1. I’m staying with my parents in a large motel room whose bathroom connects to an office where I work. I realize this is very convenient because today I need to go to work just till lunchtime, then leave for my wedding. I haven’t really given it a lot of thought, but I decide I should at least put on a different set of clothes than I wore yesterday. I also shave.
As I’m about to go to work, it suddenly occurs to me that I’m not sure I ever got legally divorced. I panic and ask my mother. Ma says that’s all been taken care of; then she starts telling me all the things she always hated about my first wife, including that her grammar was too good. This embarrasses me a little.
2. I’m stopping at an Internet cafe with my sister. Before she checks her E-mail, I decide to watch a movie trailer that someone left running on the computer. It’s for some science-fiction horror movie starring Patrick Stewart and Danny Glover; the latter is getting devoured by a small wrinkly alien while Stewart chuckles in a trance. It looks disturbing as hell and I apologize to my sister for scaring her.
I should’ve known better than to look because now I’m in the damn movie. I’m on a spaceship with about a dozen co-workers. Unfortunately most of them are just standing around uselessly getting in the way of my escape, because they looked at the monster—and when you look at this monster, it’s so fascinating that you can’t look away.
My girlfriend got me to get out of the house today (while she was running out the door to work, and I was standing there looking dazed from reading the news) by reminding me that the California Academy of Sciences is downtown now and that I should go to the aquarium.
It's not my favorite place (little, harshly designed, tanks too small) but it was good to see penguins and frogs and fish. The soft-shell turtle is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time.
There was a big ant display too, and for some mysterious reason possibly related to current events, this description of Polyergus breviceps jumped right out at me and made me sad:
Their curved jaws are so specialized for fighting that they can't feed themselves, care for their young or dig nests. As a result, these ants cannot survive without workers captured from another colony.
I'm not good at writing on certain subjects, so, with permission, here's an E-mail I got today. The author is a local guy I met on Tuesday, when he graciously hosted a volunteer get-out-the-vote phone party in his apartment.
Hey folks,
I meant to write everyone after the party and thank y'all for helping, but I was so saddened and shocked by what happened I really didn't know what to say. I felt like I'd swallowed something big and dark and choking.
But in the meantime some of you have written back and said kind things, and it has greatly warmed my heart. Let me just say that it was an honor to spend election day with a bunch of committed people, all of you friendly, hopeful and decent. I think my first despairing feeling on the morning after was that we'd wasted our time, been tilting at windmills. But after getting a few emails from you and remembering how it felt seeing all of you stream into my home and make out of a group of people who didn't know each other and who'd never done something like this a laughing, supportive team reaching thousands of people in mere hours, I felt a sting of hope. How, in the end, can such a thing be defeated?
It seems that hope does, in fact, sting, and more often than not, hope is disappointed. It's just the nature of things.
I tried to think of something out of this to salvage, to believe that despite so much of the country being driven by unshakeable intolerance, confusion and despair, we still have something to hold onto. And, in the end, the only image I had was of all of you and my family and friends. We know what love is, and how it doesn't decide where to reside based on sexual preference or race or class or anything else. We know that diversity enlivens and enriches. And we are young and they mostly are not and hopefully our tolerance will win in the end.
I'm sure as time goes on and our grieving ebbs a little, more ideas about what to do next will arise. But for now I'm just glad that there are so many of you. This is not a sporting event, when we lose the season isn't over and we don't all go home. We're still surrounded by loved ones who are gonna need our help in the troubled times to come. Mourn, but be gentle, and be strong.
Don't move to Canada. I mean, unless you really have to. And if you're gonna hang around here frozen with dread or doing nothing but yelling how we're all doomed, then yeah, please do move.
I have to say, though it's been nice to see a lot of folks get interested in and passionate about politics for the first time over the last four years, it's also frustrating because so many of them are stuck in a bubble where nothing has any history or context, so everything is the newest best worst most hopeful most hopeless thing ever, like when you discovered your favorite band in high school, or the first time you heard of the second law of thermodynamics.
