I just had an e-mail exchange with one of my oldest friends in the world that succinctly summarized something I would have written a 4,000-word post about, so I will simply quote it:

Dude, just checked out your website and saw that you haven’t written since Christmas. What could have happened around Christmas that keeps you from writing?

I’ll tell you!: around Christmas, I realized that even my best friends in the world only visit my site every four months.

You think I’m joking. If you think I’m a good writer, and you’ve known me half your life and actually care about what’s going on in my life, and not even you think to read it more than twice a year then what, I ask you, is the point? Make a case.

Now, it may interest you to know that I have succumbed to peer pressure recently and started taking a creative writing class that has been very fruitful. I have been considering posting some of my assignments; I’m just not sure they’re up to snuff. I’ll flip a coin.

still not a christmas song!

This just came to my attention:

In the Charlie Brown Christmas special, Charlie Brown gets his little tree because he is depressed, since he feels the holiday is becoming overly commercialized and plastic…

…and now they’re marketing a plastic version of it.

How’s that feel? Living in that world?

Get the turkey out of the oven to make room for my head.

When I started dating my wife, one of the things I liked the most about her was that we both wanted the same things out of life.

No. That’s not true. We both wanted completely different things out of life, but the differences were so compatible they fit together like Ikea furniture. Each of us was wandering around with an abstract portrait of the ideal partner in our heads, someone who was everything we were not, but both of us had resigned ourselves to the idea that this person was imaginary or pulling a Carmen Sandiego out there somewhere. Most of our early courtship was wonder and incredulity; I spent some time trying to prove she was actually a grifter working a long con on me, until I remembered that I don’t have any money or prospects.

We were especially sympatico when it came to children, though as usual it was for completely different reasons.

—

I was adopted when I was three months old. Before that, I had spent time with a foster family so negligent that my head was flat from spending so much time lying in the crib untouched. The pictures from the day my parents picked me up should be captioned, “Honey! There’s a little Frankenstein in this dumpster!” I would not have picked me up without a radiation suit, but pick me up they did, and they continued to spend the next two decades keeping me from just lying there staring at the ceiling.

I literally could have ended up anywhere. Everyone talks about their potential and their possibilities and what-might-have-been, but if a check hadn’t cleared on time or a paper had been filed differently, I could be a mechanic in Wisconsin named Charlie. I could be Fr. Steve right now. Sometimes it stops me in my tracks to think that everything I have in my life, everything I am, is because once I had no one in this world, not even my own mother, and two people with no obligation to me whatsoever walked in off the street and said, “We volunteer to take care of that kid for the rest of his life in exchange for nothing. I dunno. He seems cool.”

In terms of heritage, this meant my family tree was one of those fake, pre-lit Christmas evergreens you screw together the day after Thanksgiving, but I wanted to pass on my legacy in my own way: when the time came to have kids, I would adopt too. I can’t remember a time when this wasn’t a given. When I was twelve, we became a foster family, the people who cared for babies after their moms give them up but before the adoption paperwork went through. I got to see a lot. Sometimes the biological mom would get cold feet; sometimes the dad would be in and out of the picture; sometimes the social worker would put the kibosh on the new guys; those kids were getting tossed around on some pretty choppy seas. I took all of this in at the time and implicitly understood, I will be a solution to this.

I grew up Catholic. I have known a lot of ardently pro-life people in my day. I know exactly one person who adopted his kid. My personal feelings on abortion are way, way more convoluted than a checkbox, but I feel like I can’t say “I sure wish they’d let those babies live” unless I’m prepared to answer the question “Live where, exactly?” with “my house.”

—

As a teenager, my wife exhibited symptoms of about four unrelated medical conditions, and in real life Dr. House doesn’t come in with three guys and a dry erase marker and pace around you with his cane challenging your belief system until someone’s offhand comment gives him an epiphany and everyone in the audience takes another shot and wonders when they’re going to write a new episode. In real life, they run all the same painful tests as Dr. House, but at the end the doctor sighs and says, “Ohhh… I don’t know. What do you think it is? We’re thinking either a bird allergy or tuberculosis. Or cancer. Tuberculosis? Let’s say tuberculosis and see what happens. Drink plenty of fluids.” This is how my wife’s story sounds to me, anyway, and it certainly tracks with my own health care experiences.

“And, oh,” the doctor added as he waved goodbye to my wife-to-be, “don’t have kids. Aaanyway, I have another thing to get to, so I really have to wrap this up, but if you get pregnant you’ll die. Good luck taking that news into puberty! Have a nice summer. I gotta scoot.”

This made something of an impact.

Before she had ever even been in a serious relationship, huge chunks of my wife’s life had been spelled out for her in blood. At some point between that crisis and the day we met nearly ten years later, she took a clear-eyed look at this huge obstacle and decided that she would just adopt. Nothing was going to stop her from having her family, not her health, not even a spouse. When I met her, she was already thinking about starting the process as a single mom.

—

By the time we met, I think each of us had been in the same conversation with a friend at least once:

“Adoption? Seriously?”

“That’s the plan.”

“That’s great of you, and you’re very heroic and brave for doing that, but your spouse might want his/her own children. That could be a dealbreaker.”

“Well, so f***ing be it.”

People with no exposure to adoption say a lot of awesome stupid things. The one where they act like you rushed in to save people at the Twin Towers because you bought a baby is my favorite. Less than my favorite is “having our own children.”

“I mean, no offense. No offense intended. Adopted children are technically real too. My husband and I would just rather spend $750,000 on fertility treatments than get one of the ones from the discount bin. We want to be able to love our baby, because it’s our own.”

“Oh. Well, now that you put it that way, f*** you.”

I think my wife was the first person I met who saw these things exactly the way I did. It was a revelation. I all but chained myself to her. It didn’t matter that she was a driven career woman who wanted to rise through the ranks of a corporation, eventually hiring someone just to get her coffee, while I was the kind of person who would walk away from my desk one afternoon and never come back, cashing in my retirement money for rent rather than look for more work. The only thing I ever really wanted to do was stay at home and raise my kids, and all she wanted was to work while her husband stayed at home and raised the kids. She never thought she’d meet a man who would stand for it. I never thought I’d meet a woman who would let me get away with this scam. It was a goddamn miracle. And she wanted to adopt! Check, check, check. I do; see you at the reception.

I married my wife knowing that she is a certified expert at planning. She spends most of her conscious hours planning and running those plans by me. Executing the final plan? More of a challenge. Me, I just don’t plan. Whatever happens will happen. Settle down; it will sort itself out. Stuff will happen.

Stuff started to happen.

Our carefully laid out plan for buying a house made us antsy. We had a chance to buy a house way ahead of schedule, so we did.

I heard more about my wife’s health and started asking questions. We mentioned it to a college friend who had become an ob-gyn, and she started asking questions too. “But what exactly did they say? Where are these test results? If that’s true, shouldn’t you have been sick for the last ten years instead of fine?”

My wife started thinking about choices. She went to a new doctor, demanded he get all the test results, demanded he run all the tests all over again.

And she was fine.

Whatever it was, it was gone. And none of the serious stuff she was diagnosed with just goes away.

Suddenly, holy s***. A whole set of barred, barricaded doors flew open in my wife’s life. She had new possibilities. She had unlocked the bonus level.

