Oh no! Gang violence in Uptown!

I am so very sick of the whining class complaining about gangs in Uptown. Like it’s new. Frikkin’ morons. Gangs are not new to Uptown.

Young, affluent, white people are new in Uptown. People of color being out-numbered by comparatively rich people of Western-European heritage is pretty new in Uptown. White people with college educations whose sense of entitlement burns hot enough to power up their videocameras and blogs—they’re new in Uptown. I moved from Bucktown years ago to get away from the Children of Privilege. Now they’re making serious inroads in whitening up and riching up Uptown, and they’re not about to put up with the signs of social decay and violence that accompanies affordable housing in a capitalist society.

Nope. They want a good deal on a two-bedroom condo and ready access to cheap weed. But they don’t want the angry young black men on the corner who ensure real estate values stay low and the weed stays accessible.

Whom exactly did you think would be roaming the streets of your new neighborhood in the middle of the night? French investment bankers?

Did you not see the fairly pervasive tags spray-painted on the dumpsters behind your building when you were looking at apartments? Or did it never occur to you to look around those alleys? Or did you think that French investment bankers were tagging your garbage too?

(A moment of clairvoyance: Next year they just might discover that Uptown has rats too! And the local news shows will scramble to get footage of the rats shot by some concerned non-rat citizen.)

No, gangs are not new in Uptown and neither is Alderman Helen Schiller. She came in on the Harold Washington wave in 1987, during that brief period when Chicago was not a feifdom ruled by the Daley family. I am not particularly fond of Helen Schiller. As I am not fond of most of what passes for elected representatives in Chicago. But I have lived in this city long enough to know her legacy. She exhibits a lot less evidence of having been bought and paid for than most of those weasels in city government. She spent the 1990's as one of the few hold-outs among the city council representatives from the Northside against gentrification. This was not easy in the 1990's. She has represented the only remaining ward on the Red Line where the poor have not been entirely pushed out in favor of new, high-end residential development.

If you make under $80,000 per annum and live someplace that isn't a complete rat-hole in or near the 46th Ward, you pretty much have Helen to thank.

And the gang violence is not her fault. It’s yours. I mean, unless you’re doing something with your money and time besides shoveling it, respectively, into Starbucks and videotaping street-fights among people who don’t look very much like you at all. If you’re not doing something to invest in a more plausible future for boys who are not born into white privilege, then the gang violence is probably way more your fault than Helen’s.

Who do you not have to thank for the housing you can afford in Uptown? You could start with not thanking James Cappleman and Sandra Reed, two individuals who have been at the fore of recent media hoopla about all that nasty Reality keeps encroaching on the dream of making Uptown another Rich White Lakefront Neighborhood. (They also both happened to have run against Helen for her seat on the city council. But I'm sure this is not about politics. Right? Of course not.)

Helen brokered a deal for a new Aldi’s to open up in a neighborhood where affordable and nutritious food was becoming scarce. What’d you do last summer?

In point of fact, the crime rate is down in Uptown this summer. It’s the White rate that’s up. Enjoy your cheap weed.

Thank God for the Internet.

Linking random Family Circus cartoon panels with random Nietzsche quotes.

The Nietzsche Family Circus

"It is always consoling to think of suicide; in that way one gets through many a bad night."

Are we done yet?

Is it safe to watch the news again yet? Are we still poring over every scrap of effluvium spun from the life, career and death of Michael Jackson? Have we finished the post mortem that wouldn't die? Can we talk about something else now?

No?

Okay. I'll check back later then.

Pride.

Today was (Gay) Pride Day, a day I have to admit I enjoy because I like the feeling of being honored for, essentially, nothing. All I have to do is stay gay for this 24 hour period—not a particularly difficult task—and I get a day of my very own. Like St. Joseph or The Harlem Globetrotters or tweed.

And this year, Pride Day has the special distinction of being the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the massively corrupt New York City Police Department conducted yet another of their routine spurious raids on bars that served People Like Us. They typically justified themselves with trumped up claims of liquor license violations. Then they arrested the patrons (disproportionately hauling away and humiliating women and people of color-- whomever was less likely to have the resources to do anything about it). This time, though, they fought back in the streets of Greenwich Village.

Oddly, although this used to be mentioned a lot, I have heard nothing this year about the back story: It wasn’t just another ordinary summer of degradation for the gay boys and girls of Lower Manhattan. Judy Garland had just died earlier in the week. Her funeral was on June 27, 1969, a massive event that some consider to be, unofficially, to be the first real Gay Pride parade. And then, everyone retired to their bars after the funeral, to numb their pain with alcohol, as is only right.

When the police busted in, the Stonewall kids were noble in their decision to fight back, to be sure. They were fed up. But they were also really depressed. And really drunk. They summoned the courage to fight back—the courage that only comes from a combination of grief-fueled existential angst and a pitcher of Singapore slings.

So in a way, we might also call it Reckless, Drunk, and Belligerent Pride Day. Another day just for me!

That being said, I haven’t really participated in the Pride festivities for a few years. Somewhere along the line, I got it in my head that pride is a notion bound up with self-respect. And that there are probably other ways for me to manifest that quality besides public intoxication and having sex with strangers. Which, I’m told, not everyone does when they go to the Pride parade. But really, why else would you waste a Sunday morning watching a stupid parade unless public intoxication and the promise of sex with a stranger were involved? For brunch? I think not. This day might just as well be called Three Hour Wait for a Table Day.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have missed the parade for anything. When the partying started early and didn’t end until—well, I’m not sure exactly when it usually ended. I know how it usually ended though: Waking up on my bathroom floor around 10:00pm or so, the cat licking little dried bits of pride out of my hair, peering at me with a vague sense of disgust in his eyes.

Even today, disinterested as I was in the parade, I had an alienated feeling as I walked back from the grocery store. Like I was blowing off Christmas. It made me wonder what the lesbian equivalent of Jewish is. Probably Baptist. I wondered if I should go to church instead today.

But no. The only church I know where the services are short enough for me to tolerate is also a really gay church. They are, in fact, so gay, so proud, so relentlessly empowering and supportive that I’m almost embarrassed for them. Like I’m not doing enough with my newfound spiritual liberation. I mean, here they are, throwing open the gates of heaven for me, fighting to give me rights that I’m not even sure I’m mature enough to handle, and am I out changing the world? No. I can't be bothered.

At least not until Liza Minelli dies.

Some Rules for Text Messaging

I only sent my first text message a few weeks ago. I am far from comfortable with it. I am still a little frightened by the sudden intrusion of someone else’s words on something I take out of my pocket, without any real warning. I suspect the feeling is akin to taking a Kleenex out of your pocket and suddenly discovering an image of the Virgin Mary. And you’re all, How’d that get there?

It takes me hours to compose a text message. Partially because I can’t convince myself that using overtly sloppy grammar, spelling shortcuts, or inadequate punctuation is anything but a slippery slope to hell itself. If, in fact, I could figure out how to integrate the judicious use of italics or footnotes in the text message format, I would probably do it.

Truly, I’m a novice. Far be it from me to expound on rules that should apply to the text messaging universe. And yet…

I received a text message tonight. (Or a text as the abbreviation-obsessed kids would say. And see how I employed that judicious use of italics right there? Ya can’t put a price on that kind of judiciousness.)

The text I received was of a reasonably serious nature concerning how my behavior adversely affects the emotional well being of the texter. Or at least that’s the best I can gather.

This sort of text should not be allowed.

Text messages should only involve one of the three following themes:
1. I just thought of something funny. (Hahahaha.)

2. I’m drunk. (Hahahaha.)

3. Let’s coordinate our plans. (Hahahaha.)

To text a serious message seems to me to be the communications equivalent of—say— trying to construct the Pentagon with a mound of damp tea cakes.

If you really have something to say, why would you choose such a frivolous medium?

That’s what I intend to ask Lola. Whenever I get up the energy to deal with someone who would so grievously misuse this woefully inadequate medium.

Last year, I was briefly romantically involved with Lola. This year, I am not. We used to work together at the Venerable Aerosol Cheese Factory. But we worked in wholly different departments and this should count toward lessening the degree to which I can be accused of being an idiot for violating the age old rule: Never slather your Triscuits with company cheese.

Whereas I was in the aerosol cheese production and distribution department, Lola was in aerosol cheese production system maintenance—a considerably less prestigious position, but as is typical of low prestige positions—much, much harder work.

Then she quit. Which was good for me but very bad for the operating efficiency of the aerosol cheese factory. So they finally got her to come back. Which is awkward for me. As my baseline behavior is awkward to begin with, additional degrees awkwardness taxes my functioning to its outer limits. I could not now be anymore awkward at work unless I also happened to be a newborn pony.

None of this story, incidentally, would not be appropriate for a text message. (“Incidentally” = “btw” for you texting kids out there.)

