Fang's Forum

Sarah Palin’s America

2012-02-12T06:38:00.001-08:00

(Or: “I See white people—in the White House”)

Now I’m not the kind of guy who sees racism under everyrock and around every turn. For instance, I had to date a Jewish girl before I realized anti-Semitism didn’t goout with goose-stepping and Benny Goodman records. (She was so Jewish that whenwe went to a stage performance of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” I had to explainthe plot and characters to her.)

So if I hear an incitement to the worser angels of ournature in what is supposed to be a standard political stump speech, it is notbecause I went into it looking for racially-sensitive areas over which to wringmy hands and gnash my teeth.

Usually, that’s the sort of thing that has to be pointed outto me. A speaker would have to really go out of his or her way to make my earsperk up at what sounds like overt race-baiting.

Which brings me to Sarah Palin, and her appearance this weekat the big gathering of Conservative heavy-hitters in Washington (CPAC).

She emerged from relative seclusion for the event, lookingeerily exactly like she did four years ago. I’m not suggesting she’s had workdone, or owns a portrait of herself that is aging exceptionally poorly up inthe attic… although either could be true, it’s important to remember the two arenot necessarily mutually exclusive.

(Don’t cry “sexist!” at me. If I was writing about, say,John Edwards, I would also lead with how he looks if it was the first thing Inoticed. When a big part of a celebrity’s appeal is their attractiveness, theythemselves have put the subject on the table.)

I have a little bit more ad hominem attack left in me. Hang on… The only difference Isaw between now and four years ago is, if possible, Palin’s Darth Vader helmethair is even bigger, and her waist even tinier. How the latter can support theformer remains a mystery to me. Maybe Palin’s avowed lack of trust in sciencemakes circumventing its laws that much easier…

I remember how scared all us Lefties were the first time weheard her speak, at the last GOP convention. She came out, stuck to the script,and blew the roof off the dump. If she hadn’t gone all rogue-y on the ticketafter her Katie Couric interview debacles, we might be trying to unseat anincumbent President McCain now.

Thank you, Sarah.

And now she’s back to help some more.

Addressing her fellow, eh, Conservatives (I am now leavingbehind the ad hominem attack portion),Palin said, “We don’t have a red America and a blue America, we have a red,white and blue America!” The 99% Caucasian crowd went nuts. To make sure thegathering of both hard- as well as party-liners did not miss her point—thattheir opponent is not red, white, orblue—Palin added, “And Barack Obama, we’re through with you!”

Wow. She’s, like, the Maya Angelou of hate speech.

Thank you, Sarah. For making it rhyme so we could all understand it.

She also took the occasion to land a well-placed,barely-veiled f-bomb at the feet of the approving Family Values and MoralMajority crowd of totally non-hypocrites. While trash-talking Obama’s jobsprogram, she quipped [warning: hold your sides, big scripted-comedy momentahead] that the acronym for the administration’s admittedly poorly-named WinThe Future program is WTF.

Did you catch that? In spelling-challenged, but socialmedia-savvy middle America, they may not know what the WPA was, but they areROTFLOL if they don’t know what WTF means.

That Obama. WTF, right? Ohhh, thank you Sarah. Sometimesit’s good just to laugh.

She also took the occasion to say that she thinks a brokeredGOP convention would be a good thing for her party, not the internationallytelevised circular firing squad it would actually be. The last time eitherparty had a brokered convention was decades before the rise of the 24-hour newscycle and cell phone battlefront reporting.

When I think about it, I can suddenly understand the appeal ofRoman gladiatorial combat (besides the leather dresses). Four candidates enterthe ring, only one emerges; his bruised and battered body slick and hot withthe blood and brain matter of his broken, humiliated opponents.

Wow, that really would be great for Democracy! In that it would tend to promote the re-electionof the unflappable terrorist-killer from Kenya [REMEMBER HE’S NOT WHITE LIKEYOU AND ME] who currently occupies our country’s highest office.

Thank you, Sarah.

While pretending to support the GOP’s putative nominee onthe Fox News Sunday morning politics show, she just coined the phrase“ObamneyCare” with an alleged slip of the lip.

Sarah, stop it! You are being just way too generous. People are going to start to talk.

What will Sarah Palin do next to help promote Americandemocracy? (Third-party run! Third-party run!) After all she’s given already,is it too much to hope that she still has another card left to play thiselection cycle? (Third-party run! Third-party run!) It’s a little late in thegame to be anything more than be a spoiler in the GOP nomination process(Third-party run! Third-party run!) and I can’t imagine what someone with herGringrichian-scale delusions of grandeur could do to further her party’sopponent’s re-election (endorse somebody else’s third-party run! Third-partyrun!), setting herself or someone she anoints up as the Conservativefront-runner in 2016 as soon as the polls close this November 6 (Third-partyrun! Third-party run!)…

Hey, it’s Sarah Palin! What am I worrying about? She’llthink of something.

Let me just say in advance… thank you, Sarah.

“My whole LIFE is art!!”

2012-02-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

The Boy issued this pronouncement a few weeks ago, during arare behavioral meltdown, right after I finally found a privilege from which torestrict him that he really couldn’t live without.

It was funny at the time—but Daddy must remain stern duringbehavioral malfunctions—and funnier now, because it’s so true.

Us: “What did you do in school today?”

Him: “Art.”

Next day, us: “What did you do in school today?”

Him: “Art.”

Next day, us: “What did you do in school today?”

Him: “Art.”

Next day, us: “What did you do in school today?”

Him: “Art.”

Us: “Didn’t you go on a field trip to the Wonka ChocolateFactory today?”

Him: “Uh huh. Then we came back to school for Art, though.”

Between the time he gets dressed in the mornings andbreakfast magically appears—usually about a minute or two—he’s at the craftstable, working on something. Between after breakfast and leaving, he’s backdrawing or coloring or gluing or taping until he’s shoved into his coat on theway out the door.

We’ve learned not to tell him, “Let’s go, we’re leavingnow!” and guarantee a scene, when it’s just as easy to tell him five minutesearlier, “Hey, we’re leaving in five.” My parents would say we are capitulatingand letting the terrorists win, but I just see it as goodconflict-resolution/avoidance skills. It also models reasonable behavior forThe Boy, which is something I’ve read about in books.

But everything he touches does indeed turn into art. Alittle girl in his class gave him an early Valentine yesterday, and heimmediately set about creating the masterpiece in tin foil below to give toher.

This next piece also happened last night. He was watching SesameStreet and yelled out for the DVR to bepaused. He got out a sheet of paper and drew the image of Elmo, below,listening next to his wall. He added Elmo’s goldfish Dorothy, including theenlarged detail panel of the fishbowl interior on the top left of the drawing.

What the hell?

Then there’s the impromptu stuff he creates and forgetsabout, like the one below:

Unless we are actively interfering with his lifestyle byforcing him to do things like eat, bathe or sleep, he is constantly in a stateof creative expression.

When he yelled at me that his whole life was art, itimmediately recalled a panel I did back in my one-panel days. I am so gratefulthat the performance piece of my son’s life is taking a decidedly more upbeattone than the one I glossed over in works like this:

Greetings from The Land Of The Giants

2012-02-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

Young Billy Maher brings home a Scarlet Letter

2012-02-04T00:56:00.000-08:00

I love me my Bill Maher show on HBO. Most weeks, he tackles an issue or two on Friday from a perspective that I’ve been obsessing about since early in the week but nobody in the media has yet picked up on.

I usually don’t take exception to Maher’s end-of-show rants, even when he steps over the line… which is admittedly most of the time. It’s kind of what he does. A vibrant democracy needs voices of dissent like his to fuel its engines.

“It’s getting dark culturally; better throw a comedian on the barbie.”

But tonight he went off on a tear defending atheism, setting he and his fellow devout non-believers as the cool rational men of reason and science.

If I was his science teacher, I’d be sending him off to the guidance counselor to talk about changing his major.

It’s one thing to attack religion. They’ve made themselves fair game. They’ve set themselves up on a pretty high pedestal—what the fuck is up with granting them tax-exempt status when returning veterans, for instance, still have to feed the government beast?—it’s only natural to expect people to take a few swings at them. That’s why the houses on the hilltops always have gates around them; because modern animal-welfare laws make crocodile-infested moats such a tediously grey area, legally.

But Maher accidentally shone a spotlight on his argument’s weakness in the way he misframed the question tonight. By rising to the defense of Atheism, he capitalizes the “a,” and underscores all the ways Atheism is indeed like any other religion.

Technically, Maher is correct. Atheism is fundamentally different than religion in that it is unstructured, unmonetized, has no charismatic figureheads or spokespeople (sidebar: why are atheists always such assholes and Mormons always such nice people? Discuss.) … in every sense recognized by the law and society and society, atheism is no more a religious entity than that group of consumers who prefer Pepsi to Coke.

But as philosophical constructs, Atheism and Deism are indeed two sides of the same coin.

Is there groupthink? Is it unyielding, intolerant of any deviation from approved canon? Arrogant in its self-assurance and haughty about the desperate ignorance of the unconverted?

Tell me again how Atheism, capital A, is not like a religion.

And best of all, what is the difference between the religious zealot’s conviction in the existence of something unproveable and the Atheist’s conviction of something equally as unproveable? Isn’t his faith in sciences he doesn’t personally understand as unshakable as Billy Graham’s faith in the six-day creation of the earth that he doesn’t understand?

The only difference I see is that religious people don’t try to hide behind science when they drone on about their endlessly unproveable belief structures.

The only truly cool-headed conclusion to reach is that although science tends to suggest religion is a slowly dying, vestigial limb of an earlier time when the species required explanations for phenomena science hadn’t caught up with yet, science equally suggests that anyone with a truly open mind has to leave the door open to theories they cannot yet disprove, no matter how outrageous.

Maher tried to head this criticism off at the pass by saying that if Christ came back from Glory during the Superbowl half-time show, he’d say, “okay, I was wrong, praise the Lord.”

But that assertion rang as hollow as his insistence that forcing his faith-based belief structure down my throat was in no way like religion.

People in the grip of a religious fervor will tell you anything to sway you over to their side.

The day the circus (finally) left town

2012-01-20T08:12:00.000-08:00

First, a caveat: I’m reviewing last night’s final televised Republican debate from an entertainment perspective. Like an ancient Roman sports reporter who is reviewing a gladiatorial match and knows in advance that most of the participants will die, but understands that’s just the job description. So, assume I either don’t care or don’t trust or don’t understand the content of the debate, I’m just here to talk about the show-bidness aspects.

That said, Oh what a circus! Oh what a show!

Uncle Newtie really got things off to a wild start by turning the opening question about his new revelations about his sordid personal life—based on the latest political news that only broke a few hours earlier—back on the Media and served up the moderator to the, eh, typically enthusiastic GOP crowd.

On the one hand, starting the debate with that question could be reasonably considered a cheap shot in the cold hard light of day. But politics is a blood-sport, and nobody on that stage last night understood that better than Gingrich. The fact that his audience lapped up his stunningly false piety tells you more about the South Carolina Republican faithful than it does about the candidate.

Speaking of the crowd, they were better behaved than most of the previous debates’ crowds, but maybe that’s only because since Herman Cain dropped out, these distinguished South Carolinians didn’t have to look at a Black man on stage for two hours. Why, I declare, that would lift any decent gentleman’s spirits…

On the other hand, it’s the media’s job to stir up shit, for the audience-at-home to observe and evaluate how the politicos handle it. And the way Newt handled it spoke volumes. In a Newt administration, questions by the press will not only be ignored, but the questioners themselves will be attacked instead.

Can you say “Nixon’s Enemy List?”

The Nixon comparisons don’t stop there, either. Both famously petulant, with persecution complexes mixed with delusions of grandeur (to which Gingrich cheerfully admitted last night, even though the first definition of grandiose, according to Webster, is “characterized by affectation of grandeur or splendor or by absurd exaggeration”), a slicker-than-average deftness with disingenuity and obfuscation; Newt Gingrich is definitely the Richard Nixon of the 21st Century.

Credit to Newt though, he nailed that opening question’s answer—killed it—all the way down to the timing. Does he want to answer this goddamned question about the most recent dirt to come to light about his malodorous personal ethics? “No. [pregnant pause while crowd goes nuts, then] But I will.” And the crowd went even more nuts. That line will not be better-executed by any professional thespian in any of the TV-movies they will make about this primary season.

Plus it followed the current Republican playbook to the letter (something else of which the crowd wholly approved). Tough question? Throw the Media-Elite questioner on the barbie. It’s always a sure-fire way to divert attention from awkward, pesky facts at right-wing events.

Most of the night, former front-runner Mitt Romney looked like he’d just eaten bad cheese, as well he should have. Gingrich wiped the floor with him. He demonstrated that he can not only talk policy circles around Romney, but he’s smart enough to effortlessly BS his way through most tight rhetorical spots; see his feeding of John King to the GOP faithful last night, for example.

Gingrich is definitely the guy the GOP (and TV viewers) ought to want debating Cool Customer Obama later this year. When he doesn’t wander off-topic and start self-aggrandizing, he’s the second most solid debater in the group (more on Ron Paul soon—I like to save the best for the last).

The biggest gaffe of the night? Romney’s. When he again revealed that his money is his Achilles Heel. He’s trying to woo voters—90+% of whom won’t make in a lifetime what he brings home in investment returns last year alone—in a dismal economy, and every time his money comes up, he flounders like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. And only when his money comes up. That frozen, pained, rictus-like ‘smile’ on his face vanishes, his eyes goggle out and he begins to stammer. When prodded again yesterday about releasing his income tax returns, he was caught flat-footed by the moderator’s suggestion that he follow his father’s lead and release his last 12 years worth of records. Romney freaked! I’m sure PBS has added it to the montage they already have of Mitt stumbling over his wallet while on the stump. And as flubs go, what a fitting finale it was. It was Mitt Romney’s Rick Perry moment, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for his presidential aspirations.

Plus Gingrich played Romney like a Stradivarius all night, releasing his tax returns an hour into the debate, allowing him to claim the moral high ground while on TV, but before any of the actual details of said returns could come to light.

Rick Santorum, handicapped by lack of a sweater vest (debate rule?) and real-world command of the issues… Okay, full disclosure, I hate this guy. Mostly for political differences, but he seems like the kind of guy who would raise his hand and tell teacher if he saw somebody passing a note in class; the kind of guy if I saw him getting beat up on the schoolyard, I wouldn’t call for the safety monitor. He just rubs me the wrong way.

That said, he put in a great performance last night. I don’t give a shit what he was saying, but his delivery was beautiful. Unfortunately for Santorum, debating before a bipartisan crowd of non Bible-thumping independent, critical-thinking voters, Obama would eat him alive, a fact which Fox News makes sure to remind their viewers of every day (in the nicest possible way, of course).

And seriously, can it possibly be a coincidence that the most preening, sanctimonious asshole of the bunch is named Santorum? I’m thinking his name might hold some meaning in addition to the popular Google definition.

Finally, Ron Paul. The last honest man. The only man on the stage to take the “self” out of self-righteous. One thing the crowd got right last night was raising a ruckus when CNN tried to move on to another question before giving Paul a chance to respond to the current question—about medical coverage! As Paul was finally allowed to point out, as the only retired sawbones among them, perhaps he had some opinions on health care, too.

Then in the time allocated to him, he made the same whacko arguments he’s been making for his entire term as a Congressman, and doing it eloquently, forcefully and (mistake!) without speaking down to the audience.

Bless his heart, Ron Paul is both the craziest and most consistent guy in the bunch. The Boy was watching with me in my office for a while, and when Paul was allowed to speak, I said, “See that man? I don’t agree with what he says, but he’s honest, tells the truth as he believes it and his commitment never wavers.” Without missing a beat, the kid goes, “He’ll never be President.” “Nope,” I agreed.

And there you have it. The debate circus has finally pulled out of town and it seems the GOP are down to two choices: Romney and Gingrich. The Big Money Guys are backing Romney all the way, but this election cycle, for once it may not be the Big Money Guys who end up calling the shots.

Ironically, thanks to the gullibility of the majority of the Republican base, the GOP stands a chance of actually getting—as I like to believe the Founders intended—a major-party presidential nominee that will have been put into place by the people, not Citizens United and K Street power-brokers.

That may not be good for the Dems come November, but as an exercise in democracy, it would be invaluable for the country.

And additionally... Oh, what a show that would be!

Snow Day From Hell

2012-01-18T15:40:00.003-08:00

I used to like the snow a lot more when The Missus was responsible for both dropping off and picking up The Boy...

Without further ado:

This one was taken before sunrise.

The Red Car was about as grateful for the snow as I was.

But it did make for cool snowy trees.

Click for the full-size image. Totally worth it.
The other snowy tree picture, too.

White snow = okay to eat.

La Casa Bastardson at a glance.

Future-Ninja Daddy

2012-01-18T00:26:00.000-08:00

The Boy continues his maturity-spurt.

With the inciting playground traumas that drove him to seek extracurricular activities getting farther behind him, his motivation—and enthusiasm—looked like it was beginning to wane there for a few minutes.

Friday, we went on a blind playdate at an indoor mega-playground with one of his teacher’s sons, who also has issues of social reticence. They hit it off great. We stayed waaay longer than I wanted to, and The Boy conquered his fear his crazy tall, slick, enclosed slides. Kicked its ass completely and repeatedly. Another confidence glitch fallen by the wayside.

Then he came through his first gymnastics class with want-to intact Monday night, so it looks like that’s squared away.

But he was a little bit grumpy today about being rushed to Taikwondo class right after school, indicating it would be really fine with him if we stayed home instead.

I had to remind him why were doing this in the first place, and that he had agreed to see at least the initial 10-lesson plan through. We talked some more a few of the critical areas in the last lesson where he could improve this time and how he could do that. We practiced in the front room. He really seemed to take pleasure in pounding my open palms with his fists as hard as he could.

Then at class tonight, he just blossomed. Right from the start, his focus, seriousness and concentration had made a quantum leap since the previous lesson. And at this stage of the game—as I told him on the drive out—all he has to do is show up, follow instructions, and he’ll advance.

And I guess he heard me. You’ve either seen the video above or rolled your eyes and decided to skip it (perfectly understandable), but compared to the clip below, he’s a whole new Tiny Tiger.

Before class, it still took a little arm-twisting to get him into his Taikwondo uniform; afterwards, he didn’t want to take it off all night, even when nature called. He’s ready to drive through blizzard conditions—in the forecast—to make it to his next lesson on Thursday. He can’t wait.

Me either. Today was a good day to be Fang, Sr.

The Craftslete sleeps tonight

2012-01-13T07:52:00.000-08:00

The Boy woke up screaming last night.

It was 2 a.m. on the dot. I was in my office, watching Colombo on DVD and ruminating on mortality… you know, the usual.

I was thinking about how after The Boy’s brush with victimhood at school, that he and we were tackling the problem head-on. He’s exhibiting moxy that I knew always had to be there, but had been dormant before.

He’s tackling Taikwondo again, and he’s taking it seriously. He had his pledge memorized between the first lesson and the second. He’s taking part and following directions. I can hear his voice above the other kids’ from time to time. And he only begins to flag toward the end of the lesson, when he just plain gets tired. We need to work on his stamina.

Which is where gymnastics will come in. The Missus suggested it and I think it’s a great idea. There’s a place right down the street that The Boy and I reconned today, and he loved it. First lesson Monday. If he hits that as hard as he has the Martial Arts… man, is he gonna be tired. And strong.

And God willing, confident.

And I realized that with all these new activities, we were turning him into a Big Little Kid (maybe a Little Big Kid?) that much quicker. With every effort we make to better prepare him for the world, we’re just placing one more layer of the world between him and us.

I can’t emphasize how special this kid is. There is not a single other like him in his peer group at school, not even the girls. He thinks in three-dimensions and is fascinated by nature and numbers (but not reading), and wants to make crafts for a living when he grows up. I was managing a meltdown the other day—ie: he was fire-engine red and screaming and I was talking quietly while I restricted privileges, one by one—until he howled, “You won’t let me do crafts ever again, and that’s what I want to do when I grow up!!”

Well, I had no idea. I knew he loves to make crafts with The Missus (see photo of craft table, top), but this was the first time he had expressed a specific interest related to his future. The Mathlete who has thought in 3D since toddlerhood wants to grow up to make cool stuff from common household items for a living. A popsicle stick to him isn’t a potential hazard to the Simple Dog,* it’s a canvas for his next flight of fancy.

My Dad would be appalled.

But this is the kid I want! I don’t frankly give a single fuck if he’s a chimp on the monkey bars or a demon on the baseball field. I was nothing like that either. But I did have a very thick skin by his age—physically and metaphorically—and had already learned to fend for myself in almost any circumstance. The Boy, on the other hand, has been brought up in a hazy, warm glow of constant love and encouragement. He doesn’t have the mad self-defense chops I had at his age. I worry that as bad as the world fucked me up, it’ll do worse to him unless we toughen him up, pronto.

And drive another wedge between us and his childhood which we have held so dear.

He and I read every day now. We go for walks around the block and play with walkie-talkies. We play board games and word games. I’ve set up a laptop for him with internet access and everything, and am looking for a proper school desk I can put in my office.

I figure until kids wise up and start playing with him at school, I couldn’t deny him my friendship at home. I’ll back off as soon as his personal life picks up. I’m sure he’ll see to it.

Which brings me back to tonight. I’m trying to train him to sleep through the night without wetting his bed. Toward that end, I got him a kick-ass Darth Vader alarm clock. I thought he would use the regular alarm function, but instead he’s chosen the creepy theme music and breathing of Darth Vader as his alarm to wake him up in the middle of the night to lighten his bladder. And every once in a while, the scary alarm noise catches him in a bad place and he wakes up screaming like the devil himself is on his tail. And that happened again tonight.

Like I said, I was up watching the first of the final run of Colombo episodes—feeling sad that we lost Peter Falk last year, thus the musings on mortality—when the screaming began. I beat The Missus in there by about 5 seconds, and she started out from a sound sleep. She came up, comforted the boy, saw I was fixing to deal with it, and went back to bed. I sat on his bed with him in my arms, our temples pressed together. I called him a butt-knuckle. Then I placed our foreheads together and whispered, “Let’s go potty.”

I waited for him outside the bathroom door. (I usually let the alarm wake him, then appear by his bedside when he’s done his business and tuck him back in, delivering a kiss to the top of his head, the back of his neck and a fanny pat.) But tonight I sensed he’d need a little more. I took his hand and he leaned his head against my arm, still slightly trembling. I stroked the back of his hand with my thumb and led him again to bed. I silently tucked him in and then, uncharacteristically for me, climbed in beside him and spooned with him till his breathing evened out. 

That’s what I’m giving up, shoving him out of the nest as hard as I am. I know it’s what is best for him so I will continue, but with every advance he makes, another layer of my heart floats away on the breeze like a shed skin. The day will come when he doesn’t need me at all. I will have succeeded at the most important objective in my life and it will finish off what is left of my heart.

As long as he’s happy, I’m happy.

* Thanks and a tip o the hat to the blogger from whom I snitched this term.

The World: 1, Sweetness: Zero

2012-01-09T00:55:00.000-08:00

Our son is officially the sweetest kid I’ve ever known.

And no, that’s not working out well for him at school. Not at all. Not even in Kindergarten.

He might as well be the new Amish kid in Silicon Valley.

There is an innocent quality about him that has already made him a vector for schoolyard abuse. Worse, he hasn’t even started to draw the bullies’ attention yet, just his “friends.”

Friday, when I picked him up from school, he reported glumly that no one played with him all day. Usually he doesn’t have much to say on the ride home, but he volunteered this. With a little prodding, he went on to reveal that after a spat over lining-up with a female classmate, they got into a physical confrontation; he used the word “karate” to describe the fight. Worse, he reported that she was better at karate than he was. There was crying [him], there was adult intervention, and all the kids lining up must have seen it. During the next recess he got into another altercation, which reportedly began with a verbal exchange of unknown nature. He said the other boy, whom I also know to be a generally decent kid, hit and kicked him repeatedly, including punching him in the crotch with the expected result. We asked if the other kid could have thought they were engaging in roughhouse play, or whether he thought he was trying to make him sad [had malicious intent], and The Boy indicated the latter.   

He’s normally a pretty happy kid. Over the past week he has been reluctant to go to school, and now The Missus and I understand why.

Of course, we’re only hearing one side of the story, but our kid embellishes less than most. And when he does, it’s usually the kind of wild flights of fancy that even his peers can see through (The Boy: “I can control people’s minds!” Bored friend: “Oh yeah? Control mine.”)… and cue the abuse.

But lying to deceive? Nope. The same innocence that is getting his ass handed to him on the playground also makes him a pretty reliable witness, even where his own interests are concerned.   

We talked to him again tonight about why kids might be mean to him when he considers himself such a nice kid. We reminded him it’s not his fault, but said there are things he can do to diminish the possibility of verbal and physical altercations. Specifically, we talked about confidence, which is something he sorely lacks on the playground, and he expressed a proactive interest in taking another run at Taekwondo--not to gain any potential fighting skills, but [my paraphrase here and I may be embellishing] for confidence-building and to learn to deal assertively but non-violently with his peer group. To make the inevitable pack have to turn their attention to the next poor schmuck. And maybe be straight enough in his own head to befriend his unlucky successor, and give him or her a smoother ride than he got.  

But between now and then, the rough ride is going to be his. Yet despite the fact that this has been suddenly brought to his attention, he continues to try to make nice with his tormenters.

For instance? One former “friend” who has been particularly mean to him lately walked with us for a way on the other side of the chain link fence as we left school Friday, then spun around and leaned his back against the fence and folded his arms when The Boy tried to say goodbye. Pretty dick-move, right? The Boy called out “Bye!” to him anyhow and blew him a kiss. A while later I asked why he did that if the kid was being mean to him, and he looked at me with sad, confused eyes, “I wanted to make him feel good.”

Before he told me this, my brain was filling in the likely answer… “I wanted him to like me” or “I wanted him to be my friend,” some variation of that. When he said what he said, it blew my mind. It’s gonna be tough keeping all that sweetness intact under the toughened outer layer he needs to develop. 

But Taekwondo starts Tuesday and as soon as I’m done writing this, I’m going to find the information for the community gymnastics program that apparently I had a month ago and lost, and enroll him in it, too. 

We are going to fix this. He is not going to repeat The Missus and my lifetime of playground ignominies. One particularly dodgy year, the biology teacher let me stay in his class during lunch for a semester and work on poster projects for his walls, in order to protect me from bullies.*

This will not be my son’s fate.

