They say the meek shall inherit the earth. Perhaps I misunderstand what they mean by "meek." If the truism proves true, perhaps by "meek" they mean ignorant, or perhaps even flat out stupid.
It's no secret that I have little affection for the ignorant or the plain stupid. They walk among us in great numbers. Ironically, they mostly vote Republican -- most likely because they suffer from the illusion that a vote for someone who rails against entitlements means squashing other dumbasses' entitlements. Word to the wise, dumbasses: the only politicians who care about your dumb asses, right or wrong, are Democrats. Sad fact. They suffer under a parallel illusion: they reject the notion that some people aren't worth bothering with, let alone saving (meaning you).
A few years ago I worked for a small company that was filthy with dumbasses. It was tolerable for a while because said dumbasses were in roles where they could, under ideal circumstances, do no real harm. The narrow niche in which our company operated was ripe with potential, and in spite of the significant handicaps brought to the table by our president and some of our middle-management, we made money hand over fist. Those were halcyon days, and only a fool or a martyr would have upset that particular applecart. Then came the Great Policy Handbook Debate.
I grant that, for legal purposes, businesses should have policy manuals. There are fundamental rules of safety and fair-play that should be spelled out, for the benefit of both employer and employee, some of which are actually decreed by state and or federal statute. Beyond such statutes, there is the grey area: what we are and are not willing to tolerate in this company. Again, I have no problem with that -- if it's a privately held company, or a small business owned by a handful of shareholders, there should be a basic set of rules agreed upon by the majority of the owners and then shared with the employees. As long as those rules don't contradict existing laws, have at it, I say. Because that's what those of us who are in the business of thinking would call reasonable.
The problem with that particular organization -- Center Point Large Print -- is that the majority (or the loud minority, I would argue -- given greater volume by the silent simperers) came to the process from a tradition that has no use for thoughtful discourse or intellectual rumination: they are fundamentalist christians. Here's the thing about fundamentalists of all stripes, regardless of which fabled god they worship: a fundamentalist accepts on faith that the book from which his or her faith comes is the literal truth. The most delightful side-effect of such a perspective is that there is never any need for either thoughtful discourse or intellectual rumination because there's already a handbook that gives them all the answers. Now, to be fair, reading is a lot of work, and understanding is hard, but fear not, because there are always helpful ministers (like the illustrious Bill Cripe) to sort out the thorny stuff for you. In other words, there are not or should not ever be occasions where you have to sort it out yourself. And god fucking bless.
Thus did we embark on the process of creating a policy manual for Center Point Large Print: with the apparently necessary intent of creating a set of rules that would prevent anyone in management from ever facing the unthinkable task of evaluating a given set of circumstances and, based on his or her intellectual capacity, choosing the best course of action to proceed. I wish I was kidding when I tell you in two months we easily dropped a thousand hours of top-level productivity in order to ensure that two idiots would never have to think for themselves -- ultimately just to ensure that these simpletons and their brethren in the company would, essentially, never feel like anybody else was getting away with more than they were.
This has always offended me -- this lowest common denominator mentality. It's one of the reasons national politics turns my stomach. The old saw in political speechmaking is that a presidential candidate should speak at no higher than an eighth-grade level. You know what I say to that? Fuck 'em in the ass. Fuck the lowest common denominator. Call me an elitist if you want, I don't give a fuck. But tell me how many times throughout history civilization has been moved forward by the will of the ignorant. Oh, wait -- never? Yeah, that's what I thought. There's a reason why I'd rather have a smart guy like Barack Obama with his thumb on the button every time -- it's because guys like George Bush are fucking stupid. Yeah, I said it. Fuck George Bush and his folksy Jesus-freak ass. He is and always will be an idiot. I don't care if he allegedly read Camus -- so did I, and I guarantee I got something out of The Stranger he never even came close to grasping. I'm smart, but if I'm smarter than the President of the United States, that's fucked up.
Which brings me, quite naturally, to Maine Central Institute. That's my daughter's high school, in the depths of central Maine known as Pittsfield. MCI is one of those semi-private schools, satisfying the needs of a handful of communities that share the lack of a public high school, while maintaining the vague trappings of a private high school, complete with post-graduate athletics programs and a murky non-public, board-of-trustees driven set of rules of behavior.
To be fair, I recognize the need for high schools to at least attempt to maintain a certain decorum. Let's face it, shit can go wrong in a hurry, especially when left to the caprices of kids fifteen or sixteen years old. I attended two different high schools, one of which was similar to MCI (if significantly smaller), and at neither one was I ever presented with the school's purported handbook. I remember when I went to Winslow High School (at the time, the ass-end of all possible options, I assure you), a kid named Simon Welch was suspended for shaving his head. Simon was a monumentally fucked up kid who would literally do anything to curry the favor of anyone who paid him the least attention, and one day when a group of football players offered him some trifle (I swear it was a chocolate-chip cookie) if he shaved his head, well, he fucking showed up the next day with his head shaved, smooth as a baby's ass . . . only to be dragged to the principal's office to be shown the clause in the until then never seen student handbook, which explained that hair must be worn at least a quarter-inch long, or else the student risked immediate suspension. Poor Simon returned to school two days later pretty sure he'd be greeted like a rockstar; instead, he was mocked incessantly. What a world.
Now, here's the thing: Simon, that poor dumb bastard, made a stupid and capricious choice, and he paid for it both in institutional terms and in the eyes of his peers. His so-called peers, those lovable lunkhead football players, would have greeted his shaved head the same either way -- because they were dumbass kids too. So what's the administration's excuse? Seriously! These are adults, for fuck's sake. A group of adults was charged with writing and approving and enforcing that stupid, capricious rule. At the very least, the one or two adults who were responsible for making the call when Simon shaved his head -- the principal and the vice principal (both of them remarkable mental midgets, even for the time, I assure you) -- could have looked at the particular circumstances and determined that this was no genuine offense, but instead took the coward's refuge and hid behind the fabled student handbook. Where is a man's shame when he punishes a boy for being as weak as him? How did Principal Leroy Blood make his way to retirement, all the time looking himself in the eye in the mirror? Answer: he lived his entire life relying on policy manuals.