I have tried to maintain a warm but professional, friendly but not creepy, cheerful but not manic, demeanor with her. Apparently I am even less good at this than I am at texting.

At least that’s what I gather from her text message of: U dnt have to b like that 2 me.

Now how am I supposed to pick up on the nuances of this message in the incredibly nuance-free medium of the text message? There is no tone. No elaboration. In a medium where vowels are optional, subtext isn’t even a fleeting shadow.

So there ya go: I don’t have to be like that 2 her.

Like what? you ask. Why, like that, of course. Presumably, like me. And I would argue: Do so.

That would be, I think, a fine riposte via text message. But we both know if I do that there’ll be hell to pay. No doubt it will be further evidence for her that I’m being like that s’more. She won’t be able to gather from my response the implication that I’m more or less stuck with being me, despite her disapproval of that way that I am apparently being. And the reason she won’t be able to pick up on the implication of my response is because, of course, it would have been delivered via a text message. (Although to be honest, Lola and I could have re-enacted the Lincoln-Douglas debates and still been mostly unable to adequately convey our points to each other without burying ourselves in misinterpretions. Communication was never our strong suit.)

And now, God forbid, she should just dial the phone. (Which, I would note, takes way less time than composing a text message.)

So I'm stuck with either responding through a text message or telephoning her, thus elevating the medium and escalating the importance of the whole exchange. Does this exchange really deserve a promotion? What would it mean if I were the one to advance to a more direct medium? Would that imply that I remain invested in whatever is (or isn’t) going on between us? Should I just recklessly hop in a car and drive to her home? Stand outside her window with a boombox held high over my head, all John Hughes movie-style?

Ummm…no. It looks like rain.

Instead I’ll draw upon another of my new rules for text messaging: If she doesn't actually ask a question, I don’t have to answer. (Hahahaha.)

Goodbye, Mr. Coffee

Stupid, lousy, stupid, stupid, red coffee-maker...


It’s been a difficult few weeks.

No. I mean more difficult than usual. My coffee-maker broke. It just stopped working. No evidence of an obvious malfunction. The water spouty-thing, without warning, stopped delivering water from the water tank over the grounds and into the carafe. The heating element stopped radiating heat. The clock still worked, but that was it.

I have been through the stages of grief and have now settled on the stage that Ms. Kubler Ross neglected: Delight.

I have come to realize that my life can be divided into eras defined by the coffee-maker. I’ll be honest here, the Braun Era was something of a golden age for me. It had the expanse of England’s grand Victorian Era. That is to say, there were some truly awful moments, but it lasted so freaking long that it also encompassed some of my most glorious escapades. And as with the Victorian Era, I am wont to remember it for the good stuff. Victoria, I’m sure, would prefer her Era to be associated not with the poverty, disease, and squalor, but for those adorable houses in Cape May, New Jersey with the eaves and the parlors and the lattice-work and what-not.

Just so with my Braun Era. It lasted for the actual majority of my life, and comprised as it was by a host of ups and downs, I seem now to recall primarily the adorable lattice-work. My Braun coffee-maker, purchased at a ridiculous mark-up at the fabulous, old Robinson’s Department Store in Beverly Hills when I was really young and would have been willing to buy anything that put me that close to women who smelled really good, lasted for nearly twenty years. Even then, the coffee-maker only broke when the dog knocked it off the counter-top one fateful day in 2006. (There was, I think, an errant piece of cheese nearby.)

The Braun Era rocked. Oh sure, it had its horrors. But it beat the hell out of the brief but miserable Mr. Coffee Era.

I did not choose to begin the Mr. Coffee Era; it was foisted upon me. Someone gave me the Mr. Coffee. Of course, I was grateful because I didn’t have a lot of (any) money then. But even so. It was red. And I was stuck with it.

Who buys a red coffee-maker? A red coffee-maker, I can only imagine, is best suited for a brothel. Is there really much demand for brothel decor coffee-makers? And if so, surely one should not expect that it would be produced by a brand whose cache was at its zenith when Joe Dimaggio was hawking it. Yes, Mr. Coffee has been around forever, but clearly that does not translate to being a product of legendary quality. After all, it broke all on its own well inside the three year mark, whereas it took an act of dog to finally take down my Braun.

When I consider why they tried to make such a stodgy, underperforming product all sporty with red, I think of how Chrysler tried to produce convertibles. Truly, this is the Chrysler Sebring of coffee-makers.

I might add, nothing has gone particularly well in my life during the Mr. Coffee Era. It may be a coincidence, but maybe not. Why risk it?

So today I have begun a new era. And suddenly my whole future feels full of possibility. It’s like how England felt when that smattering of Edwards and Georges quit flitting about for their gnatlike and unimpressive eras and finally made room for Elizabeth II to settle in for a good, long (substantially irrelevant but carving an indelible groove into history, nonetheless) reign.

Now I might have purchased another Braun. But I’m not even sure they make them anymore. If they do, I can tell you that they sure don’t sell ‘em in most of the coffee-maker selling outlets in Chicago. (Granted I didn’t go the really high end stores. Because now I find that if I want to, I can smell really good-smelling women without having to pay exorbitant prices.) And it stands to reason that when you make a small appliance that lasts for twenty years or more, you may well go out of business before people get around to buying s’more of your product.

And God knows I wasn’t going to get a Mr. Coffee II. If we have learned nothing else from the English, we should have learned not to keep repeating the names of our eras. Just consider that yawner of micro-eras spanning across Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, and George VI. In 51 years there was one interesting moment in 1936 when Edward VIII flaked out.

No. What I need is a good solid new beginning. Something reliable and indefatigable. The Brits instinctively knew they had this when Elizabeth II cozied into the throne, and they celebrated with blissful relief. That’s what I need: An Elizabeth II Era. I.e., a kitchen dominated by a stoic and dutiful small appliance that is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, but in whose absence I would be lost.

I thought very seriously about declaring the Cuisinart Era. I have a few other Cuisinart products that are holding up quite nicely. (My now vintage food processer finally broke recently after being handed down over a span of something like 30 years.)

But when I went to look at the Cuisinart coffee-makers, I found that the one that most suited my needs came with what they called “retro” styling. Which means they designed it to be cleverly ironic with old fashioned toggle switches. Sadly, this violates a crucial rule for me: I must resist all urges to be sucked in by clothing or interior design elements that are primarily amusing. Because they ultimately look stupid. Neither clothes nor home furnishings should be funny. Whimsy has no place in decorating. This rule has saved me from purchasing a wide array of regrettable shirts with slogans and furniture with now painfully dated prints. This is why, unlike you, I have almost no picture frames made with distressed metals from the early 1990’s and have never had to ditch a futon. It’s a good rule, and so I obey it faithfully.

Then I saw the Krups. A fine coffee-maker with a fine reputation. Back when I bought the Braun, I remember that Krups was the only serious competitor to Braun, poised among the gloriously scented women at Robinson’s department store. And they had it in stainless. Which is good, because I don’t care how much you paid for that Kitchen-Aid mixer of yours, if your small appliances are not generally white or stainless steel, you probably have no business being in a kitchen. And a grown-up should probably start authorizing any of your purchases over $100.00.

The Krups (Model KM1000 if your curious) has everything I was looking for: A good brand track record. An easily accessible water tank that doesn’t require the precision water-pouring technique of a Cirque De Soleil performer. Easily visable cup measures for those bleary-eyed mornings. Fully programmable with a pause function during brewing. (A feature I did not fully appreciate until I was without it during the Era We Shall Never Speak of Again.). I also was able to save several bucks by getting the 10 cup machine instead of the 12-cup machine. (I have never, ever, ever, ever needed 12 actual cups of coffee in one brewing. We should admit this: No one does.) And, importantly, it had no design elements that inspire one to comment on how cleverly whimsical it is. I would have gotten it in plain white so as to be certain I'm not being too hoity-toity about it, but the ideal model was only available in stainless steel. Good enough.

The Krups Era promises to be a bright shining era, indeed. I have nothing but hope and a couple pounds of Seattle’s Best French Roast in the freezer. The world is my Falklands for the repatriating.



The Coffee-maker is dead. Long live the Coffee-maker!

This might mean my moral compass is de-magnetized.

Is it wrong that I'm kind of hoping for a pernicious return of the Swine Flu in the fall so I can spend more time gazing at Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius on C-Span?




She's just so... so... so... sigh

Jenny McCarthy is coming, and she's bringing killer bees!

Bah! I knew it!

In February I said this would happen. What I didn't do was establish incontrovertable proof that I said this in February. And why didn't I do that? Because that's how I roll: Swathed in layers of regret and backpeddling.

Here's what I wrote down, but did not document in a public forum, on February 13, 2009: Jenny McCarthy wil get her own daytime talk show, and it will be excruciating.

