Confessions of a Nice Guy

Early-80's Tears for Fears would like to wish you and yours a Happy Holidays!

After all my self-righteous indignation about Assholes and the supposed failures of Feminism, I have to come clean: I ain't no Nice Guy. On multiple occasions, I've treated women with something less than chivalry, and all because I was desperate to get laid. This is the tragedy of the Nice Guy. I got nowhere with women, and I blamed my Niceness for holding me back. I should've blamed my shyness. ("Confessions of a Shy Guy" might be a more apt title for this.) But, temporarily, the Niceness got the old heave-ho, and I became what I claim to despise: an Asshole.

The Nice Guy Theory of Virginity was an easy answer, which is why I embraced it. It was self-aggrandizing to think that I was too nice instead of too shy. I could cast myself as the victim of Woman's Inhumanity To Man, instead of the victim of my own personality, cowardice and grim visage. I didn’t have to look in the mirror or do any of the hard work it takes to improve oneself.

I didn't lose my virginity until I was 31. Even 6 years later, I'm still hesitant to share that. The shame I felt about it was staggering. But I certainly wasn't a late bloomer in terms of my interest in girls. I had some smooching sessions with a girl (Ah, Naomi.) in first grade and enjoyed them very much. Then middle school came along and destroyed my self-confidence and my relationship with my parents.

The Nice Girls who had been so nice before puberty didn't seem interested in dating me. (There's a good chance they were, but my low self-esteem blinded me to those possibilities.) The only girl I asked out in high school (over the phone, of course) said she'd "have to think about it." (Yes, even 18 1/2 years later, I still remember her exact words.) Even though we had a class together every day, she never gave me an answer, and I never mentioned it again. This was a painful betrayal and resulted in a long-standing grudge against Nice Girls. That's another problem with being a Nice Guy. If the few times you ask a girl out don't go well, you become even more reluctant to stick yer neck out.

Predictably, college kicked off with a couple (tacit) rejections to wipe out the uncharacteristic confidence with which I'd arrived on campus. There were probably many opportunities to sow my wild oats, as is the custom, but my self-esteem had been knocked down to its previous, miserable condition. As I progressed through my 20's, the shame and anxiety about being a virgin kept growing, which obviously didn't help my nerves around the ladies. I carried my virginity around like a cross, hoping no one noticed the gaping hole in my adulthood. It contributed to my nervous breakdown at 27. To recover, I cemented a few strong friendships and repaired some of my relationship with my parents. After that, I wasn't as anxious about it, but I was still extremely eager to throw off the psychological burden.

Ironically, I think the gentlemanly way to do it would've been a casual hookup, as long as I was upfront about my intentions. But that would've required a boldness and straightforwardness that I lack in spades, so I took the "easy" way out. I found a girl on an online dating site, tricked her into developing feelings for me and then dumped her after we'd had sex a few times and the guilt became unbearable. It's a story as told as Time. This happened in November 2008. The joke I came up with later was that, after a black man was elected President of the United States of America, the Universe figured anything was possible and finally let me have sex.

Granted, I'm being very reductionist and kinda hard on myself, but that's it in a nutshell. She was very nice (in the real sense), but I didn't feel a strong emotional connection with her. I expressed affection for her, most of which was feigned. It wasn't totally fake, but a lot of it was just the warmth I would feel for any decent, pleasant human being. I also let myself get swept away in many "tender" moments. I take some solace in the fact that, after a month, my conscience was killing me, and I broke it off as honorably as I could (over the phone, of course).

A year later, I went through a similar, month-long routine with another woman. I could've ended it better, but it wasn't a total mess. It didn't really matter, because I wasn't interested in being friends with either of them afterward. I didn't think we had enough in common even for that. I just wanted the sex. In the parlance of the streets, I "hit it and quit it."

As disingenuous as it sounds, the truth is I'm a hopeless romantic. In elementary school I could cry at the drop of a hat. But middle school taught me (and many other boys) that crying is for girls. My heart was filed away and only brought out on rare, safe occasions. Anger took the place of sadness, and my sensitivity was replaced with a hard shell of apparent indifference. I really haven't had a good cry since I was 12.

Failing to get a girlfriend or get laid eventually turned me into an (internally) angry, bitter, resentful Asshole. I gave up on romance and took the easy (or sleazy) way out to rid myself of the stigma of virginity. Of course, having sex didn't fix my emotional problems. I was still desperate to have a girlfriend, to be in a romantic relationship and feel that love, warmth and intimacy (both physical and emotional) with a woman.

This was largely a result of my broken relationship with my parents, especially my mom. I think the yearning for sex was really a need for unconditional, unguarded love and emotional intimacy. I don't know why it was redirected as sexual desire. Perhaps to distract me from its essentially emotional nature, so I wouldn't have to think about the real problem. It's also much safer emotionally; sex without love exposes far less of the heart than love alone.

I think I’ve taken care of my issues with my parents, but I still have a ways to go in fixing my abandonment issues in the wake of losing touch with many close friends. This essay is a good step in that process, I think. It feels like a moral and emotional "cleanse,” like something someone in Los Angeles would have done periodically at a clinic for a ridiculously inflated price. But I don’t have that kinda money, so instead I blog about embarrassingly personal things. You could call it the Confessional Cure.