Which brings me to my daughter. My daughter is not only tall, she is long-legged -- meaning that the span from her knee to her hip is significantly longer than the span between the knee and hip of the typical stock in central Maine, where they are grown mostly low to the ground. Now, a reasonable person would conclude that the intent of a dress-code proscription against short skirts has nothing to do with the area around a girl's knees and everything to do with the region closer to, say, her pelvis. If the rule says that the hem of a girl's skirt should be no higher than two inches above her knee, I imagine that two-inch rule is intended to prevent those girls from (inadvertently or otherwise) showing off their undies -- and I think that's a pretty good idea. These boys and girls are kids, for one thing, and for another thing they're in school to learn, not to . . . well, regardless of what we all know about high school, that's not what they're there for, and so, yeah, there should be reasonable rules. But at the same time, catch-all rules that are intended to satisfy the lowest common denominator are never, ever the right way to go. I realize this is a narrow example, but hear me out. If the average girl has, say, a ten-inch span between her knee and her hip, but a girl like my daughter has a fourteen-inch span, does the two-inch rule make sense? Ultimately, if there is going to be such a rule, wouldn't it make more sense to measure down from the hip rather than up from the knee? Yes, it would -- which is why harassing a girl because her skirt is literally two and a half inches above her knee (I kid you not) is, ultimately, not about propriety, it's about small-minded academic bureaucrats throwing their limited weight around in the only sphere in which they can ever exercise any power whatsoever.
And this is why the stupid, the ignorant, the weak of mind are dangerous: they are everywhere, they are vigilant, and they have institutional endorsement. In this particular instance, I'm fortunate: my lovely daughter is pissed as hell. She's fortunate, too, because so am I. Fair warning, simpletons: I'm coming for you. And I'm bringing my posse.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Local Time
In spite of the relevance we give it, time is ultimately a feeble measure of experience. It's something I don't often think about, as I get in step with everyone else, noting five years since this, ten years since that. Fifty years ago last week John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. Eight years before that, the first polio vaccines were administered to children. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution confirmed that women should have the right to vote -- some one-hundred-thirty years after the U.S. Constitution was finally ratified by the last of the original thirteen colonies (way to go, Rhode Island). These are all remarkable benchmarks, but they're made more remarkable by every day that preceded and follows them. Just the thought of floating in space chills me to this day -- it is, somehow, too much for me to grasp on anything but an intellectual level. And yet it happened and continues to happen. It happened decades before cell phones and iPods and laptop computers. And polio: generations upon generations of families lived with the effects of that debilitating illness, and then one day it was all but eradicated. Don't even get me started on women's suffrage: can you even imagine a collective mindset that says women aren't entitled to have as much say in deciding social and political issues as men? I realize there are still considerable imbalances, but I'm talking about something fundamental, something that has existed for the entire lifespan of anyone reading this blog (presumably -- I doubt there are any ninety-three year-olds clicking through to the Bear Cave from Facebook). The fact that I can't even conceive of this particular society in which we live so recently having to scrap and fight in order to achieve something we can all agree makes perfect sense (in that its opposite is ludicrous) speaks to the ways in which the passage of time colors our impressions.
When we hear about something shocking or impressive, more often than not the first question that springs to mind is, "Wow, when did that happen?" We seek that particular context as a way to either relate to or distance ourselves from the event, and our incredulousness is measured by the duration of time that has passed. In the mid-nineteenth century slavery was finally done away with in America; in the 1960s Mississippi still burned, and when I was six years old the city of Boston, that pantheon of intermingled intellect and ignorance, rioted against attempts to bring some semblance of racial balance to inner-city schools. Just last week a staff writer at ESPN lost his job because he thought it would be hilarious to note the end of the New York Knicks' winning streak, in part made possible by the contributions of Chinese-American rookie Jeremy Lin, by posting the headline, "Chink in the Armor." Hilarious. One of the old saws in the world of comedy is that if you have to explain it, it's not funny. Sometimes the same can be said if you absolutely don't have to explain it.
I'm not raising these topics because I want to stir anybody into a frenzy -- they are just prime examples of how time is supremely relative. It's 2012, for fuck's sake. Just in my forty-plus years on the planet, we as a species have shown ourselves to be capable of remarkable things: artificial hearts and life-saving medicines, modes of transportation and communication only dreamt of in science fiction fantasies seventy years ago, and on and on and on. Again, it is the point in time before, and the stretch of infinity beyond, which fill us with awe.
A week ago I sat down to work on an essay that centered around a particular weekend during which I was left to my own devices in my friends' house, to watch their dog and cat and please, please, please not kill myself in their bathroom (or anywhere else). I spent that weekend shuffling around the quiet house, playing solitaire on my laptop, half-watching bad TV, swallowing a small pink pill every morning, napping on the couch with the cat curled up on my chest, the dog stretched beside me on the floor. I became mildly obsessed with a great blue heron that appeared in the stream behind the house, in spite of the fact that it was late December and the ground was blanketed with snow. It seemed like that heron shouldn't be there -- it was full-on winter, and I imagined heron, like most wading birds, would head to more hospitable climes. I mean, there were ducks -- lots of ducks -- but they stuck around because the old man across the way fed them throughout the year. But the heron had to find his own food. I worried about him, and so every morning I would stand at the window looking out on the stream, watching for him. Every morning he sailed down the stream from the north and landed in the shallow water below the dam, and because I saw him as an anomaly, I considered that we were not so unlike, this great blue heron and I: we were both out of our element, and only just barely in control of our destinies, limited as we were to the extent of our efforts to survive. A week and a day later, I woke up in the midst of a heavy snowstorm, and I wrote the story of my weekend of shuffling around like a sad old man, watching for a bird that shouldn't have been there any more than I should have.
That story means a lot to me: it was the first piece I'd written in a very long time that actually had some weight to it, and it was the beginning of what became a much longer narrative. As I tapped out the essay about writing that story, I found my mind wandering to that question: "Wow, when did that happen?" I cocked my head to the side, my fingers poised above the keys, and realized it had been just about fourteen months. And I was utterly stunned. Fourteen months? All that happened only fourteen months ago? I was unconvinced to the extent that I actually pulled up the calendar on my computer and did the math again.
Two months longer than a year might sound like a good chunk of time to you, but I can tell you, in the context of the months preceding and subsequent to that stretch of time, fourteen months is no time at all. It is certainly not enough time for a person to reinvent himself -- or, more accurately, reclaim.