She could just have a kid. Just make it at home and pop it on out. There’s something that doesn’t happen to you every day. That might be wicked cool.

What was I supposed to say to that? “Sorry, hotshot. We had a deal. A-dop-tion. Take it or leave it”? I’m not a complete douchebag.

She came to me, a little worried about what I’d say, and in our marriage’s typical Bizarro fashion she made the case for not adopting a baby.

I thought about it for a second and said, “You know…? Whatever. One way or another, we’ll sort it out. Let’s see what happens.”

So we had a kid.

(To be continued)

Sometimes, you decide you’re going to write something momentous, and the weight of that hypothetical essay becomes too heavy for you to move your fingers on the keyboard. My wife is going to give birth to our first child essentially any day now, and that is a Big Deal, and before the child is born I decided I was going to say all there is to say on the subject. Turns out that’s a little bit daunting.

In the meantime, though, I cannot overlook the date on the calendar. For a couple of reasons, ranging from my desire to use Good to eradicate Bad to my warped sense of humor, it would be sort of awesome if my daughter were born on 9/11. (I originally wanted my wedding day to be on 9/11 for similar reasons, but at the time it didn’t seem feasible. It would have been totally feasible, as it turned out, but everyone always makes you think wedding planning is on par with planning a moon landing so I chickened out.) Leaving all that aside, however, I was looking at my thoughts from this time last year and found my thoughts today were essentially the same. With that in mind, I thought it might be nice to do a reprint of myself. Enjoy (?)

a moment of silence, but only a moment

Happy Apocalyptic Death Cult Christmas, everybody!

How were your family’s celebrations this year? Did you get a chance to catch any of the parades and decorating ceremonies on TV today, or any of the many specials and movies that they rerun at this time each year? This year, CNN.com started running a 24-hour marathon of themed programming, which is sure to become a holiday tradition for the whole family to enjoy in years to come. Signs of the season were everywhere today; all the cubicles at work were decorated, and many local radio stations stopped their regular programming to bring us horrible, stomach-turning sounds of the horrible, stomach-turning season over and over and over again.

Not commercial-free, mind you. What, are you kidding me? Everybody’s listening to talk radio on Apocalyptic Death Cult Christmas; you’re never going to find a better time to sell American Equity Mortgage. This year– and this is absolutely true– I heard an excerpt of a Tony Blair speech about the way They Hate Our Freedom played over the Battle Hymn of the Republic, followed immediately by a chirpy pitch for Dobbs Tire and Auto Centers. So presumably they were the sponsors of that hour of audio of people on fire.

I don’t know how your family chooses to celebrate, but my wife and I like to get some cremated remains from the funeral home and just roll and roll and roll around in them.

“Never forget”? “Remember 9/11″? Is that supposed to be a fucking joke? What else have you been thinking about for the last five years? I don’t remember the last time I went a day without hearing about a plane being urgently diverted by air marshalls, but 9/11, yeah, that I remember pretty okay. Thanks anyway for rerunning the footage of people jumping to their deaths. Could you trot out some more of the victims’ kids? Thanks again. My memory’s gotten fuzzy in the last couple seconds. September the which now?

I was going to say “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since 2001,” but that’s not true. What is true is that I have not had a pleasant awakening since 2001, starting with that Tuesday five years ago. At the time, I was working with friends at a company with no dress code and a 9:00 a.m. start time, so I usually got out of bed at about 8:46. That day, before my alarm clock had a chance to get to squawking at me, my friend Chris (who worked at a real job) woke me with a message on my machine telling me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. At the time of his call, it was just the one plane; I can’t remember now whether his message made it sound like a small craft way off course or the first wave of a coordinated attack. I only know that it was armageddon on the radio by the time I got into my car and headed to work. It must not have sounded intentional when Chris called me, because I don’t think I even bothered to turn on the TV before heading out the door.

I remember that everyone showed up for work, and that nobody did any. I remember somebody produced a flippin’ 17″ television from Mary Poppins’ satchel or somewhere and set it up by my boss’ office. I remember my boss asking me if anyone was getting anything done at about 11:00; I thought he’d be mad if I said no, so I assured him that, oh yes, they were, nothing is more important when WWIII starts than daily tasks at a bullshit internet company. Had I been honest with him and said “no,” his plan was to let everyone go home. As a manager, this is probably only one of the many ways I inadvertently screwed over the people under me during my tenure.

I remember my friend Nicole, a school counselor at the time, calling me from Texas to ask what was going on. The kids were being kept away from all the information, so she was in the dark too. I wish I’d had more to tell her, but as you may remember the things you were hearing that day were about 85% crap. A plane had been shot down headed for the White House. A car bomb had gone off outside the State Department. They just found a big pocket of survivors in the rubble. They found a stewardesses’ bound, severed hands on a nearby rooftop. To this day, there are a couple of those that I never verified or debunked. For all I know, they were true.

I remember– and this is one I never hear anybody else say in this era– that the World Trade Center meant absolutely less than nothing to me on September 10th. In the aftermath of the attacks I would hear about everything it had symbolized to us as Americans in its heyday, but I had never given it a moment’s thought, and probably neither had you. I also didn’t know anyone who’d said a kind word about Rudy Guliani; at the time, he was mostly known around these parts for letting his mistress shack up with him in Gracie Mansion. A few months earlier, Virginia and some other states had complained about the excessive amount of New York trash that was being exported to their landfills; Rudy’s response, as I recall, was “New York is the cultural center of this nation; you are lucky to get our garbage.”

I remember driving home from work that night past abandoned streets and businesses. The city’s most upscale mall had been closed in case more attacks were on the way; even that day, the idea that United 93 was headed for Frontenac Plaza struck me as somewhat unlikely, but only because I knew bin Laden had never tried to shop there.

I remember that gasoline shot up to $1.25 the next day for no reason, and that the price never, ever went down again. Given that none of our pipelines or refineries had been attacked and we were still on good terms with the Arab nations that provided us oil, I thought that $1.25 a gallon was a scam and an outrage.

I remember that everybody was nice to one another for a good long while, and though there were reports of isolated foreigners chuckling at our fate the nations of the world rose in solidarity with us. We were all Americans for a while. We really had a chance to do some excellent things.

I remember driving to work on September 12th and, in the midst of the end of the world, seeing a lone woman in front of Planned Parenthood with a poster of a fetus. Though sympathetic to her cause, at the time I wanted nothing so badly as to murder her with the bumper of my car. “Really, lady? Right now??” I decided that, in such desperate times, it became all the more important to cling to the vestiges of our normal lives. Me, I defrosted my refrigerator for something like four days. Maybe if my new fridge didn’t self-defrost, I wouldn’t be here right now.

Ever since, my alarm clock has gone off with the sound of the day’s terrible, frightening news of the people who hate us and our plans to torture them till they like us again. This morning, already a Monday with a sky that looked like death on Halloween, I awoke to the sound of the president saying, “…must never forget that there are still people out there every day that want to kill us.” When did we forget? Will anyone ever get the chance to forget?

Yesterday, at about 2:30 in the afternoon, someone or something destroyed the water main that feeds my neighborhood. My psyche working the way it does, the instant I heard this news I went from feeling fresh, air conditioned, and comfortable to instantly feeling like the sweatiest, filthiest non-Hilton who ever lived. No condition changed except my knowledge of my inability to take a shower.

