Blab of the Pave

2008 Nobel Prize in Physics Award Ceremony

2008-12-10T13:25:00.001-08:00

I’m in here for the award of the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics to Dr. Yoichiro Nambu, now an emeritus professor after having come to the University of Chicago in 1952. He is being recognized for groundbreaking work in spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The ceremony is taking place in the Assembly Hall of the University’s International House (or “I-House”) , an imposing old art deco building that may be an old hotel . The Hall itself is a rather incongruous mix of old and new. From the black armchairs with school seals and gold trim, to the tall, narrow cathedral-like windows, to the collection of national flags mounted on the wooden walls, the place stinks of tradition and academic pomp. On the other hand, I’m sitting in the back row of the balcony section, where decade-old taupe paint is peeling off the ceiling above me and the headsetted producer of the event’s live simulcast is barking orders down to his cameramen from a thin-walled room located directly behind me. It is hard to hear what the speakers on stage are saying. The original, handworked metal light fixtures, adorned with shapes of vines and such, are strikingly beautiful, but one can’t help but notice that they descend from a drop ceiling that is also interspersed with cheap looking plastic fans.

PUT HIS FACE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FRAME! COME UP A LITTLE... THERE!

President Robert Zimmer, in his welcome to the crowd, says that this Nobel Prize is further evidence of why the administration and faculty have gone to such great lengths to “preserve the University’s distinctive culture.” What he means by this, I’m not quite sure. Cue the live video feed from Stockholm. The Nobel speaker in Sweden expresses more concrete views about what a University should be. In particular it must be three things: the memory of society, the cutting edge of society and the critical mirror of society. It must stimulate, attract and refine researchers. Occassionally, they cut away from the video of his remarks in favor of who I assume must be the Princess of Sweden, who is wearing an elegant gown that puts her killer rack on full display. An ever smaller share of the world’s resources are being devoted to basic research. Our future progress as a species is in peril.

Dr. Nambu is speaking now. He uses a metaphor to dramatize his discoveries about the behavior of physical particles, something about group psychology among the constituents... He has a very thick Japanese accent, and one can’t tell whether his voice is shaking from age or from emotion. ZOOM ALL THE WAY IN! HOLD IT! It is hard to hear him. People are turning in around in their states to glare at the back room wall. That is a broken symmetry... The attire for the event is supposed to be business, but some people around me are certainly wearing jeans, and the scent of body odor is not unnoticeable. Down on the floor a cameraman in a denim shirt trips over a tripod and falls over into a pew. People pretend not to notice. Dr. Nambu is still talking. ...the *spontaneous* breaking of symmetry... The clicking and chirping of conventional and digital cameras is all around.

Dr. Nambu has finished. The hall stands to applaud. A medieval looking group in purple sashes forms at the front of the stage and starts playing a recessional on an undifferentiated quartet of long, valveless horns. Folding up our coats and putting away our notes, we are invited to an adjoining room for a reception, complete with finger desserts and a champagne toast.

Quotation

2007-02-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

"I do not know much about the tariff. But I know this much, when we buy manufactured goods abroad we get the goods and the foreigner gets the money. When we buy the manufacutred goods at home we get both the goods and the money."

-Abraham Lincoln

Univision

2006-12-09T10:27:00.000-08:00

So I’m sitting here on Saturday, noonish, drinking some coffee and eating cereal. I should be preparing to write my admissions essay for public policy school, but I get sidetracked by an interesting piece of reality programming on Univision. Basically it consists of two tasty bitches playing Jenga. The one who appears to be the fan favorite is dressed in tight fitting jeans with patterned stitching on the back, several bracelets on her right arm, long diamond-shaped dangly earrings and a silver necklace with a small bauble that hangs over a teal tube top. The other is the designated hoochie in this contest. Her outfit is sky blue from head to toe. She’s wearing fuck-me stilettoed heels with fishnet stockings and ass-hugging jean shorts that give her a cameltoe. She’s wearing one of those silly half-cocked club hats, this one denim with a a bow just above the brim, and a lacy, partially see-through bra type thing that dangles a jeweled skull and crossbones between her bombs. The camera begins every shot of the Jenga tower with an unsubtle tit shot. It’s compelling television. The girls are consulted with respect to which blocks to remove and how to remove them by various dudes, one of whom has a buckled white jacket with a snap collar that makes him look like he just stepped out of a late-80s foreign language textbook. The audience clearly loves this shit, which seems to be like the Hispanic, models-only version of a dice game. When the fan favorite topples the tower, a dude (not the jacket dude) with a ponytail and a green and orange T-shirt puts a fat stack of colorful, foreign-looking currency on top of the pile of blocks, the audience goes wild, and the hoochie starts dancing, hands raised. The end. Fascinating.

Cards Win!

2006-10-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

Since the national media has decided to take a holiday from critical thinking during these 2006 MLB Playoffs, choosing instead to go with the inane partisan blather of Jeanne Zelasko and Kevin Kennedy, and the even more inane albeit nonpartisan blather of Tim McCarver and Eric Byrnes, I'm going to step in here and offer my two cents on the World Series from here on out. Disclaimer: I'm a Cards fan, a huge one, and although I will offer up actual arguments, supported in many cases by statistics, as opposed to mere "storylines" supported by greed masquerading as frontrunnery, I make no representation of impartiality. In fact, if the Cards start chugging cock between here and Game 7, you can count on these entries stopping, immediately, to the chagrin of just about no one.

Moving on.

In the pregame coverage for Game 1, FOX did its best with the shitty hand it was dealt. With the denizens of both coasts retreating en masse to the refuge of one-hitters and reruns of 24, FOX tried to spin the storyline of Detroit as the team of "Destiny" and the standard-bearer of a city undergoing a renaissance.

Sorry to rain on the parade, kids, but while it's not too late for the Tabbies to pull out a victory in this Series, they're going to return, either to celebrate or to recuperate, to a city in its death throes. In 2005, US automakers slashed 110,016 jobs. GM and Ford combined to announce 60,000 layoffs in November 2005 alone. Just last month, Ford announced another 10,000 layoffs, these to salaried workers. And early this month, just as the "Motor City" was gearing up for the Tigers' joyride through the American League playoffs, General Motors broke off talks for a partnership with Renault and Nissan. It's just a matter of time--likely months, not years--until Toyota surpasses GM as the world's largest automaker. A recent press release revealed that GM is planning the release of its first hybrid sedan in 2007--a mere six years after the worldwide release of the Prius, and a full decade after its release in Japan. And yet, the General Motors advertisement/conceptual art installation in Comerica Park's left field still boasts an extended-cab, four-door red pickup truck bookended by an equally huge blue SUV, the two framing a fountain that might as well be spewing pure gasoline into the chilly Detroit night whenever a player wearing the Olde English "D" goes yard.

And with most of America tuning in and tuning out to the latest envelope-pushing joint from Lil' Jon and/or Shakira, don't expect Aretha or anybody like her to put Motown back on the nationwide entertainment map any time soon, either.

In other words, the whole "Detroit Renaissance" storyline is cute, it really is: But it is completely unsupported by reality. So take that, Jeanne Zelasko, who began postgame coverage of the Cardinals' dramatic Game 7 NLCS victory over the Mets with a list of excuses for why the Amazin's choked against "The Worst Team Ever To Play in the World Series." And also, Jeanne, take my advice: no amount of time and money spent in the salon and in the plastic surgeon's chair is going to make you hot, so please stop trying. The shit is tragic.

Moving on.

Anthony Reyes beating the tar out of Justin Verlander was the big story of this game. Prior to the game, no less an expert than ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski predicted that Reyes "didn't have much of a chance against Detroit's 17-game winner and Rookie of the Year Justin Verlander." Wojo, you'll recall, is one of ESPN's vaunted panel of experts, none of whom predicted a Cardinals victory in the WS, and only one of whom even predicted that the Cardinals would be able to beat the San Diego Padres in the NLDS. Oops.

But was the notion that Reyes "didn't have much of a chance" defensible? Only if your understanding of the game is so basic that you can only conceive of a pitcher's talent in terms of Wins and Losses. Let's take a stroll down memory lane and have a quick look at the peripheral stats of Reyes and Verlander.

VERLANDER

In 118.2 minor league innings spread between A+ and AA ball in 2005, Verlander had 10.36 K/9 and 1.98 BB/9, with an ERA of 1.29 and a WHIP of 0.91. I'll be the first to admit that those numbers are hot. But the sample is limited, and after three years of college at Old Dominion, you sort of expect a high draft pick to mow down hitters at the lower levels of the minors.

So what about in the bigs? Verlander tossed 186 innings during the 2006 regular season in addition to 11.1 at the end of last year. His rates over that span are 5.97 K/9, 2.96 BB/9, 2.01 K/BB, 1.35 WHIP, 1.02 HR/9, and a 3.83 ERA. Damn fine for a rookie, no doubt, particularly for a rookie in the AL, but his peripherals hardly scream "dominant."

And what about over the second half of his first full major league season? Was he still lights out, or did he tire? I'd say the latter. Emphatically. His ERA in the second half was 4.54; his WHIP was an atrocious 1.55; his opponents batted an even .300 against him and his K/BB was 2.03. He complained of shoulder fatigue down the stretch, which could have contributed to his poor late-season numbers, and which wasn't at all surprising considering his 186 regular season innings were more than 70 more than he had ever pitched in a season at any level. But all we heard about coming into the Series was how "well rested" he was. And of course those 17 Wins.

REYES

The Cardinals, owners of the majors' best starting ERA in 2005 with a rotation that lost only over-the-hill Matt Morris in the offseason, gave their organization's golden arm a little more time in the minors.

Reyes threw 239.2 innings over two seasons and three levels in 2004 and 2005. In these innings, his rates were as follows: 10.38 K/9, 2.03 BB/9, 0.79 HR/9, 1.10 WHIP, 3.57 ERA. Verlander's rates surpassed Reyes' in every category except K/9 and HR/9, but not by much. To the extent Reyes' rates sagged behind Verlander's, he could be excused for having to have pitched against AAA hitters, something Verlander has never done. Also, Reyes' 3.57 ERA was a little bit unlucky considering his sterling rates, and could easily be explained by the fact that the Cardinals' farm system, particularly at the upper levels, is virtually barren of talent, either defensive or offensive. In sum, though, Reyes was more dominant than Verlander over a much larger sample size; he gave up fewer homeruns than Verlander; and his control, while not as tight as Verlander's, was still very, very good.

And what about his rates in the majors? In his 98.0 regular season major league innings in 2005 and 2006, Reyes has averaged 7.53 K/9 and 3.49 BB/9, with a 1.26 WHIP. His K/BB is 2.16. ERA: 4.41. The one real fugly number is his 1.59 HR/9 (ouch). That being said, Reyes surpasses Verlander, handily, in some pretty primary pitching categories--Dominance (K/9), Command (K/BB), and WHIP.

Based on these numbers, an insightful analyst might have analyzed the matchup something like this...

***

SCOUTING REPORT

Verlander's had tremendous success at a young age at the major league level, but he tired down the stretch of this season and complained of shoulder fatigue, which is the worst thing any pitcher, particularly a 23 year old pitcher, can complain of. He's thrown more innings this season than in any other season in his career, by a wide margin. In the second half he made every hitter who faced him a .300 hitter, and he's never demonstrated an above-average ability to strike out major league hitters.

Reyes has very limited experience at the major league level, but he's had flashes of brilliance. Nevertheless Reyes had tremendous success at every level in the minor leagues, and his ability to strike batters out has been superior to Verlander's in both the minors and the majors. Although Reyes demonstrated an uncanny ability to keep the ball in the yard in the minors, he's gotten taken deep well more than his fair share in his brief major league experience, which has contributed to him giving up far more earned runs in the bigs than his great skills would indicate he should.

The one area in which Verlander is hands-down better than Reyes is in control, where Verlander's (barely) sub-3.00 BB/9 could already be considered elite, while Reyes 3.49 indicates that his control is still a work in progress.

Both are extremely talented young pitchers, and they have similar skill sets. Verlander might seem to have the leg up, given his well-publicized success this year, but if Reyes can find a way to keep his ball in the strike zone and out of the bleachers, he stands just as good a chance to have success tonight against an impatient and largely punchless Detroit lineup.