The Asshole Theory

Well, once again I'm left to ponder why my romantic overture to a girl came up empty. One at a time, each detail of the event will rise to the surface of my mind for thorough examination. Should I have asked her out in person when I had the chance? Was the email a mistake? Was I a complete goober for phrasing it "If yer keen, we should hang out sometime?" Is this all just pointless self-flagellation because she was never interested in the first place?

When I step back and think about it more rationally, though, this incessant fretting over minutiae feels more like a defense mechanism than an objective assessment of my performance. I think I'm just trying to protect myself from the far more likely possibility that she's "just not that into me." That potentiality is much more depressing than thinking I did something to put her off.

Of course, imagining that she (tacitly) declined my offer because I emailed instead of asking in person is also troubling. I certainly hope she didn't hold my shyness against me. It would be a mistake, I think, to dismiss someone (male or female) for being reserved or even socially awkward. To cite a couple of cliches that have been quoted so often we usually ignore them, you can't judge a book by its cover, and still waters run deep.

It bothers me to think that women may be more attracted to bold men. Several years ago, I came up with a theory that explains, at least to my satisfaction, why confidence isn't the best quality by which to judge a suitor. I call it "The Asshole Theory," and it goes like this: It's easy for assholes to be confident with women, because they aren't emotionally invested in the outcome. Assholes just wanna get laid by a chick, any chick; they're not looking for a relationship or a personal connection. If they get shot down, they just move on to the next target, because to them the objects of their desire are just that: objects.

This is why it pains me when the lady in the Match.com commercial says, "I live my life, and, if somebody comes along and talks to me, that's how it goes." It seems like a lot of women approach romance this way. Well I've got news for ya, ladies: We ain't livin' in the 50's anymore. You wanted equality, and, even though we're not there yet, we've certainly come a long way. But with more rights come more responsibilities. In other words, if you wanna date Nice Guys, yer gonna hafta make the first move sometimes.

[Excuse the colloquialisms. I often lapse into urban (Southern? Hard-boiled film noir detective?) vernacular when I get worked up.]

Speaking as a (hopefully) Nice Guy, I have to say that ever since I hit puberty I've been disappointed in how passive women seem. Feminism has let me down. I thought girls would be asking me out on a regular basis. Not because I had a high opinion of my own attractiveness. (I didn't and still don't.) I just thought that's how it would go. Most of my bosses have been women, yet when it comes to dating y'all seem stuck in the past.

But, again, when I stop to really think about it, I'm forced to admit that I've been hit on about as many times as I've hit on girls (or women). If you count the times I've been hit on without realizing it, they probably far outstrip the times I've made the first move. (But I don't count those. Sorry. If your intentions aren't clear, it doesn't count. This is another problem. Women usually wanna communicate by Morse code, but men generally only understand semaphore.) It leads me to believe that my lackluster lovelife is a product of my shyness rather than a failure of Feminism.

Then I see something like the catcall video, and I become horribly ashamed of my gender and wonder how women even get out of bed in the morning, much less routinely pass me on the corporate ladder. It makes me much more understanding of women's passivity and seemingly old-fashioned perspective on dating when I see how many fucking assholes and Neanderthals are out there. After I saw that video, I realized that I have an obligation, as a Nice Guy, to stick up for women who are being harassed. Women can't overcome the rape culture on their own. We men who don't want that in our society have to stand with them.

Which leads me to my conclusion, that I have to take a more active role in my own lovelife, as any shy person (male or female) should. At the end of the day, my ruminations on "the failures of Feminism" are probably just another example of a middle-class white guy bitching about not being the lord of all he surveys anymore. It's not like I have to overcome major obstacles to find true love, like women still do. I just have to deal with the fact that things aren't as easy for guys as they used to be. The world is changing, and we all have to adapt.

Hate the War Crimes, Not the War Criminal

While searching for a very different kind of photo (Don't ask.), I found this picture of former president George W. Bush holding his grandson. I have to say, it melted my heart. All the rage toward him I accumulated since my political awakening of 2004 just disappeared. I was reminded that he's still a human being, endowed with all the foibles, passions and graces endemic to our species.

That isn't to say he isn't a war criminal, because, technically, he is. But it's worth remembering that war criminals are people too. Hating someone, no matter how heinous we find their deeds, is a destructive activity that dehumanizes us as well as the object of our hatred. As the saying goes, "Don't hate the player; hate the game."

In the spirit of that wise, old axiom, I will continue to hate the machinations of the Military-Industrial Complex while trying not to hate the people who carry them out. Besides, what did all our hatred of Dubya get us? A Democratic president whose foreign (and domestic) policies are virtually indistinguishable from his predecessor's and a bunch of Democratic members of Congress who continue to fall in lockstep behind the Power Elite.

Yet we on the Left don't hate Obama or any Democrats with anything like the passion we directed at Dubya. So what does that say about our hate? That it has little to do with reality or effecting beneficial change in the world. Anger can be harnessed to achieve worthwhile goals, but when it turns into Hate, we are the ones who have been harnessed. At that point, Hate is holding the reins, and it has no interest in doing good.

