Not too long ago, Holly and I were talking about some demerit our house had just earned. Maybe Libby was pathetically pressing her face to the glass of the back door, as she does every other day or so, longing to play in the backyard that isn’t back there. Maybe it was dinner time, and all of the neighborhood restaurants were still refusing to deliver to our block. Maybe we were discussing when we were going to pick up our Fedex packages from my parents’ house, since the last two times we’d had things sent to our own house someone had just blatantly walked up in broad daylight and strolled off down the street with them under his arm. Whatever it was, it was a conversation we had had enough times that I just wasn’t in the mood, and instead of shrugging it off I piped up with, “Oh, you know what? Let’s just pack it up and hit the rails.”

Much to my surprise, Holly was listening to me. Moreover, it seems clear that we were waiting for Jim to say these words for some time; the conversation was exactly two weeks ago, and our house is on the market as we speak. Sign out front and everything. Most people need more time than this to burn a house down.

Of course, now there has to be a new house. The hunt is in full swing, and both Holly and I are having a good time and trying to be open-minded. Lots of former dealbreakers are now negotiable. Really nothing is off the table. Everybody’s being flexible.

In theory. I’m having kind of a problem with one aspect of this commitment to open-mindedness.

Here’s the thing: one of my favorite things about our existing house is that it’s centrally located, near everything I like to do and everyone I like to see. That’s great and everything, but lately I’ve been thinking: what difference does that make if I never see anyone and never go anywhere? Who cares if I live here, or in the burbs, or in Yemen? If they have wifi, the way I “hang out” with people 85% of the time will be unchanged.

I am not happy about that, but it is what it is.

So Holly’s suggested houses that, last time, I would have rejected out of hand with nothing more than a glance at the map, but I’m trying not to do that this time because I am an awesome, reasonable grown-up of a man. I have house-hunted in neighborhoods with man-made lakes, neighborhoods with directions like “make a left at the strip mall, and then a right at the other strip mall. If you hit the third strip mall, you’ve gone too far.” The houses themselves, I could live in, but I look at these neighborhoods and cannot hold my mind open with both hands. I just hate the burbs so f***ing much. I am actively trying not to, but it’s uncontrollable. I have lived within walking distance of a grocery store and two movie theaters, and now I am ruined forever. I’m in the breakfast nook on one of these house tours, and I keep picturing my neighbors mowing their lawns in Dockers, and I feel like the whole thing ends with my daughter voting libertarian and making her first non-white friend in college, and I just want to throw myself out the damn bay window and run until I get to a street where someone tries to panhandle me.

But then I also have a voice in my head saying that this resistance is all a stupid, petulant waste of time and money. That to even think something like “am I selling out?” makes you the emotional equivalent of a fifteen year old. Just shut up and move somewhere where you get an office and can hear the TV over the traffic.

It’s a big decision, and it’s really bothering me. I would dearly love to get some perspective, and if you could offer it, that would be outstanding.

If you can imagine this feeling, you have a sense of how I feel every second for the week before Election Day. And once the day actually arrives… up on the housetop, click click click….

This campaign, and the eight years that preceded it (well, seven) have worked me over like a loan shark in a back alley. The cynics in the Beltway have succeeded in at least one of their goals: I now earnestly believe on a primal level that, if I step into a voting booth and color in the wrong circle, we are all going to die. At the same time. On a date you could mark on a calendar you already have. I am completely electorally paralyzed; I cannot trust myself with this kind of responsibility! Even when I am confident I’m making the right choice, I think, “Of course, everyone I know who’s making the opposite choice is equally confident that my guy is the Angel of Death, and they’re not kidding. What if they’re right? What if I’m right, and my guy loses? What if we actually have entirely bad choices? What if I picked the right guy, but the other side is a bunch of sore losers and keeps him from getting anything done, including stopping that shipping crate full of ricin that breezes through a port in Jersey next spring? I need to go have a lie down.”

My friends, I have many a lie down.

For a long time– and the campaign has gone on a very long time, longer than I have been a father or even a father-to-be– I believed that I would be the winner of this election no matter what happened. No matter what, the old guys and all the geniuses they brought in the door behind them were going back to Texas to hide their Yale diplomas and pretend like they were ranchers who didn’t summer in Kennebunkport for my entire childhood. (Did you really think I would forget a word like “Kennebunkport”? How did you get the rest of the country to forget it?) Among the crop of new guys, there were relatively few who put a tingle in my tailbone. Of course, I did publicly declare that I would take my own life if my only choices were Giuliani and Clinton, but fortunately his haunted house didn’t work and she packed up her carpetbag and went back to whatever volcano her lair is hidden in. When the field began to narrow, I took a look around and thought, “Hey! Could be worse. And I speak from experience now.”

Back then, I was under the impression that John McCain was that guy who ran in 2000. The guy who got smeared by push pollsters, as opposed to the guy in 2008 who hired those same push pollsters. This new guy. . . I feel like this is a guy who decided, “Heroes who take the high ground lose to Yale ranchers,” and started signing away one piece of his soul at a time in order to sit in the big chair. I don’t think there are too many pieces of the old guy left. Maybe I’m reading him wrong. I hope I’m reading him wrong. It would be great , six months or a year from now, if the old guy emerged from the husk of whatever this new guy is and sat down for an interviewer or a ghost writer and spilled every remaining gut with bridge-burning, gasp-inducing candor about what Decision ‘08 reduced him to and how broken the system is. I imagine him saying something like, “My campaign tried to turn inspiring people into a negative! Can you believe that? We sarcastically compared him to the Messiah and Paris Hilton, in that order. What does that have to do with levees, or stop loss, or subprime mortgages? I can’t believe I did that; I was a war hero. My bad, everybody.”

This, of course, assumes he loses tonight. Not nearly enough people I know are even considering the possibility that he won’t. Listen to me, friends: start thinking about Santa’s fangs.

But first, before Obama loses, before you turn over my car and set it on fire tonight, consider with me the remote possibility that there is still a decent, bright guy in there despite it all. The other guy does not want to hurt you; he just has a different idea about how to help you, an idea that half the presidents for a century have had without plunging the nation into the sea. (Never mind this last guy, President Mulligan. No matter what happens, let’s all get busy trying to forget the living shit out of this bozo. That is why the campaign’s gone on for two years, right? Everyone’s been bouncing on the balls of their feet, waiting to move the hell on?) My dad occasionally says, “If two people believe two different things, they can’t both be right.” Don’t be like Dad. Even if every bad thing you ever tried to believe about McCain is true, begin 2009 assuming that he has learned the lessons that come with taking over for the least popular, possibly just least president in history. Assume that it will take him a while to dig us out of this hole. Assume that he wanted the big chair to fix what’s broken, and that he will do the best he can to achieve that before dying of cancer six months in and leaving us in the hands of one of my mom’s friends. That’s when it’s time to buy the canned goods.

Oh! And I guess there’s also a chance Barack Obama might win. Which I think might be good. Of course, a lot of people I know think it would be so good, and are so excited about it, that sometimes it seems almost ludicrous. Whenever I start to talk about him, I imagine my diaries behind glass in a museum where a curator is saying, “And these were found in the ruins. It seems almost darkly funny to read them now; this was before President Obama ripped off his mask and announced the construction of the forced labor camps.” I feel bad for my parents, who don’t think what I just wrote is a joke. It’s okay, Mom. Just read the thing I wrote about McCain up there and replace all the names. You voted for Bush a second time; now’s the time for some more of that optimism.

-In 2000, a “late night” to me was staying up to watch the beginning of Conan. In 2008, I routinely stay up long after Conan despite the fact that I get up earlier now. This helps to explain how I have retained my matinee-idol looks.

-The “documentary” I describe actually turned out pretty well under the circumstances, even though it was edited on a home VCR. I have recently seen movies about the campaigns of Oliver North and JFK that were no better. So… take that. Or whatever.

-The record indisputably shows that, in 2000, I voted for John Ashcroft. I did this based on his qualifications, namely that unlike his opponent, he was alive. At that tender, innocent age, I was not yet in a place where I was ready to vote for a dead Democrat and hope for the best. Try me again today and see what happens.

———

Election Day

4:40 a.m.

Severe sleep deprivation is something I haven’t given myself a chance to appreciate in a long time. In college, it was a way of life, almost an ethos: anything worth doing was worth doing at 3:00 a.m. the night before it was due. In my public speaking classes, I got my best grades by vowing never to prepare more than ten minutes in advance, and my paper writing career had much the same arc. The philosophy (drowsism?) served me well; I graduated without ever having written a first draft that was not also the final draft, although those final drafts often cited “Telepathy, mental” in their bibliographies and contained unusually frequent instances of the phrase, “and, oh, let’s say….” Not a lot of libraries stay open until 3:00 a.m.

My post-academic career is nothing like that. Rarely is anything “due,” for one thing. Any late nights are self-inflicted now and usually center around the opening statement, “God, I haven’t seen Conan O’Brien in forever.” And I never, ever have to get up before 8:00. Except when friends of mine are running for office.

Returning to the all-nighter lifestyle is like running into an old friend just long enough to remember why you weren’t in touch anymore. I had forgotten the sensation of weird pain you get in your spine as you’re setting your alarm clock to go off at a time that seems mere moments away. As the numbers tick by on the digital readout, you think about all the things you would not be able to finish during that brief period if you were awake. “4:30. I couldn’t even read two chapters of my book between now and 4:30. I could maybe get the laundry and some of the vacuuming done. That’s a nap, maybe.”

So I compromise. 4:40. Much better.

Eventually 4:40 a.m. comes, and I dutifully rise from my bed. Today is Candidate Joe’s big day. Months of planning, phone polling, and going door to door with informational leaflets with pictures of Citizen Joe shaking the hands of the elderly. It has come down to today. We have to get the name out there one last time. When the voters of Joe’s district show up at their polling places today, each and every one of them must see a bright, diligent representative of his campaign exactly twenty-five feet from the door with a leaflet and a smile. This representative should be knowledgeable and friendly. Or at least alert. Or at least well propped up and not audibly snoring. This representative should not look like he set a 4:40 alarm in the midnight hour.

As I step into the shower, I wonder if Citizen Joe ever bothered to go to bed at all. Last night, I dutifully planned to turn in at 9:00 or so, but I was overtaken by hubris and my camcorder. I’d been filming the campaign in action, and I just couldn’t resist the idea of being there during the final crunch before election day. I didn’t want to miss anything. I wanted to capture this, to get a shot of that. You know, for the ‘documentary’ that nobody but me would ever willingly watch. One of the things making my movie so great was that I hadn’t broken down and bought the camera until two weeks before election day, so I decided to go over to HQ, helping a little and filming a little.

People are getting pretty goddamn sick of the camcorder.

They’ll thank me in a year, I tell myself as the cold shower jolts me into alertness, assuming they’re still talking to me after today.

I also went over last night because I began riding a swell of Catholic guilt about my friend’s campaign a couple of weeks ago. I’d skipped campaign meetings, telling myself that I was useless and that nothing big was getting accomplished at the meetings anyway. I told myself I was helping in other ways, like… oh, let’s say sending positive vibrations to the chakras in his district from the comfort of my couch. As November approached, I began to think more could have gotten done if I’d just flexed my blowhard muscles, putting down the camera and adding to the dialog more. As I drifted off to sleep on some of those October nights, I’d started saying Acts of Contrition for all the things I hadn’t done; Sister Marie Carol would have been proud. I walked the precincts, putting literature in people’s screen doors. I talked to neighbors and got chased down the street by their f***ing unleashed dogs. And If there was anything that needed doing the night before the election, I was going to be there.

So I went to campaign headquarters, known more commonly by locals as “Joe’s parents’ basement.” I drove some carless volunteers back to the university, which the candidate had mined for support like a forty-niner. I picked up a button maker with Joe’s girlfriend MC. After we went back to headquarters, I hung around for a while filming before coming to the conclusion that I was useless and wasn’t getting anything accomplished. I packed up and left at 11:00 or so. Joe was still wide awake, making buttons and studying the huge map of the district on the wall by the ping-pong table.

5:30 a.m.

A dozen or more of us are standing in the parlor of Joe’s parents’ house. At our feet are a dozen Office Depot bags full of stickers, buttons, flyers and refrigerator magnets with Citizen Joe’s name and/or picture on them.

The magnets are a stroke of genius. Everyone throws away the paper right inside the door. Even the supporters throw away the paper. When was the last time you threw away a magnet? It could have a swastika made of penises on it, and you wouldn’t throw it away. Even in this age of wonders and pocket phones, you’re never too old to be impressed by metal that sticks to metal.

I thoughtfully gnaw on a donut and stare at the bags while Joe ties his tie. He is effusive and cheerful. He has hit the ground running this morning. I have seen no evidence that his batteries ever need recharging. He is the Atomic Candidate.

I wonder what it’s like to be surrounded by this stuff, to be Joe in a world of Joe leaflets and Joe magnets. To drive down the street after a hard day’s Joe work and see great big red, white, and blue Joe signs with your Joe name boldly printed on them everywhere you look up and down the street. To be the most humble person anyone in your group of friends can name while simultaneously being surrounded by an entire staff of people devoted solely to the cause of Joe. People signing up, pulling strings, networking, taking off of work and school, giving evenings and weekends and money, putting on buttons with your face on them and going into the Joe business. What does it feel like to have dozens of people in the You business? I find it deeply bizarre just knowing the guy whose name is on the signs. Does that humility survive the experience? If you don’t lose, I mean? It has to be the most incredibly surreal experience possible for a person, unless that person is some kind of a-hole. The opponent is running for the third or fourth time. It must be addictive.

