In general, I think taking topic requests might be a great way to keep writing and often think about opening the Request Line over at iFanboy.com but don’t, because I am ****ing terrified by what sort of requests I would actually get.

Anyway.

Searching my site this evening, I was stunned and appalled to see that the original Reagan post did not survive the transition from SnipSnap to Wordpress. And so, dear reader, I reproduce it for you now, with the understanding that I will very soon– I promise– do more than just copy and paste old entries I know you didn’t read.

—–

Since you asked:

I voted for Ronald Reagan twice, both times proudly and enthusiastically. During the 1980 race, I even went so far as to join his campaign, fashioning and coloring an elephant of construction paper (what an elephant had to do with strong defense and tax cuts, I still do not entirely know; I think that in 1980 I decided that the kindly old man behind the podium on television looked wrinkly and large, and that that must be the idea) and attaching it to a straw to make it into a crude picket sign. My zeal before the polls closed had very little impact, then as now; in the Sacred Heart kindergarten election, Jimmy Carter crushed my guy in a landslide. (Then as now, it was obvious that the electorate had no idea what they were voting on. Didn’t they see how boring Jimmy Carter was? Weren’t donkeys obviously lamer than elephants to anybody who gave it even a moment’s thought? Didn’t their dads ever make them turn off cartoons to watch the stupid, boring news?) Had the fate of the free world rested in the tiny hands of Sacred Heart, today page 14 of the newspaper would be mourning a genial old actor and union leader who died “after a long illness,” and I’d be saying, “Why do I know that name…?”

Fortunately, the right to a vote that actually counts has only been extended to people who are emotionally kindergarteners, so we got eight years with America’s grandfather. I remember liking President Reagan unreservedly; I would even go so far as to say that disliking him never occurred to me as an available option. Last summer, when I was surer than ever that the current president was going to bring about my speedy personal death, I went on a maniacal Reagan binge at the library in an effort to convince myself that the simple, prosperous times I remembered from childhood were actually just as complex and fraught with peril. (We didn’t start the fire; it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.) What I learned, other than the fact that it turns out I had no idea what was going on around me in the 1980s unless Optimus Prime was involved, is that there was indeed an option to dislike Ronald Reagan and people exercised it with such vigor that you could almost see little bubbles of spit froth forming in the corners of their mouths. Everyone everywhere loved him except for people who really, really hated him a lot.

At the time, though, I never ran into these people. (The only one I remember is John Cougar Mellencamp, on the 80s retrospective “Decade” that MTV ran in December 1989, ranting and raving like someone who was smart enough not to have written “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” You owe it to yourself to borrow this tape from me one day; there’s something about looking back nostalgically at a nostalgic look back that makes you feel like a bad mimeograph. Plus, kids, it counts as a primary source now.) At the time, my every day was Morning in America. Of course we were going to prosper. Of course we were going to triumph over the Reds, the ayatollah’s terrorists, the Decepticons. If cartoons were anything to go by, our enemies couldn’t even aim right.

I remember loving it when Reagan would interrupt shows to have press conferences. Which, I might add, he seemed to do all the time. Remember that? When the president was always on TV daring people to ask him questions? And then he’d answer them like it was his job, with wit and some off-the-cuff facts (most of which, we would learn the next day, he made up off the top of his head?)

(And remember when finding out the president was making stuff up off the top of his head didn’t bother America at all because he was so awesome? I just remembered for the first time in years the phrase “the Teflon president,” which increasingly bewildered pundits used to call Reagan because nothing ever stuck. We let him get away with anything; we didn’t even care! He was gonna kick those Commies in the ass! I never would have even entertained the notion that we were going to get nuked into our component atoms. Ronnie’s steering the ship! So what if he said trees cause more pollution than cars? He scares Kaddaffi more than he scares me, and my dad paid $.35 in taxes this year and bought me an Atari game with the leftovers! Ms. Pac-Man, muthaf***a!)

I remember one time, I had just seen the totally awesome Back to the Future, and then Reagan gave a speech and quoted Back to the Future! He was always referencing movies and giving medals to Michael Jackson (yeah, some of those are real) and sending his wife to visit the Drummonds on Diff’rent Strokes. And then, when I was ten, he tried to make Star Wars real! Laser machines in space?! Are you sure I can’t vote for him a third time?

(SDI aside, the real connection in my memory between Star Wars and Reagan was when I came home from the store one day with a new Empire Strikes Back pop-up book to learn that Scooby-Doo was not going to be on because the president had been shot. That was one time his surprise appearance on television did not interest me, though it seemed to grab my mom’s attention pretty effectively.)

I think I was more interested in presidential politics when I was nine than I am now, and Ronald Reagan was the reason why. (When you’re nine, all you need is a president who quotes movies and cracks you up. At twenty-nine, I’d settle for a president who quotes anything and cracks you up intentionally.) I remember his speech after the Challenger explosion like it happened this afternoon. I remember his debates with Mondale in a way that I don’t remember my most recent meal. The only thing he ever said that made my spider-sense tingle was when the debate moderator in ‘84 asked him why, if he was so moral, he never went to church, and he replied that his presence would be too disruptive and a Security Threat. “mmmmThat smells a little funny to me, Mr. President,” I remember thinking, though I was probably just annoyed that someone else had figured out a way to skip church and still make it sound like he was doing something good.

In later years, of course, there was Iran-Contra, but I couldn’t engage long enough to figure out what was going on there. Something about shredding Oliver North’s papers or something; all that really registered was Fawn Hall’s big ol’ hair. I was in seventh grade by then and had other things on my mind. I do remember a lot of Carson jokes about a presidential astrologer. (Now, Carson, I still miss.) By then, I guess the lustre had started to fade a bit. None of that changed the fact that, when Ronald Reagan gave his farewell address from the Oval Office, I sat alone in my living room and did everything I could not to start crying. In 1989, I had only really gone to one school in my life and had only really had one president, and now both were ending pretty much simultaneously. All my friends and authority figures were scattering into the sunset, leaving me with George Bush and high school and who-the-hell-knows-what-else. In hindsight, it would have been nice if someone’d tried to walk me through that one. As it was, I was left sitting in front of our 3-ton oak-paneled television with a severe case of Ending Overload trying not to choke up.

Strange that I would feel that way then and not now. I suppose that’s a kind of secondary symptom of Alzheimer’s. My grandmother had it for roughly as long as Reagan did, and when she died in January it was almost like we had been at her wake for ten years. We were no less sad that she was dead, but we finally got to go home and get out of those clothes. Six or so years ago, I went to visit her and she asked me if I was still in the service. Six months later, she couldn’t narrow down my gender. Shortly thereafter, she went nonverbal and nonambulatory. Then she got stuck there in a thick, murky, sooty fog for years. She would get sick; she would pull through; she would sit there, either unaware of it all or unable to do anything about it. When they called and told me she had pneumonia this year, I said, “Oh my God, that’s terrible. I guess. Relatively, you know. I hope she… gets better? I don’t– help me out: what should the prayer be here, exactly?” I’m still not sure I know.

The Long Goodbye aside, time does all sorts of things to perception. I sometimes wonder about what I would have thought of Reagan if I were twenty years older, if I hadn’t been looking at the space lasers and exploding rocket ships through the eyes of a ten year old, if my mind wasn’t processing the Soviets and COBRA as roughly equivalent. What is it like to be a fully cognizant adult who turns on the television in time to see your president hold up his veto pen and say to congress, “Go ahead; make my day”? To hear your president call the world’s largest non-you superpower, which has the money for leaky nuclear weapons (to point entirely at you) and essentially nothing else, an Evil Freaking Empire? I would have had a daily coronary with my waffles. “What’s in the paper this morning?… Hmm! we seem to have bombed Libya. Didn’t see that coming! How does our leader explain this, I wonder? Ah, there it is: ‘They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.‘ I see. Sounds good! I’ll be back in bed.”

Would I vote for Ronald Reagan today? Oh, probably not. It’s all moot, of course; if my older cousins are anything to go by, if I’d been in high school in 1981 I’d have been too high to care about any of it. Also, to a large extent, I no longer have to wonder what global presidential hijinks would be like. Just typing the paragraph above gave me a powerful feeling of Eeee!ja vu. The current president is still trying to build a magic missile shield, and he has assured me that his mission is to wipe out the Evildoers, particularly those in the Axis of Evil, evil evil evil, etc. It’s kind of encouraging, in a roundabout way; we did, after all, live through the eighties. I thank Mr. Reagan for that (and any number of other things) wherever he may be.

I am not trying to deny royalties to the writers of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” “Frosty the Snowman,” or “Winter Wonderland” (well, maybe “Winter Wonderland” a little) but I feel it’s important during this season of festivity and generosity to reflect on just how many Christmas songs have f***-all to do with Christmas. No Santa, no Jesus, no mistletoe. Not even any nog. Just a song about riding around in a giant horse-drawn sled, and how much fun that is.

How much fun does that sound like? How likely is it that anyone doing that in 2006 would be laughing all the way, oh ho ho, as opposed to remarking all the way, “This is ridiculous,” “how did anyone even think this up as a mode of transportation,” or “Holy Christ, this brakeless horse-drawn contraption will kill us all”?

I would also contend that even in 1857 the constant ringing of bells attached to a horse’s bobbed tail would only make spirits bright for about a minute and a half before sending you running off the back of the sled, o’er the fields, but I’m not prepared to make a big deal about it. What I do find insidious is that “Jingle Bells’” lyrics contain an ad for themselves. “Oh, what fun it is to sing a sleighing song… and we just happen to be doing that right now!”

(Are sleighing songs a genre? Were sleighing songs the 1850s equivalent of surf rock? I can think of two.)

Only working together can we hope to stamp out “Jingle Bells” in our lifetime. According to a recent study by the International Christmastime Jolliness Institute, 47% of all people who think they hate Christmas actually just hate that song.

-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.

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!”

—————
Dial-An-Anecdote
November 20, 1999

When I was a senior in high school, I was the chauffeur in a one-car carpool. I drove a 1989 Dodge Colt, a wheeled red jelly bean most notable for the half-dozen occasions on which friends of mine– and not many of them, mind you– lifted it up and moved it, sometimes without my knowledge, sometimes at my request. (Ever parallel park so tightly that you just can’t get out on your own?) Into this slight Tupperware roller skate three or four younger fellows from my neighborhood would cram for the daily 40-mile round trip, paying me a king’s ransom in gas money they got from their moms at the end of every week. Usually, it was a very jovial ride home, especially after Knuckles, a vain primping used Kleenex of a kid, got his own set of wheels. Or maybe he was the manager of the wrestling team or a football tackling dummy or something. I forget. The important thing was that he wasn’t in my car anymore.

Unfortunately, this created a vacancy in the back seat which was occasionally filled by Drew. Drew, though he didn’t ride with us often, was easily fifteen times more grating than Knuckles. He made Knuckles look like a shrinking violet. Chris Farley was Woody Allen compared to Drew. Even now, when I type his name, I’m rewarded with a stabbing pain in the temples.

I’d known Drew in grade school, when he was in my little sister’s class, and he’d never gotten on my radar as anything but a nice kid. As far as I can tell, his chief problem in high school was that he was a freshman in a car full of juniors driven by a senior. We were upperclassmen, and yet we didn’t pummel him (initially). He was a feral animal; our kindness excited and confused him. A stiff breeze excited and confused him.

It was like transporting a chihuahua raised entirely on Pixie Sticks and Dexatrim. Drew’s methods of fitting in and joking around with his carmates included calling them names, elbowing ribcages, taking tone-deaf jibes at anything anyone expressed an opinion about, yelling directly into people’s ears at top volume as a “joke,” and most venally, lunging into the front seat to change my radio stations. There are former acquaintances of mine who walk this earth without hands just for trying that from the front seat, and none of them ever knocked my car into neutral on the highway.

Yes, that happened. And not once.

The thing Drew found hilarious, more than anything on earth?: our anger. Oh, it was his sustaining tonic.

Frankly, it was a long enough commute without him. That car felt like Das Boot even when everyone in it understood personal space.

One day, after a long and joyous respite, Drew joined Brian, Matt and I once again with a passenger. He threw his bookbag in my trunk/hatch/shoebox and piled into the backseat with a bag of flour. Naturally, the flour was wearing a diaper. It had a face. It was smiling at me in the rearview mirror. Its skull said “STAN.”

There was a pause.

“Hey there, Drew,” I said. Just knowing that he was getting in my car had already made me preemptively tired, but I rallied my patience as best I could. “Aren’t you going to introduce us? Who’s this Stan, the happy incontinent flour bag?”

“This is Matt Bell’s flour baby.”

The pause was longer this time.

“I see.”

Satisfied with the amount of information he’d provided, Drew leaned between the seats and started scanning the dial for some Paula Abdul.

After feeling some swats with real sincerity and passion behind them, Drew sat back down and explained that one of the freshman theology teachers had decided to teach the 14 year olds to keep an eye on their sperm by showing them what a pain in the arse it is to take care of a baby. Instead of the traditional fragile baby surrogate, an egg, the teacher had settled on personalized bags of flour. (A superior choice, if you ask me; like babies, flour can survive the occasional accidental dropping. Plus: no morbid baby-frying parties at the end of the project.) Stan the Flour Bag’s father was a football player, and since being caught stuffing your baby in a locker resulted in some extremely severe penalty that the teacher couldn’t have possibly carried out, possibly involving a firing squad, Stan’s dad needed a babysitter during practice. The father, having the mental capacity of a football player, decided that Drew would be an excellent nanny.

The ride home was typically unbearable. Hurricane Nitwit bounced around the back seat, jabbering and yapping and thrashing like an epileptic. About five miles in, his jostling became too much and Brian shoved him. Lapping up the attention, Drew elbowed him. We were headed for Cuban Missile Crisis territory; I could see in the mirror that Brian and Matt were going red in the face. I was looking back to shout, “Stop touching him! Stay on your side of the car!” like a soccer mom when suddenly everybody got very still.

“Oh, s***,” said Matt, without the luxury of asterisks.

“What?” I said. “What ’s***’?”

“Jim?” said Drew meekly. “Jim? Stan… Stan is bleeding.”

I made a noise like a chicken laying an egg and flailed my arm behind my head in a vain effort to grab Drew’s spiked hair and scalp him with my bare hands. In crisis mode, Matt and Brian had become a flour baby EMT unit, applying pressure to the wound and trying to hold the growing tear together as spilling flour turned my car into a giant hourglass.

“Hold it… dammit, hold still!”

“You’re making it worse! You’re making it worse!!”

“Do you have any Scotch tape?!”

“Oh yeah, I always have Scotch tape in my car! It’s in the glove box, underneath the glitter glue and safety scissors, you little nutsack!”

“Well, I don’t know!”

“Ack! What the hell are you doing to my backseat? It looks like a drug deal gone bad! I hope you know your way home from here, genius, because so help me God–!”

Drew made a last desperate effort to quell the flour, and with a mighty POOF my car looked like a steam room, full of puffy white clouds and hacking coughs. My passengers looked like the Ghostbusters after their climactic battle with the marshmallow man. If Brian had not taken action at that exact moment, it would have been Drew, not Stan, who needed to be contained in a bag. At that moment, however, the juniors had an epiphany.

Matt and Brian took one look at one another as the human pastries they now were, simultaneously said “oh, to hell with this,” and grabbed Stan by the face while I rolled down the window.

Several more ounces of Stan ended up in our laps during the ensuing struggle, as Drew, meek for the first time in a year, pitifully cried out, “He’s a football player! He’s a football player!” Stan dangled out the window like an action hero for a minute, spewing a white trail that made it look like the poor man’s James Bond smoke screen. A fellow motorist honked in appreciation from behind us.

And then it was over. Stan hit the shoulder of the highway like a dunked basketball and burst in one last apocalyptic POOF, leaving us to somberly ponder what we had just done as we caught our breath between the hysterical gales of laughter. Except for Drew, who sat in horrified silence trying desperately to preserve a mental picture of Stan until he could get to the grocery store for a bag of flour. I was told later that neither the father nor the theology teacher ever noticed. (Even if the teacher had noticed, the football player earnestly believed that he was doing a good job, since Drew wisely never told him what happened. Plausible deniability.) Every day for the rest of the year, we would slow down on the way home and look over at Stan’s decaying corpse. One day, a road crew cleaned him off the highway. We learned a lot about ourselves that year.