There are people of my age who have no idea what it was like for people of my parents' age to see Ronald Reagan get elected President in 1980—hell, some people of my parents' age don't seem to have noticed either. (For the record: he was an ignorant evil man with a criminal gang who killed a lot of people and took us to the brink of nuclear war, and it wasn't hard in 1980 to know exactly what he was.) There are people who latched onto the Democrats or the Greens four years ago as if those organizations are the only ones who ever did or will ever do anything good for the country, and who think anyone not in their crew is blind or irrelevant or a filthy traitor. And there are a lot of people who seem a lot more comfortable with the idea of an apocalyptic showdown than with a slow hard slog, or who think a slow hard slog is in itself evidence of permanent defeat, even though that's how all previous generations had to do it.
Then again... my high school sucked, and probably yours did too. The history books mostly left off after 1945, and we were encouraged to think that the last big problem this country had was Vietnam, and that after that, everyone became sensible and pretty much agreed on what was important. And I went to college in the '90s, when it was easy for a lot of people—the ones who were getting all those new jobs, anyway—to get complacent as hell and think that Bill Clinton had magical powers that would surely carry us smoothly into the sunset, regardless of the irrelevant antics of a few Gingriches and McVeighs who just didn't understand how great everything was gonna be from now on. When I first heard a Bay Area friend refer to the Clinton years as "a golden age", I kind of wanted to barf; I mean, we were admittedly both stoned at the time, but it just seemed like a lame, arrogant rationalization of the way a lot of people didn't think they had much reason to pay attention back then. It's sad but understandable that it takes war and terrorism and unemployment to get people's attention. Unfortunately, when the buzz of apocalyptic fear and righteous anger—a novelty for many of us—becomes the whole story, and the struggles of those who went before us are filed away with school days, what's left is not something that'll carry us past the next defeat.
Election day was also Día de los Muertos here. When I walked in the procession for the dead, I was thinking mostly about people I'd recently met who were done away with by disease. But taking part in a political system—or even choosing not to take part in it—is about what the dead have left to us, and what we the living have been doing with it.
It's a big house we've been living in for a long time. If some of your housemates have been trashing it and now they've set some of the rooms on fire, there might be some point when you'd need to flee instead of helping to save the place... but you'd better at least acknowledge that you're leaving a bunch of other families in there too, and all your food, and all your photos, and your grandmother's ashes; not to mention that the people across the street might not be totally ready for you to move into their house. Just don't stand around in the mess going "This is like when that other house burned down in the '30s! They didn't manage to stop it, so how can we? I'm gonna run! I'm gonna run any minute now! It's not my house anyway..."
I'll get down off my high horse now, but I just remembered: one of my grandma's expressions for anything extreme was "like a house on fire". It was usually ambiguously positive: "Those two got along like a house on fire!" Didn't necessarily mean a bad end—just that you'd better be paying attention.
dear Tim Kreider:
Well, in the spirit of reconciliation, let me say I think Michael Lerner is full of shit. I mean, it's still a nicely written essay, and he's kind of right about the thinking behind nominating Kerry (though, see below *). But, first, he ignores the Right's even greater contempt and opportunism: why would they have sold Bush as a "compassionate conservative" unless they knew that, as Lerner says of liberals, "if they were to ever present their own highest vision ... the American public would reject it and then they'd be out of power"? They play up their ideology in selected venues, but if they know if they pushed God'n'guns in the same style nationwide, people would freak out, and not just the people who are already freaking out. The only difference, when Democrats give fire-breathing speeches to a union crowd or an anti-war crowd and then turn "moderate" for a general audience, is that the Democrats aren't as good at flat-out lying about their goals and their record.
(Also: how the hell has the Right's ideology become "more intellectually coherent" in the last 40 years? They haven't appealed to the middle class and the billionaires, the churches and the Birchers, the small-government zealots and the crony capitalists, by articulating a higher vision; they've done it by convincing each of the above that it's really the favored interest group no matter what else they may say or do. And also by getting a bunch of propagandists into the media, though Lerner seems to think that to notice this is to insult the public for being gullible, or something.)
