I have no idea.

Steve: Any regrets?

Steve: I have eleven regrets.

Steve: Thank you.

Steve: Thank you.

Yet Another Day

Anthony is a typical nine year old. He has a deep fascination with Star Wars, bodily functions, and Bakugan. He talks to himself out loud as he plays with his Legos; he blushes and stammers when you mention his crush on Valeria; he can make a sword out of anything; and he is late for his bus.

Anthony likes the bus, even when he doesn't get to sit next to Noah, and it's even better when he gets a window seat.The fifteen minute ride is a giddy mix of laughter, name calling, Pokemon card exchange, profanity (both real and imagined), Velcro rips, and coughing; but, as the bus pulls into the parking lot, the mood changes dramatically.

Principal X is already outside, with his bullhorn, shouting suggestions to the children on how they might more efficiently move from the bus to their classrooms. Anthony ignores these useful suggestions (walk, don't talk, let's go, right to class) and heads straight for the bathroom. He doesn't have to go, but the boys can usually squeeze in a pretty good water fight before class. The door is locked. It turns out that the custodian is absent again and the bathroom doors will remain closed for a while. Now Anthony has to go.

First thing you notice about room 16 is that every square inch of wall is covered. There are number lines, class rules, punctuation cartoons, poems about responsibility and squirrels, target words, the Denelian alphabet, and countless references to state standards; large, incomprehensible, and showing a lack of imagination that would make Soviet Russia blush.

Anthony is barely in his seat when Principal X's voice comes over the loud speaker. He is reminding teachers that it is no longer enough that the child is in the classroom when the bell rings but that they must be seated. Any child not seated should be marked tardy and sent to the office. This is a relatively new rule and, when combined with the wrought iron gate that surrounds the perimeter of the school, gives the place a warm, prisony feel.

Anthony's school takes the 'Vitamin C' approach to teaching. You see, at some point in our history a group of aging hippies decided that it was a good idea to inundate their bodies with massive doses of vitamin c; the premise being that there couldn't possibly be too much of this particular good thing. Shortly thereafter some actual scientists took a look at this idea and found that the body can, in reality, only absorb so much and then quite reasonably discards what it can't use in the form of waste.

The corollary is that every minute of every school day is accounted for, apportioned, and meticulously filled. The white boards of all the teachers have the day mapped out, in that unnervingly precise script that they all seem to possess, according to the chunks of time that are to be devoted to each activity. This is the type of approach that appeals to frustrated, half-bright adults who have long since forgotten what it was like to be a child. The fact that this accumulation of activities, and whatever knowledge they are designed to impart, far exceeds the saturation point of any child is utterly lost on these bureaucratically conditioned go-getters. They are also oblivious to the form of waste that this tact will ultimately produce, while the children seem to have some fairly clear ideas.

Miss D spends three minutes going over the difference between right and left, and adjusting the children's hands, before launching into the Pledge of Allegiance. Anthony was going to sneak the word 'poop' in, but Cassie was watching and she always tattles. Miss D is in a foul mood because they just added a mandatory meeting after school and this, combined with her two other scheduled meetings, will put her squarely in the jaws of rush hour traffic. She is very worried about having a job next year.

Anthony stares at a large, orange reading book entitled: Delights. He is supposed to read a story about a sad dog that doesn't appreciate a healthy diet. In the end the dog is rehabilitated, with the help of some of some wise gophers, and all is well. Anthony thinks he liked it, but trying to translate it into a "story hill" makes his neck hurt. And why wouldn't it? A story hill is just the latest in a long line of well intentioned gimmicks that seem designed to be as unengaging as humanly possible. They are also noticeably ephemeral. Three years ago classrooms were filled with chatter about "text to self" and "text to text" references and three years from now there will probably be multi-colored orangutans spouting various phonemes to the tune of Who let the Dogs Out? in high-def; and, still, no one will know what the hell is going on.

The principal's voice comes over the loud speakers again. He lets everyone know that, although it has been raining a little, they will still have outdoor recess. The children cheer and don't seem to hear as the principal goes on. "So, be careful out there. It is wet and I don't want to see anybody running or jumping or playing on the grass or any of the play structures or with a ball or rope of any kind. Have fun."

For the last three days Elijah has brought a dirty plastic Safeway bag filled with Cheetos and red licorice that his step-father, who clearly hadn't read the story about the sad dog and wise gophers, had prepared for him. He and Anthony quickly gorge until they become dizzy and short of breath and take on the appearance of prom-bound oompa loompas. Then the bell rings and they line up.

In elementary school, no ritual is as reverently observed as that of the class line. The process of getting children into, and then maintaining, a line has taken on all the earmarks of a cargo cult fetish replete with solemn incantation (Is this a line? This is not a line. Is this a line?) and human sacrifice (OK Brenda, go to the office. You will not destroy my line.) And so the children are marched off to Excel.

Excel is one of the many acronym laden programs that teachers are supposed to use in place of actual teaching. They are ubiquitous. They are adored. They are also big business and have mission statements like:


C1. Students will access, use and communicate information from a variety of technologies.
Division 1 1.1 access and retrieve appropriate information from electronic sources for a specific inquiry
1.2 process information from more than one source to retell what has been discovered
Division 2 2.2 organize information gathered from the Internet, or an electronic source, by selecting and recording the data in logical files or categories; and by communicating effectively, through appropriate forms, such as speeches, reports and multimedia presentations, applying information technologies that serve particular audiences and purposes.

Much money changes hands and the perpetually bewildered feel productive, but, functionally, these programs are to teaching what a suit of armor is to bowling; painful and irrelevant.

Mrs. G is the mean teacher and when she hears any noise above a whisper she makes an explosive noise that sounds very much like a chicken swallowing a cat. Anthony is terrified of her and, consequently, of math. She also has a gift for making the merely dull seem overwhelmingly complicated. At the end of Excel, her white board is a confusion of arrows, double arrows, sweeping X and O covered arcs, and incomprehensible symbols that have been semi-erased and smeared across basic addition problems. Anthony breathes easier as he leaves her room.

Lunch. For those of you who are old enough, who may remember drive-in movie theaters and the heat-lamped delicacies that awaited you during intermission; you have some idea. For those of you who have had the good fortune to stay at one of our many correctional facilities; you have an exact idea. To spend any more time making fun of the food would be like beating Rush Limbaugh to death with a chainsaw; temporarily fun, but a little too easy and ultimately unnecessary. Suffice it to say that Anthony picked at his half frozen taco pocket for a couple of minutes and then downed a pint of chocolate milk and bolted out for recess.

One nice touch is that teachers have taken to posting standardized test results on the wall. The students are divided into five categories: far below basic, below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced. The student numbers are placed into the column that reflects their testing proficiency. There is one chart for math and one for language arts. Orwell would appreciate the 'language arts' touch; Anthony does not. His number is below basic on math and basic on the other. Even though it is just his number, he knows that every body else knows whose number is whose. If asked, he would tell you he feels defeated.

Miss D is in a much better mood. Her late meeting was rescheduled and the girl's decided it would be a good day for happy hour at Aqui's. She is now in the process of trying to describe the Civil War but becomes flustered when she can't remember whether the North was in favor of or against slavery. Last week she said that the San Francisco Bay was no deeper than five feet at any point. Anthony looks over at Mr. S, the guy who works with the wheel chair kids, and tries to make something of his cringing, angry body language.


The rest of the school day is a blur of not doing art, or music, or having time to digest what one is supposed to have learned. He vaguely remembers attending an assembly, something on the dangers of dodgeball, that was presented by a colorful group of smiling neuters, but can't remember if it happened on that day or another. After school, there is the indignity of homework club and the forced frivolity of KidPlay, and then the late bell rings, adrenaline courses through his veins, and he is back on the bus.

Anthony gets home around 4:00 pm. A thing called a lunchable is on the kitchen counter. It consists of three circular pads of half baked dough that can be covered with ketchup, cheese, and raw pepperoni, to simulate pizza. It also comes with a raisin box sized container of juice, a bag of skittles, and a coupon for Flintstones chewable vitamins.

Anthony puts a disc into his Xbox 360, sits down in front of the TV, and earnestly sets about killing everything that comes across his path.

The Chick Magnet Gene and a Less Fortunate Mutation

You know the guy. He enters a room and woman of all ages begin to lean, unconsciously, toward him. As he moves through the party a constellation of the bolder ones break off from their minor satellites and fall into orbit around him. There is hissing and jostling for space. Phone numbers pour from the girl's mouths and the end result usually requires a hot shower. And it all seems so effortless.

Perhaps it is. According to the Indiana Institute's Journal for Genetic Understanding, Dr. Wolfram Parky has isolated a gene, designated cm435, that she feels contributes to a male human's innate seductiveness. She studied several hundred Malaysian chinchillas, some with the gene altered or removed, and came up with some startling results. The chinchillas who had the gene removed became: "Forlorn, self obsessed, obese, lethargic, and displayed unusual aggression. That is until confronted by the unaltered chinchillas, after which they sulked off to a distant corner, nervously rocking back and forth."

In the human realm, it is interesting to note that the effectiveness of cm435 is not limited by any sociological or economic strata. Nor is it the exclusive realm of those waifish, antiseptic magazine boys who exude an aura of having, long ago, been neutered and who appear to have been carved out of bars of Ivory soap by a cabal of silken-gloved albino virgins.

I know a guy (NC) who has above average looks and a superabundance of charm, but who is unlikely to ever find himself gracing the covers of Tiger Beat or Outdoor Male. Still, he has the gene, and I have yet to enter, with him, any room in America that didn't include several old flames, a multitude of potential fires, and at least a handful of random smoldering embers that flit by merely to breath in his essence. He says things to women at bars that, were I to say them would have them frantically lunging for their cans of mace as they shrieked the word "RAPE!" He's got the gene, alright.

No biological endowment is entirely free of its reciprocal flaws, however. In the course of her investigations, Dr. Parky observed a small sampling of individual chinchillas who had a very different attractive force. They preferred to spend most of their time alone, but when placed into a group cage they would invariably elicit the attention of the infirm or disturbed chinchillas. Dr. Parky was able to identify this characteristic as being the result of a mutation in the cm435 gene. She dubbed it cm435a and noted that it afflicts approximately .002% of the population.