It's a gift I have, seeing the future. I saw the return of the goatee in men's facial hair fashion during the early nineties. (It was the Van Dyke actually. And I saw it coming.) I saw the election of George W. Bush in 2000 when others still laughed him off during the early primaries. (It was Laura. She made him seem more likable.) I saw the evil that lurked in Mel Gibson when everyone else still thought he was buckets of fun. I knew Rod Blagojevich was going to jail before he even got elected to congress.

Yes, It's a gift. And the ironic twist of that gift is that I never quite get around to advising others of my uncannily accurate predictions. In this way, you see, I am burdened. Burdened both by my eerie ability to foresee the future and burdened by profound laziness that prevents me from doing anything about it. I am like a superhero who keeps forgetting to get my superhero outfit back from the dry-cleaner.

Here's what else I wrote but did not think to have notarized more than three full months ago: Today I saw yet another story on the news about how strenuously the FDA is saying that vaccines don't cause autism. And I got to thinking about how much Jenny McCarthy has become the voice of alternative conceptualizations of autism. And then I got to thinking how she was recently on Oprah. And how she's been on Oprah a lot in the past year or so. And how Oprah seems to like her a lot. And how she seems more and more expertacious every time she's on. That's when the vision came upon me: Liked by Oprah. Sliding into the expert role. Being the face of a newsy issue. It all adds up, doesn't it?

Oprah is going to hand Jenny McCarthy her own show and there's nothing we can do about it.

Jenny has an ideal set up by going up against the FDA. Sure, with ordinary opponents, she might just seem like a moderately successful entertainer insinuating herself into a discipline well outside her skill-set. But against the FDA, she might as well be Marie Curie. I wasn't particularly buying the whole vaccination etiology theory of autism, until I heard how stridently the FDA opposes it. Now I can only assume that vaccines are, like most of what the FDA oversees, some source of kickbacks and pay-offs for the FDA, a department entirely dedicated to whoring for the pharmaceutical industry. If it's Jenny against the FDA, I'm with Jenny.

But what I don't want, (and didn't want on 2/13/09, mind you) is to watch her talk show, squarely slotted between Rachael Ray and Dr. Phil.

But it's coming. I knew it on Valentine's Day Eve. It's official now. Get beneath your desk with your head between your knees and brace for it.

And while we're at it, we should brace for a few other things that I will now detail in a rambling fashion, lest they come to pass before I document it, and I will be unable to enjoy the position of smug superiority that suits me so well. Please note: I have a bad feeling that Valerie Bertinelli is moving into the talk show host orbit. . . If Chicago does win the 2016 Olympics, it will more than likely be withdrawn when Rich Daley is finally indicted for a generation's worth of corruption based on depositions by John Harris in the course of Rod Blagojevich's trial. (Either that or U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald will die mysteriously.). . . Pope Benedict (who is essentially a rebound girl for the Catholic Church that still closes its eyes and pictures John Paul II during genuflection) is going to make a few more winking gestures to welcome Nazi sympathizers back into the fold and say a few more crazy things about condoms spreading HIV, all the while stroking his furry Prada muffler, and there will be an open movement to dump him. . . He will forestall this by speeding up the fast track to declare his predecessor a saint and the Church will forget what it was saying, sigh softly, and pretend they’re not still thinking of JPII when they’re looking at whats-his-name.

I’m not saying I can predict everything. For instance, I definitely missed the psychic boat about that week when the news was dominated by pirates. Nor did I anticipate the trip down memory lane with Swine Flu. (Although both of these events lead me to suspect that we may soon be at the mercy of killer bees and Legionnaire’s Disease.) But this I will never yield on: I totally called the Jenny McCarthy thing.

Wine-boxing.

You know as well as I do that eventually, you’re going to start buying your wine by the box. Don’t pretend you haven’t occasionally slowed down as you passed the boxes just adjacent to those giant bottles of wine in the back of liquor section of the grocery store. Don’t act like you haven’t noticed the absurdly low cost. Don’t try to deny that you haven’t noticed those articles that show up in respectable publications or heard Alpana Singh suggest that more and more often, they’re putting decent wine in boxes. And don’t go feigning surprise at the implication that you’ve been considering buying some of the stuff just as soon as you can figure out how to do it without sacrificing your self-respect. Fortunately for you, I am here to soften the blow, my self-respect having slipped into the shadows of retreat somewhere around the same time as the last significant film role for Theresa Russell. So I am here to help you through this inevitable transition. No one did that for me. But I’m doing it for you. That’s how I am. I am generous. I am thoughtful. I am sensitive to your needs.

What I am not exactly, is sober. I have not been altogether sober in probably two weeks. This is what happens when you buy your wine in a box. No one tells you that. But I will.

Here’s what happened: About two weeks ago I went to Target to purchase power tools and alcohol. After comparison shopping for drills and sanders, I headed over to the coffee and alcohol section. (Because at Target, they apparently organize the foodstuffs in aisles according groupings appropriate for categories on The One-Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Pyramid. This being the aisle identifiable as Foodstuffs That Directly Interfere with Normal Brain Functioning.) I have to admit, the wine selection is not at all bad for a discount store. They have most of your favorite really cheap wines from the grocery store. Plus they have there own line of box wines. The insidious part is that the wine boxes are available in smaller sizes than one might see in the grocery store liquor sections. That’s how they seduce you. With introductory sizes at a deeply discounted price. It’s not the big twelve dollar commitment it might be at the supermarket. It’s just a few bucks. Clearly, the people running the wine business for Target are the same ones who sold weed outside my junior high school.

So I hardly had to think about it. I bought myself a box—nay, a mere cube—at a cost equivalent to seventy-eight cents a bottle. Or something like that. As I said, I’m not entirely sober. I shouldn’t be relied upon for calculations.

I feared my neighbors would see me bringing it in, but I think I managed to scurry up to my apartment unnoticed, securing, perhaps, another week of avoiding their pitying sidelong glances. Yay.

It didn’t take long to figure out how to place and operate the spigot. You’ll figure that out fine by yourself What you may not realize—and it’s really important that you realize this—is that you will have no way of tracking how much wine you have consumed. I mean, unless you count the glasses—and who does that?—you will be unable to estimate the volume by which your wine box is diminished. This is more than an invitation to overimbibe. This is practically a demand. The box, you see, unlike the traditional bottle, is opaque. So there is no wine-line to tell you you’ve sucked up half a bottle before dinner’s even ready. It carries the illusion of an endless supply of (surprisingly tasty) wine. The box, is, in fact, merely the housing for a bag. And that bag is remarkably similar in texture and appearance to a mylar balloon. And as you know, the mylar balloon is practically a universal symbol of deceit. It is the customary means of seeming to have contributed something important while expending minimal effort and cash. (E.g., “Hey, it’s your birthday! Look what I got you! A balloon! Not just a balloon though—a mylar balloon! Did I go the extra mile, or what?!”

Don’t be entranced by the mylar illusion of the wine bag in the box, I implore you. It’s too late for me, but you can still save yourself.

Me? I was entranced. The box o’ wine had me mesmerized. As a consequence, I have made some significant errors in the past two weeks. These errors may have included but are not limited to:

Going to an organic food store and spending approximately seventy-two dollars on six dollars worth of vegetables from a be-mohawked young lady for whom, from what I can tell, organic foods have done nothing helpful.

Watching Tyra.

Pulling out the guitar that’s been in the closet for at least six years and calling up an ex-girlfriend to play the song written especially for her, not giving a second thought to the guitar being way out of tune, and not really knowing how to play a guitar.

Losing a large bottle of laundry detergent and at least two loads of laundry.

Watching Barack Obama’s press conference, noticing the lame, softball questions put to him by the press, and thinking at one point, “Ooooh, that young blond Republican girl on The View is certainly going to have something to say about that!”

You can avoid these errors. Circumvent the excessive boxed wine consumption problem by pouring yourself one big tumbler of wine and then cutting yourself off right there. If you’re like me, this will probably mean hiding the wine box somewhere that’s hard to reach when your equilibrium is compromised. Because after one big tumbler, you’re likely to change your mind and decide you want more. I suggest you put it up high. On the top shelf of a closet perhaps. That way, when you get out the ladder to try to get it, tipsy as you are, you’ll more than likely fall of the ladder and knock yourself unconscious, thereby cutting yourself off for the evening. When you wake up in a heap just inside your coat closet the next mid-morning, you’ll congratulate yourself for your temperance. Go, you!

Robots. Autism. And so it begins.

Can Robots Help Treat Autism?

This was a story on the Today Show this morning. Basically, the idea is that kids with autism, having been functionally compared to robots inasmuch as they tend to lack a socially appropriate range of affect, might learn to assemble the elements of constructive social transactions by interacting with humanoid robots. Humanoid robots. That’s what they said in the story. Humanoid robots are apparently less threatening than actual humanoids if you’re autistic. Hence, the robots would not provoke anxiety and would be more relatable for the kids. This actually makes some sense when you consider how the plan seeks to avoid the overstimulation that often sabotages learning for people with autism. The robots could help autistic kids deconstruct the components of social behavior without all that loosey-goosey human affect that so often rattles 'em and sends them packing into social withdrawal. The robots would be presumably be programmed in such a way as to model and encourage more adaptive behavior.

