Down By the Old Milly Stream

Another piece up on TNB, kids, check it out. And in case you're wondering, yes, I would love to field your relationship questions: just email me and I will post a response as soon as I get around to it, unless your relationship issues are boring, in which case I'll respond right away. Seriously, I may be one of the best untapped resources in this particular discipline -- just ask any of my many recently single friends. I know my stuff.

I have a couple things on my mind, the first of which is something I admit I don't know a whole lot about, in part because I've avoided the coverage as much as possible, but also because what coverage I have seen doesn't tell me anything. I've started to look into it in the last few days because it's getting awfully goddamned real all of a sudden, but even a concerted effort isn't telling me much. I'm talking, of course, about the Occupy Movement. I have friends in some of the cities where the Occupiers are or have been Occupying. The one constant refrain I've heard is that a substantial number of the Occupiers are not at all unlike my friends and me: they are average people in their thirties and forties, they're thoughtful and articulate, they have jobs (so in that way they're unlike me, but fair enough). The point is that they're not just a bunch of dirty hippies and drug-addled punks who are simply flocking to tent cities because it's the groovy thing to do right now, man. If I understand the Movement correctly -- and please, someone, straighten me out if I'm way off-base -- it is fundamentally about holding Wall Street fat cats accountable. It's about putting an end to "corporate greed." Is that about right? Because that's what it sounds like to me, and honestly, it sounds like a good idea. Except how do you do that? I'm not being glib or negative, I'm honestly asking: how do you put an end to corporate greed? How do you even define corporate greed? That seems like an entirely subjective term. If someone can enlighten me, in her or his own words, I'd be grateful. And I mean that -- in your own words. Please don't send me links to media analysis of the Movement, I've read too much of that already and, again, I don't find myself any closer to understanding the essence of what's going on.

The other thing on my mind is my friend Milly.

A few years ago I wrote a vaguely investigative piece for the local newspaper -- my great pal Christina was the assistant city editor, and she would very kindly offer me softball freelance assignments from time to time because she knew I needed the money and, although I'm really not a journalist (I have neither the eye nor the ear for it, and "just the facts" leaves me feeling anxious), I can write a sentence, so it was all good. The last piece I wrote involved the typical contentiousness that arises whenever someone who owns undeveloped land on or near a lake seeks permission to subdivide his property and sell the lots to people who will build houses on them. There are compelling reasons to manage that sort of development with a deft and careful hand: unchecked development kills lakes. It's that simple: more houses means more run-off. You're cutting down trees, building roads and driveways, putting in septic systems, et cetera. In truth, though, more often than not the most compelling reason to squash such development tends to be much more personal: nobody wants his pristine spot sullied by the presence of a bunch of other people. This particular piece of land sits just north of the lake in question, on the banks of an inlet brook that feeds the lake from a source far up in what's called the Kennebec Highlands. Beaver Brook is a pristine piece of water, virtually untouched by anything man-made along its entire course from the hills to the center of the valley where it terminates in the lake. The two families that own the only other camps at the mouth of the brook raised that point in challenging the petition: they feared this subdivision would eventually destroy that rare unspoiled water source, which would in time lead to significant damage to the lake. Anyone who has ever known long-time lake people -- I'm talking about lake houses that have been in families for at least a couple generations -- would recognize in the shorthand what was really going on: they didn't want eight new houses springing up in a spot that, for their entire lives, had contained but three small, inconspicuous camps. But I couldn't write that, of course, because no one would actually say it. I could only write the facts: that some people thought the brook would be destroyed, and that other people disagreed, and ultimately the planning board approved the petition because, unless the property owner actually did something stupid like put an outhouse hanging out over the brook, he wasn't doing anything wrong.

I'm meandering, I realize, but take my word for it, I am doing so for appropriate effect. You see, in writing that article I had to do a fair amount of research into things I really knew nothing about, one of which was the waterway in question, as well as inland waterways in general. I still don't know all there is to know about lakes and streams and fens and such, but here's what I took away from that research: waterways such as these are remarkable. If you were to follow that particular brook backwards to its source, you would find it taking a handful of different forms: at times it's an unassuming brook, sometimes it is wide and swift, at one point it fattens up into a modest pond, other times it appears to disappear entirely, when in fact it's flowing beneath a mossy fen. I found this fascinating. It is often a wondrous thing to have your perceptions either proven spectacularly wrong or, at the very least, unexpectedly broadened.

Beaver Brook came to mind this evening as I was scrolling through some photo albums Milly posted on Picasa -- was called to mind, actually, by a picture she'd taken of a stream somewhere in Quebec. Milly, it turns out, takes astonishing pictures. I don't have the language or the inclination to analyze visual art and tell you what I think is good or bad about it. I approach visual art much the same way I approach wine: I know a good bottle of wine when I taste it, not because there's something on the label that means everything to connoisseurs but nothing to me. I know when I'm looking at Milly's photos and find myself smiling and nodding my head, find that my breath catches in my throat, that I'm looking at something special. Milly is, by nature, quiet and observant, which means she is inclined to see things many if not most people miss. This is one reason she manages, through the lens of a camera, to transform moments into art. The other reason is that she so clearly loves it. It's impossible to look through her photos and not understand that about her. Maybe if I ask her nicely she'll let me post a few of my favorites for you to see. No promises.