As it happens, I have this gene; in fucking spades. I can't so much as enter a busy grocery store without the eyes of the unstable being ineluctably drawn to me. I often know that they are there from a tingling sensation that starts at the base of my spine and radiates out toward my extremities. I'll be casually thumping a cantaloupe when, several aisles away, I catch sight of a pair of pleading, misunderstood eyes. I know this person MUST speak to me. I grab my basket and circle through the store, backtracking and creating false trails, the way they taught me in Ranger school, and wend my way to the cashier only to find that he is right behind me. His hand placed upon my shoulder he begins to tell me... what? Whatever.

An actual incident should elucidate this problem. I used to go to a bar on Wednesdays before a lesson I had to give. This bar has an outdoor patio for smokers and is usually filled with people. It is big enough, so I can usually find a seat at a small table, alone, and out of the line of vision of people exiting the bar. Even though it is a sweltering July day, I have on a hooded sweatshirt, hood up, gloves, a pair of dark glasses, an Ipod with the earbuds conspicuously extending from my ears, my phone open in my left hand, a book open in my right, and the body language of a wounded badger.

I see her enter the patio and my spine begins to vibrate. She is, maybe, fifty, in a full trench coat, with disheveled hair and an unsteady gait. Moving through the crowd she reaches my table and, standing before me, mouths something that I can't hear through my blasting earbuds. I take them off and say, "Huh?"

"Well? What's it going to be? You gonna ask me to sit down?"

I am neither sober enough nor drunk enough to interpret her question and so I motion for her to sit. She does so, sitting at an angle that allows her to hover uncomfortably over the table, but she says nothing. Just as I am about to reach for the earbuds she reaches across the table and grabs my hand. She starts talking, very fast, in oddly syncopated rhythms, all 7/8 and 13/2, but I can't take my eyes of the medical bracelet that is on her, now, exposed wrist.

I'm locked out of my apartment. Can you help me get in?

What about your landlord?

He hates me. They all do, really. But not you.

I don't know how I can help.

You can break the window. You can crawl through the window. You can unlock the door. You can let me in. Do you like casserole?

Huh?

I won't have any of it, you know?

By this time the alcohol was doing its thing and I was beginning to appreciate her tempos. I bought her a drink and confronted her about the bracelet (gout/dizziness/misunderstanding) and sent her on her way. Not a typical encounter, but not atypical either. I've got the gene, alright.

And so it goes. Pinballing and careening through life, attracting and repelling in haphazard fashion, based on the whim of some very small chemical elements. What else are they determining? Well, like the man in the book says, they don't really determine much of anything; life is far too complicated for that. Human beings are too messy and nature is too messy and we really seem to be just along for the ride. And if that crazy woman was hot then this would have been a different story. Maybe.

Context, Accountability, and Fear in Elementary School Education

Will someone please think of the children?
-Helen Lovejoy

What I want is to be able to enter a classroom and hear a teacher starting a sentence and then to enter the classroom next door and hear the other teacher finishing it.
-an actual administrator who works for the C.U.S.D.



It is always the same. The parking lot is a miniature Calcutta filled with still-running cars parked at all angles and surrounded by a cacophonous din of anxiety and confusion. Elephantine parents rage through the hallways dragging their listless vacant-eyed children behind them, occasionally pausing to shoot me a look that practically screams: "Why is a grown man working at an elementary school? I know you are a danger to my children and if I only had the time I would do something about it." And then they are off. The first day of school. It is always the same.

The teachers, fresh from a summer of mandatory training programs (Comprehending Disruptive Behavior, Whole Language and the Whole Child, The Autistic Spectrum: A Rainbow of Hope,) move slowly, with heads bowed, and rarely make eye contact. The prospect of countless hours of reading Houghton Mifflin aloud to classrooms full of bewildered children weighs heavily upon them. There are, everywhere, empty coffee cups and power bar wrappers.

In the corner of room 26, eight year old Julie fans herself with a copy of The Teacher From The Black Lagoon in a futile effort to combat the stifling heat. This is the most pleasure she will derive from a book for the next sixteen years. She will work as an administrative assistant for a mid-level auto parts supply depot and will develop a fondness for box wine. One of her daughters will almost be chosen for a reality show about unpleasant chefs.

A smart friend of mine (E.R.) once asked me one of those cocktail party/parlor game questions at a BBQ we happened to be drinking through. It went something like this: What is the biggest lie your parents ever told you? Unthinkingly, I blurted out that the inherent value of education, a ubiquitous bit of propaganda familiar to all, was a myth. It seemed like a provocative enough thing to say and was likely to get us through the remaining bottle of Maker's Mark. It did. Good times.

But as the weeks passed, and as I actually thought about what I had said, I realized that I should have been more narrow in my criticism. Becoming an educated person is undeniably an inherently noble thing. It is the commonly accepted means of becoming educated, the de facto processes that one encounters in almost any school in the country, that are so overwhelmingly delusional.

Ms. Greaves frowns at Martin and asks him why he isn't paying attention. He has no idea, but is a little nervous about going to see his dad at that scary place again and wonders if the Sponge Bob movie is this Thursday or Friday. He will spend a fair amount of time in his own scary places and then something will go wrong with his pancreas or spleen. The final thirty-two hours of his life will be a restful blur.

There has been a move over the last eight years towards greater accountability among teachers. The measure of this accountability is in the form of standardized test scores. Teachers are considered successful if their students achieve high scores. If not, then the state will ultimately take over the school, teachers will be flogged in public, etc. Something had to be done, with the world going to hell and all, and this is what they came up with. It couldn't make more sense.

Especially to the great mass of quasi-literate reactionaries whose heads are over flowing with Fox News Channel's unbiased reporting on America's omnipresent everyday atrocities; whose hearts have grown cold at the thought of the countless schoolyard shootings perpetrated by the godless sodomites who kidnapped prayer from the classrooms; whose eyes mist over at the thought of the roving gangs of pedophilic thugs who have taken over their neighborhoods; whose loins, those vestigial reminders of their animal nature, have evaporated into the ether and are already forgotten. Really, will someone please think of the children?

Leanna doesn't want to read that book. It is a stupid book and she has a better one in her backpack. But her whole class is reading it and so she kills the next twenty minutes by trying to think of words that almost rhyme with orange. She will go to college for eleven years and found her own not-for-profit food bank. She will wonder if she spends too much time being angry.

It is as though education is being managed by people who are entirely unaware of the last fifty years of human psychology. And perhaps it is. Standardized testing of this sort doesn't work because it can't work. Humans develop at different rates and through different means. The effort to make every classroom into the same classroom robs teachers of the opportunity to apprehend their students as individuals and to teach them accordingly. What was once an engaging, creative act is now no more meaningful than a trip to the DMV. We are told we have to do it and so we do, but God knows we die a little every minute we spend there. And so do God's children.

Still, principals actively seek to create faculties comprised of docile bodies; of teachers unwilling or unable to challenge the status quo. And, in all honesty, the profession of teaching doesn't exactly attract the most courageous, outspoken, type of person. They just want to keep their jobs and not get yelled at. And they already have the aggressively uninformed parents to deal with. The end result is classroom after classroom filled with uninspired, nervous teachers teaching material that they have no passion for, or belief in, to children who have no interest in hearing what they have to say.

They have no interest because everything they are taught is decontextualized. A good teacher knows that all you can actually do is instill a love of learning in a child and give him/her strategies for dealing with it. It can't be enough that children are told to learn for their own good. Or that they won't get a slightly less mind numbing job if they don't pay attention in school. And children innately see through any attempts to make what happens at school into a moral proposition. Only their Mongoloidal parents have trouble with that one. And, God bless 'em, those parents just don't have time anymore to think. So they let others do that for them.

Viola! Here we are. No child left behind. Soccer Moms rest easily. Politicians garner votes. Administrators congratulate themselves on the fact that all those meetings weren't for nothing. Teachers are unburdened of the tiresome task of teaching. Money, once frivolously wasted on unnecessary extravagances (art, music, field trips to places that don't suck) can be finally be used for realpolitik perks, e.g. large iron gates, uniform reading documents that have been standardized in an effort to make them unappealing to all, salaries that attract the best and the brightest to positions of high authority within the Ministry of Education. Beaming with pride, they must truly think this will be the best of all possible worlds.

Why can't Johnny read?
Because he doesn't give a fuck.

Breakfast With The Knight Of Faith

The first thing you notice upon entering Antonin Scalia's lovely Plantation style Virginia mansion is the sheer amount of space devoted to relics from the Spanish Inquisition. Hanging from every wall, drooping from the ceilings, and overflowing from countless antique glass cases are thumbscrews, Spanish boots, pincers, spikes, strappadi, leather trusses, bejeweled stilettos, "Trident" manacles with the optional genital restraints, and vices; vices of every conceivable shape and configuration, stretching off into the distance as far as the eye could see.

You can imagine my surprise when, two weeks earlier, one of the many threatening e-mails that I regularly send to public officials was not only answered, but contained an invitation to a "wholesome, traditional breakfast," and was signed: Sincerely, Mrs. Antonin Scalia Esq.

She was adamant about giving her husband the opportunity to explain a quotation of his that has been fodder for agents of the Liberal Agenda for over two decades. In its popular form it usually goes something like this:

"Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached."

"I never said any such thing," said Scalia, who insisted that I call him Nino, and who was already a little groggy from a pre-breakfast palette cleansing that consisted of bourbon and string cheese. "It's the fucking internet. Worse than Sodom or Gomorrah. Goddamn thing is infested with every form of lechery and perversion. And I can tell you, under genuine authority," and here he paused to give me a knowing look,"that most of it is run by Jewish Gaylords and atheist pedophiles." Mrs. Scalia, who stood quietly against a wall during this outburst, leaned forward to wipe flecks of foam from his crimson face.

In all fairness to Nino, the quote, as it usually appears, doesn't exist. What he actually said (or wrote) was:

"... there is no basis in text, tradition, or even in contemporary practice (if that were enough) for finding in the [506 U.S. 390, 428] Constitution a right to demand judicial consideration of newly discovered evidence of innocence brought forward after conviction."

Nino is a gregarious, intelligent, funny man, and a gracious host, but if the above quote isn't legalese for the same idea (that actual innocence isn't enough to set someone free) then I'll eat a bug. I said this to him as his ancient Negro butler, Lemuel, wheeled breakfast in on a silver, doily bespattered cart.

"You don't understand, Steve-O, the Constitution is not a living document open to the interpretation of every moral reprobate who managed to squeak through law school at Michigan State."