A fine plan. Right up until those robots secure a bond with the kids and beguile them with their cool, brushed metal lack of emotional range into doing their evil bidding.

Robot planetary conquest: Phase one.

And I’ll tell you what else: When the robots and autistic kids have fully joined forces, the first thing they’re going to do is avenge this poor kid.

And by the by: Over a lifetime of hearing kid-left-on-school-bus-by-incredibly-stupid/high/stupid-bus-driver news stories, I have yet to have anyone sufficiently explain to me how a bus driver, even a stupid or high or really stupid bus driver, gets off a bus without noticing a person sitting there. Even little persons can be seen fairly easily when they’re sitting on a school bus. It’s not like these things are big old rolling auditoriums with distant, darkened recesses and all manner of colonnade obfuscations.

Oh sure, a kid could slump down behind the seat and not be immediately noticeable at a glance. But you’d think that any school bus driver, recalling the innumerable stories about kids left on school buses and the very bad social ramifications for the bus drivers who leave them, would perhaps look around a little bit for some sleepy hanger-on before closing up shop for the day. A minor investment, I should think, in contrast to the possible consequences for losing a freaking kid.

And besides, think back to your school bus rides. Was it remotely plausible that your school bus ride was so serene, so smooth, so deliciously soothing—that you actually fell into the kind of ossified slumber from which the heaving brakes of a bus couldn’t rouse you?

Now granted, the autistic kid who got recently left behind while his bus driver went shopping, was perhaps not as likely as the average student to say, Hey! Where the hell are you going? as the driver bound from her sacred charge to a party supply store. (I thought at first it was a craft store. Same difference. You just know that a school bus driver that eager to get to the party supply store is likely to be one of those people who regularly uses “scrapbook” as a verb.)

It’s possible that an autistic kid might not summon the social initiative to bring his presence to his stupid bus driver’s attention. Or maybe—just maybe—like the robots with whom he will eventually unite to take over the world, he was lying in wait. Biding his time. Knowing that a species that leaves kids on buses and maybe spends their spare time scrapbooking, is a vulnerable species indeed. Ripe for submission to our eventual robot overlords.

Florida is weirder than I remembered.

I am back from Florida, and I feel I have been divinely appointed to come back to you with this message: Florida makes you strange. Of course, you all knew this. But as with so many things, I never really thought about it until it directly affected me. And by then it was too late.

The photo is of the book that my father was reading when I arrived. 23 Minutes in Hell. It came highly recommended by a guy with a wholly insufficient Jesus-hat. I skimmed the book long enough to know that the title might well be referring to the experience of reading it. The author has not very good sentence-putting-together-ness. Which means he apparently made a lot of money with very little skill. Which makes me jealous and actually more offended than I am when I consider his absence of even a blush of theological integrity.

To his credit, and to my relief, my father thought it was probably unlikely to be a true, visit to Hell’s actual postal code, as claimed by the author. Still. Just knowing that my father felt this book might be worth reading caused me to lose a little bit of sleep.

Throughout my visit, I steered assiduously clear of conversations that might lead one to speculate on the identity of the Anti-Christ. Fearing that Barack Obama might be a candidate. Or Michael Phelps. Or Tom Bergeron. Or me with this mannish haircut of mine.

One never wants to believe that their parents have gone all apocalyptic. But I suppose when you’re in your eighties, a big hootenanny End of the World is probably not as threatening an idea as it once was.

Oh. Then there’s the marshmallow fluff. Also pictured. It disappeared shortly after my arrival. My parents, over the course of two weeks never mentioned it. I never mentioned it. It made no detectable appearances in the food. The marshmallow fluff situation may be another sign of the apocalypse. But just as with wondering what it must be really like to spend a half hour or so in Hell, some questions are better left unexplored.

On Vacation with the Florida Amish

I'm on vacation.

Every time I go to Florida to visit the parents, I'm surprised by how fully I had forgotten what inspired me to move far, far away in the first place. It's sort of like what I've heard about childbirth: Your sense memory dictates that you block out the memory of the horror of it all, lest you would never be willing to repeat it, and the species would, at least, fall into disrepair.

On my arrival, we went straight from the airport to their weekly bowling... thing. Picking me up at the airport had caused them to be too late to bowl with their church group, and this meant I already had to come back from a fairly serious social deficit.

But we arrived on time to join the group in heading out for dinner. (4pm. Yes. 4pm.) The group decided on an Amish buffet. Even though I cautioned them that any Amish in Sarasota had surely been run off their Amish communities probably for not cooking as well as they're supposed to.

Fortunately I was wrong. Which is proabably why none of them laughed or even seemed to consider the possibility I was joking. Instead, I'm pretty sure that these Amish people were sent away for doing fabulous things with a relatively liberal food like poached salmon. I have never had such incredible salmon before.

They also make their own ice cream. Kahlua Krunch among them. What the Amish are doing with Kahlua, I cannot imagine. I'm also fairly sure it's not very Amish to spell Krunch with a "K". But these are Sarasota Amish, after all. The radical anarchists of the Amish. These Amish have their own website. Apparently this is okay, but driving cars is still totally a sin. (Which may mean, since I also have no car, plus I have a much crappier web presence, I'm technically a better Amish gal than this group.) I noticed one woman even had her hemline two to three inches above her ankle. So there ya go. Hell in a handbasket. (A handmade Pennsylvania Dutch handbasket, but to hell with it, none the less.)

I also tried to point this out to the church group guy sitting across from me who looked at me as though I were speaking Swedish. Or some other devil-loving language. He was wearing a baseball cap that said "FBI". And in small print beneath it, it read "Fully Baptized In Jesus". Now I'm not one to quibble, but shouldn't it be "FBJ" then? Or "FBIJ" at the very least? Isn't there something keenly wrong about leaving Jesus entirely out of your clever, Jesus-themed hat abbreviation? I mean, it's a hat for Jesus, isn't it? Let's give Jesus his due then. I don't think it makes Jesus very happy if the best amusing Jesus-themed hat abbreviation you can come up with is FBI, and Jesus doesn't even get the same billing as a preposition. In fact, I'll met that makes Jessus pretty mad.

That said, I'm totally going to get myself a had that says "NCIS". (Neat Christians in Sarasota!)

Grown-Up Brunch

Today I had Sunday brunch at the home of someone with whom I work at the aerosol cheese factory. We’ll call her Florence.

Florence lives in a lovely two bedroom apartment in Rogers Park. One bedroom for her, the other, I presume, for her colossal sense of contentment and order.

Nice apartment, I said. How the hell is she affording this on what we make, I thought.

It’s beautifully decorated, I said. I’ve been at the cheese factory more than twice as long as her! Is she making more than me, I thought.

Did she clean her baseboards just for today? Are they always this clean? Does she do that regularly? What’s wrong with me that I can’t even be bothered to make sure the Kleenex hits the trashcan, and here’s Florence, coming home every night to scrub her baseboards! I suck! But I didn’t say that. Instead I gulped down a tankard of champagne.

True, I was already tense, being out of my element. (My element: Nestling among porn junkies in the Harold Washington Library.) Brunch among clean people who have meaningful careers is different for me. I’m not used to having manners and talking in complete sentences. Brunch in general, is sort of a what-we-do-when-we’re-pretending-to-be-adults kind of activity. To wit: Our parents almost never went to brunch. At least not until we got old enough to force them to. That’s because they’re grown-ups and don’t have to prove it by eating ever more creative egg-based foods. But as for ensuing generations--how gladly we consume the quiches of ambivalence.

Florence has the cleanest, shiniest hardwood floors I can remember since my middle school gym. I reflexively reached for my doctor’s note to get me out of gymnastics the minute I walked in.

As the morning went on into midday and I huddled on her comfy sofa with nary a stain upon it, and I dined on bread pudding and resentment. And plans. Oh yes, I dined also on big plans for the renovation of my home so I can be contented and orderly like Florence. She’s not the only one who can hit the trashcan with the Kleenex!

Hah! Take that, wadded up tissues in that hard to reach space between the toilet and the bathroom vanity! Your days are numbered!

To get inspiration tonight, I watched the Extreme Home Makeover show. But it didn’t really help. Instead, it brought out buried resentments so self-involved, I felt for a minute what it must be like to be a rich white guy. If only I had a terminal disease. If only I were missing multiple appendages. If only I had adopted a whole boxful of handi-capable kids. Then maybe the Extreme Makeover people would come give me a new home with unstained furniture, cleverly placed throw rugs, decorative art objects, and a brand-spanking new 52 inch HDTV. Or they might at least clean my baseboards really good.

But what kind of pitiable disabilities do I have for leverage? Is a really Extreme student loan debt and a keen capacity for self-pity enough of a disability? I think so, but I fear network television does not.