***

Instead, we get nonsense from McCarver like "Arm goes up, ball goes down" (in this case for Jeff Weaver) and Reyes, an "unknown," doesn't stand much of a chance against Detroit's 23 year old ROY ace.

We all saw what happened. After Yadier Molina and Dave Duncan tipped off the not-too-bright Reyes that the Tigers were teeing off on his crappy changeup, he went to his smoking fastball and at one point mowed down 17 batters in a row. Reyes' superior ability to locate his fastball as compared with his changeup resulted in precisely what we said he needed to take his game to the next level: Control. Further, it was little surprise that the flat-hatted Reyes wasn't plagued by the home run ball while pitching against a team whose top slugger knocked just 28 bombs out of the yard during the regular season, and which plays in one of the most notorious pitcher's parks in the majors.

Of course that isn't what we got. What we got was more post-game befuddlement from the clueless FOX crew.

Dewey Defeats Truman!

2006-10-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

The St. Louis Cardinals defeated the New York Mets in the 2006 National League Championship Series by a tally of 4-3 in a decisive Game 7 in which St. Louis again received support from the unlikeliest sources. Yadier Molina, who hit .216 during the regular season but looked like Roy Campanella during a seventh inning mound conference with Jeff Suppan, went deep in the top of the ninth with one man on to put the Cardinals up 4-2.

The national media seemed unprepared to report the Cardinals' victory. Postgame reports on ESPN documented the Cardinals' recent history of postseason failures, as opposed to their businessslike domination of the National League since their loss to the Mets in the 2000 World Series.

It also didn't escape the attention of the discerning observer that the FOX production crew, from the studio to the pressbox, consistently, seemed "enamored with" the story of the ascendance of the 2006 Mets, particularly as their postseason success contrasted with the ineptitude of the cross-borough Yankees. If "D"etroit is the national media's darling of "D"estiny, the Mets, the dominant regular season Mets, were their Yankees Lite.

Instead of reporting the Cardinals' victory, and the plays that contributed to it--Yadier Molina's bomb in the top of the ninth inning; Adam Wainwright's curve to end it in the bottom--ESPN was talking about the plays that "were overshadowed in the loss." Endy Chavez' brilliant catch?

So how'd that work out, Endy? How'd that work out ESPN, headquartered in Bristol, Connectituct?

Let's take a look at postseason Web Gems--like Endy's--instead of the story of how the Cardinals beat the Mets.

All y'all haters can suck my motherfucking dick. We won, bitches. "Cardinals can choose to choke now or choke later." Choke later, funboys...

Adam Wainwight, a 25 year rookie closer who took the job in Septembrer when Jason Isringhuasen finally ended a subpar season with a trip to the DL, struck out Cardinals nemesis Carlos Beltran to end the sereis and clinch the Series berth. Beltran has owned the Cardinals during his postseason career. But on Thursday night, the handful of red-clad Cardinals fans who braved the misty Queens night against about 50,000 flag white-flag-waving Mets fans celebrated silently but animatedly in the aisles of Shea Stadium.

Outcasts in Queens, the Cardinals' clubhouse of bargains and retreads happily toasted with their countrymen back home in St. Louis and in their respective adopoted home cities in the national diaspora of ambitous Midwesterners. And in the process, they joined the Detroit Tigers in the 1956 World Series.

Enough.

2006-05-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty disgusted by the content and sheer volume of the press exposure regarding Barry Bonds' steroid use and pursuit of Babe Ruth's home run record. So it's with some hesitation that I tackle the issue at all.

The hypocrisy demonstrated by virtually every sector of American society in response to this issue is sickening.

The fans knew he was doping--if they didn't, they were stupid, or just not paying attention--and they cheered for him and regularly tuned into Baseball Tonight to watch his dongs splash into McCovey Cove anyway. Now they're offended. Betrayed. Concerned for the sanctity of the game. Puhleeze.

The commissioner and owners were complicit in rampant steroid abuse, including Bonds'. The Steroid Era filled stadiums and enhanced the reputation of the Commish--shit, it damn near built it after the strike--and lined the pockets of the owners. Now they've got a serious interest in maintaining the game's integrity and sending a message to America's "youngsters". Uh huh.

The press has taken a wide assortment of negative stances towards Bonds, whether because they bear personal antipathy towards him or because they just sit down over their morning coffee and are too lazy to find anything else to write about. It's easy. Believe me; I know.

But the most ridiculous thing I read came recently, in a story on ESPN.com, about how Babe Ruth's descendants have declined the Giants' offer to participate in a congratulatory ceremony of some sort when Bonds hits 714. First of all, do we really give a shit what Babe Ruth's granddaugher thinks of Barry Bonds? I should think not. I should hope not. I find the whole inclusion of the families of former record holders to be a bogus PR stunt. It was bad enough when McGwire broke Maris' record.

But this businses about Linda Tossetti, Ruth's granddaughter, is rigoddamndiculous. Despite having never met the Babe, the Durham, Conn. resident told reporters "I've got a lot of my grandfather in me." Sure. "What she knows about the Babe she's had to learn from her older siblings." Uh huh.

But the biggest bullshit is Tossetti's bogus moral stance on the message doping sends to kids. OK, I buy that, but did you KNOW what Babe did behind closed doors? ESPN says it thusly:

It's the steroids allegations trailing Bonds that are disconcerting to Tosetti. She said drug use sends a disturbing message to youngsters. Her grandfather, she said, enjoyed being a role model for children, even though his hard-drinking, hard-living life is well-documented.

"Look, he did his carousing. But liquor didn't touch his lips when he was with children. That's how his image is for the youth," Tosetti said. "I would hate myself a million times if I shook Mr. Bonds' hand if he did do it. These guys are making adult decisions about their body. It's the kids who think they're bulletproof coming up in high school who don't have that luxury."

Tosetti insists she has no malice toward Bonds, whom she's never met.

"I can't point a finger at Mr. Bonds. That's for people at a higher power to do," she said. "I'm sure he's a nice young man."

Where do I begin?

OK, so liquor didn't touch Babe's lips when he was around kids. OK, great job. So he wasn't a complete sleazeball. But isn't it important to keep in mind that Bonds doesn't walk around the clubhouse with a syringe hanging out with his ass cheek? Or do PSAs about the benefits of human growth hormone? He avoids the issue at every opportunity. He's been intensely private about it. Untl this year's reality show, that is, at which point every sordid detail had been fleshed out by nosy reporters.

I'm not saying the press shouldn't pursue stories like this. But the fact remains that had everyone just shut up about it--or if they resolved to do so now--their WOULDN'T BE ANY BAD EXAMPLE for kids, because they woulnd't know about it. Conversely, had the assembled press been all up in Babe's business while he was passing out drunk in hookers' tits, etc., maybe Ms. Tossetti wouldn't feel so morally superior.

She makes one good point. He made an adult decision about his body. So leave the man alone. He wasn't sending any sort of example to kids. He was trying to make that money and break those records. But any effect his personal actions have on the actions of children is the media's fault--not his.

But you know the part that really gets me? The "I'm sure he's a nice young man line." Not only is it the most ingenuine, tossed-off, subtly shit-eating self-loving line I've heard in some time, it's ridiculous when you consider Tossetti's age relative to Bonds'.

Bonds is 42 years old. He's a grown ass man, with children of his own. He's not nice--she probably knows this--and he's certainly not a young man. And she's 51! Not nearly old enough to adopt the tone of sage wisdom born of old age, as she does here. Shit, she's probably fuckedguys that are Bonds' age.

She, and the rest of society, should cut the bullshit. Please.

Dream-The Author As Old Man.

2006-03-20T05:30:00.000-08:00

Having fallen into disrepute at the end of his high school career and forced to withdraw his college admission at West Virginia after having been exposed (with a classmate) as a liar in the death—at soccer—of an opposing player some months before, exposed through the discovery of his passport being somehow held in hock at a new tournament in Australia, in which yet another opposing player, the goalie, had been killed, reduced to a bubbling yellow pool of guts and brains and jersey after attempting to stop a shot kicked much to hard at the small triangle of goal he defended, such exposure beginning prematurely an adult life that sent him on a trajectory of possible alcoholism and certain non-success, an old man, eyes runny with the dotage of many bitter decades, returns to his high school, its wood rotted and windows lined with runny liquid streaks, the light somewhat dimmer and the floorboards browner and more stained that he remembers them, to read for a small group of assembled students, most of whom have never heard his name, a passage from his book, not his first book, but now in the twilight of his life, his first book to meet with any small measure of critical approval, let alone acclaim, both of which he now received, if only from the most obscure and capable critics, themselves mostly old, none of whom with the audience necessary to vault this book, believed earnestly by these zealous few to truly be the mark of genius long concealed, to any sort of bestseller list. The school is physically much changed, to be sure, and the dust is gathered in the corners, but the same ivory bust of Alexander supervises this same darkish room located right off of the third floor library, where this group of very young students, sixth grade perhaps, now assemble, understanding none of what the school used to be when the author attended, indeed nothing of the author himself or the past, notably including no knowledge whatsoever of the author’s catastrophic pre-college Exposure to his shocked classmates, and they don’t see (as the author now does) that whatever spark of Good and Truth and Desire that existed in this man before his Exposure, still lives inside of him and is now being fanned and brought to flame in this man, for the first time in years, by the presence of these young children in this too-familiar place, much changed but not beyond recognition.

Two teachers are present. One is herself youngish, early thirties perhaps but heavy and slow and prematurely gray in streaks from the fatigue of supervising boisterous children without having any of her own, and in her too there’s a certain latent bitterness and resentment laps gently just inside the limits of her skin and finds occasional silent outlet in her overblue eyes. She regards The Author with suspicion, sees only his streaming, tearing eyes, and ascribes them not to the warm reemergence of memories and impulses long dormant, but to years of self-abuse through whiskey, and cigarettes, and God-knows-what-else, both of which are true, but only one of which is now active and alive and relevant. The other is much older, much older indeed, ancient even, coated with wrinkled skin that, collapsed in creases and flaps around her eyelids and sockets, obscures clear unwet white eyes that maintain and radiate harmonious equanimity even in the face of a tremendously bitter and increasingly cruel old age that has robbed her of most of her faculties. Into the cobwebbed room she walks lamely and half-stumbling with the help of a knobby walking stock, her weight shifting erratically between her out-jutted left knee (her good one) and right elbow (her good one, the one not linked to the hand that holds the stick), and she arrives, at the end of her journey, at an ancient chalkboard, yellowed with the fossilized chalk dust of many years and suspended by a hinge inside of a withered oaken frame that is fundamentally solid, but is decorated by shells on its corners and a coat of arms in its upper center. In the groove that runs along its bottom is a quarter-piece of nubby chalk, which she now retrieves and applies, with much effort, to the surface of the board, before writing in clear, precise, even strokes that betray no palsy, the Author’s name and the title of his recent novel. The Author, holding together above his head with the clasped thumb and forefinger of his left hand, as always, the four fern fronds of different lengths which when brought together and suspended as they are have become the signature headdress of one of literature’s most ancient, most obscure eccentrics, notices that a certain guileless infant smile is coming over his face as she finishes writing, and turns to him, and meets his watery eyes with her own clear eyes (which barely see and which have not been corrected by contacts or glasses), and meets his smile, too, and says: “The kids. They keep you young.”

And with that his smile finally births and bursts forth across his face, and his legs uncross at left-ankle-and-right-knee and recross gently at the ankles, and his right hand falls limply at his side, the fern fronds that they previously suspended dropping feathery and in lyrical slow motion at his front, back and sides, so that the four of them come to rest perpendicular to the Author as the cardinal points of a compass of which his being is the center. And suddenly the room is experienced again in full color, and full moisture, and without dust, and the life and the joy creeps back into the Author starting at the place above his head where the fronds used to be, enveloping his face, and chest, and hips, and thighs, and calves before it extends all the way down beyond his toes, and the camera finds his eyes, which seem to suck in the moisture they had previously leaked and hold it in, are reborn by it, and he notices too that the old teacher across from him is young again, too, her eyes also the same as they had been when they were young but unobscured by flappy ancient eyelids, and indeed her hair is curly, a luminous shade of brown, and her face is radiant and young and newly pubescent, and they are together, face to face, these two, surrounded by thirteen other young male students, in coats and ties, in this cleanly scrubbed white room, just as they had been, eighty years ago, on the day they first met.

