Entries from April 2004 ↓

I’m hitting a rough patch with the stuff I’m working on right now, so I find myself spending a great deal of time sitting back in my chair at Starbucks, staring off into space, pretending to ruminate. This on the theory that faux-rumination will lead eventually to real rumination which will lead, inexorably and inevitably, to the Breakthrough. This theory is not at all like the theory of nuclear fission, except in the fact that it has proven to be completely worthless, despite years and years of study, research, and effort. I’m just about ready to demote it to hypothesis, or maybe bump it all the way down to superstition.

But it has afforded me the opportunity to stare obtrusively at many Starbucks patrons, which is usually a diverting and sometimes fascinating pastime. Take, for example, the Asian gentleman who comes into my morning Starbucks at around 6:30, every day, gets his drink, finds a table, sits, takes off his cap, and spends a good half hour muttering silently to himself. Not lackadaisical scattered insane person muttering, but forceful, focused, and apparently extremely important insane person muttering. He stares straight ahead, squares his shoulders, and speaks, rapidly, to no one at all. At first, I thought he was just practicing for a speech he was about to give. Now I think he’s a little bit nuts. But we’re all a little bit nuts, of course: the key is in how our insanity manifests itself. The crazies with the more benign symptoms are the lucky ones.

And then there was the family that walked into my evening Starbucks, last night, three boys and a very serious looking man. Father and sons, I think. They got their drinks, and the father settled down in one of the big plush easy chairs, and one of his boys sat down across from him. They were all carrying bibles, so I thought at first that this was going to be some sort of bible study thing. But the father wound up talking to each boy individually, without reference to holy books: the kids grinning and flippant at first, and then, perhaps lulled by his relentless severity, sober and serious. I guessed that this was a sort of father-son talk thing, a scheduled airing out of differences, motivations, goals, a laying down or reinforcement of the law. Not contentious at all, as far as I could tell, but each boy got up with an expression of what looked to be relief and signaled the next in line. It seemed a little weird to me, but I’m not really equipped to judge.

Or the guy who arrives in what looks like an unmarked police cruiser every morning and sits in his car, in the parking lot, watching. He watches everyone who walks into the Starbucks, and everyone who walks out. Occasionally he gets out of his car, opens the backdoor, takes something out, puts it back, hitches up his pants, gets back in, and watches. Sometimes he’ll come inside and engage someone in an animated conversation about something or other — one of those soliloquy type conversations, where the accoster stands too close to the accostee and holds forth at great length. His victims smile and nod and, after five minutes of this, find a way to extricate themselves and flee. Eventually, he wanders back to his car and gets back in, and watches. I’ve never seen him buy a drink. He strikes me as a very sad man.

I wonder sometimes what all the other patrons think of me, sitting at my table, staring at other people or off into space. Why is that guy wearing a duck suit, they may wonder. Or why is his tongue unfurled all the way down to his chin? Or why is he screaming at the little clown doll he’s propped up on the opposite chair?

I don’t think I’m doing any of these, of course. But you never know. It’s hard to tell, sometimes.

We went to see Fountains of Wayne at American University on Friday. It was a blast. They played great, sounded great, and seemed like a bunch of likable, hypertalented guys who were genuinely happy to be on stage playing their music. Their performance pretty much cemented my belief that they are the perfect pop band: they have a Beatlesque ability to wed catchy, sophisticated harmonies to smart, funny lyrics. They make me smile.

The singer, Adam Schlesinger, turns out to be a tall rail-thin slightly effiminate guy with a friendly, hesitant smile. His voice sounds exactly the way it does on their records, which is to say, amazing: it’s smooth and nuanced, and can move effortlessly between sweet falsetto and rock and roll growl. There was nothing very inspired in the mechanics of the performance: they basically just lined up and played, with almost nothing in the way of embelishment or Rock God posturing, except for a little bit of camp near the end. They didn’t need it.

