They never forgive you for not believing what they want you to believe.

As some of you may know, I was something of an idealist as a young man. I still am, I guess, though as I’ve gotten older I’ve honed an ability to see both sides of most serious arguments, and as a result, there are fewer things I believe in now than there used to be. But I’m pretty fierce about the things I do believe in, and no less then than now.
Among those things are these two truths: first, that war, although occasionally necessary, is wrong (duh); second, that the people who run our country are not interested in moral or ethical questions, but rather are motivated purely by self-interest, the lust for power, and (to a lesser extent) by narrow ideologies that, once they’ve reached office, they never seem to question.
I was outraged by injustices perpetrated by the United States government, and they made up a litany that I chanted in the dark years of Reagan’s Eighties. I looked at Polk’s war with Mexico, at the unjustifiable (and ultimately doomed) entry of the U.S. into World War I, and the desperate fiasco of Vietnam. I read about how we overthrew the peaceful, democratically-elected governments of Iran, Guatemala, Chile, and a host of others, and of the human disasters wrought by the right-wing dictators we replaced them with. I learned that our government is capable of great evil.
So, when I turned 18, I was aware that at some point my country might need me to take up arms in its defense, and I was prepared for that. If Russian ships had sailed up the Chesapeake Bay and landed invasion forces in Virginia in 1989, I would have been right there on the front lines, fighting them off. But I knew that historically it is very rare that soldiers are called upon to defend their country. For the most part, they are called upon to destroy other peoples’ countries in the service of the narrow self-interest of the wealthy and powerful.
In other words, I was going to decide for myself whether something was worth fighting, dying, or killing for. I was NOT going to allow that decision to be made for me. I didn’t know anyone else who could be trusted. And so, I refused to register for the draft.
That’s illegal, of course. I suppose they put you in jail for that, though I don’t know the details. How long do they keep you? Do they keep you until you register? If you never register, do they keep you ‘til you die? I should have researched this, really. But being idealistic, and a bit naïve (and then as now a little dramatic) I was willing to go to jail when they came for me. I may also have been calculating how much my success with the hippie chicks would increase after such an arrest. Going to jail for what you believe in…what’s more American than that?  What could possibly be sexier?
They did come for me, of course. By happy coincidence, when they came to my house, I was already in jail for something else (something distinctly non-idealistic, but that’s a story for another time). I suppose they made a note to come ‘round again after I got out, then filed me away while they dealt with the other recalcitrants, and eventually forgot about me. They never came back. I slipped through the cracks.
It’s a strange fact about human nature that, once you’ve convinced yourself that you believe something strongly enough to go to prison rather than recant, it’s a little disappointing if you never, in fact, go to prison for it. Nevertheless, I never did register for the draft, and I’m proud of that.
It has caused me some problems in my life. When I was an International Affairs major, I discovered that I can’t hold any sort of federal job. Not only can I not be, say, Attorney General, but also I can’t be a low-level clerk at the Justice Department. Given my major, the State Department would have been the obvious employer to seek out after graduation. Even if I didn’t plan to make a career out of it, that would be the place to get experience, make contacts, get my foot in the door. However, in order for me to have even a minor position working for the Federal Government, there would have to be an actual Act of Congress. I’m pretty sure I’m not important enough to debate on the Senate floor, you know? So, there was nothing to be done about it, and after considering various options, I quietly decided to go for a different degree.
Degrees, actually, have been a much bigger problem in general. See, not only am I not eligible for government work, I’m also not eligible for federal money. None at all. The only program that I’m legally allowed to take part in is Social Security. Everything else is closed to me, and that includes every kind of Financial Aid available. None of the big government programs for student aid are open to me. I can’t even get student loans that are backed by Federal money. The main reason I still don’t have a degree is financial; you have to work full-time just to live, and if you’re doing that and going to school full time, that’s pretty stressful. But if you aren’t getting any sort of financial help, you have to have another part-time job (at least) to pay tuition and costs. There just isn’t enough time. If I work enough to pay tuition I can’t go to school, and if I have enough time to go to school I can’t afford tuition.
There are other problems, too, and they never go away.  There is no statute of limitations on this offense; once you’ve reached 27 (the age at which you can no longer register), you can never be forgiven.  Still, I don’t regret the decision, even after all these years. I believe still that I was right, and if there’s been trouble from it, it hasn’t been anything I couldn’t handle. I have lived an interesting and full life. I’ve been everywhere and done everything. I’ve grown tremendously as a person, if I do say so myself. I’ve learned so many wonderful and fascinating things, and known so many wonderful and fascinating people, and I’ve always had fun, always.
I’m not even sure that the lack of a degree has hurt me. I mean, yeah, maybe I would have had a more “respectable” job, making more money. Maybe so. But maybe I would have been less happy as well, because I would almost certainly have been less free. The absence of a degree hasn’t kept me from getting a lot of jobs that I’ve enjoyed. And now, of course, there’s the job at VCU, which doesn’t require a degree and for which all of my recent experience qualifies me. This is sort of like a dream come true, really; I’m perfect for the job, and the job is perfect for me. After all the miles and all the years, I’ll get to go back home. If you’ll forgive me for quoting T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Yeah, exactly. What could be more exciting than that?
The job has been posted finally. I feel like I have a pretty good shot at it. I have fixed up the nicest résumé I was able to without actually lying and sent it along. I have been (indirectly) in contact with people who will be involved in the hiring process, and they’ve been encouraging. I’ve told my landlord that I’m leaving, and notified the people I work for that I might be gone at the end of the summer. The only thing left to do is fill out the online application and schedule an interview.
So I was filling out the application, and I came across this:

Section 2.2-2804 of the Code of Virginia prohibits any board, commission, department, agency, institution or instrumentality of the Commonwealth from employing a person who is required to present himself and submit to the federal Selective Service registration requirement and failed to do so. If you are/were required to register for the Selective Service, have you done so?

And now I really don’t know what I’m gonna do.

UPDATE (5:38): Pretty momentous day. I just found out that I have to move. Which, yes, I was planning to move anyway, but not ‘til sometime in August (regardless of what happens with VCU). I discovered just now that I have to be out of my apartment by July 31. So, I need a new place, that isn’t too expensive, and won’t tie me to a long-term lease. Any suggestions?

I only kill to know I'm alive.

I’ve got no problem, generally speaking, with life imitating the movies. However, it seems like life never imitates the right movies, you know? It’s never Amélie or anything sweet like that (I would love to spend the day running all over town solving puzzles, especially if the last one would lead me to Audrey Tautou). No, for some reason, when the screen world bleeds into the real world, it’s always something kinda scary.
They’ve got a new warplane. It’s a little computerized drone that flies around on its own, blowing things up, without a pilot. Now, I hear you saying, “But they’ve already got drones like that, and they’re using them in Iraq and Afghanistan.” No, they don’t. The ones in use right now are remote-controlled. They have cameras and “pilots” sitting safely in a bunker somehow guiding them to their targets. Whatever those things do, an actual person makes them do it. These new planes, though, are completely automated. You tell them what to destroy, and then they go off and destroy it on their own. Tell me that isn’t a recipe for disaster.
Anyway, the new plane is named the Reaper, which just proves again that irony is dead, but I prefer to call it the “Flying Death Machine.” Several thousand of them are currently under construction at Wright-Patt in Dayton, Ohio, which is now reason #41,356 I’m glad I don’t live in Ohio anymore.
That isn’t the scary part, though. See, I said “you” tell them what to destroy, but that isn’t true. “You” don’t. Even if, by some chance, “you” are the President or the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (it would be awesome if any of those people actually read my LJ), you don’t tell it what to target. No, that job has been given to a super-computer. That’s right, a fleet of thousands of Flying Death Machines are under the control of a computer which, I’m sure, will never become self-aware and turn on its human overlords. I mean, the scientists who designed the thing would make sure that couldn’t happen, right?
Sure they would. I am confident that they put some sort of “do not become self-aware and turn on your human overlords” switch on it.  I mean, these are serious scientists, the best and brightest.
Oh, and by the way, would you like to know what these genius scientists named their insurrection-ready computer? Think for a moment; what’s the best possible name you could give a computer like this? What name would signify that you really are absolutely not trying to court disaster, and don’t have your hopes set on the worst possible outcome? Science fiction fans are probably waaay ahead of me here: they named it SkyNet. For those of you who aren’t fans of science fiction, “SkyNet” was the name of the computer in the Terminator movies.  You know, the one that became self-aware and turned on its human overlords. And subsequently destroyed all life on Earth.
Remember the words of Kyle Reese:  It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead. “Excellent,” says science.  “Let’s put it in charge of the Flying Death Machines! With that attitude, what could go wrong?”
This is one of those movies that life way the hell definitely does not need to be imitating.
Our only hope now is that silly action movies will continue to make the transition from screen to reality, and James Bond will be sent after these people, and their SkyNet Instant Armageddon Generator and their Reaper Flying Death Machines, before it’s too late. Keep your fingers crossed.