Wafah Dufour Bin Ladin

2006-03-13T21:38:00.000-08:00

From the files of the ever-more-ridiculous "American" present:

"Her story will bridge the gap that people feel exists between the cultures she has lived in," ReganMedia President Judith Regan said.

"She is also a young woman who falls in love, has her heart broken, worries about her looks, doesn't always listen to her mother, and hasn't spoken to her father in years," Regan said.

Um, is this what we believe typifies the American experience? Even scarier, is this what *really* typifies the American female experience? God knows, there are better people to ask than me.

But even so, it's disturbing to think that using one's infamous last name in order to be able to a score a Rolling Stone photo shoot in which one poses in a bubble bath wearing only a necklace constitutes "bridging the gap" between cultures. In such a context, one is forced to question whether culture even exists in any meaningful way on either side being "bridged" here.

PS. I'm not saying I wouldn't do her.

We couldn't have said it better ourselves

2006-02-22T17:23:00.000-08:00

From the Guardian in the UK regarding the civil strife in Iraq following a bombing of a golden-domed Shiite mosque:

"Appeals for unity and calm were made by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's senior Shia cleric, and the president, Jalal Talabani, who warned that Iraq was in "grave danger" and urged Iraqis to work together to prevent a civil war.

The calls for restraint were echoed in Washington and London. President George Bush, pledged financial help in reconstructing the mosque. 'Violence will only contribute to what the terrorists sought to achieve by this act,' he said."

I'm pretty sure George said this without a trace of irony or self-awareness, which is pretty hard to believe. Nearly five years after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, look at what a fucking mess we've made of the world. Sad, but true.

This cartoon shit is rigoddamndiculous

2006-02-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

The following statement, from a no less reputable newspaper than the Washington Post:

“The publications caused outrage across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, becoming a showdown between religious tolerance and freedom of speech.”

This emphatically not a showdown between religious tolerance and freedom of speech, and it is journalistically irresponsible, or perhaps merely stupid, to say that it is. This statement implies that tolerance and freedom of speech are diametrically opposed, at opposite sides of some ideological spectrum.

In fact, they are not: they are allied. I submit that religious tolerance is not possible without freedom of speech. This type of cartoon that is necessary to create the kind of dialogue necessary for the West to understand and eventually embrace Muslim culture.

What’s most disturbing is that no major news outlet has argued that these cartoons were not intended to be disrespectful or hateful to Muslims, but rather to highlight the fact—thrown into starker relief than ever by the recent month’s events—that Islam has been perverted by violent ideologues bent on rolling back Western freedoms, even in the West itself.

OK, I take it back. What’s actually most disturbing is that British Prime Minister introduced legislation prohibiting disrespect of religious faith. Excuse me. The whole fucking point of free speech is being able to do exactly this. I am disgusted by my leaders even more than I was one month ago, and that’s saying something.

I never thought I would excerpt the Washington Post, but from what I’ve read regarding this issue, they have said it best:

The cautions for us are clear enough. Setting limits on free speech -- whether by the "speech codes" on college campuses or attempted intimidation of everyone else by the presumed elites -- is political correctness run amok. Free speech, after all, is like virginity: either you have it or you don't. Our First Amendment, unique in the world, does not guarantee speech in good taste, or speech that is responsible or reasonable. It guarantees only that speech shall be free. Our own government is no less subject to temptations to nibble at this guarantee.

State of the Union "Crappy", says Bush

2006-01-31T17:12:00.000-08:00

In a stunning development, George W. Bush tonight became the first U.S. President to call the State of the Union "crappy," sending into overdrive the spin machines for both both parties. "I think that President Bush was being candid. The state of the union is crappy, and it has been for the past, oh, six years," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California).

Advertising Copy for the Airsoft Pellet Gun

2006-01-14T14:42:00.000-08:00

"Great for target practice, with the same look and feel of a real pistol."

Coming to a suburb near you?

2005-11-05T14:03:00.000-08:00

The New York Times tells us that unemployment in the largely immigrant, working-class French suburbs that are currently on fire is over 30 percent.

Yet somehow, most discussion regarding the causes of the ongoing violence centers around the fact that the people who live in these communities are largely Muslim and come from Northern Africa.

Let's ask Bruno Beschizza, leader of the French Police Union, what he thinks the problem is: "This is a form of urban terrorism led by a minority of kingpins, who have a financial interest - such as drug trafficking - or an ideological one - such as Islamic radicals who have been seen by our colleagues." Ah, thank you Bruno. Interesting.

So international drug kingpins are responsible? And they would gain what exactly by pissing off every police officer in the country and focusing the attention and resources of every police bureau in France on the communities in which they operate?

Or maybe it's Islamic radicals... who have been... seen?... by our colleagues? What does that even mean? I'm hoping that this is an error in translation from the French, because it's barely comprehensible. Islamic radicals, huh? Let me ask a question. The people who live in these communities are Islamic. Some, no doubt, are radical. Does this mean that they are Islamic radicals?

Ongoing debate about these riots should interest anyone who assumed--as I did--that the hysteric, xenophobic, McCarthyite spirit that pervades American culture in 2005 stopped at our borders. What this proves is that the nonsensical "anti-terrorist" rhetoric of the post-9/11 era has infected even such eminently rational and intellectual countries as France.

And this is a scary thing, indeed. This is how critical thinking ends. This is how social progress gets murdered in its embryonic stages. We are witnessing the worst mistakes of the 20th century being replayed--this time on a truly global scale--at the dawn of the 21st. Solutions that have been effective in the past have not even been discussed, let alone implemented.

In 1900, when Big Business had become a selfish, destructive, preying monster on the American public, we elected Teddy Roosevelt. The Roughrider. The Trustbuster. He restored competition; he restored the public trust; he cemented a positive self-image for a country about to emerge from an troubled adolescence into an adulthood of responsibility and leadership.

One hundred years later, on the brink of senility, this country elected George W. Bush, who as the first American president with a graduate degree in business, promised to run an "MBA-style administration." He promised US an "ownership society."

Can we blame him for getting what we bargained for?

What he promised has come to pass. The first move your average Harvard MBA would make upon joining the management team at your average business would be to cut costs to increase profits in any and every way possible. This means outsourcing relentlessly. This means outsourcing customer service calls to Bangalore. This means outsourcing manufacturing to China. This means outsourcing skilled labor to places much more unfortunate than either.

This means merging with and acquiring other businesses to centralize operations and create vertical monopolies. This means that New York and L.A. get the meat and the Middle shares the scraps. This means slashing insurance benefits across the board. This means renegotiating pension benefits to retirees. This means axing employees of 20 years with salaries to match in favor of new fish with little experience and low pay--who will never enjoy the same benefits their predecessors did. This means sales is king. This means a kind of "free trade" that allows business to exploit natural resources, producers, and purchasers ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

From the government's perspective, this means globalization, deregulation, and privatization, the "real" Holy Trinity of the neoconservative revolution after intelligent design, abortion, and gay marriage get cast aside as the smokescreens they really are.

We are becoming a society based exclusively on ownership. Business owns the electricity in California (blackouts)... and in Texas (Enron). Business owns the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Business owns the governing council in Iraq. Business owns our roads, airways, and rivers. Business obviously owns our politicians. Business owns YOU.

Look at that unemployment number again: 30%. A number like that is coming soon to a community near you. The American economy is a house of cards. It has become an economy based almost exclusively on "services"; an economy that produces nothing of any tangible value. The one flesh-and-blood industry that persists in the United States, the industry that our entire economic and physical infrastructure has become devoted to--the automobile industry--is about to receive a cataclysmic, epochal blow when Peak Oil hits, either this year or next.

When that happens--and it will--what will happen to unemployment in the United States? I've been out of work for nearly four months; I'm 24 with good work experience; I live in what was purported to be a major metropolitan area... and I have a degree from Stanford. If I’m having problems, others will have more.

What will our "youths" think then? Will they be angry? Will they burn down the bombed-out inner cities of Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and Toledo just like Paris and its suburbs are burning today? Will our leaders call us "thugs" and "scum," just like Nikolas Sarkozy just called the teenage rioters in France?

Or will they actually hear our grievances, and take steps to redress them? I think I know the answer...

Some people probably think that a Paris-like scene in a major U.S. city is the stuff of fairy tales. That it could never happen here. That problems like discontent and unemployment could never have the magnitude here that they have in France. That if there ever were such profound social unrest and such pressing social problems as exist in the Parisian suburbs that our "democratic" government would take immediate steps to remedy the situation, restore order, and take responsibility.

I would like to ask those people to take a look at one more picture, and then think. And then tell me if they still feel the same way.

Well?

Affton Days

2005-10-08T09:15:00.000-07:00

Affton, Missouri is a town of about 20,000 located in South St. Louis County, where my dad moved into a ranch-style divorce cottage after my mom left him for my best friend's mom.

Affton is 96.62% white, and has a higher percentage of retirees in its makeup than any other municipality in St. Louis county. My dad is a 58 year old white male.

It is early October, and the autumn is beautiful everywhere in St. Louis. Even here. The leaves are still on all the trees, and have started to turn in only a few skyward patches. The temperature has dropped from the high 80s to the low 50s in the space of the past week. The sky is a clean, pure blue, and cumulus clouds dissipate as they roll towards the southwest. When the clouds are gone, the birds will leave, and our skies will empty until March. Now, though, it is easy enough to ignore this fact. The weather is ripe for light sweaters and pumpkin picking and playoff baseball. Mornings like are disinfecting me of the cynicism of the East, even if they still have a long way to go.

My dad, a notorious penny-pincher when it comes to groceries, clothes, and toilet paper, has filled the house with Halloween-themed nicknacks, most of which appear to be new this season. Pumpkin ashtrays adorn every room, filled with cigarettes left to burn unsmoked. In the small square patch of well-manicured front yard, painted plywood figures of a witch, a ghost, and a gigantic black cat stand five feet tall around a bubbling plywood cauldron.

When my mom and dad were still together, they made one of these scenes for every holiday from forms they saw in magazines. We had Christmas carolers and two nativity scenes, and a big purple bunny with a half dozen purple babies getting hatched from Easter eggs.

My dad would cut them out with a jigsaw and my mom would paint them with brushes and flat paint. My dad kept all of these, although he gave the old nativity scene to a local church and never got it back. My mom no longer decorates.

My dad is especially pleased with this current display, even though it has started to show its age after ten years.

When we first moved here, I didn't know my way around the neighborhood very well. I asked my Dad's sister, who has lived here all her life. "Got any parks around here?" I asked. "Parts? Oh sure, there's one place out Gravois' got everything you need--mufflers, brakes. There's another one up here on Mackinzie that don't have as much in the store, but he can order whatever you need--"

"No no... Not parts. parks." "Oh, parks? No nothin like that around here."

Affton is unincorporated, and consequently lacks many of the amenities of other communities, such as a city hall, a dedicated police force, public parks, or indeed public space of any kind. The citizens here have resisted incorporation several times. The generally agreed upon rationale for this resistance to collective government is a desire to prevent higher taxes. Others might argue that a healthy distaste for authority and the concept of government and a touch of senile dementia is also at play.

Across the street lives a retired Polish immigrant couple, whose carless garage is stacked to the gills with collapsed cardboard boxes that the husband has lifted over the years from people's trash piles. Last week he grabbed a new TV box from off of our pile and I watched him gingerly open his garage door by hand, and carefully place it into one of the few remaining crevices, as though, placing the last card in an elaborate house of cards, he suspected great danger of the whole edifice collapsing on top of him. By day, he sits on a lawn chair on his front stoop oiling and testing the sight on a rifle that looks to be vintage. Behind him, hanging from the top of his front door in lieu of a curtain or a blind, is a yellow vinyl flag with a picture of a coiled, hissing snake that reads DON'T TREAD ON ME. We do our best to steer clear of the neighbors.