As I've gotten to know Milly well over the last few months, and particularly these last few weeks, I've come to understand that she is very much like that shape-shifting waterway. I've found myself walking along her banks confident in my sense of what I'd find when I rounded the bend, only to be, time and time again, greeted by a sight that is not unpleasantly unforeseen. She surprises me not just in what she notices but in how she draws the picture for me. Since some of those things she notices are about me, and because she relays her observations of me in a way that conveys her sincere sense that I should be as impressed with myself as she is -- well, that's what we call a genuine win-win. She's also the girl who will casually mention the time she spent as a day-trader in her twenties, or her brief stint as a trained phlebotomist, and always as she's describing the impulse to follow these paths, her eyes take on a look that is equal parts intensity and curiosity and mischief. And always in the telling there is a moment when she smiles, and then she laughs, delighted as she should be by the fact that she's just told me something about herself I wouldn't have guessed even given an infinite number of chances.

This evening as I was making my way through an album of photos Milly took at a very snowy outdoor winter wedding, my phone buzzed and it was my friend Chili telling me he had a piece of mail for me from Milly. I love this about her, too: when she was in Chicago a couple months ago, she sent me a postcard, care of my favorite bar, the bar where she and I like to sit and share beer and bacon; this time she sent me a package, care of my buddy's office. Delightful. In the package were several snack packs of Whoppers and a card in which she wrote (among other things), "p.s. You're a really handsome guy." There are times when I feel a little bad that this smart, beautiful woman apparently lost a bet with Satan and thus ended up spending quality time with the likes of me, but for my own sake I'm glad because it means I get to keep tracing the course of that mysterious stream, slowly uncovering its secrets.

I can very much appreciate the allure of putting up four walls and a roof at the terminus of that lovely brook, with a porch on the front where I'd sit in my creaky rocking chair every evening and watch her lovely waters settle quietly into the vast, peaceful lake.

So I've been trying to write a new post all morning, but blogger wouldn't let me. It's pretty harsh when your own blog doesn't want you blogging anymore. I was closing in on a strange sort of despair when, probably the ninth time I'd gone back and tried to open a new post, my eye finally fell upon the notice in the menu bar suggesting I try the new blogger interface. It wasn't until that moment that it occurred to me that blogger is a Google product, as is gmail, which recently launched a new interface that, as promised, is not optional. Neither is it particularly appealing. Function means more to me than form, but still, if you're going to get a hard-on about rolling out your new facelift, try to make it look like something that wasn't designed by developmentally challenged second graders. Those who would point out that my blog is pretty spare in appearance, I'd say this: I don't pretend to be a designer, nor do I want to be one. I just write. I'm willing to bet Google paid some design firm a fair chunk of change to drape their sites in the emperor's new clothes, and if I'm right, they got fleeced hard.

Before I get down to it, I want to point out the link in the upper right corner of the blog: it connects you to The Nervous Breakdown, an arts & culture website featuring work by some of the smartest, funniest, most insightful people you'll encounter anywhere. If you enjoy my writing, you'll absolutely love TNB. They've published two of my essays in the last couple weeks, and with any luck I'll be contributing regularly. Check them out, and if you're a real trooper, join their book club -- it's an outstanding deal, and it supports some truly vibrant and meaningful writing. Feel free to email me if you have questions.

Thanks very much to all who have commented on my last post. That one was special to me in a few ways, but mostly because it surprised me by going someplace I didn't expect. I was, as I mentioned, in a funk I hadn't been able to shake, and as I cracked my first Rolling Rock pounder Saturday evening, out of nowhere I remembered the image of the sign behind the bar in Seattle: "Attitude Adjustment Hour." From that image I started coaxing recollections of the days and weeks and months that surrounded that evening sitting in a bar in a far-away city with my girlfriend's dad twenty years ago, and bits and pieces I hadn't thought about in years surged back to me like the benign remnants of a capsized cruise ship washing ashore, hats and shoes and deck chairs and umbrellas, only faintly hinting at some distant tragedy now that they've been separated from the wreck itself (as well as the casualties). There I was, just sitting in the Bear Cave trying to adjust my own attitude, and all of a sudden I found myself thinking about a lovely pixie, three electricians from Texas, a closet full of handguns, and the flaws and joys of a relationship that at one time meant the world to me. You don't need any more than that to tell a story.

Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." Yeah, no shit, Soren. Actually, I've always been partial to the way Milan Kundera put it in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." Life is a complicated, backwards affair. The events that have the most profound effects on us do so most often in hindsight: whether we act or react or sit silently still, the play goes on, and as time accumulates behind us we find ourselves sitting in the balcony gazing down upon those remembered scenes being reenacted by perfect replicas of ourselves and, removed now from the stage, we notice details downstage, off center, that eluded us in the living of those moments. We remember a sign in a bar, and from that brief detail we hear a wistful admonition for what it was, we see strangers become generous neighbors, we smell gun oil, we remember unfair fights, and the threads of bad choices made for good reasons become clear and compelling and forgivable.

It's reasonable to say this contributes to my inclination toward storytelling. I hear it in my voice, hear it in the voice in my head when I'm writing: an implied sense of perpetual wonder. How and why lead to exactly when was that and where was I and who else was there. I'm constantly searching for something in those scenes from my life. I'd like to tell you I'm trying to make sense out of all of it because I believe that will help me do a better job tomorrow or the next day, but that would be a lie. What I'm really looking for are those wooden boxes hidden in the closet, the ones containing my long-ago neighbors' pistols. I'm looking for those guns because that's where the story is. If we don't buy that ridiculous couch, there's no story. If we don't move to Seattle together, break up, reconcile, love each other but disagree constantly, no story. If I don't hide the guns in the closet, no story. If I don't find my way to that particular bar and choose a seat that affords me a view of the sign hanging over the bartender's head, I don't sit up straight almost twenty years later in the Bear Cave and realize what I need is an Attitude Adjustment. I could have gone twenty more years without looking in that closet. Except that Saturday I needed an Attitude Adjustment. And from that I have a story. See how easy it is?

