I know I compared the Tea Party and Glenn Beck to the Nazis the other day, but that doesn't mean I think they're genocidally wrong about everything. They're right to oppose the bailouts, although they seem to think that the bailouts were meant to give government greater control over private enterprise. Members of Congress have said they were told by (Bush's) Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that, if they didn't vote for the first bailout immediately, the economy would collapse. I think the politicians were trying to save the economy, but they refused to attach strings to the money, due to either their faith in laissez-faire capitalism or their being so deeply tucked into the pockets of Big Business they can't see $#!+.
They should've demanded that the bailed-out financial institutions cease the risky behavior that precipitated the crisis. Instead, we're stuck with too-big-to-fail banks that are now even bigger after gobbling up a bunch of little banks that didn't get government handouts to help them through the crisis. As if that weren't enough to induce vomiting, the TBTF banks are still playing fast and loose with their money, secure in the belief that the government will bail them out the next time they go belly up.
No matter how much I loathe the idea of bailing out corporations, the economic devastation that could've resulted from doing nothing was scary enough to bring me around to George W. Bush's point of view, a monumental feat. Of course, the way the money was distributed left much to be desired. Rather than letting the companies use it to buy out the competition, the government could've paid off all those subprime mortgages. The banks then could've wiped the toxic assets off their balance sheets, and the homeowners could've kept their homes.
But the bailouts did achieve their stated goal: The economy didn't go into freefall. Unfortunately, all we got for our $42 billion (officially, the amount that hasn't been paid back) was the elitist oxymoron of a "jobless recovery." It's a recovery only for the financial industry, whose government-favored goliaths enjoyed a record-breaking rebound from the Great Recession. The rest of us have to deal with the lingering symptoms of unemployment and foreclosures, which don't seem to disturb the Wizards of Wall Street in their glass towers.
Besides redistributing wealth to the wealthy, the bailouts were misguided in another crucial way. They were predicated on the assumption that continued economic growth is good and, with correct government policy, inevitable. If our leaders knew the folly of infinite economic growth as it relates to resource depletion and environmental degradation, they would've used the bailouts to begin a managed contraction of our economy.
As it stands now, we've left Nature to manage the contraction, and, the more we rage against her limits, the more precipitous and chaotic our decline will be. It's possible that more bailouts will be passed by Congress and signed by the President as the economy lurches from crisis to crisis. But, given the extreme unpopularity of the bailouts and the emergence of a well-endowed, right-wing movement dedicated to their rejection, I doubt it. The only saving grace might be to attach meaningful strings to the money, and I don't see the free-market acolytes on the Right going for that.
What we're left with is the probability of a swift, chaotic collapse of the economy in the near future. The people who would be presiding over that situation range from those who think capitalism occasionally needs no-strings-attached handouts and a little regulation (Democrats) to those who think capitalism works best with no handouts and no regulation (most of the GOP and all of the Tea Party). I really don't think they have the knowledge to deal with such a contingency. Barring the ecological enlightenment of our federal government, they will keep trying to grow the economy, which will have the rather ironic effect of digging us deeper into a pit of poverty.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Weimar Days
Back in April, I saw the recording artist Ke$ha perform one of her chart-toppers on a rerun of Saturday Night Live. The spectacle resembled a musical number from Cabaret, even though she and her backup dancers were dressed and acted like robots from space. This insubstantial pop starlet appeared to be attempting some obtuse political statement with her absurdly overblown stage show featuring two U.S. flags, one draped over the mic stand and the other lining the underside of her cape.
I've fallen far behind the music scene these days, but Ke$ha seems to be a cut-rate composite of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, the Taylor Dane to their Madonna. It's astonishing to me, a child of the '80s and '90s, that a pop star of her slim caliber would try such ambitious social commentary. Of course, I wasn't around for the late '60s or early '70s, but there seem to be disturbing parallels between our era and the Weimar Republic, which produced an abundance of politically-conscious art.
Glenn Beck's rally to restore America's "honor" is Exhibit A in this theory. The Right has been thoroughly enraged by Obama's "global apology tour," his speeches overseas that expressed a teensy bit of regret over the recent conduct of U.S. foreign policy. They feel that he's dishonoring the glorious, righteous wars we've been waging in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, more than that, he's suggesting that America is capable of making mistakes when it comes to war. Such self-criticism rattles one of the pillars of their world, American exceptionalism. This is the belief that America is "the shining city on the hill" (in Reagan's words) chosen by God to spread Truth, Justice and the American Way.
They can't imagine that, as far as our foreign policy is concerned, the U.S.A. may be nothing more than the latest in a long line of empires that use war merely to aggrandize their power. The only moral distinction between us and previous empires is the lengths to which we'll go to rationalize mass murder. Our forerunners were comfortable with conquest. We must convince ourselves that our way of life is threatened before we can bomb Third World peasants with a clear conscience.
The Nazis had a similar version of German history. It denied or rationalized the crimes Germany had committed in World War I and led the Nazis to believe that the Fatherland had been betrayed and disgraced by its leaders when they accepted responsibility and punishment for starting the war. German exceptionalism convinced the Nazis they should rule the world and exterminate all non-Aryans. Of course, most American exceptionalists do not desire global dominion. But, if you claim the right to destroy a country that poses no threat to your own (like Iran), what's the difference?
The other red flag thrown up by the Beck rally was its co-opting of the civil rights movement. Beck calls himself and his Tea Party pals the true inheritors of that movement, a claim whose absurdity transcends both comedy and gobsmackery. They are the most sheltered and privileged demographic in history. It recalls the twisted logic of the Nazis insisting that Christian Germans were oppressed by Jews, a minority that had known centuries of subjugation in Europe.
I know I'm guilty of the cliche of comparing my political adversaries to the Nazis, but the similarities are too striking to ignore. And, as I'm sure we've all heard, knowing history is the best way to avoid repeating it. Of course, if you erase the unpleasant parts, you might be inclined to repeat it.
I've fallen far behind the music scene these days, but Ke$ha seems to be a cut-rate composite of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, the Taylor Dane to their Madonna. It's astonishing to me, a child of the '80s and '90s, that a pop star of her slim caliber would try such ambitious social commentary. Of course, I wasn't around for the late '60s or early '70s, but there seem to be disturbing parallels between our era and the Weimar Republic, which produced an abundance of politically-conscious art.
Glenn Beck's rally to restore America's "honor" is Exhibit A in this theory. The Right has been thoroughly enraged by Obama's "global apology tour," his speeches overseas that expressed a teensy bit of regret over the recent conduct of U.S. foreign policy. They feel that he's dishonoring the glorious, righteous wars we've been waging in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, more than that, he's suggesting that America is capable of making mistakes when it comes to war. Such self-criticism rattles one of the pillars of their world, American exceptionalism. This is the belief that America is "the shining city on the hill" (in Reagan's words) chosen by God to spread Truth, Justice and the American Way.
They can't imagine that, as far as our foreign policy is concerned, the U.S.A. may be nothing more than the latest in a long line of empires that use war merely to aggrandize their power. The only moral distinction between us and previous empires is the lengths to which we'll go to rationalize mass murder. Our forerunners were comfortable with conquest. We must convince ourselves that our way of life is threatened before we can bomb Third World peasants with a clear conscience.
The Nazis had a similar version of German history. It denied or rationalized the crimes Germany had committed in World War I and led the Nazis to believe that the Fatherland had been betrayed and disgraced by its leaders when they accepted responsibility and punishment for starting the war. German exceptionalism convinced the Nazis they should rule the world and exterminate all non-Aryans. Of course, most American exceptionalists do not desire global dominion. But, if you claim the right to destroy a country that poses no threat to your own (like Iran), what's the difference?
The other red flag thrown up by the Beck rally was its co-opting of the civil rights movement. Beck calls himself and his Tea Party pals the true inheritors of that movement, a claim whose absurdity transcends both comedy and gobsmackery. They are the most sheltered and privileged demographic in history. It recalls the twisted logic of the Nazis insisting that Christian Germans were oppressed by Jews, a minority that had known centuries of subjugation in Europe.
I know I'm guilty of the cliche of comparing my political adversaries to the Nazis, but the similarities are too striking to ignore. And, as I'm sure we've all heard, knowing history is the best way to avoid repeating it. Of course, if you erase the unpleasant parts, you might be inclined to repeat it.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Mickey hits the Big Time!
On Saturday I was interviewed by KMO for his C-Realm Podcast. The subject was my blog post, "The Doomer's Course," which was published on Energy Bulletin. You can listen to the podcast here. KMO starts by reading my essay, which takes a while, and my interview follows that. I probably should've reread my essay before the interview. I wrote it a month before and hadn't looked at it since then. If I wanna make it on the podcast circuit, "preparation" will hafta be the name of my game ;^)
Interestingly, KMO is working at The Farm Ecovillage Training Center in Summertown, TN, the same place I went in 2005 for a two-week permaculture course shortly after learning about Peak Oil and collapsing into an insomnia-fueled emotional breakdown. For me, the healing began there, so I have extremely fond memories of the place.
Interestingly, KMO is working at The Farm Ecovillage Training Center in Summertown, TN, the same place I went in 2005 for a two-week permaculture course shortly after learning about Peak Oil and collapsing into an insomnia-fueled emotional breakdown. For me, the healing began there, so I have extremely fond memories of the place.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
How LeBron's Decision Affected Me
In case you haven't heard, LeBron James had a one-hour primetime special on ESPN last week to announce what team he was gonna play for. It was entitled "The Decision" and was almost as self-absorbed and un-self-aware as it sounds. He plunged a dagger into the back of the Cleveland Cavaliers, his hometown team that had helped him achieve global superstardom during his first 7 years in the NBA, and for some reason he decided to perform this soul-reaping on national television.
But that's not what I wanna talk about. Plenty of sportswriters and fans have vented their rage on this subject, castigating LeBron for his egomania, obliviousness or maybe even vindictiveness for subjecting Cleveland fans to such a public abandonment. I'd like to talk about how LeBron's decision affected me. I've been a fan of his since he went pro straight out of high school in '03. He has always seemed like a super-nice, fun kinda guy. Now he kinda seems like a jerk. Or, at best, an idiot.
Not only did he show zero sensitivity to the feelings of Cleveland fans, he showed very little regard for the feelings of people like me, fans of his who aren't from Cleveland and don't care that much where he plays. We deserve some consideration too. Sure, I would've liked to see him stay in Cleveland and exhibit loyalty to a fanbase that has become the poster child for sports-delivered gut punches. But if he was gonna leave the Cavs, the least he could've done was pick a team with a decent jersey design that didn't already have an alpha dog. Allow me to explain.
The Miami Heat, LeBron's new team, has rather boring jerseys. The colors are dark red and white with black trim, or black and white with red trim, which is fine. But the design is sterile and unimaginative, just basic block lettering. The script is slanted in a lame attempt to add some dynamism to the look. Say what you will about the Cavs, that their owner's a jerk, that their new coach is a cast-off, that their city is where championship hopes go to die, but you could NOT say that their jerseys lacked pizazz. Whether they were wearing the white-and-navy-and-wine-and-gold home jerseys or the wine-and-gold road jerseys or the navy-and-gold alternate road jerseys, they always stepped on the court in style. Maybe the Cavs don't know how to win titles, but they certainly know how to put on the Ritz.
I'm not sure if I'm willing to split with $40 for a replica LeBron Heat jersey, even though he'll be wearing No. 6 as a tribute to one of my favorite players, Julius "Dr. J" Erving. (Bill Simmons, ESPN.com's "The Sports Guy" and my favorite sportswriter, will surely have a field day with that choice, since he's already tagged LeBron as another Dr. J, i.e., an outlandishly gifted athlete who would belong in the game's pantheon if not for his lack of a killer instinct. Simmons may also find it significant that LeBron hasn't mentioned the other legendary player to wear No. 6, Bill Russell, winner of a record 11 NBA titles, a ruthless competitor and firmly ensconced in the pantheon.) It'd be nice to see the Heat wear their retro jerseys, the style they sported at the dawn of the franchise, back in those myth-wreathed days of '88. I'm sure they'll be churning out all kinds of throwback jerseys for the Tropical Trio of LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to wear and for us to buy. I seem to recall the Heat donning the uniforms of the ABA's 38-years-defunct Miami Floridians not so long ago. Those may be coming out of storage as we speak.
As for the "alpha dog" argument, it feels almost like nit-picking. You see, we sports fans want our heroes to be deeply committed to winning, to the exclusion of nearly everything else in life. LeBron has shown an interest in winning by his choice, choosing to join forces with Dwyane Wade, at worst the third-best player in the NBA, and Chris Bosh, one of the league's best post players. But they have formed such a talented core that it seems like cheating for them to play on the same team. Anything less than a championship would be a disappointment, if not an outright embarrassment.
Also, we want LeBron to be the Man on whatever team he joins. As I've heard someone remark on ESPN, Jordan wouldn't have wanted to play with D-Wade; he would've wanted to beat him. And Jordan is the gold standard for competitiveness. He may've been a gambling addict who cheated on his wife and punched his teammates, but nobody fought harder to win. That's the ideal to which all NBA stars aspire, no matter how destructive the personal consequences may be. LeBron's desire to play with his All-Star friends undermines his basketball stature, even in my eyes. He should want to win but on his own terms on a team that automatically defers to him in crunch time.
It's too bad we've lionized these qualities in our sports heroes: obsessive competitiveness and anti-social individualism. Perhaps LeBron "Bron-Bron" or "King" James, Dwyane "D-Wade" or "Flash" Wade and Chris "I Could Really Use A Nickname That's Better Than CB4" or "The Texas Toothpick" Bosh will teach us all a thing or two about teamwork and friendship. I suppose if they rattled off 8 straight championships, that might be cool. But I think LeBron has forfeited his chance to supplant Jordan as the Greatest Basketball Player of All Time, which sucks because I really wanted him to be the Chosen One and, as we've all learned from the sacred parchments of countless cultures and endless viewings of The Matrix on cable, when the time comes, the Chosen One must stand alone.
But that's not what I wanna talk about. Plenty of sportswriters and fans have vented their rage on this subject, castigating LeBron for his egomania, obliviousness or maybe even vindictiveness for subjecting Cleveland fans to such a public abandonment. I'd like to talk about how LeBron's decision affected me. I've been a fan of his since he went pro straight out of high school in '03. He has always seemed like a super-nice, fun kinda guy. Now he kinda seems like a jerk. Or, at best, an idiot.
Not only did he show zero sensitivity to the feelings of Cleveland fans, he showed very little regard for the feelings of people like me, fans of his who aren't from Cleveland and don't care that much where he plays. We deserve some consideration too. Sure, I would've liked to see him stay in Cleveland and exhibit loyalty to a fanbase that has become the poster child for sports-delivered gut punches. But if he was gonna leave the Cavs, the least he could've done was pick a team with a decent jersey design that didn't already have an alpha dog. Allow me to explain.
The Miami Heat, LeBron's new team, has rather boring jerseys. The colors are dark red and white with black trim, or black and white with red trim, which is fine. But the design is sterile and unimaginative, just basic block lettering. The script is slanted in a lame attempt to add some dynamism to the look. Say what you will about the Cavs, that their owner's a jerk, that their new coach is a cast-off, that their city is where championship hopes go to die, but you could NOT say that their jerseys lacked pizazz. Whether they were wearing the white-and-navy-and-wine-and-gold home jerseys or the wine-and-gold road jerseys or the navy-and-gold alternate road jerseys, they always stepped on the court in style. Maybe the Cavs don't know how to win titles, but they certainly know how to put on the Ritz.
I'm not sure if I'm willing to split with $40 for a replica LeBron Heat jersey, even though he'll be wearing No. 6 as a tribute to one of my favorite players, Julius "Dr. J" Erving. (Bill Simmons, ESPN.com's "The Sports Guy" and my favorite sportswriter, will surely have a field day with that choice, since he's already tagged LeBron as another Dr. J, i.e., an outlandishly gifted athlete who would belong in the game's pantheon if not for his lack of a killer instinct. Simmons may also find it significant that LeBron hasn't mentioned the other legendary player to wear No. 6, Bill Russell, winner of a record 11 NBA titles, a ruthless competitor and firmly ensconced in the pantheon.) It'd be nice to see the Heat wear their retro jerseys, the style they sported at the dawn of the franchise, back in those myth-wreathed days of '88. I'm sure they'll be churning out all kinds of throwback jerseys for the Tropical Trio of LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to wear and for us to buy. I seem to recall the Heat donning the uniforms of the ABA's 38-years-defunct Miami Floridians not so long ago. Those may be coming out of storage as we speak.
As for the "alpha dog" argument, it feels almost like nit-picking. You see, we sports fans want our heroes to be deeply committed to winning, to the exclusion of nearly everything else in life. LeBron has shown an interest in winning by his choice, choosing to join forces with Dwyane Wade, at worst the third-best player in the NBA, and Chris Bosh, one of the league's best post players. But they have formed such a talented core that it seems like cheating for them to play on the same team. Anything less than a championship would be a disappointment, if not an outright embarrassment.