Sometimes, though, it's not always easy. Two weeks ago today, on a Saturday, the community presented its annual "Affton Days" celebration. It's really only one day, actually--like I said, the tax base is small--but pluralizing the name lends a certain pastoral touch that people seem to associate with "halcyon days." The festival takes place in an open air square, bounded by multicolored plastic flags, right there next to the electric plant, which starts up where our backyard leaves off...

On Bullshit -- A Brief Response

2005-05-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

"The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions
and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to
say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility, as a
conscientous moral agent, to evalute events and conditions in all
parts of the world… bullshit also has deeper sources, in various form
sof skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an
objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of
knowing how things truly are."

Frankfurt argues, then, that there are two chief causes of the
proliferation of bullshit, which appear to contradict one another: the
compulsion, from within and without, to evaluate everything, and the
inability to evalute anything. How is it possible for evaluation to
be the hallmark of morality—how is it possible for morality to exist
at all—when 'skepticism' (a word mentioned in this tome for the first
and only time on the second-to-last page) ostensibly denies the
existence of an objective reality to evaluate?

Frankfurt proceeds to argue that evaluation, as a process, turns
inward when external referents are (or are believed to be) unstable,
and he believes that this is the most propesterous development of all.
But how can Frankfurt argue that evaluative impulse becomes directed
exclusively at oneself at the same time he argues that, more than
ever, people are compelled to evaluate "the conduct of his country's affairs" (OB, 64)? It seems that the
argument requires a finer analysis of the relationship between the
internal and the external.

I would argue that evaluation of onself or out of oneself becomes
increasingly projected on an outside world, and so colors and defines
the external, which exists regardless of whether we exist, with and by
the internal, which exists if and only if we do. The projection of
self upon the world is exactly analogous to the projection of a movie
upon a screen. The screen exists with or without the projection, but
it has no meaning, and no purpose, without it.

This self-projection occurs and intensifies because of skepticism.

Skeptics believe that they can say only one thing truthfully: that
they don't know enough to say that they don't know enough about a
world that those who know objectively more about insist is
unknowable. Hence, skeptics, suspect that they may know more than
those who 'should' know more .

The 'Objective' is increasingly and tyranically 'right' in principle.
Paradoxically, however, it becomes less known, less completely
understood, with each new discovery. Reality becomes less knowable
not, as in the past, because the universe is so large or so awesome,
or because its magnitude overwhelms our feeble, tiny circuits of
comprehension. No; today, reality is less knowable because our
circuitry is not fine enough.

The universe of atoms, quarks, and energy is so small, so complex, and
so indecipherable that we cannot see it, smell it or feel it. We
cannot interact with it. And yet we're told that the universe is
better understood today than it has been on any day before?

An increasingly fine understanding of the universe, or rather, an
increased understanding of how fine the universe is, makes us bulls in
the chinashop of our own reality. The world no longer dwarfs us: we
dwarf it.

Our ignorance is increased in proportion with our understanding. The
veil is rent from whole new vistas of cluelessness and confusion
within us.

The truth teases us: but it retreats from us!

Hence, skeptics reserve all judgement on right and wrong until more
is known. They believe that one day we may know more. This is not
certain, but it is possible. In measured anticipation, then, all
determinacy, judgment, and morality (the three are related) are
suspended indefinitely…

Until the day when a directive comes—either from within (subjective)
or without (objective)—that I (subjective) or we (objective) know
enough .

Either case requires a cataclysmic event to jolt the skeptic from the
inertia of indeterminacy.

This begs the question: must this event necessarily be unpleasant?
Given the likely magnitude of the event, and the presuamble
epistemological shift at the moment of this event, questions of
pleasant and unpleasant cease to be relevant. It is, after all, a
cataclysm. It could be either pleasant or unpleasant, depending on
how you look at it. More than likely, it will depend on how much you
like the new determinacy, the new truth that results from the moment.
If you love the truth, the cataclysm that reveals it will be, will
have been pleasant. If the "truth" is undesirable, it will have been
unspeakably unpleasant . Sometimes, the truth hurts.

In any case, the new determinacy now, certainly, and for the first
time, defines you.

It should be noted that—functionally—the new determinacy is equally
determinant regardless of whether the cataclysm that bore it was
internal or external.

The new reality and the new determinacy are the cause and effect of
one another.

The bullshitters are the ones who wish not to be skeptics in the
moment of indeterminacy. That is to say, bullshitters wish not to be
skeptics, but they exist in the same time, and they are borne of the
same conditions and the same beliefs.

Their opposition is exactly analogous to the opposition between liars
and truthtellers, but bullshitters and skeptics live in a completely
different dimension.

DIMENSION A: WE KNOW ENOUGH TO KNOW WE KNOW THE TRUTH

LIARS |----------------------------------------------------------------|
TRUTHTELLERS

DIMENSION B: WE DON'T KNOW WHETHER WE KNOW THE TRUTH

BULLSHITTERS |------------------------------------------------------------|
SKEPTICS

DIMENSION X (FRANKFURT'S WORLD): WE KNOW ENOUGH TO BELIEVE WE SHOULD
KNOW THE TRUTH

LIARS |--------------BULLSHITTERS------------------------------SKEPTICS----------------|
TRUTHTELLERS

Terry Schiavo, Hottie

2005-03-29T07:55:00.001-08:00

After many, many days and weeks of trying to ignore the issue, and
being unable to do so--the story of Terry Schiavo's feeding tube
beating out such recent favorites as the Red Lake, Minnesota school
shootings, the ongoing war in Iraq, the Syrian pullout in Lebanon, and
even the "elections" going on in Zimbabwe--I was finally pulled into
the debate by the comments of my friend Michel, who, upon finishing a
battie this weekend and seeing a news clip flash on the bottom of the
screen said: "Man she used to be hot is all I know. People need to
leave that bitch alone."

Having grown accustomed to pictures of listless eyes and a distended
face (come to think of it I never have seen pictures of her body,
which must be attached to this pathetic countenance, somewhere,
somehow), this possibility piqued my interest, and I set out on a
Google image search, which revealed this photo:

Ouch. That is hot. There's no denying it.

Doesn't the decision to pull the plug, or rather, to leave the plug
out once it's been pulled, become a little easier when you compare the
above picture with, say, this picture?:

Or, perhaps even more compellingly, this picture?:

On this, the tenth day of her knife fight with death, I brought up the
issue with my office mate, D---, who promptly said: "They need to get
over it and get on with it. Their daughter's been dead for ten
years. They can do whatever they want with their memories of
their daughter but don't mess up my judicial process. The
fact that I think that there are dozens of people who could benefit
from her harvested organs has nothing to do with it."

He clears his throat.

"The Bible is a misogynistic piece of shit." Whether this is a
continuation of his previous train of thought is unclear.

And then there's the other side, that comes out in angelic fashion on
the PATH train and the subway. While examining the gape-mouthed,
expressionless face on the cover of the Daily News, my
friend's buddy asks, purely, it seems, for the sake of conversation:
"What do you think of this Schiavo girl?"

As I begin an explanation that includes numerous hesitations and
qualifications (even at the outset), he blurts: "IT'S A HUMAN LIFE,
MAN."

I'm in the camp--a small camp, apparently--that doesn't see this is as
a cut-and-dried issue.

Is it me, or do the divisions created by this crazy, crazy case (read:
a distraction) make it seem like a horrific repeat of the Presidential
elections?

Refuge

2005-03-12T17:18:00.000-08:00

From a craigslist.org discussion board on the job market [yes it's come to that...]

Everything happens for a reason, huh? < not_so_much > 03/12 10:22:25

Someone made this comment on a post below, and I just had to react.

OK, so my husband was laid off 2.5 years ago. No amount of kindness, asking, pushing, or begging has encouraged him to take a job beyond a very part-time thing. But I love him and have a lot of faith in him, and he takes care of me and our home while I bring home the bacon.

In spite of feeling pressured, dealing with personal issues like serious health problems, and taking care of elderly parents long distance, I have hung in there.

Then, my company goes and hires the employee from hell, whom I have to work closely with, thus bring screaming amounts of work stress into the picture, on top of financial, personal, and health issues.

So, I want to know, WHAT is the greater reason behind taking the last refuge I had - work - and destroying that on top of everything else?

Because if it's to get me to divorce my husband and run screaming to a place where I can be left alone for about 2 years to recover my sanity - I'm almost there.

--

To which:

I don't believe everything happens for a < Werewolf32 > 03/12 11:13:40

reason. To believe that, you have to believe that a) there's a god, and b) he has a personal interest in organising your life. For it to be a positive belief you also have to add c) that aforementioned god is good.

If you don't believe all of those things, which I don't, then hearing "everything happens for a reason" can be infuriating when you're in a situation like the one you described. However, you can also read it like this - in everything that happens, it's possible to learn something which you can apply to your life in a positive way.

Often it isn't possible at the time. And it's equally easy, and often easier, to apply the things you learn from your experiences in a negative way.

I'm not going to tell you all that crap you're going through is happening for a reason. But you can find something in it that's useful, either now or in the future when it's all over and you can look back calmly on it. Does that help at all?

___

Kindest thing for God is to not believe in him < norednx > 03/12 11:29:29

otherwise you have to deal with the realization of:

1. An absent landlord

2. A rather mean spirited and unfair puppet master who awards the likes of Paris Hilton multiple and punishes thousands through disease, natural disasters and any number of ugly things that happen in this world

--

And...

Some more thoughts on your specific situation < Werewolf32 > 03/12 11:57:49

I'm glad to see in your other post that you're taking some steps such as therapy. I hope this is something that involves both you and your husband, because it doesn't seem to me that this is all about your own issues.

There are many couples where only one partner works outside the home. But for this to be healthy and fulfilling for both of you, it has to be what you BOTH WANT and mutually decided on. If you're not already getting some marriage counselling as a couple, you should be.

If any part of your life feels like a refuge from the other parts of it, you need serious changes to those other parts. I know I'm not telling you anything new here, just thought it might need some emphasis because you seem to be taking all the effort upon yourself to make changes. That doesn't work. It just adds one more burden to the heap.

--

Clearly, there are people who use craigslist--often--who feel very strongly a desire and an ability to help their fellow, anonymous human beings with their advice, given on this completely decentralized, egalitarian, chaotic message board, which may or may not be an adequate substitute for or appropriate complement to a rigorously applied program of mental help.

But what kind of advice are they giving?

The piece of advice that really struck me was this: "If any part of your life feels like a refuge from the other parts of it, you need serious changes to those other parts."

If this is true, does this mean that refuge itself is a concept we need to throw out of the philosophical and emotional window entirely?

I mean, isn't every refuge in every human life a refuge from something else in life? Here's what Merriam-Webster has to say about refuge:

1 : shelter or protection from danger or distress
2 : a place that provides shelter or protection
3 : something to which one has recourse in difficulty

Essentially, the existence of a refuge always points to the existence of some other dissatisfaction or danger in one's life. And yet everyone has their own version of refuge, do they not?

Some take refuge from their unhappy personal lives in their professional lives. Some people do the opposite. Some people take refuge from human society in general in well-armed, isolated compounds in the rural fringes of Texas and the Upper Midwest.

But doesn't everyone require some kind of refuge from some kind of bullshit?

Sure, it would be nice to be able eliminate every aspect of unhappiness, heartbreak, lack of success... bullshit... in every phase of one's life. But usually this isn't possible, and often not desirable, and in these situations, it really seems appropriate to thank the Lord up above (or your own damn self) for having found or provided a stable refuge.

The real problem occurs when one realizes that every part of one's life is a refuge from some other part of one's life. When one begins to take refuge in the things one originally or occasionally took refuge from. Sometimes it works the opposite way, and we take refuge from the things in which we originally took refuge in (see: failed human relationships).

If the existence of a refuge points to the need for serious changes in another aspect of life, what does an existence filled with nothing but refuges indicate, and what is the solution for this kind of a situation?

Not an unpleasant feeling, to be sure. The temptation is there to say fuck it, scrap the whole thing, move, start over, lose phone numbers, and wake up with a completely new, largely unattached life.

But then what would we do without our abandoned refuges?

Sometimes, the refuges themselves are sweeter and more necessary in the role they play than the dangers that first provoked them, such that even in the absence of danger, one feels the painful absence of a former refuge...