Attitude Adjustment Hour

I just bought the cheapest six-pack I could find -- and don't ask, don't guess, I'm not going to tell you what it was. All you need to know is that the price was right, and now I'm on beer number two. Because for three days now I've been in an impressive funk, and none of the usual remedies were making a dent. I wrote, I read, I hung out with friends, I went for walks, I watched an episode of Louie I hadn't yet seen, I watched some adult entertainment, I corresponded with smart, thoughtful people -- I did all the things I know how to do to kick the crap out of a funk, or at least ease myself out of one, and nothing helped. So now I'm downshifting into cheap beer, I've got a fresh pack of smokes, and I'm listening to Alkaline Trio. If you text me tonight and don't hear back, it's probably because the cure is working. Or it isn't.

The year after I graduated from college (a minor miracle for a number of reasons: I was a terrible student, I got by on charm and brains and a silver tongue and should have had my ass booted out of Colby half a dozen times), I moved to Seattle with my lady love, Charlotte. This was an enticing but not unexpected adventure for me: but for brief forays bopping here and there during college, I'd lived my entire life within a dozen miles of where I grew up, and so moving all the way across the country with my girlfriend seemed like the next logical step to me. What I never suspected then (but have more than an inkling about now that I have a daughter of my own) was that maybe her parents wouldn't be so keen on the idea of their youngest daughter relocating three thousand miles away to live with a guy they certainly liked but didn't exactly consider a strong match for young Charlotte. In my mind, of course, we were both adults -- she was twenty-one, I was twenty-two -- and for all intents and purposes we'd spent our last year of college living together (and all that that implies -- sorry, Barry and Mary, your daughter and I had relations -- a lot). So no big deal. Sure, I get it now, but at the time I couldn't fathom why Charlotte's mother didn't speak to her for three days after she finally told her (sometime in July) that we were moving to Seattle and would be living together. I mean, yeah, I get the sentiment, but come on -- passive-aggressive much? Nice parenting. When Mary finally came up for air, her first spoken words to Charlotte were the announcement that she had purchased plane tickets for her and Barry to visit us at Christmas. Bully for you. (And all that that implies.)

Our transition into the real world of adulthood was by no means seamless. We had a sweet housesitting gig when we first arrived, leaving us free to explore and have some fun, which we did. But two weeks after we got there, Charlotte finally announced that she didn't think we should live together. I confess, I was nonplussed. She didn't know that word, so I had to be incredulous instead. Still no good, so I settled for disappointed. I crashed for a month and a half in the boyhood home of one of my pals from Colby (hey, Q!), found a job managing a cookie store, and with gainful employment in my favor, began courting Charlotte anew.

I can be good when I want to be, and in that instant, I definitely wanted to be: I found my way back into the warm glow of that smile. Charlotte and I weren't a good match for the long haul, it's true, but for a brief, memorable moment in time we were good for each other. I liked being the guy who made her laugh, and she made me feel like I was larger than life -- I mean, seriously, she believed in me. I think she was the first girl I ever knew who made me feel that way. Regardless of the expected shelf-life of that relationship, it was more than worth sticking around even if only for that. Props, Charlotte: you were one of the good ones.

I was an artist back then, man: I wrote sad, angry little stories about heartache and class warfare and being a young but promising drunk, always wrapped up with the sort of vaguely discernible lesson twenty-two year-old me thought you ought to have waved in front of your nose. I was so awesomely earnest -- it's one of the memories that informs my less judgmental older self. Goddamn, are we full of shit at that age. We're always a little full of shit, but once you top forty, you have a much better chance of recognizing it. I cut no slack whatsoever back then, man. I was a swinging dick extraordinaire.

Charlotte and I reconciled, after a wild night of intense wine-drunk fucking on the floor under the piano in Q's mom's sitting room (sorry, man, and, um, thanks), and soon we started apartment shopping. We finally settled on a place in Northwest Seattle, in Ballard, which is up by the salmon locks and quite near a ridiculous marina that, if not for the view of the Olympic Peninsula from its docks, I would have utterly cursed: gross money, kids, gross. But Seattle wasn't curse-worthy then, not yet at least. I loved Ballard. There were seven or eight bars within walking distance of our place, all of which had local brews on tap. And everyone was so nice. And smart, and interesting. Those first couple months in Ballard were straight-up excellent. Charlotte and I were, on a daily basis, donning the costumes of grown-up her and me, and every evening we rode the bus home together, made dinner, split a bottle of wine, and crawled between the sheets together. It was an awful lot like what I thought it might be. And then Christmas happened.

I should back up and tell you that Charlotte and I furnished our apartment at the Salvation Army. Neither of us had much money, and I for one didn't really care one way or the other: give me a bed, a couch, some chairs, a table, and I'm good. Charlotte, very much to her credit, was on board with this plan, so our first Saturday in the new place we took the bus all the way downtown, down by the old Kingdome, and we wandered the aisles until we'd found what we wanted: a chunky dining room table with four chairs, a beat-up recliner, a couple end-tables, and what turned out to be the most massive couch I've ever seen (in that sprawling warehouse, nothing seemed as big as it actually was). We, of course, had no car, but no problem: the helpful clerk at the checkout called a man who, for a nominal fee, would transport our new belongings wherever we were going.