Also, we want LeBron to be the Man on whatever team he joins. As I've heard someone remark on ESPN, Jordan wouldn't have wanted to play with D-Wade; he would've wanted to beat him. And Jordan is the gold standard for competitiveness. He may've been a gambling addict who cheated on his wife and punched his teammates, but nobody fought harder to win. That's the ideal to which all NBA stars aspire, no matter how destructive the personal consequences may be. LeBron's desire to play with his All-Star friends undermines his basketball stature, even in my eyes. He should want to win but on his own terms on a team that automatically defers to him in crunch time.
It's too bad we've lionized these qualities in our sports heroes: obsessive competitiveness and anti-social individualism. Perhaps LeBron "Bron-Bron" or "King" James, Dwyane "D-Wade" or "Flash" Wade and Chris "I Could Really Use A Nickname That's Better Than CB4" or "The Texas Toothpick" Bosh will teach us all a thing or two about teamwork and friendship. I suppose if they rattled off 8 straight championships, that might be cool. But I think LeBron has forfeited his chance to supplant Jordan as the Greatest Basketball Player of All Time, which sucks because I really wanted him to be the Chosen One and, as we've all learned from the sacred parchments of countless cultures and endless viewings of The Matrix on cable, when the time comes, the Chosen One must stand alone.
Smooth
(Author's Note: Last night I read an abridged version of this essay in the Word Ninjas open mic at Kieran's. It went over quite well.)
There comes a time in every hirsute man's life when he must choose between two unpleasant options: either continue on his hairy way and invite unflattering comparisons to Big Foot and Robin Williams or declare endless war against his follicles in a desperate bid to join that elite group of men one constantly sees in ads for cologne and deodorant. For the most part I have yielded the field to my androgens (the male hormones associated with body hair). My eyebrows and the nape of my neck are generally only trimmed when I get a haircut. I shave every other day (all the way down to the collar), but that's a common practice among men hairy and not. Only once have I waged an all-out assault on this scourge, the prosecution of which took me to a place I'd never been before.
It was a chill wind that blew through November in that Year of Our Lord 2006. On my way down Hennepin Ave, across from the YWCA, I would pass a salon that advertised waxing services. Eventually, I overcame my fear of the unknown and made an appointment to get my back waxed. (Yes, I really am that hairy.) The salon was empty on that particular weeknight except for the man who would be servicing me. He was very friendly and chatty and led me to the basement, where there was a room with a table covered in sheets that looked very hygienic and white.
I removed my shirt and lay on the table on my stomach. In my memory there was a stereo in the corner playing soporific, Enya-style music, but that could've been a later addition by my unconscious, since every other room I've been in like that has had a stereo in the corner playing soporific, Enya-style music. When I said I went to a place I'd never been before, I was referring to the pain. Never before had I voluntarily subjected myself to the physical pain that this amiable, gregarious, smaller-than-me man was inflicting on my back. Do you remember that scene in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" when Steve Carell has his chest waxed? I now know for a fact that, if he was truly getting waxed, he did not need any motivation for that scene.
Luckily for me, I have a higher pain threshold than Steve Carell's character had in that movie. Very little sound escaped my mouth as he worked me over, and I was confident enough in my tolerance to flip over and let him do my chest. This pushed my stoic facade even closer to the breaking point, for the pain of a back wax turned out to be a mere warmup to the Guantanamo-esque torture of a chest wax. I soldiered on, though, leaving only a small patch of hair in the middle of my chest to mark my masculinity and maintain consciousness.
During the treatment, my waxer regaled me with stories of his other clients, mainly women who had no qualms about exposing themselves to him while he waxed their nether regions. One voluptuous black woman stripped to reveal a pubic area that the waxer said resembled a shar pei. My guess is these women felt comfortable with him because he set off their gay-dar as strongly as he did mine. As if to confirm my suspicion, he told me about his idea for a holiday show called "Gay Nativity." It was such a brilliant (and potentially lucrative) concept that I found myself wishing I'd thought of it first.
After we were through, my waxer explained that I would have to scrub the waxed areas thoroughly with a loofah when I showered so as to avoid getting in-grown hairs. This was news to me and made me wonder if the whole thing would be more trouble than it was worth. A few minutes of blinding pain is one thing, but spending extra time in the shower to use a loofah was something else entirely, especially since I did almost all my showering at the Y. I found it ironic that this attempt to make myself more attractive to women was making me feel uncomfortably effeminate.
When I put my shirt back on, the difference was visceral. The skin felt almost like a mannequin, hard and smooth. Upon returning to my apartment, I showed off my smoothness to one of my roommates. He was politely bemused by my appearance and perhaps slightly discomfited that I had seen fit to share this personal, physical secret with him. Duane and I were good friends, but we were also heterosexual men who didn't normally confide in each other so intimately. Our relationship was defined by Vikings vs. Packers, not waxing vs. shaving.
I decided to finish the job on my own and shave off my pubes. At the time, it seemed like the way to go in order to even out my body hair coverage (except, of course, for my still-bushy arms and legs). In case any other man is struck by the same fancy, let me be perfectly clear: There is nothing easy about shaving one's testicles. Films such as those in the "American Pie" franchise have done us a grave disservice in discounting the dangers inherent in such activities. Only a fool would attempt it without the proper training. That I am still living today to impart this advice is testament only to the grace of God.
Having survived that ordeal, I embarked on a lifestyle of near-hairlessness. It was remarkably similar to my former, hairy lifestyle, differing only in the degree of my self-consciousness while nude in the YWCA men's locker room. Even in my former life I had been quite self-conscious in that setting. Now I was even more self-conscious. I wondered what the other men thought of me as I traipsed about with my smooth torso and nearly-smooth crotch. Perhaps they thought I'd landed a small, but crucial role in a locally-produced porno, just the sort of artistic initiative one would expect from a member of the Uptown Y-Dub. More likely they were thinking the same thing I was: "Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact."
Other than that, my life didn't change at all. After a month or two of scrubbing with a loofah at the Y, I was back to my hairy old self and feeling rather silly about the whole experiment. It hadn't given me the confidence to talk to any attractive women, nor had it gotten me any modeling work in the cologne and deodorant advertising industry (or the porn industry for that matter). I learned that, just because you're hairless, it doesn't mean you're smooth.
There comes a time in every hirsute man's life when he must choose between two unpleasant options: either continue on his hairy way and invite unflattering comparisons to Big Foot and Robin Williams or declare endless war against his follicles in a desperate bid to join that elite group of men one constantly sees in ads for cologne and deodorant. For the most part I have yielded the field to my androgens (the male hormones associated with body hair). My eyebrows and the nape of my neck are generally only trimmed when I get a haircut. I shave every other day (all the way down to the collar), but that's a common practice among men hairy and not. Only once have I waged an all-out assault on this scourge, the prosecution of which took me to a place I'd never been before.
It was a chill wind that blew through November in that Year of Our Lord 2006. On my way down Hennepin Ave, across from the YWCA, I would pass a salon that advertised waxing services. Eventually, I overcame my fear of the unknown and made an appointment to get my back waxed. (Yes, I really am that hairy.) The salon was empty on that particular weeknight except for the man who would be servicing me. He was very friendly and chatty and led me to the basement, where there was a room with a table covered in sheets that looked very hygienic and white.
I removed my shirt and lay on the table on my stomach. In my memory there was a stereo in the corner playing soporific, Enya-style music, but that could've been a later addition by my unconscious, since every other room I've been in like that has had a stereo in the corner playing soporific, Enya-style music. When I said I went to a place I'd never been before, I was referring to the pain. Never before had I voluntarily subjected myself to the physical pain that this amiable, gregarious, smaller-than-me man was inflicting on my back. Do you remember that scene in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" when Steve Carell has his chest waxed? I now know for a fact that, if he was truly getting waxed, he did not need any motivation for that scene.
Luckily for me, I have a higher pain threshold than Steve Carell's character had in that movie. Very little sound escaped my mouth as he worked me over, and I was confident enough in my tolerance to flip over and let him do my chest. This pushed my stoic facade even closer to the breaking point, for the pain of a back wax turned out to be a mere warmup to the Guantanamo-esque torture of a chest wax. I soldiered on, though, leaving only a small patch of hair in the middle of my chest to mark my masculinity and maintain consciousness.
During the treatment, my waxer regaled me with stories of his other clients, mainly women who had no qualms about exposing themselves to him while he waxed their nether regions. One voluptuous black woman stripped to reveal a pubic area that the waxer said resembled a shar pei. My guess is these women felt comfortable with him because he set off their gay-dar as strongly as he did mine. As if to confirm my suspicion, he told me about his idea for a holiday show called "Gay Nativity." It was such a brilliant (and potentially lucrative) concept that I found myself wishing I'd thought of it first.
After we were through, my waxer explained that I would have to scrub the waxed areas thoroughly with a loofah when I showered so as to avoid getting in-grown hairs. This was news to me and made me wonder if the whole thing would be more trouble than it was worth. A few minutes of blinding pain is one thing, but spending extra time in the shower to use a loofah was something else entirely, especially since I did almost all my showering at the Y. I found it ironic that this attempt to make myself more attractive to women was making me feel uncomfortably effeminate.
When I put my shirt back on, the difference was visceral. The skin felt almost like a mannequin, hard and smooth. Upon returning to my apartment, I showed off my smoothness to one of my roommates. He was politely bemused by my appearance and perhaps slightly discomfited that I had seen fit to share this personal, physical secret with him. Duane and I were good friends, but we were also heterosexual men who didn't normally confide in each other so intimately. Our relationship was defined by Vikings vs. Packers, not waxing vs. shaving.
I decided to finish the job on my own and shave off my pubes. At the time, it seemed like the way to go in order to even out my body hair coverage (except, of course, for my still-bushy arms and legs). In case any other man is struck by the same fancy, let me be perfectly clear: There is nothing easy about shaving one's testicles. Films such as those in the "American Pie" franchise have done us a grave disservice in discounting the dangers inherent in such activities. Only a fool would attempt it without the proper training. That I am still living today to impart this advice is testament only to the grace of God.
Having survived that ordeal, I embarked on a lifestyle of near-hairlessness. It was remarkably similar to my former, hairy lifestyle, differing only in the degree of my self-consciousness while nude in the YWCA men's locker room. Even in my former life I had been quite self-conscious in that setting. Now I was even more self-conscious. I wondered what the other men thought of me as I traipsed about with my smooth torso and nearly-smooth crotch. Perhaps they thought I'd landed a small, but crucial role in a locally-produced porno, just the sort of artistic initiative one would expect from a member of the Uptown Y-Dub. More likely they were thinking the same thing I was: "Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact. Don't make eye contact."
Other than that, my life didn't change at all. After a month or two of scrubbing with a loofah at the Y, I was back to my hairy old self and feeling rather silly about the whole experiment. It hadn't given me the confidence to talk to any attractive women, nor had it gotten me any modeling work in the cologne and deodorant advertising industry (or the porn industry for that matter). I learned that, just because you're hairless, it doesn't mean you're smooth.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Doomer's Curse
The Deepwater Horizon disaster has triggered a strong emotional response. Gulf Coasters are grieving for their lost way of life and expressing outrage over BP and the government's response to the crisis. People from across the country and the world have demonstrated their empathy though protests, directing most of their frustration at BP. Even the President of the United States said in a televised interview that he was looking for an ass to kick.
I share in the pain and anger brought on by this tragedy. But I can't deny that it also summoned another feeling: self-satisfaction. The Doomer in me is cheered by this confirmation of the oil industry's reckless greed. He is delighted that millions of people will be shaken out of their torpor by the only thing apparently able to wake them up: an abrupt end to their livelihood. The Doomer says catastrophe is necessary to effect the societal changes required to deal with Peak Oil and Climate Change.
However, I know the Doomer is wrong. Crisis can bring out the best in people, but it can also bring out the worst. When people are in shock, they don't often make the best decisions. Extreme emotions tend to cloud one's judgment. The Doomer also forgets that it's a slippery slope from hoping for disaster to abetting it. He may get so caught up in following the news of collapse from around the world that he neglects (intentionally or not) to do anything to prevent or even mitigate the repercussions of that collapse. He may not even feel responsible for taking preemptive action, since he believes calamity is a prerequisite for reform. Of course, this theory only applies to the supposedly oblivious residents of distant states and countries. He would surely be singing a different tune if the same fate had befallen him.
The Doomer is motivated by much more than a perverse sense of altruism. He mainly desires to see everyone brought down to his level. His fondest wish is for everyone to be as emotionally crippled as he is, and, if they could also be paralyzed fiscally, that would be great too. The argument for the necessity of disaster is merely an excuse for his vindictive fantasies. This is the Doomer's Curse: to wallow in despair, to sneer at the happiness of others, to revel in schadenfreude and to believe that he has humanity's best interests at heart. The Doomer honestly thinks that a universal depression (in the emotional sense) would lay the foundation for a better world, but this belief is rooted in his own selfishness, not in a rational socioeconomic analysis.
The Doomer wants this world to end, because in this world he is a failure. He has failed to achieve his goals personally and/or professionally, but he lacks the maturity to take responsibility for his failure. He blames the rules of this world for his defeat, to the point of judging this world irredeemably corrupt. This belief makes a virtue of his failure, for only the corrupt could succeed in such a world. His moral integrity precludes his success in this den of iniquity. With a better perspective, he could see that it's not the world's corruption that condemns him to failure, but rather his failure that leads him to condemn the world. Therefore, instead of taking steps to improve his chances of success, he throws up his hands, picks up the remote (or the mouse) and eagerly awaits the end of the world that (he believes) is dead set against him.
The Doomer confuses his personal collapse with the "inevitable" collapse of society. ("Inevitable" is the keystone of the Doomer vocabulary and, as such, should be avoided whenever possible.) He suffers from a severe case of tunnel vision. Like a horse with blinders on, he can only see what's immediately in front of him. Anything indicating that other people's experience contradicts his world-view is dismissed as false or a lie propagated by the corrupt elite. He doesn't want his dogma tested, because then it might be refuted, and the emotional consequences of that would be too much to bear. He would have to accept that he has failed due to his lack of merit and not by his refusal to make some moral compromise.
As I mentioned before, the Doomer I refer to is not a personality type. He is an aspect of my personality and, it seems, the personalities of many people. (How else do you explain the enduring popularity of apocalyptic cults, auto racing or Goth music?) I'm attempting self-analysis in the hope that it will resonate with others. Therefore, when I call the Doomer a loser willing to blame anyone but himself, I'm talking about myself. All the characteristics I enumerated are ones that I've personified many times in the five years since I learned about Peak Oil and even before then. My hope is that being honest about my Doomerism will help me overcome these tendencies and help others recognize the same tendencies in themselves.
My other motivation for writing this essay is to point out that our emotional condition goes a long way toward determining our vision of the future. Someone wrote that Peak Oil is like a Rorschach test. People use it to project their wishes onto the future. For instance, those who pray for the death of industrial capitalism are likely to view Peak Oil as the catalyst for just such an event. In this mindset Peak Oil functions as a Messiah, able to deliver the faithful from whatever evil plagues them. But we must remember that the future doesn't take requests. Unless we can make common cause with millions of like-minded individuals, we aren't likely to get the change we want, with or without Peak Oil. And, even if we do succeed, we'll probably have to work within resource limits far more restrictive than we're used to.
I share in the pain and anger brought on by this tragedy. But I can't deny that it also summoned another feeling: self-satisfaction. The Doomer in me is cheered by this confirmation of the oil industry's reckless greed. He is delighted that millions of people will be shaken out of their torpor by the only thing apparently able to wake them up: an abrupt end to their livelihood. The Doomer says catastrophe is necessary to effect the societal changes required to deal with Peak Oil and Climate Change.
However, I know the Doomer is wrong. Crisis can bring out the best in people, but it can also bring out the worst. When people are in shock, they don't often make the best decisions. Extreme emotions tend to cloud one's judgment. The Doomer also forgets that it's a slippery slope from hoping for disaster to abetting it. He may get so caught up in following the news of collapse from around the world that he neglects (intentionally or not) to do anything to prevent or even mitigate the repercussions of that collapse. He may not even feel responsible for taking preemptive action, since he believes calamity is a prerequisite for reform. Of course, this theory only applies to the supposedly oblivious residents of distant states and countries. He would surely be singing a different tune if the same fate had befallen him.
The Doomer is motivated by much more than a perverse sense of altruism. He mainly desires to see everyone brought down to his level. His fondest wish is for everyone to be as emotionally crippled as he is, and, if they could also be paralyzed fiscally, that would be great too. The argument for the necessity of disaster is merely an excuse for his vindictive fantasies. This is the Doomer's Curse: to wallow in despair, to sneer at the happiness of others, to revel in schadenfreude and to believe that he has humanity's best interests at heart. The Doomer honestly thinks that a universal depression (in the emotional sense) would lay the foundation for a better world, but this belief is rooted in his own selfishness, not in a rational socioeconomic analysis.