Why am I thinking about this story?

Just now, my friend Joe called as I watched TV. My spirits leapt; my other plans having mysteriously vanished, I was eager to do something.

“What are you doing right now?” he asked.

“Nothing!” I said. “Nothing at all! What’s the plan?”

“We’re on our way to a play. Could you tell my girlfriend the flour baby story?”

So I did. They thanked me. They hung up. That was all they’d wanted. They called me up to tell the story, and that was pretty much it. I never did end up going anywhere.

I think I should start charging.

On the morning of my wedding, I sat alone on my old bed in my parents’ house for an hour, staring at my rented tux in the mirror. We had watched every video, listened to every lecture, attended every class, taken every quiz and successfully landed on the other side of the last flaming hoop. Nothing left to do but cleave together as one blah blah blah. I was surprised not to be more nervous; everyone had always warned me that I would be hyperventilating, but I had spent ten months hearing and thinking about little besides this day, and I was ready to move on to the next thing. I was prepared. I was excited. I was profoundly uncomfortable.

The tuxedo had not proven to be my natural habitat. Every component of it existed to restrict and contort; I had spent twenty minutes threading fake buttons into a shirt that already had buttons on it, ten minutes linking my cuffs into something unholy, something that seemed designed to inadvertently blind someone before the end of the day. I felt like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and moved as gracefully. I would have torn the starchy suit of armor from my body by noon if not for my shoes.

In high school, I had fallen in love with the Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star high top and had been wearing a pair ever since. When one pair wore out, I’d buy an identical new pair. I had a very liberal definition of “worn out.” Once, a girlfriend had written an expiration date on the soles to encourage some whisker of common sense, but the relationship expired first and I’d continued wearing them until the sole gave up and left the shoe altogether.

“Which of these shoes do you want to wear?” Holly had asked me that day at the tux place, holding up three rental loafers that looked like they were made out of stale licorice.

“None of them!” I exclaimed. “I don’t want to wear a one of them. They look like they’d flatten my arches like a ball peen hammer before we even made it to the dance floor.”

Holly regarded the foot torture devices for a moment. “Talk to me after you’ve tried heels for six hours. So what, then? What are you going to wear on your feet?”

“Oh,” I said, “I’m wearing my high tops.” I looked at her and grinned mischievously in anticipation of the look on her face.

She grinned right back. “Okay,” she said. “Good idea.”

She had called my bluff. I laughed and dropped it, but later that week she arrived at our premarital apartment of sin with a brand new pair of All-Stars that she informed me were my wedding shoes.

“Don’t wear them until the wedding day,” she said. “I don’t want you to walk down the aisle scuffed.”

They were black and white, to match the tux. We weren’t animals, after all.

Technically, the shoes were the bride’s idea. I would find myself repeating this often as the day wore on.

I waited until my parents and sister had retreated to their separate bathrooms to prepare for a day of having their pictures taken, shouted, “I’m taking off; see you at the church,” and slipped out the front door in my sneakers before anyone could see me. We had made it all the way to the big day without any strife or arguments, and I didn’t want Dad to see my footwear until it was too late to talk about it. My sister would laugh; my mom would roll her eyes; but Dad would take one look and filibuster until I lost my will to walk down the aisle. Dad had grown increasingly dogmatic since he’d retired and had nothing to do but go to church, and as he aged he seemed to genuinely believe that Jesus Christ was watching us all walk into His house like Joan Rivers on the red carpet. Never mind that you were one the three remaining people still going to church; if you were wearing jeans, you might as well just steal from the collection plate while you were in there. As an adult, I could not count the number of times I’d met up with him at a funeral and instead of saying “hello” or offering a consoling hug he had greeted me with, “No tie?”

“It’s disrespectful,” he would say in the conversation I imagined having as I tiptoed out the front door. “They’re insincere.”

“They’re shoes,” I’d reply. “I don’t even know what an insincere shoe is. I talked to them earlier, and I assure you they’re taking this very seriously. Besides, on the list of things God cares about today, I promise this does not make the top three billion. He probably appreciates the personal touch. He’s having a giant invisible chuckle in the sky about it right now.” This would be the point at which Dad would pin me in the foyer and begin unlacing. Best to leave it a surprise.

I stood by the asphalt sea in front of Our Lady of the Galleria for an hour while the photographer thought of new ways to position me and my ushers in front of a nearby tree. My in-laws and family were soon buzzing in and out of the church like worker bees, shuttling programs and flowers and whatever mysterious beauty implements Holly needed far from my curious eyes. After a bit of milling about, the photographer pulled various relatives over for pictures with me in front of the tree. Eventually, everyone’s eyes would drift down to the footwear. My sister laughed, and my mom rolled her eyes. Dad made a face like he was beginning to turn into a werewolf, but my mom shushed him and since there was nothing he could do at that point he stepped into the photos and accepted defeat. He would pray especially hard for my feet on Sunday.

The wedding would not start for another hour, and I had already nearly had my fill of flash photography when over my shoulder I heard the double doors to the rectory swing open. I turned and saw Bob headed over to the tree with the same bright smile and genial manner as always. Good old Bob.

He had gotten halfway to me when his teleprompter went blank again. His gait barely changed but got just a bit too stiff, a bit too quick. His smile got wider, but his eyes were not smiling at all.

“Hey, padre!” I said as he sidled up to me. “The big day!”

He was close and quiet, like he was telling me a secret. “I didn’t know you were going to wear those.”

“Wear…? Oh, yes! The shoes. Believe it or not, Holly actually–”

“That is completely unacceptable.” His lips barely moved, and the smile never failed him for an instant. Any bystander would have thought he was posing for one of the pictures with me. Above his smile, his eyes bored into my skull as if to say, “I’m nice to you, and then you pull this shit on me? If there weren’t so many witnesses out here, I would break a sacramental candle on your spine, you little asshole.”

“Huh?” I replied. I was the one drawing a blank now. “I don’t– Seriously? Completely unacceptable?”

Dad’s ears perked up when he saw the look on my face, and this turn of events nakedly delighted him. “Completely unacceptable wedding shoes!” he said, trying not to clap.

“Those will have to be changed,” said Father Bob flatly.

“I can’t change them,” I said. “I didn’t bring any other shoes. I have nothing but these.”

“You look about my size,” said Father Bob. “You’ll wear some of mine.” Without any part of his face betraying anything, he turned with the precision of a robot and walked calmly back toward his bedroom.

“You’ll just wear some of Father’s shoes!” said Dad with a mixture of relief and don’t-panic chirpiness. All of those years praying had paid off for Dad. Within minutes now, he would get his wish: God would deliver him a reverent son with a little divine punishment thrown in for free. He cheerfully led me right behind Father Bob, behaving like if he could just be happy enough for the both of us, he could stop me from having a stroke.

“So what you’re saying,” I said at increasingly high volume, “is that I have been through forty-seven hours of ‘instruction’ on how I’m supposed to talk to my spouse and not use birth control, I’ve actually agreed to sign a document that says I will raise my hypothetical children Catholic, I have spent entire Saturdays being told things I already know all for the sake of playing by each and every one of your rules, and now you are telling me you are not going to marry us because my feet have canvas on them instead of leather? Canvas is offensive? To God?”

“Here we go!” said Father Bob, pulling a pair of small black loafers out of his closet. I might as well have said nothing; my participation was no longer necessary. The momentum would carry everyone through the rest of the afternoon now no matter how hard I floored the brakes.

On the other side of the church, one of my ushers who had witnessed the kidnapping had run off to tell Holly what was happening. Surrounded by her half-assembled dress, she listened with equal parts exasperation and worry as he told her about this latest theological crisis.

“This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” said Holly as her attendants froze in their tracks. “The shoes? I bought him the stupid shoes. Tell them that. His dad likes me.”

I stood in the rectory with the priest’s sincere shoes in my hands. I stared at them very hard for a long moment. How could I have forgotten Best Woman v. Pope? No man who treated that speck like a sandstorm would ever be able to handle something like canvas shoes. Of course this was happening. I was so naïve to think that we were friends and equals just because we had some Chinese. This was a hierarchy, and he would always be three rungs up; we were sheep in the flock. If I jumped through every hoop, my only reward would be new, smaller hoops higher off the ground until the last jump killed me.

I took a breath. The two men were both staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to bend down and undo my laces. On the other side of the church, Holly was hearing the latest report and saying, “Oh, good Christ. I’m not getting married today.”

If this were any other day, any other moment in the history of my life, time to think would not have been something I would have burdened myself with. “Fair enough!” I would have said on any other day. “Go on in and tell everyone I’ve ever met that you won’t say the wedding. March into the church right now and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I refuse to perform this wedding on account of shoes.’ I dare you to be that big an idiot in front of everyone who has traveled here. I will be delighted to come along and see how that goes for you.”

But it was not any other day in my life. It was my wedding day, and I had started all of this in an attempt to act like an adult.

I bent over and undid my laces. I crammed each foot into a little fist of leather. They didn’t remotely fit, but today they would have to. Father Bob and I stood in the room behind the altar in silence for the rest of the afternoon as people filed into the pews. Father Bob kept breathing deeply, periodically saying, “Whew!” as if he had just had the scare of his life. After correcting the inappropriateness of my attire, he prepared himself for the ceremony by donning what appeared to be a bright purple tablecloth.

Holly and I got married. We sat on the altar, and Father Bob recited his sermon as if it were instructions for assembling a bookshelf. He had collected dozens of anecdotes and funny stories from the time we spent with him that he had planned to use at the service, but he was so thrown by seeing my shoes that he couldn’t regain his equilibrium. He was too dazed by the sight of canvas on the feet that would walk down the aisle to recover for the rest of the evening.

I saw Father Bob only once more, from a distance. Holly and I tried going to church after our honeymoon, and Father Bob was the one standing atop the altar in the center of the room, talking to his flock about how to stay in God’s good graces. I couldn’t concentrate on a word; I kept catching myself looking at his feet. It was as if a small absurd thread had been pulled and unraveled the whole crazy sweater. It all seemed ridiculous and infuriating; what about this was I supposed to take seriously? The only good option left was to lace up my running shoes and run the hell out of there as fast as I could. If I ever felt like returning, I still had Father Bob’s shoes in my trunk; he would not be getting them back.

The sun was setting when we parked in front of the rectory that first night, but the June heat was still pitiless. The Church of the Immacollatta loomed at the top of a hill surrounded on all sides by its massive asphalt parking lot. The main building was a giant beige pie wedge that pointed like an arrow to the mall just down the street; for years, I had referred to this place as Our Lady of the Galleria. Now, we were headed to the squat brick rectory behind the pie wedge to ring their faded buzzer and ask to become members. This was what we had chosen.

“So, how is this going to work?” Holly asked as we crossed the asphalt. Holly wasn’t Catholic, and while she hadn’t bought into the faith yet she was interested in leasing if it meant we could get married.

“Well,” I said, “this is my first marriage, but as I understand it they assign a priest to us, we meet once a week for a few months, and we talk.” Six steps away from the car, I had already started sweating, only partly from the heat.

“And what do we talk about, exactly?” Holly asked.

“Well, marriage,” I said. “What marriage is, what it involves. Whether we’re ready. Whether we’re compatible.”

Holly crinkled her nose. “What marriage is? He’s a priest. He’s never been married.”

“Welcome to my people.”

“And who is he to say whether we’re compatible?”

“Well, that’s why we have to see him all summer. Don’t worry; they give him worksheets or whatever down at the home office.” I patted her shoulder in mock-condescension that probably felt like real condescension.

“Oh, God,” Holly said as we approached the bolted glass door to the rectory, “we have to take a test. What if we fail the test?”

I smiled. “I presume they arrange a better marriage for each of us and baptize you.”

“Ha, ha,” she said, trying not to smile back.

“‘True or false: I appreciate my spouse’s wit’ is a question on the test,” I said.

I was being as upbeat as I could. Holly was worried, but she was a worrier by nature. She said “what’s wrong?” instead of “hello” when she answered the phone. But this time, I was secretly as nervous as she was for completely different reasons. Holly was a Lutheran from small town Missouri. She had no frame of reference for postmodern pie wedges of worship; she grew up in a church where it was against the rules to sing any song newer than 150 years old. She was nervous because she didn’t know about Catholic priests. I was nervous because I knew about them.

We were going to get married in April, right after my thirtieth birthday, and I figured that was as good an excuse as any to try becoming an adult. For years before meeting her, I had been the kind of person who you occasionally read about in the paper, the kind of person who dies in his one-bedroom apartment one night and isn’t missed anywhere until neighbors in the hallway start noticing worse smells than usual. I had no “strong ties to the community,” as they say at bail hearings. I was only marginally more Catholic than Holly at that point; I went to Mass about once every six weeks but didn’t know anybody when I got there, hopping from church to church each time depending on which of the services most conveniently fit into my schedule that day. It was always only a matter of time before the priest said something in a sermon that pissed me off so much I had to vanish, especially during an election year. I was a ghost; I didn’t volunteer anywhere or belong to anything. Then one day, without warning, I belonged to Holly.

While we waited in nervous silence at the buzzer, Holly looked up and regarded the pie wedge like it was an alien spacecraft that had crash-landed in the asphalt. When the intercom finally squawked to life, she leapt like she’d set off an alarm.

“Hello?” The voice coming out of the box didn’t sound too old or grouchy. This was a good sign.

“Hi, Father Bob?” I said, not sure what part of the ancient device I was supposed to talk into. “It’s Jim and Holly…? We spoke on the phone earlier…?”

“Just one minute,” said the box, and then nothing happened for a long time. Standing there wilting on the oversized welcome mat, I stared past the first set of bolted glass double doors at the second set of bolted glass double doors. My eyes rested on the keypad on the wall just inside the entry hall.

“For people who are supposed to have faith and love their neighbors,” I said absently, “these guys have an awful lot of security.”

The doors unlocked, and through them walked a genial middle-aged man with a tentative smile and a hand extended for a shake.

“Bob Stevens, nice to meet you,” he said. “You’re here for the marriage prep instruction?”

We were relieved by Father Bob’s relative youth and harmlessness. He couldn’t have been any older than forty-five, with slightly receded black hair and a broad, plump pleasantness like a large Keebler elf. He was even wearing a sweater vest. Holly’s preachers back home had filled her head with a lot of intimidating ideas about the Papists and their priests (she had spent half an hour deciding how to dress, as if we would be turned away at the front door if her sleeves were too short) but one look at Bob popped those ideas like a big black balloon.

The site of the elf made me lower the shields. I’d been on the team since birth, but I was dreading what might come next. There was no way we were getting out of this without watching at least three hours of marriage videos. We would be going to classes on “natural family planning” given by people with half a dozen children. Years of lectures like these always left me itching for a fight. Holly knew there was a good chance when we arrived that this priest would say, “Won’t you have a seat?” and I’d blurt, “Who the hell are you to tell me how to live my life, old man?” but Bob immediately put me at ease.

Bob led us on a tour of the rectory, which looked like a finished basement from the seventies. The carpet was a little too orange; the walls were a little too wood-paneled. Every wall had at least one picture of Jesus, most of them painted in the motif I recognized from my eighties Catholic grade school religion books– Hippie Guidance Counselor Jesus. The whole thing could have used some updating, maybe a woman’s touch. Holly’s eyes darted around like we had just crossed the threshold to Wonderland.

We arrived in his leathery office and sat down on opposite sides of his desk. Any other man in this setting would have made it feel like being told you have cancer during a job interview.

“So!” Bob said. “Getting married, huh?” He seemed genuinely excited to be doing this part of his job. This was what he had signed on for.

“Yep!” said Holly a bit too quickly. “Finally found someone who can put up with me, ha ha!”

Bob smiled warmly. “It is always so wonderful to see two people coming together. I understand from talking to our secretary that you, Jim, are a lifelong Catholic…while you, Holly, are… let’s see… Lutheran?”

“Yes,” she said. “Is that okay? I heard that might not be okay.”

“Oh, it’s no problem at all. People outside the Church have a great many misconceptions about supposed rules and restrictions, but in fact mixed marriages are quite common.”

Holly unclenched. I had assumed as much, but it was nice to hear him say it out loud.