Escape from the Shadow Realm

In the words of the Grateful Dead and Soul II Soul, what a long, strange trip it's been back to life, back to reality. I finally seem to be coming out of a soul coma. For the last few years, I've been plagued by a sense of unreality, a feeling that the world and its inhabitants are unreal or (more often) that some inter-dimensional haze separates me from everything (and everyone) else. The effect is mainly emotional, but I'm most aware of its visual component. It slightly blurs my vision, softening all edges.

Apparently, this is a symptom of Depersonalization Disorder. I discovered this quite by accident when I looked up Adam Duritz of Counting Crows on Wikipedia. On an episode of the hit podcast Jordan, Jesse, Go! one of the hosts (Jordan) said Mr. Duritz's dreadlocks were fake, so I decided to conduct some independent research. I was unable to confirm that claim, but I did learn that he experiences the aforementioned disorder, which is marked by a feeling that the world isn’t real.

Usually, I would be relieved to learn that my condition has a name and afflicts others too. But that revelation increased my anxiety. For some reason, I wanted to keep this malady to myself. I wanted it to remain personal, unique and nameless. I didn't want to label it with a clinical diagnosis. My bouts of depression often provoke this reaction: “Must sadness always be pathologized? Can't I just be bummed out? Isn't there enough pain and suffering in the world to justify being down in the dumps?”

I've been out of phase with Reality since the fall of 2010, but it feels like I’m almost all the way back. I keep bursting through fuzzy membranes of distortion that were cutting me off from the Real World. It's like I'm traveling through dimensions, getting closer to my home dimension, but never quite there. I'm striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping that the next leap will be the leap home. (Sorry, I had to.) The goalposts keep moving. The closer I get to Reality, the more I notice the sensations that are still missing. I didn’t even notice my sense of smell had diminished until it returned in full force a week ago.

This case of Depersonalization Disorder must be a result of repressing emotional pain. I think my mind has tried to escape reality to avoid the stress and misery of my situation. My closest friends stopped calling me back, and I failed to find any new friends with whom I connected emotionally. The only jobs I could get were of the soul-crushing corporate variety. My cousin, with whom I’d been living, moved back home to Chicago, and I didn’t want to live with strangers anymore. Therefore, I moved in with my parents for what was supposed to be one winter, but which just passed five years. My relationship with them was still broken from adolescence and fraught with tension and anger. By pretty much any measure, I should’ve been despondent. Internally, I conformed to that expectation, but I was unable to process my grief.

In the absence of constructive action to extricate myself from this predicament, my brain took me out of my rut and whisked me away to the Shadow Realm. The world became a ghost town and the people tumbleweeds. I could still see and hear them, but their actions didn’t have much positive effect on me. However, even benign comments and deeds were enough to trigger my anxiety. When nothing anyone is saying or doing makes you feel better and often makes you feel worse, I guess turning everyone into a wraith is a logical defense mechanism. It comes in especially handy when your friends disappear, because the transition from ghost to empty air is less jarring than that from corporeal being to nothing.

This parallel universe was safe, but it was also boring and lonely. Nothing was worth doing, because I was numb. Since everyone was a shade, physical contact felt illusory and emotional connection vanished completely. I wasn’t willing to open up to the only people who were emotionally available to me at the time. I lost the ability to connect with new people. I was too afraid to open up to them, feeling like I’d been emotionally abandoned by my family and all my closest friends.

This isn’t the first time I’ve withdrawn from the world. It’s a habit I developed as a child. I would routinely plunge into the abyss of TV rather than attempt human contact. My parents had to force me to go outside and play with the other kids. Socialization has always offered me greater rewards than television, but it also offers greater risks, foremost among these, rejection. Being a sensitive boy, I was an easy target for verbal abuse as the new kid in elementary school and then as any kid in middle school. By the time I got to high school, I’d already had my fill of rejection.

That pain has driven me to flee the company of people many times. I often wish I could live alone and keep the world at arm's length to avoid being hurt anymore. If it were up to me, I would live Jorge Luis Borges's "life of the mind." I would lose myself in fantasy, TV, movies, music and books. For about half of my two years in Chicago, right after college, I realized that dream. Discovering that all my bachelor’s degree entitled me to was a seemingly infinite string of temp jobs left me bitter. I wanted nothing more to do with a society that had convinced me a college degree was the Key to the Kingdom and then, once I got one, still denied me a stable, white-collar job. I retreated into my apartment and spent my days watching TV and playing video games.

But the peace of solitude quickly curdled into paranoid isolation. Each day became a repetition of eating too much, watching too much TV and staying up too late. I was lonely, depressed and obese. This is what happens whenever I spend too much time alone. Physical symptoms crop up that are severe enough to convince me I need to overcome my fear of rejection and re-engage with people. Ultimately, my body is the one that keeps pulling me back into the World.

There’s always been a tension between my desire to be in the middle of Life, amidst teeming Humanity with all its joys and troubles, and my desire to be free of those obligations, indulging in solitude and serenity. I assume most people have to deal with that tension and strike a balance between the stress of engagement and the loneliness of isolation. I’m usually overwhelmed by the stress and easily hurt by my family and friends’ perceived rejection or abandonment. If you’re grateful for my continued participation in Life’s Grand Pageant, you can thank my unconscious. If it were up to my conscious mind, I would’ve checked out a long time ago.