I was so worried when I let him bail on his first crack at martial arts, maybe a year-and-a-half ago. I knew he should have stuck with it, but didn’t want to make martial arts a “thing” between us the way Little League was with me and my Dad. Not having made a “thing” of it, now that he needs something like that, he’s happy to give it another try.

Goooooooooooooooooooooooooal!

We’ve got our work cut out for us, but now that The Boy is on the same page as we are and is finally engaged, I expect big things. When he gets determined, things get done. Taught him to tie his shoelaces in ten or fifteen minutes this weekend. And there’s not much like getting karate-ed by a girl and punched in the nuts by a boy within an hour of each other to make even a six-year-old take a closer look at the path he’s on. He’s stubborn, but not intransigent.

Parent/teacher/kid conference coming up this week. Didn’t think it would start this soon, but in a way, I’m glad it did. It may still be early enough to repair his reputation, which will be important if he ends up going to this school for any length of time.

I remember being sensitive like him as a kid, and now I’m remembering why I stopped.

~Fang 

* In my defense, I had misguidedly antagonized the bullies first by portraying unfortunately dead-on caricatures of them demonstrating clearly effeminate mannerisms in the school newspaper’s comic strip, but at the time, I thought this was still America!

Sabbatical

2011-12-30T10:08:00.000-08:00

Going to give the ol’ Forum a rest for a while and put the time I would otherwise have spent writing to more useful pursuits.

Best of luck on your 2012
~ Fang

My own private Christmas in Idaho

2011-12-13T06:34:00.000-08:00

Or “There Will Be Scotch Tape”

And plenty of Bratwurst.

Have I mentioned that The Boy turned into a bit of a monster the very minute he started Kindergarten? I must have. All of a sudden, he’s sassy, talking back, yelling back—it was less than a week ago that he was flicking my arm (our family’s version of corporal punishment) in an argument. I lamented the loss of our up-to-5-year-old Good Child to anyone who would listen... It got so bad, I was so bummed, I even bailed on my volunteer gig at his school last week.

Then The Missus went out of town Saturday morning before dawn (to DC, on the Fed’s dime, for some thing or deal they’ve got going on here), and in her absence, The Good Child has returned! With bonuses. Now he’s even saying “thank you” when being served, without being prompted. The contrast couldn’t be more striking, or jarring. Suddenly, we’ve been getting on the way we always used to again, the way I had always imagined it in my mind. Friends, with respect. I’m no longer the “bully” I’d allegedly turned into since he started getting disrespectful and contrary. He’s been so damned sweet, he had me almost falling asleep in his bed with him tonight, and Daddy doesn’t play that shit.

He’s been wildly productive, too, making all sorts of weird, 3-dimensional projects with a heavy emphasis on Scotch Tape. Cobbling together stuff found around the house, and developing elaborate stories about what they are and what they can do.

And he actually played with the dog for the first time ever!

The stuff he’s found to do to fill the time that he would otherwise have guilted his mom into directing is remarkable. If The Missus were here, he’d plead her away from Work—work she desperately needs to finish before the semester ends, and have her guide his creativity at the crafts table. Having to fend for himself creatively, he’s made this slightly disturbing but undeniably interesting leap forward artistically.

If he can do... uh, innovative work on his own and not derail his mom’s productivity, why not put our foot down in everyday circumstances? Everybody benefits.

Also, no ‘accidents’ the last few days, either; he’s made significant progress in an area that he is going to want me to stop discussing in public soon. When I showed up today after school to retrieve him, his teacher jumped up from reading to the class and ran over to whisper the good news.

(To be fair, as I told The Last Boy Scout when discussing this phenomenon, if I had gone away for four days, he probably would have been good as gold for The Missus. I never realized how even an Only Child plays his parents against each other. We’re a tricky species, we are. Mendacity just comes naturally to us, even the good ones.)

Last night, we watched Aliens, tonight it was The Abyss, I’m not sure what we’ll screen tomorrow night, just that it’ll be shorter. But his attention span has been a happy surprise. Even during the many draggy parts of the director’s cut of The Abyss, he was engaged and asking questions.

I’m not worried that The Boy will revert to his new/same intolerable, spoiled self when The Missus comes home tomorrow night. Of course he will. That’s what addicts do when our Enablers return.

So I decided to keep him home from school tomorrow, mainly just to enjoy one more day of The Good Child’s company. I even arranged a playdate with a pal of his who’s moving to Hawaii shortly, a midday playdate I volunteered to referee…, I mean, chaperone. We’ll watch some superheroes in the morning, finish One Fish Blue Fish…, then I’ll tell him to get lost and make something while I get some work done for a couple hours. We’ll have Bratwurst for dinner. We’ll watch some wildly inappropriate, but Necessary Film and he’ll go to bed well past his bedtime… It’s going to be, to use his favorite new word, “awesome.”

After that, it’s all downhill with a bullet until Christmas is over. I’m reminded of the old Bill Cosby bit about Noah and his ark—how long can you tread water?

So I’m taking my annual holiday warm-and-cuddlies—usually absent altogether—from this brief, unexpected respite from The Boy’s recent turn to The Dark Side.

Santa doesn’t need to bring me a damned thing this year; I’m having my merry Christmas right now. I hope you get yours, too.

The resident artist is on a roll...

2011-12-09T17:04:00.000-08:00

Honestly...

2011-12-08T06:54:00.001-08:00

Why would anyone want to be President now? Seriously.

Daniel Day-Lincoln for President!

2011-12-02T06:36:00.000-08:00

Movie coming next awards-season from Steven Spielberg...

Just saw the year’s best film today

2011-11-28T01:50:00.001-08:00

But before I get to that, here’s the Fall Movie Report, half-way through:

Caught Immortals a few weeks back. It’s one of those flicks that was great fun in IMAX 3D, but I wouldn’t make it through the first half if I was watching it at home. I honestly don’t remember a thing about it, other than thinking its debt to recent big screen swords & sandals films like 300 and Clash of the Titans was over-evident.

Caught the new Muppet movie over the weekend with the Bastardson side of the family. It was better than I expected (I only used to watch The Muppet Show if the guest was somebody I really liked) and what little plot there is, I actually remember. It’s a road movie with a “Save The Muppets” theme. It treads well-paddled water with good humor and in terms of sticking the dismount, comes closer to the easy, off-the-cuff vibe of the original Muppet Movie than any other entry in the franchise’s considerable filmography. It’s a shame Frank Oz (Miss Piggy, Rolf the Dog) decided not to participate.

While I can hold my head high and report that I will not be seeing the latest Twilight installment, I do have to admit having paid actual American currency to see the most recent Adam Sandler vehicle, Jack & Jill, where he thespianizes-up both himself and his twin sister. I have two excuses. One: Al Pacino plays a send-up of himself in an extended cameo as a pompous movie star who falls for Sandler’s hideous twin sister and Two: Did I mention Al Pacino is in it? He’s slumming, but it’s clear he’s doing it as a lark, as opposed to, say, Robert DeNiro, whose participation in a film used to make it an event, but these days is a red flag as often as not.

Puss & Boots was a gas. Better than any of the Shrek movies, which I disliked very much. But the trailers convinced me to give this one a try and for a change, they left a few good parts out of the trailer to include in the movie. Funniest animated kiddie flick since Rango.

In Time was a rip-off. I thought it was going to be a time-travel flick, and all I remember without checking is that it was not a time-travel flick!

Tried to see Eddie Murphy’s alleged return to form in Tower Heist, but the local theater screwed the pooch on that one. That was the weekend they were transitioning all their screens over to digital, and the 1:45 screening of Tower Heist ended up collateral damage. Oh well. I’m sure it’ll be out on video in time for Christmas.

Want to see J. Edgar, but Eastwood’s record as a director is all over the place, from well-meaning but predictable (Invictus), to overwrought (Mystic River) to terrific (his twin Iwo Jima films; Unforgiven). And then there’s Leo Decaprio’s participation, whose only credible performance since Titanic was in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which is still technically a fluke, as well as a testament to director Scorsese’s deft touch with his actors, as far as I’m concerned. Probably will wait for J. Edgar to hit video unless it has staying power past the holidays.

Speaking of Scorsese, he has made the best movie I’ve seen all year and it’s honest-to-goodness good, clean fun for the whole family. I saw it with The Boy today, and asked him tonight which one he liked better, between the Muppet movie yesterday and the one today, and our six-year-old Sesame Street fan promptly answered, “Today’s.”

The name of the film is Hugo. I went in expecting nothing other than to give The Missus a couple hours of peace and quiet, and there happened to be a screening at just the right time. I saw it was another 3D extravaganza and grumbled about all the extra damn money this stupid 3D shit has cost this year, mostly for idiotic fluff like The Immortals.

But Hugo? This was that rare case of 3D being used both brilliantly and subtly. About 1/3 of the film takes place in a wide-open, mile-high clock tower overlooking 1930s Paris. There are some truly vertigo-inducing scenes that advance the story instead of distract from it. It has all the dream-like visual POW! of a brilliant animated movie (which most of the environments are) and hits all the heart-warming, family values-oriented buttons middle-America could possibly hope for. Everybody is redeemed in the end, even the bad guys, by the love and innocence of a child. Are your eyes misting up yet?

And the CGI environs are eye-popping and dreamlike. It seems almost like something I imagined, rather than something I went out to see at the theater. With a distinctive glowy, sepia palette and sparkly things that float in the air like snowflakes or drunkard fireflies, Scorsese shoots every scene as if it is a painting rather than a moment of narrative fiction.

It features Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen in a B-role as the comical evil nemesis of the film’s protagonist, an amazing child actor named Asa Butterfield, who plays an orphan tinkerer living secretly on his own above the Paris Train station. Butterfield is so good, he holds his own onscreen with Ben Kingsley in his not-in-it-for-the-money mode. The Ben Kingsley of Murderers Among Us and Sexy Beast.

Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass) is also winning as the pal/potential love interest of Butterfield’s character. Rumor has it this young American actress went into her audition with Scorsese and had him believing she was actually a British child actress, until she let on she was just doing an accent. She classes up any film she’s in.

Moreover, the movie is the Oscar bait of all Oscar bait; the Academy is going to wet itself. Hugo is a completely sincere, wet-kiss-sealed love letter to the motion picture industry, past, present and future. Only Marty Scorsese or Speilberg could have pulled this film off with this much conviction. Come award season, it’ll be raining Oscar gold for Hugo, and deservedly so. I don’t throw around words like “masterpiece” casually, but this holiday surprise absolutely qualifies.

Mark my words, even if it tanks in its initial release—I can’t imagine how they’re going to market an almost black-and-white, 2-hour-plus European period piece with non marquee-name actors to American audiences—it will be discovered over time, the same way the Wizard of Oz was, and for the same reason.

Movie magic this potent is timeless.

In defense of a One Percenter

2011-11-21T08:28:00.000-08:00

It’s not pretty, but that’s my job.

As most people who might stumble across this blog probably already know, there is a national-news level story going around right now about peaceful protesters being pepper-sprayed—repeatedly and at close range—by cops at a Northern California university.

The footage is shocking. The cop walking back and forth in front of the kids sitting on the ground looks he’s using a garden hose, and holding it about a foot from their faces. One early official excuse was that the police had to zap ’em because the protestors were creating an impediment they couldn’t get around, until footage surfaced of cops stepping over the sitting protestors in order to pepper-spray them in the face instead of their backs.

This is some very bad policing. The cops involved should be fired, the hiring process examined—the dope in H.R. who thought this cop would be a good hire should be let go, too—and maybe establish a student/civilian oversight panel, to remind the police that we’re watching them as they watch us. Heads should roll, but they ought to be the right heads.

Why do I mention this, when it should be obvious? Because now there is a hew and cry brewing up for the Chancellor to resign, and if this example of police misconduct is the only reason why, I have to call Bullshit. They must have other axes to grind with their boss already… imagine that. Wouldn’t it be cool if in every work environment, the employees could get together and fire their boss?

There wouldn’t be a boss left employed in America.

The school’s faculty association, which is calling for the Chancellor’s resignation, described the incident as “a gross failure of leadership.” I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet she didn’t personally hire the bad cop(s) in question, nor green-light the pepper-spraying of sitting protesters.

What it was, was a gross failure of policing. It was a couple of douchebag bully cops, too stupid to remember that in 2011—especially on a University of California campus—everybody is walking around with a video camera in their cell phone. These pepper-sprayers should be fired for their sheer stupidity, even in the unlikely event some review panel eventually proclaims their actions warranted.

I’ve also read complaints that the police provoked the protesters by showing up in riot gear. Come on. It only takes one or two bomb-throwing anarchists to turn a peaceful rally into a violent free-for-all. “Occupy” rallies in other cities have taken violent turns (probably started by douchebag anarchists) recently, even in hippie cities like Berkeley, just down the road from Davis. What’s a law enforcement officer to do?

If I’m the Top Cop in town and I hear an angry mob of students is gathering to protest, and in the wake of other similar, nearby protests turning violent, I’m not going to send my crowd-control officers in wearing Hawaiian shirts and open-toed sandals. They’re gonna go in hoping for the best, but outfitted for the worst.

And if I’m the Chancellor, I’m probably relaxing in the drawing room of my million-dollar mansion sipping a martini, and the first thing I hear about the incident is when all my phones start ringing at once.

Which is not, to my way of thinking, a firing offense.

The Party of Ho-Ho-Ho

2011-11-20T23:24:00.001-08:00

When the history of this election’s Republican primary race is written, it will read like an SNL sketch, even including the part about going on for way too long and ultimately having an unsatisfying conclusion.

The parade of dingbats, nutjobs and knuckleheads the GOP have apparently seriously considered for President so far reads like a Who’s Who of What The Hell?

Remember, it all started a hundred years ago with Donald Trump.

Yes, that Donald Trump. ’Nuff said.

And defying astronomical odds, things got even sillier from there.

The next fart bubble to pop to the surface of the race was Michele Bachmann. Despite being transparently, obviously crazy—and having a husband who was bound to be a liability with the base in the general election—she was given a serious look after winning the Ames Iowa straw poll.

As a political party, when your front-runners start with candidates the caliber of Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann, you may be in for a rough ride. Which doesn’t necessarily mean you should go looking for a rough-rider; poor Rick Perry proved that. His unforgivable sin wasn’t his consistently egregious debate performances, however—remember W’s first run for the White House?—no, his unpardonable gaffe was to help the children of illegal immigrants in his state receive higher educations and then not even have the decency to back away from said unpopular action. In the party of Lincoln, going soft on Brown-skinned people is a career-killer this year.

While continuing to not coddle the Brownies, new this election cycle is that the GOP is granting Black-skinned people a shot at their top slot. Any Black-skinned person. Hello, is this thing on? Seriously, is there anyone of color in the room who only got in the race to sell more copies of his book and hopefully procure a contract with Fox News afterwards?

I’ve never seen anyone as eager to get out of the front-runner slot as Herman Cain—who has done everything but get caught with both a dead hooker and a live boy—in my life.

This week it’s Newt Gingrich.

Newt at least has a head on his shoulders, but it’s massive in proportion to the size of his body; somebody wrote last week that Newt was less a man with an ego, than an ego with a man. I don’t know what kind of President he’d make, but at least the mere thought of it doesn’t make me chuckle.

The thing about all their other serious contenders so far is, just the mention of their names elicits spontaneous gales of laughter from about two-thirds of the country. Try it yourself. Look in the mirror and attempt to say with a straight face, “President Sarah Palin.”

Ba-da-bump clish!

The Republican Party is pantsing itself in front of God and the world. Besides Mitt Romney, whom they hate, their bench is non-existent. There was even an intense, unrequited period of wooing the governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, for Pete’s sake. Besides being both fat as well as jolly, I never saw what the attraction was.

Speaking of Romney, his unforgivable sin is two-fold: Omnibus health care package passed in his state while he was governor, and the GOP base doesn’t like his religion. They’ll even come right out and say it. I guess now that The Gays are getting formal recognition, Mormons are the next socially acceptable group to look down society’s nose upon.

Their best, most winnable candidate, and they fucking hate him because his Big Book Of Crazy has a few more chapters than theirs.

My guess is, The Big Money Guys will saturate the airwaves with commercials closer to voting time and give Romney the boost he needs to secure the nom.

Poor Ron Paul; among his peers, he’s the elder statesman. There was a time not too long ago when he would have been the craziest guy on the stage, but now he’s not even crazy enough to be given a couple weeks of front-runner status.

Not yet, at least. Next debate is tomorrow. If Newt chokes on his necktie or trips over a shoelace onto the moderators’ desk, Rep. Paul may yet have his day in the sun.

I’m being Kindergartened to death!

2011-11-18T09:16:00.000-08:00

As I’m sure I mentioned before, we won an actual lottery and got The Boy into arguably the best K-8 school in town. (I wouldn’t ague, but I’m sure people from other schools in town would.)

Because this school is so progressive and hands-on, everything is great as great could be. The Boy is flourishing socially and scholastically, his teachers love him and he them, the after-school art program is all he ever talks about… you’d think everything would be great.

Except for, along with all the cool greatness comes a lot of extra parental responsibility, usually in the form of me having to drag my lazy ass out into the elements at least once daily to go pick him up and bring him home. That means, among other things, having to put on actual clothes at least five times a week. This week there will be six because one day I had to drive him in, too.

And at school, there are expectations—stated up-front—of a lot of parent involvement.

With which I am down, don’t get me wrong.

But today’s special event, the second in three days requiring parental attendance, kinda did it for me. I have reached my limit on public appearances for the moment and need to take a step back. I’m really glad school is closed next week. They wouldn’t dare schedule extracurriculars during vacation week, would they?

Anyhow, I wasn’t gonna go today. I had a solid-gold excuse all lined up, but then I stopped for just a moment and thought about The Boy. The Missus had already said that because of her work schedule she expected to arrive just on time, and I don’t want to risk our kid to be the one sitting there, scanning the crowd in vain, alone in a sea of happy families.

I really don’t feel ready to debut my new grille in public yet—especially at an eating-themed event—but again, this isn’t about me. I figure The Boy will be happier having a defective Daddy by his side than none at all.

Goddammit to hell. I hate it when it’s not about me.

Rick Perry is going, going….

2011-11-10T05:17:00.000-08:00

…mostly gone. I mean, real gone, baby.

I actually felt bad for Rick Perry in the otherwise deadly dull GOP primary debate last night.

The big news was supposed to be Herman Cain getting beat up for his recent Bimbo Eruptions by his fellow candidates, but when given the opportunity by the moderators, the other candidates passed. The question itself even drew “boos” from the Republican faithful gathered to watch the show.

It seems allegations of sexual predation are only an outrage when it is a Democrat accused of same.

And CNBC insisted on inserting that howling jackass Jim Cramer on the moderator’s panel. Every time he asked a question, I looked up because it sounded like the TV had switched itself over to professional wrestling. For that, I felt bad for all the candidates.

But Herman Cain—with the audience’s hearty approval—slipped right past the current scandal dogging his presidential bid, and the governor from Texas grabbed last night’s headlines instead.

In all the wrong ways, as is his wont, but even worse than usual this time.

We’re used to seeing him not in command of the facts, being smarmy and condescending, mangling his native tongue ala his predecessor in the Texas governor’s mansion… but this is the first time I’ve seen him suffer what honestly looked like an Alzheimer’s Moment.

It wasn’t pretty or fun. The clip embedded below is not for entertainment purposes, although I am sorry to disclose that a presidential candidate’s dreams were harmed during its production:

I’m not joking about Alzheimer’s. Between his freewheeling address that made news last week:

…and last night’s performance, I am convinced we are watching a sick man. I hope to God it’s only substance abuse, but that’s not what it looked like last night.

And believe me, it’s not easy for me to summon sympathy for probably the greatest mass-killer in the history of the state of Texas, natural-causes aside. I would wish anal warts on the man, but not Alzheimer’s.

So I reckon Rick Perry will go riding off into the sunset of his career in the next few days—in order to spend more time with his family, of course—with only history to eventually reveal whether we were watching a man in the early stages of a terminal illness, or just someone who couldn’t hold him his Jaeger and Ambien.

Ahh-dios, partner. Whatever your heath situation is, good luck with it. You may want to relocate to Massachusetts, where I understand they really coddle their sick.

And sorry again about Jim Cramer.

Mr. Punctuality Man:

2011-10-31T17:15:00.000-07:00

Worst. Super-power. Ever.

I’m always the first one to show up at the battle, and by the time the other heroes arrive, I’ve usually had my ass kicked but good.

How I Wrecked My Halloween Vacation

2011-10-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

“I didn’t kill nobody…”

“…matter of fact, I was next door robbin’ the grocery when my brother-in-law was stabbin’ that poor fella to death. I couldnta done it!”

That’s the basic pitch I used, then I improvised from there depending on the audience. If there were little kids, I kept slipping my dead-eyed gaze back to them while I talked to their parents. Of the scores of kids I saw Friday night, I scared all but about five of them out of talking to me.

What in God’s name am I going on about?

I volunteered to be part of a Halloween extravaganza at the local “Old State Pen” and current tourist destination. The event ran for two nights and featured a “Thriller” dance, prison-related booths, the local music school provided entertainment, etc. And a bunch of us locals dressed up as the ghosts of real-life former prisoners of the pen and drifted around talking to and scaring folks who were there for the festivities.

We were each given a specific prisoner’s name and history and required to memorize it, because as this event was run by academics, we were there to educate as well as terrify.

There were four weeks of rehearsals, but I was brought in just in the last week. Which was fine, because if I had had four weeks to bail, I almost certainly would have. I only did it because it was a last-minute thing, and expectations on me would therefore be uncommonly low.

Friday night was Family Night. The instructions were, no swearing and don’t scare the kids too bad.

As soon as the doors opened, the volunteer playing my brother-in-law and I interacted with the first couple coming past. As soon as they left, “Ernie,” my brother-in-law, pulled me aside and hissed, “We’re not supposed to swear tonight!”

Saturday night would be the 16-and-up night, where, God help us, alcohol will be served. We could say just about anything then. But not on Family Night.

I asked Ernie, “Uh oh. What did I say?”

“‘Bullshit,’” he whispered.

I said, “Really? I had no idea.”

Chastened, I dialed it way back for the next group of revelers. As soon as they were gone, I was conferencing with Ernie again. “Dial it back!” he seethed through clenched teeth.

“I was!” I protested.

He assured me I didn’t exactly hit the mark and illustrated his point with an example.

“Really?” I said. “I had no idea.”

So I learned to be a lot more subtle, quick.

For instance, the visitors were given a scavenger-hunt-type list of questions that had to be answered by the convicts (to force them to interact with us). One question is, “Who was the youngest inmate, and how tall was he?” To which my stock answer became, “I reckon he about ten, but ah couldn’t right say ‘xactly how tall he was; I ain’t never seen him standin’ full up. Haw haw heh”

See? I can do family-friendly. The adults got it and it sailed right over the kids’ heads.

At one point, I picked an unplanned fight with one of my fellow actors—a guy my size who must weigh 300 pounds—and it escalated rapidly from a shoving match into a full-fledged brawl, with him body-slamming me into a wall, knocking me to the ground then running away. He came up to me afterwards to make sure I was okay. I assured him this was not my first fake fight, and anyhow, I started it.

It was a magical night.

I based my character on Karl from “Sling Blade,” but leavened the Dixie accent and made him just a few ticks smarter.

And I also made him a sick fuck.

I liked to find a single overhead light source and stand under it, arms crossed, glowering at everyone who came by, daring them to talk to me.

Not that many people took me up on the dare.

Whenever a group of pretty girls walked past, I lowered my head, followed them with my eyes and made a quiet “tick-tick-tick” noise deep in my throat. Scared the shit out of them without saying a word. Or I made a little suck-suck-sucking noise with my tongue against my teeth and made dead-eye contact.

Once I stood glaring down from the top of the stairs in the Death Row building and a little girl screamed out loud when she looked up and saw me. Again, I said nothing.

Family-friendly, that’s what I’m all about.

We were also supposed to respond to modern technology (my felon was executed in 1951). I was talking to one group of people—who kept asking me questions, and instead of answering them immediately, I kept protesting my innocence while my eyes wandered up and down the most defenseless member of their party—and when they pulled out a cell phone I screamed and jumped back, causing most of them to scream, too. “What the hell is THAT?!” I cried before turning tail and running away from them like the devil himself was at my heels.

Playing a hateful asshole also meant that if I started getting bored with a particular group’s use of my time, it was fully in character for me to tell them I thought they were wasting my time and stalk away from them. And my make-up was so good that I was virtually unrecognizable.

It was the most fun I’ve had in I can’t remember how long.

Unfortunately, Saturday did not go as well. The “Sixteen and Up” night, complete with beer garden, produced at least five times more paying participants, but most of these were, well, sixteen and up, and their attitude toward us was, generally speaking, decidedly different. They mostly wanted to prove that they knew we were just losers in make-up, and that they couldn’t hold their alcohol. My natural-high from the night before wore off pretty quickly.

Plus, the first night my make-up was terrific and most of the crowd hadn’t put much effort into theirs; Saturday night I looked like a pasty raccoon, and all the paying customers were Halloweened-up to the nines. Frankly, I felt like a fool instead of a ghoul.

Additionally, as it turns out, I was coming down sick. When I signed up for the gig last week, I did not realize it was going to be an outdoor event, at night, at the end of October in Idaho. By midday Saturday, I was wondering where all my energy had gone. Saturday night was supposed to be the fun, wild-and-crazy night, but for some reason on the drive into town, I just couldn’t muster up very much enthusiasm.

By the end of my shift, it was painfully clear why. It must have been ten degrees cooler that night and considerably windier. The back of my neck was exposed and cold as the summit of Everest the whole second half of the evening (until I bailed early, for which I still feel guilty).

In spite of wearing SIX layers of shirts, sweaters and jackets, including thermal underwear, I noticed my sore throat on the drive back home. I managed to convince myself at the time that it was just because I’d been doing my Karl voice all night, but by this morning there was no denying it.

Today, I am one sick fuck, for realsies. I must have slept half the day away in a feverish daze—while The Missus and The Boy busied themselves with various holiday-related family activities—and it’s still just coming on. I’m gonna miss the whole damn holiday.

I think next year—as much fun as the first night was—I will pass on portraying a cautionary tale at the prison Halloween event, and stay home and carve the traditional pumpkin with my family. Halloween will be coming around again next year, but The Boy is never going to be six again.

Another hard life lesson learned at the old State Pen.

Going, going...

2011-10-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

This is my goal weight:

The Boy’s first official school picture:

2011-10-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

Kindergarten, 2011/12

Separated at birth?

2011-10-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

Maized And Confused

2011-10-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

The area circled in red is the part of the maze in which we got hopelessly lost last weekend.

Click photo to embiggen.