Just as well. That show has a serious decorating problem. They’re a little too into the personalized theme thing in the bedrooms. You let those guys into your house and they’re immediately casing the place for clues to your unique style. They see a few scraps of evidence of some kind of personal interest lying next to the nightstand, and they run with that design element like fiends. And seven days later, I’m stuck with a bedroom with walls painted with dizzying, giant crossword puzzles and a bed shaped like an enormous box of Benedryl. No, thank you. And don’t tell me that the families on that show are all that thrilled about the theme rooms. The kids, sure, but the parents have to be faking their expressions of pleasure. They know that the resale value of an otherwise lovely house is now surely shot all to Extreme Pieces. They’re already trying to envision how the real estate agent is going to pitch the room made of Legos, the Fairy Princess Room, and the truly inexplicable Amphibians in the Bayou Room that exists solely because some kid said he might like to go fishing one day.

"You’ve seen the gourmet kitchen, and the master bath with the built in hot tub and steam room. Oh, and this bedroom over here has a built-in bed made entirely out of NASCAR helmets and half of a stock car protruding out of the wall. Of course, you can paint it pink."

So yeah. Having all my appendages intact, the Extreme Makeover people are probably not the way I’m getting a better apartment. Short of actually making an effort to pick up the Kleenex and scrub my baseboards, my options are sadly limited. The only way I’m spending time in the embrace of so much order and niceness is to brush up on my brunching skills.

My Left Foot

This morning when I climbed out of bed and put my feet on the floor, I had to double check to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently left a boning knife balanced somehow on end, by happenstance in the spot where my left foot landed. From my position (curled up on the floor, writhing in pain) I was a little surprised to find no knife. Not even the anticipated pool of blood. Instead I discovered a tiny lump just where the arch of the foot meets the first joint of the second toe. A lump from which the stabbing pain emanated. Nay, rocketed.

Naturally, my first thought was that I am in the end stages of some rare variety of cancer. And it figures that of all the cancers that might kill me, I would get stupid foot cancer.

Of course I did what I always do when I want to confirm my worst fears about physical symptoms. I Googled it, searching out gory photos of eventual oozing and malformation accompanied by grim texts describing the hopelessness of the situation or the required arch transplants with a 13% success rate.

The good news is that Google says this lump is unlikely to be a plantars wart associated with HPV infection. So I’m not going to get a reputation as a foot-slut. At least not that way. For a few minutes there, I thought I was going to have to call up all the people with whom I’ve recently had foot sex and have that awkward conversation. (Lola would be pissed. Not because I might have transmitted the foot-slut disease to her, but because she would be sure I suspected that she was the foot-slut who gave it to me. She would have been right.)

More likely, my disabling pain is product of plantar fibrmatosis. Which, according to an assortment of Googled opinions and musings, is an aspect of the broader problem of C-T Band Syndrome. C for Calf. T for Toe. And the Syndrome is for the range of unpleasant things that can happen when the band that runs from your calf to your toe is subject to overstress. Like from being on your feet a lot without adequate stretching. Or, in my case, I suspect, from having the ill-chosen favorite exercise of calf raises. And doing like a hundred of them yesterday, just to see if I could.

(The even better name for this problem is Ledderhose Disease. Which sounds too similar to Lederhosen to be a coincidence, if you ask me. I cannot locate an explanation about how Lederhosen may cause foot pain. Perhaps Lederhosen can alleviate foot pain. Where can I get Lederhosen?)

Now I’m doing calf stretches, but it just doesn’t have the same thrill as calf raises. There’s no shivery burn when I stop, just a vague feeling of stretchiness.

According to Google, it could have been worse. I could have been traipsing along and suddenly snapped my Achilles tendon. I know a guy who had that happen once when he was playing tennis. He said the snap was so loud, he’d thought at first he’d been shot in the leg. Then he sat on the tennis court and actually watched his tendon recoil up his leg into a massive ball on his calf, like a some kind of serpent burrowing into his flesh. Cool, huh?

Of course, he passed out, so I wasn’t able to get more details. Plus no one was there to take pictures to post on the internet. From what I understand, his tennis partner called an ambulance and he went to a hospital. So in a way he was lucky. It never once occurred to him that he might have end-stage foot cancer. And he never even had to even imagine making that awkward series of calls to acknowledge that he was some kind of foot-slut. All he had was several months in a leg cast and unfathomable time and freedom to Google every minor symptom he could possibly imagine. How lucky is that?

Sutton Foster Releases Her First Album, Draws Closer to Escape From Clutches of Disney

Sutton Foster released her first solo recording last week. If you don’t know her, it probably means you’ve managed to avoid paying regrettable amounts of money to see some bad Broadway musicals. Yay for you. On the other hand, unlike most of the shows she has done, she is worth seeing and hearing. She has an extraordinary voice, and she’s funny enough to warrant being absolutely indispensable in the plays that she does.

I’m hoping that when she negotiated her contract for her current show, she made sure to collect a hefty percentage of the profits. ‘Cause if her last two shows are at all predictive of how this one will go, after the initial hype sales die down, she’ll become the only real audience draw and the only thing to keep the locals from showing up with pitchforks and torches to burn the evil outta the building.

Sutton Foster is actually playing a Disney princess now. (Disney shows have converged in Broadway theaters, alien podlike, to the horror of decent theater-going folk everywhere. That's because when Rudolf Giuliani became mayor of New York, he sold off Midtown Manhattan to the Disney company in short order. Make no mistake, if the man had become president, we’d all be wearing mouse ears by now. And if you think you might have resisted, revisit Rudy’s record on civil liberties and think again, mein Liebling.) Now even though I regard Disney princesses as Satan’s primary agents of evil in this world and the sworn enemy of all three-dimensional humanity, I’m willing to give Sutton Foster a pass because at least she’s not doing it in a movie where it will infect the culture in epidemic proportions. And also because she is apparently, Disney’s first farting princess. That makes me no more inclined to see the show, but I’m hopeful that it’s a step in the right direction.

For my full review of the new album on Amazon, JUST CLICK HERE!

Seven Eazy Mealz in Minutes!

Because when you spell it with a “Z”, it soundz fazter! (Or German. Or Spanish if you opt to pluralize a word that ends in “e”. Like “Minutez”. Which is not recommended because it’s too confuzing then.)

If you, like I, find no comfort in those 30 minute meals hawked so incessantly by that coked up TV girl, if you can’t be bothered to dial the telephone and order a pizza, if you haven’t the creativity or problem-solving skills that God awarded to even most houseplants, or if you’re just paralyzed by clinical depression and cannot bear to haul yourself out of bed for more than five minutes or, God forbid, face other people, then these are the conveniently numbered tips for you! How can you be sure these tips are for you? The exclamation points! That’s how!

1. Take a pre-packaged hot dog and place it in boiling water until heated through. Remove from water and place in a bun. Voila!

2. Break up several lettuce leaves or the greens of your choice into bite sized pieces. If desired, combine with other vegetables, such as chopped or sliced cucumbers, broccoli, tomato, or mushrooms. Top with salad dressing. A salad!

3. Spread mayonnaise on one side of two slices of bread. Stack atop the mayonnaise covered side of one slice of bread two or three pieces of pre-sliced deli meat and the deli cheese of your choosing, cover with the remaining bread, mayonnaise side down so that no mayonnaise is expose on the exterior. Pair with a bag of Chee-tos. A nice lunch!

4. In a skillet, melt a little butter. Break two eggs into a bowl and stir vigorously with a fork or any convenient utensil. Pour eggs into hot skillet and stir them while heating until they cook through. Remove eggs to a plate and add salt to taste. Delicious!

5. Using either an electric or manual can opener, open a can of tuna. Draining optional. Mmmmmmm!

6. Place two slices of bread in a toaster. Press down toasting mechanism and retrieve bread slices when they pop up. Top each slice with mounds of peanut butter. Smooth or crunchy, your choice. San Frantastic!

7. Open a microwavable container of beef-a-roni. Heat it up. Don’t heat it up. What do I care? Eat, damn you!

The Most Useless Neighborhood in Chicago

Whenever my family makes incredulous noises about how I can possibly live in a major city, I remind them of two things: First, I don’t make enough money to support a car-driving habit and would therefore quickly die in the suburbs. Second, if going out to dinner might mean eating an entire deep-fried onion, however cleverly marketed and packaged, death could not come quick enough.

Not that I don’t enjoy visiting the suburbs. The driveways, the backyards, the star-drenched skies viewed from outdoor furniture in a backyard deck, the alcohol that someone’s father or brother-in-law paid for—it all makes me kind of giddy. But I’m always relieved to return to the city. After all, I tell myself as I see the skyline emerging over the Eisenhower Expressway, the city is rich with conveniences. There’s something to do 24 hours a day. You can get anything you want when you live in a major city.