I think this desire for escape is fueled by our Lonely Society. I doubt it would be so easy to slip into the Shadow Realm if I were part of a true community, like in the Olden Days. Those personal connections are what keep me rooted in Reality. Having supportive family and friends gives me a feeling of self-worth that convinces me living in the Real World is worth the pain and struggle. On my own, I’m liable to lose touch with Reality and fly off into a void of despair at the apparent futility and cruelty of Life. The love of my family and friends (eventually) convinces me to stick around by renewing my faith in Humanity and giving me hope for the Future.

Waiting for the Waterworks

My emotional recovery proceeds apace. (I had to look up "apace." It means "quickly," which is good, because I really wanted to use that sentence.) Yesterday, it went faster than I could handle. I was having dinner with my parents, and I was consistently amused by their conversation, which hasn't happened since I was about 12. It felt good to let in the joy without putting up the usual barricades against my folks.

Unfortunately, after I went downstairs to watch TV alone, I had an anxiety attack. It felt like a burst of uncontrollable energy. It didn't last long, but the anxious energy lingered in my chest, so I took a Lorazepam. I've only used 3 of those sedatives since I got the prescription in May, and they're mild anyway. I turned off the TV and meditated briefly on the floor. That seemed to help more than the Lorazepam.

I went upstairs and told Mom and Dad about it. They were helpful. I said I must've gotten too much energy from our dinner conversation. It's also kinda scary to feel like you've finally fixed your relationship with your parents after 24 years. The last time we had a strong relationship I was 12. I don't know what a healthy adult relationship with my parents looks like. I don't know what the repercussions will be. They should be good, but they're still unknown.

Maybe the main reason I'm afraid is that I'm making myself completely vulnerable to my parents again after 24 years. I still feel like they've let me down in the past. But, after re-examining our history with an empathetic mind, I think their mistakes were the result of good intentions or common human flaws. Still, though, that's a long period of distrust to overcome.

But I'd be willing to bet the primary cause of this distress is my inability to cry. That was the other emotional bridge that broke down when I hit puberty (and started middle school). I think if I could cry, esp. in front of my parents, that would go a long way toward healing me. A lot of pain has built up in the last 24 years. I'm not saying I haven't released any of it, but I'm guessing some of that old pain is still causing me problems, still waiting to be liberated.

It would also be nice to be able to process emotions healthfully. In elementary school, I cried often. My stone face didn't take over until I got to middle school. Fully opening up to my parents could re-open the waterworks. It means changing back into someone I haven't been since I was 12. Change is scary, as is being emotionally vulnerable. I'll have to proceed cautiously.

Taming the Doomer

After a difficult summer, I've achieved some sense of emotional security and stability. But still the Doomer insists that I'm surrounded by fools. I walked through the Augsburg campus today and saw a large circle of college-aged kids. (I'm guessing they were college-aged, because nowadays college kids look like high school kids to me, high school kids look like middle school kids and so on, although infants still don't look like fetuses, thank God.) The Doomer just wanted to point at them and shout, "You're all doomed! DOOMED!"

I've come to accept the Doomer as an aspect of my personality, an incorrigible child of the Dark Side who must be kept in his corner. He acts out every now and then, and that's when he needs a timeout. This taming of my Doomer has been instrumental in my emotional recovery. I've had to learn to look on the bright side and not wallow in pessimism. It has helped me recognize the subjectivity of my perspective and realize that happy people aren't oblivious; they just have a different, arguably better perspective.

In my solitary wandering, I've often seen happy people and thought them stupid. My mind would ask, "How can you be happy in this vale of tears?" I usually diagnose this reaction, correctly, as envy. I'm lonely and resent their apparently happy, friend-filled lives. But the persistence with which I've discredited happiness as ignorance imprinted that equation on my psyche. I came to distrust happiness in others and myself as a symptom of naivete or willful blindness.

In order to climb out of a hole of anxiety and depression, I had to re-program my brain to accept happiness as a legitimate response to the world, even with all its injustice, pain and suffering. The things that had previously supported my sense of self-worth (living in a hip neighborhood, working a job that paid the bills, hanging out with friends with whom I felt strong emotional bonds) were lost.

I was forced to expand my emotional aperture to accept support from sources I'd been rejecting, most notably my parents. The friends I have now aren't as artistic or sensitive as my old friends, but I've learned to focus on their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. I've also tried to reciprocate their loyalty, no longer expecting the relationships to be one-way streets of encouragement. Once I pulled back the curtains to let in more light, the Doomer had fewer places to hide.

Li'l World

At least a year after my 2005 breakdown, the world began to appear small to me. The rooms of my apartment, the houses that I walked past, the skyscrapers that filed past the window of the buses and cars I rode in. They all suddenly looked small. For some reason, my visual perception of the size of the world had changed. It was as if the world had been warped and shrunken to fit inside my anxiety-addled brain.

It was a depressing development. Formerly, the world had intimidated and fascinated me with its size. I loved to gaze up at skyscrapers in Minneapolis, Chicago or New York and stare across the vast expanses of flat farmland while driving through the Midwest. I was usually nervous when in public, and being in the presence of a large feature, like Times Square, increased my nerves. At the same time, though, it excited me. 

But I could no longer lose myself in the world's labyrinth. I walked the city streets, but really I was only walking the streets of my own mind. There was no interaction to take me out of my head. The strangers passed wordlessly, reinforcing the sense that this world was just a figment of my imagination, an illusion meant to torment me with the unfulfilled promise of connection.