Seven Steps to a Successful Eating Disorder

2011-10-16T00:12:00.000-07:00

People have been asking me how I lost 30 pounds or so this summer and went from this:

to this:

Well, here it is, the secret to my success, in an easy-to-follow, step-by-step format. You can thank me later.

Step One: Go to a family reunion at the beginning of the summer and come back so emotionally traumatized that you’ve lost seven pounds over the three-day weekend. (I think this is the only part of my formula that the reader should not try to replicate, but that’s okay because it is an inessential step.)

Step Two: Identify your chief source of empty calories and eliminate it. Cold turkey, today. Mine was Mountain Dew. Yours might be beer or wine (previous favorites, already long-gone from my diet), or Cheesey Puffs… but if you drink a lot of soda, that should be the first thing to go. If you really need your caffeine, take an Excedrin every morning. Take care of the morning’s little aches and pains and get you out the door on the bounce. Throw it in with your vitamins if you want to feel less like a junkie.

Step Two-point-one: I also eliminated caffeine this summer. Not because it was part of the weight-loss plan, just because. It turns out it was a crutch that I did not actually need, and was only doing habitually. Buh-bye.

Step Two-point-one-point-one: If you can, look at your medicine cabinet and see if there’s anything else you can cut back on, or out. For instance, I stopped taking Advil PM to help me sleep and an Excedrin in the morning to help me get up. Shortly thereafter, I went out for four hours in unfiltered, 95-degree heat and photographed a track meet and was shocked to discover I didn’t miss the caffeine a bit.

Step Two-point-two: Have an especially shitty cholesterol score. That’ll really reduce the amount of food you want to eat—that you are still allowed to eat—to almost nothing. I tried Step 2.2 and it’s worked awesomely! These days, walking through grocery store aisles is like flipping through the pages of a scrapbook of old girlfriends.

Step Three: Schedule a colonoscopy (you know you should). They’ll starve you for a week before the “procedure,” at least if the diet restrictions the prep requires are as distasteful to you as mine were to me. I quickly decided I’d rather eat nothing than the tasteless, vegetable-based slop I was allowed. This worked to my benefit by establishing a self-discipline where eating was concerned that I had previously lacked. I took that week to reassess my relationship with food, and having discovered how much less food I actually required to do all my regular stuff, couldn’t in good conscience go back to trying to fill up my self-esteem hole with groceries.

This leads directly to Step Four: Only eat when you’re hungry, and then only eat until you’re not hungry, instead of full.

Re-read Step Four until committed to memory.

You will be amazed at how little food you actually need to eat to still function and feel like a normal human being. It’s like discovering that you’ve been using super high-octane for years, when you could have been using regular unleaded all along. And driving a snazzy import with really excellent gas mileage instead of your dad’s clunky old American sedan.

Step Four, I think, is the genius Step. Once you’ve gone cold turkey and are only eating when your tummy has been grumbling for a while, prepare whatever you’re going to eat in half-portions then try not to finish that. The genius part is that I have been able to continue to eat whatever I want—within the damned guidelines of my low-cholesterol diet—and still drop weight. You’d be amazed how many sweet treats and high-calorie delicacies are low in cholesterol, and fill you up in a hurry.

But for the most part (and for the record), stick to undressed fruits and vegetables. That is to say, don’t dip your fresh strawberries in mountains of powdered sugar, nor add buckets of heavy sauce to veggies in a hopeless effort to make them palatable. Eat them raw and fresh. I lucked out and dropped my spare tonnage over the summer, when fresh fruit was abundant. You can burn off a lunch of grapes and peaches just feeling sorry for yourself that you weren’t able to have a proper meal.

Step Four-point-one: At this point, you’ll be drinking water like you used to pound back Pepsi. Or Budweiser. Or Franzia or whatever. By replacing your whatever with water, you’re not only dropping the millions of empty calories from not drinking your usual whatever, but you’re also peeing extra pounds of water away on top of it.

Step Four-point-two: Nothing to eat or drink but water between 8 p.m. and breakfast. Impossible you say? This brings us to Step Five.

Step Five: Work your self-loathing. It will provide the momentum to pull you through the particularly rough patches. Just repurpose it. Turn it from punishing your body with abundance to punishing it with denial. The result is still the same, with one exception. When you pass yourself in the mirror and risk a glance, you’ll see one less thing to hate about the person looking suspiciously back at you.

Step Six: This one also is strictly optional, but a dental emergency or two is always good for helping drop the spare pounds. Especially if you’re already committed and just looking for enablers to help your budding eating disorder along.

Taking a closer look at it, Steps Five and Six, like Step One, may be specific to me.

Moving on… I also have it on reliable authority that if exercise were added to the mix, I would probably be healthy by this point instead of just looking healthy. Still, exercise has that same sense of inevitability about it now that sobriety did back when I was drinking. I know it’s coming, I’m just not in a big rush to get to it.

But to be responsible, let’s put Exercise down as Step Seven. Hand to God, The Missus and I have been talking about getting me a stationary bike. My Spiritual Advisor recommended it, and he’s never been wrong before. He pointed out that I could watch TV while I did it, and a wealth of possibilities opened up before me. (I’ll be able to get to the fifth season of The Rockford Files after all!) Suddenly, the thought that I might get that other kind of cholesterol down and get my doctor off my back seems slightly less out of reach.

Plus, I’m going back to another family get-together for Thanksgiving. The Missus and I have agreed I will stop at 180 lbs, so I will probably have to weigh myself frequently while I am there to make sure I keep my end of the bargain up.

Like guitar playing, if I had known how satisfying this feels, I would have started years ago.

Disclaimer part: Now, this is just what has worked for me. I’m not a dietician or a doctor, just a layman relaying his personal experience and extrapolating some larger conclusions from it. I’ve lost weight in the past, but it’s never felt like a lifestyle change before.

All the same, I am not discounting the possibility that with seven steps currently identified, I may still have a few yet to discover. These things usually come in twelves, don’t they?

Running to Stand Still: The American Jobs Crisis

2011-10-09T10:11:00.000-07:00

I was watching the Bill Maher show on HBO this weekend, and he posed a question that’s been on my mind for a long time now: What if there are not enough jobs for the amount of people we have in the world?

Every bastard politician running for office in this country is touting an alleged “plan” to get everyone back to work, but not a one of them—not even Ron Paul, that I know of—is talking about the jobs that are gone forever. And I’m not talking about manufacturing jobs as they are popularly understood (cars, munitions, etc.).

I’m talking specifically about jobs that have been erased from existence by the Communications Revolution.

There are entire industries being rendered obsolete. Anything that can be gotten over the web, is being gotten over the web.

I’m not just talking about my beloved newspaper industry. Writers and photographers may still be able to transition their skills into the new employment paradigm, but when are all the pressmen and production people laid off by shuttering newspapers going to find another print house at which to work?

How about never?

What about the travel agencies that don’t exist anymore? Are those jobs coming back? No.

What about CD store employees? Department store, one-hour photo and book store employees. Map, phone, Encyclopedia, dictionary and cook book printers and the lumber and delivery industries they used to support. Paper boys. Typewriter manufacturers and repair shops. Greeting card makers. The United States Postal Service. Porn cameramen and lighting guys—the actors should be able to transition smoothly to the world’s oldest profession, not yet in jeopardy of obsolescence from the technological revolution.

I could spend all day on the Internet, looking up other ways the Internet is radically reconfiguring the American jobscape, eliminating whole fields of employment.

Still our elected leaders—and lots of ‘Job Creators,’ too—continue to ignore the ugly reality we’re facing. Nobody wants to say it out loud. Nobody wants to be the Big Name who bursts America’s balloon by pointing out that the emperor is nekked; that the unemployment numbers aren’t going to improve until we start looking forward instead of backward.

Nobody holding the reins of power wants to acknowledge that whole industries—and all their lovely jobs and support industries—are going the way of horse-and-buggy makers and the milkman. Because to do that would be scary as hell, and even the GOP doesn’t want to scare America that badly, without some actual device in mind to relieve that fear, once in office.

And there currently is no device on the table.

Instead of focusing on the ‘job creators of the past’—I keep hearing Henry Ford cited, a fine example of an innovator for his time—we need to accept the new communications paradigm and prepare for it, not continue to rework outmoded business models from the last century.

In the 21^st-century paradigm, as it is unfolding, it won’t be muscle and guts and assembly-line stooges that employers are looking for, it’ll be brainiacs. If we want to rock the 21^st century the way we did the 20^th, we’re going to have to do it by being smarter than the rest of the world, not just having the biggest dick.

And we are absolutely not preparing for that.

Our kids’ readin’, writin’ and arithmatickin’ scores compare extremely unfavorably to our global competitors. Why are American jobs being outsourced to India, and our general crap manufactured in China? It’s not just the fact that most modern Asian cultures have an indomitable work ethic that’s ingrained from day one and produce workers who are renowned for being slavishly devoted to their jobs.

It’s not even just because they’ll work cheaper, too—although that is definitely part of the equation—but because the workforce in Asia has been training for the 21^st century for a while now and hit the ground running, while we’ve been admiring ourselves in the mirror, swapping tall tales with each other about how bad-ass we were when we whipped the Soviets in the Cold War back when we were kids.

Obama’s taking the same backward-looking approach to the jobs crisis, trying to recreate FDR’s WPA model, again from the previous century; build (or shore-up existing) bridges, highways and dams. Infrastructure! Which is fine for this election cycle, but all those jobs are necessarily short-term in nature. Once the bridge is built, Joe Constructionworker goes back to queuing up at the unemployment office.

We’re not fixing the problem at all, at best we’re proposing changing its bandages. We need brand new fields of endeavor, not a patchwork of one-time quick fixes. America doesn’t need new jobs anywhere near as badly as we need whole new, forward-thinking, technology-based industries.

To paraphrase a wiser man than me, give a man a job and you’ll feed him for today; give him a career and you’ll feed him for life.

All the WPA-type jobs in the world are not going to create new careers or new industries. They won’t produce the smarter, more tech-savvy workforce that will be necessary to advance this country’s interests in the 21^st century.

What America needs is a modern-day Henry Ford, someone who will help us acclimate to and succeed in the ever-changing new world order. Some gutsy, high-profile politician or Captain of Industry who will step up and start an honest conversation about the vast number of jobs that are not coming back, not ever.

And ideally, also have a revolutionary innovation in his or her pocket that will help us to begin to address the crisis-in-progress the paradigm shift has created.

But the first step has got to be to acknowledge the severity, and define the true parameters of the problem.

Otherwise, we’ll keep right on denying the scope of the problem as it exists, and running in place until we dig a hole for ourselves so deep we’ll never get out.

We have a new air missile at home...

2011-10-08T16:26:00.000-07:00

...and it’s an awful lot of fun to take pictures of:

The annual R&RHOF rant

2011-10-08T11:12:00.000-07:00

This year’s rant about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees practically wrote itself.

I have a friend whose super-power is knowing everything—everything—about music and sports from the latter half of the 20^th Century, down to the tiniest detail. (My super-power, if you’re interested, is punctuality.)

Anyhow, my friend--who is an actual writer, as in, he gets paid to do it--wrote this column, to which I replied, said reply comprising the bulk of this post. I’ve done just a little bit of editing, mostly to omit private jokes that wouldn’t make sense to someone who was not Daniel, The Last Boy Scout or me.

Speaking of the article, I eventually had to copy and paste it to a Word doc because the rotating ads on the page change the text layout every five seconds and it was giving me brain seizures. I recommend you cut to the chase and copy and paste into a text program document before reading.

So to be clear, the format is a paragraph-by-paragraph reply to Daniel’s comments in his article. Let the lazy blogging begin!

Daniel: “The criteria used by voters for this operation is often vague, but seems to favor obscure artists with one hit or less.”

Me: In their [the RRHOF] defense, what I imagine their actual criteria is focused on is honoring the artists they’ve been influenced by, and the panel being made up—undoubtedly—of Rock Snobs, one-hit wonders like Laura Nyro, Tom Waits (zero hits, I think) and Leonard Cohen are eventual shoe-ins. Bands like Rush and KISS are not usually the kinds of acts that Rock Snobs champion, thus they continue to go begging.

And I’m not just mentioning KISS to suck up to TLBS, but among actual bands—as opposed to Ivy League Rock Snobs—there are a shitload that cite KISS as a major early influence. Hell, they were my first experience with non AM-radio music. They blew my mind and reset my musical magnetic north. They were the gateway band to Led Zepplin and Pink Floyd. (The Floyd are in, right?)

While cases can be made for eventual induction of the Beastie Boys, the Cure, Guns ‘N Roses and Red Hot Chili Peppers, as newer acts, they can wait. There’s an incredible backlog of performers that need to precede them.

While I agree with the second part of this statement, I have to take exception to your exception to Guns and Roses... and God help me, The Beastie Boys. I was a pop culture omnivore back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, and these two acts took their respective genres to heights undreamed of previously. And the Beasties, although strictly speaking a hip-hop band, rocked as hard as any metal outfit the couple times I caught them live at festivals. So if your metric is inspiration to actual musicians of succeeding generations, GNR and the BB are slam-dunks.

Personally, I say fuck The Cure and RHCP. They were flashes in the pan with small, insular fan bases. Very few current acts ever mention either one of them as influences or childhood favorites. Shit, I’ve heard Sublime cited more than the RHCP. And the one time I saw RHCP live, they sucked. Ass.

Heart: Okay, I’ll say give them a go, unless Sinead O’Connor is also eligible. I’m sure they opened a lot of doors for babe rockers to follow (not that I can think off-hand of a single babe rocker still working.). But Sinead should be inducted in her first year of eligibility. She’s going to become my new Tom Waits/Leonard Cohen!

sidebar: Is Kristofferson in the Hall? He should be. Right next to Johnny Cash.

Laura Nyro: Never heard of her till Daniel hipped me to her. As I recall she had one hit of her own, and apparently wrote many of my favorite childhood tunes, as performed by bigger-name acts. She should definitely be in the Songwriters HOF. The RRHOF is a reach, though.

Faces: Mos def. Nuff said.

Donna Summer: No fucking way. Her one hit was a series of faked orgasms to the usual period disco beat. Not only is that not rock and roll, it’s not even music unless you happen to be having sex at the time. Rock and roll isn’t the soundtrack to sex, it’s the soundtrack to foreplay. In case I have not made myself clear, Donna Summer my ass!

Eric B. and Rakim? Never heard of them. Pass! Send them to the hip-hop HOF. Fuck, man. They call it “rock and roll” for a reason. It’s ROCK AND ROLL!! If disco or hip-hop ever start a Hall of Fame, you can bet your ass Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and U2 will never make the ballot. And with good reason. (Pssst: because they’re not hip-hop artists...)

If the RRHOF wants to honor all musicians of every genre, that would be an honorable endeavor too, but they should change their name to the Pop Music Hall of Fame. I actually think that would be a good idea, if it stopped all these non-rock acts from elbowing out deserving actual-rock bands.

I agree with Daniel on Joan Jett. One big, crunchy hit, then straight to the oldies circuit with Pat Benatar. Excellent framing on “…who opens the show?” It makes your argument iron-clad.

GNR: Come on. Culturally, to my generation, they were HUGE. They influenced tons of kids to head out to Hollywood and get strung out on drugs, some of them even became rock stars.

On The Spaghetti Incident – a 1993 collection of glam and punk covers – they also covered a Charles Manson composition, “Look at Your Game Girl,” which was hidden as an unadvertised bonus track. Though vocalist Axl Rose insists the media doesn’t understand his fascination with Manson, there’s fine line between being edgy and displaying poor taste.

For what it’s worth—and I agree with you that the inclusion was a ‘mis-step’ at best; I always stop the CD as soon as I recognize the first couple chords of the song—by that time, Axl had assumed almost Roger Watersian control of the band, was secretly buying up the rights to the band’s back catalogue for himself and had already inserted a track the band didn’t know about on their previous album.

Finally about GNR, if they induct anyone other than the late’80s/early ‘90s line-up, it’ll be a crock. Whatever Axl is doing now, it isn’t Guns and Roses, no matter how loudly he insists that it is.

Regarding your list of outrageous omissions:

Dick Dale: Agreed. Put him in, coach!

Moody Blues: Maybe, but they’re much more pop than rock. Their exclusion doesn’t offend me.

The Guess Who: Agreed! They rocked and, unlike the Moody Blues, their stuff still holds up great today. I recently bought a bunch of MB songs off iTunes recently that I remember liking, and was surprised at how unimpressive I found them now. On the other hand, I still stop and rock out every time I hear The Guess Who. The long version of “American Woman” alone should be enough to require their induction.

Of your laundry list, I would add Sinead for sure, and agree with Rush, Kiss, Deep Purple, Tommy James and The Shondells, of course the Raiders… and Three Dog Night. Stevie Ray Vaughn was unquestionably a virtuoso, but he was a Blues virtuoso. If they’re looking to induct a proper Rock Guitar virtuoso, Ynwgie Malmsteen would be a much more appropriate pick.

And Carole King as a non-performer? That’s just insulting. The board must be not just snobby, but deaf, too.

Anyhow, there you have it. I agree with you and everyone else that the Hall has long since become a joke, but as long as Jagger, Springsteen and Bono keep showing up at the ceremonies, it will remain a going concern.

A working class hero is something to be

2011-10-07T01:22:00.000-07:00

I was surprised at how taken aback I was at the news of the death of Steve Jobs. I mean, it wasn’t like we didn’t know he was sick.

But now that he’s gone, I realize I haven’t been this emotionally impacted by a celebrity death since Johnny Cash.

And what the two have in common is I can’t believe I walked the earth at the same time as these two giants.

Leaving Johnny Cash aside for the moment in the interest of brevity…

In the wave of media attention following Jobs’s death, the full scope of his contributions to popular culture is being tallied. The standard fonts—I mean standard, having shipped with every Mac since God-knows-when—were his innovation, and he named them himself after favorite cities. Chicago. Monaco. Geneva. He did that.

Before that, only graphic-artist monkeys like me had any idea what the hell a font was. Today, everybody’s a damn expert.

In his short life, he lived long enough to render many of his own seismic innovations obsolete, the mouse and the iPod being the first couple that come to mind. I refuse to even consider the changes he might have wrought, had he lived another 30 years, the approximate average lifespan these days.

What a loss.

I came to the Mac party late, securing a newspaper production position in the summer of ’89 and barely surviving a crash course in all things computer. You have to understand, just a couple months before working on my first Mac, I was using a punch-tape Mergenthaler for typesetting and a light table, t-square and Exacto knife for paste-up. Back then “cut” and “paste” weren’t computer functions, they were activities I performed manually.

I remember the papers’ first server boasting a whopping 40 megs of storage capacity! Quark and Illustrator were still just babies and the internet was a series of tubes that only a few dedicated early-adapters had discovered.

I was given two weeks to go from zero to running two newspapers completely by Mac. My employers were nuts to hire me. By Wednesday of the second week, I was only just beginning to “get” it. But if I had been given the same timeframe to master the PCs of that era, I’d probably be flipping burgers at McDonald’s today.

And during Jobs’ exile from Apple in the mid ’80s, he revolutionized animated filmmaking by founding Pixar. This tectonic shifting of the motion-picture paradigm was side-work for the guy while he waited for Apple to come calling again.

According to the media coverage, Jobs never graduated college. He wasn’t an inventor per se, but he was the visionary who kept the inventors’ paychecks coming. He wasn’t the genius who wrote the code and put the guts of the communications revolution together, but he was the futurist who was always ten steps ahead of everybody else in ways to apply the fruits of the eggheads’ labor.

He took a complicated, ugly workplace workhorse and made it into a sleek, sexy fashion accessory, in many circles a necessity by the time of his death. He took other peoples’ ideas and improved them, and integrated them in novel, commercially bold ways.

He took the stuff of science fiction and made them household staples. Like the famous Kennedy quote, he really did look at the future and say, “Why not?”

He didn’t ask “What’s next?,” he determined it.

And by and large, we live in a better, more connected world because of him. When the history of the communications revolution is taught a hundred years from now, Steve Jobs will be the Irving Thalberg of the tale; the indispensable innovator who laid the foundation for the industry that would change the world in the wake of his premature passing.

It’s a damned shame that that we’re still living in Steve Jobs’ world, but he isn’t.

Weighty Matters

2011-10-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

Or: “Weight Matters”

My younger sister texted me the other day, wanting my feedback on why she appears to be unemployable. She wanted me to check something called “e-verify” for her, to see if it’s saying bad things about her that are scaring potential employers off.

I didn’t have to check e-verify. I know what’s scaring employers off. She’s twice the size she should be. She’s almost as round as she is tall. If I’m doing the hiring and five qualified candidates make the cut to the final elimination round, the morbidly obese candidate is the first one I am going to vote off Potential-Employment Island.

Unless there’s one with crazy-eyes, or serious personal hygiene issues. They’d get eliminated first, then the morbidly obese one. But they’d all definitely get the door.

Why hire someone who is comically fat? They’re going to need special accommodations at the office, they’re statistically likely to take more sick days off because that kind of extra weight is inherently unhealthy, and they demonstrate their lack of control over themselves just by squeezing into the doorway, why would I figure they were any more disciplined at any other part of their life, specifically work?

The same way I wouldn’t hire someone coming in reeking of booze—and for many of the same reasons—I wouldn’t hire someone as overweight as my sister or Gov. Chris Christie. Or as fat as I was at the beginning of the summer.

I’m in the newspaper biz, so I’m looking nervously at having to hit the job-interview circuit myself sometime not too long from now. Consequently, I have put forth the effort and dropped a good 25-30 lbs this summer. Granted, it started off as trauma-induced weight-loss a couple times at the beginning of summer, but the decision to Step Away From The Mountain Dew has been critical.

So has my decision to eat only when I’m hungry, and then only till I’m not hungry—as opposed to “full.” Such a tiny change in behavior has yielded such happy results! 30 pounds just by denying myself soda and a full belly. Not a lick of exercise (which is my next cross to bear).

The Missus, her parents and I also threw down a bunch of cash at my long-in-the-tooth teeth, in an attempt to resolve the issue once and for all. I am now the owner of a dazzling, picture-perfect off-grey smile.

I may not have any marketable skills to offer in the new digital communications paradigm, but by God, I’ll look good flaming out at those job interviews!

Which really brings me back to Gov Christie of Bruce Springsteen’s home state. I’ve long said, there’s no way Lincoln could win office today, ugly as he was; just like there’s no way Taft could win, enormous as he was, in an America that is as increasingly health-conscious as we are. Even people who don’t care, like my sister, at least know what they’re doing to themselves.

(For an in-depth rebuttal of my argument, click here: BALDERDASH )

Even if you love Christie’s politics, which I understand are too “liberal” for the Tea Party fire-breathers currently pulling the strings of the GOP, why would you vote somebody into office knowing they’re actuarially likely to suffer serious, debilitating illness in the next five tears, from diabetes, to stroke, to heart attack to you-name-it.

You wouldn’t be voting for Christie, you’d be voting for his Vice President.

Hell, I’d vote for Oprah first. She’s at least shown she can take the weight off. Keeping it off is the real bitch, but that will be another column another day, I’m sure. Meanwhile, Christie can’t get it off at all.

I dated a plus-size gal for a little while, and let me tell you, it wasn’t long before I hated watching her eat. It was like having a drunk in your life, for whom you cared deeply, drink his liver away in front of you. Or a lung cancer patient with a three-pack-a-day habit. I couldn’t handle it. I had to bail.

The time to bail on Gov. Christie is before he is thrown into the GOP Primary whirlwind. This is a star-crossed affair at the onset. Even if the Deep Pockets of the GOP talk Christie into running, the Ron Pauls, Michelle O’Bachmanns and Rick Santorums of the ascendant Right Wing won’t have a thing to do with him.

And even if by some dark miracle of political arm-twisting they did, he’d be a lousy candidate because of his unhealthy personal habits. Seriously, it would be like voting for Otis the town drunk, or your teenage daughter who cuts herself, for President.

The mess she’s in, America deserves better. She deserves someone whose mettle has been tested, and the response didn’t come back, “Super-size it! And throw in a basket of them curly-fried onion rings.”

And my sister deserves better, too. I’m gonna screw up the courage to have a come-to-Jesus phone call with her soon about the real reason she’s not getting past Point A in the job application process.

Because I believe that although people don’t change, behavior can. And that’s what I’m going to try to impress upon my sister.

Show me a Gov. Christie in four years who’s half the man he is now, and I’ll give him twice as serious a look.

In the meantime, I would urge my sister and Governor Christie to heed the sage advice of the wife of the Oracle, Ronald Reagan, when confronted by your next Denny’s Jumbo Texas-Sized Breakfast Platter or 64-ounce tankard of Pepsi Cola… and just say no.

Heroes happen when you need them

2011-09-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson blew through town a couple nights ago.

They shared the stage for the entire almost-two-hour set, which was a cool surprise. I’ve seen them both before and thought Haggard was okay (he spent too much of his set on anti-Bush rants, in this left-winger’s opinion) and Kristofferson was sublime.

I came away thinking the same thing after this joint appearance. Kristofferson hit the stage first, dressed in black, his head framed by a halo of unkempt white hair and scraggly beard. He floated out to a single spotlight and dedicated the first song to our young men and women in harm’s way overseas. The crowd ate it up of course, but Kristofferson is a vet himself. I give him the benefit of the doubt.

After that, Haggard and his five- or six-piece band strolled out to thunderous ovation. Kristofferson stepped back and Haggard and the band belted out a couple big hits (I really should’ve taken notes) before the place got quiet as a church again, and Kristofferson did another couple of his poignant, incisive, delicate compositions. Repeat for about 100 minutes.

Occasionally Haggard would join in on guitar during one of Kristofferson’s turns, and for a number of songs, Kristofferson was ably backed up by Haggard’s band, which included Haggard’s son Ben on lead guitar.

Kristofferson, on the other hand, was a comic disaster on backup guitar and vocals. Early in the show he turned to face the mic and stabbed himself with the fiddler’s bow instead. During Haggard’s hits, Kristofferson just hung back and tried to not get in the way. A couple of times he was advised during the song what song the band was playing. (The Missus scored us third row orchestra seats, so we heard everything, including stage banter that Kristofferson forgot to do into his microphone.) Most of his attempts at singing harmony, I would swear he was only mouthing the words. It’s probably just as well. Kristofferson sings crazy low and he isn’t always particularly choosy about what note his voice lands on.

Haggard’s fine, smooth baritone was still in evidence, but the man himself seemed incapable of drawing fully upon it. He still sang circles around Kristofferson! But it was sad to see his son looking on worriedly as a coughing fit forced Haggard to turn his back to the audience and get a drink of water. He mentioned being a cancer survivor after stopping a song in progress and insisting they start over. He was great. He was up for anything—doing one fan’s shouted request off-the-cuff—and as spry as I’d probably be if I had to stand basically still on my feet for two hours every other night.