The breakfast tray consisted of half inch slices of peppered bacon, hollowed out honeycombs filled with grits, wild trout, and molasses soaked black currants, a bottle of Johnny Walker Gold, a bottle of Johnny Walker Green, several shot glasses, a pitcher of deep red wine, a gravy boat filled with mayonnaise, and what appeared to be a battered, deep-fried hedgehog. Nino leaned over, tore off a portion of the hedgehog's face, and, jamming it into the mayonnaise for emphasis said, "The Founding Fathers got it right the first time. I'm just here to make sure they get their way."

Emboldened by wine, anger, and the improbably humid Virginia morning I pointed out the fallacy of thinking that there is any way of dealing with the Constitution that doesn't involve interpretation; that there is any way of accurately applying rigid general laws to specific situations; that the very Raison d'être of jurisprudence in America is to have judges who interpret the facts of specific cases and handle them according to their individual merits; and that wild trout never, under any circumstances, belongs with molasses soaked anything.

As Mrs. Scalia wiped the flecks of foam from my crimson face I could see Nino shifting uncomfortably in his chair. The Walker Gold was open and flowing by now and he thought it might be a good idea to get "Sandy" over to help clear things up. Sure. Why not? There were plenty of glasses and security was top notch in case things got out of hand.

"Do you want to see my tattoo?"

Not the first words I expected to hear from a former Supreme Court Justice; at least not since Earl Warren died. Still, the mood was warm, the bacon was peppered, and Ms. O'Connor looked pretty good for an octogenarian.

"Why not, Sandy? I guess you took John Riggins advice and finally decided to lighten up." She beamed at the mention of his name.

"Johnny's the best thing that ever happened in my life." She glared at Nino. "He knows how to treat a real woman." Then she turned to me. "He's outside now. He won't come into Nino's house cause he thinks he's a crypto-fascist pig." At this she started shrieking hysterically and poured herself a shot of Johnny Green.

Sandy was wearing a red leather half-shirt, low rider jeans, panda fur boots, and she practically oozed judicial authority. I shyly walked over to her and said, "Nino and I have a disagreement about...," and before I could get it out she said, "Dude, why are you living in the past?"

Nino shouted: "Dammit Sandy! Did you or did you not say that the issue before the court was not whether a State can execute the innocent. It was, as the Court noted, whether a fairly convicted and therefore legally guilty person was constitutionally entitled to yet another judicial proceeding in which to adjudicate his guilt anew, 10 years after conviction, notwithstanding his failure to demonstrate that constitutional error infected his trial? Well?! Did you or what?!"

Her face brightened noticeably and she looked at me and said, "See, little man? That's why I love him. He's Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith, mother fucker! Even when he's drunk he can quote me at length" and she made some kind of grotesque, stretching hand gesture as she over pronounced the word leeeennnnggttthhhh .

I was angry and humiliated and had so much more I wanted to say, but Lemuel had started playing the piano and Nino and Sandy were laughing and dancing and the room started spinning and the only thing my mind could hold still was Mrs. Antonin Scalia, back against the wall, not frowning, looking through a distant open window at the sun washing over an empty meadow, and I could see clearly; she knew.

Beijing Report: 08-11-08

Team handball is the Olympic equivalent of inadvertently brushing up against your great-aunt Mildred's breasts as you lurch across the Thanksgiving Day dinner table for your fifth refill of Safeway brand Merlot. Awkward glances are exchanged and then averted, and everyone feels a little uglier as a result. This has happened to me more times than I care to mention, but may explain the hefty birthday cards I received throughout my young adulthood. Nothing, on the other hand, can explain the existence of a sport like team handball.

The Olympic Sports Center Gymnasium is located in the heart of Beijing and it is where I got my first look at this awful and confusing spectacle. I am not one for alcohol fueled jingoism, but even I could see that this was a direct affront to anything that a genuine American might hold dear. The gym was a cacophony of low level meth dealers, Euro-trash go-go boys (the nylon sheen of their sky blue Addidas sweat suits a persistent reminder of the failure of Old Europe), and the bleary-eyed and bewildered families of those doomed to participate in this godforsaken mess.

I was fortunate enough to be seated, by formal invitation, next to Jacques Rogge, the current IOC President and an ardent team handball enthusiast. During an earlier interview we had nearly come to blows over what I perceived to be the sport's long term and catastrophically deforming effects upon western civilization, but his deep appreciation of my red Volvo functioned as a touchstone between us, and the residual tension was no match for his fine gifts of opium infused Tsingtao and two, startlingly well read, Thai hookers.

"You must know yourself to know this game," he said, caressing my shoulder in that effervescently gay manner that orthopedic surgeons from Belgium tend to have. "It is philosophy in motion."

Professional decorum combined with the Tsingtao, which by this time had cost me the use of my legs, to create a situation in which I had no choice but to sit through the Championship match between Slovenia and Portugal. Chan had warned me on several occasions about Rogge's tactics and their dire consequences but, as Hunter used to say: Buy the ticket, take the ride. And so here I was.

Team handball is an unfortunate combination of all of the worst aspects of basketball, lacrosse, modern dance, Canadian sketch comedy, and public drunkenness. Fourteen hideously unitarded players pirouette up and down a 20 by 40 meter court, in a jagged flash of tip-toeing and jazz hands, only to break into a gruff post-up style game that resembles nothing more than a prison strip search. Movement away from the ball is practically non-existent until an elfin figure appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and sashays toward the goal, whipping the ball behind his neck, passed the startled goal keeper, and into the back of the net. This was followed by another fifty-nine minutes of precisely the same behavior; behavior that even Nathan Lane would deem superfluous. I sank deeply into my seat, massaged my lifeless legs, and pondered the implications of this unlikely sport.

Hanflugen, as it was originally called, arose in 1510 in the tiny hamlet of Laxcombe near modern Irkutsk. Initially conceived of as an initiation rite for Quaxtic monks, just prior to their entry into manhood through the Festival of Cats, it was adopted by the explorer Juan de Grijalava and brought to Mexico, where it thrived for many centuries. Today's "modern" team handball is clearly an offshoot of this rich Mexican heritage combined with the fluorescent subterranean homoeroticism of pre-war Europe. From there it was a straight shot to the farmlands of the Eastern Bloc and the impossible glory of the Olympics.

When the match was over, Rogge leaned over and angrily insisted that this sport means more to more people than penicillin. Maybe he is right. The next day at the hotel I came across a wildly optimistic report in which the website teamhandballnews.com had this to say:

Whether you’ve been a Team Handball fan your entire life, or just discovered the sport flipping through channels yesterday, you’re soon going to have to come to grips with the stark reality that the Olympics are over and along with that fact, so is your opportunity to watch the sport on TV in the U.S-- at least in the immediate future.

I have to say that I am intrigued by the idea of countless people forced to deal with the stark reality of a team handball free fall schedule on Fox or the WB this season; of the many silent dinners endured by families trying to reconnect after the senseless devastation of Ireland's upset win over Lithuania; of the ennui that settles like a fog over the barren landscape of the true fan's immediate future. It is a sad and beautiful world.

Celebrity Profile: Nancy Grace

In an effort at journalistic integrity I should disclose at the outset that Nancy Grace and I have a personal history. We lived together for several months in a small apartment on the outskirts of Atlanta. This was after her two run ins with the Supreme Court of Georgia and prior to the terrible business with CNN. Of this time I can only say she still owes me $645 in unpaid phone bills to various psychic hot lines, and that she once, after a night of box wine and miserable sex, tried to cut off my left ear with a butterfly knife.

In her more sober moments, Nancy often described her childhood as a whirlwind of Lil' Miss Beauty Pageants, Junior Klan bake sales, and awkward Girl Scout outings (many a night ended with her crying herself to sleep, unable to explain exactly what transpired in those lonely humid Quonset huts.) But it was bible camp that gave her the greatest joy. I can still see the little flecks of foam that would form at the sides of her mouth as she regaled me with tales of "outing" sinful classmates and protesting evolution.

"We almost got the entire high school Biology department shut down my junior year but some pinko freak made a stink and it didn't happen. I'll tell you, though, I made darn well sure I didn't learn a thing in that class."

Nancy grew up and went to college where she was going to study Shakespearean Literature, "or something like that", but her fiance was tragically murdered and she found herself compelled to study law. Her time at Mercer University was not filled with drunken revelry or sorority parties or late night pow-wows or quick lunches with her roomie or the occasional movie or friendships of any kind, but was instead devoted to the grim business of getting a degree.

After that it was a string of near successes that propelled Nancy into the American consciousness. She became a prosecuting attorney who won all of her cases. Some of these were later overturned on appeal for reasons as varied as lying on subpoenas, illegal searches, and a generic air of evil. Even the pointlessly conservative Supreme Court of Georgia has said of her: "...the conduct of the prosecuting attorney in this case demonstrated her disregard of the notions of due process and fairness, and was inexcusable."

After a brief stint on Court TV, she made her way to CNN and The Nancy Grace Program. It is one of those talking head programs where an articulate, gloomy moron spouts platitudes and shrieks at her guests. This is a job that attracts a certain type of humorless Troglodyte who has designs on getting back at the world; and Nancy's shrill, unknowing voice would be the perfect tool.

Yes, she had finally made it. Among her notable successes was her vilification of the Duke lacrosse team. Without bothering herself with the tedious work of investigating the actual case, Nancy proclaimed them guilty and had many shows devoted to her wisdom on the matter. The day after they were acquitted, Nancy, in a genuinely classy move, had a substitute reporter announce the removal of the charges. And she never brought it up again.

Of course there is more. Berating a distraught woman to the point of suicide. Assigning guilt, in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping ordeal, to a man who was later found to be entirely innocent. Her well known passion for, and advocacy of, cock fighting. Her willful ignorance of the details of the FLDS raid; accusing them of child molestation even after they found out that the thirteen year old pregnant girl was really a twenty-two year old pregnant woman. If H.L. Mencken were alive today he would gouge her eye out with a fork.

You see, I know her. I know her type. Her eyes are small and hard. She is quick to judgment, inaccurate, and ultimately unrepentant. She is the journalistic equivalent of a psychic in that she makes all sorts of grand pronouncements and counts on the fact that the people will forget the misses and revel in the hits. She is, in all fairness, a loud mouthed hillbilly cunt who somehow found herself on TV and who will do anything to stay there. She reeks of malice and frigidity and countless generations of inbreeding. And I want my fucking money, bitch!