At 5:30 a.m., I cannot imagine anything addictive about any of this. But I am psyched to be in the Joe business.

Joe and MC hand out the volunteer schedules to us, his coordinators, and give us our marching orders. I’m spending the day at Daughters of America, which is apparently some kind of grown-up sorority for the wives and widows of veterans. I grab my literature and a map and head to the car, thanking God that somebody gave me a map. The south side is a vast Escher labyrinth to me; if I weren’t in the Joe business, I would never go there. In the dark, I pass the Daughters of America twice before seeing it. I later learn that in a nod to tradition, they are still using the building’s original unpainted unlit sign.

Good call, Daughters. After all, signs are on buildings for the people who already know where they are.

Standing next to me at the polling place is our opponent’s sister. We each say hello politely but are eyeing each other suspiciously right from the start. I wonder whether we’ll warm up to each other. During the primary, the gaggle of volunteers outside the retirement home where I was stationed were like Woodstock. It was a great big love fest. We had two opponents then, both Democrats who hated each other, and by the end of the day the volunteers were practically making out and sharing flyers. Standing outside for thirteen hours and being swatted by voters who don’t want your damn papers instills a kind of solidarity, I think. You become a community filled with differing single-minded personality traits. Like the Smurfs.

7:00 a.m.

A quirk of campaign volunteerism: As people walk down the street, I am engaging them in conversation and asking them to do something for me. A second later, a woman facing me from the other side of the sidewalk is politely asking them to do the exact opposite. She and I are required to disagree about most things. Each of us is trying to make the other’s loved one unemployed. For most of the day, the only people we have to talk to are one another. To date, the language has not developed a word for this kind of discomfort.

Political campaigning takes everything I am wired not to do and combines it in one place, like a Swiss Army knife with twenty different ways to stab me in the comfort zone. Knocking on strangers’ doors to prod them about their core values is just the beginning. Even under ideal circumstances, in well-lubricated social situations where everyone was invited by a friend of mine, I don’t like walking up and talking to people I don’t know. I become shy, I feel like I’m bothering them, and it generally makes me feel like I’m covered in spiders. Today, I know for a fact I’m bothering each and every one of the people I talk to, and I’m here aaaaaall day. In order to do the best job I could, I’ve been preparing for this day for weeks, building up to it by trying to be extra friendly to grocery clerks and neighborhood dog walkers. Unfortunately, that didn’t prepare me for the fact that my opponent at the polling place would be on a first name basis with every f***ing pedestrian in the ward.

“Hi, please consider voting for Joe for–”

“Stevie! Long time no see, ha ha! How’s your wife Pat doing? Did she enjoy dinner last night? You guys are going to have to come by again Wednesday! We’re having butternut squash! Anyway, go on in and vote, you scamp!”

My morale is starting to take a graceful swan dive. This is a Democratic neighborhood in a Democratic city, and although I am wearing a button that reads “I’m A Democrat For JOE,” he is not a Democratic candidate. Many of these people are straight ticket voters, and some can barely contain their disgust with me for selling out the human race by not burning Joe’s house down. I do not need to stand and watch them chitchat about little league with the enemy to put a spotlight on how unpopular I am here. I’m too far right (approx. rightness: 1 centimeter) for any of these people to talk to me. When I go back to HQ, I’ll be too far left for any of those people to talk to me. Democracy is awesome.

7:30 a.m.

It’s got to be 45, maybe 50 degrees out here.

In retrospect, some kind of coat would have been an above-average idea.

The Miscellaneous Democratic Party volunteer is a really nice lady. She too knows everyone who walks by, and she tells me all of their dirty laundry and peccadilloes with relish after they go inside. I can’t quite figure out what’s going on with her; she seems to either work here or work for the party. She’s campaigning for one side, but she seems to be involved with the election officials. Her husband is one of them. He brings her coffee. I keep my hands warm by alternating them inside my mouth. We gossip and laugh about the foibles of this candidate and that, and then someone walks by and we hand them directly contradictory pieces of literature. Woodstock returns.

9:00 a.m.

Our ranks have swelled. A guy from the Dick Gephardt campaign is here, as is a kid trying to get people to sign a petition about home rule. The kid was apparently plucked off the street by the special interest group and paid $60 a day to get signatures. He, too, is a Democrat, but he doesn’t know anything about the issues (including the very petition in his hands) so we get along well enough.

When we arrived this morning, all of the candidates’ signs had been yanked from the earth and thrown down onto the grass. The Democrat woman learns from her husband that one of the signs was not 25′ from the door like it was supposed to be. One of the retired senior citizens the election board had hired to be an election official for the day had come out and plucked every single sign as a show of his temporary might. The Gephardt guy has a hammer, so he fixes the Democrat signs. He refuses to fix mine, since I am the enemy, but he does allow me to use the hammer myself. It’s all about principles.

Shortly thereafter, a Republican voter comes by (!) and notices that none of the Republicans’ signs are up. A minute later, the senior election official du jour storms out, marches up to the signs and uproots them right in front of us. His haughty, unblinking gaze says, “This is the first time I have had power over anything in twenty-five years! Fear my wrath! Yoink!” and the signs are on the ground again.

“What are you doing, man?” we ask.

“These signs are too close to the door!” he rasps.

“There’s no way that isn’t twenty-five feet,” I say in unison with about three other people. “Get a tape measure out here.”

“We don’t have a tape measure. They need to go across the street, or I’m calling the board of elections.”

“Across the…? Buddy, I’m 6’ tall. If I have to lie down four times between here and the door to show you how far away it is, I will.”

His eyes flash a warning not to tempt his righteous anger, but all he does is go back inside. We get out the hammer and immediately put all the signs back up in a bipartisan effort to fight The Man.

10:00 a.m.

A police car pulls up with election deputies in it. They carry with them a piece of chalk and 25’ of kite string. They mark off the perimeter of the polling place. All of the signs are 37’ from the front door. The senior is outraged. He seems to shake his fist at us, though in fairness I think his fist always shakes. I feel like I was just in the f***ing Boston Tea Party. Possibly the most trivial election impropriety in the history of democracy, but it beats staring at the sidewalk and waiting for voters.

The polling place has already seen a 42% turnout for the day. All the elections are close. This Bush/Gore thing is obviously going to be great for the country. I can’t wait to get to the party tonight and find out who won.

11:00 a.m.

A new wrinkle. The Republican supervising “election judge” has come out to say hi. He is wearing a gray zippered jumpsuit, six earrings and wrap-around sunglasses. His mullet is longer than my leg. He is not a bath fan.

He goes back inside and my gossipy friend informs me that he is a multiply convicted felon. Apparently, he is an election judge as a way of working off some kind of community service. He is not eligible to vote in the election, but he has been put in charge of it.

He comes back out to hit on women. He jokes about needing to borrow my car. After the third time, I realize he is not joking, nor does he plan to stop asking. An additional volunteer in the Joe business arrives, and with a hearty “screw this” I go home for my coat. On the way back, I take Joe and MC some lunch.

7:00 p.m.

The rest of the day is humdrum. Everyone has made up their minds already, but I am polite and see to it that they get some scrap paper anyway. Rumors begin to circulate by means I cannot detect. People in another precinct weren’t allowed to vote. Scandal! The polls may be kept open until 10:00.

The felon/judge is irate. “This is f***ing bulls***. I’m gonna miss my f***ing bus! They can kiss my f***ing a**.” He goes inside to stab someone.

At 6:59, not even the people running the polls know if the polls are open. They take the American flag inside and lock the doors. I take down Joe’s signs and load them into my trunk.

At 7:01, a police car comes screaming up the street. An election official runs up to the door, but can’t get in. She throttles the knob and says, “The polls are open! The polls are open!”

The man inside comes to the door and says through the locked door, “Sorry, ma’am! The polls are closed!”

I decide to leave before Curly comes out and hits me with a pie.

HQ is in chaos. Nobody knows if they’re allowed to leave their polling place. Joe comes in and gets on the phone. Stay at the polls, he says. He goes to rescue carless volunteers. My job is to await anybody arriving for the victory party. In the meantime, I’m to get on the phone and call anyone who said they’d vote for Joe during the last phone poll. If they haven’t voted yet, I need to tell them the polls are still open. I feel like my head has been emptied out and filled with whipped cream.

8:00

Never mind. The polls are closed again. The people who sued to keep them open got sued.

I love this city.

Now, all we need to do is watch the results and see who won.

9:30 p.m.

Nobody won! Yee hee! It’s a tie! I guess Bush gets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Gore gets the rest of the week. Oh well. They love the country more than they love power; I’m sure they can be counted on to solve the whole thing like gentlemen by tomorrow morning.

I can’t wait to see what Joe did.

We all gather ‘round… the county’s mid-day results have been reported…

…Joe… is…

winning?

Hell yes! Winning! Ohhh, what a relief. Ideas do triumph over cronyism and knee-jerk party lines. That is the deepest breath I’ve taken all week. Now, to go party and hit on some people. You know, after standing in a cold wind all day, when I look and feel my best.

11:30

Oh dear.

I’m sorry. Did I say winning? That seems to have been a bit premature.

Oh, dear.

It was a good showing. Make no mistake. Considering the odds for a first time candidate against an incumbent in an “unfriendly” district, 37% to 59% is pretty good. We have a lot of intangible things to be proud of.

Too bad some of us had our minds set on some tangible things.

That moment when the totals went up on the dry erase board will still be with me years from now, only partly because I caught the whole thing on video. I have never heard air go out of a room like that before. Everything hung there like it was trapped in amber. This was unexpected. What do I do now?

We are all out of the Joe business.

Citizen Joe only pauses once. He’s the only one I never see deflate. He is offering me a drink within moments of conceding the race. Atomic. If that were me, I would have a jagged vodka bottle to somebody’s throat by now. Hell, I may do that anyway; I’ve been up since 4:30.

I stay until 2:30 in the morning watching results that aren’t resulting in anything and talking to people. I have learned a lot today. There’s always that. Mostly, I learned that my support is the kiss of death. Nearly everything and everyone I voted for lost. My state is now represented by a man that has been dead for a month. My country may now be run by a drunk driver who as a governor installed a turnstile in his state’s death row, a man whose foreign policy is to build a magic missile shield in the sky. At least if he’s president someone else will be driving his car. People even voted against the ones I thought were home runs. Propositions that promised sunshine and milk for sick babies got voted down if I was for them. I may opt out of participatory democracy if I can’t get non-dead people elected.

Joe is eternally gracious, but I am wiped out. I think I needed him to win more than I realized. A lot of other parts of my life had kind of quietly taken a turn for the worse lately. The campaign gave me and a lot of other people hope that we had needed at just the right time. In a few days, I’ll realize that the hope was as valuable as any other product of the race. I met and got to spend time with a lot of wonderful people I wouldn’t have otherwise known, and the campaign caused me to have a lot of incredible experiences I’d have otherwise missed. I have a buried feeling that someday soon we’ll be saying, “Thank God for that loss. It turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to us.”

Someday. Today, that feeling is buried pretty deep. Today, all I can do is go home and be grateful that I took tomorrow off. I won’t be getting out of bed any time soon.

_____________________________________________

I imagine being picked as the candidate for vice president. I imagine that, the week I get picked, the press immediately starts comparing me to some obscure TV comedian I’ve never even heard of just because we both have dark hair and glasses. I chuckle warmly the first couple of times people ask me about it; I guess I can see it, I say.

Within a week and a half, every time I check my goddamned e-mail, another one of my “friends” has sent me a link to some Youtube clip where this “comedian”– this asshole– is dressed like me on national television making fun of the way I talk. When my little sister used to do that thing where she repeated everything I said just to get on my nerves, it was all I could do not to punch her out, and now I’ve got someone walking around behind me for the whole nation to enjoy, aping my every mannerism in my favorite suit. Great; guess I can never wear that suit again now. Thanks a lot.

And then my advisors start weighing in, like it’s a campaign issue. They want me to go on the stupid show.

“You have to show the voters you have a sense of humor about yourself,” they say. “You seem more relatable and human if you show you’re not bothered by it.”

“Not bothered by it”? Mark my words: when I take office, the first order of business is to dispatch a small squad of Secret Service guys with silencers to take care of this clown once and for all. Sure, I have a sense of humor! For example, you know what’s hilarious? Having the IRS audit the shit out of a sketch comedian. We can share that little joke in January, joker.

In the meantime, I have to stand here like a yutz in front of 10 million people, watching from 20 feet away as this bozo mimes what an idiot I am and a studio audience laughs and applauds the whole thing right in front of me. And oh, joy, here comes Alec Baldwin. Maybe someone from Nickelodeon can just come pour some slime on me from the catwalk now, then douse the whole thing in feathers and call it a night.

Ha ha, America! See how well I’m taking all this? See how the smile never falters? That’s electability, huh? Laugh it up, America. You’ll get yours.

Marky Mark now. How did I get here? If you had told me two months ago….

Oh well. Apparently this is the way people decide who to vote for now. And they’re questioning my qualifications. What qualifies you to decide who runs the free world, geniuses? Make fun of all the pageants you want; the talent competition factors into my final score all the same.