The Doomer wants this world to end, because in this world he is a failure. He has failed to achieve his goals personally and/or professionally, but he lacks the maturity to take responsibility for his failure. He blames the rules of this world for his defeat, to the point of judging this world irredeemably corrupt. This belief makes a virtue of his failure, for only the corrupt could succeed in such a world. His moral integrity precludes his success in this den of iniquity. With a better perspective, he could see that it's not the world's corruption that condemns him to failure, but rather his failure that leads him to condemn the world. Therefore, instead of taking steps to improve his chances of success, he throws up his hands, picks up the remote (or the mouse) and eagerly awaits the end of the world that (he believes) is dead set against him.
The Doomer confuses his personal collapse with the "inevitable" collapse of society. ("Inevitable" is the keystone of the Doomer vocabulary and, as such, should be avoided whenever possible.) He suffers from a severe case of tunnel vision. Like a horse with blinders on, he can only see what's immediately in front of him. Anything indicating that other people's experience contradicts his world-view is dismissed as false or a lie propagated by the corrupt elite. He doesn't want his dogma tested, because then it might be refuted, and the emotional consequences of that would be too much to bear. He would have to accept that he has failed due to his lack of merit and not by his refusal to make some moral compromise.
As I mentioned before, the Doomer I refer to is not a personality type. He is an aspect of my personality and, it seems, the personalities of many people. (How else do you explain the enduring popularity of apocalyptic cults, auto racing or Goth music?) I'm attempting self-analysis in the hope that it will resonate with others. Therefore, when I call the Doomer a loser willing to blame anyone but himself, I'm talking about myself. All the characteristics I enumerated are ones that I've personified many times in the five years since I learned about Peak Oil and even before then. My hope is that being honest about my Doomerism will help me overcome these tendencies and help others recognize the same tendencies in themselves.
My other motivation for writing this essay is to point out that our emotional condition goes a long way toward determining our vision of the future. Someone wrote that Peak Oil is like a Rorschach test. People use it to project their wishes onto the future. For instance, those who pray for the death of industrial capitalism are likely to view Peak Oil as the catalyst for just such an event. In this mindset Peak Oil functions as a Messiah, able to deliver the faithful from whatever evil plagues them. But we must remember that the future doesn't take requests. Unless we can make common cause with millions of like-minded individuals, we aren't likely to get the change we want, with or without Peak Oil. And, even if we do succeed, we'll probably have to work within resource limits far more restrictive than we're used to.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Champions of My Heart
We've come to the end of another long NBA postseason and, once again, I find myself emotionally bereft. Well, maybe not bereft, but certainly disappointed. I managed to attach myself to the losing side for the final three rounds of the playoffs, and in the Finals the team I was rooting for lost for the sixth straight year. There hasn't been an NBA champion I was honestly happy for since the '04 Pistons. (I should've been happy for the '08 Celtics, but, due to cowardly extenuating circumstances, I was not. For an explanation, refer to my post from June 2008, "I Won't Let the Celtics Hurt Me Again.")
Heading into the playoffs, my team was the Cleveland Cavaliers, as it was the year before, led by my favorite player, the charismatic (and messianic) LeBron James. For the second straight season the Cavs had the best regular-season record in the league, and for the second straight season they crapped out in crunch time.
This year their comeuppance was delivered by the crafty, often-decrepit Boston Celtics, although the difference in their second-round matchup was an up-and-comer, Boston's point guard Rajon Rondo. The Celtics administered a devastating lesson on the finer points of the game, schooling the younger, more athletic Cavs with poised, heady play. It was another reminder that, as Don Mashak once said, "Age and Guile do not always beat Youth, enthusiasm and Idealism, but that is the way to bet." Of course, this begs the question, "Who the %$@# is Don Mashak?"
Once LeBron and the Cavaliers had exited stage right (in an inglorious and ignominious fashion, I might add), my loyalties drifted to the Orlando Magic in the hope that they could dispatch these rough, crude Celtics post-haste. Sadly, the Magic proved just as helpless to Boston's wiles as the Cavs had been. The Celtics made Orlando look amateurish and stage-struck as they conducted a basketball clinic against another youthful, spry opponent.
Matched up against the Lakers in the Finals, I had little choice but to pledge my allegiance to the Celtics. In '08 my rooting interests had become so confused that I'd found myself (shockingly) pulling for the Lakers against the Celtics, despite a pro-Celtic, anti-Laker bias bred in childhood by my father. I wasn't able to throw my support fully behind the Celtics until Game 4, when Glen "Big Baby" Davis and Nate Robinson, two Boston bench players, provided the decisive lift to even the series at 2 games apiece. After making a key basket while drawing a foul, the 6'9", 289-lb Davis let out a barbaric yawp (along with some drool) as the 5'9" Robinson jumped onto his back. (It should be noted that the listed heights and weights of professional athletes are not always accurate. Davis and Robinson are a few inches shorter, and Davis a few pounds heavier, than they would have us believe.) Their unbridled enthusiasm and uninhibited revelry won me over.
By the time the NBA Finals had reached Game 7 (for only the third time in the last 22 years), I had pitched my tent firmly in the Celtics camp and thus effectively ruined Boston's chances for their 18th championship. The final game was a gritty, defensive struggle with all the effort (if not all the skill) one would hope to see in the season's ultimate showdown. Los Angeles came out on top, and I was left to pick up the pieces once more.
The questions I have to ask myself now are: "Why does it mean so much to me? Why do I put myself through this?" The mystery of fan-dom has confounded scholars since time immemorial. If I may add my two cents, I would guess that I'm eager to place my happiness in arbitrary hands, because I have little faith in my ability to bring myself happiness. Also, rooting for the home team is a shortcut to a sense of community sorely lacking in our society these days. Finally, and most crucially I think, sport provides a stage for mythic storylines to be played out: Good vs. Evil, Celtics vs. Lakers, Anybody vs. Duke. Although, just as in real life, there's no guarantee the Hero will defeat the Villain, which makes the contest all the more interesting. Doesn't everyone need a Champion to ride into battle on their behalf, whether it's Richard the Lionheart trying to wrest the Holy Land from Saladin or LeBron James dunking on Kobe Bryant's head?
Heading into the playoffs, my team was the Cleveland Cavaliers, as it was the year before, led by my favorite player, the charismatic (and messianic) LeBron James. For the second straight season the Cavs had the best regular-season record in the league, and for the second straight season they crapped out in crunch time.
This year their comeuppance was delivered by the crafty, often-decrepit Boston Celtics, although the difference in their second-round matchup was an up-and-comer, Boston's point guard Rajon Rondo. The Celtics administered a devastating lesson on the finer points of the game, schooling the younger, more athletic Cavs with poised, heady play. It was another reminder that, as Don Mashak once said, "Age and Guile do not always beat Youth, enthusiasm and Idealism, but that is the way to bet." Of course, this begs the question, "Who the %$@# is Don Mashak?"
Once LeBron and the Cavaliers had exited stage right (in an inglorious and ignominious fashion, I might add), my loyalties drifted to the Orlando Magic in the hope that they could dispatch these rough, crude Celtics post-haste. Sadly, the Magic proved just as helpless to Boston's wiles as the Cavs had been. The Celtics made Orlando look amateurish and stage-struck as they conducted a basketball clinic against another youthful, spry opponent.
Matched up against the Lakers in the Finals, I had little choice but to pledge my allegiance to the Celtics. In '08 my rooting interests had become so confused that I'd found myself (shockingly) pulling for the Lakers against the Celtics, despite a pro-Celtic, anti-Laker bias bred in childhood by my father. I wasn't able to throw my support fully behind the Celtics until Game 4, when Glen "Big Baby" Davis and Nate Robinson, two Boston bench players, provided the decisive lift to even the series at 2 games apiece. After making a key basket while drawing a foul, the 6'9", 289-lb Davis let out a barbaric yawp (along with some drool) as the 5'9" Robinson jumped onto his back. (It should be noted that the listed heights and weights of professional athletes are not always accurate. Davis and Robinson are a few inches shorter, and Davis a few pounds heavier, than they would have us believe.) Their unbridled enthusiasm and uninhibited revelry won me over.
By the time the NBA Finals had reached Game 7 (for only the third time in the last 22 years), I had pitched my tent firmly in the Celtics camp and thus effectively ruined Boston's chances for their 18th championship. The final game was a gritty, defensive struggle with all the effort (if not all the skill) one would hope to see in the season's ultimate showdown. Los Angeles came out on top, and I was left to pick up the pieces once more.
The questions I have to ask myself now are: "Why does it mean so much to me? Why do I put myself through this?" The mystery of fan-dom has confounded scholars since time immemorial. If I may add my two cents, I would guess that I'm eager to place my happiness in arbitrary hands, because I have little faith in my ability to bring myself happiness. Also, rooting for the home team is a shortcut to a sense of community sorely lacking in our society these days. Finally, and most crucially I think, sport provides a stage for mythic storylines to be played out: Good vs. Evil, Celtics vs. Lakers, Anybody vs. Duke. Although, just as in real life, there's no guarantee the Hero will defeat the Villain, which makes the contest all the more interesting. Doesn't everyone need a Champion to ride into battle on their behalf, whether it's Richard the Lionheart trying to wrest the Holy Land from Saladin or LeBron James dunking on Kobe Bryant's head?
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
The Best Name in Baseball
I've found the best name in baseball: Lastings Milledge. He's the Pittsburgh Pirates' leftfielder. How does one come by such a name in this day and age? His bio on MLB.com offers no clues. He's from Bradenton, FL, as many professional athletes seem to be. He played in the Little League World Series in '97. And that's about it. No mention of any Amish background. Not a word about being named after some Gilded Age robber baron ancestor. The only thing Wikipedia has to add is that he has his own cheering section called "The Milledge People." I can only hope they dress in Edwardian fashions and pepper the opposing players with such jibes as "You have the uncouth bearing of a Knickerbocker!" or "Your mother is so rotund she requires a hogshead of figgy pudding in order that her appetite might be sated!"
Monday, June 07, 2010
The Slipper Didn't Fit
This is my attempt at literary therapy to get over the men's college basketball championship game. Even though it happened 2 months ago, I've struggled to process my feelings verbally. It was a crushing defeat, for me, for Butler, for underdogs everywhere, for anyone who ever felt they weren't good enough, for the American farmer struggling to make ends meet, for scruffy orphans of the Natty Gann variety and, most of all, for the universal human sense of justice.
The day after the game I went to the health club and shot hoops for an hour, trying to reverse the outcome. But no amount of swished jumpers or sweet reverse dunks on the 8-foot basket could change the score, even if they did bring me some peace. Duke's crime against nature hadn't diminished my game, just my soul, along with the souls of every other person on earth who believes that dreams really do come true.
I thought of recording my own rendition of "One Shining Moment" and setting it to a montage of Duke's most painful defeats. There would be the No. 1-ranked Dukies losing in the championship game to Louisville in '86, a heavily-favored Duke team losing to UConn in '99 and, the coup de grace, Duke getting shellacked by UNLV in '90. The last game remains the Duke Hater's finest hour. It still holds the record for biggest blowout in a championship game (3o points). UNLV's run'n'gun style combined with the elevation at Denver and Bobby Hurley's flu (which resulted in him losing his lunch at halftime) made for a fabulous evening for the Duke Hater in all of us.
There's a sports journalism convention of featuring the champion in stories about the championship game and rightly so. But to me it often seems like more of a favor to the champs than the readers. The champs' stories aren't always the most compelling, especially when it comes to the Final Four. It may be the impulse to cozy up to the powerful, a trait that infects every segment of journalism. Or it may be our culture's worship of winners and the Social Darwinism encapsulated in the popular phrase "survival of the fittest" (a telling deviation from Darwin's original "survival of the fit"). Yes, all hail Mighty Duke, Slayer of Hope, Destroyer of Dreams!
Right on cue, that week's Sports Illustrated delivered its paean to the champions, Duke, with only a brief, cursory salute to Butler, the vanquished underdog whose story is about a million times more interesting, even in defeat. I think the real reason SI didn't focus on Butler is because it would've pissed off Duke. Mike Krzyzewski (Duke's legendary "Coach K") might never give SI an interview again or let them interview anyone else associated with the program. Or maybe they focus on the champions because they've always done it that way and they can't even imagine doing it any other way. I have a rather low opinion of mainstream journalists.
Is my despair at Butler's loss a symptom of my collaboration in the dominant narrative, the belief that the victor is always the hero of the story? After all, what does it matter that Butler came up two points short of the national championship when their performance was so inspired and inspiring? The point is not that they lost but that they played beautifully and would've been deserving champions had they won. The loss shouldn't diminish their achievement. After two months, I think I'm ready to start believing that.
The day after the game I went to the health club and shot hoops for an hour, trying to reverse the outcome. But no amount of swished jumpers or sweet reverse dunks on the 8-foot basket could change the score, even if they did bring me some peace. Duke's crime against nature hadn't diminished my game, just my soul, along with the souls of every other person on earth who believes that dreams really do come true.
I thought of recording my own rendition of "One Shining Moment" and setting it to a montage of Duke's most painful defeats. There would be the No. 1-ranked Dukies losing in the championship game to Louisville in '86, a heavily-favored Duke team losing to UConn in '99 and, the coup de grace, Duke getting shellacked by UNLV in '90. The last game remains the Duke Hater's finest hour. It still holds the record for biggest blowout in a championship game (3o points). UNLV's run'n'gun style combined with the elevation at Denver and Bobby Hurley's flu (which resulted in him losing his lunch at halftime) made for a fabulous evening for the Duke Hater in all of us.
There's a sports journalism convention of featuring the champion in stories about the championship game and rightly so. But to me it often seems like more of a favor to the champs than the readers. The champs' stories aren't always the most compelling, especially when it comes to the Final Four. It may be the impulse to cozy up to the powerful, a trait that infects every segment of journalism. Or it may be our culture's worship of winners and the Social Darwinism encapsulated in the popular phrase "survival of the fittest" (a telling deviation from Darwin's original "survival of the fit"). Yes, all hail Mighty Duke, Slayer of Hope, Destroyer of Dreams!
Right on cue, that week's Sports Illustrated delivered its paean to the champions, Duke, with only a brief, cursory salute to Butler, the vanquished underdog whose story is about a million times more interesting, even in defeat. I think the real reason SI didn't focus on Butler is because it would've pissed off Duke. Mike Krzyzewski (Duke's legendary "Coach K") might never give SI an interview again or let them interview anyone else associated with the program. Or maybe they focus on the champions because they've always done it that way and they can't even imagine doing it any other way. I have a rather low opinion of mainstream journalists.
Is my despair at Butler's loss a symptom of my collaboration in the dominant narrative, the belief that the victor is always the hero of the story? After all, what does it matter that Butler came up two points short of the national championship when their performance was so inspired and inspiring? The point is not that they lost but that they played beautifully and would've been deserving champions had they won. The loss shouldn't diminish their achievement. After two months, I think I'm ready to start believing that.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
River of Sadness
I just can't seem to let the sadness go. If I let it run through me it might pass more quickly and with less pain. But I'm afraid to feel it completely. At the same time, I think the only time we feel pain is when we resist emotion. The pain is the turbulence caused by blocking the emotion instead of just feeling it and letting it flow through you. (I feel like I read that in a book Megan lent me. It doesn't feel like my personal revelation.) Of course, thinking something and feeling something are very different things. My understanding of this concept still resides more in the head than the heart.
P.S. That's why I went with the dopey title. My head said it was lame, but my heart wanted it.
P.S. That's why I went with the dopey title. My head said it was lame, but my heart wanted it.
Monday, March 22, 2010
My Brush With Greatness
In the spirit of the season (March Madness), I thought I would recount the story of my encounter with one of the greatest college basketball coaches of our time, Rick Pitino. Travel with me now back to the year 1992. Right Said Fred was too sexy for their shirt and apparently anything else, the first President Bush barfed in the Japanese prime minister's lap and I was a paranoid, persecuted 8th grader.
The spectacle of the Final Four arrived in the Twin Cities for the first time that year. (The men's NCAA Division I college basketball championship had been played here once before, in 1951, but it wasn't nearly the spectacle back then.) As a college basketball-crazed adolescent, I was beside myself with glee. My dad took me out of school early on Friday to watch the teams' public practices at the Metrodome. That was the biggest thrill of the weekend. The practices were free and there was no assigned seating, so we kept moving down until we were within maybe 50 yards of the court. That might not seem very close, but, for a basketball event of that magnitude in a football stadium, it's like sitting courtside.