Ultimately, that's the point: we are all, in truth, on local time. It's not the amount of time that passes that is most significant: it is that span of time relative to the events that have filled it.
Fourteen months. It might as well be two and a half lifetimes.
When we hear about something shocking or impressive, more often than not the first question that springs to mind is, "Wow, when did that happen?" We seek that particular context as a way to either relate to or distance ourselves from the event, and our incredulousness is measured by the duration of time that has passed. In the mid-nineteenth century slavery was finally done away with in America; in the 1960s Mississippi still burned, and when I was six years old the city of Boston, that pantheon of intermingled intellect and ignorance, rioted against attempts to bring some semblance of racial balance to inner-city schools. Just last week a staff writer at ESPN lost his job because he thought it would be hilarious to note the end of the New York Knicks' winning streak, in part made possible by the contributions of Chinese-American rookie Jeremy Lin, by posting the headline, "Chink in the Armor." Hilarious. One of the old saws in the world of comedy is that if you have to explain it, it's not funny. Sometimes the same can be said if you absolutely don't have to explain it.
I'm not raising these topics because I want to stir anybody into a frenzy -- they are just prime examples of how time is supremely relative. It's 2012, for fuck's sake. Just in my forty-plus years on the planet, we as a species have shown ourselves to be capable of remarkable things: artificial hearts and life-saving medicines, modes of transportation and communication only dreamt of in science fiction fantasies seventy years ago, and on and on and on. Again, it is the point in time before, and the stretch of infinity beyond, which fill us with awe.
A week ago I sat down to work on an essay that centered around a particular weekend during which I was left to my own devices in my friends' house, to watch their dog and cat and please, please, please not kill myself in their bathroom (or anywhere else). I spent that weekend shuffling around the quiet house, playing solitaire on my laptop, half-watching bad TV, swallowing a small pink pill every morning, napping on the couch with the cat curled up on my chest, the dog stretched beside me on the floor. I became mildly obsessed with a great blue heron that appeared in the stream behind the house, in spite of the fact that it was late December and the ground was blanketed with snow. It seemed like that heron shouldn't be there -- it was full-on winter, and I imagined heron, like most wading birds, would head to more hospitable climes. I mean, there were ducks -- lots of ducks -- but they stuck around because the old man across the way fed them throughout the year. But the heron had to find his own food. I worried about him, and so every morning I would stand at the window looking out on the stream, watching for him. Every morning he sailed down the stream from the north and landed in the shallow water below the dam, and because I saw him as an anomaly, I considered that we were not so unlike, this great blue heron and I: we were both out of our element, and only just barely in control of our destinies, limited as we were to the extent of our efforts to survive. A week and a day later, I woke up in the midst of a heavy snowstorm, and I wrote the story of my weekend of shuffling around like a sad old man, watching for a bird that shouldn't have been there any more than I should have.
That story means a lot to me: it was the first piece I'd written in a very long time that actually had some weight to it, and it was the beginning of what became a much longer narrative. As I tapped out the essay about writing that story, I found my mind wandering to that question: "Wow, when did that happen?" I cocked my head to the side, my fingers poised above the keys, and realized it had been just about fourteen months. And I was utterly stunned. Fourteen months? All that happened only fourteen months ago? I was unconvinced to the extent that I actually pulled up the calendar on my computer and did the math again.
Two months longer than a year might sound like a good chunk of time to you, but I can tell you, in the context of the months preceding and subsequent to that stretch of time, fourteen months is no time at all. It is certainly not enough time for a person to reinvent himself -- or, more accurately, reclaim.
Ultimately, that's the point: we are all, in truth, on local time. It's not the amount of time that passes that is most significant: it is that span of time relative to the events that have filled it.
Fourteen months. It might as well be two and a half lifetimes.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Fingerless Gloves
What was that I said about expensive dreams?
There's a girl named Milly who's spent the last couple months hiding out in a dark cave. Recently she's taken to knitting fingers for otherwise fingerless gloves, something I enjoy watching her do, sitting across the low table from her in the window of the tea house, sipping coffee and tapping away at the keys.
She's a tough cat, Milly. I speculated sometime back that she'd lost a bet with the devil and thus ended up having to spend time with the likes of me. I haven't always made it easy. I guess last night I finally made it harder than she could bear.
Which in an unexpected way proves my point, I suppose. I'm selfish and, when I write, often thoughtless, certainly solipsistic. Whether or not the thought even crossed my mind -- "This is going to hurt" -- it had no bearing on what I wrote or how I presented it. And ultimately it can't. This is my job, and there's only one way to do it right.
So, Milly, if you're out there and you read this, I'm sorry it hurt, sorry I made it hurt.
But I'm not going to lie to you: I'm going to do it again. And again and again and again.
It's the thing I do.
And if I apologize for that, I might as well go get a real job, then sit around waiting to die.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Guts
This is one of those nights when I smoke too many cigarettes and drink a six-pack of cheap beer and entertain my expensive dreams.
Why expensive, you ask? There are a handful of reasons. I've spent a lot of time in the last few years scrupulously not working at anything that would pay me money so that I could work at something that might, if I get lucky, pay me a little bit of money. Believe me, there are countless good books out in the world that never get published, or if they do, they barely get read. The risks far outweigh the likely rewards. That's good though, right? Writing is something you should do because you love it, because you're compelled by something inside you to do it. Writing for a paycheck seems little different from doing anything else for a paycheck: you punch the clock, put your head down, make it to Friday. Don't get me wrong, I want to get paid. I just know there are no guarantees.
It's also expensive in that it can be a polarizing endeavor. It requires a lot of solitary time, a lot of what amounts to selfishness. It can cost you friends, it'll ruin marriages, alienate children and other loved ones. I'd call that expensive.
But tonight it's what I'm doing, fourth-tier style. There are four projects I'm involved in on an ongoing basis. One is a memoir I'm editing for a buddy of mine. That's a very high priority, in part because he's paying me to do the work, but mostly because he's one of my oldest friends and I want his book, which is an excellent story, to be an outstanding read, and it's my job to make that happen. Tiers two and three are a version of the same thing: writing about the last few years, some fiction and some memoir for TNB (and perhaps a book down the road). The fourth tier -- and I know this sounds like I'm demeaning it, but I'm not -- is this here blog.