_____________________________________________

I also imagine what it must be like to be the comedian who resembles the candidate and gets pressed into satirical service, even though I have my own show to worry about. Here I am onstage, going, “I’m gonna be VP, duh duh duh!” and I can literally see the person I’m making fun of out of the corner of my eye, staring at me intensely from 20 feet away. I wish I’d foreseen this evening when I told that reporter I would “leave the planet” if the Republicans got elected. As we pass one another mid-sketch, I get a look that I’ll be describing to my grandchildren one day. Oh yeah. Tonight’s afterparty is gonna be super comfortable. It’s still open bar, right?

_____________________________________________

For that matter, I wonder if anyone who ever wrote a campaign song ever stopped to think about what’s going to happen if their guy loses. That single is out in the world forever, dating you to new fans, reminding old fans of the sting of defeat. It turns from an anthem to a dirge overnight, and if your cards really suck people start to resent you for getting the Adlai Stevenson song stuck in their heads. Every time I hear a bad poll for the Republicans, I think about that guy who wrote “Raisin’ McCain” hearing the boos rising up from the crowd, thinking, “It could be worse, right? I could be a Dixie Chick.”

_____________________________________________

One day’s news, compressed:

“If there is any single upside to this economic crisis, if there is one positive outcome in our behavior, it is that this brush with the Depression should finally be the thing to shake this consumerist, credit-obsessed culture out of its irrational spending. This could finally be the thing to get the American public to live within its means, to conserve, and to spend less of its money frivolously chasing the latest status symbol instead of responsibly OH MY GOD A NEW MACBOOK IS OUT! It’s made of one piece of aluminum instead of five pieces of aluminum! I have to go call my lender!!”

_____________________________________________

I imagine being an older conservative guy. Actually, I imagine being someone like one of my dad’s friends. You’re a little older; the eighties were pretty good to you, and you worked your way up the rungs into management so long ago that when you look at a union guy your mind’s eye sees him turn into a giant cartoon rat. Your faith is very important to you, and your brain is burning way more calories on the pro-life movement than anyone you know even realizes. You see the poll numbers for this Obama character on the TV, and you feel like the anchorperson is going to turn into a Cheshire cat and vanish before your eyes at any moment. A ten point lead, for a community organizer? Is something psychotropic being put into the water supply? So when the McCain campaign has a rally in the suburbs of your town, you are standing in line outside bright and early, singing “God Bless America” to drown out the protesters across the street.

You get inside, and the rally is a moderately loud, manageably fun party. There are dozens of people with signs that say “Give Em Hell, Johnny” and “Blind Deer Hunters For McCain” and all of the things you would have expected to see among your people. There are also some other signs, though, that don’t mention McCain at all. They’re all about Obama. Some of the things the signs say about Communism and al Qaeda give you a little bit of pause, even if you worry too on some level about the things they allege.

Then the candidate comes out, and the place goes nuts. For a while, you can forget about the polls and the signs and the presidential approval ratings and the worries and just enjoy John McCain, the man you want to give the keys to the car. Let the other side have their electrifying celebrity orator; the steady hand of the Maverick on the wheel is all the inspiration you need. For now, you can let your guard down among your own people and enjoy being like-minded in a world that seems to have gone crazy. Even without the singing and the shouting, it’s a great time just knowing everybody in the room is on the same page as you. You don’t have to watch your tongue for fear of getting into it with anybody. It’s like a warm blanket. It’s like being at Cheers.

Then McCain mentions his opponent, and the two guys standing next to you– younger guys, a little rowdy and unshaven– shout loud enough to be heard on the other side of the auditorium. “Terrorist!” one screams. “Kill him!”

Kill him. These people are standing right next to you. You could reach out and touch them if you wanted.

What do you do? How do you react?

Do you recoil? Do you look over at them disapprovingly and say, “Now, now, fellas”? At this moment, do you hear the anger in the shouting all around you and, your own pro-life passions weighing suddenly heavily on your shoulders, look around the room thinking, “What sort of company am I keeping? What have I signed on for?” Does it stick with you in the car all the way home, and for days thereafter? Or do you stand there clapping and put it out of your mind?

_____________________________________________

I suck at donating. Years ago when I was unemployed and living on macaroni and NPR, I swore I was going to give money to public radio one day. In the end, it took so long I just stopped listening to public radio. I am a drag on society.

I haven’t given to a campaign in years either. It’s the balloons that do it to me.

I watch the conventions every four years, and every four years the candidate gives his triumphant speech and 70,000 balloons descend from the rafters. Those balloons have to come from somewhere. Someone had to sell them; someone had to ship them; someone had to inflate every single blessed one of them and get them up there. Very few of those someones did that out of the goodness of their hearts. Money changed hands for that minute forty. And then someone had to clean that popped disaster up.

This year, Ted Kennedy spoke to the Democrats for what unfortunately was likely the last time. He took the stage to thunderous cheering, and thousands of the delegates in unison began waving uniform, professionally printed “We Love Ted Kennedy” signs. It was very moving, to someone; I kept looking at the Ted Kennedy signs individually and thinking, “That’s my donation right there. I cracked open my piggy bank so Barack Obama could pay his staff, and he spent the money on two ‘I Love Ted Kennedy’ signs.”

Imagine what it must be like to be that little kid who sold his bike to donate to Hillary. Remember that stump speech? Little Timmy’s not gettin’ that bike back. Though I’d certainly try if I were him.

The e-mail was from my dad. The subject line was “FWD: Video of Obama MOCKING the BIBLE.”

It had been seven days; the time had come to put this in the rearview mirror one way or another. To watch or not to watch? Delete unseen, or arm myself with information? Should I send the usual response to Dad: “Interesting! Thanks!”

All I knew for sure was what I would not be doing, namely replying, “Hilarious! Obama really nails it, although the guy who compiled the video is a douchebag whose tone makes me want to egg the next megachurch I drive past.”

In the end, I opted for watch-seethe-”thanks!”-delete.

The bland, grateful failure to engage is as close as I can come to matching Pops frustration for frustration. Pops would dearly love to get this dustup a’dusting; that was the whole reason he had sent me the e-mail (and dozens more like it) in the first place. He’s not trying to sway my vote. He is itching for a scrap, and even pulling out semaphore flags and hiring a skywriter cannot successfully convey the signal that I am not having any. Returning each broadside with the Blank Thanks is all I can do, partly to dodge the scuffle and partly to aggravate him as much as the forwards are meant to aggravate me.

I’m guessing I probably seem like the sort of person who would get knee-deep in this sewer before you could say “hockey mom.” The more I talk to people, the clearer it becomes that they think of me as just this sort of person, the person who is waiting for the chance to push up his sleeves and put up the dukes. That’s not how I see myself. From where I’m sitting here in the beehive, we just want to quietly glide from flower to flower, buzzing happily and making our delicious honey without bothering anyone. But as I go through my day, flitting from daisy to buttercup, people keep spraying me and swatting at me as I try to mind my own pollen until I have no other choice but to plunge my stinger in as deeply as it will go. Once the stinger is out, it will find a home, even if it means getting my thorax ripped out.

I do not go looking for trouble– I will go a mile out of my way on side streets to avoid it, in fact– but if you insist on bringing it to me I will eventually give you a nice return on your investment.

I’m not a conservative, generally speaking. Yes, every time someone mentions Gossip Girl or that skanktacular Katy Perry song about how awesome it is to be one of the Girls Gone Wild I want to have my family spirited away to a Ruby Ridge cabin where we homeschool and sing only the dourest hymns. Generally speaking, however, it’s my understanding that I am an unwitting member of the Communist party. I get this understanding from some of the out-and-out conservatives I know, and I know plenty.

In my daily life, I see my share of venomous (true!) stories about John McCain or President Bush eating babies on film. I’m occasionally very tempted to forward those e-mails to those conservative people. I don’t do it. I don’t make it my business to offend or infuriate the people I care about just because they made the mistake of opening some e-mail. Somewhere along the line, I got the loco notion that confrontationally bringing up politics was a rude thing to do, although clearly I was not raised that way. I don’t say or think, “Dad loves that John McCain. This right here is a direct attack on everything that’s important to him philosophically. He needs to get this from me right now. He’s certainly not going to change his vote because of this, but I want to damage his worldview in some way for no reason. Maybe it can lead to a pointless, protracted argument somewhere down the road.”

I cannot even imagine doing this. I send none of these e-mails. Last week, I disconnected my Twitter updates from my Facebook account, thinking, “I ‘friended’ people who I’m really only acquainted with; they don’t need to be getting these status updates where I attack their candidate. They didn’t sign on so I could freshly offend them ten times a day. That’s obnoxious.”

So: why isn’t anybody worried about offending me?

Because they’re not. They’re really not.

Maybe it’s because they know they can get away with it; all they’re going to get, after all, is the Blank Thanks. I have friends and relatives alike who will wait until I get into a room and bring things up they know I disagree with, things that have nothing to do with whatever we happened to be talking about, just for the sake of sort of loudly braying their opinions like donkeys and daring the rest of us to make somethin’ of it. These people know, though: if anyone does actually rise to the challenge and disagree, go f###ing meth-bananas on rocket fuel. I have a friend who gets so mad in these situations that she starts screaming with you for agreeing with her. You have to keep tranq darts in your crisper just in case.

The only time I ever came close to letting the vessel stray into these waters was the time I wrote a letter to the editor, and I learned a valuable lesson from that experience: shut the #### up. Should I be teaching that lesson to other people? When I get these forwards about Obama trying to outlaw flags for Christians, should I too begin to squawk and caw like a chicken caught in a barbed wire fence?

In the interest of full disclosure, I have been trying to dip a toe into these waters lately over the fact that John McCain is calling Obama the actual, literal, biblical antichrist in language only evangelicals would recognize. You may have seen these ads from McCain’s web site; they were supposedly lampooning Obama’s popularity by calling him the Messiah and the Chosen One. When I saw the actual ads, I thought, “These aren’t especially funny or witty. Actually, the wording seems really stilted and peculiar.” Then I realized, the language isn’t peculiar if you remember anything about the Left Behind books, because it’s the language used to describe the antichrist character in the books. Of course, to know that, you’d have to be the kind of person who reads the Left Behind books.

That’s the truth. That’s actual. Nothing there is satisfactual.

Oh, and it’s working.

Naturally, when all of this clicked for me I thought I might have to stop talking about everything else until election day. I don’t carry a torch for Obama, but I sure would like to lob one at McCain’s head. I feel like that could be the entire case against him. You’re John McCain, and you approved that message.

So I sent out an e-mail about it to people, but even in this case it was as ginger as walking a sleeping baby through a room full of low-hanging windchimes. “Hey, d’you guys see these ads? What do you guys think about all this? Jeepers. Does it… you know, does it feel good? Being on that guy’s side? If you don’t mind my asking? What are your thoughts, for an open exchange of your crazy ideas?”

No response.

Probably for the best.

November 21, 1998

These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about something that happened this summer outside the tenement where I live. I realize that I don’t talk about my apartment or my neighbors very much. That isn’t because nothing happens between my neighbors and me, but because our interaction is typically kind of unpleasant and lingering, like some kind of reverse mouthwash that starts with a minty sting in the morning and leaves a bad taste in your mouth all day long.

I went through a late summer phase when I’d basically hibernate in my apartment for days at a time, returning home right after work and staying there until the next workday beckoned. It wasn’t the kind of life you write stories about (which is part of my excuse for that huge gap in these pages a few months ago) but it was what I needed. During the hibernation, I became acquainted with the Neighbor Children.

At the risk of sounding like the unpleasant old man down the street who takes the softballs hit into his yard, the Neighbor Children are miserable, wretched little trolls. I felt kinda bad for them at first; they were part of a family of four or five people, living in the same kind of one-bedroom refrigerator box I do. With that in mind, I always tried to be understanding when they would run around the parking lot right outside my window like loosed zoo animals, screaming at the tops of their lungs for hours at a time. Kids need to play. I remember being that age. If I’d lived in an apartment like this when I was five, I would have started huffing glue just to make my bedroom feel bigger. I don’t know how I feel about kids almost literally playing in traffic, but I always told myself that their folks were keeping track of them by listening for the sharp, unrelenting shrieks they produced until sunset every single day.

At any rate, it was understandable for a while. It was summer, there were no classes, and the kids needed to play somewhere. After a while, though, the yelling that initially made me think of my own games of cops-and-robbers eventually just made me think of the cops. And it wasn’t just the yelling; after a while, they started to play fun games like “who can bang on the railing the hardest?” and “who can pound on the most doors?” These games, like drums and Nintendo, are only fun to the people playing. They certainly don’t do your sleep cycle any favors.

Nevertheless, I stayed out of their way. I minded my own business. I never imagined that the children would come gunning for me.

One Saturday, after a morning of bad TV and chatter from outside, I went to see my then-girlfriend. As I went outside, the chattering from the stoop above got more agitated, as if someone had walked up to the cage and started mimicking the chimps, daring them to get off their tire swings and do something about it. “Bar bar bar!” they yapped, and as I often did from inside my apartment, I wondered, “Just what the hell are they so excited about? Are they even saying anything?”

I got into my car. I rolled down my window and started the engine. I started to recognize the faint traces of words. I fastened my seat belt. I released the emergency brake. The fog of sounds was starting to take shape. They were talking. They were talking to me.