Michigan practiced before we got anywhere near the court, although seeing my favorite team, the fabled Fab Five, from a distance still gave me a chill. The confirmation that these superhumans were real, and I was in the same building as they, was exciting and disorienting. I enjoyed the practices most, because it was the first time I'd been in a Final Four venue and it was an exhibition. The competition in the games is what drives the sport, but basketball's aesthetic sets it apart. In the practices we could see the camaraderie of the teams as they joked around. Although the highlight was the layup line, when the players could show off their dunking prowess. What other sport puts such a high premium on style points that will never be counted?
On Saturday morning my dad took me to a high school where the NCAA was conducting a basketball clinic for kids. I signed up and got some freebies for my trouble, including a cool poster commemorating the centennial of basketball's birth. (Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian, invented the sport at the Springfield, Mass. YMCA to keep his young charges entertained during the winter of 1891-1892.) We were divided into groups of 5-10 kids, each one overseen by a Golden Gopher men's or women's basketball player. Mine was led by Randy Carter, an elite recruit who'd been hobbled by knee injuries. He was pretty quiet and reserved, not what I'd call a "people person."
There were quite a few coaches who ran us through basic drills, including Tony Barone of Texas A&M and Joe Harrington of Colorado. Not exactly top-flight programs, but they were still in D-1, and major conferences at that, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. We all assembled in the bleachers when they brought out the big-name coach to talk. Exactly one week earlier, Rick Pitino had lost what was already being called the greatest college basketball game ever played. He resurrected the once-mighty Kentucky program and brought them to the brink of that year's Final Four. Only a miracle had denied them the opportunity and kept alive Duke's drive to repeat as national champions. With 2.1 seconds left in overtime, Grant Hill threw a three-quarter-court-length pass to Christian Laettner, who faked left, turned right and hit a jumper from the free-throw line as time expired.
I admired Coach Pitino for showing up to the clinic after what must've been a crushing defeat, even a week later. The content of his speech escaped my memory a long time ago. All I remember is lining up with maybe two dozen other kids to run through a drill with the coach. It was extremely basic. At the top of the key, behind the three-point line, each kid would fake right, take a dribble left and shoot. My first time up the shot seemed to fall about 2 feet short. Performing under pressure was not one of the strengths of my game.
My second time up Coach Pitino stopped me and tried to clarify the drill. Apparently, I was doing it wrong. Unfortunately, his clarification didn't sink in. If he had tried to explain to me how to open a door at that moment, I would've been trapped forever in whatever room I found myself in. I was so hypnotized by his aura nothing he said would've gotten through. So I did the drill exactly the same way I'd done it a few seconds earlier. I looked at him to see if I'd executed the maneuver to his satisfaction. He just shook his head while a faint smile drifted across his face. As I took my place at the back of the line, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I'd improved slightly on the first attempt. My shot had only fallen about 1 foot short this time.
People talk about how meeting their hero changed the course of their life. The hero said something to them that cleared the chaos in their mind and unlocked their true potential. They don't talk about when they met their hero and, instead of changing the course of their life, the hero merely confirmed what they had always suspected about themselves, namely, that they have no idea what the %#@$ they're doing. I hope that, with this story, I've done my part to correct that imbalance.
Epilogue: Michigan won their semifinal later that Saturday, as did Duke. On Monday, however, Duke put a 20-point hurt on the Fab Five to capture their second straight national championship, becoming the first school in 19 years to repeat. It would be another 15 years before another school, Florida, won back-to-back titles. To put it another way, I watched in person as my favorite college basketball team of all time got blown out by my least favorite college basketball team of all time in a game that cemented the latter's place in my favorite sport's pantheon. To put it yet another way, it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
Epilogue II: I was also at the '93 Final Four. Chris Webber's timeout probably condemned me to a life of melancholy.
The spectacle of the Final Four arrived in the Twin Cities for the first time that year. (The men's NCAA Division I college basketball championship had been played here once before, in 1951, but it wasn't nearly the spectacle back then.) As a college basketball-crazed adolescent, I was beside myself with glee. My dad took me out of school early on Friday to watch the teams' public practices at the Metrodome. That was the biggest thrill of the weekend. The practices were free and there was no assigned seating, so we kept moving down until we were within maybe 50 yards of the court. That might not seem very close, but, for a basketball event of that magnitude in a football stadium, it's like sitting courtside.
Michigan practiced before we got anywhere near the court, although seeing my favorite team, the fabled Fab Five, from a distance still gave me a chill. The confirmation that these superhumans were real, and I was in the same building as they, was exciting and disorienting. I enjoyed the practices most, because it was the first time I'd been in a Final Four venue and it was an exhibition. The competition in the games is what drives the sport, but basketball's aesthetic sets it apart. In the practices we could see the camaraderie of the teams as they joked around. Although the highlight was the layup line, when the players could show off their dunking prowess. What other sport puts such a high premium on style points that will never be counted?
On Saturday morning my dad took me to a high school where the NCAA was conducting a basketball clinic for kids. I signed up and got some freebies for my trouble, including a cool poster commemorating the centennial of basketball's birth. (Dr. James Naismith, a Canadian, invented the sport at the Springfield, Mass. YMCA to keep his young charges entertained during the winter of 1891-1892.) We were divided into groups of 5-10 kids, each one overseen by a Golden Gopher men's or women's basketball player. Mine was led by Randy Carter, an elite recruit who'd been hobbled by knee injuries. He was pretty quiet and reserved, not what I'd call a "people person."
There were quite a few coaches who ran us through basic drills, including Tony Barone of Texas A&M and Joe Harrington of Colorado. Not exactly top-flight programs, but they were still in D-1, and major conferences at that, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. We all assembled in the bleachers when they brought out the big-name coach to talk. Exactly one week earlier, Rick Pitino had lost what was already being called the greatest college basketball game ever played. He resurrected the once-mighty Kentucky program and brought them to the brink of that year's Final Four. Only a miracle had denied them the opportunity and kept alive Duke's drive to repeat as national champions. With 2.1 seconds left in overtime, Grant Hill threw a three-quarter-court-length pass to Christian Laettner, who faked left, turned right and hit a jumper from the free-throw line as time expired.
I admired Coach Pitino for showing up to the clinic after what must've been a crushing defeat, even a week later. The content of his speech escaped my memory a long time ago. All I remember is lining up with maybe two dozen other kids to run through a drill with the coach. It was extremely basic. At the top of the key, behind the three-point line, each kid would fake right, take a dribble left and shoot. My first time up the shot seemed to fall about 2 feet short. Performing under pressure was not one of the strengths of my game.
My second time up Coach Pitino stopped me and tried to clarify the drill. Apparently, I was doing it wrong. Unfortunately, his clarification didn't sink in. If he had tried to explain to me how to open a door at that moment, I would've been trapped forever in whatever room I found myself in. I was so hypnotized by his aura nothing he said would've gotten through. So I did the drill exactly the same way I'd done it a few seconds earlier. I looked at him to see if I'd executed the maneuver to his satisfaction. He just shook his head while a faint smile drifted across his face. As I took my place at the back of the line, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I'd improved slightly on the first attempt. My shot had only fallen about 1 foot short this time.
People talk about how meeting their hero changed the course of their life. The hero said something to them that cleared the chaos in their mind and unlocked their true potential. They don't talk about when they met their hero and, instead of changing the course of their life, the hero merely confirmed what they had always suspected about themselves, namely, that they have no idea what the %#@$ they're doing. I hope that, with this story, I've done my part to correct that imbalance.
Epilogue: Michigan won their semifinal later that Saturday, as did Duke. On Monday, however, Duke put a 20-point hurt on the Fab Five to capture their second straight national championship, becoming the first school in 19 years to repeat. It would be another 15 years before another school, Florida, won back-to-back titles. To put it another way, I watched in person as my favorite college basketball team of all time got blown out by my least favorite college basketball team of all time in a game that cemented the latter's place in my favorite sport's pantheon. To put it yet another way, it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
Epilogue II: I was also at the '93 Final Four. Chris Webber's timeout probably condemned me to a life of melancholy.
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Other End of the Gun
(Author's Note: This is a short story about a future scenario I've been meaning to explore.)
Joe found a spot on the lawn and parked. He and Carrie got out. She was carrying "their" gift. His only contribution was the money to buy it. He didn't even know what it was. She'd told him, but his memory couldn't hold onto anything since he got back home.
They went around back to where the chairs and tent were set up. Joe hadn't wanted to come, but Carrie insisted it would be good for him. All their friends were there; that's why he hated it. He couldn't stand to be around anyone from his old life, from the time before his deployment. They didn't understand what he'd seen or what he'd done. They couldn't understand, which meant they could never forgive him, not that he could ever bring himself to ask for their forgiveness.
Carrie set the gift down on a table under the tent and went off to talk with some of her friends. Joe headed straight for the bar, hoping to drink his way through the joyous occasion. Just two yards short of his goal, his old pal Mark intervened.
"How's it goin', man?" Mark inquired jovially. "I haven't seen you since you got back."
"OK," Joe mumbled. He couldn't hide his irritation at being denied the sweet oblivion of booze.
"Can you believe Carl and Lisa are finally tyin' the knot? I never thought she'd get him to settle down."
"No." Joe was perceptibly shaking now. "Excuse me." He brushed past Mark and asked for a whiskey double. Mixers were a thing of the past for him, an old comfort that no longer comforted. Now he needed the truth of that straight whiskey burning down his throat. He couldn't stand anything sweet or soft anymore; it just seemed like a lie.
Joe stood off by himself, often looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was outside his range of sight. He didn't like being out in the open like this, surrounded by people. They weren't strangers, but they might as well have been. He did everything he could not to think about Iraq, about the suicide bomber at his checkpoint, about his friend who died that day, halfway across the world for a mission Joe didn't believe in.
He'd never questioned the mission before, but when Scott was blown to Kingdom Come the mission didn't make sense anymore. The Iraqis had a democracy. It wasn't perfect, but neither was ours. The country was fairly peaceful; they'd withdrawn from the cities a decade ago with no serious problems. All the American troops were stationed at remote bases, just trying to "keep a lid on" the region, as the folks in Washington liked to say.
That's why Joe didn't see the problem when the Iraqi government said they didn't need the U.S. military presence anymore. He was overjoyed at the thought of leaving. But the American politicians thought it was "dangerous" and "unwise" to leave Iraq completely, especially after they'd been forced out of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iraq took its case to the U.N., where the sanction for the U.S. occupation was cancelled. Of course, the U.N. was no more able to end the Iraq War than they were to prevent it, so Iraq appealed to a more powerful body: OPEC. They weren't able to pass a full oil embargo of the U.S., but enough members went along with the idea that the American economy went from paraplegic to quad.
With its tail tucked firmly between its legs, the U.S. military abandoned Iraq, although not without a parting shot. The huge bases (and embassy) it had constructed during the occupation were demolished. Unfortunately, as in Af-Pak, some hardware was left behind. This knowledge of U.S. weaponry wiped out much of the American advantage in military technology. Combined with the economic depression at home, it pushed the world's last superpower back onto its own continent. There had even been a few attacks on "the homeland" using U.S. equipment, prompting the usual disproportionate retaliations against the revolutionary government in Mexico, which was only occasionally responsible for the attacks.
It's funny how much you learn about things you never cared about before when you're best friend dies. After Scott's death, Joe had gone online and read everything he could about why they were still in Iraq. What he found out was almost as jarring as losing Scott. They weren't fighting for truth, justice and the American Way. They were killing (mostly) innocent people for oil. Instead of setting him free, the truth had driven him deeper into a pit where no light could reach. Even at the wedding of two of his friends on a beautiful summer day he was alone in a dungeon. The joy of the people around him only made it worse. They were oblivious to the real world, the one he'd lived in and his best friend had died in. He hated them for being ignorant and selfish and happy.
"They're about to start," Carrie interrupted his rage. They took two seats at the back right. Joe always needed the option of a quick escape in case the anxiety got to him. The audience quieted down so the music could begin, but, just before the organist started in, a strange, distant noise pre-empted the ceremony. The hairs on the back of Joe's neck stood on end. He knew that sound. It was a UAV, a drone plane.
He leapt to his feet. "Everybody needs to take cover! Get inside NOW!"
"Joe, it's all right." Carrie stood up and tried to reassure him. "You're not in Iraq anymore. You're safe."
"No, Carrie, it's not all right! That's a drone! We've got about five seconds before it spots us!"
But Joe's estimate turned out to be optimistic. As he turned and saw the drone approaching, the missile had already been fired. There was only enough time for one last thought:
"My sins have followed me home."
____________________________________________________________________
Ahmed confirmed the strike visually and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. Bombing people on the other side of the world was never easy, no matter how many times he'd done it. The rest of his shift was basic reconnaissance, no more unpleasant surprises to his relief. At 5 pm he took off the headset and logged out of the computer.
"Have a good one," Samir said as he took over Ahmed's workstation for the evening shift, arranging his coffee mug, sandwich and portfolio in their usual places in front of the monitor.
"Please, Karimah. Don't do this to me. If you think I'm a murderer, there's no way I'm gonna be able to live with myself."
Her shoulders fell, and she seemed to shrink. When she turned around her face was red and her eyes wet.
"I don't know what to think. We called them murderers when they did it to us. How is it any different now?"
"We never invaded their country! We never killed hundreds of thousands of their people!"
"But how is this supposed to make us safer? They've left our countries. Why don't we leave them alone?"
"They still have thousands of nuclear weapons, Karimah. They could incinerate us with the push of a button. They need to know we can strike at them even in their precious 'homeland.' It's a deterrent."
"I don't see how poking an angry giant is a deterrent. You're just giving them an excuse to incinerate us. If you'd just let them be they'd forget about us and focus on the Mexicans. They're the only ones the Americans really hate anymore."
"I know," Ahmed admitted, collapsing on the bed. "It doesn't always make sense to me either. But if our leaders managed to kick the U.S. out of the Middle East, then I have to believe they're right about this too."
Karimah lay down next to him and rubbed his chest. "I wish I had your faith in generals and politicians."
Ahmed laughed. "I'm just hoping they're better than the American generals and politicians. It's not a very high standard."
"True." She kissed him on the cheek and set her head on his shoulder.
It wasn't enough to cure his insomnia forever, but it would get him through that night.
Joe found a spot on the lawn and parked. He and Carrie got out. She was carrying "their" gift. His only contribution was the money to buy it. He didn't even know what it was. She'd told him, but his memory couldn't hold onto anything since he got back home.
They went around back to where the chairs and tent were set up. Joe hadn't wanted to come, but Carrie insisted it would be good for him. All their friends were there; that's why he hated it. He couldn't stand to be around anyone from his old life, from the time before his deployment. They didn't understand what he'd seen or what he'd done. They couldn't understand, which meant they could never forgive him, not that he could ever bring himself to ask for their forgiveness.
Carrie set the gift down on a table under the tent and went off to talk with some of her friends. Joe headed straight for the bar, hoping to drink his way through the joyous occasion. Just two yards short of his goal, his old pal Mark intervened.
"How's it goin', man?" Mark inquired jovially. "I haven't seen you since you got back."
"OK," Joe mumbled. He couldn't hide his irritation at being denied the sweet oblivion of booze.
"Can you believe Carl and Lisa are finally tyin' the knot? I never thought she'd get him to settle down."
"No." Joe was perceptibly shaking now. "Excuse me." He brushed past Mark and asked for a whiskey double. Mixers were a thing of the past for him, an old comfort that no longer comforted. Now he needed the truth of that straight whiskey burning down his throat. He couldn't stand anything sweet or soft anymore; it just seemed like a lie.
Joe stood off by himself, often looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was outside his range of sight. He didn't like being out in the open like this, surrounded by people. They weren't strangers, but they might as well have been. He did everything he could not to think about Iraq, about the suicide bomber at his checkpoint, about his friend who died that day, halfway across the world for a mission Joe didn't believe in.
He'd never questioned the mission before, but when Scott was blown to Kingdom Come the mission didn't make sense anymore. The Iraqis had a democracy. It wasn't perfect, but neither was ours. The country was fairly peaceful; they'd withdrawn from the cities a decade ago with no serious problems. All the American troops were stationed at remote bases, just trying to "keep a lid on" the region, as the folks in Washington liked to say.
That's why Joe didn't see the problem when the Iraqi government said they didn't need the U.S. military presence anymore. He was overjoyed at the thought of leaving. But the American politicians thought it was "dangerous" and "unwise" to leave Iraq completely, especially after they'd been forced out of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iraq took its case to the U.N., where the sanction for the U.S. occupation was cancelled. Of course, the U.N. was no more able to end the Iraq War than they were to prevent it, so Iraq appealed to a more powerful body: OPEC. They weren't able to pass a full oil embargo of the U.S., but enough members went along with the idea that the American economy went from paraplegic to quad.