This minor, temporary inconvenience became more of a problem when the water still had not been returned to our house as of 8:00 this morning, my not-difficult-to-compound irritation compounded somewhat by the fact that the rest of the household’s concern in the midst of the crisis was that the cat (whose chief job is ruining my stuff) would run out of water to drink despite the fact that his bowl holds more water than either of the much-larger humans in the house have swallowed all week. The first time my beautiful, talented wife mentioned it, I almost said, “Oh my God, that’s right! The cat has water!” and ran upstairs to bathe with it. Though not comfortable when I left the house this morning, luckily I’d recently gotten a haircut and could show my face outside without washing my hair, as my chief job is going to my job.

I wouldn’t be mentioning any of this to anyone if not for the fact that it butted up against one of my most frequent pet peeves. My calls to the city’s Water Department were… let’s just go with “not fruitful,” but I wanted to find out more about what was going on. Water mains don’t hide behind the bus stop and jump out into oncoming traffic; I would imagine breaking one open, particularly in a way that disrupts a whole neighborhood’s water supply in a way that takes more than 18 hours to set right, takes some doing. I saw where the break was; there’s no construction or demolition going on at that corner. What was the deal? Did something explode? Did something hit something that hit something else, etc etc? Since it was happening to my neighbors and I, obviously I wanted to know what was happening.

“Well,” I thought this morning after I called the city and said “we haven’t had water for 18 hours” and the zombie on the phone said “the water main broke” and I said “I gathered as much, is there anything you could tell me about the repairs” and the zombie said “they are trying to fix it right now” and I said “I gathered as much, have the people working on it had any prior experience fixing water main problems like this that might inform an educated guess as to how long I’m going to smell like this” and he said “they will be working on it until it’s fixed” and I said “I gathered as–” and slammed the phone down again and again and again for emphasis, “it affects an entire neighborhood in the city. I’ll look in the newspaper.”

I looked at the stories in today’s newspaper, and this is what I saw:

Democrats push new Iraq withdrawal bill (AP story, happened in DC)
Vick to enter plea on conspiracy charges (AP story, happened to some goddamn football player in the South)
New British Prime Minister to visit U.S. (AP story, happened in England)
Sept. 11 rescue dog dies of cancer (AP story, happened in New York)
SKorean envoy heads to Afghanistan (AP story, happened in Afghanistan)
Indonesian quake sends people fleeing (AP story, happened in Indonesia)

Arguably, these are stories that an informed person should know (ignoring the fact that two of the six are about hurt doggies) which is why it’s a good thing the stories were available on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, cnn.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, USA Today, Yahoo.com, Google News, 10,000 blogs, and every site on the internet. Significantly less available on all of those sites: local news, of the type one might expect to find on the front page of a local newspaper.

The paper’s lead story, at least, was written by a local reporter: apparently, milk prices have gone up.

You understand the Urban League is having its conference in town right now. Every Democratic presidential candidate is going to speak there.

Pricy, pricy milk. Locally.

This normally doesn’t bother me so much, but only because I stopped reading the paper. Newspapers across the country fret about declining circulation, but it looks like the pep talk editors are cheering up the newsroom with is not sending the right message. “All right, people! News is happening out there in the big world! Let’s wait for that news to come off of the wire and retype it. Now, get out there and give our readers the same thing they can get everywhere else, often for free! Old people who’ll be dead soon still don’t have the internet; let’s tell them what it said yesterday! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting with the publisher about why fewer people keep paying for our paper. I think today’s the day we figure it out. I think it’s environmentalism. People want to conserve trees; that’s my theory.”

They can’t really believe people turn to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to find out what the president is up to, can they? You have the world at your fingertips; how often have you wondered about Tony Blair’s tour of the Middle East and gone out looking for the St. Louis Post? This is what people did when there were three television stations and you had to stay up till 11:00 to see the news. We have the wireless telegraph now.

CNN, on the other hand, is never going to mention the Central West End’s water supply unless al Qaeda poisons it. (Which, for all I @^#%$ing know, they did! It looked like Transformers had rampaged through Delmar and Belt. Is the Post covering up the Transformer invasion?) The Post-Dispatch could be all over that shizzity. There are three guys working for the Post who didn’t have water this morning. They could fill the paper entirely with stories that happened to the people buying the paper. Wrap your mind around that.

But they don’t have the staff to do those stories. Because they don’t have the money. Because people don’t buy the paper. Because they don’t have the staff to do those stories. So I’m dirty and cranky, and I have no idea why. I might as well walk my happy ass over to the guy working on the pipe and just ask him what’s going on. And hey, then I’ll post the story online! I smell a business model.

The Post does have some staff for my neighborhood: last night, while the water was leaking everywhere, an old man tried to cross the street against the light a block away from my house and got killed by a car. The Post web site posted three stories about it in the span of 24 hours. Which story affects more readers? Oh, well; at least it happened here, right?

Ten years ago today, I had been out of college for about six weeks. I had taken four years that were supposed to be about a)intensive study in my chosen field or b) intensive care after partying four nights a week and chosen c) “neither,” devoting the bulk of my time to student quasi-government and extracurriculars that exposed me to the maximum amount of behind-the-scenes administrative hypocrisy, frustration, and “executive board meetings.” If I’d had it to do over, I’d have spent a lot more time at the radio station. I did not have it to do over.

Having neither partied nor picked a career path in any meaningful way, I left academia cranky and adrift. Having grown more than accustomed to calling my own shots for a few years, the prospect of moving back into my parents house was anticipated with all the excitement of a trip to the gallows. (At my school, the end of senior year culminated in “senior week,” when studies were over but the seniors were allowed to remain in their dorm rooms and party before graduation. I did not participate in any senior week activities, but I told my parents that it went on for a month and spent that month sleeping on my girlfriend’s floor rather than face the inevitable.) But move back in I did, having failed to come up with any non-blood-plasma-based source of rent before May, and though my relationship with my parents had never dipped below “cordial” in all the time I’d been alive the air began filling with poison like a sub that had been underwater too long. They didn’t know what to do with me; I didn’t know what to do with me; the cracks were definitely going to start showing if I didn’t come up with some kind of outlet and/or source of cheap opiates.

It was under those conditions that ten years ago today (well, tomorrow) I started what would become this site. Fascinated with the then-new web, I wanted to put something out there but had nothing new to say about any subject that didn’t already have ten sites listed in Infoseek. I was an expert in bitching about myself, though, especially in July 1997. So I sat down at the keyboard and put the best available face on. In theory, I have grown as a person since then, but looking back on that first entry today (as you will now do) I can’t help noticing how many 1997 attitudes are exactly the same as the 2007 attitudes, as well as laughing out loud in glorious thanksgiving about all the things that have changed. I stopped updating the site for a good year or two in there, when it got so grim that even I didn’t want to know about it, but I’m glad I never tossed it. Its purpose may evolve a bit in the coming months– blogs are all too commonplace in 2007 (goddammit)– but it has been a useful chronicle of times that would have been otherwise forgotten. May the next ten years be as good as the last ten. Well, most of the last ten. All right, half of the last ten. Okay, the last four years. The last six months.