I can’t say I liked the band that opened for them as much, though, a group called Throne. They were a lot louder than they were good, and they did a lot of preening and hair tossing, and spent an inordinate amount of time wiggling their asses at us. The ass wiggling in particular I found a little tiresome. While I will say that they had fairly nice tushies, as these things go, they waggled them so much and so often that it just became ludicrous, and then mildly irritating. I realize it is not for me to set arbitrary limits on the maximum amount of butt wiggling that is acceptable during the course of a twenty-minute set, but I think it’s safe to say that anything over ten minutes is excessive.

Almost as much fun as watching Fountains of Wayne, though, was watching them with a bunch of college kids. I like going to concerts at universities. This one was in Bender Arena, a cavernous basketball stadium with a tarp taped to the floor, presumably to protect against unpleasant rock and roll secretions. The kids around us were an eclectic bunch. There was a hypercool guy with big aviator sunglasses leaning up against the stage barrier, flanked by two students of the shapely female persuasion; there were were a couple of semi goth girls that looked like they’d been wrung through Alice’s Wonderland a couple of times, with striped multicolored stockings and bright prismatic hair to go with their odd piercings and dark garments. There was the stock Couple Who Couldn’t Keep Their Hands Off Each Other; it was nice to see two people so obviously overjoyed to be in one another’s company. And then there were the Really Strange and Unclassifiable People, like the two guys running through the crowd, trying to slap each other’s asses and giggling maniacally whenever they succeeded. Very weird, but everyone seemed to take it in stride.

I didn’t get to many concerts when I was in college, alas, but I nevertheless found myself cataloging the differences between this event and the ones from back in the day. First, there are a lot more cellphones. Every other person seemed to have one. During the opening band’s set, the girl in front of us was simultaneously gyrating to the music and checking her email on her phone, occasionally holding it up and waving it along with the beat, perhaps in unconscious tribute to the lighters that her ancient ancestors from the sixties held up at their proto-concerts.

Of course, the cell phones in my era were brick-sized and tended not to work very well unless you were actually in hearing distance of the person you were talking to, so it just wasn’t feasible back then. Still, it would have been cool to have them, because … um … I could have, like, called the nuclear clock to get the correct time, down to the millisecond, right in the middle of the concert, man. Right in the middle of it.

Yeah.

Also the skirts at this show, where there were skirts, were much shorter, and the jeans, where there were jeans, were much lower. Shirts tended to end far above the midriff. I’m not complaining about the additional bared flesh, of course. That would be extremely unmale of me. It’s merely an observation.

Other than that, everything felt about the same. The charge that ran through the crowd when the lights dimmed for each band was palpable, and exciting, and I was happy to be a part of it. There’s nothing like the sensation of a press of people around you, moving to a beat that you feel in your sternum, the primal sensation of meat unhooked from its brainstem for a while.

We’ve got to do this more often. Continue reading →

Doonesbury is doing a really powerful series this week about one of its major characters, B.D., who’s wounded in combat in Iraq. Worth checking out.

The House of Representatives, in its appointed role as Protector of Decency, Goodness and Morality, is considering a bill that would further clarify the ban on the use of the Seven Deadly Words and Phrases on broadcasts in this country. It is only a matter of time before these bans are extended to the blogosphere, so I thought I should warn my fellow scribblers that, henceforth, they should avoid the following words and phrases:

1. shit
2. piss
3. fuck
4. cunt
5. asshole
6. cock sucker
7. mother fucker

Nor should they combine these filthy utterances into any compound words, such as cock-asshole, or shit-piss, or cock-sucker-cunt-piss-fuck-mother-fucker. Nor should they use them in their palindromatic form (no tihs, no ssip, no rehtom rekcuf), or attempt to sneak them past the censors by means of clever scrambulation (no nuct, no kcco eksruc ), or use any words that may be mistaken for them, such as bass hole, or sheet, or priss, or clock stucker.