I think I started my first blog in 2009, but it doesn't exist anymore, which is sort of sad because there were some good pieces in there. If I'm not mistaken, it was called the Rubber Room, which was a nod to my dear friend Jodi. Years ago she and I worked together in a big accounting firm, and we'd spend hours every day emailing each other. I had an office on the top floor (yeah, that's right), she was in a cubicle a floor below, and we'd send each other emails that frequently made us LAUGH OUT LOUD. It was part of how we made the best of sometimes dark, often mediocre times. I was newly on my own, she was newly married to a monumental douchebag, and we both worked too much when all we really wanted to do was drink beer and hang out. One afternoon in an email exchange, we hatched the powerful dream that one fine day we would find ourselves in adjoining rubber rooms, and we'd communicate by banging our heads against the shared wall. Thus was the Rubber Room blog born.
One of the hallmarks of the Rubber Room was the music -- I would usually start out by telling the reader what I was listening to just then. I wrote one entire blog about mix tapes, because I happened to have on my desk a stack of mixes I'd made starting in the late 90s. Music is an excellent entree, I think. It strengthens the bonds with people who like the same music, and it inspires people who admire and trust you to give it a listen. Music has slipped from my radar screen somewhat. I'm still a little susceptible to the damage done by connecting with a girl over so much of the music I love. Putting my iTunes on shuffle these days is a bit like trying to find someplace to rest your gaze on a pretty well-packed nude beach (that's packed with people you don't want to see naked, like your family or the cast of The Golden Girls).
And speaking of nude pictures of Bea Arthur, I also used to include a photo with just about every blog post. I'm not sure how I feel about either doing or not doing that. I still have the directory containing all the photos I used in those blogs, but I barely remember anything I wrote in them. Should that tell me something? I dunno. Give me some feedback, people. Would you like to see the occasional photo, something that pleases the eye and the mind? No promises, but i might be able to scare up some enthusiasm for the visual thing.
I digress. I liked writing that blog, liked hearing from people who read it regularly. I'm pretty sure that blog ended because I stopped paying Apple for my .mac account, but it might have been because I woke up one day besotted with a girl named . . . something. Toast. I called her Toast. I made a lot of dumb choices after I encountered Toast. That may have been one of them. Nonetheless, I did get shut down by Apple for non-payment (take a number and get in line, heirs of Steve Jobs), but then I started another blog, this time for free on this here blogspot, something called Memoirs of a Garebear (which in my head sounded like a fantastic play on Memoirs of a Geisha, but you tell me), and that one you can still access, although I think there are fewer than half a dozen posts, and I was so wrapped up in trying to impress a girl who possessed an allegedly magic touch that none of it was particularly worthwhile.
Then one day out of the blue my remarkably prescient daughter suggested I rekindle the blog thing. She doesn't read it, of course, because she's sixteen and her life is full of important things. But it was her idea, and so she can take the blame. Which means this evening, more than half a month after my last post, whatever I write, that's on her. You're welcome.
I've been listening to Pandora all night. Right now Elliott Smith's "Rose Parade" just came on. This is a song I dearly love but which is tainted by that girl Toast, who eventually decided that this song and not "Waltz #2" (also a fantastic song) was her favorite. The night I went to the hospital, this song came up on a mix I was listening to, and I bellowed the lyrics with tears in my eyes. Which is why the music report is fraught with a small amount of peril.
And this is a picture of the girl in question, with a butterfly she'd raised from a pupa sitting on her shoulder:
Which is why photos carry some risk as well.
I kid, of course. The thing is, no single song and no picture you could show me make me think of why I loved her then, why I missed her when she turned away, or why I don't think highly of her anymore. And that's the problem, because I'm trying to make the case for why she ever mattered in the first place. Here's what we know: she responded well to good music. Check. She is obviously pretty. Check. She's smart and she's curious, she has a decent sense of humor (but a laugh like a canker sore). She possesses some wisdom, though most of it is poached from people she admires. So in a lot of ways she's quite something. But guess what? So's your mom. So's her mom (seriously).
All things considered, though, I did technically lose my shit over this girl. Which means I need to find my way to doing justice to whatever it was that happened between us. Which a lot of days feels like wiping my own ass with fifty-grit sandpaper.
And this is why I beat myself up with songs that call her to mind, why I look at pictures and re-read the hundreds of emails that went back and forth between us. You have to be willing to rip your own guts out if that's what it takes to tell a story that means something.
I don't believe in writer's block -- I think that was a bullshit invention that came about because some dude didn't feel like working one day, and the next day he realized not working felt pretty good, so he took a hiatus, and he called it "writer's block."
I understand the impulse. Some days ripping your own guts out is more than anyone should have to bear. But make no mistake: if it's going to get done, the pound of flesh will be exacted. In the end, you pick your day, you slowly, excruciatingly eviscerate yourself, and the second your finger taps the "send" button, for better or worse, the healing begins.
To health. Cheers.
Why expensive, you ask? There are a handful of reasons. I've spent a lot of time in the last few years scrupulously not working at anything that would pay me money so that I could work at something that might, if I get lucky, pay me a little bit of money. Believe me, there are countless good books out in the world that never get published, or if they do, they barely get read. The risks far outweigh the likely rewards. That's good though, right? Writing is something you should do because you love it, because you're compelled by something inside you to do it. Writing for a paycheck seems little different from doing anything else for a paycheck: you punch the clock, put your head down, make it to Friday. Don't get me wrong, I want to get paid. I just know there are no guarantees.
It's also expensive in that it can be a polarizing endeavor. It requires a lot of solitary time, a lot of what amounts to selfishness. It can cost you friends, it'll ruin marriages, alienate children and other loved ones. I'd call that expensive.
But tonight it's what I'm doing, fourth-tier style. There are four projects I'm involved in on an ongoing basis. One is a memoir I'm editing for a buddy of mine. That's a very high priority, in part because he's paying me to do the work, but mostly because he's one of my oldest friends and I want his book, which is an excellent story, to be an outstanding read, and it's my job to make that happen. Tiers two and three are a version of the same thing: writing about the last few years, some fiction and some memoir for TNB (and perhaps a book down the road). The fourth tier -- and I know this sounds like I'm demeaning it, but I'm not -- is this here blog.