7/19/97

One of the best things about my life right now is that I somehow graduated from college. I don’t mean that I expected to fail; I’ve always been blessed with good grades, although whether I deserved them or not has always been a topic of debate. No, when I say it’s amazing that I graduated, I mean that I thought I’d be in college until I died. More precisely, I thought I would die from being in college. Between cafeteria food, dorm living, and the hordes of reckless imbeciles who only seemed to be getting dumber with each passing year, I was positive college would kill me. Somehow, someday, someone was going to pour beer on the floor and light it on fire, flames would spread through the shanty until they hit the cafeteria’s grease supply, and the resulting explosion would blast us to the Dakotas. By the time it was over, college had really wound down.

Graduation, however, never winds down. No matter how bad my life may get, I will never have to take another test again. There will never be another ten-page paper about Aztecs. There will never be another “finals week.” Never again will I have to care what Marx thought about Napoleon. I have earned the Magic Piece of Paper. If I ever decide to earn another, even more magical piece of paper, I can do it one class at a time for the next 45 years if I want to. I don’t expect I’ll want to.

So, what now? Well, now comes what I always thought would be the fun part. I get out of school, go to work wherever they’ll hire me, rent out some modest apartment somewhere, and start being Grown Up. Sure, dorm living was a kind of Grown Up simulator, but even in college there are far too many people intruding on your life. Leaving college and the dorms, I couldn’t wait to live someplace where I could cook my own dinner with whatever appliance I chose, without having to check a policy manual to see if it was okay. I couldn’t wait to leave classes in favor of work. If you hate your professor or your course of study, you more or less have to suffer through it. Either that or drop the class and justify yourself to your parents, your advisor, your friends, the janitor, etc. If you don’t like your job or your boss? Go the hell home and get a new one. No explanation necessary; you’re your own person. No parents, finally. No roommates, for better or worse. No responsibility to anyone but yourself and the people you choose to include. Your own space. Your own life. What a gift from God Almighty is the holy and blessed Graduation!

Or at least that’s what I thought for the first month of unemployment. See, it’s all fun and games until you run out of money. When I was still in the graduation process, I thought the world was at my feet. I sent out a couple resumes; I looked at apartments; I collected graduation checks from relatives. In a fit of stupidity, I told my parents they were controlling and overbearing, and that living with them drove me crazy, and that they could basically kiss off. I could afford to be brutally candid; after all, I was graduating.

Then, a funny thing happened: the resumes didn’t lead to anything. The apartment was no longer in my price range (considering that my price range was $0 a month). The graduation checks stopped coming. I had to move into the last place on earth I wanted to be, my parents’ new house in the middle of nowhere, with people who didn’t particularly want me to be there.

When my boyhood chums and I were in grade school, and someone tried to give us cooties or something, we would periodically defend ourselves from the attack by announcing that it was “Opposite Day,” thereby smiting our enemies with their own cooties. Well, every day since graduation has been Opposite Day. I have a degree, but I feel dumber than ever; I’m at “home”, but I have no idea where anything is; I have more life experience than I’ve ever had, but getting a job keeps getting harder and harder. And I probably have cooties.

My parents, who are both clinically neurotic, have somehow gotten the impression that my job hunt is a team effort and buzz around me like flies. Maybe it just seems that way after all those years of living relatively alone. Still, you know that sound a radio makes when the station is just out of range? That’s what my brain sounds like all the time when I’m at home.

My sister, who has gone absolutely schizo since going off to college, spends most of her time pouting because she had to go to summer school instead of following Phish. Last week, workers started cutting down trees across the street to build a house. This made my sister so mad that she threatened to “go get an axe and cut them down and see how they like it.” Needless to say, I sleep with my door locked and I certainly do not walk on the grass.

The rest of the world hasn’t made things any easier on me. During graduation season, Tom Brokaw and the other nightly news guys fell all over themselves to make me feel like an idiot. For years now, the nightly news would do a story every May about how graduates could expect a crappy economy and insurmountable employment odds. So, what was the story when I graduated and couldn’t find work? “This just in: any monkey can fall out of a tree and get a job this year, especially if the monkey has a degree. Unemployed people are morons. That’s Nightly News for this evening.”

In my experience, “there’s a lot less unemployment than there used to be” translates into “there are a lot more Taco Bells than there used to be.” There are hundreds of job opportunities, as long as you’re willing to make $6000 a year. I am not. Yet.

In fact, I have snagged a couple jobs in the past few months. I was in line for a reporting job at the Suburban Journal; all I had to do was spend the next year living in Hillbillytown, going to Hillbillytown Council meetings and turning them into fifteen stories a week (all of which would be printed, I was told, no matter how bad they were). Before that, I was hired as a retail ninja; I was told we’d go into Wal-Marts under cover of darkness with counting machines, doing inventory on the entire store, only to vanish without a trace before the store opened. It certainly sounded sexy, but it just didn’t scream “advancement opportunity.” Actually, it screamed “den of vampires.”

I’m not a careerist or anything; I’m not working my way up to the big corner office with the huge picturesque view. For rent and grocery money, I would do all my work sitting on a little wooden box. With nails sticking out of it. Under train tracks. That drip acid on me. For the rest of my life, no questions asked. All I want is enough money for a small apartment, food, an occasional night out, and an almost constant stream of unnecessary trinkets.

I should probably mention that my mom tries to prevent me from reading the “Help Wanted” ads. Given my luck so far, she has come to the conclusion that I’m not actually sending out resumes. After all, how could I be sending out resumes all this time and still not have a job? Why, the job market’s the best it’s been in years. Tom Brokaw says so! So obviously, according to my mom’s thinking, I must just be pretending to send out resumes so that I can continue having the fun of telling people I live with my parents. As a result, she takes the ads immediately and reads them aloud to me in an attempt to make my head explode. If she is unfamiliar with a word in an ad, she will skip the word. Words she often skips include “doctorate” and “custodial.” You can see how helpful this is.

And Dad? Well… he really needs to keep in mind that, someday, it will be my job to pick his nursing home. I’ll leave it at that for now.

Believe it or not, I actually feel pretty positive about things right now. Despite the above complications, I have a pretty decent life. I’m not sick; I have great friends and a great girlfriend; and legally, my parents have to love me even when I tell them to kiss off. I’m optimistic about jobs (still). Most importantly, I can look forward to the day when all my friends go back to school… and I don’t. Long live graduation.

From a product page on Amazon.com:

Did Paul Shaffer do the music for Pirates?

Does Chevy Chase play the undead monkey?

I’ll be workin’ on this one like a Rubik’s Cube for the rest of the week.

“181 things you need to know now”

NOT PICTURED ON THE COVER: a thing that happened in the news this week

Problem: things keep happening, and you don’t have time to keep up with them all. More to the point, things that seem like a big deal on Tuesday turn out not to be worth a good goddamn by Thursday, meaning reading about said things would have been a monumental waste of your time.

Solution: a magazine could be printed once a week that just f***ing told you the news that happened that turned out to be important or meaningful.

Exact opposite of solution: a magazine could be printed once a week that assumed you were reading the “news” five times every single day. It would provide detailed analysis of the stories you didn’t read, along with content that was 65% health news because only aging Boomers buy magazines. On one hand, it would tell you nothing, but on the other hand it would cost you money and make you want to punch a wall.