Luster Mitchell was his name. It was a quintessential Flannery O'Connor name if ever there was one. I will not forget that name as long as I live. I will be on my deathbed and the name "Luster Mitchell" will escape my lips, and with any luck those two words will inspire a Citizen Kane-esque mystery. Luster Mitchell is my Rosebud. We met him upon departure, gave him some money and our address in Ballard, then sauntered up to the bus stop and headed home to greet our new used furnishings.

Luster Mitchell was there when we arrived. Our belongings were piled high in the back of a two-tone early eighties Chevy pickup that clearly needed some suspension work: the body was sitting right on the rear axle, and having been through some momentously stupid overladen adventures in my day, all I could think was that I was glad I hadn't been in the cab for that trip. Luster was unloading the pieces one dining room chair at a time. I stepped around the truck, reached up and shook his hand, thanked him for getting everything there in one piece, and asked him what it would run me to have him help me cart everything upstairs -- to our third-floor apartment.

Luster shook his head apologetically. "Oh, no," he said, "I don't do no stairs."

We'd paid him fifty to drive everything that far, so I asked, "How about twenty bucks?"

Again he shook his head. "No stairs," he said, more firmly this time.

"Seriously?" I asked. "Not at any price?"

"You on your own," Luster Mitchell informed me in no uncertain terms.

We unloaded the rest of the truck in relative silence, with no fanfare, and then Luster Mitchell climbed into his piece of shit Chevy and Charlotte and I stood there, surrounded by our current folly, and watched him drive away. I glanced at her soccer-playing pixie body that, in every other way, I absolutely adored, realized she had the arm strength of a nine-year-old, and heaved a world-weary sigh. "Well," I said, "let's get this stuff inside."

We got everything, including the awkward table and the more awkward recliner, which as we wrestled it around the tight corners of our stupidly designed modern apartment building kept extending itself enthusiastically as though it was trying to endear itself to us (See how comfortable I am! Please! Sit in me and banish all your worldly cares!) -- everything except that behemoth of a couch.

You see, Charlotte had insisted we needed not just a couch, but this couch. Did I mention it was a sleeper-sofa? Well, it was. To her mind, it was a good idea to have such a thing because, well, you never know when you're going to have to make accommodations. Did I also mention that this sleeper-sofa was nine feet long? You think I joke -- but no. I only wish. I've moved a lot of furniture in my day, and all I had to do was look at that hallway to realize a nine-foot sofa wasn't going anywhere near the top floor of that building, at least not via the stairway, and certainly not with Charlotte's spindly (but lovely) arms at one end of it. Standing there in the driveway with all but one of our new possessions securely stowed in our apartment, I allowed myself to contemplate the fate of Moby Couch if we chose to, say, abandon it on the sidewalk. And just as the vision was about to crystalize to my satisfaction, our downstairs neighbors pulled in.

There was a fair amount of high-level development going on in Seattle back then. It has always been a vibrant city, and in those early nineties days, money was flowing into the city proper from all over the world, which meant that high-rise office buildings were springing up at a ridiculous rate. The three guys living downstairs from us were commercial electricians in town from their native Texas, working on one of the new buildings down on First Ave., overlooking the Sound. Before that moment, we had seen each other maybe twice and exchanged no more than a quick "How's it going?" These guys were older, probably all in their late thirties or early forties. They'd been around, and I'm sure they'd sized us up immediately as a couple of hapless kids who were, for the first time, embarking on what we thought was the big thing. They also accurately estimated our present situation in less than a handful of heartbeats, and they offered to help.

I could easily leave it there: these three men who didn't know us at all and had just come home from a long day, their sixth in a row of working eight solid, far from home and their families, unflinchingly and sincerely offered to help two people they didn't know at all but instantly recognized were out of options. I could just say they helped us and leave it at that, but in truth, these three men spent the next hour and a half conjuring what amounted to a magical solution to our dilemma: they dug out some climbing ropes, lashed the couch to it, and the four of us proceeded to essentially clean-jerk this five-hundred-pound sleeper-sofa up three floors to the lanai that (blessedly) projected from each of the apartments in that building. There was no other way. It wasn't easy, but we did it, and, all four of us sore and sweating, goddammit, that couch ended up in our living room -- in Charlotte's and my living room.

Three days before Christmas, a day before Charlotte's parents arrived in Seattle, one of those guys -- they were Terry, Darren and Frank, by the way -- Terry knocked on our door and, a bit sheepishly, asked if we would do them a favor. I said, "Are you kidding me?" and I gestured toward the couch, which sat along the wall to my right -- the only space that would hold that beast. He smiled and said, "You woulda done the same for me, son." I nodded and asked, "What do you need?" Of course, they were all going back to Texas, back home, for Christmas, and they were worried about leaving certain things in their apartment unsupervised. "I wouldn't ask," he said, "but I'd hate for something to happen."

What he wanted was for us to hold on to their guns for them. Each of them had a handgun. They were all in wooden cases, none of them were loaded (Terry pulled out each one and showed me), they just didn't want someone to break in and steal them and then use them to rob a convenience store. He didn't have to give me a reason: he had me at "Let's get this couch into your apartment." Of course I said yes. He could've said, "Can you stash our heroin until after New Years," and I probably would've said yes.