Kristofferson split his parts of the set between big hits he’d written that other people have made famous (Me and Bobby McGee, Help Me Make It Through The Night, Sunday Morning Coming Down), and tender ballads from his last couple of albums that apparently nobody but The Missus and I had ever heard before. No matter what song he sang, every time he stepped up to the mic, the venue immediately went from being like a rowdy honkeytonk to a hushed house of worship. Which is actually apropos, considering most of Kristofferson’s rich output of recent compositions are poignant ruminations on issues related to faith, family and mortality.

Seriously, This Old Road and Closer To The Bone are a couple of the best CD purchases I’ve made in recent years, and I’ve bought a lot of CDs.

All too soon, the concert was over. I had a bad feeling when Haggard whipped out Oakie From Muskogee, and sure enough, that was it. Afterwards, with a wave of their hands, the two legends left the stage while the band played them out.

On the walk back to the car, The Missus and I agreed that Haggard was still good, but Kristofferson was great. In his case, having a limited vocal instrument works to his advantage. The audience is forced to pay attention to hear him, and when they listen that close, they hear the words.

And then Kristofferson has them.

The Other

2011-09-19T23:44:00.000-07:00

I was a bad worker-drone today. Took the morning off at the last minute to help chaperone The Boy’s class field trip to the summit of Mt. Scary Vertical Dirt Road, where there was some serious bird-watching scheduled to occur.

The trip had been on the books for a while, but since we don’t own a 4-wheel drive vehicle—or a rocket ship—I didn’t think I met the volunteer criteria for the assistance required on this particular trip. Then last night, I’m tucking The Boy in and we’re talking about the upcoming bird-watching trip, and he hits me with, “I wish you could come, too, Daddy.”

And it occurred to me, by moving some things around, I actually could go with him. And the Kindergarten teacher might appreciate another adult chaperone, even one without Thunderbird One at his disposal.

My favorite definition of happiness, ironically from brooding anti-Communist author/philosopher Ayn Rand, popped into my head. “Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.”

Seriously, top that if you can.

And The Boy is what I value… why the hell wasn’t I going bird-watching with him and his class?

So I ran into my office, after 8 on Sunday night and emailed his teacher. Got up in the morning, disappointed to see I hadn’t heard from her but resigned to staying home and working. Utter chaos followed, trying to eat and get The Boy out the door to school in time. When I finally made it back to my computer, it was 7:30, and I beheld the email from his teacher that had come in at 6:35, that said I was welcome to come along. I flew out of here like a hastily-sunblocked hurricane and made it down to the school with minutes to spare.

One insanely dangerous ride up to the mountaintop later, the adventure began.

The adventure for The Boy involved petting recently-caught birds, hiking, listening to sincere people talk about birds, more hiking, an up close look at some mean-looking clawed birds, and finally getting to launch a bird off his hand back into the wild.

My adventure was getting to watch The Boy interact with his peers.

And it was illuminating. Without going into dreary detail (I save that for the parts of the story that are about me), I came to the conclusion that my son, like both his parents, is an Other. For better and worse.

You know what I mean. The “Other.” The odd man out. The square peg, looking for a round hole…

His teachers love him because he’s polite and uncannily focused. He plays with the other kids willingly and has formed a couple of close bonds with peers over the years (always abruptly severed by a change in circumstance).

But he’s very much, as Pat O’Brien used to describe his friend Jimmy Cagney, a far-away fella.

The other little boys, there was a commonality that ran through them. I don’t mean they were common, but there was a common thread that bound all of their behavior: they acted like the wild, unmanageable little beasts that boys are supposed to be at that age. They were cute as hell. Part of me wished my kid was more like that: a little more rambunctious, a little more of a risk-taker… then the parent thing kicked in and I remembered how grateful we are that he’s not a crazy, risk-taking, perfectly normal little six-year-old boy.

We like that he’s different, and not just because we sleep better at night knowing he isn’t falling asleep thinking up new ways to wreak mayhem in the morning.

He’s also gentler and more contemplative than his peers. Tonight he was on my lap and we were talking about stuff he’ll be able to do when he’s a grown-up, and he asked me, “Daddy, will you be alive when I’m a grown-up?” Taken aback, I told him that I sure expected to be. I told him that I wanted to get to know the man he’d grow up to be, to meet the woman he’d marry, to hold my Grandchilden in my arms.

And damned if I didn’t mean all of it.

Besides being twice as tall and half as coordinated as the average member of his peer-group, The Boy has classic Only-Child Syndrome; he gets along better with our friends than kids his own age. Adults find him precocious and charming, but his contemporaries sometimes don’t know quite what to make of him.

I’m pretty sure he’s the only Kindergartener, boy or girl, whose parents had to talk to him shortly after school started about the inappropriateness of blowing kisses to his teacher (whom he loves) when he leaves for home in the afternoon.

Fortunately he transferred over to his new school with a preschool pal, a little boy his same age, half his size and more agile than our Tall Drink of Water by leaps and bounds. Literally. His friend gets up on the monkey bars and you’d swear they named them after him. Having a friendly face in his new classroom eased the transition considerably, and the fact that his friend is a rough-and-tumble little bugger is a delightful bonus.

Because this world is designed to eat up and leave behind highly-sensitive little men like The Boy. By his age, the world had twisted me up into something even more interesting than our son—and infinitely more dangerous—and I used to dread The Boy going down the same dark path.

I don’t anymore. Especially not after today.

He’s definitely an odd duck, but he has the odd-duck qualities that eventually produce scientists, philosophers and statesmen, not serial killers and members of the lower house of Congress.

He’s not like everybody else and he genuinely doesn’t give a damn.

Maybe he isn’t so different from me, after all.

Rick Perry’s “Bimbo Eruption*”

2011-09-13T20:14:00.000-07:00

This story warmed the cockles of my heart: Palin hits Perry on state-mandated vaccine.

Apparently while he was governor of Texas, Perry decreed that all girls below a certain age were required to get this anti-VD shot. I have no idea how this passed as it seems on the face of it like something with which both the extreme Left and the Right would take issue.

This isn’t just an example of the Daddy State the GOP is proud to be known as, it’s the Daddy Who Takes His Daughters To Chastity Balls-State.

I had been expecting The Stupids to push Perry over the line, into the White House. But now even their leader is calling him on the carpet. If he loses The Stupids, he’s done for. Because nobody but The Stupids want to see another gun-slingin’ Texas bully swagger into the White House.

You may not remember, but W was sold in his first Presidential campaign as being a reconciler, having worked so successfully with the Democratic legislature while governor of Texas. What they didn’t tell us is that a Texas Democrat is like a right-leaning Republican in most other places, and most of the best progressive legislation enacted during his terms was done so over his repeated vetoes.

Now The poor GOP have Rick Perry to contend with. Perry has all of W’s baseless bravado, lack of grasp of the issues and quotable, shoot-from-the-hip malapropisms, but he’s also an imposing enough physical presence that he makes women’s knees weak and men wish they were men. He’s what W might have been if W had been the quarterback in college, instead of a cheerleader.

Then you might get to wondering, what could motivate a rootin’, tootin’ Alpha Male like Rick Perry to suddenly develop an overwhelming, single-minded interest in wiping out a venereal disease prevalent specifically in young females? Usually these crusades have a deeply personal instigating incident; could it be that too many persons-unknown of the Good Ol’ Boys network were coming home to the missus with unwelcome cases of the French Disease?

Or maybe it was just the $28,000 in campaign handouts Perry received from the Merk corporation—the sole maker of the vaccine in question—over the years.

Perry’s been caught looking suspiciously like he was in a pay-to-play relationship with Big Pharma, and by his mandating gub’ment-issued vaccinations (shades of ObamaCare!) to potentially unwilling citizens, he exemplifies the kind of Big-Government candidate the Right usually rallies against, not for.

I won’t say he’s toast, but his battle just got a lot more uphill. When you can’t even pull the wool over Sarah Palin’s eyes…

* This phrase is, of course, well-known to people who have read tell-all tomes of the Clinton administration. It has been deliberately repurposed here. And thanks mucho to whoever did the art at the top of this post. I have repurposed it, too.

The Road Goes On Forever

2011-09-12T00:26:00.000-07:00

I have this recurring conversation with my Mom that goes something like this. Mom: If you could do just one thing for me, son, it would be to give your heart to the Lord. Me: Come on, Mom. Not again… Mom: [dramatic sigh, right into the receiver] It would just give me so much peace knowing we’ll spend eternity together… Me: Are you kidding? We barely survived 18 years of living together.

Actually, I don’t say that last part. We’ve stopped hurting each other for sport decades ago now.

What I do say is—and it bugs the hell out of her—is that I’m a Believer once-removed. Johnny Cash believed in Jesus, and I believe in Johnny Cash, so I figure I’m about half way there and can we please drop the subject already?

Johnny Cash’s body of work so perfectly reflects the simplicity, depth and spirituality of the man himself that it is impossible to separate the two. In a world full of hypocrites and posers (especially the show-biz part of the world), Cash was simply who he was; a reliably decent man, bent on speaking on behalf of those upon whom society had turned its back, even at the lowest points of his epic battles with drugs and alcohol.

Artistically, he took the kind of fearless, principled risks with his career that wouldn’t be seen again in a major name until Neil Young came along. He invited his Mama and Papa down to the legendary Ryman Auditorium for every episode of his short-lived TV variety show, and played free shows for prisoners as well as internationally-telecast Billy Graham come-to-Jesus rallies.

He embraced both the darkness and the light in equal measure, always looking to strike a livable balance between the two, but never completely forsaking one for the other.

I get that. We’re the products of our impulses as well as our empathies. It’s our choices that dictate our destinies, not our circumstances.

Cash and I made a lot of the same mistakes in our personal lives as young men, including an eventual deliverance from said errors in judgment that never completely chased away the demons.

So when Johnny Cash used to talk about his relationship with the Lord, it was hard not to listen. Out of respect for him, my mind remains officially open on the subject.

And that’s what I mean when I answer questions about my religious affiliation by referring the questioner to the music of Johnny Cash. Because if God can’t be found somewhere in the music of Johnny Cash, maybe the heathen horde is right after all and He doesn’t exist.

Anyway, like anyone with a quasi-religious agenda to promote, I have taken my campaign to YouTube.

As I alluded to a few paragraphs above, back in the late 60s/early 70s, Cash had his own TV variety program for a couple seasons. Back then they were giving variety shows to anyone. They were like the reality shows of the day in that they were cheap to produce and it was easy to control the content because they were usually produced in-house. And the public just couldn’t get enough of them; celebrities, in their front rooms! Imagine.

Dean Martin famously showed up for his own show only once a week, for the taping, and winged it every time. Glen Campbell had a show. Sonny and Cher had a show…

Well, Johnny Cash was smoking hot off the release of his Folsom Prison Blues album and ABC came to him with an offer he couldn’t refuse. He ended getting to shoot his show from the historic Ryman Theater in Nashville, Tennessee, then home of country and western’s venerable Grand ol’ Opry.

The rest is pop culture history.

And unfortunately, currently unavailable commercially on DVD except in a truncated, edited form (which I bought anyway and love for the picture’s crystal-clarity).

Fortunately, the same Interweb that has made a laughingstock of most of my chosen careers in the last few years, has also made it relatively easy to get my hands on a full run of the show, as well as to post highlights occasionally online via the YouTube.

The coolest thing about my Johnny Cash YouTube channel isn’t watching the number of hits grow—although that has become part of it—it’s receiving the emails from YouTube every time anybody leaves a comment on one of my clips. About 90% of the comments happen to be glowing praise for my favorite artist—and frequently gratitude for my having posted the clips—from Cash fans. It’s like a little stream of good will that flows in regularly, through good days and bad.

I mean, how can your outlook not improve when you receive this kind of thing in your email:

[name redacted] left a comment on Johnny Cash recites “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver,” below: I was 20 years old when I heard this song, I have been looking for the song for 40 years, every year at Christmas time.. I’d think of it, and wish I could hear it, just one more time. Today, I thought on youtube, dare I look. just one more time ? I knew if it wasn’t there. I would never hear it again !! Thank You for sharing this beautiful poem ~ and for making this womans dream come true. Bless you, and Johnny...Rest in Peace ~with love [redacted].

(Caveat: I’ve decided to leave all comments verbatim, or [sic]. Not only would it take forever to edit them into grammatical precision, but in some cases the form and the content of the communiqué dovetail revealingly well.)

Only a couple of the clips have generated controversy. I have several uploads where Cash talks and sings about the Civil War, and even 150 years later, the subject still enflames passions (which I will get to shortly). I usually don’t moderate comments—newspaperman, First Amendment, you do the math—but have occasionally had to step into conversations about that particular clip, or in a few cases, delete what I considered hate speech.

Mostly though, it’s all sunshine and light. Check out a few examples…

Somebody reacted to Maybelle and Sarah Carter on The Johnny Cash Show (below): Oh my God...how did you ever get ahold of such a gem? Thank you for sharing it with us al1!

Another left a comment on The Everly Brothers on The Johnny Cash Show: thank you for this my Dad and my Uncle used to be entertainers on the road and did these songs all the time Uncle Fred passed a few years ago so this music is very near and dear to me.

Another left a comment on Johnny Cash sings “Man In Black” for the first time (with intro): Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! I Love Johnny Cash and this is BY FAR my favorite version of this song!

Another left a comment on Pete Seeger on “The Johnny Cash Show” complete and uncut: Holy hell I feel better about my day. Thank you for sharing this.

Another left a comment on Johnny Cash sings “Bird on a Wire” on Jon Stewart’s old show: Thank you, man, thank you very much for posting this video! It is... like heaven’s speaking to you. Every time I watch it... I look into these great old man’s eyes, and I would have like talked to him so much. So much more than show biz. That is life.

Another left a comment on Johnny Cash and June Carter: I’ll Fly Away: 0:23 holy shit.. i never heard johnny belt out a note like that before! that was awesome!

Then there are the commenters who relate to Cash’s crash-and-burn period of his life…

One such person left a comment on Johnny Cash sings “The Junkie’s Prayer”: Cash was clean when he did this song, but no one knew better than him the total destruction that drugs cause, He was a very brave man to publicly admit his level of addiction. God Bless you Johnny Cash.

Another left a comment on Dennis Hopper reads a poem on The Johnny Cash Show: IF I CAN DIE CLEAN AND SOBER ALL MY IFS WILL HAVE COME TRUE

Only a couple clips have raised a ruckus, one being an extended version of “This Land Is Your Land” that also mixed in elements of “God Bless America.”

Here are a few samples of the comments generated:

One commenter wrote: I like how you all are saying this land is stolen....
The native Americans never “owned” America, they just lived there. This is because they didn’t believe land could be owned, and I think they were right, how can you claim a piece of this earth?
You do not own America, you just live there.

Another said: Agony of it all internation immigrants respect America and the American flag, culture and beliefs but Americans themselves are cursing this nation at a time when it needs it’s people to stick by it’s side, you are disgracing the founding fathers of this great nation they built this country with their own bare hands lived through tough times and you people are living in today’s America where these economic problems can be solved because we have the required resources.

Another wrote: he knew what America was about, the nature, this country is beautiful, the government is fucked up.

Another wrote: Had it not been for the imperialistic policies of the US government, America would have been the most loved country in the world . I still love the American people (not the government ), the ones who have helped my country so much.
Love from Pakistan

Another wrote: If we didn’t take this land, SOMEONE ELSE WOULD HAVE! This country has done so much amazing good, if the Chinese or the Middle Easterns took this land, it would be HORRIBLE. We have modernized and changed the whole WORLD. In a period of 200 years, we made a 5000 year leap. Someone else would have “stolen’ this land, and they would not have NEAR such an audacious idea as freedom. We are wonderful people, who’ve done wonderful things. Stop making us out to be evil.

Another wrote: Great video. If you notice who is shown, there are workingmen, Native Americans, and children. Not a CEO or banker or politician to be seen.

I eventually had to post a rebuttal clip of Cash doing ten minutes of prime-time TV educating America on the plight of the American Indian, even though he had done an entire album on the subject, “Bitter Tears,” less than ten years earlier. As an advocate for Native Americans, Cash got to have his cake and eat it, too.

But the most hotly contested clip is “Johnny Cash sings Civil War songs.” It really brings out the faithful, if you know what I mean.

I lost this guy’s name, but his comments are typical of the of the revisionist wing of 19th-century American history:

“In most class rooms now kids are taught that the civil war was about slavery. People seem to know less and less about the war the more time passes. It irritates me to hear people say it was about slavery, that was only a small part of it. It’s hard for us now to understand the politics involved that started the war. For the most part it was states rights. People associate having southern pride with being racicist, which is not the case at all. Blacks fought for the south as well.”

Then I made the classic mistake, and replied to him in the comments section:

Actually, it’s not that hard at all to understand the politics involved in the Civil War. There are many excellent histories written about the conflict, and the one thing they all agree on, is that every road to secession began and ended with slavery. Most states’ official documents of secession cite slave-owners’ rights and/or the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ (period doublespeak for the slave trade) in the first paragraph, if not the first line. It would be like saying the Revolutionary War wasn’t about taxation without representation.

Well, I haven’t made that mistake again. It didn’t make me a lot of new online friends, as I learned the only side still fighting this particular battle are the historical revisionists, and boy did I hear from them. A random sampling:

One wrote: The war was fought by the South for good reason. To overthrow the the tyrannic government that had formed. They raised taxes and abolished many peoples only means of income. The Declaration of Independence stated we had the right to do this. Nowadays, the US government is becoming the same way. Will the South rise again? The answer is no. But anyone who gives a damn about what this country USED to be about, and has a spine, will march up to the white house and take this country back.

Another wrote: Good reason this, good reason that, either way, the war was going to be fought. No war should be fought, but this one was definitley going to be. As for the POW’s, as a veteran and a former supply worker, I can tell you that NO one prepares for pow’s, thousands of German’s died in US hands at the end of WWII cuz we had no where to put them, and not enough to feed them, and the locals wouldn’t help us. We have the ability to feed the insurgents we get in Iraq and afghanistan but only because only because we only get like a dozen or so of them at a time. We don’t get droves and droves of prisoners like we did in WWII, WWI or the bigger wars. In the civil war, they expected the war to be over in the north in a few weeks. Months at most. They did not expect or set aside the food reserves needed to maintain their armies and the pow’s. Remember, this is nowhere near the amount of food we’re making now. There was no way either side could cope with the numbers they were receiving. • War sucks. People die. Usually its the poor man fighting, and not the rich man telling them what to do who does the dieing. Look at it like this. Yes the Union was a bit oppressive but the Confederate states were also being a little beligirent (they did fire on ft. sumter first) and there is that slavery bit. The war was never truly about slavery, it was about succession. • Either way, both sides were wrong. And for that, thousands upon thousands died. And the financial debt mounted wasn’t paid off fully until near 1918 - if my memory serves correctly. And we still sit here and argue about it like two feuding brothers.

Another wrote: Is that why the CSA, in it’s established constitution, outlawed the slave trade? Yes, that’s right. The Confederate States of America outlawed the slave trade before the United States of America. Historical fact. But please continue spouting the various Yankee lies you’ve been taught.

Another wrote: Slavery would have died out of natural causes if the yankees had`nt showed aggresion agnest its own peoples rights to choose for themselves. To quote General Lee “We should have freed the slaves and than declared secession, but we didnt want to look like we was backing down. A mistake we will pay deerly for.”

Then there are the ones from obscure clips that are just plain interesting for so many different reasons…

For example, one person made a comment on Johnny Cash: Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord): Christ is my Savior, not my religion.

Preach, brother!

Another made a comment on Johnny Cash: Singin’ in Vietnam Talkin’ Blues: My Father served in Vietnam, 4 tours of duty, He is my hero. This song makes me tear up everytime. Thank you Johnny Cash. at least he cared and tried to offer some sort of comfort to the troops. It is also the reason that Hate Hippies and the whole Hippie culture. Hippies and anti-war protesters are death of this country self respect. Have you kicked a hippie today?

And finally there are the 2% who are unpleasant about random non-hot-button issues, like this fellow:

You don’t know who Al Hirt is? Was Johnny Cash the only music you had to listen to under the rock you grew up under?

To which I replied: @[commenter’s name]... you’re welcome?

Even before there was YouTube, I traded non-commercially-available live Cash recordings with like-minded folks. Back in those days we found each other via the nascent internet, but still exchanged CDs by the U.S. Mail.

There yet remains a very old page on my eponymous site, hidden from everything but The Google, where (an outdated) list of my Johnny Cash collection resides. I never took it down because, over the years, I’ve met some of the coolest and most interesting people courtesy of that page.

Last year, another such person contacted me. He said he was from Australia, and his band, the Hawking Brothers, had opened for Cash one night in 1973 and I had a recording of the show but he didn’t. He begged me for a copy. Offered me money, the whole deal. I told him I never take money for anything Cash-related.   What I do when contacted nowadays—since I already have just about every underground recording extant and therefore the interested party never has anything but dollars to offer me in trade—is I ask petitioners to write me a little essay entitled “What Johnny Cash Means To Me.” Then I send them whatever they ask for.

I have gotten some amazing responses over the years. I wish I had compiled them somewhere. But this one was recent enough that a search of a back-up drive quickly revealed it.   The fellow from Australia turned in his essay, and one of the anecdotes he shared is as good an example as any of why I still miss the Man In Black, eight years after his death and counting.

The musician from Australia wrote:   You may be interested to know that this concert was sold off as a fundraiser. It was outdoors, an extremely cold night and therefore poorly attended. Johnny told his manager, Lou Robin, to find out how much money [the event organizers] had lost. When Lou reported back that they had lost $10,000.00, Johnny instructed Lou to “write them a cheque.” It is a moment I will never forget.

And that is just one of the things that Johnny Cash means to me.

Finally, since I’ve posted everybody else’s favorite clip, I figure I’ll close with one of mine. As an added bonus, it also contains the show’s signature opening. If you’ve read this far, you will enjoy!

9/11 security: Mrs. Bush draws the short straw

2011-09-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

It Was A Very Good Year

2011-09-05T00:51:00.000-07:00

Six years ago today—it was Labor Day that year, too—The Missus and I became parents.

That first year convinced us to put off trying again indefinitely. It wasn’t any one catastrophic thing, rather a cascading series of events and issues that, cumulatively, argued too compellingly that our circumstances did not allow for enlarging the family at that time.

Today, my back is too shot and we’re too poor. And we’re twice as far away from the support of family and friends than we were when we had The Boy.

Did I mention it’s his birthday today?

Man, five was a good year. Five was great.

Five was finally taking command of his language skills, and usually producing at least a howler or two every day. Here’s one from earlier this week: We’re working together at the crafts table. I jump up with a new treasure and tell him I need to scan it right away. As I head for my office, I stop in the kitchen for a swig of chocolate milk. I notice the pastries left over from the weekend and remember they’re either expired or about to expire. I pull off a paper towel and set it down and start to look for a knife. Knowing full well how easily I am blown off track when I’m not concentrating, The Boy asks innocently from the crafts table, “Are you scanning it with a paper towel?”

Five was learning how to swim. Five was me accepting that my little boy would never have to cling to me for dear life in the pool again.

Five was learning to play chess, and catch, and ride a bike; to varying degrees of success.

Five was virtually the end of out-of-control displays of temper, and the beginning of being able to reason with him, and hold him to account for his own actions.

Five was the last year I had the luxury of keeping him home from (pre)school every Thursday, and just hanging out with him. Running errands, going to the pool, watching superhero cartoons, enjoying fast-food lunches that launched my cholesterol numbers into the stratosphere…

I’m having a hard time letting go of five.

He turns six on the fifth, and starts Kindergarten on the sixth. Just like that, in 24 hours, he’s going to be a six-year-old and a Kindergartner. Our five-year-old will be consigned to the realm of digital scrapbooks and fond memories, and the rebellious teenager-to-come will be that much closer to making his debut.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for another year of five-years-old. He’s been home these last three weeks, alone with me and the dog as The Missus’ professoring job started in mid-August. Best three weeks of the year so far, hands-down. I haven’t had a lick of personal time or accomplished a single thing other than random, late night blog posts, and I can’t remember ever having enjoyed a stretch of unproductive time so much.

The last few weeks have been a mitzvah. I explained to him at the onset that when he starts Kindergarten, our Thursdays together were going to be gone. We should try to make the most of this window in time as it was almost completely closed.

And he got it. He didn’t seem to actually care too much, but he also remained stoic through his beloved Great-Grandmother’s recent passing. In some ways he’s very much a six-year-old, and that too is a mitzvah.

So we maximized our time together. I put everything else aside and just concentrated on inculcating myself into his world. I played games with him I’d never played before, did activities, crafts even, went places—that’s how we ended up at the Day-Glo, 3D, indoor miniature golf place around here last Friday.… he was so clear on the closing-of-a-chapter concept that he’s used it a couple times in the last few days to nudge me into agreeing to whatever he was proposing.

He knew I cared, and that was enough for me.

Losing him to six-years-old and Kindergarten in the same week is going to be rough. I’m taking steps, measures, making sure my days stay busy that first week. Introspection will not be my friend.

And I will be tasked with picking him up after school every day, and some days he’ll be home a couple of hours earlier than The Missus, but it won’t be the same. Which it isn’t designed to be, which is the whole point of growing up. But the whole point of growing old seems to be to try to hold onto your own childhood through your kids’.

Well, that’s the instinct I’m fighting, anyhow.

I know I should be looking forward to six—and I am, and all the remarkable advances in coolness yet to come (he’ll be beating me at chess before he’s seven)—but I wish I could capture five in amber.

When I was a kid, my whole family would pile into the station wagon and drive my older sibs to the airport when they had to fly back to college after holidays and school breaks. And my parents would weep and moan and carry on like it was the end of the world and it always seemed ridiculous to me. They’re only going to Champaign, Illinois, not Vietnam, I’d think, and they’d be back in no time to cramp my style all summer. What the hell was with the waterworks?

On a completely unrelated note, man am I going to miss five years old. Man oh man.

“Compromise” is not a four-letter word

2011-09-04T16:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve beefed about Obama recently, about how he has no idea how to deal with as an intransigent an opposition in Congress as the one he faces.

Now I’d like to complain about the opposition.

Proceeding on a hypothesis formed by a casual familiarity with recent Congressional shenanigans, I Googled “GOP + no compromise” and got over 3 million hits.

Here’s the first page:

Always seeking to be fair, I then Googled “democrat + no compromise” and got even more hits, below, mainly because it also includes tons of stories about DEMOCRATS who folded like cheap lawn chairs because of the Republicans’ NO COMPROMISE stand, etc.