But by the end of the essay he's gone off the rails completely into a type of smug paranoia that's more generally seen on the Right. You'd think if Democrats in politics and the media were all a bunch of contemptuous atheists, Lerner would be able to find one or two examples of "the contempt for religion that gets so frequently expressed" other than Bill Maher. (True, he could cite you, but I'm not sure it's fair to call Tim Kreider typical of mainstream liberalism—sorry.) He can't, because what he's really talking about is that he and Tikkun don't get enough respect from other leftists, and the only reason he can imagine for this is that they despise his spiritual enlightenment. It sounds like nothing so much as a college Republican bemoaning atheist lesbian bias in the Women's Studies program. Unfortunately many of Lerner's critiques of progressivism end up falling into this rut, and it's why I became unable to read Tikkun despite basically agreeing with their goals. (It'd be silly for me to grouse about Michael Lerner, who has no influence to speak of, if I didn't think he was talking about important things.)
He's also very selective in his demand for visionary ideals—he's been saying for years that although the Palestinian cause is just, they should avoid asking for too much justice too soon because it'll scare the Israeli mainstream. And his little "word of self-criticism" at the end is welcome, but if he realized he was being unfair and ignoring important aspects of reality, why the hell didn't he just edit his writing?
* I do have one bone to pick with your own comments. In summarizing Lerner, you said "'we' (antiwar liberals) didn't actually want Kerry for President, we just figured maybe 'they' (the gung-ho knuckle-draggers in the Red States) would go for him". That's what he's saying all right, but it's not "his sharpest point", because it ignores people like me for whom "they" = moderate-to-conservative Democrats all over the place. I disagree with those guys too but I don't think they're knuckle-draggers, and there should've been enough of them to elect a guy like Kerry—who wasn't my choice either, but was at least a competent politician and not a criminal idiot, and got my vote last week with no second thoughts.
And oh yeah, your remarks about "East Coast" as a slur were right on. No Democrat would dare to talk about Bush's "Texas redneck values" that way, and I have a really hard time imagining that any of these salt-of-the-earth Republicans, who were supposedly so outraged by liberal condescension, have ever in their lives heard any public figure express, even in the politest form, any of the sentiments in "Fuck the South". I believe some guy may have honestly felt like he did, just like I believe some guy may have honestly felt disrespected or disadvantaged for being white; but I'm not gonna feel guilty about it.
I never knew we had such great books in that little shed out back! I haven’t read these in years. And whoa—there are some Moomintroll books here that I’ve never even read!
This one’s really peculiar: blue denimy cover that’s only half stitched together, no pictures, looks kind of like an engineering text. It’s a sort of Jansson mini-anthology, with a few Moomin stories mixed in with political essays. It’s dated 1945. And reading the very lengthy introduction, I finally get the picture: this is a limited edition printed up for pharmaceutical trade shows! Apparently, Tove Jansson suffered from exotic autoimmune diseases, and Pfizer made the drugs that kept her alive in her youth.
I could spend all day here sorting and browsing. I wonder if I should move the books into the house to protect them from the weather...
Oh shit—the house—there’s a party starting in there in about five minutes, and I haven’t done a thing all day to get things ready. I realize this just as my sister looks into the shed to ask what’s up. I start screaming FUCK! and pounding my hand into the door really hard again and again and again while she just gives me this “not again” look.
This is late, but I wanted to write about it because it was purely good:
So on Hallowe'en, the day after the big party at my sweetie's house, Claud and I went to do something nifty that made me feel lucky to be kind of a geek.
OK, the background here is that Claud and his big wall of science-fiction paperbacks are the reason I got to know the aforementioned sweetie (since he met her at a store full of such things), and the first time we exchanged more than three words was in front of Claud and those paperbacks. We were talking about this crazy book he'd loaned me, and then somehow we all got to looking at a big map of San Francisco and talking about the history of the city and the sand dunes that used to go as far east as Divisadero, and I said: oh I don't suppose either of you know that Fritz Leiber book Our Lady of Darkness...
A little later I said: oh you know I just randomly found on the Internet this guy who sometimes does a walking tour based on that book. I never have much luck getting people to go to anything, but again I got an unusually enthusiastic response. When the day came, my lady was unable to go—she had a real good excuse though, having been asked to read her writing in front of a crowd—but Claud was the first one there; I was dragging my heels a little due to some kind of hangover-related condition.