“Of course,” he added, “in a few weeks you will have to sign some documents promising to raise the children Catholic, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first! Everyone focuses on the flowers and the deejay and whatnot, but the most important thing any wedding needs–besides the priest, of course!–is two official witnesses. Do you have anyone in mind for your maid of honor and best man yet?”

“We sure do, although not all of them are Catholic either….”

“Again, not a problem.”

Holly was beaming. This thing was actually going to happen.

“See?” I said. “No problem. The only thing a little out of the ordinary is that we’d like my sister to be ‘best man.’”

Father Bob’s expression changed almost imperceptibly, as if he had been flash frozen. His car salesman grin never faltered, but his eyes widened unmistakably, like he was giving a live speech on national television and his teleprompter suddenly went blank. His face still said Hey, we’re all buds here, kids, but his eyes said Don’t panic, Bob. Keep it together. We trained for this. Everything’s going to be okay.

“Really?” he said.

“Yeah,” Holly said with an embarrassed chuckle. “Instead of one of those weddings with nine bridesmaids where you leave half your friends out and leave the other half with ugly dresses, we decided we’d just let all our friends enjoy the party and go with an all-sibling wedding party. And Jim just has a sister, so….”

Already nervous about this Catholic magic man and his power over our wedding, Holly was struggling to fill the silence. If Bob didn’t talk soon, she would launch into the story of how we met.

“I…” Bob said very deliberately, his grin desperately rigid, “am not sure that you can do that.”

I was so taken aback by his transformation that I caught a laugh in the back of my throat. I knew they were called “best men” for a reason, but Bob was acting like I’d drawn a gun and ordered him to drop his pants, like he just needed to keep me calm until he could furtively call for help. I glanced over at Holly so we could share a get-a-load-of-this-guy look, but when our eyes met hers were saying, “Oh, no; I have to cancel the invitations.”

It was hard to take this crisis seriously, but since I had gotten engaged a lot of things that were hard to take seriously seemed to have gotten important. I could see I was the only person in the room who wasn’t panicking. I decided to diffuse the situation with a joke.

“The best man actually has to be a man, as a rule?” I said with a raised eyebrow and a chuckle. “Well, I wouldn’t want to break such an important rule, but it would be a shame if we had to get married out in the parking lot.”

“Now now now, it won’t be necessary to marry outside the Church,” said Bob. He had completely missed that I was joking; he thought he was about to lose my soul to the heathens. He walked briskly over to his bookshelf and began piling the leather-bound volumes out on his desk and rapidly thumbing through them. “I will just need to do a little bit of research. Don’t–just–give me one week. Oh! I’m having lunch with a fellow who specializes in canon law on Thursday. I will ask him. Okay. Yes. I will ask him.”

Here we go, I thought. They set up the hoops, I dutifully come in to jump through them with a big smile on my face, and now my best woman has induced a legal crisis. This is actually happening. Before this is over, I am going to end up faxing something to Rome to get stamped.

Thankfully, we learned a few days later that our best woman would not destroy the Holy See; the religion-lawyer told Father Bob out on the golf course that all we needed were witnesses, and it didn’t matter which gender was witnessing for whom. With that settled, Holly and I only had 3,947 things left to worry about before the big day, so the case of Best Woman v. Pope was quickly forgotten as our thoughts turned to flowers, deejays, and cake flavors. The sweltering summer nights passed in the rectory’s wood-paneled office. Before long, we skipped the office and started just taking good old Bob out for Chinese, or inviting him to our apartment for Holly’s lasagna (though we had enough sense not to mention that it was our shared premarital apartment of sin). The meetings became get-togethers; we started spending a lot less time going through exercises and more time chatting like friends, though at no time did Bob ever realize when I was joking unless Holly told him.

Next: Is the Church finished with our heroes? What does Chuck Taylor have to do with any of this? Wouldn’t a good writer have said by now? Tune in to part II to find out!

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)

One time, somebody scrawled honest-to-Himmler swastikas all over our front door. Though annoying, this vandalism didn’t exactly send us packing in terror because

1. the swastikas were drawn with Sharpie markers and looked like they were done by Hitler’s fourth grade art class
2. the swastikas were backwards, and any self-respecting skinhead would have shown more attention to detail
3. Nazis never start with the Catholics

A year or so before my parents moved out of that house, my sister’s car even got broken into, and by “broken into” I mean “ransacked because nobody locked their doors in the suburbs.” And that was really the paradoxical root of all our problems: because it was a 95% middle class white neighborhood in the ‘burbs surrounded by strip malls and box stores, nobody thought anything bad could happen, so nobody knew their neighbors (or which suspicious characters weren’t their neighbors), so my idyllic childhood home was actually the most f***ed-with place I ever lived. It was a neighborhood so nice, so quiet and peaceful, that you could be completely fearless walking the streets at night to paint a goddamn swastika on someone’s front door.

Then I went to college in reputedly dangerous midtown, where the only bad thing that ever happened to me was when I left my dorm door unlocked and a friend of mine came in and rearranged all our stuff to teach me a lesson. (Lesson: my friends are a-holes.)

Well, I suppose there was that one time at the Walgreens up the street when the guy got shot in the face in broad daylight, and then the students asked what the authorities were doing to keep kids safe, and the head of campus security said, “Telling them not to go to that Walgreens.” And the time at Del Taco when the guy got in his car to go home and backed up over what turned out to be the body of a guy that had “taken it outside” with another patron earlier in the evening. But other than that, nothing happened.

My post-college apartments have been marked by one odd event after another, and industrious searchers for my original online journals would be treated with many tales of cops called and lunacy witnessed, from Volkswagen Driver to the Gay Dude Gang to the guy who once camped out outside my door because he was convinced my apartment was full of promiscuous teenage girls. All of this weirdness took place in the ‘burbs, in The County, in neighborhoods full of nice houses where women walked their dogs alone at 11:00 at night. The day I moved into the “best” neighborhood where I have ever dwelled, the police were searching the dumpsters for a little girl’s body.As these things were happening, I was very open about them. I told these stories to people eagerly, hyperbolically. None of them ever caused anyone to think ill of my neighborhood; it was in The County, after all. Nobody was ever afraid to park their car when they visited. People thought the stories were a riot.

Now, though, I don’t live in The County. I live in the Big, Bad City, with the poor people. I live in a house where all my neighbors know me and are friendly, on a street that is in some ways even quieter than the one I grew up on, and when I tell people about it they ask, “How… how is that? What have you seen so far? What have you seen, you know, ‘going down’?”

“Well, the other night I saw a 70-year-old white woman alone on the corner with her poodle, smoking a cigarette while the dog peed, suggesting that even a little old lady is not as much of a racist wuss as you are.”

Some time not too long ago, a friend of mine said to me about the fact that I live in my house, “I really respect what you guys are doing. Settling down there, trying to improve things.” My hand to God. Like I’m in my f***ing Conestoga, bringing Christ to the savages on the Oregon Trail. I wanted to dispense some frontier justice all over his face. It’s a townhome.

Because… you know who doesn’t need to hear shit like that?: my wife. My sweet, nervous wife, who moved to the city from a town with a slightly larger population than my college. My wife, who has been told all her life that getting knifed is a “New York Handshake.” My wife, who is petrified by a ringing doorbell no matter where she lives because, I don’t know, apparently murderers ring the doorbell. I am very protective of my wife, and I want her to be happy, and she does not need stupid things to be afraid of. She already goes, “WHAT WAS THAT?” every time pedestrians on the sidewalk outside talk to each other. So we’re all stocked up on that nonsense.

For this reason, I was very much against getting an alarm installed when we built our house. You might find this counterintuitive– surely an alarm system gives you more peace of mind, right?– but I stand by my gut feeling. Alarms have one effect: they plant and foster the idea that alarms are necessary. From the minute someone says, “And of course it comes with an alarm system” for as long as you have one, on some level you are thinking, whether you set it or not, “Somebody is coming to steal my shit.” This feeling is multiplied tenfold every time the alarm goes off accidentally, shrieking needlessly into the night, so much so that your subconscious never stops to think, “Hey, you notice how this thing only ever goes off accidentally?”

• In ten months, number of times our alarm has gone off: 7,349,642
• Number of times the glass breakage detector has sounded at 1:00 a.m. because I opened a soda can, waking the neighbors and propelling my wife out of bed and into the ceiling fan: 1
• Number of times it has been set off by a toddler putting a glass on a table, causing the toddler to think she’d ended the world and cry in terror: 1
• Number of times in the last month my wife has rushed home midday from work to investigate an alarm set off by, I don’t know, a spider scaring the house or something: 2
• Number of times the alarm has gone off for a legitimate, alarming reason: 0, 0, 0, 0

I am now in a position where, due to the number of false alarms, I must set the alarm before leaving each morning (killers and pirates and bears!) but I must first enter in a bypass code to deactivate part of the alarm so it doesn’t work too well. These are the things we do to make ourselves feel better because people who don’t live here think we ought to. All we can do is settle down here and try to improve things. We really are like some kind of heroes.

There are a good many things I keep out of quote-unquote polite conversation, in fact. A good way to figure out what they are is to read the things I post on the web. I think about political and religious issues more or less all day long while the area near my brain stem labelled “Job” makes my fingers do the things that make the money appear at my house, but I almost never have particularly meaningful conversations about them with other people. I know too many party-liners on both sides to get further in a political discussion than “Boy, I sure do prefer our system of government to that one on ‘Survivor’ Island.” And people are so keyed up about religion (especially in the last few years) I’ve had people scream at me while I was agreeing with them.

“We’re all sinners, but Jesus loves us so much!”

“I know. Jesus died for our sins!”

“You shut up! Don’t you patronize me, you son of a bitch!”

Things are further complicated by how the two topics increasingly intertwine. Political agendas in America are more often framed with religion, and religion becomes more explicitly politicized.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Dad! Say, Dad: have you ever noticed that there are planks in each party’s political platform that reflect Catholic teachings, but the bishop only teaches the ones emphasized by the Republicans? Why is that?”

“Well son, if the Church seems to lean to the right, it’s only because Republicans are the forces of Good, and Democrats want gays to abort Christians.”

“I see. I must now attack you with this carving knife.”

“Yes, this discussion has decreased the quality of our relationship. Same time next year?”

So I use this little safety valve that nobody sees and get it all off my chest here. Nobody has to get defensive; I don’t get my face chewed off because the kitten-rescue operation I like turns out to be tied to Planned Fucking Parenthood somehow, possibly through the Freemasons; nobody is involuntarily put in a position to find my immortal soul wanting or wonder aloud how they ever made friends with an amoral traitor like myself. Years of experience and unguarded, ill-timed asides have taught some bitter lessons.

Occasionally, I do need a refresher course.

As helpful as it is to vent my spleen in my little corner of the world, sometimes I thirst for something more. I long to be inspired instead of discouraged. I long for affirmation of what is good instead of laundry lists of what is not. That’s one of the things I love best about Advent and Christmas: you go to church and get your glory booster shot. Peace on Earth! Good Will Toward Men! Joy to the World! Giving! Sharing! Hot Damn, We’re All in This Together, Hallelujah!

No anger there, right? Everybody can get behind joy? To the world?

So this year I sent a gasket into orbit when I read an article in the local paper saying that all the priests in the state were instructed to use the first week of Advent to deliver a statement opposing a petition on stem cell research. Stem cells? Right now? It’s Christmastime, time to put aside the acrimony and controversy for a few weeks and come together as brothers and sisters… or, failing that, instruct people how to vote on one of the most divisive cultural issues of the day in the most condescending, stultifying way possible. We are all out of Joy to the World, but as a priest, my prepared notes on cellular biology should be at least as inspirational as a PowerPoint presentation.

Whatever happened to moving people’s hearts?, I thought. Whatever happened to trying to convert people? It feels like a lot of church leaders honestly couldn’t care less whether or not anybody believes in anything, just so long as they win. As long as we get out the vote and squash this petition, you can believe Jesus Christ is a grapefruit in your refrigerator. Then, once the stem cell petition is done, we can start fighting Target for saying “Happy Holidays.”

So after I read the article and went crazy, I did the thing that crazy people do: I wrote a Letter to the Editor. Having the remaining flicker of sanity to realize that these things always go badly for me before going ahead and doing it anyway, I tried to sound as little like myself as possible and turn the dial to “simmer.”

To Whom It May Concern:

While I recognize that social issues are a huge part of the Church’s mission, I was nonetheless almost inarticulate with frustration when I read that the Catholic Church in Missouri would use the first Sunday of Advent to uniformly lobby against stem cell research. As we should be preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ, I cannot believe that the Church I was raised in would actually choose this time of all times to deliver a canned stump speech for the sake of advancing a political agenda. At a time when we should be celebrating a joyous holiday on the Church calendar, our “leaders” have once again chosen to wade into the areas of science and politics and emphasize all things divisive and inflammatory. It breaks my heart that I hear about abortion and Petri dishes from the pulpit nearly every week, but issues like poverty and caring for our fellow man– about which, incidentally, Jesus actually had something to say, and which actually relate to the coming holiday– almost never seem to come up on Sunday. If only my priest or bishop had this much to say about Medicaid cuts! As troubling as it is to see religion shrinking from the public square, it is downright infuriating to see the extent to which politics, specifically Republican politics, keep finding their way onto the altar.

Sincerely,

Jimski

Having said my piece and put the whole thing out of my mind, I was taken by surprise a day or two later when a message on my voicemail informed me that my letter would be published. I got the little charge that you get when these things happen: They’re printing my letter. The priests will read it, and they’ll send it to the bishop, and everyone will change their minds. It all starts here. Oh my God, I am going to be pope. I’d better pack.

No, you don’t really think that, but you sort of do, don’t you? Why else are you writing the freakin’ letter? What do you think the outcome is going to be? Maybe you don’t know what the outcome will be. Well, let me tell you. In the aftermath or my letter’s publication, my mom heard the story I’m telling you now and summed it up in her inimitable fashion: “You see? This is why I always say, ‘Never say your opinion about anything.’”

If hearing that my letter would be published was a surprise, that was nothing compared to actually seeing the letter in the paper. It was at this point I learned the horrible secret of why people who write letters to the editor sound crazy, and also that Christmas would be cancelled.

To Whom It May Concern:

…It breaks my heart that I hear about abortion and Petri dishes from the pulpit… every week, but issues like poverty and caring for our fellow man– about which, incidentally, Jesus actually had something to say– never come up on Sunday…. It is downright infuriating to see the extent to which… Republican politics keep finding their way onto the altar. [I drink Christian blood from a hollowed-out Bible. I need stem cells to clone our Fuhrer.]

Sincerely,

Jimski’s Dad

I knew the name thing was going to be an issue. I was ready for that. My dad and I have shared a name for thirty years, which was always just icing on the cake that is having an eleven-letter Polish surname made entirely of consonants. I will always cherish the character-building experience of being seventeen years old and having girls call the house, only to hear my mom ask them, “Do you mean Big Jim or Little Jim?” I’m not bitter about that. Six feet tall, shaving before I drive my car to my college interview, and I’m getting “Little Jim.” “The father or the son?” would have done the job, but it’s fine. I could live with it, big smile, just name your son Gustav and put it behind you. What I had a harder time with was that, as I got older, my dad got also got older, as well as more devoutly religious and somehow more forceful in his opinions. Dad eventually retired, and retirement could mean only one thing: letter after letter to the editor with my name signed at the bottom.

When Ray [Hartmann] stated it was an embarrassment that Missouri passed Amendment 2, I presume he was referring to the embarrassment of the 28% who voted to reject the sanctity of marriage. Signed, Jimski

-Donnybrook, August 12, 2004

So I have to admit that as I wrote my letter, all the calls I have fielded from old friends saying, “My brother is gay, you ass!” were not miles from my mind. “Let’s see how he likes it,” I may have remarked in an unguarded moment. But honestly, in my naive, puppy-like heart, I truly believed that my thoughts as written were nothing to get upset about. My family loves Christmas, right? Who’s going to get in my face about keeping the church’s Christmas about baby Jesus? It’s a little nuanced, but we’re all more or less on the same page here, right?

Here is why I am an idiot:

(this is only a partial list.)