In situations like this, it would make sense for human beings to seek out new problems, and with them, new refuges.

The Truth Puts Its Boots On

2005-03-12T00:37:00.000-08:00

Nothing takes away from the gravity of a triple murder like watching its aftermath transpire on CNN.

Watching Vernon Keenan, chairman of the GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation), causes great fear if one imagines him as the chairman of the Federal B.I.

PRESS: Are you confident that he's out of the area?

GBI: No, I'm not confident... We don't know where he's at.

He says photo-graphs like it's two words, heavy on the O's. Sure, he looks like a gumshoe, with the checkered suit and the loosened tie, and the wide-brimmed, half-cocked hat. But this is reality, and this gumshoe appears more clueless than most.

The news has just broken that the green Honda Accord that Nichols was believed to be in for the past fifteen hours since "carjacking" (never have I heard it so much) it from an Atlanta newspaper reporter was, in fact, in a parking garage.

It is the same garage from which it was carjacked. It never left the building.

The broadcast cuts to a picture of the reporter who got jacked and goes to audio voiceover. In a still picture, the reporter grimly, proudly displays the facial wounds from his pistol whipping.

For the past fifteen hours, Law Enforcement (throughout this broadcast it's been verily personified) has spearheaded the manhunt via the resources of the media, notifying all Atlantans to keep their eyes peeled for Nichols... in a green Honda Accord.

Introducing a segment, the anchor--his first name is Miles--introduces the fact that the car has been found as "the good news" before turning and soliciting an expert with hypothyroid eyes who is wearing an orange button down shirt.

CNN anchor [to expert]: "Give us Manhunt 101."

The CNN anchor is a pandering, blathering fool, and even at 2:30 AM, it's an embarrassment to CNN to put him in front of the camera in any capacity.

"He's going to go where he can get what he needs. He needs to get out of there."

"Henry Schuster," says the anchor, "who has covered many a manhunt for us, back with us tonight. Stay close, Henry."

The anchor keeps mentioning Nichols' appearance in court the day before with two home-made knives shoved into his boots, and seems to take great pleasure in using what he believes is jailhouse slang, and defining it for the general public; he doesn't seem to have much to add.

CNN Anchor [to expert]: "So he came to the jailhouse with these homemade knives, these shivs... Correct?"

He wears his hair combed straight back, revealing a receding hairline he considers dignified, and his shirt and tie are solid blues of slightly different hues.

Their legal expert wears his hair combed forward.

The anchor ignores the expert's gentle attempts to correct "shiv" with "shank".

After repeatedly emphasizing with contempt that "one, single, [cough] female deppity" was all that the Department of Corrections assigned to Nichols--"even after this shiv incident"--the anchor's own words provoke him to muse:

"That borders on outrage right there." All the while thinking this is a special night for my career.

During the commercial break he rolls up his shirtsleeves.

Nancy Grace, a lady with large blond hair whose program, recorded earlier, reappears now, calls him the defen-DANT.

In six consecutive hours of round-the-clock coverage, Brian Nichols' is the only black face shown anywhere on the broadcast.

Our Love Is Like An Overripe Tomato

2005-02-26T12:30:00.000-08:00

Our Love is like an overripe tomato;

Willing and
Red and
Hard soft skin
That beckons
To resist-

Then you saw me
You cut me with a knife
With Ridges that get beneath
And loose my sloppy insides,

Which you keep together crudely
With your fingers
And arrange
In thick slices on a slab

To dry them out with
Paper towels
And snug them carefully
One upon the other

Between two slices of toast,

Before you moisten all again with lite Mayonnaise.

Our love is like an Overripe Tomato
That contains both our bloated loves inside it
Fertile
Waiting to burst
Or rot

Like when I'm Not with you
And I come
Apart at the seams

Great Room Window

2005-02-23T23:02:00.000-08:00

I love this island.

Tonight, on either side of me, the East River shifts comfortably in its channel.

I love the look of bridge lights streaked and dancing across a black river. I love the sound of no cars at all except the dull, steady roar of highway driving deep in the distance. When most people hold a conch shell up to their ears, they hear the sound of the ocean. This is what I hear.

What does it mean that a river always brings me more peace than the ocean? It always has. Why?

Maybe it’s because I never saw the ocean until I was a man full-grown. Because I spent the happiest moments of my childhood in boats and on banks, and not on beaches.

Sometimes I worry that that’s where I left them. But then, that's melodramatic, isn't it...

A lot of the people I’ve met from these parts are well experienced in the art of sailing. They troll out to open water, so far from the land that they can’t even see the shore; they spread the sail, smell the sea, and let the wind do the work.

Where I come from, a boat needs a motor.

On a river, there isn’t any use for a sail. If you’re on a river and you’re moving, you’re moving somewhere, and you’re going there because you’ve decided to. Even if you’re going with the current, you’d better have that motor running. Everyone knows: if you leave your journey down a river strictly up to Mother Nature, she’s likely to run you straight into a pile of rocks.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that a river won’t take you for a ride if you pay close enough attention to its currents and eddies and know how to work a gas bar.

Drinking With Michel

2005-02-23T22:58:00.000-08:00

In a gluttonous episode late the night before, shredded wrappers of every stripe already spread near our feet, next to the grilled cheese sandwich machine we used as an ashtray, we had ordered six buffalo wings, with bleu cheese, and a small cheese pizza, mostly out of a lack of other options. The pizza being average and the wings being exceptional, we went to sleep regretting that we had not ordered wings alone, and more of them.

Early the next afternoon--under a similar set of circumstances--now hungry and unwashed, we decided to try them again.

So Michel and I went out, in his mom's red Honda hatchback, to pick up 24 hot wings (with bleu cheese) from the pizzeria down the street.

On the car's bumper was a heavily faded sticker that said “SAVE GREENLAWN” in big green letters. Near this, behind a red circle with a diagonal stripe running through it, was the logo of CVS drugstores.

Michel’s mom was a nutritionist who worked for the United Nations on various humanitarian aid efforts. His mom and dad had met at Cornell, at graduate school, after which they moved briefly to Santa Monica, where Michel had been born. After that, June’s work had taken all of them to Africa, where, ostensibly, her expertise was in greater need. As a consequence, Michel had grown up--for the most part--in various sections of West Africa. He had lived in Niger, and Burkina Faso, and Mali. To bring this up casually in conversation, when strangers finally inquired, often after having waxed poetic about their own, suburban upbringings, was one of Michel’s favorite things.

He had arrived in college with an uncertain manner and a stern, confused look on his face, before he settled in, stopped running, and started smoking weed. I didn’t run to begin with.

During the next four years he rocked an assortment haircuts that were intended to be ironic before they became earnest. He cut his hair short and close like Mike Tyson and wore it with a part shaved into it near his left temple. He rocked an afro, cornrows, and dreadlocks. Briefly, towards the end of our junior year, when his hair had gotten long and amorphous from months of disinterest, he faded it into a foot-tall pillbox like Kid from House Party.

Now, over a year after our graduation, he was wearing it close and well-groomed, taking math classes for enrichment nearby at Stonybrook, and tutoring physics to children and adults in the area who he advertised to in the local newspaper. Often, though—mostly, perhaps--he just sat around in his parents’ basement and didn’t do shit.

When we came back his grandma's car was parked in the street and his little sister and her friend, the neighborhood busybody girl with two ponytails and purple eyeglasses, were standing in the driveway.

"We went in to get the tape and we saw your mess."

They put their hands over their mouths and laughed before they ran away towards the white Honda hatchback that sat, exhaust smoking, waiting, in the street. Michel was visibly disturbed.

Later, we went out to smoke a bowl in the garage because Michel refused to smoke in his backyard out of fear of the girl with the purple eyeglasses. "She's like the girl in a Roald Dahl novel," I said. Michel nodded in assent and puffed, scowling. "The one who gets killed because she found out something she shouldn't have."

In front of me was the Suffolk Life newspaper. It's bottom headline read: "Defribrillator Bill Dies In Ways & Means Committee". He was a good man, Bill. I'll always remember him walking around with that defibrillator...

"Don't worry about it dude. I can't believe you're worrying about it."

He denied being worried about it. I noted, again, that it was very, very cold in the garage, and that it was sunny outside. Michel looked beyond the fence that separated us from the neighbor's house.

"You know what makes it warmer?"

He looked at me earnestly before moving towards the button that operated the garage's sliding door.

"Closing this..."

"That is totally fucking ridiculous, dude."

He protested as he moved closer to the door mechanism.

"This is not my idea of a good time man! Standing in a dark garage with the door closed--in February--getting high because we're too afraid of the ten year old girl next door to go outside. At 23."

Michel was abashed; was embarrassed for both us; we went inside.

Porcelain Girl: A Dream

2005-02-13T22:21:00.000-08:00

I forgot exactly how it happened?

My apartment was sided in white and the Midwestern sunshine was young and clean and ready.

I went across the street and a few houses down, to a white townhouse with half of a white-picket fence.

I was there to buy drugs.

At least I think I was but I’m not exactly sure… A bombed-out dude in his thirties with a three-day shadow and a Jansport backpack waited for me on a gray-striped couch.

No one spoke.

A white staircase corkscrewed above and behind me, flashing the sun from a five-storey window that ran the length… There were no decorations, but blank huge walls, but nevertheless, it looked lived in. The place felt very empty—but only since recently. The whole thing had the feel of an unfinished basement.

The transaction took place wordlessly, I think. Nodding. Hand manipulating.

A dark-haired girl peered down from the floor at the very top of the corkscrew and I caught her eyes as I opened the screen door to leave. She wore a tank top with two spaghetti straps that exposed gentle, unformed shoulders. She must have been in her early twenties, but in her eyes there was a sadness, a vulnerable beauty, that aged her beyond her years.

When she didn’t smile, I left.

When I returned another morning, my burned out, bearded friend was absent, but for some reason I was not surprised and I was not disappointed. I wasn’t scared. Still, though.

I had planned this, hadn’t I?

She found me on the couch and we connected in a perfect, blameless, wordless moment before I kissed her and parted the straps. In the bedroom we did, and afterwards we spoke.

Her chest was tattooed blue and white like a porcelain bowl. It was carefully lined with portraits wherever previous works would accommodate the new ones, each one of a perfect, but unique hand. They were photorealistic in detail of human faces, human bodies, some complete, some abbreviated, some merely alluded to… Blue pools in the cheeks of an Indian chief. A man leaning with one hand on the butt end of an axe while he smoked a pipe with the other. A woman wearing a bonnet curved in an L-shape on a loveseat with a string of pearls around her neck, looking at me over her shoulder. In the blue whorls near her upper thigh a thousand unnamed faces lurked, exposed in all their exquisite detail only when then sun hit her thigh and caught their features at the proper angle.

With bated breath she allowed me to examine her. Was she humiliated? She was not…

I went to the bathroom in a room down the hall, questions gathering in my head, when a large black man arrived and said she had to go. The door remained ajar. There was a mirror at the foot of the bed. Through it I watched him fuck her hard on the floor. She emitted no sounds of pleasure, nor did he. Exchanges took place. He left. I returned. She cried. The sheets were rumpled and twisted from months of neglect.

“This is how I decided my life would be after I died the last time.”

“Oh. You believe in reincarnation?”

“I actually already have been reincarnated.”

She looked down at herself while I played with her nipple.

I let it drop.

Sun streamed in. She was still crying, now hysterically. Our legs tangled. Semen came out of her nose in clotted strings. It was coming apart. How I wondered but did not judge, anxiety growing inside of me. Her face changed. A bulging purple vein split down the middle of her forehead and her eyes bulged.

She was in pain from inside.

I looked away.

I fucked her quickly, yet lovingly…

When I looked up, I found in place of her eyes and her nose one giant, orange eye with a reptilian pupil surrounded by red-hot veins that popped and hissed.

I screamed, just as you would, wishing myself elsewhere, and awoke in a clean white room in a Spartan apartment, where I slept alone amid clean white sheets.

One Long Digression?

2005-02-13T22:20:00.000-08:00

A big problem for some people is the inability to distinguish attention from affection.