With its tail tucked firmly between its legs, the U.S. military abandoned Iraq, although not without a parting shot. The huge bases (and embassy) it had constructed during the occupation were demolished. Unfortunately, as in Af-Pak, some hardware was left behind. This knowledge of U.S. weaponry wiped out much of the American advantage in military technology. Combined with the economic depression at home, it pushed the world's last superpower back onto its own continent. There had even been a few attacks on "the homeland" using U.S. equipment, prompting the usual disproportionate retaliations against the revolutionary government in Mexico, which was only occasionally responsible for the attacks.
It's funny how much you learn about things you never cared about before when you're best friend dies. After Scott's death, Joe had gone online and read everything he could about why they were still in Iraq. What he found out was almost as jarring as losing Scott. They weren't fighting for truth, justice and the American Way. They were killing (mostly) innocent people for oil. Instead of setting him free, the truth had driven him deeper into a pit where no light could reach. Even at the wedding of two of his friends on a beautiful summer day he was alone in a dungeon. The joy of the people around him only made it worse. They were oblivious to the real world, the one he'd lived in and his best friend had died in. He hated them for being ignorant and selfish and happy.
"They're about to start," Carrie interrupted his rage. They took two seats at the back right. Joe always needed the option of a quick escape in case the anxiety got to him. The audience quieted down so the music could begin, but, just before the organist started in, a strange, distant noise pre-empted the ceremony. The hairs on the back of Joe's neck stood on end. He knew that sound. It was a UAV, a drone plane.
He leapt to his feet. "Everybody needs to take cover! Get inside NOW!"
"Joe, it's all right." Carrie stood up and tried to reassure him. "You're not in Iraq anymore. You're safe."
"No, Carrie, it's not all right! That's a drone! We've got about five seconds before it spots us!"
But Joe's estimate turned out to be optimistic. As he turned and saw the drone approaching, the missile had already been fired. There was only enough time for one last thought:
"My sins have followed me home."
____________________________________________________________________
Ahmed confirmed the strike visually and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. Bombing people on the other side of the world was never easy, no matter how many times he'd done it. The rest of his shift was basic reconnaissance, no more unpleasant surprises to his relief. At 5 pm he took off the headset and logged out of the computer.
"Have a good one," Samir said as he took over Ahmed's workstation for the evening shift, arranging his coffee mug, sandwich and portfolio in their usual places in front of the monitor.
"You too," Ahmed replied. He got his coat and briefcase out of his locker and headed for the parking lot. The guard at the door nodded as Ahmed left the building. The sun was setting through the barbed wire. Ahmed showed the man at the gate his pass on his way out, and then he was outside the fence again, back in the land of the innocent.
"How was work?" Karimah asked from the kitchen when he came in.
"It was fine." There'd be time for coming clean later, after the kids had gone to bed.
"Good. Tell Jazmin and Salim to come in. Dinner's almost ready."
Ahmed opened the back door and saw his children playing soccer with the neighbor kids. They were still young enough to play co-ed without being embarrassed. He wanted to keep them this safe forever. These were the moments he thought of when he struggled with the morality of his job. This was what gave him the strength to continue.
Later that evening, when he and Karimah were getting ready for bed, Ahmed told her what had happened. He explained the situation and the intelligence, without going into specifics of course. He admitted they didn't know if it was a meeting of rogue U.S. soldiers or a garden party or a wedding or what. All they knew was at least one of the people there had been stationed in Iraq for a couple years, and his online postings indicated mental instability. Like always, she got that look on her face that killed him. It was as if the life had drained out of her, and her soul had been replaced by a motherboard.
"Well, you did what you thought was right." She turned away from him and got her nightgown out of the dresser."Please, Karimah. Don't do this to me. If you think I'm a murderer, there's no way I'm gonna be able to live with myself."
Her shoulders fell, and she seemed to shrink. When she turned around her face was red and her eyes wet.
"I don't know what to think. We called them murderers when they did it to us. How is it any different now?"
"We never invaded their country! We never killed hundreds of thousands of their people!"
"But how is this supposed to make us safer? They've left our countries. Why don't we leave them alone?"
"They still have thousands of nuclear weapons, Karimah. They could incinerate us with the push of a button. They need to know we can strike at them even in their precious 'homeland.' It's a deterrent."
"I don't see how poking an angry giant is a deterrent. You're just giving them an excuse to incinerate us. If you'd just let them be they'd forget about us and focus on the Mexicans. They're the only ones the Americans really hate anymore."
"I know," Ahmed admitted, collapsing on the bed. "It doesn't always make sense to me either. But if our leaders managed to kick the U.S. out of the Middle East, then I have to believe they're right about this too."
Karimah lay down next to him and rubbed his chest. "I wish I had your faith in generals and politicians."
Ahmed laughed. "I'm just hoping they're better than the American generals and politicians. It's not a very high standard."
"True." She kissed him on the cheek and set her head on his shoulder.
It wasn't enough to cure his insomnia forever, but it would get him through that night.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Confessions of a Doomer
A month ago I visited my friend Sadie in Cincinnati. During a chat in her apartment, I confessed to a morbid fascination with the possible collapse of society. She laughed and, in a tone of gentle sarcasm, said she'd noticed my enchantment with that subject. I wasn't sure how subtle I'd been with my pessimism. Apparently, not that subtle.
But I'm not ashamed to be a "Doomer" (one who believes society will be forced to radically re-simplify through a painful process of collapse). When I first learned about Peak Oil 5 years ago, it was very difficult being a Doomer. I was petrified by the potential for social breakdown and extremely reluctant to share my concerns with people outside my circle of friends. Of course, at that point I was convinced we were headed for a Mad Max-style future, and my discussion was framed in terms of absolute certainty, the sign of an insecure cultist. Now I talk about it in terms of probability, allowing for the possibility of a safe future, even though my worries remain. That's a result of my emotional stabilization and has nothing to do with the feasibility of the Peak Oil theory. If anything, my belief in the theory has been strengthened by the events of the last 5 years.
I'll concede that my personal struggles predisposed me to Doomerism. If I were a rich, happily-married screenwriter living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, I probably wouldn't care a tinker's cuss for Peak Oil. (Shout-out to Frank McCourt!) But I'm a 32-year-old temp living with my parents, so I'm far more receptive to apocalyptic theories. At the same time, I don't think my beliefs are any less valid than those of my successful, parallel-universe doppelganger. Just because I'm more likely to look on the dark side doesn't mean I'm more likely to be wrong. It just depends what era you're living in. Here in the U.S. of A. we've had Happy Days for almost 65 years in a row. Sure, there have been some bumps in the road, but overall our material comforts have been good and getting better (nearly) all the time. Therefore, people who look on the bright side have generally been right for the last 65 years. Now I think we've entered an epoch when the Doomers will be right most of the time.
Again, I must come clean and admit that I'm looking forward to collapse. (I'm using "collapse" in the anthropological sense, meaning only a re-simplification of society, without the catastrophic connotation the term has accumulated.) The process would be difficult, the resulting turmoil and loss of life could be horrific, but the alternative, in my opinion, would be worse. The status quo has devastated the biosphere and impoverished perhaps a billion or more people. Some would say those people were even poorer before, but whatever creature comforts the global capitalist system has given them have been more than negated by the social, emotional, spiritual and (usually) physical dislocation it has forced on them. I realize these are broad generalizations. I make them because I feel that dislocation and despoilment in myself, and I think our way of life is the cause of it.
Re-simplifying our society could improve our lives tremendously. Instead of spiritual alienation, we could again feel connected to the land, the wildlife and the seasons (and there might not be so much Seasonal Affective Disorder). Instead of social isolation, we could again live in community with our neighbors. Instead of competition, we could provide for ourselves by working cooperatively. This is the Sunny Side of Collapse. It may be (ironically) Utopian, but I think the disintegration of capitalism would strip us of many of our paranoid, competitive tendencies. This may be what truly isolates we Doomers, the fact that inside every one of us is a Utopian. We reject society as it is, yet still believe we'll embrace a society forged in the crucible of apocalypse. We're funny that way. (Shout-out to John Astin!)
Now the time has come for my final confession: The sooner collapse happens, the better off we'll be. That's right. Not only am I pro-apocalypse, I'm rather impatient for the end of the world to begin. It's simple, really. Since the System (a.k.a. the economy, or the method by which we keep ourselves alive) is destroying the natural environment (a.k.a. our habitat, or the only planet that can support our kind) and our spirit (a.k.a. the soul, or the thing that makes life worth living), it only makes sense that the sooner the System collapses, the better off we'll all be. The longer the economy hums (or coughs) along, the longer we continue with business-as-usual. Whether we go along to get along or because we honestly believe in the benevolence of the System, we're all just lemmings headed for the cliff unless we diverge from the mainstream.
Also, it's hard to convince people we're in the early stages of collapse when things are still pretty good. Unemployment is around 10% (officially), and foreclosures are spreading like kudzu, but most Americans can still afford to feed, clothe and house themselves. Only when we have trouble meeting our basic needs will we begin to seriously question and fundamentally reform our society. And I believe, passionately, that we need to begin this process ASAP, while there are still enough fossil fuels, water and other natural resources to support 6.8 billion people. So my message is this: Don't wait until the $#!+ hits the fan, because by then it could be too late.
But I'm not ashamed to be a "Doomer" (one who believes society will be forced to radically re-simplify through a painful process of collapse). When I first learned about Peak Oil 5 years ago, it was very difficult being a Doomer. I was petrified by the potential for social breakdown and extremely reluctant to share my concerns with people outside my circle of friends. Of course, at that point I was convinced we were headed for a Mad Max-style future, and my discussion was framed in terms of absolute certainty, the sign of an insecure cultist. Now I talk about it in terms of probability, allowing for the possibility of a safe future, even though my worries remain. That's a result of my emotional stabilization and has nothing to do with the feasibility of the Peak Oil theory. If anything, my belief in the theory has been strengthened by the events of the last 5 years.
I'll concede that my personal struggles predisposed me to Doomerism. If I were a rich, happily-married screenwriter living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, I probably wouldn't care a tinker's cuss for Peak Oil. (Shout-out to Frank McCourt!) But I'm a 32-year-old temp living with my parents, so I'm far more receptive to apocalyptic theories. At the same time, I don't think my beliefs are any less valid than those of my successful, parallel-universe doppelganger. Just because I'm more likely to look on the dark side doesn't mean I'm more likely to be wrong. It just depends what era you're living in. Here in the U.S. of A. we've had Happy Days for almost 65 years in a row. Sure, there have been some bumps in the road, but overall our material comforts have been good and getting better (nearly) all the time. Therefore, people who look on the bright side have generally been right for the last 65 years. Now I think we've entered an epoch when the Doomers will be right most of the time.
Again, I must come clean and admit that I'm looking forward to collapse. (I'm using "collapse" in the anthropological sense, meaning only a re-simplification of society, without the catastrophic connotation the term has accumulated.) The process would be difficult, the resulting turmoil and loss of life could be horrific, but the alternative, in my opinion, would be worse. The status quo has devastated the biosphere and impoverished perhaps a billion or more people. Some would say those people were even poorer before, but whatever creature comforts the global capitalist system has given them have been more than negated by the social, emotional, spiritual and (usually) physical dislocation it has forced on them. I realize these are broad generalizations. I make them because I feel that dislocation and despoilment in myself, and I think our way of life is the cause of it.
Re-simplifying our society could improve our lives tremendously. Instead of spiritual alienation, we could again feel connected to the land, the wildlife and the seasons (and there might not be so much Seasonal Affective Disorder). Instead of social isolation, we could again live in community with our neighbors. Instead of competition, we could provide for ourselves by working cooperatively. This is the Sunny Side of Collapse. It may be (ironically) Utopian, but I think the disintegration of capitalism would strip us of many of our paranoid, competitive tendencies. This may be what truly isolates we Doomers, the fact that inside every one of us is a Utopian. We reject society as it is, yet still believe we'll embrace a society forged in the crucible of apocalypse. We're funny that way. (Shout-out to John Astin!)
Now the time has come for my final confession: The sooner collapse happens, the better off we'll be. That's right. Not only am I pro-apocalypse, I'm rather impatient for the end of the world to begin. It's simple, really. Since the System (a.k.a. the economy, or the method by which we keep ourselves alive) is destroying the natural environment (a.k.a. our habitat, or the only planet that can support our kind) and our spirit (a.k.a. the soul, or the thing that makes life worth living), it only makes sense that the sooner the System collapses, the better off we'll all be. The longer the economy hums (or coughs) along, the longer we continue with business-as-usual. Whether we go along to get along or because we honestly believe in the benevolence of the System, we're all just lemmings headed for the cliff unless we diverge from the mainstream.
Also, it's hard to convince people we're in the early stages of collapse when things are still pretty good. Unemployment is around 10% (officially), and foreclosures are spreading like kudzu, but most Americans can still afford to feed, clothe and house themselves. Only when we have trouble meeting our basic needs will we begin to seriously question and fundamentally reform our society. And I believe, passionately, that we need to begin this process ASAP, while there are still enough fossil fuels, water and other natural resources to support 6.8 billion people. So my message is this: Don't wait until the $#!+ hits the fan, because by then it could be too late.
Friday, December 25, 2009
The Canary in the Coal Mine
I feel I must post something sweet and uplifting on Christmas Day. Unfortunately, I have no interest in that, and not because I'm drowning in the depths of despair (I'm actually quite content at the moment.), but because it seems so boring to me right now. I'd rather expound on the difficult, possibly desperate future that lies ahead for most (if not all) of us, even though it isn't really in keeping with the season.
The pessimistic vision of the future held by most Peak Oilers holds more allure than any heartwarming stories about the True Meaning of Christmas. This may be due to the fact that the quasi-apocalyptic view espoused by most in the Peak Oil movement comprises only a tiny sliver of public discourse. When you're inundated with messages claiming the Great Recession is merely a bump in the road of infinite growth or, at worst, a temporary detour, you're more likely to cling to your Mad Max scenarios. It's hard to stay sane when you're swimming in a mainstream that has gone off the deep end.
But, with perseverance and the help of family and friends, I've managed to right my ship and am trying to embark on a sane course. For me, this means searching for a commune (or intentional community or ecovillage or whatever euphemism seems most apropos) that can function without fossil fuels and also meet my emotional needs. The quest for organic farming apprenticeships has shifted slightly to a journey for sustainable community. I've realized that, more than finding a way of life that achieves harmony with nature, I need a community that provides the emotional, spiritual and even material support to live happily. In addition to degrading the biosphere, our society has a destructive effect on the human spirit. There are many who can live well in this culture, but, in the decade (come May) since I graduated from college, I've proved (to my satisfaction) that I'm not one of them.
I could look on my sensitivity to loneliness and other emotional obstacles as solely a disadvantage. However, I also think of it as an advantage. I see myself as a canary in the coal mine of society. As conditions worsen, I'm forced to flee the situation and seek shelter elsewhere. If I'm right about the future and the economy collapses completely, then I'll have gotten a head-start on building a society that can survive this century (assuming Climate Change doesn't do us all in). (I know it's Xmas, but I just had to slip in that parenthetical qualifier. What can I say? I'm a doomer.) If I'm wrong, then hopefully I'll still have found a community where I can be happy.
Although my loneliness remains, I'm grateful for what my family and friends have done for me. (I have to be "grateful" instead of "thankful," because it's too late for a Thanksgiving message.) My parents have just accepted me back into their home (for what I hope will be just the fall and winter). My friends have helped me over the rough patches of the last few years. Without them I don't know what would've become of me. The next few months may be my Farewell Tour. I hope to see you all in the years to come, but if I were you I'd arrange a visit before I move on to my next great adventure. It may take me far away, and the chances of our reunion could be slim.
But for now there's still plenty of time to get together and enjoy each other's company, so have a Joyous Winter Solstice and a Happy New Year.
Love,
Mickey
The pessimistic vision of the future held by most Peak Oilers holds more allure than any heartwarming stories about the True Meaning of Christmas. This may be due to the fact that the quasi-apocalyptic view espoused by most in the Peak Oil movement comprises only a tiny sliver of public discourse. When you're inundated with messages claiming the Great Recession is merely a bump in the road of infinite growth or, at worst, a temporary detour, you're more likely to cling to your Mad Max scenarios. It's hard to stay sane when you're swimming in a mainstream that has gone off the deep end.
But, with perseverance and the help of family and friends, I've managed to right my ship and am trying to embark on a sane course. For me, this means searching for a commune (or intentional community or ecovillage or whatever euphemism seems most apropos) that can function without fossil fuels and also meet my emotional needs. The quest for organic farming apprenticeships has shifted slightly to a journey for sustainable community. I've realized that, more than finding a way of life that achieves harmony with nature, I need a community that provides the emotional, spiritual and even material support to live happily. In addition to degrading the biosphere, our society has a destructive effect on the human spirit. There are many who can live well in this culture, but, in the decade (come May) since I graduated from college, I've proved (to my satisfaction) that I'm not one of them.