Don Herron is a good tour guide. I would recommend his guidebook The Literary World of San Francisco and Its Environs except that I've barely managed to read five pages of it so far—there's just so much, and reading about all these places in the city makes me want to put the book down and go outside. But if you go to the source, you get not only a nice walk and the company of a few other weirdos, but a whole lot of gossip (Herron having been a friend of Leiber) that might not make it into print. And since one of the other walkers was John Law (walking the two cutest wiener-dog puppies in the world), there was an extra layer of stories of Bay Area oddity that sometimes had nothing to do with Leiber except that they evoked the boozy tall-tale conversational scenes in Our Lady pretty well.
The first two-thirds of the tour were in a small area around Geary & Hyde, where Leiber lived and set his book, and where Dashiell Hammett lived and set The Maltese Falcon—not a coincidence, since according to Herron, The Maltese Falcon was what got Leiber interested in local history after he emerged from a three-year drinking binge and started to notice that he'd moved to San Francisco. It's a beautiful neighborhood (if you like big buildings—I'm still glad I live somewhere with more sky) and I'd never paid attention to it before.
Near the flabbergasting building that used to be the El Cortez Hotel, we had an eerie moment when a guy walked by who looked a whole lot like Leiber, except two feet shorter. A few minutes later (and I know it was Hallowe'en, but still) a slender elegant woman passed us with her face invisible behind a black veil, which, if you've read the book, is very creepy—especially in daylight. Fortunately(?) no such apparitions followed us up to Corona Heights; that was just plain fun, with little dogs going nuts as they hurdled the stairs, people taking turns climbing up on the rocks, and me sneaking in a cellphone call to my sweetie from a spot that belongs to us.
The crowd who'd been there 15 years ago got to see Leiber appear up on the hill in a big black cloak declaiming "A CURSE upon Master Clark Ashton Smith and all his heirs..." Yeah, I'm always coming to the party late, but I'm not really complaining.
1.
Gangsters (the old movie kind, Italian/Irish thugs with fedoras) are searching my house, so I’m hiding out in the back yard with my friends. Unfortunately we’re really bad hiders: some of us are behind a very small hedge, others (including me) are just hunched under a card table near the back door, hoping no one will look down. The thugs are pretty stupid, so they don’t see us... but then my dumbest friend, who seems to be Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons, says proudly “I’m hiding!” The mob boss, a little old weary guy, walks over to me and says he’s calling the whole thing off, out of sympathy for my late grandmother.
Also, although it didn’t seem to matter, I was apparently Batman.
2.
I’m sitting at a cafe table and a gangster (the new movie kind, a young black guy in a sharp suit) comes over and starts telling me how I’m on his boss’s list and I’m gonna die unless I give him a good excuse right now. I argue loudly that it’s all a mistake. I must be pretty good at not showing fear, because the cafe patrons are entertained and rooting for me from a safe distance. But for some reason I’m really not that worried.
After I excuse myself for a minute and go over to the mall, I remember why I’m not worried: I can fly.
I test it out with a couple of slow backflips to the ceiling (surprising a passing cop). Works fine. Then out to the front steps and glide down to the sidewalk. There’s a whole college campus out here, lots of open space and low buildings and big green hills. I start to do some serious flying.
Basically you just inhale while doing a small mental shift that feels like putting something in gear near your heart [I can do this right now while awake; I don’t levitate, but it feels good], and you start moving in whichever direction you want; if you don’t focus, you go up, so it’s easy to get alarmingly high. You need to keep doing the shift every few breaths or you’ll disengage and start to drop, but I’m not worried; it works every time.
Joy!
It wouldn't be totally proper for me to use the Internet to encourage people to trespass on a construction site, but I can certainly say this:
If you bike all the way around Golden Gate Park, at some point you really can't miss the big, big, big huge giant mass of sand that someone has bulldozed into a bunch of steep peaks and left there for unknown reasons. And supposing that someone left the fence open, and it had rained a few days ago so as to make the sand nice and firm, you might be right in thinking that climbing up there and running and leaping around would be the most fun you've had with your clothes on in a long long time. That's all.