It all came into focus as I drove off. They were shouting at me.

They were shouting, “Hey, Gay Dude! Why don’t you ever leave your house, Gay Dude? Don’t you have any friends? Hey, Gay Dude! Ha ha ha! Gay Dude!…”

I almost turned the car around right there in the alley. “‘Gay Dude’? What the hell is that?” I was being mocked by a group of people that couldn’t have had a combined age of 12. I felt like I was back on the playground, covered head to toe in snowballs.

I mean… six year olds didn’t even mock me when I was six. Had I actually become a bigger dork since then?

It upset me on levels that weren’t even under construction yet.

Was I just the victim of a hate crime?
Could they even know what a Gay Dude is at that age?
Did they hear that from their parents?
Are their parents going to come kick my ass?
Can’t their parents hear them taunting strangers out on the stoop?
Who the hell says “dude” in 1998? When did Keanu move in upstairs?
…Oh, hey, wait a minute: also, I’m not gay.
I mean, sure, I’m wearing a Hawaiian shirt and driving a car described in its brochure as “electric purple” and described by my friends as “Barney the Dinosaur,” but what does that prove, really?
Do kids still call people “gay” as an insult?
No gay person has ever said an unkind word to those kids.
I’ve never said a word to those kids. Never ratted on them, never bothered them, never gave in to the urge to run outside with a wiffle bat and concuss them one at a time…

People suck.

In the days since, I’ve been a little sensitive about the straightness of me. Those kids took a lead pipe to my whole self-image. The sensitivity is more pragmatic than anything else; women who think you are gay, as a rule, do not try to date you. And God knows I’m not making the first move again for about 30 years. The lesson I have learned from the whole incident: you can make the most profound, lasting impact on the lives of complete strangers without even meaning to. Those kids didn’t give a @%#$ about me, and they probably never gave any of it a second thought. They played Bang the Railing all day, taunted Gay Dude downstairs, then went in for some juice and never thought about it again. They moved away awhile later, I think, unless somebody finally shot them.

——–

A few months later— yesterday, as a matter of fact— I went to see a concert with my friend Michelle. Michelle is the kind of person who actually has a hard life, rather than the matinee melodrama that passes as my stress. Michelle once left college and is now clawing her way back to graduation while working full-time as a wage slave at a nearby theatre. She has a “car” that is powered primarily by karma and kind thoughts that she could never even hope to replace if her luck ran out. Three weeks ago, her two roommates (engaged to one another) moved out of the apartment. They made no mention of their plans to do so; they left her a terse note and a $700-a-month rent bill. They took half the furniture, some of her stuff, and her cat. Yesterday, she had to pack up all her things and move them to her boyfriend’s parents’ garage. She is now literally homeless; she resides on the couch of her boyfriend’s pal. Just in time for finals. As a testament to what kind of person Michelle is, she chose this exact time in her life to do me a favor and get me a front row ticket to the Barenaked Ladies concert through her theatre clout. She escorted me to the show, despite the fact that she had moved all her worldly possessions hours earlier (without asking for my help!) and was probably about to go “home” to the most depressing night she’d ever had.

Of course, if that was my situation, I’d probably rather be at a concert too. It was still very nice of her.

So, we arrived at the show and I was treated to the nicest seats I’ve ever had to anything. We were in the front non-orchestra pit row, “a safe distance from performer sweat,” Michelle promised. Still, as I sat down, I remarked to her, “Wow! We’re so close that shouting, ‘You suck!’ would actually impact the performance!” It felt almost powerful. I would soon see that power used for evil.

The opening act was a guy named Rufus Wainwright. It did not take long to see that Rufus was not gonna light the crowd on fire with his antics. He was full of nervous laughter and uneasy twitches. He paused a lot, and in the pauses you could hear the sound of people checking their watches.

Then we heard something else.

About three songs from the end of Rufus’ set, the frat guy two seats down from me decided that he didn’t like Rufus very much at all. He thought to himself, “This flamboyant man has come to my town and tried to entertain me. How dare he! I came down here in my backwards white ball cap and my khakis to see a rock concert! He has a lot of nerve, coming here and trying to make people happy. He needs a lesson I am uniquely qualified to teach.”

(At least, that’s what I guess he must have thought. What do people think about as they initiate the heckling process? I wish to understand, people of Earth.)

The lesson Joe Frat decided to teach was a simple one: entertainers who aren’t famous need to be punished. So, during one of Rufus’ nervous pauses as he desperately tried to get us to clap or breathe or something, Joe Frat implied very loudly that Rufus enjoyed having sex with other men. In essence, he called Rufus a Gay Dude. If the Neighborhood Children had known the word Joe Frat used, they’d have used it on me. It’s all the same big swastika.

The thing is, as I prophesied to Michelle, we were close enough to be heard very clearly. The word hung there in the air, thick and hot, as if someone had suddenly unfurled a huge banner that just said “HATE.” The world froze like a haiku, this little ugly moment in time photographed and captured eternally.

“What?” said Rufus, scanning through the lights for a trace of Joe Frat. “What did you say?”

Oh God. Rufus is gonna come down and kick some ass. There’s a kickoff for your evening.

“Shut up!” shouted indignant people at Joe, now suddenly big Rufus fans for the first time all night. I felt so tense, you’d have thought I came with the guy. I was waiting for somebody to throw a chair. I was ashamed for humanity for the first time since that Star Trek convention, for many of the same reasons.

Rufus did one more song, thanked “some” of us, and beat it. At the time of the slur, his little sister had been onstage performing with him. Can you even imagine? I’d rather get pantsed on national television than witness something like that again.

Michelle returned from the restroom, having missed the whole thing. Soon after, Barenaked Ladies came out and performed several songs in a row. The crowd was pumped. People were on their feet. The ugliness was almost forgotten when the band decided to linger a bit.

“We have a very special guest with us tonight,” said the guitarist after the first few numbers. “We have with us a time traveler! From the fifties! Or from some other time when it was considered acceptable to ridicule people for their sexual orientation!”

An esctatic cheer went up from the crowd as the singer began to talk about tolerance and then, as they often do, Barenaked Ladies launched into a somewhat impromptu freestyle song/rap, which this time turned out to be about gay-bashing. For a brief moment, I was rather glad they were standing up for ol’ Rufus. But then an odd thing happened.

As they sang, the guitarist from a few yards away looked at me— looked right at me— and smiled and winked, sort of nodding his head. It was the sort of wink I have delivered myself a time or two. It was a wink that said, “I’m smiling to show you that I’m not bothered by how much you suck. Hi. How’s it goin’. You suck.”

Oh, good Christ. They heard the taunting coming from over here, and somebody pinpointed it, and they think it was me. Barenaked Ladies think I’m a Nazi!

I looked over at Joe Frat. He was clapping wildly and shouting, “Yeah! Tolerance! Woooooooooo!”

I felt so bad, and the whole time I just wanted to say to someone, “But… I’m Gay Dude!”

When Mom and Dad met at the altar on that gray November Saturday in 1968, they had been dating for two years and decided to stick with one another for life. They were both 23. My mom had been engaged once before, to a police officer, but that relationship’s murky entry into the family history book is simply that it “didn’t work out.” The record is similarly fuzzy on how my parents met, exactly; I do know that my grandparents were notorious drinkers and carousers back in the day, and reading between the lines I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad met because Dad and Grandma used to frequent the same neighborhood bar. (It was a different time.) All the murkiness is probably for the best; how much do any of us really need to know about our parents’ love lives? I’m friends with some of my exes, and occasionally when I’m playing with their kids I think, “If I told you how your parents and I knew one another, your head would explode.” Some things are better left in the past.

The record is window-clear about the wedding, though. Everyone in the family talks about that morning as if they just fled the church a minute ago.

As planned, the whole thing was to be an unspectacular affair, just the standard Catholic ceremony at the neighborhood parish (Holy Name, which sounds less like the name of a church than a placeholder until someone could think of a cool saint) followed by the standard pot luck at the neighborhood VFW hall. Everything went according to plan until about 11:00; the young priest said his words, the couple said their vows, and then they went to lay some flowers at the feet of a statue of Mary. Mom had just placed the flowers and started to kneel when suddenly she felt her knees shaking.

“Why would my knees be shaking?” she thought. “I’m not nervous.” Mom is very hard to impress, and the thought of being nervous about something like marrying my dad would have been ridiculous. It was then that she realized she wasn’t shaking; everything else was. That was when the plaster started falling.

The papers the next morning would say the earthquake measured a 5.5 on the Richter scale, nothing to get excited about on the West Coast but something akin to the apocalypse for Midwesterners whose town hadn’t so much as twitched in almost 100 years. At the site of the plaster crumbling, everyone in attendance lost their minds and began climbing over one another to escape. The sanctity of the event went right out the stained glass window; if anybody in the church was thinking about God, they were thinking that He was scary when He was mad and they’d better get out of His house. When it was all over, the priest would make Mom and Dad go back into the church to finish the ceremony and walk down the aisle “officially”; not a single wedding guest would go back into the church with them.

The thing that always stuck with me was that, when the earth moved, my mother and grandmother both froze. Grandpa took a second to evaluate his chances and left Grandma standing right where she was, bolting for the door; some people remember him at least pausing to yell at her to run. My dad heard the rumble and immediately took Mom in his arms and ushered her out the side door to safety. I have often wondered, as they got older and more tired of one another, whether my mom or dad ever looked at one another in the middle of an argument and thought about that moment. When you go to God’s house and ask Him to bless your union, and He responds with an earthquake, it’s hard not to take that as a bad sign. But maybe Mom saw the way Dad cared for her when everything around them was trembling and decided it was a pretty good omen after all.

Any time I put something online, I have the hardest time grappling with that moment when the blog post or column or bon mot I wrote disappears from the site’s front page, having been replaced by the latest piece of new content after an agonizing descent. No matter how many times it happens, it still fully obstructs my craw.

“Don’t go, my precious, precious words!” I cry as each gem drops into eternal obscurity. “O sweat of my brow, how I toiled on you, forever immortalizing the time my little sister put the Capri-Sun in the microwave! Now who will remember you there in history’s dustbin, the ‘Older Posts’ link?”

Sometimes, it gets to the point where I let the whole site come to a standstill. “Ooh, I worked really hard on this one. I better not post anything else for a while so it stays in the spotlight.” It’s like the online marketing experts always say: “Always let your content stagnate. Visitors love that. The constancy makes them feel safe in a changing world, like a big fluffy blanket.”

Or am I remembering that wrong?

It feels bad enough when it happens here, on a site where I control everything, but on the always-fresh iFanboy it’s like a staple gun to the throat every week. I mean… that’s no Jimski.com. I actually work on that stuff. People are looking at that site.

Lately, though, I have been better at putting it all in perspective. Whenever the drop-off gives me the blues now, I cheer myself up by remembering the ultimate futility of mortal existence. As Ted Koppel put it the night he left Nightline:

There’s this quiz I give to some of our young interns when they first arrive at Nightline. I didn’t do it with this last batch. It’s a little too close to home. “How many of you,” I’ll ask, “can tell me anything about Eric Severeid?” Blank stares. “How about Howard K. Smith or Frank Reynolds?” Not a twitch of recognition. “Chet Huntley, Jack Chancellor?” Still nothing.

David Brinkley sometimes causes a hand or two to be raised; and Walter Cronkite may be glad to learn that a lot of young people still have a vague recollection that he once worked in television news.

What none of these young men and women in their late teens and early 20s appreciates, until I point it out to them, is that they have just heard the names of seven anchormen or commentators who were once so famous that everybody in the country knew their names. Everybody.

Trust me. The transition from one anchor to another is not that big a deal.

The world is full of stuff like this, people and things that were so unbelievably well-known and beloved that Amish toddlers could tell you about them, only for those same things to be completely forgotten within a generation or two. John Belushi died in 1982, and seven years later I mentioned his name in the cafeteria one day and had an entire table of blank stares for dessert.

Even Belushi pales in comparison to Vaughan Meader, who had a life so amazing it’s begging for me to write a book about it. He was the most successful comedian in America, ever, as of 1962. Unfortunately, his claim to fame was his amazing JFK impression. He went from selling 7.5 million records to being banished from public life in the span of a year; he was a comedian, and just looking at his face broke people’s hearts. He suddenly reminded America of the worst thing that had ever happened. 7.5 million records forty years ago, and you wouldn’t meet three people who know his name.

One of the best gifts I have received in the last several years is a cast recording of the original 1902 Wizard of Oz Broadway musical. Well… they didn’t really do “cast recordings” since they had just, you know, invented recordings. It’s actually a collection of every remaining Edison Records wax cylinder and piano roll of the music that they could find. (I know they were Edison Records because back then apparently every single began with some carnival barker who sounds like W.C. Fields announcing the names of the singers and the recording company, a tradition that P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Records carries on to this day.) At the time, this show was phenomenally successful; it ran for a ridiculously long time on Broadway before beginning a ridiculously long tour. Performances would go on for four hours because of all the encores. The sheet music was in every home and/or bird cage. The success of the play was what inspired author L. Frank Baum to write the rest of the books. It was bigger than Jesus Christ Superstar as performed by Jesus Christ.