Doodleplex will, of course, scrupulously adhere to these newly clarified rules, which is to say it will not use the words shit, piss, fuck, cunt, asshole, cock sucker, or mother fucker in any of its posts. To reiterate, the words shit, piss, fuck, cunt, asshole, cock sucker and mother fucker will no longer be used on this blog. So if for example, I wanted to say, hey, that guy is a shit piss fuck cock sucker mother fucker, I wouldn’t, because the words shit, piss, fuck, cock sucker, and mother fucker are not allowed, nor are cunt and asshole.

So you ask, what if you’d spent the day sucking on a male chicken, and you wanted to tell everyone about your cock sucking experience? Well, you wouldn’t. And you should stop sucking on male chickens, because that’s just weird, and probably very unhealthy.

In fact, it would be best if bloggers constrained themselves, wherever possible, to the following Officially Sanctioned Morally Unreprehensible Words, which will be provided by a future House bill, currently being formulated in committee:

1. Church
2. Good
3. Fig
4. The, A, An
5. Night
6. Promulgate
7. Duck

More words are being considered for this list, of course, but it’s a long, painstaking process, as moral reprehensibility can hide in even the most innocent of words. In the meantime, then, you’re better off confining yourself to language your government deems safe.

It’s recently come to my attention that, one of these days, I’m going to die. Which isn’t to say that I’ve become paranoid about it. I haven’t. I don’t look in the bathroom mirror every morning and see the Grim Reaper peering over my shoulder, idly tapping the haft of his scythe against the palm of his hand; I don’t imagine that my usual morning stiffness is a presentiment of rigor mortis; and I certainly don’t consult bus schedules trying to figure out whether it’ll be the 55 or the 72 that flattens me today. But I am starting to come to terms with the truth of my mortality, to see it as a real, tangible, present thing. I didn’t before, which is probably ok. It’s not a good idea to be too comfortable with the notion of death when you’re in your twenties, and just learning how to live.

But the sad truth is that you can’t spend your entire life ignoring the edge of your mortal coil. We live in a universe of opposites, where things are meaningful only in the light cast by their antonyms. Good isn’t good unless it’s got bad to measure itself against; sad isn’t sad without happy. And life — the real sense of life — loses a lot of its luster without the shadow of death looming on the horizon.

Anne Lamott tells a story about a good friend of hers who was diagnosed with cancer. Lamott called her friend’s doctor, some six months before she died, to ask whether there was any hope. The answer was no. “But watch her carefully right now,” the doctor said, “because she’s teaching you how to live.”

So the trick is to live every day as if you’re dying, which, as Lamott points out, you are. In practice, though, this is very hard to do. Because try as you might to wrap your arms around your life and squeeze everything you can out of it in the time you have left, the details always get in the way. There are dogs to walk and forms to fill out and taxes to pay and commutes to make. There’s food to be put on tables, and roofs to be mounted over heads. It’s tempting to tell the details to go fuck themselves, but, really, those little bastards are like Pac Man ghosts: if you eat the right dot, you can turn them into little blue pansies and hound them to their death, but they’ll always come back, no matter how many times you kill them.

Of course, if you’re really lucky, you’ll find a way to discover enough simple joy in the details to sustain you until you buy the farm. And, if you’re really really really lucky, you’ll be so preoccupied with enjoying those details that, when your time comes, you’ll have taken a couple of steps off the precipice into thin air — Wile E. Coyote style — before you realize that it’s all over. And then you’ll plummet, arms and legs spread out like the Vitruvian man’s, staring up at everything you left behind; and thinking, just before you turn into a tiny little mushroom cloud at the bottom of the canyon, that maybe, just maybe, you did things right.

I caught the last twenty minutes of Bush’s press conference last night, and, as usual, found myself wondering why I’ve been stuck in this nightmare for so damn long, and what exactly I’m going to have to do to wake up. You’d think that, with three years of practice, he’d be able to put two sentences together without sounding like a broken Speak & Spell, or suppress that nauseating smirk, or spout something other than nonsequitors when confronted with a question that his paid ventriloquists haven’t fully prepped him for. But no. All he’s learned is the gutter art of ramble and circumlocution; and not even circumlocution, really, because he’s not actually talking around questions, so much as fleeing from them, leaving contrails of feckless babble in his wake. And what’s he fleeing towards? The four or five stock phrases he’s memorized, the ones that his handlers hope will cover every possible permutation of every possible question that’s lobbed his way.