I could look on my sensitivity to loneliness and other emotional obstacles as solely a disadvantage. However, I also think of it as an advantage. I see myself as a canary in the coal mine of society. As conditions worsen, I'm forced to flee the situation and seek shelter elsewhere. If I'm right about the future and the economy collapses completely, then I'll have gotten a head-start on building a society that can survive this century (assuming Climate Change doesn't do us all in). (I know it's Xmas, but I just had to slip in that parenthetical qualifier. What can I say? I'm a doomer.) If I'm wrong, then hopefully I'll still have found a community where I can be happy.
Although my loneliness remains, I'm grateful for what my family and friends have done for me. (I have to be "grateful" instead of "thankful," because it's too late for a Thanksgiving message.) My parents have just accepted me back into their home (for what I hope will be just the fall and winter). My friends have helped me over the rough patches of the last few years. Without them I don't know what would've become of me. The next few months may be my Farewell Tour. I hope to see you all in the years to come, but if I were you I'd arrange a visit before I move on to my next great adventure. It may take me far away, and the chances of our reunion could be slim.
But for now there's still plenty of time to get together and enjoy each other's company, so have a Joyous Winter Solstice and a Happy New Year.
Love,
Mickey
Friday, October 09, 2009
Jammin' with the Beatles
I finally got a chance to play The Beatles: Rock Band yesterday. Unfortunately, it was at the Best Buy at Mall of America instead of a friend's house. But I was joined by some nice strangers, and Andrew was there, so it was OK. I started gettin' into it after a few songs. I had to switch from bass to guitar to really rock out. Wielding Paul's Hofner bass was a bit limiting while I was playing the bass part. When I switched to a guitar part (must've been rhythm) it got to be a bit more "groovy." It made me wanna pick up my acoustic guitar again and crank out some high-voltage rock'n'roll while singing a heartbreaking melody, in classic Beatle style. Too bad Andrew just went to bed. I'd like to do that right now.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Bedhead
Author's Note: After the serious-to-dyspeptic tone of my recent posts, I'd like to lighten the mood a bit with a more humorous essay. I hope this foots the bill.
On many a morning I will wake up with a pompadour. Somehow, the way I sleep (on my side, mostly) and my tossing-and-turning often conspire to style my hair in a manner best suited to motorcycle-riding rebels of half-a-century ago. I will concede that many men have rocked the pompadour effectively since then, but I've never counted myself among them. Honestly, I've never even tried. It just seems too far outside my milieu, even though it usually looks halfway decent in the bathroom mirror.
One time in college, I walked out of my room right after waking up, and a female friend asked me if I'd combed my hair. On the surface it's a reasonable question, but I wanted to laugh and ask her why I would drag myself out of bed at 11 am (This was senior year.) and comb my hair into a pompadour for the 20-foot walk to the bathroom. It's not like I was worried about coming up with the perfect hairstyle to tie together the bleary-eyed, pajama-bottomed look I had goin' on.
So I comb it out (with my hands, of course). Although I'm afraid that might represent the peak of my hairstyle, and my efforts to "style" or at least "manage" the hair are futile attempts at coolness (or, really, presentability) by an aging, half-hearted hipster whose fashion instincts were never that good to begin with. It is as if my hair begins each day in a perfect, Edenic state, and my clumsy machinations bring about a tonsorial Fall From Grace.
Have I been blessed with the ideal "bedhead," hair that needn't be styled or even touched? Doubtful, but I should try leaving the pompadour intact someday and see how people react. Perhaps they'll think I've become a "rocker" and try to beat me up with their "mod" friends. Or they'll mistake me for a "greaser" and misinterpret my penchant for drag-racing as hopeless nihilism. I have to ask myself: Is perfect hair worth that kind of rampant hostility?
On many a morning I will wake up with a pompadour. Somehow, the way I sleep (on my side, mostly) and my tossing-and-turning often conspire to style my hair in a manner best suited to motorcycle-riding rebels of half-a-century ago. I will concede that many men have rocked the pompadour effectively since then, but I've never counted myself among them. Honestly, I've never even tried. It just seems too far outside my milieu, even though it usually looks halfway decent in the bathroom mirror.
One time in college, I walked out of my room right after waking up, and a female friend asked me if I'd combed my hair. On the surface it's a reasonable question, but I wanted to laugh and ask her why I would drag myself out of bed at 11 am (This was senior year.) and comb my hair into a pompadour for the 20-foot walk to the bathroom. It's not like I was worried about coming up with the perfect hairstyle to tie together the bleary-eyed, pajama-bottomed look I had goin' on.
So I comb it out (with my hands, of course). Although I'm afraid that might represent the peak of my hairstyle, and my efforts to "style" or at least "manage" the hair are futile attempts at coolness (or, really, presentability) by an aging, half-hearted hipster whose fashion instincts were never that good to begin with. It is as if my hair begins each day in a perfect, Edenic state, and my clumsy machinations bring about a tonsorial Fall From Grace.
Have I been blessed with the ideal "bedhead," hair that needn't be styled or even touched? Doubtful, but I should try leaving the pompadour intact someday and see how people react. Perhaps they'll think I've become a "rocker" and try to beat me up with their "mod" friends. Or they'll mistake me for a "greaser" and misinterpret my penchant for drag-racing as hopeless nihilism. I have to ask myself: Is perfect hair worth that kind of rampant hostility?
Friday, August 21, 2009
One-Way Street
Before I begin, let me thank the people who have left comments on my blog at Facebook. I really appreciate the kind words.
Now, as for most of those who have left comments directly on my blog (ridingtherubicon.blogspot.com), you have convinced me to turn off the comments feature. It's not helpful when people who've never met you or your family tell you what a terrible person you are for writing about family issues so candidly. Did you really think you were shedding light on the situation? Who are you to judge me? You don't know shit about me or my family. Fuck you for thinking you had some serious insight into my life.
I should be above this kind of childish bickering. I'm sorry if it upsets any of those people who have enjoyed my blog and/or left nice comments on Facebook or the blog proper. But some of the comments really pissed me off and the fact that I hadn't let those people have it yet was bothering me. I felt the burning need to disabuse them of the notion that they were contributing trenchant, well-informed opinions to the conversation.
Like the Onion, this blog is now a one-way conduit of information. I'm not one to suffer fools.
Now, as for most of those who have left comments directly on my blog (ridingtherubicon.blogspot.com), you have convinced me to turn off the comments feature. It's not helpful when people who've never met you or your family tell you what a terrible person you are for writing about family issues so candidly. Did you really think you were shedding light on the situation? Who are you to judge me? You don't know shit about me or my family. Fuck you for thinking you had some serious insight into my life.
I should be above this kind of childish bickering. I'm sorry if it upsets any of those people who have enjoyed my blog and/or left nice comments on Facebook or the blog proper. But some of the comments really pissed me off and the fact that I hadn't let those people have it yet was bothering me. I felt the burning need to disabuse them of the notion that they were contributing trenchant, well-informed opinions to the conversation.
Like the Onion, this blog is now a one-way conduit of information. I'm not one to suffer fools.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Opening Night
Last night was the first performance of my Fringe show, A People's History of Love. We had the 10pm slot, and I was nervous early in the evening, but by the time I got to the Bryant-Lake Bowl I was pretty relaxed. The performance got off to a rocky start. It's disappointing when work for which you have such high hopes is greeted with perplexed silence. I think the volume was too low on the opening music and narration, and the actors should've been louder, but the audience reaction forces me to question just how funny and/or compelling the opener is.
The rest of the show went pretty well. There were even a few big laughs. The attendance was good. Some of my friends showed up, which was great. But then I forgot to invite them to the bar. My social incompetence remains, albeit less crippling than before. It was still a nice after-show gathering with my female lead's family and boyfriend.
I went home at midnight, ate a Reese's chocolate-and-peanut-butter bar (rather good) and a slice of Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza, watched "Bart Gets an Elephant" and "Burns' Heir" from The Simpsons' Season 5 DVD (part of Andrew's complete Simpsons collection) and went to bed at 2 am. Around 4:30 I awoke with the sensation that some food was stuck in my esophagus. I got up and took some Tums.
In short order the sensation transformed into a raging case of heartburn to rival the fires of Hell. Then the nausea set in. Bad nausea is much worse than actually throwing up, so I was hoping to vomit and end my agony. But nothing happened. I wasn't sure if I should get on my knees or drop trou. It felt like, at any moment, I could start spewing from either end. The nausea and heartburn kept building until I was regretting every decision I made that night.
I regretted having that slice of Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza (an old nemesis of mine). I regretted eating that Reese's bar (even though it was quite good and probly blameless). I regretted using that Sweet & Tangy Polynesian sauce with my stir-fry dinner. (In fact, I regretted that choice as soon as I started eating my dinner. It's not a good sauce. It'd been in my fridge for almost a year, long enough to forget how bad it was.) I regretted not inviting Dustin and Chris to join us for drinks after the show. I regretted not striking up a conversation with any of the women at the BLB. I regretted being a coward all my life, whether it was with women or potential friends or standing up to bullies or throwing off the comfortable shackles of the mind-numbing 9-to-5 for an insecure life of political activism or organic farming or whatever vocation that could spiritual and emotional fulfilment.
Then I threw up. And had some diarrhea. And the crisis was over. The heartburn lingered for hours and robbed me of sleep, but the desperate need to change my life had passed. Now, in the clear light of day, I can look back on that torturous night with some amusement. Although it would be a mistake not to draw some lessons from it.
Lesson #1: Don't eat Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza for a while.
Lesson #2: Don't eat food that doesn't taste good, e.g. the Sweet & Tangy Polynesian sauce.
Lesson #3: Take more chances emotionally, so the next time I stick my neck out it won't be so traumatic.
The last lesson refers to opening night for the show. I'm convinced that was the main (perhaps indirect) cause of my distress. The anxiety surrounding the occasion must've been repressed and then manifested in my recent eating habits. I've had a little insomnia this week which, fittingly, sapped my energy on Friday and led me to order a Pizza Hut delivery that night. That's what happens when you don't (or can't) deal with your emotions.
Take comfort, dear readers, in the knowledge that I am capable of self-criticism and personal growth. I would appreciate it greatly if you could soften the tone of some of your comments. They often feel like attacks. Please keep in mind that I'm sharing deeply personal information, but this blog is at best a sliver of me. You would need a lot more knowledge of my character to make an informed judgment of my words and deeds.
That being said, I'll keep as many comments as I can stomach. The feedback can be illuminating, and it may encourage more people to read. So, yes, I am using your comments to self-aggrandize and, potentially, profit off of. But, with all due respect, you can take all the cheap shots you want at me, while I'm left to be haunted by anonymous cyber-ghosts.
NOTE: The request above refers only to some of the comment posted directly on the blog, not those posted on the Facebook feed.
The rest of the show went pretty well. There were even a few big laughs. The attendance was good. Some of my friends showed up, which was great. But then I forgot to invite them to the bar. My social incompetence remains, albeit less crippling than before. It was still a nice after-show gathering with my female lead's family and boyfriend.
I went home at midnight, ate a Reese's chocolate-and-peanut-butter bar (rather good) and a slice of Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza, watched "Bart Gets an Elephant" and "Burns' Heir" from The Simpsons' Season 5 DVD (part of Andrew's complete Simpsons collection) and went to bed at 2 am. Around 4:30 I awoke with the sensation that some food was stuck in my esophagus. I got up and took some Tums.
In short order the sensation transformed into a raging case of heartburn to rival the fires of Hell. Then the nausea set in. Bad nausea is much worse than actually throwing up, so I was hoping to vomit and end my agony. But nothing happened. I wasn't sure if I should get on my knees or drop trou. It felt like, at any moment, I could start spewing from either end. The nausea and heartburn kept building until I was regretting every decision I made that night.
I regretted having that slice of Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza (an old nemesis of mine). I regretted eating that Reese's bar (even though it was quite good and probly blameless). I regretted using that Sweet & Tangy Polynesian sauce with my stir-fry dinner. (In fact, I regretted that choice as soon as I started eating my dinner. It's not a good sauce. It'd been in my fridge for almost a year, long enough to forget how bad it was.) I regretted not inviting Dustin and Chris to join us for drinks after the show. I regretted not striking up a conversation with any of the women at the BLB. I regretted being a coward all my life, whether it was with women or potential friends or standing up to bullies or throwing off the comfortable shackles of the mind-numbing 9-to-5 for an insecure life of political activism or organic farming or whatever vocation that could spiritual and emotional fulfilment.
Then I threw up. And had some diarrhea. And the crisis was over. The heartburn lingered for hours and robbed me of sleep, but the desperate need to change my life had passed. Now, in the clear light of day, I can look back on that torturous night with some amusement. Although it would be a mistake not to draw some lessons from it.
Lesson #1: Don't eat Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza for a while.
Lesson #2: Don't eat food that doesn't taste good, e.g. the Sweet & Tangy Polynesian sauce.
Lesson #3: Take more chances emotionally, so the next time I stick my neck out it won't be so traumatic.
The last lesson refers to opening night for the show. I'm convinced that was the main (perhaps indirect) cause of my distress. The anxiety surrounding the occasion must've been repressed and then manifested in my recent eating habits. I've had a little insomnia this week which, fittingly, sapped my energy on Friday and led me to order a Pizza Hut delivery that night. That's what happens when you don't (or can't) deal with your emotions.
Take comfort, dear readers, in the knowledge that I am capable of self-criticism and personal growth. I would appreciate it greatly if you could soften the tone of some of your comments. They often feel like attacks. Please keep in mind that I'm sharing deeply personal information, but this blog is at best a sliver of me. You would need a lot more knowledge of my character to make an informed judgment of my words and deeds.
That being said, I'll keep as many comments as I can stomach. The feedback can be illuminating, and it may encourage more people to read. So, yes, I am using your comments to self-aggrandize and, potentially, profit off of. But, with all due respect, you can take all the cheap shots you want at me, while I'm left to be haunted by anonymous cyber-ghosts.
NOTE: The request above refers only to some of the comment posted directly on the blog, not those posted on the Facebook feed.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Forgetting Mom's Birthday
I'm not so enthused about blogging tonight. While stopping by my parents' house this evening, I learned that I'd forgotten my mom's birthday a few days ago. Dad suggested I wish her a happy birthday. There was some disappointment in his voice. The best I could manage was a perfunctory "Happy Birthday." It didn't help that I was borrowing a boombox and folding chairs for the Fringe show. "Hey, I'm just gonna take this CD player, these chairs, wish you a happy birthday and then be on my way."
Now I feel guilty. That leads to feeling angry at Mom for making me feel guilty. The anger often triggers violent conversations with myself wherein I spit verbal venom at my parents' imaginary holograms. Sure, they're generous with money and material support, but that will never make up for the fact that she checked out emotionally when I hit puberty. And why can't he see that?
I've covered this in other posts, and I really don't wanna go over it again tonight. I'll be funny again tomorrow.
Now I feel guilty. That leads to feeling angry at Mom for making me feel guilty. The anger often triggers violent conversations with myself wherein I spit verbal venom at my parents' imaginary holograms. Sure, they're generous with money and material support, but that will never make up for the fact that she checked out emotionally when I hit puberty. And why can't he see that?
I've covered this in other posts, and I really don't wanna go over it again tonight. I'll be funny again tomorrow.
Monday, July 27, 2009
An Open Letter to the Stylists of Uptown
Dear Stylists,
Is it really that difficult to cut my hair? I would think my hair and my desired hairstyle offer few challenges to a competent hairstylist, but apparently I am mistaken. For some reason, our nations' cosmetology schools have ceased to produce graduates who can effectively deliver the short, no-frills, by-the-book male haircut that has served our country so well for decades, if not centuries. None of the Uptown salons I've patronized has produced a stylist able to cut my hair in a manner consistent with my expectations.
Not one, with the notable exception of Great Clips, that national chain of supposed cookie-cutter, dime-a-dozen, cut-by-numbers stylists. Only in that bargain-basement (but still well-appointed) hair salon have I found anyone with the surprisingly rare gift for cutting my hair to my specifications. Victoria was the first Great Clips angel to descend from the heavens (a la Frankie Avalon in Grease) and bestow on me the hairstyle I have often imagined but only fleetingly worn. Sadly, the Powers That Be at Great Clips do not allow us to schedule haircuts with our preferred stylists. Thus have I been denied the safe harbor of Victoria and left to drift into the nearest random port whenever the shaggy hair-storm blows me back out to the Sea of Salons.
The last 2 times I've landed in the capable hands of Mary Jane. She's a looker, let me tell ya. Her skin is a sultry bronze color, her hair dark and nicely framing her face, her figure trim with curves in just the right spots. Also, she has a ring through her septum, but it doesn't make her look like a cow or some other barnyard animal as it does for many others with the same piercing. Under one eye is a tattoo of three black dots in a crescent formation. I don't know what it means, but it's pretty hot.