Every pundit and pollster agrees: These are times of crisis! Times that call for statesmen, not gamesmanship.  

But in addition to his own political baggage, our feckless Commander-in-Chief has a Tea Party-guided GOP to work with; legislators who think that compromise is a dirty word, not one of the words used most often by the founding fathers they claim they adore, but about whose actions and opinions they clearly know nothing.

Because American history is littered with compromises. It was built on them; they are the mortar that has held our society together for more than two centuries.

There’s the Great Compromise of the Constitution, which gave us a deliberately bifurcated Congress to begin with; the Missouri Compromise; the Compromise of 1850; the Compromise of 1877…

A Google search doesn’t reveal a trace of any historical Great Intransigences, however.

Compromise is supposed to be unpleasant. It’s supposed to leave egg on everyone’s face. Lincoln famously said, early in his presidency, that he would free either all of the slaves or none of the slaves if either action would put an end to the Civil War.

Compromise has been an essential element from the birth of our experiment in Democracy, through its baptism by fire, a Great Depression and two World Wars.

And now it’s being abandoned by a Boomer generation that’s never had to sacrifice a damned thing to keep the good times rolling. Newly-minted politicos who believe the only way to make their mark on history is to raze the government and rebuild it in their own image, rather than fix the one that already exists.

So on the one hand, we have the former Constitutional scholar, palavering endlessly about compromise to an empty gallery; and on the other hand, we are blessed with the alleged leaders of the GOP, who are in lock-step behind the anarchic Tea Party, and on the record that their number one legislative priority is to block the President from getting anything passed and send him packing in 2012. Unemployment, two wars (three?), financial unrest... every other objective is Number Two or less.

To be fair, that’s always been the tacit political goal, to limit the oppo prez to one term, and I get that. But in the past, this beltway tomfoolery was played out against a background of a functioning central government, a luxury we no longer enjoy.

Serious times call for serious, responsible behavior. Uh oh!

Due to the myopic, politically dug-in House of Representatives currently sitting, the President is indeed screwed, job-prospects-wise; mission accomplished. But because Congress has been focused exclusively on impeding the President instead of working with him to solve the country’s problems, every other jobless American remains screwed, too.

Except for the Tea Party. They’re sitting pretty. At the moment, the sky’s the limit for Tea Party candidates.

Because every falling empire needs its fiddlers.

Luke learns to swim in 20 minutes:

2011-09-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

Thanks to swimming instructor Michelle, who was amazing!

A note to my Dad on his 98th birthday

2011-09-01T00:16:00.000-07:00

Hey Dad,

It’s another September first, and I find myself thinking about you.

I came across this really cool picture of you, above, from when you were a rakish young lad with a full head of hair. (FYI, better break out the Brylcreem; this is how Mom expects to find you when she meets up with you, Jesus and Johnny Cash on the other side some day.)

I suppose it’s just as well you’re not here anymore, I don’t think you’d much approve of the state of the country or the changes in the world lately.

For one thing, having a “colored fella” in the White House doesn’t tend to play well with your age group. But there you go; times may change, but the dead are not required to change along with them. Call it one of the perks.

On the other hand, I don’t think you’d like the way America is sticking it to the poor these days, either. I’m sure you didn’t believe in coddling the indolent, but I do remember you standing outside of church every Sunday for a couple years, collecting canned food for Tucson’s hungry.

Funny thing, though, I don’t remember you vetting the people to whom the food was distributed for ethnic origin or ideological solidarity, or having to approve of the particular details of their unfortunate circumstances. Hungry people had to eat, and you could help. Done deal. I like the way you kept it simple.

For an Old School dude down to your three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, and a man I don’t ever remember voicing what could be described as a liberal sentiment, your actions spoke much louder than your words.

I wish you could have met The Missus, oh, you would have liked her; young, smart, pretty, even-tempered, accomplished… you definitely would have no idea how I had landed her, any more than I do. And you would have said so, but with a smile and a wink.

God, you were cute as a Little Old Man.

I’m sorry I wasn’t there with you at the very end, but at the same time, I’m glad I wasn’t. That isn’t how I’d like to remember you, and due to an inescapable scheduling conflict at the time, I don’t have to.

I get to still remember the round, bald little tough guy with a heart of gold. All Jimmy Cagney on the outside and Father Flanagan on the inside.

You were a sweet, kind man, but you were also hard as Detroit steel when you had to be. That’s why going to war in the ’40s didn’t destroy you inside, your mettle had already been put to the test, growing up during the Great Depression. Walking up endless flights of tenement stairwells, selling Coca-Cola products to the good citizens of Chicago for what must have been pennies on the dollar, back when Coke was a nickel a bottle.

Pretty sure you wouldn’t be too happy with the way I turned out—a recovering-everything, hippie-artiste type with flagging professional prospects and a lousy attitude about doing anything about it—but from an early age, I did everything I could to lower your expectations. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Still, despite my (previously-documented) total failure as a boy-child in your eyes, I always knew you cared about me; I just knew you cared more about Mom.

With whom, unfortunately, I was at war for the better part of my upbringing. You were occasionally called upon to take sides and could almost always be counted upon to take hers. Which as a husband and parent now, I understand better. If The Missus and I were outnumbered two-to-one by our kids, I’d probably toe the party line more consistently, too.

In spite of which, I have many memories of you secretly ameliorating what damage you could. I remember you repeatedly sneaking me food when I was being punished with skipped meals, always with the promise—well kept—never to tell Mom about it. The same with secretly reinstated TV privileges, returned comic books… wherever you could discreetly correct Mom’s parental missteps you did, but in front of her, you always went with the United Front protocol.

Again, you and Mom were outnumbered two-to-one. Being a former soldier, you appreciated the importance of unit cohesion.

But you couldn’t ignore your innate instinct to be the deliverer of kindness, even in stealth. That’s probably the reason I’m the kind of bleeding-heart liberal you likely would have looked down on in your prime, despite the fact that it was your example that inspired me to walk in the other guy’s shoes, and look for ways to lighten his load.

I think that aspect of your personality, and its appeal to me, is what kept me from growing up to be the complete sociopath into which Mom was trying to mold me. There was always shelter from the storm, even if it was just a lean-to in a hurricane. And there was nobody who understood better than me why you were determined to keep your random acts of kindness on the DL from Mom.

The example of your simple humanity is also, I think, what drove me to aggressively redress the grievances of my own childhood when I became a parent myself. To make sure when I shuffle off this mortal coil, my replacement will be less volatile, less angry, less broken inside and spoiling for a fight with any and all comers.

And as you know, Dad, we have done very well in that regard. The Boy might be too much of an artsy type for you, but as a Granddad, one generation removed from parental responsibility, I really don’t think you would have cared in the face of the kid’s overwhelming sweetness and easy humor.

He’s an awful lot like you.

Your Grandson goes to sleep every night under the watchful eye of your vintage Army induction photo on his wall, have I told you that? Your image has been in his line of sight since the first day we brought him home from the hippie birthing center you assuredly would have advised us against.

Sure wish you guys could have met each other, though…

Well, as you can see, I’m starting to get maudlin, so I guess that’s about it for this year, Dad. Like the song says, I don’t think of you that often; but when I do, you come rushing back all at once. And unlike most flashbacks of my childhood, the tears that accompany the memories of our time spent together are those of loss, not terror or regret.

Hope you’re enjoying your reward for a life well-spent in the great Hereafter. And as always, if you run into Mr. Cash up there, make sure you tell him I said hey, won’t you?

Love,
Fang

Low Crimes and Misdemeanors

2011-08-31T17:40:00.000-07:00

The President has ordered Congress back to Washington for a joint session of Congress, to address the most pressing domestic issue of the day: jobs.

Ordinarily, this would not be newsworthy. The President, it seems, has given thousands of toothless speeches about jobs this year to little or no discernable effect.

What makes it newsworthy is the GOP’s response to the Presidential summons. Top House Republican leader Boehner has informed the President that the date of the joint session of Congress needs to be moved to accommodate a GOP primary debate scheduled elsewhere for that same night.

Forget about the fact that he GOP wants to the President move the address to a Friday night, when no one will be home in front of their TVs to watch it.

What’s important is that this is the same GOP that, by and large, claims to worship the Constitution like Moses coming down the mountain.

And Article II, Section 3 of that venerable document states explicitly, that “[The President] may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”

The ABC News tonight ended their coverage of the story with, “…so far, not even the date of the address has been confirmed.”

Yes, it has. It’s happening whenever the President says it is. There’s not even a conversation to be had. The President has full legal authority to order Congress back to Washington as he sees fit in the case of national emergency, which is how the GOP has been describing the jobs situation for months.

I say, if sitting Republican candidates fail to appear before the President as ordered, the matter should be turned over to the Attorney General for review.

The Constitution isn’t like the Bible, you don’t get to pick and choose the passages you want to live by. Once you swear to uphold it, to do anything less would seem to be an act bordering on dereliction of duty at the very least, and at worst a deliberate breach of their oaths of office.

Obama should sack-up, deliver his address as scheduled, and if any of the empty seats in the room were supposed to have been filled by the lcandidate lawmakers in question, throw them to the mercy of the Constitution they claim to revere but ignore in practice.

Next: Christians to launch new campaign against puppies that are not cuddly

2011-08-22T01:17:00.000-07:00

The cnn.com headline cried out, in larger point-size than your average headline, Inside the Christian crusade against porn!

It goes on to breathlessly ask the question that’s been on virtually no one’s mind, “Is Christian therapy for porn addicts working? Or does it confuse sin and addiction?”

The answer is a simple mash-up of the question: No, Christian therapy for porn addicts confuses sin and addiction with human nature.

The subhead on the story’s main page was equally as overwritten: Can the Christian crusade against pornography bear fruit?

Now, when one calls up images of the Christian Crusades, it isn’t morally indignant suburbanites that come to mind, it’s rapacious, invading hordes of murderous thugs. I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, but historically, the women and children the Christian crusaders of old were trying to “save” usually ended up sexually assaulted and murdered, their villages put to the torch and any surviving men impressed into service.

All in the name of God. God is great, no?

Digressing from my digression… I’m not even sure I like the label “sex addicts,” because it casts a really wide net whose interpretation is loose enough that it could be applied to almost any sexual activity beyond marital coitus for the purpose of procreation.

I was reading a recent article in Newsweek about sex addiction and thought roughly the same thing.

The Newsweek piece went on to bluster with great umbrage that they “...had big, big trouble finding non [loosely-described sex-trade users—wait till you see how loose],” Farley says. “We finally had to settle on a definition of non-sex-buyers as men who have not been to a strip club more than two times in the past year, have not purchased a lap dance, have not used pornography more than one time in the last month, and have not purchased phone sex or the services of a sex worker, escort, erotic masseuse, or prostitute.”

By that definition, no wonder they had trouble finding non-users. By throwing “using pornography” into the mix—up to two times a month!—they made their control group almost impossible to assemble. I mean, if somebody whacks-off to Field & Stream, does that necessarily make Field & Stream pornography?

When I say it’s a slippery slope, I’m not just making a weak pun.

Plus, nudie images are as abundant—and free—on the web as poorly-articulated political opinions and YouTube clips of cats playing the piano. The actual porn film industry is dying because everything they used to charge for, people can now find gratis on the web. As a newspaperman, it’s strange to find myself in any group that includes people who get laid as often as porn stars, but these are strange times we’re living in.

Moreover, erotic images date back to as long ago as man started sketching images on cave walls. No ancient society that has survived intact enough to be studied has ever been found to be free of sexually-explicit imagery.

The urge to surge is universal and timeless. Is whatever dogma-based “therapy” the Christians are wheeling out to combat the sin of Onanism—which has been around considerably longer than Christianity itself—likely to succeed?

Human nature says no.

History says no.

History does suggest, however, that the attempt to suppress one’s most primal instinct tends to lead to aberrant, amoral, animalistic behavior. Do I have to say anything more than The Catholic Church + pedophilia?

Christians, please, direct your energies to more attainable, worthy goals. According to your own Good Book, Christ never once beefed about jerking off, but you couldn’t get Him to shut up about making peace and feeding the hungry.

You don’t suppose He was trying to tell His followers something about priorities, do you?

No vacation until the job is done!

2011-08-19T00:50:00.000-07:00

The President should not go on vacation right now. The wackos and dingbats of the chattering class are correct this time, it looks terrible. Purely as a political calculation, it’s a horrible blunder and it’s not just the right-wing that thinks so.

As they say in politics, the Optics couldn’t be worse. It doesn’t matter that all the bang and clatter of the presidency follows him wherever he goes, whether it’s Martha’s Vineyard or Camp David. The Left gave Dumbleyou shit for years about his frequent brush-clearing extravaganzas; we’d be hypocritical to make excuses for similar behavior from our guy.

Hell, we ought to hold our guy to a higher standard than Bush. Wasn’t that what Obama campaigned on in the first place?

At a time when the Average Joe is having a hell of a time just meeting his monthly obligations—let alone paying off his debts—and those are the lucky ones... this isn’t a wise time to flaunt the perks of office. He’s giving the GOP candidates and punditry talking points and photo ops with which to pillory him in next year’s election. Like he won’t already have enough strikes against him.

What happened to the crafty motherfucker who stole our hearts in 2007-8?

From drowning-man to Aquaman in no time at all

2011-08-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

This year, there is a three-week window between the end of preschool and the beginning of Kindergarten. This window coincides with when The Missus is required to be back at work, so I’m flying solo on parenting from 9-5 until the first week of September.

Which is working out pretty much as I expected. It’s awesome and awful at the same time.

Awful is trying to find time to squeeze in all the shit that makes me me, shit that precludes The Boy’s active presence. Like writing, for instance. Or getting any work done. Or trying to strangle recognizable tunes out of my guitar.

It’s leaving me burning the midnight oil, in addition to [burning] the candle from both ends.

The awesome part is everything else.

I’ve got three weeks to crash-prepare him for the Big Kid world of Kindergarten, where he’ll be rubbing elbows with young ’uns from his age all the way up to eighth grade. In most areas he’s ready to go, but there are a few chinks in his social armor still, and I plan to weld them together before I release him into the wild.

Toward that end, I have a loose agenda for every day, which naturally, circumstances have conspired to keep me from hewing to. Day One, Monday of this week, fell apart when a Pal of The Boy’s from preschool came over to spend the day at the last minute. His Mom was in a scheduling pickle and the boys really like playing together. What could I do? Split the difference. We hung out with the Pal all day, but just added him to selected parts of our already-scheduled agenda.

After Cars 2 (Pixar, please: Sequelize The Incredibles! The kids would be teenagers now; the script would write itself) we went to a restaurant where I let the boys wreak havoc because of the low customer count at 2pm at this particular place.

Then we came home where more havoc requiring my full attention ensued, as well as comedy: a friend gave us a magnetic Jesus for the fridge, with different magnetic suits of clothes to dress him up in. From the front room, I overheard this conversation coming from the kitchen.

The Pal: Who’s that?

The Boy: That’s Jesus.

The Pal: Who’s he?

The Boy: He’s dead.

Then The Boy went on to explain that Jesus has super-powers, where he lost his audience entirely. The Pal can’t believe The Boy has never seen an episode of Sponge Bob, and The Boy can’t figure out how his Pal could have grown up without watching superhero cartoons.

Hey, they’re a good fit, not a perfect match. Not that The Boy knows that. He still thinks he likes all his friends equally. He has yet to have a friend fuck him over for sport… but he does start Big Kids’ school next month, so that day is coming.

Tuesday things stuck closer to The Plan, a quick trip to the vet for our constipated pooch notwithstanding. As promised, there were superheroes right after Mommy left for work; there was an hour for me to play guitar; there were puzzles and games and not a damned lick of work accomplished.

But we did play chess, he for only the second time ever. And the damned kid—he’s five—remembered where every piece went and how they all moved, even the Knight. I was delighted. Then it was all about strategy. By the end of the game, he had grasped the concept of thinking a couple of moves ahead, and it was terrific the couple of times he captured my pieces when I didn’t see it coming.

Now I am no kind of chess ace. I kept having to check the rules for even the most basic things, like what is up with all the weird rules for how a pawn can move and capture. The game also got more interesting when The Boy asked what happens if his pawn makes it all the way over to the other end of the board. After a quick trip to The Google, we had a ball capturing and re-capturing each others’ Queen.

I didn’t let him win this time (figure I’ll go about 50/50 until he is beating me honestly every time, probably in about six months) and we spent an awful lot of time after that working on losing (and winning) gracefully. That part is still a work-in-progress, and is the weakest part of his game at the moment.

But chess is important in developing tactical thinking, and so far The Boy has had absolutely everything handed to him so he has never had to learn to be crafty. And getting ahead, or even getting by, in this world requires a certain level of craftiness.

We also watched the brand-new Lady Gaga video. Heads-up, fellow parents: Not entirely appropriate for five-year-olds, but The Boy loved it just the same.

The other thing I was/am determined to work on during this period is playing catch. The Boy has a mother of a throwing arm, but until yesterday had only ever caught a ball thrown to him by sheer luck. I still remember not being able to do sports as well as the other boys when I was in school, and decided he’d suffer the same fate only over my dead body. Especially since I had three whole weeks to work on it.

It must have been funny for the neighbors, watching us in the front yard. Him, trying to figure out how to avoid the ball being tossed to him, and me, the guy who never met a sport at which he didn’t suck, trying to teach something I myself am no good at.

But even though I know fuck-all about sports theory, I do understand systems. If I study something long enough, I’ll begin to see patterns emerge and strategies will form to exploit those patterns. Thus it was I taught my son to catch.

I watched the mechanics of every dropped ball, and one-by-one addressed and redressed them. Approaching it as a systems analysis instead of a sports exercise was the key. Eventually, I honed my instructions to, “Keep your eyes on the ball, and think about your hands.” And I’ll be damned if he didn’t catch it every time he applied that formula.

Every single time.

We have taken our first giant step toward making sure our son is not the kid who is picked last for every team sport in P.E.

And now it’s almost time for swimming lessons, where in the last three weeks he has progressed from being afraid to put his head underwater, to nailing every challenge that is thrown his way, except where physical grace is called for. But when all that is required is bravery, The Boy is stepping up admirably.

And today he played a crappy game of chess, but I played even worse and lost to him.

We’re only three days into the three weeks of 24/7 cohabitation, but so far, confidence is high. Based on his performance so far, I expect by the first day of class next month, this kid will be prepared to not only succeed at his new school, but run the damn thing if that’s what he decides he wants to do.

The Boy’s current playlist:

2011-08-14T09:25:00.001-07:00

Demonstrating great taste in pop music since 2005.

The Little Candidate Who Cried “Sexism”

2011-08-12T23:57:00.000-07:00

Or: Sexual Harassment is where you find it.

I will make this brief because I’d much rather be watching TV right now, or writing about The Boy’s last day at preschool. Instead, Tea Party Dingbat-Like-A-Fox-News-employee Michele Bachmann has got my dander up.

I watched a little bit of this week’s GOP primary debate. Ron Paul, as usual, sounded mad as a hatter even when he was saying things with which I agreed. Rick Santorum got in a good one when he asked Paul if his Libertarian ideals were so broad as to encompass, say, polygamy?

Booya! I know somebody must have fed him the question, but it was a beauty. I was shocked Fox didn’t go with a Mitt Romney reaction shot.

Anyway, I missed the question Michele Bachmann was asked that has caused such a stir [Moderator Byron York of the Washington Examiner asked Bachmann about her 2006 remarks that she studied tax law because her husband told her to, even though she hated the idea. Bachmann said at the time, "But the Lord said, 'Be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.'" York then asked, "As president, would you be submissive to your husband?"].

But the moderator was only asking about one of her own dingbat quotes from a couple years earlier. Having gone on the record that her faith requires her to subjugate her will to that of her husband’s, the questioner reasonably asked the candidate if she would continue to remain the good Christian, submissive wife, should she gain the White House.

Now if a male politico had gone on the record that his religion made him run every big decision past his wife first, it would be considered fair game to publicly revisit that questionable decision-making process should he decide to run for the highest office in the land.

How is it any different if another candidate has stipulated that his or her religion required all decisions to be subject first to their spouse’s approval?

That’s the thing that Bachmann has said, and even posed in gender-neutral language, it is stupid on the face of it.

Bachmann is essentially saying that if elected, America is going to get a two-for-one deal in the Oval Office. You may recall how well America responded to that proposition when Bill Clinton floated it in his first presidential campaign.

So the topic was definitely fair territory for a political debate, where the moderator’s questions are usually framed around statements the candidates have previously made for the record. It was in that context that the “offending” question was asked.

Calling any question they can’t two-step their way around “sexist” is just a load of crap that is very popular with the Right’s female candidates right now. The GOP has long been seen as the party of Old White Men until just the last couple of election cycles, and now that they are finally fielding viable female candidates for high office, they find they can wield the liberals’ own rhetorical club to bludgeon them, and are doing so with glee.

The real issue, the one that is actually kind of important and is being completely, successfully obfuscated by all the hew and cry about sexism, is that the Republicans have a handful of serious presidential contenders who swear their first fealty to the Bible, not the Constitution.

That is a fucking problem.

All this sexism bullshit is just a smokescreen, and the mainstream media is too cowed by the fact that a huge majority of their audience considers themselves Christian to call the candidates on it. For instance, if the media truly were sexist, they would have made much more of the fact that Bachmann alone, of all the candidates, left the stage during every commercial break to get her make-up touched-up, even after being asked by Fox to stop fleeing the stage every time they threw to commercial. If one of the male candidates had done the same, I doubt seriously he would have been given the same free pass by an admittedly bloodthirsty mainstream media. Remember John Edwards, caught on-camera fussing with his hair? Everybody ran with that.

Gee, maybe Bachmann is benefitting from “reverse” sexism. She doesn’t seem to have any complaints about that, however.

The real problem doesn’t have a damn thing to with supposed sexism by the media. I didn’t buy it when Hillary was hollering it in the last Democratic primary election and I buy it even less now.

The real problem is Bachmann’s adherence to an ancient set of writings that specifically and repeatedly place her entire gender in a secondary role to that of her male counterparts, wholly on account of the simple fact that she was born a woman.

It’s not the media that is sexually harassing Ms Bachmann, it is her religion.

Meet my new favorite band:

2011-08-10T06:09:00.000-07:00

The fabulous Yabanci Brothers, performing their genre-shattering smash, ‪Arkadaşım Eşek‬.

We’re Spartacus!

2011-08-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

I turned on the TV yesterday afternoon to Spartacus in-progress on TCM.

I recognized I had tuned in just a couple of scenes before the “I’m Spartacus” moment, where all the rebelling slaves claim to be their leader, the man named Spartacus, to save him from dying alone at the hands of the Romans. It’s a magnificent movie moment, courtesy of writer Dalton Trumbo—breaking Hollywood’s infamous Black List by penning the screenplay under his own name—director Stanley Kubrick and actor/producer Kirk Douglas.

If anybody ever asks you who broke the Black List in Hollywood, point to a picture of Douglas and say, “That’s Spartacus.”

But I digress. I called for The Boy, who was playing in the next room. He came in and we watched the rest of the movie together, from “I’m Spartacus” (below) to the crucified rebel leader watching his wife and newborn son flee Rome with citizenship papers in hand, his mission accomplished even as he lay dying.

I don’t know. What is the right age to let your kid see images of the Apian Way lined with crucifixes on either side of the road as far as the eye can see? I took a chance on almost-six. If we were a proper Catholic household, the sight of a dying man nailed to a tree would have become commonplace long before now.

The Boy seemed to take it all relatively in stride, although it initially took some convincing to get him to believe this was something people actually used to do to each other.

I spent the rest of the night trying to teach him to say, “I’m Spartacus!” on demand.

He starts his last week of preschool today, then I have him at home for three weeks, then he’s gone, man. Into the system.

Kindergarten. At a school where all the K-8 kids mingle with each other on the playground during recess.

I want to send him in there accompanied by a detachment of Blackwater goons.

I worry that because of his 95th percentile height, he’s going to be mistaken for a kid much older than he is. I’ve seen it happen in parks and pools for the last couple years. A kid about The Boy’s size will come up and want to play with him, and I eventually have to explain to the ten-year-old that The Boy is actually only five, not “special.”

He’s gonna learn to have to do his own talking pretty soon. But something happened last night to make me think he may just be up to the challenge.

I was trying to put him to bed so The Missus and I could watch Breaking Bad with a clear conscience. The night before had been a disaster. He had refused all entreaties to cooperate with the getting-ready-for-bed process and I eventually ended up literally dragging him kicking and screaming to the bathroom. Much drama ensued, much gnashing of teeth of shedding of tears, and apparently the shenanigans continued with his mother long after I went to bed.

I was determined tonight would be different. Better.

I went into his room about 7:30 and we played war games with little plastic effigies of an airline passenger jet and the China Clipper for a while. About ten to eight, I said, “Hey, you know what time it is.” He glanced at the big, old-fashioned round schoolhouse wall clock and said pointedly, “I know.”

I taught him how to read that clock. It’ll be obsolete before he gets his learners’ permit.

Knowing one of his favorite tricks is to demand to be fed after the evening tooth-brushing has occurred, I suggested we hit the kitchen for a treat before bed-time.

He took his treat and retired to the front room coach. His body language was hollering in all caps, “I expect to be here for awhile.”

Treat finished, I told him, “Let’s go. Time to get ready for bed.”

“Noooo…” he sulked.

I explained again how much Mommy and Daddy needed to watch Breaking Bad, but how irresponsible it would be for us to let him see it, because of the potential for graphic violence. (This after Spartacus.)

He said he didn’t want to go to bed. He swore up and down he wasn’t tired.

I decided to outlast him by being tediously logical and unflappable and boring. I said, Okay, what do you want to do instead? Knowing from past experience that he can usually be counted upon to fold under direct, specific questioning.

Instead, he said, I want to talk.

And stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t have a prepared answer because this is a card he had never played before. It was a masterstroke and I told him so. I told him I hadn’t been prepared to accept any answer he had to give me, but he had come up with one I couldn’t refuse. High-five.

So, I said, what do you want to talk about?

He said he didn’t have any idea.

I said, Look, you called this conversation. It’s up to you to get it going. Now, what do you want to talk about? You want to talk about you?

He said Yeah.

I bore in: What about you do you want to talk about? Your hair? Your nose? Your arm?

He said Okay.

I asked him, Do you think that’s going to be a very interesting conversation to me?

He said No.

I said, How about if we talk about my hair, my nose, my arm? Is that going to be a very interesting conversation to you?

Again, he admitted, not so much.

So I said, What we need to talk about is something we’re both interested in. Like superheroes, or Mommy, or our big dumb pooch Jake…

Superheroes, he said!