This shift in perception was later supplemented with increased confidence and a lack of interest in taking part in the world. Even though I had a new-found serenity, I had no desire to put it to use by making friends, dating or pursuing my artistic aspirations. I just wanted to keep watching TV in my apartment and hang out with my roommates. This seems to have been another symptom of depression, the sense that the outside world had nothing to offer me.

I recovered from the apathy, but that feeling of living in a diminished world still crops up on a regular basis. The key to fighting the depression seems to be engaging with people socially, especially strangers. It takes guts for me to venture outside my Minnesota comfort zone, but it's good for me and hopefully my sociability will "go viral," as the kids say.

I think it would be good for most Minnesotans to adopt this habit. Here are some ideas I came up with for a Minnesota PSA: "Friendliness: Pass It On!"  Or "You're an Adult. It's OK to Talk to Strangers Now." Or "Talking to Strangers: It's not just for at-risk youth anymore!" One of those should do the trick.

That Deep-Down Body Thirst

I've been walking the streets of Uptown, Loring Park and Downtown all day, trying to perpetuate the illusion of constructive activity in lieu of employment. That kind of self-delusion can work up a powerful thirst in a man. And I don't mean no tap water thirst. This ain't no Brita water thirst neither. Nor is it the kind of thirst that can be quenched by your Vitamin Water or your Sobe or any of those high-classed, namby-pamby, pantywaist beverages. No, this is the kind of deep-down body thirst that can only be quenched by a man's sports drink, the kind of liquid ya need after you play pickup basketball for 106 straight hours in the blazing sun, or you run 12 marathons in a row, or you build the Hoover Dam.

How I do love Gatorade, with its electrolytes and complex carbohydrates and flavors not found in nature, like Orange, Grape, Lemon Lime, Fruit Punch, Strawberry Kiwi, Tropical Mango, Citrus Cooler, Cool Blue, Cool Glacier Blast, Frost Glacier Freeze, Frost Cascade Crash, Frost Riptide Rush and Cold Fusion Reactor.

It smacks of summer scorchers, walking down the sidewalk with the sweat drippin' off ya, stopping at the convenience store and reaching into the cooler for a cold, plastic bottle of watered-down, Kool-Aid-for-diabetics sweetness. I had a few more blocks til home, but it didn't matter with those electrolytes replenishing my dangerously-low supply of electrolytes.

It also makes me feel athletic. When you drink Gatorade, you're showing a firm commitment to hydration. You're telling the world, "I refuse to let the elements stand between me and my appointed task. Even if my appointed task is to pick up some cheddar and sour cream potato chips, French Onion dip and maybe a pint of Ben & Jerry's, I will dedicate myself to its successful completion as if I were picking up Brett Favre at the airport or repelling Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg or driving my wife to the hospital to give birth to our first child. My current errand may seem trivial, but I refuse to shirk my duty. I will be bringing the full, hydrating, electrolyte-replenishing force of Gatorade to bear on this endeavor. God help the thirst that dares stand in my way."

And if you even imply that Powerade is remotely similar to Gatorade, I will Greco-Roman wrestle you to within an inch of your life, pretty boy. This is not open to discussion. Either you pledge allegiance to Gatorade, or you get the hell outta my country. How do I know Gatorade has been chosen by Jesus as the All-American elixir of champions for the greatest nation on Earth? Because Michael Jordan drinks it, and Michael Jordan is our Greatest Living American.

End of story.

Germania, Mon Amour

The model of Germania, the planned capital of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich, sits under a sheet in the basement of the Western imagination, waiting to be unveiled again. We think we've immunized ourselves against this evil. We watch hour after hour of TV shows about the Nazis. We might even read a book or two about them. How could we ever be as wicked as they? But even as we maintain this blithe naivete, our ignorance grows, as does our potential for evil.

Let's walk the streets of the unconscious and trace the outline of this city. Surely we'll find many blind alleys and dead ends haunted by monsters. How many virgins have been sacrificed to this Minotaur? The streets are paved with their bones. Their ghosts fill every silence with moaning, crying, wailing. They deliver warnings. Don't repeat their mistakes. Don't succumb to hubris. Remember: thou art mortal. You are just as capable of evil as anyone else. You are just as vulnerable to pride and arrogance, more so because of the power of your technology.

Why does Germania feel so familiar to me? This is the capital of my dreams, the wellspring whence my imagination sprang. The smooth walls of the edifices. The rigid geometry of the streets. It calls to me. But this is only a dream, a figment of madmen's fancy, the gleaming facade of our murderous heritage, the handsome face of evil, the impossibly perfect skin stretched over the bottomless pit of savagery.

Living in this city, you'd never know the horrors of its construction, the brutal enslavement of its builders, the cruel fate of its citizens. But this is our home. Our empire is also built on death, destruction and oppression. We are shielded from these truths by our sanitized environment. The pollution and exploitation necessary to maintain our lifestyle have been mostly outsourced to factories and sweatshops beyond our borders. The media politely refrain from troubling us with the true causes and costs of the conflicts fought by our military and our proxies. But all empires fall. Let's hope we leave more than a model of evil when we go.