Still, when I reflect upon our time together, the cute way she used to blush when she talked about the purity of the race; her gritty determination to never make love with the lights on; the way she would hide ice cream cartons in the clothes hamper, carton after carton, just to keep me from worrying about her gargantuan ass; I have to say they weren't all bad times. She smelled weird but the woman could really cook a steak.

Influence, Plagiarism, and the All-Too-Human

For P.K. & J.K.



A great book like the DIVINA COMMEDIA is not the isolated or random caprice of an individual; many men and many generations built toward it.
-Borges



Borges is talking about Dante. Dante, for God's sake! One of the undisputed heavyweight champions of the Western Canon. And he is basically repeating what artists have known for quite some time: Artistic creation does not take place in a vacuum, free from influence or contingency. Everybody's dirty little fingerprints are all over everybody else's mirror. And if you read, and understand, Harold Bloom, this isn't a chronological one way street; modern authors influence how we apprehend past authors just as profoundly as the past authors influence the modern. This makes it incredibly difficult to determine the primacy and authority of a given piece, to find the methods for locating and defining originality.

The factors that go into creating a work of art are invariably as mysterious to the creator as they are the viewer. I've read plenty of books about the writing process by plenty of authors who seem to have one common theme; bewilderment at the vital point of explanation. The smarter ones seem to revel in their influences while the less secure seem more likely to get drunk and stab their wives. And, amazingly, the author's knowledge of these things, or lack thereof, has very little to do with the quality of their actual work; the two are simply unrelated.

At the same time we don't let everything pass as original. Kaavya Viswanathan of Harvard wrote a book (I'll omit the details since her name already took me fifteen minutes to type) that was publicly derided as an instance of overt plagiarism. The evidence was strong and the fallout predictable. Many examples from her book were paralleled, in the press, with near duplicate passages from another; Ms. V could not be reached for comment; e-mails went unread; movies deals fell through; the faculty room at Harvard was heavily re-stocked with Johnny Walker Blue.

An after school special is surely in the works.

Mother: Kathy, did you write this book?
Kathy: I did Mom. I swear.
Mother: You know I'll love you even if you didn't.
Kathy: Why do lies hurt so much?

And stoned teenagers everywhere will once again get a big laugh on an otherwise dull Tuesday afternoon.

There are many other examples of outright aesthetic theft. Vanilla Ice lifting the signature bass line from David Bowie's Pressure and then attempting to stutter his way through a denial (I never heard of that song), an explanation (I listen to the radio a lot, maybe it just got in my head), a lie (my part doesn't really sound like his, it's more def), and a non sequitur (word to your mother), before finally admitting that he was full of shit and scampering back to the mean streets of suburban Port St. Lucie, Florida.

Hell, John Fogerty has actually been sued for plagiarizing himself; no small feat, even in a litigation addled and stupefied America. The case was not laughed out of court as one might hope but went on for years before the artist was finally acquitted. Fogerty had to go through his creative process in great, and humiliating, detail before a legal proceeding that was not comprised of our greatest aestheticians and who consequently could have no way of determining the legitimacy of Fogerty's description. Zappa wept.

In all fairness, it may be impossible to tell, in many cases, whether someone is stealing, referencing, adoring, satirizing, or unconsciously adopting the work of another. There is good reason for this. The human brain has evolved into a remarkable pattern interpreter; remarkable, but not perfect. We see patterns everywhere, even where there are none. This can be helpful, as when we notice that the beautiful furry animal by the river has a predilection for human flesh. But it can also contribute to our ongoing and idiotic fascination with things like astrology, numerology, and God.

It also gives critics (everyone interacting with a work of art is a critic, consciously or otherwise) impetus to find signs of plagiarism in the works of artists that they are ambivalent about. This can be problematic, especially in situations where the accuser has some institutional leverage over over the accused. That is when common human motives (envy, narrowness, dislike, or the simple desire to save one's ass) can have disastrous results.

It is a murky business. Vonnegut openly claimed to have stolen from everybody he read. Likewise Twain. Harold Bloom has made himself into a cottage industry with books like The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading. And these are Big Minds eating at the grown up table; how can a typical high school teacher, with a head full of platitudes and thwarted ambition, be expected to navigate such treacherous waters? Well, he can't.

Christopher Hitchens points this very tendency out in his essay In Defense of Plagiarism. He gives many obvious examples of literary theft ( G. Harrison/Chiffons; A.L. Webber/Puccini, etc) and even a less well known, but devastating, charge against Eliot and the Wasteland. But his main theme is captured in a quote by de Quincy and Hitchen's response to it.

"It is undeniable, that thousands of feeble writers are constantly at work, who subsist by plagiarism, more or less covert. It is equally undeniable ... that thousands of feeble critics subsist by detecting plagiarisms as imitations, real or supposed."

Just as writers should beware of joining the first category, so readers should not be too eager to enlist in the second.

Ecclesiastes says that there is nothing new under the sun. Still, part of what is good about human beings is that we pretend that there is. We thrill to an original voice, or at least the potential for one. And if artists politely deferred to their intractable connection with everything that came before, then we would be left with nothing.

The remainder of the Borges quote from above seems a good place to end.

To investigate its precursors is not to subject oneself to the miserable drudgery of legal or detective work; it is to examine the movements, probings, adventures, glimmers, and premonitions of the human spirit.

Car Go Fast

I am pleased to inform you that yet another blow has been struck against terrorism and godlessness and that it is, once again, NASCAR that is leading the way. Next year there will be mandatory drug testing of all drivers and pit crews, and I, for one, say it's about time. This most emblematic of American sports has lain in tatters for far too long. With the help of our Savior and by "working the steps" we can right this ship, and once again hold our heads high.

Because these are a proud people, these devotees of the stock car, with their gargantuan sticker-laden RV's, their American flags saturated with Budweiser and countless patriotic tears, and their courageous attempts to bring the philosophy and techniques of horse breeding into the human realm. So you can imagine how these Daughters/Mothers/Daughters of the American Revolution felt when they found out that their beloved NASCAR had turned into a breeding ground for ketamine freaks, meth-heads, pillbillys, go-go boys, blacks, and communists; God, Home, and Country indeed.

A little background might be useful here. Dr. Winston Sinclair III ("Please, call me Cooter") is the dean of History at Duke University, and the foremost authority on NASCAR's murky beginnings. Cooter's den is a veritable shrine to all things stock car, from the Dale Earnhardt memorial plates to the gentle hum of the copper whiskey still; and it is whiskey that played the predominant role in NASCAR's early stages, much the same way it did for organized crime.

To hear Cooter's heroic tales of bootlegging (high-speed drunken car chases through residential neighborhoods) which eventually worked its way from the backstreets of South Carolina to the magnificent stadiums of North Carolina, was nothing short of inspiring.

"Well, in the beginning, there was Billy-Ray (Billiam) Dixon, and he drove a Ford. And there was William (Billy) R. Horton, and he also drove a Ford. And, of course, Willy (Big Willy) Williams, who was cousin to Billiam, and he drove a Ford as well. But it was the Kennedy's who came and fouled things all up. They drove Packards."

With this historical perspective firmly in place I thought it best to check out a NASCAR show myself. I contacted Del Minkin, of the Atlanta branch of the John Birch Society, and set up a meet. Much to my delight he chose the Mecca of stock car racing, the Daytona Speedway; an improbably massive metallic mosque of a stadium that practically shrieks: "Submit to the will of NASCAR."

Del met me in the parking lot with his daughter May. She was fifteen; had, at least, thirty-eight double D's; and her cut-off jeans shorts were so tight that I could just make out her fallopian tubes. Del shook my hand, tossed May onto his shoulders, and led us into to the stadium.

"I knew there was a problem back in the sixties when some of the drivers stopped getting drunk and started getting high."

Del stared off into the distance as he said this, clearly moved by the tragic state of affairs. We had worked our way to the inner area and were now completely surrounded by the track. May jumped off her dad and onto the shoulders of a passing stranger and disappeared into the crowd. I handed Del a Bud-Light and asked him to continue.

"Well, it was that damn LSD. It made it god awful difficult to drive those cars at such high speeds," Del said, as he continued to tell me stories of those dark days. Stories like the one where A.J Foyt was found on his knees, naked and crying, in front of a Woolworth's store, in Lexington, Kentucky, at three in the afternoon. It took several doctors, a priest, and a frantic call to Ken Kesey, to get A.J. back into his truck. "We finally got him home, but all the whiskey in the world couldn't bring him back down that night."

And so you might wonder why it has taken NASCAR so long to deal with this problem. From the sixties through the nineties there had been 135 official complaints; most of them from local churches, all of them drug related, all of them terrible. Tony Stewart's obvious track marks and Jeff Gordon's public dalliance with PCP are just the most well known instances. But the nightmare is over.

As Del went off in search of his daughter, I took a last good look around. A permanent haze of gray exhaust hung over a sea of shirtless fans, lumbering clods of flesh grown pink with alcohol and indifference to the sun, as engines, pushed to the high pitched point of collapse, whirled around and around to the thunderstruck awe of everyone involved.

"Yes," I thought. "This is worth saving."

Sex, Death, and Faberge Eggs

Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.
-Spinoza



Imagine a genuinely omniscient God who came into existence just long enough to create a top-ten list entitled "Things Human Beings Have Irreparably Botched." There are many, many candidates for top honors, but this God (being omniscient and all) would surely place at the top of this list the twin disasters of sex and death; especially if He turned out to be a She. And She would be right.

No?

Have a seat, let me explain.


Thus finishing his grand Survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous Fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!
-Swift

First, and it (shockingly) bears repeating: People Are Animals; not corporeal angels floating in the ether along the circumference of the animal kingdom, but full-fledged participants in the near chaos of sustenance and survival that delineates the existence of any creature in possession of a mouth, stomach, and anus. We are crawling, inside and out, with millions of microscopic organisms that tend to react to us symbiotically until they don't, and then it's nothing but fever, vomiting, sloughing off of skin, liquification of organs, and tooth decay. We are even in trouble at the cellular level. Lewis Thomas points out that the mitochondria that power our cells are in a very real sense not even our own. I could go on. No, really.