And I don’t honestly remember how we got from that, to discussing the concept of unlimited alternate realties, other than that he brought it up. It’s a central conceit in one of his favorite not-for-kids cartoon superhero DVDs. We’ve watched it maybe eight or ten times, every time but the first time at his request.

He was talking about all the different earths and I stopped him and asked, did he understand where all those different earths came from?

He admitted he did not.

I explained it was a popular theory that every time we made a choice, we created another world where we had made the opposite choice. Seizing the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone (really wanted to get to Breaking Bad), I used the example of the going-to-bed fracas of the night before. I said, Remember last night, when you were bad, and we had that big fight and everybody ended up sad?

He said that he did.

I said, Well, when you made that choice, you created two worlds: ours, where you disobeyed and everybody went to bed sad, and another where you behaved and everybody went to bed happy. Then I took my clasped hands and spread them apart and said, Do you see how making that choice created two worlds?

He nodded, looking somewhat chagrined.

Then I thought about it for a second and said, And there was another choice made last night. I made the choice to drag you to the bathroom which made you really mad, then we all got sad; if I had made a different choice, and been just a little more patient with you instead of forcing compliance, none of us would have gone to bed sad, either. I spread my hands again to illustrate. One choice, two more different worlds.

Then what could I do? I apologized. I explained that I, too, should have made a different choice last night. We both had a shot at making a better world and we both let it slip through our fingers.

We agreed to make better choices going forward and try to make sure that every world we split off into is the best one it can possibly be.

Then I accompanied my 5-year-old future astrophysicist to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, helped him change him into his PJs and packed him off to bed to be read to sleep by his Mommy.

And nobody cried, and no unnecessary drama was had, and every choice we made that night did indeed lead to the best-possible-world scenario, as far as I can tell. I wouldn’t have changed anything.

Who’s Spartacus? When we make the right choices, we can all be, and live to tell the tale.

America’s very very bad, no good week

2011-08-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

• 30 American servicemembers killed in one attack in Afghanistan, including members of the Navy Seal team that sent Osama bin Laden to hell. Killed while engaging in a war that America lost any legitimate claim to pursuing long ago.

• The climax of the budget battle embarrassment that ended with America’s credit rating being downgraded anyhow for the first time its founding, based on the perception of “political instability.” Hard to argue with that one.

• The partial shutdown of the FAA due to additional partisan budget bickering, unnecessarily laying off thousands of working-class Americans at a time of unprecedented financial crisis.

George Will just summed it up excellently on ABC’s Sunday morning show: America is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions.

It’s easy to point fingers at the Tea Partiers or the tax-and-spenders or our useless, emasculated excuse for a president and call names, but in the end, it only adds to the sound and fury that is obfuscating the fact that America is quantifiably in decline. Steep decline.

I’m coming to the conclusion that there is no resolution to be had, short of another foreign-born attack on American soil. Nothing less than a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11—a disaster with a clearly-identifiable bad guy, an ‘other’ to focus our rage on—is going to have the purchase to even momentarily distract us from the self-inflicted wounds our country is suffering, and unite us again in common purpose.

God help us.

I accept the newfound man...

2011-08-05T07:18:00.000-07:00

...and set the twilight reeling

—Lou Reed

Family is a choice

2011-08-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

Summer comes to Boise with a vengeance

2011-08-01T06:52:00.001-07:00

Even the squirrels have lost their will to live...

Obama’s 2012 problem

2011-07-31T06:52:00.000-07:00

If Obama hasn’t bought himself a primary fight next year, it’ll only be because the Democrats as a party and an institution are too fucking feckless to dare to give it a go.

I don’t think Obama’s in trouble because of taxing, or spending issues; not because I hate the weak, watered-down version of health care reform that finally squeaked through; not for failing to get us out of Afghanistan, even though our mission there ended long ago; not for any of the thousands of capitulations he’s made to the other side because, like Lincoln, Obama understands that successful politics necessarily demands compromise.

No, I’m going candidate-shopping because of the out-to-lunch way this President has continued to try to reach comity with an opposition that has sworn they are not about to compromise, and have followed through on that oath on every occasion.

It’s easy enough to say the Tea Partiers, by and large, are no fucking rocket scientists. The fact that they want—to paraphrase a well-known Vietnam-era quote—to destroy the country in order to save it proves that.

When they were elected, I had very little doubt they’d follow through on their campaign pledges and go to Washington and deliberately fuck everything up. They had nothing to lose; a couple months before they were homemakers and dentists and gas station attendants. Their worst-case scenario is they get two years of living in Washington DC being feted by their admirers, lose the next election and go home with U.S. Congressperson on their resumé.

However, when your only purpose in becoming an elected representative is to destroy the institution to which you’ve just been elected, you are not being helpful. Bless their hearts, though, most of the freshman Tea Party class are not thoughtful enough to understand that. All they know is that they’re winning and it feels good.

Their entire platform boils down to decrying government hand-outs, despite the fact that the clutching hands are frequently theirs—or their constituents’—and the hand-out is their monthly Social Security check or Medicaid subsidy. If a person doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to put those two facts together and see that ending one would necessarily end the other, I cannot in good conscience hold them to a normal standard of accounting. The “special” kids always get a pass.

But Obama? He’s a smart feller. He’s traveled the world, taught at Harvard and won a Presidential election—which would not be that impressive an accomplishment considering the other option at the time, but I give him major points for besting Hillary in the primaries. That shit was intense.

So no, Barack Obama doesn’t get a pass.

And for the life of me, I don’t see a grand master scheme behind him slashing entitlements to the bone to reach a compromise with an opposition that has promised not to compromise, has never compromised and is ready to go back to selling used cars in Paducah before they compromise.

If only politics wasn’t known as “the art of compromise.”

On paper, the Tea Party’s unified, unwavering adherence to their common goal—after winning election—is admittedly admirable. Practically unheard-of!

Unfortunately, in practice, it’s making us the laughing stock of the world, is close to bankrupting us and according to every pundit I’ve heard—even on Fox—has already guaranteed a downgrade in the country’s credit rating, whether or not Congress pulls some kind of hellish, diseased rabbit out of its hat at the last minute.

Obama should have quit throwing everything the Left holds dear under the bus a long time ago and gotten serious. The Tea Party is holding the country hostage, and he’s dithering over what kind of get-away car to provide for them.

He’s climbed onto the bully pulpit numerous times during this process, comandeering prime-time TV airtime, and was so modulated, sensible and restrained that nobody even noticed. He’s exercising emotional restraint at a time that desperately calls for passion, it’s what is propelling his political opponents.

Instead, he’s bringing a slingshot to a showdown with an intransigent, dug-in opponent armed with suitcase nukes-grade ignorance of the Process. His compromise argument—with the Tea Party crowd—has all the potency of a Hansens Kiwi Strawberry fruit drink.

It’s a major tactical fuck-up, and makes me wonder about some of his other decisions as President.

In the end, he may just be too much of a professor and not enough of a street brawler.

Or maybe he simply can’t bring himself to believe that America has come to this point, where a small but vocal minority with half-formed, ill-advised and counter-intuitive ideas are successfully steering the entire political direction of the country, and has thrown in the towel.

Either way, I am so disappointed with Obama’s unfathomable denseness in insisting to try to compromise with people who have repeatedly told him flat-out they are never going to compromise, that if a candidate comes along who matches W’s swagger with Clinton’s wonkiness and grasp of the game of politics, I will give that person a very serious look, party affiliation notwithstanding.

Well, except for a Tea Party candidate. I, myself, am not willing to destroy the country in order to save it, nor do I believe it is necessary or advisable.

Rearranging deck chairs, one day at a time

2011-07-29T10:17:00.000-07:00

This has been a shitty year.

For almost everybody I know, not just me. It’s been the first time in my nearly half a century that the “economic downturns” I hear about on the news have affected me and my peers personally.

It’s all the goddamned internet’s fault.

I was a newspaperman. I had business cards that said “Newspaperman” as job title. Newspapers have been around for centuries. When I started in the field, I’m sure the tiny part of my brain that wasn’t working on where my next line of speed was going to come from, assumed Newspapering would be a job I could ride all the way to retirement. Generation upon generation before me had.

For a while, I even played with the idea of buying a struggling weekly somewhere and getting it back on its feet. I had observed my publisher and his lifestyle through the ’90s and came to the reasonable conclusion that his was a pleasant existence, with enough money and respect of the community to go around.

Instead, now I have a part-time production job that was cut from full-time, six days into this fabulous year. I have to either scramble for the freelance work I hate, or feel like a dick because that’s what I ought to be doing but am not.

And my misspent youth? Coming back to haunt me big-time in the medical arena.

Stay away from drugs, kids. Keed spills.

Even my high-achieving friends are finding their careers termed-out by the Communications Revolution. Their business is not mine to share, but even non-druggie, college-educated friends and acquaintances are finding their backs against the wall.

How shitty a year? My Mom, the most iron-willed person I’ve ever known, succumbed to depression and had to go on meds for a while.

And every indicator, from the asinine squabbling over the budget in Washington to the shrinking page count of the Idaho Statesman, points to continued hard times in the days to come.

The very worst part is, I look at my beautiful son, so full of life and love and promise, and absolutely dread what the world is going to put him through. He wasn’t lucky enough to be born into the right family, one with all the money and influence in the world. He’s not going to be protected when the shit really hits the fan.

He will be as prepared as I can make him, but being admittedly unable to foresee the pitfalls of the future that awaits him, I am necessarily going to fall far short of the mark and he will bear the consequences of my failure.

Meanwhile, we’re rearranging deck chairs. The Best Man is coming to visit this weekend. I’m going to see a movie this afternoon with my Idaho Friend. Next week, a stranger is going to put a garden hose with a camera on the end of it into my butt and take a bunch of pictures, see if I got any cancer going on down there. (Up there?)

And The Boy is taking swimming classes.

We went back to the same young lady with a pool in her back yard he worked with last summer. He started the week about exactly where he’d left off last year—timid and over-cautious—but by Thursday, he was doing everything the instructor was telling him to. He picked up in one week what it took two weeks last summer to fail to accomplish. (Well, he’s still working on back floats and jumping into the pool, but I’m pretty confident now that he’ll have those down by the time his classes end next week.)

As we left class yesterday, the instructor already had the next group of kids in the pool and was working with them. We walked past and he said, “Bye.” She glanced up and offered a polite “bye bye” in return. We walked another couple of steps and he turned around and blew her a kiss, a big one. She giggled and said something like “see you tomorrow!” A couple more steps and he turned around and told her, “I love you!”

This genuinely took her by surprise. After a short pause, she replied in kind. She was smiling from ear to ear.

That’s just the kind of kid he is. He deserves a better, more secure world and we have not only failed to provide it for him, we haven’t even bothered to begin laying the groundwork.

And that’s why I’m still here, arranging deck chairs.

The assholes who run the world—the governments and financial behemoths—aren’t going to give a no-name, un-wealthy kid like him the time of day. It’s up to The Missus and me to prepare him for the rough road ahead, and for today, that is enough to make this former Newspaperman keep next week’s appointment with the butt doctor.

Why America is short on heroes

2011-07-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

Here’s just the latest example, torn from this morning’s headlines: 9/11 responders will not get coverage for cancer.

The 9/11 First Responder Program’s administrator has crunched the numbers, and somehow come to the counter-intuitive conclusion that the unusually high number of an unusually wide variety of cancers among 9/11 responders doesn’t quite tippytoe past the threshold of illnesses the 9/11 First Responders Bill is required to ante up for.

According to the CBS news story on the denial of health care coverage, “There is inadequate ‘published scientific and medical findings’ that a causal link exists between September 11 exposures and the occurrence of cancer in responders and survivors, program Administrator John Howard said in a statement.”

It’s the exact kind of slippery, slimy loophole that tight-fisted bastards have always exploited to keep from having to part with one cent more than they absolutely have to.

In case you’ve forgotten, the Bill itself was even controversial when Obama signed it into law. He had to battle stiff GOP opposition to even pass the son of a bitch. Why, because the GOP hates America?

No. The GOP does not hate America.

A majority of them, however, appear to like their money even more.

At the time of their principled opposition to the 9/11 Responders Bill, they swore they’d love to help the heroes of 9/11—the brave men and women we rallied around in those darkest of days following the attacks—but couldn’t, because it would necessarily create “a massive new entitlement program, expose taxpayers to increased litigation and is ‘paid for’ with tax increases…”

Oh, rich people, is there nothing you love more than your own money?

Saying disproportionately high numbers of 9/11 responders are now succumbing to cancer and not giving them the fucking benefit of the doubt is a shitty thing to do, no matter how you look at it... Except if you look at it fiscally. Financially, it makes a hell of a lot more more sense to let the damned responders pay for their own oncology specialists and not force us to part with any of our lovely cash.

They ran for office, many of the current crop of Congressmen and Senators did, on the backs of the attacks, and by extension the first responders. And as soon as they got to town, they got busy with their real work of pinching pennies until poor people bled. If a war or two comes along, put ’em on the credit card and let the next guy down the line figure it out. He’ll probably be a Democrat anyhow, it’ll be easy to dust-off the old ‘tax and spend’ bromides when he does something financially reckless—like insist on helping the American heroes of 9/11 with the medical bills they most likely incurred by running into buildings that others were fleeing.

Oh, it’ll be such great sport!

It takes years and years to document cancer clusters, years and years the program’s administration will drag out playing silly word games with the press and the courts, and which the heroes will spend dying slowly and plunging their families into crushing personal debt for generations.

Yes, taxpayer, you may rest assured that with the way the system is currently being run, nobody but the people who helped us through 9/11, and their families, will ultimately be required to sacrifice anything.

God bless John Howard and his fellow dedicated patriots who are keeping our wallets safe from the heroes of 9/11! May their financial portfolios swell in direct proportion to the number of victims their fiscal austerity produces.

Nope, they’re just not making American heroes the way they used to, and the old ones… well, they’re dying off.

Young.

I met Steve Martin at a laundromat in Boise, Idaho…

2011-07-24T06:17:00.000-07:00

Of course, that is a re-tooled Steve Martin joke from back when he was selling out arenas with his stand-up comedy act.

These days, he’s playing ad-hoc outdoor venues in the hinterlands with his Bluegrass outfit. (Picture above courtesy of the amazing photo technology of the G3 iPhone—thanks, Apple!)

Lucky for me, I call The Hinterlands home these days.

[Sidebar: In case you’re not familiar with Bluegrass, it’s like country jazz: It’s played with traditional country/western instruments, but it’s real fast, you can’t follow what’s going on melodically and you shake your head that mere mortals are capable of producing such a magnificent sound and fury. Also, like jazz, there are not a lot of strong hooks for one to hang one’s cowboy hat on, just stunning musical virtuosity on display.]

So we packed up The Boy for his first grown-up concert last night and drove another 15 miles deeper into the wilderness.

The venue’s location was brilliantly chosen, at the end of a long, winding, one-lane road, choked with a line of idling cars that was being passed by old people in walkers so fast they were hardly more than a blur.

After sneakily circumventing about the second half of the inexorable line of cars (we are from L.A., after all), we made it into the concert just as the band was hitting the stage.

The venue itself was an open field, with what looked like a stage the band brought with them, and rows and rows of folding chairs with less leg room than the cheapest economy seat on the smallest commercial airplane. When I had to leave to go get a drink, I drew lots of unhappy vibes from my row-mates, and some open hostility on my way back. I told one particularly pissy older woman, “Hey, I didn’t lay the place out!”

But the homemade environs aside, we had come to see Steve Martin, and there he was onstage, in his trademark white suit, wearing a banjo.

The concert that followed was about 65% music to 35% stand-up, as Martin filled in the dead air whenever the band stopped to tweak their tuning, which was frequently.

When he introduced the band, The Steep Canyon Rangers, he explained they were already a band long before he came along. “They’re not so much my band, as I am their celebrity.”

The night was full of memorable quips I no longer recall, but since I never caught him in comedy heyday, this was closer than I ever thought I’d get. When The Missus wakes up, I’ll have her remind me of a few and I’ll add them in and delete this sentence.

Equally impressive (to me, because I came for the jokes) was the fact that Martin wrote all the songs but one in the two-hour program, the venerable “Orange Blossom Special.” And only a couple of the tunes were what I would describe as comedy or novelty numbers, mainly “Atheists Ain’t Got No Songs,” a gentle, hilarious send-up of gospel music.

As expected, there were not a lot of catchy melodies to be had, but the songs were short enough and the between-song patter snappy enough, that even The Boy didn’t begin to flag until about 90 minutes into the show.

Early in the first set, Martin apologized for not having any “big hits” to play, before wondering aloud just what the hell we had come out for, anyway. Then he mentioned that, well, he did have one hit, and when the audience began to stir, he mumbled that yes, they’d play that too.

True to his word, he and the Rangers sent the crowd back to traffic gridlock with a Bluegrass version of “King Tut,” which lost very little in its translation to Hillbilly, and which I present at bottom, also courtesy of my last-gen iPhone’s prehistoric video technology.

All in all, some day we will remind The Boy that his first real concert was Steve Martin, and in Boise Idaho in 2011, he could have done a lot worse.

Captain A-meh-rica, the movie review

2011-07-22T16:01:00.000-07:00

Man, did I want to love this movie. It could have been amazing.

Who knows? Maybe my fanboy expectations could never have been fully met.

And it’s not a bad movie. Hell, it might even be a good date movie; the slab of beefcake they have playing the title character is mighty easy on the eyes. And frequently shirtless and oiled-up.

And I bought him as Captain America, but I bought him as a very boring Captain America. Which is strange, because the same actor, Chris Evans, was probably the best thing about the Fantastic Four movies, where he played the Human Torch with a lusty, light-hearted brio.

Other than a perfunctory framing device, the whole deal takes place in Nazi Germany during WWII. The bad guy from The Matrix, Hugo Weaving, plays the Red Skull, but also failed to make much of an impression, beyond his make-up.

When I think back about the movie, the first word that comes to mind is brown. I’m really glad we didn’t see it in 3D. Maybe they were going for a faux sepia, but why not just do it in black & white, like Schindler’s List?

Because this is no Schindler’s List. This is an extended trailer for next summer’s Avengers. There is an actual trailer attached to the end of this film, and it’s telling about what’s wrong with this film: Robert Downey Jr. appears for two seconds on screen and delivers a line and you realize, that’s was missing. An interesting central character.

Downey’s Tony Stark also disproves the argument that interesting good guys are impossible to write, which was what I was telling myself during the film as the disappointment was setting in.

Hell, I even wrote a Captain America screenplay myself about 10 years ago, and although it needs trimming, I still like the story better than this one. I open with a framing sequence set in WWII, then move directly to the actual fim’s last scene… then my movie begins in earnest. Basically, I dispatch in fifteen pages what this film spends two hours dragging out, and as a writer, I am not known for my brevity.

Anyhow, the best parts of the film were the pre-becoming-Captain-America sequences, featuring a digitally skinnified Chris Evans, and the present-day set-piece late in the film. In between, the lead actor fails to catch fire (bad pun intended), the action scenes feel stuffed and bloated and are occasionally hard to see clearly and the romance storyline never goes anywhere.

Still though, Captain America—The First Avenger is a pleasant enough summer diversion and achieves all its ambitions, modest as they are: shit blows up real good, quip lines are exchanged faithfully and the Avengers’ franchise fuse is successfully, officially lit.

But this movie is not the epic it could have been, shoulda been. It’s just a really good comic book movie.

I was hoping, given the rich subject matter, for something a little more substantive, more ambitious.

Curse you, Dark Knight! You’ve spoiled another superhero movie for me.

Peckish and Prickish

2011-07-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

I failed as a parent last night.

I let my temper get the better of me, and instead of talking The Boy down to a reasonable place, I made the classic parental mistake of getting pissed and deliberately exacerbating an already unpleasant situation.

This my not actually be a “classic” parenting fail, but it was in our house when I was growing up, and I swore to myself I wouldn’t do the same thing in a similar situation. Yet there I was last night, eye-to-eye with my intractable 5-year-old, saying shit just to needle him, knowing it wasn’t doing anything at all to advance the resolution of The Great Ravioli Crisis of 2011.

And as a direct result of my failing to hold my shit more fully together, he went to bed without dinner for the first time in his life last night. After an exhausting 2+ hours of alternating tearful, grudgingly-reasonable and plain histrionic verbal sparring.

I know on paper I did the right thing—or so people have assured me—and I frankly don’t think he would have eaten the ravioli last night even if I had kept it 100% together. Every time he comes back from a trip to visit his Grandparents, he comes home peckish, and this time he’s been… peckish for longer than usual.

Earlier in the day, we had a 45-minute delay on the way to the pool because he would not stand still and allow sunblock to be applied—a skill he’s demonstrated mastery of as recently as a couple days ago—without writhing and screaming in imaginary pain.

Peckish. And I got irritated with him during The Sunblock Incident too, exacerbating it and contributing to the delay.

The way I see it, one of us needs to remain consistently reasonable. And as I am literally ten times older than he is, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the adult in the room ought to be me.

Anyhow, he was fine this morning. I’d been feeling like Joseph Mengele all night, but he didn’t bring it up and I was only too happy to let it slide until the next time.

The Missus just came in and reassured me that I had done fine last night, then added, “…except maybe when you walked by his bedroom and yelled to me in the kitchen, ‘Yeah, some ice cream sounds GREAT!’”

Ugh. What a prick. I sure hope he sees me as a cautionary tale and not a role model; that’s what we have sports athletes for.

Plantman the Terrible

2011-07-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

The Boy’s preschool class had a project recently that involved growing a plant from a seed. He got assigned Basil. Wow!

It wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it wasn’t for the progress-chart he was mandated to fill in. I can’t pass it in the hall without breaking out in giggles.

The day he brought the finished project home—the remains of the plant and all the attendant paperwork—he explained his plant “didn’t grow very well,” but that did not keep him from posing with his victim:

Clearly, The Boy inherited his green thumb from The Incredible Hulk, not his grandmother.

Empire or ashes?

2011-07-17T06:14:00.001-07:00

I try not to write about stuff I don’t understand. For some reason, I always seem to take a lot of flak for it when I do.

Chief among the things I don’t understand is finance. Money.

Math.

Debt.

Taxes!

But I always thought I understood people—as a herd—pretty well. Like, the herd might get spooked by thunder and stampede, but American herds always had a way of not running themselves off a cliff in their blind panic.

For over 200 years now, against the odds, we’ve run our little corner of God’s paradise without self-destructing. That is no mean feat.

Ancient empires ran for thousands of years, but then, they did not have Twitter. In the modern era, a good dictator is lucky to get 30, 40 years tops, before old age takes him in his sleep or the creeps in the street throw him to the wolves, and the empire goes the way of the emperor.

So, 200 years? Good job, America!

Okay, you were a bit of a douchebag the first hundred years or so, granted. Human slavery turned out to be, historically-speaking, more than a bit of an embarrassment. Nor did you do yourself any favors when you continued to keep your former slaves under your thumb with Black Codes and Race Laws and segregation for another hundred years, but you’re finally showing some belated signs of progress.

Kudos.

Oh yeah. And the Native Americans thing. Also pretty uncool, but an empire is not empire if it does not spread to fill up all the adjacent land for which it finds it has a fancy.

Bygones.

But now you’re more than 200 years old. A spring chicken by European standards, but in terms of modern empires?

You’re beginning to show signs of wear and tear. You’re growing old, ill-tempered and insular. If you’re not careful, you’re going to find your estate executors (in this case, China) shipping you off to the Old Empires Home and forgetting abut you except on birthdays and Christmas.

How ill-tempered and insular? You’ve stopped talking to the rest of the family. A common early symptom of encroaching dementia.

You’re ass-deep in financial trouble that, as I have already stated, I don’t actually understand, but instead of hashing out a workable solution, half of you won’t even talk to the other half.

Remember Abraham Lincoln? The man who saved the Union? Our first GOP president? Who said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand?”

When half the country refuses to talk to the other half, that is the textbook definition of a house divided against itself. We’re heading toward the brink of predicted financial calamity—particularly if you’re a soldier or a senior getting by on Social Security, both of which I have in my family—because the Right is so rigid in its orthodoxy to even allow the subject of taxes to be raised.

That’s the crux of everything, taxes. The people who don’t want to pay more have joined with the people who don’t to pay any, and have become a power political force. So powerful that politicians in Washington are doing really smug, stupid things in the face of looming disaster (hello, Eric Cantor, you preening ass!).

Eric Cantor, Number Two Republican in the House of Representatives, is acting like he’s Noah, except it’s raining hard but he won’t let any of the animals board until he’s figured out the seating chart to his satisfaction. Drowned bunnies are floating by his cabin window while he checks his thesaurus for different ways to say “tyranny.”

He’s Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Rome. Another empire that grew too cocky and is no longer with us.

Is it our turn?

The anti-tax base, including newly-elected Tea Party-supported Congressmen, are playing chicken with our geriatric experiment in Democracy.

Even the GOP head of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, has devised a work-around that avoids the debt crisis, washes the Republicans’ hands of all responsibility and explicitly leaves Obama holding the bag if things goes even more south… what’s not to love? It’s actually quite brilliant, as a financial quick-fix and a political calculation, but the Tea Partiers won’t touch it, because it does not definitively rule out future tax hikes.

Remember when patriotism used to define our country, like World War Two? Or afterwards, when we were the Rebuilder Of The World, and their unofficial Top Cop? Remember when we kept the USSR in line (until their empire crumbled) with barely a life being lost, James Bond films aside?

We’re not that country right now. Right now we’re the country that is ready, willing and able to risk everything we’ve worked so long to keep together… in order to hang on to more money.

“Wait a minute!” you cry. “This country was founded on a revolt to taxation without representation!”

Indeed, taxation without representation was paramount among the causes of the American Revolution.

But what we have today is not taxation without representation. We have representatives up the kazoo.

No, people are just stingy. Times are tight, so they’re happy to sit on their porch at sunset, drinking their bitters, and watch Sherman’s army march to the sea as long as their mattresses inside are stuffed with dollar bills.

That is not the America of the founders. Or the soldiers on either side of the war between the states. Or the race to the moon, or storming the beach at Normandy…

That is an America in decline.

It is one thing to risk one’s political future on a principled stand. Some of our best statesman have done so, and not coincidentally, have gone on to be remembered as having been the best among us.

Rebelling against taxation without representation is an example of the defense of a principle that was both honorable and necessary.

Rebelling against taxation with abundant representation, however, does not fall within the realm of lofty ideals.

It falls under the category of short-sighted stinginess.

Like I said at the onset, I know nothing about money issues. But I do know quite a bit about empires historically, and America is following the classic journey to oblivion.