Grrrrrr.

My current position on electoral politics is pretty similar. “Who do you like in ‘08?” “Well…! There are currently 24 people running between the two parties. By the time I can cast a vote in the Missouri primary, roughly 4 will remain, and my opinion about the other 20 will have been rendered completely moot by some old women in New Hampshire 6 months prior. So here’s what I’m going to do: 1) not care at all 2) rename every debate night ‘Playstation Monday,’ because I am utterly powerless and impotent.’” I admit that I am secretly a bit concerned about the overall outcome, of course, because (not to be outdone by Alec Baldwin’s nakedly ridiculous threat to move to Canada) I did publicly declare that a McCain vs. Clinton race would prompt me to kill myself. And God help me, America, I want to live.

Between Paris Hilton, Larry King, and the Apple iPhone (”$600 really will fill that hole inside you this time”) this has been– how shall I put this?– not the most patriotic week of my life. If you were stuck in the elevator inside my head, the muzak would not be Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”

-You cannot make it through ten minutes of commercial television, radio, or (especially) movie trailers without hearing the record scratch. I just heard my third one today. The pleasant background music is playing, and then someone says or does something shocking and– “wha?! she’s a dude?!”– the music is jarringly interrupted by the scratch of the needle being jerked away from the record.

So, here’s my question: what is a “rec-ord”?

Ah, the big plastic platters? Used to play music… oh, with the needle? Those things my parents used to have when I was small? And I’m very old now, and haven’t seen one in person in easily twenty years? I’ve had a CD player since 1989?

I see.

That’s… yeah. Are we planning on retiring that one any time soon? No? Just gonna get louder and more annoying until everyone who remembers where the sound originated is dead? Gotcha.

-Also, I would like to renew my call to retire the “Save” icon. 99% of the time on a PC, “Save” is a cartoon picture of a floppy disc. My last floppy disc sighting was about 12 years ago. Kids who’ve never seen one are creeping up on driving age. Let’s brainstorm something else. Life preserver. Crucifix. I don’t care.

-Another renewed call: it’s 2007. Just tell me your domain name. Telling me that I get to your web site by “visiting double-you-double-you-double-you-dot” anything has officially reached the stage where you’re insulting my intelligence. I’m hip to the need for the Ws; as it turns out, this is not my first night on AOL. Again, the web was popularized in roughly 1995. Let’s go ahead and lump that time-wasting chestnut in under whatever exemption the “http://” and “1″ from long distance calls got.

-Finally, if you find yourself watching the NBC Nightly News, here’s a good way to blot out the day-to-day horrors of the world: every time Brian Williams begins a segment with “There’s a growing controversy in this country…” take a shot. You might want to consult your doctor first. I’m starting to wonder if it’s actually the name of a featured segment, he says it so often.

Mythbusting Quiz

1. If I gave you a text file full of code for your web page, and that file was named “Code to paste.txt,” what would you do with it?
   a. paste it onto the page
   b. see its name and decide to turn it into a Javascript file and put it somewhere completely different

2. In the aforementioned text file, there is a line of code that literally says “CHANGE
_ THIS _ LINE _ TO _ WHATEVER _ THE _ FOLDER _ NAME _ IS” in capital letters. What would you do with that line?
   a. change it to whatever the folder name is
   b. put the code online having left that line exactly as written

3. Towards the bottom of the code in that same text file, there is a line that literally says “DO NOT ALTER ANYTHING BELOW THIS LINE” in capital letters. Upon seeing that, would you
   a. leave the remaining code alone?
   b. delete everything that came after that line?

4. After doing all of the above incorrectly, you are troubled to find that the site does not work properly for some reason. Do you take three seconds to read over your own handiwork, or do you pepper a busy, hard-working, handsome young man with repeated e-mails  saying, “Your code still doesn’t work,” forcing him to repeatedly go to the web site, deduce where you’ve hidden the code like a leprechaun with a pot o’ gold, download the work by hand, and eventually have a life-threatening stroke?

This quiz is meant to illustrate a common misconception about web designers and IT nerds. Conventional wisdom holds that they are clever, obsessively technical, inventive, and operating on an IQ level normal people cannot even understand. In fact, they are borderline goddamn illiterate and incapable of cognitive activity. Most computer code actually began as a series of increasingly horrible misspellings on English essays.

Did you ever get so mad that you could see your pulse from inside your eyes?

This afternoon, I was scheduled to be on a conference call. The fellow who set it up called me hours before it was set to begin and said, “The guy who always has your back on conference calls and I aren’t gonna make it; could you run that call?” This was no surprise after being stood up earlier, so I said, “Yeah, sure.”

Since he’d run the last call, the fellow sent over his notes from that call to help me out.

The notes were six lines long, and the fourth line was:

a lot of discussion occurred that I missed.

I opened this lifeline to professionalism after the call had already started and it became clear that none of us were entirely sure what the call was about. After ten minutes of waiting, I called the site’s designer and reminded him we had a call, which took him by surprise. When he got on the call, it was quickly determined that the conference call which the other guy had set up, ditched on, and put me in charge of was for a site that had completely launched and was totally finished two weeks ago. None of us had any reason to be there.

I can’t decide whether this makes me an idiot, makes them idiots, or proves beyond a doubt that this new role they’re moving me into is absolutely necessary.

About a month ago, my bosses approached me about taking a new job. They had a task that needed doing– a kind of project coordination, air traffic controller thing– and they thought I would be just the perfect fellow to watch the 500 green blips on the screen and make sure they didn’t hit each other.

Also, the first guy they offered it to quit after they offered it to him. I decided I’m not reading anything into that.

This new job would not replace my old job, but rather be sort of stacked on top of it for a while. For the time being, I would do my old job 50% of the time and my new job the other 50%. Previously, getting my old job done took 100% of my time, so I looked forward to what kind of magic spell would make this feat possible. From what I can tell, the spell is something along the lines of “Abracadabra, your lunch hour has disappeared!”

Nonetheless, I accepted the challenge. It seemed like the smart thing to do, given my long-term goal of taking over the world by doing things for strangers that don’t seem important at all. They put me in touch with a guy who’s done it all a million times who’s in all the same meetings as I am anyway, and he has been showing me the ropes.

At this moment, I’m on a conference call with England and Ireland about a new Irish site for our company. I’ve never worked on an international site here, so I have no idea what the process is, and the guy who’s done it a million times agreed that this would be the perfect time for such a call knowing full well that he was triple-booked and had no intention of showing up. He saw that the boat’s fuel tanks were low and said, ”Now’s the time to head into open water! I’m just going to go check on the lifeboat.” So I am leading the call with literally no idea what I’m talking about.

The good news is I accepted these responsibilities without a raise, so as I try to fake competence I’m not distracted with conflicting thoughts of how I’m going to spend all that money.

hey!

I just had a bunch of friends come into town, several weeks in a row, and I have a lot of comments about that!

Okay, sassypants! Say those comments immdiately!

Umm… no.  Sorry! Later.

Plazes.com in a sentence:

“I wish it was easier for strangers to find and kill me.”

What are you laughing at, twitter.com?