They don’t, of course, so he has to spend a little bit of time making his way over to them. You can see it happening, too, his progress toward that nirvana of the familiar: his face goes into serious frat-boy mode, twitching through various shades of smirk, and he begins to gesture nervously, irrelevantly: the motion I’ve noticed him doing most, recently, is the one where he draws his hands up and touches his chest with the tips of his fingers, and then sort of rolls his shoulders forward and points back at the questioner. Kind of a Me President, you Jane gesture, except it hardly ever seems to bear any relation to what he’s actually saying: “You see, because what all those terrorists [points to self] don’t understand is that we love freedom, not killing and torture [points to questioner]“. And then, after a lot of fumbling, he finally eases himself onto the track of one of the safe lines, and calms down, visibly, and goes on for a good five minutes about resolve, and heart, and his soul, and destiny, and so forth.

Ugh. Truly an execrable performance. All of his hagiographers will say what they’ve been saying all along, it’s the message that’s important, not the medium, and that, yeah, maybe he’s the teensient bit aphasic, but it doesn’t matter because he gets the message across. That’s ridiculous. The President is his bully pulpit, and if he hasn’t mastered the basic facility of speech he’s at a serious disadvantage, not just in his relationship with the people he represents, but with the rest of world. The United States has a big stick, the biggest stick in the world, and so people listen to its leader; it would be nice if the stuff they were listening to rose above the level of babble, or empty, scripted homily.

In the guise of an editorial about the recent outrage in a San Francisco art school, where a student was expelled for writing an unpleasant and violent short story, Michael Chabon has written a powerful defense of the Bill of Rights, and of the fucked up stew of emotion, uncertainty and fear that is the teenage mind. Here’s some of it:

It is in the nature of a teenager to want to destroy. The destructive impulse is universal among children of all ages, rises to a peak of vividness, ingenuity and fascination in adolescence, and thereafter never entirely goes away. Violence and hatred, and the fear of our own inability to control them in ourselves, are a fundamental part of our birthright, along with altruism, creativity, tenderness, pity and love. It therefore requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder. It requires a policy of dishonesty about and blindness to our own histories, as a species, as a nation, and as individuals who were troubled as teenagers, and who will always be troubled, by the same dark impulses. It also requires that favorite tool of the hypocritical, dishonest and fearful: the suppression of constitutional rights.

Thanks goodness there are people like Chabon around to remind us that ugliness cannot be ignored or censored away, only repressed; and only then for a while, and with disastrous consequences.

And how sad that, 200 hundred years after the Bill of Rights, we still need to write editorials like this to defend it against the forces of ignorance, fear, and repression.

I have just recently discovered that George W. Bush, in preparing to step into his new role as President of the United States, played a “training” text adventure game called PRESIDENT. It was commissioned and designed by his staff, in the hopes that it would help him to understand the unique challenges he would soon face as Commander in Chief.

We have obtained a transcript of his first session with that game:

You have just been elected President of the United States. You are sitting at your desk in the oval office. You are the leader of the free world.

You see: (1) A treaty to reduce the spread of greenhouse gasses; (2) a comprehensive report on the likelihood of terrorist attacks in this country; (3) a rubber ball.

What do you do?

LOOK AT TREATY

The treaty is called “The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” It appears to be foreign.

READ TREATY

You read the first page. It’s going on and on about the environment. It’s boring.

STOP READING TREATY

Way ahead of you.

WITHDRAW FROM TREATY

You withdraw from the treaty. Several environmental groups begin to howl in protest, as do some foreigners. The treaty collapses.

You have earned 100 points.