We’ve done this once before, and Lincoln was just barely able to hold us together.

I’m not convinced we have a statesman of his caliber to pull our asses out of the fire this time. Lincoln was famous for consulting with, even elevating his opponents to positions of great power within his administration.

Compare that to today’s GOP leaders, especially in the House.

This is not a recipe for success.

You know, I’ll bet better than 50% of the anti-taxation people identify themselves as Christians, ie; people who are trying to follow the example of Christ in their day-to-day lives.

Jesus never went on record about other hot-button issues like abortion or gun control, be He actually expressed an opinion about taxes! Not many, just one, and then only when prompted by a questioner, who asked what he should do about the taxes he was being forced to pay. You can find Christ’s answer in the authorized Good Book, Matthew 22:20-22 KJ.

So what would Jesus do? He showed the questioner a gold coin and asked, “Whose face do you see on this?” They replied, “Caesar’s.”

And Jesus replied, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.”

Jesus said to pay your damn taxes. Do you need a house to drop on you, too? Then your sister will have both broomsticks!

When did the Christian God stop being the God of compassion? Does not a single self-proclaimed “values-voter” remember the Sermon on the Mount? Blessed are the merciful, the peace-makers, the meek—everything they’re not being.

In the end, you got your death, and you got your taxes. It’s perfectly reasonable—sane, even—to take every precaution one can about both. To forestall the former and limit the latter.

But there is a grand American tradition—or so we like to tell ourselves—of America squaring its shoulders and doing the right thing, even when it was hard. Especially in hard times.

The Americans who actually embodied those ideals, now long-since deceased, wouldn’t recognize this current conversation.

It’s beneath us because dammit, we’re suppose to be better than this.

Right now, America is one divided house, teetering on the brink. The debt ceiling embroglio is just the most obvious, critical symptom. How it is resolved will be an important bellwether as to what is to come.

As long as I’m loving on Sinead…

2011-07-13T06:07:00.000-07:00

...and bitching about addict behavior, here’s a song that incorporates both themes.

I don’t know who did what to piss Sinead off, but I’m glad it wasn’t me.

And I love that, in addition to all the lovely lullabies she writes and sings, when she’s been wronged, she can still pull something as direct and literal and angry as this out of her ass and make it work as both beautiful music and a righteous rant of condemnation.

As always, many props to Sinead for continuing to tell it like it is.

Only drugs can cure a broken heart

2011-07-13T00:17:00.000-07:00

The Missus and The Boy have been in SoCal for a week now.

I’ve gotten a lot of writing done, but the dog has gone completely to pieces.

At first it was funny, but as the days ticked by and Mommy did not return, he’s taking on more and more aspects of a junkie going through withdrawal.

Sidebar: Which brings up my favorite unanswered question about addiction. I believe as a retired junkie and a drunk myself, I am allowed to discuss my own peeps...

What’s the difference between being in love with a woman who’s bad for you and addicted to a drug that’s good for you? Which is bad and which is good? Are lovers addicted to each other? If you describe new love clinically, you might as well be describing two people strung out on crack. I think the word “addiction” isn’t a diagnosis, it’s a value judgment. Depending on what one is addicted to, one is either a hero (Superman: addicted to enforcing truth, justice and the American Way) or a villain (Jeff Dahmer, addicted to eating young human boys).

It’s for this reason I think calling addiction a “disease” is a slight to people with proper diseases, which by definition is shit that jumps up and gets you, not something you repeatedly do to yourself even though you know—every time you do it—it’s killing you. If your “disease” involves you voluntarily lifting that bottle to your lips or lowering your nose to the grindstone, what you have is more accurately categorized as a mental illness, like depression; not a disease, like cancer.

We don’t do addicts any favors by mis-casting them as victims. Victims aren’t expected to pick themselves up by the seat of their pants and take responsibility for their misfortunes, but addicts absolutely have to.

Anyway, another blog for another day.

The dog, Jake, has lost his shit completely. It’s just like he’s withdrawing from a drug (in this case, The Missus, to whom he is singularly devoted). The first couple days he was confused and disoriented and planted himself as close to on top of me as he possibly could.

Then he developed a limp, I kid you not. I’m convinced it’s 100% psychosomatic.

When that failed to produce his mistress, he began to sit in her office and groan, piteously and repeatedly. I eventually moved his bed in there, but he ended up treating my effort like it was a violation of his special relationship with The Missus. He hasn’t been back in there since I took this picture:

I’m at the point now where I’m keeping him away from sharp objects. He’s jittery, twitchy, scared—just altogether worthless. He doesn’t even eat until he’s almost too weak from hunger to drag himself to his bowl.

Tonight was the last night before the key family members return and I ran out of patience. He was limping around, jumping at every sound and looking at me with the eyes of Methuselah, not eating his food… I grabbed one of the Doggie Downers we’d been given a while ago when we had to board him and dropped it down his gullet.

About an hour later I realized I wasn’t tripping over his mopey, dopey ass every couple of minutes, and went to go check on him:

That was about six hours ago, now. He’s gotten up in the last half hour, eaten his dinner, came in for a rambunctious cuddle and is now wreaking havoc on his giant polystyrene bone. I think I pulled him out of his steep decline, at least long enough for The Missus to return home tonight and set his world aright.

No question about it, he’s got it bad. We need to get him to a meeting and have him start working his steps, pronto. Please leave your contact information in the comments if you’re interested in being his sponsor.

Sinead O'Connor writes Bob Dylan a mash note

2011-07-12T22:48:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of his recent birthday, re-posted from sineadoconnor.com:

Dear Zimmy

It’s your gorgeous birthday next week. You’re three years younger than my father (whom I hope never reads this!). That’s a bit of a head-wrecker.

It is a fact that I wish to high heaven that my father’s father had met my mother’s whatever-it-is earlier. Then I would have been old enough to tell you all this in a more delicious setting. My beloved brother Joseph, who introduced me to you, passed an invitation to me from the Mail to write something about you because next Tuesday is your birthday.

I said, ‘But I’m a moron! What will I say?’ He said, ‘You could make it like a letter to Bob. To say the oul’ happy birthday’.

So... Bobby, or R.J or Ray, or Anything...Here is my birthday little thing for you.

Next week when everyone is writing and talking and thinking about your birthday, they’re all gonna go on about the usual stuff.

‘Prophet’.

Blah blah.

‘Voice of a generation.’

Blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah.

All true I’m sure... But no one ever says: ‘Holy Mother of God! That Dylan fellow is an extremely adjectival sexy adjectival m.a.n. so he is for himself!’

It’s about time all the ladies, and I mean ALL the ladies, need to tell everyone exactly where it’s at concerning the deliciousness of Robert Zimmerman.

Drop. Dead. Gorge. Us.

Yes, sir! THE sexiest man that ever stalked the face of this earth.

‘Tis lucky for you, boyo, that you’re away over there in America. Sure there’s barely a woman in the universe who could keep her mitts off you! Thanks be to God that flights are not cheap here in Ireland or you’d be wise to run. And also to follow Ghaddafi’s example by employing fake Bob Dylans, so no-one will know which one is actually you. Incidentally, should you decide you want to follow Ghaddafi’s example by employing all-female body guards, I hope you will consider me. Please don’t ask for a reference though. I wouldn’t come up looking very good.

I once worked with a lady who’d once worked with you. She said you’re just crazy about the ladies. I took her in my arms and danced with delight. Hurray!

This means I’m not the only person on earth who thinks you’re a ride. Despite your main feature being sexeliciousness, you’re also not a bad oul’ sayer of songs. And by the way, there’s something the 13-year-old me wants to say to you: Thank you for making Christian music sexy. Poor God. Until you made Slow Train Coming, he was suicidal. From listening to terrible religious music.

I mean, have you ever seen Irish dancing? It’s the un-sexiest thing one could see. We only dance from the knee down. Keeping everything else tight as a board. Arms stiff at our sides. For fear we might slip into the world of sensuality.

People say, and I hope it’s not so, that you didn’t ‘stand by’ Slow Train Coming. I don’t know what they mean exactly. And I don’t even care. Either way you could never have known what it was like in Ireland before that album tore down the walls which separated God and sex. You couldn’t have known the effect the record would have. And that’s appropriate. Why should you know?

I was 13 the year it came out. Joe, my brother, brought it home.

I was just beginning to wonder what kind of person I wanted to be. And what kind of woman I wanted to be. And what kind of artist I wanted to be. There weren’t many options open to a female like me. I would either die or go to jail if I continued along the path that was given me.

But when I heard you singing those songs on Slow Train Coming, and when I saw the drawing of the train on the sleeve, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

So Rabbi, from you I know I gotta serve somebody. I know I’m a precious angel. I know God believes in me. I know I’m gonna change my way of thinking. I know I’m gonna make myself a different set of rules. I know I’m gonna put my best foot forward, stop being influenced by fools.

I saw you at Slane when I was like 16. I couldn’t believe I would actually see you in the flesh. I had a boyfriend at the time. Only reason we were together was we were both obsessed with you. Sadly we never did really anything but talk about you! Of course I could never have dreamed of telling him you were way sexier than him. Am I bad? I certainly hope so.

Santana played before you. When you came on you had on Oompa Loompa orange make-up. So it wasn’t only musically or spritually that you were ahead of your time. You foresaw fake tan! And the dreaded RTE make-up department. [C’mon, Ryan, man, let’s just come out and admit it, they’ve not been the Mae West over the years. Though I do grant you they’re not as woeful as TV3 - I’m forever tweeting Vincent Browne’s show over the make-up. They have him looking like Bob at Slane.]

I think you also had on loads of black khol eyeliner. Very strange sight. Gorgeous nonetheless, obviously. But strange.

Then I briefly actually met you twice. Backstage at two festivals, there were loads of us playing. I must have seduced your manager with sexual bribes, I can’t remember, but there I was in your dressing room. Just you and your tour manager.

You asked would I like a drink. I said yes, and though I can’t stomach alcohol I sipped away and pretended I wasn’t supressing the desire to let you have a look at what I ate for lunch. You did a lot of pacing up and down. I remember thinking ‘Holy mother of the divine lord Krishna, who could perform after drinking this?’

The third and final time our paths crossed was on that infamous evening at your tribute concert in Madison Square Garden, an evening which heaved with consequence. In the week or so before that show I had done an incendiary acapella version of a Bob Marley (the other ‘Bob’) song called War on Saturday Night Live. I changed some words and made it about child abuse instead of racism. And at the end of the song I tore up a picture of the then Pope, JP2. No smirking please, Bob - when mentioning ‘the incident’ one must always look very serious.

Then, soon after that, I went shopping to find an outfit for your upcoming show. The decision I made was so wrong - a turquoise jacket and skirt suit which should have been worn by a very old woman...and with a hideous gold thing on the jacket. Unforgiveable. I look at the footage of the show now and I am appalled. What was I thinking? Perhaps I should have slipped you a note before the show, explaining ‘the incident’ to you, but in the terror of my image in my dressing room mirror I guess I forgot.

So I walked on stage that night and half the audience cheered and the other half booed. Was it the Saturday Night Live fallout or had I just totally made the wrong wardrobe choice?

Seriously though, backstage afterwards, you looked at me confused as if to ask me what I had done to upset people so much. Instead of singing I Believe in You, as planned, I had screamed out the Bob Marley song instead. But it felt appropriate for me to scream while I had the chance. And I knew, if you understood, you wouldn’t mind that I used the stage you gave me to stand for the God you also gave me. I hope your questions from that night have since been answered for you by the various revelations concerning the spiritual condition of the catholic church. In God’s wide world. If I had simply sung I Believe in You that night my voice would have been drowned in the noise of the opposing spiritual forces in the room.

I had to do what I did in Madison Square Garden. Even if it meant being treated like a mental case for years after.

The God I believed in was the one you brought off the pages of scriptures into my life. Not the one those bored black-and-white-wearing priests droned on about whilst flicking bits of dust off their altars in the middle of the consecration of the Host.

Even if they showed me to the door. And said don’t come back no more cuz I didn’t be like they’d like me to. Even if I walked out on my own. A thousand miles from home, I didn’t feel alone. Cuz I believe in you.

I believe in you, even through the tears and the laughter. I believe in you even though we be apart. I believe in you even on the morning after. Though the earth may shake me, though my friends forsake me, this feeling’s still here in my heart.

Don’t let me stray too far. Keep me where you are. So I will always be renewed. And Lord, what you’ve given me today is worth more than I could pay. And no matter what they say, I believe in you...

But, I digress, Bob. I only meant to tell you you’re gorgeous. So have seventy kisses for yourself on Tuesday.

—Sinead

Consider my mind blown

2011-07-12T11:30:00.001-07:00

I just received the first phone call in my life from The Boy. You could have scooped me up with a spatula!

Thanks, Pops...

Taking a mountain out of a mole hole:

2011-07-06T06:38:00.001-07:00

HWCACID?

2011-07-04T00:39:00.000-07:00

or: How would Captain America celebrate Independence Day?

This 4th of July, this land is everybody's land

2011-07-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Woke up this morning to several dozen emails from YouTube, containing comments on a single video I uploaded forever ago. That’s several dozen more comments than all my videos combined usually generate on a good week. Something was up.

It seems Billy Ray Cyrus has placed an upload of mine on his Fourth of July Playlist, Johnny Cash sings “This Land Is Your Land.”

Obviously, I was flattered, despite not being a Billy Ray Cyrus fan, per se. “Achy-Breaky Heart” was the first song they taught us on the first day of Guitar 101 a few years ago, but I think that was more for its familiarity and very simple two-chord structure. Still, if you asked me to, I could whip it for you on demand, it’s just that easy.

Anyhow, a lot of the new commenters have beefs to pick with Cash for two reasons: One, ‘our’ land was originally somebody else’s, a race we casually herded into camps and slaughtered on the plains, and b) In the clip, Cash ultimately melds Woody Guthrie’s protest song about taking responsibility for our own actions with Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” tear-jerking, patriotic swill of the first order.

[Sidebar: Ordinarily I don’t moderate comments much. I’m open to people who disagree with me, but I’m not about to let my little online Johnny Cash shrine become just another nasty place on the web where people say hateful shit. If you can’t disagree without being disagreeable, I will delete you.]

Anyhow, there’s too many comments for me to answer them all individually, so I’ll answer them here and maybe provide a link.

First, the clip in question:

I’ll start with the second complaint, because it’s the more interesting one.

I don’t know what was on Cash and co-writer Merle Kilgore’s minds when they wrote the piece above, and they’re not around to ask anymore. Well, Cash isn’t.

And I’m willing to bet that Cash and Kilgore didn’t have any idea that Guthrie is alleged to have written “This Land Is Your Land” as a response to “God Bless America,” which Guthrie considered patriotic claptrap.

Guthrie’s point was no matter the provenance of this land, its upkeep, protection and maintenance was the ongoing responsibility of every American. “Thank you, God, we’ll take it from here.”

One would think the two songs would be irreconcilable, yes?

Not Cash. By this point in his career, Cash had put himself through the wringer in almost every conceivable way. He was newly sober, and taking a look around at the mess the country was in, in the wake of the Kennedy/King assassinations and America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam, ironically enough it was The Man In Black who saw the shades of grey that still acted as mortar, holding this great country together.

He saw that both arguments had merit; moreover, that both arguments benefited from the presence of the other. So in what may now seem like a clumsy effort, he attempted to marry the two opposing sides, and illustrate that what unites us is indeed stronger than that which divides us.

The Missus keeps telling me that one definition of genius is the ability to hold two opposing viewpoints equally at the same time. If so, Cash was a certifiable genius.

The other big beef, that this clip fails to mention the genocide of the Native Americans at the hand of the White Man, is a fair one, but beside the point. Cash had one agenda for this clip, which he executed to his satisfaction. But it was not about the plight of the American Indian.

He saved that topic for any number of other special segments—where he did not mention the glory that is America even once—as well as entire albums’-worth of songs on the subject.

The clip below is just one of the many pieces he did on the sad state of Native Americans during his show’s two-season run.

So please, haters, if you’re going to hate on Johnny Cash, do it from an informed perspective. And do it courteously, or I will indeed delete your comment. I’ll even delete your ass if you agree with me discourteously!

I’d like to thank Billy Ray Cyrus and the people at YouTube for making me part of the national conversation this Independence Day, even in this tiniest of ways.

Bittersweet

2011-07-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

Today is kind of a sad and a glad day for me.

It was the first time, when presented with the option of going to school or staying home with me, that The Boy chose school.

I knew this day was coming. When he starts Kindergarten in a couple months, the gravy train was over anyhow. Thursdays With The Boy were already coming to a pre-ordained end.

And I’m glad but sad that he made the call before fate took the decision out of his hands.

I want him to prefer spending time with his peers than his parental units. That’s healthy development, no matter how you slice it. As his parent, I am pleased with his choice.

But the Selfish Bastard in me wouldn’t have minded not having his illusions dispelled, especially not this close to the finish line. I only had to retain his fealty a few more weeks, and I fell just thiiiiiis short of the mark.

Anyhow, we worked out a compromise. I pretended to be happy to be rid of him, and he agreed to let me pick him up early so we can go to a matinee of Transformers 3: The Re-EnDumbening, before Mommy comes home from work.

Thanks for the weekly Date With Daddy, son. It’s been amazing, enlightening, enchanting, exhilarating… and as I knew it would be, all too brief.

And that is why he is called The Last Boy Scout

2011-06-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

When we left Christmas Island almost exactly a year ago, I left behind one good friend.

My whole life, I’ve pretty much had a single good friend at a time, one after the other. I’ve never needed a following, or anyone to lead me along with like-minded people, because I’ve never met actually met any like-minded people. I’ve whined about it before. I was “Born This Way,” too, but my class-action indignation is limited to one party: me.

So one friend at a time suits me well. And my one friend is almost always cooler than I am (otherwise I cast him or her as a follower, and that’s a bit part at best), and funny as hell. I need someone who can hold their own, bullshit-wise, when I’m in The Zone. This guy banters with the best of them.

He’s also my token Republican friend. I don’t have any token Black or Latino friends at the moment, but I do have a Republican locked and loaded. Come to think of it, I have any number of Republican friends. Real ones, too, not Facebook ones.

Anyway, when we left Christmas Island, the usual pleasantries were exchanged—the pro-forma little white lies and well-meaning balderdash people who are never going to see each other again tell to make the saying goodbye a little less Lifetime movie-of-the-week. I knew email and partisan bickering would keep us on each others’ radar online, but drive all the way out to Idaho?

No way in hell was that gonna happen.

Seems I never get tired of being, eh, not exactly correct.

TLBS and his three lovely girls—one wife, two daughters (one of whom is The Boy’s age and already a year ahead of him in school)—just left after having spent four or five days in our little corner of paradise.

And these people are like Vacation Samurai. They do a vacation like Ike storming Normandy! No weakness will be tolerated! Daughter Number One, eight, was frog-marched up this insanely high water slide (left) and summoned the bravery at the top and take the quickest, scariest 5-second ride of her life. At the end, she loved it!

We bowed out of their day-long river rafting excursion. I already have an “S”-shaped lower back, I don’t want to go for an ampersand. Christ, I damn near broke my fanny bone on the yellow kids’ slide at the water park, which had about 6” of water in the pool at the bottom. BUMP-P-P-P!!

We also spent a day doing typical tourisity things together. In Boise, you can park the cars and walk to everything worth seeing in the entire town, tourist-wise, in an afternoon, if your kids are up to it. (Three-to-two on that score; I bet you can guess which kid wore to a frazzle long before the others.)

TLBS and I even worked in a little guitar time—including an impassioned version of Wind Beneath My Wings for The Missus and her friend from out of town—the less said about which the better, except we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly and stayed up way too late, which was kinda the whole point.

All in all, it was a lovely visit. The hardest part for me, physically, was the clean-up before. I had eleven months of dust and dog hair to remove from every horizontal surface in my office, a vacuum cleaner with which to acquaint myself, dog poo to pick up in the yard, porches to sweep, lawns to mow…

Plus, I knew from stories of past summer excursions, that these guys vacation like Ali practicing for a title fight, and they did not disappoint. I’ve lost three pounds since they’ve got here; we definitely need to have friends like them through town more often.

Of the three members of the Bastardson clan represented at the water park today, The Boy came through with the most dignity intact, even if you count the time I sent him behind the bushes to pee because I was waiting to get a shot of his mother going down the massive slide, which shot I then totally pooched anyhow...

Anyways, kudos to The Last Boy Scout for not being a bullshitter. Last year, during the height of the Boycott Arizona movement, first he pontificated against it, then he put his money where his mouth was and took his family there for the summer vacation. And they had a great time.

This year, he once again put his money where his mouth was and kept a promise to an old friend he could have ignored and I would have had the courtesy to never mention it.

I keep telling him, you need to get into politics. Politics needs men like him. He’s intelligent, articulate, actually believes the rhetoric he’s pitching and his on-camera chops are improving with every televised performance. Plus he’s a right-wing Mr. Smith Could Go To Washington.

Or even stay on Christmas Island. There are definitely important political careers to be made in his home town. If all the good men and women sit on the sidelines, the only people who run—and therefore get elected—will be the megalomaniac scalawags and scoundrels with whom we’re all too familiar.

Meanwhile, I think the next visit is on us, back to Christmas Island. Don’t know when, but a couple of things are certain: There will be pictures! And I will probably not be put in charge of anything next time. Not even pictures.

“There’s just one more thing…”

2011-06-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

Peter Falk • 1927—2011

gone but never forgotten

Fifteen years ago today...

2011-06-22T11:37:00.000-07:00

...I made a new friend.

R.I.P. Clarence Clemons

2011-06-18T21:10:00.000-07:00

Came home from class n culture night in Boise (you know, roller derby) to hear the sad and the bad news that legendary E Street Band member Clarence Clemons had succumbed to the stroke he suffered earlier in the week.

Here is the copied-and-pasted official word from brucespringsteen.net:

It is with overwhelming sadness that we inform our friends and fans that at 7:00 tonight, Saturday, June 18, our beloved friend and bandmate, Clarence Clemons passed away. The cause was complications from his stroke of last Sunday, June 12th. Bruce Springsteen said of Clarence: Clarence lived a wonderful life. He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage. His loss is immeasurable and we are honored and thankful to have known him and had the opportunity to stand beside him for nearly forty years. He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band.

I will leave it to better writers, more familiar with the subject to write him the eulogy he deserves.

But I can’t fucking sleep tonight for thinking of him, and Springsteen and by extension, my own mortality. I’m sure I’m not the only aging Bruce Springsteen fan up tonight, losing sleep to the same thoughts.

I didn’t see the E Street Band live till the Tunnel of Love tour in 1988—I was a bit late to the Bruce party, even though I’d been buying his albums faithfully since Darkness On The Edge of Town. It always seemed like the tickets for his shows were gone before I had peddled down to the box office to purchase one.

Since the late ’80s, I’ve seen Bruce with and without a band a few times. Always from really lousy seats because by the time I figured out how to properly game the system, tickets to his shows had become exponentially harder to secure, and more expensive.

But it was clear to me, especially on the E Street Band tours since 1999, that Springsteen shows had their own beginning, middle and end. There was a narrative structure to the song selection, and the action occurring on stage was just as dramatic.

Springsteen’s two onstage foils were Little Steven Van Zandt and Clemons and the trio brought every bit of humor, pathos and affection they shared offstage into their performance. As much as it was part of the show, it was clear it was also a reflection of a genuinely affectionate bond between the three men.

And videos of the band, from before Bruce broke them up for a few years in the ’90s and Clemons still enjoyed full, robust health, show that the chemistry between he and Springsteen then was even more palpable.

Little Steven got more center stage time with Bruce, but when Clemons wailed, Springsteen ceded the spotlight to him. Literally bowed down before him, his arms flung wide and head back. And he usually shared a stage kiss with him before the show was over.

When Danny Federici died in 2008 it first occurred to me (and no doubt the rest of Springsteen’s core, aging fan base) that the ride was not going to last forever.

But Federici, even though a 40-year-member of the band, was never the center of attention that Springsteen always made sure his beloved Big Man was. The next time Springsteen takes the band out onto the road, I can’t imagine anyone else ripping into one of Clemons’ solos and the audience not bursting into tears.

Clemons’ last live performance, on American Idol, no less, with Lady Gaga is here.

All of a sudden, Gaga’s decision to scrap the elaborate video planned for her latest single, which features Clemons on saxophone, and do it instead with just Clemons and herself doesn’t look like a career misstep after all.

Although his screen time is all too brief, the somber setting serves tonight’s news well. The Big Man’s last video:

Celebrating the men in my life, from old to young

2011-06-17T00:30:00.000-07:00

I picked up the guitar a few years ago at the tender age of forty-something. Took a few weeks’ worth of lessons and have been freestyling it ever since.

That’s right. I still haven’t gotten very good and don’t realistically expect to. But if a song has the courtesy to be really easy, with a steady, loping beat—and for God’s sake doesn’t require any barre chords—I’m willing to give it a try.

Recently, I had a favorite song transcribed for me, Steve Goodman’s “My Old Man.” I discovered it as a deleted scene on Goodman’s Austin City Limits DVD and fell in love with it. It’s a big ol’ Man-Weeper and my friend, The Nutty Professor, puzzled-out a way for a perpetual novice like me to play it.

It’s a song about the boomer-songwriter’s father, and except for the names and a couple of other minor tweaks, it could be my own Dad’s story. This is exactly the kind of song I picked up the guitar to try to play.

Other than one ill-fated attempt as a teenager to convince my father that prog-metal trio Rush really was worth giving a listen to, pop culture is among the vast panoply of things we never discussed.

Consequently, I don’t know much about his taste in music, except that my Mom told me when he was wooing her, he was all about Der Bingle, which tells me that my old man was one smooth operator. I’ve looked into covering some of Bing Crosby’s hits, but the man sang pop songs, and for as maligned a genre as pop is, it uses an awful lot of fancy, complicated chords.

It’s probably just as well my lack of manual agility will keep me from ever profaning the Bing Crosby catalogue; it’s my long-held theory that every (male) pop crooner from the 1930s until today can trace his or her stylistic lineage back to either Bing Crosby or David Bowie. They’re all wannabes or wannabes of wannabes. Want to sing like Elvis, who wanted to sing like Dean Martin? You want to sing like Bing. Want to sing like early Sinatra? Any-period Dean Martin? Also Bing Crosby wannabes from the get-go. And so forth, until…

Until the 1980s, when inexplicably (to me), it seemed like almost everybody who got started suddenly wanted to sing like David Bowie, even girl-fronted bands like Blondie. While you can’t lay blame for the entire decade-long pop music debacle that was the ’80s at Bowie’s feet (even Rush’s albums from that period are not their best), neither can you deny how much all those earnest, over-dressed mulletheads from Flock of Seagulls to early U2 just happened to look and sound exactly like ’70s-era Bowie.