Of course, the funny thing is, I'd forgotten all about it by the time Charlotte came home from work: I guess that's the thing about repaying a debt, you don't necessarily think to flaunt it, unless you're a dink. If I'd been thinking, I would've realized Charlotte, the child of good Massachusetts liberals, only ever saw guns as one thing: bad. And I'm no fan of guns myself, but I'm also smart enough to understand that this wasn't about guns, it was about people -- good people, who also happened to own guns. I'd stashed the guns in the hall closet, on the shelf behind something that, as it turned out, Charlotte needed that night for her holiday prep work. I heard her open the closet door, rummage around, and then she asked, "What are these wooden boxes?"

That turned out to be a strange and unexpected shitstorm. How could I allow guns in our home without consulting her? I'm pretty sure I referenced the couch no fewer than nine times: the couch that wouldn't be there but for the intercession of those dreaded gun owners, the couch on which we had stretched out to watch TV, to nap, to quite gloriously fuck many times. I failed to convince her, and but for a lovely Christmas morning, the next few days she greeted me with a disappointed stoniness. Her parents arrived, and we spent a fair amount of time entertaining them. One evening her father (who I still adore to this day) and I found ourselves in a bar that was new to me, waiting for his daughter to get out of work and his wife to wrap up a conference call, and on the wall behind the bar stood a sign that, instead of "Happy Hour," announced the "Attitude Adjustment Hour" specials. I pointed it out to Barry, who appreciated it in the same way I did. Then something else caught his eye, a sight not at all unusual in Seattle in those days (and almost certainly common now): a well-dressed young Asian man, his tie slightly undone, a vodka tonic in hand. Barry, in his unassuming and endearing Mississippi drawl, said (in the old-world way even Massachusetts liberals from away could get away with if they were of his generation), "I have a lot of respect for the Asians. They work hard, and family means everything to them. I wouldn't be at all surprised or disappointed if one of my daughters ended up with one of them boys." Barry had three daughters, one of whom was married, one was undeniably going to end up with no one because she was a basket case, and the other, of course, was Charlotte. I nodded, finished my Ballard Bitter in one long pull and, since Barry was buying, waved to the bartender for another.

I never forgot that moment, not because it was my girlfriend's father telling me he didn't think I was in it for the long haul, but because he was, in his gentle way, telling me it was okay. He knew who I was, and he knew I was good for his little girl, if only for a while, but that we were different people. In a sense, he was telling me he wished he had another bite at the apple and could be me. Because believe me when I tell you, as much as Barry loved his daughters and loved his wife, there was a deep swath of Barry he'd had to put down in order to have that life. What he was saying to me was: don't put down that part of you, unless you really mean it and it's what you want for now until the end of time.

We survived Christmas unscathed, and on the evening of January 2nd Terry and Darren and Frank returned from Texas and showed up at our door to wish us a happy New Year and retrieve their guns. But they weren't just there for that: in his arms Terry held a whole smoked salmon they had just picked up down on the docks that afternoon, as a token of their thanks. He made a bit of a ceremony of presenting it not to me but to Charlotte. "That fish was caught two days ago," he told her, "and smoked just for you." She blushed, and I left her alone with them while I collected the guns from the closet.

"Did you guys have a good holiday?" I asked.

They nodded and chuckled and one of them, I forget which, suggested one of them had had a bit of a run-in with the law and that had made for quite a night. They all laughed, and I laughed with them, but I could see on their faces that they were all still back there, with their wives and girlfriends and kids, with their friends, and that they were in a sense grateful to be laughing at the dark, faintly insidious stuff because now they were back to facing long months away from home and to remember the good stuff would make them feel that much farther away from what mattered. We shuffled our feet the way men do, though I was anything but a man then, and we said our bashful goodbyes and they went back to their apartment, and Charlotte and I settled into our massive couch and talked about how we would feast on that bountiful salmon. Sometime later we climbed into bed and made -- I'll just say it, fuck it -- tender early twenties grown-up, crazy-for-each-other love. In two days I turned twenty-three, and less than three weeks later I was walking away from her standing in a pair of pajamas I'd bought for her at Victoria's Secret (cute, flannel, not at all sexy except on her), she was sobbing and I was on my way to Tacoma to get on a plane to fly back to Maine, away from her. Because, of course, Barry was right: I wasn't the guy for his daughter. Not even an unbroken string of Attitude Adjustment Hours could have fixed that.

No Heroes

When I was a kid, we had a crappy black and white television with a pair of rabbit ears (tipped with aluminum foil, the advantages of which I still fail to understand or accept -- it always seemed like an ineffective panacea to me) perched on top. Under optimum conditions, we got three channels to varying degrees: PBS, CBS, and sometimes NBC, sometimes ABC, but never both. Watching TV was almost always an ultra low-def experience, but we didn't care. We didn't watch a ton of television anyway, certainly not by today's standards, and we barely knew any better (I think I was eleven or twelve the first time I saw cable television, at somebody else's house, of course). What we did watch pretty regularly, however, my older brother and I, was college football on Saturday afternoons. I preferred it to the professional game: the ball seemed to be just a little bigger than most of the players could comfortably handle, and for the most part the players on the field seemed, to me at least, mostly evenly matched. There was also an element to the game that I appreciated even then: there is no playoff system in Division I college football, which means that every game matters, and you can see that in the way the kids go after every play. You can't simply limp through a nine and seven season and then maybe make unexpected waves in the playoffs like teams can in the NFL. In college football, you win, you make it to a Bowl game, and maybe if the pollsters feel kindly toward you, you're crowned national champion. As a kid, for all those reasons, I appreciated and enjoyed the game.