• When your writing is somewhere besides your web site, the people printing it can change it however they want. Sometimes, they can take the entire point right out.
• While I did take into account the fact that my father and I have the same name, I forgot that in his retirement my father had taken a job with the local Catholic Church’s pro-life office. We as a family became aware of my publication when every priest and parishoner at my dad’s church called him Saturday morning to find out when he decided to give the devil his soul for Christmas.
• The source of my original frustration was that the local Church was using Advent to talk about stem cells, and I didn’t think Advent was the time to get people angry about stuff like that. Having written my letter, I have now guaranteed that people will be shouting at me about stem cells for the remainder of the holiday season. Oh, shit! “The Christmas season”! I meant “the Christmas season!” I don’t even know why I said “holiday”! I’m sorry!
• If you say you’re tired of the Church being political, that means you love stem cell research and won’t be happy until winged monkey bodies with baby heads are flying out of labs all across this country.
• Calling the local church leaders “divisive” and “inflammatory” is sounding pretty funny right about now, eh, funny man? Good thing nobody’s dividing or inflaming people around here, eh Copernicus? Cheer up, though: at least they didn’t print that part.

Here’s the good news: my refresher course was a complete success. A+ for me. As much as I struggled to keep these things to myself/my site before, the old me will look like friggin’ Michael Moore compared to the new me. Send the word out: cancel the death threats! Intimidated into silence! Already taken care of! As you were! I got my year-end booster shot; it just wasn’t the one I expected.

Jimski Writing Crutch Count:
-exclamation points: 22
-italics for emphasis: 8
-parentethical asides: 2, possibly a record

The state of Idaho is divided into three barley regions. A barley producer from each region is appointed by the Governor to serve a three-year term (limited to two terms) on the Idaho Barley Commission. The commissioners not only represent their districts but the state of Idaho through national organizations such as, US Grains Council, National Barley Growers Association, and the National Barley Foods Council. An industry representative also serves on the board bringing to the commission experience and insight from the malting industry.

I mention this so that, the next time you are at your desk facing the most pointless conference call or annoying coworker, you can think, “Right now, someone somewhere is spending every day on the Idaho Barley Commission. Well, not somewhere; in Idaho.” For that person, every professional thought revolves around barley. Grains Council meetings on Tuesdays… staying late at the office, missing that birthday dinner to finish the big barley PowerPoint presentation for this year’s National Barley Growers Association conference at the Tulsa Days Inn… losing business to your competitors and swearing in frustration, “Grrrr! Millet. Son of a bitch.”

Now that I’ve actually written this, I can’t decide whether my point is “it could be worse” or “it’s all roughly that pointless.” Either way, don’t worry about it.

Unfortunately, five months late, I have nothing really original or well-remembered to contribute. Fortunately, since this is Self Amusement Theater, I can go ahead and jot down some stuff anyway.

I generally liked the movie. DVD will tell the true tale, of course; any opinion of the movie formed alongside the horde of the fanniest fans is going to come out a shade too rosy by half. You can hardly give an eyes-wide-open review of a movie you saw at 2:00 a.m. on a school night surrounded by guys dressed up as the Power Droid. (There will always be a special place in my heart for the guys so immersed in the fantasy that they dress up as characters, but not immersed enough to dress as one of the good characters. It’s like they want to escape their humdrum lives for a galaxy far, far away, but they don’t have the self-confidence to imagine anything but another humdrum life waiting for them out there on Planet Dirt. I’ll always be pulling for you, Guy Who Could Have Been Boba Fett But Chose Walrus Man.)

Even without the cheering Halloween party in the theater, even without the two guys having the prolonged, all-business, attention-ravenous lightsaber duel in the front rows before the show, I would have thought Revenge of the Sith was the best of the prequels, which is admittedly the equivalent of winning the gold medal in Olympic Speed-Walking. Better than Return of the Jedi? I’m not trying to make any trouble. I only know that I went home satisfied in 2005, and that in 1983 I went home with a feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on which I can now recognize as unmet expectations. (I had many years to become familiar with that feeling later.)

Perhaps because it went out of its way to tie everything up with a neat red and black bow, however, the movie ended up underlining fundamental issues that have always been there. After the original, the Star Wars movies just don’t work if Vader is Luke’s father.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid watching Star Wars I always imagined that Darth Vader was “born” and led his stormtroopers on a brutal quest, using his Jedi insider knowledge to hunt down and personally dispatch his former colleagues. It was a cool, bad-ass, epic thing in my imagination. On the screen, it happened in an afternoon by remote control.

But it had to happen that fast. Once paternity enters the picture, Vader’s on the clock. He’s locked into a timeline. Luke is 15-20 years old, so Vader has to be charming/”fully functional” enough to make a baby with somebody, turn into the quintessential, picture-next-to-the-word-in-the-dictionary Evil, and eradicate the Religious Left from the face of the universe so that by the time his kid’s a teenager, the eradication has to have happened a very long time ago. Vader has to multitask.

This is the kind of s*** that happens when you write the story backwards.

Remember how the Jedi were treated in Star Wars? Han Solo acted like he’d never heard of ‘em before. That officer who made fun of Vader on the Death Star behaved as if the whole idea of super-powered Jedi knights (which during his lifetime had once been the government’s entire peacekeeping force) was ridiculous mumbo-jumbo. Wouldn’t that be a lot like me never having heard of the Reagan administration, or believing audiocassettes were an old wives’ tale?

At one point, Peter Cushing says of Ben Kenobi, “Surely he must be dead by now.” Why would that be reasonable to assume if he’d been a vital Jedi when they’d last seen him several years earlier? And boy, those last 15-20 years were pretty hard on ol’ Obi-Wan, there. That’s a pretty short trip from Ewan MacGregor to Alec Guinness. I guess years on the lam in the desert, watching over the son of Space Hitler from a discreet distance to make sure he doesn’t start Force-choking kids on the playground, really wear a brother down. (Not to mention staying in the closet about being Public Enemy #2, spending every day of your life with nothing to do but think about having unleashed Space Hitler on the universe, dreaming about overthrowing the government with no one to help you but a Muppet in a bog.) It’s sort of like how President Clinton looked like Elvis F. Kennedy in 1992, but by 2000 looked like he had been repeatedly struck by lightning.

I’ve had plenty of years to watch and think about these movies, but it was only after seeing the last one that I finally got it. I’ve realized that everything you need to understand the evolution of these films can be found in the life of George Lucas himself.

Lucas is Star Wars, Rough Draft:

The original Star Wars was made by a kid, one of a band of rebellious kids working against the studio system in the seventies, as a scrappy more-or-less independent film. The movie was about a scrappy band of kids who didn’t have a whole lot of money or resources– there was one princess on a trust fund, but the rest of them were basically blue collar– fighting the evil imperialist System and its lockstep oppression of freedom and creativity. Everything in the System was gray and uniform and corporate, right, but the rebels weren’t about that. Sure, they did things on the cheap, but they made do and did things their way. And the System was being run by Vader, this old stuffed shirt who had turned his back on the ideals that got him his power in the first place, man. But the rebels had had it with the System; they were gonna fly right in there and blow the System to smithereens. They were gonna blast the System right where it was weakest: in the heart. Take that, System! Take that, Dad!

Then, as the story progresses… Lucas gets his own company, starts to get a little gray in his neck-beard… and sure, Vader is running the System with an iron fist, but you have to understand: there is good in him. He doesn’t want to be a part of the System; it’s just too late for him to do anything about it now. But maybe, even within the System, there’s still a chance for him to take everything that’s wrong with the System and throw it down a bottomless pit or something. He’s made some wrong moves, but you know, in the end he’s basically a good guy.

Actually, now that we’re on the subject, what about Vader? Did you ever stop to think about how such a basically good guy ends up a part of the System? Have you ever thought about how hard it was for him? Forget the rebel kids and all their overzealous idealism. There’ll be time for rebel kids in some later installment. In the meantime… look. You have to understand, Vader was only trying to do good work. Trying so hard. All he wanted was a little recognition and respect for his vision… but noooo. Those artsy-fartsy philosophers in their gigantic ivory tower wouldn’t let him in, would they? They wouldn’t let him be on their precious Council; they were just so afraid of all his talents. And the bureaucrats, oh my God, the f***ing bureaucrats. You have to go through fifteen people to get anything decided, and half of them don’t even speak your language; they speak in subtitles through some damn snout thing. Vader just realized that the only way he was ever going to be able to do good work is if he grabbed the power of the System for himself and made everyone do it his way, correctly, efficiently, with computers. And if that meant replacing a dozen cheap Jedi knights in ponchos with thousands of digital clones and slaughtering some little padawans’ childhoods, well, it’s tragic but Vader had the best of intentions. Nobody can fault Vader there.

(Imagine how this might have turned out if I could actually remember the movie. If I’d written a review when it was actually timely? Way shorter.)

For the most part, though, I simply found the book to be sour, unpleasant, and best left behind me. No matter how much you’re enthralled by the larger story, it’s hard to be engaged by a book when the main character hates being in it and can’t stand to see anyone else enjoying it either. (“Everyone at Hogwarts was laughing and sharing their ice cream cones, but how could Harry laugh? After all that had happened to him, the most popular boy in the world who was right about everything all along, how could poor Harry ever smile again? All he could think about was turning their ice cream cones into pus-filled boils. He went up to the Gryffindor dorm and put on a Cure record while his enchanted Morrisey poster moped on the wall.”)

Compared to that, book six was almost great. It got a little wobbly in the end, though.

Not because of the death. I couldn’t care less, probably because I’ve heard a bit too much about phoenixes (phoenices?) in this series where he’s concerned. Feathers of them, Orders of them… anyway, even if that character’s death does stick he was always a cipher, all enigmatic and taciturn in a way that does me no good as a reader. And we know Yoda has to die for Luke to face Vader. I hope Joseph Campbell is getting royalties.

No, the thing that gets under my skin is the Snape thing again. I’ve calmed down with time and convinced myself the series could still end in a way that satisfies me, but during the first read-through I was so annoyed I almost renounced the series.

Professor Snape is my favorite character in the Harry Potter series. To understand why, one must appreciate some overlooked but fundamental truths about Our Hero. Because, look, here’s the thing: Harry Potter is a cheater. Harry Potter is a total, unrepentant liar. Harry Potter’s dad was a total a-hole. Harry and Ron never pass up a chance to copy someone else’s homework or make Hermione write their papers for them. Harry will literally steal the teacher’s edition of the textbook, disguise it, lie about having it, and then stash it someplace he’s not supposed to know about, and expect everyone to be okay with that. Harry Potter will make himself invisible and hide in your room to listen to your private conversation. Harry Potter will steal your car, and he will crash it. Harry Potter will never even try to compensate you. Harry Potter is a sociopath.

Harry Potter will kiss a dementor before he ever follows a rule. He will break that curfew. He will go wander the grounds in the dark. He will march right into that Forbidden Forest with a pic-a-nic basket, how d’ya like them apples? Unhappy with the current school administration, he will train teenagers to form a small insurgent army and break into a government building to steal classified documents. What the f*** does he care? He’s Harry Potter.

Above all this, however, Harry Potter will make his mind up about you in about twenty seconds, and 85% of the time he will decide you are a pinhead. After that, buddy, God have mercy on your soul, because Harry Potter is watching you on his stolen spy map. Soundproof your keyhole; he is out there in the hall, possibly disguised as one of your friends who he has clubbed unconscious and stashed in a bathroom (it’s okay! He’s Harry Potter!) and he is going to get you. And if he’s a student in your class, well, hope ya like smartass remarks undermining you and constant attempts to get you fired. Never does he say, “Maybe it’s for the best the adults won’t tell me what’s going on,” or “maybe I should leave this to someone with more than 18 months of training.” Pinheads! All of them!

He never learns anything, in class or out, and he never pays for it because he was always Right All Along. God is literally on his side. J.K. Rowling likes him a lot more than I do, so the universe keeps rewarding Harry and his friends for everything they do wrong.

The more suspicion points to Snape, the more I silently pray that this once, this one very important time, Harry gets served.

“Boy,” Harry said, “that seven-year grudge turned out to be an irrational waste of everyone’s time. I wish I could do that differently. I owe a lot of people apologies.”

Though it has been pointed out to me that the hero is often my least favorite character (SEE ALSO: Vampire Slayer, Buffy the) I did not always harbor this grudge. Harry and the gang were 11 years old once. When you’re eleven, sure, you’re new to the world of responsibility and in over your head and not the clearest thinker. When a twelve year old steals a car because he’s going to be late for school, it’s alarming stupidity but you can at least see how it happened. I mean, they were making him live under the stairs six months ago. He’s got some things to figure out.

But once you get to be 16, 17, maybe you don’t aim the curse at Draco without even knowing what it does. Maybe you stick to the cute “lift him up by the ankle” one, or learn three words of Latin. “That sounds like it might mean ‘cut forever.’ I’d better turn his pants into flowers or something instead.”

I am still Dumbledore’s man to the end, in a readership sense, because Harry only became a complete douchebag gradually, and now I’m genuinely enthralled by what’s happening in his world despite the fact that it’s his world. Yes, I do wish Hermione and Neville and Luna would just freeze him and take over the book, but I also keep looking forward to the day he has an epiphany, learns from his Hogwarts experience, settles down and starts treating me right. I also have The Phantom Menace on DVD. I have it coming.

Dear Sen. Clinton:

I’m writing to commend you for calling for a $90-million study on the effects of video games on children, and in particular the courageous stand you have taken in recent weeks against the notorious “Grand Theft Auto” series.

I’d like to draw your attention to another game whose nonstop violence and hostility has captured the attention of millions of kids — a game that instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing.

I’m talking, of course, about high school football.

And it only gets better from there.

There has been so much hype on this topic since Doom came out (12 years ago!) that I can’t believe that there are still people left who think of video games as childrens’ toys. Are people my parents age still having kids somewhere? I’m so conditioned now to think of video games as violent, sexual adult entertainment that when I heard my 7-year-old cousin had gotten a PS2, I let out an alarmed little cry.

But my cousins don’t play Grand Theft Auto; their parents have at least that much sense. When you look at their collection, all you see is EA Soccer and Hockey and Quidditch and probably something involving rapping, dancing monkeys. Every game they own is rated child-friendly, and those kids are still criminal masterminds. Not because they’re allowed to play with video games, but because they’re allowed to play with fireworks on the screened-in porch. In fact, the PS2 bores them. I think they’d be a lot better kids if they would just sit down and play some video games. At least take the bow and arrows away.

This has been going on my whole life. Phil Donahue went after video games back when they consisted of vaguely spacecraft-shaped red blocks shooting asteroid-shaped green blocks. (In fairness to Phil, I did need counselling in third grade to overcome my uncontrollable urge to shoot rocks.) They might as well have protested that asteroids weren’t really green.

On the subject of the new Grand Theft Auto, which I must disclose I own (as perhaps the best wedding gift ever) but still haven’t had time to really get into: Sen. Clinton and her ilk are upset about some sexually explicit code that was wisely abandoned by the developers (or possibly added as an inside joke) and that is literally inaccessible to the player. Some Danish guy found it accidentally by hacking into the ones and zeroes. As far as I’ve heard, there isn’t even a cheat code that can be used to get to it; you would have to use an outside device and play the game for more than four straight hours to see the smut. If your impressionable youngster has gotten himself to this level, make him save the game and submit it to the dean of your local university’s CS department; you may have a prodigy on your hands.

All that aside: am I actually hearing the complaint, “My children could play that game, in which you can shoot innocent bystanders and police officers in the jugular vein, and see people having sex in it!“? At that point, it becomes upsetting?

Oh, right. America. I forgot.

Every time something like this arises, there is one issue that sticks out like a floating block with a question mark on it. This latest carnal carnage killing and whoring video game that’s going to break into your kids’ room and make them go to juvey costs over fifty American dollars. If your nine year old has Grand Theft Auto and you don’t know about it, you have more serious things to worry about because he is selling cocaine at his school. “But he can rent it.” Yes he can, if you got your nine year old his own Blockbuster card.

To say nothing of how he got to these stores. I grew up in suburbia, with its subdivisions and distant strip malls on dangerous, pedestrian-hostile roads. My friends and I tried riding our bikes to K-Mart every now and then, and we felt like the Fellowship of the Ring by the time we made it down Lindbergh Blvd. If your kid has this game, a) you helped b) your kid has sh*tty friends, and you haven’t noticed c) you and your child are engaged in a “Hogan’s Heroes”-esque game of cat and mouse, and he is going to grow up to be Lord Voldemort. Be on the lookout for mysterious injuries to your pets.