Endless Punishment

How do you punish a mass murderer, a Master of War, an architect of genocide? How could we have brought balance to our moral universe for the millions executed on the orders of Hitler, Stalin or Mao? Shall we rain down on Kissinger the sum total of all U.S. aerial bombardment in the Pacific theater during World War II, as was done to Cambodia at his command? How much pain should we inflict on George W. Bush for the million-plus deaths caused by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars?

The leaders of the guilty have few lives to sacrifice on the Scales of Justice, but there are millions of lives on the other end. The nooses of Nuremberg seem too humane for these crimes. They are too quick, too clean for the monsters who managed to keep the blood off of their hands. Shall we resurrect them to exact an execution for each life taken? Shall we pursue them through reincarnations, ensuring that each of their next million lives ends in misery?

This is why vengeance never ends. No punishment that fits the crime can be anything short of a new crime that reverses the roles of the victim and the criminal. I feel like a monster just for proposing these sentences and committing them to (digital) paper. But who of moral clarity and passionate temperament hasn’t entertained such thoughts?

When does justice become revenge? That could be measured by the level of emotion invested in the prosecution. But even justice requires emotion. Science has shown that emotion is needed in order to make the most basic decisions. Therefore, we must temper our passion with empathy and mercy. Each murder, be it state-sanctioned or not, is a wound that must be treated, not an offensive maneuver in a zero-sum game.

A Lonely Boat

I think what may appeal to me most about Peak Oil is the idea that it will throw everyone into the same boat. No matter your current station, it's supposed to reduce everyone to a state of discombobulated poverty.

That may be wishful thinking, but it's certainly attractive to an alienated, isolated member of this atomized society. Chaotic, communal destitution sounds better to me than pointless, lonely comfort.

Granted, I had a chance to embrace a better version of the communal life 4 years ago when I visited an ecovillage, and I rejected it. The reality of that lifestyle caught me off-guard. Ironically, I wasn't ready for the constant social contact. I came to crave the same privacy and solitude I'd been trying to escape.

Surely there's a happy medium that provides both community and privacy, but it may require a long, arduous journey to find. I don't know if I have the strength to take that path. At this point, though, the shame of being too afraid to follow my bliss has become unbearable. Being true to myself may now be the only way for me to keep my sanity.

Grounded

I'm about to quit another corporate job. I've been through this cycle before, the one that climbs toward stability and then gets tilted over by the weight of stress, anxiety and guilt over my complicity in the corporate ruination of the world. Maybe my moral objections are just excuses for my inability to meet the jobs' demands. Whatever the reason, I'm back at the bottom, trying to find a way off this ride.

The worst part is that each time I get back on the corporate carousel (or Ferris wheel), I drift further from reality. The world becomes less real. People become harder to reach. I know they're there, but my heart won't let them in. I'm afraid to open myself to joy, because it lets the pain in too and, when I'm part of the corporate machine, the pain is too much to bear. I feel like a cog in the Machinery of Death.

On that corporate carousel, the world was slipping away. Now the fear that I'll never find a healthy niche in the world is threatening to hurl me out of the earth's orbit into the black void of space. But I've been reaching out to people to keep from losing touch with the world. Only human contact will keep me grounded. Here's hoping I can establish a permanent base on this planet.

Winter's Turning

Still arching toward Christmas, the winter glows with warmth and radiant whiteness (as seen from my heated vantage point). The snow remains pure and the decorations fresh and clean. We're still weeks away from the post-Xmas-and-New-Year's hangover. After the expectation of the holidays has been fulfilled, we start down the far side of winter, the descent into mind-numbing cold, dirty snow and the stubborn death-grip of King Boreas that refuses to yield to Spring. He is a receding glacier whose fingers grudgingly give way to life, slowly shrinking until they end in skeletal points.

But winter won't make that turn for four weeks. It hasn't yet worn out its welcome. After New Year's though, winter loses its raison d'etre. Once the gifts have been exchanged and the New Year toasted, the season suffers a severe loss of focus and meaning. It devolves into a cruel cosmic endurance test, punishment handed down by the gods in their haughty caprice. Although, to be honest, my love of winter barely registers the change. I enjoy the frozen wastes of the early year, free of social obligations and fellow pedestrians. Solitude is abundant even in the heart of the city. The outdoors become the exclusive domain of the hearty and determined.

A Chip on My Shoulder

I realize now that I've been living with a chip on my shoulder. Every situation has been entered with the baggage of past grievances for which the other people involved would have to atone. Or I would "graciously" forgive them for those trespasses, which they did not commit nor even had any knowledge of. It's amazing how much pain from old wounds I projected onto their words and deeds. Anytime their behavior fell short of my expectations, I would imagine it was motivated by antipathy of me or malevolence.

I've always considered myself the underdog. This sense was deeply imprinted by the bullying I experienced in elementary and (especially) middle schools. I absorbed the idea of myself as a fat nerd and am still trying to uproot that self-image from my psyche. One problem with this mindset is that I used it to justify my own antisocial behavior. Because I thought I'd been a doormat in most situations, I didn't feel the need to say "excuse me" when squeezing by someone at the grocery store. Any of those daily scenarios that call for courtesy often inspired resentment in me. "Why should I show others consideration when I've been shown so little?"