Have you ever heard of a single one of these blockbusting hit singles that captured a nation’s heart? Let me save you some thinking time: no, you have not. Not one of them survived in the popular culture, mostly because 1) all the jokes were 1903-topical and 2) the people of that era seem to have spoken some kind of crazy made-up twin language. I understand Shakespeare’s jokes better; I listen to some of these comedy sketches by turn-of-the-century Laugh-In on the CD and think, “Man, I’ll bet there were some Irishmen steamed about that zinger! Since presumably they knew what a ‘codswallop’ is.” My favorite track is “Budweiser’s a Friend of Mine” (I beg you, do not ask me how it relates to tin men and scarecrows) which contains the line,

Although Bill the Kaiser’s a friend of Budweiser,/ Budweiser’s a friend of mine.

“Bill the Kaiser!” Sassy World War I jingoism from the Tin Man and an effing barbershop quartet! I wish this had been my prom theme.

But it wasn’t, because nobody remembers the most famous play in the world. And that’s not even the worst of it.

Ever heard of Franklin Pierce?

I know what you’re thinking: “Wasn’t that Alan Alda’s character on M*A*S*H?” In fact, no! He was the president of the United States.

I know what you’re thinking now: “No, I’m almost positive that was Alan Alda’s character on M*A*S*H.” I’m telling you, he ran the country in the 1850s. His incompetence reopened the wounds that ended up starting the Civil War.

Pierce’s eleven year old was squished to death right in front of him in a train derailment right before his inauguration. Franklin’s wife believed God was mad at him for taking the presidential job, and apparently Pierce was mad right back at Him because he was one of the few presidents who didn’t get sworn in with his hand on the Bible. The three historians who know anything about him remember him as a man completely overwhelmed by the challenges of his office. In 1856, when it was time for him to run for a second term, the Democratic Party flat-out didn’t renominate him.

Can you even imagine? You’re the damn president, and when reelection time comes your party sits you down and says, “Frank, we… we’ve just decided to go in another direction. It’s not anything you did; the kids have just got Buchananmania right now.” Rush Limbaugh’s heart would launch itself through his ribcage if that happened today.

I was delighted recently when a friend of mine designated Pierce the hipster president, primarily because it confirmed that someone else had heard of him. I think he may be my favorite president, not because he made a bunch of sly moves or because he was a misunderstood genius. (It sounds a lot more likely that he was a breathtaking drunken imbecile.) No, I love Frankie Pierce as a symbol. For one thing, he makes President Bush look like Franklin goddamn Roosevelt, and yet the damage he did does not even live on in anyone’s memory, so that’s sort of inspiring. More importantly though, he achieved the highest office in the land, landed the job that gets you put on money, and unless you’re from New Hampshire the name doesn’t ring a bell.

What chance can any of us have at immortality, or even fleeting public success, if Frankie Pierce doesn’t have any staying power? Even if you get published, what does that buy you? Ten years?

All of this actually cheers me up immensely, because it frees me from the notion that my words are some precious, delicate time capsule, that every whimsy that falls out of my word-hole has to be spun gold. Bad news: in the long run, none of it matters. Good news, though: in the long run, none of it matters. I don’t have to craft and hone every turn of phrase like I’m carving my statue for the park. It’s not one for the ages. Hell, it’ll be off the home page by Wednesday. Be free, little words! Scamper along and join your friends. Be as creative as you can with the time you have, because there won’t be any time devoted to you after you’re gone. Get yourself out there while you can enjoy people enjoying you.

Five years ago last month, I didn’t know my wife. Not in the way my dad doesn’t know my mom; I mean we literally had not been introduced five years ago last July. I was living in a perfectly lovely one-bedroom apartment on the edge of the city in a pretty great neighborhood. I could walk to the grocery store. I could walk to two different movie theaters. I was rarely walking to either of those places five years ago this month, however, because I was still in the midst of my “early retirement”: I’d abruptly quit my job in September of ‘02 and devoted most of the following year to a long term research project determining the effects of sleeping until 3:00 p.m. on the human body. (My hypothesis was proven: all of the effects are positive, particularly those that offset the effects of staring at the ceiling until 4:00 a.m., until one day at the six-month mark when a switch flips in your head and your whole life turns into the last ten minutes of The Shining.) When the funding for my project reached ramen noodle levels, I took a subsistence job doing digital work for the local historical society. This job was fun and felt Important but did not put money back in the coffers. My checks were the fiduciary equivalent of slamming on the brakes at 80 miles per hour; you’re still crashing, but maybe you can give people a chance to get out of the way before you roll the car.

This was the state I was in when someone introduced me to my future wife. Was I so successful a fraud that I seemed like a good match for someone– anyone?– at that stage? I would have told you that day that I was perfectly happy; was I hiding the cracks as effectively from everyone else as I was from myself? Was I being given this beautiful young woman as something to shoot for? Was she just supposed to occupy me until the white-coated men with the butterfly nets arrived? I have no idea. I do know that my wife was a fish out of water here in town, and that she was fed up and just about to move back home when she met me. The poor thing.

Instead, we went to the Mexican place, and then we went to X-Men 2 at the second-run movie house, and then before you knew it we were a married couple with a damn-near-one-year-old and a big ol’ house and hopes and plans and that goddamned cat. It’s been an instant. It’s been forever. I have no idea how we got here, but I’d never go back. Thank God you came along when you did, sweetness. You are a miracle; if you hadn’t come along when you did, I’d be under a bridge somewhere right now.

As I look back on those five years, there is one story from our wedding that I keep wanting to tell. If you were there, you heard it already; if you weren’t, you won’t believe it. I wrote it up for a creative writing class I took a couple of months ago; it is gargantuan, but I’m going to try to serialize it here over the next few days. By this time next week, I will have gotten The Shoes out of my system once and for all. Be on the lookout.

But now, of course, I’m also a parent, and it seems likely that the kidbrain is going to fade. As my little one gets less little with each passing day, I keep waiting for the point where I go from thinking everything my parents said was stupid to saying all of those stupid things.

It doesn’t seem to be happening.

This is on my mind today specifically because I’m wondering: when do you reach the point in your relationship with your children where you start to see them as field hands?

“…and it’s his job to cut the grass,” I overheard some tubby IT lazy-ass say to his coworker in our office this afternoon, “and, you know how it is, all I get is ‘it’s hawwwt outside, what are you gonna paaay me?’ And I’m like, ‘I pay you in room and board,’ amIright?”

Suddenly, I was having some kind of post-not-particularly-traumatic stress flashback to every Saturday in 1987, and I wanted nothing so badly as to sneak up behind this complete stranger, tug on his waistband, and empty a coffee cup into his pants while bellowing, “Cut your own ****ing grass, fatty.”

See, I’ve had the yard work foisted on me before. That was “my job.” When you’re a kid at home, where no labor law can save you, employment works a little differently. You don’t even have to be looking for work. One day, someone with a lot of frustration in his life walks into your room and sees you playing Nintendo and announces that you have a job. Your resume and interests are a non-issue, and asking about benefits or vacation time would be a mistake. It’s more like olden times, when you’d be walking down the street and someone would bludgeon you over the head and put you in a sack, and when you woke up you were in the navy.

My parents hated the task of mowing the lawn so much that they would sooner put their only son into regular close contact with gasoline and a rusty whirring blade, but my dad was stunned and affronted that I would even ask to be compensated for doing this task which he literally vowed never to do again the day he showed me how to start the mower. As an 11-year-old boy, that seemed insane to me, but now that I’m 33 I realize that it is actually ****ing insane. It is a sign of deteriorating mental health when grown people refuse to part with ten dollars in exchange for a manual laborer caring for their property.

If it’s your mess? Absolutely. If you splayed the Barbies all over the floor, yeah, you’re cleaning those up without a payday. If those are your Cheerios all over the tile, there isn’t going to be an awards ceremony after you put the broom away. If a cat lives in my house because of you, exactly one person in the house will be handling cat puke in the course of that vile creature’s lifetime. But I cannot imagine getting to a place in my life where I think, “I bought that, and I still want it, but I don’t feel like taking care of it. Ooh!: I’ll make a child do it. That way, it’s free.”

My money and my mouth are adjacent here. When my wife and I bought our house, the lack of a backyard was 40% of why I liked it. When we look at new houses, and I say, “My God, look at the size of that lawn,” the real estate agent thinks she has made a sale, but she is mistaken. At home, her kid is pouting as he power-washes the boat.

And I love the “room and board” thing. That takes me back. I wanted to go shake the guy’s hand today. “Wow. I can’t believe your child isn’t more grateful to you for meeting the bare minimum expectations keeping him out of state care. You both house and feed the baby you willingly had? And he has the nerve to wonder why your lectures about the value of a dollar do not apply to his conscripted labor? Sir, I don’t like to use the word ‘hero’ lightly, but your story reminds me of some kind of film. The Right Stuff. No, wait! Sorry. I mean Cinderella.”

Will I reach the point where I forget being a kid? Wanting things on days other than my birthday and Christmas, and wanting the means to obtain those things without shoplifting? Will I one day expect my daughter to kiss my ass in gratitude for providing her with the exact same standard of living I have provided her every day of her life, like she’s supposed to know any better? Will I one day grow irritated when she doesn’t say, “Oh, yes, father, I would love to spend my time away from school pacing an acre of land, cutting down plants I just watched you water all week expressly so they would grow this tall; I wouldn’t dream of asking for anything in return; you go watch the ballgame in the air conditioning”?

Even as I sit here, I can feel the wheels starting to turn. “My God, we can make the baby fold the laundry and go to the movies.”

—————————————————————–

In all his years of delivering pizzas to the suburban zombies of Deercrest Village, Charlie had probably driven past the man-made lake bordering the neighborhood three hundred times without ever giving it a second glance. Now that it was too late, now that he was standing at the edge of the water in the light of a full autumn moon, his eyes flitted over every last detail, taking in a list of his mistakes with photographic clarity.

From the troublingly well-lit cul de sac, in his state of mind, the lake had seemed like exactly what he needed just when he needed it the most. True, it wasn’t completely secluded– the manicured backyards of Mountain View Drive were plainly visible just across the water– but the dry, gray reeds and weeds on the north shore of the lake were just tall enough to conceal a grown man from the road, and in the heat of the moment that had seemed good enough. Now that his pulse had slowed a bit, though, Charlie scanned every ornate porch light and bay window on Mountain View Drive with gnawing dread.

I can see them, Charlie thought, which means they could see me. Could anyone be up at this hour…?

The smell, too, had seemed like an advantage at first. Fat tendrils of algae extended across the surface, strangling the life out of the fish the lake had been stocked with to attract retired fishermen to the neighborhood. Apparently not many had been attracted, since the lake was now mercilessly assaulting Charlie’s senses with the reeking algae and dead bass floating near the shore. Once his eyes had stopped watering, a wave of relief had surged through Charlie: if it smelled this bad already, nothing he hid here could possibly make it smell any worse.

Now, of course, the tepid green water had soaked into his sleeves and pants. He had been careless in his haste, had slipped on a bass in the darkness, and now he looked and smelled like a papier-mache sea monster. This would be difficult to explain. At the very least, he would need some air fresheners for the car now.

And then there was the mud.

Back at the house, Charlie had been so preoccupied with keeping even the tiniest speck of red away from his clothes, and now like an idiot here he was nearly up to his ankles in thick, murky mud, unmistakable coffee-colored gunk that surrounded the lake and would now trail behind him all the way home like a yapping puppy. A little bit of the lake would be with him all the way to the car, maybe even all the way back to the laundry room. Worse still, the once perfect man-made monstrosity– a little too symmetrical, a little too smooth around the edges, less like a lake than the dirtiest pool in the neighborhood– was now completely ringed by dozens and dozens of footprints from his large, distinctive work boots. The banks looked like a marching band had held a parade around the damn lake now. He couldn’t attract more attention to himself now if he waded out to the ducks sleeping in the water and wore one as a hat all the way home.

Charlie briefly thought about taking off his boots and tossing them in the lake before deciding muddy sock prints would be no better. Besides, in the silence of the night, with not so much as a breeze stirring the willows around the lake, his every footstep made a sound like a plunger in a toilet. Without traction, and with his luck, he’d probably end up stuck in the mud altogether at this rate. All he could do now was get a move on and make the best of it.

He took a deep breath and gazed at his reflection in the water. With the algae dancing just below the surface, for a moment it was as if he had glimpsed a monster from the depths. He shuddered and quickly put it out of his mind. The feeling in his chest would pass in time. For now, there was still work to be done.

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)

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

One symptom of that tendency is that lately I’ve been reviewing the movie Grindhouse at the drop of a hat, despite the fact that I have never seen the movie Grindhouse. Nobody has asked me what I thought of it, or if I saw it, or if I wanted to see it. I just hear the word, and off I go. It has touched something deep inside me; it’s like when a ham sandwich makes you throw up, and then for two years you can’t even look at a ham sandwich again.

I have seen every movie Quentin Tarantino ever made (I saw Four Rooms) and have more-or-less accidentally seen almost all of Robert Rodriguez’s ouevre. We put Kill Bill on our wedding gift registry. But I took one look at this thing and on an immediate, primal level, something in my brain instantly went, “Ugh, no. No! Absolutely not.”

Maybe that midwestern conservatism I’ve always been warned about is starting to kick in, but after Kill Bill and Carla Gugino in Sin City, maybe I’ve just officially reached my quota for how many women I can watch these two men graphically mutilate. You had me at “machine gun leg,” by which I mean you had me buying tickets for that Ninja Turtle movie.