East is East, West is West, two different colors on the map.

Three young people walk into a pizza place, two boys and a girl. They are fresh and lovely, and all three are foreign; even though the driver can’t really hear what they’re saying, their heavy accents are obvious. He is not sure where they are from, though there is an air of Southeastern Europe about them.  The driver’s opinion is that they are from somewhere in the Balkans, but they could be from anywhere.  They might even be Israeli.
They are at the cash register, talking to the cashier, trying to decide what to order for dinner. Wherever they’re from, they are apparently either Jews or Muslims, and are unable to eat pork. Their accent is charming if a bit obtuse, but their vocabulary is somewhat limited, and among the words they have not yet learned is “pork.” So they are going over the menu with the cashier, trying to ensure that they don’t accidentally order “pig meat.” The cashier is unable to understand them, however. His imagination is maybe a little too vivid, or his knowledge of foreign cultures might possibly be derived too much from comic books and Eli Roth movies. He hears “pig meat” as “Pygmy.”
So when they ask him, “Is this made from pig meat?” he tries to cover his horror with an affronted politeness.  “I’m sorry,” he responds, “but we don’t eat people in this country.”
 

Ex-PFC Wintergreen told Colonel Cargill that there was no record at 27th AFHQ of a T.S. Eliot

I’m listening to the audiobook version of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. This is my book. It is, in my opinion, the finest American novel. It’s funny and insightful and disturbing and bizarre and mesmerizing and sorrowful, and while other novels can be those things too, no other has all of them at once, in such great profusion, coming at you in wave after wave. Reading the book is a brilliant and draining experience.
Things in the book happen fairly randomly. I mean, I say that and I know it’s not true…it took Heller 20 years to write it, and I’m sure quite a few of those years were spent organizing the incidents into their present order, which must have been a massive job. But they can sure seem random. For those who haven’t read the book, it jumps around crazily and apparently haphazardly between events, reporting them out of order, separated by arguments between the characters and flashbacks to events that happened, sometimes, decades before.
Also, things happen repeatedly. Incidents are introduced early in the book in brief outline form, then a few chapters later the book goes back to them with a little more detail, and then a few chapters later it does it again, and finally at the end of the book everything gets explained in full detail (the death of Snowden is the principal event that’s treated this way). I’m convinced that Quentin Tarantino based his editing of Pulp Fiction on the patterns in this book. I’ve read it easily a hundred times, and although I have a general sense of what came before what, I don’t believe I could sit down and write you a timeline showing the events of the book in chronological order. I’m not sure that Heller himself could do that.
So I report without shame that I listened to my new audiobook version of Catch-22 today for more than an hour before I realized that my iPod was set on random, and was playing the chapters out of order.

Idiots Rule

Oh, man, creationists piss me off.
It isn’t that they’re stupid. They are stupid, of course. Believing that the Earth is only six thousand years old is just plain stupid. To believe that, you have to believe that recorded history is older than the Earth. I’m serious: Sam Harris points out in his wonderful Letter to a Christian Nation that creationists believe that the Earth was created about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Square that one for me, would ya?
So, yeah, it’s stupid, but people are allowed to be stupid. Stupid isn’t against the law, generally speaking. The thing is, they want to make our kids stupid, too. And, see, that’s kind of a problem.
So, they’re debating whether or not to send Texas schoolchildren straight to hell (poor Texas schoolchildren…they’re always the test subjects in these ridiculous episodes) by teaching them evolution in the schools. You know, again. A court in Pennsylvania (yaaaaaaay, Pennsylvania!) just ruled that teaching creationism in the public schools was unconstitutional, seeing as how it’s really just fanatics trying to impose their religious beliefs onto scientific education. So Texas has had to start from scratch in their efforts to return to a Stone Age that they, of course, believe never existed.
Some moron named “Dr. McLeroy” who is the Chairman (yes, the Chairman, saints preserve us) of the school board was quoted as saying during the debate that he believes the Earth is only a few thousand years old. When it was pointed out to him that this belief is ludicrous (presumably in more polite language), he responded, “I believe a lot of incredible things. The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.”
Leaving aside the temporal anomalies implied in that statement, he has a right to believe that if he wants. Personally, if it was me, I would have phrased that in a way that made me sound less like a nut, but hey, it’s his business. Note, however, that his religious beliefs clearly inform and justify his creationist beliefs. The juxtaposition of the young Earth and the Christmas story demonstrates that beyond any reasonable doubt.
And then, minutes later, he says, “My personal religious beliefs are going to make no difference in how well our students are going to learn science,” which perfectly contradicts what he’d said only moments before. This goes to show why this battle, although completely ridiculous, is also so important: obviously, a lack of understanding of scientific principles leads to certain cognitive disorders. It can cause an inability to speak logically, for example. It contributes to the erosion of the capacity for rational thought. The failure to understand that words actually mean something, and that when one bunch of words means the exact opposite of what another bunch of words means, they shouldn’t be used by the same person in the same conversation, there’s a good one.
I know that there’s a lot of crazy in Texas. They’ve got crazy piled up two feet deep from one end of the state to the other, and brothers and sisters, it’s a great big state. But how crazy does a state have to be to make someone like this the CHAIRMAN OF THE SCHOOL BOARD? This guy does not belong on a school board, or anywhere near any school, ever. Why can’t we at least agree on that?

We come in the age's most uncertain hour and sing an American tune.

Compare these two recent events in Oklahoma, and tell me if you figure out the punch line before I get to it: 

Case #1: The sweeping new immigration law in the state has become something of a sick joke nationally, since it includes things like making it a felony to give an immigrant a ride (imagine being sentenced to a year in prison ‘cause you stopped to pick up a guy whose car had run out of gas on the highway). But there’s nothing funny at all about it, because among its many provisions (many, many provisions) is a regulation making it illegal to provide medical care to any immigrant, even a child or an infant. Think about that for a minute.
There was basically no resistance to the bill. Combining the votes in both Houses, it passed 129-15. This means that 89.6% of the elected representatives chosen by the citizens of Oklahoma supported this bill.
Case #2: As a peace offering, the Ethnic American Advisory Council, a state agency, sent copies of the Koran to each and every state legislator in celebration of the state’s 100th birthday (earlier this year, the Baptist General Convention sent “Centennial Bibles” in the same spirit). Many GOP folks, however, refused to accept the gifts. One of them, some halfwit named Rex Duncan, explained, “Most Oklahomans do not endorse the idea of killing innocent women and children in the name of ideology.” 

Brothers and sisters, this is clearly not the case. 89.6% of Oklahomans endorsed that very thing this past Election Day.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Okay, this is the kind of story I love.
Thirty years ago there were these scientists, see? And they were conducting experiments on lizards. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. But they took five mating pairs of a particular kind of lizard (the Italian Wall Lizard, which is a good name) from the little island that they were indigenous to and put them on another, nearby island named Pod Mrcaru (that is not a misprint), just off the Croatian coast.
The lizards weren’t supposed to be there long. Unfortunately, right around this time, the Croatian War of Independence broke out. And, you know, suddenly, everybody had more important things on their minds than ten lizards in a strange place. And they just kinda, I don’t know, forgot about them.
So, I guess somebody recently remembered and went back for the lizards. And, man, Pod Mrcaru was crawling with the little bastards. They completely took over and drove all the island’s native lizards to extinction and now the place is pretty much wallpapered with the interlopers. Which I’m sure you expected. That’s how stories like this always end: new species is introduced into an environment and grows out of control. God knows it happened back home, both with ladybugs and kudzu. I don’t know what folks were thinking when they brought kudzu to the Commonwealth.
Anyway, but that isn’t the whole story. The scientists found, when they examined the lizards, that they weren’t the same any more. For one thing, the source species eats mostly insects, which are easy to digest. But these lizards were eating mostly plants. It turns out that they have grown new organs specifically to help them digest plant matter! They grew something called a “cecal valve,” which is musculature between the stomach and intestines that holds food and essentially allows it to ferment, so that their digestive system can break down vegetation. Their heads got bigger, too, allowing for a stronger bite (presumably for tearing leaves). And their social structure changed; the new lizards aren’t as territorial as the original species, and they apparently mate somewhat more freely.
And all this happened in thirty years! According to Duncan Irshick, a biology professor at UMass, that’s like humans spontaneously growing a new appendix in a couple of centuries. Who knew it could happen so fast?
So, anyway, yeah, and the point is this: the next time some fundamentalist wacko tells you evolution is a myth and that there’s no evidence for it, ask him, “Say, have you heard about the Croatian lizards?”