Many, many years ago, when the internet was as a newborn babe and Saturday Night Live was starting to look like it was in real jeopardy of being canceled due to a couple years of sheer awfulness, I read on a Janeane Garofalo proto-fansite a reference to a vicious behind-the-scenes takedown of the show that had been printed in New York Magazine. (You see what I mean about the internet being new? The site I was reading had a bibliography that sourced its information.) Though I hadn’t watched the show in years, I sort of thought of it as a childhood friend, and I hated to hear that my old pal had been spotted sleeping under newspapers in an alley with track marks on his arms so I endeavored to read this article.

My efforts were doomed. We hadn’t gotten to the technological stage yet where old issues were archived online, and even the most rabid fansite wasn’t bug-nutty enough to transcribe the whole thing. I thought, “Boy, I’d love to get my hands on that at a library or something… maybe I can order a back issue from somewhere if it’s not more than $5,” and then promptly went and did my history homework.

That should say “did my history homework and promptly forgot about the whole thing,” but I didn’t. Though I never tracked down the physical magazine, I have thought of the article on and off– and continued to search for it online– for nearly twelve years. I didn’t know the author, but I remembered that it was in New York Magazine and it was called “Comedy Isn’t Pretty.” Every so often, I would be minding my business when suddenly the ball marked “New York Magazine article” would tumble out of the bingo ball cage that is my mind and I’d be frantically Googling for ten minutes or so. I never found it.

A few weeks ago, NBC did a whitewashed quasi-documentary about this godawful period in the show’s history for sweeps. In this doc, those years were amazingly transformed into a golden comedy renaissance that was misunderstood by the public and those stodgy critics. This is what happens when a show’s history is recounted by the network that kept it on the air. Anyway, in that show, those interviewed mentioned my article and their desire at the time to literally viciously beat the man who wrote it, as he had gained their trust backstage and betrayed them, like Judas with taste.
“Hey,” I thought, “there’s that bingo ball again.” Again I turned to Google.
And New York Magazine had seen the show too. And they too had been disappointed in the whitewash.

So they put up a PDF of the mother-loving article.

After eleven or twelve years, it’s sitting on my desktop. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost terrified to read it.

I recognize that this is not an interesting story. I just 1) found it illustrative of something about myself that I cannot otherwise articulate and 2) wanted to share my nerd joy. The white whale is cut up into steaks in my freezer!

Marriage is about compromise, and compromise is about occasionally sitting back and accepting things that you would otherwise never allow. Living single, my wife wouldn’t have an AT-AT in the living room, and it is highly unlikely that the bookcase by her front door would have a year’s worth of comic books piled high on one of the shelves. She has never complained about any of this, mentioned any of this, or maybe even thought about it, which is why I say (almost) nothing when what seems like 9 months out of each year are devoted to American Idol in my living room. When I look at the glorious 60″ HDTV I worked so hard to get being used to trasmit Ryan Seacrest’s gay jokes about Simon Cowell, I do not cry out in anguish, no matter how much my heart yearns for me to do so. It makes her happy, and that makes me happy. Simple as that.

In principle, I’m glad American Idol is out there. It’s a harmless show. Nobody’s out there trying to stab anyone in the back. You don’t win by crawling over the bodies of your former friends. Democracy is involved, and viewers vote for singers they like rather than against the ones they hate, which is a crucial distinction. Theoretically, talent is rewarded. If it’s cheesy and homogenized, well, I’m sorry there’s an hour of television that doesn’t involve dick jokes or cheerleaders getting their skulls sliced off, but my mom needs something to watch too. There’s room for all of us on the dial.

In practice, American Idol to me is like a Jim-specific dog whistle being blown by the dying screams of a rabbit. I can’t stand to be in its presence. I can’t really explain why. Something about amateurs who think they’re Maria Callas and then get shot down with arrogance that matches their own makes me uncomfortable in two distinct and powerful ways.

Is it just that these kids have been surrounded by people their whole lives who tell them they’re the best them they can be, and no one’s ever said, “Honey, I love you, but you’re no Mariah Carey; you sound like a malfunctioning foghorn”?

Or even, “Honey, stop looking up to Mariah Carey; Mariah Carey’s life is not desirable, and she’s not actually a good singer”?

Never mind “Honey, how many albums by 300-pound, 5′1″ pug-nosed women do you have?”

You see these people trying to get to Hollywood and think, “Where are the people who are supposed to be looking out for you? Someone saw you leave the house dressed like a melted crayon box, and I’ll bet that person knows you can’t sing.” You occasionally find yourself actually in the position of thinking, “Wow, you obviously feel very good about yourself, miss… why is that?”

And of course, if you’ve ever heard about how much weeding out the producers do before contestants get to stand in front of the judges, it quickly becomes nakedly apparent that they do look for a certain number of Christians for the lion pit. “Oh, this guy is atrocious. Simon Cowell is going to ruin this guy so bad he’ll have to take all the mirrors out of his house. Right this way, sir, quickly! To the cameras!” That’s pretty rough, but as a country we eat it up. I know a guy who only watches that stage of the competition; once only the talented people are left, he stops watching. What’s that about?

But who cares about all that? What’s a little weekly discomfort for the woman carrying my child? She’s certainly spending more time uncomfortable on my behalf than I am on hers. I’ll watch a DVD on my laptop. (Trying to read, or do anything that doesn’t actively involve precious, precious headphones while Idol is on, is quite impossible for me. It’s paralyzing.)

Obviously, I do pick up some Idol by osmosis anyway from time to time, and this week I caught a little of the finale. They have elevated this event to the level of a ’70s awards show, complete with the made-for-TV celebrities that have nothing to do with anything but have gotten their hands on this hot ticket, and between songs the show would often cut to shots of, say, Jeff Foxworthy or David Hasselhoff cheering for the little beatbox dimwit’s utterly tuneless rendition of the Maroon Five song or whatever.

This is the part that is on my mind days later.

At one point, they pan the audience for celebs, and right there on the aisle, applauding enthusiastically for the vocal performance, is actress Marlee Matlin. Who you might know as The Only Deaf Person I Ever See In Anything, The Most Famously Deaf Person In America.

Huh?

Puzzle that out for me. If I had no sense of taste, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time at the buffet.

I hope she broke up with whatever date made that pick for the evening’s festivities.

I propose that the next version of Netflix require the user to write a summary of what s/he was doing/thinking the night s/he added each disc to his/her list. Just anything. “Drinking, suddenly remembered watching the Three Stooges on Saturday nights.” “Saw Snakes on a Plane; reminded me of Delta Force; seemed like campy fun at 2:00 in the morning.”

Have you ever looked at your list of prospective movie rentals and suddenly realized that you didn’t want any of them to show up at your house at all?

Wow. Ninja Turtles 3? Am I the only person who knows this password?

A week or so ago, right before Mother’s Day, the missus and I took my mom and dad out to dinner at a local Mexican chain. Getting my folks to go out has gotten increasingly difficult over the years, but the joint was having a fundraiser for the neighborhood Catholic school, and despite their age my folks just cannot stop putting kids through Catholic school.

Though it was my mom’s birthday, my parents didn’t know they were being treated to their fajitas until I snatched the bill and quietly dispatched it with my credit card. This was one of those rare moments when I felt like a real grown man, because as I was recently discussing with some friends of mine, it seems like people my age never grab the check for the whole table. When I was a kid, we’d go out with my parents’ friends, the check would arrive, and inevitably an asinine verbal slap-fight would break out as one man took it upon himself to get everyone’s dinner.