Unless, that is, you’re in the Bermuda triangle of my neighborhood. My neighborhood kind of sucks. It’s not really even a neighborhood. It’s an awkward convergence of neighborhoods where no one appears to feel entirely comfortable. Except for the one armed troll-like man with the untrained pit-bull at the end of the block. He looks comfortable. But he’s another story. A creepy story.

True enough, the residents are a delightful mix of ethnicities and socio-economic strata. And yet we are unified by one thing. Apparently we are all expected to be preternaturally voracious consumers of cupcakes.

What happened was, last Sunday afternoon, I ran out of soy milk. (I didn’t run out, actually. But rather, I came to that last quarter cup or so at the bottom of the carton that isn’t enough to fully saturate a bowl of grape-nuts and so I let it sit there long enough to become convinced it’s probably turned bad by now. I’m not sure I have ever truly run out of soy milk.) So I went out to pick up some. My neighborhood is one of those little business districts where most streets are lined with storefronts. So you’d think this errand would be lickety-split, right? Just the kind of convenience I’m supposed to enjoy as part of the divine right of being a city-dweller. But if you look behind the fronts of those stores, you’ll find nary a splash of soy milk. On a Sunday afternoon in my neighborhood, you can buy a bicycle. You can rent any number of DVDs in Spanish, Arabic, and at least two African languages. You can buy a back-pack be-weighted-down with bedazzling. You can buy cheap wine at a madly inflated price. You can buy all manner of candy with names and slogans that appear to actually be written in Pidgen English by the characters that comprised the extras on M*A*S*H (and I wish I could recommend more highly the “You Make Super Happy Crack Honey Bar” but it tastes oddly tangy). Or you and you can armor the tips of your fingers in long, dangerously encrusted with jagged stuff, fake fingernails. What you cannot do is buy things you might actually need. That is, of course, unless you prefer to subsist on a diet primarily composed of boutique coffees and Cupcakes, Cupcakes, Cupcakes!

The problem crystallized as I waited to cross the street and walk too, too many blocks to a fully stocked grocery store. A couple stood at the corner nearby, one of them on a cell phone. They were trying to explain to some friends where to meet them.

It’s right between the occult magic shop and the day spa… no not THAT occult magic shop and day spa. If you’re looking at an occult magic shop and day spa that are right next to each other, you need to go down half a block and look on the other side of the street. Do you see that store with all the lingerie and Sponge Bob alarm clocks in the window? Just past that, there’s a cupcake place. Next to that there’s a tanning salon, but not the tanning salon with the big banner that says they do teeth whitening…Yes, that’s next to a cupcake place too, but the tanning salon I’m talking about is directly across from the cowboy boot store that sells small electronics. If you look just past THAT tanning salon, you’ll see another occult magic shop and day spa, and we’re at the board game place between them!

I should have stuck around to see if the couple managed to successfully connect with their friend. Instead I got preoccupied with counting the magic shops in my neighborhood. Maybe the owners of these occult shops are thinking we can just buy a book that will tell us how to conjure soy milk. But then, only in the last couple of years have soy milk manufacturers been able to rid the stuff of the lake of fire aftertaste. I fear the conjured version would just set us back to the 1997 version of soy milk.

And ya know—you’d think when the occult shop competition heats up, those guys would be hexing each other right and left. Heaping bad luck and whatnot upon one another. It honestly makes me wonder why there aren’t more inexplicable sulfuric smelling explosions in my neighborhood during, say, the witching hour. But so far, nothing. Just the predictable holiday gunfire out back in the alley. (Which I’m pretty sure is the doing of the one armed troll-guy at the end of the block.)

I griped about the soy milk dilemma to my mother last night, who currently inhabits two of America’s finest suburbs, depending upon the season. Not knowing what soy milk actually is or why in Heaven’s name, anyone would need to drink it, she was unimpressed with my suffering. She cannot imagine a world without big restaurants with parking lots and high-school girl servers and remarkably similar menus among them. And she thinks I should be more appreciative of the cupcakes.

Some Letters to Famous People

Dear Barack Obama,

I have one of your hats. It is the warmest hat I have ever owned.

Love,
Mazeppa






Dear Jay Levine,

I saw you in the CBS-2 news van yesterday on Michigan Avenue. I waved but I don’t think you saw me. When I waved, I said “Hi, Jay!”

Love,
Mazeppa






Dear Tom Hanks,

I saw the trailer for your new movie. It looks weird.

Love,
Mazeppa






Dear Rachael Ray,

You are so frenetic. You are the most frenetic person on television.

Love,
Mazeppa

What I Learned at the Library

I’ve discovered the library. To be more specific, the Harold Washington Library, the behemoth flagship branch of the Chicago Public Library. True, I’d actually been there once before, nearly twenty years ago when the building first opened. But I didn’t really explore it the way I have in the past several days. Circumstances have conspired to force me out of my home during my days off from the aerosol cheese factory. And a good friend suggested that I go get lost in the library. So I have.

Did you know you can take all the books you want? For free? And this particular branch has, I have discovered upon thorough perusal, every book ever published. It has the dishy theater/moviemaking memoir by Josh Logan that I owned when I was about ten, but was too young to appreciate the context of most of the anecdotes contained therein. It has multiple copies of Suzanne Somers’ book of poetry published before she rocketed to the success of Three’s Company. It has a bunch of cookbooks. And unlike at the bookstore, they don’t frown upon me taking one aside and copying a recipe or two. It has the score of every opera and most musical comedies I could think of. It even has a complete stock of the New Yorker, enabling me to sit down one day and read every brilliantly rendered film review Pauline Kael wrote in the 1970’s. All this for free.

I may never have to buy anything ever again.

Then there’s the computer word processing and internet access. I thought this would be a prime opportunity to resume my writing habits just like at home. Only at home, I don’t have anyone else sitting at either elbow, muttering curse words and gigglin. Responding, perhaps, to voices that other people cannot hear, smelling of that telltale combination of urine and… well, okay just urine mostly. But then again, conditions down at the aerosol cheese factory can be similar in terms of close quarters and olfactory overwhelm. (True, the scent of artificial cheddar-bacon-flavor may be heavenly when you first pop open that spray can of cheese product, but after a while, it wears on you.) What eventually got to me was not the experience of snuggling up between two people who were off their meds and inattentive to their hygiene. What was really distracting was the pornography. Each monitor is equipped with a privacy screen that effectively blocks from view the content of screens to your left and right. But the screen ahead of you, in the next row, is fully, dare I say, exposed.

I asked a librarian about the policy. She looked embarrassed and apologetic, wincing a little, and told me people are free to look at any misogynist, obscene, pornographic allowable by law.

It turns out, the Chicago Public Library has one of the most liberal policies in the country regarding using the internet to access porn. And I just don’t know what to think about that. It’s not as though I was traumatized by the site of it. It's not like I'm sitting here adding up the dollar amount to match the emotional distress I’m gonna sue them for. Rather, it’s the combined revulsion at the idea that my (not many, I’ll admit) tax dollars are helping to defray the cost of letting gross guys do gross stuff in the Public Freakin’ Library. There’s a bit of seediness about looking at porn in general, and I shudder to think how much seedier is the person who wants so very much to look at porn that they’re willing to make a trip to the library for it. These are not your average porn viewers. These are guys willing to sit elbow to elbow among rows of perfect strangers while watching their porn. These are people for whom watching porn is so important, they have decided it’s worth it to toss aside any scrap of dignity to which they might have been clinging, and sit in a public place, essentially announcing their creepiness to the world.

I’ve always been under the impression that there’s more or less one objective being pursued when people look at porn. But I’m pretty sure, however liberal the CPL’s policies are, they’re not likely to permit any one-handed typing. So ya gotta wonder how someone is getting much of a thrill under library porn-viewing conditions.

I advise you: Don’t wonder too long. You’ll soon realize, as did I, the logical conclusion that watching porn in close proxemity to you is a central part of the thrill for these guys. See? You’re grossed out now, aren't you. You thought about it too long, didn’t you? Now you have the same sick feeling that I did, don’t you?

The thing is, having internet access to porn at the library does not invite your average porn-watching guy into the fold. They are appropriately ashamed of themselves like good, healthy Americans. No, the CPL policy inadvertantly invites the guys who think a lot like sex offenders. Guys who choreograph their sexual behaviors to include others as tools (objects) in seeking their own gratification without regard to the impact of their behavior upon others. Now, I’m not saying the guys you can find at any given time watching porn at the library are necessarily child molesters. I’m just saying they think like them.

But what are we to do? It is perhaps the stickiest among sticky wickets, ain’t it? Should we put filters that prevent viewing porn on library computers? Other major libraries have done this. But then we get into that whole dilemma about what’s obscene and what isn’t, and I, for one, don’t want to march down that road. We might cordon off a certain area for unfiltered internet viewing so us decent folk don’t have to look at it. But that smacks of a social quarantine that could essentially limit freedoms by creating untenable stigma, the internet access equivalent of a poll tax meant to exclude some people. Besides that, it would likely force some art student to sit among the creepy porn guys in order to access information about some controversial modern art thing or other. And I ask you, would you want to be the librarian stuck with the job of monitoring the porn room? Would you want to be the custodian who cleans that place up at the end of the day?