I think I started my first blog in 2009, but it doesn't exist anymore, which is sort of sad because there were some good pieces in there. If I'm not mistaken, it was called the Rubber Room, which was a nod to my dear friend Jodi. Years ago she and I worked together in a big accounting firm, and we'd spend hours every day emailing each other. I had an office on the top floor (yeah, that's right), she was in a cubicle a floor below, and we'd send each other emails that frequently made us LAUGH OUT LOUD. It was part of how we made the best of sometimes dark, often mediocre times. I was newly on my own, she was newly married to a monumental douchebag, and we both worked too much when all we really wanted to do was drink beer and hang out. One afternoon in an email exchange, we hatched the powerful dream that one fine day we would find ourselves in adjoining rubber rooms, and we'd communicate by banging our heads against the shared wall. Thus was the Rubber Room blog born.
One of the hallmarks of the Rubber Room was the music -- I would usually start out by telling the reader what I was listening to just then. I wrote one entire blog about mix tapes, because I happened to have on my desk a stack of mixes I'd made starting in the late 90s. Music is an excellent entree, I think. It strengthens the bonds with people who like the same music, and it inspires people who admire and trust you to give it a listen. Music has slipped from my radar screen somewhat. I'm still a little susceptible to the damage done by connecting with a girl over so much of the music I love. Putting my iTunes on shuffle these days is a bit like trying to find someplace to rest your gaze on a pretty well-packed nude beach (that's packed with people you don't want to see naked, like your family or the cast of The Golden Girls).
And speaking of nude pictures of Bea Arthur, I also used to include a photo with just about every blog post. I'm not sure how I feel about either doing or not doing that. I still have the directory containing all the photos I used in those blogs, but I barely remember anything I wrote in them. Should that tell me something? I dunno. Give me some feedback, people. Would you like to see the occasional photo, something that pleases the eye and the mind? No promises, but i might be able to scare up some enthusiasm for the visual thing.
I digress. I liked writing that blog, liked hearing from people who read it regularly. I'm pretty sure that blog ended because I stopped paying Apple for my .mac account, but it might have been because I woke up one day besotted with a girl named . . . something. Toast. I called her Toast. I made a lot of dumb choices after I encountered Toast. That may have been one of them. Nonetheless, I did get shut down by Apple for non-payment (take a number and get in line, heirs of Steve Jobs), but then I started another blog, this time for free on this here blogspot, something called Memoirs of a Garebear (which in my head sounded like a fantastic play on Memoirs of a Geisha, but you tell me), and that one you can still access, although I think there are fewer than half a dozen posts, and I was so wrapped up in trying to impress a girl who possessed an allegedly magic touch that none of it was particularly worthwhile.
Then one day out of the blue my remarkably prescient daughter suggested I rekindle the blog thing. She doesn't read it, of course, because she's sixteen and her life is full of important things. But it was her idea, and so she can take the blame. Which means this evening, more than half a month after my last post, whatever I write, that's on her. You're welcome.
I've been listening to Pandora all night. Right now Elliott Smith's "Rose Parade" just came on. This is a song I dearly love but which is tainted by that girl Toast, who eventually decided that this song and not "Waltz #2" (also a fantastic song) was her favorite. The night I went to the hospital, this song came up on a mix I was listening to, and I bellowed the lyrics with tears in my eyes. Which is why the music report is fraught with a small amount of peril.
And this is a picture of the girl in question, with a butterfly she'd raised from a pupa sitting on her shoulder:
Which is why photos carry some risk as well.
I kid, of course. The thing is, no single song and no picture you could show me make me think of why I loved her then, why I missed her when she turned away, or why I don't think highly of her anymore. And that's the problem, because I'm trying to make the case for why she ever mattered in the first place. Here's what we know: she responded well to good music. Check. She is obviously pretty. Check. She's smart and she's curious, she has a decent sense of humor (but a laugh like a canker sore). She possesses some wisdom, though most of it is poached from people she admires. So in a lot of ways she's quite something. But guess what? So's your mom. So's her mom (seriously).
All things considered, though, I did technically lose my shit over this girl. Which means I need to find my way to doing justice to whatever it was that happened between us. Which a lot of days feels like wiping my own ass with fifty-grit sandpaper.
And this is why I beat myself up with songs that call her to mind, why I look at pictures and re-read the hundreds of emails that went back and forth between us. You have to be willing to rip your own guts out if that's what it takes to tell a story that means something.
I don't believe in writer's block -- I think that was a bullshit invention that came about because some dude didn't feel like working one day, and the next day he realized not working felt pretty good, so he took a hiatus, and he called it "writer's block."
I understand the impulse. Some days ripping your own guts out is more than anyone should have to bear. But make no mistake: if it's going to get done, the pound of flesh will be exacted. In the end, you pick your day, you slowly, excruciatingly eviscerate yourself, and the second your finger taps the "send" button, for better or worse, the healing begins.
To health. Cheers.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Small Change
Well, here we are, two weeks into the new year, and I realize I have yet to post a single blog. It's a little remarkable to me, but it's abundantly true: the one flaw in 2012 thus far is that the words have been coming painfully slowly. The right words, that is. Lots of words have come, but they meander into what are ultimately empty rooms, devoid of furniture or fixtures, curtains or wall hangings, any signs of life whatsoever. But, as a wise man recently pointed out, that's the truth about writing: most often you start out writing in order to find out what it is you're trying to say, and you keep hammering away at it until you find your way there. An inelegant way to arrive at something you hope will be exquisite.
Indeed, as I say, it has been an outstanding two weeks. I've been reminded of the difference between being fortunate and being lucky. Fortunate refers, ultimately, to an ongoing condition, the state of having much in your life that keeps you steadily moving forward. Lucky, though, that's something else. Luck is fleeting and capricious, and when you find yourself on a streak of good luck, treat it right. I like to think I'm doing just that, and hope it'll stick around for a good long time.
This essay, though . . . this essay is kicking my ass. There's no easy way to write with compassion about someone for whom you feel no affection. That's the bad news. The good news is that, if I can pull it off, it will be something worth reading. I could take the easy way out, tell myself it's not that important and simply move on to something else, but that would be a lie. Sometimes you have to write a love letter to the enemy because the only way to understand the war is to recall the days of wine and roses that preceded it. There is one thing and one thing only at stake here: making the case for why this particular girl mattered so much once upon a time, I was utterly lost when she went away. What could possibly have made this girl so goddamned special?