Suffice it to say that we are firmly planted in the animal kingdom and that we have a terrible time accepting this fact. Why? Because animals die. All of them. You can sing in praise of the rich tapestry of life all you like, but every one of them, from Snowball II to that tiger that ate those kids, is dead; and all the rest are just waiting their turn. And if we are like them, if we ARE them, well, then we will die too.


Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
-Pascal

So, what are we going to do about it? I know. What if there really was a God. Not the imaginary God from the beginning of this piece, but a real God. One who created us and is with us all the time. One who looks out for us in times of trouble (we will, for now, overlook the fact that He was there when the trouble started and didn't do anything to stop it) and who guides us when we are weak with temptation. You know the guy. And he didn't JUST create us, he created us in HIS image, and so, ipso facto, we can't be mere animals. We must somehow be different. We must be like Him; never to know the cold touch of death.

The fact that it was We who created Him is by now irrelevant. Not only that, but it seems to work. There are studies that indicate longer life spans for people who have this type of belief. So it should come as no surprise that people are reluctant to do away with their godly associations; even in the face of overwhelming logic; even though these beliefs are a type of social disease; even though the people, on some level, must know that they can't be true.

Those Jesus Freaks
Well, they're friendly but
The shit they believe
Has got their minds all shut
An' they don't even care
When the church takes a cut
Ain't it bleak when you got so much nothin'
-Zappa

Well, good, that takes care of that. No more death. But since we are largely unconscious animals it won't be easy. Nothing is free, we must pay; and the currency of this payment will be in the form of sin, which can only be redeemed at the one true bank. So we set about attaching this sin to even the most basic human functions; those most likely to represent our animal nature.

From the sin of Eve to the curse of Ham. From the Ten Commandments to the lunatic ravings in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. From Matthew's prohibition against impure thought to Paul's keen advice on marriage. It is all laid out before us as a virtual graph of our inevitable failure; and I am only using a single, two-thousand year old, book. Add the moral advice of such great texts as the Koran, the Talmud, the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, the various gitas and hymns, the Left Behind series, the Analects of Confucius, and Dear Abby, and we should be knee deep in self-loathing for ten thousand generations. Praise be to Allah! Or, at least, one of his friends.

Human beings are not animals, and I do not want to see sex and sexual differences treated as casually and amorally as dogs and other beasts treat them.
-Reagan

The most confusing, weird, wonderful, ambivalence generating, messy, creative and procreative act a human being participates in is sex and it gets tons of extra attention from the sin fetishists. There are rules for every aspect of sex, from the words we can use to describe it to the manner in which we can have it, and almost every one of them is negative. We have marinated in these rules for thousands of years and the effect has been frankly deforming. What should be obvious has been obfuscated beyond recognition.

Well, maybe that is overstating it. I mean, there are six and a half billion of us, covering this fuzzy blue planet like a virulent mold, so somebody somewhere must be doing some fucking; but, boy do they feel bad about it. I think this says a lot about the power of sex. In spite of our best efforts, here we are. I guess that hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary biology can't be swayed by two and a half thousand years of glib, fashionable, facile morality.

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.
-Robert Mueller

Women, of course and as always, get the worst of it. This can happen in the most obvious ways (genital mutilation, arranged marriage, the Lifetime network) but it is the subtle psychological distortion of their bodies, pressuring them from all angles, that interests me here. And that leads me to the Faberge Eggs.

They are everywhere. In movies: The earnest, well intentioned father telling his bright, confused daughter, in a gray-lit room on a rainy day, that her body is a precious gift only to be given to the right person at the right time. "Thanks Dad," she says, through tears of relief. In music: The ubiquitous new generation of anatomical Barbies extolling the virtues of abstinence while, ironically I guess, thrusting their crotches towards anything remotely phallic. In the news: Fathers, daughters, mothers and sons, proudly displaying their purity rings to arenas full of grinning idiots in a kind of symbolic ritual of mock incest that the participants are, presumably, completely unaware of. In their role models: Behold the new Oprah Winfrey, now 98% vagina-free.

Well, there is a reason that most boys, by the age of seventeen, have had more orgasms than most women, by the age of forty, will even consider having; and it isn't entirely physiological. It is largely due to the fact that women are trained to see their bodies, especially down there, as delicate, esoteric, semi-precious display items that, once despoiled, can never regain their value and purity. They end up viewing their sexual organs as museum pieces, pristine and vulnerable, suitable for viewing by only an elite audience, under special circumstances, in the right light, and not without the aid of a docent carrying a handful of pamphlets. And like most museum pieces, they end up dustily appreciated rather than enthusiastically enjoyed.

If we, as a society, had any sense, we would have government issued vibrators mailed to every girl over the age of twelve. Then she could figure it out. On her own. Well, at least at first. Then, once the cat's out of the bag, so to speak, it'd be each woman for herself. And we would be, ever so slightly, less neurotic.

But we are far from doing anything like this. And so, reasonably intelligent fathers foam at the mouth as they tell you what they'd like to do to the long haired little freaks who may be thinking about sticking it to their daughters. Nervous mothers, half remembering what they had to go through, furtively pull at their collars and hope for the best. Sons continue to jack off relentlessly while daughters rue the day that they have to look at themselves in one of those little hand held mirrors. You can almost hear Zappa singing in the background: She's just twenty-four/ And she can't get off/ A sad but typical case.

I know. I am intentionally overstating things. This doesn't apply so much today. If I had written this thirty years ago it might have been more relevant. But I was ten at the time and didn't know what a hoo-hoo was, and plus, my writing style back then was wildly affected.

Think about it, though. Don't fool yourself. This stuff is still with us, still in us; and deformities rarely just snap back into place. So take it from my friends, the Bonobo chimps: Go. Fuck. Be happy. Life is short and you've already spent half of it fretting.

Beijing Report: 08-10-08

It is hot. Hot. God it's hot. She lilts to the left and offers me a red blanket. Waterless beaches fill with angry children. Miniature suns streak across the horizon and pelt the sand into fine sizzling dust. Habanero clouds hang like humid night-orange fruit. Wait. Jesse James said that. I am not allowed. "Why isn't she?" I ask, as another door silently closes. My fingers grow embarrassed into her and around her neck choking the yellow from her eyes. She whispers a math equation. Three plus infinity equals.... No, it is a chemical problem. Heat and stupidity create an unstable, volatile mixture. Yes, yes. The water returns. And... with that... I am...

Awake.

Or almost. Opium is a hell of a drug. I am awash in a thick sheet of sweat. The room seems to be entirely two-dimensional and my eyes are filled with cotton. Chan suddenly appears before me. He has a severely burned hotel towel wrapped around his waist. Using a barking noise combined with a type of epileptic semaphore he is trying to communicate with me.

-you were sleeping
-I was dreaming
-you didn't look too good
-it was something about a lizard
-we have to get out of here


We grab the tickets for the Equestrian Dressage and head for the Volvo.

The road to Sha Tin Stadium in Hong Kong is empty except for the free Tibet protestors, uniformed with Richard Gere masks and empty gerbil leashes, who pop up like mile markers along the 1000 mile corridor. Chan and I re-acclimate ourselves narcotically and spend the bulk of the trip in a smooth gurgling warmth. The Volvo, resistant at first, more than lives up to its reputation and we find ourselves at the city limits in record time.

Equestrian Dressage is commonly regarded as the most civilized event at the Olympics, using terms like "Airs above the ground" and "Baroque", and it hits a strong 8.7 on the Fitzfield-Klein Gay Meter. From the videos I researched it appears to be a sport predicated on the idea of getting your horse to behave well at a tea party. This takes years of training and involves many esoteric techniques. Controversy has surrounded this event ever since the Foundational Uniform Codifying Knights of Equestrian Dressage, the sport's governing body, instituted the practice of 'cosseting', or the sewing shut of a horse's anus in an effort to prevent virulent discharge, in 1989. PETA was involved and the sport's Olympic status was in peril but Ingrid Newkirk was plied with bourbon and coupons for Black Angus and here we are.

Chan and I made our way to participant's table, where the brightest lights of this proud event were gathered, and sat down. Isabell Werth, of the troubled German squad (steroids, white slavery), mistook Chan for a Japanese dignitary and presented him with a gold plated marmot. The table was laid out with expensive champagnes and inedible cheeses. Debbie McDonald, Dressage's elder stateswoman and a notorious drunk, was doing her best to live up to her legendary reputation, but the rest of the table was in fine spirits.

In an uncommonly refined move, the participants had decided to forgo the actual events and to determine the winners by means of a brisk and heart felt conversation. Steffen Peters opened with a comment on the beauty of the sylvan landscape, but was shrewdly cut off by Courtney King-Dye's observation that the Chinese were no longer using infant girls as currency. The Austrians mounted an attack but accidentally broke into song and were disqualified.

It seemed all but settled when, out of nowhere, Canada's Eric Lamaze blurted out something about Nietzche's use of irony in his critique of Kant's idealism. It was a tremendously risky maneuver; a less gifted rider had tried a similar approach in 1996 and subsequently lost three fingers on his left hand. But after twenty minutes of back and forth it was decided. Canada would win its first equestrian gold.

I am not one for emotional outbursts, but I am not ashamed to admit that I misted over as the strains of Oh Canada reached their resounding conclusion. Chan and I thanked them for the marmot and for their courageous performances and made our way back to the Volvo.

Tomorrow would be another day, and another event (team handball), but today belonged to those champions who put their lives on the line to make horses behave more like people. And to them I dedicate these immortal lines from The Horses Prayer:

Examine my teeth when I do not eat; I may have an ulcerated tooth, and that, you know, is very painful.

Very painful, indeed.

Beijing Report: 08-09-08

The first thing you notice when you enter Beijing is the startling number of large, clean, empty streets. It's as though your grandmother bought several hundred miles of beautiful sofa, and then proceeded to cover it in plastic and glare at you when you had any ideas about sitting down. The second thing you notice is the smog that hangs over these streets like an unfortunate brown-green comforter that she knitted herself, even though her hands are in terrific pain and her grandson never seems to call, and that she's just waiting for you to fail to adore. And so I won't. I have loftier ambitions. I'm here for the 2008 Olympic Games; and fuck her sofa anyway.

I am staying at the Hotel Kunlun on the Tian' Anmen; a seven hundred room tower of glass, angles, and discipline, that should give me easy access to all of the most important events. After checking in I am assigned a militant dwarf named Chan who will, apparently, guide me through the labyrinth that is modern urban China. Chan has what I can only describe as a French accent when he speaks English, all throat and phlegm and anger, and an insatiable hunger for opium that might prove useful should things go badly.