Living in the hinterlands with limited viewing options, we saw the marquee games. There was a lot of Notre Dame, lots of Ohio State and Michigan and USC and UCLA, plenty of Alabama and Tennessee and the dreaded Florida universities (hate them all, without exception, in every sport, in every way), Texas and Oklahoma and Nebraska. And there was a whole lot of Penn State.

I loved Penn State football immediately. The uniforms were stark: bright white helmets with no adornment other than a dark blue stripe running down the center, dark blue jerseys sporting nothing -- nothing, not the player's name on the back, not the school's name on the front -- and plain white pants. Those uniforms represented not only a fierce solemnity but also an unequivocal sense of unqualified unity: no one player was above any other, and if you had to ask what team it was, you should probably just go watch golf. Seeing that sea of dark blue and white amassed in the mouth of the tunnel preparing to storm the field at the beginning of the game -- that was a sight to behold. And always, at the front of that mob, stood a tiny, bespectacled man in shirt and tie. At first glance he looked as out of place among those padded and helmeted giants as would a lawn gnome, or my mom, but when he took that little hop step and ran across the field, the mad corn-fed horde of his players swarming around him, there was no mistaking who he was or what he meant to those young men. He was Coach.

There are a lot of things I can tell you about Joe Paterno. His entire coaching career was spent at Penn State (although for about three weeks in 1972 he was technically the coach of the New England Patriots, before he changed his mind and decided to remain at PSU), where he won 409 games, the most ever by a Division I coach. His teams won 24 of the 37 Bowl games in which they played. They won two national championships, most recently in 1986 when they went undefeated and then beat top-ranked Miami in the Fiesta Bowl. Sports Illustrated named Paterno its Sportsman of the Year as a result, the first time a college football coach had been so recognized.

I can also tell you that, in a sport that is notoriously rife with unbridled corruption, his program has remained remarkably free of NCAA scoldings. An impressive percentage of his players actually graduate, in part, no doubt, because Paterno preached "success with honor," challenging his players to succeed in the classroom as well as on the field. For more than four decades, with rare exceptions, the name Joe Paterno was synonymous with dignity and honor and doing things the right way. I admired the man a great deal, so much so, in fact, that when his program fell on hard times in the last decade and many clamored for him to step down, suggesting that at his age (he is now 84) the game had passed him by, I maintained that he had more than earned the right to walk away from the game when he was goddamned good and ready. Because some things are more important than winning and losing football games.

Last weekend my buddy Travis, a talented and thoughtful sports writer, mentioned to me that two administrators at Penn State -- the athletic director and one of the university's vice-presidents -- had been charged with perjury in connection with the investigation into sexual abuse charges against Penn State's former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky. I won't lay the Sandusky story out for you, it is by now front and center and you can find out everything you ever thought you wanted to know with a quick and easy Google search. I will tell you that when I heard charges had been brought against two high-level PSU administrators, my first thought was, "This is going to get very, very bad." Still, for another two days, I didn't believe it would get bad for Joe Paterno. I didn't believe that because he was Joe Paterno, the guy who did things the right way. He was an honorable man, and honorable men fail less frequently than other men. They certainly don't fail when the margin between right and wrong is nonexistent.

The details of what went on at Penn State are now coming fast and furious. The facts that appear to be beyond debate are that a grown man was sexually abusing young boys, and doing so for many years. That man continues to assert his innocence, but too much has already come to light for that to be even remotely believable. It is also irrefutable that a number of men -- at least one of whom caught Sandusky in the act of sodomizing a pre-teen boy -- knew what was going on and chose not to report what they knew to the police. Instead, they banished the perpetrator from the sacred halls of the Penn State football complex. They knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man was sexually abusing children, and the best they could do was to get him out of their sight. Get him away from their beloved football program before his behavior tarnished what they held dear. One of those men, it turns out, was none other than the Coach, Mr. Joe Paterno.

I have posed this question to a number of friends this week: if I have never faced a given moral question, do I necessarily have the right to judge another for making what I deem to be the wrong choice? I've never been in Joe Paterno's shoes, confronted with the news that a co-worker and long-time friend has done something abhorrent (or even just pretty bad). I've never been in the position of then graduate assistant Mike McQueary, who in 2002 walked in on Jerry Sandusky raping a young boy in the shower. What I believe about myself is what I think all of us believe about ourselves: that had I been McQueary, I would, at the very least, have gotten that kid the fuck out of that situation. And had I been Joe Paterno, I would not have been even remotely content telling my so-called superiors what I knew and leaving it at that. I believe this of myself because I know that at a certain point it ceases to be about who you are in relation to the victim or the perpetrator, it becomes about what you know. And if you know but you don't tell, you become part of the act itself. For my own sake I answer the above question on that basis. But that only leads to another question: if I understand it this way, and presumably so do most if not all of you, how is it that a handful of men who were in the position to actually do something about it didn't see it at all?

As this story has swirled out of control over the last few days, calls for Paterno's swift dismissal grew from firm suggestions at the periphery to shrill cries from nearly every corner. Late yesterday morning Joe Paterno announced that he would retire at the end of the season, offering to spare his university's board the uncomfortable chore of deciding his fate. To their extremely limited credit, a few hours later that board announced that Paterno was fired, immediately. I say "limited credit" because those trustees still have a tremendous amount of work to do. Because somebody at long last has to step up and own this. Because somebody has to insist there are things that are way more important than winning or losing football games.

Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." I agree with Burke in principle, but I would rephrase it this way: All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for otherwise good men to prove they are nothing of the sort.

So much for success with honor. Go to hell, Joe, you fucking bum.

Tongue, Meet Cheek

First I'd like to give a big shout-out to the guy who found his way to my blog by typing the search term "womensuckstories." How ya doing, buddy? You enjoying the blog? Yeah? Good. Now go eat a bag of dicks. Asshole. Seriously, grow up, you fucktard. I'm going to find you now: I'm going to type in the search term "guywithsmallpenisandsmallerbraincan'tseewhygirlsdon'tlikehim." Yeah, women suck. They must if they can't see the diamond in the rough that is you. Asswipe.

Just so you all know, I am not and don't pretend to be a feminist. Honestly, I don't even know what it means -- I certainly don't know what it means to be a feminist dude. It strikes me as a potentially slick and disgusting way to get women to like you. At the same time, I can't imagine women being genuinely enthusiastic about the results over the long haul: is that really what you want? A man who, by virtue of having minored in women's studies, is inherently more sensitive to your plight? I'm not going to lie: that feels disingenuous to me. Because here's the thing: he's still a man, and no matter how in touch with your feelings or his he might be, he can only sympathize, he can never truly empathize. And don't you really want a man to be a man, in the end? Those of you who do actually like guys -- isn't that one of the things you love about us? Our man-ness? Our quality of being "other?" because I can tell you without the least hint of smartassery: your otherness is one of the reasons I dig women. You get to experience some of the world in a way I never will, and I'm into that. It's compelling, it's rich, it's cool. For me, looking back over my four-plus decades, I'd say it has been and continues to be essential.

So I'm not a feminist, though to the extent that I understand it, I don't see anything philosophically wrong with feminism. Off the top of my head, the only -ism I can think of that is truly problematic would have to be fascism. That's just rude. I'm not a big fan of catholicism, but just because it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway, moving on: in a broad sense, I'm an individualist, more or less in the sense that the transcendentalists meant it, though, and less as a political stance. I believe in the power and autonomy and mutability and potential of the individual. I believe a lot of people suck, but not because they're women or Chinese or tall or left-handed or protestant or gay or hairy or talkative or physically weak or green-eyed or eleven years old or an exterminator or whatever: just a lot of people suck, because they're sucky people. They are individually, as a product of the traits that make up their respective characters, sucky people. But that still leaves quite a few cool people in the world (especially now that we've topped seven billion; think about that for a second, man: that is a whole lot of fucking going on). And this may shock you, but I'm going to say it anyway: some of my best friends are left-handed.

One left-handed friend in particular has had it pretty rough over the years. He was ridiculed very early on because he couldn't master the art of cutting shapes out of colored construction paper with the safety scissors in kindergarten -- this was before the engineers at MIT designed a pair of left-handed scissors (because, of course, all eggheads are left-handed, so they had a stake in this experience). Well, technically, they designed the first pair of left-handed scissors in 1951, but based on the original prototype, which included a small nuclear reactor, the device was far too expensive to mass-produce. It took some time to work out the bugs, and they weren't available by the time my friend reached kindergarten. It got worse, of course. Sister Beneficent beat him severely each time he reached for his pencil with his devil hand. He quit Little League because all he'd ever wanted to be was a catcher (big Pudge Fisk fan), and although they managed to find him a left-handed catcher's mitt (miracles do happen), he ultimately lost the position because half the time he tried to throw the ball back to the pitcher he ended up bouncing it off the helmet of the kid standing in the batter's box -- because, in those days, all good boys batted from the right side of the plate. The shame proved to be too much for him. By the time he got to high school and really discovered girls, he understood immediately he would have to master the art of heavy petting with his right hand. By all accounts, he pulled it off with remarkable frequency and great success. But it never felt right to him, not being his true self, and soon after college he dropped out of life, choosing to live alone in a remote mountain cabin, where he dreamt of a day when left-handed people enjoyed the same experience of the world's many joys as right-handers. Last I heard, he's still up there waiting. I believe he's writing a book about it, but honestly, who's going to read it, typed all left-handed and all. Poor bastard.

And I sympathize, but I would never pretend to know what it's like for him to be left-handed in what he perceives as a right-handed world. I can tell him we've made some strides. Christ, we've actually had a couple openly left-handed presidents in the last twenty years. I once dated a left-handed woman for about a month -- yeah, it was kind of weird at first, but what can I say, I was in the right place mentally to let a little strange into my life. Just the other night I had a left-handed bartender, if you can believe that. I ordered a Rumford martini, and I watched him start to pour the coffee brandy left-handed, then pause and glance my way a little chagrined. "Go ahead," I assured him, "it's cool."

The point is, I'm a person, you're a person, let's just take each other that way. Yes, I'm interested in your struggles, your stories, your perspective. But I promise you, I will never be more interested in you as a member of a group or a movement than I am in you as a human being. And I think sensitive, new-age guys are willfully ignorant of the complexity of the world. Which means they pretty much suck. Turn a corner, folks. At some point the road ahead needs to stop being entirely dictated by the road behind. That's something I would like to be around to see.

Gigantic

Pixies. If you were there last night, you know what I mean when I say: Pixies.

I've always told people I was listening to the Pixies in high school, but that's impossible: I graduated in 1987, the year Come On Pilgrim was released, and believe me, even had the album come out on January 1 (I think it was actually sometime in April), there's no way it would have found its way to my ears before I graduated in June because, here in the wilds of Maine in those days, without internet or decent radio, there's no chance whatsoever I would've stumbled across it. It's an honest mistake, though: except for the fact that I lived in a dorm room and had slightly easier access to booze and charming women, high school and college weren't substantially different animals.