Got info from the National Geographic …check it out!
 

The Time Machine

It’s early spring in Dayton, Ohio. I’ve just arrived in town, and I don’t plan to stay, but I’m gonna rest a while and save up a little money. I’ve found a job, working at the local gas station-slash-convenience store. I’m a night person, and they’ve hired me to work second shift, 3-11 PM. These are perfect hours; I arrive late enough to sleep in, and get off early enough to go to the bar after work. But for training I have to come to the store in the morning for the first two weeks. At seven o’clock in the morning, to be precise. This is torture.
Belly’s second CD has just come out, and because their first is one of my all-time favorites, I’ve bought the new one on the day of its release, even though I can’t really afford it. The fifth song, “Super-Connected,” is the first to really catch my attention. It starts off very downbeat, with a slow, heavy-reverb bass line. Tanya Donelly sings the first verse in a tired-sounding, off-key sort of groaning whisper. She sounds, in fact, like me when the alarm goes off at six AM.
When that verse is finished her voice trails off, and the guitar starts up. It’s a rising-and-falling, grinding, aching sound. It sounds angry. It sounds unhappy to be alive. That’s me, too, as I struggle to sit up, to throw off the covers. I’m hung over, and I haven’t had enough sleep, and the arthritis in my knees has locked them in place during the short night, so that it’s painful to move my legs. I am outraged that I have to go to work.
But then a strange thing happens. Donelly returns, singing the next verse, but now her voice is stronger, more awake, as if she is becoming more sure of herself. She sounds defiant, though she’s still struggling. Now she means business. She faces the meanness and bitterness of the guitar, and she shoves it aside, and goes on.
And then she reaches the chorus, and suddenly there are harmonies, and the guitar stops grinding and begins to shimmer and pulse, and her voice soars. It is not a beautiful voice, but it means what it says, and is everything it wants to be. She is transcendent, otherworldly. She is the sun rising above the clouds, and she sings to me, and she takes me with her.
After that, each verse is stronger and stronger, and each chorus flies higher and higher, until the song achieves escape velocity and shoots off into space. It ends abruptly, except for a ringing echo of the exhausted drone from the song’s beginning. But now that sound is forlorn and abandoned. She has shaken it off. She is finished with it now, and has gone off to get busy living.
I can’t smoke in the house. Every morning I get up, and I get a cup of coffee, and I shuffle into the garage for a cigarette. I’ve put a stereo out there, and I play this song compulsively, over and over, every single morning. Early spring in Ohio is still winter-cold. Although it’s dawn, the sun hasn’t really risen yet, and there’s no heat in the garage. I sit shivering, nearly sightless in the dusty grey, having the first smoke(s) of the day, heaving great shuddering coughs and coming to life painfully but steadily, listening. It’s one of the greatest early-morning songs ever.
That was long ago, and though I still love the song I don’t listen to it as often as I used to. But sometimes, when I do, I close my eyes and I’m back there. It’s strange that some songs have the power to carry you through time, isn’t it? I love songs for lots of reasons, because of their great beauty or because they’re silly and they raise my spirits, or because they have an irresistible energy that I can draw from them. But the ones I love best are the ones that have an anchor in time and memory. It doesn’t even have to be a happy time that they’re taking me to. There was absolutely no reason to love six AM in Dayton, and I don’t miss it. I guess it’s the trip itself that’s important, rather than the destination.
I sit now and listen to “Super-Connected,” and it’s a time machine. I’m smoking the day’s first cigarette, standing in the freezing grey light of an Ohio morning in March of 1995. Everything is so clear, it can’t be a trick of my mind. I’m really here, and it’s amazing.

Murder is the sport of the elected

Well, I’ll be damned. You’ve heard of the “Clinton Body Count,” right? That’s the list that the craziest of the crazy right-wing bloggers started keeping of all the people the Clintons had murdered, either because they stood between him and the White House, or to cover up scandals during his terms as Governor and President. Well, it turns out I’m on it, Richard Winters, partway down the page.
Yes, that’s right. In case you don’t want to check the link, here’s the story: you see, there were these two guys named Kevin Ives and Don Henry. They stumbled onto some drug-running operation masterminded by the Clintons, but before they could talk, they were killed by a train on August 23, 1987. Except, it turns out, they were killed first and then their bodies were placed on the tracks. Which, I gotta say, doesn’t seem like the best way to commit a murder to me. I mean, it seems a little clumsy and haphazard, plus pretty damned pointless. And my opinion counts in this, because apparently I’m the guy who killed them!
And then a whole bunch of people “had information” on those murders (when you’re dragging two bodies along a train track, you’re gonna get noticed, even in Arkansas), so I killed them, too, one by one. And it really was a WHOLE BUNCH of people. I’m not sure how none of them managed to fill out a police report or talk to the press before I got to them, but hey, I guess luck was on my side while I was hunting them down over the next two years.
My favorite was James Milam. I decapitated him, but arranged the crime scene in such an expert way that the coroner ruled he died of natural causes. I wish I could disclose how I did that; suffice it to say that I’m The Man, and that The Man got mad skillz. There was Keith Coney, who died in a motorcycle “accident” (there were “unconfirmed reports” of a high-speed car chase…I’ll admit, that bit does sound like me). There was Jeff Rhodes, who was tortured, mutilated, shot in the head, put in a dumpster, and set on fire (yikes! like I have that much energy). There were other boring ones, too, shotgun blasts and stabbings that I won’t bother going into.
And then I was myself killed in a “robbery” in July of 1989, only of course it wasn’t really a robbery, it was an assassination made to look like a random crime. I guess I’d asked for a little hush money from the Clintons, so they had to silence me for good; or maybe they were wondering how, even after I’d killed a half-dozen or so potential witnesses, there were still so many people who “had information” on the Ives/Henry murders. I mean, hell, they still had another five or six of ‘em to bump off after I was gone! (Incidentally, they managed to kill one person via a bout of viral pneumonia; man, their skillz are even madder than mine!)
I am very distressed to learn that I’ve been dead for the last 19 years. I’m wondering why death hasn’t saved me from suffering through, for instance, the death of my father, or the end of my relationship with Bonnie, or seven-plus years of being ruled by a mendacious, war-mongering sociopath. Where’s my goddamned sweet oblivion?
On the plus side, I suppose this means that I can drink and smoke all I want, and eat lots of fatty foods.
Oh, yeah, and vote Obama. He doesn’t have a list yet.

naked, rude, inaccesible, and cheap

Whew, the last few days have been eventful. I’m not gonna write about everything right now, because I kind of hate to have more than one subject in an entry, and also because I haven’t yet decided which bits I’m gonna write about at all. But I will tell you this particular bit from last night, because it’s funny and made me feel good:

Okay, as you folks know, I deliver pizza for Husson’s. And, like people who work any job where they have to deal with the public, we have certain regular customers that we hate. Husson’s Enemy #1 is this guy named Ayers who lives on Wilson Court. In the first place, I just don’t like Wilson Court. I don’t want to drive there. It’s a narrow, hilly, poorly-paved (even by local standards) deathtrap, and it wrecks Rosie’s suspension. Even if I was fond of him, I’d be unhappy about delivering to that place.

But really, I’m not likely to feel any fondness for him. In the first place, of course, he never tips. Ever. That’s bad enough, but he’s also very rude. He answers the door in his underwear, which I hate, a pot-bellied man in his mid-fifties standing there in his boxers and socks, no shirt. But more than that, he never says anything. I ask “How are ya doing?” Nothing. I tell him how much his food costs. He gives me the money (exact change, of course) but says nothing. I tell him I hope he enjoys his food and has a good night. By the time I can finish this statement, his door is already shut.

So last night I had to go out there. I had plenty of time, picking my way out to Wilson Court, to simmer, and I was angry by the time I got to his house. But when he opened the door, I was still all polite smiles.

“Hello,” I said. He just stood there.

“Hellooooo,” I said again. Still, he made no response.