He also has a bright red Volvo 240 wagon that we pile into as we head off for the Beijing University of Technology Gymnasium and the cruel world of Olympic Badminton. The gigantic steel gym is awash in indirect light and smells faintly of sweat and mango. Malaysia's best hope for its first ever Olympic gold medal, world No.2 badminton player Lee Chong Wei, is eyeballing me from the moment I enter the gym. Her orange and brown sweat suit is severe and uncompromising. Unwashed children massage her thighs and ply her with Chicklets gum. Her racket rests softly beside her chair.

The Chinese have long abandoned the practice of public cat burning, but you wouldn't know it from the ugly demeanor of the audience in the gym tonight. Uniformed men with megaphones march trough the aisles shouting the most horrible, I'm assured by Chan, sexual epithets at any passerby who doesn't visibly appreciate the rigors of the game. The lights grow dim and, amidst the angry shouting, two androgynous multi-colored badmintoners are wheeled out onto the pit. An elderly woman of indeterminate race shatters a crystal pumpkin and the game begins.

What appears to be series of feline shrieks is followed by the tossing of the shuttlecock and an audible groan from the audience. Chinese rock music careens throughout the gym and Chan is noticeably shaken. After seventy-two minutes of flashing lights and epileptic frenzy, the girl/boy in orange is carted from the arena and a national anthem of some kind is blasted through the PA system. Muscular Korean women weep uncontrollably.

Chan grabs me by the arm and hurries me into his, still idling, Volvo. "There are so many events," he implores me. And from the manic look in his eyes, I see that he is speaking from his heart. Well, I'll be here two weeks. The key, as it almost always is, is adequate pacing. On the way back to the hotel, I compose myself and prepare for tomorrow and the giddy heights of equestrian dressage.

Hell is Other People

While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
-Eugene Debs



On my best, most enlightened, days I figure people are doing as well as they can in difficult situations with limited resources; on my worst, I want to chew their eyes out of their fucking heads. Most days I am somewhere in between.

I tend to find relief from this manic fluctuation in movies, books, and drink. They are consistent and provocative. They help me to think and to understand what I am thinking and, more importantly, to contextualize my thinking. They can also highlight human absurdity and provide strategies for dealing with it. They are why I don't have pieces of eye in my teeth.

A fine example of human absurdity is the American prison system. Right now there are well over two million Americans in jail or prison. A little less than half are in for non-violent crimes. The United States has the highest documented per capita rate of incarceration of any country in the world. If we weren't so busy watching mentally disabled people run through obstacle courses on television, we might get the idea that something has gone horribly wrong.

You don't have to be Michel Foucault to understand the problem. There are people at every level of the incarceration process and people are normally bad at thinking. Our frontal lobes are too small and our adrenal glands are too big, to quote Hitchens, and we are lucky to have made it this far. We are only barely removed from our hunter/gatherer status and, if the Berkeley study is to be believed, a full 98% of our thought is unconscious.

Take Chad, the twenty-seven year old, unemployed bartender who has been up for two weeks, feverishly reorganizing his sock drawer and who may have been spanked once as a child. He gets into his Chevy Cavalier and heads out to Longs at three in the morning because he can't feel his eyes. On the way he notices that people are looking at him funny. He pulls over and grabs a screwdriver from his glove compartment. He strolls over to Jenny, who has no business being out at three in the morning anyway, and plunges the screwdriver into her neck.

Brian, the police officer whose lust for guns and loud noises has put him in good stead with the rest of the guys and whose GED certificate hangs proudly on a wall in his mom's trailer, springs from his patrol vehicle and gleefully tasers Chad while beating him about the face and neck with his baton.

The arrest report hits Virginia's desk and she thinks back to college, where a guy named Chad (or was it Chaz?) may or may not have date raped her. Her psychiatrist had tried, on several occasions, to explain to her that the sex was consensual and that she was really mad at her step-father, Chet, but she had stopped going to therapy and, anyway, what do psychiatrists know? She is a new Public Defender and she has so many cases. And her dog, Ribbons, has seemed lethargic lately.

When she has her first meeting with Ron, she can't help but notice that he looks a little like Chuck Woolery. He can't help but notice that she won't be much of a challenge. Ron is 6'3", has all of his teeth, and sings baritone for the First Presbyterian Church of Fresno. His golf swing has a natural left to right. His friend, Travis, thinks he heard him say the word 'shit' once. He will be a congressman in seven years.

The courtroom is quiet except for the persistent humming of the air conditioner. The Honorable Judge Judith Flester is sweating like a Kings of Leon roadie at Bonnaroo. She has never masturbated and often wonders if there isn't something wrong with her "down there." Every workday, a full slate of TiVo'd daytime television is waiting for her when she gets home. She calls it her 'routine' when she talks to her scrapbooking friends.

Chad is sitting next to Wayne on the bus to Corcoran. Wayne remembers reading somewhere that Corcoran is the most troubled of California's 32 state prisons. He ran over a Japanese woman named Miyako in the Rite-Aid parking lot in Bakersfield. He blew a .32 on the breathalyzer and was dutifully flogged. Chad is wondering whether Wayne is gay or not and if those rumors about prison rape are exaggerated. The bus smells a little like Wayne's gym.

Capt. Wiggins has patrolled Level IV housing for eighteen years. He relentlessly jacks-off to a Nickelodeon web-site he stumbled across, while googling Mike Nichols, and secretly hopes his wife will catch him. He has roughed up countless inmates over his eighteen years but becomes queasy at the sight of blood. He thinks this is ironic. He isn't exactly sure what ironic means.

Gunther is carving the symbol of the Aryan Brotherhood into Wayne's ass. It is Gunther's second ass carving of the day and he is starving. He is the son of a dentist and, like Ron, has incredible teeth. When he was eight, he saw his sister touching the neighbor's dog's penis and he couldn't stop laughing, even at dinner, and he got in trouble and was sent to his room to think about it. In prison, the fork is commonly considered the best tool with which to make a weapon. Gunther prefers the tightly rolled newspaper and as a result is known around the yard as "The Editor." He has no idea why.

There are some unfortunate tattoos on Chad's upper body. One is supposed to represent a mermaid going down on Uncle Sam, but looks more like an aerial map of Finland. Gunther mistakes it for an Asian gang symbol of some kind and shoves his weapon of choice through Chad's left eye. As Chad is convulsing, he wonders if his life will flash before his eyes and dies. Gunther is sent to the hole, for one month, where he will not think of anything.

Wayne can tell you, quite convincingly, that those rumors about prison rape are not exaggerated.

And this may be as good as it gets. It's a truism that ours is the worst legal system in the world, except for all the others. Still, common sense dictates that prison can't possibly work, much less rehabilitate, as long as we do stupid things like locking up violent offenders with the non-violent; as long as we continue to adhere to mandatory sentencing or participate in wars against drugs and vice; as long as one shining asshole with a head full of atavistic nonsense still believes in the death penalty; we are doomed. Whether they are well-intentioned or sublimely idiotic, people will fuck up complicated problems as long as there are people left to fuck them up. Sartre was right.

Casual Lesbianism as a Narrative Device in Film and Television

We have all seen it before. The new nurse on that show that you watch once in awhile is having trouble fitting in. She seems competent, has a way with the patients, and she was the one who suggested a percutaneous transhepatic cholangiography which got the doctors thinking about Wilson's disease, and saved young Michaela's life. But there is something about her and the other nurses can't quite place it.

Three episodes later, the nurses will be at a booth in their local pub, laughing and drinking tankards of gin, and one will glance toward the bar. A look of astonishment will come over her face. She will reach out to get the other nurses attention and the music will take a peculiar, almost playful, turn. Of course, there, in the corner, will be the new nurse. She will delicately brush the hair from the forehead of a small blond thing as she leans in to kiss her flush on the lips. Back in their booth the nurses will share confident, knowing smiles. Cut! Break to the Prilosec commercial.

When you see this in movies or on tv, it is easy to get the impression that something has been explained. That it isn't merely a concession to the idea that more lesbians (dwarves, Hungarians, hermaphrodites, albinos, lepers, business women, etc.) need to be represented in the media. That there is a meaningful subtext. But what could that possibly be?

The obvious answer is that television executives have a keen understanding of my desire to contemplate the idea of attractive young women going down on each other. The less obvious answer is that the writer's were trying to create a sense of "otherness" in the character. Our new nurse will win the respect of the hospital's staff, and may even befriend another nurse or two (Platonically, and not without a scene or two of Sapphic awkwardness) but she will never fully be one of them. The other nurses, doctors, and by extension the viewers, will always see her through the prism of short haircuts, studded leather, ersatz penises, and the awful specter of fisting.

By "otherness" I don't mean the solipsistic, can one consciousness ever truly know another, type of thing. I mean the guy in the black hat, he's the bad guy, type of thing. I'd like to lay this all at the feet of Basic Instinct because it is such a wretched film, but the history is richer and the trend is more deliberate. And it is meant to be obvious; you immediately know it when you see it.

The "guess who doesn't belong" time line in Hollywood films goes like this:

1930's: Dark clothing, visible scars, eye-patch, limp.
1940's: European ancestry, monocle, unusual way of smoking cigarettes.
1950's: Black, poor, leather jacket, sunglasses.
1960's: Colorful clothing, sexually active, tinted sunglasses, high.
1970's: Make-up wearing male, androgyny, a single false eyelash.
1980's: Men holding hands, blotched skin, lisp.
1990's: Women holding hands, unwashed hair, lack of affect, ice-pick.
2000's: Brown, poor, not American, out.

This is not to say that some things haven't changed. If anything, there has been a kind of corrective backlash. The lesbian nurse will turn out to not only be the best on the staff but will be a constant source of wisdom for the young doctors she works with. The hemophiliac midget will win several bronze medals in Beijing. The one armed girl will marry the dyslexic Iranian jockey and they will run a successful bed and breakfast in Fresno. Hell, the writers may as well wear t-shirts that say: See, we're not prejudiced. We're enlightened.

It is as old as Christ and nearly as effective. If you want to make a character genuinely stand out, then describe them as having sex in a way that most people don't. And for the male audience, this is especially true of female sexuality, which is mysterious and messy and consequently more terrifying. So, the next time you see a bright young paralegal smiling at your favorite female lawyer on that other show you watch once in awhile, you can be sure that she is there for a purpose.