Of course, nothing is ever that simple. She was as much a victim of horrible timing as I was: she arrived in my orbit as I was already in swift decline, broke and desperate and fading. Somehow, though, she chose to bestow the crumbs of her affection on me of all people, and here's the thing about a girl like that: when you watch guys all around her being made completely stupid by her charms, and she chooses you among all the others, that's pretty much irresistible. Up to a point, though, what she was choosing was relative safety: I was much older than anyone she would actually be with, plus she had a boyfriend who was Mr. Fucking Wonderful (so-called), plus all she really wanted was to strip-mine my mother lode of knowledge and experience, and to bask in my unconditional devotion. I didn't realize that, obviously, or if I did, I wasn't willing to admit it to myself. Either way, I told myself I had it covered. I assured my friends there was nothing this girl could do that would send me over the edge. I believed that in part because I'd already been through the wars with a woman, one I loved deeply and to whom I was unerringly devoted. What I went through with her I wouldn't wish on anyone, not even the handful of people in this world I despise. She and I have made our tentative but lasting peace, but there were dark days that, well, if they didn't kill me, I believed I'd be hard-pressed to imagine anything that might. And then I met the last girl.
I want to be fair. It matters to me. I have friends who would spit in that girl's face before they'd so much as offer her a grudging hello. They wouldn't piss on her if she was on fire -- but they might do so if she wasn't. And I get that -- I've certainly felt that way about people who have hurt my friends. Still, it's no good. Nobody I could feel so much for could ever possess enough evil to deserve that. The truth is, I gave her power she didn't know how to wield -- or, more accurately, she didn't know how not to wield it. That's on me. She did some heartless, careless things, made some shitty choices and behaved like an abject coward -- and that's on her. Nonetheless, I still need to make the case for why, at a very particular point in her life, she was worth someone as fucking fantastic as me falling in love with her. And right now that's really, really, really difficult. But goddamit, I'm going to do it because if I don't, I don't have a story. And if I do, it'll be the story that changes my life. That ain't no small change.
Indeed, as I say, it has been an outstanding two weeks. I've been reminded of the difference between being fortunate and being lucky. Fortunate refers, ultimately, to an ongoing condition, the state of having much in your life that keeps you steadily moving forward. Lucky, though, that's something else. Luck is fleeting and capricious, and when you find yourself on a streak of good luck, treat it right. I like to think I'm doing just that, and hope it'll stick around for a good long time.
This essay, though . . . this essay is kicking my ass. There's no easy way to write with compassion about someone for whom you feel no affection. That's the bad news. The good news is that, if I can pull it off, it will be something worth reading. I could take the easy way out, tell myself it's not that important and simply move on to something else, but that would be a lie. Sometimes you have to write a love letter to the enemy because the only way to understand the war is to recall the days of wine and roses that preceded it. There is one thing and one thing only at stake here: making the case for why this particular girl mattered so much once upon a time, I was utterly lost when she went away. What could possibly have made this girl so goddamned special?
Of course, nothing is ever that simple. She was as much a victim of horrible timing as I was: she arrived in my orbit as I was already in swift decline, broke and desperate and fading. Somehow, though, she chose to bestow the crumbs of her affection on me of all people, and here's the thing about a girl like that: when you watch guys all around her being made completely stupid by her charms, and she chooses you among all the others, that's pretty much irresistible. Up to a point, though, what she was choosing was relative safety: I was much older than anyone she would actually be with, plus she had a boyfriend who was Mr. Fucking Wonderful (so-called), plus all she really wanted was to strip-mine my mother lode of knowledge and experience, and to bask in my unconditional devotion. I didn't realize that, obviously, or if I did, I wasn't willing to admit it to myself. Either way, I told myself I had it covered. I assured my friends there was nothing this girl could do that would send me over the edge. I believed that in part because I'd already been through the wars with a woman, one I loved deeply and to whom I was unerringly devoted. What I went through with her I wouldn't wish on anyone, not even the handful of people in this world I despise. She and I have made our tentative but lasting peace, but there were dark days that, well, if they didn't kill me, I believed I'd be hard-pressed to imagine anything that might. And then I met the last girl.
I want to be fair. It matters to me. I have friends who would spit in that girl's face before they'd so much as offer her a grudging hello. They wouldn't piss on her if she was on fire -- but they might do so if she wasn't. And I get that -- I've certainly felt that way about people who have hurt my friends. Still, it's no good. Nobody I could feel so much for could ever possess enough evil to deserve that. The truth is, I gave her power she didn't know how to wield -- or, more accurately, she didn't know how not to wield it. That's on me. She did some heartless, careless things, made some shitty choices and behaved like an abject coward -- and that's on her. Nonetheless, I still need to make the case for why, at a very particular point in her life, she was worth someone as fucking fantastic as me falling in love with her. And right now that's really, really, really difficult. But goddamit, I'm going to do it because if I don't, I don't have a story. And if I do, it'll be the story that changes my life. That ain't no small change.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Gravy
"After that it was all gravy, every minute . . ."
Raymond Carver, "Gravy"
Well then, here we are, the eve of a new year. January is named, of course, for the Roman god Janus, whose two faces looked both forward and backward, and what better way to symbolize turning the corner into a new year? It also happens to be the month of my illustrious birth, which means the cosmic significance of January simply can't be denied. Don't fight it.
When I sat down to reflect on 2011 (because I always sit when I reflect), I quickly realized there were many, many more high points than low, even without holding 2011 up against the glare of the unmitigated disaster that was 2010. It wasn't all good, and this will be an incomplete list because, honestly, it was a jam-packed twelve months, but here are a few observations from my year.
I learned that my daughter loves Henry David Thoreau and The Great Gatsby and that she speaks with impressive eloquence and thoughtfulness about the books she reads. I watched her demonstrate that she's a natural at tap dancing. I gave her my monster iPod for her birthday, complete with some eighteen-thousand songs, and was delighted time and again as she discovered songs and bands I love, and now she loves them too. She's the person I'm fortunate to be able to point to as the reason for all the best things I do, and I can't imagine being luckier than I am.