And, it just pissed me off. I just decided that I was tired of his behavior. So I said, “Look, I’ve been coming out here a couple of times a month for a year now, and you’ve never said one word. I’m a human being and I deserve to be treated with respect, and I’m not giving you this food ‘til you say hello to me!”

He stood there for a second, and I was really just about to take his food and go back to the store, but he finally mumbled a grumpy “hello.” Didn’t hurt, did it?

“Thank you,” I said. “That’ll be $14.56.”

So when I got back to the store I asked Phil, the manager, whether he’d called to complain. Phil said no, but asked why I thought he might. So I told him and Anthony, the other driver, the story. And they laughed, and Anthony said I was his hero, ‘cause EVERYBODY at Husson’s hates this guy, it isn’t just me, and then Phil got on his cell phone and started calling the rest of the crew, all the people who work there but were off last night, to tell them the story.

So now I’m accidentally a Husson’s legend, which is pretty cool. But mostly, it just felt really good to tell Ayers off. I had a big smile on my face the whole rest of the night.

You're no URNOJFK

Some of you young folks may not remember much about the 1988 Presidential election. It went badly. But it did boast one beautiful moment, one iconic, pop-culture incident that stands out. It came in, of all places, the Vice-Presidential debate. Dan Quayle (remember him?) was trying to deflect criticism that he was too young and inexperienced to be the VP. He said at one point during the debate that “I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.” Which, incidentally, wasn’t true, but we’ll let that go.

Anyway, Lloyd Bentsen responded with an all-time great line: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy; I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.”

And the crowd went wild, and we all went wild. It was really the only bright spot for the Dems in that campaign. (The GOP had their own iconic moment, of course; remember the Snoopy helmet?)

So, there was this person in Richmond back then who went out and got a personalized plate put on her car that read “URNOJFK.” Mama spotted it first and told me about it (I can’t remember now if the person in question was a friend of hers). And a little while later I happened to come across it on one of my late-night walking, thinking, singing and drinking sessions. For the next few months I brought all my friends by to look at it. I never got tired of it, you know? It was a welcome voice of defiance during the Daddy Bush presidency. Every time I’d pass that corner, and she was home, it would make me smile.

She kept it throughout his mercifully short term. She kept it when the Clintons came to power, too (and after the election results were final in 1992, my friends and I went out and toasted the license plate in the middle of the night). For ten years or more, that license plate was a standard tourist stop for me. Every time I went home, I would be sure to stop by the apartment, near the meeting of Elwood and the Boulevard, to see that car. Dude, it just never got old.

This past time, when I was home, I went by to see it, just before leaving town. And it wasn’t there! I was heartbroken. There was a car parked in her old space, though, that had a plate on it saying DEMOCAT. D’ya think it’s maybe the same woman? If it is, I wish someone would tell her that this is much less cool.

Unconvincing

You can never, ever, trust anything the government tells you about illegal drugs. You just can’t. They lie like crazy, ‘cause if they were ever honest, we’d all immediately demand an end to the drug war, and they really like the drug war, ‘cause it costs lots of money and provides an excuse to do all sorts of horrible things to people. Plus, it gives every politician an opportunity to look “tough on crime” by demonizing a segment of the population that is largely inoffensive but is also unchampioned and defenseless.
Fifty and sixty years ago, when most folks didn’t know anything about marijuana, they pretended that it turned people into psycho-killer sex fiends (they still say this about other drugs, of course), and many people believed it. But by the seventies, when I was a kid, everybody knew this was ridiculous. Pot doesn’t drive you to Clockwork Orange-style ultraviolence. Pot makes you sit on the couch grinning ‘til your face hurts. It makes you talk about stupid shit and listen to Pink Floyd records and giggle. Stoners are many things, but one thing they clearly aren’t is dangerous.
So the government needed some new scare tactics. One of these was the idea that marijuana was a “gateway” drug, that it would lead to the abuse of harder drugs which people still believed stupid things about. Insofar as this is true (and I am not convinced), I always figured the obvious reason for it was that, to get pot, you often had to go to seedy and dangerous places where harder drugs were also in use. If you could buy a box of Js down at the 7-11, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Well, there’s been a new study that might possibly indicate that marijuana is, in fact, a gateway drug. The study didn’t track marijuana users to discover if they also got into LSD and cocaine, which is the obvious way to do it. Instead, they got some rats hooked on drugs.
What they did was, they gave a group of rats injections of THC every day for three weeks. The rats got used to feeling good, of course. Then they put those rats, and also a control group of non-pothead rats, into cages where they could push a lever and get heroin whenever they wanted it. I don’t know how they came up with a rat-friendly form of heroin, but I would have liked to have been there.
Anyway, so both groups discovered the heroin at the same time, and both really dug it. But it turned out that the stoner rats liked it more (that is, got it more often), by about 25%, which is a non-trivial number.
Still, I’m not convinced that this experiment proved anything. In the first place, it doesn’t indicate that the pot-rats are more likely to use heroin (which was supposed to be the point), only that they use more of it. The doctors who conducted the study aren’t convinced, either. While saying that the results are interesting, they pointed out that more studies would have to be done before anything definitive could really be said on the issue. Among other things, they would have to try the test using different baits for the rats. One doctor’s comments amounted to, “Maybe they just got used to feeling good, and were happy to find something else that could make them feel good. Maybe the results would have been the same if we’d been offering them sugar. Maybe the test rats would have been 25% more likely to go for Froot Loops or something, too.”
And my point is this: please tell me they aren’t gonna conduct experiments to see whether marijuana use increases the desire for Froot Loops. ‘Cause, dude, I can answer that question for you right now and save everyone a lot of time and expense, okay?

Octopus

It’s a freezing cold day, and I’ve survived the walk across campus and have reached the cafeteria in the Student Center. I’ve just gotten a big-ass thing of hot soup and am attempting to place the lid on it while turning towards the drink machine, where I can get some sweet tea. My attention is completely focused on the hot soup, as you would expect, and I don’t see the young woman approaching rapidly on my right flank. I’ve got my headphones in, and so I don’t hear her footsteps, either. She, for her part, is trying valiantly to stuff loose sheets of paper into the inadequate folder inside the front cover on her notebook without dropping her plate; probably she is planning to study while she eats.  In any case, she is sparing no attention for where she’s going.
She reaches me just as I return to a fully upright position, and just as her notebook brushes against my shoulder I become aware of her. She still hasn’t seen me, and I’ve got practically no time to avoid her. Most men in this situation would simply stop and let her run into them, or fall frantically back in an effort to avoid the collision.  However, I’m me, and I like for everything to involve grand, flamboyant gestures. As far as I’m concerned, the camera is always on, you know?
I continue the upward motion of standing so that I’m on tiptoe and raise my arms high above my head. I make a big show of dancing from one foot to the next, swing my hips around, shift my shoulders. I slither next to, past, and behind her, and the motion startles her; she finally notices me, and stumbles in an effort to pull up short. I slip completely around her and do a full turn, but we both keep our balance. Although our clothes brush against each other all the way ‘round, our personal gravity never meets, and I don’t spill any of the soup. It is a grand, goofy, graceful, impromptu pirouette.  Afterwards, when my momentum has carried me safely clear of her, I (the consummate dancer and perfect avatar of cool) nod to my partner, bow to the audience, and still none of the soup spills.
She smiles at me, bemused and intrigued, and I smile back. She speaks. I shake my head, so she repeats herself. I realize that my headphones are still on. I shrug my left shoulder up and knock the phones clear of that ear. “Sorry,” I say.
“No, really, it was my fault.”
“No, I meant, sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”
“Oh. Well, no, but I was just apologizing for running into you.”
“You didn’t,” I say, and gesture grandly as I continue, “Fortunately, I am light as the air, and graceful as the mighty…" for some reason I can't think of a graceful animal, "...I don’t know, the mighty…octopus…or something.”
She laughs and then smiles again, still bemusedly, as though I’m something entirely outside of her experience. She is lovely: red hair, fair skin, wide lips, long fingers. She is dressed down, a student preparing for exams:  sweatshirt, sweater, worn-out jeans and ancient sneakers.  She usually wears glasses, but is not wearing them now, and her eyes are merry and kind. She looks me up and down, and she thinks I’m interesting. She wants to get to know me better. “You’re puzzling,” she says, and her voice implies that she would like to solve me.
I’m on a break from work, just here to grab food that I’ll go back and eat in my office. I wish I could invite her to lunch with me. Instead I say, “Well, I’m really not so much of a puzzle, once you get to know me.  Like how, if you stare at the two faces long enough, you see the vase between them, and then, you know, mystery solved.”
She nods, and when I make a move to walk to the drinks she turns, and we fall into step together. I’m thinking what a good “How We Met” story this will make for our grandchildren someday, and am already choosing the words and picturing their little faces in my head.  She gets a fruit juice, and while I’m pouring my tea she asks me what I’m listening to. I had forgotten the iPod was even on, frankly. It’s on Shuffle, but I recognize the piece that’s playing. “Ravel, at the moment,” I answer, and begin trying to put a lid on the teacup.
“Oh, do you like Ravel?”
“Yes, very much.”
She is surprised and pleased. I hope that she is a pianist or violinist, a musician of some kind. She steps a bit closer as I continue wrestling with the lid. One edge has folded under and it won't go on.  Why is it fighting me when I'm trying to be at my coolest?
“I love him, too,” she says, “he's on of my favorites, in fact.  I like it that you’re listening to him.”
“Well, thank you very much,” I say, and perhaps my voice betrays some frustration with the lid as I continue, “I was hoping someone would validate my tastes for me.”
She reacts to this, starts abruptly. It hadn’t occurred to me before I'd said it that this statement could be taken as sarcastic, arrogant, and bitchy; I didn’t mean it that way, certainly, but that’s how she’s perceived it. Her bright, friendly eyes cloud over; she has the look I get when someone sits down next to me at the bar and tries to talk to me while I’m reading, the look that says, “I must get out of this conversation, politely if possible, but in any case immediately.”
The coolness is gone and I am suddenly flustered. My tongue stumbles around my lips. I want to apologize, but before I can speak, she has said, “Well, it was nice meeting you” in a voice like a knife slipping between ribs and is walking away. I stand stunned for a moment. Should I follow? Try to explain and make it up to her? Bewildered, I hesitate too long and am lost; she’s gone.  One non-functional plastic drink lid has ruined wondrously limitless possibilities.  And it's on a line that thin that all fate depends, isn't it?
I’ll see her again, though. She’s gotta eat. I’ll do better next time. No more being stupid. Promise.