America: I am sick of your f***ing kids. You put TVs in their rooms, you don’t pay any attention to who they hang out with, you treat them like your goddamn pets, and then any time you find out adults are doing adult things near where you last saw them you go on a rampage trying to babyproof the planet. The entire planet does not need to be appropriate for children; I live here too. Ooh, it makes me so mad I could just shoot you and steal your car.

If I saw one of these things — even if it were six inches long and in a cage– I would run and run and never stop. I got up and walked briskly away from the picture of it. It has wings on its knees. The Lord don’t make ‘em like that.

Other researchers have been doing equally remarkable things with [dinosaur] bones. Kent Stevens, a computer scientist at the University of Oregon, became interested in the large long-necked sauropods of the late Jurassic Period, about 150 million years ago. Members of this family, which includes apatosaurus and diplodocus, were assumed to be treetop browsers, usually depicted standing foursquare with their heads high above the ground, like fat, short-legged giraffes…. But when Stevens modeled the bones on his computer, he discovered the vertebrae just don’t seem designed to fit together that way. Instead, their natural position seems to lie almost parallel to the ground, or even below the horizontal, where the animal could browse on low shrubs or aquatic plants. This has been an unwelcome revelation to many laymen, Stevens has found.

II.
Dr. Stevens:I am a curious layman who recently read with great interest the Newsweek article that featured your research so prominently. I was intrigued to read about your computer models and what they suggested about the behavior of long-necked sauropods (since it challenged everything I thought I knew about them, rendering my education more worthless still) but the article left a question unanswered that has bugged me ever since I read it: if diplodocus couldn’t use its long neck to reach tall branches, why did it have such a long neck in the first place? Conventional wisdom holds that an animal with such an unusual feature must have evolved in response to some kind of need or environmental factor. In other words, one does not need a 20-foot neck to eat a shrub.

III.
Mr. Ski:Good questions. Please check out the discussions on my webpage www.cs.uoregon.edu/~kent under DinoMorph. It shows up in several places, including the discussion of Apatosaurus on that link and in the Science article which you can read online or download.

Moral:

Crazy old shut-ins know what they’re doing: write more random letters to the people in the newspaper. It doesn’t cost anything, and you learn about dinosaur necks.

* Can you even imagine the time it would save if you could reach your Cheerios, your juice, and your toast without using your hands or bending forward? I have to evolve me one of those necks.

Since those days, I have periodically tried to spot the regrettable things of the future, the things I’m wearing, watching or buying that I don’t yet have the good sense to be embarrassed about. This week, I had the accidental chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter good fortune to lay two pieces of technology next to one another, and the thread revealed itself.

Yes, they are a phone and a CD player, but in emergencies they can also be used as delicious, sustaining candy.

Whatever else it does to you, spending serious time in a Target store right now really drives home the point that, now that you mention it, yes, I think there may be a Star Wars movie coming out sometime soon. Everything in that humble shoppe has Darth Vader on it somewhere. And isn’t that interesting, by the way? Not Yoda. Not Obi-Wan. Not droids or wookkies or Jar Damn Jar. M&Ms and Pepsi and Doritos and Playtex and Depends Undergarments and all of the 1400 companies hitching their wagons to this merchandising moonrocket have chosen the movie’s genocidal nightmare factory as their mascot.

“Choose the Dark Side!” the dark chocolate M&Ms shout from the candy aisle. Well, I think every time, that’s a slogan maybe not as well thought out as I would have liked. Culturally speaking. Their candy is reminding me of bone-chilling evil, and that’s their actual marketing angle. “Evil is wicked cool, kids! Look at the cute candy guy in the stormtrooper helmet.” I’ve often suspected companies of wanting to turn me to the dark side, but I’ve never had one come out and ask before.

The electronics aisles presented us with a whole different kind of temptation: the Revenge of the Sith game for the Playstation. Because listen: I could sit here pick apart these cheerfully cynical marketing campaigns all day long. I’m honing a good twenty-minute rant on what kind of screwed up mind it takes to intentionally make a movie too dark for children, take every opportunity to say that parents should not take their kids to see it, and then choke the rivers with walls and walls of tie-in toys. I have given these slick tricks a lot of thought, and that is because they work on me very, very well. Those f***ing M&Ms are delicious. All of my action figures have been in storage for a year, and I cannot walk past the new ones with picking one up and holding it for a long time. There is so much shilling going on that I can’t tell if Lucas is using candy to sell his movie or Mars is using the Sith to sell their candy, but both strategies are working on my sorry reptile brain just fine.

(Though I am weak, there are some lines I cannot cross. I’m sorry, but what kind of whacked-out fetish do you have to put in the spotlight on the day you order your dog the Slave Leia pet costume? Use that money to see a specialist, my friend.)

So I had quite the inner struggle when I saw the game within my grasp. My chief incentive to buy it was also the best reason not to look directly at it. On each shoulder, the little angel and devil were both saying the same thing: play it now, and you see what happens without waiting for the movie to come out.

Though it breaks my heart to say it out loud, I have a lot of memories where Star Wars is concerned. This week, as I fight the dark urge to break down and ruin this movie for myself, the one that comes to mind most often is that Return of the Jedi taught me what a spoiler was.

In 1983, my best friend was a guy named Frankie who lived about three suburban blocks away. When we were seven, of course, an unsupervised journey across this distance might as well have been a jaunt over the Berlin Wall. As a result, Frankie and I were coming into the full bloom of our phone discovery phase. (I say this like it’s normal, but for all I know we were the only ones who did it.) He would call me after school, and we would literally sit there on the phone for hours at a time like nitwits, talking about whatever we happened to be doing, often watching TV silently while holding the phone to our ears, the still-corded receiver creating a barrier for anyone who wanted to go to the fridge.

When you think about it, our parents could be pretty indulgent when they wanted to be. Anything to keep us from bugging them for ten minutes, I guess.

Anyway, Frankie was indulged in many other things; he was one of those kids who had the Millennium Falcon and Castle Greyskull and an AT-AT battalion… and he was one of those kids who would invite you over to play with these things, but then he wouldn’t actually let you touch any of them. So it was a little like a primary school strip club in that regard. In the spring of 1983, the juiciest plum Frankie had to dangle over my head was his membership in the Star Wars Fan Club.

I was hotly jealous of those Fan Club guys, with their fancy patches and their “Bantha Tracks” newsletter.

One afternoon, Frankie and I were engaged in our pre-call-waiting marathon phone sit-in, and I was beside myself with excitement after seeing a Return of the Jedi ad. I was speculating aloud about Darth Vader, when Frankie piped up.

“Vader is really Luke’s father, I hope you know,” Frankie blurted. “And he dies. And Yoda dies, and Jabba the Hutt is fat and they fight.”

And though I said “oh, shoot; darn it” etc. until I was nineteen years old, I do remember hearing Frankie and thinking, “you son of a bitch.” I didn’t even know Yoda was sick. The last time I saw him, he looked so good.

Later, the Scholastic Book Club would release the storybook a month early; I would buy it, swearing not to read it at first and then weakly allowing myself a page a day in a war of attrition with my own impatience. I badly wanted proof that Frankie didn’t know what he was talking about. By the time I got to the theater, I had about six pages left.

As we got older, Frankie would grow up to be widely regarded as the second most popular boy in class, a boy whose eighth grade photo was given the caption “Don’t Touch the Hair” in the yearbook. As roughly the 30th most popular boy in class, I had some trouble fitting Frankie onto my calender after about ‘85-86. I ran into him during a sale at my favorite comic book store the summer before eighth grade, holding (as fate would have it) a thick stack of back issues of Marvel’s “Star Wars” comics. He looked at me like I had caught him masturbating to them.

“Please, do me a favor,” Frankie the star jock entreated me. “Don’t tell any of the guys that you saw me in the comic book store, okay? Please?”

This would have been a good time to teach Frankie the true meaning of the word “spoiler,” but I never mentioned it to anyone. We didn’t really talk to the same people anyway. That was probably the first conversation we’d had in a year.

So, after all those meaningful years of grade school friendship, that is how I always remember Frankie. He was like my internet training wheels, my preparation for Harry Knowles’ being unleashed on the world. Now, every time I start to let impatience get the better of me, I think twice and put the game down.

Besides, if episode I taught me anything, it’s that it’ll be half price in a month anyway.

*Video games were actually the last thing we should have been buying. We probably got fifteen of ‘em for the wedding. I’m going to have to quit my job to have time to find out what my Thank You notes are actually thanking people for.

not pictured: gravitas

Flowers? Candy? Maybe a nice piece of chicken at a classy restaurant?

For my mom’s birthday, which seems to be on Mother’s Day every other year, I got her the one thing she has been asking for consistently for the last several months, the thing that every mother really wants: a 30,000-volt stun gun. This gift brings Mom more in line with the practice of her life’s central philosophy, “The bastards are going down.”

I could not begin to guess who the bastards might actually be. Every time I deactivate the crisscrossing lasers of my parents’ home alarm system in a mad dash not to wake up their army of defensive killbots, I think, “Where exactly do you think you live? Your house is forty minutes into the ‘burbs; the only reason anyone would be breaking in here is to find food they need to sustain them after accidentally getting lost in the dense woods surrounding your compound here. Alarm system. Sheesh. Eek! Killbots!”

Eight years after moving into a house so remote that the backyard has a naturally occurring spring, it occurred to Mom that there was a gap in her defensive net. Sure, the alarm and motion sensors would ward off burglars, pillagers and Vikings, but what was she supposed to do about the highwaymen and killers lurking in the shrubs of Summer Meadow Estates? In the near-decade she and my father have been living in this neighborhood, no one in a ten-mile radius has ever reported an attack, abduction, or suspicious character; that’s how stealthy the killers are. That was when she realized: I need to be able to electrocute the bastards.

And so that’s what I’ve given her. Never let it be said that I am not a loving son. Never content to simply tolerate my mother’s delusions, I insist on feeding them. Begin praying now for the first teenager who startles her in the grocery store parking lot.

Someone recently told me a story about seeing a lot of old people walking around with broom handles in the neighborhood; upon investigation, it turned out the old folks had the broom handles for beating back packs of stray dogs when they were out on walks. As far as anyone could tell, none of them had ever encountered a single dog in the history of these walks, but all of them were sure they needed their broom handles. It seems that Mom has taken this to heart, and that the AARP arms race is on.

(For the record, I did encounter a pack of stray dogs on a walk last week, and though they gave me a wide berth I’m pretty sure good ol’ fashioned punchin’ would have gotten the job done.)

This is not a Photoshop. This actually happened.

UPDATE: much, much worse.

Though I would not have predicted it a month ago, some friends and I went to see the movie Constantine last weekend. It was the most recent example of something that has been going on around me for about a decade; everyone I knew was vaguely disdainful of the trailer, just a little too good for Neo Goes to Hell, and everyone had their tickets in hand the day before it came out. No one could muster a kind word for it even as they stood in line to get inside. We have problems of the brain, possibly caused by something in the soda.

So, in a year when I have seen exactly one of the Best Picture nominees, I checked out a movie in which Keanu Reeves fistfights a demon made entirely of angry bees. I spent the money, and it’s gone, and I’m not sorry. It was in fact a somewhat thought-provoking movie in its way, in the way that those Magic Eye 3-D images were in fact pictures of birds and sailboats. All I had to do was lose my focus a little bit.

We make a lot of movies about heaven and hell, I thought, for people who spend more time at Wal-Mart than we do at church. Well, a lot of movies about hell, anyway; for some reason, we have a real lack of interest in heaven in our stories. Maybe it’s because we don’t really see a place of perfect love and happiness, where no one wants for anything and time has no meaning, as the setting for a lot of plot-heavy drama. Not a lot of snappy patter in that dialogue, I imagine. Not a whole lot of comical misunderstandings in heaven. (“Cherubim? I thought you said seraphim! HA ha ha ha ha!”) And the sexual tension is for shit.

When characters go to the heaven of cliché, they usually see dead uncle Charlie playing chess with Sun Tzu, or poker with Lincoln and Janis Joplin. Over in the corner, Socrates is debating philosophy with Ben Franklin. I guess it’s a nice thought, but they never address the question I have every time I see this scene trotted out: if both people are playing chess in heaven, who loses the game? If Ben and Socrates have rejoined the all-knowing universal consciousness and already know how history ends, what do they really have left to talk about?

Maybe heaven just makes bad fiction. Or maybe we have a hard-on for hell. Constantine “walks in both worlds” and can see the supernatural alongside the natural, but all he ever really sees is people’s faces melting off. The guy sitting next to him on the bus never has wings. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was the same way; demons by the thousands were ravenously gobbling up the earth from every square inch of the ground below us, but for seven years God never had anything to say about that. He never does; He leaves it up to Keanu and his trenchcoat to beat back the unholy legions all by himself. “The things we’re scared of fascinate us,” even if it’s true, is a pat answer that doesn’t cut it with me anymore. I think we as a people believe that everything good has been completely swallowed up, and we’re what’s left. I think the things we find interesting and enjoyable to look at (sex, violence, Tom Hanks) are so often the same things printed on the standard one-way ticket downstairs that even people who say they don’t believe in it usually half-seriously think they’re going there. Even on an unconscious level, that’s a lot to deal with.

At best, movie hell is like a traffic ticket you can fight; you ran the light, but you show up in court with a big manila folder ready to duke it out, and if the arresting saint doesn’t show up you just might skate. The rest of the time, the movies make me wonder if we’ve given up altogether on the idea of living good enough lives; we’ve resigned ourselves to perdition and are now settling for convincing ourselves it won’t be that bad. Sure, there’s the eternal fire, suffering, and blood-drowning, but they have cars down there. It looks a little like California, see? Even if you don’t stop masturbating and go to confession before the bus hits you, you can still have the satisfaction of kicking your demons’ teeth in when you get down there. That’s what happened to Keanu, and he’s basically a good guy. Hell: whaddya gonna do, eh?

We do leave room for angels, but we don’t buy into them. The idea of a being who just loves God and loves you and knows everything is going to work out gets on our last f—ing nerve. The only reason the angel is in the story is to fall. Inevitably, movie angels are complete pricks, and the more time they spend in the movie the crazier it drives them being around people. No one seems to have told movie angels they get to go home to heaven when they punch out. They’re like smug, molting ghosts. This, too, is a way of making us feel better: absolutely, I’m a sinner, but have you talked to the archangel Gabriel? Total a-hole.

Though they grapple with issues of life and death and what comes next, movies like Constantine are patently made by and for the very young, people who have never lost anyone or thought seriously about it. Characters don’t say, “Your sister who just died is in hell. I saw her there. Sorry about that,” when the screenwriter has been to a lot of funerals recently. As it happens, I have been to a lot of funerals recently. A lot for me, anyway. I’m not living in Fallujah or anything, but I have been to two this month with the promise of a third this week. Every few years (months?) I enter a period when every ringing phone holds news of another serious illness, another bad spill, another trip to the mortuary. My tires seem to have gotten stuck in the mud while driving through one of those periods. Keanu and his trenchcoat haven’t shown up to stomp on the Reaper yet.

My fiancée’s aunt passed away on Super Bowl Sunday when her flu became pneumonia and her pneumonia became septic. A week earlier, she was a healthy, active woman in her mid-fifties with a bit of a cold. In a family where a lot of people still look at me like I’m wearing a shark skin suit and I’ve come to audit them, she was unfailingly kind and inclusive and outgoing. She helped convince me I was part of the family. We were beside her bed singing “Amazing Grace” when they turned off her ventilator; because her casket was closed, that is the way I will be forever forced to remember her. I now read about the Terri Schiavo case with the kind of added understanding I would gladly give back. Everyone in the family walked around like the recipients of a hard gut-punch for a while. The day after the funeral, her husband went to the doctor and found out he had pneumonia.