She gave me a fine haircut and provided some good banter. I'd like to think she's into TV On The Radio, vintage greasy-spoon diners and Critical Mass, but her style could also belong to a Lady GaGa-loving, vegan Republican. (Of course, only one of those would be a deal-breaker.) You always hope for the best with the pretty ones, no matter how much evidence piles up in the "con" column.
There's always a sexual subtext when a woman cuts my hair. That's why it's always nice when the woman is cute (except when it's really awkward). The female stylists must be aware of this. A haircut involves persistent, albeit slight, physical contact, often of a sensitive nature. A thigh will press against my hand as it lies innocently on the armrest, a flat stomach will brush past my shoulder, and my head may even be pulled back to nestle just under the cleavage between two breasts. It can be quite a treat for a man as under-sexed as I.
In conclusion, Mary Jane is a great stylist, as much for her BUST-Magazine-covergirl looks and friendly demeanor as her styling ability. If only every hairstylist in Uptown possessed her combination of pulchritude, congeniality and talent. Then this would truly be a Heaven on Earth.
Sincerely,
Mickey
Is it really that difficult to cut my hair? I would think my hair and my desired hairstyle offer few challenges to a competent hairstylist, but apparently I am mistaken. For some reason, our nations' cosmetology schools have ceased to produce graduates who can effectively deliver the short, no-frills, by-the-book male haircut that has served our country so well for decades, if not centuries. None of the Uptown salons I've patronized has produced a stylist able to cut my hair in a manner consistent with my expectations.
Not one, with the notable exception of Great Clips, that national chain of supposed cookie-cutter, dime-a-dozen, cut-by-numbers stylists. Only in that bargain-basement (but still well-appointed) hair salon have I found anyone with the surprisingly rare gift for cutting my hair to my specifications. Victoria was the first Great Clips angel to descend from the heavens (a la Frankie Avalon in Grease) and bestow on me the hairstyle I have often imagined but only fleetingly worn. Sadly, the Powers That Be at Great Clips do not allow us to schedule haircuts with our preferred stylists. Thus have I been denied the safe harbor of Victoria and left to drift into the nearest random port whenever the shaggy hair-storm blows me back out to the Sea of Salons.
The last 2 times I've landed in the capable hands of Mary Jane. She's a looker, let me tell ya. Her skin is a sultry bronze color, her hair dark and nicely framing her face, her figure trim with curves in just the right spots. Also, she has a ring through her septum, but it doesn't make her look like a cow or some other barnyard animal as it does for many others with the same piercing. Under one eye is a tattoo of three black dots in a crescent formation. I don't know what it means, but it's pretty hot.
She gave me a fine haircut and provided some good banter. I'd like to think she's into TV On The Radio, vintage greasy-spoon diners and Critical Mass, but her style could also belong to a Lady GaGa-loving, vegan Republican. (Of course, only one of those would be a deal-breaker.) You always hope for the best with the pretty ones, no matter how much evidence piles up in the "con" column.
There's always a sexual subtext when a woman cuts my hair. That's why it's always nice when the woman is cute (except when it's really awkward). The female stylists must be aware of this. A haircut involves persistent, albeit slight, physical contact, often of a sensitive nature. A thigh will press against my hand as it lies innocently on the armrest, a flat stomach will brush past my shoulder, and my head may even be pulled back to nestle just under the cleavage between two breasts. It can be quite a treat for a man as under-sexed as I.
In conclusion, Mary Jane is a great stylist, as much for her BUST-Magazine-covergirl looks and friendly demeanor as her styling ability. If only every hairstylist in Uptown possessed her combination of pulchritude, congeniality and talent. Then this would truly be a Heaven on Earth.
Sincerely,
Mickey
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Perks
Yesterday's post ended on a rather sad, bitter note, so tonight I'd like to lighten the mood with some comedy. I attended Improv-A-Go-Go and witnessed some excellent comedy. I could probly count on one hand the number of times I've seen the show since moving to Uptown 6 years ago, which is quite ironic since I saw it many times in the months leading up to my move. In Improv-A-Go-Go terms, if I were a Scottish village I would be Brigadoon. And if I were a cast member of Happy Days, I'd be Donnie Most. (Right? Family Guy, anyone? Am I right? Don't leave me hangin'!) Why did my attendance tail off so dramatically? Because it got to be really awkward for me. After several months, I still hadn't broken into the IAGG clique. It doesn't help when you're socially retarded, although (meaning no offense) they didn't seem much more advanced than I.
Today was a very good day. We had tech rehearsal for the Fringe show. (A People's History of Love at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. Check fringefestival.org for details!) It went quite well, considering the actors hadn't heard many of the sound effects before. This final week of rehearsals should be fun. I'll be manning the tiller again, since Noah has 2 other shows in which he's actually performing and he's given us everything we need for the dance numbers and blocking over the past 2 weeks. It feels good having this chance to guide the show down the stretch run, offering plenty of encouragement but not sparing the whip. All kidding aside, I don't wanna "lay down the law," as it were. Doing so would make the experience unpleasant for me and may discourage the actors. Though surely there's something to be said for the disciplinarian approach, considering how many great directors have employed it. But for me it would be the technique of last resort.
Before and after the rehearsal, I noticed quite a few attractive women at the BLB. It made me think about why I'm getting back into this crazy comedy/theater game. Am I still just searching for acceptance and love and (while I'm at it) fine-lookin' women to have sex with? I do wonder if all this artistic striving is only my way of trying to make friends and meet women (to have sex with). Are all my comic and theatrical conceits mere pretentions to exquisitely intellectual dysfunction and, therefore, eminent fuckability? No, I don't think so. By now I'm pretty sure I've realized that there are better ways to find those things. At this point, the only thing that could keep me writing is a genuine need for self-expression. Of course, the possibility of those other perks doesn't hurt.
Today was a very good day. We had tech rehearsal for the Fringe show. (A People's History of Love at the Bryant-Lake Bowl. Check fringefestival.org for details!) It went quite well, considering the actors hadn't heard many of the sound effects before. This final week of rehearsals should be fun. I'll be manning the tiller again, since Noah has 2 other shows in which he's actually performing and he's given us everything we need for the dance numbers and blocking over the past 2 weeks. It feels good having this chance to guide the show down the stretch run, offering plenty of encouragement but not sparing the whip. All kidding aside, I don't wanna "lay down the law," as it were. Doing so would make the experience unpleasant for me and may discourage the actors. Though surely there's something to be said for the disciplinarian approach, considering how many great directors have employed it. But for me it would be the technique of last resort.
Before and after the rehearsal, I noticed quite a few attractive women at the BLB. It made me think about why I'm getting back into this crazy comedy/theater game. Am I still just searching for acceptance and love and (while I'm at it) fine-lookin' women to have sex with? I do wonder if all this artistic striving is only my way of trying to make friends and meet women (to have sex with). Are all my comic and theatrical conceits mere pretentions to exquisitely intellectual dysfunction and, therefore, eminent fuckability? No, I don't think so. By now I'm pretty sure I've realized that there are better ways to find those things. At this point, the only thing that could keep me writing is a genuine need for self-expression. Of course, the possibility of those other perks doesn't hurt.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Peak Oil Glasses
(I wrote most of this in Rice Park in downtown St. Paul, beginning at 12:06 pm. It's important to know that to fully appreciate the post.)
I find myself in a place that would strike any Minneapolitan as strange: St. Paul. I moved to Mpls. in the hope of acquiring a social life, if by no other means than sheer osmosis. But Mpls. is not that happenin'. It only seems that way because St. Paul is dead. I'll give St. Paul one thing though. It has held onto much more of its old buildings, making it far more architecturally appealing than downtown Mpls.
I'm forced to wonder what will happen to these buildings if our society collapses, mainly in the sense of resimplifying, not necessarily falling apart. I look at most places through these Peak Oil Glasses, trying to peer into a future of energy descent.
There was a little girl whom I thought might be waving at me. It turned out she was waving bye-bye to a pigeon. They'd had some good times together. The bronze girl standing in the fountain is skinny, but she's got a nice rack. Sculptors sometimes neglect the rack. Or they just have bad taste in models. Threatening clouds are rollin' in. The Landmark Center's clock tower is facing me. Consequently, I'm instantly aware of the time. I like that. Now I don't even hafta reach into my pocket.
Peak Oil Glasses are the opposite of Rose-Colored Glasses. It's a lot like Life After People, that History Channel miniseries. I see abandoned buildings overrun with weeds and vines, trees growing in parking lots, streets filled with bikes and stripped-down cars rusting on the shoulder. I'd guess within a decade the ratio of bikes to cars on the streets of Uptown will have reversed itself.
It's not a pretty picture (except for the bikes), but we'll at least get a chance to redeem ourselves for the monumental waste of abundant energy and resources in the 20th Century. We had the power to make almost anything, and we chose to produce continents of crap, mountains of manure, oceans of offal. What will our descendants think of a civilization that churned out enough disposable goods to inundate every home on the planet with useless bric-a-brac? I only wish every Fortune 500 CEO had the foresight (or the sense of shame) to meditate on that before they invent another emotional need for us to fill with stuff.
I find myself in a place that would strike any Minneapolitan as strange: St. Paul. I moved to Mpls. in the hope of acquiring a social life, if by no other means than sheer osmosis. But Mpls. is not that happenin'. It only seems that way because St. Paul is dead. I'll give St. Paul one thing though. It has held onto much more of its old buildings, making it far more architecturally appealing than downtown Mpls.
I'm forced to wonder what will happen to these buildings if our society collapses, mainly in the sense of resimplifying, not necessarily falling apart. I look at most places through these Peak Oil Glasses, trying to peer into a future of energy descent.
There was a little girl whom I thought might be waving at me. It turned out she was waving bye-bye to a pigeon. They'd had some good times together. The bronze girl standing in the fountain is skinny, but she's got a nice rack. Sculptors sometimes neglect the rack. Or they just have bad taste in models. Threatening clouds are rollin' in. The Landmark Center's clock tower is facing me. Consequently, I'm instantly aware of the time. I like that. Now I don't even hafta reach into my pocket.
Peak Oil Glasses are the opposite of Rose-Colored Glasses. It's a lot like Life After People, that History Channel miniseries. I see abandoned buildings overrun with weeds and vines, trees growing in parking lots, streets filled with bikes and stripped-down cars rusting on the shoulder. I'd guess within a decade the ratio of bikes to cars on the streets of Uptown will have reversed itself.
It's not a pretty picture (except for the bikes), but we'll at least get a chance to redeem ourselves for the monumental waste of abundant energy and resources in the 20th Century. We had the power to make almost anything, and we chose to produce continents of crap, mountains of manure, oceans of offal. What will our descendants think of a civilization that churned out enough disposable goods to inundate every home on the planet with useless bric-a-brac? I only wish every Fortune 500 CEO had the foresight (or the sense of shame) to meditate on that before they invent another emotional need for us to fill with stuff.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Monetize Your Dreams!
With the Fringe Festival fast approaching, I've been trying to think of how I might make a living once my ill-gotten (corporate) gains run out in Sep or Oct. Stand-up, freelance writing and selling plasma have all occurred to me. (If you have any suggestions, please send them along.) Returning to CorpWorld is out of the question. I'm actually now willing to starve rather than work another corporate gig. It may be a moot point, but would I even be willing to perform comedy at a corporate event? Probly, but I'd still feel guilty about it. Ideally, I wouldn't have to take any corporate money, but that seems like a luxury I can't afford. My main goal is to no longer allow CorpWorld to drain me of energy and the will to live. So if I could do something I enjoy on the corporate dime, I might be OK with that. Besides, where do you draw the line? Are you gonna refuse the money of patrons who work for corporations? I've never heard of anyone doing that. So what's the difference if you take money directly from the company (assuming they impose no conditions on your work)? As far as I'm concerned, it's a fuzzy line.
Could I possibly make a living as a writer? I mean right now, without any significant experience on my resume? It seems sad to me that I made at least $12 an hour entering data, yet my writing (which is composed of far more profound insight than the data I entered, in my opinion) is apparently worthless in the capitalist sense. There's a tab on Blogger labeled "Monetize." I would gladly monetize my personal thoughts and feelings if I thought I could make real money off of them. Isn't that what working artists do? The problem with this blog is it isn't fictionalized or stylized or otherwise creatively distorted in such a way that the people I discuss cease to be recognizable. I can't hide behind artistic license.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I either hafta get more creative or stop talking about people so bluntly. I'll also try and blog every day to see if I can build up an audience. And if any of you want to send me money for my work, I'll gratefully accept it. Just don't ask me to endorse Hostess Zingers or that new reality show, More to Love, much as I may be a fan of the first and improperly curious about the second.
The problem with starting an artistic career now is the artistic bubble may be bursting. There will always be demand for art, but our society's aggregate wealth has likely peaked. This is the point in the blog where I pontificate on Peak Oil. It feels like I haven't pontificated on it in a while, so I'm going to indulge a bit. We may be witnessing the bursting of the biggest bubble in history, inflated as it is with fossil fuels and the technology we've developed to take advantage of those energy sources.
(I feel inadequate as a Peak Oil writer though, so for now I'll defer to blogs like John Michael Greer's The Archdruid Report that put mine to shame.)
Seriously though, the potential collapse of society has informed many of my choices in the last 4 years. It was the only reason I cashed out my 401(k) last year. It motivated me to quit my temp job last month, and it may be compelling me to leave CorpWorld for good. It's pretty easy to quit your job when you honestly believe the whole economy is about to go belly up and there won't be any money left in gov't coffers for unemployment insurance anyway.
I used to feel crazy for believing that everything could just fall apart, but I no longer do. Partly because I've learned a lot of people agree with me, even though many of their theories differ widely with mine. But mainly because I've gotten over the initial shock of the discovery and have had 4 years to process it and reexamine the evidence in a sober light. I'll admit that I may still be biased in favor of the societal collapse theories due to my failure to find a meaningful job or romantic relationship in this capitalist Eden. However, an expanding economy would improve my chances of finding a writing job and would eliminate the need to move to the boonies and become a farmer.
I feel too scatterbrained to compose a satisfying essay tonight. I'll just end it here and hope my brain is more organized tomorrow.
Could I possibly make a living as a writer? I mean right now, without any significant experience on my resume? It seems sad to me that I made at least $12 an hour entering data, yet my writing (which is composed of far more profound insight than the data I entered, in my opinion) is apparently worthless in the capitalist sense. There's a tab on Blogger labeled "Monetize." I would gladly monetize my personal thoughts and feelings if I thought I could make real money off of them. Isn't that what working artists do? The problem with this blog is it isn't fictionalized or stylized or otherwise creatively distorted in such a way that the people I discuss cease to be recognizable. I can't hide behind artistic license.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I either hafta get more creative or stop talking about people so bluntly. I'll also try and blog every day to see if I can build up an audience. And if any of you want to send me money for my work, I'll gratefully accept it. Just don't ask me to endorse Hostess Zingers or that new reality show, More to Love, much as I may be a fan of the first and improperly curious about the second.
The problem with starting an artistic career now is the artistic bubble may be bursting. There will always be demand for art, but our society's aggregate wealth has likely peaked. This is the point in the blog where I pontificate on Peak Oil. It feels like I haven't pontificated on it in a while, so I'm going to indulge a bit. We may be witnessing the bursting of the biggest bubble in history, inflated as it is with fossil fuels and the technology we've developed to take advantage of those energy sources.
(I feel inadequate as a Peak Oil writer though, so for now I'll defer to blogs like John Michael Greer's The Archdruid Report that put mine to shame.)
Seriously though, the potential collapse of society has informed many of my choices in the last 4 years. It was the only reason I cashed out my 401(k) last year. It motivated me to quit my temp job last month, and it may be compelling me to leave CorpWorld for good. It's pretty easy to quit your job when you honestly believe the whole economy is about to go belly up and there won't be any money left in gov't coffers for unemployment insurance anyway.
I used to feel crazy for believing that everything could just fall apart, but I no longer do. Partly because I've learned a lot of people agree with me, even though many of their theories differ widely with mine. But mainly because I've gotten over the initial shock of the discovery and have had 4 years to process it and reexamine the evidence in a sober light. I'll admit that I may still be biased in favor of the societal collapse theories due to my failure to find a meaningful job or romantic relationship in this capitalist Eden. However, an expanding economy would improve my chances of finding a writing job and would eliminate the need to move to the boonies and become a farmer.
I feel too scatterbrained to compose a satisfying essay tonight. I'll just end it here and hope my brain is more organized tomorrow.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Commie Gray
Back in '04, when I became a left-wing radical, I had some reservations about joining the Arise! Bookstore and Collective, our local leftist looney-bin. I was afraid none of the members would have a sense of humor, and they'd all be wearing black and gray. Everyone knows that leftists are only allowed to wear black, gray and, occasionally, red. Blood red. I remember the episode of Seinfeld when Elaine had a communist boyfriend. He only wore bland, gray shirts and jeans. Elaine tried to get him to wear more fashionable clothes, but he refused because his dad had been blackballed, if I remember correctly, from the garment industry. That's the only time I can recall an overtly leftist character appearing in the pop culture of my youth and adolescence. The '80s and '90s were generally apolitical, a period of relative prosperity that kept most people contentedly distracted.