Holy shit. I totally forgot that over a year ago, I signed up for a free login on eHarmony.com because my then-co-worker, who was apparently checking out every dating service in existence, kept raving about what a clever scientific system they had. 300 questionnaire pages later, I couldn't be bothered to read any more and I forgot all about it. Now they started sending me a frightening newsletter. These are just a few small excerpts:
Fun fact about your narrator: so, the aforementioned temp-job lady who loved eHarmony? For a little while I almost tried to put some sort of moves on her, because she was a cute redhead and she was always hanging around my desk when she wasn't reorganizing the supply closet, and I used to daydream about hanging out in the supply closet with her... who knows, we might've ended up on the Leno show... But I did do her one favor, which was to tell her that this "Landmark Forum" someone had recommended to her was really Est, so she might not want to go there, since they don't let you take bathroom breaks in Est and she was always taking a lot of bathroom breaks.eHarmony's 2004 Dream Date couple, Claire Schuster and Haroot Hakopian, spent a romantic weekend enjoying Los Angeles and seeing the city's sights. On Friday, Claire and Haroot paid an inspirational visit to the eHarmony offices in Pasadena, where they met with the entire staff and shared their story. [...blah blah...] They were VIP guests of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. [...blah blah blah blah blah...] Claire and Haroot spent the day taking a VIP tour of Universal Studios. [...blah blah blah...] Perhaps the best perk of all was the VIP "no waiting in line" policy.
In July, eHarmony announced the release of an exciting new audio CD series, Finding the Love of Your Life. This 12-CD [YES TWELVE FUCKING CDs] coaching series works hand in hand with your eHarmony matching experience to help you find and grow your soul mate relationship.
The series allows you to spend time with eHarmony founder Neil Clark Warren, who shares his personal insights in hundreds of areas that will make you a wiser dater and raise your relationship IQ. ... [A SAMPLE OF NEIL'S WRITING FOLLOWS:]
"Hi, I'm Robert, and I'm from Albuquerque."
"Hi, I'm Nancy from Little Rock."
(Secret Number One, Robert: Nancy has some wonderful attributes.)
(Secret Number Two: In every encounter with Nancy, look hard for at least one of these attributes.)
Robert: "So, how's the convention going for you, Nancy?"
Nancy: "Well, I found that last speech sort of strangely interesting."
(Secret Number Three: Ask a question to lure one of these attributes to the surface.)
Robert: "Strangely interesting?"
Nancy: "Yeah, I've got to hurry up and make you feel good about being yourself so that you can get to work making me feel good about being me. Boy, you've got to think fast, don't ya? You've got to be an interpersonal rocket scientist."
(Secret Number Four: When you encounter one of these attributes, even a hint of one, reinforce it with attention - laughter, appreciation or respect.)
Robert: "Ha, ha, ha ... that's good!"
Nancy: "By the way, I'm sort of new at this; have I made you feel good about being yourself yet?"
Robert: "Ha, ha, ha ... you're funny!" [NANCY SHOOTS ROBERT]
Well now here's a dilemma. I really wanna be happy about Soft Skull because they're putting out all kinds of good books by good people. And they pulled themselves up from near ruin in a pretty admirable way.
On the other hand, they just did something really crappy to a friend of mine and the very very promising book she's been working on for I don't know how long. Megan is a great cartoonist and, based on everything I'd heard about the making of this anthology, she had the makings of a great editor. I'd been hearing there were problems ever since the books failed to show up at the release party, but now she's posted the details: holy shit, what a fuckup.
So the publisher gave the book to an apparently incompetent printer and told them to go ahead with a very wrong process which made a lot of the art look like bad photocopies. Megan begged them to reprint the book correctly, and when they wouldn't, she offered to reimburse Soft Skull for the cost of the print run, if they just wouldn't put this garbled thing out in the world with the contributors' names on it. And they said no thanks, it's fine this way.
I'm not surprised that the original mistake could happen with a publisher who doesn't have tons of experience with comics, and maybe Megan could've averted this by slowing down the process to re-ask every question five times... if she'd known that she was dealing with total goofballs. But this final decision to go ahead and break the editor's heart even though she was willing to pay for the whole mess herself... is just... well it's not very classy, is it.
And on the Soft Skull website there's a small note that "due to a problem with the printer," you can't buy the book from them online—go to Amazon.com instead. As another angry guy pointed out, "they're embarrassed enough not to offer the ruined books on their site, but not embarrassed enough to refrain from dumping those ruined books on retailers. Nice."
If anyone with closer knowledge of these folks could explain this in a way that might piss me off less, go for it.