After 87 years on the planet, my friend Al also died last week. His daughter is my godmother; when she moved away many years ago, my mom became Al’s surrogate daughter, the closest member of the family who didn’t officially have to put up with his crap. Since he lived nearby, I would see him often, and Mom would swing by to say hi whenever she was running his errands with him or checking in on him. In the last year or two, I started to get a lot more of those visits from Mom. I saw Al more often too, but only because he was spending a lot more time in the hospital at the end of my block. Al was always a bombastic, exuberant, larger-than-life Irish stereotype (complicated somewhat by the fact that he was German) who was always a mover and shaker on the go. For years he had been a big muckity-muck in the police department, always chairing a fundraiser or a golf tournament or a banquet where he knew everyone in attendance, and his mind refused to accept his body’s increasing limitations. He didn’t care that he wasn’t supposed to go out anymore and eat all that terrible food; he wasn’t going to let his social life wither just because his legs didn’t work like they used to. The result was a great big man taking a lot of great big falls in his favorite restaurants and my tiny little mom incorporating her slapstick attempts to get him off the ground into the never-ending “I Love Lucy” episode that is her life. Even as he grew weaker, they laughed a lot as he crashed his scooter into yet another grocery display or tried to act like getting out of a car wasn’t as hard as it increasingly was.

Al raised enough money to buy the children’s hospital its first modern blood oxygenator. When his grandkids forgot his birthday, Al was known to mail them blank cards with self-addressed stamped envelopes and a post-it reading, “Please sign and return.” Al tried to convince his lawyer/granddaughter to write up an adoption contract entitling him to custody of my 59-year-old mother. Knowing how much my mother hates Hillary Clinton, Al bought her every book ever written about the Senator and inscribed it personally. And every single time someone asked him how he was doing, even as he sat in his hospital bed undergoing dialysis, Al’s response was invariably, “I can’t complain, and it wouldn’t help anything if I did.” If I ever have anything in common with anyone, I hope to have that attitude in common with Al.

Al was better informed and mentally sharper at 87 than I am now, which means he lived every second of his life but also means he fully experienced every second of his infirmity and death. I’m not sure whether I want that in common with him or not. Very few of us spend our last moments vital and vigorous, fighting off the bee demon.

Well, probably none of us will fight the actual bee demon. But you know what I’m saying.

The more I lose people like Al or our aunt, the more I am bound to take movies like Constantine way, way, way more seriously than anyone involved ever intended. Filmmakers aren’t trying to provoke this kind of thought; they use theology to drive the CGI because aliens are so last year. But the more I see of their heaven and hell, the less it looks like mine. I haven’t double-checked the catechism to see how well I score on my descriptions, but I can’t help thinking hell is actually pretty sparsely populated. I cannot get myself to believe that God treats life like one of those board games with the egg timers, that you screw up and die and suddenly it’s too late to say you’re sorry. (“God always loves you; God always forgives you… except… not now. Just when you’re alive. Now there’s burning.”) Surely when we die we are plugged into the universe, giving us a chance to see every horrible thing we ever did through the eyes of everyone we ever did it to and feel how it felt to them. Only the hardest sons of bitches on the planet will be confronted with something like that and say, “So?” Just about everybody, once they’re able to step away from life and get some ethereal perspective, will straighten up and fly right, and I just don’t buy that God would say, “Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids!” and throw a f—ing trapdoor switch in the floor. In a dimension of existence where time has no meaning, how can there be such a thing as “too late”?

I’m sure there’s a priest somewhere who would be more than happy to tell me. Maybe these are just my versions of the stories we all tell ourselves for comfort and reassurance. Some people think heaven is a place full of jealous angels. I tend to think of it as a place where I finally know everything and understand other people. Either way, we can all agree on one thing: Keanu Reeves isn’t getting in.

“That’s not acting; that’s staring.”
-Holly, 24

“Hey, that wasn’t in the book!”
-Peter Jackson

“I cannot accurately review this movie, having given up profanity for Lent.”
-Jimski, 28

Mel Gibson is a carny.

I was really looking forward to this movie, too. I’ve been waiting for this one to come out since they were talking about releasing it without subtitles and letting the acting and imagery speak for themselves. Back when it was called Revenge of the Passion, I was checking the “Coming Soon” sites to see if a studio would actually release it. “Ooh! This kind of flick doesn’t come along every day. How often do you get to see someone put his entire heart and soul into crafting an uncompromised vision of the thing that’s most important to him in the world? In Aramaic? And it’s about my favorite Messiah to boot. Save me a seat!” I have often griped about movie phenomena like Lord of the Rings, which fans declared to be the most magnificent epic ever made – indeed, declared themselves fans – six months before the movie was even finished, let alone shown. Well, that could have been me this time. Rarely am I so poised to enjoy a moviegoing experience; I all but walked into the screening with a “Welcome” sign on my jeans and laid down spread-eagled in front of the screen. What a letdown.

I was ready for the violence. The ending of the movie had been ruined for me a little in advance. It’s not the violence that bothered me (although, don’t get me wrong, the movie is pornography. What exactly is the NC-17 for? I’d like to make this movie again, substituting Lou Ferrigno or a puppy dog for Jesus, just to see if I could even click my stopwatch before the MPAA banned it from every theater in the country. But I digress; the gore was actually the thing about the movie I disliked the least. At least the gore had a point.) The Passion is like a somehow-sillier version of Titanic, where twenty people are playing a version of Billy Zane’s half-note, moustache-twirling, damsel-railroad-track-tying villain, and all twenty of the people are William Shatner. (There’s even an equivalent to Titanic’s painful, groan-inducing “some nobody called Picasso” sequence in which Jesus invents the table. Laugh all you want; I didn’t make it up.) The writer-director wants you to feel every moment and action palpably, and then he apparently instructs everyone to act so bizarrely that only face paint and miming would make it more over the top. Between the dialogue and the delivery, it’s like watching dinner theater written by a high school student. (Any temptation to say, “But the dialogue was from the Bible!” transcends wishful thinking.)

“I don’t know exactly what they’re saying,” I often thought, “but I know no one would ever say it like that.” It’s like… like…

My God, I have had an epiphany.

Pro wrestling. It’s exactly like watching pro wrestling. That absolutely hits the nail on the head, or inaccurately through the palm as the case may be.

There’s scene with the Sanhedrin trying Jesus when a couple of Jewish leaders protest that Jesus’ whole trial is a travesty. When they say this, Caiaphas and their peers and presumed equals morph into Moe the Stooge, shouting, “Get outta here, you!” and girlfight-slapping them out the door like they were transients who wandered onto the set.

And Gibson adds a character! He loves the Gospel so much he changes it, putting the Devil into the story as a character with dialogue. Dressed like an extra from Dune. Occasionally, Gibson has the Devil walk silently through crowd scenes smirking. This is to help you figure out who the bad guys and good guys are in the story of Christ. He also has snakes and maggots occasionally crawl out of the Devil’s orifices. This is so you will know that the Devil is evil. My favorite scene in the entire movie features the Devil. Jesus has just died, and at the moment of his death – and I swear that this is true – they cut to Hell, where the Devil is on his knees going, “Nooooooooo!” Mel Gibson seems to think I have suffered a head injury of some kind.

Speaking of violence, it only bothers me because it’s bad. I don’t mean extreme-bad, I mean poor-bad. The “filmmaker” is fetishistic about torturing his Messiah in a way that primarily makes me want to avoid sitting next to him on the bus while also having the exact opposite of its intended effect. Jesus is being scourged, and hunks of his skin are flapping in the wind, and then the soldiers say, “Switch weapons!” and they tag out at the ring, and then they scourge him some more, and just when it looks like he can’t possibly take any more they shout, “Okay, now turn him over and do the front!” Meanwhile, though, they have to wade through the blood in fishing boots and all I’m thinking is, “I don’t care if he could turn butter into margarine, he’d never stand up again if he lost that much blood, Mel.”

Worse still, it’s like The Book of John: Special Edition. Gibson invents about half a dozen never-before-seen hypothetical ways to hurt Jesus that weren’t in the original. If one of the Roman officers had said to his underlings, “Does this cross look sturdy to you? We’d better jump up and down on him for a minute or two, just to make sure,” it would have been completely consistent with the storytelling up to that point. Between that and the sound effects (they’re nailing him up! SQUISH! SPLORCH!) I was stifling laughter by the end of the movie.

Because unfortunately, all the extra, kinky Jesus hurting does is draw your attention to all the wrong things. There’s a scene where they’re trying to get the second nail to line up with a hole in the cross – and what Target bookshelf purchaser among us hasn’t had this problem? – but Jesus’ arms just aren’t long enough. So, being practical men, they just dislocate one of ‘em (with a nice loud crispity-crunchity Butterfinger crunch on the soundtrack). But ten minutes later, he’s up on the cross with so much slack that his hands are up over his head like he was atop Golgotha trying to start the wave or break into a chorus of “YMCA.”

These are not the things you notice when you’re watching a good movie.

Also – and I’m repeating myself – slow motion should be against the law.

And I haven’t even gotten to the part where the centurion pierces his side, and it’s like he has a lawn sprinkler living inside him. (The centurion is played by Uma Thurman in a track suit.) Or the way that, much like modern cartoon villains, ancient civilizations apparently liked to laugh uproariously for no reason when horrible things were happening. Crucifixion was, the film posits, the ancient equivalent of America’s Funniest Home Videos or Fox reality programming. I did not so much want to help Jesus as I wanted to approach a Roman and ask, “Exactly what about this makes you laugh? I find your reaction wildly inconsistent with human behavior” as fast as I could before they stoned me to death or something.

And Judas. . . ! His first appearance, when they throw his bag of silver to him from across the room and it spills at his feet (in slow motion) was the first time in the film when I said, “Ohhhh we’ve got trouble!” Sure enough, every scene he’s in is infused with ham-handed hand-wringing and completely inappropriate surreal imagery. When Andrew Lloyd Webber does better with a character than you do, it’s time to hang it up.

I think the entire spirit and content of the film can be summed up by the Crow Scene. As you may remember from Sunday school, one of the thieves being crucified along with Jesus mocks him for not just getting down off the cross. As soon as he does this in the film, a huge black crow lands on his cross and starts eating his face off, stabbing his eye out with its beak. When this happened, I thought, That’s the entire movie in a nutshell.

I realize that I may come across as somewhat irreverent, but nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, I have strong, very deeply held beliefs that I now have to re-explain to people because of this irredeemable piece of excrement. Every Christian in America is going to see it. (My girlfriend was delighted to hear a representative of my faith say on the radio, “Even non-Catholics will be able to understand it!” “Gee Jim,” she said to me, “I hope I’m able to follow the story of Christ even though I’m… Lutheran.”) The brilliance of this geek show’s marketing campaign is that it is designed to make Christians feel like they’re sinning if they don’t want to see the movie.

“I heard it’s really bad.”

“What’s the matter? Do you hate Jesus?”

“I like him more than you do; you’re the one who beat the #### out of him.”

(Not saying the profanity is easy. Not thinking it constantly is turning out to be much harder.)

The ironic thing (I think; I’m not even sure anymore; thanks for nothing, Alanis) is that the whole mess ends up achieving its goal in the most roundabout way possible. I found myself thinking about the crucifixion in ways I hadn’t considered, but primarily because my mind was wandering away from the tedium on the screen. “Yeah…. you know, they arrested Jesus at night, but they didn’t crucify him until midday the next day. So that whole night and morning, he was just sitting there waiting for it to be over. Much like I am now.” As my girlfriend later remarked, “It makes me want to go to church again immediately, just to better erase it from my memory.” Amen, sister. Amen.

II: when jesus donned the leather cassock, i almost lost it

Reactions to my review of The Passion have been beyond my grandest delusions. E-mails and phone calls the like of which I haven’t seen since I declared war on The Matrix back in aught three. In fact, Raukodraug’s Matrix comparison in the comments section (does anybody but me read those? I hope so) still makes me laugh out loud; I thought the last shot in the movie was one of the funniest because it reminded me so much of the last shot from The Matrix. For some reason, Jesus leaving the tomb was so reminiscent to me of Keanu leaving the phone booth, all that was missing was the Rage Against the Machine. They pan away from his burial shroud as it’s doing an Obi-Wan, and there he is, kind of going, “Yeah, that’s right,” and then as he struts out they pan down to his hand and the CGI hole through it…! I did not know what to say, so I chose to say “BOOOOOOO.” Much to my girlfriend’s consternation. Our rowmates were not septugenarians you wanted to run afoul of.

I know, I know there were shreds of silver lining in the movie. As I sat there, desperately trying to clutch onto a sliver of the positive experience I was eagerly planning to have when I went to this K of C S & M, there were one or two moments when I feebly thought, “There! That would be out of place in the worst movie ever. I would admit seeing a movie with that scene in it.” But when I try to focus on them, all I can think about is the tidal wave of hooey they were adrift in.

I didn’t even mention the Bridge Scene. Judas is being hounded by the Devil and Gollum and Jar Jar and Linda Blair (you may remember this scene from the Gospel According to No One) and so he’s hiding out in the dark. Meanwhile, Jesus is being led from Gethsemane in chains and repeatedly kicked in the bum bum. After one ill-placed kick too many, Jesus topples off of a bridge, but the guards are still holding his chains and so nnnng there he is painfully dangling like a hastily-hung chandelier off the side of the bridge railing. As luck would have it, like the Chili Peppers before him, Judas is under that very bridge, because really, where else would he be hiding in this movie? And Jesus, who appears nonplussed by having just been made into a sacramental pinata, shoots Judas a doleful stare as if to say, “And after all those times I drove you to the airport. After all those times I helped you move,” and Judas replies, “GAHHHH!” A thought came to me that was very reminiscent of when the Titanic was sinking and Leo Dicaprio was handcuffed to a pipe below deck: was the actual story not interesting enough? Was it not going to hold my attention without the addition of this Young Indiana Jones malarkey? Does the 15 minutes of lashing him with a mace not work without the bridge dangling? And as for the Judas component, well, I believe that ground is well-trod in the previous post.

Another regrettable choice which I am too bored to belabor: the portrayal of Barabbas as a slobbering snaggletoothed imbecile. I was taught that Barabbas was an insurgent, making the whole thing just a wee smidge more complicated. I got the point – the crowd would rather release an evil rapist John Belushi than Jesus! Ooh, that crowd makes me so mad! – but can there be no vestige of subtlety anywhere? You’re already portraying Pilate as a contemplative high school guidance counselor; does Barabbas actually have to be cross-eyed with flies buzzing around him like Pigpen? “Who do you choose, people of Israel? Jesus of Nazareth, or Mungo of the Drool People?”

This serves as a caveat about anything you may read here: if my voting record is anything to go by, my beliefs are in direct oblivious opposition to whatever community I may inhabit. So many grains of salt, it’s no wonder I raise everyone’s blood pressure.

I was thinking about presidential second terms during my election hangover, and it occurred to me that we might really be in for something special in the next four years. As I began to think back, I realized that the presidents’ second terms in the 20th century were some s***ty things indeed. clinton, we all remember, was impeached for being exactly the bag of dirt we knowingly elected twice. Reagan briefly torpedoed his legacy by trading arms for hostages, illegally funding Cobra Commander with the profits, and letting his wife’s astrologer schedule summits with the Decepticons. As I recall. Nixon? Shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Ike lived with the widespread rumor that our enemies had more missiles than we did; attempting to confirm this rumor, he inadvertently upgraded it to “our enemies have more missiles than we do, and also one of our U2 spyplanes, along with perhaps not the best pilot.” Even Wilson had to watch his League of Nations crumble on his head as he packed his bags. Given a twofer, presidents tend to get a little big for their britches and end up smacked down for it.

Gifted with this epiphany, I planned to sit down and unveil its hidden brilliance to the rest of the world as soon as I was sure all the things I was thinking of had actually happened. By the time I had gotten around to researching my hunch, however, I found the research was made easier by the fact that everyone on earth had written about it last week. While I was sitting around tonight, I saw a story about it on CNN.

That should be sufficient indication of how dim my bulb is at the moment: my mind is working like cable news. Then again, if the ethos of cable news is anything to live by, my only real crime was not unoriginal thought, but rather failing to break the story before everyone else. But anything that suggests my problem is a failure to blurt things out as soon as I think them should probably be ignored.

It is the news broadcast itself, not the contents of that broadcast, that depresses me most of the time these days. The haughtiness of a post-election gloater does nothing that irritates me as much as something like this:

I don’t begrudge these knights of the blog-table their grandiose dreams. But I worked on a school paper when I was a kid and I owned a CB radio when I lived in Texas. And what I saw in the blogosphere on Nov. 2 was more reminiscent of that school paper or a “Breaker, breaker 19″ gabfest on CB than anything approaching journalism.