I thought not.

So even though I’m loathe know think about what better uses for the library budget there might be than to support the habits of creepy porn guys, I have accepted that it’s the painful cost of freedom for the rest of us. And I have decided upon my own policy. Just as the First Ammendment should protect right of some behaviors I find objectionable, it should also protect my right to walk up behind them and say, “Hey! That’s my cousin, Myrna!” and proceed to detail the ups and downs of Myrna’s difficulty keeping a job, inability to collect child-support, and her struggles with crystal meth addiction. I may not have a choice about being used as an object whose presence may facilitate creepy sexual behavior, but I can sufficiently humanize Myrna (and her three to five friends) to rain on the porn parade for at least a little while.

It's a dog-eat-dog world.

This has been nagging at me for days now. At first it was just the strangeness of finding myself siding with the Taliban on any issue. Generally, the Taliban and I, we are not of one mind. It’s true that I, as does the Taliban, frown upon setting off firecrackers, reading sewing catalogues, and flying kites. And truly indeed, we agree on the very, very wrongness of adult humans having anything to do with stuffed animals. But strongly though I may frown, for me it ends at frowning. I’m not one to instigate public executions. And really, these things merely irk me. To be irked is a world of difference from going all jihad on some kite-flying, firecracker lighting, Butterick pattern-seeking, grown woman with stuffed animals on her bed. I just avoid that girl. The Taliban wants her dead.

Where the Taliban and I start to come a little closer, it turns out, was highlighted in the December 28th New York Times article about the popularity of dogfighting in Afghanistan.

The Taliban says dogfighting is un-Islamic. Me too! Only I also think that preventing women from becoming doctors and then telling women they can only be treated by doctors who are women is un-Islamic. So there ya go.

It turns out that quite a lot of men (and I specify men because this is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon) in Afghanistan have a strong cultural association with dogfighting. Especially in the south, where oppression is a primary thread in the fabric of the culture. This place, currently oppressed by a resurgent Taliban, lays claim to having been under the heels of a line of invaders beginning from antiquity. Everyone from Alexander the Great, to Genghis Khan, to Richard the Lionheart, to Leonid Brezhnev has wiped their feet on the Afghan people. In between invasions, they’ve been oppressed by a seemingly infinite list of brutal tribal leaders.

You’d have to go back at least 700 years to find an oppressor as controlling as the Taliban though. I mean, heck, I doubt that even Genghis Khan had a problem with sewing catalogues. That’s what makes it puzzling that the banned activity of dogfighting should persist in their shadow. Now, I don’t know what appendage they cut off if they catch you attending a dogfight, but I can’t think of any hobby I wouldn’t give up if I thought I might get even a tiny part of me cut off for pursuing it. Even the threat of a really bad haircut might dissuade me from some leisure activity or another. Not those Afghan guys though. Even though the Taliban doesn’t like it one bit, dogfighting remains popular. I think we have to assume that there’s a particular cultural salience to the activity.

Last February, a suicide bomber killed about eighty spectators at a dogfight. Now my first thought is: Well good. Eighty fewer walking vessels of stench on the planet. More oxygen for the rest of us. But the fans are hardly deterred since then; they keep coming out. To watch. To bet. To identify themselves with this stultifying occupation of feeling one has won something.

That NYT article quoted one of the spectators: “It’s not about money. If my dog beats another dog, it makes me feel like I’ve won $100,000. I can survive just from the happiness.”

It’s vicarious access to empowerment. Owning a dog who beats another dog is happiness. Afghanistan, that place more plundered than any other in human history, has cultivated this peculiar cultural value. It would seem that the culture of winning appears to thrive most perniciously among those who never win.

But who likes dogfighting in the U.S.? In Chicago, the only dogfighting references one ever hears, associate it almost exclusively to African American street gangs. But the subculture of dogfighting in the U.S. hardly began there. The gang-related dogfighting that we mostly hear about is a largely disorganized echo of a much older and elaborated subculture. As in Afghanistan, that culture is centered especially in the South. And from what I can see, wherever dogfighting is entrenched, it is not a single subculture that sustains it, but two distinct subcultures. One has money and power, and it dictates the terms. Around the world, the Italian Mafia and Russian Mafia control much of the organized dogfighting action. In Southern Afghanistan, it’s the Pashtun tribal leaders. In the southern U.S., it’s the monied kennel owners. The other subculture is made up of those who crave access to power enough to identify with the very persons who hold them down: The low-paid agricultural workers who gladly pay the guys who ensure their pay remains low for the chance to bet on the fights. The kids of negligible status in street gangs, buying status-identified crap that makes rich white guys richer, killing off their communities for crumbs of the profits going to the guys who are just as happy to see them dead.

It’s the ol’ exosystem-microsystem switcheroo here. A familiar story: The white trash overseer who beats the slaves in his impotent attempts to identify with the rich slave-owner who disdains him. In his gut, the overseer knows he is not the owner’s equal. He knows that but for the pseudo-power he attains through aggression, he is equal to the people enslaved under his watch. It’s the same process with the guy who’s boss treats him like garbage and goes home and kicks the dog. Someone who is secure in the belief that he possesses real power and that he will one day be the boss—that person never goes home to kick the dog. Nor does that person need to play Cinderella by going to a dogfight. Empowered people don’t sink into fantasies or rely on surrogates. If you have to have a surrogate winner, surely it’s because you believe that you, yourself, can never really win.

As I wondered this week how on earth dogfighting can thrive in any way under the watchful eye of the Taliban, I began also to wonder about how the City of Chicago can devote such paltry resources to combat dogfighting, despite it’s particular prevalence in this city. Then I remembered the position of the slave-owner. He relies on the overseer to act as his pawn in order to maintain control. Just so, the Taliban relies on the men of Kabul to occupy themselves with games that numb them further.

Much to my relief, the Taliban really has very little in common with me. They have much more in common with the Mafia. They have plenty in common with those dwindling few who control most of the money in the U.S. And they certainly have some key things in common with the breathtakingly racist and callous political machine that runs the City of Chicago. These agents of power rely upon maintaining ways for keeping the disenfranchised people whom they dominate numb to the experience of oppression. They maintain power by keeping the powerless spinning in circles, hopelessly play-acting their growing anger and aggression among themselves. It keeps the oppressed people busy.

If you’re reliably distracted by going home to kick the dog, you forget that kicking hurts, and you never get around to organizing to overthrow the one who has his heel on your neck.

Laura, Lost in the Bushes

Over the last eight years, like a lot of people, I have managed to hold onto essentially warm feelings toward Laura Bush. Having a facility for divorcing myself from reality, I have been able to shut off from my awareness that this is a woman who never (to our knowledge) acted on the many opportunities she must have had to take out Dick Cheney from close range.

I always enjoyed the fact that she is well-read. I took some smug satisfaction in recognizing that she obviously holds more progressive views than her husband and his band of puppeteers. And that he must be irked by that. Or better yet, that he doesn’t realize it, and there’s a special part deep inside Laura Bush that I will always understand—even touch—with more sensitivity than George ever could. Even now, I one day hope to have the chance to make George feel very small and insecure about that.

Although I am a consummately judgmental and intolerant former smoker, I’ve even taken pleasure in knowing that Laura Bush is a secret smoker. Because that would bother the other intolerant and judgmental people who probably voted for George because they mistakenly thought that Laura was a kindred intolerant spirit. And really, you can hardly blame her for having the occasional stress smoke. Look at the family she married into. Can you imagine dragging yourself through a holiday with these people? She deserves a good old fashioned heroin habit.

Laura Bush has been fully insulated from my wrath against the Bushes. I can’t pretend I don’t hold some grudges with the pointlessly infinite grip of a Bond villain. I’m still mad at Barbara Bush for calling Geraldine Ferraro a bitch back in 1984. Did she ever apologize for that? Didn’t think so.

But Laura has remained unsullied in my view. She has been that single intact and well-constructed tower rising in hopeful contrast from the ruins of a dessicated and crumbling medieval castle of a feudal overlord who had lived too long as a parasite upon the toil of the serfs.

Now that edifice is crumbling, and it’s all because of what I saw on TV this week: Really ugly china. Not at all the tasteful understatement I have grown to expect from Laura. No, this crap is gold leaf. With gold utensils. Yes. Gold utensils.

Really, Laura? Gold leaf? Isn’t that just a little too on the nose?