The Power Pose

From the $3200 ostrich-lined mesh unitards to the boyish good looks of Kate Moss, the world of high fashion has always been an impenetrable enigma. It is a world populated with exotic, speechless Vikingettes who distantly tower over you from every magazine cover and who seem, somehow, to lack bodily fluids of any kind. They exude a mixture of allure and decay that can only be explained by years of dietary heroin suppositories and 'funny uncles.' And they cast no shadows; they are the perfect Tabula Rasa. Advertising executives bank on the fact that we will project our many unreachable masturbatory fantasies onto these glossy black-and-whites as we deliberate the relative merits of Old Navy and The Gap.

This, of course, is precisely what we do. But why? If a nation as intelligent, sophisticated, self-aware, grounded, subtle, profound, disciplined, keenly observant, and self-actualized as ours can be so easily manipulated, then surely a force with uncanny power must be at work. Fashion Moguls and Demiurges are notoriously reluctant to discuss such things. But in an effort to find answers, I came across a genuine rarity. A model, an insider, who was willing, and had the capacity, to speak.

Sitting across the table from me, at Sunnyvale's impossibly posh Fibbar MaGees, he looked almost normal. You would never have guessed that he was modeling's "Next Big Thing." He was clearly nervous, as evidenced by the fact that he had barely touched his free-range salmon cubes that were marinated in mango chutney and placed atop a bed of pine-nut infused mixed greens, candied olives and pan-seared marshmallows and that had a cloud of whipped cream, raisins, and corn floating a full three inches above it, (which reminds me of another article I'll have to write for this fucking thing.) He had, also, insisted on taking a seat that faced the entrance and I knew I would have to be extremely gentle with him.

"It's the hands."

His voice was barely audible and had a furtive, resigned quality. For reasons that should be obvious I will not use his real name. "Mark Schnittker" was introduced into modeling, through the Boy Scouts, at the relatively advanced age of thirty-seven. But his lack of experience was easily overcome by a kind of vulnerable innocence and a tremendous shock of thick red hair. He quickly moved from Sears catalogs to the cover of Seventeen and this is when he had his first encounter with the Fashion Cabal.

While on location in the Cayman Islands, "Mark" was asked to strike a pose that suggested power and confidence. He opted for the traditional arms crossed over the chest, feet slightly apart, method. An ominous hush fell over the set and children could be heard crying in the distance. He realized that something had gone horribly wrong but was unable to place it. It was then that several helicopters swooped down onto the beach. From one of them, a small old man, dressed in black and covered in blankets, was wheeled through the set by a gigantic Filipino woman and placed directly at "Mark's" back.

At first, he could hear a single voice speaking angrily in a language he couldn't understand. This was followed by a deeper resonant voice and a hand that came to rest upon his shoulder. "You have made a grave error. This shoot is finished." Startled, "Mark" moved to turn around, but the hand on his shoulder tightened its grip and he collapsed to the ground in pain and lost consciousness.

He came to, several hours later, and found himself alone on the deserted beach. Struggling to regain his bearings, he noticed what appeared to be writing in the sand near the water. He moved over to take a look and was barely able to read it before a rogue wave crashed onto the shore and obliterated every word.

Most of the crowd had left Fibbars and "Mark" was visibly shaken by the re-telling of this terrible story. His famous red hair was matted against the sweat on his forehead. He reached out and downed his pomegranate martini in one desperate gulp. Looking again at the clock, he said, "It was a rookie mistake; one that I'll never be able to get over."

He looked me in the eyes for the first time that night. He was nearly weeping. "When I struck that pose, I had covered my hands with my arms. You must show your hands." Abruptly, and without warning, he shot up from the table and ran from the bar, shrieking, "You couldn't see them! YOU COULDN'T SEE THEM!"

I have since done a great deal of research. The world of fashion is as tight-lipped as Scientology, and precisely as meaningful, but, through the Freedom of Information Act, and a couple of well placed oral indulgences, I was able to get my hands on their charter.

It is an ugly and severe document of more than 2000 pages and is not fit reading for any person who hopes to retain even a modest portion of their humanity. I made it one third of the way through the introduction before buying an incinerator, assembling it, and then throwing the damned thing into it. But it was too late. Right there, on page four, was this:

Sec. 2-973.134
Regarding the assumption of, or request thereof, a physical gesture indicating power, confidence, or any related sub-virtue (cf. pp138), the subject must, in lieu of contradicting features, attendant to, but not limited by, said gesture, will, in accordance with addendum 9 to sec 3J-209.3, and in good faith, make visible, and in reasonable (as defined by subjugate protocol) time, said subject's posterior ancillary extremities, or "hands", the withholding of which will result in the de facto forfeiture of said subject's elan or vital fluids.

It is a sad and beautiful world. I have been unalterably changed. How does one maintain hope in the face of such obvious malevolence? As my philosophy professor, Joe Steinke, once said: Knowledge makes a bloody entrance. And it is easy, now, to understand why I have a closet full of Prada bags and Vera Wang shoes.

Voyuerism as Therapy: The 30 Minute Hour

Why are you watching that shit? You seem like a pleasant, intelligent enough person. And I am not so much of a snob that I don't appreciate the allure of other people's grief. Even Aristotle defined luck as the arrow going into the guy next to you. But Christ, how many bewildered, celebrity-craving, human disasters (their eyes made small and hard through genetic bankruptcy) have to endure a public breakdown before you are satiated? It's as though television has become the genuinely ugly girl that the moderately ugly girl hangs around with, in the hope that she will appear less ugly by comparison. And you are that moderately ugly girl.


Or, I guess, WE are that moderately ugly girl. I watch a lot of this stuff on that show "The Soup." It's a funny, low budget, video anthology of deformity and mayhem, and it goes well with a Sierra Nevada and a shot of Maker's Mark. The thirty minutes fly by. And, like sex or whippets, afterwards I briefly feel pretty good. Actually, in contrast with the show's unfortunate participants, I tend to feel like a cross between Baruch de Spinoza and Michael Jordan.

But, the feeling passes. And I begin to sense an itch deep within my reptilian brain. The logic is precise; it felt good once, this exercise in palliative schadenfreude, and it should feel good again. And why not? Other people spend thousands of therapeutic dollars just so they can tell perfect strangers about that dream they had where they set their boss on fire and then skull-fucked her smoldering remains. Watching an alcoholic transvestite regurgitate a plate of silkworms on tv seems positively benign by comparison. And less expensive.

The danger in this form of therapy is that it is so easy to build up an implacable tolerance. Suddenly, it is no longer enough that some tweeked out Nebraskan caught Chlamydia from her autistic brother. Ever greater feats of weirdness and depravity must be sought out. The Random Public Execution Hour with Jim Lehrer might fill the gap; or is it simply too late? I'm sure TV execs are doing their best to help, but even those gifted minds must be approaching the end of their collective tether.

So, at the risk of oversimplifying, turn the damned thing off. Eat an apple. Pick a daisy and duct tape it to a pony. You may feel a little better; and, hell, we are not designed to feel all that great anyway. This is why I limit myself to that half hour of The Soup. It frees up the rest of my day and allows me to deal with the complicated nonsense that I managed to make of my own life.

Your 30 minutes are up.

By Request: We Happy Few

For A.G.



And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here
-Henry V


Not since the Mamelukes seized control of Egypt in the early 870's has there been such a public outcry as the one I am now experiencing. It involves two British women who drunkenly tried to down a plane full of people after they were denied additional alcohol and after they created your typical "I can't handle my booze" scene; a scene replete with the waving of vodka bottles, extensive groping and harassing of flight attendants, and the slapping of someone's Mum. Suffice it to say that this behavior, formerly de rigueur on any legitimate college campus, is no longer tolerated on our once proud airlines.

This terrible, terrible news. What am I to make of it? Do I just go about my daily business as though nothing has changed? Will I forever be averting my gaze at cocktail parties in a vain attempt to manufacture appropriate topics of conversation, fully aware of the ghastly trouble that plagues every guest's beleaguered mind? How am I to answer all of the difficult questions that the students at Blackford Elementary School will surely have for me when studies resume in September?

Well... One British newspaper (the Telegraph) comfortingly assures us that the ladies in question "were thought to be from Merseyside." Armed with this astonishing piece of information, I feel better prepared to make sense of this horrible nonsense. I mean, Merseyside? For God's sake, not Merseyside. Will they ever be able to live down the shame? Perhaps they can take solace in the fact that the girls were only THOUGHT to be from Merseyside. Perhaps there is hope yet.

As you undoubtedly know, Merseyside was designated as a "Special Review" area in the Local Government Act of 1958. Of course I have never been there, or even heard of it, but I am confident that this quiet, sylvan hamlet is comprised of well read, smiling children who attend to the needs of the elderly and who are free from the horrors of methamphetamine addiction. And it is those helpless waifs who will suffer the most.

Suffer at the hands of countless drunken bimbos. Suffer at the hands of airline personnel that are apparently unaware of the delicate persuasiveness of the taser-gun. Suffer at the hands of a permissive society grown fat on socialism and non-procreative sex. And suffer at the hands of you, the reader. Because, while you were reading this blog, someone, somewhere, did something stupid. And you did nothing to stop it.

Hope is a Thing

The sky in San Jose this morning is a canopy of poisonous browns and yellows. Smoke pours in over the mountains from any number of recalcitrant wildfires that portend the end of days. Elderly Asian women ambling through the streets in masks, once a happy source of derision, are being openly worshipped by those with enough leg strength to keep up. Cormac McCarthy described such things and they never turned out well.

Still, amidst the ash and living debris that makes up my back yard, a small cache of tomato plants are finally coming into their own. This year has been hard on them. They are surrounded on all sides by impossibly shaped purple-green weeds; weeds grown bold and nihilistic after generations of heavy metal leeching, acid rain, and American Godlessness. The insects that dare to feed on these weeds become the size of kittens and develop a slathering hunger that can only be subdued by tomatoes and occasional human flesh. The shadows are long, the days are short, and Angels have abandoned weeping.

But...

Like Dickinson's feathered thing. Right there in my garden. Little green orbs of... what? Hope!? No, probably not. Just little green orbs growing on weary vines in a kind of reflexive animal shudder. But they are something that pushes against entropy, if just for a second; and I'll take it.