EXAMINE TERRORIST REPORT

It appears to be a report, prepared by a man named RICHARD CLARKE, about a little Arab who thinks he can hurt the United States of America. It is very long and detailed, and points to a large body of evidence that seems to indicate that a terrorist attack is imminent.

IGNORE REPORT

You throw the report in the trash can.

You have earned 300 points.

EXAMINE BALL.

It’s a little red rubber ball.

PLAY WITH BALL

You play with the ball. It bounces all over the place, like some sort of crazy Mexican jumping bean. It’s a lot of fun.

PLAY WITH BALL

You continue to play with the ball.

PLAY WITH BALL

You continue to play with the ball. It is now approaching evening.

The VICE PRESIDENT walks into your office. He is carrying an ENERGY POLICY.

EAT VICE PRESIDENT

He doesn’t look very tasty.

SURRENDER ALL AUTHORITY TO VICE PRESIDENT

You’ve already done that.

PLAY WITH BALL

You play with the ball. The VICE PRESIDENT puts the energy policy down on your desk and tells you to sign it.

LOOK AT ENERGY POLICY

The energy policy is very thick, and very intimidating. The first page says “Executive Summary for the President”. It is brightly colored. There are pictures of nuclear power plants in big green fields.

READ EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

There are no words in the executive summary. Just pictures.

LOOK AT PICTURES

There’s a picture of a man in a coalminer hardhat, blowing the top off a mountain. He is smiling. There is a picture of a powerplant spewing clouds of sulfurous gas. The power plant is smiling. There is a picture of mercury droplets floating away from the grasping hands of nasty liberals. The droplets are smiling. There is a picture of a man in a nice suit handing you a bag of money.

TAKE MONEY

You already took the money. That is why you must sign the energy policy.

SIGN ENERGY POLICY

You sign the energy policy. The VICE PRESIDENT leaves.

You have earned 700 points.

PLAY WITH BALL

You play with the ball.

The TREASURY SECRETARY comes into your office. He says that all signs point to a downturn in the economy, and that something should be done to prevent it.

CUT TAXES

You cut taxes. The surplus disappears, and a large deficit appears.

CUT TAXES

You cut taxes. The deficit rises to historic proportions. The TREASURY SECRETARY protests.

FIRE TREASURY SECRETARY. CUT TAXES.

You cut taxes. The deficit spirals out of control. The media are ganging up on you. Members of your staff are quitting and writing books about how incompetent you are. Your poll numbers are sinking.

PLAY WITH BALL

You play with the ball.

I am exactly 44 pages into Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and it is already, by far, the best book about writing I’ve ever encountered. I haven’t read any of her novels, but I plan to, I almost have to, because how could someone who knows so much about her craft — who really really fundamentally gets it — not produce wonderful novels?

Here’s what I’m talking about:

You sit down. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every other morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again … There is a vague pain at the base of your neck. It crosses your mind that you may have meningitis.

Or this:

Very few writers really know what they’re doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do — you can either type or kill yourself.”

All of this stuff is gold, in the advice department, but the book’s got so much more than that going for it; it’s beautifully written, spare and taut and wise and funny as hell. It’s always seemed to me that books about writing need to be the best written books there are, just as priests need to be the most moral, upright people there are, or chemistry teachers need to be able to recite the periodic table backwards and forwards and whip up vials of nitro-glycerin without breaking a sweat. Otherwise they’re just not credible.

But there’s one assertion Lamott makes, and keeps making, that I find a little troubling. Not just because I don’t agree with it, but because I can’t agree with it, and I so much want to agree with everything this woman is saying.

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand what we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

The problem with this, in my opinion, is that every quest after truth is bound to fail; and not because Truth doesn’t exist, but because it exists everywhere, in so many motley and divergent permutations that, if you examine it for any length of time, the whole concept becomes meaningless. There are a few baselines truths, of course: killing people is bad, George W. Bush has the intellect of pizza crust, my dog was sent to me by God to punish me for not believing in Him. But even these baselines don’t hold up to scrutiny, there are always exceptions. Truth isn’t solid and monolithic, it’s a series of subjective compromises, a plague of Gray Areas mixed together and stained white or black to appear Absolute.