Epic

I like Husson’s, but some things about it aggravate me. Little things, mostly: we buy these cheap trash bags that can’t be pulled out of the cans without breaking; the owner frequently pulls silly rules out of his hat, and we have to pretend to take them seriously while he’s around; there is insufficient parking during the day, so close to campus; we don’t accept checks. This one bothers me specially, because I don’t understand it. I don’t see that check fraud is any easier to perpetrate (or more difficult to prosecute) than credit card fraud, and anyway it makes the customers mad. Things that make the customers mad adversely affect my tips, and so I am opposed to those things.

Lately I've been bothered, too, by being there too much. We were already a man short and then Jeff quit and Travis got fired (which was about the stupidest thing the boss could have done) and now Aretz is leaving, too, and Kenny, the general manager. I’ve worked both places (Husson's and the library) six of the last seven days, and eight of the last ten, and I’m tired. But not as tired as I was when I woke up at 8:00 this morning.

I worked at the pizza place before coming to the library today, and we got three delivery orders before the place even opened. One was a “walker,” a destination so close by that we don’t bother to drive it, in this case a worker in the university purchasing office wanting a couple of sammiches. One was for a new cultural oddity downtown: a gangsta-run incense and scented candle shop (?!?!?!). The fella who runs the place, and who ordered the pizza, was so gangsta’ed up that his speech was impossible to understand, especially over the phone, and so I was given not only the wrong name for his business, but also the wrong street address, by the person who took the order. That was fun.

The third order was for the St. James building, a big order, what we call the “Family Feast.” Large pizza, breadsticks, salad, dessert, drinks, the works. I got the ticket for that one and headed down there, and spent some small time trying to find a place to park. It is always troublesome when someone orders for one of the downtown offices during business hours, but I managed eventually by grabbing a handicapped spot (yes, I felt bad, and also, shut up) and leaving my hazard lights on.

Once that was accomplished I checked the ticket to find out where within the building I was going, and discovered that there was no room/suite number listed, only the address of the building itself. The street address, of course, was superfluous; it isn’t as though I couldn’t have found the St. James. For them as ain’t been to Huntington, the building takes up half a city block and is 12 stories high in a four-story town. You really can’t miss it. If you were a bird flying randomly through town looking for a window to swoop into and break your neck, odds are that the window you'd end up with would be in the St. James.

But no suite number, and as I walked into the lobby the only information I had was that the person who was to receive the food was named Milton. I called the number listed on the ticket and let it ring thirty times or so, but there was no answer. I thought, “What am I supposed to do, wander every floor of this building shouting ‘Milton! Pizza for Milton!’” I pictured myself as a modern-day Diogenes, endlessly searching the hallways for a hungry secretary.

A security guy saw me wondering and helpless and offered his assistance. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a directory of the building that lists the names of everyone who works/lives there, and the name “Milton” wasn’t familiar to him. He tried the number on the ticket, though, and when he dialed it his cell phone told him that it belonged to the law firm on the fifth floor. I thanked him very much for his help and went up in the elevator.

I walked into the office and told the receptionist, “I have a pizza here for someone named Milton.”

She looked confused. “There’s no one here named Milton,” she said.

The swelling sense of relief quickly deflated. “I’m sorry, but there must be. The phone number of your office is on the ticket.”

“Honey,” she said, “I’ve worked here as long as the firm’s been here, and I don’t know anyone named Milton.” She sat and thought for a moment. Then she picked up the phone and dialed. “Judy? Hey, it’s [whatever her name was]. Is your last name Milton, by any chance? It is? Well, there’s a young man here with a pizza for you. Okay, I’ll send him down.” She hung up the phone. “I’m sorry, honey, I knew her, I just didn’t know her last name. I thought you meant a man whose first name was Milton. She’s downstairs on 4, in the collections department.”

I thanked her, also, for her help, and left. Now, I was on the fifth floor and the person I needed to see was on the fourth. Obviously, I’m not so lazy and decrepit that I can’t manage a single flight of stairs, so rather than wait for the elevator I decided to walk down. Well, it turns out that the St. James is one of those silly buildings where the doors leading into the stairwell are fine, but the doors leading out are all locked. Once I walked into the stairwell I was trapped.

So I had to walk back down to the street, across the lobby, wave a sheepish hello to the security guy (while giving the international “don’t even ask” sign), and get back on the elevator.

I finally made it to the fourth floor, only to discover upon searching that there was no collection department there. But after some careful consideration (during which there was also a fair amount of self-recrimination for not having asked the receptionist upstairs what the suite number of the “collection department” was), I decided that prob’ly “Accounts Management” was a friendlier-sounding euphemism for “collection department,” and tried that door. Success!

The lady was very nice as I explained why it had taken so long to get her pizza to her. She apologized for not having given the suite number when she called, and for not answering the phone when I called, ‘cause the ringer didn’t work (wouldn’t you think that a law firm could afford to fix something like that?).

I handed over the pizza, and assured her that it was no problem. Which wasn’t true, it had been an ENORMOUS freakin’ problem, but I was just glad it was over. Then she got out her purse and handed me a check.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

I was walking. It had been a hot day, but the evening was cool, and I was shivering. I had a canteen full of cheap wine, and I sipped it for warmth. I had walked far enough that the lights of the city no longer obscured the stars, and they were company. I remembered all the nights with my father, him pointing out constellations and the names of the stars, and wished I had paid more attention. "You," I decided, pointing at a star at random, "can be Sirius, because you're very bright. And you," I picked out five stars that were arranged in a vague W, "you ladies will be Cassiopeia. Just for tonight."

I was removing myself from everyone, but I was not isolating myself. I was absorbing the night, riding the tide of the universe around me, and trying to figure out if that's maybe Mars on the horizon. I could have come home and gotten my star charts, but I had already walked so far. Anyway, the things I didn't know weren't bothering me. It was the things I did know that were trouble.