I rediscovered my words this year. They'd been in absentia for far too long, and I recovered them from a heap of ashes. I wrote a book that still needs work but will, I think, turn out alright. This year has taken me very far from the circumstances that conspired to make up that book, which is good because I can see the stories with new eyes. They need to be funnier. And maybe a little meaner. I'll keep you posted. As for the blog, I give my kid credit for suggesting I dust it off and get it going again, and thanks to all of you who have read and shared your thoughts. I mostly write to get chicks (obviously), but I also write to be read, and it's a great thrill to know you're all out there checking out my work. Last but by no means least, it's been a blast writing for The Nervous Breakdown -- many thanks to Peaches for hooking me up with them. Writing is most definitely work, and sometimes it kicks your ass for what feels like no good reason, but for me it still beats a hell of a lot of other things I might be doing with my time, so I'll take it.
I got a little smarter this year, thanks to, among many others, Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, Rabelais, Steinbeck, Michael Chabon, Thomas Paine, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Bret Easton Ellis, Kurt Vonnegut, Andre Dubus, and of course my favorite living writer, Ron Currie. I read a hell of a lot more than I watched TV (which should be a no-brainer), but I did find myself quite happily absorbed in Louis C.K.'s FX series, Louie. It is wise and brilliant, and I hope you'll all take some time in the new year to check it out.
Lots of outstanding new music came my way in 2011, which was very good news because the ongoing soundtrack was all wrapped up in bleak despair, a natural side-effect of connecting with someone in part over your music collection: your best tunes take on the echoes of that cruel ghost. There were new-to-me bands like Frightened Rabbit, the Mountain Goats, Portugal. The Man, and Wild Sweet Orange, as well as new albums by some of my favorites: Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie and the Twilight Singers. I think I'll roll out a few tasty playlists in 2012 -- it's been a while since I've done that, and I have enough new stuff now to make it worthwhile. Oh, and speaking of music, I saw the Pixies -- easily one of my top five moments of what was a pretty good year.
I pondered somewhat incessantly the statement, "But I didn't mean to," and struggled to understand why anyone would perceive carelessness as a virtue. I continue to ponder this question.
I was reminded that secrets are hard to keep because they are burdens. The more a secret strives to escape your lips, the more determined you should be to keep it because, if it's hard for you to keep, imagine how hard it will be for the next twenty-five people.
I kissed some ladies this year. I liked that a lot, too.
I managed to nothing somebody -- not love or hate, just nothing -- and that ain't no mean feat.
More than anything, I got back to being myself this year, and that's good stuff because, no kidding, I dig me, warts and all. I make my share of mistakes, I stumble over my own feet sometimes, but all things considered, I think I'm a pretty good guy to have around. I admire my better impulses and am relieved to see them back in play. I'll make you laugh, help you move a couch, hold your hand, get your back, and tell you it's all going to turn out fine when you're not able to see that for yourself. I like this version of me a whole lot better than the version that was free-falling into an abyss of his own making. That guy was pretty useless and absolutely no fun.
So raise a glass or whatever you like to do, and here's to 2012: a year of meaningful accomplishments and thoroughly satisfying surprises, of lost puppies and missing children finding their way home, of bad luck turning good and good luck turning great, of windfalls and great sex and minor miracles. A year where no one gets sad or hurt and nobody dies. To 2012: may it be nothing but gravy for us all.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Missing
It's the day before Christmas, and I find myself with good things to look forward to: my lovely daughter comes tomorrow, and we'll spend the day in Portland with my parents at my younger brother's house. Sweet Milly comes home from her travels and I'll be seeing her soon. All good stuff. But I'm not going to lie to you: I have heavy thoughts on my mind these days.
By now anyone who has watched or read or listened to any news reports in the last several days knows a little girl from these parts went missing a week ago. It's a story that swirls with low-end melodrama. The little girl's mother went to rehab, and the Department of Health and Human Services placed the girl with her father. I don't know any of these people, but from what I've seen of the mother (in multiple television interviews), she is no prize pig. Add to that the comments of that woman's mother, the little girl's grandmother, who claimed DHHS took the girl away because for some reason that agency has a personal bias against the elder woman's family. The depth of ignorance betrayed by a statement like that can't be quantified. It also adds a particularly insidious ripple to the investigation: if a person is so irrational (and immature) as to pointedly express such a bizarre persecution complex, how do you measure your expectations of either that person's credibility or her potential culpability? In other words, if someone is both stupid and batshit crazy, what can you reasonably put past her? More than one person has openly speculated that somehow the grandmother sent someone to kidnap the girl, to take her away from her father. On the one hand, given what we know about her limited intellect and obviously dubious judgment, I don't think you can put that past her. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine this woman knowing anyone with sufficient smarts to pull it off and then elude investigators for even a day, let alone a solid week. The conundrum of dealing with dumbasses.
I admit, I judge stupid people harshly. I also admit, again, I don't know any of these people, I only know them through the lens of what they've said to the press. The father has been mostly quiet, and so I have almost no opinion about him, except that, well, if you have a child in your care, and that child happens to have a broken arm, and you don't look in on that kid even once in twelve hours, you fucked up. If the father did nothing else, if he is in no way involved in whatever has happened to his daughter, I won't say anything more than that: he fucked up, and he's going to have to live with that the rest of his life. But the mother and the grandmother have been quite vocal, and each time either has opened her mouth, she has proven herself to be the quintessential scumbag. They are small-minded, simple-minded, self-absorbed people, neither of whom should have ever had a child. They are shitty, shitty human beings, and if this little girl is found safe and sound, I hope she never has to suffer another day in the presence of her mother's family.
Now to the observable particulars of the last few days. There has been a massive police presence here in Waterville, presumably every cop on the force, as well as State Troopers, game wardens, the FBI. There have been scores of volunteers out searching. It's an operation being undertaken in just the way it should be: all hands on deck. Local businesses have contributed staff to assist in the search, restaurants have been providing food to keep the volunteers going. This is all good and sadly necessary. Then there are the ancillary cohorts of events such as these: at least one erroneous report, broadcast on Facebook, that the girl's body had been found; the overheard conversations in bars and restaurants and coffee shops, endless speculation about what really happened; and, of course, the vigils.
I take no comfort in vigils or in impromptu memorials, piles of teddy bears and flowers and handwritten notes left in the victim's yard. To me such things feel contrived, but that's my temperament: I don't sport yellow-ribbon bumper stickers, don't drape myself in the flag. Confucius said that when the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger. In real life I resist embracing symbols and symbolic gestures because, it seems to me, too often people get caught up in the symbol and lose sight of what the symbol represents. It's the moon, not the finger, that moves me.