I think that Amanda was one of these people. Maybe it's unfair that that's the first thing to spring to mind. I'm probably one of them, too.

So much for not saying too much too early with Beth. I cannot participate in type-written conversations of any emotional kind with anyone, I feel, because when I'm writing my thoughts don't have the same filter that they do when I'm speaking.

I guess what's more likely is that it adds a certain filter and adds a certain time to think and devise a well-thought response. Maybe sometimes, in "matters of the heart," a well-thought response is not what you want. I'm more willing to divulge. Even though I understand that the person who I'm typing with is there, somewhere, alive, and processing what I'm saying, there's no visual contact of any sort, and the desire to say whatever the fuck comes to mind, without having to attempt any kind of affect of face or speech (or being able to) to color it.

Watching the Devil's Advocate last night, which stars Al Pacino, playing Satan, as the nefarious head of a major midtown law firm involved in--it goes without saying--very evil things, begged the question: is what I'm doing evil? Is it evil of me to work for a law firm? Are lawyers themselves evil?

My first instinct was to say back to myself that the question was so absurd that I won't even dignify this thought with an answer.

To circumscribe the argument a little bit though, I feel comfortable saying this: even if there were such a thing called "evil," and even if this "evil" did resemble the evil a typical non-Heathen (Jew, Christian, or Arab) understands, the lawyers who I've met are not evil.

Not a single one of them.

Not Christine Chi. Maybe especially not Christine Chi. It actually frustrates me that I've been unable to connect with the Chi, because I feel there's a lot to be understood and learned in that crazy dome of hers. But digress.

Unsurprisingly, the movie paints the conflict between good and evil in pretty black and white strokes, and the legal industry appears to come out on the "completely evil" side of the balance. Meanwhile, the crazy evangelistic mother of Keanu Reeve's wife, who warns him, cryptically, zealously, "I send thee out as a sheep among the wolves," along with the wrist-slashing wife herself, are the saints of the movie. Those who have seen that episode of Upright Citizens' Brigade cannot help but think "A river of lamb's blood" when they hear the mother say this. Funny stuff. Here, the writers make the audience's choices pretty damn easy, as Reeves represents the a womanizing wife-murderer who is unrepentant and a liar to boot.

The tax shelter industry, though--which apparently I'm a part of, in that I'm helping a prominent international bank to retain the profits in made in these legally and ethically questionable transactions--has its own sinister moments. There can be no doubt of this. These were concerted efforts, it would seem, not to break the law, and certainly not to flout it, as has been suggested by some Senators--but merely to circumvent it. Which is something like ignoring, but requires more effort and less respect for the thing being circumvented. And here, of course, there is a substantial component of exploitation of the common American taxpayer who pays H&R block a larger percentage of income they're working to produce to knock a couple of percentage points off a rate that saps their paycheck at a crippling to pay for a bunch of things they can't see for people they don't know.

And this is not a mini-rant against the bluebloods of this country. For a good number of these, I think, contribution to society and community really has become a priority, and paying their way, whether in taxes and tuition, is a badge of pride, and of course, of worth. Rather, it tends to be the nouveau-riche of every stripe, first generation millionaires who all are richer than they ever thought they would be, and want to keep every stinking penny they possibly can, however they must. This is how most of them have made millionaires of themselves. There are dot-com entrepreneurs who created some bogus company in their garage and sold it for millions before the bubble burst. There are people who distribute pork bellies. There are world-class professional athletes. I've seen fortunes that have been made in both boxing and baseball. We're going against the owners of professional sport teams; we're going against the guy who pay the baseball players. These are the same people, though I won't name names--who rename the Anaheim Angels 'The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim' in order to gain merchandise revenue, despite the fact that, as many have pointed out, Los Angeles and Anaheim are, um, not the same place. These people are trying to make that money, and they're willing to stretch the fabric of reality, if they have to, to squeeze out every last drop. And the tax code is built to drip, just as it's designed to retain water.

Inefficiency and corruption are built into every economic and political system. They are themselves industries within every industry. Without them, we'd be lost. They generate a lot of money and, one could argue, distribute more evenly and completely than a system that was perfectly efficient. What would we do without inefficiency and corruption? Unemployment would skyrocket! We'd have somebody like Ken Jennings running the country. Money would only get spent on things that are boring. No more missile defense here. More homeland security. More fourth of July. Fewer fireworks. Presumably, this lack of inefficiency and corruption would spread to the religious sector, being as close at it is to the political and business sectors, which, presumably, are the first to be infected. And then Americans would head back to churches and temples in droves! There would be fewer tort lawsuits against priests. There would be fewer abused children. Lawyers would make less money. Insurers would make less money. Very scary stuff, man. And, oh yeah, everyone would take Ritalin.

Thanksgiving

2005-02-13T22:16:00.001-08:00

On his 40th birthday, which fell in late November, Lester went turkey hunting in the relative wilds outside of Kansas City. After a few shots of off-label whiskey, he found a turkey hiding in the branches of a low tree. He squatted and fired a blind shot at the balding branches, at which point a 20 pound bird fell, hit him directly in the face, and broke his nose.

Ward's Island

2005-02-13T22:16:00.000-08:00

It's interesting that they continue to use two different names for this landmass of two former islands. Randall's and Ward's. I started out at 125th and Lex in Harlem, where a McDonald's taunted me a for a minute before I realized, decided, that I was over an hour late already and in a bad spot, and should just wait in the long line against the warehouse outside of the subway exit.

The M35 bus took me across one leg of the Triborough Bridge, which leg I'm not quite sure. After no more than ten minutes of travel and our progression through the EZ pass section of what must have been a Queens toll booth, we arrived on this underdeveloped gray and green chunk of land where the roads were chunked in asphalt. The first sign had a list of seven destinations with trailing arrows that pointed towards directions in which there were no roads. My hopes were raised somewhat when I saw that we were [apparently] heading in the direction of Ward's Island, where I expected this rugby match to be taking place.

Our first stop was the Randall's Island Psychiatric Hospital, where approximately one dozen passengers, some obviously and visibly ill, some clearly employees of the hospital, exited the premises, none of them with a facial expression that suggested happiness or eagerness. There was a woman with chemically straightened hair, a shirt that said FUCK ME, and a hunched back, whose disturbed gait looked to be unrelated to any kind of physical impairment, and an elderly black man in a powder blue button down shirt, carefully polished black wingtips, and hair like James Brown, who took the stairs with a look that straddled some line between determination and disdain. A white man with one leg and arms full of crutches shifted off with much difficulty and eyes that bespoke much experience and little love. I crossed my legs the other way and texted Doug: which stop. The bus was now notably absent of females of any shade.

Numerous passengers broke from their respective mutterings to eyeball me as I placed my iPod into my backpack surreptitiously and opened up my late model Verizon cellphone to inquire, in what I hoped was a casual whisper... "Which field, Doug, exactly. and how many stops is it." No longer a question.

When the bus made a U-turn back towards the highway I got a little jumpy and texted Doug with an increasingly urgent For real what stop this bus is the scariest and for that I had to type on Abc and not T9EN.

Still, I had to call to get a hold of him. I got of at the section of the fields that are maintained by the veterans, an inordinate number of whom lack limbs. I cut a wide angle around them and walked down the strip of broken sidewalk between the two bridges. To my left was a great red bridge that was cantilevered, elaborately buttressed, with ten foot cones that looked like Eiffel Tower miniatures holding up power cables along its upper outer edges in intervals of twenty feet. On my right side was a bridge whose upper car section was painted in chipped green and was supported at regular intervals by giant, inverted tridents made of concrete. The sky was notably grey. Later, Doug asked me if I was sure that the green bridge wasn't light blue. At the rugby fields that, was the way it looked. Not so near the psychiatric hospital...

When I passed a rusted chain link fence just beyond a NEW YORK CITY FIRE DEPARTMENT sign that appeared to relate to nothing in the visible landscape, three twenty-ish kids emerged from the woods opposite me. One was a girl with severe features awhose uniform and muscled calves made it clear I was headed in the right direction. Two of them boasted patchy facial hair; one of them carried a frisbee.

It turned out, though, much to my surprise, that my destination was not, in fact, the busy green patch to the right of the bridge, which blasted Barry White from an invisible set of speakers and which was littered with multi-colored triangular flags and human-sized white tents, but the much less busy and much less colorful field down the hill and next to the river...

You Don't Like Pop Culture

2005-02-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

Tonight I found out that it is common for people to have favorite commercials.

Sherien likes the Paxil commercial: "all these people are like at this conference table and their faces are like" and makes this sound like a more nasal wow or whoa and she makes cones of her hands at her ears and winces to signify a face that has been distended graphically on the commercial. I tell her that I am familiar with the drug but not with the commerical. I admit that my favorite commercial is the Levitra commercial with the hot middle aged wife who certainly seems, with her constant coquettish glances and full, glossy lips, to love the cock.

I guess I realized that there are some people who actually do, consciously, enjoy pop culture, like whatever it is you throw at them they'll respond to amusedly, and satisfied, and they think it's weird that I don't respond the same way. Sherien was getting ready to emote about some recent episode of some show that she likes to watch and was about to turn to me and ask me things about it before she said, "Oh, yeah, Deuser. You don't like pop culture." Almost in the same tone as like "You don't like girls," or, "You don't like babies," or something. I didn't really know what to say. The only things on television that can hold my attention are the commercials. The frequency of the flashes on the screen and the energy and mood of the commercials on television demand and reward one's attention much better than does the majority of the programming. Perhaps this is a sad point. Perhaps I'm watching the wrong shows.

Last night I dreamt that Richard took me aside for a moment to discuss the professionalism of my beard, implying but not explicitly saying that it has to go. Without many words or the threat of discipline he conveyed great disappointment.

I also had a dream of an armless hand forcibly breaking the resin cap molding from my eye tooth with a dentist's plaque hook while I screamed in horror and felt the grit fill my mouth.

A month ago I had a dream of a dark haired girl whose breasts and chest were tattooed blue and white like porcelain with the half shadowy faces of babies and politicians and Indian chiefs.

Most nights I dream nothing.

At least I'm not a fat slob who the lawyers look on as a subordinate--because you are--who is still a paralegal five years later because he can't get into law school. [Pause]

I could not have endured the karmic hit associated with dropping that bomb. Even if he asked for it.

I'd say upper Ohio. Like you might have chopped wood in the sticks to fight your way up here and here you are.

They sell advertising everywhere. In New York, storefronts are usually advertisements for the stores themselves. About a quarter of the buildings in midtown are scaffolded at any given time with the usual POST NO BILLS stenciled scaffolding. Right now there is a large advertisement for The Shark Tale on the construction scaffolding of a prominent corner of a building whose name has been obscured. It is a fully functional temporary billboard with full color and even a special triangular plywood addition to the scaffolds upper edge which, when painted gray and bolted flush, resembles the continuation of a shark's tail.

Good evening I'm Joe Buck and Fox would like to remind to you grab a Budweiser: it's Game Time. Yanks-Sox. The Yomiuri Giants are advertising in Chinese and English on an orange patch on the left field gap where the GAP signs were in '98. In the seventh inning a ball off the bat of Kevin Millar bounces off of it.

Bush Fundraising Stomp

2005-02-13T22:09:00.000-08:00

Word on the street is that GW is in town today for a fundraising jaunt. There are uniformed officers, some on motorcycles, lining the sidewalks along 6th Ave. 52nd Street is essentially completely closed off to foot traffic; I went out the side entrance to meet Doyle and Sullivan for an anti-cigarette and the place was like a ghost town. Apparently, they asked all those who loitered too long to go back inside. I had been outside for about five minutes when three all-black Explorers with blue sirens drove past quickly through the traffic on Sixth.

Apparently this, too, is the reason why traffic was so devastating this morning, why I couldn't get one single cab to stop all along my York-to 86th-to Park route, which is usually money as far as cabs go. I finally flagged one going north at 70th Street and made him turn around. He looked earnestly back at me and said, "The traffic today is really really really bad." I nodded. "Are you prepared for this?" He said.