-from the web site of CBS, bastion of journalistic integrity

I could just slap the shit out of this guy.

I’ll grant you, I have never seen new information on a bl*g. Every bl*g I have personally encountered has consisted of its owner pasting up links to other people’s reporting, regurgitating the swift boat vets, or posting pictures of his cat. But as for “anything approaching journalism”…? Today, we launched a major military strike on an insurgent stronghold city in Iraq that may end in the capture/termination of al-Zarqawi or may end in another royal clusterf*** atop a pile of Iraqi and American bodies. I really wanted to find out how this strike was going when I got home tonight, so I turned on a journalism-approaching cable news network. The top story, trumpeted and breathlessly bleated at the top of the hour, an hour in which the United States Armed Forces were engaged in pitched battle on foreign soil, was

THE JURORS MIGHT BE DEADLOCKED IN THE SCOTT PETERSON TRIAL! THE SCOTT PETERSON TRIAL JURORS MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO DECIDE! HOLY S***, HONEY, WAKE THE KIDS AND GET THEM DOWN INTO THE STORM CELLAR BEFORE THE DELIBERATIONS END!

Disgusted, I changed the channel to another cable news network, this one inexplicably starring the skeletal remains of Larry King. As midwestern boys dodged bullets in the sand thousands of miles away, their best friends dying in explosions all around them, Larry King was prepared to deliver me the latest information on

LACI PETERSON’S HUSBAND! A DOUCHEBAG IN CALIFORNIA MAY GET A MISTRIAL! THE JURY WENT TO BED, BUT THEY COULD WAKE UP AGAIN ANY TIME! OH JESUS GOD ALMIGHTY! HONEY, GET THE KIDS IN THE CAR AND DRIVE! DRIVE, AND DON’T STOP FOR ANYTHING! JUST GO, AND DON’T LOOK BACK! I LOVE YOU!

Give me a f***ing break.

After about two minutes of Larry King’s skeletal remains hollering like he was trapped in a cave and trying to get the rescuers’ attention, I went online to a legitimate, journalism-approaching web site. They did, I was relieved to see, have a story that suggested the battle in Falluja might actually exist somewhere in this dimension. The story, unfortunately, reflected what bothers me the most about journalism right now. Allow me to paraphrase:

Thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops streamed into Falluja on Monday, beginning an all-out assault aimed at driving insurgents out of the city, the Associated Press was told by someone who was there.

Pentagon officials said the operation involves more than 2,000 Iraqis and about 10,000 U.S. troops, and the AP has no reason to doubt that. Other sources have suggested that the Iraqi army is being deserted en masse, but no one in the hotel bar had heard anything to confirm those reports.

U.S. tanks fired 120-mm rounds into booby-trapped barricades for about an hour, igniting massive explosions. We’re told it was really something to see.

Military officials told our Jane Arraf, who is “embedded with troops” but apparently still needs to be told what they did, one of the initial goals has been achieved — clearing a path through the legion of orcs and trolls guarding Falluja’s massive stone gates.

The Army said U.S. airstrikes against one position killed an estimated 20 to 25 insurgents, none of whom were actually children waving cardboard tubes. That seemed like a strange thing for the Army to say, but we really weren’t sure what the follow-up question should be.

Arraf reported hearing an almost constant barrage of explosions and Dixie Chicks songs and said that tracer fire was lighting the night sky, which the AP would have loved to have seen. Insurgents could be heard chanting in Arabic: “God is great, and we hate your freedom.”

A target hit Monday was a position manned by about five insurgents armed with assault rifles who were acting as forward observers, trying to direct mortar fire against Marines outside the city. You would not catch our Jane Arraf anywhere near that s***. Our Jane Arraf is looking for some hazard pay before the upcoming Christmas sales at Neiman’s; that does not mean she is suicidal. Just because she is covering a war does not mean she has to go where fighting is. The official Marines spokesman made it sound pretty hardcore, though, and contradicting him might mean losing access to juicy government sources.

Before the ground offensive began at oh, let’s say 7 p.m., Falluja was pummeled for hours by airstrikes. Arraf said the forces cut the power before the start of the assault. Without power, many innocent people spent hours without the free HBO to which they were entitled as guests of the Green Zone Sheraton. The Army has no figures for how many innocent women and children saw their afternoons senselessly wasted, unable to find out how ‘Booty Call’ starring Jamie Foxx ends until DSL was back up in the Courtesy Room. This senseless tragedy will merit a special investigative report later in the week, possibly a -gate. ‘HBOgate’…? Doesn’t really flow. ‘Cablegate’! There we go.

In Washington, the AP has learned now that the hotel cable is back on, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld told reporters that the battle for Falluja was critical for the success of the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Rumsfeld downplayed the threat to the city’s civilian population, saying U.S. forces are disciplined, well-trained and protected by the mighty fire of the Sun King.

“There aren’t going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by U.S. forces,” he said. That should be good enough for the AP; it’s not like he’s ever lied to us before.

Given this level of journalism, I’ll take my information where I can get it. I can understand staying out of the line of fire. I don’t want to get shot either. That’s why I’m not a journalist who volunteered to cover a war.

Why is that? Is something wrong with us?

Whether it’s Harry Potter or Seabiscuit or whatever maudlin s*** Oprah’s peddling this month or (especially) Lord of the Rings, we get really jazzed about our legacy movies. “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood? If anybody needs me, I’ll be in a sleeping bag in the lobby. I loved that book, especially the vivid characters fully made flesh in my imagination and the ending which, having read it, I totally know.”

I imagine you see what I’m driving at.

When I flew to Moscow as an exchange student in 1992, a surprise 8-hour layover in JFK International prompted me to buy a copy of Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. (While my copy of Rolling Stone with Wayne and Garth on the cover was brawny reading, it seemed increasingly unlikely to get me all the way to Finland.) In addition to being a ripping yarn for the fertile 16-year-old mind, Jurassic Park quickly became one of my last precious non-McDonald’s lifelines to the English language in a land where, for all I knew, my hosts could have been saying “good morning” or divulging launch codes. (My host mom was convinced that immersion was the way to go for me and ended each day with a lengthy dissertation on politics or human nature, neither of which had been covered in our chapter on Russian Names For Fruits and Vegetables. I wanted to tell her I lacked the Russian vocabulary to keep up with all of her monologues, except I didn’t know how to say that.) It was the first thing I had read, possibly ever, that took at least half a stab at being science fiction as opposed to pseudoscience fiction, a book that didn’t cause me to imagine the author sitting at the typewriter muttering, “‘His DNA was… resequined?…’ Resequenced! ‘His DNA was resequenced by the… photon… spectrum. Also quasars.’” I had never encountered pulp with a bibliography and appendix before.

A year later, when I heard they were making a movie out of my beloved linguistic oasis, I was unnaturally excited. Jurassic Park, in fact, marked the first time I ever bought movie tickets in advance. And without any of your debit cards and interweb either, I might add. (Cost a nickel, it did, and you got cartoons and a newsreel!) Since it was summer, my friend Mike and I went to the Esquire theater’s noon showing, laughing long and loud as we breezed past those suckers who were waiting in line for their tickets like chumps. “Good luck getting a seat, chaps! Ah, waiting in line. Were we ever so young?”

The movie itself was chock full of all the fun that severed Sam Jackson arms and disemboweled lawyers can provide, but the longer it lingered in my memory afterward the more disillusioned I became. While it was a good run-and-chase action spectacular, it really wasn’t the book I read. Dr. Grant hates kids now? Oh, so he can be stuck with the kids during the ordeal and learn and grow as a person. How necessary. Wait, were Grant and Ellie dating in the book? And Ian Malcolm lives now? Is it because he’s Jeff Goldblum? And wait! Wait! Who replaced crusty, nail-spitting, kitten-burning John Hammond with Uncle Grandpa the Leprechaun? Sir Richard Attenborough? Are you kidding me?

So like everyone else, I learned the poignant lesson that The Movie Will Not Be As Good As The Book. Sorry, son. The rites of adolescence are painful. You are doomed to spend your life shouting at screens, “If you liked the book so much, why didn’t you use it to make the movie?”

Many years later, another movie was made of a book I quite enjoyed, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone. Again we bought our advance tickets; again we went to the Esquire, though this time we waited for “good seats” in a line full of people wearing glitter and bathrobes, waving cardboard wands at one another. When the movie got underway, I had an epiphany about Jurassic Park. As I watched Harry and his friends fight Voldemort and product placement, I thought, “Now you see? That’s more like it! This is very well done. They’re staying incredibly faithful to the source material. Everything is exactly the way I pictured it, and in almost no way does it diverge even slightly from the book… that I… already… wait a minute, what the f*** am I doing in here?”

So you can’t win. Either you ruined everything or you’re wasting my time.

But as a nation, we love it. Why do we love it? Why, once we’ve experienced something fully and made it our own, are we so eager to experience the exact same thing again in a slightly different (but not too different) way? Why do people have reason to believe that a Mod Squad movie is a good idea? Lost in Space starring Matt LeBlanc gets a green light; what’s going on there?

Why could people like me not wait for X-men? And why would hundreds of people then go online to complain about how the costumes were all wrong and Wolverine wasn’t short enough? There have been probably 700 X-men comics printed in my lifetime; I’ve read roughly 200 of them personally. That’s about 4,600 pages of X-Men, my friends. How much more of those mutants could you possibly need, and how hard would it be to find it? If you think Hugh Jackman has the power to single-handedly ruin your favorite book series, go reread some of the 15,000 pages of the original. Float away on the mighty Mississipp of marketing.

I have concocted a theory that it all boils down to this: movies are the last vestige of the democratic spirit in America.

Our political system has become ugly, crass, and divisive. Though it was generally considered impolite, it was once possible to discuss your political positions without getting booed or pissed on. That way of openly defining ourselves without anger or defiance or confrontation is, at least for now, gone. This does not stop us from needing a banner to gather under.

More and more, people use fandom to identify themselves. More and more, people carry their movies over their heads high. The kind of bumper stickery and opening night rubber forehead escapade that used to mark unabashed Klingon speakers is creeping into the ticket lines for more and more flicks. More and more, people I do not know are calling me a “muggle.” More and more, people become franchise partisans and swear oaths of loyalty before the first frame of film ever goes through the projector. And every weekend, those people vote with box office receipts. People don’t see movies anymore; they vote for them with money.

If you ever read one of the bigger fan sites for a Star Wars or Hobbit or Kevin Smith or Scooby Doo movie, you have seen this phenomenon. People will have online pep rallies to encourage the faithful to give a movie a huge opening weekend. People who have never cast a city ballot in their lives will log on and write, “We have to make Alien vs. Predator the number one movie in the country! Come on, people! It’s up to us!” The first time I saw this, theforce.net was encouraging its readers to mark (I think) the three-month anniversary of the release of The Phantom Menace by going in droves to see it again and make it the #1 movie in the country again. This, as I recall, was being organized “to send a powerful message.”

To whom? About what? Watto for President? Did they want to make sure Hollywood knew Star Wars had fans? Were they worried George Lucas might get discouraged and stop trying to sell them ceramic Podracer coffee mugs? What am I supposed to be getting out of this?

The same thing happened when Titanic was poised to overtake Star Wars as the top grosser of all time. “Come on! Take your mom and dad! We can do this!” Do what? Make a movie studio $7? I already did that last week. Are they sending me a cut?

“No, but I am a Titanic person. I choose Titanic as my movie, and when it does well this validates my likes, my worldview, and by extension me as a person.”

Do you ever miss the days when you didn’t know on Monday how much money a movie made the previous week?

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say how nice it almost was to run into you at Blueberry Hill the other night. Actually, a couple of friends and I went by there specifically to talk to you, and for a while I started to worry that you weren’t going to show. For a while, I thought you might have driven by, seen the line, and said, “Sheesh! Forget it. It’s too crowded. Let’s go to Fitz’s.” We almost did.

That’s actually the main reason I wanted to write. You see, I’m currently an undecided voter, and when I heard you and John Kerry were coming to town on Wednesday I thought it would be a prime opportunity to wrap my head around some things before the primary, not to mention participating in a little footnote history. Unfortunately, John Kerry apparently only wants hobos and late night DJs to vote for him, because he held his event at 4:30 in the afternoon. I mean, come on. I’ve got a job to go to, even if I do spend the afternoon writing letters to presidential candidates instead of working.

(As we speak, Howard Dean is down at the History Museum leading a town hall meeting that started at 2:15. Don’t get me started.)

Anyway, I wanted to give you some advice. You need to have a serious talk with your campaign staff; they’re going to wreck your chances of getting elected if they keep scheduling events the way they did this week. I guess I can see what they were going for, capturing liberal U City’s hip, youthful energy with a late rally at a popular bar. I can also understand the need to make the event look crowded, lest it appear like a Kucinich rally on C-SPAN or something. But… come on. They had you in the Duck Room downstairs. The Duck Room is where you go to see local swing bands and Chuck Berry. Do you know why? Because the Duck Room has a capacity of 350 people. 350 people, Senator. The owner of the bar has a place that can fit 1,000 people inside right across the street. I gazed longingly at it as I stood out in near-zero temperatures for an hour, thinking, “Is this the kind of thinking John Edwards is going to use to run the country?”

We arrived nearly two hours early. The line when we arrived stretched from the Duck Room through the bar to the front door OUT the front door into the street and around the corner to the back of the building. Unbelievably, my friends and I got all the way into the room directly above you, the reward for which was the chance to hear your speech piped in through the bar’s speakers. In that room, it was like a cross between a high school mixer and the world’s biggest overcrowded elevator. Arm raising was not an option, nor was it really advisable from an olfactory standpoint; it was five degrees outside, but 112 inside.

And oh, oh, pity upon the poor waitresses who were trying to bring food to tables, tables full of people who had gone out that night with no idea that the next president of the United States was playing the Duck Room.

I will say this much: the enthusiasm that greeted my friends and I when we arrived (a half hour earlier than planned, after we heard from reliable sources that the crowd was already “like a zoo fire”) was heartening and unlike anything I’ve seen in a while. People there genuinely believed in something rather than against every thing but one. This was particularly true of your young, perky, nubile campaign volunteers, who certainly seemed to be motivating the electorate. After meeting one young brunette, whose batting eyelashes ensured that we would all be on your mailing list from now until the apocalypse you may well cause, several of my friends expressed an eagerness to get out the vote.

I should probably explain that apocalypse comment, but I’m not sure how to do so and still sound sane. Let’s put it this way: you are very charismatic, almost hypnotically persuasive, and unnaturally young-looking in a way that borders on the unholy. For these reasons, several people I know half-jokingly believe that you may figure prominently in the Book of Revelations. I don’t necessarily agree, but if you do have any position papers on mandatory barcode tattoos, I would appreciate it if you would forward one to me at your convenience.

Anyway, your event ended up being fun and educational even when it became clear we weren’t getting in. (Though some of us got to go anywhere they wanted because they brought their big, fancy microphones.) During the hour we spent standing in the snow, the half hour we spent snaking through the bar, and the half hour where you were totally late, my friends and I had a chance to talk about a lot of the issues facing us on Tuesday. By forcing me to vocalize my thoughts, my friends helped me to realize that it’s pretty much either Kerry, Bush, or you. And that’s before you even got there to say anything, while we were still standing by the window listening to John Mellencamp.

That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.

When we first got inside and I heard the Mellencamp, I thought maybe somebody put a quarter in the jukebox or something. As the first nonstop half hour of Mellencamp twanged on, I wondered when exactly this CD was going to end. By the end of an hour of nonstop Mellencamp, I began making aloud comparisons between myself and Job, while simultaneously being in unabashed awe that John Mellencamp has written so many songs. It seemed cruel on his part; it seemed cruel on the bar’s part. So imagine my disappointment when they announced you and began blaring “Small Town,” and it became clear you had told them to do that to us. Seriously, I could recommend something if you want. Beck’s “Midnite Vultures.” Or, you know, everyone loves the Beatles. Think about it, and soon. My ears still have dried blood in them.

Anyway, since the whole point of going to see you was to, you know, see you, we eventually decided to go back outside at 10:00 and shake your hand when you pulled up. I really liked that when you (eventually) got there, you climbed on that van and gave that bullhorn speech. A friend of mine who had split his chin on the ice while campaigning for Gephardt tried to shake your hand; he missed, but- true story- when he touched the hem of your sport coat, his cut was completely healed.