“I’ve got this one!”
“No, no! You can’t! I won’t stand for it! Let me get it!”
“No, no! I want to pay! You get the next one!”
“C’mon, now! Don’t do that! I wanted to spend $150 tonight, a lot! Give it to me! Oh, I’m very serious!”
“Oh, we’re arguing! Oh, each of us feels very strongly, and it’s fun! I will feed your wife and children this day! It means everything to me!”

And as a kid, I would sit there and look at these crazy people pretending like they wanted to buy the entire table’s lobster knowing that the father-shaped man to my left could only be an impostor; earlier in the day I had asked for $.75 for a G.I. Joe comic and found myself spontaneously on trial. But apparently, that was What Grownups Did. I think about it every so often as an adult, because every time a bill arrives at the table when my peers and I are out today the first person to pick it up goes, “Let’s see, Bill had the salmon, right? And John had three beers, if I recall… Jim, I believe you had two of the seven potato skins, right? Two and a half, you split one with Tom?”

Don’t get me wrong; you don’t see me whipping out the Visa most nights any quicker than anyone else. With my folks, though, it seemed like the right thing to do. It was Mom’s birthday, and they have certainly footed their share of my bill up to this point, G.I. Joes notwithstanding.

Of course, as I was also recently discussing with those same friends, when you offer to buy your dad dinner, he basically takes it as some sort of direct challenge to his manhood. Your thoughtful gesture essentially means, “You, old man, are no longer expected to be able to take care of your family. It was probably nice to be the provider once, but the nurse will wheel you back to your room while I handle this.” Luckily, I kept the pride-wound to a minimum by having my credit card handy and elevating the payment to a kind of magic trick; “Hey Dad, what’s that, ohhh I’m paying it’s too late the bill is gone already look at that.”

I don’t have time, you see, for the slap-fight bullshit. I’m not saying “I’ll buy” in the hope that someone will talk me out of it. I’ll never say “oh no, please, let me pay this time” knowing that the other guy isn’t going to let me. You will always have a pretty good idea what I want; it will be easily identified as the thing that I said I wanted.

As I discovered last weekend, this principle continues to be lost on many people. I did not, it turns out, learn it at home.

After our Mexican dinner, on the way to their car, I said to my mom, “Hey there, matriarch, we got ourselves a Mother’s Day coming up on Sunday. What sounds good? What do you want to do for your big day?”

My mom said to me– my mom clearly, explicitly, and literally said to me and at least two witnesses– quote: “Oh, pfffft! Mothers Day. Big deal. It’s just another Sunday. You can call your sister and see if you two can work something up, but now that she has a baby she considers Mother’s Day ‘her day’ and she already told me she has plans that day. So whatever, Mother’s Day. Pfft, sheesh.”

“All right,” I said, “we’ll get together later in the week then. Lunch or something.”

On Mother’s Day, I called Mom to wish her well, talked to her for half an hour, reiterated the lunch plan, and hung up pretty satisfied with how the whole thing had gone. My sister hadn’t yet called her when we talked, so I even got to check the “Good Kid” box and pat myself on the back. Pfft, Mother’s Day, big deal. My mom is so cool.

So having said all that, I imagine it is needless to say that neither of my parents were speaking to me last week because I didn’t go over with a cake and a brass band on Mother’s Day.

You knew this was coming five paragraphs ago, right? You are more savvy in the ways of the world than I, dear reader. You have learned that “I insist you absolutely go to no trouble for me” actually means “call the florist, for bullshit head games are a delightful merriment.”

It took my dad three days to calm down enough to yell at me. Which was awesome, because for those three days I didn’t know anything was wrong. (Count that as your lesson for the day: in order for the silent treatment to be effective, it has to be announced.) Our call was brief but followed the standard 1990s young-Jim, old-Jim script, with me listing the logical bullet points in my favor and him repeating his position as if I were not actually on the phone.

“Dad, I talked to Mom for half an hour Sunday, and she never mentioned any–”
“No card? No visit?”
“Dad, we’re going out to lunch next–”
“No card; no visit.”
“You were standing right there when she told me–”
“No card! No–”
[hangs up; does deep breathing exercise; takes aspirin; opens web browser, types “untraceablehandguns.com”]

This brand of old-age dadcrazy weighs heavily on me as I prepare to become a dad myself. Because I must say, after this? If he thinks Mother’s Day was a letdown, Father’s Day is gonna put him in the ground.

As for Mom, I cannot imagine wanting something and then declaring the opposite in the hopes that everyone will see my secret, tender heart and do it anyway. Is this why people keep throwing me all those f***ing surprise parties? I’m not testing how well you know me. Your gift to me is not unlocking my fiendishly devised word puzzle. I’ll know you love me when you say “Jim, I love you” and/or buy me an Xbox. Those games, I’m interested in playing.

• frustration
• aggravation
• rage
• violence
• flight

This morning, I walked into my office the same way I always do, the same way I walked out last night, only to find that the door I walk through every day on the second floor has been walled off.

Just walled off. Last night it was a door. Today it’s a wall. Why? No reason. Just makin’ stuff a little harder.

As a metaphor for the week, it was a little on-the-nose.

It is tempting (if ghoulish) to joke that the Lord must have lifted His veil of protection and smote the Reverend Jerry Falwell today for his 4,000th stupid remark. News like this stirs up some complicated feelings. There are thoughtful people in this world with whom we disagree; there are people who are genuinely good, and who genuinely want the world to be a better place for everyone, but who approach the world’s problems from a direction which the rest of us find cockeyed for whatever reason; and then there are guys like Jerry Falwell.

That doesn’t mean we get a free pass on human decency. A man is dead.

There is a dark, sharp, sticky corner to the soul that not everyone has taped off, a corner that tries to turn some deaths into a cause for celebration. Every once in a while, a bullet will find its way to your Uday Husseins or your al-Zarqawis and a guy in fatigues will go up to a podium and proclaim, “We got ‘im!” and a crowd will respond, “Hooraaaay! Someone died! He probably had some kids!”

I’m not sad that some would-be Batman villain has been prevented from hurting any more innocent people, but I can’t really bring myself to break out the party hats either, catchy though “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead” may be. I’m not upset that the world had to part with Uday Hussein, but I’d much rather he had to live with the consequences of his actions and sit in the mess he made. Every day he’s alive is another chance to work on him, to open his mind, to make him think about his actions and atone for them, or at the very least to make him live in a great world where his way lost.

And that’s the thing. We have forever lost the opportunity to change Jerry Falwell’s mind. He will never stand in front of his congregation and say, “I still think God is great, my brothers and sisters, but I got a lot of the other stuff wrong.” He filled the heads of his flock with a lot of crazy douchebag rambling, and he went to his grave believing every word of it and never set it right. I mourn for that, no matter how tempting it is not to.

Here’s to your speedy repose, Rev. Wherever you’ve gone, I hope it’s more like I imagine it than like you imagined it.

This morning, I typed “Woohoo!” in an e-mail and Outlook’s spellcheck corrected it to “boohoo.”

Good on ya, chef Carey! Way to be famous!