It bothers me somewhat that I have enough disgust for Bush and his policies that I will toss about threats of leaving the country--which relatively few people would be especially sorry to see happen--but that I don't, apparently, have the actual energy or determination to do anything more than download an ironic AIM icon to express my anti-Bush views. This is lower than buying bumper stickers. Although my icon is actually just a pro-Bush icon that advertises America as being safer, stronger, and something else positive that begins, I believe, with 'S', it is not substantially more clever or incisive than those buttons that The Nation is currently selling in packages of twelve that bear catchy slogans like 'W' is for Wrong, sometimes with an additional note below that details exactly what, in this case, Bush is wrong on. Almost as inane as 'W' is for Women but perhaps even worse for having been pilfered. Bonus points, however, for correctness.

I wish that my peers would show more interest, as well. But the protest during the RNC was hardly a great advertisement for popular demonstration: it wasn't bad, it wasn't violent--it just wasn't impressive. There was no anger. There was no vitriol. There was no emotion. These are things I feel conservatives have more readily at their disposal, to summon when the mood to argue or denounce strikes, as it so often does.

At the same time, Sonia, one of our younger associates, is on sabbatical until the end of November in order to volunteer [I assume she's volunteering] for the Kerry campaign. She speaks many languages, Larry says, and therefore she is very useful to them. She will make contacts that will help her professionally in her career and will make many contacts that will be beneficial to the firm. She made a decision that this was something she wanted to do and we support her in this.

No one's facial expression seems to indicate that they disagree with her particular political stance, which is somewhat surprising. Then again, most of them wear Casio watches.

Is this the answer? If nothing else, I have become very good at determining those courses of action that are, definitively, not the answer.

Family Feud

2005-02-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

My feelings.

The “batman cowl” look of John Kerry’s forehead, nose, and eyebrows.

My feelings of guilt at having sold my brother out to the cops in Nevada.

The desire not to write or think about the pervasive feeling of nausea.

The desire to write about things I don’t like to think about but think about too much.

I have a coquettish relationship with myself whereby I think everything I produce is valuable, but still feel compelled to dismiss it all as worthless and trite.

I can’t tell whether I revise too much or too little.

Fantasy basketball statistic checks in regular intervals. Feverish attempts to construct pin-shaped joints out of roaches that we’ve collected in empty yellow box tops. Irregular bouts of Halo undertaken in sudden and intense moments of determination.

When the late-night programming roster begins, I feel a sense of relief. I have my choice of syndicated reruns and B-grade blockbuster movies. Roseanne, M*A*S*H, Roseanne, Bad Boys, Cops.

Earlier today I watched an episode of Family Feud, the version before Ray Combs.

The host had an alcoholic face and a full head of graying hair that he wore brushed forward all around with fat chop sideburns. He wore a polka-dot tie with a fist-size knot and ate a ripe strawberry bite-for-bite on the air with a game twenty-two year old female contestant [he asked in between bites] before he kissed her on the mouth in front of her father.

This prompted Hichem, sitting next to me on the couch and scowling at a roach he was having difficulty lighting, to take a moment and say: “This guy is like the most pimp dude ever.”

He then shuffled down a notch and kissed a tall blond on the mouth before introducing himself, breath stinking, to her husband, a stiff man with rose-colored glasses who stood to her right in full military uniform.

The first question, dating the program to a time at least two decades before now: “Children can be spanked. What can you do to discipline a teenager?”

The Middle

2005-02-10T19:59:00.000-08:00

No one from Southern California thinks that there's any life east of Las Vegas. And everyone from the East Coast thinks that civilization ends just west of Philadelphia. The Midwest, however, is acutely aware of the coasts, and it regards them with suspicion.

After all, this is what Midwesterners tend to do best: regard, with suspicion.

The Midwestern mentality is by far the most earnestly judgmental. Whereas the Californians live and let live and leave judgment to their fine courts, East Coasters tend to be a discerning bunch. There are things they want to know, and your answers to these questions, you can be sure, will determine the way they categorize you, which is, after all, a kind of judgment all its own. To name a few, usually phrased in slightly more subtle ways: How rich are you, where do you buy your clothes, how good is your family's name, where do you ski, do you ski?, where did you attend boarding school, these kinds of things. The Midwesterner does not understand the moral and decisional limbo in which the Californian lives, and the blunt evaluative tools of the Easterner do not satisfy the Midwesterner's appetite for rock-solid truth and the harsh-if-necessary justice that is its natural consequence.

If a Midwesterner gets a new haircut or decides in some way to "change his style," or her style, s/he had better be prepared to give an explanation. The judgmental closeness that the Midwest breeds in its many clucking subgroups is reminiscent of being home again for the holidays after months or years of having been away. Things will be discussed. This is not up for discussion.

You might be able to argue that I was born in the middlest place in the whole world.

And before you get started, no, that does not mean that I, or the place I happen to be talking about, is necessarily the center of the universe in any way. My father, a stern sort who liked to smoke cigarettes, always made sure to tell me, whenever I made unreasonable requests of his time or money, in bursts of teeth-clench, rehearsed vitriol: "Son, the world does not revolve around you." And I'm here to tell you, beyond the shadow of any doubt, despite statements you've probably heard attributed to me and things that have been deliberately misconstrued by the media--that my father was absolutely right. I've leave it at that.

Now, the thing about St. Louis, Missouri, is that it's very close to the geographical center of these United States. There's a name for whatever they call the actual like center of area, but I don't remember what it is--you'll remember if you can dig up the memories of balancing precisely cut foam triangles on pencil points; look it up, let us know--but the real point is that we're talking a really central spot here. On some sort of a profound level, I think you'll agree with me.

You've heard about the four points that they have there in the Southwest, where you can go out to the borders of Colorado and Utah and New Mexico and Arizona or something like that and get yourself all spread-eagled at some highway rest stop or something and have a hand or a a foot in each one of them at the same time? That's all well and good but if you'll indulge me for a minute and think of it this way, you could walk yourself out to a spot, who knows where, in some random point probably near some field in central Missouri, and you would be--literally--in the middle of the country. Like if--at the moment you were standing on this invisible spot in this cornfield--if you took out a gigantic jigsaw and cut out the [continental] United States out of the Earth just perfectly along the lines you could see on any common map, and you turned it upside down... The whole thing would balance perfectly on your head. And it wouldn't even be like Atlas, holding the whole world up because of his great strength, or anything like that. You'd just be in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time... See what I mean? If your back could stand the pressure, the distribution of the weight itself would do the work. Kind of crazy. That's the thing about the middle.

I, myself, though, wasn't born in the middle, actually, I was born in a little place outside of St. Louis about twenty miles from the Mississippi River, a place called Webster Groves, where the first city folks who were sick of the smoke and the crowds and the encroaching blacks decided to escape to, to live in houses where they could get some space and some peace from one another, where they could put a solid twenty feet and a white picket fence between themselves and their neighbors and be a lot happier and more neighborly because of it.

They called it Webster Groves because of the larger apple orchard that was its chief geographical landmark when before the commuters took over. Initially, there was this huge debate about whether to call the new community Webster Grove or Webster Groves. Apparently--the newspaper coverage suggest that the issue was contentious and hard-fought--the vast majority of people agreed that Webster Groves sounded more elegant, more appealing, more plantation-like, and this is certainly what they all were going for in moving out to the country. But the hold up was that a large contingent of the new settlers--though not quite a majority--just didn't think it was honest, in spite of the name's obvious appeal, to name the place Webster Groves when there was only, in point of fact, one grove. In the end, of course, as tends to be the case (though not, typically, in parts like these), those who preferred to play fast and loose with the truth in the interest of painting a rosy picture won out over those who might have preferred a slightly less impressive fact.

Super Rich

2005-02-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

Tonight, while dropping off a dozen slightly soiled and well-wrinkled shirts along with over ten pounds of loose laundry to Super Rich, down there on the northwest corner, three obese women confined to wheelchairs obstructed his entry. A body’s length to the left of the entrance they triangulated such that six gigantic knees sat pressed together, connected at their front outside edges. Slowly yet briefly they looked up, without interest, as he passed.

Quickly, efficiently, in no discernible order, they emptied the dozen or so sacks of laundry that slumped around them with loosened drawstrings.

The Korean with her shoulder to the window dispatched a pair of gray slacks with two deft swipes and added it to the stack that grew on the ledge beside her.

A brunette with oily bangs and drumstick forearms pushed together the wrists of a maroon and green self-knit collared sweater and then halved it with her chin before dropping it limp to the pile at her feet.

Laughing, her eyes darting up then down the street and lighting--occasionally--for a moment--on the stacks of her companions, the broad black woman forced a series of white undershirts into rectangles with great, dark sausage fingers.

From this angle it was difificult to tell: was it obesity alone? Or some other--unobservable-- injury to those well-nourished legs that lay gathered there between them? They strained against their armrests, hands groping, as the clothes level dipped in the bags beside them.

They folded on.

Inside, the tiny Filipino woman with the ponytail and well-fitted jeans waited and eyed his approach. She was the owner and operator. She knew that blue mesh bag, which was, impossibly, the only bag quite like itself. Memorable especially because of the semen splashed socks that spotted the bag’s interior like mines. Her eyes were tired. Bespoke long pain. Behind her, bent over a stool at the waist, her spectacled, multiply braceleted, lighter-skinned son was reading Glamour as he fingered the pencil behind his ear.

He looked up and watched Leon’s entrance with what looked, to a casual observer, like too much interest.

Hollywood & Vine

2005-02-10T19:56:00.000-08:00

Richard Raymond Engelke owned and operated a video store called Hollywood & Vine two addresses down from my apartment building. In the afternoons after lunch he would get stoned with his friend Keith, a big black guy with Coke bottle glasses and a patchy beard who he used to hang out with sometimes behind the counter, and challenge me and Nick to rubber band fights when the store was empty. After a while he’d declare himself the victor, usually when he was winded or defeated, and pinch our asses before we went out. Funny, though, I never thought of Rich as gay. Word was he had a ladyfriend towards the end there.

He was from a small town in Missouri in an era when orthodontia was still in its infant stages. His front teeth were yellow and rodential and were separated by a wide gap that was usually filled in by something opaque and organic. No matter the company, he referred to strip clubs as “titty bars.” He often had occasion to do this.

One afternoon in early November of the year when I turned eleven, I came to him with the new X-Men videogame and placed a ten on the counter. He gave me my change all in ones. He laid out three of them one beside the other, each one folded three times to resemble a penis, with the presumable meatuses pointing towards the ceiling.

“Dicks.”

He emitted a crude chuckle, which was his trademark. It matched his appearance well.

“Use them at the titty bars. Three folds, man. Lay em out there and they pick them up with their tits.” Chuckle. “Don’t touch em though, or else they have a big guy come and throw you out.” He threw a glance at Keith, who was behind the counter watching a monitor that we could not see, his eyes transfixed, eating a chili dog. Keith did not meet his gaze, nor did he appear to hear the joke.

Chuckle.

He looked back at us with a wide grin. He was in a weight loss stage—it tended to go in cycles—and his front teeth were, for the moment, unobscured. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while and his white sideburns were curling in wide wings over his eyeglasses and behind his ears. He gestured with his liver spotted right hand at the middle penis.

“You little peckerwoods want to donate a dollar to charity?”

In front of him on the counter next to the monochrome CRT was an empty two-gallon size commercial Laffy Taffy container adorned with a scissor-slotted plastic lid and a faded neon green Lions sticker. On the back in shaky capital letters in broad black permanent marker he had written the words: “MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY.” It was roughly half full, mostly with metal and not paper. He raised his peaked eyebrows and smiled convincingly, first at us, then at the jug.

It was well known that behind the fabled counter was one of the county’s richest stockpiles of adult films. Occasionally, I’d be in there with my dad, and a guy with a worn leather jacket and dark bifocals would come in, make eye contact with Rich, point hastily in the general direction of the back room, and make a quick sweep into the privileged zone as I avoided eye contact with my dad. He always made a point to come out of the back room after we had left, because I never saw him come back out.

At this very moment, right behind the muscular dystrophy jug, two empty movie boxes lay rubber-banded together with a dot-matrix printed receipt next to the CRT. The spine of one of them pointed outwards and, in white block letters festooned with Christmas lights, read: JINGLEBALLS. Keith’s eyes remained glassy and unmoved from the invisible video monitor above Rich’s head. Beside him in a red-striped KFC takeout box were the sloppy remains of his chili dog.