It makes the 1977 TV-Special appearance of Bowie and Crosby a pretty monumental pop cultural summit. I suspect there was a Watcher in the room somewhere, just out of camera range…

I remember catching that show with my Dad when it originally aired, and enduring his familiar ribald insinuations, this time repurposed to remark upon Bowie’s questionable sexual orientation. Looking back, it seems more cool than irritating that I got to watch that generational passing of the torch with my Dad, ‘homo’ jokes aside. From his favorite crooner to, well, my generation’s, anyhow.

My old man’s grandson has his own wide-ranging taste in music. The CD selection in the car when he is a passenger is always an item of great concern to him. He loves him his big, splashy popsters like U2, Bruce and even Lady Gaga, but also allows room for traditional favorites like Johnny Cash and Tom Jones’ recent album of gospel classics. The Missus even pulled off the neat feat recently of getting him to sing on command.

We have been trying to steer him toward an arts-steeped life without being too obvious, unlike the clumsy, oblivious way my own poor old man tried to shoehorn me into an athletics-and-scouting-steeped lifestyle choice, to his unending frustration.

Fortunately, The Boy shows considerably more disposition toward the arts than I ever did to jockdom, so he is less likely to disappoint me the way I did my Dad.

You want your Daddy Issues? Oh, I’ll give you your Daddy Issues...

There’s a verse in Goodman’s song that includes the line,
“And now that the old man’s gone, I’d give all I own
To hear what he said when I wasn’t listening.”

The classic regret, right?

Except it’s not my main one, because of what I can remember of my Dad’s input at the time, it wasn’t actually very constructive. It consisted mainly of variations on the theme of what to do about my suspect masculinity.

The poor guy wanted a proper son he could do Norman Rockwell father and son stuff with, and instead he got my brother the science geek and me, the artist. My brother did a better job of faking it, eventually becoming an Eagle Scout, but I was never about pleasing my parents as a kid. We were locked in a life-or-death struggle over my daily destiny; I didn’t have time for nuance.

Still, I have no idea how my Dad pulled it all off—working the hours he did, keeping up his busy social life (Knights of Columbus, bowling league, etc.) and still having time to sneak me up some dinner after my Mom had sent me to bed without any—whenever I stop to really think about it, I take my hat off to him.

The fact that he and my Mom adopted all four of us sibs-to-be at different times, usually when they could barely afford to feed the ones they already had, also speaks volumes about either my Dad’s resilience, my Mom’s persistence, or what turned out to be a pretty consistently questionable decision-making process. My Dad was about 50 when I came along, back in the early ’60s when 50 was considered old. And they still went out and adopted one more after me, so they’d have a matched set.

No wonder all my Dad ever did was work. What other choice did an honest man have?

As an only child, The Boy knows he gets the benefit of 100% of our attention when he’s around. It’s easy to do.

You know what would be hard, that would push all my fight-or-flight buttons? If we had two or three other kids, all also clamoring for 100% of our attention. I would make a lousy father of a proper Roman Catholic brood, the type of family from which I am myself descended.

My Dad did such a better job of it than I ever could.

And considering how completely I failed to measure up to what his idea of a man was, he in fact treated me much better than I deserved. I’m lucky he didn’t throw me into the river in a burlap sack.

Here’s how disappointing a son I was. In our little suburban town growing up, my Dad’s business sponsored a Little League team, securing for me a spot on the roster at a time before social promotion necessarily applied to athletic competition. On my own merits, I wasn’t qualified to be bat boy (nor interested in even that proximity to summer sports programs).

I spent one inning a game—the league minimum—in center field, being shadowed by edgy left- and right-fielders covering my flanks. I struck out every time at bat, unless the pitcher was an even bigger schmuck and accidentally walked me. Then I inevitably died on base, usually due to an error on my part.

My Little League highlight occurred the one time my bat miraculously collided with a pitched baseball, and I took off around the bases, starting with the one on my left, reasoning that that’s the way we do everything else, left to right, like reading… Needless to say, the third-basemen was almost too incapacitated by laughter to tag me out… but not quite.

How could I have spent that much time in center field, and on the bench, and not taken note of the correct order in which to run the bases? I guess I just never thought it was information I would need to apply to my own baseball experience, so I ignored it.

Whatever happened that night, I’ve blocked it out. My Dad wasn’t the hitter in the parental power structure anyhow, but his disappointment resonated a lot more and hurt a great deal worse than my Mom’s most histrionic whuppings of ass. And there are probably fewer Dad-disappointments more humiliating than suffering all the your fellow neighborhood dads watching your probably-a-fag son run the bases backwards after a once-in-a-lifetime lucky hit.

So I ask myself, what am I doing right that my Dad didn’t? Why is my son happy and well-adjusted, but his son was miserably unhappy and well on his way to a life of crime by the time he was five? Is it really as simple as hours-put-in?

Because my Dad was an indisputably good guy, whereas fewer people have said the same of me with a straight face. He would give a stranger the shirt off his back, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. Not because he was rolling in greenbacks, but because that’s just the kind of sweetheart of a guy my Dad was (generational gender-assignment prejudices aside).

Here’s an example that sticks in my throat. In the last few years before illness took him down a long, debilitating terminal bunny hole, he noticed that people in Tucson were going to bed hungry. So he started his own one-man, ad hoc charity operation, and casting pride aside, stood out in front of church after every Mass with a table and a box and a sign requesting donations. And by God, after a while, people started bringing food to church, and dropping it off with my Dad afterwards. No one put him up to it, he had to spend all morning every Sunday manning his booth outside of church through good weather (rare) and bad (abundant), and then he had to drive all that food to the really dangerous part of town and drop it off with the proper aid organizations down there.

I believe it’s at least partially because he was of the generation that survived the Great Depression as kids, and made the world safe for democracy shortly thereafter. It was simply my old man’s nature to step up where he saw a need.

To him and his peeps, artsy-fartsy navel-gazers like me were just road-kill waiting to happen. “Send the poet with the thick glasses up ahead to check the road for landmines.”

BOOOOM! One pantywaist down…

Guys like me were the exact sort of hippie artist-types my Dad and his contemporaries had contempt for. He knew—and he was right—if the fate of American freedom found itself in my hands, I’d think about registering for an online Chinese language course right now. Maybe Farsi, too, just in case.

Still, I think my Dad would have liked my son, in spite of The Boy’s undeniable artistic bent (he did the chalk drawing, right, last month with his cousin Amelia, 7), and the fact that his rapid growth has left him fairly clumsy, physically, compared to his peers—just like I was.

But I’d like to think my old man would have overlooked his inherited shortcomings and appreciated his grandson, because like him, he is a righteous dude. The Boy remembers what stuff is important, and reminds me of it when circumstances necessitate. Just today I was fretting—loudly and at length—about something I’d misplaced, and he chided me, “Daddy, it’s just a thing.”

When he leaves preschool in the afternoon, he blows kisses to his teachers. Not show-biz kisses, but genuine demonstrations of affection. They blow them back. His classmates hug him goodbye. One of them drew a lovely picture of The Boy and I last week. Yesterday, a kid who’d been in class three days informed me that my son “was funny.”

He’s so much like his Grandpa, without being anything outwardly like him at all. The Boy is a mensch. He’s the-guy-everybody-loves my Dad always was. He’s Norm walking into Cheers. In so many of the very best ways, he’s my old man all over again (as well as his maternal Grandpa, who is also an extremely likeable chap) and thank God, not me.

I’m just the worn, rusty link between these two generations of great men. I’m proud to share their name, and if I do nothing else right, I’m going to make sure my son doesn’t grow up with the same Daddy Issues as me. He’ll never disappoint his old man like I did mine, because I won’t place any expectations on him besides the few simple items I’ve already introduced and he’s dug into: That he be happy, helpful, and that he places people ahead of the value of objects.

Just like his Grandpa Bastardson, except for maybe that first part. He was only really happy when he was working his ass off and smoking cigarettes… which, come to think of it, meant he must have been happy most of the time, too!

I love those fucking guys… I reckon I always will.

Here’s my attempt at the song that got all this emotional bloodletting going:

FF Person of The Week, 290th week in a row!

2011-06-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

Guess who?!

Wednesday of this fun-filled week, when I took The Boy into preschool, I noticed his teacher was in a lot of pain. She has a mystery malady they’re trying to diagnose; all they know for sure is that it hurts like holy hell. Yesterday morning, her eyes screamed: extreme pain + lack of sleep. I was not surprised to find she had already left when I picked up The Boy in the afternoon.

On the ride home, I asked him about her. He said, she left early. Then he changed the subject.

Squirrel!!

Next chance I got, I tried to chase down the teacher topic again. This time he mentioned she had been crying. I said, you saw her cry? He said, yeah. Then he mentioned the song we were listening to, and that it was a good one.

Music!!

I couldn’t help thinking about his poor teacher. She’s in her twenties or thirties (it’s hard to tell; chronic pain adds years to your eyes) and has a lifetime of this bullshit to look forward to. It vexed me, but I didn’t press The Boy any further on the issue. It didn’t seem to have phased him, and I didn’t want to draw a big, red circle around it to make sure he was traumatized by it.

Out of the blue that night, The Boy announced he was going to make a drawing for his teacher and immediately got to work on this intricate, colored piece of work. It’s something they’ve printed-out a lot of at his school; it’s a circle, but it has an intricate array of almost stained glass window-type tiles and sunburst shapes drawn inside of it. He worked on it until dinner.

He worked on it after dinner. He didn’t finish it until after breakfast this morning, just before we left for school. Over the course of the time he spent working on it, he occasionally reminded us, I’m making this for [his teacher].

Now, nobody asked him to do this. Or suggested it, or implied it… I know this because I asked him, and he looked at me like I had rocks in my head, and said “no” with every bit of disdain a well-mannered 5.5-year-old can muster. Just to make sure I had it straight, he added, This is my idea.

He reminds me of my Dad, more and more.

Much to my surprise (based on her early exit the day before), we found his teacher there this morning, so The Boy was able to give her his drawing in person. It turned out, she was just stopping in on her way to have Boise’s answer to Dr. House try to figure out why her body is punishing her like this.

But it gave The Boy the chance to give her his drawing in person. He had me cut the circle out this morning, and I noticed that on the back, he had written his name, and hers (carefully copied), along with an “I love you” and I’m pretty sure some Angry Birds ephemera in the margins for good measure.

I’ll have to check tonight when I pick him up, but I’d be willing to go out on a limb and bet that none of the other little boys made their teacher a pretty picture last night because they had seen her cry. And judging from her reaction, I don’t think she was expecting any others to, either.

For maybe 15-30 seconds of an otherwise truly shitty day, he had lifted her spirits and made her actually happy. Her kind of pain makes periods of happy infrequent and fleeting, but even more precious.

And that small, self-actuated act of kindness, in addition to all the usual reasons, is why The Boy is Fang’s Forum Person Of The Week—still.

I’m not here to make you like me

2011-06-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

Last night, out of the blue, The Missus hits the wall, big time. More or less can’t get anything done but drag herself off to bed. Of the three of us under this roof, The Missus is way the most likely to get sick if sick is coming calling. I figure last night is no exception.

This morning, even after almost 12 hours in bed, she sounds and feels like 50 miles of unpaved road. She apologizes, says she has to stay home. I feel like a dick because my obviously ill wife is apologizing to me, yet at the same time, I can’t help but feel crowded by this interruption of my beloved routine.

I am so all about routine, it’s not even funny. Sad, yes. Funny, not so much.

So in my infinite givingness, I tell her if she’s as sick as she looks and sounds, she’s going to the doctor. Subtext: I’ve had it with this shit! If you’re really sick, we’re gonna give this illness a name, find out what kills it then stock up on that shit and kill it once and for all.

Get to the doctor… [sidebar: Boise’s walk-in clinic is amazing, in terms of wait-times. You can wait the better part of a day in the E.R. in Long Beach and not be seen, but we were in and out of Boise’s drop-in sawbones within a couple hours.]

The doctor gives her a good once-over while I am explaining my intention to identify this illness and proactively eliminate it. The doctor shrugs and explains it’s probably viral, meaning she’ll just have to ride it out. I do not care for this answer, not in the least.

I inquire about having a blood test done; the doctor warns us off of having blood taken, citing the expense. That’s when my dander really begins to rise. Honestly, how do you put a price on a loved one’s health? We’ve blown thousands of dollars we didn’t have to improve and elongate our dog’s life, but I’m supposed to cut corners on the health of the mother of my child?

I keep my cool, but continue to ride the doctor, respectfully. The doctor orders up a breathing test. After every exhale, The Missus goes into a coughing jag. When she finally finishes up coughing and the doctor can hear herself think again, she asks The Missus if she experienced “any trouble breathing.”

It’s at this point that I am glad she is a woman doctor because I would never hit a woman, not even this provoked. I suggest that the fact that my wife has coughing fits every time she exhales, indicates she is experiencing some “trouble” breathing. I’m so angry by now I am beginning to stammer.

The doctor agrees with my roughly-assembled sentence fragments and we run The Missus down to X-Ray. Sure enough, there’s a pneumonia-thingie sitting on the bottom of one of her lungs. Suddenly I’m not upset at all anymore about the interruption of my routine and focus my wrath instead at myself for having been so upset at the interruption of my routine.

I have another point, beyond the rote self-loathing. I think I’ve made this point before, but it bears repeating:

When you’re sick, get thee to a doctor. Don’t let lack of ready cash stop you. If going to a doctor you can’t afford saves your life, you can spend the rest of it working to pay him or her back. It beats not having a rest of your life. We’re still paying off that damned dog and don’t regret a penny of it.

And bring somebody with you who doesn’t give a jolly good fuck if the doctor likes them or not to advocate on your behalf. Most people doctors see aren’t that terribly sick, especially at these walk-in clinics during flu season. Their first impulse, it seems, if one doesn’t present with blood flowing from open wounds, is to assume the patient is a hypochondriac. It’s your advocate’s job to make sure the doctor is apprised of all your symptoms, whether or not they seem related, then push for more aggressive diagnostic steps to be taken.

Honestly, initially it looked like the diagnosis was going to be “Go home and if it gets worse, come back in a week.” In a week, she’d be taking an ambulance to one of the two big hospitals in town.

Remember, they’re your family, not the doctor’s. Don’t be afraid to be a dick for someone you love.

Oh, and next time, we’re getting that blood test.

Baby Steps...

2011-06-11T23:19:00.000-07:00

Born This Way & That

2011-06-11T15:00:00.000-07:00

On the MTV Movie Awards this year, after the best kiss award was announced (one of the “Twilight” couples), the male of the couple ran from the podium, into the crowd of celebrities in the first few rows, and planted a long, lingering lip kiss on his male co-star. And you know what the audience of trendy teenagers did? It hooted and applauded. I didn’t hear one catcall or epithet.

The kids—the cool ones, the ones who go to MTV tapings, who will be the future tastemakers—do not consider male gay PDAs to be the agreed-upon anathema that my generation of teenagers did.

The Boy, almost six now, is a big fan of Lady Gaga and “Glee,” and we encourage that kind of behavior. He watched “Glee” for several months (with The Missus—it has too much singing and dancing by half for me), before we discovered he thought the character of Kurt was a girl.

But where I can take or leave “Glee,” I am surprised to find myself firmly in the Lady Gaga camp. God, it’s still embarrassing to even type her name. But that’s all right. Nobody who knows me reads blogs anyhow...

So let me tell you my Lady Gaga story. I’d heard about her. I’d seen pictures of her dressed in meat. She was supposed to be the latest big pop creation.

Naturally, I dismissed her out of hand. Assumed she was a Madonna-wannabe, but didn’t have even Madge’s squeaky chops, so she had to do crazy shit like dress in meat to get attention.

And in my defense, I can still see how she has set herself up to be perceived that way.

Anyhow, just to punish myself, I decided to watch the Grammys this year, too. I saw Ms Gaga arrive in an egg; I figured hers would definitely be a performance I would fast-forward through. Then she opened her mouth to sing, and this roaring arena-rock voice came pouring out. Sure, she had choreography and the usual excessive trappings of the successful best-selling pop tour, but this weird little chick could sing!

She proved it a couple days later when she released the studio version of the song, and her live vocal had been stronger than the studio one. That never happens, certainly not among pop phenoms. Suddenly I had visions of her going out, fronting a Queen tour with the surviving band members—it would be amazing.

Freddie Mercury definitely would have approved.

Anyhow, I also loved the content of the single she sang at the Grammys, “Born This Way.” My mother, for instance, just can’t get head her around the idea that people are born gay—not broken down then converted, or courted by the devil—and that it’s like being left-handed or blue-eyed: It’s okay, in spite of what her Good Book tells her.

It’s so cool to have that message boiled down to three simple words, set to a crazy danceable beat, and sold to millions of eager young listeners around the world. Bruce Springsteen said something a long time ago that Lady Gaga is now embracing: You may not be able to save the world, but you can change it.

The time is definitely ripe for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign.

You have to have heard about it. A web site where LGBT kids and adults can leave video messages advising the latest generation of LGBT young ’uns to hang on, stick it out; it gets better. It’s brilliant and wonderful.

I’ll bet it’s saved a lot of lives, and improved many that didn’t need saving.

As much as I admire and am grateful for the “It Gets Better” campaign, though, I can’t help but regret the fact that had it been around in my youth, it wouldn’t have been a place I would have gone to because of its emphasis on gender-identity issues.

As it’s being marketed now, they’re leaving too many kids behind, and we can’t afford to spare any.

There is a whole underclass of schoolkids who are bully-bait every day who are barely mentioned in the It Gets Better pledge, which reads as follows: Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I’ll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it [I love that bit!], at school or at work. I’ll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know “It Gets Better.”

Four words: and other bullied teens. Giving that many kids so few words in your mission statement seems to me more like an afterthought, or political cover, so “It Gets Better” doesn’t get spun by the Bad Guys as another Gay Campaign To Indecentify Our Children. Those four words may help protect it from partisan smear campaigns, but the site doesn’t seem to have much content for the kids they refer to.

I watched a lot of the videos on the site, and they are heart-breaking as well as hopeful. But almost every one of them deals with someone’s testimony concerning surmounting issues created by their gender identity. And there are at least as many kids bullied in school for any number of other specious reasons, and I was one of them.

Nobody at school targeted me because they thought I was gay, I was just different. Didn’t fit in. Socially inept. I was easy prey there for a while, and there were a lot of other victim-written-all-over-them kids getting their asses handed to them on the playground every day, too. It eventually got so bad for me, one year the biology teacher took me in and had me work on assignment posters in his classroom at lunch.

He made it better, but lunch only lasted an hour out of every day…

For most of those of us unaffiliated with a larger group of like-minded outcasts, it never got much better for us as we grew older. I eventually joined the stoners because their entrance requirements were pretty easy to meet, and because nobody but nobody wants to go through high school alone.

Because if you’re in school and you just don’t fit in—and aren’t lesbian, gay, bi or trans—you don’t even have the promise of a strong community which has endured similar prejudices to take you in and embrace you to look forward to. What you’ve got is bupkis; more grade-pressure, a stress-packed home life, peer-indifference and/or abuse and pretty likely a damned lonely life to look forward to.

Who speaks for those kids? All too often it is the suicidal assholes who come to school one day with trench coats, shotguns and a to-do list of high-profile classmates and teachers.

Because baby, they were born that way, too.

Why Edwards is worse than Arnold

2011-06-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

Jeez, this is a tough category. Arnold knocked up the domestic help, then kept her around for over a decade while he secretly co-raised their bastard child. That is some hard-core Harlequin Romance bad-guy shit.

Then this Edwards guy, he goes and cheats on his terminally ill wife, produces a love-child with a woman other than said dying wife, and engages in a lengthy, complicated cover-up of the whole affair while he was running as the Vice Presidential candidate on a major party ticket.

Let’s start out by pretending I have empathy with these scoundrels. Arnold spent his entire adult life having women literally throw themselves at him. You can’t just apply the brakes to your dick like that. And Kennedy women are nothing if not used to being cheated on by their philandering better-halves.

And Edwards’ wife is dying, which is probably a turn-off in the sack. Another pretty boy, used to having women at his beck and call, when Option A is no longer desirable but Plan B is, his dick is going to go a-wandering.

Both indiscretions are just extreme examples of the old Jerry Seinfeld line, “Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place.” Most men are only as faithful as their options, which is why celebrity marriages tend not to last. I would guess the same rule applies to women, perhaps to a lesser extent.

I’ve already taken Arnold out to the woodshed for a spanking, now it’s Edwards’ turn.

And as in Arnold’s case, where I didn’t get on his shit for cheating—if it was Bill Clinton’s ‘personal business’ then, and I believe it was, it’s Arnold’s personal business now—but I thrashed him to within an inch of his life for making a fraud of his public face for the last ten years of his life. He chose to make his family part of his public image, and when he did that, he didn’t just lie to Maria, he lied to all Californians. To my mind, that’s when Arnold crossed the line between personal indiscretion and the public’s right to know.

But what Edwards did was infinitely worse. Arnold lied to a state, Edwards lied to the whole country. Worse, by keeping such an enormous, juicy secret at a time when he was running for the second highest office in the land, he left himself wide open to blackmail by an opposition party that had long since demonstrated that no tactic was beneath it (coughswiftboatscough). It was don’t-start-a-land-war-in-southeast-Asia stupid. It was careless and reckless and potentially dangerous on a Tom Clancy-scenario level.

Mind you, I’m not making a moral judgment here. My house is made of as much glass of anybody else’s; I’m taking Edwards to task for putting his ego ahead of his country by running for office with this career-destroying scandal just waited in the wings to be exploited by his enemies, in the event that he attained a position of great power.

As bad as his moral lapse was, it’s none of my business. As a voting liberal, however, my candidate being politically compromised before he’s even out of the gate, but choosing to run anyhow? That damned sure is my business.

I hope they lock this cocky asshole up in some red state penitentiary and make him wander the yard, unprotected, in one of his $5,000 suits and $400 haircuts. And a “Hello, my name is…” nametag.

He likes careless and reckless sexual behavior. He’s going to love being the new fish in genpop.

“X-Men First Class” best comicbook flick since “Dark Knight”

2011-06-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

I’m waiting like crazy for July’s Captain America, The First Avenger.

Thor clocked in at just about exactly what I thought it would be. As you may recall, I considered it kick-ass fun without kicking much actual ass. It hit all its compulsories, helped set up next summer’s Avengers franchise launch, but failed to add anything vital to the genre. It didn’t so much stick the dismount as it hopped gracefully off the bar and had its assistant hand it a cappucino.

Can’t wait to take The Boy to see his first comic book epic on the big screen, Green Lantern, in a couple weeks. The trailers make it look like loud, fast, dumb fun, with comic-booky violence so removed from reality it shouldn’t needlessly traumatize the lad. He’s looking forward to that one like I’m looking forward to Captain America.

It’s a great summer for comic book films and next summer should be even bigger, with the last film in Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel and Joss Whedon’s The Avengers being the ones I know of off-hand. I’m sure there are some that are flying beneath the radar, too...

Like X-Men First Class. I’ve always liked the X-Men movies without loving them. There was always a shiny sheen, a remove that kept me from caring too much about the actual characters. They were top-notch productions and one had a cool, WWII backstory, and Ian McKellan was awfully good as Magneto… but I always thought Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier was a crap character. I love the actor, but somehow never even cared about his character in the X-Men movies.

It was a series ready for a reboot, and director Matthew Vaughn picks up the challenge and runs with it. He has really improved his game since Kick Ass, which I also enjoyed. In what I consider a brilliant move, he did not ret-con* the comic book continuity to place the story in the present day—as is the usual custom—but instead retconned history to accommodate his superhero yarn. The result in this case is to lend the proceedings considerably more heft than the standard comic book movie formula.

This is the best superhero movie since Dark Knight, hands down.

Initially set briefly in the last days of WWII, it features Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr as children, juxtaposing Xavier’s blueblood upbringing stateside with young Lensherr’s nightmarish concentration camp boyhood. As might be expected, the two backgrounds produce young men a few scenes later of starkly different outlooks concerning the paranormal abilities they have discovered they wield. Xavier is a privileged idealist who wants to unite mutants and mankind in peaceful coexistence, whereas Lensherr’s experiences in the camps have caused him to have given up on humanity altogether, and decide the only safe thing to do for mutantkind—his kind—is rule the world himself.

There is also a proper bad guy, an energy-absorber played by Kevin Bacon, who sets about screwing around with the Cuban Missile Crisis and all those lovely energy-filled nukes. His powered-up minions include January Jones as a mind-reading ice-maiden (of sorts) in a bikini; a red, teleporty Nightcrawler-looking scalawag; and a third evil mutant who apparently creates tornadoes with his hands.

It sounds like there should be too much going on, but the movie is constructed just about perfectly. And the actors playing the twenty-something mutant leaders—James McAvoy as telepath Xavier and Michael Fassbender as metal-master Lensherr—are terrific. Both are vaguely familiar, but not in any way I can put my finger on; they’re perfect as people who are supposed to grow up to be actors with whom I am already very familiar. And the actors themselves are both more than solid. They made me care. Maybe part of it is they had more screen time in this film, but I’d wager both young actors are movie stars in the making.

The gal playing Raven the shapeshifter, Jennifer Lawrence, just couldn’t be hotter in a voluptuous, Marilyn Monroe kind of way, either. The fact that she spends much of the movie in blue body paint and little or nothing else may add something to her allure, and screen time.

Familiar character actors ably fill in the necessary military commander roles, and the movie boasts a couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em cameos that are sure to have fans’ tongues wagging (but not mine!).

In the end, though, this film is a buddies-gone-wrong picture about Professor X and Magneto, and as such, succeeds marvelously. As an astute tweaking of American/Soviet history, it also must receive points. And purely as an exercise in big-screen superheroics, it wreaks maximum mayhem, with only a couple of cheesey-looking effects shots to detract from the overall impact and hint at what was probably a relatively miserly budget. (And perhaps a re-shot ending?)

It was written smarter than the average four-color fare, so I hope it has enough whiz-bang moments to keep the kids coming back for the bean-counters to justify another film by the same creative team. They certainly laid enough Easter Eggs for fans to suggest the direction a second story might take.

On the ride home after the movie, I was already looking forward to buying the DVD of this thing when it comes out. I’m not sure why or how it flew so well for so long under the radar, but it was a damned happy surprise.

Recommended!

* ret-con: a comic book term, short for retroactive-continuity, where an old character’s origin is taken out, tarted-up and re-vamped for the current generation of fans.