About once a week for the past few weeks, I’ve been having these Vietnam acid flashbacks where a neuron has suddenly come out of retirement. I don’t know if I’m getting more sleep or way too little, but I will be driving to work or washing my hair and suddenly relive something I haven’t given a moment’s thought to in twenty years. I would love it if these were my opportunities to redo my first kiss or the day I got my driver’s license, but typically they are vivid Quantum Leaps back to that Thursday my friend Rob and I went to Forest Park and played racquetball in 1992. It’s possible that I’m dying, and my life is just flashing before my eyes very, very slowly.

Today, for some reason, I was thinking about my high school’s literary magazine, Sisyphus. I never submitted any stories to Sisyphus (in fact, I don’t know if anyone has ever read my fiction except for my father, who once fished a story of mine out of the garbage grave which it so richly deserved, but that’s a story for another time) but I did submit at least one poem a year.

My poetry style, best summed up as “what do you mean there’s already a Dr. Suess?” was generally a hit with the Sisyphus editorial board. Everything I ever submitted got printed, with the exception of one poem. The poem was called “Sisyphus,” and its central theme was that the editors of Sisyphus were posers with their heads shoved up their own asses so they could gaze at their navels from the inside.

Again: they had published the first drafts of everything I ever sent in. A couple of them were avowed fans. A couple of them were personal friends. Why would I do that? What motivates me to behave in this way? This morning, I suddenly found myself remembering that day at the Sisyphus meeting when I came to see what they thought of “Sisyphus” and my friend Adam looked at me as if to say, “Keep your voice down; if the others find out that was you, they’re going to jump you with socks full of quarters. Or at least write tortured free verse about their wish to do so.”

I think I was chafing at being on the same page as some anguished, black-eyeliner pretentious high school nonsense in the previous issue. I remember “Sisyphus” did explicitly insult the other writer by name. What can I tell you? I needed a rhyme for “grave,” and his name was Dave.

That must have been it. That sounds like the kind of thing that would have spurred my pen into action in high school.

“Here’s my new poem. I hope it’s good.”

“This is great, Jim! Let’s print it!”

“Here’s a rejected Pearl Jam lyric about when my junior prom date ruined my life forever.”

“This is great, Dave! Let’s print it!”

The universe would have its revenge on me a few years later when some friends started up a similar lit mag at college and asked me to be the chief literary editor. Our team of editors would read each submission and rate it; it was my job to wrangle these frustrated souls and use their ratings to make the final selections. The pieces were graded on a scale of 1 to 4, but that one soul-patched, black-turtlenecked asshole always insisted on giving each story a 2.5 or a 3.75. It was like he was offended that the Man would try to restrict him to four numbers, when Art has so many more shades. It’s a good thing I didn’t ask for thumbs-up or thumbs-down; he would have graded everything Tall, Purple, or Maximum Strength.

My God, it’s all coming back to me now. He used to supplement his ratings with explanatory comments (trivia: no comments were asked for, or indeed desired) like “the metaphors are too loose,” in effect turning his ratings of bad poetry into worse poetry. He was the same guy who would anonymously submit stories where two childhood friends would go on an idyllic fishing trip to share beers and jokes, and then the boat would suddenly turn over, and when they emerged from the water one of them was inexplicably covered with deadly snakes. It was, you see, Symbolic Irony, at least according to the flashing neon sign he stapled to every page. Looking back, it’s pretty clear God sent him to torment me for what I did to the Sisyphus board.

One year, a girl submitted a poem on a piece of paper that had lyrics to a Nine Inch Nails song written on the other side. We graded, approved, and printed the Nine Inch Nails song and credited her as the author. Nobody caught the error until she saw it in the published magazine. I ran a pretty tight ship.

We rejected a lot of submissions, but it felt like some kind of sin to throw any of them away. Many of them were original, handwritten works. I don’t know what happened to the accepted submissions, but I kept the rejects in a box under my bed for almost a decade. They may still be in my basement. It only seemed fair.

Nine years ago (!!!) my friends and I went to see the X-Files movie on opening night. As is the case a good 75% of the time, I can remember where I saw the movie, who I was with, and what my life was like that night, but I have no memory of what happened in the X-Files movie or what it was about.

With that in mind, when I saw the flick pop up on the cable menu last week I decided to Tivo it despite the fact that it was obviously not one of my favorites. It’s on right in front of me as I type these words, and as I watch it I have only two questions: What happens in the X-Files movie? What is it about?

Cavemen oil IEDs! Mulder cornfield angry bees! Rock and roll the cola wars, I can’t take it anymore!

Have the contents of any Taco Bell hot sauce packet ever found their way onto food? The drive-thru transaction invariably grinds to a halt over the issue of sauces– “What kind of sauce do you want? Do you want hot sauce? Do you want mild sauce? You don’t want any sauce? Are you sure?”– and I cannot remember a single time in the 14 years since I was introduced to the place when anyone in my presence has ever torn open the sauce packet and squeezed it onto a taco. I can’t even imagine it being important to anyone. “What… what is this? I can’t eat this. Where’s the mild sauce?”

Well, we are nearing the halfway point of my wife’s pregnancy now, and I think I’m just about ready.
Oh, I know. “You can’t ever be ready.” That’s what They say. Let’s be honest, though: how often are They right about anything? Really? Everyone tells you that parenthood is a constant state of fretting, hypochondria, projecting an air of calm reassurance, and sleeplessness. If this is true, I have been training for parenthood for most of my adult life.

There is one area, though, in which I am completely deficient: if I am going to be a good role model and shape young minds, I am going to need to learn and practice some profanity substitutes in a big hurry. And the usual ones aren’t going to cut it, either. “Shoot” and “darn” are not going to get it done. When someone cuts me off on the highway and I almost crash, I will never get to a place where I reflexively say “shoot.” I don’t want to; I’m not an old lady.

Though she would deny it, my mom’s approach to this problem was always to let the bad word slip out and then say, “That’s a bad word; don’t ever say that.” This was obviously tremendously helpful. Dad had a full regiment of fake swears, but they’re his and I don’t want to sound like him. He’s a big fan of “oh, nuts.” I’m not from the forties, so that’s not in the cards.

As I see it, I have two solid options.

1) Super-villain: “Curses! Blast you, you dratted fools! You nearly ran me off the benighted road!”

2) Full-on Yosemite Sam: “Razzle frazzin’ razzafrazz, dagnabbit!”

I’m leaning towards 1). The child’s vocabulary will turn out much better that way.

Any suggestions from existing parents who have already had to become more upstanding citizens would be greatly appreciated. I like “drat!” a lot; “rats!” is growing on me; I am a big fan of “clown” and its sister word, “bozo.” Beyond that, I have nothin’.

Sometimes, when you are having a very bad weekend or are in grim spirits, it can do you immeasurable good to know that the things you find odd or crazymaking are experienced by other people. For a moment or two, you have the solace of knowing that We Are All In This Together.

With that in mind, I cannot put into words the joy I felt this evening when I saw that someone else has captured the constant Borders phenomenon that is the manga hobo.

Even though I myself am in the aisle to buy a comic book, nothing turns me into an old man faster: “Holy @%$#, buy it or get out! How are you here at 2:30 in the afternoon? Get a job!”

It’s just… there’s a cafe with forty-five goddamn chairs ten feet away.