At the same time, as a parent I recognize something in all of this that perhaps some without kids might fail to see: if you have a child you adore, you can't watch any of what's going on and not ask yourself, "What if that was my daughter?" It is almost certainly the most obvious truism of parenthood: any threat of harm coming to your child is something you desperately hope to never have to bear. The sense of helplessness that accompanies any mystery is pervasive -- we feel it collectively. Something as incomprehensible as the mysterious disappearance of a child ratchets up that sense of paralyzed impotence. It gnaws at an empty place in your belly. It makes you want to do something, anything that might offer the vague promise of even the slightest comfort. It is as though, as a community, we are holding our collective breath. It's important, though, to remember that while it feels like we're holding our breath, for the family of that little girl, it is much more like someone is holding their heads under water: they don't have the choice of taking a breath. Keep that in mind while you're lighting candles and sporting ribbons and wristbands and whatever else people choose to engage in, regardless of their motives. Don't ever assume that either sympathy or empathy makes somebody else's pain your own.
On this Christmas Eve, I hope for everyone's sake, but mostly for the sake of the little girl, that she is found and she is unharmed. I am not a praying person, I don't believe in gods or their associated mythology. I don't believe things happen for a reason. I do believe in my gut, and I'm sad to say my gut is telling me nothing good is going to come of this. Too much time has passed, too many of the stones under which she was most likely to be discovered in one healthy piece have been overturned to no avail. That being said, though, my wish this Christmas is to learn, and soon, that my gut is completely and utterly wrong. I don't like being wrong any more than most people, but this is one of those times when I'd be overjoyed to find out I'm mistaken. Here's hoping.
Merry Christmas.
By now anyone who has watched or read or listened to any news reports in the last several days knows a little girl from these parts went missing a week ago. It's a story that swirls with low-end melodrama. The little girl's mother went to rehab, and the Department of Health and Human Services placed the girl with her father. I don't know any of these people, but from what I've seen of the mother (in multiple television interviews), she is no prize pig. Add to that the comments of that woman's mother, the little girl's grandmother, who claimed DHHS took the girl away because for some reason that agency has a personal bias against the elder woman's family. The depth of ignorance betrayed by a statement like that can't be quantified. It also adds a particularly insidious ripple to the investigation: if a person is so irrational (and immature) as to pointedly express such a bizarre persecution complex, how do you measure your expectations of either that person's credibility or her potential culpability? In other words, if someone is both stupid and batshit crazy, what can you reasonably put past her? More than one person has openly speculated that somehow the grandmother sent someone to kidnap the girl, to take her away from her father. On the one hand, given what we know about her limited intellect and obviously dubious judgment, I don't think you can put that past her. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine this woman knowing anyone with sufficient smarts to pull it off and then elude investigators for even a day, let alone a solid week. The conundrum of dealing with dumbasses.
I admit, I judge stupid people harshly. I also admit, again, I don't know any of these people, I only know them through the lens of what they've said to the press. The father has been mostly quiet, and so I have almost no opinion about him, except that, well, if you have a child in your care, and that child happens to have a broken arm, and you don't look in on that kid even once in twelve hours, you fucked up. If the father did nothing else, if he is in no way involved in whatever has happened to his daughter, I won't say anything more than that: he fucked up, and he's going to have to live with that the rest of his life. But the mother and the grandmother have been quite vocal, and each time either has opened her mouth, she has proven herself to be the quintessential scumbag. They are small-minded, simple-minded, self-absorbed people, neither of whom should have ever had a child. They are shitty, shitty human beings, and if this little girl is found safe and sound, I hope she never has to suffer another day in the presence of her mother's family.
Now to the observable particulars of the last few days. There has been a massive police presence here in Waterville, presumably every cop on the force, as well as State Troopers, game wardens, the FBI. There have been scores of volunteers out searching. It's an operation being undertaken in just the way it should be: all hands on deck. Local businesses have contributed staff to assist in the search, restaurants have been providing food to keep the volunteers going. This is all good and sadly necessary. Then there are the ancillary cohorts of events such as these: at least one erroneous report, broadcast on Facebook, that the girl's body had been found; the overheard conversations in bars and restaurants and coffee shops, endless speculation about what really happened; and, of course, the vigils.
I take no comfort in vigils or in impromptu memorials, piles of teddy bears and flowers and handwritten notes left in the victim's yard. To me such things feel contrived, but that's my temperament: I don't sport yellow-ribbon bumper stickers, don't drape myself in the flag. Confucius said that when the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger. In real life I resist embracing symbols and symbolic gestures because, it seems to me, too often people get caught up in the symbol and lose sight of what the symbol represents. It's the moon, not the finger, that moves me.
At the same time, as a parent I recognize something in all of this that perhaps some without kids might fail to see: if you have a child you adore, you can't watch any of what's going on and not ask yourself, "What if that was my daughter?" It is almost certainly the most obvious truism of parenthood: any threat of harm coming to your child is something you desperately hope to never have to bear. The sense of helplessness that accompanies any mystery is pervasive -- we feel it collectively. Something as incomprehensible as the mysterious disappearance of a child ratchets up that sense of paralyzed impotence. It gnaws at an empty place in your belly. It makes you want to do something, anything that might offer the vague promise of even the slightest comfort. It is as though, as a community, we are holding our collective breath. It's important, though, to remember that while it feels like we're holding our breath, for the family of that little girl, it is much more like someone is holding their heads under water: they don't have the choice of taking a breath. Keep that in mind while you're lighting candles and sporting ribbons and wristbands and whatever else people choose to engage in, regardless of their motives. Don't ever assume that either sympathy or empathy makes somebody else's pain your own.
On this Christmas Eve, I hope for everyone's sake, but mostly for the sake of the little girl, that she is found and she is unharmed. I am not a praying person, I don't believe in gods or their associated mythology. I don't believe things happen for a reason. I do believe in my gut, and I'm sad to say my gut is telling me nothing good is going to come of this. Too much time has passed, too many of the stones under which she was most likely to be discovered in one healthy piece have been overturned to no avail. That being said, though, my wish this Christmas is to learn, and soon, that my gut is completely and utterly wrong. I don't like being wrong any more than most people, but this is one of those times when I'd be overjoyed to find out I'm mistaken. Here's hoping.
Merry Christmas.
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