So it was college, Christmas break of probably sophomore year, and I was hanging out with my buddy Josh. We spent some pretty choice weekends at his parents' house our last year of high school, filching his dad's Silver Bullets and playing ping-pong on the impossibly warped table in his basement -- seriously, this table was hilarious, both ends curled madly, such that the center of each court was a good two inches lower than mid- and end-court. Trick shots were not just at a premium, they were essential. We were improvisers, and we were young aspiring drunks, and we were almost without exception concerned with but two subjects: sports and girls. We both knew a lot about one and enough about the other so that our analyses and theories and budding philosophies easily carried us well into the night, up to or just shy of the point where the Silver Bullets won out and we had to call it. Even though the frequency of those beer-washed, wacky-pong weekends diminished after high school, we managed to recapture them one school break at a time all through college. Maybe the tone changed a little as we grew incrementally more sophisticated, more worldly, but that was a difference without a distinction. The music definitely changed, and that mattered.

Josh can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he had Come On Pilgrim (the song "Caribou" rings with the recollection of that night, but memory is like a self-governing neighboring dominion, its spaces arranged as it sees fit regardless of whatever sense of jurisdiction the conscious brain supposes it's entitled to, so perhaps I'm wrong) and I'm confident he had Surfer Rosa because there's no doubt in my mind that was the first time I heard "Gigantic" and "Where Is My Mind?", two songs on my personal all-time favorites list, without qualification. Regardless of the details, the love affair started that night, and the ardor has not been diminished by time. Cheap beer, an improvised table game, a best friend and a band that was a true original are all intertwined with my experience of two smart guys with big, dopey hearts trying in our way to figure out girls. That's a party with one hell of a soundtrack.

It's true, last night we would have liked to see them play longer, although it wasn't a short show, really -- ninety minutes, and they did two encores. But shit, man, they're all between the ages of forty-five and fifty. I'm not quite forty-three, and I was getting worn out just tapping my foot and swaying. So I forgive them for wanting to, as Kim put it when she was saying goodnight to the band, get on the bus and go right to sleep. And of course we could all rattle off a handful of songs we wished they'd played, but what can one expect from a band that wrote almost nothing but songs we love? Anybody got a seven-hour show in them? No regrets.

Beyond a certain age -- and I don't know what that age is, I only know I passed it at some point -- there aren't a lot of things that can make you feel like a kid again. I suspect fantasy baseball camp is like that: you spend a week taking batting practice, shagging flies, and stepping onto a real baseball diamond beside guys you grew up watching play the game. Being there when your daughter is born, and then watching her become a new person on an almost daily basis that first year of her life recalls a sense of perpetual wonder unlike any you've known since your own childhood, when the world was revealing itself to you in increments. Or such as these: Watching a live performance by a band you've loved for more than twenty years, one that never once tried to reinvent itself, just walked away when they felt like they were done with each other, and then came back together and said, "These are great songs, let's go kick some ass . . ." Seeing your name on something you put some of your heart into that someone was kind enough to publish . . . Realizing when you open up your email and find yourself looking into a certain girl's eyes that you're not actually frozen in your own personal emotional wasteland and that you really, really, really adore her . . .

I've never been to baseball camp, and my lovely daughter is all of sixteen years old now. Nonetheless, beginning around nine o'clock last night, and showing no signs of stopping yet, goddamn do I feel like a kid right now.

Breakdown Breakup

It's time for me to come clean: I've been living a lie. I thought I could handle it, this leading of two separate lives, but I was wrong. It's tearing me apart and I can't go on deceiving you.

How long has it been going on, you ask? Since last Thursday. Yes, I know, I know: how can my feelings be so certain, so strong after such a short time? Sometimes you just know. There is simply no explanation beyond that: I just know.

No, I'm not breaking up with you. Not really. I mean, I suppose it's up to you to decide: do you still want me if you know my heart is divided (more or less equally, I swear) between you and another? Is affection necessarily diminished because it is split in two?

You haven't done anything wrong. It's not y-- Ouch! No, sorry, I won't say that. Fuck, man. Don't hit me. When did you start hitting? Jesus.

Just say it? You want to hear me say the words? Are you going to hit me again? Promise? Alright, fine, I will: I'm writing for another website.

There -- are you happy? Do you feel better? You kind of look like you want to punch me in the throat. No? Good.

A name? You want a name? Look, come on, this is . . . it's not helping.

The Nervous Breakdown. Okay? I said it. The other site is called The Nervous Breakdown.

Don't cry. Come on, don't.

Look, I didn't plan on this. I didn't make it happen. It just sort of . . . happened.

Peaches introduced us. Look, he didn't know either. He just thought we'd dig each other but, you know, not like that. He didn't know. Okay, that's a lie: he totally knew what he was doing. Of course he doesn't hate you. He loves you, too. He just wants us both to be happy.

Of course I still love you.

No, I don't want to leave you.

We can make this work.

How? I don't know. You'll just have to trust me.

Nothing's ending. It's just becoming something other than it was. Something better. Something more. In my beat-up little heart I truly believe that.

Of course I'll hold you. Come here. Just put your head right there on my chest. Close your eyes. Shhh. See? This is good, right?

Oh yeah, one other thing: I'm gay.

I am so not gay. But wouldn't that have been funny?