After noting this, and removing his hand from his chin, Nick angrily snatched the three dollar bills from the counter and shoved them into his pocket. Self-righteous, inflamed, he pointed at Rich, who had unwrapped a wooden toothpick and was now picking absently at his teeth while he stared my brother down.

“You’re a pervert.” Unperturbed, Rich continued to probe, now nearer his molars.

His speech impaired by the maintenance, he replied, “What would you little jagoffs know about it.”

A statement, not a question. He took the toothpick and said clearly now, “Two little rich kids too good to help out some poor little homeless kids.” He shook his head in mock disapproval.

From an invisible place behind the counter he removed two pieces of Laffy Taffy and slid them across the counter to us.

“That’s bad karma,” he said, and grinned again. “Get on out of here now.”

And with that, he placed the toothpick back in his mouth, left it there and locked eyes with us dramatically before turning his the back of his customary black T-shirt to us in judgment.

Talking Times Square

2005-01-23T05:39:00.000-08:00

There are few better cures for depression than taking a stroll down Times Square, especially during the daytime. The sights and sounds of the place soon divert the mind to thoughts unlike any that are likely to pop up anywhere else.

Like exactly how many cups of noodles one would have to sell to bankroll the twenty square foot billboard that advertises Cup Noodles brand cups of noodles at [above] that famous juncture where 7th and Broadway merge or diverge, depending on how you look at it. It is the largest billboard in a sea of billboards.

Or the extent to which the Times Square 2004 reflects or fails to reflect the spirit that produced Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence, which is being played by an appropriately registered street quartet three blocks up from the MTV studios. Bleecker Street is another issue entirely, though related.

For a moment one marvels at the speed and determination with which a man in a wheelchair cuts through the bidirectional foot traffic for which this area is so famous and so frustrating. Then one looks down and sees two feet attached to this infirm person eschewing his chair's slightly askew chrome footrests and paddling madly in tandem on the pavement.

And finally, one can contemplate, hopefully without bitterness, the sheer marketing brilliance of the federal government establishing a multi-floor DEA museum only blocks away from Madame Tussaud's. And this when Clinton took flak in this city for using his office in Harlem as a positive public relations vehicle. At least it was a relatively inexpensive public relations vehicle.

Coming to the Island

2005-01-23T01:11:00.000-08:00

Soon after I arrived on the island, children in the backseats of SUVs began gesturing at the tail end of my car. I waved them on and kept the windows up, preserving the coolness, the smoke, the pulsing anticipatory thump of bass that led me forward to her through the misty night by rhythms through ground. When the traffic slowed, just as the signs had predicted it would, a bob-haired housewife waved franctially from her high driver’s seat perch. I flicked the switch and the glass that separated me from her voice disappeared.

THERE’S SOMETHING COMING OUT OF YOUR MUFFLAH, MISTA!

Although I’m sure my brow furrowed for a minute, I smiled and waved her on, still wondering if I’d heard right, and resumed my former posture.

When I finally stopped at an empty house a block from the seashore, I inspected the situation as my car cooled.

There it was. It ran five feet beyond the bumper when you straightened it all out, as it had become a little clumped and clotted with the sand, grease, and grit of a 100 mile jaunt down a dirty coastline. Maybe it’s your muffler lining. Sometimes that stuff has like fibers and stuff in it. But there it was, jet black, with long streaks of gray interspersed, a five foot ponytail of human hair that had undergone a natural—random—human graying process, been dragged wet along a bad stretch of interstate, and, by, hanging on to dear life to somewhere inside of my muffler, had lived to tell the tale. I spread out its cords in my fingers and inspected it. It was metallic? Maybe slightly synthetic. More like human hair after it’s spent the three straight months of mornings in chlorinated pools. But it was wet now, and when I bent it, it curled and it gave, still anchored somewhere near the heart of my car.

Well that’s a woman’s hair there alright! Now, how in the world… Do you suppose?... That a woman’s hair got stuck in there!? He turned, a perfect mix of certainty and confusion, to his wife, who could do little, in her drunken state, to ease his perplexity.

When I pulled it—hard (by this time I was bracing my thigh against my bumper and pushing off with my outside foot)—it finally gave from somewhere deep inside. It gave, haltingly at first before, conquered, yielding, it came in generous loops that I circled around my arm like in Boy Scouts.

For thirty minutes the locals eyed me with suspicion as I looped the growing, blackening strand around my arm and shoulder.

Amanda

2005-01-23T01:06:00.000-08:00

Amanda always wondered what it would be like to drink a whole glass of honeysuckle juice. To squeeze each bud clean into a glass, one after the other, while the sweet nectar accumulated and beckoned.

There is a honeysuckle bush near where she runs now, close to the school, not too far from the lab on the ocean that she walks to each morning for work. But, she feels, she can’t hardly kneel down right on the path like that, for like an hour, harvesting honeysuckles. It’s probably wrong to pick them, anyway, if you think about it, at least not before they’re ripe, but then how could you tell if they were ripe or not? That’s something you should know.

You should harvest them in greedy handfuls and draw the nectar in the privacy of your car, Mandy. That’s what you should do. Go back for more if you need to, and you probably will need to, but just go when no one’s looking so that no one can ask you what you’re doing with protected honeysuckles in the middle of a nature conservation compound. And if they ask, say that you’re doing an experiment on honeysuckle nectar, that you work for the lab. Point to it. Technically, you’re telling the truth.

It reminds you of when you had Meetu and all those other girls over for a camping sleepover, when mom bought snacks for eight and you guys all stayed outside in the backyard on a ten-by-ten blue nylon square and talked about boys. When you slept in nets and bugs spray to keep the insects off, and made rings and necklaces out of the abdomens of lightning bugs to pass the time. Meetu ran around the yard all night in circles screaming Banzai. When you kissed her as a joke that night, she had put honeysuckles in her braids. You didn’t care whether they were ripe.

Cape Cod

2005-01-18T23:35:00.000-08:00

Brian's family owns a well-windowed House in Cape cod whose roof is an acute triangle that terminates about twenty five feet above the front door.

It's always interesting to meet the families of your friends. One soon gets the impression that one's friend is at once one of a breed that is like him and, at the same time, a completely original creation who is critically different even from those closest and most like him.

Brian's father is an older and perhaps more reserved version of Doyle himself. with stockier legs, a grayer and substantially more recessed hairline, and smoother skin. His legs remind me a little bit of Mr. Harkey's legs in Boy Scouts, a well-muscled pair with a huge, protrusive, distended, distracting varicose vein spangling its left calf. Purple and green, it strained and filled with each crunching step in front of me. As a former Russian teacher [following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, funding and interest dropped in Russian programs nationwide, and many programs actually didn't get renewed], Mr. Doyle is very well-educated and is an academic sort through and through. Chiefly, I know this because he notices my unintentional puns.

An small, old metal boat that people on Cape Cod leave lying on the beach during the wintertime is called a sunfish. Presumably it brings great pleasure in the summertime, but today, in October, we had the duty and the honor to place it face down in a weeded place off the beaten path where it will remain for the next six months.

Brian's aunt Mary took the group of us out on the boat. Here, the pronounce "aunt" like I presume the British must, but very much unlike the Midwesterners I grew up among. Down at the pier, a truck with a towing hook-up extended four hyrdaulic metal feet from its outer corners out to the dock below. They were taking down the mast.

Welcome

2005-01-18T01:38:00.000-08:00

The little one sleeps in its cradle,
I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand.

The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the busy hill,
I peeringly view them from the top.

The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen.

The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtained litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fred or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain'd by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them--I come and I depart.

-Walt Whitman

H&M

2004-09-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

Being in the checkout line at H&M is a lot like slow death.

The employees at the cashier desk remove the hanger slowly from the garment and place it with the rest on the rack behind them. They slowly remove the security device from the garment's seam with a tool a lot like a bottle opener, which is built into the counter, and seems to cause many problems. They discuss their weekend and vacation plans with their coworkers and customers at other registers. They fold the garment slowly into an excessive number of sections and slam it to the counter in front of them, where it lies akimbo. They pick up a black phone from somewhere you can't see, hold it to their mouths sideways so that it doesn't touch their ear, and make a request for assistance over the loudspeakers that in no apparent way relates to your purchase. They slowly run your credit card and take care to place a deliberate 'X' on an already prominent signature line. One resists the urge to shoot oneself in the face.

My friend Glennon recommended this place to me, advertising it as a cheaper alternative to the Gap "where the clothes are not ugly." What became clear upon entry was that this place is extremely budget. The signs on the racks have no ostensible relation to the clothes on the racks. The clothes are cheaper than the advertising and graphic design that surrounds you would suggest. Most of the clothes are designed for people either much taller or much skinnier than myself. Is it possible that my arms are that much shorter in my relation to my torso than the population on average? The shoulders of every shirt seem to beg for shoulders narrower than my own, and yet, there is extra fabric that seems to have nowhere to go. There are no pants shorter than 32 in length. And so forth. To me, H&M resembles a large outlet store, with multiple locations throughout Manhattan, for irregular clothes.

Curiosities at Bryant Park

2004-08-20T19:31:00.000-07:00

I just donated a dollar in change to the Grand Central Neighborhood Social Services Corporation, which bought me a few moments with the haggard woman who hands out their publications (as she proceeds, I look more closely at her tired eyes and wonder if she, too, has a history of homelessness coupled with drug abuse. She does, however, have a daughter now).

After complimenting me on my ability to type without looking at the keys, she launches in to a mercifully brief and surprisingly informative precis of her group's involvement in the homeless community. Working Not Begging is their tagline, and a damn fine one if I say so myself, and their mission is to pick up for homeless adults and children (I think she led with the children part, which is wise, though little did she know I would have paid a much greater sum at this particular moment to be left alone with my computer) where state funding leaves off.

"Where does it leave off?" I ask, and she informs me that it leaves off very early in the month.

I guess it never struck me that corporations like this get checks on the first of the month like everyone else, and that they, too, "run out of money before they run out of month" [this is a phenomenon that I've become familiar with now on a more-than-anecdotal level].

A blanket, a warm bed, a place to shower, they say, and who can argue with that. Particularly when they gather around my table here like larger and more imposing pigeons...

But the funny thing of it is that they organize a soccer tourney, or, more accurately, a series of soccer tourneys. See the the current cover's headline: US Competes in 2nd Homeless Streetsoccer World Cup in Sweden! The exclamation point here is not editorial. It sounds kind of rad. The US, she tells me, is the defending cup holder. Even our homeless athletes are dominant.

I don't believe that the major networks (unsurprisingly) or ESPN (much more surprisingly) have sufficiently exploited the existence of a product with so much entertainment potential. For Christ's sake look what they did with poker. And many of the economic angles have got to be the same: it's a game, so the drama is reproducible and spontaneous; neither owners nor spectators have to deal actually or mentally with the looming spectre of escalating salaries or work stoppages; the contestants are, as in other reality-based programming, not so beautiful that they prevent the possibility of a viewer identifying with a player. Short of that one guy, perhaps, with the dreads and the tooth who everyone must admit looks really good in a uniform.

Obvious drawbacks to potential broadcasters being the quality of play, which is a legitimate concern, and of course the fact that, as a friend pointed out to me afterwards, they're fucking homeless. To the organizers, absenteeism is a concern. To the world, the potentially explosive mixture of having incredible media access and being completely insane. But you have to admit it has potential.

Someone, clearly, has recognized this as a quick perusal of the special section on street soccer reveals the prominently placed logo of the New York/New Jersey Metrostars, who have apparently signed on as promotional partners (not, it would appear, sponsors).

Sometime in the approaching fall, she tells me, they are organizing a tournament right here on the lawn in Bryant Park--a lawn which, incidentally, is not close to playing shape--in which homeless men from TWENTY DIFFERENT NATIONS will compete. You should see it when they brawl. Obviously, I'm there, but the question remains: is my 85 cents really going towards European travel expenses for American homeless? Normally I might say something about fiscal responsibility and the most efficacious appropriation of public funds... But that shit is cool, no doubt, and a European vacation, I know, can have profound effects on motivation and the psyche.