I’ve recently been told it’s not that bad within the context of the movie. “The machine gun leg makes sense in the context of the bubbling genitalia” is not what they should put on the poster to draw in the skeptics.

Plus… how long is it going to be before these guys make a second film? A retro pastiche of style-over-substance moments that pay tribute to bad movies I never saw in theaters that closed before I was born 1,000 miles away, featuring appalling scenes of violence (usually against women) punctuating long, apropos-of-nothing stretches of pop culture-referencing dialogue and featuring one of the director’s favorite faded stars from a bygone era. I understand the working title was Every Quentin Tarantino Movie Ever.

You know what was interesting about grindhouse movies?: they didn’t cost $70 million. There are film students right now with grand epics in their heads, fresh, unique visions, forced to slum it on hand-me-down DV because it’s all they have access to, and then they turn on their televisions just in time to hear Quentin on a talk show going, “Yeah, it’s great! We added scratches to the film; reels are missing; we really spared no expense to make it look like shit.” Magnificent. You’re the next Orson Welles.

By no means do I mean to say that it was great of him to call college women “nappy-headed hos” because they won some basketball games. It was dickery that the team will get to carry around now.

“We did it ladies! We’re gonna go all the way to the finals! This is our moment!… Who did what? ‘Nappy-headed’? Oh, well, great. Now I get to remember that every time I remember this. Whew, that was a close one; almost had a moment of pure happiness in my life for a second. Print out the transcript; I’ll make room in my scrapbook. Wonderful. Outstanding.”

But here’s the thing: I listen to the audio of the NBC Nightly News as a podcast while I’m at work every morning. I got a couple of days behind, so I started today by listening to Monday’s news and was surprised to hear that Imus was that day’s top story.

“Wow, people are a lot more upset about that two seconds of not-especially-popular radio than I thought. Insulted the hell out of those basketball players, though. So… did we ever win those wars? What ever happened with those?… Top story. Really. Huh.”

So I had my little moment with my headphones, gleaned whatever news I could out of the show before Brian Williams moved on to the daily Boomer-pandering bullshit health story about prostates or whatever and I gave up on him. I clicked ahead to the next day’s edition of the Nightly News.

And Imus was the top story again.

More than the top story, actually. The podcast has no commercials, making it easy to see by checking the little countdown at the bottom of my iPod screen that, of the 20-21 minutes of content that was on the air last night, the Rutgers basketball team talking about how the bad Don Imus man huwt their feewings took up literally half of the goddamn national newscast for the day.

Empirically. 11 of the 21 minutes. They ran the Rutgers press conference, where the coach said, “They are young ladies of class, distinction. They are articulate, they are gifted. They are God’s representatives in every sense of the word” (the center then healed a leper with her tears of outrage) and then after running the coach’s press conference Brian Williams interviewed the coach in case she left anything out of the huge clip he had just played.

This was not the local Action News Team, with their Cover Story on puppy hoarding or fighting flab; these are the people who ostensibly are on the air to tell you, as a nation, everything important that happened today.

As I understand it, the story that merited this level of coverage was “Famous Douchebag Paid to be a Douchebag Every Day Starts Douchebagging It Up Again.” America, sucker-punched! If Howard Stern belches on the air tomorrow, I’m not sure we’ll be able to trust anyone anymore.

Oh, won’t someone please devote an episode of “Dateline” to what Ann Coulter thinks of all this?

At the end of the 11 minutes, before the commercial break, Brian Williams gravely intoned, “We have a lot of ground to cover here as Nightly News continues.” Oh?

I say this not because I think unsupervised teens spend mad mall money; in fact, I imagine teens are actually terrible customers, just going to the mall to roam around in indecent clothing and listen to that hippity-hop music too loud on their confounded i-Pop contraptions and talk about YouTubes.

The thing is, the Galleria alerted the media, ostensibly in the hope that older, upscale customers would respond to the information by saying, “Hmm! The mall is safe for us crusty, mature consumers again,” but I contend that those people listened to this news and distinctly heard, “people are getting murdered at the Galleria every day.”

Which is not remotely true, incidentally. As far as I can tell, the Galleria has experienced two noteworthy incidents in the last year: a lengthy scuffle in November and a teen shouting match at the beginning of this month. (Two more than usual, yes, but one year not too long ago the dishwasher at the Galleria Houlihan’s carjacked a patron, and they didn’t respond by closing down all their restaurants.) The key words above are “two,” “scuffle,” and “shouting.”

Last weekend at the grocery store, the day the story broke, I heard the following conversation between two cashiers:

“You can’t go to the mall anymore, squirt.”

“What?”

“Kids can’t go to the Galleria anymore.”

“Yes they can!”

“Dude, it’s right there on the front page of the paper.”

(glances at paper) “Aw, man! I can’t even go to the mall anymore! That sucks. I guess it’s because of all the gang fights they’ve been having there. My brother’s friend heard shots fired a couple weeks ago.”

“Shots?!”

“Well, somebody had to kill that leopard.”

In a neighborhood not too far from my own, there was once a part of town called Gaslight Square. In the early sixties, it would not be unreasonable to say that this neighborhood was on the cusp of becoming one of America’s hippest cultural hotspots (see the link if you think I’m blowing smoke). Gaslight Square vanished like the Roanoke Colony only a few years after its heyday. When you read first person accounts of its decline, crime is always cited as the reason, but not in the way you’d think. The way it’s remembered by the people who were there, people stopped coming to Gaslight Square not because there was an increase in crime, but because there was a single shooting a block away that the local media reported like a Son of Sam murder spree. It was the appearance of a crime spree that killed the business. The Galleria could have learned a valuable lesson from this, if it weren’t for the fact that nobody remembers Gaslight Square existed.

Well, no, not the East Side. The place that’s trademarked “The Happiest Place on Earth.” Walt’s place.

If I had to go to Disneyworld for every vacation until I died, I don’t think I’d have any problem with that. Which is good, because I do have to. Give my wife or her siblings a blank piece of paper and say, “Draw me a map of the United States,” and they would draw an inaccurately large blob labeled “Cape Girardeau,” a blob labeled “DISNEY,” and a narrow Gaza-like line connecting them. (On the edge of the Cape blob, there would be an area marked “St. Louis,” but it would be like the unknown, New World parts of those maps from the 16th century. There would be a picture of a dragon on St. Louis, or a sea monster eating a minivan.)

Disneyworld seems like it ought to be the kind of thing I would hate, all artificial smiles and cheerful authoritarianism, but once you’ve been acclimated after a few hours it’s easy to fall for a place where everything is always clean and everywhere you go people have to be nice to you. Those are some promises your trip to Europe is not prepared to keep. (Even strangers on the street are friendly; after all, they’re all on vacation.) I would occasionally be taking a leisurely stroll by a lovely beach that had been put there by bulldozers, alone in the middle of the night but completely safe and comfortable, thinking, “Sure, there are probably three cameras fixed on me right now, but this is lovely! There isn’t even any trash on the sidewalk, and the monorails are running on time. Fascism might just work if we put Goofy in charge. The Disney Goofy, I mean.”

So for a week, thousands of people were paid to make sure I was having a good time, and I gladly obliged them. The missus and I drove to Orlando with all of my in-laws and a couple of our friends. The next sentence should read “three people were killed, four injured,” but in fact everyone had a good time together for more or less the entire trip. We were surrounded by pirates and six foot chipmunks, and I think that was the most astonishing thing I saw all week. I took it as a good sign that, as the trip wound down, we were trying to schedule opportunities to see more of the people we came with, as opposed to saying things like, “If she pops her gum one more time, I’m pushing her out of Dumbo to her death.”

If you find yourself headed to Walt Country, I strongly advise you to take my wife and her family with you as sherpas. One advantage to taking the same vacation over and over and over and over and over and over again is that, by the tenth time, you have honed your primal instincts like some sort of prehistoric mammoth hunter to ensure that you will never wait in a line again. “Okay! We get a FastPass for the Tower of Terror, check the line for the Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, and make our way over to the MGM Movie Ride. By the time we get out, the parade should be starting, and after that our reservations at the Sci-Fi Diner should be ready. Then it’s on to the Tower of Terror, after which the roller coaster line should be down due to the 2:35 Brat Siesta, and then funnel cakes to celebrate our seventh consecutive hour of constant uninterrupted motion. Then it’s off to the First Aid station.” My vacation was more efficient than my office.

I don’t know quite what to make of the Aerosmith Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster. I guess I’m supposed to take the sight of them all over a Disney theme park ride as a definitive sign that Aerosmith has given up even the pretense of being “hard core”? Or should I have gleaned that from that Armageddon song and, I guess, everything after that Armageddon song? At the same time, I’m not really sure where Disney’s head was at, either. [easy cryogenically-frozen Walt head joke here] There’s more to being family-friendly than just sort of getting old and deciding you are. As you stand in line for the ride, and as you ride it, speakers blast Aerosmith songs nonstop. A recovering high school classic rocker like me cannot help looking at the kids in the line with their mouse-eared balloons and mouse-eared hats and mouse-eared mouse dolls and think, “Has anyone running this park ever listened to these lyrics? Because I’m almost positive this song is about cunnilingus. It truly is a magic kingdom.”

Of course, Disneyworld is completely wasted on children anyway, but that doesn’t seem to stop people from bringing them. It’s always fascinating to observe the human child in this, its natural habitat. I learned a lot from watching how kids behave at Disneyworld, but my wife and I have decided we’re probably going to go ahead and have some anyway.
In Walt Disney World, you have a place that has been designed from water fountain to Space Mountain for the sole, overriding, sacred purpose of making all children’s dreams come true. After careful observation, it is my conclusion that having all their dreams come true makes children miserable and obnoxious. Obviously the only way I can make my children truly happy is to frustrate them at every turn. At least if they’re anything like me.

At about 10:30 one morning at Disney/MGM Studios, I heard a young boy no older than seven sneer at his mother, “Mooooom, I’m starving! What are you gonna get me, nothing?!” I’m not sure text does the quote justice; I only hope I did when I repeated it in a whiny falsetto three times a day for the rest of the trip.

I think Disney is missing out on a real revenue stream from disgruntled adults who, as responsible parents, can’t react to that kind of behavior in public the way they’d like to. Every street corner in Disneyworld should have a villain or some other sour character standing on it under a sign: GRUMPY THE DWARF KICKS YOUR CHILD TWICE IN THE SHINS, $5. You don’t even have to take your child over for the kicking; they just have to believe you could. Tantrums would go way down.

“What are you gonna get me, nothin‘?!” was my favorite quote of the trip. My mother-in-law’s, something you could only hear in Epcot: a little girl crying, “But I don’t wanna go to China!” My wife’s was predictably something cuter, the precocious little girl overheard on the way back to the shuttle, “When we get back to the room, I know what I’m gonna do: take off my shoes and sit down.”

My second favorite quote of the week can’t really be counted since it was indecipherable gibberish. My only disappointment on the trip was getting close, so tantalizingly close, to riding on Splash Mountain, only to have it shut down for half an hour due to some technical difficulty/horrible, disfiguring accident on the tracks. (They were vague.) The signs along the route of the line said we had a 25-minute wait; we blew through the line in 8 minutes, only to grind to a halt at the final turnstile. The cheerful “cast member” told us there would be a slight delay as they worked on the problem, but her cheer was undercut by the announcements from the technicians, which we could hear coming from some combination middle school PA system/Jack in the Box drive-thru clown somewhere. “Splash Mountain, releasing log echo niner, mimsy mopsy mumble, stand clear.” Every two minutes, “Splash Mountain, something something, stand clear.” Then they’d release a handful of car/log things onto the tracks, and away they would go… never to return. In half an hour, we saw a lot of logs leave, but none ever came back. Later, we saw people leaving the ride looking as though Brer Fox had tried to drown them.

In case you’re unfamiliar, Splash Mountain is a log flume/roller coaster which has a Brer Rabbit, Song of the South theme. Disney has made 497 movies they could use as a ride theme, but in the 1990s they chose the one about the happy slave that is too offensive to mention by name. God forbid they retire that one and make it a Rescuers ride or something. I wonder if that was designed by the same guy who approved the Aerosmith ride.

I have one unanswered question from the trip. We finished our week with the Hall of Presidents, where robot Commanders in Chief abruptly stand up and begin gesticulating and talking about America. The thing is, at the end of the show the current President gives a long robot speech that was recorded by the flesh president himself. I have to know: where on the president’s inauguration schedule is this task? “After the swearing in, you’ll go back to the residence and get the nuclear launch codes. Your briefing on the truth behind Area 51 is at 2:00. Oh, and at 3:30 Mickey Mouse will be here to record your robot speech.” What do they do if the president says, “**** my robot speech”? I guess we’ll find out if McCain wins.

Tesco condemned for selling pole dancing toy

Quote of the day:

“This will be sold to four, five and six-year olds. This is a most dangerous toy that will contribute towards destroying children’s innocence.”

THE SKY IS FALLING!

I remember those good old days when I was five and would walk unaccompanied into Walgreens. I would stroll up to the counter with my stripper pole and champagne, buying them with the money which I did have from my job for five year olds.

“Oy, where’s your mummy?” would ask the British shopkeep.