But this is clearly no way to live in society. Eventually, I had to deal with the true source of my resentment. For me, this was my parents. We've come a long way in repairing our relationship, and I've been able to shed much of my ancient anger. This isn't meant to imply that the kids who picked on me were innocent, but they were kids like me and therefore largely not responsible for their behavior.

In my opinion, the truly guilty party is Society. The bullies were created and allowed to bully because of socioeconomic conditions. I would say even the need to reconcile with my parents was motivated by societal factors. The fact that all my best post-college friends either moved away or stopped calling me back probably owes something to the economy and government social policy.

Of course, I can't sit down for a chat with Society to work out my issues with it. Nor can I depend on my local community to provide essential emotional support. That was a luxury of past eras, but it seems to have been lost. I have to count on my parents and friends to help me through the rough patches. Before reconnecting with my parents and finding friends I can rely on, I really struggled. My point is that we should work to rebuild community and social services to help people who don't have dependable family or friends. This would also improve the chances of having family and friends who are dependable.

Four Lessons of History

"We can't change the present or the future. We can only change the past, and we do it all the time."

That's a quote from Bob Dylan's interview with Rolling Stone in the September 27 issue. Like much of Dylan's work, it can be interpreted many different ways. I take it to mean that history is often written to suit the interests of its author. That's why we need to know history; we need to protect ourselves from the warped versions of history that are used to justify destructive politics, science, religion, etc. If we don't want to repeat history's mistakes, we have to know what really happened and why. Unfortunately, our schools teach history in a boring way that reinforces the social order. It's in the interest of the elite to make learning excruciatingly dull and misleading. An ignorant public is easy to manipulate. The truth of history is fascinating, liberating and energizing.

The first lesson of history is that things haven't always been the way they are now. The second one follows from that, though not inevitably: Things don't have to be the way they are now. The third one follows more easily: The reason things are the way they are now is often arbitrary and not always in our best interest. History should explain how the current status quo came into being, because the process is never a natural evolution of institutions designed to best serve human nature. It's a struggle among competing groups who (no matter how strenuously they profess their selflessness) always privilege their own interests above all others' once they come to power. There is no enlightened historical progression in which the best system (e.g., capitalism) eventually comes to the fore. Just because capitalism is the most successful economic system right now doesn't mean it's the one best suited to meet human needs. Capitalism has many benefits, but it has also always had a regime of violence enforcing its demands.

The fourth lesson has eluded many in the modern age: Things don't always get better. We've been led to believe that our society is the fulfilment of history's destiny. All those old civilizations were just experiments laying the foundation for our society, which is the best, most just, most equitable society in history. Granted, we've made significant strides, but we have problems that never afflicted previous societies. Social isolation and alienation are endemic, and racism is a post-Columbus invention. No one dismisses the historical record of civilizational decline, but we've decided the rule that what goes up must come down no longer applies to us. Our technology has supposedly freed us from the limits that pulled our ancestors back to earth. In reality, we're subject to the same limits on natural resources; no matter how sophisticated our technologies become, we'll never be able to extract energy from alternative sources without expending much more energy than we do now pumping oil or natural gas or digging coal out of the ground. We've probably already begun our descent.

Knowledge is power, and the ability to deny knowledge to others or trick them into ignorance gives one power over them. Therefore, I strongly urge everyone to learn history, no matter how difficult it may be to find the truth. Not only do you have to fight the Man's machinations; you have to fight your own conditioned resistance to uncomfortable truths. But it's well worth the pain. (I hope.)

Back to Middle School

My annual State Fair pilgrimage was somewhat spoiled by a group of kids who looked to be in high school. (In other words, to a 30-something like myself they looked very immature and disrespectful.) I was sitting along one of the fairgrounds' main thoroughfares when I felt a pebble strike my forehead at incredible velocity. (Two notes: 1. It did not produce any pain. 2. It was slightly bigger and rougher than a pebble, but I couldn't think of a better word for it than "pebble.") I looked around, saw no signs of an assailant and didn't think much of it.

Then I noticed a tall teenage guy sneaking glances at me and smiling. The glances and smiles spread to the short guy and girls with him, accompanied by laughter. The short guy whipped a pebble into the street, reinforcing my case. They were also doing things with their smartphones, a diabolical new tool in the imagination of the tormented. I quickly found myself back in school, specifically middle school. Once again I was paralyzed by fear and humiliation. My face seemed to be reddening along with, possibly, my eyes, presaging the onset of tears.

How could I still be terrorized by teenagers? Am I not an adult with a college degree and a corporate job? I passed my academic tests with flying colors, but I'm not sure if I ever passed the Bully Test. The physical bullying I experienced never exceeded the nuisance level. It was the verbal bullying that ground my self-esteem down to a nub. I would usually just take it, sometimes attempting a timid comeback.

Like many victims of bullying, I carry a chip on my shoulder. Even 20 years after leaving middle school, the seeds of doubt about my self-worth planted back then still bear the occasional fruit. When those kids started smiling and laughing at me, my nerd rage emerged from dormancy and contemplated revenge. ("Nerd rage" is a term I first heard from stand-up Brian Posehn, whom you may know as the tall, goofily endearing guy on Mr. Show and the tall, goofily menacing guy on Just Shoot Me.) Of course, the rage limits one's mental faculties, and my vengeance was predictably unimaginative.