A not-so-much needed ego boost

Had an interesting experience. I was out on a delivery. I started, of course, heading down 4th Avenue from 16th Street. But it's important to avoid lights and there are MANY on 4th, plus which sometimes you turn right onto a street instead of crossing it because of oncoming traffic.
So I went into my serpentine routine on my way to the 600 block of 9th Avenue. I hung a left up on 14th Street, across 5th to 6th Avenue, where I turned right. I went a block on 6th before turning left onto 13th Street (only just barely making the light), and then right again on 7th Avenue, then left onto 10th Street for the viaduct. Coming out of the viaduct the light on 8th Avenue was red, so I turned right and then left up 8th Street, and was just about to turn right onto 9th Avenue when I saw flashing lights in my mirror. “Now what in the hell,” I thought, “could they possibly want?”
I pulled into a parking lot and the cops pulled in crosswise behind me, blocking me in. They walked up to me and saw the pizza sitting next to me on the seat. “Oh, that explains it,” they said. They had first noticed me because I sorta cruised through a stop sign or two. Didn't run them, exactly, just kinda didn't come to a full-and-complete stop, 'cause there was no one coming. Plus I was driving maybe just a little bit fast. So they followed me, and then when I started weaving through town, they though maybe something was up. In the words of one of the cops, “We thought you were taking evasive action, trying to lose us,” they said.
“Trust me,” I thought but wisely didn't say, “if I'm trying to escape from you, I'll be driving a lot crazier than that.”
Anyway, they radioed my ID in just to make sure I had no outstanding warrants, and then they let me go without a ticket. But the point of the story is the strange and wonderful thing they said to me before they pulled away. They said, “If you'd had a light on your truck telling us that you were a pizza man, we wouldn't have pulled you over for that.”
See, this confirms something that I'd kind of suspected, which is that regular traffic laws, within reason, don't apply to the pizza man. It makes sense because cops order pizzas too, and they like it when the pizza gets there fast and hot just as much as you do. So it appears that, as far as the cops are concerned, there's a separate set of traffic laws for us, which appeals to me, and also makes me want a lighted sign for my roof.
Courtney thinks that I have the biggest ego of anyone she knows. I disagree; I just think that I have a very healthy self-image, and part of that self-image is the belief that I'm the perfect avatar of cool, and am completely capable of figuring out my own rules for being a productive member of society (in so far as I'm interested in being a productive member of society, which frankly ain't that far). I think that I should be trusted to use my own judgment.
Anyway, I'm sure that, upon hearing this story, Courtney is thinking to herself, “Oh great, just what he needs: support for his belief that the rules that apply to other people shouldn't apply to him.” And really, I'm guessing that some others among you who know me are thinking more or less the same thing.
Well, it isn't so much that I think they shouldn't apply to me. I think most of them shouldn't apply to anyone at all. The overwhelming majority of rules I'm aware of are painfully stupid and need to be eliminated, and this includes virtually all traffic laws. I have a sticker on my truck that reads “The more corrupt the society, the more numerous the laws,” and I absolutely believe that's true. Our governments, both federal and local, have become more and more convinced that they have the right to tell us what we aren't allowed to do, and how to do the things we are allowed to do.
So, I don't think the rules should apply to me, dear reader, but I also don't think they should apply to you. However, in spite of the empathy I try to have with you good people, I only have to experience being myself. Given that, it seems to me that the rules not applying to me is a good place to start. I'm satisfied with that for now.

Everyday Heroes

There's been strange goings-on in this little town of late.

I was out on a delivery, and came up out of the 10th Street viaduct towards the corner of 9th Avenue. Ahead of me, a car was sitting, burning, in the middle of the street. Not, like, overheating, or burning oil, but actually on fire. Not wishing to pass too close to a burning car (which, after all, is full of substances that are likely to go BOOOOM), I ducked into the Family Dollar lot and prepared to turn onto 9th.

Just then the light at the intersection changed, and the burning car started moving. I hadn't realized there was someone in it; I couldn't see well enough through all the smoke. But yes, there was, and the mad motherfucker was still driving it. Me, I would have abandoned the silly thing. I watched him out of sight, shaking my head and saying, “Whoa...dude's hard-core.” 'Cause, really, what else can you say? Folks think they're tough 'cause they get tattoos and body piercings, but to hell with that. Buckle up and lemme set you on fire; we'll see how tough you are.

A fella came into the store today and placed an order, but then asked to have his pizza delivered. He had no phone, he explained, so he couldn't call it in. We assumed that he was having the pizza delivered to his kids or something, and paying for it while he was away. That happens sometimes. Didn't matter to us; we'd gotten our money. So we made it, and I drove it to the address he'd given.

The address is actually right here on my block, just around the corner from my apartment, but it's an abandoned building. At least I've always assumed it was abandoned; the ground-floor windows are all boarded up and there are “No Trespassing” signs everywhere, and as far as I can tell the power's shut off to it.

I didn't see how he could possibly live here, and I checked the address twice before going in...4** Fourteenth Street, #4. I considered calling the store to make sure there hadn't been a mistake on the ticket, but my curiosity was piqued. Who doesn't love exploring?

Bemused, I entered and found an extremely steep and evil-looking staircase in my path. I followed it up to a door with a big 4 drawn carefully on in magic marker. I had to knock several times, but the door finally opened, and there was the guy who had placed the order, the guy who had been in the store thirty minutes earlier. I guess he had wanted pizza but hadn't wanted to carry it home on a hot day, so he'd coughed up a couple of extra bucks to have me bring it for him.

I was curious about the apartment, of course. What sort of crackhouse is he setting up, forty yards from my own apartment? He didn't open the door very wide, but I could see past him into the place, and actually he'd done it up pretty nice. It was furnished, and although it appeared that I'd been right about the absence of electricity there were lots of windows, so the place was airy and well-lit. I could see a sofa and coffee table, and in the small section of kitchen visible to me there was a nice, old-fashioned table, and the counters sparkled. It looked very comfortable and neat, inexpensive but really quite homey. I was impressed.

As he took the pizza, breadsticks, and soda from me, a very lovely young woman walked into my view. She saw me and smiled. She was slender, black, and probably about twenty. And let me explain what I mean by lovely. She was not pretty, like girl-next-door pretty, but beautiful, like she belonged on the cover of a magazine, except that no magazine could possibly be classy enough for her, and no photographer talented enough to do her justice.

I looked from her to the old man and tried to judge: Daughter? Granddaughter, even? May-December romance, possibly? I returned the smile, shyly and awkwardly, and she passed out of my view into the kitchen in search of plates.

He gave me a small tip and asked me to lock the downstairs door when I left, which I did, thinking to myself, “Living in an abandoned building is only a half-step up from homelessness, but in this case, that's a serious goddamned half-step.” I haven't walked a mile in his shoes or anything, but that seems like a nice little world he's made, basically from nothing.

I'm fascinated by these two guys. The first guy, the guy driving the burning car, you've got to admire his courage, if not his intelligence. And the second guy, carving a comfortable existence out of the wreckage of the city, you've got love his resourcefulness. Everyday heroes, I'm calling 'em, and I like this town a lot more than usual today.

Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?

SCENE: It's the middle of the night. A man and woman are sitting on a low brick porch with an iron railing, in cheap folding chairs. HE holds a 32-oz. cup full of whiskey and water, and he chain-smokes. SHE holds a can of beer, and there’s a cat asleep among the empty cans under her chair. It’s a hot night but there’s a misting rain that cools them and makes everything shine, even in the low light. Both are slightly drunk and laughing.

SHE: We’re going to Hell.

HE: ‘Sno such place.

SHE: No. But, pretend. Just to keep the conversation going.

HE: Okay. There’s a Hell. (drinks) Just the one?

SHE: As many as you like.

HE: Really?

SHE: Sure. How many do you expect to need?

HE: Ummm…fourteen.

SHE: Okay. Fourteen hells, then. And we’re going.

HE: Now?

SHE: Eventually.

HE: To which?

SHE: All of them. We’ll split ‘em. Fourteen hells…that’s seven apiece.

HE: Wait, we aren’t gonna share hells? ‘Cause, love, if I can’t hang around with you, I’m not going.

SHE: Well, you can come visit, I guess.

HE: Okay. We’ll build a subway connecting them all, like the boroughs in New York.

SHE: Won’t that be expensive?

HE: I don’t know from infrastructure. And anyway, will there even be money in Hell?

SHE: Well, it’s the root of all evil. I had just assumed, I guess…

HE: Maybe I’ll hitchhike, then.

SHE: Good for you. Though I’m guessing that in Hell, you have to be careful who you take a ride from. If Ted Bundy pulls up in his little blue Bug…

HE: Not a problem. Serial killers lose a lot of their mystique if you’re already dead.

SHE: I suppose that’s true.

HE: I’m gonna taunt ‘em. I’m gonna walk up to Jack the Ripper and just point and giggle. Their eternal punishment will be me making fun of them. It’ll be a blast.

SHE: Looking forward to it, are you?