And besides, who wants to get at the truth, especially about yourself? It always seemed to me that people who spend an excessive amount of time trying to understand themselves are just asking for trouble; it’s like digging through quicksand, looking for landmines. The stuff I don’t know about myself I don’t know about myself for a reason, probably a good one. People should let sleeping incendiary devices lie.

Case in point: I recently stopped reading a book called Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Gutterson. It’s a beautiful novel, beautifully written, funny and fascinating and so bone-jarringly sad that I literally cannot bring myself to read another page. Books don’t usually make me sad, so I made the mistake of wondering why this one did, and then of linking it to my own life, which led to all sorts of unpleasant revelations that just made me sadder. It was a pointless exercise in self-depression, and would likely have continued indefinitely — or until I found whatever land mine was at the core of all this, and blown myself to bits — had I not had the foresight to pull out, put the book down, fire up the XBox and play Halo for five straight hours. I must have killed a thousand of those vile evil alien bastards, and by the time I was done my hands were shaking, my eyes were bleary, my legs were useless, and Snow Falling on Cedars was gone.

Anyway. My point here, as best as I can tell, is that you shouldn’t seek after the Truth about yourself, because the Truth doesn’t just Hurt, it Really Really Really Hurts. If you stabbed yourself with a knife, and noticed that there was blood gushing out of the wound, and that you were wracked with pain, and that it was quite likely that you would soon die unless you sought medical attention, would you (a) stab yourself again or (b) stop stabbing yourself? I would choose (b).

Reading over what I’ve just written, I find that most of it (except maybe the part about my dog being a punishment) is complete bullshit, and that I should probably just delete it. But I won’t, because it is also, in some sense (granted, a very narrow sense)true, my contribution to the vast untidy multifarious universe of Truth: a universe that rejects nothing, ultimately, and so, taken as a whole, means nothing. So maybe the key is not to take it as a whole. Pick some corner of Truth, some reasonably non-self-contradictory corner of a somewhat inoffensive galaxy, and stay there, and ward off all those other Truths with sticks and chest-pounding and monkey shrieks; whatever it takes, whatever you need to do to stay happy, and reasonably sane, without hurting anyone else. It seems to me that this would be a pretty nice way to live.

This poor blog has recently been beset by a veritable locust plague of comment spam, all from one company that’s apparently hawking cut-rate pharmaceuticals. I was just about to go in and delete them all when I paused to actually read the stuff they were posting. Here’s the first note I saw:

In a fog-enshrouded age like the eighteenth century it was all-inclusive for a man of learning to talk about effective ultram and out scenes under a Congo moon.

Huh. So what the fuck is that all about? Ultram is a pain reliever, I think, but the rest of this is just pure, beautiful, gibberish. Here’s another one:

It doubtless matched as food the well-armed fish, bats and nexium of the cave, as well as some of the bourgeois fish that are wafted in at every freshet of Green River, which communicates in some occult manner with the viagra of the cave.

Cool. I did a little bit of research, and it turns out that these nefarious characters are trying to wriggle their way through Bayesian spam filters, which use fairly sophisticated statistical methods to detect the stock phrases one usually finds in notes like this; the spammers have devised techniques to string together a series of non sequiturs that, though meaningless in and of themselves, are able to fool the filters. It’s evil, but I must say I’m very happy with the results. One more:

Then I thrust with a start that, even should I succeed in felling my antagonist, I should never behold its form, as my torch had long since been carrier-current, and I was entirely padded with female viagra.

That’s just brilliant. It should win some sort of nonsense award.

My suspicion is that these guys have hired that troupe of million monkeys we’ve been hearing about for so long, the ones tapping randomly at typewriters with the expectation of one day producing an exact replica of Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre. The great insight of these viagra merchants is that the chaff these monkeys are producing in the pursuit of their quest is actually worth something. I’m sure the monkeys are quite pleased. I’d be.