Editorial: Logic and Bureaucracy

October 21, 1921. All is imaginary– family , office, friends, the street, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.
-Kafka

It was such a good idea. In the middle of the 19th century, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was worrying about the infant mortality rate in his hospital. Long story short, he linked the problem to medical students coming from their autopsy lessons straight to the maternity ward. He suggested that they wash their hands before delivering the babies. He was ridiculed, endured arduous personal grief, was finally vindicated, the world is a better place as a result, etc. It would make a fine TV movie starring Adrian Zmed and Emmys would be duly awarded.

It really WAS a good idea, and I can confidently state that the difference between the washed and unwashed hands was significant. Later, as stronger disinfectant, better gloves, and universal precautions became the norm, even the most skeptical hypochondriac could rest easy. The logic is sound; in this instance.

Of course people still die of infection during childbirth; it's just that there are fewer of them. But, using the same logic of refinement as before, couldn't we do better? Maybe doctors should wear full body clean suits during deliveries. Or, better yet, they could wear them at all times while in the hospital. Perhaps some of the more dedicated doctors should wear them at all times, period. They could become an elite class of viral priests, consulted only for the most heinous threats. We would store them in pristine glass cathedrals, and feed them vaporized nutrients through long silk tubes that have never felt the degrading touch of human skin. And, still, people would die of infection during childbirth. Fewer of them, to be sure, but not by many.

It is this type of thinking that leads well intentioned idiots to put a stop sign on every street corner where some unfortunate child was run over by a Jeep. If only we had a stop sign HERE. If only there was a law against THAT. If only every contingency had been taken into consideration, then Chad would still have the use of his left arm; Dakota would be able to see the candles on her birthday cake as her nurse blows them out.

"Somebody is to blame," exclaims the deranged talk show host as she wrings her hands pleadingly before the camera. "Somebody must pay." And the helplessly uninformed nod their heads in solemn resignation. Because, if even one bad thing happens to even one person, anywhere for any reason, then we must do something about it. Right?

No. It simply isn't the case. Having doctors wash their hands prior to surgery makes sense and works. Still, the logic can obviously be taken too far. We cannot take every variable into consideration, nor should we. That type of thinking has an inevitable deforming effect. It is the reason we have ten million abstruse, self-contradictory laws. It is the reason you need eleven kinds of identification just for the privilege of filling out eleven thousand forms in order to get anything done in any government building. It is the reason that decent people are duckwalked through crowded airports, strip searched and probed on the off chance that they packed three lighters rather than two.

Face it. Crazy shit happens. All the time. And it is due to the fact that existence is almost perfectly indifferent to human desire. Even that randy old philistine, Ben Franklin, was in the know: The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. Sure, he could have used a couple of commas, but Goddamn, buy that man a drink. And go ahead, wash your hands before delivering a baby, just don't cut them off. You'll probably need them.

Celebrity Profile: Darren Woodson

Against the dark blue blur you can barely make out the number 28 as it frantically grows larger and larger until, with a blast of sweat and malice, you are staring up at the hole God looks through and wondering why your teeth feel swollen. Darren Woodson disappears back into the defensive huddle and you get no high-fives. Your children will probably see you on ESPN tonight.

At 6-1, 219, this five time pro-bowler lead a talented Dallas defense that controlled the National Football League in the early nineties and deprived Steve Young of more jewelry than any self-respecting Mormon could ever justify wearing in the first place. He was one of the new, archetypal, hybrid players; good in coverage and strong against the run. Easily placed anywhere on the field by savvy, experience laden coaches, he was a sniper's scope, honed in upon the subtle gaps found in any offense's Kevlar vest. But, this is understatement. Or, maybe, it isn't. I really liked this guy though.

In an interview that never took place in the wondrous Cowboy's facilities at Valley Ranch, I asked Darren some questions about those Halcyon days and what effect they had on his love of painting.

PP: How would you describe your early years in Dallas? Did they exceed your expectations?

DW: I had a lot of very good, talented, driven people surrounding me. Haley (Charles) was a mentor to me and the coaches really helped me grow. Who are you with again?

PP: Sports (inaudible).

DW: Huh?

PP: Yes, and three Super Bowls in four years; that must have given you a sense of super-human invincibility, as though you were a God placed upon this earth to help shine light on the lives of quiet desperation that most men lead.

DW: I wouldn't go that far. Who are you with again?

PP: Right, and how did this commitment to football excellence effect you as a painter?

DW: Oh, I don't paint. I can't even draw a cat.

PP: I see.

DW: Troy (Aikmen) could draw caricatures though. He could draw you in a dune buggy. You like dune buggies, don't you?

And who doesn't? Yes, these were heady times for the Cowboys and for human society in general. What man cannot look back at the toe-headed waif he was in 1992 and not shed a tear of joy at that simpler, happier era?

An Open Letter: To Natalie Portman

Dear Natalie,
I had a dream about you the other night.
Yours, Pirate

An Open Letter: To Nicole Kidman

Dear Nicole,
I had a dream about Natalie Portman the other night.
Yours, Pirate

First Thing: Dental Hygiene is More Important Than Love

Good dental hygiene is quite a bit more important than love. Not merely from the practical perspective, but also from the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic perspectives. Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in his great novel Galapagos, that although the human animal will still exist in 1,000,000 years, his teeth will continue to be the same shabby constructions that they are today. Heed this warning; for the love of God.

Practically speaking: You are on your bed, dangling your head over the edge and rotating it counter-clockwise in ever decreasing concentric circles as you jut your right leg up and out at a 28 degree angle ( always a 28 degree angle) and then back down, alternating legs in amateur balletic fashion. Vaguely squirrel-like noises punctuate a simultaneous humming and grunting as thick, hot tears stream down your freakishly swollen face. Stray fragments of hair and blood cling to your numb fingers; testament to the necessary hours of preparatory pulling and scratching. And why? Why are you doing this? Because your teeth are in such terrific pain that you've come to embrace the idea of an immediate and all encompassing apocalyptic cataclysm; and THIS is all that seems to help. You have no thoughts of love.

Morally speaking: It is a well known and established fact that deviant behavior is directly related to poor dental hygiene ( cf "Bad Teeth, Bad People" - New England Journal of Medicine, June 1994.) Anecdotal evidence abounds, and to those in the know it should go without saying that there is an unwritten, unspoken code in the prison systems of the world that allows for the segregation of prisoners based on their various oral contingencies. There is also archaeological evidence in some deleted sections from Sir James George Frazer's magnificent work "The Golden Bough" ( graciously shown to your humble author, by the Frazer estate, on condition that they not be quoted at length.) The sections were deleted as a result of the controversial nature of their subject matter; all things oral being very much taboo at the time of its printing. Suffice it to say that through his study of primitive tribes ( the Yacutl, Wargamo, and the hideous and malingering Pygmy Nation) Sir James documents no less than 43 instances of ritual orthodontic deification; not to mention the unfortunate practice of gingimuertification. Dental Hygiene has always been a useful tool for weeding out undesirables, while love is simply an inferior gauge for such delicate work.

Spiritually speaking: God has lovely teeth. Jesus, Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, could all chew through barbed wire. Saul had awful teeth before he became Paul, and now they are a vision. Spinoza's shone like the sun. Pol Pot's teeth exploded into fragments upon eating oatmeal. Hitler had an abscess. Mussolini could only chew on one side of his mouth. It is even said that Stalin had no teeth at all, but rather a series of official dentures made from the teeth of better men. Res ipsa loquitur.

Aesthetically speaking: Chicks dig nice teeth. So, perhaps, love does have something to do with it. Still, I can't help but feel that my dentist is thinking of the inscription above the gates to hell when she opens my mouth for yet another six hour ordeal: Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.

God Damned: An Underground Plea

I am conflicted.

Not regular conflicted. The other kind. I am in conflict. I am watching a documentary on hurricane Katrina and the human grotesqueness that elevated it to such incomprehensible proportions. People. I don't get them. They are people. I don't get it.

I have an inherent flaw. Any time I get behind the wheel of a car, it is only a matter of minutes before I want to annihilate every living thing on the planet. I see that this is a flaw. I also, invariably, see such a level of heroic stupidity that my neck begins to hurt. "Maybe that person has his reasons for doing the things he does," I tell myself as I try to remember what I know of Stoic philosophy; but I can never remember enough. I hate it when my neck hurts.

It can't be so simple as to say that George Bush is an idiot. Of course he is an idiot; what did you expect? But that isn't it. He put people in charge who didn't know what they were doing. People. Friends, or friends of friends, or savvy political allies, and as a result old women and infirm children could not withstand the trauma and died, waist deep in poisonous shit filled water.

So I am angry and my neck hurts. Now what? Some survivors are interviewed in the documentary. A man tells of a National Guardsman who helps many people; a great man. His last name is Christian. The survivor sees it as a sign. Someone is looking out for him. That must be quite a feeling. Many devastated and neglected people praise God for their ultimate relief. By this time my neck is on fire.

I have no privileged vantage point. I am weak and stupid as well; and not in the Socratic sense. I am angry and conflicted. The people I am so desperate to empathize with are so befuddled that they don't understand the nature of their own God. Is this too much to ask? I don't mean Theology. I mean that the God who finally gave them relief, these people who I crave some kind of communion with, is also the God who sent the fucking hurricane; is the same God who sent Mozart and AIDS and pedophilia and Tang and erectile dysfunction and Wilma Rudolph and gum wrappers and a poorly manicured lawn and sunsets and mastectomies.

I feel hate when I could feel indifference; this is a flaw.

The brain, the human brain, my brain, is designed to see patterns. I am in it. Those poor people. Patterns where there are no patterns. I see them. The music is almost almost-music; almost. But I still have to drive. I still have to watch these documentaries. So now what? Genes, fate, habit, imagination. An earnest man might say humanity, but what he really means is the human condition; embracing the human condition.

The human condition is ambivalence with ambiguity. Look, alliteration, a pattern. No, the human condition is much less. Clay, ribs, atoms, will. Tell me I'm wrong. It doesn't matter, I already see you. Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Maybe we will start looking for Carlyle's heroic men; (men, universal generic, someone must be irate) or maybe we won't.

Still, we have done a number on each other. No creeds, no medicine, no luck, will pull us out of this. We are ugly/beautiful freaks with abnormal facial hair and misshapen fingers clutching at unseen triggers. Or more, or less. My patterns want so desperately to connect. They are frankly poignant on the matter. And I have Freud's oceanic feeling once in a while. But I also have something else.

I am conflicted.