“Clam up,” I would reply, “and hand over the hooch before ya get a knuckle sandwich, see?” Then the compliant shopkeep would do whatever she was told by a small child, and I would drive my car for five year olds home.

If an adult actually did see a portable stripper pole and say, “You know who would love that? The four year old,” what do you think the four year old would do with it?

a) use it as a pretend mic stand
b) weaponize it
c) use it and a blanket to make a tent
d) not know what the **** it is, because she was four years old

It’s the same violent video game nonsense all over again.

The other night, as two-income households are wont to do at the end of a mutually hard workday, the wife and I ordered some pizza. When the pizza eventually arrived, we both took our respective duties: my wife went to the door to pay the good man, and I went to chase the cat. “Our” cat, in case I’ve never said so here, is an ill-tempered malcontent who hates all human life and reacts to encounters with it in, shall we say, unpredictable ways. (Some of my friends cite this as proof that pets take after their masters, but you know what?, f*** those a-holes.) The first time I came to my wife’s apartment and met her cat, he didn’t claw my face off, and on that basis she knew she would marry me someday. So I have to keep him away from the front door whenever it’s open; the theory is that he’ll see someone at the door, become terrified of them, and in his terror he will run directly towards them and outside into the street, where a truck will terrify him causing him to run under it.

This theory cannot really be scientifically verified. It’s sort of my wife’s theory more than mine. Pick your battles.

Anyway! I have to chase the cat upstairs, so I do. I got him up there last night when the pizza came and was soothing his misanthropy when I heard my wife talking to the pizza guy about what a nice place we have. At length. As I listened, it slowly dawned on me that my wife was doing her usual duty as Auxiliary Real Estate Cadet First Class, talking up the place and selling it to a curious party. In my significantly more jaded mind, however, it quickly began to seem clear that what had actually happened was a complete stranger had just come to our door, and she was now describing to him our security system’s various weaknesses.

“You all totally live on top of each other, right? And with these alarm systems… man, it must be so noisy.”

“Oh, no, not at all. Our insulation is so advanced and thick that stuff happens right next door and we never even hear it. Sometimes, people accidentally set off their alarms and we don’t even notice for like half an hour.”

I tried to lunge down the stairs, crying out, “Big dog! Kitchen guns!” but by the time I got there, he was making change and my words were more like, “Guh fuh buh! Nuh nuh. Pant, pant. No hurty.”

Immediately after he left, I explained to my wife why she doesn’t get to answer the door ever again, and then spent the next half hour regretting the paranoia tsunami I had just caused and reassuring her it was probably nothing. (Still, just to be on the safe side: tell the CSI guys that it was the Papa John’s guy delivering at 6:45 on 3/7, or someone he knows. My estate thanks you.) The problem isn’t that my wife grew up on Sunnybrook Farm, but that she married a frustrated criminal mastermind. When local-boy-made-evil Michael Devlin (from whom I am two degrees of separation) was arrested for kidnapping those kids, there was briefly a completely untrue rumor that he was a pizza delivery guy; talk radio know-nothings speculated that, as he went door to door with his pies, he was scouting out houses with kids to swipe. When I heard this speculation, this monstrous speculation, I confess that my first thought was, “Oh my God, that’s brilliant. You have to give it up for the ingenuity.”

And that is not even in the top 10 reasons why I’m going to hell. Pray for me.

If you have spent a lot of time in the cubicle-resplendent workplace, you have probably been in meetings like these, meetings at which 60% of the people in attendance are only there in the event that the three people who called the meeting might have a question they can answer; it is the professional equivalent of warming the bench. These meetings are typically scheduled for an hour but run long every time because the first fifteen minutes are spent listening to beeps on the speakerphone, asking “Who just joined us on the conference bridge?” and then writing that person’s name down. If you’ve worked in an office, I’m not painting you an exotic word vista here. “I’m on a call” is Biz English for “I am playing solitaire with my head cocked.”

So, I ended up in this series of meetings that takes place twice a week until February. (I imagine this project’s weekly meetings will be replaced in February by a “what went wrong with this project?” meeting, which I will attend once just long enough to say, “This.”) The other day, the guy who schedules and organizes the meeting was not in attendance.

“Steve had to step out,” said his surrogate. “Apparently his newborn had some sort of sudden medical emergency and had to be rushed to the doctor, so he will obviously not be able to join us.”

“No, I’m here,” said a voice from the speakerphone. “This is Steve. I’ll occasionally have to go on ‘mute’ while I talk to the doctors. So, first item on the agenda: where do we stand on infrastructure?”

Thinking about this fills me with an overwhelming urge to steal and launch a missile at whatever satellite facilitates Blackberries. There is no project, no launch date, no deadline that could cause me to even be curious about a project meeting while my baby was being rushed to the doctor, and my baby is imaginary. The more time I spend participating in this culture and witnessing its effects, the more astonished I am by the colossal loss of perspective and essential humanity that everyone around me seems comfortable with. It’s hard not to despair. When I go home at night and hug my wife, I’m surprised our chests don’t make a clanging noise.

You know how department stores and marketers supposedly try to trot Christmas out earlier and earlier every year? Every year, one of your older relatives will come home from a trip to Crate and Freaking Barrel (to buy the Trading Spaces Home Collection’s Automatic S’more Maker Cleaner and Fondue Set Cozy) and sigh, “Lordy, they had out the Christmas trees! Right out front, they were, plain as you please. Wreathes and Santas and whatnot already out for sale, with the Columbus Day decorations not even taken down yet. Lordy. There oughtta be a law. It gets a little less special every year, by cracky.”

Well, Aunt Getrude is right. Christmas is probably starting just a little earlier every year. And that is great, so you can tell her from me to zip it up.

I couldn’t care less if retailers are just trying to milk a few more dollars out of me (my wife has rendered that feat quite impossible). I love Christmas, if memory serves, but every year since the yoke of the working man has been placed on my stooped shoulders the holiday season has passed faster and faster. The idea of the old childhood Advent calendar that never seemed to count down the days fast enough seems like some kind of absurd joke to me now; I wouldn’t even have time to put the candy behind the little doors. Last year, the entire winter passed in the time it took me to wish one person well. “Happy Thanksmastine’s Day!”

If this year is anything like the last few, I expect that I’ll realize on the 22nd that I never got around to taking out the Christmas CDs and think, “Well, if I’m going to spend any part of my favorite time of year enjoying myself, I’d better get the Christmas spirit right now,” and then undergo the psychological equivalent of trying to grow a beard by tomorrow. If creeping the Holiday Season starting line up a few feet gives me a chance to take a breath and drink some damn nog, then I hope they start in September next year, how d’ya like them apples, Gertrude? Let’s make it August and stretch our legs a bit. Burl Ives’ estate could use the money.

Now, the bitching about it every year, that I wish would start a little later. “Holy Jesus Almighty! They’re a’gonna make us think about sugarplums and happy children for three extra weeks a year; these must be the End Times. People selling goods and services under the guise of joy to the world and peace on earth; this is the worst thing that has ever happened to the culture. What ever happened to Veteran’s Day? What ever happened to Grammy fever?”

St. Louis Named Most Dangerous U.S. City

It’s your own fault for enjoying yourselves downtown. I guess we just can’t have nice things.

My first thought upon hearing this (first thing this morning; happy Monday!) was, “Hey, I’m going to get e-mail from my mother-in-law today.” After that, though, all I could think was, “If this is the most dangerous city in America, then way to go, America.” Honestly, when you next encounter one of my fellow city folk, ask them: Do you feel 20% more endangered this year? My guess is that they probably will not say yes. Because they’ll be stabbing you.

No, they won’t. This sort of thing has come up before, and it’s always the same b.s. numbers from the same b.s. guy; the mayor has already taken him apart the same way I wanted to, except with less cursing. Every place has good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods; it’s just that, in addition to those things, St. Louis also has forefathers who drew an imaginary line around a lot of the good neighborhoods 100 years ago and declared that they weren’t officially part of the city. (At the time, the good neighborhoods were the bad neighborhoods and vice versa. Sort of. It’s complicated. Just try to take the long view next time you’re redrawing your borders. That’s my advice to you.)

It just kills me because the city is like a different planet than it was when I was in college. We routinely go to a restaurant near my old school that’s in a neighborhood I would not have run through in broad daylight wearing kevlar with a military escort ten years ago, and now I park my car on the street and stand out front at 10:00 at night. There’s been such a huge resurgence, and then some airspender like this comes along and kicks the legs out from under everybody.

I noticed, by the way, that New Orleans is nowhere on the list. Apparently the list is only comprised of those cities that chose to release their crime stats. I think I have an efficient way to fix our problem.

Christmas is coming, but do not get this for me; I will have it four minutes after it is released. I have wanted exactly this for years. I can’t remember the last time anything online or off made me shout, “Oh f*** yeah.”

Is that sad?

I don’t care.

We are finally reaching the last stage before conventional DVDs become obsolete: all of the shows that were released in “Best Of” compilations from Time-Life by people who signed video deals without realizing where the medium was going are finally straightening themselves out and hopping aboard the money train. (“You can get complete seasons of ‘Mork and Mindy’ but not ‘Star Trek’? I mean… I don’t want ‘Star Trek,’ but that seems apostate or something.”) When the Muppet Show arrived, I knew everything was going to be okay.

I think the reason this DVD set excites me so much is that, although it is something I’ve awaited hungrily for ages, I honestly never thought I was actually going to get it. SNL has wisely been chopped up into bite-sized clip shows on video for years to camouflage what a crapshoot the typical episode has always been, and I was resigned to the idea that the Powers That Be would continue to play this shell game with America’s memory forever. All of those sketches from 12:45 and regrettable musical acts have been disappeared into the dustbin of nostalgia, leaving only the classic moments and a vague, whispering sense that five years of writing produced one good hour of material.

I was an impressionable youngster when Saturday Night Live was going through one of its periodic renaissances, one of the “SNL’s back!” peaks that briefly arise between longer “Saturday Night Dead” valleys. This, combined with the fact that Nick at Nite began showing the ’70s reruns (in 20-minute “Best Of” clip format, naturally) at around the same time, made a fan out of me at that age when enthusiasm is particularly enthusiastic. Though the show had already morphed from rebellion to institution as early as the ’80s, they were still doing the kinds of things on TV that got you sent to bed early on a weekend. (How many kids my age were inconvenienced for months because their moms overheard that Robin Williams opening monologue?) A little nostalgia for those days of sneaking TV goes a long way; I still half-watch the show practically every week, even though it abandoned brief peaks and deep valleys years ago in favor of a plateau of pleasant irrelevance. It’s like being married for 30 years; the show doesn’t excite me like it used to, but we’ve had a good comfortable thing going for so long now I wouldn’t know how to leave.

It seems like it should be the best show on television, doesn’t it? The typical TV show takes forever to produce, and by the time the producers find out people hate what they’re doing they’ve already got half a season more of it in the can. SNL should have the most flexibility of anything going; they can hear the audience, see the reviews, fire the whole staff and be back in a few days with the leanest, juiciest meat from a whole different cow. Frequent flyer miles ought to be shooting out of the pockets on the seat of their pants, yet in many ways SNL can be the most staid thing on TV. They don’t have bad episodes; they have terrible eras. (Funny SNL: that Bass-o-Matic sketch. Unfunny SNL: 1994-1997.) They don’t even have a central premise they have to stick to; they can do an entirely new show every week; and yet they have these ice ages of Bad. One of the most interesting things about these complete seasons on DVD will be seeing what they do when they get to 1981.

But whenever anybody is lamenting (or acknowledging) the state of SNL, it is always in comparison to those first five years, when the show really was unlike anything on TV and everyone involved was like a part-time Beatle. Those years have fascinated me since I was young, in part because I eventually realized that while I thought I loved those shows, I hadn’t actually seen them. I had seen 20-minute Nick at Nite nuggets culled from a 90-minute show and edited to be less ’70s-topical and more suitable for a general audience. “Ready for prime time,” as their marketing wizzes might put it. I’d seen plenty of Coneheads in my day, but I’d never seen the bits about the cast being strung out on heroin or the undoubtedly side-splitting material about President Carter trying to get America to convert to the metric system.

The crapshoot and the dated stuff excised from the reruns is exactly what I’m looking most forward to, especially the dated stuff. I am fascinated by the end of the ’70s and dawn of the ’80s, years for which I was there but unaware.

Actually, some of my earliest memories are of Saturday Night Live, specifically being f***ing horrified by it. I will never forget coming into the room one weekend long after my bedtime just in time to see Dan Aykroyd dressed in drag bleeding to death. Oh, when you’re three or four, there is nothing funnier than a man bleeding to death while no one helps him. We laughed and laughed. The drunk driving parody where Steve Martin runs over a kid with a steamroller was another childhood highlight. The less said about Mr. Bill, the better.

I love the primary sources, the biopsies of the culture sliced out and tucked away in formaldehyde. I love watching old movies or reading old comics and seeing the pop culture references that mean absolutely nothing now. Those old Bugs Bunny cartoons full of caricatures of no-longer famous people? “Abbott & Costello” radio shows? Forget about it. I’m all yours. I bought the “Star Wars Holiday Special” at a convention years ago, and while I’ve never watched the entire thing without cracking I could sit in front of the TV all night watching the 1978 commercials that are on the tape. (The “Union Yes!” ones in particular seem more otherworldly now than an hour of Wookies.) On one of the rare occasions I saw a longer rerun of the original SNL (E! used to show versions that only had 1/3rd of the episode deleted, instead of Nick at Nite’s 2/3rds) they were showing some sketch about Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture or something. I was paralyzed until the commercial break.