HE: Hell? Oh, sure. I mean, who wants to go to Heaven? Singing hymns and praising God and all that, sounds kinda boring to me. And it’s forever, remember. A little bit of boring is gonna go an awful long way. Hell seems like it would suit us better.

SHE: You know, you’re right. The things we’re going to Hell for, those are the things we enjoy, right? So maybe in Hell we'll be surrounded by the things we love. We'll bring our taste for illicit substances and lewd entertainment with us...

HE: ...we'll have a few drinks, smoke a little pot, get in the odd barfight, fool around a bit...

SHE: ...an eternity of sex, drugs, and John Waters movies, huh?

HE: It'll be divine.

SHE: So to speak.

Dancing with the Moon

Months are getting shorter. This is happening so slowly that you can’t really tell unless you use very precise measurements and careful observation, but it IS happening. Back when folks first started to look at the sky and try to keep track of the rate at which things happened, months were approximately 40 days long. Now, as I expect everyone knows, they’re about 28 days long.

The reason for this is the gravitational effect that our blue planet and its moon have on each other. The tides she creates on our surface are very gradually slowing down our rate of rotation. And the pull we exert on her is speeding up her orbit.

To which you’re saying, “So what? I didn’t come to the blog today for an astronomy lesson.” Well, okay, but keep listening.

You know how the moon always shows the same face to us? Her rotation has synchronized itself so that she always faces the center of her orbit. It turns out that that’s natural; any two objects in orbit around each other will eventually do that. They start off like they’re next to each other in a mosh pit, swinging around each other and spinning crazily and looking every-which-way, but little by little they come together and start doing a waltz, locked in an embrace, gazing into each other’s eyes. That waltz, and not the slam dance, is the natural order of things, the result towards which our mutual orbit is drawing us.

So someday, about 20,000 years from now, we will reach a point beyond which we will always show the same face to her, just as she does to us now. Which means that she will, from that moment on forever, hang always over the same spot on the Earth.

And what I’m thinking is this: I want to find out what spot that’s going to be. And then, when I know, I’m gonna move there. And if I happen not to live for 20,000 more years (‘cause, you know, accidents happen), then when I die, that’s where my remains are gonna be stored. Wherever she’s gonna be, I wanna be there, too.

Quest

I am driving. I’m on a quest. I need a new tea pan, and it’s gotta cost less than $3.39, which is all the money I’ve got in the world until the bank processes my paycheck, an activity for which they have no apparent skill or enthusiasm.

I’ve been to the grocery. They sell pie tins and cookie sheets, but no pans. I’ve been to the dollar store. They sell coffee makers and tea pots, but no pans. Now I’m driving West, heading for a store I know nothing about, on the advice of my mother, who is wise in the way of such things.

I’m getting more and more absent-minded as I get older. I will put on water to boil for tea. It takes only a couple of minutes, I shouldn’t even wander off, really, but a watched pot never boils and so a-wanderin' I go. I have a smoke on the porch and soak up the sun. I sit on the couch and put on a movie. I check my e-mail, or a story comes to me and I begin to write. Next thing I know, it’s an hour later and there are bad smells and ominous crackling noises coming from the kitchen.

I make at least two pitchers of tea per day, and sometimes as many as four. It’s the only caffeine and sugar I get in my diet. A functioning tea pan is a necessity. So I’m broke, but I’m out looking for a tea pan. As noted, there aren’t that many places downtown that sell pots and pans, but I finally reach the Odd Lots or Big Lots or what-the-fuck-ever it is out on 14th Street West.

It’s hard to get into the lot, actually. Evidently Congress has declared today “National Rednecks Idling in Beat-Up Cars on the Side of the Road Day.” They are everywhere, just sitting there, and they are blocking at least two entrances. But I finally manage it on account of my vast skills and perseverance.

They have appropriate pans, in sets of three, for six dollars. Too much for me, but as I cast about the store I discover that someone has already broken up a set. I grab one, and after much discussion and sidelong, accusing glances, the cashier lets me have it for two bucks and tax. $2.12. I give her exact change and have money left over for a fruit juice at work tomorrow. I am triumphant.

I arrive home to discover that a local garage band is committing a violent crime of a quasi-musical nature in my little alley. But I’ve got a soft spot for garage bands, and their sloppy exuberance suits the ambience of 4½ Alley, and it’s okay. I walk into my apartment, put on Lucinda Williams’ Essence, and get out the sugar. The new pan is so beautiful that I am hesitant to use it. I feel like I should hang it on the wall above my bed and keep it shiny and clean and lovely forever. I show it off to Amy instead, and she pretends she's interested for my sake:

Isn't it beautiful?

Yes, it's very beautiful.

How beautiful?

Ohh...just really very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed.

It's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, isn't it?

Umm...okay. She is doubtful, but at my crestfallen look, she reconsiders. Well, yeah, I guess. She nods her head decisively. It sure is.

Oh, thank you, sweetheart, and I smile a big goofy smile, and she smiles back tolerantly.

I put the water on to boil. The urge to write this story is tugging at me, but I do not leave the stove. I hover over it, and Lucinda and I sing of sofa covers and books ‘bout being saved, tables no one eats on and pianos no one plays, and think that it sure would be silly not to use my pretty little brand-new two-pint saucepan.

I don’t take my eyes off of it. And you know what? It boils anyway. And the tea is sooooo good.

On Sleeping with Ernest Thesiger

“The air itself is filled with monsters,” she says. I wince and shake myself. My knees and neck are locked in place; I crack them open patiently and painfully, and moan, and stretch, and the warm stillness of the room is filled with voices.

“We must have a long talk, and then I have an important call to make.” His voice is smooth and shiny and rich in malice. It is ichorous and venomous. It has ugly secrets.

I swim up into the light and shake a smoke out of the pack. I am dry and sore, and he is pouring a drink. “Do you like gin? It is my only weakness,” he says.

I exhale and scratch my head. I rub my eyes against the sun and cough. I need some sleep, I think. “Work, finish, then sleep,” he says, and waves his hand, and the motion is somehow both menacing and dismissive.

I reach for my drink, and he raises his glass. “To a new world of gods and monsters,” he exults, and I swallow.

I Don't Like Mondays

I just had a smoke break. I went and sat in the shade (it’s wonderful that I must now sit in the shade, instead of huddling in the sun trying not to freeze to death) and read and listened to my Walkman, which is set on random, because that’s the only way to fly. I was reading a collection of Philip K. Dick short stories. In one of them, a non-fiction piece I’d never read before called “Strange Memories of Death,” I came across this passage:

Going down to the newspaper vending machine, I buy today’s Los Angeles Times. A girl who shot up a schoolyard of children “because she didn’t like Mondays” is pleading guilty. She will soon get probation. She took a gun and shot schoolchildren because, in effect, she had nothing else to do. Well, today is Monday; she is in court on a Monday, the day she hates. Is there no limit to madness?

The girl’s name, if anyone’s interested, was Brenda Ann Spencer, and Dick was wrong about her probation: she is still in prison. The incident took place in January of 1979 at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, and afterwards Spencer really did say, when asked why she had done it, “I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day...I had no reason for it, it was just a lot of fun.”

Spencer shot 11 people, two of whom died. This means, of course, that she’s been far surpassed in the 28 years since, at Jonesboro and Columbine and a few weeks ago at Blacksburg. I suppose progress has many possible definitions.

Anyway, I know all this about Spencer, not because I religiously follow news of school shootings, but because Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats was moved by the incident to write a song called “I Don’t Like Mondays,” which hit #1 in the UK in 1979 (people just love a good tragedy, especially if it’s served up in great sloppy dollops with a good soundtrack attached). It’s an excellent song, and a few years ago Tori Amos covered it on her album Strange Little Girls

The silicon chip inside her head

gets switched to overload

And nobody's gonna go to school today,

she's going to make them stay at home.

Daddy doesn't understand it,

he always said she was as good as gold

And he can see no reason

‘cause there are no reasons

what reason do you need to be shown?

Tell me why? I don't like Mondays.

Tell me why? I don't like Mondays.

Tell me why? I don't like Mondays.

I want to shoot the whole day down.

And the thing is this: as I sat in the shade and read Dick's words about Spencer and her trial, the song that my Walkman randomly chose to play was Tori Amos’ version of “I Don’t Like Mondays.” I am absolutely fascinated by weird little coincidences like this.

Sunshine and Stink

Good God, it was sunny today. Even with my sunglasses on, the light just about burned my eyes outta my head. It was hard to read on my smoke breaks ‘cause of the light reflecting off the pages…I wish publishers would convert to a nice off-white paper.