It’s not just a whisper of gold leaf, mind you. A thin stripe of gold leaf around the edges might have squeaked into tastefulness. But this is quite a lot of gold leaf. A little more gaudy and it would be suitable for a turn of the century whore-house. Ever so slightly more gaudy than that, and it would be right about what an eight year old might design as part of their If I Were King of the World fantasy. More gaudy still, and then we would have descended into the screaming-infant hell of Donald Trump’s taste.

The new White House china was on the news because people were upset that Laura spent $492,000 on china while the rest of us are saving up for that package of organic chicken breasts we’ve had our eye on. Laura explained fairly well that this deal was made two years ago when the economy was better, and seemed to put the subject to bed. Not so for me. I’m still wondering what kind of ecstasy laced bubble you have to be living in to feel like $492,000 on plates is ever a good buy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a zillion place settings with a zillion individual pieces per setting and blah, blah, blah it’s important to demonstrate gravitas for visiting heads of state. But that brings us back to the gold leaf problem. Shiny swaths of gold is not gravitas. It’s the film set of Hello Dolly. And it’s all very disconcerting because this is not the Laura Bush I know and whom I have till now felt confident that I could steal away from George if I wanted to. Where, amidst all this Liberace-wear china, is our secretly progressive, intellectual, Laura—jonesing for a Marlboro Red and rolling her eyes at Karl Rove? Has she been too long trapped in a maze of Bushes? Has she gone from dissident to being Barbara’s dutiful daughter-in-law? Will she inherent the pearls of disdain for us simple folk?

Perhaps it’s good that Laura is leaving when she is. This selection of expensive and overwrought crap for the White House is too much a signal that something has changed. She’s lost her way. She’s out of touch. And as Barbara reminded us in 1984, out of touch can make you very unkind, indeed. Today it’s kitschy dishes. Tomorrow Laura may wish to make us all her bitch.

Oh, Sylvia.

Last night I finally started reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. What a hoot that gal is. Was. Y’know. Till the suicide thing.

Like you, I used to think the most depressing thing about Sylvia Plath was the fact of her life and talent cut short long before it could all be fully realized. But here’s what’s more depressing: As an eighteen year old college freshman, she was tossing off journal entries more prescient and insightful than I have ever mustered, even in the full bloom of grown-up-hood. I think back to the journal I kept in my freshman year of college, and I must recognize that Sylvia and I may not even be the same species.

(I should note here that while at least two generations of readers now primarily associate Sylvia Plath with a weird sense of domesticity in suicidality and with poetry that betrayed her vulnerability to depression, Plath was above all else a starkly fine writer whose eye was as often turned to observe the world without as the world within. Her intuitive braiding of reason and emotion is unmatched among modern poets. And you should read her unabridged journals because the book is rich with great language and good thinking.)

Now here’s how eighteen year old Sylvia described getting a dose of nitrous oxide at the dentist: “I didn’t have to try hard to breathe now; something was pumping at my lungs, giving forth an odd breathy wheeze as I exhaled. I felt my mouth cracking into a smile.”

Here’s how eighteen year old me wrote about the same thing: “I like my new dentist. She said all you have to do is get this little thing on your nose and breathe through your nose. I seem to breathe very well through my nose. And it smells so fresh and clean. It’s just swishing past with no effort. I guess I must be about the best nose breather around.”

In her freshman year of college, Sylvia was coughing up cinematic descriptions and subtle, pithy metaphors for her journal. I, by contrast, am light years past college and still, when I journal, I tend to go on an on about how I don’t feel like writing and how I have a headache and how maybe I should just go back to bed. She processed, unflinching, the power of her own impulses and desires to shape her perceptions and assumptions. I whine about work and muse endlessly about whether I should buy a steam mop and which one to get. (They all work so well on the infomercials!)

When they come to posthumously publish my unabridged journals, they’ll find the whole mess of it shaping up to be a big swirly black hole of tedium, generating a vacuum powerful enough to suck the slightest speck of interest from the reader and spew it out into a vast empty space of indifference. Can’t do that with a steam mop.

That’s why I now realize I need to abandon those volumes of private journals I’ve been keeping since high school and become the easiest kind of fiction writer—a fake non-fiction fiction writer—a memoirist! (That’s still popular, right?) It’s never too late to start faking a life. Lacking substance, I now have the urge to fabricate a persistent drug problem and a much more colorful childhood. Soon enough, I can start checking the mail for an advance from a publisher who has nothing to do but trawl the internet for random memoirist types and send them money. Advance in hand, I promise I would promptly spend it on drugs and maybe a stylist to help me figure out what to wear on Oprah. It’ll be grand.

But at what cost? Could I sleep at night knowing that while my people continue to faithfully contribute to the world by going in early to the aerosol cheese factory and producing something that matters, I have chosen instead to betray the art of aerosol cheese-making and live, instead, on my own blather? Could I handle Liesl Schillinger’s inevitable paragraphs-long observation in the New York Times Book Review that while my grammar is mostly okay, the content of my thoughts is somehow both disturbing and uninteresting? Do I have the courage to face what might happen if Spazzita, my boss down at the aerosol cheese factory, were to discover my secret uncertainty about the benefits of aerosol cheese and summarily dismiss me for violating the fairly rigid ethical standards that dictate the production and distribution of cheese foods? Can I recover from the almost certain dressing down I might get from Oprah for failing to disclose that I actually don’t know what I’m talking about and have violated the high-minded integrity that surely suffuses the ethics of other people who contribute to the world by essentially writing down their emotional grocery lists?

Well, no. I can, in fact, handle precious little. And as the years recede behind me, I’m actually finding that that I can handle less and less. That, I suspect, might make me a better memoirist than, say, a real writer. Sylvia Plath, bless her heart, had some courage. True, it flagged under enough brutal treatment, but she held on as long as she could. I vaguely recall that I used to have courage. But my courage stole my wallet and left in the middle of the night years ago. Courage and I always had, at best, a cagey relationship. Bravado, I got; I traffic in stupidity, after all. But courage, not so much. That’s what makes Sylvia’s journals such interesting, if painful—in an affluence of ways—reading for me. She had so much of what I don’t got. And it’s almost heartbreaking to notice the small thing I seem to have, that she didn’t. She had courage and discipline and tornadic intelligence. I have misplaced confidence in winning lotteries I don't actually play. But there's something else. Apparently years ago when we were teenagers at the dentist, I learned to trust that I can breathe.

What the world doesn't need

There was a time when I wondered if the thing to do might be to undergo sex re-assignment surgery. When I was really young, I had no means to comprehend the notion of variability and ambiguity in gender expression. When I was a kid, Taco Bell was exotic. But thanks to Tom Snyder, I knew all about sex changes. Which made for interesting lunchroom chat in the fourth grade. Ultimately, I only really discounted the idea on the principle that the last thing the world needs is another straight white guy. Especially a relatively short one with anger issues, inwardly goaded and tortured by his own inability to grow a decent beard.

(In retrospect, I suspect I should have investigated the option of sex re-assignment more seriously. If only to avoid these many years of torment I have endured, trying to figure out what to wear. Sure, on most days, it’s easy enough to fall into the default lesbian uniform of androgyny. But special occasions demand drag. For a big event, you more or less have to pick a gender and run with it. Unless you’re in heels. Then you must not run; you must totter, awkwardly, whilst keeping track of that purse you would otherwise never carry and aren’t at all sure goes with your outfit because nobody ever taught you these rules, and no matter how much you studied Vogue in high school, the secrets of accessorizing remain more elusive than fractal geometry, and you must then ultimately drink too much in order to soften the sting of trying not to look like Peppermint Patty for one friggin’ evening—is that too much to ask?)

Now here’s a new temptation to give the world s’more crap it doesn’t need. Even less than the world needs another straight white guy scratching at the door does the world need another person with a blog, also at the door, also scratching. And writing in throbbing detail about what it’s like to scratch. And speculating about what makes her scratch. And hurling excessive time and effort formatting and editing her unheeded scratches. For no money.

Yes, it’s another great idea. What could be a better use of my time than to generate the literary equivalent of that cheaply made and wholly untantalizing free gift that comes with the infomercial product you would only consider buying when you’re drunk? In this endeavor I am the personification of that flavor injector that comes as Ron Popeil’s gift to you with your purchase of a counter-top rotisserie oven. You, by the way, will probably not use that oven very often. (Where are you going to put all that meat? Have you even thought about how much space a standing rib roast is going to take up in your freezer?) And do you really need the free the flavor injector? Maybe if you need to rocket-launch a pill down your cat’s throat and lodge it into the lining of his intestines.

Perhaps I am best served by accepting my remarkable similarity to the flavor injector. I too am free (or seem to be). I too may seem clever at first. And upon further consideration, my appearance also tends raise questions regarding possible uses for gendered, if not unsettling, behavior. A questionable use of time. Hardly justifiable effort. Uncertain purposes. No promise of penetrating content. At best, I can hope to just inject the flavor of something, but never the thing itself.

But it all manages to turn out okay anyway. Who needs a sex change when ya got a flavor injector, anyways?