Love your Daily Show, because it will only be funny today and you will never, ever see it again. Except for when they rerun it three times tomorrow. After that, though, poof. Enjoy it while it lasts.

So yes, lame or not I will be counting the days until I get my 1975 box set. I will get to see old things with new eyes. I will get to understand the generation before mine from a whole new perspective. I will get to see a sacred cow through the veil of nostalgia, warts and all. I will dance around my house with my Best Buy bag. I will get weary two discs in and put the rest of the box on a shelf for a year and a half. But I will enjoy the enthusiasm while it lasts.

My dad and I get together sometimes after work to grab a bite and gab like two old men at a bar. Sometimes, I will be at these dinners with my father and (only after provocation) launch into a lengthy monologue challenging his political or religious misconceptions using the most cogent and devastating language in my arsenal. After I finish these philosophical Sherman’s Marches and stop to breathe, proud of the way I have just blown an old man’s mind, my father always says the same thing: “You said ‘umm’ or ‘uhh’ somewhere between 21 and 23 times.” Sometimes, to turn this into a complete body slam, he will pause first just long enough to give me the fleeting hope that he was listening to me at all.

I’m not bothered by “umm.” In fact, I think people who “umm” are brilliant. They only have to do that because they think so deeply when they talk that their mouths lose synch.

There is one that drives me cuckoo-go-nutty, though, one that I’ve never heard anyone else discuss.

People of earth: when you are speaking and use a gerund, the “-ing” is pronounced “-ing.” It’s not “-een.” It’s f***ing “-ing.”

I find this speech tic to be the conversational equivalent of that intractable piece of popcorn kernel stuck between your tooth and gum; when I’m trying to listen to an -eener, I find it impossible to think about anything else.

“Hey, I’ve been lookeen for you. Where are you goeen? Are you headeen over to the meeteen?” “Oh, no. The meeteen was cancelled, so I’m going to the meeting.”

Bright, articulate people speak this way. (I think they’re bright and articulate; I’ve never heard a word they’ve said.) They say “swing”; they say “thing”; they say “writeen.” It’s an unsung epidemic.

(My theory is that, as children of the fifties raising children of the eighties, my friends’ parents were still used to living in a world where absolute filth was not broadcast over public airwaves. Or were negligent drunks or something. Looking back raises more questions than it answers. Anyway.)

The two films are very different snapshots of the comedian: the first was filmed just as he was reaching the pinnacle of his superstardom, and the second was filmed at the cusp of his inevitable decline, at that slow, awful cranking peak of the roller coaster where you’re as high as you’re going to get before your gut drops out and everyone starts screaming. Delirious was right after 48 Hours, the film that made him a household name despite being a lot more awful than you remember it being. Raw came right as he started cashing those sequel checks and got jaded about everyone around him. In both cases, you can hear his life bulging at the corners of his material.

Despite their differences, there was one similarity between the two movies that struck me in 2006: in both, Eddie needs to lead off strong and therefore decides to kick off the night with his f@gg*t material. In Delirious, the first words out of his mouth are a warning to the f@gg*ts not to check out his rump while he’s pacing the stage. Then for a good five minutes, it’s Hollywood f@gg*ts, f@gg*ts giving you AIDS by kissing you, f@gg*ts, f@gg*ts, f@gg*ts.

But as I listened, I couldn’t escape making note of the fact that, while Eddie Murphy is on stage stereotyping homosexuality within an inch of its life, he is dressed like this:

Looking through the prism of history, I think that might be the funniest thing about the movies.

(In these photos, Eddie’s microphones obscure the fact that he is bare-chested under his skintight leather suits, wearing only a spectacular golden medallion. Both movies are on YouTube.)

With the fall television season upon us, many of you will undoubtedly be watching NBC in the near future. When you do, look down in the bottom left hand corner of your screen. No matter what time of day, no matter what you are watching, you will always see this:

This symbol, called a “bug,” used to be used by the network to tell you which channel you personally turned on with your own goddamned hand, because market research apparently suggests you are a foil-chewing imbecile. Even if you did manage to figure out how you got the picture box to make Jason Lee, you might forget unless it said “NBC” on the screen somewhere at all times. You might grow confused and start running into the wall over and over again.

Now, as my wife pointed out this evening, the bug reminds you at all times that [inscrutable peacock symbol].com.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to leave it here just to make myself feel better:

This is for no one. Any prospective visitor to NBC.com who did not arrive in Doc Brown’s Delorean is pretty sure that, in 2006, NBC has a web site, and if they want to get there, they f***ing well know how. Adding that “.com” in 2006 begs the question, “What, no ‘cyber-’?”

And even as I type this, I can hear the smug marketers saying, “Tsk! Foolish eyeballs, you just don’t understand branding.” I understand branding perfectly well: you put this bug on every show all day long, and looking at it makes me want to plunge a red hot iron into your ass. Branding.

Winding down the week by browsing the news, I took a moment against my better judgement to glance at Yahoo’s Most Popular News Images of the day. One of them was this:

First of all, yes, obviously. “Awwww.” Absolutely. But why? Why? Why is it a news photo? What about it is– bin Laden is not hiding inside the peanut. Squirrels are not on the front pages for spreading a disease, at least not a new one. The story is not about some sort of interspecies marriage initiative gaining traction on the east coast. It’s a random guy in his backyard touching mouths with a wild rodent. That right there is fetish photography at best.

But I don’t even care about that. I’m used to that. Half of the week, Yahoo’s news photos are 50% burn victims, 25% bikinis, and 25% cute baby kitties. Why is it a news photo?: because it is a photo taken by someone working for the news. He hands in the memory card from the Prime Minister’s press conference, it also has a shot of a monkey chasing a balloon he saw on the way there, and both of ‘em go out on the f***ing wire. Some day, you will see somebody’s nephew’s birthday party on the AP wire between Rumsfeld and a bonobo. Fine. That’s where we are. But what I keep staring at is this part:

Do you see that? Do you see that “(R)”? I– now, I don’t– I’m having a hard time fitting it into my head. But I’m pretty sure the caption is telling me that a squirrel is taking food from a human, and the human is the one on the right.

I just need to know someone else sees it.

This is not a high school newspaper. It is not distributed on the moons of Rigel 7. “Oh, these Earthers all look alike to me, with their two legs and their two ears…. Oh, I see. Al’s the one on the right.”

By reputation– nay, by job description– ninjas are an elite brotherhood of stealthy, silent assassins. Ask any Eastern cultural expert or eleven-year-old boy and they will all tell you the same thing: a ninja is supposed to be such a badass that one of them can creep in through the top floor window or mail slot like Samurai Santa with his nunchuks and his little throwing stars and take out an entire armed installation without even tripping the alarm.

So why is it that every time you see a ninja fight, these shadow assassins are travelling in a pack of 400 clods and attacking like an elephant stampede? And then dying? Come on, ninjas. It’s just Daredevil.

S***, Wolverine, look ou– oh, hang on, it’s just 200 ninjas. Let me know when you’re done.

I had to do something at work this morning that I imagine other people are used to, but which I don’t think I’ve had to do for years (if ever). There’s a project our company is working on that won’t be finished and ready for release until roughly next spring. Unfortunately, one of the companies working with us on the thing spilled news of its existence to the press (the president is right; these leaks are tearing our country apart!) forcing us to whip all sorts of things together now in a manner my grandmother would have called “higgeldy-piggeldy.” This includes a web site that did not exist three days ago but is today the most important thing in the most important mind in the most important wood-paneled, leather-chaired, lushly carpeted office in the company because the papers mentioned it.

As a result, people are calling me wondering why one of the widgets (made by an outside company) isn’t ready yet. The answer is “because it wasn’t due until spring, and your agitated phone call marks the first moment of my life I have ever heard of the widget, the product, or you.” The outside company reported that it would take two days to complete the widget, since they’re only hearing about it now. The Powers That Be, upon hearing of this timeline, declared a two-day wait to be “just ridiculous.”

It was at this point when I found myself in an unusual position: it became my job to call the other company and demand that we get our widget today, ASAP, because a two-day widget wait was just ridiculous, I mean seriously, come on you guys, get real, this is just, I mean come on. It was my job to make this call and express this sentiment as vehemently as possible while not believing it at all, while believing in my heart that this big deal was in fact one of the littlest deals since Paris Hilton released an album. The two days of waiting was completely reasonable; no matter how much the Powers wanted to look at the widget, we did not in fact need it at all; the gizmo that the widget plugs into is currently a sign reading, “COMING SOON: GIZMO,” and even the sign isn’t finished being painted yet.

But it’s important to the three guys over in the office, so I had to call a perfectly nice man who did nothing wrong and try very hard to communicate irritation on the one rare occasion when I wasn’t feeling any. I found it surprisingly taxing.

“Hello, Bill’s Receptionist, yes. I am very important and need to speak with Bill immediately, in the broadest sense of the word ‘need.’ I have what I’ve been asked to call an urgent problem with Bill. Lives are… lives are in the balance. Over here. Because it definitely sounded like my coworker was going to have some kind of health problem if this went on much longer. Hello, Bill? Yes. We need the widget right this minute. Dammit. The failure of your telepathy to foresee this need is really… just… so disappointing. That widget is an inexplicably vital part of something that, in addition to not curing cancer, fighting terror, or improving lives in any measurable way, will not be available for several months. So, you need to resolve this right this minute!… or else… nothing bad that I can put my finger on will happen. Call me back the minute this is done! Asap, and so on! Harrumph!”

They say that flight attendant is actually one of the hardest jobs you can have, not because of what you’re expected to do but because your job description requires you to be friendly, pleasant, and calm for the entire time you’re doing it. “Emotional labor,” they call it.

None of these attitudes were taught to me in childhood. My parents choose their houses by how much space they can put between them and their neighbors without the use of a ferry. For most of my life, my paternal grandma lived in a suburb of Hannibal, Missouri (a suburb, you understand; the hectic, go-go pace of city living in Hannibal was too much for her) and it only occurred to me after she died that my “Hannibal grandma” wasn’t actually from Hannibal at all. She was from north St. Louis. She moved to Hannibal– on purpose– just to get the f*** away from everybody, us included.

Which I actually sort of understand.

All of this comes to mind today because a phone conversation with my mom reminded me that I still have a relative, an 82-year-old great aunt, who lives here. At last count, it was a city of 644 people, about twice as many people as were in my freshman dorm. (I want to laugh at a town that size calling itself “Center” of anything, but when you look at the big picture you sort of have to give it to them.)

Take a good look at that photo. The entire city is a blip in a field, excema on the landscape. 

My aunt lives in a house that I think is made primarily of termite exoskeletons, a house exactly like you’d imagine an old house out there would look, but she insists that she will live there alone until she can no longer stand. She still goes out every day and mows a patch of her own grass. But if she wanted to hand that job off, who would do it? She was the school teacher; what did they do when she retired? What would she do if the one guy in town running a grocery store quit? What hospital would she be rushed to, and how long would it take to get there? I see her at age 82 in that little patch of streets surrounded by vast green nothing, and I imagine her last day on earth, and it is not one I would wish for.

It transcends the concept of “different strokes for different folks.” Explain to me your strange customs, people of Planet Country! The ways of your tribe are not known to my people!

Snakes on a Plane, a movie that is being regarded as essentially an internet-driven film with a devoted online fanbase, was the top movie in America this weekend. If you look at the wire stories reporting this fact, however, what you will see again and again is that the movie (and the following emphasis is mine, based on what I know was in the writer’s heart, even though he totally would have emphasized it himself if he was allowed to) “technically debuted as the No. 1 movie, but with a modest opening weekend.” In other words, the web movie didn’t really make that much money. It only technically counts as the #1 movie, in the sense that it made more money than any other movie in the country. So, sure, says the AP, if you want to get all “dictionary definition” on the actual meaning of the words “#1 movie,” then yeah, I guess it counts. But its total take wasn’t that impressive, other than in the sense that it was larger than everything else. Don’t you start thinking you run things, you web nerds. With your “blogs” and your “memes.”

These same articles also pause and clear their throats before making a point of mentioning that the movie’s box office totals as reported by the studio included the money made on the Thursday sneak preview screenings, subliminally suggesting that this was a sneaky, deceptive way to puff up the numbers. If memory serves, the studio got this sneaky idea from every other summer box office total ever reported by every studio in the history of film.

Again, I may be reading too much into it… but no, I’m not, I’m exactly right about this. The Old Media reporting on Snakes on a Plane’s box office take is just another cousin to such insightful analysis and objective reporting as “MySpace Rapes Your Children,” “videogames caused Columbine,” and “These news bloggers aren’t legitimate; they just sit at home writing ‘news’ in their underwear without doing any of the hard things we do, like writing the exact stories our government sources tell us, suckling the teat of our corporate overlords, and making many, many, many mistakes.” The idea that online communities might have any relevance or value, the notion that the media gatekeepers might not run the entire world at the moment, is still making puddles ‘neath many a pant leg.

Speaking of scary: the movie itself is not a surprise. On the right day, it could be your favorite movie of all time, that day being October 10, 1987.