But there were many subtle jabs at the Left in the supposedly apolitical pop culture of that era, so subtle in fact that I can't remember any. Family Ties was an interesting example. The parents were former hippies shown in an admiring light, while the son, Alex P. Keaton, was a Republican portrayed as a young Gordon Gekko. Head of the Class featured an ex-hippie high school teacher who was a font of drug-scarred wisdom. I wish I could blame this on Growing Pains. Now that I think of it, Small Wonder was probly an allegory for the dehumanizing effects of the Soviet system. Yeah. I'm gonna go with that.
Imagine my pleasant surprise when I found the radicals at Arise! to be quite warm and funny. They weren't the angry, dour people I'd been led to believe all leftists were. Although the colors of the bookstore's sign and website are red, black and white, and a few of the members stick to a punk wardrobe of black with the odd splash of red. They haven't totally dodged that stereotype, but it does set them apart from the rest of Uptown, so it's not a bad choice of color scheme. It certainly works for the White Stripes and the Chicago Bulls.
But there were many subtle jabs at the Left in the supposedly apolitical pop culture of that era, so subtle in fact that I can't remember any. Family Ties was an interesting example. The parents were former hippies shown in an admiring light, while the son, Alex P. Keaton, was a Republican portrayed as a young Gordon Gekko. Head of the Class featured an ex-hippie high school teacher who was a font of drug-scarred wisdom. I wish I could blame this on Growing Pains. Now that I think of it, Small Wonder was probly an allegory for the dehumanizing effects of the Soviet system. Yeah. I'm gonna go with that.
Imagine my pleasant surprise when I found the radicals at Arise! to be quite warm and funny. They weren't the angry, dour people I'd been led to believe all leftists were. Although the colors of the bookstore's sign and website are red, black and white, and a few of the members stick to a punk wardrobe of black with the odd splash of red. They haven't totally dodged that stereotype, but it does set them apart from the rest of Uptown, so it's not a bad choice of color scheme. It certainly works for the White Stripes and the Chicago Bulls.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Brand Loyalty
I worked out at the Uptown YWCA today, in an effort to get the most out of the final 2 weeks of my membership. In the shower was a guy with a Nike Swoosh tattooed on the outside of each foot. In my sneaker-mad adolescence I might've modified my body in the same manner, but the intervening years have endowed me with a certain amount of restraint and integrity. Even though Nike's athletic shoes can still inspire in me orgasms of aesthetic ecstasy, I've been innoculated against supporting their slave-labor practices. New Balance, for all its derivative shoe designs and Chinese-made products, is much more to my liking now. But this brand loyalty is based on substance, not style. Well, maybe a little style.
Will this seemingly inconsequential paragraph on shoes provide the jumping-off point for a discourse on some topic of immense gravity? Probably not. I just happened to eat a Mocha Swiss Roll from the Wedge (quite tasty) and am wiling away the early morning hours until the caffeine wears off. Since I packed in my steady corporate gig last year I've noticed an increased sensitivity to caffeine, and I was never fond of the buzz of coffee to begin with. Eating those coffee beans nestled on top of the roll was a mistake, but I just can't say no to a chocolatey dessert late in the evening. It will surely prove my undoing.
It's 2:01 am and one of the two people who live upstairs in our duplex just got home. I wonder what he was up to. There are things I could write about my duplex-mates, but I'm afraid of hurting their feelings. It will have to wait for another time. The hour grows late, and I weary of this ennui.
Will this seemingly inconsequential paragraph on shoes provide the jumping-off point for a discourse on some topic of immense gravity? Probably not. I just happened to eat a Mocha Swiss Roll from the Wedge (quite tasty) and am wiling away the early morning hours until the caffeine wears off. Since I packed in my steady corporate gig last year I've noticed an increased sensitivity to caffeine, and I was never fond of the buzz of coffee to begin with. Eating those coffee beans nestled on top of the roll was a mistake, but I just can't say no to a chocolatey dessert late in the evening. It will surely prove my undoing.
It's 2:01 am and one of the two people who live upstairs in our duplex just got home. I wonder what he was up to. There are things I could write about my duplex-mates, but I'm afraid of hurting their feelings. It will have to wait for another time. The hour grows late, and I weary of this ennui.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The Vicissitudes of Capitalism
I quit my temp job almost 2 weeks ago. The call to the temp agency went unexpectedly smoothly. I told them I found another job that started the following week. "Can you give us any more notice than that?" the guy said. "Fuck you, you fucking corporate lackey!" is what I wanted to say. "No, I'm afraid not." is what I actually said. Two days' notice is the royal treatment in TempWorld. They should have had a fucking parade for me in gratitude for my gift of two days' notice. Would they have given me any notice if the assignment was about to end? Maybe, but most likely not. So why do they expect consideration when they show us none? I tell ya: Corporate Love is a one-way street.
The stress was gettin' to me. They placed a strong emphasis on productivity. We were reviewing mortgage documents, a process that required 6 weeks of training and plenty of continuing assistance. The floor was big, dozens of us working at computers, not much in the way of privacy, but precious little socializing either. The only reasons I lasted 4.5 months were the amiable folks (many of them immigrants) in my training class and my revitalized outlook. In the last few weeks the stress combined with my righteous indignation to create an untenable work environment. I'd listen to Democracy Now! and KPFA, the Pacifica (leftist) radio station out of Berkeley, and ask myself, "What the fuck am I doing here? Why am I working my ass off at a meaningless, mindless job just so some Wells Fargo (Cat's outta the bag!) execs can embroider their Golden Parachutes? If I had any balls and/or soul, I'd quit!" So, after a few weeks of that, I did.
What really pissed me off was how they pressured us to do overtime, even though they admitted that, as temps, we didn't have to. I submitted to it for a while, putting in 50 hours for 4 straight weeks, before I mustered the courage to refuse anymore, knowing it would put my chances of getting another temp job from ProStaff (The other cat's outta the bag!) in doubt. I let this be known the day before my first performance review at Wells Fargo, prompting my WF supervisor to postpone the review from Tuesday to Friday. That was a pretty shitty week. I spent a considerable part of the time wondering if the guy would turn the screws on me for more overtime. When that Friday finally rolled around, he never once brought up overtime. Instead, he told me (politely) that my productivity was only 60% of what it should be, and, unless I brought it up, we'd need to have more meetings. It was a Pyrrhic victory to be sure. Those of you with experience in the Corporate World will know that no further meetings were scheduled. Just another idle threat. I should've seen it coming.
I know I said it in the previous paragraph, but lemme tell ya what really pissed me off about that job, and capitalism in general lately: They were pushing us to work our asses off... in the middle of a FUCKING RECESSION! And not just any recession, the MOTHERFUCKING GREAT RECESSION! Am I the only one who finds that a little fucking retarded? It's just the Invisible Hand of the Market fisting us yet again. You see, while the rest of the economy is on life-support, Wells Fargo's Home Mortgage business is going great guns, thanks to refi's sparked by the Fed frantically lowering interest rates to stimulate borrowing and new sales that take advantage of plummeting home values. Of course, when people can't make the payments on all those mortgages Wells Fargo is buying, you know WF will either be first in line for their bailout, or they'll just shutter the whole operation so the management can spend their golden years in Rio (or Fiji or wherever Golden Parachutes land these days).
SIDEBAR: If you like the style of this post, you can thank James Howard Kunstler. If not, you can leave a comment on his blog.
Suffice it to say, most (if not all) of the employees will go straight from mandatory overtime to pink slip. That's what really sucks about the current Market Correction (piggybacking on the last 2 paragraphs): There's no in-between. You're either chained to your desk or cut loose for good. The same thing happened with my one-week temp job in December. I was working 12-hour days, but it only would've lasted a few weeks if I'd had any stomach for phone customer service. It took ProStaff 3 months just to find me that gig. The Great Recession has produced a wildly volatile job market, yielding long periods of lethargy punctuated with short bursts of frenetic overtime. I find it endlessly irritating that Capitalism makes greater demands on us when it has even less to offer in return.
I didn't realize how good I had it at ING. Easy-going atmosphere, no real deadlines and 12 hours of overtime in 5 years. Although, even after "pulling my personal thing together" (as Dennis Miller used to say), I still wouldn't be happy there, because I don't believe in those corporate pursuits. Never have, never will. The difference is now I know which work is worth giving your life to. Also, perhaps more important, I finally have the emotional security to relocate away from friends and family to pursue that work, whether it's organic farming, saving the rainforest or whatever. Yet the question remains: Will I make that leap? My Fringe show will keep me here until early August at least. After that, I won't really have any more excuses. Am I ready to self-actualize? Only time will tell.
The stress was gettin' to me. They placed a strong emphasis on productivity. We were reviewing mortgage documents, a process that required 6 weeks of training and plenty of continuing assistance. The floor was big, dozens of us working at computers, not much in the way of privacy, but precious little socializing either. The only reasons I lasted 4.5 months were the amiable folks (many of them immigrants) in my training class and my revitalized outlook. In the last few weeks the stress combined with my righteous indignation to create an untenable work environment. I'd listen to Democracy Now! and KPFA, the Pacifica (leftist) radio station out of Berkeley, and ask myself, "What the fuck am I doing here? Why am I working my ass off at a meaningless, mindless job just so some Wells Fargo (Cat's outta the bag!) execs can embroider their Golden Parachutes? If I had any balls and/or soul, I'd quit!" So, after a few weeks of that, I did.
What really pissed me off was how they pressured us to do overtime, even though they admitted that, as temps, we didn't have to. I submitted to it for a while, putting in 50 hours for 4 straight weeks, before I mustered the courage to refuse anymore, knowing it would put my chances of getting another temp job from ProStaff (The other cat's outta the bag!) in doubt. I let this be known the day before my first performance review at Wells Fargo, prompting my WF supervisor to postpone the review from Tuesday to Friday. That was a pretty shitty week. I spent a considerable part of the time wondering if the guy would turn the screws on me for more overtime. When that Friday finally rolled around, he never once brought up overtime. Instead, he told me (politely) that my productivity was only 60% of what it should be, and, unless I brought it up, we'd need to have more meetings. It was a Pyrrhic victory to be sure. Those of you with experience in the Corporate World will know that no further meetings were scheduled. Just another idle threat. I should've seen it coming.
I know I said it in the previous paragraph, but lemme tell ya what really pissed me off about that job, and capitalism in general lately: They were pushing us to work our asses off... in the middle of a FUCKING RECESSION! And not just any recession, the MOTHERFUCKING GREAT RECESSION! Am I the only one who finds that a little fucking retarded? It's just the Invisible Hand of the Market fisting us yet again. You see, while the rest of the economy is on life-support, Wells Fargo's Home Mortgage business is going great guns, thanks to refi's sparked by the Fed frantically lowering interest rates to stimulate borrowing and new sales that take advantage of plummeting home values. Of course, when people can't make the payments on all those mortgages Wells Fargo is buying, you know WF will either be first in line for their bailout, or they'll just shutter the whole operation so the management can spend their golden years in Rio (or Fiji or wherever Golden Parachutes land these days).
SIDEBAR: If you like the style of this post, you can thank James Howard Kunstler. If not, you can leave a comment on his blog.
Suffice it to say, most (if not all) of the employees will go straight from mandatory overtime to pink slip. That's what really sucks about the current Market Correction (piggybacking on the last 2 paragraphs): There's no in-between. You're either chained to your desk or cut loose for good. The same thing happened with my one-week temp job in December. I was working 12-hour days, but it only would've lasted a few weeks if I'd had any stomach for phone customer service. It took ProStaff 3 months just to find me that gig. The Great Recession has produced a wildly volatile job market, yielding long periods of lethargy punctuated with short bursts of frenetic overtime. I find it endlessly irritating that Capitalism makes greater demands on us when it has even less to offer in return.
I didn't realize how good I had it at ING. Easy-going atmosphere, no real deadlines and 12 hours of overtime in 5 years. Although, even after "pulling my personal thing together" (as Dennis Miller used to say), I still wouldn't be happy there, because I don't believe in those corporate pursuits. Never have, never will. The difference is now I know which work is worth giving your life to. Also, perhaps more important, I finally have the emotional security to relocate away from friends and family to pursue that work, whether it's organic farming, saving the rainforest or whatever. Yet the question remains: Will I make that leap? My Fringe show will keep me here until early August at least. After that, I won't really have any more excuses. Am I ready to self-actualize? Only time will tell.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Hard Way
Two of my best friends are spending this month in Brazil. That makes my unpleasant situation somewhat more so. I landed a (potentially) long-term temp job doing some mindless busywork not unlike my old job. It's also February in Minnesota, although the mind-numbing cold has given way to bizarre 40-degree days full of puddles and slick, stubborn ice.
There's nothing unbearable about my circumstances; I'm just not sure if my body's gonna let me go through the motions. My sleep has been OK, but not quite enough to be completely rested. Is it my conscience that won't allow me to enjoy a job that only pays the bills and doesn't benefit humanity? Or is it the same old emotional issues with my parents? Well, after an often depressing weekend, I'm feeling better and more conscious.
Friday was the "last straw," when I decided to commit to getting an organic farming apprenticeship and getting out of my rut. Three days later, I'm not as fully committed to that destiny, partly due to a chat with my pal Troy in L.A. and the improvement in my disposition, but I still think I need to take that chance. I need to face my fear of loneliness. Staying in the city would be the easy way to go, but maybe not the best way.
There's nothing unbearable about my circumstances; I'm just not sure if my body's gonna let me go through the motions. My sleep has been OK, but not quite enough to be completely rested. Is it my conscience that won't allow me to enjoy a job that only pays the bills and doesn't benefit humanity? Or is it the same old emotional issues with my parents? Well, after an often depressing weekend, I'm feeling better and more conscious.
Friday was the "last straw," when I decided to commit to getting an organic farming apprenticeship and getting out of my rut. Three days later, I'm not as fully committed to that destiny, partly due to a chat with my pal Troy in L.A. and the improvement in my disposition, but I still think I need to take that chance. I need to face my fear of loneliness. Staying in the city would be the easy way to go, but maybe not the best way.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
How to Succeed in Blogging Without Really Trying
In honor of my last voice lesson tomorrow, I'm gonna reference a classic Broadway show. As a baritenor, I naturally gravitate to showtunes, or so my teacher has told me. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is one of the Broadway shows I've had the pleasure of seeing in situ, if you will, along the Great White Way. I attended the 1995 revival starring Matthew Broderick and Megan Mullally with my Aunt Betty. Although Ms. Mullally skipped that particular matinee, my aunt claimed not to notice the difference. Mr. Broderick was, in a word, effervescent. Seriously, though, he was pretty good.
(Can you tell I'm watching Anchorman?)
I recently observed the 1967 film adaptation of the original production on Turner Classic Movies. It was quite witty. The man who played the protagonist was Robert Morse, who currently portrays the eccentric president of the ad agency on Mad Men. I was struck by the startling symmetry of his body of work, first gaining fame by depicting a corporate peon who scales the ladder through cynical subterfuge and now landing what could be his last plum role as a business bigwig with the philosophy, mystique and decor of a Zen guru. It's funny how life works out sometimes.
Did you know that H2$ (as it's known in the business) won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama? Neither did I. Thank you, Wikipedia. If nothing else I've said here tonight has had the least effect on your entertainment choices, that alone should convince you of its fitness for your viewing pleasure. It's a cogent, crafty, campy analysis of the corporate culture and well worth your three dollars and 20 cents (which I believe is the cost of one DVD rental from the local Hollywood Video's Film Library). I leave you now with a lyric from that transcendent show.
You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth... Think on that, dear readers.
(Can you tell I'm watching Anchorman?)
I recently observed the 1967 film adaptation of the original production on Turner Classic Movies. It was quite witty. The man who played the protagonist was Robert Morse, who currently portrays the eccentric president of the ad agency on Mad Men. I was struck by the startling symmetry of his body of work, first gaining fame by depicting a corporate peon who scales the ladder through cynical subterfuge and now landing what could be his last plum role as a business bigwig with the philosophy, mystique and decor of a Zen guru. It's funny how life works out sometimes.
Did you know that H2$ (as it's known in the business) won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama? Neither did I. Thank you, Wikipedia. If nothing else I've said here tonight has had the least effect on your entertainment choices, that alone should convince you of its fitness for your viewing pleasure. It's a cogent, crafty, campy analysis of the corporate culture and well worth your three dollars and 20 cents (which I believe is the cost of one DVD rental from the local Hollywood Video's Film Library). I leave you now with a lyric from that transcendent show.
You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth... Think on that, dear readers.
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