I would swear you were making eye contact with me, and only me, throughout the entire thing. “Oh,” I thought as I listened to you, “you’re good.”

Unless you really were. I was the one in the green coat. Let me know.

When you went in, we dashed back inside to listen through the speakers. It was okay, but you didn’t do any of your new stuff. Do you ever feel like Billy Joel or Lynyrd Skynyrd, going from town to town, standing in front of cheering crowds as you play all your greatest hits? As my friends and I listened to your stump speech yet again, we literally found ourselves saying, “Ooh, I hope he does ‘35 million Americans are in poverty’! Wait, shh! I think I hear the opening notes of, ‘And talkin’ lahk thi-yus, Ah’m sure to win in the South!’”

Anyway, it was all right. I still might vote for you; let me know if you plan to swing through town in the next few days. We can talk.

Oh, and there was a guy going around the bar selling buttons with your picture on them and then pocketing all the money for himself. Just thought you’d want to know.

Sincerely,

Jim

I mean no offense. Don’t take it personally. I’m sure you’re a pretty groovy person, intelligent, happenin’. You’ve got a lot going on, but you’re still fashionably bored enough with the world to come look at this nonsense in the middle of your day. That devil-may-care, fire-me-for-noncompliance-to-posted-web-usage-policies attitude is pretty hip of you, as hip as any attitude with the word “compliance” in it is going to be. You would never have a ten minute argument with a comic book store clerk over whether or not Star Trek was “camp” while dressed in a Starfleet uniform in public in broad daylight where people can see you for no discernable reason.

(Sorry for the tangent, but I just encountered such a person and am still coming to grips with it. Trekkies notwithstanding, I had convinced myself that guys like this didn’t really exist. I thought they were the stuff of folk tales, like the yeti. Several of which, incidentally, this gentleman appeared to have eaten. This girl I met is way cooler than that guy. His effect on my psyche was such that I would not be surprised to learn that the comic book store had hired him to stand there, just to make the rest of us feel better about being in a comic book store. “I may be buying a pamphlet full of illustrated leotards, but at least I’m not wearing one. I can march proudly to the counter with three copies of ‘Spider-Girl’ knowing that, no matter what they take from me, I’m still not the becostumed, mastodon-sized trekker.” None of which, of course, has anything to do with my point.)

Cool though you may be, the girl I met is peerless. She has no rival. She is a girl who invites you over to her place so she can bash your teeth out in a game of Soul Calibur. She is a girl who speaks in programming languages and does the Disney-movie, stuffed-animal girly girl crap. She is the only other person I have ever met who has been seen consuming, in fact regularly restocking her refrigerator with, Diet Rite Cola. (Has anyone ever uncovered evidence of a Regular Rite Cola? Not that I would imagine you’ve devoted a lot of your resources to the subject. Though I have.) She is a girl who goes to dinner with you and grabs the check so often you start to mistake her for the waitress. She, like the Trek guy, is the kind of creature that I did not believe actually existed anymore. (And that is the only thing they have in common. I really cannot shake that species embarrassment from my head.) So when I met this cool girl, I quickly decided to stake my claim. Plant my flag, in a non-double-entendre kind of way. We needed to date. Especially after she asked me out, which was sufficient to bump her up a whole bracket all by itself.

I’ve never had anything fall into place quicker, and I knew we were destined for greatness the first week I knew her.

In my circle of friends, I have been at the center of a continuing scandal regarding Ted Drewes frozen custard that stems from my not giving a damn about Ted Drewes frozen custard. “There’s a custard stand down the street from me,” I famously said, “and I grew up near this other place called Fritz’s. And you know, it all tastes pretty much the same. So why am I driving all the way over there?” Apparently, this remark was reported in the press as, “Ted Drewes sells frigid mucus in a paper cup, and I spit on Ted Drewes and by extension your personal childhood, and I can’t wait to give all my money to the custard stands in the suburbs in an effort to see the once-proud city of St. Louis burn to embers, which I will also spit on.” My originally innocuous comment, born of nothing worse than laziness of mind and palate, has met with such resistance and defiance from my friends (some of whom are saving money to construct a large wall around the city of St. Louis and poison the suburban water supply) that it has gone from being a simple lack of preference to being a way of getting force-fed ice cream. There have been times I’ve brought up abortion just to get the conversation civil again. We only reached detente this year when, after my friends threatened to exile me to Elba, I conceded that it may all just taste the same because I always order Reeses Peanut Butter Cups as my custard’s topping. And really, how different are those gonna taste? Staleness aside?

(But I mean, seriously. It’s custard, and they freeze it. Ooh, get the patent office on the phone. We must safeguard the recipe.)

So this summer, I met this girl at the movies with some friends (and yes, the first movie we ever officially saw together was based on a theme park ride, and there’s no going back and doing anything about that, so let’s all just agree that at least it wasn’t “The Country Bear Jamboree” and move on) and soon thereafter she struck up an e-mail conversation, taking the initiative attractively while also dodging all that phone awkwardness. And during this back-and-forth, we began talking about the relative merits of living in my more central neighborhood instead of the godforsaken suburban wilderness she moved into when she settled in our fair city. Attempting to sell my neck of the woods with a proven crowd pleaser, I wrote, “…and of course, everyone enjoys being less than ten minutes from Ted Drewes.”

She replied, and I swear that this is exactly what happened, “Personally, I’ve never really seen what the big deal is about Ted Drewes. I have this place right down the street from me called Fritz’s, and it’s all pretty much the same. But I mean, I almost always get peanut butter cups in mine anyway, and how different is that ever going to taste? If you think about it.”

And that was probably the first time I said, “I’ll see you at the altar.”

Well, I mean, not to her. We hadn’t even gone out yet. What am I, some kind of creepy weirdo?

No, I mean from like a romantic standpoint.

Okay. Fair enough.

Anyway, that turned out to be only the first of many times in the months to come that I would claw at my temples screaming, “Get out! Get out of there!” Not needing to speak to communicate my thoughts has freed up a lot of my time, which has now mostly gone into smooching and driving to the godforsaken suburban wilderness. As the months have flown by, the girl has become a girlfriend, and the girlfriend has become an integral part of daily life in a way that would have made me feel like a caged pet just a few years ago. (I have always valued my freedom and unstructured time above everything else. I’m a bit like a cell phone in that every so often I need to be left alone plugged into my base; otherwise all you end up with is static followed by death. The thought of someone expecting to spend time with me or in my space, even every other day, would have driven me out a window before I met her.) In a process resembling the reintroduction of a captive animal into the wild, I have slowly put her in front of small groups of friends and relatives, trying to see if the baking soda and the vinegar make a volcano. So far, the verdict has been universal: everyone loves her instantly. In fact, most of my friends like her more than they do me, and have had no problem telling me so.

So, six months will have passed next week without either one of us having thrown a single piece of flatware at the other person. Sheer bliss. My girlfriend is celebrating this weekend by moving into an apartment much, much closer to mine. It is a two bedroom apartment. The second bedroom and the space it allows are explicitly being rented with me in mind. It is assumed by all parties that the day will come in the not-too-distant future when we do the proper paperwork, everyone chants the proper chants in the proper big magical building, and suddenly we’re both entitled to one another’s furniture. To live happily ever after, as they say.

Unfortunately, even this promise of domestic tranquility and chair sharing has its pitfalls. The wedding guests are restless, and as of this very week it is officially pissing me off.

I had a conversation with my dad this week that typifies the lip I’ve been getting for the last couple of months. The conversation itself didn’t bug me- it was, in fact, all I could do not to burst out laughing at the poor man- but it was a more innocuous syptom of a much more serious cancer of the mood.

“Tell me something,” he began. “I have to know: do you like her as much as we do?”

“Well,” I replied, “for the sake of all involved, I hope I like her more.”

“Because I mean, wow,” he said. “We… she’s just… wow.”

(See? No matter what comes next, it’s hard to hate this conversation. This is the first choice in my life that my dad’s approved of since I decided to go ahead with the potty training.)

“Wow, indeed!”

“You’ve of course talked to her about the future by now.”

“To some extent, we’ve certainly discussed-”

“So what are you dragging your feet for?”

“Well, I- wait, what?”

“Quit futzing around with this girl! She’s going to leave!”

“‘Futzing’?”

“When I dated your mother, we were engaged for a year, and even before that we were together practically all the time. Every day. And all the time we futzed around dating before the wedding, that whole long drawn out foot dragging, was wasted time.”

“Well, we’ve only known-”

“Wasted time!”

“But-”

“Hurry up!”

And this appears to be the consensus among people whose goddamn business is, technically speaking, none of this.

Whenever someone asked me the limp, tired question, “When are you going to propose? To your girlfriend? Hahn? Haaaaaahn?” I used to joke, “Six months after the last time someone asks me that.” I hoped that this would communicate all sorts of things that it did not. “If I do it, I want it to seem spontaneous and surprising, not the result of some kind of word-of-mouth marketing campaign or grass-roots mandate of the angry mob.” “I would prefer my engagement to seem like my decision, rather than yours.” “We still need a couple more months to see if the other shoe drops. Like, more than six of them.” “I do not respond well to pressure, and the best way to see this happen is to stop telling me to do it. F***er.” And so on. But recently, remarkably, the question has shifted from teasing to a kind of exasperation. People are starting to act like they expect something I owe them. I feel as though something is being taken away from me.

It’s become exactly what I prayed it would not, and much too soon. It has risen to this neverending cacophony of voices, this din that begins to resolve itself into a chant. We’ve been together six months. That would be like going half our lives without getting married… if we were field mice. As it is, I give us another fifty, sixty years. So I’ll think we’ll make it. Just under the wire. Somehow.

Did this happen to any other marrieds reading this?

I am not exaggerating when I tell you, gentle reader, that I cannot go a day without someone bringing up how many bridesmaids we’re going to have, or where we plan to do it, or whose church it will be in, or how many guests we will have or how much we plan to spend. I recently got a new one about whether our kids were going to public school. There are only two people I can think of who have never brought up this topic:

1) My girlfriend.
2) Me.

That’s another reason why I love her.

So, with all this in mind, I wanted to take a moment today to issue an edict.

I HAVE NEVER, TO MY KNOWLEDGE, PROPOSED TO ANYONE. THE WEDDING IN QUESTION IS THEORETICAL; THE CEREMONY IS FICTIONAL, AND THE RECEPTION IS BEING HELD IN YOUR GODDAMNED IMAGINATION. No more will I penalize my girlfriend because of the asinine questions and opinions of other people. When the day comes, it will have everything to do with our feelings for one another, and nothing to do with public demand. Kindly f*** off. I have spoken.

You know, I feel better.

(You should meet her. She really is… wow.)

Unless it’s like, “This is not an idle rope tug, blaggard! This is a tug of war!”

My work is very engaging.

A friend of mine had started to get “into” the show in that way people seem to get “into” all of this reality garbage. In a time when I am only nominally employed and still can’t seem to find the time to call my loved ones, it offends me on some level that people are setting their VCRs for “Trading Spaces.” But my friend is into “Queer Eye,” referring to the actual humans featured on it as “characters,” breathlessly anticipating the next episode (prediction: they’re going to do a makeover, indistinguishable from the previous week’s makeover, while hundreds of talented screenwriters die penniless in the streets with good ideas for fictional dramas in their starved brains). That sort of thing. In this mindset, my friend asked what I thought of the show. Having seen a whopping two episodes, and therefore being an authoritative expert on the basis that every episode is the same, I replied, “I think it’s about time a group of well-financed men devoted themselves to helping straight men become more superficial and shallow. I’ve always said, ‘People need to be more superficial and shallow.’”

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think it’s making democracy crumble or anything. I thought it was entertaining and good-natured when I watched those two episodes in a row, the two episodes that constitute my entire “knowledge” of the show. It was (on the surface) more about building up than tearing down. When I think about it seriously, though, I do get a little depressed.

Is it just me, or does our society react to inequity by trying to bring the high down rather than the low up?

There’s this Christina Aguilera song on MTV 3 or 4 (digital cable rocks) all the time. It’s called something inspiring like “Nobody Can Hold Us Down.” Once you get past the title and listen to the actual song, you hear that it once again complains about that rightly upsetting double standard that says a promiscuous man is a stud but a promiscuous woman is a whore. No new ground is broken here. Then, though- and this is where it becomes relevant to us- the song and its singer seem to state the position that this double standard would be resolved if female promiscuity were just acceptable, too. This is, in fact, the opposite of the way to solve the problem. The problem is not that Christina is being called a whore unjustly (or even inaccurately); the problem is that there’s no male word for “slut.” It’s not that the girls’ behavior should be acceptable and
I should leave Christina’s hotpants alone; it’s that the guys’ behavior is also unacceptable and should not be celebrated either. More acceptable promiscuity is not the way to make the world a better place.

A similar principle is at the root of my relatively minor problem with the Queer Eyes. Yes, yes, straight guys are slobs who don’t care about color coordination or ironing and don’t know how to dance. All of them, everywhere. Whatever. All women and gay men, every last one, have an eye for personal appearance and the finer things. Fine. Women are only demanding that men show the same effort for them that they’ve had to show men for centuries. I suppose that’s OHHH hold on a second; isn’t all that effort something we’ve been complaining about for the last 50 years?

Correct me if I missed something, but have I not been hearing for my entire life that women are held to a ridiculous standard of perfection, fitness and weight by the fashion industry? That they are forced to starve themselves and cover themselves in absurd beauty products to meet an unattainable standard of beauty and sexuality? That male-dominated society judges women on their appearance rather than their skills, intelligence or accomplishments? That magazines and videos have presented us with an airbrushed fantasy that is leading us all to nothing but bulimia and plastic surgery? Was I not forced to memorize The Beauty Myth? Haven’t I listened to cultural thinkers ever since I could read telling me that we are slaves to consumerism and status? Most importantly: after an entire lifetime of hearing this, am I supposed to be entertained by the idea that the solution is to give guys body dysmorphia too?

Be yourself!
People will love you for who you really are!
Don’t give in and follow whatever other people say is cool, trendy or fashionable!

So, was that all officially bullshit now?
Because I thought it was kinda nice.

When I see Queer Eye, its message as I interpret it is that straight guys’ real problem is that they’re not insecure enough. Their problem is that they’re comfortable with themselves, and that pisses off people who spend two hours getting ready to leave the house. It’s like makeover-as-cultural-vengeance.

As I see it, in other words, the problem isn’t that straight guys don’t care enough about their appearance. It’s that everyone else cares way, way too much, and as a result the world we live in is ugly on the inside.

You know what show I want to see? I want to see a show where a woman is dating a disorganized slob, and a task force of five comes in and shows her that there are things more important than clothes, not everybody likes to dance, and wine really isn’t especially important. Then they could do a makeover where they make her take off all that goddamned lipstick and put her in a polo shirt and some jeans. If he’s still not good enough for her, they can buy her a one-way ticket to Los Angeles and some Botox. They could call it “Love Me or Leave Me,” or “There’s a Human with a Soul Inside This T-Shirt, You Merciless Harpies.”

It’s okay to like a guy who cooks food, perhaps in his spotlessly clean bachelor bathroom. I think those are things that can be reasonably expected of everyone. But if you’re dating somebody and thinking, “He/she’s great, but the way that apartment is decorated may come between us,” the decorating is not your actual problem. The fact that you’re an ass is your problem.

There’s a conundrum at the heart of it all: if a guy really likes you, he should want to look nice for you some/all of the time without you even having to ask, but if you really like him, you shouldn’t ever care what he’s fucking wearing. And the same holds true on his end.

In defense of the show, half the episodes I’ve seen (which is to say one of them) was a guy who wanted to sing a song he wrote about his wife to her on stage at a club, and he wanted it to be special and magical for her because he loved her so much. He was the one who said, “For a special occasion, I want to knock my wife’s socks off,” and I thought that was really sweet. Unfortunately, the other episode featured a girlfriend who, frankly, had fangs and leathery wings and represented everything about the show’s message that troubles me.

Be yourself.
People will love you for who you really are.
Don’t give in and follow whatever other people say is cool, trendy or fashionable.
Either we believe it or we don’t, my friends! Slobs of the World, Unite!