It probably didn’t help that I hadn’t had enough sleep; the semester is over, and until summer school starts I have to work mornings instead of evenings. I’m a night person, and nothing can make me fall asleep early, even if I have to wake up at 9:00. That’s always a difficult adjustment to make.

Bright is bright and pain is pain, but thirsty is thirsty and I braved the sun for a fruit juice, same as always. They had a table set up outside the student center, collecting money for a local shelter for battered women. They said nothing to me as I passed, which is just as well, really. That’s a good cause, but I only had one dollar for the fruit juice machine, and really it never occurred to me to give it to them. I went and got my Peach Papaya.

As I left one of them did call out to me, “Hey, would you like to help battered women?”

“Sure,” I said, “but I had only the one dollar, and I already turned it into fruit juice,” and I waved the bottle at him to demonstrate. He looked disappointed; I guess they hadn’t had much luck. I sympathized, and felt maybe a little guilty. Then I had a happy thought and said, “Here, you can have the fruit juice, if you like.” He was not impressed. In fact, he looked kinda pissy. So, in case you were wondering, battered women don’t need yer damned fruit juice, thanks.

I walked back across Buskirk Field towards my library. About halfway across I was struck by a strange smell. It was a disinfectant smell, but not only that, as if the smell of whatever they were trying to disinfect lingered persistently through the cleaning, like it was a stronger thing. And it was really overwhelming, and I was thinking, “How the hell can the smell be that strong, out here in the open, in the middle of a field?”

I caught sight of the Science Building, looming over the field. I wondered if the smell was coming from there. “Maybe some experiment has gone horribly wrong. Maybe,” I thought, “the whole building is filling up with this noxious gas. Maybe the whole Science Department is already dead, and now the gas is coming after the rest of us.”

Then I thought, “Maybe the gas is flammable. Maybe it’s just waiting for a spark to set it off, and then the whole building will go up. Maybe even the whole campus!” I sniffed the air, and looked down at my cigarette. “Eh,” I said, “it’s worth the risk.” I shrugged, took a drag, and kept walking.

When I talk I gesture a lot, especially if I’m excited, or tired, or drunk. I do it even when I’m talking to myself. It’s how I work things out. Bonnie used to say that I thought with my hands. We’d be sitting in the kitchen, each doing our own thing, paying no attention to each other but each drawing comfort from the other’s presence. Maybe she’d be doing her homework or reading the paper. Maybe I'd be doing a crossword puzzle, or writing a song, or maybe just thinking. And my hands would start to dance. I’d play with my hair, wiggle my fingers, drum complicated rhythms on my skull with my fingertips, point at imaginary objects, draw lines and circles in the air. I would gradually get that feeling of being watched, and I’d look up and she’d be grinning at me indulgently.

“What?” I’d say. “What?”

“You’re thinking with your hands again,” she’d say.

As I walked across Buskirk Field, wondering about the smell and whether I was about to blow up the entire campus, I was making broad, sweeping gestures with my arms, plotting the trajectory of shrapnel and brick and the bodies of researchers. I was raising my arms high above my head, imagining a fireball reaching to the heavens. I was running my finger along the outline of the Science Building, noting each exit that any survivors might make for. And then I saw, on the edge of the field, a guy standing and watching me, and grinning like Bonnie used to. He was in my path back to the library, and as I passed him I leaned in and said, by way of explanation, “Smells bad.”

He took a step back and looked affronted. He had misunderstood me. “Did you just say I smell bad?” he asked.

I looked at him, bemused, then tilted my head back and shut my eyes against the sun, and inhaled grandly. “Even if you did, brother,” I reassured him, “with all this ugliness in the air, how would anyone notice?”

Pop and the Chinese Food Odyssey

I’m about 16, I guess. Mama is off visiting some relative or another, and my sister Debby has gone with her, so the men have the house to themselves. It’s me, Pop, my brother Teddy, and Ricky Flowers, my best friend, who lives with us. Although the absence of the womenfolk entices us with the possibility of hanging around the house watching sports in our underwear, farting and wiping boogers on the sofa, we decide instead to celebrate the complete maleness of the occasion with some Chinese food, and pile into the long-suffering family car.
It’s an extremely beat-up Oldsmobile. It is painted a yellow so faded by the years that it’s really become more of an off-white, and has a brown vinyl top. The passenger-side door was torn off by my mother in a collision between the car and the concrete post protecting a gas pump at the 7-11 up the street. My father has cleverly fixed the door back in place with wire coat hangers, but of course it no longer opens. We enter the car through the window, like on The Dukes of Hazzard, and as always we shout “Yee Haw!!!” as we climb in. I love this memory.
Teddy rides up front with Pop, and Ricky and I are in the back seat. Pop starts the car with his trusty screwdriver; the key went missing a year ago. On the day it disappeared Debby was running down the street and ran face-first into a piece of lumber sticking out of the back of a truck. She injured her eye, not very seriously but it bled, and her panicked screams were heard several blocks away. In desperation Pop tore out the ignition and started the car with a screwdriver, and drove her to the hospital. Later the key turned up, but by then the ignition had been destroyed and the key was useless. Ignitions are expensive and the money never seemed to be around, so the screwdriver stayed.
After a couple of false starts the engine catches and we’re off. It’s a heavy summer evening in Richmond, overcast and we’re praying for the rain to come ‘cause it’s 100 degrees and the car has no air conditioner. But thoughts of Chinese food are comforting, and we take back streets towards our favorite place, out in the East End, so that there’s a constant breeze from the windows.
The radio is on as we drive, and the news is full of another day of Oliver North’s testimony over the Iran-Contra scandal. Pop is conflicted over this story. On the one hand he is appalled at the activities North engaged in, and wants the men responsible punished. But on the other hand, he can’t help but respect North’s courage, in his refusal to name names, to “rat on his friends.”
As the reports unfold he becomes more and more agitated, yelling at the reporter on the radio, and finally snaps it off. But this does not end the discussion. Ostensibly, I suppose, he’s talking to us, since we’re right there in the car with him, but really he’s having the argument with himself. He’s Hamlet. He’s reciting his own soliloquy, and we’re just in the audience.
“Umm…Pop…” Teddy says after a while, “isn't that the way to the Chinese place?” He points plaintively down the road we've just crossed.
When there's no answer, I reach up and grab his shoulder, and repeat the question. He looks at me for a second as if trying to remember who I am. Then, realizing where we are, he tries to play it off. "This is a shortcut," he says, and his attitude is the same as that of my cat when she pretends she meant to fall off the television.
After a few moments he turns on an unfamiliar road, but we're at least heading in the right direction now. But he just keeps talking and driving, and soon we’re someplace none of us boys have ever seen before. We’ve driven so far East that we’re no longer in the city at all, or even in Henrico County.
As if waking from a dream, Pop shakes his head and looks around him, then makes a couple of quick turns, as if nothing was wrong, and pulls into the parking lot of an abandoned drive-in theater to turn around and head back west.
He pauses for a moment before returning to the road. “You boys hungry?” he asks.
“Well, of course we're hungry. Listening to you arguing with yourself is hungry work.”
He denies that he was arguing with himself, says that he was discussing the important news of the day with his sons.
“Don’t discussions generally,” I ask, “involve one person saying something, and then a comepletely different person saying something?”
He laughs and admits that he was excessively caught up in the evening's civics lesson. But at least now we’re on the right track, he assures us. He knows exactly where we are, and Chin-Yung, the restaurant we're going to, is only a few miles away. We’ll be there soon.
He pulls back onto the road, but the nowhere we're in doesn't seem to change much as the miles pass. It’s dark now. My brother was already asleep when we turned around. Ricky and I are awake and aggravated, but the whispered passing of trees on the dark road, the warm air from the open window, the gentle swaying of the car on the backroads and the accompanying rhythmic rattling of the broken door, are hypnotic, and soon we’re nodding off, too, to the sound of the argument having started afresh.
We’re awakened by the sound of the driver’s side door slamming. We look up and find ourselves outside our apartment, and that it's been almost two hours since we left home.
Pop is walking towards the front door. I climb over Teddy and out the window, “Hey, hang on! Chinese Food? Weren’t we getting Chinese food?”
He stops and looks back at me in some confusion. “You know,” he says after a moment, “I believe we were.” He walks back toward the car, but stops and checks his watch. “It’s too late for Chinese now, anyway” he says.
“But, but…Chinese food,” I say, pleading. “Chinese food?”
“Don’t worry,” he says, “we’ll order a pizza.”