After a few minutes of absorbing the humiliation and hatching a plan, I got up to leave. The tall guy, who I assumed was the guilty party, was standing with his back to me, holding a large, bouncy, blue ball. On my way from the scene, I came up behind him, knocked the ball out of his hands and swatted it up to the walkway around the agriculture building a few yards above us. The nerd rage probably made my swatting look undignified, but I kept a lid on my emotions the best I could. The incident ended with me walking away. I didn't hear or feel any reaction from them, which was a relief.

After I'd put some distance between us, I began to wish I'd taken the ball with me. That would've been the smoother thing to do. But I think I got my point across, and hopefully I didn't look too nerdy doing it. There's a sore spot on my wrist from hitting the guy's arm when I dislodged the ball, a reminder of something I'd much rather forget. Just writing about it brought back the fear, humiliation and self-doubt, but I wanted to get it out of my system.

My favorite comedy-rock band of all time, King Missile (I love Tenacious D, but in terms of laughs-per-minute King Missile still takes the cake.), had a song called "Wuss." The masterful John S. Hall tells us of the many indignities of being a wuss in junior high. The lyric ends with these lines:

...and even now,
Now that I'm not nearly as much of a wuss as I once was,
I still feel kind of wussy from time to time:
Residual wussiness-
The kind of thing you can never really leave behind.

I have plenty of residual wussiness left over from my school days. Luckily, the adult world does not operate by the same rules as the kid and teen worlds. It's humiliating and enraging to be reminded that I'm still vulnerable to bullying by teenagers. At least now I have the emotional security to get over it, even though it might take a few days.

So I've managed to put the experience in perspective on a personal level, but it raises a larger cultural question: How do you discipline kids you don't know? Should you even try? I think we should; after all, as the title of Hillary Clinton's book said, It Takes a Village (to raise a child, I think). But I have no idea how to do that in an effective, non-violent way. If anyone has any ideas, I encourage you to share them here.

Art for Love

Artists refine their technique for attention, in the belief that the excellence of their art justifies the feelings that inspired it. How could a crudely phrased note express true love? What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and walk out on me? Friends don't do that, of course, but artists are reaching out to strangers for validation, and that requires skill.

Conspiracy Theory with Tony Sutton

Edward Abbey, the late environmentalist writer, once said, "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul." Well, the comments by Minnesota GOP party chair Tony Sutton stirred up a lot of sentiment in me, and I knew I had to write about it. I even thought of calling this essay "F*** Tony Sutton," but I figured that would be in poor taste and could jeopardize whatever chance I have of becoming a political columnist.

If you're not aware of Mr. Sutton's remarks, I suggest you check them out on MPR, although you won't get the full flavor of his venom as I did when I listened to it live and uncut. He did everything but accuse Secretary of State Mark Ritchie of serving up the Senate seat to Al Franken on a silver platter. Nick Coleman called Sutton "Tony Baloney" in his Strib column today, which I encourage everyone to read and employ as the state Republican honcho's new nickname.

My first impulse was to launch a campaign to get Mr. Sutton fired, until I realized that leaving him in his current position would probably do the GOP more harm than anything else. It's scary to think that his opinions may be common among the Republican leadership in Minnesota. In the video the two guys standing at his sides seem to agree with him; they keep nodding their heads. What's even scarier is the possibility his conspiracy theory is widely held among Minnesotans who tend to vote Republican.

Are we really that full of paranoia? Must every political setback for our side be the result of a nefarious scheme by the Other Guys, a.k.a. the Bad Guys? It's a bit difficult for me to make the argument for sanity, a la Jon Stewart, since I still believe the Supreme Court contravened Florida law in stopping the 2000 presidential recount. And I still have my doubts about Bush's 2004 "reelection."

It's not what Republicans or sanity advocates want to hear, but the situations are different. The Supreme Court included in their Bush v. Gore opinion the proviso that the decision could not be used as precedent, casting doubt on its legal validity. The hijinks in Florida, from butterfly ballots to hanging chads to Miami's rent-a-riot, turned the election from high drama to tragic farce. In 2004, Ohio experienced many similar irregularities with the strategically positioned Kenneth Blackwell, honorary co-chair of the state's Bush campaign, overseeing the election as secretary of state.

By contrast, the Franken-Coleman recount was a model of propriety. Mark Ritchie, the DFL secretary of state, presided over an even-handed, thorough process to guarantee that every legal vote was counted correctly. Many Republican-appointed judges ruled on the recount before it was unanimously endorsed by the Minnesota Supreme Court. The idea that our election bears any resemblance to the charade in Florida in 2000 or the question mark of Ohio in 2004 is absurd and insulting to the people who toiled to insure the legitimacy of our democracy.

There have been plenty of stolen elections in U.S. history. Besides what I consider to be dubious presidential elections in 2000 and 2004, there was JFK's narrow victory in 1960 that may have been assisted by LBJ's political machine in Texas and Mayor Daley's skulduggery in Chicago. But the only evidence Tony Sutton has that the Franken-Coleman election was fixed is his dissatisfaction with the outcome. Calling it a conspiracy theory would be an insult to the meticulously-constructed crackpot schemes Jesse Ventura showcases on his television program. Mr. Baloney is really just suffering from a severe case of sour grapes. Let's hope it's not contagious.

The Right Isn't Totally Wrong (Just Mostly)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.